Interlude 1

[Yonagoda]

"I've noticed," the wet face asked, "That you haven't been really talking to me much, Claudia."

(The moment she locked the door behind her, it felt as if her mind had gone through a very distinct shift- which was odd. Nothing really changed, really. She was still herself- but now that she was disconnected from Olivia, it felt as if it were a different version of her- like a sequel directed by someone else, perhaps?)

The figure wrapped towel around herself, not caring for the water dripping across the floor.

"You... I know you want to write me as a lost cause, Claudia. You don't have to just ignore me. I get it."

It was so tough for her to feel weak. She'd only started to cry when she got underneath the showers, and she only came out when she had no tears left to cry. If the angle was right, she realized, it must've been a cinematically compelling scene- cliché, maybe, crying while wet in some form or another, but it felt so comfortable and private, relatively speaking. God knows that she wouldn't feel alright with everybody viewing her if she hadn't had, what... almost a week to get used to it?

Lucia hadn’t really felt weak in a while- physically, she meant. Not mentally. Mentally, she’s been pretty bad the past few days, yeah, no shit, everybody’s dying around her. It took a wobble of her knee and a grumble of her stomach, and suddenly the reminder that her body was a rusting machine slammed into her.

She spent most of her life practicing self defense, fuck, her bestie was the type of person to literally shoot guns for fun and now he’s dead and she’s feeling a lot more like her joints are made of silly putty than she honestly should. The prevailing feeling was that everything was all for nothing- years spent training her body, and she ended up being dragged around by a girl not in her team, ended up getting attached. All of her future plans- films in her head she hadn’t shot yet, hypothetical futures of where her channel is going she discussed with Vasily, the agonizing debate over which colleges to apply to and that was also a waste because if she didn’t get out, she’d be too dead to care, and if she did then she probably had a helluva bigger future ahead of her.

So, like, what now?

She watched Olivia assault a boy and steal from a girl, and then drag her, a non-teammate, to be her buddy. She watched Olivia pick fights without putting any brain cells to work beforehand. She saw Olivia shoot a boy on the same team and then keep up her cheer. She watched, watched, and watched, and she still tried to protect her. Stuck by this one girl who drove most of her story, probably barely being the support character to Olivia’s anti-villain protag role. Vasily was her main motivation- he was her anchor, her second half, somebody who had such a defining impact on her from the very first day she watched that little film and started to become herself, and… all that. Gone. Reduced to a corpse by Ivan. There wasn’t any future she envisioned where she wasn’t with Vasily, hell, she’d thought about what happened when they were sixty with creaking joints and wrinkled skin and whether or not they’ll still be calling each other with holograms or whatever, and it took one single person to just- just crumple it all down.

Maybe Lucia was tired, and she was grumpy, and she expected better of herself and her friend and basically everyone and everything and her own luck. To be honest, maybe she can stab Olivia right here and now. To be honest, she wasn’t sure if she could bear it.

To be really, really honest, she’s just lost. She was mourning. She was sinking. She was feeling as if the ghost of Vasily’s hand grabbed into her throat and tore her windpipe out. It was so burning and painful that she didn’t really know how to deal with it at all- she was almost an adult, but she was also a sheltered child, a growing teen, a person who isn’t prepared for this sort of trauma at all.

By this point, Lucia felt so lonely that she might’ve just stuck to Olivia anyways. She still was sticking to the girl. Always was. Since the beginning. Since everything went down. Lucia was a creature that thrives off of social interactions, off of being admired and loved and needed and held. And Olivia had held on to her not like somebody who loves her, but like a predator to prey.

It was apparent that she was lost, really- too nice to cut Olivia's neck as she slept, too lonely to even leave her- but too prideful to ask for help to what to do, too self-preserving to know that this would never last.

(In the real world, away from her own monologue-ey ramblings, she tried to replicate her bedtime routine to the best of her ability. Mints instead of toothpaste, a pair of soft shorts and tank top instead of her usual pajamas, sinking into a bed that smelled like a road trip hotel- hearing Olivia turn the water on while she was trying to take a nap felt a lot like it was Reyna instead, like she'd wake up to motel breakfast and another six hours in the car.

All she'd wake up to is another day of trying her best, or not trying at all.)

[Yonagoda]

Drifting between lethargy and anger was difficult to manage.

The second she was about to fall asleep, Olivia's screams of outrage shook her right up again.

Lucia closed her eyes.

Tiredness dragged her into her dreams again.

She and a girl were by the docks, of some kind. The girl looked a little like Olivia, and there was a boy that looked a little like Vasily, and a few more people that felt vaguely familiar but mostly unrecognizable, in that way where she couldn't put a name to them but if someone else were to name them, she'd remember again.

The sky was bright outside, sun gleaming off of the butcher's knife. The students held cameras. Phones. Notebooks and sketchbooks, all staring down at her. Not-Olivia was pinning her down, no matter how much she struggled, and the dull burn of her muscles overtook the flush of humiliation on her face.

She should be smiling, she'd thought. Everybody knew an actor's dream was to die on stage.

The issue was that she was always the director, the cameraman.

Not-olivia raised the knife. The edge of the blade cut through her skin and fat, in a way that's almost impossibly smooth. White lipids and black blood spilled from underneath. It pooled, and then bubbled, and the flowed out. It didn't feel like pain, it didn't feel like anything, but beneath the girl Lucia was still trembling, legs twitching, brain functions a wreck.

''ah-guh,''

Not-Vasily looked away. He had two eyes.

''Haah...''

Tears might've spilled, big and fat, puddling in the ground. Olivia kept on carving into her, like a piece of meat, and everybody kept on filming her like it was some kind of show. She wanted this dream to stop. It was too intense, too much, overstimulating her brain and senses. Emotions she'd never really felt, at a scale she'd never really had, flowed their course through her.

And then the dream ended, and her sleep was peaceful once more.

When she woke up, she'd question her own imagination on its violence but the truth is-

nobody intends their own dreams.

So she's quite content at it meaning nothing.