crushed_pearls | Come Sail Away IC Inbox

I cannot actually fly but we will see if super strength and gliding will do the trick.

It does. Less than thirty minutes later Helena can hear those huge wings moving through the air alongside the approaching sound of Erin's Mantle; she lands hard, with an 'oof', but doesn't go staggering too far. She's been practicing, you see.

She sits down next to her friend and then very gently places a cup of tea from Sand Dollars in Helena's hand.

"Thank you."

She'd heard her as she approached, but stayed quiet, letting the ship's false breeze run through her hair and the relative silence fall on her as an armor. It's not easier to talk about this now, but she has to. She sips at the drink, first, and lets the warmth try to relax her. A moment passes, and then she breathes again.

"...You were kind to me, when you met me there. Kinder than perhaps you wanted to be." She can decipher some of that space between what Erin had actually said at that time and what perhaps she might have said. "Why?"

"...You didn't need an angel of vengeance. No matter how much I might have wanted to shank your teacher and feed her body to the dogs."

"...I don't hate her, Erin. I can't. Despite everything, I can't call her a bad person. She still gave me so much."

It's a tangled, winding thing, the thorns and the roses both, sweetness and joy mixed with tears. Helena takes a deep breath, curling both her hands around the cup.

"But...it sunk in after a while that things could be different. While I still remember them being different, because Security was there. And it made me wonder, how much would have changed if I had simply had the strength to do something, say something, alter something." Her fingertips twitch on the cup. "But I didn't. I was weak, and a liar, for I at least contributed, and for some reason no one agrees with me on that."

Security wouldn't let her hate herself for it. Mr. Smith wouldn't let her blame herself. How is she supposed to carry this, if she's not allowed to hold it in her own arms?

"Mmm. And now you've come to the worst villain you know to ask about it." Erin sucks in a soft sigh. There is...

...A sound?...

Of liquid moving through a straw or maybe a tube, for Erin has worn her beer hat and it is full of Mountain Dew from the buffet. No way was she gliding with two hot drinks.

"...I'm decently sure I know the answer to this already, since you're, y'know, a Southern American, but are you a Christian girl, Helena?"

"Arguably, belief in a singular Providence gets shaken about a bit when one ends up meeting other gods."

Those benevolent and malevolent alike. But she knows Erin will grasp the yes that's underneath that, the teachings woven into her upbringing, her education. You didn't come out untouched from it.

"And I didn't come to ask you because you're a villain. I came to ask you because you're my dear friend, and I value your words, and because my younger self trusted you enough to talk to you too."

Erin makes a soft sound of amusement. "Helena, my little bird...there's no universe where my past and present aren't relevant to your question. I'm not putting myself down here. I'm just thinking." She goes quiet for a minute, and then, quoting: "For all have sinned, and fallen short of the glory of God. A lot of people think that way. Hell, I still think that way sometimes, and I hate it. People walk around with the injuries and iniquities of having to be a real person in a physical body and they go, you cannot wash blood from silk; I am tainted and lowly, unworthy and vile. I was told something different, when I finally took help. They said to me: what's gold stays gold, no matter how hard you beat it."

Erin's poetic phrasing gets her in trouble a lot, but something tells her that Helena will grasp the idea.

"And what if you aren't sure it was gold to begin with?"

She gets it, she knows what Erin is trying to impart. She understands, but unwinding years of thinking one way can't be done in a short time. She has to doubt, because there is room to doubt, to question. There's time to be a mess, and for all she wants to be composed, viewed a certain way, Helena knows she's that mess inside. Something witnessed through cracks.

"...I was going to go to college, and see if I had any real talent at all."

Or if it was just manufactured, just a cloyingly sweet encouragement that mediocrity was made extraordinary from the false framing.

Erin sighs. "Little bird, hearing you doubt your own splendor like this is a good seventy percent of why I was close to murdering your teacher. But fine; you want empirical evidence of whether or not you have any talent. I can understand that. I can even empathize with it. God only knows the weird feelings that happen any time someone calls me a good person or a good friend...but there's another fun Bible quote here that you might have heard before: by their fruits shall you know them. You want to see if you have any talent? Publish. Show your work to someone with no reason to be kind to you."

"That's the problem, Erin! I can't publish if I can't write anything!"

It bursts from her, words nearly thrown up from where they've been lodged behind her breastbone, and she feels something almost physical - a cord she's been gripping onto for so long, and now her hands are empty. Arms no longer burning with the effort of staying upright.

"I haven't been able to write anything of my own making. For months."

So much softer in being said, the crumpling of a leaf come to rest in the grass. Fallen now, the space where the truth was a hollow, and she sets the tea aside so she can draw her knees under her chin, to protect that space inside her.

Erin opens a wing and uses it to draw Helena into a soft cuddle.

She doesn't say anything, for now.

It helps. It stops her from holding onto herself too tight, trying not to fall apart on her own. Finally, she breathes, but she's no louder.

"It makes me think that there's nothing except what we...what she made. And I want so badly to think otherwise."

And maybe she could have stepped away from it on her own, unstuck that with a pure leap of faith, but now with everything thrown into new angles, rearranged, having to find her way around a room now and afraid she'll run into sharp things and hurt all over again. It needed to be done, but it's left her at a loss.

Edited 2023-03-24 02:54 (UTC)

"Scary, isn't it? Not just what you are now, but looking back at before and wondering, what if I'd been different? What if I made another choice?" Erin blows out a long breath. "...It haunts me too. But the past can't be changed, only the present. As much as it sucks to hear, you're gonna have to live with it and see about right now. And maybe that means putting out work you don't like. Work you think you coulda done better. I know it's not exactly writing but I'm not really happy about making my crush rip my eyes out with her bare hands...but that extremely shitty, arguably good deed, helped me figure on getting better ones handled. If you want to know, you gotta try it. Even if it just sucks at first."

"Your crush isn't ripping your eyes out every time you're putting pen to paper."

Mumbled, but the response should tell Erin she's getting somewhere. Discontent is better than the mire of self-loathing.

"And thank God for that, can you imagine if poor Security had to do that every time you sent a text?"

"Erin."

Guess who's still not used to being known and perceived in that particular way? It means Erin has a vast well of affectionate torment to bestow, when she so chooses, but it's not what she means, Helena knows. Even if she is going to whine just a little about it before sobering back to the point at hand.

"It's - sometimes I get two words, maybe five, and it's all terrible and I want to scream, and then I feel like I have nothing and I'm just lying to everyone by saying I'm a poet at all."

"...People say that true art is suffering. This is because they are fucking stupid." Erin takes another long sip from her hat. "People talk up artists like Vincent Van Gogh and say, if he wasn't mentally ill we wouldn't have had his art! But the thing is, ol' Vinnie didn't do his best work from depression. He did it while he was being treated. The fucking Hunchback of Notre Dame was primarily motivated by a paycheck big enough for our man to visit every whore in Paris, which, I do not hesitate to add, he did. You've been suffering in silence for ages, little bird. Of course your hand is having trouble moving."

There's a silence there between them, soft like feathers, like the steam that comes from a neglected cup of tea left to cool on their perch. Erin isn't going to let her call herself a liar either, and it's a frustrating, difficult thing, to accept being loved in a way where others will hold your hands so gently, to prevent you from digging your nails into your own nerves.

"What do I do, then?"

This is her agreement. This isn't hiding behind I'm fine by comparing her injuries to other people. This is admission that perhaps, it hasn't been fine for a very long time. Enough that to find the way out, help is needed.

Erin sighs softly. Makes a complicated and thoughtful sound; it's somehow both musical and distressed. Finally: "We're going to have to proceed on the understanding that I'm being a hypocrite. Not. On purpose, but still. You good to continue on those terms, little bird?"

"Okay. I won't say anything about it."

Because hypocritical or not, she needs the advice. Needs a direction, a helping hand, to get out of this quagmire of her own mind.

"Okay." Deep breath, mainly to steady herself. "Whether or not you're a liar isn't the important part. The important part is, are you getting the help and support and care you need? I know Security's gotta be putting in a heroic effort here, but people have to let themselves be helped too. Set aside questions of worth or taint and try to focus on you. When you're free of the cage you've put yourself in, then you can face the mortifying ordeal of creation."

There's a silence there, and then Helena shifts, reaches over for that tea that Erin brought to drink some more before it gets too cold.

"...I...am trying to not say it's fine if it isn't."

Which is very, very difficult. But she's come to talk about it, not to pretend it didn't happen, so that's some kind of progress. Even if she wants to apologize for bringing all this up at all, which she will bite back down.

"It's hard to let go of the things that helped us to endure in a bad place. You had to be fine for a very long time, even before you got far more literally imprisoned. And now you're here, where things can still be so scary, and old habits don't want you to let them go." There's a soft and knowing sigh. "But. That's the devil talking, little bird."

She nods, a tiny thing, and breathes in the scent of the tea. At this rate, she's going to end up permanently associating tea with hard conversations and loved ones.

"I still worry, every morning before I open my eyes, that somehow I'll be back. And that everything I have here, it'll all fade into the mist. I'll have to go right back to surviving."

As if they aren't surviving here. But it's been months, and she hasn't had to feel that sick sensation of being hunted down.

"This place can be awful, no doubt, but it's not...that. That's why I keep count of how long it's been since I arrived - so I can see how much space there is between myself and there."

"...Peter Smith cursed my sense of ease when he said that home is where you feel safe, and I realized that I've never had such a place."

A small confession; an admission that Erin knows how Helena feels.

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