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rhea and zeph/mari and marnie - this has been a post.
Rhea and Zeph - Fight Me/My Mirror Speaks
“Evil is evil, isn’t it?”
They’ve been over the same point again, leaving it, coming back to it, leaving it once more. Rhea is flat out on the sofa, an arm over her eyes. In her other hand is a cup of tea. She has a headache. Zeph is sitting with his back to her, his hands on her fish tank. He’s been talking to her fish for the last part of their argument, too scared to look at her; he can see the blue of her jeans reflected in the water, can feel the anger in her voice just beneath the calm surface. He’s afraid, but his point needs to be made.
“Sometimes things are made evil. So they must be careful.”
“You are not evil.”
“If I dematerialise I may kill somebody.”
“You don’t, though,” Rhea says in her kind voice. “Not if you can help it. You’re very thoughtful.”
Zephyrus sometimes thinks Rhea’s kind voice sounds very similar to Rhea’s condescending voice. Then he feels bad. But…it does. “I have hurt people,” he tells her. “I have hurt people. Which is why I leave.”
“That doesn’t make you evil,” Rhea, rationalising. “We have all hurt people. Every one of us. You’re not hurting me. You’d only hurt me if you left. You should stay. We all hurt people.”
“I do not hurt people like you hurt people.”
“Don’t you?” Rhea asks. It is a low blow. They are both hurting, from different losses. He has lost Iris and it feels as though she might have died, so cut off he has been from her. Rhea has not spoken of her husband but she does not wear her wedding band and she lives alone out here, in rolling valleys, the other side of the world.
“There are other ways to wound,” Zephyrus says. “Deeper ways.” His chest hurts. The goldfish continues to swim. He wants to have the memory of a goldfish, to have everything washed clean after three months, like baptism, like water from a river. There are thousands of years and they hold him like chains.
“You help though,” says Rhea and he hears the prayer in her voice, calling to the god in him. “You help me. You help other people.”
He comes over now and she sits up on the couch and he crouches down and holds her hand. She doesn’t flinch or pull away; that is how he knows she is truly lonely, can feel the yawning chasm of emptiness inside her through the cool of her palm. “I hurt a lot of people too,” he says.
“You made a promise once that you wouldn’t dematerialise.”
“No,” Zephyrus corrects. “I said I would promise, but that I break promises.”
Rhea doesn’t say anything much after that. She leans back and looks up at the ceiling, her head lolling. Zephyrus stays on the ground. “I’m really tired,” she says finally. “I’m so sick of grey.”
Zeph closes his eyes and wonders if either of them could be called anything other than grey. There are so many levels, dark, light, and all between. He doesn’t want to be any part of it. He wants to leave, to feel safe and alone, but Rhea is stuck navigating her way through moral mires, rationalising their friendship. He sits down on the couch next to her. “Evil is evil,” Zeph says. “Good is good. Grey is grey.” He doesn’t know what they’re talking about anymore. He wants to be a fish and clean and free.
“You’re a good man,” Rhea says quietly, when they’ve both been silent long enough to assume the other is asleep. “You’re the best person I know,” she says. Caveat: “To me.”
Zephyrus finds her hand and squeezes it. He doesn’t tell her he’s leaving in the morning. Goodbyes kill him. Her head rests on his shoulder. She doesn’t feel like Rhea. He doesn’t tell her he’s leaving in the morning. He just lays her out on the couch and covers her with a duvet when her breathing goes slow and deep and even and packs his things. He looks at the fish one last time and then he closes the door softly, softly so she won’t be woken by his absence. He’s had practise at that.
But he never feels clean and free.
Mari and Marnie - Remember Me/Southwood Plantation Road
I did a mini FST for this one since I reread a lot of their old threads to work shit out. Fuck me I even have an essay brewing in my head. That may get done later. I miss being a dickhead.
The tables at this cafe were the type made from some plastic that’s supposed to look like natural material, weaved together. Little square holes dot through it in uniform patterns. It was trendy, Marnie supposed, and it supported her pot of tea. Which was important. This was her third day in rehearsals and some words in the script she still stumbled over; some lines still eluded her when she searched her memory for them. She was reading her script again and again, making notes, sipping tea outside this little London café. Little square holes in the table casting mutated shadows on the ground, light running through the grey. The table was short on its third leg; it rocked. That is what she will remember.
The sun was blocked for just a few moments, a long shadow falling across her page. Marnie squinted behind her sunglasses and looked up. A girl was watching her from the other side of the table. Dark hair, angular, unwholesome looking. Marnie gave her a tight smile; the girl took the chair opposite her and pulled it out with a scrape of metal against pavement. As though she were perfectly in her right to do so (and why wouldn’t she be?) she sits down and puts her arms on the table, her eyes on Marnie. Her eyes were grey and they burned into her like lasers.
“There are other tables,” Marnie said, as politely as she could. There were other tables. There was one next to them, empty; more inside the cafe.
“So you’re here,” said the girl instead. She had a Welsh accent, but it’d been diluted by others. Marnie couldn’t even tell if she was from North Wales or South Wales. Her voice was thick with the ghosts of other tongues.
“Are you a fan?” Marnie asked. She’d heard of things like this; an actress goes out, meets with a sticky end because some mad fan with a proprietorial take on them feels slighted. Under the table she reached for her phone in her bag; fumbled about, trying to locate the 9 button. She input three 8s by accident, but didn’t notice.
“Fan?” The other girl looked almost offended. “Why the fuck would I be a fan of you, Moirine?”
“That’s not my name,” Marnie said, narrowing her eyes.
“Cerys, whatever,” the other girl slid down in her chair, her chin on her chest and her face is sourness defined. Lip curling, she poked a finger through the little square holes in the table, cropped hair floating on the slight breeze. “I gave you that name, you know. I invented you.”
“My name isn’t Cerys,” Marnie let go of her phone and gripped the edge of the table, her eyes on the other girl. “That’s my grandmother’s name. My name is Marnie. Marnie Burrell.” Leave me alone, she thought, hard.
“Burrell?” The other girl raised her eyes. “Marnie, Burrell?”
“Yes, that’s right. Marnie Burrell,” Marnie felt less scared, now. This girl looked closer to a scarecrow than anything intimidating; still, there was a touch of the inhuman about her, something in her eyes that told of angers too deep to know, and something else, something vulnerable and small.
“No you’re not.”
“Yes, I am,” with each word Marnie grew a little more in her seat. “My name is Marnie Burrell. I don’t know who you are, but—“
“Mari,” said the girl.
“Mary?”
“Mari.”
Marnie paused and licked her lips and swallowed, cut off from the conclusion she’d been swelling to. “That’s your name?”
“Yes,” said Mari. “You remember it.”
“No, I don’t,” said Marnie but she could not deny, a strange, tiny hint of familiarity in the swell of sudden anger the name had caused. It was the something else in her, stirring beneath the surface. Marnie put her hand flat on the table, longing for stability. The table was short on its third leg; it rocked.
“You do,” the other girl insisted.
“I don’t.”
The other girl looked away. Marnie thought for a second she could see something wet in her eyes. “I named you,” Mari said, suddenly. Marnie was suddenly reminded of children she’d seen, small children denied a toy or a sweet by their parents; how they frowned and cried and folded their arms and stamped their feet. There was something close to that in Mari’s frame, some child losing something they wanted badly. “I named you Cerys. That means ‘love.’”
“My name is Marnie,” Marnie said in a voice gentler than she’d meant it to be.
“You actually spoke to me in Welsh once. When we’d run away. Except it wasn’t speaking, it was writing.”
“My name is Marnie. Marnie Burrell.”
“Cerys. Like Care-ease, the way I’d say it.”
“My name is Marnie.”
“You kissed me in the snow and said, ‘I like you so much (like this).’ Like this in parentheses. There were always parentheses.”
“My name isn’t Cerys.”
“You hit me more than you kissed me,” she was smiling ruefully at the table, her fingers sticking through the square holes. There was something squirming in Marnie’s stomach, something close to pity. The uncomfortable pity one feels when confronted by the obviously mad. “Punched me, right in the face.”
“You’ve got the wrong person, I’m afraid.”
“You mussed up my hair and we laughed together. But only once.”
“I’ve never met you before in my life.”
“Because you never liked me, did you, Moirine?” Now Mari looked at her. In her face was an appeal, some pathetic, almost childish appeal to her to recognise her, identify her, say something that would show she knew who she was. “You didn’t like me. And now you’ve forgotten me. I remembered you, but you forgot. You forgot about me, Moirine!”
Marnie didn’t speak for a moment. The air had gone sharp and tense and thick. It seemed clear that the girl wasn’t listening to her. She reached across the table and touched the girl’s hand. “Is there someone I can call? Someone who can come get you?”
Mari looked back at the table. She looked like she might cry. Marnie went on gently, “A caseworker? A doctor?”
“No,” said Mari. She poked her finger through the little holes in the table, a round peg in a square hole. “Maybe it would have been you, once.”
“No,” said Marnie. “I don’t think so.”
Mari didn’t say anything. She folded her arms on the table and buried her face in them. Marnie thought she might be crying. She put her hand on Mari’s shoulder. Mari let it rest there and didn’t look up; Marnie could feel her shoulders quaking slightly. “Is there anyone I can call?” She asked once more.
“Nobody,” Mari said and her voice was thick. “Not anymore.”
“I can give you some numbers,” Marnie suggested. She took out her phone, ready to google them. “Do you need to talk to someone?”
“Only to you,” Mari said.
They were silent a little longer, until the girl sobbing on the wobbly little tea table regained herself and sat up. Her nose was red and the skin beneath her eyes looked swollen. She stood up, her chair scraping, all metal against pavement, and looked away. “That’s it, I guess,” said Mari.
“I see,” said Marnie, not seeing at all. She looked down at the table, at her forgotten script, at her cold tea.
The other girl took out a cigarette. Her hands were shaking as she lit it, the flame on the top of her lighter dancing in the breeze. “I’ll go, then.”
“Okay,” said Marnie, not knowing what else to say. “You need to get help,” came out before she could stop it. She felt terribly rude all of a sudden, and her fingers curled up to her palms.
“Yeah,” said the girl. “Probably.”
They were still like that for a moment, the girl standing, Marnie sitting. The girl dropped her cigarette and the light went out of it. Marnie watched it crushed beneath the girl’s sneaker, stared at it as all the glow went away. When she looked up the girl had gone, a phantom of cigarette smoke and the few lingering tears she’d cried still wet on the coffee shop’s table.
“Evil is evil, isn’t it?”
They’ve been over the same point again, leaving it, coming back to it, leaving it once more. Rhea is flat out on the sofa, an arm over her eyes. In her other hand is a cup of tea. She has a headache. Zeph is sitting with his back to her, his hands on her fish tank. He’s been talking to her fish for the last part of their argument, too scared to look at her; he can see the blue of her jeans reflected in the water, can feel the anger in her voice just beneath the calm surface. He’s afraid, but his point needs to be made.
“Sometimes things are made evil. So they must be careful.”
“You are not evil.”
“If I dematerialise I may kill somebody.”
“You don’t, though,” Rhea says in her kind voice. “Not if you can help it. You’re very thoughtful.”
Zephyrus sometimes thinks Rhea’s kind voice sounds very similar to Rhea’s condescending voice. Then he feels bad. But…it does. “I have hurt people,” he tells her. “I have hurt people. Which is why I leave.”
“That doesn’t make you evil,” Rhea, rationalising. “We have all hurt people. Every one of us. You’re not hurting me. You’d only hurt me if you left. You should stay. We all hurt people.”
“I do not hurt people like you hurt people.”
“Don’t you?” Rhea asks. It is a low blow. They are both hurting, from different losses. He has lost Iris and it feels as though she might have died, so cut off he has been from her. Rhea has not spoken of her husband but she does not wear her wedding band and she lives alone out here, in rolling valleys, the other side of the world.
“There are other ways to wound,” Zephyrus says. “Deeper ways.” His chest hurts. The goldfish continues to swim. He wants to have the memory of a goldfish, to have everything washed clean after three months, like baptism, like water from a river. There are thousands of years and they hold him like chains.
“You help though,” says Rhea and he hears the prayer in her voice, calling to the god in him. “You help me. You help other people.”
He comes over now and she sits up on the couch and he crouches down and holds her hand. She doesn’t flinch or pull away; that is how he knows she is truly lonely, can feel the yawning chasm of emptiness inside her through the cool of her palm. “I hurt a lot of people too,” he says.
“You made a promise once that you wouldn’t dematerialise.”
“No,” Zephyrus corrects. “I said I would promise, but that I break promises.”
Rhea doesn’t say anything much after that. She leans back and looks up at the ceiling, her head lolling. Zephyrus stays on the ground. “I’m really tired,” she says finally. “I’m so sick of grey.”
Zeph closes his eyes and wonders if either of them could be called anything other than grey. There are so many levels, dark, light, and all between. He doesn’t want to be any part of it. He wants to leave, to feel safe and alone, but Rhea is stuck navigating her way through moral mires, rationalising their friendship. He sits down on the couch next to her. “Evil is evil,” Zeph says. “Good is good. Grey is grey.” He doesn’t know what they’re talking about anymore. He wants to be a fish and clean and free.
“You’re a good man,” Rhea says quietly, when they’ve both been silent long enough to assume the other is asleep. “You’re the best person I know,” she says. Caveat: “To me.”
Zephyrus finds her hand and squeezes it. He doesn’t tell her he’s leaving in the morning. Goodbyes kill him. Her head rests on his shoulder. She doesn’t feel like Rhea. He doesn’t tell her he’s leaving in the morning. He just lays her out on the couch and covers her with a duvet when her breathing goes slow and deep and even and packs his things. He looks at the fish one last time and then he closes the door softly, softly so she won’t be woken by his absence. He’s had practise at that.
But he never feels clean and free.
Mari and Marnie - Remember Me/Southwood Plantation Road
I did a mini FST for this one since I reread a lot of their old threads to work shit out. Fuck me I even have an essay brewing in my head. That may get done later. I miss being a dickhead.
The tables at this cafe were the type made from some plastic that’s supposed to look like natural material, weaved together. Little square holes dot through it in uniform patterns. It was trendy, Marnie supposed, and it supported her pot of tea. Which was important. This was her third day in rehearsals and some words in the script she still stumbled over; some lines still eluded her when she searched her memory for them. She was reading her script again and again, making notes, sipping tea outside this little London café. Little square holes in the table casting mutated shadows on the ground, light running through the grey. The table was short on its third leg; it rocked. That is what she will remember.
The sun was blocked for just a few moments, a long shadow falling across her page. Marnie squinted behind her sunglasses and looked up. A girl was watching her from the other side of the table. Dark hair, angular, unwholesome looking. Marnie gave her a tight smile; the girl took the chair opposite her and pulled it out with a scrape of metal against pavement. As though she were perfectly in her right to do so (and why wouldn’t she be?) she sits down and puts her arms on the table, her eyes on Marnie. Her eyes were grey and they burned into her like lasers.
“There are other tables,” Marnie said, as politely as she could. There were other tables. There was one next to them, empty; more inside the cafe.
“So you’re here,” said the girl instead. She had a Welsh accent, but it’d been diluted by others. Marnie couldn’t even tell if she was from North Wales or South Wales. Her voice was thick with the ghosts of other tongues.
“Are you a fan?” Marnie asked. She’d heard of things like this; an actress goes out, meets with a sticky end because some mad fan with a proprietorial take on them feels slighted. Under the table she reached for her phone in her bag; fumbled about, trying to locate the 9 button. She input three 8s by accident, but didn’t notice.
“Fan?” The other girl looked almost offended. “Why the fuck would I be a fan of you, Moirine?”
“That’s not my name,” Marnie said, narrowing her eyes.
“Cerys, whatever,” the other girl slid down in her chair, her chin on her chest and her face is sourness defined. Lip curling, she poked a finger through the little square holes in the table, cropped hair floating on the slight breeze. “I gave you that name, you know. I invented you.”
“My name isn’t Cerys,” Marnie let go of her phone and gripped the edge of the table, her eyes on the other girl. “That’s my grandmother’s name. My name is Marnie. Marnie Burrell.” Leave me alone, she thought, hard.
“Burrell?” The other girl raised her eyes. “Marnie, Burrell?”
“Yes, that’s right. Marnie Burrell,” Marnie felt less scared, now. This girl looked closer to a scarecrow than anything intimidating; still, there was a touch of the inhuman about her, something in her eyes that told of angers too deep to know, and something else, something vulnerable and small.
“No you’re not.”
“Yes, I am,” with each word Marnie grew a little more in her seat. “My name is Marnie Burrell. I don’t know who you are, but—“
“Mari,” said the girl.
“Mary?”
“Mari.”
Marnie paused and licked her lips and swallowed, cut off from the conclusion she’d been swelling to. “That’s your name?”
“Yes,” said Mari. “You remember it.”
“No, I don’t,” said Marnie but she could not deny, a strange, tiny hint of familiarity in the swell of sudden anger the name had caused. It was the something else in her, stirring beneath the surface. Marnie put her hand flat on the table, longing for stability. The table was short on its third leg; it rocked.
“You do,” the other girl insisted.
“I don’t.”
The other girl looked away. Marnie thought for a second she could see something wet in her eyes. “I named you,” Mari said, suddenly. Marnie was suddenly reminded of children she’d seen, small children denied a toy or a sweet by their parents; how they frowned and cried and folded their arms and stamped their feet. There was something close to that in Mari’s frame, some child losing something they wanted badly. “I named you Cerys. That means ‘love.’”
“My name is Marnie,” Marnie said in a voice gentler than she’d meant it to be.
“You actually spoke to me in Welsh once. When we’d run away. Except it wasn’t speaking, it was writing.”
“My name is Marnie. Marnie Burrell.”
“Cerys. Like Care-ease, the way I’d say it.”
“My name is Marnie.”
“You kissed me in the snow and said, ‘I like you so much (like this).’ Like this in parentheses. There were always parentheses.”
“My name isn’t Cerys.”
“You hit me more than you kissed me,” she was smiling ruefully at the table, her fingers sticking through the square holes. There was something squirming in Marnie’s stomach, something close to pity. The uncomfortable pity one feels when confronted by the obviously mad. “Punched me, right in the face.”
“You’ve got the wrong person, I’m afraid.”
“You mussed up my hair and we laughed together. But only once.”
“I’ve never met you before in my life.”
“Because you never liked me, did you, Moirine?” Now Mari looked at her. In her face was an appeal, some pathetic, almost childish appeal to her to recognise her, identify her, say something that would show she knew who she was. “You didn’t like me. And now you’ve forgotten me. I remembered you, but you forgot. You forgot about me, Moirine!”
Marnie didn’t speak for a moment. The air had gone sharp and tense and thick. It seemed clear that the girl wasn’t listening to her. She reached across the table and touched the girl’s hand. “Is there someone I can call? Someone who can come get you?”
Mari looked back at the table. She looked like she might cry. Marnie went on gently, “A caseworker? A doctor?”
“No,” said Mari. She poked her finger through the little holes in the table, a round peg in a square hole. “Maybe it would have been you, once.”
“No,” said Marnie. “I don’t think so.”
Mari didn’t say anything. She folded her arms on the table and buried her face in them. Marnie thought she might be crying. She put her hand on Mari’s shoulder. Mari let it rest there and didn’t look up; Marnie could feel her shoulders quaking slightly. “Is there anyone I can call?” She asked once more.
“Nobody,” Mari said and her voice was thick. “Not anymore.”
“I can give you some numbers,” Marnie suggested. She took out her phone, ready to google them. “Do you need to talk to someone?”
“Only to you,” Mari said.
They were silent a little longer, until the girl sobbing on the wobbly little tea table regained herself and sat up. Her nose was red and the skin beneath her eyes looked swollen. She stood up, her chair scraping, all metal against pavement, and looked away. “That’s it, I guess,” said Mari.
“I see,” said Marnie, not seeing at all. She looked down at the table, at her forgotten script, at her cold tea.
The other girl took out a cigarette. Her hands were shaking as she lit it, the flame on the top of her lighter dancing in the breeze. “I’ll go, then.”
“Okay,” said Marnie, not knowing what else to say. “You need to get help,” came out before she could stop it. She felt terribly rude all of a sudden, and her fingers curled up to her palms.
“Yeah,” said the girl. “Probably.”
They were still like that for a moment, the girl standing, Marnie sitting. The girl dropped her cigarette and the light went out of it. Marnie watched it crushed beneath the girl’s sneaker, stared at it as all the glow went away. When she looked up the girl had gone, a phantom of cigarette smoke and the few lingering tears she’d cried still wet on the coffee shop’s table.
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i love how rhea and zeph will never understand one another's morality, but they try so hard.
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