TEXTINGS ✥ OPEN TO ALL

[bambicakes]

❝No matter how careful you are, there’s going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn’t experience it all. There’s that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should’ve been paying attention.❞

Comments

2/2

[synchronised]

[ A beat.

Two.



Three.



Then: ] I want to fight him.

[ Mako regrets pressing send almost immediately. (Chuck's always had that effect on her.) ]

1/2

[rageful]

[When you're a successful Ranger, your whole life is spread open to the public; you're a fighter for show. You're a headline. Glory and gore go hand-in-hand at the Shatterdome. So, unsurprisingly, Chuck is familiar with Raleigh's stats; he can read him like the specs on a warhead. That's not the point. (...He just doesn't have the patience or the right sense of vulnerability to explain to her why he felt...betrayed by this guy, how he felt cheated of the idea that heroes can't fall --

because everybody can fall, can't they -- ?

Their conversations always end up like this, mired in their own miasmic silences and the bitter tang of their individual inability to simply open up.)

It's time to change the subject.]

Oi, don't call me that. Makes me feel like my old man.

[There is an obvious playfulness strung between them now, delicate as spider-silk (and doomed to be short-lived). Chuck knew she was trying to rouse a rise out of him for fun.

And it's working.]

2/2

[rageful]

[Oh.

He types a reply.

He immediately erases it.

He tries again.

Then:] I thought you weren't up to jockey.

[...and, yeah, Chuck knows that he's her perpetual "poor life choice". Oddly enough, he actually counts this as an achievement.]

[synchronised]

[ The brief stint of playfulness they'd been able to muster is immediately squashed by the sudden shift in conversation. Momentum is so rarely often on their side, either halted by the uneven start-stop of their exchanges or otherwise simply barreling forward, snowballing into conflict or misunderstanding. When they were children things had been easier, but isn't that always the case with kids? Both angry and seething in their young skins they had served as reflections of one another; served until the mirror cracked, splintering them both in directions opposite of each other.

Chuck's right. She isn't up to jockey, but that doesn't mean she doesn't want to. At the end of the day, she would defer but up until that moment she would fight — not furiously or explosively, the way that Chuck might have, but with a restrained tenacity shored up by conviction. ]

I'm not.

[ I should be. ]