Stacia, Nothing-to-See-Here (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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piper902021-01-08 11:32 am
credit_not_blame) wrote in piper902021-01-08 11:32 am
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BACKDATED: An Aftermath of Ghosts [locked to New Hires, including Kokichi]
[The morning after three ghosts visit the Rig in the night, Stacia appears on the comms.]
All right, I've had my coffee now. Anyone else have weird dreams last night? Because I sure did. If I appeared in yours and you have questions or concerns, I'd prefer to talk about it in person or otherwise privately. I imagine everyone else would too, given the themes.
Also, sorry about all the blood and/or violence.
((OOC: feel free to have locked threads between non-Stacia characters in this post as well!))
All right, I've had my coffee now. Anyone else have weird dreams last night? Because I sure did. If I appeared in yours and you have questions or concerns, I'd prefer to talk about it in person or otherwise privately. I imagine everyone else would too, given the themes.
Also, sorry about all the blood and/or violence.
((OOC: feel free to have locked threads between non-Stacia characters in this post as well!))
no subject
[Lord, but is Stacia charming. Dan takes a sip of his coffee and gives her hers.]
That's fine, Bunny might be my favorite too. He's certainly easy on the eyes.
So. I saw a memory of yours, and I wanted you to know I'll keep it secret if you want.
no subject
[Stacia accepts the coffee and starts to doctor it with creamer and sugar, pausing only a moment to process that comment about Bunny and deciding that she doesn't want to poke at it until after she finds out what the Ghosts showed Dan. She takes a sip of her coffee and sighs.]
I appreciate the discretion. Technically, I'm not supposed to talk about werewolf stuff to people who aren't werewolves or werewolf-adjacent, so I'm trying to walk a line between letting people here know what they need to know about me and not saying anything that would get my ass kicked back home.
[She pauses, sighs again, then turns toward Dan.]
So, what did you see?
no subject
[He leans against the rail of the roof at just less than a dangerous angle to fall off.]
I saw a conversation with you and your mom that was [distant and seemingly loveless] you were updating her that someone had been executed, and four more died in a fight, and then she sent you to bed.
cw: violence
Yeah, that was right before I ended up here. [She glances out at the horizon, chewing on her lip, then looks back.] So, the short version is that some other asshole werewolves decided that my pack was getting ideas above our station or whatever. They broke into my parents' house and forced my mom to call me so they could ambush me. They hurt her badly enough that she was in the hospital for a couple days. I was...badly hurt, but I survived. Two of my five-person pack were murdered, and a third had to cut ties for his own safety. They thought they'd covered their tracks, but we found out who they were and a bunch of other bad shit they'd done and we turned it over to the werewolf justice system.
[Sort of. She and Ace had handed the information off to King Albrecht and then asked him to let them handle a few things. The fight the four Silver Fangs had died in hadn't been an accident. Stacia had spent six weeks constructing it, driven by rage and grief, and set it off like throwing a match into a tent full of fireworks. Alloran and Remus saw the final event the last time the New Hires had been in and out of each other's memories, but it's a need-to-know kind of thing. She shakes her head.]
But Mom and I haven't...things had been tense for more than half a year by that point, between us. It sucks.
no subject
Werewolf culture is...in Dan's world, not terribly different. Rival packs, a justice system that's more a bludgeon to punish your enemies than enact fairness, bloodiness. Kids shouldn't have to be involved in it, and they always end up involved anyway.]
And that was right before you came here?
[When Dan's mother died horribly, he was on beautiful terms with her. Even finding out that his parents' foolishness was what cursed all his siblings to die, he never once doubted that they loved him, never had any memories of periods of tension or cold shoulders or distance.]
That sounds difficult.
no subject
[And hopefully that just sounded like a grief-stutter rather than Stacia almost saying 'pups'. Stacia swallows hard and forces a laugh.]
You're not wrong about that. It sucked. Being a werewolf sucks a lot, but most of the other options seem to suck more.
no subject
My friend back home, Lionel - he got turned and then left for dead, so he didn't start with a pack. And my world ain't kind of werewolves, so everywhere he went he got cursed at - literal curses, we're just lousy with magicians - or shot at or beat. He and me got a drink one time and I recognized what he was and he was so surprised I didn't turn on him that he started crying.
[Dan takes a long sip of coffee. He's trying to articulate why he's telling Stacia this, except that maybe it can make her feel safe.]
Once he told me, "being a werewolf at least sucks less than being dead", so I reckon there's truth in that.
no subject
Poor guy. No one should have to go through that shit alone.
[She takes another sip of coffee herself.]
It's a family thing, for us. Something we're born to, not something we can...share or inflict, whichever word is more appropriate. Not everyone in a family shifts, most don't, no one knows for sure why or how, but if you don't have it in your family tree, it's never going to happen.
[She grips the rail with her free hand, knuckles whitening.]
But some families are shitty, and some people leave shitty families to start their own and try to leave the old family secrets behind.
no subject
[Some stories do have happy endings.
He watches as Stacia's knuckles whiten, reads the tension on her body, pretends he doesn't by drinking more coffee.]
Is that how your family started? Breaking off? [He pauses.] Sorry, I'm not trying to pry.
no subject
[She sighs and lets go of the rail to flex her fingers.]
No, it's okay. I'd like to talk about it with someone. Maybe you can help me figure out if I'm right to be mad, or if it's just something I should get over.
[She stops flexing her fingers and takes a deep breath. She lets it out again, and starts tapping her nails against the side of her cup, staring down at the ripples.]
She didn't...warn us that werewolves were a thing. Not just that, she lied to me when I tried to ask about it. When I tried to tell her about the "weird dream" I had, she looked...well, I assumed that she'd repressed some traumatic memories. There's a bunch of asshole werewolves out there, it wasn't a stretch. So I didn't push it.
[Stacia takes another deep breath and works her jaw to keep from clenching it.]
And then a year later, my new boyfriend, who knows about the stupid werewolf stuff, calls me to tell me that there's a strange woman creeping around outside his house. And it was my mother. I hadn't introduced him to my parents or even mentioned him yet. So I went and I confronted my mother, and she tells me that she'd known about the werewolf stuff all along.
[Stacia turns away to glower out at the horizon.]
I'd almost died at least a dozen times, I'd had to pick bits of monster out of my teeth, I couldn't sleep through the night for nightmares, and she'd know the whole time and hadn't said a damn thing.
no subject
He won't tell Stacia this, but once upon a time - before he really stopped being able to feel anger at all, it seems - he wrestled that same question about his parents, who got themselves and all his brothers and sisters killed. In the end, anger wasn't productive, so he didn't let it go so much as it just faded out of him until one day he realized he didn't have any of it left anymore. It took a few years. A shockingly few years. So few years. He's not wired to hold onto anger.
When she's finished her story, he takes a moment to consider it.]
The way I see it, you have the right to do both. Stay angry - hell, furious - and get over it at the same time. Anger's how you feel. Getting over it's how you act about you feel, if that tracks.
[He takes a deep breath and drinks more coffee.]
You got the right to be hurt and angry that the person who ought to have been protecting you decided not to step up and be honest and help you when you were scared and horrified and confused and needed someone. That is your right. She did wrong by you. She did so wrong by you.
And if you want, you got the right to get over it by going ahead with life without that anger making the decisions for you. If you want, when all this is over, even in how you treat her. You can hold onto still being mad and hurt but decide that's not going to be the determining factor in the way you love her, if you still want to.
I guess my point is that it ain't something you should get over. It's something you can, if you want to, and that getting over it don't mean denying how much it hurt you or pretending it didn't happen. But she hurt you bad enough that there's no 'should' anything.
[He's sure that's a garbled mess, but it's sincere.]
no subject
[Stacia breathes a sigh that sounds somewhere between relieved and heart-broken.]
Okay. Okay, good. I was worried...when I asked her if she was sorry for not telling me sooner, she just said that she wasn't going to apologize for protecting her family. I wasn't sure if I was being unreasonable. [She scoffs.] I thought being hurt and mad was reasonable, but I didn't have an unbiased source to check with. Just angry assholes and people who have to deal with those angry assholes. Maybe she'd explain herself to you differently, but she never explained it clearly to me, so I can't tell you her defense.
[She wraps her fingers around her coffee.]
I'm not even mad about the ambush, though I guess we should talk about code words in the future. Just the lying.
no subject
He drinks more of his coffee, then holds the styrofoam cup up to the sunlight to see how much more he has left.] Having an unbiased source or two around definitely helps sometimes.
no subject
You're right. I guess I don't.
[She takes a swig of her own coffee, then copies Dan's trick for checking how much remains.]
Thanks for listening to me vent, I really appreciate it.