Ghost House (Felicia)

[Helena Rahal]

I’m burning the memories
Burning the letters that might have redeemed you
You forfeit all rights to my heart
You forfeit the place in our bed
You sleep in your office instead
With only the memories
Of when you were mine
I hope that you burn

For a woman who desired to exert control and the signals of being cool, composed, and in control of the world around her, Helena knew she was anything but those things. Inside of her heart there was an unbridled rage that had been allowed to grow and fester, a host of sorrow that had buried itself too deeply inside her being. For a short time she had been able to channel it all through the focus she had thrown into being the Director of Company, focusing on the work she was supposed to be doing to change the world for the better.

Yet what good was a Director working for a change in society and the world when she could not even change the temper she held or the methods of the ones closest to her. How many lies had she been fed or had chosen to believe because she still held out hope, that her heart might have been mended. It was her friend Alice though who had showed her the truth, she was attempting to let the one who had broken her be the one to fix her, a sure fire method to fail in that aspect.


What was meant to be a home now felt like a ghost town and she had taken to sleeping in her office rather than to share her bed with Felicia. Helena had also realized that she was now attempting to shift her focus into actually being a good parent to her children in the absence of focusing on work. However being a parent and loving on her children was no replacement or tonic for the holes that had been ripped through her heart. Helena only hoped that Tivodar and Ildiko would know how much she loved them even if she was not always adept at showing that care for them.

Today though the ghostly feeling was amplified with the grey-black clouds that had dumped piles of snow through the state, keeping Helena snowed into the house. Sure she might have been able to call upon a teleporter to get to work, but there was no real point in it. Another day full of doing meaningless paperwork, surveying reports that would ultimately lead nowhere as they always did. Rather than have that frustration in the monotony, she decided to not even bother with it if nature herself was feeling an icy chill.

A darker side to the Director wanted to tear at her would be wife, to have the cathartic release of causing Felicia to bleed and suffer. There could not have been any reconciliation from where Helena stood and she could only suffer alone for so long. She longed for some way to make Felicia hurt the way that she had been hurting over the last year, to feel like all the pain and suffering could be accounted for in retribution in some way.

Instead though, she had pulled out an easel and was working on her painting, a skill that she had seriously underdeveloped in her informative years. Helena knew she always been the creative type, but it had been writing and poetry that had been her outlet in her youth. Somehow now thought painting seemed a better choice, even if she was quite miserable at it. She had hundreds to thousands of years to get better at it, with her cells altering their own state of being, reworking themselves and those around them. At first a prolonged life seemed a gift, now it seemed a curse, if sorrow was this heavy even now.

Mood: Musetastic
Outfit: This
Lyrics: Hamilton's "Burn"

[Felicia Soler]

We don’t need a legacy
We don’t need money
If I could grant you peace of mind
If you could let me inside your heart . . .
Oh, let me be a part of the narrative
In the story they will write someday
Let this moment be the first chapter:
Where you decide to stay
And I could be enough
And we could be enough
That would be enough
______________________________Hamilton the Musical – That Would Be Enough, as sung by Marlie Rodriguez

Cazenovia Lake Estate
Cazenovia, New York

As she watched her now nearly five year old children romp around in the snow from a safe distance away, the sound barrier provided by the thick white powder muffled the sounds of her sobs. Even the happy squeals and laughter of her children were unable to raise her spirits.

She’d been trying for months now to break through the miles-thick emotional and psychological carapace Helena had wrapped herself in. There were just so many times that she could beg for forgiveness and say that she was sorry. Short of divorcing the woman she loved and having to drag their children and their emotional baggage through the court system, she didn’t know what to do. Her mother had at least been there for her when she’d needed a weekend away, if anything just to have some physical contact with someone who loved her other than her children. Few things in the world paralleled the comfort that she felt when being embraced by her mother, but there were wounds that even her mother couldn’t heal.

Felicia was at the point now where all she could do was cry, alone, or hope that she could fix herself up before anyone caught a glimpse of the crack in her façade, especially her wife. Helena could pick up on the slightest weakness of character with the power of a shark sensing one drop of blood in the water several miles away, and much like a shark, she wouldn’t let it go once she had it in her mouth. For the past several days, even barely being around Helena had been draining. Whether energy vampirism was a newly-manifested aspect of Helena’s power, she didn’t know. Maybe it was the combination of the constant rise and fall of her emotional state and insomnia that had left her feeling ill.

What had happened to her over the last year? She felt like she’d undergone more of a metamorphosis in the last twelve months than she’d experienced in the nearly 735 years of her life. Known for her often sarcastic and caustic sense of humour and spontaneity, she’d withdrawn from public life outside of her career as a cardiac surgeon. The hospital staff had noticed a rather drastic change in her demeanor over the last handful of months. Most days she came into work looking bedraggled, with almost-bruiselike circles under her eyes. There hadn’t come a day yet when she hadn’t felt comfortable handling a surgery, and the instant she found herself in the operating room, she felt completely in her element.

She laughed in spite of herself and brought her breathing back under control, wiping the stray tears from her cheeks with a thickly-gloved hand. How ironic was it that she spent her life mending the hearts of others when she couldn’t even fix whatever the fuck was wrong with her own?

“Mama, why are you crying?” Tivodar looked up at his mother and dropped the snowball he’d been intending on throwing at his sister as she came running up the path behind him. Ildiko stopped just short of tackling him.

There was no sense in lying to children. They were much more perceptive than most people gave them credit for, able to sense emotions and know when something wasn’t right in their environment.

“It’s nothing for you or your sister to worry about. Sometimes I just get sad.” She did her best to smile at him, but didn’t want to dismiss his concern. “Just having the two of you around makes me happier than you will ever know.”

“Is moeder making you sad?” In her spare time, Helena had been teaching them Dutch. That was one way to spend time with their kids, she supposed.

Felicia sighed. She didn’t want to burden her children with adult issues, but she didn’t want to lie to them, either. It was a fine line she’d learn to tread as a parent. “Yes and no. I love your moeder very much, but she can be a little . . . ” She searched for the word a five year old would understand, “ . . . butthead sometimes.” They both giggled at her when she said the ‘naughty’ word. With her tears gone, she grinned at the two of them. “Let’s head back inside. It’s a little too cold to be out right now.”

“I’m telling moeder that you called her a butthead!” Butthead was a funny word. It made her think of someone wearing a hat in the shape of a butt on their head.

“No, I’m telling her that!” protested Tivodar, not wanting to be left out.

She ushered the two of them inside and instructed them to remove their boots at the door so that they wouldn’t track half-melted snow and salt all over the house. The twins continued to argue about which one of them was going to tell Helena that their “other mother” thought she was a butthead as Felicia helped them remove several layers of warm clothes which she gathered into a ball and carried to one of the house’s handful of laundry chutes, and dumped them inside.

“How about instead of doing that, you go bother your aunt Amalia? Have her make Slenderman or smile.dog appear so you can go play with them.” Her kids may have been five years old, but they loved all the classic creepypasta characters for some reason. She wasn’t sure whether they got that fixation from her or Helena. Probably from her.

The twins took off running in the direction of Amalia’s room, each trying to outpace and/or shove the other one out of the way while yelling different variations of Amalia’s name.

“Don’t forget to knock first!” she yelled after them--not that they’d ever caught Amalia doing anything untoward with Devon before. With two five year olds in the house, she figured that Amalia had enough sense to go fuck Devon somewhere that children were scarce. God, that was such a weird thought. Amalia and Devon, when she’d been the one to divest him of his closely guarded v-card. Ugh. Her family was seriously disgusting sometimes.

She did her best not to vomit in her mouth as she removed her scarf and her jacket and slung them over a nearby chair. She kicked off her boots and placed them on the drying mat next to the sliding glass door which housed all the other pairs of muck boots during the winter months so they wouldn’t sully up the hardwood floors.

Steeling herself for what was probably going to be an incredibly arduous conversation, Felicia took the long walk to her wife’s study. Getting Helena to talk about anything let alone her own emotions was like pulling teeth from an unsedated lioness. With practice, she reckoned she could get it done and survive with only a few missing fingers. They hadn’t slept in the same bed for who knew how long. She doubted that Helena knew that sometimes when she’d awoken to an empty bed, she’d search the house until she found Helena asleep in another room (usually her study) and would fall asleep beside her on the floor for a few hours, leaving before Helena woke up.

Felicia tentatively cracked the door open. It made an unwanted grating noise as its heavy metal hinges, tinged with age, rubbed against each other like broken bones. Now that Helena was aware of her presence, there wasn’t any need for her to be silent. There wasn’t any need for her to be silent to begin with; this was also her house. She just felt like she had to walk on eggshells so as not to break the fragile balance that was in place.

An easel and a mixture of paints were set in front of the large bay window behind Helena’s desk, facing their expansive backyard as well as one side of the lake which took up a portion of their property. It was mostly frozen over now, and the entire backyard was covered in rolling hills of snow, which drifted with the wind like sand dunes. Winter had a deathly beauty to it. She’d always preferred the summer.

Coming up behind Helena, she wrapped her arms around Helena’s waist and rested her head on Helena’s shoulder, giving her a gentle kiss on the neck. “You know, I lived in Florence for several years. It’s where my then-husband and I raised Niri. We could take off for a weekend. Or a week. Leave the kids here with Amalia and Devon or with Lilka or Ma.” She daintily plucked the paintbrush out of Helena’s hand and spun her around so that they faced each other. With one arm still around Helena’s waist, Felicia tilted her backwards and kissed the tip of Helena’s nose before daubing it with the moistened end of the paintbrush, leaving a smudge of paint in its wake.

She dropped the brush into a small cup of turpentine and chuckled, pulling Helena close. She always smelled so nice, even when she hadn’t showered for days. Like a combination of rosewater and good Italian food. It was weird. “God, I miss you so much. We live in the same house, but it’s like we’re a world apart.”

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ф Word count: 1874
ф Outfit: This

[Helena Rahal]

I told you I was hurt
Bleeding on the inside
I told you I was lost
In the middle of my life
There’s times I stayed alive for you
There’s times I would’ve died for you
There’s times it didn’t matter at all

Helena had learned that those who were creative were often told to let go and use whatever medium they used as a venting of their emotions. Those who preferred to write would free write, while those who preferred to draw would free draw with no conscious effort in dictating the outcome of the words or piece. That was what Helena was doing now with her easel and the paints, letting go and painting what felt right. What resulted was a blurring array of blacks, reds, and dark blues, all dark hues that seemed to confirm what Helena already felt.

The screeching of the door opening told Helena that her time in a solitary peace had come to an end, whatever the case may be. That she had not heard the pattering of a pair of feet in the hallway though told her that it was most likely Felicia herself that had come into the study. Helena would have preferred that it would have been one of if not both of her children, as they seemed easier to get along with these days. Nor did they seem to bring on the same amount of sorrow that interacting at all with her wife did as of late.

Helena had heard all the apologies she could stand though, she felt as if they were but broken lies like broken plates along a kitchen floor. They had all been pretty to begin with but in their shattered form, they were only dangerous former pretty things. What Helena did not know though was what she wanted from Felicia, could she so callously ask the woman to change who she was in the same fashion that the Rahals and others had asked of her in the past years? Perhaps this was an impasse that could not be reconciled and a sign that the relationship was never meant to be in the first place.

Part of her wanted to shrug out of Felicia's grip, just the feel of the woman seemed to make Helena's skin crawl. What had been lost in the spaces in between them, had love been lost completely in the vastness that had developed between the two? Was it so wrong to still want to feel love and joy in an embrace, to try and enjoy the moments with the very person who had so broken her? Alice's words seemed like such wisdom and yet in the moment, Helena could not deny that a part of her wanted to just embrace the feeling of being held.

The Director could not muster any words at the suggestion of a vacation into the Italian city nor find room to giggle at Felicia's antics. A year ago she would have smiled and giggled, teased the dark haired woman about her suggestion. That seemed like a whole different time and different people from those that were in the here and now.

"I feel angry and depressed all the time, torn between wanting to hurt you and not even getting out of bed. Every day it is a struggle just to continue moving on, I don't know how I can anymore." Her voice was barely above a whisper and her body felt so stiff. Months of sorrow and hurt had just come out in a second and not in a roar but a whisper, leaving Helena feeling paralyzed from finally admitting to feeling something beside the act she had put up.

[Felicia Soler]

You'll never understand,
The meaning in the end,
We're standing at the gate,
You'll meet the darker fate...

Your purity and rage,
Your passion and your hate,
You promised more than bliss,
With your God and with your kiss...
______________________________London After Midnight – Kiss

Had Helena always been this sullen of a person? She certainly didn’t remember the woman being that way before she’d become the director of the Company. Maybe the stress had been getting to her for a while. She’d been trying her damnedest to be more available for her wife, but she could only be as available as Helena would let her--and she could only get as close to Helena as Helena allowed. The second she overstepped her boundaries with seemingly any little thing, she either didn’t see her wife for a full week, or Helena simply noticed her in passing. Half the time, Felicia didn’t even know what she’d done to piss her off.

She could feel Helena reflexively trying to back out of her embrace and reluctantly let her go, frowning. “What is your deal?”

Helena paused long enough to compose herself and considered her words carefully. Felicia assumed it would just be stuff that she’d already heard. "I feel angry and depressed all the time, torn between wanting to hurt you and not even getting out of bed. Every day it is a struggle just to continue moving on, I don't know how I can anymore."

Oh. Seriously? She was the one who was depressed? Had Helena even looked at her over the past few months? Well, if she wanted to play the Depression Olympics, Felicia wasn’t going to take the bait. Even so, she did a horrible job of hiding her incredulousness behind a derisive half-snort, half-choking noise, and rolled her eyes.

“Oh. You’ve been depressed?” Okay, maybe she’d indulge herself in a round of Depression Gymnastics. “Have you even looked at me--I mean really. Looked. At me. Over the last few months?” She gestured to her sallow-looking face, the hollows of her cheeks, and the dark purple rings around her eyes. Though she hadn’t weighed herself lately, she figured she’d probably lost a fair amount of weight as well. Not to the point where she was wasting away, but enough for it to be noticeable. “Fuck’s sake, Helena, honestly. I’m done with apologising. I’ve admitted my mistakes, I’ve made amends, I’ve been faithful, I’ve changed--and yet you’re the one who’s still stuck in the past and brooding and hanging onto every little thing. Doesn’t that get tiring after awhile?”

Felicia wasn’t yelling, though her voice was animated with frustration. She gazed over Helena’s stony face to see if she could find a crack in it; some semblance of an emotion. Seeing none, she brought a hand up to her face and pinched the bridge of her nose between her fingers. “You’ve been pushing me away now for like at least a year, and I don’t know how to get through to you that I am not going anywhere. The more you try to push me out the door, the more I’ll dig my heels in. You should know by now that the Rahals are really fucking difficult to get rid of. We’ve had literally centuries to perfect stubbornness.”

She sat down on the edge of the desk and sighed. For once, she was at a loss for words.

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ф Word count: 785
ф Outfit: Listed in previous post.
ф Other: None.

[Helena Rahal]

I can't be sorry for everything that I am not
I can't be sorry for not tearing you apart
I wont be sorry for the lives that we have lost falling apart

Something about the tone of Felicia's voice triggered a deep impulse to punch the woman in the face. Helena was not often prone to violence but Felicia had a way of causing her passions to flare and even the most atypical behaviors rise to the surface. How very dare Felicia try to cast herself as the victim in this situation that the two of them had found themselves in. It had been her initial infidelity that had sent Helena into this downward spiral and now she had the gall to blame Helena for her problems? Fuck that.

"You, you don't get to play the victim when it was your actions that caused all this. I tried to bend but you kept pushing and pushing until I finally broke down under all that pressure! So don't give me all that crap." Her voiced cracked as the anger swelled within her at Felicia's gall to try and pin everything on Helena. That was not something that was going to fly when it was so far from the truth.


She sighed and pivoted away, walking over to the window and looking out of it instead of at her wife. Why did Felicia infuriate her so much, where was the passion of love and not anger, the tenderness of admiration instead of the ache that had seeped in. Why had she become so filled with melancholy when she had such high hopes and aspirations when the two had married? It all seemed like it an ultimately futile effort that was tearing apart at the seems and taking the both of them down with it.

"I am tired, I am always tired." She whispered in a half hearted response all while watching some flurries trickle from the sky to the ground. "Everyone I have ever cared for has hurt me in some way, it is tiring to carry that burden every day. Secrets kept, being back stabbed by friends and close ones, the lies told to keep up appearances. The one person who never seemed to have any ulterior motives died and there was nothing I could do to save her. With all the power I have, I couldn't save my best friend, I can't have a healthy, loving relationship with my wife or family."

To be at the top of the world and it all feel like it was nothing but a sand castle waiting for the tide to come in and smash it down. Bringing her palm to her forehead, she shook her head in frustration and then fell back to the floor, landing with a soft thud. "It all feels extremely meaningless."

[Felicia Soler]

Paradise or hell
Are the bloody answers
To enlighten all the darkness
What dreams may come

The pain is too much to bare
There's no more "together"
Still i'm real, still i exist
I am forever
______________________________Shadowsphere – What Dreams May Come

"You . . . you don't get to play the victim when it was your actions that caused all this!” Ah, there was the emotion that she was looking for. Finally, something. Felicia stood in front of her wife and waited for the rest of the words to pour out of her. “I tried to bend but you kept pushing and pushing until I finally broke down under all that pressure! So don't give me all that crap."

Helena was the first to break eye contact with her as she turned away and walked to gaze out the window. Ugh, this argument was going to be entirely circular, wasn’t it? “Yes, I know that, and me wasting my breath and saying ‘I’m sorry!’ fifty million times and grovelling for a decade isn’t going to change that, but goddamn, woman, it’s not fair to you or to me or our children to keep living in the past and hanging onto all that ‘Oh, but you did this and that to me and it hurt me!’ bullshit. Like, okay, I get it. I know that I hurt you, and I said that I’d change, and I did.” Now she was out of breath and paused only long enough to fill her lungs. She didn’t want Helena getting an edge in on her word-wise. “I’m just getting really tired of having the same argument like every week, and then getting stressed out about it, and then you going MIA for like a freaking month while you ‘get yourself together’ or whatever the fuck it is that you do when you’re off being a bitch and isolating yourself.”

Well, that felt nice. While she wasn’t quite yelling, her voice was nearly there. She’d completely passed over being sad and pissed off and was now about to launch into a full out rage. Felicia would never attack Helena directly, but there were plenty of things in her office that could sure as hell use a facelift.

"I am tired, I am always tired." . . . and then Helena proceeded to throw an ocean’s worth of ice water on top of the volcano that was her temper. Felicia was experiencing emotional whiplash, and it quite literally knocked the wind out of her lungs as if she’d been thrown off a skyscraper and had plummeted into the earth.

"Everyone I have ever cared for has hurt me in some way, it is tiring to carry that burden every day. Secrets kept, being back stabbed by friends and close ones, the lies told to keep up appearances. The one person who never seemed to have any ulterior motives died and there was nothing I could do to save her. With all the power I have, I couldn't save my best friend, I can't have a healthy, loving relationship with my wife or family."

Whatever angry verbal cannonball she’d been about to throw at Helena had all but died in her throat, and she swallowed. The two of them were different in so many fundamental ways. Even in her youth, Felicia had always been a firecracker. Quick to anger, quick to sputter out. She had the personality of a raging forest fire; anyone who got in her way was going to be taken out, and it took an act of God to bring her back under control.

Helena had hewn an unsurpassable canyon in front of the flames of her anger, and there was nowhere left for Felicia to go except down. “There is always going to be shit that happens that you’re not going to be able to fix, and there’s also going to be plenty of shit that happens that you’re going to regret or second guess or whatever, but we don’t live in a world of what-ifs or I-can’ts.”

She took a seat beside Helena and looked out the window. This was a problem that going on a simple vacation or having make up sex wasn’t going to solve. As much as she hated delving into her emotions, she loved Helena and their children more than that. “Your life isn’t meaningless, and it really hurts me to hear you say that. You’ve got me, our two wonderful children, our weird way too extended family, and we all love you. You might not see it because you’ve been so goddamn absent, but when you are around, you bring a lot of meaning to our lives. I don’t know what to tell you or what I have to do to get you to believe that.”

What was it about Helena that made her so goddamn exasperating all the time? She really hoped to high heaven that this was a storm that would pass them over and leave.

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ф Word count: 1041
ф Outfit: Think I mentioned it in the last post.
ф Other: None.

[Helena Rahal]

Burn the page for me
I cannot erase the time of sleep
I cannot be loved so set me free
I cannot deliver your love
Or caress your soul so
Turn that page for me
I cannot embrace the touch that you give
I cannot find solace in your words
I cannot deliver you your love
Or caress your soul

If Felicia was trying to comfort Helena, it was not taking as the words just sank the truth further into Helena. Why did it have to be Sparrow, why did her best friend have to be the one to die? Out of all the people who took to that battlefield, of all those who had become entangled in the proxy war, why was the person with the purest hearts the one who had been killed?

Was that it then, was she feeling guilty over being the person to have survived all of that destruction, of being the one who now was running the Company as well as Vital? She knew she deserved neither position, she had been a traitor to the country and because of it she had been granted her ascension to the top of the Company. It hardly seemed a just or fair outcome, given that her own doing had seen to the deaths of countless dozens. What right did she have to Vital besides merely being lucky to have been born into the right family? A family who refused to even tell her of her heritage until it was knocking right on her door.

She shifted in her lay position, subconsciously moving closer to Felicia but not quite closing the distance between them. What did she want from Felicia, what did she want from herself so that all of this feelings of worthlessness and depression would fade? Had Felicia changed and Helena had somehow managed to overlook it wrapped on her in own hurt and anger? It seemed too out of how she had perceived everything to even be remotely true, yet Felicia seemed adamant about it.

She could not keep going on like this, it would eventually wear her down into nothing, but what was it that was going to change. "You must think I am weak and vindictive..." If she could not handle the mere rigors of a single lifetime, how could she withstand what would lie further down the rabbit hole of eternity? How does one learn to let go and forgive when all they had ever known was betrayal? That was the root of it wasn't, she did not trust Felicia because she could not trust herself, she did not believe in herself.

"Why haven't you run far away from me already?"

[Felicia Soler]

Why do I have to cry every time I try to love someone?
Why do I give up fighting every time my feelings overflow?
I believe in love yes I do and in all mankind
Love is not a crime to hide and there is joy to find
All we need is to try, to try to heal
Your bleeding, bleeding heart
______________________________Myrath – My Inner War

Felicia was not, in fact, trying to comfort Helena. She was simply being her normal, belligerent, no-filtre, Felicia self. She was torn with what to do. Helena had never really been the touchy-feely-please-hold-me-and-comfort-me type, unlike her. Her wife was always the more reserved and emotionally colder of the two. Whereas Felicia wore her opinions of just about everything on her sleeve, Helena was far more reserved, and Felicia had yet to learn just how Helena was able to survive like that without ever completely imploding.

No, Helena didn’t implode; Helena just took out her inward aggressions on everyone around her, which was worse. Whenever Felicia asked what was going on with her wife, she got generic answers like, “I’m fine,” “Why do you care?”, and “You know why I’m angry.” Uh, if she knew why Helena was angry, she wouldn’t have bothered asking the goddamn question.

“Listen, if you want to live this life like your own personal pity party, that’s fine. You go ahead and do that. Trust me, after the first twenty years of feeling like absolute shit because of things you can’t control, the whole ‘oh woe is me’ crap gets really fuckin’ boring.” Felicia felt Helena move closer to her and bristled slightly. She fully believed in the whole in sickness and in health trite bullshit that was often said at weddings, but even she had her limits. “But you can’t live your entire life like that, ‘cause you’re gonna be around for a long while yet, and being so emotionally depressed isn’t going to win you any friends because it alienates everyone.”

Ugh, she really sucked at the whole “try to be compassionate” thing. There was a time and place for compassion. Working in hospice care--a time for compassion. Being a cardiac surgeon, she had to be compassionate with her patients and their families. Being a caregiver for an indigent person--that also required compassion. Putting up with her wife’s passive aggressive quips and other antics for months on end and not being told what she was doing to have put Helena in that position? Or if she even had any part in why Helena was feeling however she was? Yeah. Not deserving of compassion.

Helena sighed and looked at her, resignation in her eyes. "You must think I am weak and vindictive..."

“Weak? No. Vindictive? Yes. But you’re mostly being a mopey pain in the cunt and you aren’t being open with me and that is why I’m angry with you right now.” Fuck, how was it that she had a great bedside manner with her patients, but absolutely zero with her own wife?

"Why haven't you run far away from me already?"

Felicia groaned and rolled over to face Helena, then propped her head up with her hand. She lightly smacked Helena across the face with her other palm. “Because I love you, you fuckin’ dense jackass. How many times do I have to say that until it sinks in? Jesus fucking Christ.” She leaned in and kissed Helena on one of her reddened cheeks. “But I’m not a miracle worker, and I can’t drag you out of the hole you’ve dug yourself into. That’s all up to you. So you can either suck it up and do it, or sit there and drown in self-pity. Trust me when I say it’s not worth it to dwell endlessly on the past.”

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ф Word count: 852
ф Outfit: Think I mentioned it in the last post.
ф Other: None.

[Helena Rahal]

Give me a reason to turn and run
Give me a reason to burn this house down
Give me a reason I wish you would
I wish you would
Wish you would

Give me a reason for disaster
And I’ll be happy ever after
Give me a reason I wish you would

Helena did not know what to do, if she reacted the way she wanted to she would just be making Felicia's words true. However if she did not react to the way her wife just gave her a proverbial slap in the face with her words, then the assertion of her being a cold, unfeeling person would just continue. It was being caught between a rock and a hard place, with no right choice to make in the situation, yet still she had to choose even if there was no right outcome in any of the choices. Perhaps that was life, making a choice even when none of them were the right choice.

Despite desperately wanting to, she restrained herself from slapping her wife back with an actual slap. There were tears swelling in the corner of her eyes that had began to redden as she mixed her rage and sadness together. She had opened herself up ever so slightly and Felicia had seen fit to throw kerosene onto the pages and light the match. Was her wife intent on seeing her burn completely out?

For a moment she felt like she hated Felicia, that it was a lie that Felicia played saying that she loved Helena. Felicia's words had cut deep and the bristling had when Helena had tried to seek a small amount of physical comfort seemed to indicate it was all an act. Did they even see the world through the same lenses? She had heard a theory lately that a person's personality actually shifted what they were able to see, not just how the interpreted the world. Could that actually be happening, were they seeing the world in completely different ways, seeing each other through different filters?

As Helena was about to yell at Felicia, she instead felt her wife's lips on her own cheeks and it had her choke down the words in her throat. Her tears were still hot and her emotions seemed ever frantic but it was being vented out as if though steam from a tea kettle.

There was a brief silence and Helena's first instinct was to try and start criticizing herself and seeing flaws perhaps were there none. Maybe it was the trust issues and depression trying to sway her way of thinking but those flaws felt so real and intense in the moment. It was not what Felicia wanted to hear and the rational side of Helena knew that it was coming from dark, poisonous emotions.

Helena pulled herself into a sitting position but pulled her legs close to her, using her kneecaps to hide her face. Somehow seeing her cry was not something wanted Felicia to see and yet crying felt like the most perfect thing to do. There was nothing she could say, nothing else she could, but to let the tears fall and all of the bottled up feelings flow out of the overburdened vessel.

[Felicia Soler]

You show me
The mistakes in life I've made
I can see the disappointment in there eyes
And I know that I will likely die alone

I'm haunted by the ghost of yesterday
Visits my dreams and steals breath away
Relive the moments, I'm desperate to ignore
I don't want to feel this pain anymore
______________________________November’s Doom – Devil’s Light

Great. Now her wife had completely crumbled into a sobbing mess. If she couldn’t handle the slightest bit of honesty or criticism, she wasn’t going to make it very long in this immortal life. Instead of slapping her upside the head, Felicia sighed and closed her arms around Helena’s body.

“You’re going to have to learn--sooner rather than later--that you need to trust people, especially in your new life.” Ha. That was rich coming from her, considering how many times she’d cheated on her wife. But she hadn’t lied about that; she’d been completely honest. It probably didn’t help that she’d slept with Alessandro, but whatever. What was done was done, and changing the past was impossible. “That sounds really hypocritical coming from me, and I know that, but I’ve also been alive for more than seven centuries, so I know what I’m talking about.”

God, of the two of them, how was it that Helena had ended up being the super-emotional one? She was supposed to be the logical one who brought Felicia back under control. Felicia considered herself to be decent pillar to lean against when it came to people being emotional, but there was just so much of it that she could take before she fell. This was one of several times that she’d reached this point with Helena, and she didn’t know how much more of it she could take before just grabbing the kids and leaving. She hugged Helena tightly and rested her chin on the back of Helena’s head.

“Y’know, as much as I want to throw up my hands and just say, ‘Fuck it, you’re on your own!’ I can’t bring myself to do that, but I’m not gonna lie to you. Yeah, I know I’ve fucked up--sometimes royally--but I’ve been honest about it, and if this--us--is going to work, you’re going to need to start propping yourself up on your own, and quit feeling sorry for yourself, or using me as your punching bag based on my past mistakes. Because I’m done with that.”

Helena would probably interpret that as Fuck you, Helena, I’m leaving you forever! but whatever. She didn’t want to say it, but this was the entire reason why she sought out other people for intimacy; because every time she tried to be intimate with Helena, she got pushed away, or Helena accused her of wanting to be intimate because she had ulterior motives, or was out to get something from her, or that she was trying to look for forgiveness for making Helena angry. It was like she thought there were always strings attached whenever Felicia wanted to be physically or emotionally vulnerable. That and Helena would always mentally shut down every time she wanted to get shit out in the open, and that was no way to run a relationship.

“You need to stop taking shit so personally and internalising everything, and treating everything like it’s the fucking end of the world rather than looking at it and going ‘Gee, this is something I can maybe learn from or work through, because that’s what healthy normal people do.’” She wasn’t known for mincing her words, and maybe (for once) Helena would take what she was saying to heart.

Felicia rubbed her hands comfortingly over Helena’s back in an attempt to soothe her and keep her from breaking down even further. “I have no problem with being an emotional support or an emotional compass or whatever, but this shit has seriously got to stop. I know you’re hurting and all, and if it’s because of me, fine, but you can’t keep tossing all your emotional baggage on my back. I need a little fuckin’ help here. This isn’t a load that either of us can shoulder on our own.” Reaching between them, she knelt down next to Helena and put her hands under Helena’s armpits, then lifted her to her feet. “I’m not always gonna be there to help pick you up when you get like this. I’m not saying I’m leaving you, I’m just saying I might be off doing something for work, or something with Ma, or someone else, and you’re going to have to be your own emotional support. Best you learn how to do that now.”

She raised her hands to Helena’s face and wiped the tears from her eyes. “Now go take a long, hot bath, and calm down while I go make something for all of us for dinner.” And just like that, Felicia turned off her serious emotional switch; it was something she’d learned how to do after several decades of practice. Kind of like how morticians and coroners were able to mentally and emotionally separate themselves from the dead bodies they worked on. Focus too much on what-ifs and emotions and mortality, and it could drive a person crazy in under ten minutes. Helena seemed to have that particular skill down to an art form.

With a final embrace, Felicia patted her wife on the back and kissed her cheeks. “And always remember that no matter how angry you get at me, or how angry I get at you, I still love you.” She stroked a wisp of hair out of Helena’s eyes and left the room, leaving her wife alone with her thoughts.

⋆ ✢ ✣ ✤ ✥ ✦ ✧ ✩ ✪ ✫ ✬ ✭ ✮ ✯ ✰ ★

ф Word count: 1082
ф Outfit: Think I mentioned it in the last post.
ф Other: None.