Logs:Blood On Your Hands

Blood On Your Hands
cn: suicide discussion
Dramatis Personae Polaris, Wendy
In Absentia	2020-11-21 "Wish I could find some glimmer of him left in her."
Location <NYC> Polaris, Wendy, and Winona's Apartment - Lower East Side
This tiny apartment is on the fifth storey of an aging and ill-maintained walk-up, its walls dingy and paper-thin. The living room immediately inside the entrance has space for a couch and a coffee table, but little else, though its windows offer a commanding view of the narrow side street below to anyone who cranes far enough to look past the rusting fire escape. The kitchen is tiny and has no windows at all, but being partly open to the living area is at least not completely claustrophobic. One bedroom is almost the size of the living room, which doesn't say much, and the other is much smaller -- really only intended as a study or home office -- to make room for the single closet-sized bathroom. Even with mostly cheap, second-hand furniture, the place has grown steadily more homey. A creaky futon is flanked by an empty food service drum on one side and two stacked milk crates on the other. In place of a coffee table is a long, low bench with a flowery sarong as a tablecloth. Potted herbs line the windowsills, and whimsical metal sculptures line the walls and tables (or the items serving in place of them). A brightly colorful fused glass mezuzah is mounted in the doorway, while a set of matching candlesticks and goblet sit on a disintegrating radiator cabinet in the living room. The sun has set on another shabbat, but the sense of restful readiness has not wholly faded from the apartment--nor even from the city outside, gearing up for a Saturday night of protest or celebration or both. Nevertheless, Polaris is home and showered and changed for bed already in a black ribbed tank and soft green yoga shorts. She's also been drinking steadily--just steadily!--from the moment she got in, and her readiness now seems mostly for intoxication and worse if she does not also eat some food, soon. But she hasn't stirred herself from the corner of the couch thus far, just scrolling endlessly on her phone, though her eyes have largely ceased tracking the tweets that float by beneath her thumb. Wendy has brought water out long ago but now she is just drifting back over from the kitchen, a pair of bowls cupped in her hands filled with rice and cabbage and red beans. She drops onto a milk crate, offering one of the bowls to Polaris. She's long since gotten comfortable, too, green pajama pants covered in silhouettes of bears and a thick soft maroon sweater. She rests her heel on a different milk crate, poking at her food without much appetite. "How," she asks, seriously, "are the tweets." Polaris accepts the bowl automatically, not just out of long habit but extensively negotiated agreement. For a moment she seems torn--bowl, phone, booze, and only two hands to go around. Finally she sets the other items aside in favor of digging with more determination than interest into her supper. "The tweets suck," she replies flatly. "I swear like 75% of queer teens these days are on the TERF fast-track. Oh, sorry, q-slur teens." She pauses a beat, huffs a quiet laugh, "I guess this officially makes me An Old. How was shabbat?" "Peaceful. I think we've been olds." Wendy stirs at her rice, finally taking a mouthful. "Eighteen or eighty. Once you lay down a 'will only go to skillshares in places with climate control' rule you officially become an anarchist elder." She tucks one foot under the opposite knee, picking a little more steadily at her food. Then grimacing, shifting her foot back on top of her knee, gently wiggling a splinter out of it. "One day. Real furniture." Polaris laughs, sharp and bright. "In that case, God bless anarchist elderhood." She sets down her spoon and picks up her Ghostfacers mug for a sip of vodka. Her mirth flees quickly--first at Wendy's pain, then at her comment. "Ugh. Fuck furniture." It's a much longer swig from the mug before she puts it back down. "I mean, not really. Sorry, it's...obviously we need real furniture." She looks up at the ceiling. "Just. Why am I so frakking bad at letting things go?" Wendy frowns at the one minuscule pinprick of red now marring one joint of her toe. She wipes it away with a palm and lifts her brows at Polaris. "I don't think you're required to be over him in one month. I can look for chair-things." Polaris stares blankly at Wendy for a moment. Then her eyes widen. "Oh! No...no, no no..." A quick frown. "Or is it 'yes'. Uh, I agree with you, anyway but I didn't mean letting go of him. Though. I guess I have to do that...someday." She swallows, reaching for her mug again. "I just--I dunno. I ran into his sister the other day. One of them. The..." She gestures vaguely in the air before plucking up the mug properly. There's an edge to her voice when she finally settles on the word, "Twin." Wendy just cocks her head at this. Her hand waggles her spoon toward Polaris in silent prompting to continue. "I mean I've run into her *before*," Polaris says, her tone and cadence precisely how she always sounds when trying to talk herself down from something she feels she's blown out of proportion. "She was -- nice, you know? Just...lost. Grieving." Her shoulders hitch. "Anyway, she was at the Chimera woodshop when I was there for that training Tuesday. Trying to finish one of his projects." Her eyes brighten and she blinks repeated. "We talked and she asked me how I met Flicker and like a frakking *dumbass* I told her and she was like...she. She fucking *worked* for goddamn motherfucking *Prometheus." Wendy's blink is very slow. She lowers her spoon back to the bowl. "Is that," she asks, quiet, "the kind of thing we should let go?" Polaris blinks. Hesitates. "Not in the sense that it should just be--forgive and forget. But like, she didn't know it was nonconsensual and--" She scrubs a hand over her face. "--like lots of Prometheus workers probably don't know that. And there's gotta be like--a spectrum?" She lifts her mug again and gives a frustrated whine when she finds it empty. "Frak. Between like. I dunno, the head of the whole project and the hearing impaired janitor dude who helped us out." Then, kind of abruptly. "I stabbed her with a chisel." "Lots of Prometheus workers don't want to know it." Wendy lowers her bowl to her knees, lips pressing down distastefully as she stares into her beans. "Was she working there while he was..." Her fingers tighten against the bowl. She looks up at Polaris. Huffs a soft breath. "Hopefully somewhere good." "I dunno. Didn't ask. Was busy...freaking out." She waves her empty mug vaguely in the air. "I didn't really aim. Cut her arm open. But then she was like getting ready to finish herself off and I just--" Her eyes stray longingly toward the kitchen counter, where she'd left the large plastic jug of Popov. "I couldn't take it, you know? Getting his sister killed. So I tried to talk her down." Once more, Wendy just blinks. Slow. "Fine!" Polaris levers herself up from the couch abruptly and stumbles to the counter, refilling her mug. "So I'm fucking stupid because I didn't want her blood on my hands." She sniffles, taking a long draught of the vodka before walking it somewhat more sedately back to her place. "I know it was messed up for her to...do that" Her eyes stray to the water, but she doesn't reach for it. "Frak. You know how he was. With Hive. With Jamie. How he fucking. Believed in people." "It wouldn't be. On your hands." Wendy leans forward, nudging the water closer to Polaris. "Learning, growing, changing, that's one thing. But. If she decided that the time to have a crisis of conscience was in front of one of her victims -- that the time to have a emotional breakdown was where you needed to clean it up --" One slender shoulder lifts. "Seems like a great time to perish." Polaris takes the water. There's an almost grudging quality to the gesture, but she drinks all the same, long and deep. "I mean...I know it wouldn't have...actually been on me," she allows, picking up her bowl again with little enthusiasm and much determination. "But I--literally already had her blood on my hands and. I dunno. I was losing my sh--" She swallows hard, her eyes brimming. "I was losing it. And she was losing it. And I'm so sick of death but I just--didn't have the words that would make it okay. Maybe there aren't any." "There aren't any. Blood on your hands? She's bathed in it. If she's suffering because of that, good. It isn't on you to fix it." Wendy moves from the crate over to the futon, tucking herself against Polaris's side. Her bowl rests in her lap; she picks slowly at the beans. "If she's genuinely changing, she'll put in the work without expecting Prometheus's victims to lay out that path for her. If not?" Her shoulder lifts again. "Good riddance if she pulls that trigger." Polaris leans back heavily against Wendy. A quiet whimper rises out of her, more felt than heard. "I know it's not on me," she says softly. "I just--wish I could fix it. Wish I could find some glimmer of him left in her." Tears trickle dully from her eyes. She forces herself to take another bite of her food. "But even if there isn't--I don't think I could bring myself to be relieved, if she went through with it. I want her to live, and live up to his legacy. Not sure that's really fair." "That is definitely a set-up for failure." Wendy rests her cheek against Polaris's shoulder. Her breath comes out in a quiet huff. "At this point in the telling of it, I don't think even he could live up to his legacy. We are way past the laser sword territory." The hitch in Polaris's chest--might be something like a laugh. She leans her head on Wendy's, her eyes slipping shut. "He was never the one-man cavalry," she agrees softly, "and he never wanted to be. We were all the cavalry, the whole time."