Logs:Of Excuses and Evildoers (Or, A Very Normal Teatime)

Of Excuses and Evildoers (Or, A Very Normal Teatime)
CN: Discussion of Rape, Murder, Child Abuse, and Gaslighting
Dramatis Personae Desi, Gaétan, Sera, Kavalam
In Absentia Lucien, Matt, NPC-Elie	2024-08-06 "C'mon, you've met our mother."
Location <NYC> Gaétan, Sera, and ???'s Apartment
The urgent knock comes around tea time. Desi must have just come from a meeting with a client, because she is dressed smart in a gray pinstripe suit with a pencil skirt, tailored to accentuate her unimpressive curves, a pale pink blouse with a ruffled cascade collar, and black pumps made just a touch daring by elegant ankle straps. Her long hair is done up in a neat professional updo with a single tress artfully escaped, tucked behind her ear and curled just so. She's not fidgeting, but it's a near thing, and the pallor of her nailbeds under her perfect french manicure tell how tightly she's clutching her stylish black handbag. The door opens almost immediately, before Desi's knuckles have quite lifted away, Sera having probably felt her coming and pre-empted her. Sera looks rather different from when Desi saw her last -- she's a little taller and a little leaner, her hair has grown well past her shoulder blades, bound back with two slender braids trailing black from her temples, and there's a skill and precision in the calm she radiates that she could not have achieved before without assistance. She seems vaguely younger, too, but that's probably a function of swimming in a Gaétan-sized green-and-gray raglan shirt and a bright orange sarong. Her eyes tick over Desi appraisingly before she steps back to sweep a welcoming hand. Gaétan is slower to emerge from where he's been tucked in his study, recording some new video if the music is any indication. He's just rebuttoning his contrast-stitched grey button down from where it's been left open a buttonhole lower than he actually tends to prefer it, running his fingers absently through his hair. He jerks his chin up, shuffling off to the kitchen to get a pot of tea started. Desi stares at Sera, her anxiety flaring and then receding just as quickly, replaced by relief and anger, which in turn erode under the weight of growing confusion. She steps over the threshold but doesn't take her eyes off of Sera until Gaétan emerges, and the ritual of tea snaps her out of her stunned silence. "Where have you been? What happened to you?" She bends to remove her heels, and when she straightens up looks like she's teetering on the cusp of hugging Sera. "Why won't you go home? Mother is disconsolate." Sera closes the door and takes a step back to give Desi room, waiting patiently until the questions have run out. "I stumbled into another dimension and Luci came after me." She takes another step to put herself out of Desi's easy reach. "We got a little lost, that's all." There's just the barest flutter in her calm. "That isn't home, and she's not my mother. What has she been telling you about Luci?" "Strawberry sencha okay?" is Gaétan's only current contribution, shoulders just a little more tense and his eyes fixed on his tea cabinet. Desi's eyes go wide. "Another dimension?" She looks Sera over again, eyes lingering on her hair. "Another dimension. Right. Strawberry sencha is great, thanks." She unbuttons and shrugs out of her jacket. "She thought...she was scared, she said a lot of things. You're back safe, that's what matters." The shuttering of her expression is very subtle, but her suspicious sinking worry less so. "What's Luci been telling you? You've been through an ordeal, I get Mother can be a lot." She looks to Gaétan for backup. "But won't you at least give her a call?" Sera just nods to the offer of tea and drifts toward the kitchen to watch it come together, though she keeps Desi warily in her peripheral vision. "I'm not going to see her or call her, and I don't think you should, either." She turns and looks directly into Desi's eyes. There's a sense of bracing in the biokinetic influence still washing around Desi. "Mom and Matt killed Luci. That's why he's been avoiding them, and that's why she's been telling everyone he's crazy." Gaétan spoons the tea into the basket, filling the pot and setting it on a tray together with four cups and saucers. He's setting a timer on his phone, nodding out towards the living room. His own emotional landscape is oddly muted -- sometimes a little like guilt, sometimes a little like hurt, sometimes a little like anger, but mostly kind of washed-out and grey. "She's never been good to him, has she? I just thought..." His mouth presses into a thin line. Desi stares at Sera, hurt and fury and disbelief roiling hot and bright. She finally does lean into the calm that Sera has been pressing toward her, and leans into it hard. Even with that bolstering she's slow to follow the teenagers into the living room, though once there she sinks somewhat automatically down to the couch. "She hasn't, but that's--" she protests weakly. "It was just--favoritism. None of us could measure up to Matt, but she wasn't a good mother to any of us, she's owned up to that. She was a different person then, and anyway it's a far cry from from wanting him dead. Even if she did, Matt--" She looks down at her hands scrunching into her suit jacket, which she now shakes out, folds in half, and drapes over the back of the couch. "Matt only ever defied her for Luci, and I think that made her hate Luci more, but he would never..." She swallows. "You're absolutely certain it was him?" Sera trembles with the force of Desi's reaction, but she doesn't withdraw. She doesn't dampen the volatile emotions, either, just guides them along more manageable channels while supplying her own steady calm. "As sure as I am of anything right now. But there's something very wrong with all of this. I don't know what it is, but think." She perches herself on an arm of the couch. "You say it was 'just favoritism', and then in the next breath she hated him -- a child, her child. Everyone's constantly making excuses for her, even when it makes no sense. I did, too." "Sometimes parents suck." Gaétan sounds somewhat bland about this. He carries his tray over to the coffee table, frowning for just a moment at the four cups before setting it down. "I've had friends tell me the most horrifying shit like it was nothing, like it was funny, like they only got how messed up it was when I wasn't laughing. Parents do that to you. For a long time they're the only normal you have." His expression doesn't change, but there's a tighter anger rippling controlled in his mind. "World's set up to make a lot of excuses. Three times as many if you're kid is like Luci. Not gonna keep doing it, though." "I wasn't making excuses for her," comes out clipped, though the irony of this doesn't seem entirely lost on Desi, as she subsides quickly after. "There was just--a lot more going on back then. I don't think she really hated him, she was just angry at what he put Matt through. It doesn't excuse anything, I just never imagined..." She's frowning down at the floor. "I did imagine Matt was the most likely of us to murder someone. I just didn't think he'd do it to one of us. Do you think Luci's in danger again? He was steering pretty clear of them before all this, and they haven't gone out of their way to thwart him that I know of, but Mother has been..." There's an unsettled sense of foreboding in her that she's trying to beat back down with her borrowed tranquility. "Gaslighting." Sera folds one ankle up under herself, which makes her perch look more precarious than it probably is. "She's been gaslighting him for months about his own murder. She's been lying to us about him for longer. To you, probably, since you were little. What could he have 'put Matt through' that was worse than how things were for all of you?" Some of the intensity eases out of her tone and her bearing. "I know this is more complicated for you. I had a lot of time away from her to think about this, and I didn't have to survive childhood with this version of her. It's fine if you need to rationalize -- whatever it takes for you to understand that she has it out for him, and will probably try to kill him again if she thinks she can get away with it." The intensity is back, and where her power is twined through Desi's nervous system it grips tighter, but can no longer fully hold back off the torrent of Sera's own anger. She allows it through deliberately now, letting it draw Desi's back out. "I don't know that he needs us to protect him, but we should be ready if he does." "Thwart him, why do you all talk like supervillains. He isn't plotting world domination, he is trying to live his life only." Once Kavalam is speaking it's been obvious that he's been here the whole time, tucked onto the couch on the opposite side from the girls. He has a controller in his hands but Hades II is currently paused on the screen. "I guess they did thwart that once before, it's just not how usually I would refer to raping and murdering someone. Which he did. In front of me. With your mother cheering him on." He isn't looking at any of the Tessiers. Just at the tray, and its four cups, kind of pensive. "I think everyone in this family is good at hiding what they need." Gaétan is just starting to pour out the tea, a small tug of smile at his mouth when Kavalam not-really-appears. "Pfft," he's scoffing quietly at the supervillains comment, his dry tone papering over the sick rage underneath. "C'mon, you've met our mother." Desi doesn't jump when Kavalam appears, but that might well be on the merits of Sera's power. The spike of her outrage at, presumably, his presence is quickly overshadowed by what he says and the rage and horror that pour in after. Even with Sera's power regulating all this she's breathing faster, and it's a few breaths before she trusts her voice to say, still a little shakily and staring daggers at Kavalam all the while, "{Who the fuck is that?}"