First Breaking Point [Fic]
Jul. 26th, 2022 10:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
re_gretaEven the first time it happens, Greta can feel the shape of a trap. Drew approaches her, giggling and amused by his own cleverness, and it has the same feel as boys pulling the wings off flies. "You know that Joe totally has a crush on you," he says with a cheeky grin, making sure to draw it out until Joe arrives, breathless and flushed. Unable to stop his friend from claiming that he has a crush on Greta, he can only deny it repeatedly and at volume. He tries desperately to protect his reputation from the stain of her, and certainly not caring what she feels hearing it. Greta freezes, unable to speak. There is some kind of soft cottony distance between her inner self and her body. it doesn't resolve until after the two boys run away, all laughter and roughhousing, with no sense of what damage they leave behind them.
The pattern repeats over the course of years. Dozens of little lessons in the way she is seen are repeated by different guys in different situations. Every time the second boy believes he is the real victim. Sometimes they manage to apologize for their friend, but they always end up talking about their embarrassment first and loudest. Most make it clear that they don’t care if she hears all the ways she disgusts them. More lessons in the ways she doesn’t matter because of their perception of her. More bricks in the wall between her sense of her self and her body.
The last time it happens is what changes her most. Things could have been different. If it wasn’t Tom. If she hadn’t spent two years in gentle longing, knowing he would never really see her but finding comfort in her secret desire and his easy kindness. If her cousin Jasper hadn’t witnessed the whole thing and laughed, proving yet again that she didn’t really qualify for the full protections of her family. If that jerk Stephen hadn’t put her in the situation, clearly relishing the act of destroying something so fragile and precious to her, while feeding on her pain and transmuting it into his own social power.
But there was no intervention. No protection. Greta watches disgust make Tom’s face alien and ugly as he sneers and speaks the words that crack something in her teenage heart that never quite mends. He repeats himself loudly, staring her down to make sure she knows exactly how he sees the fat girl he uses to pass classes with now that she's gotten too close and familiar. That is the moment she finds that she's not as soft and gentle as the family rumor supposes. There is something cruel and vicious in her. Something that hates him for seeing her the same way sees herself.
She cradles the rage in her chest, letting it fill up the emptiness of her wounded heart and dance along her nerves until it becomes a part of her. Every dead thing around her hums around her senses, prickling along her skin, taunting her with the possibility of performing a ritual or invoking her will. She barely holds out until she gets home. Her peers already give her space, wary of her and uncomfortable with their sudden fear of the soft silly girl.
There is a fleeting moment when Greta thinks of using a love spell. Not to survive. Not out of some last desperate attempt to have a relationship with him. Not even for the satisfaction of seeing him want her the way she wanted him, hopeless and aching. She wants to dominate his will and force someone to finally actually see her for the whole of what she is and what she is capable of: terrible, feral, and wonderful. She is stopped only by the knowledge that the spell it wouldn’t actually give her what she needs. This understanding of herself could almost be mistaken for maturity but is in fact so much closer to despair.
Greta's family home holds horrors but her feet carry her to the kitchen. It holds nothing ominous to normal eyes, just an austere and well-appointed space. With rage and power boiling under her skin, Greta exists as much in the liminal spaces as the room itself, and there the kitchen is full of all the things she never speaks of. In this state there is no difference between the bodies of the human or plant dead. Everything from the herb cabinet to the refrigerator becomes a place of powerfully desecrated dead. Instinct, training, and the voices of the spirits guide her hands in the forming of the spell.
Her mother is so disappointed to find the smell of death that builds in the house is nothing more exciting than Greta baking cookies.
Two days later, they are in the principal’s office with a cop hovering threateningly. Greta never admits to doing anything to the cookies even in the face of threats and pressure. Her look of wounded innocence and sorrow never wavers even with the reports of Tom slipping in and out of consciousness. It is one of the only times Greta can remember her mother being proud of her.
After the police run a chemical analysis on the cookies that shows there's nothing in them that Tom was even allergic to, Greta is allowed to visit. She watches him struggle to breathe as invisible spirits eat him from the inside out and feels regret like a knife her gut. Not enough to call them back. Not enough to save him. Just enough to recognize she's crossed a line she won't come back from.
The pattern repeats over the course of years. Dozens of little lessons in the way she is seen are repeated by different guys in different situations. Every time the second boy believes he is the real victim. Sometimes they manage to apologize for their friend, but they always end up talking about their embarrassment first and loudest. Most make it clear that they don’t care if she hears all the ways she disgusts them. More lessons in the ways she doesn’t matter because of their perception of her. More bricks in the wall between her sense of her self and her body.
The last time it happens is what changes her most. Things could have been different. If it wasn’t Tom. If she hadn’t spent two years in gentle longing, knowing he would never really see her but finding comfort in her secret desire and his easy kindness. If her cousin Jasper hadn’t witnessed the whole thing and laughed, proving yet again that she didn’t really qualify for the full protections of her family. If that jerk Stephen hadn’t put her in the situation, clearly relishing the act of destroying something so fragile and precious to her, while feeding on her pain and transmuting it into his own social power.
But there was no intervention. No protection. Greta watches disgust make Tom’s face alien and ugly as he sneers and speaks the words that crack something in her teenage heart that never quite mends. He repeats himself loudly, staring her down to make sure she knows exactly how he sees the fat girl he uses to pass classes with now that she's gotten too close and familiar. That is the moment she finds that she's not as soft and gentle as the family rumor supposes. There is something cruel and vicious in her. Something that hates him for seeing her the same way sees herself.
She cradles the rage in her chest, letting it fill up the emptiness of her wounded heart and dance along her nerves until it becomes a part of her. Every dead thing around her hums around her senses, prickling along her skin, taunting her with the possibility of performing a ritual or invoking her will. She barely holds out until she gets home. Her peers already give her space, wary of her and uncomfortable with their sudden fear of the soft silly girl.
There is a fleeting moment when Greta thinks of using a love spell. Not to survive. Not out of some last desperate attempt to have a relationship with him. Not even for the satisfaction of seeing him want her the way she wanted him, hopeless and aching. She wants to dominate his will and force someone to finally actually see her for the whole of what she is and what she is capable of: terrible, feral, and wonderful. She is stopped only by the knowledge that the spell it wouldn’t actually give her what she needs. This understanding of herself could almost be mistaken for maturity but is in fact so much closer to despair.
Greta's family home holds horrors but her feet carry her to the kitchen. It holds nothing ominous to normal eyes, just an austere and well-appointed space. With rage and power boiling under her skin, Greta exists as much in the liminal spaces as the room itself, and there the kitchen is full of all the things she never speaks of. In this state there is no difference between the bodies of the human or plant dead. Everything from the herb cabinet to the refrigerator becomes a place of powerfully desecrated dead. Instinct, training, and the voices of the spirits guide her hands in the forming of the spell.
Her mother is so disappointed to find the smell of death that builds in the house is nothing more exciting than Greta baking cookies.
Two days later, they are in the principal’s office with a cop hovering threateningly. Greta never admits to doing anything to the cookies even in the face of threats and pressure. Her look of wounded innocence and sorrow never wavers even with the reports of Tom slipping in and out of consciousness. It is one of the only times Greta can remember her mother being proud of her.
After the police run a chemical analysis on the cookies that shows there's nothing in them that Tom was even allergic to, Greta is allowed to visit. She watches him struggle to breathe as invisible spirits eat him from the inside out and feels regret like a knife her gut. Not enough to call them back. Not enough to save him. Just enough to recognize she's crossed a line she won't come back from.
