Work Text:
Ivy is the first to reject what they were, afterwards.
She's efficient, blunt about it: just a simple "Well, she's dead now, and so is Porter. Not much we can do about it, and to be honest, not much I feel up for doing about it," while her hands grip a cigarette so hard and with such anxiety that Lucy doesn't even have the heart to tell her to do anything about it other than tell her, lightly, to take care of herself. Even before the - before the rage stars, she was always the most destructive of all of them, itching for something to take her mind off of everything and to prove that she could be the best adventurer possible.
They're in the woods - a different stretch of the woods, because none of them can walk past the old stretch without at least one person getting sent into a fit of panic so strong that they can't think. Lucy, of course, doesn't bring up her own memories, the times when she catches fleeting glimpses of shatterstars and malice dripping from her friends' eyes and the sudden flashes of searing pain that her limbs sometimes feel even without any outward cause. She knows it would just make them feel worse. Sometimes, though, she sort of wants them to.
It's odd, how for the one who never got shatterstarred, Lucy finds herself feeling the angriest. She never used to be angry; there was more gentleness there, and there still is just as much gentleness, but underneath it, all the frost in her veins has started to melt and give way to a turbulent storm. Apparently that's a natural response to being murdered by your best friends, though Lucy doesn't exactly have a point of comparison to work off of, and her therapist certainly doesn't. It isn't the same sort of rage as Porter and Jace fostered, those targeted lightning strikes of violence - but it's potent enough that she sometimes still feels the need to distance herself.
Everyone's so quick to move on, even if it's just outward. Ruben starts making his cheery beach tunes again, Oisin starts studying to apply to Highcourt for an apprenticeship, and Ivy spends more time in the woods than ever, disappearing for seemingly hours on end to track... something. Anything.
Lucy can't move.
She feels paralysed, most of the time, with the aftermath. Routine helps: she takes up gardening, tries to go to all her Cleric lessons on time, gets involved with planning for some of the school events. She'll say that it's a way of keeping herself sane, to the others; mainly, it's a way of not having to face them. She hates that she doesn't feel up for facing them anymore, but whatever shape they took before, messy and convoluted as it was before, now, it's teetering on the verge of breaking.
They never talk about the shatterstars, part of the pact Lucy knows for a fact that the others made before visiting her in the hospital, their voices low and barely-perceptible were it not for the incredibly heightened state of her senses after resurrection. Lucy wishes they would. Wishes they'd talk about any of it, about the shatterstars, about her death, about the damage that Porter inflicted, still inflicts, even dead, on their group -
About Kipperlilly.
The last time Lucy heard her name mentioned was just after the funeral. It was a small affair; maybe it would have been bigger, once, but anyone from school who had known the Rat Grinders - the High Five Heroes - whatever they were now - definitely knew about the whole rage cult. And anyone from Elmville who would have associated with Kipp's family were long-gone the moment the news came out, too. It was quiet; Lucy remembers lingering in the rain, her hair plastering to her face as she stands just outside of the service, eyes focused on Kipperlilly's parents.
They were always kind. That was the one thing that Lucy had never understood about Kipp: why she was so keen for it to be otherwise, to have the same tragedy haunting her that some kids would've killed to escape. She killed to find it.
Despite her cold resistance, Lucy shivers. She feels a concerned hand on her shoulder - blinking away the rain, she sees Kristen standing, brow furrowed, having promised to walk her as far as the graveyard before she made up her mind. ("No further, though," she says with a slight smile. "I don't think I'd be able to do that.")
"We can turn back if you don't feel up for this," Kristen says, raindrops on her lashes and tone far more somber than she's ever heard it in Cleric class. Kristen Applebees was the last friend Lucy ever expected to make - she knew of her, of course, from watching her shine with Helio's radiance in Freshman Year classes to watching Kipperlilly spiral about the cleric student who resurrected herself twice all because of some stupid divine luck.
Well, now, resurrection is something that the two of them can bond over. Between her, Kristen and Buddy, they could probably say it's a rite of passage for Cleric students and no one would really be able to challenge them on that.
Lucy smiles wryly, folding her arms into her jumper. "What, and make it so that we both get hypothermia for nothing?"
Summer rain in Elmville is hardly cold, and it's the sort of weather that Lucy loved when she was younger for the feeling of windswept freedom, and now loves simply for the reminder that she's alive. That they're alive.
But not all of them.
Kristen huffs. "You know, Fabian got hypothermia in Sophomore Year so bad it still resurfaces sometimes. But me?" She shrugs. "I'm just built different. I'll stay out here as long as you want me to," she says finally, perching herself on the stone steps by the graveyard. "Go ahead... or don't. We can just sit for a while."
"I just - I think I hate her," Lucy admits under the rain. Kristen looks up at her from the steps. "Sometimes - most of the time. But I just..."
"Can't stop hoping you can get those easy moments back?" Lucy nods, and Kristen's eyes drift to the ground. "...I think I know what you mean."
Lucy huffs a slight laugh. "See, maybe all the shared trauma is why we're friends." She sighs, and stares at where the ceremony is beginning, candlelight sputtering against the spitting rain. "I'm going to go."
A small nod from Kristen. "No one's going to blame you for that."
When Lucy reaches the gravestone, and the empty grave that accompanies it, she crouches down, wordlessly dropping the flowers she's been keeping at her side since she picked them from her garden on the grave, letting the anger and the grief and the naive hope that somehow, everything will be as it was again, wash away with the rain.
You got your tragedy, Kipp.
I hope it was worth it.