[There's a delighted little flush to her cheeks when she's helped down, mouth split wide when he strips, shuffles out of his shoes - she stops to step out of her own, bare feet in the dirt.
There's a glint in her eye - devious, competitive, when she says: ] It'll hardly be a race, [and then tugs her arm back, side knocks him and bolts towards the water, cackling as she goes.]
[ Yelled, but gleeful as he charges after her, and she might meet the water first, her feet splashing in first, but Billy thunders in behind her, arms scooping around her middle, pulling her tight to his chest when he spins her around and then—
drops them both into the water down under their heads. It's so hot, but the water is a brisk shock when his head breaks the water laughing. There's probably still ice melting in it toward the middle, the heatwave still scorching through everything. ]
[She screeches with laughter when he grabs her and takes her down. It's so fucking cold, and when she comes back up for air she's chattering even as she laughs, reaching to grab his shoulders and push him back down.
Her shift is soaked; white gone entire transparent against her skin, hair clinging to her face and shoulders as she pushes back to the surface to take it off before she becomes too weighed down. ] You dick, this is so heavy - [and it is. But it's also clinging to her thighs, her hips, her tits, half-pink with the skin shining through. ]
you ever forget where a thread was going.... zooms forward...
Oops. My bad, baby. Whatever are you gonna dooo? [ Cooed, happy and pleased, bright and brilliant like nothing's gonna go wrong. He ducks to kiss her, to press his hands against her wet hips, the sticking fabric, drag his hand against her inner thigh. ] I'll help you get it off, don't worry.
[ Tuzik grazes, and Billy is light and airy even though his chest feels too full, too heavy. They swim, their hands wander, and later, when they're laying on the bank baking with the sun on their naked bodies, Billy turns and sees her expression, waiting, expectant.
He groans. ] You've got to be kidding me.
[ She won't drop it. He knows this. His head tips back up toward the sun, eyelids closed. He sees the warm glow of the back of his eyelids and pretends he's at the beach. Not Rubilykskoye. Not Hawkins. Him and Jem on a beach somewhere. ]
It wasn't like that. I don't even know if he leaned queer. He didn't look in the showers.
[ But there's no denying: ] He was pretty though. I thought about it. Then I beat his face until it looked ground, and we didn't talk after that. Then he hit me with a Cadillac. [ Steve's face, battered and red, set to turn blue is a stark memory. More quietly he says: ] I went too far.
We talked about him, right? In that closet. Like I knew he was - pretty, or whatever, without seeing him.
[She'd made Billy jealous, egged him on, used Steve Harrington's name without really knowing a thing about him. She leans over him, strokes the hair from his face, thumbs away the lingering water droplets on his cheeks and nose. ]
You wanna talk about it? Going too far?
stranger things lore dump..... damn... cw: refs to for assault, threatening behavior and drugging
[ She leans over him, blocks out the sun for a moment, and he squints up at her, eyes crinkling at the corner even though he hates talking about this shit. He looks at her ear, then past that at the blue, blue, so fucking blue sky. If she moves, he'll have the sun in his eyes, but he doesn't mind. ]
It's stupid. Now I know they were... I don't know. Monster hunting? Munson wasn't there so he doesn't know, but, I guess that's what the fucking deal was. We were still really new to town, and Max snuck out. My dad got after me about it, made it my fucking deal, so I had to go hunt her down.
[ That all comes out casual. Got after me about it masks a whole heap of bullshit. ] I found her at this shithole of a house, four boys from the middle school and Steve goddamn Harrington. Who didn't live there.
It was fucking weird okay? I get it, that I went too far, but he fucking lied about her being there. At the end of the day, she just didn't trust me to know about the bullshit— which fair, I wouldn't have trusted me either.
But I went after her little boyfriend, really got in his face, shoved him around, and tried to scare him off, and when Harrington threw himself into it, I just... lost it. He hit me, and it was the funniest thing in the fucking world, you know? Like I'd had a date. I wanted to be on a fucking date. Listening to music, probably getting pussy, and instead, I'm in some shitheap getting clocked by a prom king who's got my sister hostage.
It was so fucking funny I... cracked this plate on his head and wouldn't let up. My knuckles were bruised the next day, all of em purple. Hurt too. But his face was... it was really fucked up. I think I would've kept going too. When I get like that, it's like I can't fucking stop. Like I woulda pushed his nose into skull, really fucked him up or killed him if Max hadn't... stuck me with something. I don't know. I woke up hours later, worst drug come-up of my life.
[ He's not looking at the blue-blue sky anymore, he's looking at the tree line, eyes tilted back to look at the sparce pines and the empty skeletal deciduous trees. ]
[All she can do is listen. He paints a strange, horror-movie-like picture; enough detail for Jem to understand why someone might lash out, ask questions later. There's other details there, the vague brushing over of his father, then the candid honesty of how badly he hurt Steve Harrington, prom king.
She says: ] You found your kid sister in a stranger house with four boys and a kid your age. It sounds sketchy as fuck. It must have looked worse.
[She hasn't pulled away. When I get like that, it's like I can't fucking stop. She understands this most of all, she thinks. That visceral anger; that innate desire to hurt when you're hurting. ] D'you regret it?
I'm supposed to, right? [ The air is hot and humid, and he knows if he rolls over, drags his tongue over her hip it'll be salty with fresh sweat from the warm sun. ]
I think so. It would've been stupid right, killing some guy because I lost it, didn't ask the right questions? She wouldn't've told me though. [ She didn't trust him, and he didn't trust her. ] But yeah. We didn't really talk after that, at school or parties. But I'd just see him, and... feel it in my knuckles.
[ His head tilts up again. ] Just don't know if 'Steve Hargrove' is in the cards. [ You know, for a little blue-eyed baby. ]
Don't go that far. I'm still gunning for Kit-the-Not-Car Hargrove.
[ Then he's grinning at her, mirthful at angling to convince her to name a joke-child after a sentient car, hiding the way he thinks over... the multiverse. Steven and Sue. Who would have thought. Sometimes he and Jem feel too similar, too many shared moments. Maybe it means he can tell her... anything.
He doesn't tell her that his Sue was kind of a stupid bitch. At least, that's what he would've said back home. He hasn't thought about her much here, hasn't recategorized his image of her with what he might know now about people and hurting. ]
I dunno. [ He squints at the way the sun lights up her tresses, turns strips of brown to molten caramel, exposing a million other colors. ] Max never really got it. No clue why, maybe she was just stupid, figured my dad wouldn't hit a girl, figured they weren't related so he'd back off. [ He's frowning now. ] He wasn't going after her, but he would've if he saw her little boyfriend.
[ God, it'd pissed him off so bad. Her not getting it, that she was walking on a knife's edge, and in the meantime, he was the one letting blood. ]
[Airy, curious. She thinks Max Mayfield was probably just very young and very sheltered. She was a year younger than Jem, before Jem became a soldier. In her brief memories, she struggles to recall being that small and that innocent. That … Free. ]
She was a little kid. It's different for girls. He would've called her... you know. Loose. Assumed the worst.
[ Sort of like Billy did that night. The more he reflects on it, the more he hates thinking about it. The rest sits on his tongue like lead. Above them, birds trill, confused by the change in weather. He wonders where they migrate. He says it blandly. ] And he was black. The boyfriend. He would've had something to say about that. And I don't know. I don't think she believed it. That it'd be... bad.
[She thinks: god, what a cunt. She hopes Neil Hargove dies early, hopes it's a terrible death, fitting for a terrible man. She hopes it hurts him half as much as he's hurt Billy, or what he might have done to a little girl for simply committing the crime of talking to a black boy.
She kisses Billy's nose. ] She might have thought he wouldn't do anything, just to keep up appearances. But kids don't always know that there's more than one way to hurt a person.
[She kisses his cheek. His jaw. ] I don't think she knew how much you were shielding her from, did she? And you - you were hurting. For so long.
He wouldn't have done anything outside the house. For appearances. [ He can agree with Jem about that, but it hangs obviously in the air: he would have done or said plenty at home. Max just didn't think she'd get it too. Didn't know it just took one inciting incident for Neil to explode. For it to become the new normal.
Jem kisses him and he feels the warmth of her, more comforting than even the heavy beating of the sun. ]
You're giving me too much credit. I was a real asshole. [ He tilts his head up, kisses the corner of her mouth. Laughs a little, corrects: ] Am.
You’re a softie under all of that, though. You picked me up on a horse.
[This is true. Whatever flaws that came before them are for the past. This Billy, the one kissing her jaw, who strokes her hair, who holds her at night, is something newer. Something reshaped, sanded down a little. ]
Did you still want to kiss Steve Harrington, after all of that?
Hey— I'm dying for something with more than one horsepower.
[ Somewhere in the multiverse, the Z28 waits for him. He wonders if he'll ever get his hands on a ride like that again. Plus, he really misses the memory of fucking Jem in the back seat.
Then his grin turns into a pained wince. ]
God. No. It's not like— listen, you were in a weird gay heaven with sugar mommies, free drugs, and collars for cannibals. Back home... [ It wasn't up to Billy. ] That town would've eaten me alive. He would've, if he knew.
[ At least, that's what he thinks. Hell, it's what he would've done given the reverse, if Harrington was a queer and Billy needed dirt... But, he wasn't. And home wasn't kind to people like him and Jem. ]
I mean, it sounds like he wouldn't have been much of a fight.
[Sorry, Steve. ] Y'know, I - where I grew up wasn't really a great a representation of the future. But it was legal, y'now. Gay marriage. Most people stopped giving a shit. Eudio was - exceptional. Paradise. But home, it wasn't always easy. So I get it.
[She noses in against him, pecks his mouth. ] My first kiss was my best friend, Lisa, before she went on holiday with her parents. I spent a week shitting myself that she'd never talk to me again when she got back.
[ See? This is why he loves her. She hasn't even met Steve Harrington, and she already knows he ain't shit.
But— no one's actually told him it's legal later on. He heard it gets 'better,' or whatever, but— he mulls that over. Doesn't act on it. Doesn't push her for answers or more information, just screws up his brow and thinks about it. He can't picture it, or— maybe he can, after living here. But not with men like his father in power.
Luckily, she makes it easy for him to grin up at her instead of staying dour: ] Yeah?
Did she talk to you again? Did she come back and want to practice kissing some more?
Yeah, she did. [This is followed by a pinch to his nose; a little mean twist before she adds: ] We were thirteen, and she didn't kiss me again until we were eighteen.
[She sprawls all the way over him. Folds her arms on his chest and rests her chin on their nest. ] Just that once. I wish I'd kissed her more than that, but I liked that she was my friend more.
[ He gets an arm behind his head so he can prop himself up, grinning smugly into her smug fucking face. She's sticky against him and his other hand finds her shoulder before gliding down her naked back. ]
Just promise if you ever meet a shitbag named Steve Harrington, you won't... tell him I wanted to suck his dick in a steamy locker room.
[The Hair is a distant memory. A blur of swooping brown against a forehead, a strong nose. A fuzzy detail in a life that was theirs, for a little while. A background character to a story that she misses so, so much. ]
I miss your car, I think. It smelled nice. Like - leather, cigarettes. Summer.
Oh, let me watch. I want to watch his heart break. Ball's are gonna crawl back up inside him.
[ He's snickering, brought back to pleased. That's something special about Jem. They always round back here. He loves being here.
His voice softens: ] You remember it?
God I fucking... miss it. It was like... That shithole my old man moved us to didn't feel like home. Home, California, didn't always feel like home, not after she left. But the Camaro always felt like home.
It was blue, right? [Faded blue, like the colour you might paint the sky. She remembers he drove like a maniac; she remembers sitting in the passenger seat on prom night with her hand in his, and that she can't really remember if they made it out of the car before things changed.
She listens, and remembers a little more. Thinks Billy was always a little more himself in the car than out of it. Protected, maybe.
She doesn't know, really, if she's the kind of girl Billy would have actually looked twice at. That maybe in reality she would have been faded into obscurity, maybe a little too weird and broken to ever really hit his radar. She says:] I think if you saw my real room you'd turn and run. But that's where I always felt the most at home.
Yeah. Blue. A Z28, dark blue, but not navy. [ He says Z28 like a lover says a pet name, he says dark blue, but not navy, with the affection of a doting boyfriend pushing his lover's hair from their face.
His hand runs over her side, feeling her warmth, the softness of her skin. He can't begin to imagine what she's thinking, not now, with her sweat and scent in his nose, on his mouth, with her so near.
He laughs though. ] Tell me about it. [ Then softer: ] I feel like you got a front row seat to all my bullshit. I should've seen yours, to even the playing field.
I was like - weird, I guess. Not goth, but close enough.
[Metal. Thrash metal. Screamo. She thinks about her room - the posters, the decor. She thinks about the music set up, the bongs, the excessive amount of skulls - and finds she misses it, but she also doesn't really know where to start. ]
I liked skulls. I still do. I had a lot of those. Candle burners, bongs - skull shaped. A bunch of posters of bands my parents hated. Crystals, photos - everything was black. [This is, obviously, unsurprising. She purses her lips, tries hard not to laugh. ] You would have thought it was weird. I can tell.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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There's a glint in her eye - devious, competitive, when she says: ] It'll hardly be a race, [and then tugs her arm back, side knocks him and bolts towards the water, cackling as she goes.]
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[ Yelled, but gleeful as he charges after her, and she might meet the water first, her feet splashing in first, but Billy thunders in behind her, arms scooping around her middle, pulling her tight to his chest when he spins her around and then—
drops them both into the water down under their heads. It's so hot, but the water is a brisk shock when his head breaks the water laughing. There's probably still ice melting in it toward the middle, the heatwave still scorching through everything. ]
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Her shift is soaked; white gone entire transparent against her skin, hair clinging to her face and shoulders as she pushes back to the surface to take it off before she becomes too weighed down. ] You dick, this is so heavy - [and it is. But it's also clinging to her thighs, her hips, her tits, half-pink with the skin shining through. ]
you ever forget where a thread was going.... zooms forward...
[ Tuzik grazes, and Billy is light and airy even though his chest feels too full, too heavy. They swim, their hands wander, and later, when they're laying on the bank baking with the sun on their naked bodies, Billy turns and sees her expression, waiting, expectant.
He groans. ] You've got to be kidding me.
[ She won't drop it. He knows this. His head tips back up toward the sun, eyelids closed. He sees the warm glow of the back of his eyelids and pretends he's at the beach. Not Rubilykskoye. Not Hawkins. Him and Jem on a beach somewhere. ]
It wasn't like that. I don't even know if he leaned queer. He didn't look in the showers.
[ But there's no denying: ] He was pretty though. I thought about it. Then I beat his face until it looked ground, and we didn't talk after that. Then he hit me with a Cadillac. [ Steve's face, battered and red, set to turn blue is a stark memory. More quietly he says: ] I went too far.
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[She'd made Billy jealous, egged him on, used Steve Harrington's name without really knowing a thing about him. She leans over him, strokes the hair from his face, thumbs away the lingering water droplets on his cheeks and nose. ]
You wanna talk about it? Going too far?
stranger things lore dump..... damn... cw: refs to for assault, threatening behavior and drugging
It's stupid. Now I know they were... I don't know. Monster hunting? Munson wasn't there so he doesn't know, but, I guess that's what the fucking deal was. We were still really new to town, and Max snuck out. My dad got after me about it, made it my fucking deal, so I had to go hunt her down.
[ That all comes out casual. Got after me about it masks a whole heap of bullshit. ] I found her at this shithole of a house, four boys from the middle school and Steve goddamn Harrington. Who didn't live there.
It was fucking weird okay? I get it, that I went too far, but he fucking lied about her being there. At the end of the day, she just didn't trust me to know about the bullshit— which fair, I wouldn't have trusted me either.
But I went after her little boyfriend, really got in his face, shoved him around, and tried to scare him off, and when Harrington threw himself into it, I just... lost it. He hit me, and it was the funniest thing in the fucking world, you know? Like I'd had a date. I wanted to be on a fucking date. Listening to music, probably getting pussy, and instead, I'm in some shitheap getting clocked by a prom king who's got my sister hostage.
It was so fucking funny I... cracked this plate on his head and wouldn't let up. My knuckles were bruised the next day, all of em purple. Hurt too. But his face was... it was really fucked up. I think I would've kept going too. When I get like that, it's like I can't fucking stop. Like I woulda pushed his nose into skull, really fucked him up or killed him if Max hadn't... stuck me with something. I don't know. I woke up hours later, worst drug come-up of my life.
[ He's not looking at the blue-blue sky anymore, he's looking at the tree line, eyes tilted back to look at the sparce pines and the empty skeletal deciduous trees. ]
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She says: ] You found your kid sister in a stranger house with four boys and a kid your age. It sounds sketchy as fuck. It must have looked worse.
[She hasn't pulled away. When I get like that, it's like I can't fucking stop. She understands this most of all, she thinks. That visceral anger; that innate desire to hurt when you're hurting. ] D'you regret it?
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I think so. It would've been stupid right, killing some guy because I lost it, didn't ask the right questions? She wouldn't've told me though. [ She didn't trust him, and he didn't trust her. ] But yeah. We didn't really talk after that, at school or parties. But I'd just see him, and... feel it in my knuckles.
[ His head tilts up again. ] Just don't know if 'Steve Hargrove' is in the cards. [ You know, for a little blue-eyed baby. ]
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[She pauses. Snorts. ] Your step mum - she was a Sue too, right? Like my mum. That’s so weird. Coincidences.
[Steve. Susan. A shared birthday. Maybe Jem was Billy, in another life. Maybe she is him, now. ] Do - d’you wanna talk about why you were so angry?
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[ Then he's grinning at her, mirthful at angling to convince her to name a joke-child after a sentient car, hiding the way he thinks over... the multiverse. Steven and Sue. Who would have thought. Sometimes he and Jem feel too similar, too many shared moments. Maybe it means he can tell her... anything.
He doesn't tell her that his Sue was kind of a stupid bitch. At least, that's what he would've said back home. He hasn't thought about her much here, hasn't recategorized his image of her with what he might know now about people and hurting. ]
I dunno. [ He squints at the way the sun lights up her tresses, turns strips of brown to molten caramel, exposing a million other colors. ] Max never really got it. No clue why, maybe she was just stupid, figured my dad wouldn't hit a girl, figured they weren't related so he'd back off. [ He's frowning now. ] He wasn't going after her, but he would've if he saw her little boyfriend.
[ God, it'd pissed him off so bad. Her not getting it, that she was walking on a knife's edge, and in the meantime, he was the one letting blood. ]
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[Airy, curious. She thinks Max Mayfield was probably just very young and very sheltered. She was a year younger than Jem, before Jem became a soldier. In her brief memories, she struggles to recall being that small and that innocent. That … Free. ]
ref to life with an abusive parent, and racism
[ Sort of like Billy did that night. The more he reflects on it, the more he hates thinking about it. The rest sits on his tongue like lead. Above them, birds trill, confused by the change in weather. He wonders where they migrate. He says it blandly. ] And he was black. The boyfriend. He would've had something to say about that. And I don't know. I don't think she believed it. That it'd be... bad.
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She kisses Billy's nose. ] She might have thought he wouldn't do anything, just to keep up appearances. But kids don't always know that there's more than one way to hurt a person.
[She kisses his cheek. His jaw. ] I don't think she knew how much you were shielding her from, did she? And you - you were hurting. For so long.
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Jem kisses him and he feels the warmth of her, more comforting than even the heavy beating of the sun. ]
You're giving me too much credit. I was a real asshole. [ He tilts his head up, kisses the corner of her mouth. Laughs a little, corrects: ] Am.
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[This is true. Whatever flaws that came before them are for the past. This Billy, the one kissing her jaw, who strokes her hair, who holds her at night, is something newer. Something reshaped, sanded down a little. ]
Did you still want to kiss Steve Harrington, after all of that?
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[ Somewhere in the multiverse, the Z28 waits for him. He wonders if he'll ever get his hands on a ride like that again. Plus, he really misses the memory of fucking Jem in the back seat.
Then his grin turns into a pained wince. ]
God. No. It's not like— listen, you were in a weird gay heaven with sugar mommies, free drugs, and collars for cannibals. Back home... [ It wasn't up to Billy. ] That town would've eaten me alive. He would've, if he knew.
[ At least, that's what he thinks. Hell, it's what he would've done given the reverse, if Harrington was a queer and Billy needed dirt... But, he wasn't. And home wasn't kind to people like him and Jem. ]
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[Sorry, Steve. ] Y'know, I - where I grew up wasn't really a great a representation of the future. But it was legal, y'now. Gay marriage. Most people stopped giving a shit. Eudio was - exceptional. Paradise. But home, it wasn't always easy. So I get it.
[She noses in against him, pecks his mouth. ] My first kiss was my best friend, Lisa, before she went on holiday with her parents. I spent a week shitting myself that she'd never talk to me again when she got back.
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But— no one's actually told him it's legal later on. He heard it gets 'better,' or whatever, but— he mulls that over. Doesn't act on it. Doesn't push her for answers or more information, just screws up his brow and thinks about it. He can't picture it, or— maybe he can, after living here. But not with men like his father in power.
Luckily, she makes it easy for him to grin up at her instead of staying dour: ] Yeah?
Did she talk to you again? Did she come back and want to practice kissing some more?
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[She sprawls all the way over him. Folds her arms on his chest and rests her chin on their nest. ] Just that once. I wish I'd kissed her more than that, but I liked that she was my friend more.
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[ He gets an arm behind his head so he can prop himself up, grinning smugly into her smug fucking face. She's sticky against him and his other hand finds her shoulder before gliding down her naked back. ]
Just promise if you ever meet a shitbag named Steve Harrington, you won't... tell him I wanted to suck his dick in a steamy locker room.
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[The Hair is a distant memory. A blur of swooping brown against a forehead, a strong nose. A fuzzy detail in a life that was theirs, for a little while. A background character to a story that she misses so, so much. ]
I miss your car, I think. It smelled nice. Like - leather, cigarettes. Summer.
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[ He's snickering, brought back to pleased. That's something special about Jem. They always round back here. He loves being here.
His voice softens: ] You remember it?
God I fucking... miss it. It was like... That shithole my old man moved us to didn't feel like home. Home, California, didn't always feel like home, not after she left. But the Camaro always felt like home.
I'm glad you met her.
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She listens, and remembers a little more. Thinks Billy was always a little more himself in the car than out of it. Protected, maybe.
She doesn't know, really, if she's the kind of girl Billy would have actually looked twice at. That maybe in reality she would have been faded into obscurity, maybe a little too weird and broken to ever really hit his radar. She says:] I think if you saw my real room you'd turn and run. But that's where I always felt the most at home.
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His hand runs over her side, feeling her warmth, the softness of her skin. He can't begin to imagine what she's thinking, not now, with her sweat and scent in his nose, on his mouth, with her so near.
He laughs though. ] Tell me about it. [ Then softer: ] I feel like you got a front row seat to all my bullshit. I should've seen yours, to even the playing field.
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[Metal. Thrash metal. Screamo. She thinks about her room - the posters, the decor. She thinks about the music set up, the bongs, the excessive amount of skulls - and finds she misses it, but she also doesn't really know where to start. ]
I liked skulls. I still do. I had a lot of those. Candle burners, bongs - skull shaped. A bunch of posters of bands my parents hated. Crystals, photos - everything was black. [This is, obviously, unsurprising. She purses her lips, tries hard not to laugh. ] You would have thought it was weird. I can tell.
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