don't go to war for me ; poppy & cedric } 92nd

She keeps little secrets out of sheer habit. She doesn’t even really want to. It’s like her tongue catches on the truth and a white lie slips in its stead. Always meaningless - like what she had for breakfast or how she likes her coffee. Poppy has sewn an intricate patchwork of all the parts of her that only she knows. It’s killing her, little by little - that’s a secret too.

Ellie had talked her into seeing a therapist a while ago and sometimes she’ll tell him about the sessions they’ve never had, as though she didn’t spend all thirty minutes in that stuffy office picking at the fraying strands of a lumpy armchair. She said one thing to the woman sitting across from her at minute twenty-nine. She was spent by then, skin burnt and blistered under such rapt attention.



There’s no reason to draw out her suffering, she's pretty sure she enjoys it. Terrified of what remains after the dust has settled on rock bottom and she’s forced to confront whether or not content and happy mean the same thing to her. Or if she is particularly interested in having either precious thing. They’re lovely and so very fragile and she’s such a fucking flight risk.

She loves Justice because it is her ruin. To this day, though she’s woken up beside him a hundred mornings now, it’s always agony. She trails her fingertips along the thinned white scars of nineteen years ago and apologizes for each with a gentle kiss. His tragedy is integral, wound so tightly within him that she’s not sure she’d recognize the man he’d be without it. There’s no attempted altruism in the way she tangles the two of them together, miles away from the families they’d made as reckless teenagers - let someone else deal with the consequences of their actions for a few hours more.

Everything changes today, after all.

She’d settled on destruction last night. That’s the thing - her mistakes are never the hot iron of impulse, perhaps then they’d be easier to excuse. Poppy is slow acting venom hidden on a dagger’s edge, acutely aware of the pain she will cause. A part of her knows this is the right thing to do, she just wishes that is why she chose to do this and not because her smile had begun to feel too familiar.

"I promised Cedric we'd have breakfast today." She pushes Justice's hair back and lays a parting kiss upon his forehead. He's not quite awake, barely stirring, and she's no intention of still being here by the time he is. Always easier that way.

Cedric turned thirteen a few weeks back and she loves him so fucking much. It's just that she's not sure her love is something good. Poppy was not suited to motherhood in the way she pretended to be. She'd been told something was supposed to click into place the moment she held her baby in her arms, some kind of cosmic alignment when everything she'd been through would suddenly make sense.

But she is not selfless and she is not patient. She hates all the parts of Cedric that remind her of herself. And that was okay, she insisted, because Ellie was more than capable of being unconditional for her. Poppy was there to help him with his homework, to talk through his endless curiosities and encourage his current fixation on whatever scheme he and Sage were cooking up. She pushed him to be better in the places she knew he was capable; she called for punishment when Ellie was too kind.

Now that he was older it was a lot easier to look at him. He resembles his father and his uncle, looking less like her by the year and that was a small comfort.

"Mom! Over here!" Cedric is already at the diner by the time she arrives. They'd stumbled upon this hole in the wall during a treasure hunt a few years ago and, though the two of them had never discussed it, it had become their hideaway. A place they knew to meet whenever the other wanted to talk. Sweet little secrets are secrets all the same and it's just a bit harder to step past the threshold this time.

"Your hair's a mess." She scolds without thinking, shuffling into his side of the booth to smooth down flyaway curls. His cheeks have lost some of their sweetness and his nose is a bit broader. He's got Justice's smile and the same eyes as Asher before she'd left him to rot in their childhood home. "Thirteen years old and you still can't use a hairbrush?"

Cedric ducks his head, batting at her hands although he can't quite hide his pleased smile at being fussed over, "It gets tangled ten minutes after I brush it. Waste of time."

"It is absolutely not a waste of time, you little shit. Brush your goddamn hair." And she presses her cheek to the top of his head, pulling him into a one armed embrace. It lasts too long, the seconds pass like hours until she feels him go rigid in her grasp - suddenly tense when he squeaks out,

"Mom? Is something wrong?" Always a little too observant, that boy.

No She almost says, quick and placating. If only to ease the trembling of his breaths.

"Kind of." She says instead, drawing back to look him in his eyes. "But it's not your fault. It's mine. It's a lot of people's, actually. We haven't been very fair to you."

His eyes, on the hazel end of brown, gloss over. The way his lips curl up at their edges in a forced smile is awfully familiar. Her chest aches. He opens his mouth, then, and lets a practiced lie spill out, "That's not true."

"Don't. Ced. Please." She closes her eyes, taking a deep breath. His hands suddenly force their way into hers and, wow, she hadn't realized they'd been clenched so tightly. "I need to say this. You deserve to hear this."

He nods, then, resolute and a little terrified.

She pretends not to feel the tears prickling behind her eyes.

"It's about your father, your uh biological father-"

"i'm not the one you want me to be"