To Earn My Stripes - Ursula/oneshot

He’s got that mysterious bad boy thing going on and all with his crossed arms, leather jacket, and brooding smirk that never really reaches his eyes. He’s got hands that grab every part of her body, lips so rough that it almost hurts, but she doesn’t want him to stop, anyway. She’s the same. They have a lot in common. They’ve both got matching bags under their eyes and lips turned down at the corners by default, like a lifetime’s worth of gravity and heartache can’t help but pull it down. Together they go down - down that void that they both share, crumbling wider at every kiss and touch and

and in the morning she’s gone. Not like he’ll care, or even be surprised. She’s Ursula Libertine for Christ’s sake. Ursula doesn’t wait around for the Sun and the sleepy sobered eyes of a loveless boy to wake her up. She can do that on her own time.

But it happens again anyway. And again. And again. And again and again and again. They meet up whenever and wherever it’s convenient. The alley behind the pawn shop. His apartment above the local drug store. Backstage at one of his gigs. The break room at her job during a slow day. They meet, and they don’t talk to each other until they meet the next time around.

It’s boy and girl colliding, like stars, like universes, like empty hollow things that no one can hear or see. No one bothers to hear or see. She doesn’t even think that the both of them care all that much either. When he clutches her waist, she doesn’t have to pretend that he’s not trying to grab for another body. And when she smashes her lips to his, she doesn’t have to pretend that she’s not trying to wipe out the remnants of another boy’s kiss from her tongue. Pretending, lying, dealing - it’s all exhausting work. With each other, at least they don’t have to pretend. That’s probably the only genuine thing they share between them.

She honestly couldn't care less for Julien Baptiste. He could drop dead any day and all she would think is, “Pity. What an inconvenience.” Which is why she surprised herself by getting offended when he told her he wanted to stop “whatever this is.” Her nostrils flared and she crossed her arms, and she had the vague idea that she probably looked like a petulant little child right now, but pushed that thought to the back of her head, amongst other things.

“And here I was, thinking I was about to get laid tonight.”

He rolls his eyes. “Don’t act like you couldn’t get it anywhere else if you didn’t want to.” He’s right, of course, but Ursula is stubborn and prideful and can’t believe that this son-of-a-bitch was the one to end their little unspoken deal. Not that she cared that it’s ending. But if anyone’s gonna end a deal, it’s gonna be Ursula.

“I’m just frustrated that you wasted my time by telling me to come here. Ever heard of a telephone, Baptiste? Would’ve saved me the walk.”

“I didn’t think that you’d care this much.” His voice rises towards the end of that statement, almost like he’s asking her a question.

“I don’t.” She insists, her hands balling into little involuntary fists. “Maybe I just want to know the reason why you suddenly want to stop. You seemed perfectly fine last night -”

“I’m just tired. Of hiding this -” he gestures to the empty space between them, and she notices for the first time how hollow his eyes look when they meet hers, “- or whatever. It’s - it's too much work, Ursula.”

“Oh, spare me your bullshit, Julien," She spits at him before she can even think about what she's saying. In response, he drops his hands to his sides and looks at her like he's tired, and she knows that if she bothered to look, she'd see the same reflection in his eyes. They're mirrors of each other in that way - when she looks at him, she is reminded of her own broken parts. She can only wonder what he sees when he looks at her. “We may do a lot of horrible things to each other, but we don’t pretend.” She pauses, takes a moment to take a breath she didn't know she needed.

“What’s the real reason?”

He doesn’t meet her eyes, but he opens his mouth anyway. She hears universes collapsing, echoing. Something inside her plummets into the void. She waits, holding her breath, waiting to hear it shatter across the bottom, crack and groan and break from the weight of the darkness it fell into.

She waits and hears nothing.

It’s Dorothea Day. He likes her, he says, maybe even loves her. He doesn’t know yet, and he feels like if they continue, he’ll never be able to find out.

She almost laughs, because this broken beyond broken fool got himself in the middle of another heart-breaking situation. She tells him she won’t be there to pick up the pieces, pats him on the back, and before closing the door, whispers him a good luck.

They don’t pretend with each other. She knows some part of that whisper was genuine. They don’t speak again.

A year and some later, and Ursula Libertine is better than ever at pretending.

She gets so good at it that she forgets it’s even pretending to begin with. She can wake up and not feel tired. She can pass by graveyards and not think of them. She can run her fingers down her wrists and feel nothing but a pulse. And its beat - its constant rhythm - is something she’s found herself relying on. You see, if Ursula has learned anything from heartbreak and death and pain, it’s this: there is no one she can rely on but herself.

And she does. Heavily.

This, however, is a burden she can at least appreciate. This is blood she doesn’t mind cleaning, wounds that she will always bandage. There’s a clear schism between the Days of Old Ursula and the Days of Now Ursula, and she sees the latter as a martyr - a naive, weak, and diluted form of herself that she had to sacrifice in order to forge the identity she built from her ashes. Days of Now Ursula is different; she is active and loud and busy. She tells herself this isn’t because there’s a darkness deep inside of her that she’s trying to cremate through work and boys and deals, tells herself that all the noise in her life isn’t just there to muffle the deadened silence of her past, but she tries not to promise anything to anyone, anymore. Deals, she’s also learned, always get broken, and Days of Now Ursula is careful not to break anything, anymore. All she does now is try to forget.

It works for a while. Rooftops are just rooftops and the dead stay dead. She learns to forget, and if she doesn’t, she creates new things to remember. Nights hazily drift through her bedroom window in the form of smoke and laughter with nameless boys she bumps into at bars. These nights flicker by so quickly that she doesn’t even have the time to notice just how dark they are.

During one of these nights, she locks lips with the boy who bought countless pieces of priceless-pawn-shop-junk in the past week alone, just so he could see her enough times to build up the courage to finally ask her out. They’re at a beach party, sitting so close to the bonfire that she can almost mistake its heat for the kiss’s warmth. He smiles halfway through and she mimics it with an upward lilt of her lips, just out of habit. When he parts from her with a shaky breath, she has the decency to laugh lightly. “You look a little out of breath, Blue Eyes.” That’s what she calls him, partly because of his blue eyes, and partly because she doesn’t remember if his name is Ben or Billy. Still, she smiles at him, and his blue eyes crinkle at the corners in return.

After a few more minutes of bland banter, he leaves her for a minute to get them both some drinks. Everyone around her is still laughing or dancing, but the second Blue Eyes is gone, she can’t help but stare into the fire in front of her, as if her gaze drifts to it by default. She stares at it idly, her dull eyes watching the flames wildly lick the sky and following the sparks until they extinguish into the night.

Across the fire, she notices two figures, shrouded behind the fire’s wavy glow. A part of her that she thought she buried makes her think she’s looking through a mirror, reflecting parts of a past or a future or a whatever that she no longer wants to see. The figures aren’t doing much, just sitting next to each other and laughing. With a jolt, she realizes she’s staring at Julien Baptiste and Dorothea Day. There is something so palpable between them that makes Ursula’s fists clench involuntarily, something that reminds her of fires that only ever left her cold in the end. She twists her head to the side - away from the fire, away from the warmth, and away from the things she thought she forgot. For the first time in a year, she thinks she’s maybe not as good at pretending as she is at ignoring.

When Blue Eyes returns with their drinks, she swallows it down quickly, ignoring the bitter taste it can’t help but leave in her mouth.