D2 :: Astraea Eldritch-Valentfyre

_{they say oh my god i see the way you shine
take your hands, my dear, and place them both in mine
you know you stopped me dead while i was passing by
and now i beg to see you dance just one more time}

"...that's a lot of swords in your back, Strae."



"Shut up, Noe!" Nox yells, smacking the arm draped around her shoulders and receiving a devastating pout as the arm withdraws.

"Maybe it's like the Death card and it seems really bad, but it's not actually," Zim ventures, her voice rapt with concern as she picks at the fringe of the scarf the tarot cards are laid out on. Astraea doesn't turn to look at her, her mouth frozen in downturned contemplation. It must be bad. Zim's fingers double the speed of her fidgeting, winding threads around her knuckles until circulation becomes an issue and her sister has to smack her throbbing hands back into her lap.

A great sigh fills the room. "Everything is fine. It's just a card."

"The book says that the Ten of Swords means: painful endings, deep wounds, betrayal, loss, and crisis," Salem informs the group helpfully, her voice completely deadpan as she misreads the tone of the room. When she looks up there's hardly a face that isn't turned to gawk at her.

"No smack for her?" Noe hisses incredulously at Nox, who immediately narrows her eyes and flicks Noe on the forehead. Hard. Apparently not.

"Hey! Tweedledee?" Zim jabs a finger at Noe. "Tweedledumber?" Her other hand points at Nox. They both look at her with childlike shock: Who? Me? Zim narrows her eyes and nods in oh-so-threatening slow motion, miming zipping her lips. Someone snorts over the scene, but manages to hide their amusement before Zim can turn on them next.

Wilder picks up the card, turning it over and over in her hand before smacking it back down on the table with a cocky scoff. "This is nothing. I have way more swords than this." Astraea's tight expression cracks at the thick-headed threat for the card, a mild disbelief — for something she absolutely should have seen coming — taking over her expression instead. "I'll avenge the shit out of you."

"How comforting," Zim mutters sarcastically, her mouth sour over having the theoretical heroics dibsed out from under her. As usual. All she wants is to be the resident knight in shining armor, but everyone is always one-upping her and that person is almost always Wilder. She wants to ask her sister to just... back down every now and then, so she can have her moment too, but she can never find the words. The longing for her sister to understand this instinctively, so she doesn't have to wrestle with the kinds of conversations neither of them are any good at, is palpable to everyone except the girl in question.

Wilder just grins like: Yeah! Thanks, sis! Comforting is exactly what I was aiming for. Fuck yeah! I'm even a good marksman outside of the training center. Emotions are my bitch. Knocking the sunglasses down from the top of her head, they slide down to settle on her nose in a way that manages to be painfully cool against all odds. Zim dies a thousand deaths of jealousy.

All of the quips and arguing swell like invisible mist around Astraea, too lost in her own thoughts to register much of it. This is the third reading in a row that the Ten of Swords has come up and the undeniable consistency of it has birthed a foul beast of paranoia that writhes in her gut. It wouldn't be so bad if only she could logic out some reasons for it, but her memory is riddled with self-protective holes, automatically purging moments of trauma whether she wants to forget or not.

Every rainbow she's ever seen, the time she discovered baby bunnies beneath the community home's back porch, tagging along for family cookouts in Zim and Wilder's old backyard — she has perfect recall for things like that. Sunshine and laughter, bike races and desserts. Unable to recollect her worst moments, so that her entire life has been edited down into a stunning highlight reel of joy, Astraea Eldritch-Valentfyre should be the happiest kid on the planet.

Spoiler: She isn't.

Whatever went truly wrong for her, she's pretty sure it's nothing particularly interesting or out of the ordinary. She was always just another community home kid, with the same old tragic backstory of a lost family. Even if her memory weren't constantly editing out her most difficult experiences, she was young when she was turned over to government custody — far too young to remember anything firsthand about it. Not remembering her birth family doesn't bother her as much as it should. It has always felt like a waste to cry over the lost concept of a "mother" or to fret over what life would have been like with only two siblings, instead of dozens upon dozens of fellow orphans creating a sea of faces endless enough to lose herself in. Those aren't the types of questions that nag at her each night she lays down to sleep.

Instead she fervently wonders about why she left. That's something she's supposed to understand. Sure, she can't remember being particularly happy in the community home, but there are no worrisome scars on her body or familiar faces at school that taunt or threaten her for having run away. When she crosses paths with an old roommate it's quiet and awkward, both of them preferring to be known by the world for different things and itching to leave each other behind for new possibilities. Astraea was mostly unnoticed, she thinks. It only confuses her more.

What she does remember is sitting alone in Zim's treehouse — long after she had pretended to leave to walk back to the community home — and deciding to stay. No one would have to know, not even Zim. There was a comfortable hammock up there with a roof over her head and she felt safe, wrapped up in an old blanket as she stole lollipops out of her best friend's candy stash. She left early each morning, before anyone in the neighborhood was awake, and had easy access to the water fountain and public bathroom in the park across the street. She showered at school, every weekday after cheer practice, and no one gave her a second glance.

Astraea had been living in Zim's backyard for nearly three weeks when Axel gathered everyone up before school, sobbing over finding out that her wealthy parents had been lying to her for years about not taking tessera out in her name. It wasn't necessary. She had always known on some level that she wasn't wanted, but this was something too big to unknow. It made their collective skin itch and Zim... Zim screamed so hard into a paper bag on Axel's behalf that she lost most of her voice, her words crackling like radio static when lunch rolled around and she pitched the idea of a runaway pact.

They all had their reasons. For so long, every day had felt like one revelation after another about how their parents and other adults in their lives didn't have their best interests at heart. Astraea was ten steps ahead of them, but couldn't find the words to confess. All she could do was stare at Zim, utterly transfixed, as the younger girl spit venom over the way her favorite people in the world were treated, swearing to the group that they could get away from it. They could leave that stuff behind and start new lives together, as if the past could be erased for all of them and never spoken of again. Everyone would be like Astraea, a history riddled with redacted blanks, and that would be normal; her heart kept asking her head if she'd heard correctly or if she was daydreaming again.

No one bothered to track them down because no one cared.

Axel's mother turned her daughter's bedroom into a workout room. Noe's family abruptly packed up and moved away before anyone could so much as suggest filing a missing child report to the peacekeepers. Zim's parents all too readily believed that she'd finally been accepted into the same career training program as her older sister Wilder, despite the plethora of rejection letters balled up in one of her bedroom's desk drawers, and that she'd moved into a sudden vacancy in the dorms. Astraea is still uncertain if anyone at the community home remembers she was ever there to begin with, much less notices that she's gone.

The abandoned parking garage they decided to set up camp in felt like a fortress. They were dirty and hungry and so happy they laughed until they cried. They roasted marshmallows over a trash fire, told ghost stories, and pet each other's hair when those stories about severed toes and hook hands made it hard to fall asleep. Then —

Well, Astraea doesn't know the next part. All she knows is that she can't remember the night they met Winnie and were given the keys to the garage's basement, so that must mean it was something really bad that happened. There were so many bullet holes in the cement floor where they'd been sleeping. Zim hasn't been the same around her since then and now both of their hearts ache with unspoken rejection when their eyes meet. That was never part of Astraea's starting-life-over fantasy. It wasn't supposed to be like this — ten invisible swords stabbed into Astraea's back and her still putting on her most convincing face to swear to everyone that everything is fine.

"I need swords. For a spell," Astraea finally blurts out, in front of everyone, like an idiot.

Zim — keeper of the weapons Astraea keeps attempting to steal, so that she can hide something sharp under her pillow to find out if that might be enough to finally help her feel safe at night in the face of some great, terrifying Unknown — clenches her jaw so tightly that her teeth threaten to burst. "No." The last time one of them cast a spell, a kid at the training center died. Wilder hexed his sword and then applauded when he stumbled and impaled himself with it. They all understand why she did it, but things have been awkward since then. Originally most of them thought Astraea teaching Wilder about magic was just a big game of pretend with a few party tricks for effect and so they all wanted to join in on ghost summonings and pimple clearing potions. Tarot readings? So fun! Murder? That was not jotted down in anyone's dream journal.

Reaching into her backpack, Astraea pulls out spool after spool of rainbow thread and a full color assortment of candles. "You gonna turn the swords gay?" Nox snickers, elbowing Axel with an upwards head nod at the pride-tastic little pile of crafting supplies.

"Swords are already gay," Axel points out, matter of fact. Wilder grunts in fervent agreement, nodding like an emphatic bobblehead who has never heard truer words spoken in her life.

"I said no," Zim repeats, glaring at everyone for screwing around when the voice of authority has already spoken.

A defiant finger points at a cluster of long bags propped up next to the pile of blankets Zim sleeps on. "My swords are your swords," Wilder declares, without so much as an apologetic glance at her little sister.

GASP! BETRAYAL! Nox and Noe trade a look of alarm, but instead of doubling down on her frustration, something in Zim's chest visibly crumbles like a house of cards someone breathed on wrong. Aces and spades flutter through the air and only Astraea is willing to meet her eyes, as sorry as she is unable to stop herself from accepting Wilder's offer.

The candles burn for hours, red wax dripping into yellow into blue and orange and white, as Astraea carefully winds enough thread around one sword after another to completely encase them, the handles spun into gods eyes. One by one her curious audience falls asleep, heads resting on slumped shoulders and others curled up on laps. Only Zim stays awake into the small hours, her emotional turmoil keeping her up as she watches her best friend's quiet tears be absorbed into the endless rainbow twisting. As the candles melt away into nothingness with the dawn, Zim begins setting out new ones, lighting them without a word.

It goes on like this for days, Astraea obsessively winding thread around swords by candlelight for four, eight, twelve hours at a time without breaks. Each completed sword is tucked underneath her thin excuse for a mattress until there isn't room for any more, her sleeping corner transformed into some bizarre retelling of The Princess and the Pea.

It works.

Her dreams sharpen and swell, so vivid that her eyes ache each morning, as if she spends each night staring directly into the sun. Painfully familiar scenes of smoking pink guns and unseasoned bowls of oatmeal linger into the dawn, like discovering lost puzzle pieces under a couch and having no idea which puzzle sets they were lost from. Sometimes the images have enough context clues to make connections, like how the gun Winnie entrusted to Zim has become an all too familiar sight or how unforgettably itchy the mottled gray blankets at the community home were. She knows that gun as well as she knows her old bed, but that doesn't mean things make much more sense than when those memories were missing entirely. It doesn't answer major questions like: why would Winnie shoot at them? And she doesn't dare to ask.

Maybe she's lying to herself and the dreams are just dreams that don't mean anything. She writes them all down anyhow in a notebook, just in case. Whether it's an entire scene or if everything is black and the words I love you are whispered into the nothingness, Astraea isn't going to chance letting any clues slip away. She has come this far. She'll continue scrying into the abyss of her dreams for the rest of her life if she has to. At this point her worries aren't that she might not like what she discovers in the dark; the real problem is that as night becomes a scattered patchwork of lost days that her memory can't fit into place, the things she used to know are getting muddled too. The whole timeline of her life is becoming a grab bag of jumbled nonsense.

The Ten of Swords smirks and sharpens its many blades. It will take more than wax and thread to bind this much madness.

<sub>they say
dance for me, dance for me, dance for me, oh, oh, oh
i've never seen anybody do the things you do before
they say move for me, move for me, move for me, ay, ay, ay
and when you're done i'll make you do it all again



dance monkey</sub> by tones and i, covered by swan.