blood_thinner. hal&harley!

She tries to ignore it, that drillbit into her skull. Around and around and around and he's doing it wrong. Peripheral vision; she puts blinders on and stays in the corner learning how to throw a knife over and over and over again until it lands and yet still her teeth grit, an ache in her jaw.

Maybe she just misses Maxen. An empty place in her chest shaped like telling a dumb kid off, correcting his flaws. Charlotte had always held an eye for perfection, flaws like neon lights in the dark. When her father had died and she'd been thrown into that same dark she'd thought she'd embraced the disheveledness of who she was when she emerged, blinking back that blinding light, but it seems not.

Hours tick by. Minutes. Her arm aches from the effort of hauling knives through the air and he's still doing it wrong. Knee twitch, bouncing on the balls of her feet. Breathe, calm -- whatever calm is, a foreign feeling. Maxen: that's what her calm is.

But her brother is so far away and she thinks she might explode, so Harley lets the fuse alight and marches over to the boy from Seven with the terrible posture and grabs at his shoulders, growling instructions all the while.

"You're doing it all wrong. Here," she twists his body into a correct stance, taps at the floor with the tip of her trainers, "stand like this. Dominant foot aligned with your shoulders, weight on your back leg. Not your front."

Harley takes a step back, assessing her corrections with a defensive fold of her arms.

"And unfurl your thumb. That'll snap into three pieces the second you land a hit."

[ coding by griffin ]