fandomhigh | Summer Camp Wednesday [The Park]

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Summer Camp Wednesday [The Park]

Today's beautiful weather was made for sitting outside and doing craft projects, which was good, because that's what you were doing. A number of tables were set up around the park, each filled with macrame and micro macrame--which was a thing Anakin had learned this week-- supplies: cording of various colors, beads, crystals, and other bits of shiny things (though the supplies were getting depleted as the squirrels kept stealing them), and a few macrame patterns mostly for dresses and other clothing-like items.

Even more worryingly, there was a runway set out down the middle of the area, along with two chairs set aside for judges.

"Right!" Anakin said, yelling into his bullhorn again. "Today you will be working in teams under a one-hour time limit to create a piece of macrame fashionwear. It does not have to be very large--it's not going to be for any of you to wear. The dimensions are provided at your stations, and the models will be arriving shortly."

Anyone have a bad feeling about that? Good.

"This week's winners will win the highly coveted Billy the Bass singing fish--" he glanced around. "Where'd that kriffing thing get off to?" He raised his hand and the fish, propelled by its own power and shrieking Sabatoge flew in from...somewhere.

"...that was odd." He glared at the assembled crowd. "Please refrain from stealing the fish until after the winner is determined this week. Listen carefully for your name and then join your team. You will have an hour to learn how to macrame and then your models will arrive and parade down the catwalk. The winners will be determined by our fashion experts Sparkle and Brooke. Your teams are as follows:

Paris, Seivarden, and Astrid
Peter, Sabine, and Tip
Jason, Ahsoka, and Norman
Verity, Aphra, and Rosa
Bobby, Mitsutada, and Hardison
Liam, Miguel, and Uma
Hannibal, Cristina, and Rufus
Steve, Yang, and Sidon
Amaya, Kitty, and Beaker
Hera, Kanan, and Breq
Jono, Kathy, and Rey
Eliot and Ino

You may begin...now."

And a giant glowing timer that Anakin had gotten from...somewhere... began ticking down the hour.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

They'd caused little earthquakes? So maybe they were huggable if you didn't mind getting squished.

"Right? Like, school or work? Rebuild so you can stop losing profits, or hire a contractor and pray that insurance isn't going to fuck you over. If this island wasn't this island, it'd probably be, like, 'get a mortgage' or 'get a car,' or something. I don't like it. But I also don't want a do-over. What can you do?"

"For me, right now, it's 'go' or 'stay,'" Kathy admitted quietly. "Which is, surprisingly, a much harder question than it really seems like it should be."

... Huh.

"Yeah?" Sparkle chewed the inside of his cheek. "Well... what do the options look like?"

It was a dilemma he wasn't entirely unfamiliar with himself, honestly.

"Move to a city infested with demons that's still struggling with basic infrastructure, or stay here," Kathy said, a little glum. "Alternately, stick with the guys or...stay here."

"... With choices like that, who needs a pros and cons checklist, huh?"

Sparkle sighed. Well, shit. Suddenly Leto asking him if they wanted kids didn't seem half as overwhelming.

"So, what does Fandom have going for it, besides that it's not infested with demons and it has, like, roads?"

Kathy did. In fact, Kathy already had a pro and con checklist. So far it had a lot of cons. And for pros...Anders and Dante.

"My adopted dad, my best friend, my store," Kathy said, ticking them off on her fingers. "Basically, my entire non-boyfriend support structure. My social life. Convenient access to schools if and when I figure out what I want to do with my life. Lower odds of actually dying and staying dead. Additional employment opportunities--I've already taught a workshop over at the school and I could probably convince them to let me do it again. A multidimensional nexus beyond Hell and Limbo..."

Yeah. She had a list.

... That was a pretty impressive list.

"Okay. So does the demon city have any pros beyond the boyfriends? Because I gotta say, there's something to be said for long distance relationships if you're not sure about throwing yourself headfirst into something that might be too big for you."

His boyfriend was an emperor on a desert planet full of giant sandworms. At least he was kind of talking from experience.

And this was before she went to visit and got to add more things to her con list!

"...Not really," Kathy admitted. "I'll probably turn into weird things less often if I'm not on the island directly? But we've proven that it follows you home, so even that's not a guarantee."

Sparkle bit his cheek again. Oh boy.

"Well," he said, finally, slowly, "then I'd say do the thing you feel better about. I know life is risk and all, but if the only stuff you can dredge up about a place are that it'll probably try to kill you and your boyfriends are gonna be there..."

He spread his hands.

"It's like... like I love Leto. A lot. And this is the only place I've really had for years and everything else I love or every chance I have to get back to the things I care about are all here. Leto loves me too, and that means he's okay with waiting for me to be ready. Shit, we're still kids. Fine, we're adults fumbling through adult shit, but we don't know where the fuck we're supposed to end up yet. If you're not feeling 'city full of demons,' the people who really love you will understand. And if they don't, maybe they aren't worth it."

Kathy nodded. "And Dante's happy to sit back and let me figure it out on my own, no pressure. I know that if I end up somewhere around 'I wanna be with you guys, but I'm not ready for there,' he'll be okay with it. I just...I just keep hoping that maybe I'll find that thing in Limbo City that makes everything fall into place, I guess."

And privately worrying about what will happen with the three of them if she didn't move. Leto and Sparkle had started long-distance. Sparkle staying here wasn't changing their dynamic. Kathy sticking around would be.

"Even the name is ominous," Sparkle sighed. "Christ."

Helpful, Sparks.

"But, like... at least you have some time to sort that out, right? That's good. It sounds like it'll be hard either way, but end of the day, you gotta do you. Nobody can expect anything but."

"Oh, sometime I'll have to give you the tour," Kathy said dryly. "We'll hit all the good spots, like the club where Dante fought a demon fetus and the building that got slagged when the giant demon turned into a flaming tar elemental or whatever."

Honestly, Kathy didn't even remember much about the battle in Limbo City. There were whole swathes where it was just...frighteningly blank, when her brain had disengaged and just let her body do whatever.

In fairness, that had happened a lot the spring she'd first come back. It was just more obvious in Limbo City.

"I mean, I guess I can't complain, right? It's not like I'll be taking anybody home to LA ever."

And now Sparkle was flat-out biting the inside of his cheek. This conversation was going in a direction he wasn't entirely certain he could navigate.

"I think," he said, a little more gently, "that's exactly the reason you should be able to complain. You've already lived it, Mouse. Nobody expects you to live it again."

"I mean, Limbo City isn't that bad," Kathy backpedaled. "I mean, it's not overrun by demons, with humans living in shelters and hiding behind the National Guard. It's just that...Limbo sorta crashed into reality and all the demons scattered and now they could be just, like, anywhere, is all."

...She wasn't making this sound better. Was she.

"And the only reason I lived it in the first place is because I'm stupid and prideful. I'm pretty sure that negates all my 'right to complain' karma right there."

"Okay, no, fuck that," Sparkle said, words coming a little more fiercely now. "You made mistakes. People fucking make mistakes. You did stupid prideful shit, but you can stand here and say that and learn from it, you aren't arguing that it was the right fucking thing to do. You don't get to stand here and berate yourself for something that happened years ago unless you aren't willing to learn from it."

Okay, Kathy was more than capable of berating herself in a variety of situations, but maybe Sparkle had a point.

"I just--I still feel guilty," she admitted quietly. "About everything I put everyone through. The fear and worry and grief--"

And it was hard to believe that she was forgiven when she still hadn't forgiven herself.

"Mouse," Sparkle said, gently, but evenly, "don't you think you've already hurt enough?"

He inhaled. Exhaled. Reached a finger up to poke her right in the middle of her forehead.

"Look, dozy-head,, you scared the shit out of people. You worried us and you made us all fucking cry. But we're not crying anymore. You're here. You're here. I'm not screaming at a fucking video recording, you're right here so I can chew you out in person. We're all done suffering. We're just happy you're fucking here." He straightened up again. "It sucked. It fucking sucked for us. But at the end of the day, we aren't the ones who lost everything, and that isn't your fault, either."

Kathy could have avoided his finger. She was three times faster than him and he'd telegraphed what he was doing pretty hard. But she didn't. She stood there with wide eyes and let him poke her in the forehead while he made his point.

And, well, it was a good one.

"Apologizing to other people is easy," she said, a little stunned by his vehemence. "How do you apologize to yourself?"

And forgive yourself afterwards?

Sparkle sighed and shoved his hands into his pockets.

"That's the hard one," he admitted. "Doctor Lecter made that one a dare, for me. Just challenged me to not talk shit about myself for a couple of weeks, and it... kind of became a habit."

He worried at his bottom lip with his teeth for a second.

"I don't think it's that easy," he said, finally. "Especially when you've got so much you're beating yourself up about, whether you should be or not. But... if you want a place to start, start checking yourself when you stop to say things like 'I'm stupid' and 'I'm selfish.' Don't let yourself open your mouth again until you have something good to frame it with instead. It can be, like, 'I'm smart,' like, I know you're doing school, right? I bet your grades are fucking phenominal, you're a nerd like that. Or you could even just replace 'because I'm stupid' with 'because I made a mistake, but here's what I learned from it.'"

He paused for a moment more.

"Or you could ask someone else what word goes there. Someone you trust. Someone who loves you. You want to say, 'because I'm stupid,' but if you got nothin' but the right people in your life at that moment, I bet they can come up with better."

"I do try some of that," Kathy said, fiddling with the hem of her skirt. "I'm trying not to dunk on myself so much." Out loud anyway. "It's just...hard. Like training myself out of apologizing all the time."

Which she still did, more than most people, but still so much less than she had, once upon a time.

"Part of the problem is I just feel like...it was my screw up, so it doesn't seem fair asking people to help me fix it. I mean, once someone walks into hell to drag you back out of it, do you really have the right to ask for more?"

"If someone walks into hell to drag you back out of it, you don't waste that by never really letting yourself come back," Sparkle said. His tone was a little more gentle, now. "Mouse, they brought you home. They put it all on the line to get you here. I think that means that you're allowed to come back from it now, or what's it all for?"

Some of it had been for Alluka, too. In fact, in those early months, she'd been assured that that had been the whole reason certain people had gone to fetch her--because Alluka wouldn't have been okay until they did.

...But things had changed since those early months. And not everything that had been said had been truly meant. Maybe it was time to go through and figure out how much she was still punishing herself trying to appease ghosts of people lashing out in hurt--ghosts that had long since been exorcised by time.

Huh. Something to think about.

"...Don't look now, Sparkle, but I think you grew up," she said with a soft smile.

"Nah," Sparkle replied, returning that smile and reaching out a fist to chuck her softly on the arm. "But I can fake it pretty okay when I think it matters."

"Oh, so you didn't get an automatic upgrade when you turned twenty-one?" Kathy gave him her best crestfallen face. "And here, I thought that came with the whole 'legal drinking age' package."

"I mean, it does," Sparkle offered, "but all I was really given was a box of spare parts and one of those dinky pieces of bent metal they pretend is a screwdriver, there aren't even instructions. So installing the 'grown up' upgrade could take a while. I can't even find the instructions online."

Summer Camp Wednesday [The Park]

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