coffinliqueur: (Default)
Nigel ([personal profile] coffinliqueur) wrote in [community profile] fandomweekly2022-02-01 03:27 pm

[#002] Proud in This Parody (Resident Evil)

Theme Prompt: #002 - Heartbreak
Title: Proud in This Parody
Fandom: Resident Evil
Ratings/Warnings: T - Implied Canonical Family Member Death, Discussion of Malicious Stalkery Behavior, Brief Mention of Vomit (Though None is Actually Present)
Bonus: Yes.
Word Count: 500
Summary: Zoe reverts to old perceived comforts and tries to talk herself through what her brother would say about her doomed romantic attachment.

Like just about anything involving her brother is wont to do, it doesn't actually help.

 

She tries to write out a conversation, in the back of her notepad.

She remembers a time that she spoke to Lucas back when she was a middle school girl with her first broken heart, as one seemed meant to do when they've got that and an older brother - writes What do I do about Mia?, and imagines herself saying it the same way she asked him what to do about Elise, when her family'd been moving out of town before she'd begun to imagine how she could break her crush to her.

She remembers his face - wincing, his eyes dull and averted - and his crow-croaked response, which she jots down on the next line:

I dunno. Throw eggs at her.

She smiles, back in that bygone moment. If she was fully in it, she'd have laughed like she did back then, spitting out his name through her tears in her taken-abackness.

Find her before she goes! he continued, hard-eyed as if indignant - which he might've been - and gesticulating wildly. Throw shit at her! Smash her window! Wreck her mom and dad's car; they ain't going anywhere like that!

She said his name again - urged him, full-bellied, to stop it! even as she kept on laughin' up a storm.

Imagining it.

It felt mighty good to - play out a carnival of hurt in her head that her lack of intention had given her no need to interrogate, along with the fact that growin' up with Lucas for a brother taught one to laugh at things regardless of whether or not they were funny.

I ain't kidding; it's what I'd do, he said, and punched his palm before he pointed. It's what I'm gonna do if a girl ever does that to me. 'Cept more than that! I'm gonna make her sorry!

Like that.

Like when they weren't even jokes, self-admitted. Even to her twelve-year-old self, the proposition wasn't a joke; couldn't be, as a fully-considerable notion, to be a sufficiently potent counter to little-girl angst.

But she ain't twelve anymore.

And the smile fades fast and leaves an aftertaste like vomit in the lack of good, now, in such thoughts' seriousness.

Certainly now that she's seen the kind of fear that Lucas was willin' to wreak. He'd have to run a different approach by her - and she'd not want to hear it from him, were he here, either way.

Even the most benign idea from a man who'd never grown up and now never would surely couldn't tell her what to do about a woman who'd never really been "hers" to begin with.

She eyes the line - Throw eggs at her.

And stops him there, without bothering to put her thoughts into words.

That ain't gonna work, Luke.

Wherever she and Ethan have gone, now, it ain't my business to follow.


Closes the notebook, shuts her eyes -

and breathes.

Accepts that her heart ain't done aching, yet, for things she'll have to rip herself free of.

And carry on ever-lonelier.