everyone_takes | (no subject)

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effy

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Even now, with all her stuff prepared and the canoe pulled up onto the sand, Kate knew she wasn't exactly the camping type. It had taken her way too long to realize that she'd forgotten to pack any water, even though she'd remembered food, a sleeping bag and a flashlight. The serious lack of water was the reason she was late now, jogging along the boardwalk to where she'd left the canoe, hoping Effy hadn't been there for ages already, waiting for her. Not that she was particularly punctual most of the time, so it probably wasn't even a surprise.

And even though she knew she wasn't the camping type, she was excited for the trip. In all the time Kate had been on the island, she'd never done anything like this. Killer stuffed animals hardly counted as an adventure, since that wasn't exactly the sort of fun anyone went looking for. She hadn't been to see the dinosaurs, hadn't gone down into that underground city, hadn't changed bodies with anyone -- though she had been a dude for a few days, which had been sort of fun. This, though, was planned.

On top of that, she'd never really gone on any sort of trip with a girl friend before. She and Tara had done that weekend trip that had ended pretty okay, even if it had started off rough, but she'd never done anything like this. By eighteen, she figured it was the sort of thing everyone had done, but not Kate. Of course, by eighteen, most girls hadn't done half the shit she'd done, but that sort of wasn't the point.

"Hey!" she called as she finally made her way to the beach, breathing hard and skidding in the sand a little. She dropped her pack as she tried to catch her breath, then waved her hand absently at the canoe. "Sorry. Forgot water. Had to go all the way back."

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"Does he have one of those— epipens, isn't it?" Effy asked, brows suddenly deeply furrowed at the thought of anything happening to Kate's brother. She didn't know him, no more than Kate knew Tony, but if there was anything that Effy was sure of on the island, it was that she had a small circle of friends for whom she'd always wish the best. Kate's name was pretty much always at the top of the list. "Helps with the allergies. Can't remember what shit the clinic has that replenishes."

She paused, raising a brow in afterthought.

"Other than the obvious."

Kate gave a snort of laughter at that, rolling her eyes in agreement. "Yeah, he's okay now. I mean, at the time I don't think he had one with him. He was out in the middle of the jungle. Camping." More than anything, she was grateful that he'd been brought back in time, that the clinic had been able to help him and that he hadn't died in the middle of the fucking jungle, alone, without anyone to help him.

"But he has one now," she said. "So if it happens again, he can stab himself in the leg." Or she'd do it for him, if she had do. Ever since she was a kid she'd known how to use one, having been trained for a long time by her parents to use it properly. And she'd calmed down a bit since then, too, not constantly worried that Marshall was going to go for a simple walk and end up dead on the boardwalk.

"Should keep that bloody thing around his neck," Effy assesses, brow heavily knit as she gives Kate a look over her shoulder, faintly alarmed even simply upon hearing stories from the past. Not having any allergies herself, there's something terrifying about having one's life on the line without intending. Every time she's found herself too close to that cliff, it's been her own mind pushing her there, and a dark acceptance lingering under her skin, but the thought of fighting tooth and nail and yet only falling again? It's unfair, Effy thinks. As unfair as it is that the darker thoughts plague anyone at all.

But they're pulling closer to the second island now, so she falls silent after that, the paddle touching against the bottom of the shore when she reaches down far enough. "Almost there," she says quietly, the volume of her voice belying her excitement.

That got another soft laugh out of Kate and it wasn't something she disagreed with. She was pretty sure Marshall was smart enough to always have one with him, but it might make her feel even better if he did put the damn thing on a string and wear it around his neck. Then everyone would know it was there and she figured most people could understand how to use it.

"Almost close enough to jump out," she replied, pushing off the bottom of the ocean with her paddle now that she could touch it. They glided foward smoothly for another moment before the bottom of the canoe scraped against the sand and Kate let out a soft noise, jolted slightly.

But she was wet already and so she hopped out of the canoe and into the water with much more grace than she'd had getting in. She was wet to her knees, but she was excited now, the island much more real to her now that they were actually setting foot on it.

Effy continued pushing the canoe that small amount more into the sand before she stood in the boat, having the fortune of being close to the front, and thus less capable of rocking it with every step. Going over the front of the canoe, she stepped onto sand without getting more wet than her feet, before her hand wrapped around the curve and she prepared to pull.

"Help me out," she told Kate, grinning as she rocked the canoe from one side to another to help reduce the friction as they tugged it up to shore. "Don't want it to wash away when the tide comes or some shit like that."

Only briefly did she allow herself to glance at the island itself, exhilarated by finally being away, finally feeling as though she had an escape from the entirety of everything on that first island. She was without brother here, without boyfriend, without his best friend, just coming as herself with someone who'd only wanted to be her friend for her. Not as part of a popularity contest. Not as a fuck. But her.

It was priceless.

"I probably should have thought to bring a rope," Kate said in a considering tone, helping Effy rock the canoe through the sand and up further onto the beach. Although she was aware that the tide came in and went out, she never gave it much thought beyond that and had no idea just how far the water would creep up the beach. "That way we could get it tied to a tree or something, too. Wouldn't have to worry about it floating away in the middle of the night."

Someone would come get them eventually, but it sort of took the adventurous part out of the adventure if they had to be rescued.

"Wait, there's some junk by the trees," she said, jogging across the sand to an old box and some weird looking papers. It felt strange to be picking through things that had obviously belonged to someone else at some point, but eventually she returned with a rope that still felt fairly strong. "This should work."

"Whizzer," Effy murmured under her breath, the word slipping before she could really give it any thought, and the longing for Pandora hitting her square in the chest. She didn't think that this island would have been too great for Pandora in the long run, would have forced the girl to be too long without Tommo, and above it all, had a futile air to it all. Where Pandora was about opportunity, the island always seemed to deny people that, from Effy's perspective. People could do as much as they wanted, but only within an extremely limited space.

Testing the rope with a sharp tug, Effy nodded. "Friend of mind showed me how to tie knots," she added, thinking of Finnick as she looped the rope around the front bench, then began work trying to replicate the work he'd done. "Spent most of his life 'round water. He'd be better at it than me."

"Well, you're way better at it than I would be, so that's a huge step in a right direction," Kate said, watching Effy with the rope. If it had been left up to her, she probably would have just tied the thing like she tried her shoes and the canoe would have drifted off in the middle of the night anyway. "There's an old fishing net over there, too. Not much use to us, but it's strange, going through stuff that used to belong to someone."

There hasn't been anyone on this island for as long as they've known it's here, as far as Kate knows. But at some point, before anyone of them arrived, people lived here. Their things are left behind and it's only now that they're here and she's touched it that it really hits home. Someone was here and now they're gone and the only evidence of their life is a few ropes and a fishing net. A box with some papers. A few huts. And no one at all knows who they were.

"Bullshit," Effy laughed, although she made quick work of the rope, muscle memory already formed from all of the times that she and Finnick had spent whiling away the afternoon. In spite of having known each other for a relatively short amount of time, it'd been incredibly easy to fall into a sort of rapport with Finnick. He never pushed too much. Never asked for answers that Effy didn't have. When she was unsure, all else fell to silence, and the two of them would practice knots.

A part of her couldn't wait to return to the first island, if only so she could let him know that all of their work hadn't gone to waste.

"We should check out the stuff anyway. Not like it's any use to anyone just rotting out here," Effy concluded, somehow unafraid of the implications of the abandoned materials, giving the rope another tug before glancing Kate's way and pointing at the knot. "See if you can undo this so I know if I need to try again."

For a few moments, Kate fumbled with the knot, her fingers looking for a loop or for some kind of purchase to undo and eventually she gave up and shook her head. "Unless the wind and the water are way more dexterous than me, I think we're okay." Of course, given where they lived, it wasn't entirely impossible that the ocean would grow fingers and find some weird way to undo the rope.

She reached down for her bag and hefted it onto her shoulder, settling it in the middle of her back. It was more than she was used to carrying with her every day, almost heavier than she expected, but that was part of it, she thought. Part of being away from what she thought of as home, doing something new and different.

"Which way first?" she asked, picking her way across the sand to the box and the fishing net. "I really want to see the ruins. I don't even really know what that means. It could be anything."

"Let's find a house," Effy concluded, squinting in the direction that the map had indicated for the ruins. Even though she knew that it'd be impossible to see anything much from where they were, still a part of her almost expected to see something emerge from the shadows and the forestry. "There's a fishing village on the way. Should be a place for us to put our shit before walking over to the ruins."

Leaning over the boat, Effy pursed her lips before taking a length of netting and wrapping it around some of their materials, hooking the entirety of the pack over her shoulder, deceptively strong that day.

"We're not very prepared, are we?" she grinned then, huffing a breath before pressing on forward through the trees.

"Hey, I'm from Overland Park, Kansas," Kate answered with a grin, as if that explained exactly why she wasn't cut out for this sort of thing. It did, in a way. Growing up in the middle of Kansas had pretty much meant no camping. No real vacations either. She'd never even seen the ocean until she'd come to the island. Her biggest adventure had been planning all the ways in which she'd leave home and never actually doing any of them.

"We're just lucky I remembered to bring food and water," she said, following Effy into the trees. The second island seemed a lot like the first, at least from where she was standing right now. The jungle looked the same, the beach was just sand, but it felt different somehow.

It hit her after a moment what was different. It was quiet. No sounds of kids playing on the beach or people shouting in the surf. Just the two of them walking through the jungle.

"You never ran away from home?" Effy asked, and for all that she grinned, it was an honest question. Most people that she knew did at some point or another, whether triggered by a specific argument, or just the desire to fly far from the coop and out of the nest, out into the world where they could test themselves. Cook had been his own case, drifting without an anchor, going where the winds took him, only pushed to action when Effy needed to run, run, and never look back.

"Find that impressive," she added, weaving through and finding the easiest path to walk, with a small makeshift sundial— or really, simply a wooden disc with a small triangle glued there— rested in her palm to help keep them walking in the right direction. "Though I guess even when you run away, usually a wallet's enough."

"Not really," Kate replied, thinking about it for a moment. There had been times when she'd certainly wanted to run away and those moments had come closer and closer together as she'd gotten older. At times all the shit going on at home had seemed totally overwhelming, but whenever things got really bad, something always happened to either put things into perspective or they just got better. Not for good, because she already knew that nothing good could ever last for long, but better. And sometimes better was enough.

"I mean, T and I would take off sometimes," she said. "We'd take my mom's credit cards and go buy a bunch of skanky clothes and cigarettes and shit at the mall. But running away from home with your mom's alter isn't really the same. It's practically running away with your mom." Because Tara always came back in the end and usually made Kate return all the shit she'd bought.

Effy considered pointing out that the fact that Kate's mother cared at all was something else altogether, something that Effy hadn't known in her life until her family had already started crumbling at the edges, her father breaking off and away to seek a life without humiliation, Tony recovering from an accident and gradually taking the experience as greater impetus to set out in the world, and Anthea herself only returning once it was clear that Effy couldn't survive on her own at all. But it seemed so unnecessarily bleak, she thought to herself. Whatever her family did back home had a minimal effect on her life on the island.

"My mom and I ran 'way from the boys once," she decided to share instead, ignoring the thought that Tony and her father had run away long before that trip. "Ran to Italy for a summer. It was nice. Came back and it was like... nothing moved. Running away by yourself's different. You come back, and then nothing's the same."

As they walked, Kate thought about that, about whether or not anything had felt different when she and T would come home. It always did, somehow, yet nothing at all had changed and she had to wonder now if what was different was how she felt about T. Every time they did something stupid and fucked up, she found her feelings changing a little, growing more impatient with T.

"The furthest my mom and I went was a scummy hotel about a half hour away from home," she admitted with a small smile. "She was really my mom that time, not one of the alters. I should have tried to convince her to take us to Italy."

But things had felt different that time, too. They'd gone and Tara had transitioned and for the first time in her life, it had been up to Kate and Kate alone to take care of her mom. She'd been the one to talk T away, to convince her to leave before she did something really stupid. Nothing had changed when they'd come back, but it had felt different anyway.

"Place is full of tossers," Effy let Kate know, though a part of Effy wondered if they were the sort of tossers that Kate would've liked. If they were the sort of tossers that just about all girls their aged liked, really, if only because they were handsome, debonair, and their accents were worthy of awe, if nothing else. There was something about the way that they looked at a woman, though, that left Effy just tempted to laugh, pushing their cheeks away whenever they drew too close. A good boost for her confidence, she supposed, if nothing else.

She bit down on her lower lip in thought.

"I liked traveling with my mum," she concluded, glancing over in Kate's direction. "Was the first time that I really got to talk to her in years, you know? 'round the house, we never got to it much."

Kate and Tara hadn't done much traveling together, but she sort of figured there was a reason behind that. Whenever shit changed, whenever it got a little too unfamiliar, Tara turned into someone else. Buck in Italy might have been sort of insane, so it was probably better they'd never gone there or anywhere beyond the Galleria. Half the time they didn't even get that far.

But it was especially obvious then, with what Effy said, just how different their parents had been. Even with all her shit, Tara had always wanted to talk, she'd always tried and even when the talks had been awkward as fuck -- Kate still clearly remembered the attempt at a 'cool' sex talk -- she was trying.

"How long was that before you came here?" she asked, catching sight of some weird, low buildings through the trees ahead.

"Italy was a year before I got here," Effy said, trying to get the words out of her lips as quickly as possible, for the thought wasn't one that she wanted to allow to linger and fester, all ill will or hurt towards her mother having been shoved into the background after she'd tried to kill herself, bleeding dry onto yellowed tile. "Talking was..."

She paused, tilting her head in thought, running through the years as though flipping through pages in a photo album without truly focusing on the faces, faces that had begun to fade around the edges ever since she'd landed on the island. Some, even prior.

"Tony was the one who talked to me. Mum didn't know how."

"So Italy was sort of... a big deal, then," Kate guessed, not wanting to put words in Effy's mouth. That was how it sounded, though, like the first time her mom had actually tried and that was the kind of thing that was important.

She knew that things at home had been hard sometimes, that there had been times when they were younger that Tara had worried about the two of them being taken away because of her DID, but Kate thought they were probably pretty lucky. It was just too bad that she was figuring that out now, here, where she couldn't actually tell her parents or change how she treated them.

"Guess so," Effy said, quickly reverting to a levity born out of necessity, because thinking on efforts her mother made and what drove her to finally do so was... pointless. She wasn't on the island. Chances were she wouldn't be, because parents seemed so rare to arrive. Chances were she wouldn't be, because whenever Tony was in her life and in control, no one else mattered at all, and some part of Effy truly believed that the island listened to wishes.

Didn't always grant them. Sometimes stomped right over them.

But it was aware.

"Doesn't fucking matter. She didn't know how to be a mum, but... not her fault. How do you know before it happens? I figure I'll never have kids. I'd just fuck them up."

"Yeah, same here," Kate says, although she hasn't given it much thought one way or the other. For the most part, she's been smart enough to take precautions to make sure she doesn't have kids, but it's always been due to her age rather than an active decision to not have them eventually. She's thinking about it now, though, wondering if that's what Harry wants one day. If he'll want kids and marriage and all those things that Kate's never really considered herself adult enough for.

She still doesn't, but one day someone might expect it of her and that thought is strange.

"I mean, I never really thought about it much," she adds. "I had to take the morning after pill once and my mom freaked out, but like, what? I was fifteen. I was supposed to let that fertilized egg implant itself and become a baby? No way."

Not at fifteen and not now.

Her earlier teen years were all a blur, yet Effy Stonem still tries to pinpoint the exact time that she'd started having sex, wondering if it's even in her memory at all. Those first days all blend into one another, nothing more than pulsing lights and loud music boring itself into her chest, reverberating in a way that only tugged at her wrists, tried to make her dance. She was only fourteen, she remembers, when Tony first took her towards the chaos, thinking her strong enough to handle herself there.

She had been. More so than she'd be now.

"Maybe she was freaking out over you having sex at fifteen," Effy points out, belaboring the obvious. "You didn't use a condom?"

"No," Kate says slowly, drawing the word out. Looking back, she realizes how stupid it had been. Everything with Ben had been stupid, from dating him to sleeping with him and right back to inviting him to that party Marshall had insisted they'd throw. But until Harry she hasn't exactly made great decisions regarding dudes and she still isn't sure how to explain it.

"He was an idiot," she settles on saying finally. "And being around him made me an idiot, I think." It turned her into someone she wasn't, that much was certain. "I let him push me around once, too. I mean, it didn't get very far. My mom saw it and she transitioned into Buck. He's the alter who's a Vietnam war hero or whatever. So Buck came to my dance recital, saw Ben and then pretty much kicked his ass."

But sometimes she wonders. If Tara hadn't seen it, if Buck and Marshall hadn't beaten the hell out of Ben, how far she would have let it go. If she would have stopped him from shoving her again or if she would have let him get away with it.

In some ways, it reminds Effy too sharply of Katie Fitch, all of those pointless meathead boyfriends that she'd cycled through, usually fit physically, but certainly a bit empty upstairs. It'd been intensely irritating, the first few months that the two girls had known each other, but in many ways, Effy still regretted the way that she made it worse for a time for Katie, before things eventually climbed back up. Made it worse by still chasing after Freddie, in spite of how Katie had fallen for him, in spite of how they were an item.

Maybe Effy fell in love with Freddie long before Katie ever had, but it didn't make what they did any fairer. If anything, it made things worse.

And now that Effy thinks about it, the two girls show more similarities than she'd like to admit. Dubious mistakes from the past, possibly taken out of a mixture of needing that attention and demanding any type of affection, and driven by a desire to escape a bit of that familial circle in the process.

More importantly, they've both grown so much.

"Didn't fucking deserve you," Effy decides. "That prick ever shows up, I'll show him how it feels to be shoved 'round a bit."