karma is a snitch. { ripley / tatum }

[🌱 kaitlin.]

ripley.

Ripley gets a suspension for dumping a milkshake over Cami's head, and she thinks it's worth it until she shows up to Exy practice just for Coach to tell her to get the fuck off the field. Suspended means no Exy, either, Sloane, they'd huffed at her. Load of good you should do us at the scrimmage now, under her breath, and Ripley felt like her skin was going to boil off her bones.

Ripley feeling devastated, she turns to rage for the warmth.

Exy stick grasped firm in her hands, she took her fury out on the team locker room when she went to collect her bag. She upended everyone's shit, the plastic head of her stick making awful, loud noises when she smacks it into the metal of the lockers. She's been practicing swinging it for months now, and has had years upon years of practice using bones for batting practice. In a match of Ripley versus the locker room, she was going to win every time.

It's a carnage of uniforms, jersey's strewn across the floor, the benches knocked on their sides, everything on a shelf knocked askew. She swings the baseball bat in her hands now and thinks about swinging her Exy stick into Coach's skull. Glass shatters into a thousand pieces, and she thinks about how badly she wants to send a brick sailing through the window to Principal Wingrave's office. Better yet, how badly she wants to send a brick sailing for Cami's plastic nose.

Empty bottle after empty bottle, Ripley scatters them to shards across the abandoned lot. She can hear Tatum coming from a mile away, chromatic boy, she can feel his energy like a heat wave. Once upon a time, they came here together, two kids way too young to be adventuring through a long abandoned car park. No one was ever very good at keeping them corralled. She knows that she should have gone home first; school probably called about the suspension, and where once upon a time she could hide behind the lack of communication between the housekeeper and her mother, there's no playing telephone anymore. Mom will know, and either she'll be angry, or she won't care, and both of those options will suck.

So when Tatum shows up, Ripley takes one of the empty beer bottles and throws it right at her brother, slightly to the left. It impacts against the broken concrete behind him. 

"I'll peg you with one next time if you don't fuck off," she says, looking at him with hard eyes before turning away. She sets another bottle up on the tree stump, then takes aim with her bat. "I'll come home and make dinner later."

Sunset reflects off the shards, bright red.

[gamemaker 💀 hades lochlan]

tatum.

When Tatum Sloane regained consciousness, it was never a peaceful awakening. He wasn't one of those people who got pan flute music and birds singing outside the window and breakfast in bed. Even on his best day, he came to with a jolt sudden and severe enough you'd think he was just electrocuted, his eyes bloodshot and wide with accusation, an animal caught with its belly up by a predator. But this wasn't his best day.

This was today.

This was him opening his eyes with that sudden jolt, and then realizing he was not in his bed, or in his house, or anywhere he immediately recognized. He sat up and his vision swam, he rubbed at something on his scalp and pulled his hand back wet with blood. "Hm." He tried recalling what happened and he remembered that he decided to dich english so he could prolong his lunch period, and made his way to the warehouse he and his buddies liked to demolish from time to time, and-

He tried to remember past it, but things started getting hazy. It was flashes of fragments of pieces of memories that he already would have struggled to remember without having been rendered unconscious in the process, due to his shit attention span, but now, he felt like it was nearly impossible to recall. Someone was wearing a blue beanie. Tatum's cheek felt slimey in the moments before he'd passed out because of something- yeah, he looked now and saw that he'd been sleeping with his face in a caked-up old puddle of some sort of black oily substance. They'd tried to take his sandwich, he thought. So maybe it was just some desperate old farts who had to jump unaware teens for their food.

He clenched his jaw, annoyed not that he couldn't remember, not even that he didn't have his sandwich, but that he'd clearly been bested. He huffed and puffed the whole way home, sulked in the shower for thirty minutes, haphazardly squirted some alcohol onto the wound on the back of his head which stung like a bitch. To go along with it, he had a pretty solid bruise on his left temple, presumably what had knocked him out in the first place, which hurt too bad for him to do anything with yet. He also had some cuts and bruises on his knuckles, so at least he hadn't gone down like a punk.

After he finished up, he made his way to the closet by the kitchen where his mother liked to hide her stress cigarettes, stole one from the open pack, and since Ripley wasn't home and there was no dinner for him to eat and because his mom might possibly make an appearance soon, he left. Went to another abandoned lot, this one he used to play at a lot when he was younger. Not necessarily safer, but closer to home anyway. Clearly, he'd learned his lesson.

Of course, Ripley was already there, because why would any Sloane child ever stay at school any longer than anyone would force them to, and upon seeing him standing there- as it was her gut instinct- she threw a glass beer bottle at his head. It shattered next to him and his head rang out in pain from the noise.

"Bro, fuck off!" he said, wincing. She was clearly on one, as bottle-breaking with a baseball bat was actually one of her healthiest coping mechanisms, believe it or not, but he didn't much care. His current predicament spoke for itself.

"Ray o' freakin' sunshine over here throwing bottles at people's heads." As if his own hadn't been through enough in the past two and half hours.

He took his seat right there on the gravel, the back of his head leaned against a chain-link fence. He was half aware that there was always a decent chance any direct interaction with Ripley would result in injury of some sort, half not giving a single shit anyway right now.

"I thought you had Exy?" He was too young to start for the pro season this year, but next year that trophy was his. Ripley had only this season to do it if she wanted it done without him there. Which he didn't necessarily think she'd want. More so, he suspected she would just be pissed that he, her younger brother, was as capable of getting it done as she. Poor thing, he guessed. He pulled the cigarette from his pocket and raised a brow at her.

"Light me?"

[🌱 kaitlin.]

ripley.

"Oh, I don't wanna hear it," Ripley dismisses her brother's protests outright. She rolls her eyes behind the sunglasses she's got on and turns back to the crate of empties she's got next to her, plucking one out and placing it on the twisted hunk of metal she's been using as a stand. She heaves a sigh before grumbling under her breath: "What are you even doing here?"

The thing about the Sloane's is that they are always out for blood. It's the only way they know how to approach each other. Growl low and angry, snap at each other like feral dogs, but then a calm would settle over both of them and they'd make each other's day. Wouldn't matter the pinching that occurred, the things that they might've scream at each other. No amount of pain would ever be enough to keep them from one another. They could steal anything from each other, possess what was the others like crows with something shiny. Their bond, no matter how gruesome, would always endure.

Ripley and Tatum have never been much for being friends, but they were siblings. Their worst parts will always be safe with each other.

It's never been a concept that came naturally to Ripley though. She clenches her hands into tight fists at her side. She does a lot of considering what it might feel like to hold them out, hold them open. She's always felt such shame at the idea of someone witnessing her want something she's not allowed to have. Anger collects like fragments in her head, a hunted house of memories that no one else can see and she doesn't have the words to describe. She knows instinctively that Tatum knows this about her, too; that he is as desperate not to be left behind by the world as she is. He knows her well enough to know she only does shit like this when she's angry. He knows her well enough to know she's supposed to be at Exy practice right now. His question about it makes her skin crawl, mouth twisting into a grimace before she can figure a mask out.

At least he has the good sense not to linger.

"Fine," Ripley manages to spit out, dropping the bat out of her hands. the thing lands with an ugly clatter among the broken glass, sending shards rolling down the low slope away from her. "But I'm not lighting that shit," she says in reference to the familiar cigarette in her brothers hands. She'd recognize her mother's preferred brand anywhere. She drops down beside Tatum, stretching her legs out across the hot ground. "Let's have this instead," she says, pulling the long emptied carton of Gold's from her back pocket and dumps one of her joints into her palm along with the small silver lighter. 

Coach made her promise not to smoke during season, but fuck it. What coach doesn't see can't kill her.

Some promises aren't worth keeping.