Set Yourself On Fire :: (Ursula + Nino + Caly)

[L△LIA]

god
that was strange
to see you
a g a i n

Everything hangs on the edge of a bottle cap — his dignity, his hopes, his future happiness. With a deep, careful breath he holds tight to the piece of metal between his fingers. It will save him; this time it has to save him. He's not sure he can handle another loss like the last one and so he sets his sights oh-so-very carefully, determined not to make the same mistakes again. He can do this. He can definitely do this.

There's a dull sound of collision as the bottle cap bounces off the wood-top bar before pinging against the side of a glass, but these things are hard to hear over his anguished wailing. "Noooooooooooooooo! I want a do-over. Mulligan! I'm calling a Mulligan!" Nino Ripley has had at least half a dozen Mulligans since these high-stakes games began and the look on Calypso's face clearly says she's not giving in this time. It's his game; it's not her fault he sucks at it.

Other than the pair at the bar, the club is completely empty. During these off-hours, the more integral employees of Bastille Styx's establishment are at home, sleeping away the profitless boredom of daylight. Uma left Nino in charge — mostly with the mindset that the cleaning could be accomplished while he didn't have to be around to listen to Ripley's endless yammering — and the only evidence of the dancers is the un-swept glitter clinging to the floorboards of the stage. Somewhere in a back room there might be an accountant, counting and filing and numbers, numbers, numbers, but this past weekend was busy enough to keep her preoccupied with actual work... unlike someone else.

"Okay, okay, okay," he says, glancing at the bottle caps already scattered at his feet with grimacing defeat, "here goes: When I was nine, Noah was going through this phase where he thought it was hi-larrrr-ious to pants us. He never really grew out of that, but — the point is — we were in one of those school holiday plays together." For the longest time, the fallen Ripley brothers were something of a taboo subject to anyone other than Jude, but more than one wound has been busy healing over the course of the past year and so there's an extra hitch in the corner of Nino's reminiscing smile right now. "I probably would have won an award for my amazing performance as Snowflake Number Four, but BAM!" A hand smacks against the counter top for dramatic effect. "One moment I'm dancing with this snowman — who, I'll have you know, was actually the cutest snowgirl in my class — and the next thing I know my pants are at my ankles and the whole auditorium knows about how our mom accidentally washed a red sock with the whites the last time she did laundry."

The rules of this game are simple:

1) Be the first person to bounce three bottle caps into an empty glass and victory is yours!

2) Losers must reward the winner with an embarrassing story.

3) Mulligan is Nino Ripley's middle name.

This is already Nino's fourth loss today, but he'd rather recount every pantsing of his life than confront the embarrassment that's about to walk through the front door. However, when the bell rings he's too concerned with swapping all the bottle caps he's been tossing around for Caly's pieces to notice, insistent that this will remedy his terrible luck. ("Are you rigging this somehow? It's illegal to dose your bottle caps with steroids. C'mon, c'mon — I told you about my pink underwear! Is it really so much to ask for you to tell me about yours?") Laughter and the scuffling sounds of Nino backing up before he can get smacked upside the head echo throughout the vacant club and then, suddenly, Ursula Libertine is there and his bad luck and embarrassment have something to blame other than a game.

The last time the ex-lovers saw each other, the world didn't end. Mountains didn't crumble. The sky didn't fall. Water didn't catch fire and burn until all of existence had been carried away by the flames. Instead it was the surreal encounter of two ghosts who had once lived together, but forgot such a simple fact after having crossed into the afterlife. It was normal, even, enough so that some might argue that Nino's face shouldn't flinch like this over the sight of those familiar eyes attempting to blink away the sunlight as she steps into the sheltered darkness of the club. Still, he can't help feeling as blinded as she is, turning to Calypso with panic muddling up his face.

The cursing that crosses his lips may be a breathless whisper, but everything else is all too clear. "Caly, she's here. I don't —" and his head ticks back and forth, looking for the closest exit, "— she's just —" but everything seems so far away and so he's looking at the ceiling, wondering if he can climb up and escape like a monkey swinging from beam to beam, "— why would she —" then he's looking down, wondering how convincingly he could drop to the floor and play dead. Except he can't move, not an inch, so he just stares at the girl walking through the door with the horror of helplessness written all over his face. "What do I do?"

He wants to ask for another Mulligan, but he knows he doesn't have any left. Not for the bottle caps. Not for Ursula Libertine. History knows his aim has always been this terrible and that's his problem, not hers. She's the victor in their game and as the loser he owes her this.

[✨ zozo.]

.  CALYPSO LETO  .
saving ends and pulling your friends
while you're chasing the first line

Picturing Nino Ripley with his pants down and his face red in front of a girl dressed in white can't not bring a smile to your face. Picturing him with pink underwear on will most certainly bring a bubble of laughter. She's been told she has a dark kind of humor that you find in kids who think it's hilarious to beat up their friends or stamp on butterflies. Calypso isn't a savage - she just finds a little joy in mortifying her new friends. (Or a lot.) So much so that after countless round of Nino losing (and herself winning) her cheeks ache from laughing.

For some reason, she pictures the little girl dressed in white on the stage as Ursula.

"No fair, Ripples. You lost. Again." Her competitiveness itches in her fingertips and she's glad Nino has a stubborn streak. It keeps her hands from scratching and her chest hurting. If he calls Mulligan one more time he's going to owe her at least three free meals at this place, and with this reckless gambling addiction the kid seems to have she doesn't think he can afford any more take-backs. He scrabbles for the bottle-cap and she picks out a new one for herself, aiming her thumb and fore-finger juuuust right. Victory runs through her veins and the need to win drums in her ears, not just to keep her childhood stories at bay for another day. Calypso could spend her whole life proving herself worthy of anything and everything and she'd still take time to pause, aim, fire-

(It's like a bow and arrow and he's running away. Running, running, running - 

- pause, aim, fire - 

Steel hitting flesh sounds sweet.)

Ting!

A bottlecap spinning in the bottom of the glass sounds even better.

"YES!" Triumph swells around her, lifting her arms up in a display of laughter and conquest. But Nino isn't paying attention, instead he's gawping at a willowy blonde that tugs at Caly's memory bank with a big red X painted on her face. The heart-breaker herself: Ursula Libertine.

A fire starts in her chest and she tries to swallow her pride, she really does.

Everybody knows the Libertines. They whisper about that poor family almost as much as they do about Nino's or Calypso herself. And Caly never really dealt with those folk - that was more Tag's thing. But the fact that this girl is the reason her newest comrade crawls into her house drunk, hides away at work, and downright avoids the pawnshop like the plague itself was housed there makes her eyes narrow, her blood boil, an instinct to protect her now blubbering friend takes over.

"What do I do?"

She snaps her fingers - quiet enough for only Nino to notice - and grasps his attention with her eyes. "Nino? Look at me. Do exactly as I say. Got it?"

She doesn't wait for a response. 

"Take my hand," she instructs - but she grasps at his fingers anyway. "Smile. Like you've told me the funniest thing in the world." (His underpants story could suffice - after all, it was hilarious.) She throws back her head and laughs, the siren call echoing through the almost-empty bar, resting her chin in her palm and twirling her hair with a finger. 

Play along or else, her eyes scream.

"Oh man Nino, you're hilarious!"

He now owes her a damn lot more than three free meals and a story.

[chelsey]

[googlefont="Voltaire:400"]URSULA LIBERTINE

TELL ME I'M THE ONLY ONE LIKE I DIDN'T KNOW

Everything is just the way it should be. There are things in this world that are just meant to be a certain way. There are also things in this world that belong together, and that - no matter how long or how far they are separated - will always find a way back to each other. The sky has the sun, the night has the stars, the ocean has the waves, and Ursula Libertine has payments rolling right under her feet.

And it feels good. Really good, in fact.

She isn't a child anymore, and children don't play silly little games. Deal-making should've been an art she left behind in her frivolous youth, along with finger painting and freeze tag. But, as she realized, she had a lot of downtime in her hands when she wasn't working in the pawnshop or bumping into a certain exlover. A girl can only hook up with Julien Baptiste so many times until she realizes she's a little bored.

So, what's wrong with that? What's wrong with playing games meant for little girls who were still whole and whose only understanding of the word "broken" was applied to shattered china plates and snapped necklace clasps? It isn't so much the game that she's playing, but the power she has over the game. To be honest, she almost forgot what it felt like to be in control of things. Because, maybe she can't control herself from bumping into Nino Ripley from time to time, and maybe she can't control her feelings (whether it be guilt or something else she'd never admit to herself) towards him, and maybe she can't control which scars on her wrists heal and which ones don't - but this? This, she can handle easily.

Besides, Ursula isn't just some player in her mischievous, juvenile game - she's the goddamn game maker, for crying out loud. She calls the shots, she writes the rules, she names the winner.

And, right now, boy, is she winning. That deal with Percy Altor all those weeks ago was like a crack in the dam; she's got "Ursula, can you do something for me?"'s and "Ursula, I need your help,"'s and (her personal favorite) "Ursula, please, I'm desperate"'s flooding her imaginary inbox daily, now.

That's why she smiles when Dorothea Day enters the pawn shop, uttering those exact words. "I just want you to know," Day starts, "that if I wasn't so damn desperate, I wouldn't have came here."

"Desperate is my forté." It doesn't take her long to recognize the mess of curls and wide doe eyes that belong to Day. Besides seeing her hang around the corners of sketchy streets and running down the school hallways like she's always late to somewhere she has to be, she's also the same girl that hijacked her sound system the night of the masquerade. "What do you need, Dorothea?"

"It's... it's personal." Day whips her head to the right, then to the left, eyeing suspiciously at the miscellaneous of customers lolling lazily around the shop. "All you need to know is that it's about my dad, and that I don't want to talk about it here." "Do you want to go to the back room?" "No, I can't. I have a gig I'm gonna be late to in about ten minutes," She runs a hand through her hair, agitated, as if she can't get the words out fast enough. Unfortunate soul. "When and where do you want to talk then?" "Tomorrow, in the afternoon. Have you ever heard of Bastille Styx's club?"

It wasn't her taste, she already made that clear to herself the last time she'd been there, but she thinks that maybe a 2PM drink would do her some good. And, if she happened to run into Nino Ripley again... well, all the better.

But, she knows very well by now that there are just some things that she can't control. She can't control the way he's smiling at her, or the way they're holding hands, or the way that Caly chick is twirling a strand of hair around her finger. "Oh man Nino, you're hilarious!" And, she knows she can't control the way her stomach feels like it just turned inside out.

But, she's the game maker. She calls the shots, still. Even if she does contemplate running right back through the door she just entered, and even if she does imagine herself pushing that girl out of the bar stool for no particular reason whatsoever, she doesn't. Instead, she walks up to the bar, takes a seat that separates her from the girl by only one empty barstool, and smiles in a way that she hopes doesn't look like it's cracking her face.

"What's hilarious?"

There are some things in this world that just belong together, but that thought itself is no longer enough to comfort her.

may or may not have edited this post an hour after posting it just to change what she said woops I am sorry

[L△LIA]

this scar is a fleck on my porcelain skin
tried to reach deep but you couldn't get in
now you're outside me
you see all the beauty
repent all your sin

Invisible lines hold more power than any physical barrier man can create. Walls may be torn down and bridges built to traverse even the largest of canyons, but that unnameable space between the love of friendship and the love of lovers is by far more difficult. There's no going back once you've gone forward, there is only next and after. If the love disappears, no one can go back for that either. Instead yet another line is drawn between what is and what simply used to be. One day you're allowed to hold a person so close that the freckles on the cheeks of one might as well be considered as belonging to the other and a few moments later even a shared smile becomes a forbidden thing. These kinds of lines don't just restrain a body; these invisible lines restrain souls.

Caly grabs the panicking boy's hand and it is more than a wall of protection; more than a bridge to salvation. It is both of those things and also a little bit of something else entirely. Everyone at the bar who has witnessed the pair goofing around together has tossed Nino a wink and a grin afterward, eyebrows slightly raised as if to ask what they believe to be the world's most rhetorical question: So... you're obviously hitting that, right? But no. No, really. He and Caly are just friends. Nino Ripley and the gorgeous brunette holding his hand are just friends. No air quotes or anything. Pinkie swear.

They laugh together and mend each other's broken hearts and have inside jokes about sticky notes and wake up for impromptu conversations at three o'clock in the morning and know exactly how screwed up the other person's usually pretty face looks while sobbing hysterically and keep their bedroom windows unlatched just in case of anything and trade embarrassing childhood stories and, yes, they hold each others hair back while puking up more whiskey than should ever have seemed like a good idea to begin with, but no, they don't hold hands. Hair, not hands. See, it's true that Ninoman has slept in Captain Caly's bed, but not like that.

Not like this, he thinks, his attention fixated on the face of a girl who is holding his hand and asking him to smile for her. His aching heart doesn't think smiling is what he really feels, but time has gone all funny — splitting itself into multiple directions — and he's having trouble processing all of the things that are happening right now. There is only the memory of something that hurts crossed with an impulse to lift the corners of his mouth for her anyway, just because she asked. It's nice to have someone to hold onto when the world is falling down around him; he's not used to that.

Nino smiles.

Calypso is throwing back her head and laughing like everything is not only okay, but good. Wonderful, even. Fan-freaking-tastic. It's convincing enough that his lips split apart until the dim lighting glints across his teeth, laughter bubbling up from his own belly. Like this, he forgets they aren't alone anymore, because for this moment they are. All he can see are the dimples in her cheeks,  the earthquake of her hair, and ten fingers tangled together in the no man's land of a bottle cap battlefield. All he can hear is her and him. All he can taste are the words he's not allowed to say right now, but desperately wants to. Thank you. He really does love her — on one side of an invisible line or another.

When the world beyond becomes insistent of its existence — "What's hilarious?" — he still can't look away. Too many things that used to be, simply aren't any more. It's not easy to figure out what exactly next is and the truth is that there probably isn't anyone in this room who knows, just three minds with thousands of incorrect theories. The intruding voice can't possibly know any more than he does, but it does know how to make his fingers fidget with the ones holding onto him while coaxing his heart into playing hopscotch with the memory of freckles he could swear don't belong to him anymore.

His eye's are tiny crescent moons that refuse to wane entirely against the tides of yesterday and tomorrow. "My pink underwear." The skin crinkles at the corners, propped up by a crooked grin, and when he finally allows himself to look at the angel of heartbreak and hysteria that has fallen into this bar, the way his expression fades ever-so-slightly is almost unnoticeable in this light. "Wanna see? The first look is free, but it's a dollar for each peek after. Caly's racked up a pretty serious debt already —" Reaching over, he teasingly tugs at the lock of hair she's been twirling around her finger as if this is his demonstration of the grand evolution of kindergarten flirting tactics. "— but I kinda owe her a little bit too, so it probably evens out."

No one understands debt quite like Ursula Libertine, but for once he isn't talking in double entendres for her sake. Hers is a hand he isn't allowed to hold anymore, no matter how much he wants to when he makes the mistake of looking at her too honestly, and it's not just the invisible line she's drawn between them that stops him now. There is a hand physically helping to prevent him from reaching out for her when he knows he isn't supposed to. Like any other barrier of flesh and bone or stone and distance, he knows he could break free if he really wanted to, but Caly has crossed lines of her own for his sake and his soul can't ignore that.