#the animation style and colour scheme make everything that little bit more disorienting

[lilacthebooklover]

no bc why did nobody tell me invader zim was this wild. i'm not even halfway through the 1st season and i already have so many questions. where did zim put keith's eyes??? did those kids ever get their internal organs back??? did dib get his spleen fixed??? why is the sky red??? is this some sort of dystopian alternate reality???? it has to be, right? why is a 12-year-old the smartest person in the show???

my brain feels like it's melting. i don't know whether i love this show or want to erase it from my memory forever but either way, i can't look away from the screen. all of the abrupt endings feel like a fever dream.

[tb5-heavenward]

artwork by the fantastically talented @birdologist and animation by the lodestar of my heart, the inimitable @awkwardarbor

you know those chapters that are a long uphill battle because they’re wrong when you start them so you rewrite them once, and then they’re wrong that second time through, too

so you rewrite them again

and then they’re REALLY wrong that third time, so you go back to the thing that you always imagined was going to happen at this point in the story, and you trust your gut and then it finally works but you have those awful, creeping doubts, because despite the fact that this is a chapter that represents the penultimate moment in a long developed secondary arc that’s spanned the entire story and slowly developed over time and been carefully constructed with specific imagery and major repeating themes and very deliberate devices, you still have doubts about whether or not anybody cares, whether this is a self-indulgent track that you never should have taken in the first place and it detracts from what people want and expect out of the story you’re telling except fuck what people want, because it’s not their story, and anyway it’s a story being told as complementary parts of a whole and not as discrete bits and pieces that don’t fit into each other

you know those chapters

this is one of those chapters. anyway here’s wonderwall

a_moment_of_dawn

You can find Heavenward on Tumblr // Ao3 // ff.net

a_moment_of_dawn - part 13

Of all the places she doesn't belong, surely she belongs here least of all.

Kayo's room seems like a place that belongs only to its owner, and even for someone whose life has revolved around getting into places that she's not supposed to be, here more than anywhere else, Penelope feels like an intruder.

The walls are dark, though colourful, a deep teal near the ceiling shading through a sunset gold, down into a rich, rusty red. Kayo's bed is low to the floor, a low platform with a futon style mattress. The space is large, but minimally furnished. There's nothing like the carefully composed suite of furniture that fills Penelope's own bedroom; Kayo appears to make use of the walk-in closet almost exclusively, and there's nothing like a dresser or a wardrobe or a vanity. A set of shelves with books and assorted trinkets, another set with free weights and other workout equipment.

The wall of windows at the far side of the room has a low sill that runs along the bottom, and this has been populated with all manner of ceramic and terracotta vessels, and all of these are populated with little succulent gardens, all in hues of grayish green with occasional pops of jewel toned colour. A small table sits to the side, and this has a small collection of simple gardening implements, a tray full of cuttings. It's not a hobby Penelope would have imagined of Kayo, but there's something rather nice about the notion. Penelope's mother had loved gardening. Perhaps it might be something to talk about, one day. It's always been so difficult to make conversation with Kayo.

It's midday on the island, but it's dark and quiet in Kayo's room, blinds drawn and the door closed. She's not sure why she's been brought here, exactly. Parker had been enlisted by Brains to help get Gordon down to the medical bay, and she hasn't seen him since. She wonders if he'll tell them all what's happened. She's not sure if she hopes so or not. For her part, she hadn't known what to do but just stay where she was, sitting alone in the back of the helicopter, with her head aching and her eyes still red, tired and lost and afraid.

And it hadn't been Parker who'd come to get her, but Kayo. And Penelope had been a little too numb and disconnected to do anything but allow herself to be led up into the hangar bay, up an elevator and into the house proper, and then all the way back into the wing of the villa where the bedrooms are.

And now she's just been left here. And she's not sure how long much time has passed since Kayo's been gone. The only thing the younger woman had told her was to wait. So Penelope's waited. And now she's not sure how long she's been waiting, sat on the bed with her hands folded in her lap, feeling the smoothness of her skirt over her thighs, caught up in the strange sort of hazy vagueness that goes along with having worn herself out with crying.

With everything, really.

It's all been exhausting, really. Maybe that's why Kayo's left her here. Maybe her solitude is meant to be a kindness. She can hardly be blamed for wanting to lie down, curling up on her side with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped tight around her chest. The bodice of her dress is tight and confining, but she doesn't care, she doesn't intend to undress. She doesn't know for certain that Kayo won't be back, or that Parker won't come looking for her, but she decides she doesn't care if they do. The mattress is deep and soft and yielding and the room is quiet and dark and far from everyone and everything else. Even if she doesn't belong—doesn't deserve to be here, there's no denying that the island is somewhere she's always felt safe, somewhere she can let go of everything that's happened. It doesn't take long before she feels safe enough to let her eyes fall closed, to allow her breathing slow and even out.

She sleeps for long enough that it's dark when she wakes.

When she does, Penelope finds that the zipper at the back of her dress has been halfway undone, that a blanket's been dropped over her. She pushes this back and pushes herself up, bleary-eyed and vaguely confused, before remembering where she is. The only light in the room is the low light from beneath the door of the ensuite bathroom, and there's a towel and a change of clothes—something of Kayo's, presumably—waiting on the low nightstand, a tacit suggestion.

She's still tired and disoriented enough that it's one she decides to take, instead of finding out what's going on, where everyone else is. Her eyes are dry and sore, her head aches slightly from a long sleep. Another twenty minutes to clean herself up and make sure she's properly awake won't matter, in the grand scheme of things.

She leaves her dress in the middle of the floor, a soft heap of fallen away white. Kayo's shower is all dark slate and live green bamboo, growing cheerfully on shelves and in little alcoves cut into the showerstall. A rainfall showerhead pours hot water to patter on the tiles beneath Penelope's feet. The blood on her skin finally washes away, but she scrubs at the place where it was for longer than she needs to. Sleep has taken the edge off her anxiety, and the heat and the warmth calm her further still. When she finishes and shuts the water off, in spite of everything, she feels a great deal better.

Kayo's left her a pair of yoga pants, a too-big t-shirt with a logo too faded to read, as she dresses in the darkness of the bedroom. Penelope towels her hair as dry as she can, considering the humidity on the island, and decides against a glance in the bathroom mirror. She knows she'll only see herself looking tired and vulnerable, exposed and off-kilter, wearing someone else's clothes in someone else's home.

Penelope can't recall offhand the last time she was in the upper part of the villa, and stepping out of Kayo's bedroom, she's briefly distracted by the view, the last glow of sunlight present in the sky but gone from the surface of the sea, far off and down below. The colours of sunset are beginning to fade into the darkness overhead. The villa is built into the high, craggy face of the island itself, and Penelope's always surprised by how easy it is to forget the sheer scale of the place. She feels small in a way she never does, at home.

But perhaps that's something else.

Down the stairs into the villa proper, and it's eerie how quiet the place is. The lights are all dimmed and the space would be silent, if it weren't for the sound of Gordon, snoring on one of the couches in the lounge.

The center of the villa has a gravitational pull about it. In spite of the fact that part of her wants to retreat back into solitude and safety, not to have to undertake this confession, there's something that draws her out of the hallway, and tentatively down the steps. The carpet is deep blue, plush beneath her bare feet, and she knows she doesn't make a sound as she approaches, doesn't make a sound as she kneels down, and then sits on the floor beside the yellow couch.

Gordon's asleep, back and shoulders against a heap of extra pillows, and the rest of him curled up around one of the island's smaller holocomms. His good hand cradles the comm against his stomach, while his left hand has been carefully bandaged, and by some habit or instinct he's kept this up, across his chest and against his shoulder, above the level of his heart. He looks a great deal better, too, although there's enough light that she can see the totality of what's happened to him, and it makes her ache with sympathy, with guilt. The place where he's been backhanded across the face, hard enough for a blue-black bruise to blossom high across his cheek, darkening the hollow underneath his right eye. Contusions on his throat, four points of purple bruising. And his hand, of course, though she can't look directly at it, even bandaged. She thinks about the scar he's going to have on his finger and how it's always going to be a reminder of what she allowed to happen to him.

Despite her careful, deliberate stillness, something about her presence must trip some deeply ingrained instinct of his, because he stirs, quite suddenly, and the snoring abruptly stops. His eyes snap open and take an almost alarmingly short time to find her, to fix her in place beneath those bright, eternally sunlit brown eyes.

And he smiles, even as she finds herself wanting to run away again, and hating the fact that he would smile at her. Penelope shakes her head before he can speak, and asks, despairing, "Why do you always have to be so happy to see me?"

And he laughs, worse even than the smiling, and shifts himself awkwardly, effortfully, to sit up. He clears his throat, but his voice remains soft as he challenges, "Take a wild guess, Penelope. C'mon."

This brings a flush of heat to her cheeks, even as she pulls her knees up tight against her chest, wraps her arms around them and knots herself up, locks herself away from any attempt he might make to get in. She has to swallow past a lump in her throat and it takes an enormous amount of fortitude to keep her voice even as she tells him, "I told you—I tried to tell you—that you shouldn't think of...of me…the way you do."

"Why not?" A beat, and then with a note of defiance. "No one's ever exactly had a lotta luck, telling me how I should feel about things." She hears him move closer and then there's a soft, gentle touch, and he pulls her still-damp hair back from her face. "Pen?"

Penelope stubbornly keeps her gaze fixed on a patch of the floor at her feet, and by sheer force of will manages to prevent any tears from welling up in her eyes again. "You've no idea what I've done."

"I don't care about what you've done, I care about you."

This is sort of thing Gordon just says, as though he doesn't know what sort of impact it makes, how it shatters against her shields and sends shards and fragments of emotional shrapnel tearing all through her. And he's being frightfully, insistently stupid, and he doesn't understand. So Penelope has no choice but to try and tell him.

"I knew about your father. All these years, and I knew the whole time."

"Yeah, I got that one. Sounds more like a problem I gotta have with him, though, Pen."

"I sent John after him, when I—when...when your father went off the radar. When I lost track of him. I should’ve told you then."

There's a long silence and it might just be that his voice is slightly husky when he says, "Well. Two hours ago, my Dad called me to tell me that my big brother's gonna be okay, and that they're both gonna come home, someday soon. And I don't know about all the rest of it, but the hell with it, anyway. So...so I dunno, Penelope, it seems like it might've been a good damn call, if you ask me."

It's impossible to tell with Gordon when he's just being deliberately stubborn and contrary, and especially impossible when she isn't actually making eye contact. So she takes a deep breath and lifts her face, sets her jaw and turns to look up at him, tells herself that she can meet his gaze evenly and easily and not crack or crumble when she tells him the worst of the truth. "I—"

He's left-handed, and she knows that, but his left hand is obviously out of commission, so it's his right that catches her face, maybe just a little clumsily. The skin of his palm is warm against her jaw, and his thumb presses lightly against her lips, steals the breath right out of her, and the words along with it. "Pen? Please, quit trying to come up with reasons for me to be mad at you, because I'm not and I'm not gonna be. I don't want to be. Now, c'mere."

She doesn't want to—or, she doesn't think she should. This was a mistake, she shouldn't have come here. She should've gone to find Parker and told him to take her home; told him that she wanted to disappear, to go home—because she doesn't belong in this place. Doesn't belong with him. But his hand falls to take her elbow and give a gentle tug, and before she's quite realized it, she's off the floor and sat beside him, and he's threaded his fingers through hers.

And she knows what she has to tell him, but she doesn't know what to say. The truth is there, but not the words to tell it, and so she just stays silent; still and tense and sorry, just so sorry for everything that's happened.

Her silence stretches the moments between them, so it seems like longer than it really is before he clears his throat and says, softly, "Hey. Penny?"

She realizes just a fraction of an instant too late why he wants her to look up again, because they've been here before. She's been at the edge of an abyss, at the end of the line, and helpless and hopeless and with no one else to turn to but him. Both times this has happened before, it's been because she's put him in danger, dragged him along behind her and into trouble. There's a pattern here, and this is predictable.

So it's not a surprise when he kisses her.

Part of her expects it; knows that he's just picking up the latter half of something abbreviated, a long ago moment between them. Months and months back, and she still remembers the way he'd taken her hand when she'd turned towards him, and the words now or never. Only it hadn't been then, and it certainly hasn't been never, because she's kissed him twice now, and the second time not even twenty-four hours ago. He's only evening the score.

And it's awful how badly she just wants to give in. To let the tension fall away, the rigidity of her shoulders, her spine—to turn inward and allow herself just to be held, because she knows more than anything else that he'd hold her, that he wants to. He never seems to have the slightest difficulty sorting out what he wants to do from what he should do. He's done this because he loves her, is in love with her, and he kisses her like that's just the only thing he wants in the entire world; just to be in love with her. His hand has come to rest against the curve of her neck, she can feel his thumb brush the point of her pulse, and she wonders if he's cheating, gauging her heart rate to measure her response. It's what she'd do.

So it breaks her heart, just a little, to close her fingers around his wrist and pull his hand away, to pull back and shake her head, denying him. Because it's not that she doesn't want this; it's that he shouldn't. She permits herself a moment of weakness and bows her forehead against Gordon's shoulder and he pulls her immediately, insistently close, with a soft shushing sound in her ear as the tears start up again. "You can't," she tells him, or tries to. "Gordon. Please—please—you can't feel like this about me, you shouldn't."

"Why not?" He presses another kiss against her forehead and she lets him, can't seem to help softening further, as his hand rubs gently up and down her back, and he asks again, careful and patient and more adult than she's ever known him to be, "Penny, I can't understand if you won't tell me why. Talk to me, Pen, please. I hate seeing you like this. C'mon. Give a guy a break."

Well.

She probably owes him that, at least. Everything she's put him through, everything between them, everything he feels for her, and everything she wishes she could allow herself to feel in return. But it doesn't make the truth come any easier, as she takes a deep breath and lets it out as a shuddering sigh.

And then—

"I need you to know the truth about what I was doing in Bangkok."