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danyka-fendyr · 5 years

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As the Raven Flies: Part 3

Okay, everybody, you know the drill at this point. I write, I edit, I queue and post, and then I sit here desperately awaiting your feedback while hoping Tumblr didn’t royally screw this whole thing up. Ah, the joys of posting your fic on a barely functional site and trying to keep a schedule. The good news is, the apocalypse is always tomorrow depending on who you ask, and it’s always 5 o’clock somewhere, so just hang in there kids!

Wordcount: 2641 approximately because I may have written this last minute sue me

Taglist: @dreamwritesimagines @rhabakoli @disengagefrmreality

(Look! We’re at three people in the taglist now!)

Vivien tried to listen in on their conversation, but they went outside to talk, much to her chagrin. Slowly, what little she could hear of their voices faded away. And then she was fast asleep, gone until the next morning.

Vivien hated mornings more than anything else in the world. This was for two reasons, the weekday reason and the weekend reason. The weekday reason was, of course, that she had to go to school. She didn’t exactly hate school, but she would have honestly preferred to just learn of her own volition. Not to mention the anxiety deadlines gave her. Reason number two was just that she had to wake up. There was just something so pleasant about sleeping when you were as exhausted as Vivien was all the time.

“Vivien, sweetie, you have to get up. You have school.” Karen’s voice spoke softly from above her as Vivien groaned, refusing to open her eyes.

It was always so bright during the day. She hated it. She hated everything.

“I don’t want to go. Can’t I just call in sick?”

“Sorry kiddo, but that’s not going to happen unless you start puking into my potted plant.”

“Darn it.” Vivien cracked open an eye to glare balefully up at her current nemesis, former role model.

“I made smoothies,” Karen bribed her.

“Really?”

“Really. I also made you a lunch to take to school and set out some clothes for you. All you have to do is get in the shower.”

“Ugh. I guess.” Vivien crawled out of bed, body limp and floppy. “Thanks Karen.”

“You’re welcome. Now go!”

Vivien hopped in the shower, borrowing Karen’s toiletries. She already had a spare toothbrush here since Karen let her sleep over pretty often. Said she needed to get away from the boys sometimes, and Vivien agreed.

She plugged her iPod into the alarm clock dock, unashamedly playing Love Bug. What? The Jonas Brothers made a comeback. They were totally cool again.

She pulled on the clothes Karen had put together for her that Matt had brought over after finishing his nightly patrol. Admittedly Matt had only been able to find them because after the first time this had happened it had gone so poorly she’d left a few spare sets of clothes laying around in her room where Matt could find them, but she’d give him credit anyway. She also may have done some lip-syncing and dancing, but that was between her, God and the downstairs neighbor.

She headed out to the kitchen, and Karen handed her a smoothie in a Mason jar with a straw. “You, missie, are going to be late, and so am I. Go!”

Vivien swung her backpack (also courtesy of Matt, bless his soul) over her shoulder and ran out the door to catch the bus as Karen pulled on her heels, nearly flashing everyone in the hallway while also narrowly missing landing on her face. Vivien steadied her with one arm before taking the steps two at a time, just barely making it before Janet closed the bus doors. She flashed the elderly lady a smile before finding a seat.

School was what school always was. Mostly boring. Her AP classes were fun, but everything else was painfully easy. It wasn’t that Vivien thought she was smarter than everyone else. In contrast, she was firmly under the impression that everyone else was just very, very, abysmally stupid. Poor creatures.

Eventually, her school day started to come to a close. She survived her second least favorite part, gym, only to make it to the worst part of her day. Every Wednesday, like clockwork, she reported to the school counselor’s office. She wasn’t required to do so by the school, but she was required to do so by her own mind. She had conditioned herself to want to do it by buying herself a soda afterwards. It sort of worked. She still hated it, but she was here, wasn’t she?

She took a seat on the other side of the counselor’s desk, trying to seem pleasant and dare she say it, happy.

“Hello Mrs. Brannigan.” She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes.

“Hello Miss Fairchild. How have you been since we last met?”

“Oh, the usual.” Vivien fake smiled again. She did a lot of that here. “Just working hard at my studies.”

Mrs. Brannigan nodded. “And making new friends.”

Vivien grimaced. “I have friends, Mrs. Brannigan. They just don’t go here.”

Mrs. Brannigan nodded, but she didn’t seem like she believed her. “I just think it would be best if you were friends with some of your peers as well.”

“I’m friendly with my peers. Isn’t that enough?” Vivien jutted her chin out, sharp eyes drilling into the counselor.

Mrs. Brannigan did not balk. Mrs. Brannigan didn’t seem like the kind of person to balk. She seemed like the kind of person to continue blinking placidly even if the building was burning down around her, her mousy brown hair coated in ashes and her dark eyes clouded with smoke.

“I’m afraid not, Vivien.” Oh good. They were dropping the formalities now. “You need friends at school. People you can rely on.”

“I rely on Mr. Carp to give me a good art grade.”

Mrs. Brannigan had the nerve to give her The Look. The sort of look you give someone when you want to convey that you are absolutely done with their nonsense. Vivien was very familiar with this look. Not only had she been on the receiving end of it many times, but she had also leveled it on Matt and Foggy many, many times, even though only the latter half of that duo could see it.

“Do you ever let yourself be happy, Vivien?”

“Yes.” The answer was immediate, and apparently, it was too quick for Mrs. Brannigan.

“What makes you happy then?”

Vivien blinked at her. It wasn’t like she could tell the woman that leaping across rooftops at night and fighting criminals was what made her happy. That would get her put in an institution, at best.

“Music,” was the first thing she choked out.

“How so?” Mrs. Brannigan folded her hands together, placing them on the desk and leaning forward.

“I like dancing to it. You know, just...by myself. It’s fun.”

Mrs. Brannigan nodded. “Well, at least you still know what happiness is.”

Vivien was pretty sure it was meant to be a joke, but it hit a little too close to home. She knew this was supposed to be good for her, but she really did hate it. It wasn’t that Mrs. Brannigan wasn’t a nice lady, but Vivien liked to handle her problems herself. This was entirely too foreign and unpleasant and exposing for her.

“And your family?” Mrs. Brannigan spoke softly. “Have you...been to visit their graves lately?”

It was like someone had found Vivien’s off switch and abruptly flipped it. The light fell out of her eyes, the fake smile from her mouth, and she became just another mannequin sitting in that office, eyes glazed and staring into the distance. She was just...empty.

“Every Sunday. I bring flowers after church.”

“That’s good.” Mrs. Brannigan’s voice was soft, and her face conveyed that she did not think anything that was happening right now was good, an understandable reaction when your patient completely shut down.

“Yeah.” Vivien stared down at her empty palms sitting in her lap.

Uninvited, her brain conjured up an image of them covered in blood. She could hear ringing in her ears, and she closed her eyes tight against it. She shook her head, shaking his voice out of her ears.

Her eyes were wet when she opened them again.

“Well, I think that will be all for today,” Mrs. Brannigan said.

She sounded disappointed, but they both knew she wouldn’t get much farther with Vivien like this. She had tried their first few sessions, but it never worked. At some point, she pushed too hard, and Vivien shut off. They were just working on waylaying that point at the moment.

“You should work on making some new friends though. I’m sure your classmates are all very nice people. Perhaps someone who sits next to you?”

“Okay,” Vivien said numbly.

They both knew she wouldn’t really try. Or maybe she would, and she just wouldn’t try hard enough to succeed. What a familiar feeling that would be.

“I’ll see you for our next session Miss Fairchild.”

“Yeah. See you then. Thank you Mrs. Brannigan.”

Vivien took her backpack, grateful she always saved her counseling sessions for the last part of her day. She swung by one of the vending machines to buy a cream soda before heading out to catch her bus. She popped her headphones on, drinking her soda as the driver pulled the bus forward.

She stared out the window on the way home, trying to think of anything that wasn’t the color red. This was difficult, considering the fact that Matt wore almost entirely red. She did her best though, trying to take herself back to this morning, when she had been happy with Karen, taking breakfast onto the bus.

But the truth of the matter would always be that she could never go back to who she was.

So instead she escaped. Usually her coping mechanism involved punching people, but that was probably not the best option at this very moment in time, so instead she chose a more literal form of escapism. She pulled George Orwell’s 1984 out of her backpack, flipping to the middle of the book. Was it required reading? No. But it was interesting, that was for sure.

She spent the rest of the bus ride drinking cream soda and reading her book, avoiding the attention of other students. Lately, that hadn’t been much trouble. There had been a certain amount of morbid fascination with her after everything first happened, but it only took a few months for that to wear off, and then came what always came to survivors of great tragedies. She became a social pariah, someone no one wanted to be around or actively interact with if they could help it. After all, no one liked a reminder of the darker moments of their lives, and the walking talking ones were the worst kind. Vivien knew this better than anyone.

She used to have friends. Of course she had. You didn’t get to your senior year of high school without ever having any friends at all, fake or otherwise, and Vivien had the oddly good fortune to be something resembling not unpopular. This fell apart quickly though after her own great tragedy.

Some of them decided that she was simply no longer worth socializing with. That might have hurt if she hadn’t been dealing with far more pressing losses. The others she managed to slowly push away. It started with her new, unapproachable personality. She was pointedly aloof, exaggeratedly lifeless. She didn’t want anything to do with anyone, that much was clear.

She had a few friends who were more persistent than that though. Sometimes she missed them. Right now she missed them. Maybe they had pitied her, maybe they had loved her. It was hard for Vivien to tell the difference these days. Either way, she had to actively tell them to go away, scream at them until they ran for the hills. After everything that had happened to her, she just wanted to be left alone.

She just wanted to be left alone.

“Hey, Fairchild.”

Vivien’s eyes snapped open. She had closed them, head resting against the back of the seat at an awkward angle that would have left her staring at the ceiling if she had kept her eyes open. After a few moments of that undesirable view, she changed her mind and decided to rest her eyes for a minute.

The face she now saw hovering above her own was disappointingly familiar. Wide blue eyes, half a smile, and night black hair that was longer than it probably should be, but not long enough to necessarily be considered long. She only knew him because he had been the only person in the entire school not to spend a brief period trying to bother her as much as he possibly could during the brief interim where she was a person of interest. She sort of didn’t hate him for that, which was unfortunate, because she was pretty sure she was about to.

For a long moment, Vivien considered telling him to go away. Mrs. Brannigan’s voice echoed in her head though, begging her to just please, please try. She sighed, rolling her eyes before rolling her neck, turning around and deciding to play nice.

“Hello Hunter. Your hair is stupid.”

He laughed. She had known he would. He was good at that. Laughing in the face of adversity.

“Thanks. So, how have you been?”

“Oh, the usual. Annoyed. Unapproachable. Trying to decide if I should be goth or punk.”

“Ah, but your prep aesthetic is working so well for you!” He said, with feigned dismay.

Vivien cracked a smile, despite her best efforts. “Yeah, well, I’ve been keeping an eye on Jessica Jones, and her whole leather jacket thing seems to really be working out for her.”

“Fair point. I would like to counter with the fact that it is the woman that makes the clothes, not the clothes that make the woman.” James Hunter settled his arms on the back of my otherwise empty bus seat, resting his head on them.

“If that’s true, then why should I keep the prep clothes?” she countered.

She thought for sure that would stump him, but he didn’t miss a beat. “Because I like them. Not that my opinion particularly matters, as you have made very clear, but wouldn’t you rather have one of us insignificant fools like your clothes than none of us insignificant fools?”

I thought about it for a moment. “Alright. I’ll keep the button downs, Hunter, but only because I don’t want to go shopping.”

“Heaven forbid you have to buy anything that isn’t a sweater vest, am I right?”

“I don’t wear sweater vests.” She crossed her arms over her chest.

“Sometimes you do.”

He was right. Sometimes she did.

“They’re hand me downs, okay?”

He took his head off his hands to raise them in the air, a gesture of surrender. “Hey, I’m not judging Fairchild.”

“I just want you to know that I’m only talking to you because my therapist said I need friends.” She wasn’t sure why she told him that.

“Well, normally I would say that Mrs. Brannigan is full of it, but I think she might actually be right about that. You’ve been painfully alone since the beginning of the year, are you aware of that?”

“Acutely so.”

“I would ask what happened there, but that doesn’t really seem like any of my business.”

Vivien raised an eyebrow. She had...not been expecting him to say something so utterly self-aware.

“Not yet, anyway. I expect you’ll want to be friends first before you tell me why you have none.”

“And who said we were going to be friends, Hunter?”

“I did. Good news Fairchild, you are no longer beholden to Mrs. Brannigan’s unreasonable demands. I promise to be low maintenance.”

She squinted at him before the corner of her lips quirked up a little bit. “Cross your heart?”

“And hope to die.”

The smile fell right off her face. “Don’t do that.”

“Right. Sorry. Uhh...hope to get high.”

Vivien snorted with the unexpected humor of it. Everyone knew Hunter was clean as a whistle.

“There you go. We’ll have you smiling again in no time, Fairchild.”

“No promises Hunter.”

The bus screeched to a halt as she spoke.

“As much as I would like to extort some promises out of you in turn, I do believe this is your stop, Vivien.”

She looked up, and sure enough, they were in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen.

“See you tomorrow.” He smiled at her again, and she told herself that she only smiled back out of obligation.

“See you tomorrow, James.”

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