india, who are you?

Hey, like this if you’re still active/wanna interact. It’s autumn again and India feels Awake. General interaction call, y’all know what to do.

musaeprimi:

“Shooting takes discipline. You need a sharp eye for the perfect moment.” That’s the thrill for her. Staying hidden, engaging the desired target in a dance alluring enough that it’s near enough--closer, closer, not yet! She doesn’t breathe in the moments before, won’t touch anything that might make sound. Oh, yes, perfect, now!--and quite often, death comes as a complete surprise to anything she takes. Just thinking about it now, her palms itch. She wonders when next she can convince her father to take her out.

Otherwise, Billy Loomis’s suggestion is looking altogether too good. “But I can’t imagine a knife is any different.  You have to get closer, don’t you?” That’s something new. She never gets close to anything, or anyone, living or dead. “I can only assume you’ve done this before.” She doesn’t know what it is, but this boy has managed to make himself interesting.

shoesgave:

Her eyes are tethered to him. He is not present, not alive with the same fire he had been when he was in her mouth, or teasing her all through dinner. The same can be said for us. She doesn’t know why something resonates so deeply there, but it seeps through her skin, past the blood beneath, and settles in her bones.  When is a villain a villain? Perhaps, she wonders, it is only when someone else is encumbered with morality. India has never been moral. Practical, perhaps. At times, sedate. (But would a father tell his moral girl she had to kill a bird so the rest of the world might sleep easy? She does not yet know what he feared. Maybe it is this.)

 "It’s better that way,” she says. “I’ve never liked how badly the people in stories want to be good.” What a waste of wanting--where were the people who wanted power? Freedom? Belonging? Something deep and base that kept them up at night? They seemed the saint when most they played the devil, as it were. “I don’t know that I blame Richard. He didn’t owe his family anything. They made him what he was. They shouldn’t be surprised.” It is a simple answer, she thinks, but one she’s never known anyone before him to reach. Would someone blame a starving hawk for tearing open the flesh of a beloved pet? If it hadn’t been starved, perhaps the thing below might have lived another day. 

Monsters are hungry, before they are grotesque. “Most who get usurped had it coming.”

India has been something of a fatalist as long as she would remember. Her father had to die so she could meet Charlie. She had to meet Charlie to realize her own potential. She had to realize her own potential to kill Charlie, and she had to kill Charlie to be set free from people too tied to fear, to need. When she nods, it is a careful one, a purposeful one, the kind to acknowledge that he has put into words a way of thinking so essential to her being, it was nearly shocking to hear echoed in someone else.

“I’ve only known one other person who was anything like me before now.” She doesn’t speak his name, because it is hers. Dead he may be, she isn’t quite sure she’s willing to share Charlie with anyone. It’s his yellow sweater she’s wearing now, oversized and soft. “And he’s gone. I could have been meant to find you, too.” She leans her chin against her hands, father’s sunglasses trailing down her nose. She lets them. She was shaped into what she was be forces outside herself--she is a creature of blood and memory and longing, and can be nothing else--and something outside is molding her still. She can feel it; her need to stalk and hunt brought her here, to meet this person, and those instincts do not lie.

"I thought I had finished with other people. But I don’t know that how we end up is wholly up to us--I was wrong, wasn’t I?” Yes, yes, she must have been, if the world wasn’t divided into ‘her and Charlie’ and ‘everyone else.’