"What Crush?"

Misty has to wait a little bit before going in search of Violet, just because there’s end-of-mission stuff to deal with, and making sure her crossbow is still in fine form, but when she has a free moment she starts wandering the base, wondering where she’d be able to find the older girl. Usually she’d guess the Danger Room, but Nat has said Violet was trying to stop fighting as much…

For her part, Violet almost never uses the danger room for actual danger activities. She’d wanted to, but she’d always had a real tension between what she wanted and the way it made her feel– this thing she was desperately attracted to but felt she shouldn’t be, that left her feeling dirty and instrumental– like a thing made for violence, an addict for the rush of danger and dominance. Instead, her hobbies tend towards repetitive physical exercise to the limits of human endurance, an activity which could conveniently act as its own punishment, to assuage her guilt.

But perhaps this is unfair. Before the Crimson Circle, Violet would practice her music until her fingers gave out. Her sister had proven herself the third fastest woman in the world in the rather highly specific condition of the 400m hurdles. Both of her parents are academics, among the most celebrated in their fields. There is something in them, whether of nature or nurture that lends itself to a certain element of obsession. Perhaps Violet simply never figured out how to do things halfway.

In either case, today is salmon ladder day.

When Misty finds Violet, she spends a few moments staring in mild awe at her workout setup, watching as Violet hooks the bar up on the next rung with nothing but momentum, considerable upper body strength, and possibly witchcraft of some sort.

Wait, no. Misty can’t make that joke, too many people in this team do in fact use witchcraft. Still, it’s impressive; Misty isn’t exactly a slouch herself when it comes to physical fitness even after a year away from intensive combat training, but she can guess how much strength and control is necessary to do this, particularly as quickly and apparently-easy as Violet makes it seem. Violet’s cool; Misty’s known that for a long time.

She waits until Violet is not mid-ascent before waving to get her attention.

“Hi, Violet!”

Naturally, Violet’s ascent doesn’t stop until she reaches the top. Dangling from the highest rung of the salmon ladder, Violet waves.

“Hey, Misty. Am I hogging the machine?”

“Oh, no--I was looking for you, actually,” Misty says, looking up to where Violet is. It cranes her neck a bit, so she steps back. “I don’t actually know how to really use that one, although it looks super cool when you do it. I’ve got, like, one normal question and one kind of weird question, if you have time? I don’t want to interrupt your workout, tho, so I can wait ‘til later if that’s better.”

She’s not sure, now that she thinks about it, which of her two questions is weirder--Violet seems fine, or as fine as is normal, but on the other hand would Nat have told her to ask Violet about the dating thing if it was that weird? She’s not sure.

“Oh, OK. No problem, I’m almost done anyhow.” Violet ker-chunked down a rung. “Just let me– “

   *Kerchunk*!

“Get down here, and then you can–”

   *Kerchunk,*

*kerchunk*

“use it, or whatever. What’s on– “

   *kerchunk*

“-your–”

   *kerchunk*,

   *kerchunk,*

*kerchunk*

“--mind?”

Misty blinks, watching Violet’s quick descent. She can’t deny that it looks interesting, and shrugs off her vest and makes sure her gloves aren’t fraying too badly--metal like the bar used to be fairly safe, but lately…well, it would be poor thanks to Violet for getting to use the salmon ladder if she instantly damaged it.

“Thanks--I’d like to try it, at least. Not sure I’m gonna be that good, it’s been a while since I’ve done much working on core strength.” She’s more worried about that than upper body strength--that’s always been solidly strong for her. “I guess the first one was just--how’re you doing? Last time we really did anything on a mission you ended up in the hospital, so…” She trails off, awkwardly. “I mean, Nat said you were doing better, but I still wanted to check, you know?”

She’d been glued to her phone that entire afternoon, waiting for the text from Nat that confirmed that Violet was going to be okay. Once she’d gotten the news, it was like a string of tension being snipped and she’d slept for twelve hours straight. But that’s a little weird to admit, so she doesn’t.

“Heh. Uh. Yeah. I, uh.” Violet dismounts from the ladder, brushing a tiny bead of sweat from her brow. “I’m… OK, I guess. I… “ She looks away into the middle distance. “I mean. Physically, I’m fine, you know?” She gives a tiny little flex as if to demonstrate her point, but the involuntary cringe told a different story.

  After an awkward pause, she admits as much with a sigh. “I just.. I have some changes to make, you know?”

“I…have some idea, I guess.” The concept, to Misty, of giving up fighting is alarming to a degree that is itself, well, alarming. But on another level, whole chunks of the past few months have been trying to change things, even in uncomfortable ways, to avoid being a person she no longer wants to be. “If there’s anything I can do to help with that, lemme know, because--well, I want to help out, and I want you to be able to do what you want to do.”

“Yeah. I appreciate it. I’m not sure exactly how, or even if, I’m going to be able to keep doing…. this,” Violet gestures around at the Big Team base all around her, “without hurting people, but just I can’t be that person anymore.” She lets out a sigh. Physically, Violet is fine; she’d been designed to heal her way through almost anything– an asset the Crimson Circle had intended to keep, no matter what. But her emotions are a lot more breakable.

Misty picks up the bar from where Violet left it and slots it into a rung, considering it with narrowed eyes. It’s a few rungs lower than where Violet left it--but then, she’s a good bit shorter than Violet. She lets out a breath, places her arms, and utterly fails to get up to the next rung three or so times before finally managing to move the bar. Dangling a scant inch off the ground, she lets out a faint “Woo!” before continuing the conversation.

“I’m glad you’re doing okay like, physically, though. That’s a relief.” She manages to get to the next rung--it’s not efficient, her method of getting up there, more squirming than controlled motion, but it is proving effective. “Oh, also--you and Nat are dating, right? Because she said you weren’t, but she’s *gotta* be messing with me.”

“Wh-”

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“What makes you say that?” Violet runs a hand through her hair when she recovers the faculty of speech, her body language quite betraying her despite something that resembles an attempt at physically swatting the question out of the air. “That’s ridiculous. Dating? Nat? And me? Pfff– That’s– “ she sputters, “Don’t be – Nat is dating Carmen, Misty.”

Misty blinks down at Violet, pausing her ascent to pull herself up and hook an elbow over the bar, for easier dangling; she tilts her head to the side in confusion. She hadn’t expected Violet to be surprised by the question! Even in the vanishingly unlikely case that Nat isn’t messing with her and they genuinely aren’t dating, certainly the question isn’t *surprising*?

“Uh, I say it because it really seems like you two are dating?” She offers. “And yeah, Nat’s dating Carmen, I’ve got eyes and ears, I can see that. And…?” She lets her voice trail off, hoping to get some--any--explanation as to why Nat dating Carmen is somehow a rebuttal. She drops back down to dangling, and manages to squirm her way up to the next rung.    “And, what? They’re like, serious. What kind of friend would come between friends that are together like that? I mean, that even if I liked Nat. And, I mean, obviously, I like Nat, but, like, like Nat like-Nat. And besides they’re both glamorous celebrities, I’m, more of, you know….” Violet gestures up and down at herself, “A fucked-up trauma case. There was a reason they cut me from the movie, right?”
“What kind of jerk would cut you from a movie?” Misty asks. She vaguely remembers that a Big Team Movie was talked about, but that all had been happening when she had a lot more mixed feelings about the team. “Sounds like someone who sucks and is just in it for the money.”

Violet shrugs a little. “I just… don’t fit the profile. I’m no *Riptide*, you know? Carmen and Nat are both famous, Nat more so because she didn’t walk away from it. They’ve got, like thousands of people – tens of thousands in Nat’s case– that are just screaming in adoration to see everything they do. There’s a real difference.”

Misty drops, moves another rung up, and hoists herself up to dangle again. She’s not sure what profile Violet thinks she doesn’t fit--Violet is pretty cool, has always seemed pretty cool--but Nat’s fans can be, well, intimidating. She presses on to the other point she wanted to make.

“And, well, about the ‘what kind of friend would come between friends’--I guess I just didn’t think of it like that, sorry. Didn’t mean to like, imply you would be a bad friend?” It’s hard to shrug while dangling from a bar; she makes an attempt anyway. “Like, I guess I don’t think about that ‘cause, like, my dad got together with my father when he was already married to two other people, so…” She trails off. “Like, it’s not always coming between people, I guess. It depends on the people.”

“I–Yeah, I guess?” Violet shrugs again; “But I don’t think that’s the relationship they have? They’ve only mentioned seeing each-other since they started dating. Something romantic about that, really.” Violet doesn’t ship them, but only because she appreciates that it’s wrong to treat your friends like imaginary characters whose lives should conform to narrative.

“I guess,” Misty says, considering the option. There *is* something nice in the idea of being someone’s everything, she supposes. She’s not sure she’d mind being that, but she can also see how to someone like her dad, or especially her father, it…wouldn’t work at all. *Depends on the people indeed*. Speaking of depending on the people… “And, well, if you don’t like like Nat, that’s like, the best reason not to be dating someone. I just thought--well. Guess I was wrong.”

Honestly, Misty feels a little bit ridiculous,now--she had been so *sure* that Nat and Violet and Carmen had everything figured out and were together! She’s not sure what signs she read wrong, other than possibly all of them, or perhaps the signs were in a language she couldn’t read, or--this metaphor is getting out of hand. “Now that I think about it,” she muses, almost to herself. “I guess that’s also the reason Nat gave--you not liking her like that, I mean. But by that point I already thought she was messing with me.”

“I don’t– It’s not that I don’t– I don’t even like girls!” Violet blushes furiously. “I mean– I don’t– I don’t…. Not like… uh–” she tugs at her scarf, feeling a sudden surge of heat as her customary effortless deflection melts into something like a  desperate and inelegant flail.

Dear reader, should you imagine there is any chance that anything even resembling eye-contact was being made at this point, you would be quite seriously mistaken.

Misty’s two brain cells make a rare moment of connection, and she realizes that “why not?” is probably not the right response to someone telling you that she isn’t a lesbian. She squirms up another bar of the salmon ladder, considering this and also the fact that Violet isn’t looking directly at her.

“Okay,” she says, after a moment. “I’d say I get it but, uh, I’m a huge lesbian so I don’t, but you don’t have to like, clarify you can like girls as friends and people and not wanna date them. I don’t like guys but they’re cool.” She gets up another rung, and then drops one arm to fist-pump in victory at making it closer to the top of the ladder. “And still, I think it’s really cool that you and Nat and Carmen are such good friends. It’s…” She’s not sure how to articulate what she means. “It’s…nice, to see people who are good friends, not because of…” she trails off. “Some cause or job or something that ties them all together but just because they like each other.”

Violet squirms, actively looking away.

“I’m not– uh, I’m not not attracted to– “ It’s been a while since we’ve seen this Violet: the one who’s engaged in losing a desperate hand-to-hand combat with her vocabulary, attempting to find words for experiences she doesn’t fully apprehend.

“Misty, when you look at me, what do you see?” Violet seems to give up with a sigh, her avoidance of eye-contact having obtained the evolved form of actually facing away from the person you are talking to.

Misty considers the question. “Are we talking, like, physically or more…” she can’t really wave a hand while dangling, she realizes, but hoists herself up to hang from one arm and does it anyway. “Abstractly, I guess? Because right now I see a girl a bit older than me in workout clothes looking at the wall, which—“ Misty checks. “Doesn’t have much going on.”

“More abstractly, yes,” Violet responds, dryly.

“Ok,” Misty says, considering this. “More abstractly—I guess I see one of my friends? Someone who’s got my back in a fight,” she adds, because—well, that doesn’t seem to be everyone’s criteria for a friend but it’s hers. “And someone who knows when to call me on my shit in a fight, which also helps. Uh…” she’s not sure what Violet is looking for in this answer. “A member of Big Team? Someone who’s got more of her shit together than I do most of the time? Someone who I can talk to at lunch about how school is weird?”

“Misty…” Violet sighed, “I'm a product.”

“I’m tall, because somebody decided I ought to be tall. I’m thin because someone decided it was– what, design-efficient? Aesthetically pleasing? Because somebody decided I ought to be thin. I like fighting, because someone thought it would be easier if I was inclined to comply with my orders enthusiastically. I find guns and knives and bows and rocket launchers borderline fascinating, because– as near as I can tell, somebody thought it’d be a good idea if I was really into something they were going to dump a ton of information in my brain about either way.”

She whips her face back around, briefly, keeping her feet planted firmly in the other direction. “They held focus groups, Misty! I’ve seen some of the data!” Her head swivels back away, because some things are easier to say when you can’t look a person in the eye.

“So… if I feel something? If I look at, I dunno, Angy and think ‘gosh, she’s hot,’ – am I feeling that because I feel that, or because somebody sitting in a room somewhere decided it was something I ought to feel?”

Misty…takes this in, for a long moment. She’d gathered, both from just being around Violet and from the last mission they had together, that this Crimson Circle group had seriously messed with Violet. She hadn’t known--hadn’t asked--what, specifically they did because that hadn’t been her business.

It’s a lot worse than she had thought.

“First of all,” she says, while gathering her reactions into something coherent. “I think if you look at Angy and think she’s hot that’s just because you have like, eyes, it’s an objective fact.” Probably. Misty’s pretty sure that’s an objective fact--it seems obvious enough to her--there’s something there that she feels like she should come back to later, but she pushes it out of her brain.

“And second of all--that…I mean, you obviously know this, but that really sucks. The--what they did. And I’m sorry it happened but like--I don’t need to tell you it sucked because you know that.” Misty knows that this is a situation where saying the right words is extremely important, which means she is about to be an *entire* disaster. “And…well, I’ve always been what I am, but--I also wonder about if anything I feel is actually, you know, real.”

She’s only gotten close to admitting this to Inge, before, but she presses on. “I’m not sure what your fate-sight can see, but you’ve gotta know that I’m--before I was born fate decided I was a weapon. I have no idea what parts of me are me, and what parts of me exist so that I will, inevitably, kill a guy I’ve never met. Do I like archery on its own merits, or is it so that can happen? Do I dislike Asgard for real reasons, or just so I will end up fighting them? Hell, to use Angy as an example again--am I friends with Angy because she rules, or because fate found it convenient for me to empathize more with dragons than with humans? When Clotho tried to change my fate--did I reject that on my own, or because it’s already way, way too late? I dunno. At least I didn’t have to look at the focus group data,” she admits. “Is…is that part of the problem, then? You don’t know what you actually like?”

“It’s not the same thing,” Violet shakes her head. “You have a fate, I have a fate, everybody has a fate.. It’s just… what is. I think it’s kind of… the thing that’s actually there and what we see is just sort of… “ word grasp, word grasp, “ like a user interface, almost. They are the ‘real’ reasons.” Violet had skipped two years of vocabulary quizzes, so doesn’t have the word ‘epiphenomenon’. Instead, she sighs.

“But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel… gross to wonder if my emotions are the result of some engineer sitting in a room somewhere who thought it’d be cool.”

“I…guess that is pretty different just in, like, cause,” Misty admits, deflating a little. She doesn’t want to think too hard about the first thing Violet said, the thing about fate, so she circles back around to a different point. “So it’s…more about how you’re worried some gross guy is the reason you like stuff you like? Or, you don’t know if it is or not?”

Misty hadn’t known how to parse Violet seeming to go back and forth on saying if she liked girls, but--with this--it makes a little more sense how ‘do you like something’ isn’t an easy question. *Can’t* be an easy question.

“I don’t– “ Violet’s thoughts are about her duplicates. She had felt sympathy for Aubrieta even after the shapeshifter had stolen her life, because it had meant that in some way a part of her still survived–before Aubrieta had thrown that away too, because stealing Violet’s life was more important to her. And on the other side, Atropos, the alternate version of her who’d been rescued from physical captivity but given in to being the kind of person the Circle had made her to be nonetheless, more weapon than person. Violet’s expression is pained as she turns back around to face Misty.

“I’m not the old me. I can’t go back. I know this. But I can’t just…. accept the person they made me, either. My instincts don’t lead me to good places.” And then she seems like she flips this little mental switch, like she’s disconnecting the topic of conversation from its obvious implications, as if refusing to look at things would make them go away. “Anyhow, Nat and I aren’t dating, we’re just— just gal pals.”

That was a thing, right?

Misty almost—almost—asks why they pivoted from talking about if Violet was dating Nat, to how Violet couldn’t trust her instincts and what she wanted, and back to the dating Nat thing—and then, for once, she thinks about what she’s about to say.

There’s…kind of only one reason that makes sense, at least to her.

And given that Violet had *just* talked about how gross it felt to think that liking something might just be because some engineer decided to make her do that…Misty thought, more clearly, about the hypothetical she’d thrown out about if she just liked Angy because fate thought it would be convenient for her to.

Oh. Yeah, that felt bad. Very bad.

She…probably shouldn’t push Violet any further on this.

“I mean I think usually when people do say ‘gal pals’ they’re being sarcastic and they mean girlfriends,” Misty considers aloud, instead of saying all that. “Just so you know, because people could get confused.”

“Right, right.” Violet grunts.”We’re girls, who are friends.”

It sits there for a beat.

“Not. You know. The other thing.”

She crosses her arms.

“...”

She uncrosses her arms.

“What?”

She clears her throat and scratches the back of her head.

“I think they usually mean the other thing,” Misty says, in a last-ditch attempt to clarify, and then shakes her head. “But, uh, I guess that’s not really important. Like, you and Nat know what’s going on, which is the really important thing, and I just jumped to a lot of conclusions, I guess. So…sorry about that.”

“Right. Yeah,” Violet rubs her upper right arm with her left hand, her body language transparent, drawing inward, her continued need to fidget betraying her unsettled emotions. “It’s very clear. We’re…. Both on the same page,” she says, with no clue what page that might actually happen to be.

Searching for something to look at that isn’t Violet, Misty glances down to see the distance between her and the ground and winces. “...and for stranding the bar up here, I’m pretty sure that’s, like, bad gym etiquette. Lemme just--” Physically climbing the side bar of the salmon ladder is probably not encouraged, but that doesn’t mean, Misty thinks, it’s not possible; she grabs the pole and slides it out of the slots, clinging to the side of the ladder with the other hand.

“You can just– drop? “Violet’s face contorts as Misty attempts to scramble down the side of the ladder, the motion and practical immediacy relieving the pressure to confront emotions she hasn’t quite managed to wrap her heart around yet. She mimes the action with her hand as her friend seems to almost– scurry? Down the sides of the scaffold. “No– you pull it back,like you were going to do another rung, but you don’t swing the bar up– if you’re trying to get down from there, you just–” This is so much simpler! “You’ve just got to let yourself fall.”

Misty, awkwardly halfway down the ladder, pauses and looks down at the ground again. “...right,” she said, clearing her throat. “That…makes sense.”

The pause lasts another second.

“I’m…this is weirdly harder when I’m doing it on purpose,” she complains, and then closes her eyes and lets herself drop down from the ladder, hitting the ground with her usual resilience and standing back up. “Letting yourself fall. Right.”

She slides the bar back into place near the bottom, and looks over at Violet. “Your turn?”