Getting What She Needs

[megafire7]

Title: Getting What She Needs
Rating: Teen
Major Warnings: Depiction of anxiety attack, mention of past character death, discussion of teen sexuality
Genre: Fluff, hurt/comfort
Summary: McCauleigh deals with an anxiety attack, Verona decides to help by talking to her. Neither of them figures anything out, but it helps anyway.

 

Verona’s Demesne had a habit of giving McCauleigh what she wanted. That made sense to her, she thought. This Demesne, from the bookstore in the basement, to the bedrooms upstairs, to the alchemy lab in the kitchen, and the war room, and the living room with its way too comfortable couch that McCauleigh had kind of claimed, was as much part of Verona as, what, her arm was? She hadn’t really taken a lot of an interest in how they worked, because she didn’t think she’d ever get one, so she didn’t know what it felt like. She knew enough to know that the fact it was so comfortable for her to be here meant Verona wanted her around.

And that was where that sentence stopped. She wasn’t used to that sentence stopping there. She was used to it being followed by a ‘for’.

She was so used to it that she didn’t really know what to do with herself now that it wasn’t there. She kept catching herself waiting for it to come along anyway, like a pressure in her chest that fancy pillows and shit didn’t do anything about, building and building until she wanted to scream, even though she hated screaming.

Adjusting was taking a while.

Still, Verona’s Demesne had a habit of giving her what she wanted, because she definitely didn’t think it was just a coincidence that she found a cat in her lap whenever her thoughts really started spiralling.

McCauleigh knew Julette was, like, a person, obviously, and that any degree to which she acted like a cat was on purpose, probably, but that didn’t mean that, when she got comfortable in McCauleigh’s lap, she was very much a cat.

And there was a part of petting that black cat in her lap that really helped. She didn’t really get it, honestly, but when Julette started purring in her lap, with her fingers running through her fur, the vibrations resonated with that pressure deep in her chest, and helped it come loose, so she could breathe it out instead of having to scream it out.

Or something.

She missed Anselm.

That wasn’t a fun thought, but it was a thought her head had room for, lately. When she was petting Julette (or Blankshanks, but he was an asshole about it), her thoughts started wandering. Like, she’d lean back and kind of doze off with her eyes glazing over or whatever, and her thoughts went in directions that weren’t just about fighting or about how much she sucked at being a girl.

And more and more often, her thoughts went to having Verona’s head in her lap, instead.

She wondered what that was about.

---

Julette was out today. She was doing something with Luna Hare, McCauleigh knew, which was fine. She was her own person, and not McCauleigh’s support animal person or whatever. Peckersnot had reclaimed his territory again, so Blankshanks was out totally not licking his wounds with the others.

That was fine.

She was totally okay with that. The fact that her hands and arms, and feet and legs were itching wasn’t something she could just expect to get help with. She’d appreciated it when she got it, sure, but she wasn’t always going to have people around for that. She was going to have to figure out how to deal with this herself at some point. Might as well start now.

She tried pacing back and forth, but it didn’t do anything, then she’d tried doing some exercises, and she thought that if she’d started with those, it would’ve worked, but now it didn’t. Being in her own room wasn’t helping either, so she got downstairs, and tried to sit down and relax, instead. But of course she wasn’t going to be able to just relax on command. That’s not how this worked. That’s not how any of this worked.

There was one way to deal with this, and that was to hit something, but she didn’t want to hit anything. She flexed her fingers anyway as she forced herself to sit down and not get up again. This was an anxiety attack or something, and sometimes she just had to wait them out. So hurry up and just wait.

She took a deep breath, and, right when it filled her lungs to bursting, she heard the door to the alchemy lab click shut, which meant she hadn’t been as quiet as she thought she was, and Verona heard her. Did she interrupt something? That would suck. She wasn’t very good at apologies, and she-

The door opened again, and Verona walked out. Her hair was a bit of a mess, and her clothes were kind of rumpled, like she’d just taken off some alchemical protection gear and hadn’t taken the time to smooth out the wrinkles after. Not that she usually did.

Verona didn’t ask if she was alright, because, obviously, she kind of wasn’t. McCauleigh always appreciated that. Instead, she just plopped herself down on the couch next to McCauleigh, and promptly put her head down in her lap. That didn’t help her figure out what to do with her hands, which was kind of annoying.

“Are you sure I’m not…?” she asked, so she didn’t have to figure it out yet.

“Nah,” Verona answered, casual. “I needed a break anyway, and it’s going to take half an hour for that to get done, so…” She looked up into McCauleigh’s eyes with her own grey ones, and shot her a smile.

McCauleigh nodded, because what the hell else was she supposed to do? “Don’t feel like watching paint dry, huh?” she asked. It was kind of awkward, but the silence was more awkward, so fuck it.

Verona didn’t notice, anyway, and snorted out a laugh. “Hey now, watching a homunculus grow is way more interesting than watching paint dry.”

But not more interesting than getting comfortable in McCauleigh’s lap, apparently. She did that in a way that was honestly pretty similar to Julette, but with a human body, instead, first stretching out, so her sweater rode up just a little and some of her pale belly showed, and then curling back up again.

Verona also didn’t think the silence was awkward, because she didn’t fill it herself, and eventually McCauleigh figured she could put one hand on the couch’s armrest and the other on Verona’s shoulder. She almost pulled it back when Verona moved, but she kind of curled up around it, so McCauleigh guessed it was fine.

She wondered what Verona was thinking about, because her face was pinched in that way that McCauleigh had figured meant she was thinking about something, but not something that was upsetting her. More like she was trying to figure a Practice problem or whatever out.

Apparently she came to a conclusion, because her big grey eyes suddenly locked onto McCauleigh’s with a kind of clarity that made her breath hitch as she asked-

“Do you like girls?”

What.

She didn’t even know what to say, because all that came out of her mouth was: “Uh…” Which didn’t help.

“Because I’ve been wondering, right, how do you tell?”

How did anyone tell whether they liked anyone? The way her- the way Grayson did it was just to tell someone who they were going to marry and that’d be it, she’d figured. She’d had other things on her mind at the time.

“Is it supposed to be a different kind of liking than boys? Probably, right, because it’s a wholly different set of bits in most cases.”

McCauleigh blinked. Yeah, of course Verona was talking about that. “I, uh, don’t know how much the bits factor in?” she tried. She was pretty sure she was the wrong person for Verona to have this conversation with.

Verona didn’t seem to care about that, though. “Okay, yeah, you don’t know what you’re going to be dealing with until the clothes are already off, but, hmm…”

Verona’s face pinched in that same way again, her eyes now looking right past McCauleigh as apparently more thoughts rattled around in her head.

It left McCauleigh to think about what the fuck just happened. She’d seen Verona in a lot of different ways, hell, Verona had looked at her in a lot of different ways, and whenever she thought about that her mind drifted back to that moment when she’d been just about ready to give up.

Most of her time in Italy was, like, a grey mess of violence and hunger and pain she didn’t want to think about much. She’d largely tried to shove that in a box and push it somewhere in the attic of her mind or whatever, but the end of that, with Verona reaching out to her and pulling her out of a literal hole was something she kept going back to.

She hadn’t looked her in the eye for most of that meeting, and the why behind that was also a mess and anyway it wasn’t what she wanted to think about. When she did look at her, she saw something in Verona’s eyes, something that told McCauleigh her friend had been willing to take on the world to get her out of there.

She’d only figured out later exactly what Verona had done for her, but yeah. She still felt like she owed her for that.

“Mm,” Verona hummed, and McCauleigh’s attention snapped back to her, and she found out that she’d started rubbing Verona’s shoulder and kind of petting her head, the way she would to Julette if she was here.

McCauleigh kind of froze for a bit, because this was kind of crossing a line, right? Verona hadn’t said she could, and that was how this worked, but Verona really didn’t seem to mind, and she totally would tell her if she did.

“Obviously I don’t get the appeal of-“ Verona gestured in the way she sometimes did when talking to that Oth- that god-begotten, like she was indication something big and difficult to grasp right over there “- boyfriends, and even outside the romance thing I know have way different tastes from Lucy, so I can’t really model what’s interesting about girls after what Avery likes about girls.”

McCauleigh hadn’t talked to Avery a lot, honestly, but she’d gotten a sense of her. “She has a pretty romance movie view of relationships, right?”

Verona nodded vigorously, which messed with McCauleigh’s hand in her hair for a bit. “And that’s just bleh to me, and sure, I’m not the only aromantic person in existence, but, like, how do people figure this out?”

Yeah, McCauleigh was absolutely the wrong person to have this conversation with, but Verona had helped her figure a lot of things out, so she might as well try to return the favour. “Well, how did you figure out you liked guys?”

Verona chuckled and her lips curled up into a smile. “Really inappropriate animated movies, honestly. Got curious about dicks, looked up some porn and then eventually got the opportunity to turn that curiosity into practice.”

For just a second, McCauleigh expected Mal to jump in with a joke, but she didn’t, because she couldn’t do that anymore. That sucked.

“Yeah,” Verona agreed, with some emotion.

McCauleigh sat back, and let some of the tension bleed out of her again as she kept rubbing Verona’s shoulder and hair. Her voice didn’t resonate with the tension in her the way Julette’s purring did, but she still felt like she could breathe, like this.

She blinked, and realised just what she was looking at. “Well, if it’s curiosity about, what did you call it? Bits?”

“Bits. Anatomy if you want to beat around the bush for some reason. Dicks if you’re a reasonable person.”

“Okay, well, look.” She gestured up at the ceiling, and the walls, that showed the many, many murals Verona’s Demesne had pretty much by default. A lot of the people in those murals were naked when Verona didn’t have a reason to make them cover up. Very much including the women.

“Huh,” Verona said, her eyes flicking up to take that in. “Okay, at the risk of sounding like a massive hypocrite, that’s just… art? I’ve done plenty of anatomical studies, and naked women came up a bunch.”

“I dunno,” McCauleigh told her. “Sounds a lot like what you said about guys.”

Verona frowned in thought, her eyes flicking from side to side as she took in that bit of potential information. Which was weird. That was what she was talking about, right?

Whatever conclusion she was getting to was going to have to wait, because she almost hit her head on McCauleigh’s chin as she shot up. “Shit! Has it been half an hour already?”

McCauleigh shrugged. She didn’t usually keep track.

“Shit, shit shit shit!” Verona cursed as she got up, apparently patted herself down and then hurried over to the kitchen. McCauleigh was pretty sure that she would’ve tripped and fallen flat on her face if this wasn’t her Demesne.

She stopped herself just as she’d opened the door, taking a moment to calm down, before she half-turned to look at McCauleigh. “Hey, thanks for the talk.”

“Sure,” she said.

Verona nodded, and closed the door behind her.

Huh. This had been a really weird conversation, and she had no idea what Verona had gotten out of it, because it wasn’t like she’d said anything. Yet she felt a lot better. Maybe she should’ve thanked Verona?

Maybe her Demesne just gave her what she needed.

 

Comments

[sunlit_skycat]

That's cute.

Canon said that in Verona's drawings, there was one sexy woman for every ten sexy men? Plenty of room to interpret that as being a 1 or 2 on the kinsey scale rather than a 0 for completely straight.

[greatwyrmgold]

Yeah, McCauleigh was absolutely the wrong person to have this conversation with...

There's no way Verona didn't have half of this conversation with Avery before she came to McCauleigh.