Now that you're actually not cool, I kinda like you better. (Open/Closed)

[wasalmostdaphne]

Who: Catchall for Bay (Open) and Abby (Closed)
When: Throughout July
What: All sorts of things.
Warnings: Abby swears and does drugs and is generally going to be a problem. Abby and Jesper's closed prompt is NSFW.

Nocwich - Open
Horizon - Open
Thorne - Open

Comments

[ordinar]

No, he'd grown up learning how to build walls around himself. Even now, he does it subconsciously — and tearing down those walls requires a very conscious effort.

Anyway, it's a weird conversation to have while casually gathered at the edge of a bustling market street, even after they've found a stone ledge to perch on. He listens closely, but the knot of confusion doesn't loosen from his expression. At the same time that Bay answers one question, she leaves him wondering three more.

"That's...pretty fucked up," Wilhelm agrees, because what else is there to say?

"So the hospital sent you home with the wrong parents, and nobody realized until way later?" He tilts his head like he's trying to calculate some complex equation. "What do you mean, a miracle?"

Life doesn't grant do-overs.

[wasalmostdaphne]

"I did become a disaster when I found out. It was weird." Bay ponders on the best explanation. "Everyone had been whispering about me since I was... six or seven. They looked at my mom and dad, at my brother. And me. My pale skin that didn't freckle, my dark hair. How little I looked like them, how different I was. So knowing I wasn't crazy? Fantastic. But I also got to see a whole life I didn't get, and my parents fawn over a girl who was everything I wasn't. And they were so mad she got sick and lost her hearing like that didn't just happen sometimes."

And that was the rub, wasn't it. Bay just described herself hearing, and Daphne as Deaf. That life she coveted, she got to have it. And she couldn't say one version was better or worse, she could just say what this version cost her wasn't worth what she gained. But if she'd never been her, maybe she would have been happy with it.

"We tried to spend Christmas together, it was our first Christmas as a weird blended family. My mom goes nuts over Christmas. Fifteen different cookies and a schedule planned to the minute of family cheer. My birth mother wants to have a relaxed Christmas eve, quick round of presents at noon, and sneak Chinese take-out into a movie." Bay shakes her head, it was such a stupid argument mostly because one mom was stubborn, and the other traditional to the point of stubborn. "So my sister and I kinda thought- we'd be better off if the switch never happened."

"And we got that." Bay gestures at her merely decorative ears. Yes, it didn't make sense. The universe doesn't give do-overs. And miracles don't happen. They were sitting on a stone wall outside an apothecary in a castle town where they lived, in a castle, full of mages. The universe did whatever it wanted.

[ordinar]

Give him a moment to wrap his head around everything. The strange things that happen here in Abraxas make some amount of sense in the framework of a world governed by volatile magic, but Bay comes from the same boring, mundane world as him. Maybe the how or why doesn't really matter, though. Elbows resting on his thighs, he tilts a look at her.

"Do you still wish it never happened?"

Or was it better to never know what could have been?

[wasalmostdaphne]

"She's my sister." It's a clean answer to a complicated set of feelings. The switch matters more to who she is than just about anything else, and the only reason she could make sense of her new life without the switch was because of the switch! No version of her life without her parents, her brother, and her sister felt right.

She seems otherwise accepting of all of this, not overly annoyed by how her life is a disaster of tangled chaos. It- just is her life, and she's come to terms with it all, even being here.

"Seeing my other life just put all the flaws on to it. Took away the dream." The dream wasn't real, it would never be. She was glad for that truth. Also the truth of who her parents would be if the switch hadn't interrupted their lives, for good or ill.