attempting the hell to communicate

Shania's first playdate with Ghondor had been unsupervised, low-key. Ghondor's mother was overjoyed by the opportunity for Ghondor to have some one-on-one time with a girl her own age who wouldn't point fingers and call names, and Shania's mother seemed happy to have someone else to do it for her, if she was even putting in that much effort at the time.

"Thanks for having the girls, Bonnie," Monica had said, and Bonnie had smiled a wrinkly-false smile and gone back to helping Titania with her studies. Times-tables, they were, and Titania had wanted to do them alone. But she supposed there were worse ways to spend an evening than filling out a grid of numbers and telling her mother how well she was doing in all her other classes. Nice, that she wanted to know. Titania didn't even feel like she was bragging.

In fact, Titania had perfect humility when her teacher called out, "Titania Reid is top of class for the third grade!" Whenever her friends were struggling with a new concept, she'd gladly make her best attempt to explain, perhaps in words that suited better than the teacher's. And if she'd shared all she knew, then she had nothing to be ashamed of, receiving this distinction. All the other kids' parents helped them out, too, right?

When Shania passed through the same lessons three years later, she struggled mightily. Titania, still at the top of her grade, would have been, once again, happy to help, but Bonnie insisted that she was far too busy with sports and advanced writing classes, and Shania would have to go it alone.

A lucky thing, Shania thought, because she did not get along with her mother. Her father was a different story, but he was always working, or away on Lost Numbers missions - with Ghondor's mother, no less. Being ordered around by someone a dozen years his junior; this, Bonnie constantly bemoaned. Oh, Alastair, how we mighty Reids have fallen. Our Founder's mentor was the greatest of them all, she claimed. But Alastair just smiled, in that gentle way of his, and said that they all had to do their part. See how well Titania's doing!

Shania, shut up in her room and struggling with the commutative property, saw how well Titania was doing, because it showed just the opposite in her.

Ghondor was a B- student, but she didn't mind. She had no father to speak of and she was at odds with her mother nigh-constantly. Hanging out with Shania was a respite for her. They had amassed a collection of coloring books, because they were a low-cost treat Alastair could bring home for his baby girl and her friend, and because Bonnie liked the way they kept young brats out of trouble. Kept them quiet, at least.

Since Shania had never been as cooperative, as good-humored, as Titania, Bonnie figured the Vandham girl was as fine a playmate as she deserved. Maybe in time she'd have an example of how not to act, and would rise up to her station.

Shania colored inside the lines until she'd outgrown the coloring books, and then she drew anatomically correct stick figures. Ghondor's pictures were violent splashes of reds and browns and blues, until she decided she wanted to learn how to fold paper airplanes instead - a much cooler skill than producing proportionate arrangements of lines.

Once, when Ghondor had used up all the scrap sheets and was waiting impatiently for Shania to toss aside her latest attempt, she craned her neck around to observe what was being outlined: two people, with short legs and short pants, holding hands in the center of a grassy circle surrounded by diagonally-laid rectangular stones. Virid Park, away from the Founder's statues.

Currently, Shania was diligently placing curlicues to form the texture of hair for the figure on the right. A small patch of that figure's face was colored in, with a mix of dark brown and beige crayon. Evidently that portion of the project had been abandoned in favor of the hair, and once finished Shania would circle back to see how the skin tone looked then.

"That me?" Ghondor asked, wide-eyed. Shania didn't look up, and when Ghondor's finger hit the page to confirm her target, Shania methodically moved it aside, grunting when she realized that the waxy crayon underneath had gotten smudged.

"I was thinking of getting braids soon. If my mother'll allow it."

Of course. No sooner had Shania carefully crafted her first illustration of their friendship than did Ghondor shoot a hole right through it.

Shania stood up. "You can have this," she said, handing Ghondor the half-finished picture in one smooth, flat sheet. "I'm done."

Ghondor sat, slack-jawed, in Shania's room, until Monica came to pick her up. Guess she had to get braids now. No going back on it.

"You wanna hang out, this weekend?"

Ghondor had so many friends, but she never asked any of them to hang out, instead waiting to be invited to some thing or other this weekend or that. She was no social butterfly, but she used her popularity to her advantage.

Which meant that this invitation, extended toward Shania, was particularly special.

"Ah...sure. You wanna go shopping?"

But Ghondor rolled her eyes. "Got too many clothes already. And you've got all those hand-me-downs from your sister, so you're set too, right?"

It wasn't mean-spirited. Not in intention, anyway, which was what the spirit of such a comment was. Yes, Titania had less and less use for her civilian daywear as she spent more and more time training to become an Ouroboros candidate. But what if Shania wanted to have her own style?

"C'mon, let's do something!"

But anything they did, according to Ghondor's standards of doing, was likely to be something that required more coordination or general knowledge than Shania had, or would wind up showing her to be aping her friend in every smallest pursuit.

They settled on baking, at Ghondor's house, and Shania found that she didn't mind the absence of her mother's voice, which had so often told Titania to watch what she ate.

The difference would be subtle to any onlooker, but Shania could never not notice it.

HRT had been much kinder to Ghondor; her chest was filled out enough that even when she, effectively, bound it under a tight sports bra, there were curves there. Shania knew it was the stupidest possible thing to get jealous about, but here she was, sixteen years old, and even the flattest other girls at school had a recognizable chest. Meanwhile Shania remained cursed with pointy, triangular boobs that stubbornly stayed separate from each other even with the help of an underwire. Titania was, in Ghondor's words, a member of the itty-bitty-titty committee, just like her dainty little gun, but that didn't really help matters.

Ghondor's nose was rounder, her face fuller. Her voice wasn't nearly as husky as Shania's.

It was almost easier for Shania to admit that she was desperately attracted to Ghondor than to call it jealousy. At least when they got older Ghondor's would get saggier faster.

What a mean thought - but it was nothing Shania hadn't heard her mother comment about innocent big-breasted girls before.

(And if Shania ended up taking after her mother, as much as a trans woman ever could, it wasn't even true.)

Ever since that disagreement in the third grade, Shania had lost all interest in showing Ghondor her art. Not just lost, but actively discarded.

Ghondor loved food, casual dating, beating boys at arm wrestling, and being spur-of-the-moment. If she didn't spend so much time arguing with her mother about the Lost Numbers missions she wanted to go on, she'd probably have noticed how much of a recluse Shania had become. And that was alright.

Guernica never babied her in public, but the few times he'd been the one to pick Ghondor up from the Reid household, he and Alastair had chatted a while, about legacy and how difficult it was to raise children, especially girls, in a time like this.

"I'm so proud of Monica's compassion," Guernica had said. "I know she struggles with Ghondor sometimes, but things could be a lot worse."

"Shania's so grateful to have her for a friend," Alastair had agreed. "And that means I'm grateful to you, sir."

That memory of tenderness had stuck with Shania almost as well as all the conditioning she'd gotten from her mother. It was what helped her isolate her mother's ill feelings toward the Vandhams from how the Vandhams themselves must have felt.

When Titania and her batch of Ouroboros candidates got, as Ghondor would say, launched into next week, both Alastair and Vandham had gone out on a recovery mission, but it had just been injury for the lot, and no Titania to show for it.

After that, Alastair felt even more keenly that Shania shouldn't be pressed into following the same path. Bonnie, on the other hand, saw it - rather, her - as their one chance for House redemption. But of course, when Shania placed eighth in her round, and Ghondor first, all that went out the window.

Ghondor never lost. Ghondor never backed down. Ghondor was bothered, not tortured. She had two bloody guards going "yes, ma'am" to her every move! Why couldn't Mother see that Vandham were more than just "upstarts" with no claim to the ranking?

But there was no glory nor money in being a painter, so Shania didn't even try to play that up.

Ghondor could never be sure when exactly she'd lost Shania, and if it had been her fault or if Shania had just...drifted.

She admitted, when she thought about it, that it was much different to be dogged by a mother like Monica than it was to be constantly put down by a mother like Bonnie.

But why'd Shania have to just lie down and take it? Why couldn't she use her brains for something? Maybe math wasn't her thing, never would be - it hadn't been Ghondor's either - but she had so much to offer. Why throw her life away to try and replace her sister?

Maybe Ghondor was just mad at the facts, but you couldn't yell at the facts, nor punch them. So she took it out on Shania instead. Was she hoping to rile her up? Get her to stop being so helpless?

But Shania wasn't helpless, just hopeless. Ghondor only had so much positivity to spare for her friend.

Bonnie clung to the statue of Founder Reid's mentor as if, with the rest of the City frozen, he could reanimate and save her. Save them all from what, ultimately, she had brought upon them.

With everyone else frozen, could Shania finally catch up? Could she finally be stronger, faster, smarter than them all?

Could she pin Ghondor in place, and explain this all to her?

No. She never even considered that last. There would be no point in trying to cling onto a Ghondor that had long abandoned her. That had sided with the common Ouroboros rabble - those who hadn't even had to fight for their place - and spoke of strategy and victory with them instead of running to her, instead of giving a single shit about the girl she'd known for longer than any of those soldiers had even been alive.

Immediately, she was a traitor to be interrogated, and to become another one of Ghondor's pummelled victims.

Did she do it for attention?

No. She did it for power, for some particle of control over her own life.

But she deserved Ghondor's attention. She deserved Ghondor's admiration. She deserved everything Ghondor had been granted, and more.

So if she couldn't have that...?

There was no point, anymore. Her father was gone. Titania, with as much attention as she had ever paid to her misfit sister, had been gone as soon as Mother had gotten her claws in her.

Shania herself was gone, and the City remained. So she would begin again, in some other life.

Of course Ghondor couldn't understand that. Ghondor, who'd never even had to try.