I didn’t look at the dog bed when I woke up. I didn’t know if Miranda was there or not, and I didn’t want to know. Not yet, anyways.
I’m not sure how much the other two saw last night, but if nothing else they sure picked up on my mood: by the time I finished scrambling some eggs on the stove, they were at the edge of the table again, mere steps from the ladder, and all but cowering as they tried to avoid my attention. I left them to tremble as I prepared the table: two small plates, each with a tiny portion of eggs, and a larger plate, where I put the rest of the eggs. It was as I was applying some jelly to the toast that I realized that there was no sign of Miranda, and that for all I knew she didn’t even know I was making food.
I would have liked to say I thought about the decision, but at the same time part of my mind was noting that the eggs wouldn’t reheat well, my mouth was opening to shout.
“Breakfast is going to get cold, Miranda!”
There. Conscious assuaged. If she still didn’t show up, then it was her fault she was going to eat sub-par scrambled eggs, not mine. Amber and Mia, if anything, lowered themselves even farther down on the table at the sound of my voice, but a minute passed and there was still no sign of Miranda.
“Looks like it’s just us, then.” I announced to the Mins, who didn’t seem reassured by my statement, but I ignored their fear and sat down to eat.
Part of me was irrationally, bitterly glad that Miranda was ignoring me: it let me be angry easier, let me put the blame for our… everything on her. Another part noted that if I wanted her at the damn table so bad, I could just make her come: she only had a choice in the matter if I let her have one. She was, it reminded me, not my girlfriend who I was having a fight with, she was the Min I owned. I could blame her for whatever I wanted, do to her whatever I wanted, and there was nothing she could do about it, and that fact was oh so tempting.
The rest of me was just pining for her presence, pathetically so. I knew, in the end, I’d be stupidly happy just watching her go about her day, even if she was ignoring me, and that fact only fed into my irritation.
The worst part of it all was the fact this was all her fault in the first place! I hadn’t expected anything from her beyond annoyance and dismissal, and I had resigned myself to a life of lonesome longing before I had even met with her; it was Miranda, in the first place, who brought up and accepted in the same breath the fact I could and would use her. It was Miranda who plead to me for safety, cried over my kindness, smiled at me with that damn smile of hers, only to all but spit in my face minutes later.
I could deal with getting nothing from her, I expected to get nothing from her, so why did she keep taunting me with all these fantasies of anything more?
Why did she keep getting my hopes up?
I was so busy fuming, only half heartedly eating my food to better wallow in my bad mood, that I was lost to the world around me until I felt a slight tug at one of the legs of my pants.
“Uh.” Miranda began, refusing to look me in the face. “Is… is it too late for me to eat?”
I stared at her, stunned and mouth still filled with eggs, for so long that she took at as a rejection.
“Oh”. She murmured softly, seeming to fold in on herself ever so slightly, before beginning to turn away.
“OK then. That’s… I’ll just-”
I swallowed hastily. “Wait!”
Miranda flinched at my shout, but stopped moving. “Wait! Of course you can eat! I was just… surprised.”
“Oh!” She said again, her tone suddenly lighter. “Thank you!”
There was a pause where neither of us moved.
“Would you… like me to help you up?” I ventured.
Yesterday, I knew, I wouldn’t have even thought about moving her to the table. Today, though, today taking that liberty felt… wrong. Like we were starting fresh, and if I wasn’t careful, I could wreak any chance I had of us having something better than how it had been.
Miranda, apparently, was just as surprised by my sudden courtesy as I was, and stared at me for a moment before smiling gently.
“That… that would be nice.” She said, sounding almost shy.
Slowly, I reached down to her, grabbing Miranda firmly around the hips before lifting her as smoothly as I could. She tensed slightly at my approached, but only that: she didn’t try to run from me, and even relaxed slightly at my firm grip on her body.
Then she was on the table again, and we were both trying and failing to eat, distracted by each other’s presence.
“Oh!” I said, starting to get up from the chair. “I just remembered I got you silverware to use. Give me a minute and I’ll grab it-”
Miranda jerked away at my sudden movement, and I froze. For a tense second we stared at each other, before she sighed and waved me down.
“Sorry about that, I just… panicked a little.” She shook her head. “This isn’t going how I wanted it to at all. Can you just… sit down for a minute? I want to ask you something.”
I nodded before lowering myself gingerly to my seat. Miranda sighed again.
“Ian, I-” She cut herself off, pinching her nose with one hand while holding the other up. “Actually, can you just… give me a minute?”
I officially had no idea what was going on. “…Sure.” I said finally.
“Thanks.” Miranda said almost absently, before starting to pace back and forth on the table, muttering to herself.
A quick glance to the side revealed that Amber and Mia were just as confused as I was, if less worried than they had been before: while it looked like they still hadn’t touched their food, they seemed far less stressed than they had been the last time I looked at them.
She stopped and took a deep breath. “Alright.”
I focused on her as she turned to face me. “Ian. I… it occurs to me that I handled things… badly, between us. Everything, honestly. I didn’t need to make things so adversarial between us. I’m sorry about that. Really, I am. You’ve been doing me, all of us, this incredible favor and I’ve been rude to you in return. I’ve just been in a bad place recently-”
She gestured at her body, before waving her arms out at the entire room, and how vast it was in comparison to her.
“-Obviously, and I’ve been taking it… badly. Which makes this next part even more awkward than it would have been.”
I leaned back in my chair as she stopped for a breath, my jaw on the floor.
Holy shit. She was apologizing. Holy shit.
“I had a hard time in the Kennel,” Miranda continued. “There is very little structure there, outside of some basic rules imposed on us, and so the biggest among us ruled. I’m big for a Min, more than enough to give Amber and Mia some protection, but there was one woman there who was bigger than me. Sydney…” Miranda winced. “Was unhappy with my presence. She felt like I was moving in on her territory, and wasn’t afraid to take it out on me.”
She snorted. “Which was stupid, really, because I wasn’t a threat to her; I tried to fight her when she got in particularly nasty mood, several times, actually, and I didn’t stand a chance. But she did it, anyways.”
She stopped, fists clenched, and I waited patiently for her to continue, barely able to breath.
“I hate her.” Then louder. “I hate her, Ian! I hate that stupid, over sized bitch! I didn’t ask for this, I didn’t want to be ‘in her way’! I just wanted to be left alone, and she just-”
Miranda was screaming now, clenched fingers clawing through the air. “I want to make her pay! I want to her to be the one to be afraid, to be the one crying! I want to hurt her, Ian! So much!”
She stopped and panted, catching her breath as I stared at her, enraptured by the display.
“But I can’t.” Miranda continued, suddenly as calm as could be. “I’m here and she’s there, and even if I could get to her, she’d beat me just as effortlessly as before. I can’t do anything.”
She lifted her head to stare me straight in the eye. “But you can, Ian. You promised me, yesterday. You said you would protect anyone I wanted to protect, and hurt anyone I wanted hurt.”
“I want her to hurt, Ian.” Her voice was like a blade: sharp, cold and completely merciless. “Her name is Sydney Wilson, and I want her to hurt.”
For a long moment I stared at Miranda, at her determination, at the weakness that she had just laid before me. This, I knew, was my chance, my choice: I could take this opportunity she gave me, and build some kind of bond with her, or reject it, and her, forever.
I nodded. “Alright. I’ll do it.”
Your daily reminder that this is not a nice story I’m writing.
Also, the real reason I’m annoyed at the name of this fic: I’ve finally reached the point where it no longer matches, and at this point, it’s probably too late to change it. Also, I wouldn’t know what to change it to.
This ‘twist’, if it is a twist to you, was something I had always planned to do, but… later. Then again, this fic, both within and without, seems to be about recklessly accelerating relationships, so it’s fitting in a way. I’ve got to say, though, working in the new character with the olive branch to ‘fix’ their relationship (and oh, what a fucked up olive branch it is: torture my enemy for my love!) for their relationship is a stroke of genius I wish I could take credit for, but I have like… only three or four plot points for this entire story. The rest is all flailing and spinning bullshit.