Survival Of The Fittest

Mona left.

LK kind of... stood there, for a bit. Breathed in. Breathed out.

Yep. She was in fact in this situation. Like, actually.

Well. First things first. LK sprung up and dashed back to her desk. Brought back up the OBS interface, returned briefly to live and facecam. With any luck, Chat wouldn't notice the residual flustered energy. Unlikely.

"Hey, so, sorry Chat, something's come up..." Yeah it did.

As she spoke, over to Twitch itself. Oh, good. A good redirect option.

"...NL's live, gonna raid, sorry! See you next time!"

Surely they'd all be entirely normal in their response, not at all speculating what could possibly have happened between her and the streamer they loved to " " " i r o n i c a l l y " " " ship her with. Yeah. That'd go great. Oh well. Sacrifices made for the cause of... uh... ruining one of her most valued friendships, and for what? Maybe it'd go well, maybe Mona would just help her with the sizing and agree yeah she's totally into Stella, Stella specifically, not LK, just Stella.Or maybe... they could actually work? They had so much in common, and... She had Long Yearned...

Anyway! Fuck that, Mona wouldn't be long, things to do, no time for existential dread! What was the worst that could happen? Torpedoing the friendship just in time to go their separate ways for college and never see each other or talk to each other again and...

So, LK dug through her closet for the forbidden cosplay, made haste in changing into it. She was straightening out (hah) her skirt and about to put on the wig when she heard knocking. Deeply uncommon gesture for Mona, but then, she could realistically be expecting to come back to LK changing. Definitely for the best she hadn't just barged in and turned the already-absurd sequence of events into a straight up ecchi anime. uwu LK-chan, is that your... uwaaaa!!. Nah, not worth it for the laugh it might give her a decade later.

"It's safe, come in! Uh, can you help me with the wig?"

That left Mona stuck on the wrong side of the door. Thoughts percolating until the soup of her mind had a thin skin on top.

It felt like forever, hovering on the edge the dread that it was going to happen again. She knew what she was capable of. Mind hollow, eyes dead (not like that wasn’t usually the case) consumed with fear about what her girlfriend Leah was up to late at nights. Just one quick checking Leah’s text message history when nobody was watching. She could stop any time. That’s what she’d told herself last time. That’s what she’d kept telling herself while her life had fallen apart around her, walls caving in right onto her head. She’d never apologized to Manuel. She still didn’t know how. and she tried to imagine what Chat was going to say. How her Discord would be hype to performative levels, how all their deluded fantasies of sesbian lex would be confirmed and chat would come alive and be the most active it had been in months. For like, two weeks, then it’d go back to the regulars who pestered her about more community Jackbox weekends.

Like, the girls who showed up on VC occasionally were chill. Voice trained or not. The, uh, guys. Well. They were alriiiiiight, she guesseeeeed. Shrug. She had signed up for the thankless job of being a barely eighteen girl entertaining men years her seniorand, y’know, it was probably the best she’d ever be able to do.

Open the door.

Monawho the hell do I think I am telling myself to do things.

Open! The door!

Leah’s door knob? Don’t get it twisted. Aaaaaand, fingers delicate, anticipating a static shock. None came, she quietly opened the door, slid inside. Leah was fortunately just out of sight, voice wafting out of her closet like a billowing cloud of war crime (go Kirby!). Indeed, contact with Leah would immediately cause Mona’s untimely(?) death. But something something risk it all for the biscuit. Mona entered, already pointer and thumb deep into the pocket of her emergency sewing kit with the bobby pins, the rat-tail, the silicon spray, the everything else one needed to rescue a wig from fly-aways so severe the wig literally just Wright Brother-ed away.

And oh jesus christ Leah had definitely filled out, the rough allowances of the cheer outfit were still right but the, uh, bust seam and the, uh, hip darts definitely needed, uh, loosening, uh, couple more uhs for good measure, help help help Mona was a total professional and in the blink of an eye was right by her friendbest friend, only friend who wasn’t a total psycho, don’t lose her Mona, don’t blow up what’s left of your normal life, you are not the Joker, that movie sucked anyways and doing as requested. Helping with the wig. She could do that. She’d done that for years of her life.

Artificial Party City quality hair woven through her fingers, she pulled up, exposed a section of the wig, wound a bobby pin through the cap and secured that section against Leah’s hair. Not even noticeable on Leah’s end.

She focused. One bit at a time. Just helping her friend. Thinking of nothing else. Simple. Easy. Nothing else to it. Minutes passed. Did you know that for every sixty second in Leah’s bedroom, one hour passes?

And

she

was

done.

“Turn around, Leah Nyquist.” Stella Mitchell? This was most likely not what generic self-help book authors and influencers meant when they said to aspire to greatness. “Lemmie see ya.”

Mona sorta neglected to back off, so like. Face to face.

Mona's fingers running through her hair, first synthetic, then real, then synthetic again. It took maybe a minute, maybe two, for which Leah-Kim tried her very best to stand still and not react to all the everything with the hands and the touching of the head and face and the presence of a really hot girl doing all that who was maybe a bit bi-curious and if she wasn't then maybe LK might be a little something else wait a second LK you already used that scene that's cheating and anyway point was don't pop a fucking boner and make this even weirder than it already is that's the point that's the fucking point LK just control yourself around a girl for one goddamn minute and don't do that and thank fuck she was facing away for a lot of this and and “Turn around, Leah Nyquist."

And suddenly it was done, was that next and.

“Lemmie see ya.”

LK turned around, a thought half-forming in her mind about responding to the way Mona kept calling her Leah rather than LK, by calling her Ramona just one time, see how that felt. It got tangled somewhere in her neurons when she turned 180 and there she was, in all her up-close and personal-space-occupying Ramona-ness. LK's breath caught in her throat, her mind somewhere between startled and expectant; at once shocked and half-predicting that within the next half-second she was about to be grabbed and dramatically smooched.

But then that didn't happen, and time sped back up to its normal pace.

"Well? Hypothesis confirmed or nah Ramona, you got the hots for Stella?"

Face to face. Eyelash to eyelash. Leah’s personal space was a cloud of creamsicle and the vaguest hint of ironic(?) gamer girl sweat scent. Mona took it in.

Ramona.

“... God, not even Jimena calls me that, y’know.”

The cringe of neurons for sale never used creaking as they fired. But still. It worked. Full body. The bullet hit a critical spot. Ricocheted like her bones were the score points on an overly bright, chipper pinball machine. Hit every other critical spot. Ramona. Like, fuck you, Leah. Turnabout was not fair play. Source: (Ra)Mona. Ramona’s eyes, chestnuts roasting on an open fire. Warm, wide open. The coldness of her soul briefly toasty, smothered in Christmas day blankets (as if those were ever needed in Vegas ‘winter’). She let a breath linger in her lungs. If she let it go she’d exhale all the memories of the moment right out with the rest of the CO2.



She exhaled. No closer than before, their faces maintaining safe COVID distance. She started to deftly work her fingers over the same spots of wig she’d just worked through, ticking off through her memory like small font bullet points on a to-do list. She only needed two fingers to get the job done. Some bobby pins ended up between her fingers in an accordion array, the others hit Leah’s floor.



The wig came off.

“I do. You look better as yourself though. No Stella hair, no Stella makeup. Just. You.”

She exhale— wait shit she hadn’t actually inhaled at any point

”Okay.” Another gulp down of air. Leah-flavored. Just to be sure. ”Lets do the rest of the adjusts real quick?” Sewing needle and blood red thread looped through like a camel. ”You can, like. Use this for a future stream or something.”



This was the easiest part, the work. The awkward silence, not as easy.

”Uh, Alexa.” The one on Mona’s phone humming to life with a polite greeting. ”Connect to Leah-Kim Mitchell’s speakers, shuffle playlist Trans Rights.”

Mmmm… oh, cool. There was one of the artists she had been trying to put Leah on.



So. When she’d told Leah she looked better without the Nyquist cosplay, she’d meant it.

Platonically.



Ahahahahaahaha

okay, let’s be real. No hiding the delulu anymore. Safe space. Let it all out.



It’s not platonic. Mona was here to be a friend. Was here to wish she could be more than a friend. She was here to remember every little thing about this room that had and hadn’t changed in the past six years

If you wanted to know me, you should've known me when we were kids

and she was here to stab a needle centimeters short of her best friend’s skin, over and over again, fingers carefully grabbing as little fabric as possible, occasional little brushes of fingertips over warm skin, adjustments, tiny barely spoken apologies,

she was here to wonder,

naming everyone I walked all over in the stupid emo songs I wrote

what would happen if she broke it all? Put it all at risk once more? Temptation was a fundamental sin, and one she spent only literally every day indulging in. The cheap dopamine she’d engage in when she got back home, the chat engagement, the loving family, the obnoxious loud music playing over her speakers, the knowing just enough to know she didn’t know what she was talking about but coping that it was just the way things were,

the admitting to herself that she hated the idea of anyone else touching Leah the way she got to, that she wanted to lock Leah in her bedroom and put her beautiful eyes and pretty smile in a jar on her shelf and cherish her for all time



Why does forever feel like just a couple years ago?



Redemption, probably, was a lie. They'd thrown a girl named Ramona Marroquín into a lake of fire a long time ago.

She was considered hot, after all. What was the harm in throwing a photo away when it was just a pretty face? Easy to find, disposable like the rest.

[Mona Marroquín, Pregame Thread 2 Concluded]
[Leah-Kim “LK” Mitchell is currently offline.]