original work | hurricane lily (ii)

[veryroundbird]

Rating: Piquant
Words: 388
Characters: Original Female Character(s)
Relationships: Gen
Summary: Prompt: "Magical girl who is sick of waiting—she's finishing this NOW." Hurricane Lily gets one last request from a former friend, and denies it.

"I need you," says Sunlit Poppy, and the bottom drops out from Lily's stomach, because she knows it's not in the way that she wants.

"You know I can't—" she starts, but Poppy shakes her head.

"Don't you get it? They're all 'oh, careful, Poppy, we have to wait to strike, we have to analyze their movements and find their base,' but the enemy is hurting people now. Sure, no one remembers it, but I've been watching—people aren't quite the same afterward. There's still some of the Withering that touched them, a light in them that's dimmer, and I can't—stand it."

She has a friend who recently got caught up in it, Lily knows; it's getting personal. "It's too early to say, Poppy. They might just take more time to recover from something traumatic." Time, the most precious gift anyone has: what Lily's teacher imparted to her before vanishing.

Poppy slams her hand down on the table, almost spilling Lily's coffee and still getting a few drops strewn across her papers. "No. We finish this. So they don't have to spend longer like this. What's a year worth to any of them, if it's spent tired and depressed and listless? If you destroy the King of Frost—"

Lily isn't sure. Maybe it's that she's an optimist by nature, but in living—she thinks, you might be able to turn those feelings into something new. Not for the first time, she wonders why it was her that ended up with this role, and also not for the first time, she absolutely knows why.

"Come back to me when all hope is lost," Lily says. "Then, we'll talk."

She watches Poppy make an agonized, frustrated scream into her hands. "I hate you," says Poppy, looking down at her.

"That's fine," says Lily. She would do anything else for her. Anything in the whole world. "For what it's worth—I think taking the fight to them's a good idea. It's about time."

"I don't need approval, especially not from someone who never actually helps," Poppy snaps. "But sure, go back to sleeping great at night from your high and mighty position of doing fuck all."

They were friends, once. Poppy whips around to stomp out, and Lily folds her hands on the table.

She hopes Poppy won't be back.