Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Magical-Girls — Magical Enby Who Is Really Unlocking Some New Fetishes
"So tell me," Katherine says, smiling her best disarming interviewer smile. "You're the most elusive of the Pretty Truth Knights — rarely seen fighting alongside the others. Is that related to the rather extensive list of interview conditions?"
Pretty Truth Knight Awakening Inside stirs in their chair and rubs their slender wrists with clever, restless fingers. "The things I do," they say, "are on the subtle side to be useful in a battle. And, I'm afraid to say, raise possible ethical questions."
"Rumours of mind control powers constantly dog magical guardian teams," Katherine presses. "Is that a concern?"
Awakening smiles. Katherine's been to the Louvre; the Mona Lisa left her cold. Perhaps just overexposure, but she saw no tantalising enigma in the vaunted painted expression. This melancholy curve of lip, though — haunting. "I don't control minds."
On the table, Katherine's phone chimes a twenty-minute countdown alarm. One of Awakening's stipulations: no more than twenty minutes on, no less than half an hour off.
"We can go a little longer," Katherine says.
"We can't," Awakening says, with perfect courtesy but no hint of room to disagree. They rise elegantly. "One more session today, Miss Montaigne, and we'll break until tomorrow; I think we'd better not rush it further than that."
There's something elusive, Katherine thinks, about their clothes. As if they slowly change when she's not paying attention; and she's been paying them so little attention. A constant, rapacious eye for uncovered detail is what she usually brings to interviews. Perhaps she's tired; perhaps continuing tomorrow isn't such a bad idea. Perhaps she's a little jet lagged.
After one more twenty-minute session.
She looks at her phone, thumb hovering over Reset Timer.
She has scrupulous integrity. She is trusted. Her rapport with interviewees is her success, there's no secret to it.
Her thumb floats, as if underwater and current-urged, to the large friendly digits of 20. She watches, as if observing someone else, far away or in a movie, at a remove, as she swipes. 30. She turns off the screen, checks the battery level on her voice recorder, flicks through her notebook to check her pre-interview notes, jots down a thought or two.
When Awakening comes back, she turns her phone's screen on, hits Start on the countdown, and puts the phone screen-down on the table between them.
Awakening rubs at their wrists again. It's as if the movement unobtrusively folds something restless in behind Katherine's ribs; her mind suddenly, embarrassingly, vividly supplies the image of a night in college, a forgettable boy, a forgettable experiment with cheap vinyl wrist cuffs. In memory, the contrast is sharpened, shiny black plastic darker and heavier around her wrists than it really was. She covers the moment with a sip of water, hyperaware of the bob of her throat, of the feel of the neckline of her sensible blouse against her skin, and the lingering memory continues to morph, to lazily saunter through her awareness and link arms with the sudden acuity of her bodily awareness. What if, the thought says, in an almost indifferently cool way, an almost cruelly indifferently cool way, a heavy dark buckled strap was around her neck, snug enough to nearly feel constricting—
She puts down the glass and her voice stays steady and professional and she asks questions and a tickling bead of sweat crawls maddeningly down her spine.
Awakening's uniform — it's the Pretty Truth Knight uniform, she knows it is. She knows it's some trick of the light, of imagination, that has it crawling when her gaze is elsewhere. If it has dangling loops, goth-chic straps with heavy, shiny snap hooks
(dog lead clips)
then it must always have had, they must all always have had them.
She almost knocks her notebook out of her lap, clumsily catches it, riffles back to her place — a place — in it. Mouths her way halfway through some inane question about childhood, whether Awakening has ever had any—
She chokes over the word pet.
"Please could I see your phone?" Awakening says softly, after just a little pause, and she turns it over for them to see that the interview session is in minute twenty-two of thirty.
Their small sigh, their total lack of anger, their — disappointment — is a mountain on Katherine's chest.
"I," she says. She doesn't sound at all herself. Tiny and weak and vulnerable and — needy. "I've been bad."
Awakening sighs again, runs a beautiful hand slowly over their hair. "Bad reporters go straight back to their hotel for the night," they say quietly. "And tomorrow, their interview sessions are fifteen minutes, with forty-five between them."
"Yes," Katherine says. Tears squeeze from the corners of her eyes. "I'm sorry."
"We'll just have to try to do better tomorrow," Awakening says, still devastatingly angerless, just wry and faintly sad, and Katherine clutches her phone and notebook to her chest and barely remembers making her way out, the melancholy set of Pretty Truth Knight Awakening Inside's turned back and retreating shoulders seared instead into her mind.