The halls of Miss Robichaux's Academy for Exceptional Young Ladies were quiet. They were far too quiet for Madison Montgomery's liking, but they were quiet with good reason. The old building was practically empty, and the only two souls within its hallowed walls were Madison herself and Zoe Benson. It was an unfortunate state of affairs, being the two chosen to stay behind and watch the house while everyone else went on vacation -- in
Cancun
, the least witch-y place Madison could think of.
Were it anyone
but
Zoe with Madison, it wouldn't be so bad.
The bottle blonde let out a small sigh, little more than parted lips and a soft exhale, and once again attacked her boredom. Sitting slouched in a most unladylike way in the Academy's dining room, she used her incredible powers of telekinesis in her favourite way: towards casual pique. With a flick of her fingers, she sent a waiting tomato into the air, throwing it neither hard nor far, putting no more force behind it than a casual underhand. Before it had a chance to smack against the ceiling, she flicked her fingers again and sent a razor sharp meat cleaver spinning end over end towards it.
Much to her dissatisfaction, the cleaver's handle hit the fruit when she had hoped to instead slice it clean in two. Though the blade went on to embed itself in the ceiling, the fruit -- or was it a vegetable? She could never remember -- practically exploded on impact, red bits of its flesh and its juice spraying every which way. Across the ceiling, across the walls... she flinched back. Luckily, though some of the mess hit the table she was sitting at, none of it quite reached her. "Ugh," she muttered, eyeballing it all sourly. Cleaning that up was beneath her, even if she could do it with her mind.
I'll just make Zoe do it,
Madison decided, intent on taking no responsibility for her mess. With that weight taking off her shoulders, she used her telekinesis to pry the blade out of where it had embedded itself in the ceiling. The next vegetable up to bat -- or pitch, whatever, she didn't know the ins and outs of baseball -- was an eggplant. Deciding to focus more on the angle of the cleaver, she sent it hurtling towards the wall near the door. To her immediate gratification, the blade THUMPED into the wall, the eggplant
almost
chopped in half and stuck on it.
Zoe, who just so happened to be passing through the door at that very moment, squeaked in delayed alarm at the blade that
very
easily could have buried itself in her forehead, either of her hands flying up belatedly to shield her face from an onslaught that just wasn't coming. She stared at Madison in wide-eyed horror, her mouth hanging wide open. Madison's first instinct was to breathe out the words
oops
-- and then smirk, of course, and raise her eyebrows. It would have been an accident, if it happened. She didn't see Zoe coming.
Did that mean Zoe deserved Madison being a sassy little bitch about it? Was it in any way Zoe's fault? Were they not friends now? No, no again, and sort of. Yet Madison was who she was, and Zoe was who she was. "Oops," the bottle blonde said, putting no effort into making her faux-surprise convincing. She paused, then smirked and slowly lifted her eyebrows high on her forehead. "You've really got to watch where you're going, slit," Madison chided the younger woman. A little tick of her eyes went to Zoe's eyes, making it abundantly clear what she meant when she said slit.
"I-- what?" Zoe squeaked out again. She was used to Madison at her worst and she was used to Madison at her best, but Zoe wasn't used to Madison when she was
bored,
of all things. Boredom redefined her 'worse'. Somehow, Zoe's eyes managed to widen just that little bit more. "Madison--" she began, taking a step back from the open door.
"And you
really
need to keep your mouth shut when you're wandering around like the ditz you are," Madison goaded, using her telekinesis to yank the cleaver out of the wall with enough force that the eggplant fell to the floor, splitting in half on impact. Zoe jumped in place when the cleaver clattered to the floor too, caught like a deer in headlights, too startled to run and too startled to make any kind of stand for herself. The two halves of the eggplants shot up at her face, one popping into her mouth while the other splattered on the wall, right where the cleaver had dented it.
Zoe's shriek of surprise was muffled, but not before Madison got her giggle on. "After all," the bottle blonde bubbled out, "it would be
such
a shame if you tripped, caught some poor person's cock or cooch with your mouth -- and they died on the spot." Feeling increasingly malicious and of course increasingly delighted, Madison leaned forward on the table and let her glossed lips spread into a bright smile, all cheerful poison. "And then you'd have to go do something like, I don't know, turn yourself in for murder by third base. Again!"
The poor woman Maison was bullying grabbed the piece of eggplant in her mouth and pulled it out. To both their mutual surprise, the normally shy, even borderline
meek
Zoe bit back. "Would you fuck off with your passive-aggressive bullshit, Madison?" she snapped, going so far as to huck the eggplant at the blonde's head.
Though Madison shrieked and ducked her head on reflex, Zoe's aim was no better than hers was most of the time. The throw went wide and splattered on the wall, nowhere near Madison's perfectly kept blonde locks. "Seriously," Zoe continued, lifting her arm and gesturing wildly as she ranted at her 'sister', her 'friend', her fellow witch. "I get it. You're an alpha bitch, you're back from the dead, you're not afraid of anything. Newsflash: you're also a complete asshole," she concluded with emphasis, her voice raising with each successive word until she was all but shouting at Madison.
Madison, who could only sit there, blinking and staring with increasingly wide eyes herself; her mouth open with shock not unlike Zoe's was just a moment ago. However similarly each of them reacted to the other's vitriol, the contrast showed not just in how much it was warranted (what had Zoe done besides walk into the room, really?), but how they reacted to the aftermath. Zoe got angry and retorted with tit for tat.
The bratty, former child actress bursted out laughing. "Oh my
god