#she'll do a funky little head tilt and be a little unnerving and not respect personal space and then poof

[ow1et]

thinking about how barn owls are also known as ghost owls. thinking about how athene has a tendency to linger, to haunt. ( is it even possible for something that is not yet dead to have that ghostlike quality? ) she haunts herself, she haunts the court, she haunts strigitect, she haunts her parents' manor, she haunts the rocky coast where her family supposedly met their ends, she haunts anyone unfortunate enough to catch her attention and keep it.

even with her socialite persona she stays at the edges of rooms, flits in and out of view, vanishes in the middle of conversations because they bore her. the tabloids question later if she had ever even been there at all. somehow she dodged every interview, every photograph, every social media post.

owlet is even more of a wisp on the wind, a single blurry photograph of a white mask peeking over the edge of a building that is posted on a forum ( half the comment thread identifies it as a poltergeist and the other half claim it's just an owl ). she lingers in the corner when court members conduct business with outsiders, half shadows and half spectre. the court doesn't introduce her and the others decide that she must be inhuman, either a talon or something worse ( people don't breath that quietly or meld with the darkness like that ). she slips through pursuers' fingers like cold fog, incorporeal and nigh invisible.

she is athene van cortlandt in name only. the girl they rescued from the bay was blank-eyed and pale and nothing like the pigtailed troublemaker that tormented her parents' galas ( they call her a ghost because it's what she looks like ). she doesn't recognize her reflection in the mirror. she swears there's something blurred about it, some overly saturated watercolor quality. she scratches her face out of photographs and the painting above the fireplace because the sight makes her nauseous. can water be a grave? can an unwilling baptism be a form of death?