[OOC] Prose, story prompt. DAMMIT STYX.
[Because Styx told me to-- can also be considered an answer to that meme that was posted today.]
That stupid eight-bit music that had driven every otherworlder in Johto out of their minds at first had eventually faded into the background just like the sounds of the highway or the constant, overhead drone of planes did for any modern city-dweller. By the time five months had passed, the beeps and blips of the music had at least grown fairly inoffensive to her ears, and by nine months, she’d almost stopped hearing it entirely unless she focused.
She’d forgotten it was even there.
And now, in its absence, the quiet yawned.
Of all the things to take for granted and suddenly feel lost without…
Ka-chunk.
The sound of the key clunkily turning in the lock fell flat against the silence of the building. Despite the many months without hearing it, the noise felt both as familiar as yesterday and as foreign as years ago.
Heather Mason stepped into her apartment for the first time in almost a year, felt for the lightswitch, then changed her mind. The dreary early-morning light from outside was enough to see by, and some deep instinct cringed away from the thought of doing anything to bring this room into sharper relief. The fuzziness suited it, in an awful empty way.
That’s what the apartment was, after all.
Empty.
Not ‘everything was moved out while you were gone’ empty, no… it was as empty as she had left it.
The walls were bare, save for a few lonesome framed photographs. Apart from them, the most festive decoration was a particularly colorful water stain up in the corner by the ceiling from when the old woman upstairs hadn’t fixed a leaky pipe for a month.
The carpet was unvacuumed and gritty, which she could not feel through the soles of her boots as she apathetically tracked more water and dirt onto it, but knew she would have if her feet had been bare.
There was a plate on the kitchen counter that still had the leftover Chinese from the night before she’d gone to sleep and woken up in another world-it smelled kind of lousy, but in a bad-takeout way, as though it was still fresh from just last night, if bad takeout could accurately be called ‘fresh’ at any point in time. The one point of light in the room came from the wall behind that-a little red bulb that stared at her, unblinking, from the corded phone hanging there. No new messages.
A gentle patter of raindrops-the sole, subtle blessing that broke the music-less silence- were pattering down from the dryer-lint-gray sky outside and plinking off of the rusty fire escape, and through the slightly-cracked windows beside the sliding glass door that led out onto it, she could hear the low mumble of car motors and murmur of urban life that she’d grown up with and therefore never noticed, but were as loud and unignorable to her now as a jet engine after those seemingly-endless days under a blue sky, in a place where cars were as rare as horse-and-buggies were here and telephone poles had been replaced with endless trees.
As Heather stood in the center of the apartment- her apartment- her eyes passed over the sheet-covered armchair she had shoved into the corner of the room an left there after that night and her throat tightened.
This world was not black and white-she had a feeling that no world truly was. She’d known that as a child-known that before she had even been born, although back then, it had seemed more black an white than ever. No, her world here had layers upon layers of other tones in between the darkest and lightest, as it should have.
The problem was that each and every one of them was gray.
She had gotten used to that-that colorlessness that had seeped into the world like bleed-over from a marker after Silent Hill-settled into that hopefully-temporarily-monochrome life with as much comfort as could be reasonably expected. It might have been gray, but it was HER gray, dammit.
The problem was not that.
The problem was that the memories of the past year…
… Otacon’s hugs, the cuddly ones that smelled like his labcoat and always seemed to wind up assisted by the yellow, tingly-furred Asimov…
Wrestling matches with Liquid that somehow always seemed to degenerate into tickle-fights (which Heather would inevitably lose, but underneath the indignation, she secretly didn’t mind)…
Playfully fending Rise off as the pigtailed pop-idol loomed behind her with a hairbrush and tinfoil …
The Professor’s proud, fatherly smile when she solved one of his puzzles, no matter how many picarats she lost in the process…
The amusement that lurked under Snake’s grumbliness at all the crazy ideas she shared with him over whatever cheap snack he’d bought her on one of the many side-streets of Goldenrod…
The fight to keep a straight face every time Sora popped up unexpectedly with that ridiculous fake beard to challenge her to a battle…
The endless number of late-night network calls to Kaito that always seemed to end in them laughing so hard it hurt, no matter what was going on in their lives at the time, light or grim…
Watching the slow transformation of a stubbornly-unamused frown into that crooked ‘stop it you’re not funny, really, I mean it, go away, I’m not smiling!’ grin every time she bothered Phoenix…
Feeling that tight-chested ache of pride whenever she spotted Miles and Ken playing like the children they deserved to be…
The quiet but somehow reassuring presence of awkward, sweet-natured James, the first person she’d ever met to have seen the full extent of that town’s terrifying underbelly and survived…
Trekking through forests and mountains and endless long-grassed fields until her muscles ached and heels bubbled up with blisters…
That feeling that was equal parts relief and triumph when she stumbled into a new city after days on end of seeing nothing but wilderness…
The rush of exhilaration that coursed through her entire body like blood in her veins during the thick of an intense battle…
Falling sleep under the stars at night, curled up against the one creature she never thought she’d trust, but somehow still feeling safer in his stupid, slobbery presence than she could have ever predicted…
All the friends she’d made, all the places she’d seen, all the times she’d shared, good and bad, with both….
… Were all so gloriously, spectacularly full of color.
Pushing aside the blankets- still rumpled from when she had gone to sleep that night, never suspecting that she’d wake up the next morning in a different world- Heather sat down on the couch, leaning back with her hands on her knees.
“Well,” she said to the empty, gray room. “I’m back.”
That stupid eight-bit music that had driven every otherworlder in Johto out of their minds at first had eventually faded into the background just like the sounds of the highway or the constant, overhead drone of planes did for any modern city-dweller. By the time five months had passed, the beeps and blips of the music had at least grown fairly inoffensive to her ears, and by nine months, she’d almost stopped hearing it entirely unless she focused.
She’d forgotten it was even there.
And now, in its absence, the quiet yawned.
Of all the things to take for granted and suddenly feel lost without…
Ka-chunk.
The sound of the key clunkily turning in the lock fell flat against the silence of the building. Despite the many months without hearing it, the noise felt both as familiar as yesterday and as foreign as years ago.
Heather Mason stepped into her apartment for the first time in almost a year, felt for the lightswitch, then changed her mind. The dreary early-morning light from outside was enough to see by, and some deep instinct cringed away from the thought of doing anything to bring this room into sharper relief. The fuzziness suited it, in an awful empty way.
That’s what the apartment was, after all.
Empty.
Not ‘everything was moved out while you were gone’ empty, no… it was as empty as she had left it.
The walls were bare, save for a few lonesome framed photographs. Apart from them, the most festive decoration was a particularly colorful water stain up in the corner by the ceiling from when the old woman upstairs hadn’t fixed a leaky pipe for a month.
The carpet was unvacuumed and gritty, which she could not feel through the soles of her boots as she apathetically tracked more water and dirt onto it, but knew she would have if her feet had been bare.
There was a plate on the kitchen counter that still had the leftover Chinese from the night before she’d gone to sleep and woken up in another world-it smelled kind of lousy, but in a bad-takeout way, as though it was still fresh from just last night, if bad takeout could accurately be called ‘fresh’ at any point in time. The one point of light in the room came from the wall behind that-a little red bulb that stared at her, unblinking, from the corded phone hanging there. No new messages.
A gentle patter of raindrops-the sole, subtle blessing that broke the music-less silence- were pattering down from the dryer-lint-gray sky outside and plinking off of the rusty fire escape, and through the slightly-cracked windows beside the sliding glass door that led out onto it, she could hear the low mumble of car motors and murmur of urban life that she’d grown up with and therefore never noticed, but were as loud and unignorable to her now as a jet engine after those seemingly-endless days under a blue sky, in a place where cars were as rare as horse-and-buggies were here and telephone poles had been replaced with endless trees.
As Heather stood in the center of the apartment- her apartment- her eyes passed over the sheet-covered armchair she had shoved into the corner of the room an left there after that night and her throat tightened.
This world was not black and white-she had a feeling that no world truly was. She’d known that as a child-known that before she had even been born, although back then, it had seemed more black an white than ever. No, her world here had layers upon layers of other tones in between the darkest and lightest, as it should have.
The problem was that each and every one of them was gray.
She had gotten used to that-that colorlessness that had seeped into the world like bleed-over from a marker after Silent Hill-settled into that hopefully-temporarily-monochrome life with as much comfort as could be reasonably expected. It might have been gray, but it was HER gray, dammit.
The problem was not that.
The problem was that the memories of the past year…
… Otacon’s hugs, the cuddly ones that smelled like his labcoat and always seemed to wind up assisted by the yellow, tingly-furred Asimov…
Wrestling matches with Liquid that somehow always seemed to degenerate into tickle-fights (which Heather would inevitably lose, but underneath the indignation, she secretly didn’t mind)…
Playfully fending Rise off as the pigtailed pop-idol loomed behind her with a hairbrush and tinfoil …
The Professor’s proud, fatherly smile when she solved one of his puzzles, no matter how many picarats she lost in the process…
The amusement that lurked under Snake’s grumbliness at all the crazy ideas she shared with him over whatever cheap snack he’d bought her on one of the many side-streets of Goldenrod…
The fight to keep a straight face every time Sora popped up unexpectedly with that ridiculous fake beard to challenge her to a battle…
The endless number of late-night network calls to Kaito that always seemed to end in them laughing so hard it hurt, no matter what was going on in their lives at the time, light or grim…
Watching the slow transformation of a stubbornly-unamused frown into that crooked ‘stop it you’re not funny, really, I mean it, go away, I’m not smiling!’ grin every time she bothered Phoenix…
Feeling that tight-chested ache of pride whenever she spotted Miles and Ken playing like the children they deserved to be…
The quiet but somehow reassuring presence of awkward, sweet-natured James, the first person she’d ever met to have seen the full extent of that town’s terrifying underbelly and survived…
Trekking through forests and mountains and endless long-grassed fields until her muscles ached and heels bubbled up with blisters…
That feeling that was equal parts relief and triumph when she stumbled into a new city after days on end of seeing nothing but wilderness…
The rush of exhilaration that coursed through her entire body like blood in her veins during the thick of an intense battle…
Falling sleep under the stars at night, curled up against the one creature she never thought she’d trust, but somehow still feeling safer in his stupid, slobbery presence than she could have ever predicted…
All the friends she’d made, all the places she’d seen, all the times she’d shared, good and bad, with both….
… Were all so gloriously, spectacularly full of color.
Pushing aside the blankets- still rumpled from when she had gone to sleep that night, never suspecting that she’d wake up the next morning in a different world- Heather sat down on the couch, leaning back with her hands on her knees.
“Well,” she said to the empty, gray room. “I’m back.”