Fic post! "Prompt: different"
Title: Too different
Author:
miri_away
Date: Aug 9, 07
Type: Original, drabble
Genre: Gen, angst
Rating: R, for language
Summary: Showing no intention of leaving, she digs into your donuts, the ones you bought in case you had another all-nighter and forgot to eat again. She picks the plain ones, picks at the fluffy insides. You knew you should have put them up.
AN: My impromptu, belated post for the prompt_a_day community, prompt 173 June 16, 07 "Finally, I realized I was too different". As with all things, I got carried away. Again, I was rushed and up too late, so I'm not satisfied with it and would like to "finish" it later on. It got too long to just post there as a comment and I'm not sure if other people besides me go back and read the old stuff, so....
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Too different
miri_away
After that morning, I couldn't stand sunrise. I tried to go back," she added, as if it were an afterthought, "but, well, there wasn't anything to go back to."
You shake your head, almost scoff a bit before realising how ineffective that gesture would be in terms of expressing how you're feeling. She doesn't notice so you carry on. "There were the ruins. There was closure, even. Proof. Isn't that what you want?"
She continues on in that quiet little lost voice you hate so much. "I didn't. Instead, I went to the hospital, got checked out. The looks on their faces, man, it made me wonder what pampered little world they were used to. They wouldn't have let me go so I left on my own, gave them a soldier's name I knew I had killed."
"Typical."
"Then I went home." She stops, takes another sip of your tea, tea you hadn't offered her. "It wasn't quiet. It wasn't even mine anymore: a party was going on. In my honor."
"Well, did you at least enjoy yourself?"
"Can't say."
This time, you do scoff. "If you mean you won't, you should say so. If you mean you didn't enjoy yourself, spit out why or get out of my kitchen."
Showing no intention of leaving, she digs into your donuts, the ones you bought in case you had another all-nighter and forgot to eat again. She picks the plain ones, picks at the fluffy insides. You knew you should have put them up. "It's all I could do, try. I remembered how to thank them, even if I'd forgotten the taste of the food they packed into me--cake, chicken, pie, chicken pot pie, it made me sick."
You sit across from her, pulling the pastry platter towards your half of your table: it is your house after all, and shut your laptop lest she decide to use that too. "Wasn't rotten was it?" You know you're not helping.
She eats the whole thing before her voice starts to sound normal. You wonder where those scars she'd mentioned earlier are. Her torso? Her leg? Her hands seem just as gnarled as they were when you last saw her, just another reminder of how much of her life you don't know about. Finally, she looks as if it's not so bad, as if she were just telling you a secret of the gossip variety and not the intimate kind. She was never one for gossip, but it's all she can do, try. "Something didn't feel right. I've gone through this before but it's never not bothered me this much. I kept wondering what made me feel so.... I was my own Switzerland and I was rewriting the language."
A laugh that makes you want to punch her. Again and again. "Why are you even here?"
She looks up at you, a mocking smirk on her bruised lip. Not a scar, but close enough. "I always used to come to you when I needed reminding. Don't you remember?"
"We were children. I was your fuckin' twin. You had no one else to go to." You hear how resentful you sound and don't bother hiding it. "And I never reminded you of anything--you never told me anything."
"You’re still my twin. But anyway, they told me you didn't even know I left until a month later. I'm sorry. Things went by so fast that year." She stretches and clearly this, nothing of what she's saying, is a problem for her. "I almost forgot you existed; no offense, but I wouldn't want you there, doing what I was training for, or suffering through it even in my head. Imagine my surprise when I looked into the mirror, the glass breaking, and it's your fist in my face and not--"
"I didn't ask you to come in through my bathroom window. What were you trying to do anyway?"
She's on that distant train of thought again. "I forget how untainted you all are. I forget how raw I became. It's not a bad thing," she clarifies. "It just took me a while to realize that. You weren't the problem and neither are they. None of you have changed a bit."
"Why did you take so long to get back to me?" And it's out, quiet and painful and she don't deserve the power to make you feel so small.
It’s not the first time you feel her eyes on you-some nights you swore she was right there, right in your face or staring at your neck, just make sure it was still attached to the rest of you-but it’s the first time you look away, the first time you feel she’s seeing you. Her voice betrays nothing and you hate it.
“You’ve never dealt with change well.” It’s a fact, another piece of advice. “It’s why you stay in this house-I always knew where to send my letters if I ever decided to write you. I never did ‘cause you would take it so hard, what I’d have to tell you. You’d hate the small talk but hate me fore going into detail about….You’re so difficult. It was easier just avoiding the critic until I was done baking.”
You’re sure you look outraged.
“You couldn’t argue with the result then and I wouldn’t get doubtful enough to quit what I loved.” She explains. “I’m a killer now. You would have made me hate myself before I had a real reason to. You have always hated change, don't deny it, and it wouldn't be the blood or debt or any of that to bother you, it would be what you saw in me. I came here to tell you that we've been apart for a long time and we can bear it as long as you need to."
"What makes you think I need--"
"Because you're seeing me in the mirror now. Let's face it, you've got a wonderful life here. You never forget any of the codes you make up and your computers never crash or go into recall. Why go through the trouble of wondering what monsters are in the back of your head when you know just as well as I do that I am as different from you as could be?" You feel like you typed something wrong again, a slight slip up that messes the whole thing up, and you have to go back, retrace every strain: when had this ever been about you? She's so selfish, making it seem like she cared. She keeps on. "I could have told you this a week ago when I was busy with a contract--my last one, by the way--, when I was freshly 'clean'. You would have hated me either way because, when I thought about coming back, I had finally realized I was too different.”
You choke on your own bile and grimace at the tea she offers you back. “Cold.”
She still has time for jokes but it’s as fake as she is now. “I can microwave it for you.”