For Everything There is a Season : Light Switch
Done after a very extended delay for the lovely rattyjol on livejournal to complete their commentfic prompt: Animorphs, Rachel, she never turns on the light in the bathroom these days, because she can't bear to look at herself in the mirror
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Conscience is the mirror of our souls, which represents the errors of our lives in their full shape.
George Bancroft
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Prompt 40. Rationality
Rachel knows the rooms of her house backwards, forwards, upside-down and- if need be- blind folded, which comes in excessively handy when she often drags herself home in the moonless darkness that lingers just before dawn.
Even completely exhausted she can trace the winding path from her room- finger tips lightly grazing the slightly textures surface of each flanking wall- down the darkened hallway of the sleeping household, silently as a ghost. Sara is murmuring in her sleep to the left, Jordan snores quietly- spread-eagle and innocently unaware of any conflicts or invasions- through the open doorway on the right, and her mother is a silent presence behind the closed door directly ahead.
A longer stretch of carpeted stairs one two three four five six seven eight turn one two three four five dead end in her front door and the cool, dead wood signals she's reached the ground floor of the house. The couch angles off to the right three steps into the living room beyond, the stack of magazine's her mom has been meaning to sort through and recycle leans haphazardly at one end, and Jordan's soccer cleats are routinely abandoned nearby.
The location of every kitchen counter and cupboard door from the entrance of the room to the refrigerator door has long since been memorized. Midnight battles both won and lost often make her as ravenous in her human stomach as they do in the ever growing side of her soul crying for her enemy's blood. She'd tried so very hard to push through and ignore-
-The call's grown louder anyways.
These rooms are all left dark and for all intents and purposes untouched to avoid questions she doesn't want to answer, much less hear-Where were you? When did you leave? Why weren't you here? What aren't you telling me? Why can't you be the daughter I trusted anymore?
So she traverses her home in silence, sometimes on days when everyone is awake as well. Silence may be an unspoken lie, but somehow it seems less guilty than a spoken untruth.
Even in broad daylight her own bedroom is ridiculously easy to look at without truly seeing a thing; the furniture hasn't changed locations in years, and the slightly outdated posters and pictures on the walls are easy for her eyes to skim over without noticing, as they were chosen and displayed by a younger girl leading a completely different life. The decorative mirror over her dresser conveniently has a colorful scarf- her father had brought her as a gift to make up for not being in town for a major gymnastics competition- draped down to below her eye level, and any reflective knickknacks have slowly been relocated out of direct sight.
The bathroom is harder to not see herself in, however- Rachel never touches the light switch in this room anymore unless it's to turn the previously lit fixtures off. Tobias, Marco, other nameless unimportant boys at her school have found her features attractive in a range from sweet to annoying ways, but she herself is done looking. Her hair- never much of a high maintenance priority to start out with- is generally done in a hurry and left to fend for itself. She never wore much in the way of make up other than lip gloss and she's known how to put that on without a mirror for years.
When she was younger, Bloody Mary had been a popular game she'd played at sleepovers with her friends; Rachel had never been anyone's version of a coward, even in grade school, so she had always been the first to march her bunny-slippered self into the chosen bathroom and, full of childish bravado, flick off the light switch. No bloodstained guilty women had haunted her in her past, but some forgotten, childish version of her was certain that if she glanced up from brushing her teeth now more horrific things than long dead specters would leap out at her.
People. Bleeding. Broken.
Blood and entrails dripping down her skin and in her hair, the worst of it staining her mouth a shameful scarlet; some mornings she's surprised she doesn't spit the blood of her victims into the sink along with her tooth paste.
Intellectually Rachel knows the things she's seen aren't real-grizzly vision is too blurry for her to have seen details like these the first time around. No one has ever called her a coward and walked out of the experience unscathed, but Rachel- Xena, warrior princess- doesn't look in mirrors anymore anyways. Just in case.
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My apologies for not updating since before dirt was dry. Working fifty hours a week has stolen my writing time. Hope you enjoy!