[Fic] despierto - dos
Title: despierto (dos)
Fandom: Crossroads
Characters: Yomohiro Tomoe, Fujioka Midori, Yomohiro Junichi, Yomohiro Hajime, "Akiyama Kou," and very vague mentions of Kunisaki Chie and Satoshi Kaede | Midori/Tomoe, Kou/Tomoe
Word Count: 2,670 (dos); 15,617 (total)
Rating: M
Warning/s: Please highlight to view the laundry list of trigger warnings. character death, graphic depictions of death and violence, graphic depictions of sex, subtextual incest, abuse, self-mutilation and suicidal tendencies
Summary: One week after she moves into her new house, Tomoe's father dies. Things start happening that she cannot explain. | tomoe and the truths that cannot be obscured
Disclaimer: "Kou" is Miles', Midori is Arah's, Chie is Momo's and Kaede is Kriselle's.
Notes: More in-depth author's notes at the end of the story.
uno. | dos. | tres. | cuatro. | cinco.
.dos.
In her dreams, the door opens to a small entryway illuminated by warm yellow-white light. Opposite the door is a small dry bar lined with dark bottles of wine which had gradually accumulated dust in her last years at home. Now, they gleam with the luster of freshly wiped glass.
The enticing scent of coffee and bacon drifts through the house and she follows the smell to the dining room, its checkerboard tiles glistening with fresh polish. At the head of the table, her father occupies his seat.
The basement light needs changing. She flicks the switch, the lightbulb glowing dimly before sputtering to darkness. In the span of its tragically short life, it illuminates the bottom of the rickety spiral staircase where paint buckets and wooden planks rest on the ground, remnants of the house's renovation.
She pats her pockets for a stray stack of post-it's. When she comes up empty, she shakes her pen and writes on the flat underside of her forearm, scritch-scratch on her pale skin: buy new lightbulbs.
Midori visits when he can get enough time off from the university. He'd been busy of late, working on a journal article on the cusp of being published. It's a breakthrough research on Cetacean echolocation and if it means she barely sees him, then so be it. She's too busy with a sudden influx of patients anyway, and when they do get to spend time together it's always calm and gentle and quiet, like the two of them are relearning the rhythms and cadences of each other after weeks going by with almost no contact. She likes it.
He brings takeaway one night in warm styrofoam boxes that waft out the alluring scent of Chinese food from their favorite place downtown. She separates his chopsticks and hands it to him as he slides her a carton of fried rice topped with dimsum.
She folds her legs beneath her and tucks into her food.
Something skitters against the far wall of the library, several quick scrapes against the plaster.
She sets her chopsticks down. "Did you hear that?"
Midori looks up from his food, a morsel of rice stuck to the corner of his mouth. "Hear what?"
"Earlier, there was-"
She shakes her head and reaches out, brushing away the morsel with the pad of her thumb. She pops her finger in her mouth and looks at him from beneath her lashes, a coy smile quirking up her lips.
The rats, probably. She'd found several dead bodies of the black-furred adults out near the pool. She'll buy rat poison after work tomorrow.
In the dream, her father is as old as she had last seen him, once bright red hair fading like the skin of a festering fruit. His face is etched with wrinkled folds of flesh, cracked and papery.
He smiles, then, his lips stretching over yellowing teeth as he lifts up his hand and digs into his eye socket. He extricates his eyeball with a wet squelch of tearing sinews and offers it to her on his palm. His blood streams like tears down one cheek.
He reaches towards her, his mouth yawning wide open, a gaping dark hole that surges forward-
She wakes up.
She rifles through her cupboard, looking for the canister of tea, tipping aside her sugar jar, her spice rack, packets of ready-mix coffee and a box of cocoa powder. She glances at the assortment of things now strewn all over her counter, gritting her teeth and throwing her hands up - she'll clean these later, when there's more time and she's had her caffeine, because her mobile is ringing insistently inside her pocket, her assistant speaking on the other end,
"Dr. Yomohiro, there's someone here-" a sudden crackle like tin foil being crumpled "-important and-" the line cutting off with a prolonged beep beep beep.
Today is not a good day: her alarm didn't ring, her phone isn't working, and she can't find her tea.
She looks at her clock - quarter to eight and she'll be late in fifteen minutes dammit - grabbing her purse and keys on the way out of the house.
She's young again, her mother laughing in the background as she traces a pencil mark on the wall of the kitchen to mark her height. It's a bit taller than the edge of the table and she puffs her chest out in pride, turning around.
"See, mommy, I'm growing-"
There is no one in the room. A thin film of grime coats the pots and pans hanging beneath the cupboards.
She catches a glimpse of a shadow just around the bend of the counter.
It flits to the edge of the pantry, a faint gray outline with the hint of a head, the slope of a shoulder, and then it darts across the hallway, rounding a corner and disappearing.
Her cactus is dying.
Or at least that's what it looks like, its succulent green stem creeping with brown patches that are starting to turn black.
She bends down and peers at it. Half of its spines have fallen off, littering the soil. One of the fallen spines moves, the soil clustering beneath it into a small ridge which trembles precariously before the slimy end of a worm pokes through the dirt. It twitches and squirms, pale and fat and segmented, swaying from side to side, its head no bigger than the tip of her finger.
She shakes her head and sighs; a patient had given her the potted plant last week as thank you for a life-saving surgery. Now she'd have to buy a pesticide spray too.
She takes out her notebook and jots it down, throwing the cactus in her rubbish bin on her way out the house. She double-checks the lights, double-checks the locks on the door, and watches the garage entranceway slide shut before she drives off for work.
As she is pulling into her parking space, she notices the stain at the hem of her pantsuit, a dark spot of brown like a bit of mud had gotten on it.
When she comes home that evening, the painting in her foyer is just a tad crooked, slight enough that she wouldn't have noticed if she hadn't been standing in her doorway, staring at it for the entire span of five minutes with one hand resting lightly on the doorknob.
She opens the door to the basement, lugging a ladder beneath one arm and a box of lightbulbs in another. Her flashlight clicks on and yes, there, the rickety staircase with the rusted handrail, spiraling into the darkness. She carefully picks her way down, avoiding molding wood while attempting to balance with the weight of the ladder.
Tell me tell me tell me come on tell me the answer, she hums beneath her breath, the sound echoing back to her. She breathes and pitches her voice louder, "Well you may be a lover but you ain't no dancer," doing a slight twist and turn at the bottom step, landing on the ground with a faint flourish. She shakes the box of lightbulbs to hear them click together in simulated applause.
The basement is dank, smelling faintly of rotting wood. She shines her flashlight towards a corner where a vast spiderweb stretches across the beams of the ceiling all the way to the floor, spreading thickly over what looked like a kitchenette sink beside a cabinet. There are several paint cans toppled over, one of them spilling a dark residue that has long since dried. She moves her light over the ceiling until she finds the defunct light bulb.
She plants her ladder squarely beneath it, kicking apart the front and rear feet until it stands on its own. She tests her weight on one step, feeling the foot pads catch on the ground, deciding that it is steady enough to climb. She slides the box of lightbulbs on the pail shelf and bites the rubber of her flashlight, shining it up as she holds on to one rail, placing her foot on the bottommost rung.
It holds beneath her weight and she sets her foot on the next step. The ladder creaks but otherwise remains steady.
She lets her arms dangle down her sides first, finding her balance before she places one foot on the top cap, then the other foot. She shifts, the ladder creaking again, but she finds her footing and reaches up for the lightbulb, unscrewing it with a sharp squeal of its base against the socket.
She loses her grip on the flashlight and it falls with a muted thud, its beam of light bouncing on one wall and stopping at the cabinet as the flashlight settles against the foot of the ladder. It's enough to give a faint outline to the empty socket hanging on the ceiling.
She reaches blindly for the box of lightbulbs.
The ladder emits a pronounced creak.
Reaching lower still, when her hand touches only air.
The ladder shifts precariously as she transfers her weight to her left leg.
Her fingertips brush against the lid of the box, the ladder groaning on its hinges as it suddenly totters to one side, careens off-balance, the extra lightbulbs clattering to the floor and smashing, her yelping in a furious attempt to step her right foot down and lean her weight to the other side, a sharp stab of fear jabbing her chest-
-remaining, though she finally gets the ladder back upright.
The phone rings.
She glances at the clock, the glowing dials reading 3:09 AM, and rubs the sleep from her eyes.
An emergency? But then they knew to call her mobile phone. She belts the ties of her robe and pads out of her room. One of the confined patients looking for her, perhaps?
She crosses the hallway, the wood leading to a glass bridge that overlooks the living room and connects to the east section of the house.
The ringing stops just as she enters the library.
A chilly wind gusts past her, rustling the curtains at the far corner of the room. She shivers, clutching her robe tight, and decides she'll close the windows later. It takes a considerable amount of time before she's warm again beneath the comforters of her bed.
On her way to work later in the day, she remembers the library and climbs back up the stairs to the second floor, phone tucked between her ear and shoulder as she describes the procedure of her next operation to Midori in the other end of the line. She walks across the parquet floor amidst stacks of books filling up the shelves in a methodical, systematic arrangement.
"The transseptal approach will be used for-"
She stops.
"Tomoe? What's wrong?" Midori's voice is tinny on the other end of the line.
"I-I'll call you again later."
The windows are shut, the heavy metal bars secured in the latch.
She probably closed the windows before going to bed, too tired to remember doing so. She'd gone through a night shift the day before, after all, and the fatigue was probably catching up to her. Paranoid fool, she berates herself; still, she leaves her office earlier than normal, as dusk is just beginning to settle. The street lamps aren't on yet when she locks her door and steps onto the pavement, tightening the laces on her rubber shoes and going off on a quick jog.
She passes by the front yard of her neighbor, a kind, elderly lady who sometimes gave her steaming freshly-baked pies. She raises her hand up in greeting when the dogs, two german shepherds, lunge at the bars of their cages, growling and barking at her.
They don't stop until she rounds the corner and disappears from sight. Their barking stays with her, the blunt edges of a headache curling in her skull, a heavy pressure by her nape. She cuts her jog off and returns home and can't shake the feeling that she's being watched.
Later that night as she is in the shower, she hears a thud, thud, thud on the hallway like a heavy thump of footsteps which stop in front of her door, pause, then move towards the opposite direction, gradually fading as a door slams shut.
She turns off the faucet.
"Midori?" She calls out. She'd given him her keys but he preferred to ring the bell and wait for her to open the door. With her in the bathroom, he probably waited at least half an hour before letting himself in.
She wraps a towel around her, dripping water on the floor as she makes her way to the door, pushing it open with a low creak of its hinges.
"Midori?"
No one answers.
She leaves a trail of water as she peers into the rooms, humming "Look out helter skelter helter skelter" just to ward off the silence, and finds all of them as deserted as she had left them when she went to work in the morning.
A line of goosebumps crawls up her arms.
She tells herself it's the house settling as she clutches her elbows and trudges up the staircase. A call to Midori's mobile is directed to voice mail, and she disconnects it before he finishes his pre-recorded message.
Her dream shifts color, the bright yellow of an early morning fading to a subtle gray as she leaves the kitchen, reentering the dim hallway and trailing her fingers along the bleached-white walls. She runs her palm over the granite top of the dry bar, cool beneath her touch, chilly even, a bite of ice on her skin. In contrast, the stairwell's banister is warm, pockmarked with tiny holes that dip beneath her fingertips, easing into a sharp right turn after the second stair. She knows the exact number of steps, counts it beneath her breath onetwothree as she climbs fourfivesixseven and up eightnineteneleven, her shoes padding over the carpeted hallway of the second floor, her fingertips trailing over a low leather seat fixed to the wall.
A ceiling fan lazily rotates at the ceiling. It slows to a stop as she pauses in front of a door - the indistinct voices of her parents rising up from somewhere in the house, "What the hell were you-" dying down, rising up again "I wasn't doing anything!" and faltering to a sustained murmur.
The door before her swings open and she knows this, she knows it, the quiet tinkle of a music box, the buzz of an electric fan, there by the corner, her bed with its red-orange quilt and the stuffed teddy missing one eye.
She sinks into the blankets - "I don't know what's wrong with you!" - pressing her cheek against the cool sheets - "What you saw was a mistake!" - curling on her side, curling tight like a small compact ball - "I'm leaving with-"
In her dream, she tries to fall asleep.
"Sorry I haven't been able to come by more often." Midori says, his voice distant. Perhaps reading through another series of articles, then. Or staring into an aquarium. She wouldn't put it past him.
There is a faint crackle at the end of the line, hinting that he might even be in a different state at the far end of the country. He hadn't told her he'd be leaving university.
"It's all right. I know you're busy." She says, but she can't help the sliver of resentment from lodging in her throat, a seed burrowing in rich, dark earth. This used to be how it was, too, back when she was younger.
She ends the call before he can say anything else, scratching at the cuticle of her thumb, digging her nail into the skin and scratch-scratch-scratching scratch-scratch scratch - tearing open a deep groove that oozes, moist and wet and dark red, soft when she scraaaaaaatches-
She blinks and her thumb is normal again.
previous. | next.
This entry was originally posted at http://quadrantal.dreamwidth.org/17515.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Fandom: Crossroads
Characters: Yomohiro Tomoe, Fujioka Midori, Yomohiro Junichi, Yomohiro Hajime, "Akiyama Kou," and very vague mentions of Kunisaki Chie and Satoshi Kaede | Midori/Tomoe, Kou/Tomoe
Word Count: 2,670 (dos); 15,617 (total)
Rating: M
Warning/s: Please highlight to view the laundry list of trigger warnings. character death, graphic depictions of death and violence, graphic depictions of sex, subtextual incest, abuse, self-mutilation and suicidal tendencies
Summary: One week after she moves into her new house, Tomoe's father dies. Things start happening that she cannot explain. | tomoe and the truths that cannot be obscured
Disclaimer: "Kou" is Miles', Midori is Arah's, Chie is Momo's and Kaede is Kriselle's.
Notes: More in-depth author's notes at the end of the story.
uno. | dos. | tres. | cuatro. | cinco.
.dos.
In her dreams, the door opens to a small entryway illuminated by warm yellow-white light. Opposite the door is a small dry bar lined with dark bottles of wine which had gradually accumulated dust in her last years at home. Now, they gleam with the luster of freshly wiped glass.
The enticing scent of coffee and bacon drifts through the house and she follows the smell to the dining room, its checkerboard tiles glistening with fresh polish. At the head of the table, her father occupies his seat.
The basement light needs changing. She flicks the switch, the lightbulb glowing dimly before sputtering to darkness. In the span of its tragically short life, it illuminates the bottom of the rickety spiral staircase where paint buckets and wooden planks rest on the ground, remnants of the house's renovation.
She pats her pockets for a stray stack of post-it's. When she comes up empty, she shakes her pen and writes on the flat underside of her forearm, scritch-scratch on her pale skin: buy new lightbulbs.
Midori visits when he can get enough time off from the university. He'd been busy of late, working on a journal article on the cusp of being published. It's a breakthrough research on Cetacean echolocation and if it means she barely sees him, then so be it. She's too busy with a sudden influx of patients anyway, and when they do get to spend time together it's always calm and gentle and quiet, like the two of them are relearning the rhythms and cadences of each other after weeks going by with almost no contact. She likes it.
He brings takeaway one night in warm styrofoam boxes that waft out the alluring scent of Chinese food from their favorite place downtown. She separates his chopsticks and hands it to him as he slides her a carton of fried rice topped with dimsum.
She folds her legs beneath her and tucks into her food.
Something skitters against the far wall of the library, several quick scrapes against the plaster.
She sets her chopsticks down. "Did you hear that?"
Midori looks up from his food, a morsel of rice stuck to the corner of his mouth. "Hear what?"
"Earlier, there was-"
She shakes her head and reaches out, brushing away the morsel with the pad of her thumb. She pops her finger in her mouth and looks at him from beneath her lashes, a coy smile quirking up her lips.
The rats, probably. She'd found several dead bodies of the black-furred adults out near the pool. She'll buy rat poison after work tomorrow.
In the dream, her father is as old as she had last seen him, once bright red hair fading like the skin of a festering fruit. His face is etched with wrinkled folds of flesh, cracked and papery.
He smiles, then, his lips stretching over yellowing teeth as he lifts up his hand and digs into his eye socket. He extricates his eyeball with a wet squelch of tearing sinews and offers it to her on his palm. His blood streams like tears down one cheek.
He reaches towards her, his mouth yawning wide open, a gaping dark hole that surges forward-
She wakes up.
She rifles through her cupboard, looking for the canister of tea, tipping aside her sugar jar, her spice rack, packets of ready-mix coffee and a box of cocoa powder. She glances at the assortment of things now strewn all over her counter, gritting her teeth and throwing her hands up - she'll clean these later, when there's more time and she's had her caffeine, because her mobile is ringing insistently inside her pocket, her assistant speaking on the other end,
"Dr. Yomohiro, there's someone here-" a sudden crackle like tin foil being crumpled "-important and-" the line cutting off with a prolonged beep beep beep.
Today is not a good day: her alarm didn't ring, her phone isn't working, and she can't find her tea.
She looks at her clock - quarter to eight and she'll be late in fifteen minutes dammit - grabbing her purse and keys on the way out of the house.
She's young again, her mother laughing in the background as she traces a pencil mark on the wall of the kitchen to mark her height. It's a bit taller than the edge of the table and she puffs her chest out in pride, turning around.
"See, mommy, I'm growing-"
There is no one in the room. A thin film of grime coats the pots and pans hanging beneath the cupboards.
She catches a glimpse of a shadow just around the bend of the counter.
It flits to the edge of the pantry, a faint gray outline with the hint of a head, the slope of a shoulder, and then it darts across the hallway, rounding a corner and disappearing.
Her cactus is dying.
Or at least that's what it looks like, its succulent green stem creeping with brown patches that are starting to turn black.
She bends down and peers at it. Half of its spines have fallen off, littering the soil. One of the fallen spines moves, the soil clustering beneath it into a small ridge which trembles precariously before the slimy end of a worm pokes through the dirt. It twitches and squirms, pale and fat and segmented, swaying from side to side, its head no bigger than the tip of her finger.
She shakes her head and sighs; a patient had given her the potted plant last week as thank you for a life-saving surgery. Now she'd have to buy a pesticide spray too.
She takes out her notebook and jots it down, throwing the cactus in her rubbish bin on her way out the house. She double-checks the lights, double-checks the locks on the door, and watches the garage entranceway slide shut before she drives off for work.
As she is pulling into her parking space, she notices the stain at the hem of her pantsuit, a dark spot of brown like a bit of mud had gotten on it.
When she comes home that evening, the painting in her foyer is just a tad crooked, slight enough that she wouldn't have noticed if she hadn't been standing in her doorway, staring at it for the entire span of five minutes with one hand resting lightly on the doorknob.
She opens the door to the basement, lugging a ladder beneath one arm and a box of lightbulbs in another. Her flashlight clicks on and yes, there, the rickety staircase with the rusted handrail, spiraling into the darkness. She carefully picks her way down, avoiding molding wood while attempting to balance with the weight of the ladder.
Tell me tell me tell me come on tell me the answer, she hums beneath her breath, the sound echoing back to her. She breathes and pitches her voice louder, "Well you may be a lover but you ain't no dancer," doing a slight twist and turn at the bottom step, landing on the ground with a faint flourish. She shakes the box of lightbulbs to hear them click together in simulated applause.
The basement is dank, smelling faintly of rotting wood. She shines her flashlight towards a corner where a vast spiderweb stretches across the beams of the ceiling all the way to the floor, spreading thickly over what looked like a kitchenette sink beside a cabinet. There are several paint cans toppled over, one of them spilling a dark residue that has long since dried. She moves her light over the ceiling until she finds the defunct light bulb.
She plants her ladder squarely beneath it, kicking apart the front and rear feet until it stands on its own. She tests her weight on one step, feeling the foot pads catch on the ground, deciding that it is steady enough to climb. She slides the box of lightbulbs on the pail shelf and bites the rubber of her flashlight, shining it up as she holds on to one rail, placing her foot on the bottommost rung.
It holds beneath her weight and she sets her foot on the next step. The ladder creaks but otherwise remains steady.
She lets her arms dangle down her sides first, finding her balance before she places one foot on the top cap, then the other foot. She shifts, the ladder creaking again, but she finds her footing and reaches up for the lightbulb, unscrewing it with a sharp squeal of its base against the socket.
She loses her grip on the flashlight and it falls with a muted thud, its beam of light bouncing on one wall and stopping at the cabinet as the flashlight settles against the foot of the ladder. It's enough to give a faint outline to the empty socket hanging on the ceiling.
She reaches blindly for the box of lightbulbs.
The ladder emits a pronounced creak.
Reaching lower still, when her hand touches only air.
The ladder shifts precariously as she transfers her weight to her left leg.
Her fingertips brush against the lid of the box, the ladder groaning on its hinges as it suddenly totters to one side, careens off-balance, the extra lightbulbs clattering to the floor and smashing, her yelping in a furious attempt to step her right foot down and lean her weight to the other side, a sharp stab of fear jabbing her chest-
-remaining, though she finally gets the ladder back upright.
The phone rings.
She glances at the clock, the glowing dials reading 3:09 AM, and rubs the sleep from her eyes.
An emergency? But then they knew to call her mobile phone. She belts the ties of her robe and pads out of her room. One of the confined patients looking for her, perhaps?
She crosses the hallway, the wood leading to a glass bridge that overlooks the living room and connects to the east section of the house.
The ringing stops just as she enters the library.
A chilly wind gusts past her, rustling the curtains at the far corner of the room. She shivers, clutching her robe tight, and decides she'll close the windows later. It takes a considerable amount of time before she's warm again beneath the comforters of her bed.
On her way to work later in the day, she remembers the library and climbs back up the stairs to the second floor, phone tucked between her ear and shoulder as she describes the procedure of her next operation to Midori in the other end of the line. She walks across the parquet floor amidst stacks of books filling up the shelves in a methodical, systematic arrangement.
"The transseptal approach will be used for-"
She stops.
"Tomoe? What's wrong?" Midori's voice is tinny on the other end of the line.
"I-I'll call you again later."
The windows are shut, the heavy metal bars secured in the latch.
She probably closed the windows before going to bed, too tired to remember doing so. She'd gone through a night shift the day before, after all, and the fatigue was probably catching up to her. Paranoid fool, she berates herself; still, she leaves her office earlier than normal, as dusk is just beginning to settle. The street lamps aren't on yet when she locks her door and steps onto the pavement, tightening the laces on her rubber shoes and going off on a quick jog.
She passes by the front yard of her neighbor, a kind, elderly lady who sometimes gave her steaming freshly-baked pies. She raises her hand up in greeting when the dogs, two german shepherds, lunge at the bars of their cages, growling and barking at her.
They don't stop until she rounds the corner and disappears from sight. Their barking stays with her, the blunt edges of a headache curling in her skull, a heavy pressure by her nape. She cuts her jog off and returns home and can't shake the feeling that she's being watched.
Later that night as she is in the shower, she hears a thud, thud, thud on the hallway like a heavy thump of footsteps which stop in front of her door, pause, then move towards the opposite direction, gradually fading as a door slams shut.
She turns off the faucet.
"Midori?" She calls out. She'd given him her keys but he preferred to ring the bell and wait for her to open the door. With her in the bathroom, he probably waited at least half an hour before letting himself in.
She wraps a towel around her, dripping water on the floor as she makes her way to the door, pushing it open with a low creak of its hinges.
"Midori?"
No one answers.
She leaves a trail of water as she peers into the rooms, humming "Look out helter skelter helter skelter" just to ward off the silence, and finds all of them as deserted as she had left them when she went to work in the morning.
A line of goosebumps crawls up her arms.
She tells herself it's the house settling as she clutches her elbows and trudges up the staircase. A call to Midori's mobile is directed to voice mail, and she disconnects it before he finishes his pre-recorded message.
Her dream shifts color, the bright yellow of an early morning fading to a subtle gray as she leaves the kitchen, reentering the dim hallway and trailing her fingers along the bleached-white walls. She runs her palm over the granite top of the dry bar, cool beneath her touch, chilly even, a bite of ice on her skin. In contrast, the stairwell's banister is warm, pockmarked with tiny holes that dip beneath her fingertips, easing into a sharp right turn after the second stair. She knows the exact number of steps, counts it beneath her breath onetwothree as she climbs fourfivesixseven and up eightnineteneleven, her shoes padding over the carpeted hallway of the second floor, her fingertips trailing over a low leather seat fixed to the wall.
A ceiling fan lazily rotates at the ceiling. It slows to a stop as she pauses in front of a door - the indistinct voices of her parents rising up from somewhere in the house, "What the hell were you-" dying down, rising up again "I wasn't doing anything!" and faltering to a sustained murmur.
The door before her swings open and she knows this, she knows it, the quiet tinkle of a music box, the buzz of an electric fan, there by the corner, her bed with its red-orange quilt and the stuffed teddy missing one eye.
She sinks into the blankets - "I don't know what's wrong with you!" - pressing her cheek against the cool sheets - "What you saw was a mistake!" - curling on her side, curling tight like a small compact ball - "I'm leaving with-"
In her dream, she tries to fall asleep.
"Sorry I haven't been able to come by more often." Midori says, his voice distant. Perhaps reading through another series of articles, then. Or staring into an aquarium. She wouldn't put it past him.
There is a faint crackle at the end of the line, hinting that he might even be in a different state at the far end of the country. He hadn't told her he'd be leaving university.
"It's all right. I know you're busy." She says, but she can't help the sliver of resentment from lodging in her throat, a seed burrowing in rich, dark earth. This used to be how it was, too, back when she was younger.
She ends the call before he can say anything else, scratching at the cuticle of her thumb, digging her nail into the skin and scratch-scratch-scratching scratch-scratch scratch - tearing open a deep groove that oozes, moist and wet and dark red, soft when she scraaaaaaatches-
She blinks and her thumb is normal again.
previous. | next.
This entry was originally posted at http://quadrantal.dreamwidth.org/17515.html. Please comment there using OpenID.