cotton candy #7: preparations
Author: Marika Kailaya
Title: kinda like it in my brand-new place
'Verse: Nagekawashii; MeYu
Challenge: Cotton Candy: 7. preparations
Counts for the Summer Challenge?: Yes.
Toppings/Extras: N/A
Wordcount: 714
Rating: PG
A/N: N/A
They prepare more for her baby than she does. The first thing they do of course is convince her into not having it burned and or sucked and or torn out of her.
They think they're convincing her, anyway. She cannot do this again. She would walk herself home, numb and still dripping blood, from the clinic, and move, calmly, to stand still in front of a bus.
There have been very few things in her life that Hotoma Raizu has wanted more than a child. And most of those things were immediate things, such as, I wish this man would stop shooting at me, for instance.
Meki is inappropriately happy on such a tragic occasion and tells her that he'll help even if she doesn't want him to. He phrases it like this: Fuck yeah! We're having a baby!, and she yells at him; but it is Chi Yuku she hates who she believes, as he stands in the corner of her bathroom, smoking a cigarette and saying, quietly, that it's okay.
They guide her through non-alcoholic beverages and make her develop a habit of eating meals instead of, say, drinking them, and they catch her sobbing outside Lucifer's hospital room and wrap her in their leather jackets and wedding rings.
By the time Lucifer dies, it's far, far too late for an abortion, and there's already too much at stake for the suicide to follow.
She could look back on it and claim Meki and Yuku as tricksters and assholes from some legend, pulling her along in a blur of fatigue and consolation and cracked laughter until it was all a failure.
She could.
She sleeps a lot, halfway between a ghost and a corpse, glowing only in the light of Lucifer's glitter and the heartbeat on the monitor to prove that regardless of herself there is life somewhere in there.
Lucifer's heart stops; the baby's continues.
Raizu doesn't have a single clue as to what her own does. (Yuku shakes her into keeping records of this risky pregnancy but what she writes on paper feels like a lie.)
They begin to buy her things, to help her rearrange her own bedroom to accommodate her child. The doctor calls girl on it, and Meki returns triumphantly from the shop one day lugging a bassinet painted in pale green. It all ends up green and yellow where Raizu's little apartment is pink. Tiny, tiny blankets in unfathomably soft materials lined with silk ribbons, small bears with stitched mouths and eyes the colour of spring, endless toys both soft and quietly jangling or rattling.
Occasionally it helps to have friends who can afford the universe and if they couldn't would just steal it and pet it gleefully anyway. (Would hand it to her and kiss her.)
Occasionally.
They drag her through all the baby stores they can find, stocking up on diapers-infinite quantities of diapers.
This is what makes Raizu feel like she's breathing. Touching the boxes of diapers, fingering the little coats and hats and dresses and itty, bitty shoes. She is the lucky one. Blankets and clothes and playthings and supplies for this thing, this old ghost of hers that until now she has simply not been allowed to meet.
It fascinates her.
All those huge, pregnant women in the shops, squealing at cuteness and groaning at prices, she with her scars flanked by a librarian and a novelist of questionable morality who match items to Lucifer's eyes.
And the bottles. So very, very small, decorated with tiny cartoon bees and kittens and glitter, their tops in any given shade of pastel; and the pacifiers with dangling soft toys from them and the way they shine like candy in light.
They purchase a breast pump for her, all manner of thermometers and then the clothes, ever stretching and growing, that are for her.
It is Yuku, dead set on calling her beautiful even when she is in part too swollen and in part too thin.
She still hates Yuku.
She thinks.
She arrives home with her baby-her baby-in her arms, and finds on her bed a fluffy pink teddy bear sitting next to the threadbare orange one Meki bought her the day of her abortion, over twenty years ago.
Title: kinda like it in my brand-new place
'Verse: Nagekawashii; MeYu
Challenge: Cotton Candy: 7. preparations
Counts for the Summer Challenge?: Yes.
Toppings/Extras: N/A
Wordcount: 714
Rating: PG
A/N: N/A
They prepare more for her baby than she does. The first thing they do of course is convince her into not having it burned and or sucked and or torn out of her.
They think they're convincing her, anyway. She cannot do this again. She would walk herself home, numb and still dripping blood, from the clinic, and move, calmly, to stand still in front of a bus.
There have been very few things in her life that Hotoma Raizu has wanted more than a child. And most of those things were immediate things, such as, I wish this man would stop shooting at me, for instance.
Meki is inappropriately happy on such a tragic occasion and tells her that he'll help even if she doesn't want him to. He phrases it like this: Fuck yeah! We're having a baby!, and she yells at him; but it is Chi Yuku she hates who she believes, as he stands in the corner of her bathroom, smoking a cigarette and saying, quietly, that it's okay.
They guide her through non-alcoholic beverages and make her develop a habit of eating meals instead of, say, drinking them, and they catch her sobbing outside Lucifer's hospital room and wrap her in their leather jackets and wedding rings.
By the time Lucifer dies, it's far, far too late for an abortion, and there's already too much at stake for the suicide to follow.
She could look back on it and claim Meki and Yuku as tricksters and assholes from some legend, pulling her along in a blur of fatigue and consolation and cracked laughter until it was all a failure.
She could.
She sleeps a lot, halfway between a ghost and a corpse, glowing only in the light of Lucifer's glitter and the heartbeat on the monitor to prove that regardless of herself there is life somewhere in there.
Lucifer's heart stops; the baby's continues.
Raizu doesn't have a single clue as to what her own does. (Yuku shakes her into keeping records of this risky pregnancy but what she writes on paper feels like a lie.)
They begin to buy her things, to help her rearrange her own bedroom to accommodate her child. The doctor calls girl on it, and Meki returns triumphantly from the shop one day lugging a bassinet painted in pale green. It all ends up green and yellow where Raizu's little apartment is pink. Tiny, tiny blankets in unfathomably soft materials lined with silk ribbons, small bears with stitched mouths and eyes the colour of spring, endless toys both soft and quietly jangling or rattling.
Occasionally it helps to have friends who can afford the universe and if they couldn't would just steal it and pet it gleefully anyway. (Would hand it to her and kiss her.)
Occasionally.
They drag her through all the baby stores they can find, stocking up on diapers-infinite quantities of diapers.
This is what makes Raizu feel like she's breathing. Touching the boxes of diapers, fingering the little coats and hats and dresses and itty, bitty shoes. She is the lucky one. Blankets and clothes and playthings and supplies for this thing, this old ghost of hers that until now she has simply not been allowed to meet.
It fascinates her.
All those huge, pregnant women in the shops, squealing at cuteness and groaning at prices, she with her scars flanked by a librarian and a novelist of questionable morality who match items to Lucifer's eyes.
And the bottles. So very, very small, decorated with tiny cartoon bees and kittens and glitter, their tops in any given shade of pastel; and the pacifiers with dangling soft toys from them and the way they shine like candy in light.
They purchase a breast pump for her, all manner of thermometers and then the clothes, ever stretching and growing, that are for her.
It is Yuku, dead set on calling her beautiful even when she is in part too swollen and in part too thin.
She still hates Yuku.
She thinks.
She arrives home with her baby-her baby-in her arms, and finds on her bed a fluffy pink teddy bear sitting next to the threadbare orange one Meki bought her the day of her abortion, over twenty years ago.