[OOC] vacation/visiting home/Taki family fic
I honestly haven't really thought about what Suzuna will do during her vacation, hurr. :D; But coming home after so long, well ...
The first thing she noticed when she was conscious enough to realise she was awake was the warmth. The next was the smell, as she wrapped the comforter more tightly around her: her personal scent. She sighed contently, trying to drift off into sleep again ...
Suzuna sat up, eyes snapping wide open in the same movement.
Morning light filtered in through the window by the bed. A glance outside told her that it looked to be a cold day. A door slammed and there were voices: it sounded like the neighbours were going out. A dog barked nearby, high-pitched and vicious - that was Mimi, the Pomeranian belonging to the family two streets over, wasn't it?
She stared around the room (her room!) as though it was the first time she had laid eyes on it. Some of it looked unfamiliar. Surely the bookshelf, opposite her, was new? --No, no. She remembered now: her mother had got it for her a month before she became a third year. And that teddy bear on the second shelf: a souvenir from when she, Monta and Rikkun had finished their entrance exams to Enma University and everyone had gone out to celebrate. To her left was her desk, upon which lay last night's homework and a few textbooks piled next to it in front of her clock, which read 7:29.
Her head reeled as memories reasserted and rearranged themselves. It was worse than the last time it had happened ... She clutched a hand to her forehead.
The last time it had happened was in camp, but that was months ago. The last thing she remembered was still being there, but she had been speeding in the direction of the barrier, with the weight of a full backpack on her shoulders and a letter in her pocket.
Yet she had woken up in her own bed, clothed in her pyjamas, with the last three years of her life - her life at home - fresh in her mind, to varying degrees.
Maybe those other three years had only been a dream. Maybe she wouldn't have to go back after three days.
Her heart rose a little.
Maybe finally ...
Suzuna turned around to look at the message board above her bed, to look at all the photos and notes and reminders pinned up there. There was a rustle beneath her as she moved. She paused for several moments, before slowly reaching beneath her thigh and just as slowly extracted a piece of paper with writing on it. The letter.
Ah. Not a dream then.
Only three days.
Her heart sank back down.
She carefully folded the letter and placed it on her bedside table. In doing so, she spotted her backpack and her rollerblades on the floor by the bed. Filled with a sudden impulse, she reached down and pulled the backpack up to her, opened it and tipped what she could of the contents into her lap. There was a bag of travel essentials and some of her clothes. There were also some hair clips, a journal and scrapbook, a pair of gloves and a few more trinkets. She looked at what remained inside her bag and saw another pair of skates, disguised ingeniously like ordinary shoes.
She replaced everything back in her backpack and set it back on the floor, although she held each of the objects she had received in camp briefly before putting it away, a corner of her mouth twitching upwards in a smile. Somehow, she felt a little better. Her head was clear at last and her heart didn't feel quite so heavy.
"Oh well," she said. It sounded loud, being in a room by herself.
Suzuna became aware of a stiffness inbetween her shoulder blades. Throwing off the comforter and swinging her feet to the floor, she stretched, yawning and groaning. As the knot started to ease, the door opened. Startled, she froze in mid-stretch, a very large and very angry purple gorilla materialising out of her mind's eye.
Instead, it was her mother.
"My!" the woman exclaimed over her basket of clean, folded laundry. "I thought you were going to sleep in this morning. Did I wake you, Suzuna? I'm sorry."
Her mother placed the basket on the floor and opened the wardrobe to move and tidy things inside, chatting all the while. Unnoticed, Suzuna slowly lowered her arms and could only stare in stunned silence. A peculiar pressure built inside her chest that had been unlike the disappointment from before. It was far more overwhelming.
"I'm just going to put these away and then you can go back to sleep. You don't have class today, right? Or are you awake enough to want breakfast now? I'm sure I can make something in a little bit." Her mother turned, one of Suzuna's skirts in her hand. "Oh, honey! What's wrong?"
Tears were spilling from her eyes. Her mouth trembled. When her mother looked at her, Suzuna started to cry in earnest.
Her mother promptly dropped the skirt in the basket and came over to sit beside her, wrapping her arms around her and stroking her hair. "Shhh, Suzuna, it's alright. What's wrong?"
Suzuna buried her face into her mother's shirt, arms going around and clinging to that slim body almost automatically. There was a tightness in her throat that made it hard to talk but somehow she managed. "K-Kaa-san! Oh Kaa-san, I m-missed you so much."
Her mother kissed her forehead and held her close. "I feel very loved. But how could you miss me? You haven't been away from home for more than a day for months. Did you have a bad dream?"
"S-Something like that."
She kept crying on her mother's shoulder for several minutes, and her mother held her the entire time, no questions asked. Suzuna found she had missed this hug, her mother's hug. She had missed her mother's voice, her warmth, her patience, the way her small gold bracelet tinkled at her wrist whenever she moved. She had missed seeing her mother in the morning when she brought up the laundry and made breakfast for the family and said goodbye before everyone else left for the day. Even if Suzuna also remembered seeing her mother almost everyday for the last three years.
She had really missed her mother.
After a while, her mother drew away, keeping a gentle hold on Suzuna's shoulders. "Feeling better?"
Suzuna sniffed and wiped at her eyes and cheeks with her sleeve. "A little." At least her voice had stopped trembling.
"That's good." Her mother stroked her cheek and then chucked her under the chin. "How about you go and clean up in the bathroom? I'll distract your father just in case: you know how he gets when he knows you've been crying." She winked, her blue eyes twinkling with mischief.
An image of her father waving his guitar wildly in the air like a savage and screaming bloody murder at whoever made his little girl cry blossomed in her mind. Suzuna laughed through the last of her tears. It came out as more of a gurgle and she felt a bubble pop in her mouth, which made her laugh harder.
"There, all better then," her mother said, also laughing and brushing aside the hair on Suzuna's forehead. "Just come down for breakfast when you're ready."
Half an hour later, Suzuna felt cleaner and more comfortable than she had in months. Dressed in an oversized t-shirt and bike pants, she studied herself in the bathroom mirror as she rubbed a towel over her damp hair.
No zombies. No demonic trees. No whispering, mocking voices in her mind from toucans. No blindingly purple gorillas going about committing indecent acts in plain view and causing traumatic mental scars. No bellowing walruses.
No one else from camp.
Well, she wondered how much truth there was to that as she left the bathroom and jogged down the corridor towards the stairs, the towel around her neck. Probably she should get on her cellphone as soon as breakfast was over and she helped with the dishes and check up on the others. She smiled at the thought of talking to and seeing Sena and Mamo-nee and everyone else again. She had probably been gone the longest. What would they say?
But camp was tricky. Maybe it let her come home to an alternative universe where no one else had gone to camp. If that as the case, she'd just look crazy if she tried to talk about it. There was the issue of her split memory... She chewed on her lip thoughtfully.
And almost collided with her father coming up the stairs.
"Tou-san," she breathed.
"Suzuna-chan!" he sang, strumming a chord on his guitar. "Baby! I was just about to go and awaken you with a serenade! But I see you as awake as an owl at daybreak!"
She smiled. She had missed her father too. She showed it by being gentler than usual, and told herself not to reprimand him for calling her "baby" in English. He always insisted it was important for his "rockstar" image. (At least he didn't say, "fuuuu" every time he played his guitar, she supposed.)
"Tou-san, owls go to sleep in the morning. Also the last time you tried that, we got complaints from the neighbours. Also, knowing you, you'd end up playing anything but a serenade."
"A flamenco then," he said, beaming, and struck the guitar again. Suzuna stepped back in practised ease to avoid being hit as his right leg shot up so far that his foot was past the level of her head. "Well, there is still your brother!"
"Listen," she said, stressing the word, but still smiling. "Why don't you go back down and help Kaa-san? I'll go wake Nii-san. You can serenade her."
"Ah, but I did that merely moments before! How she sighed! How she swooned! How she stroked this marvellous moustache of mine!"
He started listing every little sound and move her mother made. Suddenly Suzuna realised that the conversation ran the risk of going off into the territory of "too much information", as her father had a tendency to do, and even if they were outrageous claims, that was where she drew the line. She punched him in the shoulder. "Tou-san! Go help Kaa-san!"
Her father laughed heartily even as he teared at the pain, probably (definitely, she thought to herself) mistaking her teenaged horror. "If you insist then. Olé!" He turned with a flourish and retreated down the stairs, humming merrily to himself and starting to pluck the Mexican Hat Dance on the strings.
Suzuna watched until he turned the corner at the bottom, music still wafting through the house behind him, and shook her head, marvelling. Yep, definitely missed him too.
All that was left was--
What sounded like stomping and thrashing and a very loud "AHAAHA!" cut through her thoughts. She whirled around and immediately started banging her fist on the door to her older brother's room.
"Hey, Stupid Nii-san, be quiet already and come down for breakfast! Don't you have class today?! HEY, I'M TALKING TO YOU!"
Scanning the corridor quickly, she grabbed the closest thing she could carry and she flung it at her brother when he opened the door. The "thwack!" that sounded when the hairbrush made contact with his head was very satisfying. So was grinding her heels into her brother's back while he writhed on the floor babbling his confusion ("MAI SISTAAAH! YOUR LOVE IS TOO VIOLENT!"), her feet fuelled by her annoyance. The old routine was almost refreshing.
She had three days. Better make the best of it!
The first thing she noticed when she was conscious enough to realise she was awake was the warmth. The next was the smell, as she wrapped the comforter more tightly around her: her personal scent. She sighed contently, trying to drift off into sleep again ...
Suzuna sat up, eyes snapping wide open in the same movement.
Morning light filtered in through the window by the bed. A glance outside told her that it looked to be a cold day. A door slammed and there were voices: it sounded like the neighbours were going out. A dog barked nearby, high-pitched and vicious - that was Mimi, the Pomeranian belonging to the family two streets over, wasn't it?
She stared around the room (her room!) as though it was the first time she had laid eyes on it. Some of it looked unfamiliar. Surely the bookshelf, opposite her, was new? --No, no. She remembered now: her mother had got it for her a month before she became a third year. And that teddy bear on the second shelf: a souvenir from when she, Monta and Rikkun had finished their entrance exams to Enma University and everyone had gone out to celebrate. To her left was her desk, upon which lay last night's homework and a few textbooks piled next to it in front of her clock, which read 7:29.
Her head reeled as memories reasserted and rearranged themselves. It was worse than the last time it had happened ... She clutched a hand to her forehead.
The last time it had happened was in camp, but that was months ago. The last thing she remembered was still being there, but she had been speeding in the direction of the barrier, with the weight of a full backpack on her shoulders and a letter in her pocket.
Yet she had woken up in her own bed, clothed in her pyjamas, with the last three years of her life - her life at home - fresh in her mind, to varying degrees.
Maybe those other three years had only been a dream. Maybe she wouldn't have to go back after three days.
Her heart rose a little.
Maybe finally ...
Suzuna turned around to look at the message board above her bed, to look at all the photos and notes and reminders pinned up there. There was a rustle beneath her as she moved. She paused for several moments, before slowly reaching beneath her thigh and just as slowly extracted a piece of paper with writing on it. The letter.
Ah. Not a dream then.
Only three days.
Her heart sank back down.
She carefully folded the letter and placed it on her bedside table. In doing so, she spotted her backpack and her rollerblades on the floor by the bed. Filled with a sudden impulse, she reached down and pulled the backpack up to her, opened it and tipped what she could of the contents into her lap. There was a bag of travel essentials and some of her clothes. There were also some hair clips, a journal and scrapbook, a pair of gloves and a few more trinkets. She looked at what remained inside her bag and saw another pair of skates, disguised ingeniously like ordinary shoes.
She replaced everything back in her backpack and set it back on the floor, although she held each of the objects she had received in camp briefly before putting it away, a corner of her mouth twitching upwards in a smile. Somehow, she felt a little better. Her head was clear at last and her heart didn't feel quite so heavy.
"Oh well," she said. It sounded loud, being in a room by herself.
Suzuna became aware of a stiffness inbetween her shoulder blades. Throwing off the comforter and swinging her feet to the floor, she stretched, yawning and groaning. As the knot started to ease, the door opened. Startled, she froze in mid-stretch, a very large and very angry purple gorilla materialising out of her mind's eye.
Instead, it was her mother.
"My!" the woman exclaimed over her basket of clean, folded laundry. "I thought you were going to sleep in this morning. Did I wake you, Suzuna? I'm sorry."
Her mother placed the basket on the floor and opened the wardrobe to move and tidy things inside, chatting all the while. Unnoticed, Suzuna slowly lowered her arms and could only stare in stunned silence. A peculiar pressure built inside her chest that had been unlike the disappointment from before. It was far more overwhelming.
"I'm just going to put these away and then you can go back to sleep. You don't have class today, right? Or are you awake enough to want breakfast now? I'm sure I can make something in a little bit." Her mother turned, one of Suzuna's skirts in her hand. "Oh, honey! What's wrong?"
Tears were spilling from her eyes. Her mouth trembled. When her mother looked at her, Suzuna started to cry in earnest.
Her mother promptly dropped the skirt in the basket and came over to sit beside her, wrapping her arms around her and stroking her hair. "Shhh, Suzuna, it's alright. What's wrong?"
Suzuna buried her face into her mother's shirt, arms going around and clinging to that slim body almost automatically. There was a tightness in her throat that made it hard to talk but somehow she managed. "K-Kaa-san! Oh Kaa-san, I m-missed you so much."
Her mother kissed her forehead and held her close. "I feel very loved. But how could you miss me? You haven't been away from home for more than a day for months. Did you have a bad dream?"
"S-Something like that."
She kept crying on her mother's shoulder for several minutes, and her mother held her the entire time, no questions asked. Suzuna found she had missed this hug, her mother's hug. She had missed her mother's voice, her warmth, her patience, the way her small gold bracelet tinkled at her wrist whenever she moved. She had missed seeing her mother in the morning when she brought up the laundry and made breakfast for the family and said goodbye before everyone else left for the day. Even if Suzuna also remembered seeing her mother almost everyday for the last three years.
She had really missed her mother.
After a while, her mother drew away, keeping a gentle hold on Suzuna's shoulders. "Feeling better?"
Suzuna sniffed and wiped at her eyes and cheeks with her sleeve. "A little." At least her voice had stopped trembling.
"That's good." Her mother stroked her cheek and then chucked her under the chin. "How about you go and clean up in the bathroom? I'll distract your father just in case: you know how he gets when he knows you've been crying." She winked, her blue eyes twinkling with mischief.
An image of her father waving his guitar wildly in the air like a savage and screaming bloody murder at whoever made his little girl cry blossomed in her mind. Suzuna laughed through the last of her tears. It came out as more of a gurgle and she felt a bubble pop in her mouth, which made her laugh harder.
"There, all better then," her mother said, also laughing and brushing aside the hair on Suzuna's forehead. "Just come down for breakfast when you're ready."
Half an hour later, Suzuna felt cleaner and more comfortable than she had in months. Dressed in an oversized t-shirt and bike pants, she studied herself in the bathroom mirror as she rubbed a towel over her damp hair.
No zombies. No demonic trees. No whispering, mocking voices in her mind from toucans. No blindingly purple gorillas going about committing indecent acts in plain view and causing traumatic mental scars. No bellowing walruses.
No one else from camp.
Well, she wondered how much truth there was to that as she left the bathroom and jogged down the corridor towards the stairs, the towel around her neck. Probably she should get on her cellphone as soon as breakfast was over and she helped with the dishes and check up on the others. She smiled at the thought of talking to and seeing Sena and Mamo-nee and everyone else again. She had probably been gone the longest. What would they say?
But camp was tricky. Maybe it let her come home to an alternative universe where no one else had gone to camp. If that as the case, she'd just look crazy if she tried to talk about it. There was the issue of her split memory... She chewed on her lip thoughtfully.
And almost collided with her father coming up the stairs.
"Tou-san," she breathed.
"Suzuna-chan!" he sang, strumming a chord on his guitar. "Baby! I was just about to go and awaken you with a serenade! But I see you as awake as an owl at daybreak!"
She smiled. She had missed her father too. She showed it by being gentler than usual, and told herself not to reprimand him for calling her "baby" in English. He always insisted it was important for his "rockstar" image. (At least he didn't say, "fuuuu" every time he played his guitar, she supposed.)
"Tou-san, owls go to sleep in the morning. Also the last time you tried that, we got complaints from the neighbours. Also, knowing you, you'd end up playing anything but a serenade."
"A flamenco then," he said, beaming, and struck the guitar again. Suzuna stepped back in practised ease to avoid being hit as his right leg shot up so far that his foot was past the level of her head. "Well, there is still your brother!"
"Listen," she said, stressing the word, but still smiling. "Why don't you go back down and help Kaa-san? I'll go wake Nii-san. You can serenade her."
"Ah, but I did that merely moments before! How she sighed! How she swooned! How she stroked this marvellous moustache of mine!"
He started listing every little sound and move her mother made. Suddenly Suzuna realised that the conversation ran the risk of going off into the territory of "too much information", as her father had a tendency to do, and even if they were outrageous claims, that was where she drew the line. She punched him in the shoulder. "Tou-san! Go help Kaa-san!"
Her father laughed heartily even as he teared at the pain, probably (definitely, she thought to herself) mistaking her teenaged horror. "If you insist then. Olé!" He turned with a flourish and retreated down the stairs, humming merrily to himself and starting to pluck the Mexican Hat Dance on the strings.
Suzuna watched until he turned the corner at the bottom, music still wafting through the house behind him, and shook her head, marvelling. Yep, definitely missed him too.
All that was left was--
What sounded like stomping and thrashing and a very loud "AHAAHA!" cut through her thoughts. She whirled around and immediately started banging her fist on the door to her older brother's room.
"Hey, Stupid Nii-san, be quiet already and come down for breakfast! Don't you have class today?! HEY, I'M TALKING TO YOU!"
Scanning the corridor quickly, she grabbed the closest thing she could carry and she flung it at her brother when he opened the door. The "thwack!" that sounded when the hairbrush made contact with his head was very satisfying. So was grinding her heels into her brother's back while he writhed on the floor babbling his confusion ("MAI SISTAAAH! YOUR LOVE IS TOO VIOLENT!"), her feet fuelled by her annoyance. The old routine was almost refreshing.
She had three days. Better make the best of it!