Saponification

Feb 20, 2009 18:37

Titles: Saponification
Author: speaky_bean
Characters/Pairings: The Yagami Family
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1,564
Notes: This is a series of loosely connected drabbles about the Yagami family and soap. Initially I was going to have a more diverse cast of characters, but I realized that most of my ideas could apply to the members of this family, thus making this a cohesive story rather than a set of random drabbles. At least I hope it’s cohesive.
Warning: This story contains shower sex! It isn’t incredibly explicit, but enough so that I feel like I should warn for it.

Sachiko makes a point of letting the children choose what kind of a particular item they should buy each time they go shopping. She wants them to learn how to choose the best quality for the lowest price, and how to cooperate and come to that decision together. Often, they do well with this. For some reason though, they’re having a hard time with this week’s item, soap.

They both seem to have very different ideas about what sort of soap they ought to buy. Sayu is cradling her choice, a plastic box containing two bright pink, sparkly bars of soap that don’t look as though they could successfully clean anything. Light is insistent on a bottle of liquid soap that is, he says, on sale for 50% off. “If we get the liquid soap we won’t lose any if we leave it in the shower,” he says resolutely, arms crossed in irritation. “And it won’t leave soap scum everywhere. Besides, it’s cheaper.”

“But I want this kind!” Sayu wails, stamping her feet and gearing up for a tantrum. “It’s pretty!”

Sachiko is at a loss for what to do. Light’s choice is far more sensible, and it wouldn’t do to give in to her daughter’s whining. Still, she doesn’t like to see her so upset. Just before she does the wrong thing and lets her have the soap she wants, Light leans over and whispers something into his sister’s ear. Sachiko can’t quite make out what it is, but it sounds like he’s saying that if they get the cheaper soap, there might be money left over for ice cream.

Sayu’s blotchy, crumpled face turns joyous. She puts the shiny soap back, and says that the one Light picked out is much better. Sachiko had had no plans to buy ice cream, but she ends up stopping by the freezer section for a pint of it.

~`~`~

He doesn’t like to shower early in the morning. It means waking up earlier, means ending up with frosted hair in wintertime. But he’ll be at work for five days straight at minimum, and the office shower is cramped and disgusting, drowning in the stench of sweaty men. And so he bathes before he has to leave, suffocating his thinning hair in too much shampoo.

Five minutes in, he’s no longer alone. Soichiro’s wife has joined him in the shower. At first, he isn’t thrilled by this. He doesn’t have the time, the energy. Sachiko is letting cold air in through the bathroom door. But he realizes quickly that he won’t be seeing her for quite some time. Realizes, too, how magnificent a sight she is without her clothes on.

She enters the shower, says “I thought you could use some company,” grin stretched across her face like a desert highway. She runs a bar of soap down his spine, trails it towards his penis as she pushes him into the wall with her other arm. Hair plastered to her neck with the shower, she’s gorgeous. Shoving her tongue in his mouth, lathering his penis with the soap, she’s gorgeous too. He returns the kiss, grips her shoulder blades, the small of her back, her buttocks. “You look like a mermaid…” he mutters into her neck between kisses. She presses his hand to her vulva. Says that mermaids don’t have anything like this.

That morning, Soichiro is one hour and forty-five minutes late for work.

~`~`~

His hands are bleeding again.

Washing them again won’t help, but he drowns them in the sink all the same. He isn’t sure why he started this, but by this point the skin is soggy and broken. They sting and they hurt and they only feel better while he’s washing them. He knows that makes it worse. Doesn’t know why he can’t break this ridiculous cycle, why it began in the first place. It was something about knowing he killed someone. Metaphorical blood on his hands.

Now, Light Yagami knows that it was right to kill that man. Now, Light Yagami is a righteous warrior, a savior of humanity. Now, Light Yagami is Kira. He shouldn’t be hunched over the sink, skinning himself on antibacterial soap.

~`~`~

Sayu’s friend Mon is a self-proclaimed shit-talking slut who wears Hello Kitty pajamas. She spends more time in the library than she does with any boy, and she prefers posing for Print Club pictures to needless gossip. The slut part comes from the fact that Mon has a desperate, incurable crush on Sayu’s older brother Light, and the shit-talking part comes from her need to analyze his every move. Mon asks what sort of underwear he has, (boxers, which Sayu only knows about because one of her shirts had accidentally ended up in his hamper) and Mon asks how often he masturbates (which Sayu doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know).

Today, Mon is stretched across Sayu’s twin bed, dirty feet making faint marks on her yellow wallpaper. Today she’s chosen to fixate on what sort of soap Light uses. “I don’t know, he smells like grapefruit, or maybe vanilla, it’s sort of different every time, and it could be his clothes. One time, he smelled exactly like Head & Shoulders, but that can’t be it, he can’t possibly have dandruff!” Sayu wonders if she can put her off by detailing the wicked case of athlete’s foot Light had recently had. Swollen, bubbly feet probably aren’t very titillating, and Sayu would love for Mon to shut up. But she doesn’t spoil her fun. Instead she says, “we have vanilla-hazelnut soap in the shower, so most likely he’s been using that.”

“Oh, no wonder he smells so delicious!!” she squeals, twisting manically on Sayu’s bed and kicking the wall. “I’ll have to buy some for myself the next time I go shopping! Well, I’d have to get the same kind! Where did you guys get it? What brand name?” Sayu shrugs, giggling slightly as picks at a string poking out of her rug. Tells Mon she’ll ask her mom when she gets home.

~`~`~

It’s been too long since Sayu’s had a bath.

This isn’t right. She was never one of those girls who could get away with not bathing. Even when it wasn’t hot outside, she sweats. She gets acne. She starts to stink. And if her listless squirming and vague grimaces are any indication, she’s started her period. Sachiko shouldn’t have let it go on this long, but Sayu’s shown no inclination to clean herself. Sayu hasn’t moved from the huddled mass on her bed since she got home. Sachiko had helped her to the bathroom a few times, had treated her like an infant, wiped her down.

Now she hast to give the girl a proper bath. She hasn’t done it herself and she should have, but she’ll get sick if she stays this filthy. And so Sachiko hauls her daughter out of bed. It’s difficult to get her to the bathroom. There is no strength in Sayu’s body, she makes no effort not to slide to the floor. She is a corpse with a beating heart.

Stripping Sayu is no easy task. Her shirt gets caught on her elbow, her ear, her matted hair. Sachiko has to sit her down and lift her legs for her, see parts of her daughter that she has not seen since she was small. She tries not to care too much about that. Tries to push her into the bathtub without hurting her too badly. If she fails she doesn’t know about it, because Sayu makes no sound. Doesn’t say if the water’s too hot, or if the shampoo stings her eyes. Just stares into the steam and leans backwards, limp and gaping.

But when Sachiko glides a bar of coarse, oatmeal-studded soap over Sayu’s shivering skin, she stops her. She closes her hand over the bar and whispers, “Mommy, let me do that.” It takes every ounce of restraint Sachiko has not to hug her right there in the bathtub.

~`~`~

The bills don’t lie.

They owe thousands of dollars in medical fees. Thousands in funeral expenses. Hundreds on therapy and medication, hundred on utilities, thousands on their mortgage, and five dollars to the grocery store after she broke down crying there when she realized she could not afford to buy milk. There’s a pension and there’s life insurance, there are well-meaning gifts from family friends, but all of it is sucked dry by the family’s debt. This isn’t the only way that they’re falling apart, but it’s the only way Sachiko can bring herself to think about. The only one she can control.

Sachiko makes soap. Financially, it’s of minimal use. She doesn’t sell a lot of soap, and the ingredients are costly, the lye dangerous if she’s crying and not paying attention. But the process is soothing, and teaching Sayu to make it brings her out of her shell. She suggests scents now, says that it’s be fun to make soap shaped like sushi. They make it together, not caring if the soap comes out alright or not, just loving the smell of cinnamon or lemongrass or whatever they’ve chosen, loving that they’re both alive to take this on.

It’s always on their minds, but neither one of them ever asks whether Light or Soichiro would like the soap they’ve made.

death note, fanfic, dn_contest

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