Writing Wednesday: Michael & Dana
Valentine's Day is coming up, so I'm making it my goal to write a drabble about one of my couples for each Writing Wednesday until then. This week is Michael and Dana from Crooked, the working title for my cartoon series. Michael is a grad student studying some sort of science (I say chemistry in this piece, but I may change my mind later), and Dana is a classmate and acquaintance that he pines for. Michael and his roommate Jamie, who works in robotics department with Dana, are unknowing minions for the ex-supervillain that funds their university. They think they're just experimenting, but they're really building the weapons that he will use when he returns to power. Oh, and Dana is secretly an android. This sounds muddled now, but it should turn out a lot more dramatically in the actual show.
We were in the lab, Dana and I. Her lab coat was unbuttoned, and she wore the green dress underneath. She was cleaning test tubes, running her fingers up and down the cold glass. Her nails were the same color as her dress. Her wavy hair was falling out of its bun, strips of it curling on her shoulders. She saw me watching her and she smiled, slowly, thickly. She pulled off her glasses, tucked them on top of her head.
"Michael. Come help me."
I put down whatever I was doing and walked towards her. I couldn't feel my legs.
Her legs were bare. She didn't have stockings on today. Just the green dress, the lab coat, and her sneakers. Her sneakers were clean, just as white as if they were new. But her lab coat was stained, red, black, silver. There was a scorch mark on the breast pocket.
I reached her and she handed me a test tube.
"Fill it up."
"With what?"
"We need your blood."
"I can't."
"You can't keep putting this off."
I suddenly felt hands on my shoulders. It was Jamie, in the beanie hat he always wears, pulled down close to his eyes. His lab coat was stained too. His hands eased me down onto a cold metal table. He stared down at me, face expressionless.
Dana mounted me, a knee on either side of my abdomen. She held a thin knife.
"This isn't how it's supposed to go."
"Micheal..."
She curved down, face right next to mine. The knife hovered over my chest. She opened her lips to whisper something to me but all I could hear was beeping.
"Huh?"
Dana's face melted away. She was gone. Jamie's firm hands and his stare, the cold table, the thin knife, it was all gone.
The beeping was still there.
I reached for the alarm clock, couldn't seem to press the button hard enough, couldn't shake the grogginess. After enough tries, the beeping ceased. I dropped my arm to dangle over the side of the bed. I could hear Jamie frying eggs and bacon in the kitchen, performing his chosen roommate duty.
I wasn't shaken yet. It would come later. All I felt, all I ever felt right after these dreams, was longing. I'd never gotten that close to her in real life. We didn't even work in the same lab. I was a chemist. She worked in robotics with Jamie. I only glimpsed her in the hallways, the coffee shop, the parking lot.
Dana Wainwright was only my dream girl.
I also edited the tags for all my old Writing Wednesday posts, and put in the new banner I made. The first post, with the descriptions of all my series, has been updated with Crooked and probably needs more story updates too.