Porcelain for Lifelink
Title: Porcelain
Characters/Pairing: Chrome Dokuro (Chrome/Her Mother implied)
Rating: PG-13 (implied abuse)
Warnings: Implied (sexual) abuse
Chosen Prompt: Chrome/Her Mother, One night stands, A lack of understanding, beauty in its purest form."
Summary: A broken doll can still be mended, right?
Notes: Thanks to sleepfighter and comixologist for keeping me on track somehow. Also Tria, for the final beta.
This is the way the world ends, not with a whimper but with broken wings and eyeless dolls. Shattered glass, bent cages with doors welded shut. And girls that probably shouldn't have existed, but did.
To a young child, their mother is a goddess, coming down from on high to bestow their touch. What does it mean when their touch brings only pain? No, not just pain, but confusion that's sharp like glass, and something-something more. Something that Chrome lets her mind glide over because a mother is a goddess, and pain is hers to give and to soothe.
Chrome remembers these things, and does not cry. Sometimes she wonders if that too was broken by her mother's betrayal.
Even so, laying on her small mattress, in the corners of a dusty, broken down school building that is barely a memory of shattered windows and walls, she tries. She tries at night, when she still feels the brush of a hand on her cheek and a woman's voice in her ear whispering, "it will be our little secret, Chrome-chan, my pretty Chrome-chan."
She can still feel the ache where love and devotion used to reside, for all that her willing worship had been torn from her chest like handfuls of clay even years before the car accident. Slowly she became a sacrifice on the alter of mother's love, pinned down with fine needles of duty and filial piety, letting herself be bled until she felt dry as a curled, dead leaf.
The accident hollowed her out, made her as much of a ghost as the fingers that still comb through her hair when she's alone at night, murmuring that she's useless and worthless and deserves no better than to be a husk of a girl. That she doesn't deserve her mother's sacrifice. Because Chrome herself was born as a sacrifice, born to be emptied of all she was, until she was nothing but brittle shell.
Dolls don't cry from their empty eyes, and so Chrome's eyes ache with something like tears, but it's just pressure, the last little bits of herself that want to come out. She puts them back in their place carefully. Even the dreams of hands and mouth and teeth and cold, cold smiles can't elicit anything more can the throb of the old wounds in her chest. The ones that have scarred over and the ones that she wishes could scar over because phantom scabs are hard to pick.
Sometimes, though, the tears come, hot and prickling the edges of her blurred vision. But not for pain, never for pain. They come for sunshine smiles and sweet, airy cakes. Those are the foods of a doll who is whole, and so they make Chrome feel whole again. They make the throbbing abate and fill the ragged tears deep inside with something soft, like cotton or kotatsu in winter.
"Look alive, da byan!" Ken crouched over Chrome, poking her face with a forefinger. "Not like I care, but Kakipi thinks you should come shopping with us."
"Wasn't that your idea, Ken?" Chikusa crossed her arms over her flat chest and regarded Chrome's curled body with an expression blanker than Chrome's own. "You're hoping those girls will give you cake again."
Chrome watched them bicker and thought about dogs on the bed and smiles like summer, as she let herself settle back in a body that wasn't whole, but maybe wasn't entirely empty anymore either.
Characters/Pairing: Chrome Dokuro (Chrome/Her Mother implied)
Rating: PG-13 (implied abuse)
Warnings: Implied (sexual) abuse
Chosen Prompt: Chrome/Her Mother, One night stands, A lack of understanding, beauty in its purest form."
Summary: A broken doll can still be mended, right?
Notes: Thanks to sleepfighter and comixologist for keeping me on track somehow. Also Tria, for the final beta.
This is the way the world ends, not with a whimper but with broken wings and eyeless dolls. Shattered glass, bent cages with doors welded shut. And girls that probably shouldn't have existed, but did.
To a young child, their mother is a goddess, coming down from on high to bestow their touch. What does it mean when their touch brings only pain? No, not just pain, but confusion that's sharp like glass, and something-something more. Something that Chrome lets her mind glide over because a mother is a goddess, and pain is hers to give and to soothe.
Chrome remembers these things, and does not cry. Sometimes she wonders if that too was broken by her mother's betrayal.
Even so, laying on her small mattress, in the corners of a dusty, broken down school building that is barely a memory of shattered windows and walls, she tries. She tries at night, when she still feels the brush of a hand on her cheek and a woman's voice in her ear whispering, "it will be our little secret, Chrome-chan, my pretty Chrome-chan."
She can still feel the ache where love and devotion used to reside, for all that her willing worship had been torn from her chest like handfuls of clay even years before the car accident. Slowly she became a sacrifice on the alter of mother's love, pinned down with fine needles of duty and filial piety, letting herself be bled until she felt dry as a curled, dead leaf.
The accident hollowed her out, made her as much of a ghost as the fingers that still comb through her hair when she's alone at night, murmuring that she's useless and worthless and deserves no better than to be a husk of a girl. That she doesn't deserve her mother's sacrifice. Because Chrome herself was born as a sacrifice, born to be emptied of all she was, until she was nothing but brittle shell.
Dolls don't cry from their empty eyes, and so Chrome's eyes ache with something like tears, but it's just pressure, the last little bits of herself that want to come out. She puts them back in their place carefully. Even the dreams of hands and mouth and teeth and cold, cold smiles can't elicit anything more can the throb of the old wounds in her chest. The ones that have scarred over and the ones that she wishes could scar over because phantom scabs are hard to pick.
Sometimes, though, the tears come, hot and prickling the edges of her blurred vision. But not for pain, never for pain. They come for sunshine smiles and sweet, airy cakes. Those are the foods of a doll who is whole, and so they make Chrome feel whole again. They make the throbbing abate and fill the ragged tears deep inside with something soft, like cotton or kotatsu in winter.
"Look alive, da byan!" Ken crouched over Chrome, poking her face with a forefinger. "Not like I care, but Kakipi thinks you should come shopping with us."
"Wasn't that your idea, Ken?" Chikusa crossed her arms over her flat chest and regarded Chrome's curled body with an expression blanker than Chrome's own. "You're hoping those girls will give you cake again."
Chrome watched them bicker and thought about dogs on the bed and smiles like summer, as she let herself settle back in a body that wasn't whole, but maybe wasn't entirely empty anymore either.