exsiliumlogs | Douse Yourself In Cheap Perfume

Entry tags:

Douse Yourself In Cheap Perfume

Date & Time: 6/14!!!
Location: Hospital room 612 (???)
Characters: Kanaya Maryam and "Haruka Takahashi"
Summary:
laying miserable in the hospital bed with fishpuns why this why her
Why Us Ru
Why Us
Warnings: An essentially innocent interaction between two young women who are essentially nothing of the kind. .....probably.

Kanaya kept going back to the hospital. Except that it wasn't the hospital. That took getting used to. Maintaining the proper cognitive dissonance (when she didn't want to go back to the hospital) was hard (she could never go back to the hospital), especially when she was working in the hospital (on Earth, when nobody (who got terminated) was ever safe in the hospital). It was a good thing she didn't have to sleep. Because then she could work longer shifts and she didn't have awful nightmares. Like she did when... She didn't even have to waste time remembering things like that, let alone sleeping. It was a good thing she didn't have to sleep.

With her mental state rapidly deteriorating, her thoughts flitted more and more and more often to her friend Haruka, like flutterbugs with severe brain damage incapable of grasping such basic notions as friendship being a two-way street oh god dammit not again. Regardless of how unlikely her regard was to be returned, she was genuinely worried about Haruka's health in this crisis; they'd discussed her physical state deteriorating early on, but she knew the girl was probably too stubborn to be hospitalized without being practically dragged ~~or cursed at~~. With this motivation in mind she had given a letter, written neatly in jade green pen on stationary, to a transport living on the fourth floor, directed that it go to "Haruka Takahashi, she's a transport of Earth Japanese origins around my age, a little shorter and thinner, with brown hair like this and light brown, a light brown eye--" and no, she did not mean "eyes". That name was of course put onto the envelope so there would be no room for confusion.

So today it was June 14th, and once again Kanaya went into work (volunteering...? She wanted to be here) and lingered closer to room 612 than she should on her rounds to see if it had gained an occupant. On this date she paid particularly close attention to her tablet; it had dawned on her that by now Haruka might have gotten so ill (she was assuredly ill, the way clocks chime and Eridan developed grudges against people) she could have become unable to adequately walk here in the rain. Or even climb stairs. It was unlikely she would ask for help, or even arrive at all, but Kanaya was prepared all the same. She had gradually begun running out of anyone else important for whom to prepare, anyway, so she had time.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

All told, the past week was a blur. Illness, sure, whatever. She got sick all the time, especially in this environment (sometimes she wondered if the mundane populace of this city used soap when they washed their hands), and would flit in and out of colds within a week. Infection, true, that had occurred too, in part from environment and in part from her own negligence. Fever, of course, why not? It came and went, and when it went the coughing came, and when the inability to breathe passed, fever returned. She thought she slept through much of that, though maybe she hadn't? Sometimes there was more paint on her hands than was rightly appropriate for someone intermittently coughing and crying into a pillow should have been able to do.

Whale, if she had, she hoped it was on something that paint was meant to go on.

She thought of this now, sitting in a bed of unknown location and origin—didn't she leave the apartment complex to go... somewhere? Get something? Water filters? Was that it?—peering at her fingernails. There was an awful lot of the stuff sticking to her cuticles and under her nails. She was more lucid now, which Ruka took as a positive sign. The oxygen mask was uncomfortable, in a way that was familiar from childhood, and knew well enough to not remove it when she couldn't fully piece together how one location had led into another, or any subsequent.

And at some point during that haze of illness, she received a letter, and though she read it (she remembered reading it), much of the content had been lost on her compromised thought processes. It was folded in her purse, with her tablet and so many other miscellaneous possessions, which was hanging off the side of a table. Her attention drifted from the purples and reds and green stains on her hands to the bag, wondering if it would be worth the effort to grab.

The date, the room—the significance of these, contained or unrestrained, were lost on her at the moment.

She floated into the room like a ghost and somewhat marveled that Ruka had graced the humble, untrustworthy Exsilium hospital with her presence after all. But she didn't want to show that on her face, as it would be a concession of station. The proper way to express her station was through action alone. (As someone without the human excuse for a blood color, her station was almost automatically higher than that of anyone else in this fucking building, but none of her hemosuperiors thought jade blood mattered even that much anymore. Where did that place her, if she was worse than the salt of Alternian earth meant to be culled on sight? Probably very goddamn low indeed. Oh, wait, this must be the spot on the spectrum reserved for idiot girls who had the gall to not stay dead as doomed, inferior copies were meant.)

In any case, she was never meant for an administrative position, unlike some people. Her life was of no worth, and very few people were kind enough to think otherwise. So it was that she was drawn to the monitor and its comforting messages of subcritical condition first, before turning to the patient attached (by various little pricks of blood along with the eternally obvious and attractive one on her face).

"Did you get breakfast, before you checked in?"

She saw someone enter the room in her periphery vision, but it wasn't until the girl spoke that Ruka really acknowledged that it was an entity worth the effort of engaging. (In other words, not a doctor.) The sideways glance confirmed a few things about her visitor, but it took a plural of seconds before the name and identity of such registered in her mind.

Oh. Right. She'd gotten a letter from Kanaya, hadn't she?

No matter (for the moment). She'd been asked a question, and though she wasn't in much a mood to answer, it might save her from more trouble to speak than if she refused. Careful, her hands groped along the sides and the fastening of the oxygen mask, seeking the proper place to begin removal.

It was a pain in the ass to talk in things like this.

But, when it finally came off, the voice that responded to Kanaya was much different than the one she was used to—deeper, rough from illness, a throat clogged with phlegm. "I'm not hungry."

It wasn't actually an answer to the question.

She heard that. The corners of her mouth twitched, tempted to turn downwards but not ready yet to form into a frown. Instead she quickly glanced at the nearest timepiece and began mentally demarcating the next few hours into intervals - Weve Got Snacks, Its Noon Outside, I Know Its Been At Least One Sixth Of Todays Solar Cycle Since You Consumed Anything, onward like that. Haruka had to eat (though this was technically not something she knew for sure, it was extremely likely). Unlike Kanaya, who just needed to drink, but that looked like a hobby to most people. Who had this frustrating tendency to not get gaping wounds or--it was a really bad idea to be thinking of blood around Haruka, whose blood was thickly infected and thin in every other respect. There was some additional tang in the air underneath those traits, but much too faint to ever identify in the fog of other patients - and antispectics besides, which made her nostrils and neurons flare uncomfortably.

She wasn't lost in thought or inner conflict; these concerns just hammered moderately on her skull all the time. (She never voiced them to anyone. That wasn't how Alternians conducted themselves, especially not lowbloods.) To the contrary, her motions in opening the drawer of the bedside table were decisive, drawing out a box of tissues and placing it delicately on the surface, secure and not even touching Haruka's slightly precarious bag. Kanaya would have moved to correct the bag's position herself (it ragged at her - the girl deserved a sylladex anyway), but she had a feeling that act performed without explicit permission would send Haruka into surly, uncooperative fits.

"I find that unsurprising considering the rarity of appetite suppression as a symptom of illness, or rather lack thereof." Okay, now she frowned. She'd gotten herself into a badly unclear loop again, hadn't she? What kind of lack would Haruka assume she referenced? (She had all kinds of lacks, especially when she was in a hospital--she wasn't supposed to be thinking about how the place where she was constituted a hospital.) The lack of rarity, of course. "Just in case there was any remaining ambiguity, long-term self-starvation isn't a recommended course of treatment."

Breathing was a bit harder without the mask, she found; the concentration of oxygen was thinner, of course, so deeper breaths were necessary to get even close to the proper amount necessary into her lungs. Then again, it was a hospital, and from what she remembered from being immersed in news and culture in The City was that hospitals, despite their attempts otherwise, often had a high concentration of germs floating about. Patients would often become sick with other, contagious diseases while in treatment, and that was in a place like The City. Exsilium, with its lackluster supplies and limited staff, was likely a hundred times worse than even the worst of the places she'd visited in that world.

She held the mask to her face and breathed in through that, as though that would undo any of the damage already done. Ruka would lower it when she spoke, but afterwards cover her face once more. Kanaya's own conflicts were, of course, lost on her.

"I know how my body functions, even when it's ill. Especially so," she said, and were her voice not so clogged she might have avoided sounding petulant. "I'm not hungry. It wouldn't do me good right now, anyway."

Kanaya couldn't hold back the frown now. She held back everything else, after all. Facial expressions were pretty far beyond her at this stage. Maybe she shouldn't be encouraging expectoration - would that just be an irritant? Her medical training was minimal and here her patient was smart enough to notice as well as stubborn enough to resist. Why was it always the petulant ones with her? Could it be that the hardness of their hearts offset the soft pulp her sorry excuse for a pumpbiscuit had been ripped into? She didn't have anyone to discuss her emotions with; in all likeligood this neurosis of hers would go unexamined. Whatever the cause of her cardiovascular yearning to end its emptiness, Haruka was currently the obscure object of said intention. Humans were always bad targets for such actions, of course - they couldn't be helped in her experience - but it was an inferential leap that Haruka constituted one in the first place. Kanaya had never asked her point blank and received an affirmative answer. Wouldn't it be just like her legislaceratorly influence to gracefully sidestep such a question? After all, at this juncture in the mystery, such a glaring omission or secret or similar was the only explanation for Haruka's existence.

(The category of similar possibilities included an actual massive lie, but Kanaya couldn't really bear that idea even if, had she been acting more rational or more prejudiced, analysis would have yielded the higher likelihood that theory would be true.)

"That's surprising, considering I've been laboring under the impression membass of your species require three meals every twenty-four hours to survive." Maybe she was just wrong, though. Kanaya was always wrong about humans. Not to mention her fair share of trolls. People in general, really. Beings, she should say, considering the widespread denial of personhood to entities like her. Sunshinin' sins against science, might be the alternative turn of phrase. Even if she was the only extant rainbow drinker in paradox space about whom she could mislead others or herself.

"Depends on the person."

It was hard to suppress the cough she could feel in her chest and her throat, aching to come out; it wheezed out through clenched teeth, ribs feeling replaced with a netting of barbed wire, tightening around her. It was a different illness than usual, but it was still sickness, and it was hard to hate something that happened so often. Then again, it was rarely so bad as this.

She kept the one hand holding the mask to her face; the other, to give her some distraction, was folded upon itself, fingertips tugging at the loop of gold around her wrist, seeking out the warmest spots of affection still bound there. It didn't make her feel any less lonely, not really; if anything, it made longing worse. But the sentiments helped. Gave her purpose. Something worth going back to, worth living and dying for.

Her eye tracked Kanaya's movement, her expression, but it wasn't easy to read. "We can survive on much less."

Much less? That definitely, certainly didn't sound right to Kanaya. Granted, both she herself and human girls had flirted with nutrition refusal in... the hospital, where she might or might not be now. That was self-punishment as much as petulance, though, and Haruka had nothing to punish herself for, right? Not in Exsilium, where she obviously could not have taken a single life. Any affliction of such a kind would be purely nervous, something meriting further fussing. Like the obscure object was doing with her wrist - Kanaya did not move her eyes to focus on the motion, but she did file it under the general observation that Haruka's arms were a location of mystery.

"That's sustenance," she countered. "You're not impoverished, you deserve better than that."

This was a pointless argument. A pattern she fell into often: Not wanting to be regarded as an enemy rather than simply a nuisance, she would likely not resort to force here, and the only actor in the process of making the decision to eat would be Haruka. More important: She heard the sputum underlying the other girl's voice, and this moved her to the action of plucking three tissues at once out of the bedside box. They were placed high on her patient's free arm, almost touching shoulder; easily obtained either by folding her arm at the elbow, or reaching over with her other hand... letting go of the oxygen mask in the process. One of those routes wouldn't add to the armwise mysterious aura.

Not knowing the trap for what it was, Ruka was snared by it with ease. She watched the laying of the kerchiefs, a little confused by the method of delivery, but thought nothing—could not think anything—of it. Her right hand lowered the mask from her face, setting it down to collect the tissues, covering her mouth with those instead.

There, she allowed herself the hard coughs, and even through the folded layers she could feel the damp and the weight of substance, and just that was enough to make her gag anew, coughing harder. How gross. She could feel her eye water, even under its tightly-clenched lid; the stinging in her throat felt worse for succumbing to the cough. It was easy to forget that there was anyone else in the room, in that moment of heightened awareness of self. Easier still, to forget that the way her fingers tugged at that bracelet, like one a cold ocean might cling to a taut rope or the chain of an anchor, would look so strange.

For the first time, Kanaya properly caught sight of the item on Haruka's wrist: A gold bracelet; an ornament ordinarily covered by her constant long sleeves. Combined with past glimpses she could only assume that this accessory was just as customary as her long sleeves worn in defiance of otherwise shut-in clothing, such as flats (which Kanaya herself was terribly fond of but had given up in recognition of Exsilium's interminable rain). The conclusion that Haruka actively hid this bracelet was not far away nor particularly far-fetched in light of her hidden voice and face. Why, though? The question did not yield an immediate answer.

She stayed back, granting her patient temporary respite until her coughs grew quieter than speaking voice, but spoke while they were still too present to allow immediate response. "I shouldn't be wasting your breath this much, should I? It's just that I knew you'd object to such an idea when the question was phrased like that."

When the cough finally subsided, the self-disgust was apparent on her face as she pulled the tissues away, damp with phlegm and speckled with color that did not belong. It crumpled in her hand, flung to the side for a wastebasket.

Considering her illness and her obvious physical limitations, there was something to be said about the fact her projectile landed where targeted. The absent attention given to the task was one.

"It's fine," she said, with just as little deliberate focus as went to the throw. "It's not like I have a finite supply, you know."

Her eyes followed the object in its arc and settled with the fall, the way they did when she was in the gallery. Hitting the ground was intentional this time - as it was, probably, all of the others. Why was it always the rebels with her, she lamented again.

"Finite, no, of course not," she conceded. The pitcher's hand was unimportant when unoccupied; unlike its right counterpart. There had to be significance to the bracelet hidden around her wrist. Though Haruka was the type to go to such measures of secrecy, she didn't do these things without reason, did she? Maybe it was magic; maybe it was her real weapon. ...nah. Haruka "liked" science fiction and "used" a bow. The bracelet was clearly just important somehow in its own right, another way.

She almost began to lean her elbows on the bedside table - but Haruka's things were there, keeping her from making the motion. Kanaya resolved to ask her patient soon about adjusting her possession's precarious position. "You do use it for other things, though, don't you?"

"Use what, my breath?" What a weird question, she thought, squinting out of a teary eye. The pain of the coughing fit was subsiding, if only momentarily, and with it came the reminder of company. The misery lingered in her pallid face. "Not right now, no. Definitely not."

"Are you sure?" Kanaya put her cheek in her hand. Perhaps it was a condescending gesture to make, considering she was still standing unsupported. "As much as I've had the inexplicable feeling we have some common traits, Haruka, I thought needing to breathe was one of our many differences."

And apparently their common traits included hidden jewelry... maybe the other members of Haruka's social circle - her previous social circle that actually existed as opposed to stubbornly refusing to form, like a compound at the wrong temperature - maybe they didn't approve of the piece. Maybe, like Kanaya's necklace, they didn't like what it meant, and maybe, whatever it did mean to Haruka, that was still so important that she had to have it on her person at all times but hidden from view. Magic still wasn't a possible explanation for that thing? Kanaya wouldn't call her sylladex and its ability to correlate an invisible personal possession to a key magic, but to someone from another world it might be. There had to be more to Haruka's world than "normal", when she knew "normal" didn't exist.

It wasn't like she'd gotten it from a seadweller or anything though, as the typical origins of gold jewelry would have been on Alternia. That would just be this preposterous cosmic insult.

And yet.

"Talking is an exhale," she explained, giving her slightly damp palm a leery eye. She was so used to the types of illness that clawed around on the inside and never emerged; this whole... mucus and phlegm parade was neither something she was used to, or something she liked. Give her dizzy spells and black points of memory any day of the week, she thought, even if such bargains would sound just as bad when well.

And, while it was impossible for her to muster up any positive feeling while so miserable with illness, she could anchor herself to those emotions underneath her fingertips, tripping notes of devotion, like music from a harp only she could hear. A song she could not, would not forget.

Using her power like this wasn't wise—it was a drain on her body's energy, pushing her more easily into a state of exhaustion—but if she could wear herself out enough to go back to sleep, it was clearly a better choice than waiting for the coughing to wear her body out.

Distracted by her own self, it took her a moment to finish the thought. "It's just as much effort as breathing is, so I don't mind."

The several seconds of silence were spent staring at her patient, and then empty space. She resisted the urge to consult a timepiece for the sake of finding out just how long Haruka had spent in her care. That would demonstrate detachment from the task before her, if she wanted to feign professionalism. Privately (and as with the grand majority of her most personal desires, parasitically) she didn't want to find out that she was supposed to be somewhere else. Of course around Haruka there was no escaping the inevitability of separation. Their mutual desire to no longer be in the hospital could be felt in the air, psychic powers or not, as strongly as the scent of antiseptics. White, the color of all her aberrant memories.

"I get the feeling," Kanaya said and then stopped. The incomplete thought, the unexpressed feeling floated in the still waters of her throat a little longer. Something her patient - she felt such a horrible sort of happy to at least have a label, in this literally sick situation, for the girl who would not let herself become her friend - might deem important. This was the sort of echo chamber where the amplification necessary for someone to grant her emotional significance had always happened. She stupidly savored the nonexistent hope that Haruka would play the same part.

"I get the feeling that you take advantage of my inferior xenobiological knowledge to present the facts as basically in harmony with whatever you feel like doing at the time." Not that she would stop her. The monocular girl was untouchable.

"Oh, certainly." It was almost callous, though the tone was wrong for it. But then, it was hard to adjust tone with a throat as clogged as hers, so maybe the words were meant to be sharp. In the end, it didn't seem to matter much: her shoulders rolled in a very deliberate shrug, as all her gestures tended to seem, and this time she turned her head enough to look at Kanaya with her one eye.

She didn't seem much capable of smiling.

"If you don't know a human body well enough to know what's the truth, I'm not going to point it out to you."

Kanaya did not receive many opportunities to look directly into Haruka's attractive, asymmetrical face. Considering how rarely they were in the same building, or on the same floor, or in the same room, or facing in complementary directions - in light of her invariable, inexplicable opting for text - the amount of times she had done this could definitely be counted on the fingers of one hand with no need to include the thumb. She would have made a conscious effort not to linger on the only spot of color in the unusually earth-toned features relative to those possessed by other Transports of her ethnicity, but wouldn't Haruka notice equally the flinching away that an excessive focus on her good side would entail? Kanaya was no slimy pink human fresh from the horrors of viviparous hatching. She could face her patient head on, like a professional, as emotionlessly as her similarly lopsided and aesthetically pleasing smilies.

She just also wasn't breathing. Maybe she should change that. There was no concern about wasting her patient's oxygen, since the respiration she performed was just going through the motions as typical of heinous undead. On the other hand, the only motivation would be if she had something to say, and right now the situation seemed to call for an expression of her interest in alleviating her ignorance about the human body, and every phrase that came to mind sounded far too much like flirtation, which was something she absolutely could not do in the direction of an unallied Transport, who was with someone in the incomprehensible, unconditional, unilateral human fashion; that would create a conflict of interest Kanaya had never wanted, except for the time that she had, in a similar restrictive white-stained sanitizer scented hell, and the more time she spent thinking about what should be a non-issue, the more she risked looking like she was crazy instead of just thoughtful.

"You're in about as much condition to do that as you were to make up metaphors involving the rain last week," is what she said instead before turning away to resume her attention on the monitors, as opposed to the question of whether that poor condition extended to the other query she had not made. The way Haruka's blood flowed sluggishly with infection was the important sensory input to process, not the shape of its circuits through her lithe body or languishment around that heart-shaped hole in her skull.

Her mouth pulled back to flash teeth, an expression with absolutely no resemblance to a smile.

"I'm not sure what it is you expect from me, Kanaya."

In stray motions, she wiped one hand against a distant patch of bedspread, and the other stopped its play with the gold bangle. Her head canted to the side, loose hair limp against her face. Ill, weak, and no more easily read than esoteric text etched in stone.

"Because, whatever it is, it's too much."

What the hell was happening on the screens of these monitors? Kanaya had no idea beyond surface assessments of "good" or "bad", and how would she know if those heuristics she had been hurriedly taught would mean entirely different things in the context of another illness? Could she learn from these pixels the truth about her patient's mysterious heart condition?

"Whelk," she said because the K stuck onto the interjection much like the mollusk it turned the word into, unnoticed, unlike the larger and more popular aquatic mammal. She frowned at herself and only then turned to her ailing companion.

"I'd say that I expect nothing, but your objections to such statements on my part have this extremely unfortunate way of modifying my expectations that I try to resist."

It wasn't a replacement that she was used to; pods had been their back-and-forth, easier stressed and drawn out in banter. For that alone, her reaction was only a momentary, milimetric narrowing of her visible eye, rather than the more deliberate squint it could have been.

Ah whale.

"Then let me rephrase. You're here for a reason. And don't pretend it's only because you want to play doctor. So. Why? Because the sooner we get it over with, the fewer circles we have to run."

She'd sorta gotten high on all these sanitized sopor alternatives to the point of forgetting that she might not just tuck Haruka into coon and go hive and go on with her undeath. This was one of those days something would actually happen to her.

"Did I not come up with enough reasonable-sounding arguments in that letter? Because I'm not shore if you want me to attack you with more or reduce my motivation to something that would sound stupid if vocalized."

That earned the full-fledged squint, disoriented by the word choice and the mention of a letter. What letter? The only letters Ruka knew about were the ones that she wrote, back in the City, as a precaution for (what she had then felt) was an incredibly unlikely circumstance of being exPorted.

Briefly, her expression softened, saddened, and she wondered if they ever reached their addressees.

But Kanaya wouldn't know about that—couldn't, in fact, and she'd been talking about one she'd written, right? Which clearly was not in the same circumstances, and—

Her gaze darted momentarily to her bag, still sitting on the table. That's right. It'd been difficult to parse through, with that tight script and her pounding headache, but with the reminder of its existence, the contents came with.

"No, don't get sappy on me. I don't think I have the fortutide for something like that right now."

Her response came quickly, with ardor, as her skin began to flicker more and more quickly: "You don't have to do anything you can't endure! Do you think I'm genuinely under the impression that 'playing doctor' with you can change whether or not you could call me a friend?"

Oh, no. She had said the F-word, and it wouldn't surprise her if Haruka thought of it that way literally. With that same supernatural speed, she clapped her hand over her mouth exactly as if she had just sworn.

The more emotional Kanaya became, the easier she was to read, to empathize with. The easier, in a way, to feel connected to. It was almost pitiful (though not in the way that her race felt things to be pitiful; Ruka knew from experience), like some extended-cable teen melodrama. With alien vampires. So, exactly such.

Her hand instinctively went to her eye patch, the heel of her palm pressing against the fabric as if to dig that sphere of gold deeper into her skull, to let the catastrophe contained therein to center her thoughts and feelings back where they belonged—but there was no resistance, as there had not been for months, and her hand dropped away just as quickly to instead fuss with her bracelet. Golden anchors.

Her gaze was fixed on an empty expanse of wall, or something far past it. "Well, if you were, you sure picked the wrong profession." A blithe joke, deflection; Ruka shook her head, nearly sighing, but holding it back lest it trigger another fit of coughs.

"I doubt you're under any impression of success, that's easy enough to say. With the way you are now, you might consider your every endeavor doomed from the start."

Her thumb raked against the underside of the bracelet, the space between metal and flesh, and felt the letters etched there scrape against her skin. It was warm, and slick with sweat, and served as focus enough.

"But you hope for something better than that."

She never knew whether to take these emotional attacks like the punch to the gut they really were or the sickle to the chest she had actually experienced herself. Both were reminders of the past - like that gesture Haruka was making, hadn't she done the same thing when they first met? Did that mean this could be the last? Memories flooded into her think pan and flowed over the sides - frantic texting and pleading and all in stupid six-Earth-month intervals, was this just her latest episode? Haruka knew - she reached right into her chest through the mess of scars and read her unbeating cardiovascular organ like a book, where the pages were torn out and frayed. Of course she had deduced the true preposterousness of the endeavor that had involved - him, oversweet plum wine, Hope and destruction, she capitalized the word for the love of God--

"Yes, it's hopeless and I'm an insane fool for wanting things to be any other way. Tell me something I don't know, please! How to escape a destiny I don't want, for instance. Or-- or--"

She bites her tongue before charging ahead against her better judgment. "There's nothing good waiting for me on the other side of the Transporter, whether my doom is a delusion or not, and-- and I'm sorry for getting attached to you when you would rather be gone than here. It's an inconvenience, I know, and -- and you don't have to play along with me, I know you'd be happier in the long term if you didn't, but besides throwing myself behind the Initiative, I have no recourse except other Transports, do you understand? You're nothing like them, Haruka," and she struggled to keep all three syllables in an address so fond, "they broke the duplicate manufacturing form when they made you, and that's no devolution into sap, that's an honest statement! You're too paranoid to say a word that gets recorded, you read science fiction nobody else has, and you banter with trolls like one of our worldmates. I wish you were one, because you understand me better than any of the ones we have left and this is you acting surly.'

"I was afraid of that."

Still that calm voice, rough and ill-pitched for sickness; still the calm exterior, in the face of almost all things. A stone too sturdy for the crashing of waves, or perhaps a lake too placid for much more than the skipping of pebbles. For all the deep trenches dug out and the feelings unearthed, it was not Ruka's damaged heart excavated for all to see; it was not her burnt-edge past or miserable existence being dissected.

And how cruel she felt, in this imbalance. How insensitive. How merciless, she knew, for even now, even at the end of this, Kanaya would leave this room and not learn even so much as Ruka's real name. Even though Kanaya's feelings could reach her, they could not change her.

A hand grasped for the oxygen mask.

"You think I'm remarkable because I can understand you. You, who feels so isolated from the rest of her comrades because of what was suffered beyond their sight. At least, that's part of the reason. But, you can only see from your own perspective. For me, it could be anyone. I can—" Read hearts like stories, but that was a little specific, wasn't it? Her head shook. "—that is, that sort of understanding, for me, it's not some one in a million chance. It's easy for me. But, in spite, I guess, I can't reciprocate feelings like that at all."

Her shoulders moved in another deliberate shrug, and with a slow motion she pushed the oxygen mask to her face. Her head was pounding, and she was so tired. She could feel it, in strange contrast, the way moist phlegm seemed to build up inside her, but while her throat felt sapped dry. But it would be better to spit it out now, before it got any worse. She lowered the mask, but still would not look at Kanaya.

"I could call you a friend, but that wouldn't be the truth, you see? Something like that is beyond me now. And I could lie, but what's the point? Hurting someone for the sake of hurting them... it's just as pointless as anything else.

"The more you care about someone, the more they mean to you. Their opinions... they shape your actions, their words shape your feelings. The longer it goes, the greater a metamorphosis. That's why it has to be mutual. Sculptor needs to be sculpture, too. If someone etches their name on your heart, you want to return the favor. The same is true all over."

How long had it been, since the last time she felt this lonely? For the people she left behind, and the ones who had abandoned her? How many times had her etchings been filled in, and her tools taken away?

"... Do you understand, now?"

The sickle. Of course it was the sickle. White science, as she had only observed secondhand, burst through a person (or object, sometimes), something-and-something, all at once. A sickle on the other hand found its inevitably animate target and made the moment of extraction equal if not greater in pain when compared to the original entrance.

She was so sensible. She wasn't sadistic, like other members of her species - and Kanaya's own, the reminder of that hung heavily around her neck, rested directly in front of and with identical stillness to her heart, something she had similarly exposed to the other person in the room with her. She knew how casually her kind took insincerity, and she stopped before such an insult actually occurred. This wasn't even kindness to her, and once again her nerves pulled her towards the thought of what kindness would look like, assuming that wasn't just the incorrigible image of puncture marks on skin.

Kanaya owed her the acknowledgement of acquiescence to her honesty, if nothing else. "I think I understand as much as you intended, at least." How strange that the words did not ring out with her usual purposeful bell-like clarity. Her chitinous windhole felt slightly damp even though she hadn't done any drinking in some diabolical, despicable double-digit number of days. Perhaps the disease had finally spread to her as well. That might explain something even distraction with her current occupation couldn't: The stray pixels around her eyes weren't purely black at this moment, but only a slightly darker shade of jade.

Troll Stephenie Meyer had made a great deal of fuss about how rainbow drinkers were analogous to diamond; it was only pretending that this was actually true that drove Kanaya's determination to continue functioning in such a high lexical register. "I must admit I don't understand how - you're inclined towards etching names into stone instead of scrawling them into sand like virtually all other members of your species. Perhaps lightning strikes on a beach somewhere - and I am willing to accept that as an accident of nature instead of a spell somebody cast, I'm not aboat to start the argument about science versus magic again--" Haruka had been so very deliberate about her description of her gift to not use a single word that could be construed as supernatural in any way. If she was actually some kind of psionic, and this was the sort of treatment they received... all would be explained. The mystery had a doubled quality, when viewed this close up, where the difficult rising and falling of the lungs' work could be observed.

"Anyway, you're scientifically-minded, you know what happens when so much silicon is exposed to great heat, it turns into glass - and maybe for metaphorical purposes a perfect mirror with no earthly peer, and when an unsuspecting innocent is taken with her own reflection and brings a tool into contact with the seemingly smooth surface, it shatters into pieces with sharp edges that can cut the skin and draw blood..."

The metaphor had gotten away from her. In the moment she lost the ability to control the path her ocular globes took in their natural motion, and they meandered across the tantalizing gap, her pale neck, that heart, so weak, had she been told about that trait out loud or read it on the bright screen she had eschewed in her last resort method to bring her closer?

Haruka and her demands weren't all that hard to understand on a surface level. Rational people rarely were. The only questions revolved around why they were so rare, and perhaps the other little flaws with the surface - take the illogical fear of being adopted, which was unlike every other new Transport Ms. Takahashi's first concern... she'd certainly had friends in Tokyo before New York, hadn't she? And in her morbid curiosity Kanaya did have a fairly firm chronological guess - that the last time she'd been on the same soil as those peers she set eyes in the plural on them. Someone who saw her as nothing but (magnetic, maddening) monocular might be welcome in their own way as refreshingly accurate and someone with the formerly fond fully viewed wigglerhood memories would have to be evaded with text messages, while only the presumably rare human being who had actually seen her transformation from one to the other would be worth giving the time of day. And Kanaya could not possibly be one of those people, no matter how hard she tried.

"I do think I know what you've told me."

"Writing in sand is a bad metaphor, is why." She picked at the words she wanted to reply, the physical strain of staying upright weighing down on her shoulders. "Since, if you write a name in the sand, it smooths out into nothing, in no time. Have you ever tried it? Daily hardships would wear it down into nothing. The only thing a beach can retain are shells and driftwood, you know, dead things. Something beached, that's a slow death.

"Seems pretty pessimistic, you know, to represent bonds. And hearts are stronger than glass."

She glanced up once more, her single eye meeting Kanaya's pair. Exhaustion weighed at Ruka's eyelid, but any burst blood vessels were the result of illness, not of emotion; her skin was pallid, clammy, but her cheeks were dry.

"What conclusion have you reached?"

"I might be in even less condition to make metaphors than you are after all," she conceded with humor that didn't lift the mood an inch. "I did intend to express a pessimistic view, the idea that the matrons of the schoolhive are obligated to wipe the slate clean practically every day. The truth of the situation might not be quite as negative as that. You'd know, better than I would, as you somehow do in almost all things on this planet."

The other girl might be dead, she thought as their three eyes met. At this point it wouldn't surprise her. She'd never actually said anything about being alive, had she? That wasn't it, though, the lightning strike was unstaring right back at her.

She really had to give the staring a rest after more seconds than could be counted on one hand. Troll Stephenie Meyer couldn't have too strong an influence on her interpersonal choreography.

"The current working theory is that you aren't emotionally capable of reciprocating my desire for friendship, and - I'm not even sure you consider that exclusively a result of our current setting either."

"It doesn't help, that's for sure."

She tried for a laugh, air huffing out over her teeth, but it only served as irritant. Her gaze dropped, as did her head, ducking to cough hard into a folded elbow. Her shoulders wracked and her chest heaved, sharp, distinct gestures for how narrow her frame was, and in another context it might have looked the same as crying.

Her free hand gripped hard at the bed covers, knuckles almost white.

When finally the tremors ceased, Ruka pulled away with a disgusted sigh, hating the illness more than anything else.

"I should have warned you better, that this would happen."

Her first response was a bit faster than playing doctor really merited, though still nothing that would be worthy of the carnival. She placed a fresh supply of tissues, this time a collection of five, in easy reach of her patient's body - and her fingers lingered a second longer than clinically necessary, stealing nonskin contact that there was a very real possibility she would never experience again. Was Haruka's skin naturally cold, or was she wearing more layers than someone stubborn with a fever normally would?

Returned from the realm of actions to that of words, Kanaya shook her head, sharp glow cutting swaths through the less bright lighting of the room.

"I don't think you can blame yourself in exactly that manner. It probably wouldn't have worked on me. The fact that this would be an inevitable event - itself contributed to the situation." She couldn't call herself sick, with her throat almost dry in the midst of this pathogen, but maybe she did belong in the mental hospital after all.

The first tissue went to sopping at the damp of her inner sleeve, the second to wiping her face with another wet exhale, chasing out what sickness still lingered on her tongue. Dizziness, night sweats, visions of fire and destruction would have been better malady than this.

"Stubborn, huh?" The words were smothered half in the tissue; these two were balled up together, and tossed aside. (Once more, predictably, into the trash can.) "Still. You probably wouldn't feel as hurt, if you could have prepared for it."

"A little," she acknowledged (Jegus, did this girl have to put more effort into missing the target than Troll Hillary Duff did into singing badly for the film humans would recognize as an analogue to Raise Your Voice), "but more than that, what I meant was that your consciousness of what was going on here - those are all the traits I consider so special and worthy of attention." She kept careful watch on the bedside situation, waiting for any sign she should take further action.

"Besides, if there's one thing I've learned about life on Earth - which is one of those things you seem to know that nobody else of your race does, incidentally - it's that you never actually get time to prepare for things anyway."

"They know." Her left hand rose then, tapping two fingers against her temple, beyond the reach of the red fabric. So lifted, the bangle was now more visible than ever. An old, ornate thing, the outer gold looked as though it had worn intricate engraving that had, for the most part, been worn away. It did not seem mystical in any way; no runes or shine beyond what was brought by the overhead light. There did not seem to be any seam or visible fastening, but even with her narrow hands it did not look the type to slip on and off easily.

The corners of her lips pulled in an uneasy expression. "Up here, we all know it. But you can't know the edge of a knife until it cuts you. Not really."

Haruka Takahashi; bundle of contradictions. Elaborate jewelry: Heavily worn down. Weak heart: Stronger than glass. At least she admitted the insincerity. Kanaya couldn't resist taking the dare that expression of hers raised to make a similar attempt at a positive expression. Her lipstick was slowly pixelating too, blast it all, beyond her sight.

"And you just happen to be unfortunate enough to have spent your formative years getting too friendly with scissors." The tag question didn't merit an entire beat, but a full stop did have its place here as she thought about the peculiar nature of the proposition when the vast majority of other transports seemed to have been raised in a hive with a wiggler-proof policy on art supplies. "Right?"

Her head shook, just once to each side. "If you mean, in the way of intending to hurt myself, you've got me all wrong."

"No," she said, and a faint pressure rose underneath her skin, some alien vampire analogue to the beginning of an adrenaline rush. "That's not what I meant. It was another bad metaphor, playing off your analogy to the pain of a knife. I'm referring to the distinctions one would presumably make between the different types of wounds you receive from different sharp objects, and assuming that your previous experiences with saddening and sudden desperation didn't involve quite the same semantics of the people in your most locally important demographic vanishing into thin air in no apparent order and at the drop of a hat."

The same full stop she didn't hear herself making a little too long. "Right?"

Edited (SLIGHTLY... MORE SUBTLE...) 2013-08-14 07:00 (UTC)

Her single eye narrowed, and there was a slump to her shoulder that did not seem the result of her illness. A fatigue, an irritation, and when she spoke, only her illness softened the rude tone.

"It's called dying, Kanaya. Maybe you've heard of it?"

Edited (wow words) 2013-08-14 07:10 (UTC)

I've done it three or four damn times, her lips started to form almost immediately, and some semantic quibble about the exact analog was the second, but the third attempted sentence came out of her mouth without further delay, chasing the train of thought before the conductor made a rain pronunciation on account of the clouds that refused to part in the heavens.

"Yeah, it's this thing trolls did a lot back on Alternia, since we never thought to set up the respawn machines that are such a sturdy pillar of your civilization."

This did earn her a sincere, exaggerated eye roll, her gaze turning to the ceiling as if communing with some higher power responsible for the dealing out of things like this.

"If. You wake up from it," she hissed, swallowing, before carefully enunciating every word. "It. Isn't. Really. Dying, You pedantic charlatan of the medical field. Death is the end. If it isn't the end, it isn't death. And your understanding of human anything is way, way shittier than I thought, if you sincerely believe respawning is a thing we actually do."

"I knew your world was different from the others," she said before thinking about how that was entirely untrue, how humans were almost always surprised to learn about the technology here, or how massively insensitive it would be to have this argument with someone who was implying her past involved the deaths of so many familiar faces that it wasn't at all funny anymore.

"They--" were nothing like her "do it all the time--" even though they're afraid and get as petty as they would about something with permanence-- "the totals were in the hundreds during May, I know you hid in your room during that entire ordeal but you have to have gathered that much about how it went."

In another world, another time, in a hospital much (but not much at all) like this one, it had been an Alternian troll in the bed, and Ruka the visitor. Not playing the role of doctor or nurse, as here, nor that of a concerned friend. In a room not-much like this one, Ruka had met the boy for only the second time—the first, during circumstances that had led him to be placed there to begin with, when she saved his life.

He, with all the power a foreign fate had granted him, could know the innermost hearts of those around him. But not all; only their shades, their shadows and their darkness. When he met her, that second time, he had sensed a hurt and a darkness so black and furious within her that it scared him—that he became more frightened of her, sitting calmly on the edge of his hospital bed, than he had of the ones who murdered his friends. In her most hidden heart, she was more frightening to him than the one who had ripped the eye from her crying face.

It was from that darkness—that anger, that fury—that Ruka's arms began to shake, her teeth grinding together and her expression pulling back into a grin more suited for a beast of prey. If humans could combust for anger, the whole hospital would have been consumed in seconds.

"Is that so?" The pitch was off, even for illness. "You really believe that? You, who has never stepped foot on the human world Earth until landing on this island, you think you understand how it works? You, who has no recourse except other Transports, you think we're an accurate picture of humanity?" Her head shook, once to each side, but the motions were so much sharper now. "If you really want to understand, I'll tell you. I want you to see it for yourself."

Her head canted to one side, sharp, bitter, her chin lilting up towards the door to the room. "This hospital is full of people infected like this, isn't it? And some just aren't recovering, are they? I want you to find one of them. Someone that was born in this country, raised here, that just isn't going to make it. I want you to sit at their bedside, and hold their hand. I don't care how old they are, what gender they are. Anyone on that verge. And I want you to sit with them until they die, Kanaya."

Air hissed in through her teeth, whistling and wet, and the exhale was little better.

"I want you to watch their heart monitor flatline—" Her hand gestured to her own, spiking at an increased speed for aggravation. "—and watch them try pumping them full of electricity to restart their dying heart. I want you to feel their pulse stop. I want you to hear the last. Breath. They take. And I want you to stay with them, you know, this dead human who's never seen any world save this one.

"When they take that body from the room, go with them. Stay with them, no matter what. Run so fast in circles around the gurney they can't see you, I don't care. But you follow them, and stay with them. And then you fucking tell me how long it takes before that person is respawned."

Her mouth pulled back into another smile, like hooks into her cheeks. "Then. We'll talk. About what death is."

Kanaya never ran away from fires even though it was a rainbow drinker's greatest weakness. That was probably her upbringing at the nonhands of a giant moth coming into play. Light was invigorating, not toxic, to funhouse vampires like her, or at least she felt that way. She was never sure if anyone else in the history of Alternia had actually made this transformation or if it was some sort of fluke from SGRUB or some other amusement in her illogical, incoherent personal narrative. Where did her patient fit there? As a second heartbreak to complement a past pettier sourspade? Haruka didn't deserve to be thought of in the same sentence as that ball of slime, even if she was likewise a puzzle.

This was stupid. Of course she listened. Her blood was jade, and the accents to the Takahashi wardrobe were brilliant purples and pinks. There was never any route available other than compliance.

She dragged her fangs back inside of her mouth, and for a few moments of control her skin was not the typical dissipated photovisual fuzzball, only sparkly white like marble. "I'm going to do that. I'm going to do that right now. Details aside, you know I won't lie about that."

This wasn't enough. There was something exhilarating as well as painful about this move to make things closer to a clean cut than an awkward acknowledgement. She had to give as good as she got, or else that would be an admission of her own inability to have any affect on a human being. The memory of their last textual exchange informed her of exactly what to do, too. "And after your inevitable convalescence, lock the door to your apartment and make a necklace out of the key, so you don't have to see the big bad war outside for yourself, alright? We don't want to stress your tender human heart over the people who live and die based on the Initiative of less than a thousand strangers."

The clattering of shoes on the floor accompanied her departure, another regrettable echo of their first meeting, though not following the same exact notes: Triple the duration, as she retraced her tracks to adjust her patient's precarious purse, making sure its shadow stayed on the table and its lip was pointed towards its mistress, before departing for good.

Edited 2013-08-24 07:09 (UTC)

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Douse Yourself In Cheap Perfume

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SLINKS BACK FROM THE HIATUSES OF ETERNITY

Ascends cliffs of despair (she's gonna spend like three tags thinking about

insert laughing dog from duck hunt.gif

I looked that gif up to quench my curiosity and it was completely familiar and I hate you

i'm glad

Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiisssss

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