Douse Yourself In Cheap Perfume

[speakveryclearly]

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.

Comments

[heartsink]

"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?"

[speakveryclearly]

"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."

[heartsink]

"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."

[speakveryclearly]

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.

[heartsink]

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."

[speakveryclearly]

"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."

[heartsink]

"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."

[speakveryclearly]

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?"

[heartsink]

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."

[speakveryclearly]

"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?"

[heartsink]

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?"

[speakveryclearly]

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."

[heartsink]

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."

[speakveryclearly]

"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."

[heartsink]

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."

[speakveryclearly]

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.