Vera blinked.
She was in the same room she’d woken up in before. But she couldn’t move. Her eyes were fixed on the ceiling, but something felt as if it was pressing against her feet and hands, holding her down. She rolled her eyes down to see what it was, and her heart missed a beat.
He was there, sitting on her legs, her wrists in his hands, his mask stained with blood and a mocking smirk in his eyes. Ice rippled up her arms as he stared at her, a predator, his eyes growing deeper and deeper, the irises becoming a void, his fingers digging into her, purpling the skin around his nails.
She made to gasp and started coughing again, each one leaving her a little shorter of breath until she was out, heaving in great gulps of air only to cough them out a second later, all the while writhing under his gaze.
Soft footsteps outside the door and a click of the latch being lifted, and she swept into the room, and he turned to dust, leaving only a lingering chill and the bitter taste of terror.
Vera blinked again and this time, her eyes met with purple. Purple that dripped with fear and worry. Flaxen hair fell like waves over her face as she gazed into Vera’s eyes, searching for what was wrong. A click, the light came on, and Vera could see why she couldn’t move. She looked kind of like one of those ancient mummies, wrapped as she was almost head to toe in bandages. One arm was completely immobile and there were inches of blood-soaked gauze over her leg, with more swathed around her free arm.
The look of wonder at the extent of her injuries must have shown on her face, because the other girl shook her head and stepped farther into the room.
“Your arm’s broken, and the femoral artery in your right leg was almost severed.” She said, stepping around to the bedside. “You’ve got a couple broken ribs, you’ve been unconscious for the past three days, and from the look of the gashes in the rest of your body, I’d say you were in a knife fight,” a single eyebrow arched as a look of protest came over the smaller girl’s face, “Care to try to tell me I’m wrong?”
Vera opened her mouth to respond, but as always, nothing came out. She sighed and cast around for something to write on and, seeing nothing, just nodded. The other girl snorted and turned back to her arm, putting a fresh bandage beside her on the bed and gently, gently unraveling the one that was already there.
Vera watched her for a moment, but sleep took her over.
The blonde paused in her movement, rolling the soft cotton of the gauze between her fingers. Sitting back on her heels, she wondered why she was doing this, spending her time sitting here, bandaging up this person who had only ever really said one word to her and seemed to have a death wish.
Then she thought back to the first time she had seen her, seen the cold, dead, vacant look in her eyes replaced by fear, anger, horror, terror, fury. Seen the regret in the assassin’s eyes as her blade drank her blood, the abject guilt weigh down on her tiny, black-clad shoulders as the truth hit her like a sledgehammer, the misery etched in every line of her face as she took her mask off.
She saw her crumple, drop to her knees as her world crashed down around her. Saw her push her away and stagger into the soaking rain, saw the water mingle with tears on her face and saw her golden eyes, so beautiful, melt, saw that one word engraved into every bit of her, sorry, sorry, SORRY!
She had seen her throw herself off, give up life, abandon everything she had in this world to try to repent for what she had done.
And she figured that, hell, someone like that deserves a second chance.
So she rushed down to her, down to where the rain pooled like molten glass and flashed in the air, and dropped to her knees on the soaking pavement. She cradled the girl in her arms, brushed her hair out of her eyes, saw that face, so young, at peace… and she cried. She cried for the things that could have been, the future this child could have had, had this world been different.
She laid her down on her own bed, not caring about the bloody trail smeared on the sheet, not caring about the wetness of her hair soaking the pillow, only caring about the smile in her throat, the same shape as the one she wanted to see on this girl’s face, and how to fix it.
She remembered the terror she felt as she touched the girl’s hand and was nearly killed in return, remembered the strain evident in the other’s face every other time she touched her, remembered the wash of warmth as the other girl covered her hand with her own, remembered falling asleep like that.
She carried her back to the bed each time she tried to leave, picking up her limp form and laying her back down with the utmost care.
She remembered the rush of fear she felt when she woke up and she was gone, the wave of relief mingled with trepidation at the sight of a familiar black form huddled on the ground.
She remembered the panic as she saw the extent of her injuries.
The anxiety as she waited for her to wake up.
The fear as she stepped out of the room for one second and she started hyperventilating and coughing to raise the dead.
The concern as she saw the terror- no, not terror. Terror’s too tame. What she saw in those golden eyes was a form of fear more pure than she had ever seen.
What she had seen in those golden eyes was stuff in nightmares, stuff that real people didn’t feel. Right?
But she had seen it. Seen it take over those golden eyes, those golden eyes that belonged to someone whose name she didn’t know but cared for anyways.
She resumed her ministrations, swaddling this girl’s arm in gauze and pinning it up, satisfied for now. Brushing a lock of hair off to the side and pressing a hand to her cheek (to check her temperature, of course), she straightened up, sighing, and swept out of the room.
Vera awoke to a weirdly familiar feeling of warmth radiating off of the body near her, the sight of hair the same color as the rays of the sun falling over slumped shoulders that rested overtop her thighs a strange comfort.
She was still too tense, though, too twitchy, too scared at the thought of another person touching her to be truly relaxed, but she was getting there. She even reached down and tugged bandages away from fingers lax from sleep, allowing her hands to linger just for a second over the other’s, letting herself feel the warmth of another person for a precious few seconds before pulling away and leaning back against the pillows, bandages in hand.
Vera unrolled a bit of the gauze, held it up to the light of the sun filtering in through the window, studied the pattern of the fabric, wondered at how this tiny, insignificant piece of material that was literally thinner than paper saved lives, daily.
Does better than I do…
A wry smile split over her face for just a second at the thought that a bit of cotton had far surpassed her, before being erased as the tightening of fingers around her leg made her hand twitch instinctively for the sheath on her arm, only for her to take in a deep, deep breath and let it out slowly as the girl who’d been sleeping on her woke up.
A muffled yawn broke the silence and the girl sat up, her shoulders rolling back in a stretch as her eyes opened just barely, still cloudy with sleep, half-lidded and slightly out of focus as she glanced up at the person she’d been using as a pillow. A hand covered (barely) a second yawn, and a head tilted in acknowledgement.
“‘Morning.”
Vera just looked at her, confused for a moment at the statement. Yes, it was morning. Her head tilted back, but in bewilderment instead of greeting. Still not managing to make sense of the gesture, she simply nodded assent, only to remain nonplussed when the other girl burst into laughter.
Giggles flowed to chuckles flowed to full-on heaving belly laughs as she collapsed to the floor, her body convulsing with mirth.
Finally gaining some semblance of control over herself, the other girl rose back to her knees, sitting back as she wiped tears of laughter from her eyes, meeting Vera’s still confused gaze with eyes alight with good humor.
“Do -hic- do you seriously not know -hic- how to respond to that?” Another hiccup shook her frame as she laughed again, “has no one ever told you “Good morning” before?”
Her laughter subsided as Vera just shook her head, a pang of pain for this girl who never really got to experience a life, never had someone to say “good morning” to and no one to receive one from in return.
Arms instinctively rose but paused as Vera froze, paused to let violet eyes meet gold for a second that felt like an eternity, before Vera took in a breath, a deep one, willing herself not to move anything except her upper body as she leant forward slowly, slowly, lowering herself into the embrace as one would enter a freezing cold pool except this one was warm and welcoming, too welcoming, too nice of a feeling for it to be anything but a trap but Vera lowered herself into it anyways, a conscious defiance of everything she’d learned and lived over the past seven years because she knew that it was what she wanted, knew that it would help the other girl so much more, knew that seeing this girl hanging, waiting for something to hold on to, was the last thing Vera wanted to see.
And then it made sense, made perfect sense as arms too warm to be real circled around her and her hands still didn’t know what to do so she just put them on her back and tried not to squeeze too hard, tried not to break this person half again her size but who still felt fragile in her arms, who clung to her like she was a lifeline, and finally Vera’s mind could make sense of this whole touching thing, found some point of reference that told her that it was like her knives, like her care for them and the scars on her thumbs, that for this other girl, people were her anchor to the world and without them she’d be cut adrift, lost, just like Vera was the first time she awoke here and her knives were beyond where she could see them on the chair across the room.
And so she took the apprehension she held, took the twitching of her muscles and the flickering of her eyes to different exits of the room, took the fear and the pain and the hurt and the blame and the feelings that she didn’t deserve any of this, didn’t want it, didn’t need it, she gathered it all up inside herself and let it go the best she could because she didn’t need it right now, what she needed was this girl in front of her, and this girl in front of her needed her back.
It was a novel feeling, being needed.
But Vera didn’t want to dwell on that.
Instead she dwelt in the warmth of this body against hers, the tickle of hair against her neck and the tightening of hands around her back and so tightened her arms in response, but only slightly.
She dwelt in the breath against her collar, dwelt in the warm press of lips to her shoulder and a whispered ‘Thank you.’
She took in her smell, lived in all the little feelings she created against her skin, lived in the feeling of a head tucked into her neck that wasn’t from a corpse, lived in the warmth on her hands that wasn’t blood, touched a kiss to the top of a head and bathed in the comfort of the living.
A/N: Well. I'm back. For a few weeks, at least :P
I hope you enjoyed, and if you want me to write anything tailor-made for you, shoot me an email at either [email protected] or [email protected] and I'll give you my commission info!
Anyway! A sneak peak!
She couldn’t just tell her that everything hadn’t faded away like she’d said it had, couldn’t tell her that he was still haunting her, that the shadows were growing bolder, that her past, it wanted her back.
Ehehe :P
Looking forward to next week!
~V
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FOR AN IMPORTANT UPDATE ON THE RELEASES OF FUTURE CHAPTERS OF THIS STORY, SEE MY PROFILE PAGE654Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡPCaFWAZHXl
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