Disclaimer: Been there, done that.
Title: Standing on My Knees
Pairings: Main: Namora Side: AkuRoku, etc.
Summary: She was so desperate. She had no food, no money, no electricity, and now, no home. It was only a matter of time before she did something completely unlike her. Surrogacy seemed like the best option.
Rating: Teen, for now. This will feature adult concepts, but I believe it's not something that any teenager above the age of fourteen can handle. It all depends on your maturity, and I don't plan on there being any sex.
Chapter One: The Part Where I Cry
She didn't have a table. She had no dining room. She had no chairs. She had a couch and a coffee table. She slept on, sat on, worked at, and watched a blank TV screen from her couch.
She had no cable, having been unable to afford such a luxury for over a year now. Her apartment was a miniscule efficiency, with only two doors, one leading to the hallway and out of the building, and one leading to her bathroom, which really gave new meaning to the words water closet.
And this miniscule efficiency… she was unable to afford the rent. Her electricity had been cut off two days before. She would have worried about the fact that her refrigerator no longer worked, thus no longer keeping her food fresh, if it were not for the fact that she couldn't afford groceries, either.
She had no lights, she couldn't watch a DVD from her TV, not only because she had no electricity, but also because she had no DVDs. She had one VHS from bygone days, when she was a child and DVDs were non-existent. Still, she didn't particularly feel that Beauty and the Beast would be the best thing to watch if she were able to. Too many good memories were wrapped up in a VHS that no longer had the writing on it, it being so old that the white letters had been rubbed off a long time ago.
Naminé was twenty-four years old, and she was staring into the gaping maw of homelessness. Scattered on her coffee table, which she knew she should try and sell, along with her TV, were bills upon bills, all with a red, angry stamp of PAST DUE pressed into the white pages.
She had no water; it having been shut off along with all of her other utilities. Trying to make sense of her finances wasn't confusing. She had no finances, just mountains of debts piling up higher. Her credit was ruined, she had been reported to the credit bureau several times over, and if she had electricity and a phone, she was sure that her phone would ring off the hook with credit companies demanding their money.
But the whole point of everything was that she had no money. Her terrible job, which paid her only four dollars an hour plus tips, could barely cover her rent and utilities. That is, until her hours were cut down to the bone, to the point where it cost more in gas to drive to her work than she was making. Still, she made do. She sold her car, and bought a cheap bus pass, something that she knew she should have done long before. Still, it wasn't enough because, in the end, her terrible job, which she desperately needed, she lost.
It had never once occurred to Naminé that Pettle Pizza Emporium would go out of business, leaving all of their employees destitute and jobless. Still, what did she expect, when they only got two customers a night and her hours had been cut down to ten a week? Even now, she was still so naïve.
And now, with no job, and no way of paying for anything, Naminé just didn't know what to do. She was going to be evicted next month when she couldn't come up with the rent, she knew it. There were no second chances, not with her landlord. With some of the last of her money, Naminé had, in desperation, bought a newspaper.
Even though she had hit the pavement over a week ago in search of a new job, one that might possibly pay her a little more and that had the job security of not suddenly going out of business, she hadn't found much. Still, she hadn't been picky- she'd gotten past picky long ago.
But it was hopeless. McDonalds wouldn't even hire her, let alone somewhere close by that she could walk to and be able to get rid of her bus pass, which was now draining on the fifty dollars that she had left.
So, in her last bid for a job, Naminé had bought a newspaper, hoping that an ad for employment would pop up: one that she knew she'd be able to get. Still, having been rejected by McDonalds, her ego had suffered a terrible blow.
She had the ads section opened, having spread the contents of the newspaper across her couch. It seemed, more and more now, that having a bachelor's degree wasn't enough to get a job, and Naminé didn't even have that. She'd barely finished high school, and she certainly had never entertained the thought of going to college. She just couldn't afford it. She couldn't afford to take out loans, knowing that she'd have to pay them back once she finished college. And while Naminé was smart, she'd just never really had the gumption or drive to use her smarts for school.
She was regretting that now.
She sighed, eyes leaving the ads section and staring into the black screen of her TV. She knew she should sell it. But it wasn't worth much, being so old that it didn't even have a VHS player attached, let alone a DVD player.
She felt like she was drowning, staring into an abyss and knowing that each moment led her closer and closer to the edge. She was going to fall and it all felt so hopeless. She needed money, and she needed it fast.
She cracked her fingers, sighing and stretching her hands above her heads. She uncurled herself from her couch, newspaper falling to the floor, and walked into her adjoining kitchen, though it really wasn't much of a kitchen. She grabbed the one glass she had and went to get water from the faucet before realizing that she didn't even have water anymore.
Her stomach growled, her throat itched, and her entire body felt grimy, not having seen the inside of a shower in a week. How had this happened? What had happened to her dreams? How was she standing in the miniscule kitchen of a miniscule one-room apartment in the worst part of town, with no job, no money, and no water?
She sunk to the floor, breaths shuddering in and out, tears silently slipping from her eyes and falling down her cheeks. She was so afraid and she had no one to turn to, no one to comfort her or tell her that everything would be alright.
And then she suddenly laughed. "Oh, God," she breathed, "I'm losing it on my kitchen floor."
Life wasn't supposed to be like this. It was hard, sure. But it wasn't supposed to be hopeless. She wasn't supposed to feel that it would be easier being dead than living through this hell. But she didn't want to die. She had no one who'd mourn her. She couldn't die knowing that she wouldn't be found, probably, for days. She wouldn't be missed, and she wouldn't be mourned. Twenty-four years of life, and she had no one to show for it.
The thought was disconcerting and alarming.
She slipped her legs out from beneath her, bending them at the knee because her kitchen was so small that she couldn't fully stretch out her legs, even though she was a petite five feet. And she shook, racked with sobs that wouldn't come out, that holed up in her throat and that felt like they were stretching her throat. She laid her head on her knees, crying silently, fingers slipping into her white-blonde hair, tugging. The newspaper wasn't working. She hadn't found anything.
Naminé was dying; dying and she couldn't do anything about it.
What a sad, sad fate for the pretty little woman.
Why did it always seem as though everything that could go wrong did? Had Murphy's Law really singled her out? Naminé had thought that things couldn't have gotten worse. But, unfortunately, they did. She was staring at an eviction notice, a full two weeks before the end of the month. Did her landlord really have the right to evict her when she had paid, on time, her rent for the month they were currently in?
Naminé banged her head against the door to apartment, keys forgotten in her hand. It had just been tacked up there, for the entire world to see, like her laundry was hanging outside her window. She probably would have been humiliated about this cold eviction notice, if it were not for the fact that she was in a full blown panic attack, her home being ripped out from underneath her feet causing her breath to shorten, her head to swim, and her feet to shake.
This wasn't supposed to be happening. Not now, Naminé thought, her latest newspaper slipping from her grasp, along with her keys, jangling to the floor in a colorful mess. Tears spilled out, pattering to the ground, landing on her keys, slipping over the little keychain her mother had bought her when she'd graduated from high school, a red horse, her school's mascot.
She grabbed at the doorknob, breath shuddering, sobs ripping from her gut. She was falling apart in the middle of her building's hallway. She desperately grabbed for her keys and newspaper, jamming the lone little key in the knob and turning, stumbling into her apartment and falling to the ground, cries coming faster and harder, body shaking with the force of her sobs.
She couldn't be homeless. Where would she go? Would she sleep in a box, underneath a newspaper on a park bench? Every horrific homeless stereotype just flew through her head. Being homeless was just not an option, at least not a permanent one.
Her body calmed, sobs dwindling to hiccupping breaths. She grabbed at her wrist, feeling the bones poke at her. Having been insanely thin all of her life, she was now emaciated, unhealthy, with her skin a dull yellow and her eyes were no longer a sparkling blue, but rather completely flat. Her hair was combed, hanging in lank, greasy strands, the white-blonde just a glimmer of how shiny and pristine it used to be.
She had once been beautiful. She'd had everything and her life had been going so well. She didn't have any of that now. She had a paper and an eviction notice, with bills scattered on her coffee table. Life had gone so wrong.
She pressed her hand to her mouth, lips crackling, dry and parched. She closed her eyes, still on the floor, still on her knees. She tilted her head back, and wondered if this was going to be it. She opened her eyes and stared at her ceiling, slowly falling back until she was lying on her back, counting the cracks and water spots until her head swam, until her eyes closed, and she fell asleep, completely exhausted.
When she awoke next, her one lone window was letting in beams of moonlight, darkness hanging heavy over the apartment. She lay there, willing her body to move. She was just so tired, though. Naminé moved her hand, brushing up against the newspaper.
She grabbed it, turning immediately to the ads section, skimming over cars being sold, ads for everything she couldn't afford. Where was the employment section?
She tossed away parts of the newspaper she didn't need. At this point, she'd do anything.
And anything was what she got.
She slowly sat up, hair spilling over her shoulders. She got up fully and made her way to her couch-slash-bed.
Her eyes scanned the ad, boring over the deep black letters.
It was not the first type she'd seen of the ad, since she'd been buying a newspaper now for the last three weeks, and there was at least one in each newspaper. But she'd dismissed it before, believing that finding a job wouldn't be so hard: that she wouldn't have to get so desperate. But her options were out, and if she had been non-picky before, she was now so not picky she was close to hiking up her skirt and walking the streets for a guy to buy any services she could offer.
This didn't seem honestly much better, but it paid better and Naminé had no choice.
She sniffled quietly and fished through her purse for change, bringing out fifty cents and writing down the number on the ad, walking down to the front of her apartment building and inserting the money into the pay phone right at the corner.
"Hello?" a quiet voice answered, sounding quite young and male.
Naminé sighed. "Yes, hello. My name is Naminé and I was calling in regards to your ad in the newspaper."
"Our ad?" the voice perked up. "We've been putting the ad in now for a while, but we haven't had any takers. Why don't we meet somewhere and discuss matters?" the man went on, sounding very excited.
Naminé nodded, even though there was no one around to see. "Sure, that's fine." She wracked her brain for a second. "How about Moogle Coffee House!. You know, the one on Core Street?"
"Ah, yes, I know the place. How about we meet tonight around... seven?" the voice went on, "I won't be the only one coming, so we'll have to get ready to meet you."
"Yeah, sure, that's fine," Naminé agreed, knowing that she had to be agreeable to anything they sent her way. She couldn't lose this opportunity.
They hung up, and Naminé made her way back up to her apartment, going over to her dresser and taking out her only dress, wrinkled from months of sitting in a drawer. It was white, with lace along the bottom. It was showing its wear and tear, but at least Naminé didn't have to worry about it not fitting.
She put on her only earrings, and situated the necklace she never took off, it being too special to lose. She grabbed her purse, slipped into a pair of shoes, and walked out the door, knowing that she'd have to walk to the coffee house, since her bus pass was null and void now, too. She left the newspaper ad on the coffee table, the black letters glaring up at nothing.
Surrogate Mother for Hire
Looking for a blonde woman around the ages of 20-27
Other information to be disclosed at meeting
Call (555) 273-1913
A/N: So, short beginning, and I don't know how long the chapters are going to be anyway. I also don't know exactly where I'm going with this, but I saw an ad like this once in a newspaper, and it seemed like such a good idea and a great opportunity to write something for my favorite het pairing, Namora. Reviews are read, appreciated, loved, and replied, even if I don't do so in a timely fashion.
