It is her first day here, and Lenka is not feeling particularly enthused.
She's always had these little flashes of her future, regardless of her state of mind. She sees things that come to be true, and things that don't, and things she has no way of knowing about. When she's stressed, though, they really, really do not help.
Her ears are flooded with the hum of fluorescent lights, and she sees monotony.
Tiny little lives. Shirts and ties, smiles and obeisance where should be knives. She sees daggers hidden in the pinprick-pupils of lying eyes and she can feel the malice sliding over her skin.
She feels stagnation. Arguments over the silliest things. Machinery that was the epitome of its inventor's life being forsaken, being degraded. She smells the unrest.
There's the sense of it stretching out into forever, almost. It's the only thing that reminds her that it's not happening all right now, insistent as the noise that's filling her head. Even when she gets away from it, she knows that it hasn't ended, just that it's let her go for a little while.
She feels it clutching about her shoulders as she goes about her day. It's her first day here, and she's already wishing it her last.
She stands in the bathroom, staring at her reflection in the mirror. Hates it. Hates how boring she looks. She hates the dullness in her eyes that looks like what she saw in the eternity moment that this morning brought along with caffeine deprivation and a distinct inclination to despising the world, and she hates the pale in her cheeks and she hates the clothes.
Shirt and tie. Smiles and obeisance where should be knives.
"You look all daggers." The comment is graceful, peacefully said, and something in Lenka panics because for all the world the person whose reflection is now slightly crowding the space of her own looks like a man, with broad shoulders and a wide jaw and hair that, while long, just doesn't really scream female. "Is aught the matter?"
"This is the women's bathroom," Lenka says, and her voice sounds like blades.
"And you don't think I'm a woman?" The eyes—short lashed and without maquillage, like the rest of the face, though gloriously pretty all the same—crinkle, or at least the skin around them. "Well, I suppose I'm not. I'm close enough, though."
And Lenka looks, she really looks, going beyond the perfunctory categorization that is how she gauges others, and still she does not see. Not really. "What do you mean?" she asks, and her voice is still harsh in her ears.
"I'm not a big fan of gender. Rest assured, though, that as far as society is concerned, I am female." Their lips curl into a kind of smile. They're thin lips, dark and expressive and they stretch broadly. They give no clues to Lenka, though it's not like she needs any, now that this individual is talking.
"What's your name?" Lenka asks. If it turns out that this person is in fact a man she is going to complain about it for all she's worth to whatever higher authority there is, despite her rather withdrawing nature.
"Clarabelle," is the answer, given calmly and smoothly by that voice which, regardless of its soothing properties, is in that kind of midrange where you can't really place it and Lenka's wondering if this will be entirely as bad as she's thinking.
She schools herself into a smile, turns now to face the other and says, simply, "It's very nice to meet you."
Clarabelle inclines her head gracefully. "And you, Miss…?"
"I'm Lenka Bazaar," she says. It's her first day here, and she doesn't think it's going too badly at all.
A/N: I seem to write a lot about dead characters. I'm really not sure why that is.
~Mademise Morte, September 24, 2012.