Disclaimer: I don't own RENT, BKLYN or The Carpenters.
Author's note: I wrote this forChallenge #142SpeedRent on LJ, but I didn't finish in time to enter. Such is life. Challenge was to write fic based on the lyrics given, mine were from BKLYN. It's an April story and it's depressing. Additional lyrics are from Carpenters songs.Cheers.
"Looking in the mirror never knowing who she really was.
With a hairbrush in her hand like a microphone,
she would sing the song that her mother would sing." - BKLYN
The light in the mirror flickers, dangerously close to fading forever. April leans over the makeshift vanity of a cracked mirror balanced on an old crate and pouts her lips out toward her reflection. The lipstick is sticky from the heat and goes on soft and thick, clumping in red blotches in the cracks of her chapped lips. She runs her tongue over her teeth and smiles through her ruined eye makeup, lashes glued together with cheap black lipstick she uses as eyeliner. April couldn't quite remember a day in her life when she'd cried before, but today her makeup had run down her face and bled onto her palms when she rubbed at her eyes with a fierce anger and denial.
Somewhere between the smoky rock clubs and dingy cafes at 2am, smoking with Roger while doing shots and yelling at strangers who stared too hard, April had stopped paying attention. Life turned into dragging her tongue over the figurative handgun in her mouth, heroin slipping into necessity and the rest of the world burning away slowly until her friends were nothing more than vague shadows.
April closes one eye and swipes the black lipstick over her eyelid, feeling it cling to the stick as it passes over. She fixes the other eye to match and in the mirror can hardly see the blue through the rings of tar. Her eyesight is ruined for the day, her bloodshot eyes sore from the sticky makeup, but she doesn't really need to see that much anymore anyway.
Earlier, while sitting alone and holding her death sentence, April waited for her life to flash before her eyes, but there was nothing to be seen. She had been Roger's girl, and Katherine's daughter, but in a lifetime of parties and boys and having sex too young and leaving home without so much as graduating highschool, it didn't mean anything. There were rules in this game, and April had always liked to break them. But life seemed to be biting back these days, biding its time while she wasted hers.
Checkmate.
She leans back away from the mirror and picks up her brush, her lips silently moving to count the strokes. Her mother always wanted her to brush her hair one hundred times before bed. It will make your hair healthy so it can shine. April likes looking nice, and for a moment she tugs on the hem of her skirt, pulling it down to cover another half inch of thigh. She looks like a porcelain doll from hell, her makeup still ruined and her hair frayed and frizzy from the brush and the heat. April smiles into the hazy image through her sore eyes, humming to herself.
In the past April liked to think her mother's love for soft, sad music was a bad habit or a closet addiction. But listening to Karen Carpenter's voice floating from the record player in the funeral home in that week before she left home changed her mind and when the people crying around her mother's casket, people she'd known since birth but didn't know at all, people who only existed during Christmas, finally left to bury their sister and their daughter and their friend, April took her mother's vinyl and went home to put it on and lean out her window and smoke, mourning in a silent and final way.
April watches herself with her eyes full of water, pondering the finality. Her friends would have to look at her, propped up like a wax dummy, smiling like life hadn't been unfair. Roger would have go on being young and beautiful without her until the disease neither one of them had ever considered would claim him. She smiles against the black bleeding into her eyes and fumbles for words.
"All the years of useless search, have finally reached an end." April bites her lower lip, closing her eyes and stretching her untrained voice, monotone and rough. "Loneliness and empty days will be my only friend."
She opens her eyes and catches her image again, and for a moment she's a little girl, hair done up in braids with her mother behind her, hands on her shoulders while they smile identical smiles and listen to The Carpenters on the old record player in her mother's room. Back before April decided life had it in for her and back before April wanted to get even with anyone.
"Not a cloud in the sky, got the sun in my eyes," She lifts up her hairbrush, grinning past the cheap makeup and the small clothes and remembering, laughing to herself as she formed the words. "And I won't be surprised if it's a dream, everything I want the world to be…"
April closes her makeup kit and tears a scrap of paper out of a notebook in her closet to leave Roger with something in writing besides just a death sentence.
"Is now coming true, especially for me, and the reason is clear…"
Love you, baby.
"It's because you are here…"
I would stay if I could.
"You're the nearest thing to heaven that I've seen."
April doesn't even understand what she's doing anymore, singing like a fool into her hairbrush, writing suicide notes to her boyfriend when she should be at his show with the rest of their friends. But April has never prided herself on her logic. She folds her note, writes Roger's name and tosses the hairbrush on the bed, hoping he'll find someone else to write punk love songs for.
In the bathroom, April hums to herself as she draws a bath, breaking the plastic safety bar off of one of her razors. She climbs into the old, stained tub and sits for a moment watching her short skirt billowing around her thighs in the cold water and traces the razor idly over her blue veins, nicking over the tracks aimlessly and waiting for the courage to seize the moment. When she presses down, the room tilts violently with the force of the thrill, better than heroin, better than sex, better than life, and even April had to admit that despite its disappointments, life was pretty fucking fabulous.