A/N: This came to me in the tub, while I was angsting about something I don't even remember now. I had a sudden plot-bunny and I wrote it down.
Visions in the Bubbles
She sees the future for the first time. Ironically, it comes to her in the tub. She is eight years old.
She is eight years old when she sees her future in the form of bubble suds.
She likes baths. She likes the hot water, the quiet, the alone time. She does not have a bad relationship with her parents, but she doesn't have a good one either.
They are unimaginative people, her parents. They tell her every day to go to school so she can someday find a good job and a husband and a child or two. She tells herself every day to enjoy the day, enjoy the moment.
And so she likes baths. She likes baths a lot.
This bath is longer than the others. Her skin is as wrinkled as it can get, and her dark hair may never be dry again. She sits there, playing with the bubbles that dance around her.
One looks like a bird. She giggles and pokes the bird and it transforms into a monkey. She stares at the monkey and it stares back at her. It is a calm monkey, which is strange to the girl. She pokes the bubble suds again.
The bubble rips into pieces and seeks the sanctuary of its brethren that are near and form a new shape. To the girl, it looks like a frog sitting on an alligator.
What an unusual picture... She stares for the longest time, pausing only to answer a question her mother asks from the outside world (away from calm monkeys and daring frogs.). She looks at the suds to see something else.
It doesn't look like anything, to be perfectly honest. The girl acquires a puzzled look and settles for helping the shape by adding more bubbles to it. It takes a true shape the eight-year-old can identify with: an octopus. Well as close of an octopus as a bubble could get.
The water is turning cold, and so the girl leaves the bubbles to clean up. She promises to herself that she will go back to playing once she's done.
She is done, after a few grueling minutes, and she takes a look at what the bubbles have formed into now. It looks like a man. A man with a hat and one of those guns the neighbor has. She looks at the man closely, and she can almost make out eyes. They look kind, the eyes. The girl feels safe. She smiles widely and thinks to herself, "Will I meet you for real, Mr. Bubbly Man?"
When she does, she is much older. She is nothing her parents expected her to be. But she is what the girl always wanted to be. Happy.
She doesn't remember the Bubble Man, but the hitman strikes as a familiarity to her. She doesn't find this puzzling.
