no longer absolute: prologue | paper hearts

summary: the last thing alisa tachibana expects when she comes to japan is falling in love. but sometimes, it's the least expected that makes you smile.

warnings: akashi x oc / swearing / depressing themes

disclaimer: no, i'm definitely not a male and definitely not a person named tadatoshi fujimaki. fat chance.

She always thought the best emotion was sadness. No, it's not like being sad felt good, but for her, it was certainly better than feeling happy or angry. When she felt happy...her cheeks hurt from smiling. When she felt angry...her veins would burn with so much anger; almost like she was being burned from the inside out — it just hurt.

But sad just felt numb. It wasn't anything else but numb, and to the prospect of being empty to the world around you — blank stares and blank hearts — was something she couldn't pass up. It was the best choice — and maybe, perhaps, the reason why she thought so unusually like this was because she was the daughter of a businessman; someone who would choose the best choice for themselves, and with this thought, she couldn't find herself to regret her choice.

Even now, as her parents screamed at each other and she grumbled to herself, trying to imagine them shutting the fuck up, she thought numbness was the best way to go. She was sad that her parents were most likely going to split up and she was going to be stuck in the middle. She was sad that she was most likely going to be departed off to who knows wherever. She was sad that she wasn't enough to bring her parents back together. But that was all she was; she was just sad. Emotionally drained. Too tired to be angry. Too tired to feel anything.

She fingered her loose sweatshirt with a blank expression on her face. She'd been in this corner of her room for quite a while now — eavesdropping on the screaming occurring just the floor below. Weirdly, she was curious as to what they were arguing about this time. It's not like it was hard to eavesdrop either; even if she didn't want to hear anything and plugged in her earphones with the music on full blast, she could still hear their arguments as clear as day.

She knew that relationships were hard. She knew that if you weren't able to pull yourself 100% into it, you'd have problems, and she knew that love was something that showed you to the entire world naked bare too exposed, and that it was something that could rip you from the inside out. She never understood why her parents had even gotten into the marriage into the first place if there was a hint of hesitation in either one of them — they should've known their family would've ended up like this, wouldn't they? Why not spare the pain, when they could've avoided it all?

They all had paper hearts. And once, when they were shared so freely — too trustingly — they handled them with care and made sure they didn't rip. But now all they wanted to do was shred the goddamn things because they couldn't give a shit anymore and they were much too frail to be handled by a couple that wanted nothing else but to wrap their fingers around each other's throats. They were much too breakable, and all of a sudden, her own was tearing into halves as she stared into her bedroom walls with much too empty dark blank apathetic freaky blue eyes, in her world that was too murky to move in and she could no longer breathe –

She flinched for a split-second as the sound of shattering glass interrupted her listless stupor. Ah, she thought robotically, they've started throwing things again. She laughed bleakly, no joy filtering past her dry, chapped lips.

Yes, sadness was the best emotion to feel. With sadness came numbness, and even though she could be pulled into stygian depths of her own traitorous mind, Alisa Tachibana was a little bit too tired to occupy a tornado of colors in her flimsy, delicate body that seemed to have aged too many years than it could take.

author's notes:

hey there! to all the old readers, welcome back, and to all new ones, nice to meet you! i've decided to edit this story (unfortunately, i wrote this a few months ago and my writing style was horrible back then) and i'm pretty sure my writing has improved since the last time i've posted chapter one, so here i am, back with new ideas + a renewed hope for this storyline! say hello to a renewed alisa tachibana!

audience: -silence-

me: -cLAPSSSSS-

also me: sorry i couldnt help it-

so yes, there will be a few renovations to the plotline, but this will still be an akashi x oc fic (since akashi will forever be one of my loves), and i hope you guys can deal with the prospect of depression. alisa's a little more mentally unstable (she isn't insane or anything, just a little bit sad and numb to everything around her) here, but i hope you guys will still like this! she'll be as happy as she can get when she gets to rakuzan, though :) thanks so much to those who decided to favorite and follow this story even when my old writing was up xx i hope you guys like this version too!

(chapter one's still being rewritten, but since i don't want my first ever review to be deleted from that chapter, i'll probably just update it so the one's that up right now is the old version. it's horrible, i know :"))

love lots, please do tell me what you think!

trina