Summary: Absences, of sound and other things.
Standard Disclaimer: I'm just a fanfiction writer. All hail the rightful owners.
Author's Note: This fic is for a Leap Day challenge from Green Lion. The prompt is "waking up in bed alone."
Something was wrong, the sleeper realized, perplexed. Subconsciously, she analyzed every scent and texture, searching for the source of her confusion. Starch, smoothness, softness, the angle of her back, it was all too strange. Unable to doze in peace, the woman woke.
Carmen opened her eyes and reached for the light switch. Her hands slid helplessly by air. Confused, she made another attempt, straining ever so slightly farther towards her expectation. The unsatisfactory result persisted.
Taking a slow and bracing breath, the waking girl reasoned the problem out, slowly bring her short term memory back. She focused on the giveaway, a backlit clock display of the wrong color, located in the wrong place. Her fingers pointed in a new direction, sliding along the textured wall paper until they contacted their mark. The cornered plastic briskly flipped, brightening the hotel room sharply.
Even accounting for where she was, Carmen didn't calm down. Her apprehension wasn't simply the result of waking up in an unexpected room. After a few moments of analysis she identified the problem. Carmen felt strange because of the sound. To be more accurate, she found the silence unpleasant.
It seemed strange to her. After all, Carmen had woken up in hotels many times in the past. However, frugal Acme insisted on at least one roommate. More often, when Carmen was working a foreign case, she'd been housed in a youth hostel or one of the agency's regional dormitories. Those places were always noisy. The former detective's home life had been scarcely better. Acme had a strange penchant for hiring the outcasts of society, or those who were alone in the world. Orphans like Carmen, childless widowers like Suhara, sentient technology like the chief, all these were the agency's type.
At that moment, alone for the first time in what seemed like forever, Carmen wondered why it had never occurred to her to wonder about the agency's motivations before. Their practice was either a wonderful and beneficent thing, taking a group of people who would be independently miserable and forming them into a joyful and useful unit, or something more self-serving and controlling. She had never really considered the latter option before. Perhaps she was only just now learning to be cynical in that way. However, in any event, Acmes hires usually found the free communal lodgings an attractive proposition.
Ignoring her side logic for a moment, Carmen returned to the original problem. Acme dormitories in the morning had always been chaos incarnate. With that sort of practice, Carmen was probably capable of sleeping through the end of the world itself.
The clock read 6:00 am. By this time, Suhara would have been awake nearly an hour, well into his morning martial arts routine. Chief, who never truly slept, would probably be cheering him on, with pom-poms or some other disruptive method. Someone would have brewed gritty coffee. Two or three people probably would be arguing. Any number of folks would be yelling that they were attempting to sleep, likely to unsympathetic ears. Cups of water would be upended over hapless heads. Copies of Shakespeare's assorted works would be thrown across the room. Someone would be found in the wrong bunk and disciplined. There would never be enough chocolate donuts. That was on a good day. On a bad day they also ran short of glazed and jelly. Cop stereotypes aside, those supplies were important because other options, scrambled eggs and potatoes, were consistently inedible. Thank goodness it was almost impossible to ruin bacon.
The coordinator would by now be calling out unassigned cases, proclaiming all the chaos that had accumulated during the night. This morning, Carmen's defection would assuredly top the list. She felt a twisted sense of pride.
Yes, an overabundance of peace and quiet was definitely the problem. Carmen's ears seemed to be ringing with lack of sound. Her mind tried to increase the volume of her thought to fill the space. The additional ambiguity was starting, no stimulus from the outside to interest or vex her. Lacking some sort of impetus to force her to move, Carmen felt strangle unattached, unsure if it was time for her to rise.
Shaking her head briskly, the novice thief sat up, strode to the washroom, turned the faucet, and splashed frigid water on her face. It helped, not much but a little. She turned on her radio and deemed the drone of the weather forecast an improvement, but only just. Carmen clapped her hands, testing the acoustics, and found them overbearing, a sink that trapped and destroyed the sound. Carmen nearly started talking aloud, but decided at the last minute that it would set a bad precedent.
This heaviness was similar to the fatal boredom that had brought her here, but belonged in a different category. Both left dead air time, a quietness inside her skull, mental faculties sitting idle. Inevitably, those things made her reckless, created an urge to move outpace the environment and inwardly fidget. Though Carmen was aware that it was counterintuitive for someone in her newfound profession, she was unused to being left to her own devices. In fact, she hated it.
Carmen swallowed. It would seem she didn't like to be alone in the morning. That was a problem. Illogical anxiety, sudden cloying need for mundane interaction, was completely unacceptable on every level. It had the potential to be the fatal flaw that inevitably accompanies hubris. Having endured a few school instructors who liked Greek tragedy entirely too much, Carmen was far too familiar with that particular convention and had no intentions of acting it out.
Pulling herself forcefully out of the nervous moment, Carmen harshly instructed herself to get used to it. True, no one had warned her that turning her life into a parody of an Emerson essay would have the effect of pressing some supernatural mute button. However there was no reneging on the deal now. There were irreversible choices, made deliberately and with malice that precluded her finding again what she missed.
Or did they? Her eyebrows twitched. Carmen firmly believed that there was no problem, emotional or otherwise, superior to her intellect. There was surely a solution. Her fingers tapped against her jawbone. When the situation failed to immediately improve, she persevered, continuing her meditation through a Wall Street report and a song, as luck would have it by The Police.
Suddenly, a possibility presented itself. Frowning at the characterless comforter, Carmen considered an imitation of sorts. Carmen knew the friendly surroundings of Acme were unreachable, but perhaps she could manufacture some sort of ersatz atmosphere.
Yes, that was a definite option. Naturally, her criminal enterprise would grow to involve others. Her business model, though still in fledgling state, required additional human bandwidth, almost immediately. Carmen knew she had the capability to run Vile as a pristine company, model of efficiency, opposite in every way of the mismanaged mess that was Acme. She had assumed it natural to operate in this way. Yet… perhaps this was not the best choice. Did the petty aggravations and confusion serve some purpose?
Then bring on the chaos. Carmen would surround herself with entropy so she would never need to wake to silence again. That would hold her. It would have to, until something better came along.