AN: Womb is officially one of my most favorite movies. I requested a category for it on here and I was going to wait to post fiction for it till they got that settled, but this just sort of exploded before I could stop it. I wrote this all in one afternoon! Aren't you proud of me? It's the most I've ever written in one sitting. God, my writing has been prolific lately. Agh, but this movie does lead to prolific writing.
FFN needs to make a category for this, because there's so much stuff I want to write about this movie!
Disclaimers: Womb belongs to Benedek Fliegauf. Also, I'm seriously, irreversibly, head−over−heels in love with Matt Smith right now. I know that's not really a legitimate disclaimer, but in case I start fangirling all over the place about what a beautiful, fantastic actor he is, you've been warned ahead of time.
There's sand in her hair and sand between her toes, she thinks. There's saltwater gathering on her skin and drying in crystalline tracks, she thinks. There are ocean waves pounding the shore and voices like thunderclaps rupturing in her hearing and birds dancing through thick breezes and the world stretching deep into the horizon, she thinks.
But it's not home.
The docks lay empty and cold. Water not yet evaporated clung to the rotting wood in puddles. She watched the way the brine and mold snaked their way up the sides of the docks, arms crossed tight over her chest and practically creased from where they had remained folded for too long. The waves crashed feebly against the side of the ship, as though in a last attempt to make her jump into the water and stay there, where she belonged.
But then, her breath fogged up the ferry boat glass, and high above the condensation she found herself staring at her grandfather's face. The solemnity of it, the starched lines and solid furrows. He waved a hand with a profusion of wrinkles, but she'd stopped waving back long ago.
She couldn't bring herself to wave anymore when his face wasn't there to see her off too.
Her bag skittered across the tile. She took a deep breath of the atmosphere and tasted the particles that settled on her tongue.
Even the air wasn't the same here.
Bodies pressed against her on all sides, tall and gangly limbs a thousand stories higher than her miniature frame. People swapped stories in languages she couldn't begin to identify, and all the letters of the passing shops blurred with characters she couldn't recognize. It was all too loud, all too noisy, all too crowded, and her sleepy mind barely registered a fraction of the activity.
She clutched her passport tight between her fingers and tried to keep walking in a straight line.
And then− someone bumped into her. A traveler like herself, and in the edges of her peripheral vision, he was a mess of patched up suitcase and raggedy coat hems. He'd tripped over the corner of her bag and practically toppled her over, somehow having managed to avoid completely toppling over himself. He stuttered an apology, but she told him it's alright, she's more than fine, he needn't worry, she'll be okay.
He inquired as to what such a small child was doing all by herself, and she told him that her mother was waiting at the gate. By some odd and decisive turn of fate, they were headed in the same direction, so he offered to walk her there, if she didn't mind.
As they ventured through the bustle of the airport together, she asked him what he was doing all by himself. Sonar, he said with a grin full of tilted teeth. He arrived on a business meeting, but all he really wanted to do was hurry through the conference so that he could find some time to tour the city and partake in some of the local eateries. He winked at the last bit, and she laughed back.
It was a friendship, of sorts. Fractured and momentary, but the formation of something strong nevertheless. Lonely child and lonely man, and for a moment, perhaps, they were almost whole.
He dropped her off at her mother's side prim and proper, than he disappeared into the crowd like a magic man diving into the embrace of velvet curtains.
She never saw him again, but a small piece of his smile stayed with her for the rest of her life.
They lived in an apartment on the seventy second floor, too far above the busy streets to be a real part of the city, too far below the top of the skyscraper to be in complete isolate. An in-between room, and it only made her feel worse.
It was her mother's idea, at first. Her mother was the sort of person who liked her coffee black and her silences contemplative. She marveled in awe at the way the apartment laid itself out in tidy rows: bedroom here, bedroom there, kitchen in the middle, bathroom, living room, and another door that Rebecca had yet to explore. All of it sealed within white, artless walls, and only one window to provide any escape.
Rebecca stared out the window often. The city lights of Tokyo puddled all around her on the plain carpet, and sitting there with only the glass to hinder her, it was like staring out into a sea of stars. Bright, luminescent spheres floating in a soup of midnight sea.
She sat gazing out the window for hours until her legs left indents in the carpet.
It was then that her mother dragged her off the ground. A lecture was tumbling out of her mouth, something along the lines of how moving shouldn't turn children docile, or about how her spine would crumple over if she sat like that for so long. Something along those lines, but Rebecca only caught two words.
Koi fish.
The tank shuddered with marine life.
A man stood next to the tank in business slacks, and a net dangled from between his fingers. The tank stretched almost from ceiling to floor, and the fish writhed their way around in a frenzy and flash of scale and color.
Creases congealed around the edges of his lips, but he managed a placid half−smile at her, one that didn't quite touch his eyes. But then again, most smiles she'd seen these days really didn't. They all looked forced. Faked. Automated.
The question hovered an inch above monotone. "Which one would you like?"
With a brilliant smile, all five fingers pointed. "Those ones, please."
Click. Clack. Ching.
The money tumbled onto the counter and sparkled under the fluorescent lights.
Rebecca left the store with an armful of plastic bag and seven wriggling, energetic fish.
Her mother told her they were very Japanese.
But to Rebecca, that didn't really matter. Did fish care if they lived in Japan? No, she was fairly sure they didn't take the time to practice all the Japanese customs on a daily basis. Did they speak Japanese? No, as far as Rebecca was concerned, they could probably speak more Japanese than she could. But that didn't really bother her− they were Koi and they were hers, and to Rebecca that was all that mattered. They belonged to her, and she took care of them, and they were like her own little children.
Almost. They didn't have any of the features she wanted in her children, though.
But she swallowed the bitterness down with a spoonful of koi−colored sugar and reminded herself that these fish were the closest things she'd ever have to children in a long, long while, and she might as well enjoy them while they were here.
Against the dull ivory of the walls, hidden away in the corner of her bedroom, they hung about like secrets and burned like comets of sunrise. Oranges and silvers swirled together in the tank, and darted past her in gentle flashes of light between the azure trembles of the water.
Her legs found a new place to sit in the apartment.
She liked to lie awake at night, trace circles on her stomach, and think. It was an odd habit, a very odd habit that she ought to have broken by now. But it was her secret, a sort of penetrating longing embedded deep within her, and it would never leave, not really. On a conscious level, she had no idea why she even did it in the first place. She just liked the feel of movement against her skin. A simple, calming gesture, but to calm what she couldn't figure out.
When she lay in the dark with her eyes closed, her subconscious teemed with images of empty beaches, blue sweaters against bare skin, and outlines of fish dragged through sea foam.
A face sparkled dazzling in the back of her mind, but she shoved it away and rubbed more circles into her abdomen instead.
He's smiling at her now, from under that tangled mass of shining hair. Water clings to him, every inch saturated, and water clings to her too. They crouch huddled together like vagabonds underneath the deck, grinning their springtime grins and plotting their summertime secrets.
He's cradling a pear between fingerless gloves, and it rests halfway to his mouth. She can't help but notice the way the juice drips down his chin. He looks cold, but his eyes are alive. Glowing, green eyes, and she grows dizzy watching them.
She makes it a personal quest to memorize every inch of his face, because he's sitting so close to her that she can feel the beat of his heart pulsing in the air, and because he's got this wondrous sort of glint hiding underneath his skin.
He takes another bite of the pear, and she smiles just a little.
"I'm Tommy," he breathes. There's a proud sort of way to how he says his name, though it's a child's appellation. He holds it up strong, and it fills him, in a sense. She can't really understand spiritual matters, but for a minute he seems so unearthly that he could be a god.
So she raises him onto a pedestal and introduces herself back as calmly as she can. "I'm Rebecca."
He moves to take another bite of the pear, but he doesn't, not really, and she can tell that it's because he's just as captivated as she is.
He lounges on the sandy ground. "Will you be staying here all summer?"
She shakes her head. "I'm visiting my grandfather."
He can't respond to that, but he has a sort of look in his eyes that betrays something more, a kindling of both desperation and friendship. Like he wants to spend the rest of his life sitting in the rain and eating fruit with her, but he can't because reality's going to come crashing down on him any moment now.
And she only knows that's how he feels because she's feeling the same way.
The rumble of the oncoming gaggle of local kids cascades down the stairs, so the boy presses the pear into her hands and flies into the downpour.
She presses the opened flesh of the fruit to her lips, and when she goes back inside and sets the pear down on her desk.
Regardless of the fact that it yellows and browns, it remains there for the rest of her visit.
Three weeks into the adventure, it happened.
She set down her backpack on the dusty carpet and took off her shoes before she went to the visit her children. One of them bobbed in the water, upside down and bloated. She tossed them all their daily dose of food and hoped it was sleeping. She poked the body once, and her finger came back dripping with dirty water, but still the fish refused to move.
She'd named it Shimi, after the one black spot it had on its back, like an ink blot on orange paper. During the times she spent watching all the fish swimming around in the tank, she imagined that if he were an actual person, he'd be the quiet, bookish type. The one with head always buried in a volume of literature. She laughed as she pictured him. His fingers would be stained with ink that left trails all over everything he touched, and his vision would be so bad from squinting that he'd have to resort to those thick coke−bottle lenses that she'd seen characters on the TV wear.
She would sit by the tank and read fables to her fish. And while she did so, she always pretended that Shimi was the excited one who didn't say a word while she read, just stared in wonderment and awe while the books formed magnificent pictures in his mind. Whereas all the other kids would clamor with their interruptions and their questions, shoving one another out of the way, Shimi would sit calm and still. He was the only one who really listened, and when she was done she always thanked him for it and demanded of the others that if they couldn't be as respectable as Shimi, she'd send them to bed without any supper.
Shimi didn't act pompous about that, though. He was the gentle one, and he put up with his sibling's many beatings as best he could.
Until now, it seemed, when their torments got the better of him.
She ran to her mother and demanded a proper funeral. But her mother pulled out the ever−ready adult logic. They didn't have a backyard they could dig a hole in, they didn't have a fancy casket to lay him to rest in, and they didn't have a tombstone to put over his grave. Rebecca gave her largest pout and declared that she would bury Shimi in one of her mother's favorite house plants because there was plenty of room in there.
But she'd forgotten that her mother had thrown out the living, breathing plants for the new and all−the−rage holographic versions several days ago, so her best chance at an argument ended before it could really begin.
Her mother allowed her to say a few words, which Rebecca did with more than one tear, and then the fish was flushed down the toilet. Her mother washed her hands off in the sink, dried them on the towel, and that was that.
Rebecca spent half the night sitting wide awake on top of the toilet, staring at herself in the mirror. Somewhere between moonlight and sunlight, she started thinking about where fish went when they died. She hoped there was a giant ocean in heaven, where they could swim for as many miles as they wanted, where they could have all the food they ever needed and more.
For some reason, that got her thinking about snails, and one snail in particular. She wondered where snails went when they died, too. She wondered where they went during their life and what sort of homes they lived in. And she wondered whose hands would hold them, and whose boxes they'd sleep inside, and whose food they'd eat plucked fresh from the emerald lawns outside.
Before she went to bed, she had one last thing to take care of.
That morning, a post−it note hung on her bathroom mirror, blazing yellow against clear glass.
In memry of a glorios being.
Shimi, who lived a long time.
rest in peace.
Across the sandy plains, they soar on their bikes. They glow under the summer sun, and their tires leave thin tracks behind them. Like snail trails, only a million times faster. The wind surrounds them in a shell of warmth. They're rushing along in blurs, flying and laughing and leaving all their caution far behind them. No idea where they're headed, but who cares so long as they can travel together. Tommy and Rebecca, together, and to her the two names have never sounded more fantastic than when they're joined so closely.
Tommy and Rebecca.
She contemplates what would happen if conjunctions and spaces didn't exist. Of course, some tiny, rational sphere of her mind replies, that would throw the grammar of the entire world into chaos and the universe would blow up from all the confusion. What do you want to bet the sentences would go splattering all over the page, and her English teacher would probably collapse from exhaustion when grading papers? No structure, no organization, no way to put anything to rights. The damage would be eternal, breaking the world apart. Laws would die out, and order would die out, and jails would break into pieces and criminals would flood the streets.
It would be like opening Pandora's box, the sphere that spent last night curled up next to her friend reading fables out of her beat−up book declares. You'd set demons and fire all over the landscape. Your grandfather would have to send you back home to stay cooped up in the house with mother.
Who knows if you'd ever get to ride around with Tommy again? You can't leave him- that would be worse than destroying the universe!
The part of her mind that's still a child would nod and agree, yes, that is quite the argument, and I know it's never going to happen. But take a moment to breathe. Imagine how it would look.
TommyRebecca.
She smiles into the wind, and she's never felt better.
A tapping noise somewhere in the distance brought her out of her thoughts. A teacher's voice, but it was washed up and old, the accent too thick for her to drudge up enough meaning, so she ignored the voice and kept doodling.
After class, her teacher called her up to his desk and asked her why she wasn't paying attention. She pulled out her notebook and held the pages open proudly for him to see.
The upper half was lined with hundreds of koi fish, and they swam between the notebook lines. Being frozen and drawn in pencil by a child, they weren't as mysterious or colorful, but the spirit remained there, lingering in the lead. Seven of them in all, and one of them had a halo that sparkled with an angelic gleam.
The lower corner of the page contained a single snail and the edges of a foot. There was something blurry in the other corner too, and when prompted, she told her teacher that drawing was a secret. No one was allowed to know about it, not even him.
Precisely twenty seconds after she'd ridden the elevator for seventy two floors, the phone went off in her apartment. When she opened the door, the phone had already been hanging on the receiver for several angry glares. Her mother refused to take her eyes off her computer screen, lest she miss an important detail for her job, but she called her child over anyway.
Rebecca did not sit. Instead, she stood, feet placed squarely between a pile of crumpled papers and a wrapper for whatever junk food her mother had ordered that morning.
"Your teacher tells me you've been drawing in class. Ignoring him. Refusing to do your work."
Hands scrunching tight behind her back, eyes downcast, she concentrated on the way her mother's fingers flickered across the keyboard. "Yes, ma'am."
Her mother's posture straightened. "He says you were drawing… your fish. And something else, but you wouldn't tell him what it was."
Rebecca couldn't say anything.
"What were you drawing?"
Her body started to shake. Her eyes started to blur with tears and memories. She bit her lip until blood trickled into her mouth. "Nothing, ma'am."
"What were you drawing, Rebecca?"
It was while lying wide awake behind slammed doors, tucked deep under the covers, that the idea came to her. It was better than her mother's koi fish idea, a thousand times more grand, a million times more genuine.
She flipped the switch on her lamp by hand instead of turning it on just by thinking. That was another program they installed last week. Supposedly, the lights had some sort of cerebral connection, and if you stared at the switch and concentrated your thoughts in all the right places, it would sense what you wanted and flip itself on and off for you. The people that installed it said it was still a bit buggy, whatever that meant, but soon they'd have it all fixed so that it would work exactly how you want, no glitches and no questions asked.
But she reveled in the feel of the switch beneath her fingers. It gave her control over the situation, which she rarely got the chance to have.
She stayed up until sunrise poked its way out through the nighttime. She closed the fable book tight after she read the last line, and gathered up all her supplies into one neat little pile by the fish tank. While Saturday wormed its way into red and faded into light blue, she slept a quiet, peaceful sleep.
Her mother had to go into work today. And since father was never home, that meant she had the entire day to spend however she pleased.
When she left the house that morning, her sketchbook lay open on her dresser.
Beside the snail, the picture of a boy grinned like a vagabond.
She pressed deeper into the seat, fidgeting with excitement. Her backpack sat in her lap, and every now and then she fiddled with the pockets, making last−minute inspections. The shuttle thundered down the tracks, dipping and diving in and out of tunnels at light speed. Every now and then the brakes screamed to a murderous halt. She gripped the seat until her knuckles turned white, determined to remain stationary.
Sometimes, staring out the window, when she drained all her mental power, she could make out blurs of Tokyo speeding by her. The people outside the train would be walking slowly, she knew, but here in the rush, they were more phantoms flying to haunt than actual beings. They left streaks of ghostly aura in her eyes, and she swiveled her head around in a feeble attempt to catch a glance of them.
It didn't work, naturally, so she settled for slumping in her seat and hoping the shuttle would stop soon.
People filed in and out of the doors at each stop like insects swarming. Sometimes, they brushed against her and stung her. Other times, they stayed a buzz in the background, out of sight and out of mind.
Suddenly, a smile found its way into her sight. "I know you!" The man with tilted teeth took a place beside her. The both of them smiled in unison. "You're that girl at the airport. Alone again, what a rarity. Where're you headed today, friend?"
"Well…" She got about half her plan out before the train came to a shudder at her stop. "I have to go. See you! Have fun with the sonar!"
He waved her along. "I will! Good luck in all your travels!"
She waved back.
The snail glides across the countertop like a displaced traveler. It doesn't know what to do, so it eventually gives up and does nothing at all. It just starts around at its two companions and marvels at how cold the counter feels on its skin.
It's her words that shatter their silence. "I'm leaving." She can't watch the snail; she won't stop staring at his face. She still hasn't been around long enough to memorize it.
His smile stumbles. "When?"
Her spirits shatter all over the ground. "Tomorrow."
"Oh." She can see the way his heart is bursting every artery its ever connected to. "Where?"
"Tokyo."
"Japan?"
She nods, but her voice dies a slow and painful death, and all the strength and hope that she wishes to put into words is gone in that single moment− when he stops watching the snail and looks, instead, into her eyes.
The room makes her feel dizzy. His eyes send her heart pounding in the most spectacular of ways, and her face burns with guilt.
She runs for the door. "I have to go." She can't sit here; it's killing her.
He grabs her arm and pulls her so close that there's no such thing as space anymore.
He tastes like fruit and sea salt.
There's sand in her hair and sand between her toes, she thinks. But she can't really tell. The waves film over with cold, and they send numb spikes up her bones until goose bumps rise on her flesh and her skin tinges with blue. She stands bare legged and bare armed and bare bodied before the sea, and her clothes are folded up and tucked away high on the shoreline, where the water can't soak them like she'll soak them later.
There's saltwater gathering on her skin and drying in crystalline tracks, she thinks. But she hasn't stopped to check. She's concentrating on the backpack gathered in her grasp, and the plastic bag inside. Salt crusts all over her alongside the sand, but that doesn't bother her.
It's never bothered her, really.
There are ocean waves pounding the shore and they break apart shells and smash twigs open on the earth. She focuses on that instead, the drumming of the ocean, as she takes a step forward.
Voices like thunderclaps rupture in her hearing, the calls of Tokyo, far off in another time and place. They are like thunder, yes, but the distance makes up for everything, and she knows that though they threaten to storm, they can wait until she's finished here.
Birds are dancing through thick breezes, a glint of grey wing against grey sky. She's always marveled at them, how they can travel wherever they please. They are free to live as they like and do as they like, love who they wish and hold on to whatever they want to hold on to.
But today she's not a bird. Today she's taking a breath and doing what Tommy would have wanted her to do, had he been here to smile beside her.
The world stretches deep into the horizon, and she thinks that if it stretches any farther, it's going to run off the edge of the world, drip into space, and never come back again. She wonders how far that horizon really stretches. As though if she closes her eyes, she'll cross seas and continents and find her old home, her real home, peering back at her.
She tries to remind herself that she lives in Tokyo now.
But it's not home. It's just a place where she's happened to end up, caught up by the tide and the storm and deposited right here on this empty beach with an armful of backpack and plastic.
She strides into the sea, and the water envelopes her naked skin.
She pulls out the contents of her backpack, a large plastic bag filled to the brim with water.
Just like that, Rebecca unties the knot. No magic, no fables, just her and her fingers and her intuition.
The six koi fish disappear into the deep.