Title: Everyday Affair
Summary: It was not your everyday affair.
Rating: T
Disclaimer: No.
Author's Note: Uuummm…Just read it. You may be surprised. I got the idea from Carol O'Connell's books about Kathy Mallory. This reflects a passage about Charles Butler reflecting on creating a person in your mind that could manipulate you and appear real to others (an old magician's trick). Good books if you like psychological mysteries and thrillers (cop books, really).
Everyday Affair
It was not your everyday affair. She put great thought into the clothes, the hair, and the tilt of the neck. Every day her fingers traced across the wooden base of the bed-she lived frugally despite her lavish upbringing as the Governor's daughter. She pictured him in this bed, and she could feel his breath on her neck when she leaned in closely. He smelled of cherry scented smoke and good soap.
They were ingredients in her madness. The scent, the music, the loneliness-every single part of her insanity fed her mind to keep her sane. For without her insanity on these dark nights she would not be able to remain sane during the O' so bright days! She looked around her dark room and sighed, calling up his face on the blank wall before her.
She had no physical trauma, but she certainly had her own injuries to the heart and mind. This was his contribution to broken soul she had claimed years ago in school.
Next would be the years of isolation, the lost time where she had been forced to create her own companion to survive. She had emerged with her phantom of him. For most of her life she had been a thing apart-a socially inept person stuck in a world not her own. But she needn't go back that far. There was always that ache whenever he left a room.
Then there was the scent. His secret outings with himself that ended (rarely) in a pinch of cherry scented tobacco and flame left her with this. She inhaled.
Yes, she had all of the ingredients for her madness.
In her head she pieced them together to form the image of him on the blank wall. The curve of his cheek and the glint in his eyes slowly emerged from the wall and her subconscious, but the three dimensional aspect she long for was missing. His mouth opened and shut in a bad imitation of a marionette.
She could never bring about the full thing. This was her brilliant minds one failing.
Either way, as his image spread across the wall Elphaba Thropp lingered in his scent and presence knowing that she would have to steal way soon to deal with reality. Her dreams of her Prince could wait.
It was not, after all, an everyday affair.
-END-