Eri's not much a person of fictions and comic books; she's a woman of science and logic and craps that takes actual thinking and hours of mulling and endlessly expanding theories to understand. She does enjoy some fantasies, long ago it was heroes and dragons, something fitting for the bookshelf from her childhood. Sci-fi isn't bad, and while most of them are just rehashed classics, some of them are golden in their own right. The novel in her hand is, not surprisingly, the exact opposite.
The other woman, sitting prettily across of hers, is one, too. Her leg crossed atop another, fingers curling on the ear of her cup, lifting the lucky piece of porcelain mid-air, making its way to those soft pair of lips – she even manages to make sipping coffee looks undeniably sexy. The table, see-through and a bit too glass for Eri's liking, is probably God's attempt at making the whole scene even more cranked up in its... fictionality. The bar is a little bit too quiet and that is one of the unusuals. No demure exchanges of words banned by sailors themselves, no shudders of smokes and too-loud, desperate gulps of beers, only the transient melody of the bar's pianist playing something soft and romantic.
And naturally, everything about the setting is there to show her just how fictional the woman before her is – it's the too-beautiful, too-charming smile. Nozomi is just as fictional as the novel she wrote, the one held tightly in Eri's hand, halfway split into page seventy-three and seventy-four.
"Well, how is it?" Nozomi asks, expectant but not really.
Eri searches for an answer, puts the book atop the table in a mumbled 'plop', and stares straight at the Unreal before her, taking in the breathtaking beauty, and finally concludes. She pulls out the ciandy cancer held lightly between her lips, inhaling nicotine, exhaling affections,
"Beautiful."
one – move out of the way, drama characters; we're the protagonists
Eri wakes up with sunlight digging into her eyes, piercing through the cracks of her lids, halfway-opened and stuck in the moment. The window at the end of her bedroom is the one to blame, its curtains set slightly apart from each other, tantalizing to the sun, inviting something a little bit too bright for the worn-out souls, reminding her of Mondays.
Turning her head to right, her left hand reaches out for a small sticky note stuck obnoxiously to the side of the nightstand, yellow against mahogany brown. She feels her tendons stretch, straining hard enough she winces a little, her body turned sideways.
She'll so move the nightstand to the left side of her bed. Mornings will be easier. Less having her chest squished between her body and her right arm, too, due to the awkward position.
The handwriting is totally hers, albeit a little wobbly. The i not as straight as to how it's supposed to be, the r with their curves crooked, the o too ellipse. Written in blue ink the name of client, scribbled below is a date, time, and a place of meeting.
So she raises from the safety confine that is bed in the morning of a Monday, left hand propping herself up, the sticky note crushed under. Eri lives for another day.
Eri's had enough of Mondays and an upcoming trial where the defendant looks like a thug and behaves like man-eating... thug. Maybe, maybe she's just too much of a friggin' messiah to decline said client. Then again, it's against her code of honors to walk away from people in need of her defense.
She's definitely too much of a messiah, then again, it might be because she's dying too, in a slow, but the most painful, exhausting, humiliating way possible.
So, on the way home, halfway through a bridge where the river below flows harsher than everywhere else, she witnesses something out of the ordinary. Something novel. Something so ridiculous and stupid.
The woman looks somewhere her age, a smile in place, hands gripping the metal railing as if she's holding onto her lifeline, porcelain skin stretched taut against trembling knuckles. She's crouching above the railing. It's 6 p.m, yet this part of the city is oddly desolate, like Eri somehow wakes up to post-apocalyptic Earth where it's just her, eyes embarrasingly wide and surprised to the bone, and this woman, who's turning to a drenched missing corpse in a span of five minutes.
But it's not like Eri lets her.
She feels her legs pulling themselves forward, finds her voice quivering and the tone an octave too high, curses at her squeaked "stop". When the stranger looks like she's about to jerk herself onto the cold stream under, Eri's left hand lunges forward, closes the gap between them lightning quick, seizes the woman's elbow in a too desperate hold. The cigarette between her lips makes love to the dust and asphalt on the road. Soon, forgotten.
"Stop it," after a decade long struggle, Eri manages, "just, stop, don't do it, don't – kill yourself," Eri notices how of the two, she's the one who's shaking, "let's talk,"
Eri waits patiently for an answer between the rough panting and wheezing she recognizes as her own. She also studies the woman closer, from the pretty, pretty face, the dainty fingers locked around the metal railing, looking somewhere between blue and purple, blood red absent. There's a trail of dried tears making its way from her eye before disappearing midway her cheek. Eri wonders how it looks like when the tears are still saline and droplets and crystal-like. She wonders how it would taste against her taste buds, maybe. She wants to taste death.
She gets an answer that throws her rather off-guard. The woman smiles, between her purple locks, wet and flattened and the one around her face looking sticky, probably cause of sweats. She smiles, something crackish. Something illogical. Something otherworldly. Something beautiful. "Okay," she says, and Eri's heart skips a beat or two, and it's not something stupid like a certain L-word, it's the whole ridiculousness of the situation. It is that, nothing more, nothing less.
And just like that, the prologue ends not with a deafening bang but a quiet shudder of "help me". It's the beginning of a story of some sorts.
Happy birthday my beloved cutie socially-awkwar d senpie Erichika! Here's a birthday fic for you. Also, I'm looking for a beta-reader; PM me if you want to kill some time ^^
Concrits greatly appreciated