wash with similar colours
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peachshipping anzu x yuugi
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drama, post-canon, oc
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uprooted (1/4)
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Anzu breathed in the scent of fresh paint. She'd picked a blueish kind of white, which made her new place look clean. Cleansed.
The building manager walked up to her from the bathroom. "Everything okay?"
"Yes," replied Anzu, grabbing the keyring that was being handed to her. "I've decided to hire handymen after all."
The manager smiled. "Good idea. You'll be needing some rest," she told Anzu prudently. "Moving day gets more taxing everytime."
Anzu pondered for a moment the meaning behind this trivial statement.
Yes, settling here would be taxing indeed. But it was also necessary.
A matter of life or death. So to speak.
"Thank you for the keys. I'll see you next seek, I guess."
They locked the door. Behind them, a promising void, barren, waiting to be dirtied and warmed up and lived in. By her.
And her alone.
.
She spent the four remaining days packing silverware, photos, DVDs in a strangely serene peace of mind. This Domino home, that she was about to leave, had become a haven of sorts now that it was deconstructed and thus, unrecognizable.
Small suppers and parties were made in her honor. "I'm not going forever," she'd tell her friends, "I'll be coming back," and everyone around the table would start laughing nervously, like part of her had in effect been taken along when she took the decision to move away from Domino.
She was given a brand new set of tableware, some nice potted plants. Miho made her gorgeous curtains to hang over her windows - because "those blue blinds will be ghastly to stare at, she claimed. You need to bring the sun's warmth into that tiny little place of yours." Honda couldn't, either, come with terms with the fact that Anzu was letting her beautiful family home be rented to strangers all the while storing herself away in a condo the size of a shoebox, a whole hour's drive from here.
"It's not that small," she kept telling them. And the 'shoebox' has a closed bedroom, so you have no reason not to stay over, either."
On Tuesday, she got up at five, having only gleaned a couple hours' worth of sleep. She sat on a wooden chair that her mother had probably sat on once, some thirty years ago, to breastfeed her. Light rain tapped the windowsills. Birds would chirp loud enough to wake her at this time of day, but that was before the old oak tree was cut off.
Anzu's icy fingers tightened around the burning coffee mug.
In other circumstances, she could have been the one sitting in this rocking chair, breastfeeding a baby, her own, lulling him or her to sleep.
She laid down the cup on a nearby cardboard box, wondering why she had made coffee in the first place. She'd arrange to box the coffee machine at the last minute, but forgot where she'd packed the sugar, and there was no milk in her empty fridge.
When she woke again her neck felt sore, and the raining had stopped. The view in the window before her was obstructed by a moving truck.
The doorbell rang.
She picked her woolen shawl from where it fell off, at her feet, and drowsily walked to the door.
"Ms Mazaki?"
"That's me," she smiled welcomingly to the three men lined up on her front lawn. "Do you guys drink black coffee?"
.
The whole moving ordeal was over about an hour or two earlier than originally planned. More than once, and on a whim, she asked that some boxes be stored away in the cellar rather than brought along with her. Photos. Some books. Duel Monsters figurines. A whole stack of dresses in their dry cleaner envelopes. Even bedding. In the cellar, she discovered a stroller that Miho had passed on to her. Anzu let the youngest handyman take it. He accepted humbly, not knowing whether he should ask more about it. In the end, he didn't.
The paint had dried out in her new condo but the scent lingered on. It reminded her the one time Sugoroku had hired her and Jounouchi to give the game shop a makeover during the summer between grade eleven and grade twelve. She'd gotten paint in her hair and ruined an old pair of sneakers. They had been paid in Duel Monsters booster packs. And Yuugi had burned the brownies he'd tried to bake for them, because he had been (in secret) putting together a new deck for her, and completely forgot about the sweet brown paste swelling in the oven.
She laid down, arms and legs sprawled, on the bare, new mattress she had had delivered here the day before. She blankly looked out the bare windows, staring at the red brick walls on the building opposite to hers for the longest time, and softly cried herself to sleep.
.
To her surprise, Anzu woke up a few minutes before noon.
She had slept in, despite the overwhelming brightness of the room, and was welcomed by a brutal headache when she sat up. She dragged her feet to the bathroom, where she drank lukewarm water straight from the tap until her stomach felt bloated from it.
The water in this city didn't taste too bad. She looked up in the mirror and took a good look at her face.
The cool, artificial glow of the compact fluorescent light bulb droning above her head, brought up to her attention a number of small flaws she hadn't noticed before. Of course, her eyes had been red from crying. But there were, in various places on her face, little, tiny creases and bumps marking, not unlike the growth rings on the severed trunk of the oak tree, the weight of years passed and of the trials of life.
She splashed her face with colder water. Walked out of the washroom. Her feet felt like they had overheated from the warmth trapped overnight in her little black socks, so she took them out an tossed them carelessly, almost playfully on one of the taller box piles. Sore from having slept in her jeans and bra, she undressed, throwing each garment in a different direction. They looked like lifeless black limbs twisted in unnatural angles on their cardboard pedestals, like fragments of silhouettes.
Completely naked, she let her back slide against one of the walls until she sat on the naked floor, enjoying the cold surface against her skin.
"So this is my new home," she declared to herself, to nobody in particular.
It was a bright, overcast sky out. Maybe she could take a walk before unpacking.
Buy jam, bread and milk. She needed to plug in the refrigerator, first.
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tbc
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social butterflies (2/4)
domestication (3/4)
let me tell you about the birds and the bees (4/4)