Winter
By xannychan
A/N: Pre-El Mañana. This was completely and totally written on the spot; I typed it out as the most random thoughts came to my head. So…it'll be a little incoherent. It took roughly half an hour to put it all together.
Warnings: Noodle-centric. One-sided Noodle/2D if you squint and nod a little to the left and look really hard. Angst like always.
---
Noodle isn't sure why she's here. She hates it here. More than anywhere else, she hates it here. The snow drifts outside the studio, the color of polluted grey and black, falling for ages onto the gravestones, onto the dismantled, graying bodies of zombies, covering the world in a flurry of darkness.
In Hokkaido, the snow fell white and stayed white, quiet, gentle. The sky was bright there, and the people were kind. The only thing to fear in the Hokkaido countryside was the deafening silence that the snow brought, not the eternal moan of zombies scraping the walls, the gateway to Hell just beneath their feet, not the darkness that seemed to cover everything and consumed their souls into nothing.
Noodle would like to go to Hokkaido again. Silence would be nice.
Her acoustic guitar rests across her lap, all smooth golden wood and steel strings and hollow body and metal pegs. It didn't bring comfort today like it normally did. Today, it was a hard reminder of her purpose: a guitarist for the Gorillaz, the internationally adored band that had people screaming and clawing the air at their concerts and women sliding in and out of the studio doors and stroking their pretty hands through 2D's hair and down Murdoc's chest and the occasional squeal for Russel and mail by the thousands everyday.
A little Japanese girl and with her little guitar in her little room; that was all she was.
Noodle couldn't remember her real name.
Today, the guitar brought bruises to her cold fingers, black and blue like the ground after a particularly hideous zombie attack, like the sky above the studio during a winter storm, like 2D and the blue hair and hollow eyes as dark as fear.
She wondered why she thought of orange colors when she thought of him.
Perhaps it was the bottles that were scattered across his bedside table. Prescription, he'd explained hastily, lamely. The migraines, y'know? It's the migraines. They're a real killer.
Perhaps it was the color of his skin when the bite mark of a particularly kinky fan scarred over. Perhaps it was the heat on her face when they brushed, or the warning the rang out in her head when she found herself thinking of him a bit too much or the jealousy rearing its ugly head in her gut when he shut the door to his room and a giggle or two escaped from the bed or the maybe it was the color of her quiet sobbing when she had so much to say and all she could do was play her little golden guitar?
But she saw red when she thought of the Gorillaz as a whole.
Red like lifeblood that ran through all of them though it seemed as if everyone was dying bit by bit, like the sundown in summer if the wind didn't burn too much, like a hickey on 2D's neck and scratches across Murdoc's back and a burn on Russel's finger from a frying pan and the underside of her fingernails when she played too hard trying to distract herself.
The winter was cold here at Kong Studios. Noodle finally figured out why.
She was lonely.
---
Hokkaido is one of the northern-most islands of Japan known for its cold winters.
Did you like?