Disgust
Rating: PG-13/T
Genre: Drama/Angst
Summary: Companion-ish to Speculation. Diana hates being touched.
Author's Note: … I don't know. It won't end.
Disclaimer: I don't own Rule of Rose (Damn it all…) Atlus does.
She hated his hands.
Hated the way they didn't stay where they were supposed to. Hated how they slid over her shoulders and down her arms and over her hands. Touched where old men weren't supposed to be touching little twelve-year-old girls.
This was the backbone of her intense hatred for adults.
His attitude in general left much to be desired: he was nasty, unfair and- worst and most infuriating of all- hypocritical. Girls in the past- ones that had long since grown up and escaped the hell that was the Rose Garden Orphanage- had been beaten within an inch of their lives for being caught with boys.
But no such fuss was made when the fifty or sixty-something-year-old man was touching someone barely a quarter his age.
Predictable, but no less infuriating.
She always felt slimy once he let her go; slimy and unclean. She would shiver for hours, tugging and wiping her clothing like she was covered in ants and desperately trying to get them off.
This was the one- the one- situation that could make big, tough, scary-within-her-own-rights Diana cry. She couldn't help it; she was scared and ashamed and embarrassed with the situation. She was bigger than this. She was tougher than this. So why was it happening? And why was she allowing it to happen?
And all the while, in the back of her mind, she was petrified that she would end up like Clara.
Hoffman didn't know that Diana knew. If he did, he would really have hurt her by now (Not that he hadn't been doing a fair job already). Maybe he would kill her, since she wasn't the type to keep her mouth shut on many subjects if it didn't suit her. If she had a chance, a glimmering opportunity, she would tell; and credibility or no credibility, it was a risk that Hoffman would not be willing to take.
But in the interim, Diana could do nothing. Nothing but pray that she wouldn't end up like poor Clara: Broken, defeated, in agonizing pain and contemplating straining the rafters of the attic.