notes— so there's this anon reader who's left me a ton of wonderful feedback and since i couldn't thank them in person, i figured i could at least give them the chapter they requested. so blame Reviewer for this trash, because it really is all their fault.
out
of
style
ii. in which she sleeps on the way
;;
if i could try a little harder i would succeed—oh,
i'd rather give up, and be happy
.
.
Lisanna knows Charles de Gaulle Airport as well as her old high school corridors. It's like looking at pictures of her younger self and imagining what it would be like to wear that hairstyle—a hairstyle she has to admit is really just a glorified bowl cut—now as a twenty-four year old.
Basically, navigating from one terminal to the next is both nostalgic and shudder-inducing. It's horrifying, quite frankly, and by the time she meets her brother in the waiting area outside baggage claim, her jaw is sore from clenching and her neck cracks every time she looks too far to the left.
Elfman quirks a grin her way, taking the handle of the heavy suitcase from her sore fingers. "Sleep on the way?"
"Regrettably." She grimaces as she tries to massage some feeling back into her stiff calves. "You'd think those eight hours would feel a little shorter after so many years of flying them, but nope. The Atlantic's as obnoxiously oversized as it ever was."
"Something we have in common," he laughs.
When Elfman glances at his phone, Lisanna reflexively does too, and immediately averts her gaze when she realises it's all in French. When her big brother started living in another language, she has no idea, but all of a sudden he's texting in French in front of her and it hits her in the face like a splash of cold water.
"How are the wedding plans going?" she asks, half out of obligatory concern as the bridesmaid, and half something else entirely.
Elfman pockets the smartphone and glances down at Lisanna with a rueful smile. "Great. Just great. Nee-san's switched dresses seven times to date, and Freed insists on walking Laxus down the aisle."
Lisanna isn't sure how to respond to that, so she stays silent.
"Ready to go?"
She nods and lets him lead the way, re-adjusting the straps of her backpack so they don't dig into her shoulders quite so viciously.
On their way, she catches snippets of smooth rapid French; from taxi drivers, coffee drinkers, luggage losers, business men in crumpled suits with deep circles underneath their eyes — like a buoy in the ocean, she obediently follows her brother to his car and wonders if she looks as out of place as she feels.
Elfman chatters happily about the lunch his girlfriend prepared for Lisanna—something she'll just love with crabs and avocado and shellfish (she's allergic to shellfish, Lisanna has to remind him)—asking her when her graduation ceremony is, laughing when she tells him it was in July, giving pointers for the job hunt as if he's ever worked in the States, and taking her monosyllabic answers with an enthusiasm that honestly just leaves her feeling all the more drained.
It's not that she isn't ecstatic to see him, because she is — Lisanna's over the moon. Of course she is. It's just that— well, it's that, isn't it? It's realising that there's this whole life that she's completely absent from, where there isn't even a place for her. It's having to remember results of a divorce that led to her family moving continents and leaving her behind.
She's close to her siblings, she really is. She adores them with all her heart. But the distance is frightening, and she's just sat for eight hours straight to fly to the city that was the bad guy in all of her childhood nightmares.
Lisanna doesn't mean to drift to sleep against the cool glass of the car window, but when Elfman rouses her with a soft, "Lis? We're here," she wishes she could keep her eyes closed for just a little longer.