Chapter 7

A/N A short chapter this time, to be expanded eventually.

„ And how long have you been seventeen?"

The pale heroine at the centre of the scene queried, camera panning fast around to underscore her distress. The male lead, who looked even paler than her, seemed conflicted as if the truth was something forbidden, dangerous even. Granted, he'd been wearing a very pained expression since the beginning, but now his scowl deepened, if possible.

„...A while"

„Tell me this is a horror movie after all", Uta drawled, but shifted his position so that he could sink further into the fleshy material of the sofa and watch more comfortably; without peeling his eyes off the screen, he reached out and brought the mug of coffee they had prepared before to his lips.

The room around them was dark and he wasn't wearing his glasses. Lotte didn't have any problems with believing his sclerae were tattooed, more interested in knowing whether he had any problems with seeing or not; she mentioned her friend had lost her sight in one eye after doing the same.

A snort came from where Lotte was curled up, snug in her fluffy blanket and a cup of cocoa on her lap. Berg was sleeping inbetween the two, and they both took turns to pet her absentmindedly from time to time.

„No, it's a first in the series. I think there are three more to go?". The ghoul rolled his eyes at that; still, he toyed with an idea that he'd ask Lotte to borrow the books if she had them around. The look on her face would be priceless.

It was dead of the night now and besides Berg snoring, only the sound of laptop heating up could be discerned; Misaki pirated the movie right after it became available over the net and Lotte had its copy sitting on the disc ever since. It seemed good idea to watch it now, what with her friendly neighbour deciding to tag along and drop in.

So far, the ghoul seemed positively entrenched in the story of a doomed romance between vampire and a mortal girl. Paying him sly side-glances from time to time, Lotte saw his expression shifting from amused to ridiculed as the scenes progressed. Unironically enough, they both had a good time watching the movie, although none of them would admit that.

It was the scene towards the finale, where the female lead evaded her vampiric friends and followed the antagonist to the decrepit ballet studio, that Lotte visibly had enough.

„That's just ridiculous", she scoffed and sipped her now cold cocoa audibly. From the corner of his eye, Uta could see that she seemed scandalized. She would snort derisively at times before – especially the glittering bits and the movie's particular brand of vegetarianism got their fair dose of thrashing, to which Uta only rolled his eyes; he was willing to suspend his standards for some hour and a half.

„You question her decisions only now?", he asked, incredulous but amused, after she had almost spit cocoa on herself and Lotte chuckled at that and shaked her head. The lead was a hot mess anyway, she said. The woman was sitting on her feet and hugging her knees; her eyes weren't leaving the screen now, following the tense showdown. Uta voiced his hope for a bloody conclusion then, and seemed disappointed when the bulk of it happened offscreen.

They discussed how lukewarm they'd felt about the ending as they did the dishes afterwards, Lotte scrubbing and Uta drying them off with a cloth. It looked strange, no dishwasher in a dwelling that, impractically enough, boasted an indoor swimming pool and a rooftop library. He told her so, to which Lotte gave a noncommital shrug.

„I get by without lots of things", were her words (the hypocrite, Uta thought) as she finished rinsing the last cup and was drying her hands with a towel.

Aside those few pieces they had just cleaned, her kitchen looked stark, unused. Uta thought it looked similar to his, and not for the first time wondered whether her diet simply didn't include processed food at all. Perhaps she preferred it just as fresh as he did. Glancing sideways to her, it was difficult to imagine she could hunt in this state at all. Carefully hidden under her leggings and a fluffy hoodie, only her face gave away her poor health. Yet she didn't act perturbed around him now, joking and commenting on the movie animatedly. If she felt ill, it seemed he wouldn't be privy to this knowledge. Pity, crossed his mind as he followed the woman to the day room shortly after.

Once again curled up on the sofa, with Berg marching off to bedroom before they finished the dishes, Uta could see how their knees were almost touching now. As she leaned into their shared space laughing at something he'd said, Lotte's body radiated warmth that was reflected in an unhealthy redness of her cheeks. From underneath the material of her hoodie, only tips of her fingers peeked and suddenly Uta had a fleeting thought of feeling her hands through it or even hugging her, random as it was. The sensation of bodily heat filtered through soft, yet thick material promised a satisfying hug, yet he left that particular whim hanging. Maybe for another time, he thought and put his head back on the sofa, letting go of a breath he didn't know he was holding up before.

As Lotte was ranting on how she thought the movie they'd just watched, though undeniably watchable, was sending all the wrong messages, Uta seized the moment to try and fish subtly for some answers. He was fairly sure she chose the movie out of her lazy sense of irony, and wanted to follow this thread some more, just to get a general picture. Presently, the bone of contention in their discussion was how for Lotte the relationship at the centre of the plot was toxic, unhealthy, whereas Uta couldn't believe how she didn't see the unfeasability of it all in the first place. Might as well roll with whatever the plot threw at them, she retorted then.

„It's a vampire story, Lotte", he baited her, not so subtly eyeing her pouting mouth; he had a hunch she wouldn't react well to mansplaining at all – he enjoyed goading her lightly. „It's ridiculous concept to begin with, an unreal premise if you ask me".

Scowling, the girl nevertheless agreed that it definitely wasn't traditional approach to the lore, and a naive one at that. Uta gave her a sly smile then and wanted to know if she was even interested in that kind of thing, since he himself couldn't care for imaginary creatures at all. He preferred his fantasy - the ghoul continued - in a dystopian costume, preferrably with a lot of angsty AI existentialism thrown in for a good measure.

Lotte however, wouldn't take the bait. She merely gave him a wry, tired smile and commented that as it was, those imaginary creatures served as a mirror humans projected lots of their emotional baggage onto, and were as good as any for this purpose. She thrummed an impatient staccatto on her knee with her fingers as she spoke; it seemed she wasn't willing to follow his planned thread of conversation. He would wait patiently for the eventual reveal till she tired and caved, he decided then, as if he were planning on adding an unusual insect specimen to his childhood collection, for a later dissection. Patient observation was an essential first step, and he was curious what pieces her whole could yield in the end.

They chatted leisurely afterwards, an occassion for Uta to have a look around her place. He wanted to see the library and the pool, and also all the paintings and sculptures below. Lotte kept to his side, commenting on the pieces she felt she did a good work on, but mostly staying quiet. She was an able painter, but clearly unmotivated and unwilling to search for her own language yet. He preferred her smaller sculptures that littered the rooftop studio and marvelled at some bigger, unfinished ones. Her talent shined in these organic masses, the different kinds of stones pliant under her touch and blooming into multitude of shapes with alarming vitality, an unsettling excess.

The building she lived in was unkempt, and they weaved their way with some difficulty to reach the monochromes around the walls, threading carefully in thick layer of dust carpeting the floors below. She owned some older masterpieces as well; not for the first time Uta wondered just how she financed this lifestyle of such random opulence amid stylised disrepair.

Perhaps her millieu would prove to be much more interesting than the girl herself, then. Attractive in her unravelling, and hinting at some interesting qualities, the woman at his side was clearly no longer in her prime condition though and, if Uta was to sum her up succintly, he would say she was as if dulled on edges. He wanted to see the edges for himself one day, he thought, when all the grit and glamour about her was taken away.

As she was showing him around, Uta pretended he didn't see how tired and ill Lotte seemed with each passing minute, but nevertheless subtly maneuvered the conversation so as to wish her good night not long after they had started the tour. He asked her to get some rest then; his gentle palms rested for a fleeting moment on her hand, on her forehead. „You seem to have a fever", he observed, his sight sliding from her round, apple-red cheeks to her mouth; it formed a slight „O" as her eyes got slightly criss-crossed following his hand on her face.

He'd say she was flustered, hopefully even slightly tickled by his attention. Maybe the movie got to her - even he was tempted to embrace her before after all. Silly things, they both seemed to think and in a sudden, shared moment, Lotte took a resolute step back and Uta allowed his hands to naturally come back to his sides.

„Well then – he said, his one hand lifted in an effortless goodbye – I'll be going. Take care, Lotte"

And with that, he was gone – the door clicked into their place with finality after he let himself out, and for few moments, Lotte was unwilling to come and properly close it. She felt slightly uncomfortable, as if she was copied and pasted into that very moment, not remembering the seconds leading to him touching her, then leaving. This had happened often enough before, a feature of an attention disorder, she was told once. A busy interesction, in a middle of a date or mid-kill, she would freeze-rewind into next moment as if reality around her glitched, tearing at the seams.

Certainly interesting to feel it at that moment, awakening to the slight flutterings of desire, disoriented and even surprised. Bewildered, she observed Uta's retreating form those few moments before, and could only think on how soft his clothes must've felt, how clean he smelled. How ravenous he made her feel.

She had never wanted to eat somebody's flesh as badly as then.

The final meeting with Takeda had been surprisingly postponed till the Christmas Eve, if one cared for Western nomenclature. The irony wasn't missed on Lotte, who had to reluctantly decline Uta's invite for a casual outing at his friend's bar the same day. Even less willing, although for reasons that hurt way more personally, was she to finally schedule a meeting with the girls, in a whole squad for the last time before Sachiko would leave for her annual winter retreat.

There could be no other time to meet regardless of the outcome with Takeda, Lotte reasoned. She could end up dead, whether by his hand or succumbing to her change, unprepared as she was on both accounts. Or she would be alive, but absolutely unable to mingle with humans anyway. Whatever the outcome, she wanted to see them, to somehow show them how much she cherished their friendship. The day before Christmas Eve, another painful irony, Lotte would march to the karaoke place that Michiru had chosen and allow herself to be at ease, for it all would end shortly, one way or another.

So it was with a fervor that had to be enough whenever her body failed her, the woman threw herself into sculpting, shaping things that she wanted to be remembered for, long before she left Tokyo. Working allowed her to chase that elusive state of total concentration on the task at hand, so much that it was Uta who had been walking Berg for the last few days. Citing the dry spell at his work this time of a year („not much traffic in the kinky circles", he said, shrugging), he spent his evenings at her place, observing how she bent over her rough models, trying on and improvising shapes she felt were best suited for the three girls.

Willing to attempt a more solid medium, Lotte found herself unable to. Her fingers failed her, unsteady and quivering and the different kinfs of stones she tried to carve would bear ugly chippings and fissures that deformed the original concepts. She had to settle for the finely finished clay, and even then she lost her first fingernail to Misaki's sleek, nimble shape of a dancer, originally imagined in spelter, had she more time or stamina to properly cast it; Misaki was a secret Tchaikovsky fan, it turned out once, and that passion suggested the theme.

When it happened, she was alone in her workshop, battling a sudden sweating spell and a sense of vertigo that chased her every move. She had already grown a tooth in a place teeth weren't suppose to bloom at all that morning, and managed to rip it off before she choked on it. Over a hysterical phone call across the ocean, Leonard suggested she would have to do this often when it had fully begun, as she wasn't yet built to house them all. He'd advised to do this whenever a new one would sprout; so far, Lotte had a collection of three, notwithstanding the three she had already foolishly thrown to garbage. She cried and burnt out all the pain with bleach; it was difficult to get pure grain alcohol Tokyo.

She was fashioning a delicate curve of a dancer's neck when her finger hitched into the clay. When she took it away, the dull throbbing and wetness on its tip alerted her to curiously gruesome view. At first she looked at the nail with a sense of disembodied interest, until the pain set and she had to choke back her wails, as Uta had just brought Berg back from her evening walk. He found her tearstricken and white as sheet, but thankfully wasn't asking questions why she was suddenly wearing a crudely wrapped, bloodstained bandage on her palm. He merely suggested he'd help her bandage it properly.

That night Lotte couldn't sleep. The pain in her finger segued into the kind of a dull throbbing that kept her alert, but no longer crying. Turning from one side to another, she rolled onto her stomach for a time being and finally settled on the back. No position seemed to give her any reprieve.

The skin on her forearms itched more and more every day now.

„Look, the snow's falling", Uta said once, over the art magazine he had been leafing through, on the last day before the meeting with the girls. Lotte planned to fire her designs that night. From where she was working on putting the finishing touches on the John the Bapist' severed head for Michiru, the woman startled and gave him a disoriented glance; concentration looked like an expression of anger on her, and a prominent crease would form on her forehead whenever she was deep in work. It was hard to soften her features when she had to stop.

Bent over her workbench, the woman swatted an unruly strand of hair with fingers caked with clay as she faced him; her forehead, the arms where the bandages on her hands wouldn't reach shined with sweat. Stretching up with a pop, Lotte got up to see the snow then, curious and in need of a break. If she didn't put a clear cut to this stage of work process, she would end up putting those 'finishing touches' long after the New Year. I might be dead by this time, anyway, she thought, surprised that it had ceased to give her the same sense of vertigo as before.

They were in her workshop, somewhere within the labirynthine recesses of the basement underneath the building. Cavernous, it only had a thin row of windows over the ground level outside. To see it from where she worked, Lotte had to clear a place on the workbench and climb it, to reach the level where the snow was visible.

Uta stopped his reading to observe the woman balancing on her tiptoes, fogging the window panes with her breath and clearing it to watch the snow some more. For the first time since they met, she seemed genuinely flustered with glee,her face lit up as she turned to him and skipped from the table to share her excitement. The clay figurines lining the workbench rattled as she jumped and Lotte looked briefly in horror, but came to the ghoul's side when it was clear her work wouldn't end up disfigured before being fired,

„It's super rare to see snow here, no?", she asked excitedly then, sitting cross-legged on the floor, next to where he sat on the old armchair she sometimes rested inbetween breaks from work.

„Would you like to take a walk tonight, after all?", the ghoul asked, suddenly eager to put some distance between himself and this strangely radiant girl. Maybe the cold air would help him get his mind together.