Codependent Equation
By Jillian Storm
(Disclaimer: A bit stressed these days, so I had to write something. Not such a surprise that it came out a bit dark and bizarre-there's a warning. *smile* Characters not mine. Lyrics belong to Garbage. Alternate Universe. Enjoy.)
***
I don't need an education
I learnt all I need from you
They got me on some medication
My point of balance was askew
It keeps my temperature from rising
My blood is pumping through my veins
***
Sally scanned the seats in the old theater and picked one along the outside aisle. The theater was mostly dark except for the dimmed chandelier lights barely visible from the high ceiling arching above three balconies. Lights along the dark red carpet guided them onward. Past the shadowed walls where murals that might have been fading seemed vivid and still detailed. Below the box seats in which those who provided more generous donations to the charity were seated.
She guided the wheelchair forward, pushing with heels that were more delicate than what she was used to wearing. Heels that accompanied the trim black dress that while modest in the front, was open farther in the back, cooling her skin as a breeze in the theater rustled past her.
Positioning the metal chair next to the cushioned seat she intended for herself, Sally reached out and ruffled the brown hair that always threatened to slip into her brother's eyes, "It's nice to get out every once and a while, isn't it Trowa?"
He didn't move his head, his arms stayed aligned to the arms of the chair, his legs stiffly placed at ninety degree angles. But his eyes lifted to meet her gaze. Her smile partway to reaching her cheeks, her eyebrows uplifted above her nose, blue eyes hesitant. As her lips parted slightly, as if to say more, Trowa answered, "It is."
Pressing her lips together, Sally nodded sharply, then fit into her chair at last a little less gracefully than her dress required. Her skin bare against the back of seat. Corn silk blonde hair coiled forward over her shoulders as her head tipped forward. She was asleep before the first actor took the stage.
***
Somebody get me out of here
I'm tearing at myself
Nobody gives a damn about me
Or anybody else
I wear myself out in the morning
You're asleep when I get home
***
Sneakers with coil laces. At home she preferred a pair of thin cotton pants, pale blue, with the childish stirrups of fabric she could slide under her heel to hold each leg in place. A grey sweater with her alma mater's design fading away on it curled just over the top of her hips like a melting marshmallow.
She half jogged down the hallway from the bathroom where she'd tied her sloppy morning hair back into a ponytail for the Saturday morning. Then she hopped into the kitchen to break a few eggs over a frying pan already snapping with butter she had started there. The watch, an athletic looking face with several time zones represented, buzzed at quarter past the hour. She looked at it out of habit, not because she didn't know the time. The silver and black contraption large like a tarantula curled around her girlish wrist.
Turning from the stovetop, where the eggs sizzled neglected, Sally reached past the Tupperware of flour and sugar to the rack where the plastic case of measured vitamins and medicine were kept. She flipped the last unopened division open and after spilling the contents into her opposite palm, set them all by the clear glass of water near the sink.
Then she systematically took each prescription bottle from the rack and placed one pill from each into the daily compartments. Three, four, five, six. By six, her hand was shaking and she wiped away one escaped tear with the back of her wrist.
"Damn it." She cursed so softly it might have been someone else's voice from another room. Reaching out, not thinking, Sally swept the pills from the counter and threw them all into her mouth at once, finishing off the water and leaving her mouth empty of the evidence in three swallows.
After shaking her head, Sally began pumping her arms as if to build muscles there and jogged down the hall and back once. When her blood began to coarse through her veins and heart more rapidly, she ran right into the sitting room where she saw him sitting in the leather reclining chair. Silhouetted by the morning sunlight coming in through the full, opened window.
Trowa glanced up from his book, said simply, "Good morning, Sally."
She nodded, in time with her knees that kept their high up and down motion even as she stayed in one place. Then she went back down the hall and fell on her bed. Exhausted. And slept. Eggs and everything forgotten.
***
Please don't call me self-defending
You know it cuts me to the bone
Though it's really not surprising
I hold a force I can't contain
***
Sally pulled off the protective goggles and looked at the test tube with her naked eyes. The liquid was yellow-green. Not purple. She wondered if the text booklet had it wrong. She had worn the lab coat, freshly washed after the slipped knife splatter and the pig's liver wiped out from under her fingernails and spilling harmless but permanent chemicals. Closed toe shoes. For protection.
Still yellow-green. She shrugged.
"How's it going, Po?" The instructor no sooner had asked than he had slipped past to ask the same meaningless question to the individual sitting in front of her. She closed her mouth after her tongue felt a bit dry. By then, the teacher had started to diagram something on the chalkboard. The symbols always made her a bit sleepy. At least, they never seemed to communicate anything besides their inherent design. Triangle, circle, rectangle. Put together, they could look like a wheelchair or a bed.
Nothing there said purple. Nothing there said not yellow-green.
***
Still you call me codependent
Somehow you lay the blame on me
Somebody get me out of here
I'm tearing at myself
I've got to make a point these days
To extricate myself
***
Walking toward the front door with her lab coat draped over one arm, Sally barely heard the purple and yellow-green leaves snap under her booted feet. She was distracted with the vision, the memory of herself coming out from the same door. Seeing herself. As if in two places at once. Her straw- like hair parted in the middle to fill out two identical braids tied with simple black bands. Her breath as vaporous clouds exhaled as quick as her laughter. Bundled tightly in a full winter coat, dark jeans, and the same boots.
At first, she wondered if it were a doppelganger she saw. The ghost in her vision. Then, as if through the door, came Trowa. Tall, taller than she remembered. Standing straight on his own two feet. His stubborn hair succumbing to the brisk breeze in her memory; although, in the present nothing stirred. Not even her own breath, as she watched him. He smiled. Both eyes revealed as turned half-moons, hints of green just peeking through dark lashes. Wearing his thin, black leather jacket, she was certain he had to still be cold even though he insisted on wearing it when they went biking.
And of course, Sally knew where they were going. Because she remembered that day of her past better than most any else. How he had been wearing the pair of worn jeans, his favorite, that she had tirelessly patched and re-patched in the worn spots. The ridiculous boots that made him look like a misplaced cowboy. His strange preference. So Trowa.
"How do you intend to hike around in those boots?" Her mirror image asked, a playful slap against Trowa's shoulder. As if she knew even then what would happen when he wore those boots.
Even though she had been told, even though they had told her, it didn't matter. Nothing mattered. Nothing could have been changed. Not sneakers, not winter coats, not brand new jeans could have saved him.
Because it hadn't been their fault.
It hadn't been his fault.
She was told she couldn't even blame herself.
Then, perhaps in the distance some noise had come to distract her, Sally was at the door. Having walked through the place where she and Trowa had stood together so many times so many years before. She reached out for the doorknob and turned it.
But it didn't give.
Stepping up toward the door, Sally twisted it again. Then leaned her left shoulder into the door, as if extra weight might make the door give. "Trowa," She called out, looking up and seeing the overhang of the ceiling, the gutters with a few leaves poking over the edge. "Let me in."
Keeping her left hand on the knob, Sally hit the forest green door with the flat of her right hand. They had painted the door green after a little quarrel. She had preferred green because it was a promise for spring. The same promise that her brother held in his eyes when they'd settle upon something that amused or delighted him. "Trowa." She said again.
While it had been her house, Trowa stayed with her while he finished his bachelor's degree. She herself was a graduate school at the same university. It had just seemed so perfect for them to stay together. They'd always been close. He'd always left the door unlocked for her after a long day in the labs.
"Trowa." She hit the door more frantically. Maybe he didn't hear her. She took a step back, staring at the door as if to will it open. Glancing over at the window where he would sit so often to read. A thin set of prescription frames balanced on his lean nose. Turning pages periodically with his thin arm, which he kept balanced over the book for just that purpose. The curtains were closed. She couldn't see in, even when she walked between the tightly planted bushes, landscape she had pick to decorate the front yard. Her first house.
She reached into her modest handbag for keys.
She went back to the door putting in the door key. But it didn't slide in more than a fraction of an inch. It was the wrong key. Puzzled, Sally tried again. Then the next key. And the third, even though she knew the last key was for her locker at school. Had she given Trowa her key for some reason?
She decided to be more insistent with her knocking. Pausing to catch her breath after calling to her brother again, Sally heard something that seemed to be coming from the inside.
"Trowa?" She whispered, leaning her head forward. Closing her eyes to enhance the attention to what she could hear.
"Go away, or I will call the police."
"Trowa?" She repeated, knowing that wasn't his voice. She didn't know that voice. The rasping voice of an old woman.
"He's dead, you stupid girl. Stop coming around here. Go home."
"Home?"
"Get lost." The voice became more shrill. Even through the thick wood of the green door, Sally couldn't block the way it sliced through her memories. They had told her to sell the house. They had told her to forget. They had told her to move on.
"Trowa." She pressed her forehead into the door, her palms flat fingers spread on either side of her face. Bare skin, no gloves. Still trying to find what was true.
***
Nobody gives a damn about me
Or anybody else
Still you call me codependent
somehow you lay the blame on me
Somehow you lay the blame on me
***
before
The smell of packing tape, cardboard boxes and stirred dust lingered in the house. Lucrezia Noin stood in the sitting room that they had used as a library. Although, the shelves were now bare of books. The front window was naked as well, the curtains having been just taken down and put in bags. They would decide what to keep and what to give away to others after the move. Just then the winter sun shone full through the glass, giving strange warmth inside while the outside sparkled bright and cold against the scattered piles of snow and frost on old grass.
"That was Sally's grandmother on the phone." His voice carried from the doorway and echoed off the ceiling and the bare walls. "She wanted to thank you for coming to take care of Sally's things."
"There was no one else." Lucrezia tucked her hair behind her ear before turning from the brightness of the window and seeing her blond companion in the strange dark of the room as her eyes adjusted, "Sally was my best friend."
"She still is," He reassured, staying where he was, letting his silver- blue eyes glide over the remaining boxes like mercury. "People respond to loss differently. Give her time."
"Maybe this is how I respond to loss," Lucrezia frowned, her dark brows knitting together, "Packing away his things. And hers at the same time. As if they both had died."
"Now you know she's only going to be in the institution for a while, until she calms herself." The matter-of-fact nature of his voice was supposed to comfort her, she knew of his intentions, but it still seemed callous. "We're taking her things to the apartment. So she'll have somewhere to go to when she's recovered."
"I didn't agree with any of this." She rubbed her forehead with two fingers, feeling the skin roll across the bone of her skull. Almost wishing she could pull it back, that she could pull back time and undue all of the things that had happened in the last month. "When she comes out, Sally's going to want to come back here. This is her home. This is what she worked for, where she came home from school."
The look he gave her was worse than the tone he had adopted only moments before. The way he tipped his head, dropping his chin only a little, and refused to let her drop her gaze. In everyway saying that her excuses were simply that and nothing more.
"I know I'm not a professional, but medication is not going to convince her that her brother is dead." She bit her lower lip, a momentary sign of weakness slipping in order for her to fight back tears she didn't want to show. "Sally still wants to believe he's alive. Somehow. And if she admits to the accident, she dreamed up some happy ending where Trowa lives." She choked on Sally's brother's name, "They won't let me go see her."
"Give it time."
"Give time?" Lucrezia laughed bitterly, "Don't imagine that time and reality are going to be synonymous."
Ignoring her frustration, he picked up two boxes, "Let's take another load over to the apartments. Just make sure they say 'Sally.'"
As he left, she muttered to herself while hefting a box of books, "And now we're going to just hide away all of his things, are we?" Shaking her head, she followed out through the hall. To where the green door was opened. "I'm sorry, Sally."
And she walked outside, from under the dripping gutters.
(If you like stories like this, my fic "End it on This" is much much better . . . but thanks for indulging me. I'm *still* struggling with writer's block!)
(Disclaimer: A bit stressed these days, so I had to write something. Not such a surprise that it came out a bit dark and bizarre-there's a warning. *smile* Characters not mine. Lyrics belong to Garbage. Alternate Universe. Enjoy.)
***
I don't need an education
I learnt all I need from you
They got me on some medication
My point of balance was askew
It keeps my temperature from rising
My blood is pumping through my veins
***
Sally scanned the seats in the old theater and picked one along the outside aisle. The theater was mostly dark except for the dimmed chandelier lights barely visible from the high ceiling arching above three balconies. Lights along the dark red carpet guided them onward. Past the shadowed walls where murals that might have been fading seemed vivid and still detailed. Below the box seats in which those who provided more generous donations to the charity were seated.
She guided the wheelchair forward, pushing with heels that were more delicate than what she was used to wearing. Heels that accompanied the trim black dress that while modest in the front, was open farther in the back, cooling her skin as a breeze in the theater rustled past her.
Positioning the metal chair next to the cushioned seat she intended for herself, Sally reached out and ruffled the brown hair that always threatened to slip into her brother's eyes, "It's nice to get out every once and a while, isn't it Trowa?"
He didn't move his head, his arms stayed aligned to the arms of the chair, his legs stiffly placed at ninety degree angles. But his eyes lifted to meet her gaze. Her smile partway to reaching her cheeks, her eyebrows uplifted above her nose, blue eyes hesitant. As her lips parted slightly, as if to say more, Trowa answered, "It is."
Pressing her lips together, Sally nodded sharply, then fit into her chair at last a little less gracefully than her dress required. Her skin bare against the back of seat. Corn silk blonde hair coiled forward over her shoulders as her head tipped forward. She was asleep before the first actor took the stage.
***
Somebody get me out of here
I'm tearing at myself
Nobody gives a damn about me
Or anybody else
I wear myself out in the morning
You're asleep when I get home
***
Sneakers with coil laces. At home she preferred a pair of thin cotton pants, pale blue, with the childish stirrups of fabric she could slide under her heel to hold each leg in place. A grey sweater with her alma mater's design fading away on it curled just over the top of her hips like a melting marshmallow.
She half jogged down the hallway from the bathroom where she'd tied her sloppy morning hair back into a ponytail for the Saturday morning. Then she hopped into the kitchen to break a few eggs over a frying pan already snapping with butter she had started there. The watch, an athletic looking face with several time zones represented, buzzed at quarter past the hour. She looked at it out of habit, not because she didn't know the time. The silver and black contraption large like a tarantula curled around her girlish wrist.
Turning from the stovetop, where the eggs sizzled neglected, Sally reached past the Tupperware of flour and sugar to the rack where the plastic case of measured vitamins and medicine were kept. She flipped the last unopened division open and after spilling the contents into her opposite palm, set them all by the clear glass of water near the sink.
Then she systematically took each prescription bottle from the rack and placed one pill from each into the daily compartments. Three, four, five, six. By six, her hand was shaking and she wiped away one escaped tear with the back of her wrist.
"Damn it." She cursed so softly it might have been someone else's voice from another room. Reaching out, not thinking, Sally swept the pills from the counter and threw them all into her mouth at once, finishing off the water and leaving her mouth empty of the evidence in three swallows.
After shaking her head, Sally began pumping her arms as if to build muscles there and jogged down the hall and back once. When her blood began to coarse through her veins and heart more rapidly, she ran right into the sitting room where she saw him sitting in the leather reclining chair. Silhouetted by the morning sunlight coming in through the full, opened window.
Trowa glanced up from his book, said simply, "Good morning, Sally."
She nodded, in time with her knees that kept their high up and down motion even as she stayed in one place. Then she went back down the hall and fell on her bed. Exhausted. And slept. Eggs and everything forgotten.
***
Please don't call me self-defending
You know it cuts me to the bone
Though it's really not surprising
I hold a force I can't contain
***
Sally pulled off the protective goggles and looked at the test tube with her naked eyes. The liquid was yellow-green. Not purple. She wondered if the text booklet had it wrong. She had worn the lab coat, freshly washed after the slipped knife splatter and the pig's liver wiped out from under her fingernails and spilling harmless but permanent chemicals. Closed toe shoes. For protection.
Still yellow-green. She shrugged.
"How's it going, Po?" The instructor no sooner had asked than he had slipped past to ask the same meaningless question to the individual sitting in front of her. She closed her mouth after her tongue felt a bit dry. By then, the teacher had started to diagram something on the chalkboard. The symbols always made her a bit sleepy. At least, they never seemed to communicate anything besides their inherent design. Triangle, circle, rectangle. Put together, they could look like a wheelchair or a bed.
Nothing there said purple. Nothing there said not yellow-green.
***
Still you call me codependent
Somehow you lay the blame on me
Somebody get me out of here
I'm tearing at myself
I've got to make a point these days
To extricate myself
***
Walking toward the front door with her lab coat draped over one arm, Sally barely heard the purple and yellow-green leaves snap under her booted feet. She was distracted with the vision, the memory of herself coming out from the same door. Seeing herself. As if in two places at once. Her straw- like hair parted in the middle to fill out two identical braids tied with simple black bands. Her breath as vaporous clouds exhaled as quick as her laughter. Bundled tightly in a full winter coat, dark jeans, and the same boots.
At first, she wondered if it were a doppelganger she saw. The ghost in her vision. Then, as if through the door, came Trowa. Tall, taller than she remembered. Standing straight on his own two feet. His stubborn hair succumbing to the brisk breeze in her memory; although, in the present nothing stirred. Not even her own breath, as she watched him. He smiled. Both eyes revealed as turned half-moons, hints of green just peeking through dark lashes. Wearing his thin, black leather jacket, she was certain he had to still be cold even though he insisted on wearing it when they went biking.
And of course, Sally knew where they were going. Because she remembered that day of her past better than most any else. How he had been wearing the pair of worn jeans, his favorite, that she had tirelessly patched and re-patched in the worn spots. The ridiculous boots that made him look like a misplaced cowboy. His strange preference. So Trowa.
"How do you intend to hike around in those boots?" Her mirror image asked, a playful slap against Trowa's shoulder. As if she knew even then what would happen when he wore those boots.
Even though she had been told, even though they had told her, it didn't matter. Nothing mattered. Nothing could have been changed. Not sneakers, not winter coats, not brand new jeans could have saved him.
Because it hadn't been their fault.
It hadn't been his fault.
She was told she couldn't even blame herself.
Then, perhaps in the distance some noise had come to distract her, Sally was at the door. Having walked through the place where she and Trowa had stood together so many times so many years before. She reached out for the doorknob and turned it.
But it didn't give.
Stepping up toward the door, Sally twisted it again. Then leaned her left shoulder into the door, as if extra weight might make the door give. "Trowa," She called out, looking up and seeing the overhang of the ceiling, the gutters with a few leaves poking over the edge. "Let me in."
Keeping her left hand on the knob, Sally hit the forest green door with the flat of her right hand. They had painted the door green after a little quarrel. She had preferred green because it was a promise for spring. The same promise that her brother held in his eyes when they'd settle upon something that amused or delighted him. "Trowa." She said again.
While it had been her house, Trowa stayed with her while he finished his bachelor's degree. She herself was a graduate school at the same university. It had just seemed so perfect for them to stay together. They'd always been close. He'd always left the door unlocked for her after a long day in the labs.
"Trowa." She hit the door more frantically. Maybe he didn't hear her. She took a step back, staring at the door as if to will it open. Glancing over at the window where he would sit so often to read. A thin set of prescription frames balanced on his lean nose. Turning pages periodically with his thin arm, which he kept balanced over the book for just that purpose. The curtains were closed. She couldn't see in, even when she walked between the tightly planted bushes, landscape she had pick to decorate the front yard. Her first house.
She reached into her modest handbag for keys.
She went back to the door putting in the door key. But it didn't slide in more than a fraction of an inch. It was the wrong key. Puzzled, Sally tried again. Then the next key. And the third, even though she knew the last key was for her locker at school. Had she given Trowa her key for some reason?
She decided to be more insistent with her knocking. Pausing to catch her breath after calling to her brother again, Sally heard something that seemed to be coming from the inside.
"Trowa?" She whispered, leaning her head forward. Closing her eyes to enhance the attention to what she could hear.
"Go away, or I will call the police."
"Trowa?" She repeated, knowing that wasn't his voice. She didn't know that voice. The rasping voice of an old woman.
"He's dead, you stupid girl. Stop coming around here. Go home."
"Home?"
"Get lost." The voice became more shrill. Even through the thick wood of the green door, Sally couldn't block the way it sliced through her memories. They had told her to sell the house. They had told her to forget. They had told her to move on.
"Trowa." She pressed her forehead into the door, her palms flat fingers spread on either side of her face. Bare skin, no gloves. Still trying to find what was true.
***
Nobody gives a damn about me
Or anybody else
Still you call me codependent
somehow you lay the blame on me
Somehow you lay the blame on me
***
before
The smell of packing tape, cardboard boxes and stirred dust lingered in the house. Lucrezia Noin stood in the sitting room that they had used as a library. Although, the shelves were now bare of books. The front window was naked as well, the curtains having been just taken down and put in bags. They would decide what to keep and what to give away to others after the move. Just then the winter sun shone full through the glass, giving strange warmth inside while the outside sparkled bright and cold against the scattered piles of snow and frost on old grass.
"That was Sally's grandmother on the phone." His voice carried from the doorway and echoed off the ceiling and the bare walls. "She wanted to thank you for coming to take care of Sally's things."
"There was no one else." Lucrezia tucked her hair behind her ear before turning from the brightness of the window and seeing her blond companion in the strange dark of the room as her eyes adjusted, "Sally was my best friend."
"She still is," He reassured, staying where he was, letting his silver- blue eyes glide over the remaining boxes like mercury. "People respond to loss differently. Give her time."
"Maybe this is how I respond to loss," Lucrezia frowned, her dark brows knitting together, "Packing away his things. And hers at the same time. As if they both had died."
"Now you know she's only going to be in the institution for a while, until she calms herself." The matter-of-fact nature of his voice was supposed to comfort her, she knew of his intentions, but it still seemed callous. "We're taking her things to the apartment. So she'll have somewhere to go to when she's recovered."
"I didn't agree with any of this." She rubbed her forehead with two fingers, feeling the skin roll across the bone of her skull. Almost wishing she could pull it back, that she could pull back time and undue all of the things that had happened in the last month. "When she comes out, Sally's going to want to come back here. This is her home. This is what she worked for, where she came home from school."
The look he gave her was worse than the tone he had adopted only moments before. The way he tipped his head, dropping his chin only a little, and refused to let her drop her gaze. In everyway saying that her excuses were simply that and nothing more.
"I know I'm not a professional, but medication is not going to convince her that her brother is dead." She bit her lower lip, a momentary sign of weakness slipping in order for her to fight back tears she didn't want to show. "Sally still wants to believe he's alive. Somehow. And if she admits to the accident, she dreamed up some happy ending where Trowa lives." She choked on Sally's brother's name, "They won't let me go see her."
"Give it time."
"Give time?" Lucrezia laughed bitterly, "Don't imagine that time and reality are going to be synonymous."
Ignoring her frustration, he picked up two boxes, "Let's take another load over to the apartments. Just make sure they say 'Sally.'"
As he left, she muttered to herself while hefting a box of books, "And now we're going to just hide away all of his things, are we?" Shaking her head, she followed out through the hall. To where the green door was opened. "I'm sorry, Sally."
And she walked outside, from under the dripping gutters.
(If you like stories like this, my fic "End it on This" is much much better . . . but thanks for indulging me. I'm *still* struggling with writer's block!)