"I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now." Bob Dylan
When I was younger my family would have huge meals together when things went wrong. My mother would spend all day cooking, fried chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans and cake, lots and lots of cake. We would sit down and eat together. I don't think that we ever talked about what it was that had gone wrong, I guess we didn't have to, it was enough to sit and eat together, something in it seemed to make things better.
So, true to form, when my mother found out what had happened my entire family showed up, each carrying Tupperware bowls and baskets full of food. I'm not sure how they ever found out, how they ever got there. Someone called them I supposed, but I didn't know whom. They lived in a completely different world than I and it baffled me how they had so easily crossed it's borders when I had such a hard time finding my way home.
My family came into my world bearing every sort of comfort food they could think of. We laid it all on the floor because my small table was only large enough for me, though I'd never used it. After we laid the food down we began to eat, or rather they began to eat and I began to watch them. It was impossible for me to eat without moving my veil aside, and it was impossible to move it aside without revealing what lay behind it. They didn't notice at first, they were too busy ignoring too much. They ignored the veil, ignored the thing that grew inside me, ignored the way I trembled and the way I crept further and further into the corner, so, for a while they ignored the fact that I did not eat. But my mother was too observant and too confident in the power of the family dinner, she reached a hand up, trying to twitch my veil aside. "Eat dear" she insisted. "You have to eat."
From somewhere deep inside myself I heard as I let out an animal scream, I saw as my mother jumped back in fright, and then I heard nothing, I saw nothing as I drowned in the memories.
I waited in my little room, in my cell. I could hear feet on the steps but I could not tell who was coming. They all had their own style, each of them had different things they liked to do, different sorts of pain they liked to inflict. As the door opened I felt a sort of morose relief. It was him, and he was alone, oddly enough that meant that I would not be raped, for one reason or another he never raped me, he always brought in others for that.
He held a small bottle in his hand and as he looked at me the feral glint that had always lain just beneath the surface of his eye, frightened me more than usual. "Good morning sweetheart," he said with a snicker, "I've brought a special surprise for you today." Setting the bottle carefully on the table he freed me from the wall. He supported me, almost gently, as I struggled to walk to the bed, where he chained me once more. Slowly, deliberately, the bottle was lifted and the cap unscrewed. "Pretty, isn't it?" he said as he filled a syringe with the amber liquid. "I found it in the storeroom, I wonder what it does, let's see shall we?" He took the syringe, stuck it into my cheek and emptied the amber liquid into my face. I screamed in anguish, it was the first time in a long while that their torment had gotten to me. The pain was almost indescribable it was as if fire had been injected into my face and was consuming it from the inside out.
I'm not sure how long he stayed, I'd lost track of time, but by the time he'd finished every molecule of my poor battered face screamed in agony.
My family sat and stared at me in shock. "I think you'd better leave." I said shakily.
"Nonsense" my mother said, busying herself with righting the glasses that had toppled during my outburst. "We've come for a family dinner and that's-"
"Mother!" I interrupted her. "You can't expect a few pieces of chicken and some mashed potatoes to make everything better, things don't work that way."
"It always used to" she said, looking very much like a small child.
"Things have changed mother. Back- before…before all of this…yes, dinner helped. It helped because I knew ahead of time that there were ways I could deal with the things that had happened, ways to get by, get through. But now…this…sometimes I barely know how to keep on living, let alone get past what's happened."
"There's always a way honey."
"Is there?" I screamed, tearing off my veil. "Tell me mother, tell me how to get past this, I'm not even Usagi anymore!"
My mother gasped and looked away and apart from sputtering a bit, she said nothing at all, what was there to say? I knew what she saw. I had looked in a mirror not long after I had escaped and been found. My face was a mass of scar tissue; there was hardly any feature that even distinguished me as human, save for the two pools of blue that stared out from behind the wretchedness.
Very shortly thereafter the food was packed and my family was out the door with only a few quiet, awkward murmurs of goodbye. They never came back, I guess crossing into my world was more difficult than they'd expected.
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Okay, there was chapter three. I know you are confused, but trust me; there is a point to all the insanity. Please review, tell me what you liked or what you didn't like, you could even tell me that you have a dog named Phillip it doesn't matter it at least tells me that people are reading this. I won't be a review whore and demand a certain number before I update, that isn't why I write this, but reviews are nice, well, there's my speech, thanks.
-Niamh
