Bring Me to Life: I
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In my memory I am five again, and it is slowly drawing close to my sixth birthday. Fall is still breathing, with the crisp chill of November everywhere, and I cannot remember the day it first began. I remember how the cold air slivered through my supposedly invincible coat, and how Daddy hated even having to run the few feet from door to car at the mercies of the cold, but I remember mostly staring glumly at him as he waved cheerfully. He was off to restock our supply of groceries, and would be gone for the better part of two hours; I sat on the steps in my coat and tried to pout hard enough for him to decide we could starve, and not go.
"Come in, Nemuri," Mother said behind me. I turned reluctantly from my watchtower of the cement steps. "You'll only get sick if you stay out here without wearing anything but your coat." She gave me a stern look, maybe a scowl, which was nothing more than her eyes narrowing just a bit more and her lips thinning. "Your father will be home soon enough." And she glanced, briefly, after the faintest trail of exhaust invisible upon the road, before raising her eyebrow at me.
I slunk inside, feeling rather like a punished criminal than a sulking child, and I felt pettily angry; had Daddy thought maybe I wanted to play with him today? It was terribly unfair, it seemed, for me to be shunted aside so quickly, and I came close to throwing an irrational tantrum: I knew I was being bratty, but I wanted attention and I wanted the adoring praise all children expect constantly. A part of me understood, while most of me was simply mad at both of them for not placing me on my ill-accustomed pedestal.
Some self-preserving quality kept me from screaming and kicking about as I shook off my shoes. "Mother," I said instead, "I'm hungry. I want breakfast, please." I obediently shed my coat when she crooked her eyebrow just so at me and dumped it on the floor. "Pancakes," I added, my good mood returning, "with lots and lots of syrup, and um, chocolate chips!" I tossed my arms in the air to show how much I wanted the chocolate chips, and trod aimlessly on the floor.
"Nemuri," said Mother sharply. I turned, shoulders slumping. She pointed to the coat I had left half-draped over my shoes and raised her speaking eyebrow again. "You should not leave your clothing on the floor. Pick it up and put it where it should go." With that said, she twisted on her heel, blonde hair shifting, and walked purposefully toward the kitchen.
Struggling to hold my bulky coat in my arm, one of the sleeves dropping to rest across my foot, I stared hopefully after her. "Can I still have pancakes?" I hollered, and tossed my coat over my shoulder. "And chocolate chips in 'em?" I bounced up on my toes, anxiously waiting to hear if she would respond. "Please-please, I'm putting my coat up right now!" Bargaining, I thought, was good.
"If you put your coat up," her voice floated back to me from the mysteries of the kitchen, "and if you do it quickly, I won't make these pancakes on my own. You will come back and help me make your breakfast. Do you understand?" A resounding clang emerged from the kitchen; a pot had dropped noisily, reverberating on the floor before she silenced it with a stomp and dark mutter.
"Yes, Mother!" I cried to be heard over the angry pot. "I'll be very, very quick, I promise!" I beamed to myself and carefully checking that the coat was hanging properly over my shoulder, ran skidding the few feet to the closet. "Almost done, Mother." I picked the door open, excited, and stared up at the hangers far beyond my reach.
A dumpy cardboard box was briefly considered as being used for a step, but I glanced curiously inside it before moving to clamber on top of the deceptively firm-looking flaps. Filled with photos, I knew if I stepped on it I would sink right inside of it or, worse, mar the pictures themselves; I was in no mood to tempt fate and my mother's wrath. Glancing curiously at a worn picture of Miss Tamao blushing at a much younger version of my father, I shrugged and tossed my coat over the box. I figured my negligence wouldn't come back to haunt me for another few hours.
"I'm done!" I sang, and slammed the closet door shut with brutal pleasure. Though I was not as close to Mother then as I was to Daddy, it was that lack of closeness making this rare opportunity a treat: I was, for whatever purpose, going to be able to spend most of an hour with Mother by myself. No matter what the state of relationships in a family, nearly all young children welcome the chance to have a parent all to his or her self, able to draw the complete attention of that one adult and savor it.
With my mother and I, it merely made it that much more flavorful.
I wriggled into the kitchen, dancing on my toes eagerly. "I'm ready, Mother," I said, forcing my feet to be still. I clasped my hands behind my back to be the image of petulance. "Can I help now?" I shivered my shoulders once, gleefully, before stilling them.
She watched me evenly, and quickly scanning her eyes over the items assembled on the counter, bent to face me. "Lift your arms, Nemuri." I did so and she hooked her slender arms under mine, holding her palms to my back. Mother's hugging me, I thought with some shock for a moment, and then she lifted with a swift movement, setting me firmly on the counter. "Don't move; I'll fix up a bowl of batter for you to mix." She busied herself, turning away from me as I scooted closer to the wall, sticking my knobby feet out from the light flannel of my pajamas.
When I thought about it, unsure of whether I was upset or not, I decided I was not surprised by her not embracing me; Mother was a secure presence, one always seen but rarely felt. Where Daddy would brush hands with her or toss me over his shoulder in a game, Mother preferred to watch us playing and keep her hands near his, close but not touching.
I watched her hands, suddenly thoughtful, at the slender lines and sleek gloss of her fingernails that shone of elegance. Daddy's – I closed my eyes, nose scrunching as I remembered – hands were darker, larger, and blunt, uncultured and yet welcoming.
"Nemuri, don't fall asleep on the counter," I heard her say dryly and opened my eyes. The bowl, batter still sporting clumps beneath its veneer, was gently edged to my hands and I looked at them briefly. "Grip the spoon tightly and work it in a circle." She carefully began working on a much larger bowl, as I stared at my chubby fingers with sudden, inarticulate fascination. "Nemuri," she said sharply. "Start mixing with the spoon. See how I'm doing it?"
Snapping away from watching my hands, I began slowly mimicking the quick, twisting motions of her wrist. With the bowl cradled between my thighs and my other hand clasped tightly around the plastic rim, I nonetheless grunted with the effort. "It's hard," I complained, and she leaned over, rapping her knuckles gently on my knee. "Well it is, Mother!" I protested. "I can't move the spoon at all!" I bit my lip and squeezing my eyes into a squint, wished for a spirit of my own, preferably a famous French chef. (Wishes, of course, rarely come true when one really wants them to, but I hardly liked thinking about that.)
"Stir harder," she directed, merciless, and I wrinkled my nose at her. She rapped my knee again and I moved my leg with a wide grin. "Oh you're Yoh's child," spoke Mother wryly. For my part, I was bewildered: of course I was Daddy's child; the finer aspects of sarcasm had yet to sink into my brain. "Motivation escapes you completely," and she lifted her bowl slightly from the counter, swirling one large lump around in a smooth formlessness. "Now, keep stirring and try harder."
"Yes, Mother," I sighed heavily. Crossing my eyes at the thickness of the batter, I struggled for a few long, painful moments in desperate hopes of defeating it. "Stupid spoon," I accused, and looked to Mother not for reassurance, but to gauge her expression: the tiniest degrees of her eyebrows, scowl, the thinness of her lips, could tell me if I was doing well.
Mother was silent; this was not surprising, but was a different silence than I was used to, an oppressive one in place of a steady, somewhat detached quiet. I could feel, over the progress of several seconds, the tiny hairs on my body slowly rising, from my legs to my neck as my skin prickled. A ghost, I thought with eerie calmness, but not one like Amidamaru. I was not frightened at the thought of a ghost, not with my heritage, but I felt uneasy nonetheless as the muscles in my arms tensed reflexively.
Those beautiful, slender fingers had fallen to the edge of the counter, fingernails digging into the wood as the knuckles shone white through her skin. "Are you all right Mother?" I watched her fingers as my own clenched around the spoon. "Do you want me to call Daddy? I think he took his phone with him." She was still silent, fingers tightening over the counter until I thought, horrified, they would snap; I drew my legs up toward my chest and clutched the spoon stuck in the batter, like cement. "Mommy?"
Mother lifted her head, dark blonde and dreamily slow. Those bone-white knuckles receded into the usual healthy color as her fingers slid down to hang by her sides. "Mommy?" she echoed quietly. A shot of terror thrust bile up my throat briefly and I hung onto that spoon as if it were my very life. "Calling for Mommy?" And she glanced, unseeing, over the bowls and boxes, over the large half-filled bag of chocolate chips, before focusing on me.
I'd long been accustomed to possession and the presence of otherworldly spirits; I knew Mother could call beings to her from the depths of heaven, and I was not innocent enough to not immediately think of a threat when I knew she was possessed. What frightened me was not worrying about threats, but that I had seen nothing to suggest Mother had called it to her. Nothing took control of Mother, nothing – not even Daddy – was silly enough to try; it was an immediate disintegration of my reality to see foreign glimmers in her eyes looking back at me and the blank, alien curiosity on her features.
I whimpered, once, without meaning to, and shoved myself flat against the wall, trying to hide under the cabinets and cupping the bowl to my chest.
Mother looked at me sadly. "Aren't you lovely?" she said softly, and turning her palm up, lifted her hand toward me. I tried to shrink back further. "You have such pretty hair. Do you think my darling will have pretty hair like this?" Her fingers, suddenly unfamiliar, touched my hair, sliding to hold the strands as she cupped my cheek. "Oh, so soft," she crooned, and I tried to jerk away, smacking the top of my head on the cabinets.
"Don't!" I snapped, while clasping hands over my head as I felt tears welling. "Don't touch me, don't touch me; you aren't my mother, don't touch me!" I waited desperately for her to snap at me, or say something sharp that would tell me my mother was herself again. She studied me, still, with that kinetically wrong, empty face, a warping of features I knew with a foreign expression. "Please, Mommy, don't let her touch me," I pleaded with the pooling darkness of her eyes.
"Are you frightened?" she asked. One of her hands moved back to my face, resting gently against my skin even as I shuddered; if she had rapped her knuckles, I would have wept happily. "Why are you frightened?"
It is impossible to explain to anyone why something can be overwhelmingly frightening. Mother yelling or her slapping Daddy was something I regarded as normal, used to the detached affection of my mother as I was. Sudden displays of affection, of any sort, even bemused questions as she stroked my hair, were terrifying to me. How can one hope to impress the fear of shocking change? If Daddy were to come home and snap at me to pack my toys in the chest, I would be bewildered and maybe even tearful; it was the same principle here, with Mother suddenly behaving innocent and tender to me, touching my face lovingly. To hear her speak as a stranger, seeing the traces of ghosts in her eyes when she had not brought them forth, this was a sinister evil attacking my world.
I began crying.
"Don't cry," she begged, mournfully. "You always cry, darling, and you know I hate it when you cry. Haven't I told you again and again not to cry?" A slow note of ugliness struck perversion into the delicate tone, an emotion I had never known before. I would understand hate soon enough.
"Mommy," I tried again, wanting to see her in those flat eyes. "Why is it in you? Make it go away, please, we're making pancakes and I can't with it here." I babbled, feeling the fingernails I had thought so beautiful slowly beginning to tighten sharply in the skin around my ear. Coldness struck me, a burst of air from her mouth as the pinpricks of pain started. I stared, wide-eyed and wet-faced.
"Stop crying," she hissed, the femininity gone and the acidic affection of Mother's voice still missing, replaced with that cloying hate. Her eyes flickered and I could feel, instinctively, I had just seen Mother reflecting out at me. Fingers digging in the side of my face, she shook my head once, twice. "I told you to stop crying!" she ordered, disgusted almost. "Stop it now!"
I merely cried harder with the sharp pain as the nails broke skin and dragged; Mother slapped Daddy, scratched him sometimes, but he was never hurt by it, and she had never hurt me before. "Stop it!" I yelled. And then a thought occurred to me, one that had me nearly swamped with the urge to giggle at my own forgetfulness. I did giggle, once, and choked out, "Amidamaru, I need you!" I closed my eyes briefly, content to hope Daddy's samurai would still be watching me in case of accident.
One of the beliefs in my childhood was that Amidamaru was just short of a god, that what I could not squirm out of, what Mother could not beat into submission, what Daddy could not charm: that enigmatic 'what' could be destroyed or subdued swiftly by Amidamaru. I had, at the age of two, stumbled into a deep pool formed by the rains in a pit, nearly drowning. After Mother raged at Daddy for the better part of three hours (and after he gained several shallow scratches on his arm), I earned myself an ethereal guardian until they decided I was worldly enough to know better than stepping into deep pits filled with tepid rainwater.
As the pain in my head intensified, her fingers shaking me painfully again, I wondered with some horror if Amidamaru was not watching. Logically, there would be no reason for him to do so; Mother had been watching me and completely herself when we began mixing the batter.
"Stop crying!" she snarled and I heard Daddy whistling an off-key tune, calling, "Anna, I forgot the money!"
A flicker of annoyance shone through the flat eyes again, her hand pulling back, and I grinned in spite of myself, even as the shallow cuts near my ear twinged. Mother wouldn't like him forgetting the money at all.
"Uh, I didn't mean to, though," he continued sheepishly, turning the corner to the kitchen and scratching at his dark hair. "It was a perfectly honest mistake, and don't hit me!" After squeezing his eyes shut in conditioned response, and Mother facing him with a remote expression, the ugliness fading in favor of bland curiosity again, he slowly opened an eye. "Anna?" he asked, perplexed. "Why aren't you hitting me?"
"Hi, Daddy," I said when she continued staring and he glanced at both of us. I was still crying, but relief sagged my shoulders and melted my bones so I slumped; by all rights I knew Mother was the dominant one in the relationship, but I believed wholeheartedly in the goodness of my father. I would be fine. "Um, Mother isn't Mother," I added, taking advantage of her distraction to inch away, dragging the spoon and bowl with me. "She's kind of, of scary."
"Mother's always scary," he replied absently. "It's what makes her mean." He took a careful step forward, and I noticed the unusual tension in his stance, knowing his arms were tightening under the obscurity of the coat. Of course Daddy would sense the wrongness in the air; he looked at me again, flickering his eyes over the tiny red crescents near my hairline.
"Anna," he started again, moving forward another step as he adopted a loose stance, as if to call Amidamaru to him, "what's wrong?" A third step, his eyes fixed on the awful emptiness of hers. "Why is Nemuri bleeding?" Daddy was facing her, and I tried to think why he hadn't called Amidamaru yet, why he was still letting that foreign thing be in her.
"Who are you?" she wondered dreamily, and all the goosebumps on my body flattened when she blinked, then slapped him in a response as conditioned as his cowering. "Yoh, where the hell are the groceries?" she demanded next, crossly, and grabbed the scarf around his neck in a move to choke him. "If you tell me you forgot the money again, I'm going to slap you again. Did you forget the money, Yoh?"
"Yes," he replied without batting an eye, before realization crossed his face. I winced as he clutched the other side of his face, reaching up to cover the tiny cuts on my face. "Anna!" he protested. "I didn't mean to forget the money; do you think I like being slapped?" She raised an eyebrow, apparently deciding that question did not suffice an answer.
Daddy probed the red handprints, grimacing and glaring childishly at her, and then asked, curious and puzzled, "Anna, what were you doing to Nemuri?" His tone was deceptively innocent, and I scrubbed at my face, embarrassed to have the tear tracks on my cheeks. "Did you summon a spirit?" he continued in that same painfully calm voice, adopting a detached, lazy expression. "We both felt," I nodded agreement, "something strange in here." He hesitated, and I saw a thought crossing his face, knowing he was going to dismiss unwilling possession immediately.
I, too, thought it silly; Mother was not the sort to be overwhelmed quickly by a spirit attacking her out of nowhere, and I decided she might have lost control of a being she had summoned. That was nearly as unlikely, in hindsight, but was more comforting to think of than something violently overtaking her.
"Nemuri," Mother said, looking at me sharply. "What did you do to your face?"
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I rested giggling in my bed, scrubbing the back of my hand over my nose as Daddy grinned down at me. "Cheater," I tried scowling, and sat up, picking at a loose string dangling form the sleeve of my pajama shirt. "You're not supposed to cheat when you're tickling me." I glared and he did his nervous shiver dance, the one I echoed constantly. "Daddy!" I giggled again, and poked him in the shoulder as he smiled.
"You look like your mother when you glare like that," he admitted. "Lay back down in case she walks by; we can pretend you fell asleep." He winked and scooted closer to my bed, glancing at the doorway and looking absurd as he did so; I didn't think any other fathers were afraid of the other mothers, and I thought my father was funny. I snickered behind my hand and he gave me a silly expression, crossing his eyes and sticking his tongue out.
Plopping my head back on my pillow, I stretched my toes out and waggled my ankles slowly as I hesitated. "Daddy?" I started quietly, playing with the string. He looked at me under his sleepy eyelids. "Is Mother okay? Something – not right happened to her this morning." I watched him miserably. "She was really nice and then she started hurting me, and it wasn't like her hitting you. It was mean."
Momentarily, he made a face and touched his cheek in distant recollection. "I don't think her hurting anyone is nice," he said wryly.
"No, that's not true," I argued earnestly, sitting up again. I dropped my hands in my lap and looked at him seriously. "Mother does it 'cause she loves you." I nodded at his dubious look and tried again. "But Daddy," my voice died for a moment as I remembered her cutting nails and shaking, "she wasn't Mother anymore." I looked down at my fingers, at the chubby ends and square fingernails, the clumps of batter dried under the tips. "She was scary, Daddy," I finished in a tiny voice.
He brushed my hair back from my face, flicking his thumb over my nose and looking suddenly tired, his constant air of cheer fading for a moment. Daddy recovered quickly, though, and grinning happily, leaned forward to kiss my forehead quickly. "Don't worry about it, Nemuri," he ordered kindly. "I'll take care of it!" To prove his point, he rolled to his feet and flexed his arm once, pathetically. "Or," he continued without missing a beat, "Amidamaru will take care of it."
Suitably cheered, I laughed and fluffed the blanket over my chest, wriggling back down and turning on my side to watch him leave. "Good night, Daddy," I called, and he waved dismissively. "I love you!" I squinted and spotted Amidamaru lurking in the hallway, barely visible if I looked for him in the shadows; he was peering toward my room. "Amidamaru!" I yelled, propping myself up on my elbows and waving. "I love you, too!" Grinning delightedly at his pleased expression, I hooked my arm over the pillow and closing my eyes, rested my head on my arm.
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Notes: Next chapter will be longer. I hope. And more in character! With Yoh/Anna.
Feedback: On toast, please.
Disclaimer: I still do not own any of the characters, of which more will be appearing soon. I promise! ^^