(A few notes: All right, following vignettes are bits and pieces from a larger story that I'm currently working on; each will be headed with a little explanation of where and when in the plot each occurs. All of these are pre-game incidents in Rinoa's life, some as specified within the game's universe, some the product of my own twisted imagination. This is as much of a beginning as Rinoa's story warrants.)
She remembered her mother, albeit faintly in the warm quiet darkness of her closed eyes. She remembered her mother's pale, strong hands and graceful fingers as they stroked the piano keys, remembered tracing each smooth knuckle and nail with her own child's thumb until she had it memorized.
It had been raining that horrible day when the sky fell. The downpour was sudden, changing the dull evening into greasy, treacherous night in a matter of seconds. She thought later that the clouds had simply opened to pour out their grief in a violent flood, a bass line over which the tires of the car squealed like a stricken beast on the wet street…
She remembered being held on her mother's lap, playing with her soft hair. Her mother had a way of sitting quietly, of letting the rushing music of the silence well so deeply from her that the child remembered the tune of it even better than the songs. She remembered the slow, marvelously wistful smile that was better than candy, the crisp clean vanilla smell of sheet music and hand lotion and clean skin.
She never saw the accident, never in this world, but it still played out in her head almost every night for the rest of her life, an old film on a spinning reel that skipped and flapped loose but never quiet stopped.
She would imagine two people, any combination she could think of: an old couple, a young couple, two middle-aged gossips, two teenage girls…
-Do you see that car? one would say, pointing. –That one, that black limo with, oh, whatsherface, the singer…
-That one? the other would say, more coherently.
-Yes! Oh, God, what is her name? You know who I'm talking about – dark hair, pale, that piano girl…
The dialogue would change sometimes, depending on her mood, depending on what she might have remembered or thought she remembered. At times she would drag it out, give the characters expressions, gestures, names, inflections, anything to delay the next inevitable sequence….
The second figure would look down the street, mouth opening in the perfect 'o' of incredulous horror.
-Oh, my God…
-Heartilly! the first would shriek in oblivious elation. – That's it! Julia Heartilly! She married, um, ooh, that general, arrrg…
Then that figure would see it too.
-Oh my God…
A shattering of glass.
The car would scream with friction and hideous momentum (like something alive, like some crooning crowing pop singer's voice fraught with contrived emotion) as it spun in perfect accordance to the laws of motion. The metal would rip with absurd ease, like cheap paper, and the car would become a work of modern, tragic art around the streetlight.
And then the storm would begin in earnest.
She was very young then, but she remembered. She remembered the shrill shriek of the ambulance that tore by the embassy where her mother was scheduled to perform. She remembered the resulting sheet of water that had plastered her hair and her summer dress to her small body, her father's scolding her for standing too near the street. And she remembered the cruel, silent certainty of something gone seriously wrong that did not allow her to cry.
She was five years old when her mother died after being untangled from the wreck. Her mother could never bear the idea of being chauffeured and insisted on sitting next to the driver of the limousine. This meant simply that her mother's body had borne the full brunt of the crash.
She never saw the wreck in person – all observations she drew from a recording made by the local news station, which had been ecstatic in finding the death of a celebrity on their doorstep. The camera had shaken in inexperienced hands, the reporter nervous and speaking too rapidly, but still she saw and still she watched (over and over and over as the years went by…).
Her mother's face was smooth and pale but for the thick rivulet of blood that trickled darkly over her cheekbone from a cut on her forehead, a strange and saintly oval of a face attached incongruously to a mangled body. Her head had lolled to one side as she was pulled from the automobile's remnants – there were no tears, no final words, no grand and touching gestures performed, only a spurt of blood that came from her mouth like a swan-song and silence. Her hands, her famous delicate hands that had made her career had been nearly shredded by the glass she had tried to protect herself from, the once familiar shape destroyed and dissolved.
The girl's father had taken her home mutely, his face closed. He did not touch her. His profile in the darkness was that of a stranger. She dared not speak to him.
She prepared for bed alone for the first time, each tiny action of the ritual (brush teeth, comb hair, stretch slowly, embrace Teddy, so on and so on and so on) reaffirming her mother's absence. She combed her dark hair clumsily. Her hand was too small to hold the brush properly and it fell from her shaking hand.
She stared at it lying on the thick carpet as if stricken, her hands balled into useless fists. Her lip trembled, once; then in a spasm of something like fear she flicked off the light and darted into the cold linen sheets of her bed. She stared, wide-eyed and silent, into the darkness, her room now huge and unfamiliar without her mother's being in the world, and only then did she begin to cry.
(Notes: First of a few scattered moments – reviews as always are welcome. Eventually all of these may be swept together into a more coherent, linear story, but no promises. More moments shall come: brace yourself.)