I actually talk to my roommate far more than this fanfiction lets on. Oh, well. She and I are friends, it's simply more convenient for the sake of expediency to cut interaction to a mere minimum.
All that said...you'd better read this. I promise you it's worth your time. Just manage to get through the first bits. I add in interesting history, too—the stuff high school never told you. Lots of 'and this person got killed by shoving a red-hot poker up his ass...' Considering that I didn't make that up at all, that should give you an idea.
Anne was aware of a keening, digging sound in her ears before she reluctantly surfaced from where she lay nestled in a deep sleep. She opened her eyes, staring at the fuzzy outline of her hand, curled slightly in a state of total limpness. Between the bent digits she could read the large, blue digital clock even without her glasses: 4:52 AM. Other than the faint yellow light coming in through the slats of the Venetian blinds on the window, it was quite opaquely dark.
"Fuck...!" she mumbled, though it barely came out as coherent. Anne's roommate on the other side of the room (she didn't have a loft) groaned as she, too, was jarred rudely from her sleep.
"What the hell's goin' on?" Carrie mumbled, and her voice was slurred heavily.
"I d'know," Anne replied, as the two roused themselves reluctantly, responding to the message that followed a triple shriek of the fire alarm: "Attention Andrews Hall Residence. An emergency has been reported, please move to the nearest exit." And then another three beeps, all loud and painful to sensitive, sleepy ears.
"It's four thirty in the morning!" Carrie complained, and Anne was inclined to agree with the aggravation in Carrie's tone.
Anne pulled on her robe but let it hang on her shoulders; she opened their dorm door and blinked in the light of the hall.
It didn't smell like fire. What was the emergency? Anne moved out of the way so Carrie could get by. They stood, rather dazed, by their door jamb. Every now and then a hall mate would walk by. Their rationale was rather lemming-like: They didn't want to go until other people went.
"Hey, what's going on?" Alison, the friend who Anne had wished good luck upon for her Arabic test, walking up to them from down the hall.
"No idea," Anne shrugged.
Some ingrained social obedience in Anne told her that perhaps she ought to do as the alarm said—out in the hall it was much louder and it made her wince—but then again, this wouldn't be the first time that an alarm had gone off for no good reason The alarms were ridiculously sensitive and could be tripped by something so mundane as potpourri or air freshener.
Earlier last semester, there had been three consecutive alarms, each set off by someone's liquid air freshener, and with that in mind the jaded trio of students were unwilling to go outside if there wasn't a real, ascertainable emergency to warrant it. They had all been quite close to midnight, and to say the least it was annoying.
They talked for a while and were eventually joined by another friend, Ellen (it was determined when no RA's came by demanding that they evacuate that this was another false alarm), but after a few more minutes the fact that it was almost 5:45 AM caught up with them and they decided that they might just try to go back to bed, despite the noise.
Anne and Carrie exchanged another round of "good night's" and then crawled back into bed.
"I'm going to kill those damned Chi O's,"¹ Anne muttered, because that was what had been determined: That it was a false alarm, and that it had been triggered by a Chi O party.²
Neither of them questioned the logic (or rather, lack of, because logic had nothing to do with it) of having a party on a weeknight, much less at 4:30 AM, but after a minute or so the repetitive screeching stopped, and they went back to sleep.
The day was over, finally. Her legs shook as she stood upon them, her fingers trembled when she lifted them, her left arm ached from the six pages of handwritten essay she turned in for her humanities test. She leaned against the steel pole of her lofted bed for a moment, simply taking it in that she could finally relax. Her book bag dropped to the ground with a solid thud, and she nearly threw herself into her chair. The laptop was turned on before she sat back.
Perhaps she hadn't had her Humanities class that day, but that didn't prevent her professor from assigning a due date.
At any rate, she was wound up and needed an escape. She decided to work on her essay.
When Anne talked about Nazis it made some people very nervous; once prodded into speaking she was unapologetic—she didn't add the usual subtle inflections of making a point to say she disliked Nazis, and instead it was simply blunt facts.
This tended to be a problem as people picked up on Anne's less-than-sober mannerisms while talking about a subject that interested her, and the conspicuous lack of deferential overtures, and, in some cases simply assumed she was a Nazi—or, at least, a Nazi sympathizer.
If anything, Anne simply resented the mystique that had grown up around the Nazis and didn't like making excuses. In terms of sheer numbers killed—well, the Nazis had nothing on Stalin. In terms of their point of view on Jews—Hitler wasn't original. Pogroms were enough to prove that point—the Nazis were hardly the first to kill Jews in significant numbers.
Perhaps the part that was most intriguing about the Nazis was the one many people found themselves surprised to learn: The very close connection between occultism and the SS—and consequently the subtleties of the Third Reich. The seeming double S at the throat of every SS man wasn't a cool font—it was a Nordic sig, or sigel, rune (well, the fact itself that it was a rune was hardly uncommon knowledge), chosen for its meaning. On the SS honor ring were additional runes, the hagal one of them, along with the tilted swastika—and she'd forgotten the others.
It was interesting how this seemed to be so unnoticed.
Anne was trying to avoid going into very much detail with this subject, despite her deep interest, because she didn't want to stick her head on the chopping block.
With an irritated flourish, she sat back and stared at her ceiling.
He asked me to do this, right? This isn't even something I'm getting graded on. I'm sure he doesn't just want me to regurgitate information...but...
She stood up and walked out of her room, and went and got a drink at the water fountain down the hall. This was an almost torturous assignment. Vaguely, she realized that she was prioritizing this paper almost too much over her other classes.
Should I take the dive and write this the way I want to write it? All he said was 'write about what you think is interesting.' He didn't even say how he wanted this written—well, he wouldn't tell me.
Anne knew what she wanted to do—but the reluctance to fully pursue, with any enthusiastic interest, knowledge about Nazis, was all but ingrained and hardwired into her being. She was, without a doubt, capable of keeping her head above intellectual waters. But, however, she was incapable of turning her back on a lifetime of being told to shun all things Nazi.
She went back to her dorm room—where else?--and sat down again.
Carrie was out at a meeting, and would probably be back within the hour.
Anne scratched lazily at an inflamed zit—she got acne when she became stressed—and stared at the screen with a blank expression.
You're going to write it like you want to, aren't you?
There was practically no way to write an essay about Himmler and not mention his interest in the occult. Well, in terms of making it interesting to Anne, at any rate.
With a wry grin, Anne made up her mind—if she got academically reamed...well, she would at least have fun in the meantime. The thought made her cringe with real fear, but she could do worse.
With that decided, a certain nervous unrest in Anne had somewhat settled, and she felt much more comfortable.
"If I'm going to do this," she murmured to herself, "Then I'm damn well going to make sure that what I say is right."
"Well it's full speed baby, in the wrong direction, there's a few more bruises, if that's the way...you insist on heading...please be honest Mary Jane...are you happy? Please, don't censor your tears..."
Anne paused for a moment, staring at the iTunes label on her monitor's task bar, then rolled her eyes and decided she'd had quite enough Alanis Morisette for one night. She was a good singer, but her warbling voice could get annoying after a while.
The next morning, waking to a clock that was set 20 minutes ahead of time in order to trick herself into getting up just that much earlier, Anne glared malevolently at the shining blue digital numbers, and slid out of bed, shimmying unsteadily down from the lofted bed, and grabbing her robe, a towel, her shampoo and basket of shower necessities, which included a razor, shaving cream, and face wash.
There was a big red sore at her chin where she wouldn't stop picking last night, and she told herself absently—in this state, there was no chance that she would remember any longer than perhaps ten minutes—she should cut her nails before she picked it all the way into impetigo again.
She shuffled half-asleep into the bathroom, where she jerked the first curtain closed for privacy, tossed her robe and towel over the bar, and shed her pajamas. She turned on the water.
Naked, she stepped into the shower and began to shave her underarms—she didn't always have the patience or the time to shave her legs—and then shampoo her hair. Of all parts of her body, Anne's hair was her favorite. It hung down in one straight, continuous fall of shiny blond to her waist—except for longish bangs that hung to her chin. She was still growing it out.
Then she washed her face.
A few minutes later—after basking in the warmth of the hot shower—Anne stepped out and dried off, and put on her robe. She walked into the bathroom and peed, and then went back to her dorm.
Carrie was still asleep, so Anne went about getting dressed as quietly as she could, dried her hair in the bathroom, and walked up the hill with her heavy bag over her shoulder.
(¹) Chi O: Short for Chi Omega, a sorority. Pronounced: "kai-oh"
(²) How many of you out there think I'm kidding or making up a word about any of the stuff about the alarms or the party? Well, if you do think that, consider this your first lesson in the school of "Truth is stranger than fiction." Because it all did happen.
I might add that parties so late at night are anything but odd. They're quite normal, actually. You'll notice that Anne and Carrie are only miffed at having been woken up.
It's a little jumpy right now, but it'll delineate pretty quick. She's not just going around like some random crazy person, there is a point.
