Rose Red: Model 85001
Chapter Four
"So what was that sludge your girlfriend wanted to feed me?" Hitomi asked Van as they walked from the only café in town to the only clothing store in town.
Van rolled his eyes. "She's not my girlfriend. It was nothing weird … I think. It was only juice crystals."
"Juice crystals? What are those?"
He laughed. "You've never had juice crystals? Well, I guess if you're used to unsweetened, freshly-squeezed orange juice than I guess you've never been subjected to the glories of flavoured sugar water that never goes bad – ever."
Hitomi didn't say anything else, but she felt flat. The pancakes were good, but now her stomach turned since she really had no idea at all what was in them. She hadn't grown up anywhere special and her family wasn't particularly rich, but there was an orange tree in her backyard growing up. Looking out at the prairie, she knew there would be no more orange juice out here. It was stupid, but that fact hit her harder than anything else that had happened since she had 'woke' up. There was no going back and this new world was … dismal.
Her hopes had plummeted since breakfast and now she was feeling suspicious about the prospective shopping trip. If that was what breakfast was like, could clothes shopping be much more promising?
Van suddenly stopped her in the middle of the street. "Listen," he said, turning to face her. "Before we go in, I have to tell you the conditions of your shopping spree so that you don't get too excited or disappointed."
"I doubt I'll be too excited," she said, sniffing back a little condensation in her nose. It was cold out.
Van said gruffly, "I only have two hundred dollars for you to play with and that has to buy you everything."
Hitomi thought she was going to faint. "Everything?"
"Well, this is a discount store, so you can probably spin the money out a bit," Van said positively. "You know how to do that, right?"
Hitomi scanned her memory. She knew that officially she was twenty-seven, but in her head she was still twenty-two since nothing happened to her while she was in cryostasis and she couldn't remember the two years before that. Her brain was a complete blur.
Van seemed to realize she was trying to get a grip on herself. "Are you okay? Are you having a hard time remembering how to do normal small things, like shop?"
Hitomi didn't answer him.
"You've got to be kidding me. There is a woman who doesn't know how to shop left in this world." He laughed.
"No," she said, tugging on his sleeve. "It isn't that. I was trying to remember the last thing I wanted to buy."
"Diamonds?"
"No."
"Rubies?"
"No."
"Emeralds?"
"No! Will you quit with the jewels and just let me think a minute?"
Just as Van shut up, the clouds in her head parted and she remembered what it was that she wanted. Then she described it for Van. "It was a camel hair coat with massive flare sleeves and it was double-breasted, but both buttons were only on one side of your chest. It cost a small fortune, but…"
Abruptly, Van grabbed her by the arm and hauled her bodily into the store.
"Hey! What are you doing?" Hitomi complained, just before Van spun her in front of the mannequin display set up in the entrance of the store. Hitomi couldn't believe her eyes. There it was. Her coat! There it was and not just in brown, but in red and grey and navy and yellow and white and cream and … they were on sale for thirty dollars apiece. "Wow…"
Van rested his elbow on the shoulder of one of the headless mannequins. Then he grabbed its empty sleeve and tossed it over the opposite shoulder playfully. "Except that these aren't made of camel hair. These are made of old pop bottles and every old lady in town owns at least two."
Hitomi's shoulders sagged.
"I guess that's what happens to high fashion after a few years have passed," he said quietly. "But you won't find anything that's the height of fashion here. That's why I didn't buy a diva. Just pick out what you can tolerate – even if it is eons out of style. No one will see it back at my place except me anyway. Buy what's comfortable that will last long." Then Van turned his back on her and headed off to a different department.
Hitomi stepped up to the display and touched one of the yellow coats. Van was right. But still, she'd wanted one for years before she'd lost her mind. She picked out her size in the yellow and slung it over her forearm. This was what her life was like now and she wasn't going to cry … even if she felt like it.
After that, she pecked around the store smelling weird scented body wash, testing the elasticity of hair bands, and trying on clothes so cheap her skin felt strange after she pulled them off. Eventually she made her way back to Van and showed him her purchases. He reviewed them without comment and paid for them with a credit card. She winced. That meant he didn't have the money in his normal account. He was buying on credit. She hoped it didn't max him out, but she couldn't do anything about that. She had to have clothes.
Before they went back to the helicopter, they stopped to pick up an order of food Van had waiting for him at the grocery store and picked up a parcel from the post office. It was an awful lot to carry, but Van made her carry everything she had bought while he balanced the parcel on top of the boxes that contained the food. Then he pushed the lot on a loading cart all the way to the helicopter landing.
"You can stay here while I walk the cart back," he said charitably with a chipper grin on his face.
Hitomi smiled back at him wearily and tried to look happy. He was trying to be nice to her by not making her walk back to the store with him, so she made herself comfortable and rested.
The town spread out before her through the windshield, a pitiful cluster of unpainted buildings with pathetic clumps of yellow grass between buildings. Hitomi remembered how she hadn't seen a single flower on her way to this miserable place. How was she going to survive here?
She cast her eyes downward and picked at her nails.
Time passed and somehow Van snuck up on the door and swung it open.
"Oh! You're back," Hitomi said, dropping her hands and forcing a smile on her face.
Van hopped up into his seat and suddenly he handed her a cluster of roses. They weren't real. They were made of purple ribbon and carefully clustered together with silk leaves coming through the breaks.
Hitomi was speechless.
"Sorry that they're not real. We're in the middle of nowhere and not even greenhouses ship out here without reason, so it's all I could get. Don't worry. There will be roses, just not for another couple months."
Hitomi was so choked up she couldn't say anything, but Van seemed to get it and started the chopper.
"We'll talk back at home."
Van did have something he wanted to talk to Hitomi about, but he didn't know how to broach it. To put it simply, it was bad news – for both of them. Ever since the orange juice, she had seemed down. It wasn't until he saw her shopping that he realized how messed up she was. She looked completely hopeless. Now he looked across at her in the cockpit and knew that what the coordinator said at the agency was dead on – she was damaged goods. Now he realized that he shouldn't have laughed when he caught Hitomi going through his trash. She had her memory wiped. She could have been doing anything in those two years. Anything. Even murders.
Well, the police couldn't have been looking for her, because if they had been it probably would have taken them thirty whole seconds to find her at Sleeping Beauty Inc. But that could just mean that they never found out what she had done.
A chill ran up his spine. He'd heard of models who had killed their owners before.
Argh! Now he had the willies.
He couldn't help it and glanced at Hitomi again. She did look a little deranged. He'd never seen hair that perfectly long and undamaged on a girl before. Usually they wore their hair to their shoulders like Merle – just long enough to pull into a ponytail. Hitomi's skin was practically transparent, like she'd been locked up for years. Add that to her vacant expression and he wasn't sure if she was the ghost or if she was the one being haunted.
Van pulled his gaze away from her and looked at the horizon. I am not sleeping with her. I am not sleeping with her. There is nothing to worry about. He chanted it over and over again in his head. He wasn't taking advantage of her or raping her or whatever those nasty guys had been doing to the models that went nuts. Nothing was going to happen. She slept on a completely different floor. He had to calm down.
Now.
It wasn't really working. He kept on chanting.
Back at the house, Van and Hitomi unloaded the chopper and put their food away. It was such normal work that Van shook off his spectral suspicions of her and got on with it.
After that, Van got in his truck and took the helicopter back into the hanger. As he crossed the yard coming back towards the house, he saw Hitomi up in her tower putting her things away. That was as good a place to break the bad news as any, so he went up to see her.
He tapped on the door.
"Come in," she said and he came in.
She was standing by the door, putting her things in the closet. That was how the room looked. It was an irregular shape even though the tower was a perfect circle, because a little space was shaved off one side for the stairs up, the closet, and the bathroom. That put three identical white doors in a row. He hoped she was never too drowsy to forget which one was the bathroom in the middle of the night.
"Everything fit okay?" Van asked cautiously, as he moved over to the other side of the room and perched himself on the window frame.
"Yeah," Hitomi nodded, taking another hanger out and putting a tank top that cost only a dollar on it.
Van sighed. He knew it cost only a dollar. She'd bought six of them.
Well, he couldn't procrastinate any longer. "I got a transmission from the Royal Bank of Freud. Does that name ring any bells with you?"
He watched Hitomi gulp down uncomfortably. "Yeah, that was where my debt was. Don't tell me the money that Sleeping Beauty Inc. transferred to my account wasn't enough to cover my debt."
Van nodded gravely.
Hitomi's face went from white to red and she stormed, "I was repeatedly assured that the payment would be enough unless no one bought me. Wasn't that true?"
"They said the principle was paid, but interest rates went up while you were in cryostasis and now they want another twenty-thousand dollars."
Hitomi stared at him.
He clenched his teeth together and gave her a half-hearted smile. "They say I'm on the hook for it."
Hitomi's shoulders sagged. "Sorry about that."
"Just let me ask one thing," Van said patiently. "Do you have any idea what you spent that money on?"
She shook her head weakly. "No. I was broke before my memory wipe, but I wasn't in debt. Back then, no one would have given me credit."
Van sat, pondering that. "Well, I'll ask RBF to send me your financial records for the past ten years and we'll see if we can figure it out. In the meantime, we need to figure out a way for us to earn twenty-thousand dollars by New Year's Day."
Hitomi shook her head sadly. "So you don't have the money?"
"Well, I have money and I don't. Right at this moment – I don't have twenty-thousand dollars. I spent nearly all my available cash getting you."
Hitomi chuckled darkly. "Was I worth it?"
"Putting the topic of money aside, I can tell that something's bothering you," he said quickly. "And I can tell you to put it away and to put it away and to put it away, but it won't get put away, will it? You obviously sold yourself to start a new life because something was bothering you back then, too. I bought you for the same reason. I want to start something new. And I want to help you adjust to this new life, so let's think of some things to help you."
Hitomi thought for a second then stuttered, "I can't think of anything that doesn't cost money."
Van hesitated too. "Well, I plan to spend a little money on my new endeavor. I suppose I can do the same for you."
Hitomi shook her head, picked up a pair of scissors and went into the bathroom. Standing in front of the mirror snatched a clump of her hair and put the scissors to the roots.
"No!" Van screeched, diving at her. He grabbed the scissors in one hand and in so doing, knocked her completely off balance. Reflexively, he grabbed her waist with his other hand and held her up.
Her eyes were wide as she stared up at him.
He breathed heavy and brought her back up to a standing position without letting the moment become any more awkward. "Whew! Don't cut your hair for nothing."
Hitomi looked confused and Van felt her eyes on him as he put the scissors away. "But Van! You didn't buy me to be your lover. Why should it matter to you what I do with my hair?"
"But Rose Red," he said, mimicking her tone of voice. "I don't care if you want to cut it. I just think that if you're going to do it anyway, then let's cut it the profitable way."
"'The profitable way'?" Hitomi repeated.
"Yeah. I know someone who can pixie you right up."
Author's Notes: Thanks to everyone who reviewed last time. Honestly, I've never seen such a poor hit to review ratio before. Although it does make the people who actually review look like angels. **waves to all the angels - I can hardly see you you're so high** Anyway, I wanted to start a forum today, because there are a few more author's notes than usual today, but I'm not quite convinced that it won't be a lonely place, so I'll write my notes in here and see if anyone has any comments on them. Here we go:
Hitomi is not getting a haircut because she has short hair in the anime. I could just as easily say that she's like manga Hitomi who has a ponytail. That's one of the things I love about Escaflowne. There's the movie, the anime, and I think there might even be two mangas. I feel like I can do whatever I want and then trump up an excuse and hahaha - it'll be valid. Anyway, all you Van fans out there, I'm playing him a little different. He's kinda funny, huh? Whatcha all think?