Lenka Bazaar is all kinds of things. Some of them are positive, some of them are negative, and many more can go either way, but one thing she will never fail to be is considerate.
It's sort of a curse, she is thinking savagely as she tidies her life away. The fact of her constant consideration, comparison, compartmentalization. She can't do a damn thing without thinking about it, and as nice as that might seem, it has never been good.
It doesn't help when she's trying to convince herself when she's doing the right thing, and after all, that really is where it should matter. But something's gone horribly wrong somewhere along the line and all her analysis shows her is the face of the girl who could have one day been her lover, who has probably not ever not been the love of her life, and the life that she could have if she weren't so set on doing this.
It's not like she doesn't know why she's going ahead with it anyway, of course. She knows that this is the best thing she can do for the people she loves, the people she loves on that level especially. She knows that this is going to be the best possible use of her life, and she knows that it is in fact going to consume her life and she knows, on any rational kind of level, that this is something she has to do.
It doesn't make it any easier.
Clarabelle. The name's stopped sounding like anything after all these years apart from safety, or sanctity, or possibly just home. The girl herself, with her charm and her mind and her strength and her complete and total wondrousness. She'll miss the world after a few decades away, Lenka knows, but she also knows that what she'll really be missing will be Clarabelle. It's a thought that stings, and she hasn't even left yet.
It's the perfect time to leave now. Clarabelle is visiting her cousins, Stentor and Civet, for the week. She's out of the country. It would be so simple to just disappear, leaving everything behind, because she'd never have to look Clarabelle in the eyes again and pretend that forever isn't impossible because their love should have been forever, would be forever if it weren't for this and something inside Lenka is falling apart.
She can't leave a note.
She'd have liked to, she thinks. Just a little thing. Three words, even, the ones she hasn't mustered up for her own pronouncement. I love you, she'd have left behind, in some way or another, and she'd have gone away and she wouldn't exactly have been overjoyed about it, but there would have been a sense of closure. That's not going to happen, though. It's not possible.
There's always the chance that she'd break into a million shards as she wrote those words, after all, and it's not one she'd be willing to take because she needs to do this, to keep the world safe like it never guarded her, or Clarabelle, or any of the other people that slipped through the cracks that reave existence. This is something she is going to do and so she slips out of the country in broad daylight, thinking about Clarabelle's everything and regretting it all and also not because this is something she's going to do and she'd damned well better get used to the idea.
She's always had these little flashes of her future. Painful little things that pull her away from the now to the maybe, or the probably, or the will. She's never had one she's wanted to disbelieve, to disprove, to defiantly fail to fulfill, as this.
Lenka Bazaar sees a future without Clarabelle, and it hurts.
A/N: For optimal symmetry, there will now be two chapters that are vaguely from Clarabelle's perspective. However, one never quite knows when one is going to get carried away.
~Mademise Morte, September 24, 2012.