SPECTATOR
The first part of the Blink saga by MargaritaDaemonelix
Chapter 2
Sometimes, you seriously don't understand why every man in your neighbourhood feels the need to flirt with Rena.
You know she's pretty and all, and her past is shrouded in mystery to everyone, but every time she steps outside, there's a wave of compliments chasing after her.
You're barely out the door when Noel is at your door, looking like he's had three coffees already. "Morning, Raven," he says. "How's Rena?"
"She's cleaning the house," you lie. She's still fast asleep, but you're not about to let Noel know that. Rena has a hard enough time sleeping without your weird-ass neighbour/childhood best friend trying to romance her at six in the morning. "Don't go bothering her. You know how she is when you disturb her."
Noel nods. "You off to the market?" He asks.
There's a small smile on your face as you reply to him. "Nothing better to start your day with than a whiff of bread from the market," you joke.
The two of you share a laugh. "Well, if you need any help with groceries, I'll probably be hanging around Praus' place," he says, waving to you as he heads off towards the elevator. It confuses you a little, because Praus' shop is in the opposite direction, but you shake it out of your head and sling your bag of vegetables over your prosthetic arm.
It's been five years since you lost in Altera. The Alterans were kind in giving you a new arm for the one you lost, but it still bothers you to wake up, flexing a shoulder that isn't really there. Rena's never pressed you about it, and you never bring it up.
For the millionth time, you feel a wave of guilt wash over you as you thank El that Rena doesn't have a single memory to her name.
Nearly a year ago, the entirety of Velder decided to show up at your doorstep, screaming something about an unconscious woman who'd stumbled into Vanessa's office and collapsed on the floor. The most shocking part was how they all told you about how she was the spitting image of your late fiancee, Seris.
When you lost in Altera, you lost everything. You lost your arm, your best friend, the young girl who was brave enough to accompany you all. You lost your will to live, because Seris lost her life. So when everyone you'd ever known was insisting she was alive, you were shocked.
The moment you laid eyes on Rena, though, you instantly knew something was wrong. Seris' hair was a pale strawberry blonde that turned to golden flames under sunlight. Rena's hair was blonde, too, but there was no warm pink, only the lightest bit of what appeared to be crisp green.
When she opened her eyes, they were just as bright green as Seris' eyes, but it wasn't right. Rena's eyes had been so dull, so dead, so… lifeless.
It took several months for the life to return to her eyes.
It became clear, after Rena had recovered, that everyone expected you to take her in. You had no choice; Rena had no clue where to go and wouldn't speak at all of where she came from. You know she has scars across her back and shoulders, so you can't begin to imagine where she came from.
The only thing you know for sure about her is that she can't be Seris. She can't be Seris.
And so you've been living with Not-Seris for nearly a year now. Sometimes you have remind yourself that she has her own name that isn't Not-Seris, but it's hard to remember Rena's name when she looks just like your fiancee.
You hate her. You love her. You don't know who she is. Even she herself doesn't know.
The walk to the market is long, but not tedious. Seris used to live almost in the middle of town, you recall, as you pass by a row of apartments that was constructed when you were six. Before she moved into your slightly more spacious house, you used to sleep on the floor in her house after school. It brings back painful memories every time you walk into town, but you've learned to endure it.
Rena calls you cold. You wonder why.
"Morning, Raven," says Praus as you pass by his shop. Funny, Noel still hasn't gotten here. Your blue-haired friend is wiping down a display case filled with carved wooden charms that were probably made by his grandmother. You know he hasn't sold anything in quite some time, you wish you could help, but you've barely got enough to sustain yourself and Rena.
"Good morning, Praus," you say as cheerfully as you can manage. It still escapes your lips in a boring monotone as always, though.
"I assume you've got more vegetables?" He says, leaning against the display. "I hear Kaeli's granddaughter has a ton of carrots today, twenty-five apiece."
You shake your head. "Rena already grows carrots," you remind him. "I've got to get these down to Kaeli's stand so I can get home and stop Noel from being a creeper."
Praus laughs. He knows Noel just like you do, and he knows about all of his romantic failures. "I'll leave you to that. My mom is making omelettes in the back room," he tells you before turning back into his shop. "See you around, Raven."
Dear El, how are you, stone cold you, friends with the bright and cheerful Praus and Noel?
You take that statement back. How you befriended Praus and Noel in the first place was simple-you were all in the same class in school. How they've stayed friends with you is a whole new question. Even though you led an uprising and failed, Praus and Noel have stayed friends with you, supported you since you came home a broken man.
You only have one stop in this trip, and that's at Kaeli's vegetable stand. She sells vegetables and buys them too. It's almost like she runs a black market for fresh produce, one that's almost completely legal.
The old woman herself isn't here today. You can imagine her kind, sarcastic laughter, and the way her eyes twinkle as she scolds you when you accidentally snap the kale in half.
Instead, her granddaughter, Chloe, is running the stand. Out of Kaeli's four children and eleven grandchildren, Chloe is the only one left in Velder. She's got the same dark skin and vivid pink hair as her grandmother, but that's about where the resemblance stops.
"What do you want, bird man," she snaps when you approach her table. She has weird nicknames for everyone. Yours is bird man because of your name. Rena's is green lady, which you figure is somewhat more polite than bird man.
"I've got some things from Rena's planters," you grumble. "Heard carrots are worth twenty-five each today."
Chloe rolls her eyes. "Oh please."
After she weighs the kale and counts the carrots and avocados and each individual sprig of cilantro and mint, she totals up the values. "Your sales will come to…" She taps her phone screen like a maniac. You note that it's one of the newest models on the market. "A hundred and seven dollars and twenty-five cents."
You frown. That's half of what you calculated back at home, using your shitty scales. "Chloe, are you doing the math right?"
She snorts at you, putting a sprig of your mint in her mouth. "Yes. I don't follow my mam's rules, bird man. Now, are you going to take your dough or not?"
She's got the bills all stacked up in her hand. Just to be sure, you count them again silently after you take them. It's short five cents.
You look up at her. She's already gone off into the house behind the table, giving you the evil eye. You glare back at her, taking back your five cents worth of cilantro before stuffing the money into the inner pocket of your thin jacket quickly.
The road back home seems a lot shorter, if only because you don't have a sack of vegetables weighing you down. You walk through the lobby of the building, which has been empty since management left. You push the up button of the elevator a few times, but it doesn't seem to work.
A sigh escapes your lips as you turn to trudge up the staircase to your home on the eighth floor. All the way up the staircase, you can see where the once clean building turned to ruin. There's an interesting starburst on the second step up from the third floor, for example, from the time someone dropped a beer bottle on the water-logged concrete. A hole in the wall at the seventeenth step up from the fifth floor because Noel locked himself out of his house and you and Praus had to get his key out somehow.
… A bloodstain, close to the eighth floor door. That one's fairly new. You have no clue where it's from, and you don't want to know where.
When you reach your door, you knock on the door a few times gently. There's no response, which means Rena's not awake yet.
Just as you're about to fish for your key in your pocket, the door swings open. "Welcome back, Raven," says Rena, her voice still soft from sleep. "Did you make a good sale?"
You just can't find the heart to tell her what really happened. As you slip past her into the house, dropping the bag on the table, Rena softly closes the door and follows you in.
She sits next to you on the tiny bed that the two of you share. It feels weird, because Seris once occupied that space. "Talk to me, Raven," she says, stroking your artificial arm gently. "What happened on your way to the market?"
You try to recall the events in order. "I talked to Noel… And then to Praus."
Rena nods. "Did you have a good chat with them?"
"Yes."
"Keep going."
"I… Went into town," you say, staring into your lap mindlessly. "I went to Kaeli's stand. She wasn't there today."
Rena exhales a little, sounding exasperated. "Was Chloe there, bird man?"
You growl a little at the back of your throat. Rena raises her hands defensively. "Hey, I meant it as a joke."
"Yeah, she was," you sigh. "And you know she doesn't follow Kaeli's rules."
The two of you sit in silence as Rena strokes your artificial arm softly. "Well, you sold the vegetables, which is what you went to do," she says. "I need to go make breakfast now."
When she leaves you to sit on the bed alone, you're suddenly aware that it's cold without her sitting beside you.
By the time you get up to join her, she's already got oatmeal bubbling on the stove and hot mint tea steaming. "Help yourself," she says, setting a spoon down from scraping out some oatmeal into her own bowl, and pouring a mug of tea for both of you.
You eat your breakfast in silence.
Rena never looks up from her breakfast. She's still wrapped in the green cardigan that she arrived in. Praus once told you that it was of a very high quality, made from fibres he'd never seen before. The green in her hair is beginning to wash out, which means that it was possibly dyed. Moments like this are when she looks the most like Seris, with her hair down like a curtain around her face.
You still have no idea where Rena comes from. When she first came to Velder, everyone noticed how healthy she was. She'd obviously been eating well, and it showed in her skin, her strength, her body shape. She came in a white dress shirt and a black skirt and boots, and of course the cardigan that she refuses to part with, all of incredibly high quality.
Heck, she's vegetarian. She eats nothing but vegetables. It was clear right from the beginning that Rena came from one of the higher castes.
But then why would she have run all the way to Velder? Your city is home to the lowest caste in Elrios. If Rena was from the higher three, then why was she running away from prosperity and happiness?
As you head out of the apartment wordlessly to go off to work, you've never felt so confused by what a runaway woman has done to you.
Five hours you work until lunch, and then another seven and a half until you can finally go home. It's nearly eight when you finally reach the old apartment building again.
Even as you gaze up at the building you call home, someone turns off their lights. Great. Another patch of darkness for your life.
You don't bother checking the elevator; at this hour there's no way it's going to work. Instead, you head up the stairs. The minute you open the stairwell, though, there are sounds coming out that make you wish you hadn't.
Your day has been shitty enough without having to take the fire escape up.
When you were about nine, there was a fire in Velder that destroyed nearly everything in the west end of the city. Thousands of people died in the blaze, trapped in their own homes and unable to escape. After the fire, all the buildings in Velder were required to install fire escapes. Thankfully, the one on your building is a legitimate staircase and not just a rickety ladder.
That doesn't make it much safer, though. The ladder has suffered significantly since it was built. The flight down from the roof to the fifteenth floor is still broken from the time someone fell off the roof and broke their fall with it.
You climb up the fire escape with one hand firmly on the railing at all times. When you get to your apartment, you knock a few times on the window glass.
Rena comes to open it. "Was the elevator not powered again?" She asks.
You nod.
"Lemme guess. Someone was doing something nasty in the stairwell," she says, pulling you into the room and closing the door behind her. "Well, you're back home and you're safe, so all is well."
She's already made dinner, though she hasn't eaten any yet herself. "It gets lonely without someone else at the dinner table," she says. Even if you do manage to convince her to eat earlier, she always sits with you as you eat in silence.
Tonight's dinner is boiled carrots and some stewed chicken bits. Rena doesn't touch the chicken at all, so the entire bowl of it goes to you. As the two of you eat your bread and carrots in silence, you can't help but ask her about her diet.
"Rena, why are you vegetarian?"
She doesn't meet your eyes. "It reminds me of things I want to forget," she tells you, grinding a piece of carrot under her spoon absentmindedly, "and things I've possibly forgotten. I've lost most of my memories, but I can remember so much blood."
El save your soul. Where is this woman from?
After dinner, Rena clears the plates away, but you wash them with a sink of water and an old rag. One by one, you stack them in the cupboard above the sink; first the plates, then the bowls, then the cups, and finally the cutlery.
Eight thirty is when you finally settle in. You and Rena have to take turns taking showers, and the water is never hot, only warm. Rena goes first, and while she's in, you get a little bit of quiet.
Well, not really. There are wild parties going on upstairs, parties you might have participated in or hosted before Altera. Now, you just want to go to sleep and wake up alive.
Rena has left some of her clothes in a messy pile on her bed. You don't try to snoop, but the sight of her familiar cardigan catches your eye. Why out of all things is she so attached to this cardigan? You pick up a corner as you kneel in front of her bed and gingerly sniff it. Rena always smells like fresh flowers, which you figure comes from this cardigan. Now, as you're examining it for yourself, you realize that it's covering up the faint scent of isopropyl alcohol.
As you scan the green fabric over, another tiny detail catches your eye. The sleeve has twelve perfect little puncture holes in a circle at the deltoid, indicating that there once was a badge sewn to it.
So Rena is from one of the higher castes after all. You figure that, and the fact that she's vegetarian, add up to enough evidence to prove she's from a higher-up caste. The question of why she left, though, still lingers. If she really were from a higher caste, she wouldn't be here in dirty, dead Velder.
Before you know it, the shower stops running, and you're scrambling to grab your clothes and look as composed as possible while Rena steps out, her hair looking greener than ever while wet. "There's still some warm water," she tells you.
"Thanks."
After you lock the bathroom door, you strip and toss your dirty clothes on the counter, setting the clean ones aside. Rena is fond of using up a lot of the hot water; you figure that makes sense, since she was most likely from a higher caste. Today, there's still some fairly warm water left.
As you stand under the running water, you begin to think back on the past few months. After Rena recovered from her wounds in escaping, it became clear that a good portion of her life was missing. No one knew how old she was, and since she had no ID card on her, no one could scan for her in the systems. There was an attempt to search the databases for her entry, but the name "Rena Lire" yielded no results whatsoever.
The only person who seemed to be able to get along with her fairly well was Vanessa, head of the Affairs Office in Velder. Vanessa spoke to Rena several times in private, and from these conversations a few scraps of information emerged.
From the sounds of it, Rena was being abused where she was living before, or at least treated horribly. There seemed to be one person who was a very good friend of hers, as well as this person's childhood friend who also treated her with kindness. Rena's concept of her own age was between twenty-four and thirty.
There was also more. She only had memories of the past three years or so. Before that was all a "messy blur of blood and flowers", in her words.
You have too many questions, and for each answer you find, there are a lifetime's worth more questions that flood you.
You blink. The water's gone cold. You're shivering.
You wash up with the little bar of soap as quickly as you can. The water slowly trickles to a stop before you can fully rinse off all the suds. You wipe them down with the remaining water in your hair, hoping it won't stick to your clothes.
You put on a fresh set of underwear and some black pants and a random shirt you didn't know you owned. It's clean, though, so as you open the door of the bathroom, Rena smiles.
"What does your shirt say?" she asks as you sit down next to her, holding the big bath towel. "Hold on a second, let me read it."
She grabs the front of your shirt and pulls it flat. "Velder Secondary, year of…" She smiles again. "Your graduation shirt? It's nice. The design is well-planned."
You have to agree. If Velder had a badge, it would be the stylized crow on the shirt. Seris designed the shirt that year, and she did a beautiful job of it.
Rena kneels on the floor in front of the TV and hands you the towel. As she turns on the TV and tweaks around with it, you gently dry her hair, making sure not to tug on it. You used to dry Seris' hair all the time when the two of you lived together. Rena's hair is slightly longer, and a little healthier-looking, and of course it's green. It feels just as soft as Seris' hair, though.
After she deems her hair dry enough, she moves to kneel behind you with the towel. Your hair is still dripping wet, but under Rena's gentle hands, it dries up quickly.
Adam Nasod is having another speech on the general news channel. You've come to tolerate his voice over the course of the past five years, though it's still painful to look at him after the kind of pain he put you through. There's a crowd beneath him, hanging onto his every word, and his younger sister, Lady Evangeline Nasod, stands with her bodyguard.
There's an old story that people used to tell about Commander Nasod's sister and her bodyguard. Legend has it that she used to have an armada of bodyguards, just like her brother. To test them, someone within the palace staged an assassination attempt(with the Commander's permission, of course) and only one stayed behind to protect the young lady.
The others… No one knows where they are now.
The screen suddenly goes dark. Rena stops towelling off your hair to peer around your head. "What's going on?" She asks, her voice suddenly very quiet.
There's a badge symbol on the screen now. It takes you a moment to recognise it, but it comes to you clearly as the symbol of the Imperial Sander Archives. A four-pointed blue star, to represent the cardinal directions.
Then, a picture. A woman with the snow-white hair of the ancient Alterans, but also with the vibrant eyes of a child.
Rena can't speak. Her eyes are wide as she moves to sit beside you in shock.
"I apologize to the people of Elrios, but this is a message from the head of the Imperial Sander Archives. Or rather, a message from someone representing the head of the Imperial Sander Archives."
Her eyes narrow, like the autotuned voice is familiar to her, and not in a good way. "What is the brat thinking?" She growls. You've never heard Rena speak like that before.
"Because this is the current condition of the head librarian at the Archives."
The picture changes, and you want to throw up your entire dinner.
The body is contorted, that's for sure. Many parts of the image are censored in mosaics, but it's still clear that the head librarian is gone. Bloody surgical instruments are scattered all across the ground around her. Locks of her bloodstained hair are stacked on a plate. The room seems to be empty, but the few lights that are on seem to be swaying eerily.
The message is clear. Sander has fallen.
"We apologise for this announcement," continues the voice, "and we hope nothing of this kind will happen again. Regularly scheduled programming will continue as planned shortly."
Sure enough, Adam Nasod's speech flickers back on within seconds. He's still calmly delivering that speech, possibly unaware of the information broadcasted across Elrios just seconds ago. The crowd below and the people behind him on the stage are clearly just as clueless on the subject. Everyone is still in a blissful state of unknowing, like a window into the past.
Beside you, Rena looks like she's about to cry. "What happened to her?" She whispers, staring down into her hands like they're covered in the blood of the dead woman. "Why did they hurt her? Why did he put that on live television?"
You don't know who "he" is, but if he's got anything to do with Rena's past, you figure you should probably shut up for now. Rena's still in a state of shock. The rest of the nation is still in a state of shock. You're still in a state of shock.
The only thing you're sure of is that you're not safe here, and maybe you'll never be safe.
A/N: AHHHHHHHHHH
I can't write male characters? I don't know how? Plz send help?
anyhoo that's chapter 2 out of 12 oh shet I don't think I'll be able to finish in time SAVE ME
-MargaritaDaemonelix
