Eventually, the door flapped open and I slowly uncurled from my spot in the corner, where I had spent the last two hours sobbing quietly. Genos stood in the doorway, wearing my mother's apron and a pair of latex gloves. Over his shoulder was a mop. He looked strangely heroic there, standing tall, with the hallway light gleaming behind him. He scanned the yard, seemingly searching for something. At last, his eyes found me.
"Senpai?" He suddenly dropped the mop and flew across the yard to kneel in front of me. "What happened senpai?" he demanded.
I backed a little further into the corner, eyes growing wide with fright. I realized I must have looked absolutely devastated. I hadn't even cried this much when I heard my mother was gone. He was probably thinking I had just witnessed a massacre in his absence or something, but here I was, literally having a breakdown over somebody touching my stuff. You absolute weenie, I pretended not to have thought.
"I… I…"
Genos shut his eyes solemnly, and then stood up. He held his hand out to me and I eyed it warily. Still, he held it out, waiting patiently. My eyes, cloaked beneath a curtain of ginger locks, scanned the smooth, gleaming surface of his palm. Steel and brass beamed brilliantly under the orange hues of the setting sun. I sniffed up a river of snot and wiped my nose on my sleeve, still backed against the corner like a scared puppy. He wasn't… gonna… yell at me, or something? Well, now I wasn't sure why I thought he would.
I thought about taking his hand. Part of me wanted to think of it as no different from a stair-rail, an inanimate thing with a purpose to serve. But I had already decided that that was wrong. I had already decided that that hand was a human appendage, and that taking it would mean too much. So, instead, I stood up on my own wobbly legs and dusted my pants off awkwardly, socked toes wiggling apprehensively on the pavement. Genos retracted his offered hand, seeming unfazed, and instead went to hold the door open for me. I stepped past him into the hallway meekly.
Instantly, my nostrils were assailed by the grand, orchestral glory of pine-scented cleaning products. The long lost vacuu-bot that I had made for mom's last birthday came whirring up the hallway, like a dog coming to greet its master. Where were you when this place was a mess, I pretended not to admonish it.
As it came to the lip of the hallway, it's delicately tuned sensors preempting a fall, it stopped and turned the other way, and I followed it cautiously up the hall. The first room I came to was the kitchen, and I wandered in, parting ways from the dutiful robot which carried on down the hall. Inside, I found the counters and the sink sparkling like a ballroom. The floor, once caked in tracked-in dirt and unidentifiable food-splatters, glistened serenely.
I moved through the room to the other door, into the dining room where a similar scene awaited. The table was finally visible, all of those scraps of candy wrappers and empty ramen cups cleared away at last.
Next was the living room, divested of its former layer of trash. Mom's CDs had been restored to the safety of their jewel cases and organized alphabetically on the shelf. All of the stains and caked in foodstuff had been miraculously pried from the carpet.
Already stunned beyond words, I moved past this room to the hallway bathroom, peaking in curiously. The toilet and the sink were astonishingly white again, all of the grime scrubbed from their surfaces. The shower had been cured of the coat of orange hair that once clung to its tiled walls like a fur. As I leaned in a little further, I marveled that I could actually see into the mirror, once clouded with a thick fog of smudges and toothpaste splatters—you know, from back when you were still brushing your teeth, I pretended not to have thought.
I went back out into the hallway where the bedrooms lay side-by-side. Mom's, of course, was off-limits. I had locked it from the inside, and I didn't even want to know if Genos had gone in there. So, next came the part that I dreaded. I stepped warily up to my room and, reaching around the doorframe for the light switch, I flipped it on.
To my utter shock, the floor was visible. I had forgotten what it even looked like. A visible gap between the bottom of my bed frame and the surface of the floor was modestly bridged by a clean bed skirt, no longer the dirty thing dotted with boogers that I recognized. The sheets were neatly made, and even more impressively, they actually matched, which meant some laundry had been done.
My fleet of vinyl figures had been relocated to the shelf that had until now been housing my collection of dirty cups. They looked like they had been individually cleaned, too. My desk had been cleared of tissues, wrappers, and dishes, too, and the various stationery and electronics rearranged into an orderly array. He even tidied the mess of cables for me.
I pulled open a drawer of my dresser. Horrifyingly, what I found was a series of stacks of neatly folded panties. The white ones, the striped ones, the ones covered in cartoon cats, the boyshorts, the briefs, the ones with little bows on the front. All there. I quickly slammed the drawer shut, hoping and praying that through some miracle he managed to fold them without touching or looking at them. That was the only way I'd ever be able to sleep peacefully again.
I wandered over to the shelf that housed my manga collection, which had previously been in a pile beside my desk. They were all there, too, organized by genre and then by title. I flushed when I realized the hentai manga had been placed in its own separate category. How I prayed he hadn't looked at the content to determine that category.
Stacked neatly on top of the dirty manga were my BLCDs, also alphabetized. I couldn't stomach the horror if he had at any point stopped to listen to one of them. Especially not the one with Ishikawa-kun, where he and so-and-so do such-and-such with a… Oh god, please not the one with Ishikawa-kun. I pulled my hood over my face so hard that I heard a few of the stitches pop. Then, I stiffened. What about that… other… thing I was worried about?
Gulping, I let go of my hood and went over to the night stand, fingers already trembling as I reached for the top drawer. I pulled it open slowly and it rattled on the track to the rhythm of my nervous hand. Sure enough, there it was, nice and clean and bright purple. It even had new batteries. I slammed the drawer shut.
He has no idea what it is, I tried to reassure myself. He thinks it's a back massager.
Yep. He definitely thinks it's a back massager.
He knows what it is, idiot. Say, I wonder if his thing vibra—No! No no no no no no. Don't go there. I collapsed into a ball on the floor, rocking back and forth slowly. Is this what mother felt like as her time drew near? Did she feel the icy claw of death gripping her tightly as I now do? Take me now, pale horseman! Deliver me from this mortal despair! Carry me gently into the sweet release of the end! Let not this poor soul wallow at the banks of—
"Senpai?"
I froze.
"Is everything alright? I apologize if anything is out of place."
Dear god why.
"Er… If anything is missing, I will do my best to locate it for you."
How could this be any worse? Suddenly, he was starting to sound like Ishikawa-kun.
"I also took the liberty of preparing a meal, though there wasn't much food in the kitchen…"
DEAR GOD WHY.
"Um… I'll lay it out on the table, so please take your time with… er… please excuse me."
The sound of him hurrying down the hallway was like music to my ears. I popped my head out of the ball of despair, gasping for breath, and plopped back on my bum. I ran my fingers through the greasy strands of my hair.
"It's too much," I said to myself in barely a whisper, voice crackling weakly. "I feel like I'm going to pop."
I knew I should never have let him come with me. I knew I shouldn't have left the house. I knew I shouldn't have answered the phone. What was I thinking? If I had just stayed home, I could have ordered takeout for the rest of my life and made myself useful debugging endless login pages.
Yeah, but if you wasted your life like that, you'd be better off dead, I pretended not to have thought. But that was true, wasn't it? At least, for me, wasn't that how I really felt… somewhere deep inside?
I took a deep breath. Then, summoning all of my strength and courage, I stood up and went back out to the dining room. When I entered, I found Genos standing by, a cellphone pressed to his ear.
"Yes, everything is fine. Sorry for worrying you. We're having dinner at senpai's house… No, I don't think it will be a problem. We should be back before—Doctor Kuseno?"
I tilted my head at the conversation. Suddenly, Genos' expression became frantic and I wondered what was the matter.
"Doctor Kuseno, what is it?"He demanded.
"—ut me on—eakerphone!" I overheard. Genos put the phone on speaker right away.
"Akane-chan, can you hear me!?" Doctor Kuseno cried.
"Um… y-yes?"
"You both need to get out of there, right now!"
"Wh… what? What do you mean? Why?"
"There's no time to explain! Your lives are in danger! You must get back to the laboratory immediately! Genos—whatever happens, keep Akane-chan safe!"
"Yes, Doctor," Genos reassured, sure and clear, like a soldier taking orders. "You can count on me." Before I knew it, Genos had slung a packed duffel bag across his chest and tucked me under his arm by the waist like a ragdoll, braced himself at the legs, and…
Promptly burst through my ceiling in a single leap.
"M-my house…!" I squeaked, holding my hand out to the ruined rooftop as it drifted further and further away, one flying leap at a time. Genos seemed completely oblivious to my distress.
Swallowing down a newly formed lump in my throat, I tried to lift myself up to relieve some of the pressure on my ribs, but with only one arm it was impossible.
"C…Couldn't you have used the front door!?" I cried, squirming ineffectively.
"Please hold still, senpai," Genos calmly instructed. "I'm holding on loosely, so if you move too much, you may fall."
"You just blew a hole through my roof!"
"My apologies, senpai, I will gladly pay for the repairs once we're safe."
"Safe from what!? There's nothing to—GYAH!"
As a huge rocket flew passed us, just nearly grazing my nose, I curled reflexively into a quivering ball. As if that's going to help! I pretended not to think.
"Don't be alarmed, senpai. I will protect you."
Oh really!? I had nothing to say to that. Instead, as I heard the explosion in the distance, I flinched a little tighter into my ball. Please, please let it have landed in some safely uninhabited building. I imagined the agonized howls of dying neighborhood children, their mothers' roasted corpses sizzling in the flames. God no, please not that.
I detected the slightest tensing of Genos' arm as he came to a stop on a rooftop. The shingles beneath his feet had been converted into rubble.
"There you are." He said darkly, abruptly changing directions.
I let out a cry of fright. There who is? Were we going toward the danger? Weren't we supposed to be heading back to the lab?
As I puzzled this in a panic, I found myself suddenly set down, very gently, in a soggy lawn behind an unfamiliar house. Genos plopped the duffle bag down on my lap. I looked up at him in perplexity.
"Take cover here," he instructed, still looking up at the sky. "This won't take long."
And with that, he leapt onto the roof in a single bound. I watched, slack-jawed, as he went, leaving only a little cascade of crumbling gable in his wake. Was he seriously just going to leave me here!? Tossing the duffle bag aside, I hoisted myself up and ran as quickly as I could around the corner, to the front of the house. Far ahead, and well beyond my reach was Genos, traversing the rooftops, his form so tiny in the distance that it resembled a flea.
"G… Genos!" I screamed.
A small movement drew my eyes toward the house's driveway, where I saw a mother, midway through pulling her toddler out of the car, frozen in shock as she gaped at me. We made eye contact—dreadful, dreadful eye contact, but there was no time to think about that now.
"Go inside!" I told her. "It's dangerous, so hurry!"
And with that, I bolted across the street and through the next yard, dodging around trash cans and startled residents. Somewhere along the way, I lost my scarf. In one spot I toppled someone's barbecue, but I didn't stay long enough to get cursed out.
At last, two blocks down, I came to a chain link fence and balked. But I had to keep going. Sucking in a deep breath and letting out a growl, I flung myself as high as I could and grabbed on with my one scrawny arm, and it took tremendous toil to keep from falling immediately as my toes groped for footholds. This one task, at least, was a little bit easier without my shoes. Little by little, I crawled my way up the fence, hanging on by my very teeth to make up for my missing arm. At the top, I threw myself over and landed with a resounding thud on my butt, breathing heavily.
What was I doing? What was I thinking? I was supposed to stay put, take cover. That was the rational thing to do. I was no kind of superhero. Me, a long-sedentary, uncoordinated, clumsy amputee? I couldn't fight something that could fire rockets at me! I probably wouldn't even be a match for a coconut! I'd probably look into its beady, intimidating little eyes and piss myself!
I cradled my head in my hands, trying to shake myself out of my idiocy. Looking down between the houses, I could still see the house that I'd just come from. Meanwhile, Genos was already miles away. I'd never catch up anyway. I couldn't even tell where he was going to begin with.
A/N: Hello! I'm so so sorry for disappearing for so long. I got commissioned to do a really freaking huge mural and pretty much all of my time has been consumed by that. I'll be posting pics on my deviantART (zerohope2survive) if anyone is curious. It was an absolute nightmare, though, especially mixing everything from primary colors. ;_;
Anyway, here's a new chapter. I hope you enjoy it. It might be a little while before I get anything new out. Like Akane, my house is a disaster, so I have to do some-okay, a lot of cleaning. Somebody send Genos and Levi over, pls. Dx