Chapter Text
Curtain call. The white sliding paper door set a backdrop for the three underexposed figures that stood in front of it. Their face was barely illuminated by the red paper lanterns painted with – strangely enough – Chinese letters in black ink hung above. Naomi, Ortensia, and Zacharie had just exited the hotpot restaurant. They walked along the dim street like puppets on paper props and background.
The scene slowly changed from the street market to the bright city with the passing cars and towering squares. The shadows chatted, they laughed, they played around, and they stopped. Zacharie’s apartment was around the bend; it was time he departed.
Now it’s just two shadows, walking side by side. They walked gently and they talked, but they didn’t laugh too loudly; they smiled and snickered. The background changed again, and now they are standing in a dark residential area. There were only a handful of houses that dotted the neighbourhood.
Ortensia halted, “Oh, my house is over there.” She pointed at it.
Naomi looked in the pointed direction. They had been walking for quite a while. She wished it had been a bit longer, though.
“Ah, I was so busy talking, I didn’t notice I walked past my place by quite a bit.” Naomi laughed and placed her hand behind her head.
Brass Knuckles joined her laughter.
“I… I really enjoyed today,” Ortensia’s arms naturally settled behind her hip in a conjoined position, “thanks to you… and- and Zacharie, of course!”
Naomi couldn’t resist the pink ink washing over her cheeks, reminiscent of the sakura bloom when she first met Ortensia.
“I'd better head home now, my parent might be worried,” Brass Knuckles added.
“Yeah, right, you should.” Naomi shifted her stance.
The two stood there, highlighted by stars and bright windows.
“I suppose… I’ll see you tomorrow?” Naomi asked.
“Y- Yeah! At the campus!”
Naomi smiled. “At the campus.”
*
Ortensia was walking away, backwards, waving at Naomi. She’s runnin’ out the door. Naomi stood there waving until Brass Knuckles disappeared. Eventually, she did. What Ortensia did not realise, or rather remember, but Naomi did five minutes after Zacharie departed, was that she was Zacharie’s roommate.
“Unbelievable.” She blamed Zacharie for omitting that fact and abandoning her so conveniently. But deep down, she knew it was her own will that omitted the fact so she could walk Ortensia home.
The door opened with the force of a blizzard. Naomi had just walked up to her and Zacharie’s apartment on the third floor, as their building’s elevator wasn’t functional at this hour. It was a very “York” apartment; two bedrooms, one bathroom, a small open-concept (it’s open-concept because of poverty) kitchen, tiny windows, and brick walls. This was the kind of place a rock musician would have their start in, or where a '90s sitcom took place, just too small for a cast of seven. It was not bad by any student’s standards, but Naomi still wished for a more aesthetically pleasing place, somewhere more “Tokyo”. At least their windows faced the bright, sparkling New Tokyo street, though.
“Was it fun?” Zacharie smugly asked as he was sitting on the crimson couch facing the TV. That couch was probably given by Zacharie’s grandmother or something, hinted at by its enduring mark of craftsmanship that had survived so many of his hijinks. He was watching some anime about mafia office workers.
Naomi had always found their television somewhat irritating to look at, because it’s way too fancy. What the hell was it doing here? It didn’t belong here.
“Fuck you, dude,” she insulted exhaustedly, staying around Ortensia for too long had drained all her energy.
Naomi walked to their kitchen and opened the fridge. She bent down and grabbed a bright purple and pink box from a plastic bag, a box of Nerds.
She slammed the fridge. “I’m doing my assignment and then heading to bed.”
“Why didn’t you do it at the library?”
“Because I’m lazy, ok?” She closed the door behind her.
Her room was dark but not unfathomable. A single beam of the street light and stars blended together pierced through probably the biggest window in the apartment onto her small, midnight-blue bed. She pleasantly strode across the room like she owned it (she did), unfazed by any obstacles. Her hand extended outwards as she walked halfway diagonally across the room and clutched the headrest of a very cushioned office chair. She pulled the chair away from the birch desk and sat down.
A laptop rested on top of the desk, a white blip of light emitted near its plugged charging port. She placed the bag of Nerds in the left corner of the desk that bordered the wall and a closet, hung her bag on the knob of the top drawer of the desk, and took out notebooks, papers, and pens. Midway through, she reached the right corner to turn on a lamp made with black-painted metal.
She opened her laptop, and the luminescent light blinded her face for a moment, announcing its launch. It was time to work on her assignment.
*
She had written a total of 5 sentences over an hour and a half. The bag of Nerds was now half-empty, even though she promised herself she would only eat a bit for every sentence, much to the dismay of her desire to foster a Pavlovian response. Naomi had her face planted on the keyboard, her glasses lay dormant next to her. She groaned, lines of the letter “n” began multiplying on the laptop screen. Usually, at times like these, she would just spare herself the project and go to sleep, let the responsibilities of today be a problem for tomorrow in exchange for blissful slumber. But tonight, she couldn’t. Something kept her up, her own mind, her own thoughts; it shackled the brain and bound her into insomnia.
She felt defeated, and she had nothing to burn the boredom away. As if it had a mind of its own, her hand escaped the crushing weight of her massive fucking forehead and went into her bag. It inspected the bag, and the sound of leather scratching filled the void. Then, she pulled out a book, The Name of the Library . The deep blue cover almost camouflaged itself in the night, but the title remained radiated. She flipped to the current page in one flick; the page was marked by a folded piece of paper.
Naomi placed the book on her laptop, and the lamp created a spotlight on top of the book, giving it a holy and seductive quality. Yet, its beholder was but a girl in university, the holy light that shone upon it was but an ordinary desk lamp.
The daring adventurers of the story were… beating up college kids. She had her fist pressed against her cheek, letting the novel consume her. Her head lazily bobbed through every paragraph. The organisation that the protagonists serve had ordered the capture of several university students following rumours that they planned to leak information.
“How fascinating…” she muttered.
“Ortensia was… right. This Tiefling girl is… really similar to her,” she whispered.
A thud, followed by loud snoring.
*
Brass Knuckles lay on her back, awake and staring at the ceiling. A fan next to the bed turned slowly for as long as her eyes were open. Her hair was untied and spread out in waves on the pillow like a sickened sun. The smooth, creaseless blanket nicely covered her chest to her toes. A shark plushie wrapped in Ortensia’s arms over her stomach was accompanying her in her wishful gazing towards the ceiling. If she looked close enough, she could almost mistake the grainy paint for stars. The dull ceiling was essentially the same as the starry skin in her vivid mind. The sound of the fan was her rain, and the ceiling was her sky.
This was her childhood room. The last time this was her home was 8 years ago. However, the image of it had never faded in her mind. Before moving here a couple of weeks ago, she still slept in this room for two weeks a year for custody reasons. She enjoyed it, of course, and she had never had trouble sleeping here. That is, until tonight.
What was on Ortensia’s mind that shackled her to the realm of the conscious? She hugged the plushie tighter whenever she thought about it. She couldn’t lie still for so long; she needed to twist and turn and hug the plushie in different ways and make sure the blanket had the correct feel. What was haunting her mind? It was a girl. A girl with large, round glasses and clean, neck-length black hair with the two thin tails on the back. The way she swayed very little when she walked, leaving her hair to catch up to her modesty. The slight tone of sarcasm in her every word, the gentleness in her actions, her smile with the eyes closed.
Ortensia wanted to spend more time with her. The most bitter part of the day was their goodbye. There was so much to be desired, and tomorrow couldn’t come soon enough. She knew that if only she could shut her eyes and slip into feverish dreams, morning would come in the blink of an eye, and she would be able to meet Naomi again. But alas, that very excitement was prying the eyelids open like clockwork. She writhed and squirmed and twisted and tumbled.
“Naomi…” she whispered in the death of the night to an audience of a lone blahaj.