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 Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2010 9:54 am
In all of his time spent traveling, Parker had been seeking out a place in this world that did not remind him of Dani. It took him several months to realize that such a place did not exist. So long as she was in his head -- and she was, most certainly, stuck there -- Dani would always find a way to drift into his life, even after her death.
Parker understood that most of his friends would not understand just how low he sank. Death is sad, sure, but he was not married to Dani. He hadn't even been dating her for a year. Besides, it was high school. How serious could anything be in high school? They were young, okay he knew that, and he knew that very few would understand the depth of loss that he felt. Parker had always been the most intense about their relationship. He knew he loved her, even if he wasn't sure what it meant to love another person. Losing Dani meant losing the happiness that he had just begun to grow accustomed to. It wasn't the healthiest of dependencies, but it was how things were.
At least, how things used to be.
That night, Super Sailor Taranis was done avoiding places filled with memories. It would be impossible in Destiny City anyway. So instead, he went to place that he knew would be so full of memories that it might overwhelm him. Maybe he needed that? Maybe he needed to feel that swell of emotion? In any case, Taranis needed to feel Dani, even if only through her things.
The suburb was familiar to him, painfully so. He picked his way along the street until he got too close. Then he took to the trees, picking his way silently across to a very familiar window. Peeking inside, Taranis was surprised to see that Dani's bedroom was almost exactly as he remembered it, down to the faded picture of the two of them from the photobooth clipped to her mirror.
A gloved hand reached out and tested the lock. The window was open so there would be no property damage that night. It took just a moment to crack open the window, slip inside, and then slide it back in place. Then he was there, alone, in a place that he wished didn't feel so empty.
For a long time, Taranis just stared. He stared at the walls, the floors, the tennis shoes stacked by the door, and the clothes hanging in her closet. It was as if she had never left, after all these months. Perhaps her parents were more nostalgic than he thought?
There was a white sweater hanging on the chair to his left. He crossed to it and fingered the soft material. He remembered the last time he saw Dani wearing it perfectly. They were getting ice cream after a date, and it had gotten cold. Parker offered Dani his coat, but she laughed and put on her own sweater. It was the independence that made Parker melt around her. She was so strong that he felt like it was okay for him not to be.
In spite of himself, Taranis smiled. He hadn't expected smiles, but standing there in the midst of a place that was lousy with memories of Dani -- how could he not? They had been so happy together, deliriously so at times. It was impossible for him to picture her face and be angry. The sadness was still there, but it competed with his happiness just to be in her presence, if only in a small way.
Taranis didn't believe in God, but he believed in Dani. It was irrational and stupid, but his heart wanted her to be there. So he allowed himself a moment of optimism in the face of his stark logic. Taranis lifted the sweater from the chair and pressed it to his lips. He breathed in whatever essence of her remained behind. "God, I miss you," he whispered.
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Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2010 10:27 am
A lot of things had stayed the same since Dani had awoken from her months-long coma, but a lot of things had changed, too. She used to shower in the mornings, first thing after her morning run, but she hadn't been taking her morning run lately. She was lucky to get out of the house in the mornings between both of her parents; they were insane, they were smothering, they were going to drive her absolutely mad if they didn't leave her alone. She understood that she had been in a coma, that she had almost died, that for a time they'd wondered if she would ever wake up or even be the same person if she did. She understood that and it frightened her, even if she wasn't willing to admit that just yet, but she couldn't live her life in a bubble just because she'd almost died once.
She'd been hurt before. She'd been hurt badly before; broken bones, bleeding everywhere, deep cuts and the horrible moments right before she thought that this was really it, but she always came back. Foolishly, she'd never thought she could be really hurt, not even after Jude had died. That had been something of a wake-up call, but then, Jude had been Sagittarius, he had been Zodiac; they were different, it was explained to her, and for all they were more powerful they also led much, much more dangerous lives. Something like being attacked by the Negaverse wasn't going to keep her from patrolling or doing what she had come to consider her divine mission... if it did, hadn't they won? If she stayed at home, scared and curled up on her bed, unable to henshin up and go fight just like she always had, wasn't that as good as actually killing her?
Dani had never been a girl who let fear rule her. Fear was useless, fear held you back, fear destroyed you. So even when it was stupid, she got back up again. Even when it hurt, she walked it off, wiped her face clean, got back in the game. She was dying to get back into the game, so ready to get out, so anxious to do something it was just --
It was just.
Parker.
Stepping out of the shower, her towel wrapped around her face, she pressed her hands against it and breathed deeply. She had no idea where Parker was. She hadn't gotten ahold of anyone yet, had barely gotten her life back together after getting out of the hospital, so she just didn't know. She'd tried to call him, had felt panic swell up in her throat and nearly suffocate her when she'd heard The number you have dialed is temporarily out of service...
It had to be wrong, she told herself. Wrong, wrong. So she'd called again, and again, and again, had sat in her room and manually entered it until she was punching her fingers down on the keys so hard that she bent back the edge of one her fingernails. Then she'd hurled it across the room, and when Dani hurled something it was no lady's throw; she did it with force, with temper, and later when she picked it up again, she saw the screen was cracked. Oops, she'd told her parents; oops, and held it out to them.
She stopped outside her bedroom, unwound the towel from her face and sighed. Sighed heavily, shaking her long, wildly curling, soaking wet hair back, combing one hand through it as she discarded her towel. It was bed time, even though she wasn't tired yet, so she wore a pair of simple flannel pajama bottoms, a black tank-top that fit snugly around her torso, allowed the scar on her collarbone to peek out just below the shoulder strap. She'd been twelve, had fallen out of a tree and broken her arm, collarbone, banged up her face. It was strange to her that she still had evidence of that accident, but the near-fatal blow she'd taken months before had left no mark on her, no evidence of its existence.
Strange, strange.
She turned the doorknob, swatted aside The Princess is Out! so that she could go through her nightly stretching routine and go to bed. She was so used to heading into her room alone that for a moment, she didn't even see the other person inside; her mind told her that her room would be arranged a certain way and so it was, so she was two full steps inside when she stopped short and her stomach flipped wildly. Fear, she realized, eyes widening; panic, because someone's back was to her, someone with dark hair and broader shoulders than hers curled in, white fabric trailing from his hands --
Someone was in her room, and her heart stuttered once, twice, before she recognized the colors. The outfit was different, but similar, the colors ones that she'd seen out of her peripheral vision more times than she'd cared to count. This wasn't a stranger, this wasn't someone breaking into her room in the middle of the night to finish the job that the Negaverse agent had begun; this was --
"Parker," she breathed, hands curled loosely at her sides, eyes wide, heart hammering. No, it wasn't Parker, it was Taranis but -- "Parker."
She swallowed, but where in the past Dani would have launched herself at him, her bare feet seemed strangely rooted to the floor. Was it really Parker? She had the strange feeling that if she blinked, he would disappear, because hadn't he? Hadn't he just disappeared? Hadn't his phone been shut off, hadn't her parents said they hadn't had a glimpse of him for months, hadn't --
Was it really Parker?
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Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2010 10:43 am
His head was dizzy with the smell of Dani's perfume still on the sweater. He didn't hear the shower turn off, or the door open. Taranis was blissfully unaware of anyone else, until she spoke.
Parker?
His shoulders tensed, the new gossamer shoulderguards bending upward with the motion. The voice, so sickly sweet and familiar spoke again, but with more conviction.
Parker.
The senshi of sand turned slowly around. Standing there, dressed in pajamas and dripping hair, was Dani. She seemed so real, so tangible. But she always did each time he imagined her. Usually there was a warm glow around her, but Taranis hardly noticed the change. He stared sadly at the pale green eyes of the girl he loved, the girl he had loved and then lost.
"Dani," he said. The words hurt to hear. They were cracked and sad. "I haven't gotten her yet, but I will. I'll make her suffer worse than you had to, much worse."
Taranis made no move to approach the girl who had to be a figment of his imagination. He had tried to do so before, reached out to grab her as she floated before him on dark roads and beside him in the booth at restaurants. The moment his fingers broached her outline, she would fizzle like steam over a boiling pot, bending around his skin and dissolving away. It was a painful dance he was used to, but not one that he was eager to enter again.
His knees buckled and he took a seat on her bed. Taranis had grown an inch or so since he'd last been in the room, but he felt different in other ways too. Of all the dreams he'd had about Dani looking like that and in this room, this one felt the most real. That made it the most painful.
Taranis propped his elbows up on his knees and hid his face in his hands. "I can't keep hallucinating this," he whispered. "God, I'm so ******** up. I'm so <******** up, and I don't ever think it'll go away." The words were muffled but audible. Sadness -- tears perhaps? -- hedged at the words, threatened to spill in.
Looking at her was hard, but the idea of never seeing her again was harder. One clear eye peeked through his fingers at her. "God, you were so beautiful," he mused. "Why did it have to be you..." It sounded like he was thinking of something else. After a moment, he hid his face again, the sweater still clutched in one hand.
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Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2010 11:05 am
He was looking at her like she wasn't real, like she was going to disappear into a puff of smoke at any moment -- just like her parents had been looking at her for the past week. It bothered her on a different level to see that look on Parker's face, though, because Parker was so rational. Parker was steady, Parker was logical, Parker was the one who sometimes irritated her because even though they were magical warriors of justice he still looked at the world as largely the same place he had before he'd even met her. It was rules and limits, and people didn't just appear and disappear in front of your eyes like ghosts, not unless you were hallucinating.
Unless he thought he was hallucinating. But she didn't want to examine just what it might mean if he did think that, so she ignored it, forced it to the back of her mind in favor of the situation at hand.
She couldn't say exactly what it was that kept her still except that she couldn't quite bring herself to move yet. There was Parker, weakly dropping to her bed; Parker, covering his eyes and speaking in a way that made her heart physically hurt because he sounded so sad. He was in henshin, but she wasn't looking at the senshi just then, couldn't have seen him if she tried because that was Parker's face. That was the slope of his jaw, the ice blue of his eyes, the scar above his lip that she sometimes liked to run her fingertips over. And she'd never -- she'd never seen him look so sad.
She took a step, two, the carpet tickling the undersides of her feet. She meant for it to be graceful, contained when she crossed to him, wanted to slowly sit down and wrap her arms around him and just hold him for a moment. She was thinking of it, too, as she lunged at him from a breath away, knocked into him and tackled him back on the bed. Even when she was pressing her face into his collar, her voice small and strangely strained as she said his name over and over, there was part of her mind that still insisted she was completely in control of the situation.
"Where have-" Her legs tangled with his, shoulders came up as she locked her arms tight around his shoulders. "-you been?"
Her voice was borderline angry, but Parker knew Dani, knew that this particular angry tone meant that she wasn't actually mad but she was upset. It was ridiculous, too, coming from the girl who had almost died, but to Dani, time had passed like the space of a heartbeat. She hadn't been out of Parker's life for months from what she could remember, but he had been out of her life for a full week, and that felt impossibly long.
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Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2010 11:20 am
When Dani tackled him to the bed, Sailor Taranis could feel the fuku peel off of him like a misty blanket lifting after a hot shower. It coated their bodies in pale glittering strands of magic as they cartwheeled backward, winding ribbons of color and light that brushed across their skin before wafting into the air and disappearing. His arms involuntarily bent to cradle her to his chest as he moved from superhero to a bearded boy in dark jeans, a pale blue sweater, and black Converses.
His eyes widened, tears springing almost immediately to their corners. This was impossible. This was a cruel dream sent to confuse his already addled brain. "This isn't real," he murmured, curling her closer and pressing his lips to her hair. "I wish it was, but," his voice broke, "it's not. It can't be." The words were choked by tears that threatened to spill.
Goddamnit, hadn't he cried enough?
The more he said it couldn't be real, the tighter he held her. His eyes squeezed tightly shut, as if looking at her a moment longer might tempt the mirage to disappear. "I saw her take your starseed. I saw her take it, and I didn't catch her." The tears streamed from his eyes, pouring hotly across his cheeks. "I'm so sorry I didn't catch her," he whispered, breath warm on the top of her head.
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Posted: Sat Oct 09, 2010 2:35 pm
At any other moment, Dani would have been ashamed to cry. She was already impatient with herself, annoyed, mortified by her very human reaction to basically coming back from the dead; like any other fifteen -- sixteen, she mentally corrected, sixteen year-old -- she was largely wrapped up in her own ego, tended to only see things from her own point of view. Because it suited her, she saw herself as larger-than-life, above things like long, desperate crying jags when she woke up out of a nightmare that she didn't understand. She was too grown up, too strong to sometimes creep out of her room in the middle of the night and just hover outside of her parents' door, twisting the ends of her hair around her fingers and worrying her lips as she debated whether she should wake them or let them sleep.
She always let them sleep, of course. Daniela Rymner was not weak, she was not a child, she -- she might have gotten scared once in a while, but she could smother that, she could bury it. If she acted like she was tougher than anything she would believe it, and if she believed it everyone else would, too. They'd let her go back to her normal life and she wouldn't even feel strange about doing it. She wouldn't look at her henshin pen and get chills, wouldn't have to force herself to even want to don her magical fuku again and go out and fight crime. Once, she'd craved it; the power and the rush of doing good, knowing that she was special and she had a purpose, powers that no one else in the entire universe had. She wanted that feeling again, so she pretended that she still had it.
Dani believed strongly in mind over matter, always had. But laying on top of her boyfriend, knowing that tears were pouring down his face -- down Parker's face -- while he whispered to her like she wasn't even real, she started to cry.
"It's okay," she said, face pressed tight against his collarbone, fingers digging into his shoulders. Her heart ached, a horrible, tight fist around it, and she said again, into his sweater, "It's okay, okay? Stop it, Parker, stop crying."
Anger was easier than anything, always had been, and so she scolded him, but there was no heart to it. He didn't seem to want to let her go, and truth be told she didn't actually want to be let go, but she arched her back, looked down at him with red, tear-filled eyes and flushed cheeks.
If she was a ghost, she was no beautiful, shining visage; she looked entirely too human, too real, too flawed to be any angel.
"I missed you," she said finally, freeing her hands from her comforter so that she could brace them on either side of his face, supporting herself with her elbows. Her brows knit, powder blue over narrowed, familiar eyes. After another beat, she managed thickly, "I hate the beard."
It scratched against her palms, for one, and she'd never liked beards on men for another, but this was Parker. Parker didn't have a beard, he had a smooth, soft face and she liked that, because when she kissed him there was nothing there to irritate, no horrible beard-burn, no --
When she was kissing Parker, why wasn't she kissing Parker?
"I hate the beard," she repeated, and even though they were both crying she dropped back onto his chest, hands sliding away, fisting in the blanket as she kissed her goddamn boyfriend. On her bed. In her room.
If her parents had walked in, she wouldn't have even cared.
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Posted: Mon Oct 11, 2010 4:48 pm
None of this made sense, but Parker wanted it to -- he wanted that more than anything. His entire life had been built upon logic and reason. Hope was a useless practice; hope was a coping tool of the weak. When he had seen Dani's head snap to the side, heard the sickening crack, when he had watched the warm, pale blue glow of life be ripped from her chest like a trout snatched from a stream by a bear's gripping claw, Parker had felt all light leave his body through his chest. It was like a hole had been carved over his heart, and there would be no filling it, couldn't be, not ever. It was a hole that grew beside the much larger, much deeper hole his mother's death had left inside him.
The fact that Dani was crying only served to convince him of this dream. That it was, in fact, a figment of his imagination dreamed up to help him cope with the emptiness left in his heart. His mind was playing tricks on him because he had flown too close to the sun, and his wax wings had melted.
One hand twisted gently in her hair, pulled her closer. God, she felt so real. He could smell the powdery sweetness of her shampoo, the light musk of her skin, the fruit of balm on her lips. It was Dani just as he remembered her, just as he wanted to remember her, always. She was a girl who might see herself as flawed, but Parker's eyes were covered by rose-colored lenses. In her reality and flaws, he saw an angel; he always had.
His chin wrinkled again, a laugh threatening to break forth from his lips, but then Dani was upon him, kissing him so intently that he opened his eyes to stare at the blurred patch of skin between her eyebrows, the thin wrinkles that crossed her clenched eyelids. Parker closed his eyes and gave into the dream, kissed her deeply. His hips shifted upward, and his arms found purchase at her sides. He flipped her neatly, setting her down on the soft cotton of her comforter, and pushed wet blue tangles out of her face. One arm braced his weight beside her head, and the other guided her hips toward him, lips roving across her neck and then settling back on her mouth.
If this was a dream, then Parker would give himself this small mercy of indulging in it, in believing that the person he thought he could give his whole heart to might be living and breathing again. His head bowed back, shaggy hair framing his face suspended above hers. Parker stared at her like he was trying to will her into reality. "Why is my mind so cruel to me," he lamented, bleary red eyes pinching out the thought.
His hand cupped her face, thumb stroking the fine muscles along her jaw. "I would give anything to make this real. I would give anything to have you back, Dani. Anything." The urgency in his words threatened to spill back into tears, but Parker held them in check. When he felt he could bear her penetrating stare no more, Parker lowered himself on top of her, let his whole weight cover her like a heavy blanket. "I saw your starseed, Dani. I saw it come out of your chest and illuminate her face. That is what I remember most about that night. Your beautiful starseed casting a glow on her triumph, her victory." His face burrowed deeper into her hair.
"Please take that memory away," he whispered.
It took hours for Dani to convince Parker that she was, in fact, alive and well, and even longer for her to get him to let go of her. For better or worse, they were back together. It was the kind of miracle that Parker had never quite believed in, but here, in her arms, he tried to believe. He tried to have faith.
And in the meantime, Parker had Dani once more.
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