29-Mar-2001
Disclaimer: Mobile Suit Gundam Wing is not mine, but belongs to Bandai, Sotsu and Sunrise. ;_; The characters and timeline have been borrowed for my own fiendish fangirl ends.
Title: Something Blue
Category: Light angst? Une-introspective.
Timeline: Post-EW
Pairings: U+13 (^_^;;;; Can I do that?)
Rating/Warning: PG. Deals with Treize's death.
Feedback: Comments, criticisms, ramblings, death threats, and marriage
proposals all welcome.
Note: Don't know what to really say about this one. It isn't really *anything*-- probably more an exercise in writing than in storytelling. >_<
Thanks: Diane, Grand Beta'er Extraordinaire. ::glomps::
"Sur ce sentiment inconnu dont l'ennui, la douceur m'obsèdent, j'hésite à apposer le nom, le beau nom grave de tristesse. C'est un sentiment si complet, si égoïste que j'en ai presque honte alors que la tristesse m'a toujours paru honorable. Je ne la connaissais pas, elle, mais l'ennui, le regret, plus rarement le remords. Aujourd'hui, quelque chose se replie sur moi comme une soie, énervante et douce, et me sépare des autres." -- Françoise Sagan, _Bonjour Tristesse_
I know she's watching me.
It should bother me, but it doesn't. She gave me one solemn glance this morning that somehow reassured me and has said nothing since. She understands that the silence that hangs in the air now is important, and, for the moment, she is content to watch, her birdlike face colored with morbid curiosity.
My hands tighten on the cloth in my lap, knuckles white and trembling. For a moment, I am transfixed by something just out of view-- a peek into a slit of separate reality-- and then the enchantment of the unconscious is broken by a sharp memory.
//The form is blurry against the sun in the window, dark against the brightness. It moves across the floor and dips into a closet, almost disappearing.
"Italy," a voice whispers. "It was made in Italy for me."
A girl-- too skinny to be gracefully willowy, too tall to be young, too awkward to be mature-- sits on the bed and waits patiently. Her fingers drum on her thighs, and she cranes her neck to gain a better view. Her glasses gleam in the light.
The figure slides back out, holding something furtively in her arms. "Something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. I have something old..."//
Something old. Once white satin and Vienna lace, my mother's wedding gown is now yellowed with age. It had been shoved in the back of the cavernous closet years ago and retrieved hesitatingly only now. I smooth it, apologizing silently for its condition: the wrinkles, the tears in the fine lace, the painstaking embroidery beginning to come undone, and the general disarray that comes from neglect.
I was fifteen when she handed it to me, still stuck in the throes of awkward adolescence. I had a thin frame, a round face, and pale, doughy arms. Only my eyes resembled my mother's; both were brown, edged with gold in the light.
My mother's name was Marie, and she remains in my mind the most beautiful woman I've ever known. She was regal; she held her head high, wore pearls every hour of the day, and had white satin gloves that covered from fingers to wrist to elbow. There was always an air of warmth surrounding her; her face fairly glowed with it. I remember her best in her ball gowns, smiling her quiet smile.
Her initials are embroidered on the inside collar. My fingers trace the lines and curves, and I try to remember more of her.
All I find are fragments of vague, albeit tangible, sensation.
Sometimes she smelled like vanilla or some particular brand of French perfume, mixed with fumes of cigarette smoke. Sometimes her eyes would change as the light hit them, shifting the tints and tones. Sometimes-- as I fumble for more and more-- sometimes she cried for unfathomable reasons, falling into erratic abysmal glooms.
But she had tucked away whatever inner sadness she held on that afternoon in July-- I could still remember the humidity and how sticky my skin was-- and all I could recall of her expression when she handed me her dress was serenity. The turbulence was all in her eyes, the eyes that everyone always said looked so much like mine. Her eyes raged and wept and despaired, dissolving into liquid, but she didn't cry as she sat down. She only fingered her pearls and said.
//"This was my something old."
The girl's hand snakes up to touch the round orbs. "Who gave them to you?"
"My mother," the woman says. Her eyes are faraway and wistful. "My something new was the dress."
"Your borrowed?"
"Two pairs of bracelets. My hands trembled so much; there was a jingling throughout the entire ceremony. Your father always thought that it was bells, tiny bells..."
"And your blue?" the girl ventures.
The answer is whispered so softly, it almost slides to the floor unheard. "Your father's eyes were my blue."//
My mother died when I was sixteen.
Something old, like forgotten puzzle pieces of something that makes the past more real than it seems. Something old, those crumbling links to surreptitious memory, those fragments in your blood, those inherited senses. Something old, like something elemental and primeval in its form and purpose, like something delicate and fragile in its existence.
Something new. The folded Preventers' uniform sits on my dresser, cleaned and ironed. The olive and blue jacket, the clean shirt, and the crisp necktie form a simple regalia. Clipped to the left breast of the jacket is the ID card with my unsmiling-but-not-grim staff photo.
My old uniform still hangs in the closet, pervaded with the smell of mothballs. There is something about the decadence of the Napoleonic jacket that makes me reluctant to set it aside. The lace ruffle is still tucked inside with the hair ribbons and the gloves.
//Her fingers thread in my hair, deftly separating the strands into sections, nimbly braiding and coiling, the red ribbons snaking through the finished buns.
I am thirteen. Natalie sings in a lilting alto that makes me think about birds. She is nineteen and plump, cheeks colored with the red of good nature, a hired girl for the winter.
"And miss will have her new," she says. I watch her in the mirror, my glasses slipping down so that the edges of my vision are only blurs.
"What new?" My voice is quiet and curious. The red dress I have on hangs off my shoulders; the sleeves are too wide, and the waist is too loose. Natalie finishes with my hair and begins to pin my dress, her eyes expertly marking where to take it in and where to let it out.
"When miss marries, miss will have something old, and she will have something new." Pins slide against my skin as they pierce the fabric, cold little pieces of metal. "And something borrowed. Something blue."
I shift, uncomfortable. "What was yours, then?"
Her busy fingers still, and Natalie is silent for a moment. Her expression in the mirror is carefully blank. Then she animates herself, and her fingers fly again. "I had none, miss. Promises do not begat realities."
One hand rests on my shoulder, and I can see in its reflection a pale band of skin on the ring finger, a strip of stark truth where romance has withered. The absence of color is as much of an indication of the absence of love as the sudden brightness of her reflected eyes. They are glassy, as distant as doll's eyes, but she looks so beatific, so sanctified in her misery, I almost expect her to weep olive oil.//
The glasses are still on the dresser, by my new uniform. Some hazy mornings, I reach for them. Every time I touch the wire frames, it's like a little shock of realization of who I have become. When I stand in front of the mirror, I will occasionally see a ghost of who I was, looming, superimposed on my reflection; the red lies over the blue, the ruffle over the necktie, and the glasses are perched on my nose again. My eyes are different somehow; they resemble my mother's, the Lady and the Saint, battling, riotous, emotions folding in the irises.
Something new, like the elusiveness of the present, the impalpable sense of being rather than acting, something that congeals the dimensions of reality into something solid. Something new, those spiderwebs and figurative embroidery stitches, those slices illuminated in fresh light, those acquired sanities and immunities. Something new, like something I have never touched, like something that will pass into the old as soon as I blink my eyes.
She makes a quiet sound behind me, the barest exhalation of breath. The flowers rustle, nosegays of violets and forget-me-nots shifting in her lap. Her cheeks are pale against her crisp carrot hair, and there is a delicate sense to her skin that is foreign to me. She has her mother's complexion, but her father's eyes, which match the faint blue of the flowers. Her hands rest on the arms of her wheelchair; she is far less threatening than the child who once sat on a throne and declared war.
She is my borrowed. Mariemaia swings her feet and fumbles with the blooms, losing her characteristic grace for a moment, those uncanny blue eyes following my every move. She will be eight next fall, when the burnt leaves fall to he ground. She will be able to walk again by then too, and then I will walk with her here. She will grasp my hand with hers-- her hands that are her mother's-- and walk with me with her father's gait, maybe marred by a slight limp.
Mariemaia-- Marie to me, like my mother with all her poise and charm and sadness-- will never see how the salt rises in my eyes when she plucks the petals off the flowers or when she traces her father's name on the marble headstone, standing over a coffin buried six feet deep with nothing but a pair of gloves and a bouquet of dead roses.
She is my borrowed, throwing my bouquet to the vast cerulean of the sky, watching as the blossoms disappear into the sheets of azure, disappearing in the reflection of her blue eyes.
I let the wedding gown drop and crumple on the grass, and I straighten and turn to her. Her nimble fingers have picked apart the flowers, and she looks at me expectantly. Her hands brush the petals off her lap, and they fall around her, staining the ground with blood as blue as his.
/Treize./ The thought of his name is like either a sin or an absolution.
"Your father's eyes were my blue," I say slowly, the words like a legacy on my tongue.
We watch the sky bruise as the sun descends, wiping the blue away.
The End
Jay