branches, branches | chishiya x original character

branches and twigs

A/N:

Hi! Thank you so much for reading my story. some things to know for easier reading:

For context, italics without quotations around them mean the thoughts of whoever's perspective we're in, and "italics inside quotations" means that Fotini is speaking Greek, so the people around her won't understand.

Every so often she'll use Greek letters, but that's when the audience isn't meant to know what she's saying at the time, or when she repeats herself in Japanese shortly after.

Author is Greek American, and the elements in this fic are taken from my family's past.

Enjoy the read!

♦ ♥ ♣ ♠

A GIRL WAKES IN A GRAVEYARD. This, on its own, is not unusual. Many girls awake in many graveyards every day. Perhaps it's not common, but there are eight billion people in the world. Someone has to get unlucky every once in a while.

What is unusual is the lack of people. Fotini herself is unusual, and is used to unusual things. She absorbed her twin in the womb, was conceived on an airplane, has a pet goat, and is from a remote mountain village in Greece, yet came over to Japan for work. Unusual. The absolute silence that surrounds the graveyard is beyond that, though. It's uncanny. She's used to silence—or at least, the silence of people. It's hard to drive up the mountain paths that surround her home, and so the creaky noise of an engine is rare there. But even then, the woods speak, and the animals, and so on and so forth. It's never quite this quiet.

She stands unsteadily, hair catching on a twig that she pulls out of her curls with a wince. She checks her phone, wondering if, while she was asleep, there was some sort of evacuation. To her disappointment, there's no connection.

With a sigh, she makes her way out of the graveyard, wondering how she even got there in the first place. She remembers making her way to a bar...and then nothing. She's not a lightweight, but she blacks out easily, even if to others it still seems that she's sober in the moment. It's not the first time that she's woken up in a place she doesn't know, but a graveyard is new.

It's night, she notices, and apprehension strikes her. It can't be night. Even after getting drunk, sleeping for more than an extra few hours is odd for her, and it was night when she went to the bar. Something is off. She misses her goat.

Suddenly, a loud boom sounds out, and a building a few blocks away lights up. She can't read what is says–she's much better at speaking Japanese than reading it—but she figures it's as good a bet as any to figuring out what the hell is going on.

The walk takes her maybe five minutes, and she finds herself at an apartment building. In the darkness, it stands out like a sore thumb, and she can already hear murmuring from some of the people inside it.

So, she enters.

People stare at her as she does, before going back to their own conversations. She gets that a lot, as a foreigner, but something tells her that isn't the reason for the suspicious glances.

She sees a table with phones on it, and notes that everyone else has one. There's a note, but she can't read what it says. With a sigh, she resigns herself to asking.

"I can speak Japanese okay, but I do not read it yet. Can a person here tell me what this paper reads?"

Her voice comes out with a bit of an accent, and her sentence seems like something google translate would write. Understandable, but somehow artificial. Bordering on fluency but not quite there.