I'm Yours

Chapter One

"Marinette? Are you up there?" A soft voice broke the silence, footsteps inching closer like small tugs on a string, leading the solemn voice to the small girl breaking apart on the staircase.

"Ma?" A voice replied, closing her eyes at the sudden sniffle that escaped her, trying to ignore the feeling in her throat. It felt like her throat was burning, and no amount of spit and saliva being uncertainly gulped would help the broken shred of promises and assurances that were stinging her very being like glass.

A petite figure inched closer, the hospital gown contrasting uncanningly against her pale skin, making her look gaunt and tired.

But her face...her face shone even admist the dark, murky corner of the stairwell, pronouncing it no secret that the spark in her eyes had a source deep routed in her heart.

"You...you lied, Ma" The voice broke out, shaking and curling in on itself.

"Mari..."

The woman had sat down, the hospital gown's material crinkling slightly, while threatening to overturn the thin line between the quiet, and the deafening silence. The woman's smooth and slender fingers slid underneath the girl's face, and slowly brought it up to her own, staring into the swollen, puffy eyes of her daughter. Her daughter's bluebell eyes stood out admirably against her pale and scared features.

They say that eyes are the window to one's soul, but Sabine Cheng called BS on that; one look into her daughter's eyes tugged her into heaven.

"Remember your first day in school?
You were so scared Mari, that I'd have believed anyone if they'd have said that you're off to military school instead of kindergarten." The woman let out a faint chuckle, stroking her daughters cheek, brushing off tears as though they were her own. "I had to shake some sense into your father you know. He was completely adamant that he wanted to send you off to that private school in Vancouver, but I told him-" She paused to tilt her daughter's face up, placing a delicate kiss on her nose, while snaking her hand up to her shoulder"-that if he tried to take you away from me, I'd string apart the heavens for you, Mari."

Her daughter looked up, the darkness seeming to claw its way out of the shadows behind her.

"Well, no, yeah I just said that I'd release his browser history." Sabine winked watching as her daughter wrinkle her nose as a giggle escaped her.

"Marinette, your father has...always been a man of authority. I suppose that also leads him to be rather...stern and firm. Mari, the first time I met him, I'd managed to weasel a smile out of him. His roommate, Trent, had been so outraged that, and I quote, 'Dupain acted like he has a meter long stick rammed up his butt around me and turns into a simp around you."

"But that's just love, right?"
"Mari, after I'm-" She faltered seeing her daughter's eyes tilt.
"You don't-You can't just...Ma you can't leave me!"
Sabine Cheng's face twisted in pain as she started stroking her daughter's cheeks as though trying to console herself too instead of her daughter. Mari shook and trembled, whimpering out a shaky 'please don't' to no one in particular, just highlighting how young she is. Sabine remembered crying in the same manner when trying to stifle out her emotions. She remembered crying in the same way that night. The night she'd changed.

Sabine Cheng's face twisted again, but this time it wasn't the emotions breaking her composure down.Her face went gaunt. Her hands started shaking and she shivered violently. Marinette, coming out of her reveree stared up at her mother, her tears stopping while her eyes felt like a seashore dried up in a split second as though a tsunami of suffering was inching forth.
"Ma?"
Her eyes rolled back in her head and she trembled one last time.
"I love you"
She took a shattering breath and collapsed. Marinette called out for help while silent tears burned so deep she was sure they'd scar,but even they'd say the same.

Sabine Cheng was no more.