Sea of Stars

Chapter Six: Dereliction

Spring 2011, 7 March, 1532

EJ's humming tapered off as she polished off her ice cream waffle. Coming back to the present, the two continued the walk home in silence. Violet felt that dreaded numbness spread through her again. The numbness wasn't pitch-black as one might expect. Rather, it turned her transparent from the inside out, so she no longer felt like anyone anymore.

"EJ?" Violet said softly. EJ, the sensitive person she was, could tell something was off.

"You okay?" EJ asked gently, touching her arm. "You don't look so good."

Violet nodded. Making her voice airy and light, she asked breezily, "So, why did Tchaikovsky die?"

"Drinking unboiled water."

Expecting something more serious, Violet gaped. "No way."

"Well, yeah. It's said that he drank unboiled water, contracted cholera and died."

"... okay? Well, that's just... I don't know. A pity." Violet did not see herself dying from drinking unboiled water. It was, after all, the twenty-first century.

"Tell me about it." EJ nodded.

Ah, well. So much for music being the shorthand of emotion.

***

Spring 2011, 7 March, 1207

The lunch bell rang. Holding his bag, Levi barely managed to grab a Diet Coke (zero calories) and had to wrestle his way through the swarm of students before he snuck back to the bathroom. His stomach hadn't been feeling good the entire morning - it was probably the tea - and he figured he would feel better if he emptied it a little.

He checked the stalls were empty before entering the last one. He knelt before the toilet and quickly shoved two fingers down his throat. Immediately, the bitter tea made its appearance and he heaved into the toilet, feeling that satisfying acid-burn in the back of his throat. He didn't hear the footsteps as he poked his fingers deeper, throwing up more than he'd ingested in two days. Green bile ran over his fingers in sticky strings as he removed his hand from his mouth. Groaning, he spat into the bowl before tearing off three squares of toilet paper. He wiped his mouth and fingers with it.

His eyes remained trained on the floor as he emerged from the stall. The door bounced shut behind him, and he looked up - and couldn't quite fathom what the sight before him was.

His first thought was - oh my God, it's Violet Salvatore. Violet Salvatore looked at him as if she'd seen a ghost.

His second thought was, oh my God. Her face was streaked with blood and tears. As his shocked gaze travelled down, he saw that her arms were streaked with blood and dribbled down from a slash across her arm.

"Oh my God, I'm so sorry. I figured you would take longer. Um, I'm really sorry you had to see this. Please, please don't tell anybody," Violet entreated, large blue eyes begging. "I'm sorry, I'm such a mess now. I'm really, really sorry. And oh God, I went into the wrong bathroom," she said as if that was of any more importance than her bleeding all over the sink.

Levi didn't say anything. His sandpaper tongue was glued to the roof of his mouth. He walked over to the neighbouring sink and gargled, feeling Violet's eyes on him the entire time. He swallowed the water, feeling his tongue gratefully absorb the moisture. Though he felt marginally better, his roiling stomach felt as if it had dropped into a pit.

"I'm sorry," she was crying at this point. "I'm sorry for making such a mess - I didn't mean for it to go quite so deep." Levi felt his senses return to him one by one, and his peripheral vision focused, only now registering a rust-stained penknife on the edge of the sink. He fought the returning wave of nausea as he once more took in the blood lacing her arms.