Un Rendez-Vous Etranger

Rendez-vous Etranger

Message from Nadeshiko [REPLY]

>Turns out I had a good time anyway.

>Thank you for that.

>

>You imps.

The girl who called herself Nadeshiko could taste black bile in her mouth. She sat on the curb and bit her cheek, trying to choke away tears. Idiot girl. Her so-called friends were nowhere to be seen, and Nade hung her head with a sick feeling.

She was cursed, or might as well have been. She drove everyone away with her misshapen wrongness of the mind. Her nails bit into her skin. Don't dare cry.

"Hey, you alright?" said a voice like the sun. Nade saw something sublime, as she looked up. A young woman in black and red smiled down at her from under a domino mask. She was dressed as a vampire, the one from Black Alley Stories. It went all too well with Nade's opera dress and half-mask, and she felt her heart lurch.

Then she saw the wings. They weren't part of the costume-- they weren't part of the world at all. They were words, pressed into a shape, a screaming of "I am not from here". Nadeshiko's breath caught in her throat and her eyes watered. She was looking at something transcendent.

"I am," she said, her cheeks flushed. She watched the wings for a moment and knew peace, for a fleeting second. It slipped away and those black thoughts came back to her.

Broken. Ugly thing. She isn't like you.

Nade's nails broke skin, staining themselves crimson. She looked back at the woman.

She doesn't want you. She couldn't want you. She'll never want you. She is light and you are a clod of dirt.

The gnarled thing that lived inside her head said these things with a velvet whisper. Nadeshiko pushed herself to her feet, bringing herself eye to eye with the soft cow's eyes framed by that thin domino mask.

"I'm fine. Don't you have anything better to do than bother people?"

The bright girl flinched, and driving in that knife quieted her thoughts. "You looked upset."

"It's none of your business." Nade turned to leave and the girl caught her by the arm.

"Please, you don't have to do this," she said. Her voice was a soft, smooth thing, accessorized with batting of lashes and full lips and bright cheeks and curves and soft skin and flax hair and beauty and women and Nade couldn't help but love it. The bile came back to her mouth, and she glared at the wings, those reason-breaking things.

"Stop putting these thoughts in my head!" Nade pushed the girl away, hard, sending that light tumbling down to earth, and she ran into the street. She could have died, should have died if the world didn't reward villians like herself. The voice in the back of her head laughed at her, it exulted in her wickedness. She ran, clacking against the pavement, until she found herself sitting on a park bench next to another woman.

The woman wore a burkha and turned to Nade and said the last thing she wanted to hear.

"Are you alright?"

"Yes." Nadeshiko scowled and dripped blood down her fingers.

"You're not," the woman told her. "What happened?"

There was something about her voice, some otherworldly quality that almost reminded her of the girl in the domino mask. It told her that there was light in the world, for all it seemed wicked.