Location: Olympia, Washington, US
Lottie wakes up slowly, like the way waking up is supposed to be. With yawning mouths and lazy stretches, thoughts of strawberries and cream for breakfast, half-opened eyes, and sunlight stretched across white covers.
The smell of clean cotton and her shampoo stain the air.
"Mmm," she groans, stretching for the umpteenth time. "Foooooooood..." She rolls over.
And she falls off the bed in a heap of grumbling and white covers.
"So much for a perfect Sunday morning," she chuckles, sitting up. She rubs the sleep out of her eyes and hefts the comforter back onto her bed.
With a deep breath, she starts for the kitchen, smiling absently to herself. Last night... last night was amazing. She didn't ever think she'd see her characters interacting the way they were meant to ever again. She didn't think she'd ever see Paris so innocently happy again. So full of the future and the brightness of it.
Thinking about it makes her grin, completely overwhelmed with giddiness.
The thought that maybe thinking this way about "imaginary" people doesn't even cross her mind. She was over that years ago, a week at most after she met Paris and Femi.
She would use the word "met" very loosely.
"Ah..." she sighs, slicing a strawberry into bites. She slices another one into several pieces, and tosses them into a bowl.
Strawberries and cream. For Sunday breakfast? Lovely.
She sprinkles sugar over them when the bowl is mostly full, and pours a bit of cream in after that.
With her breakfast in hand, she starts back to her room to check up on the Software.
She sits down on the fluffy mattress and curls her legs up to set her laptop on them. Her mouth waters with the first bite of breakfast she opens the Software folder. It's set on Femi this particular morning.
The redheaded girl is all curled up in her bed of blankets, but her eyes are wide open. She blinks slowly, curling her limp hand into a loose fist.
"Femi, are you awake?" Elena pokes her head in through the curtains that separate Femi from the rest of the house.
"Yeah," she replies hoarsely, sitting up.
Elena smiles at her. "Do you want to come with us? Matt and I are taking Piper out to the park for a picnic."
"Is it noon already?"
"Nearly," Elena says, stepping into the little room. "Are you alright, lovely?"
She nods, pulling on a small smile. "I'm fine. Just exhausted. Catching up for years of lost sleep, I guess."
Elena smiles understandingly. "Alright, love. We'll be back in a couple hours. Get some rest."
Femi nods her head a little, flopping back down as Elena walks out of her curtained room. She looks tired, but she also looks like she's desperate.
For what, though? Lottie wonders.
Lottie sits there for a few minutes, watching Femi lie there, motionless, as the other people leave the house.
When they've been gone a while, she stands up, stretches her bare legs, and yawns. But it isn't one of the sleepy yawns, it's a nervous yawn, the cold kind that catches on a chatter you feel in your jaw toward the end.
There's something off.
The redhead turns a full circle before pushing through the curtains. For a moment, she stands there in her pale skin, eyes wide, pushed onto her toes, hands bent into feathery wings.
Then she looks down, forehead pinched into a confused, broken frown. "I know what I feel," she whispers, shattered words.
She climbs onto the countertop, rubbing her forehead. "So why does it hurt?"
Lottie is somewhat confused. Not really, though. She has this sinking feeling that it might have something to do with the fatal flaw change that Paul suggested.
No, she knows that it has something to do with that.
Femi looks straight at the screen for a moment, or straight through it, it would seem, her face spread with a fair amount of confusion and a little bit of fear.
What good did changing the detail do? Anything for the better?
Femi begins mumbling things to herself, climbing off of the counter.
"Mechanic," she says softly, running the material from her thin shirt through her fingers. "I'm not damaged, I'm not damaged, not damaged..." she trails off, looking around. "Just a little broken. That's okay, right?"
It's almost visible, the thoughts closing in on the girl, the feelings, like a wave held back for a while too long, spilling over, let through.
"He calls me beautiful," she murmurs, "he calls me loved. What does it mean? Why does it hurt? Mechanic..."
Like he should appear. Like his name will summon him.
But on the little bitty square of split camera, Paris is still asleep. At noon. Because he stayed up all night.
"Mechanic," she sobs, voice cracking. "I'm without you again. Why?" She shakes her head, starting for one side of the room. Then she stops, pressing a hand against her face. "Music would help... none. No music..."
All of her thoughts seem to come in fragments, like there are too many to simply release, and her hands are shaking. Her shoulders are shaking.
She shakes her head, red hair whipping her face. "All these horrible rearrangements of me," she whispers after a still moment. "Why must it all be like this? It rips me apart. Don't change me, don't change me anymore..."
Lottie swallows, heart starting a little painfully.
"Dear heart," Femi sighs, and gulps air, "please don't touch me anymore."
It's like the stars have exploded in the room, there are so many fractured pieces of light coming in through the handful of windows. But none of them touch Femi.
With a trembling hand, she grabs a piece of paper off of the top of the stove and a small pencil and carries them back to her room of curtains.
What is she doing?
"Dear Paris," she whispers with chapped, trembling lips, "I'm gone."
The scribblings on the paper match the words she utters. And her hands get away from her, her mouth gets away from her. The tears, too, get away from her, and pour.
"And even though I don't know anything for certain, and I'm overwhelmed by my own mind, and nothing lasts forever, I do know that I do and always will love you. Forever. Like anything and everything." She licks her lips as sobs overwhelm her voice, and the tears flood her beautiful eyes. "I'll come back in a while, okay? I just need a while to get myself into fewer pieces... I need to collect my scattered thoughts. Away. Okay? I love you. I'll be back sometime. I don't know when. It could be a day, it could be a month. A year, if necessary. Maybe. Don't come looking for me, that will just make it worse, I'm sure. I don't know how to escape all of these thoughts..."
She sets the paper down for a moment, sobs wracking her entire body. Her mouth is held open in a silent scream, her eyes squeezed shut to block out whatever she'd rather not see.
And it breaks Lottie. "I should have known," Lottie whispers, looking away. Her empty breakfast bowl sits on her nightstand. "Why didn't I just let it be?"
But she knows that wouldn't have been good, either. Sharp pain that only lasts for a while is less crippling that dull pain that persists for eternity.
The redhead picks the paper back up, hands quivering. "I'm sorry. Don't lose heart."
The pencil moves across one more line of the paper, and she stops, not speaking that part aloud. Lottie can only wonder what she wrote.
She signs her name in a hasty swoop of emotion, and shudders, as an afterthought prints itself across the bottom three-quarters of the page.
And I love you. I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you.
Gasping tearfully, she stands up and walks with long, sure steps into the kitchen. She folds the paper into a square and writes Paris' name on it before setting it on the counter.
Lottie watches with a sinking heart as she pulls on a jacket and shoes and opens the front door.
The wind blows her red hair into her eyes, but she steps outside, anyway.
The camera doesn't follow her.
Lottie groans aloud, falling sideways into her mattress. "Noooo..."
It's all so bleak. So sick. Yuck.
She hopes that Femi stays okay.
For a moment, Lottie wallows in condemnation and self-pity, then she gets up, deciding that it's too early in the morning for that kind of thinking. Which-while true-is not something she believed last month. She has a new perspective, now.
With cold fingers she picks up the phone that sits on her night stand.
"Paul?" she asks when the ringing stops.
"Hmm? Lottie?"
She sighs, smiling a tiny bit at the note of sleepy innocence in his voice. "Yeah. Can you talk?"
"Of course," he says, his tone like sunshine and clueless sleep.
She smiles a little, trying to forget to a measure all of the things that are happening on the Software. Which is ludicrous, she could no more forget Laura's-her sister's-birthday than she could forget Femi and Paris.
It's silly. But it's true.
"What's going on?" he asks from the other end of the line, his voice straining. She can only imagine him sitting up, half of his hair pressed flat and the same side of his head covered from eyebrow to chin with sleepy tracks.
She smiles despite all of the other things she has running through her mind. "Oh, things. I think our switching of the flaws has backfired on us."
"She doesn't love him still?" He yawns.
"No, she does. She does a lot. She's just overwhelmed and scared, and this morning she wrote Paris a goodbye letter and ran away."
"Did it mention coming back?"
"She said 'eventually,'" Lottie sighs, sitting down on the edge of her bed. "Which could mean anytime."
"I think it'll be okay," Paul says. "Give her a while. She'll adjust."
"No, no, listen." Lottie grabs her laptop and scrolls through several pages of logged storyline, no longer live on the screen, but being captured in script and saved to a different file.
"'All these horrible rearrangements of me,'" Lottie quotes, eyes dragging over the words. "'Why must it all be like this? It rips me apart. Don't change me, don't change me anymore...'"
"Ooh," Paul winces from the other end of the line. "That doesn't sound good. Was that a thought, or did she actually verbalize it?"
"She said it out loud." Lottie reads along. "Whispered it." She continues perusing the logs, sighing over a few of the lines. "Here's where she says that she's going. 'I'll come back in a while, okay? I just need a while to get myself into fewer pieces... I need to collect my scattered thoughts. Away. Okay? I love you. I'll be back sometime.'"
"She repeats herself a lot, doesn't she?"
"Only when she's stressed," Lottie mutters, rubbing her temple. She knows these people. She knows them so well. And she's done all of this to them.
Paul is silent for a moment. "I'm sorry, Charlotte."
"It's fine," she whispers, smiling a little. Her full name out of his mouth sounds so much better than it does anywhere else.
It's so strange.
"No, it's not. I can hear it in your voice. Do I need to come over? I could pick up donuts or something."
"You're going to make me fat, you know that, right?"
"So that's a yes?"
She sighs, clapping her laptop shut. "Maybe. Sure, you can come over. But don't bring donuts. I already ate, and they're horrible for you."
"But I haven't eaten... you want me to starve?"
"Deal with it," she laughs. "You're smart. Figure something out. Eat something messy in that car of yours."
She laughs when she hears him gasp.
"What?" she titters. "You love that hunk of steel too much. And it isn't even a man car. It's just a car."
"It's my car," he replies. "I like it. It gets me around."
"Whatever, boss man." She climbs off of her bed and opens her closet door, considering the day's outfit. "Are we going out?"
"Not unless you want to."
"Pick up a movie?"
His tone is bright. "Of course."
"See you in a bit," she says quickly, ready to turn the phone off.
"I love you," he says.
She smiles, pulling a light tunic off of its hanger. "I love you too."