Work Text:
6:34 am; 0
The sibilant hiss of snow against the window woke Rose far earlier than she intended to rise, and she lay still where she was for a long while, half-awake and listening. The tree outside cast a weak shadow in the glow of the clouded sunrise, curving like a bandit's mask over her face and pouring off the mattress on her other side. She was comfortably warm, safely cocooned in her sheets with a pillow wadded up in her arms.
She was starving.
The thought ambled lazily to the front of her mind as her stomach churned, burbling quietly against the pillowcase. Rose ignored it gracefully, shifting slightly to one side and finding a cool place for her cheek to rest. Perhaps the most wonderful thing about true hunger, she mused drowsily, was that it could be almost indefinitely postponed.
It was too early to do anything about it, in any case. She would make breakfast when she was really awake.
8:28 am; 0
This time it was the sun that dragged Rose up and out of a dream, an uncomfortable but nonfrightening whirl of teeth and tentacles and soaring violet spires. There had to be some significance to that, she thought idly: contrary to what she relished assuring Strider, not every dream was an uncomplicated profusion of phallic imagery. There was in fact some merit to the technique of dream interpretation, though calling it a science was perhaps a stretch.
She would look into it later, she decided, if the fancy took her. Stirring slowly, she wormed her way nearly to the edge of the bed before she ventured sitting up and placing her feet on the floor. It was far easier to bypass the blind vertigo feeling of the blood dropping from her head if she took a few moments' pause before making the actual effort to stand. It helped some- her vision whited out briefly as she finally stood, but faded back in again long before she reached the bedroom door.
Everything was part of a routine, a well-oiled machine which made keeping order that much easier. There was a ritual of sorts that Rose kept in the bathroom in the morning: the toilet was always first, after which she scrubbed her hands, up over the wrists, before they were meticulously dried on the towel hung behind the door. Her pajamas came off after that; these were folded neatly and placed on the counter one piece at a time, aside from the underwear, bound for the hamper. Only then did she dare glance up and look at herself in the mirror.
A good deal of her mother was present in her face, in her thin lips and upturned nose, but her anonymous father had contributed her high cheekbones, the shape of her jaw, the droop of her eyelids at their outer corners. Character grounded in imperfections. Rose toyed with these, lifted the folds of her eyes and opened until white was visible all around her violet irises, turned her cheek to the mirror and smoothed the taut skin under her chin, flared her nostrils wide, then scrunched her philtrum up to the tip of her nose. She wet her lips, scarred black in their cracks by the daily application of dark lipstick, and leaned close to inspect them, the marble edge of the sink grinding her skin against her hipbones.
That brought her back. Glancing down from this angle, she could make out the tiniest strip of tile floor between her flat belly and the countertop; if she sucked in, there was enough room to watch her toes wiggle.
She took a small step back, looked up, and ghosted her fingers over her ribs. They were visible under her tiny breasts and across her sternum even when she let herself relax, and remained present when she hunched her shoulders forward and took a deep breath and for a long, terrible instant, tried to make herself look bigger. She locked her ankles together, and with a small smile tilted her pelvis back and watched the hourglass gap between her thighs and knock knees spread.
She admired the space until without warning, dissatisfaction slugged her in the gut and she shoved herself away from the mirror to fumble with the shower faucet. With the frosted door shut and the mirror fogged, her reflection was, for the moment at least, out of sight. Out of mind was a different matter.
9:12 am; 0
Blow-dried, made up, and dressed in leggings and a favorite sweater, Rose turned onto the great landing at last, swept a mocking curtsy up at Zazzerpan's craggy face, then stopped still. From the top of the stairs, her mother's prone form was clearly visible, sprawled face down on the couch and somehow still flawless as ever, save for the single patent pump which had tumbled to the carpet during the night.
What a sad woman, Rose sighed mentally as she descended the stairs on sock-tiptoes. Doctor Roxanne Lalonde, world-renowned scientist, whose rampant alcoholism was rapidly approaching the sensationalism of her published papers.
Rose couldn't stand her, and not only because she herself didn't have the luxury of drowning her sorrows in gin and cheap vermouth- thank God for that! No, it was an immutable fact that Rose would come out on top in the end. She had neither her mother's recognition nor the recognition her mother had attained, but what she alone possessed was control; she didn't need an escape from her problems when she was coolly and patiently taking care of them herself, one at a time. As it stood, she was certain that all the empty calories and unconscious hours were just waiting to catch up on her mother, and when it happened Rose would be there to revel in it: the tiny daughter, poised and perfect, forced tragically to raise herself and yet ever-so-graciously present in time of need to condescend lovingly to her poor, pathetic wash-up of a guardian.
She breezed past the sofa without a sound, not that it much mattered. Her mother's cacophonous snoring easily drowned out both her footsteps and the soft chuk of the refrigerator door, the appliance full to bursting, as usual. Just one more of that accursed woman's multitudinous attempts at sabotage, swaddled in a perfunctory veneer of motherly concern.
Of course, Rose knew better, and had long since perfected the art of countering the blatant disrespect with some of her own. Working swiftly, she withdrew a precarious armload of items from the softly humming refrigerator: a plastic-wrapped loaf of bread, a fresh stick of butter, an orange frighteningly perfect-looking for the dead of winter, two eggs from the shelf of the door.
Preparing a meal was such a chore! One slice of bread made it into the toaster, while a second was torn into tiny pieces, soaked with a thin stream of tap water, and shoved soggily and without ceremony down the drain. It was followed shortly by a thick slice of butter, nudged gingerly off the end of the knife with a fingernail as though it might suddenly become capable of being absorbed through the skin, and an egg yolk, separated painstakingly between the two parts of the shell as she heated a frying pan. The other yolk sat temporarily abandoned as Rose cooked the whites with a sprinkle of water, peeled the orange, and then hopped finally up onto the counter to savor the results of her labor.
She ate slowly, looking up only when there was a pause in the rhythm of her mother's breathing. The cushionless counter was somewhat unforgiving to sit on, as little cushion as Rose was in possession of herself, but the reassurance of such far outweighed the discomfort, even as the numbers gradually added up. According to its bag, the bread was sixty-five calories per slice. Rose inherently distrusted the accurate reporting of nutritional information; she added ten to be safe as she stacked the uneaten crusts against the rim of her plate. Egg whites were sixteen each, practically free protein! The orange was mostly sugar, but fruit could be forgiven: judging roughly by its size and heft in her hand, about sixty-two calories give or take some seeds and pith. One hundred and sixty-nine in total. A perfectly healthy breakfast for a growing girl.
Finishing her last bite, she used the discarded bits of toast to smear a convincing splotch of egg yolk onto the plate, tipped the rest of it down the sink, and left her dirty dishes and the butter knife stacked haphazardly where their use could clearly be seen. The eggshells and orange rinds were heaped just as visibly on the very top of the trash bin under the sink, and she left the butter unwrapped on the counter, more the product of laziness than of directed spite.
The rest of the orange she took with her, though. She'd finish it as she worked, she thought with a wry smile- after all, there was no sense in wasting perfectly good food.
10:43 am; 133
The subtle sounds of Rose's mother stumbling gradually back into consciousness on the floor below were easily ignored as her daughter focused squarely on the project at hand. Putting her birthday present to good use to create one for John would do well to show her gratitude, she had decided, and it had become her duty of late to repair the loveworn heirloom of a stuffed rabbit she'd had squirreled away on her bookshelf for as long as she could remember. It was slow going, but nearly two months of devotion to the craft had served her well. Something was definitely beginning to take shape in her hands, and the tangible progression was exceedingly rewarding.
Even so, Rose still wasn't entirely convinced that the gift, a pair of knitting needles and a few balls of yarn, hadn't been a passive-aggressive jab in and of itself, a jeering sign that her friend looked upon her current hobbies with disdain. Likewise, whether this overly sentimental present she had dedicated herself to was meant as a gesture of appreciation or of scorn, she didn't quite know either. Either it would burn him, really and truly, or John would accept it in the same genuine stride which with he seemed to take everything else. One or the other. Both, perhaps. She would have done her part regardless.
And so she battled on, valiantly persevering despite the striking similarities of knitting in the round to wrestling the writhing maw of Fluthlu. She had mastered the basic stitches in the span of a few weeks, and this was still somewhat outside the bounds of her capabilities, if she was to be honest with herself. But time marched steadily toward the day circled in blue on her calendar- she would have to pick up the pace if she intended to finish in time.
Doing so was easier said than done. Her fingernails were chewed ragged under their chipped polish, an anxious habit that Rose refused to acknowledge but which liked to snag yarn; in addition, the fingertip calluses she'd built up over years of avid violin playing had cracked in the dry weather, and more than once as she worked the winter away she'd been forced to stop and bandage herself up before continuing.
But friendship and resentment were both powerful things. In order to speed the project along, she had cut herself something of a deal: for every certain number of rounds completed, the number of exercises she was self-obligated to perform was lowered. Today she'd set the number at three as she worked, and had set a decent pace over the last hour, clumsily rotating the slowly reforming rabbit around and around. As she made the transition from her current needle to the next for a new stripe, though, a loop slipped from its point and immediately dragged several others with it. The v-shaped gap which yawned suddenly open between the needles wrenched a frustrated shriek from their operator.
The sound downstairs temporarily ceased, but Rose was too preoccupied to notice, hands trembling with aggravation at the setback as she attempted to fish a handful of tiny bumps of yarn apart from hundreds of identical ones. Dropping stitches was unacceptable. Her count was reset to zero.
1:54 pm; 120
The snow had ceased by midafternoon, the sun peeking through the clouds to light up the fresh blanket. The glow was brilliant, clean, reflecting upward through Rose's window to dapple the ceiling, but she was focused elsewhere. Resting on her side, the muted friction of her leg rising and falling was barely audible under the constant drone of the waterfall. She stared at the opposite wall without really seeing it, counting silently to herself under a similar stream of thoughts.
Thirty-nine. Forty. Forty-one.
What a painfully privileged problem this was, her mind scolded her, and not for the first time. Here she was, preteen daughter of an exorbitantly wealthy woman in the most powerful nation on the planet, inundated by opportunity and resources and abjuring every last one.
Unrealistic expectations of herself aside, she wanted for nothing. Hardship in Rose's life was the shower not being quite hot enough, the wrong brand of tampons under the sink before she'd starved the monthly affliction into acquiescence, the lack of a consistent wireless signal in every corner of her massive home. There were impoverished children the world over who would kill for the food she wasted on a daily basis, for heat and hot water, for her education, her computer, for even a fallaciously loving parental figure. She didn't deserve the degree of self-loathing to which she subjected herself; she had no right to it, and she knew it. The thought made her sick.
But it never managed to accomplish much aside from bringing her own guilty scrutiny of herself down harder than ever. There was no winning in this cycle: Rose hated herself, hated herself more for doing so, and in the end her destructive behavior remained her only outlet for any of it. The only way to prove her worth to herself was to hold out, to shrink down until she was nothing and no one and it ceased to matter what she did or what she thought. She was well aware that the perfect vision of herself was unattainable. The only place she could go from here was down, logic dictated, and her personal strength had nothing to do with it.
Ninety-seven. Ninety-eight. Ninety-nine.
She lowered her leg a final time, took a deep, shuddering breath, and rolled over.
One. Two...
3:21 pm: 36
Exhausted but once again bolstered by the satisfaction of diligence, Rose felt she had earned a bit of respite. Her abdominal muscles burned pleasantly even as she lay still on her front with a book propped open between her elbows, and she clenched her stomach periodically just to remind herself exactly how hard she'd pushed herself. How the virtue of hard work had triumphed over the sin of sloth! Atonement had been obtained, for the present at least.
She remained that way, lost in the tale of some particularly loathsome beast, until from her desk, the familiar chime of an instant message window opening sounded from her closed laptop. She ignored it, and the second, and the third with a bit more difficulty, but by the fourth her curiosity had finally been roused enough to eclipse her disregard.
-- ectoBiologist [ EB ] began pestering tentacleTherapist [
TT ] at 15:37 --
EB: rose!
EB: ...are you there?
EB: hey rose!!
She pushed aside the half-desiccated remains of that morning's unfinished orange from the keyboard, then took a seat.
TT: My, you're online awfully early.
EB: oh hey.
EB: yeah, this whole town is pretty much lousy with snow right now.
EB: we got sent home right after lunch.
EB: which is i guess kind of what i wanted to talk to you about?
TT: Oh?
TT: I was under the impression that your father's culinary prowess was unremarkable if anything.
TT: The lengths to which you've regularly reported going in order to eschew his saccharine abominations are frankly quite impressive.
EB: okay it's not THAT bad.
EB: he just likes to bake a little too much.
EB: anyway, that is not what i mean and you know it.
EB: come on, rose. i'm not stupid.
TT: Up for debate.
EB: har har.
EB: look, you've been acting kind of weird for awhile, and i have been doing some research.
EB: i'm worried about you.
TT: What reason have I ever given you to worry about me?
EB: i'm serious!
EB: i think you might have some kind of eating disorder.
A jolt of simultaneous shock and guilty confusion ricocheted through Rose, countless conversations she'd had with John and with her other closest friends flashing through her mind in the span of a few seconds. What had she said that had caused him to grow suspicious? Where had her guard faltered? Were the others in on this as well?
It was then that she realized she had been sitting silent for an inordinately long time and that John may have expected a response to his sudden accusation.
TT: That's preposterous.
EB: denial isn't just a river in egypt!
EB: wow, that really doesn't work as well when you type it does it?
EB: scratch that.
TT: I'm not in denial about anything.
TT: I simply regret having to put the kibosh on your little conspiracy theory.
EB: well prove it, then.
TT: Pardon?
-- ectoBiologist [ EB ] began sharing camera at 15:46 --
Rose's forehead collided with her palm before she realized either was moving. He couldn't be serious.
But from where she sat, he certainly seemed as though he was. Backlit too intensely by a snow-bright window to be entirely visible at first, John stood up to adjust the camera, sat back, and waved cheerily at Rose, grainy and tousled but smiling toothily. His mouth was moving, but after a few moments he seemed to realize he lacked a microphone and held up a perturbed finger.
Rose was already typing again, however, as he hunched over his own keyboard.
TT: John, this is completely unnecessary.
EB: no it isn't!
EB: anyway, maybe i just want to say hi.
TT: Given the circumstances, I'm hardly inclined to believe you.
TT: You need to clean your room, by the way.
EB: yeah, okay. look who's talking.
Rose glanced over her shoulder, narrowing her eyes slightly at the perpetual mess. Her bedroom was the one place in her life in which she allowed disorder to accumulate, and he'd seen it before. She considered for a moment shaking out her bedcovers, kicking the worst of the mess against the wall where it would be out of the line of sight of her own camera, but the scope and scale of even that rendered it completely out of the question.
TT: ...Alright. I'll play your game.
She typed grudgingly, and hovered her mouse cursor over the tiny webcam button for several conflicted seconds before finally clicking.
-- tentacleTherapist [ TT ] began sharing camera at 15:48 --
EB: hehe, hi rose!
EB: look, i'm not going to ask for too much.
EB: just go get something and eat it!
EB: easy peasy.
TT: You're forgetting your time zones. I already ate.
EB: so?
EB: have a snack.
TT: I'm not hungry.
EB: you're not helping!
TT: You're also forgetting that I'm under no obligation to help you with anything.
TT: Less when I'm being diagnosed with a serious psychological disorder by a silly boy with too much time on his hands and unfettered access to Wikipedia.
EB: rose... :(
On screen, John's shoulders slumped, and his face fell into such a pathetic exaggeration of the emoticon he'd just typed that it took Rose a great deal of effort not to burst out laughing. She quirked a thin eyebrow instead, hiding her spreading grin behind the fingers propping up her chin.
Her looming panic managed to force it back into submission fairly quickly, however and she heaved a similarly exaggerated sigh for the camera before resuming typing.
TT: Fine.
TT: If it will ease your apparently overwhelming paranoia, I'll spoil my dinner.
EB: yessss.
EB: and make it something good! not just an apple or something.
TT: I'll be right back, John.
EB: good.
Leaving her laptop open behind her, she slipped from her chair. Her thoughts were already clouding angrily at the thought of being discovered, having her sphere of perfect control infiltrated and meddled with. How dare John think he knew better than she, to look upon her with pity, to demand that Rose prove herself to him, when he would be far better served minding his own business? It was jealous sabotage, plain and simple.
The vitriolic thoughts came and went with surprising speed, and as Rose descended the stairs her mind refocused, turning instead in its clutches exactly what she could get away with. If she returned with too little, he was likely to send her back for more- she retained the mindset that she owed him nothing, but knowing John his pestering would likely be ceaseless until she obliged him. A sandwich would be harmless enough, she supposed, and easy to make appear more substantial than it actually was.
The first thing she noticed as she reentered the kitchen, however, was that her dishes were no longer in the sink, nor in the dish drainer, whisked away to God-only-knew-where. An envelope lay on the counter, propped neatly against an empty bottle of some clear liquor or another and sealed with a dramatic daub of wax. It contained nothing but a paid invoice for a ludicrously expensive dishwasher and an installation work order. Rose's mother appeared to have at last become bored with the game Rose had been playing. So be it.
She briefly considered a range of possibilities for immediate retaliation, but upstairs John was waiting, and so too would her mother be forced to, for now. Rose placed the envelope under the bottle for the time being, drew a clean plate from the cabinet, and opened the refrigerator, only to immediately tighten her grip on the handle in disgust: the butter she had left out on the counter had had its wrapper trimmed and impeccably re-wrapped, sealed in the same manner as the envelope with another obstinate waxen blotch. How the witch had managed that without melting the contents of the package Rose didn't know, and didn't care to work out just then. This would require a far more subtle execution of vengeance than she had initially suspected.
There was no time for this.
She rushed through the construction of a sandwich, mostly lettuce and tomato but with a decent showing of lunch meat and a pickle spear for garnish. A hastily-poured glass of milk and a last hateful glare at the butter dish, and Rose slammed the refrigerator door so hard it rattled the frame welded to the freezer before stalking back upstairs. She returned to find the John onscreen picking his nose with his feet propped up on the corner of his desk, though he hastily sat up as he detected movement, and was back in prime typing position by the time Rose had settled herself.
TT: How about this?
EB: oh! hi!
EB: yeah, i guess that's pretty good.
TT: Pretty good? I put a lot of work into this sandwich, I'll have you know.
TT: In belittling my labor you deride that of the artisans of the Wonder Bread, so named for how, after decades of ceaseless experimentation, the properties of the cotton swab were at last miraculously reproduced in edible form.
TT: What of the vegetables, cruelly vellicated from the soil in the prime of their lives, then trucked en masse amongst the remains of their mangled brothers to my supermarket?
EB: okay, okay.
TT: Somewhere an emaciated calf bleats its last as it languishes, its sole source of sustenance frivolously appropriated for my drinking pleasure.
EB: jesus rose quit stalling and eat it already!
EB: and you have to finish the whole thing.
EB: no cheating.
Rose ate slowly as she always did, pausing every so often in picking at her food to return a snippet of banter or to carry the conversation in a different direction. That she required her hands to converse was a happy development, however she was careful not to take an especially long time between nibbles of sandwich; any delay beyond what John seemed to deem acceptable was met with a veritable bombardment of berating exclamation points. He was otherwise amicable, though, insistent that she detail her day to him despite her repeated assurances that nothing of interest had really occurred, and in turn relating to her with theatrical flare the perilous journey home of his lumbering school bus through the snowpocalypse. In fact, he was almost certain he would be home for the next day, at the very least, and this he asserted as Rose at last dropped the final bite-sized chunk of sandwich to the plate and flopped back wearily in her chair in a display of uncomfortable excess.
EB: wow, are you finally done?
EB: drink the milk now.
TT: Are you listening to yourself?
TT: Honestly. Words fail me.
TT: Is Strider aware of your predilection for watching young girls gorging themselves?
TT: Between the two of you you might have a disquietingly lucrative business venture on your hands.
EB: gross.
EB: wait, i thought words failed you.
She had responded without moving from her slumped position, but in a sudden fit of good-natured (if childish) retaliation, Rose snatched the last bit of sandwich from the plate, crammed it into her mouth, and pulled a face at John and his sarcasm, chewing brutishly with her mouth wide open and her eyes crossed. Vengeance was swift; the boy burst promptly into ugly, unrefined laughter, tipping his head back and gripping the edge of his desk with one hand to keep from toppling his chair.
Rose let out a muffled chortle herself, clapping her hand to her mouth to keep its contents contained, and swallowed with a lightness she had all but forgotten, when food was involved. It was pleasantly refreshing, compounded by the satisfaction of having swiped a few precious points for her own perpetually exhausted prankster's gambit from the master himself.
John took a moment to collect himself, lifting his glasses and scrubbing at his eyes with the heels of his palms before he returned his attention to the keyboard, a residual smile lingering.
EB: hmmm...
TT: Hmmm?
EB: okay, well...
EB: i GUESS i feel a little better.
TT: You see? I told you this was unnecessary.
EB: maybe you were right. some of the stuff you were saying really freaked me out though!
TT: Then allow me to offer my sincerest apologies for causing you distress.
EB: you'd better!
EB: you owe me.
TT: I owe you?
TT: I already provided you the satisfaction of watching me stuff myself, did I not?
TT: It wouldn't do to cultivate the expectation that I could muster the same zeal again in the face of working pro bono. Charity work isn't my specialty.
TT: If you're expecting further services from me, John, I'm afraid I'm going to have to request payment in advance.
TT: Or at the very least, a cut of the royalties, should you choose to involve Dave.
EB: i told you that's not what this was about.
TT: A likely story.
EB: roooose!
TT: In any case, would you mind terribly if I turned this camera back off?
TT: Much as I relish any chance I'm given to admire your flawless countenance, I need to reapply my lipstick.
EB: ughhh, FINE.
EB: girls. :p
TT: I won't be long.
TT: Keep your hands out of your nose if you can help it.
-- tentacleTherapist [TT] ceased sharing camera at 15:59 --
EB: heheh ok. i will be here!
-- exoBiologist [EB] ceased sharing camera at 16:00 --
EB: hold on.
EB: you saw that?
4:19 pm; 477
Rose had left the conversation in relatively good spirits, but as she knelt now in front of the toilet, one hand fisted into her hair and the other gripping the edge of the tank, the groaning lump of her meal churned sickly in her belly. It would be simple, so simple to do what she'd silently mastered. She'd done it dozens of times, and her panicking mind pleaded, screamed for her to do so now. She could force a finger down her throat in a heartbeat, nick the raw patch on the back of her knuckle, bring up what was weighing down on her emotionally as much as it was physically. It would take no time at all, solve the problem simply if not necessarily neatly, and yet she couldn't bring herself to do it.
Oh, it would certainly show John, prove to him that Rose was the one in control after all, that his good will and geniality had no bearing on her and never would. It would likewise chalk up one more victory for Rose over her mother, a so-there-take-that grounded in petulance and disobedience for its own sake. She came close twice, gagged once, but each time came again to rest her head on her arm, distraught and defeated. Her subconscious refused her, rebuked her, battered her back and forth until at long last she forced herself upright, stumbled dizzily away from the toilet, and caught herself on the vanity. Just this once, she assured herself. She could make up for it tomorrow.
So that was that. She would dry her eyes, wash her face, adjust her makeup, and confront John's question- she knew it was coming, even if he framed it in jest; she had taken too long, now. Had she caved? Had she lied? Had she done it?
This time at least, the answer would be an honest, unwavering 'no'.