Heartbeats [ON HOLD]

three | machinery

◆◇ machinery ◇◆

•─────⋅☾＊☽⋅─────•

Out of all the places in Alderville, the Biology laboratory might just be Quyen’s favourite.

Ironic, because when she was younger, maybe twelve, and she had dissected her first flower— it was supposed to be a frog but she was friends with the frogs in her neighbourhood in Phan Thiết and she couldn’t fathom the thought of cutting one open—, she had cried at the sensation of stamen rubbing against her little twelve-year-old fingers that haven’t grown since.

But something about the sharp scent of antiseptic wafting through the air paired with the vague, yet ominous darkness that shrouds the entire room never fails to make Quyen feel at home.

A lot of Alderville is… intricate. Futuristic, almost, with its high-technology laboratories and its students whose quick, harsh fingers clack against the keyboards as they pump out their assignments at abnormally fast rates. The Chemistry laboratory is filled with glass test tubes and beakers that look as though they might break if someone stares at them too hard, and the Physics laboratory’s walls are lined with lenses used for refraction and screw gauges that are ancient, as if they would crumble upon being touched.

The Biology laboratory, however, has a distinct sense of This. This is where I belong.

Here, the jars filled with a myriad of organisms take her back to the day when her father first told her she was proud of her, when she had done well on a practical examination in her school in Phan Thiết. Here, the pristine tables with not a speck of dust on them serve as a reminder of the large dining table back home, the way her mother would wipe them down before someone prominent from her work came over, getting rid of all the evidence of the erase residue (and tears) that had taken place earlier while solving math problems with her father. Here, if Quyen is quiet enough, she might just hear the skeleton perched in the far left corner of the laboratory breathing, ribs rattling with wheezed exhales, nostalgic— is it nostalgia if thinking about it leaves your chest concaving within itself?— of all the stifled gasps after coming home with eight points on the grading scale rather than ten.

Somehow, somewhere, her mind has clutched onto the Biology laboratory as a safe haven in the labyrinthe that is Alderville, which automatically makes it one of her favourite spots to study in.

And she desperately needs to do that, considering the exam is in less than ten days, and she doesn’t have notes to rely on to get her through this. Just the tall stack of books that she borrowed from the library a few hours ago, though half of them were missing from their shelves.

She’s smart enough to know that the reason those half of the books were missing is because Thea has taken them to do some studying of her own, but she isn’t as… angry about the situation as she expected to be.

Partially because she knows that Thea is in the same boat as she is, or at least, she hopes she is, but mostly because she’s too tired to care.

It’s almost a fever dream, if Quyen is being honest. She never thought the day would come when she would be tired enough to not care about what Thea is doing with relation to her studies, but really, after spending the previous night pouring over her scrap notes that she had made during a lecture, and the night before that, awake on the grass and staring at the stars, her brain doesn’t have the capacity to be angry at anyone but herself.

Rolling back her shoulders, she makes her way into the laboratory, spare key in hand, but once she’s at the door, she finds that she doesn’t need it at all. A small crack between the door and the wall is enough for her to know that if she pushes that door open, she isn’t about to be the only one in the library.