"Are you praying again?"
Saki almost choked on her own breathing.
"What?"
"I said, are you really okay?" Ann's silvery voice became clearer the second time she spoke. She felt the concern on her words lingering in the air deep in her bones, strumming a pattern she once used to know the same way she knew the creak of the fourth step of her house's stairs, and the reason why she never woke up cold, even though she always left her window open late at night. She had concern carved on her skin since she had been born, yet she couldn't help letting her mind track back to the disembodied whisper that she had cried to in the past when she still poured out her heart to God.
"Don't worry." She tried smiling. Instead, her face contorted slightly in pain, so she stopped. "It'll pass."
With shaky hands, she placed the first aid supplies they had been lucky to gather in a rush next to her. Her fingers roamed carefully over the fabrics and a little bottle of chlorhexidine Ann gave her to disinfect her wounds while she took her time with whatever experiment she decided to busy herself in.
"What are you doing anyway?" Dropping her beach shirt on the floor, Saki pulled over her head a knitted sweater to cover her exposed chest, leaning forward from her seat at the end of the bed.
"If we heat this super glue and hold it over the murder weapon, the cyanoacrylate vapors will fuse with the moisture to show fingerprints, which means that if we use some cocoa powder to dust for fingerprints on things like cups that have been used by the most likely suspects, we'll be able to identify the culprit." Ann didn't have a clear reason to hear Saki actually respond to her, but after giving her a look over her shoulder to find her blank staring into nothingness, slightly nodding her head, and a silent of course coming out her lips, she just simplified all explanation. "Proving what really happened to Momoka is all we have left to stop this massacre."
What really happened, what is happening, Saki flavored.
All devotion turns violent. Somehow, some day, it just happens. A man yells and people drunken their ears with his words so they aren't alone, so they don't face reality as it is, so they stay in a place for so long rigor mortis sets in. People give up, but they don't forget, they can't, not even when death is looking right into their eyes. Perhaps that was why Saki needed to ask that question; she didn't want to sit and rot, in silence and with her tongue tied; she didn't want to be selfish, to make it all about herself, she only wanted to let someone change her mind one last time, make her feel herself.
"May I ask you a question?" She murmured, resting her feet on the bed's edge and her chin on top of her knees..
"Shoot." Ann glanced at her just as Saki swallowed her heartbeats down.
"What do you see when, you know, when you see me?" She asked between pauses, afraid that all the words would come out of her mouth in such a rush they would crash against each other.
She felt as if she was a child again, asking her mom why had God forgotten to lift the curtain covering her eyes so her classmates would stop making fun of her, or so she could sozzle her sight with the colors of her dad's flowers and her mom's goldfish. Saki had always wanted to see what she felt, what she tasted, what gave her tickles and smelt like a midday at the beach, what her favorite socks were like and if her parents eyes would blind hers the same way she heard the sun did. She desired something she knew would never be given to her, and yet she made the effort to think otherwise. She asked why multiple times even if she already memorized the answers; even if her mom laughed at first, awkward and short, and left space for soft cries to sing her to sleep from the kitchen's door frame, muffled by the faucet constant dropping and her dad's chest.
"You chew your bottom lip when you get lost in your thoughts," Ann started, voice low and calm, getting her back to Earth. "You sleep pressed against your room's door, I know 'cause I can see your shadow when I'm walking to mine. You also care about your hair being messy, especially your bangs, and you're always trying to be alone but you just end up attracting people into your bubble either way. You have too many scars on your hands, a slight limp on your left leg, and a mole right on the center of your chest that you've trapped inside a star, and... I don't know, I just see you being yourself."
The tattoo itched behind the layer of cotton. Saki's lips turned upwards at the feeling of a pair of eyes watching her fondly from the distance, tilting her head at Ann as if she was studying her by the sound of her breathing and the warmth coming off her gaze.
"You draw people's attention even without knowing," She then continued, "It's annoying."
"Is that so?" Saki teased, a funny tug on her heart.
"Yeah."
Ann got closer. So close her knees brushed Saki's feet, making her arms squeeze her legs harder into her chest. Expectantly, savoring something sweet on the tip of her tongue, Saki waited for anything and everything, but Ann added nothing to her statement; she just bent over her the nearest she could get to her face and twisted a piece of her hair between two fingers before she let it rest behind her ear.
Just a touch, that was it.
All contact ended the moment Ann remembered the mission. She distanced herself from Saki to get a hold on the knife once again, however, that time, they got their ticket out of The Beach finally signed.
"I got it!" Ann exclaimed, so determined Saki couldn't help not believing her.
YOU ARE READING
BIG FISHES, rizuna ann
同人小说BIG FISHES ATE LITTLE FISHES UP. . . ˗ˏˋ Ever since the day she was born, Ishikawa Saki thought the world was still asleep, as no light reached her every time she opened her eyes. There were no colors, no figures, and no scenery-just sounds, tastes...
