technicolor dreams • a modern fairy tale

• 012 •

As soon as she held her phone in her hands, Tiana felt her frantic heartbeat calm down.
There it was, the device that was able to provide her with a small sense of security, of familiarity when everything around her seemed to be falling apart. Why had her parents never warned her about things like this happening? Or had they and she'd just never listened?
Tiana had always thought that she didn't have to care; that bad things wouldn't happen to her. But now she had been proven wrong, and her fingers trembled as she thought about all the possibilities, and she remembered that she had to text Maurice so he could come and get her. She needed to go home, now.

Time went by in a daze, her eyes were solely trained on the illuminated display, as she scrolled through her social media without really seeing anything. Shock had dug its claws into her flesh, and reality just seemed so far away.

But then, the familiar purring motor of her family's car resonated through the street, the tension in Tiana's shoulders dissipated and breathing became easier again.

She still wasn't capable of wasting a single thought on the man next to her though. Her focus was on the black Cadillac and the security it provided.
God, she couldn't even wait for the car to come to a stop before she opened the door on her own and climbed in. The next breath Tiana took was deep enough to let her sink into the cushions, and she was able to lock her phone without completely hyperventilating.

"Miss Holloway? Is everything okay?" the chauffeur, Maurice, asked sometime after they'd pulled out of the doom-laden street.

Tiana breathed a shuddery laugh, shaking and nodding her head simultaneously. "Yeah... Well, not really. But yeah, now it will be," she concluded eventually, and wasn't able to say more as it dawned on her that there was someone whom she had to thank for not having to answer even more negatively. And she'd left him standing there, without uttering a single word of thanks, breaking a promise of which she wasn't even sure if she'd ever intended to keep.

Now that she thought about it though, she almost felt bad and almost wanted to tell Maurice to turn around.
But then Tiana remembered just who exactly her saviour was - a dirty nobody, a ragamuffin, that is - and she decided with only a little pang in her chest to just forget about him and the whole incident preferably.