Wish-weaver

In Which Turning Human Doesn't Necessarily Give One Social Skills Or a Bath

Lawrence led Rosie down what seemed to be the main hall (she had never spent time in a normal house, always moving and living in tents, but she'd heard stories of them and had watched them as she'd passed in her strange circus caravan). Monroe split off with a mediocre excuse and climbed a set of spiralling stairs to somewhere, greeted by whispers as soon as the second floor's occupants thought Rosie couldn't hear them.

Everyone waited out of sight.

She heard them and felt them, in a way she had remembered from life before flesh but that now split itself into sound and smell and feeling, could feel the eyes watching her and the ears listening to her bare feet against the ground, but she forced herself to stare straight ahead and focused on not tracking too much mud into the house.

A boarding house, Lawrence had explained. A place for people like them. She wasn't quite sure what "people like us" had meant when it came from the lips of someone so clearly unlike her, but she wasn't about to protest if there was someone who identified with her at all.

Lawrence jiggled a knob on the door at the end of the hall as if he was warning the room's possible occupants and then opened the door, scooting aside to give Rosie room to step off the hardwood of the hall floor to the velvety carpet that lined the room.

"Wait here," he said as if it pained him, and then slammed the door and locked behind him it almost theatrically, as if it was a signal to someone else.

When Rosie thought about it, it probably was.

She looked around, but there wasn't much to look at, she realized. Not even a light except for a hand-sized window near the corner of the room, the glass as thick as frozen river and nearly as murky. No furniture, either, nothing interesting to play with or break or create. Just a velvet carpet between her dirty toes and the musty air of an expensively built room cocooning her, stagnant as her last month of life had certainly not been.

She sat down for a moment, keeping her back to a wall as she felt most comfortable doing, and stretched her legs out in front of her. The eyes probably still watched her, but Rosie tilted her head back against the fancy wooden wall and closed her eyes, waiting for the world to finish unspooling around her. Everything spun, dizzy and alight, even in this place of nothingness and no-one. If Lawrence came back soon, Rosie wanted to savour all of this nothingness she could, wanted to pack it into a box and remember it as the closest thing to her old half-life as she could get.

It took her ten whole seconds to get bored.

Well, Rosie didn't get bored, because she had never seen the point of it, but it took ten seconds for her brain to start coming up with questions and for her to realize that there was nobody around to ask them to. That was the closest thing she could get to boredom, the sort of question that itched beneath her skin and begged to be asked.

People had sometimes told her not to be so curious, but Rosie had told them that she'd stop it as soon as there was less to be curious about.

Sometimes she wished she'd been a bit more curious about what it would be like to live like a human. It would have made a lot of this a lot easier.

"1..." she tried. "2, 3...4...5...6, 7, 8, 9...10."

Counting seconds was difficult, as time still made little to no sense in relation to her, but Rosie made it as far as a hundred before giving up. She tried, "101," but the back of her mind laughed at her tone and Rosie shrugged.

Lawrence had probably found something else to do, and maybe he'd forgotten about her. Or maybe he'd left her there as a test, Rosie thought, and the cynicism she'd been bred on purred at that thought. Maybe one of his bosses had decided Rosie belonged here until they could get rid of her some way. Lawrence did seem like the type of person to conform to the wishes of authority, and there was no way Monroe could have trusted Rosie yet, not with how open he'd acted.