Warnings: Femslash/femmeslash, which means girl on girl. However, the real thing I should be warning you about is how terribly boring this fic is. Really, it’s absolutely mind-numbing.

Summary: This is my nullifying nothingness, so easily sliced in two. (femslash/yuri.)

Chaotic Mind – please find a scanner! I really, really, really want to see that picture you drew :) (I nearly did cartwheels when I heard you drew me fanart! Thankies so much!!)

Seven – Thankies so, so much for the review :). Your comments were very helpful and totally made my day. I went back and tried to fix it up a little afterwards... though I fear I failed horribly. ((sweatdrop)) (I’m no good at writing things that make sense... XP)

X

Pour the water down, watch it swirl past, around, and around, and around. Sliding down the drain like a tiny river, spiraling into the nothingness this world will eventually be. White spray and clear residue splash up around the edges, erasing all traces of what once was. So everything. So my life. Swirling down, and down, and down. Straight down the drain.

“Fascinating, isn’t it?”

“Terribly.”

My heels spin, I leave the sink. Reach for the cupboards, reach for a new glass, fingers splaying over meaningless patterns designed to appeal and attract. Who really cares what their cups look like, anyway? Art is art. Glass is glass.

The floor creaks, we’ve got to fix that, we never will. I pull out a chair. I fall down into it. Grace forgotten, why bother, Narcissa walks along the hard wood boards like polished expense is utterly mundane. A larger container sloshes over, so she holds it at the ends. A glossy shake spills down my glass. What’s in it, I don’t care. I suppose I could ask.

But then, she’d only lie.

I down it in an instant. It tastes horrendous, like liquid illness strained into something clearly unfit for human consumption.

“Raw eggs,” she tells me, with a smile.

“You’re kidding.”

She chuckles. “What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.”

So I’ve heard.

I’ll die for her. I know it.

Or, more accurately, I’ll die from her.

Incessant beeping from an incessant machine blared through my apartment mind. I slapped it off, yawned, rolled out of bed and hit the floor. The blankets fell with me. Climbing to my feet, I absently made the bed again, because that was a time when I didn’t realize that the importance of creating an ephemeral tidiness is virtually nonexistent. Happily lived bliss breeds idiocy.

But Narcissa hadn’t taught me that, then. This is before I knew her. This is before I became me. ...Or maybe while I still was me. I’ve never really thought about it.

I slumped over to the kitchen, because that’s what I did in the morning, because I was dependent on the sleep I didn’t get, as all of us are. I made coffee, because coffee kept me alive, and awake, and I believed that being awake mad me more aware of reality. Consciousness didn’t drain away my very being, before I knew her.

I drank the coffee, I headed for my shower, and I threw my nightshirt half way across my flat. It landed on the couch that was the center of my life for the three whole hours before I actually bought it. I can still remember salivating over its picture in the catalog. I thought it such a drag that things went out of style.

Hot water ran down. Swirled into the drain, I didn’t notice, didn’t care. I tied my hair up, and I thought as I brushed it down, ‘I need more complementing mascara.’ I locked my door when I left, suitcase in hand, I drove to work in the expensive car paid for by discarded boyfriends that never really met my needs.

Keys in the lock, I smiled at the radio songs, I danced, and I sang. I smiled, and I danced. I smiled.

I remember thinking, ‘Tonight’s the night, I’ll find someone, and this one will be different.’

I find it kind of funny that I can remember things like that.

Smiling.

Clicking black high-heels don’t make any sound when they cross soft carpet. Soft carpet, so the sound of gentle clicks don’t disrupt the monotonous clatter of fingers and keys perpetually in motion. I swing my desk chair around.

White willow shirt and faded blue jeans – so out of it, I so don’t care. Narcissa tells me you know you’ve lost all sense of fashion when you’ve got a tree on your chest, of all the nullity in the world. I’ve no opinion on the matter.

How am I supposed to have any, anyway? How am I supposed to think? She always does it for me.

Papers on my desk, a stapler holds them down, computer screen of black oblivion blinking on and off. The phone rings. I answer. The phone rings. I answer. Papers come. I sign. The phone rings. I answer.

I work with duties I hate for the green I don’t need, so I can throw it to the wind and force myself back to my desk. It’s the sad story of a sad circle in a sad, sad, and sadder void of life. The only highlight in my day is the smudge of black lipstick left on my collar from the source of the green headed for my wallet and the window. Affair with the boss. How cliché.

More clicks, click, click, click, high-heels that hurt her unfeeling ankles make no noise as they approach. More papers. Oh joy. I’ll sign them in black and stamp them in red and deliver them to modern white boxes and modern white shelves. A secret smile, a twist of the lips. A note to my mind that she doesn’t have to write down and tack to my board. There’s nothing to remember. She’ll tell me when I need to know.

She’ll kill me, I swear. Her silent clicking shoes are drowned out by the silent ticking of digital hands. The automatic clock on the wall ticks away the seconds till my escape, counts down my life. How morbid, how true.

“The roof, lunch.”

“Yes.”

Exactly what I need to know, never more, never less. Unless it isn’t more to elaborate, with flourished words and meaningless echoes that mask shadows of symbolic interpretation. The phone rings. I don’t answer. Click, click, click. Head to the door.

My coworkers glance up for a second, the rows and rows of cubicles and desks and chairs and candied frowns that never smile within the modern white walls. It’s like a reflection of the entire dying community society’s become – sleepless consumers. Reality is a desk job.

Or so I’d like to think.

Why do I bother?

Open the door, I swear this is it, I swear it to my core. This is the last time, like I told myself the first time.

If she doesn’t kill me, I will.

I’ve been doing so from the moment I was artificially brought into the world. With every bite of processed chemicals so humbly dubbed ‘food,’ I’d like to believe I’m bringing myself closer. It’s all fueled on with every step taken in and out of natural public ‘education,’ a cleverly veiled government attempt to steer the already deadened minds of television-addicted adolescence into acceptance of an unnatural world. It’s like the slowest death you can possibly imagine, having your hopes and dreams crushed out of you by the mind-numbing weight of a fabricated reality.

Behold; Narcissa’s many theories on the construction of so-called life-as-we-know-it. Behold; my mind. I consider myself her largest lab rat.

She considers me the end-all be-all of human existence – her secretarial slave.

Lucky me.

I smiled.

I was on even odds with my job. It wasn’t particularly interesting, it wasn’t particularly boring, and it wasn’t particularly anything. I smiled, despite that. All I cared about was that it put cash in my wallet, anyway. I needed it to buy the new table I wanted. The new chairs. The new couch. Hopefully, the new boyfriend. None of the above ever seemed to last long – I needed the not-particularly-anything job just to keep up.

The bell rang, the customers entered. A pretty blonde with a handsome brunet on her arm. They approached the counter. I smiled at the boy, and kept my eyes on the girl, and lead him to the isle he wanted, and watched her pretty hips follow prettily along. I giggled when he winked at me behind her back.

I scribbled on the papers at the desk at the front, and drew what was at the back of my head. A lopsided pony, a lumpy bird, a smiling sun. An infectious plague of bunny rabbits. Aw. How cute.

My boss told me that when he took over the shop for my lunch break, and I grinned at him with a twinkle in my eyes. I’d been trying to get his number for months, but he wasn’t interested, and now that I think about it, neither was I. Life doesn’t have to make sense when you grew up on company labels and crafted commercials. You just go with the flow.

When the flow says leave work, you do. I did.

I stop.

Clattering sounds echo into the air. Step, step, step, closer now than ever. I sit down beside her at the edge, she turns to me and smirks.

“You’re a minute late,” she teases.

“Sorry,” I mumble.

Beep, wrong answer. The correct one: “Says the meaningless metal around your all-important wrist, fashioned together by the uncaring corporation, meant only to turn money you don’t need in your wallet into money they don’t need in theirs.”

“Oh.”

She grins. The correct response: “Perceived as such by the similar psychopath,” she adds, with a point at the watch on my wrist, “who – so insanely – believes the same as those she accuses.”

Another day, another game, she pulls the strings only to watch me dance. I dully watch a bird fly by, and wonder why the gift of flight was given to something that can’t comprehend the brilliance of such a gift, anyway. Irony is the pinnacle of self-enlightenment.

The cold concrete rushes down beneath us, after miles and miles of transparent windows and secretive walls. The ground below is like a child’s toy model of a city, with decaying organic life forms stumbling around in a race of unimportance, appearing to the contestants as the reason for being. I know how all of this sounds.

Kind of like I’ve lost the will to live.

I suppose that’s fair. I could just end it all now – jump off the roof of a million-story building and meet the ground below in a splatter of scarlet welcome. I bet I could even look up at the sky as I did so, and comment on how tedious watching the clouds really is. Little swirls of commercialized naturalness, reeking with the scent of chemical pollution, ready to form lightning or acid rain at any moment, what isn’t to pick apart? I bet I could even find my last view alive to be an utter bore. It would be all too easy – the uninspired build of characterless buildings is nearly an incentive to try.

Only, she didn’t tell me to jump. So why would I ever consider that?

I smiled again.

I ate lunch at a café down the street. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, I wore my sunglasses so the glare of the sun bouncing off the windows of taller buildings didn’t blind me. The waiter was cute. I smiled at her. I just didn’t get it.

I think that might have been the first time it occurred to me. I didn’t usually realize what I was doing, I didn’t think about it. I don’t know why I did, this time. For some odd reason, I noticed that while she walked away, I was watching the swing of her hips, and the flow of her hair. She had nice legs.

I ordered salad, ate it while watching dogs on leashes be dragged around by oddly-dressed teenagers no older than myself chatting on cells, and ordered the largest carbonated drink on the menu.

The problem didn’t stay in my mind as I went back to work. It was only a problem, and something small. Just another blob of stress, I still smiled, because the pharmaceuticals took care of that. It was just a quick stop at a convenience store and bam, the headache’s gone. I ran back to work after the store. I couldn’t afford to be late, because then I couldn’t afford the new furniture.

I drove home at the highest speed legal for the area. I liked the way the wind played with my hair.

I stop, again.

Watch the midnight curtain close, tiny white credits scrolling up the screen. My eyes stay glued wide, and I don’t think they’ll ever close. Narcissa laughs above me. The movement rattles down her body, her legs vibrate, I can feel them at my back. She gets the couch, and I sit at her feet, like the broken rag-doll she’s carefully crafted me into. Click, the television’s off.

Soft sounds, my head turns around, turns up, look her in those honeyed eyes surrounded in charcoal pain on pale skin. The bad news of a scary movie? After being terrified to your very soul, things all look like they’re in black and white. The good news? Once you’ve been terrified to your very soul, it takes a lot to make you feel so again, because what once would’ve scared you is now nothing more than a familiar experience. It’s all good. ...Once you get past that first moment of utter fright.

“That was... disturbing.”

“What doesn’t scar you for life, only prepares you.”

So I suppose.

She runs a hand through my hair, fingers tangling through the soft strands. They tightened, tug me back, my head tumbles against her knees. She looks directly into my eyes, while one handed caresses my cheek, drops lower, traces down my spine. I shiver, while the feel of the living dead consuming me washes over my recently-traumatized body. My parents would never have let me watch that movie.

I don’t get the point of any of this, of anything. The ceiling above stretches like a creamy sky with limits no sky should ever have. It hits the wall and shatters, the wall runs down, and separates one arid space from another. Everything around me is so...

“Don’t worry about it, next time you see it, it’ll be just as dull as everything else in your dead-panned, fabricated world.”

She tugs at my hair, I turn around, get to my legs, fall to my knees, straddling her waist. Blaring lips call out to me, I lean in, and a blonde curtain spills over my eyes. Black and white, black and white. She’s so very, very warm.

Smells of musky lies and dirtied truths waft down and suffocate me. Pale hands dropping down her chest, fingers running across her breasts, filling me with driving need I’ll never, ever act upon. She runs hers up mine and touches everything she wants, there’s nothing she needs. She gets what she wants. And she doesn’t want what she needs.

Gasp, breath sharp, I curl my fingers and stretch out my arms. White willow silk slips off and down. What wonderful foreplay, a movie of mindless fright watched with cramped limbs in cramped positions. Stale bread and stale wine, water running down the drain, like a tiny river spiraling into the nothingness this world will eventually be. White spray and clear residue splash up around the edges, erasing all traces of what once was. I swear I’ll jump tomorrow.

My zipper’s undone, my pants slide down, smooth skin on fabric and gasps and useless moans. White water heat and wasted words, but everything tastes like ash when that’s all you ever see. Everything’s in black and white, with the volume down, and the only smell in the air is human decay, creeping slowly up on us all like snakes sliding close through the grass. She’ll crush me this time, I swear, she’ll break something deep inside that won’t ever be fixed again.

I’ll die for her, from her, I’ll die when I jump to the sky and I’ll let her watch me fall.

I bet she’ll laugh.

I didn’t smile, this time.

I could be such a spoiled princess, sometimes.

Tap, tap, tap, monotonous machinery groaned under the weight of logical responsibility. I typed the words and poured out my soul, without understanding, without even seeing. They say curiosity killed the cat. I watched those words work their magic.

It’s not that I didn’t like guys, because I did, but they just weren’t... that everything. They couldn’t understand, couldn’t connect, they couldn’t be what I was and what I wanted. I supposed girls could. Naïve little me, with my naïve little keys, typing out my questions to the world. Ah, the internet – society’s pool of infinite lies and eternal trickery. And she seemed so nice at first.

She knew what I was saying, which was something, because even I didn’t know what I was saying. I didn’t know how to word it. Didn’t know what I meant. She understood. Everything. I loved her instantly for that.

Love is such a deceitful word. It is. Wish I’d known that.

She listened to me pour out my mind, pour out my soul. All those little things the every-day pharmaceuticals couldn’t cure, the little pockets of stress and the little reasons to cry. I couldn’t afford the dress I wanted. My job didn’t pay that well. My next-door neighbor had a scary dog that barked too loudly. Other chicks turned me on. Little things like that.

She listened to me. So I listened to her. I thought she was solving problems I didn’t even know I had.

She asked to meet.

Sure.

Why not?

Shiny metal under my fingers, reflecting the light of lamps that cost more than they’re worth, plays in my hand like liquid fire. An extension of power I don’t have, I hold the gun up, wonder all about it.

Narcissa’s watching me from the door, of course she is. Smirk, smirk, smirk, stare, stare, stare. My shirt’s hanging open and I really don’t care. The mattress is hard. Figures.

“Not the best way to go, once you think about it,” she tells me, and slides over to the bed. Soft fingers splay over my cheek, her thumb rubs it, runs down, down. Her other hand reaches for the gun. “And besides,” she adds, leaning up to my ear, and whispers. “You shouldn’t play with my toys.”

I yank it out of her reach. I don’t care, I don’t care, jump off a building, shoot myself in the head, a couple of seconds wasted means nothing next to a lifetime of the same. I don’t care about the wasted water down the drain or the wasted work of a clock or the wasted walls of concrete stretching for miles through a sea of gray. I don’t care about colours I can’t see and a volume I can’t hear and the words I’ll never know. I don’t care because it doesn’t matter, and nothing does, and everything’s part of a void of nullified oblivion I’ve been drowning in from my moment of birth.

Behold; Narcissa’s twisted teachings.

Watch me tear them down.

“What does this prove?” she asks, suddenly, and I can tell she doesn’t care, either. “What does escaping one oblivion for another provide?”

Sweet release. Sweet freedom from the incredible fragility of the world. It’s like one big boring ball of nothingness that holds everything inside, and we all depend on this ball to keep us alive and going at our very core, when really, it’s made of glass. I’m surprised it’s taken me a while to realize this.

With a snap of your fingers, you can snap in two.

Click, click, click.

Crimson click after crimson click, and cold fingers fall from a colder end.

Sweet release indeed.

I stopped, so the world stopped with me.

The car screeched to a halt, I stopped. Traffic was bad, we were late, the taxi sped off behind me. I ran into the theatre.

Naïve, naïve, I ran towards the description in my head, heels clicking against the carpet.

Golden blonde hair fell long over delicate shoulders. Deep eyes surrounded in black, pale skin stained by darkness all around. Piercing here and metal there, paperclips and safety pins, and a sweatshirt of midnight. Jeans too-tight and nails too long, a smirk that held a cynical sense of the maddeningly mundane. Tall, curvy, well built, beautiful. It was like coming face-to-face with the queen of the living dead, and finding it gorgeous. I lost my breath.

“Narcissa.”

And she smiled.

O

...Was that okay? Did it make a wit of sense? (Not that I really intended it to...) ((sweatdrop)) please review and tell me either way... :)