The hallway was empty - it was jus the two of them. Karen didn't know if that helped or not. Had she expected a Grimm out here, just sitting in the hallway like a dog waiting for its owner? Would it have made it any better, if there had been one? They'd have had to fight it, maybe get hurt, but still, she'd wanted...
Karen shook her head a little in confusion, looking back and forth between the windows as if somehow that would make it all make sense. Yuina was right behind her, fingertips grazing the wall for a moment, then retracting. Karen reached out her hand as well, hesitating. I want...
No.
No. Something wasn't right there. She closed her hand into a fist and lowered it to her side, reluctant. "They're... here..." A whisper. Where were they, though? Why weren't they here, waiting for her? If only...
No, no, this wasn't right. Yuina suggested finding a teacher, which seemed like all too reasonable of a suggestion. It was probably the right one, but Karen found herself not wanting to leave. Maybe if she just waited-
She unclenched her fist, then reached back, taking Yuina's hand in her own.
No. They shouldn't wait. They should find a teacher and find out what was going on. Karen gave a nod, and started towards the stairway.
Karen hesitated, for just a moment, before taking Yuina’s hand in her own. Was this the right thing to do? A teacher would know what they should do more though, older witches knew what to do about weirdness. Yuina squeezed Karen’s hand, and that helped to settle her buzzing nerves. As long as they were together then they would be fine, even if things were weird.
But still, she could feel the longing lingering on the tips of her fingers like the sticky grease from toffee. Thoughtlessly she brushed her fingertips against the frill of her skirt, if only to brush the feeling away with the texture of silk. She looked to the wall again, nervously, as if she expected it to reach out for her. ”The walls are just so… clingy?” Yuina said as the two hurried down the hall. She didn’t know if Karen could understand that, but she shivered and looked away.
Nothing jumped out of them as they reached the staircase, though the air felt thick against her skin, like how sea air was sometimes. Still, Yuina pressed forward, one hand still held by Karen and with her other she reached out and took a hold of the railing.
I want. I want. I want. I want. Give her. Give. Her.
Yuina pulled her hand away fast, and for just a moment she thought she saw a man. Tall and slim and crooked, with joints placed and bent at angles just close enough to correct that they looked wrong. The longing clung to her skin like tar, lingering longer than the momentary vision. Her breath felt short and she shook her head.
“I don’t think we should go that way.” She said. Yuina swallowed but her mouth felt dry. “Sorry, it just… doesn’t feel right.” She offered a weak, apologetic smile.
“Was there something you wanted to try?”
//... into the dark she stepped, but never did she feel free of the gaze...//
Clingy. Karen didn't know if that was the word she would have used, but she wasn't always very good with words. She struggled, trying to find what fit, trying to figure out how to explain something that was felt but not known.
"Maybe they're... lonely."
It was sad, wasn't it? Clingy was such a bad thing, but sometimes, if you didn't know how to do anything else, and there was only one thing you could hold on to...
Karen looked at Yuina for a moment, a little frown marring her features. Am I... clingy?
But if she weren't with Yuina, she would be alone, and that... Karen didn't know what to do about that. Her fingertips grazed the wall, ever-so-gently: an apology, more than anything else. She drew them back, and shook her head. She couldn't stay with the walls. She had to stay with Yuina. Karen looked back towards the classroom they had left, thinking of the colored horizon they'd seen out the window.
"Try... out the window?" Perhaps if they could get outside, things would change.
“Lonely? Do Grimm get…” Yuina reached for the wall again, but pulled her hand back before it connected. Was the emotion that was lingering there even a Grimm? She had assumed it was because things were so strange but maybe she was wrong. The loneliness too, Karen was so much better at understanding emotions like this in a way Yuina couldn’t quite grasp, so she could very well be wrong about that too. Yuina held her hand close to her chest as she looked back at Karen, her friend’s lips bowed into a tiny frown. Yuina smiled, a little attempt to offer some support and comfort.
“It’d be worth a shot, if it’s a Grimm it might not expect us to try that.” Yuina said, returning to the room. She kept her pace careful, letting Karen lead, but the hallway remained still. The room was the same as how they left it, with only the fireflies beyond the glass flittering in the twilight. Yuina made her way over to one of the large windows and flicked the latch. “If we lift together we should be able to open it.” Yuina said, looking down at the campus below.
“But, it might be dangerous going down.”
Last Edit: Apr 17, 2023 19:11:43 GMT by UmbraSight
//... into the dark she stepped, but never did she feel free of the gaze...//
Karen shrugged. She didn't know if Grimm got lonely. She didn't know if anyone had ever asked. She knew what lonely was, though, and she couldn't help but wonder if that desperate longing came from a place like that.
Sympathy or not, it didn't make it any safer to be around.
"It's dangerous in there," she pointed out to Yuina, with a nod to the hallway. She moved to the other side of the window, giving Yuina a nod and helping her to lift the window together, pulling it open. It was a way down, but not too far. Still... she didn't want Yuina getting hurt. Karen had to keep her safe. She tilted her head to one side, thoughtful.
"If I transform..." The bone-armor could take a fair amount of damage, after all. "I think... if you hold onto my back and I jump, we'll be okay. If... if that's okay?" Would Yuina want to get that close? Would she be willing to hold on, like that?
“Yeah, you’re right,” Yuina said. She looked back over her shoulder to the hallway, a cooling evening breeze drifted through the window, ruffling her hair and tickling the back of her neck. The light outside the room flickered again and reds of the distant horizon bled through the windows. Still, knowing the hallway was scary didn’t really do much to settle the bundle of nerves in her stomach when she looked back down at the drop. Would Karen be fine? She was always carrying the burdens for the both of them, always getting hurt.
Yuina nodded her head and the ruffles of her dress returned to the neat lines of her school uniform in a puff of smoke. “I’m sorry for always troubling you like this.” She said with a small smile.
“If you think you can make it, then I know you can” Yuina added. She reached out and after a faint hesitation she placed her hand on Karen’s shoulder. She gave her friend a small squeeze. “We are partners afterall, right? Uh, and sorry if I’m a little too big to give a piggyback ride too.” She added, with a little laugh to help brush away the tension she could feel on the tips of her fingers.
//... into the dark she stepped, but never did she feel free of the gaze...//
"It's okay," Karen said, quietly, once more. There were things that she wanted to say, but she couldn't find the words for them. She didn't know how to tell Yuina how she felt - how it was nice, for once, to do something useful, something real. Something that might help solve a problem, rather than just running towards it screaming. Even if it was running away, it was... it was using what she could do for something besides destruction, and that meant a lot. Maybe not to anyone else, but it meant a lot to her.
Yuina's fingers were on her shoulder again and Karen's hand moved slightly, an almost-instinct to reach up and touch them. She stopped herself, though, thinking back to the walls. Am I clingy? A frown creased her features, and she didn't know whether or not she could play it off as concentration. Better to change her features, then. At least there was no mistaking what she was like, when she was...
Intrusive thoughts whispered; bone shrieked. Karen climbed up, perching herself half out of the window to give the bones space to grow, letting Yuina come closer and hold on.
I want...
Mine.
Karen shivered, and closed her eye, and jumped. She hit the earth with a crunch, the splintering of bone enough to silence the whispers, at least for a moment.
“Right, okay. Just a little fall.” Yuina said, mostly to herself, as Karen stepped up onto the window sill. She wrapped her arms around Karen, one over her shoulders and the other around her chest and squeezed a little tighter than was necessary, but it wasn’t like she knew exactly what the necessary amount of squeezing was for jumping out of a building while hugging someone’s back. The plates of bone were hard against her skin, and even through the fabric of her school uniform she could feel the negativity like something oily smeared against her skin. It was… Yuina tried to push the thought aside, it was wrong to read people like this, and she felt even guiltier knowing that Karen was a friend who trusted her.
But, it was hard not to focus on it when she really didn’t want to think about falling.
Karen tipped forward, and Yuina felt her stomach drop as a faint oh escaped her. Wind whipped through her hair, and Yuina quickly turned her eyes away from the rapidly approaching ground back up to the window that they had jumped from. A black shape, like a stain, lingered in the window in the room next to the one they had been in, two orbs of glittering golden light staring back at her.
They hit the ground hard, Yuina winced at the sound of bone cracking and the stinging in her own shoulders. Yuina loosened her grip, a worried knit in her brow.
“Are you okay?” She asked, placing a foot down onto the ground below.
//... into the dark she stepped, but never did she feel free of the gaze...//
A lot of things were very broken, but Karen nodded in answer to Yuina's question anyway. Sometimes, it was okay to be broken. Some things were meant to be broken. As long as she could hold on to Yuina-
No, that wasn't right. She had to let go, sometimes. Carefully, Karen released her friend, making sure that she was steady on the ground and looking back up at the window. The window was looking back at them. Karen looked away, not liking it. Something was very wrong, that much they were both certain of, but Karen didn't know what she was supposed to do about it. There hadn't been anything there for Yuina to turn to smoke, just strangeness and mysteries.
They needed help, help from someone who knew what they were supposed to do. Yuina had suggested finding a teacher earlier, but that hadn't worked out so well. There had to be someone out there, didn't they? They were so...
“Okay, good, good.” Yuina breathed. She didn’t know if Karen really was fine after that fall, but Yuina had faith that Karen would tell her if she was too hurt. Karen was always the one who was getting hurt for her, wasn’t she? Yuina shook her head quickly, pushing the thought away, for now they need to remain focused on how to get out of this weirdness. “Should we try to head back to the dorms?” Yuina said, looking back over her shoulder. She had no desire to attempt going back into the school, but there would be people that way, right?
The trees seemed to loom a little taller in the strange muddled light, and Yuina caught the edge of her lip with her teeth. “Can you walk? I can lend you my shoulder if you need it.” She said, a little softer as the feeling of eyes prickled the hairs along the back of her neck.
—~—~—
Windows were such odd things. Walls he understood, they built walls to keep themselves separated, hidden away in their own little piece of space but safe. But windows were so frail, like skin, and he could feel it creaking against his crooked fingers. He was grateful for windows, that they always gave him a place to peer inside, though today it was he who was huddled inside watching out.
The girls too were strange, and they had not been as clear as a window. He had thought that all other means of escape had been stolen away forcing them to go down the stairs, but then they had found a different way down that wasn’t part of their routine. It would have been so simple if they had just taken the stairs but now…
His breath wheezed out, and Désir struck the window with the palm of his hand. It crackled, thin breaks forming into a latticework of a spider’s nest whose thin strands glittered with golden light.
Karen was quieter than usual for a moment, thinking about Yuina's question. Back to the dorms seemed like the best place for them to be, but there would be other people there who could help with whatever this thing was. If there was an attack at the dorms, there would be someone there who could do something about it.
Here... here, Karen didn't know. There should have been someone here, shouldn't there? A teacher? A staff member? Another student, even? But the building had been quiet and wrong and quiet, in all the wrong ways. Were there still other people there? Were they trapped, like Karen and Yuina had been? Not everyone could just jump out the window, after all. What would have happened, if they had gone down those stairs.
I want...
Karen didn't know what she wanted. She wanted to be with Yuina, of course, that was easy. But beyond that... she thought about some of the people they had met, about the little boy who had signed to her, about their teachers. Karen didn't always know what to do about people. Usually she was afraid of them, or afraid of herself when she was with them, but that didn't mean that they should be alone. No one should be alone.
And she wanted to help. She wanted to do something right with this awful thing that she was, some day, to make it become something that no one had to be afraid of, not even herself - and if she wanted to find out how to do that, then she couldn't run away, especially if there might be people still in there. Karen gave a quick shake of her head, to the first question rather than the second, trying to figure out how to put that into something that was easy to understand.
There was a noise, somewhere above them. Karen looked up - the window was broken, like they had almost been. Like Karen had always been. She pointed, drawing Yuina's attention to it, testing her strength. She had enough, she thought.
Yuina drew in a breath and she turned her gaze to the school, her lips drawn into a tight line as she set her jaw. After doing all the could to get out of the school did she really want to go back in? Something stood in the staircase window as Yuina raised her gaze, its broken image scattered between the crackled edges of the glass. But… Karen was right wasn't she? They were magical girls so they were the ones who should be going to help. Yuina released a breath and relaxed. She looked back to Karen and gave a determined nod as black smoke washed across her school uniform, turning it to ribbons and lace.
“It was planning a trap, I think” That was an obvious statement wasn’t it? Still she could feel the ghost of that tackiness on her fingers, that… Yuina brushed her fingers against her skirt to wipe that feeling away. She pressed her fingers to her chest and took another breath. That helped push the nerves away. “There might be others in the school, helping them should be our priority, first.”
She looked back to Karen, a faint smile curving her lips. “And, how about we set a trap of our own?”
//... into the dark she stepped, but never did she feel free of the gaze...//
Karen nodded at Yuina's assessment. This felt like a trap, the same way that the Grimm in the alleyway had. It wasn't chasing them down, it was letting whatever it wanted come to it. Of course, if they went back in there, that was going to be exactly what it wanted... but if they didn't, who would? Someone else would. Someone else would, maybe one of the younger girls who wasn't ready yet, maybe one of the teachers, maybe just someone who happened to be walking by. Maybe one of their fans, the people who supported them.
Magical girls didn't leave things unfinished. Whoever was still in there still needed help, and Karen might not have been the best help, but she was here. She was here, and she had Yuina with her. With Yuina beside her, she could do anything.
Karen flashed a quick smile, nothing of the Grimm lurking behind it - just a simple happiness, being there with her friend. Yuina's smile was there as well, and Yuina had a plan of her own. It was rare that they had a chance to plan things - much of being a magical girl was about reacting to a situation. Being able to shift the situation was an interesting concept.
I want that.
Of course she did. It was only natural. Karen gave Yuina another nod, this one much quicker, much more definitive. Let's do it.
The school was still as the duo passed through the shoe lockers and into the entrance hallway. A pinboard decorated with butterflies greeted them, as it did every day, covered in several neat rows of papers. The current rankings for all the active magical girls in New Kyoto, updated weekly (or at least Yuina was fairly certain it happened every week) and with the names of enrolled students bolded. Yuina had never really spent much time looking it over before, even after they had signed a contract with the DDC, but in the stillness it caught her eye. There were only two names, and those names repeated down the sheets of paper;
Yuina reached out and brushed her fingers against the board, and the longing lingered here as well, sticky as old gum.
“They were on the western staircase, right?” Yuina spoke softly, turning to face Karen. “There’s a blind nook to the left hand side that one of us could hide in and the science classroom is just across the hall with that big window.” Yuina undid the clasp to her cloak and slid it off her shoulders.
“We’ll need to draw it downstairs somehow, and if we dress the anatomical model up with my cloak then we might be able to distract it enough to… I’ll try to use that one power again, the one I used on the Grimm that had been in my dorm room. I think we can take it down if I hit it with that first.” Yuina smiled, faintly, though she could feel her heart high in her chest.
//... into the dark she stepped, but never did she feel free of the gaze...//
The paper on the board was very strange. Karen knew that neither she nor Yuina had really looked at the paper much before, but they both stared at it for a little while. There was something wrong there, having just their names on the paper and no one else's. It wasn't supposed to be that way. Yuina started planning out what they might be able to do, and Karen nodded agreement. Getting whatever it was to stop hiding was a good first step - they couldn't fight it if they couldn't face it.
Yuina seemed to think that she could use the new power, which was impressive - but Yuina had always been impressive. Karen could see why the Grimm wanted her, but she was not about to have that. Yuina was her friend, and there was no way that Karen was giving her up. Her eyes returned to the paper after she'd met Yuina's gaze. It seemed to be trying to claim them.
Karen picked up a pen and crossed out Yuina's name, rather firmly, over and over again. As many times as it took.