kh_drabble | (no subject)

Challenge: [222] Historical AU
Title: Neurasthenia
Wordcount: 584
Rating: K
Spoilers: None
Characters: Namine, Larxene

A maid peels away the curtains that cover the window on the east wall, and sunlight barrages the thin tissue of Namine’s eyelids like angry needle points. She is pulled away from a dream in which her music teacher conducted the beats of her heart—rather than the tempo to which she would ordinarily strum a harp—and scolded her each time she allowed the muscle to flutter erratically.

She trades the cotton swathe of her bed for the cushion of slippers against wood, then trades again for the ivory and steel bindings of a corset. Her spider thin fingers trace the sculpted bodice, feeling for the barely there dip and expansion of her breath.

At breakfast she pretends their guests are porcelain figurines, supplying appropriately demure murmurs for any conversation she becomes a part of like a child speaking to imaginary friends. She pretends the wet sheen of their polished teeth is the gilded gleam of dishes laid out upon lace.

The blonde daughter of the visiting viscount is seated across the table, right beneath a chandelier towards the left. Namine only knows this because the proud angle of her jaw and strong line of her shoulders is glaringly improper, along with the stare that lingers too long on Namine’s face. And the smirk that curls like a scorched vine of ivy along her lips afterwards.

She spends the afternoon in a parlor that overlooks the estate, imitating the sweep of green with a set of paints and a practiced hand. But when she looks back at the window there are figures on the lawn, out for air or out to admire the building from afar, she doesn’t know. But she recognizes a set of strong shoulders topped by a smudge of yellow, barely visible beneath an elaborate hat. A tremor in her hands spoils the image.

Dinner is a strained affair. The viscount’s daughter—a force of nature she now knows as Larxene—has eyes the most peculiar shade of green, and a voice that carries startlingly well. The frame of Namine’s corset is an ever present fist, tapering her own words into watery sighs. They are side by side, and Namine’s mouth trembles against the rim of her wine glass as she pretends her body is porcelain. But the teasing hand beneath the table is like a thunderbolt, and her body feels more like a willow tree, shaking helplessly beneath the beating of a storm.

She wakes the next morning in the hazy dark, drawn by the clattering of rain against shingles and glass from a dream in which childhood drawings spoke to her and stroked her wheat blonde hair. The outline of gray light around the window lets her eyes trace the ornate molding along the ceiling, and the soft glow that creeps along the wallpaper. Involuntary images replace them, the recollection of toxic eyes and collarbones caressed by tender light. Her chest shudders on an exhale, and she pretends the room is as colorless as she believes, and that the raindrops tapping at the window pane are locusts, come to eat away the curious sensation welling in her abdomen like blood in a fresh cut.

Overtaken with fear when the maid comes to draw the curtains, she pretends to be taken with illness. There is no need to fabricate a fever, and the cotton swathe of her bed feels like the feather touch of beautiful hands as she swims in and out of dreams.