Rosario Ortiz (reluciente) wrote in nevermore_logs, @ 2022-03-16 22:45:00 |
|
|||
She’s living in Apollo’s building, in Apollo’s apartment. She cooks on Apollo’s stove and she washes up in Apollo’s sink and she eats, hunched over her plate, in Apollo’s kitchen. She studies (tries to study) (fails to study) in a bedroom that belongs to Apollo and she lies in bed and stares at the cracked plaster of Apollo’s ceiling. Take his name out of it, it’s not like it’s anything new. Rosario’s lived in rentals all her life. This place has never belonged to her, even if she can map out her entire childhood in the constellations of scuffs and stains on the walls and furniture. She knows that, she pays a third of the rent, but she’s never felt the weight of that knowledge bearing down on her the way it is now, not even when she was afraid they were about to get served an eviction notice. Because it is him. Your regular landlord, when they hike up the rent or don’t do ass about the mould even though they’ve promised they’ll look into it seven times, they ain’t doing it at you. They ain’t even thinking of you. Apollo is. He’s thinking of her, specifically. It’s because of Rosario that he’s talking about going to tenants’ meetings and getting to know everybody and throwing money at stuff. She’s the reason he bought their home— shit, she’s the reason he even looked in their direction. Because she told him point blank that she didn’t need his help, not with cash or with study or with prophecy, so he had to go and find a kind of help that didn’t strictly necessitate her consent. He’s decided he’s gonna be her father whether she agrees to it or not. So now she’s living in Apollo’s house, and it’s suffocating her. The bitter powerlessness of it, blinding anger and paralysing dread turning her in impossible knots. Sure, she’s talked him into leaving her family alone for now, but when’s he ever made a promise he wouldn’t break when it starts to annoy him? What happens if he starts to think the afternoon a week she’s had to hand over to him isn’t enough quality father-daughter time? Or if he decides she needs his help again? At least when your regular landlord screws you, they don’t tell you they’re doing it for your own good. It’s no wonder Rosario can hardly think straight right now. She’s behind on sleep and behind on study, and at this time of night she should be catching up on one or the other, but instead she’s been reading the same page for the last half-hour, staring at the words and absorbing nothing. But she’s still Rosario, and if Rosario is gonna be getting nothing done, she’s gonna be getting it done productively. That’s the decision she comes to at 1:08 in the morning, when she leans back in her chair to crack her knuckles and her eye catches on the mocking green glow of the digits from her clock. That’s what pushes her defiantly to her feet and drives her to wrestle a bulky old sleeping bag out from the back of her wardrobe, and a matter of minutes later she’s pushing her way onto Apollo’s roof, laying it out and zipping the covers around her and reaching for her— No notebook. Dammit. Must’ve left it on her bed. Well, fuck it, she’s meditated (failed at meditating) enough times now that she remembers the basic sequence. Rosario slows her breathing the way Merlin’s taught her, stretches each inhale and exhale out to a count of three, four, five. It’s a clear sky tonight — bright, even, by New York standards — and the stars welcome her with a comforting familiarity. She lets her eyes wander along the line of the Milky Way, drawing it around her like a second blanket. The roof might belong to Apollo now, but this, this is still hers. He doesn’t own the stars. (Just one star. Just the only one humanity needs to survive.) The books say to visualise. Mostly they say it in crunchy woo-woo terms, like ‘imagine a pure tranquil gluten-free organic white light entering your body’, so Rosario usually ignores all of it. But the sky, the pale glow of the Moon, the whoosh and flow of the ever-present city traffic, the frost-tinged night air— these things are real, she breathes them in daily, and she craves them like oxygen tonight. Breathe in the stars. Vega, Polaris, Spica, millions of years younger and and magnitudes brighter and large enough to swallow the Sun whole. Breathe them in, and watch the arrogant fucker dwindle into insignificance. There’s other steps supposed to come after this. Stuff about progressive relaxation and mantras and even more visualisation exercises, and if Rosario had her notebook to consult she’d be flicking through to check the correct order. But she doesn’t, and she’s tired, and it’s easier just to lay back and breathe and bask in a light that Apollo could never touch. She recognises it when it happens, this time. Her eyelids have begun to droop, the starlight’s softening into a formless sea of silvers and indigos, one she’d happily float away on, and then there’s— it’s— a ripple that shudders through the sky-sea-sky, or maybe it’s running through her, sparking against her optic nerve— and everything flares blazes into impossible sharpness and Rosario sees The sky, the sky is writhing with snakes. There’s Serpens, arching his neck and thrashing free of Ophiuchus’ grasp. Draco, a hundred heads swivelling together, a hundred tongues flicking out in unison. Hydra— always Hydra, long and golden and sinuous and mindless of the smaller constellations brushed aside like so much detritus by the sweep of its tail. And in their centre, Boötes the Herdsman, shepherd’s crook held aloft, tinged brilliant orange with the light of Arcturus. He’s surrounded— the serpents ready to swarm or to scatter— hard to make out from the flailing movements— The tip of Hydra’s tail catches Libra’s scales, which tilt and swing drunkenly, and Crater the goblet teeters, spills— It’s a deluge. Dark amber water cascades over the edge of the cup in an endless torrent. The snakes are swimmers, they scarcely notice it, but Corvus, perched as always at Crater’s side, stands no chance. The little bird makes a valiant effort. It spreads its tail and works its wings and holds its head high even as the current sweeps it along. But it’s a crow, not a duck, and the water doesn’t roll off these feathers, it saturates them, weighing them down, and with every wingbeat the bird has to work harder. And the torrent shows no signs of slowing— The vision loosens its grip, then evaporates like so much water. Rosario sucks in a breath, so sharp and so cold she immediately explodes into a fit of coughing. She has to lever herself up, rasping and spluttering, and once she’s cleared her throat, once she’s swiped away the budding tears, she tips her head back again to see— Stars. They’re just stars now. But for a minute, before, they were— Fuck. Oh, fuck. |