WHO Luna WHEN Thursday night WHERE The apartment WHAT Trying to avoid sleep and thinking about the past WARNINGS emotional domestic abuse?
The whole apartment is climate controlled, a good thing when Peitho’s body against hers is warm and soft. The goddess is asleep, her breathing deep and slow, but Luna can’t quite get there. She doesn’t want to fall asleep because she knows that nightmares wait, just on the other side of it.
The week old bruise on her face has faded to yellow, and during the day it’s now easy to hide with a good quality concealer, a little colour correction, and a setting powder. There had been an offer to have Hecate heal it, but Luna had turned it down. If Hecate heals her again then surely Luna just gets broken again. It feels like a waste of magic, and Luna can’t stand the idea of magic becoming a mundane thing to her, becoming a tool at her own disposal instead of the wonderful thing that it still is.
Imagine the idea of no longer finding wonder in that?
No, Luna will keep the bruise and let it heal. It isn’t like the injury on her throat that hurt with every breath and swallow. A bruise on her face she can live with. Skin heals - that’s its whole purpose. And although Hermes and Peitho had near insisted on getting it fixed, Luna stood fast. It’s fine, she told them.
It’s fine, has become her mantra. She forms those words on her tongue more easily than any other, and without even thinking about them. This is fine.
She’s a cartoon dog in a burning room.
The sigh when Luna gets out of bed is internal, and she goes to stand by the window to watch the night city, arms crossed.
When she’d first moved into this place with all its walls of glass in every direction, Luna had felt so exposed and on display, like everyone in the whole city would see her every move. But she had come to realise that she didn’t really care if someone saw her. If there was someone out there with a telescope pointed at their apartment, what did it matter?
With a view like this, what is a little privacy relinquished? Luna doesn’t even really think about it anymore, and stands frequently naked in front of those windows watching the tiny people move in other apartments. Everyone in this city lives inside their own little box and forms their opinions with only the briefest of glances into others. The glass apartment only serves to make the metaphor a tangible thing.
As Luna walks back to her room she hears a buzzing and stops by the bathroom, looking in.
Inside she sees not the bathroom, but Bruno’s tattoo studio. There Luna is lying on her side in the chair and Bruno is down beside her arse, tattoo machine in hand. They are arguing about the shark that he’s started on the side of her hip.
“I don’t want it,” she says again, repeating herself. “Bruno, you said it was going to be a koi!”
“And I’m sick of koi,” he sighs, stretching the skin on her hip with his gloved hands. “This is going to look better, so stop complaining.”
So far he’s only done the line-work and she stretches her neck to look down at it again. She is angry, frustrated, unheard. “No,” she says firmly. “Stop, I hate it. I don’t want an ugly shark on me!”
Bruno’s grip tightens on her leg and he looks up at her seriously. “Luna,” he says in that tone she knows so well, the one that says this discussion is about to end. “I am finishing this shark. And when it’s done you’re gonna feel like such a fucking idiot, because it’s gonna be sick.”
“Bruno,” she whines, and then flinches when he intentionally presses the machine harder than it needs to go to make a point, to shut her up. He continues like that for the rest of the session and each time the machine skims over her hip bone, Luna’s stomach lurches at the spark of pain.
The edges of the shark are blown out when it heals, looking forever like it's swimming through a pale bruised ocean. Bruno blames her for being a difficult canvas. When a fellow artist sees it, they critique it together, Luna standing still while he holds the band her her underwear to the side and her skirt up. Bruno tells the other artist that Luna wouldn’t stop moving. He says, as she’s standing there being pawed, that she has terrible skin and it makes her hard to work on.
Three weeks later Luna is in the studio and watches Bruno tattoo a friend with a truly beautiful koi. Bruno smiles up at Luna and to her it looks slightly smug, but only enough that she feels like she might be imagining it.
She never gets a koi.
Luna closes the bathroom door and heads towards the kitchen, feeling like a glass of water will settle her, might centre her back into her own body. She has her first dance class tomorrow and knows that it will help with that feeling.
In the dark apartment - never truly completely dark with the city lights coming inside as they did - Luna stands in front of the kitchen counter and slowly downs a large mug of water.
A quiet laugh and Luna turns around.
In the kitchen, her parents are dancing.
Luna, twelve years old, watches them from the doorway, keeping half hidden as she does.
There is no music but her parents are swaying, her father’s hands on the small of her mother’s back. Luna feels like a tiny voyeur, but she doesn’t know how to turn away. They never really touch her, and she is not used to seeing them intimate, even with each other. Sometimes, when she feels lonely, Luna pretends that her parents are robots or body snatchers or yeerk-infested humans, and that’s why they ignore her.
If her real parents were still there it would be different. It can’t be helped that these versions of her parents don’t stroke her hair or ask about her day or hug her goodnight, because they couldn’t. It wasn't in their nature or their programming.
But… they dance with each other in the kitchen and her father leans down to kiss her mother’s neck and they both chuckle and Luna presses herself against the door frame.
Do yeerks dance? Do robots kiss? Do body snatchers have such tender hands and eyes for each other?
Her mother slips away, smiling, towards the dishes and Luna draws back from view, because it is dangerous to be seen by invaders that have replaced your parents.
(But do invaders love each other?)
She goes up to her room and tries not to picture them down there together like that.
In the present, Luna puts down the glass quietly and rubs at her face.
She’s too tired for all of this, too tired to keep her thoughts straight. She needs sleep, even if that means the terrible visions of Michele-Ares will come to harass her.
Another glass of water and a couple of sleeping pills, and Luna practically tumbles into her own bed, and into the waiting and willing arms of sleep himself.