Chapter Text
He could smell her a mile away.
Piers had learned young that some people were very, very different from everyone else. He was one of them. Rosemary Winters was another. They were people, he had decided, who exploded so far beyond what could be considered normal that it was a surprise there was two of them so close together.
And Rose smelled weird, too. Very definitely not like anyone else, not even like dad or mamă, though maybe a little bit like them in a subterranean there-but-not-there kind of way, notable only if he concentrated hard enough. Rose smelled like a girl, of course (earthy and softer around the edges than boys did); she smelled young (talc, a little bit of blood);but mostly she smelled like the damp days right on the cusp of fall and winter, when everything was uncomfortably wet and the whole world stank of summer rotting away, and mamă said it was because of the mold, see, back when Rose was stolen as a baby, the thing that had made her own dad so strange. What made her strange, too.
He'd seen her sweating white; had made a dirty joke about it and earned a playful not-really-offended kind of punch on the arm. She only ever did those things when she was upset, weird things, and he got it. I get it, he’d say, and tell her a story his mamă told him about a time in preschool when he fell and broke his ankle, and got so upset from the pain and shock of it that he began growing hair all over his body. And Rose – well, Rose had laughed, so that was good, right? She’d been crying before. They were just past ten and different, and had reached a point where it didn’t feel good.
But they had each other. For a while that was enough.
He could smell her, a brackish, latex ooze. Ears twitched; that wasn’t good, that smell.
“Mister Redfield!” called his teacher, and when Piers tore his eyes from the door of the classroom he found her looking at him, half of her face flooded red in the light of the projector. “Perhaps you could offer some insight into this question?”
He hadn’t been listening. She knew he hadn’t been listening. He glanced at the cheerful blue shoes she was wearing and said, in a voice barely shaking, thick in his throat: “Sorry, I – I’m not feeling so good. I’m gonna go to the bathroom.”
He didn’t ask, but the faculty were careful around him, warned by his dad in a low rumbling murmur that Piers couldn’t make out even with his hearing being what it was. They were especially careful with words like sick or angry or stress. And he couldn’t blame them for that, really. He’d probably be worried, too.
He left the curious chatter of his classmates behind, grabbing his stuff and booking it from the room. The air felt a little pressed, and the taste of latex spread through his mouth, bitter and milkish. The squeak of his sneakers against the floor was a lonely ricochet of a sound. He was running, first a jog and then a sprint, God, the stink of her.
Piers found her in the girls’ toilets. She usually went there because the stalls were small and the main light had been broken for so long that Piers wondered if it had ever worked at all, leaving only the lamp over the mirror to give a white-wine glow. It was dim and easy in there, often quiet.
He heard the sniffling before he opened the door. Heard it stop abruptly when the hinges squealed. He didn’t bother hiding. There was only one locked stall, and he went into the stall beside it and hauled himself up onto the toilet so he could peer down over the top of the wall.
Her eyes were pale, luminous in the dark well she'd made for herself. Red and a little swollen, nose pink, inflamed from the scrub of her sleeve. She was glaring at him.
“Go away,” she said. Might have snapped it, too, if there’d been any strength to her voice. But all it did was rattle, hoarse in the way it only ever was after crying.
“Naw,” Piers drawled. He'd seen her like this often enough that he knew there was no point coddling. “I could smell you a mile off, y’know. You reek. I thought you’d start sprouting mushrooms or somethin’.”
It got a snicker out of her, at least. She crushed her fists to her eyes, face hidden by the ratty fall of her hair, and Piers saw the stark white ridge of her spine flash above the collar of her jacket, lilac snake of veins.
“Aw, hey. Can I come in?”
“No.”
Piers folded his arms on the edge of the wall and considered her, ignoring the burn in his calves from where he held himself on his toes. He was tall for his age (thirteen last week), which he had almost certainly inherited from his dad, though the coiled leanness of his body belonged to mamă. He still wasn't quite tall enough to be useful, though.
“That bad, huh? Was it Jim? I’ll bash his head in.”
Rose shrugged and pulled a wad of toilet paper from the dispenser, using it to wipe viciously at her hands. It came away just as Piers expected it to: like the watery sap of a broken stalk. She shoved her hands back into her sleeves and balled them up, anxious habit, and not for the first time Piers wanted to fold her up like a flower and put her in his pocket for safekeeping.
He thought a bit. Drummed his fingers on the wall and filled the room with a meaty, dull percussion. He glanced at the wall clock (broken), then at his wristwatch (birthday present from dad, fully digital, and he promised it wasn’t even tracked). 2:17pm. Close enough.
“Do you wanna go home?” he asked her, already reaching for the handkerchief in his back pocket. Safekeeping.
Rose did look up, then, her face shining with the gentle whiteness of her sweat like the chalky face of a geisha, her eyelashes clumped with tears. She nodded.
There was no need to question where home was.