Chapter Text
Click, click, click.
The rotten knowing that all she’s ever been is a victim of living gave her a headache.
The heat welling like flaming drapery on the back of her eyes and on her frontal lobe as she held back rivulets of choking tears gave her a headache.
Remembering the disgusting, itching feeling, the fear, it gave her a headache.
She wanted to strangle herself on the spot, to grip those revered hands around the soft of her constricting throat and squeeze, squeeze the breaths already caught by her repressed sobs until astringent saccharine pooled into her windpipe.
Her head felt like it was closing in on her blazing mind, a navy haze tightly wrapping her fermenting, aflame brain, eyes that felt like they were doused in gasoline, a burning teary inferno that singed her fogging, heated airway.
And the repetitive sound of clinking rosary wasn’t doing much to ease it this time, not this night. Not in this room without windows. Not in this place without safety.
Click, click, click.
It gave her a headache
She wanted to cry, to bash her head into the marred wall she was collapsed against, to sob until she couldn’t see through the flaming clouding of her seemingly ever-falling tears. To finally let out every single bit of terror-driven charred disdain infesting the space somewhere in the middle of her chest. But she couldn't, for her sister, who was only separated from her by thin, deteriorating drywall, would hear. Finally hear her, and understand. Understand that their violating stares were eating her alive. Understand that the hands that itched to desecrate her had already done so, without even having had grazed the top of her skin. Understand that she was reaching her limit.
But again, she couldn't, for telling her so would only make the current situation exceedingly worse. Terribly worse. Woefully worse. She begged she’d never uncover how she felt, lift the veil that was her gentle, blissfully smiling face to unearth festering thoughts, anxieties, and premonitions. The mortifying prophecy; Her downfall. Her flatlining ruin- because her purity and her glory would be robbed from her in the end. Because she would be nothing more than the thing they saw her as in the end.
Her true feelings. Her pains.
Leaning, rocking, depending against the tarnished wall, trembling rosary beads of a cloudy, ceramic color were wound serpent-like around her hand. They gently clicked as her timid fingers rolled against them, counting. Counting each number, engraving each digit in her brain with noticeable promptitude. In desperation, maybe.
Click, click click, reciting the ever-growing numbers until her brain went numb.
-
After a few minutes, the room she sat in, which was once full of haggard, harrowed breathing and the hasty and frantic clanking of dull rosary, fell silent. Her figure, which was putting its weight on the yellowed walls of the room, slowly shifted itself up and brought the now-quiet beads to the left side of her chest and squeezed, holding them incredibly tight against her loose undershirt. The burning of her formerly-panicked body still radiated through it. She could feel it on her fingers. And the side of her hand. And in the whittled, white, and perfumy bones in her arm.
Rosary rolled in her pale palm as she leaned limply against the wall, still, lifeless. Like a hung painting or a resting vase she was until she broke the serene, empty silence with a much-needed deep and shuddering breath, which she then let exhaust with a shaky sigh, chest heaving with it once and hard against the stiffness of the drywall. She could feel the miasma leaking from her skin. Flowing out of her like post-cooked steam. Wafting out of her like post-burnt smoke.
After a minute of sitting again, perched, still, like a porcelain doll, basking in the murky silence and her own dissipating pessimist vapor, she finally somewhat soothed. Clearly no longer crazed, burning, and panicked, she raised her head to look up at the dark of her tattered ceiling, blonde curls gently falling over her shoulders with slow movement.
She stared for a while, maybe whispering silent prayers, begging for them to be answered, yearning for solace, for salvation.
She stared up, for a long while, cloudless whispers enfolding her mind, before she finally blinked back down, content, a serene floral golden glow alight in her eyes.
Just a little longer.
Things will get better.
They need to.
They have to.
-
“Barbara,” she heard a voice say from outside her room, and although the voice did its best to carry a serious front, it was basked in warmth. A sweet warmth, a kind only her sister had for her. Maybe there was a shadow of concern in her tone, too. Maybe a little.
“Yes, Jean?” Barbara answered drowsily, stretching out of her bed. It was still night out. She could tell, because Jean’s voice wasn’t accompanied by a yawn and didn’t sound terribly exhausted, worn, and barely audible like it did in the mornings, when the pollen-colored sun she couldn’t see rose to permeate the clouds with a petalling pink. And because she could see the hall lights were on beneath the crack of the door.
“You need to be at Diluc’s by 10, and it's already half past nine. Are you gonna skip performing today?” she spoke as soon as she heard Barbara was awake.
Please. Yes. Skip, please. Please. Please. Please, please. Please. She begged.
But that wasn’t an option.
“No, I didn’t see the time. Sorry for falling asleep, I’ll get ready now.”
After a second or two long pause, the response from beyond the door finally came.
“Alright.”
-
The flowered sheets pooled beneath her as she slipped off her stiff mattress in the dark, hair unkempt, undergarments wrinkled.
Grabbing a hairbrush on the way and flipping on the lights, she made toward her floor-length mirror, leaving her now-illuminated bed disheveled. She didn’t bother tidying her blankets and covers, since she’d be back to ruin them soon anyway.
At least, she hoped.
Barbara locked eyes with her reflection through the dirtied glass, and began combing through her hair, separating tangled, blonde honey curls.
She prayed Diluc would be there when she arrived. Typically, things were safer when he was tending the bar. People didn’t bother her. Didn’t even dare to look at her weird. Like they were afraid he would notice their behavior and castrate them, or something. Which means they knew they were in the wrong when they did what they did, but did it anyway.
Or Kaeya, too, but he only came when Diluc was there. So it didn’t really make much of a difference.
She tugged the brush through a knot.
Despite the fact that Diluc seemed cold and she was, without a doubt, mildly uncomfortable around him and preferred being around the friendlier Kaeya instead, she can’t deny the safety he provided her. Although he probably was entirely oblivious and had absolutely no idea what was really going on, she was still grateful. Beyond measure.
Eventually, after dragging the brush through her locks over and over again, Barbara’s hair was smooth and gently coiled. She put the comb away, then turned, walking, from her tarnished, unframed mirror to her dresser to change.
She’d learned not to put on makeup when heading to the bar anymore.
Now in front of her dresser, she bent down, freshly-combed curls bobbing. Barbara picked out her usual performance wear, a knee-length white dress with some intricacies on the lace fringe and silver ornaments adorning the collar and ends, dove-colored tights, and a coat in similar fashion that she draped over her shoulders. The coat was more of a recent addition.
Slipping on her earrings, plain hollow silver hearts, and her shoes, white and gently heeled, she was at last, fully dressed.
Her bottoms clicking against the cold wood floor, she slowly left the coaxing comfort of her bedroom and entered the better-lit basically barren hall, which led to the living room, where Jean was. There were old, graying photos hung on the same cracking walls and sat on the same dark brown tables in the corridor. Some of her and Jean. Some of their mom and dad.
Just up ahead, Jean was seated on a fairly worn navy sofa angled to the side, organizing a handful of files sprawled haphazardly on the living room coffee table, which you couldn’t even see half of beneath the mass of papers, as she waited. As soon as she heard the signature clacking of Barbara’s white shoes approaching close enough to the living room, she turned her blonde head towards her, putting down the documents in her hands and offering a gentle smile as Barbara’s blue eyes met hers. “You ready?”
“Mhm.” Barbara responded, nodding.
And with that, Jean rose neatly from her seat, and they were off.
-
You could see Xinyan’s head bobbing as she walked, her red-dyed and black spiked pigtails following the same yet slightly delayed rhythm her similarly decorated headphones were blasting, playing one of the many mind-numbing vehement riffs she had downloaded on her phone. She strode down the road, hands in the soft pockets of her black sweater, golden eyes attentively watching the cracks in the pavement ahead, and even though she seemed significantly more focused on the dark and poorly lit road beyond, her body, perhaps due to natural instinct, still moved in sync with each chord.
If this was any few weeks before, she would be taking her sweet time to enjoy her only dosage of daily freedom, her necessary life-support: metal and hard rock- completely zoned out and lost in her own distant realm, the music taking complete control of her every bodily function. The only reason she was entirely mentally present right now was because of a goal she had in mind and an encounter a few weeks before. An encounter with an angel.
The day had been similar to every one that came before, with Xinyan taking her routine nightly stroll along the cracked, gray-beige pavement lined with distant street lamps eluding a very pale golden light, their gentle and weak illumination barely persisting against the dark’s purple haze. The volume was up, and her head, although it wasn’t violent per se, was still nodding to the rhythm of each riff. Drifting, melting in the solace, her body like that of a puppet’s, being moved along by tight strings, except, these strings were woven from hearty, hair-pulling lyrics, bass, guitars, and drums.
And right now, things were going how they went every other therapeutic night. She was walking down the street, past homes and shops, playing songs until her worries melted like ice left vulnerable during a violent August thunderstorm. Except maybe, this night, she was walking a little further than she typically would, her frozen troubles a little more frosted than they typically were.
And that’s why she ended up passing by a certain bar she had never really seen before and also why she ended up stopping dead in front of it. Turning to the large glass window offering a somewhat scuffed panoramic view into the small shop, she lowered her headphones to her neck, and peeked inside. Peeked inside to see the gentle lines that made up a face she had never seen before. Peeked inside to hear the muted sounds of an angel's voice, illusionary white-feathered wings sloped and folded against the soft curve of her well-dressed back.
Before Xinyan even knew it, she had already been standing for well over 10 minutes, her soles melted into the ground, listening and listening as the blonde girl’s songs began and ended through the muffling of the slightly scratched transparency that was the glass window of the bar. Xinyan was utterly captivated. Bewitched. Stolen. How could someone look so purely gentle, so pretty, so loving? How could someone sound so truly sweet, so kind, so warm?
She didn’t know. And maybe that was why- maybe that was the reason she had stood there for half an hour, listening attentively outside of the building, all the way until the end of the performance, and all the way until the beautiful blonde girl herself had tidied up her belongings and was making her way to the bar’s exit.
Yet although she was pretty and Xinyan was undeniably drawn to her like a moth to a flame, she was also shy. Xinyan had just watched her for 30 minutes straight, on her sore booted feet, with her headphones, which she completely forgot about, still playing music and hanging loosely around her warm neck.
The door of the bar creaked as it opened, letting out the teeming shouts and laughter of the filthy drunkards inside, polluting the almost silent dim outdoors as it flooded out around the illustrious her.
Xinyan’s blushing face turned away in a hasty panic, and she immediately stepped back a few steps before pressing herself to the clay bricks of the building and slipping around towards the side of it, out of sight, breathing heavily and cheeks reddening.
She looked even more perfect up close.
She desperately wanted to take a peak around the corner, just one more glimpse at the beautiful silver-dipped and gold-strewn body that made up her every astrally thin fiber, but her feet were tightly wound with fear to the cold cement. She was afraid of being seen- seen by someone so revered and lovely. Afraid of losing her chance forever.
“Barbaraa~!” a voice louder than the rest of the high pandemonium from the mini winery broke, almost gross-sounding.
“Um, yes?” a gentle voice responded, like an angel’s sigh, or the elliptical lazy traces of god’s misty fingers. Somewhat like heaven-sent ceramics submerged in a sun-warmed river.
Xinyan’s breathing immediately caught as she strained to listen.
Her.
“Are you leaving already?” the nauseating voice spoke again, now accompanied by a second smiley-sounding dumpster hound-
“Yeah, come play a few more!”
“Mhmm!”
“Sorry, I really have to get home..” she muttered, and when Xinyan heard this, she envisioned her lovely face, pale fan of blonde lashes downcast as she gazed at the ground in discomfort.
She swallowed.
“And do what? Come on, stay~!” the first voice cooned again before lowering into a heavy whisper. “We’re lonely without you.”
“Oh- um- I really can’t, I’m sorry! Jean’s here to pick me up. I really got to go-” and before they could respond, she gave an apologetic nod and an almost unintelligible word of departure, before turning away and scurrying down the road, her low white heels clacking against the pavement as she did so. And just like that, she had slipped away.
The grimy drunken pair stood there, confused and stumped.
And Xinyan also stood there, very confused but not so stumped, hidden in the shaded side of the brick walls of the bar.
That was a night that still haunts her. A night whose colors manifest in the fog of her dreams. A night that holds her gently as she stirs from sleep.
The night she saw an angel.