He'd been so calm. That was the part that kept her up at night.
Lay sighed, her heart rate slowing, and rubbed her hands slowly over her face. Her hair was damp with sweat, her t-shirt clinging to her. She cradled her face, eyes closed, and just focused on breathing. Her cheeks were tacky beneath her fingers.
Gently, almost as if it were human, the vines that trailed over and around her bed brushed against her skin; the touch of a concerned younger sibling in the night, and when she fisted her hands against her eyelids, pulling her knees in closer to her chest, she felt the wide, cool waxy texture of the palm leaves brush against her calves.
But the plants weren't human. There was nobody else in the apartment to hear her cry, and yet she tried to keep it silent anyway. The foliage around her would know, anyway; they sensed that sort of thing. Reacted to it. And people were so fussy about their breath-plants, these days, especially the people who came to Lay. But while they brought good business, they also brought numerous complaints, about the quality of their oxygen, about the vibrancy of their ferns.
As if any of them knew a single thing about keeping something alive.
She sighed again, and swung her feet over the side of the bed, her feet sinking into the moss that covered the floor.
Across the room, the light outside the window burnt orange; dark red flames and smoke licking the sky. But inside, there was only the quiet rustling of the plants she tended, overspilling their pots and spilling over their trellises. She breathed in deeply, the scent of the freshly earth she'd turned that day, the damp of the rain in the corner. It always rained over her bed, and for all that she knew plants she couldn't quite work out why the ecosystem kept raining on her head. She'd moved her bed two days ago, which should give her another few nights, at least, before she woke up to a small storm.
She ran her fingers along the ivy, smiling slightly, and got to her feet, weaving her way through the forest she lived inside, to the one area she tried to keep clearer - the bathroom. It was all well and good having fronds in the shower, the toilet was another thing entirely. She allowed the moss, though; it was soft. Soaked up smells.
The sink had a small terrarium nestled in its bowl -- perhaps, once, it had been porcelain, but Lay didn't care to remember.
Not while she was awake anyway.
She flicked the light on and splashed water on her face, staring down into the small curling leaves, before meeting her own bloodshot eyes in the mirror.
"You've had better days," she murmured to herself. Then again, so had everybody else. So had the rest of the whole fucking world. She lifted a fist, but stopped, trembling, before she could thump it down again on the lip of the sink. It was barely hanging onto the wall to begin with, and if a pipe burst -- the plants.
It was all about the plants.
She was the best breath-plant tender this side of L.A. Her apartment was the most breathable place in the city, perhaps the world, though they didn?t know much about that anymore. The air outside-- well. Lay hadn't been outside for years.
Not since-- not since. She didn't need to go; she had her plants, she was safe in the glasshouses of her apartment with the plants that gave her oxygen and water and food and that was all she needed. She nodded at herself, firmly, as if that might help her believe it, and moved into the kitchen, or what was left of it.
She didn't cook with fire.
She had a small generator, though. Powered by the run-off water from the foliage, and it was enough to have a cup of tea, to steep some of the herbs she allowed herself to keep and dry.
Herbs were popular, though, and she didn't have a lot left -- it was the last of the mint, she noted, as she emptied the browning leaves into the cup. She'd only got to keep them because the man had suddenly decided he wanted rosemary in his bowl.
That's what the plants were for, of course. The only way to breathe was through plants, and the only way to go outside was suited up. She tended the plants that went inside the bowls, recreated her apartment's eco-system within endlessly varied shapes and sizes of glass. Miniature worlds.
But he'd been so sure.
"Damn you, Harry," she muttered into her tea. A drop splashed off her nose and into the cup. She sniffed. "If you?ve made my last mint tea salty, I swear to Mother Nature--" she half snorted a laugh.
Why had he taken the bowl off?
Why?
He'd been so sure. So sure that if they got high enough up that mountain, the air would be breathable, he'd been so obsessed with --
"We?ll be at the top of the world - we can touch the sky, Layla! There?s no way we can?t breathe in the sky,"
And he'd lifted it off, his hood still up and --
She could still see it. Could see the way his eyes, so green, had widened with realisation, the way the skin began to thicken and blister and peel, before his whole face had been obscured by smoke. That was when she'd started screaming. That was when she screamed, every time, every night, when she saw his hand reaching through the smoke where his face used to smile and laugh and breathe and --
Why didn't she scream before then?
Why hadn't he screamed? As his skin boiled from his bones, and yet he'd never made a sound.
She shivered, though it was rarely cold anymore, with the forest fires rampaging constantly. Even with the aqueduct protecting the city from burning, only glass could keep you safe from the air. Only glass.
She wondered if he?d been looking at her, before the smoke obscured his vision entirely.
If he'd seen her turn away, in those last moments. Or if he'd looked to the sky, that sky he?d been so determined to touch. If he'd only seen ash, where he'd hoped to find life.
(About 25 minutes of writing, minor rewriting as I paused and thought about stuff, and I fixed one typo, but otherwise completely untouched and done in one session!)
Topic: Draft 1 - Untitled (Read 1597 times)