Come To My Window

[caladwen]

Come To My Window (CR-verse)

I would dial the numbers,
Just to listen to your breath
I would stand inside my hell
And hold the hand of death
You don’t know how far I’d go
To ease this precious ache
You don’t know how much I’d give
Or how much I can take

It had been a week since the Split, as Mishka delicately referred to it in her head.

The room the Nyugens had given her was rather spacious; they had even included a chair near the window for her after she had commented on how much she liked to watch the sky. They were nice enough; they kept her fed and clothed, and sometimes even took her to town with them when they went. She was the one always sent to retrieve Callisto (who, though she didn’t like it one bit, she was forced to call Cassia) when she lagged behind in the nearest bookstore or other place of interest.

Lily Dale (Alexia, she enforced her brain) didn’t know what to do with herself without her other Sugarcube. She did whatever it took to keep her mind busy. To be perfectly honest, they were all doing a lot of that these days.

Mishka refused point-blank to call herself Delia in her head. She hardly answered to it anymore, and more often than not, it had to be called a few times before it registered that they were speaking with her. Delia was a name tied to her old life, just like [Rachel?] was tied to the girl that died that night at the hands of the wolf.

Cassia hardly came out of her room unless they were going to a bookstore or she was requiring one of the vital things she needed to function. She was resentful that she had been removed from Nanuq, for which Mishka couldn’t blame her.

Lily Dale almost never left the side of one of the Nyugen; she was learning various busy things from Victoria. Among these were knitting, sewing… the art of making things. Mishka had a scarf and pair of mittens already, knitted by Dale and Victoria respectively. She never wore them, though… the weather wasn’t near cold enough for anything but a light sweater. She doubted it would ever be cold enough… she lived in Albuquerque now, she kept telling herself. She didn’t even know if it snowed.

There were a few things that life at the Nyugens was missing. Some she could live without; playing in her wolf form was out. It would look suspicious if they had a white wolf running around in the back yard. Besides that, the logistics were screwed up; Callisto would squash her if she tried to play with her (not that Callisto *ever* wanted to play), and she in turn would squash Lily Dale.

Another of the things that she found she missed was the other theris. The spaces where her family for the past year had been were dreadfully empty. She had never been that close to Callisto or Lily Dale (besides the playful threats to eat her and her fellow Sugarcube). The Hat-Wearing Mafia had all gone to separate families, as had all of the other people she was close to.

As much as she tried not to think about it, as much as she tried to keep herself busy and not think at all… her thoughts would always return to the one major thing that her life at the Nyugens was missing.

Kami.

She was reminded of it all the time, when she woke up to the absence of the other girl beside her, when she entered her room and unexpectedly found that the bed was so much smaller than she remembered and there was only one person living there instead of two…

Immediately she found something else to dwell on, something that would occupy her mind and restrict her from thoughts of the other girl. The sky reminded her of Kami (Kami, the Japanese word for “God”, that ruled over the sky and heaven and the sapphire was the color of her eyes when the sun struck them at the right angle through the bedroom window and the way the clouds swam across the sky and pronounced a storm the same if she was feeling a strong emotion), so she was wont not to sit and look like she used to.

The moon was near full tonight, full enough to sing to, and Mishka had to do just that to prevent changing and howling at it as she would much prefer. But it turned out it was going to be cut short; the Nyugens were going into town again, and of course she would go with them. The bookstore was always a good stop, and the pocket money they gave her at random intervals allowed her to buy a book or two if she wanted. So far the collection that was a direct result of these outings were a few titles that she remembered the library at Sanctuary having; a few Harry Potter titles, an all-in-one collection of the Lord of the Rings, and three or four books of animal pictures.

These she couldn’t bother passing up, even though she avoided looking at them. They were her friends, in the pictures, not the random animals whose pictures they had taken. That panther, there, was Bastet, and that fox Brushy. There was Ayatzi, though she looked a bit forlorn without the usual accompaniment of hound.

She kept the book she had bought about wolves buried at the back of her bookcase. There were too many pictures of black wolves in there… Kami. Too many memories of black fur against white, of threading her human fingers through the soft fur on the wolf’s back and hearing Kami’s contented sigh. They all mixed together, became one shade of grey, exploding inside of her head and reminding her, always, of what she had no more.

Oh. That was her name now, wasn’t it? Delia Grey. Irony.

“Delia!” a voice echoed through the house, as if brought on cue by her thoughts. “We’re leaving. Aren’t you coming?” Victoria reached the door to her room and smiled at her.

Mishka remained looking down at her hands for a long moment, and when she raised her head to smile at her host-mother, she was no longer the white wolf theri, but the young woman the host family wanted her to be.

“Yes, sorry. Lost track of time.” She grabbed the black sweater off the desk-chair near the door and threw it on on her way out the door, following Victoria.

It turned out they were going to one of the larger malls in Albuquerque, to get gifts for one of the Nyugen family friends that had a birthday the next week. Delia, Cassia, and Alexia were given some money and run of the mall, to get whatever they wanted as long as they met their host-parents back at the entrance in two hours.

Alexia went to the food court, determined to get ice cream, while Cassia made a bee-line for the nearest Borders and Delia was left to do as she pleased. She browsed the free-air stalls for a moment, looking over such things as link decorations and sunglasses, before getting bored and looking in on a store that sold odd trinkets. She found a pendant in another store and decided right away that she was going to buy it.

It was silver, though probably not pure. There was a miniscule wolf howling at a similarly miniscule moon made of black onyx. It pinged something in her memory, one single word that floated over the din roar of the distractive walls that she’d built up around her memory.

Yin.

As soon as she was out of the store, she hung the chain around her neck and toyed with the pendant. She threw the bag away in the nearest trashcan and went to look in on Borders, to check on Cassia and perhaps pick up another title for her collection.

The book store, as it turned out, was on the other side of the mall. As she walked, she allowed her minds to escape over the walls with which she contained it and off towards the direction that Dallas surely lay. What would the Garcias be doing now? Where would Kami be, and what would she be thinking about?

There was a myth that Mishka read once, concerning distance and thinking about people. It said that when two people thought about each other, no matter how far apart they were, they would meet in the middle and their thoughts would mingle with each other’s. If that was the case, then surely Kami hadn’t thought of her since the separation.

Then, of course, she herself was guilty of the same crime. She didn’t want to think about Kami, as much as she knew she did. The pain it would bring would be too great, she felt, and she didn’t want the Nyugens to think there was something wrong with her. She didn’t want them to send her to live with the ferals.

Her mind was three hundred miles east as she wove her way through the crowded Albuquerque mall.

Come to my window,
Crawl inside,
Wait by the light of the moon,
Come to my window,
I’ll be home soon…

While her mind was away, her body was still moving, and as such, she ran into a woman with her arms full of shopping bags on the way to the bookstore. Her mind flew back to her body at an alarming speed, and she bent down automatically to help the woman with her shopping.

“I – I’m so sorry. Here, let me help…” she gathered up all of the things that had spilled out of the bags quickly, hoping to get to the bookstore in time. She had no idea for how long she’d been daydreaming, but she hoped that she wouldn’t upset her host-family by being late. Once the lady was set right again, Mishka set off for the Borders, which she could now see.

Checking her watch, she noticed with relief that she hadn’t been out of it for long. Indeed, Cassia was curled up in a chair, a book open on her lap. She might have been reading, but for the small fact that her eyes weren’t moving on the page. They just stared blankly down at it.

“Cassia,” she called quietly, walking to the chair in which her fellow-theri and once-Beta was now occupying.

“Mm?” was her only reply as she continued to look down at the page.

“Oh, good, I’ve found you,” Mishka stated, as though the answer of where she was going to be wasn’t always the same.

Cassia only nodded once, and Mishka gave up, setting off down along the shelves and browsing for anything interesting. The first thing that caught her eye was a book called, ‘Taoism: The Way’. Taoism, Mishka knew, was the culture from which the Yin-Yang was devised, the idea of the balance of everything.

She decided to buy it; she needed some new reading material anyway. Sighing, she went to the front of the store and spent the last of her money on the book. Not long thereafter, she had to rouse Cassia from her spot in the chair to go meet the Nyugens once more.

They met Alexia there, who showed off all of her purchases proudly, and then the Nyugens, who were a few minutes late, no doubt giving them some leeway with the time limit. The journey home was quiet, although Victoria asked them all about their excursion and received replies that meant nothing.

Mishka headed straight to her room when they reached the roomy house, laying her book out on the bed and changing into some more comfortable clothes. She curled up in her bed, despite the early hour, and started reading out of the book.

The ancient religion really wasn’t that interesting, granted, but it gave her something to do, something that wasn’t completely blocking out her memories and yet allowing her mind to travel somewhere different.

She tried to ignore the funny little back-flip her stomach did every time the word ‘Yin’ came up, but was largely unsuccessful. She kept reading through the text, shifting every half hour or so. When she looked up at the clock about halfway through the book, she realized that she had missed dinner. In fact, most of the occupants of the house were likely asleep by now.

She rolled over, looked once more between the book and the still-open window, and discovered that she was right in thinking she would get no sleep this night.

Keeping my eyes open,
I cannot afford to sleep
Giving away promises
I know that I can’t keep
Nothing fills the blackness,
That has seeped into my chest
I need you in my blood
I am forsaking all the rest

Just to reach you….