daisy / d3 / {fin}

Mister Tom — a white lab rat that’d, somehow, climbed up to her window’s ledge one night — scuttled under her four-poster bed. He usually behaved more rodent-like than ever during downpours; a trait which Daisy also shared. Cocooned delicately in a fort of blankets, she gazed at the silver droplets as they plummet down the glass. It’s noisier than yesterday, thunder and rain roaring together in unison.

One ought to be at unease when they used a dead roommate’s bed sheets as rough and ready blankets but Daisy did not.

The warmth was a comfort whereas May, her dead roommate who succumbed to a malady, was an absolute spoilsport. She certainly would had Mister Tom thrown away. And, her crybaby persona was a nuisance. She produced more tears than the sky. The girl next door screwed with her sporadically, called her names, stole her cosmetics and May always broke tears. She would sometimes help her torture May; it was cut-rate entertainment at best.

The Austere Academy was not an ideal haven for most. The janitor told her not to run on the very first day because its floorboards were so prone to damage that they cracked into halves whenever you stomped hard on them. 

But, a two-third of Daisy’s breathing moments were spent here, memories sprayed onto rickety hallways. It was derelict here, but it was home.

Bricks in the walls webbed with green moss, apertures in the ceiling where rainwater leaks, windows that always appear closed for the sake of it.

( It suited her. ) 

Her parents discarded her at preadolescence on the muddied steps of an orphanage—a freckled eight year old with a worn teddy bear as her security net.

Since, she’d never staged an attractive personality to be adopted, to be enslaved by a pair of strangers. Too streetwise for the posh, too conceited for the poor. So, they had her transferred to a Preparatory institution: The Austere Academy. The world and its spectrum did not have a place reserved for this sharp-tongued feline.

“You’re going to die alone, Daisy.”

( “No one fucking cares, Alyssa.” )

“Ugh, all of you are taking so long. How long does it to take to move a few crates, nutheads.”

It was dark out. Storm had subdued to a silvery drizzle a moment ago but she was wearing rivulets of rain from downpour earlier. A canine howl of wind rushed past from the fields ahead, forcing Daisy to interlock her arms together over torso.

“If you’re not done in the next few minutes, I’m going to call the authorities on you all and have you arrested for second-degree manslaughter because I am freezing to death here.” Each syllable, articulated with staged malice to hide the shivers her tongue was wrapped in. She wasn’t resilient to the outside elements; so what. Beneath the layers of steel and poison, she was as sheer as and as humane as the rest.

And, perhaps that stirred her hunt for power. That led her to trail after power in the dark, because she revered a force that wasn’t mundane or humdrum.

Because, she'd shed tears for a mother who threw her away like one mere trinket and swore to not waste more tears for that red widow.

Because, she’d been jeered at, by posh daughterless families who visited the orphanage like misted shadows, rising at dusk and subduing at dawn.

Because, her breathing moments were a maelstrom of turbulence, broken toys and nihilism. After a series of unfortunate events, one start to adapt, to familiarize and then, to metamorphose.

( I do fucking care, Alyssa. )