Tamaya Yuuko no Monogatari

Chapter 43

Chapter 43

            Yuuko bolts awake with a strangled sound and flailing limbs, then holds her hands at the ready to defend herself as she snaps her head left and right in a futile search for the nightmares that had ceaselessly plagued her for the past few hours. The dead-stillness in her amour’s room slowly allows for her heart to steady it’s rapid pace, and she concentrates on the blood pounding through her ears in an effort to focus on anything except her lingering sensations of anxiety and dread…

            The terrors that had been haunting her had long since passed in reality, of course… years previously… but that still wasn’t much of a consolation.  The damage to her psyche had already been done… and no amount of time would allow that ingrained fear to dissipate.  No matter how much she wanted it to…

            The small seamstress twitches as a soft snort comes from her left, and she glances towards the source to find a happily-snoozing giant, rolled over on her side with a pair of thin pillows propping up her head.  She could feel a foreign, bare knee resting on her own thigh under the covers… a reassuring, possessive display… but the fact that the taller teen hadn’t woken up when she did kind of pissed her off.  As her loving girlfriend, it should only be proper that Misa-chan be fawning over her right now, damnit…

            “Tch.”  Yuuko snorts out a breath of annoyance, then pans her glare around the near pitch-black room in a search for something else to hate.  But there was nothing… so in an effort of sparing her lover any more unnecessary blame, she eases herself out of the shared mattress, slips into her borrowed, silken pajamas, then heads out to the hall and into the bathroom.

            Even having a quick pee and washing her face isn’t enough to exorcise her demons, so she plods downstairs, grabs a large glass of water, then moves over to her book-bag in the living-room and claims her near-empty package of berry-flavoured cigarettes.  Hmm… the only way to go into the back-yard was to head through the master-bedroom… damnit… might as well just have a smoke on the front stoop… at least there wouldn’t be much vehicle traffic at this hour…

            The short highschooler heads over to the main entryway, slips into her school loafers, then flips the deadbolt and slides through the door to sit on the edge of the tinted-concrete landing before firing up a stick of tobacco.  She finally feels the last of her tensions ease with the burning pain in her lungs, and she holds on to that sensation for as long as she can before blowing out a few mere traces of noxious fumes.

            Gods… how many times in the past week and a half was she forced awake by these nightmares?  A dozen?  Two?  And why had they never plagued her when she was living under her parents’ roof?  Was it because she was currently more relaxed?  Had she unwittingly let her guard down, and was only now starting to process all of the atrocities that had been done to her?  Shit… if that was the case… then maybe she’d be better off moving back in with her abusers…

            “Oh.”

            Yuuko abruptly cuts off her next drag mid-way, and snaps a fear-filled look over her shoulder as a shuffled step easily pierces the cold, silent night air.  “M-Miharo… san…”