Cherry || b.barnes

02 || Cherry

Headaches are the first thing to greet me when I wake up again. Without any orientation, I take a few seconds to inhale and exhale, trying to recall what has happened. I can count on one hand how often I have been beaten into unconsciousness, and it definitely aren't happy memories. According to that, my mood has sunken onto the same level as the wrack of the Titanic.

The light behind my lids must be bright, so I rather cautiously lift them, trying to adjust to the environment. Slowly, I get aware of being in a sitting position, back resting on something hard. With the movement of my head, my neck chimes into the choir of pain, and I grunt a curse underneath my breath. I try to move my hands, but my assumption unfortunately is verified: I'm tied to a chair, being kept in position. I tug on the strains lazily, getting a feeling of their tightness while my gaze roams about the room.

Grey surrounds me in a light shade, probably concrete that builds a square room. In front of me, there is a black desk, and the room itself smells of nothing but dust mixed with the scent of new furniture. White light flashes down from neon pipes, and I push back the shudder when the wall in my front suddenly dissolves, first depicting a bluish shining checked wall, and behind that, maybe five meters ahead, a black staircase with no banister leading upwards.

What's more important, though, is the young woman tapping on a flat screen in her hands opposite to me behind the checked wall. She has a rather light shade of skin, although the features of her face remind me somewhat of Asia. Short, brown hair locks to her shoulders, and she wears a pair of blue jeans with a black top and a red-checked, open button-shirt. For a brief second, the bluish, transparent wall disappears into nothingness, until she enters the cell, and it closes behind her again. There comes a faint buzz with it, and I suspect it to electro-shock me should I get the idea of running through.

I immediately begin analyzing everything and anything about her might being important in terms of being able to harm me. I know there's a pistol hidden, the neck of it buried into the waistband of the jeans behind her back. There is no reality in which I could mistake that distant yet unique, piercing scent of gunpoweder. Otherwise, her sweet perfume overshadows a smell that isn't quite human, though it is not not-human. It confuses me, but I'm smart enough not to let it show. Any emotion will be used against me, and the fact I'm in their hands is chilling me enough. Features having moved not once since I woke, I look up at her, happy that I wisely changed clothes before I went to Leo.

The young woman lays down the technical device on her side of the table, before finding a seat and taking in my sight. For a brief moment, almost not to identify if I hadn't been paying attention, her gaze sticks on my eyes. Like everyone else's does the moment they take my appearance in, because my eyes are unusual for everything else my body is indicating at. Most of my features, I inherited from my mother. She is Cuban, born as I was in Artemisa, and so, strangers see me as a Latina woman, assume me as such. Which I obviously do look like, although my round face with sharply chiseled features, relatively thin lips and slightly lighter skin shade do not really fit to the stereotype. Most strikingly countering my heritage, though, are my eyes. My mother used to tell me they were like her mother's - unique, something I could people easily get in awe with. Personally, I'm definitely not that satisfied with them. They are almost colorless, a bright shade of grey like the clouds in the sky not being ready to rain down, yet denying the people from the beauty of the wide blue horizon. The only thing breaking that endlessness is a zickzack-ring around my pupil, dilating and shrinking with its diameter and shining in a mixture between grass-green and azure blue. Short: my eyes are both natural and unnatural, stunning everyone who first gets sight of them, and this woman in my front is no exception. I would almost swear the team behind her, observing the interrogation that very likely is incoming, are also surprised.