[modern au - fic: circle]

[population_ctrl]

Title: Circle
Characters: Regate Duroc (FOC), mentions of Jean Louis and Mireille.
Summary: For the prompt: It's time to leave, I'm really not sorry. NaNo preperation.





Circle

It’s time to leave
I’m really not sorry

*
She’s five years old. She watches the woman in the light summer’s dress close the door, the empty hallway falling into darkness. It’s cold in the shadows; her hands balled into fists, she steps closer and knocks on the door. She’s five and the knocks are childish. There’s no response. From inside the room, a slow waltz with hints of dressed-up Classical transparency leaves her shut out definitively. And the woman locked away, in turn.

It takes ten minutes before the house falls quiet, the noise from downstairs fading into nothing with a familiar abruptness. During which she simply stands there, staring at the locked door. She’s freezing, goose-bumps raised all over her bare arms; her unwashed, pink t-shirt is stained from playing outside in the sun. She doesn’t think about changing it. She’s just five. But she thinks that in a moment, he’ll see – her brother will notice and he’ll disapprove. The thought alone makes her clutch the fabric between her tiny hands, pulling at it awkwardly and hoping that the shadows will cover up her imperfections. She knocks on the door again.

There’s no response.

“What are you doing?” He’s walking past her before she can react, his pace brisk and dark eyes narrowed in the shadows. She never heard him coming and it makes her want to cry. She’s too young to understand what sort of failure she’s just experienced, here, in front of a door that won’t open – but she knows that he’s seen and the thought alone is devastating.

“Go change that shirt,” he says, sounding distracted as he pauses outside the door. Fixes her with a stare that seems just a bit dazed, his left eye slightly unfocused. “Regate.”

“Yes?” She’s looking up at him almost fearfully because she can’t expect anything from him but rejection, doesn’t know anything else and even this young, she expects it to hurt. It always hurts.

“Get lost.”

And so she does.

*

She holds onto his disinterest for years. It’s the only constant she knows and even when she finds out he’s still alive, that he’s alive and hasn’t bothered to look for her – she doesn’t let go. Surely, she thinks, it’s normal enough. That he wouldn’t know. That he’s been too busy, like her, fighting just to walk. It has taken Regate fifteen years to understand that she’s been crippled for life. After all, she walks just fine. She doesn’t wake up in pain every day or require supportive instruments to get from A to B. She’s got a beautiful girlfriend and a future that doesn’t leave her too frozen to move. It’s pretty much perfect, really, and there’s room for Jean Louis’ consistent disregard because she knows that it can’t be helped. After spotting his picture in the paper, she spends weeks composing a letter. Feels fantastic about taking the first step for once, about catching him off guard with something different than a stained shirt or a half-ruined pigtail.

Then one evening, the letter almost finished in her drawer, she catches him on television, painting their past existence onto every public surface of the Luxembourgish media. His own, first, and hers by proxy. She can’t even turn it off – because once more, she’s frozen in place with her hands balled into fists, the hairs on her arms standing on end and pain rushing through her. Crippling her all over. She doesn’t crumble, not in the literal sense. But she’s reminded forcibly that yes, she’s been injured beyond true recovery and his disregard is a crutch that’s finally broken beneath her weight. As the public fawns over his tragic family history, their alcoholic father, their broken home and his poor sisters, left to fend for themselves in the light of their mother’s lack of love, she rips up the letter and throws it in the fire.

Half a year later, he’s only seats away from leading the country, his last name (theirs) more or less public property. Angelique holds back at least a hundred questions and she doesn’t offer any answers. There’s nothing left to say. The door’s been closed again and this time, he isn’t meeting her outside in the darkness either. She doesn’t invite his rejection this time; she simply takes it for granted and hobbles on.

*

To: Regate Duroc (reduc@hotmail.com)
From: Jean Louis Duroc (jld@cdp.com)
Subject: RE: Sponsorship.

Regate,

In response to your request, I am happy to inform you that I will be granting Mds. Angelique a sum of 20.000 euro in support of her upcoming exhibition. Should she choose to accept the grant, please have her inform Monsieur Alain Grünner by way of the contact details attached to this e-mail.

Fondest regards,

Jean Louis Duroc
Minister of State


She pushes the door open, makes the attempt after years of hesitation and self-deceit. Simultaneously shocked and disgusted to realise that it wasn’t even locked in the first place.

*

It takes another ten years before she understands. Before she realises that the implications aren’t merely echoes from downstairs, shadows on the wall – they’ve living, breathing and terrible, marks of black and blue flashing through his wife’s tender make-up. Like she’s wearing a clown’s mask. Regate watches her away from prying eyes at Angelique’s largest exhibition yet (sponsored, as always, by him), looks on in silence as Mireille fixes the smears on her cheek with further layers of expensive concealer. She doesn’t want to say anything; not to this woman who’s wearing such an expensively beautiful autumn dress along with the most unattractive shade of rouge she’s ever seen. It’s a nauseating combination and when Mireille walks away to join the guests once more, Regate doesn’t follow. Doesn’t seek out that turned back or the figurate sound of Mozart because the game’s stale by now and the door’s been blown to pieces before her feet.

Instead, she dismisses him. Finds him amongst the crowd and pulls him aside, telling him to get the fuck out of her life. To get lost. Take the money, make them pay it all back or whatever; just leave. Because she may be crippled for life, yes, and reduced to begging for scraps from him, like he’s the greatest benefactor in the world. But the story ends when there’s no character left to breathe the plot. And to her, then and there, he’s air. Glass. Less than he’s ever been before, with all his power and his beaten-up trophy wife and his tiny, tiny life.

It’s too little and too much at the same time. With Angelique’s arm around her waist, she makes do with less – walks with her limp, her illusions crackling apart and fading along with the sound of their fancy car, speeding off into the evening.

~