Jean-Pierre leaned back from his work, the soft click of under-used lungs filling air preceding a long, slow sigh blown down to ruffle the hem of his shirt. The pencil remained poised atop his thumb and under his forefinger, nestled into indentations that had formed between his fingers. His right hand reached up rubbing at his face and squeezing the bridge of his nose. "Auugh,Tabarnack.Not this sh*t again."
Saffron had a single moment where she noticed that her father had no pulse, that the spark of neural activity had similar bouts of fits and starts to Abby's, that everything about the world hummed to a slightly different tune to those massive vulpine ears. That moment disappeared once she caught his words. "The F*ck you trying to say, Dad!? HUH!?!?" The distance from the kitchen to Jean-Pierre was about six meters. Saffron's leap over the island counter closed it in less than a second. Her momentum knocked the chair back as she took hold of her father's right arm, twisting her hips to yank it up high and reveal his flank. An elbow strike, two punches and a leopard-hand shattered every floating rib that he had on that side. "You leave a f*cking--" Her nails dug into his right forearm and tore in, tendons making a soft twang as she shredded the muscle all the way down to the wrist. "--string of kids behind--" She caught him twisting back into his arm. She tucked her elbow into his and slammed his palm into his face, jamming his own fingers into his eye sockets. "--that you enchanted before f*cking up again??" The blood which seeped out was cold, and his skin was clammy, like seafood taken out of the fridge on a hot day. ".. HUH!? ... You F*cking Loser??"
Jean-Pierre's left hand simply kept drawing while he laid flat on the ground, catatonic. The rhythmic scritch and scribble was the only indication that he retained his function; no breath, no pulse, no flush to his cheek. On the corner of a piece of paper, a minimal image showed an overhead shot of the outline of an '88 Honda Accord, T-boned by a Ford Taurus on the passenger's side. A black scribble had been placed in the driver's seat, and a five-petaled rose in the passenger's side. A cross set above some squiggles for grass had been drawn next to this, with the same five-petaled rose above. The weak voice chimed out again, in weak Quebecois French. "Saffron is dead. Saffron is dead, and I'm only hurting myself again. This isn't real, but it's still happening..."
His words... the image on the paper... Saffron's eyes ticced back and forth over the image as she shook. She reeled forward as the blood vacated her head, leaving her as pale as her father below. She slid from the tipped over chair, hands still up, still with bits of skin dangling from her nails as she inched, bit by bit into a corner... then flopped down. Her exhales came in puffs, at first, inhales shallow. She tugged the skin from her nails, and tossed them to the floor. Almost immediately, they began to stink and wilt in time-lapse. She plunked her rear against the wall, set her hands on her knees, and tilted at the waist, dangling her head down as she took slow, deep breaths to keep from passing out. "... Hold on... I'm... I'm sorry.. but... could you..."
The syrupy blood had already coagulated in Jean-Pierre's sockets, and the ribs made noises like muffled firecrackers as they re-knit from their pulverization. "You died in a car crash when you were thirteen, three days after your birthday... You hit me just now right where your head landed when your neck snapped. It broke my ribs then. I broke my leg when I turned to catch you while we tumbled into a ditch." His right hand fumbled for a piece of paper as he rose to a kneel, swiping, swiping, then finally grabbing a sheet once the tendons wired themselves back into place. "I see you every few nights or so. Some nights, a child, others the young woman you never grew up to be... and then there are nights like this where you look too f*cking ridiculous for me to take my mind seriously.You look like some... Brandon Graham doodle to fill out a crowd scene by using a curves and a tail to take up more space when he tires of those meticulous details he adores so much. I must have aftereffects from that silly girl at the rave dressed as a ragdoll, tripping like Keaton, no?"
Saffron flexed her fingers against her kneecaps as she exhaled, watching a moth trundle across a bit of floor before taking off to smack against the window. "You know..." She scritched the velvety down at the left side of her mohawk, staying down for a while longer, but regaining the pink in her cheeks and the breath in her lungs. Her ears tilted a bit as she started to get her bearings, easing up to stand, but still crossing her arms over her middle. "... That part... should be the part that, like... doesn't bother me." She blew out the same downward sigh as her father, rattling the V-shaped neckline on her baseball T before scratching the scar on her nose. "Aaaanyhow... is uh... this..?" She peeked out the window, squinting a little and rotating her ears, then rocking up onto the balls of her feet, and back onto her heels. "Ope, this is France."
"Oui oui!" Jean-Pierre chuckled and tilted up his chair, setting the board on his desk aside, and slipping another into its place. "Somessing zat tuu much drink can make more of, eh?"
She squeezed her eyes shut with a little groan... then finally spasmed from the shoulders up in a chuckle, a smile pulling at the corners of her petite, plush lips. "Your English is rotten, but... good to know you still have your sense of humor." She felt around in her pocket and drew out the train schedule, along with her initial ticket from Paris to Arras, dated for... two hours from then, after a plan of a week of The High Fashionsssz oggling. She pursed her lips and blew out a raspberry... then slid the ticket into her pocket. "I... I'm sorry for..."
JP turned to face what he believed to be the hallucination of his daughter, his left hand still making small marks, like little streaks of comet-tails, across the sturdy paper. "Saffron, I do not blame you..." A single streak of red started from the inside of his eye and dribbled down to his chin as he smiled, his head tickng back and forth like a metronome. "... I blame myself." The droplet splattered onto the corner of the work. "Agh, Eucharist of Sh*t, not another Red Star picture! The world has been ending for thirteen years; you'd think it would get on with it, no?"
"Yah, Y2K conspiring with the Mayans for the f*cking... lizard-aliens to sell us Amway products." Saffron cackled and leaned back against the wall. her ears kept trained on the dead thing that bore an uncanny resemblance to her father as her eyes settled on a page dated around the time that he was working on God of Iron, tilting a foot onto its edge and settling it back down. "I have too many questions, but right now, I'm just a figment of your imagination... and I'm here for someone else's benefit." She reached down and touched at the pocket near her knee, checking on the broken watch. "So... yah, have a good night, Papa. Not sure when I'll see you again." She stepped hesitantly towards the door. Once the tremor inside her leg stopped, she took another, easing up a wave.
"You have been one of the most interesting of my hallucinations, Fox-Saffron." Jean-Pierre glanced to her out of the corner of his eye as he filled in the sky and stars around the Anti-Helian blood splatter. "I'd welcome you far more readily than the other, more insipid variants."
By the time his sentence had ended, the click of the door's latch breached the air. Saffron crouched in the world's shadow, wrists on her knees, staring at the dog-sized spider across from her with a smile pursing out her lips. "So..." She drifted her fingers up and down to gesture to her tail and ears. "... what are we going to do about this?"
