I Know Who I Am When I'm Alone (Melanie King x F!Reader, Chapter 1)
DO NOT INTERACT WITH THIS POST IF YOU ARE A MINOR
Triggers include: Mentions of seasonal depression, loneliness, implied upsetting backstory, lesbian situationships.
I have cured my bout of temporary illiteracy and now the Melanie King x Reader fic exists!!! I’m trying my hand at multi-chapter, and though I do use y/n designations here, I’ve kinda trespassed into original character territory. Also the first time I’m writing in third-person.
Anyways!
Y/N in this case is a 20-something working a dead-end job, who (for some reason oooo character backstory foreshadowing) has no active social connections from either her past or present. Until, of course, someone shows up, and insists on reliving versions of themselves they were convinced they had both killed for good.
[Post episode 106, where I’ve just kind of inserted a storyline where Melanie leaves and tries to find some comfort in a past that exists no longer. You, my dear reader, are indeed that past! It doesn’t seem that you’re very happy about it at the start. But I suppose there’s always a time for a change of heart, especially given more chapters are to come!
That’s assuming, of course, I don’t forget how to write again…] —------------------------
The snow had been threatening to end for days, now.
Every few hours, a new cloud would begin falling over the horizon, which would gently dissipate from when she turned her back to pick up the phone - “Hello, Goodwin Solutions Law Firm, this is Miss [Y/L/N] speaking.” - to when she heard her hand press the receiver down.
Old-fashioned phones were still the way. Getting hired to this place, she had lied entirely about her experience in organization, overstating her way through the years she spent meandering about local county fairs. She still got a bit of a laugh out of the notion that the press-and-click piece of junk she was meant to use was her ‘work phone’. At the very least that meant that it did not ring past her leaving the building. She could never quite get the hang of being available at all times. Dust bunnies hid underneath her unread texts.
Walking home on Wednesday (doesn’t matter whose month claimed it) she mourned the loss of old habits. She had once, as a child, been robustly healthy. Her cheeks were once chubby and cherubic. She clutched her image in the damp, filmy old window of foreclosed storefront, the skin of her face like the sandbanks upon which she had once tresspassed as a child. Her acne scares pocketing their way across her face grew deeper like rill erosion upon sandbanks. She could hear the run of water by her feet, slush painfully dislodging the concrete of the road.
Soon enough, we’ll have to have a third word for whatever falls from the sky over here, she thought.
She didn’t know why she said things like that to herself. The cadence of a joke, despite the lack of humour or punchline, had always comforted her. She replicated the chatter of people whose habits of speech she had never quite gotten the hang or handle of, as a child deprived of language nonetheless hums to keep alert.
Concrete stands out against snow, she had learned that this past year. Uncannily, it had not melted since first taking hold in September.
Back in school, she would every day come home to find that the makeup she brushed into her face during the morning had not evaporated, or even moved, but the stale air of the building had rendered it putrid, stuck to all the holes and hairs on her face like the scum at the bottom of her shower. Speaking of, she had meant to clean her shower when she got home.
From her kitchen she looked out to the mucky mid-winter, and littered some frozen hashbrowns (tasteless, low calorie) on an unevenly ripped piece of parchment (waxen, very noisy).
She had begun chewing her nails, again. The disgust in her mother’s eyes was enough to get her to stop the first time around. It wasn’t exactly a vice, but slowly the suspicion that she would in fact explode somewhere intangible, internal, would build slowly until there she was: chewing.
Except she never did chew, only let them grow long enough so that they wouldn’t interfere with the ridges of her instruments and folds of her body, but would also wedge in between her two front teeth. Her mother once convinced her she would give herself a gap-tooth smile if she kept it up. She had an artist she liked as a child who had one. Pretty sure, like most of them, she had been revealed to be a predator of one sort or another, though now her life had taken her far enough away from the Internet that she couldn’t be arsed to look it up. She knew enough dickheads in her time to believe that the rich and famous were no exception, especially as it was concerned in the music sides of things. She had become, at some point, convinced that anyone who attempts to make themselves known online had something very, very wrong with them.
A few decent melodies will give someone an awful lot of balls, she thought to herself as she shoved the potatoes in the oven.
At least one more than what I’d call medically normal. It smelled still vaguely of chemicals from when she hired that cleaning service. She was pretty sure that she had hired the wrong one, or missed some insinuation in their slogan, since the small Slavic woman who greeted her as she came home offered her condolences on whomever it was that she lost.
She tried to count the people she lost track of in the past months. Very few. Past few years? More. None were dead, and certainly none had had the indecency to show up in her life again just to die on her carpet. She had said thank you. The cleaning woman replied tonelessly, “appreciate”.
The world had been feeling darker than it ought to have.
The winter forces a vagueness of the boundary of two emotions. Of course seasonal depression takes the largest slice of cake, in its fashion and nature, though there was a level of despair that followed her hands and feet as she attempted to accomplish the simplest tasks that had not let up with the same ease that a few good vices and runs in the lung-burning air hadn’t cleared up before. Very rarely in life will one’s head truly be above water, but a certain implicit panic comes from watching the surface freeze above your forehead. Perhaps that was why she kept having to hold herself back from smashing her head into any number of surfaces she brushed past on a daily basis.
Once upon a time, this feeling followed her through exams and then levelled haunts at her with the taunts that she could never truly relate to anyone she was friends with, her life was an act in going through the motions. It certainly felt true, then, but she had never been terribly alone. Even in her own imagination, she had about 20 worlds at a time she was living in. Her friends would come to her with barely concealed admissions that they were really considering it this time, or that had relapse from whichever substance got to them before the age of 13, or which ex-boyfriend [Y/N] really did not want to hear about again. The carefully calculated and off-the-hook tailored answers she would give were about as real to her as the career she led as a musician in her head, an unusual character in the industry who somehow managed to make the viola punk.
Her inability to scratch past the surface in all of her friendships made her into a good enough law student. She had been taking a break from her studies, going back in a year or so. She thought privately maybe that was what had spurred on her depressive episode. She would then always retort that the only way she’d ever really figure that out was if she went ahead and signed herself back up for the next semester, which would kick her income to the curb and put her back in the same exact position she had been in previously.
The potatoes were done. Brownish, smelling like nothing but the vague notion of carbohydrates. She fancied herself thin, now, like she had grown up wanting to be. Realistically, she was average, flabby in the fatless way, and nutrition had become a wary subject for her ever since she quit it with those roommates years prior. There was a sort of grossness, putridness, almost, that had developed in the layer past muscle in her body ever since she lost all that fat. She heard once that scurvy made all the wounds you once had come to the surface again. She looked to the stretch in her skin. She dragged her cracked toenails against the kitchen floor. She turned off the oven and stared at her hands.
Caluses on the fingertips, vaguely manly, though serving her well. There is a grace assumed of a musician’s hands that didn’t follow through with her. Crackle nail polish had been such a fashion when she was back in school. She remembered she taste of it, and the way it unfortunately would always make its way, thick and chipped, into the intersection of her canines like a chemical corn kernel.
She ate absentmindedly. With every bite that dropped into her stomach came a splatter of acid reflux in the back of her nose. She had to resist the urge to hyperventilate or delude herself into thinking she was dying every time she swallowed.
She had been enjoying sleeping more than usual, recently.
A simple sip of the stupor that awaits us all. She snorted and tilted her head back as the back of her nose flared.
Don’t be so melodramatic.
In her bedroom down the hall, she could see that there was a brief flash of light. She wished the landlord hadn’t painted everything so grey.
Though a cellphone wasn’t a part of her office’s budget, a shiny laptop was, and she couldn’t bear to stand up and watch the notifications go by. She briefly considered closing her eyes, opening her email and closing the lid of the laptop, but nothing that played out in her mind seemed to ever make it to her muscles. It struck her, then, with a potency she had been staunchly avoiding, what a profoundly unmoving person she was becoming. A large part of her thought this must just be adulthood, and that lazy excuse she gave herself worked fine for the rest of dinner. After half of her serving had gone down, she had even managed to entirely forget about the emails, and her computer went back to sleep.
She would help herself into the shower, tonight, at the very least. Losing that habit was more of a snowball than others. Flossing, she could do without. She may even sleep without her retainer. But she had found that greasy hair turns into greasy pans in the sink and alarms on snooze and expensive takeout and cheap wine and stern emails from her boss and her sister.
She put on gloves to do the dishes, just like her mother did. She didn’t quite see the point in that, never had the sensory sensitivities she did, but she was able to turn the water as hot as it would go, and despite the money she watched leak from the tap, the steam blowing into her face, the pooling light onto the street a few floors down, this calmed her senses in a manner she rarely experienced anymore.
In her daze she heard the constant hum of traffic below her, the twitching LEDs and the scalding of the oven as one, a familiar nighttime routine, which felt always like a minor, temporary and prolonged failure to thrive, or rather a reveal of a sort of avolition that she was warned she would develop if she didn’t simultaneously live half a dozen different lives.
She ought to be a socialite, a something-or-other Prize winner, a homesteader, arm candy for one of the more successful young tradesmen from her hometown, a lawyer and the new Shalom Harlow, by now. The future - wasted and washed up, or either already smudged into a long line of women who lived sorry, painful and mundane lives in her gene pool - knocked at her door wondering why she hadn’t put anything on for dinner yet.
Her lips were dripping with the steam pooling in the large ramekin she had eaten the potatoes out of.
The knock repeated itself.
The lines in her forehead bunched together. She wiped her upper lip with the sleeve of her bodysuit, thick cardigan lying in a confused ball on the tight red couch.
She looked through the glass, seeing only the top of a dirty blonde scalp. The part in her hair lay flat, curls bunching by her ears. She had heard about Girl Scouts before, but she had grown up too far out of the city to have ever had any walk up. She stepped back.
Do they go away if you ignore them? Should I get my wallet?
The blonde knocked again, and stepped back with a pained look on her face. What [Y/N] had thought was the thin layer of bumpy oils that tends to cover most children, was actually the head of a rather short but adult woman who had been splashed rather aggressively with the freezing rain. [Y/N] hadn’t even registered the sound of it starting.
The woman’s eyebrows did what they always did when peevish, but which was very hard to replicate given the sheer size of them and also that she had a bit of an odd - not special - but particularly indescribable bone structure to her.
The woman outside could hear a thin clop of flats on linoleum, then the slam of a cabinet, and smiled to herself. [Y/N] stood shaking at the kitchen sink, staring at the cracked black spots in her vision and slapped off the gloves.
The blonde could hear two locks being unlatched.
“Oh! Hi?”
Her laugh sputtered like the rain outside. She was shivering. “Hi, I- God, I’m so sorry. It’s just, I don’t have anywhere else to go, and-”
She did not make any gesture of ushering the visitor in, just let a few seconds pass and then tilted her head when she didn’t move. [Y/N] looked terribly struck by something. The tips of the woman’s hair were a faded blue.
“Are you going to come in?” was [Y/N]’s response. Completely deadpan, almost to the point to caricaterise herself.
“I couldn’t impose-”
She cut herself off when [Y/N] walked further into the apartment. The other woman swore she heard something to the effect of ‘likely story-’ whispered. In a moment, [Y/N] had the water turned back on, and sounds of scratching against a metal pan could be heard from the doorway. [Y/N] didn’t put the gloves back on and the steam was billowing at her chin. She did not move from her task when the blonde finally decided she had enough of politely waiting for a proper greeting in the doorway, but called, “Lock the three that I have there, King.”
Melanie’s face was soaking, and the eyeliner had disappeared from only her right eye, though around the bottom rim the makeup had been washed away to reveal a reddish tint that puffed under her lashes.
“I’m sorry that I’m imposing.”
No response. Once [Y/N] had finished with the dishes, and placed them to air-dry on a rack she kept beside the right edge of the sink, she quickly walked into the bathroom without a look towards Melanie and came back only to say, “You’re real filthy, you know.”
Melanie diffidently tried to agree with her, but it didn’t seem to leave a mark on the tired, placid set of [Y/N]’s jaw. “I’ve got towels and anything I expect you need in the washroom. Feel free to use anything you find in the drawers and stuff. I had my outfit for tomorrow on the counter, I think it’ll fit you. It’s clean, at the least.”
Melanie’s face went as visibly pink as could be possible through the thin, soupy grime covering her hair and leaking down into her face. [Y/N] shook her head sharply once and put a stop to the beginning of another thankful rant.
“I don’t worry about you snooping. I keep my drugs somewhere smarter than the washroom.”
Melanie laughed nervously, but went ahead anyways after a few certain but distant nods from [Y/N] as she looked over her shoulder. As soon as [Y/N] heard the shower hiss, she quietly turned on the stove.
[Y/N] cringed as she heard the unbuckling of the, admittedly, comically oversized belt bukle Mel always wore. She had the nail of her index finger stuck between her teeth, the heaviness of her breathing hidden by the rolling boil of both the kettle and the pot she leaned over. She had in her mind the image of a trail of snowy hair trailing up to King’s belly button, dusted like flour on uncooked sourdough.
“[Y/N]?” She could hear coming from down the hall. She refused to turn her back, and simply made a vague noise of acknowledgement.
“[Y/N], I can’t find the towels. Did you say they were in a cabinet?”
[Y/N] felt a strange tingling between her shoulderblades. Slyly, clandestinely, she tucked her chin to her shoulder and from the corner of her vision she could see Melanie’s face against the stark white paint of the door and frame. The acid reflux appeared again.
“Wait,” was all she commanded, and walked to the hallway closet, nestled just beside the bathroom. The door opened in such a way that she would not be able to walk over without exposing herself. [Y/N] grabbed two towels, and then a third small one. For good measure.
Melanie still had her cheeks smushed in the door, her body tilted out of the cast of the LED lights. The opaque darkness of the hallway exaggerated the outlines of [Y/N]’s form, as the warmth of the kitchen clawed at her back. She looked down at Melanie, and hesitated a moment before stepping back slightly and holding out the three towels. She did so just far enough that Melanie had to readjust and push her dripping body fully flush against the door. She was, in a moment, in a blurry darkness again, and heard a thank you from the other side of the wood.
[Y/N] could not, for the life of her, figure out why she did it.
In seven minutes, Melanie came to the small circular kitchen table to a plate of pesto pasta. [Y/N] had spoken no more than three words in response to any conversation Mel would attempt, but equally refused to stop staring at her.
Was she trying to scare her away? Unlikely. She was already scared, it seemed. At one point, [Y/N] turned on reruns of IT Crowd, and Melanie flashed her teeth. She seemed to take it as a sign of an albeit unwilling friendship rekindling.
[Y/N] was trying to ignore the ghost of her fingers Melanie’s soft jawline. Her face had been cold, the way your blood chills in the British winter. It was a less brutal, and more brooding sort of thing to survive. “So, England finally kick you out again?”
Messy green eyes, wide-open and veined like a drained pond looked up in surprise. Oil pooled on a crease in her lip as she softened. [Y/N]’s breathing picked up in pace as she struggled to make eye contact and the blood in her neck froze. “Quite the contrary. They’ve been trying to get me back since I left.” “What, your old mates, the British government?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m talking of course of my good friends, the Windsors.”
“And how long ago did you evade their company, then?”
“Month or so. You know, it’s been a good long while since we’ve spoken. Do you even check your phone?”
“Don’t have one, anymore. I guess I forgot to delete my number.”
“I’ve sent you emails.”
“Usually people accept hints when so obviously given to them.”
Melanie’s plate was empty, now. She pushed it away and pulled her knees up to her chest. “I only need to stay the night. I can take a train or whatever somewhere else. I know other people in this country.”
“That makes one of us.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“From who?”
Melanie’s face faltered at the sight of a strage heat in the eyes she met. [Y/N] was aware of the bridge she was setting alight, but felt much more embodied than she had much of this year, and the last.
“I remember you smiling a whole of a lot more, [Y/N].”
“Alright-” she noisily got up from her chair and shut the TV off. “I’m off to bed. Sleep on the couch. You can figure it out.”
“Wait-”
“No, alright, I get it, okay? I get it. This isn’t something we have to discuss, we’re not going to fix anything by going over it, we’re just- We’re done. We have been for a while.”
[Y/N] could make out every freckle on Melanie’s face as she stood closer. She could tell which of her perfumes she had chosen to use.
“Mel? You’re- you’re standing just a little close-”
She stepped away like she had been hit and shook her head. [Y/N] went back to knitting her eyebrows. She chewed on the inside of her cheeks to be sure she made no expression.
“Well, at least we both managed to make an ass of ourselves-”
“Look, I’m sorry [Y/N], I don’t know what I was trying to-”
“Go to sleep, Mel.”
In her room, [Y/N] took two shots of vodka and sat upright in the dark for hours. She heard the kettle go on again at 4am. The clumps of snow fell audibly in the street, and the blue light on cinderblock neighbourhoods was a melancholic sort of calming agent. She could have sworn she saw a bat’s eyes watching from the corner of her window, which sat across from the foot of her bed. It watched her take a third shot and fall asleep, dreaming up memories of her year with Melanie King, who used to have the darkest brown eyes you’d have ever seen.
-------------------- [Tagging people who commented on my original post: @thef4gnusarchives @chocolate-flora @necromancers-incorporated]
