( @savedfromtheslaughter )
So it’s been a while. Months on months in fact, lost to the quiet gray plane of poor timekeeping, Honey’s feet treading a path far up and away from the smoldering crater of everything and everyone who ever looked at her with love in their eyes for the shape of a boy they didn’t understand even a little bit. It’s been a while, but every cycle comes back to its own tail eventually, and Honey, well.
She’d missed human contact.
Missed a lot of things, really, but furthest up the list: speaking and being spoken to, the unnatural weight of human tongues in her mouth. She’d missed it terribly; but who was left, honestly, to give her any of what she wanted? Bridges as ash beneath her toes, every interpersonal relationship cut off at the pass, nobody left she still remembers favorably.
Except Clarice.
So. A year and a half missing, assumed dead by even her closest friends, and suddenly, capriciously, out of the blue, here she is-- perched primly on the hood of Clarice’s car smoking a menthol, as the sun blots itself out behind the edges thrown up by academy buildings. She’s a little less thin. Grown her hair out; a nearly attractive bob. That terrible fashion sense though, that’s unmistakeable--seven shades of pink layered around her in a passing attempt at mori, dirty mint tights, the same pink sneakers they’d once gone out and bought together in solidarity laced tight around her feet--and so is, she hopes, the selfsame way she tracks Clarice’s ducked head, bobbing lazily through the car park back toward thoughts of decompressing, of a shower, of homework and a hot meal.
With one last drag, burned filter introducing a new and more terrible smell to the mix, Honey drops the cigarette at her feet, heedless of the dot of light and heat dimming now next to her ankle, and calls out:
“I know, I do know-- Should have called first, shoulda checked right in, should not have dipped the heckie out the way that this body-person did,” And her smile is a crooked thing, aimed squarely at the place Clarice’s flinch will put her head as it lifts, “But! This boy is back in town. And, this girl wanted to catch up. If that is alright.”
And here is where Honey’s endless well of confidence shatters itself, quietly. She had resolutely not thought beyond this moment, planned out so meticulously in her head. She’d wanted a surprise-- remember, about cycles and the way they inevitably bite at their own tails? She falters, self-conscious in a sudden way.
“...Only if it is alright, I mean,” A swallow. A tilt of the head, too-focused gaze dragging twitchy across Clarice’s face for the shadow of recognition. “You remember this one, right? It is Honey, if you forgot.”
