@scarecrovved (as promised)
There are several reasons why she postpones springtime cleaning.
The most obvious, of course, is the pain she’s constantly in, and the low levels of energy with which she has to get through every day; if cleaning is hard on its own, imagine trying to do it when any false movements can have unexpected consequences on your health.
And then there’s the allergies, which inevitably make themselves present whenever she’s near dust. All in all, the general results of her cleaning efforts are beneficial in the long run, but the short term complications make it hard to actually decide to do it.
She can’t postpone it any longer, though, and this means she has to come to terms with the fact that she HAS to throw some stuff away.
Yes, even from that room.
She rarely goes in, unless she really has to. It’s a constant reminder that he’s gone, really gone, and he can’t help her anymore.
(She wonders, sometimes, if things would have been different if he was still alive; she thinks of what would have happened that time with the fear gas, or if they would have been able to break into the apartment and kill Rocket with her father there…)
It’s no use; standing on the door thinking of her father will only make matters worse. The fact is that he isn’t there, and he wasn’t there then, and she needs to come to terms with it and let go.
It’s what he would have wanted.
She always opens the door carefully, as one would if they knew someone was sleeping and didn’t want to be disturbed. She’s always expecting to find someone in there- maybe her father, maybe less pleasant company.
But she always finds herself alone, and the room feels too big.
It takes her a while to actually start doing something, and most of her willpower is wasted on trying to convince herself not to lay down on the bed and just stay there until everything passes. But she eventually gets to work, and soon there are boxes strewn all over the floor, their contents half-emptied into the bed; photo albums, all of them full of pictures of happier times that she wishes would either fade away or come back.
Melissa is always smiling in the pictures. So is she. The only person who looks perpetually concerned is her mother, who’s never more than a few steps away from her youngest daughter; it is then that she realizes she has no pictures alone, not even as a baby. There’s always been someone with her, at least in photographs.
Her dad is always smiling. She finds it funny, how it was all so obvious back then, and yet no one saw it coming...
She slams the album shut, throwing it as far away from her as she can. It crashes with the wall and falls open on the floor.
It’s only when she moves to put it away that she notices the figure standing by the door, watching her.
Just what she fucking needs.
-“What are you doing here?”
What she means to say is “What are you doing here RIGHT NOW? Why couldn’t you pick another time?”
