(no subject)
Welcome to Weston City.
That was the sign written on the whitewashed stone slab a few hundred meters away from the actual gate of the city. The letters were painted over, and you could see the faded paint of the older layers paint if you looked carefully enough. The letters were bright blue or maybe just very faded purple, the color eaten away by sun exposure and who knows what else; it doesn’t rain on this side of the world, so acid rain’s out of the picture. The letters were beginning to chip off again, as well - they’d need to be painted on again in a few months.
Cielo Corva mused on about the welcome sign. Her uncle was at the wheel, driving fast enough to toe the legal speed limit - law says 150 and they were going at 148, give or take - but thankfully the whirring siren of a police bike wasn’t running after them yet. Not yet, she thought with a soft smile on her mouth. Her window was down, her spirits were up, and her life was going every which way away from sanity.
Or so she’d like to think.
She was barely seventeen, at that precarious time of the calendar when one’s birthday was looming near but isn’t quite as near as one would like for it to be, and sixteen was quickly being the yesterday and the age one doesn’t want to live. Seventeen - it even has poems and songs written about it. Funny. Cielo was happy enough to be sixteen and counting.
But enough about age. She didn’t mind age, she didn’t mind time, she didn’t mind the gum stuck under her shoe. She thought of her red, waist length hair, the shade bright enough to look like it had come out of a bottle. She thought of buying herself new contact lenses, maybe something bluish to soften the color of her eyes. She thought, this time with a frown on her face, about the unnatural shade of her eyes, of how they were nearly as bright as her was. She thought of her mother, and how much they had in common - the slanted, catlike eyes, the pale skin, the nose that was a little rounded near the tip, the pale pinkish shade that tinted both their lips even without lip gloss.
Not that she used lip gloss. Or make-up, for that matter. Mother was the movie star, she was the rebel daughter. That was what it was going to be, at least, if dear old mama had lived.
Cielo frowned. This was why she’s moving to a new city. New life. New family. Enough of the wishy-washy looking back on the past thing.
“Are we there yet?” Cielo asked. The words rolled off her tongue smoothly, fluidly, and her voice - now that was another thing she had in common with her mother. Soft to the ear, like that of a jazz singer, but a little lilted, as you would expect from a teen. It would be a good voice to hear when you want someone to sing you a lullaby, really, except Cielo chooses to shout herself hoarse whenever she could, which isn’t exactly as calming.
She tipped her head back and asked again. “Are we there yet?”
When her uncle - named Allen, by the way, who shares the same last name as she, and his hair looks like it’s been set on fire half the time, though more in terms of color than in style - didn’t answer after five seconds she kicked the back of his head with the sole of her right foot.
“Talk, damn you,” she said, mirth coloring her tone. “I’ve been riding with you in this stupid white car of yours for close to twelve hours, and I’m bored as hell.”
There was a low grumble up front in the driver seat, and then Cielo got her reply. Allen had been most patient with his niece since picking her up at the airport, though as one would expect with first meetings it had been
“Hey, look, I know we’ve just met and all, but we’re in the city now, yeah?” He answered, rubbing the back of his head and not-so-subtly brushing the dirt off his hair. “So sit back, we’re almost home. New home for you, yeah? Or something. Yeah.”
Cielo lounged, as one could ever lounge in a car, making ‘pffffh’ sounds and blowing her bangs out of her eyes. Back to the hair topic again. She’d cut her hair in a way that her eyes got lots of hair ends sticking into them whenever she turned or moved and left them unclipped, and she still had eartails on the sides of her face. She’d need a haircut soon.
Then the smell of garbage hit her nose, and she had to put the car window back up. She didn’t like the smell of trash. It smelled too… trashy. And wet. Every smell felt different in her mind, but that never helped her tolerate the malodorous kind at all.
“Does trash always smell that bad here?”
“It’s just around here that it smells bad, yeah? But the further you get into the city, the smell… and view, and stuff… all that changes,” Allen told her, his voice full of the boy-next-door feel. “It’s just a little hard to clean up when people in this area don’t care much about what the city government does.”
Cielo stopped on her tracks. Aha. “We’re driving up to the richer side of the city, aren’t we?” She paused, and felt a break in his breathing, a slight hitching that told her this was making him feel bad, just a little.
“It’s not like that, really… I mean… We’re not rich or anything, but…”
The car stopped.
“We’re here,” he announced halfheartedly, getting off the car to open her door like a real gentleman would. Haha, she thought.
The place they stopped at was a shop. It was more of a restaurant than a shop, really, because from where she stood she could see through the glass window the tables and chairs that seated four or eight, depending on which on you took; the long wooden bar along one side of the shop; and the old fashioned cash register at the counter at the end nearest to the door. It smelled strongly of rosewood and oak. That was good. Wooden smells always made her feel pretty inside. There was an alley between the shop and the four-floored building on its left, and you could see the street on the other side clearly. There was a strip of sidewalk that led away from the shop and into a garage, on the right, please, the one with shutter doors, and it was on this strip of cement that they currently were standing on.
Cielo shook her head. “So this is where we’re staying?”
Allen, who was leaning on the car, shrugged, smiled sweetly and started to talk. “This…,” he said, waving a hand to indicate the shop, “is our livelihood. Big guy’s, actually, since he’s married and all and he needs money more than us, but basically, this is where we get money.”
He took a short breath, and continued on. “The house’s at the back of it, and you could, like, get to it on the other side of the building. Or through the alleyway; the shop’s got a door on that side that leads to the kitchen.”
There was short awkward silence, mostly because Allen didn’t want to say anything more and Cielo was more than happy to be quiet. So there they stood, both now leaning on the car, staring at the shop’s door.
And then Allen broke the silence with a touchy question.
“So, hey, Cielo,” he started out, his eyes looking anywhere but near her, “Are you?”
“Am I what?” She threw blithely at Allen, not really noticing the question.
“You like your dad?”
Cielo, who was checking the ends of her hair for split ends and whatnot, stopped to look at him from beneath her bangs. She knew this question - only she didn’t expect for it to be asked this soon. Guess there are things you can’t keep hidden.
She sighed.
“I am,” she confirmed. “I’m like my dad. You know how the rest of it goes, don’t you?”
She looked at him fully this time, the sunset lighting his face up in a way that added a few years to his face without making him look old. The sky what shot with red and orange and dark yellow, and there was soft indigo and light pink and blooming midnight grey at the horizon; Cielo could see the shades of the sky reflected in his eyes. The sky seemed to flirt with the skin tone, so similar with hers that he looked like he was fading into the sky. And then it hit her.
“…You.” She had a smile on her face. Wide grin. Whichever.
“Just like you, yeah?” He answered. He was smiling as well.
“This is why you asked for me to be sent here, wasn’t it?” She asked, her expression something like happiness, only a touch sadder and more quiet. “You knew about it, too.”
Allen lifted a hand and ruffled her hair lightly. “We take care of our own.”
The city’s welcome sign faded a little more that day, the white paint chipping off slowly with a sudden gust of wind that carried sand and dirt and little stones with it, these little things hitting the surface of the sign and weathering the paint off in its own way. It might get new colors on it soon if someone would notice.
Inside the city, meanwhile, a girl comes home.