A/N : I AM STILL ON A ROLL. HERPDERP.
Heart racing, Dawn spreads thin fingers on her mother's cold skin. "M-Mommy?" she stutters, voice too childish for a girl of fourteen. "Mommy, answer me!"
Artificial light spills down on the two, but Twinleaf is dark outside the window.
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I CAN TASTE THE
daddy dearest
F I L T H I N S I D E
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Dawn cries at her mother's funeral, black silk draped over her pale arms; the contrast with her red rimmed eyes and blue irises is stark and ghostlike. The trees surrounding the cemetery are filled with pokemon, humming a tune too much like a lullaby.
After everyone has gone and Barry has said goodbye, Dawn stays by the grave, head resting where Johanna is carved out in block letters.
She falls asleep there, curled up over the buried coffin.
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(mommy, mommy, i know you're there, i know you're there—where are you?)
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A hand shakes her awake, firm and gentle and—"Mommy?" she asks with a quiet voice because Dawn never talked a lot.
"No." The reply comes without hesitation, and blue eyes blink at the man above them.
He looks too much like Dawn's reflection and she shivers—she should not know who this is—but he is, must be, "Dad."
The man who is her father nods and Dawn suddenly takes into account the beautiful woman, willowy and sculpted, who clings to his arm.
"I'm here to take you home."
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(but papa home is where the heart is, and you have no heart.)
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The house looms, flights of stairs riddling the inside and locked doors tucked away behind curtains. Dawn hates it.
Her father's caretaker opens the door to her new room and hands her a key. The walls are white and the sheets are white and it is all too much like a hospital to bear.
She tugs out her clothes and hangs them in the closet, puts her books on the shelves and waits for it to feel anything like the little house in Twinleaf, waits for it to feel anything like (a) home.
She waits and waits and waits but it never does.
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(dearest mother, did you want to leave me like this?)
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Her father buys her frilly dresses and satin bows but it is oh-so-very clear that he couldn't care less about the girl who he left as a baby, screaming and writhing and nothing like what he was expecting in a child. He wanted a quiet boy who would fill up size 10 shoes instead of the dainty Dawn he got.
She hates the looks he gives her at the dinner table, when they eat filet mignon with sterling silver cutlery and the most important of guests. Dawn says nothing in reply to their flat voices and saws through the meat with the gentlest movements.
When she gets to her room ("you may leave now, Dawn") she locks the door and screams, as loud as she possibly can.
The men in fancy suits downstairs don't hear, anyway.
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(oh mama, mama, papa doesn't care like I want him to.)
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Dawn stands in the doorway watching her father kiss the thin, beautiful blonde.
It's been a month since the funeral and Dawn is still wearing black—because she knows better than ignoring Mommy, even if Mommy is dead.
Quietly, she retreats from the fancy, gilded room, wearing patent leather loafers that her 'beloved father' had bought her. On the way out, she scuffs the shiny finish of the brand-new-shoes and scowls back at the doorknob.
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(why aren't you mourning, daddy, when mommy is dead?)
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"Papa?" Dawn murmurs, knocking on the thick oak door.
The noise behind the door filters through the brass keyhole, and she waits for the shuffling papers to stop,
"Come in," Her father's silky smooth voice comes from behind the door. It's a voice made for lying, used for lying. She hates it.
She hates him.
His face falls when she peeks around the door, and deep inside Dawn's esteem crashes and burns.
"What, Dawn?" he snaps irritably. "I'm busy—you know that!—why would you find any reason to interrupt me?"
Outside his fancy, expensive window she can hear Pokemon humming, as if agreeing with him.
Why would you interrupt him he's far too busy for you you're the reason he left are you stupid? —
"Nothing, Papa." she says in the smallest voice she can manage.
—you're nothing to him nothing you don't know anything don't mean anything you've messed enough things up already you ruin everything leave leave leave—the Pokemon sing, seeping poisonous words into her mind.
Dawn stumbles out of the room in a blind haze of anger-anger-anger but even the curse words in her brain (why does my father even exist why couldn't he stay a fairytale like mom made him why why why I hate him I hate him I HATE HIM) can't cover the echoes of insecurity that bounce around in her skull.
That night she screams into her pillow and breaks her pretty things and promises herself that she will get out.
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(oh mommy i feel ever-so-lonely)
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15, 16, 17, 18, 19—
She never does.