“Your lasagne is just too good. Can you make something for me while I am away?” Aska and I sat at our usual table and ate while music played in the background. Much has changed between us since the showering incident which was four years ago. For once, our relationship was less toxic than ever before and he didn’t hurt me anymore since that day.
Additionally, we agreed a year ago that we wouldn’t try to manipulate each other but that quickly became unfeasible as we started to fight for control in our weird relationship through different means like making deals daily along the lines of I cook and you wash me later as I still couldn’t shower at all and we kind of gave up on trying. The deals turned out to be quite a horrible idea, so we went back to secretly manipulating.
I was obviously aiming for total servitude … not really, I only wanted to chain him further to me, but I didn’t really make much progress with that. He apparently just wanted to push his limits further and see what I let slide and what I was angry about. It took him just a year to figure out that he could do whatever he wanted as long as it didn’t hurt me and didn’t restrict me in any way. As he tried to stop me from breaking the window over and over again by throwing used plates out, I drew the final line and started throwing the plates at him instead. Needless to say, the used plates were thrown out of the window after that again.
My fear of water never went away during this whole time. I found out that I could dump a bucket of water over me without freaking out completely, probably because I could control it perfectly fine and knew that there was a limit to the water in the bucket, but as soon as I stood under an unlimited supply of water like the shower, I couldn’t handle it anymore. If I learned one notable thing during my life until then, it was that I didn’t have to fear something that I could control at all. Take fire for example. Aska burned my hands before that, but I didn’t fear it one bit, just because I was able to extinguish it.
Water on the other hand … well, I couldn’t do anything against it as I died during the night and I didn’t have the feeling that I could control the shower at all. I mean, the pipes could break again and everything could result in an even bigger mess than last time. Thus, I stayed away from it when I was alone and only entered the bathroom when Aska was with me.
While that didn’t change, my training started to change quite a bit. He obviously didn’t throw daggers at me the whole time, but rather taught me how to dance, behave like a normal human, sing and act. In particular, the acting was incredibly useful and we made a game of lying out of it. Whenever I made a successful lie, I gained one point, whenever he caught me, he gained one. I obviously lost every time, but it was fun nonetheless.
We didn’t stop there though. As he promised, he also taught me boyish stuff like renovating the whole house. It was a wonder as we finally completed painting as we usually made a mess out of everything while trying to splash the other one with paint. We even started to build a shack near the house for a purpose he didn’t want to reveal at that time.
And all of this basically lead to my fifteenth birthday where we ate lasagne. I obviously had to cook it and prepare everything, but that was quite usual for him. It didn’t ruin my mood in the slightest though as he usually worsened the food if he tried to help anyway, so I was happily munching on my food while I listened to this strange metallic device that spewed music out of it and I wasn’t allowed to take apart. He even put some kind of electric barrier around it that shocked me whenever I tried to touch it which honestly made it even more interesting for me.
“Oh, right! Today is your birthday, isn’t it?” I was quite impressed by his ability to ignore the cake in front of him with a big fat 15 on top of it. I even asked for two sparklers so there was basically no way he wouldn’t notice.
“No, it´s not.” I snatched the two sparklers from the cake and threw them away in front of him, but I noticed that he was seemingly somewhere else with his thoughts.
“Alright then. Here is your gift.” Nonchalantly, he handed me a compass with two needles in it. One turned around the whole time, while the other steadily pointed towards my right. Strangely enough, there were no other markings on this compass which made it quite useless. Now, I was deep in thought and wondered what this was supposed to be.
“Don’t hesitate if the moon turns black…” I nearly missed his words because he spoke so quietly. It sounded important, but also nonsensical. I mean, how would a moon turn black? Did he mean a lunar eclipse or something else entirely?
“I´m sorry, what?” Or maybe I didn’t hear correctly and he wanted to say something else. After gulping down a mouthful of lasagne, he finally replied.
“You will know what to do when the time comes. Never tell anyone about this, understood?” Telling me not to do something was probably the worst thing he could do, but this time, it kind of worked. He was even looking out of the window as if there was some poor soul that investigated us but soon looked me straight in the eyes as I was still pondering what to do. This seemed to be something important and I didn’t want to mess this up.
“Alright, can I ask you a question about that?” I tilted my head slightly, already expecting his answer. He was still leisurely eating as if nothing happened which made everything even more suspicious. It was my turn to look outside, only to find the usual sight.
“No.” He finally finished chewing and gave his answer with a deadpan expression. I was quite annoyed by his behaviour and switched topic immediately as I noticed that he wouldn’t tell me anything, no matter how hard I tried.
“What is this?” I pointed towards the compass in my right hand and wondered if this had something to do with the strange words he uttered a minute before.
“Oh, it´s a compass.” He wasn’t an idiot, he just wanted to get on my nerves badly. And honestly, he was quite good at it. I balled my hands into fists but quickly realized that hitting him would bring me nowhere.
“Thank you very much for this very, very helpful explanation. But please, could you enlighten this idiot about where the fuck these needles point?” A conversation like this wasn’t really rare between us. While he made me choose my words carefully during my first years of living, he basically allowed anything after my twelfth birthday.
“Sure, absolutely. The one who is spinning in circles always points to this house, while the other one shows you the object of your desires. If you bring it inside the shack we build, you can keep the compass.” I only desired three things and the needle was definitely not pointing towards them. Once again, it felt like he was hiding something from me, but this time, I was fed up with it. It was absolutely unacceptable that he knew things about me that I didn’t. If he was able to accurately predict what I wanted while I didn’t, wouldn’t that mean that he still had the upper hand?
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I hated my conclusion so much that I immediately did what I could do the best. It was to be like him, a total asshole.
“Oh, by the way, where is my mum?” Since I read about it in a biology book, I wondered where she was and sometimes even why she left me alone with Aska. Sometimes, I also thought of a life with her and how it would be. But generally, I thought of her as my rival in love, although I never met her in the first place.
“Your mum?” He didn’t look like he knew what I was talking about. Did I really have to explain everything?
“Yeah, you know … when a man and a woman … and then the woman gets pregnant … and suddenly you have a child. Oh, I´m that child by the way, so where is my mum?” It was really weird talking about how I was born, especially because I knew that I was a strange case as I had no memories that my body changed at all.
“She …” He didn’t know what to say at all or didn’t want to tell me anything. Instead, he began to fiddle with the plate and looked away.
“She left you? I see absolutely no reason why she would ever do that. I mean, she must still love you to leave me behind as a replacement for her.” I always wondered why he had these feelings for me, his child. It didn’t feel wrong to love him, but it would be quite awkward if others found everything out about our relationship. I usually tried to avoid that topic, but that day, I wanted to provoke him as much as possible.
“Where is this coming from so suddenly?” I succeeded. He wasn’t really angry, but it did get on his nerves.
“Oh, out of nowhere obviously. Could she sing? Was she an actress? Were her knitting skills as good as mine? How well did she fuc-” I stopped as the plate in front of Aska broke into pieces as he hit it. I congratulated myself silently for enraging him this easily.
“LUCINDA!” He stood up with both hands on the table, barely holding back and shouting at me. Seeing him like this was so satisfying that I just couldn´t hold back. I did this. This was my achievement and I wanted, no I needed to know how far I could go.
“Oh? I´m just taking notes here on who you want me to be. I mean, you probably liked to be the one in control in bed … did she like the thing this needle is pointing to as well? Do you know so much about me because I am just like the whore that is my mum?” Without bothering to reply, he slapped me on my cheek so hard that my neck nearly broke. Still, I couldn’t help but smile as I rubbed my red cheek and made sure that I had his full attention. “If this compass leads me to something that my mother desired and I don’t know about yet, we …” Without looking, I rammed the knife into the place where his hand was. I smiled even more as he winced and glanced downwards. “ we will have a problem.”
I didn’t like hurting him at all. I loved to play with his emotions, but pain was not something that I wanted to give him. Still, I wanted to make it crystal clear that I wasn’t a replacement for my mother and didn’t intend to be like her.
I pulled the knife out and saw black blood running down the blade. I thought that Aska would flip out completely, but he was surprisingly calm as he waited for his hand to heal. It was way quicker than my healing abilities, but it was interesting that I could hurt him in the first place.
“If she ever comes back, what will you do?” The question kind of surprised me, but it didn’t take long for me to find an answer. I smiled as innocently and cute as I could and even leaned a bit forward.
“You know exactly what I would do.”