Chapter Text
Gégé waits in Emmy’s room idly, sitting on the edge of the bed. Emmy keeps it remarkably clean—much cleaner than Gégé could ever manage–and he wonders to himself if that’s because part of her wants to pretend she doesn’t live here at all. As if all of the rooms in this godforsaken place are just sections of a dollhouse, perfectly kept, and the dolls will all return to a little fabric box at the end of play.
That end never comes. Gégé was not made with the hope needed to dream of an end ever coming. As a low sound pricks his ears (mice in the walls, perhaps), Gégé’s eyes fall back to his hands, knuckles dappled with bruises from being pushed up against surfaces and nails colored in with stolen black marker. He twists his fingers together, as if to pry them off the bone. These hands feel too big for me, he thinks to himself. Smaller, nimbler hands would suit him better, suit his fledgling craft of pinning together scraps better. Nevertheless, his hands are long and bony and dappled with bruises. Gabriel always makes sure to get them out of the way first before he subjects Gégé to anything, for some reason.
The low sound grows to something Gégé can recognize: Sniffling.
Emmy opens the door, a frown set deep into her round face. The hair that’s been roughly tousled catches the light of the hallway, its blonde turning to white. Over her forearm, she’s slung a pair of her jeans—The jeans she had been wearing earlier that day, most likely, as she isn’t wearing any. Gégé knows the walk of shame all too well, and so he averts his eyes to give her a privacy he knows she is unable to get anywhere else.
Emmy sits down beside Gégé on the bed, her seat closer to the headboard. The breath she lets out through her nose is curt and hostile, like the snort of a bull. Gégé keeps his mouth shut as Emilie grabs one of her pillows from her bed and throws it at the wall with all the might she can muster in her little body—As the pillow hits, she then lets herself fall until her back hits the bed, too. It’s only after a few more sniffles and choked sobs that Emmy finds her words.
“I thought maybe if I had that piercing in my ear he’d think I’m too ugly,” she hisses, the bite undercut by a grogginess to her voice. “He just got mad and told me I needed to be ‘disciplined’. I- If he does it when he likes me and does it when he doesn’t, what’s even the point?!”
Gégé had only ever been assaulted by Gabriel as a form of discipline (to his knowledge), so he had no complete way to relate to her. Gégé could still remember it clearly, three days ago almost to the hour: Being bent over a table and held down by the head as an angry voice cursed at him. The yelling was only insult to the very potent injury of being sodomized, and most of the time Gégé had no clue who Gabriel was even referring to in his tirades.
Emmy hiccups out another sob, her whole body seizing with it. She wipes away the blonde hairs stuck to her cheeks by tears. Gégé, with nothing else to do, falls back to lay on the bed with her, his gaze on her while hers is on the ceiling. Any beauty he can find in her is rendered perverse by the crying, he finds: There’s nothing to appreciate about the way her eyes are sparkling or her cheeks are flushed. It’s only a gnawing feeling of awful.
“I don’t know if there’s any way of understanding him,” Gégé concedes, thinning his lips out. “I’ve given up on it.”
Emmy grumbles. “But there has to be something. There has no be a reason. I don’t know how it’ll stop if I don’t know why it started.” She turns to Gégé, her brows knit together. “It’s my fault, I know it has to be my fault, but then I just have to fix it–“
“No, no, Emmy.” Gégé brushes another lock of hair out of her face, his fingers tracing his temple. “Please don’t get yourself worked up over this. It’s not worth it.”
Her lip quivers.
“I don’t like being here. They- I don’t remember why I applied to be an intern here, but I don’t like it. It’s all I can think about when he does it to me, that I should’ve worked for someone else. I don’t like being here, Gégé. The only good place is the garden and even then when I’m there all I want to do is dig a big hole in the dirt and let myself die in it. -I wish this stupid house was somewhere out in the country. I wish it was by a forest that I could run into for hours and hours and hours and he’d never be able to drag me out of it.”
“Would you let me run off too?” Gégé jokes. “Or is it every man for himself in this house?”
“…If you’d like.”
Gégé smiles for a moment, only for his mind to wander back from whatever fantasy he couldn’t picture of forests too big to be found in. “I half wonder if it’s the only reason we’re here,” he admits, the fear thick and hard to scrape out from his lungs even if the flippancy in his voice belies it. “Just to be…”
When he looks over at Emmy again, Gégé notices a smudge on her lip. He’s seen her wear makeup (dipping her fingers straight into shoplifted eyeshadow palettes and heating up eyeliner crayons with Gégé’s lighter), and because of that he knows the lipstick she has on is a shade she would never wear. Emmy would never choose to wear it, at least. Gégé looks to Emmy's lips, then back up to her, the question he's clearly asking going unsaid: He made you put it on, didn’t he?
The way Emmy’s face shifts tells him his suspicion is right.
Gégé, tentatively, reaches a hand over to wipe the lipstick off Emmy’s lip, looking back into her spring-green eyes. He intends for it to be an olive branch of sorts, he supposes: A sign that even if everything else in this house wants to hurt them, at least he can promise never to do such a thing. Gégé would never dream of it. And yet, for some reason neither can place or begin to place, something happens as the skin of his thumb meets the soft flesh of her lip, dragging the stain out the smear across her face. Some old memory or instinct surfaces again in both of them, only galvanized, unknowingly, by the way the house has been training them.
Gégé and Emmy kiss before either of them realize that's what they're doing.