Dragonfree

Teh Spwriter. :3

Age 33
Female
Iceland
Seen February 9th, 2020
Posted November 28th, 2012
1,290 posts
19.1 Years
I actually had this idea a couple of years ago and thought of it often, but never actually wrote it until now.

Though this is written in first person and is set in the real world, it is not autobiographical, as I sincerely hope will be clear before you've reached the end. Contains some swearing and disturbing thoughts.


It was starting to rain now.

I stuffed my hands in my pockets, silently cursing the public transport system as I peered up the road from the bus stop. There was still no sign of number twelve. It wasn’t exactly behind schedule, not yet, but it was cold and I wasn’t dressed for that. I was still less dressed for rain.

As I stood there freezing, trying to keep my head down and my eyes squinted, the sound of rapid footsteps approaching drowned out the rain. I didn’t look up or register it on a conscious level, not quite, until a woman came to a halt a few feet away by my side, looking frantically up and down the road.

I glanced up at her out of the corner of my eye as she caught her breath. She was young, hardly more than a couple of years above twenty, her face made up hastily, eyeshadow a little streaked thanks to the rain. She wore a black coat with a fur collar, the kind of garment that looks superficially impressive but still gives off some distinct cheap, imitative vibe. Her hair was blonde, brushed back into a ponytail that disappeared under the collar of the coat. I wondered idly where she was going.

She turned towards me and hesitated, her eyes wide and urgent. I turned my head slightly in her direction to acknowledge her; she gave a quick, small nod in return. “Excuse me,” she began after a moment’s further hesitation, a vague impression of a polite smile barely flickering across her features. “Do you know if number fifteen has come by yet?”

It hadn’t. I’d been there twenty minutes and there had been no sign of either of the two bus lines that stopped here since I’d arrived. But for some reason, I nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “It was here a minute ago – you just missed it.”

She looked at me for a split second more as my words sank in, then blinked. “Muk,” she said, and I saw her eyes start to water before she turned away. “Muk,” she said again, louder, looking around; I could hear the waver in her voice. “Oh, ****.”

I watched her cover her mouth with her hand, blinking into the rain, then suddenly turn back to me. “Sorry, are you taking number twelve? Where is that headed?”

“Around the neighborhood,” I replied, shrugging. “The one on the other side of the street goes downtown.”

“Muk,” she said yet again as she turned away. She wrung her hands for a moment, then turned to examine the bus stop sign. I continued to look at her, at the mounting despair in her expression, the tears she blinked rapidly away as they formed. Again I wondered where she was going. Did that nonexistent missed bus ruin her day, her week, her life? It was an odd feeling to stand there and realize that she was in agony because of me, because I’d opened my mouth and said words that weren’t the words I was supposed to say, because she’d trusted a stranger who had no reason to lie to her and he’d done so anyway in a random act of malice, without purpose and without motive.

Everything she was right now was my doing; everything going through her mind was tainted by my strange little spontaneous lie. I had never seen her before – or if so only fleetingly, without either of us sparing the other a second glance – and yet in this moment, she was mine.

She finally looked up from the timetable, her face anguished. I smiled at her, sympathetically; she didn’t notice or care. I watched her turn a few times, as if she were evaluating different, hopeless ideas for remedying her situation. “Could I borrow your phone?” she asked after a few seconds, the pleading in her voice strikingly pathetic as the rain continued to smudge her makeup.

“Sorry,” I said, shaking my head; another lie. “My batteries are dead.”

I watched her as she turned away and buried her face in her hands. What was she late for? I wondered. What was her story? How much of her life would be altered, indirectly, because of my intervention, because of this change in the flow of chemicals in her brain?

Bus number twelve appeared over the hill. She looked dully at it, and I knew that she was envious, envious that my bus was arriving and hers supposedly wasn’t. I walked to the edge of the sidewalk without looking at her, waiting for it to stop.

As I stepped inside and walked to the back, bus number fifteen rounded the corner at last and turned towards us.

I looked through the window at the young woman at the bus stop. She stared at number fifteen, then turned her head towards me, expression puzzled, bewildered, lost. Our eyes met, and I smiled serenely at her; I realized with a liberating glee that it would never occur to her that I had lied, that she would rationalize it as a mistake or a scheduling mishap and never suspect me of anything.

As my bus drove off and left her behind, I turned away and grinned, relishing the knowledge that she was still staring after me.
~Butterfree/Dragonfree/antialiasis of The Cave of Dragonflies

Still not going to sprite for your fangame. Sorry, but I don't really sprite or give out permission for people to use my fake Pokémon anymore.