![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
intheheartTitle: Tea
Rating: PG.
Summary: Summer has ways of coping.
Date: 2028
Notes: Tangentally related to the Thriller Project.
This is not a proper tea ceremony.
There should be four guests, and an assistant, and a host (but she doesn’t like people, so who would she invite, and anyway this is for her, not them). Summer takes off her coat and drops it on a chair, kicks off her shoes with an impatient jerk.
There should be a proper room, with a proper scroll for decoration and a proper place to purify oneself (she'd like to see the affordable apartment with space for that). Besides, it's raining; she runs her hands through her wet hair, wringing out as much water as she can. There is cleansing in the rain, even if there is no peace; she shivers once, hard.
Really, she should be Japanese for a proper tea ceremony, although it is acceptable for guests to be foreigners. She flicks her hair back over her shoulder, picks out a red strand that caught in her nail and drops it in the trash. She is very foreign. Although maybe if she goes far enough back she can find Japanese ancestry somewhere in her background... well, it would still be wrong.
Summer has read all about the way tea ceremonies go, properly; she knows what she's doing wrong. Once upon a time she would have felt bad about that.
Now, she has other things to feel bad about. Like the little boy who crossed her autopsy table today, with half the Potomac in his lungs. No sign of foul play, no sign of anything but pure, dumb, terrible luck. Only his brown hair fluffing away from his skull as it dried, his hands, limp against his sides, his eyes, open and oddly peaceful. She sat for a long time after she finished, looking into his eyes.
But she is not thinking about him. She doesn't think during this; that's the point.
She washes her hands and face in a small stone basin, carefully, savoring each movement. If she was doing this right, it would be pure spring water inside the basin. Instead, she's scented it with lavender, because she likes that smell, fresh and clean and alive. That's the one thing she hates most about her job; the smell that permeates everything in the morgue. Disinfectant, sharp and clear, and underneath it, the sweet/sour smell of bodies.
She's not supposed to think. She is only supposed to experience. Summer pushes her job away.
Her tools aren't right either. She doesn't like green tea, so she uses jasmine instead, loose leaves already settled in their wire cage-- and that's wrong too, since it should be a paste. She only has an electric kettle, and no hearth, so she lights a candle for the atmosphere, and ignores the bubbling hiss the kettle makes as it heats. It clicks, and she kneels beside it, pours the steaming water into her cup with a movement of her wrist that is as studied as it is graceful.
She likes the way her wrist bends, when she pours things, or lifts things. She doesn't usually see it-- who watches their wrist?-- but it makes a smooth, elegant arc that she traces now with the forefinger of her other hand, feeling her skin and the bones beneath, and the tendons that run from her knuckles. She likes the way she is put together, even if some of it is wrong.
The kettle replaced and the tea steeped, she sits back, settles herself comfortably, and lifts the cup, turning it in her hands. That is one thing that she does right; this is the loveliest, most elegant cup she could find, made of thin, bone-white china with tiny twists of flowers painted on the handle and the bottom.
The flowers are blue, the color of her eyes, the vines that link them the green of her mother's eyes, the tea the deep amber brown that touches her father's eyes in the sunlight.
She raises the cup to her lips, and sips a tiny bit; just a little for now. Her sister brought her this tea; it is Chinese, which is another piece of wrong, but it tastes wonderful, like summer afternoons on a swingset, or dancing with Lars.
She closes her eyes and for a moment she is home, sitting at her kitchen table, holding a warm mug of tea and listening to her brother expound on the Japanese tea ceremony. He was practicing a presentation. She doesn't think he knows how much she learned, then.
The tea smells calm. She sips it until it is gone.
Rating: PG.
Summary: Summer has ways of coping.
Date: 2028
Notes: Tangentally related to the Thriller Project.
This is not a proper tea ceremony.
There should be four guests, and an assistant, and a host (but she doesn’t like people, so who would she invite, and anyway this is for her, not them). Summer takes off her coat and drops it on a chair, kicks off her shoes with an impatient jerk.
There should be a proper room, with a proper scroll for decoration and a proper place to purify oneself (she'd like to see the affordable apartment with space for that). Besides, it's raining; she runs her hands through her wet hair, wringing out as much water as she can. There is cleansing in the rain, even if there is no peace; she shivers once, hard.
Really, she should be Japanese for a proper tea ceremony, although it is acceptable for guests to be foreigners. She flicks her hair back over her shoulder, picks out a red strand that caught in her nail and drops it in the trash. She is very foreign. Although maybe if she goes far enough back she can find Japanese ancestry somewhere in her background... well, it would still be wrong.
Summer has read all about the way tea ceremonies go, properly; she knows what she's doing wrong. Once upon a time she would have felt bad about that.
Now, she has other things to feel bad about. Like the little boy who crossed her autopsy table today, with half the Potomac in his lungs. No sign of foul play, no sign of anything but pure, dumb, terrible luck. Only his brown hair fluffing away from his skull as it dried, his hands, limp against his sides, his eyes, open and oddly peaceful. She sat for a long time after she finished, looking into his eyes.
But she is not thinking about him. She doesn't think during this; that's the point.
She washes her hands and face in a small stone basin, carefully, savoring each movement. If she was doing this right, it would be pure spring water inside the basin. Instead, she's scented it with lavender, because she likes that smell, fresh and clean and alive. That's the one thing she hates most about her job; the smell that permeates everything in the morgue. Disinfectant, sharp and clear, and underneath it, the sweet/sour smell of bodies.
She's not supposed to think. She is only supposed to experience. Summer pushes her job away.
Her tools aren't right either. She doesn't like green tea, so she uses jasmine instead, loose leaves already settled in their wire cage-- and that's wrong too, since it should be a paste. She only has an electric kettle, and no hearth, so she lights a candle for the atmosphere, and ignores the bubbling hiss the kettle makes as it heats. It clicks, and she kneels beside it, pours the steaming water into her cup with a movement of her wrist that is as studied as it is graceful.
She likes the way her wrist bends, when she pours things, or lifts things. She doesn't usually see it-- who watches their wrist?-- but it makes a smooth, elegant arc that she traces now with the forefinger of her other hand, feeling her skin and the bones beneath, and the tendons that run from her knuckles. She likes the way she is put together, even if some of it is wrong.
The kettle replaced and the tea steeped, she sits back, settles herself comfortably, and lifts the cup, turning it in her hands. That is one thing that she does right; this is the loveliest, most elegant cup she could find, made of thin, bone-white china with tiny twists of flowers painted on the handle and the bottom.
The flowers are blue, the color of her eyes, the vines that link them the green of her mother's eyes, the tea the deep amber brown that touches her father's eyes in the sunlight.
She raises the cup to her lips, and sips a tiny bit; just a little for now. Her sister brought her this tea; it is Chinese, which is another piece of wrong, but it tastes wonderful, like summer afternoons on a swingset, or dancing with Lars.
She closes her eyes and for a moment she is home, sitting at her kitchen table, holding a warm mug of tea and listening to her brother expound on the Japanese tea ceremony. He was practicing a presentation. She doesn't think he knows how much she learned, then.
The tea smells calm. She sips it until it is gone.
