Elle se remit debout devant lui qui n'avait pas bougé, qui gisait toujours au fond du fauteuil et elle le défiait tout bas … et elle s'attendait à être insultée.
—Colette

Beautiful: that was what he was, when he stretched his neck from numbness. Smooth, narrow lines curving and elongating as he grunted in frustration at how slow Rainbow was being.

He didn’t think she was beautiful, not when she stood threateningly, looking down with confusion at his bound form.

Why not just let him go, eh?

Every morning, the quick pattering of her footsteps down the basement steps would signal her awakening, and he’d be the first person to see her deep-set eyes surrounded by circles radiating and growing out as maniacally as she apparently was. She stood, everyday, whispering to herself before going to her laptop and typing incessantly.

He was tired; so tired. Probably, nobody even suspected that he was lodged right beneath his own home. At least, he tried to comfort himself. Rainbow is a smart girl. She’d know.

Five floors above, his sister surfs through the meagre, amateurish webpages dedicated to her missing brother. A familiar name crops up every now and then. Trixy Bee. Trixy B… Trixy.

Ri Ah, the building manager’s sister. She mentioned more than once— more than twice and more than ten times— that she used the name. She claimed not to know of Rome’s internet fame, but this name is an active part of her brother’s little fan domain.

She used the name to write stories, romances. There are lurid descriptions of her brother, the one whose name she laughed at along with Rainbow’s because it sounded so funny. But apparently, even before they moved in, Ri Ah knew everything: his name, his school, his smoothly distinctive dancing, every line and blemish on his face, his hips. Rainbow didn’t even want to know, but she had to.

She appeared not to have a job, and this was what Rainbow’s parents believed. But the girl knew more, having fortunately or unfortunately have had made friends with the recluse.

She is a ghost writer; an invisible puppeteer of desperately lazy students, aspiring experts and incompetent doctors.

For herself, she looks over the beautiful man on the chair and weaves words together to form the poetry of unrequited love. That is what he is: beautiful; he will never see her in the same way, she knows.

Ri Ah is wondering if she should go beyond the bounds, when men carrying search warrants barrel through the basement door. Her basement door. The one her brother was supposed to keep from strangers and interlopers and trespassers and people.

In half-light of the cloud-covered full moon, as she kicks and flails and shrieks and tries to escape from the law while he rubs his sore wrists from the six month-long ordeal, her face is lit in the most beautiful possible way that Rome has never seen before: she is exquisite.

Epigraph from Chéri, as translated by Roger Senhouse: She stood up again in front of him, but he did not move from the depths of his chair, and she taunted him under her breath … and waited for an insult.

I did say drabble, right? Spent more time looking for the French original than writing because this scene is way too funny. Cries because laughs.

Also, sorry for the Stockholm Syndrome. This is my only chance, okai.

This is a stoopid drabble. Almost tagged as horror because of the Stockholm Syndrome and the change of tenses midway. Yes, I caught that but did not change a thing.

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