Yuki lie on her bed, in her small room, and stared up at the ceiling, listening to the pitter-patter of the rain on the ceiling. The scent of Stacie's fresh-baked homemade peach cobbler wafted through the house. Yuki could hear the other housemates through the walls. Somewhere in the house, Chelsea was yelling for Shiro to bring her some miscellaneous item, and Shiro was yelling back that he wasn't her slave. This was followed by Chelsea reminding Shiro that he was in fact her slave, having sold his soul to her last summer. Yuki chuckled to herself when she heard the clanging to pots and pans, followed by Shiro's desperate cries for help. that idiot's mouth would forever get him into trouble.
She heard footsteps in the hallway outside her bedroom door, accompanied by Karen's familiar humming, and the faint sound of music coming from Rika's room down the hall. There was a grunting coming from Tsurugi's room on the other side of the wall. God only knows what goes on in there. The rain started coming down harder, drowning out all the other sounds.
Yuki glanced for a moment at the shelf on the opposite wall, covered in various trinkets she had acquired over the past year; a broken dagger; a glass bottle of mysterious green liquid; a teddy bear with one eye and multiple stitches; a cut-out from a box of cereal; a small cardboard box containing the remnants of a robot doll; a trophy; a baseball; and a faded photograph of her mother. Glancing at these objects, one by one, brought back a fountain of old memories."Has it really been a whole year?" she asked herself.
She thought of that night, one year ago, when her seemingly normal life was turned upside down. Was that life really normal? This life, the one she had come to know so well, was so far beyond what most girls her age were use to. But for Yuki, this strange existence, which rivals the cheapest low-budget cult fim, was the only kind of normal she knew. It was a night, much like this, when her sort of normal came to be.
She was curled up under her comforter, loving the feeling of soft cotton on her skin, hugging a pillow close to her chest, listening to the rain.
It was raining that night too...
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