InsaneJournal

Title: A beautiful friendship.
Characters: The Girl and The Ficus.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Questionable language? Mentions of a post-apocalyptic scenario?
Word Count: 713.
Prompt(s): this game from ~nanoljers @ LJ.
Summary: Nuclear winter happened! ...Now what?
Disclaimer: Mine. No touchy. Any pop culture stuff mentioned is very much not mine.
A/N: Holy crap on a stick, it's something original. Basically, my writing professor dared me to not be long-winded. So this happened.

“The French have a way of discussing orgasms-”

“Shut up.”

“Why must you always mistreat me so?”

Sighing, the girl cast a sideways glance at her companion. For the love of Christ, she had to be going insane. The best she could hope was that this was grief-induced psychosis and would, thus, go away with a proper course of sedatives, mood-altering drugs, and a good, solid bit of therapy.

All she needed was someone to be grieving. No one she knew had died since her grandfather, when she was twelve – at least, no one she knew and cared about had died. There had been that girl in her psychology class the previous year, but that hadn’t been a personal tragedy as much as it had just been mildly upsetting that Stacey had worked so hard, and been so dedicated, only to die so young. But there had to be, the girl figured quite logically, some explanation for suddenly hearing plants talk; one did not just wake up one morning with the sudden ability to hear and communicate with plants; such things were unheard of, outside of comic books – and, really, if she had to wake up with a supernatural ability, why did it need to be this one? She would have much preferred to be telekinetic.

She wasn’t even taking a biology class this semester; this made no sense whatsoever.

“Your aunt was always lovely to me,” the ficus chided.

“She wasn’t my aunt,” the girl groaned, sinking against the freezing bench. Leave it to Michigan to actually be frozen over after something vaguely resembling an Apocalypse – all those years she’d spent calling it a vast northern wasteland and now it actually was. Why were they even waiting for a bus? There couldn’t be anyone alive within ten miles or more, and the Southeast Michigan bus system was notably unreliable to begin with.

“Your mother’s friend, then. Whatever you’ll have her called.”

“Just shut up.”

For several minutes, they sat in silence, listening as the dry, frigid wind whipped through their barren surroundings, sardonically tickling at the exposed skin of her pale cheeks, teasing out a rose amidst her facial reflection of the landscape. In the quietude, just how badly off the two of them were made itself painfully obvious: snow fell before them, and behind, and it didn’t appear to be obscuring anything – but what was there to obscure? The diners, the bagel shop, and the nice boutiques across the street had all been leveled to rubble, as had most of the buildings on this side of the street; all that had been left standing was the movie theater – the Eight, not the Palladium; would the Palladium had survived; they had better choice in candy at the Palladium – and the solitary streetlamp that was progressively becoming the only light.

Out of compulsion more than anything else, the girl checked the time on her cell phone; just as it had the last time, the device searched for a signal and failed to find one. She sighed. Of course there wasn’t a signal to be found; all the towers had probably been knocked down, the same as everything else in this godforsaken place.

“What, exactly, is your problem with me?” the ficus finally inquired.

“It’s not you,” the girl huffed. “It’s just… you’re a plant.”

“I find that racist.” …God, a politically correct plant. She had to spend the rest of however long with a politically correct plant. God hated her.

“Well, it isn’t. Just… look: you’re a plant. You’re a plant, and I’m a human being.”

“A fairly obnoxious human being.”

“Oh, bite me. It’s just… I can’t spend the rest of time with a plant. I’m going to go crazy.”

“Maybe you already are.”

“I’d rather not entertain that possibility.”

“Oh, shut up and listen to yourself, princess. Crazy or not, we’re stuck together, got it? You’ve only got two choices, and there’s a pretty simple choice between them: either we don’t talk to each other and you actually do go crazy, or we try our best to get along and keep each other sane.”

The girl sighed, staring pensively down Old Woodward. Still no buses in sight. Turning back to the ficus, she asked: “So what’d you think of Helen’s dog?”