My Heart Will Roam {Wallflowers vs Skeleton Warrior} (Day 3)

[googlefont="Playfair Display:400"]basil anatola

When the bones dissolve into dust, so does his adrenaline. Every part of his body is shaking, convulsing, with the pain and shock of what’s happened to him. The loss tremors through him like an earthquake, rattling him from the top of his head to the tips of his foot. His fucking foot. Underneath the now still waters, a piece of his body is rotting. That thought is more painful than the sensations he feels at the end of his left leg.

He’s still on the ground, on his hands and knees, like a fucking dog. His hands cave into fists, shoving mud and algae beneath his nails. Dark red pools around his submerged wrists, spreading out like a hurricane beneath him. The way his blood clouds the water makes him think of the way milk clouds Holloway’s coffee on sunday mornings. It makes him think of paintings. It makes him think of going home.

“Is that it?” He shout-whispers - not to Danny or Ezero, but to the people watching him right now. To the people who did this to him. He stumbles up, too quickly, probably, for someone whose foot just got severed from their body, because now his head is spinning and all of his broken bones are begging him to stay down. He doesn’t. He throws his axe out into the water, close to where the skeletons dissolved. He’ll have to wade into the water, later, to find it, but he doesn’t think about that, right now. “Is that all you fucking wanted?,” he screams, instead, throwing his head back to unleash his misery towards the sky. His vision is clouded, and he can’t tell if it’s because maybe he started crying, or maybe it’s just his body losing consciousness. “That’s all you’re going to take?”

By the time night falls, Basil has stitched up whatever he could at the bottom of his leg, and then bandaged up the rest. His adrenaline has completely worn out, so, now, he can feel every single ache and pain that’s scratched onto the canvas of his body. There’s a sharp, burning feeling where his foot should be. It swells as the blood blooms across the white of the bandages. He resists the urge to look at it.

He doesn’t want to look at it. He doesn’t even want to feel. He just wants to go home. He wants to fucking go home, and walk, and breathe or laugh without feeling each fucking crack in his sternum shake with him. He doesn’t want to fight anymore.

“You should just kill me.”

He says it as a whisper, like a secret, or a breath so soft that the other two probably wouldn’t have heard it if the air hadn’t been so still. “Stop,” Danny says, voice full of meaning that he can’t interpret.

He lifts his gaze from the water to where her voice came from. It’s so, so dark where they are, right now. He’s sitting at the base of some tree and can hardly make out their expressions. A dim moonlight falls over them, barely outlining the shape of their faces. But, he tries to look at them right in the eyes, anyway, his own gaze hard and unwavering. Death is written on all of their faces tonight, and he is tired of looking away from the things that scare him.

“I mean it,” he says, even if he doesn’t. His voice gets choppy, then, breaking over the last syllable in the same way a wave breaks over a shore. Anger ripples through him, uncontrollable and untamed. It is a storm waiting to wreak havoc, kinetic energy thudding through his veins, making his pulse synchronize with the marching footsteps of an oncoming army. Right now, looking into Basil Anatola’s eyes would be to look into the face of a lost cause.

What comes out of him, though, isn’t a storm, but a drizzle. It leaks behind his eyes and slides down his face. His voice is all full of rain, unsteady and uncertain and cold and damp. As the tears start to fall, it feels like an intrusion - just one more thing he can’t control. “I’m deadweight, now.” Beneath all that rain, though, his voice is still dark and bitter. The tension of the night bites into him, and he lets it.

“It can’t get worse than this, anyway, can it?”

“Stop it!”

It does get worse. Danny lifts up her shirt to reveal bruises he doesn’t remember her getting there, and Basil’s not even surprised. “I’m not doing too well myself,” she says, which isn’t much of an explanation, but the realization hits Basil suddenly, anyway. It makes him sadder than he’d expect it to. She’s dying, he thinks to himself. Even if she makes it out alive, she’s dying.

“You two can’t give up on yourselves. Okay?” She stutters when she says it, but she still sounds resolute, as if she made up her mind about this a long time ago.

He can feel the tracks that his tears left on his face, leading all the way to where the residue still drips from the bottom of his chin. He wipes it off with a hasty jerk of the back of his hand. He thinks of Roland, and Holloway, and Gavin, and Sage, and Raven, and his mother. He thinks that everyone in this arena has some baggage to carry.

So, when Danny falls, he reaches out to catch her without hesitating. He’s not strong enough to pull her up, though, so they both go splashing into the water, his arms wrapped around her shoulders as her whole body wilts and her words slur into each other. “Somethin’s… somethin’s wrong,” she says, voice all full of shards and splinters.

“Danny,” Basil says, his voice still gravelly from the tears that punctured it, but also softer than how he sounded before. He tries to tug upwards from where he’s gripping her shoulders, but the stump of his leg screams in protest as it submerges into the water again. “Danny, come on, get up.”