Memories will taunt you [Ghosty]

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kousei ♚
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now and forever

Memories will taunt you [Ghosty] Apr 6, 2016 18:19:18 GMT -5

Post by kousei ♚ on Apr 6, 2016 18:19:18 GMT -5

MERCURY

{They'll make me drink this potion
I'll sleep forever}

I'm not there yet.

Stop - pause - breathe.

"Please."

The weight of the bottle is almost unbearable but I begin chugging anyway. Every drop a kick to my liver, brain cells, throat and all. Fire flows down my throat, leaving a rough scalding effect - I may as well be drinking lava. I pause, taking a moment to remove the bottle from my lips because air is needed. Raw whiskey, the stuff leaves it mark, leaving its boot print on my liver and all and perhaps that's one of the reasons why it's my favourite drinks. I need a proper mark to be left to cover of the marks of the sharp shards of a past, shards left by two names drawn from a bowl and the hoof print of a horse.

"Please." A mystery word, an agony filled cough and sputter makes me wince every time I hear it. It sounds like a death rattle carried by the wind but when I spin around no one's ever there. I shake my head, my brain's fucked; I know that so I guess it's no surprise I'm hearing things that aren't there.

I'm begging to reach that inescapable, untouchable euphoria gained when I drink just enough. I-i-intoxicated, yea, that's what they call it. Intoxication, when the world turns on it's side and swims before my eyes. I remember nothing, I feel invincible, untouchable like I can take on the world. I haven't gotten that way in a long term. I'm not even careful or subtle about it - although I should be, the risk of alcohol poisoning hangs over my shoulder like an inescapable black cloud diluted by the souls of two dead boys who's names I didn't know until 32 days ago. I won't die like that - it's too merciful for a Scoff.

I'm nowhere near there yet.

My vision is crystal clear and my senses aren't dulled enough. I can still feel the not-quite-hot-not-quite-cold rays of light weeping down from the sky. I can still see the white clouds drifting lazily through the sky and I can feel the wood hard tree at my back. I can still feel the shadow of an oversized tree looming over me and I can see every orange leaf slowly that drift down from it. I'm still touched by the not-quite-freezing-not-quite-hot slow breeze gently cutting through the air.

I need to be there.

Crystal clearly I can see the rows of gravestones for the fallen tributes that this hill overlooks. Every single grey stone erected from the ground in the same uniform straightness and symmetry up at the sky in mockery. From here I can still count the gravestones and the rows and like the back of my hand I tell where the two boys with the name Scoff lay in rest. Separated by seven gravestones the name Scoff haunts the graveyard.

I shudder and raise the bottle to my lips once again but the lava burns my throat only temporarily because before I know it nothing pours down my throat any more - it's fucking empty.

The weight of an empty bottle is harder to bear than a half-full one.

I mentally deduce that father much have drunk most of it and I was unlucky enough to pick out the wrong one before leaving the house. My frustration is molten lava in a volcano but it builds up ten times as fast and explodes with as much -if not more- fury. I fling the bottle as hard as I can and it flies across the hair and makes it home in the grass - away from me.

Too bad I cannot throw the weight of two dead boys along the grass either.

I bite my lip to stop the trembling and quickly sling myself up. Kicking the bottle across the grass I make my way from the tree, dead boys in tow and all.

I'll never get there. Face the grim reality, euphoria is unreachable now. My movement is automatic, the pull of the gravestones of the dead is magnetic. I failed to reach the euphoria I lusted over this morning, the numbness I was excited for is gone with the bottle I flung across the glass and crushed under the weight of two corpses.

I reach the gates, completely sober and all feeling, and I grab the metal and slowly swing it open. The cold sends a chill down my spine and I clench my jaw and persevere, stepping over the blurred line from living to death with a step.

Come to think of it, when did I come here? It doesn't take a lot of brain racking to remember, Day 40 since the day I woke up in a bed full of the shards of my shattered past. I breathe in and out, every step bringing me further from the world of the living and closer to the world of the death past. Lost wars and kids who couldn't come home. And two of their names were Scoff; remember that. Being in this graveyard is a terrible, grim reminder - there are worst things than the hoof of a to shatter your past.

It doesn't take long for me to reach one.

I find the District Ten Male if the Sixty-Ninth Hunger Games first.

I ignore the female, a name lost in the wind who I will never learn - her weight will never be on my shoulders.

"Who are you?" I ask him but I know it's all fallen on dead ears. Jordan Scoff-Reye surrendered but he still burned a long time ago. "He was so determined, so angry, so vicious." That's what people say. So, no, he didn't surrender, he probably burned kicking and screaming and hating death - or if he was like me hating life - and death probably had to pry the life out of his burning body. Perhaps he knew that in a war like that there is no right surrender. But how would I know? I'm a coward who doesn't even have the courage to watch the recap video.

In truth, I don't even know what Jordan Scoff-Reye even looked like.

"Who are you?" I repeat the question and not even I can tell if I'm speaking to the death boy looming over my shoulder or my lost self. At the moment I don't know the answer to either of those and at this rate I never will. Jordan Scoff-Reye is an enigma, all I know is that he was a soldier thrown into the snow and left to burn and watch his future melt in the flames just as I watch mine melt with every drop of poison I pour down my gullet. "Who are you?" I ask once again.

"Please." A repeated unknown death rattle carried in the wind, I instinctively snap my head back but no one is there. I look back and down at his name inscribed on a gravestone. Jordan Scoff-Reye. District 10 male. 69th Hunger games. Three simple sentences to sum up the life of the boy who's future was shattered by his own name just as my past was shattered by the leg of a horse.

Fists clenched at my sides, I scoff in disgust. What a shit memory.

Last Edit: Apr 7, 2016 15:38:36 GMT -5 by ghosty

ghosty
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Memories will taunt you [Ghosty] Apr 7, 2016 8:42:50 GMT -5

Post by ghosty on Apr 7, 2016 8:42:50 GMT -5

Feeling alone is something that I have got too friendly with, in the past three years. Never a moment had past since she died to the monsters that the Capitol created, and took her life away before she really had any chance to protect. She'd have been 15, going on 16, otherwise. But she was pulled out of a stupid glass bowl and died from a grotesque thing with teeth sharper than the knives we have in the butchery. It's been too long since her face crossed my mind, and yet, I miss it. It causes me pain each moment that Bree's face appears, yet it's the punishment that the Capitol sees fit.

But it's for a crime that no one who suffers, ever caused.

All my sister that I was left was marked on a stone, in a graveyard, away from the rest of our family. With all the other ones that fucked up in the process of trying to survive. The graveyard itself, is an eerie place. Children lay here, and no one else. I had flowers clutched hard in my hand, roses, colour of the blood which Bree left behind in the blue-white sheen of the ice. When I was young, Bree never liked going outside, and the roses, I told her, stopped all of the evil monsters of outside coming to eat her. The cuts in her hand showed the belief, showed the panic was real.

She needs protecting now more than she ever did before. Not from the monsters, but from the mind which we all hold. It tries to make me forget, and I'll never fucking let it do it. It will never make me forget Bree, unless it drugs me and yanks it out as hard as it can.

I wander down the path which is worn with pretty much nothing but the soles of my own shoes. I doubt that anyone else walks down this path with the same consistency as I do. 3 games are always sat next to each other, and I know that one of the boy's of the 70th only brother killed himself, it was all over all of the papers for about a week. And yet, they are separated beyond the stones of all that have fallen before and soon to be after him. I don't care about him, he wasn't ripped away from me with my sister next to him.

That was Jordan, and he rests heavy next to Bree. He lead her by his side to the train that would drag them both to Hell.

And that was when this figure shocked me by his grave; I heard that Jordan's father killed himself, and that, well, I'm not surprised in. Both of his sons died, pulled from a bowl that he was once entered in himself.

Finally, I get close enough behind him, "So, how's Jordan today?"

kousei ♚
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now and forever

Memories will taunt you [Ghosty] Apr 8, 2016 8:51:10 GMT -5

Post by kousei ♚ on Apr 8, 2016 8:51:10 GMT -5

MERCURY

{They'll make me drink this potion
I'll sleep forever}

Soft wind brushes my hair in response to my question. Nothing. Jordan Scoff-Reye is nothing, he burned and he burned into ash and from there he devolved into a memory. As a memory it was Jordan's right to slowly fade like all memories do, at a painfully slow pace he would fade because the flames destroyed his flesh and just like that he ceased to exist. He was a memory but he shattered, the muscular leg of a horse tearing him out of my mind.

Who are you Jordan Scoff-Reye?

...

That's right, you are nothing now.

Can I even say he was ever something? I can stand here and wrack my damaged brain all I want but it won't give me anything; it's like he never existed in all honesty. The only evidence of his existence in the form of a cloud diluted with his extinguished soul.

I think I'm going to need another drink after this, just standing here sends sharp shards of pain ripping through my skin. I need it. I need that unreachable euphoria to make me numb to it all. I can still feel it looming over me, grey clouds diluted with the souls of two dead boys who's faces I cannot recall. I need to be nu-

"So, how's Jordan today?" A voice behind me sounds. Sharp alarm bells pierce my brain and I almost jump. Movement automatic, I twist on my heels so my back is turned to the dead boy. What? I turn my back on the dead and am met with the living and I'm shocked. Why is someone else here? The living do not belong here, this place is for the dead and the non-existing. So what does that make me? Perhaps I'm just in a weightless limbo, waiting to teeter over the edge of one side of the other.

It's a woman. No-no, scratch that, it's a girl who looks no older than me. For a split second I swear she's a ghost or a hallucination because the living don't belong here. No, I know that's wrong. She cannot be part of the army of the dead because she looks too whole. Besides, ghosts aren't real or I would've seen the two dead boys long ago. A hallucination means a figment of the imagination, a structure formed by the brain so in that sense is it not subject to the wishes of the person hallucinating?

Anything my brain constructs would never have the guts ask me how Jordan was doing.

Dark hair cascades over her pristine face and her voice sounded too normal. This place is a field of grey so she sticks out like a sore thumb. The dead and non-existing have no right to colour. Am I sure she's real? Hundred percent, she's real but she doesn't look like she belongs here, she definitely doesn't belong here because she stands out to much. Or maybe she's like me, teetering in limbo waiting for that final shove to kick her on one side of the other. I relax, silently thankful that she's not some sort of assailant or something but I'm still suspicious. The world of the dead and non-existing is a tender topic after all and she just poked and prodded right into the middle of it with a simple question.

Who is she to ask such a stupid question? My emotions still remain dormant, not stirred one bit by the disruption to my chain of thought. Numbness, weird because I'm nowhere near intoxicated. I probably need to be just to get through this. There's always the possibility that she's someone I knew before I was sent into the inescapable limbo, that would explain why she seems so foreign to me. But she would've visited me sooner after I woke up. I quickly scratch that possibility out of my head, she's just a stranger to me and she's playing a tender game; a game that the living don't tend to win.

Girl, I would answer your question if I could but I don't know anything about Jordan Scoff. "Dead and charred, as always." I know that, this gravestone is crystal clear evidence of that. They tell me he burned (I still cringe at the thought) what a way to go. Perhaps I shouldn't be so disgusted. Such a merciless death is typical for a Scoff. My words are as cold as the corpses that litter the ground beneath us and I allow them to sit in the air between us for barely a minute before adding to the flood. "Who are you?" I ask, my words barbed with cold steel and unmoving wire. It's a question inaccessible to the dead and non-existing but she's neither. She has no right to not answer.

I'm not bitter and that's reflected in my words. No anger, no bitterness or sour feeling. I just want to know the answer my ~~two~~ three questions. I almost forgot the most important question of all. Barely a second passes between that question and this question. "Why are you here?" I add, after all, the living don't belong here in the field of the dead and non-existent.