you knew the heroes died, | team titans, day six

Post by gamemaker tallis 🧚🏽‍♂️kaitlin. on Nov 27, 2021 12:40:33 GMT -5

The Gamemakers put Aneesa's face in the sky even as she's sitting behind Sasha, gasping for breath painfully, terribly, wretchedly, and it makes everything inside of Sasha want to scream. It feels like the world giving up on Aneesa, and that, that does things to tighten the spaces in Sasha's chest. Every single bone, every single muscle, every single part of her right down to each silly little nerve ending and the spaces between them start to sing in unison. A dissonant echo that threatens to shatter.

"She's not dead," she hisses into the dark, hands clenched fists gouging into the half-moons already scarred across her palms from days ago. "She's not dying." A trembling breath, and a glance over her shoulder that feels stolen—"you're not dying."

But Sasha can feel herself trembling all over, feels like her bones are shaking and she doesn't have any control over them anymore. Cecily's words have been playing on her head in an endless loop, just over and over and over a million times. For Aneesa, she'd said, and Sasha had known she was never going to think twice. She does everything that she can in her power not to look back at the other girl, doesn't want the image of her splayed out across the back seat to be the last image that she has of her. Call her stubborn, but Sasha refuses to entertain the idea that she isn't going to be able to get Aneesa out. Jaw quivering, clenched, grit, she can't let her die here.

Not here.

Because when people say I love you they're really trying to say I see you, right? And that's the thing that deranges, the thing that Sasha has been running from her entire life. She looks at herself in that tiny mirror above the driver seat, breathes in, breathes out.

She remembers standing on the platform in the bloodbath, feeling so desperate, so alone, so lonely. Graceless and careless. And then—Gavin, stumbling into each other and deciding they loved each other before either had blinked. Aneesa, eyes wide and bright and accepting when Gavin topples over himself like a cartoon character and lands ass over head in front of her. Cecily, letting her have her quiet. Cecily, who Sasha refused to let herself really think about for days. Cecily, girl who Sasha thinks she could have been like if she had just been a little kinder, a little less willing to be alone, a little more willing to fight the good fight rather than fight, well, just to fight. Just to be cruel.

Grace, Sasha sees now, comes violently.

Tenderness is learned.

When people say I love you they're really trying to say I see you. Sasha decides it this time, doesn't question. What awful power does it give a person to see you? What weakness are they going to find? You don’t know, and that’s the hard part. The not knowing. The cost of trust.

You see me. You see me and I see you.

She wonders what she would have been like had she stopped being cruel the first time she noticed that she could be. Tiny blonde girl, hand in hand with a girl who looks too much like her, Sasha remembers watching her shadow scare away the fish in the pond. She remembers laughing.

She remembers "that's mean," and a girl wearing her face, but a pout and crossed arms where Sasha wore a faltering grin and empty hands that wish they were still being held.

She remembers being seen.

She remembers never wanting to be again. And yet, Sasha thinks she's glad her friends see her now.

"You're not going to talk me out of it," she says before Gavin has finished crawling into the backseat aside Aneesa, and Sasha knows that he is the last one Cecily brought her little plan to, can see it in her eyes and all over his face. "And don't look at me like that," she says, feeling her teeth grind and the muscles in her neck tense. "I don't want to hear about how this isn't going to work." She swallows. "Cause the other choice is all of us dying."

And that's all that Sasha can give him because she has always been more boundary than girl, too many edges and too much definition and too little willingness to bend.

"And I'm not doing that."

It's a fine narcotic, feeling loved by them. She isn't ready to give it up yet. 

So she starts driving.

Through the rain, the Jeep slogging through the mud and the trees and kicking up a mess behind them, Sasha doesn't look in the rearview mirror, just fixes on the spot Cecily told her to drive towards and doesn't blink, doesn't think about it twice. 

Sasha is glad when she meets Cecily's gaze as she's running away from the explosion, wishes that this part of the plan hadn't involved leaving the other girl alone to run through the forest to plant the bomb ahead of the others, but Cecily hadn't wanted to hear that. Ever the hero, ever the martyr, Sasha doesn't blame her.

There's little Cecily is better at.

But there's nothing she can do about it now, and her gaze is ripped away as flame ignites powder and suddenly—BANG! And it's deafening, even sat back in the Jeep the explosion is loud enough to send a ringing through Sasha's head. It's hard to tell through the smoke at first whether or not this has all been a foolish dream from the very beginning, if they hadn't really found a way to use the Gamemakers arena against them. But there, among the soot and the ash, Sasha can see a little crack, a spiderweb of faltering code and broken screens extending away from it in a beautiful spiral.

A fissure. A hope.

"What do you think people will say about you when you die?" There's no time for words, but Sasha has never been able to follow the rules, has never been able to get this right. Her mouth twists, and she rolls her shoulders; she doesn't have time to listen to his answer and they both know it. Swallowing, she puts on her bravado. "Actually, don't be morbid."

And like that, there's nothing left to do. Nothing left to say. There's only a girl and her hope and her willingness to follow through on it. Sasha drives full speed at the forcefield and it's like a star devouring itself. The thing heaves and groans under the pressure of the Jeep, and Sasha has to jam her arms out straight to try and compensate and not let herself be thrown forward through the glass.

It's a strange, quiet scene beyond the crash.

As far as she can see, there's an ocean of blues competing for dominance. The sea churns in slow waves along a slim line of sandy beach, littered now with smoking scraps of metal. Somewhere along the horizon, purple and faded yellow leak across the sky, turning dark blue to light and forcing night into morning. A stark difference from the sky across the arena, still covered in dark rain clouds. Sasha can still feel the rain dripping down her temple, slipping along her jaw and collecting at the base of her throat. 

The moon hangs in the sky.

Sasha inhales, sharp. It's beautiful.

But then it's just—pain.

Blinding, white-hot, something that she's never felt before and will never be able to put into words. It sears itself into her body, makes her feel like her insides are molten and her limbs are putty. With worse groans and screeches even then when they had crashed into the thing, the forcefield begins to shift and move slowly, pulling itself apart in ways that look like it shouldn't make sense. She grins around what tastes a lot like blood, and starts to laugh, because what else is there to do when the forcefield moves in a flash and comes down right on to of the Jeep, cutting into the engine. She tried to accelerate. what direction she isn’t sure just away but it feels like Sasha implodes on herself with the impact of the blast back into them.

She could see the stars.

The real stars, she means. Not the ones that hung Aneesa's face in the sky, or wore the face of a dead-girl whose throat Sasha had cut, just—stars. Fading out in the early morning light, hard to see against the coming light of the day, and stars all the same.

She thinks she's crying now.

It feels a lot like rage.

"I tried," she says around the blood in her mouth. Terribly. Always, always, always terribly. The Jeep is halfway through the forcefield, engine half-gone and half in flame, and Sasha has done a terrible job. She's gotten it all wrong, is watching everything go up in smoke around her, but she tried. Fuck, she tried. For her entire life, the world chalked her up to someone beautiful, saw her as a thing to look at and oogle over and she let them because it meant that no one ever really saw past the veneer. She let them, told herself that her beauty was her weapon, but now it feels like it was a cage with sharp edges and she could have been—she could have been more. "I tried."

I did good this time, she says, this time to herself. I did what Maisy would do.

Like a vulture beating its wings for scraps, she looks for Cecily. She can't explain the ways she needs her right now, the ways in which she would do anything to see the look in her eyes right now, needs her to look at her one more time and tell her how she saw light. Sasha doesn't want to know how the blackness has spread under her ribs, doesn't want to know how she has for so long allowed herself to be consumed by the wasp nest living in her head. She'll grow out of it, her mother's friends had told her of her daughter's mean streak, but she'd only ever grown into it.

If her mother could see her now.

She finds Cecily, she thinks. Or she doesn't. 

"I did good, huh?" around a bloody smile.

And like that, the weight of being is too much, and she blinks herself into a beam of light. In a breath, she's the sun.

Somewhere, an echo starts to cry.

Sasha?