D2 :: Axel Whiskeyjack

dropped that, fought that
in the life i used to have as
baby, i just lost my memory
in the new life

We all grow up dead by default. Our parents did too. Lucky people are born on their 19th birthdays and that's when they take their first breaths as living people and the world acknowledges them as actually being human. Before that we're just maybes and our whole childhoods are spent wondering if we'll be murdered for sport or if we'll watch each other be murdered for sport or if we'll be doing the murdering.

We're all dead here.

Well, not Winnie. Winnie's a full-grown ma'am and she's been human for probably a decade now. We've all asked her what that's like. Like, being alive for real. For real, for real. It's not that all of us asked her at once, but rather one by one and quietly, secretly, when no one else was around to overhear us worrying if our heartbeat is something we're allowed to believe in or not. None of us know the feeling of being confident in our own life. All it takes is our name being called out in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and then we'll be ghosts on the television, like so many others.

Winnie doesn't lie and that's why we all like her. All of our parents swore to us that the world is normal and so we should accept it because it's the way of things, but she's the first adult who admitted that, no, the world is actually pretty fucked up and it's right for us to question everything we've ever been told. That asking questions is important. Okay, so it's that and also she didn't call the keepers to kick us off her property — we swear, we thought the parking garage was abandoned — and on top of that she let us stay. And she fixed the toilet in the basement's utility room and even put in a shower so we didn't have to rely on the school locker rooms for all of our collective hygiene needs anymore. It's like... she laughed so hard when we first started calling this place our safehouse, because it's a dangerous crumbling parking garage from the old days with rusted rebar jutting out everywhere you look, but that's what it is for us: safe. For the first time in our lives, it feels like.

There's almost always a visible cringe when we giggle and call Winnie mommmmm~, but she's more of a mother than any of our "real" ones. Mine was —

Well.

You know how some... uh. Um, okay. So.

Phew. Ha. I, uh. Ha ha. Wow, I just. Sorry, I don't know sign language, I don't know why my hands keep doing that right now. Um. Words. Right. I know how to use those. No more tapping, sorry, I'm done. See? Hands in pockets.

It's, like...

Um.

I was always going to be a problem, one way or another. The list of things I needed to change was too long. It was everything. If I'm quiet, then I'm too quiet and it's difficult to break into my thoughts. She was always telling me to drop my armor when I would close my mouth too tightly in response to being told I was being loud and needed to dial it back, just not that far, I guess. Because when I open my mouth I have a hard time closing it. Words jump out one after another, strung together with yells of overexcitement and too many teeth all trying to show off their existence at once and the next thing I know my hands are flapping around trying to convey what my mouth isn't fast enough to say or I'm throwing my hat at something I like too much or maybe I'm just SCREAMING because my laughter got so big it combusted. Apparently I was too grown for that kind of behavior. I was an embarrassment. I brought shame to her, to my father.

I was my parent's biggest regret. They never said it, but I felt it every time my mother's hand dug into my spine, a wordless gesture telling me to straighten up my posture, or when she would pull a brush out from her purse and suddenly began fixing my hair while her tongue went tut tut tut for what felt like hours. Urgh, I know, I know. It sounds so fucking small when I try to say it out loud. It's not like they ever hit me, but sometimes I wish they would have. Because instead it was always tension and tension and always this infinite tension pulling the air so tight that everyone's hands clenched and my mom's palm would be so hot as she wiped a smudge from my cheek that I was endlessly waiting for her to snap and scorch my skin. But the tension never found release. Everything was eggshells riddled with micro-cracks. And lies.

The day I ran away was the day I found out my parents had been taking the maximum amount of tessera out in my name, after years of telling me they didn't. That they would never. We were well off; we didn't need it. Leftover food was regularly dumped into the scrap bin. I had never been hungry a day in my life and neither had they. There was no reason for them to do it, except to increase the odds of me being taken away from them.

Astraea, Zim, Noe, and I had a pact to run away together for a long time before that, we were all just waiting for some kind of undeniable piece of evidence. Everything was already too much and we all knew we were being gaslit everywhere we turned, neighbors and teachers telling us we were merely overdramatic children who needed to trust that the adults in our lives knew what was best for us. That kind of bullshit. But we knew, we finally knew, that we couldn't keep pretending the way we were supposed to, because what was best for the adults and what was best for us wasn't the same thing at all.

"Not all parents are good for their children," Winnie admitted to me so bluntly that my heart nearly burst, the night she finally bribed me with enough tea and candy to coax me into talking about what brought me here. The four of us had been camping out in the parking garage for a few weeks already and Zim woke up with a bright pink assault gun pressed to her forehead. It was the weekend and so we were all dirty and half-starved, not having eaten since our school cafeteria lunches on Friday. The barrel fire was almost dead, so we had huddled together for warmth in a pile of limbs and tangled hair, with our varsity jackets spread out on top like an unfinished quilt. Zim didn't scream. She didn't even cry, despite her eyes welling up to the absolute brink. I felt her squeeze my hand, because it was okay. No matter what. Even if Winnie had pulled the trigger, at least we had tried to free ourselves and if we were still the walking dead despite all of our effort, then at least we were free ghosts now.

Besides, we've been conditioned to accept death our whole lives.

Astraea whispered I love you in Zim's ear, so quietly that no one else should have ever heard, but the sound of Zim's easily riled heartbeat pounding with sudden ferocity was deafening. Winnie pulled her gun away in such a panic that she nearly shot herself in the foot, the bullets chewing up the concrete where she stood and sent so much dust into the air that I thought a pipe of some sort had burst and was spitting smoke or steam. She scrambled backwards while we clutched each other tighter. Then her hands were franticly snatching at the muddled air, pushing our hair back from our eyes, squeezing our hands, and checking our pulses. Were we okay? Were we hurt? God, she was so sorry.

No one had ever been apologetic for wronging us before. No one had ever sat us up and carefully looked over our faces and limbs for fear of the harm that might have been caused. I was so used to being harmed that I didn't understand what she was doing at first. I thought maybe she was going to zip tie my wrists together, to make it easier to turn me over to the peacekeepers. My surrendered hands continued hanging in the air even after she let me go to examine Noe, who was curled up beside me just as shellshocked as I was. I stayed like that for so long that halfway through Noe's check-up, Winnie suddenly turned her face back to look at me. Her brows were furrowed and everything was quiet and perfectly still as we stared at each other until she reached out and gently moved my hand into Noe's, our fingers tangling together automatically.

An invisible wound stitched itself back together in that moment, one that I'd had my whole life. Before then, I didn't know that quiet ache wasn't everyone's default way of feeling. I'd just assumed everyone felt like I did and that my hurt wasn't special.

Winnie gave us the keys to the basement, because clearly it wasn't safe for a bunch of teenage girls to sleep out in the open like we were. There was already a mattress down there, piled with blankets, and a furnace. A tea kettle. Tinned food. Things like that. She told us a friend used to stay there sometimes, but that she hadn't seen him in years, so she thought it'd be alright for us to use the space. "Apparently I could use some security guards to keep the riffraff out," she joked, her voice strained with regret, "we can talk salary later." Astraea began quietly laughing and didn't stop for hours, hysterical until her head finally dropped onto Zim's shoulder and exhaustion coaxed her to sleep.

The others came later, but that's another story. First Wilder, obviously. Then Salem and Nox, even though some of us didn't know them quite as well before. They were still ours and we were theirs. It's like how Winnie knew we were hers instinctively. Some people just belong to each other. That's really all you need to know about any of us. We're just a bunch of dead girls hiding in our mom's condemned basement, waiting for the day we're declared legally alive.

But like, I get it. My part of the story is boring. If you want to know about the witchcraft then you should really ask Wilder or Astraea, they're much better at all of that than I am. I mean, Wilder totally killed a guy with a hex once! That's what actually got the keepers all up in our business... Hey. Tell anyone and you'll be next.

We're dead and you can be too.

villain by pixy.