To fix you {Kolt}

and i've lost who i am
and i can't understand
why my heart is so broken, rejecting your love
without love gone wrong, lifeless words carry on
but i know, all i know is that the end's beginning

I never used to think of death as a gift. When I brought it down on so many people, a cold tide of chemical doom, or more recently the warm outpouring of blood over razored steel, I had always viewed it as punishment, as retribution for a million unnamed sins that would go unrepaid if not for my own righteous hand. Now my point of view is different, although any point of view I might have is limited to the walls of my bedroom. I sleep when I can, drifting into the blissful unconsciousness that comes when Colt rations out a morphling tablet every few hours, but I don’t dare to close my eyes when there’s no drug in my system to hold back the nightmares that lurk in the shadows beyond the end of my bed. If I woke up screaming before, I don’t want to know what sort of phantoms lie in wait for me now. I was awake the last time Aurora came over, heard what were meant to be hushed murmurs in the hallway as she tried to make Colt understand that this wasn’t his fault. Part of him died with Kiera, she’d said, and not for the first time I found myself thinking that I wished all of me had died with her instead.

Some mixture of grief and madness has stolen my voice, my will to function, has stolen the deepest part of me and left only a shell in its wake. Any time I try to dig down deep enough to find any sort of motivation I find only the cold fact that she died hating me, and I lapse even farther into this horrific limbo that I’ve been stuck in for days (or maybe it’s years, now. I’ve lost track of the passage of the sun outside my drawn curtains, only marking the hours by the merciful dosages of the little white pills that give me a few hours of living death). Colt claimed the bottle from its place on my bedside table after he walked in to find me sitting up in bed for the first time in days, holding a small mountain of the little chalky tablets in my palm contemplatively. I had thought of my mother then, of how despite the sobbing I’d heard from my bedroom that night and the tears that were still wet on her cheeks when I’d found her she had looked so peaceful in death. I had wondered if the pain sitting somewhere in the marrow of her bones had felt like this, how many years she had dealt with it before finally giving up. I used to hate her for the selfishness of taking her own life, but now I’m beginning to think she may have had the right idea. There’s nothing left of me but the hurt, the feeling that everything inside of me has been flayed raw and exposed, and compared to a forever of this death would be a mercy.

Colt has taken that option from me, though; he stole it the moment he snatched the pills from my hand with the worst sort of fear written across his face. He’s aged decades in a matter of days, not showing it in wrinkles or gray hair but displaying it outright in the weary stoop of his body and the quiet lament behind his eyes whenever he looks at me. I know I’ve left him with a burden, saddled him with the task of trying to keep something alive that has no will to live, and it’s all the more reason for me to silently curse my body for not giving up the fight like the rest of me has. I tried once or twice in the dead of night to simply stop breathing, to let the last of me slip away into the sweet embrace of painless dark, but each time my lungs rebelled and I would gasp in a ragged inhalation, still tethered to a world that does nothing but hold me in a suspended state of agony. Blame is a heavy load to carry for one who had vowed to live his life blameless, and my spine broke beneath the weight of it the moment Kiera told a whole nation that her demise came at no other hand but mine.

It’s time for another pill. I know because of the silent yearning that pulls at my veins in its absence (I’d heard once that addiction came fast for those seeking a good time and even faster for those seeking escape), buzzes through my head loudly enough to wake me from sleep and peel my eyes open to take in the murky half-dark of my bedroom. Colt sits all folded-in on himself in the corner, a constant sentinel to guard what’s left of me from slipping away when he’s not expecting it. The scent of burning nicotine and stale regret hovers in the air, stemming from the little spot of orange glow nestled between his fingers, and the tiny part of me that’s still alive wonders vaguely when he started smoking. Our eyes meet, mine empty and his broken, and although he can’t be more than a few feet away it feels like there’s a whole universe between us. He’s hurting, but he’s still alive. I’m not truly living, not really. Maybe the imagined distance is just the veil between life and death. His eyes tear away from mine as he stubs the cigarette out, the light from the candle at his feet catching the moisture on his cheeks. “T-tell me what I can, how I can, how do I...”

I blink at him. That’s the only real response I can muster, the only thing I can offer to let him know I’ve heard even though the ghost of me is whispering things like baby, please don’t cry and you can’t help, no one can that will never be strong enough to make it past my lips. I’m not even strong enough to cry anymore, let alone speak. All I can do is exist, and even then the effort of it exhausts me. There was a time when he was my hiding place and my source of strength, but now that any strength I may have had is gone he’s become an anchor, what I’ve begun to think is the only thing holding me to life. I’m not sure whether I love him or hate him for it. Either way, the bed suddenly feels painfully cold without him. I don’t have it in me to like or dislike anything anymore, but I know that I rest a little easier and a little longer when I drift off with his arms wound around my emaciated form. The effort it takes is absolutely Herculean, but I manage to inch my hand over the edge of the mattress, reaching out for him in a silent plea for him to cross the distance between us that he’ll never truly be able to travel. It’s a bitter thought, that in the end all of my hard-won I love you’s and nights spent tracing the map of his skin beneath my fingers have ended in this, in me reaching for him in the smoke-scented dark. Or maybe I’m not reaching so much for Colt as I am for the chemical salvation in his pocket. Over time they’ve become one and the same. Comfort. Security. Rest.

who i am from the start, take me home to my heart
let me go, and i will run, i will not be silent
all this time spent in vain, wasted years, wasted gain
all is lost, hope remains
and this war's not over

there's a hunger, it's slowly growing
chasing shadows but never knowing
if all that i have done is keeping me from you
then can the arms of mercy bring the rescue to return to you
but i'm so far, i'm so far from home

The effort it takes to even take the pill from Colt’s hand and swallow it is exhausting. Some distant part of me wonders how I became this, this shell of a body with nothing holding me together, but the train of thought only leads to I hate you, this is all your fault and only gives way to a fresh paroxysm of pain, so I push it away with all the strength left in me and settle back into the haze of numbness that is still more comfortable than agony. Colt slips beneath the covers beside me, an arm draping across the rail-thin barrier of my waist and fingers twining up with my own. I think I try to squeeze his hand, to let him know that a piece of me, however small it may be is still here. I think I do. But there’s no way to be sure as the morphling blurs over my consciousness, tugging me down, down, down into blissful respite. A dreamless sleep is better by far than a waking nightmare.

When I wake again, I can’t be sure of what time it is. The heavy curtains drawn over the window keep the sun from marking a tally of the days, turning my bedroom into an airtight containment for my broken soul. It could be midnight or morning or nine in the afternoon for all I know,

last year's wishes are this year's apologies
every last time i come home
i take my last chance to burn a bridge or two
i only keep myself this sick in the head
'cause i know how the words get you off

I know what’s coming for me as soon as I slip beneath the seductive waves of unconsciousness. I know that she’ll be there, waiting in the only place where she and all the other ghosts I thought I’d vanquished can truly hurt me. I knew Kiera will be standing vigil in my nightmares, but I hadn’t expected this. I hadn’t expected her smiling, whole, radiating life in the bright sunshine that flows between the golden leaves overhead and dapples her skin into a million different shades. Uncertain and suspicious – my dreams have never been good and they have more than one reason to not start now – I watch as she crosses the space between us, her Arena uniform no longer bloodstained, her face serene and her hair falling past her shoulder in a familiar, messy braid.

“Kiera?” I ask softly, noting that my throat no longer clenches around any sound I try to make. My dreams are limitless, and at least here I haven’t quite lost myself so much as I have in the world of the waking. But that’s not a good thing. The less broken I am in dreams, the more of me there is for my ghosts to destroy.

She grins, that impish half-smile I know so well overlaid with something else, something so genuine and deep-rooted that I can feel it tugging at the depths of my being. Fleetingly, foolishly, I allow myself to think that maybe just this once the nightmares have fled, giving me one night of golden peace to make things right with my soul-sister’s memory. Kiera’s smile has never been more welcome, never brought so much relief, and I don’t hesitate when she opens her arms. “I missed you, Kae.”

When I touch her, she dies.

The instant I throw my arms around her, Kiera screams and staggers, blood from the ragged place where her arm used to be drenching the both of us in sticky-hot crimson, pooling at the stump of her foot and flowing from a million gashes that carve fresh red furrows into the pallor of her skin. She looks confused, surprised, and worst of all betrayed as her eyes lock onto mine, fixed there as the light leaves them. My heart pounding in my ears even as her pulse stills, I jump back, expecting her to crumple to the ground, but she doesn’t. The sky has turned black and the trees sinister; the dreamscape died with Kiera, and yet still she stands, dead and icy-cold where her remaining hand grips my arm, lifeless eyes staring at me. “It’s all your fault.”

“No,” I whisper, shaking my head numbly and making a fruitless effort to pull away from her iron grip. “No, Ki, I never wanted you to die, I never meant –“

“It’s all your fault. It’s all your fault.”

Breaths ragged and skin freezing where the hand of my cousin’s corpse is locked around my arm, I screw my eyes shut, willing myself to wake up, which only serves to be a bigger mistake. When I open them again, my mother is standing beside Kiera, cold and pale but strangely angelic in her rumpled white nightgown, tears still wet on her cheeks where they’ve fallen from dead, empty eyes. Everything about her is familiar in the same eerie way as looking in a mirror, the honey-brown curls falling down her back, the delicate bones shifting beneath the skin of her wasted cheeks, the elegant, spider-fingered, cold hand that pets back my hair in a mocking echo of soothing.

“It’s all your fault,” she sings to the tune of a lullaby that carried me off to sleep for only six short years, her voice lilting and constant as the tide of the sea, something that might be comforting if not for the malice that sits in the flat, lifeless blue of her eyes. “It’s all your fault, my baby boy. All your fault.”

“Mom, please –”

“It’s all your fault.” My father shimmers into being, rivers of blood pouring over his lips with every word. Eyes so dead, eyes the same strange amber as my own have never looked so threatening, or maybe that’s just the all-too-familiar belt in his hand.

“I didn’t have a choice! You didn’t leave me any choice, I couldn’t just –“

“It’s all your fault.”

Dahlia, wasted and thin, with leaves tangled in her hair and one last kiss upon her lips. Irina Grace who used to be in my math class, blue-faced and choking, the victim of my first foray with chloroform. The red-headed girl from the bar last week, blood staining the pretty blue silk of her dress. The blonde who came after her, hissing around the red smile rent into her throat. The green-eyed boy who’d been the last, lips stained carmine and clutching his chest. Scores of other faces, all pale and blank and dead, dead because of me, and they are all repeating the same mantra as they close in on me. “It’s all your fault. It’s all your fault. It’s all your fault.”

“Everything you touch dies, Kaelen,” Kiera says almost sweetly, her icy hand caressing my cheek in a way that sends a shiver all the way down to the core of me. “Everything.”

And then her nails dig into my flesh.

They rip me apart, every last one of them, trying to find the life I stole from them hidden somewhere beneath my skin and digging deeper when they don’t. My own blood mixes indistinguishably (you were never a god, you foolish child, see how you bleed just like the rest of them?) with that of the restless dead and I become my pain, finding an odd sort of salvation in it. After a lifetime of numbness, the agony feels almost like home. The faces of my ghosts blur together as I fade, but with an exquisite stab of misery my vision clears enough to allow me to see the form right in front of me, cradling my still-beating heart in his hands. Those eyes were never meant to be so lightless, that face was never supposed to look so emaciated and sad and dead. It’s not until he moves the hand holding my heart that I can see the ragged, bloody hole in his chest where his had already been ripped out.

“It’s all your fault,” Colt whispers.

I scream.

---

I keep screaming, even as I slam back into consciousness, sitting bolt upright in the middle of my sagging mattress. The guttering candlelight is sinister rather than peaceful, the shadows it casts only serving to augment my panic – the tree branches outside are claws reaching for me, and the threadbare sheets tangled around my legs are the vice grips of the dead dragging me back to hell with them. I know that this is reality because the scream hurts, sears like fire through my unused vocal tract, my voice popping and cracking like kindling in a campfire before it gives out altogether, leaving me suspended in a soundless shriek until the door bangs open.

Eyes wide and breathing ragged, my head snaps to the direction of the intrusion, expecting to see Kiera there in all her bloody retribution, come to claim my sinful soul. Instead, I see Colt, which is about a thousand times worse. He crawls onto the bed next to me and I sit there paralyzed with fear, not wanting to see the lifelessness of his eyes. He pulls me close and I shake like the frightened child I am, cowering in the face of this ghost-made-flesh and falling under the weight of my own transgressions that bloom past my lips in cracking, incoherent ramblings. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I never wanted this, please, I’m sorry…”

If I could move at all I’d tear my heart from my chest to save him the trouble, offer it to him with no hesitation and the assertion of here, take it, it’s always been yours anyway. But his skin is warm, his words forming soothing, silly little turns of phrase rather than razored accusations, the candlelight catching the undeniable life in his eyes. Apprehensively, I press a seeking hand to his chest, only coming back to the world of the living when I feel the steady thmp-tmp, thmp-tmp, thmp-tmp pounding against his ribs. Colt is no ghost. Not yet, at least. Shaking with relief rather than terror, I feel myself go limp and languid, relaxing into his waiting arms with a tremulous exhalation. He feels like and smells like and is home, the safe haven that shelters me here on my bed-island afloat in a sea of nightmares, and even though the dream is beginning to fade into the edges of my consciousness I still find my fingers pressed against the places on his skin where I can feel his pulse, the steady reassurance that he is still the one thing I haven’t killed yet. It takes me a good five minutes to see Aurora hovering awkwardly in the door, her face bruised nearly beyond recognition.

“Wh-what…” I croak blearily, abused vocal cords still not wanting to cooperate. For another terrifying moment I wonder if Aurora is a ghost, if she died sometime while I was sleeping and has come to join her sister in haunting me, but then she speaks and dispels the theory.

“I was walking home and one of the Morenos jumped me,” she shrugs like it’s no big deal that half her face has swollen up like a balloon, looking at the floor rather than the pathetic shell of what I’ve become. “Some hyped-up moose twice my size wailing about family honor. Couldn’t get in a good spot to fight him fair, so I kneed him in the balls and ran.”

Ella had warned me this would happen. The Morenos don’t take slights on their reputation too well, and with Kiera dead there was a stain on District One’s proud traditions in their eyes – a stain called Dempsey. Elspeth ad gone after Ella Dahl for the sin of stepping down, and now the rest of her ilk are out for anyone sharing Kiera’s surname to bring down punishment for her crime of volunteering in place of some supposedly worthier candidate. Will they give my family any trouble? I’d asked a million years (or just a few weeks) ago, and Ella had laughed, showing her scars with a motion that almost felt sympathetic. Kae, they’ll kill your family.

The floor beneath my feet feels oddly foreign, like I’ve stepped into a whole other universe when in reality all I’ve done is step out of bed. Not a large feat for most of the world, but it’s more than I’ve done of my own volition in a week without Colt nagging me. The blatant weight loss is more noticeable now that I’m not covered in blankets, a shirt that used to fit perfectly hanging off my shoulders like a tent and an old pair or pajama pants slipping from my nonexistent waist to settle across the bony notches of my hips. Squinting through the candlelight, I shuffle over to Aurora and bring a hand up to her cheek to examine the damage, knowing but not caring at the moment that pain isn’t the reason she flinches away from the contact. “Y-you’re… dammit, my stupid voice… you’re certain a Moreno did this?”

“Positive. Asshole’s in my Chem class. Why does it matter?”

Unbidden, something sparks in my veins, something warm and real and alive. I’d heard somewhere once that there were few things that could motivate a person as well as fear or the desire to protect, and I had always laughed at that. And yet suddenly, the comatose cold that’s been gripping me for the past week melts away beneath the misplaced something thrumming under my skin, tingling in my fingertips and pressing my lips together in a hard line. Suddenly seized with an odd impulse, I turn and fling open my closet door, digging through the moth-eaten clothes and the pile of blunted old training weapons until a small flash of live steel catches my eye. Pulling the throwing knife out of its hiding place, I spin it deftly through fingers that never really forgot the motions of destruction, a grim smile settling across my face. “The Morenos started a war when they tried to kill Ella Dahl a couple of weeks ago. Now those troglodytes just brought me into it, and they’re all going to die screaming.”

I have something to fight for now, and at least for a while, the prospect promises to keep my ghosts at bay.

we're the new face of failure
prettier and younger
but not any better off
bullet-proof loneliness at best
at best