Hope There's Someone [Peethon]
Oct 22, 2013 23:48:02 GMT -5
Post by arx!! on Oct 22, 2013 23:48:02 GMT -5
There's a ghost on the horizon
when I go to bed.
How will I fall asleep tonight?
How will I rest my head?
when I go to bed.
How will I fall asleep tonight?
How will I rest my head?
One whole year. An entire year of nothing but tear stained t-shirts and pained voices. Or maybe just one pained voice. It started with Drace. The 64th Reaping came around and suddenly everyone in this mansion was shaken to the core. There was a place much worse than the cage we lived in and only one, very fucked up person came back from that place. Drace wasn't one of those fucked up individuals that came home to their families and friends a completely different human being - he was one that came home in a body bag. My best friend was dead and gone and sleeping six feet below and honestly, even though I had expected that outcome, some tears still manage to slip past my usually stellar defenses and that tiny sliver of hope I had was crushed into non-existence. The idea that I wouldn't ever see him again alive and in the flesh made my stomach twist and sometimes I would wake up at night drenched in sweat, remembering only that I couldn't catch up to him before the blade that ended his life fell upon him. It was on those nights when I awoke that I could hear Val's quiet sobbing through the wall. Sometimes I would go to her, try to comfort her as best as I could, but most times I only sat with back pressed against the headboard and listened, forcing away tears as I waited for her to go back to sleep. Sometimes the sun would come up and I could still hear her. She would crawl out of her bed and I mine and she would try to look presentable and so would I and we would go on like that until she broke from the stresses of the day and I would just hold her, trying to make it better but mostly feeling like a horrible person.
Drace was dead. That's why she was crying. They were in love ... or at least I think they were. I was too busy hating Valencia to really notice if she and my best friend were getting along alright despite Magnus' watchful eye. They wouldn't have to worry about that anymore if he had come home alive. All in the time span of about a week Drace was gone and Magnus was gone and everything in my usually well balanced world was being completely flipped upside down. I was glad Magnus was dead. Val burned the contract the say she was released from the hospital. I never asked and I never will, but I'm certain that having your own father shoot you is not something that you hope to receive as a gift from the man. She was essentially an orphan. But seeing as I had no other place to go and she the idea of leaving a grieving girl like her alone in a big, empty mansion made me feel horrible, I stayed. It was only right that I do it anyhow. Tib may have incited the whole fire fight thing, but I had carried her to the hospital when I thought she was going to die right there in my arms, sat by her bedside until the doctors were certain she would live, and I hid her father's body in a way a very dignified manner. As much as I wanted to kick and spitwell, I still did that but stillon his corpse, I took the time to bury him somewhere outside the District parameters. Maybe I should've asked if she wanted to kick his corpse herself. He was a horrible man and yet she was so, so good and it still was bewildering to me. She and her mother must've have been nearly identical. There was no way Val had gotten anything from her ruthless, manipulative, cold-hearted father.
She was distant though. Her heart was shattered. It was hard to watch. It was even harder to comfort her. In the beginning, while my arm was still in a sling and she was still immobile, I tried to tell her that everything would be alright. That the worst was over and now she just needed to get over it and it would be alright. That didn't work of course. I was fairly certain it wouldn't. After all, I was still brooding, bitter, and utterly depressed about having been sent to the Detention Center to endure a punishment that was not rightfully mine after watching my brother shoot my sister. There was no convincing me that after her mother died when she was young, her boyfriend died in the Hunger Games, and her father shot, and nearly killed, her that a few words from someone she had barely talked to was going to make all of that disappear. So it seems that it has only gotten worse and worse since everything had happened. And now with the next games rolling around, she was only reminded of what had been lost. Lucky for us, we didn't have to stand in the square this time. But just watching all those tiny faces flash on the screen was disheartening enough to make me want to cry all over again for completely different reasons. My sister would've been that age this year.
I've never shared that story with anyone. I've never even mentioned my little trip to the Detention Center to anyone before out of fear that they couldn't stand to look at me anymore, that they might actually see me as the criminal thug that I had been forced to become. It really was insane how Val could even look me in the face. I can remember when I hated her with every fiber in my body and soul. I looked at her, saw the jewels and the make-up and pretty clothes, and I saw her father written all over it. She could look like that because we were essentially her father's slaves. I still hated her even after she lent me money to pay off my next month. I knew there was something that she wanted, that the only reason she could possibly be helping me was because there was something that she wanted in return. Maybe she wanted me dead, maybe she would tell her father about how I had threatened to kill her, maybe she was just as sadistic and heartless as her own father and just wanted to see me fail - I didn't know the exact reason, I just knew there was one. For so long I had believed that there was nothing but a hideous monster hidden beneath it all. I figured that the reason she wore the make-up and put a smile on her face was because if she trying to cover up the same sort of evil that possessed Magnus. I had to see her broken and torn to shreds to realize she was still just the same beautiful girl underneath. I had been a real jerk to one of the kindest people on the face of the Earth. Drace had tried to tell me, he really had, and I guess, as always, I was just too stupid and blind with rage that I couldn't let myself see it.
But now I saw it everyday. She walked around and one might swear she was a ghost the way she only just seemed to be balancing on the edge of existence. Once I found her just standing in the middle of the kitchen, her gaze caught on something distant. She didn't even flinch when I walked in, her gaze didn't even flicker. When I got closer, asking what was wrong, I had to step forward to catch her as tears and a fit of sobbing ensued. Just like I had my good days and my bad days, she had her's. I regretted the days when we were both too broken down to be of much help to each other. Those days were the hardest, when we were both just too lost in a realm of sorrow and loneliness that we couldn't even manage to make it out of our bedrooms. But really, I just wanted her to stop crying and hurting so much. I had been doing it for years now, I had adjusted to the loss and the pain and I can deal with it most days. And if I could just step in and talk it all away from her and wear it upon my shoulders I would. There wasn't many people I would do that for and slowly but surely, Val has become one of them. When she cries, I feel it. Not just because her tears soak through my t-shirt and her soft sobs rack her body as I comfort her, but I can feel the pain inside me, too. When she smiles (I love it when she manages to smile), I can't help but feel this huge weight lift off of my shoulders, like somehow when the pressures of the day lift off of her shoulders they are lifting off mine just the same. Like we were connected ...
I sigh as I wander through the streets, the morning air cool, my breath billowing out in front of me as I exhale. The sun was only just beginning to rise, and out of old habit, I had stayed out all night. But instead of holding a knife, I held a beer bottle. And instead of wearing a big, black hooded sweatshirt, I wore nothing but a thin grey tee. I had grown numb to the cold hours earlier while I stood on street corners and watched the hustle and bustle of the night streets with a different perspective. I didn't need to hunt these people anymore and I couldn't help but just stare. Most were wary of me, avoiding walking past me as I stood sipping out of a bottle I had found back at the mansion. It made me chuckle. The one time I have never needed to hurt anyone and they were edging away from me. But if I had hid in the shadows and blended with the night, they would've walked straight into me, forgetting to fear what they couldn't see hidden around the corner as they walked home alone. But now I was completely harmless, fighting hard to tire myself out so that by the time I got back home (Yes. It most certainly was home now, not a cage.) I might be able to sleep. What with the nightmares that have been occurring more and more often though, I looked like I had risen from a grave. My eyes ached, drooped, and burned from all the strain of staying open, and my entire body almost felt as if it was shutting down. But it wasn't just the nightmares that kept me awake at night. She was there too, pushing at all the critical pressure points in my brain, forcing almost all of my thoughts to turn her way.
I made my way through the large gates at the front of the mansion, tossing the completely empty bottle into the bushes along the edge of the path. Part of me wished that I could toss my feelings away just as easily. Where there was longing there was guilt, where there was pleasure, there was more guilt. Everything I was doing - everything I was feeling - made me feel like I was betraying him or her or me. There is a simple equation for all of this madness, a little story that I told myself to get through it all, to try to sort out what I thought in the simplest terms possible. I turn the door knob, stepping out of the cold as my mind runs through it all again, just as it always does when I enter the house. (Drace was - is - my best friend. Drace and Valencia are in love. Drace died and that made the both of us sad. I hate seeing Val hurt so much, but I like getting to hold her in my arms. I should feel guilty. Val cries because Drace isn't here. She only cries on my shoulder because there is no one else to go to. She is still in love with Drace. I am still friends with him. Dexter really likes Valencia. And he should feel really guilty about that because he is betraying his best friend and stealing the girl he cares about away from him, and because he is using his best friend's tragic death as a way to justify his actions. I, idiot Dex, should really stop being so stupid. But I want nothing more than to call her mine.) End of story. So clear cut and yet so damn complicated.
Kicking off my shoes I make my way through the house, down the hallway, planning on collapsing into bed and sleeping for all eternity, when I hear a sound that has become to familiar. I stop at the staircase, turning towards the living room. As I peek around the corner, my footsteps quiet as I make my way into the room, I only see the back of her head, golden blonde hair brushed and shining as morning light stretches across the room to meet it. But I can already hear her crying, quiet, but not in an empty and silent house. I swallow hard, the story I have told myself over and over again playing in my head. I make my way around the couch until I can see her, tears running down her cheeks and the smell of hot cocoa contradicting the oppressing depression in the room. She is clutching the mug in her hands, as if maybe her life depended on it or perhaps she didn't even realize it was there anymore. I don't even ask what is wrong. I just reach for the mug and pull it free from her hands, set it down on a nearby table, sit myself next to her on the couch, and pull her into an embrace. "Sorry." I whisper, because I am. Sorry that Drace isn't here, sorry that I wasn't here when she woke up, sorry that I can't make it better, and sorry that I couldn't stop myself from wanting her in a way that I am sure she did not want me.
Oh I'm scared of the middle place
between light and nowhere.
I don't want to be the one
left in there, left in there.
between light and nowhere.
I don't want to be the one
left in there, left in there.