i was a ||H E A V Y|| heart to carry :: dahlia

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i was a ||H E A V Y|| heart to carry :: dahlia Feb 8, 2014 22:43:46 GMT -5

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Post by Deleted on Feb 8, 2014 22:43:46 GMT -5

K A E L E N D E M P S E Y

“There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.”
_Charles Bukowski

I never understood the concept of "rock bottom." Once upon a time, I thought that the entire notion was a false one. There was always farther to fall, always more to go wrong, always more to destroy. It took having my life ripped out from under me to make me start believing that I'd been absolutely right. I thought that I'd hit rock bottom after Kiera died. Then Colt left. I thought I'd hit rock bottom a second time in those empty days that followed, costing me sobriety and almost costing everyone Aurora's life. Then I got dragged to the Detention Center, thrown in a cell with someone I never thought I'd see again, tortured, forced to confess, and then miraculously set free. I couldn't figure out why until one of the Agents releasing me explained it.

Colt had heard everything. No, he did not want to talk to me. No, he did not want to see me.

I had found an even deeper bottom to sink to, and in the opinion of the Powers That Be, that was a more fitting sentence than the release of a bullet in my skull.

Putting me out in the forest with nothing but the clothes on my back, emaciated and defenseless, was enough of a death sentence anyway. I'd been informed on no uncertain terms that setting foot in any District would mean the immediate and brutal deaths of every last person with the surname Dempsey, along with Ella, Ender, Tarquin, Bean, anyone who I'd ever called a friend during my time in District One. In my current state, I'd never make it back to Thirteen. I didn't want to make it back. The prospect of looking Bentley in the eye and trying to explain where Colt was made me sick to my stomach. It wasn't as though I had many other options.

I wandered into the trees and waited to die, looking forward to it.

When I saw the angry graffiti slashed into the trees, I thought it was the hunger making me hallucinate. What other reason could there be for the hateful things to be there, things attached to my name like monster and traitor that I'd never admitted to myself until recently? I followed them, those ruined trees, simply because I had nothing else to follow. If wandering myself to death was to be my fate, it was nice to at least have some sense of direction.

Three days, no food, and only a few sips of water from a passing stream since I was shoved out of the Detention Center. My head hurts, but I'm not sure why (the fact that the vision in my right eye has been effectively nonesxistent since Pyrite Shore got knife-happy during my brief capture back in One, the lack of nourishment, the demons clawing at the inside of my skull). I pass a tree that simply reads 'Why?' I laugh. "Why indeed?"

I don't know why. I don't know why I was ever stupid enough to go back to One in the first place. If I hadn't, everything would be different. Aurora would be happy and healthy. The gang war wouldn't have escalated beyond a tussle between Ella and Elspeth Moreno. Beryl would know nothing of heartbreak. And me? I'd be back in Thirteen, content for the first time in my life, maybe even married and settled down by now. The only why that I can justify is karma finally catching up to me, pulling my life apart over and over again the same way my divine justice did years ago.

Maybe it's because I'm starving and increasingly insane, but I swear I can hear my father laughing somewhere. The old man's probably enjoying finally getting his justice, sitting there with a belt in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other, biding his time until we see each other in Hell.

Surprisingly, I'm anxious to get there. I'd always justified all the poisoned drinks and bloody knives with the assertion that they were suffering less that way. Dying has to hurt less than this. However, suicide isn't an option, at least not yet. I didn't get my weapons back when I was released, I haven't been able to find any poisonous plants powerful enough to kill nearby (and wouldn't that be ironic? Kae Dempsey dying by his own preferred method. How the Peacekeepers would laugh!), and I don't have the willpower it would probably take to sit down and bash myself repeatedly in the head with a rock. Whether or not I starve to death by the time I find some wild-growing atropa belladonna or jimson weed is completely up to fate.

Some of the trees just bear angry slashes. I walk up and press my hand to them, feel the hate they hold. My hate, or someone else's? Kiera's? Colt's? One way to find out. I keep following them, lost even though I have something to lead me, right to the only answer I have in the world anymore.

Dahlia's. Dahlia's hate.

"They let you go," I observe mildly, walking into her camp like I belong there even though we both know that I don't belong anywhere. Aching down to the very center of myself, I curl up against the trunk of the tree she's currently mutilating, looking up at her with sunken, empty eyes. "They let me go too."

And I wish they hadn't. For both of our sakes, I wish they hadn't.

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Last Edit: Feb 22, 2014 3:17:01 GMT -5 by Deleted

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i was a ||H E A V Y|| heart to carry :: dahlia Feb 15, 2014 21:16:38 GMT -5

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Post by L△LIA on Feb 15, 2014 21:16:38 GMT -5

( D A H L I A W I D O W E R )

you took me to hell and back
how many times
can I walk away from you

I lied to them with truths. Screaming and wild with panic, I confessed to the Peacekeepers who were taking Kaelen away, telling them over and over and over until my words turned into a loop of madness about how it was me. I had done it all. The poison. The death. The terror. Guilty of everything, I could tell them details no one else could possibly know except for the one who had murdered all those people and for a few days, I think I was not the only fool in the room. They had almost believed my words enough to keep me there for a fate I can't imagine; I could see the stutter in their eyes when they looked at me and wondered exactly how much such an innocent-looking girl might be capable of. Honestly, I wonder too.

When they set me free into the wilderness, probably hoping I'd die by nature's hand instead of their own — on the off-chance that I'm not a complete headcase who only knows how to make up horrible stories or perhaps even with the belief that I am — I punched one of them in the face enough to bloody his nose. I'd wanted them to keep me there so I could make the kind of sacrifice I'd always been meant for, giving my soul away as if it had never actually belonged to me. After all, I hadn't cared much about my father's cathedrals, but I cared for Kaelen. Why should I die so that a building might have a soul when he needs one as well? For once I had believed that I didn't have to be the victim, but the officers still insisted I was as they pushed me away into the trees and left, just the same as I've been left so many times before.

In my cell I had dreamed of the forest bursting up through cracks in the concrete and how freedom would feel different if only I could have it back. Surely nothing could be more suffocating than the depths of the detention center, I thought, but being in the open air began to feel like drowning. There is space everywhere out here, but no place within it for me. Kaelen doesn't want me. The peacekeepers don't want me. Even the wolves refuse to bother with my withered bones. Be it my heart, soul, or body — no one seems to be able to find a use for me.

However long I lingered near the hell of that building, it wasn't hunger or simple desperation that finally caused me to walk away. At some point it just began to sink in: Kaelen isn't coming. Not out of that building and not for me. Once again I had been left, even though I had finally convinced myself that I might be the one leaving him, and suddenly my feet became a pair of restless wanderers. Vengeful, I threw rocks in an attempt to dent the earth, the rivers, and the trees. My mark seemed to stay only with the later, creating jagged dents as if I were a monster sharpening my teeth across ten thousand trunks, and I liked the way something of me finally felt remembered. So I raged and as the great oaks and sequoias bled over the anger of a girl like me, their dust scattering at my feet, I told them them what I couldn't tell the peacekeepers. Painstakingly, I began carving graffiti into the bark, scattered words and phrases or just one letter again and again: K. K is for Kaelen. K is for Killer. K is for not knowing that this act of attempting to separate myself from him would be exactly what leads him back to me.

"They let you go." I don't jump, because after all, this wouldn't be the first time his voice has haunted me. My life begs to be his ghost, so it is only fair that now and again he deigns to be mine. Still, a telltale shiver rattles my spine and I have to close my eyes in an attempt to shut it out and pretend that just the wayward thought of him isn't still enough to sway my bones against their will, not when I'm halfway convinced I am the lone daughter of an apocalypse. "They let me go too," and I know this is not the voice of my girlish daydreams. Misery lives in that sound and my eyes flick down to look at him, despite everything. For half a second, my expression must echo his own, the way my words have so many times before. I can feel my echolalia prying at my jaw as the habit writhes across my tongue, begging me to speak just one more lie of truth and repeat: Let me go too. Instead, the rock in my fist bites into the tree once more as that infamous K makes its mark with me yet again.

Last Edit: Mar 4, 2014 0:01:03 GMT -5 by L△LIA

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i was a ||H E A V Y|| heart to carry :: dahlia Feb 22, 2014 3:14:12 GMT -5

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Post by Deleted on Feb 22, 2014 3:14:12 GMT -5

K A E L E N D E M P S E Y

“Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it's the things you don't do, and you get screwed.”
_Chuck Palahniuk

Directionless once again, I sit and watch Dahlia carve her anger into the tree’s skin, both thankfully and hatefully tougher than my own. In the silence that follows, I have half a mind to stand up and present my own flesh for her to mutilate. It would be easier than trying to make a mark in a two hundred year old oak. My fragile human (not divine, I realized that far too late) skin and bones would fall far more easily under her onslaught, and I think that in a way, both of us could get what we want out of it, Dahlia her severance, me my respite. It would hardly be the first of my scars. Besides, the tree hasn’t done anything to her. I have.

But whatever the morbidity of my musings, it is not enough to give me the strength to move, arms wrapped around my knees as the repeated thud, thud, thud of Dahlia’s attack on the tree morphs into the drums of a funeral dirge that vibrates in my bones, errant flakes of bark falling down and getting caught in my hair. There’s something new in her that I’ve never seen before, something that blooms outward across her skin with every downward arc of her improvised weapon. There’s anger in her now, fierceness, a determination to do something other than follow.

I’d always promised her that she’d be a goddess one day, but never did I think that her transformation into an entity of vengeance would come from my downfall. Maybe she’s as broken as I am, but if she is, she’s doing a far better job of hiding it.

“If it’s any consolation, Karma caught up to me,” I half-whisper when she doesn’t respond, pulling the shining golden band that is now my sole possession out of my pocket and worrying it between my fingers like some ancient token of prayer, the lone physical reminder of all that I once had. “I’ve been turned into a human horror show, I can never go home, and Colt knows everything now. He thinks… He knows I’m a monster. He refused to even see me.”

Tallying my losses in the wilderness to a girl who no more cares about them than I ever cared about her. What a pair we make, and how the mighty fall. I can remember, albeit distantly and dreamlike, a time where Dahlia was the helpless thing and It was I who stood impassive, keeping her around only because it suited me. It’s cruel and unbelievable, the difference a year and a half can make. Hindsight is surprisingly easier with only one good eye, something that’s plagued me from the moment the bullet buried itself in my shoulder.

Everything I did to her was sick. Not as shocking as it probably could have been, given that in comparison to serial murder, playing with an innocent girl’s heart wasn’t exactly the most heinous of my crimes. But in a way, perhaps it was. Only when I’d experienced myself the total annihilation that came with the person holding my heart deciding that they didn’t want it did I realize that maybe Dahlia was unfortunate that she didn’t die when I meant for her to. Death is preferable to walking around knowing that in the end, everything you had to give just wasn’t enough.

Her silence is almost worse than any kind of vitriol she could spit at me. A part of me wants her to explode, to call me every hateful thing that she’s been carving into this forest for days and days. At least then I would have some closure. If I’m to lose everything, I would rather lose it all at once. Rip it all away, get it gone and final rather than picking away at the scabs and scars of the things and people I’ve made the stupid mistake of loving. I should know better than to think that it’s possible to ever heal, but my one hope lies in the possibility of going numb after a time. I lived most of my life before that way. My one salvation lies in being able to do it again, although now that I’ve seen the vibrancy of a life with feeling, the alternative almost seems a worse fate than a life full of regrets. When it comes down to feeling pain or nothing at all, I can’t make an honest judgment on which I would choose.

Thud, thud, thud, and without her knowing it, Dahlia’s blows have fallen into sync with my heartbeat, each little tick in the silver-blue conduits beneath the pale skin of my wrists feeling like it’s somehow mocking me. Maybe this is how ghosts feel, horribly present in a world that holds nothing for them anymore.

“You know, if you wanted to kill me, I wouldn’t blame you for it,” I tell her conversationally, half-hopefully, the band of metal between my fingers suddenly feeling as though it’s scorching my skin off. “I’d deserve it.”

I’d thank you for it. But Dahlia Widower doesn’t want to do me any favors. I can see that much in her. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and a woman scorned twice is something from whom even the God of Death himself will find no mercy.

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i was a ||H E A V Y|| heart to carry :: dahlia Mar 9, 2014 17:36:36 GMT -5

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Post by L△LIA on Mar 9, 2014 17:36:36 GMT -5

( D A H L I A W I D O W E R )

you wake up
with a hatchet over your head
i can see you running
gone, gone, gone
in the blink of my eye

The flesh of a tree older than a memory like mine can fathom falls as if my strength is actually worthy of it. Bark is chipped away in deceptively thin, pulpy shreds that represent months or years of passed time and love swells up inside me in equal measure to my rage. Each swing is a triumph against history. Dust and grit scatters across the toes of my boots and the life I'd once had with Kaelen back in One lives within, flung violently away from me before losing a battle of great momentum to nothing more than gravity. In the end, gravity has always been enough to take us down. This is a simple, inevitable law of nature — of humans; of trees; of life.

Time slips over me as though I am untouchable and I don't know if it's a moment or a minute or a month that passes between us, his words reaching out for my skin as my savage chiseling swipes at each syllable, tearing the details of his voice apart, wrecking him. "If it’s any consolation, Karma caught up to me." Each time I lash out, I am adding to my own determination. Be the Destruction, Dahlia, this feeling says, don't be the Destroyed. Not again. "I’ve been turned into a human horror show, I can never go home, and Colt knows everything now. He thinks… He knows I’m a monster. He refused to even see me." Silently, I am screaming at him, wretched and deafening in my own head. I am not consoled, not by that. Regardless of my determination over the years to see through his eyes and deny a world that does not share my reverence for a boy like this one, when he speaks to me like this, even I am forced to recognize what a twisted bastard he is.

I am a girl who has sacrificed herself for him and, even now as I'm tearing the innocent world apart in his name, he's fretting over another lover. These worries that haunt him care nothing for me. If I burned the forest down around us, he wouldn't even notice; I am no more present to him now than if I were the rotting corpse of the poisoned girl he abandoned for dead so long ago. "You know, if you wanted to kill me, I wouldn’t blame you for it." He says it easily, as if I have any comprehension for the things I want anymore. The more he offers me, the less I know. Love or lust or leaving, there is no line of separation, just a series of invisible, meaningless lines strung between my fist, a rock, a scapegoat tree, and a pair of useless hearts. If there is an answer to this neverending equation, I have yet to learn how to solve it. "I’d deserve it."

Renaming the rock as a bullet, I hurl it at him without pausing to think. There is a dull echo as it collides with his chest, the clunking note of a brutal ribcage-xylophone attempting to weave a song into the air that might soothe me. "D-deserve —" One hand is a fist, shoving knuckles into my jaw and lower lip, incoherent with a misguided effort to stop the words from falling out of me, but I cannot staunch this wound. "— to kill you. Wanted to kill you?!" All I can do is loop myself into his words, stitching my tongue into the ghost of his mouth. Scooping up dirt and scattered rocks from the earth, I throw everything I can reach at him. Leaves and snapped twigs flurry between us like woodland fairies exploding in midair. Wild with fury, the scream I'd held in bursts out to chase a series of pebbles scattering attacks across his body.

One random projectile follows another until my palm swings out into the fray, cracking my lifelines into his cheek with enough force to not only inflict new wounds, but to reopen old ones. Blood wells up between my fingers, as red as my horror, and when I pull my hand back to clutch the incriminating evidence of my attack to my own chest, my fingers are stained with guilt. His face is a catastrophe and I caused it. With my breathing ragged, the softest echo escapes me, shrouded in an optionless exhalation of failing momentum. "Refused to even see me —" Gravity forces me to fall for him again, my knees dropping hard into the settled dirt. Inevitable. Taken down.