Sabotage :: [Calliope Bloom // A Series Of Oneshots]
Mar 23, 2014 18:27:18 GMT -5
Post by L△LIA on Mar 23, 2014 18:27:18 GMT -5
Curiosity can kill you. That's how the saying goes, at least, and if she doesn't believe in things like that, maybe she should. She can add it to the list of what she secretly wonders if she might be wrong about, stubbornly unwilling to admit that such thoughts ever cross her mind. Mulling them over in the deepest dark of night, when everything feels as if it has ceased to exist, she's free to uncage ideas like these without wanting to throw herself off imaginary cliffs. That would be redundant anyhow. It was all some kind of terrible accident — the coffee, the graceless fall, the memory of a forgotten face, this side-glance into a room that has nothing to do with her. However, it's a wreck she can't look away from. Something in her wants a peek at the lives of strangers she has been disconnected from, after she took the path less traveled and discovered that she travels alone because this is a road of treacherous self-destruction. It should be untraveled, but she has already come this far. What her life might have been like had she taken another way, she wonders, but only to the unjudgmental dark. There is a crack in the door, left open enough to accommodate a single eye and for the hushed song of dozing lungs to reach out, tugging her closer. He has nodded off in the chair next to his sister's bed, a book on the brink of free-falling from his slackening hand as both of them nod off into the evening. She is so terribly jealous that her teeth clench and her fingers turn to fists at her sides. Maybe she looks this same way to some people as she sits by Poe's comatose body, but whatever feeling of sibling-devotion swells in this room is noticeably vacant from the one she visits. It's funny, really, in a way that makes her want to crumple to the ground in anything but laughter. The way she remembers it, this used to be her life — loving brothers watching over her or falling asleep with a book still in her hand. If ever a hospital was involved, it was only in her dreams, as she walked the halls wearing a crisp white uniform and shoes that made the sweetest tapping sound upon the tiles. Her hair was combed and perfectly parted, although if ever she had glasses in these imaginary-places, they would have never slipped down her nose. She would have simply glanced over the top of their frame while making a key point in a brilliant speech and gone on her way, breaking into a self-satisfied smile and a small flurry of victorious flailing the second she turned the next corner. "You are so awesome," she'd have squealed with a fist pump, "Calliope Bloom, fighting!" As far as she can remember, this boy who has taken her place in her childhood daydreams (despite the fact that he doesn't look anything like a boy anymore) shouldn't be here. Her fleeting crush on him had been something she'd fought against, even then, telling herself she had better taste than that. That day had been the first time she had actually looked him in the eye; before that, he had just been one of the class bullies. Punching. Drinking. Swearing. Being eye-rollingly useless. Calliope Bloom was still the stright-laced dork, raising her hand to volunteer an answer to every question and determined to make something of herself. He represented everything she disliked in the world. Besides, the cute boy who sat two seats over from her in her maths class, a fellow honor-roll student with a devastatingly nice smile, was obviously meant to be her soul mate, and so this temporary infatuation — also known as insanity — was beyond unacceptable. She was in no way allowed to quietly notice a hooligan whose antics reminded her far too much of her own trouble-making brothers. Nope. Absolutely not. You shall not pass go, you shall not collect two hundred dollars, you shall not think a boy with no future has pretty eyes. Not that any of this actually mattered. A few days later Aesop was Reaped and her world ended. Suddenly, all she wanted was for everyone around her to look straight past, unable to see her even if her face was only a foot away from theirs. There was no more school, no more crushes, no more souls to have mates, no more daydreams. Years would pass, each day reaffirming these terrible truths, and she became the ironic echo of a boy whose face she had spent a week or two childishly resenting. Blinded to the world around her and holding her fists up to everything that moves as she screams at her own brother to just fucking die already — Surely, there is no return from this. Except, a sense of contradiction is snoring lightly in that chair, just a few feet beyond a door she knows she can't open. That should be her calm face and her perfectly styled hair and her neatly pressed clothes. That's not even to mention how she can't remember the last time she touched a book — the only paper that doesn't feel like it burns her these days is the kind with monetary value. She doesn't understand how he took her place on the good path when she so clearly remembers how he should be her traveling companion now. It really must all be a terrible accident. A mix-up. A body swap. A strange dream. Punching her own curiosity in the face, she turns on her heel and skulks back to reality, but somewhere upon the darkest, most hidden page of her mind, there is one more tally mark. More than ever, she tells herself that she is not allowed. |
