D4 ☼ { Elia Roth } ☼ DONE

You're not wearing shoes, or a jacket despite the fact that the morning wind is tearing your skin raw with fanged gusts of something fierce. In fact, you're not wearing much of anything, really. You're just down to your underclothes, a leather pouch tied around your neck for whatever treasure you can find, and your lovely bones, because anything else will leech the loving ocean and drag you so far down beneath the waves you'll forget the night sky was never meant to damn us, never meant to leak beneath us. Your final resting place: a breathless cathedral behind the sea. No need to speak, no need to pray. Prayer became obsolete a long time ago.

We. We're the bastards of the district that had nowhere to go but down. Down to the cliff by the shitty little bay the fish rather fry than frenzy in. The curved cliffs overlooking a choir of jagged rocks and boulders that took the lives of those not ready yet to go in for the dive, those of us who got a chill from the blanketless nights or days spent on two bites of bread and a swig of ale and made a fatal miscalculation. Broken little things, all of us. Far more broken than the shards of shattered glass and beer bottles we try and pass off as crystals of value when we resurface. But we had nowhere to go but down. Off the cliff, between the rocks, down to the depths below. Hell exists. And its littered with pearls and the cracked skulls of babies no one wanted.

The night before Nicky's adoptive parents came to finish off all the paperwork and take him away we escaped. And even now I can remember him. I like to remember him as he was then, in the orphanage-standard bleach white pajamas waking up everyday like a little Christmas parcel.  I like to remember him like that. When he was still chubby and rose-colored with a flush of youth and optimism. When he looked to me like I was something of valor and grace, like I was both the queen and the knight to save the day and all those long, harsh weeks marinating in our own agonizing starvation and the bitter cold of homelessness was just a phase. I promised him a kingdom and found him the inferno.

They made it seem simple enough. The older kids go pearl diving in the mornings, and the children Nicky's size could go down to the tide pools and use their little hands to pick out anything that shines. The bigger the treasure, the bigger the reward.

There's a certain kind of freedom that free falling brings. A weightlessness unlike any other, the sweetest wine spilling from Atlas's palms, giving you a good four seconds, a good stab of a moment of reprieve from all the demons dancing behind your eyes. Because when you're in free fall, the weight of the world once on your shoulders has to fall with you. Everything seems like it's falling after you take that leap. All the world is falling and dropping and coming apart and for four seconds of a day filled with unbearable anguish it's comforting to know everything and everyone, one day, will crumbled into the sea and die.

They promised me Nicky would never have to go pearl diving. That if I was good enough, he wouldn't need to. And I made sure and well I was good enough. Better than the rest. I sprinted first off that cliff every morning, oyster dagger clenched between my teeth, carving into the water and staying under for lifetimes at a time trying to find those damn oysters. There's so much that can go once you're under, missing the rocks is just loading the gun. The rest is a game of roulette where the tides are the trigger and you have to learn how to play. Violent waves to smash you back against the rocks, blackouts, drownings; a bad formation when jumping off the cliff can result in you breaking and arm or a leg once you hit the open water. Or worse. We've all seen worse.

I am the best.

Better than these other children, anyway. Running around like wet puppies with their tails between their legs. I am the best because I stopped fearing death the day I saw Nicky crack his skull out on the rocks. I am the best because I jump off the cliffs with my eyes closed, knowing that if I hit the rocks I really wouldn't care. I am the best because even when my lungs threaten to rupture and shriek out for a kiss of mercy and a breath of air I dive deeper. I am the best because as I sink lower and lower into the darkness, I'm comforted by the chilling embrace of my midnight family. I am the best because while the others hold their hands in prayer, mine crack open the tough shells of artillery shooting out to keep me alive for another day.

As far as I'm concerned, there is only one hell. It's the one we live in now.