Click Click Click :: [Day 2 + Gunner Oneshot]
Jun 26, 2015 12:09:49 GMT -5
Post by L△LIA on Jun 26, 2015 12:09:49 GMT -5
The gun is God. In her hands it is her father, her son, and her ghost. Everything she was. Everything she could have been. Everything she is. Idly spinning the barrel, the single flare within goes round and round... round and round... round and round and round and — Ravi La Torre loves his money almost as much as he loves his daughter. Born in a gutter, he told stories of what it was like to have nothing. These were Gunner's fairy tales as she grew up, impossible fiction for a girl who would never know poverty and who only feels hunger when she's looking at a pretty face. Even here, she has more money than she knows what to do with — tens of thousands of dollars spilling out of the backpack beside her, fluttering away on the breeze. It smells like her father. The money. It smells like her father so much that when she closes her eyes, she swears he's sitting next to her. Looking up to discover the lie of it is a knife to her neck, a crowbar to her head, a bottle of acid poured down her throat. It fucking hurts. Knuckles whiten around the gun in her hands and she jerks it up, pressing its hungry mouth to her temple, finger on the trigger. It won't shoot bullets, but a flare would still burn brightly enough within her skull to blind her senses. The metal is cool against her skin as she stares at a hundred dollar bill fighting for freedom. Gunner and the money, they understand each other. Neither of them know how to go without. Gun to Gun, like palm to palm, this is prayer. "Once upon a time when I was young like you —" The memory of her father's voice is both warm and heavy in her gut. He wasn't there when she was Reaped, ten thousand million miles away making meth deals with hard luck chemistry school dropouts, but that doesn't mean he left her. "— I fought a peacekeeper in order to get my hands on my first gun." Fists against bullets, he keeps the memento mounted above the fireplace like a hunting trophy. The gun is everything. The gun is God. There are five empty chambers of life and one bright death held within her hand. She cocks the hammer and pulls the trigger without hesitation, but only a dull c l i c k fires at her head. "It's yours, little Gun. I'm giving it to you. I'm giving you everything, because even that gun will only ever be half as dangerous as the one holding it." She doesn't die. She lives. "Remember that." Once more, she readies it to fire, still holding it to her own skull. To her right, the fortune of her father's ghost continues stitching itself into the air until she can almost see him and to her left, Circe is curled up with her head resting on Gunner's thigh. Everything is warm, everything is painful. "What —" Automatically, she whips the gun down, aim shifting. C l i c k. The voice is a half mumble drowning in sleep and although her eyelids struggle to lift up the dark, it is too heavy and continues to swallow them both. "— are you doing?" The gun is still pressed to Circe's forehead. Gunner's ever-insistent hands aren't shaking and she doesn't pull away, even as her eyebrows furrow and she forces a rough, struggling laugh from her throat. "Nothing, Kitten. Just..." Setting the smoking gun down on the pile of cash beside her, the teenage hustler runs both hands through her hair and sighs. "...just thinking about what I'd do without you." There isn't much left to do but wait — for daylight, for death. Sooner or later someone will kill Circe or Nat the same way Noah Bowers murdered Elya. Gunner has nothing to win from this game, she just wants to be the one to kill their killers. It's the only thing left for her to do. After that, there is nothing and she knows it. She knows it like once upon a time there was a Gun that was everything — She presses two fingers to the place on her temple where there's a wound but not a hole, closes her eyes, breaths in the last gift of her father. The Gun is God. |
[$462 flutters away]
