time is slowing and it's rolling still [day 5 clusterfuck]

When his eyes are pried open, sunlight's bladed fingernails gashing through his eyelids in the process, the only sight he is met with is the back of Wyatt O'Connor. He sees no branded 10 on his back, and yet what he can see is the broken trust between them, one hand weapon clutched between fingertips, each breath a warning to not come one. step. closer.

N O !

He remembers it like it's the only memory his one sided, two tracked mind can process it, remembers sunlight on blade, bloody broken bruised knuckles tightening, whitening, against the handle as he grasped it and lunged, rivaling only the virachne and the cornucopia in his bloodlust.

bloodlust rage. rage regret.

One hand on the steel toed stomach, he counts his own breaths, feeling the rise and fall of his stomach as if to make sure that each breath he takes is real, that all of this- the blood the sweat the toil the fear the

Stella Summit and Kiena Ward gather themselves in his mind.

This is real.

Caramel pockets, he slips up for a single second and reaches into his coat as he rises, slathering bloody fingertips and bruised knuckles with the melted, heat pressed substance. He can't bring himself to lick the substance off fingertips, fear of tasting the metallic poison that was slathered beneath it, so instead he resorts to wiping it on pants bottoms, caramel handprint stuck there forever to bake in the sun.

Pause- breathe in, force toxins out.

He glances over at Kiena Ward, blood boil fear rising up in his gut before it disperses like Stella Summit's final breaths. His thoughts had been too preoccupied with everything else to focus on the fact that he could have murdered the girl in her sleep with a simple slice with his sword. But home, he'd discovered, was Death. And Sue Tate was not up to the challenge of adding onto that.

It's wordless between them, tension tinting the air, thick enough to reach out and snap like the realities of all three of them. Dust clouds and footprints, they leave both in the past as they walk towards the clock tower, only sound to be heard the past anthem's bells in their mind.

Pause- spit sideways, there's figures on the horizon.

This Cornucopia had left them gifts after taking more than it could ever repay, eyeballs and lives and souls and boom. He rests one hand on the gun as they come into view, for the first time realizing the fact that he's never held a gun before. Closest he's come to it is admiring the men in white as they shouldered their weapons.

One hand on the gun and two thoughts on the trigger, is gun smoke poisonous?

He dismisses the thought, he's already poisoned anyways.

Skirted answers and unsolved problems I watch my spear skim the back of the boy from seven like a simple signature across a stained page. A new feel in a heavy heart the spear lays lightly, tingle of metal across a now-calloused palm I see my father’s hands in my own when I draw it back, tipped in the blood of another like I often imagined the pocketknife crushed under my heel. I long for weight. For the axes lingered with a heaviness I could not describe— for some reason I always imagined that my lungs work better under the strain of a heavy heart. Tightened veins and a silent breath I watch in succession Sue Tate and the girl from three lay their weapons against the boy from eleven.

They do not fall for reasoning.

I do not fall.

TheydoIdonottheydoI do not want to fall.

But truth be told I climbed the summit of a mountain too tall at age thirteen, and I’ve been falling ever since. Maybe not realized until my spine made contact with solid ground, but noticed when staring up at a grey sky while lying flat on my back. No color in a world of black and white I did not see the eyes of my mother and father in the time it took me to pull myself to shaking feet. Instead I see the void of five years wasted, and with it the weight on my chest becomes a terror and not a consolation.

Useless was not scratched on those white-washed walls without reason.

Standing solid against my own fears I feel Sue Tate at my back, finger on the trigger of a gun I do not trust to fire into my own chest. I close my eyes when I watch loaded bullet and twitch when the rebound sends Sue’s shoulder into my back. Trust diminished from the get go I step away, locked and loaded in my own mind I turn the safety off. Not that’d it’d ever been truly on, jammed somewhere in the middle I had laid flame and axe to two beasts and counting—this would be the third. Not quite as deadly as the girl from three killing Sue’s schoolyard love or Sue himself laying rest to that which killed Maya Xiaoping and Noah Bowers three days prior.

Just Wyatt; just falling.

The number four still etched upon my mind I watch the girl from eight fall, swarmed by that which I do not see until they are gone. Her cannon sounding I turn to the boy from eleven, bullet hole in his heart I see the cannon ringing in his ears—and he’d just cleared his lungs of gun smoke. I do not pity him, nor Sue’s finger on the trigger, it’s just another side effect of backlash in the heart of a broken man.

Arm painted with blood I turn to see the boy I turned my spear against holding a sword tipped with that which could only be my own, the repercussion I was not expecting added weight on a sinking chest. Ribs collapsing I run a free hand over the red that rests at the end of my spear, his downfall—I’d say my own but I have already reached ground zero, cracking the ribs that now threaten to give way, I breathe smoke instead of fresh air like my lungs were equipped for the dirty work they could not do in prior times.

Ashes in the air I do not apologize when I run bloody fingertips across scratched shoulders, for I am a dirty canvas never to be cleared for the next artist, instead being built upon like a memorial to a boy who only knew how to spell his name if he was finding a synonym for useless.

War does not end with a simple surrender.