Blow a Kiss, Fire a Gun :: [Day 5 // Cinner vs. Cinner]
Jul 16, 2015 15:13:51 GMT -5
Post by L△LIA on Jul 16, 2015 15:13:51 GMT -5
GUNNER LA TORRE we would only hold on to let go blow a kiss, fire a gun all we need is somebody to lean on Death leaves emptiness in its wake and the girl who can’t cry, can’t ache, can’t feel the loss of Nat beyond the physical weight of his empty body against her… She fills the vacancy with doubt instead of a moment of mourning. No one has ever lived long after crossing a La Torre. Back home tradition was to meticulously peel the flesh off a thief’s hands and set the sinner free for twenty-four hours to walk the streets as a warning. This is the horrible heart of violence. Snitches, spies, deserters — they become estranged family members damned to exile. Once valued within an operation of money and power, the betrayal of loyalty is unforgivable. The closest the drug lord or his daughter have ever come to mercy is by bestowing a quick death instead of drawn out retribution. Her gaze slips from Nat to his two-faced killer to the girl who breaths Gunner’s name in the dark like speaking in tongues: naked truths, lies of betrayal, and the meaningless nonsense of feigned regret. There is no reason for mercy. She should take one of Circe’s own knives and carve the girl’s flesh back from her fingertips until she can look down upon her skeleton hands and see the loss her mistake has cost her. Nat’s head still rests upon her lap in a half-dried mess of blood and perpetual silence. They had both fallen still with her fingers tangled in his hair — thoughts scattered and breaths unsteady. While his heart has faded into a hush of peace, Gunner’s rages. The furious beat ticks into double time as she unceremoniously shifts her dead piece of home off of her, skull thunking as it hits the floor. His soulless body means nothing now, hollowed out and bled dry, and she doesn't even bother to take a last look at him as she walks away. There's no one to see there anymore. Slinging her backpack over her shoulder, she marches past Circe and Orion without a word, prying open the door of one train car after another. By the time she's passing through the second, there's a lead pipe swinging in her hand — round and round and round, like a haywire clock that has decided not to believe in time anymore, but doesn't know how to stop. Smashing it into the window to her left, the glass shatters and wind is howling in as she hits the next pane she stalks past. It breaks. Of course it breaks. Everything breaks. Splintered glass crackles beneath her boots with every step and it looks so much like home that her jaw clenches. Each time she blinks she sees electric memories of crystal meth burnt into the backs of her eyelids — heaps of the drug being weighed on scales, plastic bags traded away for dirty cash, and her father's hands full of those rough diamonds as he tells her that this is the secret to owning the world. Gunner believed him. Maybe this world isn't worth owning. Demolishing the entire train car, she doesn't move on to the next until every window is smashed free, all the seats are gashed open with her musket's bayonet, and several dents have been punched into the walls with her gilded fists. Everything the La Torre girl touches turns worthless and she's too used to this simple fact to gain any satisfaction from the destruction she's causing. Leaving it behind for the pristine train car ahead, she drops her weapons and hurls her backpack at the wall hard enough that it bursts open. Stripper cash whirls through the air in a plague of green tornadoes, raining everywhere regardless of gravity. The breeze coming in from behind her won't let anything settle. Money rises and falls with a breath of its own and a small bird flies into the mouth of this greedy monster. It carries a prosthetic arm to her, offering Gunner a hand. Never in her life has she admitted to needing anyone's other than her own, but she takes it now, running curious fingertips across wood and metal. Each joint bends to her will and she loses minutes, months, years, playing god. This is how she's used to treating people. Make a fist, Stella. Now open your hand wide enough to hold anything I ask. Hold this dollar bill, hold this lead pipe, hold me. The hand goes through every movement she tells it to, but the weight of her weapons is too much for it and the burden of Gunner is too much for anyone. There is no soul flexing these false tendons, fingers giving way as easily to a piece of flint as to the La Torre girl's touch. When Circe walks in, chasing the echoes of Gunner's rampage, every wooden finger but one is pushed down. "Stella says fuck you." The prosthetic hand is flipping the blonde off and the voice of the devious girl holding it drops as low as a promise of eternal damnation guised in a temptation of warmth. "How am I supposed to deny a dying girl's last wish?" Yanking Circe to her by the wrist, the mock-limb clatters to the floor as Gunner's fingers begin grappling with a set that actually know how to fight back. She pushes into unyielding knuckles and feels them flex against her, denying her perfect control. Even pressed between a devil and a wall, she won't surrender. The self-proclaimed follower fights for the lead and wins it, if only for a moment as she battles to back Gunner into a corner. One body tangles with another and soon enough they're tumbling to the floor, both attempting to tear self-release out of another person. They grant more than one wish, sprawled out on a bed made of forty-four thousand five hundred and fifty dollars of cold, hard cash. Gorgeous girls stripped down to nothing more than a few pieces of paper currency stuck to their skin, Gunner's name cradled in their lips and a fortune laid out beneath them... this is what she dreams of, as if it's everything she's ever wanted all co-existing within a single moment. This is what she thought the pinnacle of life would be. Maybe it is. Stomach retching each time her name hums within the lungs of the girl pressed against her, something has changed. Something is different. Something is wrong. It's not because their every movement is laced with rage or the borderline violent insistence of their push and pull — she has used rope and duct tape for better things than murder before — but this isn't a game of pretend. Circe's arms wrap around her and Gunner realizes that she is being held against her will. Their next kiss is a punishment. Gunner wakes up alone for the first time, only dead presidents pressed against her. Her fingers fuss idly with the scattered cash as she folds paper planes, fallen stars, a dozen different kinds of animals, and several hearts. These are her toys, all the way back from the days before her father knew he loved her. He spent her youngest birthdays somewhere else, giving a five-year-old girl stacks of hundred dollar bills instead of teddy bears. Even then, she hadn't minded as much as she should have. The paper was pretty enough to capture her imagination and she quickly realized it could become anything she wanted it to be. A money gun blows the head off a greenbacked lion, invisible bullets jaggedly tearing it apart at the neck. She tosses the pieces away without remorse and meticulously stacks the rest of the cash into her backpack, pulling her clothes back on and leaving her playthings behind. Somewhere down the line Circe is with Orion. The La Torre girl won't go back to them, climbing out one of the windows she smashed out earlier to get to the roof of the train. Here, the world blurs away into something beautiful enough that she catches herself wanting it. Still. The sun is rising and the wind is tearing her apart and all her pieces are being thrown into a technicolor sky. She is scattered. It feels like getting away, like the novelty of her own terror, like she'll be reborn at any moment. Gunner La Torre doesn't just see the train crash before it happens, she is the crash. One train derails into the other as she is standing upon the roof, arms spread wide and welcoming as she screams. Fear doesn't own her lungs. It's the act of living that consumes her, that throws her into the sky as she floats above a twisted wreck of metal and broken things. Below everything burns, but Gunner is the sky. She is pink and blue and radiant orange as her skin smudges into the star scattered haze. Like this, the world belongs to her and she holds it in her infinite arms as she flies. She doesn't remember landing, waking up to a turkey pecking at her bloody arm, clearly trying to sort out whether she's dead or alive. It gets its answer as she smacks it across the face and bares her teeth predatorily. The deafening squawk echoes across the wreckage and several more turkeys screech so loudly in response that they knock themselves into the chasm beneath the train tracks, flapping their useless wings all the way down to the sewers. The only creature here who knows how to fly is Gunner and she won't teach them. Instead she pulls herself to her feet, checking to be sure her weapons and bag are still strapped to her shoulders. That's when she spots them — Orion and Circe — not more than twenty feet away. The questionably gentle giant is still out cold, but the girl from Two is slowly sitting up, blinking her eyes at the fiery sky. Gunner clocks the blonde upside the head — without pausing, without blinking, without feeling anything except a dull collision of metal against bone. A fistful of hair later, she is dragging the unconscious girl away from the wreckage to she-doesn't-give-a-fuck-where. Everything looks the same. The entire world is made of metal — smashed, shattered, fragmented, crushed, cracked, and split. She lugs her prisoner far enough away for it to be difficult for Orion to follow and slumps her against the side of an old, busted grandfather clock. At least twenty minutes tick by as Gunner fidgets with one of the blonde's own throwing knives, pressing it to her fingertips like she knows she should, but never hard enough to split the skin, to peel flesh away until only an easily commandable skeleton remains. Losing her patience, she crouches down and pistol-whips Circe across the face with her flare gun. "The sun's up, Kitten," the girl who is more duct tape than skin at this point opens her eyes enough to regret it, "and you should be too." Grabbing the heavy gold chain she'd once clasped around Circe's throat with her own hands — Gunner's token — she hauls her precious pet up by the collar. Knuckles digging into the flesh of her throat, she doesn't let go, even though her stomach twists at the point of contact. "You've only got the guts to kill someone when the rules allow it." Shoving the flare gun into Circe's hand, she kisses the mouth of the firearm to her own forehead, dead center. It's Gunner's hand wrapped around Circe's hand, wrapped around death. "So let's play a game." Circe's finger is on the trigger, but her eyes are locked onto Gunner's. "Roulette," the other girl murmurs, naming two ways to die at once. Even now there is a single breath floating back and forth between their mouths, but this time only one of them will get to take it. |
[receives Stella's prosthetic arm via Word]
[feels Stella up ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ]
[$986 of origami angst]
[bitchslaps a turkey]
[gives Circe her six-chambered flare gun, loaded with one flare, aimed at Gunner's head]
DICE ROLLS
[*roll range="1-6"]
1: empty chamber
2: empty chamber
3: empty chamber
4: empty chamber
5: flare [+40 damage]
6: empty chamber
[feels Stella up ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ]
[$986 of origami angst]
[bitchslaps a turkey]
[gives Circe her six-chambered flare gun, loaded with one flare, aimed at Gunner's head]
DICE ROLLS
[*roll range="1-6"]
1: empty chamber
2: empty chamber
3: empty chamber
4: empty chamber
5: flare [+40 damage]
6: empty chamber
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