days gone by { a n n i e }
Dec 5, 2016 18:21:33 GMT -5
Post by rook on Dec 5, 2016 18:21:33 GMT -5
you've got a chip on your shoulderit's getting worse now you're older
The wind is screaming, cutting into my skin with its cold, razor sharp edges. An unrelenting rain lashes down, and I am soaked to the bone. A figure lone waving in the midst of a torrent. My skin is numb and cold, pale and drained. I don't even have the energy to shiver. The stripped-bare trees dance around me, their skeletal limbs scratch at the air like a mechanical spider reaching out, trying to ensnare me. I grip the straps of my rucksack tightly, my bare knuckles turn whiter, my mind tried to focus on what is ahead.
The world is so big. They told us we would have to walk a long, long way. At times it felt like we would travel for months at a time, but back then our legs were short and our minds were open. Now a month feels like a day to me, and two hundred miles is nothing. I've done this journey more times than I can count. It's so much easier now than it used to be, but I suppose my mind is conditioned to handle this kind of routine.
Each step I take, I find it harder to lift my foot from the heavy mud and take the next step. It is difficult to make good time in such horrendous conditions, but I know that there are many hours of darkness left, and that I need to press onwards if I am to get to shelter before dawn. The night is a blanket that shrouds my movements - these skies are not vacant during the day. Wanderers are shot on sight.
It's easy to overlook how dangerous it is when you've done this as many times as I have. Sometimes I forget that I did this journey on my own when I was eleven years old. A wide-eyed little girl who wanted nothing more than to please her father. Fuck, I was so scared and alone. But I made it.
I feel strangely safe out here, despite the gale-force winds and the torrential rain. Whilst exposed to the harsh elements with little protection or shelter, the isolation from anyone and anything gives me an odd comfort. I have always been someone who hates being in the eye of the storm - I would much rather be caught up in it. At least in the midst of a raging hurricane I am alone. I can feel the rain on my face, I can hear the wind howling. It's real. I am alive.
There were times I felt entirely numb in the Capitol. I connected with one, maybe two people that I perhaps shouldn't have. Those fleeting sensations of warmth were all I clung to. For the most part I felt nothing. I knew what I was, and what I was doing. How could a monster like me feel anything at all? It's not natural for me to feel. It scares me.
I know that it is now long behind me, and for that I am glad, but what is ahead is even worse. I laugh out loud, because if I don't, I think i'll break down.
I approach the fallen tree where Reiner and I used to fight, my hand moves gently across its scarred bark as I pass. These woods have seen unnatural things at the hands of those desperate enough to push moral boundaries in order to win a war. We were kids, and they made us do things that no child should ever have to do.
This valley was where I was shaped into what I am today. Just over the hill I learned to shoot a pistol, glass bottles on a tree stump. Down by the creek was where I first held a sword, and where I trained for months to master using it. Reiner hunted boar until there was no boar left, whilst I studied which mushrooms were poisonous or not, and had to prove it by eating them. Down in the fields was where Bertholt told me he was too scared to do what they were asking us to do - I punched him in the stomach and dragged him back to the base. By the old Oak tree was when they told me I was going to kill hundreds of people. I remember smiling at that, but now the thought of it makes my stomach feel sickly and heavy.
I follow an invisible path that is embedded into my mind until I arrive at my destination. The side entrance to District Thirteen - nothing more than a bunker in the middle of nowhere. I am afraid. It is human to be afraid, which only makes it all the more worse. I thought they washed fear out of me, but no, it's still there, like a stain. You can't erase fear from the mind, it's not an emotion, it's not a mindset. Fear is something entirely different, and it has me breaking out in a cold sweat, breathing through my mouth, and my face creasing into a concerned frown.
Reiner gripped the door frame of this entrance, refusing to be dragged back inside. It took several injections and five men to overpower him. Over the ridge where the trees thin out is where Bert asked me if I was okay with what I was going to do. I spent a lot of summers in the clearing, chopping down wood with an axe. On Fridays we got extra portions of meat and gravy. On Saturdays we were made to sprint until we threw up. My father didn't praise me, he shut me in a dark room and told me to get some sleep. I didn't sleep properly for a few years. On my seventeenth birthday Bert and I walked to the river, we said goodbye. I left for the Capitol.
I made friends, made a few enemies too. I became part of a system. Sometimes I tell myself that I enjoyed graduating from the Peacekeeper academy. For once in my life I actually felt normal. But some things are embedded within me, and I can't fight them. Tracker jacker venom is bleeding into my mind, even now the urge to kill is rife inside of me. There's more blood on my hands than can ever be wiped clean - they're dripping red. I'm a nuclear fallout, a force that can kill hundreds in the blink of an eye, a walking weapon manufactured right here.
I'm crying. I cannot remember the last time I cried. I feel ugly and horrible and exposed and broken, and my entire existence just crumbles as I fall to my knees weeping. I hate myself. I hate what I am, and what I've done. I want to die. I want to lie in the mud and die. I hate the ones who made me. I hate them. I could go in there right now and murder every single one of them, paint the walls with their blood. The venom burns inside me, and I'm on the edge of the temptation, practically drooling at the thought.
But I can't. There's a fail-safe in the back of my mind that's stopping me, something that was planted that is preventing me from killing.
And they didn't put it there. It's something I didn't think I had - a conscience.
Armin once told me that I was a good person.
I realise now that coming back was a mistake. I have to go back to the Capitol and fix the mess that I've caused. I have to get Reiner and Bert. I don't know what that means for me, and I don't know if I'm going to have to fight some people who I consider friends, or even spend the rest of my life locked up in a cell, but I can't run away from it, whatever it is.
So I run towards it.
The world is so big. They told us we would have to walk a long, long way. At times it felt like we would travel for months at a time, but back then our legs were short and our minds were open. Now a month feels like a day to me, and two hundred miles is nothing. I've done this journey more times than I can count. It's so much easier now than it used to be, but I suppose my mind is conditioned to handle this kind of routine.
Each step I take, I find it harder to lift my foot from the heavy mud and take the next step. It is difficult to make good time in such horrendous conditions, but I know that there are many hours of darkness left, and that I need to press onwards if I am to get to shelter before dawn. The night is a blanket that shrouds my movements - these skies are not vacant during the day. Wanderers are shot on sight.
It's easy to overlook how dangerous it is when you've done this as many times as I have. Sometimes I forget that I did this journey on my own when I was eleven years old. A wide-eyed little girl who wanted nothing more than to please her father. Fuck, I was so scared and alone. But I made it.
I feel strangely safe out here, despite the gale-force winds and the torrential rain. Whilst exposed to the harsh elements with little protection or shelter, the isolation from anyone and anything gives me an odd comfort. I have always been someone who hates being in the eye of the storm - I would much rather be caught up in it. At least in the midst of a raging hurricane I am alone. I can feel the rain on my face, I can hear the wind howling. It's real. I am alive.
There were times I felt entirely numb in the Capitol. I connected with one, maybe two people that I perhaps shouldn't have. Those fleeting sensations of warmth were all I clung to. For the most part I felt nothing. I knew what I was, and what I was doing. How could a monster like me feel anything at all? It's not natural for me to feel. It scares me.
I know that it is now long behind me, and for that I am glad, but what is ahead is even worse. I laugh out loud, because if I don't, I think i'll break down.
I approach the fallen tree where Reiner and I used to fight, my hand moves gently across its scarred bark as I pass. These woods have seen unnatural things at the hands of those desperate enough to push moral boundaries in order to win a war. We were kids, and they made us do things that no child should ever have to do.
This valley was where I was shaped into what I am today. Just over the hill I learned to shoot a pistol, glass bottles on a tree stump. Down by the creek was where I first held a sword, and where I trained for months to master using it. Reiner hunted boar until there was no boar left, whilst I studied which mushrooms were poisonous or not, and had to prove it by eating them. Down in the fields was where Bertholt told me he was too scared to do what they were asking us to do - I punched him in the stomach and dragged him back to the base. By the old Oak tree was when they told me I was going to kill hundreds of people. I remember smiling at that, but now the thought of it makes my stomach feel sickly and heavy.
I follow an invisible path that is embedded into my mind until I arrive at my destination. The side entrance to District Thirteen - nothing more than a bunker in the middle of nowhere. I am afraid. It is human to be afraid, which only makes it all the more worse. I thought they washed fear out of me, but no, it's still there, like a stain. You can't erase fear from the mind, it's not an emotion, it's not a mindset. Fear is something entirely different, and it has me breaking out in a cold sweat, breathing through my mouth, and my face creasing into a concerned frown.
Reiner gripped the door frame of this entrance, refusing to be dragged back inside. It took several injections and five men to overpower him. Over the ridge where the trees thin out is where Bert asked me if I was okay with what I was going to do. I spent a lot of summers in the clearing, chopping down wood with an axe. On Fridays we got extra portions of meat and gravy. On Saturdays we were made to sprint until we threw up. My father didn't praise me, he shut me in a dark room and told me to get some sleep. I didn't sleep properly for a few years. On my seventeenth birthday Bert and I walked to the river, we said goodbye. I left for the Capitol.
I made friends, made a few enemies too. I became part of a system. Sometimes I tell myself that I enjoyed graduating from the Peacekeeper academy. For once in my life I actually felt normal. But some things are embedded within me, and I can't fight them. Tracker jacker venom is bleeding into my mind, even now the urge to kill is rife inside of me. There's more blood on my hands than can ever be wiped clean - they're dripping red. I'm a nuclear fallout, a force that can kill hundreds in the blink of an eye, a walking weapon manufactured right here.
I'm crying. I cannot remember the last time I cried. I feel ugly and horrible and exposed and broken, and my entire existence just crumbles as I fall to my knees weeping. I hate myself. I hate what I am, and what I've done. I want to die. I want to lie in the mud and die. I hate the ones who made me. I hate them. I could go in there right now and murder every single one of them, paint the walls with their blood. The venom burns inside me, and I'm on the edge of the temptation, practically drooling at the thought.
But I can't. There's a fail-safe in the back of my mind that's stopping me, something that was planted that is preventing me from killing.
And they didn't put it there. It's something I didn't think I had - a conscience.
Armin once told me that I was a good person.
I realise now that coming back was a mistake. I have to go back to the Capitol and fix the mess that I've caused. I have to get Reiner and Bert. I don't know what that means for me, and I don't know if I'm going to have to fight some people who I consider friends, or even spend the rest of my life locked up in a cell, but I can't run away from it, whatever it is.
So I run towards it.
