canticle :: day 4, niko's death

canticle :: day 4, niko's death Jul 12, 2020 12:08:06 GMT -5

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Post by L△LIA on Jul 12, 2020 12:08:06 GMT -5

Staggered into motion by the weight of the spiked ball crashing into your chest with enough force that it should have felt like being crushed alive, but instead felt like a kind and gentle nudge against the blanket of hurt thrown over your body when your arm was severed, you whip your remaining arm forward to steady yourself. It careens wildly in a reflexive attempt to maintain your balance. "AHHHH-HA-HA-HA-HAAAAHHHHH," you continue to bellow nonsensically, unable to stop screaming even as the sound jolts and fragments with your breathless heaving. "GRAUHUFFUAWWWAHHHHH!" There is no relief — not for your suffering, not for your self-pitying howling, not for your blind scrabbling for purchase against the air that cares little for what becomes of you. It has no steadying hand to offer. Your only hope is your twisted dagger, guided by the sightless dead birds impaled on its blade, searching for something to dig into while you're unable to force your eyes open to look for yourself.

Dead birds will not save you. Once again your knife flails wide, skidding uselessly across a skull too thick to pierce as your mangy pet kitten leaps from the unsteady lifeboat of your severed arm to the questionable safety of your pant leg. Utterly panicked and desperate to escape the water, it claws its way up your body in moments, pulling itself atop your shoulder and struggling to find a path up and over your head — tiny feet digging into your ear canal for purchase; tiny feet slipping off your forehead to nearly take out an eye. Scurrying down your fighting arm, it makes an impulsive grab for the suspiciously food-like paper cranes impaled on your dagger and suddenly you're fighting two murderous teenagers and a starving gremlin.

Attacked from all sides, you lurch and teeter for a few fleeting moments, nearly falling down before you're suddenly steadied by the blade of a falcata slammed deep into your stomach, propping you up. It rips through your soft flesh and guts a thousand times more easily than it did your arm. Here there's no bone to get stuck in, no brutal echo of cracking or uncontrollable shuddering as — halfway through — the sword is forced to twist against the dense pressure so that the bone will snap, your half-severed arm finally tearing free against its own floppy, dangling weight. No. This is so much quieter than that.

Instead your screaming is muted to a dense gurgle, your mouth frothing as bloody spit bubbles push up your convulsing throat and out from between your teeth, oozing ugly from your slackened jaw to be popped by rain. Your tongue lolls. Your eyes roll back in your head. You feel something slip in your spine, like a marionette thread snipped — something that had been holding you up your entire life, but you never realized until now.

I'm a void, someone says —

— and you feel those words in the empty place in your gut, the place where the gaping hole is after a stranger braces a hand on your shoulder to push your collapsing weight off his sword. Afterward, there is nothing there. There is vacancy where there never was before, not for your whole life, not even in the countless moments of despair when you thought your sister was dying and you were finally losing someone you loved as much as you've ever loved yourself. You loved her even more than that, maybe. It wouldn't be hard. Reflexively, you try to hold the wound shut — as if your fingers can play pretend and become stitches for you, pinching and fastening — but that arm, that hand is on the ground and it cannot reach your stomach, no matter how its ghost tries. You attempt to hold one void with another and nothing happens. Nothing happens. You want to hold yourself when no one else will and nothing happens.

But yesterday I watched my ally's throat get cut open by some mutt —

The words are distant, but they pick at a knot tied closely to the muscles, bones, and tendons being undone by swords and spikes; it's tied to your empty places, to your voids.

I heard her fucking cannon and I watched her die.

— and the knot in the voids of you is named for a life you saw and then suddenly didn't. You've tried not to think of him since, even when you and Perdita stared up at the sky to see his face, a day late, a face that looks nothing like you and yet exactly like you. You're not blonde, pale, light-eyed or any of the other obvious things differentiating your from Emmett Le Roux, but you're both dead. Even before the morning star breaks your ribs, you know that.

That's her voice —

You tilt. Sway. Ricochet. You're in focus then out, losing time as if you have any left to spare.

I know it is...

The worst part about dying at eighteen isn't the excruciating pain; it's feeling incomplete. Much like your body without its arm, you feel the phantom presence of experiences you were meant to have, but never will. You are missing so many more things than your arm and it's scary to be this aware of what isn't there. It's not so much that you want to pick out one more book to read to the kids who flock to the library for story time — tugging on your sleeve excitedly because they like the way you do the voices of the lady knights rescuing damsels or the lost baby birds searching construction sites for their mother — or that you're pining for one more bite of your favorite food. Instead it's how things like that are all you can think of because you've never fallen in love, you've never moved out of your childhood home and lived on your own, you've never been a father or had an opportunity to make a mistake big enough to regret on your deathbed. There are only devastatingly childish hopes and dreams occupying such a small part of your heart and until now you'd never tried to look beyond them to realize how much unused space exists within yourself, just waiting to be grown into.

A heavy ball of spikes crashes into your ribs and you hear the cracking of your bones, despite the way your skin muffles the sound. They break free and splinter, fracture, float within the massacred confusion of your chest, where nothing stays as you left it. Half of your ruptured stomach is pushing its way up into your punctured lungs, the other half pressed down into the severed ropes of your intestines. Your insides spill into the floodwater, a mess of mangled organs and flesh sliced so raw there's no telling where the wounds begin and hope ends.

The momentum of the morning star slamming into your chest sends you spinning on your heel. You stumble into a headstone and bounce back toward the stable bodies of your attackers. The blade of your knife soars harmlessly through the air — plunging into the floodwater, the kitten stubbornly biting down to maintain its hold on the wing of a dead crane, unwilling to give up its meal despite free-falling peril — and you're no more in control of it than you are the rest of you, dizzy with blood loss and unbearable pain. When you come to a halt against something warm and softer than stone — another person, you would think, if only you were able to think right now — you collapse your weight into them, burying your face into chest, shoulder, or neck. You don't know or care what this fleeting softness is. Friend or foe, all you want is for them to put their arms around you and hold you in this, your most horrible moment of living.

You whimper, paint her with your blood, gurgle and cough red again. You cry on her, probably; you can't tell the difference anymore between tears and the rest of what leaks from you. Kahinta wraps her arms around you just as you're about to fall and then you know you're crying for sure, trading your last breaths away for a horrible heaving that tugs gruesomely at the wound in your stomach with each hiccup, but at least your body feels like it's yours this one last time. At least it's trying to do what you tell it to, even if it physically can't anymore.

"It's alright," she mumbles to comfort you, her voice the opposite of you in every way. While you struggle to speak, to cry, to move, to breathe — she is overly controlled, a wire strung too tight. As she holds you, you can feel her tugging at the wire, checking it in paranoia in case it has slackened because of you and the way you greeted her with a smile, a big wave, hopeful stupidity. She's as close to snapping as you are to dying. You would have been a good person to teach her how to loosen up. It's the only thing you're good at. Maybe she could tell. Maybe that scared her. Maybe that's why she thought she had to kill you. "It's alright, it's over. You'll be fine —"

You're not going to be fine. You're going to die.

For all your life you've been told that your scratches are nothing to worry about as you put your own bandaids on your scraped knees and paper cuts, your parents keeping their attention perpetually fixated on your fragile sister. Even when Charlie was completely fine, double checking her was still more important than your petty scratches and bruises. You were fine. You were always fine. There are real problems in the world and you shouldn't whine for attention for things that aren't important. That's selfish. Don't be selfish, Niko. Your sister is terminally ill. You're fine.

"You'll be fine, now," Kahinta tells you again, repeating herself to make sure you understand. She doesn't know you've already been told this countless times before. You know very well that it's wrong to ask people to spare concern for you, but you did it anyway because you thought this time you might be allowed to. You thought maybe your death might be as important as anyone else's. You thought, finally, someone might acknowledge that you're not okay — and maybe you never have been — but at least in this moment someone might concede that it's valid for you to feel horrible right now and sad for yourself and how everyone can agree that getting murdered sucks and there's nothing alright about it. Instead Kahinta kneels to lower you into the floodwater and it fills your ears, rising up to splash into your mouth and nostrils as she walks away and the waves of her leaving echo back to you with each footfall. All the while the water is wicking blood from your open wounds to make them as raw and empty as possible. Nothing heals here. Certainly not in this moment. You're fine, Niko. "I promise."

Someone lifts your hand out of the water. Two fingers to your withering pulse, Perdita assesses your life with harsh practicality. There is no point to lifting your head and looking into your eyes if there isn't going to be anything left in you to look back. This way is easier. Objective. Less emotional risk. "You're not dead," she declares and you don't hear her crying because there is too much water in your ears. You can't hear anything. "Come on. It's not over." Hoisting you up, she carries the kitten with one arm and you with the other. You are clutched against her side as well as she can manage, your arm dangling uselessly and head lolling as she attempts to drag you away from the graveyard. You can't lift your feet and they drag through the submerged mud behind her as your weight slips down and down and down her side until your calves scrape the ground and your knees thump against rocks hidden by the water, as if trying to sound out emergency morse code. Unable to raise your head to see where you're going, the only thing you can do is watch the blood drip from your gut. "You idiot." The kitten reaches out to swat at you, reiterating the sentiment. "Why'd you fucking do that?"

There's a sickening jolt as her arm clenches and suddenly loosens. "I can't —" Nearly plummeting from her grasp, her fingers barely manage to find a handhold to catch you. You can feel her nails digging into the gaping wound through your stomach, hooked inside you out of desperation. Skin tearing and muscles unraveling around her knuckles, it should hurt more than it does. Instead, for just a moment, you feel a little less incomplete. "Niko, I can't. I can't carry you."

(If I fall and you're there, don't leave me.)

When she lets go, you don't blame her. It's okay. You're fine. Your body plunges into the floodwater with a splash, your forehead slamming into stone as you compulsively gasp for air, breathing in water and blood instead. You drown quietly as she walks away.

(Don't leave until you make sure I'm dead.)