where does the good go — lysander & terra [day 8]
Aug 1, 2020 22:36:19 GMT -5
Post by 🌱 kaitlin. on Aug 1, 2020 22:36:19 GMT -5
When you wake, you wish that you hadn't.
You remember trying to will your body to get back up, remember being there, on your knees looking up at the boy who wanted you to know beyond knowing that he was not there to die for you anymore than you were there to die for him, and he'd been asking you a question, but then his knife was pointed right at your neck and you were lifting your hand to try and stop it with whatever strength you had left and suddenly the sharp of the blade was dug all the way through your forearm and—
The memory is hazy after that, softly blurred, like the edges of an oncoming rainstorm.
You remember the boy rummaging around your body, your breath so shallow that you doubt he even realized that you were still breathing. You remember trying to tell either of your hands, still loosely gripped around your dual misericords, to just fucking move, swing, bury a knife in the boys carotid, but you don't move fast enough and sooner than later he takes what he wants from you and goes to find whoever it is that he is willing to die for.
Then you were alone.
You don't know if that makes you angry or if it makes you want to weep or if it makes you want to put your fucking skull into a lit fire, but—you were alone. And you feel something about that, something that feels all too much like drowning. You remember it feeling like a slow motion suicide, the life slowly fading out of you, every moment you didn't get up, didn't keep fighting feeling like a choice, like something that you were doing to yourself. A terrible choice you were making, a decision to die instead of getting up, pushing through the pain and the blood loss, to make your way back to JJ, letting him have your final breaths. It's all you wanted, the one thing that you knew beyond even how to breathe that you had to do in this life to finally become the person that you think maybe you were supposed to be all along.
You close your eyes again, think that somewhere in the back of your head you can remember a flash of white light, something bright and horrible and so clearly out of place in this arena that you didn't even want to look more closely. It was too sterile, too clean, too much like the place you came from back in Six. Sharp lines and clean cut wires, and a feeling of being strapped down to a table—no, maybe that one was real.
Either way, you want to burn the memory from your brain, want to burn away the brightness.
You decided days ago that you were never going to go back to that place, that you were never going to go home, that you weren't in here to fight for your own life anymore. The second you watched JJ kill someone for the first time, watched the way it haunted him, hung on his shoulders and threatened to turn him into someone that you don't think he deserves to be, you knew. You were never going to go back to Six.
And now, all over again, you are a girl where you are supposed to be, and yet, not.
It takes you a long moment to fully realize that your eyes are open again, your brain pain addled and confused. The darkness is all-encompassing, suffocating in a way that you don't fully expect darkness to be except it's like there's nothing but you and the dark, wrapped all around you, boxing you in and keeping you there. You knew, of course, that tributes were coming back, but you didn't give much thought to the how of it all, didn't think about the where of it. You'd taunted that boy yesterday, listened to Perdita tell Kenji that he was a corpse walking around on two feet, but you hadn't fully understood.
Laying there, feeling like you're suffocating, you can feel every nerve ending in your body setting itself on fire, unable to comprehend a world in which you are both dead and alive and still completely, utterly, without doubt, a failure of a girl. Your entire body tries to clench, your stomach rolling into knots until you're thrashing in your box of stone, elbows bashing painfully into the walls, your forehead smashing into the ceiling as you try and right yourself. You can feel your knees scrape, your heels push. You wonder if you could actually suffocate in here, if there's any airflow, anywhere for the light to seep in.
You wonder if this is how they decide who gets to come back.
You wonder if Helle died here, suffocated.
The thought makes you want to stop fighting.
Tears start to streak down your face, run down your temples until you become less a girl and more a scream, a full-bodied and high pitched thing that takes over your every sense. You scream and scream and scream until there's no more air left in your lungs, and then you scream again. It's only the thought of JJ still out there, alone and probably with Perdita right at his throat, makes you finally reanimate, a corpse turned—not quite a girl. But something; a walking death. At some point, you think that maybe you actually do run out of air and pass out all over again, because between one scream and the next, you're just sobbing. Silent, heaving sobs that wrack through your entire body until physically beating into the stone above your head is all you can do to make them stop, a physical outlet of all your pain and anger built into one single motion, made over and over. You feel your knuckles split, ripped raw and bloody, and your nails shred as you claw at the stone.
You drop to the floor of your tomb gracelessly, clatter to the ground into a pile of limbs and dust. It's only then that you realize someone has seen fit to change you out of you black attire, only then that you realize they decided you were to be resurrected as an angel instead of a demon. Somewhere, you're sure, Kingpin is laughing at the idea.
If he's even watching.
You can't be sure he would be bothered.
Either way, it doesn't matter much. In all your desperate attempts to free yourself from the box of death, you've nearly ruined your new clothes. There are scratched holes at the knees, dirt and dust covering almost every inch. Blood stains already crusting along all the edges where you have shredded yourself into bits and pieces. You crawl away from the scene of your death, from the scene of your rebirth, crawl backwards awkwardly away in a desperate attempt to free yourself of yet another cage that you've been locked in.
You never expected death to be a cage you got to free yourself from, and yet, here you are. Clumsily, you try and pull yourself to a stand, but as you do you nearly fall down all over again. You have to lean your weight against the wall, fight against the buckling in your knees that wants to send you once and for all into your grave. JJ, you think, the name ringing in your brain over and over and over again. I have to get back to JJ.
You stumble through the hallways, try not to let your eyes linger on any one thing for a moment too long. Maybe you're afraid of what you're going to find down there, afraid that you're going to see something that makes you want to stay, something that makes you want to die more than you want to find JJ and finish this game, make sure that anyone who looks at him ends up with a slit throat. You stumble past a mural of dancers, refuse to let your eyes linger on the lithe shape of the bodies, the limbs so far stronger than yours are ever going to be again. A set of tusks, ready to rip you into shreds even further, a skeleton come to life.
You're scared of how you relate.
It's in a room of sunflowers that you finally come to a stop. You aren't sure if it's the flowers or the girl that finally gets you to stop, aren't sure if it's the idea of these beautiful things trapped down here forever, or if it's the sight of Lysander that finally does you in all over again. You don't know why, but suddenly there are hot tears streaking down your cheeks and you vomit finally, all bile and nothing else. Your sick splatters onto your shoes and you want to just curl into yourself, want everything to fucking end and for nothing to be real, for all of this to be some sick variety of hell that you know you earned and deserve, but—a hell that will end.
You start to laugh.
"So you're dead then?" you say, voice manic and horrible and broken. "All of that, the almost-friendship, the death, us killing each other slowly—all of that just to meet each other as dead versions of ourselves." You inhale, sharp, can't stop the manic way you're laughing, the way you think maybe you're falling apart. "Rebirth isn't a very good look on us."
You remember trying to will your body to get back up, remember being there, on your knees looking up at the boy who wanted you to know beyond knowing that he was not there to die for you anymore than you were there to die for him, and he'd been asking you a question, but then his knife was pointed right at your neck and you were lifting your hand to try and stop it with whatever strength you had left and suddenly the sharp of the blade was dug all the way through your forearm and—
The memory is hazy after that, softly blurred, like the edges of an oncoming rainstorm.
You remember the boy rummaging around your body, your breath so shallow that you doubt he even realized that you were still breathing. You remember trying to tell either of your hands, still loosely gripped around your dual misericords, to just fucking move, swing, bury a knife in the boys carotid, but you don't move fast enough and sooner than later he takes what he wants from you and goes to find whoever it is that he is willing to die for.
Then you were alone.
You don't know if that makes you angry or if it makes you want to weep or if it makes you want to put your fucking skull into a lit fire, but—you were alone. And you feel something about that, something that feels all too much like drowning. You remember it feeling like a slow motion suicide, the life slowly fading out of you, every moment you didn't get up, didn't keep fighting feeling like a choice, like something that you were doing to yourself. A terrible choice you were making, a decision to die instead of getting up, pushing through the pain and the blood loss, to make your way back to JJ, letting him have your final breaths. It's all you wanted, the one thing that you knew beyond even how to breathe that you had to do in this life to finally become the person that you think maybe you were supposed to be all along.
You close your eyes again, think that somewhere in the back of your head you can remember a flash of white light, something bright and horrible and so clearly out of place in this arena that you didn't even want to look more closely. It was too sterile, too clean, too much like the place you came from back in Six. Sharp lines and clean cut wires, and a feeling of being strapped down to a table—no, maybe that one was real.
Either way, you want to burn the memory from your brain, want to burn away the brightness.
You decided days ago that you were never going to go back to that place, that you were never going to go home, that you weren't in here to fight for your own life anymore. The second you watched JJ kill someone for the first time, watched the way it haunted him, hung on his shoulders and threatened to turn him into someone that you don't think he deserves to be, you knew. You were never going to go back to Six.
And now, all over again, you are a girl where you are supposed to be, and yet, not.
It takes you a long moment to fully realize that your eyes are open again, your brain pain addled and confused. The darkness is all-encompassing, suffocating in a way that you don't fully expect darkness to be except it's like there's nothing but you and the dark, wrapped all around you, boxing you in and keeping you there. You knew, of course, that tributes were coming back, but you didn't give much thought to the how of it all, didn't think about the where of it. You'd taunted that boy yesterday, listened to Perdita tell Kenji that he was a corpse walking around on two feet, but you hadn't fully understood.
Laying there, feeling like you're suffocating, you can feel every nerve ending in your body setting itself on fire, unable to comprehend a world in which you are both dead and alive and still completely, utterly, without doubt, a failure of a girl. Your entire body tries to clench, your stomach rolling into knots until you're thrashing in your box of stone, elbows bashing painfully into the walls, your forehead smashing into the ceiling as you try and right yourself. You can feel your knees scrape, your heels push. You wonder if you could actually suffocate in here, if there's any airflow, anywhere for the light to seep in.
You wonder if this is how they decide who gets to come back.
You wonder if Helle died here, suffocated.
The thought makes you want to stop fighting.
Tears start to streak down your face, run down your temples until you become less a girl and more a scream, a full-bodied and high pitched thing that takes over your every sense. You scream and scream and scream until there's no more air left in your lungs, and then you scream again. It's only the thought of JJ still out there, alone and probably with Perdita right at his throat, makes you finally reanimate, a corpse turned—not quite a girl. But something; a walking death. At some point, you think that maybe you actually do run out of air and pass out all over again, because between one scream and the next, you're just sobbing. Silent, heaving sobs that wrack through your entire body until physically beating into the stone above your head is all you can do to make them stop, a physical outlet of all your pain and anger built into one single motion, made over and over. You feel your knuckles split, ripped raw and bloody, and your nails shred as you claw at the stone.
You drop to the floor of your tomb gracelessly, clatter to the ground into a pile of limbs and dust. It's only then that you realize someone has seen fit to change you out of you black attire, only then that you realize they decided you were to be resurrected as an angel instead of a demon. Somewhere, you're sure, Kingpin is laughing at the idea.
If he's even watching.
You can't be sure he would be bothered.
Either way, it doesn't matter much. In all your desperate attempts to free yourself from the box of death, you've nearly ruined your new clothes. There are scratched holes at the knees, dirt and dust covering almost every inch. Blood stains already crusting along all the edges where you have shredded yourself into bits and pieces. You crawl away from the scene of your death, from the scene of your rebirth, crawl backwards awkwardly away in a desperate attempt to free yourself of yet another cage that you've been locked in.
You never expected death to be a cage you got to free yourself from, and yet, here you are. Clumsily, you try and pull yourself to a stand, but as you do you nearly fall down all over again. You have to lean your weight against the wall, fight against the buckling in your knees that wants to send you once and for all into your grave. JJ, you think, the name ringing in your brain over and over and over again. I have to get back to JJ.
You stumble through the hallways, try not to let your eyes linger on any one thing for a moment too long. Maybe you're afraid of what you're going to find down there, afraid that you're going to see something that makes you want to stay, something that makes you want to die more than you want to find JJ and finish this game, make sure that anyone who looks at him ends up with a slit throat. You stumble past a mural of dancers, refuse to let your eyes linger on the lithe shape of the bodies, the limbs so far stronger than yours are ever going to be again. A set of tusks, ready to rip you into shreds even further, a skeleton come to life.
You're scared of how you relate.
It's in a room of sunflowers that you finally come to a stop. You aren't sure if it's the flowers or the girl that finally gets you to stop, aren't sure if it's the idea of these beautiful things trapped down here forever, or if it's the sight of Lysander that finally does you in all over again. You don't know why, but suddenly there are hot tears streaking down your cheeks and you vomit finally, all bile and nothing else. Your sick splatters onto your shoes and you want to just curl into yourself, want everything to fucking end and for nothing to be real, for all of this to be some sick variety of hell that you know you earned and deserve, but—a hell that will end.
You start to laugh.
"So you're dead then?" you say, voice manic and horrible and broken. "All of that, the almost-friendship, the death, us killing each other slowly—all of that just to meet each other as dead versions of ourselves." You inhale, sharp, can't stop the manic way you're laughing, the way you think maybe you're falling apart. "Rebirth isn't a very good look on us."
{ table by rose }
