soaked in guilty verdicts :: cabin fever
Jul 20, 2021 15:20:53 GMT -5
Post by pogue on Jul 20, 2021 15:20:53 GMT -5
L O V E
The breath that catches in his throat when Julian's spear enter Six's neck tastes like metal and bile, bubbling up from the harshest pits of his stomach as he watches metal enter flesh and come back out the other side, dripping with hues of red and black and flesh and muscle and Love's jaw hangs open, eyes wide and blue irises wavering in a sea of white as he watches Six sway from the impact.
It doesn't feel real, for a moment.
Six's form stumbles backwards on shaking steps and borrowed time, Julian's snide remarks still hanging dead in the air between them. And there's red, so much fucking red, more than what spilled out of the back of Evan's chest and more than what hangs from Waverly's scrapes and gashes and more than any page signed in the Diamond Legacy of the Bellisario family. It's so much red, and it only continues to ebb and flow when Six collapses to the ground with the chorus of a cannon cheering him on, a flock of birds rising up from the trees around them as it rings through the skies.
His eyes snap shut when Six mumbles harsh nothings out in the world, stained permanently with red as he takes his last fucking breaths and Love tries to gulp down the way he knows he's killed another person that he brought into his own path, stammering voice laced into the metal of a cassette tape and sent out to the very same people he knows he'd have to kill to make it home. He bites back the scream that catches underneath the shallow breath in his throat, his body shaking in response to the way he can't even look at Six's corpse without knowing that he played a part in it, without knowing that another ghost would make its way into his dreams and his nightmares and slowly chip away at a diamond exterior and a heart that is half-dead already.
A parasite chokes on his own venom as Six's cannon echoes out above them, only broken by the sound of Thad's sudden sobs as the realization comes to pass, settling in between all of them in a sudden wave of reality. Thad doesn't waste any time before he turns and runs, and every piece of Love's Career training tells him to launch the axe into the boy's back, take down another tribute at the expense of another tick on his own gravestone. It tears into him, heart and mind battling it out and before he knows it it is too late, Thad's silhouette blurring in the shadows of the trees and leaving the three of them in silence.
So much silence, marred only by Waverly's increasingly shallow breaths as the last bit of shock begins to wear off.
His survival instincts kick in after what feels like an eternity, breath forced out from his throat as he suddenly adjusts his stance, the brush of the tree line still shaking from Thad's escape. It's a bandage over a wound that is doing nothing but widening with every heartbeat, infected with a sickness of his own design and spreading surely throughout his entire form. He blinks once, twice as the shock finally begins to pull away from his heart and his lungs, his gaze shifting from the trees to the bodies and up to the skies above.
Two corpses are collecting dust in the grass around them, and there'd soon enough be hovercrafts to collect them, alerting every other weapon and armor-clad tribute to their location within minutes. He gulps, tightening his grip on the axe in his hand before he moves through the situation.
"Jules.." He says softly as he makes his way from behind him and around the front, cutting off his view of Six's crumbled form that has laced itself into the daisies that sprout from the earth below them, staining yellow with harsh waves of red as his final words spill out of the boy's throat. The lion in front of him is caught in stone and gold that seeps into his skin, as if Midas has carved his claws up and down every vein that Love has traced across Julian's skin in the life of the night and turned them to nothing more than painted ash. And his body tears itself in two as he stares, one half of him seeing a wounded pride and a dying heart and the other seeing nothing but an open door and an opportunity waiting to be taken.
He could kill him right now. He could close the slacked jaw that hangs from Julian's face in shock with the blade of his axe, drive it up into the boy's throat until a cannon marks his first kill, until that cowardly pride he'd held so dearly to himself in the beginning of the Games comes back.
His mind tells him to do it, pulls forth every killer instinct that has ever been driven into his brain by Father and training alike. Kill them both, his brain speaks softly, and the words feel so familiar and so right and as he holds the axe in his grasp his knuckles crack and twist as if to cheer him on, turn a parasite on its host and come out on top.
The thoughts die in the span of three painful heartbeats.
Because his gaze drifts left from Julian's spear, shaking softly in the boys grip and remnants of Six's final moments still dripping down in red from the tip and his heart sinks. Because Julian's eyes are still focused down on the spot where he knows Six is lying dead, the sounds of him choking on his final hymns still bouncing in between Love's ears whenever he breathes. Because Julian is looking through him, not at him, as if Love is made of glass and smoke and mirrors and is doing nothing but twisting and distorting what is already done, what is too real to be changed, what they both are. Because maybe, he is.
Because he cares, and he hates that he does.
And he wants to help him, wants to peel back the layers of toxic gold that the lion has drowned himself in until his heart stood still and start them both new again. And he wants to rip Julian back from the edge of a monstrous fall that he knows all too well from his own experience, doesn't want to see Julian carve a path that only leads to blood and cracks in the heart. And he wants to pull him close and whisper falsities into his ears until the world starts turning again, until the world goes from red to gold to the most vibrant hues of blue, until they can both move on in wrapped arms and synced heartbeats.
And he can't,
because they're both too deep in gold and diamond to come back.
because they're both too deep in gold and diamond to come back.
One monster lets go of his axe and wraps blood-stained fingertips around another monster's hand, and it's as he peels back Julian's fingers from the metal of his weapon that he realizes he can't tell if it's his own heartbeat he's feeling hammering through his skin or Julian's, or if it is some deadly combination of both. He curls his fingers into the other's and it's like he's forcing open a safe that has been sealed closed from time itself, Julian's hand wrapped so tight around the spear that it's only when Love interlaces skin with skin that the metal finally hits the dust and the dirt below. With his other hand he raises a palm gently to Julian's cheek, cupping his chin and raising the boy's gaze up from his chest, no, from the corpse of Six to his own eyes. "Jules, listen to me." He starts and his voice immediately betrays the confidence he wants to inject into the world, stammering breaths rising up in his words. "You need to snap out of this. The hovercraft will be here soon, and other alliances soon after that." His voice turns from sadness to a warning as his gaze flits between Julian's eyes and the tree line, recognizing that every alliance had been forced into these wooded areas by the rain storms. "Help me loot the bodies, before Waverly passes out from blood loss."
He pulls back his hands from Julian's face and undoes their intertwined fingers and feels the shards of diamond and gold embed and carve themselves into their skin, too thick to be broken and too heavy to carry forever. It's their coffins, the way their legacies will do nothing but break down their bones and bury them six feet under in a grave they had no clue they were digging all this time. When he turns away from Julian he drops his gaze to avoid the eyes of Six as they stare dead ahead, catching the ghosts and the demons that bend and swirl in the skies above them. He intentionally avoids the body, nodding towards Julian as the lion finally begins to stir from a shocked slumber in a way that tells him to take what they'll need from Six and nothing else. He clenches his teeth and steels his gaze as he slides the armor from Evan's limbs, their weight increased tenfold now that a heavy heart and a guilty conscience have to lift them. The ghosts that haunt the back of his mind threaten to spill forth, cackling and laughing at his own demise as he finally slips Evan's bag from off his shoulders, his gaze settling on Six's form as he rises.
Wherever you ended up, I hope you're able to be yourself.
One final thought to a boy he never really knew and he is back on his feet, Evan's bag slung over his shoulder as he moves past Julian's form, stopping to squeeze the lion's hand one more time, genuine against everything he knows he should not be doing. "I think we're both monsters." He whispers softly, somberly, and he knows it will cut Julian as much as it is cutting him, and he knows that it's true, and he knows that it's selfish- he hates that he is, but he hates a lot of things in here.
He moves quickly to support Waverly's weight, waves of red spilling out onto his uniform as he does so. "C'mon, Waves. Let's get you out of here."
[ Leisures, leisurely ]
