Here's the meltdown fic I've been rambling about for a while. I hope you don't kill me for not updating my other stories. m(_)m
This took a good few months, which is probably the longest I've taken to write 2000+ words.
enjoy.
meltdown
00:03:24:26
Sometimes I'm flying. I'm flying on silver wings past the stars in my sea of crap and my head full of crap and my life full of crap. I fly beyond the stars that roll with golden light and wait for the crap to catch up with me again.
Sometimes I'm drowning. I choke myself and try to cough up my own blood just to get rid of all this white white whiteness and too-bright light, like fluorescence carved into the backs of my eyelids so deep that they don't bleed anymore, because the water that drops down them is clear.
Sometimes I wait.
I wait for someone to notice that I'm drowning.
Xx
People see me bleeding and they patch me up with fluffy flower pads and kisses. More weight to pull me down. I'm not bleeding, I'm drowning. The redness was just a bonus.
Maybe it's because I'm drowning quietly that no-one notices. Someone pulls at the strings hiding under my arms and I unravel more, coiling redness into the sea I'm thrashing in.
The moon is red today. So are my hands.
But you're white. You're white and young and pretty with those big blue eyes and your pale, pale skin and you don't even scream when I try to wring your neck. You're pretty. You're not what I see in the mirror and in this glass sea.
Turn red, damn you. Turn. Red. And scream. Scream.
Xx
The air is cold when I breathe. It's ice knifing through my lungs and biting the back of my eyes and cutting through my hands.
The air is cold under the sea I'm drowning in and above the world I live in and in my head.
Fog settles behind my eyes but I can't sleep. I stare at my ceiling and will it to be anything other than black or white, maybe blue. I like blue. It reminds me of things that aren't hugs that only touch the air around you and nothing else. Of warm hands. Of me and my voice, my voice.
My voice.
I don't know what it sounds like anymore. I bet it's not as pretty as yours.
Because everything about you is pretty-perfect, sculptured Lolita of the nonexistent faerie tales I write in my head. And I want to kill you, so watch out for evil witches and wolves.
Xx
I want to fly. The sky is blue, just like your eyes, and the stars are golden kisses on my forehead. I want to fly. Why are you holding my wings?
Answer me.
Because you've always held them. And you've folded them and tucked them inside yourself and bit at them when you hurt.
You took my wings and hid them, because you're the only one perfect enough for them. You little asshole.
I swallow ice water and feel it cut through my veins. I am drowning and I have no-one here to hear me.
You do. You have the world behind you. And I have hell behind me.
Scratch that.
I have nothing.
Xx
The flowery bandages have stopped.
I'm beginning to wonder if they were there in the first place, because the flowers have faded to grey and have crumbled to ash. No proof. Nothing left. Nothing.
I tried to tell someone earlier. That I was drowning. That it wasn't the bruises she should see, because the bruises don't hurt.
"Hey," I said. "Where is my reactor?"
She had long green pigtails that slapped me in the face when she turned around. She told me that it was wherever I wanted it to be. And then she walked away. She wasn't my lifeline.
I decided that the reactor was the mess of rolling blue light in my head.
Xx
(Please, she screamed, take my hand. And she reached out with fingers made like marble, flawless.
I cut them off.)
Xx
I am deaf to the world, and the world is deaf to me. But not to you. Never to you. You had an angel's tongue sewn into your mouth and used it to enchant the masses.
And then you went back inside and never returned.
I hate you for that, for hiding inside my head, in the tiny corners where the sun shines. I hate you for not giving me your voice because I actually need it.
Drown.
Die.
Your sky-blue eyes don't belong in this world.
Xx
(Sing for me, I want to say. Remind me what I sound like. I'm not deaf to you. Sing for me.
But you sing nothing.)
Xx
I wring your neck. And still, you don't sing. You never sing. You never let me listen to you. Because you're too perfect for that, pretty pretty princess in white. You're the innocence that needs to rot.
I wring your neck.
I wring my neck.
The water's rising far too fast for me and then I'm under.
Xx
In a broken dream, I've almost killed you ten thousand times. I've strangled you. I've strangled myself. Nothing in the outside world changed. Nothing in my head changed.
In a broken dream, I hold your head underwater and drown myself. The sea is thrashing red with our blood.
And you speak. For the first time, you speak. You speak and it's not in the angel-voice I know. It's with the voice of someone whose throat has rusted. The voice of someone who's died.
You say, "Let me help you."
I say, "Drown faster."
In a broken dream, you struggle for breath and gasp, but this time you die.
Xx
(I said to her, "Where is my reactor?"
She said, "Only you know where yours is. You can find yours if you know who you are."
She told me it was wherever I wanted it to be.
"No," you say. "She told you to look for it."
But I didn't want her to tell me that. I wanted her to tell me where it was in five easy steps that didn't involve me figuring out what this body is, what these thoughts are. )
Xx
I have reached the bottom of the sea with you. Your head crashes to the floor and I take my hands off your neck for one second.
You stare at me with those eyes and that past and the person who I don't see in the mirror because I'm not as good as you. I want to open your mouth and tear out your voice and swallow it whole so it can be mine again.
And then I think. I think and think and think about what you said and what I said and what I heard and what really happened.
Facts –
I have killed you, because your heartbeat is silent.
I have killed me, because I locked myself into you.
I have killed me, because you're everything I wanted for myself, and you're dead, and you were my fairytale.
Therefore, I am dead.
Therefore, you are dead.
Therefore, the world is a better place.
Therefore, I have triumphed.
Ha.
I win.
Take that.
I.
Win.
.
.
meltdown
00:02:13:01
Xx
So I wait at the doorway of my world and the sea in my head and the cold concrete of the tangible and mundane. I slip on grey shoes and walk along the alleyways, staring at the faded spray paint and bastard street punks that dance around like drunken monkeys. I watch television and hear the newscaster talk about the latest car crash and celebrity scandal.
I don't go to class. My name isn't on the roster anymore because I erased it myself. Nobody noticed.
At night I drink my own saliva and curses and swallow everything down with a glass of water. I stare at your carcass, waiting at the edge of the sea, and I dunk my head in the waters and scream.
Xx
And nothing has changed at all. Because I told no-one, no-one was here to hear me drowning, no-one will notice I'm gone, and people will chatter and laugh and watch television and feed on the lives of others like they used to. The whole world is the fucking same and killing you-me has done nothing.
I hate this. I hate you. I hate me. Hate. Me.
Me.
Dead me.
Xx
Death creeps into my head through my ears. It eats through tissue and muscle, ripping a pathway into the reactor that rolls in my head. I hope the red won't stain the blue.
Death leaves a song behind, a buzzing song that reminds one of distorted voicebanks and dead flies. It's my voice, I know it.
Allegro, Agitato.
I stare at your corpse. Too beautiful to be dead. It's all I can do not to rip you apart. See? Even after you're dead and gone your plastic prettiness beats me. And I sit here for hours, watching you and hearing my voice echo in my head. I watch you do nothing. I think, think think think – I remember.
Allegro, Agitato.
And I hear her, her with the green pigtails and the soft voice, in my head, jarring against Death's siren call. Please. Take my hand.
But I don't remember her saying that. And maybe I didn't want to. Maybe it was easier to believe that you were the one everyone wanted. Maybe everyone saw you in me and wondered where you had gone. Maybe they wanted you back. Maybe they wanted me back, because maybe I left them because I put me inside you and buried you.
Facts –
You're dead. They're never getting you back. Too bad, haha.
But they might be getting me back. I know, because the light's growing nearer and bluer, with the warmth of white. And maybe they'll be okay with that. All I have to do is to steal your voice.
But I can't. You're dead.
Death shrieks, shrill and painful. My voice. Useless voice. Fake voice.
Wait.
Something's off here. Wait, wait, wait.
My voice was real. My voice was real. And then I was lonely and useless and I made you because you were so perfect and you took it…right? I gave it to you. And then you used it for me while I hid behind you. Then you crawled back in my dank cave of rotten meat and left me to stand there, alone, but you kept it, but you couldn't use it—so – where is it now? Did you kill it? Did it die with you? Did I kill it, just now; throw it into the rolling blue that keeps me sane?
And I know I have killed me, because without my voice I am nothing. My voice is gone. Your voice is gone. I wrung it from your skinny little neck and what good has it done?
I'm useless, I am. Everything I've done doesn't amount to anything.
Maybe that's why the world is better without me. I contributed negative space to busy lives full of bright rainbow promise.
Maybe that's why you were my fairytale. Because I wanted to be bright and busy like them. And I was you, for a while. For a while you were real, but then you broke down inside yourself. And I failed to make myself you.
I also failed to make myself me.
.
.
.
So, in the end, I throw your body down the rolling blue mass of light that could be my memories, my thoughts, my voice box, my past, all meshed together in a plasma heap. I sit at the edge and scream into it, sending you down with the voice that may or may not be yours.
In the end, I sit at the edge. I don't jump, I don't walk away. I wasn't able to take myself back from you. I wasn't able to change the lies back into the truths they used to be. You, my glass princess, broke inside me, and your pieces stuck in the most uncomfortable places. You're in me now, but fragmented, not in a way that would tell me how to fix you and put my brain in your shell instead of the other way around.
Allegro, Agitato.
Faster, livelier, brighter, happier, more musical, more sparkling.
Allegro, Agitato.
Sluggish, quiet, faded, saddened, tone-deaf, dull.
The light of the reactor dims when I stare at it. My blood is pure silence, weighing me down from the inside.
On earth, I walked, but I never left footprints. I sank into my own corners and nurtured my hate for you. I watched and I listened and I ran away. Is this my fault, or someone else's? I used to think it's yours, but I'm not sure. You did your part, but you quit too early and left me to fend for myself without telling me what to do. Maybe others tried to nurse you back to the outside, but you were done.
There are no hands that can reach me here, and I like it better this way.
meltdown
00:00:00:01
I'd really like to hear how you see Rinny as portrayed here. Please review!
Oh. And I'm reading Bakuman now, which was first referred to me by kim-onka, a long time ago. IDK if she'll read this or if she's even following my work anymore, but hey, just to get this out there: It's a great manga. Thanks.
