This is as always un-beta-ed;;
You'd never truly considered mortality, in any less than an abstract. Something you'd only felt vicariously though voices of great classics. You'd vaguely heard the about unpruned aspects of your family tree fading away, but it never touched you. They'd only ever been names, or small faces in the back of faded vintage images. You never felt anything. They'd only been a punchline at dinner, or a name never spoken at one. You had never meet them, you'd never grew to love them. You only grew to acknowledge their existence and even that was on various plains of success.
It bends you slightly as your grandmother passes the inevitable void. A void you'd onlt even read about. Its your first forced acknowledgment with the fact that the human spirit was not immortal. But even then it didn't touch you, you never saw her pass. You just sipped wine and smiled at members of you family you'd only even seen on Christmas cards. You'd mourned, you felt her presence in the world miss. But the world still fell in to place and spun on its axis. It had bent you, but you'd felt yourself eventually become parallel. You might have felt something, sad, loss. But it never stopped you living.
But this touches you. This leaves you bruised and broken in places eyes cannot see. This forces a gloss on your own sapphire gaze, the burden of mourning falls to you as there are no others. This has dislocated and axis. This had stopped you living, this had you simply surviving.
You're told by a man you've never meet, with a voice you'll never forget. The word comes unexpected and hazed by the static background of wired voices. A doctor calls you Ms Chapman and tells you he has bad news. You hadn't expected it, the guard who called on now looks morose on reflection. You'd known she'd left the prison and was lain up in hospital. But you'd somehow believed her unrealistically immortal, you'd expected her to come back. You'd expected her to survive.
But that isn't the image nor the words that greet you. You are told she slipped away in the night. He never uses the word, but you know it lingers just beyond his lips. You fall silent, before your knees kiss the ground. You'd crumbled. The fleshy blooms still linger, even if she doesn't. You imagine the same fleshy water coloured tones painting her fractured marble skin and it turns your stomach still. You'd see the rivers of crimson which had trickled infesting the concrete of the green house. You'd seen her leave, her once Amazon figure reduced to a fractured figure of a marionette. But even so, you'd never expected this. This isn't her, she is stronger than this, she is a fighter. These are the words you'd whispered to yourself hours after the phone had cut out. Your knees still pressed into the mosaic splatters of the vinyl. Your own tributaries of crimson had stained and strained against your khakis.
It's only later you realise you still think of her in present tenses.
Silver trails smudge your skin. Your voice is soon lost to the abyss. No-one approaches you; you figure Caputo's guilt keeps any CO from within your perimeter. Inmates are held back by a gloss eyed Morello. Your entire body feels empty, no lungs, no heart, no muscles, no veins. Your entire chest feels concave beneath ribs. Your breaths had long since become silent howls which claw at your throat, each jagged shuddered sound slices you.
You know there must be something beating between your ribs, because being empty could never hurt like this.