About: Metaphorical one-shot, Thalia-centric.
Author's Note: It's metaphorical, folks.
Running Up
by Skadi*IdiosyncraticInk
Fleewick ran up walls, but Thalia ran faster.
Fleewick ran up walls.
The rubber soles of converse slapping against the brick, each foot raising and coming down again on the hot stone or the hot metal or the slippery hot glass, lead bones pulling but sly dreams winning and impossible smirking confident. That was walking up walls, ignoring the options that possible offered, eyes flickering and flickering because you knew you shouldn't do it. Fleewick had seen the silhouettes of babies against gauzy curtains, walking up walls in the darkness of their rooms, climbing out of cribs and taking with bare feet to plaster painted daffodil yellow and princess pink and bibbidy-bobbidy blue.
But Fleewick did not walk up walls, he ran up walls.
He ran, and his arms swung like madness, and his head stopped working and his stomach flattened hard and his legs flew and kicked and his lungs sucked ragged and the rubber soles got hotter than the metal and his sweat fell off his forehead and hit the ground below in droplets that sizzled on the frying tarmac. Then defiance snipping out the questions and shearing out the answers and burning his mind blank and slivered rationality tugging sideways but quickened dreams winning and impossible grinning wicked in his bones.
Fleewick ran up walls faster than anyone.
He could outrace the babies, the toddlers, the children. His legs were the longest, his stride the farthest, and Fleewick was the oldest to run the walls, to fly up the side of the library, to take off at a sprint down a dark humid alley filled with gasoline and smoke and slam up the building faster than a hummingbird with its pompous needle of a nose that hurt no more than bloody noses did. He cut out the questions with a drill as fast as his feet as they beat the wall like chainsaw teeth and cut answers into bloody sprays that splattered the wallpaper of his mind sick with delightful empty empty bliss.
Fleewick ran up walls faster than anyone, even Thalia Grace.
(This is the part of the story where we start lying.)
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Their arms swung, sleeves pushed up and shirts soaked dark and evil lurking behind blatant scathing insolence.
"You're never going to win," said Fleewick.
"How much you want to bet?" said Thalia Grace.
"Everything," hissed Fleewick.
"Good luck," spat Thalia Grace.
Their sweat bubbled in a puddle at the foot of the building.
-][-
Their faces shone with a wet gloss. Nylon shorts were glued against the inside of their slippery knees. Under running flesh was criminal desire and fiendish scorn and the rhapsody of soaring.
"Give up now and you won't fall," Fleewick said.
"You really don't know a thing, do you?" said Thalia Grace.
They kept running.
-][-
Converse, rubber soles, nylon shorts, whispering under the hot breathing and the rasping sunburn and the rippling throat and the burning sunset and the flashing glass windows and the echoing patches of light and the scorching white holes and-
Blindly running, running straight into the light-
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Fleewick ran up walls, but Thalia ran faster.