Now I've freedom unbound,
Cut the laces of life.
The pistol, the poison,
The noose or the knife?
- 306, Emilie Autumn
It is a fairly old blade. Her mother hardly ever uses it, as blunt and as small as it is, her father even less. It is this assurance that gives her confidence to abduct the plastic-handled, shiny-bladed knife from the kitchen, to give it a new edge, as bloodthirsty as any butcher's cleaver, and to give it a new purpose.
Despite how little Melissa uses it, though, she knows the very moment it is gone, and she gets a tiny bit worried. Desmond doesn't, because, after all, Steph is far too sensible to do anything overly stupid, or so he believes, because of course he knows his own daughter well. She's his daughter.
In the meantime, Valkyrie Cain is tearing gashes into her own flesh.
Oh, she's not doing it to die, she tells herself late at night when she's staring at the ceiling and listening to the sounds of silence, when she's craving the feeling of metal on skin. No, she just wants a little bit of a reality check, something to ground her away from the fantasy world she now inhabits. The quiet little lines of not-quite-pain are so much more accessible, more credible, than living skeletons and the like.
She tells herself that she could stop at any time, and sometimes she even comes close to believing it.
Her life begins to revolve around the tyrannical little brand. Not the surreal, dreamish emptiness that she once considered her life, but everything else. Everything that matters. If she's not bleeding herself, bringing herself just that much closer to her death, she's planning to, envisioning it with a lover's affection, or else she's dreading it, because there's a part of her that still squeaks at the sight of blood.
Once or twice, she tries to stop, she really does. Butterflies scrawled, ice-cubes clenched, insects casually murdered. In the end, the only effect this has is to drag her even further down, make her need the reality that is pain even more. It's a vicious circle, one that she should have anticipated, and one that she completely failed to, because the reality is that when you're driven to desperation, you're already beyond caring about consequences.
One day, the inevitable happens, and she finds herself dead. She can't bring herself to care, because she's finally broken free of the pain and the need and the horror that come from being alive, and in her last moments, the knife, the instrument and symbol of her end, is the most beautiful thing in her twisted, broken, fantasy world.
A/N: This one's actually pretty old. It's been ages since I worked out of a notebook, so that already says something about the time period.
~Mademise Morte, October 15