A
Hush, Distilled
abstraction
(Heroes isn't mine.)
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It happens at the wake. Unfamiliar odors mingling with the damp heavy scent of lilies, paraded around the room like a ward against the dead, and she feels like something has shifted in the air, an intangible knowledge that this place, this house, no longer breathes home to her.
She felt safe here, once. A hush, distilled, echoes quiet voices through the hallways and she wants to believe that when she looks up across the room, his eyes will greet hers and this was all a dream, all a dream. It doesn't, and the wooden timbre of his voice calls in her mind, a distant hollow comparison to what it once was. Alive.
His room is the way he left it, and she gently runs her finger across his dresser. She died when he did, she thinks, but the hurt doesn't lessen. Her body remembers the shock, the clinking woosh of glass slipping sideways out of her hands, shattering against tile in slow-motion. Heart stopping; oxygen going stale in her lungs; the sour taste of not-enough-air and then the slow rush of blood to her ears before nothing. Before familiarity.
They finally have another thing in common and she wants to be sick, all over his stupid, expensive rug. She pushes the hair out of her eyes and then- something. She feels him step inside the room and the sudden drop of her heart is enough to know. Peter.
Hey, he says, soft as death. She turns, pulls a small smile from somewhere in her memories even if her face doesn't remember as well as she'd like it to.
Hi escapes in a little breath and she clears her throat. And then, when she looks at him, when she looks at him, something in her body feels correct, feels complete and it halts her thoughts. Something aches exquisitely within her and it's so perfectly, horridly right she wants to cry, to tell him what she does, how she keeps dying and she cares less and less. That her life is slowly becoming less and less and that's it's her undeath that's really killing her.
It's something strange, then, when he exhales unsteadily and his fingers twitch at his sides, an electric shock of movement she can feel, even from across the room. He stares hard at her, like he's solving a puzzle, and she thinks of lazy crosswords she used to do on her bed, legs crossed in the air and a hand in her curls.
He stops breathing then, but just for a moment.
They continue to stare for moments that remain uncategorized in her mind.
She hears him say something before turning, hands pressed against the doorway before his footsteps are less and less audible.
She wonders if he is becoming less and less too.
Another look around the room, and she follows.