forward fall by frooit
ouatim, sands & el
originally posted 3/04/04
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Tap. Tap. Tap.
The sink's dripping.
Tap. Tap.
Sands is slumped down into the bowl of a white, rusted tub with masonry legs. He can smell piss and disinfectant and rubbing alcohol. Breathing through his mouth, slow and steady, and he can still smell it. Hot, moving, like something living and holding a grudge.
His head picks that moment to remember colour and blood, and how he's probably filling the tub red, red, red with it all. Tips of his fingers just scraping the surface, that gooey film, and still it's rising. It isn't crimson, it isn't scarlet-it's red. Made-for-TV-movie red. So fake in appearance, and it's the most real you're liable to touch on.
"...Bleed... death... Hey..."
That's reality, that's the horizon of blood swirling closer and closer to the edge, that's El. El, stupid and bouncing Sands' head off the stained tile with every jolt to the shoulders and hey and what the fuck.
"Yeah..." he lifts his arm, thinks he lifts his arm, and claws in El's general direction. "I'm alive, I'm alive. Go fuck yourself." And the blood and its rising stops, and he smells smoke and he breaths it in; and that's the window in Time. Forward fall. Reset.
Not everybody's got the button. The reset button. Sands just happens to have the walking, talking, frettsucking type. Not so lucky as delirious. Not so delirious as fated. Not so fated as wouldn't-be-anywhere-else.
"One time, Sands," and El pauses to extract the bone-white fingers from his coat sleeve, "your nine lives will run out."
"Until then..." he makes it sound enough like a question before the wince and hiss and El's hands.
"Let's hope every hotel has a tub."
Sands smiles, thin enough not to be there.
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