It's in the flashes of blinding white, blinding yellow.
Light is a damning thing.
Her fingers slip from the blinds, and the aching brightness slips back, leaving her in darkness.
She is shaking, she knows this much. Her mouth is burning, tasting of bile and leftover traces of alcohol.
Her head bangs up against the wall, and there is the feeling of fire.
In her veins. Coursing hot and shimmering down the sharp planes of her face -(just skin and bone, skin and bone)-
in the blood trailing from her knuckles and their swollen bruises. (but i think it's home, home, home)
Her fingers wrap around the death cold barrel of a pistol
& she smirks.
Her mouth tastes of mint, and the world is spinning to a steady clack-clack of heels on pavement. The sun shifts away from her eyes, covered in thick black shades.
A soft breeze licks at the back of her neck, stirring up chopped-short and dizzyingly free hair,
(it's pink, the pink of blood and milk and chaotic things)
The pistol hides in her jacket, and her mouth is spread in a blood-colored smile.
(First kills are considered the hardest aren't they?, she thinks as she remembers the almost-panic, the adrenaline, the thrill of it all.
She's got his money now, and he's got his grave.)
Seven different states, nineteen different men, and a new smoking habit.
She only goes for them, the ones with black hair and silent eyes, and it's a deranged game.
Make him love you, love you, love you, put a bullet in the heart that once beat for you, you, you.
It's easy.
She breathes out into the night air, watching the glittering stars above the endless California wastelands, leaning against a rusted, weather-worn sign, peeling paint barely hanging onto the metal.
Her fingers grip a different coldness: a locket.
She only ever kills the men that look like him.
She doesn't know how long she's been doing this, but the seasons have whirled around in confused spirals around her: green, green, yellow, white, repeat, repeat. But she knows it's been 48 states, 62 men that were all the same but different, and she has a smoker's cough that interrupts breaths of sweet air pounding through her lungs every so often.
She thinks it must be spring, possibly.
She's wearing a crown of flowers and dead leaves in her hair, and it's grown longer than it had ever been, stringy and falling in bright strands to her waist.
& there's him, the one she's killed 62 times over in her head and someone else has taken the bullet.
There's shock in his eyes; she's not supposed to be the serial killer he's been chasing. She's supposed to have some happy family, a husband and maybe two kids, somewhere back east, without him.
Living the life they never could.
He can't bring himself to point the gun at her, and she strokes his cheek.
She kisses him, slow and soft, and as he kisses back she breaks away and smiles like she knows something he doesn't, and that something is very very very sad and he doesn't to think what it might be.
"I think you told me once...no story has a happy ending."
Her words ring into the empty air, into the dampness of a molding, abandoned apartment with broken windows and half-rotten blinds.
Outside, police sirens pass and fade.
"I believe you."
It's a short gunshot, absorbed into the bare, rotten boards, and he catches her as she falls.
(Inspiration - Kinda Outta Luck, Serial Killer, both by Lana Del Rey (I highly suggest listening to both of these while reading))