So I literally thought up to write this five minutes ago and Tune4toons is ready to exact bloody murder on me but whatevs.
I don't know what I'm doing going in and I pray to god it doesn't suck. Warning: some jarring subject matter, some slash as well. Not gratuitous or explicit, but very much implied.
So, I know you've heard this one before. This will vastly reveal itself to sort of be a stereotypical concept, but I like doing stereotypical plots and putting my own spin on it. I've always been of the belief of "it's not what you do, but how you do it" and I'm just hoping I did well. At least, not horrendously.
Yeah, I've never written horror. I mostly entered this to test myself and because I wanted to enter a contest last minute. Be gentle, I swear, I'm better than this!
Also, you know that icky feeling you get after you realized you've reached full heartless bastard with your writing? I'm there.
Also, thanks to Tune for reading this and tearing it apart and inserting this A/N into the beginning of the story with the rest of the beginning A/N! If you need me, I'm going to hell!
Disclaimer: Enter at your own risk.
Darkness. We meet again.
I was never a normal girl, so I always loved darkness. Everyone I knew was so fearful, so consumed by what could happen, and darkness embodied every fear they could have. Darkness was mystery, and mystery was fear of the unknown, and they feared anything that was unknown to them.
But my fondest memories were ones that took place in darkness. Darkness was where I was alive. But now, it's the opposite.
Darkness gave me life, and now it will take it away.
People talk about death with a melancholic finality. People hate death, loathe death. Death is evil. Death is failure. Death is desolate. Death is darkness. But I've never had a problem with it. Death has been a close friend of mine. She's helped me through many a trial, and now I can only wait for it to return for me, her mistress.
Where are you, my love?
It's painful, to say the least, but for death I will face the trials. It's been a few minutes, or a few weeks, or anything in between.
So cold…
My throat aches, constricted, swallowing itself. I long for water like the touch of a lover.
So thirsty…
I have forgotten the taste of food; it's erased itself from memory, another fragment of my mind blowing away in the breeze.
So hungry… work, body…
My memory of the world outside is hazy, slowly drifting away, leaving a corpse in progress. This is how I am to die. Slowly disassembling, drifting away in the breeze, nothingness becoming nothingness amongst nothingness until the sharp edge in my hand finally fulfills its purpose. Darkness is my tomb.
And it's all my fault.
Come back for me.
~MoD~
I was once so bright.
Everyone saw the stars in my eyes. My parents, the teachers, the boys in the fields, they all used to talk about me. They adored me, and I never knew why. They would talk about my intelligence, my wisdom, my grace, my beauty, or in the case of some of the more rowdy men or even women, my body. I would hear all this praise, all of what I was told, and I never cared an ounce. Light never had any real meaning to me. Light was transparent, so flimsy; it was as if it didn't exist.
They saw the stars in my eyes. But there was nothing to see. The stars were not my own. The stars were their hopes reflected back into me.
I was never perfect. I never wanted to be. There was no beauty in perfection. But that was all they tried to make me. I didn't resist. I made a whole career out of not resisting. It wasn't that I felt that I couldn't fight. It was because I had nothing to fight for. I had no reason to resist.
She had every reason to resist, and yet she could not.
My parents always told me to watch out for the boys. My mother especially made no haste to remind me that the noisy boys in the fields, who whistled as I walked and blushed as I looked at them, they were not always to be trusted. Some of them caged inner beasts inside, she would tell me, speaking in hushed tones as if she actually feared one would swipe her from her chair and tear out her spine. This would be fitting, as my mother never had a spine. She feared everything, and she tried to instill that fear onto me, but I never had such an involvement with anything that I feared what could happen. Who was I but a spectator in a world that was never truly mine? I never cared.
But for a short time, I did care. It was the worst mistake of my life.
My mother told me to watch out for the boys, watch out for that inner darkness unleashed by passion and fury. I humored her, and I watched out for the boys. Yet, it was the girl's beast that tore me open.
The girl. I remember her. Even as the rest of my memory flies away, she remains. Her face. Her touch. Her story.
There are very few things in this world that I have ever cared for. It was funny to watch everyone else fluster about in a panic, worried about every little thing. I was a spectator in a mad circus, acted in a language I did not speak.
How bizarre, emotion. How strange, innocence. How unusual, love.
I was born turned off of to all of these things, until one day she turned me on.
I will never know how she did it. I will never know how she fixed me. I simply cannot understand how the touch of another can connect the link that was broken within my mind. I have never comprehended how through the gaze of her eyes, I saw the world. Was she a magician? Was she my cure? Was she real?
She was everything I wasn't, and somehow she gave all that I wasn't back to me. And for a moment, I was alive.
I had never encountered death before. I had never even considered it a friend as I do now, waiting for it, lying across the stone floor in all of this darkness. Death was a human function that simply meant a terminus to the progress of our own timeline. It was inevitable, but it was too far away to see. And back then, I didn't see it.
Now it's all I see, or would see.
~MoD~
I shudder, starving and thirsting on the ground of my own home as I realize that I am going to die.
The surroundings are shattered, the door is locked, the key thrown away, the windows I always escaped through jammed shut. All the food is gone, thrown to the animals. The well is a long ways out of my reach. I didn't own much, and there wasn't much to this house, but whatever I left in here is broken, bashed and beaten into smithereens on the floor.
God damn it all, I was screaming, loud enough to scare the birds outside of the house. Another clay pot was launched at the ground, the shards tearing my skin. If you want me, come and get me! And take it all with you! I don't need it! I never needed it! I never wanted it! The anger is finally released. I never needed any of this! I took the hammer and smash my wooden table with it. I needed you! That's all I needed! And *smash* you *smash* took *smash* it!
Crack!
The table stood firmly, even with many of its pieces cracked off. I scream again. How dare she! How dare she leave me! How dare she do this to me! Did she ever think that she would leave the one she loved like this? Did she care? Did she ever care?
I stare at the table, and I break down sobbing, for the first time in my life. Words aren't enough anymore. I am finally preparing myself for consumption. I'm beyond the point of return. I'm beyond sanity. It's too late.
I don't care. I didn't want to leave myself anything to go back to, but going back was never an option.
I collapse on the ground and prepare to die.
~MoD~
She was the personification of a reason to live. She opened my eyes to the beauty before me, all that I had looked upon but had not seen. I realized that I was broken, and she fixed me. She had no reason to. She was not paid to. She wasn't another adult that my mother had hired to see if she could find the problem with my mind. She simply did it because she wanted to see what would happen. And when something happened, she stayed with me because the result was worth it.
She told me I was beautiful. I don't know if I ever believed her, because if I was beautiful, what did that make her, she who was so much more entrancing than I? She, with her cascading blonde hair, rolling down her shoulders in unmanaged bounds? She, with her eyes as big as dinner plates and blue as the sea? She, with the voice that crisply leapt across the air like the sound of a flute? She, with the wind tracing around her body like a sculpture crafted by a master? If I was beautiful, what was she?
Could the defection in my mind really be erased so easily? Was love all that I needed? Is it as insipid as they say it is; that love cures all? I still do not think so, and yet something shifted. I was never to be the same. I found my destiny. I found me.
I was in love.
I was never meant to love.
I loved talking with her, to see what she thought of the things that I had seen from my venerable distance. Her description put color to the whitewashed world I lived in. I loved to venture into the world with her, crawling out of my window and seeing where we would run today. I loved the discoveries we made, and all that she taught me. She taught me to laugh, to smile, to find beauty, to be at peace, to embrace myself, and even if I never were to learn she brought all of those things to me, like a source of life unlocking everything that I had never unsealed.
She first taught me to love darkness.
Within the darkness, I discovered mystery, and I discovered its answer. In the darkness, she lit me up. She lay beside me, and we discovered the answers together. Her kiss was a translation, her touch a lexicon, her body against mine a tale for the ages told through her breath on my neck as the discovery of all that I had never known or expected to know washed over my body, filling me from the inside out.
~MoD~
I remember the darkness. I loved the darkness. I still do. Even now, as I lay dying, alone and forgotten, I still love it, because it reminded me of her. But now, it's incomplete, because she isn't here… yet. I touch the inside of my leg, and I can still feel her warmth, but it's not enough. It's not enough to remind me of the life she brought me. It's not enough to calm the inner fear I have towards my situation.
I need more.
I have to have more.
But I'm not done yet.
I'm not all gone yet.
I lay dying, alone, forgotten, holding my razor in wait and meditation.
I wonder if that was how it was like for her.
~MoD~
Sometimes, when we were together, she would cry. I never understood what to do when she cried, because I was unaccustomed to concern. When I heard tears, I never had cause to care, but now I did. I would awkwardly ask what was wrong, and she would tell me I didn't have to worry. But I did have to worry, because she had to be happy, or it wouldn't be right. She told me to stop worrying, because bad things happened, and it would all be okay. I could do little more than simply nod, and then kiss her again.
Sometimes in the darkness, I could feel her tears. Not tears of the eyes, but tears of her skin. The ridges of her skin would raise dramatically at some points, jagged and uneven, an anomaly to the rest of her. I never saw these scars in the light, but as my hands and lips traveled her, I would always notice them. They'd grow in number, new ones popping up in places I did not remember them being before. It gave me cause for concern, but then I remember her words, her telling me to stop worrying, and I would just kiss her again.
The last time I saw her, I didn't, because we were in our own dark world. She had already blown out the candles, and we had already been lost in each other. We were tired, exhausted really. I never left the darkness satisfied, but I took in every moment we had in it. I couldn't be ungrateful, because our time in the darkness was an anomaly that we could never replicate within the light, and every moment was incredible.
Tonight was different than the rest, but I wasn't suspicious. Oftentimes, after some time she usually lets me know that we need to run before someone finds us. She doesn't want anyone to find us, two young women adorned in nothing but the metaphorical wool of a black sheep, not playing with the men like we were supposed to, like every other woman did. We were an anomaly, but I was already an anomaly, so I didn't care. The girls could have their boys and the boys their girls, just so long as none of them were mine.
For once, she was without paranoia, and I never had any to begin with. For once, she stayed with me in the darkness, doing nothing more than lying in my arms, breathing softly, at peace. Her energy, always so rampant, had expired, and she was drifting away to sleep. For once, the euphoria didn't die away with the gathering of clothes and the scattering of feet. I was allowed to sleep with it in my arms.
For the first time, I whispered into her hair that I loved her. She just nodded, and that was all.
I never saw her again.
~MoD~
I need to see her again. I need to see her in the right way. The way she was supposed to be seen.
It's why I'm here.
She's coming back for me.
~MoD~
I woke up alone, bathed in natural light, realizing only my own naked skin. Immediately I knew something was wrong. I threw on my clothes and ran out the door and into the sunshine, which blinded me in a piercing flood. I knew not to call your name, expose our secret, but I was terrified nonetheless, biting my lip as I searched my house and everything around it; the gardens, the village, the pathways just near to me. I couldn't bear the thought of her being too far away from me, not without saying at least a brief farewell.
Eventually, I gathered my wits about me, took a deep breath and walked to her house. My primary concern was that she was hurt, or that she was crying and I could not comfort her.
As it turns out, these were the two things that were always the problem.
I opened the door, looking down at the floor, more nervous than I cared to be. As I took baby steps, afraid of what was inside, I kept my gaze on the stone ground. I didn't want to see. I was afraid to see.
Yet, it was the ground that burst the fixed seams within me wide open.
The ground was where I saw the first trail of blood.
I had wandered into the beast's den.
Oh, no.
The trail of blood was skinny and narrow, dead in its paths, no more power to move. I gasped aloud, and felt my body go numb. Every step I took, I did not feel, only saw. I reluctantly followed the blood trail, knowing that it led nowhere good.
My nervousness turned into terror as I followed the blood. It meandered through the stone, around ridges and through canyons not an inch deep, as if it was the river of hell winding through a desolate wasteland. Slowly, the trail merged into another, even wider than before.
At that moment, I started to fall apart.
~MoD~
Here, I make my landing. Among my ruined house, my fragile, dying body and everything I used to be splashed around me.
But we aren't here yet. We aren't at my death scene. We're at hers.
~MoD~
My heart sinks into the blood with her.
No, no, no.
The trails of blood began to merge into more, consuming more of the land around it, until finally the floor was covered in a sea, a sea that consumed her and began to consume me.
You can't. No.
It grew and grew, consuming the stone floor. Consuming me.
You can't. You aren't supposed to.
But she could.
Finally, the sea broke, and in it I saw a hand, a hand never to move again. The same hand that knew where it belonged, with me, lost its way and drowned in a crimson sea of its own blood. The telltale gash that reached one end of her wrist to another was the diagnosis.
No… that's not you. That's not…
Suddenly, I snapped. Tearing my eyes away from her wrist, I glanced up, my own newfound faith betraying me with the idea of the hand not being the one I knew so well. My own faith would let me down so easily, as I should have expected.
She had given me so much. And with the razor in her other hand, she had taken it all away.
No!
The beast inside her was one I never expected. It caught me by surprised. All at once, it ripped me apart, just like it had ripped open the hole in her wrist, and I could only scream.
Why did you do this?
You were so beautiful…
~MoD~
I was left defeated, slain by the power of the beast. Even standing I was as cold, dense and lifeless as the form of the beast itself. Everything I had gained was lost, and I was left incomplete, just as I was before. This time, it was different. This time, I knew I was wrong. I was ugly. I was lifeless.
But it's okay now. It's okay. The story has a happy ending. It will soon, at least.
~MoD~
I never did find myself again. I never knew where to look. I knew I'd never find her again, only the beast. I couldn't face the beast again, and I didn't have a prayer of where to look. Eventually, I lost the passion. I became a zombie again, unsatisfied by the something more that I had lost, seams burst wide open, complete deconstruction with a pretty face and lifeless eyes everyone else saw the stars in.
Where are you, my love? My mind called out, over and over.
Why did you leave me?
Come back to me, please.
I can't believe it took me so long to figure out.
I could never get the image of the beast out of my head, the one that had torn a hole through the hand of the one I loved. It watched me through my mind's eye, never letting me free. I hated the beast, but after all the time I spent resenting him, I never realized that the beast was the answer.
I've found you.
~MoD~
I lie amidst the wreck of me, everything left of me gone. I enjoy the poetry of it all, the thoughts of my mind falling out of my ear, broken next to all of the broken fragments of my life.
Waiting is never easy, but for death, I will do it.
She used to be life itself, but like all life, she too became death.
I feel the razor in my hand, and against all sanity, all preconceived notions of normalcy, I smile. We were never too good at normalcy. I still see the beast in my mind, but it's different now. I see the message. The razor in her hand, the blood on the ground, it entices me. It beckons me. Come here, it tells me. Follow me.
I'll follow you, my love.
In the darkness, just like the darkness we used to know, I have seen the light.
I finally feel myself slipping away. I wonder if anyone has noticed my absence. Noticed the boarded up windows. Noticed the mountain of food thrown in the pig slop. Noticed that I've never been the same since my love let the beast kill her.
Goodbye.
I know it's time, and suddenly, even in my weakness, I am excited to the point where I could dance among the stars, but we'll be dancing soon enough. I lift my hand over my other wrist, the razor in hand, and it takes me every ounce of energy I have. But somehow, I have the strength to slice across and let my beast out.
Suddenly, I scream, because my beast is nothing like hers.
It all flashes before my eyes. Everything I had never been a part of before. My mother, nervously pandering to me about dangerous things and other warnings I failed to heed. The fields of wheat the farmer boys worked, waving at me as I passed. The villagers, the parades, the conversations, the feeling of the stone ground beneath my feet. The women, as they spin pottery out of a lump of clay. The soldiers, as they stand with their swords in perfect synchronization. The lessons and stories told in school. The stars in the sky and the grass at my feet.
No! No! I'm sorry!
The beast strikes me as everything before my love that I had never seen, never bothered to see, never fought to see like I fought to see her.
I take it back! I'm sorry!
I can only flail around on the ground, screaming as the blood escapes from my hand, as the beast snaps at me before running away, out of my reach.
Help! Please!
I'm sorry…
Without the beast, I am empty again, only a body which screams and flops around as the blood drains out of my wrist.
As abruptly as it started, I stop, collapsed on the ground as I feel the seconds tick away. I can only hang onto five words, one last hope, one last prayer, one last call to my love, the angel of death.
She's coming back for me.
She's coming back for me.
She's coming back…
And suddenly I feel her touch again.
I think this literally may be the worst piece I've ever written and the fact that I can write it makes me kind of a bastard. I can at least claim to my own fears, my own pathways that I have never pursued, and the fact that I'm thankful she is not me.
I hope you… I can't say I hope you enjoyed this, what kind of fucker am I?
~MoD