Written 2012 - December - 11.
Capital I and disdain in her voice, It is an inferno within her and she blames It whenever things go wrong.
They do so quite often. She blames It for that as well.
When she's seven and already beautiful and dangerous and so filled with magic that that hurts her too, the man tells his soldiers to burn the witch, and It makes her scream at them that she's already burning. She tries to run away, but It holds her limbs still and twists her face into a ragdoll mocking smile when the soldiers grab her arms and she's not the one that kills them in that instant: It is.
And so China Sorrows grows and It does too, and It festers within her like some kind of rot and It is pain she's never known reprieve from and so she becomes an exaggeration of order because It is inside her, wrecking her being into chaos of the worst kind.
China loves books because they are stationary and still, last forever and do not move, and she clenches on to their pages while It writhes within her and her eyes dance about the page like meat drying over tongues of flame. China loves history because it is done and will not happen again, has been cut into sections and selected well, and she learns all she can while It destroys her memory messily, without method.
China loves Murder Rose, and Murder Rose is the closest thing China has ever met to It, except that where It is nothing but a torment to China, It is something Murder holds fondly close to her soul, that has woven Its way into her bones and being. China can watch Murder for hours, observe the way she walks, jerky and loose and unconcerned by the world around, soak in the words she speaks, spat out haphazard and random and losing their original sense and gaining swathes of it through Murder's tongue.
China could spend her life trying to find the meaning in Murder because knowing she's not alone is a twisted kind of heaven, because all her life It has driven her away from others but right now seems to be shoving her in Murder's direction.
But something inside of China, maybe more than one thing, is broken, and It will never let her forget that fact. As soon as Murder Rose has become China's everything, It tugs her away again and at night when China is curled up fetal and injured, she whispers burn the witch between sobs and feels It convulsing in her gut.
She leaves her life behind and It follows her, of course It does, but she learns to hide It better, learns how to shut It up, and she is safe in the knowledge that Murder won't tell a soul about It, about China, because there's a reason why China would have trusted Murder enough to spend her life with her.
Things keep going wrong. China stops blaming It.