Escape by Conrad2
Rating: R
Spoilers: None
Disclaimers: The translations from Sappho are slightly altered from Mary Barnard's translation.
First published on my livejournal.
He couldn't see very far; he vaguely suspected it to be sometime after midnight. In the center of the abandoned parking lot, miles away from the main road, a single streetlight cast a sickly disc of yellow on the concrete around him. The young man reclined against the base of the pole, shivering faintly. He could almost make out the skeletons of junked cars outside the range of the lamp. They disappeared in the fading light, and so Sam Anders lay silent for the first time in a very long while.
Clarissa Darling violently dragged on a cigarette, cringing as the smoke burned her lungs. She should be used to this by now. Disgusted with her own unsophisticated tenderness, she snuffed out the brand new cigarette, scraping it against the rough concrete.
"We should be glad we made it this far, really. You know that, right?" She looked wistfully at his lips, moist and red, the rest of his face a patchwork of shadows; she turned away quickly. The skin on the top of her thumb was torn as she grated it against the pavement. The remains of the cigarette lay shredded below her hand. One more scar to add to the series of horizontal scars on her arms. The freshest one was an angry red, but she didn't care. She had stopped sanitizing the blade weeks ago.
"This life is too terrible to last. Isn't it, Sam?" But Sam didn't reply.
She remembered some of the Sappho she had read once. "Young Adonais is dying O Cytherea, what shall we do now? Batter your breasts with your fists, maidens–rend your dresses " How glorious that now sounded; if only she could wallow in the pain and blood and vitriol of the past years. Now even that was beyond her grasp. Wallowing was too great a luxury at a time like this.
She had just now saved Sam. In this cold place they were safe from Blake. Now she had to save herself, and she didn't think she still had the strength. He couldn't harm her sweet Sam now. She wouldn't let him, even when Sam hadn't been strong enough to stay away. She had caught Blake a couple of times. His hand on Sam's wrist.
"Young Adonais is dying." She exhaled into the cool, damp air.
She gave the knife embedded in Sam's side a final, sharp twist. She could feel something inside him tear, and the blood squished in the darkening wound.
The blood red sun rose in the distance, its clear light overwhelming the street lamp. The gunshot echoed in the twilight. The tear that escaped her eye and the waning life that escaped her body could be of no more significance than the sun that fell in the distance, and was extinguished by the hills it had almost escaped. It, too, would not return.