Continuity: Episode entitled Live Through. Opening sequence.
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Abandon-
The words are out before he has the strength of will to stop them, a simple admission of the knowledge: "I remember." And it flashes through his mind again, the screaming and the gun shaking, quivering in his hand, metal warm even through the sweaty material of his glove; the knowing he must kill to save the two women that are Beloved; the swish of heartbeats, imagined and real, and stopping one with a quick thunder crack.
"I remember everything."
She leaves, of course, leaves just as the anguish and desperation said she would, with an excuse hurriedly blurted from her lips that he cannot remember. He stares at the door behind her, for a moment, watches her hurry from the room in swift, tiny steps, and he curls his fingers around the bowl, trying to dig his nails into the porcelain for some sanity or reason. The soup is hot, steaming and rich-smelling, and he for once feels no strong pull, no ravishing appetite.
She leaves.
He needs her, needs to tell her because what he feels around her is something he has not felt since Rem, something that is different, even, from what Rem brought to life; he needs her and she leaves him to the boiling oppression of the room, and the unending assault of images and memories, and God she's gone except this time she chose to leave, she left of her own free will where everyone else who left him was dead.
A moment, as his fingernails gouge slowly into the porcelain and the faint sensation of coming blood around his fingertips pricks his consciousness, and he feels the wail starting deep in his diaphragm. He killed to save her, to save them.
But she leaves when he needs her to save him.
What, precisely, did you expect? thinks a part of him tiredly, unable to muster self-hatred. Hypocrite. And now he is overwhelmed with self-hatred, with revulsion and grief and a thousand dark emotions that he cannot articulate but had desperately wished to try to tell her…because she, of all the people he has known since Rem and the brother, she is the only one who draws near to understanding him.
But she leaves.
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Notes: I have this shameful feeling this didn't come out half as well as I wanted to, but I'm not terribly surprised – I've had a hard time trying to even put into words what I feel watching the opening sequence of Live Through. Ryan-the-Bitchy-Muse insists a rewrite.
Disclaimer: *flashy Broadway song-and-dance* I! Don't! Oooown!
Feedback: I want your honest-to-God true opinion. Go ahead and flame me baby.