My Aching Veins
Disc: Nada
Well, herah it be. And thank you all very much for reviews. I'm appreciating them. Much. Keep them coming.
6:18 Pm
Have you ever felt your head explode? Have you ever felt the pain that comes with a metallic, mental blow to the mind? It hurts. It's like a buzzing, deafening shrill war cry that cradles itself in your ears and builds its home for all of eternity. It escalates into this dull, searing pain and cleaves apart every molecule that rests inside of you. You'll never forget that pain and it'll stay with you as reminder to why you were punished in the first place. I never once forgot the feeling.
"I'm leaving." She says it again.
I am love's loaded rifle, aimed at my throat. She says it to make sure I'm here. To make sure I am listening. I am. I am hearing every hidden message on every radio wave in the existence of infinity. I am in tune on every note leaving her shrunken, small bodied lips. I am listening.
"What…? Are you talking about?" These words aren't mine. The voice isn't mine either. They are backups, tumbling from my lips like spilled secrets. "Leaving?" I have comprehended, but my mind hasn't.
"Yeah." She confirms with too graceful of eloquence. "Tonight." Tonight? No, not … Tonight. That's not good for me. Did you ever stop and think, Buffy? About me? About what I NEED? What I WANT?
I am anger's silent fear, ready to attack. If I have begun to understand, I don't know it. She doesn't wait for me to ask. She doesn't debate in telling me the truth. Her lips begin to move and I let reality sink into the crevices that still remain in my battered brain.
"They need me in Sunnydale." They don't need you, they put you in here. They only come to talk to you about apocalypses, Slayer stuff. I'm the one who needs you. I need you. I love you. I need you. Not them. ME ME ME ME ME. "Something's… happened."
I am the straightjacket around my head. I am a sonnet of sobbing inside. Before the words drop from her mouth, her snake arms are attached to my sides, dragging me towards the bed, keeping me safe from the dark outside of our home. I hate her for this. I hate her more than I love her in every way possible, even though I don't mean it.
She is death itself and if I touch her I may be infected.
"I have to go. You… understand, don't you Faith? And look, I want you to come with me, I want you to come once it's safe and I'll send for you or something and we'll be out and away from here forever and…"
"I understand."
We sit again in the silence of love and hate until I finally bring my eyes to her. She won't look at me, like she's allergic. Like she can't. And then I see the bruises, and nothing else matters. There's monsters rolling up and down her arms, purple tinted, yellow edged and a painful scream about them. They weren't there before and why are they here now? My new train of thought takes over.
"What are these?"
"Nothing." And her arm is pulled away, latched back around me, hidden from plain sight. I'm swooning, swearing, fringing at the hole and searching madly for answers. Why is she leaving? When will she be back? Where did she get hurt? Why am I passion's little whore?
I believe her answer, though fruitful, and maybe if I close my eyes for a minute, a moment or so, she won't leave, the bruises will go away, and I'll wake up 1000 miles from home, happy. Only the sleep part becomes truthful and my mind shuts down for the time being. I am gone.
-
-
-
-
9:23 pm
There was a blaring siren in the distinct airwaves, not far away, if my senses were up to par. There was a wave, a cloud, of chaos when I awoke. I couldn't see it, but I could hear the yelling, cackling, screaming, whispers of questions from uneducated inmates. What was happening?
I sat up on the bottom bunk where I had previously fallen asleep, but my pillow was absent. Buffy was gone, disappeared. Somehow my Slayer and the pandemonium were connected; I knew it in my gut. And now that I looked around what was once, briefly, our home, there was no evidence that Buffy had ever been here before. Her own bunk was made with extreme care, however large patches of blood caked the fabric.
The pictures she kept stationary at the mouldy desk, cramped in the corner of the room unsteadily, were gone.
She had disappeared, escaped, run back to Sunnydale as she had promised she would.
And I was alone.
Alone. Like before. Things were how they were. I was alone. I was with unsinkable reputation, and alone. And Buffy wasn't here.
I turned towards the door, hoping maybe for a sign, as simpleton as it would be, for Buffy's whereabouts, whyabouts, or howabouts. Instead of a note, a sign, a waiting messenger I found the door to my cell standing wide open. Strange. It was close to lights out. Doors were closed around this time and it was unlikely for special circumstances to open them.
With a sigh of hesitance on my left shoulder and a galloping whistle of curiousness on my right, I stepped through the door and peered down the hallway. Chaos ensues. Three EMTs carried a gurney, a lumpy figure beneath a dark blue body bag atop, down the corridor, shouting orders to each other, screaming into walkie-talkies. There was blood pooled around my feet, in a wide, deepening puddle. From behind, along another block of cells, two more gurneys emerged carrying bodies.
I didn't know what was happening, didn't care to. Buffy was gone, I was alone, and that was important.
I stepped back inside my own cell and for the first time noticed a lone piece of paper sitting folded across the desk. My name, quickly, nervously was scrawled across the top. I unfolded the paper, squinted at the smudged sort of letters and silently read Buffy's verdict to myself:
Faith,
I wish I could explain. I wish you could come with me. Things are happening and you need to leave. I've arranged it already. Don't ask how, don't ask why, don't ask, just go. Leave. You are free to go. So come to me. Come to Sunnydale, come to me and we'll be free together. Just get here, fast and now.
…
I look at the door.
…
Can I? Can I just… leave?
Did Buffy create this scene for me? Did she create this death and travesty just so I could slip away, into the night, back to Sunnydale, back to her? She had to have. I look back into the scene, and it is still raging.
For me. It's all for me.
She didn't leave me to return to Sunnydale, to get a fix on what caged life is and leave. She came for me, and she's asking for me. I pocketed the letter and glanced once more outside. No one particularly seemed to notice me. And so, as instructed, I left.
I let my feet pull me down the hallway, down the blocks, following a collection of EMTs holding one more gurney. I pretend to walk with it, as if the body beneath the cover is someone I care for. Which, I don't. My steps fall into the rhythm of the rolling wheels on the body's cast and I feel a surge of slowly failing energy. Something that could have been strong, dying away.
From in front of me, a walkie-talkie is told, "We've lost her."
And I am free. The gurney wheels outside and no one seems to notice me run along with it. Except I'm not loaded into the back of an ambulance and carted off to the closest morgue. Instead I run. I run as fast as my legs will take me, working solely on the battery acid and radioactive waste in my system. I run until I get to Sunnydale.