next piece in the descent. takes place after this is my body and soul here. this will be four chapters.
Cold seeps into his bones, bears him out. He has known cold before: Decembers spent in a barely warmed house, days walking with his brothers and friends, the taste of it on his tongue on a hot summers day, and the feeling of a dead friend come back to life, animating his body bit by it, telling him that he was there, and not alone.
The cold he feels now is bone deep, not soul deep. He feels it sink into his skin in a way that doesn't feel like the comfort he had felt weeks, months before. That cold had felt so menacing at first, until he understood it, understood who it brought with it, who he had missed so, so deep inside of himself.
He doesn't like this. He wants it deeper, wants it driving into him so badly that he might freeze from the inside out.
He calls again, for him. Calls his name, shouts it as far as he can into the landscape, begging, pleading for him to come back.
The cold travels down his throat, locks up his words. He still screams, wordless, desperate until he finds himself flailing. There's a cracking sound, and then he's slipping downward. The cold is no longer simply air: it is water, seeping into him all at once, up his nose, down his throat. He thinks that he feels hands pinning him down, flailing.
Someone says, You should wash the grease out of your hair.
Panic builds in him, wild and unrestrained. He's going to die. He's going to die here, he's going to drown, he's going to—
A wet gasp leaves him as he wakes up, arms flailing in his bed. Ponyboy falls out of his bed, gags and chokes, can barely get himself off of the floor in time to vomit violently in the toilet. His body heaves, stomach almost folding in on itself from the force of it all, the tears coming down his cheeks in salty tracks of desperation.
By the time he's done, he's shaking, palms coming to press themselves against his eyes, choking out, "Dallas — Dal, you've gotta come back. Please. Please."
He receives the same answers he's gotten for weeks now: utter silence. There's only a yawning emptiness there whenever he calls out for Dallas now. No presence beside him, no sneer to look forward to, no sudden ripple of chill down his back to let him know that Dallas was there.
Only old nightmares mixed with new ones, rising to claw up at him over and over again.
The only bright spot is that his brothers weren't here to see this, to know. It is the smallest mercy, and Ponyboy takes it, unable to control the loneliness in him now that seemed so much more permanent than it did before.
Logically, he knows he shouldn't feel this bad. There had been no thought of an afterlife, of a possibility of more.
Now? It wasn't like that. It feels worse than the first time Dallas died. It feels so, so much worse as Ponyboy has to suddenly live with the emptiness of it all, of the suddenly finality of it all simply left a hole in him that he didn't know could be dug. Dallas coming back had given him something precious he didn't know he had lost: hope, a sense of a future. That even with Dallas dead, a specter in Ponyboy's life, having him there even as a ghost still gave something of a life to Dallas, still gave a window into more even if it was limited.
And now…
Now he had to figure out what to do, how to go on.
Even if he didn't want to.