Title: Fearless
Rating: M for Language, Violence, Grotesquerie, and General Trippiness
Summary: A girl suffers trauma to her temporal lobe. The result: no fear. ~ Squint and turn the screen sideways for romantic subtext. 1000 words per drabble.
Disclaimer & Important Notes:
I don't own Freddy. I don't want to own Freddy. He's a bad, bad man. I do not own Elm street, either, though once I stole a sign.
None of the poems in this piece are mine. They are a collection of Mother Goose nursery rhymes, poems from children's books and stories, and songs passed down through generations of children and parents to acquaintances who were kind enough to let me use them.
Entry Six, Night Seventeen: Fall-Out
Word Count: 665
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Fall-Out
Night 17
"Did you think I just gave up, bitch?" he hissed into her face.
She frowned and tugged at the barbed wire cutting into her wrists. "Isn't this getting old?"
"I figured it out," he shot back, leaning close. He dragged his tongue up her cheek. No fear yet, but he assured himself it would be coming. He lifted his gloved hands and let the blades trace her cheek delicately. "I've been gliding over the surface," he purred, tapping the center of her forehead with one sharp point. The metal whispered in the darkness. "I kept trying the typical shit, hoping to catch a glimpse of what'll make you wet yourself—but clearly that technique won't work on such an exceptional little piggy like yourself. Obviously, I need to"--he paused, pushing the blade into her forehead; her skin broke with a soft pop and blood trickled into one eye as the point scraped against her skull--"go deeper," he punned.
He disappeared in the shadows, and for a moment, Ash was disappointed. He'd left again, presumably to kill--again. And she would be bored—again.
But then her brain felt like it was splitting open in a fountain of burning, bright-hot memories, and she realized faintly that he was in there, no longer reading the prominent thoughts that came to her subconscious but instead digging through them, burrowing deeply into the hidden recesses. Memories came in no particular order, as though he were tripping over neurons—no, tearing at them, heedless of the damage he might wreak.
Of course, she thought with sudden—and utterly calm—clarity. Of course he would be.
Her first homecoming, and the birth of her brother, and the time she'd split her knee open on the pavement. The time she'd wrecked her car, the time she'd gone skydiving and had been so tempted not to pull the cord, or to wait until the last possible second in the hope—the prayer—that whatever was sleeping inside her would wake up—
There. The crash. She'd been fourteen, and her mother had been taking her to her first homecoming with a boy. Butterflies had been dancing a tattoo against her ribs. She wore her new fancy heels, which wrapped around her ankles and were beaded in silver and gold.
Something so mundane—a sharp-tipped screw in the road. If the car hadn't had front-wheel drive, or the screw had been three inches to the left—
The tire sounded like a gunshot when it blew. Ash had stared, wide-eyed and mute in her terror, as the car swerved to the left, into oncoming traffic. Her heart ad stopped in her chest. She vaguely remembered the aching pressure of it.
Her mother overcompensated, jerking the wheel to the left, and then there was a tree and then there was nothing.
She woke up in the hospital later, feeling like there was a thick plate of glass between her and the world. She'd been calm, sitting slowly, pulling the IVs from her arms with quiet care.
Bilateral temporal lobe trauma, the doctors explained later. Potential side effects: hypersexuality, memory deficiency, inability to recognize faces.
Lack of fear and anger responses.
The brain is a delicate instrument, Ash had thought logically. Clearly, it could have been much worse. She didn't have trouble recognizing faces; she didn't seem to be memory-deficient (But how would you ever know? she'd asked herself on more than one occasion, though the possibility never frightened her). She wasn't--she thought--hypersexual, though perhaps she just had never found herself in the right circumstances to test the theory.
Yes. Clearly, she had thought hollowly--clearly it could have been much worse.
Strangely, she wasn't so sure anymore.
And then Freddy was standing in front of her again, looking down at her with something like disgust in his twisted, cratered features. She met his gaze evenly: utterly, inhumanly unafraid. There was no way he could get in.
"You're damaged," he muttered, and turned away.
Rock-a-bye baby, in the treetop,
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock,
When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,
And down will come baby, cradle and all.
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