46. Challenges
To run without a heartbeat, without a drumming rhythm to accompany the rush of feet and cloth and limbs.
Beat, little heart…
To feel the wind, to hear New York buzz in his ears.
To forget that he was no longer alive, not really. That his existence in the City of Justice was now a matter of choice by its inhabitants, to look, to see. To care enough to run from him.
Dance with me…
And yet he found it difficult to breathe, to take in such gasps of frigid breeze, the yellow perfume of the night, as the young boy slipped into the shadows and hurried into them.
A thin-legged child dressed in black.
His own body, perhaps. Some ages ago. He was chasing a shadow. A silly orphan boy with an ugly haircut and a magpie singing voice.
You're still the same hideous boy with violence in his eyes.
And then there came the smell of salt and the memory of John. And the clacking of concrete and the rusty pipes and the time-softened woodblocks. The nets. And…
Petes.
A fence.
Pete.
And Beverly was in the puddles the child trampled through.
Peter.
And she glinted off the metal cage that the boy now shoved open. Spun, shut. Slammed. Dark hair flying before white-shot eyes. Panic and sweat and soot.
Peter…
Such simple machines, the living. Peter missed being this easy to break.
He had been killed so quickly. Drowned, fallen, sunken. Taken into his lover's arms and put back on his feet. Now the challenge came in the continuation of an unfinished story he'd left behind, written in a language he hadn't practiced in over a year, by hands that always existed, solid matter that forever belonged to reality regardless of who chose to notice their existence.
He remembered now, the thunder in his body. The adrenaline. The rush of the wind and the terror of fences. Lives he'd taken. Regrets. The doubt. The heaviness that chained him to the world and shook Beverly in her flight through the starlight.
It had been so easy to take a life. It had been so easy to die. The transition from place to place was always easy, he realized. From indifference to love. From happiness to misery. To linger was the challenge.
It had been challenging to stay alive, after the taking of a life, after the loss of another. And it was challenging to be dead, as well. As had Beverly commented, back in the sky, in his arms.
To linger was challenging. To stay and hope and continue a story that he'd once found too painful to continue… That was challenging.
To hear this fence again…
Petes, Pete…
Beverly glew for him dimly from the rusty metal, the artificial golden gleam of the City of Justice.
He heard her piano. Felt her. Let her feel him.
And he followed her lead as he always had. Chose to follow. Chose to trust.
I'm grateful to you, she'd said to him. All that you choose to be and all that you are.
He looked at the magpie boy from between the bars of a fence, and he stared. And he let himself be seen. He let himself exist.
Cecil had stayed behind, in the Avenue, behind the golden curtains of Beverly's tent. When he found him later, he'd know why. He trusted this. He trusted them.
I'm the luckiest bastard to ever walk the Earth.
So for now, he followed the music.
Alive, or dead, I'm loved, and I'm awake, and I exist, and I'm lucky.
And spoke to the boy behind the fence.
Author's Note: To anyone who is here today, thank you for reading.
I did write a very long note earlier today, when I was gonna upload this chapter originally, but since fanfiction-dot-net decided to crash at that very moment, the Note was lost. Another great thing to happen to me this week...
I've had one of the worst weeks of my life, probably. Starting off Sunday, where I literally worked all day along with my teammates on an art guide for a short film we're working on for uni, it's part of the beginning of our year-and-a-half long final project for our major, 2d Animation. It sounds cool, and it is, but... I animated two full turnarounds on Sunday. I also helped design a whole dragon character. I was gonna go to the cinema with my mom that afternoon. We were gonna rest for a while. But no.
And then the rest of the week, I've been burned out by uni every day, staying at college every afternoon with my classmates to work on this project we have no idea how to conclude, a story that, again, we'll be stuck with till graduation that we cannot seem to figure entirely out; our Illumination prof is an actual bully and he is extremely rude to all of us, he failed most of us in one of his assignments and he seems to enjoy the fact that he'll make us all go to the recuperation exams on June, as if we had time to spare, my friend and I are typing down a complaint against him cause we're done; our other profs are great, I love studying animation, I want to love studying animation, but we're so tired, we're so overworked, and I just got progressively sicker today during our 6-hour class schedule. So I went home and I've spent most of the afternoon crying in my room and waiting till this stupid site gets back online so I can lay my feelings out the best way I can.
I feel like I can never escape pain. As is life, I know, but... pain this deep isn't normal. It can't be. I carry it most days without complaining until I burst and it all flames out of me. Like Beverly's screams in my fanfics, I burn everything around me and myself if I dare scream. And I have had a lot to scream about these last few years... I need to cry more often. I've cried too much today.
My brother has gotten way better and he no longer attributes to this pain, my parents are very busy most days and I don't really talk with them as much but we're all still holding onto each other... so now my uni needs to crash down? My love for what I do? My drive, my passion? No. I cannot give this up. I cannot let it die. That is what makes me cry like this. I couldn't even draw for pleasure this week. I am now ill (forgot to mention that I'm also on my period today :3 my life is great) and with a fever and stuck in my room, weeping, cause I can't do anything right now. I'm just tired. And pained. And this terrifies me. I cannot stay still. I always need to do something. My love for drawing and writing has saved me so many times. But this week I felt it slip away from me and being instead replaced with a deep and horrifying rage and exhaustion.
As always I assure you that I'll be better tomorrow, as I often convince myself. Every day this week I went to bed thinking that this pain I felt would be lighter the following day... and now here I am, Friday, sick and broken on my bed. I only got worse. I do need to cry more. I wrote my tears out earlier on an Author's Note that then disappeared... And that also made things worse.
So yeah. Of course I had to lean on the aspect of challenges today. I needed to push Peter forward. To push myself. Maybe I'm not ready to talk to the boy behind the fence yet, to be seen, to exist in the world today... but I will be next time I see you. I promise. Thank you for reading this far. As always. *hug*