Fear to Tread... (first chapter or one-shot, unedited)
Title: Fear to Tread...
Genre: Action/Sci-Fi
Rating: PG-13 (Death and other unsavory references)
Word Count: 2,638
Some of you may have seen this before, but for those that haven't this is a piece I wrote one night after having a pretty horrible day at my minimum-wage excuse for a job. The girl in it isn't me, though the prompt was based off of a friend asking me "If you found yourself at the edge of a cliff, what would you do?" and a song (not the one referenced, actually) which fit perfectly and helped me finish this.
It was originally meant as a one-shot, but I now have a second chapter...so maybe its not over yet. We'll see.
Anyways, this is the unedited draft right here, which means, crit is welcome, as I know there are probably things wrong with it. And it's open to everyone, so have fun!
(Disclaimer: I don’t own the Rise Against song quoted here…though it is a nice song, go listen to it.)
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I. Collision
Is this the life that you lead?
Or the life that's lead for you?
Will you take the road that’s been laid out before you?
Will we cross paths somewhere else tonight?
-Rise Against (Paper Wings)
She had finally found a place where she could finish it.
It was a narrow outcropping of hard, peppery granite, striated with pale lines of quartz, like hazy streaks of unending lightning. Covering the surface above, sand coursed across the small area she stepped along, whipped up by the wind, and in tiny fractions gradually tumbling over the edge to join the waves, which sloshed lazily in the afternoon’s chilly autumn bite, eternal and unrelenting.
To her, the sea had always represented the ending and the beginning of everything. All that was living had come from it, and when anything died, it went back to the dark rivers of the Earth below, becoming part of something else. Knowing that, there had never been any other way she would have liked to do this…and being here, she suddenly realized that what she had been thinking all those years was now very real.
And some small part of her took assurance in that.
She looked up, briefly, to watch the setting sun one last time, then smirked, realizing that there was really no point in such a useless action. In five minutes it would not matter if she had seen a final sunset, because she wouldn’t remember it anyway.
The only thing that held any meaning now was the sea, and it hurt her to realize that. She kicked a small struggling weed out of its desperate hold in the sand, then toed it over the edge, watching with morbid fascination as it hit the rocks below, small specks of sandy dirt flying up in a spattered halo. It was then that she realized her legs were trembling. What if it wasn’t instantly fatal?
Doubts, they crept in like bluebottle flies, or small predatory spiders, beating against the edges of their dark prison in her head. She realized that, doubts or not, she didn’t have any time to go back now. This was all she wanted…and now it was time to take hold of that finality.
Many would have called her an idiot. She certainly could see her mom, when she was found later, looking stricken and drawn, her eldest daughter having finally given in to what was hunting her. And this hurt to think about, but the numbing burned far more then that. A deep part of her felt dead, as if great black dogs were slowly, lazily, moving about her soul, tearing off chunks and staring at her with glittering eyes and thick yellow fangs, daring her to take them on.
And yes…she’d fought them. For so many years that she could not remember what it was like to not feel their frigid bodies against her heart. She had done as her parents had begged, gone to doctors of the head and of the heart, taken pale pills which did, for a time, make her feel a bit unnaturally euphoric.
But in the end…she could not claim that any of this had brought her happiness.
She had once been told that in order to get happiness, one had to make some themselves. Whoever had been such a fool to make that up had probably died unhappy, in her opinion, wasting away looking for their foolish fancy on some desolate alien plane, believing that their ideals would save them in the end.
She had never liked idealists.
The wind tugged at her pale green windbreaker, teasing her to do it now, not to wait, for perhaps she wouldn’t get another chance. But she merely smiled and shoved back, wondering where people like her went after they’d taken their own leave. Certainly not to Heaven. She couldn’t imagine Heaven taking a liking to her. Nor was she evil enough for Hell. She’d never really done anything to anybody, she realized momentarily, and as a result going to either place seemed near-impossible. So where did one go? Was she ready for that sort of reality?
“Be careful, you’ll fall.”
The voice startled her, made her instantly freeze, the muscles in her back tightening and a cold shiver slipping up her belly. She knew by the tone that whoever it was, they were male. But their voice had been soft, deep, unworried. Not like the voice of someone addressing another about to jump off a cliff. Whoever it was seemed confident that the one before them would respond, and she found that they were right, for she was too curious not to want to turn around.
But who would bother her in these last moments? She had few friends that she felt valued her enough to come to her aid, and those that might have were just too wrapped up in their own ghostly lives to notice. Divine help? She laughed inside at this, there were no such things as angels here. After a long minute in which she slowly took in the unhurried sound of the speakers breathing, she turned around.
It was indeed a man, wrapped in a dun-hued, suede, leather duster with gun slits on the sides and an extended mandarin collar. The straps on the front of coat and collar were undone, however, and he eyed her through slightly curious umber orbs. Taking her in even as her eyes ran down his own body, over his plain white shirt, black jeans which hugged his lean legs, and finally his large scuffed brown boots, the tread worn a bit from what must have been many lonely miles.
The man’s skin tone a odd burnt honey, and his hair such a pale blond that it shined white in the last rays of the sun, glinting silver at her in the half-dark, like dragon’s teeth. She had never thought of hair like teeth before, but now…the thought struck her instantly as both strangely disarming and comfortingly right. There was no other way it could be described.
There was a dangerous quality to the way he stood, for it was too casual, and forceful, all in the same moment, his long legs and lithe arms moving soundlessly as he shifted to his other hip. In that silent moment, he seemed to be daring her not to speak, and she tried to control a confused creasing of her brow, but couldn’t quite manage it, and their eyes met.
Which was almost painful, for they held her like a crawling thing pinned to a mat. Not your typical brown, and not a normal gray-green like her own. These eyes didn’t fit the body. His irises were like small spheres of mead, or flawless amber, deeper then she had expected eyes could ever be, and filled with a curious questioning. He seemed just as interested to see if she would jump off as she was.
She felt her lips crease into a half-hearted smile. “Did you get lost out of some bad Japanese cartoon or something? Or did you just walk out of one of those old Clint Eastwood movies? I didn’t ask for a visitor.”
“And you’ve none,” he countered, full lips twitching ever so slightly in response.
It struck her very suddenly why she was so disarmed by those eyes. They were…gentle. There was a wisdom there that said, ‘yes, I’ve seen many horrible things’ and accepted them, peacefully, willingly.
And the fact that anyone could truly accept this world, when she was about to leave it as a result, scared her to death.
“Then why are you here?”
He slipped up beside her, gazing down at the sea with an amused half-smile, and his leather boots crunched on sand as he stepped from the gravel-filled edge of the path behind them and onto the desolate outcropping. She backed away a step, surprised that he towered over her, almost six-five to her barely over five foot frame.
“Tell me…”, he sighed, a warm, guttural sound, “what do you see there?”
She followed his eyes down to the cliff bottom. The last slips of sunlight edged their way lazily over the night-dark sea rocks, gathering light like liquid gold in the crevices where water had been left as the waves pulled out. Seaweed bobbed in the faint current still left, and drops of saltwater, like dew, dripped from the shells of stony mussels.
“My ending,” she whispered.
He gazed down at her through glistening strands of pale hair, his eyes saying ‘really?’, in a bemused sort of way. Then he looked back out over the edge, breathing in deeply, voice coming out once more as little more then a deep whisper.
“You won’t find it there. No such ending exists for us in that way.”
She turned her face up to look at him, suddenly defiant, her long lashes glinting in the last stretch of daylight.
“You can’t possibly know where I’m going. Heh, you must be from some kind of ‘save my life’ club or something…I mean, some random guy just shows up and tries to talk me out of this? That’s cool man, real cool. If you’re my guardian angel, sorry buddy, but you’re a little late.”
He stuck his hands into his pockets, braced his own body against the wind, and stared out into the sea.
“I’m not talking you out of anything. I’m just saying,” he paused, and the flame in his eyes died down to mere coals, “that you won’t find what you seek over the edge of this cliff.”
She stuck a hand on her hip, “and how would you know?”
He gave her a critical glance, brow knitted, long, thin jaw set. His lips showed no emotion, but his eyes seemed confused. He stared at her for so long that she almost backed up a step, until she remembered that to do so would send her over the cliff. His eyes made her doubt, in a way she had never thought possible. What had happened to the raw pain that had brought her to the edge, to the perfect place at this perfect time? Where had it all gone?
Her stomach burned, and she was suddenly very aware of her own heart’s beating. The spiders and green-carapaced flies had fled from the inside of her mind, leaving her, just her, alone with the shusshing sound of the roiling surf, and the eyes of a very quiet young man. He didn’t move, and she realized, in that instant, that she couldn’t hide from that gaze. It knew her far better, in only a single moment of connection, then she quite possibly knew herself.
Then, a muscle in his shoulder twitched, and his expression became irritable. He blinked, and turned from her, breaking the single dewdrop moment in which he’d held her transfixed. She watched him about-face with a gentle swishing of his duster against his calves, then move away, leaving her not really sure of anything anymore.
For one moment longer, she looked back at the sunset, unable to bring her eyes down to gaze at the dark rocks twisting up, now seeming to her like the fingers of the dead. Then her body swung sharply around, and her eyes followed, and she was stretching her rounded legs, her heart hammering as she dashed away from the cliff toward his slowly moving form. His legs were far longer then her own, and when she finally did catch up with him, she skipped for a moment at his side, slowing down and trying to match his gait as much as possible.
He gave her an interested glance, then turned back to watching the path he was taking down from the cliff. It wound in front of them as a single stretch of powdery sand and gravel, locked between boulders of more striated granite. She caught her reflection in a puddle of rainwater in the lee of one of the huge rocks, but the girl looking back still didn’t seem familiar. His eyes shifted to follow her as she left his company and peered into the clammy depression, but he made not a sound, only kept walking.
She felt a tinge of anger. Wasn’t he even going to be happy that she hadn’t jumped?
“Well, I guess I won’t right now.” She told him, coming up on his other side again, putting her hands behind her back, one set of fingers capturing the other wrist and holding it tightly. “I guess you accomplished your mission. Thanks for ruining my day.”
He didn’t look at her then, merely wiggled down into a crevice between the boulders that marked the entrance to the cliff path, his height and larger bulk being more of a hindrance at the base then it had been for her. It took her a moment to realize that they had already reached the end, for going up it about an hour before had seemed to take far longer. She followed him through the narrow stretch, and then out onto the open beach, the sand glistening along where the tide had been like a gritty Wonderland mirror.
“But…but,” she was growing increasingly upset. “Aren’t you going to even ask me why?”
He looked down at her, brushed a strand of pale hair out of his suddenly amused eyes.
“Would you like me to walk you home.”
It wasn’t really even a question. She wasn’t sure what it was. She wanted to tell him that he was scaring her, and frustrating her. That she didn’t understand his silence, or the odd sort of peacefulness that she saw within his gaze.
But she couldn’t do that.
“No,” she growled back. “I don’t need your help. I mean, I don’t even know you. You might be some kind of psycho-rapist or something and I…”
His eyes narrowed, and he stopped walking. ‘Seriously,’ his gaze seemed to ask, ‘you really think I might be?’
She really did doubt that this was the case. If it were, he would have already taken advantage of her up on the cliff where no one would have been around to hear her screams. Now, they were no longer alone. She could see that off in the distance, but moving closer along the shore where the lashing slate-hued waves met the equally pale sand, a man was throwing a Frisbee for a panting border collie. The beast’s whole body twisted in wild exuberance as it rose up to catch the disk, eyes glinting in the twilight, the balding man below laughing at the dog’s completely wild abandon.
“Listen,” she turned away from the approaching figures, “I’m sorry about that. Just, I’ll be fine walking home alone. I got here in the first place. Besides, it’s still too early for any of the city patrolmen to be out rounding up stragglers. Um…why don’t you go home too, and we’ll just keep this between ourselves.”
His lips became thinner, and then, he closed his eyes and nodded. She watched him leave her side and saunter along the beach, his shadow growing long beside him as he turned and passed the man and tired collie. Then the other man passed her, and waved, the collie panting briefly at her feet.
But she didn’t respond. Her eyes remained transfixed on the lanky man in the dun coat until he wound his way up to a grassy hillock above them both, and disappeared from sight into the nearest parking lot, a rest stop that she had crossed just hours ago herself.
Then, she looked around, shivered in the silence, and dashed off in the opposite direction.
Taking the long way home wouldn’t be such a bad idea tonight, for her mind was too alive with thoughts and feelings which warmed her dangerously, like a thousand wild fireflies.
And she needed time to think, because she was worried. There had been no reason for that man to find her, and yet he had. Things like that just didn’t happen in real life.
Did they?