muse of fire
Author: Nathalia
Rating: R
Challenge:
Quince #18 - the world may never know
Tropical Punch #30 - the end of the earth
Extras / Toppings: blueberries (It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying - or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity - but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes. - William Styron), cherry, cookie crumbs ( a grave, light), gummy bunnies (origfic_bingo: silence), malt (summer challenge 257: "Through the darkness of future past, the magician longs to see, one chants out between two worlds, fire walk with me!" - Twin Peaks (Leland Palmer)), pineapple (Seether - Broken), pocky chain, sprinkles, strawberries (Tuskegee Airman)
Word Count: 550
Story: Misfits
Summary: Tim returns home one last time.
Notes: pocky dance party: limbo. The first link is 100 words long and the next is 90, then 80, down to 10 words.
The wooden floor boards creak under his feet as he slowly walks through the house, taking in the sights of the bleak walls that once were decorated with family pictures.
The pictures, just like most of the furniture and the life, are gone from the house, leaving it as dead as he feels inside.
Looking around, he can still see how things used to be.
He can smell his mother’s cooking in the kitchen, hear his father slam the door when he comes home, see his brother lying on the floor, just where he is standing now, reading a book.
***
His little brother; how much he misses him.
He hasn’t seen him, the only family he has left, in years. Far too long and yet he never wants to see him again -- it would only make things worse. He knows his brother has been looking for him; he’s hidden.
He feels a tinge of guilt for abandoning him, letting him down like this.
Soon enough, his brother won’t have any family left to call his own, find the last bits of his childhood still in existence taken from him.
***
His thoughts drift to the other person he’s abandoning, who will probably start looking for him soon if she hasn’t already. He told her he was going to get groceries and then took a road trip that lasted almost eighteen hours, from the Third Coast to the East Coast.
The drive was used to set his plan in stone, think over every detail.
He had expected to doubt his decision but much to his surprise, it had only cemented it.
***
He asked her to marry him three weeks ago, knowing it would never happen, that he wouldn’t be there to marry her.
He wanted to ask her because maybe, if things had been different, he could have stayed, married her, been happy.
Whenever he was with her, he has wished that that could have been the case, that she could have given him what he was missing, made him happy.
***
She has made him feel a semblance of happiness sometimes, made him forget that he couldn’t feel positive emotions. She had been an exception, had made him smile, had shown him love.
But he is a destroyer and he will break her heart today by freeing himself from this mortal coil.
He enters in his old room, his safe haven.
***
Everything around the house is prepared.
The floors, the walls, the old curtains, drenched with gasoline.
It is a comforting smell, he thinks, as it intensified with every canister he has emptied over every surface to make sure nothing can possibly go wrong.
There is only one single canister left.
***
It stings when the liquid with the strange properties runs over him, narrowly missing his eyes that aren’t completely shut.
The smell of gasoline dominates everything now.
Drenched, he knows he’s close.
He is ready for his baptism of fire.
***
He lights the match, rough against the box, and throws it to his feet.
The floor catches fire instantly and spread fast, much faster than he had expected it to.
***
He closes his eyes, takes deep breaths, his last.
He feels at peace with himself for the first time in years.
***
A muse of fire, she takes him in, embracing him.