What Is Done In the Waiting (Alice/Uncas) 2/3
Disclaimer: I make no profit off this story it is simply a way to amuse myself and anyone who is bored enough to read it.
Summary: Alice/Uncas. "She wants him to come for her, to walk through the proverbial fire, to save her. She wants him to be the Nathaniel to her Cora. She wants to live." Alice excerpts up to the fateful cliff scene.
Companion fic to 'What is Said In the Silence' (Uncas's story) and although it can be read alone I suggest you go read the other first (or after). It can be found here. Chapter 1 , Chapter 2
Warning: Adult themes will include death, sex, and a heavy load of angst. Rated PG13.
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"What is Done in the Waiting"
Part Two
-
-
-
I'm higher than high, I'm lower than deep.
metric-twilight galaxy
-
Last Time:
"Each step is as tortuous as the one before it. Her body feels sore and tired. She slips and her ankle turns underneath her and then out of nowhere he is there, grabbing her arm and steading her. She thanks him under her breath, face heating at her own clumsiness. She is disgusted by her own weakness and thinks he must be too. But she is helpless to turn that weakness into strength. For the first time she despises what she was molded to be and realizes how truly frivolous it is. She is nothing more than ornamental. Her skill at the harp and the neatness of her stitch cannot help her in this place. She has no purpose beyond aesthetic value and no practical talents to help her survive.
She is truly useless."
-
-
-
Thunder booms in the distance heralding a storm.
She shudders to think of rain and what it will mean to her already chilled flesh. She longs for the warmth of a heated bath or hearty meal or even the simplest cup of tea, anything to drive the cold that has sunk underneath her skin.
As they reach the top of the bluff overlooking she realizes the thunder is not thunder at all but the thunder of cannons. She then wishes for a storm because she would rather rain then the fort under attack. The feeling of desperation begins to permeate, settling somewhere deep in her stomach. To have travelled all this way and to reach the place they had thought to be their safe harbor and for it to be not, it is almost more than she can stand.
Under the cover of night they navigate between enemy lines and into the stockade walls. She hardly knows how, everything seems hazy. She anticipates only the sight of her father for in his arms she will feel safe, surely? She craves that feeling of security. And soon they are inside and there he is and she runs into his arms.
"Papa, Papa!!"
But the look on his face is one of shock not the joy of a father reunited with his daughters.
"Why are you here?"
He is angry, but his rage is not so much at them but for them. Because now they are trapped. Even she, young naïve and sheltered as she is, knows it.
-
-
-
She has exchanged her travel worn clothing for a borrowed muslin dress splattered with faded bursts of flowers throughout. She smoothes her fingers over the rough fabric and stares down at her hands.
She stands in a small room, empty with only sparse cots lining the walls, and the quaking of distant cannons striking. Cora has made her way to the infirmary and Alice will soon follow. But for this moment she stands, staring at her frail empty palms, asking herself when everything spiraled out of control. When did things get so messy?
Nothing is as it seems. And all at once it is.
In just a few short nights everything, her whole world, has been upped and shook and spun around. She feels like one of those small flecks of snow in a glass snow globe, swept every which way with no notion of what is up or down.
There is no one to catch her as she falls.
Her father is far too preoccupied to notice her distress. He is too caught up in this war, this senseless battle between French and English over a great hunk of rock and soil that belongs to neither.
She had listened moments earlier, ear pressed to the hard wood door, as Cora broke Duncan's heart, rejected his hand and threw him away. Once she would have secretly rejoiced. She would have been waiting in the sidelines, eternally waiting. She would have been there to offer him comfort. She might even have gathered enough nerve to have offered herself. But now... now everything is different. Everything has changed.
Duncan is not who she once thought he was.
When he stood in front of her father and lied, yes lied, about the very real danger that faced these mens families she could not stand to look at him. Something bitter and afraid and small had filled him up.
Where was the brave honorable solider she had loved for so long? Where was the kind thoughtful man she had thought she knew so well?
In his place there was a person she did not like. A person she could not like.
And her sister is too swept up in Hawkeye, no longer torn between him and Duncan, to see that she desperately needs the warmth embrace of her sister. To see her... Alice, at all.
And all she can see is him. His image burns its way across her retinas, into her very brain.
She wants him.
The revelation is astonishing. She wants him in a way she has never before wanted a man. It is true that she had wanted Duncan, or rather the idea of him; a gallant gentleman to shower her with attention and compliments and attend to her every need. It is after all what she has been taught to want. So the revelation that she wants a red man, an Indian, is both terrifying and exhilarating.
The need of want thrums through the very core of her. She can no longer deny or lie to herself. She wants him in every way possible there is to want another person. She wants him desperately and fully, with everything inside her. Worse yet, she fears she always will.
What she wants scares her to death. She cannot comprehend herself.
She is unraveling and there is no stopping it. She is glad of one thing, that there was no mirror to gaze into. She wasn't sure she would recognize herself if there was.
-
-
-
She is filled to the brim with anger. Anger that stems from sharp sting of betrayal. For there sits her sister, so very closely to Uncas, arms intertwined about him. The gesture is innocent enough, the embrace being simply Cora dressing his wound, yet she still feels irrationally that it is more than what it is. Even though it is an uncharitable thought she can't help thinking that Cora always gets everything-all that she wants, while she, Alice, is left with nothing.
She knows deep down that there is nothing between them, but she is blinded by a more baser instinct, that of jealousy. It leaves no room for rational thinking
However she can not blame Cora for her own weakness. It might have very well been her with her arms around him if it was not for her ever present weakness.
Moments ago she was within the infirmary determined to be of use. But the smell of it, thick and clogging, nauseating to all of the sense; the smell of death, invades so wholly that she is left reeling in its wake. She had been shadowing Cora's footsteps, offering of herself what she could, even though the extent of her talent lay in the fetching of bandages and distribution of water. But when confronted with the bloody stump of a soldiers ruined leg and another's empty eye it is all too much.
Her stomach is still heaving in her throat as she seeks refuge from beyond the infirmary door. But the smoke filled air only serves to intensify the heaving within. After great big breaths of air, after her stomach has decided to settle back where it belongs, she finds when she looks up he is within the surgery room and being bandaged by her sister.
That is when the envy rises, creeping and green, along with the anger and jealousy, red hot and all consuming. She glares at his bent head with everything in her. It is not his fault that she feels this way, and yet it is. It has to be.
His eyes meet hers across the barren gulf between them and the sight is enough to make her forget the anger. Unconsciously her fists uncurl leaving white half moons in their wake. His eyes captivate her. She cannot look away.
Nathaniel enters and converses briefly with Uncas and Cora and what has built between them through the pull of their gaze dissipates slowly. He leaves soon after, brushing by. She stares after his retreating back, her thoughts in a whirl. Tumbling round and round.
She is loosing herself.
-
-
-
It is over. It is all at an end.
Their long arduous journey, the bombardment of the fort and the general unpleasantness of this wild, wild land. The knowledge should bring her comfort. Yet it does not. For some unexplainable reason it does not.
Perhaps it is because she knows that it is to be the end of their short acquaintance with those that escorted them all this way. She will not see him again.
The thought is more unpleasant than she would have expected.
At the very least she has her sister back. She squeezes Cora tighter around the waist as they sit on the horse at the front of the long line of retreating soldiers. Plodding forward, ever forward.
She is just beginning to be lulled into some semblance of relaxation when the first war cry rings out shattering the quiet afternoon. From surrounding trees they come, like horrible wraiths of death and destruction. It is like some kind of nightmare, a nightmare that she has already had. A reoccurring never-ending nightmare.
She has already lived this. She has already seen the clash of redcoats against red-men. She has already heard the tortured screams of the fallen. She has already felt the claws of terror. And to experience it anew, so very acutely, is so much more than she can stand.
She finds herself thrown from the horse, the ground hard and jarring draws her from her revere long enough to stumble to where her sister has fallen.
It is all war cries and gunshots around them. The smoke from the guns pervades everything. Its thick nauseous clouds clog her nostrils and obscure the clearing. From the fog one of the Huran, face stamped with a black hand, runs at them, tomahawk drawn.
Cora grabs her wrist and pulls, and they are running, running, running. Running from one horror only to stumble upon another. For in front of them is a Huron scalping one of the soldiers. He turns toward them, eyes filled with bloodlust. Cora draws a pistol from within her skirt and shoots him square in the chest.
But Alice sees none of this. She is too riveted to the gory scene that surrounds. The blood that gushes from a Huran's ruined eye, the torn holes through his bare torso. The grunting sound a soldier makes as he is hacked at, over and over, by the wicked edge of a braves war axe. The scream torn from another as an arrow grows out of his chest. She wants to scream herself, to scratch out her own eyes. It is all too much.
Than as if she is underwater everything else falls away, disappears and she is left with only her heart beating loud in her ears and the sight of her father upon the ground. And above him stands the guide from before, the Indian responsible for their first attack. Black paint marking him from shoulders to chin. He looms over her father his mouth moving, soundless to her ears. Than he pulls his knife and kneels over her father. She wants to run to him but her feet are rooted to the ground unable to move. Her limbs are as frozen and she is immobile with terror. She can only wait, wait and watch.
Then as she watches something breaks inside, turns cold and shatters. Her heart spasms, tearing, even as her fathers heart is cut from his chest. And above he stands holding it up over his head like a trophy. She can't breathe, can't even think. There is only this moment. There is nothing before it and can be nothing after. There can only ever be this moment.
Even as a brave grasps her by the chin to face his arm raised and his knife raised...
Even as Cora launches herself on him and he turns backhanding Cora unto the ground...
Even as the brothers reach them, Nathaniel disposing of the man reaching to strike Cora, the Mohican father lifting her to her feet and Uncas following up the rear...
Even as they climb into canoes and race under the cover of smog over the falls...
Even as they run below to the caves...
None of this matters. For she still only thinks, sees, feels of one thing. Her fathers body twitching as he is torn apart. Her own chest feels torn apart. The red streaming down the clenched hand. She is frantic with sorrow. She is delirious with grief.
She will go mad.
-
-
-
They take shelter in the deep cold recesses of a cave beneath the rushing torrential downpour of falling water. For once she is grateful for the cold, it numbs away at her flesh and she hopes it will do the same for her soul. Inside she is crying, desperate with grief. Her father is dead.
Nathaniel embraces Cora, holding her close as if to say it is all alright. That it is all okay. But nothing is right. She wants to scream it out, to rip her sister away and curl into her lap and pretend that she is four again and her tears are for her broken doll not her broken father. But she can hardly move. The walls press in at every side, dark and smothering. She feels stifled. She will suffocate.
Her feet carry her away. Away to nowhere. Up towards the surface, and yet the mist calls to her and she pauses to listen. She is unbearably cold. Her blood icy in her veins. She can't stop shivering. And it has nothing to do with the cold mist from the falls.
She wants to cry, to scream, to bash her head against the rocky wall until her vision bleeds red. But she cannot. The tears refuse to rise. She is numb inside, numb and cold. She feels dead already. A walking corpse.
The water beckons. She wonders what it would be like to fall, to soar down crashing. She wonders what it would be like to forget. Her feet move soundlessly to the edge and she feels a calm enter her. The mist on her face feels like tiny kisses, a call, an embrace. She sways forward...
...and is pulled back, suddenly and fiercely by him. His face is angry and worried, fearful. For a moment she is angry at him, why should he care?, why could he not let her find peace? But then what she might have done strikes her hard. Hysteria follows, and terror. She can see herself, awkward splayed limbs, blue face, smashed into rocks at the bottom of the falls. She can't breathe. She finds herself hyperventilating, clutching and clawing at him as panic rises suffocating.
The tears come now, filling her eyes to overflow onto her face pressed into the warm skin of his neck. So many tears. She will drown in the tears. She will drown them both.
She is sobbing now, gasping with the force of her weeping. And words spill out of her mouth to match the images in her head.
-
Blackened brown hands reaching in, digging to rip and tear and cut, to bring death.
Her father convulsing, jerking, breaking...
A face splattered in red, clawed hand holding a still twitching mass of flesh.
So much red.
A heart squeezed to nothingness.
-
She knows not of what she says, nor does she care. She is desperate with grief. She is desperate to feel anything other than this overwhelming anguish. She is desperate to forget.
He kisses the top of her wet head and her eyes rise to meet his. Even through the liquid clouding her eyes she can still see his face. The flare of his nostrils. The diagonal slant of high cheekbones, a slash of strength across his face. The long length of his straight nose. Smooth wide lips the same dark color of his skin like burnished copper, so unlike her own. Taken apart it is a jumble of parts so different and foreign from her own. But together it is utter perfection. Pure incomprehensible perfection.
And she feels something now. Something other than despair and overwhelming grief. She feels desire. Desire for wanting life. Desire for him. She is desperate to feel anything other than the grief, so she takes hold of the desire and lets it flood her, washing away anything else.
She lets it rise inside and something foreign and desperate and hungry is unleashed. She wants him. And she is so desperate with the wanting that it is not want at all but need. Desperate hungry need. To forget and to feel.
She is deranged with need.
She presses her lips harshly against his. When he opens to her the hunger only grows. He tastes of smoke and rain. Or perhaps it is herself that she tastes on him. She doesn't know. She can't tell anymore. It seems as if they have always been like this, connected. She can't remember where she starts and he ends.
It should not be perfect. She is tired and afraid and so horribly sad. It should not feel good or right or any of those things. It should not be perfect at all.
But it is.
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chapter 3
Summary: Alice/Uncas. "She wants him to come for her, to walk through the proverbial fire, to save her. She wants him to be the Nathaniel to her Cora. She wants to live." Alice excerpts up to the fateful cliff scene.
Companion fic to 'What is Said In the Silence' (Uncas's story) and although it can be read alone I suggest you go read the other first (or after). It can be found here. Chapter 1 , Chapter 2
Warning: Adult themes will include death, sex, and a heavy load of angst. Rated PG13.
-
"What is Done in the Waiting"
Part Two
-
-
-
I'm higher than high, I'm lower than deep.
metric-twilight galaxy
-
Last Time:
"Each step is as tortuous as the one before it. Her body feels sore and tired. She slips and her ankle turns underneath her and then out of nowhere he is there, grabbing her arm and steading her. She thanks him under her breath, face heating at her own clumsiness. She is disgusted by her own weakness and thinks he must be too. But she is helpless to turn that weakness into strength. For the first time she despises what she was molded to be and realizes how truly frivolous it is. She is nothing more than ornamental. Her skill at the harp and the neatness of her stitch cannot help her in this place. She has no purpose beyond aesthetic value and no practical talents to help her survive.
She is truly useless."
-
-
-
Thunder booms in the distance heralding a storm.
She shudders to think of rain and what it will mean to her already chilled flesh. She longs for the warmth of a heated bath or hearty meal or even the simplest cup of tea, anything to drive the cold that has sunk underneath her skin.
As they reach the top of the bluff overlooking she realizes the thunder is not thunder at all but the thunder of cannons. She then wishes for a storm because she would rather rain then the fort under attack. The feeling of desperation begins to permeate, settling somewhere deep in her stomach. To have travelled all this way and to reach the place they had thought to be their safe harbor and for it to be not, it is almost more than she can stand.
Under the cover of night they navigate between enemy lines and into the stockade walls. She hardly knows how, everything seems hazy. She anticipates only the sight of her father for in his arms she will feel safe, surely? She craves that feeling of security. And soon they are inside and there he is and she runs into his arms.
"Papa, Papa!!"
But the look on his face is one of shock not the joy of a father reunited with his daughters.
"Why are you here?"
He is angry, but his rage is not so much at them but for them. Because now they are trapped. Even she, young naïve and sheltered as she is, knows it.
-
-
-
She has exchanged her travel worn clothing for a borrowed muslin dress splattered with faded bursts of flowers throughout. She smoothes her fingers over the rough fabric and stares down at her hands.
She stands in a small room, empty with only sparse cots lining the walls, and the quaking of distant cannons striking. Cora has made her way to the infirmary and Alice will soon follow. But for this moment she stands, staring at her frail empty palms, asking herself when everything spiraled out of control. When did things get so messy?
Nothing is as it seems. And all at once it is.
In just a few short nights everything, her whole world, has been upped and shook and spun around. She feels like one of those small flecks of snow in a glass snow globe, swept every which way with no notion of what is up or down.
There is no one to catch her as she falls.
Her father is far too preoccupied to notice her distress. He is too caught up in this war, this senseless battle between French and English over a great hunk of rock and soil that belongs to neither.
She had listened moments earlier, ear pressed to the hard wood door, as Cora broke Duncan's heart, rejected his hand and threw him away. Once she would have secretly rejoiced. She would have been waiting in the sidelines, eternally waiting. She would have been there to offer him comfort. She might even have gathered enough nerve to have offered herself. But now... now everything is different. Everything has changed.
Duncan is not who she once thought he was.
When he stood in front of her father and lied, yes lied, about the very real danger that faced these mens families she could not stand to look at him. Something bitter and afraid and small had filled him up.
Where was the brave honorable solider she had loved for so long? Where was the kind thoughtful man she had thought she knew so well?
In his place there was a person she did not like. A person she could not like.
And her sister is too swept up in Hawkeye, no longer torn between him and Duncan, to see that she desperately needs the warmth embrace of her sister. To see her... Alice, at all.
And all she can see is him. His image burns its way across her retinas, into her very brain.
She wants him.
The revelation is astonishing. She wants him in a way she has never before wanted a man. It is true that she had wanted Duncan, or rather the idea of him; a gallant gentleman to shower her with attention and compliments and attend to her every need. It is after all what she has been taught to want. So the revelation that she wants a red man, an Indian, is both terrifying and exhilarating.
The need of want thrums through the very core of her. She can no longer deny or lie to herself. She wants him in every way possible there is to want another person. She wants him desperately and fully, with everything inside her. Worse yet, she fears she always will.
What she wants scares her to death. She cannot comprehend herself.
She is unraveling and there is no stopping it. She is glad of one thing, that there was no mirror to gaze into. She wasn't sure she would recognize herself if there was.
-
-
-
She is filled to the brim with anger. Anger that stems from sharp sting of betrayal. For there sits her sister, so very closely to Uncas, arms intertwined about him. The gesture is innocent enough, the embrace being simply Cora dressing his wound, yet she still feels irrationally that it is more than what it is. Even though it is an uncharitable thought she can't help thinking that Cora always gets everything-all that she wants, while she, Alice, is left with nothing.
She knows deep down that there is nothing between them, but she is blinded by a more baser instinct, that of jealousy. It leaves no room for rational thinking
However she can not blame Cora for her own weakness. It might have very well been her with her arms around him if it was not for her ever present weakness.
Moments ago she was within the infirmary determined to be of use. But the smell of it, thick and clogging, nauseating to all of the sense; the smell of death, invades so wholly that she is left reeling in its wake. She had been shadowing Cora's footsteps, offering of herself what she could, even though the extent of her talent lay in the fetching of bandages and distribution of water. But when confronted with the bloody stump of a soldiers ruined leg and another's empty eye it is all too much.
Her stomach is still heaving in her throat as she seeks refuge from beyond the infirmary door. But the smoke filled air only serves to intensify the heaving within. After great big breaths of air, after her stomach has decided to settle back where it belongs, she finds when she looks up he is within the surgery room and being bandaged by her sister.
That is when the envy rises, creeping and green, along with the anger and jealousy, red hot and all consuming. She glares at his bent head with everything in her. It is not his fault that she feels this way, and yet it is. It has to be.
His eyes meet hers across the barren gulf between them and the sight is enough to make her forget the anger. Unconsciously her fists uncurl leaving white half moons in their wake. His eyes captivate her. She cannot look away.
Nathaniel enters and converses briefly with Uncas and Cora and what has built between them through the pull of their gaze dissipates slowly. He leaves soon after, brushing by. She stares after his retreating back, her thoughts in a whirl. Tumbling round and round.
She is loosing herself.
-
-
-
It is over. It is all at an end.
Their long arduous journey, the bombardment of the fort and the general unpleasantness of this wild, wild land. The knowledge should bring her comfort. Yet it does not. For some unexplainable reason it does not.
Perhaps it is because she knows that it is to be the end of their short acquaintance with those that escorted them all this way. She will not see him again.
The thought is more unpleasant than she would have expected.
At the very least she has her sister back. She squeezes Cora tighter around the waist as they sit on the horse at the front of the long line of retreating soldiers. Plodding forward, ever forward.
She is just beginning to be lulled into some semblance of relaxation when the first war cry rings out shattering the quiet afternoon. From surrounding trees they come, like horrible wraiths of death and destruction. It is like some kind of nightmare, a nightmare that she has already had. A reoccurring never-ending nightmare.
She has already lived this. She has already seen the clash of redcoats against red-men. She has already heard the tortured screams of the fallen. She has already felt the claws of terror. And to experience it anew, so very acutely, is so much more than she can stand.
She finds herself thrown from the horse, the ground hard and jarring draws her from her revere long enough to stumble to where her sister has fallen.
It is all war cries and gunshots around them. The smoke from the guns pervades everything. Its thick nauseous clouds clog her nostrils and obscure the clearing. From the fog one of the Huran, face stamped with a black hand, runs at them, tomahawk drawn.
Cora grabs her wrist and pulls, and they are running, running, running. Running from one horror only to stumble upon another. For in front of them is a Huron scalping one of the soldiers. He turns toward them, eyes filled with bloodlust. Cora draws a pistol from within her skirt and shoots him square in the chest.
But Alice sees none of this. She is too riveted to the gory scene that surrounds. The blood that gushes from a Huran's ruined eye, the torn holes through his bare torso. The grunting sound a soldier makes as he is hacked at, over and over, by the wicked edge of a braves war axe. The scream torn from another as an arrow grows out of his chest. She wants to scream herself, to scratch out her own eyes. It is all too much.
Than as if she is underwater everything else falls away, disappears and she is left with only her heart beating loud in her ears and the sight of her father upon the ground. And above him stands the guide from before, the Indian responsible for their first attack. Black paint marking him from shoulders to chin. He looms over her father his mouth moving, soundless to her ears. Than he pulls his knife and kneels over her father. She wants to run to him but her feet are rooted to the ground unable to move. Her limbs are as frozen and she is immobile with terror. She can only wait, wait and watch.
Then as she watches something breaks inside, turns cold and shatters. Her heart spasms, tearing, even as her fathers heart is cut from his chest. And above he stands holding it up over his head like a trophy. She can't breathe, can't even think. There is only this moment. There is nothing before it and can be nothing after. There can only ever be this moment.
Even as a brave grasps her by the chin to face his arm raised and his knife raised...
Even as Cora launches herself on him and he turns backhanding Cora unto the ground...
Even as the brothers reach them, Nathaniel disposing of the man reaching to strike Cora, the Mohican father lifting her to her feet and Uncas following up the rear...
Even as they climb into canoes and race under the cover of smog over the falls...
Even as they run below to the caves...
None of this matters. For she still only thinks, sees, feels of one thing. Her fathers body twitching as he is torn apart. Her own chest feels torn apart. The red streaming down the clenched hand. She is frantic with sorrow. She is delirious with grief.
She will go mad.
-
-
-
They take shelter in the deep cold recesses of a cave beneath the rushing torrential downpour of falling water. For once she is grateful for the cold, it numbs away at her flesh and she hopes it will do the same for her soul. Inside she is crying, desperate with grief. Her father is dead.
Nathaniel embraces Cora, holding her close as if to say it is all alright. That it is all okay. But nothing is right. She wants to scream it out, to rip her sister away and curl into her lap and pretend that she is four again and her tears are for her broken doll not her broken father. But she can hardly move. The walls press in at every side, dark and smothering. She feels stifled. She will suffocate.
Her feet carry her away. Away to nowhere. Up towards the surface, and yet the mist calls to her and she pauses to listen. She is unbearably cold. Her blood icy in her veins. She can't stop shivering. And it has nothing to do with the cold mist from the falls.
She wants to cry, to scream, to bash her head against the rocky wall until her vision bleeds red. But she cannot. The tears refuse to rise. She is numb inside, numb and cold. She feels dead already. A walking corpse.
The water beckons. She wonders what it would be like to fall, to soar down crashing. She wonders what it would be like to forget. Her feet move soundlessly to the edge and she feels a calm enter her. The mist on her face feels like tiny kisses, a call, an embrace. She sways forward...
...and is pulled back, suddenly and fiercely by him. His face is angry and worried, fearful. For a moment she is angry at him, why should he care?, why could he not let her find peace? But then what she might have done strikes her hard. Hysteria follows, and terror. She can see herself, awkward splayed limbs, blue face, smashed into rocks at the bottom of the falls. She can't breathe. She finds herself hyperventilating, clutching and clawing at him as panic rises suffocating.
The tears come now, filling her eyes to overflow onto her face pressed into the warm skin of his neck. So many tears. She will drown in the tears. She will drown them both.
She is sobbing now, gasping with the force of her weeping. And words spill out of her mouth to match the images in her head.
-
Blackened brown hands reaching in, digging to rip and tear and cut, to bring death.
Her father convulsing, jerking, breaking...
A face splattered in red, clawed hand holding a still twitching mass of flesh.
So much red.
A heart squeezed to nothingness.
-
She knows not of what she says, nor does she care. She is desperate with grief. She is desperate to feel anything other than this overwhelming anguish. She is desperate to forget.
He kisses the top of her wet head and her eyes rise to meet his. Even through the liquid clouding her eyes she can still see his face. The flare of his nostrils. The diagonal slant of high cheekbones, a slash of strength across his face. The long length of his straight nose. Smooth wide lips the same dark color of his skin like burnished copper, so unlike her own. Taken apart it is a jumble of parts so different and foreign from her own. But together it is utter perfection. Pure incomprehensible perfection.
And she feels something now. Something other than despair and overwhelming grief. She feels desire. Desire for wanting life. Desire for him. She is desperate to feel anything other than the grief, so she takes hold of the desire and lets it flood her, washing away anything else.
She lets it rise inside and something foreign and desperate and hungry is unleashed. She wants him. And she is so desperate with the wanting that it is not want at all but need. Desperate hungry need. To forget and to feel.
She is deranged with need.
She presses her lips harshly against his. When he opens to her the hunger only grows. He tastes of smoke and rain. Or perhaps it is herself that she tastes on him. She doesn't know. She can't tell anymore. It seems as if they have always been like this, connected. She can't remember where she starts and he ends.
It should not be perfect. She is tired and afraid and so horribly sad. It should not feel good or right or any of those things. It should not be perfect at all.
But it is.
-
-
-
chapter 3