be with me always, take any form, drive me mad

#1

“And honestly, you could have been anything? But you chose to be an idiot instead.”

God, Thomas? Not even in her own fever dreams could she stop seeing stupid men.

Yet there he was, and there he went and there he sauntered along. Like a ghost from a house she’d abandoned to rot. She’d gotten what she’d asked for when he’d paid back the abandonment in kind. She’d paid for it with her now ever boiling and evaporating blood- tritely written pulp fiction, lost somewhere to a bargain bin in a store corner somewhere in space and time. If that. Could have just been shittily written fanfic with double digit views, worth less than the infinitesimal server space devoted it.

((Princess McQuillan continued from Dude 4tified))

They’d all come and gone, one after the other, Sakurako and Desiree and Marco and Zach and Claudeson and Lucas and the rest of the reminders of her shoestring mortal tether. Illusions of her impotent mental state trying to prosetelyze at her in her final moments. Reminding her, rather bluntly, of things she’d honestly forgotten long since. She’d gotten in a kind-of knife fight with Teresa? Heavens, that sounded completely out of character for her.

Of course it had happened, then.

Impolite, these proceedings. Couldn’t she just die in peace? She’d never asked for the entire student population of her high school to run a musical number through her rowdy enough thoughts. The production value was atrocious- Lucas remained as punchable face as ever, even in his Broadway-best makeup.

But they all left her, funnily enough leaving her missing them in the most babyish form of ‘it’s not because I need your phantasmal existence to justify clinging to life so I can keep torturing myself with my useless navel gazing’. She was left alone with just her now, the only one who’d tolerated the pretense long enough to get to know enough of her to go off and up and die for no good reason, and break her heart only Princess wasn’t honestly that sure that she had a heart to break. She’d put in improv exercises for club more rousing than she had her own girlfriend’s death.

There she was. Violet, still somehow completely inaccurate to the bloated corpse original.

“You really do miss me? Princess.”

Well, bloated corpse insofar as Princess could even guess at in her melting marshmallow nightmares where all the colors were annoyingly just barely the wrong saturation. Not like Princess knew, right? Six-some days and a life-threatening infection later and she still hadn’t even bothered to say goodbye to Violet in a meaningful way. That door she’d never walked through haunted her better than any living not-breathing ghost could have done her in for.

“I have to wonder, though, if you’ve actually managed to somehow talk yourself into believing that you have to miss me.”

Oh, and Megan was also there too- Princess could feel it. Somehow even her ghosts could have ghostlier things wandering among their ranks. She figured that particular twist to her egotist illusions was self-inflicted insult to self-inflicted injury: Megan wouldn’t speak to represent all the things she’d said that Princess had never listened to like she should have. How bad a friend she’d been- goodness, the classic trope of Princess getting a girlfriend and ghosting the rest of her actual hard-earned friends, was that seriously how insultingly basic she really was and always had been, at the end of all this eighteen years of incomprehensible incompetence?

“You’ve always been so performative, haven’t you?”

Honestly Princess couldn’t be assed to reply anymore. Somehow even in the depths of hypnagogic reality she had such a dry, eroded mouth.

"Hey…"

“Look at how you’ve managed to devolve, right?”
“Used to be that when we were doing the whole Socratic schtick you kinda had the energy to reply, but now the formats completely changed because you’ve happened to have given up on life.”
“Look, I’m not going to, like, blame you for falling that far into your own inevitable self-loathing.”
“You and I both knew your insecurities were going to majorly flare up, like, even if you never ended up on a death trap island failing to fight for your life.”
“I wouldn’t have left you though.”

"Hey, Princess…"

“Hah, look at that. That’s the most in-character thing you’ve imagined me saying to date.”
“But like, it wouldn’t have been that bad, I think. We would have still been able to visit each other regularly.”
“I mean, Knoxville’s not that far by bus, right?”
“But yeah, I know. All this small talk, you don’t like it, right?”
“Reminds you of all the people you had to pretend you liked.”
“I guess, you know, it’d be nice if you could just make it easy on yourself.”

"Princess."

“It’s okay to give up, Princess.”
“No reason to blame yourself.”
“You know that I’d hate seeing you like this.”
“It’s really not so bad, living with the silence. Can’t be any worse than all this noise.”
“If you listen a while, you might finally be able to say something that really matters-”

"Princess, it's time again."

((Katelynne Kirkpatrick continued from Dude 4tified))

They were both quiet for a moment when she finally woke. Princess still swore it was too bright. She felt a bit better, at least, but some arbitrary amount of betterness was all the worse when Princess could still remember the limber nubile body of a girl some days less ruined, pracing barefoot through the forests. Lingering on her clammy, shriveled-up Raggedy Anne skin, the graceful wind of motion sewed through the gaps between her toes. Just sticky cobwebs now, inert reminders of her final days of youth.

Kate had been calling her awake, Princess realized. Weird to think that one of the voices still belonged among the ranks of the living. She had to wonder if the dream lecture had been leaking out onto her face. All the abject horror at being reduced to a child that needed scolding- as if she hadn’t been that for the last few days. Kate might have just intervened to wake Princess from her exceedingly mundane nightmare.

Or apparently to give her medicine. Princess didn’t bother to reject it this time. The thought did briefly cross her mind, but there was no point in martyring herself when she already had no value left in her life to give.

Slow swallow. Her throat didn’t hurt as much choking it down this time. A few less needles gently massaging her windpipe point-first.

“Are they… not back yet?” Princess wanted to crick her neck. Felt a bit too stiff for that. She wondered if it was the collar for a moment, before she realized it was just as insignificantly prominent as ever, the worst among all fashion statements.

“They ain’t,” Kate sighed, a grim look briefly obscuring the bulk of her lips. “It’s been half a day now.”

“Too ambitious for simpletons like us… I’m guessing.” Princess blankly rejected Kate’s briefly reproachful eyes- her friend was a bit stoic, perfectly embodying the American Gothic in moments like this, but the emotion bled through the details like hemorrhage, if you knew what to look for.

“They’re not bad folk. Should'a nailed their feet down when I had the chance, but they'll come on back home eventually.”

In a body bag, maybe. But Princess didn’t have the energy for unwanted and unwarranted cynicism. She was trying her hardest to get up, which would have been the first time in… a day, a week, she didn’t know, hard to tell. The first time she’d managed to straighten up, out of however long out of these disconnected and unstuck grains of hourglass sand floating in a balmy oven-baked breeze in her front lobe. Kate offered a supporting hand, which Princess took as she stumbled ungracefully to her feet.

“You sure?”

Princess just shrugged. “If I collapse again…” As she almost did just then, with her vision ever so briefly becoming a charming array of black spots blotting out reality. “... Then obviously I was wrong.”

Princess’ usual idea of a nice walk was a certain amount more ambitious than a roundabout of a building barely larger than her old trailer. Still, it was pleasant enough, in that particularly empty and desolate way Princess believed everyone felt at least once at their loneliest and most pathetic. A leisurely stroll through the apocalypse. Bastardized Austen, but she’d take it.

In the end, the two girls found themselves by the closed doors of the temple, chancing them open so they could catch at least a little bit of cool breeze. For Princess it was like the ice cube melted long before it ever got to her drink. She wondered how Kate could stand all the heat.

Kate was the one who broke the silence, funnily enough.

“Feels like it’s all coming to an end soon.”

“... In a good way.” Flat disbelief, as much as it could come through the hoarse voice strain.

Kate shrugged. Noncommittal, as Princess expected her soul genuinely found was most fit. “You… were always honest about it. If you didn’t know… didn’t know. You know, sometimes I… like. Our conversations would be so… cheerfully dumb, right? Didn’t think I even had them in me. Maybe you brought it out of me…”

A bit of a glimmer of hope, something like the last spark on a firework before it puttered for good and curdled up to rest on cold earth. Princess was at least happy her lungs were less keen to protest her every syllable. If she put her heart and soul to it she could really have let off one of those usual McQuillan rants she was famous for, she guessed.

“Yeah. You made it easy. You were one of the only ones in school who ever thought what I liked to do was fun.”

“Without hesitation... Honest, Harmonious was my favorite.”

“I ain't surprised; you helped dress her up and everything. I can hardly pick palettes myself without it looking like a clown threw up.”

Maybe it had been okay, that Princess had always lived her life like layers of clothes to mix and match and make adorably silly disguises out of. Her favorite one, of course, had always been ‘the relevant one’. But maybe ‘the simple one’ had been the best life she’d ever lived. Much as she’d lied to them and disrespected them, she’d only ever really enjoyed her life with Kate, Megan, Violet, Non-... Marco. They’d forced her to be the absolute best she could be, which was in hindsight a profoundly sad and pathetic state of affairs. Points knocked off for her, rather, not for them.

“... Look, I’m sorry that I was so secretive about-”

“It's fine; it don't matter no more.”

God Katelynne had a beautiful smile. And Princess meant that in the most platonic way possible- Kate wasn’t exactly her type, she swore up and down. Kate’s smile was like the rest of her. Bit whimsical, but not in a showy way. No pretenses about it, just a few slightly crooked teeth and a corner of the lip high as the sun.

“...Can I ask you somethin', though? That alright?”

“Really don’t mind, Kate.”

“Why no shoes? Two decent pairs in your bag still.”

“... Just a thing I learned from my grandma, I guess.”

"Ah."

They were quiet for a while after that. Princess holding Kate’s hand, the two of them staring out at a vista Princess could only sort of make out through all the extra effects and side effects of her wasting away.

It only just then occurred to Princess that she’d never mentioned her grandma to any of her friends.

...

“I don’t think they’re coming back, Kate.”

Kate was facing a different way, not looking at her. It felt like hours before she replied.

"They will… they will."

((Princess McQuillan and Katelynne Kirkpatrick continued later in the temple))