Monochrome Memories

[Rattlesnake]

Who the fuck was she?

((Kelsey Brewer continued from Broken Angels, Wingless, Cast from Heaven's Gates))

Kelsey slumped to cold, hard floor. It was a welcome change from the cold, uneven ground she'd covered in her pilgrimage to nowhere, and the cold, sharp winds that had harried her along the way. Her breath steamed out around the borders of her mask in plumes that did not scintillate in the total lack of ambient light.

Had she really done... all that?

To be the one to stand against a killer, or a would-be killer, or a will-be killer—or to collapse all those possibilities, simply a fuckstain with a pointy stick—to be the one raising the only weapon in the room against them and put her own body on the line, to deal with it all and simply slip away instead of collapsing into someone's arms and trauma bond with them whether they welcomed it or not. To abscond with that slim, violent hope carried awkwardly in her hands anticipating its further use at some point in the not-so-distant future. She never would have imagined herself doing any of that.

Well, she might imagine herself like that, but only in a 'tag urself I'm the idiot who acts like capital-J Justice is a physical force present within our universe' sort of way. Everyone moonlit as the tragic hero of their own dark fantasies, the ones where the weight of the world was placed unbidden on your shoulders, those cherished dreams in which you were dying. But that dying could happen tomorrow night, because death was a burden for you to tragically, excitingly bear and not something so droll as the erasure of your being. This night would be rife with adventure and love and sadness and betrayal, and it was up to you with your Look and your Weapon and your hard-won skill and determination to defy fate, to stop the manifestation of your oppression from its final fatal descent upon the world, to wear an extremely short skirt and have someone cute and strong and soft beside you. Someone with eyes the color of a breaking dawn you thought you'd never live to see, pulling you away to shield you from it all. To cleave to as two halves of an implacable whole, an island in a stream of misfortune that threatened to wash all away.

So maybe not everyone had those specific fantasies, but she sure did.

Point was, when push came to shove, her knowledge of who she'd be had apparently been only a vague guess, and there was little she could imagine as being so unnerving. That understanding, those concepts, had been honed through such a long time, through such a gauntlet of experience. Things she'd wanted to be true but weren't; things other people would beat out of her if they could. Things that would be so much simpler never to come into contact with, or even to grandly renounce and hurl stones at from the other side. You always wanted to picture yourself as the one to rise from the depths of privation, to bear those scars showing how you were opposed and how you fought and how you stayed nearly whole. But, doctors' daughter, would you ever really cast your comfort and security aside for another? Social remora, would you ever think to reject the willing invitation for company? Fucking bottom bitch doormat, would you ever stand on your own to do what had to be done, and be the one to negotiate the wages of that labor?

Maybe, apparently.

She fished the lighter from where she'd stowed it, within easy reach. In a place like this, it seemed prudent to be able to conjure light and warmth or commit arson or seal or melt something on a moment's notice. It was poor remedy for the dark and cold, and the bare concrete of this particular construction wasn't something that lent itself to the more exciting inclination by either possibility or motive, but it did at least give her a chance to get a picture of her surroundings. They were rough-hewn and utilitarian, and offered a least two different directions to run away from someone in. They'd do well enough.

Time passed, and in the world above, the slanted sunlight gave way to true darkness. Kelsey huddled in her corner, hugging her knees, letting the walls and the floor leech away her vital warmth.

Doormat.

Each moment ticked away more slowly than the last. People stalked the surface, no doubt, and the ones active now would be the only the ones with the most unsavory intentions and the courage or bravado to roam amongst their most dangerous compatriots.

Coward.

No light, no comfort, but here, she would draw no attention to herself. Any footsteps would travel far despite the baffling of dust and dirt over the hard concrete surface, and any approaching source of light would...

...

Fuck it, she was getting cold.

She heaved herself up, shouldered her bag and let her weapon dangle from one hand just in case she found herself unexpectedly divorced from her little nook, but the way out and back was not at all complicated. Hand on the wall, the path to the outside was unbroken. She emerged where she'd entered, near a building on the outskirts of the built-up area where the wilderness encroached to an impolite distance. With a quick glance around, and then a longer one for good measure, she struck forth and gathered up some dead brush in her free hand before slipping back through the tunnel entrance and depositing it back at her chosen site of repose. She was no accomplished outdoorswoman, but it didn't take one to hold the lighter's flame to a bit of wood until it caught. Nor to add whatever she found within easy reach of another furtive, crepuscular adventure, and another. Laying near the merry warmth of her little fire, the night's true torture could begin.

Time passed. Kelsey grasped desperately at every passing moment, and wished all the same that they would all fly past her at once. She lay with her head on her bag, partly because it was the only thing even vaguely resembling soft and comfortable, and partly because she'd heard enough of the grim science of what happened when you burned things indoors. Though a silent, smothering blanket pressing itself over her face would be one of the kinder fates she might meet here.

She thought of the day she'd spent, the moment of abject terror and adrenaline, the creeping silent hours of uncertain dread and the weight and coolness in her limbs that followed. She thought of that spearpoint, the terror and malice in its wielder's eyes, the dispelling of any sense of security she would ever feel again. She thought of death, and life, and death again. Of home, her brother and mother and father and her cat. Of warmth and softness, ever after banished from her existence, because there would be nothing but the cold and the dark and the hardness of the ground for the rest of her life. She would never ever make it out of here, and she would never feel properly warm again.

Maybe.

Phantom arms stretched around her in intrusive reveries that cut more and more into her mindshare. She wanted to be held. To retreat against someone's welcoming chest and feel the rhythmic heaving of their life. Maybe then things would be ok, if only for a moment. Perhaps even all the sweeter for the bleakness and bitterness around her. One face in particular swam before her when she closed her eyes, one person hot and soft and something else besides in her mind's eye. Evie was a centerpiece of her imaginings, silly and shameful and achingly wistful by turns. Her smile and her laugh, the strength of her limbs and the softness of her body. Though the future was ever briefer before Kelsey's view, ever more narrow and constricted, there was a flight of fancy with no end of variation and no limit to where she might explore.

Still, there was no willing those strong arms into existence to cross tight over her midriff this night. No conjuring soft hands to linger in the small of her back. Minutes stretched like hours, and hours stretched into obscenity. Time passed, as it did, as it had, as it would. And Kelsey was dragged along for the ride.

Morning ambushed her. Tentative fingers of light stretched down the walls and floor from the entrance of the tunnel, brushing against her makeshift camp in absence of her little fire's illumination. Ash and soot and bits of things unburnt were all that lay before her in her little nook now. Wasn't that a fucking metaphor. A sudden urgency spiked within her, a sudden longing.

She sat up and searched in her bag. Her drawing pad was gone, along with every other suitable scrap, and anything she might mark her nonexistent canvas with. She'd known that, of course, couldn't really be surprised the fifth time around, but if she allowed herself no hope, what did she have? In this case, there was something else; her own assigned "weapon," or rather the box it came in. Smooth and uniform and paper-adjacent, at least. It would do.

Kelsey tore off a section of the box and set up shop with her issued flashlight for illumination. How to approach it? She tried wielding a half-charred stick directly, but the strokes were too broad, too crude. And besides, it seemed to want to crumble and snap more than anything when she applied any pressure to it. She made a couple more experiments, but In the end, it was the simple application of her fingers over the blank surface that provided any sort of result. Still not exactly the deliberately manufactured charcoal pencils she was more accustomed to, but not exactly a child's fingerpainting. She sketched out a couple figures, layered them over with what refinements she could. One quartering away from the viewer with hair pulled back into a nexus of wild spikes, another facing toward with brow suggesting what the medium was too crude to impart into their eyes. A jagged point raised between, slathered over in reality as well as in depiction by the messy, staining dregs of what had been life.

After some time she stood and swung her flashlight beam around until a glassy, lifeless eye glittered in evidence. She brought her scrap up to it, shone the light over it to illuminate her handiwork.

"Hey," she said. "Feed number whatever this is. You can find this spot, I'm sure, and take this—"

Tears flooded over her cheeks and her voice broke. She took a deep breath.

"My name is Kelsey Brewer, and I'm alive right now. And maybe, when it's all—"

She could say no more, but simply shook her head and stretched her lips into one of her sad, shallow smiles behind her mask. She let the camera take in her work a moment longer before placing it, face-down, by her bag and gathering up her things.

Maybe nobody would disturb it, and whoever arrived to clean things up in the aftermath of it all could bring it back home. Add that one to the list. Maybe her message wouldn't be needed. Maybe they could really make it out of there, like nobody had before. Maybe she could feel warm again, or happy, or comfortable. Maybe she could find who she was looking for before, well...

If nothing else, then maybe, just maybe, she at least wouldn't be forgotten.

((Kelsey Brewer continued in Would You Like to Pet the Kitty?))