treatises on falling down. [pete/oz]
Feb 17, 2022 19:58:39 GMT -5
Post by doodle :) on Feb 17, 2022 19:58:39 GMT -5
oz
We gotta get away and disappear
We're running out of time
The sun is low we'll go and break away
Fade into the light.
First: he tilting, spiraling, quaking of the body -- how it freezes the brain, and the muscles, as each braces itself for the impact. The drop. How the body is no longer a body but a cumbersome mass, like a boulder, how it no longer feels like you but instead something colliding into you, for that brief second that you're in suspension. Then the blow. How it never feels like you hit it, but it hits you. Smacking right into you, how your mind, frozen with one shock, is shattered by another. For a moment, you're a broken thing, only half-aware as your mind tosses between numbness and an aching pain. Then not a broken thing, but a limp, heavy thing, much like a dish-rag sopping wet, trying to haul yourself back to your feet. Then a fixed thing, standing upright, aware now that you had fallen, that a part of your body hurt because you fell, so not totally whole, but as the pain ebbs (if it ebbs), you begin again. Assuming you do.Oz had grown very used to falling. He had the sequence of events perfectly memorized. It didn't surprise him when the shock came; when the pain came; only that it always seemed to get harder, not easier, as he tried to peel himself off the floor. He stopped midway. Knees tucked to his chest, beneath his chin, fetal position, looking like a turtle to the tributes that passed by the self-defense station.The training dummy loomed over him. Its pinkish holographic face flickered, as a little green light on its chest flared. The ball-joints of its robotic abdomen whirred as it straightened up stiffly, its arms dropping and swaying listlessly at its sides. Tribute down -- awaiting further instructions.A voice like god boomed over the station's intercom, dry, bitter: "Get up." Not far, a flabby and balding man smoking a cigar glowered behind a wall of tinted glass. His thick, tobacco-smudged finger fell away from the intercom's switch. "Come on, kid. You know the moves, you're just refusing to watch the damn robot. It's not that hard. Get. Up."Oz's hands convulsed into fists. Joint by joint, he righted himself. He aimed his eyes at the dummy, taking it in, his eyes dark, hollow with an anger that he'd never known before. It lay quietly in him. Somehow it seemed patient, because it was so still, so calm. Oz wasn't used to anger. It wasn't his way. Sometimes it seemed as though he forgot what it felt like. Yet the anger in him was familiar. He thought it was determination. Maybe, this time, I'll be something."Position!" the intercom barked.He spread his feet apart, raised his fists.The green light on the dummy's chest flared crimson; the face flickered. Oz watched the hands, the ball-joints as they whirred and positioned it into a fighting stance. The first fist -- a blur of white, yet he saw it, the distance, it was coming for his face, he knew right away. All he had to do was tilt back -- more like jerk -- swing his head out the way. He felt a slight breeze push into his face as the dummy punched air.He didn't see the other fist.A collision in the lower back. Pain halved him; it seemed to split apart the vertebrae in a sudden explosion. He didn't even notice he had fallen until his nostrils flattened against the floor and his mouth was gaping open and his lungs were shuddering for air.The dummy straightened. Its light flashed green."UP."Oz stretched his fingers across the floor."Get. UP."He rolled his face onto his cheek so he could breathe. He saw the climbing bards, a few yards away. Always fell as he tried to climb them, again and again. People watched, but they wouldn't say anything. They could see the bruises on his face and arms from where he kept falling; the band-aid across the bridge of his nose. The sunken cheeks and eyes from his inability to eat and sleep. It already looked like he was in the arena.The wall of glass. The tributes that passed him by. He didn't have to see their eyes. He knew. You look like a crushed bug.Back in his bedroom, there was a drawing of one of his old characters. A rabbit. Crushed and dismembered in a shallow character, blood flowing freely from its facial orifices. He had drawn it without thinking, with the hopes it would make him laugh. Yet it hadn't.He saw the eyes of the people that passed him by. And he imploded.The anger in him lashed out and seized him and crushed him. It became him. He was no longer a broken thing on the floor, he was movement itself, he was a scream that burned his throat, he was a projectile slamming itself into the chest of this horrible, evil thing that hurt him and hurt him and hurt him. It laughed, and so Oz laughed with it, as the robot creaked backward and fell, rigidly, clattering, totally unaware. Laughed at the man barking over the intercom: "The fuck you think you're doing?! Don't you DARE touch that shit, it costs more than your fucking house, Niner! Get the hell out of my station, you little psycho!"He laughed and pointed his middle finger at the air, laughing happily, freely.