the boy under the bell jar / karl, day 5

[tick 12a / calla]

k a r l .

"stewing in
my own
sour air."

It started with Calamity, and then it grew with Yael, and now it's fractured with Johnny.

Like this -

He sees Johnny, bleeding out and rasping on the edge of the rocks that Karl's dragged him to.

Mirage and Itzal don't follow them. They probably haven't deluded themselves the way Karl has. But he sees Johnny dying, and Johnny sees Karl holding his sword above him, and they come to an agreement.

Karl takes Johnny’s katana and slides it gently through his heart and makes the pain stop.

But the sound. It just

keeps going.

Even when the cannon’s officially gone off, and Johnny is lying there still, Karl can hear his heart beating, too loud to be an echo. It’s a steady badump-badump-badump that seems to settle right at the base of his skull, and it might truly be the first sign of him going insane.

He stumbles away from Johnny’s body badump-badump-badump and drops the sword somewhere along the way, breaking out into a run badump-badump-badump and it’s like it’s chasing him, he can feel it on the back of his neck and right on his heels and if he listens close enough he can hear the sound of beating hooves underneath the tempo.

He screeches to a halt when his running takes him back to the campsite.

To the tent.

To his bag in the tent.

He yanks it out from under the tarp, it's miraculously untouched under the scavenged mess of Johnny's things. Mirage and Itzal must have done that, and normally Karl would care more but badump-badump-badump he breaks out into full body tremors and upends his entire bag onto the ground.

Yael’s little paper crane flutters out, and then the rolls of bandages, and then the jar.

It hits the rocks with a thunk and a badump-badump-badump that sends Karl to his knees.

It never did sound quite right before.

It used to keep him up at night because of how unnatural it was. The heart left out every other beat, like it was only taking in the blood without releasing again. Now it’s familiar, now it’s badump-badump-badump and now Karl cradles it, even though the lump of flesh inside is dried and brown and rotting, he presses red fingertips to the glass and stares into it the way a small child wondrously stares into a fish tank.

"They're all gone." He whispers to the heart, and if he closes his eyes then the cool press of the glass against his forehead feels almost like Calamity's hand, "It's just you and me."

[gamemaker kelsier]

People often say you're all heart, but that's not quite true.

It'd be wrong to say that there's no heart in you at all of course, but you're also a jar. You're about ninety percent heart, ten percent jar. To be clear, you're a heart in a jar.

And you're rotting, rapidly.

Maybe it's the temperature, causing the quick decomposition of your ventricles, collapsing your arteries further than the lack of air, blood and life moving through them ever could.

Maybe it's the loss of it all.

They say time is a mother but in time a mother always becomes the crone, when everyone else has finally left her and she's grown gnarled with a sense of loss, twisted from hanging on so long. Fingers, crooked wrapped around too tight and choking, smothering, seeking out any last gasp of life until it's crushed and ruined too.

In fact, you, my dear heart, you're beyond that.

You're dead.

And should have been given up to The Mother days ago yet you remain, languishing in the confines of your jar, not even preserved properly, being shaken around in the bag of a boy who holds you like you are still so alive and still so precious.

But you'll never be that again.

You're a heart in a jar.

[tick 12a / calla]

k a r l .

"stewing in
my own
sour air."

"I think so too." He says to the heart.

It wasn't his fault. This thing inside him, it's not evil. It's growing, and it's carnivorous, but there's something gentle to it.

Little martyr; wounded lamb, there's a set of horses on the horizon, riderless, you've been turned into a harbinger.

The thing they never tell you about pestilence is that it's one of the only omens that can be completely silent. The people forget about it sometimes. It's as flashy as the others. It sits and it waits and they try to ignore it at first, but they can't. A cough turns into a hack turns into a lung on the ground turns into a heart in a jar.

"Okay." He opens his eyes, and the light slanting down the cliff face makes the red seem redder. "But you have to tell me what to do."

Calamity never give him the whole story. Just bits and pieces, badump-badump-badump, it's like putting a puzzle together except the pieces overlap and some of them don't fit at all and some of them grow legs and walk away when he's not looking.

"Really?"

He pulls away from the jar and wipes at the smudge his forehead leaves. It just turns the outside of the glass bloodier, the streaks of red block the light and turn the flesh inside a burnt shade of rot. Karl tucks it in close to his chest, so his own heartbeat fades back into an echo. He hunches his shoulders and curls himself around it like its something valuable.

It feels fragile when it's like this, talking to him like this, more tangible and breakable and oh so easy to lose. He sits with his chin tucked on the lid, arms wrapped around it, listening to the rhythm of it and finding the words in-between.

The horses get closer, impatient, and Aed materializes in a tumbling murky mess to let out a long series of creaks and groans, floating closer and closer and closer badump-badump-badump to the jar. Karl doesn't push it away this time, just lets it attach to the side of the glass and watches it start to flicker like a candle.

"Okay." Aed's light shines putrid and casts the three of them in a stuttering plague, it draws across Karl's face like a knife slash, across his throat like a breeze, "We can do that."

[gamemaker kelsier]

It's pathetic that no one ever held you like this in life, for how much you were promised, how much you were told you were beloved, you always lived apart.

Inside the encasings of a body, beneath a cage made of flesh and bone, that's where your place was but I'm not really speaking of you here.

I talk of the body that surrounded you, the life that you powered, the one that ended. You were both the same, seemingly untouchable, you in your spot beneath the skin, their's in place at their father's side at the head of a church. Lamb prostrated at the altar, but were they the knife or the offering?

Perhaps a person can be both.

But what do you know of such things? You're simply a heart in a jar, there's mold growing on the underside of the lid, there's a thin layer of liquid at the bottom of the jar that wasn't there before your being placed within. If one were to smell you, they'd throw you as far from them as they could, you're not even dead, you're past that.

It doesn't pay to hold onto things far gone as you.

But the boy clings to you like an anchor. You are the very last thing he has left in this world and that is pathetic too.

Maybe you belong together.

You tilt onto your left side with a gentle splat as he wraps his arms around you, rocking the two of you back and forth and if you had sentient thought, maybe you'd consider beating for him.

We've been over this though, you're a decomposing organ in a jar that was made last year in a factory in Nine before the industry change.

Inanimate, unfeeling.

But held.