choir so heartfelt / krueger, day 8

[pogue]

G   A   M   B   L   E

He yells along with the chorus, Perry's cannon cutting through the clouds and a final reminder of the girl she once was, the person he took away. Krueger lays there for what feels like forever, set on his back and bleeding into the dirt, staining the once-green grass a sickening shade of crimson as he drowns in a pool of his own making. Perry collapses next to him, his spear bending under the pressure before it finally is forced from her skin with gravity and momentum, jagged blade taking with it a steel handful of muscle and sinew, stuck to it in bloody wet tissue and ribbons.

Odd, how he still holds the spear tight in his grasp, even though his wrist is bent at an awkward angle and discomfort nestles beneath the skin like poison. Odd, the voice in his head mocks him and the ghosts cackle from the distance. Bloody spear and bloody boy, his only true ally remaining is the only thing that could actually get him home, and the only true thing left to do is to kill one more time. He can't blame himself for holding the spear pointed towards Perry's neck, half-expecting her to suddenly stir and take him out, half-expecting him to join her in wherever she's gone, blood and loss and a mixture of the two.

But she doesn't, and that's the kicker. There's an irony somewhere in there, that when the yin to his yang falls to the left and breathes out one final gasp of bloody breath, crumbles into a cannon, he actually misses the banter they'd shared for a moment. He misses it like it's a sin, feels something new under his skin burn like treachery, memories of home and rugged conversations and venomous tongues flooding through to the front of his mind. Peregrine didn't feel like home, no, there was too much blood and too many newfound wounds to say that. But her words had, sharpened tongue and lashing insults and a hint of fulfillment coming out of it.

The arena responds in vicious kindness, dedicating new life to a blighted tombstone of a corpse. Petals and tulips spring out from underneath Perry's corpse, masking the blood stains left from his most recent blow, their delicate and ethereal nature betraying the bloodshed she leaves behind. He feels the blight that has rotted his skin echo and pulse underneath tissue paper flesh like it's hissing in response to the springing of life, comfort in the chaos. The flowers wilt when they reach him,one final act of insult, browned petals sticking to the blood on his skin and calling themselves roses.

Krueger lets his gaze drift up to the sky and watches it stare back like there's nothing left of him, clouded and distant and so far gone. He thinks it looks just like the irises of a long gone troupe, a held hand by candlelight, a shovel and a grave and sweat on the brow and an unmarked grave.

He only feels himself crying when they tears reach a half-healed wound on his cheek, leftover from Magi and it stings him, singes his flesh like fire. That might be the most hurtful thing, that even a show of his emotion is nothing but a newfound pain. The eyes, young and old and scattered across his body from tributes living and dead echo the sentiment of their host, tears well up at the edges of a hundred visions of blight and rot, then chart a path down the skin of a boy who never should have made it this long in the first place. Tears pull blood both dried and new down to the ground in scarlet roots, planting himself firm to the spot like a half-fledged burial, a massacre of his own making as he cries softly, sound taken by the wind before it can reach anything.

Bruiser would call him a wimp in a way that involved a lot more expletives, and he thinks Soleil would offer him comfort with a hand held just slightly too tight for comfort, and he thinks Shotgun would ball up his fists and tell him to meet him out back but never show because he never meant it, and he thinks Lady Light would call him gullible for thinking it was real, and he thinks half would agree and the other half wouldn't give a shit- caring in their own way.

The would, if they could, but they're not here anymore. He held their hands and watched the color fade from their cheeks, diluted with scarlet and lungs shaking in shallow chests and eyes gone grey, cloudy, gone... forever. He wishes their ghosts could trace the path of the tears from his form now, dry up his sins with fire and brimstone and everything in between until there is nothing left but a boy who wants to go home, all of the brutality and none of the baggage.

There's a part of him, though, starting small and growing larger each day, that not even their ghosts would want any part in the hurt he's caused. Maybe that's the ultimate punishment for a self-made martyr- to realize that all the wrongs you pledged yourself to have helped no one, that they never needed it in the first place. That they never wanted it, either.

He's seen too much death for a boy his age,
caused too much of it, too.

But what choice did I have? He thinks, only for a moment before he acknowledges it all, and a second voice confirms it.

Oh, don't play dumb.