What Sin is She Paying For? [South]

[Eastern Orange]

How long has it been since I left that place? Days? Weeks? Months? I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like that long ago… I can still feel his rough hands on my thighs and his slimy lips on my mouth. The Peacekeepers did nothing to help me. They stood at the cell door and watched. I tried so hard, so hard to get away. But where would I have gone? What were they thinking putting a male and female in the same cell? It’s like they wanted it to happen. My screams still tear at my throat and ring in my ears. My heart still beats erratically. I still feel him inside me. I feel dirty and worthless and unloved.

I feel used.

I don’t know how long I was in that cell, but everything is still sharp in my mind: the stink of sweaty bodies, human waste, and fear; the stagnant air that clung to you and stuck in your lungs; the rough stained concrete; the torture I endured, not by the hands of the peacekeepers, but by the hands of my cellmate. Everything stood out in vivid detail, blurring everything that proceeded my time there. I lived in constant fear and it was hard to imagine a place where I felt safe. There must have been somewhere right? Before that cell? There had to be. I just couldn’t find it anymore.

My windows were shuttered against the streaming sunshine, leaving my room murky and gray. I was balled in the corner staring at the wall across from me, trying my hardest to keep my mind from traveling back to those dark days. I examined the sketch I had just recently done. It was a boy I had never seen before…at least I hadn’t seen him outside of my shattered memories. He was about the age I was now, and he kinda looked like me. I felt love when I looked at the drawing, but I also felt sadness and a deep sense of urgent primal fear. I saw his face in my memory in that cell, while that boy did things. I saw him standing over me. I saw him handing me food. I saw him pushing me on the swing that’s out back. I saw him during various stages of my life. He was my brother. I have – had? –a brother. Why do I get such a mix of strange emotions when I see him?

You are scared. You have never been so scared in your life. Your father isn’t here to hold you. You saw and axe in his head. You mother is not here to smooth down your hair; you saw her being stabbed, stabbed, stabbed. You screamed. He hit you. A blow to the mouth. A blow to the stomach. You don’t scream anymore. He climbs on the bed with you and your dead parents. He pushes your nightgown past your hips. You want to look away but you can’t look left. That’s where your father is. You can’t look right lest you see your mother. The bed is sticky with their blood. He tells you that you deserve it for betraying him. He says it’s all your fault. You believe him.

You don’t even know the boy’s name. He never introduced himself. He just immediately went after you. He yanks you from the floor and pushes you against the concrete wall, shoving himself between your legs. Aren’t I lucky to be roomed with such a babe? He sneers at you and shoves his fingers in your mouth. They taste like sweat and blood. You bite down. He knees you in the stomach. After that he is especially rough with you. It hurts. You don’t fight back anymore. Over his shoulder you see the flashing smiles of peacekeepers standing in the doorway.

He keeps you locked in the cellar. He cuts you with knives and burns you with cigarettes. He rapes you. You have lost hope. He will kill you, and then himself. He tells you that as he lovingly slides a cold blade down your inner thighs. He forces himself on you for the hundredth time. You have learned to lay still.

Your cellmate is sleeping. You don’t feel any respite. It is just a matter of time before he wakes up and continues his abuse.

He hasn’t returned for a while now. You fear that he has left you down here to rot. You find yourself relieved.

He is awake now. He plays with your hair and takes pleasure at twisting your fingers. He breaks one of your fingers by accident. You scream in pain. He smiles at that and he breaks another one.

He didn’t leave you. He is back again. He runs his hands over your body, delighting when you shudder in fear. He hisses obscenities at you. Bitch. Slut. Whore. Cunt. He says you are worthless. You believe him.

He yanks your hair, pulling your head next to his. He whispers in your ear. Bitch. Slut. Whore. Cunt. He calls you worthless. You believe him.

The peacekeepers come and take him away. They take you to your aunt’s house.

The peacekeepers come and take you away. You arrive back at your aunt’s house.

I shivershakeshudder. It’s too overwhelming; I can’t make sense of my jumbled memories. It’s too hard. I can’t take it. I wrap my arms tightly around my legs and raise my blurry eyes to the drawing. I feel nothing for the strange face. I am empty. I can’t even comprehend what happened to me in my lost years. I can’t deal with it. Who was this person? No one to me. No one. What happened to my parents? Nothing. They hated me so they gave me up. What were these scars on my body? I feel out of a tree.

My shoulders are hiked up to my ears and scream in pain with how tight they are. My breathing is high and shallow and my head is absolutely pounding. I’m fine. I’m fine. Nothing happened. What happened in the cell was just a hallucination brought by stress.

I’m not tragic. I’m not.

I pull my arms in front of my face and grab onto my hair. A high keening sound scrapes its way up my throat, and I start to rock slowly, fast, faster. I slam my back against the wall, my cries hitching in my throat with each strike. Through my tears and a sliver a space between my arms, I see the drawing. It mocks me. His angular face captured in smooth confident strokes, his mouth an upturned line. A smirk. He is laughing at me. laughing With a feral scream, I toss myself across the room and slam my hands on either side of the drawing. “Who are you?!” I scream ferociously. It stares at me. “You are not my family! I don’t know you!” I screechwailsnarl. I bang on the wall, and with one swipe of my arms, I tear down the drawing, taking about five other drawings with it.

I am not done. I see him everywhere. He is everywhere in my drawings.

I run around chaotically shredding and tossing everything I come across, grunts of aggression and desperation pursuing me. Poems. Sketches. Intricate drawings that took days to complete. I tear down everything. Only once my walls have nothing but torn corners, and my floor is blanketed in paper snow, do I stop. I stand in the middle of the disaster, breathing heavily, and stare at the snatches of drawings and words peeking out between the mess. I still see him. I scream in frustration and run for the door. I throw it open to find a couple of the kids gathered around, attracted by the noise I was making. They look beyond me, at my room. They look at my wide eyes and haunted expression. They started to murmur to each other.

I push past them without looking at them. I have to get out! I can’t breathe. It’s like being trapped in that windowless cell again. I need the sky. I need the trees. I need to air. I trip down the stairs and fling myself down the hallway. I don’t look back when I throw open the door and run out. I head for the woods. I didn’t grab shoes, so my feet get cut and stabbed on various obstacles as I run. I trip and throw my hands out to catch my fall. I land hard. My hands are bleeding and my two broken fingers throb. I pick myself up again and feel stinging pain in my knees. They are bleeding too. I run faster.

For some reason, I ended up in the clearing with the swing. I fall to my knees in front of the swing and finally I break down into sobs. I wrap my arms around my stomach and scream with pain. I double over and dry heave (I haven't eaten in forever, there's nothing to throw up). Why did I come here? What was I hoping for? For the swing to not be here? That I imagined him putting it up, and thus imagined him? That was dumb; I had sat on it many times. What then? Proof? Proof that he was a good person? What brother would put up a swing for his little sister and then…

I fall to the side, and land face down on the ground. I clutch the grass, and taste dirt. My screams go on as loud as before, albeit a little muffled.

[/justify][/blockquote]

[Deleted]

{*| I'm skin and bone, just a king and rusty throne |*}

[/color]

When the world gets too heavy
Put it on my back, I'll be your levy
You are taking me apart
Like bad glue on a get well card[/size][/font]

I’ve never been strong.

You can spin it any way you like, but it’s pretty much a fact that I’m a weakling in every sense of the word – physically, mentally, emotionally – and that weakness has only grown worse since they brought Trogon and I home. How many days has it been (Two? Three? A million years?) since I’ve been unable to sleep even in my own bed, psychological scar tissue ten miles thick twisting and warping until I’m right back in my cell with nothing but that wide-eyed, silent girl from Five and Trogon’s screams from the next room over as company? I could have dealt with any of it, the isolation, the rotten food, the stench, but the screaming… It broke me.

I've never felt so helpless in my life as I did during those moments, curling up on the metal shelf that was supposed to be a bed and trying with all my might to just block it out, because in the end there was nothing I could do to help her and that knowledge drove me completely over the edge. Neither of us have been altogether right since we came back, jumping at little noises and wolfing down even Lauren's substandard cooking like it's gourmet stuff. And they all notice it. I don't miss the whispers, the odd looks, the way Trace pats me on the back with a nervous you okay, man? at least fifteen times a day. Every last person in this community home knows that something went down at the Detention center, something that made Trogon and I both dissolve into overly-fragile basket cases, but hey're all too scared to find out exactly what it was.

I don't blame them. I wouldn't want to know, either.

For some reason, I hung out at the cemetery a lot when we first came home. Maybe because no one bothered me there. As jovial as I usually am, I'm starting to get sick of everybody treating me like I'm made of glass when it's really Trogon they should be worried about (I may have been a captive witness, but she's endured so much more), and sometimes it drives me so far up the wall that I've just got to get outside and away from people. For once, I'm angry at everything, mad enough to shout and snarl and punch the living daylights out of something if I actually had the physical power to do it. But that person, that guy with all the rage and fear pent up inside, he's not me, or at least he wasn't until I got back from that hellhole. I'm not sure I even know myself anymore.

Which is why I went and talked to Lyd. Sure, prattling on to my dead sister for hours every day probably didn't appear to be what was best for my mental health, but it kept me grounded, helped me get back pieces of who I used to be a little at a time. All the smiles were still fake and all the laughs were still contrived, but at least there was a faint blossom of hope that one day things might be somewhere close to normal again. Jessa went with me at first, still carrying on with those vacant smiles and false affirmations that Lydia's still here, she's not gone, but even she gave up on me after I finally blew up at her (it's something I regret more than almost anything I've ever done) and yelled that she was dead, dammit, she was dead and it was my fault just like every other bad thing in my life. I didn't go back to the cemetery after that.

Lately I've just been holed up in my room trying to keep myself from having a complete meltdown. Lauren keeps saying that I should maybe try using my photography as an outlet, but the basement that serves as my darkroom is too dank and dark and disturbingly familiar for me to be down there for any prolonged amount of time. So I find other things to occupy my time. I read, I attempt doodles that come out as pathetic stick figures, I mess around with Trace's guitar until I can coax a few tentative chords out of it. Anything to keep me busy, keep my mind away from that dark place it inevitably reverts to when there's nothing else going on.

I'm sitting on my bed folding one of the most god-awful, lopsided paper airplanes on the face of the planet when the door slams open, the sudden noise making me jump at least a foot off the mattress. For the briefest second I think of metal clangs and dull thuds and Peacekeepers coming to beat the hell out of me for no reason, but then I see Trace in the doorway, eyes wide as saucers and face drained of color. "Dude, Trogon's having some sort of freakout. The others said to come get you, that you'd know what to do."

Before he's even done speaking I've shouldered past him and out into the hallway, following the murmur of a large group of voices until I'm left standing among the group that surveys the carnage in (what's left of) Trogon's room. This isn't the first time she's had a moment of hysteria, but this is so much worse than the others that I have to suck in a deep breath as I glance at the chaotic explosion of ripped paper in the empty room. "Jesus, what a mess. What the hell happened?"

One of the younger ones, a Doe-eyed eight-year-old named Kari, shuffles to the front of the group with her face still a mask of shock. "She started yelling. And then we heard a bunch of crashes, and then she ran off. That way."

"Okay, thanks. I'll go get her." I take the stairs two at a time and rocket out the front door, wondering how much of a head start Trogon could have gotten while everyone was standing around looking stupid and trying to figure out what to do. Thankfully she's left a pretty obvious trail of mayhem in her wake, broken branches and uprooted undergrowth that only takes me a few minutes to follow into the clearing with the swing. When I find her, she's a bloody, dirty, hysterical mess, curled up on the ground and shrieking like the world is coming to an end (silly girl, our world ended weeks ago in damp cells with screams and misery as a backdrop).

I've never been strong.

But I'd like to think that I'm a decent enough actor to make people believe otherwise, and as I scoop Trogon up into my arms for the millionth time since we got home, fingers lacing through her tangled hair, I start to think that maybe one day if I act well enough I might even be able to fool myself. "Shh, sweetie, it's okay, calm down, there's nothing that's going to hurt you. I've got you. Just breathe. You'll be all right."

It was always you falling for me
Now there's always time calling for me
I'm the light blinking at the end of the road
Blink back to let me know

[Eastern Orange]

Aren't you tired of being weak?
Such rage that you could scream,
All the stars right out of the sky
And destroy the prettiest starry night.
Every evening that I die.

I couldn't hear anyone approaching over my sobs, so when I felt arms encircle me, I started screaming with a renewed vigor and thrashing around like a fish caught in a net. For an instant, I was back in that cell with that boy holding me against him as his hands groped my body. I’m screaming ‘no’, and struggling against my captor, pushing to get away, but then I hear his voice whispering in my ear, and I deflate like a balloon.

Denver has found me somehow. I don’t know how, but he did. Did I want him to? No, certainly not. Have I avoided him recently? Yes, yes I have. I’m not stupid. I’ve seen how… that place has affected him. He been different. He isn’t that smiley, carefree guy anymore and it’s because of me. It just kills me to see how distressed he is. I can’t be around him. I can’t do it; not knowing who he used to be is gone. I don’t like this new Denver, he honestly scares me. He looks like a cable that is wound so tight that it might snap at any moment and decapitate everyone in the vicinity, including me. When will all this pain (that I cause) be too much for him? When will he snap (and leave me)?

I wanted to push him away. I didn’t want him to be here while I had my mental break down because I knew how much pain it caused him. But I’m selfish. I could already feel his embrace soothing me like some miracle drug, effectively calming my shaking into shivers and quieting my keening into low whimpers. I sit up in his arms and wrap my arms around him, laying my head against his chest. His thrumming heart beat jumps in my ear, pulling me back into present day and away from morbid memories, while his body heat worked the chill out of my bones.

The initial shock of the memories has worn off by now, and I don’t feel so overwhelmed. In fact, I feel kind of detached from the world. I pull back from Denver and look down at my forearm, running a thumb over the one circular, puckered scar that was directly in the middle of my wrist. I had always deluded myself into thinking that it was some bizarre puncture wound, but now there was no denying it. It was a cigarette burn, one of many scars, given to me by my own brother. His torture had spanned days, but I don’t know how long. It could have been two or three days, it could have been months, but I didn’t get that much information out of my murky memory. It still felt as if they were being blocked, the brunt of the emotions and pain I must have felt back then, were being held back, like water by a dam. But it seemed to me that the dam was breaking, and I shudder to think what is going to happen to me when that wall of water comes crashing down. I will most certainly drown at this rate.

I look up at Denver and search his eyes, looking for answers that couldn’t possibly be there. How could he know anything? But I looked nevertheless. Of course I didn’t find my answers, but what I did find was distracting enough to mercifully pull my mind away from myself (I was more than willing to go). What I found was a boy struggling to keep his head above water in this chaotic world I have thrust him into, tired, downtrodden, lost, angry. I knew he has been different since we got back, but I had forgotten how much, wrapped up in my own misery. I feel my desperation bubbling up to the surface, and place my hands on either side of his face, gently sweeping my thumbs over his eyes as if I could wipe away all those nasty feelings and return the laughter to them. I tip his head forward and place my forehead against his.

“Denver.” I whimper, torn between confiding in him and keeping him safe from more of my fucked up life. “I’m so sorry.” I sob, fresh tears spill down my cheeks, but this time I’m crying for slowly strangling the happiness out of Denver. It was so much easier when I was alone, but the thought of ever going back to those days terrifies me. “I never meant for this to happen. I never wanted to drag you down with me. I’m so scared you’ll hate me for everything I put you through,” I drop my head to his shoulder, and add in a whisper, “…and that you already do.”

Denver is my only confidant. When we came back, and he held me as I shook at night, I decided that I could trust him. I just don’t care about getting hurt anymore. What I endured in that cell (and what I went through so many years ago) probably trumps anything I will come across in the future, so I figure I can afford to be a little reckless. But now I see that maybe confiding in Denver, won’t be what’s best for him. I’m aware that he must have heard my screams at that place; we were right next to each other, but haven’t talked about it. But I think that I need to talk about it. I can’t stand dealing with it alone anymore, and now with this brother shit on top of it, I feel like I’m going to implode and just become a black hole. I can't keep all these slithering dark emotions bottled up.

I lived through hell in that fucking cell, and I’m so tired at being dragged through life by one unfortunate event after another. I’m done. Done, you hear me? I’m going to find happiness whether it wants me to or not, and I’m hauling Denver along with me.

I look back up at Denver with a new resolve hardening my spine, and the tears drying in my eyes. Tears have never gotten anyone anywhere (I would know). “You know what? I’m absolutely sick of being one of those girls.” I say fiercely, all that pain and fear channeled into a more useful emotion. “A girl who just sits around and cries and cries. I didn’t used to be that girl, Denver. Granted, what I was wasn’t much better, but at least I wasn’t some crappy damsel.” I feel this new energy boiling through my veins, invigorating me. I give a short bark of laughter. “It took being arrested to wake me up.” I say bitterly. That’s when I decide that it would be more detrimental to dance around the subject of what happened to me in the cell. We had to face it, and it would best if we did it together.

I take a deep breath, and jump right in. “While we were at the Detention Center, I was raped, and then psychologically and physically tortured." My voice cracks a bit one the word 'rape', and I have to look away for a second, but I gain control over myself and continue with more determination than before. "You were just a cell away, weren't you? You could probably hear me...screaming. I can see how much you hated that, but it wasn't your fault, Denver. There was nothing you could possibly have done to help me.” I try to give him a small, reassuring smile and press my hand to his cheek. My smile dips into a frown. "There’s more.” I say nervously. ”I-I just remembered today...It's happened before. When I was younger. I was raped by my brother, and I was tortured then, too." I lapse into silence, thinking about what I saw. "He killed my parents." I say quietly, more to myself than him. I looking down once more. A tear plops down onto my leg.

I had always known that my parents were dead. I knew that. But to see them like that (for the first time ever), bloody, mangled, and murdered by their own son, was a shock. I had always thought they had died, I don’t know, less violent deaths than that: illness, old age, whatever. Anything would have been better, and the fact that they were murdered while sleeping, with me right there…it was just too much. I could feel myself teetering once again on the brink of hysteria, those memories threatening to pull me within their grasp once again. I look up a Denver and take one of his hands in both of mine, squeezing it tight. I was able to pull myself up again.

“What is wrong with my life? There must be a reason this happens to me. Look what happened to you because you got too close! My life is a poison. It literally destroys everything it envelops. What sins have I committed? What have I done wrong?” I ask, my voice edged with anguish. Hot tears ran rivers down my cheeks. “I’ve done nothing to deserve this life.” I sniffle, and wipe one of my cheeks, scrubbing away the tears. “But I also have done nothing to deserve a better life. And I think it’s time I changed that. I just want to be happy for once in my life. I told you all of that, because I want to move on from all this, and I can't do that if I just hold it all inside. I don’t care about any of it anymore.” I say fervently, wanting to believe it. “It’s in the past; I can’t do anything about it now. I don’t even care about my missing childhood. Let’s just move on!” I say desperately.

“What do you say, Denver?” My voice is softer, almost pleading (pleading for him to come back to me). “Do you want to be happy with me?” I don’t even need an answer. “I’ve been wanting to do this since forever, and I’ve been too scared. Well, not anymore.” I wrap my fingers around Denver’s collar and yank him forward, smashing my lips into his. I feel myself soften considerably against him, and my arms move up around his neck. The kiss momentarily puts me back in that dark place with my cellmate, but I stave that off with a knife, and put that much more effort into kissing Denver.

[/justify]

After all these images of pain, have cut right through you,
I will kiss every scar, and weep you are not alone...
Then I'll show you that place in my chest where my heart
Still tries to beat.
It still tries to beat.

[/blockquote]
[/center]

[Deleted]

{*| Strike me down with lightning, let me feel you in my veins |*}

[/color]

Today is a winding road
That's taking me to places that I didn't want to go
Today in the blink of an eye, I'm holding onto something
And I do not know why I try[/size][/font]

If there's anything that can turn me into something beyond the fragile, useless thing I've become, it's seeing Trogon cry. Seeing anyone cry, really. Sorrow that deep has the power to make me forget about myself for a few blissful seconds (life is so much easier outside of my own freshly warped mind), make me drop all the confusion and hurt and anger for something at least a little more constructive. So even though it's a horrible way to think, I'm almost a little relieved when I feel hot-salty moisture gradually soaking its way into the fabric of my shirt, little reminders of exactly how messed up and broken the two of us have become sliding down the planes of elegant cheekbones and making themselves my burden for the umpteenth time. This is comfort. This is something I can do, I reassure myself silently as fingers work their way into soothing strokes of her hair and I start putting her back together again (because even trying to reconstruct myself is futile).

Even though being her reassurance has been my job for God-knows-how-long, those little whimpered insecurities threaten to tear me in half because I'm not like that, I would never be that person she imagines will leave her in the dust because the weight of carrying her troubles as well as my own will become too heavy one day. I sigh, squeezing her a bit tighter than I probably should (sometimes I'm terrified of breaking her) and bringing her closer under the sparse shade of the overhanging trees. "Don't talk like that. How could I possibly hate you? None of this is your fault."

It's a mantra I've repeated at least a million times over the past weeks, but the truth still stubbornly refuses to go anywhere but in one ear and out the other, making Trogon start drowning in that swirling mess of twisted self-loathing that I always feel so helpless to stop. If there's one thing the girl does with consistency, it's blame herself for absolutely everything, including things that couldn't even possibly be her fault. And then my own feelings of inadequacy begin to gnaw at me when I can't convince her that she's anything other than a horrible person (she must be the most stubborn girl on Earth to not see how damned beautiful she really is), making us both dissolve back to that darkness that constantly threatens to consume the both of us, that place where neither of us are good enough.

No matter what I do, I can never seem to find the right words to say to her, and it infuriates me to no end. Words have always been something that I've had a mastery over, little things that I could weave together into something that could be molded and used for any purposes I intended. Someone told me once that I had a master manipulator lurking under the nice-guy facade. I laughed at them, albeit very uncomfortably. The truth has a habit of making me uncomfortable nowadays. But Trogon... she has this unintentional (at least I hope it's unintentional) way of robbing any coherent words that I would say, leaving me with my duties of keeping her somewhat emotionally stable while dealing with an ever-growing tidal wave of my own unexpressed feelings that scream and clamor for a release I can't give them without the proper articulation.

Damn it, I love her too much for it to be healthy.

And I wish I could just leave it at that, make it clean and short and simple. But nothing with Trogon is ever simple, I've at least learned that much over the past few months of my life. Being in love with her comes with responsibilities that I would have never imagined, juggling her problems with the Alters that I can never tell her about for fear that she'll spiral into another breakdown, wondering whether keeping her past a secret from her is the right thing to do, putting my own issues aside time after time after time in favor of attempting to alleviate hers (and when I think like that I want to kick myself for being such a selfish bastard), putting up with the fact that half the time she seems to truly hate me, knowing that she has no idea of the power she has over me... I shouldn't want this. I shouldn't be in love with someone who has the potential to utterly destroy me from the inside out, but I am, and the really big problem is that I wouldn't change it for the world.

Guess I'm just a masochist.

Something has to be wrong with me for me to be so willing to jump headfirst into something that will never work, even at the cost of my heart (mind, body, soul, everything I have is completely hers and I almost hate it). Until now self-preservation had always been my top priority - hell, I let my mother and sister die because I was scared of getting hurt - but all of a sudden I'm willing to throw myself off the top of a building just to see Trogon smile, and something underneath this haze of feelings I'm not sure I want tells me that I'm setting myself up to get knocked down. Hard.

I feel like I've been punched in the stomach when she starts actually going into detail of what happened in the Detention Center, of the memories that it triggered, how it unlocked her past (does she want me to hurt the way she does? Maybe. Probably. Every masochist has a sadist that loves their pain as much as they do). It's like there's this sick exchange that makes her pain mine but still doesn't allow either of us to heal, and moments like these make me wonder if fate just chose the pair of us to shoulder the weight of all the world's misfortunes at once. The words are gone again (they disappear more and more often lately), leaving me mute and scrambling for something, anything I could possibly do to take that haunted look out of her eyes and lock it up somewhere dark where neither of us will ever find it again.

It almost feels wrong when she talks about happiness and rebuilding our lives (happiness and the two of us will never go together and I've finally begun to accept it), but the fiery determination that gradually replaces that lost, gone look that always reminds me too much of Jessa on a bad day actually makes the ghost of what might grow up to be a smile one day bloom across my face. My hand squeezes hers back with that same familiar pressure of the both of us clinging to each other in order to stay afloat in this upside-down-inside-out hell of an existence, and something in the back of my mind whispers to me that maybe one day everything might stand a chance of being okay.

And then she's kissing me. Trogon's always been what some people would call... well... volatile, but random outbursts of physical affection aren't her typical mode of operation and the action is so utterly shocking at first that I can only sit here wide-eyed and dumbfounded and asking myself if this is seriously happening. I guess this isn't technically the first time we've kissed (I think back to that time where Morrigan tried to jump me and can't decide whether to be terrified or entertained at the memory), but it's the first time that Trogon's really been herself, and the fact that she's (hopefully) fully aware of what she's doing is enough to make me shake off the vague sensation that I must be dreaming and actually kiss her back.

It's not gentle or even overly romantic, like those symphonically-underlined kisses in the rain that Lauren likes to watch on her Capitol soap operas; there are no fireworks in the background or waves crashing on the shore, and that warm fuzzy feeling that I'm supposed to have feels a bit more like there's something trying to claw its way out of my chest. It's intense, maybe what some people would call passionate, more a physical manifestation of both of us trying to assure the other that I'm still here, I'm never leaving as two sets of hands take turns mapping out the angles of torsos and faces and the intricate twists of wind-tossed hair. And for the first time since they dragged the two of us back from that hellhole, I start to feel like myself again.A little less angry, a little more lighthearted, and when we finally break apart, the words are there, and I'm all too happy to finally say them. "I don't know if you already knew this or not, Trogon, but I'm sort of madly in love with you. And if you want to be happy with me, then all I can say is that we should go for it."

I hate myself just a little for the hesitation that hitches in my throat behind the statement, for that little inkling in the dark corners of my consciousness that whispers to me that it will never work out the way we want it to. It will, even if it takes blood, sweat, tears and ultimately destroying ourselves so we can start anew.

I would happily take the fall if she was by my side.

Tried to read between the lines, tried to look in your eyes
I want a simple explanation, what I'm feeling inside
Gotta find a way out, maybe there's a way out
And your voice was the soundtrack of my summer