Thnks Fr Th Mmrs [South]

[Eastern Orange]

It had been weeks since that scene at the training center, and still I was too ashamed to face her. I had… I had attacked Corinne when she grabbed my wrist in that alley. Her hands had been claws, and when I looked at her face I had seen lupine eyes and a mouth full of jagged teeth. The next thing I knew my fist was connecting with her face, and I was unleashing blow after blow to her grotesque body. It wasn’t until she stopped moving did my vision clear and I was able peel my shaking hands from the pale skin of her throat which had been covered with shaggy fur only seconds before. I had stared down, slack-jawed, at the sight of her bloody, mangled form, not really comprehending what I had just done. Then I heard the rattle of her breath, and knew that she needed medical attention and fast.
I only waited around long enough to make sure that she was getting help before I bolted. I couldn’t face what I had done.

I didn’t go back to the training center, I didn’t go to school the next day, hell, I didn’t even leave my room. I decided that I needed time to…acclimate myself. When I had gone to the training center I was fresh out of the psych ward. Of course I had lost my shit like I had. Anybody would have been stressed. I should have waited, relaxed, savored my freedom, but I hadn’t and someone had paid dearly for my mistake.

My parents had allowed me a three week grace period. Just twenty one days to get my shit together. It hadn’t been enough.

I looked up at the cream-colored building in front of me, feeling slightly queasy. School. The bane of all children everywhere. I struggled in vain to rein in my galloping heart as I took unsteady steps toward hell. I took deep breathes, trying to sooth myself. I hadn’t had such a terrible time in school, right? I was popular. I had oodles of friends, and every girl swooned when I looked at them. I wasn’t bullied or hated. What was I worrying about? Ha! I would have a great time, right? Right?!

Who the fuck was I kidding? Even before I left for the hospital I was abandoned by everyone. I’m not that bright, social butterfly anymore. I was the schizo freak. I wasn’t bullied before, but I would be now. Well, maybe they wouldn’t bully me, but they’d avoid me, be afraid of me, pity me. I just had to keep my head down, maybe no one will notice me and this won’t be so bad.

I took a deep breath and pushed open the door. I must have put more force into it than I meant to, because it flew open and banged loudly against the wall. Every eye in the crowded lobby turned my way. Blood flooded my cheeks, and I gulped. Kids stared openly, but I didn’t see recognition, just curiosity. Why would they? It was a big school, and I had been gone for over a year. I was silly to think that people would recognize me. Sure some of my friends would, but not the whole damn school.

That’s when the whispers stared. It started somewhere toward the back, and spread around the room like rapid fire. ”Gossamer Harlow.” “Isn’t that the schizo?” “I heard he had a freak out at the training center.” “He beat the crap out of two other Careers.”

Yep. This was going to be fun.

The whispers followed me down the hallway. I didn’t turn my head and look at them, just stared at the shoes of the people in front of me. If I looked at them I was afraid they would turn into monsters, and I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from hurting them. The floor below my feet undulated and shifted colors. I felt sick. The press of bodies from all sides stole the air from my body and I was sure I was going to snap, or at the very least throw up.

Then the bell rang for class, and the hallway cleared instantly. I was left in the middle of an empty hallway, sweaty and gasping for air. I fell against the lockers and tipped my head back, trying to stop the hallway from spinning. That’s when heard a locker slam. I jumped and looked down the hall toward the noise, only to see a girl making her way toward me. Wait. Not just any girl. Corinne. Oh shit. My eyes widened at the bruises still present on her skin. I gulped, suddenly wishing that the hallway was filled to the brim with people again.

[Deleted]

I don't want to change the world
I just want to leave it colder
Light the fuse and burn it up
Take the path that leads to nowhere[/size]

The fading heliotrope fingerprints around her neck paint a story that people are too eager to hear, and they absolutely burn shame whenever Corinne is in the presence of other human beings. They speak of things that previously she had never even allowed herself to think about - defeat, submission, weakness - and maybe, she thinks, this is karmic retribution for her years spent handing out the same treatment unmercifully to others. But even in the aftermath of that... incident, mercy still isn't in her vocabulary. No, at her core she's still a stone-hearted statue of icy rage at a world that's never been fair, and that's why even though the motion pulls uncomfortably at a split lip that hasn't quite healed, she feels her lips pull back over shinybright teeth in a feral snarl when she shuts her locker (hard, a metallic clanging slam to cover the whispers and snickers that follow her through the hallways nowadays) and spies a telltale flash of white-blonde at the end of the hall.

He has stolen everything from her in a flurry of fists and rage that neither of them can justify. Her reputation, her fragile spun-glass structure of self confidence, her identity itself, all that used to be solid in her existence that has gone from cold but steady to frigid and utterly uncertain - Gossamer Harlow has swept it all out of her grasp with a few well-placed hits and strength she'd never have expected from him (had he really been holding back all those years? Letting her win time after time after time? Why?), and Corinne feels rage swelling with hurricane force when her own deepdarkangry gaze locks onto his rightfully frightened icy blue. Revenge and retribution sing a siren song in her veins that makes her heart hammer painfully against ribs still not fully healed from the trauma and her fingers curl into fists so tight that her nails furrow sharp crescents into the heels of her palms. Something fuzzy in the back of her mind hums apprehension as she advances on him with malicious intent preceding her in a palpable wave - after all, he did this to her once, who's to say he won't do worse with no one around to stop him? - but Corinne shrugs it off, assured that the combined forces of wounded pride that still stands tall and a rage that could consume them both if she let it will be more than enough to protect her (darling, you can't put armor around the part of you that he really hurt. A shattered heart is not so easily mended).

"So, they're letting you out among the general populace now?" she hisses, coming to a stop a few feet away from him, shoulders set firmly even though the shift in posture makes her tender ribs scream protest in painful twinges that wrap around her torso. Corinne won't tell him the details, won't tell him how her father won't even look her in the face anymore, how she hasn't even bothered asking for her medicine in weeks when she knows she won't receive it, how Neva looks at the necklace of bruises she wears like a badge of dishonor and laughs with a haughty smile painting her perfect features. She won't tell him how she's had to leave class or training or the dinner table when she feels the tremors start at the back of her neck, how she's been running (from everything) to corners and dark closets to wait out the seizures that no one can ever know about because she brings enough shame on her family as it is, all of it his fault for baring her weakness to the world and drawing her parents' displeasure enough to make them withhold her medication. She won't tell him about the taunts that follow her wherever she goes, the jeering celebration of everyone who's been waiting for years to see her knocked off the pedestal she so painstakingly climbed to, the laughter in their eyes making her long fall back to the bottom seem infinite. And she certainly won't tell him about the odd feeling that wails a quiet lamentation somewhere deep in her chest when she looks at him - things like betrayal and heartbreak and loss are foreign to a girl of stone who trusts no one and loves no one, or so she thought - and then feels the dull thrum of pain from a million injuries that have yet to heal, reminds herself that he did this, that the nubile hope she'd cradled close to her chest that maybe someone could put her back together one day has been crushed by the very boy that had sparked it in the first place.

No, Corinne won't give him the details. She won't tell him all the things that catch in her throat and writheclawscream for release. Instead, she stands eerily still like the statue she is and lets the full force of her hate (and something else that's far more frightening) smolder quietly in his direction as she fights tooth and nail against the salty-hot weakness that licks liquid fire in a haze across black-brown orbs that hold too much for her shell that is perhaps more fragile than she'd even admit to herself. Afraid of breaking again, she decides to keep it short and not so sweet, taking everything that burns in her eyes and bruises and in the air she tries to breathe and summing it up in the simplest of utterances. After all, bluntness has always been her forte.

"You ruined my fucking life, Harlow, and I will never forgive you."

All is lost again, but I'm not giving in
I will not bow, I will not break
I will shove the world away
I will not fall, I will not fade[/size]

[Eastern Orange]

T H I N K I N G | S P E A K I N G | L I S T E N I N G
A U D I T O R Y H A L L U C I N A T I O N S / V I S U A L H A L L U C I N A T I O N S

I flinch back against the locker as her words lash out across the space she’s put between us and hits me like a slap in the face. "So, they're letting you out among the general populace now?" Actually, I think a slap would have hurt less. “Um, I wasn’t locked up again…It was self-imposed.” I knew she was being rhetorical, but I had to say something to that, didn’t I? I couldn’t quite meet her eyes. Every time my eyes would travel to her face, they’d slide by, seemingly of their own accord, often times coming to rest on a red blotch of paint on the wall beyond her shoulder. I stared hard at it, trying not to think, see, smell, hear, feel: basically trying to fade into oblivion. I just wanted to get this encounter over with.

I hadn’t expected facing Corinne so soon. I mean, I just stepped into the building, and I just happened to run across her? Like…What the fuck? The universe just hates you. It’s as simple as that. My reaction to that voice is immediate. The blood drains from my face, and I suck in a terrified breath. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. It’d been a days since I’d heard the voices! Fear spiked through my chest, which was smothered in the feeling of crushing disappointment. I know it’s stupid, but after a few days of silence, I had hoped I was getting better…

Idiot. You’ll never be free from us. I hear an evil snicker, and a second voice joins the first. What would you do without us? We are all you have. You can’t trust anybody else. Take the girl, for instance. She practically forced you into beating the shit out of her. On purpose. She’s coming for some kind of…payback. She wants something.

I tried to push that thought away. I didn’t want to think that Corinne was going to ask for some kind of compensation; she wasn’t that kind of girl. Or at least, she hadn’t been. She could be a completely different girl than who I feel in love with a year ago. I haven’t had a chance to really talk to her since I came back, have I? She’ll never love you. No one will. You are a worthless piece of shit. I had to bite my tongue to stop myself from snarling. No that isn’t true. Without even realizing it, I lifted a hand to my chest, and rubbed over where my heart was, as if it’s words had caused the organ pain.

"You ruined my fucking life, Harlow, and I will never forgive you."

Her words tear my eyes from the red splotch on the wall, forcing them to her face. Inside my head the voices are cackling, their mirth radiating through my body. Good Job, Gosser. You showed the pretty princess that she wasn’t so perfect. Maybe now she won’t be such an icy bitch, and you can finally get in her panties. Think they’ll be frilly pink lace? No, leather. She is definitely one of those girls.

“Shut up.” I hiss. I grind my teeth, sending shooting pains across my jaw and skull. I had been addressing the voice, but you know what? It worked for Corinne too. She wasn’t going to blame me. Yea, I had did the fighting, but who had done the provoking? “It was one fight, Brightman. Jesus, I didn’t think you were such a…girl. Did I complain to you when you broke my collarbone for no reason but to show that you could? You wanted a fight. Well, you got it. The only reason you are mad is because I didn’t let you win this time. Just go lick your fucking wounds like the dignified ice queen you are, and leave us peasants to our lesser existence.” The bitterness I felt was a sick and sour thing at the back of my throat that brought tears to my eyes and threatened to upturn my stomach.

Maybe this was misdirected anger, maybe it wasn’t. At the moment I wasn’t sure if I actually believed anything I was saying, or if I was saying them just because I wanted to feel something besides defeat and listlessness. Anger felt good after the past few weeks of depression.

Thing was, I wasn’t done.

An ugly sneer twists my lips. “And you think I ruined your life? Ha! That’s priceless! You didn’t have a life to ruin, hun. Come on, you have, like, no friends. ” I laugh cruelly. “As for your forgiveness…Shove it up your ass, if it can even fit with the stick that’s lodged up there.” I give a bark of a laugh. I feel a spark of something fiery in my chest, but then it’s gone, replaced with vast amounts of self loathing that makes my want to go get shit faced.

[Deleted]

You make your way in
I resist you just like this
You can't tell me to heal
The truth never set me free
So I did it myself

She doesn’t know quite what to expect from him (Apologies? Condolences? Promises that he doesn’t intend to keep?), but no matter what fragile fantasy of how this encounter might have gone that ran on endless loop in her mind for days on end, none of them included the razor-edged bite of words just as inflammatory – more so, even – as her own, cutting through the space of the locker-lined corridor and sinking into her skin with red-hot precision. Corinne clings to stability and shuns change with every considerable amount of vehemence she has in her, and the knowledge that Goss Harlow isn’t that boy anymore (the one who would probably just roll his eyes at her fury, call her a drama queen, and ask where she wanted to eat lunch that day) feels vast and overwhelming, like drowning in a sea of unspoken regrets and a million things she’d never been weak (brave) enough to say, and she feels even closer to breaking now than she did moments ago. For some reason, the snarled verbal abuse is even more of an indicator that he’s no longer the same person than the healing damage that paints her skin in mottled purpleblackblue tragedies.

“And you think I ruined your life? Ha! That’s priceless! You didn’t have a life to ruin, hun. Come on, you have, like, no friends. ” Each word hits like another punch to the gut, robbing her of air and twisting her stomach into knots because as much as she lies to herself, Goss has never lied to her. At least something about their dynamic hasn’t changed. The unwanted truth settles hard and blazing in a tight knot in the center of Corinne’s chest, a searing sort of pain radiating outward from it as if one of her ribs has somehow found a way to re-fracture itself. She knows, she knows, she knows she’s alone in this world now that he’s gone, so why is he twisted enough to drag up the fact just to watch her squirm? Corinne is cold, cruel even, won’t argue with someone if they deem it necessary to call her on it, but she knows with a heavy certainty that she isn’t a sadist. And this, what Goss is doing, throwing verbal jabs with malicious precision into every chink in her armor, this is nothing short of sadistic, opening wounds she can’t let bleed freely because she doesn’t know how to, lacks the understanding of things like giving in or letting herself fall for once. He seems to almost delight in it, watching her struggle to breathe through lungs constricted by bruised ribs and a heart of stone with a chisel driven right to the core, and Corinne wonders what she’s done to deserve this even though she knows exactly what the answer is (I can’t believe I was stupid enough to fall for someone like you rings like a funeral dirge in her head and she wants to whispercryscream that It’s not my fault, I can’t be what you want even if it’s what I want too, you can’t possibly understand). “As for your forgiveness… Shove it up your ass, if it can even fit with the stick that’s lodged up there.”

“I… you… this is… fuck you,” Corinne hisses venomously, the lung-flooding pain warping into icy-sharp fury that licks sinuously along her veins and pulls her lips back over her teeth in a feral expression that is more animalistic than human. “You don’t know shit, you don’t know a damn thing about what I’ve been dealing with since that day. I’m a fucking laughingstock, I can’t go to school or training or even sit in my own damned bedroom without someone coming up and giving me a ration of shit. Don’t think I don’t see your stupid little game, Harlow. You’re just a whiny, butthurt little baby who threw a tantrum because I wouldn’t go out with you, and you trashed my life because of it. And I am done with your shit, you got me? I –“

The phantom tingles across the back of her neck whisper a silky almost-warning to her rage-fogged mind, tiny electric impulses prickling over her skin and up her spine until they wrap her brain in a sudden onset of dizziness. Corinne sways on her feet, a slender palm unclenching from its tight fist and pressing shakily over her forehead. She can see the tiny tremors dancing along her fingers, can feels the fuzziness settling over her mind, and underneath all of it an sharp stab of panic digs palpably into her consciousness. She has a minute, maybe less before it all goes dark and she’ll be powerless as to who sees her, and she knows full well by now that if her father withheld her medicine for losing a fight at training that he’d kill her for letting their family’s dirty little secret out into the public eye – Corinne’s used to being a source of shame by now, but only recently has she begun to wonder if she actually deserves to be.

“I… I need to go.” Her voice sounds garbled and far-away, as if she’s hearing it from under several feet of water, and the effort of wrapping her lips around the words is enough to send the world tilting on its axis again, the floor snapping to a sharp angle in her cloudy perspective and making her stumble as she tightens her grip on the straps of her backpack and shuffles with all the speed she can muster down the nearest hallway. Darkness eats teasingly along the edges of her vision and her hands are almost shaking too hard to function by the time they grasp the doorknob of a supply closet, yanking it open and stumbling inside. Corinne can hear every breath rattling weakly in her lungs as she shuts the door with a final-sounding slam, jittery fingers dancing over the cool metal surface of a shelf before finding a screwdriver and clasping the handle between her teeth (the last time she’d blacked out before she could get something in her mouth and had woken up to a mouth full of blood and a very sore tongue) as she slumps against the cold cement surface of the wall. She thinks fleetingly and inexplicably of Goss, probably still standing out in the hallway wondering what the hell just happened, and the world spirals away to blackness before she has time to wonder why he’s on her mind at all.