let's be {alone} together :: kolt

[Deleted]

[bg=0a161e][atrb=border,0,true][atrb=cellSpacing,0,true][atrb=cellPadding,0,true][atrb=width,500,true][atrb=style,width: 500px; -moz-border-radius-bottomleft: 10px; border-radius-bottomleft: 10px; -moz-border-radius-bottomright: 10px; border-radius-bottomright: 10px; opacity: 1;] put another "x" on the calendar summer's on its deathbed there is simply nothing worse than knowing how it ends and i meant everything i said that night i will come back to life, but only for you .:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:. two months, one week, three days, five hours, twenty minutes .:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:. I have learned that there are much more frightening things than dying. Watching everything you love fall to ashes, a blade in the hand of a merciless young girl with nothing to lose, the one person who ever meant anything walking away… my last two months have been nothing short of a living nightmare. There was a little respite in running away, though, a volatile sort of solitude that alternated between granting me something that might have been peace and turning inwards to drive me even further into the ravenous pit of my own madness. I don't really know where I'm going. For the first time in my life, I'm directionless. My goals in life shifted from divine retribution to survival to Colt, and now that all of those are either irrelevant or hopelessly out of my reach, I'm broken. A puppet with cut strings, waiting for someone to pick me up and move me. As it were, anyone who might have been persuaded to do that is back in District One, or else out here wandering the aimless wild, wanting nothing to do with me. Not sure if I'm talking about Dahlia or Colt with that last one. I follow her because it's the only thing I can bring myself to do, and the irony isn't lost on me. Dahlia spent years as my echo, blindly craving the solace of the shadow I cast as I walked continually away from her, and now the roles have been reversed. I was never the best at tracking back in my Career days (I lacked the patience and the willingness to look beyond the superficial black-and-white details of the world), and I've gotten rusty since leaving the Training Center behind. Thankfully, Dahlia leaves an easy trail. She moves like a broken soul - the same as me - stumbling forward with no regard as to who does or doesn't find her. Still, it takes weeks of traveling on her heels to catch up. In that time, my mind drifts. I fall into a sort of routine, wake up, follow her trail until it gets too dark, sleep, wake up, repeat. Sometimes I eat, although I don't really feel anything hungry anymore. I shift my purpose onto Dahlia for no other reason than that she's the only thing I have left. There's simply a nameless drive living in my veins that says if I can catch up with her, something about my life might be a tenuous definition of okay. When I finally do, I discover that it's anything but. When the misty morning dawns that I finally catch a glimpse of wild blonde curls up ahead of me, I forget everything else for the briefest snatch of time. Adjusting the shoulder strap of my bag, I break out into a run, crashing through the undergrowth with foolish disregard to the noise I'm making. "Dahlia!" I've always been good at knowing when I'm walking into a trap. This time, I don't even feel it. (The truth of the matter is, I do. I just don't care.) The bullet catches me in the shoulder, shot with a quiet puff from a silenced gun. It's an odd sort of pain, being shot, not like anything I've experienced before. At first, it's just the momentum, hurling me ungracefully to the ground and leaving me blinking up at the lightening sky, wondering what's going on. And then the pain hits, a hot, radiating ache that rockets through my body as sticky red spreads terrifyingly fast over my ragged shirt. I don't even have the will to scream, so accepting of anything that could possibly happen to me that even the pain feels like a blessing because it's something. And then out of nowhere, they come, demons in white wielding rifles and the secret terror that drove me from One in the first place. So this is how I die, gunned down by Peacekeepers in the middle of the woods. I am so far from home. I am so, so far from home. One of them rips off his helmet to reveal a young face that would be handsome if it weren't for the flabbergasted look warping it. "Well, I'll be damned. Thought you were dead." "Jury's still out on that one," I hiss through the agony, the blood loss starting to make my head swim. I fight the gray eating away at the edges of my vision, my body's instinct for self-preservation kicking in even though my mind's instinct is long gone. My head tells me consistently that nothing matters anymore, but my adrenaline and thrumming heartbeat have something else to say about it. Unconsciousness is death in one way or another - either I'll lay here and bleed out, or I'll wake up somewhere far less pleasant. Fuzzy and fragmented, the hope that maybe they'll think I'm someone else skates across my mind - after all, I hardly look like myself, all the sharpness and superiority gone from me, and the wreck my face has become might serve to protect my identity. But then the handcuffs click around my wrists, and the Peacekeeper looming above me smiles. "Get Agent Micro on the line, boys. Tell him we bagged Kaelen Dempsey." Just before my world tunnels into blackness, I think I hear Dahlia screaming. From there on out, it's all a blur. Someone pressing a wad of cloth to the gushing wound in my shoulder, darkness, the shuddering interior of a hovercraft, more darkness. When I finally regain lucidity, it's in a sterile white room, blinking at the blinding lights overhead. Groaning, I try to sit up only to realize that my wrists and ankles are shackled to the structure of the industrial-looking bed on which I'm laying. Looking down, I see that my ragged clothes have been swapped out for simple gray sweatpants and a matching shirt, the feeling of bandages wrapped around my upper torso constricting my breath. The irony of it almost makes me laugh. I'm in the hands of the Law now. Why would they bother patching me up when they're just going to kill me anyway? Perhaps, I muse, they want me to die on their terms. It's the only satisfaction they can get after I've run circles around them for years. A door opens behind me, and the Peacekeeper that shot me is back, a smug look on his face. "Morning, sunshine." "You know, officer, if you wanted me tied down to a bed, all you had to do was ask," I deadpan, flexing my aching hands. "Haven't you heard? Consent is sexy." The impact comes out of nowhere, knuckles cracking brutally against my jaw and whipping my head to the side in a burst of pain. I can't help myself. I laugh. The extent to which I no longer care is staggering. Death? Pain? Nothing I'm not already acquainted with. And if any part of who I was has survived all of my crippling losses, it's my unwillingness to bend to anyone's will but my own. If I'm going down, I'll take in flames over burning out. My ears are still ringing when he hauls me to my feet, adjusting the bindings on my wrists and ankles with a sour expression. "Shooting your mouth off's not going to do you any favors. Don't think us patching you up was some kind of star treatment, Dempsey. We just didn't want you dying before we got some information out of you. But you're healed up enough to get moved to a regular cell now, so I suggest you move." "A regular cell," I smirk, shuffling out the door and all too aware of the pistol-barrel jammed into my spine. "No solitary confinement? No padded walls and straightjackets? You're putting me on a cell block with the rest of the scum and petty criminals. I'm offended. Who's my bunkmate, some coal miner's kid from Twelve who stole some bread to feed his family?" "Some guy we picked up wandering between Districts, actually. His head's addled, but he's not dangerous. Actually, I'm worried about his safety in a confined space with you." "Well, I can't very well poison anyone without the proper materials, but I suppose if you want a show, I could always try whittling one of those quaint little prison shanks," I snort, turning a corner into a long row of imposing-looking metal doors. There won't be any breaking out, and somehow I can't bring myself to be distressed by that. My family will never know what happened to me. Lyss will never know what happened to me. I can't help but think that maybe this is for the best. But then the door to my cell swings open, then the light falls on the huddled form inside, and I realize that I couldn't be more wrong. This isn't for the best. This is the worst thing that could ever happen. I have learned that there are much more frightening things than dying. Hearing your sister die cursing your name on national television. A family torn asunder before it even had the chance to be functional. Loving someone with every last beat of your blackened heart and watching him leave you. Finding him again at the gates of Hell itself. "Colt…" I whisper, the single syllable a fervent prayer, a plea to any god who will listen for this to be just another mirage brought on by my diseased mind. I had accepted the idea of dying without ever seeing Colt again. I'm not prepared to accept the idea of him dying with me. "No… Oh god, no." I have learned that there are much more frightening things than dying, and I am staring into the face of the most terrifying thing of all. The man I love. the world may call it a second chance but when i came back, it was more of a relapse anticipation's on the other line and obsession called while you were out yeah, it called while you were out

[gamemaker kelsier]

[atrb=border,0,true][atrb=style, background-image: url(http://i46.tinypic.com/30c0h6r.jpg); width: 499px; padding-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px;][atrb=border,0,true][atrb=cellSpacing,0,true][atrb=cellPadding,0,true] And the heart is hard to translate It has a language of its own It talks in tongues and quiet sighs, And prayers and proclamations In the grand days of great men and the smallest of gestures And short shallow gasps And it's funny how days can turn into years and weeks can turn into months in two seconds flat. How the world can turn completely upside down in a matter of seconds and make your tongue stick to the back of your throat in horror. Stop beating, I ask my heart. Not so much ask, do I command it, voice as stern as I can make it, which isn't very stern at all. I think I have been staring at these concrete walls for hundreds of years. Thousands of seconds at least spent staring and not knowing what else to do, even when they threatened to cut out my tongue I didn't know what to say. Dad, why would you say that? My father had never made such threats before, and my mother wasn't as kind as she was when I wasn't here. Something about coming here made them mad at me and I don't know how to apologize because I don't know what I did. I gave up on sorting through the files that I call my mind weeks ago, because after awhile, staring at a pile like that gets exhausting. I don't know when I lost my resolve, but I haven't been able to find it. Things seem more complicated now than they were before. Standing up takes steps, where before it was just the simple matter of pulling myself up, now I have to consider what I will exert. I have to think about the fact that I will have to do something with my feet, that I will have to do something after standing. It doesn't seem worth it. Not when it hurts so much at least. Standing hurts because I have become bruised. I have become bruised, cut, burned, everything. They asked me questions, they do everyday, questions I cannot answer. My brother prods me with metal, my aunts and uncles watch me from a one sided mirror. I think sometimes that I can hear my little baby cousin crying outside my door, but when I knock on it, desperate to get at her, my old school teacher tells me to stop. They always tell me to stop. They tell me to speak a lot too, to tell them things that I don't know and I try to tell them I don't know but I can't. I've forgotten how to speak at all. Words, they always skittered away from me, now they never come near at all. To say the simplest sentence...I cannot. Walking is painful. Speaking is painful because I never speak fast enough for them. I am not smart enough for them because they pull things from me that I didn't mean to give and I wallow in my own guilt for days after. I don't know how long I've been here, I don't think it matters because they'll never let me out. I don't think I want them to. I can't remember what's left for me out there. Sometimes I'll come back, walking around the room, banging on the walls until my hands are raw from hitting the concrete. That Colt wants to get out, I watch him sometimes, making his rounds around, while I try to work out if it's worth it to even stand up anymore. Everything just seems so pointless, and by the time I'm done calculating, I've lost why I wanted to get up in the first place. My mother comes to visit often, and she always bring flowers that grow into the floor and wilt within minutes. I don't mind though because they're beautiful for at least a moment. For at least a few minutes it doesn't hurt as much because my mother is there and she has brought me Gazanias. I don't know why I ever missed her because I can't remember the time when she wasn't there. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I know she has been dead for years. I know they all are. In that big mess of paper on the floors of my mind I hold the information, but I can't find it. I don't think I really mind anymore, because even though it hurts to see my ghosts, they aren't ghosts to me. Especially when he comes to visit. Sometimes they come one at a time, other times they come all at once and I am nearly suffocating from all the people packed into one small room. It's alright though because I've missed them even if it's only been hours without them. With them, the pain is gone for a while. Sometimes they try and tell me things. They try to tell me where they went in the first place, and they say I know. Sometimes when they come, they're bleeding. Not paper cuts, but serious blood. It drips onto the floor and onto me. Once it filled up the entire room and I thought I was going to drown in blood, I couldn't stop screaming, I couldn't. Everything went black that time, and when I woke up, I was strapped down to something. It was okay though, I knew that. It meant the knives and the whip was coming soon. Routine. I could handle that, especially with my mother smoothing back my hair and telling me what a brave little boy I am being. I could even handle it when they injected me. He will come to me the least often. He only comes when I don't think I can handle it anymore, when I consider asking them to just shoot me. He'll come and press his hand to my cheek and smile. Or he'll tell me I'm an idiot and I'll laugh. Sometimes, in the dead of night he will lay down beside me and he will hold me, wrap himself around me so tightly that I can breathe again. I will study his eyes, and never sleep again, or I'll be able to sleep for once when he's there. Other times I will hate him, I will hit him. I will slap him. Other times I can't understand why they care so much about him, why they're always asking me things. My mother asked because she cared I think, but my father always seemed to be angry, so I'd deny knowing him. My dad had never been okay with how I was. For him, I could pretend to be whatever he wanted. My mother, I'd give shy details. Stuff like how once we'd had spare time and had sat in a field. How he'd read to me as I'd played with his hands. How I thought I was in love with him. She was always patient with those, but seemed to want to know other things more, like who he talked to, where he seemed to spend most of his time. It has been weeks and days spent here. I know because I mark the wall with little ticks after I get three meals. There are many ticks on the wall. They got me one day after I went to visit Rora in the hospital. I just made it into the woods when there were guns and I was taken, a hood on my head so I was blind. At first, they were going to just take my tongue and be done with me. Then, a voice told them that I was needed because I had information, and I ended up here, a concrete forest with no trees. There is a bed but I prefer the corner so I can watch the door. I like to be able to see who is coming to take me next. I like it best when it's my mother, but my brother isn't too bad either. My brother always looked out for me. He does it here too. My father and my teacher are the worst. My teacher still calls me stupid, my father doesn't give up on my love life. I forgive them though, I don't think they mean to hurt me. Not like he did. I wonder if I could forgive him, but whenever he comes to me, it's like I already have. Sometimes it's not, and he looks like I've slapped him when I haven't. Sometimes it's like nothing ever even happened and he was running down the stairs looking all nervous and excited. Sometimes it looks like I never broke his heart, and it feels like he never broke mine. Today when he comes, it's because he's pushed through the door. Which is funny, because usually he just comes in. He comes in and takes me to the place with the chair and the straps and the metal with blood. Or he just comes in to stare at me. He's never been forced in before. I should find that odd. Mostly I'm just happy to see him today, although he came yesterday, and that's far too often than normal. He looks different from yesterday too, scars are on his face, he looks ragged, at first I'm not sure if it's him. He says my name. I shut my eyes from that. My head hurts again, splitting pain piercing through me, and my hand flies up to grip my hair, to pull on it, to make something else hurt instead. The way he says my name, I didn't think I would hear that properly again. The way his voice holds each syllable. It hurts. Confused, I open my eyes again, I blink at him. I hit my head into my palm, and the thud doesn't stop the pounding in my brain. I don't understand. Shallow joy blooms like a ripple from underneath my collarbone, and I can feel something beating again down deep in me. It hurts, searing through me as something comes to life again and I can feel my memory flashing disjointed warnings from their places in the pile, but the pile is enormous. I can't understand what it's trying to tell me. There is joy, but I see him all the time, why is there so much joy? Warily, I stare at him, and when the door closes behind him, I stay put, limbs feeling like cement blocks after today's session. I drink him in, the scars on his face, the grey sweatsuit. Off, because he's always just been in one of his t-shirts with those skinnies and the eyeliner. Never fresh faced in a grey suit like this. Never with all those scars. I don't know if this is Kaelen or an imposter sent to mess with my mind, for my father to get information from me. Hesitantly, I ask, "K-kaelen? Th- A....are you....a-are..." helplessly, I gesture at him, Are you real? And it talks to me in tiptoes It cries out in the darkest night and breaks in the morning light But with all my education I can’t seem to command it And the words are all escaping, and coming back all damaged And I would put them back in poetry if I only knew how I can't seem to understand it

[Deleted]

[bg=0a161e][atrb=border,0,true][atrb=cellSpacing,0,true][atrb=cellPadding,0,true][atrb=width,500,true][atrb=style,width: 500px; -moz-border-radius-bottomleft: 10px; border-radius-bottomleft: 10px; -moz-border-radius-bottomright: 10px; border-radius-bottomright: 10px; opacity: 1;] open up next to you, and my secrets become your truth and the distance between that was sheltering me comes in full view hang my head, break my heart built from all i have torn apart and my burden to bear is a love i can't carry anymore "K-Kaelen?" The sound of his voice, the sound of his voice saying my name… It was something I never thought I'd hear again. I never really liked my name. It always sounded stuffy to me, mechanical and odd, a name I inherited from a grandfather I never even met. But the way Colt says it, the way he trips over the sounds and wraps his lips around it like he wants to keep it close for fear of it getting away; he takes my name and turns it into something beautiful. Two simple syllables, but it's like a sunrise, like coming in to a warm fire after playing in the snow, a candle-flame in the darkest part of the night. And it absolutely guts me. He has no right to say my name like that anymore, no right to look at me like I'm something he wants, no goddamn right to act like he still loves me when we both know he doesn't. He has no right, but he does it anyway. I have every right to be angry, but I'm not. What a pair we make. I want to be angry, want to cry and shout and accuse, want to hate him half as much as I hate myself. But I can't. Not when he looks so lost, when he's reaching towards me with plaintive hands and a hurt in his eyes that I can't even begin to define. "Th- A...are you...a-are…" Colt has always been my exception. I could hate the rest of the world but never, never him, and in the end, I suppose I've always known that. When someone rips you to shreds and you don't have any hatred to mend yourself, all you can do is run, hide, try to cobble yourself back into something functional, and, if you're me, fail. Everything about him digs in deep under my skin and tears mercilessly - the sound of his voice, the exact shade of his eyes, the way he shifts his weight like he's not certain of where to go. Colt's presence wrecks me, but I'm so far gone that I'm not sure there's really anything left to wreck. My last hope in the world was for him to go out and find his great perhaps, to hunt down a happy ending with someone who wasn't me, someone who could give it to him. As long as I believed in that, I told myself that I'd be content to die, even like this. And look at us now. I'm suddenly painfully aware of myself - mutilated face, wasted body, a tangle of bony limbs shaking hard enough to fall apart, hard enough that I can see the tremors in my own hands. Some part of me knows that it's my body's last comically futile attempt to reject him. My mind knows that the best way to avoid the things that hurt you is to push them away, but my soul has always held a different argument when it comes to Colt. I must look pathetic to him (although he did call me pathetic the last time we spoke. Perhaps I look like something worse now), standing here bearing all the wreckage of who we used to be, scars from our car-crash romance, but I find myself not caring. After all, I'm standing across a dank cell from a person whose last words to me were a fervent I hate you. How I look to him is irrelevant. How he looks to me is everything. With every stunned blink I see more bruises, more scars, more haunted terror beneath his skin. They've been hurting him, and it isn't hard to guess why. I feel violently ill at the realization, my stomach churning as ghost-images of everything he's gone through because of me flicker in front of my eyes. Any thought of anger I may have had goes flying out the nonexistent window, even though my shaking only worsens, something hot and uncomfortable swimming behind my eyes. "I'm here," I choke out, and it's the worst kind of irony that it's not only the best consolation I can give him, but also the most horrid curse. Feeling like I'm in some sort of disjointed dream state, so lost, so close to home and yet so far away, I take a tentative step in Colt's direction. Part of me is still convinced that he's a mirage, that I was so desperate to see him before I died that my brain whipped up a convenient ghost of him for me. But I would never want to see him like this, so frightened and battered, and even though I'm still a few feet away, I can feel the undeniable pull of his gravity reeling me inward. No ghost could mimic that. My base instinct reaches for him, but something stops me partway, my arms half-extended awkwardly in his direction. It's like my body has forgotten how we work even though the rest of me remembers every vivid detail. I wonder if this is how Colt feels all the time, trapped in a body that can never seem to catch up to the endless possibility of his essence. Touching him used to be second-nature, as easy and as necessary as breathing. Looking back over the past year, the times when I was in contact with Colt far outnumber the times when I wasn't. Hands held in secret under back-row desks, fingers through hair in a calming gesture when the world felt like it was closing in, legs tangled in a nest of sheets hours after midnight - His skin always felt like home to me, but now I can't tell whether or not I'm walking up to a locked door. By the time my palms settle experimentally on either side of Colt's face, ghosting, barely-there, the shaking has started again. In an aching burst of memory I remember the first time he kissed me, how the tremors had shot so noticeably through his limbs but stopped in the instant his lips met mine. I remember it all, remember how he smiled against my mouth and gave me a silent promise of something better to hope for, a life that wasn't so empty. And then I remember how he walked away from that, from what we had, and it hurts in a way that no bullet or knife could ever mimic. I don't have to wonder if souls can scream anymore, because I can hear mine, screeching a mournful keening through my veins, a lament for everything that we've lost. In that moment, I know it's always been true - I will never be able to stop loving him, even if he's stopped loving me. It's not one of those wounds that time will supposedly heal, and for once, I'm glad I don't have much time. At least there's respite on the horizon. Give me death, give me Hell. Eternal damnation's got nothing on what I've endured in my attempts to live without him. The only problem is this: I was always prepared to walk into oblivion on my own. Now I'm taking Colt with me. And that hurts worse than anything. "How could you let them catch you?" I whisper, so weak and so unlike myself that I'd be taken aback if surprise didn't require me to care about something other than him, my broken heart bleeding into my breath and painting itself across lips that are both too close to and too far from my own. "You beautiful, beautiful idiot. How could you let them take you from me?" And that's what they've done. They've taken Colt from me even though he's standing inches away. Even if we'd never seen each other again, I would have gone to my end with the memory of him, whole and happy and mine. Now? Now all that's left are the hollow husks of us, staring at the echoes of what we used to be and waiting for the end. They have taken him from me. They have taken him from me in the worst way possible. all i have, all i need he's the air i would kill to breathe holds my love in his hand, still i'm searching for something out of breath, i am left hoping someday i'll breathe again

[gamemaker kelsier]

[atrb=border,0,true][atrb=style, background-image: url(http://i46.tinypic.com/30c0h6r.jpg); width: 499px; padding-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px;][atrb=border,0,true][atrb=cellSpacing,0,true][atrb=cellPadding,0,true] I was the match and you were the rock Maybe we started this fire We sat apart and watched All we had burned on the pyre You said we were born with nothing Grass sprouts up through the floor, pushing aside the cement in such a way that I jump to my feet in surprise. I had forgotten what spring was. Flowers force them up through the floor, roses climb the walls, thorns sticking into the cement like tacks into drywall. The metal pillar by my meagre bed grows bark, and it laughs at me in a gravelly voice. The sun breaks through the ceiling of this underground world, and it presses itself up against Kaelen. I doubt I've ever been so happy to see anybody. As I struggle to my feet, he only stares, and I am afraid to step towards him because I know I haven't the strength. I press a hand against the concrete wall to steady myself and I feel the wood panelling of my home, the world fills with chatter of friends and family but where it has always come so loud, it is dull in the presence of him. For a moment, I believe I have died. It's the only way to explain this, other than the fact that maybe I am insane. Because Kaelen looks so different from even last week, but those wounds couldn't have had time to heal in the short while it's been. I shake my head, trying to clear it. The man said that the Kaelen I knew wasn't real, that I was just seeing things. That funny little man with the bow tie and the heavy brow. He told me that I haven't been seen in the District for months, and Kaelen Dempsey is still on the loose. I told him that didn't make sense because here he was, and here I am. Yet I'm lost, oh ripred I'm lost. He's never made his presence so clear before. He comes toward me and I flinch away. I don't mean to, but it's hard not to, not after becoming so used to instant pain after the touch of another human being. Even when they heal me here it hurts. It's come to the point where I'm not sure if they're actually healing me or just trying to slow down my rate of death. And yet, when his hands hover over my cheeks, I can feel heat radiating off of them. Trembling, I reach up and grasp one of those long spidery hands with both of mine, and press his hand against my cheek. I shut my eyes, and press myself so hard into his hand it hurts from the bruises that have only barely faded. I don't mind though because for him, any pain he gives me will always be worth it to me. What happened here is that I lit a match late one night and instead of trying to extinguish the fire that started, I let it burn me right up. I am a creature of dust and sorrow, things to be swept away with wind and time but I cannot help spreading myself all through a room, feeling my heart crumble away with my life passing. I feel depriving sadness, a deep longing, and it has rested in my chest since I left, like so much water that I am drowned by it. It's alright though, I don't think I was ever meant to survive this. I am so cold, I have been frozen, and he has always come to me colder still, draining me away and I am tired all the time, but he has heat, and it is beautiful, I press myself into his hand, drinking him in, the scent of him. Woolen sweaters, cigarette smoke, and fall. There are new smells too, and they hurt me physically because I know I caused some. I can't look at him, I can only be in two places at once, and I have found myself stranded in twelve separate places at this moment. I am overwhelmed and underwhelmed. I am whelmed. I cannot think at all, I float in this moment of him physically being here, and I am excited for my mother to finally meet him. I feel like I have been given my last meal before they finally do me in, I'm on the edge, I know. I have been for a long time, all it took was a little push to get me to my tipping point. All it will take is one more. Then I could be free. He calls me an idiot and I grin against his palm, I feel my lips spread against skin, and the warmth of happiness falls into me. I feel my roots screaming in happiness, finally nourished for the first time in weeks. That was what I had wanted to hear, wasn't it? I had wanted him to call me his idiot. Not with that pain filled voice though. But didn't I? In confusion, I pull away from him. Wasn't I mad at him, didn't I hate him? Didn't I hate him for not noticing me? Why hadn't he noticed what was happening to me, I can't remember why he didn't seem to care. His proximity is suddenly terrifying and I slide down the wall, falling to my knees, I stare into the face of a sunflower. My mother used to loved those. Used to? She still does. She said they were wonderful because they always looked for their sun, and would always face them. They watched the sun all day and when the sun went to sleep, they loved it so much that they did too. She told me to find my sun one day. I rest my head against him, unable to stay away, as long as I don't have to look into those eyes. I can feel myself ticking away, something starting again now that I have him here. It's like his presence has restarted me, I can feel the air stiffen. "I..I ju-st wanted....I wanted to...I wanted to see..you....walk a-a-across the sky." I eel like my tongue has betrayed me. everything does if you live long enough to let it I suppose. I can't stand to not be able to tell him what I feel, but I'm not sure if I do feel after so long without sunlight and it feels like I am dying every day and I'm not sure if it's worth it if everything is spiders. I can feel myself decay and it sickens me, I can feel my body dying on me. They told me to tell them where he was and I didn't yet he's here anyway. I must have failed him yet again. I'm in the kitchen, and I have my hand on the table. My head pounds and the wood breathes beneath my hand. I'm watching him break. Replaying it again and again, I can see the exact moment in his eyes when I went too far and we became an irreparable thing. I chuckle, and it isn't the same malice that I felt before that night Yet the night is around me, and I vaguely know that I am in a cell, but here I am too, locked here, in this moment. There is a fire going in the living room, but I am so cold. I am so unbearably cold, and there is his hand, reaching for me. I smile softly, and apologize, "....I...I...have have failed. You. Again." Things we'll never see again All that we've amassed Sits before us, shattered into ash These are the things, the things we lost The things we lost in the fire fire fire

[Deleted]

[bg=0a161e][atrb=border,0,true][atrb=cellSpacing,0,true][atrb=cellPadding,0,true][atrb=width,500,true][atrb=style,width: 500px; -moz-border-radius-bottomleft: 10px; border-radius-bottomleft: 10px; -moz-border-radius-bottomright: 10px; border-radius-bottomright: 10px; opacity: 1;] give me hope in silence, it's easier; it's kinder tell me not of heartbreak, it plagues my soul, it plagues my soul and bury me beside you i have no hope in solitude and the world will follow to the earth down below There's no comfort in the knowledge that Colt has become as broken as I have. I half-expected the part of me that's been paralyzed by bitterness for so long to find some sort of satisfaction in it, a small beat in time to relish the fact that I haven't been the only one hurting. In my mind's eye, I saw myself as a victim by default. While I spiraled down the neck of a whiskey bottle and drowned in the crippling loss flooding my lungs, my constant mental image of Colt was something entirely different. I pictured him happy, liberated, moving on with his life. After all, he was the one who left. I'd be happy to walk away from me, too. I never imagined this. I could never have foreseen the shattered remnants of fragile, warped sanity gleaming behind his eyes, the tenuous desperation in the way he clutches my hand to his cheek like he's not sure if I'm really here. For the first time, I let myself believe in the possibility that leaving hurt Colt as much as it hurt me, and the realization makes a heavy ache spread through my bones. I hurt for the could-have-beens, for all the lost nights and lazy mornings that never came, for every day I could have woken up beside him and been borderline delirious with love until the inevitable road led me here. Given the chance, I'd do it all over again. I would have accepted his denial with more grace, would have listened to his silent warnings that something was wrong in the way his fingers flitted over my ribcage in the dead of night, would have never been foolish enough to leave Thirteen in the first place. Things were easier for us there, more stable even if more hushed. If we were still back there, buried under miles of earth and secrets I was never quite strong enough to share, what would we be? Perhaps by now I would have grown brave to the point of holding his hand in the hallway, of kissing him goodbye before we went our separate ways for the day and waiting for him when he came home. We could have been that vision I had for us, that domestic pipe dream of always having him beside me. We could have had our forever if I hadn't been such a fool. I ruined us. Burnt us to ashes and scattered us to the wind. What else is new? As if sensing the poison still present in my touch, Colt recoils, sinking down to the floor and looking pointedly away from me. I follow him unconsciously and kneel beside him, pulled along by the red string of fate that I now know has always been wrapped around our wrists - or maybe it's a noose that's forever tightening around our throats. Some days it's hard to tell which is which. He's floundering, lost in the sea of whatever brokenness plagues his own mind, looking at me and touching me like he loves me one second and then pulling away the next. The harrowing thought strikes me that this is what I did to him for months. The beginnings of us back in Thirteen were a constant back-and-forth, me loving him to the point that it consumed me and I held him close enough that I hoped our veins would merge and we could become one person, and then being so angry with myself for falling into the weakness of that love that I pushed him far away, hoping that I could keep him from putting down roots under my skin and crumbling my already-fragile defenses. They say that everything you do comes back threefold. It may not be possible for me to be killed a hundred and eight times, but I'm sure this is what it feels like, watching Colt struggle to connect me with his surroundings and wondering whether his love or his hatred for me is stronger. It's a hard decision. Even I have trouble reconciling my love for him with my hatred of myself. "I...I ju-st wanted...I wanted to...I wanted to see...you...walk a-a-across the sky." His words don't make any sense, but the feeling of his head on my shoulder makes more sense than anything has in ages. My first instinct has always been to keep him close enough that his heartbeat can resonate in my own chest, and so it's without a thought that I shift to the side in a way that allows me to pull him close, arms tightening around him until I fear our fragile bones will break in the way our hearts already have. It feels like coming home. And maybe in the end, that was what I loved about him, about us, the most. Through all of our complications, our love at its essence was so simple, so concrete, a home for two lost boys who had been homeless for far too long. At our peak and even at our lows up until the end, it was what we held onto. The rest of the world could have fallen apart, and if we knew nothing else we still would have known that we loved each other. It was the ultimate truth of our universe, our theory of relativity, the thing that held our stars aloft. But somewhere along the way, something went wrong. Somewhere along the way I lost myself, and in doing so I lost him. The way I've been losing everything my whole life. But sometimes the things we lose come back, even if only for a little while. The final reality of my world has come back into my life, curled into my arms all bruised and broken, and I will hold him because that's what we do. The world is falling, we're in a living Hell, and it could be anywhere from days to hours before I'm nothing but a cold corpse. But he is in my arms for now, and I love him. Even though I tried to deny it at first, that has always been my one certainty. And it always will be. Colt shudders against me, eyes distant and locked on something I can't see. "...I...I...have have failed. You. Again." And just when I thought that nothing could break me further, he finds a way to prove me wrong again. He thinks that he's the cause of all this. Shaking my head slowly, I move my hand back to his cheek, cradling the sharp angle of his jawline and tilting his head back until he's at least looking in my direction even though it still feels like he's not really looking at me. "No. Baby, no. This isn't your fault, it's mine. There were things I didn't tell you about before and I... I did some really foolish things after you left. I couldn't cope and you were gone and everything was just so hollow and I didn't care about anything anymore. I wanted to die. Went out looking for death a few times, and now I'm here." The words make bile rise in my throat, my entire body a living cataclysm of guilt as I breathe the horrible truth out across Colt's lips. "I'm not here because of you. You're here because of me, and I'm sorry, Colt, I never meant for it to end like this." I could kiss him. If I wanted to, I could, we're an inch apart and breathing each other in and kissing him would be as easy as falling asleep, as inherent as a pulse, as comforting as a fire on a winter's night. Part of me wants to, needs to, wails at my mind that it might be the only way to bring him back to me. But the dregs of my heart that have been broken, scorched, and left for dead are frightened of it, so terrified of him pushing me away that they whisper of distance being better than rejection. I want to kiss him, but I don't, because there's no certainty in it. And so we stay the way we are, an inch of infinite miles between our lips and the one real certainty I have bleeding out into the air on the tide of my broken voice. "I love you. I love you so much." but i came and i was nothing, and time will give us nothing so why did you choose to lean on a man you knew was falling? but i came and i was nothing, and time will give us nothing so why did you choose to lean on a man you knew was falling?

[gamemaker kelsier]

[atrb=border,0,true][atrb=style, background-image: url(http://i46.tinypic.com/30c0h6r.jpg); width: 499px; padding-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px;][atrb=border,0,true][atrb=cellSpacing,0,true][atrb=cellPadding,0,true] This is gospel for the fallen ones Locked away in permanent slumber Assembling their philosophies From pieces of broken memories If you love me let me go Vines are trying to force the roof up. I can see it from the corner of my eye and it bothers me. Those vines should know that we need this roof to be warm under. It feels like it's raining, a torrential downpour in here, I can barely hear Kaelen. I'm getting tired too. He doesn't usually stay for so long and I struggle to put together why he's here again. When I really saw him last, I know it wasn't on good terms. The kitchen clock loudly ticks just above my head from it's place on the wall, as if it's trying to tell me something. Something about how time is running short, we've got little left. They haven't come for me yet today, but they will soon. The ghost, the silver metallic sharpness of words sliding over my skin and cutting. Or will they still? Now they have who they want. The table in the middle of the kitchen floor is made from a solid oak and I've wanted to sit on it since I saw it. It's the comfortable looking kind, and I can feel his lips ghosting over mine. It feels like home to have him so near. Yet my throat tightens, and I almost shout at him, I want to yell at him. I wanted to yell at him all those weeks ago. Uncertainly, I place my palms against his chest, tension there, ready to push him away. Yet, I cannot. He might hit his head on the table, and I care about his head. I do. There are things I am supposed to remember, and I cannot. I feel like everything I thought I knew is flying away. I can feel the corpses of my past trying to tear through my skull and show me their faces. Horror is a common sight in here, and I can taste it in the water when they let me drink. It's constricting, making breathing difficult. I want the sun to come out, but it's raining. The sunflowers will wilt. If I cry, it will be pointless. Everything seems pointless now. I think I only wake up every morning to make my mother happy when she comes to visit. I'll be nineteen soon but I feel like I have been alive for thousands of years. I can remember seeing the first rock being formed, and hear the sounds of the first drums of war. I can taste salt on my tongue and the first sunrise under my eyelids. My body feels older, battered and bruised. It is tired now, of everything. I want to shut my eyes and never open them again. I want them to toss me out into the ocean so I can float off the edge of the world. Maybe I will cross the River Styx and meet the god of Death face to face. My family would miss me if I die. I cannot do that to them. So I fight on. Then there is this too. The pockets of time when he is here and I am not so alone. When he is here and I can touch his skin and know him again. I can forget my anger for this, fresh as it still is. I can forget everything for just a moment with him. Everyone always says that there is a soul mate out there. You are connected by a red string of fate, and when you find them, you'll be drawn to them. Life is just you getting closer and closer. I was lucky, I think, to find my soul mate so young. He pulls my eyes back to his, and I stare up at him, obediently. I am good at doing what they tell me here. It hurts less when you do what they say. I guess I'm just used to it now because I've been doing what they say for a long time, now as best as I can. They tell me they don't want to hurt me. They have to because I am bad and I don't tell them everything. I tell them I told them everything. They don't believe me. I act like I hate him. They don't believe me. I think it's because of the time I cried out for him. (He didn't come.) I've never seen so much sorrow. He looks like a sandstorm. A soft, slow one, where the grains seem to be dancing with the wind. I've missed his eyes. I will not waste this luxury. Softly, I press my lips to his. The very first time I kissed him, it was hunger for something I'd never had. It was feral. Now my lips are hesitant, and I am almost afraid. There is a queer feeling in the pit of my stomach like hundreds of butterflies battering the walls. I won't let them out. Not yet. They don't get to go out for at least another half hour. Their feeding time is soon. When I am hungry they batter the walls, trying to break loose. They frighten me. Not this time. Now it is like they are whipped into a frenzy. When my lips brush against his, they tingle like they've been touched by electricity. My fingers slowly curl, until I clutch his shirt. Lowering my head I try and make myself smaller, to push myself into his very being. It's harder than it was before. I don't fit as well. My voice comes out low and calm in a before the storm way, "I......too." I too. I love him too. I feel like a kid in class again, waving my hand in the background. Me too, please. Me too. If you love me let me go ‘Cause these words are knives that often leave scars The fear of falling apart And truth be told, I never was yours The fear, the fear of falling apart

[Deleted]

[bg=0a161e][atrb=border,0,true][atrb=cellSpacing,0,true][atrb=cellPadding,0,true][atrb=width,500,true][atrb=style,width: 500px; -moz-border-radius-bottomleft: 10px; border-radius-bottomleft: 10px; -moz-border-radius-bottomright: 10px; border-radius-bottomright: 10px; opacity: 1;] i must've forgot, you can't trust me i'm moment-to-moment and close but don't show it before you know it, i'm lost at sea and now that i write and think about it and the story unfolds you should take my life, you should take my soul It's odd how well I remember the first time Colt kissed me. Memories are funny things; they twist amorphously through your mind, eroded by time and personal bias until they're mere ghosts of the events themselves, snatches of color and sensation that fit like pieces into the washed-out puzzle of a life. It wasn't until I looked at the pictures lining the shelves in my room that I realized that I hadn't really remembered my mother's face the way it had truly been. I'd forgotten how her smile was slightly crooked or how she'd had a spray of freckles across her cheekbones. My memories had ironed out those imperfections, and for some reason, I found it terrifying. If I could forget those little things about her, what was there to keep me from forgetting everything else? After that moment, I tried desperately to cling to the little details, the sound of Aurora's laugh, Beryl's habit of playing with a cigarette when he was nervous, Ella's smirks, the even rasp of Colt's breathing when he was fast asleep. I tried, and yet when I attempt to recall them, there's still a fuzzy veneer keeping them from me. I can't remember if Aurora's laughter sounded like bells or birdsong, can't remember if Ella's teeth showed when she smiled. But that kiss is something different. In the fuzzy landscape of my memories, it's crystalline and sharp, every detail as fresh in my mind as if it had happened seconds ago. If I shut my eyes and think, I can still feel the cold solidity of the kitchen wall against my back, still hear the sharp intake of my own breath, taste summertime and sweet tea and warmth against my lips. That kiss haunted me for days, for weeks, addling my head as I frantically tried to make sense of the newfound sensation in the hollow cavern of my chest. It's been an inexorable part of me since the moment it happened. I clung to it when my bed felt unbearably cold and empty in the endless nights after Colt left, played it over and over in my mind because it was preferable to the endless mantra of I hate you that would have bounced off the inside of my skull for eternity if left unchecked. There was security in the memory of that kiss, a knowledge that no matter what happened, it was the one thing in my life that I could never forget. When his lips find mine in the here and now, I know that this will be another of those memories that shine in the forefront of my mind, iridescent and incorruptible. It's the polar opposite of that first kiss, lacking all the feral intensity and blazing hunger that neither of us could justify. We're something different now, something broken and fragile, and that fragility is exemplified in the cautious brush of Colt's lips, the desperate way his hands curl into the fabric of my shirt. In their progress, his fingers brush over the bandaged bullet wound in my shoulder. I flinch without meaning to, the pain made sharper by my heightened senses, but every self-preservation instinct I ever had is entirely dead now. The hordes of Hell itself couldn't pull me away from him, and my own pain seems like such a trivial thing in the face of the quiet terror that's been sitting behind Colt's eyes since the moment I walked into the cell. "I…too," he whispers, and whatever was left holding me together breaks entirely. He still loves me. Something hot and aching rises in my throat, and I don't bother ignoring the fresh moisture clinging to my eyelashes as I pull his lips back to mine, searing every detail into my brain with feverish effort. He still smells like sunshine even under the darker scent of sweat and hopelessness, still tastes like summertime with a fire on his lips that burns all the way down to the core of me. I am a lost, conquered thing, every cell of my body overtaken with Colt until I'm nothing more than the hopeless addict I've always been around him, basking in the high that he brings. If nothing else, this is one more memory I know I'll always have, the final closure that will carry me through whatever comes next. I'll be dead soon. How long? Hours? Minutes? For once in my life, I have absolutely no control, and there's a weird, morbid sort of peace in that. Before, it was horrifying. Now? I feel like a rush of morphling has hit my veins, relaxing all the tension beneath my skin and settling my turbulent mind with a pervasive sense of acceptance. Colt still loves me, and although I don't deserve it, I will still cling to it. I'll hold the feeling of his lips on mine and his hair woven through my fingers like a pilgrim might hold prayer beads, my last salvation until the moment the needle enters my arm or the bullet enters my skull. The realization hits me in these precious moments of exactly what Colt Hanlon is to me, what he's always been. I spent my whole life worshipping myself, and I was content with it until I realized that he was far more deserving of my adoration. Colt is closer to a god than I ever was, ever could have hoped to be. Pulling away from him settles in my chest with a real, physical ache, but I do it nonetheless. I have to remember every detail of what he looks like for however long I have left. At the end of all things I want to think of the little imperfections that make him so beautiful, the crooked place in the bridge of his nose and how the angle of his jaw would be too wide on anyone else but him. I want to remember how his hair sticks straight up first thing in the morning. I want to remember how his lips look when they wrap around the syllables of my name, flushed and full as they stumble over missing sounds and lost intentions. I want to remember how his eyes are the color of polished mahogany when the light hits them, the bleary haze that settles across them right before he falls asleep. I want to remember Colt in every essence of himself. When the time comes, he is the only thing that will make me brave. "I know you're confused," I whisper against his mouth, fingers coming up to brush a stray piece of hair back from his forehead. "And I know you're scared. I'm scared too. But I promise you, Colt, you're going to get out of here. You're going to go back to Thirteen, and everyone will be so happy to see you. Jace will throw you a big party in the choir room and everyone will come. You're going to be home and happy and safe." I don't say the same for myself. Why should I? At this point, lying to him will only make the wounds deeper, the scars uglier. Colt is too fragile for me to tell him the truth - that the only way I'm leaving this place is in a body bag - but I have come to the conclusion that no good has ever come from me feeding him fallacies. And so when I kiss him again, trying to breathe him in until he coats my lungs, I speak the only truth that has ever meant anything to me. "And no matter what, I will never stop loving you. Not for one second, for the rest of forever." And here at the end of it all, that's what matters. That's what I'll hold onto. you are surrounding all my surroundings sounding down the mountain range of my left side brain you are surrounding all my surroundings twisting the kaleidoscope behind both of my eyes and i'll be holding onto you