Gimme Fiction :: [Napoleon Bloom // Coma]

[L△LIA]

Four days, one hour, eleven minutes, and twenty-six seconds.

Bent low, she is hunched over the comatose body of a boy only a few years older than her. Anyone looking upon the scene can immediately see the desperation that wracks her body with choking sobs as she clutches the hand of her unconscious brother within both of her own, whispering her pleas into his ear with a voice so hushed it could break a heart foolish enough to meet the gaze of her tear-flooded eyes. Have mercy, this tragic expression begs whatever invisible ghost named God might be haunting this hospital ward, and please wake up. "I said wake up, Napoleon Bloom, you useless —"

Battles have rarely been fought with more ferocity than that which strains her voice in secrecy, pulling it so thin and tight that whether or not her vocal chords will snap against the tension is not a question, simply when. "— good for nothing —" Her bloodshot, sorrow-stricken eyes meet those of another patient's visitor across the room. The sister or lover or beloved friend (wrapped up in her own selfishness, Calliope Bloom currently cares as little about that difference as the witless patient she accompanies) shares a knowing grimace, thinking that the two of them understand each other all too perfectly within this moment, as they hold tight to the nonreciprocating hands of a pair of sleeping boys. That girl is wrong.

Calliope digs all ten of her nails into the flesh of the hand she holds, feeling the warmth of her brother's blood breaking through his skin to stain her fingertips red. "— lying, stealing, conning, drug hounding, self-centered —" If she hadn't bitten her weapons down over thoughts of how she will raise the money that will pay for her bother's life support — feeding tube, catheter, and a thousand wires her stunted medical education hasn't yet taught her the meaning of — then her nails might have been a force to be reckoned with right now. As it is, they are ragged as a serrated knife, but cut shallow of inflicting any level of satisfying damage... not that he is capable of feeling her anger either way. "— waste of space and oxygen." Long nails or short, awake or asleep, she is convinced he doesn't feel a thing. That's why he didn't give a damn when their brother Aesop was murdered in the Games a few years ago and that's why he can't be bothered to wake up now.

If he can't save himself, the least he could do would be to save her the trouble of being responsible for him. It's one thing when he goes off on a morphling binge or deals stolen medications on the backstreets downtown, but it's another when he asks her to help him steal pills when his supply runs low... or blacks out so hard he goes comatose. "Poe, you are such a gutless bastard." The sound that haunts her voice is a numb hatred. "You were supposed to be the one taking care of me or you were supposed to be the one to die. Where do you get off with this double-crossing bullshit?" Her voice breaks against itself, betraying its deadpan guise with a degree of emotion she thought she had long cut her surviving sibling off from. For years now she has told herself that he's not worth bothering with anymore and yet here she is, wasting herself on him again.

There are supposed to be stages to grief — she studied them in school — but she cannot escape this purgatory of rage. "I don't —" Once the crack appears, she is helpless to stop it. It digs into her badly mended seams the same way she attacks his palm now, ripping her apart until she is keening with frustration. Aesop used to fix things with something like magic, the kind of slight of hand that made her forget she was too old for games of make-believe, but she has grown too practical and jaded in his absence for daydreams. "I can't —" Instead all she can think about is how she can't afford to save Poe this time.

She is a high school dropout and it has been a long time since her family name was worth anything to anyone not in possession of it, so the impossibility of the responsibility literally laid out before her is more than she can take. Despite having told Poe that she wished he'd have been the one to die and meaning those words, she'd never wanted to be personally responsible for killing him. "What am I supposed to do? What the fuck am I supposed to do with you?" She unravels. Throwing her head back as she sobs at the ceiling, one hand wiping uselessly at the tracks of tears snaking down her neck to pool in the ditches of her collarbone, scattered shadows of red dirty her skin in the wake of her desperate pawing. Already, his blood is on her hands and she cannot hold tightly enough to stop the flow.

what you need to do is be thankful
for the life you got
stop looking at what you ain't got
and start being thankful
for what you do got

[L△LIA]

There is blood on his hands, although he cannot remember what he has done. The only thing that fills his memory is snow, white and endless. He doesn't know how long he has been trudging through the infinite drifts — hours or years feel no different when there is nothing to mark change within the passage of time — but he is so tired of all this walking that he thinks he will surely sleep for days on end when he is done, just lie down and sleep and sleep and sleep... however, for now, there is no end in sight. Looking back, his footsteps have already been filled in with newly fallen snow and the trail of blood that drips from his guilty hands whited out. All this walking appears to have been for nothing, but surely he is going somewhere. Despite not knowing the destination, there is a desire within him to prove that he is not quite that useless. Surely, he must be good for something.

One thing he knows is that the blood on his hands is not his own. He has not fallen and scraped his palms on hidden rocks or fought off a yeti with his bare fists, but there is no denying the sticky red that floods his fingerprints. How ever it got there it was not through courage or bravery, a twinge of lingering desperation coursing through him each time he glances down, and for the moment he's content to push these thoughts from his mind and maintain his ignorance. It's better not knowing. He has walked so far in this never ending snowscape by now that whatever situation shed that blood, it is behind him and he'll never have to face it again. Although the wind is howling in ghostly, gasping whoops that seem to struggle for each new breath of air, the fact remains that the dead cannot follow the living and Napoleon Bloom was not the one who died.

you know about me dog
don't talk about me dog
and if you doubt me dog
you better out me dog

[L△LIA]

Eleven days, three hours, fifty-eight minutes, and nine seconds.

A week has passed since her last visit, but it feels like longer to both of them, although the girl only realizes her own struggles. By now one might think she would be used to things going badly after a lifetime of tragedy, but despite everything she's stubborn enough to convince herself each new loss will be the last one, even if she won't speak such nonsense aloud, and soldier on through her own screams and tears. Muttering to herself about how she shouldn't be here — how she should have left him to rot and die, because he did this to himself — she still takes the seat at her comatose brother's bedside despite her outward reluctance. After all, if she was going to turn back, she'd have done so before she slapped a roll of dirty cash down on the countertop of the clinic's billing department twenty minutes ago.

The man on the other side looked back and forth uncomfortably between her and the fat roll of money for so long that Calliope snapped at him. "What?! I'm here to pay Napoleon-goddamn-Bloom's hospital expenses. You don't want it? I can take it back —" Reaching out, it became a race of who could grab it first, because if one more factor in her life was going to tell her she couldn't take care of this situation, then fucking fine, at least it wouldn't be her problem anymore. His grubby fingers closed in first, however, and she couldn't have hated herself more for it. It wasn't so much that he had won that bothered her, but that Napoleon had won and she'd finally realized it. All of this, the coma and everything, was clearly just another one of his con schemes to get her into the drug dealing business with him. God knows, it's not like she had any other options.

For days she called in every last favor she thought she might still have — long lost family friends who owed the Blooms a debt or old school friends who had borrowed lunch money from her before she'd dropped out — and scrounged up little more than spare change and a half-hearted job offer at a private hospital across town. She took it after negotiating an advance on her paycheck, but it still wasn't enough. The frustration sent her on a rampage through Napoleon's bedroom, smashing framed family pictures their father had hung on the walls when they were still young and ripping open his pillow with a steak knife... and that's where she found his morphling stash. Pretty little yellow bottles came spilling out into her hands and she curled up in the middle of the chaos she had made, feathers drifting aimless through the air and broken glass tangled in the carpet, clutching the drugs to her chest as she wept pure venom.

Aesop and her mother wouldn't have wanted her to go this far. Dropping out of school and taking her dead brother's place working in the factories was already too much, but this line was supposed to be uncrossable. That was the theory, at least. Turns out it wasn't difficult at all to make the rounds with Poe's junkie friends, dealing out his morphling to people too blitzed out of their minds to wonder why she was the one at their doors. Suddenly, like one of Aesop's magic tricks, her pockets were full of wads of cash and it was enough. She couldn't hold her head as high as the day before, but that didn't matter anymore.

"Congratulations on surviving one more day, Poe." It's a tight, serpentine hiss of sarcasm through her teeth, eerie in the silence of a room full of rows of unconscious patients. She doesn't know why she even bothers keeping her words hushed when no one in the room would be able to tell the difference. "I did what I had to do, so if you're pissed at me for hocking your stash when you wake up," lungs swelling with displaced rage, her voice rises louder and louder until a nurse walks in and she makes a desperate grab for his hand to mask her outburst, reigning herself back in, "then, Ripred as my witness, I will tear you to shreds and kill you myself. So don't you dare." Gripping his wrist, she yanks his arm until his head lolls over to look at her with closed eyes. "I don't owe you any of this. I'm a fucking angel, okay? Don't you forget it."

She leaves and although her head hangs low, her shoulders are stubbornly squared.

you steady chasing that paper
just live your life
ain't got no time for no haters
just live your life
no tellin' where it'll take ya

[L△LIA]

A familiar voice booms through the air, frazzled with static but still resonating somewhere within his chest. "Congratulations on surviving one more day, Tributes!" It is both wrong and right, laced with the memory of a melody so persistent he can't tell if it's actually singing out upon the breeze or if he's imagining things. Inexplicably, he feels as though he should put his hand upon his heart. Loyalty or conditioned patriotism or something like aching twinge and wrestle within his chest until he throws his head back in frustration, only to discover a golden seal hanging across the ceiling of the sky, angels swooping over the arcing patterns.

WIP WIP WIP OOPS SLEEP

you know about me dog
don't talk about me dog
and if you doubt me dog
you better out me dog