and the world gets darker | {rave/dars}

[umber vivuus 12b 🥀 [dars]]

GLORY AND GORE GO HAND IN HAND

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R O X A N N E
THAT'S WHY WE'RE MAKING HEADLINES

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Moving on.

That was what people did. It was human nature to care and to love and to appreciate, but in the end, we moved on. People grew apart as they grew older, and most of the time they didn't even notice that a wedge of ignorance to the other person had driven itself into their backs until it was far too late to ever recover from it.

Roxanne had fallen victim to this, not once, not twice, but three times. All the people she cared about were gone now, and she had to take some of the blame. Holden wasn't her fault, or at least she hoped. He seemed to have just disappeared, and his parents refused to confirm or deny that theory. Here one day, gone the next, there was no subtly to his disappearance, no long lasting numbness to distract her for just enough time for him to slip away. He was taken.

Bette and Dustyn- they were another story.

Losing Holden hurt her, it hurt all of them. They had lost a fourth of their group. But it seemed that those two were stunted with his disappearance, acting as if they were children, refusing to grow up; Roxanne left them behind because she had to, not because she wanted to. There was only so much she could handle, and when they reverted to playing childish games, hiding in the woods and jumping out at each other, when they still had sleep overs and only slept, it was too much for her to bare. It was hard enough knowing Dustyn didn't love her, but knowing he loved Bette instead- that was what finally broke them apart.

She still saw them in school, laughing at jokes only they understood (she would have understood them once, too) and sometimes she wanted to go back to them, pick up where she left them, maybe even try and put them together again. She couldn't though. She had already dug the grave and thrown her friendship with them into a dirty grave and waking sleeping ghosts was not a smart thing to do.

Roxanne was nowhere close to perfect herself, but whereas they refused to grow up, the redhead decided to grow up too quickly. Alcohol and drugs became habits for a long time, and for years she didn't see anything wrong with them, but eventually she straightened herself out. She still used them on occasion, breathing in repugnant smoke, holding her breath until her throat burned, all to feel the sensation of peace that she couldn't find elsewhere.

She was holding it then, and a person could have believed it was only a cigarette if not for the odor, but she was deep within the mouth of the woods in Two, and the only ones that ventured this far out were stone-cutters, and by this time they were fast asleep in their beds, dirt kicked under their nails and muscles thankful for the long-anticipated relief, so she breathed in the stuff again, calmness swallowing her in an ocean of serenity, and then she heard a twig snap.

She coughed, once, twice, what felt like a hundred times, and spun around. "I have a prescription!" She lied on instinct, her voice haggard and strained from the coughing.

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template by chelsey

[Deleted]

phantilius {♔} atwood Demitri forced them out into the forest at some point. Phantilius remembered the man's voice chirping through the air snaking between trees in miniature breaks of silence, and Phantilius also remember himself attempting to ignore the instructions while wandering off path. Rarely had he ever actually step foot in the woods - he always found himself more of a rooftop or a bar fight kind of man - usually Errol or Demitri or one of the ones under him called the outskirt objectives first and left the third oldest stuck against bricks and benches (he never argued against it of course, wasting time away in the sullen streets at least meant there'd be people in general instead of just tree after tree). In the back of his mind, even after piling against the ground and rotting away like fallen leaves for hours in a line, still reverberated Demitri's directions on the task or training or whatever at hand, and Phantilius was still evermore uninterested. And still attempting to ignore the words with a smirk. The ground felt morphed against his body's weight more so than it had when he first passed out against the tree; it morphed to the bottom of his pants like the dried saliva latching under his bottom lip. Damp grass hugged his under thigh with the intensity of the crickets' opera beside him as he pieced together the area of his post-wake through the nightfall. Dirt meshed against all nine of his finger with the pop of his wrist, the earth seeping through into the grooves carved into his fingertips and between their individual shields. The other two (being Errol and Demitri, there was a small skill gap between the three in Phantilius's eyes, unlike the gap between his self and the next in line) would have a fit of sorts: skipping instructions, ignoring both Nelaar and his 'superior', literally sleeping on the ground, etcetera , etcetera. Thinking about the annoyance raking against the second's face cannoned a shaky laugh from his throat; it was funny, of course, as long as he was feet away from the both of them. However, it wouldn't be much of a war, considering their occupation. Assassins were like, the fine felines of the shade throwing world if nothing else, it came with the job. His knees and back let out a synchronized pop against the air like static as he came to his feet, soaked in the tree's dirt and the ground's clutching at his legs. Underneath his feet the ground cracked - dried leaves, twigs, down to the sliding earth, cracking into place to the patterned imprint of his shoe - as he moved to replace his steps while he filled his lungs up to his throat in air. It had a hint of smoke. Like a trail instead of a furnace or a wildfire, like something overcooked prancing through the trees on its own. Of course, less than significant details considering the paradigm of a horror story (the ones they always scoffed at whenever mentioned, albiet for different reasons; Phantilius scoffed due to the typical idea, while Demitri's was forced at how they "always got the details wrong"). The smell of something burning away triggered the thought of food, something to combat the discomfort in his throat he woke up to. He hoped for chicken. Instead he was met with coughing, sputtering of someone close breaking through the air; the fit echoed through the air imitating the beat of his slowing steps. Red. It bounced through the web of sticks and moss and leaves, the color red, meeting his eyes with the smell of nicotine and for a moment he was well on believing a forest fire ate his chicken. Barks of fighting against the smoke riddled back to him as the red remained steady instead of dancing, spreading and catching on the grime of life surrounding him. Shifting in place for the red's job, he was mesmerized with the thought of him mistaking hair for fire. Smirking at his own stupidity under the cover of the redhead's hacks of breath against the atmosphere as he transitioned himself from the lattice of tree excess. He had no recollection of where he ended up (yet he still remembered the indignation in Demitri's voice and glee at it in his own) but the silence in between barks casting back over the area took him home again for seconds as he slipped between the mesh of trees. His arms threw up crooked at the elbows into the air as "I have a prescription!" came as a pop against the breeze in place of a routine cough. Prescription, like medicine, the word, as he looked over his shoulder with his chin parallel to his shoulder. Prescription? Like the medicine. "Oh really," the phrase arched with exclamation laced with sarcasm, much like his eyebrow game. Words fit weird in his mouth, like they were caught by a draft, as he tried to catch a glimpse at the girl threatening him but only getting the same red and a mix of trees once more. I have a prescription! Oh did she now? "And what are you gonna do with that?" The answer was probably to stab him.