the dreams of when i'm dying | ☀

[gamemaker kelsier]

BECAUSE OF YOU

SUN 

I AM BECOMING RUINED.

Two year of living in hell and you begin to forget what the sun looks like. I've been rattling my chains for three years but I guess I've only gotten weaker because no one's heard my silent cries for help. It's that, or I'm being ignored. How a man treats his Avox is up to him and him alone. When Nathanial has guests over, they don't say a word about the appearance of his slaves. It would be impolite I suppose. I should know. I've been here long enough. Even if we were allowed to talk to each other with the Avox signs that are still so foreign to me, it would not take a rocket scientist to understand that no other boy has lasted as long as me.

I'm an exception.

It's because after he's done with me, Nathanial likes to spend long minutes treating my bruising, sticking little bits of gauze to my cuts. Sometimes he talks to me, telling me that he doesn't want to be like that, how he is with me. He's rough, he's always been rough but I stopped crying a few months in. It's easier to just not feel anything than to let everything he does scare and hurt me. So I still feel it in hues of reds and purples and blues, turning my view violet and forlorn but I never show it in tears anymore. Nathanial doesn't like tears just as much as he doesn't like sound.

So my hands shake. Like the way the leaves used to be rustled by the wind back in seven, in the middle of fall when they were still clinging so desperate to the trees there. They thought they could cling on for dear life and no one could reach them n their branches. They were shades of panicked yellows and oranges, and the wind was the smell of cinnamon and nutmeg then. I remember the colour of pumpkins. They are yellow and dull orange. Here, in the Capitol, they are whatever colour you like.

That is too bad.

Nathanial likes to fix up my bruises and breaks because my eyes are too sweet so I'm working on making my gaze colder.

He's been fixing me up less so I think that maybe it's working.

I'm nineteen years old and I haven't been a child for so long now that I nearly forgot that I am no longer in the reaping. It never applied to me much anyway. I haven't seen my home for almost five years. I've nearly forgotten how the pine trees look when they're towering above your head. That feeling of insignificance is such a deep blue that you can't see the bottom of it. I haven't been able to see the bottom of anything for a while now. There's such a black shade of maroon hung low inside this house that seeing anything is hard, too much work.

Sometimes concentrating on breathing past the pain takes too much work to try anything else.

I think my neck has gotten too big for the collar that Nathanial placed on me three years ago. It feels so raw from it that I've been trying not to eat anything at all in the hopes of getting some breathing room. Or to stop breathing at all. That would be fine too. Sometimes I imagine that the collar is rubbing my neck so raw that one day my head is just gonna pop right off from the friction. That would be an interesting way to die I suspect.

But I don't think I want to die.

If I wanted to die, I think I would have done it long ago.

So instead I stand where I'm told and wear the white uniform of the Avox. I wait for Nathanial to call for me and I go to him. Nathanial removes the white uniform and then he hurts me. He grips my collar and tugs me along like a dog with a metal chain. He pushes me down and he makes me feel like I am the size of an ant, I'm so small. I can't do anything against him, if I try he'll hurt me worse. I know this because I have been here for three years. The waves of velvet maroon have enveloped and settled over my too.

I never tried running from Nathanial. He told me that if I try, the blade hidden in the curve of the collar will stab me in the neck. After years of searching I have never found a remote or control box for this operation.

I am going to run today.

It's four in the morning and I'm staring down the house's gates. No one guards them, they work on electricity. I've seen Nathanial climb over them many times when his elderly mother locked him out for missing curfew. I've watched from the house as he's fallen on his face because he's so drunk. On those nights I hide, hoping he won't remember that I did by the morning.

I know that if I climb over this gate and I roam too far, the collar could kill me.

I know that if I don't do something, I'll die here anyway. One night Nathanial will go too far and I'll be dead.

The idea of that is so yellow that it's blinding.

I rest one foot on the lower bar of it, wrapping my hands carefully around the bars of the rusting gate. I pull myself up carefully, muscles that never truly faded from home helping me along. I straddle the top of the gate in moments. I blink back at the house as best as I can with one black eye and I don't give the place that has been my prison for so long a second thought after that.

I'll find freedom out there or in death, it doesn't matter to me anymore.

When I land on the other side I have to stop for a few moments because I can't breath from the pain in my chest. I think that even if the collar isn't as deadly as Nathanial promised, I'll be dying soon anyway. I've felt it for awhile, like every bit of me is finally falling apart.

When I was younger I thought my Grandmother would come save me, she'd always told me that she wouldn't let anything bad happen to me.

But I know that she must be dead. They probably killed her after torturing information out of her for a few months. I think she's been dead for years and all that is, is a soft pink on the horizon. That's all it is. Part of me is angry. I wouldn't be here if it weren't for her.

I know that.

After the months of torture where they would only ask me about what she had done, I know. She's the reason I'm here in hell.

I step away from the fence and wait but nothing comes. No blade to slice my neck.

I take another step.

Another.

Soon I am running, pavement slapping loud beneath my feet, chest screaming in pain, long hair flying behind me in the wind. The collar is tight around my neck, it chokes my breathing but it does not slice into me and I am alive. Suddenly I am alive.

The city is either awake or asleep still around me but people walk in droves down a busy street and it overwhelms me, splashes of colours from different sights and smells painting my vision too quickly. I hear fireworks in my ears and suddenly I remember how small I am but not in the good way like the trees make me feel but in the way Nathanial makes me feel and I feel like I might throw up.

I shut my eyes and search for quiet in the roaming crowds but someone walks into me and laughs. I stumble, tipping forwards, and orange panic lights up the pavement beneath me as I fall against it and hit it with a thud. A grunt of pain leaves my lips and I try to stand but my arms are weak from climbing and someone bumps into me, drawing blood from a wound only half closed. I fall on my side and scramble up again quickly, searching for a wall, something to have against my back in this city that I have lived in for over three years but is still so foreign.

I wonder where the trees are.

There are only tall, grey structures with many windows.

But those aren't trees.

I find something to lean against and grip my side, the shallow cut on my ribs bleeding quickly. No one looks this way. I am an Avox, not worth looking twice at. Nathanial sleeps until noon. He won't know that I am gone for eight more hours, I can slip away. I can do it. I can disappear. The idea makes tears form in my eyes and I wipe them away quickly. Nathanial doesn't like tears.

Not that it matters anymore.

I laugh then, an odd barking sound. I don't have a tongue to quell the roughness from a voice that hasn't spoken for years. My voice was soft before, light. Now I'll never know what it sounds like. They took my voice from me.

Tears fall anyway.

I crouch against the wall, sobbing into my hands, wishing I could just disappear. I want to go back to seven. I miss my home, the way the woods are so quiet and empty at dusk. There are so many sounds and smells here. Even the rocks are foreign to me.

No one knows my name, not even Nathanial.

No one knows my name here, so I can die here, right?

The collar bites into my skin and I let out a terrified cry before realizing that I am not being killed by it. It's because of the way that my neck was bent.

I stand up and wipe my eyes dry. I have to keep moving. I have to walk as far as I can before Nathanial realizes that I am gone and he triggers my collar. I want to see trees before I die. I need to see them. I run again, pushing through the crowd, shivers crawling down my spine every time I accidentally touch someone. Every touch is a smell, an emotion, a memory.

I see store fronts and strange hairstyles. I see colourful clothing and smell delicious things wafting from restaurant doors. I want to stop and smell and listen and touch but I can't. There is a monster on my heels. If I can get out of range of Nathanial and his remote then I might survive. I might see the trees.

There's a sign for a park on a lamp post. I can't read the words but it comes with a simple picture of trees and a pond. An arrow points straight ahead and I know that it is for me, put there just for me to see. There will be trees.

I rush forwards, sweat pouring down my back, pooling between my shoulder blades. My breath comes ragged and I am barely breathing now. I stumble. Pain slices into my neck like Nathanial is stabbing me in the thigh again but it's under my skin, inside of my neck, I feel it, the blade.

The collar.

He wasn't lying.

My legs give up beneath me.

Blood flows from my neck.

I think I can just see a tree in the distance before I tip forward, collapsing on the hot, summer pavement.

I am dying.

He killed me.

[gamemaker kelsier]

S    U    N

"AND WAILING ON THE DOLDRUMS HAD OURSELVES A LONESOME NIGHT, PASSED OVER"

It is slow, painful. Waking up is painful.

Tears form in the corners of my eyes before I am fully there. There's spit pooled in the hollow of my mouth and I swallo-

I wake up again, sometime later, uncertain as to how much time has passed. I know that it was bright and silent again for awhile, that I lost consciousness. I feel like I've been staring into the sun. Pain laces my skin like silk on my bones and I can barely hear or see past it. I blink quickly, trying to clear my eyes from blurriness, trying to remember where I am.

This feeling of waking up in pain is familiar. I believe for a moment that I am lying in Nathanial's bed and the reason my throat feels like magenta is because Nathanial's strangled me to the point of passing out again. He's done that before. There's beeping though, and there isn't usually beeping in Nathanial's room.

I can't place why the beeping is so familiar. The room is still blurred around me but I can make out dimmed bar lights above my head, like the florescents that lined the ceiling of the detention center. I used to count them as they took me down the halls to the interrogation rooms from my cell.

Ahh.

The beeping.

It's the monitor they attached to me in the detention center to make sure my heart didn't fail on me during the interrogations.

no.

Tears form in my eyes. If Nathanial catches me crying he'll punish me.

I can't help them falling. It hurts. It really hurts. I try to move. I'm not strapped down this time but I can't move my body. I'm heavy all over, like my body doesn't belong to me anymore. It hasn't. My body hasn't been mine for so long now, maybe it's finally stopped moving of my will. Maybe someone else controls it now, I'm a puppet with strings.

My neck is sore.

It's so sore.

The trees. My eyes widen. I was looking for the trees, I was almost there. There'd been a sign. I'd nearly seen one poking up over a row of houses, just the very top of one, I'd nearly seen it. After such a long time away, I'd nearly seen one. It's silly to cry over such a little thing but somehow I'd felt that if I could just see one, the tight feeling in my chest would go away and I could breath again.

I wanted the smell of pine and the green of the bark, rough on my skin.

Bitter tears slide down my cheeks as I lie there, stuck. I remember the collar's blade, sliding into my neck. I could feel it go in, cold and sharp and there, inside of my neck but I could breath.

The collar must have shifted after wearing it for so many years. It was not as deadly as Nathanial had wanted it to be.

How am I alive?

Why?

After some minutes, I sink into whiteness.

I slip in and out of it over the next few days, I wake once and a lady dressed all in pale green with a heart-listener around her neck smiles encouragingly at me. She tells me to open my mouth for her and ever the obedient Avox, I do as I'm told. A whimper of pain leaks out of me at the movement. She makes a clucking sound and it reminds me of the soft purple you get if your grey paint gets too runny. I used to paint, back home. I remember the curve of the lady's cheek when she smiles at me because I want to paint that too.

A smile aimed in my direction is not rare, but I have not seen one so innocent in a long time. There is nothing behind it but kindness. She pute a needle of something into my arm and I wonder if it's tracker venom again. I've ahd that before. It takes me a moment to realize that she is speaking to me. My brain is fuzzy, like someone has places a blanket over it. My throat does not hurt. Nothing hurts. I am floating on a cloud.

A soft cloud.

The lady fades from view.

Weeks pass this in irrelevance this way. The passage of time is confusing for me. I'm not sure how much of it has passed when I wake up for the final time and my neck is no longer sore. I feel like I have been sleeping like this for years and years.

The nurses tell me it is only two weeks since a man brought me in through the emergency doors.

I am afraid to see Nathanial again. I wonder why he has not come in to see me sooner, wonder when my punishment will come for this betrayal. I have never rebelled against him, or sought out his punishment like this before. I wonder if he will break me.

The man who comes in to my room is not Nathanial.

For a moment I am confused.

For a very long moment.

This man has wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and he is wearing a suit that looks like mint leaves. He wears a matching bowler hat that has a raven's feather sticking from the band. There's a tattoo of a butterfly in the hollow of his throat.

"I am Adam," he says to me and he smiles. I do not like his smile. It is hollow, like the smile of a wood carving. He tells me about finding me collapsed on the sidewalk, about how he rushed me to the hospital in order to save my life. He did not realize I was an Avox until the nurses opened my mouth for surgery to my throat. He tells me that he has been searching in vain for my previous master. I let out a sigh of relief and nearly start crying again. I like my legs and being able to walk.

He tells me he did not search very hard. Two of my ribs were fractured and they had to break my left leg again after Nathanial had failed to make sure it set properly. Along with the evidence of past scars earned and bruises half-formed, Adam told me that he stopped searching altogether.

He tells me not to be afraid anymore.

I cry then.

For a long time.

Adam leaves after some time but I don't stop crying until everything sinks into whiteness again and I don't know anything anymore.

When Adam visits me again he tells me that the reason I survived was because the collar had shifted away from anything major and had simply sliced through a spot that was not vital. The collar itself had left a nasty ridged pink scar around my neck that would remain there. He told me apologetically that I would probably not be bought for my beauty the next time I was sold. The scar around my neck was too gruesome.

Adam tells me he will personally sell me at his own Avox pens.

He tells me gently that he will not send me home with someone untrustworthy.

I understand then that I am not a human being.

I am simply damaged goods at a repair shop between owners.

It is not shocking to realize.

The hospital keeps me for some weeks, rehabilitating me after so long spent in bed. They help me walk again, months pass before it stops hurting. I walk with a slight limp if I walk for too long. My chest is no longer tight and I can breath again. The nurses make me feel like pink grapefruit. Their smiles are sticky and sweet, covered in sugar.

They call me 'jungle cat' with affection because of the way I find patches of sun to nap in. They make a joke of me, reaching out to pet my head every time I walk by them. I have to bend down for the shorter ones.

For awhile, I feel safe. I feel warm.

Adam comes for me one afternoon and tells me that he is checking me out from the hospital. My health bill has been cleared. The nurses pet my head before I leave. I remember the way their hands feel, gentle and kind.

I hold onto that.

Adam brings me on a long ride in his piece of rolling plastic with seats. He calls it a car but all I have to compare it to is the train. It's a small train for the road, as far as I understand. When Nathanial bought me we road in one too. I didn't leave his home until now after that.

He brings me to the pens. They are different than the ones Nathanial bought me from, cleaner, softer. Adam tells me that they are for Avox suited to the upper class.

I am no longer considered suited for the upper class because of the scar around my neck and the damage done to my skin.

Adam leads me to the back of the pens, a slightly less clean area. The cages are smaller than the ones up front where possible buyers can see them. The lights flicker overhead and it is damp.

We stop at a cage between two others. It is empty, there seems to be only one Avox per cage. There is a small pool of water to drink from and a bowl of nuts for protein.

I do not want to go in.

Adam unlocks the door and gestures for me to enter but I stand still, hands shaking as I look at the metal bars, at the Avox to either side, heads hung low and eyes glazed. The feeling in that cage is dark purple and I do not want to go in.

Adam grips the back of my neck tightly and I cry out. He forces me in and locks the cage door.

"You're an Avox," he reminds me. His voice isn't harsh but I must have forgotten this. his words sting like a slap.

I am an Avox.

I take my seat in the corner of the cage, knees fitting snug against my chest.

I wait.