Work Text:
No update schedule. No beta. Self-edited.
All the warnings needed before you start reading
On self-sabotaging and self-limiting behavior
Why writing a protagonist like this is a healthy outlet for me
Disclaimer on the hang glide scenario in chapter one
The reliable unreliable narrator
The cold Swiss air whips my cheeks. Every frantic step both drives and steals the air into and out of my lungs. My fingertips have turned to icicles, my nose was a lost cause when Bill the hang gliding instructor told me to take off my scarf and take off my earmuffs, and my feet stopped hurting ten minutes ago. Tears blur my vision and biting air stings against hot tears. They leave tracks over my cheeks. My fingers throb where I hold the handles. Fucking Raynaud’s. Let me breathe in the direction of a picture of the Alps and my fingers will fall off, I swear.
Canvas snaps Bill’s words away. “- to run!” He shouts it in horrendous half-Swiss half-English. I wince.
Right. Run.
My legs almost refuse. They’re heavy. Wouldn’t be surprised if they just gave way. Sorry, Bill, can’t do this. My legs just had a stroke. You go over the edge, I’ll just sit here and watch you not plummet to certain death. But no. Giving up means losing. Losing means not improving myself. I have to make up for the lost time. I have to make up for the incompetent, scatterbrained idiot part of me that sat at the wheel for most of the last year.
My knee pops and burns. It’s just a joint. It’s nothing. The cold is worse. The edge is even worse. My heart will explode before I even reach it. I’ll probably projectile-vomit it up in a grotesque, surreal vision of blood, gore and fleshy bits. My body will just slump on the ground between the snowflakes, or maybe my fingers will not give up on their death grip. The hang glider might just lift me up and carry me down as the present no-one wants to get on just another day’s work. Sorry, Bill-on-the-Ground.
Oh, fuck. I don’t want to do this.
Halfway to a cliff’s edge doesn’t really leave room for reconsideration. A half-hearted flail towards a don’t-let-me-fall prayer, maybe? My feet slam down and devour what little rests between me and the edge. It’s this tiny juncture of grass and powdered snow, glittering with tiny ice crystals. I wish I were an ice crystal. On this mountain. No worries about melting for this snowflake.
Canvas snaps again, and something rips . A glimpse of flapping red and yellow in my peripheral weaves up and down in the world’s most obvious, most horrifying red flag ever made.
“Brake! Brake! Turn! Throw it!”
I throw my weight backward, feet slipping through frost and semi-frozen mud. My gut lurches, my bladder shudders and squeezes. I pinch my legs together, hold my breath and stand on the edge of the world.
“Let go! Let go of it! Draus!”
A hysteric little laugh wrestles itself from my squeezed, exploding chest at his… mangled… German? The wind chafes. Snowflakes and little bits of hail dance a vortex in a whole lot of empty at eye-level. My fingers are senseless. My arms are caught in a cramp bad enough to make me bite my tongue and scrunch up my face. My knees wobble.
I can’t let go. My body won’t let go. My fingers don’t move. My heart pounds in my chest and in my ears and I swear, when it skips a beat and hops, it shudders as a cherry-pit sack might. Bill screams in my earpiece, miles away. He can see me, but he was getting ready to jump after me. Keep an eye on me. He wants to help me, he has to untangle himself from his glider, first. Unbuckle all the buckles. No need to leave his equipment somewhere safe, but still a necessity to make sure it doesn’t get swooped up and knock us off the edge either way.
My worst fear is dying afraid. My scalp tingles, the side of my face tingles. The hairs on my arms and legs are upright. My lips taste like ice and stick together. A snowflake dances down and I go cross-eyed staring at it until it touches my nose and melts.
Fear is an emotion. It’s a sensation. Where?
It’s in my stomach, churning and flip-flopping. It’s in my bladder, which was bursting to begin with, and now threatens to empty itself whether I’m on a mountain in mortal peril or not. It’s on the inside of my wrists, where it writhes around. Two snakes of biting, burning acid. It’s the prickling burn on and between my shoulder blades. It’s my locked jaw, my cramping fingers, the foul taste of bile on my tingling tongue. It’s in the uselessness of lungs that suck in air and yet don’t know how to make use of it. It’s the hum in my ears and the stabbing pain behind my left eye and my rock-hard neck muscles.
Bill still shouts. The wind still buffets me and almost pulls me off the edge. Almost. I hunch into myself and almost topple over when I lose my balance. Almost. I look over my shoulder into flapping red canvas and a wealth of ice and snow and mountain behind.
The wind catches the left intact wing and drags me forward. One mad stumble, one series of manic, terrified heartbeats, one jerk from the hang glider against my hands and arms and one hard, reeling slap against the back of my neck. A bar. Must’ve been a
My left foot overshoots and my other leg pulls and gives away. The wind died down. I’m near the ground. I could hold my breath, roll myself away from the edge and force my fingers to give up their death grip. I shift. The wind grasps the remaining intact wing. A bar hits me in the back and open air kisses my lips and blurs my eyes.
I’m not a snowflake, and the wind doesn’t lift me up and carry me around like I am one.
I fall, instead.