Archive of Our Own ^beta

The music dies, the stream of guests file out with smiles as plastic and insincere as the artificial beats of her dead hearts, the door clicking shut rings with a finality of a lone gunshot. 

The party is done, the glitter is on the floor, and Callie is alone. 

That’s the worst part, isn’t it? When she doesn’t get to pretend anymore. Out amongst the shine of the lights, the heat of bodies, the grease of inauthenticity that clings to her in a way she can almost convince herself is love – she can be someone else, someone better. 

Someone who is more than enough. Someone who is worthy of all the world’s treasures, of life, of beauty and love. There, in that false skin, she can get a taste – no matter how bitter – of a life worth living. A life that reminds her that her hearts are beating, that the blood in her veins is singing, screaming at her: alive, alive, alive! 

But when the lights shut off, the music stops, and the false skin starts to shed, all she can do is contend with what it means to be dead. 

To be dead is to yearn for something else entirely – no, no, yearn is not quite the right word. Yearning is soft, if melancholy. It implies that something can be reached, that something safe and warm is waiting through the winter of her own self. What she feels is ugly, wretched, demands to be actualized. It howls, she howls. It’s from the very depths of her being, the shattered pieces of her soul crying out from a decaying body. 

Perhaps that is the beauty in being dead, the rawness of it. There is nothing more to hide. Some part of her, quiet and consoling amongst the millions of other monsters tries to tell her that this is a silver lining. That if she were to be a walking, howling corpse, the ugliness could be beautiful if just draped in a different light. 

That small part, a break in the clouds for starlight to shine through. The other clamoring voices are familiar and expected - she’s grown used to hearing them. Gentleness, that’s what it is, is what is foreign. It has her wrapping her arms around herself, tucking her chin to her chest in an effort to make herself small in a room that already dwarfs her. 

Beautiful corpse, don’t cry, don’t cry. 

Her arms squeeze tighter then, like she’s trying to save herself. If only she could be saved. 

Howling, howling, howling. It’s at its loudest now, drowning out anything else that would threaten to oppose it. It’s almost like music. She latches onto that and starts to hum - watery and desperate, some tune she remembers from a happier time. 

Her eyes are burning with unshed tears but she refuses to close them, like she wants to bear witness to her own collapse. She’s staring into the glitter laying dull on the marble floor, willing it to glint and shine and drown it all away. Take her misery and rid of it, replace it with the false, fleeting ecstasy she’s been chasing all her life.

Hesitantly, she scuffs her shoe against the floor and sends it dancing. Again, this time with more purpose. Her breath hitches with a strangled sob and salvation, it’s all she needs to start slowly swaying about the room. Every move kicks up the glitter again – she can feel the scales of her faux-skin growing back – until she’s caught up in a frenzy. Dancing to nothing but silence, her own hearts breaking, the chance to save herself even if it’s yet another lie. 

And so she twirls, and spins, and sways until she’s dizzy. Until she’s caught up in the countless falsehoods she tells herself. Until that tiny voice cuts her to her core and tells her: you can’t hide forever.

She stops dead in her tracks and the tide that promised to finally take her away pulls away. Her legs give out under her as a choked sob tears from her throat. She is small as she hugs herself and cries, cries, cries in this room that’s more like a stomach waiting to digest her whole. 

The party is done, the glitter is on the floor, and Callie is alone again.