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Blood.
Blood, earth, and water.
That was all the girl could smell – all she could sense at all – as she came back to herself. The exhaustion set in before all, the deep, hollow ache carving into every fiber of her musculature, her overused lungs igniting with her sputtering breath in as she awoke to darkness. A beat of only relatively blissful ignorance and physical agony before she became conscious enough for the dread to claw in next.
It happened again. That dark, miserable passenger that lay side-by-side with her heart had won her over again, fresh enough to still feel the clogging of her nerves and the viscous weight in her chest as it receded out of her mind, down her spine, and back into the nothing she wished it’d stay in. Despite her face still being swathed in a mix of mud and her own hair, her eyes still attempted to draw tears, only to find she had already spent them all in the course of her episode, ducts coming up stingingly dry, her lungs too worn to even sob. All she could muster to externalize her pain was a wet and whining cough.
She didn’t want to think about what had dredged the thing up this time, not for the effort of rooting through her newly fucked brain, not for the pain and guilt of revealing to herself what petty little nothing caused her to lose it again. She scarcely wanted to think at all. The only thing on her mind at the moment was how longingly wished for this to be over. To simply die and be free of this endless cycle of restraint and failure. The idea was so attractive she considered trying for it there and then, shifting in the mud as she brought her hand to her collar, considering using the last of the energy left in her little arm to tear out her own throat and bleed out right where she lay. She wouldn’t even need to sit up. It’d be so easy-
The mud around her arm audibly flung as she shoved it away from her neck, nails digging into the palm of her balled fist, shuddering in the dirt as she pushed the awful presence down and back out of her spine again, still left with it clinging to her bones. Some form of self-schadenfreude brought the most minute of smiles to her filthy face – It really was just her, wasn’t it? To come to her so fast, with such fluid ease, it had to be. Even having just forced out its influence, the suicide it suggested was still an appealing one, one she had considered without need for its help plenty of times by now. But even more than she desired freedom for herself, did she fear giving it freedom. She knows what that thing can do – god, does she know – and her shuffling off the coil would almost certainly result in it simply heaving up her corpse, free of her consciousness to hold it back, or, barring that, infesting someone else, someone with less willpower than her already flimsy own. Giving up was one of the many luxuries she was simply not allowed, because fuck her, I guess.
Releasing her hand from its own grip, she took a deep, burning breath before pushing against the ground to get herself sat up on her knees, the previously silent wounds in her sides crying out to her nerves with the effort. The familiar smell of death filled her chest as she inhaled with the depth her previous position didn’t allow, hands moving up to reflexively move her hair out from the way of her mouth as she then unceremoniously slouched back down to vomit, as she had wanted to since waking. It never got easier, just more familiar. She wiped her mouth with the least dirty section of her sleeve she could feel out before mustering the strength to get herself on her feet, bits of mud and half-dried blood sloughing off her shoulders and out of her hair with the movement, then wiping her hands off on the back of her coat.
She took another deep breath to build her resolve, through her mouth this time, to then clear the hair blinding her and open her eyes, placing a hand over her lips to stifle the imminent urge to puke again. Looking down at her feet, she could already see the pooled blood surrounding her, and the slightly rusted weapons that lay within it, adjacent to the unrecognizable piles of metal, cloth, and dark gore that must have been their wielders, those who gave their lives trying to stop her. Before even thinking, before the chill of disgust and guilt could travel down her spine, she felt both her hands claw into her own skin, the one not clenched to her mouth rearing up and slamming into her hip, the pain reverberating through her already present wounds and sapped muscle. The smallest bit of catharsis for the knowledge that it was her fickle will that let this happen. In a fit of continued penance, unable to tell if she was struggling against her body or brain, she forced herself to look up at what she’d done before letting herself move forward.
She had brought the whole town down around her. Every building leveled to stonefall or flooding. Dozens of corpses, none left whole. She hit herself again, harder this time. And again, and again, until she drove herself back down to her knees, her legs buckling under her meager weight, and again, until the pain alone made her vomit in the same spot she did prior. This was the closest thing to justice she could bring to any of this – Vengeance.
Wiping her mouth on her sleeve and standing up once more, she spared herself the sight of looking up again, keeping her eyes to the ground as she trudged forward, averting her eyes from where she had seen bodies from looking up before or wherever blood began to creep into her present vision, until she made it out of the ruins of what once was the town she inhabited, stopping as she reached the gates, a desperate desire to do something, anything to make up for herself welling up and being met with the reality that her damage has already been done; there’s nothing she can do, she’s not even strong enough to bury the bodies – or what’s left of them – it’d make more sense to leave them for the crows, if anything. The only thing she can do now is keep moving. Keep living. Keep it locked up inside. Pray to everything she can that it doesn’t lash out again. Keep going after that when that inevitably fails.
She struck herself in the hip again.
Fuck.