Work Text:
December 28th, 1951
The rate of acceleration of gravity is 9.80665 miles per second.
Have you ever considered peeling off your nails, blue and bruised, one by one to check if there is anything crystalline, invasive-and-poking beneath? The sort of slow-gruesome thing you have to check, you have to, to make sure. You just have to make sure.
She can feel it under her nailbeds. Something invasive. Her nails grow blue by the root now. They're hiding it. Hiding the truth. Hiding poison-killing-blue.
She needs to find it.
The rate of acceleration of gravity is 9.80665 miles per second.
Have you shaved yourself bald in the middle of the night? Dragged a shaving razor across your scalp, bled into the blue of it, nicking yourself with too-trembling hands,
But her blood is still red. Her blood is still red.
Repetitive motion, severing the poison from her skull. Blue-locked-curls falling to the can, ropes of it, head lighter with each stripe of metal.
She burnt it all, acrid-smoke air, better to be safe, better to be safe and be rid of it. Bathroom-metal trash can on fire, Her little brother staring at her from her room,
Petey’s eyes are bluer than hers. She can't look at him. She can't look at him,
The baby was screaming where she left him on the bed.
The smoke alarms screamed a continuous wail of burning.
The rate of acceleration of gravity is 9.80665 miles per second.
Empty house. Empty halls.
The baby is gone now. She gave him to a church. Her brother’s baby is gone.
She would have killed him if he'd stayed here. Starvation or shaking him to just stay quiet, just stop screaming, just stop— stop I can't, he's dead, Mark is dead, Pete, stop fucking asking stop, stop stop—
The rate of acceleration of gravity is 9.80665 miles per second.
She's picking her pinkie finger bloody and open in the hallway. There's something like broken glass in her bathroom. She can't open the door. Her hair is contaminated and blue. There's something like death in every room of this house. Her body is contaminated and blue.
Mark crashed his car two weeks ago. And Wanda Walter is not going to make it through this.
There was a time when she thought she was the sanest person in the room. Her father spilling caustic chemicals and hardly caring as he cleaned them up, her uncle's perpetually blue-stained hands, her husband's theories of dimensions, of the universe, a grand sort of future, progress and technology, all unfolding in front of her
She—
She—
She's sitting in the hallway. She has her pocket knife. Gift from her grandfather. Eight years old. It lived on her shelf next to chemistry and physics books.
The rate of acceleration of gravity is 9.80665 miles per second. The rate at which you crack under pressure is significantly faster.
Did you know that at absolutely no point it stops hurting? Prying a knife around the edge of your nail? Digging it up and off piece by piece?
She has to be sure. Sure there's nothing under it. That there aren't crystals there. That there's nothing tumorous and blue growing under her skin.
The rate of acceleration of gravity is 9.80665 miles per second.
They found him three days later. She spent three days screaming. His Cadillac shined white under the surface. His face was eaten by fish. His stomach bloated with water.
She's seen corpses.
Mama was burnt red. Grandpa was cold. Grandma was peaceful. Guy was fingerbones-and-a-scrap-of-leg bleached pale blue. His glasses. Dad was less.
Mark was bloat-flesh, blue in another way, a different way,
Blue blue blue.
Her nail splits in the middle, as she stabs into it, tearing it off in sideways halves,
She still bleeds red.
Red isn't blue.
Red isn't blue.
She's not going to make it through this. She knew it the moment she told them to cremate him.
She's not going to make it through this.
The rate of acceleration of gravity is 9.80665 miles per second.
It’s gore underneath. But it's red. Perfect and living red. She grabs for her head. Pressing her scalp to her knees, peach-fuzz blue hair under her fingers,
Why can't it just be brown again?
The rate of acceleration of gravity is 9.80665 miles per second.
She locked all the doors when Dad died. She locked the doors to keep the curse in with the dead. When they found his body she pushed a book case in front of his door, heaving and coughing bile, Petey screaming at her, and she'd—
She'd shoved him hard, maybe, but he'd fallen back, and she just kept screaming, and—
And Mark is dead and Wanda is not going to make it through this.
The rate of acceleration of gravity is 9.80665 miles per second.
“Wanda.” Words are spoken to her. And it might be her uncle. Crouching down. And there might be hands pressed-carressed to her back.
Her uncle is going to die soon. Her little brother is going to die soon. She is going to throw herself from the top floor, she is going to—
Her uncle's knees hit the floor, and she's bleeding, maybe, bleeding a lot, bleeding red,
And—
She's pulled to him.
And he's broken. He broke when Dad disintegrated to base elements - carbon oxygen hydrogen. Broken down to the basic components a human is composed of,
And he's broken. Because he had a stroke. And he can't fix any of this.
And the rate of acceleration of gravity is 9.80665 miles per second.
“I've got you.” He says, and things are turning dull and grainy, and she hasn't taken a breath in minutes, and oh, she's crying?
And his arms might be the only real thing left.
“Wanda, Wanda I've got you.”
But the rate of acceleration of gravity is 9.80665 miles per second.
And she's falling much much faster than that.