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Her own underwear, held and stretched above her head in a way it shouldn't be able to, makes a faint snap sound against her head as Max Jägerman lets go of her and pushes her down.
Ruth Fleming floats in and out of consciousness, being drifted between the two states by the waves of torture pulsating through her body. She hits the floor with a thud that she doesn't have the energy to even whimper at, and she can feel the blood draining out of her own body—above everything, above the agony and the throbbing in her legs that won't budge no matter how hard she tries to move, she hears the faint dripping of her blood. It adds to the already large puddle of blood beneath her and gives her a fucked sense of awareness of what's really happening and how she might look.
She’s dying. The thought lands and cuts through the fog in her mind with a sense of clarity nothing else has been able to provide. She tries to think around it instead of about it, reaching for anything else—but it always circles back. Try as she might to convince herself there's still something she isn't accounting for, it doesn't change how she knows well, deep down, how this situation will end. There isn't enough denial left in her to mistake what's happening.
It's more than humiliating to die like this—her laced, cotton panties draped over her head, sturdy enough to split her in two starting from her bottom half, leaving her pathetically kneeling on the stage with the spotlight still bright and burning on her. She thinks that maybe, wherever she goes after this, she might dare to be a little bit happy about the melodrama and cinematography of her own death, even with the humiliation of her bloodied underwear being used as a veil of sorts.
But right now, it doesn't feel that way. Before being beautiful, tragic, and whatever bullshit she'll soon make up to make herself feel better about her death scene, it was first just considered as dying, and dying sucked. Dying was meant to be meaningful, like Juliet, or Fantine, or Éponine, and it just… wasn’t. The plays had never mentioned how cold it gets, or how much blood there’d really be.
Everything below her ribcage feels like it disappeared into nothing but just pain, and the air hits everything in her body in just the wrong way that it feels unbearably hot and freezing cold at the same time.
She makes the first movement she's been able to for a while and shivers, curling in on herself further, which only makes it hurt more. The pain still lingers, sharp and persistent, and the new position still doesn’t help with the temperature.
A while. It couldn't have been that long already. Maybe a few seconds; that revelation doesn't help with how every single one was filled with raw agony, her own chronoception turning completely against her. Seconds stretched long enough that 3 minutes ago where she was singing her heart out already felt like a distant memory, and long enough where she couldn’t tell if she’d been laying down for a lifetime or for 5 heartbeats.
Ruth has never been particularly suicidal, believe it or not. Even though she’s had nothing going for her recently, she’s wanted to get better, get into theatre, have her life be what she’s always wanted it to be. She’s never actively wanted to go and seek for an ending.
…Despite that, part of her feels ambivalence toward her own death. She finds herself more bothered by the circumstances than actually dying, as if her mind already accepted it long before she realized it herself. She wants to care more about everything she’s done and everything she hasn’t, but she can’t find it in her.
Maybe it’s how she looks at herself through an outsider’s lens, sometimes, and all she can see is a weird, teenage loser who’ll end up alone, peaking in high school despite never having done anything anyway. Through an outsider’s lens, she hardly thinks of herself. She imagines an absence, a seat in the far back of the class without her in it.
It’s hard to feel something about losing that, even if it’s herself she’s referring to. The curtains will eventually fall, and the world will keep moving on, and she can’t blame them for how quickly it’ll happen.
Through everything, Ruth still feels the lace of her underwear. Her attention drifts back to that, even though she knows how absurd it is to have that be what she’s fixated on at the moment.
Why does this have to be the last thing that touches her? Of everything she’d ever laid her hands on—it was this completely random and arbitrary piece of cotton and lace she’d chosen to wear on a whim. Not even anything remotely sentimental or meaningful. She tries to recall what she was thinking this morning when she put it on, or even when she bought it, and how embarrassing it’d be for everyone to have this be their final impression of her.
Then again, she doesn’t know why she cares about that at this very moment.
Her thoughts don’t rearrange themselves into the neat precision she thought they would—no childhood flashing before her eyes or grand last minute epiphanies happened. The world around her just refused to broaden into more than the stubbornly mundane details she focused on.
She reaches into her mind, searching and scraping at what’s even there for her to look at. It seems to come up jumbled, a mess of names and people that she can hardly make sense of.
She wants to think about anything other than whatever she just went on a tangent about—something noble, something that actually has some sort of value, but her thoughts keep getting stuck on the irrelevant, smaller details as if the whole of her life is too much to hold at once.
She thinks of the way the lace itches before she thinks of her passion and talent that she wasted away under the excuse of her anxiety. Before she thinks about Richie, whose death was brushed under the shelf by everyone else except for her and Pete and Stephanie. Before she thinks about her friends.
Her… friends.
It all floods into her mind in one sudden, coherent rush.
Richie. He’d died on Friday night and she’d only found out Monday morning through the police. It still fills her with excessive guilt that she hadn’t noticed his unusually long absences. She doubts she could’ve done anything anyway now that she knows he’d died because of Max. She still thinks she should’ve been a better friend. Either way, it doesn’t matter. He’s gone.
All Ruth can hope for is that maybe he’d thought about her in death, too.
Pete. He’ll blame himself. God, he’ll blame himself for dragging them all into this, as if there was some way he could’ve known and prevented it. There wasn’t, and he can’t go back in time to reverse it now. She knows he’ll figure something out. He’s the good one. The one who still gets to have a future. He has to make it… It’s better her than him.
She prays that he turns out fine after everything, even if she can’t be there with him.
Stephanie. Or Steph? Ruth still isn’t quite sure of what they’re meant to be. They defiled a body together. They got questioned by the police together. They… have done only bad things together. They’ve done more crimes than they’ve had real memories. But… Pete likes her, and she really, really hopes that’s enough to last.
The rest of the names she either gives a passing glance or they dissipate too quickly for her deteriorating brain to give it a coherent thought. Grace—whom she feels she actually does have a valid reason to blame, Stacy—she isn't quite sure if the little amount of interactions they had after Max's death was real, but she supposes she wasn't so bad—
The rest of the names fade as all feeling in her body does. She feels disconnected from everything, which almost horrifies her more than if the pain were to continue until she died, because now not even her own body feels truly hers anymore.
It never really has, hasn't it?
She tries to picture herself from the audience, deepening the disconnect between her soul and her body.
The spotlight she still hadn’t gotten to fix, the spike tape on the stage floor she recalls someone was meant to replace, an apparent red line trailing the underwear swathed over the top of her head, the blood pooled around her.
In another world where she’d lived long enough to romanticize it, she would’ve called it beautiful. The lighting, the set, the composition. A girl sprawled across center stage, half-lidded and resigned.
Would she still recognize herself, seeing that, or would she only see someone who happened to have her face?
She tries to answer, and nothing comes.
She doesn’t know when she stopped being Ruth and started becoming the corpse in the middle of the stage. She searches for the immediate answer—the certainty that seeing yourself in the mirror accompanies; the instinctive pull. She comes up empty.
She’s wearing the same headgear, the same striped sweater, her hair still frizzy and undone, the same everything, which should in theory, give her any sort of sense of familiarity.
But she knows that the body she sees is Ruth Fleming the same way she knows the actor playing Juliet is Juliet—they’re meant to be that person, playing that role. Recognition without ownership.
Her eyes drift over the stage. The faint markings of sticky residue from previous shows, the smoke machines she paid for that they never even used in shows—the place she’d wanted so, so badly to belong in. She spent years wondering how it’d feel to be up here during curtain call, everyone watching as the applause settled in.
She remembers herself and holds that thought.
No.
This isn’t anything she’s ever wanted to be remembered by.
Still, whether she wants it or not, her first and final audience will be one who’ll scream her name, loud enough for people to learn it for the first time.