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Her lungs seized as she ran, her legs burning and buckling with every step she took. She couldn’t be there, it was suffocating, that stupid fish hut in Megii’s stupid village. She had to leave, had to go somewhere Drift wouldn’t find her, where she couldn’t ruin Drift’s life by just existing.
The farther she ran the more her brain yearned for her lover, to hear the soft, gentle caress of her voice early in the morning, or the way she touched AJ’s face like she was handling the most precious thing in the world. AJ knew she couldn’t go back, she would stay far, far away; that way she could decay and rot alone, and Drift never had to try and kill herself to find a way to fix the inevitable.
~~~~~~
The Decay Mage was collapsed against an old tree, her chest heaving and her mind reeling. She was in the middle of nowhere, with no food, no idea of where she is going, and the looming, cold presence of the person she wants to simultaneously be with forever and sear every memory they have together out of her mind forever. Maybe that would let them both down easier.
‘Why the fuck did I do that? I need to go back. No! This is for Drift, this is so she can be happy, so my stupid fucking magic doesn’t tear her life apart.’
The longer she thought about it, the more her mind spiralled, the thoughts getting deeper and deeper, worse and worse, more irrational by the second. First came the guilt, wishing she didn’t leave, then the reassurance, knowing it would be for the best, then the second guessing, what if Open Book came after her, then finally the deep, dark thoughts that plagued her mind every time she felt sober, what if she just… kills herself. If she were to find a way to do it quickly, but that would be too kind, she didn’t deserve for it to be quick.
She was already playing a slow and gruesome dance with Decay, and with that Decay, she was ruining everything and everyone around her; if she really were to take the coward’s way out, she didn’t deserve for it to be merciful. She was going to die the same way she ruins everything else, it was going to happen violently, it was going to be bloody and messy, with tears and grime coating everything that would be involved.
She deserved to have herself be torn apart slowly by bandits, or have the corruption eat away at her mind like maggots to a carcass, or to be buried deep under the ground, slowly suffocating on her own shit piled mess she created for herself. She wanted to feel the dirt entire her lungs, sucking all the air away while she gasps and realises she wants to live after all, trying to claw her way back out again.
The Decay Mage dropped her head against the wood of the tree, the bark stabbing into the back of her head, bringing some reality back to her spiralling mind. The thing it didn’t mend was the suicidal thoughts that tormented her brain, almost as If she was hearing it being told to her through a secret, ominous voice looming over her.
She knew that voice was only her, she knew that it was just her spiralling, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that those voices might be right. The earth around her greyed, the grass turning to piles of dead matter, the roots rejecting from the earth and shrivelling into piles of nothing. The tree groaned as the bark morphed and peeled off the wood in a sad, pathetic display of her loosing control of her magic.
The only constant through all of this was the moon, the soft, creamy, buttermilk yellow that stared back at her. She faintly remembers the night where she’d stare out of her dorm window, just talking to the wind. The moon reminds her of Drift, her eyes, the softness of her care, the way she is always there for her even if not physically in her vicinity.
A weird sense of déjà vu washed over her when she thought of the women, she doesn’t remember why. She knows that there is a correlation between the girl she begrudgingly loved and the soft glow in the night, she hated that she couldn’t remember what it was.
Although, that just gave her another reason as to why she needed to leave, so that she would stop hurting Drift with forgetting more of her every day. She doesn’t want to forget her Glowing Girl; she doesn’t want to have everyone she was close to be forgotten by her. One thing that AJ will never forget though, is the feeling of being looked at and truly seen by the person she can barely understand herself.