(no subject)
"Hello?"
The word flees out in front of her, skimming its way off the walls and fading quickly somewhere along the way. The halls are quiet, flooring cold and unfamiliar beneath her feet, until something in the shadows catches her eye and Lethe -- was choked with that great multitude of corpses brought low and scattered on every side -- stops.
"Hello," the mirror-girl with the poppy (dream) crown echoes with her voice and her eyes and her fingers curled around the Cup, nearly tipping, held high in offering. "Now that you have it - what will you miss?"
Now that you have -
The question refuses to come and she lets out a shocked - I do not understand. - silent breath (speak no evil) at the sudden lacking - something stolen, freely given - lips parted noiselessly, uselessly. There's the dim, nearing sound of footsteps, the rapidly approaching murmur of familiar voices - not alone anymore - and she turns quickly, red petals drifting toward the floor.
- now that you have something -
And suddenly she knows.
Behind her there's a laugh spilling over the edges and a splash (a dissolving) as she the mirror-girl falls apart - cup clattering, water pooling, spreading out - and the walls are white in a way that makes her dizzy for a moment until there's water rushing in, down like cracks on a mirror (dark, dark rivers down) and she knows this water -
-- Lethe water --- and when she tries to scream (stop, do not come) there's no sound at all. The words catch and she can feel them crawling there, somewhere low within her - the flooding, falling, drowning - and she holds her fingers to her stomach, wraps them there and holds on (holds in) but she can't seem to stay together at the seams. The water is warm between her fingers - slow and seeping and nearly sticky - and it's almost like bleeding.
Stop. Please. Wait, she pleads, digs her nails in deeper and the silence echoes through her head. The words are not loud enough - they don't stop - they can't hear. Wait, wait, please do not touch - it is poison - it is - I am - I am.
- you have something to lose.
They watch as the solid parts of her slip away. They watch with the same eyes that she always sees - dark and cold and lost and dead dead dead - as the water rises higher, slowly higher still and choking, and they call Lethe and they ask "Why?" and they know her.
They know her. They do - they do - they did.
drink too little and things stay, left behind in fever dreams and iches at the back of your eyes, an inescapable loss
(sorry, so sorry)
drink too much and things disappear, fade like photographs, empty places - how to see, to sing, to walk, to breathe
They drown. They drown and then they will know nothing at all.
She can't stop - the (empty empty empty) water - what she is.
She tries anyway.
--
And she wakes to water in her lungs. To burbling, rasping breaths that take her a moment or two to remember she doesn't even need (water cannot drown) and when she shifts she can feel the bruises underneath her hands from the desperate press of fingers - dark, angry lines striped along pale skin like prison bars.
It's dangerous, she thinks, this wanting. Dangerous, how she's come to expect people to remember her at all.
She brushes a shaky hand through her hair and the flowers scatter.