you’re not bulletproof

MELITA

Then do it Melita thought about snarling, bitter and unrelenting, even if it wasn’t truly directed at him. Her raw anger, her contemptuous, rancorous loathing, was for the world that continually spiraled out from underneath them – promises of peace, repose, and sanctuary, all fallen and cracked and split apart before they even had an opportunity to cherish it. Her eyes settled on that damned wall while her fingers clenched and unclenched, while her despair for him, for anyone else who had to continue facing these insurmountable truths and overbearing beacons barreled on through her shoulders, through her limbs, and through her wild, wicked irreverence. Fangorn hissed from somewhere, feeling the tension brewing beneath her frame, but the girl hastened on, listening and drawing those firm chalk lines, wondering if she pressed hard enough, the world would just collapse beneath her vitriol.

For a second time; resurrections incomplete, like little hovering promises and benedictions, and smothered in the next. Cruel and malicious, this damned earth they stood upon. No one deserved it.

His words flickered alongside her sedition too, spread them like little fires and embers, stoking the flames. Nothing to fight against. Nothing to push against. Nothing to throw his weight within, and she wanted to come up with something, wanted to proffer a target to assail upon. She always had Kiada. She always had that stupid, insipid, foolish Harpy who’d decided to anoint and consecrate herself with the indulgence of a false god and kill off Helovia in the process – incapable of forgiveness, barreling and brewing and contorting her vengeance into the folds of her raw hurt and anger. “I don’t know,” she only extended, still staring at the threshold and all its lines, all its drawn, etched details where the rest of the sorrowed, gone citizens would still reign, and it was soulless, to glance upon all the canvases already started, all the lives already vanquished. “I just want to fight something. Sometimes all I crave is for the world to pay.” Her glance tilted back his way, the inferno spreading along her gilded eyes, narrowing at his steeled contortions.

Maybe she’d already been taken and drown and smothered and this was all she was destined to be from now on.

Or that she billowed over the surface, never pausing, never ceasing, long enough to sink into its depths.

“Tell me about her then,” she swallowed down the choking bile, the heated, scathing, noose tucked over her nape.

help tonight to split its seams
Give the bruises out like gifts