#her curiosity is insatiable and can turn her a bit macabre at times and she has a bit of a manic edge

[rexscanonwife]

I may be insane

I made THREE s/i concepts since I was having trouble choosing a race, and it actually forced me to go against my knee jerk reaction and I ended up going with something I wouldn't have considered initially!

[pyroclaststan]

Heartbreak Panes

So uh, finally posting my first Fallen Hero fic/bit of writing or what have you. Apologies for any mistakes and the sheer clogging length of this nonsense: there’s no readmores on mobile, and the formatting is trash because I copy-pasted from my phone notes for ease of editing. Warnings first then we’ll hop right into it. CW for possible: suicide, suicidal ideation, body horror, blood, graphic depictions of body trauma, gore, self-harm

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It all needed to stop now: just like you stopped Heartbreak.

Your eyes still aim forward, not risking a good look or even a glance at whoever the dying telepath is that you’ve fired upon. You know mind games, you know what telepaths can do if you let them in, and worst of all you know what she’s done here—what she’s still doing. It’s still building around you, drowning out what’s left of everyone still inside. You know that she needs to be stopped here and now or your feelings—

No, her feelings.

—her influence will continue to spread. And so you continue to fire your caster. Over and over and over...

Let it out. Let it in.

You remember the sound of rushing waters.

You remember the weight of your limbs. A familiar weight you’ve fought many times before but you didn’t care to (I do) now. You remember how curious you were suddenly about the energy caster in your hand—about how it felt to be on the receiving end. You remember the morbid curiosity about the material of it: how would it taste?

Would it taste like freedom? Like relief? Like a satisfying sleep, the first in your life? Would it taste like an end to an ever-constant nightmare from which you couldn’t wake?

Didn’t everything always feel like you were dreaming?

Being made—grown—and trained to be a tool... that certainly sounded like a dream sequence. Some kind of sci-fi plot with bad actors and even worse special effects. All of the stone-faced meat-machines of blue and orange around you: no expense spared for the makeup and effects. The symbolism of other, and of danger, and of you’ll never belong.

Falling perfectly into place like a little toy soldier was like a dream: belief in the cause, blind devotion, fervent idealism, and an insatiable... hunger?

Your dry lips twitch, and again the urge to fill your mouth and taste pulses. The pressure building at your temples and the base of your skull like an anxiety attack you can’t shake. Your jaw aches under the strain you apply to clench it.

The dream carries on to freedom. Well, a freedom to any degree or sense you could experience it. You’ll always be followed, watched, touched, experienced, seen. You meet people who will never truly know you and they make you believe that you have a place among them. And sometimes, in bad times, they fulfil their purpose in your life and exit just as swiftly. It is hard to break the habits they’ve instilled in you: this is only a dream.

Like dreams, sometimes it all turned towards the fantastical, the above and beyond: you became a superhero. Like the ones in the vintage comics and shows and movies people—real humans—used to partake in. The classics Anathema would show you of people striving to be more than they’d been before circumstances gave them a taste for something more. A hunger for being more, doing more, going beyond the everyday limitations of others.

A hunger that pools in the stomach, an idea that feeds the brain dreams and passions and even more ideas. You never had a choice in hungers like that—force-fed.

And as dreams do this one darkened. This one crept in so slowly, fell upon you so heavily, and reminded you that even in dreams the hunger of the nightmare lingers.

You remember now that this is real life, always has been, and that reality has never held any favour for you. You will live and die by another’s rules or choices, bound by your limitations. And right now, at this very moment, something across from you is telling you it feels it, too. And it understands that secret you never shared: that you only ever found one decision that was truly for you.

Always running, always crafting a careful exit, always passing through. The only option you ever really had for yourself was leave.

Look at yourself: even in coming here you were carrying on the directive given to you, lying to yourself that it was of your own free-will.

Helping people.

Sounds a lot like what you were made to do: save the ‘right’ people, stop the ‘wrong’ ones. Sure, your definitions changed or broadened and sure, you pick your own targets now, but you were never very good at pushing the boundaries.

It crawls across your mind with a jackhammer. An involuntary inevitability that is swallowing you whole. An inescapable pounding at the door of your mind—the neighbour who will never leave.

What if you pushed this boundary?

What if you made a real exit? Leave the dream?

Taste the metal.

Your hand feels so much lighter when it starts to move up and you realise it’s right. You could truly make a choice for you: one that’s not just a rehashing of what you were made to be. One that’s not just a lie or a dream. A real choice.

It isn’t deciding this for you (it is), it’s just pointing out the obvious: you’ve always wanted to let go.

You’ve always felt the weight of the leash on your chest and the cut of the strings on your heart. You’ll always be someone else’s to order—someone else’s property—and you’ll never ever be safe. You’re not yours: there is no You.

You feel the tightness in your throat, the bile begging to fill your mouth, the hatred of knowing your dream has always been a carefully crafted lie. You have always been a creature, a tool, a science experiment.

An experiment of which you are the variable. The variable this time lifting your gun and your mask. The variable remembering that a tool must always do the job efficiently and to completion, as you turn the dial to its strongest setting. Nothing else will do.

If you were ever a tool of worth to those that made you while you were here, let them mourn you once you’re gone. Let them cry at the loss of their equipment.

Something in the back of your mind is screaming at you but the sound of waters is too loud. Something churns in your stomach and your mind tells you that it’s the hunger.

(It was my everything telling me this was wrong.)

The gun fits into your mouth like it was meant to be there: something in your mind supplies that it always was.

Your morbid curiosity is answered: metal.

It just tastes like metal.

Something in the waters is roaring, your name called out only to be muffled by the tide.

Kingsley, it cries. Your name.

It’s not from your lips, or hers. It’s Ortega, begging you to stop.

He begs on, cries for explanation, tries to make you see but you can only see your exit. You know with the whole of you that something about him should be causing you to stop, but all you can hear are the rapids.

Pull the trigger. End the dream. End this. Die. Let it go. Be free. Stop the game. Cut the leash. Finish this.

The cacophony is scraping against your mind with a pain you can’t imagine but you can’t gather the will to move. Ortega is wrestling your limbs, pulling your arm behind your back almost painfully if not for your dull haze. You need to escape this: the crescendo is maddening. Your body is stone and you need to be free, now, so all you can do is fire.

The flash is green and blinding even in your delirium, but your body is light again. You let go of your escape plan—it’s in Ortega’s hand now—but your mind quickly supplies another.

The window.

Like a moth to flame the light draws you in, every sense screaming at you to go. Your feet move before you can think any further: you need to get to the light, go forth, nothing else. And as Ortega reaches for you, your instincts move you out of the way: you need to be free of this dream. You’ve always been true to your namesake when it matters most.

The hunger for the light overrides the taste for anything else; you don’t know which dream it is you’re escaping or if it’s all of them. You suppose there won’t be dreams anymore, just sleep.

And you are so very tired. It takes so much to try and be real.

Your hands then face collide with glass and momentum carries you forward, shards and edges tearing you from your reverie. Your sharp inhalation slows the world to a crawl as you go, the shrill sound of your name being screamed somewhere behind you is rising in volume and the feeling pooling in your stomach earlier is gathering in your throat. For the first moment in your life you have a perfect clarity; powerful, complete awareness.

The sun is setting over Los Diablos, sparkling off the shards of glass that cascade around you like a waterfall of gems. The air is cool and rushing against you through your coat and the tears in your suit that have yet to seal. Your arms flail in the slowest of motion—you look like a newborn bird trying to take flight in some macabre yet poetic way. Your breath is stolen but in this small moment it feels as if you’ve never needed it. Or you never wanted it.

Is it cruel to find this day so warm, so beautiful?

The streets below you are blessedly empty, the LDPD flittering away—no, flickering away. One by one you feel the terrified and panicked lights extinguish from your mind. A rapturous warmth slides across you as the pressure of each one builds and then silence washes over. A welcome reprieve. The quiet will be coming for you, too, finally.

(I don’t want silence, I don’t want it.)

You feel Steel, somewhere: his worry for Ortega, his desire to finish the mission. Everything in you reaches out for him—you want someone to hear you. Hear your final words, give you some kind of closure with the people whose light you’ve been a shadow to. You always admired Wei’s motivation and now you’ll never be able to tell him that. A small, traitorous part of you screams for him to catch you, notice you, but you know that’s impossible.

Would he have even cared to try?

You search for Ortega but he’s a blind spot as always, and now more than ever you crave the static of his mind missing from your side. You care about him, so goddamn much it hurts, and everything in you claws out for some sort of purchase on his mind to reach him, but you know it won’t. Just one more small thing to die today: your hope.

(So sorry, I am so sorry.)

The hot, uneven pavement of just another Los Diablos street is rising to meet you, its arms open and waiting. Was it always waiting?

Some small, guilty part of you feels so bad for taking so long to reach it; no terminal velocity coming from that height to help you on the way down.

Nevertheless, the dream will all be over soon.

Faster now—your reverie ending—it comes for you, and you brace yourself for an asphalt kiss.

Again comes your morbid curiosity: will this taste like metal, too?

And so you meet it with a symphony of a disgusting thud, an echoing crack of bones, glass and gravel puncturing palms; a muffled scream as the stone clashes forcefully against your teeth and blood fills the spaces in between. Your hands’ instinct was to catch you but they touch down at the same time as your face and the impact reverberates up your limbs as your bones shatter like splinters. Your brain slams against your skull and not fast enough because holy hell you feel all of it. You feel it all and hate yourself because somewhere back there you thought that the end would be sweet and painless.

Before you black out from the torment you make a macabre note: the fifth story isn’t the place to find heaven.

You don’t know when, you don’t know how, but somehow you find consciousness. And you will remember the atrocity of it for the rest of your short, sad life unfortunately.

Your mind is muddled, your vision blurred if not destroyed, and everything screams with more pain than you’d ever experienced in all yours days of infiltration and hero work. Your thoughts feel like they’re in a blender, trying to reach for the solids while it’s still going. If your brain is not completely in tatters your bones have picked up the slack. Who knows how much trauma you’ve caused?

(And not just physically.)

Every part of you feels like fire, your mouth is filled with the taste of metal and bone. It makes you panic and cry and every quickened breath hurts like molten lava and threatens to make you pass out again, if you don’t drown in blood bubbles first. Stab after stab, unable to move: and here at the end, waiting to bleed out, you fall apart.

What tiny speck of consciousness you have is like a banshee scream against the rest of you, and it only sounds out one thing: Ortega.

If you beg and plead, will your calls fall upon the ears of a god who never cared for you? The one Tía spoke so highly of? Who never looked your way? Who never made sense to you? Who never even made you?

Your messy keening is only the answer that breaks the silence. Fitting. You’ve never been stupid enough to believe you’re worth anything that matters.