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 Posted: Mon Dec 09, 2013 10:26 pm
Alois wondered mildly if someone ever wrote of an anthropomorphic percolator. He might've been too tired and too deprived to form coherent thought at this point, as he nearly missed the reasoning behind that tangential thought, but another rasping breath clarified its origins.
Every time he breathed, something bubbled in his lungs. It popped and crackled with every inhalation, and Alois feared tasting liquefied viscera on every exhalation. In a sense, he wasted himself in a constant state of worry - if he wasn't considering dying in his sleep, an act he found wholly distasteful and utterly wasteful, then he agonized over maintaining enough oxygen to meander through life at a lukewarm pace and refrain from passing out due to deprivation.
And that wasn't including the pain.
Thraen could've killed him - he might've even succeeded at one point, as he remembered a marked and bleary disconnect between his memories during the event. The mark of near victory stained his neck with such prominence that it stood out as shadows on the buildings after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thraen ravaged him, and left him this broken, hollow shell of the man he used to be - the one who sought to end over a dozen lives with the intention to change or silence every single one. He had aspirations - he had joys and strengths and intentions - but between Ida's words and Thraen's actions, he was nothing now. Certainly Serpentine wouldn't deny that. Certainly Laurelite wouldn't deny that. Certainly Buddingtonite wouldn't deny that.
A lowly lieutenant with a handful of broken ribs and a nearly crushed windpipe did not amount to much in the realm of the Negaverse, and why would it? He found himself surprised, if not disappointed, that they hadn't dispatched someone from SpecOps to finish the job, if only to prevent a leak to the opposing faction.
And perhaps worst of all... He considered purification. He even voiced the idea to Persephone, whom he met in the forest some time after that fateful day. She acted equally disgusted toward her own faction, and even sympathized to a point, but... She also explained that he would be absolutely miserable as a knight - a lasting and damaging repercussion that he desperately wanted to avoid at this point. Thanks to a well-prepared prescription for the drugs he already abused liberally, Alois managed to thwart any sense of physical misery, but the mental toll ran rampant with his long string of failures.
He wasn't fit to be a general anymore. And if Laurelite promoted him to that point once more, he feared simply coming undone in front of everyone present. Serpentine, Buddingtonite... And if even more were present? Natron, Xenotime, Benitoite? Alois wasn't sure he'd have any dignity left after an affair like that.
Powering up proved a task too difficult to undertake anymore.
Alois couldn't move with the bag of ice still pressed to his side, tucked under his unconscionably cold elbow. The room assumed a permanent pseudo-nighttime due to blackout shades, and his room accumulated a variety of empty beer cans, water glasses, and the occasional tea cup that Alex hadn't swiped just yet. Sitting on a glass shelf mounted to the wall above his bed was a single half-drained smoothie - some health food concoction his roommate devised - and Alois lay against the black bedsheets examining it in excruciating detail from below. He even counted the various shattered seeds buried at the bottom.
The misanthrope knew he was bored, and when he was bored, he thought too much. He thought about his failures. He thought about his absolutely pitiful physical condition. He thought about the note he left with Porsha. He even clarified his intention to call her, yet he hadn't the conviction to do so and explain to her that he had, in fact, been demoted for actions against his peers. And how would she take it? That he's just another waste of life, or that he was a two-faced liar? The latter wouldn't be far from the truth, but...
The quality of his life couldn't budge much further.
After dialing out the memorized number, Alois pressed the sticky 'call' button on his phone and held the cracked phone to his ear, listening for the broken jumble of ringing. Sure enough its fragmented, warbling purr sounded readily, and Alois counted the seconds to striking voicemail.
Don't let her be in the shower this time.
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Posted: Mon Dec 09, 2013 11:16 pm
The counter was empty again. No rose colored glass with half an inch of stagnant water resting in the bottom. No dead, bald flower stems drooping over the lip. No painfully short, baffling note painted pink by the play of light through colored plastic from the nearby window. The cup was back in the cupboard, the flower stems had found their way to the garbage, and the note had migrated throughout the small apartment and had finally ended up lost within the cluttered contents of the bedside table. out of sight, but not out of mind. The sudden departure of someone that had become integral to her life had left Porsha in a haze. She had gone about her daily routine, training and work, various tasks set about on high from the Negaverse. Life had gone on, she had learned to breath again. And then she had seen him again in the free-for-all ambush at the warehouse. Smiling at her, aiding her, asking once again for her to take a life, and it had been so achingly familiar, so right, that she had fallen right back into her role as devoted disciple. The mystery of his rank still baffled her, still rested like an anxious weight at her core, but it was a trivial thing having seen him alive and well. Next to that, what else really mattered? When the dust had settled and the fight was over, the captain had assumed he would contact her at last. She'd been wrong. Now, days later, the waiting and worry had left Porsha irritated and emotional, and the buzz of her phone on the bedside table initially pulled a frustrated growl from the teens lips as teeth clenched and the muscles in her jaw tightened. Every call that wasn't him brought her one step closing to throwing he phone against the wall until it shattered into insignificant little pieces. It was on the 5th ring that she'd finally reached out check who was calling, and she startled when she saw the name and picture staring up at her from the smudge covered screen. Her heart jumped into her throat, choking her as she slid her finger across the glowing bar to connect the call, and when she brought the phone up to her ear her hand was shaking. Maybe in anger, maybe in pain, at this point she wasn't sure anymore. "Alois?" Her voice was soft, softer then it usually was. Her chest hurt. Aching like an old injury. She cradled the phone to her ear and huddled against the headboard.
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Posted: Thu Dec 12, 2013 11:25 am
"Porsha," he wanted to say with strength and clarity, but his injuries easily seeped into his voice along with the faint crackle of fluid buildup. He thought of the syringe. He thought of simply stabbing between his ribs and drawing out what viscous matter he could if it would only help him fake it a little better. "I said I'd call when I am able."
It was his pitiful way of saying hi, how are you. Of saying sorry I missed you. Of saying how have you been since I left abruptly, with no explanation whatsoever?
But Porsha understood that he wasn't a caring person. He wasn't Benitoite - Alexandre - who could fawn over his allies and try so desperately to help others that he practically snapped his spine in half in the process. He wasn't Buddingtonite - Richard - who had the flair and pompous personality to cheer his friends up in his own unconscionably unique manner, through offering drink and a place to stay and carefully chosen phrases to anchor one into his own strange brand of reality. Bischofite and Alois both suffered a marked lack of empathy, of the ability to understand and sympathize with another's feelings.
But he was aware of what she must've felt right now: anger, resentment, pain, maybe even a little yearning. He understood on a logical level. These things were normal when someone suddenly vanishes from one's life without so much as a viable explanation. He should expect these.
But he didn't understand them.
"A lot has changed. You'f seen it." His words continually faded out like a bad radio signal, due to the extensive damage to his windpipe. It hurt to breathe, so he didn't put much effort into his words either. And even as he turned over onto his injured ribs, just what the doctor ordered, away from the half-empty glass of some liquefied edible matter, he still found it unconscionably difficult to speak louder than a whisper. His voice still came in fits and starts, rather than the smooth and commanding tones he'd maintained so easily before. "I got demoted. I know you wonder why."
And he would get to that. After swallowing audibly. Even that hurt, and he winced with an audible click of his teeth.
"I couldn't explain it before I left. I didn't want you to know. But you saw." She was present in the warehouse, drawn by the call undoubtedly, and he knew she'd see him regardless of his intents to disguise his appearance there. She'd feel him out through his aura most likely, for a fresh lieutenant likely needed the assistance of a captain in such a madhouse, so he sought control of the situation before she could wrench it away. His ribs hurt badly, but he needed to breathe.
He bought consciousness with pain these days.
Alois wet his lips and tried to continue with a little more strength than before. More pain, he needed more pain. "I was demoted because I tried to kill anozzer officer. He attacked me first. He said I nearly killed him as a civilian. I didn't know who he was." Serpentine - now his superior - claimed this story once before and Laurelite believed it. She believed it over him, a general, a tool of the Negaverse who had loftier plans for success than the other two, who couldn't see past their own noses. "Serpentine. A captain. He now commands me directly." But this wasn't the worst of it.
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Posted: Thu Dec 12, 2013 4:06 pm
It was him, it was his voice turning her name into something exotic and much more it ever was from anyone else's lips, but it wasn't right. Strain had seeped into his voice, and something thicker, something that sounded like pain and worse. It sent a chill down the teens back as she sat up straighter, fingers tightening around the phone until her knuckles turned white. He was hurt. He was hurt badly, and every nerve in captains toned body was suddenly on high alert. She was tense, and a small sound escaped, somewhere between a whine and something more angry. "Alois, you can barely talk." When he was able. It was almost funny, in an abstract, sadistic way. But he'd called. He'd finally called, and even if she could hear the pain in his voice he'd still reached out and she would selfishly cling to whatever contact she could draw from him. Did she want to yell at him? She didn't even know anymore. Whatever bitterness and resent she'd been building up over the past few days, no, the past few months, was forcibly shoved aside by worry and concern. Later she could be angry. Later they could fight. If they would even fight at all. Porsha had always been skilled to forming grudges and hanging onto her rage, but somethings were more important then retribution or any selfish bid for retaliation. Somethings. Someone. He kept talking and she wanted so badly to tell him to stop, to save his strength and save himself whatever pain this conversation might have been costing him, but she didn't say anything. She couldn't bring herself to be quite that reasonable, she'd missed him too much not to hang on every word, soft or fading. And he was answering questions she'd so badly wanted to ask but hadn't gotten the chance to when they'd crossed paths in the warehouse. It would have been impossible for her to have missed the changes, to wonder over them. He hadn't wanted her to know, would have kept it from her if he could have. It made her jaw clench, breath drawing in for heavy sigh. When he got to the story of how his demotion had come to pass she stilled, listening intently, committing accusations and names to memory, lingering on the phrasing. Serpentine. Attacked first. Direct command. Porsha listened, and her blood boiled with a desire seek out the officer that dared try to play commander over someone like Bicshofite. Someone that claimed a story and managed to be believed, and in so doing had managed to tear at something she considered extremely important. It was an outrage. The anger returned, as she had expected, but it was not directed at Alois any longer. Her voice was an angry purr. "Is he the one that hurt you?" Because that would have been the final nail in Serpentine's coffin. Porsha could swallow the injustice, the irony, and the outrage, because to fight back would mean the same fate, or worst, and then what? But revenge was another matter entirely. One that Could fuel the rage and warm the heart. If Serpentine had hurt her general, then she would see him bleed at her feet, and she would smile in the face of whatever reaper came to collect payment for that sin.
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Posted: Fri Dec 20, 2013 12:40 am
"No." Oh, how it hurt to remember the man who did - his blonde hair pulled into a voluminous ponytail, sprouting vines aplenty, and the curiously strong and calloused hands that brushed against his neck almost intimately before administering an agonizing grip. The callous eyes that settled on him in an ephemeral moment of recognition, of mourning for something - someone - worthwhile. A hint of basic kindness cast his way, like a bottle of water for the parched soul. Enough to whet his lips, though too meager to quench the longstanding draught.
Alois coughed gently, sending no small amount of bloody sputum into his hand. Too much trauma. Too much pain, pressure, fear. "A senshi did zis to me. Someone I'f met before. But..." He swallowed before coughing into his hand once more. The milky, viscous fluid stared back at him with a swirl of blood crossing through its midsection. "Anozzer senshi, an eternal, stopped him. Saved me." The misanthrope frowned, a strained motion that pulled his gaze downward toward the edge of the bed, where naught but dust danced across the sheets. He amounted to that same principle - dancing ceaselessly across landscapes that received him in such indifference, and even the people around him operated independently of his actions.
"Zere's somesing else, someone zat I wanted to change." To speak of Buddingtonite now would be folly, but as Alois cast those bony fingers over the edge of the bed, to dangle pointlessly above the ground, he came to accept that folly marked his path far more than incident or planning. "He... Stood against me as well. He did not care zat I sreatened him to improof' him, and rebuked me all ze same." His frown gave way to a cringe, and from that bore the nearly imperceptible quakes of the tightness in his chest - a tightness further constricted by broken ribs and a damaged lung.
The pain confirmed it. Agony welled up in his throat and threatened to spill into the phone through wordless cries. His voice hitched, as he was sure she could hear, and breathing often shuddered with the stuttering draw of mourning. "I'm afraid to sleep," came his whispered recognition for this eternal toiling through agony and half-consciousness. Muted coughs of sputum and sorrow followed, still drowning out the monotonous buzz from the phone's tinny speaker.
Alois groaned lowly while the pain bubbled up from his ribs - no matter how he lay, how desperately he avoided disturbing the broken bones that moored against his skin, even breathing raised their ire. Slowly he retracted his limbs toward his body, forming a loose fetal position while his free hand sought grip on his mass of greasy bangs. He hadn't even bothered to shower since the blonde senshi of plants broke his ribs - either out of fear or recognition that death anticipated his arrival soon. His mind churned tumultuously with incessant paranoia about his lack of breath, the buildup of fluid in his lungs that, even now, he was sure Porsha could hear.
And Porsha... The one who waited so patiently for his contact, possibly with bated breath - would she be able to relate? Would she equate her incessant yearning for his call as a parallel event? Did it matter to her? Or had she grown cold with distance, an opportunity lost to paranoia and lack of confidence? What she needed was a general firm in his beliefs, not a lieutenant muddling around in the dark, plagued with his own insipid notions of the world around him.
Tired, glassy eyes found the ubiquitous texture of the drywall and traced it skyward, across the ceiling and toward the fan that stirred air slowly and fruitlessly. He felt dead, but the dead never suffered.
"I don't sink I can do zis anymore."
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Posted: Fri Dec 20, 2013 1:10 pm
A single word, and Porsha held her breath as she waited for more, some description, a name, a face, some identifying feature she could use to locate the responsible party. He gave her nothing but the tiniest of bread crumbs. A senshi did this. No name, no sphere, nothing. A maddening lack of anything meaningful to work from, and she wanted to drill the poor man on the other end of the line. To demand something that would let her hunt them down and destroy them, and perhaps she would have, but Alois coughed, and she could hear the pain, and something else. Thicker, viscous. Again, she wanted to tell him to stop, to save his breath, but she bit her tongue to keep from speaking. Letting him say what he wanted to say, because if she stopped him now, she wasn't sure if he'd ever open up to her again. And would she survive it if he shut her out again. But the strain in his voice was building. Obvious agony that carried well enough over the phone to make the woman's chest hurt. She realized she was shaking, not just the numb tips of her fingers, but through out her entire body. Violent, shuddering quaking that sprang from the core and radiated outward. Every soft cough, every hissed breath or telling hitch caused her pain, and she had sank back against the headboard again with long legs drawn up and messy bangs pressed to her knees. He groaned, and she broke. "Where are you?" A plea, faint and shaking as tears spilled in hot lines down her cheeks. At one point she had needed the general and his firm resolve and careful teachings. She'd needed that hard push in the right direction and the proper motivation to ensure orders be carried out. Certainly he'd provided, his influence had changed her, making her better. But he'd done more then taught her lessons on half measures and whole notes. He'd walked into her life, and she'd taken him into her home. He was more then a commanding officer to her, so much more. Company, rival, lover. I don't think I can do this anymore. The confession struck like a blade. Do what? Keep fighting? Or keep living? "Please." She could hide the tears as she spoke, and all that pent up emotion leaked into that one quiet plea. Squeezed and half strangled. "Please. Don't give up." Her head lifted from her legs, rolling back against the wall, as she drew a quaking breath. The hand not holding the phone wiping at tears before sliding back to curl tight within purple hair. "Come back," she begged him. "Come home." Because it didn't feel like home without him. Something was missing. Had been missing since the day she'd found his note.
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Posted: Sun Dec 29, 2013 7:35 pm
"It doesn't matter," he returned in wet tones, fully intending to bar Porsha from seeing him in such a pathetically weak state. "Don't come." Finally he sat upright with painstaking effort, but he couldn't stave off the bubbles of mucus that laced his voice. Even as he adjusted the phone pinned between his ear and shoulder, he couldn't help but survey the room for all of its disappointments and dreary, dull decorations forming a loose smattering of personality to an otherwise empty space. It lacked color in the walls or any real indication of its constant use aside from the occasional empty beer bottle or tossed candy wrapper that never quite made it into a wire mesh wastebasket. Normally he kept his bedroom impeccably tidy, but as of late... He found it unconscionably hard to muster the effort.
What Porsha and Xenotime deserved was something far from himself - something strong and unmoving rather than a volatile bundle of turbulent ideas and philosophies that sought to raze the city to its bones. What point was there in following a general that proved too unpredictable to inflict any lasting impression on those he intended to break into changes too great for their minds to endure? With plans too grandiose for his meager abilities, why should she subject herself to such abject failure?
Xenotime possessed ability far beyond his own, and it would not take much effort to impart his intentions toward her - she had the groundwork for great tidings, but currently lacked the foresight to plan such massive affairs. But with recent teachings, he expected that she'd become a fully functional tactical strike force of one. She proved she needed no leaders or followers, so his presence in her life would soon become superfluous given the right direction. A push toward murder, toward pricing human lives, and she would prove his existence entirely inconsequential. He could leave, could resign himself to dying in his sleep or whatever monstrous and meek death awaited him, but his intentions remained all the same in her mild tints.
"It hurts to breaz'e. I can't function wis'out painkiller." He drew a gurgling breath as a testament to his statement. It coaxed a soft wince out of the misanthrope, accompanied by a pained grunt that he couldn't suppress. With every measured breath came the disturbing and painful shift of a floating fragment of rib. "I don't want to power up anymore. I don't want to leaf'. I'm sorry, but I can't." Can't get out of bed, can't go home, can't power up, can't manage to impact anyone in a meaningful manner. It hurt to admit his repeated failures and doubts on all fronts, but there was still purpose in the call.
It wasn't just for him, nor to quell her potential worries.
She needed to know his faults, to know his utter lack of progress in order to tear him down from the pedestal. To stand on her own was to eliminate all she valued above herself, and the last means by which he could manage such a feat was to use the call to destroy her opinions of him. The moment she realized she could far surpass him was the moment he knew he could shirk his second identity without regret. "Ze Negaverse is not my home anymore."
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Posted: Wed Jan 01, 2014 7:15 pm
It didn't matter. Don't come. The faintest peel of warmth welled up once again. Not exactly anger, though that was there, but frustration. Enough to set her jaw in rigid lines, pressing so tightly she might have heard the joint creaking somewhere deep in her own ears. A faint echo of straining bones. It didn't matter. Of course it mattered. It mattered a great deal. More then Porsha was willing to admit. More then she wanted to acknowledge, if even just to herself. She clutched at the phone pressed tight to her ear as tickling lines of hot tears painted gray tracks along her cheeks. A sound was her only answer to that, almost a laugh. Abrupt and short lived and maybe even a little bit bitter. An ironic slip devoid of any real humor. He didn't have to verbalize his pain, she could hear it in his voice. In the harsh ebb and catch of his breath, and the escaping signs of anguish. She could hear it all, and she empathized, she took that burden of pain onto her self, and she ached with him. For him. "Then don't," she answered, perhaps hastily, but she was running off fear and impulse and suffocating worry. "Don't power up. Be you, be Alois." Her throat worked against lump that sought to strangle her words, and she swallowed uselessly as small fingers curled ever tighter in violet locks. Silver eyes flicked up, taking in the room around her though blurred edges and tear heavy lashes. She stared at the mirror on the wall and the section of closet reflected within. Countless bits and pieces of her wardrobe, but there, standing out in vivid contrast, little reminders. Long sleeves and dark colors. Shirts she had never owned, jeans she had never worn. They didn't belong to her, but they did belong there. "Home is here." The words were stretched thin through clenched teeth. Had to keep her jaw tight, had to keep control, least her hear the tell tale chatter of overwhelming emotion. The tears had already leaked into her voice, but he wasn't there to see the shaking, that much she could hide. "This apartment, this bed." They were soldiers, but they were so much more then that. Who they were did not cease to be when the corruption was awakened. It had been Bischofite that she had met first, the captain she had invited into her bed, but it had been Alois that she had shared her life with. They were people first and foremost. Before the war. Before the struggle for power and nightly prowling. They were human beings, with hopes and aspirations. And of course they were flawed.
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Posted: Fri Jan 10, 2014 11:04 am
Be Alois. Be the one thing he loathed - the regrettably and infinitely human form of himself. The broken pieces he was born as - Alois with his rusted nails for kidneys, his shattered glass for a heart. His heap of lye for a liver and a pair of knives for his eyes. All the missing pieces filled with better (bitter?) means of annihilation. But that pain only ate at himself now - all those weapons utilized against Alois, by Alois, for no reason other than to eliminate all trace of those traits he steadily despised. But Porsha encouraged it. Be Alois. Embrace the hate.
He tried to draw a sigh, as he was instructed for every hour. A deep breath to ward the pneumonia away - to prevent further, mounting harm. Suddenly the war felt small and far, as the texture to his ceiling. Maybe that was what a war looked like from several thousand feet in the sky, as a spectator over the scene. A solitary crow flying above the preparation for the last supper, it seemed. But his eyes strayed to the cracks, the thinning of the drywall that produced the plateaus of imagined people. What lay there, but shadows? Youma?
That breath hitched in his chest. It bubbled like blood, and he winced with a grunt. Simple tasks proved insurmountable these days. How was he to play the part of Alois now?
"I want you to do somesing for me." She knew of her own potential. She knew, by now, by his insistence if anything, how far she could go within the Negaverse. And to see Destiny City so wholly changed by the ubiquitous presence of the Negaverse... Was it so grand anymore? "Keep going. I cannot, I was set back, but you can. I can't..." He paused to consider proper phrasing, but a cough seized him temporarily. It ached, rattled the broken parts, but he progressed nonetheless. "I can't abide by zeir rulings much longer. It's stifling, and I'm tired of it." But Laurelite pronounced her judgment, as she sided with a pair of inept officers. One who repeated his folly, and one who cowered behind his companion.
They wanted the meek, the reckless, the easily controlled.
"Zat bed will not be warmed by ze broken and bleeding.Your apartment is not a hospice." Perhaps most importantly, she might negate the suffering he needed to survive this with some inkling of improvement. Pain could not undercut his pressing need to speak further: "You will see me again. But not until make some changes."
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Posted: Fri Jan 17, 2014 8:12 am
Be what he'd been when he'd shared her bed and her home. When he'd seemed so happy. Porsha winced at the sound of that labored sigh, her heart throbbing as mounting anxiety continued to creep up. Twisting the muscles in her shoulders. Tighter and tighter until she was sure something should snap, and she was unsure if it would be muscle tearing free from skin or bones, or if it was her mind that would break first. Because this was a level of emotion she wasn't used to feeling. Overwhelming and foreign, her flesh was flushed, her body shook, and she struggled just to breath and even still she didn't know exactly what it meant, because she had never felt this way before. Close, on multiple occasions, when she'd seen Jude walking home with discolored smears of bright color bruised around his eyes. Battered and beaten and preyed upon, but she wasn't helpless then. She felt helpless now. The rasp of his voice pulled her back from the unfriendly folds of her mind, and she clung to his words as she clung to the breath that caught in her throat, but they were not what she wanted to hear, and they provided no comfort. Only the sense of a widening void, and she would feel the build of emotions in her chest that was the seed of something bigger. A half strangled whine that threatened to grow into useless screaming. Loud, ragged shrieking that would shred the throat, rend the voice, and leave her rasping, but still just as alone in her bed, in her apartment. In her life. He was supposed to be a part of her life. Why else had he so easily burrowed beneath her skin? Not so he could just disappear. Her fingers were cold when she pressed them against her brow, smoothing flushed skin and rubbing as if it would relieve some of the tension. "What changes?" This at least she could work with. This single statement gave her something to hope for.
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Posted: Sun Jan 19, 2014 3:31 am
Alois smiled vaguely - an exhausted smile, but a welcome turn from the ever-decreasing mood he suffered before. "Changes," he echoed. Bony fingers crept toward his throat to test for bruises, for the slowly blooming indication of his near-death experience. "You remember when I set myself on fire. Zat was for a far different reason, but..." How could he phrase this in as few words as possible? He normally spoke volumes to cover the depth he needed, but between broken ribs and a slowly leaking lung, he hadn't the luxury to dictate. Even the thought of it dampened his spirits.
"Somesing ze Negaverse teaches upon induction - pain is ze key to change," he started in broken sentences. "I endured ze pain. Now comes ze change. I don't know how, not yet. I don't know what will change. But I will be different." Regrettably he had very little to offer on the topic. He recognized the frustrations behind it, as he suffered them himself, but he had little indication toward the depth of suffering that Porsha endured due to his vagueness.
Speaking grew more difficult as his lung slowly succumbed to the building air pressure in the chamber surrounding it. Alois felt the increasing labor with every breath, an indication that he either needed to drain the air himself or forsake the conversation in order to conserve breath. And considering that the syringe still sat atop the bathroom sink, the choice became dreadfully clear in a manner of seconds. To think of air in the form of currency, Alois knew he was destitute - were his call from a payphone, he couldn't afford the minute rate. It irked him greatly to think that he had fallen so far - that a phone call now stood outside his scope of abilities.
The silence over the phone buzzed and cracked with imperfect signal. She was waiting. "When next I call, I might haf' a mission for you. Wiederseh'n, Porsha."
After ending the call, the misanthrope rolled onto his injured side. It amplified the pain, but breathing came easier. Afterward he let the phone drop from his hand in favor of eyeing the eerie blue luminescence from the alarm clock atop his glass nightstand. It ticked off the seconds by flashing the colon, but given the time listed, he had a long time to wait.
Morning came in four more hours. He couldn't sleep.
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Posted: Sat Feb 08, 2014 4:52 pm
She wouldn't hear that smile, but he would certainly hear the harsh exhale of her breath at the reminder of the inferno they'd escaped from together. That she'd saved him from. Of course the girl remembered the fire. Burns still traced her thighs, scar tissue stretched shiny across the backs of her knuckles, her palms. Still not completely healed, and if she still carried the marks, she knew his were worst. Reminders of a lesson well taught, and of a terror that struck to the core. It had been the starting point, the moment she'd realized how very far he'd crept beneath her skin. How far she'd welcomed him in. With the memory came a measure of resolve, or resolution, or some other random, exhaustion emotion she didn't have words for, but regardless it calmed her breathing, slowed the shaking, until she was quiet on her end of the phone. Listening to his struggling to speak around what she knew now was an punctured lung, broken ribs, a bruised throat. One, or all. From just his voice, the hitch in his voice, and the pain lacing each careful word. She could hear it, and it caused her pain. But she'd already told him that, hadn't she? Surely he knew. His answers explained so much but gave her nothing. No indication of when she might see him again, no plans, nothing. It pulled a small, bitter laugh from dry, cracking lips, and she allowed herself to fall to her side, curling on top of her blankets as she pressed her phone to her ear and tried to decide between more useless tears or simply scream. But there came hope before she had to really decide. A glimmer of something to reach for, to hold out for. Porsha rolled onto her back, eyes flying open at the mere mention of a mission. She wanted to ask him when, but he was already saying his goodbyes. So many things she wanted to say, and there was just no time!. "Alios, I-!" A soft click, an answering beep, and that was it. He was gone. For a long moment after she stared at the blank face of her phone. Watching the light dim from the screen before it finally just went black. When she finally tore her eyes way they burned, and she had to close her eyes against the prickling threat of tears. No more. She was stronger then that. The phone was placed beneath her pillow, hand curled around it loosely as she tried to get to sleep, but morning was due in just for hours. She didn't want the dreams.
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