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rosextango · 1 year

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Apocalyptica Insomnium

A middle aged woman named Willow Harper has a nightmare about the death of her husband.

CW: death, blood, violence, grief, suicidal ideation, depression, paranoia, brief mention of a gun

There she was again, in the infinite oil colored mist that stretched long beyond the horizon of her cyclopean vision. Above her, a vast chandelier of fractured starlights. Of disco lights, of stage lights, in an eons long ritual dance that started long before her and would continue long after. Below her, an ocean of ink, an inch or two deep, reflective and clinging to her bare feet. Lukewarm, like untouched but old coffee. Black coffee, she thought, his favorite. All at once, the scent of whiskey, ash, and gunpowder filled her nostrils, blown away by a phantom wind. Memories filed away by time.

A flash of red lightning, pain, down her spine, blinding rage and inconsolable grief. It was time for her midnight apocalypse again. It always started the same. The vibration of machinery, the thrum of metal. The industrial pistoning of her heart chambers, in her ears. On her knees, a tall man halfway rested on her lap. Once upon a time, he may have been smiling with his eyes closed. But at this-- at that moment, his black-steel eyes looked up at her, as if she were the infinite universe, with all her nebulae, her white heat and dark matter, compressed into one being. He was still warm, even as her shaking hands became red with blood, his blood. An artery was severed. She didn’t remember which one.

His hand came to rest on her face, warm metal dented from fighting and red with blood that belonged to no one on the extraction vehicle. Blood on the right side of her face acted as tears while clear streaks made their way down the other. She remembers the gravelly voice he always spoke in, from being such a heavy smoker. Metal thumbed away the onslaught of tears on her face, a losing battle.

His voice was soft. “Willow… It’s okay. I love you.”

It wasn’t okay. The heat came from her eyes faster as her throat tightened, an ice pit stuck in her chest, crystalizing in her blood. Her shoulders shook as she whimpered her love back to him. He continued.

“I’m just… going back to the way I was.”

She didn’t know what he was referring to. Until it was too late.

“You told me, once, that…” Blood leaks from his mouth, but he continues. Her lips partially mirroring his in her own brief, silent vigil. “I was so… great, because I’m made up of… the stuff of stars. Even when… I thought I was nothing but dogshit… you said I was stardust.”

No, her heart screamed.

“And when stars die…”

Don’t say it, her soul pleaded.

“They explode… a supernova…”

I can’t bear it, her mind confessed into the echoing chamber of her thoughts.

“And in their wake… they leave a cloud of stardust, for new things to be born from… so I’m just returning to it.”

The shieldmaiden’s voice, Willow’s voice, cracked as she spoke. “I love you. Please don’t go.” She was a little girl again, not the one armed maiden who survived by rage alone that others thought she was. She was a little girl in blue overalls, holding a yellow duckling plush that had been splattered with red ichor. Staring down the barrel of gunmetal, facing foreign men with foreign accents and foreign tongues. Dragged apart from her family, her brother, on a titanium ship that was turning red. Alone, always half of something, never complete. An unfinished sculpture, a half-completed painting…

His other hand was on her face now. This one was made of flesh. The sensation of him was one of the only things that could ground her. But the situation at hand… it didn’t ground her. It ripped back the veil of unreality, to follow with the truth. “Oh, darling… I love you, too, but…”

She had seen this moment a million times before, yet her throat couldn’t produce the sound needed. Her lips moved with his, in perfect tandem, like a choreographed dance, a silent mimicry.

“Nothing gold, can stay… can it?”

She kissed him and he kissed her, amidst the pain and agony and tears and blood and soot. Through the last stretches of energy he had, slumping down into her lap after eternity gave way to oblivion, his gaze getting more and more distant and unfocused. Unspoken love was exchanged between them.

“What an honor… to die in the service of a beautiful woman…” His eyes were blank now, clouding over. “Oh… there’s my little sister. She’s in the white meadow, with the… with the orchids, and the lilies, and the… I haven’t seen her in so, so long…” His eyes were tearing up, as one hand dropped from Willow’s cheek, then the other. “Her smile… I’m right here, I’ll be with you soon, I just need to, need to… pick some for…”

Silence. The hum of the machine that carried them functioned as white noise.

Then, it came. Like a shot from a pistol, like the sound of a car backfiring, like a lock on something deep inside of her being snapped with bloody bolt cutters. She would never forget her murderous rage that could not be slaked and the sound of her own screams. That scream that could turn the heat in someone’s blood to ice, the cries you hear at hospitals when they break the news. Her throat twisted in agony as she screamed and sobbed as part of her whole was torn from her. A part of her gone, not even halfway through her life like the fortunate. He was torn from her. She was twenty-eight.

And like that, the dream within a dream ended, revealing her alone in the vast void, on her knees, head hung low. Where he had once laid was nothing more than smoke and mist, his once material form fading fast into the ether. Silence, deafening silence had filled the air. No, the silence had consumed it, like a black hole consuming light.

She sat like this for a long time, letting the sweet sound of oblivion take her. Soon, hands of black tar, stretching like the starving dead, reached for her. One hand around her right ankle, pulling it deeper into the oil with ease. Another wrapped around her calf, pulling her other leg in as more and more hands joined it. When she first started having this dream, she would fight against the black, liquid quicksand-- but she had quickly learned that it was no use, because it’d only make her sink faster. More hands, pulling at her clothes in desperation, each body part that became submerged lost sensation bit by bit. Like static, pin-prick needles, eating away at each individual nerve until no signals were left to receive.

Nondescript whispers of men and women and voices long past blew past her ears like cold, winter winds. She never could hear what they were saying, but somehow she knew.

“It’s your fault,” one said. The chorus of voices chimed in, one after another.

“Why are you still alive, when they’re not? What made you so worthy?”

“You’ve caused so many people anguish.”

“You’re a burden.”

“Why can’t you drink until you can’t think?”

“Why can’t you let the smoke fill your lungs? Why can’t you let the fire take you?”

“You should kiss the barrel of a gun. It would be the right thing. Or maybe that familiar red noose should give you a hug. Payment, for your sins. People aren’t meant to outlive their loved ones.”

“You should do it. You should kill yourself. When have you ever amounted to anything? Nothing you do has any effect. Nothing will change. You will simply keep crying and holding his cold body, in an eternal loop. A circle in time.”

She never saw them, but she felt their eyes. Heard the scratching of something on paper, as if each minor infraction in her life was being written in a leaking ledger. She could taste iron and smell it, too. She had sunk into the ink, up to her chest, her arms reaching upward for something, somebody to hold, but nothing ever came. Nobody ever came.

Eventually, it was just her hand above the line. Her pale fingers twitched in the physics defying lighting. Below, she was drowning. She had held her breath for as long as she could until the dying oxygen was forced from her lungs. Even as primal instinct kicked in, screaming into her mind to move, to fight, to breathe and live, she found that her body wouldn’t respond. Completely immobile, her vision gone, her sense of touch and taste gone. Everything but her thoughts.

I want to die. I want to kill myself, she began. But I can’t. I have people who need me. I’m bound to them. When I finish raising my- our son, I’ll make my way back to him. I’ll make my way home. I’ll cross the Jordan, just for you.

She knew nothing could hear her as her fingers twitched like a dying insect.

Then there was a low roar, coming from somewhere distant, getting closer. She was thrust from the tar, opening her eye with a deep gasp of breath. Her hand instinctively shot to somewhere close by. Scarred fingers wrapping around the grip of a handgun.

It was dark and lonely in her small, sparsely decorated apartment. The low roar was the sound of someone arriving in a loud vehicle outside the complex. Her body was cold and aching and creaky and drenched in sweat. She was laying on her couch. Slow blinks, getting the tired out of her eye.

Denied respite from her mortal coil, she sat up like a machine that never stops running. An olive gaze fell upon the closest clock.

It was only three-thirty A.M.

She stood up, grabbed a pack of cigarettes, and moved to her balcony. The balcony of her home away from home. She stared out over the blurry city lights, neon lights, dystopian lights. A sound of metal striking metal, roar of flame, an inhale, a puff of smoke. The wind was cold, carried by the season of death and night and snow. Her body was still wet, and she was only in underwear shorts and a tank top. But, it didn’t really bother her much.

She wasn’t going to get any more sleep, she knew without trying. It was simply how it was. It was retribution for her many crimes, the inability to rest without the echoes of the past haunting her.

This waking world was the realm of time’s cold, endless march. It was where the hopeful, sweet dreamers went to die.

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