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John Raide · (01-30-2014)

I awoke and I saw you watching me. We’re going to have to leave soon you know that. One of these days you’ll change many things. But not today ... You know what I love about you, and it’s not your arrogance, though that does bemuse me, it’s the way you’ll choose everything or nothing. I know what you’re like. I’ve seen it all before. Maybe if there’s time before this all ends, you’ll show me the way back to life.

Hank Lane resorts to juvenile insults and believes he has won the game but in truth, there can be only one ultimate victor. And where my shadow falls, all things end...

You want to know why you're surrounded by all these maggots, Eli James? Because you did what you said you'd do. You recreated the whole world in your image. And what you see in them is your own ugly disguise...

Pain is what makes us strong and all the heroes are dead...

He imagined himself drifting through the air, floating like a crumpled leaf between the trees. There was an urgency to what was happening, but he wasn’t sure why. It felt like the sensation of falling, and he was sick with the feeling of it. It went from the pit of his stomach to the roots of his hair.

The feeling had hardly passed before he could see images starting to fill in around the curtain of light in front of his eyes. He lifted his hand, or at least it felt like he did, to shield his eyes from it. He could feel the bend of a chair underneath his legs.

A girl who looked familiar sat on his lap, and he felt something slipping around his neck, and then pulled taut. The Girl with No Name had karats of humor in her eyes. He could smell the mint on her breath that she’d just chewed. What was her name? It sounded so nice to say. That much he could remember. He was afraid that if he couldn’t remember her name she’d be gone. He saw the outline of her face, and thought that if only he could keep her there, everything would be fine. White smudges came in and broke the memory apart, blurring it to fragments in his mind. He felt himself wince — a stab of pain to the head and for a moment he couldn’t tell if his eyes were opened or closed.

Through the bleached uniform of blinding white, he saw her again.

She was heading down a set of stairs now. She turned, a knowing, slightly pitying glance upon her face. He wasn’t sure where his body was, couldn’t feel his physical self anymore. He could see her though, and she kept coming down the stairs toward him. And he remembered that her hair smelled like her bedroom in the summer. Her mouth was moving. It looked like she was asking something important, but he couldn’t hear it.

The light was too intense, he turned his head from it, squinting and raising a hand to shield his eyes. The ache in his temples was beating with his pulse.

The light withdrew temporarily, and he blinked as it receded. He could feel his legs again. They were still bent, still sitting. Yet something was different … he was rocking. Back and forth, gentle even, so soft he almost didn’t feel it.

For the first time he could feel himself really open his eyes, and he blinked again into dusty yellow sunshine. The air around him was cold, clammy and it got stuck in his nostrils.

The old wooden boat that he sat in rocked side to side. The wind ruffled up the waves around him, which glinted like polished steel. The ocean stretched out on all sides, erasing everything. Maybe it had even swallowed up what was left of the world. He found it hard to think about that, there were very few thoughts in his head.

There was something rough around his wrists and he glanced down to see that they had been bound together by coarse strands of rope. The knot was good. He couldn’t move his wrists at all.

He shuffled in the seat of the old boat and tried to take in his surroundings. He checked once, then twice, to see if maybe he had missed some land somewhere. The boat dipped a little bit due to his motions, and he glanced to his left and he saw it — another boat. Identical to his, just rocking aimlessly in the churning waves.

A girl with red hair sat hunched over, her body moving in rhythm to the boat.

He called to her, but she had seemed closer than she really was and his voice died before it could reach her. His eyes went to the rope that was draped over the side of the girl’s boat. Then they jumped back to where the rope went from his own wrists and up over the front of his boat and down deep into the water.

He barely had a chance to process what was happening before he heard a sound that was like a suction cup coming unstuck. He wasn’t even finished turning his head before he saw the girl being yanked up over the boat by the rope. She hit the water with a loud snap.

A yell escaped his mouth, more shock than anything. On instinct he shot to his feet and the boat didn’t like that. It tipped, then decided it was time for him leave.

The water was ice. The cold tore up through his body like an electrical current and punched all the air out of his lungs. He tried to kick his legs, make some sort of motion with them, but they’d gone numb.

The rope jerked. Hard.

It was pulling him forward, deeper into the darkness that waited down below him. His mind leapt to weird places, and he tried not to think about what may be in the water with him.

She was there in the darkness. He could see her opening her eyes. More than anything in the world he wanted to remember her name. He wanted to tell her he was sorry. Sorry he couldn’t keep his promises, sorry for not being honest and sorry for not understanding. There were other things he could’ve said, but he couldn’t find his voice. Not here in the darkness. Not with the humming in his head. And through the darkness, he saw the Girl with No Name. And she reached toward him, putting a hand on his face. And he gave in to it.

Threaded Mode \| Linear Mode First Breath After Coma (RP:3)
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