The world plodded its way into existence riding a wave of disjointed nausea. A veil of static parting as blurred shapes began to appear, vibrating with a malevolence accompanied by a cacophony of chittering white noise that felt oily beneath the skin.
She stared a thousand miles, a thousand days, past the amorphous creation before her and waited with ambivalence for it to mean something. A cool blue...claustrophobic gray, shadows and portents, a manifestation of order in triplicate that hovered out of sync...images that wavered and swayed before making their way towards consensus under protest.
Through a lake of mercury a face became visible, but alien and unknowable. Instinct moved her hands to touch the face but a strange jarring resistance halted her gesture. She turned to look down at her hands, pressed against the gray, and discovered an object in her left hand was caught heavily against the counter, and she raised her fist up to examine it more closely.
Her fingers coiled around it, realizing she held it incorrectly for its intended use. A short protrusion thrust forward from the top of her clenched hand, matte black and cold, while its longer y axis descended below her palm in monolithic shadow. It felt lethal in her grip and yet, seemingly feeling more like an antagonist at rest, and she felt comforted. She turned her hand and looked over its flat surface, details and impressions began to form...a barrel... sights...a port for ejecting shells... the handle that stabbed forward from her fist contained a clip, she noted, but also something more...a color out of sorts with its abyssal monochrome …a thick painting of deep crimson spattering upwards from the base of the grip... and a small mass of pulp and black follicles like miniscule tendrils convened across it, as she frowned unintentionally.
Her hand set the gun down beside the sink with a slow careful movement as she noticed the flash of silver to her right, covered in dull red. A knife... she realized...broad and thin, a recurve at its tip folded back towards the handle, and a second beveled edge waiting in that protruding hook. 'A knife chooses its owner', she thought... and knew whom it had chosen. A scarlet lake pooled beneath it, its shores defined by the porcelain sinks on either side of the small space it inhabited, a placid and tranquil place removed of what had preceded its present state of stillness, and she knew...but could not remember.
Color saturated slowly as the world seemed to return in small moments. A sterile light, wholly unnatural, filled the space in a murky haze and she became aware of sound. A distant thrumming pulse seemed to reverberate through her as it jerkily shifted from crazed syncopation to horrible even certainty with a rattling pulse that seemed to make the boundaries of the room she theoretically occupied breathe and close in upon her...and she felt constrained, confused, and trapped.
The lake of mercury before her, the resting face, seemed to shift and an overlay of a insidious other became present, but this face she knew... knew in the way that truth is revealed in dream, a certainty without context. The expression presented on that face was so familiar to her, yet rarely shown herself. Something horrifying behind the mask, writhing beneath the skin, and buried within bones of titanium and falsehood. She shifted uneasily and contorted to bear witness to it, even as the eyes of that face seemed to follow her beyond any natural order, an offering of shattering knowledge that frightens with its view of the absolute.
She had been searching, she realized... following a promise. Had she found it in her desperate fumbling with arms outstretched before her to touch what she could not perceive in the dark? Flashes of cyclopean geometry of dead matter, formless faces that moved about their routines like runtimes in a grand program, passing her by...a fixed point in a perpetual kinetic chaos beneath starlight and neon overcast, but for how long? A city of faceless shades...a bridge within her that lead only into the void. The connection was severed, she realized, and that knowledge sealed her breath within a tomb of plastic and metal, for what she had found was denied her in that moment inside memory apocryphal, draped in uncertain fog and doubt.
She looked down, past the swath of thick vermillion slickness and soiled fabric and realized her right hand also clutched something in a fierce grip, an obscured confusing form that oozed unbearable revelation from between her fingers. What it represented was all at once an invitation to glimpse the infinite and a gate to madness, a warning of what must remain undiscovered. She wanted to keep her hand clenched in perpetuity, but it taunted, teased and seduced with a siren's song of desired obliteration.
'Needs must... when the devil drives...' said a voice from the mercurial lake before her, its voice full of invective and dead of tone. Dread enveloped her tightly even as she lifted her fist to unclench it before her. Fingers that uncurled one by one, like the tumblers of a lock releasing to allow passage beyond the gate, and it was horror that waited just beyond the threshold. Her palm flat, digits splayed wide in presentation as she took stock of the mass that came into abhorrent context...
A unsettling mosaic of pale tone and rough shape, disturbing in its ragged asymmetry. A mottled collection of pinkish-black and sanguine stains smeared across soft porcelain...ghastly wet jagged chaos...a painted heart wreathed in wings...and she knew as it fell from her hands...the wet sound of the passive meeting the immovable as it collided with the sink below...the folded viscera of the metaphorical and metaphysical alike, resting in stripped gore. Her hands covered her face, her body was wracked by tremors and learned behavior carried out by reinforced repetition and yet, agonizingly, no tears fell.
The mocking face that gazed upon her in judgment rippled and hovered there in the mercurial lake, and she turned away from it to face instead the shadows behind that seemed to fill the space from whence she had come. Her eyes looked down to her stomach where a mass of inelegant irrevocability waited below, all ripped endings and blackened terminus, and she knew.
Her hand instinctively covered the hole in her being that leaked grief like a sieve, and a stomach that she did not possess turned with disgust that she could not feel it fully. Its flowing river fueling a waterfall of numbness that she could detect only through the rationalization that it should be present, but unseen and unfelt, and she hated that she understood this truth. Memories bubbled up from diseased landscapes of thought...faded broken moments...the appointed meeting...their sanctuary...the blissful hope that never was. In its designated place she had found only absence. No monument marked its creation, nor showed its future reserved, no soul waiting for her, no evidence there had ever been one at all... a trail she followed in fevered desperation that froze over as she tried to find the one, vanished.
Whether by failure or deception, she couldn't know, and the worst of it lay there. A blood-soaked tabula rasa that offered an endlessly weeping wound, but no greater understanding. No certainty, other than that most familiar of circumstance: abandonment. A cycle she had grown so accustomed to it lost the prominence of being recognized as a manufactured certainty, the need for delusion making each fated meeting with it a startling surprise and unforeseen revelation. 'None would know you...' said a voice behind her with the timbre of flesh pulled from limb. 'None would have you...' it intoned with loathing, mocking.
It had been so before, when she was cast into her own abyss. When that other had never come, after that flash of light and pain and darkness. That other who had never come as she cried and screamed in a cyclical nightmare, had never come when she languished, ripped asunder, imprisoned in the monstrosity within. Just as it had been, so it was again, and yet more terrible for all that had been peeled from her, gutted, spread out and cast over the cliff with the tearing and tugging of dislodged bowels.
She wanted to cry. Her hand covered her face and a yawning chasm of lack responded to her desire with dust as she bowed her head. Her face attempted to contort into the proper shape, to carry out the process as she had learned from that other, but from the bridge to nowhere came only emptiness, and she bore her solitude in bitterness and swallowed curses.
'Fool...' she thought, admonishing herself. 'Arrogant... Pathetic...' her voice spat with disgust, uncertain if the words were spoken or left unsaid as she hugged herself and stared light years away. Twice had she believed, twice opening doors within herself both proverbial and literal for the singular thing that had been ineffable to her comprehension, ephemeral in her grasp, the grand flirtation with undoing...trust. She had twice thought herself deserving... and twice imbibed poison most malignant.
Dopesick she'd chased after it, blind to her unravelling, and the compromises that macerated her in small parts. Willfully ignorant of the sickness of will that eroded in fractions, the hollow creature that remained in its wake bearing only desiccated likeness to the vital vigor that had borne it. A lie that once stood so firmly that it could have been believed to be truth was now supplanted with a listlessness and apathy so vast that the lie was given only the most half-hearted deception of pedestrian motions to sustain it.
'Purposeless.... Meaningless...' said the voice behind her, its words belching forth from twisted machinery that churned and drove the abattoir, and she could only agree as the memories began to come not as a river, but as a flood. A pile of bodies stacked blocks from the authorities, unknown innocents and the smell of almonds... a warning carved on a dead girl's chest left for friends to find, to be torn apart by accusation and duplicity... the death rattle of a violent suitor given in distorted love requited, and driven by need of ecstatic annihilation, a corpse flower given to another to admire... comforting those horribly betrayed by hands she knew with terrible familiarity as she mimicked the pantomime of what she had never truly known, until that one...
'Feeble... Weakness...' the incessant litany from behind her continued, razors that opened the skin to let wire descend into meat below, and she hugged herself more tightly, shuddering against cold she could not truly feel. Composing a lie so grand in that moment of disastrous reckoning, his eyes pleading even as he subconsciously begged for an explanation for it all, weaving it into a greater tapestry that would work his ruin. Old faces that considered her a friend, extending the benefit of their suspension of disbelief as they ignored what festered in their midst.
'Succumb... Fade... Undeserving... Unworthy... ' she tried to sob, to tune it out. Her eyes yearning to feel wetness they could not produce, a begging plea for a feeling that would not come. A comm handled lazily over a bottle of wine, an ally asking for advice, hearing the screams and desperation in the background as she provided what learned wisdom she had. Their laughter at a shared lack of understanding of the motivations of those in love. The same man suspended, a twisted art of her own devising... long chains, load bearing links, biting steel and elasticity tested beyond all sense... standing beside the one who loved him more than any other as she bid him to continue, providing a fatal riddle to one she viewed as pupil.
'Unaccepted... Unwanted... Unknown... Undesired...' her fingers tightened as best they could against themselves, the metallic click of their resistance like the creaking of a hull about to snap. The flight from those who would come, hunting... the escape... a new beginning that saw only the ruin of herself in little deaths, obsolescence, a catalyst without reactant. Distant and uninvolved. Terrible inaction, surrounded by allies, a weapon kept in an armory for a fortress never assailed. Bitterness and spite from those she had looked up to, seeing weakness and hubris in equal measure within them, pulling punches to preserve an ego that could handle no scratch or injury, no machinations visited upon them as would have once had been guaranteed in perpetuity. Restraint as her throat was torn out again and again.
'HATRED...' the voice, stated, chewing on the word in odious humiliation, and she kicked her foot backwards then against the counter as she shut her eyes tightly. A small synth, a dying intellect centuries old, who had yet to learn how to grow up, knowing only sadness, drowning in his ocean of loss. Her cruel words to turn him towards strength he didn't know he had, to stave off an ending he subconsciously sought...his vanishing. Savagely hurting one who freely called her sister with words of ambivalence, suffering the failure of being completely out of step with everything around her, mistakes she would have never made before. A gradual malaise that had plagued her for as long as she had sought acceptance and alignment with what the other provided to her in what she elevated as the sublime unknown.
'HUBRISTIC...' accused the voice, the word carried on a whirlwind of twisted wreckage, and something broke within...her eyes snapping open. The bathroom materializing from dim twilight into greater clarity as she turned and the mercurial lake alone awaited her, placid and truthful in what it revealed of all that lay behind. She collected her pistol, her fingers flicking the bit of scalp from the butt of the gun onto the floor carelessly before holstering it.
She slid the knife off the counter into her waiting hand as she flicked her wrist, sending ruby droplets onto the floor before sheathing it. She turned around again, to the lone toilet stall door that was nearly closed at the end of the row, one more thing to collect. She pushed the door open slowly as she leaned into the small space, her arm reaching past the face that gazed upwards, its final expression frozen, a glassy pleading stare that belonged to a departed soul unknown to her and unrecognizable. Its pulpy mass of spilled substance and twisted flesh, a frantic misshapen reimagining of original form, remained seated upon the toilet, leaking passively, its misaligned gaze begging an answer to a question she would not respond to as she collected her katana from where it leaned against the divider within the stall, pausing only to press the handle on the toilet. The amassed viscera and stagnant russet swirled into oblivion as she pulled the door half-heartedly closed, and made her way towards the bathroom exit.
The music of the club still boomed through the very walls, soaked into concrete and metal that absorbed the bite of sharper frequencies into a muted resonance that waited just beyond the exit, and as she shoved the door open the piercing treble rushed into the room along with a thick haze of blended smoke. The door, continuing its forcefully started path, collided with a 'bathroom closed' sign that quickly clattered to the floor beside an unattended cleaning cart in the hallway beyond as she stepped out into sound and fury. Letting the door close behind her she halted beside the cart and collected a damp rag from it, ripe with the smell of strong chemicals. Wiping her face aggressively for a few moments she finally withdrew the cloth and paused to look at it in the aftermath, attempting to make out the impression of a face in its woven surface and rosy stains, but finding nothing she recognized she balled up the soiled rag and tossed it into a waiting trash bag.
It was then that she became aware of a line for the bathroom assembled beside her. For how long they had stood impatiently she could not know but she could read their faces, horrified and staring with mouths' agape. The tableau's myriad faces of disgust, shock, and horror awakened something within, something that dwelled in a cold, wet and dark place behind her, and the gaze that was returned from that fathomless abyss froze the hall in silence and turned away any complaint. The moment was held in unknown time before she finally pushed her way past the collected throng to leave the club. A station needed to be navigated carefully, egress improvised and carefully executed, and she knew she would never pass this way again. She had only one destination, she knew...to try to replace, with scars, the necrotic tissue she had let be eaten away from her with rot...even if she was without purpose or meaning she would return regardless, alone... and somehow continue.
