BEXLEY BRIAR
They will answer for this…
Oh.
Won’t they. It’s almost funny, that Seraphina bothers to say so - as if there were any way Bexley, Bexley fucking Briar, would ever let them get away with not answering.
She smiles, then. It is a ghastly thing. Pale with rock-dust, teeth shiny with blood, the birdlike bones in her face flooded with red sunset, Bex’s nostrils flare, her lashes lower. A grin slashes across her mouth. It is unmistakably violent. She will be a dead girl walking - that is, when she can walk - and the benefit there is she has nothing left to lose. No beauty, or reputation. or friends begging her not to. They won’t, and if they do, she will not listen. Nothing matters but the face she sees when she closes her eyes (Acton) and this simple, embarrassing fact: the sound of her breath, loud and rasping, is absurd in the emptiness of the cavern. It brings tears to her eyes, almost, to hear the imminent reminder of her own mortality, each breath punctured and gravelly, tainted with copper, increasingly ominous.
She hates it. The omnipresent ticking of a clock, or more fittingly, the flickering movement of a sundial. You are dying. You are dying. You are dying.
Can you stand?
You can stand -
With immense effort, Bexley breathes deep, swallowing the sharp pain that follows with only the most fleeting visible grimace. Slowly and jerkily, she scrapes her body into working order. One leg adjusted underneath. Then a second. She hiccups at the pain the movement brings, but tolerates it. Toleration is all she can manage. Shimmering with silvery bruises, darkened in places with blood, Bexley’s body takes on a life of its own, a shell of what it once was, or a marionette, one that jerks and twists to sitting up straight, to kneeling, then standing. The world goes dim-red-and-dark. For a moment, wobbling as she stands, Bex thinks that she might faint. Her head drops and blackens. The scent of sand and copper overwhelms her, and a thick, hot cloud of nausea pools in her stomach. This is a miracle, she reminds herself. My bones. My blood. This continent - the whole damn thing is a miracle.
Bexley’s head snaps up. All at once, something enters her eyes, sharp and violent rather than defeated. Her jaw sets. The expression is rabid, perhaps, but ten times more relevant - more effective - than defeat. That fisted heart, as stubborn as ever, chokes up the salty trail of her throat. Yes. Seraphina’s gaze, in the dark, is a comforting, familiar shade of blue, almost like Bexley’s own. And yet it seems warmer than usual. Less guarded.
For both of their sakes, Bexley does not mention it.
She steps, agonized, toward the mouth of the cave.
@
