[P] the violence in the pouring rain

[Marisol]

YOUR SOB HAS A NAME 

As the sunlight fades and day turns to dusk, the air grows chilly. It grows teeth. Little, nagging and needle-sharp, they chew their way through Marisol’s skin until she wants to shudder, but stops herself, irritated that her self-control is waning by the minute. Her heart burns an awful, loud tattoo inside her chest. The cotton-white clouds have started to wane. Over the steep drop of the cliff, where it falls away just a few feet ahead of her, the ocean howls salt and cold high into the air. 

Oh, she hates it.

Rage fills her with every sound of a new wave. The smell of salt in her nostrils burns just as much as it heals. She hates it and hates it and cannot live without it — it is a part of her now, ripe and dark and dangerous. So now matter how much it hurts, she cannot move away from it. It is the only thing that keeps her pulse going, under the thin silk of her skin. She knows that if she strays too far it will call her back, and it will not be any kinder the second time she comes knocking.

Her heels dig into the ground. Marisol braces herself against the biting wind and blinks back her tears furiously. They burn in her eyes, spill onto her cheeks; she cannot remember when was the last time she really cried, and the fact that she has succumbed to it now, when the world is ending, when Erd is gone, when Terrastella needs her more than ever, makes her sick to her stomach with disgust.

When she hears Theodosia’s footsteps behind her, she pulls her head to her shoulder and closes her eyes until the threat starts to subside. Which is more than a few moments.

Are you okay? And Marisol makes a noise that is half giggle, half sob, wet and terrible in the back of her throat, and all of her efforts cannot keep the tears from brimming in her eyes once more. “No,” she says emphatically, and barks out an awful laugh that rattles her chest way down to the bone. “No, not at all —“ she falls silent for a moment, too long of a moment, until it becomes a minute, then longer. Her gaze is fixed, blank and glassy, on the middle distance of the far away horizon.

“Why what?” She turns to Theodosia, and her eyes are blazing with — with — righteous fury, desperation, fanaticism, something so raw and feral it can hardly be given a name. “Why did I fall, or live? Fell because I was dragged. Lived for sheer luck. Why did Vespera fucking pick me to do this to I don’t fucking know — “

She unhinges her jaw. Slow and sultry, like a snake preparing to swallow something whole. And with each centimeter of her mouth revealed comes a new row of tiny, razor-sharp teeth, the teeth of a demon, of something that both needs and wants for blood.

The teeth of a monster.

---

@Theodosia <3

aimless | kokovi