END OF 𝚂𝙼𝙰𝙻𝙻 𝚂𝙰𝙽𝙲𝚃𝚄𝙰𝚁𝚈 @daught3rs - Tumblr Blog

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⸺ ⟳ # 𝐇𝟒𝐍𝐆𝐄𝐃𝐌𝐂𝐍 ⋯ a study in a saga of wounds birthing wounds, faith and hope crumbling like sandcastles in the tide. The deepest treachery, sown by those who gave you breath. A fragile dance to hold the seams for the one who was your world — even as their heart whispered its wish to fade away. The weaving shadows of living nightmares, threading them into tales of horror that speak your truth.

And yet, the ache of endless gray lingers, a companion from the first light of your days. A quiet despair that clings to the edges of your soul, hungry and relentless.

Presently stationed at . Kindly refrain from further interaction unless aligned with the aforementioned group. Created and overseen by rei.

𝗖𝗢𝗡𝗦𝗜𝗗𝗘𝗥𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗩𝗘𝗥𝗬 𝗠𝗔𝗧𝗨𝗥𝗘 𝗔𝗡𝗗 𝗗𝗔𝗥𝗞 𝗡𝗔𝗧𝗨𝗥𝗘 𝗢𝗙 𝗛𝗘𝗥 𝗦𝗧𝗢𝗥𝗬, 𝗣𝗟𝗘𝗔𝗦𝗘 𝗣𝗥𝗢𝗖𝗘𝗘𝗗 𝗪𝗜𝗧𝗛 𝗘𝗫𝗧𝗥𝗘𝗠𝗘 𝗖𝗔𝗨𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡.

#here have this while i eventually put up her card with her full info!#SO GEEKED TO BE HERE AHHHHH #feels like its been eons since i last wrote #tw sui ideation #tw murder #tw abuse mention

dailyoliviacooke

THE SIGNAL (2014) dir. William Eubank

#⸺ ⟳ 𝗘𝗙𝗙𝗜𝗚𝗬.#actually more young cheryl coded #so #⸺ ⟳ 𝗖𝗛𝗘𝗥𝗬𝗟.

endlesswoes

After what felt like months of no sleep, Leandro was able to figure out the riddle that haunted his sleep. Or so he thought as he took his children hand in hand towards the very tree that signed their sentence. They hadn’t lingered long, he didn’t want to be there in the first place and most definitely wouldn’t have if the riddle hadn’t ended up sending him there. It had been two days since and the very night the dreams seemed to have ceased. Lea wasn’t being too hopeful just yet, he needed a bit more time to be sure of it, but for the moment he was comfortable putting Lupe and Diego back into their beds.

Once he learned of the nightmares his own children endured, he felt it safer to sleep in one room. Lupita refused to let him in on her nightmares, but he had noticed the redness on her arms not too unlike that of Diego’s. With them in his bed it was easier for Leandro to wake them if the need arose. He hadn’t been able to sleep for a couple of nights now, doing his best to get to Diego before he screamed. Thankfully that all seemed to stop when they visited the tree so he felt a little better about tucking them each into their beds.

“Padre nuestro, que estás en el cielo. Santificado sea tu nombre…” they began their nightly prayer, all kneeled on the bottom bunk while resting their elbows over the bed. Hands pressed in prayer as they leaned forward and bowed their heads. “...no nos dejes caer en malas tentaciones. Mas líbranos del mal, Amen, Amen, Amen.” Using the frame of the bed for support, Lea raised from the ground and placed a kiss on both his children’s heads before tucking them into their respective bunks.

That night the Contreras slept soundlessly, so much so that the following morning they all decided to sleep in. Leandro less so, as he rose to make his children pancakes for breakfast with some ingredients he was able to source from the diner. He’d been mixing the batter when he heard the loud thump coming from the church entrance. “Valentina?” Leandro called out, in case she needed a hand with something large and heavy, but he heard no reply.

Furrowing his brows, Lea set the bowl aside and wiped his hands on a nearby towel before walking onto the sanctuary. It took only a matter of seconds for him to find the source, her body hidden behind one of the pews almost completely out of sight. “Are you alright?!” Leandro called out, dropping the towel in his hand as he rushed over to her convulsing frame. Not wasting a moment longer, he reached for her shoulders putting some distance between her and the pews to prevent any further injuries.

“Meryl? Stay with me, okay?” He spoke softly, doing his best to remain as calm and collected as the moment allowed, “I’m going to turn you slightly so that you don’t choke.” Lea felt it necessary to inform her of his actions, just in case Meryl was mentally present and scared. He followed the little information he knew on handling seizures, and sat beside her on the ground while holding her at an angle. “It’s going to be alright. You’re going to be okay.”

daught3rs

𝗜𝗧'𝗦 𝗔𝗦 𝗜𝗙 𝗦𝗛𝗘'𝗦 𝗗𝗥𝗢𝗪𝗡𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗜𝗡 𝗛𝗘𝗥 𝗢𝗪𝗡 𝗕𝗢𝗗𝗬. It was a wretched thing, a marionette tangled in unseen strings, twisting, snapping, thrashing as though some ancient, merciless force had its fingers dug into the sinew of her being. Every muscle wrenched taut, every nerve crackling with static, her limbs striking against the cold wood of the church floor in a grotesque rhythm, a dance of possession and suffering. She could feel her own mind splitting at the seams, thought UNRAVELING into raw sensation — light and shadow smearing together, sound dissolving into a thick, drowning hum. She is trapped inside the agony, locked beneath her own skin, a prisoner rattling the bars of a burning cage.

And through the flickering ruin of her sight, Cheryl stands.

Her sister is still as a corpse, an unblinking specter haloed in fractured light, watching from the periphery with something that might have been pity or might have been hunger. Her image is distorted, stretched thin like an ECHO of something that had long since died but refused to decay. Her lips moved — shaping words Meryl could not hear, syllables lost beneath the riptide of her own agony. The convulsions tore through her like an exorcism gone wrong, but Cheryl did not reach for her, did not try to soothe or mend. She only watched.

Leandro was different.

The priest’s hands are firm, grounding, tethering her to what remains of reality. There is something unbearably gentle in the way he tries to steady her, in the way he murmured reassurances she could barely register through the shattering of her consciousness. His voice was a current, flowing beneath the surface of her pain, a WARMTH in the ruin of her cold-wracked body. He shifted her carefully, positioning her at an angle, cradling her as if she was something fragile, as if she was not a thing already breaking. His kindness is a contrast so sharp to what she's used to it almost hurt worse than the seizure itself.

She wanted to respond. To nod, to move, to acknowledge him — but she is nothing more than a PUPPET of suffering, and even gratitude is beyond her reach.

Time became something cruel and infinite. The agony did not pass — it bled, it spread, it consumed. The church warps around her, the candlelight bleeding into the shadows, the faces of saints in stained glass twisting into something unfamiliar, something VORACIOUS. She felt herself slip into the place between worlds, the threshold where breath meets silence, where flesh meets ghost. Cheryl was still waiting there. Always waiting. Her presence seared into the fabric of existence itself.

And then, it stopped.

Not in an instant, not cleanly, but in a slow, wretched unraveling. The tremors dull into shudders, the vice of her own body’s betrayal loosening by agonizing degrees. She feels hollowed out, a HUSK left in the wake of something repugnant. Sweat clung to her like a second skin, soaking through her clothes, turning ice-cold against the frigid air that seeped through the cracks of the church. She was trembling — whether from exhaustion or the brutal chill that had sunk into her bones, she couldn’t tell. The bruises forming beneath her flesh pulsed in time with her ragged breath, proof that she was still here, still real, though she barely felt it.

Leandro was still speaking. His voice wove through the fog of her senses, a steady rhythm she could anchor herself to, but the words SWAM together, slipping through her grasp like smoke. She stares past him, beyond the veil of the living, her eyes finding Cheryl once more.

Her sister had NOT moved. Still standing. Still watching. Still there.

The words of the riddle oscillating at the edge of her mind, curling through the cracks of her scattered thoughts. I grow until the day I die. You’ve seen me once, if you don’t see me now you won’t survive. And somewhere in the abyss of her exhaustion, she understood: a tree. Roots gripping deep, branches reaching for a sky it will never touch. A thing both living and dying at once, a body turned to ash if burned, to rot if cut, to RUIN if forgotten. A thing she would have to see again if she wanted to live. The answer had been there all along.

Meryl exhaled. A sharp, shuddering breath. The first she had taken in what felt like an eternity. Her hand shoots out, bony and trembling, locking around his wrist with a STRENGTH that shouldn't have left in her. Wild-eyed, sweat-drenched, her breath torn from her in ragged, frantic gasps, she screams. Not a wail of pain nor panic, but a sound almost crude with revelation, guttural and unrelenting, the words tearing themselves from the depths of her throat as though they had been locked there for centuries:

❛ HELP ME, PLEASE! ❜

Her voice cracked, the heaviness of the enigma crashing through the stagnant air like a death knell, like a prophecy RIPPED from the lips of the forsaken. The church walls seemed to tremble with the force of it, the candlelight flickering as if recoiling from her, from the thing that had been birthed in that moment of horror. And then, as quickly as it had come, the fire within her guttered out, her grip loosening, her body collapsing back into itself, empty, spent, trembling against the wooden floor. When her eyes finally lift again, the world exhales — and her sister is nothing but an absence, a whisper unraveled, a shadow devoured by the dark.

#⸺ ⟳ 𝗧𝗛𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗗𝗦.#𝗖𝗢𝗠𝗠𝗨𝗡𝗜𝗖𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡: Leandro.#Leandro & Meryl: Chapter I.#tw horror #tw body horror #helltownevent2 #it took me forever to write you a reply you deserve #but i still loved on you like you asked

solidgrovnd

To Shaw, sunlight was not always a welcomed thing. The promise of a new day was just as much a confirmation of the horrors that came in the night. There would be no more dark to soften the wreckage, by which the town could attempt to obscure the destruction that had been left in the wake of Their arrival. The imminent glare of sunlight and the world moving despite had dragged it all into focus. The sun, and the life it had been meant to promise, contorted into a mocking thing that would cast light unto death with neither mercy nor care.

Just the same, a clinic could be an institution for healing as it was merely a holding room for death. Shaw would never take for granted the days—even weeks—when quietude would befall it, intrusions made manifest only in treatable wounds and bodies. Suffering then that could be contained. At times something even like warmth could befall its halls: indulgences from a spark of a match struck in the worn strip of its box, the slow burn and bloom of a cigarette, the tarnished ashtray to the side of the window. Flickers of images of a company favored, of smoke and breathy sighs curled against their throat. Shaw would have liked more of those colored fragments that could be held against the gray of the clinic’s walls but it was not quite a place for growing, only a pastiche of it. Of restitching wounds and reorganizing bones back into place, mending, not letting bodies sink down into themselves.

And if day broke, if the doctor couldn’t quite save them—

Shaw preferred not to live in those moments. When loss finally came. The immediate aftermath of it, and the aftermaths still to come. Grief could only ever be described as a runoff, something that the town had held in abundance. There was never a seasonality to death, no clouds by which its presence would be heralded. Nothing so mundane as a seasonal disease or an outbreak would number their days. The creatures had made that decision for them. Had made the decision, in all the time the doctor had been here, fifteen years ago, five years ago, a year ago. The night before.

“I’m not here to ask you to let her go. Or to forget her.” Shaw met Meryl’s eyes then. Did not falter. Let themselves be undeterred by her rising anger and the merging of their shadows in the changing light. “I wouldn’t insult you like that.”

The doctor stood there, now. Taking it all in. Bore witness to the contortion of her words and laughter so cutting that it had inflicted its own wound. A knife twisted against itself. Shaw stood still, folded their arms. Not quite to protect themselves from the harm weaned from the other’s grief but merely to contain themselves. Later, the doctor would ask what could be done to help salve Meryl’s despair. For now, Shaw would let this moment linger, when the loss had begun to sink through. To gather the slightest remains of life left and to let it dissolve into her being. After today, after the burial—this town would not afford Meryl the luxury of grieving.

“I do understand.” A quiet offering, then, but that was that. Knew better than to locate themselves against the sentiments of another. Here grief was almost a rite of passage if not something that had arrived, a prelude of whatever there was still to come. “But this is your grief, not mine. That anger will hollow you out.”

Their mask of indifference would not easily waver. Not when Shaw had had much practice. Time had passed, and would pass again, and while they might attach some mileposts to mark memories worth remembering and perhaps even relieving, it was impossible not to be desensitized to it. How it had been a while since they held people with a different eye. More tender, perhaps. Gentler. More befitting the bedside manner doctors of their past had told them to emulate. But this town took, indiscriminately and without grace. Time blurred. People, too. It was not only impossible to unsmudge the lines; it was also painful.

“Right now, time is all I can give.” They paused, letting the words settle in the air between them, “So are you going to take it?”

daught3rs

𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗪𝗢𝗥𝗗𝗦 𝗦𝗧𝗥𝗨𝗖𝗞 𝗛𝗘𝗥 𝗛𝗔𝗥𝗗𝗘𝗥 𝗧𝗛𝗔𝗡 𝗦𝗛𝗘 𝗪𝗔𝗦 𝗪𝗜𝗟𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗧𝗢 𝗔𝗗𝗠𝗜𝗧. It's not a blade but something worse, something deeper — words that don't cut clean, but instead fester beneath the skin like an infection that no knife could excise. She thought she had built herself from fire, from steel, from the brittle edges of barely held-together rage, and yet here Shaw stood, not backing away, not offering FALSE comfort, but holding up a mirror to the rawness of it all. Meryl felt her fury begin to collapse in on itself, curling inward like something withering, something caving beneath its own unbearable weight, its own inevitability.

She had been trying to outrun it, trying to shroud her grief in anger because it was the only shape she had ever known that did not render her weak. Anger was structure, it was walls and barriers, it was teeth bared in defiance of the world she had faced before this place. But now — now the walls were crumbling, the mortar turned to dust, and the foundations cracking beneath the ponderousness of something too vast, too CONSUMING. She could feel the truth of it pressing in, suffocating, filling the vacuous spaces inside her like a rising tide, like hands tightening around her throat. There's nowhere to run now. No refuge, no escape. Only the unbearable light of day spilling like blood across the cold, lifeless world she had tottered into. Meryl stumbled backward, as if Shaw’s presence alone had struck her physically, as if the sheer force of reality had finally knocked the breath from her lungs. The room felt smaller, the walls closing in, stretching long shadows that curled like reaching hands, grasping, pulling her under. She tries to summon the rage again, tries to call forth the fire, but all that comes is exhaustion, an emptiness so vast it swallowed thought and left her standing on the precipice of nothingness.

Her knees buckle before she even realize she is falling, her body crumbling beneath the sheer weight of it. She hits the ground hard, but she barely registers it. Her hands, shaking, curled against the floor, fingers twitching as though searching for something, ANYTHING, to hold onto. But there was nothing. There was no hand to reach for, no steady presence beside her anymore, the only one she had always sanctioned and embraced in turn. Cheryl was gone. Gone in a way that was irreversible, absolute. Gone in a way that no amount of screaming, no amount of fury, could ever change. The tears came then — not in heaving sobs, not in gasping wails, but in silent, unrelenting streams that burn hot trails down her cheeks.

It was an unraveling, a shattering, a breaking so deep she thought she might never piece herself back together. The world outside the clinic continued on, unbothered by her devastation. The sun would still rise, and people would move, and life would continue despite the gaping, EMPTY wound that had torn through her. The birds would sing their wretched songs, and the wind would still whisper through the trees, as if the world itself had not just caved in on her.

She lifted her head, eyes glassy and unseeing, staring through Shaw as if looking past them, looking at something ONLY she could see. The silence between them stretches taut, a thread that might snap with the wrong breath. She opens her mouth, but the words come gradually, dragging from the depths of her chest like something buried long ago, something that should have remained untouched.

❛ I don’t know what to do now. ❜ Meryl let out a breath — ragged, uneven. A breath that held no answer, only capitulation. The fight is gone. The indignation absent. All that was left was her, kneeling on the clinic floor, drowning in a DOLOR too vast to name. And time is the only thing remaining.

#⸺ ⟳ 𝗧𝗛𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗗𝗦.#𝗖𝗢𝗠𝗠𝗨𝗡𝗜𝗖𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡: Shaw.#Shaw & Meryl: Chapter I.#tw death #it wasn't even close to trash please

thcmpscns

Dayn paused, brows raised slightly in wait for the next piece of the puzzle to come out of her, hanging on the edge of the maybe until he realized there wasn't anything that was going to come after it. He couldn't have given a more apt description - just clone him, and there you have it, there was Joel.

He looked around, back to where he came from, shoving one cold hand in his pocket, the other's thumb pressing to his mouth as he nervously picked at the nail with his teeth, and wondering where the hell his brother could have possibly gone to. Was he really going to have to knock on every door of every woman he could think of here? That would take way too long. It took him a moment, to register the way her eyes raked over him - not in a way he would have liked and immediately on with a grin and a far looser body language, but one that was more studious. People like that always made him a little nervous, like they knew something about him that he himself didn't even know. What could she see in him? Did she know him?

"You'd think, yeah," he nodded, unconsciously aiming himself away from her, from her intense scrutiny, but keeping his tone light nonetheless. It was a balancing act he had grown to be something of an expert at over the years - of keeping true intentions buried underneath seemingly uncaring, unaffected demeanors. "Well, historically speaking, I'm the one who's a bit better at disappearing," he joked, rather dryly. "I got here first."

daught3rs

𝗠𝗘𝗥𝗬𝗟 𝗛𝗔𝗗 𝗦𝗣𝗘𝗡𝗧 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗟𝗔𝗦𝗧 𝗠𝗢𝗡𝗧𝗛 𝗪𝗔𝗟𝗞𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗪𝗜𝗧𝗛 𝗔 𝗣𝗛𝗔𝗡𝗧𝗢𝗠. Not the kind that rattled chains or whispered in the night ( well at least not all the time ), but the kind that lived inside the vacant space between her costae, pressing COLD fingers against her lungs whenever she breathed too deep. This place had taken her sister the first night, swallowed her whole like the greedy, aching thing it was, and left Meryl standing in the wreckage, searching the faces of strangers for a reflection she would never find again.

And now — this young man stands before her, worrying at his fingernail with his teeth, shifting his weight like a skittish animal, speaking of his twin like it is a certainty. Like it is a given that somewhere in this town, his other half was still out there, still breathing, still CONNECTED to him in ways she could barely stomach thinking about.

It was envy, sharp and bright as a cut-glass edge, that bloomed first inside her chest.

She shoves it down. Stomps it out.

He had angled himself away from her, like her gaze was too heavy, like it pressed too laboriously against his skin, and for once, she didn’t relish the discomfort. He was trying to keep something buried, but Meryl had spent too long watching men PRETEND they were untouchable not to see through it. He was worried. He was unraveling. She knows what that feels like almost too intimately. His joke is thrown like a coin into dark water — something light, something casual, meant to smooth over the sharp edges of the conversation. I got here first. A truth tucked beneath a laugh. A confession dressed in something that probably held more weight.

Meryl let it settle between them, let the words roll over her before deciding she isn’t CRUEL enough to let them go unanswered.

❛ Can’t say I’ve run into your long-lost reflection anywhere around here, ❜ Though her tone is flat, clipped, there is something steadier beneath it now, something less BARBED.

She had no softness to offer, but she had understanding, and sometimes that was better.

Her arms loosened, just slightly, her stance no longer braced like she was expecting something sharp to come from him next. ❛ People don’t just disappear here. ❜ Her voice dipped, almost unconsciously, into something darker. A bitter edge curling at the corners of her mouth. Not unless this place takes them. She didn’t say, like it took my sister. Didn’t need to. Instead, her eyes flick past him, out to the docks, the boats bobbing on the tide, the lazy sprawl of the town beyond. She looks even though she knows it is useless. Even though she has spent weeks looking for someone who will never surface again, their new resting place now six feet under.

Still, she didn’t leave. Didn’t turn away. ❛ Do you know at least know where was he last? ❜ she asked. It is something. It was more than she usually gave. And maybe it is SELFISH, this small act of kindness. Maybe it is just a way to claw back at fate, to tip the scales, to spit in Arcadia’s face and say: You can’t have this one, too.

#⸺ ⟳ 𝗧𝗛𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗗𝗦.#𝗖𝗢𝗠𝗠𝗨𝗡𝗜𝗖𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡: Dayn.#Dayn & Meryl: Chapter I.#excuse me for taking so long #won't happen again #:D

archvillainofromance

Interview with the Vampire I Want You More Than Anything in the World

Been through some shit like anybody else. Mom died. Dad ran off. Aunt didn't want me. A fire. Adopted. One of them was bad trouble. Ran away.

#⸺ ⟳ 𝗖𝗛𝗔𝗥𝗔𝗖𝗧𝗘𝗥 𝗦𝗧𝗨𝗗𝗬.

kristenschaals

#⸺ ⟳ 𝗖𝗛𝗔𝗥𝗔𝗖𝗧𝗘𝗥 𝗦𝗧𝗨𝗗𝗬.

thcmpscns

It was already bad enough when he was alone here, when it was his own skin he had to worry about. And while Dayn was overjoyed (in a completely selfish way) that Joel was here with him, to endure something similar to what he had to, something they could actually share in, it meant that he worried more. Before, it would be easy to think that in danger, or in any circumstance that necessitated strategy, a plan of action, he only had to think about himself. Now, with Joel, there were backup plans upon backup plans.

They were not getting separated again, if he could help it.

And he knew Joel thought the same about him. They both always had their own reasons for trying to protect the other, with anything. They were each the other's biggest weak points in their armor. It could have very well been a dangerous thing here, but it was non-negotiable.

It was also why he was a little frantic this afternoon, with the day growing longer and he hadn't seen his brother since this morning when they both woke up. Knowing him and the various conquests he had already acquired in his short time here, the obvious answer was with one of them. But he didn't know where to look, and they usually had an agreement that they would be back at a certain time - this was cutting it close. He liked the docks, and the water, Dayn thought - it was pretty enough to draw, and that was as telltale a sign as any to where the other Thompson could be. Though he turned up short, he still called out to a woman walking towards one of the boats, yelling a "Hey!" for attention, and a little wave as he strode over. "Hi, sorry-- have you seen a guy that looks exactly like me wandering around here today?" he asked. "Not like, creature or anything, we're just twins." *// @h4ngedmcn

daught3rs

𝗘𝗩𝗘𝗥 𝗦𝗜𝗡𝗖𝗘 𝗦𝗛𝗘 𝗙𝗜𝗥𝗦𝗧 𝗦𝗘𝗧 𝗙𝗢𝗢𝗧 𝗜𝗡 𝗔𝗥𝗖𝗔𝗗𝗜𝗔, Meryl had been raw nerve and tightened sinew, strung taut like a wire humming in the wind. This place has teeth, hidden in the cracks of aged cobblestone and the hush of lapping waves, in the slow-turning heads and the glint of watchful eyes. There is SOMETHING about it — something slanted, something that never quite sits right. A town of whispers. A town of waiting.

And it had already taken her sister.

The first night. The first damn night.

It was almost as if Meryl had blinked, and she was gone. Arcadia had ripped her apart, just like it wanted to do to ANYONE who wasn’t fast enough, sharp enough, wary enough. And every day since, Meryl had walked its streets with a blade hidden at her hip and her shoulders squared against the weight of its silence, hunting for a ghost she refused to believe was dead. Arcadia had made her sharper, quicker. It had forced her to be. So when the voice cut through the heavy afternoon air — blaring, sudden — her whole body tenses like a thread pulling tight enough to snap. Her fingers twitched toward the hilt at her hip before she even turned her head, already bracing for WHATEVER mess had come to find her.

A man. That was bad enough.

An unfamiliar one, moving toward her with the loose, easy swagger of someone who had never once been told to watch his step. Worse.

She shifts, weight evening out, grounded but primed to move, boots pressing into the damp wood of the dock. Before this hell she was already watchful, hyper-aware, listening for the space between sounds, always tracking the shift of movement in her periphery from the NIGHTMARE of her own childhood home. And now, here, she studies him with the same measured attention she gave anyone who stood too close. He speaks, and she lets the words hit her, lets them settle without letting them in. There is something practiced in his tone, something careless in the way he occupies space like it belongs to him.

Her expression doesn’t change, but something in her stiffens, a barely-there flick of her gaze that betrays her VIGILANCE. She exhaled slow, steady. Measured.

❛ Maybe. ❜

That was all he got. No invitation. No explanation.

Then more words — too many words.

She almost scoffs, but the instinct is BURIED under sharper things. Instead, her head tilts just slightly, the closest thing she allows to a reaction. Two of them, then. Twins.

Her eyes flicked over him once more, intense, assessing. Broad-shouldered but not imposing, something restless in his hands — like they were used to holding something but weren’t, now. A blade? A gun? A habit? It put her on edge. Men with empty hands were men waiting to take something. Her gaze flits past him, scanning the shifting tide of people, the sway of boats moored to their wooden skeletons. Perhaps, this young man simply is just harmless but she doesn't know how to be anything else.

She finally speaks, words edged and honed as the pocket knife she carried.

❛ If he looks exactly like you, you’d think he’d be easier to find. ❜ Her tone is dry, unimpressed. Not a joke. Not friendly. Just an OBSERVATION carved out of impatience. Her mouth presses into a thin line. ❛ You sure he didn’t just figure out how to disappear? ❜

Because people did that here. DIED.

Meryl didn’t move. Didn’t blink.

She had learned to listen to her instincts, and her instincts ALWAYS told her that everyone and everything needs watching, until otherwise earned.

#⸺ ⟳ 𝗧𝗛𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗗𝗦.#𝗖𝗢𝗠𝗠𝗨𝗡𝗜𝗖𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡: Dayn.#Dayn & Meryl: Chapter I.

solidgrovnd

In Arcadia, only death held permanence.

It was days like these when Shaw realized how much they had taken the quiet of the clinic for granted. Certainly, there were days and nights mellower than others, when work came as a slow, but steady trickle. Stitching skin, resetting bones, dispensing what little they could offer. The roll call of familiar faces and the predictable reasons from which they had gotten hurt. It was the closest thing to routine to which the doctor could orient themselves, having collapsed now into a familiar pattern of hurt and healing. It was the disruptions to the routine that had unsettled them most, and Shaw made it a point not to settle into a single memory for too long and too intensely. They had become conscious of both external and internal stimuli that would provoke something in them beyond what was needed in their profession. A strong mind would always be the best defense against those creeping thoughts, unwelcome recollections, and regrets that had flashed in their mind more vividly than others.

Yet, for as much as the mind could be resilient, the body could never hold that same discipline. It demanded attention. It demanded to remember.

Shaw had insisted on seeing her. Seeing them both. They had not been an active participant when the catastrophe had struck—had been somewhere else, surrounded by fields of green, an attempt at something like living. It was incidents like these that reminded them that the clinic and its sparse attendants could only do so much without their guiding hand. Over the years, they had become its de facto leader, hough the criteria that needed to be met were already so narrow. Had held the position only by virtue of technicality, by the fact that they had not yet folded under the burden of its expectations. Shaw was among the few people who would not cave completely: their jaw always pressed taut, muscles wound, wrung, and held. Yet even the doctor would concede that on the worst days, what they did could no longer qualify as healing. They could offer advice, support, even affection, and care, or stitch a body back into shape and coax a heart to beat a little longer. But the monsters would only ever be an inevitability. All they could do at that point was for the bodies to be preserved as much as they could, to be redrawn back into their familiar contours and order. Yet they had lost count of how many times there had been a need for a closed casket all the same.

There would be no cure to it. So many had fallen now. Hundreds. Thousands, maybe. The graveyard with all its unmarked graves and stones had stretched to the point of innumerability. Shaw did not deign to count at all.

Against the doorframe, Shaw held the thicker blanket in their hands. They stopped, still, and watched the other woman as she watched the other in the cot. Silently. Deliberately. Curiosity stirred despite themselves. They’d always wondered what it was like, to be of one and the same nature as another. To not have come into the world alone just as they had. They wondered whether it felt like an extension of oneself, a mirror, or something else entirely.

What happens when that connection would be severed? They recalled that the first principle of recovery was through the empowerment of the survivor. Would it make a difference if the person who had fallen was your own face staring back?

The sheet draped over the body was such a slip of a thing. Shaw would have to ask about it soon. More threads to be spooled into fabric, more cloth to be woven into something whole.

Was it time, then, to announce their presence? Shaw had committed to stepping back but the ineptitude of the nurse provoked something like indignation, however displaced. The nurse was only doing their best. It was a strange role to play, this act of healing. It would not get any easier. Each experience of profound grief would be so different; the challenge was not to be swallowed by it and be infected with the resulting hopelessness. Shaw had trained themselves against it, to become this hardened thing, though their heart remained carelessly tender.

It would be that same instinct, then, that provoked them to break their stillness. Cheryl’s hand had slipped from the thin sheet. The skin was now left bare, unguarded. Shaw pressed forward from the doorframe where their body had settled and towards the cot. At the very least, they thought, Meryl was spared an audience to her grief. The remaining beds in the clinic had been empty.

With small, practiced movements, Shaw took the hand—not to hold, not to comfort, those points all moot now—and tucked it back beneath the fabric and then pressed the larger sheet into place. The body now firmly out of view.

Turning on their heel, Shaw watched the other woman. It was the silence that they’d dreaded most. For all their attempts at making this easier, the words could never come correctly. There was nothing like death but death. Nothing like grief. Just grief. Their heart tipped sideways, but tears had not come readily anymore.

“I could leave you alone.” But as they turned to face her, it was not coldness that blanketed their expression. Just—understanding. “If you needed more time to say goodbye.”

daught3rs

𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗪𝗢𝗥𝗟𝗗 𝗛𝗔𝗦 𝗘𝗡𝗗𝗘𝗗, and yet the sun had the audacity to rise.

The light, weak and thin through the cloth-covered windows, cut across the cot in jagged streaks. It did not warm, did not heal, only ILLUMINATES. A cruel and artless revelation. It slithers over the contours of the body beneath the sheet — her body, their body. The only body that had ever mattered. It was obscene, this mockery of morning, the way the world still DARED to turn, as though it had not just carved her in two and left her there, dissected and alone. The air remains stagnant, thick with the scent of stillness, of finality, of death that has settled into the walls like an unholy specter. The dust in the air caught in the light like fragmented ghosts, whispering in a language only grief could decipher. It is an intrusion, this daylight — slicing through the sacred darkness of mourning, dragging her unwillingly toward a future she could not fathom surviving.

Cheryl.

The name was a prayer she can not speak. It festers in the back of her throat, raw and swollen with unshed screams, curdling like spoiled milk upon her tongue. To say it aloud would be to call forth a specter, to invite the truth to consume her whole. Her lips part, tremble, but no sound came. As if the mere act of UTTERANCE might solidify the nightmare, might carve it into the nucleus of her bones with a permanence she could never undo. Silence, then. Silence is the only mercy she could afford herself. And yet, even that mercy was cruel, a suffocating thing, pressing into her chest with the weight of a thousand unspoken words. Her ears rang with phantom echoes, the sound of Cheryl's laughter lost in the spaces between heartbeats, slipping further and further from reach.

Meryl has been still for so long she might as well have been petrified, a relic of grief, something carved by sorrow’s cruelest hands. Her arms hang at her sides, fingers trembling in minuscule, broken spasms, the phantom of Cheryl’s touch still pressing against her palm. She still had not blinked, had not breathed, had not moved since the moment they had taken her sister’s hand and folded it beneath the shroud. That movement — so small, so seemingly insignificant — had RIPPED her open in a way she had not thought possible. It is finality given form. A wound shaped like the girl she had been before this moment, before this morning, before she had been severed from the other half of her soul and left to fester in her own skin. Her chest heaves, breath stuttering, but it is not truly breath — it is survival's cruel imitation, a mockery of life in a body that is now half-dead.

Shaw spoke.

A sound. A voice. Something from outside the ruin of her own mind, something unwanted, something unwelcome.

Meryl moves, at last, with the slow, deliberate precision of a blade being drawn from its sheath. Her hands flexed, curled, uncurled, the tremors of something barely restrained quaking through her bones. Her breath — no, not breath, but something fractured and AGONIZING — raked its way up through her diaphragm, scraping against her throat like shards of glass. Her body rebels against itself, the sheer impossibility of subsistence thrumming through every nerve, every bone, every tendon stretched taut to the breaking point. The walls feel as though they are closing in, pressing against her, trapping her in this grotesque tableau of loss.

Their words. They had spoken as if any of this was something she could endure, something she could OUTLIVE. As if she would not rather rip her own heart from her chest than let time drag her forward, inch by torturous inch, away from the only person she had ever loved.

Meryl turned to Shaw, gradually, wanton. Her eyes — hollowed out, burned-out husks where something like life had once flickered — fixed upon them with the cold, quiet focus of a woman staring down the executioner who had already swung the blade.

❛ Leave me alone? ❜

The words oozed from her lips like oil, thick and cloying, slow to ignite but waiting to burn. She took a step toward them, and it felt as though the very air in the room recoiled, the weight of her grief pressing outward like a living thing. ❛ Leave me alone? ❜ Her laughter came then, sharp and brittle, like bones SPLINTERING beneath an unrelenting heel. It is not laughter at all, not really — more a sound of something unhinged, something jagged and wounded, something that should not exist. ❛ What a luxury that must be. To leave. To be able to walk away. ❜

Her breath hitches, shudders, catches against the sharp edges of her ribs before escaping in something close to a sob, something she would not allow to take shape. She felt it — felt the rage, rising like bile, thick and hot, setting FIRE to the numbness that had settled like frost in her veins. Anger was all she had now. Anger was the only thing that made sense. The only thing that did not crush her beneath its weight. It surges through her, setting her blood alight, filling the empty spaces inside her with something violent, something alive.

❛ How dare you? ❜ she whispers, stepping closer, her shadow spilling over them both like the tide dragging something unwilling into the abyss. ❛ How dare you stand there, breathing, speaking, existing? How dare you tuck her away like she is something that can be put aside? Something that can be forgotten? ❜

Meryl’s voice cracked, splintering like ice underfoot, and she welcomed it. She wanted to break. She wanted the whole world to split apart beneath her, to FRACTURE and crumble and be swallowed whole by the howling void that had taken root inside her chest. She wanted to make Shaw recognize, to carve this agony into their skin so they might carry even a sliver of it, so they might taste what it was to drown in sorrow with no hope of surfacing.

❛ You don’t get to stand there and act as if you understand, ❜ she hisses. ❛ You don’t get to talk to me like I will ever, ever be able to say goodbye. ❜

#⸺ ⟳ 𝗧𝗛𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗗𝗦.#𝗖𝗢𝗠𝗠𝗨𝗡𝗜𝗖𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡: Shaw.#Shaw & Meryl: Chapter I.#tw death #i'm so sorry meryl is letting this out on shawbaby

baarra

Languorous months pass in wroth chimes, constituting the brickwork of you. Within the mortar, there are grey gasps and pink-pasted eyes. Reddened by your touch, and then blackened by your heart. It is there, in your residual thump, living swallowed seconds, that he resides and wrests life from the beat of it. Another punch through the gap between blood-pulses. One, singular: that is what the afterlife makes you, and all it permits atop the bridge to the living. He was there when you waded through Russian ice – blue in its sky-reflection; the mark yet unspilled – into tepid Arcadian soil. When life shifted to the next, he was there. Alacrious / Awake. And he was here, after the month struck eight, for the first reprise of your gelid endings. White snow and whiter toes, entrapped by bark-swollen earth and the stretching slant of moon-soaked grins. Teeth without lips. Partially flayed cheeks. Harkening back to your military days: the drills that dubbed you Zero, and the wrongly bent elbows that soldered it into place. Vagarious advents. And she is here now. The snow has returned, days after meeting this woman. This talcum-cress woman, clinging to the serrated edge of her own undoing. Loud as his shared womb. All jugular, and no will to rip with your own nails. To sow atrocity into yourself.

Her court name was Meryl Silverburgh. She said it days before, in sight of an exit’s comfort, like she must sever it from her throat. Abrupt yet un-swallowed. As if she couldn’t bear neither eye nor ear. The word hurts, then, when spoken. Like an improper pulse wedged within a composed heartbeat. I see all you are, for it is in me. On television, her voice couldn’t waver in its dense watch. Eyes beyond her world, yet of her tenor. His eyes. His stringent gaze that would, one day, look upon pixel made flesh. And how wan it has become. The room was sunless, yet each curl glistened like a glassing eye. Raw with the prospect of the rest of her life. The scored body blasphemes in its proximity to humanity. You bleed, therefore you are. YOUR RIB IN ANOTHER HEART. This is a living twin’s mellifluous toll. I breathe, therefore you aren’t. She might think it’s her own heart – for it drums, invitingly, near the grave – peeling love from wickered tendon. Weary bones encased in evermore child-flesh, mortified in place by father-hands. They would be red, like his father’s, and overbearing, unlike his father’s. You know the truth of meat. Of how marrow writes on its cloak of bone. The skin of the eaten, and the teeth of the eating. You were born sliced. You are the uneaten one. And so, you will eat.

Within that courtroom, she loved needling word, spoken and written, to catch on spectator’s breath as it had embedded within her own throat. Life-long relics from another’s sin. A howl cast into newspaper’s wind until it finds her own typewriter, word beyond lip and tooth. How the televised want to make their image unpalatable to an adoring mass. There would be a blank page, and she would finally find herself. Crimson silence settles in the aftermath – clenched jaw and pen-knife in hand – and in the written account of it. There is finality to pen on paper. The fact is no longer simple. It is truth. The precarity pronounces itself when your ears wed your eyes. You heard, once, but can you bear to read? To separate fact from its definition. She could be a case study. [ HER FATHER IS KILLED BY HER HAND. HER UNREPENTING HAND. ] He knows the sculpt of her scene, the god-sent paintbrush that carves hollows to her cheekbone. The unlit corridors: wood-slat floored, gritty in its aged unclean; bare of life yet full of breath. Coyote-yowled night. Settling grass after timed water jets. The heartbeat in her wrist, reaching to the tips of her nails, brushing against the knife’s hilt. Her drying taste buds. His home / Your house. This pay-off must define the rest of her life, for this routine is outlined in blood. How free can you be, when you are defined by his lack? Therein lies the rub: the pervading truth. YOU WILL NOT KNOW DEATH-LESS COMFORT, AFTER THE MURDER BEGINS.

Albeit, the first truth of many. There is only one fact, but there are many truths. The firstborn took her, feeling unfound in the elseworld, to this half-death. To a purgatory populated by those you loathe to remember, and those you loathe to forget. That is a truth of this place. Everything numbs within it. Your face, and then your unwept face. Your salt-water image, and then your glass reflection. Let sweat turn to bile. Spit to blood. Touch to taste. Sight to swallow. It brings stomach from below your heart, to the eager soft tissue of your mouth. There, however, it will not stop, for it doesn’t stay where it is wanted. The veins that connect tooth to eye, unraveling you into flipped eyelids and exposed muscle. By god’s will, you won’t whiten in night-earth among your dead. YOU WILL SEE RED. YOU WILL BE RED. The white of you is already buried. Death has already seen your face, and wants no more of it. You do not make him hungry. You sate. You breathe. She was a child that knew. In an alcove hewn from an eyeless socket, thumb-ground, and an appleless throat. Nick was a disgraced soldier, home-sojourning, but he was a child that knew. Once. An endless moment. Your brother’s digested soul. Still in the throes of its impending loss.

Your red hands / His clean face. Plumes of gore unspooling from his cracked skull, like a snake’s tongue, forked at every sharp tip, pulling out of its guts. Your blaspheme rests in the hands. You could touch the haemorrhaging puddle, but not his paling skin. You could hear his garbled blood-breath and the desperation that angles your gaze towards his. A touch of red. The sight of white. [ HE DIED IN A LAMPLIT ALLEYWAY, FLAILING FOR YOUR HANDS IN HIS. ] Without the horrified gasps overhead, you would’ve cleaved guts from him. A slab of a different ilk: street-fogged and wriggling body. A worm on soiled ground. You are, after all, a butcher’s son. You prepare meat in death, and he was almost there. He looked at you and knew your hands kill. Your hands are hungry. Tamed only by his warmth, however much it leaks on the pavement. This is the kind of truth that tangles man into myth. Lungs into smoke. Light into shadow. YOUR BROTHER SILENTLY BEGGED FOR SOMEONE MORE THAN YOU. FOR A WHITE TUNNEL OUTSIDE OF YOUR FACE. For those more man than shape, this would rend nightmare into reality. You are the dream and the perennial. You are the fallacy of the end. Both the prefix and suffix, without the noun. Thick-skinned. Cored.

It is this cataclysm of her delirium that blurs her pallid skin into the blizzard air tonight. She remembers the before, balking at what could become the after. And that, he wouldn’t abide. Nothing begets nothing. She speaks, and so, can’t be nothing. For all of it to culminate to naught. To a gasp in the woods. To another ravaged flesh. Because of a mere fact that fears truth. Paused gait. He is still, side-long, eyes narrowed to slits. Slimmer target. ‘ I know, ’ he rumbles back. I haven’t done anything to earn it. His words crack fact – I – from truth – know – and discard the waste into the febrile ground shakes the night’s flake-work: the snow that separates soil from skin, mud from boot. It reaches with those bark-sore fingers – feeding on itself once marrow dries to grain, before its incensed hunger feels you upon its ivory blanket – to the source it yearns to absorb. Welcome home, Death; let us feed upon you. He doesn’t listen. There, stands a living twin turned woman. And he, a living twin turned man. His shoulders are light, but the world is upon hers. She knows the barbiturates of killing, riding its coattails into a wounding town. Into him. She raves and blisters. You watch and wait.

Nothing he says will be enough. Word will not coax mind from craze. It is too soft. A lifted, stolid hand, fingers splayed in surrender, before his free one delves into his inner coat pocket. He procures a handgun – for smaller prey, a quieter shot in this weather – and holds it by the barrel. Thrown at her feet, his hands drop back to his sides, bequeathing fate to her own hands. Empty without him. Full with what he can give. There is already a deep gulch of what she should be. You live for them, it says, for no one else can. As the human you, that walks without enfleshed reflection. ‘ If you’re going to shoot me, aim for the head. ’ He throws these vestiges over his shoulder. ‘ It’d be better for the both of us. ’ The answer doesn’t matter. He walks away from her, showing his back like a patrolling dog. Tireless in its trudge against harsh gale and prickling snow. Galoshed by hackle and claw. He reaches the door of a boarded building, arms rough when parting ice from wood. She will decide whether she will fend teeth or skin. Them or him. The monster you know, or the monster you don’t. The pig doesn’t squeal in the backroom of a meat shop. It is already dead and bled.

daught3rs

𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗚𝗨𝗡 𝗟𝗔𝗡𝗗𝗦 𝗪𝗜𝗧𝗛 𝗔 𝗦𝗢𝗨𝗡𝗗 𝗧𝗛𝗔𝗧 𝗦𝗣𝗟𝗜𝗧𝗦 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗡𝗜𝗚𝗛𝗧'𝗦 𝗔𝗜𝗥, a rupture in the earth’s frozen breast, a thing not meant for snow but bled into it nonetheless. It does not clatter — it settles. As if it has always belonged there, as if the weight of it was destined to sink into frostbitten essence, an unspoken prophecy that she, too, must make a choice. A test. A THRESHOLD. Will she cross it? The metal lies stark against the frost, dark and waiting, the bloodless alternative to something far worse. It does not breathe, does not leer, does not grab or whisper or press its weight into the tender hollow where her shoulder meets her neck, but it is no less a predator than the hands of men. Cold, indifferent, not cruel by its own design, but cruel in the way all weapons are — because they are only as kind as the one wielding them. And yet, in the shallow hush of snowfall, where the trees whisper to one another in the wind, where the distant dark is watching, waiting, hungering, the gun feels like something else. Something more than steel and trigger and the brutal mechanics of death. It feels like a demand. A riddle to be solved with blood. A contract written in the thinnest of margins, signed with her breath on the frozen air. The kind of thing that cannot be refused, only delayed, only circled like carrion waiting for the dying to still their limbs.

Meryl watches it as if it will shift beneath her gaze, as if it might roll onto its other side and show her a face she recognizes, a thing with too many teeth, a grin stretching ear to ear, something slithering in the corners of her vision that wears her father’s hands, her father’s voice, her father’s hunger. She is not afraid of it, not the way she is afraid of what waits inside of men, but she is afraid of the moment after. The second between breath and exhale, between lifting the gun and what must follow. Because she knows — oh, she knows. If she picks it up, she is EXPECTED to use it. The metal is not made for holding, not for cradling, not for anything but the act. Her father had never needed a gun. He had needed only her silence, her stillness, her compliance. And yet — had there been a gun between them once? A long, long time ago, when she was not yet fully grown, when she was still soft, before the calluses had formed around the tendons of her hands, before she had felt the first real heat of blood against her skin? If there had been, she would've taken it. And now, as it lays before her, as this stranger with a name that does not yet fit him walks away as if the matter is settled, as if he knows her, as if he understands the depths of her enough to say here, this is yours to do with as you wish, she feels something even uglier take root inside her chest. It has not been forced into her hands. It has been placed before her like an altar, an offering, an expectation sharpened to a fine point. This is yours now. Do what you will. A kindness dressed as surrender. A performance of trust. A trick she refuses to play into.

Her fingers twitch. Not in hesitation. In memory.

Because it is not the first time she has stood in front of a weapon and had to decide if she was going to pick it up. It is not the first time a man has given her a choice that was not really a choice at all, dressed it in words that were meant to sound merciful but instead felt like another chain. The difference is that last time, it had not been spoken aloud. It had been there in her father’s eyes, in the gurgling noise that had slipped from his throat when the blade went in. It had been there in the way Cheryl had looked at her afterward — grateful, horrified, broken. It had been there in the silence of the courtroom, in the way the words self-defense had rung hollow in the mouths of men who had never known what it was like to fight for their own body, their own skin, their own right to exist without being devoured.

And now this man, this stranger, this potential threat, this thing she still does not trust not to turn on her the moment her back is turned, is offering her the same choice wrapped in different colors. The same breathless, waiting silence. The SAME expectation.

Meryl clenches her jaw so tight her teeth ache, breath leaving her in a slow, shaking exhale. The wind claws at her cheeks, stings at her exposed fingers, tries to work its way beneath her skin and settle there like ice. She does not shiver. Not yet. Not while the rage is still sitting in her chest like a smoldering coal, burning so HOT it makes her stomach curl in on itself.

She will not touch it. She will not give him the satisfaction of thinking that he is right. That this is the choice she would make, the weight she would take into her hands as if it had not already been pressed into them a long, long time ago, before she had learned that men always prefer the decisions to be THEIRS. He walks away as if she is meant to follow. As if this moment was only ever meant to funnel her into one path, one inevitable corridor of fate, one locked door that opens only into his silhouette, his will, his expectations. That is what this is, isn’t it? The act of walking ahead without looking back. The confidence of assumed obedience. Even when they do not grab you, they expect you to be held. Even when they do not pull, they expect you to be tethered. He is moving, and she is meant to move with him. That is what he believes. But belief is not truth, and he does not know her.

❛ You’re lucky I don’t take you up on that. ❜ The words drop between them, BRITTLE as frostbitten glass, sharp as the memory of blood beneath her fingernails. All men are monsters. Some of them just haven't shed their skin yet.

The gun remains in the snow, untouched, gleaming dully under the thin blade of moonlight. She steps over it, deliberate, measured, her body a raw wire of tension, her breath leaving in sharp, curling bursts, like a woman stepping over the body of a thing already dead. Not because she is rejecting it. Not because she is AFRAID of it. But because she does not need it. She has done more with less. If he turns, if he pivots wrong, she will unmake him with nothing but her own body. The knife of her voice, the razored edge of her bones, the muscle-memory of survival writhing beneath her skin like a second soul. He does not look back, and she does not allow herself to count her steps as she follows, not a chase, not a yielding, but a hunt. The snow consumes the sound of her movement, and the door waits ahead, pried open like a wound, dark and waiting.

The doorway is a black mouth yawning wide, a gaping cavity in the fabric of the world, and he disappears into it as if he has never known fear, as if he has never LEARNED the terror of stepping first into the dark. She does not follow immediately. The wind presses against her back, urging, whispering, and her breath knots itself somewhere beneath her ribs. Something is watching. Not him. Not the man. Something else. The woods around her are too quiet. The sky above her is a frozen thing, waiting, listening. And her father’s voice — that thing that wore his face in the labyrinth, that thing that should have died but did not, that thing she feels in her breath when she closes her eyes — is curled up in the roots of her spine, purring, waiting. The threshold is a vice, something tight against her ribs, something pressing her down, something whispering: If you step inside, you will never step back out. The dark does not let go. The dark does not forget.

She shivers.

The first sign of collapse.

It is faint, a flicker of a thing, something she barely registers because the heat of her own anger has kept it at bay. But the fire is dying now, the edges of her awareness growing thin, the REALITY of now creeping in where fear had taken root. The warmth she had forced into herself, the rage that had stitched her together, is leaving. And with it, the walls begin to close in.

The courtrooms, the holding cells, the psychiatrist's office, the small rooms where she had not been alone but felt more trapped than ever. The places where men sat across from her with hands folded over paper-thin judgments, where they looked at her and saw something to be NAMED, something to be understood, something to be dissected in the neat and clinical language of crime and consequence. The places where she was not believed. The places where she was forced to sit across from people who thought they could explain her own life to her, as if they had been there, as if they had seen his hands on her, as if they had been the ones holding the knife instead of her. It wasn’t self-defense, Miss Silverburgh. It was premeditated. As if she had planned her own suffering. As if she had spent years waiting for the moment where she could take back what had been stolen from her. And you know what? They were half right.

She knows this feeling. The feeling of being watched, being assessed, being turned into something measurable, digestible, understandable. She knows what it is to be NAMED before she can name herself. And she knows what it is to step into a room and lose the right to leave.

And now here, now THIS, a closed door, a space she cannot see the ends of, a man inside who she cannot trust to not be another lesson she will have to carve into her skin just to survive.

The cold WINS.

Her body moves before she tells it to. A step forward, then another, then she is inside, and the wind is gone, and the night is shut out, and the sound of her breathing is deafening.

She will have to close the door.

Her hands tremble as she does so, and she hates it. She locks it behind them before clenches her hands into fists at her sides, locking her jaw tight, forcing herself still. But she cannot stop the shiver. It rakes down her spine, crawls into the marrow of her bones, makes her feel small.

She is NOT small.

She keeps her distance. Does not move further in. Her back stays to the doorway, her body rigid with something FERAL, something twisted and waiting, something that knows that if she steps even a single inch further, she will not be able to run fast enough if she needs to.

Nick is ahead of her still, a shape in the dark, something she can barely make out. He is waiting. Not in the obvious way. Not in the way men do when they are trying to seem patient, to seem like they have nothing to fear. He waits like something that has already made peace with the inevitable. Like something that has accepted the outcome before it arrives. If you’re going to shoot me, aim for the head. Those had been his words. And yet, here he stands. Here he waits. Here he remains unburied, still breathing.

Meryl exhales, slow and sharp, like the release of something DANGEROUS. Her breath fogs in the cold, curling in the air between them, filling the space she refuses to let him claim.

And then she speaks.

Her voice is not soft. It is not kind. It is not GRATEFUL. It is the jagged, rusted thing inside of her, the thing she has sharpened against the bones of those who thought they could touch her and survive it. ❛ I let the gun sink into the snow. ❜ A pause. Her shoulders roll, the last remnants of cold shaking through her bones, and her mouth curls into something that is not quite a smile, just something thin and bitter and bloodless. ❛ It's better for the both of us. ❜

#⸺ ⟳ 𝗧𝗛𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗗𝗦.#𝗖𝗢𝗠𝗠𝗨𝗡𝗜𝗖𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡: Nicolas.#Nicolas & Meryl: Chapter II.#tw sa mention #tw csa mention #tw murder mention #helltownevent1 #you've awakened something in me

𝑵𝑶𝑾 𝑻𝑯𝑬𝑹𝑬'𝑺 𝑩𝑳𝑶𝑶𝑫 𝑶𝑵 𝑬𝑽𝑬𝑹𝒀𝑶𝑵𝑬'𝑺 𝑯𝑨𝑵𝑫𝑺, 𝑩𝑳𝑶𝑶𝑫 𝑶𝑵 𝑬𝑽𝑬𝑹𝒀𝑶𝑵𝑬'𝑺 𝑯𝑨𝑵𝑫𝑺, 𝑩𝑳𝑶𝑶𝑫 𝑶𝑵 𝑬𝑽𝑬𝑹𝒀𝑶𝑵𝑬'𝑺 𝑯𝑨𝑵𝑫𝑺…

Emotional Dysregulation and Flashbacks: 𝙸𝚗 𝚖𝚞𝚕𝚝𝚒𝚙𝚕𝚎 𝚜𝚎𝚜𝚜𝚒𝚘𝚗𝚜, 𝚛𝚎𝚌𝚘𝚞𝚗𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚙𝚊𝚜𝚝 𝚎𝚟𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚜 𝚑𝚊𝚜 𝚝𝚛𝚒𝚐𝚐𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚍 𝚙𝚑𝚢𝚜𝚒𝚘𝚕𝚘𝚐𝚒𝚌𝚊𝚕 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚎𝚖𝚘𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗𝚊𝚕 𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚌𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗𝚜 𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚜𝚒𝚜𝚝𝚎𝚗𝚝 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑 𝙿𝚃𝚂𝙳 𝚜𝚢𝚖𝚙𝚝𝚘𝚖𝚊𝚝𝚘𝚕𝚘𝚐𝚢. 𝚂𝚑𝚎 𝚑𝚊𝚜 𝚍𝚒𝚜𝚙𝚕𝚊𝚢𝚎𝚍 𝚞𝚗𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚝𝚛𝚘𝚕𝚕𝚎𝚍 𝚝𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚋𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚐, 𝚑𝚢𝚙𝚎𝚛𝚟𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚒𝚕𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗, 𝚊𝚗𝚍, 𝚘𝚗 𝚝𝚠𝚘 𝚘𝚌𝚌𝚊𝚜𝚒𝚘𝚗𝚜, 𝚑𝚊𝚜 𝚌𝚞𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚍 𝚒𝚗𝚝𝚘 𝚊 𝚏𝚎𝚝𝚊𝚕 𝚙𝚘𝚜𝚒𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗 𝚠𝚑𝚒𝚕𝚎 𝚐𝚛𝚒𝚙𝚙𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚘𝚠𝚗 𝚊𝚛𝚖𝚜. 𝚅𝚎𝚛𝚋𝚊𝚕𝚒𝚣𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗 𝚍𝚞𝚛𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚜𝚎 𝚎𝚙𝚒𝚜𝚘𝚍𝚎𝚜 𝚒𝚜 𝚘𝚏𝚝𝚎𝚗 𝚏𝚛𝚊𝚐𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚎𝚍, 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑 𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚝𝚎𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚜 𝚜𝚞𝚌𝚑 𝚊𝚜 “𝙸 𝚌𝚊𝚗’𝚝 𝚐𝚘 𝚋𝚊𝚌𝚔” 𝚘𝚛 “𝙸𝚝 𝚠𝚊𝚜𝚗’𝚝 𝚜𝚞𝚙𝚙𝚘𝚜𝚎𝚍 𝚝𝚘 𝚑𝚊𝚙𝚙𝚎𝚗 𝚕𝚒𝚔𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝,” 𝚜𝚞𝚐𝚐𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚒𝚗𝚝𝚛𝚞𝚜𝚒𝚟𝚎, 𝚒𝚗𝚟𝚘𝚕𝚞𝚗𝚝𝚊𝚛𝚢 𝚛𝚎𝚌𝚘𝚕𝚕𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗𝚜 𝚛𝚊𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚗 𝚊 𝚜𝚝𝚛𝚞𝚌𝚝𝚞𝚛𝚎𝚍 𝚗𝚊𝚛𝚛𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚘𝚏 𝚙𝚊𝚜𝚝 𝚎𝚟𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚜. 𝙰𝚝𝚝𝚎𝚖𝚙𝚝𝚜 𝚝𝚘 𝚍𝚒𝚜𝚌𝚞𝚜𝚜 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚜𝚎 𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚌𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗𝚜 𝚊𝚏𝚝𝚎𝚛𝚠𝚊𝚛𝚍 𝚊𝚛𝚎 𝚖𝚎𝚝 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑 𝚟𝚒𝚜𝚒𝚋𝚕𝚎 𝚍𝚒𝚜𝚝𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚜 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚊𝚟𝚘𝚒𝚍𝚊𝚗𝚌𝚎, 𝚒𝚗𝚍𝚒𝚌𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚊 𝚙𝚛𝚘𝚏𝚘𝚞𝚗𝚍 𝚎𝚖𝚘𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗𝚊𝚕 𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚐𝚎 𝚊𝚝𝚝𝚊𝚌𝚑𝚎𝚍 𝚝𝚘 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚜𝚎 𝚖𝚎𝚖𝚘𝚛𝚒𝚎𝚜.

Self-Harming Behaviors & Impulsivity: 𝙲𝙷𝙸𝙻𝙳 𝙱 𝚑𝚊𝚜 𝚊𝚍𝚖𝚒𝚝𝚝𝚎𝚍 𝚝𝚘 𝚒𝚗𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚗𝚌𝚎𝚜 𝚘𝚏 𝚜𝚎𝚕𝚏-𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚖, 𝚙𝚛𝚒𝚖𝚊𝚛𝚒𝚕𝚢 𝚝𝚑𝚛𝚘𝚞𝚐𝚑 𝚜𝚌𝚛𝚊𝚝𝚌𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚊𝚗𝚍, 𝚒𝚗 𝚊𝚝 𝚕𝚎𝚊𝚜𝚝 𝚘𝚗𝚎 𝚍𝚒𝚜𝚌𝚕𝚘𝚜𝚎𝚍 𝚒𝚗𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚗𝚌𝚎, 𝚜𝚞𝚙𝚎𝚛𝚏𝚒𝚌𝚒𝚊𝚕 𝚌𝚞𝚝𝚜 𝚖𝚊𝚍𝚎 𝚝𝚘 𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚏𝚘𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚛𝚖𝚜. 𝚆𝚑𝚎𝚗 𝚚𝚞𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗𝚎𝚍 𝚊𝚋𝚘𝚞𝚝 𝚒𝚗𝚝𝚎𝚗𝚝, 𝚜𝚑𝚎 𝚎𝚡𝚑𝚒𝚋𝚒𝚝𝚜 𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚏𝚕𝚒𝚌𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚙𝚘𝚗𝚜𝚎𝚜 — 𝚘𝚜𝚌𝚒𝚕𝚕𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚋𝚎𝚝𝚠𝚎𝚎𝚗 𝚍𝚒𝚜𝚖𝚒𝚜𝚜𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚖𝚒𝚗𝚒𝚖𝚒𝚣𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗 ( “𝙸𝚝’𝚜 𝚗𝚘𝚝 𝚊 𝚋𝚒𝚐 𝚍𝚎𝚊𝚕” ) 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚒𝚗𝚍𝚒𝚌𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗𝚜 𝚘𝚏 𝚍𝚎𝚎𝚙𝚎𝚛 𝚍𝚒𝚜𝚝𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚜 (“𝙸𝚝 𝚖𝚊𝚔𝚎𝚜 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚗𝚘𝚒𝚜𝚎 𝚒𝚗 𝚖𝚢 𝚑𝚎𝚊𝚍 𝚜𝚝𝚘𝚙”). 𝙰𝚍𝚍𝚒𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚢, 𝚜𝚑𝚎 𝚑𝚊𝚜 𝚍𝚎𝚖𝚘𝚗𝚜𝚝𝚛𝚊𝚝𝚎𝚍 𝚙𝚊𝚝𝚝𝚎𝚛𝚗𝚜 𝚘𝚏 𝚒𝚖𝚙𝚞𝚕𝚜𝚒𝚟𝚒𝚝𝚢, 𝚒𝚗𝚌𝚕𝚞𝚍𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚛𝚞𝚗𝚗𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚊𝚠𝚊𝚢 𝚏𝚛𝚘𝚖 𝚑𝚘𝚖𝚎 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚎𝚗𝚐𝚊𝚐𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚒𝚗 𝚑𝚒𝚐𝚑-𝚛𝚒𝚜𝚔 𝚋𝚎𝚑𝚊𝚟𝚒𝚘𝚛𝚜 𝚜𝚞𝚌𝚑 𝚊𝚜 𝚠𝚊𝚗𝚍𝚎𝚛𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚞𝚗𝚏𝚊𝚖𝚒𝚕𝚒𝚊𝚛 𝚊𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚜 𝚊𝚕𝚘𝚗𝚎 𝚊𝚝 𝚗𝚒𝚐𝚑𝚝. 𝚃𝚑𝚎𝚜𝚎 𝚋𝚎𝚑𝚊𝚟𝚒𝚘𝚛𝚜 𝚊𝚙𝚙𝚎𝚊𝚛 𝚝𝚘 𝚌𝚘𝚒𝚗𝚌𝚒𝚍𝚎 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑 𝚎𝚖𝚘𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗𝚊𝚕 𝚞𝚙𝚑𝚎𝚊𝚟𝚊𝚕, 𝚛𝚎𝚒𝚗𝚏𝚘𝚛𝚌𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚙𝚘𝚜𝚜𝚒𝚋𝚒𝚕𝚒𝚝𝚢 𝚘𝚏 𝚝𝚛𝚊𝚞𝚖𝚊-𝚍𝚛𝚒𝚟𝚎𝚗 𝚖𝚊𝚕𝚊𝚍𝚊𝚙𝚝𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚌𝚘𝚙𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚖𝚎𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚗𝚒𝚜𝚖𝚜.

Fragmented Memory and Disorganized Thinking: 𝙲𝙷𝙸𝙻𝙳 𝙱 𝚜𝚝𝚛𝚞𝚐𝚐𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑 𝚌𝚘𝚑𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚗𝚝 𝚛𝚎𝚌𝚘𝚕𝚕𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗 𝚘𝚏 𝚙𝚊𝚜𝚝 𝚎𝚟𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚜, 𝚘𝚏𝚝𝚎𝚗 𝚓𝚞𝚖𝚙𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚋𝚎𝚝𝚠𝚎𝚎𝚗 𝚝𝚒𝚖𝚎𝚏𝚛𝚊𝚖𝚎𝚜 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚙𝚎𝚛𝚜𝚙𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚒𝚟𝚎𝚜. 𝙰𝚝 𝚝𝚒𝚖𝚎𝚜, 𝚜𝚑𝚎 𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚝𝚛𝚊𝚍𝚒𝚌𝚝𝚜 𝚙𝚛𝚎𝚟𝚒𝚘𝚞𝚜 𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚝𝚎𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚜, 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚠𝚑𝚎𝚗 𝚙𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚜𝚎𝚍 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚌𝚕𝚊𝚛𝚒𝚝𝚢, 𝚜𝚑𝚎 𝚎𝚡𝚙𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚜𝚎𝚜 𝚏𝚛𝚞𝚜𝚝𝚛𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚏𝚞𝚜𝚒𝚘𝚗, 𝚜𝚘𝚖𝚎𝚝𝚒𝚖𝚎𝚜 𝚕𝚊𝚜𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚘𝚞𝚝 𝚟𝚎𝚛𝚋𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚢 𝚘𝚛 𝚊𝚋𝚛𝚞𝚙𝚝𝚕𝚢 𝚜𝚑𝚞𝚝𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚍𝚘𝚠𝚗. 𝚂𝚑𝚎 𝚑𝚊𝚜 𝚎𝚡𝚙𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚜𝚎𝚍 𝚞𝚗𝚌𝚎𝚛𝚝𝚊𝚒𝚗𝚝𝚢 𝚊𝚋𝚘𝚞𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚛𝚎𝚕𝚒𝚊𝚋𝚒𝚕𝚒𝚝𝚢 𝚘𝚏 𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚘𝚠𝚗 𝚖𝚎𝚖𝚘𝚛𝚒𝚎𝚜, 𝚏𝚛𝚎𝚚𝚞𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚕𝚢 𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚜𝚑𝚎 “𝚍𝚘𝚎𝚜𝚗’𝚝 𝚔𝚗𝚘𝚠 𝚠𝚑𝚊𝚝’𝚜 𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚕 𝚊𝚗𝚢𝚖𝚘𝚛𝚎.” 𝚃𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚜𝚞𝚐𝚐𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚜 𝚙𝚘𝚜𝚜𝚒𝚋𝚕𝚎 𝚖𝚎𝚖𝚘𝚛𝚢 𝚏𝚛𝚊𝚐𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗, 𝚊 𝚌𝚘𝚖𝚖𝚘𝚗 𝚜𝚢𝚖𝚙𝚝𝚘𝚖 𝚒𝚗 𝚒𝚗𝚍𝚒𝚟𝚒𝚍𝚞𝚊𝚕𝚜 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑 𝚌𝚘𝚖𝚙𝚕𝚎𝚡 𝚝𝚛𝚊𝚞𝚖𝚊, 𝚙𝚘𝚝𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚒𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚢 𝚎𝚡𝚊𝚌𝚎𝚛𝚋𝚊𝚝𝚎𝚍 𝚋𝚢 𝚍𝚒𝚜𝚜𝚘𝚌𝚒𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚌𝚘𝚙𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚖𝚎𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚗𝚒𝚜𝚖𝚜.

Subject: Meryl Silverburgh ( Child A ) Age: 17 Location: REDACTED Date: 00/00/2006 Interviewer: Dr. Evelyn Tanner Setting: REDACTED 𝙸𝚝 𝚑𝚊𝚜 𝚋𝚎𝚎𝚗 𝚗𝚎𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚢 𝚏𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚖𝚘𝚗𝚝𝚑𝚜 𝚜𝚒𝚗𝚌𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚌𝚘𝚖𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚌𝚎𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝 𝚘𝚏 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛𝚊𝚙𝚎𝚞𝚝𝚒𝚌 𝚜𝚎𝚜𝚜𝚒𝚘𝚗𝚜 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑 𝙲𝙷𝙸𝙻𝙳 𝙰, 𝙼𝚎𝚛𝚢𝚕 𝚂𝚒𝚕𝚟𝚎𝚛𝚋𝚞𝚛𝚐𝚑. 𝙾𝚟𝚎𝚛 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚌𝚘𝚞𝚛𝚜𝚎 𝚘𝚏 𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚝𝚒𝚖𝚎, 𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚎𝚗𝚐𝚊𝚐𝚎𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝 𝚑𝚊𝚜 𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚊𝚒𝚗𝚎𝚍 𝚖𝚒𝚗𝚒𝚖𝚊𝚕, 𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚊𝚏𝚏𝚎𝚌𝚝 𝚕𝚊𝚛𝚐𝚎𝚕𝚢 𝚋𝚕𝚞𝚗𝚝𝚎𝚍, 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚍𝚎𝚖𝚎𝚊𝚗𝚘𝚛 𝚙𝚎𝚛𝚜𝚒𝚜𝚝𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚕𝚢 𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚒𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚗𝚝. 𝙴𝚏𝚏𝚘𝚛𝚝𝚜 𝚝𝚘 𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚋𝚕𝚒𝚜𝚑 𝚛𝚊𝚙𝚙𝚘𝚛𝚝 𝚑𝚊𝚟𝚎 𝚋𝚎𝚎𝚗 𝚖𝚎𝚝 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑 𝚍𝚎𝚏𝚒𝚊𝚗𝚌𝚎 𝚘𝚛 𝚍𝚎𝚝𝚊𝚌𝚑𝚎𝚍 𝚒𝚗𝚍𝚒𝚏𝚏𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚗𝚌𝚎, 𝚘𝚏𝚝𝚎𝚗 𝚒𝚗 𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚛𝚔 𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚝𝚛𝚊𝚜𝚝 𝚝𝚘 𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚝𝚠𝚒𝚗, 𝙲𝚑𝚎𝚛𝚢𝚕 𝚂𝚒𝚕𝚟𝚎𝚛𝚋𝚞𝚛𝚐𝚑, 𝙲𝙷𝙸𝙻𝙳 𝙱, 𝚠𝚑𝚘 𝚙𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚜 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑 𝚙𝚛𝚘𝚗𝚘𝚞𝚗𝚌𝚎𝚍 𝚜𝚢𝚖𝚙𝚝𝚘𝚖𝚊𝚝𝚘𝚕𝚘𝚐𝚢 𝚒𝚗𝚍𝚒𝚌𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚘𝚏 𝚌𝚘𝚖𝚙𝚕𝚎𝚡 𝚝𝚛𝚊𝚞𝚖𝚊, 𝚒𝚗𝚌𝚕𝚞𝚍𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚍𝚒𝚜𝚜𝚘𝚌𝚒𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚎𝚙𝚒𝚜𝚘𝚍𝚎𝚜 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚜𝚒𝚐𝚗𝚒𝚏𝚒𝚌𝚊𝚗𝚝 𝚍𝚒𝚜𝚝𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚜 𝚍𝚞𝚛𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚛𝚎𝚌𝚘𝚞𝚗𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚘𝚏 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚒𝚛 𝚜𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚎𝚍 𝚌𝚑𝚒𝚕𝚍𝚑𝚘𝚘𝚍 𝚎𝚡𝚙𝚎𝚛𝚒𝚎𝚗𝚌𝚎𝚜. 𝙽𝚘𝚝𝚊𝚋𝚕𝚢, 𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚜𝚎𝚜𝚜𝚒𝚘𝚗 𝚖𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚍 𝚊 𝚍𝚎𝚟𝚒𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗 𝚏𝚛𝚘𝚖 𝙲𝙷𝙸𝙻𝙳 𝙰’𝚜 𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚋𝚕𝚒𝚜𝚑𝚎𝚍 𝚙𝚊𝚝𝚝𝚎𝚛𝚗 𝚘𝚏 𝚎𝚖𝚘𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗𝚊𝚕 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑𝚍𝚛𝚊𝚠𝚊𝚕. 𝚄𝚙𝚘𝚗 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗 𝚘𝚏 𝙲𝙷𝙸𝙻𝙳 𝙱’𝚜 𝚙𝚘𝚝𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚒𝚊𝚕 𝚊𝚍𝚖𝚒𝚝𝚝𝚊𝚗𝚌𝚎 𝚝𝚘 𝚊 𝚙𝚜𝚢𝚌𝚑𝚒𝚊𝚝𝚛𝚒𝚌 𝚏𝚊𝚌𝚒𝚕𝚒𝚝𝚢 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚘𝚠𝚗 𝚜𝚊𝚏𝚎𝚝𝚢, 𝙲𝙷𝙸𝙻𝙳 𝙰 𝚎𝚡𝚑𝚒𝚋𝚒𝚝𝚎𝚍 𝚊𝚗 𝚒𝚖𝚖𝚎𝚍𝚒𝚊𝚝𝚎 𝚜𝚑𝚒𝚏𝚝 𝚒𝚗 𝚍𝚎𝚖𝚎𝚊𝚗𝚘𝚛. 𝙵𝚘𝚛 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚏𝚒𝚛𝚜𝚝 𝚝𝚒𝚖𝚎, 𝚜𝚑𝚎 𝚒𝚗𝚒𝚝𝚒𝚊𝚝𝚎𝚍 𝚟𝚎𝚛𝚋𝚊𝚕 𝚎𝚗𝚐𝚊𝚐𝚎𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝, 𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚝𝚘𝚗𝚎 𝚖𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚍 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑 𝚞𝚛𝚐𝚎𝚗𝚌𝚢 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚞𝚗𝚍𝚎𝚛𝚕𝚢𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚍𝚒𝚜𝚝𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚜. 𝚃𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚌𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗 𝚜𝚞𝚐𝚐𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚜 𝚊 𝚜𝚝𝚛𝚘𝚗𝚐 𝚙𝚛𝚘𝚝𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚒𝚗𝚌𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗 𝚝𝚘𝚠𝚊𝚛𝚍𝚜 𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚜𝚒𝚋𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚐, 𝚙𝚘𝚝𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚒𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚢 𝚒𝚗𝚍𝚒𝚌𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚘𝚏 𝚊𝚗 𝚎𝚗𝚖𝚎𝚜𝚑𝚎𝚍 𝚍𝚢𝚗𝚊𝚖𝚒𝚌 𝚘𝚛 𝚍𝚎𝚎𝚙𝚕𝚢 𝚒𝚗𝚐𝚛𝚊𝚒𝚗𝚎𝚍 𝚜𝚞𝚛𝚟𝚒𝚟𝚊𝚕 𝚖𝚎𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚗𝚒𝚜𝚖𝚜 𝚜𝚑𝚊𝚙𝚎𝚍 𝚋𝚢 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚒𝚛 𝚜𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚎𝚍 𝚝𝚛𝚊𝚞𝚖𝚊 𝚑𝚒𝚜𝚝𝚘𝚛𝚢. 𝙵𝚞𝚛𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚎𝚡𝚙𝚕𝚘𝚛𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗 𝚒𝚗𝚝𝚘 𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚜𝚑𝚒𝚏𝚝 𝚒𝚗 𝚋𝚎𝚑𝚊𝚟𝚒𝚘𝚛 𝚠𝚒𝚕𝚕 𝚋𝚎 𝚗𝚎𝚌𝚎𝚜𝚜𝚊𝚛𝚢 𝚒𝚗 𝚏𝚞𝚝𝚞𝚛𝚎 𝚜𝚎𝚜𝚜𝚒𝚘𝚗𝚜. 𝙴𝚖𝚙𝚑𝚊𝚜𝚒𝚜 𝚜𝚑𝚘𝚞𝚕𝚍 𝚋𝚎 𝚙𝚕𝚊𝚌𝚎𝚍 𝚘𝚗 𝚒𝚍𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚒𝚏𝚢𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚗𝚊𝚝𝚞𝚛𝚎 𝚘𝚏 𝙲𝙷𝙸𝙻𝙳 𝙰’𝚜 𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚒𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚗𝚌𝚎 — 𝚠𝚑𝚎𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚒𝚝 𝚜𝚝𝚎𝚖𝚜 𝚏𝚛𝚘𝚖 𝚊𝚟𝚘𝚒𝚍𝚊𝚗𝚌𝚎, 𝚖𝚒𝚜𝚝𝚛𝚞𝚜𝚝, 𝚘𝚛 𝚊𝚗 𝚒𝚗𝚝𝚎𝚛𝚗𝚊𝚕𝚒𝚣𝚎𝚍 𝚗𝚎𝚎𝚍 𝚝𝚘 𝚖𝚊𝚒𝚗𝚝𝚊𝚒𝚗 𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚝𝚛𝚘𝚕. 𝙰𝚍𝚍𝚒𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚢, 𝚐𝚒𝚟𝚎𝚗 𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚊𝚝𝚝𝚊𝚌𝚑𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝 𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚙𝚘𝚗𝚜𝚎 𝚝𝚘 𝙲𝙷𝙸𝙻𝙳 𝙱’𝚜 𝚌𝚛𝚒𝚜𝚒𝚜, 𝚊𝚜𝚜𝚎𝚜𝚜𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚍𝚎𝚐𝚛𝚎𝚎 𝚘𝚏 𝚌𝚘𝚍𝚎𝚙𝚎𝚗𝚍𝚎𝚗𝚌𝚢 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚙𝚘𝚝𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚒𝚊𝚕 𝚜𝚎𝚕𝚏-𝚗𝚎𝚐𝚕𝚎𝚌𝚝 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚗 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚒𝚛 𝚜𝚒𝚋𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚍𝚢𝚗𝚊𝚖𝚒𝚌 𝚠𝚒𝚕𝚕 𝚋𝚎 𝚒𝚖𝚙𝚎𝚛𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚖𝚘𝚟𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚏𝚘𝚛𝚠𝚊𝚛𝚍. 𝚂𝚞𝚌𝚑 𝚒𝚜 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚏𝚘𝚕𝚕𝚘𝚠𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚝𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚜𝚌𝚛𝚒𝚙𝚝.

#⸺ ⟳ 𝗖𝗛𝗔𝗥𝗔𝗖𝗧𝗘𝗥 𝗦𝗧𝗨𝗗𝗬.#tw violence #tw abuse #tw murder #tw death #tw blood #tw csa #tw csa mention #tw csa implied

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Joints - Holly Miranda

#⸺ ⟳ 𝗖𝗛𝗢𝗥𝗗𝗦.

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now that suki has seen, they cannot easily look away. meryl is beautiful up close; its the most inappropriate realization that suki has ever had, possibly. it lies next to the realization that she would have liked to drive an axe or a knife into her father when she was younger, and it stays there - sticking her right in the throat - as her eyes trek the expanse of meryl’s face in the diner.

it feels inappropriate to notice, something sickly like desire slides down the expanse of her spine but they shake it off because now is not the time to wax poetic about a girl whose grieving. (still, if suki were to wax poetic about someone, they thought that the most likey candidate would be this woman in front of them. and not because of her sorrow or her grief, but because she looked at suki as if she really saw them, every little piece left to unpack waiting at her feet. suki found themselves breathless not for the reaction or the piercing gaze dissecting them, but because they had found themselves a new altar to worship.)

they found themselves in the steadiness of her gaze, waiting there, and yearned to be touched. not for the sake of touch, but for the life affirmation of it. suki wasn’t sure they existed on this plane anymore, but wherever meryl was, wherever meryl could be, that’s where suki wanted to be; talking about ice cream and helping in whatever way they could. it is the strangest thing to look at someone and think these things upon the first meeting of eyes, but suki is used to stranger things; like creatures who look like her dead father and the faintest shadows following her around in the cabin. suki is used to bordering up all the windows in her mind, keeping people out, but she thinks that maybe someone who doesn’t bite back - much, at least - when suki makes an attempt to apologize for their luck, maybe someone who keeps talking about ice cream with them, is worthy enough to see all the secrets left inside.

“i think i remember the first time i ever had cherry vanilla.”

the words stick in her throat, much like the memory, but a glance up from the bacon sandwich laying cold on the counter to meryl’s eyes steels suki with a new resolve; this, they could do. “i was a kid, probably 6 or so. i remember it vaguely; the sticky sweetness of the ice cream, the maraschino cherries in the mix. they were vivid red, like…” like blood, they didn’t say. “I remember my grandmother being there; she used to give me treats when i stayed over at her house; she died a year later. i wasn’t allowed to go to her funeral, but i remember her all the same. she was nice to me.”

they want to apologize for bringing up cheryl - they don’t. they want to press forward and pull meryl into their arms - they don’t. they do wince, and sigh, trying for a smile.

“rocky road sometimes has too many almonds in it,” they say, stubborn, and then relent, all sugar and sweetness; all molasses for the woman in front of them. “but it’s my favorite too. coincidentally, i don’t remember when the first time i had it was.” and wasn’t that just the way of things?

daught3rs

𝗠𝗘𝗥𝗬𝗟 𝗗𝗜𝗗 𝗡𝗢𝗧 𝗠𝗢𝗩𝗘. The diner’s air sat thick and still, pressing down on her, pooling in the hollow between her collarbones, slipping into the spaces where breath should be. The weight of it is different than grief, but not by much. It carries the same quiet violence, the same bone-deep knowing that things have shifted beneath her feet and would never realign. The hum of the lights above, the low murmur of someone talking at the counter, the scrape of a fork against a plate — mundane sounds, sounds that belong to people who did not live in the shadow of the things she has seen. But they felt distant, unimportant. The only thing tethering her to the moment, to the here and now, was the WEIGHT of this beautiful stranger's gaze.

It is not intrusive, not devouring — not the way some people stared at a WRECK just to see what had been lost — but it is steady, unwavering, and Meryl isn’t sure she has the strength to hold it.

She had spent her whole life perfecting the art of being unreadable. A locked door, a curtained window, something people looked at and then away from, assuming there was nothing beneath the surface worth pressing for. But the blonde is pressing, even if they did not realize it. Not with words. Not even with intent. Just with the way they stayed. The way they sat with the silence between them like it wasn’t uncomfortable, like they expected it to be there. Like they were willing to wait.

Her fingers flexed against the tabletop as has become her new habit, the tension a silent thing, the only betrayal of the storm still moving inside her. It had been over three weeks since she’d arrived in Arcadia. Over three weeks since the night her sister was taken. Over three weeks since she had last stood beneath a sky she RECOGNIZED, since she had felt like a person that belonged to a world that followed rules she understood. She has survived so many nights in this strange, suffocating place, survived in a way that felt cruel, survived in a way that did not make sense because Cheryl had not, and every morning she woke up with the reminder of that fact pressed like a knife to the base of her throat.

She had tried not to count the days.

But her body knows.

Her body remembered.

And the worst part — the absolutely devastation of it all — is that she can STILL feel Cheryl’s presence somewhere, like a breath on the back of her neck, like a whisper at the edge of a dream, like a voice calling from the bottom of a deep, dark well that she could never reach. There were nights she awoke to the sound of footsteps pacing just outside her door, rhythmic, unhurried. Cheryl had always been restless, always moving, always there. And now she wasn’t. And yet, she was. Meryl had learned to ignore it. Had learned to keep her eyes shut, to keep her breath even, to let the shadows stay shadows and not reach for her, not listen too closely. Because she knew what happened when you listened in Arcadia. She knew what happened when you believed.

But she had always believed in Cheryl.

And that was the part that was KILLING her.

Meryl had survived things most people would have collapsed beneath. She had walked through fire and come out the other side, her skin charred but intact, her bones cracked but whole. She had survived a childhood carved by sharp edges, by the quiet and the loud of a man who had worn the word father like a mask, who had built his love out of cruelty and called it teaching, who had taken and taken and taken until she had learned to live with emptiness like it was something sacred. She had lived through his silence, his violence, his hands and his absence, his words and mouth that slithered beneath her skin like maggots until she had to peel herself open to get them out. He had cut pieces from her, had made her something angry, something ferocious, something murderous. But he had never taken Cheryl away from her. This town had.

Arcadia had.

It has stolen the only thing she had left, the one thing she had fought to protect, the one person who had kept her ANCHORED, that had kept her Meryl and not just a collection of wounds stitched into the shape of a person. Her father had hurt her, had built her into something cold, something untrusting, something that could not be touched without flinching, but in the end he hadn't won. He had never erased her. She had gotten away. She had left his body behind in his rotting house, with his rotting mind, with his rot, his rot, his rot — but Arcadia has reached into her chest, has taken what even he had not managed to destroy.

Cheryl.

Cheryl, the who had been hers before she had been her own.

Cheryl, who had been the first voice Meryl had ever known, who had been her first home, her first witness, the only thing in this world that had belonged to her without question. Cheryl, who had been GNAWED out from the inside, emptied, hollowed, left behind like something used up, discarded, as if she had never mattered, in that fucking clinic.

Meryl had thought she knew what pain was.

She had been wrong.

Because grief is not a bruise, not a wound, not something you carry like a scar to show the world you had survived. It's a thing with teeth. It burrows. It consumes. It had already been INSIDE her the first time their father showed who he truly was, and even more palpable since the night Cheryl whispered her last breath, since the moment Meryl had heard her, felt her, and had been too slow, too weak, too human to stop what had come for her. It had settled in the hollows of her ribs, in the spaces between her vertebrae, in the marrow of her bones, whispering, whispering, whispering —

She should be here. She should be here. She should be here.

Her father had thought he made her into something small, she thought for the longest time he didn't. Until Arcadia had finished the job.

And now she was nothing but the space Cheryl had left behind.

She could feel the stranger's eyes on her, searching, still waiting, but she said NOTHING. Couldn't say a thing.

Because how did you explain this?

How did you tell someone that you had already survived one monster, only to be devoured whole by something much worse? How did you say, I lived through hell, but I did not escape it, because hell simply changed its shape?

She exhales, slow, CONTROLLED, letting the weight of it press through her ribs, letting the taste of it settle against the back of her teeth like something bitter.

❛ I don’t remember the first time I had Rocky Road, ❜ It's said as if it were a sudden EPIPHANY, voice soft, but still an offering, not much, but something. ❛ But Cheryl loved it, too. ❜

It's the SAFEST way she can say her sister’s name aloud, to let it exist between them without breaking apart at the seams.

The words are quiet.

Half a lie.

But it is the only thing she has to give.

She does not say that some nights, she swore she could hear Cheryl’s voice threading through the walls of her boat like a radio frequency only she is tuned into.

She does not say that she has stopped looking into mirrors longer than a glance because sometimes — just sometimes — there is another face behind hers, something too familiar, something with Cheryl’s eyes but wrong, wrong, wrong.

She does not say that the smell of almonds makes her stomach turn now, not because of the grief, but because she swore something in this place reeked of it, something watching her from the corners of the town, something waiting.

Instead, she only looks at the other person, meets their gaze and holds it, though it feels like the HARDEST thing she has done in years.

#⸺ ⟳ 𝗧𝗛𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗗𝗦.#𝗖𝗢𝗠𝗠𝗨𝗡𝗜𝗖𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡: Suki.#Suki & Meryl: Chapter I.#tw csa mention #tw csa implied #tw murder mention #tw death #tw abuse mention

dailyoliviacooke

OLIVIA COOKE for Variety's Power Women of Hollywood 2024 (October 2024)

#⸺ ⟳ 𝗘𝗙𝗙𝗜𝗚𝗬.

𝑺𝑼𝑺𝑪𝑰𝑷𝑬𝑹𝑬 𝑬𝑻 𝑭𝑰𝑵𝑰𝑹𝑬.

Arriving at THE CHURCH ⟳ ˚ ╱ written for @endlesswoes !

𝗧𝗛𝗘𝗥𝗘 𝗜𝗦 𝗔 𝗣𝗢𝗘𝗧𝗥𝗬 𝗢𝗙 𝗔 𝗦𝗢𝗥𝗧 𝗧𝗢 𝗔𝗟𝗟 𝗘𝗡𝗗𝗜𝗡𝗚𝗦, the dichotomy of life and death belonging in the same body, the concept that all things must END and then become new. But for most, the lyrical nature of it stops at the concept. For most, the cyclical nature is apparent only to those who can encounter the aftermath of it ( whether that be the reaper itself or those proposing a eulogy, memorializing the departed with an insight only afforded when looking backward ). Meryl thinks she's died a million little deaths, yet the torment this town has brought upon her seems worse than the former life lived.

The second night swarms into her veins like ink in water, curling, diffusing, staining, just as the first night. The dreams had begun the night prior, creeping into her mind like a parasite, whispering riddles and promises of torment. The first time, she had shaken it off, convincing herself it was nothing more than the echoes of exhaustion, the strain of Arcadia masticating at her nerves. But now, the weight of the dream still claws at her ribs, curling, diffusing, staining all the same. It did not slip from her upon waking; it clung, webbed and whispering, a living thing burrowed into her marrow. The bruise where Cheryl had struck her pulsed like an open eye, dark as an eclipse, as if it too is watching, waiting. The words from the dream scuttles through her skull like spiders weaving WEBS in the hollows of her bones: the ice will claw... The morning staggers before her, a fever haze of twisted air, the town outside her window silent in a way that felt unnatural, predatory. No beasts. No howls. Only a brittle, waiting hush, thick as stagnant breath against glass.

A flicker. A smear of movement in the periphery, a presence slides just behind her sightline. Meryl has seen ghosts before — has lived in their company long before Arcadia swallowed her whole. The specters of her father and brother had LINGERED at the edges of her sight since the day she had killed them, shadows caught in the turning of her head, echoes warping the quiet ( they would stand just beyond reach, in doorways where no one stood, at the foot of your bed, watching with eyes that saw past flesh and into marrow; they had never spoken, never reached for you, never clawed their way into the space you occupied; they were there but distant, half-formed figments of grief, specters born of the past, shackled to your mind's quiet agony — until Arcadia ). But Cheryl — Cheryl has never been here. Never once. Until now. The mirror. No. Not the mirror. She refuses to look, refuses to acknowledge the weight pressing against her spine, the too-cold fingers of recognition creeping up her ribs. But the gravity of the thing in the glass is a force that demands surrender. Her eyes dragged against her will, and —

Cheryl.

Meryl’s breath snaps, caught between throat and ribs, trapped in the tight hollow of her chest. Her twin stands behind the silvered surface, abnormal, her face blurred at the edges, features slipping like oil on water. Not still, but seething, moving at the periphery, shifting through reflections fractured by something unseen. The mirror bled, the edges no longer defining the boundary between real and not. Cheryl reaches out. Frostbite. Her fingers graze Meryl’s skin through the glass, and the cold is a living thing, a hunger burrowing deep into the bone. The riddle. Again. Again. AGAIN.

Meryl fled.

She does not remember to put on her coat. Does not remember stepping into the streets, the fog swallowing her whole, pressing into her pores like damp rot. The town bends around her, streets twisting inward, narrowing, guiding her somewhere unseen. Cheryl follows — no, not in form, but in PRESENCE, always just beyond reach, a whisper of breath at her nape, a tension in the marrow. Arcadia pulses with something unseen, something coiled beneath its surface, waiting to slip its fingers through the cracks of reality. Was she running, or was she merely circling a place she had never left? The church rose before her, its door ajar, dark and waiting. A mouth parted in expectation. No thought, only instinct, only the urgent, desperate need to be elsewhere. She stumbles inside, breath clotted with the thick scent of wax and aged wood, the hush within pressing against her skin like a second presence.

The stained-glass windows fractured the light, and in their broken spectrum — Cheryl. Always Cheryl. Her face contorts in the colored panes, fragmented into something almost DIVINE, something otherworldly varnished. Seven nights. Meryl’s vision wavers, body swaying under the weight of unreality. Was she still alive? Had she ever been? Or was she merely spiraling some fevered dream, a body half-decayed in a bed elsewhere, trapped in an eternity of unraveling?

Meryl feels the convulsions come, cruel and sudden, as if strings have been snapped and her body no longer belongs to her. A violent arc, her spine bending, limbs seizing with an unseen force, her muscles wrenching against her own control. Her fingers curled into claws against air, scraping at the unseen, her breath a choking rattle in the cavern of her throat. Something slithers beneath her skin, illicit, tightening like wire COILED through flesh, a alien thing burrowed into her essence. Her head snaps back, mouth open in a silent cry, her eyes rolling, whites stark and gleaming against the dim candlelight. It is inside her, creeping through her veins, whispering in a voice that was her own but not. The world blurred, edges distorting, collapsing into themselves.

A shadow moved in the periphery. A warmth at her side. A presence, pressing gentle hands against the violence of her body’s betrayal. The pastor? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But it did not matter — her mind is a sieve spilling into the darkness. Cheryl’s voice tangles through her thoughts, a whisper threading itself through every synapse, burrowing deep, deeper. I grow until the day I die. You’ve seen me once, if you don’t see me now you won’t survive. The church was spinning. The walls were bending. The floor tilted, and Meryl plunged, ENGORGED by the yawning chasm of something ancient and unfeeling, as if the world had cracked open beneath her and spilled its secrets in a spiral of suffocating black. The darkness does not simply consume; it coils around her like a serpent, whispering in tongues long buried, a chorus of echoes that gnawed at the edges of her sanity. She is falling, not through space, but through something deeper, something bottomless, an abyss stitched from the frayed remnants of forgotten things. Shadows wrap around her, thick and suffocating, pulling her downward in a spiral of weightless descent, her mind unraveling thread by thread into the abyss.

#⸺ ⟳ 𝗧𝗛𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗗𝗦.#𝗖𝗢𝗠𝗠𝗨𝗡𝗜𝗖𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡: Leandro.#Leandro & Meryl: Chapter I.#tw horror #tw body horror #tw murder mention #helltownevent2

missusmags

I am the face of love's rage I am the face of love's rage

#⸺ ⟳ 𝗖𝗛𝗔𝗥𝗔𝗖𝗧𝗘𝗥 𝗦𝗧𝗨𝗗𝗬.#katy is evil

𝑺𝑼𝑵 𝑩𝑳𝑬𝑨𝑪𝑯𝑬𝑫 𝑭𝑳𝑰𝑬𝑺.

Arriving at THE CLINIC ⟳ ˚ ╱ written for @solidgrovnd !

𝗦𝗢𝗠𝗘 𝗪𝗢𝗨𝗡𝗗𝗦 𝗗𝗢𝗡’𝗧 𝗖𝗟𝗢𝗧. Some wounds bled slow, unseen, like ink seeping into fabric, spreading until it STAINS everything. Others never stopped aching, even after the flesh had knitted back together, even after time had done its best to erase the moment of impact.

Shaw is there when the light of the sun was bright enough to press against Meryl’s skin, thick as coagulated blood, when the weight of what had happened had not yet settled but swelled, a grotesque, UNHOLY thing, pulsing in the cavity of her chest like a second heart made of ruin. The clinic’s lights hummed overhead, cold, flickering, casting elongated shadows that slithered in the periphery, shifting like they knew. The air is stiff with the stench of antiseptic, but it could not mask what lay beneath, what had soaked into the walls, into the fibers of her clothing, into the raw, gasping spaces between each breath. Something had ripped through this world, ripped through Cheryl, had hollowed her out with no reverence, no regard for the sanctity of the body, the self, the soul. Meryl could still feel the wet heat of Cheryl’s blood cooling on her skin, even though her hands had been scrubbed raw, even though Shaw had placed a towel between them, as if that flimsy partition could sever what had already fused, as if there is a way to separate her from the terror of what she has touched, of what she had, in the aftermath, held.

But the body was still there.

It lay upon the cot, covered but not fully, draped in a sheet so thin it may as well have been translucent, as if whoever had done it could not bear to commit to the illusion of dignity. The air around it is thick, unmoving, as if time had stopped around Cheryl’s remains, as if the space where her body lay has become something unnatural, something wrong. Meryl can't look. She knew what waited beneath that sheet. It had seared itself into her mind the moment the thing had finished. The body had been Cheryl, but it is no longer Cheryl. It's a vessel, a thing scooped out, EMPTIED with monstrous savagery, its insides ravaged, its existence reduced to a paper-thin husk, brittle, sagging inward as if whatever had filled it — whatever had made her older sister her — had been devoured whole. The skin had collapsed against itself, pulled taut over vacant cavities where lungs should have risen and fallen, where a heart should have pulsed, where blood should have still flowed, slow in death but still present. But Cheryl had been mutilated. Meryl had seen it happen, had watched as her sister opened the window, had watched as her lips parted, trembling, forming that word — Mama? — before the thing outside answered. Before it descended. Before it ate.

There had been no blood. Only the gaping, cavernous proof that something had fed upon her.

Meryl could not move. She could not move. She could feel her pulse hammering against her ribs, erratic, disjointed, trying to tell her that she was alive, that she was still here, as she's always done but she does not feel alive. She feels like something has already begun UNRAVELING inside her, something has already started pulling, the same way it had pulled Cheryl from the inside out. Her breath comes in sharp, shallow stabs, a forced thing, something her body did out of muscle memory rather than necessity. The world had turned dim at the edges, vignetted, like she was looking at it from the bottom of some deep, dark well, some place where the light could not quite reach. It's an aching pain she thought she had escaped years ago.

Shaw had not spoken, had not moved beyond the periphery of Meryl’s awareness, but she could feel them. They are not like the others, not like the nurse who had fumbled to pull the sheet over Cheryl’s remains, whose hands had trembled, whose eyes had refused to linger. Shaw stood like a fixture, like a WITNESS, like someone who had seen things that did not belong in the realm of the explainable and had accepted them as part of the natural order. And yet, there is something in the tightness of their jaw, in the barely perceptible shift of weight between their feet, in the way they exhaled through their nose, measured, deliberate, like they were containing something.

Meryl’s gaze flickers toward Cheryl’s body, just for a second, just for the smallest sliver of a moment, and oh, God, the sheet has slipped lower.

Not enough to reveal anything fully, but enough. Enough for the suggestion of it, for the HORROR to crawl into her throat and settle there, thick and unmoving. Cheryl’s hand, small and delicate in a way she has always covertly hated, in a way that made her look younger than she was, now peeking from beneath the fabric, waxen and wrong. The skin looks too tight, stretched over the bones, as if the body itself had begun to shrink around its own absence. The fingers, still bearing the remnants of her nervous habit they shared, nails bitten to the quick, now looked as if they belonged to something dried, something long since emptied, something left to decay in the quiet hush of a forgotten room. Meryl’s stomach lurches.

Her hands tighten against the table, gripping the metal so hard it sends a shudder through her arms, trying to tether herself, trying to keep from moving, from standing, from going to her. Because she knows — she knows — that if she reaches out, if she lets herself get close enough to touch Cheryl, to press her fingers to that cold, slackened hand, the truth would SOLIDIFY into something unbearable.

Her sister is gone.

You're all alone, now...

And Meryl doesn't know which is worse.

#⸺ ⟳ 𝗧𝗛𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗗𝗦.#𝗖𝗢𝗠𝗠𝗨𝗡𝗜𝗖𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡: Shaw.#Shaw & Meryl: Chapter I.#tw body horror #tw death #tw horror

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