kittybeisel:
date: 17 november 2178 location: level alpha, cells time: 3:21 a.m. availability: @ervtreia
The cycle goes a lot like this: family lost, enemy found. Enemy lost, family found.
And repeat.
Kit had always been a social creature, a bee taking flight from pretty flower to pretty flower, giving himself to whatever entertained or drew his attention in that moment. Isolation had never been his favorite companion–much as he had spent the past years enjoying the sound his his own voice in the air, it just wasn’t the same where there was no voice to play with his, no wit to match his (or at least try). Even when he sought his own thoughts, when he wanted to bury himself in his own head and just think he did so better aloud, with someone at his side. Kit had walked away from his family when he was still only a boy, already more ready to take on the darkness of his parents would than they would ever be. He had lost a family, and found enemies left and right. Rising in the ranks of Wrotham’s dark criminal underbelly, young Kit Beisel had made more people angry than he had made happy, but he chose his allies carefully and padded all the right pockets until he’d contented himself to let enemy and family mean the same thing for the time being.
Then–he found Conejita. All of his enemies were left behind, and he was flying. The next phase of the cycle didn’t come until later, when Eretreia had waltzed into his home and given him his first kind of partner in life, given him someone worthy of bing called family.
If only it had stayed that way. If only he had been anyone other than so completely himself.
Family lost, enemy found.
And the cycle goes.
When he’s transferred to a new cell on Alpha Level, woken in the dead of night from a fitful sleep on a hard floor, he’s at an odd stage of the cycle. Somehow, along the way, being at the center of an explosion with the crew of the Concord had made Kit start to remember them all like his family. It should have gone family lost, enemy found. By all accounts of his past, if he were to understand anything about how his life had gone thus far, he should have walked into his new cell and looked out through the glass door and seen someone he’d nearly killed ten years ago. He had spent all of the last nights alone, the days with electrical nodes stuck to his temples and pain a friendlier companion than the prison guards that took him to and from his cell–there wasn’t a positive bone left in his tired body. He expected to look out and see an enemy, someone that would bring an end to the pain he’d been feeling nonstop for the last weeks.
Instead he sees her.
Instead he sees family.
The cycle had always been the same way between the two of them, a cycling between kinship and the kind of unadulterated anger that can only come when you truly, incandescently know and understand someone for exactly who they are. Maybe this was one of the moments where he was supposed to find an enemy, where he was supposed to see across the darkness and see it mirrored in her gaze, but Kit was blind to all of it.
In that moment, he’s blind to anything but Eretreia.
So he sees her, and with tears in his eyes, there’s nothing he can do but smile.
The story goes something like this: family found.
There was once a question said from a mother’s embrace. “Where does it hurt, nena?” holding on to a little girl with tears forming in her eyes, a scrape on her knee bleeding through the dirt and the sand. Eretreia was five and she fought back the tears until the moment her mother held on to her and caressed her hair, slender, warm hands caressing her sun-burnt skin, placing kisses on top of her head. Where does it hurt?
The yellow of her suit was beginning to change colours, a shade she couldn’t quite describe, the once clean fabric now stained with sweat and blood, smearing it out of recognition. Her hair, previously gathered in a ponytail, fell off, clinging to her forehead, covering her face. The nights were no indication of safety; if anything, the darkness was harder to bear, like a fur cloak weighing her down against the filth on the floor, the stiff and humid concrete where she lied. Eretreia knew, whenever she was close to shutting her eyes and falling asleep, another one of her ghosts would appear, constant visitations without invitations, haunting her, keeping her awake. She was never afraid of the dark, could even welcome it when needed, until now; now, it crawled under her skin into her veins, making her tremble.
They want to break you. A voice whispered in the back of her mind, starting to become harder and harder to hear. Fight them, Eretreia. Fight them. And that was the voice of everyone she ever loved, the mother holding her, tending to her bruises and the father, kissing the top of her head, reading to her. For the first time, she didn’t listen to the voices; instead, Eretreia, broken and bruised, dry blood clinging to the side of her head and new scars adorning her back, gave in to the floor, and it welcomed her, no longer feeling as hard, no longer smelling like piss and pain and fear. That is, until a loud sound transported her back to reality.
Body turned to the glass door, she saw the two guards and the new inmate, the one supposed to occupy the cell across from her, where the last prisoner had mysteriously disappeared only a few days ago. And when he turned, and she saw him, the few remnants of sleep that clung to her eyes disappeared with a jolt on her back, bringing her up to her feet, hand against cold glass, blinking twice before the guards left him there, and disappeared.
It couldn’t be, was her first thought. It wasn’t, was her second. Eretreia closed her eyes and counted to ten, biting the inside of her cheek, turning her gaping hand into a fist, knuckles turning white from holding on too strongly. But when she opened her eyes again, the figure was still there, across from her, caged in the same way. “You’re here.” She finally let out in a whisper so low she thought it lost between the screams and the deafening sound of silence.
Standing, barely, legs shaking from the pain and the fear, she looked at him, taking every single one of his features, searching for the crease in the brow and the smug smile on his face, searching for that missing something that would tell her that no, he wasn’t here: this Kit was but another one of her ghosts, sitting cosily on the curve of her rib, ready to disappear like ash, returned to the darkness of nothingness.
Instead, what she saw glittering in the darkness almost blinded her. Tears, running down his face. She couldn’t help the laughter that started to form in the pit of her stomach, the rumbling of a scream lodged at the bottom of her throat, sore and dry. “No.” She said, simply, a scoff to her tone. No, Kit doesn’t cry. No, Kit doesn’t cry for me.
She loved him, once. Like a dark night sky where the stars don’t reach, a small, weak spot began to shine, a star ready to combust into a supernova -- and it would, and Eretreia would never say so, and then it would crash and burn and die, returning to its usual darkness. And, just like before, she would admit that she loved him, still. Like a lost lover and returned friend, she loved him just as much as the reminding of his betrayal burned her. He burned her.
Eretreia finally turned her back to the ghost, let her back fall against the glass and let the weakness of her knees finally give him, bringing her down, eyes closed because she knew if she opened them, she would be blinded by tears.
Where does it hurt? Everywhere, everywhere.
