TW: blood, violence, mild body horror imagery.
WORD COUNT: 862.
TL;DR cricket was dancing/goofing off by the fire when they got ambushed. she took part in the fight, but got knocked unconscious near the end of it. she awakens to recall the scene of events that led her here; knuckles bloodied and flesh aching beneath her skin, absolutely set on going after the people who thought it was wise to hurt her. (oh, and on rescuing the others too.)
— everyone was at war
with what it meant to be alive. that’s why we refused to be banished,
and why when they set us on fire, there was light at our core.
TERRANCE HAYES.
the wasteland is in flames.
the camp’s bonfire is dying out, but the horizon burns with a damned, bloody red. this is not a celebration; this is a war zone.
mind drifting unconscious, cricket dreams that she has been eaten alive.
bone for bone, muscle for muscle. there is nothing of her left, save for the smell of flowers left under cool rain to rot. she floats, feeling as though she had left her limbs in a pretty coffin for a pretty girl, and instead she is a graveyard nymph; a flower-girl for death, dangling pretty and foolish and dead in the trees.
she can feel a ghost in her chest, but she is the one haunting this body. its legs are her legs, its claws her hands, its teeth her own. she feels its muscles tense and coil in her back, raising bumps along her spine. she is a horrid, hideous thing, bleeding ichor and poison; the ghost gnaws at the viscera and marrow of her.
alas, it is just a dream - the reality is far less pleasant.
cricket’s head is pounding. dull at first, beginning as a gentle prickling, as though millions of invisible, glass needles are digging into her skin, piercing vein, muscle, sinew, nerve.
she slowly becomes conscious as the sensation escalates with every pale, reviving sense, until is is a mounting wave of blistering agony, poised to fall. and it does; this swell of torture falls the instant she opens her bruised and bloodshot eyes.
(she is dancing barefoot by the fire when they come. in seconds, her hands are firm on her crossbow, knuckles white as she tries to fend off the attackers. government officials; she stands atop a tree stump firing bolt after bolt, arrow after arrow, until something knocks her on the back of her head and she falls. the world grows quiet around her.)
the campfire has been reduced to ash, black and dusty, scattered and coughed up from inside her lungs. she cannot remember much, but she can remember bits of pieces. flashes of horror, of fighting, of tooth and nail, of blood and blood and blood.
their camp is cast into chaos: their sanctuary has become a battlefield. where minutes ago there had been joviality, now there is only fire and fear. she is knocked out for no more than a handful of moments toward the end of the devastatingly quick fight, but in that time, the officials clear out; the group is beaten and battered; the five are taken; the fire dies.
she feels as though she is being cleaved from darkness and shadow; her shivering body - once knitted from the skirts of the moon, dusted with the constellations trembling through the sky - is empty. inside her, a grave. she feels it rolling in her stomach when she sleeps, hears the whine of its hinges throw open as she wakes and refuses to stay down.
cricket reaches over in the space around her for something solid, something to wrap her restless, angered fingers around. she finds a body in the darkness, a corpse or an unconscious form, she can’t tell; still like a felled oak, solid and cold and unmoving.
she curves her spine and pushes off the plane of the person’s chest, spitting out a mouthful of blood on the ground; as though it could get rid of the dark tendrils wrapping tight around her mind, as though it could remind her that she was both alive and breathing, as though it would make her think she was still unbreakable.
(she is not. she is not the wolf she has built herself to be; not the witch she’s grown into. she is but a lost, wandering little red, her cape thrown to the fire and her braids coming undone and ragged against the soil, and here, the ground will devour her.)
she trembles as she stands, knees buckling beneath her, eyes trying to focus on the scene before her.
within minutes, she hears the story: of the few who had been
snatched up by the officials, taken back to the cages inside.
cricket has not been with the group long; she barely knows the faces of the names who were taken. she should run, now, from this cursed group, because she should be afraid of the consequences to come.
she should be afraid, perhaps: ambushed at camp, a celebration having morphed into battle, haplessly caught on one side of a war with the tyrannical sectors. but she is cricket, and the forest swells with the rise and fall of her ribs: the velvet of a crow’s wing brushes across the flesh of her lung, its lithe little body flitting in her throat, pressing the throb of its chest against her pulse.
she should be afraid, but instead, her skin starts to buzz like live electricity, angered at the injustice of the attack - angered at the audacity of it. she bites her lip, splitting open a wound, her dark eyes hot with spirit.
how dare they attack her?
how dare they. how dare they!
(about time i had some fun, anyway, she thinks, wiping the blood from her lip; she stands firm in her vote to go after what has been taken from them.)
the wasteland cries around her; but she is the forest, and she is not afraid.
He knew there were voicemails to be listened to, knew with greater clarity who they were from. It wasn't a matter of ignorance as it was insecurity--there were, after all, ten thousand emotions that swarmed him since the very first voicemail, swirling and infuriated like hornets ready to sting.
Confusing, overwhelming emotions that folded over themselves and each other until none of them made even a lick of sense--fear, surprise, the mad dash of his hopes sky-rocketing through the ceiling, the subsequent instinct to cut them down to save himself from injury. There was the need to protect himself and yet the desire to expose every vulnerable part of him just for the chance to maybe experience even a fraction of what he wished for the most: to feel like he was someone's again.
All over the course of several grueling days, but it's only now that Junichi swallows the hard rocks in his throat and concedes defeat against his own will. Sometimes it was better not to know, but he decides this may not be one of those times. The least he can do is pay respect to he who spent the time to gift him his voice, even if--and this was one of Junichi's fears--it was just to inquire about the weather. So it's with several deep breaths and his nails practically digging into his knees that Junichi allows the voicemails to pour, starting from the earliest.
It’s 3:56 in the morning! ...I was thinking about Kyoto... Lots of places to visit–restaurants, onsen, temples, that kind of thing... It might get really cold, but that’s why we’ll be going together. So we can hold hands or something.
Junichi resists the urge to draw tight into himself and never unfurl, jaw gritting as the familiar voice washes him with so many conflicting feelings at once that he thinks he may burst. To think of such contact once again, even hypothetically, brings forth so many memories of longing then satisfaction, a sharp wound to consider seeing as how only the former is ever present nowadays. Barely recovered is he from the impact of sunny, tired laughter when the second begins to play, and he reluctantly lets out the breath he didn't know he was holding in a rush of shaky anxiety.
It’s me again! ...We have to make plans now, you know? While it’s early... Okada-kun’s so weak to mountains... Think about it, okay? Kyoto, I mean... Ah, and before I forget–thanks for the coffee earlier! ...You always did make the best coffee, didn’t you, Okada-kun? It’s nice to know some things never change.
'Some things never change.' Oh, how Junichi wishes it were so, and the very pain of that particular sentiment causes him to make a weak, brief noise in his throat--crumpled and knotted up with all the hard-hitting waves crashing against his heart. He wishes he wasn't so doubtful, so hesitant, but there's a reason these simple voicemails--probably of little to no weight to everyone else--are affecting him as deeply as they are now: it had been a very long while since he last had them. The weight of what that means is crushing. All this as the third and fourth waft up.
...relax tomorrow... You’re an amazing boy. Try not to be so anxious! You only have good things to contribute, after all... take care of yourself until I get to see you again.
Good job this weekend! Really... I know it must’ve been difficult... but you pulled it off! ...You were great, is what I called to say. That’s all. But... Thank you for dealing with me, too.
To hear the little praises tugs the strings of Junichi’s heart a million ways at once, until he’s beginning to slump into himself, arms drawing closer to his chest. The pride and severe, honest happiness he hears in that timbre says so much more than the syllables themselves, filling him over and over to the brim with all manners of thoughts--relief, yearning, emptiness, loneliness, gratitude. For someone to say they were worrying for him, thinking of him, thanking him for being there when Junichi was the one with appreciation etched into his bones... it brings the muddled tenderness of his heart almost to a breaking point. Until it breaches it altogether.
Two voi'sh… v-voicemails in a day! ... y'know, th’… wha'happened earlier? ... You were... warman'small... My Jun-chan...
Every fiber in Junichi’s body freezes, his ears pricking immediately. Even through the intoxicated, slurring inflections, he understands what is being said. How he feels is beyond comprehension.
But that’s–y'ain’t no more... I f'cked up sssssssh'o bad...
“Oh, God,” Junichi murmurs faintly to himself, his own words small and wrung. Even if the speaker likely has a swimming vision and an even more unsteady train of thought, Junichi knows him enough to understand that these words are not of a dishonest state of mind. In fact, to think that they could only be brought out from under the fortification of inebriation means so much more than he’d think it would.
I m-miss... miss takin’ care of you smiling with you laughing with you being with you... m'sorry... so sorry... don’t giffup'n me please--
Junichi truly does curl into himself now, arms hugging his middle as his head drops down inches away from his knees. He feels devastatingly like a boy again, a boy struggling not to cry, a boy with the crawling tightness drawing up his chest--a boy with a thousand pains and no one to soothe them again. He hadn’t known. He hadn’t known, but now that he does, he wonders if that’s any better. He had hurt someone, someone so dear to him who he had kept at arm’s length for how long. Someone invaluable and priceless and matchless, someone who he never even got to tell--
Junichiiiiiiiii…
“I love you,” murmured and shaky, watery and small in the vastness of his lonely, silent apartment.
