Build A Fantasy, Take This Reality Away From Me {Self Para}
She had begun to lose count of the days she had spent alone, waiting for the Reaper to pay her his daily visit, to rake her skin raw, to brand her, to torture her, to wrap his hands around her throat and laugh in the moments following. She forgot what it felt like to see the sun, and as the Angel of Death, had never thought much about it before it was ripped from her cold and cruel hands. If she had been human, she would have relinquished her faith in God, but she was not. She had known him once, in another life many lifetimes ago. She knew that he existed, and that was perhaps the worst part of all-- to know that he had all but given up on her. If he had not, how could he allow such a thing to happen, such cruelty. How could he even allow the Reaper to escape? Had he truly forsaken them or was it just her debt to pay? Had she lost herself, as Cole had said at the memorial? Had she wound up so far from God that she was irredeemable? Was the Reaper a harbinger from their Heavenly father himself? Then again, the way things had been, maybe she would never know.
Closing her eyes, she gave one last tug on the reinforced steel cuffs wrapped around her wrists, but after being starved and beaten, her yanks were more like weak pulls. They held her chained to the same chair she had woken up in. She hadn’t moved since. Her head felt like shit, and most of all, she was angry. She wanted to blame everyone and everything, sink her fangs into the first red blooded neck she could, and then into the Reaper himself.
“Ah, ah--” came a chiding voice from inside her head that she had come to know so well. “Thinking thoughts like that will only anger me. I do not think either you or Abbadon really wants that.”
“Shut up,” she hissed back mentally, though even the voice inside her head felt weak, like a disattached voice box of a girl who vaguely resembled Laney McLeod. Then again, she hardly resembled anything of herself after what he had done to her.
The room around her was dark, grimy. The scent of rotting flesh found its way to her nose, though she knew it was from the preserved eyeballs in the jars lining the shelf pushed against the far wall. As she had come to learn, the Reaper liked to keep the eyes he had taken the careful effort to carve out himself. It was a bit tacky for her taste, but utterly grotesque all the same. Some said the eyes were the windows to the soul. He had not so subtly suggested that by stealing them, he was preserving their souls, trapping them in a state of limbo as the Blue Bloods had done to him. “Bitterness doesn’t suit you, babycake,” she had remarked when he told her. Of course his speculations held no truth, but she wasn’t about to tell him. “Let him keep his damn eyeballs for all I care,” she thought. “What does it matter to me?” Her own thoughts felt drugged, and as the scratching in her throat began to scrape at her sensitive flesh, she closed her eyes.
“One moment... one moment of rest,” she murmured to herself.
“Eloise, are you listening? It is of critical important that you attend this luncheon. It is for ladies who intend on sending aid to the confederacy, and not to forget that it is necessity that you display your patriotism for the South, lest the townspeople think you are a Yankee sympathizer.”
Tilting her head high, she narrowed her gaze into cool slits. “I shall not be ordered by anyone to do any such thing that poses an inconvenience. I have promised a possible suitor my long and lonesome day so he may attempt to court me. Though we both know I refuse to marry, again, to keep up appearances will only benefit us and our community that we’ve built here.”
Shifting her gaze to Ellen, her mousy and irritating conduit, if Eloise had not the need for such luxury, she would have been happy attending to matters herself... but it was in good fashion to show appreciation for the Red Bloods that swore their lives to your service, and if there was an extra hand to help tighten her corset, who was she to turn it away? It was the height of the Civil War, in 1863, and most of the men had gone away to war. Those who remained were craftsman or too elderly to serve. That was her reality.
“Why must you lead this poor boy on? You already have all ... the forms of sustenance that you need in the house,” Ellen said quietly, leaning into her while referencing Eloise’s carriage man and butler. The two young women were having a picnic under her plantation’s willow tree, but there were servants and slaves milling about. They had not the privacy to take such liberty with their identities. Casting a disdainful look at Ellen, Eloise stood abruptly, hands fiddling with the bow tied around her waist. Why were all of her conduits such disappointments? Since Renata and Rome, she hadn’t had another that pleased her nearly half as much nor understood what she needed at any given time.
“I’m terribly worried for my brother so, it will do me good to get my mind off of other things,” she smiled, hissing her words through gritted teeth. She could tell the women washing the laundry in the river next to where she and Ellen sat were listening closely, scrambling for the least bit of gossip they could get in a time of disappointment and death. “During a time of war, it is best to find distractions, no?” she asked, tilting her head in silent challenge. She muffled a cry of surprise when Ellen grabbed her wrist and rose beside her, her eyebrows furrowing in anger.
“Do not treat humans as your playthings, Eloise. They are people, with lives and families.”
“You do not realize how easily I can make your life very difficult. You do not tell me what to do, yes? I can take your job amongst other things. I do not think you want to get on my bad side,” she snarled, leaning her face close to the smaller girl. Eloise was larger in both reputation and stature, and her conduit shriveled beneath the harshness of her gaze.
As she was about to slap the girl out of pure rage, a familiar voice rang behind her.
“Now that’s no way to greet your dearest brother. I much prefer your face to your back, though the stitching of your corset is finely woven and threaded.” She could almost hear his wink before she turned to see his face. Immediately, her face brightened and Ellen’s indolence fell from her mind.
Dropping the parasol she held tightly in her hand, her feet carried her running straight to her brother. Jumping into his awaiting arms, tears of joy fell in waves down her face. Wrapping her arms around his neck, the idea that she should ever let him go again seemed like an impossibility she could not even begin to fathom. Though the two had caused a stir in the setting of the plantation, after a stone hard look around at those who had paused their day’s work, all productivity resumed. Kissing his cheek as any sister would a brother, he swung her in a large circle, the bottom of her dress blooming like a flower.
When he set her down, she leaned in close to his ear, the scruff of his face unfamiliar to her soft cheek. “Don’t you ever leave me again,” she whispered. Everything about him seemed different, but he was still the same Abbadon and the same man he left. Though his arms were thicker and he bulkier, he had the same eyes... the same twinkling blues that laughed when hers cried.
“War may be my mistress, but you are my one love. I will come back to you.”
“You must. I expect nothing but.”
“Those Yanks didn’t know what hit them,” he said with his usual lopsided grin. Weaving her arm through his, she waited for him to pick up his luggage before heading into the house. “Ah, how much I have missed home...”
Laney awoke to the sound of metal being sharpened, the serrated edge of a blade scraping while sparks flew from it. Staring at the Reaper in the corner as he set to work with his preferred method of pain for the day, she spat to alert him that she was indeed, awake. If he was going to torture her, she would bear the burden of the pain. She would not cave, would not give him what she knew that he wanted: the gratification derived from her suffering. When he walked behind her wordlessly, she expected the sharpness of a blade against her skin, she expected to feel her own blood floating over the top of her skin, she expected-- and that was where her error lay.
Because when he pressed a burning poker into her shoulder blade, she couldn’t help but let out a despairing moan, lips pressing down on her teeth as she attempted to keep from crying out. She could feel the skin peeling under it, the gash opening where he had roughly stabbed her with the burning metal. Before she could even describe what it truly felt like, he jammed the poker again into the same wound he created just moments before... and he kept doing so, again and again and again, until she cried out for him to stop... but he wouldn’t. The burning just kept coming and coming and soon it felt like he was prodding her everywhere, rather than isolating one place for repeated torture. The places in her back where he had already broken skin through, he shoved the poker even deeper inside of her, until she felt it hit bone. Every time he did this, it gave the rest of her body a moment to heal... to cover the burns that encapsulated her entire back, but the Reaper knew this, and carefully kept his torture evenly spaced on her skin. Bone, flesh, bone, flesh. She had never known such pain-- though she was unsure what hurt more... the separation of her twin and the possibility that she may never see him again, or the physical pain that filled every single of her five senses with an inescapable brokenness.
She wasn’t sure how long it had been or how long it would continue, but all she knew was that her screams had been reduced to nothing more than shallow pants before she fell unconscious with the pain of the burning coal pressed into her memory and her skin.
