old muses, new fingers - noisy ghost
“So. You’re hosting my murderer now?”
Rissa flinches. It hasn’t gotten easier. It will get easier. It’s barely been three weeks. It will get easier. It has to. She’s sitting on the floor in the corner of an empty room. Stripped of everything, furniture, pictures, clothes, curtains, blank and empty and bare. Knees drawn up to her chest. Today had been good, better at least than most lately, she was just going to check the room and go to bed, it was nearing five in the morning, it was—
—There would be no sleep for Rissa today.
Christa Morgan leans against what used to be her bedroom wall, arms crossed, half-covering the gaping hole where her heart should be. She’s spattered in Aksel’s blood, there’s a knife held loosely in one hand, resting against her shoulder. This is an image that doesn’t exist. Rissa knows that. But—
“I guess it isn’t the first time,” the imagined ghost whispers “although I’m glad we’ve taken a step down from drooling over the men who ruined my life to just befriending them.”
Christa never blamed her.
Rissa did all that well enough herself.
“It’s over now.” She says quietly, and the thing that isn't Christa laughs.
“Over? No, no, I don’t think so. You can burn all my things, paint over my existence, but you can’t rip the memories out, Riss.”
“I could.” She wouldn’t ever. Even considering it feels like a betrayal. Who are you when you’ve forgotten everything? Who do you become with the foundation wiped away? Rissa would have burnt the whole house down if it hadn’t been so goddamn expensive. Would have torn the walls apart and shredded her fingers raw on carpet nails trying to rid herself of it all.
It would be nice to live a lie.
Take all the rotten shit out and start over.
Would she be wary of the blank spaces?
Would she wonder where those years went?
“Nothing you do makes up for this, you know.” Nothing makes up for befriending the Walters. Nothing makes up for not believing Christa when her mother was killed. Nothing makes up for all the blood. Nothing brings her back. “You left my ashes down there with his fucking gore for days.”
Another laugh, cold and wrong, something Rissa had heard before but never in her direction. At Jonathan. At Nikki. At idiots who came knocking. “I only blamed you,” Christa says, she never said, would never say “but I knew you were too fragile to hear it. You were my best friend, and you let me down every time it mattered. But I was always there when you needed me. I would have burned down the world for you.”
“I never asked you to!” Rissa is snapping at empty air. “I told you over and over to just leave, to live, and you never listened.” Still her fault that Christa stayed. Kept fighting until Jonathan found them again. Forever her fault. Never strong willed enough to stand up to the person trying to goddamn hard to save her.
“Riss,” soft. Barely a whisper. The vision now bloodless and whole. Sixteen. Younger than she had looked in over a decade. Still bitter with loss. Still newly running on spite and rage. “I promised you I would never leave you to this alone.”
There is no hand on Rissa’s face.
There is no feeling there.
There is nobody in this room with her.