Sleep came rarely and never easy these days. She could never remember the nightmares, the same way she couldn’t really remember the details of hell- it was confusing, to feel as though you’d spent years in a place but the remember it only as an agonizing blur. She could put her finger on certain things, Mercy’s laughter, the initial agony of burns and the way they never stop aching. The one of her neck was starting to yellow on the edges and peel, healing slowly, while the bone in her arms was almost mended. Her face was healed perfectly though, only a scar of Lucifer’s mark remaining, it was a stark contrast to the rest of her.
She looked strangely peaceful for a time, laying on the picnic table on her back, with her arms folded behind her head, scarf bundled beside her to giver her rats a place to sleep. Her breath came in hitched bursts, ribs still healing, but exhaustion seemed to have taken it’s toll.
The sterile smell. Yelling. Needles and long white coats. Sutures and incisions.
Hunter laughing, the smell of popcorn. “Where are we?” Lola felt herself ask him, but he never stopped laughing long enough to answer.
Red. Red. The wings are sewn into her back Mercy healed her left her hanging on hooks. Everything is red when the demoness pulls one plastic, comical wing out of the broken girls’ back and bones break and snap and Lola can’t stop screaming.
In the sudden cold she hadn’t been able to move. Everything was numb, pale, empty. A hand held hers but she didn’t feel it. Caleb’s voice floated through the fog, “Lola get up we have to go. Lola look at me.” And she didn’t want to.
Fenris standing in the trees, the cold more tolerable here, and Lola knows through the fragments of dream that she’s still trying to make sense of everything. The lycanthus tries to tell her about gods but she can’t believe them, can’t see them, doesn’t want any part of them. He tells her he sees kindness in her still. She stares at him, she opens her mouth to ask how, why, to ask anything, but her body moves and she can’t control it- she is commanded again, she grabs the pipe and slams it across his jaw so hard his knees buckle. She brings it down again and again, the same way she killed Duardo, unto his smiling face is unrecognizable.
She wakes up to her own screaming, begging ‘stop stop stop’ but no one knows, everyone thinks Lola is begging Mercy, no one knows she is begging herself. She clamped a hand over her mouth as she jarred awake, already sitting up before the world came into clarity. She looked around quickly, panicked, and then grabbed the scarf full of rats, held them carefully in her arms as she tripped over her own feet, still shaking, disappearing into the trees.