act three, scene one.
sneak peak at that one monologue i have dreaded writing for years... i'm kinda happy where i ended up but just in case i'm saving the whole thing for beta readers
Ophelia sits with a book on her lap, open to a chapter heading, her hair in a loose braid looped over her shoulder. The curtains are all thrown open. The sun bathes the room in light, a harsh and cold white glow. Her door is slightly ajar. She looks up from her book only briefly. A quick flick of her eyes that Hamlet almost misses in the light of the day.
They do not say anything. The need to say something begins crawling under Hamlet’s skin. There is so much unacknowledged. An unknown force possesses her to speak.
“To live or not to live—that is the question I am asking myself. All these hours I wander the halls, the same question. The same argument. Am I a better woman to suffer it? To suffer the life we all live? Fate has cast her eyes upon me and there is only one way to escape her gaze. She stalks me in the forest with the eyes of a deer. To die, to sleep—it ends, then: the fate I am bound to. To die, to sleep…”
Hamlet stops. She drags her hands over her face, makes a sound that is between a sigh and a sob. Ophelia looks down in her lap. She hasn’t turned a single page.
project : calla lilies.
word count : 362.
prompt : from @wordsforyourwip : finite, trundle, rail, dose
taglist : n/a. let me know if you’d like to be added!
I did a project on the Lost Colony when I was in elementary school, and so I know that, and I know Sienna knows it because she stood asking me question after question for well over ten minutes - all the way up until her mama had to drag her away. At the time, she frustrated me, an unknown entity who was surely just trying to bring me to the brink of failure. For years all I wanted was to give her a dose of the hell that she put me through, convinced it was purposeful. Now, I’m not so sure.
“So it is,” she replies, level toned, and continues, “But there are ghosts spread through all sectors of the country, I’m sure. It’s only a matter of time before some of them start to go off the rails.” And she says this in such a matter of fact way, as if we are not discussing something impossible, as if ghosts existing and feeling and attacking is not such a strange idea.
“You believe in ghosts?”
We roll to a slow and steady stop at one of the few stoplights in town, and when I take the chance to look over at her this time, she is looking back.
Sienna Bradley has a spattering of scars across her face, a walking homage to the accident that took her parents. And nobody talks about it, of course - or they don’t talk about it where they think she can hear them. But even I have heard the whispers, good hearing revealing laments about the poor orphan girl and questions on how she survived and sordid murmurs wondering if she had anything to do with it. She must have heard them too, passed around the county for months, making a home out of trundle beds and borrowed blankets. Yet she always came to school with a smile on her face, and they would make fun of her. We would make fun of her.
It wasn’t my best moment.
“The chance of their existence may be small, but it is finite. We can’t rule anything out, Calla. Coming from your family, I thought you would know that.”
“Oh no. Oh no no no.”, Yekarov whispered more to himself than to the girl. He turned to check if Strov was still sleeping before he motioned for her to put her things on the table in front of her.
When she had, he went to the back of the sofa, wrapped one arm around her waist to pick her up, and hurried out of the room.
“Mitrik!”
He turned a corner, went down a set of stairs and up a ladder, only to turn another corner.
“Mitrik!”, he called again, and this time, there was panic in his voice. He was not anyone’s guardian. He’d never been and he would never be. He was a demon. Demons were not guardians.
“Mitrik!”
Turns out, carrying around a child that had the bubbliest expression on her face while he did his best to sound and walk like the menace he was, was not as easy as he’d assumed prior to having this situation.
And that his right hand man wasn’t responding to his calls really wasn’t helping.
Putting the kid down, he motioned at her to stand still. Placing both his hands on her ears to make sure she wouldn't startle, he took a deep breath and closed his eyes.
“MITRIK SEVEREON HEBESK, report at once!!”
Several floors above, a loud thud echoed down to the floor he was on and soon, harsh, trampling steps followed. The ship seemed to tremble and shake from the sheer hurry that was put into these steps and even if it wasn’t the steps but the riled up ocean, Yekarov liked to think that either of them was scared enough to physically express it.
That’s why he was a demon and would gladly stay one; he thrived when others lost their composure.
Tag list: @yayo-shinyua @eater-of-hopes-and-dreams @ultimatecryptid @a-traitor-king
~~
Shera’s outstretched hands knocked against something smooth and hard. She scrabbled for purchase, searching blindly for a door, a window, anything -
Hands grabbed her arms and pulled her forward. Something slammed behind her and the sounds of storm turned muffled.
“Hello?” she called tentatively when the grip on her arm did not subside. She kept her shield up, peering into the darkness for her apparent savior. “Who’s there?”
A bare lightbulb flickered on, illuminating the room in weak yellow light. She’d been wrong, it wasn’t a warehouse - it looked more like a shack than anything, with a ratty mattress in one corner and a messy kitchen in the other. A shack, or a safehouse.
Two humans stood before her. The taller one, face tanned and weathered with a ruby-red headscarf patterned with gold flames wrapped around their head, stepped away from the light switch to step around Shera, probably to check the door.
The second, a short, pale woman covered in swirling black tattoos, didn’t loosen her grip on Shera’s arm. Shera tried to pull away, she was stronger than most humans (well, most humans who weren’t d’ehb), but the woman held fast. “Who are you?” she demanded. “How did you get in here?”
“What are you talking about?” Shera snapped, clenching her hands into fists. “I was lost in the storm, I thought I saw shelter -”
“Oh!” The woman’s dark eyes widened - they almost looked like they were glowing, with the way they caught the light. “You’re a Sakerian.”
Shera tensed. The magical shield was a dead giveaway, but. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The woman snorted. “Don’t be modest,” she chided, releasing Shera’s arm. “It’s fine. Come on, let’s get all that dust out of your system. Sedar, show her to the bathroom, would you please?”
The squiggles on the document swim in front of my eyes. It’s been hours, and I can’t make sense of a single word on this paper. It shouldn’t be this hard, but for some goddamned reason, it is. Pavel can, Katya can, Anja can - it’s so easy for them. There are trifling things like roadsigns and menus, and then there are important things, such as this paper.Â
Instead of tearing the document into scraps like I want, I grab the cup sitting on the table and hurl it at the wall. It shatters into a million pieces, spraying glass everywhere. For a moment, all I can hear is my heartbeat thudding in my ears over the silence.Â
Then the bed creaks a little, and then soft footsteps pad towards me. A pair of gentle hands begin to rub my shoulders in just the right places, loosening some of the knots. I groan a little, rubbing my eyes, trying to quell the headache that I can feel coming on.Â
“Sascha.” Pavel’s voice is soft, soothing, a prayer under his breath. He leans over my shoulder a little, eyes on the paper. “You don’t need to do this. Let me -”Â
“No,” I snap. I want to pull away from him, to push him away, but his hands on my shoulders feel just a little too good. “I can do this. I don’t need your help for anything.”Â
Pavel sighs as I bend over the paper again. His hands move away from my shoulders, into my hair instead. He begins to comb through it, fingers moving deftly.Â
“Your hair’s gotten so long,” he murmurs, changing the subject.Â
I shrug one shoulder. Now that he’s mentioned it… “I haven’t had the time to get it cut,” I mutter. His hands feel as good in my hair as they did on my shoulders, but I’m trying not to think of that. Â
“It looks good,” he says quietly, gathering it all at the nape of my neck and then letting it fall loose again. “So did short hair, though. You look - you look good no matter how you wear your hair.”
“I don’t care.” I smooth the worn paper down against the table, frustration causing my hands to shake. I clench them into fists and hold them there for a moment. When I finally release them, my hands are still. It’s not quite true, and I know he knows it. He knows the time I spend on my hair, on my clothes, on making sure I look like I’m supposed to. Like a revolutionary is supposed to.Â
“What are you doing?” I ask, still not looking away from the damned paper.Â
“Braiding your hair,” he answers after a moment. “I thought you might like it out of your face. Also, you - look good with your hair tied back.”Â
I snort, but I don’t stop him. “Pavel, you say the stupidest things sometimes.” Still, I can’t say I don’t enjoy the feeling of his fingers carding through my hair.
Sagittarius interrupted him with a kiss. It was so brief that for a second, Theo wasn’t sure at all what had happened - all he felt was the feeling of Sagittarius’ lips pulling back away from his. His heart flipped, and his breath caught. Theo blinked and looked back at Sagittarius, speechless. His expression didn’t betray anything. Everything was there. For the first time in a long time, Theo felt his cheeks warm. He let his eyes fall shut, and dipped his head.
“I’m still... I can’t- you don’t know how much it hurt, when you left.”
“I didn’t know that it would at all,” Sagittarius said quietly. “You keep your cards quite close to your chest.”
Theo opened his mouth to reply. He froze. His mind raced for a moment about everything Sagittarius had just said without saying any of it at all. That voice in his head, the one that always said no, and it’s not like this, was suddenly disquieted.Â
“Of course you wouldn’t know,” Theo said, the words coming out in a breath of laughter. “I always thought you could always see right through me.”Â
“It’s not that I didn’t have my hunches,” Sagittarius said softly, “but even immortals have their doubts.”
“What did you doubt?” Theo asked, before he had the time to stop himself. Sagittarius’ expression fell for a second, and he looked very suddenly put on the spot. He met Theo’s eyes and paused just long enough for Theo to think that perhaps he was nervous, but when he spoke, it was with conviction.Â
Gabriel sat in an office alone watching the minutes tick by. He had been in many offices in his day, from the Principal’s office the one time he beat up a kid who was bullying a nine-year-old Sophia. Though, she ended up having it covered so they both spent the day there. To doctors and dentists offices growing up, to the grief counselors and therapists after Dad, to the counselors and therapists after he changed, he still hadn’t had a word a for it yet.Â
Whatever the case, he had been in a lot of offices. But none of them this cold, this lifeless, no pictures of family members, it was almost disturbingly clean. No papers, nothing in the trash cans. It was quiet all except for the ticking of the clock. Until finally she walked in, the sound of her kitten heels squeaking quietly against the floor. It was what always notified him that she was coming.
THE CHILDREN FLICKER, FLICKER, AND FOR A MOMENT SHE THINKS SHE CAN SEE HER TOOTHY SMILE OR THE GLARE OF HIS GLASSES. THEN THEY'RE GONE, AND SHE IS ALONE WITH NOTHING BUT ASH.
