Content Warning:
Attempted Suicide (Heavily Implied)
Darkness holds me a gentle babe, body swaddled in its peerless veil so far from any who would wish to hurt me. Tight and safe, almost total, but through its tender clutches breaks a nagging call, repeating:
"Deeper. Deeper. Let go. Sink."
In the soft, murmuring whispers of the murky drowning place my mouth yawns open, letting in a rush of dank lukewarm water, though no bubbles rise from within. No breath cycles through my body; still. Weightless. Dropping. Sinking.
"Deeper."
Tendrils abound, touching, passing, reaching up from what can only be down, here. Inky branches weaving a basket to carry my oh so sweetly home. Sinking. Heavy. My arms, once dexterous, still reel from years of overwork and repay my debt in a punishment so enduring and fierce that even now I fear I only paid the interest. Sinking. Heavy. My leg, lone twin, has burdened so long alone, and isn't that pain enough? Deeper. The rest of me fares little better. Tired, lonely, broken down and in debt. Take me. Please. There isn't a question, but I accept for all little I'm worth.
"Let go."
I accept. Please take me.
"Sink. Deeper. Let go."
I. Accept.
"Let go."
A beat. I writhe as a single pulse of blood rushes through my system, bringing the world alight in a wall of pain and phantom urges. Limbs twist. Nerves burn. I see the red that stains deep into my soul, and bleeds down. Electric. Screaming. Every feeling simultaneously. I feel the light prying. Movement. Electric. Colors.
Where am I?
Colors. Movement.
My arms twinge, the pain returns full force and I scream out bubbles.
Electric. Red.
My leg beats against the dredge tide, kicking tendrils, stretching, tearing.
Eyes. Color. Red.
It is prying into my mind. It is sneaking in.
The light.
The Light.
Red.
Electric.
Darkness.
My eyes fly open and I reach about myself, grabbing, finding purchase on both sides before I even start to register the room around me. I'm wet. I grab at myself. Naked too. I'm not sure why I'm so wet and so naked but-
Eugh-ack…
I cough, keeling over as water bursts from my gut thick with phlegm and bile. After a good minute of gasping I manage to to stem the tide, but I'm left sitting in it as it pools around my feet. Feet. Mess. Porcelain. Metal. A bathtub.
God. Where am I?
I move to stand, but a huge metal lug masquerading as one of my legs weighs me down. I'm hungry. Starving. It's making me so weak I can barely move. Better yet, the rest of my senses are finally coming awake. A splash. The taste of yellow. I sniff and smell burning with a welcoming undertone of puke that elicits a gag. Too much at once. I need to think. Quick. Before I spend the next 30 minutes emptying my internals into this stinking tub.
I look down closer at the hunk of metal. Metal. Metal. I tense my brow, trying to squeeze a single thought out of my exhausted brain. I scan the intricate mass of pistons, wires, and bulky plastic that's stuck attached to me. Spent and useless. Burnt. Wires. Useless.
Shit.
My leg. My bionic prosthetic. I spent so much on this fucking thing and it's fried. God. I punch at it.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
My fist stings and pain rockets up my arm, through my shoulder, and jolts the rest of my body into a cringe. I shake my hand in the air as the subsequent sudden numbness breaks to pins and needles. Stupid. Why did I do that?
My brain takes a moment to find my other arm, sending it patting down the sides of the leg for some sort of detaching mechanism that I have a feeling must be there. A zap stings through a loose wire. Then another. My right hand aches. I still smell burning.
Click.
I close my eyes as the cold air of the room touches the tender flesh once trapped between machine and man. It's wildly strange the feeling, but it's such a feeling, and such a feeling that isn't pain. God. I revel in it.
I let out a long exhale as time stops on what must be a hilarious sight. A naked man in a tub, leg half hanging off, eyes closed, leaning over the side of a tiny porcelain bathtub. Wet. Time unfreezes as my hands slip. Metal catches. Clunk. Floor. Cold, hard, wonderful floor.
The landing is hard, no arms ready to catch me as my whole body —sans a metal leg— tumbles out of the tub and onto the floor of the bathroom. It's ceramic, tiled quite professionally, with cute little black spiral details you'd never see if your face wasn't rubbing into them. Curvy and free against the geometric pattern of the tiles themselves. Expensive. Artful. Again, Where am I?
A bathroom.
Pushing up, I finally take the time to survey the room. A modern affair, with pristine tiles and walls, all built around the centerpiece of the porcelain bath sized for one. Two opposite walls are lined top to bottom with mirrors, trapping anyone relaxing in the tub between the endless replication of their own reflection. Fuck it does my head in. Not the reflecting, but that thing. There. The figure laying there. Shaking and coughing and shambling.
Me. Prone on the floor.
I wretch and cough but I have nothing left to choke up. I'm dizzy, shaking, everything blurs, stuck struggling to think as I crawl a direction that isn't to there. My skin scrapes against the tiles. Abrasive, so you don't slip. I reach the wall and feel along it until I grab something polished smooth, carved, short enough to prop myself up. I feel drawer handles. Cool to the touch, my naked body leans over, screaming with the sensation. My vision clears and I see the familiar shape of a vanity.
Fucking mirrors.
At least this one has a nice chat with a weighty right hook.
I lean there panting, forcing my head straight as to not look at the mirrors, much less see myself stuck in them. I can’t handle it. Not all at once. Calm. Calm. Breathe. Breathe.
I turn my gaze up.
A bloodshot eye peers through a slit of glass. Gentle brown iris, triplicate on a crack, they all blink. My face is numb, half numb, down a notch, half a lip half-frowns, inflated and blue-red. I must be bleeding, I've painted a path on the floor. Fell harder than I thought. Still not all together.
I raise my right hand to the shard, and it's bloody. Not the left though, of course. I write with that one, though what good I've done keeping it to just that over the years. Old scars set in, though the right has set in blood. Dry. I injured it some hours ago.
I drop the shard and move my hand to my skull, running it across and over my cheeks, mouth, eyelids, ears. Everything, reminding it that its there, and me that I have it. I switch hands as the left tires from propping me up against the vanity. I remember. The body remembers. Left hand, left drawer. A neat stack of clothes.
Atop them a gun.
Old sort. Safety off.
I stare at it and it stares back at me. Jeering. Familiarity, holding it in my hands. I lift it. Light. It feels right in my left hand. The dainty, deeply scarred left hand. It would be so easy to lift it to the mirror and-
Click.
Empty. I drop it onto the vanity.
God, I'm so very naked right now. Cold, wet, smelling of puke and smoke. If anything, clothes would do me good. Better than a naked man marveling at a gun. His own gun, even. A madman.
I put on the clothes. The shirt is fine, but the pants are a clumsy ordeal as the twisting forces me to face the infinite wave of reflections. I see it all, once a frail mess, now a madman wildly fighting himself. He completes himself with a leather jacket.
The madman calms and I see him straighten. He picks up the gun from the vanity and stows it in a pocket, where I feel it bump into a phone. He lets it settle in place before turning, hopping and catching himself on the bathtub. I see the leg still sitting there sparking from the main socket that connected it to my leg. My eyes dwell on it as the madman continues, hopping towards the door out of the bathroom. He leaves it all behind so easily.A single button press and the door slides open. Hurried movement. Varnished wood. Wallpaper. A violet hue breaking a window. I see the hand of the madman grasping a tall bed bannister as he catches his breath, eyes locked with mine and another on the bed. Lying there, a man resting with a bullet in his skull, blood pooling down in a flower of red and scarlet. At least he is calm. Calm, in deep sleep.
I pause. The gun in my pocket has nerves of its own, tingling ghost impulses I'm not too fair to ignore. I touch it to calm it down and fall to the ground, no longer anchored on the weighty bed frame. The impact is better than the last. Red silk trails on the floor. Dust. Carpet. Violet streaks from the window. Strange comfort.
I am naked again, bathed in violet, crawling towards the window. A door of windows. A balcony.
The carpet is warm. It burns as I crawl.
I lift myself up by the door handle and push, falling down onto flat black stone bathed in violet. I rise once more with he metal railing of the balcony. Deep breaths.
I look down upon a violet city. Buzzing, whirring flashing lights chasing the screaming wake of a holoRail track. It weaves round and through neon towers each desperately shooting into the dark night sky, where in return, that horrid sky reflects a solemn and perfect blackness down to greet all wayward wary dreamers. Wind blows against me, echoing down, and competing with the roar of the holoRail amongst the cacophony of sounds that ebb and flow into the environment like waves against a sheer cliffside. Precipitous. So much activity, blurring into a monotonous neon glow. There’s so many people carting about, even now. Down there.
Where am I?
I feel faint.
I catch myself falling to the left. A vibration in my pocket. The tingling, ghastly impetus, forcing my right arm to steel and the left to reach in, bat past the gun, and raise the phone in front of me.
How did I get here?
My whole face stares blank for a moment before being overtaken by the monotonous neon glow.
A: Ae212 069395 F35 X
The light fades.
I leave the balcony.
I need a new leg.