Nostalgia is the tacky residue of memory, the clot that aches to be picked at. Mercy is not invisible in these memories, but only the thinnest shadow less than that when she takes off her slippers and carries them with her through these halls so very much like so many other halls, this story so very much like so many other stories. She can be subtle when she cares to be.
The files on their fellow creature give her pause, lingering on them from where she adheres to the ceiling on sticky strands of tendon. Do they understand, these cuckoo children, the whole of what they read? The base horror of it, prosaic as it is, of course - but the rendering of a body to an object before it dies is something she has found children only grasp at the outside edges.
That is still enough to crush the ebullient young thing to a bruised, curled up husk of himself, his easy, idiot smiles fled. He wastes away. He turns from life, then lashes out to cut at it, and she watches, and she does nothing, because there is nothing to be done.
(He told her that he understood the risks he undertook, the things he might be subject to. Here is his understanding, a blade in his hand, inward and outward.)
The ticket. The woman who wants him to live more than she wants herself to; the woman who wants them all to live, so terribly, so devotedly, that it sets her alight, a candle flame through a door that closes forever over it.
They break away.
Mercy's breath is very hot in her mouth. Her body quakes and tightens around her as she encloses herself in her arms, suspended away from the boys who wail and wilt, and she is locked in herself with the thing that never runs away from her, that lives where she lives, and as safety claims them, and the memory ends, she finds herself on the floor without knowing how she came to be there, hunched over the slim volume with wetness on her face.
There is no one to needle her from it, to strike her hard across the face or to clasp her hard inside their arms, or to laugh too loud and bright with fingers carded into her hair, tugging at their roots, brittle nails in her scalp until it bled, and Mercy shoves herself blindly at her own knees like a huddled, sick animal, trembling in silence.
cw: unethical experimentation, death, attempted suicide, attempted murder, panic attacks
The files on their fellow creature give her pause, lingering on them from where she adheres to the ceiling on sticky strands of tendon. Do they understand, these cuckoo children, the whole of what they read? The base horror of it, prosaic as it is, of course - but the rendering of a body to an object before it dies is something she has found children only grasp at the outside edges.
That is still enough to crush the ebullient young thing to a bruised, curled up husk of himself, his easy, idiot smiles fled. He wastes away. He turns from life, then lashes out to cut at it, and she watches, and she does nothing, because there is nothing to be done.
(He told her that he understood the risks he undertook, the things he might be subject to. Here is his understanding, a blade in his hand, inward and outward.)
The ticket. The woman who wants him to live more than she wants herself to; the woman who wants them all to live, so terribly, so devotedly, that it sets her alight, a candle flame through a door that closes forever over it.
They break away.
Mercy's breath is very hot in her mouth. Her body quakes and tightens around her as she encloses herself in her arms, suspended away from the boys who wail and wilt, and she is locked in herself with the thing that never runs away from her, that lives where she lives, and as safety claims them, and the memory ends, she finds herself on the floor without knowing how she came to be there, hunched over the slim volume with wetness on her face.
There is no one to needle her from it, to strike her hard across the face or to clasp her hard inside their arms, or to laugh too loud and bright with fingers carded into her hair, tugging at their roots, brittle nails in her scalp until it bled, and Mercy shoves herself blindly at her own knees like a huddled, sick animal, trembling in silence.