Master Apprentice
Archive
Stoicheia 15: Bromine
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Silence, humming menacing silence, light coming from nowhere and utterly failing to illuminate the end of this room, this hall, indefinite metallic coolness in the air, and the taste of blood lingering like a remembered pain, never quite palpable but oppressive nevertheless. Silence dripped from the hazy corroded machinery, pooling on the uneven floors, once-shiny metal blinded by years of dust and the acrid air, liquid silence soaking into the echoes and reducing them to eerie wisps of hallucinated sound.
All of this made no impression whatsoever on the feet, feet rushing across the uneven stained floors in stepless haste, hardly there enough to leave footprints in the dust. The feet were Jinn's, and he was moving too fast for description, the sweat from his brow disappearing in blurs, and even his hot sour breath refusing to dissolve into the dank metallic air. It stayed behind in indecisive clouds.
Where he was running to, he did not know, but one thought ruled his mind with burning clarity: to exterminate _it_, to undo, to banish it forever from memory, this agonising throb of memory. Forever the same image: the startled face, the piercing red glow, the sound of breath leaving his body where it shouldn't, and silence. Forever, again and again, his memory played him that same loop, forever closer the face, forever brighter the red, forever louder the tortured whoosh of breath, never ending, never resolving or dissolving. Feeding back on itself, feeding the desperate wish to end it, to undo it.
The door didn't stand a chance against Jinn's iron will: it just had to exist, had to be there in the corroded blackened wall of at the end of the hall, at the end of his stamina. Jinn did not take the time to breathe in -- still bent double from the last sour gasp out of his lungs, he stumbled straight into the iron door. It tore open like a sheet of paper, like the first page of something final... and breathlessly, Jinn found himself in the mouth of a tunnel sloping ever so slightly into the dark depth.
He felt the water seeping into his boots, cold, reddish-brown water shimmering dirty in the fading light of the hall behind him. The air was shrouded in a dull stinging smell that made breathing hard and painful. But Jinn had forgotten to breathe -- bracing himself against the rough wall to his left with one hand, he began the descent, half running, half falling. A few steps in, the wall disappeared from sight, darkness enveloping the lime-encrusted wet wall with its dirty flowers of rust and sharp-edged veins of dripping corrosion, leaving his mental eye with dancing images, photograms of an older world, of women in rust-red dresses dancing, craving, bleeding... then his sight failed completely, and there was nothing but the velvet depthless darkness and the rough wall under his hand.
It cut into his skin, and he felt like he was leaving pieces of skin behind with every step, like he was diminishing with every sloshing faltering step through the rising water, thigh-high now and so cold it stung, drew the breath out of him, breath he no longer had. He had nothing. No direction, no sight, no breath, and yet he kept feeling his way forward, or what he thought was forward, through the icy acid water, in the insanely bright hope to find something other than the endless echoes of the brown water sloshing around him, enveloping him in a coldness that would soon be his own.
Colder and colder, his feet began to get numb, his skin turning from tingling to burning, senses growing fainter and more absent, and the dull throbbing sound in his head louder and louder, coming from nowhere outside, and yet closing in, getting louder and louder still, threatening to burst his skull from within, until he opened his mouth to scream and wrapped his arms around his head to keep the scream from filtering through his rushing throbbing ears, to keep it from adding to the pain he was in --
- and the wall fell away from him, or he away from the wall, robbed of his last sense, the sense of balance. The water welcomed him sideways, murky cold and soothing, chilling. He was here. The machinery room.
He was here. No... not much of him was here any more, and what little was left was fading, wasting, dissolving in the clinging cold liquid, disappearing towards the illusory yellowish light that was invading the centre of his long-dead vision, filling blinded eyes with the approach of the inevitable... at the end of the tunnel... and the noise filled his ears like the cold brown water filled his mouth, filled his head, dull, cold, throbbing. His body had given up, senses ebbing away in the cold of the machinery room, alone, too late, not enough, not enough to make a difference, his iron will the last thing to fall under the corrosive wash of the cold tide, the last thing to cling to with fingers that had gone stiff and numb, curled in a last desperate grasp, holding on to he knew not what, holding on to the last seconds of consciousness before the hopeless light enveloped him, dissolved him, him who did not _want_ to go, did not _want_ to dissolve, holding on with cramped cold fingers to the last warm touch... the...
The light moved, moved wrongly, away, down... he was being lifted up? Out of the cold, away... holding on, trying to hold, none of him would move, limbs fading into heavy insensibility, closing in from the outer reaches of his body, weightless now, and dying from the edges inwards, numbness creeping up his chest, covering the wound with spider-web softness, easing the chill out of him as he fell limp, water trickling from his mouth down his throat on to a chest that no longer felt its coldness, the throat that now no longer itched with the acrid waters, the mouth that no longer needed breath, falling open, falling slack... only to be closed by an insistent soft warmth, a desperate pair of lips, and breath, he tasted breath so sweet as to make him thirsty, greedy for more... he tasted memory, and sweet familiarity, and goodness, goodness wrapping his senses in silk and spider webs. Senses. He heard the long torn scream from another's throat, in a stranger's voice, smelt the stink of burned flesh and seared clothes, felt the hard warm mouth on his, felt his lips being bitten and the rough press of hands on his chest, insistent, painful...
He saw no more of the yellow warm light. No more of the corroded brown darkness of the machinery room. He saw a brief glimpse of the dim bluish lighting of the generator room, and then he saw no more as a calm warm faintness wrapped him in its velvet embrace.
It was done. It was good.
--- The End ---