closed.

[frostfist]

WHO: wriothesley, various
WHAT: 2024 catchall log
WHERE: around
WHEN: march 2024 onwards
WARNINGS: n/a; will be added in thread headers

Comments

[picky]

[ Marcille is in the cool, empty dark somewhere. All that's in front of her is a door with golden light leaking from behind it.

To a Fontanian, the steel door is nondescript—its usual deep turqoise with golden hardware, windows set with clouded blue glass accented with golden, uniform, geometric patterns. To Marcille, it's one of the strangest ones she's seen. The fact that it's a single door at standard height is all that betrays it as more commonplace than luxury. Before she can contemplate it more, her hand moves on its own to open it. That golden light soon swallows everything, and without a single step forward, Marcille opens her eyes and sees the inside of a house.

A home. Her mind supplies the word before she can think it. She looks around at the furniture, the upholstery, the pictures on the walls, the toys and books and tchotchkes broken all over the floor, the little betrayals of who might live here.

(Another weird fact about this dream: it's incredibly hot. Marcille doesn't realize that this is residual from the desert heat. She's currently passed out on her bed in the van, still sweating through her desert clothes after running out into the desert. The person she saved from drowning in the sand is now in the custody of the medical trucks.)

More prominent than anything: it's eerily quiet here, and there's a familiar scent on the air. It's the only thing she recognizes in this place. Dread walks up her back like fingertips, tickles the back of her scalp. She knows what she might see if she walks through the kitchen doorway. She also knows that she has to do so if she wants to leave this place. ]

H-... Hello?

[ Marcille's voice is small and shaky. She carefully maneuvers over and around the broken things on the floor, her fists brought up in front of her chest. She's heading towards the kitchen—where the gory smell sharpens, assailing her through her nose, warm against her open eyes. ]

Is anyone here?

[frostfist]

[ There's no reply—at least not right away.

The scent of blood might've hit Marcille first but the sight of it follows not long afterwards, pools of crimson red that stretch across the floorboards and run dark rivers through cracks and down counters. Cups, broken dishes, forgotten silverware decorate the ground in an unholy mosaic, clear signs of the struggle that had taken place less than an hour prior. Nails, too, lie useless on the ground, dangerous obstacles for Marcille to carefully step around.

Though more obvious, more alarming, than all of that is the figure (figures) that lies prone on the ground in the spreading pools of blood, ugly red flesh and gaping cuts peeking through torn fabric, the occasional limb bent at an unnatural angle. Three bodies, two adult and one child, splayed across the floor, all of them still and unmoving.

—No, that's not quite true. There's a slow rise and fall to the hunched back of the child, a tremor that runs through his arms, and the faint sound of breathing as he gasps for breath. His hands clutch around something unseen. Nearby, a stained knife glints in the light. ]

[picky]

[ The chaos reaches her the moment she turns the corner into the kitchen. Everything litters the ground‐broken drawers, cabinet doors, dishware, cutlery, food, pieces of wooden chairs, the broken halves of the kitchen table shoved up against a wall. But the mess is hardly the worst of it.

As soon as she catches sight of the streaks and pools and spatters of blood, Marcille's hands immediately fly up to clutch over her mouth, her eyes round with horror. It's a grisly scene that makes her stagger backward, and only then does she catch the flash of a nail across the floor. She follows their trail up to the mangled bodies spread across the kitchen floor.

Her stomach lurches and burns, bile reaching up her innards before she forces it back down. If she hadn't seen so much gore and death in her lifetime, her reaction would have been much worse.

Instead, she slowly steps inside, crushing broken pieces of everything underfoot. Her eyes dart from the floor to the bodies, tracing their open wounds and their twisted angles, joints turned backward. Whoever did this didn't just want these people dead. They wanted them to suffer.

That's when she sees the young boy's bloodstained body move, pulsing slowly with every breath, arms shaking presumably with horror. Marcille, naive as she is, rushes to meet him immediately, ignoring the pain—phantom pain, but she doesn't know this—that bolts up her feet as she keeps her balance. ]

Oh my— Oh thank goodness! You're alive!

[ She has no idea who this boy is. Someone lived through this awful, terrible mess. She has to save him. That's all that matters. ]

[frostfist]

[ He hasn't dreamed of that day in a long, long time. It's a footnote in his history now, faded words in the margins that he chooses not to dwell on until something brushes up directly against them. But here he kneels now, unaware that all of this is nothing more than a too-real memory, hands once again wet and sticky with blood, the pain of too many cuts and deep bruising beginning to dull at the edges as his mind struggles to cling to consciousness.

And then a voice snaps him back to alertness, unfamiliar, high-pitched. He doesn't comprehend the words and barely glances at the face, operating entirely on instinct as the storm of his emotions bubbles violently back of the surface. All of it - the anger, the betrayal, the horror of knowing that everything he'd believed had been nothing more than a lie - kicks into overdrive and he scrabbles towards her, snarling as he curls his hands into fists, the empty nailgun strapped to his wrist now relegated to a blunt force weapon. There's blood streaked across the front of his shirt, the gashes across his chest and throat, and splattered across his face...an eerie complement to the manic look in a pair of familiar grey-blue eyes. ]

Get away from me!

[ He makes it all of three steps before he passes out from blood loss—only to be shunted into a completely different scene. ]

[picky]

[ It happens instantly, as soon as the last syllable leaves her mouth. The erratic flashes of movement, the angry shake of his limbs, the way he sucks in his breath and pours out blood from every wound as he pivots and claws towards her, brandishing his nail gun like a hammer poised to strike—Marcille is frozen with terror, the sights of this crazed, infuriated, bloody young man sears into her memory. Him and the rings of color in his irises, almost glowing against the backdrop of blood on his face.

Somewhere in her subconscious, the image of those eyes wrestles with her memories. She's seen them before, but her fear keeps her synapses from firing, the connection failing her for the moment.

At the last moment, she recoils and screams, shielding herself with her arms. She loses her balance as she staggers again, falling backward, and in the middle of that fall, the scene suddenly changes. ]