TRIGGER WARNING!!!!!
This chapter deals with a suicide. It has some upsetting imagery and lingers on it for a while. If you are sensitive to such things please skip this chapter. If you need it, please message me and I will provide a summary of the chapter with the upsetting details omitted.
TRIGGER WARNING!!!!!
Chapter 28
Scratchy Purple Carpet
As soon as the countdown finished a hole opened in my head. I think metaphorically but I lost complete control of my limbs and mental functions so I had no way of checking to know for sure. All I knew, Kenzo’s hand felt like it’d tore open a hole in my forehead and now it was sucking, forming a vacuum. Only it wasn’t sucking out my brain and organs, it was going deeper than that. Thoughts whizzed by, then feelings, then, yeah, memories. Good ones, at first. I saw when Stephen I first became friends, talking at that writing shithole, laughing. I saw the meeting where I met both Stephen and the man currently delving into my mind.
But then it went back to the night of my birthday. I relived all that pain again, the helplessness. The despair in turning to the group I had resisted pretty much my entire life. And from there tons of bad memories spiraled out of control, a web of interconnected bad, all being sucked up into the vaccume. Only I didn’t think I would be free of them when it was done. No mental cobweb cleaning for me. I was pulled along with the web, bouncing between every horrible failure of my life.
There was me making the rounds on the media tour, the girl with the Jack of All. The spin out of my life once it was revelead to be a trash Starter Skill. The many attempts of finding something to be good at. There I was trying out yo-yoing, every trick I tried ending in the toy somehow launching straight at my head. There I was trying to cook, burning things so much I became more accustomed to blackened food than normal meals. Look, it’s Darcy failing at making a friend. Oh, that one played hundreds of times, a different person each time but the same outcome.
And… yes. This web of failures was tied into an even bigger tapestry that was my mother. The fun we had. The fights. The never ending talk of a world long dead. But also the beauty she shared of that world. The feelijng of always letting her down, never being enough and… not being able to save her in the end.
To my horror, the vacuum changed. It no longer sucked everything. Instead, it was guiding just me, closer to the feelings and memories of my mom.
I shook my head, again, figuratively or literally I didn’t know. But I broke the teachers instructions, shattered them and spit on them. I fought. Like hell, like mad. I wanted nothing to do with those memories. I’d seen enough, I didn’t need to revisit them. I couldn’t.
“Darcy,” Kenzo’s voice drifted through my headspace. “Don’t fight me. I know it's difficult but we are almost there.”
Even inside my mind, I could feel my tears streaming down my face as I shook my head uncontrollably. I couldn’t. I couldn’t go back to that day. Not even a minute of it. A second.
Was power worth it? Worth the pain? What was I doing this for, just to win a tournament for some more meaningless Stat points?
“Darcy,” my teacher’s voice sounded far away, I could barely hear him over my racing thoughts. “Even if you gave up on the tournament today, wanted nothing to do with your latent abilities… you would still need to face this.”
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
No… I…
The webs moved again, sticking to me. I struggled, totally taken aback. Was the teacher doing this? Why? The memories and feelings wrapped themselves around me completely, I felt and remembered everything. Every memory with my mom, every feeling she ever gave me. The happy ones, the bad. It all enveloped me and dragged me, kicking and flailing, toward the memory at the center of it all.
I knew what awaited me there. It was the only thing that hadn’t hit me yet, the thing that I’d been fighting from before the teacher had even dived in.
The webs of pain reeled me into it. I tried to scream but they’d even bound themselves around my mouth. As soon as I touched the memory, the binds vanished and I was tossed onto a floor. A familiar purple carpet. The rough and scratchy feel of it exactly as I remembered. I was in a room of my apartment that I hadn’t stepped inside for more than a year: my mother’s. The very last place I saw her and, I had no doubt, I was about to see her again.
I shook, all over. Every part of me wanted to keep looking at the carpet, crawl out the door, and run, always and forever. And maybe I could have. The webs were gone, nothing forced me to be here any longer. I could run away.
… but if I did, when would it stop? If I ran now it could be another year of running. That year could turn into a decade. I could die still running.
I pushed myself to my feet, feeling the carpet inbetween my fingers one last time before I let it go and stood all the way up. I calmed my breathing. Preparing for what I was about to see. The last time I was here I did not have that luxery. Would I have believed it if I did? The truth too horrible to comprehend that my mom was…
I looked up, tears streaming down my face, and saw my mother hanging from the ceiling. For the second time in my life. Once is too much. Once is all it takes to shatter another life and send them into a spiral. More than a year later and my head was still spinning.
Shit, it actually was, too. My vision swirled and my legs went weak. I fell back onto my knees. I wanted to look away, begged my head to turn, but my eyes remained locked on her body. Slightly swaying. A slipper clung to her left foot, somehow staying on during the struggle. I tried to focus on that impossibility. If I couldn't move my head I could at least move my eyes. Focus on the slipper. Wait–what was that?
A shadow moved by the window. Massive, the entire light from outside was blocked by it for a few seconds. Then, it came back, and stayed. A giant mass of… something, was in the window. There was a fluttering of movement from the bottom and then a flap jumped open, revealing the biggest eyeball I’d ever seen in my life. It filled the window and was even bigger than it, all I could see full on was the pupil. It towered over me, my mothers body in the center of it but, somehow, it peered through her, straight at me.
My mind twitched.
“You did it Darcy! I found it!” Kenzo’s voice blurted from everywhere, not helping my head at all.
That was great, but I had no idea what he was talking about. Couldn’t he see this too? I had much bigger things to worry about. A giant eye meant there was an even bigger body. Big reaching claws, gaping jaws.
But the thing just looked. Didn’t even blink. Just stared.
“Hold out your hand, open up your mind, let me guide you to it.” The man's voice said.
I still couldn’t look away so I might as well do what he asked. I held out my hand, looking down my arm and seeing my mom swaying in front of the eye.
Another stab wracked my head. I felt the vaccum again, sucking, pulling. I did as he said, wanting the pain and this whole thing to be over. I gave in, let it guide me.
The eye blinked, once. When it opened again a pale yellow light burst from the pupil. It went through the heart of my mom and then, for the second time, she was gone. The light took on a string like appearance. It stretched out to me, came for my outreached hand… and wrapped around my wrist, but continued to spool out, up onto my forehead.
When it touched, the vacuum force shook, like it had stalled or hit something. And, suddenly, I was no longer being emptied and guided. I was filled up, the power came from the string, the eye, filling me with power and light. The memories, the pain–they didn’t dissapear or fall away. They clung to me but, in that moment, I could see the point of them. The tapestry of pain and joy, making me who I was, giving me power.
My eyes burst with the same yellow light and my head was thrown back, back, back… up to the waking world.
The eye watched, un blinking, as I soared back to consciousness. It was the last thing I saw before I opened my own eyes.