I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles

[Pippi]

((Aurelien Valter continued from Waking From One Nightmare into Another))

He didn’t make it too far from the infirmary.

His emotions had been through the wringer since the moment he’d woken up, and he’d hoped that the cool night air might have been enough to shake out the cobwebs and blow away all the awful thoughts clogging up his mind, and let him either focus on something, or totally clear out his mind, and give himself an hour or so’s respite.

And you know what? It seemed to be working. The sudden shift from the stuffy, still air inside the hospital building to the gentle chill of the wind outside had taken Aurelien off guard, but not in a bad way, not in the slightest. People always said a change of scenery did a person good when they were feeling down, and there were more than a few kernels of truth in that. Slowly but surely, his memories since waking up started to trickle away, leaving nothing but the image of a big open space, filled with rows upon rows upon beds, flooded with an orange light. Voices. Movement. Actions. But nothing concrete.

Hmm. Maybe it wasn’t just the sudden injection of fresh air that was clearing out Aurelien’s mind wholesale. Maybe it was the fact that he was pushing 13 hours without sleep, now. He didn’t count his attempt at rest back in the infirmary. That had been far too filled with shadowy figures and unnerving thoughts for him to have regained any energy.

It wasn’t unnatural for him to go this long without sleeping, but that in combination with the knockout gas and everything that had gone down in the building now behind him was a recipe for disaster. He could feel it now, the stiffness in his legs, the clarity and emptiness in his head turning into a heavy fog, his eyelids feeling like it was taking all of his strength to keep them open.

He hadn’t even made it out of the village, but the part of his brain that wanted to argue they should get away from all the bad thoughts and memories was too exhausted to put up a fight. He stumbled towards the closest building, just about registering that the door was already ajar as he slumped in. The windows were smaller here, the silver moonlight cutting long shadows and casting the rest of the house into gloom. He could see the vague shapes of tables and chairs, what might have been rugs and lamps, and of other things that were totally unidentifiable.

The only thing he cared about right now, though, was a bed. Slowly, each foot feeling like it was sunk into treacle, Aurelien wandered towards the first doorway he could see, each step creaking as he did so. The bed, mercifully, was just to the right of the door, directly underneath a window and clearly visible, and he just about managed to drop his mace and bags to the floor before he sank into it, almost passing out the moment his head hit the mattress. He’d slept in his clothes before. For a moment he could almost pretend he was back home.

There was a chance somebody came in during the night, or first thing in the morning. A chance they were looking to hunt. Who cared. He couldn’t muster up the strength to think about that any more. That was something for Tomorrow Aurelien to deal with.

---

Morning came, as was its wont, and thankfully, no raiding parties or wannabe players or rogues trying to justify mugging and robbery came with it. Nobody came at all. His wake-up call came not from the hands of his classmates with ill intent, but from the mechanical crackle of loudspeakers coming to life, born from the hands of his unmerciful, but currently passive, captors.

Not that Aurelien was particularly thankful as he groaned, rolled onto his back, rubbed his bleary eyes, then rolled once more straight off the bed. It wasn’t a high fall, but the impact onto the hard wooden floor sent a shockwave through his body, knocking the wind out of him, making his head spin momentarily.

Well, he was certainly awake now. He’d circumnavigated the hours of lying in bed, desperate for yet another ‘five more minutes’, whether he wanted that or not.

As he clambered to his feet, stretching his arms and legs and shaking out the sudden pain in his joints after clattering off the bed, Danya’s speech made its way from the background to the foreground, and he realised that this wasn’t a good thing in the slightest.

The names started to come thick and fast, unrelenting even as Aurelien tried to distract himself with busywork, checking his pockets and his bags, slinging them over his shoulder, tying and untying his shoes just in case, screwing his eyes shut, as the announcement broke through the flimsy wooden barricade surrounding him.

Tirzah had managed to kill somebody. They’d stood together and pushed her away and kept themselves safe, and it had all been totally pointless, because Tirzah had still killed and Violet had still died, and Aurelien hadn’t been able to stop either of them. He recognised each and every name surrounding Tirzah’s, some more, some less, each one with a face and a voice and a different smile and laugh. Violet and Quinn’s names came up. The memories of the previous day had slowly been filtering back into his head, given enough time to settle and become less painful, but now they were forcibly shunted in, all at once, like a high-speed train on a collision course, and as each memory and each image flickered past, that same feeling from yesterday started to build up, and his blood bubbled in his veins, and the desire to smash the mace through the bed and crush it to splinters started to well up.

And then in the blink of an eye, it all disappeared. One name cut through it all and caused it to vanish instantly. The name he’d never wanted to hear again for the rest of his life. The name of the person who couldn’t be, shouldn’t be, wasn’t on the island.

Aurelien stood there, standing totally still for a while, long after the announcements had died away. Somehow, the mace had found its way into his hands as Danya had been talking. He wasn’t sure how, or why, but there it was. After a while longer, he started to walk. He had a feeling that if he stayed here any longer, it’d become his second infirmary, filled with bad memories and ideas and exhilarating rage.

And as he walked, padding across the room, each step on the wooden floorboards making a groaning noise that sounded like it was miles away, he told himself that Danya had been lying. If he stopped thinking about it, it wasn’t true. If he didn’t think about it, they weren’t here. If he pretended, and kept them out of sight, and kept them out of mind, then they were back home, and they were safe.

It was the sort of thing a child would do. But it was the only thing Aurelien could think of doing to stop himself from going insane. So he kept hold of that thought, kept it tight, until he reached the doorway of the bedroom.

He saw the body the moment he pushed open the door. It was right in the middle of the room, a blanket flung to one side next to it, a folded, bloody shirt next to that. There was blood coating its leg, and a hole in its head, painting the floor and its skull with even more of that same dark crimson. It was still. He could tell from where he was stood that it wasn’t breathing and never would again. It was hollow, and it was empty, and it was nothing even similar to who it once had been.

But Aurelien knew every inch of the boy in front of him like the back of his hand.

If he concentrated or lost focus enough, he could still see that warm and loving smile on his lips.

The mace wasn’t in his hands anymore. He stumbled towards him, almost tripping over the handle of his weapon, feeling like he was moving in slow motion. His mind flickered back to the announcement, back to the name on the other side of this coin. Blaise. Of course it was Blaise. Of fucking course it had been Blaise. They were trouble, and Aurelien knew it, and he had told him that whenever he could. He’d never liked them, never wanted to be around them, never trusted a single word that came out of their lips.

But he had. He had, implicitly, wholeheartedly, and it had gotten him killed, killed for the crime of being too trusting, too caring, too goddamn innocent to survive in a scenario where people like Blaise would thrive, and Aurelien wanted to find them and beat them to death, crush their skull, break their bones, throttle them until they turned purple, break something, break the closest thing to him, hit it until it stopped moving, hit it until it was unrecognisable.

Then Aurelien reached the body, and everything collapsed, all at once, and he fell to his knees. His chest was heaving. His cheeks were damp, and even as he realised it, he saw patches of water appearing on his jeans, spreading even as he looked down, and he pulled Dante’s head into his lap, coating his own leg in red, and now the water was spreading to Dante’s face, and he didn’t know if that was disrespectful or not, and he didn’t care, and he didn’t know.

He couldn’t run away from it any more. Not now that he was cradling him in his arms. Not now that his chest ached as he pressed his face into Dante’s shirt, sobbing into it, body shaking.

How far away had he been when it had happened? Had it happened whilst he was still in the infirmary? Whilst he was walking away from it? Whilst he was upstairs, passed out, just too fucking sleepy to hear a fucking gunshot? Once again, somebody could have killed whilst he was mere feet away, and once again, he’d done nothing to help them, to protect them, to save them. Was that the truth?

He didn’t know.

All that mattered was that the boy he loved, the boy he would have followed to the end of the world, the boy he would have done anything for, was dead.

It took a long, long time for Aurelien to be unable to cry anymore. It took longer still for him to disentangle himself from Dante. Slowly, he pulled the blanket back over his body, turning over the corners and smoothing out the creases. He looked down at Dante, his own body feeling unnatural, unreal, like he’d stolen it from someone. He felt like he should do more. Dig a grave, carry his body to the ocean, build a pyre. But he didn’t have a shovel, and he didn’t have a tinderbox, and he didn’t know if Dante would want to be washed away to sea and lost forever, and he didn’t know what would be respectful or not, and he just.

Didn’t.

Know.

He didn’t know anything, he didn’t know what he should be doing now or how to survive out here or whether he should kill or scavenge or hunt or whatever, or what he should do with his boyfriend’s corpse because why the fuck should he ever be expected to? What kind of universe did they live in where this was something that just happened? He was lost, and he was hurt, and he was scared, and his guiding force, the gentle hand that slipped so easily into his own, was gone.

Dante would know what to do. But Aurelien had no clue what that might be.

Aurelien pressed his fingers to his lips, kissed them, then softly placed them against Dante’s own. Then he slowly walked back towards the stairs, back towards the mace. As he picked it back up again, the metal bludgeon feeling weightless now, he realised that he did know something. He did know what he needed to do next.

There was somebody he needed to find.

((Aurelien Valter continued in The Sky is a Neighbourhood))