Crown of Shit (Liar's Chair)

[MethodicalSlacker]

Lili walked into the crematorium chapel shaking, every inch of her body itching, the feeling of phantom spider legs crawling all over her, like so many devils picking apart her flesh, cursing her for her own sins, her mistakes, her lack of good, her false hopes and aspirations, all shattered by one shotgun shell, careening through the body of her last remaining friend, scattering about and cutting the ties to the core of her being, firing both ways and slicing both into pieces on two different planes.

She shot Asuka. She shot Asuka and she ran away.

[Lili Williams continued from Ship's A Goin Down.]

There was no good excuse for what she did. She thought pointing the gun alone was inexcusable, and then her finger slipped, and then there was blood everywhere - or nowhere - she hadn't stayed, and now, that didn't matter. The gun was so powerful, and she was going to wander around with that thing and possibly kill more people? No way. That was unfitting for a member of the peace group, a friend of Kizi's. Kizi was still right here with her. There was blood on Jennifer's shoes. So much blood, inside of her, like a water balloon waiting to pop and stain the world red. Red and black; bile would spill out, too. It wouldn't be clean, and it wouldn't be pretty. All four of the ancient humors, a swirl of disgust, a fitting end to her life.

When Asuka asked if Lili wanted to die, Lili didn't think that she'd end up, unconsciously, taking it as a challenge. She didn't exactly want to die, but now, she felt like that was the only thing there was to do. Lili Williams, to LilI Williams, was the last and final foe. She needed to die. That was the only way to peace.

Two corpses lie in the garden grounds, draped everywhere like drunks at parties that Lili was never invited to, set down over furniture and rugs and appliances, all sound asleep. She'd heard death referred to as "The Big Sleep" before. By her Father once, even. It was a bit surreal, to hear something that in this case looked nothing like sleep, referred to as something akin to a nap. She hated it. Resented it. Clutched it in her fist and beat it against the wall until her fingers were a mess of a bone and tissue, a bloody pulp.

But both of her hands were fine. There was no blood anywhere, and for the most part, she was perfectly intact and healthy. She remarked on these dreams of self harm, and wistfully stared out into the sky and thought that she couldn't even get that right as the world began to spin like a carousel, the gnarled and polished faces of porcelain horses taunting her with their garish nostrils and square cut teeth.

Lili felt like a failure. She was, of course. There was no way around it. Even if she could start again, from the beginning, she'd just wind up right here one way or another, staring down the barrel of a gun. Her gun. The gun she shot someone with. That someone being one of her only friends.

After such a sin, where else could she go but the chapel?

An emaciated, wasted corpse sits in the middle of the chapel, burned and torn to shreds. It's not a face that she recognizes. Poked all through with holes. A girl, blood everywhere. Disgusted, Lili kicked it across the ground as she walked past. The last thing she needs to see now is a reminder of how she could have ended up. All the places that she could have gone wrong, the times to die that she narrowly avoided along the way.

The only winning move was not to play.

Lili looked around in a daze, then sat down on a bench. Then, she pulled her bag over and opened it, pulling out her map. According to the faded words on the flimsy piece of paper, this was supposed to be a crematorium, so where were the crematory chamber things? Lili couldn't find them with her faulty eyesight.

Now this was no good. She wanted to climb into one of those, where there probably were no cameras, curl up into a ball, and die of starvation. Now, she didn't know what there was to do. She scratched her chin, and took another look around the room. The idea well was running dry. Believe it or not, Spiderland wasn't the best place for a symbolic suicide. Quietly, Lili meditated on the idea of death, wandering through various possibilities in the forest of thought. Shady sunlight streamed down through bloody leaves until she reached a clearing, where she sat down, and meditated yet again.

At first, nothing.

Eventually, however, her mind settled on one option that seemed the best. The most fitting.

As she walked up to the podium, gun in tow, Lili cleared her throat. She put her gun on the ground next to her feet, and set her hands on either side of the small wooden pedestal.

"Well," she began, projecting her voice as best she could, "I've gone and done it. I'm finished, now. There isn't much left in this world for me to do but lie down and accept whatever punishment God has for me, laid out in Hell. The very place that I will not go, because I don't even think it exists." Her eyes turned upward. Toward heaven? No, not necessarily, but toward something.

"On top of not believing in him, I abandoned my friends, shot someone because they got on my nerves, and I didn't even really feel all too fucking bad about it. Now how about that? What's in store for Lili Williams now? What road is there to walk down, when all your friends are dead and gone, and there's no hope left in sight?"

Her nose was starting to run. She wiped at it with her sleeve.

"The road that is left," she announced to the empty room, "is the road of sin, fellow clergymen."

She addressed a full room, full of spirits and weeping. In reality, her only audience was the smelly, decaying body that she kicked. Sighing deeply, Lili realized that even her own feeble attempt at attaining meaning was just an awkward atrophy of any creative thoughts she had left in her body. She wanted it expelled from her. When she died, she wanted to make sure that there was nothing left to salvage. Nothing of value to be lost.

She chuckled. Now, she'd get that shitty Nine Inch Nails song out of her head for sure.

"Which is why," she resumed, wiping the bittersweet grin off of her face, "At this decisive moment, I have decided to turn away from sin. From the devil. I have decided to take matters into my own hands."

Lili lifted the shotgun up from the ground, and pointed it at her head. Obviously, this wasn't the right way to kill oneself - the barrel would have to go upward, in through her mouth, for any real consistent damage to be done - but the point right now was to send the message of what it was that she was going to do.

"So to speak, that is."

She was going to join her friends.

"I only ask now for forgiveness," Lili said, moving the gun closer to her face, "For forgiveness, and, for privacy."

Lili turned her back on the empty room. She turned her back on Spiderland. She turned her back on everything she left behind on the bridge. She turned her back on every face that she had ever known, and on every person there was to meet. There was a camera pointing downward at the podium, directly facing her, but Lili ignored it. She opened her mouth, and fit the cold steel barrel inside. Rolling her eyes, she fumbled around for the trigger, finally finding it with her index finger. She began to tighten her grip, to steady herself, and to brace for her final descent into the unknown. Her eyes closed, steeling herself for the shock, pop, and release, for the wave of pain that would burn her to the ground and then be over and done with.

Then, she did the unthinkable; she hesitated.

Lili began to consider the thought that what she was doing right now was, quite simply, a bad idea. She had enough food to last her for ages, and a good enough weapon to win her the game. She could make it home, with all her promises, the memory of the dead living on in her head. Why would she do this to herself if she had so much going for her?

For a few minutes, Lili stood, frozen, as if waiting for somebody to come along and snap her out of it. All she wanted was for somebody to run into the chapel, scream at her, and pull the gun out of her mouth. Even if that person ended up killing her when they found out what she did, she didn't care. All she wanted, in essence, was to be delivered from her own evil. Wouldn't it be funny, she thought, if that person was Alessio? What a poetic way to end things. Him and her, both killers at this point as far as she knew, and one was talking the other off of the ledge. If it was him, she wouldn't be able to stop herself from breaking down in tear filled laughter. But she didn't care if it was him. She really only wanted her fate to be taken out of her own hands by somebody, anybody. The responsibility was stifling, growing more and more pungent the more she stood and waited. It was up to her to pull the trigger. It was up to her to bite the bullet.



































































Or-

Or.

A final, desperate saving throw, a Hail Mary over the entire island, past the pits of spiders and shame, the corpses she had left in her wake, through the guilt by association and the failed dreams and realized nightmares.

Or.

Or, she could shoot the camera.

Lili's eyes snapped open. She vaguely recalled something about camera vandalism being punished by collar explosion. In this case, it wouldn't be her shooting herself. No, the decision would be for someone else to flip a switch and trigger her own death. There would be nothing to do but wait for that death, however instant, but she would know that it wasn't her own fault. She had acted in defiance her whole time here, so why not go out with a bang?

But, no. There was no time for that. She had already committed to this pathetic suicide, hadn't she? All of her mental stock and energy had gone into making herself die, right here, right now, by her own hand. Nobody would have any involvement, not if she could help it. Not the ghost of the shoes on her feet, or the poltergeist of the cross necklace around her neck.

She was keeping those on. She wanted to see those two faces first.

If she was lucky, her own conflicted mind would shake itself apart, like a washing machine set to max settings and overloaded, nothing inside, rattling itself to bits. At least a washing machine could clean things, and be of some use. There was nothing for Lili to hope toward. Nothing at all. Nothing now, nothing then. Nothing, or else, something. Something was the worse alternative. She hoped not for something, anything but something.

Lili felt like she was dawdling for too long. That probably meant, to her, that she really didn't have the heart to go through with it. Sitting on the brink, it took too much effort to want to fall. Eventually, she'd be flying kites downward, from a cloud, or something like that.

See? Even her visions of heaven were starting to become incoherent. And didn't she say that she'd be going to hell anyway?

She needed a smoke, to calm her nerves. That would settle things for sure.

...

That would be her last thought. Lili would stand there still and statuesque for a few more seconds, thinking about the taste of cigarettes, and then a muscle spasm, caused by one of the last aftershocks of that vain addiction, would make her hand tighten on the trigger involuntarily, sending fire and metal twisting upward into her head and the last chemical fragments of her daydreams splattering out and onto the floor.

More instant than she could have imagined, Lili fell backwards over the podium, letting go of the shotgun. Her head caved in, blood pouring out onto the floor, pieces of her brain falling out, tissue torn apart by gunpowder and gravity.

There was something, then nothing, and, lastly, dead air.

G051 - LILI WILLIAMS: ELIMINATED