Leaving The Other Half Undone

[Cicadan]

(( Continued from Dinner and a Movie ))

now... and at the hour of our death...

Two corpses bobbed and drifted in a bloody miasma, a vortex like stirred coffee dyeing the seaweed and algae choked pool.



Amen.

Clay had stripped his shirt. It was now a bloodied rag with a slightly decorative paste of ground... meat, something like that, the desecrated innards of a human. Clay had felt trying to sink the gruesome body he'd found by poolside was at least by the slimmest of margins more respectable than leaving it baking under the sun so bright and hot it was alien... It was the melting orange haze of sunset turning to evening now, cool and crisp breeze inbound from the ocean's breadth. Clay had worked up a sweat trying to flop the corpse into the pool. What had once been his shirt was no longer sufficient for trying to wipe at his soft flabby chest. He settled for percolating, standing in place.

Embarrassment as an emotion was petty, anyhow. He let the shirt crumple to earth in an undignified heap of wrinkles cannibalizing each other.

He supposed he couldn't stay here much longer to enjoy the sunset, but it was a quiet and undisturbed moment. He bathed full body in the ambiance, dull to it all the same.

By now he well couldn't ignore it. Bridie was a two time killer.

He couldn't really shake that funny feeling, it was numb but electrifying, burnt like tears but none fell. A film reel of melodramatic memories playing in the background but he was paying little attention: their first dance, their first kiss, their first time... all awful. A peaceful serene moment, at her grandparent's overlooking the waterfront. Coeur d'Alene was painfully beautiful, in the summer when the blue skies seemed almost painted on they were so perfectly clear and bright in hue.

He couldn't really say he hadn't seen this coming. He had known what it had meant to her.

Maybe that's what made it hurt all the worse. Trust given wrongly. But, for all the right reasons.




Really, Clay didn't think he wanted to see anyone again. Maybe ever in his life. The rustle of someone moving up the path behind him was noticed all the same, however. He let that humane noise crash onto his moment of disconnect. Merely there, noticed, not really acknowledged.

[MethodicalSlacker]

"Clay."

[Cybil Price continued from Seek A Way Out!]

The last person he expected to see was one he had been seeking.

The day's shamble through the village had turned up no food or water to speak of. He was aching, and he was hungry.

And unarmed.

His sword lay discarded off one of the docks in the wharf. If he couldn't go through with it before, he wouldn't be able to go through with it ever.

"Clay."

All he could do was say his name, and step closer to the slurry.

Maybe Clay would offer some help. Food, water, anything. Some painkillers for his aching face. He had been hit harder last night than he thought.

He stopped just a few paces away. His mittens, shell, and shirt were all gone, disappearing into the water with his blade. The heat was scorching and the clothes stifling.

"Clay."

Cybil looked into the pool, and saw the bodies.

His lips felt like sandpaper.

"You aren't responsible for those, are you."

[Cicadan]

Cybil's face looked hellish. He sounded hellish, natch. Clay almost wondered if Cybil's likeness had been chosen by the demon sent to collect.

"Hey." Clay was a little quiet. His throat sounded arid, he had to chew at  his syllables moistly to get them out. "... Shit." What he had evaluated at a distance looked all the worse up close. Clay couldn't remember seeing splotches that inhuman a color on any of the faces of the living he'd yet seen.

Clay glanced at the macabre and chunky soup that had once been a pool.

"S-shit, no." Clay could at least smile a laugh, even if soundless, even if pained. "They were... like that, when I got here. I just moved them all into the pool. Seemed like a slightly better resting place." His smile stayed, but his tone remained flat. Maybe vaguely concerned, as his eyes continued to evaluate Cybil's battered form.

"Shit man, what happened? I can-..."

His bag was some distance away, abandoned along the ocean-facing corner of the pool, but Clay began to make for it. He imagined for a brief moment, or at least his brain did on his behalf, that Cybil could use the distraction to slip in a fatal wound or two.

Really, anyone could have. Clay knew that all too well, but he ignored that fact every time to date.

[MethodicalSlacker]

By comparison, Clay looked angelic. Healthy, even. His body had taken a toll, but it still looked to Cybil's eyes like Clay had been through relatively little, despite the gunshot wound.

Clay had a sounder mind, too. His thinking was admirable. Keep the bodies off solid ground, where they'd be more easily feasted upon by flies and decomposed. Preserve them in water. The line of logic may have been flawed, but at least Cybil could trace it.

His friend could stand to touch dead bodies. Cybil couldn't even stand to think of creating one. Even the sight of those bodies bobbing in the water would have made him retch if he had anything left in his stomach to lose.

"I failed, Clay."

Clay walked over to his bag. Cybil's eyes turned and lingered on Clay's bare back.

"I couldn't do it. I've lost."

He tried to squat down on the ground, but fell out of it, falling onto his back with a grunt.

[Cicadan]

Bandages. Clay had so far only used them on himself, on his knee that was as of last he'd checked weeping some ugly smelling yellow-red brine. Two days of bandages, and not a single one selflessly used. His hands dug through half opened rations, packets full of crumbs, he found the kit and held it protectively in two hands.

He turned around.

"Shit, Cybil..?" The kit clattered to earth as Clay hustled to Cybil's side. Odd juxtaposition, Cybil being the one who needed help, the young man with the powerful build collapsed while the beer gut toter was the one offering him a hand up. One hand on the shoulders too, for good measure. Clay put his legs into it- not the back- and squatted a bit, spine straight, to prop up Cybil onto his own two legs.

It was a bit odd. Clay would have never expected the most intense, driven of his friends to be fallen like this...

A lot of things he couldn't have expected though. Faces he'd hoped he'd see again, lost under the withering desert sun.

Well... whatever. "What were you talking about dude, failing and losing?" How was he supposed to respond to that? Question of the hour, impossible to answer. Clay didn't want to pretend that he was feeling any positive about any of this. "Well, I dunno. Depends on how you define it... I mean...?"

Cybil had talked about this, before. It hadn't been, like, a day before, but... shit. Clay couldn't remember.

[MethodicalSlacker]

It wasn't the worst of falls, but it was enough to draw attention.

He wasn't used to being supported like this. He clung to Clay tightly as he was lifted back up.

What do I mean by failing?

Can I even get the words out?

"I ran into Nanna-Fiora and a boy," Cybil said with a cough, "At the scrap-yard."

And just like that, he was there. Under the cover of night, dressed in clothing far too warm for the heat. Sword in hand, bag squirreled away under some pile of garbage, targets in sight. He was organized. He was methodical.

So many moving parts and so many things that could break and the first and only thing that did was his resolve.

"I tried to sneak up on them."

[Cicadan]

Clay felt their bodies, draped together. The firmness of his friend's form.

Nanna-Fiora. Familiar. Clay's heart briefly flew, an icy plume, stabbing into the base of his collarbone. He could have sworn he'd known how to breathe a second ago.

He'd already lost Bridie. Not Cybil. Not him.

The pauses in the conversation were heavy. Pregnant. Falling onto Clay like the entire weight of the world that greater men had once held up on their shoulders. Once upon a myth, or once upon a dream.

"... Cybil," Clay prompted, with a low and curt monotone,

"What happened."

With what measure ye mete... He reminded himself, pointedly. In the spaces between the words that were said.

[MethodicalSlacker]

"I knocked over a pile of garbage."

Clay was tense. Firm. He had been so soft and warm and welcoming just a few minutes ago.

Cybil remembered briefly something his father said. According to him, all souls went to Heaven for a time to be judged before being allowed in or sent down to Hell.

Now was the arbitration. His time in Heaven was soon over.

He had to lay himself bare. Let it all out.

Hide nothing.

"They came to find me. Nanna-Fiora had a gun. She shot the pile of garbage."

There were moths in his stomach.

Deep breaths.

"I jumped out with my sword and slashed her in the side."

His voice began to waver, and the sky felt closer than it was just a few moments ago.

"And then her friend came and elbowed me in the face and she fired again and I saw it, Clay, I saw the wound in her side and all of her stomach pouring out and it was nothing I haven't seen before on the television but I saw it this time, right there, in front of my face, and it was real.

"It was real, Clay. That was the difference. I saw the look of pain on her face and I felt ashamed of myself for feeling ashamed of myself. My father—"

The taste of salty water reached his lips. He blinked a few times and realized that it wasn't raining.

"I couldn't go through with it. Even though I—

"I could have, if I wasn't such a—"

Coughs and sobs wracked his body in equal measure before Cybil managed to squeeze the last three syllables of his plea out of his chest.

"—a coward."

[Cicadan]

Every moment a word wasn't said was overly potent, like shrieking poison in the veins. Breaths, stagnant caesura.

Purgatory was perhaps blood-drenched pools. Maybe garbage piles. Clay noted there was a tension in the way he embraced his friend. He tried to relax his own painfully erect shoulder blades. Tried.

"You..."

Cybil wasn't done speaking yet. A gunshot, a blade reaping entrails. A story not yet complete, yet the blue of heaven seemed to stretch far away. Infinitely so.

"You couldn't."

Simple conclusion. Redundant, repetitive. Awkward, really, that all Clay's time traversing this blasted wasteland of American irreverence had been redundant. Repetitive.

"Maybe you weren't supposed to, man." The informal language, the unnecessary overture to having once been a normal man with normal purpose... it slipped by. Everything was slipping by in this moment. Yet... Clay felt something, yes. Consecration. Damnation. The concepts might well have been one and the same.

"Maybe you were too good for that. But... fuck. I don't know." Only truth yet spoken.

"No matter what happened, I would have stood here, for you. Like this. Killer or coward... you're a man. A mortal loved by..." god, no, he couldn't even respectfully say such a name with besmirched lips.

He continued to hold on, for dear life.

[MethodicalSlacker]

It was precisely when Clay failed to invoke the grace of God for Cybil that he noticed the flies swarming around the bodies in the pool. The water was practically teeming with them. Insects, landing on bodies bogging in sludge, taking infinitesimally small bites that would eventually add up to the total destruction of a system. He hadn't seen them—he didn't need to. He heard them buzz in their crisscrossing flight paths across the corpses below, emissaries of a dark, petulant force called nature. There was no malice in their actions. They were feasting because they had to. It was why they were put on God's Earth. Their role in life was being fulfilled through their eating, and if Cybil could imagine a world in which the flies had emotions he would find it hard to imagine them feeling anything other than contentment.

That was how Cybil thought about what he had tried to do back at the scrapyard. He had hoped it would come naturally. Put himself into the shoes of someone to whom it would, someone who didn't have to dance around the thought of actually doing it, someone who could do their family and their upbringing proud. Maybe he wasn't supposed to, but for a time... no, for most of his life, he had wanted to. Or at the very least, he wanted to be someone who could stomach the thought.

So yeah. Maybe he wasn't supposed to. Maybe he wasn't even supposed to be able to. Do it, that is. He had fancied himself a predator, but maybe he was closer to prey than he had hoped. Cybil was ready to accept that.

It didn't make it any less emasculating to find himself crying about it. To look square over Clay's shoulder and see a camera lens pointed right back at his twisted face damp with tears. He made an effort to stifle himself. Quiet down the tears, get himself a little back under control. He couldn't quite do that if he was still holding Clay, so he let go. A bit more of a push than a release, but they were no longer touching, and that was the release that he needed inside.

He sat there and stared at Clay, his lips still quivering, breath still quaking, skin still shaking with the shadows of sobs.

Stared, and didn't dare say a word.

[Cicadan]

He might have felt a tremble, before they were apart.

He hadn't noticed that alien quality to Cybil's eyes before. A mirror held up at Clay, of the specific shade of blue that Bridie's eyes were. Some quality rubbed away, like flakes of charcoal, right at the edges, the emotions Bridie would wear on her sleeve gone. Fact of the matter... Clay hadn't even known how to comfort people when he'd been so close as to a lover and a best friend. He could only begin to comprehend the unearthly pressure on his shoulders when it was a strange face, a friend's body, a hand that had thrust a sword at flesh and blood.

Fuck if Clay could do anything at all besides try. Judgement was only the instinct he had reserved after his very last resort.

"Look, I..."

The silence thereafter was probably not the best punctuation.

He wished he could see anything, anything at all. Pierce the veil that was Cybil Price, that was the murderer-yet-to-be standing before his own eyes.

"Are you-..." No. "Can you-..." No.



"Will you try again?" It was the wrong question with all the wrong answers. Clay regretted it.

Silently, without the space to feel regret.

[MethodicalSlacker]

A fly landed on Cybil's face and crawled along his cheek for a few moments before he blinked and it flew away. A few had started to circle him in the air, and seeing them he saw that the majority of them were not flies but mosquitoes, hungry for blood. It was only fitting. He was not a predator, but he wasn't quite prey, either. He couldn't see himself trying to kill, but he couldn't see himself as a body in the pool.

He was a parasite.

So when Clay extended the olive branch—gave him one last chance to take back his dignity, admit that what happened in the junkyard was a fluke, that he had been scared of what would happen if he did, in fact, lose, of the oblivion that lay beyond the facile promise of heaven, not just for him but for those he might raise a weapon against, not wanting to subject anything to that lack of feeling, and that he had gotten over himself—when he felt that some kind of redemption was being offered to him,

he laughed.

Laughed, cackled, squawked like a bird. It came on in waves, first a small troubling in the water, a chuckle, then rapturously it rose higher and higher and higher and higher in his throat, the acid burning in his stomach not vomit but hysterical guffaw, as tears rushed back to his eyes and he doubled over on the ground, clutching his stomach, a shrieking hyena. Cybil stood, pushing himself off of the ground and onto his feet, stumbling back and forth, his smile sending him spinning. Arms at the stomach, holding it in tightly, as he bent forwards and retched and only screams of laughter came out, vomit all their own. His sides felt like they were smiling the same way a slit throat did. It was forced and was a force, pushing itself out of his belly.

Cybil pawed at his eyes to wipe the tears away. There was mucus dripping from his nose, and he wiped that off too, but he was still laughing. His eyes turned to the sky and stayed fixed on a cloud. He loved it all. He hated it all. Still howling, he pivoted to look at Clay, unable to see what expression had crossed his face through the steadily-replacing-themselves-in-his-eyes-tears, but guessed it was confusion, and laughed some more. Not even worth it to pretend that part of it wasn't at him, even if he didn't know what the rest of his crack-up was aimed at.

Into his open, whooping maw flew a fly. Cybil gagged, his laughter turning to coughs. Clawing at his throat, he teetered himself too close to the edge of the pool and fell in.

[Cicadan]

Clay was lost at that point. Maybe it didn't even matter. Maybe he was being had, maybe he was about to die when his own friend gutted him with a hitherto sword hidden somewhere deep in a shitty plot twist. Cybil, driven mad. Teenage student driver taken to it's mad-logical conclusion.

Trying to jury rig a punchline... either the highest or lowest point to date.

Cybil's violent laughter wrought Clay into an avant-garde piece of sculpture. A hand extended towards the motion blur, the thing hysterically crying snot that he still maybe called a friend. The rest of his body language cold, withdrawn as he stared with all of the emotion he could no longer muster heavily dredging shadows on his hitherto featureless, unmanly jawline.

He sighed at some point, deep, deep into the bizarre interlude to their maybe meaningful, maybe irrelevant to everyone and fucking everything heart-to-heart.

"Are you alr-..?"

This next interruption though.. Not something he could stand and mope for.

Jump, more like. Red exploded in a viscous splatter, like the violent swing of a child's maestro finger painting. The pool water was in some way like a broth as his body pierced through. Thick, soupy, it hugged him uncomfortably, didn't slip smoothly like water would.

He flailed for a second, the next his arms powerfully cut as he searched for his friend. Blood-choked water soaked the back of his eyelids, stole away the tears he'd yet to actually cry. Didn't matter, he ignored the sting, the gag bubbling up in his throat as he tasted and smelled the rust and iron he'd thrown himself head first into. His arm swiped, left, right. He screamed Cybil's name, it came out in a frothy bubble of several corpse's worth of oily films and decay.

[MethodicalSlacker]

He didn't expect it to feel so warm.

The stewing miasma around him caressed his form, the water otherwise still with death. Cybil stayed under the water, his lungs relatively free of air. He was not yet swallowed, but swished around in saliva. Tasted. Judged. He had time to close his eyes before he hit the water, but the impact forced them open. The sight of the sun glistening through the bronzed surface was too bright to look at, but too powerful to look away from. Something's detached fingernail brushed up against his chin and then floated away. His left hand bumped against something that felt like the side of a torso before pushing it away. The water tried to pull him down, but it had trouble finding its grip. He imagined the bottom of the pool just inches beneath him. He imagined the pool going on forever, containing bits and pieces of everyone who had died, these past few days. Muffled noise came from the other side of the surface, but otherwise he was in a soundless place. Warm.

Redemption. The idea threatened to open his mouth from the inside. He felt like laughing into the pool. Laughing at it. He loved its embrace, he hated its existence. In his drift backwards, the top of his head bumped against someone else's. This time, there was no push away. The two stayed touching until they naturally slipped apart and Cybil could see them drift away just inches from his face. The water was not clear, but it also was not completely opaque with filth. Particles brushed up against his everything. He tried to kick, and floated backwards even further into the muddy water.

The muffled sound came even closer before it breached the surface, carrying with it a form that Cybil knew could only be Clay. Only Clay would care to jump in after Cybil. If God would not redeem him, then he would be saved by a folly of man. He smiled instinctively and some of the crimson water entered his mouth. It tasted like tears and sweat and blood and shit and pain. Warm water. A flailing hand reached his own, fingers brushing up against each other. He could easily grab onto them and be flung to the concrete, spatter on the pavement, bake in the sun.

Or he could float like this for just a little while longer. Let Clay work for it.

There was a change in the water, as he thought this. It no longer felt like something he was becoming a part of, something that he had accidentally stumbled into. Now the other limbs and bodies bobbing in the bloody broth felt like extensions of himself, even the parts that he had not touched.

For the first time in his entire Program run, Cybil Price felt like he was in control.

And now he knew

that it was time.



Time to come out of the pool.

Clay's fingers found their final purchase around his own, and Cybil took hold. The water rushed around his ears, the sounds of life crackling back louder than ever as he felt himself dragged out of the pool, pushed to the surface, made to lay on the poolside floor. Gore dripped from him as he rolled over onto his back, hacking coughs sending spurts of water from his throat. He rolled over once more onto his hands and knees, trembling in the wake of a new feeling inside of him. His pants were ruined, made wet with red blood, and his shoes were soaked through his socks to the soles. He rubbed his eyes and looked at his hands. They came away blood-soaked, but he couldn't tell whether they had always been that way.

He didn't entirely mind. Somewhere beneath the layer of water that had clung to his body was new skin.

[Cicadan]

The moment he'd been clawing for a fistful- less- of his friend's flesh had passed the slowest. Clay had gulped down lungfuls of his friend's dead, drifting pallor. He'd only learned at the very last second that his friend was still certainly alive.

Clay flopped to the cold stone deck of the pool. Hard weathered rock kneaded itself into the dough of his shoulders, the flab of his chest gently broadcast acute stress and strain. He lost count of the panting after the very first one, but he was pretty sure he could still count the seconds evaporating by. In the slow cool of the brackish water that still clung to him, protectively curdled into little dumplings of gory gelatin, streaked down his bare skin, exhausted little bullets of a hellish purple-bile stained red.

It was peaceful, and of course he'd be the one opening his mouth to vomit words over that peace.

"You alright..?"

He let that joke without a punchline hang, suspended in time, hang, from the gallows.

"You're still my friend, Cybil. This doesn't change a thing."

Clay didn't know who'd just said those words. Not him. He didn't like to call himself a liar.

((Clay Bronson continued in ... And An Ending))