What I'd Give for a Sunless Sky

[xylophonefairy*]

((Elliot Day continued from How Not to Meet))

Elliot sprinted through the dusty streets, swerving his body around with a maddened glint in his eyes. Surveying the shop fronts, homes, a dust ball rolled past him and he felt suddenly like he could do anything. He would find Vienna's killer and he would serve them justice. It wasn't fair. She had never done anything wrong to anyone. His hat, Vienna's hat, had fallen slightly to one side and he pushed it straight on his head without breaking concentration.

There was a flash of movement out the corner of his left eye, and without thinking about it he turned and streaked after it. This was the fastest he had ever run, and the hot, dry air was mobilised by his movement and for a beautiful moment it seemed like there was a breeze.

He kept running even after it was obvious that he wasn't chasing anything. His muscles burned with the force of the exercise, and his head throbbed with the heat, but he kept pushing because he knew it would be more painful if he stopped. Past the town borders until he finally ran out of road and found himself aimlessly in the middle of the desert. Finally, Elliot slowed. He turned briefly back towards the town, which had shrunk in size quickly and already seemed like it was a million miles away. His breath came back to him in painful gulps, and Elliot fell to his knees and rested his head against the floor in the shadow of a cactus. In the absence of the blazing sun he closed his eyes and tried not to cry.

Once his body seemed to return to the norm, he staggered slowly to his feet and picked up his bag. The sledgehammer fell out of it, bouncing against the sandy floor. With some effort he picked it up, feeling the weight of it in his hands as a master might feel a sword. He squared up to the cactus, and if he squinted he could almost convince himself it was the girl with the brown hair. The girl he didn't know. Vienna's murderer. He swung the sledgehammer back with a cry, and opening his eyes at the last second plunged it with all of his might into the cactus.

The guts of the cactus went everywhere, and for a few minutes Elliot allowed himself to celebrate, forgetting the heat and the dryness and the fact that his classmates were all out to kill him. He danced around the pathetic stump, the juices already evaporating away, his sledgehammer possibly stuck there for all of eternity.

He flopped down on the sand and poured most of a bottle of water over his face. He had to lie closer to the cactus now to feel the benefits of the shade. Its dying blood dripped onto his nose and made his face feel sticky. The sun beat down on his legs and chest and Elliot tried to justify what had happened.

After all, you don't want to be one of them. Someone who kills people. You'd just get arrested when we get rescued and it would all have been for nothing. For a game that no one is really making us play. He touched the collar around his neck lightly, surprised at how quickly he had become used to it. It took no time at all until this was his life, and it had been hours since he had thought of home.

The heat was incessant. There was nothing he could do to make it go away. Too tired to get up and find a better shelter, too hot to fall asleep. Reaching clumsily for his bag, he rifled around in it until he produced a bottle of water. Without thinking he poured it over his face, into his hair and soaked his clothes. Elliot sighed in relief; even though the water was tepid it was cooler than his boiling skin. Cooler than the boiling air.

He fell asleep.

When Elliot awoke several hours later he was thirsty. The sun was starting to dip ever so slightly in the sky, casting longer shadows that were no longer covering him. He was all dried out from the water, and Elliot sat up woozily. His head swam with dehydration and sleepiness and he looked in his bag for a bottle of water.

They were all empty.

Leaning on his sledgehammer, which was heavily buried in the destroyed cactus, he struggled to his feet and looked back towards the town. He wasn't sure if he could make it that far without any water, and in a fit of frustration he kicked the empty bottle out into the dust. A couple of drops spewed across his trainers and immediately he chased the bottle and shook the last remaining drops into his mouth, clutching heavily at it like a desperate man might cling to gin. Cradling the bottle in his arms, he returned to the shade of his cactus, and sat back on the floor. Somewhere nearby an insect was rattling.

Glancing around in curiosity, he saw the lake.

It was much closer than the town. He could easily walk that far. Heck, if he was properly hydrated and in a cooler environment, he could probably hop that far. Craning his neck to get a better look, Elliot made a small sound of excitement and scrabbled to his feet, taking the water bottle with him. The pool was right next to a distinctive cactus, with a pink flower and a big rock next to it. A big rock perfect for sitting on while he drank the pure, shimmering water from the lake.

It took a few minutes to gather the energy he would need to make it there.

Taking only his water bottle and one of the canteens, he started off confidently. Every step was an effort when his body ached at each movement and his mind was slipping constantly. It was like he was drugged with morphine, parts of his weren't painful that he suspected should have been. Maybe the pain was constant and he had simply stopped noticing it.

Elliot walked.

He stumbled slightly and regained his balance.

Walked further.

Wondered if his parents had been told he was missing yet.

The white trainers might never have been white at all.

Elliot Day kept walking, until he was sitting on the rock next to the cactus with the pink flower. He looked over to his right, and the pool was just as far away as it had always been. He looked to his left, and the town was even further away than before. He slumped forwards, too tired to be angry at his mistake. To thirsty to think about anything else, the constant crack of the dry membranes of his mouth. His lips were raw and burnt and his arms were seared red by the sun. His eyes were dry and his vision blurry.
Were his sisters missing him? Did they know he was gone?

He wondered if Harry had won her football game. It was the first time she had captained and he had been so upset that he was going to miss it. He owed a lot of his happiness as a child to his baby sister distracting his Dad so that he wouldn't have to play sports. Already, in this strange environment with concerns that were just not concerns in his usual life, they seemed far away. He missed them, but in the absent way that he might miss them if he was spending the weekend at a friend's house or on a school trip. Like he acknowledged that they weren't there but he was confident he would see them soon and that nothing would really change while he was gone.

Elliot wondered if he was having some deep insight into the concept of heaven, or if he was dreaming and would wake up soon. Or if he was a mind deprived of water and food slowly falling into stupor. He knew without thinking that it must be the latter, but the first two gave him hope, and Elliot decided to go back to his stuff and walk back into town. Live or die trying.

As he stood up, the seizure took him. He fell hard to the floor and every muscle in his body contracted as he lost consciousness and became a slave to the clonic phase.
Waking up, Elliot couldn't remember what had happened. The pink flower on the cactus reminded him and he rolled over, post-icithal. Lying on his belly in the sand he looked over as he heard the rattling insect again.
"Hey Mr. Rattlesnake," Elliot giggled as it slithered from behind the rock. "Are you a mirage too?"

He didn't really know what a rattlesnake looked like, but it was the only snake type he knew. Crouching in front of the serpent, Elliot studied it closely. His vision was too blurry to properly make out its features, but he stared into what he assumed must be the eyes.
Tiring quickly of this activity, Elliot turned to crawl away.

It was as though the snake was angry at him for leaving. No longer the centre of attention. Like a puppy left to play by itself. And, Elliot thought, the snake had no way to communicate. He wasn't a Parselmouth, couldn't talk to snakes. So when the snake bit him, squarely on his ankle, Elliot wasn't actually all that surprised. His senses were mostly dulled and he only felt a strange throb that he had a feeling he used to associate with pain.

He was never going to move from this site. This was to be his final resting place. As he stared at the wide expanse of blue sky, punctuated by a single pink flower that punched a beautiful contrast, he realised that there were worse places to die, and less peaceful ways to go. He wondered which was worse, something short and painful like Vienna's, or this long drawn out death with fire burning his insides and the sun burning his outsides while his brain shrank with water from an imaginary pool.

This was strange. He had too much time to think. Too much time and yet not enough. Some infinities are bigger than other infinites. This was an infinite time when he had to accomplish so much. And yet nobody would ever know what he had said. There was nobody left to read his thoughts, and his journal was fifty feet too far away for him to reach. There was nothing but him, stuck in a dying body, the desert and blue sky and a pink flower. It was majestic at the same time it was horrifically sad.

As the poison coursed through his system, the pain came back. It was everywhere and yet nowhere. A pain that didn't really feel like pain. An infinity.

As the sun began to set, he could start to pick out the stars that were hiding behind the impossibly blue sky. He'd never been one for stars, and anyway the constellations were different this far south. Everything was displaced, everything was wrong. He traced shapes with his eyes but realised quickly that he was no longer capable of such abstract thought. So instead he imagined his sister Delilah, and how she had always liked the stars. She would sing about them in abstract lines stolen from other songs. A Medley of Stars, she called it. And more often than not, the medleys were beautiful. Most of the beauty came from how much she cared, her passion. The way her eyes would sparkle like the very stars she sang about.

"I don't want to die," Elliot said in a small voice, his eyes squeezed shut. It was impossible to stem the tiny squeak of tears that came at the end of the sentence, but there was no water left in him to cry.

He wanted to listen to Delilah sing about stars and hear about Harry winning her football game. About Claire getting into medical school and Katie getting married. They were things that he had been looking forward to, back when his main concerns had been that they might not. Now all he was hoping was that he might fall unconscious before he died.

His wish was granted about seven hours after waking up, six hours after being bitten by the rattlesnake. His final dreams were abstract, involving snakes drawn in the stars in the sky and chasing his sisters across the heavens. Elliot watched them from a rock next to a cactus with a pink flower and there was a pool of beautifully clear water at his feet. In the sky his parents shouted at his sisters, who were all the ages he could first remember them being, telling them not to tease the snake or Elliot would be upset with them. And then, in the moments right before he died, they turned to look at him from the stars. But they couldn't see him, they were too big, too far away. They were too full of life. And they called out his name, banging on a proverbial window as if by shouting loud enough he might be able to hear them from across time. Because that was all there was. Time. It would keep on moving forwards like a conveyor belt. And if he were to fall off the conveyor belt of the sky and land in a heaven that looked like a desert, it wasn't like they could go back and pick him up. It was impossible to walk backwards on the conveyor belt, impossible to be anything but a passive passenger in time.

But from his spot on the rock far below, the entirety of the conveyor belt was visible. It arced across the sky as the snake from the stars. And he could see his sisters when they were younger. See his parents in a life before he knew them. And everything was becoming whiter. Paler. Like someone was altering the image, applying filter after filer, upping the brightness until the image was obscured. And then all that was left was the white. The purest of white he felt he was disrupting with his presence. It was calm, he felt calm. And in the end, that was all there was.

M21, ELLIOT DAY - DECEASED