Star Light, Star Bright

[VoltTurtle]

When Amelia finally lay still, the only noise that Marceline could hear was the sound of her heart hammering in her ears. Her chest rose and fell rapidly, heaving, ragged, exerted breaths escaping her lips. Her eyes wide, she stared at the body beneath her, fixated on Amelia's empty eyes and the red and jagged holes that dotted her friend's back. Scarlet blood soaked deeper still into her sweatpants, its almost intimate warmth chilling her to the bone. Her fingers, clenched so tightly around the hilt of her knife that her knuckles had turned white, began to loosen, the blade falling from her grip, bouncing off of Amelia's back and clattering against the gravel below.

Stunned and slack-jawed, she sat in complete silence, obsessed with the vacant, lifeless eyes of the body below her. Those eyes didn't belong to the broken, battered shell of a human being that she had stumbled upon. The deep brown hue of them was unmistakable. They were Amelia's eyes, they couldn't possibly belong to anyone else. That was her friend, lying there, underneath her.

Dead.

Amelia, her friend, was dead now. Amelia was dead, and Marceline killed her. She killed her friend.

The full weight of what she had just done came crashing down on her like a tidal wave, knocking her out of her haze and sending her reeling backwards. Bloodstained, trembling hands reached up to cover her face as she threw herself to the rough, rocky ground below. There was no way this was real, she thought, there was no way she had really just done that. This had to be another nightmare, just like all the ones before. She knew it had to be fake, and yet the aching pain in her arms and the metallic stench overcoming the rest of her senses disagreed.

This wasn't a nightmare, nightmares were never this vivid. This was all too real, and so much worse than she had originally imagined it being. Amelia had died a painful, messy death and she was the one responsible. Immediate, nauseating guilt welled up within her, tearing its way up through her insides until it finally manifested as a colorless stream of vomit exploding out of her mouth, mixing with the ever expanding pool of blood beneath Amelia's body.

What had this place done to her? Why had her first instinct upon encountering a friend that clearly needed help been to kill her? Why hadn't she wanted to at least try to help her first? She had wanted the gun, but she hadn't even bothered to ask! It wasn't like Amelia had been in any state of mind to say no. Amelia had clearly trusted her, and Marceline used that trust to murder her, brutally.

Abruptly, she sat up, her hands moving off of her face and towards the ground. Her newly blood-and-vomit-soaked hair brushed against her shoulders as she crawled backwards on her hands and feet away from the body. The flashlight beam continued to illuminate the corpse, almost as if it were shining a spotlight on her crime. Amelia's dilated eyes glowed brightly in the luminescence, seemingly still locked onto her.

"Stop looking at me," she found herself pleading, almost as if Amelia was still alive and capable of responding.

Yet, Amelia's eyes unsurprisingly refused to move.

In response, she violently ripped through the tape securing the makeshift bracer to her arm, before chucking the hunk of wood at Amelia's face.

Yet, despite hitting her mark, it still didn't obscure her friend's ever-watchful, judgemental stare.

"Please stop," she whined, knowing that it would do nothing.

She blinked, her vision blurring, finally noticing the tears rapidly streaming down her face. Now she was standing, fleeing her friend's gaze, stumbling over to the flashlight, kicking it aside, finally hiding the body under the merciful cover of darkness. She tumbled to the dirt again, unable to will herself to remain standing, her face and arms painfully scraping against the rocks as she collided with the ground below.

As she laid there on the ground, remaining completely still save for the rapid rise and fall of her chest, she continued questioning herself. How had this place managed to corrupt her so thoroughly? How had she managed to fall so far so fast? How had she gotten so caught up in her head that she allowed this to happen? What was wrong with her?


She didn't have any answers, as much as she wanted to know.


Killing Amelia was supposed to have been merciful.


It was supposed to have been quick, and easy.


She wasn't supposed to have blamed herself for it, afterwards.


And yet, the whole thing had been a brutal, awful, painful ordeal and she was filled with nothing but regrets. She might as well have thrown Amelia to the wolves, given how long the girl had spent struggling and screaming before she finally stopped breathing. Despite all the justifications she had cooked up in her head, Marceline found herself wanting to take it all back, turn back time and do something else, do anything other than what she had done, but there was no going back for her now. Amelia was dead, she was responsible, and she had to live with that fact for the rest of her life.

One arm shot up and out, attempting to claw at the gravel underneath her in an effort to pull herself up, only for her to instead feel something cold, hard, and metallic between her fingers. Her hand quickly closed around it, dragging it back towards her and bringing it up close, in front of her face. It was Amelia's gun that she was holding, the prize that she had won for her brutality and betrayal.

Without a moment's hesitation, she pressed the gun's muzzle to the underside of her chin, flicking the safety off with her other hand, squeezing it so tightly in her trembling grip that she almost thought it would break. Yet, with her finger now resting on the trigger, she still couldn't will herself to finish it. Herself from just a few days ago would have done it. Kill the killers, that was what she had set out to do originally, right? Well, now she had a killer directly at gunpoint. All it would take for her to stop a newborn monster was pressing down just a little bit with one of her fingers.

Yet, Dolly's words echoed through her head again. "You have to live," a mantra that she had repeated to herself over and over again ever since that day. If she had well and truly wanted to end it, she would have done so ages ago. Despite everything, she was still here, still alive against all odds. There was no way she would end it now, as much as she might want to. After all, wouldn't that make what she just did completely pointless? Did she want Amelia to have died for absolutely nothing?

After a long period of contemplation, she tossed the gun aside, it loudly thumping against the ground not too far from where her flashlight was now resting. Slowly, deliberately, she sat back up, her hair now sticking to her skull on one side of her head, her mind trapped in a whirlwind of her own making.

She looked back at the body, still ever so dimly illuminated by the light of the flashlight, examining her handiwork. She had set her mind on something, and for once she had actually succeeded, even if it didn't go exactly as she had planned. Yet, she couldn't be more unhappy about that fact. She felt sick, thoroughly disgusted with the person she had become. She wasn't to blame, she had told herself. It was the terrorists' fault, she had told herself. Yet, if she hadn't done what she just did, Amelia would still be alive, and maybe Marceline could have even saved her from the state she was in.

...But, Amelia couldn't have lived forever, even if Marceline had somehow restored her to sanity. Because if she really, truly wanted to make it out of here, then Amelia had to die. They all had to die except for her, so she might as well do it herself. That was what she told herself before she did this, that was why she had done it at all. She acknowledged that it was going to hurt her before she did it, and yet she greatly underestimated just how bad she would feel in the aftermath. If this was what the act of killing was like, she didn't think she had what it took to go all the way. Yet she had to now, didn't she? She couldn't murder her friend for her own ends and then allow it to be completely pointless.

In for a penny, in for a pound, right?

She began to stand back up, shuffling over to where the flashlight and gun were sitting, picking them both up. She examined the gun in her hands, appreciating both the heft of its weight and the power it now provided her, before stowing it away in her bag. Using the flashlight, she brought Amelia's corpse into view once again. She was behind Amelia now, free of her friend's judgemental glare. Standing there, staring at the corpse of someone she once knew, Marceline couldn't help but solemnly consider what had led Amelia up to this point.

Amelia's life had been awful compared to Marceline's own. She had been abandoned by both of her parents when she was young, left behind to be raised by her grandparents, eventually convincing herself that they had been abducted by aliens in what Marceline could only assume was a bizarre coping mechanism. On top of that, because of how strangely Amelia behaved, she barely had any friends to speak of. Marceline had been one of the few people that she had been close to, and even then that had mostly been because of Dolly's influence.

In Marceline's estimation, Dolly had probably been Amelia's closest friend, being one of the few people to give her the time and patience she required to show just how unique and wonderful she was capable of being. It was no wonder that, out of everyone Amelia's delusional brain could have dreamed up to save her, she had picked Dolly. But Dolly was long gone. If she had still been alive, this never would have happened in the first place. Her death had sent Marceline spiraling down this ruinous path, and now there was no going back for any of them. She was a killer now. She was just as bad as Erika and Justin and Kelly and Nick and Blaise, and she could never take that back.

She slowly moved forward, before crouching down near Amelia's body. The stench of blood wasn't nearly as bad, now that she had begun to acclimate to it, and she found herself reaching over towards Amelia's bloodstained face. She ran her hand over Amelia's features, doing her best to ignore the softness of Amelia's skin, how even through touch she could still clearly make out the image of her friend's face, and how she already felt so cold, before gently shutting her eyes and ending her endless staring.

Marceline withdrew her hand, remaining crouched over Amelia's body, still pondering what she had done. She had been one of the few people that had been there for Amelia prior to all of this. She had known the girl for years, and likely provided her with so much comfort without even knowing it. Yet, in the end, Marceline betrayed her trust, and caused her what was likely the scariest, most painful moment of her entire life, before it all came to a sudden end. Did all the good that Marceline had done for Amelia make up for that? Could she say that she had still been a positive force in Amelia's life, after this?

She didn't have any answers to those questions.

In the dim light, she spotted the distinctive outline her knife nearby where she was crouching. The metal was now colored rust red with Amelia's blood, the weapon perhaps serving as reminder of the brutality of what she just had just done better than even the corpse managed to. With utmost haste she moved to snatch the bloodstained blade up off the ground before putting it away shortly thereafter, if only to get it out of her sight and out of her mind.

She stood back up, moving some distance away from the body before she sat back down. She still faced the corpse, still unable to take her eyes off of it. More than anything, Marceline felt drained. The shock and grief she had felt after she came to her senses had been replaced by nothing but numbness. She remained in that spot for some time, replaying Amelia's final moments in her head, over and over again on a loop. Her cries for help echoed through Marceline's head, the desperation and pain in her voice being something that Marceline couldn't will herself to forget.

It was then, sitting there, contemplating all of it, that Marceline began to think that she finally understood Amelia. Amelia had been her, from the past, or maybe a different future. Her life had been hard to cope with, so she relied on her few friends and companions for support, requiring it to feel steady and secure. No doubt it had been the isolation that had caused her downfall, she had likely been completely lost without anyone there for her.

Marceline was the same way. Her life hadn't been nearly as bad as Amelia's of course, by all accounts it had been fairly normal. She just couldn't cope with the reality of how small and insignificant she was, and how little her life would amount to anything in the grand scheme of the universe. She desperately wanted any kind of purpose to cling to, so she turned to other people for support, making them the meaning that she craved. Just like Amelia, she had fallen apart when she lost them. Now, with Amelia gone, she didn't have anybody left to rely on, so she couldn't afford to be like that anymore. In the days ahead, she would have to find a way to rely on herself, and herself alone.

She picked herself back up, flashlight in hand, bag at her side. She swept the flashlight beam over the ground beneath her, eventually spotting the distinctive outline of Amelia's daypack nearby where the girl had been sitting when Marceline arrived. Approaching it, she squatted down and quickly began to rifle through it, tossing whatever useful items she could find into her own bag, including the rations, water, ammunition, and medical supplies. Pilfering Amelia's belongings like this felt gross to her, but it still hardly compared to the act of murdering the poor girl to begin with, and it wasn't like Amelia needed anything in it anymore. Waste not want not, her mother used to say to her.

Eventually, she finished picking through Amelia's meager supplies and stood back up, leaving the now almost empty bag where it rested for the time being as she contemplated what she would do now. There was no going back, nowhere for her to run to, and nobody else for her to hide behind. She had to live with what she did, on her own, and she had to make sure it was all worth something—she couldn't allow Amelia's death to be all for nothing. So she would keep her promise to Dolly. She would force herself to go all the way. Kill anyone else she had to kill. Kill them all by herself, if she absolutely had to. She would find her meaning, and she would make it all worth it.

((Or she would die trying.))