The View From Halfway Down

[Emprexx Plush]

I sorta wish that we could've been friends before all this.

Fitting enough that the last words she spoke were the ones that stuck to his mind, though in fairness they were already there in vague form. Marco would not dare shape the alternate possibilities of Marceline Carlson, he did not know her well enough for any predictions to be more than stretching her face over a blank slate. She offered insight, though. Marceline believed, perhaps only because of guilty delirium, that there was a world behind them where they could have been friends. Among all the regrets weighing her down that's the one he facilitated her exit on: a lost friendship in promise of what could have been. If he had come to her as a friend in this garden, would it have kept her hands off of her guns?

Had she ever thought of Amelia as a friend?

Or Nick?

Marco had made peace when she started meandering that her final words were not for him. All that passed between them since he shot her had been for her benefit, not his, so a few sentences more sliding over his consciousness would not be any burden. Living long enough for them to mean anything meant they would soften to white noise in the hum of dozens of memories, too calm to stand out among the cacophony of curses that made up the negative and too impersonal to rival the warmth of the positive. Marceline's final words were meant only for herself, to guide her into the sort of place of comfort where when her face came to haunt him on sleepless nights it would be at peace and he could send it away with less effort than all the others. With her final statement echoing in his head Marco watched Marceline fade away under the sunset. It spoke to the life that she had chosen that she looked so uncannily similar to how he had found her. Her position had gone from seated with her arms around her legs to slumped on the ground with her hand on her chest, the sort of gesture that might clutch a wound if it weren't off-center from the bolt jutting out to its side. The bolt that was the only indication she might be wounded at all. Marceline was already so soaked in blood that when hers dried it would be indiscernible from that of her victims. It might make one wonder if the blood on her face was really hers; a gash on her lip topped the trail running down to her chin, but taken at distance where her reputation filled in the details the human eye could not one might draw ghoulish conclusions of a killer who tore into her victims with every tool available. An act totally unthinkable when they awoke seemed all too plausible after days of desperation; only a monster from the most fantastic of fiction would tear another's throat out with their own teeth, but wasn't that the image Marceline had presented? If he had tried, no, succeeded at shooting her from a distance wouldn't it have been as simple as letting his imagination wander to draw conclusions like that from the twisted snarl death would have frozen her face in, the small sign that someone had struck back along her lip going totally unnoticed in favor of speculation justifying her death beyond want for revenge?

I sorta wish

that we could've been friends

before all this

Black roots stretching into dim pink locks and frayed ends splayed into the ivy. Mouth slightly agape, corners bent towards the suggestion of a smile. Eyes eased closed but not like one who was sleeping. To sleep was a natural act, one that Marco had learned from night after night of staring into Nick's face did not come with complete stillness. There was movement behind the lids, rise and fall of breath in flaring nostrils, twitching in the lips, in the cheeks, rolling and scratching and murmuring, more personal habits that Marco could not attribute so broadly. Sleep was not a still thing though. What was still, and what he thought the association of stillness with sleep came from, was the desire to sleep. How when people were trying to sleep they tried to stop every motion but their breath and wait for it to take them. That was the impression Marceline gave him, not a girl who was sleeping but a girl who was yearning to sleep, resolved that it was time to rest with mumbled hints of what dreams might come as the last note on her lips. It was all there in front of him. The peaceful face they had been working towards. It was there in every detail for him to study for as long as he wished. A lasting testament that at her last opportunity Marceline had chosen to be a person, a damaged and vulnerable person, rather than a monster struggling to kill them all. Someone who thought she could have been friends with the boy she'd forced to live with the worst pain she could imagine.

He took it all in before finally allowing himself to scream.

No one believed the screams he could make the first time they heard him. His mom had heard them on stage dozens of times and she still struggled to wrap her head around how he did it. Incredible lungs for his size, that was all the explanation she could imagine. She'd heard him strain on the guttural roar of Silence Calms The Storm for a nearly twenty seconds straight, or shriek before The Marshall Art's instrumental breakdown for twenty-five of the full thirty. He had videos saved at home of competitions where the winner had held a single scream for up to a minute as a sort of aspirational challenge. What made them so difficult was trying to control his voice, either to maintain an effect or keep it from squealing higher into comical ranges; his voice wasn't squeaky by any means, but it made him self-conscious as it crept. Twenty-five seconds, that was his upper limit for performance scream.

Marco couldn't have controlled this scream if he wanted to, and there was no way for him to time it. Not when his next conscious thought came pitched over in the dirt with his chest feeling like it would cave in. The rawness of his throat filled every breath with needles. Clawing hands found cloth that felt familiar enough, it did not occur to him how far away he left his bag until he had already torn Marceline's open and choked through sputtering pulls from her water. He sank over the bag feeling like he might vomit again. He would vomit again if he looked back.

He didn't hate her.

He wouldn't allow himself to hate her.

He wanted to, though, with her placid expression turning smug in his imagination he wanted to hate her like even she knew she deserved. Again and again she told him that she deserved consequence and yet the worst he'd given her was not saying in so many words that she had his forgiveness. It was the practical thing to do because her suffering would not satisfy him, or if it did he was already the sort of person who couldn't have a normal life off of the island. It was right thing to do because she was already dying, she was already no threat to him, there was no justification for...he heard Nick's voice under rushing water. 'Provocative shit like that. Don't use people you kill for verbal jabs.' Nick had done things Marco would never fully understand at his worst. At his best, though, he urged Marco to be a person who never went farther than needed. Letting Marceline drift away at peace lived up to that standard.

Once again doing the right thing didn't make him feel any better. Taking full inventory after the disorientation of screaming himself breathless passed, most of his feelings went numb save for two: emptiness hanging in the pit of his stomach and the copper plate of the glove pressed against his waist.

They both tempted him in the same direction.

sl-slit my f-fucking throat…

If the right choice didn't make him feel any better, maybe the wrong one would.

The glove fit over his hand so easily now, he could have it on and adjusted in moments. The blades were clean and sharp after the day they'd had yesterday, in as good or better condition than the first time he had used them. It did not make him so sick to turn and face Marceline's body now, or to return to the kneeling position he'd studied her in, or to wrap his fingers around her neck until the edges were just making contact with skin he could only assume was still warm. He did not have to imagine what would come next. Marco knew with greater certainty than any other function it possessed what the glove could do to a corpse.

Marco took a deep breath.

He let it out in a sigh that relaxed his entire body. His hand pulled away with her throat still untouched.

Because it didn't make him feel any better.

All this time when he thought about Kayla he wondered if he was only telling himself more lies. He'd accepted that what had happened to her was his fault, that his state of mind could just have been another convenient layer of self deception, that he'd kept pushing on into atrocity and struggling with violence because that's the sort of person he was underneath everything. He liked it. He wanted it. He could only be satisfied by suffering, no matter how many times he told himself otherwise. Either Nick's influence or deliberate restraint had kept him from pursuing those impulses any farther, but if the opportunity presented itself again? If he could justify what he'd done even further with a real threat rather than an imagined one? Would the guilt still eat away at him or was he waiting all along for more permissible excuse to be his own kind of monster?

He could never be sure until he imagined her throat torn open under his hand and it did not make him feel any better.

Marceline had been taller than him by almost half a foot, so her scabbard sat loose on his back. The guns and the knife fit better into his bag restocked with what was left of her supplies. The only thing he left behind was the glove, which he left with the back plate laying across her cheek. There was not a drop of blood on its edges.

Marco was a murderer. That would never change in the sense that he murdered someone, but he did not have to embrace that mistake. Marceline could have been a murder as easily as she was a murderer but at every opportunity offered he chose another path. No one choice made him feel any better, but as he considered them all together on his path back to the manor he thought it was possible, not certain but possible, that he could feel proud of them someday. Still doubts insisted under his reasoning that it would have been better if she was, that she did not deserve her peace, that he failed Nick, that he was weak, that he could never earn the life he wanted

Although it was no longer a habit, Marco was still talented at not thinking about all the things he did not want to think about.

((Marco Hart Continued It Don't Matter if I'm Coming Home To You))