oom: intervening years
Aug. 8th, 2019 08:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
abyssum_invocatOn a gathering storm comes
A tall handsome man
In a dusty black coat with
A red right hand
A tall handsome man
In a dusty black coat with
A red right hand
When Sinthia leaves, the door to Milliways shuts gently behind her with a soft whisper of moving air. It’s unbearably soft, almost inaudible but for the little push of breeze that makes her skirt rustle. It’s early nighttime in Austria, though that would be hard to tell from indoors, as eternally dim as it is beneath the layers of metal and clouded, dirty glass. She lifts her head, taking a deep breath and fingering the matchbook Logan gave her.
It’s supposed to help.
It doesn’t.
-----
What she remembers of her time on the other side of the door gradually fades in the months and monotony of anguish she endures. There are dead people, and there are live ones: occasionally the live ones join the former, occasionally it is by her actions. Usually there is blood and pain and eventually Sinthia learns to shut that out. She stops feeling the twist in her chest when the life leaves their bodies like water draining from a stoppered sink.
She stops caring how many there have been or are yet to be.
The game changes from practice to survival, and in that game Sinthia proves remarkably adept. A year goes by with almost no change except for her almost entirely ceasing her habit of visiting the prisoners of war. She doesn’t look at them, she doesn’t speak to them. They become nothing but fixtures to bookend her days and nights, and their deaths stop mattering to her.
She stops wondering if they matter to anyone else.
-----
Years go by--the end of the war goes by--and while nothing for her particularly changes, the targets do. Faces go from clean-shaven soldiers to civilians, women, children. The only thing that doesn’t change is that they’re all scared, all realizing the paralyzing fear that comes a moment before death.
Sinthia begins to recognize the weight of the intangible, feeling it settle like a yoke across her shoulders that evens out the longer she feels it there. She becomes very good at what she does, killing with accuracy and speed, and a surprising amount of creativity. Her art--and it is an art, however grotesque the origin and material--is in undiscoverable or unrecognizable body parts, not the plausibility of accident. It makes her no less good at it.
