Robnonymous wrote:Doomish wrote:I'm going to try my hardest to avoid describing things visually as they pertain to Lilly, but from other interpolating characters, I'll have no choice. I know it doesn't make much sense, because it really shouldn't be that hard, but for some reason I find it that way. I'm chipping away at it, though, while writing another, completely different fanfiction every time I get stuck.
It's no big deal, really. It made sense that the visual descriptions popped up once someone with actual vision entered the story. To me at least. I just wasn't sure if you'd done that on purpose or not.
Ah. Well, either way, I'm distancing myself from this one until I come up with a direction to take the plot. I apologize for the short hiatus, but I need a few days to contemplate where I want the story to go from here. Here's a snippet what I'm writing in the meantime. See if you can spot what it's a reference to:
...I don't know what happened to him, but I've stopped dwelling on that. I've stopped dwelling on anything anymore, really. I'm cold, hungry, but I'm not letting it get to me. I'll never let it get to me. The others think I'm the only one that still has any hope left, any hope that we'll see the light of day again. Hope of anything, really.
But I'm not the worst off. Lilly sits in the corner, huddled and broken, head and arms across her knees. On the few occasions we're given food, she doesn't have any. She cares too much about Hanako to let her starve, even though she never says it. She hasn't spoken in years, and I'm starting to think she's unable to anymore. Her blonde hair is matted to her forehead, and her eyes are closed, sewn and grafted shut by the malevolent dictator that runs our lives now. Not that it matters to her. Nothing matters to her anymore. Sometimes she looks up, alert, mumbles for a moment, and then slumps right back over, dry heaving like she's going to vomit, but she never does. We think the reason she doesn't stand up is because she's starting to grow into the wall, but we can't ever be bothered to check. Nobody ever catches what she says, but she doesn't ever come back to reality for very long.
Hanako is gone. Mentally, of course. She's been clawing at the walls recently, her fingernails and eventually her fingertips turned to bloody stumps on the end of her hands. They're always fine after she wakes up. I tried to talk some sense into her once, tried to keep her from scrawling on the walls in her own blood until she fell asleep, but she just looks at me with horrified, anguished eyes, and I can't bring myself to tear her away from her work. The burns on her body have been spreading for a few years now, every day slowly enveloping more and more of her beautiful visage into a horrible, scarred monster. Eventually the scarring grew so painful that she wrenched her own eye out, and can only see out of the one that hasn't been covered yet. On a good day, you can still talk to Hanako like nothing was ever wrong, and she'll work past her giggles and her horrible, gnarled smile and talk about how she misses the way things used to be. Sometimes she sits over by Lilly and they cry together. Sometimes she doesn't.
Shizune and Misha are sitting in the corner opposite Lilly's, staring at each other. Thinking. Shizune has always been unable to speak her mind properly, and now that she's seen Misha broken and shredded to bits so many times that it's physically hurting her, I don't think any of us want to hear what she has to say. They're no longer two entities, Shizune and Misha, but one bigger object. Not physically, of course, but they're literally inseparable. If you bring them more than a few feet from one another, their almost animal instincts will kick in and they'll claw at whatever they can find to get out of your grasp and back to each other. Misha's trademark hairstyle was torn right from her head on the first day we were put in this place and it's never come back. Sometimes she twiddles idly with the air like she's twirling the drills again, but then she realizes what she's doing and is ashamed. Misha is very protective of us, and would- and has -thrown herself onto almost anything to protect the rest of the group, especially Shizune. Shizune has stopped trying to comfort her physically, but I'm almost certain the two have grown almost a symbiotic telepathic link. The way they help each other is insane, I've seen them collaborate like twins, one knowing exactly what the other wants and vice versa. Emi's suggested they're sexually entwined, but I've never seen it happen.
Rin is also gone. Only, physically. Nobody has seen her in a decade or so now, and I'm starting to think that the voice above us let her go, either out of pity, or out of mercy. I have nothing to say about her. She never broke. She was our voice of reason, the one thing that kept me sane. And now she's been gone for so long that I can't even tell how much time we've been down here anymore. In fact, she might have been taken away from us to spite me and only me.
Emi... It hurts to talk about Emi. The voice broke her first. It took away her prosthetics, forced her to hobble around on her stumps for a while. After it got tired of that, it threw her down into what she talks about as the pits of hell, being constantly jabbed by pins and needles in sheer darkness. When she returned, she didn't talk for a year or two. I don't really blame her. Emi's been talking to me, lately. I'm the only one she ever talks to. The others are too far gone to listen to her anyway. It took her some time to work up her emotions, but the facade she puts on is almost like her old self. She's constantly crying, but she tries not to let it get to her. By now I'm sure she can ignore the tears to the point of her entire shirt being soaked without her even giving a second thought. The voice gave her back her prosthetics eventually, but she can't take them off. She's tried, and she claims it will kill her and she'll never come back to us. They're manufactured like some sort of horrible steampunk anomaly, jutting out in random spots and chugging like they're controlling her. She's shown me how they transform before, how they arrange themselves into whatever shape she needs them to be to get by. I've seen them coil like springs, and turn into thick hatchets to cut through jungles as she walks high above us. I've never seen what the ends that latch onto her legs look like, but she claims they're long, horrible hollow needles, jabbing so far up her legs that she can feel them in her pelvis when she walks. She can't run anymore, it hurts her too much.
She spoke again. "I said stop it, Hisao." I turn towards her and realize that I'm so lost in thought that my nails are digging into her sides, tiny specks of blood coming from the deepest puncture. I hesitate to let go of her, because I know what's going to happen when I do. I mutter a sorry. I can't muster up enough courage to feel anything, because as soon as I start feeling anything, I know I won't be able to stop. Like mechanical creatures, my hands retract from around Emi's sides. I hold her when I don't know what else to do...
Just a small passage of what I've been working on. It doesn't pertain to this story at all, but I may flesh it out once Cutter is finished. That is, if I ever get Cutter finished. The next chapter will be coming soon, I promise.
