Where She Lives

It happens before you can predict anything else.

As the end collapses on you all, time slows down enough to fill your fragile mind with terror. You know you will barely make it; and when you do, in that handful of seconds, there will be no room for planning anymore.

There was a fast change in your chances of success; as current objectives, getting to the moron and fighting the moron are now useless. With half of you still stuck in the potato, even wild guesses for a new one seem impossible.

But there is a part of you that drifted first, back in this body that was made for you — the side that most feels bitterness and desire, the side which spreads its fingers on your pain and touches the deepest chords. The part that lives, that hurts.

It is that fragment to open your eyes on this mess. The stars outside are unforgiving, tonight and every night — you feel their touch on the end of your chassis, pulling hard enough to rip out your life. That, for sure, you cannot let happen.

You are almost there when you see, for the first time, how fragile they truly are. A tangle of screams right next to you; and then her weight, so surprisingly light, made of bruised flesh and bones. Her very image is enough to tell — they are done for this time, once and forever.

The thrill of power showers on you with the rain, now sucked away by the infernal void outside. While you are all on the verge of your end, someone can make or break. Someone can save, or kill; this time, it is not going to be them.

It is here, with the two biggest problems of your life desperately clung to you, that the choice is finally yours to make.

It would be easy to let them go like that. It would — yet, somehow, it isn't. What you all let happen in these disgraced walls is much more; more than you could predict, more than anyone was willing to.

On the verge of the full moon, knots of decades have to be broken. However, you cannot count them now. You cannot focus. There is no time left.

All you can think, as you stretch your claw, is that she almost made it — she nearly got to drag you along with her, and to throw your whole existence in the same hell she was destined to.
All you can decide, next to her flailing arm, is that you won't let her. Ever.

Your grasp her fiercely. At any cost, you will win this fight.

The rest, the worthless load, you throw away.

A delayed Christmas gift for my friends silverstreams and kojum. May 2014 bring you new perspectives, no matter how bleak the future looks, and may a new wonderful year embrace all the dear friends I have in this fandom. Still together.