Repose Memories (reposememories) wrote in repose, @ 2017-06-06 20:52:00 |
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Entry tags: | cat dubrovna, newt penhaligon, ~plot: memories |
[Memory]
What: Memory.
Will characters be viewing the memory or experiencing it?: Experiencing it.
Warning, this memory contains: Violence. Sexual references.
It’s late. It’s cooling now, the bloody heat that has made it hard to think even within thick stone walls is beginning to break. There’s an uneasy pressure in the air but you’re walking up the drive and you’re still buzzed so the length of it seems endless. But you’re not thinking about the heat, it’s too fucking grown up a complaint. ‘Oh, the weather is terrible’. You’re thinking of the girl at Will’s, the party. She was hot, older, probably somebody’s sister. Probably the reason they had beer because Will can’t bloody buy it, he doesn’t look sixteen, let alone eighteen, daft bastard. You don’t know whose sister, Will’s place isn’t the Ritz, it’s a halfway house for flotsam from the holidays. His parents clear off to Lake Como and leave the place behind.
But you’re not thinking about Will, you’re thinking about playing strip-poker and getting rat-arsed on what was in the liquor cabinet while the hot older girl stripped off to her knickers. You’re grinning at this as you shove your hands in your pockets and trudge past the box-hedge on the way in, the memory of cheap red lace and the way a girl looks when she’s interested and the rime of expensive liquor on your tongue. You’re still bloody stoned, and you’re buzzed and you have absolutely no intention of going in the regular way.
You take the stairs two at a time, up the back route. He’s probably asleep. He should be asleep, but he might be at the bottom of the garden, Newt’s a funny chap like that. He’s apart. He doesn’t look like he’s made up of them, of her fizzing like overblown champagne and him weighted like rocks, he doesn’t look like he’s stretched out, a vector between two extremes. He just looks like a boy, somebody who might come through this without the extremes.
You listen, in the hallway up here where you’re both tidied away out of reach, at his door and you hear nothing. It doesn’t mean anything, the doors are thick, they’ve been around longer than your family has, but you sit listening to silence and you hope he’s not asleep somewhere where his pyjamas will mildew.
You sit. Your head’s still spinning pleasantly round and round and you’re warm, sticky from the night out. You ought to get up, take a bath, peel off clothes and climb into your sheets or toss one out on the memory of the shadow of her pussy behind cheap red lace but you’re comfortable and your eyes are heavy and your head rocks back against the door. You’re almost asleep when the silence breaks.
You can hear her screaming. Your first thought (you wish you felt the knee-jerk of sympathy; you wish this wasn’t normal; you wish you were still too bloody young to notice or to bother with) is that you hope he’s out of the house. It’s warm enough that he could be at the bottom of the garden, you don’t know. That he’s not in his bed, he’s at the bottom of the bloody garden, mildewed pyjamas and all and he can’t hear that high soft sound that echoes on a hall that’s empty since they flogged all the furniture.
You’re awake. Whatever of your buzz there was left is submerged under shocking-cold awareness, adrenaline swamps your lungs, your heart until you’re shaking sat there against the door and you push off, both palms on bare floorboard and you can hear your own feet thunder down the stairs. You’re an idiot, you’re a fucking idiot, but you can hear her voice fade into broken sobbing and you can hear the sharp crash of something breaking and you’re probably still rat-faced because you’re angry now, you’re fucking angry and it’s rising in your throat like gorge, like sick pleasure in knowing you’re right when you shoulder the door and it bounces on its hinges and they turn.
He’s in his shirt-cuffs. The ugly vase from your aunt is missing from the mantle and is scattered in fat glass hanks across the hearth. She’s cream as milk and she’s curled into her chair as if she can make herself small enough not to warrant attention, his hand is on her wrist and you watch her hand splay, fine-boned like delicate china made for a mantlepiece. It works, helpless, like something beautifully detached and he turns to look at you.
You know how this goes. You’re wearing the remnants, the mottled color like house colors across your belly and up your side. He’s bigger and he’s heavier and you can smell in the air the sharp fear from her in her chair and you can see, almost in slow motion, almost in second-by-second, when he swings at you, the weight of his body behind his fist: there’s a rolling, sick certainty that swoops down your gullet and into your belly and a shockwave, electric and ice until you’re shuddering anticipation, the pendulum swing between getting hit and staying down and getting up and giving the sick bastard everything you have.
You can feel the cartilage crumple, the sting as his signet ring catches the corner of your eye, clips you, a gush of warm heat over your upper lip, your chin, your throat as your weight rocks back on your heels as she screams again, high and piercing and god you wish she’d shut up. You wish she’d shut up or she’d walk out or she’d take the boy and leave, you’ll kill one another eventually but an audience doesn’t bloody help.
You’re empty and you’re buzzing and all that fills in between where you should feel something, anything because he’s on his heels, savage anticipation and satisfaction and you know this is sick, you know this is fucked but you’re riding a tide of what feels like fission in your throat, your veins, your gut and you’re throwing yourself forward to knock him over, knock him down, to hit him as hard as he’s hit you, because she’s screaming, she’s screaming like birds and all you can think of, all you can think of as he hurls you toward the wall and your back catches the corner of the mantle, bludgeons your kidney and you crumple like one of the stuffed bears upstairs - all you can think of is the sheer rush, the cantering of your heartbeat as you black out.