Bunny can has! (i_can_has) wrote in light_of_may, @ 2011-03-14 21:17:00 |
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Entry tags: | #solo, 2009-08-12, bunny |
you are your own weapon
Who: Bunny
When: Nighttime
Where: Dreamland
In the center of an empty white room was a coloring book and a box of crayons. Bunny looked around the room. It had no windows, no exits, and she didn’t know how she got there. Yet she felt no anxiety. She trotted over to the coloring book, and traded her animal form for her human one. She was a little girl again. When she shifted to human form, she was fully dressed. She wore a frilly dress with pale pink and white stripes over a beige pair of khakis. On her feet were a pair of her mother’s high heels – way too big for her tiny feet. She wore layers of costume jewelry from her dress-up box. Bangles of every color lined her arms practically up to her elbows. This wasn’t unusual for Bunny – as a child or otherwise.
Bunny plopped down on the ground and opened the coloring book. Some pages were different animals, some were cartoons. Some were even memories. On one page, she saw a cartoonized version of her fifth birthday. On another, sitting on her dad’s lap in the doctor’s office when she was being diagnosed. On yet another, the night Locke first went through her bedroom window. Bunny kept flipping through the pages, trying to find the one she wanted to color in. She flipped again, and this page was marked with the number 14. On it, she saw a road, a line of cars, and herself sitting in the passenger seat of Lily Flores’ car. She knew where that road went. It made her feel scared. Quickly, she flipped back on the pages, pretending she’d never seen it. Back through the years and her childhood, and to a simple picture of a kitty chasing a butterfly. She liked kitties, and she liked chasing butterflies. What color did she want to make the butterfly? After thinking about it a moment, she grabbed a blue crayon, and leaned over the coloring book. She was content to draw. Her tics made it impossible to stay inside the lines, but that didn’t bother her so much. The jagged lines and imperfections almost made the butterfly look like it was moving. It was alive with its flaws. It was no cookie-cutter, perfectly colored butterfly. And Bunny liked it that way.
She took her time with the butterfly, adding many colors in her attempt to bring it to life. This would be the most perfect butterfly ever, even if it was outside the lines. But something was wrong. Something kept tapping on her shoulder. She tried to ignore this annoyance. There were butterflies to be brought to life, all with glorious, untidy colors. But the tapping wouldn’t stop.
Tap, tap, tap.
It was incessant. It was demanding. It would not be ignored. The longer the tapping went on, the larger the tiny ball of anxiety in her stomach became. The tapping wouldn’t stop. She had to see what it was. She didn’t want to see. She wanted to make colorful butterflies and playful kittens.
Tap, tap, tap.
Bunny huffed and sighed, blowing her hair out of her face as she tried to focus on the book. It seemed like the butterfly was getting smaller. Every time she blinked, the playful kitten in the book seemed to change. It was so subtle that she didn’t notice right away. Eventually, she realized the playful kitten didn’t look happy any more. It was getting angry. Predatory. It didn’t just want to play with the butterfly anymore.
It wanted to destroy it.
Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap…
Bunny was mad. The tapper had done this. The tapper was ruining her happy, playful kitten and colorful butterfly. She growled and turned, and when she faced the tapper she was staring down the barrel of a gun. She wasn’t in the clean white room anymore, and she wasn’t a little girl, either. She was sixteen-years-old and sitting naked in the center of that road in Saginaw, on that horrible day. She didn’t want to be here. She didn’t want to have to face this. She just wanted to color. She just wanted everybody to be happy and safe.
Rage boiled up inside of her, and she hissed at the man with the gun. “Go away,” she snarled, in a voice so angry it was hard to believe it was her own. It grew loud and echoed. The ground shook with the power of that voice. A few of her crayons rolled away, and leaves fell off of trees. And the tapper fell over dead – his throat ripped out by invisible teeth.
Everything grew cold. The world faded to black. Things were darker and darker, until she could no longer tell where she was. She could have been in the clean white room, or that horrible, bloody road, or the abyss itself. She was in a world of blackness. A world of shadow and doubt. All that was left were Bunny and her coloring book, and the body of the man she had killed.
Bunny was scared. She scrambled to her feet, and hugged herself for warmth. She looked around. At first there was nothing. And then faceless people began walking out of the shadows, encircling her. They were pointing at the body. “Look what you did.”
“I had to,” she murmured. “It was him or me. Them or us. I made the right decision, and I’d do it again.”
They pointed at her. “Look at who you are.”
Bunny looked down at herself. Blood was dripping down her torso. She realized belatedly that she could taste blood. It was dripping from her mouth.
“Look what you did.”
“Look at who you are.”
“Look what you did.”
“Look at what you are!”
“Monster! Monster! Monster!”
Bunny put her hands over her ears. “Stop it.”
“Monster! Monster! Monster!”
“I’m not listening,” Bunny whispered. They didn’t listen to her.
“MONSTER, MONSTER, MONSTER-!”
Now Bunny screamed. She squeezed her eyes shut and clenched her fists over her ears, and screamed with all she had. “STOP IT!”
It stopped. At first, she wasn’t sure how she knew this, but after a moment she figured it out. The chanting crowd had grown so thunderous she could feel each shout in her heart, thudding like bass from a noisy car radio. Now everything was very still. She lowered her hands. She opened her eyes.
She was standing in the grass. It was nighttime. Something felt strange. It took her a moment to realize – the world was black and white. She was black and white. She looked down at herself, and realized she was no longer naked, nor was she covered in blood. She was wearing a little black dress. She could smell birds and rabbits.
Fear seized her again. In the distance, she saw her coloring book. She ran to it. The paged turned wildly in the wind, and she realized with some shred of hope that the pages still held color. She reached out for it, and when the pages settled she froze. She saw herself standing on the front lawn of the Moriarty house. “No!” She recoiled and stood, clamping her hands over her mouth in horror.
“What’s wrong, dear?”
Bunny whirled around. Across the lawn was Eleanor Moriarty, as she had appeared that night. She was offering a tissue.
“I am not like you!” Bunny snapped.
Eleanor chuckled. It was a deep, throaty sound, full of both contempt and amusement. “You can’t fight your nature.” She gestured with her hand, and suddenly Bunny was very aware of their surroundings. Bodies and gore littered the grass – as did various weapons. They were standing on a battlefield, with the Moriarty house in the background.
“This isn’t my nature,” Bunny insisted. “It’s not who I am!”
Eleanor was holding a gun. Lazily, almost with a sense of disinterest, she thumbed off the safety and pointed it at Bunny. “You’re going to have to prove that, dear.”
Bunny looked around for the nearest weapon. She saw a particularly ancient looking battleaxe lodged in-between the shoulder blades of a dead warrior. She reached for it. Eleanor threw her head back and laughed. “Silly kitten. You are your own weapon.”
And Bunny realized she was. She shifted and lunged for the woman’s throat in the same instant that Eleanor pulled the trigger.
Things went black again. But she still felt – and heard - that incessant tapping.
Tap. Tap. Tap.