op (maldito) wrote in repose, @ 2018-03-31 01:39:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | *narrative, newt penhaligon |
Narrative: Newt P
Who: Newt Penhaligon
What: narrative
Where: the bottom of the lake
When: morning after this
Warnings/Rating: slight self-harm
A handful of gillyweed swallowed thickly, and the bottom of the lake was a dark, black place. Newt sat in sand, silt, and with his back to the rotting hulk of a car. It was slick with overgrowth, the car, metal covered over with algae and other lifeforms, primitive but living, that needed very little to survive. Oxygen, carbon dioxide, inorganic material. Naked and pale, Newt himself glowed like the moon, if the moon'd been dropped down to the bottom of some great body of water and left to erode and wither into the skinny, knobby form of a skinny, knobby man. Color was a funny, ephemeral thing in water. Red rather stopped existing after about six meters. Then orange. Then yellow. Then green. Then blue. Newt guessed from the color of his own pubic hair that he was about 20 meters down. His fringe, where it floated amorphously just before his face, was a greenish shock. He touched it. It was cold, tickling.—It was quiet down this far. Loud—the constant push-pull roar of water, the currents, the swirl of life—but, to human ears, it was all a jumble, and so atonal that it was quiet. As if it all canceled out. As if it couldn't be comprehended, so it became nothing. And Newt could only envy that. The pressure was enough that his headache from his hangover was more like the cracked cranium Chant'd suffered in that corridor. But, that wasn't so bothersome. Newt'd brought a pen knife and he pulled it out now, fingers warmed by magic enough to remain nimble. He released blade from casing and looked at the dull glint of it in the green-blue light. Curious, he pressed it to the flesh of the inside of his left thigh. Pain, pointed, warning. And he sliced across skin, toward his groin. The blood that seeped out and up was inkblot black, fingers stringing from parted skin, and he watched it go by wandlight. The lake took it, dispersed it, and just like that, he was made into something larger.—Ever more curious, he did it a second time. This gash was a rollick and crash of pain. Blood was a cloudy drag suspended. Newt closed the knife. His body tingled, his thigh ached. He leaned his head back against the shell of the car. The sound of impact reverated only in his skull. He breathed in, the gills that'd erupted on the sides of his neck filtering, expanding. He thought about habitat fragmentation. He thought about Patrick and what he'd done. He thought about Adrian. He thought about Daniel. And he felt certain he'd mucked all of this up. Him, with his sick desires, with his lack of boundaries. He'd never made friends well. He'd never thrived with other people. He was at his best alone. Like this. Anger and helplessness were ugly twins that grew in Newt's chest, clotting there like cancer. Of course he cried. He'd always cried too easily. His father'd said as much. He couldn't let himself mire in it. In any of it. He squeezed the knife against his palm. An inward rush of water sucked into the space he vacated by the car. The blood churned in a spew. Nothing else was left behind. |