Neveah was always someone Ezra felt as if he could talk to for hours on end and she would never pass judgments over him because she would have the same neurotic thoughts he did. And she didn’t disappoint when she began to share her own philosophy on life with him. The blonde nodded every now and again while he listened, his eyes scanned over the barren desert surrounding the lab. It was so fucking quiet out here; it blew his mind away that he didn’t hear gunfire off in the distance or the occasional yelp from somewhere in the dark. It was completely quiet other than Neveah’s velvety voice speaking in a soft tone. “There is no higher being, and if there is, like you said,” He began when she stopped speaking. “He’s got a sick sense of humor torturing humans in ways unimaginable. If there was a God I would have been dead a long time ago when I begged him to strike me dead. I gave up that faith a long time ago.”
Rolling his tongue over his bottom lip Ezra’s eyes shifted to the raven haired beauty. “I’d like to think of death as pressing the restart button. Instead of seeing that blinding white light as you glide into heaven on some scooter it’s you being pushed out as another being, whether you are a human, a bug or an animal. What’s that called? Karma or somethin’. I hope I come back as a woman so I have tits.”
He gave her a crooked smile and chuckled lightly. A laugh was what he needed right now, especially since all negative thoughts were being pushed in the back of his mind. “If there is a hell, Neveah, we’re living in it. I mean Jesus Christ people used to be able to do what they wanted. They could speak freely and voice their opinions without the government takin’ them out. People used to be proud to be an American and now look. The government is peekin’ up everyone’s skirts and controlling us so badly that no one is proud to be American. People shoot each other down without thinkin’. Not to mention the fucking heat. This is hell, right here in Avalon.” He shrugged. “That’s my two cents. What are you doin’ up here anyways?”
“You know, sometimes I forget why guys think tits are so awesome, but then I grab my own and I remember.” She tries to keep a straight face, obviously playing, but ultimately she ends up bursting into a short lived bout of laughter. Finally she stands from where she was sitting in front of him, and as she does, she is hovering an inch away from what could be her death, a decent drop, from her own gang’s hideout, that would be all it took. What a valiant way to go. She stretches up on her tiptoes, back arching, spine popping. And then she turns on her heel and moves over to Ezra, tips her head to the side. She beams up at him with a wide, innocent-seeming smile. He is several inches taller than her, but it doesn’t matter. It feels like they’re equals out here, with only the night sky as a witness, and the stars are their jury. So who is the judge, if there is no God, she wonders vacantly. And then the thought drifts away like water in a stream, like white dandelion seeds carried away by a gust of wind.
“I think I would want to be a bird, if that’s true. If I could press restart, I would want to be able to fly away from all of this. To fly and fly until everything under me is just a blur, until there is only me. That’s what I would do.”
She is moving away from him now, a little ways, beginning to pace along the side of the rooftop, unafraid of the looming edge, it’s like she can’t be near another human for too long before the proximity begins to wear on her nerve endings, making her squirm. “There’s no such thing as America anymore. And pride in your government, that’s a long dead theory too.”
She sighs heavily, lifting a hand to rub at her eyes sleepily. Why is she up here? It’s hard to remember, and so her answer takes a moments to decide upon. “Thinking I guess. Which isn’t safe in itself. Have you come to save me from my mind?” She has taken on a dreamy voice now, peering over her skinny shoulder at Ezra with a grin, she speaks as if she is asking if he is her prince charming, like a twisted version of an apocalyptic Cinderella. And that makes her wonder if Ezra has ever heard any children stories. “Have you ever heard any Grimm Fairy Tales? They’re such bullshit. Did you know that most of them actually had awful endings, but they got switched around to be deemed correct for children. The Little Mermaid, in the modified version she turns into a human and then ends up with the prince, happy ending, yadda yadda. But originally, the mermaid sees the prince being married to a princess and the she despairs. She is offered a knife with which to kill the princess, but rather, she jumps into the sea and dies by turning into froth. Which is great because everybody knows that truly good stories end tragically, right?”
Silence was something Ezra Wright never took for granted; whenever it was possible he took a few moments to enjoy the solace and attempt to clear his mind from the clutter it had acquired over the past few weeks. Although he was a strong person both mentally and physically the stress of events going on around him was beginning to wear the loyal Toy Soldier down. And it was beginning to show all over his face. Beneath his ebony eyes were dark circles indicating sleepless nights; his pale skin no longer had a sunskissed glow to it and his sunken in cheeks made Ezra look deathly ill. At this very moment the only medication he needed was silence and he wasn’t getting that as he sat alone in his bedroom with a half smoked cigarette perched between his chapped lips.
The Toy Soldiers were almost all inside either mingling amongst themselves or sleeping. While they were all behaving for the most part he could hear the occasional shout or the murmurings of their conversations, possibly a few moans here and there from a couple fucking down the hallway. Regardless f how ill behaved they were they were his gang and he’d do what he had to to protect them. Believe it or not Ezra had morphed into a leader in a matter of a few days because being timid and unsure was no way to earn this pack of psychopaths respect. He had to be firm and fair with all of them and although he tried his best to mimic Judas he couldn’t hold a candle to the real leader of the Soldiers. Ezra was beginning to believe he was cut out to be a leader; he just had different ways of going about it.
Combat boots trudged against the stairs as he climbed them towards the doorway leading to the roof of the laboratory, no longer wishing to have his solace interrupted by his fellow gang members. The rooftop was one of his favorite thinking spots: it wasn’t a particularly tall building but you could see a lot from up there. Ezra pushed the door open and stepped onto the roof, letting his eyes adjust to the change in light. The Mojave heat was no longer lingering in the air like a suffocating chokehold; the night had brought cooler air in to force the warm air out and now a chilly breeze blew lightly. He probably would not have noticed Neveah if she had not spoken to him.
Do you believe in hell?
Believe or not her question actually pushed the pressing thoughts of depression and anxiety from his mind and now set her question on a pedestal to be debated. Was there a hell? “Of course I do,” He murmured with a shrug, taking a drag on his cigarette before he put it out by dabbing it against his tongue. “We’re livin’ in it.” His dark eyes moved to examine the girl’s face before he moved to stand beside her. Ezra rolled his shoulders and shifted his gaze to look out over the moonlit desert. “Do you?”
Neveah was not one much to take kindly to disturbances, and she had caught this visitor before he even made himself known, so, generally speaking, she would have usually been on her feet already, calmly warding them to stay away, because for the moment this was her area. Civility would have disappeared. Disappeared and been replaced with the quiet, chilling kind of anger that Neveah specialized in so dutifully. However, she discovered it was Ezra who had come to join her, when he spoke in response to her, and that made her smile. Ezra, whom she felt for like a brother. Blonde hair, black eyes. A disaster who was troubled, but wasn’t as terrible as he made himself out to be.
She felt family to all of the Toy Soldiers, and brawled, laughed, partied with them as such, but certain individuals stood out in her eyes, whether they knew it or not. Ezra was one of them. The affection didn’t have to be returned, nor acknowledged. Perhaps it was simply born from admiration, usually it was, and then there were cases when Neveah felt she connected with a person, or could if she made an attempt, be it from things she knew about their past, or other means.
“Death is a charade, that’s what I believe in. And maybe it’s the next great adventure we’re all looking for right from the start, we just don’t know it.”
She pauses, kicks her foot out against a bit of rubble lying on the roof, sends it scattering, until it tumbles, tumbles, and then rolls off the edge. She can hear it hit the ground several heartbeats later. “Humans are fragile things. You ever think about that? Broken bones, mental disease, fevers, coughs. We’re fucked right from the start. If there is a God, he sure does have one great sense of humor. So humans, as a whole, do pretty good just living. I’m not saying everything is survivable, just that everything except the last thing is.” She knows she’s babbling now, and it might scare him off, because he’s probably looking for peace just like she is, but it feels pretty good to babble, and her voice is just a breath, it’s barely audible. Like the brush of a feather against skin Her voice is liquid, smooth and fluid, not faltering or pausing. It’s like she has what she says planned out in front of her, like she’s reading a book of verses.
She should simplify it, so perhaps she just likes the sound of her own voice, and that’s why she talks like this. Complicated things make for headaches, something she doesn’t want, in any case. She settles for taking things at merely skin-deep level because it’s so terribly easy to get lost inside herself when she really starts to think, and that’s terrifying, to be lost in your own labyrinth, because she knows that one day, maybe sometime soon, or maybe sometime impossibly distances away from the now, she isn’t going to find the way out again.
It is cold, in the break of dawn. To the east, the sun is rising, slow and languid, lazy. Tired as everything else in this peace, it does not want to wake, Neveah is not one of those tired things, and she is alive as ever. The morning is when she thrives. The brisk air sends chills over her skin; the vague light hanging in the air with an ethereal effect makes the tattoos lining the pallor of her skin stand out vibrantly.
She can recall the exact dates for each one of the tattoos she has on her body. Can recall the reason she got them right down to the beginning and end of detail. Whether they be for pure fun, or hold something so important to her that it might act as a memory all on its own. She started gathering them in the time between her mother’s death and when her father kicked her out at sixteen. She would scrounge and pickpocket to save money, and he would turn his head and act as if they were invisible to his eye that way. It was an act of rebellion that became more then she had intended, and now they are each, individually, the world to her, a piece of the past that she doesn’t have to let go of anytime soon.
Some things you don’t escape. Most of those things, you don’t. You don’t escape things, mostly bad, that just happen to you. Disappointment. The loss of love. The whip of tragedy. Death.
Inescapable.
For her, there is nothing in this world. Standing alone in the middle of a wasteland, her solitude is enormous. In the vast space of tumbleweeds and brambles, she thinks, everybody has a reason to be. Everybody but her. She looks around herself once more, and this time she thinks, nothing says hell has to be fire.
Sometimes Neveah thinks that her mind is her own labyrinth of suffering. It would be shocking to her to find that she isn’t the only one who has horrible, sinister thoughts. She’s sure she isn’t, but she wouldn’t wish the things that go through her mind on anyone else. They say the only way to escape the labyrinth is to forgive, but can she forgive herself for her ultimate sin? She was the cause of her mother’s death. She sat and watched, oblivious, naïve, stupid. She is a murderer, by any standard, hers mostly. And she doesn’t ever think she will escape this labyrinth.
Cage The Elephant- Ain’t No Rest For The Wicked
