10-17-2018, 08:48 AM
You were awake, and I was asleep.
When he gets stressed, he finds all sorts of strange coping mechanisms. One of them is blacksmithing. He kept working stone against stone until it felt like his limbs were about to snap and break, wither to the ground like torn paper. He feels the weight of worlds crossing along the pathway of his shoulders, but at the same time he feels light as air as though all his strength and muscle has been sucked out of him. At any moment, he feels he can drop in a thud that can create an earthquake. It gives him a mechanical sensation. He is a machine, labouring and working all day and night. Every creak and cog of his body is churning and turning, moving rigidly as fire blares and metals clang. The emotions are all hitting each other like fresh coal, ready to be lit and broken down into ashes. Smoke rises and curls, spindling webs within the hot air. His eyes are mirrors – reflecting the hostility of the flames, angrily chewing at the sacrifices he has laid.
And now I’m awake, and you are asleep.
The number doesn’t leave him. Twelve days. It took him twelve days to heal from those wounds. He was devoured by the earth, left to regenerate the limbs he had lost. As much as he should celebrate, feel at peace for not having to experience death a second time, there is still the shock of it all. It’s the realisation that everything went dark. All that was left was the remnants of his emotions, still burning but dying quickly into the darkness that was his closed mind. To reawaken feels surreal. He feels as though he is still in a dream, frightened by everything and everyone. For once, he hasn’t really been able to be himself…or at least the Bakugou he’s known himself to be. The Reaver is quieter now and far more cautious. He can’t look at Luca in the face, can’t even stand to be anywhere close to him. How could he have been so rash? For one moment in his life, he should have stopped to think. He let his emotions run ahead of him, ignoring the blaring signs and warnings which shot within his subconscious. He was out of touch and a fool. Even in his old world he had been careful with his decisions. He was calculative and quick. This world has softened him, he realises. It’s let him slow down and run on autopilot. His emotions should never govern what he says or do.
And now it’s Goldie who is asleep. She is in a wakeful nightmare, surrounded by foreign faces. Her memories were stolen, stolen by the grasp of an unfair universe. It caught her and it’s strangling him as punishment. Again, and again he continues to blame himself. He should have been there! He should have been there to save her! It never would have happened had Bakugou been there. Or at least he would have at least known he had tried to help her. Bakugou hits the stone hard, embers sparking between the two rocks before spluttering to the ground like bright tears. They are the droplets of the sun, vanishing the moment they are seen. Nothing can describe how large his desire was to climb to the roof of his hut and scream from the top of his lungs: “It’s not my fault!” But somehow those words feel foreign the moment he considers letting so much as a whisper of it leave his tongue. Maybe he is the one who is still dreaming, stuck within a reality of nightmarish encounters. Or perhaps Goldenluxury was always just a figment of his imagination.
He remembers she called him sir. It is a polite way of maintaining a distance. To be honest, it caught him off guard to be called a sir. He wondered if she was just being nice to him, deciding to display a superior detachment toward him. He would, after all, understand if she was angry with him for not being there. He should have been there. The very thoughts continue to make the bottom of his throat feel drier than the surface of Mars. Heartache. It’s a pain different to the emotions he felt with death, the emotions he felt with failure. To be forgotten, to become yet another stranger, an unknown face… it surely makes him shudder. It’s like his body is possessed by ghosts. His own system reacts in a way that he can’t control it. He shakes, he quivers, heat swells up in him in a way that is different to the usual anger he felt. Bakugou remembers that after she asked him his name, he felt his own walls begin to rise again. From the ground, bricks protrude and rise higher than they had ever been. His original sense of comfort, his misunderstanding of contentment, were broken at that point. He felt himself shut off, no longer able to react or control his body. Caesar introduced him, told her his name was Bakugou and that he was a Reaver. None of it mattered at that point. He just turned around and left. Mechanically, robotically.
It was a sadness that disguised itself as anger, manifesting and rooting within him. Every strike he takes is a channel of that energy as Bakugou attempts to vent, neurons sparking with the desire to be noticed and appreciated once again. She had been a light in his life, a beacon of hope for him. He thought he would have redemption through her. She viewed him…a friend. It had felt so nice to be considered one, to feel less lonely. Of course, Kirishima has always been there for him but he felt stuck, imprisoned within metal poles refusing to let him out. Now he feels alone again, alone to let these emotions appear in unhealthy ways. He can’t eat the way he used to. He eats too much or too little. He’ll go ages without a single bite, without a drop of water, and then his mood will fluctuate. He’ll feel the wave again and he’ll be eating until his stomach swelled and he threw up, coughing and unable to hold the choke of tears which force their way through.
He was never really afraid to cry, never really afraid to tell others how he felt. It’s always been about him. He’d cry because it was his fault, cry because he was afraid, cry because he was disappointed. For some reason, the realisation that he is nothing within this spinning void of a universe was worse than all of it. He is not even a speck of dust floating aimlessly in a vacuum. He is nothing when he wants to be everything, a failure when he wants to be an achiever. For the first time, he finds himself running. He is running away from the truth, trying hard not to face her, avoiding Luca and desperate for that ‘breath of fresh air’. Still, everything feels polluted. His own lungs are struggling to expand, constricted by the disease that was his mind, roots twisting and moving within him to hold all his organs to a standstill. His own body wants to deconstruct. It wants to tear itself down into compost, return to the earth in the foul shape it was in. At least that way he could stop being a waste of space, an embarrassment to all he had stood for.
No one’s awake. We are both asleep.
It took him a while to stop weeping. The sharp and hushed wheezes that came from his throat continued to rattle and shake when he tried to stop, tried to let himself calm down. He had stopped all he was doing, his unfinished work of art. To tell the truth, he wasn’t sure what it was supposed to be. He was trying to make something out of stone, not particularly caring about the unfinished product because he had so much raw energy surging within him. It’s an untameable ocean, criticising everything he did. It follows him. It continues to flow back and forth, drawing closer and closer to pull him further and further away. Her blurred hands grasp at his ankles, heaving and pulling him to drown. He wants her to do it – let the ocean have her way with him as he free falls, sinking from a heaviness that pulls him straight down. Finally, air expelled, he will become weightless yet again. Free of burden but cast into a heavenly, ink-stained abyss. Starless with no signs.
Fields of space. There must be constellations in between them now. Their past is scattered into the blackness of the universe. Stardust, all twinkling and struggling to stand out. The longer he turns away and lets his eyes close, the dimmer they will become. Who will catch the fragments glittered throughout space, cast away where no smart eyes could find them? His body twitches, slumped over his ashen covered furniture, coated by the dark texture that buries itself within his fur. His walls won’t go down, but he raises a white flag, he lets himself come to terms with his situation. He rises with his high walls, still unable to break through, unable to forge the weapons that will let him strike the stone. The Reaver begins to reanimate, each limb slowly beginning to function and move, shifting and returning. He begins to look for hints, he begins to look for the pieces they had lost.
We can both wake up. We don’t have to be asleep.
The sunlight makes his eyes wince the moment he steps outside, lugging all sorts of equipment and items behind him. For once he can see a goal setting up before him, sketching itself with his vision a blueprint of sorts. As of this moment, he’s too cowardly to try and knock on her door, call out her name and tell her: “It’s Bakugou.” Like her, he feels an awkwardness. A sense of displacement. Just as Goldie feels as though she doesn’t belong, so does Bakugou. He’s always been outcasted, viewed differently than the rest. They think it’s okay to disrespect him, okay to get on his nerves because he was always guided by anger. He just wants to be respected and appreciated, wanted within their island community. At this moment in time, it feels like it’s too much to ask. Each step feels like a long haul, but it is a step towards his goal that will be decorated by the scent of spices clouding the air, letting him breathe calmer. He feels desperation. He needs to at least try something. That way he can stop sulking, feeling as though everything was his fault because right now, in this moment in time, he was ready to make himself truly vulnerable. He’s ready to take the hits, become shot by words alone. That way he no longer has to be injured by the emotions swimming in his mind. It can be solidified and real, or maybe he can find relief from the tension.
How does it start again? His own temples feel as though they are converging towards each other, pressing and straining hard as he tries to remember himself. The voice of her past self is muffled, static whenever he tries to decipher the words and ingredients. The smell, however, is nostalgic. He takes a whiff at each ingredient, closing his eyes whilst standing in his makeshift kitchen station outside her house. He’s still too scared to knock, cautiously chopping ingredients and adding them slowly. The scent is familiar and amorous. It lifts itself into a cloud, spreading along the area. It is likely the smell passes through Goldie’s doorway too as Bakugou continues to work, brows furrowed intensely as he whispers and mutters to himself her words to him. There’s something wrong with it. He can’t quite get the taste right. Bakugou isn’t sure if he’s missing an ingredient or has too much of another thing, trying to work things out through taste and smell. It’s supposed to be right, it’s supposed to be perfect. That way he can finish it or watch her walk out surprised and ask her if she remembered the time she came to his house to make curry with him.
Even if she doesn’t remember, asks him what on earth he’s doing, he can at least tell her his soppy story. The story of how he was lonely, unable to integrate, but was lifted by her. She extended to him and the least he can do is return the favour. To be frank, it makes him feel a little sheepish. He felt that this gesture was too rosy, too desperate. He’s sunken so the walls are higher than ever, reinforced and unbreakable at this point. They had grown again, taller and monstrous, wrapped within an assortment of vines twisting between the cracks. Even then, he feels brave enough to know that he is afraid – afraid because he is filled with a radiant hope to befriend her again and set things right. Even if he fails, at least he’d know he tried. It was the only thing right now that was letting him keep going.
[member=48]goldenluxury[/member]