*"You can't do much good if you're dead."*

He said those words to me—I’ll always remember them. For one, he made it clearly obvious that he wasn’t in on the joke. You know the one. That looming absurdity that hung around me all the time, like some noxious cloud of stink and goddamned giggles. He didn’t know who he was dealing with, what kind of glorious screw-up he had suddenly taken into his custody. But I guess that’s the beauty of it—maybe he thought he was being noble by pushing me away like that? Maybe he couldn’t leave me because of some moral oath he had taken years back on the battle field, all scarred and boss in a war-torn shell of a horse: He wouldn’t make that mistake again. Or, No innocent will fall if he could help it. Or….something else righteous and badass you could mutter under your breath on a blood-soaked vista. I’m investing way too much imaginative brainpower on this stranger.

Anyway, this is pretty much what happened: he pushed my dumb-ass a little, away from the dark cloud I decided to shout my throat hoarse at, as though it would do something beneficial. Or maybe I just felt like shouting at this black mass of dark and bad things because that was all I knew what to do—it was the only way I could hold off the instinct to bolt away and panic, to cry like a little girl and let the adults handle it, because I sure as hell didn’t know how to handle this. Anyway, he pushed me—he was the adult at that moment. And I—well, I was a child, and that tiny stumble he forced me into broke the façade of anger and control of myself I had erected all around my person. Basically, he nudged me, and all illusion broke—I ran like hell. I got the fuck out of dodge and I didn’t even care if anyone followed me, because I was scared, and my body said run and I let it, and for a moment of soaring freedom I wasn’t the adult anymore—the Abominable Snowman was. I let him take the reins.

We ran.

I’m not sure I’ll ever run like that again. I sure as hell hope I don’t. It was the single most exhausting thing I had ever done to my body; I pushed my legs as fast as I could make them go, and all the while my heart reached a dangerous tempo in my chest, a mix of overdrive and sheer terror causing my vessels to pulse in a manner that I was sure they were going to burst midstride. As I ran, the notion came to me that no mortal beast should run like this—and as soon as I thought this, my legs stumbled unevenly underneath me, and I fell from my gallop into an awkward sort of flailing, inelegant trot. My clumsy, tired body broke through a thicket of pointy things, and I entered a shallow grove that I would recognize if my sight wasn’t so blurry for exhaustion.

Panting heavily, my legs gave out, and my body fell sloppily onto the shore of a small pool that sat in the center of the cops, letting the tiny waves wash over my over-heated sides. Okay, maybe I was being dramatic throwing my body all over the place like this—so what? Who was gonna stop me? And besides, I was preoccupied with the thing that I had outrun, the thing that still managed to persist in my thoughts, whirling about and causing doubt and creating even greater alarm in my chest. I can’t do much good…well. That’s it. I can’t do much good dead or alive—how do you fight pure terror?

@[Mauja]
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