☓ LOVE LIKE AN ACHE IN THE JAW. ⁽ᵃᵖ⋅⁾

so i’ve moved blogs! you can find me now at @lovemartyred - this blog is a mess so i wanted somewhere a little cleaner.

big love always,

Jane finally understands. 

She rereads the inscription in the book for the hundredth time, but this time it’s different; the words don’t make her feel sick, and like she’s discovered something dirty. She understands, because she knows this same feeling. Loving someone you shouldn’t is agony. It’s a death sentence for the soul. It is the sweetest, most noble of martyrdoms to give yourself so completely to somebody you can never have.

      My truest love, it reads, and she is transported back to a dirty room, where she sits on a bed with a paper-thin mattress, counting coins with a temporary boy. The dull pain of it all has a lump catching in her throat.

      “It’s against God, you know,” Jane says, but it’s a very weak opposition, more like she’s going through the motions than attacking. She isn’t really sure how much she even believes it anymore, and it shows in the way that her features have softened. If God created love, then surely He meant for those who love each other to be free to do so? Why should Thomas and Flint -- James, she reminds herself -- be punished for finding the love that they were born to find?

       The book is extended out to Thomas as a sort of peace offering. Now that she isn’t in some righteous rage about the whole thing, it feels wrong for her to be holding it at all -- like wearing somebody else’s wedding ring. 

    hazel eyes slowly made their way over to the other woman, in a slight glimpse and observational gaze. she could tell the judgmental gaze was under, and olivia didn’t particularly like it. who was a person to judge her? olivia’s expression turns from one of annoyed to one of confusion when her hand is touched. 

a part of her tries to remember when any person tried to comfort her or talk to her. besides giving her orders to follow. it mixes up feelings inside of her, and olivia isn’t sure she wants to open that can of worms. she moved to pull her hand back. ’ i think it would be best if you stayed out of it. ‘ her puzzled expression seems to last for a moment longer. as a fragmented memory flashed in her mind. she had been getting more and more of them recently. 

     jane senses that she might have gone wrong here. not everybody comes from a small town in the middle of nowhere and appreciates people being all in their business. it’s what she’s used to -- she can’t help it. jane doesn’t remember doing a single thing growing up without somebody having something to say about it.

        all those neighbourhood busybodies kept real quiet whenever they saw her with a shiner, though.

He said that he wasn’t angry, and Jane was convinced that it was a trick to make her come back. She stayed in her corner, shrunken back so far that she became a part of the wall, half-hidden by the curtain. 

Jane looked at the pieces of the once-pretty plate and hated herself for them. She’d only wanted to play -- a tea party for her dolls (she had two now, even if they were wooden and not store-bought and pretty like her one back home). She had thought that since her new dolls weren’t fancy, that they might enjoy being treated like they were, which is why she’d stretched right up on her toes to reach their best crockery to lay the table. She’d been so worried about the big smash that she’d retreated to her corner right then and there. She could still feel sharp little pinches in her toes where she’d run across the broken pieces -- but she supposed she would get in even more trouble for not having her shoes on, and so it went unmentioned.

Lack of guilt, lack of remorse, as to Troy the dead was the dead. No one left inside the shell of a human being. No one left behind to understand what they were doing. Their brain controlled by the virus that kept them going. The infection that kept them alive. Their rotting flesh, their retched odour, a giveaway to the life they were forced to lead. No threat as after a year they were predictable. A kick of the leg and they were down on their knees, sharp blade driven into their skull. The tip into their brain to kill the pulse point.

How Jane felt he couldn’t relate but an understanding as he knew of the son left behind at the safety of the ranch. The son he made sure was well looked after the day they crossed paths. How he couldn’t risk the bite, proven wrong hours later. Giving herself and her son a place to stay. A chance at a life worth living. What couldn’t have been closer to the life left behind. The life he never preferred, the life that most people did.

Machete clasped between the fingers and palm of his right hand. Blade pointed towards the skies above, lowered to the dirt filled ground as he made his way towards her. An assumption he let pass him by. The shake of her head, the dismissal of the words he wasn’t about to say.

“Look, it ain’t ever gonna be easy.” At least not for faint hearted. A mother, a father, a parent or guardian. “But what you killed back there, they weren’t no kids. They were shells of kids. A threat if you gave them the chance to be.”

Everything had become so routine that Jane had almost forgotten the cruelty of this whole thing. Today shocked her -- and she took note of this feeling, trying to remember how goddamn awful this world was so that it never had the chance to catch her off guard again. 

“I know it ain’t.” She didn’t join the militia under the pretence that it was going to be easy on her. She joined to do her bit -- and if that means killing zombie kids to keep the others safe, then fine. She would do it, because it was her duty now. Jane just hated knowing that now, whenever she lay down to sleep, she was going to see that image replayed: the technicolor movie of so much innocence lost. She’d never seen that many bodies before, and they were all so tiny... 

A swallow. A sharp sniff as she told herself to get her shit together. For a moment, she almost had it, but then she crumbled again, remembering a boy who’d looked so much like the one she still had the good fortune to be able to care for. Weak for a moment, she found herself turning to Troy for support, in a split second stepping in close and hiding her face away in his shoulder.