i will not be great

and you know what. it’s only one paragraph but welcome to my in process riley piece ft. @statichvm’s lily (she’s the freckled shoulders.)

“When’s the last time you slept in a twin bed?” he muses quietly, fingers tracing warm shapes over her freckled shoulders.

and now the shame. ignore the random paragraph marker where i haven’t had the brain cells to connect my two disjointed scenes.

“You shouldn’t have come for me,” Pratt says, tightening the straps on her wrists. “You should’ve run.”

Her vision swims and doubles, one Pratt becoming two. Lucy tries to focus on his battered face, the stubble on his jaw, something to ground herself. It feels like the haze in her head is going to swallow her.

“Pratt?” she manages. His name feels thick and fuzzy in her mouth.

There’s a rustling noise behind her, then heavy footsteps. Pratt blanches. Lucy watches him scurry away from her, over to the front of the room where the other two captives are bound to their chairs. From somewhere in the room, a projector flickers to life. The light casts Pratt’s face in heavy shadows.

An emaciated deer appears on the wall in front of her.

“The world is weak. Soft.”

The blood freezes in Lucy’s veins. It’s different from what she remembers — harder, a little raspy, filled with contempt — but she knows that voice.

“We have forgotten what it means to be strong.”

In her peripheral vision, all she can see are faded blue jeans, the camouflage pattern of a jacket. Red hair.

<*>

“Now, the Collapse is upon us.”

She doesn’t flinch when Jacob leans down, grabs the arms of the chair, and pulls her closer to him. There are patches of dried blood marring the grey of his shirt, she notices idly. Part of her would rather not think about why they’re there.

“And this time,” Jacob says, a foot away from her, his breath ghosting across her face as he speaks, “the lives of the few outweigh the lives of the many.”

The collar of his shirt has dipped down, and Lucy can see the pale, undamaged skin of his neck, his throat. How far does the scarring travel? How badly has his life ruined his body? Is this all that’s been left untouched? It makes her heart ache in a way she wishes she could ignore. His dog tags sway where they hang from his neck, and Lucy’s eyes flit over the letters engraved in the stainless steel.

He’s close enough to touch, but she doesn’t think she can look into his eyes. She doesn’t want to.

She doesn’t want to meet his gaze, because the moment she does this becomes real. The moment she does, she’ll have to acknowledge that this is the same Jacob Seed she remembers, that this is not a sick joke.

The breath hitches in her chest when she finally makes herself look up. She expects to see something in his eyes — recognition, shock, sadness, anger, something.

Instead, she sees indifference.

“And when a nation that’s never known hunger or desperation descends into madness,” Jacob murmurs, his voice a low, deadly rasp, “we’ll be ready.”

The projector goes black as the slide changes again, and Jacob’s face is bathed in shadows. His stare is burning, heavy, and it lingers on her for a few seconds too long. Lucy wants to break her bonds and reach out, wants to touch the side of his face, just to see how he’ll react. If he’ll react.

And then he stands, an unkind half-smile playing at the corner of his mouth, and reaches for a small box. A music box, she realizes, as she watches him twist the brass key.

“We will cull the herd,” Jacob says, and Lucy thinks he may be talking to himself more than anyone else. “We will do what needs to be done.”

His fingers rest atop of the music box for a moment, and he stares her, watching. Then, slowly, he lifts the lid and lets the sound warble out.

The edges of her vision burn red.

— look. i’m disappointed in myself too. we don’t need to talk about it.

“You’re different than I remember.”

Absently, Lucy reaches into the tub, grasping at the submerged washcloth. She pulls it into the open air and wrings it out, the drip drip drip of water on water hypnotic in a way she can’t name.

“Yeah?”

Dirt has built up around her ankles, a ring of caked on sweat and grime circling each one that her hasty showers are never quite able to cut through. Lucy busies herself scrubbing at the filth, leaving patches of raw, red skin in her wake.

“How do you figure?” she says, finally, not entirely sure she wants to hear what Jacob has to say.

“Lucy I knew was soft.”

Irritation pricks at the back of her mind, an insidious little thing that winds around her brain stem and squeezes. The wound in her side aches fiercely, and she forces her attention there in a futile effort to tamp down on the frustration building in her bones.

Before she can tell him she’s not in the mood for another lecture on the dichotomy between weak and strong, he speaks again.

“You, though—you’re angry. You’re tired,” he continues, voice as quiet and raspy as ever. “Somewhere along the line, you got all rough around the edges. Sharp.”

“You’re a real Sherlock Holmes, you know that?”