Post by Poppy Montgomery on Sept 13, 2013 13:13:21 GMT -5
[atrb=border,0,true][atrb=style, width: 500px; height: 600px; background-image:url(http://i43.tinypic.com/5e5p5g.jpg)] Distant lightening flashed through Poppy’s closed eyelids, nudging her closer to consciousness. She felt like death, but by the time thunder pealed, soft and murky, she found it in herself to open her eyes and prop herself up on her elbows with her chin tucked to her chest. Never mind where she was right now. Never mind the sandpaper tongue and the pounding tranq-induced headache. Or the world that warped and stretched around her. Just breath. She breathed and breathed, letting out fevered air and pulling in the cold. Poppy’s brows knitted. She couldn’t remember anything- what she’d been doing when the keepers took her or what they’d done to her in the compound- but she was sure it would come back to her soon enough. It always did. It took an unnamed amount of time for the black world around her to come into a semblance of focus. Slowly, she pushed herself off her back so she sat up. Her headache pounded on the insides of her skull like a prisoner. The lightening continued to stitch and boil painfully over the horizon. It kept her eyes from adjusting to the dark, so she closed them again, rubbing the heels of her palms into her eye sockets. So many visits from the keepers these days. Poppy was morbidly curious about the empty patch in her immediate memory, but she knew it wouldn’t come back if she focused on it. Probably more of the same, anyhow. The girl focused on trying to get her bearings. She was sitting on dry, patchy grass, and there were trees around. The smell of sea salt was fairly faint. That crossed out Carna territory. Poppy growled softly. Why couldn’t they drop her close to home, at least? These thoughtless little cruelties just knocked her flat. Every minute she spent out of Carna borders was sixty seconds of waltzing with the reaper. She used to get a thrill from it... Well, she still did, to be honest. But only when it was a choice. Only when she wasn’t exhausted and stoned out of her mind from too much morphine in her IV drip. Well, there was nothing to be done about it. Slowly, the girl rolled forward and figured out how to stand up. She tilted her head back to check the low, charcoal clouds above her, and quickly got head rush. Somehow she managed to stay upright. On instinct, she turned toward the stiff, brine-laced wind. It was coming off the water for sure. If she was going to get home, that was the way to go. On she went, her steps short and weaving. The darkness seemed to bubble, and the lightening and thunder beckoned her. As she walked, memories from the compound thawed and came back to her. She instantly wanted them to go away again. Yeah... Memories of electrodes on her temples smeared with sticky lubricant- and then being shocked, electrocuted- oh, just screaming- and straining at her constraints, and the burning all over her body, that fuzzy, numb pain. Waking up hanging onto a metal bar over a tank of frosted water, and then feeling an electric current building in the bar until the pain of the shock was enough to make her let go and fall. Then waking on a table, surrounded by technicians in masks, with fluorescent lights blinding her. Then being crammed into a cell with a couple of anthros, all quiet and miserable and scared. And finally waking up, free. Poppy brooded as she staggered east. This kind of appointment with the keepers was becoming regular. Thy’d been taking her in ever since midwinter, when that one Keeper who she’d been heckling had shoved her against the bars of one of the holding cells and electrocuted some nasty scars into her back. Seemed like they wanted to keep up that theme. The trees thinned out into scrabbly streets, and the tingling in Poppy’s cheeks didn’t seem to fade. The landscape was coming into focus, a little. My god, she was high. Where was Levi when she needed him? East and east, she stumbled, swaying and tripping from time to time. At last she stopped, feeling nauseous and wretched and utterly exhausted. She stuck an arm out to the wall of the building she was skirting, hanging her head. Just when she was about to give up, to slide down into a puddle on the fractured sidewalk and come what may, she noticed that the wall she was leaning on was patterned. She turned her spinning head, peering at the concrete. Patterned and painted. Kind of familiar. Could it be? It had to. Art was so rare in the Menagerie. Studio Ess. This also meant that the walk home was longer than she had hoped. Longer certainly than she could handle tonight, although the thought of the sewers and a warm blanket made her gut ache with longing. No, she could sleep here tonight. Even though no-man’s land was crawling with Fulsi these days. So she followed the painted walls until she found a metal door in, slightly ajar on its hinges. It screeched like a dying crow when she opened it and stuck her head in, but Poppy was too tired to wince, or even care that much. There would be a cot in here for her to lay down on, and that was enough. This was unclaimed territory. There was certainly a possibility of her making it through the night. It was utterly black through that door. She shuffled in, her fingers trailing the walls and her feet brushing away dust and paper as she went. When the first door came, she hesitated, but then turned into it. The thought of laying down kept her brave. There was window in this room, letting in the lighter dark from outside. She stood in the doorway for a long time, catching her surroundings in each flash of lightening through the empty panes. There were three moth-eaten couches in this room that smelled of must and rotted foam. She picked the one closest and melted into its creaking springs like butter as the thunder moved in above her head. When she woke up, she knew two things. Firstly, it had been a day or maybe more since she had arrived here. As in, it was night, but night the same night she had arrived on. Secondly, she was not alone in this room. |