BEAUTIFUL FLOWER | MATTHEO RIDDLE

THE BLACK LAKE

─── ･ ｡ ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

TRIGGER WARNINGS

Death, bodily harm and injury, use of weapons, graphic detail of death and murder

─── ･ ｡ ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

Mattheo stared down at his hands, his eyes watching closely as the pair of pupils appeared across his grimy, dirt-caked knuckles. He spread his fingers, the tendons in them stretching and straining and burning all beneath his dermis. He could feel the tug in the back of his mind, asking him to look, pleading with him to bear witness to what he had done. It was like a faint cackle, an evil, grievous sound that reverberated off the sides of his skull, its impending torture never ceasing to exist, like it would fall into his grasp were he to look at what he had done.

Because he had done it, he had. He had.

Simply he tore his eyes to the plate of grassy forest. The body of the young boy laid limply on the ground, his face hidden in the mossy drawback of grass, neck twisted in an unusual way. The sound of his neck played like a record in Mattheo's head and the goosebumps wouldn't stop appearing all across his fleshy skin when he would remember what it felt like against his hands. The skin on skin, so personal and intimate and vulgar all at once.

Now the boy was no longer moving or trying to fight back.

How his corpse lay there so deftly, as if it carried no weight at all, as if that had never been a boy in a body with people waiting for him in some small corner of the world. As if he hadn't had beliefs of his own, ones which drove him and forced him to chase after; a boy with dreams and aspirations and the possibility of a million lifetimes inside of one.

How Mattheo has taken that from him, and didn't even ask the boy. He didn't even know his name, this child. Mattheo thought about that. For one of the very first times, Mattheo thought about the person whose life he had taken. Although, Mattheo supposed, the reason he never gave them a thought was still standing, still clear to him. Thinking brought nothing back. Not that it would have mattered anyway.

There was something so repulsing in taking a child's life. It was an act that lingered in the air long after it took place, causing it to go bad as though it were stale. An energy hung there like a scent, a putrid nature that burnt the nose. It was inconceivable, unbearable. It created a heaviness on the chest of the taker, a blood lust in their subconscious that they wouldn't even grasp once they understood they had it, they would fixate until they could contain it, and by that time they would be uncontrollable.

Birds drew him back in. They were chirping in the distance, though they were nowhere seen by his soft, tired eyes. Mattheo missed nature, any sort of sign of life, something that wanted anything other than destruction. A thing of color that simply came and grew and left. The circle of life. He couldn't think like this anymore, couldn't manage to fathom how he was supposed to. Why he needed to.

Burning. There was burning on his arm and it hurt and he could feel it and it was burning. And he knew what it was. It was him, the dead boy on the grass, waiting there for Mattheo. Waiting to take the last of Mattheo away.

He flexed his fingers, shaking them as if the set of eyes would go away. As if they were washable with the fingers. The pupils stared back at him, lashes long and gorgeous. Long like Epiphany's and curled like Calantha's. Reminiscent of everything he loved. Every very invaluable valuable thing that he, with his whole heart, loved. He'd killed it.

The tattooed eyes molded with the rest of his tattooed arms, but each and every set was distinct in its own way. Each one known to him, brought back to life every time he dared trying to close his eyes. He tried not to linger on the eyelashes for long, simply because the realization was unbearable every fair time.