Warning One-Twelve [Peter Ballard, 001]

013: Naive. So Naive

A/N: This chapter is far shorter than my usual chapters, but it is necessary!! I hope it is still satisfactory ;) (lots of mentions of gore and blood)

 A beating heart. A miraculous gift- something that things yet to be born and the dead souls of the world no longer possessed. Something to be thankful for. An organ that pulsed with life, exerted itself and quickened with emotions. 

A heart brought something life. Gave something a will to breathe.

Always nestled in between the cages of bone, encapsulated between lungs as a soul would hide inside ones body.

At times in your past you wondered what it would be like if your heart escaped from your chest, lept from your throat, leaving you soulless.  You'd never have to see the protruding walls of this laboratory again if you didn't have a heart to beat it's rhythms into your body.

Very few things in this world could have ever crushed that idea of fantasizing death for you.

Peter had.

Peter, had left you wanting to live. Wanting to forever breathe, claim your senses as you always and forever use them on him. Smell the scent of his hair, stare back into his equally emotion filled eyes, run your fingertips over the chills on his skin.

You were staring into his eyes now.

But didn't in any form or fashion have the effect it was supposed to.

You couldn't smell the scent of his hair, the once deeply saturated mint smell now overridden by the metallic scent of fresh blood. His eyes sharp and jagged, the flowing oceans of emotions you dived into to find the hope in his eyes now resided with waves crashing upon rocks, eroding cliffs until their lack of foundation left them unstable enough to plummet into the cascades of violent waters below. And his skin.

 Chills when he was around you made you feel so open. Like you were the perfectly intricate key that fit through he keyhole of his hidden self, locked even farther than ones demeanour is carefully embedded into a mind. You loved how you felt he could become vulnerable around you, as open to your touch as all your secrets were on display for him.

Now his skin was leaping with tremors beneath your touch. quick jolts of pain, intertwined with the rapidly imposing effect blood loss.

Suddenly,

Everything felt too real.

"Peter?"

Your words were an earthquake. an unsteady bout of letters pieced together only by fraying emotions, willing to snap and give way to hysteria within moments. 

You couldn't see much. 

But you felt it. 

You felt your adrenaline pulsing its racetracks through your body, feeling so small compared to such a catastrophic scenario. You couldn't breathe, yet all you could hear was your lungs gasping for air, screaming inaudibly in a way only you could hear. Your eyelashes batted back tears too thick to be water, vision that was too stained red to be clear.

Your hands were before you, searching for some grounding object to keep you from succumbing under the force of fearful pressure. You found nothing. Nothing but your blood stained hands.

Red not of your own, but stained enough to entwine you into the fear. So close to home that it felt like your own, pouring out of your body as it did to Peter.

It was funny to you how people always exclaimed to be caught red handed. As if the trouble stayed at the palms of your hands and fingers, implying that the mischief hadn't come from your words, betraying eyes, erratic movements. Caught red was a more fitting accusation. Red all over. Your fault and not all at once.