VAIN | Inside the Universe

Chapter Twenty Six • The Mouthpiece of Heaven

I truly never expected this to happen again, but there is no mistaking it.

This isn't something you get to simply forget.

The ringing came as invasive as ever, accompanying all of the senses with dense, pure darkness. It robbed my conscious, taking my vision and all to either shield me from myself or use me for its own listing.

Despite the blackout, I can feel myself moving.

I'm awake.

As if to be rewarded, or rather punished for my stroke of intelligent thought, the world starts to return to me — slowly, blurry, muffled...red.

Please, no.

My eyelids prove to be impossibly heavy, prohibiting me from seeing anything around me clearly, leaving the worst to my imagination and the reality under the blurred lens to my incurable assumptions.

It's only when I force my eyes open for a full second that I see a figure amongst the haze stalking towards me moving perfectly in step with the slow motion picture. I couldn't run if I tried, but to my own astoundment, I don't think I wanted to.

With each paralyzed second focusing all of my energy into sight, it's hair becomes more definitively black, it's eyes more searing, and his words much less smothered. In some risible irony that must only be existent in a twisted simulation like this, it seems he turned out to be the antidote.

He called out to me something that sounded like my name and as my eyes drag themselves to my hands with a clearer view, it seems the title may be all too appropriate.

Stained a different race once more, some red crossbreed between the Devil and Hell itself, I have to laugh at how I wear blood so casually, and how it eagerly awaits to coat me so heavily until I am consumed by utter and complete blackness.

My shoulders sag as if they have been holding up the last of my denial, my breath pants as if I had been sprinting away from certitude, but all I could do was look down at the two creations of my body that only know how to destroy and whisper a single, tearless cry into my accepted submission, "Oh fuck."

"Safiya." His voice was low, stern, but he approached me with a paradoxical cautiousness that feared I might break with a step too far.

Steadying my breath, my eyes fall to an almost sedative calm that comes with a helpless defeat. I held my hands out in front of me — to keep them away or to get a better look I don't know — before dragging my eyes up to meet his. "What did I do?"

Loki simply looked, narrowing his eyes into the space between my hands like they held a secret that wasn't already painfully obvious.

"What did I do?" I pushed.

He drew his full attention to my face, running his eyes across every feature and shaking his head almost elusively. Such regard brought a softness to his voice I never thought he was capable of, and for a second I couldn't recognize it as his own.

"You didn't do anything, love."

It wasn't the words that had rendered me speechless. The sight of my ironically lifeful, shaking hands had done that well enough. But he captured my eyes for a moment, luring them successfully enough to break my fixation on the massacre in front of me, and for just a few seconds all I could see was him.

I suppose he had his own sight of destruction in front of him. It's everywhere — in us, between us, standing across from us. I mean here I stood in front of him, a nuclear bomb in the flesh whose very existence is so ruinous that it seems I don't even need to be conscious anymore to level structure to the ground. Apparently my eyes are more bloody than my hands ever could be, because he chose instead to hold an insane attentiveness to every move they made as if he were watching a train wreck he couldn't yet quite understand, but couldn't look away from.