Dying to Breathe

9.2: sexual energy... and god-like arrogance

A/N: obsessed with this song, pls listen to it with this chapter part because it's amazing and makes you feel things and sounds like you're under waterrrr (headsup i love this part so much and it's so long because it's just so good eep). 

***CW: naughty sentences and sexist remarks are spoken briefly 

Chapter 9, part 2: Sexual energy, Irritating Behaviour, Belittling Words, Chaotic Choices, and God-Like Arrogance

Time seemed to disappear, made irrelevant as Penelope waited to hit the bottom of the ocean. Waited for the world to swallow her and consume her, like it did Millie.

"Penelope!"

Millie? Penelope's eyes fluttered sluggishly as she groaned.

"Shit! Are you in here? The door was locked. You're here, right? Your blazer's here... Hold on!" The voice, echoing out of nowhere, called.

"Millie?" She squeaked, her heart pounding as she tried to pull herself up. Everything was so exhausting though—even inhaling was beginning to hurt.

"I hear you. I'm coming." The eerily familiar voice promised from somewhere nearby, their voice frantic as they swore again and again. "It's hot as Satan's asshole in here, Jesus fuck..."

She made some type of noise, her eyes heavy as she struggled to find her voice. Her body felt weird; light as if she were floating, yet she felt her body being dragged down by the hands pulling her into the deep sea around her. Always tethered to the bottom where Millie laid in wait.

And then suddenly all she could see was blue.

The usual coldness she had become enthralled by, melted by the bright and lightened colours swirling above her, revealing far too many emotions to recognize. All she knew was that they were beautiful. The type of beautiful that made everything disappear. They made everything that she was irrelevant, made every doubt go away, made every thought fall into silence. It was like they pierced into everything that she thought she was and revealed a truth she'd long forgotten about—she wanted to live... to really live. She didn't want to follow a script. She didn't want to do what was 'right'. She didn't want to be someone's pawn. She just wanted to live.

But that thought was terrifying, so instead, she buried it—suppressing it so entirely it was practically repressed at that point.

"Maverick Ricky," She mused with a scrunched-up nose as she lifted her hand and touched his flushed cheek with the brush of her fingertips, his skin wet from the steam and hot from the quickly rising heat in the room. "You know... I'm not stupid. You are."

He exhaled an exchange of rude words annoyedly, shaking his head as he bent further down from where he was crouched over her. Scooping her weightless, tingling body up, his arms fit around her perfectly as he stood; an arm sliding beneath her thighs as the other one coiled around her torso. "Can't ever just say thank you without hostility, can you?"

Her body pressed chest to chest with him as she dug her face into the crook of his neck and wrapped herself around him, "Jerk." She muttered before finding herself falling into a dreamless abyss in his arms.

Within dizzying moments, and seconds she found herself forgetting, she was quickly pulled back to shore. Forced to breathe. Forced to be in a world where Millie was missing but where she finally had the chance to live.