Her blood had gone cold, like ice water invaded her veins. Capsizing the once fiery blaze that burned throughout her being, saving her from the flames that numbed her nerves and blurred her senses, only to be submerged beneath frigid waves that threatened to overwhelm her faster than the fire. Body rocking with the currents, dragging her shaken being out to sea without a single lighthouse in sight to guide her back to certain land.
Maybe the smoke arose over the far horizon line, any last remnant of a saving grace tumbling into the atmosphere alongside the ashes of the structure that littered across the shoreline. Bobbing beneath an ocean's grasp, everything she'd been numbed to as her heart beat with a brutal fury, suddenly came flooding back with overwhelming clarity.
The adrenaline in her veins coating the shock that suddenly sent voltage throughout her very bones, the waves only amplifying the static like the salt of the sea hit a live wire, wore off as it floated away in the tide like kelp around her ankles. Leaving her nerves exposed, her mind vulnerable and her chest heaving beneath the weight that crushed down upon it.
The dusky light of the Garrion Tavern that she'd stumbled into, cast shadows over the package of worn and nearly empty cigarettes, her fingers fumbled with. Pads brushing over the creasing and faded label but feeling not a thing as she couldn't keep her fingers from trembling, like an electrical storm shot through each and every one. She'd grip one of the last remaining cigarettes from the carton, only to drop it back into the case or onto the tabletop of the booth she tried to hide within the shadowed upholstery of.
The matches seemed to mock her, as they lay in their own little box that she hadn't dared to touch, as she knew she'd never keep still enough to light the flame to singe her smoke. And so she simply placed the single cigarette between her fingers, bringing it to her lips as though the tightly rolled tobacco could suddenly ignite itself and stream down into her drowning lungs, drying out the ice water that froze her breath and replace it with the heat that had made it possible for her feet to carry her here in the night.
Midnight dawned on the other side of the establishment walls. Darkness seeping in through the paneled windowpanes, but only seeming to make the haze of this place stand sharper in the shadows.
Maybe because it illuminated the very foundation of its purpose, a housing for lost souls and those wanting to merely hide away in the darkness of this world, obscured from the sight of the devils that wanted them gone. Perhaps, the Garrison was a refuge for the damned.
Her hair hung a matted mess over her shoulder and cascading in tangled, windblown knots down her spine. The once neatly coiled curls, loose and spilling over thin fabric of pale evergreen, carried in the scent of the night. Eradicating the breath of perfume that once danced subtly along the curvature of her collarbone, sensual jasmine and softening rose hips, dominated by the smell of the smoke that carried throughout the streets of Birmingham like oxygen in her lungs.
The smell of the wind wove itself into the strands that hung heavy. Split ends tousled with a shade she couldn't see, seeping into the threads of her dress that was fortunately too dark a shade to showcase the crimson it suddenly adorned.
She'd scrubbed her flesh raw before she'd journeyed into Small Heath, over and over again in a basin turned pool of deep maroon, but as she held her unlit cigarette as firmly as she could in her trembling hands, she swore the sight still bled onto the paper. Like beyond the soap that foamed and frothed over her skin and through the valleys of her palms she'd torn through, the metallic nature still loitered, a stain never to be cleansed.
She could feel it still, the thick ooze that coated her flesh in a heat that made her nauseated all over again, collecting beneath her nails and in the whirls of her fingerprints, until she could no longer see the sight of her own skin but rather the bloodshed of his own.
