A Handful of Stardust

RIGHT NOW, THEY'RE BUILDING A COFFIN YOUR SIZE

CHARACTERS: Celia Starling

TAGS & TRIGGERS: angst, revenge, running away, injury & blood mention, implied self-harm, implied abuse, 2000s

Celia knocks hard on the door, so hard she wouldn't be surprised if it collapsed from its hinges. There's no reply, but that doesn't mean there's no-one home—she moves the door carefully and peers around the edge, at the sagging couch. Empty. She locks the door behind her.

She's brimming with energy, with the potential to explode. The cautiousness with which she checked the house is in no way replicated with her movements, sharp and clunky and loud. Her boots thud on the carpet and silver chains bang together, accessories to her belt and wrists that she found just outside a junkyard a year ago, rusted but safe to touch with no injuries prone to infection at the places they touch her skin. They're thick and heavy, and she wears them most days.

Plod, plod, plod. Her platforms touch the edge of a bottle as she picks her way through the living room, with bright blue walls and flattened carpet. The curtains aren't normally open this time of day. The air feels dry and dangerous.

Celia pushes on the neck of the bottle—a wine bottle, but cheaper stuff—with one heavy boot, and it cracks satisfyingly under the pressure. She draws back and aims a kick at it; it flies against the wall, leaving two small purple pockmarks on the wallpaper and shattered glass under the windowsill.

She half-runs over to the green wine bottle. The glass is pretty and dark and sharp, dangerously close to slitting her palm clean open if she should touch it.

Celia touches it. It's smooth and cold. She drops it again and grinds it under a heel.

There's one more bottle, some sort of gross-smelling spirit, and a crinkled can of Red Bull under the sofa. They're gone almost immediately, ground harshly into the carpet and kicked under the couch again. She stands then, silently and perfectly still, breath coming in forcefully controlled drags. The carpet isn't torn enough, and she slams a foot over a chunk of glass and pulls it back and forth under her heel until the fabric rips.

This wasn't what she came to do, but it's satisfying and clears her head well enough. Destruction is something Celia avoids, but it's far too tempting just to kill—not real things, but objects and feelings and memories, shattered against the walls and leaving purple bloodstains.

Something bangs outside—the wind, hurling gravel at brick. It sounds nothing like a person, but she flinches anyway, heart speeding up for a second. Her nails dig into her palms, dangerously close to her wrists, anger flickering as her heart did at her irrational fear. It was a stupid thing to think, that anyone could arrive at the front door without her noticing before; still. She has to hurry.

There are places in the wallpaper and the carpet and the curtains she wants to rip open, but her hands stay firmly in fists as she forces herself past them. The lighter in her pocket burns, it and her fingers begging to be reunited, to hurt something, anything. Nobody else is here. Her nails are close to drawing blood.

Her door stares at her as she rounds the corner. A door that doesn't shut thanks to the carpet, which wouldn't lock anyway because the curving silver metal of the latch tore when it was forced open. Her bedsheets are plain black and her room is fairly neat. She pulls back the duvet.

A pile of junk lies there, creating an indent in the mattress. A broken lighter, a cable with the jack torn off, the snapped-off neck of her old guitar. Ribbons and guitar strings braided into bracelets, a doorknob, lighters, cigarettes, snapped pencils, tiny medical blades, a penknife that doesn't retract. There's a little blood on some of it: some she remembers, some she doesn't know where it came from. Celia's wrists ache; she finds a bag buried somewhere under all the junk and shoves in about half of it: the stuff that isn't broken too badly, like the penknife and packs of cigarettes, or things with nostalgic value like the bracelets.

She straightens, looks around at the grey room with nothing on the walls except water stains, nothing on the carpet except spots of blood and dirt from her shoes. Nobody would know she was here. The only proof of Celia's existence, now, is herself and pieces of herself scattered in objects on the bed; it lies on her skin in faded scars, in her abdomen as a faint sickness, in her head as it scratches away at her. She is so close to being out but that can wait, because she wants to stay here, on the brink of it all, knowing she's about to be gone forever. The walls will forget her name, and so, eventually, will he.