Wildflowers and Tattoos (The Crow: Bill Skarsgard)

Prologue

❀Lillie❀

Am I dead?

The question, however odd, is the perfect alarm that wakes my body up every morning drenched in a cold sweat, with a racing heart, trembling limbs and wild eyes. With each beat of my heart, and deflation of my lungs my mind separates further from my body. I used to scream, and scream, and scream, and scream; until one of my parents held my body and reassured me it was all a dream, or one of my foster siblings slammed my door open and demand I shut up, or a sleazy passerby clamped a hand over my mouth and told me to pipe down or they'd give me a reason to scream, or one of the guards came barreling in with threats of beating me to death. In every situation, no matter the comfort or threat, nothing convinced my crumbled mind that my thundering heart was well and truly keeping me alive.

After my screams either died down, or were forcibly stopped, the voices started. They spoke in haunted lullabies, and venomous hisses, and alluring promises, and lethal threats, and violent demands, and desperate pleas. They sang of the monsters in the dark, and reprimanded foolish dreams, and promised blissful peace, and threatened bloody violence, and demanded searing pain, and pleaded for quiet silence... all consuming silence.

Nothing made it stop. Nothing made them stop. My heart continued to assault my ribs. My lungs continued to strangle themselves. My hands continued to shiver, spreading from my fingertips, to my lips, to my empty stomach, to my knees, and my toes until my body was wholly consumed with motion. My skin continued to sweat, and my tears continued to flow drowning me in my own fears. And the voices... the voices never stop. The whisper, and yell, and promise, and taunt, all fighting for the forefront of my attention. Nothing made it stop... except for pain.

Searing, stabbing, burning, pricking, needling, suffocating pain was my sweet, heavenly reprieve. Agony, even the smallest bit satiated the darkest and most prominent commands, thus silencing the rest. The wonderfully silent relief I got from pain was addictive. I craved pain every hour of every day, and every ticking second of my hellish 'sleep.' My need for self-inflicted bloodshed was the only way to allow myself the assurance between reality and imagination, dreams and nightmares, day and dusk, sun and moon, yin and yang, life and death.

My foster parents did not see my blood the same way I did. Where I saw sanctuary and peace, they saw hours spent cleaning a stain out of a carpet, and an unstable girl not worth the little money the state provided each month. They sent me to hospitals, rehab, and correctional facilities, all with the hope of 'fixing' me so that they could keep their worthless check and continue funding the brats they actually cared about. Luckily, or unluckily, for me they finally saw that I couldn't be 'fixed.' I was so broken I was missing most of my pieces, and those pieces were so far out of reach that they may as well be nonexistent.

Their realization led me to where I am now.

Hammering heart.

Sticky skin.

Quivering limbs.

Moist eyes.

Cracked lips.

Sealed lips.

Silent lips.

White walls.

Small bed.

Scratchy clothes.

Loud voices.

Loud... loud... screaming... shouting... crying voices.

Silent lips.

My eyes flicker down to my hand, resting limply in my lap, and cradling to tool for my sweet, sweet relief. A jagged piece of glass, just barely bigger than my palm. Its sharp point smiles at me, cruel, dark, pretty, calm, joyful, promising. I wrap my fingers around the makeshift knife, and squeeze until crimson lines where the edges meet my flesh. My lips curl back from my teeth in a wary smile.

The piercing tip embeds in the flesh of my abdomen.

The voices still argue.

Retracting the now bloodied glass, I look at the blooming color on my shirt. Plunging the glass back into my body, I let my head fall to the wall behind me.

The voices lower their volume, as if pausing in their conversation to observe my crazed pleasure.

Again, I extract and puncture my stomach with the crimson glass. My smile widens at the same time breathing becomes harder.

The voices are merely a whisper now as I continue to stab, and stab, and stab.

My eyes roll back, my smile dulls, and my hand falls into my lap. The glass tumbles out of my hand and lands harshly on the floor. I can't tell if the sound of shattering is a result of the impact between the glass and the tile, or the final pieces of my mind splintering and breaking as I relish in the quiet that surrounds me.

So quiet.

The edges of my vision blur, and my body slumps against the wall, relief claiming me like a beggar would a loose coin. Faintly, in the fog of my mind I can hear the caws of obsidian crows. My eyes flutter, before making out the vague shape of a person- of a boy.

"What did you do?" He asks gently, crouching down in front of me. His shadowy hands slowly morph into fair skin. The shadows recede and slither into lines and shapes and words along his pale flesh- tattoos.

My flickering consciousness allows me to slowly rack my gaze along his hazy body. Shadows- tattoos, cover a lot of him, snaking up his forearms, and painting his very bare chest and the chiseled muscles of his abdomen. His large hands move to hover over the many weeping wounds in my stomach. I feel a pressure on the area, but can tell, even in my state of dying, that he isn't touching me.

Ignoring the oddity, I move my eyes to settle on his face. It's nearly impossible to make out any of his features, with my vision swaying like a seasick sailor, but through the waves I can make out green eyes. Green like an ocean of pines covered in mist, a gentle color. His eyes bore into mine, like he is searching for something, something that he wishes desperately to find but has no clue where to look, and time is running out.

I wish I could draw his eyes. They look as though they hold a million emotions behind a barely standing door. I wish I could open that door, and see all of the emotions swim in and out of his eyes, his pretty eyes.

"I like your eyes." The whisper is weak, and barely more than a gasp for breath, but I'd gladly lose my ability to breathe if it meant I could stare into those forest irises for the rest of my existence.

"What did you do?" The boy asks again.

My lips quirk briefly, "I made them stop."

"Stop?" His dark eyebrows furrow, and his features begin to blur together.

"Stop."