{ normal again. † From Ashes one shots.

maddie, #2 ↭ who are you? [drabble]

"Who is Madeline Hayes?"

Madeline Hayes is a little girl cowering in a playground, using her arms as a shield as tears threaten to drown her face. She is skinny and frail, with shoulder blades so defined under her paper skin, perhaps she was supposed to be born with wings. Hands hold her down, the reality of gravity and hopelessness crushing her bones. There is no flying away; there is only sinking slowly into the sand as she heaves another sob and begs for it all to stop.

She is a caged beast, snarling and bellowing out screams of pain and rage as they rip out of her rib cage and up through her throat. Calling out for war through her iron bars and slashing at anyone who edges toward her. She is old; time and tradition have rusted the chains she battles against so fiercely. Her metal hell is hers alone; she created it herself. She's just too feral, too dangerous. A demon that mustn't be approached, that should've been slain long ago.

She is the knight on the chessboard, with movements and placement so precise that wherever she ends up is never an accident. She will easily move from the light to darkness, sometimes taking the hard way to get to her destination and take down the enemy - but she only holds value if you see her worth, if she's strategically aimed. If not, she's aimless, going in circles until she gets in someone else's way, shielding the vital pieces still on the board as she's mowed down.

She is a broken china doll that no one cared to glue back together just right. Something that fell from her place in the universe and shattered. She can feel the cracks in her skin and remembers with perfect clarity how it felt to be unfixable, to lose bits of herself forever. The pieces of her still have missing shards, gaps where people can see in - not that there's anything left to see.

Behind the beast, beyond the child and the knight, and underneath the cracked ceramic, there is nothing. A void. A hollowness that was carved out long ago. Nothing but inky blackness that has swallowed everything pure and beautiful. And yet...

In the darkness, there is a faint thumping. A beat that bounces off of the walls and slips through the cracks, despite the scarcity. A beat that means she's alive, alive, ALIVE. A beat that threads all the pieces of her together, that makes her use all of what she is at once. A beat that helps her stand. That helps her move. That helps her fight.

A beat that only she can hear that helps her understand that she is better off alive than dead, no matter how loudly the grave calls to her.

When the shards come together and she can feel the beating in her chest, no matter how little the time, she is - for a fleeting moment - whole, or perhaps an imitation of whatever 'whole' feels like.

Perhaps someone else will see all of the pieces and find her whole. Perhaps they will hear the beat in the black hollow of her chest. Until then, she will scream and slash and stand guard and lift her arms to shield herself. She will walk in time with the thumping behind her pieces and know they are made of something stronger now. She will feel all of it all at once and whisper between heartbeats,

"I will fight."