Devils and Angels

xxxv. sympathise

a m a r a n t h i n e

undying, immortal; a deep purple-red

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"WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?" DIANA stormed, her eyes wide and blazing with fury. She stalked up to me, slippers slapping against the kitchen tile, before her palm whipped out to meet my flesh.

My body concaved at the shock of her impact; crutches clattering beneath me as I crumbled to the ground. The eyes I faced her with were blank and devoid of emotion. Now that I knew the truth, her approval meant nothing to me.

"Out," I answered flatly, reaching for the crutch she kicked away in an instant. I watched it skid across the floor, but couldn't bring myself to care as two hands reached for the fabric cut just above my cleavage line, dragging me to my feet and shoving me into the wall.

One knee buckled beneath me; the other kicked out at an awkward angle to keep all the weight off of the fracture.

Pale blue eyes kept me pinned, and it was with white-knuckled fingers I clutched the counter with to keep me upright.

"That isn't an answer," She spat, her hot saliva searing my skin. I wiped it away with a trembling hand, letting it drop back to my side in an instant.

"I don't care," I responded seethingly, digging my nails into the wooden underbed of the counter. "Why does it matter to you anyway? If it were up to you, I wouldn't even be alive to tell you."

My words struck a nerve; I knew it when Diana's expression became molten, and long fingers reached for me. The prisms of her diamond glittered in my peripheral vision, but it my mind's eye, it was still dripping with crimson and forever tainted with my blood.

Since finding out, I didn't know whether it was a miracle or a curse that I was still alive today.

"How did you find out?" Her cobalt eyes pierced into mine, Stygian and metallic. A twisted concoction of everything cold and gruesome in the world. The heels of her hands pressed into my shoulders, my throat, stealing the breath from my lungs in the worst of ways. "You weren't meant to know."

"I remembered," I hissed, tearing away from her touch, my blood beginning to freeze in my veins. "How could you?" A sob climbed up my throat; no matter how many times I swallowed, it remained lodged in my windpipe, choking me. "...I'm supposed to be your child."

There was no response to that.

Diana released me in an instant, her hands closing around a bottle she tipped to her lips in one fluid motion. Her world became one that reeked of vodka; wiping me from her memory and replacing me with the glass prison at the bottom of a bottle.

I watched her, with a feeling of hurt building in my chest. Maybe, in some parallel universe she was a good mother to all of her children: loved them, cared for them, and nourished them like they deserved.

Or maybe, there was no world where Diana Collins was a good person.

Because when I looked at her,

I saw no humanity left at all.

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I staggered awake to shadows stretching across the carpet, matching the haze of lavender and grey swirled under my bleary eyes.

Five-thirty AM matched my mood―unseasonably cold, and obsidian black; infinitesimal scatters of stars lost in the inky void. Though the first shimmers of morning light were creeping upon the horizon, the world itself was still bathed in a darkness that weighed on my shoulders, digging its talons into my stability.