Writer Games | Death Wish & 51

Task Eight: Ever After /F - Aster Wheatleigh [5]

I

The room was white.  There were white walls, a white ceiling and even a patchwork of white  ceramic tiles slotted into place next to one another to line the floor  of the miserable hospital room.

Within seconds after  waking up, Aster's thoughts registered what exactly the quiet hum and  beeping of machines around him meant. As if blood had began to drip from  the ceiling, splotches of the thick red colour began to spread across  his mattress and coat his vision in a flood of furious emotion.

It was red with the  anger of a boy who'd been dragged back to health in a display that so  clearly ignored his desire to die. It was red with hatred; a passionate  loathing directed equally to the Games and himself, and it was red with  the emotion of all the blood on his hands now that he had found the  audacity to continue breathing. More than that, a raw pain crept up each  of his limbs and made its way to his head, delivering him the memory of  a violent fall and making him relive the feeling of each of his bones  shattering against jagged boulders intended to kill him. The pain was  red, too.

Unable to move a muscle,  his eyes scanned the room for any clue of what was going on.  Eventually, he acknowledged the terrible elephant in the room that his  life meant their death, even though he had always intended it to be the  other way around. Paralysed by fear, only his eyes could flit around the  room wildly as the panic began to rise up in his chest and pound  through his weeping veins when he realised that the deed had likely  already been done.

Without warning, a spark  of fury ignited behind his eyes and his open resentment of himself for  the simple act of living sent adrenaline pulsing through his veins.  Gagging against the volume of medication racing their way through his  system, he forced his broken limbs to bend to his will and carry him  from his bed to the desk by the window. Filled with hatred and loathing,  he swiped his hand across the surface and hurled the elaborate crystal  vase at the head of an alarmed Avox waiting on him from the corner.

The servant quickly fled  the room as Aster took up an almighty wail declaring how passionately  he did not want his life. He wanted to die - he had died! He had thrown  himself from a building and found himself finally at peace knowing he'd  made the right choice. He had finally chosen to do the right thing and  despite it all, the heat of his promised sins had melted the angel wings  straight from his back and plummeted him back into hell.

An alarm began to blare  in the corridor outside of his cell, but he paid it no attention. Upon  hearing the sound of approaching peacekeepers' footsteps, he bolted to  the marble door and scrambled to find a phantom lock, hoping to keep  them out long enough for him to be dead when they found him.

Unable to find such an  amenity, he forced a bandaged arm against the door and brought it down  on the surface with enough force to cause a spiral of red to blossom  through the layers of gauze. Enjoying his own self-inflicted punishment,  he began to slam his whole body against the door until the feeling of  his bones shattering even further beyond repair was enough to drown out  the pain of his unrelenting guilt.

Eventually, he succumbed  to the pain and slid to the floor next to the shattered vase, his own  blood mixing with the water to form a sickly pink puddle too shallow to  drown him. When the doctors finally sedated him, he was still looking at  the remains of the flowers.

The daisies weren't white anymore.

II

Time came to him in  snapshots after that; most details he chose to ignore as they melded  together in a string of meaningless events. Some, however, he could  remember as vividly as the day they happened, even if he didn't want to.