Breed and Burn: Skinless

chapter 8- this is hell

"How was Heaven," something whispered. These words hardly reckoned with Axel for they are hardly a scratch against his skull.

Axel woke up with the feeling of fat raindrops falling against his skull, causing a dull but persistent ache. Although he wanted to cry, the tears wouldn't come. He tried listening through the darkness but it was like something sucked away the sounds of living.

He couldn't. How much he couldn't frightened him. He just couldn't...

Emptiness. Thoughtfully, he brought his hand to his chest. There was no heart beat just the deafening sound of silence. Something in him wanted to make a noise but there was nothing left in him. He couldn't bring himself to hear his own voice- it reminded him of Seven more than it did of himself.

Strangely enough, the silence reminds me of the silence found in funerals – forced, solemn and made up of rules. Time took its own time. It felt like hours and all Axel managed to do in this time was stand up. His hands trembled at his sides.

A snicker of leaves ran through Axel's mind before pieces of memories began surfacing. A storm of emotions twist in his gut. He hated this feeling and desperately wanted to send it back. An inward explosion of fear, instability and anguish twisted and pulled. Eventually, it stopped. Holding his breath, he shivers inside and out.

"I don't want to remember," he said but his voice did not matter. This time, he did not have a choice.

All Axel could do was focus on his memories, watch them grow and fit like puzzle pieces with each other and dissolve into another one. As pieces of his memories fell into place, he felt like a paradise being taken apart by its will. Ignorance was bliss.

Faceless were cutting open a human and replacing the bad, depraved parts with memories he never wanted. Even as cracks began to form in the wall that blocked his memories, there was never any curiosity. Knowing would just make it worse. In his bones, he knew it. That's just who Faceless were.

It felt weird- he didn't have proper memories. Even the memories he did have were both in the cage and train; places which he did his best to forget about. These were memories he would look fondly back on for the rest of his life but these were also memories that reminded his of his lack thereof. His loss.

Inside the swirling cloud of pain and frustration, Axel found thin memories.

His mind became foggy. Images started to fill his vision. At first, they are unclear, cold and colourless but the more focused they become the warmer Axel felt like growing sunbeams battling building wind. It was a strange contrast but it was an incredible release epically compared to what he had endured.

He chose something that was in vivid detail and yearned to be reopened. Even though the memory was a book with layers of dust, the pages had remained intact after all this time. Wisps of charcoal black protruded from the murky growth. A shadowy lake lapped at a fog strewn cliff. The sky was an endless stretch of grey and blends in with the uneven ground. The trees are skeletal and eerily resemble skeletons. Some of them move, without wind, in ways trees should not be able to move

However, Axel remembered feeling happy. This was the first time out of the city. The smell of smoke and pollution was less important- his father even allowed him to take of his gas mask for a few seconds. However, his mother intervened and made him put it back on but she still smiled. This mother was very different to the one he had from the memories that appeared when trying to become his doppelganger form.

There's a man with a boy on his shoulders: him and his father. Alongside him, his mother walked whilst holding his father's hand. Then the sounds appear one by one: the rustling of bracken underfoot, the wind stirring the leaves and laughter. There's the smell of damp leaves and rain. There is an unfocused sense of familiarity.