Bloodlove: a dark piper au

afterbirth of beauty

    Right, so Piper had been wrong about the vines. They were a lot less vine-y and lot more like evil, sentient little shits that had the nature of a pissed off mother-in-law. Back to the present.
She could see the vines encasing her, growing and thickening, but she wasn't thrashing against them. The world had exploded into white blindness around her as the sound coming from Goat Boy ceased and all her senses went deaf except for the pictures.
The pictures.
    Piper never liked to look at dead bodies for long. There was something beautiful about a killing, about the way something could go through and through and simply stop the procession of air, the procession of being. The way that if you did it fast enough, no blood even stained the blade. The way a body heaved backwards with the force of a blow and wrenched forward when the intruder left the gleeful direction it came- and the majestic impact of a person hitting the ground as whatever was inside left existence. There was such beauty in that power.
    But dead bodies were nothing beautiful. They were the morning after the party, the hangover, the leftovers. Stagnant, rotting, festering spoils of war and doubt that no assassin should ever indulge in. The psychedelic lights, the sunburst high in that one and only explosion of violence and evil- dead bodies were the byproducts of a miracle. They were afterbirth.
    But there they were. Piper's eyes were wide open, so blindingly white, a perfectly tortured canvas for all those dead bodies. All of them. All together. Piled on top of each other in a massive heap, towering over her. Her skin crawled with bugs she knew weren't there and Piper screamed at the top of her lungs, no sound coming out as all the others kept blasting at full volume, and somehow she knew that every single living thing she'd killed was in that pile.
Piper whipped her head back and forth, howling, wishing for blindness, wishing for some merciful dark place to look and for someone to crack open her skull and remove her brain so this memory, of the ghostly pale five year old, crying, as Piper skinned her mother alive with a paring knife like a slab of beef for forty thousand dollars, would disappear and loving blackness would save her.
    Blackness had left her. The sound would never stop. Piper begged. She begged for what felt like years, begging till she was completely encased in the vines, being pulled into the ground, only her mouth uncovered, still screaming for that precious air and darkness to help her, howling in the vain hope that her screams would drown out those that came from the first grade school bus she'd set on fire just two weeks ago, screaming to drown out the crackling noises of flesh igniting.
    I thought it was beauty, she sobbed. One can sob without a mouth, as it turns out. Piper was floating, floating through space, no physical form. The horrible noise was her now, and she wondered how so much beauty could be so horrific. Beauty wasn't supposed to be this wrong.