The Waiting Room
Her clothes disappear first, starting from a suspiciously ragged pinprick hole in the center of her chest and raveling ever outwards.
She is uncovered. Her inhibitions are laid aside.
Why hadn't she been with Lora, when her lady went to march to run to fly to die?
Why? For the same reason she had always been optional, a bonus Blade, the healer who never stopped the fighter from getting hurt.
Your original Blade, you said. But am I not original? Am I not more wholly yours?
Do I not wear your face, your clothes, your hair, your perfume?
Do I not practically live inside your skin?
Didn't I? Wasn't I?
A crow screeches. Death.
One caw is fine. Two are a pair, call and response, question and answer. After all, they have both died.
But...as yet, they are not both gone.
A horde, borne upon screaming wind, are not fine. These birds...these creatures are sick.
Oh, we were so sick.
Codependently, they fly together. Alone, they are merely freaks.
Freak, freak, freak. A Blade with its Driver's face. A Blade who is nothing but an empty reflection.
A Blade who is nothing, nothing, nothing on her own.
There comes a rumbling sound. Haze feels a shutter pulled down before her eyes. It rattles, brittle and broken. Nothing is fit to contain.
She knows she is dying. She has accepted that now. And thus she cannot see how gentle it looks from the outside.
She only knows how violent it feels on the inside.
Shards of glass drag across her stomach, bubble up from within.
There was never meant to be blood down there. Haze, the carefree adventurer, had been vegetarian.
Is that the problem? Oh, Architect, you God whom I also sought to believe in, because Lady Lora believed in people and Jin struggled to but he believed in her, always her, always her, and I thought that there must have been someone kind up there, to give me to her, to her, always her, always her...is that why?
Was I not thirsty enough? Was I not hungry enough?
Did I not desire strongly enough for her blood and her taste?
(Haze licks her lips.)
Her extremities disappear, hands and feet wrenched from wrists and ankles. On the battlefield where Mikhail no longer is, whisked away as he has been before the cleanup crew will come, she simply fades.
It is not violent, to be a Blade. It is not suffering. It is euphoria, only.
Only. And no more.
No more.
Not ever.
Not anymore.
Yes, the ripping. Sinew by scratch, each fiber expunged as a follicle from a pore, Haze is torn apart.
(Off with the bandage, don't you think?)
(.I do)
She would scream, if she could, but she can't. Something cruel and harsh and self-righteous, coming from internal or external source she knows not, shushes her.
Shut up, Haze. No one cares what you think. No one cares how you feel.
No longer is she one. Criminally enough, the fading of the bond had been the easiest thing.
It's all so very...slow. If she could hear Lady Lora's heartbeat, that would help to pass the time.
Right? Because hadn't she always set her clock by Lady Lora?
She had been my precious Driver too.
When the pain and the excruciation is over, when Haze feels her soul fully left any sort of corporeal body (will she ever even look like Lora anymore? and so shouldn't she be so grateful?), it's...a dim sort of feeling.
Who (what) is she? What (who) does she know?
Nothing, and no one.
Nothing ever happens, in a waiting room. No one special is ever there.
Oh, what's that?
The doctor will see you now. You have his full permission to strip.
You have all professional, clinical recommendation to bare yourself to your Core.
All will be well, soon. Gone is the time to be sick.
Oh, Haze. Aren't you so glad to go?