Angstymuse - Blog Posts
─── put it straight
content warnings: heavy angst, substance abuse (shimmer), violence, brief suggestive descriptions - read at your own discretion
summary: you break up with sevika. she falls apart.
wc: 1.7k
"i don't think love can change, how could all that passion change? you must be lying, but if you're not tell me you don't love me now if you leave me, i'll end up like this could you still leave me, even if i end up like this?" — (G)I-DLE. “Put It Straight (Nightmare Ver)"
Sevika tells herself she doesn’t need you. And if she ever did, she never will again.
Forget everything. She’s good at forgetting. Since a tender age she’s become an expert at burying unwanted memories in the bottom of a bottle.
Seven days since you left. Seven things to forget.
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The first thing is the sound of your voice.
She hears it everywhere. It's the hardest thing to escape. In crowded marketplaces, on the harbor, in her dreams.
The last thing you said to her before you walked out the door. The words like stones sinking into water, disappearing into the murky depths, never to be retrieved.
“I can’t do this anymore. I can’t save you from yourself.”
When Sevika heard this, she had only laughed. What was it supposed to mean? Who said she needed to be saved?
You were the one who didn’t understand.
Your anger. The fear in your eyes whenever she stumbled home with the pink blaze in her pupils. She didn’t get it. She didn’t get the way your voice grew tight, the way your hands shook as you bandaged her injuries, wiped the blood from her face.
If you were afraid of her, it would have been different. But it wasn’t that. You were afraid for her.
She can’t eat, the food sticks in her throat. She can’t sleep, you return to her mercilessly, and sometimes you’re angry at her the way you were when you left, sometimes she wakes up with the ghost sting of your palm against her cheek or the sound of your voice still ringing in her ears.
You said, “I can’t save you from yourself.”
In her dreams the words change. Now you’re laughing at her, hysterically, feverishly.
You’re saying, “I don’t love you. I never loved you. I should’ve seen this coming.”
She wants to tell you not to leave. Over and over again she watches you walk out the door, but she can’t say a word. Not a single fucking word.
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The second thing is your touch.
The way your tongue felt between her legs, the way you dug your nails into the muscles of her thighs as she ground herself against your open mouth, making sounds that she would have been ashamed to hear from herself if she weren’t so far gone.
The way you kissed her, clung to her like she would save you. The way you wrapped your legs around her waist and planted kisses along the scars on her body, the way you whispered of her beauty into her skin, making her shiver.
The tender way you held her at night, the way she lay her head in the pillow of your lap and let her eyes close as you stroked her hair.
The feeling of your grip on her arm when you walked through the streets to keep up with her long strides. As if you needed her. As if you couldn’t stand to let her go.
Sevika doesn’t look for it anywhere else. She doesn’t go anywhere near Babette’s. She can’t. Every face is loathsome because it isn’t yours. The very thought of another woman on her skin makes her nerves burn.
She wants you, damn it, she misses the warmth of your back against her stomach when you were curled up against her.
The silence of an empty apartment, the chill of an empty bed, is there anything worse than that?
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The third thing is the rain.
It was pouring in torrents the first night she had to sleep without you. The wind howled between the buildings and the thunder roared with a vengeance above the silent neon city.
Sevika listened to the sheets of rain hurling against the grimy glass of the windows and wondered where you were sleeping. If you were thinking about her at all. If you had been caught in the rain, or if you were safe somewhere warm and dry.
She tried not to think about the way you’d towel her hair dry if she was caught in a storm on the way home, saying sweet nothings, nagging that she’d catch her death even though both of you knew Sevika does not get sick. The laughs you shared as you ran the hot baths for her after a grueling day of shipments and warehouse checks for Silco.
You would say with a smile, “Where would you be without me? Hmm?”
Sevika doesn’t know. She genuinely doesn’t know.
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The fourth thing is Shimmer.
Before she met you, Shimmer meant nothing more to her than a necessity, a tool. Rip it through her bloodstream, make everything more efficient.
When you were with her, it was the subject of every fight—she couldn’t understand why you were so hellbent on keeping her from using it, why you pleaded with her time and time again not to use it, why you insisted that anyone else could fuck themselves over with Shimmer for all you cared, just as long as it wasn’t her.
“It’s killing you,” you would say. “I can’t lose you. You’re all I’ve got.”
After you leave, it becomes a lifeline. She keeps the capsules in a belt slung over her shoulder. Takes them with complete abandon. Three at a time in every fight just to feel like she was somebody, just to feel invincible the way she had before you came along and unravelled her, made her fall to pieces, then left the fragments on the floor.
When she fights on Shimmer, she can leave herself for a little while. Never mind the comedown. Blood, everything is drenched in blood now. Blood on her hands, blood under her nails, blood staining her clothes, the tang of it in her mouth, the vivid blaze of it in her eyes, roaring in her ears.
She becomes the monster you told her she was not.
Without you, there is nothing to keep her human. Nothing tying the fragile organ of her heart to something real.
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The fifth thing is pain.
Maybe she’d gotten used to having you patch her up. Maybe she’d grown to take it for granted that there’d be someone to look after her when she stumbled in bloody and broken, head reeling with the comedown from Shimmer. Someone to force her to slow down.
Now as she leans against the wall in the darkness of an alley, breathing through broken ribs, as she fumbles for the syringe of Shimmer that will mend the bones even as it poisons her blood, she tries not to think of you. She tries not to think of what you’d say, how you’d look at her.
You were so kind. You were so kind to her.
No one will ever care about her like that again.
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The sixth thing is the loneliness.
It doesn’t hit her as hard during the day, when she’s on her feet from the crack of dawn to nightfall, running jobs for Silco and keeping the goons at the harbor in check.
Only when she finds herself on the floor of the apartment surrounded by empty bottles and hollow Shimmer capsules, only when she catches glimpses of her reflection, the haggard eyes and unwashed hair, does it sink in that you have left her and she is alone again.
Have you moved on? Over and over again she wonders. Have you moved on already? Have you forgotten her already?
Her devotion to you had always frightened her a little. The way you looked at her and seemed to see her. You saw her for who she was, you peeled back the layers of toughened skin until she stood bare and vulnerable before you. You saw beyond her roughness, her silence. You saw her—the cracks in her skin, the broken parts, the ugly parts, the hidden parts. Yet you stayed.
She had driven you away, and she knows this. Back then it had seemed so easy. She had seen you as a distraction from the cause, she tried to tell herself that it was a good thing you left.
Why, why, then, does it feel like something vital has been torn out of her insides?
Why does it feel like something in her snapped when you shut the door behind you, why does it feel like she is constantly bleeding internally?
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The seventh thing… The seventh thing is you.
She needs to erase you, wash you away in the cruel waves of time.
Even if it means leaving it all behind. The soft moments, the tender moments, the moments where she felt, even for a brief while, that she was something worthy of love.
She works harder than ever. She doesn’t let herself sleep. She doesn’t go near the places she used to go with you—she doesn’t even walk through the Last Drop anymore, because that’s where you met her—she reaches Silco’s office by the back stairs.
She drinks to forget, until your face begins to blur in her memory like a ruined watercolor portrait. She drinks to swallow the sound of your voice.
I can’t do this anymore. I can’t save you from yourself.
DON’T LEAVE. DON’T LEAVE DON’T LEAVE DON’T LEAVE, FOR JANNA’S SAKE DON’T LEAVE.
She fights to feel something, taking on Silco’s assignments with cold, grim eagerness. The heat of Shimmer rippling in her veins. She becomes something else. Her vision distorts, her throat scraped dry from the yells of rage, her mech arm like a separate creature, insatiable in its bloodlust.
I can’t save you from yourself.
Who said you had to? Who said who said who said? All you had to do was stay.
This is all your fault.
I don’t love you, I never did.
Don’t leave. Please, don’t leave.
The body falls at her feet. The Shimmer drains from her arm. As it powers down she feels her body crumple. She sees the corpse, she sees the hollow eye of the moon above the buildings, watching her without comment. As she sinks down against the wall, as her consciousness begins to slip from her, she finds herself mumbling your name.
She can’t forget. She will never forget.
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end note: i swear this was gonna end well but then it turned into a monstrosity of angst.. i'm so sorry. blame (g)i-dle. i've been listening to this song on repeat