Try Hiding Now

Stepping on the fallen leaves, they crunched them beneath her feet like bones, turning them to dust under her weight.

There was silence that was too loud and biting cold that burnt her skin as she grasped at her side. Mavis weaved through the trees, clutching her side as the blood continued to pump and flow, body unaware that it was forcing her own life out of her body.

In her mind, the screams of the past hour echoed while the domestic life she had dreamt of slipped through her fingers, sand seeping into an endless hourglass that drank up her life, the time rapidly diminishing.

The blood reminded her that time was, in fact, limited.

She has been raised immortal, raised to never fear the bright light or abrupt darkness. The trees all started to look the same, the more Mavis weaved through them, all the gnarled roots and rough bark that scraped against her side when she leaned on it.

With every nonhuman howl, her will drained, too many wild cries of nature that played around her like a sick taunt to the immortal she was seeking, half dead and scrambling along fallen logs to find her. Because it was always supposed to end this way.

With the pen of fate that drew her line to Elysa. Even when Mavis thought that she had escaped the person she was always expected to be. It all ended with the screaming of the girl she loved and had been trained to slay.

Her legs began to feel too weak, stumbling into a clearing where the moss met her knees as she folded. Only, when Mavis looked up, expecting to see the trees framing the moon and the darkness of her mother swarming her vision, Mavis saw her.

Darkness and moonlight and savage villainous all wrapped into one, even though at the moment, she looked pathetic.

Elysa kneeled on the ground with her forehead pressing against the floor, her white head spilling around her, shaking slightly with every sob that Mavis couldn’t even hear. She almost wanted to take in the sight more, let her gaze roam the sight, only time kept running on faster, leaving Mavis behind.

She didn’t even feel the warmth in her blood anymore. It was just wet and childishly upsetting.

“Elysa,” She hoped her voice sounded breathless with awe rather than exhaustion.

The girl’s head whipped up and back, a beast in the wildness of her purple irises and a woman in the trails of tears marking her pale cheeks.

“No,” the noise was raw coming out of Elysa’s throat, “why are you here?”

“I had to…find you.” Mavis wrapped her arms around her torso, hiding the blood stain blooming on her cloak.

“Are you blind? Stupid? Can you not see me?” Elysa stood to her full height, the scars along her back rippling, “I lied to keep you close, keep you with me because by nature, I am greedy, selfish, made to take advantage of all the good you saw in me. But you know the truth now,” She stalked towards Mavis, feline in her movements, “Cats’ out of the bag.

“So why are you so hell bent on trying to shove it back in?”

“Elysa,” Mavis’s voice croaked out as her fingers twitched where they were gripping the fabric of the albino’s shirt.

Panting in silence, Elysa looked down at Mavis, her lips. She knew they must have looked kiss swollen, especially if Elysa’s lips were anything to go by. “I…I’m sorry I don’t know why they did that.

A furrow developed between her smooth brow, lips parting as if to continue while she tried to pull away.

“You’re such a fucking idiot, Mavis let herself laugh as she surged back in to kiss Elysa again.

They tumbled onto the couch like one united piece, the furniture creaking beneath them fragile as a glass cracking from a fissure.

The meeting was a chance, library shelves winding mazes. Mavis lived in the walls of the library, being surrounded by a story other than the one of her parents, which turned the insistent anxiety that rang in her ears into a dull thrum. Just slightly. Most of the time it was enough.

Mavis reached up to pull a brown colored book from its place–the color the type of ordinary that she had longed to be. Only as she pulled the tome from its spot an empty space greeted her. Iris' purple eyes and the white hair and skin of an albino looking back at her, equally surprised with a book in her hand as well, both had taken their picks at the same time, leaving a space in the shelves where time stilled for just a moment as they stared at each other.

On the other shelf, like a whole other world, the girl smiled at Mavis. She might have been delirious but she swore she saw a hit flush on her pale cheeks.

She was raised around love, but she was not built to be this soft.

Weak. A small starting tear in a bag that was too fragile to begin with.

Mavis’s hands had been created to wield daggers, not cradle the delicate flesh of a beating heart, no matter how much a greedy voice tooted in her ear that she needed the to rip the organ out anyway, from herself, from another, at some point it stopped mattered as her mind grew wild with savage need.

No. Mavis’s trimmed nails might as well have been claws and the rosy flesh scaled skin of something not human. Her hands were not capable of being gentle, so he kept them clenched shut. Maybe if she sat alone long enough, the cutting of her nails into her palms would be enough.

Mavis turned the floor length mirror in her room around. She didn’t want to look at the contradiction of her reflection. A sweet face with a soul of corruption and disease. Small nose and thin face, beauty she had been praised for, only whenever she saw it, Mavis only wanted to flee like a stray cat from the rain, only she could never run by the stain of her nature.

Lock the cat in the bag. Mavis could claw and hiss but the blood on her hands could only ever be one.

She just needed to find the girl she was looking for.

“Elysa, I’ve been looking for you for so long,” Mavis whispered. So long. Her whole life. Only before she hunted down the demon with blades and now she wanted to run to Elysa with only her own heart in her outstretched palms.

“You shouldn’t have—-” Her lips continued to move but the words were plunged beneath a ringing that infested Mavis’s ears, “-----Mavis?” Fear moved over the albino’s cold features.

“Wait!” Was all Mavis could read on her target? Her girlfriend? Her cause of death’s lips.

There was blood on Mavis’s hand, streaming through her fingers and glittering like jewels. Her only mission had been to rid the world of its evil, and as Mavis felt the ichor on her skin, she realized she had done just that.

It was always meant to end this way.

With the blood of the true monster on her hands.

And with a cat that died in its bag.