A Nightmare (CL. RP)

Eve gave a small pout at his comment of calling her young, her being naturally short not helping matters. She shifted her weight more onto her toes in a failed attempt to reduce the height difference between them. “I’m not that young,” she grumbled. “I’m nearly fifteen.” It was a second too late for her to realize how childish the comment sounded, as well as it not helping her case at all. Her cheeks reddened, and she was almost too caught up in newfound embarrassment that she had almost missed his next comment. “And uh… well, if you were trying to poison me, you wouldn’t admit it, right? Unless you’re trying to pull off some reverse psychology to trick me!” She joked, at least more than not.

Grins were contagious. The sight of his fangs would’ve offset her more if Eve met him when she first joined the cult; at this point, his scars and mark made her more uncomfortable than claws and fangs. “Seventy?” She repeated, some disbelief tracing her voice. “No wonder you called me young. I’m probably like a twelve-year-old to you.”

Eve nodded along to his baby boomer comment as if she knew what it meant. She did recall hearing it once or twice, probably when she tagged along to one of her ward’s history classes, but she hadn’t really paid much attention to those anyways. As for her fair share of hell… “Yeah, well… I wouldn’t say seen since I kinda ran away once everything started happening.” The fallen angel admitted, her gaze shifting down to her feet as she thought back on it. “In retrospect, I guess that left way too much to the imagination. For all those taunts I made to her, I do have more of a flight reaction. I didn’t want to face the repercussions.” She still didn’t. Her imagination she had some form of control over. The truth, not so much.

Out of all the words she had used to describe her life, lucky was not one of them. Someone having envy of her cowardice and sheer dumb chance sounded insane. However, if she was being honest, they probably were. “Well, you know what they say,” Eve shrugged. “‘One man’s hell is another man’s heaven’.” For him, at least. The angel glanced back at the brand on his neck and the scars littering his body. She believed with her entire heart and mind that she should’ve gotten something like that… but that wasn’t what she wanted. “Okay. So I flew away and I survived. What’s next?”

Move on. The angel had heard those words countless times, from her friends to herself. The mantra had echoed in her head for months. She was supposed to become numb from things like death, simply accept that they were a part of a human’s lifespan and move on. And she ignored it then- no, she didn’t just ignore it. She completely rejected the idea out of pure stubbornness and guilt and renounced everything. “Sleeping is more trouble than it’s worth,” she retorted. “And I can’t pick up where I left off. For me, it was easier to try to get rid of what I had.” She made a gesture to the halo of blue flames above her head. “It still didn’t get rid of everything.”

Moving on, learning to live with the results, change in general, they were all broad life lessons the young angel had to encounter with much earlier than she had ever expected. It didn’t even count all the extra emotions she once never even considered dealing with with either. “I know, I have to learn to live with the consequences of my actions! It’s just…” Eve’s grip on her mug tightened, her throat tightening, unsure on how the next part would come out. “I… I’m tired of waiting, okay? I don’t want to wait for things to get better, not when I have no idea when or if they will! I want to take shortcuts. I want to cheat. I want to run when I’m supposed to confront my fears. I want… I want to not have to.”

She placed her mug back on the counter and buried her face in her hands, hiding a few tears of frustration behind them. “Ugh…” She slid onto the floor and pressed her back against the counter and wiped her eyes. “It doesn’t really matter want I want, does it?”