IN MY HEAD¹ ━━ Bellamy Blake

𝐗𝐕𝐈: Starry Night

     Bellamy lifts one hand, grazing it against the terracotta skin of her bare arm (her jacket is discarded in the corner) and the intimacy of it makes scarlet ash sweep inside her lungs. There's a strange furnace burning her alive. An odd heat crawling up her neck.

     He clears his throat suddenly. "Uh, that's good."

     She tugs away from him. Fumbling with the gun, she tries to lift it up and match it with the target.

     "Those spiders won't stand a chance," he says, grinning at her.

     But her heart drops into her stomach.

     Lined up through the spoke, all she can see are faces of phantoms she'd hoped to be free of. Her moms shadowy figure waltzes by, followed closely by a giggling Charlotte utterly drenched in scarlet. God, she can almost smell the blood. Atom's disfigured corpse drags a pockmarked finger down her face and she shudders. Pike. Jaha. Great expectations.

     Do you not have the heart for this, Miss. Jupiter?

     "Are you - "

     "I can't do this," says Lyra, setting the gun delicately onto the cargo. "I - I can't."

     Sucking in a sharp breath, she does her best to ignore the walls crawling towards her. One blink and she'll be back in solitary again. One false movement is all it will take. Caged in that box as she sits and waits to die. Alone with nothing but the voices.

     "I'm an engineer, a physicist," she says as lightly as she can, though she is horrified. "Not a soldier."

     "Hey, it's all right," he says gently. His hands hover over the trigger of his own gun, the edges of his mouth tugging up more cautiously now. "It's not so bad. All you need to do is trust me."

     Cradling it in one hand, he shrugs it over his shoulder. Cocking it easily, he jabs its onyx snout through the air, his nose scrunching in concentration as he adopts a casual stance, feet in perfect parallel. Lyra waits in trepidatious anticipation as he pulls back the trigger.

     Nothing happens.

     He reloads, clicks it once more.

     Again, nothing.

     "Don't worry," Lyra teases. "I still trust you."

     "Shut up," he mumbles.

    Taking her gun, he copies his previous motions only this time, when he fires, a shot rings out and explodes just centimetres off from the dead centre of the target. X marks the spot, thinks Lyra dryly.

     But she cannot deny how the deafening ring makes her stomach curdle. Guns, bullets, war. . . she always has been a star girl, more cosmic than human, head to high in the clouds of dreams for her feet to touch the ground where harsh reality burnt all who walked there. Wreathed in the mist of phantoms, walking with ghosts at her hands, death at her back, and starlight in her eyes.

     The stars cannot exist in a universe of black holes, in a sky void with ash. She could never condone violence.