Ground Down

Chapter 38

Humans were social animals. She had learnt that in school. They did not lead like wolves, yet they travelled in packs; they did not synchronise like fish, yet they formed swarms; they did not wear their colours on their outside like birds, yet they flocked together. Social animals. Dependent on touch and closeness, body to body, mind to mind, like they depended on food and drink, a baby not shown affection, not held close, would die like a plant not watered, but adults defied that. An adult had the physical and mental capacity to deny themselves the most fundamental human needs, water, food, connection, and while the former two would, in due time, claim that person's life, the latter did not. Humans, then, were social animals capable of overcoming their nature to reach something higher. 

The walls in the catacombs below the temple knew few dry spots. The main halls hollowed into the stone structures were liveable, cold, damp, but with enough patches untouched by the wrath of the elements to hold valuables that did not immediately weather. In the darker corners, further in, where the light did not reach, the river ran down the walls over weeping trails of moss and caused a low-frequency gurgling timeless and unrelenting in the silence. Puddles on the floor, leaking, leaking down the drain. The air smelled moist of human despair. 

Gaia inhaled so deeply into her shoulders they moved her arms against the wall, hands clawed into the stone, fingers relentlessly scraping, scraping, splintering nails against stones older than the world she knew. Their edges dug into her forehead, would leave a bruise. She had been standing still for hours, slanted against the wall, eyes closed, saliva dripping off her parted lips, listening to the water gurgle and her fingertips scraping and scraping along the stone. She didn't feel them anymore. The cold air burnt in her lungs. She had been shivering, shivering all over, from the cold, then from the position, muscles threatening to give out, but it all faded. It all passed. She did not feel much of herself anymore. 

Her body remembered its injuries, the bullet wound and the arrow-wound she had sustained in her shoulder, healing, they had been healing until fingers and knife-edges had pried them back open. Blood had dried down her chest. Sweat glued the tunic shivering around her to her skin every time it touched her body bare below, and it hurt every time it caught her wounds. 

It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. 

Gaia opened her eyes. 

Wet stone greeted her, blurry with moss, its tiny little leaves took on shape with her vision sharpening, the tiniest of arteries sprouting from their centre, unbothered by the cold. She pulled her head back and a storm of pins and needles erupted in her neck, muscles seizing, stuttering, pain zapping down her back, her breath cleared bouts of smoke through the air in short, heavy bursts. Her fingertips had turned blue. It stood out against her blood leaking down on them, red tears chasing blue frost towards the middle joint of each finger, near purple on each tip. They felt stiff like wrapped in leather when she tried to curl them in, the skin strained. 

The wounds around her wrists were festering. 

The left more than the right, bracelets of parted flesh sliced into her skin, if she pinched them, stretched them, tore the weeping flesh apart, she could tease out the cusp of her wristbone. 

Pus leaked down her arm. Wound fluid. Clear and warm, sticky trails that neither smelled nor looked like much. Gaia took her hand off the wall to push one stiff fingertip against the wounds on the other, pressed it into their edges, breath burning hot through the open parts of flesh refusing to heal, and blood mixed with clear wound fluid. 

It burnt like acid, touching them, digging her splintered fingernail in between the parted edges of her skin where pus was clotting yellow and sticky, she gritted her teeth, gritted them harder, pried on a piece of lint trapped in the wound, gave up and turned around with a shivering outbreath.