Blue Ribbon

Chapter 53 - Bloodied Ribbon

"Some people are simply born with tragedy in their blood..."

***************

Chase's POV

They say you freeze.

That it's the body's natural response, an instinct; to enter a state of "fight, flight, or freeze."

When an immanent doom approaches, when tragedy entwines and stares you dead in the eye, when destiny's cold hand draws cruelly near; you freeze, they say. Similar to when you are crossing a street and a speeding car comes hurtling at you—you suddenly stop, you look at it, you don't run, you don't move, you simply freeze.

The world spins in chaos around you, yet you remain rooted in place, unable to move.

They say a scream tries to claw and scratch at the walls of your throat but it gets silenced.

Your heartbeats falter.

Your breath locks in fear.

Time stands still, and you freeze.

They say, your brain is simply not capable of processing the magnitude of what's unfurling; that you were never prepared to deal with something so formidable.

That the speed of how everything in your life could shatter in mere seconds startles you.

I didn't believe them.

I didn't believe them because I thought—I thought that I knew pain, that I could control it. I thought I'd felt pain and tasted it multiple times before. We all think we've mastered the art of pain until we're proven otherwise; like when you fall off your bike and hurt your knee as a kid, you think that's the worst pain. Like when you watch your father cry when he loses his grandma and you feel so helpless, and you think that's the highest level of pain. Like when you think all of your future dreams and hopes got shattered, you think nothing could be more painful. Like when the person you love is in love with someone else, you think no pain could be more excruciating.

I thought I knew pain. I thought I'd tasted its bitter sting multiple times before.

But at that moment, as I watched her fall, as I felt my world shatter around me, I realized I knew nothing of pain.

Time fractured, splintering into shards of unbearable agony, and I froze in the eye of a storm that could annihilate me.

My body didn't feel like my own anymore, and I felt like I was watching everything unwind from the outside. It all happened so fast and at once.

I was trying to catch up with her, but she ran so fast, an urgency in her steps that echoed within the hollow chambers. She ran so fast into the room, trying to catch something, to stop something, only to be stopped by the bullet that pierced her in the back. I watched it. I saw it hit her, I saw its impact, the invisible ripples as they wreaked her body and that's...that's when I froze.

That's when everything in my being shut down.

I watched Alex rush to her in a frantic blur, his eyes wide with bewilderment, his shaking hands desperately clutching to her body before she'd hit the ground, but the weight of it all had him going down with her, his knees hitting the floor, grasping her frail body into his arms and cradling her closer to his chest.

"Lilly...what did you do, what did you do..." His breathless agonized words shattered through the fog wrapping around me. I could see how he was tasting it too —that highest most excruciating level of pain. I saw it in the way his fingers trembled as he tried to feel her cheek, the raw shock of the trauma exploding in waves across his face as he looked down at her, like he couldn't understand, couldn't believe it, couldn't move; paralyzed by the enormity of the tragedy, frozen in time just like the rest of us.