Travis steps back, even if she didn't stand a chance of hitting him. Lessons learned from the past, maybe. His grin flickers.
"Claire," he says, a little harder. "The world's a shitty place. Sometimes you don't get any more choice in how you leave it than how you came into it, right?"
He lets the machete hang at his side for a second, a rivulet of blood sliding down the side to pool and then drip, drip, drip. He looks down at her body, the little trembles of an interrupted nervous system, and when his gaze settles on the exposed back of her neck his grin has faded entirely, leaving his mouth with an ugly neutrality. He thinks about how her body will lay here in the dirt until it is a putrid mess, just like the others, and how animals will feast on them and then birds will pick at the bones and then insects will tear away the microscopic remains. Right back to the earth, yeah? As nature intended.
Maybe her clothes will remain. And oh, shit. Microplastics. The micro plastics, too. Bizarre how you can't just stand over someone you've killed and think about the whole body being taken apart without remembering there's microplastic pollution in like, 80% of people's blood, the same ones you can find on the very tip of Everest and at the deepest parts of the oceans, the parts where the fish don't have eyes and shit because no light reaches there. But there are micro plastics. Where they are, people were. How fucking influential they are. They can go everywhere, but they can't totally go back to the earth.
That thought, amongst all others, is sobering.
"Hey, I'm sorry," he says, and crouches down at her side. Lays a hand on her back, over the wound. Nothing's going to fix this shit but he can at least give her what he didn't give the others. He closes his eyes for a beat and mumbles something –– how twisted it is to fight someone whose back is turned –– and then he gets up again and shucks off his jacket. He hangs it on a knob in a tree. He takes the machete and starts cutting up the ground.
It takes an hour, but he digs enough of a grave that he can drag her into it by her ankles and bury her in it. By time he's finished piling the dirt on top of her, he realizes he didn't go deep enough, and her nose is sticking out. Tendrils of hair. The point of a shoulder where her body is a little twisted. Oops.
He's fucking beat, though, and the dirt clings to the blood soaked into his clothes, and he smells like rot. Is he supposed to dig her out again and dig deeper? Fuck, that'll take hours. Doesn't he have shit to do?
"We're not going to see each other again," he informs her, or at least the tip of her toes. "I'm definitely going to Hell. You? Who can say. It's not up to me. But I hope wherever you go, you're at peace."
And then Travis wanders down the path. Where he's going, he doesn't know.
no subject
"Claire," he says, a little harder. "The world's a shitty place. Sometimes you don't get any more choice in how you leave it than how you came into it, right?"
He lets the machete hang at his side for a second, a rivulet of blood sliding down the side to pool and then drip, drip, drip. He looks down at her body, the little trembles of an interrupted nervous system, and when his gaze settles on the exposed back of her neck his grin has faded entirely, leaving his mouth with an ugly neutrality. He thinks about how her body will lay here in the dirt until it is a putrid mess, just like the others, and how animals will feast on them and then birds will pick at the bones and then insects will tear away the microscopic remains. Right back to the earth, yeah? As nature intended.
Maybe her clothes will remain. And oh, shit. Microplastics. The micro plastics, too. Bizarre how you can't just stand over someone you've killed and think about the whole body being taken apart without remembering there's microplastic pollution in like, 80% of people's blood, the same ones you can find on the very tip of Everest and at the deepest parts of the oceans, the parts where the fish don't have eyes and shit because no light reaches there. But there are micro plastics. Where they are, people were. How fucking influential they are. They can go everywhere, but they can't totally go back to the earth.
That thought, amongst all others, is sobering.
"Hey, I'm sorry," he says, and crouches down at her side. Lays a hand on her back, over the wound. Nothing's going to fix this shit but he can at least give her what he didn't give the others. He closes his eyes for a beat and mumbles something –– how twisted it is to fight someone whose back is turned –– and then he gets up again and shucks off his jacket. He hangs it on a knob in a tree. He takes the machete and starts cutting up the ground.
It takes an hour, but he digs enough of a grave that he can drag her into it by her ankles and bury her in it. By time he's finished piling the dirt on top of her, he realizes he didn't go deep enough, and her nose is sticking out. Tendrils of hair. The point of a shoulder where her body is a little twisted. Oops.
He's fucking beat, though, and the dirt clings to the blood soaked into his clothes, and he smells like rot. Is he supposed to dig her out again and dig deeper? Fuck, that'll take hours. Doesn't he have shit to do?
"We're not going to see each other again," he informs her, or at least the tip of her toes. "I'm definitely going to Hell. You? Who can say. It's not up to me. But I hope wherever you go, you're at peace."
And then Travis wanders down the path. Where he's going, he doesn't know.