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She, she, she was a god, a new god, the only god they would ever need, she was the new god of this world. Every other god was dead, had died long ago, had died with all the other women. Every other god was not not not necessary anymore, not worshipped, she was the only god worth worshipping, she was the only god who could do anything to the world.She was a god and a god could be benevolent or she could be malevolent and the world had hurt her too much for her to deign to benevolence, the men in it had kicked her down too far and she had risen up to crush anyone anyone who dared stand against her, anyone who dared to threaten her life, her health, her safety, her power, her strength, her freedom, everything she had been fighting for.Any love in her heart had been burned away with the numbness of the Joy, the Joy, any love she had had was only an echo within her chest that hummed like a motor burning through its last gasoline. Love caused her pain, everything and everyone she had loved hurt her and trapped her and made her feel like an object, like someone’s property, like she could be controlled, but not anymore, not anymore, now she was dangerous, she was the Big Girl, the men who would have raped her now backed away from her with the light of terror in their eyes and she killed them, killed her reasons for fear, killed her fear.She raised her head to the sky. She was getting used to the halo of crimson around her vision and how it tinted her world like a sunset. Her gaze travelled down the wall where names had been scrawled in blood and new blood had been painted through them in slashes, like great wounds, like the ones she had left in the men with her blade. She had watched them bleed out and with every death she felt something bleed out of her as well, the last vestiges of the despair that had festered inside her for thirteen years. Blood on the ground, blood on her sword, blood on her face and hands and clothes and tainting her body.There was one uncrossed name at the top of the list, and the dead flickered around it, gazing balefully down at her with their sad, blank eyes. She ignored them and read the final name and her hand tightened around the handle of her blade. She was ready, she thought. She thought. She knew.There was a new ghost looking upon her, but his head was hidden under a faded green helmet and she couldn’t guess his expression. He was one of the only people who had spoken to her without desire or fear, had treated her like just another human. And even one of the most genuine people she had ever met still ended up hanging himself with no reason left to live. Who would be left alive after this? Who even still wanted to live?He looked at her and she swore she felt his disapproval, the same disapproval that pricked her skin from every other solemn pair of eyes that she refused to meet. “What makes you think I care what you think?” she asked aloud, and the ghost flickered. Her voice had grown hoarse from lack of use. After all, she had nobody to talk to anymore. The ghost of Dustin seemed to hover behind her. He haunted her more than any other, even Brad.She turned away and faced the empty stretch of world. It was time to go. Her quest was nearly at an end. There would no longer be anyone to oppose her after this. She decided not to think about what she would do when it was all over.She took her first step and another and another, and the red thrummed around her vision and she felt a familiar itch in the back of her throat, a familiar dry feeling in her mouth. She fumbled in her pocket with one shaking hand and found another few pills and took one, stumbling to a stop. Once she felt it bloom within her and flood through her body and brain and blood, she kept going. She ignored the hovering people in the corner of her eye, the hallucinations enhanced with every pill she swallowed. Die, die, die, I am your god now, she thought, wordless yells ripping through the space between her and her enemy, hacking and slashing through every gap she could find, refusing to feel fright, to feel hesitation, to feel anything, the Joy had forced it out of her body and all she felt was kill, kill, die, die, and the texture of the handle of her blade under her hands. Why? came a murmur from behind her, inside her head, all around her, as she kept fighting. Why this? Why? “Because I have to!” she screamed, probably confusing her enemy, but she wanted this voice out of her head, wanted these people out of the edge of her vision leave me leave me stop this, wanted their disappointment gone, gone, gone! “This is all - I’ve - got!” Each word accompanied by a slash, a parry, a strike, blood spattering her blade and her arm and her face. Hits landed on her and she barely felt them, but she registered the blood dripping down her body. Die, die, die, kill, kill, kill them all, kill everything, try to kill me, I’ll kill you, she was breathing breathing breathing, she could taste iron under her tongue, and every move was a fluid dance as some part of her mind detached and wandered. Part of her knew that this was wrong, all of this was wrong, but the Joy, the Joy was coursing through her veins and it made everything feel okay again even as her self, herself, was fading. All she was was disappearing and she she she knew that even the greatest gods could die.She felt the fire in her head and felt the Joy pulse and her blade struck true, stabbing the wolf-man through the heart. She ripped out the blade with a fresh burst of blood and slashed at his throat for good measure. She was baring her teeth and gritting them so hard they were starting to hurt, and she opened her mouth in a victorious shout when he finally collapsed, clutching his chest, blood dousing his hands and staining his shirt. He looked up at her, some sad clarity in his final expression, and then he was dead.She stared down at the corpse with blood dripping off of her blade and her mouth curved in a savage almost-smile, a grimace. It was done. Nobody could hurt her anymore. She she she was now truly the god of this world, she was unconquerable, nobody could ever crush her or contain her. She had broken the chains and torn up the roots the roots that bound her. Nothing and no one could stop her. Her. Her.Finally she was free free free, her mind blank, Joy still feeding her itch to hurt, to kill, but there was no one left to defeat and so the violence tightened in her chest, strangled her heart. It was the drug that made blood hum around her eye, she realized, but she was addicted, like Brad before her, they shared no genes but he had passed this cup to her with his death and she had drank her fill. Who else was she to imitate, after all, but the man who raised her? The man who made her sick?She gathered any supplies her foe had on him, shoved them into her bag, wiped her blade off on his clothes, then turned and left. Their faces hovered before her, everyone who had ever touched her life, everyone who had struck some chord in her heart, everyone who had left an impact upon her. I am your god, she thought, desperate, I am your god, and you will obey me, living and dead, you will leave me alone, you will all obey me, "Obey me,” she said aloud, her vision tainted by Joy and by her tears, “Obey me! Leave me ALONE!” She collapsed to the ground and in that moment she knew that she was worse than Brad; no matter how many times he relapsed he at least tried to stop, but she had nothing holding her back, nothing to stop her from feeding her addiction until it killed killed killed her.He tried to stop because of her.She coughed until she tasted blood in her mouth and spat it onto the ground.
He tried so hard. He loved you.
Memories of her selfishness stung her like insects, knowing how much she had turned inward and only cared about her happiness and her feelings and her desires and lashed out to protect herself because Brad’s brand of protection was just control. But she was only thirteen years old, give or take, wasn’t she allowed to be a stupid kid who made stupid decisions? If her world was the one that Brad had been born into and he had still raised her she would still be making stupid choices; probably not ones that sent an entire civilization into chaos, though, she thought wryly.She had been so ready to bear responsibility, to know that she was the catalyst who could change everything, that she was special, that she was to be a queen of this bleak world, that she deserved better than being caged underground like some kind of monster. She had been riding on a high of self-importance and freedom from that hole in the ground, and watching the violence committed in her name only fueled the fire of her new righteousness until she was convinced it was all worth it, she was worth all the blood and the lives lost and the gangs divided.But then they tried to rape her, they tried to put their hands on her, they used her as a bartering chip, they told her exactly what they wanted from her with their leering mouths and eyes raking down her body, they didn’t care that she was only thirteen or fourteen years old, didn’t give her a choice, and she realized that if she was a queen, all the kings were dead. Better to be a god, to rule alone.So she sat with her head in her hands and her tears dripping onto her legs because it was her selfishness that had driven her here, she could have easily just gone home and she and Brad could have hidden away somewhere for another thirteen years and been safe, unhappy but safe, unhappy but with hundreds of people still alive. But her freedom, her vengeance, her ego had been worth more than their lives. Worth more than the lives of her father, her brother.And so she lived, lived as much as she could with the drugs in her veins and their ticking clock, but the faces of all these interconnected men with their tangled, twisted relationships cycled over and over in her head. Anger, hatred, revenge, bitterness, trauma, despair, even compassion that raged and hurt everyone around them.She was the god of the world now and she knew that any god that came before her and let this happen was even more vengeful and awful than she herself. With all of the cruelty and insanity that bubbled just beneath the surface of her skin, she knew that the Joy was going to take her just like Brad, just like the random people dotting the landscape with their bodies perverted into mockeries of the men they had been in some other life. She was going to join them. Her fate had been decided the very first time she took one of the pills, just a stupid girl making stupid choices in her childish, performative rebellion. She didn’t know the consequences. Her bloodlust would never end, not even after death.Human or mutant, they were all going to kill each other, weren’t they?Was any of this worth it? Thirteen years of fear and pain and a week of anger and terror, so much blood on her hands, blood of hundreds who wanted a piece of her, who went blind with rage and hunger and lost themselves in an image of her, their messiah, their toy. They may have been disgusting, they may have been fucked up, but did they deserve to die like this? Crawling all over each other and killing indiscriminately out of panic and desperation, like rats trapped in a hole. In the end, they were still just animals who were born to fuck and die.Her throat itched. She took some Joy. Father. Father. Father. She was crying. Tears ran down her cheeks like they never had before, but she could barely feel them. Something something forced her forward, something forced her blade to move, to slash at the face of the man who had raised her my dad though she knew it was just a random, nameless mutant who wore his face my dad as the Joy twisted the world around her. She screamed out of sheer anguish and frustration and sadness for all that she could have had, all that she had lost lost lost.“I loved you,” the words spilled from her mouth, “I loved you, I loved you, I hate you!” she shouted. Tears fell onto her lips and she tasted salt. “Why did you do this to me?! I loved you!” He gazed at her, a hallucination that looked so real so real like he was still here still alive. “It was all your fault, all of this!” she shouted, though she knew it wasn’t true. “It’s your fault I’m like this! It’s your fault I’ve got this fucking drug in my veins! You fucked up my life! ” Flashbacks of her childhood filled her mind, the good and the bad, and she knew he tried, he tried so hard to be good to her, but he didn’t know how and had too many demons of his own to chase hers away. “You ruined everything! I loved you, and you - you -” Her words dissolved into an unintelligible scream.His face faded and she screamed for him to fuck off and die die die and she screamed for him to stay with her and hold her please just show me you loved me one last time until the Joy took over and she became just like him, and the tears kept falling when Dustin’s sad face replaced Brad’s, replaced her father’s.“I’m sorry,” she spit out, her voice ragged and raw, “I’m sorry I didn’t trust you. You - you are my brother - you were one of the only people in this whole fucking world who gave a shit,” but she kept swinging her sword, kept fighting. You didn’t try to rape me. You didn’t threaten to kill me. I killed your men and you just looked at me. You saw a sister. I just saw another man who could hurt me. "Fight back, Dustin!” she screamed. “Fight back, you fucking pussy! I hurt you so much! ” He still looked at her with his mutilated face in a despairing frown. “It’s my fault you’re dead! I’m sorry! ” The misery, the misery in her voice shook the world around her.The fault ran in circles. It started somewhere long ago and ran around and around and around and stopped here. This was where the Armstrongs’ story ended.Her battle blazed on. Buzzo saved her life, then, after it was all over all over, and blood poured from the stump of his arm and his last words were filled with the same regret as her Joy-tinted thoughts. He who had had Brad’s arm cut off and had sliced off her fucking nipple and, in a lone act of kindness, chose her life over his was crying out for some girl she never knew but whose name she had heard so many times so many times who is Lisa who is she why has her name followed me all the way here as his body rippled and changed before her eyes until he was just like the monstrous thing that had almost killed her. Intelligence still flickered in his eyes as he opened his mouth and bit down hard on his own body, shoving that violence inward, auto-cannibalizing so that she could live as she raised her blade one more time one more time one last time, her hands trembling from exertion. She knew she knew he would rather be dead than fully mutate. It wasn’t wasn't a hard fight, considering the last sane part of him fought alongside her. It didn’t take long before the last person she knew was dead dead at her feet.She stumbled and fell onto her hands and knees, gasping for air, blood dripping from her open mouth onto the baked earth. Their faces swarmed around her for one last time and she felt Joy Joy throbbing in her chest like an extra heart. Blood pulsed pulsed around her vision. Something pushed at her body from the inside.The cure. The vaccine. It was right there right there there there. Her shaking fingers brushed the syringe. Join us, Dustin was saying. Join us, Buddy. Brad, too. Join us. Their voices all blended. Everyone she had ever let herself care about. Everyone she had ever known. She could be with them again. She could let it all go. Let it go. Go. Join us. But she wasn’t going to take orders anymore.“No.” She picked up the needle and shoved it into her arm. She didn’t feel a thing. “You do not control me.” She blacked out. When she woke up, the sun burning her eyelids, her vision was no longer tinted red. Her whole body wasn’t throbbing. The itch in her throat was gone.She sat up, leaned over, and vomited.Then she staggered to her feet and looked around. The mutants were docile, dormant, almost asleep. She retrieved the trumpet from the dead man who had called himself her birth father, not giving his body more than a brief glance, and played the song she remembered. Just a few notes, so melancholy and so wretched, and they woke the mutants around her, the ones she hadn’t slaughtered.There was Brad. He looked upon her with his eyes glazed over, but there was something behind them, something intelligent. She knew he would never hurt her. Never hurt her again. And in that moment, some of the ice melted around her heart and she felt something like guilt, something close to forgiveness.There were a few others. Terrifying, disgusting things that stayed many feet away from her and made no sudden moves. Silent, brainless, not a threat, not anymore.She climbed to the top of a crumbling rock structure, looked down upon the quiet, sedentary mutants, and gazed at the barren world that stretched for miles beneath her. A tired, weary, but victorious peace settled within her. The roaring of blood in her head, the ceaseless violence, all that fury and heartlessness, all of it had faded and a new, stronger girl had risen from the ashes of her addiction. Whatever came next, whatever remained in the world, she could handle it. Nothing and no one could stop her.She was a god. The only god this world would ever need.