Post by Brytain Montgomery on Jun 5, 2013 22:43:49 GMT -5
Hissing, Brytain Montgomery slammed her first into the punching bag again, as hard as she could. She was almost relishing the pain that shot up her arm in constant waves. The feeling of the broken bones in her right hand grinding against one another just beneath of her skin as she punched the bag again was equal parts excruciating and reassuring.
Her hand was starting to swell again but she pushed that to the back of her mind. The bruising that covered her knuckles like lack looked almost black in the hazy, dim basement lighting. She’d decided that it was too much trouble to replace the fixtures in the basement of the Philadelphia home she shared with Syn; so when she’d converted it into a studio she’d bought standing lights instead to brighten the room when she was painting. But at the moment, she wanted the dim, dingy darkness. She wanted to sink into it, let it comfort her. Brytain didn’t want to see the world in sharp relief, the darkness was much more forgiving.
When she’d put her hand through the wall during training on Monday, she’d argued fruitlessly over going to get the x-rays done. If it had been Snapmare, the gym she’d trained at with her mentor Trickee, she probably could have gotten away with it. But instead, it was some local dive that she’d found a few blocks from home and these people were pretty uptight when it came to liability and getting hurt on the premises. She’d rolled her eyes but begrudgingly spent four hours in the emergency, first waiting and then getting x-rays and then, finally, arguing with the doctor overseeing her care about why she was refusing to let them put a cast on her hand.
They’d pushed for a hard cast, but she’d refused that. They’d pushed for an air splint, but she’d refused that as well. She couldn’t get into the ring with a hard cast on and that night she was facing Aaron Weston for the PDW Prodigy championship.
Once again, for the seemingly millionth time, she’d been read the riot act as she’d checked herself out of the hospital against doctor’s orders. A part of her argued that it didn’t matter. She was already a ticking time bomb. She already had an expiration date that had nothing to do with the couple of broken bones in her hand.
Your dominant hand, a little voice inside of her head reminded her. But she’d pushed it aside. It wouldn’t be the first time that she’d fought through some pain and it wouldn’t be the last. It was the nature of the beast. And besides, she’d had worse.
After the match at PDW’s Blind Fury that had left her unconscious for nearly four hours, she finally hadn’t been able to put off the cat scan that doctors had been trying to convince her to submit to for years. At first, she’d dodged them because she’d been poor and struggling, working indie shows and barely paying rent on time each month. After that and a few decent concussions, she’d put it off because she was afraid of what they would find.
All of her fears had been founded.
The multiple closed head traumas caused by each of those concussions she’d wracked up had taken their toll on her body. Shit, she boasted a depressingly impressive five major concussions in an eleven month period when she’d first begun wrestling for WWEA. It wasn’t that she didn’t know how to protect herself, it was just that she hadn’t cared. Death had neither fascinated nor repulsed her. It had simply been something that happened to everyone eventually. Something that would happen to her. Something that would probably happen to her sooner rather than later with the kind of risks that she took with her life.
Once, there had been nothing holding her. Nothing tethering her to this world or the next. Now...
Brytain sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose against the headache that had begun building steadily for the last hour. Yet another reminder. An almost constant, daily reminder lately.
The doctor in Raleigh had stood in front of her, gesturing towards the scans in the light box with an air of importance that had only made her want to introduce her fist to his face in the worst possible way. He’d pointed towards a small, gray mark on the scans of her brain and had explained in a clinical, detached kind of way that sometimes when the brain has sustained trauma it can weaken the major blood vessels. It could cause what they called an aneurysm.
And eventually aneurysms burst open, destroyed everything. She’d probably be dead before she even hit the ground.
She’d reluctantly taken the card for the specialist in London. It would either be her saving grace or the death of her career and the beginning of a risky surgery to correct the damage before it killed her. But in London, she’d panicked.
She’d changed her mind.
They’d told her that the damage wasn’t entirely as bad as the doctor in North Carolina had believed it to be and she had stopped them before the other shoe dropped. Stopped them before they could push for more tests and a longer stay alone, in a hospital across an entire ocean from all the things that she loved. Not quite as bad had been good enough for her. For the moment. She’d intended to go back and have the tests run... but it had never been a good time. Or at least, that’s what she continued to tell herself. Truth, she probably could have made the time commitment. But she was afraid of what she’d find out.
So her hand? Yeah, it was the least of her worries. The very bottom of the list.
She’d been keeping it wrapped tightly and icing it when she was alone to keep the swelling down. If it got out that her hand was broken in two places there was no one stupid enough to let her compete like that. Not now. In WWEA, maybe. But not in larger, national companies like PCW.
The bruising was visible but she could easily play that off as a minor injury. Just a mild side effect from her fist going through the drywall. She’d be lying if she said that it hadn’t been satisfying... even just for a moment. Before the pain set in, the satisfaction of destroying something that had once been whole.
Destroying something like she was destroying her own relationship...
Brytain shook her head to clear the thoughts away.
That was the entire reason she was down in the basement, brutalizing her already broken hand against the heavy bag. Bare fisted, she pummeled the bag a few more times and used the sharp, heady pain to clear her mind of anything, everything.
Turning to her left, she punched the play button on her iPhone’s iPod app and “Putting Holes in Happiness” by Marilyn Manson started thundering through the speakers that she’d hooked the small device up to. She smirked bitterly when she thought about apt the song was at the moment, her mood just as dark and heavy as the bass beats.
Turning back to the bag, she took another swing at it.
Brytain had never developed the necessary coping skills to handle the emotional bullshit that she felt like she was drowning in. Emotional pain had never made sense to her. It was overwhelming her. The only thing that seemed to make sense at the moment was the physical pain of letting her damaged hand hit the thick canvas of the bag again and again and again. That, she could comprehend. She could look down at her swollen, bruised mess of a hand and say This is why I hurt.
She couldn’t look at the snarled, tangle of her feelings and say that. The whole thing was like a tangled ball of yarn and she wanted so desperately to untangle, roll it back up into the neat ball it had started out with. But it was so hopelessly snarled that she couldn’t even begin to find the end of it. The beginning of it.
When had this all started?
Maybe, if she wanted to be honest, it had started after she’d come home from London. Or maybe before that, when she’d left for London. Or maybe even before that... maybe in Chicago. Maybe the ball had started rolling there and despite what they’d thought... it had never stopped.
Maybe it had been a ridiculous idea to assume that two people as emotionally damaged and destroyed as the two of them could ever coexist. Could ever love enough to overcome all of it.
Her eyes flicked over to the ring that she’d gently sat on the edge of one of her easels before she’d taken the bag to task. It was almost as though it were mocking her... taunting her. The day that she’d been so happy almost seemed tarnished now, like a cruel joke.
Sighing, she turned back to her hands but that was a mistake. The ring she could take off, the tattoo that curled delicately around her left ring finger was forever.
Maybe this was her fault... maybe she was the one becoming cold and distant. A response to his own coldness, maybe? A response to her own blind fear of giving too much, loving too much... being the one who got hurt. She’d held back and maybe that was where she’d set the ball in motion. From the very beginning when Syn had pursued her in their very own, private cat and mouse game, maybe that had been her mistake. She was so very unused to being the mouse that maybe she had spent far too much time and energy trying to regain just a little bit of the upper hand and not enough time breaking down those walls and learning how to give herself to him. Mind, body and soul.
Maybe she was simply incapable of it. Incapable of saying fuck the consequences and laying herself bare for him.
But deep down, she knew that a larger part of it was probably her desperate need to protect a man who didn’t need any protection. Especially not from her. But in her own way, maybe she was trying to protect him from her own bad choices. Her own mistakes and the years spent disregarding her own health. The mistakes that had brought her to where she was now.
Twenty-four years old and so broken physically that there was a chance that she would take one shot to the head and go down and never come back up.
Or worse than that, that she would go to sleep one night and never wake up. Fall asleep in his arms and that would be the end. Could she do that to him? Live like that? Could she let him live with the burden of knowing that one morning he may wake up and reach for her like he usually did and she would be gone. Still, lifeless.
She couldn’t.
She knew that she couldn’t.
She’d turn the sword on herself first. She’d take the pain of pushing him away, the ache of the widening gyre between the two of them, just to save him from that pain.
But fuck, it hurt.
“According to Sjin Drako, my name is synonymous with evil and impending destruction...” a voice says from the shadows. The camera pulls back just slightly to reveal Brytain Montgomery as she steps out of the darkness. It slides off of her like water. Her long, pink hair hangs down her back in soft curls and she’s wearing a pair of jeans with jagged holes at the knees. The kind put there by years of abuse and wear and not purchased that way for an absurd amount of money. Even in the summer heat, she’s wearing a beaten up, old black leather jacket.
The jacket is more symbolic. It was a graduation gift when she left Snapmare and went out into the world on her own for the first time. It was like a security blanket, in some ways. Maybe it was stupid and maybe she would never admit to it but she felt stronger, somehow when she was wearing it. She felt more immune from the hurt and the pain that the world seemed absolutely hell bent on heaping on her already aching shoulders.
“There’s something I’ve never heard before,” she said, her lips parted in a slight smirk as she steps away from the camera. “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. The destroyer of worlds... impending destruction... what are you trying to say, Drako? That you know that this match is over before you ever step into the ring with me? Because the only impending destruction I’m considering is the one where I slowly and systematically destroy you in the ring just like I took Curtis Wilkes down two weeks ago. If someone like him can’t stand up to me, can you?
Maybe.
But then again, Wilkes doubted me too. I wonder if he still thinks that I’m nothing but the world champion’s girlfriend.... maybe he does. Maybe he doesn’t. What he thinks doesn’t particularly matter now, does it? What he thought didn’t help in the ring when I put him down for the three count. Maybe he can take some level of solace in the fact that it took two Thrillkillers to finally put him down but at the end of the day, no matter if it took two or if it took twenty... I still put him down.
At the end of the day, I still ended an almost six month long streak. He went into that match, believing that he was unstoppable. Incapable of losing. But I showed him that he was nothing more than a man. A man who was capable of being brought down off of the pedestal that he put himself on.
And now you have the opportunity to do what no one in this company has managed to do yet. You have the opportunity to beat me. No one has ever pinned me in a PCW wrestling ring yet... will you be the first?
Fuck no. Not if I have anything to do with it...
Not just because of my own stubborn pride, my own inability to lay down and die... not just because I kind of like the idea of being an unkillable monster. No, because I have something to prove and I still haven’t made my point yet.
Unfortunately for you.
This really doesn’t have anything to do with you, Sjin. This match isn’t about showing you that you shouldn’t buy into your own hype, like it was on the last Rapture when I showed Curtis Wilkes just how wrong he really was. This match isn’t about anything more than using you. Using you to prove a point and maybe using you to work out some of my anger issues.
See, when you walk into a bar and punch a motherfucker in the face... they arrest you. When you walk into a wrestling ring and punch a motherfucker in the face they pay you. Works wayyyy better than anger managment, to be honest. Why go sit in some room with a bunch of other pathetic assholes and let them tell you that you should learn to find peace and happiness and let go of all your anger? Why do that when you can let your anger work for you.”
Brytain turns away from the camera once more as it pans back to finally reveal her location. She’s standing on a small, wooden dock that sets out over a secluded stretch of water. A murky, black stagnant pond feeding into a larger, slightly less tranquil river.
Pulling something out of her bag, she holds it up and reveals that it’s a thick, black Bible.
“But maybe your god will save you... maybe he’ll pull some sick lightening bolt smite-y shit out in the middle of the match,” she shakes her head in amusement, “But then again, I’m a recovering Catholic... organized religion is something that I’ve never had time for. Even when I was a kid, forced to sit through mass and all that stupid bullshit I couldn’t understand what the point was.
Why bother?
Why give your money, your time and your pathetic, wasted faith to a god who doesn’t exist? Why be a slave to a god who doesn’t give a shit?
I knew then and I knew now that there is no benevolent and fluffy lord and savior working behind the scenes to make sure that we all live happy, content little lives.
There is no righteous justice and there is no divine intervention.”
She quirks an eyebrow and looks down at the book in her hands before she slowly pulls an orange, plastic lighter out of her pocket and flicks it, the flame sparking and flickering at the end.
She holds it up to one end of the book, watching with an unreadable expression on her face as it slowly takes flame. “This isn’t totally about you and your misguided beliefs... some of this is that I’ve always wanted to do this,” she said, with a quirk of her lips into something resembling both a snarl and a smile. “Ever since I had to sit there... for hours... during fucking catechism. Or all those goddamn hours spent going over the rosary after confession...”
She smiles brightly as the flames begin to lick her fingertips, climbing higher and higher as the book burns quickly; the bible crumbling and turning to ash as it drifted out over the water.
Finally, she tosses the still burning remains into the river beside her where it fizzles out and begins to distengrate.
“Where is your god?” she asks, tilting her head curiously as she glances up at the cloudy afternoon sky. “He isn’t there and you aren’t a holy soldier. You’re just a man. A man who is fallible. A man who has weakness. A man who will fall.”
Her hand was starting to swell again but she pushed that to the back of her mind. The bruising that covered her knuckles like lack looked almost black in the hazy, dim basement lighting. She’d decided that it was too much trouble to replace the fixtures in the basement of the Philadelphia home she shared with Syn; so when she’d converted it into a studio she’d bought standing lights instead to brighten the room when she was painting. But at the moment, she wanted the dim, dingy darkness. She wanted to sink into it, let it comfort her. Brytain didn’t want to see the world in sharp relief, the darkness was much more forgiving.
When she’d put her hand through the wall during training on Monday, she’d argued fruitlessly over going to get the x-rays done. If it had been Snapmare, the gym she’d trained at with her mentor Trickee, she probably could have gotten away with it. But instead, it was some local dive that she’d found a few blocks from home and these people were pretty uptight when it came to liability and getting hurt on the premises. She’d rolled her eyes but begrudgingly spent four hours in the emergency, first waiting and then getting x-rays and then, finally, arguing with the doctor overseeing her care about why she was refusing to let them put a cast on her hand.
They’d pushed for a hard cast, but she’d refused that. They’d pushed for an air splint, but she’d refused that as well. She couldn’t get into the ring with a hard cast on and that night she was facing Aaron Weston for the PDW Prodigy championship.
Once again, for the seemingly millionth time, she’d been read the riot act as she’d checked herself out of the hospital against doctor’s orders. A part of her argued that it didn’t matter. She was already a ticking time bomb. She already had an expiration date that had nothing to do with the couple of broken bones in her hand.
Your dominant hand, a little voice inside of her head reminded her. But she’d pushed it aside. It wouldn’t be the first time that she’d fought through some pain and it wouldn’t be the last. It was the nature of the beast. And besides, she’d had worse.
After the match at PDW’s Blind Fury that had left her unconscious for nearly four hours, she finally hadn’t been able to put off the cat scan that doctors had been trying to convince her to submit to for years. At first, she’d dodged them because she’d been poor and struggling, working indie shows and barely paying rent on time each month. After that and a few decent concussions, she’d put it off because she was afraid of what they would find.
All of her fears had been founded.
The multiple closed head traumas caused by each of those concussions she’d wracked up had taken their toll on her body. Shit, she boasted a depressingly impressive five major concussions in an eleven month period when she’d first begun wrestling for WWEA. It wasn’t that she didn’t know how to protect herself, it was just that she hadn’t cared. Death had neither fascinated nor repulsed her. It had simply been something that happened to everyone eventually. Something that would happen to her. Something that would probably happen to her sooner rather than later with the kind of risks that she took with her life.
Once, there had been nothing holding her. Nothing tethering her to this world or the next. Now...
Brytain sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose against the headache that had begun building steadily for the last hour. Yet another reminder. An almost constant, daily reminder lately.
The doctor in Raleigh had stood in front of her, gesturing towards the scans in the light box with an air of importance that had only made her want to introduce her fist to his face in the worst possible way. He’d pointed towards a small, gray mark on the scans of her brain and had explained in a clinical, detached kind of way that sometimes when the brain has sustained trauma it can weaken the major blood vessels. It could cause what they called an aneurysm.
And eventually aneurysms burst open, destroyed everything. She’d probably be dead before she even hit the ground.
She’d reluctantly taken the card for the specialist in London. It would either be her saving grace or the death of her career and the beginning of a risky surgery to correct the damage before it killed her. But in London, she’d panicked.
She’d changed her mind.
They’d told her that the damage wasn’t entirely as bad as the doctor in North Carolina had believed it to be and she had stopped them before the other shoe dropped. Stopped them before they could push for more tests and a longer stay alone, in a hospital across an entire ocean from all the things that she loved. Not quite as bad had been good enough for her. For the moment. She’d intended to go back and have the tests run... but it had never been a good time. Or at least, that’s what she continued to tell herself. Truth, she probably could have made the time commitment. But she was afraid of what she’d find out.
So her hand? Yeah, it was the least of her worries. The very bottom of the list.
She’d been keeping it wrapped tightly and icing it when she was alone to keep the swelling down. If it got out that her hand was broken in two places there was no one stupid enough to let her compete like that. Not now. In WWEA, maybe. But not in larger, national companies like PCW.
The bruising was visible but she could easily play that off as a minor injury. Just a mild side effect from her fist going through the drywall. She’d be lying if she said that it hadn’t been satisfying... even just for a moment. Before the pain set in, the satisfaction of destroying something that had once been whole.
Destroying something like she was destroying her own relationship...
Brytain shook her head to clear the thoughts away.
That was the entire reason she was down in the basement, brutalizing her already broken hand against the heavy bag. Bare fisted, she pummeled the bag a few more times and used the sharp, heady pain to clear her mind of anything, everything.
Turning to her left, she punched the play button on her iPhone’s iPod app and “Putting Holes in Happiness” by Marilyn Manson started thundering through the speakers that she’d hooked the small device up to. She smirked bitterly when she thought about apt the song was at the moment, her mood just as dark and heavy as the bass beats.
Turning back to the bag, she took another swing at it.
Brytain had never developed the necessary coping skills to handle the emotional bullshit that she felt like she was drowning in. Emotional pain had never made sense to her. It was overwhelming her. The only thing that seemed to make sense at the moment was the physical pain of letting her damaged hand hit the thick canvas of the bag again and again and again. That, she could comprehend. She could look down at her swollen, bruised mess of a hand and say This is why I hurt.
She couldn’t look at the snarled, tangle of her feelings and say that. The whole thing was like a tangled ball of yarn and she wanted so desperately to untangle, roll it back up into the neat ball it had started out with. But it was so hopelessly snarled that she couldn’t even begin to find the end of it. The beginning of it.
When had this all started?
Maybe, if she wanted to be honest, it had started after she’d come home from London. Or maybe before that, when she’d left for London. Or maybe even before that... maybe in Chicago. Maybe the ball had started rolling there and despite what they’d thought... it had never stopped.
Maybe it had been a ridiculous idea to assume that two people as emotionally damaged and destroyed as the two of them could ever coexist. Could ever love enough to overcome all of it.
Her eyes flicked over to the ring that she’d gently sat on the edge of one of her easels before she’d taken the bag to task. It was almost as though it were mocking her... taunting her. The day that she’d been so happy almost seemed tarnished now, like a cruel joke.
Sighing, she turned back to her hands but that was a mistake. The ring she could take off, the tattoo that curled delicately around her left ring finger was forever.
Maybe this was her fault... maybe she was the one becoming cold and distant. A response to his own coldness, maybe? A response to her own blind fear of giving too much, loving too much... being the one who got hurt. She’d held back and maybe that was where she’d set the ball in motion. From the very beginning when Syn had pursued her in their very own, private cat and mouse game, maybe that had been her mistake. She was so very unused to being the mouse that maybe she had spent far too much time and energy trying to regain just a little bit of the upper hand and not enough time breaking down those walls and learning how to give herself to him. Mind, body and soul.
Maybe she was simply incapable of it. Incapable of saying fuck the consequences and laying herself bare for him.
But deep down, she knew that a larger part of it was probably her desperate need to protect a man who didn’t need any protection. Especially not from her. But in her own way, maybe she was trying to protect him from her own bad choices. Her own mistakes and the years spent disregarding her own health. The mistakes that had brought her to where she was now.
Twenty-four years old and so broken physically that there was a chance that she would take one shot to the head and go down and never come back up.
Or worse than that, that she would go to sleep one night and never wake up. Fall asleep in his arms and that would be the end. Could she do that to him? Live like that? Could she let him live with the burden of knowing that one morning he may wake up and reach for her like he usually did and she would be gone. Still, lifeless.
She couldn’t.
She knew that she couldn’t.
She’d turn the sword on herself first. She’d take the pain of pushing him away, the ache of the widening gyre between the two of them, just to save him from that pain.
But fuck, it hurt.
xxx
“According to Sjin Drako, my name is synonymous with evil and impending destruction...” a voice says from the shadows. The camera pulls back just slightly to reveal Brytain Montgomery as she steps out of the darkness. It slides off of her like water. Her long, pink hair hangs down her back in soft curls and she’s wearing a pair of jeans with jagged holes at the knees. The kind put there by years of abuse and wear and not purchased that way for an absurd amount of money. Even in the summer heat, she’s wearing a beaten up, old black leather jacket.
The jacket is more symbolic. It was a graduation gift when she left Snapmare and went out into the world on her own for the first time. It was like a security blanket, in some ways. Maybe it was stupid and maybe she would never admit to it but she felt stronger, somehow when she was wearing it. She felt more immune from the hurt and the pain that the world seemed absolutely hell bent on heaping on her already aching shoulders.
“There’s something I’ve never heard before,” she said, her lips parted in a slight smirk as she steps away from the camera. “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. The destroyer of worlds... impending destruction... what are you trying to say, Drako? That you know that this match is over before you ever step into the ring with me? Because the only impending destruction I’m considering is the one where I slowly and systematically destroy you in the ring just like I took Curtis Wilkes down two weeks ago. If someone like him can’t stand up to me, can you?
Maybe.
But then again, Wilkes doubted me too. I wonder if he still thinks that I’m nothing but the world champion’s girlfriend.... maybe he does. Maybe he doesn’t. What he thinks doesn’t particularly matter now, does it? What he thought didn’t help in the ring when I put him down for the three count. Maybe he can take some level of solace in the fact that it took two Thrillkillers to finally put him down but at the end of the day, no matter if it took two or if it took twenty... I still put him down.
At the end of the day, I still ended an almost six month long streak. He went into that match, believing that he was unstoppable. Incapable of losing. But I showed him that he was nothing more than a man. A man who was capable of being brought down off of the pedestal that he put himself on.
And now you have the opportunity to do what no one in this company has managed to do yet. You have the opportunity to beat me. No one has ever pinned me in a PCW wrestling ring yet... will you be the first?
Fuck no. Not if I have anything to do with it...
Not just because of my own stubborn pride, my own inability to lay down and die... not just because I kind of like the idea of being an unkillable monster. No, because I have something to prove and I still haven’t made my point yet.
Unfortunately for you.
This really doesn’t have anything to do with you, Sjin. This match isn’t about showing you that you shouldn’t buy into your own hype, like it was on the last Rapture when I showed Curtis Wilkes just how wrong he really was. This match isn’t about anything more than using you. Using you to prove a point and maybe using you to work out some of my anger issues.
See, when you walk into a bar and punch a motherfucker in the face... they arrest you. When you walk into a wrestling ring and punch a motherfucker in the face they pay you. Works wayyyy better than anger managment, to be honest. Why go sit in some room with a bunch of other pathetic assholes and let them tell you that you should learn to find peace and happiness and let go of all your anger? Why do that when you can let your anger work for you.”
Brytain turns away from the camera once more as it pans back to finally reveal her location. She’s standing on a small, wooden dock that sets out over a secluded stretch of water. A murky, black stagnant pond feeding into a larger, slightly less tranquil river.
Pulling something out of her bag, she holds it up and reveals that it’s a thick, black Bible.
“But maybe your god will save you... maybe he’ll pull some sick lightening bolt smite-y shit out in the middle of the match,” she shakes her head in amusement, “But then again, I’m a recovering Catholic... organized religion is something that I’ve never had time for. Even when I was a kid, forced to sit through mass and all that stupid bullshit I couldn’t understand what the point was.
Why bother?
Why give your money, your time and your pathetic, wasted faith to a god who doesn’t exist? Why be a slave to a god who doesn’t give a shit?
I knew then and I knew now that there is no benevolent and fluffy lord and savior working behind the scenes to make sure that we all live happy, content little lives.
There is no righteous justice and there is no divine intervention.”
She quirks an eyebrow and looks down at the book in her hands before she slowly pulls an orange, plastic lighter out of her pocket and flicks it, the flame sparking and flickering at the end.
She holds it up to one end of the book, watching with an unreadable expression on her face as it slowly takes flame. “This isn’t totally about you and your misguided beliefs... some of this is that I’ve always wanted to do this,” she said, with a quirk of her lips into something resembling both a snarl and a smile. “Ever since I had to sit there... for hours... during fucking catechism. Or all those goddamn hours spent going over the rosary after confession...”
She smiles brightly as the flames begin to lick her fingertips, climbing higher and higher as the book burns quickly; the bible crumbling and turning to ash as it drifted out over the water.
Finally, she tosses the still burning remains into the river beside her where it fizzles out and begins to distengrate.
“Where is your god?” she asks, tilting her head curiously as she glances up at the cloudy afternoon sky. “He isn’t there and you aren’t a holy soldier. You’re just a man. A man who is fallible. A man who has weakness. A man who will fall.”