Little Fictive
By Jewels
Shantytown is Seraph's concept, and she was nice enough to say anyone could play with it. Kayla and Milla are the property of the writers. The author places full responsibility for the story on our muses. It's all their fault!
**
Milla watched the other fictive warily, biting her nails in her nervousness. It wasn't Kayla's fault she was like this, she supposed, but after... how many years?... well, after a long time, she had gotten used to Kayla's rapid and changable moods. She had learned to be wary.
Kayla was sitting on a small, threadbare mattress on the opposite side of the room. She looked almost childish, sitting there with her arms wrapped around her legs, the fingers of her right hand plucking at the sleeve of her left arm. It was a nervous habit, the same sort of thing that compelled people to wash their hands two hundred times a day. Kayla plucked at her sleeve so much that it was ragged and threads hung from the uneven edge.
No, it wasn't Kayla's fault. She'd been written to be mad.
**
*... little bitch she did this to me it is all her fault not mine kill her if i can ...*
Kayla sat rocking back and forth, repeating that thought like a mantra, lulling herself into semi-consciousness with it. And that damned rhyme.
Little fictive, do not cry,
Just like them, you came to die.
It didn't make any sense really. It was nonsense, just trying to get the words 'fictive' and 'die' into a rhyme. She had done it to torture Kayla, to push her just that little bit further towards insanity. She had enjoyed it, watching her fictive slowly spiral downwards.
On the wings of dreams you sang,
But now, at last, you're going to hang.
That had been twisted. Evil and twisted. Kayla's writer had enjoyed torturing her fictives, putting them through the wringer in every story she had ever written. At some point, the darkness that she had poured into her stories had just taken over her completely, and she had started being nasty and bitchy in reality. She had stopped writing, focussing her dark feelings on the real world. That left an awful lot of her fictives living in Shanty Town.
Evil knows evil, and evil is real,
Fictive, my darling, you're no longer here.
I know what you know, and I know what you feel,
You will know pain and you will know fear.
**
"I don't want to go on..."
Milla peered up from the bit of artwork she was doing on a scrap of paper she'd found. She sighed, "Face it, Kayla, if you didn't want to be here, you'd have faded away already." She added an extra bit of shading in the corner of picture. Maybe she should do a bit of cross-hatching in the middle there...
"You don't care. DO YOU?!" the last was screamed as Kayla jumped to her feet.
"Actually, I do." Milla said, her voice with an unearthly quality of calm to it. She turned the paper over so that the drawing was face down on the concrete floor of the room they had lived in since they had met. She stood and approached Kayla slowly. "If I didn't do you think I would have hung around you this long?"
"You were using me! Just like my writer used me!"
Milla was stung by the words. "Is that what you thought?"
A panicked look came over Kayla's face. "No, Milla... I didn't..."
Milla tried not to look too hurt. "I'm going out for a bit." she said softly, not looking back as she headed out of the room into the bitterly cold winter night air.
Perhaps, as she later thought, she should have looked back one more time...
**
*... she hated me she hated us all but she was worse to me she was horrible and nasty and could not do anything for us just against us ...*
"Why?" came the sob from the mattress.
*... i wish i were there i wish i could see them again oh god I WANT TO DIE!! I WISH I WAS DEAD!!!!!!!! ...*
She shouldn't have pushed Milla away. The other fictive had been the only kind and friendly face that she had known since her writer had abandoned her in Shantytown. Not accidentally abandoned, deliberately left to rot in the depths of Subreality. Milla had been so good to her...
"Oh god..."
Kayla's memory had been fading away to almost nothing over recent time, but some twist of fate had left the poem that her writer had written for all her fictives.
Your life is my own, dear,
To use as I choose.
Don't try to deny me,
You know you'll just lose.
"IT WAS ALWAYS MY LIFE!!!!!!"
**
She was gone when Milla returned. Milla shouldn't have been surprised, she'd been seeing the signs for weeks. Losing her memory of her written history, fading away from sight a lot of the time towards the end. Perhaps she had just hoped... prayed that it would never actually happen...
Milla crossed over to the mattress where Kayla had spent so much of her time on. She stared at it a moment, then wiped her eyes as she felt traces of moisture about to betray her. Now that Kayla was gone, there was no reason to stay around here.
She crossed to the other side of the room and picked up the drawing she'd abandoned here when she'd stormed out earlier. It seemed a pale imitation of what had existed in that room up until a short time ago. Milla brushed her fingers across it as if she could touch the image, and then shoved it inside the bag next to it on the floor, picking it up and leaving the place that was now so empty.
-Fini