theywhooncewasnamed

[theywhooncewasnamed]

Snippet from chapter 21 - All Acid and Bile

"Quiet." Catherine snarled, stepping away from Beth to glare out the window. "You do not get to tell me that I am a good person. You do not know me. Perhaps you did know me, back then. But you don't now. You don't know what it was like for me. The nightmares that followed me around like an after taste. All acid and bile." Catherine looked down at the space between them, her hands wringing the rifle in her grasp.

"I remember more than I think. More than I want to and less than I'd like. The worst of it is that I still..." Her face scrunched as her mind tried to find the right words to articulate any of it. "That I know that I wouldn't have hurt you. Or Sarah, or Maria. I know cause the thought of it even now, even without the contexts makes my skin itch and my teeth ache, like I want to rip them both off my body."

Why she was saying any of this to Beth was beyond her, but now that she had started she wasn't exactly sure on how to keep her mouth from opening again. "It was the Betrayal that broke me. Not the two bullets, though they obviously did little to help. The first few months wandering the Mojave, doing what i usually did...I just—...I thought if I was someone else then it wouldn't happen again."

The admission tasted like ash in her mouth, because she knew without a doubt who she would always be. It was a nature she cultivated and one that was self-propagating, like a nightstalker eating its own tail.