Chaos Intrepid: In Her Shoes

Prompt the Tenth: Ah Sunflower, Weary of Time

And the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset

It was an accident.

That’s why he laughed as he sagged against the wall, hands clutching at his stomach. She was that crap at shooting.

Red spread like ink on blotting paper through the white and blue striped shirt he’d selected for court that morning. As the sound of her feet faded into echoes, the shape of her shadow vanishing into the gloom of the London close, he slowly crumpled to the ground. He’d liked this shirt. It was pretty much the only shirt that survived after he became Chaos Intrepid. He’d worn it on the day he officially broken up with Taz and she’d ripped the sleeve. Sewing it up, seeing the crooked stitching of the right shoulder seam, was like a reminder of all the things she did. The things she ripped up and tore and broke and never helped to mend. But he could fix them. He could fix him. Bloody great hole in it now but… He pulled one hand away from the epicentre, brows furrowing as it came around stained deep, dark red. Pulling himself away from the wall a little, he felt behind him.

Nothing.

Only one hole to stitch later then. It wasn’t a through-and-through. 

Did blood even wash out?

The close was silent now. Silent apart from the ringing that was back in his ears.

She’d come back, he thought, and find him like this. Half a smile glimmered, then faded.

It hurt, he realised, being shot.

Not the same hurt that he recognised from a thousand and one nights with a leg that wasn’t there. Not the dark, dull pain that never stopped. This lanced through him. It spliced through his stomach, felt like acid dripping slowly… slowly… Like Loki and Skadi’s snake… Right? That was the myth? Myths had been his nectar since his childhood, but was it Skadi? He always confused the wife with the gaoler. He let out a low gasping laugh as his body reacted to the next wave of pain. A chill was beginning to creep inside him, spreading up his leg, setting pins and needles ablaze where the prosthetic twitched against his stump.

“Chaos? Chaos?” He could hear a voice calling.

Stirring caused the pain to rocket once more and he let out a low moan that could have been a response.

“Oh god no jeez no.” A litany of words spilled along the close, bounding along to the pattern of footsteps racing back towards him.

He knew she’d find him here. As her face swam into sight, that beautiful face he’d learnt to love, he grinned.

“Heya, beautiful.”

But her face was full of horror. Eyes wide like she was looking at the devil rather than him, her hands reaching for but not touching his own. “Oh god, no, no, no. How?” she asked. “Did you call an ambulance?”

“No phone. Court.”

“Jeez, you foolish, foolish, bloody…” She whipped out her phone, hands shaking, ignoring his gasping chuckle. She typed in the number, the three digits. She knew it was bad then too. “Yes, I need an ambulance. Reiner’s Close. White Chapel. No. Yes. Yes. My friend.” That stung. “He’s seriously injured. I don’t know.”

“Shot.”

“He says he’s been shot. No this isn’t a joke.” Her voice that started off so steady began to waiver, “Please can you just send an ambulance, police. Anyone that can help. We’re putting pressure on the wound but… It’s bad.”

“Hurts like a bitch too.” He added with a twitch of a grimace behind his smile, as he felt her spare hand fall upon his hip, the way she rested it when they watched television on a Friday night before any of this really started. Platonic.

She hung up after a few more lines, urging them to come quickly. Then she turned her tempestuous gaze back upon him.

“What the bloody -"

“Don’t make me laugh, Tils. Hurts.”

“I don’t -“

“Then you stop bloody punning too.” He didn’t let his grin fade. The distress in her eyes was too much and he didn’t like that look on her.

“Chaos…”

“You’re alright, Tilly. I’ll be alright.” He was lying and she knew it but she wanted so badly to believe that he believed he was going to live. “I’ve done it before remember.”

Snorting, she shook her head in disbelief, in horror, “You were shot… Who? How?”

He said nothing, struggling to answer. How could he tell her… but the dawning dusk that shuttered her eyes told him she knew.

“No.”

“It’s ok.”

“No. No. No.”

“Really, hun. Save the epizuegxis for poetry ok.”

“Chaos. Chaos, I didn’t mean – I’m so sorry."

He raised a tired hand a little, attempting to hush her but only succeeding in her grabbing his hands and pressing down on the wound. He hissed.

“You wasn’t aiming for me. Just unlucky,” he tried to comfort her. “It’s almost better this way. I thought,” he coughed, wheezed in a breath as his abdomen burned beneath her hands and his. “I thought he were going to get me.”

“I think it’s a woman actually.”

“Our killer’s a woman?”

“Explains the shoes.”

“No. Those mean something. I’m sure.”

Tiredness accompanied the increasing cold that had now seeped into his shoulders. In his minds eye, a yellow eye turned towards him, blazing yellow, burning as bright as the red in his belly.

Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a
flower? when did you look at your skin and
decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive?
the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and
shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?

“Tilly, did you know,” He began, “In the desert, all I could think of was sunflowers? Did I tell you that?”

“Sunflowers? When you were…”

“Yeah. It was when everything went quiet. After the rest of the survivors were shot. I kept flashing back to different places. School mostly. Learning to write.

But before they found me, all I could focus on was this memory of my mother, trying to sing a poem, but she was so tone deaf it just sounded like a kind of chant. Ah Sunflower, Weary of Time…”

“Who countest the steps of the Sun: Seeking after that sweet golden clime…”

“Where the traveller’s journey is done.”

Chaos remembered it. The way his mind roamed, obeying with nothing more than the shell of his body. It was dusk then, the crackle of fire had dimmed, the loss of light had stopped the militants from finding him alive. And his mother trying to sing had filled his every thought, the same sunflower sutra over and over. It calmed him then.

But when he’d come back, she claimed not to remember it. So he’d searched. Found William Blake and Allen Ginsberg, the tired and wily poetry of his own Sutra. The meditation, the vision.

“Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!”  Chaos mumbled, falling away from the world a little more. Then he laughed.

You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a
sunflower!

Impossible to say how long he laughed, for the sniggers mixed in with agony he couldn’t keep secret. She smiled beside him, soft and confused and terrified.

“It’s the same as last time… I can see the sunflowers.”

And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me
not!

“But this time… I don’t really want to go. I don’t. I don’t want to go.” He insisted, grabbing at her fingers in his bloodless, bloodstained grip. A hint of wildness burst into his eyes, wistful desperation. They roamed the walls, the sky, returned to her face where they fixated, “God I’ll miss you.”

And as the black at the corners of his eyes became tunnels, became obsidian dark, his strained smile relaxed, his body sagged.

Beautiful human thought detonated inside his head. Oh Sunflower, he thought, We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread
bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all
beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed
by our own seed & golden hairy naked
accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black
formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our
eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive
riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening
sitdown vision.

Tilly felt his hand grow cold, the sirens in the air. Howl.



Word Count: 1,357