Au-Uber missed moments used for character study, explaining Lola

Pillers strange and skyless projected from all around her, she was alone now.

She couldn’t shake it, cut off from the shimmer of matching rings, her lover had failed her. All because he chose a pretty face over a stupid one.

She wanted to scream- but it would be wasteful. That pragmatism she was now realizing, had been her folly, would be meaningless still in this place.  

Liminal hall could only be described as a great tapestry of long forgotten things, it was the point where the ever folding mass that was the world beyond death just so happened to fold over again onto the living plain. 

And Lola had been fool enough to want past it, and even more a fool to not hold on tighter to Ivan when they first found the sacred place.

Such shame for how she landed, but he still failed. Her.

It had been no matter, watching, pacing, killing time in the edge of existence, while he tried to save her from the encroaching mass of this place.

But he failed, and now she’s stuck

The climatic screaming that was the end of all worlds was as silenced as it was deafening, in which what she was as the fragmentary memory of sensation was apt to fall apart.

This is what it meant to disappear.

She’d wanted it to be different, high flying and boisterous amongst the living, in the time of that other-side. She wasn’t sure when it was, the first scream that opened this place for them, but such promise was nothing less than- 

Than false now.

she’d been dead, she’d forgotten. She’d been forgotten, if she was anyone to remember at all.

She didn’t know if there even was a memorial, or family, or when she left them behind.

And at the time even crossing over, it didn’t matter.

Ivan was there.

But now he wasn’t and that whatever in the core of her being that replaced a living heart was as broken as it was dissipating.

“Do you plan on talking any time soon?” Suddenly she was seeing what was in front of her, a girl blurred by a similar incident to her own. Bright pink, in stark ugly prints, blond hair longer than the girl found comfortable, even in her sorry state.

“I’m not surprised if you can’t talk.” things were clearer for a minute, as spots and zebra stripes and cable knit became visible, what was there while textured seemed skimpy. The type of thing she knew her father hated. “So little left. They said before that things ‘like you’ can’t take much.”

“You're dying aren’t you?”

“I’m not.” that wasn’t the right name for it, if she could guess what ‘they’ were. This wouldn’t have been death to them. She wasn’t all that sentimental, but she didn’t want to think that such base understanding could just burn away.

Everything else could, but it still hurts to think about.

“Really? Aren’t you now? Then what are you doing?” The girl’s head tilted without her body, and everything feels cold, not like the shift of forms, but like snow on living skin.

“Nothing much. It’s not like you’re doing any better.”

“You’re right.” was it sickening that she’d only seen her eyes then? Bright and living, and blinded by lightning, how did this girl die?

“Isn’t this death?”, the girl said with more clarity this time, “I mean you're being torn apart. You’ll be gone after. Ain’t that death?” a role of the girl’s blank eyes shifted to look around Lola. Waiting for something. Watching for something.

“I don’t want to call it that.” “I was dead before, I was gone before, this isn’t really my body, it’s just-”

“It’s just your soul.” 

“No.” Lola said, she didn’t think she was ever her body’s soul. “It’s not that either. Souls don’t die like this.”

“Everything dies, socks die, shoes die, men die,” the girl said, mocking a memory, at least by her gestures. She went forward with the child’s logic, “who knows maybe you can Darn a soul, make it like new?”

“Why make patches in burned cloth?” Lola thought following along. She wasn’t sure she even said anything.

“Why not mothbitten?”, she said, why not chewed up also? Like, Liminal Hall was just a mouth of sorts. Like it wasn’t the edge of the world.

“I’ll be broken, I’ll be weak, I won’t be me.” which was the truth of darning, thread pulled and pulled again through weakened fabric can only do so much.

“Are you less so now?”

“Yes.”

“Why let it end then?” she pushed whatever else she was looking for away, as she looked Lola in the eye. “you’re already dying, is it really worse to fight for it now?”

“What would she have left to fight for?” a voice deafened and many, beneath and above, like the memory of air.

“Be quiet. You don’t know what you’re saying to her-” the girls couldn’t see Lola now, shifting her gaze trying to see a source, there wasn’t one to be heard.

“Don’t you remember how easy it was for him to look away?”

“Stop-” somebody said.

“Don’t you want to be better than that? Begging for a man who fails and flits, and flirts so goddamn much?” with the depth of many the voices scoffed, “He can’t even fly, why keep that f-”

“Shut up! Shut up!”, the girl screamed, her form flickered and everything smelled like petrol.

“I’m just saying the words, it’s not just gentle things in the dust of her.” they felt eyes looking at them. Lola was sure of that, “not just cleverness, she’ll need this back if you want her to live.”

“You can’t-” 

“You only happened after this, you can’t know what’s best.”

“You mean what happens.”

“Same difference.”

“No one should trust voices like that,” the girl said, looking down at Lola, her face stricken, before asking, “do you anyway?”

Lola didn’t want to respond, the world the whole of it was so much stranger than she’d given it credit for. And she wasn’t sure that a voice existed, a saying, a way of speech she could take up, that would replace this horrible coldness inside.

“I don’t know that, it would be living if I did.”

Time seemed to stretch on the bias on the edge of creation, as the girl searched through her pockets. Like someone in her state could have pockets.

Sleep overtook, as her heart was patched over with a Fools Clock.