Prompt Fic (original)

[icarus_chained]

Title:  Rising
Rating:  PG-13
Wordcount:  313
Notes:  Inspired by this image: http://patdollard.com/wp-content/uploads/chained_hands.jpg, courtesy of ilyena_sylph 

Rising

 

The wind sheared across her chest, slicing through what was left of her clothes, through her hollow bones, through her heart. It swept right through her, and raced out uncaring across the seared and cracked earth. She staggered, helpless, on her knees before she'd even realised she was falling. She didn't feel the impact.

For a second, she just knelt there, stunned. The wind blew, cutting through her, snatching sight from her eyes. The chill throbbed through her, the ache sowed deep from the bones of her wrists, from the chill of the steel, from the press of her pulse into itself, echoed from one hand to the other and back. Isolation. Empty and cold and pressed into herself. Hollow. She blinked down, the tears burning her cheeks, staring at the dull gleam of the links as the light fell white around her shoulders.

The world was empty around her. No-one was coming. No-one was coming ever again. She'd left them all behind. Every last one.

Something pushed against the inside of her heart at the thought, insistent, desperate. A need, as deep and throbbing as the chill, as strong as the steel. A need, from the very deepest part of her.

Blindly obeying, pushed by the nameless instinct, she tipped back her head, staring up into the white, ignoring the pain as the wind whipped the tears away, and slowly, achingly ... she lifted her arms. The cold burned, the bones of her hands burrowing deeper into themselves, weak and hollow and aching, but still she raised them. Lifted them high, into the light, into the white brightness of the sky, watching them through blurred and shattered eyes.

She raised chained hands to the sky, to snatch the light, to open her pressed and captured self into it, and in the stillness beneath the wind, her cracked and joyous laughter was all that could be heard.