Day 12 - Villain

Hi !! Sorry I haven't posted here for a while, school started back up, we fly for World Scholar's Cup tomorrow, and I've been exhausted, but I'll try to get back to writing consistently again

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Pushing the leftover bombs under the cabinet in their room, January looked up at their best friend, who watched on with frantic concern, “Jan, this is crazy, you wouldn’t actually blow up the city…” January snapped their gaze towards her, tilting their head, the corners of their lips raised ever so slightly, curling into an amused smile, their eyes still azoic, nothing but empty, bottomless pits of endless darkness, “Really, now? And how would you know that?”

“Because you’re a good person, January,” Leola reached for the remote on the desk that would activate the bombs, but her friend pushed her wrist away.

“Everybody knows you’re a good person,” January looked out the window, tapping the frame slowly with no particular rhythm, “But for me… different case. All I’ll ever be is the villain, the bad guy, the person who wants nothing more than pain and suffering for everyone else and that. Will. Never. Change,” their voice was near hysterical at that point, tears blurring their vision, reddening the skin around their eyes. The brunette’s formerly cold, lethargic demeanour was gone without a trace, replaced by a raging tsunami of fire; Accompanying the deadly wave, however, was a rainstorm of tears. January had been slapped with inaccurate labels over and over, had been chronically misunderstood, and had mountains of assumptions stacked up about them. The straw that breaks the camel’s back had been dropped, there was no turning back.

There is a point when people are told they are something so often they start to believe it, then believe it so much that it becomes true. Drowning people can be saved, often. But sometimes, no one helps them. Sometimes, people sink so deep that the person in the water accepts their fate, when it’s easier to just swim down. Onlookers come to terms with it too, sometimes people are just past saving, sometimes, the best thing you can do for a person ablaze is to let them burn. Sometimes people need to understand that not everybody can be saved.

“Jan, you can’t just stop trying-” Leola was interrupted by a harsh scoff.

“Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do, Blanc. I let you do that for the past two years and all that did for me was make everything worse,” January’s voice adopted a frosty edge to it, like a deadly sharp blade of ice, one that could cut you with no more than a light touch to your skin. Recoiling, their old friend looked disappointed, almost hurt.

“They called me evil, Leola,” they pulled at their hair, pupils dilating slightly as they hunched over, more than just a hint of desperation in their voice, “They called me the villain of the village. They said I couldn’t be good.”

“That’s not true Jan…”

“You’re right!” January chuckled, swiping the remote detonator for the bombs located all over the city off the desk, “I can’t be the villain of this story.”

“Because after this, there will be no story.”