End of year festivities, End of world parade

Fluttering open, the glint of an abandoned box cutter greeted my heavy eyes.Like a starter cord had been fashioned from my spilling guts, my heart whirred like a chainsaw into rebirth.
Unfurling against the webbing of my fingers, viscous tendrils whirled like amputated tentacles, before settling into a hardened shape that my palm could grip tightly. It felt like pulsating muscle beneath my skin. Vague darkness solidified in the form of a figure against my blurred vision, tottering back and forth as my slumped body raised from the grave. Before I could understand myself, myself lunged forward with a viscous roar, guttural and with spittle flying across my cracked lips.
Whether I had revealed myself or her senses were simply far too honed, the shadow gracefully twirled against me, like breath against my cheek. I could see colours, soon I could see shapes, then soon they came together to form the hotel room, the bed, chandelier, bedside table, and the woman with flashes of violence in her eyes.
"What the hell are you doing?!"
Her words meant nothing to me, even with a cognizance whirring into motion like chainsaw blades. It was the instinct, then the conscious decision to destroy what had destroyed me.
Again I brought down what was once my flesh against hers, and her dance continued without missing a step, but I had joined her without permission, and now it was the both of us twirling against each other. For each swing of a box cutter, each projectile of a staple, my own blade sung against the air. Her backflip against the bed sent the sheets rippling across the air, and my plunge into the pillow sent feathers fluttering against our faces.
Swinging with my body weight wildly, I could feel myself begin to fill the whole in my chest, and my voraciousness grew smaller and more disgusting. My direction changed from ruthlessly forwards to a careful retreat. While we danced, I mulled over, under the duress of inexperience and shock, my options.
I would lead her to polite-glasses.
I couldn't be sure that I wasn't just putting him in greater danger, but I felt that it was the only choice I had. I should be the one to die, not him. I don't have a concrete direction for my life, I'm past making something out of myself, even without considering the approaching apocalypse. Polite-glasses was a person that I could believe would help the world somehow. I'm sorry for never learning your name.
Wait.
Could I even die?
If I could revive once, then what's stopping me from doing it again?
But I was pushed forward by a single welling-up memory.
These people were trying to save my life.
Even if I didn't find worth in myself, for some strange, indiscernible reason, they could find it in me.
My life wasn't worth saving, but that sentiment was.
Besides, dying hurts like hell.
As the adrenaline wore off my momentary burst of skill ceded to my amateurism, affording Lady a powerful blow against my chest. Spittle flew from between clenched teeth as I felt my back contort, and the rough concrete of the hallway doing anything but cushioning my impact. However, this could work to my advantage. Scrambling on all fours like a wounded cat, her languid swings of the box cutter whistled throughout the empty hallways as she stalked. Having used the momentum to bolt upright, I could feel icy pricks of wind pinch against my face in intervals from the cranked-open windows lining the hallway, rhythmically splattering my vision with sunlight as I tumbled forward, running for my life.
Sometime ago the blade of flesh had thudded to the floor, and I was left darting around corners, hoping to lose her some way or another while reorienting myself. Where polite-glasses usually lurked at this time of day would require my looping behind this predator to reach. Rasping against the heavy weight of the stress piling upon me like tar, I fell back against one foot, leaning against the hallway wall to catch my breath. Like a visual explanation aid in an anime where the director doesn't trust the viewers intelligence or attention spans, I could conjure up the image of a burning white line from my position towards the exit out into the lobby.
From there, it would be smooth sailing.
Now, all I had to do was contend with the rough seas that were a certain furious woman.

Her panting seemed almost as strained and desperate as my own, while her eyes darted tremulously in a sea of milky white. It didn't come across as shock at having her murder-target revive himself like it was another day on the job, or at his murderous, out of character craving for her life. Though in a trance-like state, I didn't even think she had shown surprise when I had used my own innards as a makeshift weapon. Her nervousness was like an employee that accidentally mailed the wrong file, and is trying to make things right without informing her boss that a wrong ever occurred.
Willowy, pale legs strutted with assuredness in spite of her expression of anxiousness, while glints of her box cutter as she passed by the line of windows refracted into wedged snowflakes against the wall behind me. Welling murmurs of people's voice in an unharmonious symphony had begun to leak through the open grills, punctuating the otherwise placated sounds of the morning.
There had been a heap more galas and parades recently, so I suppose people wanted to go out doing what they loved, or go out trying everything they think they would love.
Newcomers and old-timers alike could cavort with jubilation, without a care in the world for their drenched personas, heavy limbs, and aching skulls the morning after.
But it's none of my business, especially not now.
I tried to sneak from where I supposed I wouldn't be seen.
Ducking probably wouldn't do much, but it was better than waltzing around upright. Beneath my fingertips, clinging against my sweaty palm, scarlet seas of carpet swallowed my vision. When my eyelids closed, I could feel the heavy thrum of my beating heart beneath them, and in the womb-like, sepia darkness whirls of thoughts, fears, and anxieties bubbled and burst in waves. Clutching me chest, it felt disorienting to think that moments ago the heart that furiously beat against it had burst into a juicy pulp.
Nausea already grew inside my throat at the memory of my death, and I didn't want reinforce it through repeated experience, no matter how supposedly resistant to it I was.
I could hear her footsteps thudding across from me. I would have to act fast. A solitary potted plant, some kind of dark-jade coloured exotic fern hung languidly against my shoulder. Fruitlessly apologising to it mid-toss, hoping it could find some solace in being used for a relatively noble cause, dirt flung like kicked-up sand, while my heel dug deep into the crimson wool beneath. Pivoting, dashing with all my strength towards the open lobby, a muffled guh faded out from behind me.
Good, all that was left before me, as the ground below surged like a crimson river against my swift steps, marble-white walls blurring like roaring waves to my sides, was a single set of stairs. Elevator was out of the question; too slow, too unreliable, and I didn't think this girl was crazy enough to leap down a flight of stairs. As the hallway opened up to the expanse of beige linoleum, paintings replaced the clear glass rectangles that had welcomed one side of the hall to the icy world outside. Metallic silver gloss reflected the vague, grey blob of my shadow, undefined like the reflection on a murky river, tiny golden rims of the elevator buttons lighting up like a Christmas tree against the bottom right.
Hold on, aren't they supposed to light up when you press them?
That is, why were they lighting up now?
Corresponding with the fizzle in my neurons at this scene before me, a brief flicker of all the light in the world, almost imperceptible, washed over the faint golden glow. Maybe the sunbeams had refracted against the elevator, and my adrenaline-pumped senses had misjudged from beneath tearing eyes.
But there were no windows in the small lobby, only paintings, a futuristic looking, bright cerulean-laced water machine, and emerald leather couches.
Tiny distorted spheres bubbled quietly, drifting listlessly, popping after a handful of seconds.
I couldn't hear there mumbles of distress from the girl anymore, or her muffled footsteps.
Not even a singing chirp from the waking Warblers, or the whistling symphony of the wind carrying across the rustling leaves in a symphony.
There was nothing.
It was only a couple of seconds, milliseconds even, before I pushed up against the silver stairwell railing, grappling it while I swung my body over the beams. Twisting my legs across the railing, I slid hurriedly to the floor below, thrusting my neck upward in case Lady decided to make a surprise appearance.
Actually, it was more surprising that she didn't even poke her head out from the lobby, that not a single echo of her feet or exasperated sighs had travelled to my ears. Landing roughly on the linoleum reflecting dully below me, whirls of chanting voices began to seep across the hall once more.
Looks like festivities had resurged with vigor.
Just as I had strolled out from the musty darkness of the stairwell, drowned by the artificial honey-coloured ceiling lights, a ding resounded across the small square cutoff from my left. Slowly, I turned to face the blinking burgundy downward-pointing arrow, consisting of a handful of chunky, bunches together LED dots.
Ah, she had taken the elevator.
Before her sylphlike fingers, caressing the cyan shell of her dear stapler, twitched their way out from the thick silver doors, I had bolted at breakneck speed down the hall, a hall identical to the floor above, to all the floors above.
Beating inside of my ears, my regenerated heart was pulsating with more audible ferocity than it's predecessor had ever exhibited. But was it a predecessor, or was it a younger version of itself? Was it the same arm in the way a wound heals, or was it a different finger in the way that a severed pinkie becomes an artificial pinkie? Concerns about the ship of Theseus that reverberated behind the shelter of my ribs could wait.
I had reached what was usually the door that polite-glasses resided behind, while the twirling scissors and clacking staples punctuated the otherwise silent halls behind me, shut off from the sonorous chants of the parade, and the subdued hum of the wind. A banal cachak, and the world opened up before me; the knowledge of a thousand sins, their meaning and purpose perfectly opaque, their innards glistening and neon, approaching me with caressing grasps.