Of everything that stands, the end - any

[Pollock]

If <i>only</i> he could read her mind.

Oh, the sweetness he’d find in her own self-doubt! 

How he would love to feel the soldered edges of that armour (that gentled, polished plate that keeps her secure and contained, just so) for the place where it peels back, just enough to get a finger in. 

(<i>Pick, pick pick.</i> He has all the patience in the world as he waits for everything to fall back into place.) 

To search out the chink in it all, where, unprotected, he may pull at the tail of her yarn until it unravels and pieces of her fall from their protective skin and onto his feet, bloody and meaty and bare.

They could scry in what remains, together.

He could help her love that monster. Show her how silly it is to resent it.

His brother begrudges it. His brother is <i>weak</i>. A perfidious dead end to be consumed one day, bones and organs whole, into the abyss that he so fights against. Some things are not worth resisting; some resistance is futile. He, too, thinks he can turn his back to the void. To the things that bump and croak in the dark (to Pollock and Warring; Birkenau and Pheper, all; their mother, may she rot in the hell she deserves for having wrought both power and impotence with such negligence). And that blood that fills him, red and blue, even if he’d rather bleed himself dry of it – or thinks he would rather bleed himself dry of it.

The gift giver will sate himself with the doubt he knows, instead. 

He smiles his wry smile, “<i>life,</i>” he scoffs, off-hand and quiet. She expects too little, from life and from herself, perhaps. (He could mend that, too, if given a night.) He’d rather live life as he had been – bloodstained, sure. There were flaws. But in pursuit of pleasures, colour, art and skin. “And what do <i>you</i> need to change?” He could tell her he needed to change nothing – she would not believe him, and it would be a lie. 

He has nothing he is <i>willing</i> to change, not this freshly removed from this weaponry. 

(He has bodies buried in moss and he has secrets, like she, buried deeper still. But these things have already been interned, prayed over and mended with earth and windflower; more bones and flesh until what remains are many tombs intertwined. Until names lose their meaning, so does life, 

—and there is the void that stares so lovingly back.)

“Hmm,” his lip curls with an unmistakable disgust. 

<i>Weak.</i> (It must be killed dead, that insidious thing called <i>weakness.</i>) 

“You surrender too easily,” he jeers, and for him it is like sweet wine on his lips. He has his proclivities – he has his needs; he likes things that bend. “You let yourself doubt <i>too</i> easily. These are dangerous things.” He smiles, his wide, crocodile smile, but does not move. Though he’d love to. He’d soo love to. “What <i>did</i> you do?” his flat eyes twinkle, perhaps, a bit as he fishes for her. For anything. For the woman to tell him something he can be quenched on. To curve towards him and brush, for a just a moment, against a monster of a different cloth. He <i>tsks</i> and shakes his head, fixes her with those black eyes, suddenly hard and judgmental, “whatever it was, it must have been awful, to deserve all that. I only lost one wing and a set of curved horns.”

He can have his hopes up here, on this false peak for dreams and lost things.

He can hope that she breaks when she bows.

Or that she finds some comfort in her bitterness (as he had, so many years ago) and then in him.

He has <i>needs.</i> Beasts to feed.