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    COTY

    Assailant -- Year 226

    QOTY

    "But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura


    in our cancer of passion; marvel
    #1
    Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,
    With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
    And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane;



    Death brings no absolution.
    He followed her into the ocean, and then -- darkness, for a time. A sweet darkness, a cherished one, because nothing mattered - he did not matter. He was inconsequential.
    Of course, there were no pearly gates, no chorus of angels. He'd never expected such things, such frivolity. 
    There was no hell-fire, either. For this, he was grateful, for if anyone deserved hell, it was him.

    A blink, and then--

    His body was made corporeal again, though perhaps more transparent. Still, he inhabits the same dulled body he once wandered so tiredly within, and it feels devastatingly familiar. 
    It feels unwanted, unwelcome.
    Unlike many, he'd died late, far too late. He had welcomed death, embraced it on that smoky shore. He had forsaken his old body, and willingly so, with no regard or thought to what lay ahead.
    He shouldn't be here, walking strange shores again.

    Yet he is. He is terribly here, in this realm that hovers in a world where it exists and does not exist. Because there is a reason. There must be. 
    Someone wants me, he thinks, and the thought causes him to shudder. He is not a man who should be wanted.
    "Hello?" he calls out to the ghosts, the ones like him, and he aches for the darkness to return.



    Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
    I never saw a brute I hated so;
    He must be wicked to deserve such pain.


    Reply
    #2
    marvel
    i'll run the risk
    of being intimate with brokenness

    Life is nothing like what they promised her, but it is exactly what she thought it would be. It is everything she deserves and yet still, she wants for more. More than this nothing, this corrosive loneliness that eats away at flesh and bone, drinks from her marrow, from the blood that burns in her veins until there is only this loneliness left. Only this pit of empty in her chest, in her belly. Perhaps too, she is in love with this lonely. It is hard to know something so intimately for so long and not miss it once it has gone.

    There is a voice in the grey, she cannot remember if it was dusk or dawn before he brought her here, and her small blue face swivels to find it. “Hello.” She calls back in a voice like a whisper with orange eyes as bright and round as embers. But then those eyes drift from the direction of the voice and settle like dust over the bones that litter the beach like broken promises and fragmented memories and she cannot help but wonder if these bones were anyone she should have loved.

    But then someone does materialize out of the grey and as though trapped in a dream, she moves slowly forward. He is black and his isn’t, grey but darker and she thinks she can see the sand and bones behind him, through him. But the strangest part of all is how her heart stutters in her chest. I have something to tell you, she thinks but does not say, I made a promise. But she does not say so yet, or maybe she cannot. Not yet. Instead she tells him in a voice that crumbles around the edges, words severed with more loneliness than she knows what to do with, “You left me all alone.”


    through this magnifying glass I see a thousand finger prints
    on the surfaces of who I am

    Reply
    #3
    Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,
    With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
    And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane;



    There are things that haunted him in his life – a whole host of them, a parade of names he said when he walked into that roiling sea, and other names besides, names history has stolen from him.
    There are a dozen of these things, these names. He has wronged many, sinned in a dozen ways.

    (A boy. A young boy. Standing there and saying
    do not call yourself such ugly things as if Garbage wasn’t something ugly to begin with. A boy, shivering, saying I’m cold, I’m so cold.
    And him, old and wretched, hellfire eyes on the boy – on his body – and weak.
    Garbage, there with a boy, and instead of running he steps closer and says
    I could keep you warm.
    He did.)

    There are things that haunted him in life that followed him to now.
    This is the cold truth of it: death was not an escape.
    It’s not an escape because he still knows their names, they burn hot on his tongue like cinders.
    He still knows their names and knows the things he did. How he kept them warm.

    He sees eyes, first. It shouldn’t be so, but the world is strange here, in this ghost-realm. Eyes like fire, like jack-o-lanterns. They are harbingers, such eyes – harbingers of death and destruction.
    (
    Do you love me, do you love me now he’d shouted – cried – at his mother, blind and bleeding, dying, his own eyes rolling on the sand before her. He should have died there. No magician should have fixed him.)
    Those goddamn eyes.

    He scrabbles backward, as if there was an escape, as if this wasn’t as dreadfully inevitable as everything he’s ever done.
    He moans under his breath, a low keen that’s kissing distance from a sob.
    This is the cold truth of it: she looks like that boy.
    (
    Vader, he thinks wildly, his name was Vader.)

    “No,” he says, but whether it’s in response to her or to the situation at hand, I can’t say.



    Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
    I never saw a brute I hated so;
    He must be wicked to deserve such pain.


    Reply
    #4
    marvel
    i'll run the risk
    of being intimate with brokenness

    There is only one name she knows besides her own, only one name worth remembering. It belonged to a beautifully alien face, with skin stretched paper thin and translucent over glass bones like trapped tears, with pocks and fissures so that no one would misunderstand her frailty. It belonged to wings made ragged and brittle by wind, bruised by rain. Her name had been Adaline, and she had been everything kind and lovely about a cold, cruel world. Do you think it is impossible for the broken to be loved, Adaline had asked and Marvel was silent with the truth. She knew it was impossible for the broken to be loved, knew it by the way loneliness followed her like an unwelcome shadow. But she had not wanted to chase away this new, welcome warmth with the brandished blade of her honesty. In the end it had been the silence that pushed the girl away, anyway.

    Marvel lifts her eyes to his face, except they are not her eyes and she does not realize that the grey had traded them for something meant to wound. So she fixes them on him and drifts woefully closer, her delicate blue face a mask of agony and brittle uncertainty. “No?” She repeats, she asks, stopping abruptly before reaching his translucent form. It is amazing how much that single syllable hurts, how deftly it buries itself like a blade in her chest and she gasps for the way pain blossoms around it like a bloodstain. “Am I really nothing to you?”

    She can feel herself crumbling, can feel those orange eyes widen and wet, and then disappearing beneath the tangles of a dark mane when she finds she can no longer look at him. She knew a lifetime alone with no one to love her, and still she had harbored a dangerous feather of hope that when she found them, when they saw her, they would love her anyway. Suddenly, she would be enough and this world wouldn’t have to be so lonely. But he looks at her and he falls away as though his is the chest impaled, as though her words have wounded him and she is no more than a nightmare come to claim him. Her voice is brittle with the question that falls from her lips, brittle when even now she cannot look at him. “Why do I exist if no one wanted me.”


    through this magnifying glass I see a thousand finger prints
    on the surfaces of who I am

    Reply
    #5
    Alive? He might be dead for aught I know,
    With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
    And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane;

    He is proof that the broken cannot be loved, not for long.
    He’s found other broken souls and together they tried to fit, like regluing the pieces of a shattered teacup – never quite fitting, never quite holding water, some vital piece missing and gone.
    He loves, of course - loves desperately and wildly, because there are no such rules for the broken. They love, but cannot be loved.
    Not for long.

    The eyes pierce him like burn and he cringes again, a beaten broken thing, a thing that is supposed to be dead, not on this wretched beach in front of this wretched girl. She echoes back the question - no - and it hangs in the air like an echo, and all he hears is no, no, no.

    Am I really nothing to you?

    He’d laugh, except he’s not much of a laughing man.
    “No,” (that word, again), “you’re too much. I can’t—“
    Can’t what? Can’t look upon you, can’t see the way you look like him.
    (The way she has Craft’s face, just a bit.)
    He can’t know these things, the knowledge will drive him mad (we’d say kill him but he’s already dead, what worse fates can we draw up?). He can’t.
    No.

    But he is broken. He is broken and she is before him, tragic, asking why do I exist if no one wanted me. It’s not a question he can answer. But the way her voice cracks and aches strikes him, he feels it like an arrow in his ghostly heart.
    “It’s not that,” he says, “you just…you look like someone I loved.”

    As if ruining that boy was anything like love.

    Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
    I never saw a brute I hated so;
    He must be wicked to deserve such pain.




    sorry I made you wait a month for this weird ass post D:
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