Fic: I'm Just a Moth Who Wants to Share Your Light (The Witches)
Title: I'm Just a Moth Who Wants to Share Your Light
Fandom: The Witches (Roald Dahl)
Pairing: Young! Grandmother/Grand High Witch
Summary: This is a story of obsession. Longing and fear and lust, not the pretty kind. Bruce's grandmother remembers.
Warnings: Sex references. Also, set pre-book.
Word Count: 615
You wonder if love loses its beauty when it isn't returned. If it degenerates from being bright and warm in the sun to something that festers, old and worn and misshapen. A thing that needs to be hidden in the back of the cupboard, along with secrets and grudges and that time you failed sixth grade. Your love for her is sharp and spiky and inflammable, something that bruises with the speed of light and suffers ten thousand wounds in a day, but you carry on loving her anyway. Because she is part of you, nuzzling that groove in your heart where lost things go.
You're forty. You're driving down a hill, snow sparkling tiredly in the sunlight and scraping your tires.
You think of her smile, beautiful and wholly artificial, and in that instant you're seventeen again. Freckled and long legged and clumsy. She's making love to you, kissing the hollow beneath your left breast, sending floods of heat through your belly. You've never undressed in front of anyone but your mother before. She takes your hands in hers and gives them warmth that is completely out of place in chilly Norway. You open your mouth to beg, not even sure what you're begging for. You're young, so young.
Afterwards, you squat on the floor next to her chair, and watch her watching herself in the mirror. That exquisite glistening skin, bare and exposed to your touch, all except her shoes, which are still incongruously perched on her feet.
Then she holds her hands up to her face, and unravels it, those pretty planes of cheek and bone ripping apart at the edges. You cry when you see the face behind the mask. It's an agony of darkness, torn flesh, jutting out from her neck like the wreck of a ship. You cry and cry and cry, shuddering until you can't draw a breath.
Finally she puts the mask back on, tears in her lopsided eyes. It's the first time she's ever shown vulnerability. The spark of fire and ice in the center of her pupil dims to a dull gray, and you feel her heart breaking along with yours. But you rise, put on your shoes, and leave. What did she expect? That your age makes you naive enough to betray your principles? Sex might be a morass of bewilderment to you, something shocking and confusing even after her guidance. But when it comes to the difference between right and wrong, you know where you stand. Your mother's warned you about witches, and that the only thing to do is exterminate them. You've long dreamed about being a witch hunter.
She leaves town the next day, and you pretend to yourself you're relieved. You don't have to tell anybody who she really is. The past is wiped clean like a slate with her disappearance, and gone, too, are your feelings for her.
Except they aren't, of course they aren't. The horror of that night hasn't quite vanquished the way your breath hitches when you think of her. Ten, fifteen, twenty years later. Your hands on the wheel, your foot on the accelerator, and you're thinking of her. The roll of the letter V on her tongue, full, rotund. The long line of her fingers (she doesn't have toes, you think desperately, shedoesn't have toes). Images wash over you one after the other like some unstoppable force. The lustrous curls, the pouting lips...
Not real, hisses a little voice from within you.
What was that? you reply. Blank, overcome by a sudden blinding of the senses. Lust, passion, something too dangerous to call love.
Not real. Not any of it.
(and the car skids.)
A/N: Dear Roald Dahl, I am sorry for what I did to your novel's adorable and unnamed grandmother. Blame it on the sugar as usual. The title is from Radiohead's 'All I Need'. It's dark, creepy, and had a ginormous influence on this, so check it out here:
All I need - Radiohead Lyrics