Writing Meme #1
From megyal:
WIP meme: post a little bit of each WIP you have (or as many as you want to pick). No context, no explanations.
Katekyo Hitman Reborn!
1. Untitled
Little boys are not born equally. Belphegor learns this at the age of four, and he remembers the slide and snake of Mommy’s satin duvet beneath his limbs as he tussled with his brother, an uneasy, slippery surface like water cascading over rock. Serafina is trying her best to get them stop, (don’t rip your clothes, young masters, don’t hurt each other, young masters, Master
Belphegor please stop that) fluttering uneasily around the furniture, bustling with her dowdy, bell-shaped skirt (servants dress servants dress servants dress servants dress). Mazikeen mutters encouragement to them from behind the velvet hangings of Mommy’s bed (use your elbows, Belphegor, kick him, go for his eyes, his throat, show no mercy).
Until Mommy tells them to stop.
So they stop.
Belphegor remembers everything about his mother, almost. Her long blonde hair, how it fell coquettishly to hide her eyes (there was power in that, he learned, people never knew where your eyes were, thought you had them everywhere, even in the back of your head), and her wide lips that planted wet kisses on his cheeks (you’ve been a good boy, haven’t you Belphegor? Yes, Mommy), and her huge magical smile that made the servants go quiet, stand straighter, made everyone else bow and curtsy a little deeper.
Mommy was a queen.
There once was a queen, and she was very beautiful.
Mommy was a queen, so everyone listened to everything she said, and everyone did everything she ever told them to do, ever, no matter what.
(Even stand on their head for a whole hour? Reziel tugs at the train of Mommy’s gown. Yes, Mommy says, laughs and smiles her magic smile. Even more than an hour? Belphegor runs ahead and pulls on her skirt hem. Yes, Belphegor. Back and forth, back and forth they go, Mommy leading them unwittingly through the cavernous depths of their castle, never removing their avaricious young hands from her skirt, always smiling. Or what? Reziel asks suddenly. And Belphegor smacks him on the head; he was going to ask that. Mommy stops, kneels down on the castle floor with a great rustle of royal fabric and a great glitter of royal jewels. Or else it’s off with their heads.)
Mommy told them to listen; she was going to tell them a story. It was a story she loved so much, she knew it by heart.
Belphegor sat up a little straighter. Whatever Mommy loved, he would love, too.
It’s the story of Romulus and Remus, Mommy said, adjusting her silk pillows around her so she could recline even further into the damask.
Mommy told them the story of two boys, two brothers, a wolf mother, a murder, and triumph, and winning, and victory, and the founding of a great city, a great empire, the start of a noble bloodline of ruthless killers. And how none of it would have happened if Romulus hadn’t killed Remus.
But why did Remus have to die? Belphegor doesn’t understand (oh, but he will).
Because, my dear, little boys are not equal. His mother is not smiling anymore.
Not even princes?
Not even princes.
~~
The first time Belphegor learned that his whole life was a game was when he saw Sam punch Lawrence’s teeth out. He was skipping lessons with his governess again today, she was teaching Reziel in disguise (ushishishi, commoners can be so stupid) and he was playing in the hedge maze in the garden, all its careful strategy green and sharp above his head, when he heard Lawrence laughing.
Lawrence was Reziel’s. Like Serafina and Cathy and Duma and Aggie. Belphegor knew, because he wore black.
Mazikeen and Sam and Johann and Mab, they were all his and they wore white like he did. Belphegor didn’t care. They were servants; the world didn’t bother itself with them.
Belphegor was playing The Follow Game; his target was one of the kitchen cats-all of them Mab’s, to sing to and feed. Belphegor liked the cats, they treated themselves like tiny furred deities, thought themselves so very clever with their hidden claws, liked the way they brought back headless mice splayed out on the doormats and made Claire (Reziel’s) shriek.
So he was following the kitty kitty through the maze when he heard Lawrence laughing. Belphegor stopped, crouched down between the bronze feet of one of the garden statues, pricked his royal ears up to listen in. Belphegor didn’t care what the commoners said about their stupid commoner lives, but every so often he’d hear his name, and Reziel’s, thrown around between their lips in whispers they were oh so careful the two princes never overheard. And they were talking about him now, Belphegor knew it, he knew~
“Oh?” It was Lawrence, Belphegor could see him through the thorns. There were other servants, too, all in black and white, like an army of doves facing a battalion of ravens.
2. Untitled
One fine day in the middle of the night
Two dead boys got up to fight
Back to back they faced one another
Drew their swords and shot each other
Hibari’s never been much of a travel person. A better way to say that would be Hibari’s never been much of a person. He’s always seemed so much more than that, his little tongue adapted to speaking with birds, his eyes slanted, their corners the clipped wings of seraphs, the shadow he casts spilling out like a portal, opening, ushering in long-limbed demons from hell.
Dino mostly just ignores that bit.
“Come on, Kyouya, if you don’t hurry up, we’re going to miss our flight!”
It’s a gorgeous day for flying-the skies clear and open as a smiling eye, and Dino’s always been the kind of guy who lets the weather decide his mood (a queer side effect the Vongola’s remain immune to, for the sake of preserving their echelon-hopefully Reborn has trained Tsuna out of it). The car’s vibrating thrum is hot, he risks burning the backs of his knees, but Dino doesn’t care.
“Kyouya!”
The unprepossessing façade of Namimori Junior High School does not reply. Panes of glass stare at him balefully, wind rattling the old window frames in a chorus of disapproval. The whole campus reeks of censure: Kyouya’s doing, Dino muses.
“Romario, honk the horn,” Dino tells his right hand man, with all the eager competition of a fox hunter: We’ll smoke him out. Romario, used to the routine, adjusts his magazine and leans his elbows against the car’s horn, brushing cigarette ashes lightly off his lap.
The noise echoes brazenly over Namimori’s silent walls. Dino waits for a minute, then five, and then tilts his head childishly, frowning at the lack of reaction. He half turns back to Romario
when the corner of his eye snags on a quick black movement. On the roof. Of course. Where else?
He knew it would come to this, cat and mouse, because that’s how it always is with Kyouya. He refuses pursuit entirely; it is always stand your ground. Dino is well acquainted with the game.
When Dino nudges open the door to the rooftop, he’s carrying his whip in one hand and half of a pastrami sandwich in the other. “Kyouya, good morning!” he says cheerfully. The words get muffled by a mouthful of pastrami, but the sentiment is there. He chews carefully, swallows.
Kyouya stares at him from a good twelve feet away, contemptuous as always. “Where are your bags?”
“I am not going.”
Of course. Dino takes another impressively nonchalant bit of his sandwich. (There’s a touch too much spicy mustard; Ivan always gets too enthusiastic with the condiments. But Romario, for all his other virtues, remains completely out of his element in the kitchen. Dino doesn’t mind. Everyone has their shortcomings.)
“Yes, you are.” He stifles a burp in his wrist-the tattooed one, holding the whip, which seemed to spiral into a casual serpentine entirely of its own accord. “Are you going to come quietly, like a good little boy?”
It’s much too easy to antagonize Kyouya; he really has to learn to restrain himself. On any other day, Dino would also have considered he gets too much fun out of pushing Kyouya’s many buttons, but not today. The sky is too blue, he is going back home, and his student is coming with him.
He is oddly resolute on this final point. His famiglia doesn’t ask.
Kyouya speaks with his eyes narrowed, along with the wind, and Dino listens to the school windows shake inside their frames like a chorus of stone angels.
“Come on, Kyouya.” Dino is not a boy; he remains undaunted by spirit voices and god hands. He’s a Mafia boss, after all. “Be reasonable.”
Hibari offers only his snake smirk. “I don’t feel like it.”
The wind curls into something playful, nipping at their feet. Dino shrugs a shoulder, licks a tiny glob of spicy mustard from his thumb.
“Tell you what.” He’s at half-open palms already, negotiations the way dragon men do them. “We fight for it.”
The wind picks up around his ankles, like excited waves rushing around his knees. One of the tonfas move; Hibari doesn’t. Dino smiles at the picture, showing every one of his teeth.
“That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
(People think Dino’s nice. Dino’s not nice. Maybe he used to be, but not anymore. He’s compassionate, yes. Fair. Generous. Gentle, even-Squalo should have bled that from him, but a lifetime of breaking ornaments and bones still makes him cautious, careful around everything. But he is not nice.)
Kyouya’s eyes open their full wingspan, as wide as Dino’s smile. His tonfas dip their steel necks, conversing with their master, shocked and angry.
“You’re presumptuous, Cavallone.” His voice is a knife through ice water, but Dino’s got no room for clouds in his sky today.
(On any other day Dino wouldn’t dare, but this day is different. On any other day Dino would not even toe the tightropes hanging loose between Kyouya’s eyes and the corner of his mouth; he knows his jelly knees, the tricks his eyes and wrist play on him. But today the sky is like violins, and his veins twist his blood into a dance.)
Romario suddenly swings in through the door, saunters between them with a polite head bob to Kyouya, and takes up his usual post as the smoking sentinel somewhere beyond Dino’s right shoulder.
“Since we’re pressed for time, Kyouya,” Dino directs breezily, “we’ll make it easy. I hit you once-only once-and you come with me to Italy. And if you hit me once, then I leave for Italy without you.”
Dino isn’t going to let that happen, of course.
Death Note
1. Encounters2. Untitled
He goes a week without screaming. Then two. Then three. The doctors think this is a good sign. It's not. Mikami would be bawling like an abandoned newborn in plastic swaddling clothes, sobbing hysterically until his blood vessels over-gorge themselves on his misery and burst, red skating down his cheeks, slipping into his mouth, dribbling down his chin. But you can't cry without tear ducts, without eyes, and Mikami had cut those out as best he could. (Gone were the cursed orbs of a death god’s blessing; good riddance and amen.)
Time slips through him and out again, and the next thing he knows is the uncomfortable press of a folding chair in the small of his back, the light splash and play of water in a bowl as his latest therapist washes her hands. And darkness, safe, unchanging, umbral, infinite-a world without light. The thought makes him smile, makes him cringe.
His mind skips. (Old skills cry out in protest, law book schooled and earnest. Always watch the details. They can make or break, that was the rule, one of many, one of a thousand, and none of them ever told you what to do when you’re already broken.)He remembers he doesn’t speak for the first session.
Or the second.
Or the third.
But on the fourth the darkness changes. It shudders and heaves, bulging and swelling like a child’s distended stomach, a pregnant mother’s prominent stillborn, until the gross, complicated convexity expels a tiny, gray figure into the visions of his mind.
A woman, with an unflattering figure, hair the color and texture of dust.
“Mother.”
The doctor across from him (Mikami imagines a table between them, plastic white and sterile, its surface vacant of possessions or personality) clears her throat. A vein in Mikami’s neck twinges like a cut wire.
“Mother,” he repeats, frowning. He turns over his mother’s un-words in his mind, pensive.
And then he turns his bandages in the direction of the doctor’s scratching pen.
“My mother doesn’t have a face any longer.”
Mikami supposes that is how his days pass. The uncomfortable pressing chair, the doctor’s pen, his voice. The darkness has no qualms with changing, but Mikami’s heart stops every time it does-this it, this time for good-with hope and fear for the strange and brittle concept of resurrection. But then the time allotted (forty seconds, Mikami never forgets, counts them under his breath with perfect accuracy) passes.
He survives.
The children of the darkness speak to him, or they are silent. Unlike his mother they have faces, without bodies, just sort of hovering there like pictures, globules of candlelight.
Criminals.
Sinners, at peace.
Sacrifices.
His victims.
The last one is whole. A willowy silhouette, shining with the light of martyrs, bearing no rosary, no sword, just her own bare body, her television smile.
He turns the bandages in the direction of the doctor’s scratching pen, and opens his mouth to speak.
Loveless
“You’re the only thing that keeps me human,” Soubi says. His eyes are the saddest shade of Prussian blue, his head bowed and palms upturned like a lovely mourner, like a statue in a graveyard of dreams.
Ritsuka is small, so small and so afraid. “But I don’t want to be.”
He’s saying empty words, again, and they make Ritsuka so upset, so angry.
“Can’t you tell me anything honestly, for once?”
His sentiment comes out in a jumble of syllables and confused sentiment; even as he says the words the drivel that comes out of his own mouth sounds trite, sounds stupid. His ears flatten into nothing against his skull, for a split second Soubi sees the adult Ritsuka tries so hard to be, angry and alive in his childish face, before it dies with a snap and catlike flicker.
Soubi folds his hands in contemplation, exhales the smallest and inaudible of sighs. There are things that simply will not be communicated in the broad age gap between Ritsuka and his Fighter, feelings that become ensnared in Ritsuka’s unshakable, twelve year old distinctions and beliefs, what he has been led to expect and refuses to see despite all the evidence collected in the flakes of acrylic embedded under Soubi’s fingernails, the scars that no longer ache beneath the bandages around his neck.
But there are lies, too, existing only in the places that cannot be seen, in the solemn places of Ritsuka’s mind and the darkest places of Soubi’s heart, the space big enough only for a blade between the wide, strong slats of his ribcage. Neither of them can forget.
Original Work
Things are not what they should have been, in the sunlight world of mountain and silk cloud.
Lovers didn’t wait at her door in snaking queues, hats in their hands, innocent eyes burnished with varying degrees of adulation. No Muse crawled around the hallway’s pillars or played its’ harp in the spacious dining hall, kaleidoscopic with murals and stained glass. The panoramic view from the towers failed to take her breath away. Her courtyard was where music came to die.
In the depths of despair, the best writers had always been able to make beauty from the scourge of their emotions, grey ghosts waltzing between lakes and mirrors, sorrowful and eyeless men moved to murder and dishonorable death, tapestries sewn from the pearly thread of widows’ tears, the somber green of opiates, pink and blue for childlessness, white for disparity, black for insomnia. But words did not come to her in the colorless world. She found no epithet to scrawl in her ashes and dust, her skin callused and contused from the kiss of golden lips, day after day after day.
She was sad, and she was afraid, afraid of this slow petrifaction of her soul, this feeling ever increasing bereavement-a connection severed at first between her and the world, now turned inwards: the emotional equivalent of cleaving her flesh from her bones. She was hollow, and listless, adrift like a black feather in a gray sea.
I watched her, and I knew. I felt everything she felt. I lost everything she lost. Everything she kept losing.
I was her. And she was me. We were part of each other.
I’m still not sure if she ever understood that. That I didn’t come just because she needed me. Or because I was sent.
It was because, I needed her too.
All I really feel like posting atm. DINNERRRRRRRRR.
WIP meme: post a little bit of each WIP you have (or as many as you want to pick). No context, no explanations.
Katekyo Hitman Reborn!
1. Untitled
Little boys are not born equally. Belphegor learns this at the age of four, and he remembers the slide and snake of Mommy’s satin duvet beneath his limbs as he tussled with his brother, an uneasy, slippery surface like water cascading over rock. Serafina is trying her best to get them stop, (don’t rip your clothes, young masters, don’t hurt each other, young masters, Master
Belphegor please stop that) fluttering uneasily around the furniture, bustling with her dowdy, bell-shaped skirt (servants dress servants dress servants dress servants dress). Mazikeen mutters encouragement to them from behind the velvet hangings of Mommy’s bed (use your elbows, Belphegor, kick him, go for his eyes, his throat, show no mercy).
Until Mommy tells them to stop.
So they stop.
Belphegor remembers everything about his mother, almost. Her long blonde hair, how it fell coquettishly to hide her eyes (there was power in that, he learned, people never knew where your eyes were, thought you had them everywhere, even in the back of your head), and her wide lips that planted wet kisses on his cheeks (you’ve been a good boy, haven’t you Belphegor? Yes, Mommy), and her huge magical smile that made the servants go quiet, stand straighter, made everyone else bow and curtsy a little deeper.
Mommy was a queen.
There once was a queen, and she was very beautiful.
Mommy was a queen, so everyone listened to everything she said, and everyone did everything she ever told them to do, ever, no matter what.
(Even stand on their head for a whole hour? Reziel tugs at the train of Mommy’s gown. Yes, Mommy says, laughs and smiles her magic smile. Even more than an hour? Belphegor runs ahead and pulls on her skirt hem. Yes, Belphegor. Back and forth, back and forth they go, Mommy leading them unwittingly through the cavernous depths of their castle, never removing their avaricious young hands from her skirt, always smiling. Or what? Reziel asks suddenly. And Belphegor smacks him on the head; he was going to ask that. Mommy stops, kneels down on the castle floor with a great rustle of royal fabric and a great glitter of royal jewels. Or else it’s off with their heads.)
Mommy told them to listen; she was going to tell them a story. It was a story she loved so much, she knew it by heart.
Belphegor sat up a little straighter. Whatever Mommy loved, he would love, too.
It’s the story of Romulus and Remus, Mommy said, adjusting her silk pillows around her so she could recline even further into the damask.
Mommy told them the story of two boys, two brothers, a wolf mother, a murder, and triumph, and winning, and victory, and the founding of a great city, a great empire, the start of a noble bloodline of ruthless killers. And how none of it would have happened if Romulus hadn’t killed Remus.
But why did Remus have to die? Belphegor doesn’t understand (oh, but he will).
Because, my dear, little boys are not equal. His mother is not smiling anymore.
Not even princes?
Not even princes.
~~
The first time Belphegor learned that his whole life was a game was when he saw Sam punch Lawrence’s teeth out. He was skipping lessons with his governess again today, she was teaching Reziel in disguise (ushishishi, commoners can be so stupid) and he was playing in the hedge maze in the garden, all its careful strategy green and sharp above his head, when he heard Lawrence laughing.
Lawrence was Reziel’s. Like Serafina and Cathy and Duma and Aggie. Belphegor knew, because he wore black.
Mazikeen and Sam and Johann and Mab, they were all his and they wore white like he did. Belphegor didn’t care. They were servants; the world didn’t bother itself with them.
Belphegor was playing The Follow Game; his target was one of the kitchen cats-all of them Mab’s, to sing to and feed. Belphegor liked the cats, they treated themselves like tiny furred deities, thought themselves so very clever with their hidden claws, liked the way they brought back headless mice splayed out on the doormats and made Claire (Reziel’s) shriek.
So he was following the kitty kitty through the maze when he heard Lawrence laughing. Belphegor stopped, crouched down between the bronze feet of one of the garden statues, pricked his royal ears up to listen in. Belphegor didn’t care what the commoners said about their stupid commoner lives, but every so often he’d hear his name, and Reziel’s, thrown around between their lips in whispers they were oh so careful the two princes never overheard. And they were talking about him now, Belphegor knew it, he knew~
“Oh?” It was Lawrence, Belphegor could see him through the thorns. There were other servants, too, all in black and white, like an army of doves facing a battalion of ravens.
2. Untitled
One fine day in the middle of the night
Two dead boys got up to fight
Back to back they faced one another
Drew their swords and shot each other
Hibari’s never been much of a travel person. A better way to say that would be Hibari’s never been much of a person. He’s always seemed so much more than that, his little tongue adapted to speaking with birds, his eyes slanted, their corners the clipped wings of seraphs, the shadow he casts spilling out like a portal, opening, ushering in long-limbed demons from hell.
Dino mostly just ignores that bit.
“Come on, Kyouya, if you don’t hurry up, we’re going to miss our flight!”
It’s a gorgeous day for flying-the skies clear and open as a smiling eye, and Dino’s always been the kind of guy who lets the weather decide his mood (a queer side effect the Vongola’s remain immune to, for the sake of preserving their echelon-hopefully Reborn has trained Tsuna out of it). The car’s vibrating thrum is hot, he risks burning the backs of his knees, but Dino doesn’t care.
“Kyouya!”
The unprepossessing façade of Namimori Junior High School does not reply. Panes of glass stare at him balefully, wind rattling the old window frames in a chorus of disapproval. The whole campus reeks of censure: Kyouya’s doing, Dino muses.
“Romario, honk the horn,” Dino tells his right hand man, with all the eager competition of a fox hunter: We’ll smoke him out. Romario, used to the routine, adjusts his magazine and leans his elbows against the car’s horn, brushing cigarette ashes lightly off his lap.
The noise echoes brazenly over Namimori’s silent walls. Dino waits for a minute, then five, and then tilts his head childishly, frowning at the lack of reaction. He half turns back to Romario
when the corner of his eye snags on a quick black movement. On the roof. Of course. Where else?
He knew it would come to this, cat and mouse, because that’s how it always is with Kyouya. He refuses pursuit entirely; it is always stand your ground. Dino is well acquainted with the game.
When Dino nudges open the door to the rooftop, he’s carrying his whip in one hand and half of a pastrami sandwich in the other. “Kyouya, good morning!” he says cheerfully. The words get muffled by a mouthful of pastrami, but the sentiment is there. He chews carefully, swallows.
Kyouya stares at him from a good twelve feet away, contemptuous as always. “Where are your bags?”
“I am not going.”
Of course. Dino takes another impressively nonchalant bit of his sandwich. (There’s a touch too much spicy mustard; Ivan always gets too enthusiastic with the condiments. But Romario, for all his other virtues, remains completely out of his element in the kitchen. Dino doesn’t mind. Everyone has their shortcomings.)
“Yes, you are.” He stifles a burp in his wrist-the tattooed one, holding the whip, which seemed to spiral into a casual serpentine entirely of its own accord. “Are you going to come quietly, like a good little boy?”
It’s much too easy to antagonize Kyouya; he really has to learn to restrain himself. On any other day, Dino would also have considered he gets too much fun out of pushing Kyouya’s many buttons, but not today. The sky is too blue, he is going back home, and his student is coming with him.
He is oddly resolute on this final point. His famiglia doesn’t ask.
Kyouya speaks with his eyes narrowed, along with the wind, and Dino listens to the school windows shake inside their frames like a chorus of stone angels.
“Come on, Kyouya.” Dino is not a boy; he remains undaunted by spirit voices and god hands. He’s a Mafia boss, after all. “Be reasonable.”
Hibari offers only his snake smirk. “I don’t feel like it.”
The wind curls into something playful, nipping at their feet. Dino shrugs a shoulder, licks a tiny glob of spicy mustard from his thumb.
“Tell you what.” He’s at half-open palms already, negotiations the way dragon men do them. “We fight for it.”
The wind picks up around his ankles, like excited waves rushing around his knees. One of the tonfas move; Hibari doesn’t. Dino smiles at the picture, showing every one of his teeth.
“That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
(People think Dino’s nice. Dino’s not nice. Maybe he used to be, but not anymore. He’s compassionate, yes. Fair. Generous. Gentle, even-Squalo should have bled that from him, but a lifetime of breaking ornaments and bones still makes him cautious, careful around everything. But he is not nice.)
Kyouya’s eyes open their full wingspan, as wide as Dino’s smile. His tonfas dip their steel necks, conversing with their master, shocked and angry.
“You’re presumptuous, Cavallone.” His voice is a knife through ice water, but Dino’s got no room for clouds in his sky today.
(On any other day Dino wouldn’t dare, but this day is different. On any other day Dino would not even toe the tightropes hanging loose between Kyouya’s eyes and the corner of his mouth; he knows his jelly knees, the tricks his eyes and wrist play on him. But today the sky is like violins, and his veins twist his blood into a dance.)
Romario suddenly swings in through the door, saunters between them with a polite head bob to Kyouya, and takes up his usual post as the smoking sentinel somewhere beyond Dino’s right shoulder.
“Since we’re pressed for time, Kyouya,” Dino directs breezily, “we’ll make it easy. I hit you once-only once-and you come with me to Italy. And if you hit me once, then I leave for Italy without you.”
Dino isn’t going to let that happen, of course.
Death Note
1. Encounters2. Untitled
He goes a week without screaming. Then two. Then three. The doctors think this is a good sign. It's not. Mikami would be bawling like an abandoned newborn in plastic swaddling clothes, sobbing hysterically until his blood vessels over-gorge themselves on his misery and burst, red skating down his cheeks, slipping into his mouth, dribbling down his chin. But you can't cry without tear ducts, without eyes, and Mikami had cut those out as best he could. (Gone were the cursed orbs of a death god’s blessing; good riddance and amen.)
Time slips through him and out again, and the next thing he knows is the uncomfortable press of a folding chair in the small of his back, the light splash and play of water in a bowl as his latest therapist washes her hands. And darkness, safe, unchanging, umbral, infinite-a world without light. The thought makes him smile, makes him cringe.
His mind skips. (Old skills cry out in protest, law book schooled and earnest. Always watch the details. They can make or break, that was the rule, one of many, one of a thousand, and none of them ever told you what to do when you’re already broken.)He remembers he doesn’t speak for the first session.
Or the second.
Or the third.
But on the fourth the darkness changes. It shudders and heaves, bulging and swelling like a child’s distended stomach, a pregnant mother’s prominent stillborn, until the gross, complicated convexity expels a tiny, gray figure into the visions of his mind.
A woman, with an unflattering figure, hair the color and texture of dust.
“Mother.”
The doctor across from him (Mikami imagines a table between them, plastic white and sterile, its surface vacant of possessions or personality) clears her throat. A vein in Mikami’s neck twinges like a cut wire.
“Mother,” he repeats, frowning. He turns over his mother’s un-words in his mind, pensive.
And then he turns his bandages in the direction of the doctor’s scratching pen.
“My mother doesn’t have a face any longer.”
Mikami supposes that is how his days pass. The uncomfortable pressing chair, the doctor’s pen, his voice. The darkness has no qualms with changing, but Mikami’s heart stops every time it does-this it, this time for good-with hope and fear for the strange and brittle concept of resurrection. But then the time allotted (forty seconds, Mikami never forgets, counts them under his breath with perfect accuracy) passes.
He survives.
The children of the darkness speak to him, or they are silent. Unlike his mother they have faces, without bodies, just sort of hovering there like pictures, globules of candlelight.
Criminals.
Sinners, at peace.
Sacrifices.
His victims.
The last one is whole. A willowy silhouette, shining with the light of martyrs, bearing no rosary, no sword, just her own bare body, her television smile.
He turns the bandages in the direction of the doctor’s scratching pen, and opens his mouth to speak.
Loveless
“You’re the only thing that keeps me human,” Soubi says. His eyes are the saddest shade of Prussian blue, his head bowed and palms upturned like a lovely mourner, like a statue in a graveyard of dreams.
Ritsuka is small, so small and so afraid. “But I don’t want to be.”
He’s saying empty words, again, and they make Ritsuka so upset, so angry.
“Can’t you tell me anything honestly, for once?”
His sentiment comes out in a jumble of syllables and confused sentiment; even as he says the words the drivel that comes out of his own mouth sounds trite, sounds stupid. His ears flatten into nothing against his skull, for a split second Soubi sees the adult Ritsuka tries so hard to be, angry and alive in his childish face, before it dies with a snap and catlike flicker.
Soubi folds his hands in contemplation, exhales the smallest and inaudible of sighs. There are things that simply will not be communicated in the broad age gap between Ritsuka and his Fighter, feelings that become ensnared in Ritsuka’s unshakable, twelve year old distinctions and beliefs, what he has been led to expect and refuses to see despite all the evidence collected in the flakes of acrylic embedded under Soubi’s fingernails, the scars that no longer ache beneath the bandages around his neck.
But there are lies, too, existing only in the places that cannot be seen, in the solemn places of Ritsuka’s mind and the darkest places of Soubi’s heart, the space big enough only for a blade between the wide, strong slats of his ribcage. Neither of them can forget.
Original Work
Things are not what they should have been, in the sunlight world of mountain and silk cloud.
Lovers didn’t wait at her door in snaking queues, hats in their hands, innocent eyes burnished with varying degrees of adulation. No Muse crawled around the hallway’s pillars or played its’ harp in the spacious dining hall, kaleidoscopic with murals and stained glass. The panoramic view from the towers failed to take her breath away. Her courtyard was where music came to die.
In the depths of despair, the best writers had always been able to make beauty from the scourge of their emotions, grey ghosts waltzing between lakes and mirrors, sorrowful and eyeless men moved to murder and dishonorable death, tapestries sewn from the pearly thread of widows’ tears, the somber green of opiates, pink and blue for childlessness, white for disparity, black for insomnia. But words did not come to her in the colorless world. She found no epithet to scrawl in her ashes and dust, her skin callused and contused from the kiss of golden lips, day after day after day.
She was sad, and she was afraid, afraid of this slow petrifaction of her soul, this feeling ever increasing bereavement-a connection severed at first between her and the world, now turned inwards: the emotional equivalent of cleaving her flesh from her bones. She was hollow, and listless, adrift like a black feather in a gray sea.
I watched her, and I knew. I felt everything she felt. I lost everything she lost. Everything she kept losing.
I was her. And she was me. We were part of each other.
I’m still not sure if she ever understood that. That I didn’t come just because she needed me. Or because I was sent.
It was because, I needed her too.
All I really feel like posting atm. DINNERRRRRRRRR.