The quiet should be nice but isn't
I guess we're going to spend the day like this
In psychic screaming
Don't you feel my eye-lasers hit?
Stare you down, but God, your skin is thick
What's it take to notice?
Show me you can read my mind
You're useless to me if you
Don't know the why or how
Or what my body needs
Give me something I can feel
Show me you can read my mind
Read my mind
Read my mind
- Jimmy Eat World
Small things, bright packages, or something of the sort. The girl is sitting at the bottom of the stairwell, a curious glint in those green-blue eyes, something that says I want and borders on Watch this. Viki does not say much, but every now and then, a whisper is offered up to the wall. Her voice is singsong, barely audible, barely there at all. Yet her wardrobe makes up for the lack of voice: a rainbow flourish of pigment strewn across layers of patchwork, borrowed, bought, stolen, given, lost. She keeps her mouth in proximity of the woodwork, to the pretty swirls and patterns that the architect allowed. Above and below, it's all paneling, all boring from then on. The seer is easily drawn to the special, sacred, in-between, things that offer stories, secrets, and sanctuary in folds. She in turn gives up her ears, her eyes, her twisting lips, keeps her attention locked to the otherworldly echo. Every now and then, her toes disrupt her words, add a backdrop cadence to the lilt of her girlish voice. They tip-tap across the bottom stair, encased in slipper-shoes, freely moving and yet sheltered by something that looked like silk. Somewhere within, a patron draws a deep breath. The seer blows one out for him, smiling in its wake.
The tender smiles to Viki as she comes to the last stair.
"Hiya. I hope your room was to you liking. A breakfast drink for you?"
Off-blue eyes flicker up at her, but do not focus. Instead, they drift, like cumulus clouds.
"I have break-ed up my fast, Amvel. It is naut... necess'ry."
So many words. She lifts her head to the rafters, but turns her ear into the last post, along the rail.
This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper: a soft little sound that was strung, stretched out, sprawling slowly with great intent. So when the shadows spill and spiral, Fafnir is the thing that wanders out of them: a jut of white and black, hair and slow-crawling flesh. Because this is the way the world ends: slowly, deliberately, the subtle changes that seem to take forever. Long fingers spread against stones warmed by fire, the loving brush, awe-filled touch of student to teacher. Particular plays, portrayed perfectly, are coming to a close and he's nothing but smiles for it all. Because this is the sad story given to gravestones one's the legacy has lived out it's last. The swan's song, if you prefer. Bare feet, white as new snow, they pressed and padded against hearth's stones, silk slithering in his wake, a match for the slash of black at his face, covering black-hole eyes. Who needed sight, when there was nothing the sighs of shades?
Whimpers and sighs, the seer knows these notes, but spins no song with them in mind. Instead she wanders, light on her feet, as if she has no need of them. Around a chair, a table teetering on it's own legs, across floorboards better swept by more grounded patrons, she wanders. The spirits call to her from beyond the bar, but she is for the fire's light this eve. Autumn lingers in the air, applespice, burning leaves, the promise of winter's chill. She can smell it on the shoulders of those strangers she flits by.
At the fireside, she stops, and her eyes widen for the one of white. Even still, her voice is silent. The inanimate clamor, but she pays them no mind.
There is a particular beauty found in impatience. It is in his small mouth, in the aristocratic blade of his nose. It crawls across his face, like a spider along windowsills. Unhindered, out of control, he is little more than a statue by the hearth, head turned towards the heat. He seems different: older, perhaps. There is a flat width of his shoulders, a pride in his spine that had never made itself known before now. It suits him. In fact, it flatters him, makes him seem as if there is more of him, as if he were something tangible and real. As if he is more than just a Shadow. He is. Slowly, surely, with great intent, he was more. A comment heard made his head turn, though there is nothing for the Shadow to see. A straighten, a stiffen, a lengthening of mass and he stepped, once, to his right.
These are the eyes of the enlightened child, the one whom, upon meeting their idol, is suddenly disenchanted, betrayed. They hold confusion in their depths, and sorrow, and that tug of longing that keeps them from ever forgetting. The seer regards the Shadow like she would an old flame. He was never that bright, was he? Not like the Sandman. Not fever-hot, pouring whorls of ink across her skin. Two-toned curls keep their distance too, swept at the nape of her neck in a tiny band of borrowed blue. She wonders at the proper greeting, but her eyes move headfirst, before thought, before action, eating into his newest endowments before she can even speak. And then, she does, but it is broken, and small.
"They wonder if you are the Christ." 'They' are not referenced here, and it isn't long before she leaves him, steals into a sofa cushion all her own, hushing the stories it gives up as she settles her weight.
Sin, sorrow, forgetting the lines that construct the places we hold dear: Bylah destroys them, erases them off a blackboard meant for new lessons. A teacher, a student, a relationship as beautiful as it is abusive. Claws crawled, caught, clung to the lives he's been leading too long, lopping off the bits no longer important. The smell of him is a cloud, a fog, a forward marching forever, fanning out before him. And so the Beast snitched, snagged, snarled his way forward, crawling from the heat that was not his furnaces, was not the stoking heat in his belly. Head rolled and horns to the sky, he seemed some horrible afterbirth, an accident never intended to see the light of days - and even before he was halfway free, the width of his mouth looked like some horrid, rusted beartrap, ready to snap shut on unsuspecting ankles. He poured and peeled, spilled across the surface of the hearth's stones, black hair spilling like fresh ink, ready to seep and stain everything black, putrid and crawling with the mice, the maggots, the roaches that writhed beneath his bone-white flesh.
"I am not," the Shadow said - and even though he had covered his eyes, he could still see in his way, the only way that mattered. Something seems to please him, tease him, taunt him all the same. One hand stretched and spread, an offering that he hasn't given in what seems like forever - like some legacy he'd long since left behind, all of the secrets he'd been devouring. The hand is not to the thing at his feet, but at that little shard of color, a prism left too long in the sun. Perhaps, perhaps, she will be forever bright. He does not know and, in that moment? It doesn't seem to matter anyway. Not in the wake of the Beast.
The cushions do not offer much in the way of comfort with the two of them so close. Power rides the air like snapdragons, buzzing bright in a language the seer barely understands, but knows enough to listen. And so she does, eyes wide and unmoving, a pretty statue mismatched among the commons, the odd puzzle piece from a neighbor's set that has somehow wormed its way into yours.
"I know. You are larger, and do naut bleed as much," says the one who takes that offering, though it almost pains her, sends a shiver racing along the track of her pin-straight spine. Fingers, small and pale, seem a stark contrast to his own white.
The air around the hearth grows heavy, humid, and the fire is not the cause. Her mouth curls at one corner, but then, the smile is gone. Her eyes are tracking the Beast, or the motions of his hair anyhow. Fluid, black, like some midnight sea. Yet the girl suddenly recalls a lake, and the twinkling of so many dying stars. Blinking, she looks to Fafnir. It seems time and tragedy have taken its toll. She is solid and shifting at the same time. She squeezes his hand, softly. Her own pulse hums at his palm.
Bylah is slow, like watching trees grow - if given the chance, they'll slowly wrap and twine and strangle. And so slowly, so deliberately, he is at his height, his cruel stabbing into the sky, ram-horns proud, save decorated with his hair, and the stars he's patiently ripped out of the sky. Forever fingers curled, twitched and then spilled outwards, the width of worlds without life. His mouth an unforgiving line, he considered his once Shadow, and the small thing near it.
Perhaps Fafnir misunderstands - or understands too well.
"Do not fret. Soon, this will all be over, and I will be mine cruel, harsh, jovial self again," he murmured down to Viki; it was hard to tell if he were making a joke or not. Something in his mouth - tongues that twist and turn - suggest he is. And isn't. Such was the way of the liar. But then, then, in his infinite kindness, he smiled. It was a smile that stretched across his face, ear to ear and perhaps it was best that one couldn't see his eyes - couldn't see the way that smile had twisted the light in them so cruelly, harsh as a tapeworm in warm flesh.
"Do you have any secrets for me, Viki?" And that is cruelty. That is the world we live in, when that which you love will treat you so kindly, and all out of selfishness.
The girl buys the bait, hook, line.. Her heart is a drum against her chest, a small bongo off-beat, wild and wrong, playing at its own pace. Life now, and life in the next. Her feet are uneven as she stands there, and then she points her toes inward, like some ready ballerina on the orchestra's cue. Her head tips to Bylah, but her curls do not follow. They stay stationary, two-tone, entwined in a tail along shoulder blades, waist, lumbar. To the voice that presses, plays at poetry, tugs her remaining strings, she turns now, although fingers are growing colder in his grip. The answer is encased in the lean of her body, in the way her small head finds an empty space to fill. Tip-toe, her chin in his shoulder, she whispers all those things she took from the stairs. Past and future wave Fafnir merrily away, as present secrets pour out of her. Most are as light as the air itself, no substance to hold them down. They are the quickest to fill that voice. A select few are sweet, mulled wine, Christmas candy, sticky as sex as they land at the lobe of his ear. And then the secrets begin to crescendo, and bare their weight upon the receiver. These are the darker, finer parts of that firmament called ether, the kind that grow and suggest and manipulate. But as the seer gives up these things, she forgets herself, and the trauma her face holds begins to fade away. Thus she is reborn by his side, hearing nothing, seeing little, and for only those few stolen moments. There are tears when she is finished, trickling down her small face without a proper trajectory.
"You may have her, says the windowsill," She says at long last, and then sighs into his forearm, finding solace in something solid. "What... What did I just say?"
Bylah watches and waits, wanting something to happen, to see some sign, some proof that these efforts haven't been in vain. He listens to the litany that flows free of the woman, and into the devourer or that which he could not quite be bothered with - secrets were terribly tough to chew, and he had more to deal with than just that.
Fafnir has done this before - once, on a roof, before spurning and sneering. He does it again: one hand rose, the heat of his thumb smoothing at her cheeks. He finds them unerringly, not because he can see, but because he knows, has faith in the knowledge of where they are, some memory he had long since locked away in his mind.
"Nothing you would want to hear again, mine dear," he rasped, tongues twisting and in that moment? He sounded so like the vast mass that stood beside him, seemed so like the Beast that it was almost frightening how like him Fafnir had become.
"It is alright. You do not have to think about that anymore. I have it now." And he sounds it - sounds sated and satisfied in the best of ways, the worst of ways, the ways that will eventually destroy lives and snuff out hopes, dreams.
She does not collapse like she once might have. There is only the faint whisper of the threat: buckling legs and loss of vision. She does not cleave and plead for more, does not mewl against the air with outstretched arms. Instead, she lingers at his side, attached but easily removed, her hand soft against his own, tangible, but fleeting. Were she to wave... Instead, her eyes stare into the hollow of his own, into the nothing of a moonless, starless sky. She is enough to fill it, she thinks. Her cheek turns, pressing into the hand that finds her face. All the better to see me with, says the patchwork girl, with her upturned brow.
"It is perhaps your birthday." Somewhere, in the perimeter, just shy of her own small shadow, is the Beast. She no longer knows how correct she is. She might, eventually. Then again, she might never.
"You make it quiet." She adds, and her voice, if it can, grins at him. Between syllables, there is the unmistakable sound of a smile.
His eyes are but a black slash across his face, silk as fine as what was about his hips. "Soon," he tells her. "Soon, I will be me." And that is both a love story and a horror, something stretching out further than it should - further than he should. On that day, he will go on for miles. His head turned a bit, more to his side than in her direction.
"It is alright," murmured low and slow, to the Beast at his back - some horrible addiction that he can't quite shake just yet. "You can go now."
Vaguely, Bylah's lips curls. It is the subtlest of motions, an expression that, perhaps, best fits a dog that is not quite housebroken, that may still bite. It's fleeting, however, gone in a second. Once more, his features are the perfect pantheon of absence. Such insolence, surely. Instead, his hand started to rise and unfurl, a ship's sail at full mast. How impossible it must have seemed, how it went on forever. Those fingers were agile, dexterous, meant for breaking, meant for making. It went on: forever, and came so near to her - but did not touch. Because he knew. There was nothing that slipped by the Beast, nothing he did not know. Eventually, they all passed beneath his cruel, horrid gaze.
"You were wise to come down here, little one," Bylah murmured: the words went drizzling out of his mouth, shoved about by his tongues, jostled and cajoled into freedom. "Though, perhaps had you stayed, you could have taken refuge in mine horns." Because even from there, they all still sang, giggled, little girls in playgrounds, whispering words behind small hands.
Caught between, some small island between two poles of earth, magnetic, pulling her toward each other, thus breaking her in half. The seer, newly blind, does not detach herself from Fafnir, but does not further embed herself to his side. She only flinches, then stares, the fluttering moth to a moving flame. How Bylah dances before her. Such radiance eclipses nearly all things. Nearly all. The one at her side, how he burns white... Her lips tremble, animating her chin. She moves her gaze from one to the other, obviously addled, and this time, perfectly ignorant. It is silent, this space between. It is clear, and she is alone.
"I am naut yours." Her whisper has a bit of lilt to it, as if it were born a question rather than fact. She does not belong to either of these beings. Yet how she longs... There are years in the way she stares at Fafnir, years untold across the shell of her youth. Here is her last secret, unsaid. Here, offered for him to taste in the quiet place between two lips.
"You could have been," it is a blessing, a curse, a little lyric slipped beneath a lover's door. She could have been part of his glorious crown. But no, no - she had to flee from such lofty heights. One last glance aside to that which was once his, before the Beast turned, considering the flames. How simple they seem, a complex thing written in one line. It is hard to tell who devours who.
Fafnir does not taste - perhaps he knows already. His hand rose, settled in the space atop her head, a perfect place for the wide of his palm. For once, in a brief second of showing just how magnanimous he could be, he bowed his head. Thick hair, black and slippery fell over her in a curtain, a cloud of the smell of him right there: of rot and decay, offal and afterbirth.
"Mine glorious maker is Entropy. The erosion of mountains, the death of cells. The way the leaves rot in winter. He is everywhere, in everything. In you. In the stone beneath our feet, in the grains of sand on the ocean. In his great crown, the antlers that he has scraped the underbelly of the sky with, he has torn down the stars."
The tension that has built between these three seems to dissipate at the departure of one, only to spark and crackle into something entirely else the moment she finds herself in the midst of that inky waterfall. With her free hand, she feels up, catching a blade of hair between her two little fingers before a voice hits her ears, hard and hot and full of its own stories. In the dark, her eyes roam skyward, and find only black holes. How he draws her in... Even the scent of her, the heavy height of summer, is swept into the being above, below, surrounding...
"He has sung that song to me. And the ones that are naut caught therein, we slip between. We fall. On accident. On whim.. On.."
She stands there, sways in dark sanctuary, her hand tightening on his own to steady her feet. Something that was once known is temporarily misplaced.
He laughs in her ear - it's the sound of new orphans and shrieking widows wanting to know why. The black sliver of silk around his eyes ticks: there is something still beneath there, something still capable of smiling. Long fingers slithered, drizzled, a slow rain through hair, along the long of jaw, finally settled to her chin, tipping her head up.
"It would not have been an unkind existence, caught up there. Perhaps he might have hung you in the hair of his woman. At the very least, you would have been cherished."
"t is quick, like life." The patchwork girl pursues that hand, moving at the direction of the other. She no longer knows if it is desire that causes her compliance. She no longer cares. Her eyes are two stars in and of themselves, twins finding fitting voids to die in. There, they linger: Fafnir's coal stare. The emotion he has wrangled free of her kills the effect. No longer surreal, sylvan, she is a mess of weeping humanity. In some pocket, there is a silver coin. The Sandman's soul is somewhere on its surface, but she has not found the courage to call him close.
"I do naut think he would put me there, even if he were quick to catch, Once-Shadow. I disappoint."
"Do you always sell yourself short, Viki?" he asked, his tone turning to sharp mock. "Is it always within your nature to belittle yourself? You do not disappoint. You never have. You, with your insistence." His had slithered, withered away, a flower falling, losing it's beauty.
"Once, you reached for me as if I were your last bastion. Now, you seem to shy and pull away. Do you always do as your told? Was it my words that put you away?" His fingers curled in a collar, the neckline of that dress; he drew her close, two mice in a shotglass. She could feel the roaches, the rats, the mingling of maggots beneath his skin..and when he leaned in, it was with the splay of tongues, his mouth so near to her's.
"When did you stop going after what you wanted, girl?"
"You are naut mine. You are... Of someone else and he of you." It is the best the seer might do for the small moment she has to suffer his proximity, the weight and rippling mass of him, so close, he seems to writhe without her coaxing. And she might pry that sort of response out of any other, any other in the world... save for those who are not part of it. The world.
Her eyes are large and bright, still moonlit waters before the proverbial skipping stone. Some small, strangled sound forces its way from her throat, only to die at the back of her teeth. She lets go of his hand, and then both thin arms rise in a sudden rush, circle his neck in a none too casual cling.
"He will hurt me again." She says, her voice pitted to the broken tune of her own sigh. "If you did naut make everything go silent and black, I might be able to see just how..." Her mouth, it hovers to the cavern of his own, home to a tongue spliced.
He laughs again..but this time, it is something low, something slow, something that slithers down the spine and pools in all the right places.
"We are nothing but porcupines - we do nothing but hurt one another, girl." The world out of his mouth doesn't sound quite so much like an insult. "I cannot help what is within mine nature. I was meant to devour secrets..."
One tongue, a ribbon of black velvet, knapped and slick slithered out of his mouth, drug across the cannibal-red of his mouth.
"And you cannot stand there and tell me you would want me any other way."
"When you did naut throw this shroud overhead, I saw your path, and it was only one." Affirmation in her roundabout way, riddleramble for the one who presses and pries. She combats his assault with a shudder. The motion may upset some of the inner turmoil beneath his skin.
Her fingertips brush the back of his white neck, and she is surprised to find it so solid. "It is about now that you would make this body meet the wall, fall into the black between the floor, and go forever and a day, leaving only the promise of dark dreams."
Yes, the seer has dreamed the Shadow on multiple occasions.
Solid, but only so much. Beneath her touch, it still writhes and wriggles, rippling in the way of the press of fingers. There is something alive beneath it all - some horrible secret, a snake seemingly ready to shed it's skin.
"I am a shadow and it is what I do. I think, however, that you mistake certain situations. Do you think I have been warming his bed?" asked, brittle and blunt. "Mine relationship with Gideon is not so simple and sordid. I do not love him as a man loves his wife. I love him as the plant loves the sun, the rain."
"Nau. It is the more important parts that grow warm with you. I knew it once. The love of rain. It once told me its name.."
She trails, lost at the foot of her own words. Lashes flutter, and eyes draw to a momentary close. There is comfort, in the dark. Her linked hands press him again: Neck. Shoulder. And soon, they slip down the frame of him, taking stock of his shape. She commits him to memory, places old and new. She halts her explorations at the bend of both hips, as if she were an unschooled dance partner. Put them here? Lead now?
Her eyes open to the full moon view of his face. She takes it in, as a mortal might a deity, or a statue of. Reverence, respect, and something shy of fear. Still, she smiles, but shows no teeth.
"Your cruelty is hiding with my persistence, I think." Her fingers twitch, itchy, as if to say they want to draw it out.
This is a dance Fafnir knows, the kind that takes two to tango, me and you, us and them. Even in her shyness, there is bold lines that she draws with her hands - only his anchor has been quite so forward. It shows in his smile, the way it widens and spreads, wildfires in too-dry brush.
"Do you like it?" he asked, fingers crawling and sprawling up her spine, just to grab a handful of hair. "Mine cruelty? Is that what you think about, Viki?"
"You make it quiet," She repeats slowly, though her voice is on edge, a runner poised to sprint across even pavement, surging ahead of any other. Two-tone tresses lock about the hand that snatches them from the sea of their sisters. Her face gives it away before her singsong voice can rise to the betrayal.
"There is quiet in pain, Fafnir." Her fingertips dance, not requiring a partner. They teeter close to where his navel might be, had he been born in the usual way. And then, her palms fall flat to his torso, gliding up again, meeting his throat, resting there moments before she steals his face between her fingers.
"That does not answer mine question, Viki," he chided, looming and listing over her, fingers tightening in her hair. "There is something to be said about being the object of one's hate, as bright and sharp, as one's love, is there not?"
One tongue slid against the sharp tip of a tooth, skin sliding perhaps too easily beneath her palms.
"Xas." Comes the answer, solid and steady, stark contrast to the way her skin crawls with his own. It is like he has infected her, like some part of him has found a way to crawl inside, settle, replicate. Instead, she only shivers, one violent tremor after the next, her skin a mess of gooseflesh beneath the soft splatterpaint of patchwork fabric. Her fingers brush against the bones of his cheeks.
She does not move anything else, does not even dip her head back to follow the motion of that captivating hand.
"I think of it."
"Good," he crooned, cooed, closed the gap so quickly that the naked eye almost missed it. It was the drag of his tongue, the subtlest of tastes, before he straightened and sprawled, letting her hair spill out of his grasp.
"Take that thought with you."
And her eyes are unclad as any, especially now, in the hollow that she has been gifted. The inanimate echo nothing. No secrets reveal themselves. The Shadow had eaten them all. She drops her hands as he untangles, feels the full of her hair fall against her back: complete, whole. Yet something more is missing. She does not pine for the one who falls away from her, but there is no look of indifference to her face. She is easily read, and with the knowledge of a mirrorglass, she nods at him. Only when she looks away does she realize her hands have chosen to close over her mouth.
And yet, despite his slow withdrawal, the way he peels away, there seems to be something in his stance, his stride, that is not quite so cold. Or maybe that's just an illusion. He pulled away, paint off a wall, and slid across the floor, a flat piece of seemingly black nothing. Unimportant and simple scenery.
The seer does not slide so much as sprint. Up the stairs and to the landing beyond. No whispers are thrown to the railing in the wake of those slippered feet. Only silence, and no regret.
