calchexxis

[calchexxis]

Your regular reminder that trickle-down economics is a cruel joke designed by the wealthy.

[calchexxis]

Attention, fellow Maniacs. I have an important announcement regarding my shop and the Durge t-shirts.

Someone is reproducing my design and selling it on another site. If the website doesn't have my name attached, nor have I announced the shop to the public, it isn't me.

(The false website is on the left. The legit one? Right)

Please do not purchase any merch or designs on any other site aside from the links I personally provide. For the time being, please spread the word on this info so people do not purchase from the wrong site.

The link to my shop is below, and it is the correct place to purchase any merch I may make in the future. I'm still selling them in my shop and restocking items this week for the next people wanting them!

The Official Site to buy the shirts here.

[calchexxis]

Bleed For Me - Chapter 2

Written for Amestris_Duran. Read on Ao3.

Satiation.

Finally, sweet satiation.

For years—decades—something awful in me had ached to take Mirabelle St. Magnus into my arms and hold her tight. That ache began as a splinter in my soul the moment I laid eyes on her when we were so very young. I remember it clear as god’s morning: my sixteenth birthday, when I was raised from the ranks of the prospectives and given my holy athames, blessed by the church fathers to slay the aberrant. With them, I was given my first raiments, fitted, brass-buckled leathers stitched with silver thread to ward away sorcery, good boots blessed with Saint Peregrin’s swiftness, and a black cloak dyed black with houndsdoom to hide me from scrying eyes of the Vast.

And, of course, Mirabelle St. Magnus.

For as every Touched must be raised as a hunter, so must every hunter be given a supporter. Someone to care for my more mundane needs. She was to be my armorer, my healer, my nurse, and my confessor. My confidante in this darkness of greater- and lessernight.

When Father MacLeòid told me her name, I thought it to be a fine portent, for Saint Magnus was the first of the divine mechanists, and the creator of the first Dawntower. That tower still spills its light across the high districts from the heart of Artemestra, and more dimly across the lesser districts. I could not know how right I was, or how truly apt her name would become to me, for she would soon become the sole light and only sweetness in my life.

She was two years my younger at fourteen years when I first met her, and I thought she must have been crafted by the very angels of the holy morning themselves, with her bright red hair framing a gentle, heart-shaped face. Every freckle dusted across her cheeks and nose seemed to have been placed with care and intention, and her gentle brown eyes were so soothing to me that I immediately felt at peace in her presence. It would not be long before I came to crave that feeling of peace, as every hour of my life not spent in her presence became one of horror, nightmare, and bloodshed.

When I returned from my first mission, deployed to the Abattoir of Kvinich in the Embers District nearest the Blackwall, it was as one of three surviving hunters out of a coterie of nine. I reentered the Cathedral of Saint Ilya feeling as if I’d been cut open from neck to navel and hollowed out. The things I had seen in that place were beyond description; abominations of flesh that should not live but could not die, great vats of blood that screamed as they were brought to a rolling boil, and other, more terrible things I shall not recall.

I passed through the chapel nave, where I later learned she had spent the entire night praying for my safe return. To this day, I believe it was her faith that carried me back to her, so fervently did she pray. She was at my side in an instant, and though she must have been exhausted, she all but carried me to my room, and, with devotional care, stripped me of my sundered raiment and chipped armaments.

Mirabelle wiped my ruined body with a cool cloth, sluicing away layer after layer of congealed blood and filth to get to my wounds. She picked fragments of bone shrapnel and tooth from cuts and lacerations, stitched and sutured each of them closed. She washed my hair, turning it from the rotten brown it had become back into gold, as if weaving it from a magic loom. And only once I was as clean did she help me to my bed.

I did not let her leave that night. Selfish as it was, I clung to her waist and wept like a child into her lap over what I had seen—what I had been made to do. I wept because I knew, then, what the rest of my life would be like, and all I wanted in that moment was to die.

And so I started as I was meant to go on.

Mirabelle, my Mirabelle, became my reason for living.

For her, I told myself, I could hunt anything, kill anything, endure anything. I would slay the Father of Aberrancy himself if he threatened her. I woke to see her, I lived to listen to her soft, dulcet tones as she read the daily scripture, and I fought to keep her safe over any and all within the sunless city of Artemestra. The way she looked at me made me feel as if I were invincible, and I would have done anything to keep that light in her eyes.

And now…

Now, that light is going out.

She is so sweet on my tongue. Sweet enough that, for a moment, I can believe that my heart might start beating once more. My throat bobs in time with her weakening pulse as the gnawing, blinding, shrieking hunger in my belly, as well as the burning of my parched throat, finally begins to ebb.

And in that moment, I know that I am truly damned.

I drink from her because I cannot stop myself, but I cannot stop crying either. I have ruined and violated all that is good in this lightless world, and only to sate myself. A pounding from behind me distracts me, and I glance up to see myself, beating desperately against the window pane. My face is a rictus of horror as it looks upon my body from those mirrored panes of glass, and begs me to stop. But I can’t stop. I don’t know how. My body is a vessel of cruelty, rapacious and hungry.

Yet, she gave herself to me. In the depths of my madness, I know this. I held myself back at the final moment with the very last of my human will. For an instant, I yoked back control from the poisoned blood of Edelmyr Santi, High Priest of the Vast, after he had corrupted the holy blessing of my body to his will and set me loose like a mad dog.

I stopped myself, and despite that, she looked into my eyes and knew I was beyond salvation, and instead of condemnation, gave me the last of herself that she could. She gave me her flesh and her blood as a sacrament, because Mirabelle St. Magnus is the light come to earth, and the only thing holy in this benighted world, that even if death, she remains perfect and utterly without flaw.

The pounding distracts me again, and I grimace up at the fragment of me in the mirror. I never told Mirabelle what I lose for the use of my knack—that to walk the Mirrormere is to splinter myself across every reflective surface in a wide radius, and then collapse myself back into place at the precise point I desired. I never told her that every time I did it, I had the awful feeling that not every splinter I cast out returned to me. Every leap, every jump, and every passage left me feeling lesser and lesser, until finally, Edelmyr caught me, and all at once, his followers shattered every window and mirror in the area, stranding me in his trap. Stranding her.

She begs, silently, soundlessly, again to stop. To please, just stop, and my face contorts in savage hate at her. Why couldn’t she have been stronger? Why couldn’t she have been better? If she hadn’t been so damned weak then Edelmyr wouldn’t have caught us! He wouldn’t have crucified us over that yawning pit, bleeding us dry over days, before finally pumping his own, foul blood into—

My eyes widen, and for a moment, my expression matches my twin’s in the glass.

I had thought I had expended what remained of my will, but I find a new reservoir in that instant. Whatever the source, I seize it in both hands and force my jaw to unlock, pull back, and unsheathe my fangs from my beloved Mirabelle’s neck. She’s so cold, and her life is fading quickly. I can hear it in the slowing pulse of her heart and see it in the pallor of her lips and cheeks.

Her blood is drenching my lips and chin, and she tastes so sweet. I want nothing more than to go back for another taste, but I fight the urge, and instead bring my wrist to my mouth and savage it open. I chew and gnaw it to ribbons, ignoring the searing agony of that autocannibalistic act, and pull Mirabelle up to cradle her in my arms before pressing the ruin of my wrist to her mouth.

I let her head loll back as I bleed into her, with my other hand, I gently massage her throat. She swallows, bit by bit, and in my madness I know that I am damning her, too. I can’t help it, though. She is my everything. My sole sweetness. Whatever the price of this sin, I cannot but commit to it. I ignore how the splinter is now hammering on the window, screaming in silence, shrieking unheard profanities at me over this final and total act of selfish corruption. It was one thing to succumb to the inevitable hunger and the poison of aberrancy in my veins. It is something wholly different to spread that aberrancy to she whom I love best in all the world.

But I will do it.

Damn the morning and all her angels.

I will do it.

There is no subtlety in the aberrant, and I see the foulness that poisons my own blood take root in my sweet Mirabelle within moments. The veins around her lips, throat, and chest begin to blacken, and it spreads through her like a fungal cancer with the speed of flame over dry grass. Her back arches, and she writhes almost sensually as her eyes fly open to stare, wide and unseeing, at the ceiling.

I pull my wrist away, my unholy biology having already sealed my self-inflicted wound. The stain of my greatest sin now lay smeared across my Mirabelle’s lips, and her tongue darts out to sweep more of it into her mouth as she goes into paroxysms in my arms.

It’s like watching death occur in fast motion; her skin goes ghostly pale, split only by the blackened veins tainted with aberrant blood, and her whole body locks tense in rigor mortis, with her fingers curling into arthritic claws, and her legs curling in on themselves. It’s as Mirabelle’s final, horrible death rattle is squeezed from her laboring lungs that I hear the flutter of feathered wings.

From the broken doorway, a nightjar bird darts in and lands just beyond arm’s reach. I stare at it, and it meets my eyes with uncommon intelligence, and just as Mirabelle’s rattle tapers out, it begins a musical, rhythmic call that even to my newly sensitive ears seems to blend with the sound. As the last living breath that she will ever take is throttled from her, I imagine the nightjar is coaxing Mirabelle’s soul in some way, and the moment I have the thought, I realize I need to kill it.

But I can’t. I cannot move.

I can only watch.

Then Mirabelle goes slack, the nightjar goes silent, and it flutters away. From the mirror, the last vestige of my humanity silently howls her grief into the void as I cradle what remains of Mirabelle St. Magnus in my arms as she once held me many years ago, when I had just returned from my harrowing maiden hunt.

When her eyes open, I half-expect to hear her breathe or to feel her heartbeat start again, though I know those things are impossible. I have stolen them from her with my selfishness, and yet as I see her stir, a terrible joy still fills me to the brim. I cannot but smile, ear to ear, as I whisper, “There you are…”

“Gabby?” Mirabelle whispers my name like a prayer, and it sets a fluttering in my chest.

“Mirabelle,” I murmur. “My Mirabelle.”

She understands what I’ve done to her. I see it in her eyes. My Mirabelle is brilliant, as if one requires genius to notice that one’s heart is no longer beating, or that breathing no longer seems altogether necessary. She takes stock of this in a moment, then looks back at me, and she smiles.

Oh, morning.

She smiles.

“You saved me,” Mirabelle whispers.

“I have slain you,” I said darkly. “I have killed you, and then filled you with such darkness that the dawn might spit you back out into my arms so I might hold you once more.”

Mirabelle’s hands come to rest on my arms, and her smile doesn’t so much as flicker. “But you’re holding me, aren’t you?”

Blood seeps down my cheeks in mockery of sorrow as I pull her up and kiss her. She clutches at me, much as she did when I was killing her, but now in earnest as our tongues meet and dance, and between tasting her, I can feel the sharp prick of her new fangs. I don’t care. I can’t. Not when death has brought me the culmination of my dreams. For years, I dreamt of keeping my Mirabelle in my chambers after her duties were finished—of begging her to stay if need be—so I might take her to bed and show her how dearly I loved her. Her gentle eyes and sweet voice haunted my heart, and some nights, I swear I only made it back from a hunt alive because I knew I could fall into her arms and allow her to soothe me once I’d returned.

I dreamt of it. I wished it. But I feared it.

The censure of the church would have been terrible had we been discovered, and the worst of it would have fallen upon the significantly less valuable Mirabelle. I could not do that to her. Nor could I, as I saw it, force myself upon her.

Now, I see in her eyes the same need I have felt for so much of life, and I fear the church no longer. I paw at her habit, pulling at it until I find the buttons to unfasten her bodice and pull it away to cup her modest breasts, and she gasps as I run a thumb across the sensitive nub before squeezing gently.

Her hands find every buckle and tie of my armor with the rote ease of a thousand undressings. I realize as she strips me bare that she has been like a wife to me for many years, dutifully caring for me after each difficult day, washing my arms and legs, rubbing oils into my feet, and combing knots and snarls from my hair. She has shown me such diligent love, and only now do I see it for what it is.

Mirabelle presses her lips to my navel as she pulls my tunic aside, and then kisses up my abdomen and between my breasts, over the column of my neck, then finds my lips with hers once more as I pull her into my lap.

“Finally,” Mirabelle says with a shudder in her voice. “Finally, I can touch you…I can taste you.” She licks my cheek and smiles as her once-brown eyes glint scarlet. “You have saved me, Gabriella. For without you, I was no better than a corpse, rotting to my soul.”

“I have damned your soul for your body,” I say softly.

“Then damn it,” she replies with a hard edge to her voice that I only recall hearing after I’ve been particularly reckless. “If my soul cannot be yours, my Gabriella, then damn it and may it stay damned til night’s ending.”

I shiver at her before tucking my mouth against her neck, suckling gently at the pinprick marks of my earlier feeding. I can still taste a hint of her untainted blood there, sweet as summer wine, and I lap at it like a dog. She hitches her legs around me and grinds against me, and I swallow thickly before plunging my hand beneath her skirts again to find her dripping sex. Her cry as I plunge my fingers inside is musical, and I catch it with my mouth, kissing her hard as she bounces wantonly on my hand. It’s the lewdest display I’ve ever seen, with her eyes wide and gazing into mine as she braces against my shoulders and shamelessly rides my fingers. Her cunt flexes and clenches around them, and I savor the sight of her eyes rolling back into her skull as she drenches my hand and breeches with her release.

Without thinking, I deposit her on the floor and rise, pulling at my loosened belt and letting my breeches and underthings drop to my ankles. I don’t even have to wait before she falls forward onto her knees, grasping at my thighs as she pushes her tongue against my clenching sex. Mirabelle laps at my cunt like a parched woman, her now-scarlet eyes staring unblinkingly up into mine as she services me as perfectly as she ever has before.

How many years have I imagined this?

How many times have I remained seated on my bed after she had left at the end of her duties and imagined her serving me in other, more carnal ways? I remember, often, stripping down and lying there with my legs spread and my fingers working feverishly as I imagined her tongue and mouth doing what she was doing right then.

My mind was a poor substitute for reality.

I gripped her head and held her fast as I ground myself against her mouth. She ate me expertly, and I cannot help but wonder, too, how often she imagined doing so that she would be so adept at it. It doesn’t even occur to me to consider that she might have indulged with other partners.

Not my Mirabelle.

No, I know from the look in her eye that she has never known any touch but mine, and by purpose. She has kept herself for me. Saved herself for me. She is mine and mine alone, and only I shall ever have her, because she is my light and my morning. She is the dawn that I can never know, and the warmth of the morning I shall never stand beneath.

And I cum against her mouth, spilling my release over her face with a guttural moan. She groans against me, a sweet vibration against my cunt as she laps at every drop, licking at my cunt and thighs and everywhere else just for the taste of me.

I fall to my knees, and she catches me as I recall her doing so often after I returned in exhaustion from a hunt. She bears me down with grace, and lets me rest against her until I’ve sunk down to lay my head in her lap. It is here and here alone that I still feel human, just as I did all those years ago when I returned from Kvinich.

As she cards her fingers through my hair, I find myself staring at the mirrored panes of glass where my splinter is weeping in disgust, but I care not. The other panes show other reflections—other splinters—some alternately pounding at the panes in righteous fury or otherwise pointing and silently screaming imprecations. Others, like the first, are simply staring, eyes wide and haunted and filled with unspeakable horror at the scale of my sins.

But I care not.

I turn away from them as Mirabelle laughs mellifluously, and then sweetly says, “Gabby…I’m thirsty.”

I smile, even as I can almost hear my splinters shrieking. “Then we shall find you a drink, my sweet,” I whisper as I roll over and look up into her wide, ruby eyes. “This sunless city is a vintner’s dream of rich reds.”

She smiles wider. “And once we’ve drunk our fill,” she added. “Let’s find that priest who dared try to part us, and make a new abattoir of his nave.” Her fingers found mine and twined with them. “I would make this city our scarlet heaven, and I will be your angel, who fills your cup til it runneth over.”

“You have always been my angel, Mirabelle,” I murmur. “My sole sweetness in this life.”

“This life and this death.” Mirabelle’s voice is like honey, and I cannot help but wonder if she sees anything like the visions I see. Perhaps not. Perhaps this is how she was meant to be, free of all the lashings and bindings placed upon her by the church fathers and the morning faith.

Better, I think, to believe that, because if I do, I can imagine the day that will come when I look in a mirror or window pane, and do not see my face screaming back at me. There is a gut-wrenching nausea to the idea that one day, that vestige will be gone, and I cannot but wonder what I will be when it is.

I reach up to stroke Mirabelle’s cheek, and her eyes glitter in the dimness of greaternight.

Whatever it is I am doomed to be, I shall be with her.

My sweetness. My morning.

My gentle and bloody Mirabelle.

[calchexxis]

Bleed For Me - Chapter 1

Written for Amestris_Duran. Read on Ao3.

In the sunless city of Artemestra, there are three types of people; the Pure, who were born without the taint of sorcere, and who make up the majority. About eighty-four per cent of the population is designated pure by age thirteen. Then, there are the Aberrant—those cursed with sorcery—although that aberrancy rarely manifests before puberty. They make up roughly twelve per cent of the remaining population, though many are purged before they can fully mature.

The remainder are the Touched.

They are the most blessed and the most cursed. The ones granted gifts by the Watchers On High with which to hunt the aberrant and protect the pure. All children who display the signs are taken to the great Fortress-Cathedral of Saint Ilya, Patron of the Holy Hunt, and are trained to become the finest hunters of monsters and nightmares. They are the holiest of holies, and the noblest souls, for their very flesh is made sacrosanct by the Watchers and by countless hours spent in purification. Each one trains endlessly with their gift, of which thousands have been recorded in the annals of Saint Ilya, to best serve the Papacy of Artemestra.

There are many general names for these gifts; Kenning, Blessing, and Ordainment are among the most commonly used in ritual and amongst the populace of the pure. Among the hunters themselves, though, as well as their supporters, only one name is ever used.

They call it ‘the knack’.

Knacks are studied extensively by clerical scholars of the faith. They are examined, cross-examined, peer-reviewed, and codified so as to best assign their use in the Deviants War that we wage every dawnless night of our lives against the minions of the Vast. Whenever a new knack is discovered, it’s a sign of great good, and of the Watcher’s favor, although it has been over two decades since the last time a truly unique knack was recorded in the annals.

That knack belonged…belongs to Gabriella von Zeidlr, and I have loved her since the day I first laid eyes on her.

I took the corner hard, grinding my heel into the concrete pavement as I bolted down the alley. Greaternight fell heavily in the lesser districts of Artemestra, where the miracles of sunlight enjoyed by the high districts only dimly reached, and the alley was almost pitch black for it. The streets were lit by towering streetlamps of heavy steel, their precious sunstones held within a cage of thrice-blessed silver and gold, but they were few and far between down here, nothing like bright enough to fend off what was chasing me.

The funny thing is, I’m not even really sure why I’m running. In theory, I suppose I could make for one of the gates demarcating the district borders. They’re beastly things of the heaviest metal attached to great clockwork steam engines that lift and drop them at the command of the gate engineers, and are more than enough to hedge out an aberrant. I would have to be very lucky to make it that far, but again, in theory, it was possible.

I’m not running toward the gates. I’m not running anywhere.

I’m just running.

Tears streak down my cheeks as I bolt past the polished windows of backalley shops. Though nothing else of them is clean, the panes are always polished, because it is said that a clear reflection turns back ill will and the sorcery of the aberrant.

All it shows now is the juddering zoetrope of my passage as I sprint. My long red hair flies behind me like the torn pennant of a beaten army, and my lightly armored habit and skirts flare raggedly around my ankles, the hems stained with blood and mud. My lungs are burning with exertion, and the muscles in my legs feel like they’ve been filled with molten lead, but still, I run. It has nothing to do with where I’m running, after all.

I run because she’s chasing me.

I run because it’s the only thing I have left to give her.

There’s a whistle of passing air, and then the dim cut of light at the far end of the alley ahead of me abruptly blackens as a figure lands between me and it. I only get a glimpse of her, but it’s enough to set my heart racing anew. She’s as beautiful as the day I met her. As beautiful as every day that I was blessed to see her thereafter.

Even in the dark, her skin was like pale gold, and her hair fell like straight sheaves of buckwheat over her shoulders and down her back. Her stature was heroic, with broad shoulders, and a lean, sharp jaw, and she was still wearing her hunter’s garb; a tunic of silk stitched with silver prayers, over a long flare skirt slit nearly to the waist, offering sinful flashes of gorgeously muscled thigh and calf. Gabriella’s thigh sheath was bare of its guardless silver athames, lost in her last battle, but still…

Morning, bless me, but she is as beautiful as the day she died.

“Oh, Mirabelle.” Her voice was the same husky rasp as ever. The voice of someone leaning in close, breath hot on your ear, to tell you a secret. “Where are you running to?”

I throw my shoulder against the door to my immediate left and bash it open, barreling into the building—an old, abandoned hostel—because it is my only other route besides turning my back on her and retreating. I’ve never turned my back on Gabriella von Zeidlr in my life, and won’t do so now.

Her laughter follows me down the hall, and despite myself, I smile. Every inch of my body is slick with sweat as I hit the stairs and take them two at a time. In my single glimpse of her, limned in the dim light of the alley, I saw her as I knew her in sunnier days, and in all respects save for one, she was the same as ever I remembered her. The Gabriella I have had the great honor to fight beside, to support, and to heal at the end of her missions, had always possessed eyes of the most fervent emerald green.

The Gabriella chasing me has eyes the color of blood.

It occurs to me as I take another turn into an empty hall that the word ‘chase’ doesn’t really do justice to what Gabriella is doing. Chase implies, in my own mind, some measure of equal footing, although I’ll admit that may be my own linguistic biases showing themselves. Rather, I will call what Gabriella is doing now ‘pursuit’. 

The aberrant has touched her, and she is no longer the hunter that I knew. Now, she is the predator and I am the prey that she pursues. I am the mouthful of meat and blood that will sate her when she finally catches me, and she will catch me at her leisure, not mine. I know that no matter how far or how fast I run, I won’t escape. I know that she could catch me at any time, were she to truly try.

Instead, she pursues me patiently. She lets me tire myself out, wear myself down, and only once I have collapsed onto the floor, panting and gasping for breath, unable to do more than swat ineffectually at her claws, will she fall upon me. I’m not sure what it says about me that the thought of that makes me smile all the wider. Nothing good, I’m sure. I don’t care, though. I no longer care for the doctrines beaten into me since my girlhood, nor do I care for the imprecations of the priests or their condemnations. The day that Gabriella von Zeidlr died, I lost my mind, and now I am fleeing her pursuit for the last time because it is the only way that I can show her my love anymore.

I take turns blind, sprint up stairs, but no matter how far I go or how quickly I move, I cannot escape the sound of her laughter. Every moment, I swear I can feel her breath on my neck and her teeth scraping the skin just beneath my ear, but when I cast my gaze back, the hall behind me is empty. She haunts me now much as she ever did.

But all pursuit comes, eventually, to its timely—or untimely—end.

The last hall I turn down is a dead end, but I keep running. I run for the room at the end of the hall and throw myself against the door. It holds fast, sturdy despite its age, and I stagger back, pull the pneumatic pistol from the holster at my hip, and blow the lock to splinters. The silversteel stake fired from the barrel buries itself in the floor beyond the door that I kick open, and there, at the far end of the room, is a window.

I don’t remember how many stories up we are, but at this point, I don’t think it matters, so I run for the window, and I don’t slow down. I run, jump, and curl into a ball with my arms and legs guarding my vitals as I throw myself at it.

But my reflection is not what greets me in those half-polished panes.

Perhaps I should mention now what Gabriella von Zeildrs ‘knack’ was that made her so terribly dangerous. It gave her eyes where no eyes should be, and doors and windows where no one ought to be able to reasonably reach. Every reflective surface, which was said to be a shield against the touch of sorcere, became, for Gabriella, a gateway.

In the annals, it is called: Mirrormere.

A pale hand, whose fingers taper to delicate claws, emerges from the wide window pane to catch me fast by the throat. Her grip is like iron, and I choke as my momentum comes to a crushing halt. My vision swims, and I flail helplessly against the corded muscles of her arm, but to no avail. The glass ripples like water, and beyond it, I can see not the alley that should be past the window, but instead the distorted image of Gabriella, with her eyes of arterial red meeting mine.

She drifts through her glass gateway like a wraith, suspended in the air by some unearthly will. I am worn to the bone; my red hair hangs lank and matted to my face and shoulders with sweat, I grip her wrist with no strength in my fingers, and I can barely muster the energy to kick my legs at her as she emerges fully into the empty room.

And then she smiles at me, and tears cut tracks through the dust on my cheeks as I see the predator glint in her eyes and the flash of dim light off of her bone-pale fangs.

“Caught you.” Even in the dimness of greaternight, there is something luminous about Gabriella as she carries me across the room, suspended above the floor like a puppet.

Something that stirs a primal warmth in my belly.

I throw a kick at her abdomen anyway. I won’t give up. I won’t let whatever is left of my Gabriella see me roll over and die, even though that’s exactly why I’m here with her. Maybe it’s madness, but I cannot live without my Gabriella. I will not live without my Gabriella. It matters not that I didn’t tell her the truth when it could have meant something—that I only ever dared to show my love for her in the polished shine of her weapons and the careful stitching of her armor and garment wards. It matters not that the only time I allowed myself to touch her bare skin was to wipe away the blood from her wounds and suture them closed, when all I wanted was to kiss each scar on her body until I reached her lips.

I showed my love for her in all of those ways and more.

Now, I show it one last time in this game of cat and mouse.

“Mirabelle…” Gabriella’s voice is a husky purr as she says my name. “Why did you have to come back?” I swear I can hear a hint of her old voice in there. Something almost like grief colored with exultation. “Why did you have to tempt me again?”

I work my jaw soundlessly, trying to speak around a closed throat.

She continues to drift forward, carried by whatever unseen will has untethered her from the laws of gravity, until my back is pressed against the wall. I kick again. I scratch and claw and fight with all my fading strength, and Gabriella just watches, smiling beatifically as I drag red lines on the skin of her hand and rest, land my knee against her gut, and kick at her knees, until I quite literally can more no more, and only then does she accept the kiss of terra firm once more. 

She lowers down until her bootsoles settle softly onto the creaking floorboards, then continues to lower herself, bending at the knee and letting me slide down until I’m seated and slumped against the wall. Her grip loosens, then pulls away, leaving a palm-shaped bruise on my throat, and I gasp for air as she takes my chin between a finger and thumb.

“Mirabelle.” Her voice is a rosy whisper as her eyes start to glow from within, going from red to luminous scarlet. “My darling Mirabelle…you’ve always taken such good care of me.” Gabriella presses the pad of her thumb to my lips. “Let me make your death sweet.”

I kiss the soft skin she offers me. It’s all I have left in me. She smiles all the brighter at that. Her hand falls to the hem of my skirts and lifts them, pushing them past my knees as she reaches between my legs. I shiver as I feel Gabriella push my soaked underthings aside, and I don’t miss the way her smile widens further when she feels the state of me. I am not ashamed anymore, though. I’m not ashamed of the way I used to muffle my voice at night as I cried out her name while I pleasured myself, nor of how I let my eyes linger on her in the baths, or how my hands would rest on her longer than necessary when I was tending her wounds.

“That’s my girl,” Gabriella murmured as one finger—then two—slipped inside of me, and one arm looped around my back to cradle me against her. “That’s my Mirabelle.”

Another shiver rolled through me as I leaned against her and tried to pretend that she still smelled of sandalwood and blade oil, and not like a butcher’s shop. “I’m sorry, Gabby,” I choked out even as I rocked my hips against her fingers. “I sh-should have been with you…should have—”

“Ssshhh…” Gabriella nuzzled against my neck, then lolled out her tongue and ran it up my neck and over my cheek, lapping up the trickle of tears that were left there before moving her lips to the lobe of my ear and whispering, “You’ve never done anything wrong in your life, my Mirabelle.” She curled her fingers and pressed the pad of her thumb to my clit, dragging a ragged cry of pleasure from my lips. “You’re sweet and darling, and perfect in every way, and I have thought so since that day I laid eyes upon you, and every night thereafter. Don’t you know that every hunt was not to protect this blighted city, but to protect you and you alone? For you? My raison d'etre?”

Gabriella’s fingers find new and pleasing places that even my own had never touched. I wonder if it’s because she knows and has known me so well for so long, or if it's simply because she is the one touching me. Her cool skin soothes the fire inside me, even as it coaxes more lewd sounds from my throat. I don’t even try to hide it. I don’t try to muffle myself anymore. I spread my legs further, giving her more space, and mumble her name over and over as she draws back to stare lovingly into my eyes.

I can see her there.

My Gabriella.

I can see her behind the predator she has become. I can see her horror and her guilt and her hatred at what she’s doing and what she’s become. I can see the raw revulsion in her, and I know that she would end herself before harming me if only she could. But the aberrant has taken her, chewed her up, and regurgitated this monstrosity shaped like Gabriella von Zeidlr, and now there is nothing like enough mortal left in her to stop herself.

Oh, blessed morning. She looks so hungry.

I will never have my Gabriella back, but I can still take such good care of her. So I roll my hips and throw back my head, I moan her name and let her see the wanton creature I become every night after I part ways from her. I let her see, in my eyes, her own reflection of that noble huntress; with her gold hair caught in the darkling winds of greaternight, framed by the moon, and flashing like an orphan strip of morning. I let her see, in me, how I would kneel at the altar of holy morning each night that she hunted and pray fervently for her return until either she came to fetch me—bloodied and victorious—or til I collapsed from exhaustion and hunger, as I did the night she died.

Her jaw is hanging open as she grips my waist and starts fingering me with a greater tempo and lust. Her eyes are practically coals, now; burning with need and hunger, and I watch saliva pool at her lips and teeth to drip down her chin as her eyes track away from mine to fixate on my neck.

Then she curls her fingers one more time, pressing against some rough, sensitive spot inside of me, and I cum with a ragged cry. I feel myself spill over her hand, soaking my skirt and thighs, and in that instant of deafening pleasure, her jaw unhinges and she lunges for my neck.

And stops.

I look down at her, waiting for the pinch of pain that will herald my death, and instead find her jaw locked around neck, but stopping just shy of piercing the skin. Gabriella’s fangs are pressing firmly, indenting the flesh beneath them withing breaking it, and I know that just a little more will be my end. The moment she tastes my blood, whatever fragmentary will remains to her will dissolve like candy floss in the rain, and I will die.

“Don’t grieve for me,” I whisper as I watch blood spill from her eyes like tears. “For without you, I am already dead.”

And I turn my head, baring my neck further, and driving her fangs just slightly into my own flesh.

The moment my blood wells from the pinprick wounds and touches her tongue, Gabriella tackles me to the ground, pushing me to floor as she bites hard on my throat. I cry out, half in pain and half in pleasure as she begins to drink deeply, and at the same time her fingers continue to work inside me. I clutch at her feebly, no longer fighting, as I stare up at the window that looks out and up into the skies of above sunless Artemestra, and as my body grows cold, I climax again to my Gabriella’s fingers.

It’s the last thing I feel as this lightless world fades away.

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To this day I remember this one anecdote I read from what, iirc, was Seanan McGuire regarding her October Daye series. She was talking to her editor (or publisher) about the titular character, and they were complaining that she was ‘too bitchy’, and that Seanan should make her more endearing. So she ctrl+f+replaced all instances of ‘October Daye’ with ‘Harry Dresden’ in her manuscript and sent it back.

She didn’t end up having to change anything.

"unlikable protagonist" and it's just a woman who's a regular human being with flaws

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I cant stop thinking about "to be a trans woman in the larger queer community is to surround yourself with potential ticking time bombs." I've fully lost count of how many time bombs I've essentially begged to see me as fully human. How many I can never know if I fully diffused or if I just prolonged the inevitable. I've lost track of how many have exploded in my face. I try and review the list in my mind and it's like be burned all over again

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CARRIE FISHER Larry King Live (September 12, 1990)

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@lovewritteninthestrands

collection of posts for a very specific dynamic

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@lovewritteninthestrands

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Stop-motion Barbie

STOP no more live-action remakes. We're going the other way now. Animated Casablanca. Animated The Godfather. Animated Oppenheimer. Animated Fight Club.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GX3Z8qG7AKo

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Doing my best, girlie pop.

bring back my opposites attract lesbians...

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This is the kind of messaging you really want to be seeing from the global hegemon

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In Dreams - Chapter 2 of ???

Flower Language

Maybe there's more hints about what this project is. Maybe there isn't. Maybe it's just weird dreamy kinda smut in here. I don't know fam.

NSFW

3496 Words

Read it on Ao3!

I saw you in a dream, you came to me You were the sweetest apparition, such a pretty vision There was no reason, no explanation The perfect hallucination

“Have you decided?”

The question lingers in the air, echoing across Jaina’s memory of all the other times it was asked of her.

This time, however, her answer is different. “I have.”

Sylvanas smirks up at her, sprawled in her chair with one leg over the armrest. It rolls slightly beneath her on its casters as she pushes off with the foot she’s still got on the ground. The plastic and cloth mesh of its backing collide with Jaina’s thighs gently.

“Let’s hear it then,” Sylvanas says as she leans back, pointed ears and platinum hair joining the collage of textures against Jaina’s jeans.

“A fern frond.”

The whirl of tiny wheels and the sudden absence of Sylvanas’ warmth from her leg tell Jaina this isn’t an expected answer. That’s fine with her. She doesn’t expect to be expected.

“Not a flower? Really?” Sylvanas asks.

The chair and the elf within it are facing Jaina now. Soft grey eyes peer up at her questioningly, but not judging. Sylvanas seems to genuinely want to know why.

And Jaina supposes it’s an answer she’s owed. As the florist next door, the natural assumption is that Jaina would want a flower as her first ever tattoo. She loves flowers. She wouldn’t have made a life for herself out of cultivating and arranging them if she didn’t, but that doesn’t mean she feels that strongly about them. That doesn’t mean they mean what she wants them to mean to her.

It’s why she’s put the answer to this question off for so long. To her, a tattoo ought to mean something. Jaina needs it to mean something to her.

“Flowers have a language,” Jaina tells her. “Sometimes, it’s better not to say anything at all.”

Would she get a wild rose to represent a life mixed with pleasure and pain? A peony to wish herself prosperity? A forget-me-not as some homage to all things past and dead and gone?

No. These say too much and too little. Symbols are symbols and stand for a thing that can be summed up in a word or a phrase. Jaina is more than that and also less.

Ferns have a meaning too. She knows this. She knows what it is. Jaina knows all of this and too much about it. She can speak sentences in her arrangement--poems even. She doesn’t think that Sylvanas will know that meaning, though, and that’s fine with her. It’s how she justifies what she does want to say, and it starts with a foundation of ferns.

Sylvanas, however, doesn’t say anything. Her chair rolls across the tile again, to a station she’d begun prepping before Jaina even closed up shop and walked next door.

“Please tell me you’re doing it in color,” is all she remarks after a while.

When Jaina looks over to her, she sees her contemplating a rack of ink bottles. “Yes. I love a good, deep green.”

Grey eyes turn to appraise her, and the smirk beneath them returns. “And where are we placing my latest work of art?”

Sylvanas looks her up and down as if she hasn’t seen the whole of her before--as if Jaina hasn’t been here before a hundred times just to chat, and a dozen or so to go up to her apartment above the shop for more than just a chat. Sylvanas has seen her naked in her sheets. She’s tasted her in every way she could be tasted. She knows her body in ways that Jaina hasn’t shared with many people, and even better than some she’s attempted to share with.

It’s this teasing and pretending that keeps her coming back--the hiding they do amidst the ferns.

Jaina lifts her shirt in answer. She slides a finger across her lower abdomen in an arc, tracing the soft skin above her left hip bone.

“Here,” she says.

Sylvanas laughs, “That’s going to fucking hurt.”

“According to you, they all hurt,” Jaina reminds her.

Though how much, Jaina questions. The woman before her is covered in ink. Her skin contains multitudes of both meaning and lack of meaning. There’s three arrows on her upper arm for her siblings, but also a fat black bulldog smoking a cigar on her left calf that she and her coworker thought would be funny to do one day. It’s an inside joke--she insisted once when Jaina asked--that she’s since forgotten.

Still, it can’t be that bad if Sylvanas is covered in tattoos. Jaina thinks herself just as resilient.

“A limb would be a better choice for a first one, but I’m not saying I think you can’t hack it,” Sylvanas clarifies. “And it would be pretty there. Plus I’d get to see my own art plenty once it's healed.”

Jaina can’t help but grin with her. It’s infectious--that lopsided smile of hers. That same expression made her feel safe and welcome, the first time they met. It’s as much genuine as it is a performance. Meaning without meaning--Jaina understands that.

“Who knows if I’ll feel like showing it to you, hmm?” she challenges, just to get that grin to widen.

“Oh, I think you will,” Sylvanas tells her. “Do you still trust me to freehand it then?”

Jaina nods.

She trusts Sylvanas with many things. It’s an odd sentiment. Months ago, before whatever it is that lies between them now began, she was afraid of this place. Well no, not afraid. Cautious is a better word, but even then that doesn’t capture the whole of it. Jaina had simply never had the occasion to be in a tattoo shop before and assumed too many things about them from her otherwise tangential knowledge. Walking in, asking to borrow someone’s phone to call a locksmith one evening when she’d dropped her keys to the flower shop down a storm drain, had not been her intended first experience with such a place and its proprietor.

But now, she’s here almost every night.

When she closes her own doors and locks them up, Jaina will take a moment to contemplate the mixture of colors their strip of shops makes on wet pavement. Sylvanas’ shop is to the left of hers, looking at it from the street. An aquarium supply and fish store is to the right. The right is always too blue, interrupted only by the black silhouette of the ugly fish that has always occupied the tank facing the window, having never been sold. Jaina’s flowers and the neons of Sylvanas’ tattoo studio blend into a better rainbow together.

All the colors say more than just one. Their cacophony of pinks and yellows and oranges and greens and purples are a symphony too loud and long to be summarized. Life itself--a jumble of abstraction that cannot be fully voiced.

The tip of the felt marker that Sylvanas draws on her with is cold. It tickles a bit, but Jaina stills herself not to move. She lays now on the tattoo chair, flat on her back, shirt hiked up to sit just under her breasts.

Sylvanas bends over her, intent and drawing on her skin. It’s as intimate as a kiss, watching her like this. She concentrates. Her long elven brows furrow. She breathes and Jaina feels it on the lines and shapes that are beginning to form the outline of a fern on her.

“Almost there,” Sylvanas tells her, but Jaina would be fine with staying here all night, watching her like this.

Jaina both dreads what comes next and thoroughly enjoys this part, so she is content to wait. She’s sure she can handle the pain. Thinking back on her life before all this is really just a flash of pain. That’s all she allows it to be. The now is better. Her present treats her better, and she chooses where, when, and how the pain comes.

When Sylvanas does eventually finish, she’s standing behind her, looking at her work in the mirror with Jaina. Her fingers trace Jaina’s hip, just beneath the marks she’s made on her.

“What do you think?” she asks.

Jaina thinks the answer is in her eyes. She can see them in the reflection. She thinks they say that Sylvanas looks good, standing behind her, hands on her skin. She thinks they say that the fern frond is perfectly rendered in a little curl, such that the spotted sori and their spores are visible on the portion that turns to show the underside of the frond. The detail on the sketch is exquisite, and Jaina knows the tattoo will be even better. She’s seen Sylvanas’ work walking in and out of her shop plenty of times on the skin of many people, and has felt the work of her hands all over her body otherwise. She trusts them. She trusts her.

“It’s beautiful,” Jaina says, but the single word isn’t enough. It will have to do, for now.

The tattoo shop is quiet. Sylvanas normally has music on, or a movie. Not tonight. It’s too late and too significant.

Soon enough, there is new music in the buzzing of a tattoo needle. The movie is Jaina, watching the color stain her skin and trying not to move or even breathe too hard.

Jaina thinks that the description Sylvanas gave her before of it feeling like being pinched really hard over and over again is pretty accurate. As those now gloved hands stretch the skin of her abdomen and ink permanent lines into it, Jaina understands why an arm or a leg might be better. There’s both more support and more firm padding beneath them. All of it brings to mind that there is a physicality to this she did not think about before it was happening to her.

Pain is the furthest thing from her mind. It’s there but it’s not. Sylvanas holds her steady like Jaina might hold a bouquet as she cuts the stems down to size--trying to fit it into a slightly too-short vase and keep the arrangement still intact. She doesn’t let Jaina fall apart. She doesn’t let her ruin the arrangement. The meanings of the flowers and the way they’re presented together in formation remains.

Jaina can see that concentration in her again, and that’s what she focuses on most. Sylvanas bites her lip through a particularly challenging-looking curve. She flicks her eyes up and down with the needle when she switches to a shader, making small sweeping movements look like an elegant dance of fingers as color pours into the outline.

This hurts more. Jaina knows the why of it too. Sylvanas showed her the shader head before, how it’s more than one needle, a collection of them in a line. Of course it hurts more.

Still, that’s nothing to her. She can ignore it. She can focus instead on something better.

Jaina thinks that the optimist in her is always on the verge of dying. It has little reason to cling on, but still, it persists. It tells her there’s hope for better days, for sunshine and flowers when she feels like she’s just stuck in these rainy nights. But the rainy nights themselves are not so bad. Not when she spends them with Sylvanas.

Perhaps that’s why her optimist continues to hang on.

It’s over as soon as Jaina’s gotten used to it. It hurts probably the most of all when Sylvanas wipes the last of the green that clouds the finished tattoo off of her with a damp paper towel. This at least is followed by her applying some sort of soothing, bubbling thing with a gentler wipe.

She smirks as a third pass moves this out of the way, leaving nothing to obstruct the piece. “A fine fern, if I do say so myself,” she remarks. “Sit up slow for me now. There you go.”

A hand supports Jaina as she rises in the chair and she doesn’t expect to tremble. She felt so steady and sure there at the end. It was almost meditative, really. Maybe it's the sudden lack of that state that causes her to shake, just slightly. Maybe it's the fear of the new permanence of her altered skin. Maybe it’s the way that Sylvanas holds her together like a bouquet that threatens to split apart--a sonnet in danger of losing its closing couplet.

The hand on her back stills her and guides Jaina to stand, walking her in front of the full length mirror.

The tattoo reflecting back at her is beautiful. It’s perfect and says too much without saying anything.

“I love it,” Jaina says.

She wants to say “I love you”, but that’s not what she’s here for today. It may not be what she comes into this shop to say ever.

Some things are better left unsaid and undefined. Their meaning is in the interpretation, not the saying of it.

Ferns, for example, mean many things in flower language. Chief among these are mystery, magic, and secret love.

Sylvanas smiles that crooked smile over Jaina’s shoulder. “I love it too,” she says.

There’s a lecture after about caring for and healing the tattoo that Jaina will likely need reminding of later. Luckily, they are neighbors. Jaina can come over any time she needs it recalled her, and from the smooth and practiced way Sylvanas recited it, she probably knows it by heart. Jaina does know that the second skin material that covers her tattoo has to come off in 24 hours and be replaced by another piece that is supposed to stay on for some longer amount of time. She plans on getting Sylvanas to do it for her.

She eagerly awaits the day she can be without it, though, and touch her skin as Sylvanas had, reminding herself of what it felt like to be held together so well.

They’re in Sylvanas’ kitchen in her apartment upstairs when Jaina ties her shirt in a knot just below her ribcage to make it stop rubbing against the tender tattoo. The texture of cotton on whatever plastic this is doesn’t feel good. It is eroding the memory of what it felt like to float in the expanse of whatever it was she felt in that tattoo chair, and Jaina can’t have that.

Sylvanas hands her a sugary drink from her fridge to go with the snack crackers Jaina is eating. Something about sugars and needing to replenish them comes to mind, but she’s too busy watching Sylvanas again to register the fullness of that thought.

Her muscles move like playful cats under silk sheets, the bedding being the designs that cover her skin. There is a beautiful pattern in their chaos. Among them, Jaina takes note of a white chrysanthemum--loss, bereavement, remembrance.

She’d never noticed it before.

She takes a sip of the sweet drink, some sort of bubbly fruit punch, and sets the proffered can and accompanying crackers down to trace the outline of the flower on her on the shoulder of the neighboring business owner she doesn’t dare name her lover.

The skin is bumpy under her touch. Jaina has felt this before on Sylvanas. She knows that means the tattoo, while healed, is relatively fresh--recently done.

“Who did you lose?” she asks.

Tonight feels like a night for directness. Jaina feels like she can ask for it and maybe even ask it of herself.

Sylvanas’ eyes follow her fingers. “Not just one thing or person, really,” she answers.

“But there’s just one flower,” Jaina points out.

It’s above the three arrows and between the swirls of a serpents’ form that cover her shoulder. “If I had a flower for each of them, there wouldn’t be enough of me to hold them. One will have to do.”

There’s a smile that accompanies this, but it’s not the same. It belies confidence and shows Jaina exactly the way Sylvanas uses it to cover her own hurts. Perhaps that’s why she has so many tattoos. Maybe when she thinks back to the past, it too is just a flash of pain that makes the present all the more appealing.

Jaina kisses the flower, her lips lingering on textured skin. She says nothing and does something because that says more.

Soon enough, Jaina is sure that Sylvanas has kissed the sweet artificial fruit taste out of her mouth entirely. They’re on her couch because they didn’t make it to the bedroom. Jaina doesn’t need to worry about her shirt rubbing up against her tattoo now, because the only thing it's rubbing up against is the patterned rug on the floor beneath them. Sylvanas is on top of her, but gingerly avoiding making contact with her hips. She’s grateful, but becoming ungrateful as those hip seek contact on their own.

This chemistry between them is something she can’t compose a bouquet for. It doesn’t make sense. It never really has. Just a moment of talking together, of a calm and collected offering of assistance in a time of stress and Jaina couldn’t get enough. She kept coming back and asking for more, and Sylvanas kept giving it.

She keeps giving it.

She gives it in the light scrape of teeth against Jaina’s neck--just a hint of what they can give otherwise. She gives it in the way she brushes her knuckles against Jaina’s exposed breasts, again just teasing. She gives it when she knows how to end the prospective and commit, holding Jaina tighter to her, but still carefully as she slides a hand past the waistband of her jeans and underwear alike.

Sylvanas finds her wet and wanting. She always does. Jaina can’t help it and doesn’t want to. Something unexplained draws them together, and maybe that’s the magic her fern represents. The interpretation is hers to choose and hers to change, and she does so by the minute--by the second even as Sylvanas’ fingers work magic, drawing on her skin in a different way.

She holds her together again. Jaina realizes that the feelings aren’t too dissimilar now. Pleasure replaced pain in a way that makes Jaina think that maybe she’ll add a wild rose to the bouquet of her fern next. Her entire side will be covered in flowers by the time she’s done finding appropriate ones, and she feels she won’t be able to stop. Not even as they claw up over her ribs, which Sylvanas has told her hurt the most of any place on the body for a tattoo.

Jaina spills over the edge all too quick. She’s floating again, meditative, but now her body is not fully hers to control. She can’t be still or silent. She’s still in her jeans, only pulled down enough to expose the new greens of her hip and give enough room for Sylvanas’ hand to cast its own magic. Jaina feels herself tighten around her fingers. She sees green and tastes fruit and peanut butter crackers and Sylvanas.

Sylvanas holds her together. Fingers slip out of her to circle her down slowly. More fingers grasp at her back, and Jaina trembles like she did in the tattoo chair. She moans out the last of her orgasm. She breathes.

Sylvanas kisses her neck again, but this time comforting, not teasing. The hand not holding Jaina to her wipes itself somewhere, then seeks just the edge of the plastic covering her new tattoo.

Sylvanas laughs before she explains herself, “I’m just checking to make sure we didn’t mess this up.”

Jaina is surprised they didn’t. She checks herself, looking down the tunnel that their bodies make together to find the bandage is indeed intact. The fern below it is sore, but still perfect.

“Never better,” she sighs.

Afterglow takes her to a different place of meditation. A moment stripped of need, bereft of thought. She stirs from it to the soreness of her hip and the residual pleasure still working its way up and down her spine.

Sylvanas kisses her one more time. She’s giving that smile again. Not the first one. Not the downstairs, business owner, “Oh sorry to hear that, but yes you can absolutely borrow my phone”, smile. Not the confident and cocky, “I’ve got you” smile.

No, it’s the kitchen smile. The white chrysanthemum. The yellow tulip, stained with red blood.

“Jaina,” she says. Her voice is strange and echoing--distant and shrill. “You have to wake up. Please. I don’t think I can do this without you.”

The lights in the apartment flicker out. It’s dark and Sylvanas’ skin feels cold, tepid beneath Jaina’s otherwise burning touch. The only illumination the vision offers now is the too-blue light of the aquarium store, reflecting back up through Sylvanas’ windows. The fish swims by, obscuring it, magnified like a giant in the play of the light.

And still, Jaina dreams.

[calchexxis]

[calchexxis]

(Sound on.) We’re all doomed.