#Caught in the Cauldron|Jonathan Crane

[brooklynislandgirl]

A small eternity takes root, blooms, then withers in the the time she takes her first step to stand and then finds herself in the frigid gloom of Gotham's twilight maw. And in that time she thinks her heart burned out before it was forcefully restarted all with its constituent ache that she's too familiar with by half. She curses herself for being stupid enough to think that there was any sort of civility between herself and Jonathan. Smug. Impervious. Not unlike that thing that lives in the dark. The one that waits for her to close her eyes and try to sleep before it settles around her, enveloping her like a caul. Forcing her to scramble for every breath though she cannot move a single muscle. Can't stop a single tear because she can't even blink. And just like the darkness, he waits ~ever so pretty and pale and patient~ to devour her whole the second she lets her guard down. Can she grow strong enough teeth to sever their artificial graft? She can ask their professor in the morning, throwing away weeks of work toward the completion of the course. She could become so impossible that he'll be the first one to make the request ~ this is critical for his degree, basic supplement for her own. How dare he try to pick her apart when he is no better than her? In that moment of lashing out in the only way she can, Beth doesn't bother to put herself in her brother's place while casting Jonathan as herself. Instead she indulges the incredibly hurtful idea that at least she had been wanted, once.

When his fingers crawl across her joint as if she'd caught herself on some gossamer web, Beth startled out of her own blinding inner landscape. Her head whips up from a ground she hadn't been seeing, her lips twisting in a chimerical sneer-sigh, bearing the sharp, small teeth. Her eyes lack humanity as they fix on his empyreal features.

Her eyes are lightlessly dead, unbearably gelid even as she gazes at him, reflecting what he strives so hard to project. That odd half blink. And she is only Beth again. She drags her attention reluctantly from his face to his hand and back again, all of her dripping in shabby obloquy. "Don' have to what? Continue flensing me?" Defensive, but not uncharitable. "You don' have to pretend t' be my friend, ya know. Don' have t' pretend ou even wanna be doin' dis project. A hundred different kind of lie we can construct an' still earn a grade." Something cracks. "Is gettin' dark, anyway." Fear gives depth to that whisper of hers, the cold chaffing her exposed face. Her hand of its own accord doesn't leave his hip or even know how it got there in the first place.

@brooklynislandgirl x.

She thinks she hides herself so well. She might even believe it. Maybe it should be a point to his pride that he's a rare capable; does pushing his palm past the surface chill her to a shiver like it tries to him?

He'd like to estrange Beth from her own secrets.

But deciphering whether she holds him above or traps him below has a habit of becoming its own chore, the paradox of knowing her.

'The wall', Jonathan also knows, is one of many pitiable defects about the human psyche, common as wither in autumn. A mind assures to itself the membrane of a shield. But in this it dissociates. There, he's never found a challenge.

Beth's wall is multi-dimensional. He peels layers away— deftly, carefully, an eidolon or a tall tale in a malnourished, wafer body— and others materialize in their places. It's like following a tail through a maze, before the hedges take on the animal fur, the creature skin. It's like wanting.

How would he like to be caught lost in the dark. Unknowing, but known. How would he like to be wanting.

Unlikely. As unlikely as saying 'He. Understands.'

She's up and moving and it gets him just as ice-still. Bl-ink-ing. His left thumb tip twitches when she shoulders her bag by its practical sling. All one beatless moment,

and Jonathan's where he always, itching, sleepless night-thing he is,

—he's thinking—

How attractive she looks when she's this bare. Vulnerability only in fibers, but then she's naked.

She's gone. Sound of a bell crying.

And Jonathan's out in the cloud-damp cold sweat day. His body's still syncing through its first lunge. His hands are empty. Filled with questions without names. He's carried out on the wind's bitter tine with surgical sterility. It recognizes him. At his best, Jonathan tastes like winter.

He catches the ledge of Beth's elbow. His fingers feel softer at the cloth. There's human under here. She doesn't make it to the light at the corner.

“Stop. We don't have to.”

Held by the damp in the wind. Muscle memory for something he's never said. It might mean something else. His eyes might say this. His voice hangnails in his chest.

[brooklynislandgirl]

What are Jon(athan) and Beth's songs?

(he still would prefer the pidgin pronunciation over Jon' :p)

Sweet Melodies || Accepting

Upwards of an hour and the entire time she is carved sandstone. A statue on her own plinth, unbothered by the smudge of his fingerprints in so far as his gaze can be felt. Try as hard as he might even the searing cold of his toneless questions do not pry under her skin and cryogenically cauterise her nerve endings. They both know it isn't like her, this malaise of spirit. More often than not she is a hair's breadth from actual violation of his austerity. Perhaps he is grateful then for the reprieve. Shadows are midway through their slow creep against the coffee shop's accent walls; woodlands, deer, black coffee, dark vanilla. Their passage only settles on her in semi-hindsight, and she rises. Still listless and silent. Looking anywhere but at him. She gets all the way to the door, hand on it. Almost free. She stops until her breath fogs the glass. Drifts listless as foam crested waves, indecisive. She stops close enough that were he to flex his fingers he'd brush indecently against the inside of her knee. The insipid dark knit of the tights. She cuts herself on the sharpness of his periphery and haemorrhages syllables that finally get strung together. "Here. For you." She cannot control whether he listens to it or not. She cannot decide which she'd prefer. ~*~

Echoes || Pink Floyd And no one showed us to the land And no one knows the where's or why's But something stirs and something tries And starts to climb toward the light

Strangers passing in the street By chance, two separate glances meet And I am you and what I see is me And do I take you by the hand And lead you through the land And help me understand the best I can?

~*~

Enigma of the Absolute || Dead Can Dance Saloman hung down her head Laid bare her heart for the world to see. She craved for intimacy. Through darkened doors her aspect veiled with indecision, gazed out sea.

She craved lucidity. Cast adrift from past relationships in her life, Hoisted up the ideal. This was her saving grace. Seas of rage that once assailed her concern for the truth

Had passed her by and left her high and dry in her saviours arms. Across the sea lies the fountain of renewal, Where you will find the whole cause of your loneliness Can be measured in dreams that transcend all these lies And I wish and I pray that there may come a day for a saviours arms.

~*~ Desolation || Adam Hurst "....."

[aerialsquid]

This has been in my hard drive since 2012

Title: Auntipathy Fandom: Batman ‘66 Characters: Aunt Hilda, Marsha Queen of Diamonds, Chief O'Hara, Jonathan Crane (mentioned)

“Hilda Keeny. K-e-e-n-y.”

This wasn’t her first trip to the police station for aiding and abetting but the boys in blue were so polite here that it was hard to be angry about it. 

“We appreciate you testifying against your niece Marsha, Miss Hilda,” Chief O'Hara said. She’d finally talked him out of using her last name but refused to drop the title. “Not many people are willing to testify against family members.”

“It’s nothing she won’t be proud of, dearie. I’m sure she won’t mind.” Hilda adjusted the brim of her pointed black hat and smoothed out the wrinkles in her dress.

O'Hara shook his head and clicked his tongue. “Such a shame that she dragged you into the awful mess. You remind me a bit of my mother, God rest her.”

“Was she a nice woman?” asked Hilda, leaning forward with a carefully formed grandmotherly smile.

“An utter saint. Why, I remember the day I became a patrolman, and my mother said…”

The chief of police’s accent reminded Hilda of a young man she’d met on a boat to Great Britain, when she’d been willing to cross an entire ocean to get away from her own sainted mother, God rest her as far underground as possible.

O'Hara looked about fifty. Ezra was twenty-eight with hair as red as a sunset and a body beaten down until nothing but muscle was left. He’d played the fiddle and a few other things besides, and made the slow, stinking trip far more enjoyable for her. She’d almost taken the train to Ireland with him after they’d landed.Now she was in the most archcriminal-infested city in the country serving as accomplice to her rhinestoned niece Marsha, and while she couldn’t say she regretted anything it was fun to dwell on what might have been.

“A woman like you should be enjoying her golden years,” O'Hara was saying when she came back from her mental detour. “Playing with your grandchildren, maybe a little knitting. Not working for some greedy criminal–no offense to your niece.”

“No grandchildren, I’m afraid, Marsha’s all of I’ve got. But I do enjoy a bit of knitting.” And who said she wasn’t enjoying herself?

Yet again, Hilda was let out on probation. The kindly old lady misled by circumstances act worked every time, and Hilda was quite all right letting Marsha take the fall for her own actions. Besides, they were never careful enough to take Marsha’s makeup away and Marsha always laced her perfume with some of some of Hilda’s carefully prepared love potion. The dear girl was rarely in a cell longer than a day or two.

Besides, probation meant community service and community service meant cooking classes at Gotham State University. They’d never let Hilda be a chemistry professor again after her little 'experimenting on the student body’ incident but cooking was just chemistry one could eat.

She was busy cleaning up after a lecture on stir-fried vegetables (which could always be augmented with a bit of properly prepared crickets, dears) when a thin silhouette flickered by her office. Hilda put her spoons down and ducked her head out the door to watch him as he passed. She’d only caught his face for a moment but it had been a very familiar moment.

Skinny like a rail, pointed features like a bird, and an expression of mild loathing for the people around him. Hilda carefully tailed the young man until he entered his office in the psychology department and shut the door behind him. As she passed by she could hear the thud of him locking it tightly.

“Marsha, do we know a Jonathan Crane?” she asked her niece a few days later. “Only there’s a young man at the university who’s the spitting image of your grandfather.” Whose name had also been Jonathan.

The beast in the cauldron before her let out a loud burble. Hilda cooed and threw in another handful of dead mice, praising him every time he swallowed one without making a dreadful mess.

Mortimer was the accidental result of leaving a potion in the cauldron overnight. His skin was a slimy green with a mouth of needle teeth at one end and a spiney tail at the other. In between there was a set of thin legs that stayed folded up against his body, giving him the appearance of a paper mache snake walking around on pipecleaner limbs.

Also he made the most adorable purring noises when you petted his nose. He was Hilda’s little darling.

Marsha shrugged. She was dressed in that mod style that women found fashionable these days, with a grey Swarovski-studded shawl and a diamond hair comb holding back her hair. For herself, Hilda felt that black never went out of style and a pointed witch’s hat conveyed a certian sense of confidence and mystery. “The name doesn’t sound familiar.”

“Would you mind shaking your phone tree and seeing if you can find out who he is? That friend of yours with the umbrella seems to know half the city and I’m sure your host of admirers know the other half.”

“I’ll look into it.”

A few days later Marsha descended into her basement with a stern look on her face. Hilda squeezed a few more droplets of fluid into her newest potion and set her work aside.

“You were right about the professor,” Marsha said.

“Oh?”

“He’s covered up most of his past and his accent is pure Gotham, but they have his school records on file at the Gotham State University office and Bookworm has blackmail on the dean.” Marsha’s smile was tight, a mixture of victory and mild disgust. “Mr Crane went to high school in Georgia. That part of Georgia.”

Hilda winced. Poor child. “Right place, right timeline. But whose is he, I wonder.” She went digging in the mess of her worktable to find a spare piece of paper. Marsha came to huddle over beside her while she sketched out a diagram of a family tree.

Hilda’s mother Mary rested like the matriarchal tyrant she was at the top of the page. Below them were Marion, Sandra, and Hilda–though of course, Hilda was most likely scratched out of any family trees in the Keeny household. Sandra had only produced Marsha before throwing a rope over a water pipe and dancing on the end of it, and it spoke to Sandra’s character that Marsha didn’t feel herself greatly affected by it. Marion bore Karen and then went off to be some lady of high society, while Karen had cut and run from Mary’s decrepit steel clutches before she was old enough to drink.

There was a reason Marsha had no interest in having children, and that Hilda occasionally provided herbal assistance in this endeavor. The Keeny tree didn’t deserve to grow any further.

“Karen would be young but it would fit,” Marsha said, tracing the tree all the way to the bottom with her finger.

“And I do recall hearing that Mary had taken in some wretched child, gods and spirits protect his poor soul.”

“Karen got herself into a state, came home, dropped the baby on Grandma Mary, ran off again? The timeline fits. 'Crane’ could be the father’s name.”

Hilda gave a curt nod.  

“What are you going to do?” asked Marsha. “The rest of the family’s not even speaking to you and you’re not speaking to them.”

“Talk to him. The least he can do is not talk back.” Hilda reached for her pen again and drew in a few neat lines connecting Karen to “Unknown”, and a final one below to connect her to “Jonathan Crane”. “Besides, you’re a golddigger with a penchant for diamonds and chemically-aided seduction and I dress up as a witch while I concoct potions in your basement.”

Marsha grinned. “True. He might have turned out all right too.”

[brooklynislandgirl]

📸 (now me do me! 🤡🐦‍⬛)

I see your face every time I dream || Accepting

[brooklynislandgirl]

@nightmarefuele

When i say enemies to lovers i do not mean "rude to each other to lovers" I need atleast 2.5 murder attempts

[brooklynislandgirl]

@nightmarefuele may have had a certain Corvid-Boy ask how often does she self-pleasure....for science, of course.

To Add a Little Spice || -

In an instant Beth comes to several different conclusions after he crisply bites out each word of the question. The first is that she is grateful they occupy space in a coffee shop that lies in a triangle between his place, her place, and the university library where they'd begun this latest assignment. An exercise in verbal intimacy and navigating emotional openness in a clinical setting. Becoming familiar and empathetic toward one's patients. The second is that despite being at this for over two hours, the permafrost in his gaze remains. A shiver runs down her spine. One that tasks her will not to allow be visible, though maybe if she weren't wearing her knee-length cardigan, he'd see the rush of chicken-skin it provokes. Third is that this is the first time in weeks she's seen a touch of amusement curve his lips. By no means a full smile, there's a grim sort of tilt to his mouth. Something she'd more likely call smug than welcoming. Beth considers refusing him an answer. There are hundreds of other questions on the list that they'd been given. It would only be fair as Jonathan at various intervals refused certain ones; anything about his family. Anything regarding his childhood in general. Not that she blames him, her first refusal came over the question about the relationship she has with her parents. Sea is her mother. The earth is her tutu. He would likely never understand what she means by that and it skirts too close to a truth that can not ~must not~ be spoken aloud. Not that he'd believe her if she told him. He's too much a creature of logic and reason. Even if she were to flay him down to the bone, down to the soul, Beth would be hard-pressed to find any wonder at all in him. Jonathan isn't an old man for banality to have him so tightly in its claws. She picks through the ways she could answer him. How truthful she's willing to be. She can't quite shake the feeling that she's going to both bore him but also make him question how many of the rumours are true. Will he ask about her brother, then? Make a lot of the same assumptions? If she were anyone else, would she do the same? Will he think she's frigid? Disdainful of anyone she deems beneath her and not in the way meant in later questions? Will he think she's lying? Their notes aren't due for review until next week. Maybe she could suggest reconvening? No, that would be a victory for him. Knowing he got the better of her. Beth sighs. Leans forward and picks her chai off the table and takes a sip. She looks at Jonathan's hands ~elegant, aren't they? expressive~ at his notes, at everything but his eyes, vivid behind his glasses. She takes hers off and perches them in her hair. She can almost hear him purr the words 'staling tactics and furtive movements'. "I…uh….I tried it once. Alone one night, anxious an' maybe a small kine irritable. Night was too hot, too close. Almost felt…alive. I'd try yoga, a bath…." She enunciates the word pitifully so there is no misconstruing her meeting. Her hands end up folding in her lap, knuckles fitted together, fingers upward and curled before lacing together. Her pulse ticks at her throat. Her breath is shallow, uneven. "Swimmin' in da indoor pool. Reading. All da usual sort of t'ings, right? An' jus….put on some music. Saint-Saëns ~ Le Cygne, f'ya curious. Poured myself some wine, lit some pikake flower candles. Uh…jasmine. Dat's what pikake means. I pick up my phone, look at some videos jus' so I had an idea. But….but it no work f' me, you know? No reaction suppose t' have. No heat or passion, no…you know. If anyt'ing it was awkward. Uncomfortable." Her voice lowers to just a bare movement of her lips. "Guilty. Sinful." She swallows and shrugs, now not looking at anything but her hands, almost accusatory. "Don' see a point in it. Don' really see one to any of dat." Now he knows. Now he can dissect her, make fun of the fact that she's … "Wha' ya firs' memory of bein' sexually 'roused?"

[brooklynislandgirl]

@nightmarefuele {{xx}}

Tides, moon-coaxed, exists in waves and in blood. It pumps red and silent through her veins and dances too near the surface of her skin. They kiss her inner shores and recede into only thunderous loudness at how close and how far she and Jonathan are. Even her marrow freezes at the sight of his frozen floes, wishing there was a way to lure him back to life. Beth knows no way to artificially warm him. Tongue caresses smooth ivory within the confines of her mouth when his hand moves. Slides through the darkening sepia of his hair, a thing she's wanted to do a hundred times but finds her own temerity insurmountable. It should be enough that she abandoned the safety of the high-walled home back in Gotham, and took a leave of absence of her studies at his behest. It had been tangential, hadn't it? When he asked? She hadn't thought he was serious until he showed up with two bus tickets ~round trip~ in hand, and she was almost indecorous enough to ask where he'd gotten the money. The air swelters thick and heavy, an oppressive humidity that lacks the salt tang and piscine aftertaste of home. Reminds her of the external biology of the last dream she'd allowed herself, shade and shadow of her host featuring prominently in oozing colours. She half remembers his name being the moan on her lips when she woke from it. Looking out over the impartial land, she finally understands Faulkner in a way she never could quite fathom before, in shades of intimation by Steinbeck. But dead as the stalks and the way their bones rattle together, something feels missing from him. That this is less a maudlin show and tell as it is ripping the bandage off and defying her to still want to stay. It is every answer he's never offered, every question he doesn't care enough to ask. An impassivity in the broken gaze that drops away as soon as she seems to reach for it with her own. He is the sickle and the fallow field. This is his generations and the loosely bound malice that underpins almost everything if you know how to read the signs. She's learning. Learning. Pomegranate heart breaks for him. Red, juicy, ready to stain. She doesn't move any more than a deer might when sighted from the blind. Jonathan's cross-hairs are impeccably sharp. Fingers twitch. A toe extends invisible boundary of dusty earth. Something green begins to sprout from the disturbed space; she's stood there long enough and life leeches into the earth whether she wants to or not. She doesn't have it in her to step on it and pretend nothing happened. Suddenly he changes. She can't tell what it is or the why of it and maybe that isn't really a matter of importance. She almost has to strain to catch that sound though she manages to see the movement of his lips. Forlorn. Inveigling her as he sees fit without any true effort. Makes her ache in the deepest recesses of her earthly confinement. Beth makes herself blind and deaf with a flutter of lashes. Only half sealing away the pellucid irises always too big in her face. They never fully close, even in sleep. She swallows. "…ʻAe…"

Ionaka never said in what language she should say it.

[brooklynislandgirl]

@nightmarefuele {{xx}}

That fey smile freezes on her lips, becomes less warm with trade-winds, and more brittle. Even a single breath exhaled might crack her into a dozen or more pieces. He no more could have surprised her if he'd lifted the notebook with its eldritch script turned into a maze of thoughts and corrections, and smacked her dead in the face with it. Not that she'd make such presumptions of him, she's only really gotten to spend two days and a few hours not counting Now in his company, enforced perhaps because no one else was champing at the bit to take either one on as a partner. Oh, there were rumours about him, as surely as there is about everyone, but the specifics of it didn't really come across as intended; Beth neither heard them correctly, and if she did, they didn't mean much. Had he been privy of the same sort of warning? The Ice Princess come down from her tower to walk amongst the peasantry? There were things about that sort of imagery that were all wrong, but she never bothered with correcting them. She did have royal blood in her veins. Could trace her ancestry back on both sides to the first time Gods set foot on the islands that combined to make her. No one would believe her. She doesn't understand why his curt and clipped words then hurt her as much as they did. She isn't some vapid thing that can't hold a thought in her head. She was trying to be nice, to be fun, considering the season. But there's early frost in his gaze, as if behind the glasses they are formed from chips of arctic waters, just as clear. Just as impervious. And just like a movie she saw as a child, horrified by it to many a sleepless night, her arms curl back toward herself as surely as if the house had been dropped on them instead of the witch. The only thing left behind is the ghost of her warmth, and the popcorn ball. He probably wouldn't eat that, but it's more likely than if she said the apple's covering was dried and shredded squid and dusted with sour dried plum. The apple disappears into an overstuffed bag, and in its place she retrieves first her own notebook ~the covers and some page margins covered in absent doodles, the symbolism thereof meant only for herself, though if he looks closely there's more than a reasonable facsimile of his face sketched in miniature and his name scrawled beneath in purple ink~ and then a case from which she removes her own glasses. "You'll find I'm quite read up on the Pavlovian learning an' memory in rodent models of CNS disorders. I also happen to think it's barbaric, and they" She clearly either means Stanford, or their professors. "Wouldn't do same-sam.. wouldn't do the same if the subjects were human. More's the pity." The small sniff cannot be called anything other than indignant. "Where d'you want to start?"

[brooklynislandgirl]

It is not often that Beth savours the meat of jealousy, the way its shreds get caught in her teeth in this moment or presses against her gums. She could spend the next hour tearing it apart yet never find herself adequate to the task. She, least of all her Kin, is built to endure but not in the same ways. Too frail a human heart. Somewhere in the back of her mind comes the scoff, the unspoken I told you so. The cost of burying the derision isn't affordable. So instead she runs her tongue along the mismatched ivory behind her lips. Sharp tips scraping against wet muscle. Sweeps something away. Maybe herself. She isn't volcano red, but rather rust. Quiet in the blood, an ocean breaking into nothing. Nothing he can reach with those flickering stares. Ones that rise and fall and eventually only fall into the crevices that hold none of her depths. She can hear the splintering between them. And the ticking of the clock. The cars on the street. The silence of his breath. The muddled murmur of the pair behind them with no succinctness, just white noise. Better than the stalemate between them, no pieces moved, no sacrifice, no pawn. She glances askance and waits to see if someone is standing there with a black narrative card with dialogue picked out in paler font. It wouldn't be first phantasm seen out of the corner of her eye. Though in truth, she has to make note that she sees more than that too. Jonathan reminds her of the great houses that cluster just deep enough that they can't quite see Gotham beyond the bridges. Stone towers, covered in ivy whose roots are maybe too rotten from lack of light, an edifice that crumbles at the edges. Jonathan reminds her of the the dozen or so cadets that attempt every year to scratch and claw their way into the Admiral's good graces ~as if the man had any~ and should, just as easily, come and go without leaving so much as a scuff on the marble floors. Jonathan who- -gouges the faintest flinch from her when his voice wends its way around her, all midnight silk that clutches to its chest the a hoard of secrets, and chokes just a small breath from her. There's just enough pause for her focus to find it's way to his lips. So much fuller than her own and she realises now her proportions are just a touch off. That they seem thinner in profile. More pliable. She smiles. One that belongs in the water, swimming very fast, toward a floundering man. She wonders if Jon knows just how close he is to drowning. Her answer is cut on the haole-bias. "None of that 'shocks' me, Jon. Not when you only have to look around. Bowery, East End, Slaughter Swamp, Crime Alley. School-to-prison pipeline in Gotham is five times what it is in Metropolis an' other cities of comparable size. Between Blackgate Penitentiary an' Arkham…" Her hands come up, splayed wide. The star-chart lines of her palms are deep etched, there's just the faintest webbing between those small, slender digits. "Maybe instead of breeding and torturing animals who can't advocate for themselves, treating them in ways that would violate every human rights ethic imaginable, you offer death row inmates a commutation of sentence if they volunteer to undergo the processes and experiments. Clinical trials on the very people you're trying to treat seems far more effective to me than using helpless animals." Sunset shades the golden sand of her skin tone, suffusing her eyes with a spark, a gleam she's never shown in the first few weeks of class. This may also be the most she's spoken, the thoughts connecting faster in process. Hands come down, bridge on the tabletop, and she leans slightly forward. "World's already over crowded as it is, for once people ought to give something back, in the name of science and medicine, instead of take, take, take."

Kintsugi is not split so finely. Even the liquid that cages her sclera — (His life is a study in the phrase 'No time wasted,' he documents the shifting tides of her face. From his first word, though the compressions and extensions of vocal cords is a discomfort, he documents.) — glimmers with riches beyond wealth. Where did she go?

Documenting. From his first word, she documents.

Early frosts are not reputable for their tenderness. Jonathan Crane's climate is an eternal one; it breathes the shimmery afterglow of waning sunlight kisses and blanket white. A cotton dream, which warps the earth into something 'snowglobe.' All his layers thereunder are too familiar with razor-rain cruelty, and the way living things turn to cement there. Smell the fresh, bitter zip of ozone before it steals your olfactories. Meet his stare: now you stand in Oymyakon, Russia.

So he watches her go, retracting like roots of withering Salicaceae, and distantly wonders (in such a way as he has not done for a long time) about this effect which has haunted him, under various presentations, lifelong.

“That is,” (Perhaps finally, after a too-long quiet. All the hall is clashing vowels and puncture- metal-sounds, peers meddling through alternate studies.) “the point.” Jonathan ('Jon,' still half relaxed to his chair) doesn't offer much else by way of explanation for dragging moments. Instead, those glacial things behind his polished Alain Mikli's flutter once again to the tabletop. It's funny. A twitch at his structural pout reflects this. He recognizes an equation she's drawn, perchance unknowingly, in her departure: one becomes two, then two becomes one, and one. Both left with a mystery spoil to signify, ironically: something opened.

His eyes avert again. Squiggles scrawled across notebook paper nonsense. If and when he's mindful of the brain's common inability to separate its distractions from subconscious meaning, he might say there are curious revelations in the nonsensical. Presently, he just goes on, documenting.

“You find the excess breeding and subsequent caging of rodents, done for 'scientific purposes' — prodding; shocking; conditioning, nevertheless — inhumane.”

Now he looks her in the eye. Just enough dryness, there: a lace thread that trails his diminutively pristine, somewhat peculiar elocution. It renders intentions unclear.

“How would you start your own experiments?” Curious. A gamble. Risks, like these, are not yet familiar to his name. Experiment.

[brooklynislandgirl]

If someone were to take a scalpel and cut away the unnecessary parts of her, then use a rib spreader to crack apart the bones, she imagines they would find Jonathan etched deep inside because they are in some way effigies of one another. Of course she'd never say it aloud, she enjoys even the pretence of some sort of dignity that's still left to her. Once in a great while he allows her to see beyond the emotional granite tomb he's embalmed himself behind. She can only imagine his childhood caretaker ~his mother? father? a grandparent or uncle?~ might enjoy going bowling with the Admiral, tacky matching shirts and all. He doesn't wear any of it so close to the surface as she does; this is why he is primordial glaciers and she is the same lava that continues to incrementally grow her islands. And this is how they tend to ruin one another, a death a few seconds at a time in the making. He'd say it all so much more poetically anyway. Words dance on his attendance where hers have to be pried out of her with grudging hands and bitterness. She sees the sharpness of his gaze slice through her. She doesn't bleed out of certain kind of spite. The fact that his opinion of her matters is something she has yet to come to terms with and she can't understand why it feels like she's skating on solidified acid. She wonders how long it will take for him to find nothing substantive to mine beneath her facade that he can use to his advantage. That will be the day he abandons her; looking behind as he steps into night, she will turn to stone. It might eventually be a pleasant ache, that absence of being. Maybe she'll be able then to take her place amongst the rest of the ideas within her manor and fade from the public eye. Someone someone thinks they remember, but don't quite. A fashionable lie. One even he would be capable of, if he bothered with her at all. She swallows all of those feelings behind another sip of the rather unremarkable sparkling wine. Cheap and rough, she notes feeling a wave of warmth flutter through her. Refusing to think its more her company evoking that feeling that becomes lead in her belly. The arrangement of his face should be criminal; there's a lethality in the cusp of his gaze and the insouciant drape of his body. She's drawn toward that regard. "The hubris of Icarus," she whisper-sings in challenge, a dare beribboned in her grudging admiration. The stakes rise with the lift of her chin, giving her feet in height her frame can never measure up to. "So prove it. Gi' me a reason, Ionaka." The taunt has a second hidden edge and it cuts her perhaps deeper than it does him. The colour in her cheeks and the way she turns her face away sings ships to their doom with the urge to follow. But just like that? Ionaka slips from her grasp and leaves nothing behind of himself but the ghost apple of what ~who~ he had been. The same stranger she'd been partnered with at the beginning of the year. Jonathan.

She sets the half-sipped flute down and shakes her head. The accusation burns in her gaze as she turns crisply on her heel. Words misconstrued within their context, wounds inflicted by his mere existence. Not you, too. "And you," she bites. "You aren't half as clever as you imagine yourself to be." Neither maenad nor fury, she attacks his softest underbelly, the thing he knows sets him above and apart from everyone else.

Back ramrod straight, chin held level, she turns on her heel. Like mist on the morning tide she starts to cross the room, putting distance between them before she can say the worst things imaginable. Ask him why he delights in cruelty when she's the only friend he has. Which isn't saying much but at least she's loyal. What fun is it for either of him if she simply exposes her heart raw and bloody? He needs to feel like he's earned it, pried it out of her with his own superiority. How else can he feel confident enough to bite? And that's when he'll choke. @nightmarefuele

He could taste that berry distillation on her lips. If he just breathed.

His heart would rather drink its fill on hard-stop denial, deny oxygen, clot his lungs with the feeling of falling. Thump, and then the thump just resounds, etches into pleural tissue the way she etches honey into him.

'Shattered.' They both deal in things great in their smallness; in this, Jonathan muses, they are the other's pulley: she knows a dictator. He knows a monster.

He would fill her contours.

He feels nomatocysts salt his skin, without a kiss.

There's a duality neath the close texture of his quartering gaze, which posits for Beth a second mirror; she surprises him, while he is utterly aware that she is not surprising. Were he anyone else here, he might think her entirely too fitting for the collective plate. Were he any one of those left outside, he might believe her worse. He might shun the quiet she pulls around herself like a protective salve amid her cotton layers, disdain it as farcical, as airs.

He wouldn't. He doesn't need to imagine it. He will ever be the outsider, looking in. Few and far are the moments when he brushes the small of her waist, when he feels the burning sinew there, the nerves. When he guides the underlying score of her insecurity in his hand.

It's all right there, all jagged chips and phantom edges between mouth and movement: Beth's hands say what her spectral veneer refuses to divulge. Jonathan, however, doesn't cling; it is one sin he may be incapable of. It is one fractal he might pluck for benign inspection. There are so few ways one might connect humanity to him. But Jonathan does understand — if, perhaps, the way a lesser predator — mutinous, quick, clever — understands the prey it shares with a looming apex.

Would that he could kill the mornings for which she yearns. Remind her that nocturnes would sing her body sweeter.

Jonathan eases his spine back against the bartop, watching her. He might be smirking at those honeyed bubbles. No; there's laughter on his lips' velvet fringes, his Alain Miklis limn more than glare. He props his brow, still sober — can feel their mutual spectators still, the wolves behind her, and perhaps their maws aglow — and brushes an edge of his chin. Mouth's subtle bow. Absentminded are his fingers.

“I can do better than God,” he murmurs, slipping, there, back into their delicate sport, chassis of rivalry. But then he nudges his chin forth, austere as the grave. “And you would do so much better to forget them.”

Strictly distant; aloof; unforgiving. His presence unsettles. His eyes have made baying Danes whimper.

None but the subtlest guile, now. His breath could polish Beth's moldavite eyes.

“You're smart. You know you need them — need to circumvent deficient opinions. Sure. But you shouldn't do their work for them.”

Jonathan knows long games like he knows the cold.

@brooklynislandgirl

[brooklynislandgirl]

Animate only insofar as he can gird himself in quiet spite. A reflexive turn inward and that unflinching gaze falters somehow. Recoils from what he sees in his mind's eye. Maybe he doesn't have to find voice enough to answer the question because she can feel it. She can smell it. A bitter sourness in the faint exhale. The tiniest constriction of muscle as his stomach tightens before it has a chance to drop through his wingtip soles. Old man's shoes, leather and gently polished, bottoms worn in his step pattern and maybe someone else's. She can't imagine him wearing designer sneakers. Not jeans or tee-shirts that bare pale-skinned arms. The freckles she's so certain cover him head to toe dotting their way down to his wrist. She can imagine a much younger Jonathan still in his suits, a leather satchel rather than a backpack with the current cartoon favourite's face emblazoned on it. What she doesn't imagine is Jonathan any happier than he is now; a sad little waif with hair that sticks out in odd directions like straw. All eyes and pouted lower lip that is no affect. Thick horn-rimmed seated askance on the bridge of his nose. A thicker drawl than he has now, the one he tries so hard to hide but that comes out when agitation settles into his bones and rattles him before he finds his iron resolve. For all that she can imagine his child self in the physical world and how little he must have taken up in it, she can't sound the depths of his nature. Was he a sweet and sunny little thing? Was he toads-and-snails-and squeezing small furry bodies so tight that they don't even cry out when he crushes them? Or was he more like her than he would ever admit to? The afterthought. The unwanted thing more trouble than he was worth, to whom negligence clings to like the smell of cedar wood-smoke when autumn sets in? Did he hold the power to unnerve and disarm even then? Questions she can't even begin to know how to ask. Ones she's sure would strip him bare and throw walls up faster than a blink, thicker than the Wànlǐ Chángchéng. She shouldn't have asked. In hindsight there is as much wisdom as there is regret. She retreats into the impervious black knit that enfolds her where her Grandmother does not open Her void arm beneath her. A skittish creature run to ground and worse, she knows what it looks like to that trenchant gaze that, when paired with the silken venom of his low voice, cuts to her quick; she's every bit the coward she claims she isn't and he can see eternity on the other side of her, she's so transparent. Maybe, they should have remained on campus. She gate-keeps by drawing her knees up to her chest with little difficulty. Her lashes lower like draw-bridges but not quick enough that he can't see lifelong haunts reflecting back at him. And not so quick that she doesn't notice the tilt up of his chin. The way attenuated fingers swallow the pen. A shift of couch-side manner that is hard to miss even when her soul shrieks silently on the inside. And the stone, rather than a die, is cast. It strikes true, shattering any sort of professionalism that she might pretend to. Her brows furrow and her lips thin, but she has the good sense not to say a word that he might continue if he feels like it, despite the hesitation in his pitch.

But she's already lost him. Maybe it's better that way. What does her blood taste like on his tongue when he takes his next bite. She wasn't making notes based on the unspoken denial of question, of everything he doesn't say leaving a crater in her from where the words and his reaction land. It is entirely her own fault in leaving herself exposed. You wear your heart on your sleeve, where anyone can touch it. Or so she had been told, complete with the implication that no one would ever want to. The truth of the matter is…it began before she'd taken her first breath of life. A girl. A useless thing. An indictment of an impulse beyond the ability to control, a woman found too beautiful not to possess. At least the religious upbringing within him prevented him of being rid of his shame. But not enough to keep Iwalani from bearing the brunt of his displeasure whenever his ship ~how ironic the words Mercy and Comfort can be~ was in port. Maybe it was the ceaseless upset. The crying that could only be stemmed by a comforting brother's presence. Too loud, too small. Snivelling. Clingy. Too brown. Broken before it came out of the box. A monster imperfectly formed. Useful only as a paper doll and a pawn in politics, in perpetual promise. Why can't you just be normal? Her mouth opens. It closes again without anything…even a breath…coming out. Oceans rise from within and threaten to spill over the rims of her eyes. Maybe she has slivers of iron, too, because of the effort she gives not to give Jonathan the pleasure of seeing her cry. She shakes her head. "No." And with that, she slides out of her chair after unfolding her limbs. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a crumpled twenty-dollar bill which gets dumped unceremoniously on the small table. Then Beth starts to gather her books and her bag. She doesn't expect him to stop her.

Ruffling her feathers. Rustling through the dead-leaf bank that seems as if to clutter her nimble tongue, and staunch whatever disruption sputters there, past her throat. Places where dermis pinkens and pulse quickens. The body is a lair, after all. This hesitating does not surprise him —

The shop is a receding bustle outside the pressure-folds of their alcove. Beyond the binds of his question. Eyes. They vivisect, relinquishing nothing. Beth belongs in a vial. Briefly, he wonders about the chemical signature that fear leaves behind in the wake of perspiration, and what might her closeness smell like, refined thusly?

— that she services him with an answer, does.

Glasses go to hair. (His eyes lift apace with this. 'Stalling tactics. Furtive movements.') His pen disappears between folded, slender, delicate hands. Listening.

It isn't entirely what he expects. Expect. As if he's wondered. Bath. There's a reflection of amusement across his face. Like a light that strides across a night-hour pond. Has he? (It's in his own breathing — expectation. Her 'too close,' living night come to ensconce his ventricles in cavity of awakened stillness.) Jonathan watches her hands. His eyes rest there like unlit embers, chafing the skin. Curling fingers — So diminutive. Saint-Saëns. His lips experience their own softness, pulling up on the stroke of her clarification: Jasmine. Jonathan carries his embers up to the sloping ridge across which her pulse carries her fretful nervous. There is a similar sort of pulsing in his jaw. No heat or passion. Uncomfortable. Furtive movements.

And sin. Jonathan Crane doesn't answer to sin.

' "Quiet, Jonny. Shush. You know what happens when you're bad. You did it anyway." '

Ah. Doesn't answer to sin, Jonathan thinks, does he?

' "I will not repeat myself to insolent little boys." '

Jonathan recalls the clatter of wooden bar over door. And then the crows come, to pluck out his soul.

The way he smiles is reflexive. Beth would find it is not to spite her, and in fact is joyless. He questions how she might be so skilled at tempting the subject matter back toward his parentage at every other turn. Which personal memory of your father stands out as the most formative? How would you describe your mother, using three words? He questions why she's so tenacious.

Father: Perhaps when he told me he was proud of me — after introducing himself. Perhaps when I nearly killed him.

Mother: Fickle. Deficient. Dead.

'What was the first . . .' is not the same question. Suppose it had been, and provided in its asking the manner through which he might refuse. Would that he had a better riposte above wordless, wintry staring.

Because Jonathan's eyes are dilated things. Not for lack of composure — he is rigid in his impassivity. He might be thinking backward in time; except that he does not need to. He might be questioning whether it was worth it: acquiescing to Beth Riley's proposal of partnership.

He inhales and scatters 'might be's' to the wind. A lack of that typical, procedural smoothness about his diaphragm; a tautness between lips, as he wets them. "About as pleasant," he says, finally, and pauses, just so, to ensure his meaning goes unmissed, "an experience as yours. I —"

Fuck. Shut your mouth. It's more physical demand than instinct. There's an uncanny sort of dissonance, which occurs when the body is locked away from the mind: Trauma, or a related memory, or even a sound can produce that high. As pure and enduring a source as any drug — more so. A psychopharmacologist's dream. He feels the pallor as it seeps through his face, his fingers. He feels the cold in his fingers and the sting of corvids' mandibles, and the vile violence of old hands, clutching where they should not be.

Clinically. Everything that comes is so, very clinical, locked behind the frozen slates that regard Beth. His jawline is too tight. Tendons along his neck, too pronounced. He wore a dress shirt, no jacket. He's undressed.

Parasympathetic response. Acetylcholine. He pictures the flood from release to blood vessels. He pictures just how much it must take. He knows his thoughts are distorted, but he doesn't need to think to know it's been over a decade, since last he felt so much. More gold in her irises than I thought there was. Between the honey, and green.

His tongue clicks. But the sound is . . . soft.

"I. Understand."

Furtive movements, now, are locked away under rigidity. He speaks very prudently, but with indubitable exactness. He does not retract his gaze.

"The sensation of . . . violation, that permeates your own body." (Waiting. Breathing.) "You. 'Sin.' Where did that start?"

The sound is soft.

[brooklynislandgirl]

Each step she takes is a forward march whilst girding herself in emotional armour. Each piece is a principle her grandfather had learned many lifetimes ago, and whispered to her from the edge of the sea; Rei- politeness. Gi- integrity. Yu- heroic courage. And so on. She cannot lean on Jonathan to prop her up. If anything his own emotional well being is far more in jeopardy than her own. Though with a sidelong glance, she realises he puts up a good front. Professionalism. He'll make a good therapist, some day. No windmills to tilt at, she has spent the last hours wondering why he's bowed to the pressure of their professors. Authority is an ugly noose around his neck. He is marble now. Smooth, cold, impervious and she misses the slight warmth that rises when she manages to pry lose a genuine reaction from him. She still harbours foolish hope that his permafrost will melt over the course of the evening. Something once they pass the threshold reminds her of a falcon tethered by jesses to her wrists. All wide eyes and caustic displeasure. And still he seduces her senses. Words so deeply embedded in her own psyche as to be a murderous task to pry them free. A surging uptick of pulse, a dilation of pupils in the shimmer of their own haze apart from opiate or bittersweet tannin, nothing having passed her lips but breath. She leans in, the idea of her lips ~berry succulent~ grazing the air that is trapped between stray locks and the edge of his ear. … "My era's obscuring mirror Shattered Because it magnified the small and made the great seem insignificant. Dictators and monsters filled its contours."… A close lipped smile and air kisses. Small talk that means nothing, vapid little pleasantries that don't register in her own mind except the moments when she introduces Jonathan to them and when they flow outward and onward, she imparts to him the true opinion she holds. Little secrets about various habits on how they fit into that dress whilst ruining their dental enamel, how many times they've slept with their one and only. They talk around Beth without noticing she is there. Perfect little specimens on paper with nothing of style or class beneath. New money. No wealth to speak of but pretends middle class is the new black. "…Now when I breathe its jagged shards pierce my heart and instead of sweat I exude glass…" His acuminous question then catches her off-guard at the heart of her social ennui. "Bein' look on like a cow at auction?" That is what it feels like. Mouths flooding in anticipation of a lifestyle she gives away hand over fist. How little they understand the price-tag that comes with it. And maybe Beth holds Jonathan's wrist just a little too tightly for fear of slipping away in his estimation, while he becomes another one of them. Not that any of this seems to be something that entices him. Maybe that's what she appreciates about him beyond the intellect. Beyond his veneer of disdain for everything including himself. She's never met anyone who can compete with her own self-loathing. She answers him in more Kajal Ahmad. "The pale celestial bodies never bid her 'good morning!' nor do the creative stars kiss her. Earth, where so many tender persuasions and roses lie interred, might expire for lack of a glance, or a scent. She's a lonley dusty orb, as she observes the moon's patchwork attire knowing the sun's an imposter who sears with rays he has stolen for himself and looks down on the moon and earth like lodgers." She peels herself away from him only briefly to take one of the glasses whose liquid is the colour of her skin though the bubbles that rise to the surface lack a certain acidic disdain. "Prospero will tell you dis is is a 2008 Cristal." She holds the rim of the glass just above her upper lip. "Is actually a Chandon Brut. You can tell because of da aspirin aftah-taste. Drink a' ya own risk, but I can promise you if you walk me home, I can offer you Caravalhas Memories, which is a tawny port. Make you see face of God."

Oh, he's seen just how near-to-heart they are. One, maybe two, or betimes more than she can shove inside her reticule with all its obligatory intellectual properties, University-sponsored and others, (each of which he would freely admit to probing from a distance). The latter mention on his pursed lips is in regular rotation with the others. When her mien reconfigures itself like that, at first a thing borne so evidently from the subconscious that it surprises him — and comes close to exacting worse — before the unabashed, blatant twist within her heterochromia takes her further, he does not quite realize how the mild curve reflected on his face is like an acceptance of accolades.

Backward steps. Trace of her laughter across his spine. Gotham City skies may do what they will; her face becomes her own sun.

He idly ponders how often she burns herself. Or has his attention pushed her to catching fire?

When she leaves him at the door to her lesson, ingress to a lecture hall he has never ambled this close to, let alone crossed, the number of hallways that lead — backward — to his own occur to him at a mental distance to rival the physical one. There is a feeling of a grin skulking somewhere between throat and chest, when he departs. He offers up no riposte of his own.

It's Friday evening when he realizes anew that life without an automotive to his name is a wonderful boon. There is no perfect quiet anywhere on campus, parks and greenwood notwithstanding. There is a subtle play of static about his thinking, and a rhythmic pulse rate's incline between his ears. Blanket edge of paranoia in his eyes what do not look at her. He relished that time in motion, walking here, much as he presently sinks into the dissonance of a mind, estranged.

(And weight is nestled inside his pocket, an object too slight to be so heavy.)

But his gaze is veiled in guile while she encroaches on his arm with hers, she's too sheepish for the mouth which days ago hooked razors in him, and he too indifferent — hands in pockets — too physically composed. His stare hasn't stilled once since he arrived.

❛ river… snow… some one vague faded in a mirror ❜

❝ ❛He strode toward the flesh,❜ ❞ seeps, more winter breeze than recitation, from between firm lips, as they follow pressed coats and plush blouses through doors belonging to Pride and Prejudice . . .

. . . his eyes cold phenakite flickering presence graze her lips,

temple . . . her right, his left,

engraving in his silence a missing piece unsaid . . .

❝ ❛Where identity . . .❜ ❞

. . . lips pluck tiny gemstones from livewire closeness

beside her ear . . . her left, his right,

imparting some such vulgar wisdom, the warm mint caress of his breath . . .

Voice fang-laced with his early paranoia, the edge scarcely hid. He feels each and every brazen stare on her — heir to the 'Riley fortune' — from the moment they walk in and his skin is dripping in ivory, hers, liquid bronze. What eyes desire his he notices only for paranoia's sake.

❝ ❛Red nitrous fumes under the orange gas flares,❜ ❞

❝ ❛Sewage delta,❜ ❞

❝ ❛Caught in this dead whistle stop.❜ ❞

Stop. He glances down at her alongside every other stare. Fang-laced, bitter edge. ❝ Does this happen everywhere you go? ❞

[brooklynislandgirl]

Truth be told, she might have been amongst the adoring and opinionated throng of Prospero's {what even is his real name?} retinue in his salon. She has always been well read with a gift for turning words on pages into panoplies of colour and form through her art. What bars her from his cadre of intellectual sybarites rests solely in the fact that it takes her far too long to speak a thought aloud in such a way that it's pleasing to the haole ear. That motion and muscle convey just as much meaning as regurgitated word. She learned this the hard way, came away with the scars and little else. But Jonathan doesn't need to know that. Her contempt for Prospero is enough. But when Jonathan deigns to reach forth ~she is never sure if he is Michelangelo or the vengeful god gifting Adam his awakening~ and invite her to the gathering, each carefully chosen word chipped from his own less than enthusiastic disdain? Honestly she's too flattered to decline, however politely. She might have even come close to offering him a shyly veiled smile, points of teeth and part of lips, except the offer comes with an explanation of some unvarnished truth ~he's being made to do this, the same way she is made to obey the Admiral~ and a subtle backhand that involves no actual touch. He knows better than anyone that she never has any plans on most nights that do not involve textbooks, hours of listening to the same lecture over and over until she's mined every nugget of instruction. Like him…she doesn't have friends. But they do have each other. He finally gets it though, just after the raking stare that imparts her with a subtle chill and suppressed shiver, the curl of her lips with mention of two of her nearer-to-heart luminaries. Jack she could forgive because everyone knows On The Road, and never stay for Dharma Bums or Desolation Angels. No, what gives her offense, is Ginsberg. As if they have any right. Her lip curls flashing something cold, vast and disturbingly predatory. He might have told her Captain Cook was a national hero. And she turns, her careful steps now taken backwards as she addresses him. Each word is a razor. "….wet dream flesh

Creakily the

The last feeble faces…"

A hiss in place of the usual anaemic nature of her voice.

"Masters of colour, exalting their dogs. Unaware of The vagrant shadows on the Glass and Metal streets."

Lilting shoulder. "Everyone forget William S Burroughs."

Of course she says yes. Of course she goes. She gives him the same appraisal as he had. The suit four shades darker than his eyes, but near identical to the vest, the pin-stripes of his shirt. The only disappointment is that neither of them are garbed in red. By the time they approach the door, she has crabbed her way closer to him, twig of an arm wrapped around his own. Trills a warm, enticing laugh at something witty he never actually said. Appearances, dear Ionaka, are after all, everything.

@brooklynislandgirl , because i am seldom one to refuse a 'pretty please.'

It is the campus' own "Dead Poets Society" — its admittees defend, quite adamantly — wherein which "WE DO NOT" (the flyer reads, in bold Helvetica beneath date, location, and time) "SOLELY OBSERVE POETIC VERSE." According to some sources, it would seem that Fitzgerald will be making an appearance this Friday. Unfortunate.

"Purely pretentious," Beth announced (albeit with those particular inflections of hers he still, admittedly, finds unreplicable) as they were crossing one of many stone colonnades that bridge the academy's disparate wings, ". . . too-grand house. Because, what's the point of leaving home when you could fit half of Gotham inside your downstairs bathroom?" He remembers hers being a focus too honed on its next subject to notice the ironic look he slid her. He respects that focus.

Jonathan errs very near to sighing when he bestows under her chin the dread flyer for her inspection.

"Will you go to this." A request about his airy timbre is unmistakable. "With me. Together."

Perhaps one too excessive a clarification. He conceals the other hand in his pocket, to put it somewhere. Tracks her with his eyes, up-to-down.

"Some of our esteemed faculty believe me to be lacking in extracurriculars." (Down-to-up.) "Unless, of course. You have more promising prospects for your Friday night."

He is not compensating.

("I DO NOT SOLELY OBSERVE FRIENDLY GESTURES.")

"I've heard there may even be discussion and analyses around Kerouac. And I did see Plutonian Ode: and Other Poems on the list."

If she doesn't accept the paper, he'll offer himself up for the next live dissection in the biology lab.