#m. au | music!verse ben: nowhere man

[kylo-wrecked]

{ cont'd from here }

Ben sterns his face with a name-brand expression he hopes Brunnhilde recognizes as disgust, his eyes narrowing at her knowing smile. Cats have looked less offended by bumbling, mucky-mitted toddlers. "You ever want spaghetti, I'll make it." Steps around Brunnhilde's kitchen island, away from her. He soaks up her half-dimmed home chef's station with the last of his body's width he hadn't snorted or smoked away. "You light your cursed candles." "Pottery Barn," Ben laughs, banging Brunnhilde's cabinet doors like he's shaking the spirits from them. "Sure. And the apple was from Whole Foods. And I'm from..." How does he feel? He stares into a liminal cupboard. A weirdly empty cupboard with a thirsty grail inside it. And within that? Maybe there's the stretch of two hundred and fifty years staring him down from a box that seems to have no back. No end. "...nothing. Nowhere," he mutters and shuts the door. The adjacent cabinet reveals angel hair, tinned olives, and a mini jar of fig jam. Ben twists and watches Brunnhilde from over his broad black shoulder; his head cocked like some bird of prey, cheek partially obscured by raven hair, hands forearms still resting on the bottom shelf. He blinks. "You loot that stuff from an ancient tomb or Eataly?"

@valkxrie

[kylo-wrecked]

@chromium-siren

been actively avoiding posting this but fuck it , modern au time ( i just wanted to draw hux in a tweed suit jacket)

anyways, this thing took me two-ish weeks to finish cus 70% of the way through finishing it i scrapped phas and hux's pose and redid it from scratch, so if you want to see that here's the link for it + alt colors

[kylo-wrecked]

{ cont'd from here }

An hour of staring at this next prize revealed behind Pinto Flare curtains: it's a fur coat with genuine white leather trim, a thirty-inch electric range, Connie jumping up and down because the third prize is a Vega notchback wagon, and the medical office pastels of radio-trained voices and tooth-drilling incidental music.

Phone buzz cuts through the fog and Ben slow blinks at 'Fair' after a fifty-three-minute break. At ‘Soldier.’ Oh boy, oh boy. Hell yes, that’s who you could count on to break you out of a hospital day stay. Ben’s almost giddy. And it’s not the drugs! They didn’t give him anything stronger than an IV. This is all

[Solo] him

A pause, then another violent tap tap tapping hailstorm over the sound of a background buzzsaw. His arms still feel heavy. His head swims, but he isn't drowning.

[Solo] fine [Solo] fucking thank you [Solo] seriously thought i had to block you [Solo] 100 E77 Street [Solo] they think im a danger to myself? [Solo] this is child’s play as far as im concerned [Solo] i cant just lie here all day haha

Bob Barker explains the four spaces to Connie on TV. A nurse glances nervously through the windowed door of reality. Ben bends his neck over the little window in his hands. Pins and needles bite his fingers as he types.

[Solo] refrigerators were so small [Solo] do you g et why i cant be here [Solo] itll be me and bob forever , my brain will explode [Solo] the # of doors ive watched open on brown schemed mid consumer goods [Solo] is like [Solo] indefensible

And there's a longing in his stomach, a hunger for something untenable, while the pastels berate him with things that have never mattered, and his fingers prickle, and his ear rings.

[Solo] im sitting in a dentist’s office while i decompose on a hospital bed [Solo] why not let me

He ignores the unfinished nature of that unfinished sentence.

[Solo] you know? [Solo] how soon can XxSoldieRxX get here

@silverjetsystm

[kylo-wrecked]

{*butterfly knife emoji*}

Her tongue was heavy in her mouth. Her ears repeated her pulse to her, rushing in and out like the sea. All salt. All air. She watched him carefully; this so-far nameless man with hair that fell like art. Who had a full mouth and who had laced the filter between her teeth with liquor. I'm not a bitch. I'm a cunt. Words ricocheted off the heavy bass, off the lights, and the selfish haze of 3am. He was all prowling. All spine. Mercy switched its place between them each time ownership was taken of a highly contested cigarette. Around and around, red cherry smouldering with all that remained of Asgard. She revealed herself; bone and blood and feathers unfurling from her back as she took a drag, her gaze sitting serrated and unyielding upon his face. A tongue slid between her teeth. Hers? Hers. They weren't going to fuck. Not yet. Fucking would put an end to the night and the edge it pressed against her throat; the column long and bare and begging to be consumed. Mercy, mercy. Maybe begging for it was all that was all she had left. Air from her wings pushed his hair back. His fingers brushed her lower lip as he retrieved his coffin nail and refreshed its liquor taste. Honey and hops. Peat and barley. Mercy, mercy. It was not in her nature to beg.

It wasn't in his nature to be merciful, not while he had his teeth sunk in the Big Sour Apple, tracing her through the mullion of absinthe-dark clubs and boudoir catwalks and the insides of great drawn oak rooms regular people never see through Upper Manhattan's windows, where gods come to die. And beg. 

He was inky hair, and a crooked smile, and cheekbones that seemed a shade too pale, and any number of epithets. Paragon, Just Lucky, Asshole. Black damask pants, black dog bite—

You're right. You are a cunt. 

They exchanged cigarettes with the brush of fingers, talons to callouses. Long trailings of tobacco smoke, longer legs lengthening in a chlorine lagoon. She rested her claws on his collarbone, and he sat in the 3 AM haze. The water and the moon lapped his calves. 

No courting. 

He dreamt of her once. More than once.

No touching.

He ate an apple.

No fucking. 

Her wings are born on a dark Thursday evening. The shadowed sky is patient, swelled for a storm. His hair settles, and his eyes fizz, filling with light the way the cigarette's beacon does when he inhales. Clicks his heel on the part of tar beach their sphinxlike hosts didn't cover in gold, and mosaic, and Bacardi. The El Dorado's bays and balconies are green-gold with 808 bass. 

This may be their first meeting or their fifth. 

He showed her the seeds on his tongue.

"You lick those clean?" Motions to her pinions, her pride, with the coffin nail's cherry. Threatening proximity, conflagration, but he only holds it out to her, refreshed with the taste of liquor and metal. 

No mercy. 

@valkxrie

[kylo-wrecked]

It's a small pot. One she had been nurturing; not that anyone would think her so. It was filled with black soil and housed tiny green shoot. A sprout of a thing, barely the length of her little finger. Resilient and living, despite it all. She had two others at home, and three in the freezer. Not enough to start an orchard, but enough to give one as a gift.

"Buzzfeed told me you're a Scorpio." Her voice holds the wraith of a smile. She wonders if there will be a big party later - all glamour, and all for other people. For now, its quiet. "Do you want me to sing you happy birthday? It's an offer I'll only make once."

The earthy terracotta doesn't surprise him, the gesture only slightly. Fills the bowl of his soul with apples baked in honey and Southern Comfort. Heart like a hand pie. 

"Don't take everything you read to face, baby," he says, flashing his wolf's grin, an angle he knows she likes. "It's not becoming. I've got squares in my chart like you wouldn't believe." All joined by other constellations. 

Brunnhilde's sprout of a thing finds itself under Manhattan's mirrored light. Someone else will have to look after it; Ben knows just the person who'll hate him and do it anyway. He considers the shoot. Then sidling back, he lifts Brunnhilde’s chin, considering her with the eyes of someone whose parties are always thrown in his honor. His kiss is his thanks and his blessing.

"Hm. You know some people can't sing sitting down?" His grin dims, becoming something dark and delicious, a raw cacao. "Sit down." 

Nods his head toward the sofa hovering on a discreet mold and above the rug like a UFO. 

"Go on."

Maybe her voice would be a gift. Or maybe it would be another curse.

@valkxrie

[kylo-wrecked]

Marc is a tall drink, too. Ben studies him, fiddling with Steven’s cuff links, smiling a vicious smile. Touché.

Sure, Ben could have been a rabbi in some other world. An architect of buildings or people and psyche, belief. Unfortunately, he is what he is. That’s wound up. That’s staring at Marc from within the cathedral of his stifled silence while his amped bones rattle on an Eames he chose with a more dominating glance than the one that now passes Marc.

Marc’s answers are more and yet less obvious than Ben anticipates—no, he doesn’t feel bad; he feels tricked somehow. Now he holds still to suss for a change in the room, whole body attenuated and focused like a fucking tuning fork, and maybe he’s just mountain high, but he feels a shift, a new shape forming between them as Chris Clark rasps the chorus for the last time before spoofing, sympathy and silence falling over Ben’s living room like a thin frost.

Ben sniffs, coils in his seat. Shivers. The record runs out of lines. A man admits to the lover he doesn’t know he has that he is not interested in having a life. It’s almost funny. Almost, but it makes his chest tighten instead. Everything about this is dumb and out of tune. And yet… it plays over and over again.

Messy.

Messy, messy.

Is it telling the way Ben turns to Marc? Is it telling that his response to casual, warm, funny ‘Jake’ is chagrin as visible as the smoke swirling just beyond the panoramic? Smoke from bright lights gone to ash. Shifting as Ben shifts in his seat. Unraveling.

Ben glares defiantly at Marc. Marc, now one button down and sitting with collar parted and tie undone, a process that distracts Ben even when he tells himself that Marc would just as soon crawl out of his skin. He still listens. Listens and sees the air crest around them in high relief.

Two buttons down. Ben’s line of vision slips. Halt. November Golf. Ben swallows and raises his eyes. Goes tete-a-tete with Marc’s frosted bottle gaze. He hears some of what comes next; the rest is just his ear ringing. The whole room ringing and solid as a church bell. The bottle green jacket…

“Messy bits…”

Aw, fuck off.

Grabbing the vodka by the throat, Ben slams its body over the scar in his coffee table, shoots up to his feet, panthers across the room once more, pacing his steel enclosure.

He favors the smoky panaroma over Marc’s sneer and wracks his mind for some part of his night with Steven that got messy, and what? Whistled for the wild dog? Hands tangled in his hair, pulling from the scalp. That’s… No. Closing his eyes, Ben takes a sharp, hissing breath. Sniffs. Pack it up. Move on. Flip back to Marc, the record running silence, a whispering circle his left ear doesn’t register over the lurid crescendo of his own voice. Ear ringing and ringing.

“What do you get? Huh?”

“Messy…” he laughs abruptly, blows air through his lips instead of smoke. His throat tightens, but his heart.

“Fuck where you’ve been.” Well, never mind. His heart has always beat this fast. “What-? 'Back-' Is where you’ve been where you’re going?”

Ben stalks forward and stops where Marc is seated unbuttoned beneath his vantage, grips his shoulders, and holds him against the back cushion. It is a tender threat.

“You’re not going back" is not.

Cocaine (confidence), desperation, confusion, desire, fear, rage, all of the above: Ben does ‘em clean. Wears them underneath a mask two seams away from loosing them upon a bristling atmosphere.

“Where’re you going, Marc?” he snarls, grabbing Marc’s open collar, arching over, urging one pounding forehead to another- it’s not right; it’s the language they both speak fluently. “Answer the question.”

Snarling becomes a whisper.

“Answer it before I answer it for you.”

Smoke outside becomes vapour, warm breath in the air. The record skips.

@silverjetsystm

“It interests me.”

Head lolls side to side after the round adrenaline shakes broad shoulders. Sniff. Solo fingers, gnaws the vodka. What they could be doing instead if Spector behaved. If Spector was Steven. If if if.

Steven Steven Steven Steven Steven. Nose puffs a laugh. “Look at you. Musician’s a fuckin’ shrink or a rabbi.” Sternum crackling, Spector briefly rasp coughs smoke. Never was good at dodging. Fingers gone clumsy (clumsy?) paw, tug gray silk. “Fuck.” Cigarillo between teeth, he two hand loosens the tie. Conditioned throat sip of water, rationing thirst for war. Tired eyes track Solo's movements without moving another muscle, track fingers dropping wrong kind of needle in brown record player. Accent color per interior decorator standards. Wants upon a time Spector paid attention.

Music break. Didn't have enough data to quantify Motown. Brassy instruments and brassy voice – line ‘Love Gone Bad.’ Steven’s noose tossed on the couch in a false flag surrender. Bottle green wool jacket ink spills across monochrome couch.

Love gone rotten like vegetables in a crisper. A scoff. "No shit," worn husky. Dropped heavy lidded gaze, fiddling Spector's crescent moon cufflinks, an alternative to clawing Steven's face up. Toss out the heart without thinking about it. Into the trash. Spare the compost. Meat rots. Brings animals.

"Y kidding me?” Sneering, the kind that used to make him look like cocky, Bushman’s knife making him look like a bastard. The kind who used to drink with corpses. “Y met the guy." Kills the flame on black glass boomerang, leaving a neat circle of ash in his wake. Kind, fierce, concerned for all the correct things in the correct order Steven who could turn cold like Marc if he needed to. “Why wouldn't I be concerned what he thinks?”

Water. Hydrate or diedrate, Recruit. Rationed glug, tracking Solo, opaque as a two-way mirror, back to the chair. “’Jake,’” tasting the verbal, what’s the word? Air quotes but fancy. “Somethin’ about Jake ticks you off.” Casual, warm, funny Jake. “What happened there? Didn’t take you to the right place?”

No, the dog won’t hunt. Solo’s not the subject they’re talking about. Spector can take a swing at the glass later, hear if it’s hollow, break out his craft to see if there’s anything substantial in a shadowed room next door. Perfidy? kills Steven’s collar and first buttons, thick muscles up for biting.

Water set next to filter. “Watch it. You don’t know where I’ve been.” Vodka down Solo’s hatch. Idly, he imagines shoving silk into pecking mouth, a shirt over marble face, emptying the bar or tap. Not dispassionate like work. Nostrils flaring, trying to suss why he’s unsettled at the imagery.

No, the party game would not devolve into liquid torture.

Second button goes for good measure. Answers like pulling teeth. “Secrets keep us safe. Keep people we care about safe. They get to have nice lives. Friends.” Hand forward-back gestures not rudely towards Solo. Exhibit A.

“I handle the messy bits. This was unplanned. We talk. I’ll go back whence I came and you’ll hardly have need to see me again.” Every bit he gives up, Steven and Jake get to come back. That’s how it works. Crack open his bones. Suck the marrow. Choose the choicest ones, finest cuts. Steven or Jake. Make him into art.

@kylo-wrecked

[kylo-wrecked]

{ expanded from here }

Brunnhilde steps onto the ledge. The sun ripens the sky, a blood orange rolling through its open mouth. A sky just blue enough to remind Ben, that gravity? That's a thing. A thing etched into their earthly firmament, and something he carries in his shoulders, his gaze.

"Oh, brother," he groans. "Stop." Gravity makes him sink toward her, nevertheless. Those fifteen bags stuffed with shredded documents, bitten-up bins, and abandoned mattresses might break a fall, but not entirely; the stray chaise wouldn't save his bones. Would Brunnhilde?

Ben's eyes burn with the question question. Instead of asking, he laughs, and his canines are dewy with new nectar.

"You already wasted it."  Hanging over Brunnhilde, a shadow cast by a fiery sky, he says, "You wasted that apple on me," and smiles, his crooked skyline of teeth, the teeth that pierced that apple's flesh, wet and shining.

Amazingly, his heel returns to the roof's edge. Steel on limestone. Neither of them lives in this clay mansion drawn over in lengths of dawn umbrage cast by Prospect Park's skeleton trees- but Brunnhilde, with her feet still bare, her dress still silk and melting between his fingers, could make kingdoms from unlikely things: daybreak, the tar beaches and solar panels lining New Brooklyn castles, really, really sad sacks of shit. She is the maker of Ben's new sky body, the chest ringing with bells, the apple blossoms growing up through his sternum.

Of course, he's still rotten to the core. Isn't that why he laughs and looms and leers? Why his lips, laced with tobacco and autumn, impose themselves on hers?

He Kissed Me (And It Felt Like a Slap). That's not how it goes. It goes like this: Ben spreads his wings across the risen sun and feels space ripping at his back. He falls because that's how the myth was written; that's the tragedy howled by the choir.

And he takes her with him, tipping them both into the air, with her silk midriff, arms, and upper back cocooned in his chest (that expanse of Tom Ford's cotton), his arms (that swallow her), his chin (tucked against the base of her skull), both their hair flapping about his God-forsaken head, feathering, window glass, dead birch, iron spokes screaming by.

This is their first kiss. It happens so fast. It's a slap in the face. And sonically, it carries the undertones of Phil Spector's ominous arrangement, He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss), Carole King's apology wasted on the Crystals.

And the ground inches closer; Ben can hear the lace patterns on an old, naked mattress, this wailing sax. So fast, and then Zemirot twelve inches above the rubbish, his shoulders and head brushing fraying upholstery.

He still manages to hit something on the way down.

"Son of a bitch," Ben groans, exhilarated. The words barely pass his lips, but he caws, "Serves you right" into the Godless sky.

There were no gods; the last of their light lined his tissues, his heaving ribcage, his kneecap, the bones around his bones.

"Serves you friggin' right," he cries, laughing, breathless. Not at Brunnhilde, who pins him in space, hovering by a distance of twelve inches, and should drop him.

Maybe only the gods have fallen.

Let Brunnhilde drop him. Ben kisses her anyway, with teeth, tongue, and nectar, in a flash. It happens so fast.

@valkxrie

[kylo-wrecked]

📞 Music!Ben to Post-Ragnarok B

{ 🫀 You broke and bought: Music!Ben }

She picks up on the third ring. Swell. He'd have guessed the ninth. He'd have guessed she'd given him a bunk number, but it's her distinctive pitch accent—and she's drinking. Something. Her mouth is wet; she comes up for breath.

"What're you doing?" he asks anyway. He doesn't know what time it is. He tries to picture her somewhere other than a damp SoHo rooftop or a dark underpass along the East River and gives up, waits for the color of her voice or an end tone.

Can she picture him? The living room panorama is the only surface that feels right right now. Cool under his leaning forehead. It suspends him over the burnished face of Battery City, which lives up to its fancy when lightning strikes.

@valkxrie

[kylo-wrecked]

{ cont'd from here, because i, like some people, had no chill }

Tenements creaked like broken bones. Old bones. Their windows whistled while the Domino Sugar Factory flipped the bird across the way. Pigeons and crows roosted on the tired arms of streetlamps, shaking out their wings. Dark pinions overlapped darker pinions in a black tangle, not unlike Ben's hair. The wind could've blown them away, man and Valkyrie both. Ben and his sharp teeth laughed at the sky. The stars, ghosts. Below, the East River laughed with him, rolling and hissing endlessly.

His laugh was curt, there and then gone, and he regarded Brunnhilde, this sliver of moonlight with the hardness of a diamond, pursing his lips in thought. Ben was listening.

Maybe selectively. Maybe with what was left of his soul. Maybe he felt as the Valkyrie did. Maybe not—maybe they didn't want the same things. Maybe he didn't give a good God damn. Nor had he ever wanted glories, ashes, feathers, and fallen sisters. He didn't care for such things any more than he'd cared for flying business class.

Ben Solo was made for the travails and tragedies of fruitless human endeavor. He was made to rot. Was she? From what she described, Ragnarok seemed like another exercise in futility: it meant nothing. Even gods destroyed themselves. 

Even gods answered questions with questions. 

When Brunnhilde pierced Ben with her gaze and asked her questions, he provided a statement. 

"Home is sound and the color it makes. That's me."

Ben was also made for music. His fingers, their seemingly preternatural familiarity with stringed instruments, the branching pathways in his brain, drawing shape and flavor from things not meant to have form, taste, or tincture. 

Additionally, he might have thought he was made for reality, the state of things as they exist, even when they have wings.  

"You? You sound like a woman," he said, shrugging at Brunnhilde, her pretty pissed-off face. "Maybe you belong to yourself now. Maybe your home is being angry. How the shit should I know? You 'belong to nothing?' Then why're you so proud? You ever think of that?"

Tapped at his temple as the wind ruffled through those black locks, and the pigeons cooed, and the crows laughed along as they ascended from the sudden smell of rain. 

"Do you have feathers up there, too?" 

[kylo-wrecked]

No?

He bristled but brushed into the master bedroom, crossed the carpet, padded onto heated bathroom tile, and sat, tentative, a dog learning how to trust a new handler with its paw. Brunnhilde came to him like one of God's testier angels, haughty and golden with tricks and lessons. He reached up and placed his palm over her palm; it was a sea-broiled crab on a white sand.

Ben was a vampire tan in midnight joggers, staring up bleary and bruise-eyed from the tub rim, his hair a rolling black storm, and his face a bi-lit mask. Brunnhilde moved and triggered the overhead saucer lights, four-by-four-inch votives.

"No," he muttered. "It's a burn."

Raised and revealed his left fist, black flecks and blood engraved in his mid-knuckles. The peroxide was for this second foul.

"Not broken either."  

His pupils rolled inside his glazed corneas, hinged on the bath vanity, the little plastic disc Brunnhilde had placed there.

"I punched a camera," Ben said, rolling his tongue under a jagged molar. "Joking," he added, with all the gravity of a black hole.

@valkxrie

@kylo-wrecked

She senses his approach; the barometric pressure changing as Ben's body moves the air and energy in his path. A hum escapes her at his first real words. She sets her phone on the counter. She listens to his command.

"No" Brunnhilde replies flatly. Her blue goes to his face, then to his hand. Her expression registers only that she is not one to be commanded. Not anymore.

"Sit" She indicates the edge of his tub. Her intention is clear, hands already removing the safety seal on the peroxide. "Do you think it's broken?"

A little plastic disk joins the space beside her phone; beside the Whole Foods bag and the pickles. She keeps the peroxide, her free fingers extending to Ben - giving him the option to decide if he would put his palm over her palm so she might see the wound.

[kylo-wrecked]

“I want a pumpkin spice latte and I don’t care what anyone thinks.” [Jake ✨️ to music!Ben]

{ from this meme :// not accepting }

Another car flared by, its horn brushing against his left eardrum. Ben's head swiveled slow on his neck, machine-like, expression indicating he'd heard Jake perfectly, studio smooth, while the rest of the noise on this corner of what was formerly known as Alphabet City frothed and flattened.

"You disgust me."

Turned out every Brooklyn Boy ate shit eventually. Ben trawled a hand through the air like it might come tenderly… and smacked Jake's cap flat over his eyes. Then Ben pitched his weight out of the cab, slamming the door too hard, stirring up crunched leaves. Some woman jumped and cursed. He smiled under shades like tinted windows and a black ball cap and disappeared around a scaffold.

Minutes racked up on a silent meter, but lo and behold, Ben returned with a fragrant cup of orange bullshit. Just for Jake. Shoved the seasonal vessel through the rolled-down window, threatening spillage and third-degree-balls.

"Here you go, shithead."

Hunched down in the back, like that might ward off any unwanted public inquiry. The nice thing about New York was that nobody cared who you were when you were right in front of them; the stone-faced barista shrugged and rolled her eyes at the tip. Ben would make a fun story for later.

And he ordered a pumpkin spice latte. A pumpkin spice latte?

Ben had his own sightings; Tyra Banks at the Odeon, ordering everything on the menu and actually eating it. Cameron Diaz crossing a SoHo street too early in the morning—she'd looked rough. Jake Gyllenhaal on the Q—they pretended not to see each other.

"Better drink it," he grumbled, fishing for a lighter with one hand. "Shaved years off my sweet ass getting you that."

Urged his own cap over his eyes and lit a cigarette. He'd picked up something for himself, gripped in the crook of an arm—dark and flat, no steam, no ice. The ephemera of lighter fluid made it phosphate in spots. Maybe it was motor oil.

"Make you drive Staten Island."

@silverjetsystm

[kylo-wrecked]

❝  you are destroying yourself. you won't be loved for this. people already hate you for it.  ❞ (plz stop coking out ben. it's sort of pathetic. not in a cute kicked puppy way. just the other kind of kicked puppy way)

Gotham is a city built for people like Ben Solo. A city bleeding LEDS for bleeding souls. Slap it on a t-shirt. 

"Yeah?" 

And Gotham is a city built by people like the Waynes. People who have to dress up and dissimulate to see the ruckus of infrareds. What's the difference between a bat and a belfry? Wayne is the belfry. And… 

Ben rolls a bitter tongue around in his mouth. It catches on a chipped molar. He smiles. 

"Then they should stop financing the monkey." Swings in a borrowed office chair, brings a knobbed knee to his thump-thumping heart, and watches Bruce Wayne, pale bag of man with visible withdrawal symptoms. Not from drugs. A comedown in a different key.  "Hatred's lucrative—what they don't know, huh?"

He turns a speckled granite cheek toward the skyline, a thing full of splintered glass teeth. Nighttime peeks in and takes off with a wet-black leaf swirl in the predawn. The moon is a bruised eye rolling up the horizon.

"Lemme ask you something," Ben sniffs, gazing back at Wayne. Neck twisted like it's broken. "How many of your hedge fund bros are sober right now? You think they know what they're paying for?" 

Smiles neatly, like a glass of whiskey. Eyes cold brown beads, unconsiderable and considering. This can't be Wayne's office, but it is. Haunted blackwood shelves, Alice in Wonderland chess-board floor, and Bruce Wayne himself, the sullen marble fixture. Sad gargoyle.

"Hoo-ee."

@nightmarefuele

[kylo-wrecked]

{ cont'd from here }

Away goes the soft pack, into one of many pockets. When the man perched nervously beside him, Ben sat back and took a drag.

“Uh-huh.” Smoke filtered through his smile, streaming sideways. “You know, they’re starting to say it’s bad for you.”

He shrugged his leather-padded shoulders and dropped his head, listening, looking up from below his brow conspiratorially as the suit here undid his tie and collar.

“Atta boy,” he replied. Cherry glow, smoke stream. Dark, thoughtful eyes. Daggered andalusite. “Say, what’s your name anyway? What’re you doing here you don’t like…” he laughed once, eyes popping with amusement. “‘Rock n’ roll.’”

As they spoke, the cash bar rolled with cigarette smoke, the hum of people, and the whole place buzzed like a devil’s den. Ben’s ear rang. He studied the man’s hands, the nervous way about him.

“You wanna get outta here, kid? We can find us a harpsichord. How about upright bass? That push your buttons?”

@musesfromthefifthdimension

[kylo-wrecked]

@valkxrie

dear mother, i’m tired.

digital drawing, part 1 of a triptych.

[kylo-wrecked]

🥂

(dealers choice)

{ 🎁 You rolled: Music!Verse Ben, Nowhere Man, the Revived }

Prince Street at the dusk of the gods. White peacocks perch clumsily on the cornices where pigeons once roosted, tumbling from streetlamp arms where they're too numerous , some hundred odd peafowl startling and darting off curbs and shaking their opulent, grassy tails in short stints of flight across the damp, opalescent pavement, roaming all over the great, howling zoo of lower New York.

The genteel cast iron dwellings bounded by Broome Street, East Houston (* Howston *), Crosby, and Howard twist into aureate wire gardens; the crumbling subway stations spit brimstone and steel shellings; long grey ghosts slog around cobblestone alleys, around Andrew Berman's reclaimed pillars, ashen and alive with hornets, and around the hairpin turn of Mulberry, where tonight the wooden slats of the old rows bloom under the pale rotten rind of the moon as they did 150 years ago when they were opium houses that glowed lavender in hazes of rain. 

Canal Street is a canal again roaring and teeming with rhapsodic bedlamites and snakes and the writhing arms of the defeated, ferried not through to a new year but a new age. An age of endings. An occasion to watch from some rich schmuck's Olympic-sized rooftop hot tub, among a New Year's Eve party's remains, the soggy corpses of all those silver paper horns and confetti crowns. Champagne flutes, thin and elegant, huddled on a soda glass end table, some still holding stale yellow broth. 

The Valkyrie takes an unopened bottle of Chianti and wades into the hot tub, lounges on the curved white steps, extending her toes in the cold, maple-checkered water, her gown billowing, moon glittery, and chlorine-green. She uncorks the wine bottle with her teeth. The plug bobs away on a moonlit current charged by her strong, shimmering legs. She beckons.

Ben studies her through long lashes, deep-set, furtive eyes hidden under a pergola's slatted shadows. 

"To what do we toast? Raising one dead on the day you decide to shuffle all us little guys off the mortal coil?"

Folds his broad arms and watches and waits, a towering enigma in smart, black wool torn beneath the shoulder and jacquard pants fit for a funeral under the rubble. 

"This is fun for you," he proclaims, feeling hard and hollow as the spoilt moon. "Look at you. Look at that smile. Fucking rude."

He hadn't known one could be homesick for death, how empty he would feel. Maybe the fallow ache will fade like jet lag. He trudges toward the stacked stone tub; the Valkyrie splashes water on his shoes. He mutters, "Qing qing," and wrenches the bottle from her feathered hand. 

@valkxrie

[kylo-wrecked]

‘a window seat on a red-eye flight during a storm’ [human!b to music!ben]

crossing the atlantic was sometimes be a crapshoot. red-eyes always were.

the roaring of engines punctuated the occasional buck and rear of the airbus. the stewards were strapped in and the seatbelt sign was glowing too brightly.

she was in plainclothes, tucked into first class for the privacy - and the fact that all other flights had been grounded.

planes don’t go down in turbulence, brunnhilde knows this, but it does make it hard to sleep. she kept the window open, watching the howling beyond. the blinking of the wing lights - another sleepless thing.

her arms reach up to stretch her spine. another set of eyes. dark and insomniac. a wide gap separates them. all plush arm rests and dividing walls. plastic and cotton and airline colours. the don’t ask, don’t tell of flying commercial.

brunnhilde offers a tight smile, a tiny bottle of rum, and a questioning brow.

“come here often?” half a joke. the air pockets protest.

He doesn't fasten his seatbelt. It doesn't matter. No one would prompt him; one of the stewards vaulted when they accidentally brushed hands. He's a celebrity, a wasp in an ant farm.

Certain species of wasps recognize each other. Dark and insomniac set of eyes meets tight smile, questioning brow, and pleated hair that shines faintly in the howling beyond.

"That is..." the voice, a low-speaking yet bombastic tenor. "Correct."

He opens one arm, its sweatshirt sleeve hanging loose like a wing, gesturing toward all he surveys. Not much. Commercial liners both look and sound medical. Hospitals on turbines. Turbulence is good; never has he ever had an overnight stay.

"This's my home away from home for the next... six?"

Hours that go by like years.

This is Ben Solo floating on Klonopin and a little something for horses, swaying forward, his brown rum gaze pouring onto the travel-sized bottle in her feather-fingered hand. Dredges up a little glassy. Holds sticky to hers. Her's blue, curious, with a touch of irony.

"My castle in the sky. My... house o'er the middle of the sea." Ben smiles, close-lipped. "What're you doing in my house?"

@valkxrie