To glory in self like a new monster - any.

[Pollock]

I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
And now I call you to pray

Her preciousness chokes him, bitter cold hands with a furious vice grip. It fills him with something envious and violent; he shifts, every muscle fibre and tendon flexing and loosening with a healthy pump – he could gnash the stars from her body piecemeal, before she could even react. Her underestimation of him feeds him, like blood to those newly gifted shoulders and thighs. Her press towards him serves as electricity, waking up the yawning monster tucked into his ribs.

Pollock still holds phantoms of touch like tattoos: on this shoulder, where once a fury of yellowed teeth pinched the folds of baby skin; there, where a shove had stumbled him on spindle legs and marked his coltish knee. He wonders what sort of memories her tight skin carries, and then he sees the red and green (oddly familiar colours) and thinks, no, these thing were not the doing of someone charged to love you. But nobody is guaranteed love, beloved one. In that moment, he thinks she is ignorant to that (whether or not that is true, is irrelevant entirely), and he imagines he must teach her that valuable lesson in time.

And yet when she gets near all this is stayed in his chest, beating like a thrashing rabbit in mortal throes. His ears fill with a great humming sound, mechanical and steely. Cogs and the hiss of released steam under pressure. His dark eyes narrow and then close tight, pulling his chin into his broad chest, a sharp sting of something like concentrated ill-will spreading from the center. That dark shard – grabbed by greedy, strange flesh to break a fall, and sate a desire – pushed through his gilded flesh, now hanging down beside his heart like a strange ornament. It crowds his body with an order: to pull the light from her eyes and destroy that brother-magic, and it is undeniable.

You were there.
You tried to stop me…

To take from him the thing that now fuels the reawakening of his mind and physical form. The thing that gently nurtured his enormous headgear and super-equine movement; that granted him a single, powerful control over emotion. He does not remember her personally, too full of his godliness even there to mind, but he feels wronged by her. Not only because of what transpired like a dream-thing in that northern dimension, but because she ripples and bulges with privileges he never enjoyed in his formative years, or since.

“Hello.”
That she doesn’t run is interesting. But no mind, if she did he could hunt her down in a heartbeat, unseen. She could send a squall of starlight and riddle his eyesight with white, but to stop a beast so incensed is a heavy undertaking.

“What a lovely little trick,” he drawls, tilting his head. Once, he would cower at her feet whilst wondering how best to pull her apart from the belly. Now that inborn fear is his to take charge of, and he refashions it into purpose. He means her stars, and he is reminded of young days mouthing little whispers to them – little questions, searching for answers. They had been cruel in their silence.


Pollock,
The gift-giver.