if the heavens ever did speak
I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
The names are repeated back to him, murmured across his skin and somehow it is worse to hear her say it. She is realness, she is grounding, and now she says the names – their names – and it’s affirming, it’s horribly affirming. Somehow, she knows. Somehow, she knows their names and knows what it was like.
I never saw her, he thinks, again, I would have seen her.
It’s impossible that she was there too, of course it is, but it’s impossible that any of it happened, it’s impossible that he’s alive now, that they stand here, pressed and broken, stained colors that are not their own.
Are you playing a trick on me, she says, and for a moment he wishes it was so – that one of them was cruel, horribly cruel, baiting the other close to madness, closer to that crumbling edge.
Ah, but one look at him shows otherwise – a man so broken has no tricks up his sleeve.
He doubts she does, either – an irresponsible trust, perhaps, but he does anyone is so good an actor to repeat those names with such a hollowed, abysmal tone without knowing what they mean, what are.
(Were.)
She tells her story and it is like and unlike his, like they’re playing two records at different speeds. Parallel universes, alike and unalike, the same start but new paths forged.
“Was…” he asks, but his mouth grows dry, woolen. He is not sure which was more terrifying – Nerissa’s hand, carving her name, or the clown
(Pennywise, his name was Pennywise, and we all float here)
and its Glasgow smile.
He knows in some way they were connected, that the clown was magic in a way the other toys were not, magic in a way Sleaze himself had been. He knows the clown would visit her at night and whisper things, but he could never understand them, and wasn’t some part of him glad for that?
“Was he there?” he finishes. Her gaze is blank. He wonders.
“Pennywise,” he amends, and a shudder runs through him at the name.
sleaze
cancer x garbage
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She could see the change in him as he remembered, could taste the bitter copper of tension as it rolled off his skin in chaotic waves. Whatever it was he was remembering, whatever ghastly recollection was taking shape in his mind seemed as though it were preparing to undo him, to unravel those sloppily knit-together threads protecting his sanity. She shifted toward him, her indigo lips pressed urgently against the curve of his jaw. In her own expression there is horror and uncertainty, a burden she aches to share with him, but it will be clear from the question in her eyes and the way it furrows her brow that this horror is not her own.
“No,” she tells him quietly, pressing ever closer as the shudder ripples beneath his skin, “he wasn’t.” She’s careful not to repeat the name, such a strange name, and she resents it for the way it still seems to hold power over him. For a moment she’s quiet beside him, curled so close again, uncertainty pressing her mouth to his neck, his shoulder, his chest. And then, in spite of her better judgement, she whispers, “Did he hurt you?”
She pauses then and her green eyes disappear beneath the blue of her forelock as her brow furrows. There’s a thought, a stray thought, and she can feel it pressing against her temples like a headache. But the harder she tries to let it in, the further it seems to go, to fade. She cringes against him, frustrated, now completely unable to shake the feeling like she had missed an important detail. And then it found her, wriggled across her mind like a cold, wet worm. She tensed, pulling back enough to see his face. “You died.” This isn’t a question and it isn’t quite an accusation, but there’s something buried there beneath the realization. “If you died, then how do you live. How are you here.” It isn’t distrust that smolders in her expression, it’s something else, something suspicious.
But it’s not of him.
Him, she trusts.
As if to solidify this particular realization, this birth of faith within such a shattered, guarded heart, she whispers, “My name is Malis, by the way.”
There was power in a name.
MALIS makai x oksana
if the heavens ever did speak
I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
It is a relief, in a way, that she didn’t know the clown. It suggests that there was something else – timelines stretched out like tentacles, universes laid parallel but never touching. It is a relief that wasn’t there with him, that she didn’t see the clown and his Glasgow smile, or the tiger with no face.
The names are the same but the circumstances were not, and while the implications of this are heavy and strange, overwhelming to think about (though, all of this is too overwhelming to think about). They started the same but grew somewhere else.
The giant impossibility of the world – the worlds – loom large, and he wonders if there is a universe where none of this happened, to either of them, and if there is a universe where they met unburdened by these memories, and what that would be like.
“Not really,” he says quietly, for though the clown had lurked and purred quiet threats, there had not been much – the teeth sunk into his flesh, leaving a scar with a strange and impossible story, but in the long run, it had not been much.
No, who the clown had hurt was her - was the girl, sleeping fitfully as the clown murmured things into her ears, worked its strange magic to command her.
She loves us, he had thought, and with the thought had come the desire to protect the girl who would end up burning him.
If you died, then how do you live. How are you here.
How is he anything – how is he flesh, how does he know the brilliant intricacies of their minds. How, how is he here, when by all rights he should be ash, should be gone.
“It was real,” he says, nonsensical, then, “but it also wasn’t.”
“We weren’t flesh, for her.”
He recalls the slickness of his plastic skin, the tangle of mane like a waterfall, black and violet-streaked.
“I died,” he says, and in the words are memories of smoke, of ash. He can taste it on his tongue.
“I died, and I woke up like this.”
Like this: purple, strange, impossible.
sleaze
cancer x garbage
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He tells her no and for a moment she hesitates, leaning back to watch him with those guarded green eyes. It isn’t that she does not believe him (what reason did they have to lie to one another) but she thinks there is more there than just a no. More than a simple answer, because how could any of this be simple. But she doesn’t pry, won’t pull the out the secrets by their roots, but she can feel that sick curiosity shaping like a stone in the pit of her chest.
She watches him silently for a moment.
There were secrets she had, not secrets, but truths she wouldn’t share. Of a clown, a different clown, this one kind and tangled in his marionette strings until she had found a way to free him. Then he had paid for her freedom (a false freedom and how she hopes he would never know that) with his life. He had died (could a toy die, could it live, Caius had but he was different) in a frenzy of flashing plastic prehistoric teeth, and still she felt the selfish guilt of a survivor. And then there had been the mare, the one who had known Malis meant destruction and had chosen to hide away in the dust filled toy chest. But as if she could sense the reluctance, Nerissa had snatched her from the shadows and gifted those gold and purple legs to the snapped off stubs Malis bore after the abuse of a game.
She looks away for a moment and tension seeps into her through every pore. “Like a dream.” She says stiffly, her quiet voice a low whisper. A life lived, time passed, and gone but for the memory when wakefulness finds you. But the color, the color, it was more than a dream. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” She tells him, looking back to his face. “It makes it seem more real. I don’t want it to be real.” Her jaw tightens, clenches like a fist, and she pushes her nose against the flat of his cheek. “I should go.”
MALIS makai x oksana
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