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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