wear a necklace of rope, side by side with me; pollock

[Malis]

"we pull apart the darkness while we can"

Her question seems to force him back inside his head for a moment and she feels instantly glad that she is not a mind-reader like her younger sister. The thoughts inside her own head, memories of small violent hands forcing bodies past their limits, of skin turned to cold blue plastic and then snapped apart like brittle bones. She can remember too, the feeling of being trapped and lucid within a body she could not control. These are the memories that surface in moments of uncertainty, these thoughts that hold the blue against her skin like a flame and burn her from the inside out. She is glad she cannot hear his thoughts, glad she does not know the sinister workings of a mind she presumed to be as dark as the shadows sitting in her empty chest.

Ordinary. He says and Malis can feel something shift inside her, something he bent without realizing, something broken that she had no desire to fix. You see, she looks back down at Hestia and she thinks she understands. This woman was no one. She was plain and unimportant to him, conquerable and thus sought after instinctually. This woman could have been any of her sisters. Sweet Ilka with sad eyes and a heart so big she carried the weight of it on her shoulders, or even Pyxis who was as wild as Malis but without the same dark and steel. This could have been, could one day be, someone Malis loved.

Rage bristled like barbs beneath her skin, slow and convoluted with the urge to bury all emotions before they had a chance to become a weapon used against her. But this rage, it would not abate and so she sank into it like a broken ship in the belly of the sea. “Prettiest when she was bloated and raw and entirely broken-” there is venom in her quiet voice when she pauses over the word broken to stare pointedly at the wing he dragged through the dirt, “prettiest when she looked just like you.”

His eyes rove her body and oh, how she aches to burn them where they land. But hers is a defensive gift, one she cannot use to maim with just a simple, well pointed thought. So instead she lowers her chin a little, lowers the row of horns on her face so they glint and wink at him like pin-points of promised pain.

“Don’t be naïve, Pollock,” she says in a voice like a snarl, latching onto the name he had offered to her so freely, “no one is lovely. Life makes monsters out of all of us. You should know that better than anyone.” She makes no effort to move closer and wills the same of him. It is only now that she has realized her mistake; she should have kept walking. But it felt too late for that, so instead she leveled her stony gaze at him, her mouth a cold slash of blue against her face. “Pollock.” She repeated stiffly, lines of tension tracing up her dark face. “And who do you think I am?” Her face darkens further as she vows to lock her name away from him in the darkest part of her brittle soul.

MALIS

makai x oksana

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