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 master laughs when Sleaze nods, there on his knees.
“That’s a good boy,” he says, and a brief flare of pleasure shoots through him, the feeling he had done something right.
“Now,” the master says, “let’s see what you can do.”
Sleaze’s body thrums and for a moment the purple of him glows bright, almost neon. He feels something coursing through his body, an electricity so powerful he cannot discern if it’s pain he feels, or pleasure. The glow subsides, somewhat, though he is still softly alit, a signal to all of them of his power. This power is not like the possession, which lives in his mind like a wild, raging beast – no, this magic is tamed, patient, his to wield.
With the magic comes another feeling – a growing dedication to the master.
A desire to protect.
(Not that Sleaze has ever protected anyone. Not even himself.)
The master lays a hand on him. Sleaze does not cringe away – in fact, he leans into the pressure. It’s comforting.
“Now’s your chance, Sleaze,” purrs the master, “remake yourself. And fight these demons. Some of them are even yours!”
He laughs, again, that same dark spoiled laughter, and for a moment the feeling of loyalty is gone and Sleaze feels terror, horror, fury at the master the monster, but then the hand is once more on his neck and the fury is gone.
The master brings him peace, and this is why he’ll fight.
The world around them once again changes, now a domed building. Beneath him in sand, stained rust-red in places, almost brown. The master is gone, safely out of range. Sleaze looks at him, confused, as the master brings two fingers to his lips and whistles, a high, shrieking noise.
The doors slide open.
The darkness is the corridor behind the opening doors seems alive. And perhaps it is, for the darkness leaks out like a noxious gas, coils of shadow spilling over the sand. It moves faster as more of it spills forth from the corridor, until the colosseum is awash in blackness. It thickens, then, seems to congeal on the earth.
Has the colosseum gone darker, or has he just imagined it?
Another horse appears, seemingly from nowhere. He recognizes her – the woman who had quieted him, who had listened to his wild memories spilling out. She is still in the light, and beautiful.
He may have loved her then, and he certainly loves her now, if only because she is something familiar, a touchstone in this unfamiliar battleground.
He forgets about his magic, forgets about the leaking darkness (a mistake he will come to regret). Instead he moves toward her, first at a walk and then, a run, eager - desperate - to see her, touch her, find a way away from this. Maybe there’s a life for them. It doesn’t matter that he hasn’t seen her in years.
She is turning, ready to look at him, to embrace him. She calls his name: Sleaze. His heart soars.
Hope is a pathetic and determined thing.
He opens his mouth to cry her name, to weep, when he sees it: in what is left of this light, she casts two shadows.
As she is turning, the flesh begins to disappear from her as if being erased. The bones still turn though.
She is chanting his name now, a record set on repeat.
Her flesh continues to disappear until there is only a skeleton left, the remains of a girl he thinks he loved. She is still saying his name. Or, something is.
The arena goes black, a switch thrown. On instinct, calls light unto himself – it feels natural, he thinks light and then he is ensconced in it, in a brilliant wrap of light beams.
He hears a clatter, like jaws, and thinks the dark has teeth.
“Vashta Nerada,” says a voice that comes from everywhere and nowhere, “the shadows that melt the flesh.”
The master laughs. Sleaze feels a sick desire to protect him, but he doesn’t know where he is – doesn’t know where anything is, the blackness is all-consuming
(the dark has teeth)
there is only the light – his light.
“I don’t think it hurts, much,” says the master, “if you want to end it here. Or will you be a good little solider?”
Sleaze is a stupid boy, and a frightened one. But he doesn’t want to die.
(“You don’t make it out of this alive anyway.”)
“Show me.”
He can hear the clack of bones – her bones – and hear the dull, robotic repetition of his name.
Sleaze. Sleaze. Sleaze.
She says it so often it no longer sounds like his name, just sounds like gibberish.
Light, he thinks, let there be light.
He is his own sun, now, and he thinks of the light pouring off him in waves, the same way the shadows had first crept in. It’s slow, at first, and Sleaze thinks I’m not strong enough, even with magic I’m not strong enough, I’m weak, I’m so fucking weak.
But the light increases – almost imperceptibly, at first, then stronger.
He radiates light, beats the shadows back into the corner. He is no longer purple, he is gold, he is the sun.
There is a clutter as bones tumble to the earth. He doesn’t turn to look. He is the sun. He is the sun.
Let there be light.
As the last shadow rescinds he thinks he hears a faint mewling sound, something wretched and miserable, but it’s so faint he will never know for sure if it was real or a figment of his imagination.
“Good,” says the master, who had sat untouched in the darkness, too despicable powerful for even the most wretched of shadows to touch.
“Let’s see how you do when it’s a little closer to home, shall we? This should be familiar.”
He whistles, again. The doors roll open.
He would have much preferred the darkness to what came out instead.
Pennywise walks out again, but this time he’s flesh, and tall - at least six feet, taller than Sleaze. He has to look at him, at that glistening mouth, the dead and laughing eyes.
“We must stop running into each other like this,” says Pennywise, “otherwise a fella’s gonna think he’s being stalked.”
The clown winks, and on his pallid face the gesture is somehow grotesque.
You are magic, Sleaze tries to tell himself, even though the clown makes him feel small, you are the sun.
“Wouldja like a balloon Sleaze? Or Velvet? Or Cloud? That’s what you used last time, remember? You set those fucking animals on me and stole my balloons. Woulda just given em to ya if you asked! We all float here, remember?”
It waves its fistful of balloons, which bob madly at the motion. They’re hypnotizing, in a way. Swirls of color. He can’t take his eyes off of them.
The clown steps closer and he almost doesn’t notice. There’s so many colors. Had there been this many before? He can’t remember. Reds and blues and yellows and greens and colors he doesn’t know the name for, colors that don’t exist in this universe.
We all float here.
The clown is closer and Sleaze can actually smell him now, a scent of clotted blood and rancid meat, and something else, too, a sewer stench.
It smiles. Its teeth bare.
Grandmother, what big teeth you have! Sleaze thinks, absurdly.
(The better to eat you up with, my dear.)
It pounces.
The teeth sink into him, sink down, down, further than they had any right to go. It takes a moment before the pain hits, crashes on him in one tremendous wave, and he screams, helpless and hurt and frustrated.
The clown rips his face back and Sleaze sees a piece of gold and red hanging from its jaws – a piece of him and it makes him dizzy, makes him faint, his legs are trembling, and oh--
He catches himself, and the jerking motion startles him out of his reverie.
He is magic.
So he shifts. He shifts into what once hurt the clown. A tiger, a sleek and sinuous thing, all ropy muscle, built by nature to hunt and destroy. The tiger’s form feels comfortable, feels more adapted to this battleground than Sleaze will ever be. He lets the tiger-mind take over, hones it only on the clown, and thinks go.
He thinks, more.
And they come. They are the creations of his own mind – real, and not-real – but they are here.
A wolf, a hawk, more tigers. Mimics of the fight in the toybox all those years ago.
The air is suddenly full of shrieks, feline and canine and human (or something like human). There is the sound of collision, flesh on flesh. A balloon pops.
He lunges at the clown, tears at it, comes away with only mouthful of its colorful clothing. He tries again. And again. His neck is bleeding, and soon there is more blood mixed in – that of the clown, but also of the friends he summed. The stench of it intoxicates the tiger even as it repulses Sleaze.
But, he keeps fighting.
Keeps fighting until suddenly the clown is simply gone - not slain, but gone, dissipated like mist. The animals are gone, too, and he is no longer a tiger, he is Sleaze again – not gold, not the sun. Just Sleaze.
“Not bad,” says the master, “room for improvement, of course. But not bad.”
Sleaze stands, sides heaving. Blood still runs hot down his neck. His vision has started to blur.
“One more, I think? Rule of threes, and all that.”
The master chuckles to himself.
“So what’s the biggest monster of all, Sleaze? Or should I say – who?”
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t know.
Such a stupid boy.
The doors roll open.
Through them walks a boy, a purple so dark it looks black unless it hits the right light. A normal boy, who isn’t particularly bright.
Sometimes we look in a mirror and we barely recognize ourselves. This is not such a case.
Know thyself, after all.
It’s the same death-Sleaze, the one who walked beside him in that terrible valley that did not exist, the one who said you don’t make it out of this alive.
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…” says the death-Sleaze, and he says it quietly but Sleaze can hear every word. The world has taken on an awful clarity.
“You took on a classic monster. Your took on your – our – iconic monster. And of all the monsters in the world -- why am I am the worst one, Sleaze? Why do you fear me the most?”
He looks at himself. He doesn’t know.
“You should have let one of them kill you,” the death-Sleaze sighs, “killing yourself is a mortal sin, after all. Though this…I wonder?”
Its head cocks, ponderous.
“You’re already weak,” it continues, “I’m sure Pennywise’s bite was just rife with infection and lord-knows-what. So why not let me finish the job, hm?”
It regards him. He hates himself under his own gaze.
“Such a stupid boy.”
They clash.
He tears his own flesh, tastes his own blood on his tongue. They fight in teeth and hooves and colliding bodies for what seems like an eternity before Sleaze remembers his gifts, that he is powerful, this thing he incubates inside him.
He sets fire to himself, adds the stench of burning flesh to the wretched miasma in the air. His own mane catches alight as the death-Sleaze comes at him again, not caring about the pain, comes at him again and again.
He closes his eyes as the death-Sleaze’s teeth sink into his crest, and imagines a heart, beating. The death-sleaze’s heart.
(His heart.)
He imagines it stopping. Imagines hands wrapped around it, squeezing.
He feels the death-Sleaze inhale, sharp, feels the stutter.
He thinks of the heart twisting in his hands, wrung out like a washcloth.
The death-Sleaze falls, the heavy body crashing into his, and Sleaze goes down with him. There is a crack like a gunshot as his front right leg breaks. Before him is his own body, burnt and dead. Beside him kneels Sleaze, mane still burning, broken leg beneath him.
There is the distant sound of clapping as the master rises from his throne.
Sleaze begins to scream. He doesn’t stop.
sleaze
cancer x garbage
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guess how much wine i've had. GUESS.
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