the church bells were all broken; malis/jenger pony

[sleaze]

I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife There are a hundred selves, a hundred deaths. Velvet was there, owner’s name carved upon his belly. Velvet knows toy boxes and a clown with a Glasgow smile, knows the sensations of falling, of drowning, of a head twisting off. Velvet knows, she loves us. Cloud was there, a creature reborn, taken by God’s hands (her hands) from the garbage. Cloud, who was made whole again, made complete, the scars painted over. Cloud knows tenderness, a girl with brown hair and a medicinal touch. He knows how she fixed things, ministered to them. Cloud knows the feel of moss under his feet. Cloud knows, too: she loves us. Sleaze knows the feel of moss. Sleaze knows he burned. Sleaze knows he was dead. Sleaze knows he was called, somewhere, and then there is nothing: an empty spot, scrubbed. Sleaze knows a prayer, or part of it: yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil. His mind was never strong to begin with, and now it is worse. Now his mind is glass, delicate. Outside the glass are memories he cannot comprehend. Outside the glass is an inferno, a knife, a tiger with no face. He cannot look too long into that abyss, lest it gaze back. His mind is frail, and it is no longer his. His mind jumps into things, sometimes. Into trees, rocks, a river. The sensations – sunlight like life pouring into chlorophyll, the cool wet completeness as he carved paths through the world – are strange and unnerving. Once he slipped into another person, and their thoughts were there, he saw himself, blank-eyed and mouth slack. He saw himself, and it was terrible. Sleaze never particularly liked himself, but it’s worse, now. Worse, now, with the strange toybox memories and the slip-sliding mind that Sleaze cannot quite control. He tries to pray, but the words are dead on his tongue. He doesn’t know what he believes anymore. He doesn’t know who he is anymore. So he walks. He walks and he focuses his mind, keeps it to himself. He walks and he tries to think of the prayers he once said, kneeling on the moss with Garbage’s head laid across his withers. He walks and he tries not to think of the things that dance beyond the glass of his memory, the grinning clown, and, somehow worse, the devotion with which he once said the words: she loves us. sleaze cancer x garbage

[Malis]

Ilka was gone.

The thought came in waves of understanding, ebbing and flowing, testing the limits of her still fragile sanity. It threatened to undo her, she who had vowed to take better care of her family if only she could escape that plastic prison and return to the place where a heart beat beneath her heels. She had repeated it like a prayer, clinging to it hard as waves of pain and illogical fear tried to shake her loose. Somehow, impossibly, and without courage or bravery, she was home again. But that promise was little more than a dropped porcelain doll, shattered and scattered, because Ilka was gone.

When her sister had fixed those luminous eyes on her, a brown so pale they looked like crushed gold, Malis hadn’t the heart to argue with her. She understood not belonging, the feeling of being trapped some place and being willing to do anything to change it. She understood better, more intimately, than Ilka could have ever imagined. So instead of arguing with her sister, she had offered to travel with her. They followed the river from the Chamber, not straying as it narrowed into a quieter stream. When it opened back up again into a wide pond, Malis had recognized the sprawling stretch of land and tree as the Meadow.

They had agreed to part ways in the Meadow.
It was a promise Malis was loathe to keep, but how could she break it now when the other one still lay in sharp, haunting shambles at her feet.

For a long moment, stretched so tight, so thin Malis was sure something would break, they stood together. Nose buried against shoulder, no words with enough meaning for either to try to speak. But then the moment passed, as all moments do, and the sisters broke apart with equally false smiles drawn like armor across their identically delicate faces. It was only after Ilka had turned and gone, little more than a smudge of black and white disappearing into the far line of forest that Malis remembered to say goodbye.

“I love you, Ilka.” Her heart crumbled in her chest.

There was a nose pressed suddenly against her neck and she turned to find Pyxis looking back at her. Somehow her heart managed to soar in her chest even as her stomach fell through her belly. Pyxis was going with Ilka. The two had always been inseparable, so it made sense, it felt right, even though it meant a little more of Malis’ world was eroding away. There was only silence between them, full of thick and static, but it didn’t matter. Malis knew that Pyxis understood. She knew she would take care of their sweet Ilka. Their expressions mirrored one another until they parted and each began the trek to their respective kingdoms.

She turned from Ilka, from Pyxis, from her own bright reflection glittering back at her from the pond at her feet, and managed not to flinch at the blade that shoved itself between her ribs when those green eyes settled on something hauntingly familiar. She tried to take a breath, she swore her lungs even shuddered with the effort, but the stallion walking past her had sucked all the air from the world. Seconds stretched into eons and she was entirely willing to let him pass without saying anything, without dredging up impossible memories that felt more like a lingering nightmare.

“Wait.” She says, she breathes – it’s impossibly difficult to speak when all the air has gone from the world – just a whisper of uncertainty that he would never hear.

But then, even more impossibly, she is scurrying after him, awkward and indigo and completely wrong. She knows in an instant she cannot let him fade back into the crowd, knows regret will haunt her like an entirely new nightmare. And when her mouth presses against his shoulder, her flat teeth insistent, she realizes she has nothing to say. Any question would be a confession, a ruinous secret revealed. So she moves to face him, to bare any ghosts hiding in the shadows of his expression. There’s something there, she thinks, something she saw in her own reflection. The indifference she wears like a mask, a shield, it fissures the longer she looks and her secrets seep like black blood through the cracks.

MALIS

makai x oksana

[sleaze]

I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife He saw the color and he didn’t see the color. The color is like the memories, a bird beating against the glass. The color, perhaps, is the memories, stained a rich purple, so dark it’s nearly black. (You almost can’t tell. In the dark, you can’t tell at all. It isn’t until the light shines on that he’s betrayed for what he is, what happened.) (There are no clouds. There is only purple.) He forgets he is purple. He forgets the clown. The tiger with no face. (He dreams, and they are back. The clown is laughing, or maybe screaming. The knife is carving a name into his belly. He is drowning. He is burning.She loves us. She loves us. She loves us.) Wait-- Someone is speaking. He stiffens, and his mind jumps out of him like a startled deer. For a moment it goes into her and there are figures, memory-creatures, a cracked goodbye and the sorrow overwhelms him, stuffing his lungs and heart. It’s a moment, no more than a second or two, and he is jolted back into his own mind, back into the purple, the ghoulish depths. Wait-- He is out of her mind but she followed, teeth press against him like he’s something real, something tangible. It’s the first time he’s been touched since (leta) (nerissa) (god) before he can remember. Who was the last to touch him? There was a girl. There was no girl. He is not a toy. He is real. Sleaze, he thinks, my name is Sleaze. She is a color, and he sees it like he cannot see his own. Indigo, shades lighter than he, flecked with gold in her mane like she’d captured sunshine there. But more, there is something to her, some invisible brand they both wear, and ah, how his memory shakes. There was no girl, he thinks, unsure why, there was no fire. He is shaking, too, and he wonders if she can tell. (Of course she can.) “You…” he says, but there’s nothing beyond that, no name, no description for what she - they - are. “How did you get your color?” is how he finishes. Surely she was born with it. They all seem to be, these days, rainbows bred across Beqanna. The memories sigh like ghosts behind the curtains, threatening to come through, to bring him to his knees. sleaze cancer x garbage

[Malis]

With her mouth against his neck, her pulse stills, the swells of anxiety sinking quietly beneath her skin. She can taste sweat and dirt, can taste summer on him. Beneath that she can feel the soft give of flesh, the flex of muscle. He’s real. The thought shapes from the doubt in the shadows of her eyes. Real. But when she pulls back and there is no warmth, no proof, the doubt flashes dangerously across her black and indigo face. Nothing was real anymore, there were only memories haunting like ghosts, sticking like burrs. Only an unshakeable hollowness, a sense of shame in having been manipulated so thoughtlessly against her will.

As if remembering were a dangerous thing, it is, it is, there is a sudden pressure in her mind, like being submerged under miles of ocean. She reels back a few steps, awkward on startled, rigid legs, and shakes her head once, twice. The feeling fades almost as soon as it had come, but she can’t shake the feeling that the thoughts had belonged to someone else. Her eyes flash warily and lift to his, but she says nothing.

There are no words.
Not anymore.

But then there are words on his lips, a dangerous question, and she wonders if maybe the fog that had swollen her head would be better than this. Her skin ripples over muscle that seems unable to stop trembling, but she notices the same of him and somehow this makes it easier. Easier, until the question takes shape like a knife to her chest.

He knows.

But of course he did, and she had recognized it immediately in him. It had been what simultaneously drew her in and held her at bay. She flinched anyway, wounded, her jaw clenched so tight her teeth had begun to hurt. “I don’t know.” She tells him in a voice drawn so tight the words themselves fray at the edges. It’s a lie and it isn’t, the truth but it isn’t. “There was a dream,” an impossibility, “a nightmare.” She watches him uncertainly, overwhelmed by the urge to make sure he is still flesh and bone, that there is still blood flowing past the pulse at his throat. “I think I’m being punished.”

She knows she speaks nonsense, an unintentional riddle, but the truth would be no clearer.
The truth would be so much harder to believe.

Except he knows.

Those desperate green eyes shift from the ghosts in his eyes to the curve of his ribs. She watches his sides rise and fall beneath the shuddering flesh, counts his breathes like a saving grace. Alive, she thinks. We’re real. Her gaze sharpens and narrows, jumping instantly back to his face. “It isn’t my color, though,”, her tone is as sharp as her expression, and she emphasizes the most important part, “it isn’t mine.”

MALIS

makai x oksana

[sleaze]

I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife Reality was an entirely fragile thing, an unreliable thing – it sits like St. Elmo’s Fire, a promise of light in the distance that he could never get any closer to. There was a girl. There was no girl. The thoughts echo and contradict themselves in the ghastly hallways of his mind, chime like church bells:it was real. It was not real. It was real. Not real. Real. But she is real. She is a touch, a sense of pressure, a streak of indigo. A scent, something he can’t define, like hyacinth mixed with the earth. She has a mind, one he’d touched, if only for a moment. I don’t know, she says, and he is overwhelmed with relief – that he does not have to face it. (Whatever it is – sometimes it’s a clown with a Glasgow smile, sometimes it’s a tiger with no face. Sometimes it’s the smell of gasoline and a match catching fire.) But she continues. There was a dream. (Pause.) A nightmare. Yes, he knows, the dreams continue still, when he can’t help it and falls asleep. In dreams the purple recedes, in dreams the other things – the it he cannot face – rise up, ghosts in the machine. Then, worse: I think I’m being punished. For everything, the thought of punishment had not strictly occurred to him – he’d assumed some descent into madness, perhaps, a mind that was never strong to begin with finally giving way. Punishment, though – Perhaps he had not prayed hard enough, his jumbled words too disjointed. (And he’d let Garbage lay his head across his back, let it rest there too long.) Perhaps his mere existence warranted punishment – him being the kind of boy who should not exist, made from ill magic between lovers destroyed. She is uneasy, too – they stand at the brink of something and he wonders who will fall first, or if they will fall together. She says the color isn’t hers, and he knows this to be true, for the purple isn’t his, either. The purple is a memory, a curtain – the purple sits like a king on a throne, guarding him, and oh, if (when) it slips— “Whose is it?” he says. He wants her to answer. He doesn’t want her to answer. He wants her to tell him he is mad and turn away, a wash of indigo and black in the sunset. He wants her to step back from whatever precipice they have found themselves on. But he wants to step forward, too. God help him, part of him even wants to jump. sleaze cancer x garbage

[Malis]

They perch together like feathers on a precipice waiting for the wind, for the blowing of their thoughts, to push them past the point of no return. But there’s an impossible balance and they cling to it uncertainly, willing and unwilling. There is something in the loneliness and shame of the not-nightmare that makes her want to stretch this moment with the purple stallion just a far as she could. To fill in the dangerous stretches of silence with the sound of their trembling breaths, to chase away old ghosts with new ones.

You need a friend.
It’s a dangerous thought and she pushes it away immediately.
There’s no one else.

She can feel desperation blooming in the pit of her stomach. It worms its way through her belly, up her throat, and she chokes on it. Unbidden she remembers the clown, that faded smile tattooed across a worn out face. She remembers the promises made, an alliance turned friendship. She remembers dozens of teeth tearing into him as he fell beneath vicious plastic raptors and a falling snow of his own stuffing.

You don’t deserve a friend.

She reels back further, further, despite the ache to push her mouth against his skin, real skin, in that frantic, desperate way she had come to know so intimately. Her chest heaves as she watches him, her eyes a disconcerting green against the black band painted around them like a blindfold. It had been a blindfold until she had scraped back to the surface. No, stop.

But his question is full of thorns and they sink like hooks beneath her skin.
Tethered.
She balks.

“I don’t,” there is panic seeping like shadow over the delicate angles of a tormented face, “I can’t.” 

You must.

For a moment she searches his face, trying to decide if there’s another way to make him stay. To keep him for just a little longer without trading truths and baring bits of her soul. She doesn’t think there is. So she considers his question again, her eyes flashes of a wounded green. There’s a name she could give him, the name she had used. But she can’t make her lips shape out the letters for those two simple words.

Try harder.

“It belongs to someone that wasn’t me. A different me. But it isn’t mine.” The confession comes easier now, the words taking shape on their own. “It’s the stain of an impossible memory, of the realest dream I’ve ever had. The worst nightmare.” But it wasn’t the worst, not anymore. Worse was the scattered family she had returned to find. Her face softens and caves with a pain too real to understand. “There was a girl,” her eyes sink to the shadows at her feet, “not like us.”

Vague.
Vague is safe.

And then her eyes return to his, and the ache returns to her chest. “This color is a scar.” She wants to feel the warmth of his skin again, to be reassured, but her feet remain frozen in place. “Maybe that does make it mine.”

This is the worst confession of all.

MALIS

makai x oksana

[sleaze]

I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife He is used to being alone. He was alone for years when Garbage left with no explanation. (He’d said ‘I love you,’ before they went to sleep and when Sleaze thinks back on it he thinks Garbage’s voice shook, but he doesn’t know if he’s falsified the memory in trying to explain it.) He was largely alone in Beqanna, adrift with no home or friends (much less lovers) and no particular need for either. He had his prayers, his own thoughts to mull over. Until – Until someone or something carved a chunk of memory from his waking mind. Until his thoughts turned to class, encased within the purple; until other names – other lives - rose up with their beliefs and memories and began to consume him alive. Until his mind was no longer entirely his own, slipping into others – birds, wolves, horses. He wrestles his mind down, tamps it. He does not want to touch her mind again. Not in that way. He thinks she might have the purple, too. Ghosts of memories shouting from the abyss, and he doesn’t want to know what they say. But her words are familiar, déjà vu but not – instead, it’s the strange feeling of having a stranger describe the dream you had as if it was their own. A different me – (I am Cloud. I am Velvet. She loves us. She loves us.) The stain of an impossible memory— (There was a girl. There was no girl.) It’s surreal and terrible but there’s a sprig of hope to it, a ghoulish hope that someone knows, that he was not alone in this. There was a girl, she says, and he reacts as if she’d shot electricity into his veins. (There was no girl.) “There was a girl,” he says before he can stop himself and the words feel like a wound opened, the infection spilling out, both something disgusting and a relief all at once. “Two girls,” he says, adding to the story – two girls, one who carved her name into his belly and one who nursed him back to health, but ah, hadn’t he loved them both? (There was no girl.) “Please,” he says, but he doesn’t know what he’s begging for, only that he’s begging. sleaze cancer x garbage

[Malis]

It seems impossible that he should be able to, but he echoes her thoughts, he echoes them and adds new ones. But he can’t possibly know anything of the nightmare that had trapped her and held her hostage for what felt like a lifetime. He could be a mind reader, a magician with a cruel sense of humor. Either would make more sense than the answer blinking down at her like cold starlight. He could be playing a trick on her (why did that feel like relief).

She eyed him with sudden suspicion even though she knew, she knew.
But he hadn’t been there, he hadn’t.
The faces were still as clear to her as the faces of her scattered family and his wasn’t among them.

Two girls.

She flinches from him as though he had struck out at her.
Remembering is the hardest part, reliving the moments that had already been fire-branded to the inside of her mind. There had been two girls, one bad, one worse. She shakes her head as if this will somehow dislodge the memory stuck there like a burr.

“But you can’t possibly know this.” She says, whispers across the space between them as if she’s trying to assure herself of something. “I would remember you.” But doubt clings to the shadows on her face, filling the hollows with a strange gauntness. “It was just a dream,” she says again, a hint of quiet desperation coloring her voice, “maybe this is just a dream, too.”

The air feels suddenly cold, so cold, and her skin quivers against a wind with teeth made of ice. But even after the wind has stopped blowing and the air is still, she trembles. Her eyes flit uncertainly between him and the trees to her left, an easy place for her to disappear to and forget all about this impossible conversation.

But his voice draws her back, a single word poised tremulous on his lips.
Please.

She feels suddenly used up, exhausted by fighting this great invisible beast. She wasn’t even sure what is was she was fighting for; real or dream. But she feels something for this strange boy, this impossible parallel, feels everything for him and his plea is enough to unravel her completely. She inches closer until her trembling, heaving chest is pressed against him, her chin draped possessively over his back. It’s easier this way, she thinks, with his pulse fluttering against her chest and the horror in his face safely away from her wandering green gaze.

“If we’re both what we say we are,” she says quietly into the night (oh, it’s so much easier when she can’t see his face), “then we’ll be each other’s ruin.”

Nothing good can come of making a nightmare a tangible thing.

“Your girls,” she whispers anyway, shifting so her cheek was pressed against the warmth of his skin, “did they have names?”

MALIS

makai x oksana

idk, i almost didn't even post this.

[sleaze]

I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife He feels like if she had been there with him he would have felt it, her presence (the way he feels it now, fog on his back). But she knows. She knows there was a girl (two girls) and she knows the color is not their own. He does not recall the memories in any real detail – what drifts through are phases, sensations. A few symbols, terrifying – a clown with a Glasgow smile, a tiger with no face. But they are not sewn together in any kind of coherent way. The memories do not tell a story. They explain nothing except perhaps for why he flirts with madness. They certainly do not explain why he awoke with the ability to leave his body and fly into others, why he knows things he should not. But she wasn’t there, not with him. He doesn’t know how he knows this but he does, and it feels as sure as anything. (Not that that’s saying much.) “I don’t remember you,” he says. They are speaking to each other but also to themselves. “I would remember you.” He would remember the indigo, the sense of realness she brings. Maybe this is just a dream too, she says and he wonders. It feels too vivid, and he recalls the sensations of her muzzle to his skin. That had been real. If nothing else, that had been real. And the touch comes again, grounding, her chest to his and her neck laid across him. It is intimate in a way he has not been since his father and their meadow-prayers and he is unsure what to do with himself, moving his neck awkwardly across her back and withers. She asks for names and for a moment he has nothing to tell her, until another memories trickles out from the purple, and he can feel the knife in his belly as the girl writes her name there, marks him. He can feel each letter, carved sharp and careful. “Nerissa,” he says, tongue feeling swollen in his mouth, dreamlike, then, “Leta.” The names bring forth other memories – a sensation of drowning, a mossy paddock, clouds painted across his body. The thought, assured in a way he had never been about anything in his life: she loves us. “It burned,” he says, numbly, “that’s how I died. She burned everything.” Even herself, he thinks, though he does not know, will never know for sure. sleaze cancer x garbage

when in doubt remember i love you and you should always post whatever you're questioning

[Malis]

The names pluck at the loose strings of her sanity and she flinches against him, startled, unraveling. “Nerissa.” She agrees with a fragile whisper. “Lena.” This sudden revelation, this confirmation of things that should never be, could never be, but somehow were breathed a new sense of unease into her veins. “One bad, the other worse.” This confession an escaped thought as it drifted through her mind.  It felt suddenly impossible to hold still, reminded her of a time when she could only be still. She had so resented the loss of her will. In an instant her very core was at war with itself- the need to be pressed against living flesh clashing with the more feral instinct of flight. Her cheek lifted from the smooth of his back but her chest remained pressed against his. The hollow at his withers, the slant beneath his spine were filled suddenly with the worrying of soft lips and gentle teeth.

“We can’t have both been there and not been there together.” She tries again, pinching his skin between her teeth as her frustrations bled out. “It’s impossible.” There is a sense of humorous desperation in the laughter that dies on her woolen tongue. And then, so quiet, so firm, “This is impossible.”

She pulls away then, smothering the gasp that flares at the way the sudden cold throbs in the space he had been just a moment before. But she needed to see his face now, to see his eyes. The truth would be buried there somewhere, she was sure of it. “Are you playing a trick on me?” Can you read my mind, do you know my thoughts, my fears. Her expression in impossible to untangle- the reflexive stoniness, the steel, the way it had welded with fear and vulnerability. “How can I trust you when you know impossible things.” But her voice is softer now, no edge. When she looks at him she doesn’t see an enemy, when she looks at him, she knows.

Her brow furrows and her jaw tightens as she debates internally for a moment. This secret could die with her someday, this impossibility, this dream that wasn’t. Days would come and go and maybe the memories would fade, maybe the color would fade. There would be nothing left to remember it by. But if she broke those secrets open and let them spill into him, this nightmare would take root. It would grow. And yet how could she ever forget, doomed as she was (though she had no idea) to an eternal life of remembering. So when her green eyes return to fall on his face and swallow his gaze, her face has changed. There is still and there is vulnerability, but the fear is, for the time being, quenched.

“I didn’t die, but I wanted to.” Her chin levels, her chest tight. “Death would have been easier. For me.” For any coward. “Nerissa broke me. Lena fixed me. And then she gave me back to Nerissa to be broken again.” It should have been a string of incoherent words, half statements, but she suspected he would know anyways. Only then does her bravery fade, that fragile façade, and she can feel her feet shifting impatiently beneath her.

“I hate to be still now.” A quiet confession, a gentle pleading in the raw green of those shadowed eyes.

MALIS

makai x oksana