I fit you like a pair of concrete shoes; malis

[sleaze]

I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife He’d hoped it would fade. Would hope whatever magic – whatever demon – worked and wiled away inside his head would tire of him, leave him here, free. But it does not. His mind turns to a feral thing, it jumps into bodies. He wakes once in the body of a wolf, crouched over carrion, a coppery warmth on his lips he knows now to be blood. The wolf throws back its head and howls, a primal noise that still echoes in his mind sometimes. He wakes once in the body of an oak, feels nothing and everything, the sun on his leaves, the acorns growing fat and tumbling to the earth. (He doesn’t mind being trees, being grasses. There is a peace to it. It’s the things with thoughts that frighten him. The things he violates.) He tries to ground himself. It even works, sometimes. When he feels his mind loosen, a caged animal rattling the bars, he picks focal points, he breathes. He mutters prayers, or what remains of the ones he once knew. (He’s lost so much of himself. Dear god, he’s lost so much.) One remains, always: yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. Easy to say. Hard to believe. Harder still when he wonders sometimes if he is evil, entering their minds in this way, without their consent. He keeps to himself, mostly. Their words and gazes invite him in like a vampire crossing the threshold and before he knows it he’s touched secrets, touched desires that leave a filmy coating on his tongue. He doesn’t want to know them. Not like that. He knows enough. He knew a girl, once. One with an impossible history that echoed his own. (Save for going mad. Save for sinking into their minds like quicksand.) There was a girl. (There were two girls.) There was a girl, colors deep and rich like his own, and she knew a history he never told anyone, not even Etro. There was a girl, and he has not forgotten her name: Malis. sleaze cancer x garbage

[Malis]

Any hope she had felt blossoming in her chest had faded long ago. Too many days passed and the blue still clung to her skin like a rash she could not heal. And that was strange, because Malis had eventually discovered she could heal almost anything. There had been a day, a strange day, the kind of day where the world could not recover and everything remained just a little more wrong than before. Erebor had tried to burn away the blue, and oh how she had hoped it would work. But as the hair turned dark and curled and reduced to little more than soot on skin that bubbled and blistered, underneath there was still only blue. Just blue. And as soon as he had stopped and her whimpering had quieted, the blue knit itself back together and fur filled the empty places. It was like nothing had ever happened.

But the trouble with regeneration, with recklessness without consequence, was the shadow Malis could feel growing in her chest. It was like a feral beast filling her mind with terrible thoughts, bleeding a darkness into her veins that she was aching to surrender to.

She had never wanted to die until the choice had been taken from her.

There is a cold fire burning in her blue and black face as she drifts through the meadow, a face crowned in horns like glittering obsidian. She has no reason to be here, no desire for friends or finding family, no desire to form ties of any kind. She knows she is like her father, built to ruin, designed to destroy and the spark of who she used to be, that brown and white girl playing in the jungle, it begs her not to touch anyone with her families poison.

But she is selfish, just as they all are, and as soon as she sees him she is edging through the currents of bodies until they are nose to nose and she is spending seconds retracing every detail she had forgotten about such a sad, dark face.

And then, in a voice that is far too soft for a face that seems so swallowed with doubt and shadow and aching regret-

“Do you remember me?”

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 copes through isolation, does not look them in the eye, tries to block their passage out. When his mind howls too feral he tries to turn it to lesser things, to plants and lower animals. (He likes being an oak. There is a timeless piece inside the bark, leaves stretched to the sky, birds perched on him. There are no thoughts, only a warmth of sunlight, a sensation of a breeze.) (He does not like being a wolf, where the taste of blood is sweet as honey in his mouth and the horses he’s long ignored stop becoming beings and start becoming meat, a network of muscle and sinew, the weak and frail among them all but glowing like beacons, begging to be destroyed.) He copes because there is a girl who negates his restless mind, whose mind he cannot touch. He doesn’t know if he loves her or worships her, or if indeed there is any difference. He’s been a praying man before and he would be again, for her. He copes because he must, because even though sometimes a suicidal ideation sticks in his bones he shakes it off. He wants to live. (Just not like this.) There are still dreams. He thinks there will always be dreams. A clown with a Glasgow smile, a name carved upon his belly, a fire so hot he melts until he is nothing. There was a girl. (There were two girls.) The body is there before he knows it, her face near his, the scent of her overwhelming. He thinks of steel traps, of iron jaws, and shuts his mind from leaping out to take her. He does not want to know her mind. His own is wretched enough. Do you remember me? she asks and he wants to laugh, for how could he forget a girl who once sat with him on a precipice while they practically dared each other to jump. A girl who validated his madness, made it real because she knew things she could not possibly know. “There was a girl,” he says in way of response, and he isn’t sure if he wants to touch her or cringe away. sleaze cancer x garbage

[Malis]

She cannot cope.

It is impossible to cope when the urge to survive is ingrained in every shattered atom of her being, when the marrow in her bones and the flesh above that are as infallible as water lapping at the shores. Even if it isn’t the same water, it is the same ocean. The same means to the same end. It is impossible to cope when every part of her ruined soul aches for the oblivion of death and yet she cannot go quietly into the night.

For how can she live each day with blood on her hands and a darkness blossoming like a stain upon her breast. How long can she endure the dreams where she sinks thirsty teeth into the throat of her sister, her mother, her father, where she wakes to the metallic memory of blood on her lips and the way it had made her soulless heart beat just a little faster.

There was a girl. He says, and she can feel her sanity draining away into the dirt at their feet.

“There were two girls.” She responds inching closer, those green eyes like emeralds on fire, too wide and fever-bright. “Two girls.” She repeats and even though her mouth is against his neck and her breath must been burning holes in his sanity, it isn’t him she’s thinking about.

She thinks about having hands and feet and fingers, about the knife held loosely in her fist until the moment the blade buried itself in Nerissa’s spine. She thinks about the hunger in her soul, like a fire raging through her veins and burning away every atom of who she used to be. She thinks about the fluttering pulse at Lena’s neck and how her humanity had felt when she sank her teeth into flesh and drained away every drop of her stunted life.

Her lips pull back and suddenly the flat and white of her teeth are pressed to sinew of his neck. “And now there are none.”

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 There was a girl, he’d said, and her response is expected but still causes a shudder to run through him: There were two girls. It’s like a mantra, a quiet one shared between them, a fever-dream they share because whatever the illness they were stricken with affected them both, was imbued in every neuron now. But they came out of it different. She heals, he possesses. (They are both unraveling – unraveled – all the same.) Her mouth is at his neck, hot, and he thinks again of fevers – she burns with something he both fears and envies, something entrenched in the veins of her. Her eyes gleam with something he recognizes, feels in the marrow of his spine but does not want to name it. (Calling her mad means he himself is mad, as well.) “Malis,” he says her name, says it again, “Malis, what happened?” He asks what happened but in truth he asks what did you do, what did you do. He thinks for a moment of touching her mind, finding out – but he is frightened, for he is ultimately a cowardly boy. (He is frightened her mind will feel too much like home, that the poison will taste like something sweet.) sleaze cancer x garbage

this had a better ending but then it was time to leave work D: