the apostate

[apostata]

sweetsunflora​:

Where: The cartography room because I apparently am too scared to write starters anywhere else in the ship. Emma haunts this place now. When: A few days after the Hunters’ return. Whom: Open to the Agathe survivors.

(tw blood, tw violence) Day has returned, rays of menial warmth filtering in through the windows of an empty cartography room. No one wants to be out in the open right now, and that suits her just fine. She keeps waiting for someone, a guard of some sort, to call her out and force her into a room; but they seem to sense that she is too broken to cause trouble. Too haunted to do human things such as make a fuss. 

She watches the sea outside, fracturing and thawing; a white porcelain temper tantrum over a tablecloth of navy vastness. In her hands is a love letter of the final sort. Her former last words. She promised Pasha that they would do it together––destroy them with whiskey, fire, and laughter. She promised a great many things.

Emma thinks of the sun again; how she should be grateful for its presence. It does bring comfort after all, doesn’t it? Illuminates the shadows and demeans menacing figures into harmless objects; monsters into coat hangers. Demons into plain branches. 

In truth, it doesn’t matter to her if the sun has deigned to take up its post once more. Even if the light should dip below the horizon and come up again a hundred times, it wouldn’t even matter because what is the point? She closes her eyes and she sees Pippa’s–No, Philippa’s–face. She does not deserve to even think of that shorthand, a nickname reserved for those who hold utmost fondness for the recently passed. Passed. Like she floated away, down a river. Like Emma didn’t bash her head in with a jagged rock until the water turned red, even in the utter darkness. She can still feel Phillipa’s blood on her cheeks. 

The naturalist (does she even deserve that title now?) forces her eyes open and is met with a too bright room. She wants to cry, weep for everything she has lost and done, but all she can manage is a sniffle––a sharp intake of breath. A creek of wood sounds, a giving way of floorboards to signify a new presence. She should smile because it is a familiar face; the only family she has on this ship, but all she can offer is a neutral glance as greeting. 

“You were never supposed to find out, you know. No one was.” She plays with the love letter between her fingers, eyes meeting paper instead of person. “I always planned to make it home to you but…I made letters just in case. Do you want to hear yours?” 

.

You were never supposed to find out.

What does that mean. There’s some trick in Jehanne’s perception, some grating blur that dizzies his empty and ill-echoing head. Emma with scarlet staining her face. Emma with vacant smile, vacant eyes, vacant blood. Emma with a still pulse, cooling slab of meat-and-flesh on the rocks. Half-eaten. Carrion-crawled. Jehanne reaches out. His fingers grasp a bruise around her arm. Can she hear it, in his silence. The bitterness. A wellspring of choking and acrid sand. If we didn’t find out, he says in the press of dried flowers onto her skin, in the vagrant blood that is crushed beneath his grip, rises to the surface in petals of lilac and sea-green. You would not have come back to us. If we didn’t find out, I would only have your body.

“Is that so,” he says, aloud. And lets go, for he cannot look at her. He cannot say, I understand. He cannot say, I forgive you.

He turns away. Lets sunlight warm the side of his face. By his elbow, a round globe with a tear where Oceania is meant to be. He curls a palm around its rounded slope. Spins it, aimless, watches the turn of the world past his thumb. He can name most of the countries that skim his fingertips. He was taught that much. His sister taught him that much. Sometimes, he thinks, hopelessly, when he glimpses Emma. Sometimes when he --

Sometimes it’s just an echo. Sometimes it’s a scar, a memory you can’t put down because it’s beside you, it’s on your skin in ropy, thick lines, it’s a wound that speaks through Emma’s voice.

“Tell me.” He does not want to hear it. He does not want to leave anything unspoken. Jehanne shuts his eyes. “Read it to me.”

[apostata]

open to: agathe crew except emma >:(. date: 30th, early morning.

— what toll does survival take.

of its famine-boned hands one holds the knife, the other cradles a heatsick head. fists your grimy hair and guides the throat as lamb to slaughter or struggling sacrifice. then what? does it lift the flat of its blade and take to its gory work? filing a dozen rows of blunted teeth to needlepoint, holding the soft mouth to mutilate the lips carnivorous — make you into a rictus grin of cannibalism, wet scarlet dripping the gums. or, say, does survival prise its rusted knife-edge from throat-hollow to navel, pull broad cuts lying diagonal to bone. at the navel, broken-nailed fingers pull through vestigial flesh and scrape spirit from muscle. leave a raked corpse tethering a being by its foot. your ghosts of morality and conscience with nowhere else to go.

but at least you survived. at least you can say that. whatever you killed to survive, within or without, at least there’s enough left of you to say it.

and now that idiot is deciding to sacrifice the rest too.

oh, emma. why go in such a pointless way. the laugh is bitter, dwelling in the corners of jehanne’s mouth. the foolishness of it, the absurdity. why go without a word to us. but even if jehanne wants, anger is a word that has lost currency to his body. he thinks: i would have stopped you. he knows, wry: if not, i would have followed you. “is there anything you want me to tell her?”

or, perhaps: is there anything i can tell you. is there anything i can vow that needs to be vowed. is there anything to be said that has not already been said. he bites his lower lip until a familiar red tang slips onto his tongue. any taste of life will soothe, when you’re hungry for proof of it. there’s a list of promises jehanne could say, here: i would kill them all for her; if we die, i’ll make sure it’s together; if we die, i’ll make sure she’s the last; goodbye, if this is goodbye. he opens his mouth and says nothing.

[intimatum]

Mary Oliver, October

[weltenwellen]

Wisława Szymborska, from “Love At First Sight“, View With a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems

[wishbzne-deactivated20210526]

ocean vuong, ‘my father writes from prison’

[ID: “some nights you are the lighthouse / some nights the sea” end ID]

[kafk-a]

Mary Oliver

[matthewolf]

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore– And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over – like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?

Langston Hughes (via matthewolf)

[soracities]

light bathes the heart. pomegranate cheeks blush. the cat goes walking in the alleys. morning breaks like the sugar cube between teeth, soft and sweet, a rosewater cardamom melt.

Anahita Shukla, from ‘City of Cream’, pub. amberflora (via thenightisland)

[apostata]

lifeinpoetry​:

There must be a phrase to contain wherever you go

whether or not you know where you’ve been or where you are going.

— Tanaya Winder, from “Learning to Say I Love You,” When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through

[apostata]

@ofvoron​ pasha’s cabin

— “i would kill them in their sleep, if we came to it.”

careless words, conversational as a sugar cube dropped to melt in a pot of black tea. sinking, syllables dissolving in delicate, fine grains. jehanne rests a thumb against the shut lock of pasha’s cabin, turns away from the door. we. them. a line of demarcation only blood will see effaced.

“if you don’t mind, ambassador, i’ll make myself comfortable.” yet contrary to his word jehanne idles. motionless. he tilts his head, moves lax eyelashes through the stale, topaz-toned air. underneath and indistinct: a gaze turned prising. eyes weighing voronin in some complicit dissection, careful calculation. “pardon me. it seems you might have been more comfortable picked up by a different ship.” jehanne breaks off his gaze and finds a wall to sit against, perpendicular to the windows. the sea in all directions and still he would walk from the water with his eyes on the waves, instinct swaddled up in human futility.

“it seems we won’t be facing confrontation in the meantime.” he lays a pistol on the ground. a folded rag. a copper wire brush and the dregs of a pot of whale oil. “but it concerns me, should our situation worsen.” here, jehanne does not clench his fingers over his ears, filter a hollow sound with bitten mouth and rippling blood bloom. “what misfortunes we may be held liable for. the blame that must be divvied, and the unhappy recipients. and it concerns me that even if we are not —” scapegoated, blamed, what was brought upon the agathe become what we brought to the promethean.

“even if we are not accused. odysseus, also, sacrificed six men to pass scylla in the deeps. he laid a meal on the altar to see the remainder of his crew unscathed. that sacrifice was a roll of the dice, but here.” here, the crystalline dividing line. our crew and theirs. it tightens his hand, he presses carpet with a palm and it softens his roiling stomach, to feel solid wood grain under the woven rug.

[villette1853]

soft in the middle, shelby eileen // 14 lines from love letters or suicide notes, david “doc” luben

[apostata]

adinfinita​:

there is so little of his past that is still bedrock beneath his feet. it is forever one masquerade or another, one veneer discarded for smoke screen, all surface and the flimsy effervescence of meteors and signal flare. what he has built for himself with handfuls of nothing but raw want — this shapeshifting, amorphous thing that has ravaged vainglory and ambition, made godhead in worship and blood sacrifice and consumed even that and its own tail — could not stand as long as he let the version of himself you knew live.

time has made it easier, made the treachery and knife work of it quotidien. he has killed himself endlessly to live, to live again, to live better. and the little he came into the world with, a name, a face, a reflection peering out at him with a pair of eyes and the slope of his nose that must have belonged to someone, once — these he has abandoned, too, like afterthought. as a million infinitesmial degrees of recalibration. countermeasures he took for granted in the wilderness of being young and dauntless, too reckless to believe in anything beyond the expanse of summer-dazed horizon. it was like this, soul cupped in his hands and a feral precociousness to every urge and discovery experienced for the first time that he met him.

jehanne. a name crowned with martyrdom, yet made to be spoken by a mouth that smiled as you said it. and maybe that was what drew him into him, at first, an ocean current curving down its natural path, the way the borders of their contradictions overlapped, the long silences  substituted for truth, for triage, for the attempt at carving out a place in the world that did not demand pretence. hugo, young and starved enough to set fire to his hunger just to feel warm, had taken to it as discovery. as invention. the thrill of creation, as only god could have known it at the beginning of everything. let it be known: that jehanne was entangled so profoundly with these dawnings was not the reason he let himself be swayed. he would not have surrendered himself for anyone else.

jehanne. jehanne. you are both a stranger and the same boy i would know at the end of all existence, just as at the beginning. it was you, first, before anything else. 

older, sharper, more rugged with the lean touch of scarcity and hollowed sleep. the compliment flows over him like water, the same way it always used to when laughter and badinage was their shared language alongside hugo’s evolving french. it rings stark in this unfamiliar territory spanning leagues of sea and time between them, how often jehanne let slip the habit in conversation. before, hugo had lacked the provision of understanding, translating his liberty as native eccentricity tinged with the easy pleasure of fondness. the same excuse does not apply anymore. a pointed spur of anger skewers the thought. an aimless rage lacking intent or direction. was it. why did you. why didn’t you.

it is the wrong thing to say the moment it leaves his lips and he mourns it instantly in the next lightning exhale of breath. what he meant to say, what he had thought to say — the words unravelled in his mind, half-finished, severed before they can be made whole. to have his gift for words, his silver-tongued craftsmanship and dexterity strangled by sheer feeling, it would be shameful if he had space in his ribs to spare. where to begin, when he has written the same words over and over, into memory, engraved into ink stains, what i would not give to see you one last time. is this not the granting of that impossible, haunted wish? unspeakable losses have scarred the agathe and her only remaining passengers, and yet if not for her drowning, jehanne would not be here. i’d recognise you in the dark, jehanne says. you couldn’t, hugo thinks. you couldn’t begin to imagine how deeply intimate the dark and i are these days. because i will not grieve the agathe if it means the loss of her has brought me you.

and it was jehanne, after all, who had taught him the words, once. the correct tenses, the right structures conjugated with the idiosyncracies of the romantic languages that used to drive hugo to madness. only the french could say it quite like this, to make absence a physical act of loss:

“tu me manquait. tu m’as manqué.”

Oh. The tremor starts at the base of the spine, climbs up its rungs to the bone cage cradling his heart.

Call it by its name. Love. Another word for it is bitterness. An apple with seeds swallowed, toxins in trace amounts. How many days for it to build in the flesh. How many days until a drop becomes a sea. Try for a bloodletting: you’ll exsanguinate over your white floors, lose all the scarlet in your body before you lose any poison. He’d done that before, after all. Bled dry on that battlefield, left that shriveled corpse and its sorry shadow tethered to another sea, fettered to another man’s feet — and thought it was enough. The footsteps that led him away expunged by sand and salt wave, no history left between them. No trail to follow to find reunion. He thought it was enough. It figures — now it had moved time, moved country and coincidence to find him. What is it that they say? You can run but they’ll find you. If you run then they’ll find you. As clean and pure as action and consequence. There’s no outstripping something that knows its yours. Here, at the join of blood and numbing air: an anguished, phantasmal thing is slotting its wretched hands seam to seam, trying to seal itself to Jehanne’s blood, trying to find any kind of belonging again.

He wants to look anywhere but at this man. But treacherous, his eyes continue drinking Hugo like a glutton, as though gaze is enough to swallow the angled, sharp lines of this face he has not seen for a decade. To move across broad shoulders, starched collar and shadowed throat and recommit them to memory. Jehanne realizes it now. He’d whitewashed this. Clenched his eyes and pretended shut lids were any kind of blindness. Took a breath and held it. Postured heartsick as heatsick, as a phantom fever in his cheeks that rough fingers could rub out. Now every drowsy thing in the chest wakes and chokes the heart.

Tu me manquait. It is his mother tongue yet he does not understand it. Tu m’as manqué.

Involuntary, his feet take a half-step back. The teeming words. A hundred thousand syllables struggling out of Jehanne’s throat, his stomach, out of every groove and fissure they had crept, hibernated. More. Every countless thing he never said, hoarded in the hollow spaces between joints, in splinters of bone marrow, in slivers of muscle. Jehanne had thought them gone: born and lived and long buried in the dead silence of his mouth. But now the revenant letters claw his tongue. How long these ghosts have haunted his body, facing the slow exorcism of time. And the sight of Hugo have burned them all back. Burned them to a frenzy, to a squall. Words to be whispered, words to be seen, words to be pressed to skin in the darkness of a night without candles nor moonlight.

“Vous dites des choses si cruelles. Vous me dites des choses si cruelles.” Jehanne does not pretend to smile now. He cannot tell what expression is on his face, what ugly, vulnerable thing is he showing.

He accedes it, Jehanne has always been the weak one. How much the shame curdled in him, in those months after, every recollection wanting to crack and crawl away from touch. Yearning touch still. And like clockwork, the memories. Every time Jehanne thought it had been consigned to oblivion, how it returned, an exiled creature skulking back again and again to the only home it knew. Even now it clenches a fist in him. He wants that intimacy without the taint of history. He wants to start over. Introduce himself with an extended palm, excise that shameful past. Has Hugo forgotten? Or is it simple carelessness. That he can say such things with such effortlessness. Tu m’as manqué.

Ah, how like his old friend, to unstitch every lost suture with only a sentence, with appellations that have fallen into the ears of a dozen other lovers.

“I as well.” He chooses English. Picks the language that aches only a breadth less. That lets him draw back some half-hearted guise of distance. “I missed you. I did not think we would meet again.”

[apostata]

ilvulcanico​:

it came at once, all this knowledge: a lost love, a lost love of him. the recognition so many of their crew carried gone loves and stolen moments — and teo, existing outside of it, away from it, peering in and trying to understand. it was the whisper of a reminder: you are not apart of them. 

he asked only a question, his arm tightening around jehanne, restless suddenly. “when did you meet him?” it was the ice-master asking, curiosity born not out of kindness but out of use. the knowledge jehanne gave him so freely was no good without a name, a place.  

“it could be. i trust no others with flames.” i suppose i’ll die for him, if he kills me. something sour pressed down on teo’s tongue. “would you die for me too, if i asked it?”

would you die for me too, if i asked it?

“yes.” like yielding his heart to a splinter, jehanne says it so easily. with sand and seafoam rocking your toes, pick the largest fragment of your shattered ship. the longest. the sharpest. locate the place on your chest, slightly left of center. there: push down, let it shiver its slow glide between your ribs. as effortless and natural as a blade peeling an apple, as a smearing of butter over toast. “of course.” jehanne rests his cheek on teo’s shoulder, shuts his eyes. “are you asking it, teo? do you want it of me?”

despair unstitches his words, floats them unfastened from their hurt. was it better than being abandoned, to be asked to die? or was it the worst kind of desertion, to know the ones you love will not save you. to know the ones you love are the ones who damn you. but still it is love. and for love. “if you sketched a line on my throat and pulled a blade through, i would let you. only tell me. only ask it of me.”

(yet. and yet — the shiver of a wave, erasing shore. when did you meet him? in the washed silence behind his eyelids, jehanne accedes another truth: he would hold a knife to teo’s throat as readily.)

[apostata]

astowsway​:

( @apostata​ / the promethean / event: the silent one )

katja’s never liked the idea of drowning. a back-alley doctor had once told her— in an attempt to distract from the needle stitching up a hole in her side— that the last moments of a drowned man’s life were euphoric, the body deprived of breath driven to create its own early heaven. still, she’s never found the concept much of a comfort, not after taking into consideration all the moments necessarily preceding it, the pressure and the panic and the lungs filling with water like a breached hull.  given the option she’d always prefer a shot to the head, quick and clean as a wounded warhorse put out of its misery.

aboard the promethean however, such a disposal would be much too flashy, the bang alerting others on board— if her ruse is to be discovered, and the captain left wanting rid of her quick and simple, she guesses it much more likely that she’ll end up overboard. neatly dropped over the side in a parcel of skirts and shrieking woman, nothing but a ripple of disturbed water to signal anything having taken place, and even that smoothed over in a matter of moments.

katja does not want to drown.

when she slips into jehanne’s room it is nearly as dark as that oceanic oblivion, leaving her to find her way by touch and instinct alone, only stopping when her fingers meet scrubbed-soft linens. slowly-adjusting eyes make out the shape of phantom pillows, something blurred and dark that might be hair, and she reaches for the blade tucked in her heel. her lips press into a hard line.

katja recognizes the moment the body in the bed awakens because it’s the same moment everything goes very still. in the density of all that dark, even the furnishings seem to hold their breath. when she finally speaks, her breath cracks the air like a spoon through pudding. “good evening, monsieur. i think it’s high time we had a chat, no?” she tries to keep her voice light, but after weeks of nonuse her native accent sounds strange to her own ears, low and raw. “i’ve heard some talk around ship on the subject of your extensive travels. the sights you’ve seen, the people you’ve met. the languages you’ve learned.” she tightens her grip, bearing down on where the blade is pressed up against the stranger’s neck, a twitch away from parting soft skin. “very impressive stuff, i’ve heard. but it does put me in a bit of an awkward position.”

before that evening, danish-speakers were like any other mythical creature; while she certainly couldn’t confirm there weren’t packs of satyrs and centaurs roaming the english countryside, the likelihood of her running into one in the middle of the atlantic was close to moot. then monsier adnet had crawled out of the hell-end of the a ghost ship, opened his mouth, and shown himself to be her own personal charybdis. “consider this a moment of reconnaissance. your chance to clear the air, before we both have a mess on our hands. convince me to take a chance on you.”

jehanne appraises the stranger through slitted eyes. at least this one is corporeal. human-like. their voice hissed in tones the dark doesn’t reply to, doesn’t listen and shudder up black vines with bladed shadows. on the flip side of a coin toss, that means this is a different sort of nightmare altogether. he tracks the slope of a shoulder, follows the line of a neck to numinous eyes. searches something and must find it; he lets his eyes fall closed again — hides the magpie glitter beneath thick lashes, only reflection, only light-flicker. “i think i’m the one in an awkward position.” the movement of his pliant throat melts into a bead of blood, shivers the knife sweet and slick. his bones conjure up a soft hum in response, tries to tap into the bird winged-flutter of adrenaline. he stays it from his veins, softens and slows the pulse. how dreadful, quelle horreur the monologue of his head says dryly — something like this is enough to make him feel human again, flesh-and-muscle again; maybe he should get into life-or-death misunderstandings more often. “you have me at a loss. what offense have i caused you, miss —” jehanne reaches for a memory of dark hair and luminant eyes. falls short. opens his eyes a crack. still does not recognize her. “well. forgive me. it seems you know me but i cannot return the courtesy.”

(peculiar, that. he’d felt the familiarity. now he skims for a recollection of this stranger and the echo that comes back is of a face entirely different. it does give him pause.)

“and what in particular should i be convincing you of, madame. i assume i have done you some grievous wrong, enough to warrant a midnight tryst in a stranger’s room.”

[lifeinpoetry]

“We have so many gods / and none of them / can be trusted.”

— Hafizah Geter, from “Fajr,” Un-American

[apostata]

@adinfinita

“I thought some things wouldn’t change.” Jehanne is smiling. The door to Hugo’s cabin left ajar behind them, a hand resting on the doorway. Leaving a smear of red. A bitterness seethes between their teeth — but wrapped. Wrapped into something tender, all that acridity washed and rinsed and wrung into words so soft they might be a dream. “I thought there was truth between us. Between you and I. It seems I misjudged you.”

He should have known: there was nothing good left in them. There was nothing good left between them.

“Did you ever miss me, Hugo? You act so well.” I never thought you would act in front of me. Their feet, soundless on the floor, or perhaps it’s only their ears — catching no sound but white noise. Even now that awful crave. Close enough to touch and their body yearns them closer. Jehanne closes his eyes. Shoulders growing slack, hands in pockets to hide the way red nails score half-moons on their palms. Blood, painted on the door frame. His eyelashes flutter. Something depthless underneath. Quiet as ice. As vicious. A carpeting on a horizon of water. Something in the water, but it’s drowned now. Drowning. Gasping for breath but he won’t let it. “Won’t you show me the truth? I tire of smiles from you. I tire of every false word you give me.”

(He is so tired. His skeleton too heavy for the flesh that carries it. His bones begging burial. Ah. He should never have hoped.)

[apostata]

ilvulcanico​:

“you still might.” such talk sat uneasy with him — he was not a man that could offer easy comfort, that could cup someone’s cheek and press his forehead against theirs. yet jehanne sat in the space offered ( offered freely, offered with full understanding ). 

teo rested his head against the wall behind him, closed his eyes to the world of the promethean. they might still be on the island, they still might be on the agathe, they still might be in france, in italy, at the bottom of the sea itself. “who is to say they will not turn on us, these englishmen who scoff at our tale?” they were physical beings, at the very least; they could be fought, they could be killed, they could lose. “you can fight them, if you are so eager to die in battle. i will not stop you. what a sight that might be.”

but not yet. a glance down at the body beside him. not yet. 

“i had always imagined i would die in a great fire one day — that it would not be me alone but all the people around.” he did not know what made him say this truth, what made him lay it bare. the thought, visited so often in memory and premonition, had carried with him for years. “i do not like to think of it.” 

Jehanne decants thought until thought is cleansed to a pale current, to thin streams cradled under skin. His fingers curling into a fist. Uncurling. Hands trembling but so is the ship. So are the waves. Indomitable, the push and pull of gravity on mortal bodies.

“Will they turn against us? I found a lost love, here.” Faint. An exhale into salt-worn fabric. Sinking into Teo’s skin and nowhere else. A murmur so quiet the aching beams of the ship will not seize it. No ears will take it hostage against him. “I suppose I’ll die for him, if he kills me. There is a ghost in me that would be glad of it.”

“If not fire then by water, I know that. Would it be a fire you set, Teo? The match and the spark. If so — I would not mind it.” Jehanne shuts his eyes, an unraveling of dust-speckled dark beneath his eyelids. “I would not mind.” I would like to be held by something warm. To be the moth, eaten by a flame.