babydoll

god i'm so crazy, baby, i'm sorry that i'm misbehaving, i'm your little starlet, harlot, queen of Coney Island, raising hell all over town, sorry bout it ! [elle bell. xix. object animation.] [ associated with nightcallhq. ]

[foxeia]

[bbydclll-blog]

houdini.:

The sky is a looming expanse of cloud, like the surface of another world hanging upside-down over the earth. Its hills and valleys are lit up by a feverish glow; in the distance, a metal beam arches out of the burning ruins like a building’s naked rib bone. But here, on the lower landing of a rusty fire escape, there’s a skinhead done up all warrior casual in her bomber jacket and military boots, her leather belt low-riding a sheathed katana blade. She’s squatting by the ladder hatch, staring off into the middle distance and trying to make her knee joints crack. 

She’s steadily observing this world in its unmaking.

In a heartbeat, Arco drops from the fire escape; she lands without making a sound, like she’s got no real weight for gravity to use against her. Through the alleyway, moving like a greased shadow, she side-steps puddles of streetlight, slip easily past barriers of police tape. There’s nothing to announce her arrival, only a pair of soot-black Docs padding soundlessly through the dusk, stepping gingerly over scorched debris, chunks of sidewalk, mangled car fenders, other unmentionable things. At the edge of the blast radius, there’s an abandoned building with it’s ground floor shelled out, but the upper stories look solid. A good vantage point. She disappears through a side door.

On the third floor, she finds Elle with her back turned. Arco materializes only when she’s within arm’s reach. “There’s a lot of dead down there,” she says quietly, matter-of-factly. The firelight’s half on her, leaving the rest sunken in the shadows. 

If Elle’s teeth hadn’t been so sunk into her lower lip, she would have screamed. As it is, the shock of her sudden company flushes her cheeks and prickles her skin hot, and she turns sharply from the rectangle of the world to take in Arco, just at the lip of the wan light spilling in, backdropped by peeling green paint and broken glass. She looks uncomfortable there, but somehow fitting all the same, like she always does, like an image from a photograph cut out and pasted onto the background of a different photograph. Elle resists the temptation to reach out and touch her just to see if her hand goes right through.

“I know,” she whispers, after a long pause and a swallow. “I smell them.” Elle turns back to the window halfway, her body angling towards Arco but her glassy eyes stuck again on the burning warehouse. She had seen an unfortunate few of those burnt to their teeth as she picked through the edges of the wreckage; she had failed to immediately connect the scent of their burning to the bodies themselves, had wondered at the smell of cooked meat, like steak on a grill, and in those instants before understanding, her mouth had watered. 

Now, it’s only making her nauseous. Absently, Elle roots into her backpack and draws out the doll inside, holding it close in a motion of comfort. She has a habit of rocking it slightly, so its eyes open and close, in way of calming herself, and she does this now, seemingly without noticing she's doing it at all, transfixed on the scene unfolding beyond the window. The light dances on her soft face like the fingers of a devil. After a moment, she asks,

“Do you know what happened?” and then, without turning to look, “Are you still there?” 

[justanotherrpmeme]

bold which habits your muse has

[bbydclll-blog]

justanotherrpmeme :

nail biting | throat clearing | lying | interrupting | chewing the ends of pens | smoking | swearing | knuckle cracking | thumb sucking | muttering under their breath | talking to themselves | nose picking | binge drinking | oversleeping | snacking between meals | skipping meals | picking at skin | impulse buying | talking with their mouth full | humming/singing to themselves | chewing gum | leg jiggling | foot tapping | hair twirling | whistling | eye rolling | licking lips | sniffing | squinting | rubbing hands together | jaw clenching | gesturing while talking | putting feet up on tables | tucking hair behind ears | chewing lips | crossing arms over chest | putting hands on hips | rubbing the back of their neck | being late | procrastinating | doodling | shredding paper | peeling off bottle labels | forgetfulness | running hands through hair | overreacting | teeth grinding | nostril flaring | slouching | pacing | drumming fingers | fist clenching | pinching bridge of nose | rubbing temples | rolling shoulders

[asilentchoir]

“And girls need cold anger. They need the cold simmer, the ceaseless grudge, the talent to avoid forgiveness, the side stepping of compromise. They need to know when they say something that they will never back down, ever, ever.”

- Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (via khadijah-zabini)

[bbydclll-blog]

iron maiden.:

In the dark of the night, they come. Like rainclouds at midnight they can’t be seen, and like clouds in the witching hour, they seem fucking useless. Young delinquents and vagabonds prowling to the same place without the unity of togetherness, looking all the more like nothing in their singularity. She’s among them in that way, passing the streets not like she owns them but like she will never fear ownership of another – there’s a difference. Or maybe there’s not.

Either way.

This is how she ends up here, ass on the high reach of a bench top and her heels on the wood like a girl whose used to sitting in VIP booths. She’s all garter stockings, sharp eyeliner, catlike boredom as she calls from the shadow:

“Shoulda stayed home,” Smooth like black velvet and gin. “Your beauty sleep looks like it needs more attention than this.” It’s clever, it’s rude, it’s something to say. 

She snaps her gum and feline-slick hops her way off the bench, looks out at the way the factory skeleton bleeds smoke into the atmosphere. The glitter under her lower lashline eyes catches the glow from a streetlight. She looks like she’s been crying in gold. She looks like you could wipe a finger across her cheek and come away with money.

“So,” her hands go into the pockets of her oversized hoody, borrowed from one date or another that never got another. “We gonna check this out or what?”

The warehouse crackles like a bonfire, reminding Elle vividly of a Hershey’s chocolate commercial for s’mores. Barring the smell of the smoke, which is more “charred” than “woody,” she can almost imagine herself right there in it: a stick piled with marshmallows burning over the flames, chocolate on her face. A real Hershey’s family event. She closes her eyes and the vision is stronger. A satellite fire burning in a decrepit five-story down the block provides a closer point of warmth than the warehouse itself, and Elle trips towards it with her eyes still squeezed shut, holding her hands out in front of her body as if to warm them.

She remains enfolded in the reverie until a voice purrs to her from the shadows. Elle’s eyes, classically blue and glassy, snap open in one instant, and in the next she is habitually drawing her backpack over her right shoulder and tugging the zipper all the way open. She doesn’t have to dig much for the baby doll inside, but she does anyways, even as the shadow materializes and Charmaine slinks out into the glow of the night, tall and glossy as a model cut from a magazine. Elle shivers.

“I sleep enough.” she pouts in response, the doll still folded in her arms. Her gaze casts from Charmaine back down the street, and she shrugs. “I’ve already been close. There’s still too many cops.” It’s a protest in every right, a salvaging of her pride-- all the same, her narrow shoulders crunch up towards her ears again, and after another beat she begins in the direction of the warehouse. 

[bbydclll-blog]

beetlejuice.:

Rarely did Evan allow herself to be scared anymore, especially considering it was now kind of her job not to be. But, the initial blast of the explosion was, for lack of better words, really fucking scary. It had taken her about five minutes to recover from the shock and another five to drive close enough to realize what exactly the damage was, holed up in her car and surveying the burning buildings from a distance. She could tell the amount of fire meant that a lot people were going to be dead. Which, in a way, meant she kind of failed already, but she had no time to think about that now. This wasn’t about her.

Slamming the car door behind her, she began heading in the direction of the fire and the police lights, her bag slung ungracefully over her left shoulder. “Hey!” She cupped her hands around her mouth, calling out towards a familiar face. “Any idea what the fuck is going on?”

Elle hiccups with surprise, whirling on her heels. Evan’s voice cuts through the night louder than any police siren to her-- or maybe, just more unsettling. She turns from where she has been standing, her eyes dragging up the block, adjusting to the darkness pressing into East End even as the warehouse burns on. At this distance, Evan is only a silhouette coming down the center of the street, but her walk makes her distinctive. It gives Elle a sense of both comfort and uneasiness: like having your favorite blanket on an airplane. 

Where Elle waits is no spot of particular importance-- like so many decisions she makes, it had been picked impulsively, and largely because her feet had grown sore from walking around in the ugly gray keds she wears religiously. Abandoning her chosen post, she trips her way back up the street to meet Evan half-way. 

“It was an explosion.” She answers, breathless but matter-of-fact. Stray strands of hair catch in her eyelashes, and carefully she brushes them away. “It’s a mad house. I don’t know what caused it.” Her eyes rake back towards the warehouse, the ghastly glow it casts against the low-pressing sky, its warmth reaching them even here. “I asked an officer, but he told me it was past my bedtime.” She pauses to pout at recounting this event, before falling back in step. 

[bbydclll-blog]

moonbound:

Send “✆” for a MORNING text. Send “✉” for a text that WASN’T SENT. Send “☎” for a RUSHED text. Send “⁇” for a DRUNK text. Send “✿” for a SUGGESTIVE text. Send “ø” for a LATE NIGHT text. Send “✘” for a HATEFUL text. Send “#” for a RANDOM text. Send “@” for a SCARED text. Send “&” for a LOVING text. Send “%” for a CURIOUS text. Send “ツ” for an EXCITED text. Send “$” for an ACCIDENTAL text. Send “♀” for a HEARTBREAKING text.

[lifeinpoetry]

we tremble / for so many reasons

Dalton Day, from “Birdless Place,” Fake Knife (via lifeinpoetry)

[bbydclll-blog]

Through a paneless window, Elle watches East End burn like a candle. She’s a block down from the warehouse, holed up in a faceless building equally as decrepit as anything characterizing the city-- even here, inside its damp walls, her face close to the peeling paint, she feels the heat of that menace fire on her cheeks. “What a joke,” she tells the baby doll in her unzipped backpack. 

She’d been nowhere near the neighborhood when the explosion had first happened, rocking the block, but she’d felt its violence anyways: first a vibration in the soles of her sneakers, like a humming bird or the chattering of skeletal teeth, and then its ear-splitting noise. She hadn’t made it there before the cops, of course not. She watches them now with the wide and glassy eyes of a china doll, wary and impatient. The swarm of policemen have mostly cleared; the papers filed, the tired eyes rubbed at, the sirens gone quiet. Now, only a few hover at the edges of the warehouse, and a lone cruiser flashes its classic red-and-blue, casting Elle’s face in a wash of warmth and cold by turn. 

Patience has never been her strong suit. She can be placated, maybe, at the expense of someone else’s efforts-- but never will she quite master stillness. She shifts her weight restlessly; blows stray hairs from her face; searches the ceiling for the secrets of the universe. What she does not do is pay attention. She hardly knows she’s in the company of someone until they’re all but right behind her. 

[nightcallhq]

[bbydclll-blog]

nightcallhq :

|  ELLE BEVERLY BELL  |  BABYDOLL  |  19  |  OBJECT ANIMATION  |  CLOSED  |

Your eyes may be wide, your cheeks round and pink, and your mouth a perfect cupids bow, but you have never been half as sweet as you look. Your mother learned this the hard way, bite marks on her palm the first time she tried to dress you in one of those frilly little things the daughters of rich, important men wear. You never knew your father, but you’re certain he was neither rich nor important. Your mother, though, always liked to pretend to be better of than she was. As a child, young and pliable, you believed her. Now, you know the only one she was fooling was herself. Still, you find it difficult to hold it against her – or hold anything against anyone. For all you’ve seen and done, you struggle to see people as wholly evil. You prefer to see the good, to marvel at the pink in the sky rather than cry that the sun is going down. It has served you well, for the most part, even if the others only see it as childish.

FACECLAIM: BARBARA PALVIN

[unearthly-worldn]

[lifeinpoetry]

I love being bad and then going home and being so good.

Stephanie Berger, from “Sorry for the Inconvenience Station,” published in Sixth Finch (via lifeinpoetry)