Elysium

I'm all dressed up with nowhere to go. Walkin' with a dead man over my shoulder.

[river-ros]

[The answer to that question. The answer. As if it could possibly be so definitive that she would know without asking. Without opening her lips and letting the words go to him because she wants to know. Wants to know for sure. Wants him to say it. Because the statement of guilt has never been enough, has it?

And she’s yellow like stars are, old light flashing forward and pulsing back like strings of matter wrap themselves around her skin and pull tight. Like she might burst from the knowing. What right does she have to supernova right now? He was the star once. Wasn’t he?

The question doesn’t matter. And when she breathes in the bloated, thick air that lingers in the space between them, it doesn’t matter either. Her lungs fill up tight and full like the belly of a man after a meal and she wants to burst again.  It doesn’t matter. Breathing doesn’t matter. She doesn’t matter if he can touch another and not feel anything like remorse.

Because, she wants him to feel human for this. Doesn’t she?] 

I don’t. [Lies trickle off of her tongue.] I don’t know anything.

[o-oneil]

[Oz knows it isn't true. He knows that words, meanings, letters form in her head just as clearly as they had in his. He knows the language of betrayal, and the ache of it all. He knows she feels it, but he too is looking for clarity.

If the words have grown in their minds, then they've bloomed out of order. Each letter positioned an inch off, throwing the atmosphere far into the realm of the unreachable. They stand real, but the air they breathe is not. There is no escape from the silence that clings to the space between them. Nothing he can say to her to make the meaning easier to bear.

There was her, and there was Christian. An all too simple way to put it. And it's too much of Oz to expect her to know what he's never explicitly said; feathered carcasses laid with care or not.

He is a heartache; the speck of dust in the air that people choke on when they breathe too deeply. Never whole, he is the frustration, and stress, and low that crawls from bone to bone in every body until even the bones are relics.

Their dance is an ever-lasting one; caught on a tide that never rises. And denial is only the first of the supposed steps. He's raised his foot and felt it fall too fast.

This is the impact. The crashing realization that there was only ever air in his progress.

He has to tell her. He has to tell her what he cannot.

The words escape in the creak of his feet, as he settles back to the floor. The metaphorical staircase crumbles away.

He is back where he started. He is still in love.]

I do.

[And though the words carry a relevant context, he doesn't mean them that way. It's a much sweeter statement than it ought to be. He'll chase it down with work and sleepless hours.]

[gublergifs]

[river-ros]

[River might have been made of words, once upon a time. When whatever celestial being had passed itself down into her and given life in the tiny, blonde form that sits on a rock awaiting a rogue passer-by now. She might have been strings and intricate, woven linguistics within the very fiber of her being — when her mother lay down and her father too, and their words came from mouth to ear so that they could feel that thing she thought she couldn’t (but knew she could) to bring her into being. At least, for the time being.

But she isn’t now. Isn’t words and it’s tongues like she knows she can be when the timing is right. She’s been to the museum in the city and she’s looked the Rosetta Stone in its core so that she might understand why this world forged of plastic and written with code chose to split tongues. But right now, it does her no good to know. 

Because she has no reason to feel the burning beneath her skin that comes with knowing he’s touched another. She’d done the same, in days that passed with those she shouldn’t have. Because she couldn’t have. Not with Oz. Not with the Ender who laid down and split the ground when she was only a child so that no touch would ever really feel right against her.

There’s no point in being angry. Not when it won’t undo. What are they? What are they but a figment that she’s made up in her own mind? Something she’d bent down and pulled from the depths of her pocket to play with and keep herself interested. God, they mean nothing. They mean nothing.

But Oz touched them like his hand never touched her and that want is about as human as she can get.

Nothing.

So she watches the rain sheet down the window like she might have known to make it so. How cliche. And she asks.] 

Were you happy? [Human again.]

[o-oneil]

[He almost thinks to laugh. Almost, as the sound catches halfway up his throat in the way that flightless birds do when they first leap. It comes out choking, strangled, and it does not do justice to the noise it ought to have been. Not that it ought to have been a laugh.

But that is, as always, the instinct.

To brush away and mend.

To peel away and mend.

To strip away and mend.

Always to mend, and in its equal, to destroy all he touches.

That is what death is after all; both a start and an end. He would not be himself if he did not ruin all he built in firm, equal measure.

But he cannot ruin her. Nor can she ruin him, though they both may make each other feel like it -- it simply isn't so. Death and the Real Girl. Made for one another perhaps. Or just thrown down on the right wrong rock.

Canopies spread above his head in simple swirls and puffs. Clouds he knows by other names, though they're printed only on his tongue like names on graves; never to leave the stone, but on stranger's lips.

Was he happy?

No.

It was only ever her to make him so.]

I think you know the answer to that question already.

[But he knows that perhaps the point is to hear it from his lips. Then again, when have they ever said the things they really needed to?]

[river-ros]

[It is days like today when the sight of him would be one the splits atoms and fills empty cracks where she hadn’t been sure what to do with before. Like the space inbetween, where she would slip her fingers and feel around until she realized that there was nothing to be found there, could have had a purpose: to fit him in quietly, stealthily, like they always had been.

She feels cracked today, only in the way that the earth around her feels like it might crack beneath her feet and swallow her up in a long storm that eats up ages and men and histories that had been meant to happen but do not for their disappearance. Her skin feels in cracked. The vessel of a girl always pulsing and bursting at the seams so that what she really could be might escape. Today feels like a day when the vessel isn’t quite big enough. And to see him and do the simplest things would be enough to distract — as if maybe he could slip between and fill her up. As if he could mend her so that she doesn’t supernova.

But the look on his face swallows planets more than any poor earth crack could ever eat stories. The way he is, not distraught and not brash, but somewhere on a level that she hadn’t been able to see before, it makes her glow dim. That glow that she reserves for the moments when playfulness come out. It falters and hides and becomes reclusive so that she can see without filter to dim what is there.

And she comes to stand next to him, eyes out the window, like they always do. Wordless for a moment, but the moment doesn’t last.] 

Penny for your thoughts?

[o-oneil]

[There's a bitter hollow at the back of his mind that jumps too instantly to -- how fitting.

And he thinks of killing birds in days long past. Of unspoken promises that had always looked more like betrayals. Only there's no way to twist this into one, and it is what it always was. What it should have been to him then.

The inside of his mouth feels like it's made of charcoal, and he will scrape away with every brush of his tongue. Not that he will ever crumble. Death has no room for that, not for a while at least. His concerns have never dabbled in aging, or rotting, or --

What he knows is that he's stripped so many people -- both of clothing and flesh -- that he ought to know what it would feel like to do it, have it done to, himself. And yet he's never quite present enough to process anything more than the steady cutting of flesh, or the muted thump of clothing hitting the floor as un-whole hands wander just too far.

And it's not that sex hasn't interested him, it just hasn't been a priority. Pretty girls and boys of days past hadn't mattered, because River hadn't been there. And they weren't real. They didn't taste like raspberries and stardust. They didn't make his skin burned where they touched.

There was only empty arousal, and hushed nights spent between other people's sheets, because what was the point of watching them live their not lives if he didn't occasionally join them?

Now it has consequences. Namely looking to her now, and trying to think back to what it was that she had said to him those weeks ago.]

I was with someone.

[Funny, a bit, how killing has no toll on him these days. The almost made-up memories of his mother's carcass hitting the floor through the gap in the closet door stirs nothing. No fear, no sadness. His second mother mixing vegetables in the kitchen as his second father speaks to the men upstairs, is not nostalgic. His fourth, his fifth families giving him up; it only feels like the sense of loss that one might experience losing a property in monopoly.

It doesn't feel like a story, a life. And definitely doesn't feel like his.

The only things that feel distinctly him anymore are the killings; the collections of bone and flesh made trinkets the police must have collected from his home.

The killings and the real girl. The only one he cares about losing.]

[o-oneil]

[The world sits heavy on his shoulders today, it seems. Though not as heavy as he knows it could, and perhaps, that stands because the world is not what is heavy after all. It's only him.

Somewhere further in his mind, fingerprints trace their way across ways, map lines, and flesh. Leaving inky trails in their wake, they are there and gone in a moment. Only long enough to make their presence known and fade. Tracks deep enough that Oz cannot simply wash them away. But it is not yet that Oz fully wants to.

The time will come, he is sure.

For now, hypocrisy takes the reins, and he lets it lead him to a common hall window. Looking out at the grounds beyond, he can pretend that things are as simple as saying sorry.

But they never are. Never have been.

He's real, and thus too whole for the conveniences of easy lies. And she is too. They are not simplistic beings -- not made of flesh and command, of programming and static echos -- and this can't be either.

He will face it, and she will face it, and they will face it both together and apart. There's no part of him that thinks this ends in anything but distance; a split that honesty demands for a time.

So it's not necessarily that he's postponing it, he's just not seeking her out either. He's waiting for the world to trip the flooring beneath their feet; stumbling them into one another.]

[debbss12]

[river-ros]

We’ll see. [The words are filtered through like all of theirs are. Cracks and codes and binary all weaving in and out of the tiny holes that exist in the space between them. They’re thick, like they always are. But more with thought than with conviction. And it sulks about in her brain to think it so.

Her hand, wrapped around his already, fingers inter-laced like children playing on a playground, squeezes gently once. And then once more harder still. A simple ‘I know.’

Because the words mean nothing when they exist for Oz’s ears. That linguistic barrier that had always stood between them could not matter if she were to head off to the moon. Anywhere but here is good. Anywhere with him is better.] 

[o-oneil]

I'll just... wait here.

[Which is less to say hat he's going to, and more to say that he certainly would. Maybe he'd find himself free of Belvedere's wall again one day. Maybe those who had sought to relocate him would decide that all was forgiven in her absence, and move him out.

But regardless of the actions -- the wills of others -- he would not stray far from where she knew to find him.

That is the benefit of being an entity, he supposes. Death must consider he word of others, but never must he listen whole-heartedly.]

[river-ros]

[It isn’t strange, the way the night sky seems to have risen up like a dark flame beneath the touch of her hand. She’s sure, as her day was spend in the space beneath it, hand to the clouds, whisking them to and fro, that no more than an hour may have passed. Morning to Evening in only an hour. And it would have come sooner, closer, farther, if she’d willed it to be so. But her hands wanted the time to paint portraits within the white on blue, pink, grey, orange. 

She’s been told that the hottest flame burns black, but never known her sky to be black any time but when her hands feel cold — itching to see the stars and paint them constellations. And as the night leaks down upon her with her final movement, she wonders if Oz has felt it too. 

And when she approaches him, it’s with quiet earnest that she speaks.] 

I’ll bring you some back from the moon, if you’d like.

[o-oneil]

[It's not quite how he means it (and he thinks she knows), but the grin that spreads across his lips swallows any intent to say so. Oz just reaches for her hand, like her hand is only a separate part of his own and vice versa. Breathes in the same air she does, like breathing is only natural for the two of them.

And maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Maybe one day they'll actually touch each other.

His tone is teasing when he finally manages to reply. He spends approximately fifteen seconds just smiling at her, but it's not like that's really out of the ordinary. Oz sometimes forgets how it feels to have someone real there, until he's standing beside her.

He's plunging his roots into the depths, and freezing his lungs in the process.The sweetest kind of choking he knows.]

You'd come back?

[It's meant to be teasing, but there's an undertone to it that suggests that if she intends to go with any permanence, she should tell him.

Because it's one thing to move away on the human earth. One, incredibly numbing, experience he would not like to repeat. It's another thing to leave the planet, and Oz has no intentions of getting separated from her again.

It's a quiet 'I'm coming with.'

He far too much likes breathing her air with her.]

[o-oneil]

[He's been re-tracing footsteps for over an hour now. Thing is, he's not so certain that they're his own. For one, his feet don't really feel all that connected and secondly, the memories feel as if they're being seen through someone else's eyes.

Which would be strange if they weren't so very surely his own. Like the way he thinks he can see his second father turning corners in the halls ahead of him.

He read somewhere once that more people die a day than he can count to in his head. He believes this easily. Thousands, upon thousands. But this is only the realization, for him, that these thousands are passive deaths. Ones set only into action by the ending of a timeline.

He's not guided someone over in months. Vaguely, Oz wonders if he's been replaced. But of course, he hasn't. Because he can still see little tears in the walls where Asphodel insists on falling apart. Rips and gaps he closes over with only a brush of his fingers.]

Any day now, I'll start collecting dust.

[oz-a-e]

Coffee

The first cup comes as a surprise to him. It’s not his design, or his doing. He doesn’t even drink coffee all that much. So he eyes it for a while, trying to stretch apart ever seam it’s made from until it makes sense, and when it doesn’t, he drinks it to taste curiosity. Or something more; consideration.

But the second cup leaves a note the first one didn’t. Not on paper - not physically. But perhaps in its persistence or existence or the way it feels like her. He doesn’t stare at it this time, just sips it down over the paper - one that it several weeks old and likely not about to be refreshed - and contemplates how he is supposed to return the favor.

The next time he sees her he considers it. Even as their words carry his mind to places far from warm, mid-morning beverages, he considers her favor. Because it’s been a week and a half now and he doesn’t think that simply drinking it and leaving the cup where she can see that he’s done it is going to cut it. It already doesn’t.

So he goes to the art room and he pulls the crayons from their cases, and he draws her a map of each thing he sees within her - how to find it and how to see it. Then he leaves it where she leaves the coffee and hopes that maybe it will better her understanding of where she’s begun to cross the veil - in little bounds and the slight of a hand.

[riley-marhefka-blog]

[Oz O’Neil. Age twenty-four. Height: Six foot one. Weight: Diagnosis: Psychosis and depersonalization disorder. Level three. There was a coffee mug ring on the back of the seventh page of his file, before Riley xeroxed the tainted page and shredded it, replacing it with a clean one warm from the machine. She’d actually had to do it twice, because she punched the holes wrong on the first copy, and the pages didn’t line up.] Silent chaos, I suppose. Or maybe some people would be brave enough—or foolish enough—to open their mouths anyway, even if they didn’t have any idea what they were saying.

[o-oneil]

[A small piece of him notes that the idea of such a widespread loss in an area he's responsible for taking care of probably shouldn't seem fun. It's the same small piece of him he tucks under the rug when logic stops being logical, and humanity's imposed reality starts to weigh on him. It's made of cloud-loss and whimsy. He doesn't have to listen to it.]

Suppose it would be easy enough for those who knew sign language. Or do you suppose that would be out of order as well?

[lake-valentine]

Dude, that would be SO confusing. Do you mean like, banana actually meant orange but no one knew that until the word was spoken and then they were just to confused to say anything at all? Oh my God, my brain hurts just thinking about that. I think what would happen is people would cry and then die. In that order. Well, obviously in that order because like, im pretty sure dead people can’t cry, but maybe I’m wrong.

[o-oneil]

[There's a lot to process there, but even as he works through it, his lips quirk into a grin. He has answers, but of course, some he cannot give. He cannot tell the soul that the dead can definitely cry. They frequently do, over living worries in their own blissful ignorance. Instead, he chooses to focus on the implication of death in general.]

Why do you think they would die? [After all, he hasn't picked anyone off for fun in a long while, and it seems drastic even to him that one would die of linguistics related confusion. Perhaps it's just the energy? The soul seems to have an abundance of it, and it makes Oz wonder how long it will take the boy to dissipate.]

[o-oneil]

What would happen if all of the meanings of words were switched for a day? And no one would know what meant what until someone spoke the word, but no one knew what to say?

[welcometomylifexxx]

[river-ros]

[There’s a sigh that breaks from her lips, lingering in the lack of space between theirs, hovering like it knows it isn’t the only thing that stops them from truly touching. But it isn’t there as a reminder, as a barrier. It’s surprise, waiting like she had since the last time he pressed his lips to hers, pending the problem that there was no reason to ever stop. She pushes that thought to the back of her mind, with the trees and the world, and lets the sigh move to touch his lips; she could never touch anothers, even with the veil between them, and feel satisfied.]

[o-oneil]

[He's the one to pull away. Though he honestly can't find a reason to, he knows he has to do it regardless; lest they choke on the emotion that's always sure to swell. It's something that used to make him bitter, that feeling. Back when they were children, and a much kinder incarnation of it would flood his thoughts. He didn't want to feel like that, and yet he did, he did, he did. But he couldn't afford to let himself get carried away. Not now, and so he presses his forehead to hers with a soft sigh.

He has no excuse to give her. No justification, no voice. It doesn't matter.]

[dr-ripley-cain]

Ice cream is a fantastic invention, I believe...

[dr-ripley-cain]

Better is subjective lad. Which inventions would you say those to be?

[o-oneil]

Vehicles, for one. [Though he could name many, they all sound about as dull as the other. Oz much prefers the things that create themselves.] Or perhaps, on a more similar scale, pie.

[river-ros]

[She smiles at this, opening her eyes once more in slight shock of the warmth growing closer.] When have you been the type to do what’s usual? [With her head turned to face him.]

[o-oneil]

[Oz doesn't reply verbally. He merely closes the physical distance between them, and tells himself that the veil between worlds, between their lips as they meet, is as unreal as her programs. But that's a lie and both of them know it. She'll feel it as he does, and maybe she'll be bitter about it too.]