there’s a little pocket sown into the breast of every shirt she ever puts on, and every morning she stands before her mirror a revolutionary, grown, and slips a small, metal transmitter into it, above her heart.
(in her mind’s eye clem is unsullied and small, and she presents them both to gucci like glittering coins. above them, fat flakes of snow fall on the winter palace. clem’s cheeks are red with the cold.
she tells gucci that she doesn’t know what they do. whether she had simply not listened at all before taking them, or could not understand, gucci does not know. failing to listen and failing to understand both ring so true of clementine kesh that she is unsure if the distinction even matters.
but if she has one and clem takes the other, they can talk. something like that.
it’s not true, of course. they tried to make them work for weeks, with no result.)
it’s a force of habit, she thinks. something silly and leftover. clem has likely lost hers in battle— so sloppy is she— or thrown it out with everything else the world has ever presented clementine kesh with that she did not find perfectly suitable. she can imagine clem in her mind’s eye a little taller and infinitely angrier, after an argument and before she is given the panther, tossing it in the garbage and stalking out, thinking she has accomplished something.
the clementine kesh she visits in her cell has become something vile and beautiful and useless. she puts the transmitter in her pocket anyway.
when clementine hits the water her bones break. it might be reflex, or realization, or somewhere in between. blood stains the sea in ribboning trails, and she reaches for the transmitter in her pocket.
gucci is watching rain lash her window. beyond it, she is watching cruciat drown. peace and confusion curl and lash one another in her chest, and she sighs them both down.
she is about to move away. the transmitter, long dead and long vestigial, changes her course.
—
it burns, circular, first through her silk shirt and then onto the skin above her breast. like a dying star. she’s struck dumb and then desperate by the pain of it.
when she has fished it out of her shirt she throws it at the floor and gasps for air.
then, she runs.
—
clem is vile and beautiful and useless. gucci doesn’t want her to die.
it’s like keeping the bouquet of flowers on your dining room table alive, she thinks, pulling on one sleeve of her jacket, a crisp blue and red thing, and breaking into a run. they can’t possibly help you, and the thorns dig your hands if you pick up a stem, but it’s the principle of the thing.
clementine has been shedding petals onto the decks of fort icebreaker for weeks, crumpling and sweet-smelling and sickly.
—
“you wanted to be princept,” gucci says, leaning into her heavy and drunk. “and you won’t be. of course it hurts.”
she can hear heels down the corridor— so many guests, and everyone’s walk sounds just like mother’s. it hits her like a training blast, rattles her back together.
“i will be princept,” she hisses in gucci’s ear. digs her nails into gucci’s hips where they press against her own. a warning. “i’m not the one who will hurt.”
gucci laughs and kisses her. it tastes like the wine crysanth had pretended to uncork for the first time in the hall but which clem had snuck shaky glasses of last night, after meeting them.
her crew. hers.
they all had the same eyes, flat black like stones in a river. even leap, and he doesn’t even have eyes.
they’ll never trust you, the eyes said. no one will.
they shouldn’t, she thinks, and sinks her teeth into the plush press of gucci’s lower lip.
—
future calls her when it’s dark. this time, she simply throws her coat over her shoulders.
wouldn’t it be funny? she turns it over and over it her hands, hating it, hating that she can’t find any dents even though they had to dig it out of gur’s side. like a meteor, if retrieving a meteor was called surgery. to see clementine a servant?
“why didn’t you warn gur sevraq? is that not your purpose?” she wants to throw it at the opposite wall. she wants to melt it down so there is material for the prosthetic arm that clementine is going to need.
did you know that divines used to write to one another? so many novels it could fill all of past, if you put them to paper and pen. all lost.
she says nothing. hot tears are starting to fill her eyes.
past remembers it. they read the whole thing, and cried before they hurled themselves to the ground. they wanted to read to cymbidium, but cymbidium did not want to listen.
“why are you telling me this?”
excerpts took their names from it. they— we— were promises to help. to serve. there is certainly a verse with the word clementine. i could teach her how to serve.
“i suppose you’ll have to ask her,” gucci laughs, in the way a sob is a laugh, and really it’s the worst part, because— “she might say no.”
