❊ a regret my muse has about your muse
0fficiallly-0ff-the-rails
He harbors the pulling of pain inside of his chest. Something cold and lifeless, it's infested his insides, picking and prying apart. He feels cold. Dark, trapped. He regrets this, her, him, togetherness. He had lived a life in solitude. He knows how to breathe like that.
Still lingering shades of life before, the salt on the cool air, the long years that stretched out between them. Molly and her easiness, Molly and her worry. And how she had taught him what stable looked like, what home felt like. Something more than shelter. Something nestled someplace in her arms, against the warm and soft swell of her chest, underneath where her heart beat. The easiness of Willy, how he was eager to learn as he had been when he was small. Quiet wishes only half fulfilled. He had wanted kids of his own.
Before the scars, the drinking, before he lost. And they had faded from him. They had been fading. He was more ghost than a dead man was. And now here, here with her. She's set up. She's different. She takes the bottle from his hands even if she has to pry it. She tells him things that he listens to but can never really hear. She tells him that things change, people, too. She talks and sometimes he thinks she's singing.
Sweet lullaby lull me to death.
Before Effy used to cry. Black tears.
And now he only screams. His nightmares are worse even when she's lying next to him.
He regrets seeing her again. He regrets her. Drinking manufactured the numb. He was eager for that.
She moved a lot like smoke. Slow and transparent. It was easy to see through her. She cried sometimes, the black makeup running down her cheeks, hair a mess. Mostly she did it at night, curled up on her side next to him. She'd reach but he couldn't reach back. His mind was half way gone most nights, days, too. When there was a memory to be triggered by every small thing. She knew that he thought a lot and about what, about who. She never asked though. Never talked it over. It was all simple fact. Fact. And it stood there in front of them, statrtling and cold.
The nights were a lot easier to pass when they were drinking. The bitter taste of alcohol seemed to linger on the tips of their tongues, lingering, burning. He could feel it inside of him, a burn in the middle of his chest. He liked being numb. Numb to her. Feeling only opened to the past. Because the past was better than the present. So much better.
Most of the time he went completely blank with her. He drifted away. Far. He didn't like staying there beside her when he could close his eyes and pretend. He had never been so eager for lies. He had preferred truths. But lately truths had been dealing him nothing but shit. He wanted a break. A break from what was real and what he lacked, from her.
She would try and pull him closer to her. Being needy although she didn't want to be. He knew that the easy indifference she greeted him with, the tilt of a bottle to her smiling lips. All of it a lie. She was aged and worn down by the lies. She wasn't one for breaking though. She wasn't one for cracking. She liked to gather herself together and oppose anything that would make her need him. But she did need him. He knew that she needed him.
Like he needed the burn of the alcohol on his tongue, he needed every small light touch that she gave him, the softness of her kisses, the aggression lingering behind every touch of her hand. He needed something to feel when he closed his eyes and let his mind fade away. He need her a steady feeling near to him. Not her. Just her solidity.
The past is the past. That was something that they always said. Lifting another shot up, cheering the past and all those memories that he wanted and she hated. He could see the darkness in her eyes whenever the word past left his mouth. He used to love before. She asked him once if he had forgotten how to. He had turned over, turning his back to her. Never answering. Something that couldn't be spoken lingering on his tongue. He wouldn't try, not for Effy. He had loved once and once was enough.
She knew that. Of course she did. She told him that she loved him, a long time ago. Between breaths and the quiet, between touch and sound, she had said it. And he had ignored it. He didn't like the way it came out of her lips. He didn't like the way she said it.
But if he closed his eyes long enough he could pretend it was another voice, another sound. Someone else close by. She'd never want to be held afterwards. They'd lay on their backs in silence and the smell of alcohol infecting the air, infecting them.
He never got a good nights sleep with her. Sometimes he felt her hand on his arm but it was always pulled away. He liked dreaming though. But dreams were shadows that faded when the sun rose completely. He couldn't have the past again. It had slipped past him somehow. Never allowed proper formation. He felt full of holes.
Sometimes she'd give him that small shrug of her shoulders as she brought another cigarette to her lips. How many did she smoke a day? He would watch the ash falling to the table. Would it burn through the wood? She told him that love didn't matter, the past didn't matter. She said she might've been a ghost, she didn't care to be dead anyways.
Nurse me // I also want this. But you can save it for last or something.
Leave a “Nurse Me” in my ask, and I’ll write a drabble about my character healing yours.0fficiallly-0ff-the-rails
But she had started to stir so he went to the bathroom, showered. He had to do so carefully, the cut was still raw on his stomach and every movement was painful. He went back into his room, passing the time with Ezra Pound because it was what was left on his bedside table. He wasn’t sure if he had done that or if she had. She must’ve. That’s why he left it there.
She came into the room after he had read ten pages. In calculation Will would have guessed twenty minutes. He looked up at her, not too into absorbing the words that he had read a lot already.
She was carrying a plate and she looked a little out of herself. Her hair was a mess, her makeup was smudged, although with her that might’ve been hard to tell because she wore so much around her eyes. He liked the way her hair looked, messed up from sleep, her shirt was slipping a bit off of one shoulder. Her skin was pale and he could recall that it was soft and warm. She always smelled like something distantly sweet and stubbornly bold but now sleep had laced through her scent and drowned it out a little.
She sat on the edge of the bed and set the plate down on the bedside table, where Ezra Pound had been left. She looked nervous. “You should eat something.” she said, not looking at him. As if the very words were hard for her to push out. She swallowed harshly, he watched the movement of her throat. He reached for her wrist, fingers touching lightly to the bracelet around her thin wrist.
"Effy." he said her name, a small smile on his face.
She looked at him, questioning. She tried at smiling but her lips failed.
"I can’t eat a sandwich. Doctors orders."
She looked a bit surprised, taken off guard. And she was about to fling curses at herself, he could see the way her mouth started to work up. But she stopped when he grabbed a hold of her wrist, gingerly though. Not forceful. He could never be forceful with her. She carried too much frailty without realizing it.
"But it looks delicious." he said with a laugh, that was slightly painful but he pushed against it only to get her to laugh along with him. She did.
Leave a “Break Me” in my ask, and I will write an angsty drabble about our characters
0fficiallly-0ff-the-rails
There was a spot on his couch now that he never sat in. It had a light imprint in it or maybe that was his imagination. The scent that lingered there wasn’t his imagination though. That was where Effy sat, right there across from him, always. Sometimes she’d lay back. And she’d talk. Which he knew was always hard for her. Hard for her as it was for him. Like running blades over their tongues, forcing out their hearts from their throats. But she would talk.
And sometimes she wouldn’t. Sometimes she’d be still and quiet. That’s when he’d sit there on the ground next to the couch and rest his head back on the cushion. He could hear her breathing. One of the dogs would come over and nestle themselves next to him. And it would all be silent, silent and breathing.
There was something wrong with her, he knew that. There was something that wasn’t working right in her head, in her insides. Something that had been twisted and charcoal painted. She was out of herself, out of everyone else. She settled into darkness easily.
But the same could be said about him. His mind was made up from pieces of everyone else, chipped off pieces, broken glass, cracked bones. He was constructed in madness and suffering, he had a keen understanding of such things. He was a relic of darkness, a long withheld breath for all the monsters to live off of once it was let out.
Maybe he fed her monsters. Maybe he wasn’t good for her. But Effy never talked but she talked to him. She was a quiet storm but she never destroyed anything in his home. She marked the couch with long dark hairs and her scent, a smudge of her makeup that stained his shirt from the only time he had ever held her.
She had been sitting there in her spot. He referred to it as that forever in his mind now. Even the dogs knew that they couldn’t lounge there unless she invited them up. Her spot on his couch, in his home. Like she had managed to craft a place for herself inside of him, cutting away at the bone so that she could fit. Effy was an ache that resided there within him. When he thought that he didn’t have space for anyone or anything. He was not made for company. He was constructed to be lonely for the rest of his life, to be a fragment of abandonment that he would never acknowledge. He had his own ghosts and monsters.
Sometimes she would ask about them, not directly, indirectly. He would tell her he understood. And she would look up at him with wide eyes full of confused belief. No one ever understood. He knew what that was like.
And when she cried he had moved to her, in slow uncertain steps. First kneeling before her, watching as her makeup leaked. Black tears staining her cheeks, tainting her lips. He had had the thought to take her tears from her lips with his own but didn’t. He was afraid she’d pull away and leave, leave and never come back. Or she would do something stupid and reckless and let him him do it. He had moved to sit next to her, slipping his arm around her shoulders, she was slender and fragile. And the pieces of her she had displayed on the ground had cut him up walking here. Effy was broken glass. He was good at fixing things. But never people, not himself.
Not her either. So in silence he had pressed her head to his chest, even if she struggled against the comfort for a moment. A rejection that stated she didn’t think she was worth the effort.
She hadn’t said anything. And her crying had been silent but her body trembled against his, frail and weak as it was. She hid her face against his chest. He didn’t remember if he had washed the shirt. If he had wanted to or not. But the black makeup stain was still there.
