ultimate vindication for being a high strung neurotic my entire life by my partner staying with me for the weekend and going “… babe I love being with you but your life is really fucking stressful”
Hm? How do you mean that? I only just got a phone because my own was stolen when I was stabbed and your brother got this one for me. So I didn't ignore you intentionally or something. And then I tried to call hanma and my husband first and izana because it felt important. Then you. I'd already asked ran if you were okay and he said you were so it seemed mostly ok. Why? Are you....bothered by this?
"oddments is good, probably a top 10 gizzard album" <- sentences said by people who have done to the popular kglw discography what Maurecia from Wayside School did to ice cream
new fic! does anyone else ever black out and write 800 words of angst about edward cullen waking up as a vampire when they’re sitting in an 8 am lecture or
could you take away his soul?
(on ao3 here)
He cannot stop looking at his hands.
They are pale. They are flawless. (Absent the picked flesh, the nails with their uneven lengths, bitten off not to click against piano keys. Absent the freckled backs and the callous of the pen on the middle finger of his left hand. Absent the tremor that lived in them, those last long weeks of illness.)
They are clean. (For now. Plunged in a river whose icy cold he could not feel, ground against fistfuls of snow until all the red rushed away—)
They are strong, stronger than he ever could’ve fathomed. They have pulverized stone, crushed wooden banisters to dust.
These are hands that could kill. These are hands that have.
(Not humans.)
(Not yet?)
The—boy? man? monster?—looks at his hands, and he wonders.
They are his. They move with his thought, at his command—faster, really. Absent the lag between desire and command. Absent the hesitation that gives a chance to withdraw. They are his hands.
But who is he?
He remembers an answer to that, somewhere behind a haze of burning and blood. So much duller than the keen knife of thirst forever at his throat…
He remembers Edward Masen, a boy who flinched away from his father’s voice, a boy with his mother’s fingers threaded through his hair. He remembers a boy with freckled hands arched carefully over piano keys. He remembers looking at those hands. He remembers moving them.
He remembers being him—dimly, in fits and fraying snatches.
Remembers the ache in his lungs and the weight of his ribcage straining against his chest. Remembers drifting into daydreams of glory on battlefields, of dying for something, for someone other than himself. Remembers the dusty stone halls of the school and a teacher’s dry voice as chalk squeaks against a board, the rap of a conductor’s baton against his knuckles when he stumbled out of pace. Remembers clinging to an iron bedframe listening to his mother weep.
Remembers walking through city smog—listening to heartbeats—
No.
He flexes his right hand, carefully. Folds the fingers in order into a fist.
They fall easily.
He remembers being Edward Masen. He remembers his thoughts, dim and frail as spiderwebs.
But does that mean he is him?
He remembers remembering a London night, splashing through tunnels with a cross slick in his sweating palm. Remembers a tearing at his throat. Remembers a flash of glinting red eyes.
He opens his hand again, splays his left in unison. Folds his fingers closed again.
They fall in perfect unison, no hint of preference or hesitation on either side.
Edward Masen’s memories are not alone in his head.
Edward Masen’s thoughts are not alone.
Even now, he can have them if he but concentrates. Straight through the laughably thin log walls of this secluded cabin, rough-hewn, undoubtedly by the gold-eyed doctor’s own invulnerable hands. They lilt and meander in a different accent than the one with which he speaks:
is he lonely did I do wrong—dear-Father-forgive-me—I should be working they are still dying—I was so-lonely-how-could-I—should I go fetch him—dear-Father-forgive-me—he has not spoken—dear-Father-forgive-me—
He tries to drag his focus back to the pale hands before him. They move as he commands them, mock the pattern of Edward’s mother’s favorite piano etude—the first six measures, he never learned the rest before the fever set in—against the wood desk.
They leave splinters and sawdust in their wake, piled in the perfect whorling imitation of fingerprints.
He is still thinking the doctor’s thoughts. How-many-how-many—how many died without me—how-many-how-many how selfish—one to damn the rest to die—FatherFatherFather—
How does he know he is Edward Masen?
He remembers being him. Dimly.
Dim as the shapes of rocks beneath the gray shadows of the lake, distorted as their image in a ripple. Dim as the stars beside a burning streetlamp.
Dim as the light in his mother’s bedroom, falling through rose curtains as she propped herself onto an elbow and smiled at him, gasping and trying not to show it.
What do memories prove? How does he know he did not simply devour them?
Like his guilty, desperate focus seizing on every fracture of the doctor’s thought, she-asked-me-to-save-him, turned to the press of Elizabeth Masen’s hands, wasted and still warm on his wrist, the blaze of her green eyes as she looks at him, the croak and crack of her voice as she whispers what only you can do.
Like the lap of blood from the vein as the light faded from the doe’s musky eyes and his tongue knew how to keep its rhythm, his lips how to seal around the gaping red wound, his dead heart thrilling like a beat.
