#r3v3n4nt

[ineskews]

@r3v3n4nt-000 : i’m the only one alive in this town. what does that make you?

has she not noticed it yet? the sea of people seething and heaving towards us, with their black umbrellas and their long coats? clara, apparently i didn't warn you enough, or i warned you too well. i have spent long hours describing eskew-in-ruins, or my memories of it alone. i did not mention the fact that eskew once designed a scenario in the cabin of a plane to give me my escape, or trapped riyo in some place that i dared not ask about. the problem with this city is that it is malleable, that given enough time and material and rotten imagination, it can make anything.

because you are right, clara, in that i am dead and the people coming down the street are not quite people. you are closer to being alive than all of us, frozen as you are. and about those people -- have you looked behind you yet? because i can perceive the gauzelike film of their faces. i can see the slits where their mouths should be, and the dripping black holes of their sunken eyes, black liquid spreading out from the holes to stain the gauze. they are wearing masks, you see. if we are lucky they will merely push past us, unseeing. if we are unlucky, then, well --

oh, clara. i think i've made a terrible mistake.

i was trying to help rather than stand by. riyo would want me to help. but there lies the rub, don't you see? my help brings harm. i knew all this and i did it anyway.

eskew split open the world, and now i've brought you and your wonderful machine here. at least there is no sign of your friend, a woman who calls herself me as a matter of self-definition. she cannot be killed. do you know how much fun this city might have finding ways to take her apart? but you are just as much of a problem too. not the valeyard. i mean you, clara, because try as you might, and you were quite successful, there is a part of you that is curious about a place like this. all those tapes. my voice like a breadcrumb trail, me as hansel and you as gretel in the tangle of eskew. have i accidentally led you towards the warped puzzle-amalgamation of flesh called why and how, blue eye and brown blinking slowly above a set of two gums and teeth melded together, layered like the teeth of a shark? if i glance back, will i see that railway bridge too close suddenly, and the splash of bodies hurling themselves into it, drawn to drown?

i learned your story. through it, i've fallen into the trap again. i have, again and again, warned you, and by warning you, i have introduced you and eskew to each other as if handing you off like a lover in a ballroom dance only to watch you whirl away into a sea of people. much like the mob still making its way down the road towards us. slowly. steadily. as if they are in no hurry, and have nowhere to be. which is quite possible here, all things considered.

"maybe you're right," i say. "maybe i've just been wasting my time with all this, because i died months ago or years ago. i'm not even sure any more. i don't know how long it's been. but the fact that you want to stay here? i can't believe that. that i can't tear you away from this. because i know you think that maybe eskew can force change, like i told you. maybe eskew could even take you out of whatever state you're in. but it wouldn't, clara, because the one thing about this city that is universally true is that it likes to watch someone suffer. and i can tell you that once it understands how miserable you are, as you are? it will want to see you like this every day for the rest of time, even as the universe starts to crack apart under the strain."

i can imagine it. the way it would strip everything from you, clara, down to nothing at all. how it would hollow you out and then offer you what you wanted at the very end. a release of some kind. an escape.

change comes, but not because you want it to. it comes when you are most comfortable, finally. i loved allegra. i did. and i grew comfortable in that, ever so briefly, and that alone might be why eskew saw fit to warp her as it warped everything else, while leaving me much the same. it thinks it is giving you what you want. didn't it tell me it had finally given me purpose?

that's the dangerous thing. places were so often depicted as relatively mindless when they were living, a warped understanding of what its purpose as a location was. eskew is anything but. it knows exactly what you want, and that alone is what makes it more dangerous than any place any of us have ever seen. it acutely understands yearning.

it wanted me, once, and i said no.

so now this is a dead town. i almost thought about taking you to see the ruins of eskew instead, the tank with entrails pouring out of it, the ruined landscape, the sky turned grey as if about to rain but never relinquishing a drop. you've seen the end of the universe, or so you tell me, and i should've asked if you wanted to see another as proof of what i know. of what i know might happen. of what i know has happened, already, and is probably still happening across other spaces and other times. if i had showed you that, would you be more resistant now?

or would you have looked even more? maybe there was never a good way out for me.

"so come with me," i say. "before the mob reaches us. just -- just take my hand and we will start running until i find a way out."

there has to be a way out. eskew is extending always, and as it stretches itself out further, there must be more cracks in its world. and i have always been good at seeing those, even when i was younger.

[ineskews]

@r3v3n4nt-000​ : you think escaping one’s fate is as easy as fleeing one’s purpose.

“just — just stop talking,” i say immediately, before i even know that the words have left my mouth. but they’re there now between us, ugly and rotten, and all at once i feel like my old self again. david ward, history student, shut-in, who doesn’t want to talk to people. who doesn’t want to be known, or who wants to be known so badly but doesn’t know what to do about it. this late in, i know exactly who and what i am, which is a refugee of a place that loved and hated me, and who i loved and hated in equal measure, and that i am no longer the same person i was when we met each other.

the thing is that clara’s changed too.

the person i knew in college has, in this moment, evaporated. like that. so easily. turned to dust, blown away into nothing. and now there’s this person, who calls themselves the valeyard, who looks at me with eyes so cold that it almost reminds me, for a moment, of watching myself in that mirror. there is no kindness there. is this clara’s reflection? because i can feel mine like something lodged in my spine, pressed up against my back as close as a lover would be. in moments like this, where i want to back away, it’s like it grows bigger. it can’t kill me without killing itself, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t want to indulge itself. everything does, really, but when my reflection does i find a broken and mangled wooden body at the bottom of my stairs, painted with the face of a neighbor, a black umbrella rolling away down eskew’s cobblestones, some perilous slope of ten degrees that i can’t even detect, until it’s gone.

i want to ask: is that what you think of me, valeyard? do you think that my purpose was to die in that city, or to say yes to allegra on the plane-that-wasn’t when she asked me to spread the word of eskew? to keep recording? that now i’m purposeless because i don’t know if there’s a way to win against that city?

i’m not the same david ward. clara oswald is the valeyard. these are the simple facts of the situation. but now i want to unnerve her just a little. that little bit of cruelty unfurls inside me like a beautiful and poisonous flower, the kind that might have been sent between mr. how and mrs. why. if i carry eskew with me, like i do, then maybe it means i can prove to her that the fate that was there for me was never a good one, but that it’s part of me now. i used to not want to watch people suffer before, in london. now i have learned to be a very good eskovian in my worst moments, and it’s easy to turn back to, like putting on an old coat you haven’t worn in a while but that still fits just right. half of me wants to make myself disappear and the other half is seething. “so are you angry that i managed to escape and you didn’t? is that what this is? would it be easier for you if i just turned around and walked right back into eskew? disappeared forever because we’re too much alike and you hate seeing it?”

she can’t feel anything, a thing frozen out of time. i’m barely solid, and on some days i waver when it comes to existing at all.

i can see my shadow by my feet, stretching wrongly. “we can both loathe ourselves all we want,” i say, and i hate the trembling there. “god knows we’re both good at it. but i’m not going to let you sit here and pretend you’re doing me some service by confronting me about purpose and about what i’m fleeing from. i wasn’t fleeing from anything. i was done running the second i went to go find my friend rather than just try to disappear again, and i was done a second time over when i threw myself out that window. i didn’t run, clara, because i’m not you. i got to leave. i finally got to leave. those aren’t the same thing.”

i don’t realize how close i’m leaning until it’s over. i used to avoid confrontation. i lived in the world of passive-aggressive emails and notes, of sidelong glances and mutterings under breath. eskew loved to pull those tricks, to make you feel like the whole crowd and everyone knew something about you that you didn’t. it could prey on the little fears too. but maybe i picked up on riyo, who would always confront. who would never look away. who would claw through the pretense and the bullshit like a bullet, straight and true, tearing the false masks of the world apart with her presence.

i miss her. i miss her so much in this moment because maybe the valeyard might respect her, someone who wasn’t meek little david ward, in his sweaters and his button-downs and with all of his clammy awkwardness. maybe i miss her because it’s that or hate myself, even now. most of all, i miss being nothing but sensation and flight, spiraling through the air.

“so really, there’s nothing for you to be angry about. we aren’t the same. because for how much i hate myself. i know i can be proud of that one thing. can you?”

[r3v3n4nt-000]

tag set up

[violnc]

@r3v3n4nt-000​.      have you been lonely?

it almost makes her laugh.      she catches it before it escapes,      turns it into something a little less than a snort.      could be mistaken for a breath taken oddly.

it’s just      ...      it’s almost funny,      isn’t it?      it’s too few words for something that permeated her life so deeply for so many years.      her life is-or-was so defined by loneliness.      sometimes vanya thinks she’s more that than she is a person;      like if you cut open her insides,      there wouldn’t be bones and tissue and organs,      just that great yawning emptiness that stretches on forever.      there’s a part of her,      born of bitterness somewhere deep in that void,      that wants to let loose the laugh,      wants to say don’t you see?      that’s all i am.      that’s all i’ve ever been.

the fog hasn’t quite learned that it will gain nothing from following her now,      and pointed glares and humming that would send a person mad is almost nothing against spectral smoke.      it hasn’t been so long,      after all,      since that gray expanse of nothingness spat her out in london      (      which is,      in many ways,      another gray expanse of nothingness,      but at least it has people      ),      her anger too bitter to the taste.      she has learned the names for things,      but not how to frighten them off for good.

clara radiates warmth.      it chases some of the chill away;      vanya leans closer to her;      sweatersleeves protect her from scalding,      and she wouldn’t mind,      even if she did get burnt.      it’s a risk she is more than willing to take if it lets her sit closer to clara’s flame.      she isn’t burning up as much as before she left,      which means something else,      somewhere,      is burning up in her place.

‘      generally,      or      ...      ?      ’            she smiles and it’s almost a joke.      in the past:      yes.      presently:      maybe.      sometimes.      she doesn’t know.      but she doesn’t think that’s the point.      clara’s been gone      ...      a week?      two weeks?      enough time for vanya to put on one concert and plan another.      (      clara’s been burning,      about to burn,      aflame somewhere in the distance;      if vanya looked she might’ve been able to see the smoke,      a signal flare for her eyes only.      she thinks she might tag along next time.      )

                 ‘      i’ve been fine.      don’t worry about me.      ’            she hasn’t told clara about the fog,      but vanya digs through the archivist’s precious manila folders of neatly ordered statements and throws them into cacophonous catastrophe and it’s only partially for fun.      in the same way she gravitates towards clara,      towards elliot,      towards jon      —      others who are wrapped up in the same sort of monsters she is,      who are the same sort of monsters she is,      if skewed a bit to the left      —      she takes the statements marked with blue post-its      (      sharpie-scrawled lonely      )      and consumes them.      it is good to know that she is not alone.            ‘      i promise.      ’

the fog has made its attempts over the last week-or-two,      but vanya has other things to cling to now.      she has anchors.      music.      blood on her hands.      it’s all the same thing,      really.

she isn’t alone now and she doesn’t feel lonely and she’s more than content to smile at clara,      peck them on the cheek.      (      a tingling warmth will remain on vanya’s lips for hours.      )                 ‘      and you?      how was your trip?      burn anything interesting?      ’