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So, my resolution...
For this year was to be the me I want to be. Make more effort to feel more comfortable in my own skin. Embrace my quirks no matter what people say. To this end, I'm looking at losing weight (to be the healthy me) and have just invested in some make up/jewellery. The jewellery is silly costume stuff, which is my accessory preference....pics to follow
Hey hey did you manage to find a prompt? ^(owo)^
No but I did spend four hours in one of those weird writing comas and then resurface with this hilariously terrible excuse for a Reincarnation Themed Fic.
I can't remember who I promised to tag in it is I ever wrote about reincarnations though. So.
IDK.
Whatever I'm in that post flow fugure state and my current thoughts are basically: "sentences. What even are sentences and how do I make them."
Whatever. Resolution for the day compelted. Rock on.
Your life goes on, and on, and all around you everyone dies.
I.
On the first day of the rescue effort, Augustine Sycamore had been part of the volunteer crew. There were so few civilians there. The average Kalosian was simply disinterested in trying to save people who would have killed them all, down to the last child.
The Rangers Corps had no such option, legally obligated to assist in times of disaster. Sixty five of them had been deployed to the scene. A few particularly kind hearted doctors, two pokécenter nurses from the neighboring towns, and a member of the Elite Four were the only others there.
He'd called Diantha, and stuttered his way through a request that she, with her enormously powerful team, consider helping.
She had refused, and he understood distantly that she was right to do so. That Lysandre had been one of her least favorite people even before this. That she could not be expected to feel sympathy for people so cavalierly willing to commit atrocities almost beyond reckoning, just because a childhood friend had called her up in tears.
It smacked like a betrayal though. Just one more. A minute fragment of ice, lost in the aching cavern.
They found three survivors, and sixty eight corpses.
On the fourth day, the stated mission of the Ranger Corps changed from rescue to recovery, and the civilian volunteers were told to leave.
II.
He counted. It was the only thing he could do. Counting and counting and counting. He tried to be precise, a metronome ticking off an eternity in his head. It was very, very difficult to do that, without a heartbeat.
III.
After a few years, Serena and Calem told him, in bits and pieces, to story of what happened that day. It wasn't something he asked for, it wasn't something they offered. But as time dulled the pains, it came up in conversation, or after too much alcohol.
Sometimes, when he was particularly maudlin, little snippets of his subconscious would conjure dreams for him. Tired, distant imaginings that Lysandre had survived, condemned to immortality by the inexplicable power of Calem's Xerneas, and so very, very alive.
Dreams that ignored the fact that his body had been found, cold and empty and beginning to rot, on the seventeenth day of the excavation.
IV.
Time passed, as it was wont to do. He was only human, in the end. His body adapted to a life beneath rock and soil, in perfect, endless darkness.
The first time he saw the light again, it burned.
V.
The human mind was a thing of immense power, an although his nose was weak, it took in the strains of unfamiliar flowers. Of unusually trees with pollen that was crisp and dusty and utterly new. And from this total lack of recollection, he was able to draw a conclusion, as the sun rose and set and rose again over him, burning out eyes that should have long ago rotted away, shielded behind too thin, too pale lids.
In the time it had taken him to lose count, fifty, ninety, hundreds and incalculable thousands of list strings and strains, things had changed. He had, as soon as the lost dregs of his sanity coagulated into a rough sheen of reason over the edges of his thoughts, recognized that things would by their very nature have to have changed.
He laid in a muddy, boggy cavern on the edge of a lake, and let the water lap at the dirt and rock around him, while he considered how best to confront those changes.
VI.
At first, time failed to re-establish itself in his mind. However long he had been beneath the soil, it was long enough to the remnants of a town to be washed away, long enough for an enormous underground complex to become a lake that stank of chemical and was almost certainly unsafe to be around. It didn't matter. He couldn't care.
Eventually, though, the angle of the sunlight into his crypt changed, and rather than falling onto him in brief flutters, it stained radioactive across his bare skin for longer and longer, until the dark became insect-brief.
The word for long, warm days and short, heavy nights escaped him. But he knew it was a form of time. That days were too.
The light, which burned and peeled his skin with a heat that it could not possibly carry, began to mark itself in patterns, and the patterns were time, and when regularity finally resurfaced from one angle, to crawled like frost across a puddle to map out other thoughts and facets of himself that he had thought long lost.
And, with the growing sense that he was human again, for the first time in an infinity, he bothered to move. To sit up, and let the rocks that had become part of his flesh fall out, blood oozing and burning with a pain that was unfamiliar, compared to the eons of being buried. Dull, thudding aches of pressure and stagnation, were reclaced with the vicious acid bright sting of blood and laceration.
And that too scoured at his thoughts until they felt like something real, and he wandered into the lake because it seemed like the place to go.
He couldn't swim, but what did it matter? Neither could he drown.
VII.
On his seventy ninth birthday, Augustine Sycamore was alone. He second wife had died three years past. Another unexpected pain in a life that had suffered few of them, but each heavier and more crushing than the last. The last of his little team of pokémon had been gone long before her. He liked to think they had welcomed her, as they had his first.
His students were still copious, of course. More of them than he could count. And he had loved every last one of them, because that was his way of living. Love was a habit he had developed in his long distant youth, and it had been his life.
But he could not invite students, no matter how long ago their studies has ceased, to keep him company on a day like today. A day of remembrance and exhaustion, as decades wore weary upon his bones. Not even his muscles, they too were long forgotten.
His children had called, of course. Grinning at him, brightly colored and superbly realistically rendered. No one called them Holo Casters anymore, save for himself and others suffering the disconnected tenacity of the long ago retired. They couldn't visit him, they had lives of their own in far-flung locales.
So he was alone. Just he and his bones, and he only wanted to lay them down to sleep. To refresh and reawaken, as he had every day in that dimly lit past whose words he still spoke, even though they had long ago passed out of vogue.
He was so tired.
When he thought to himself, in the cool, soft bed that had been his for as long as he could bother to care, that tonight he would fall asleep and stay there, remain unconscious and empty until his sore, heavy body finally failed, it did not frighten him.
When death finally opened her pallid arms, not to steal from him, but to give him welcome, he returned the embrace.
IX.
Lysandre did not let himself feel regret. He was no fool. He knew that guilt lead only to madness, in the end. And with an eternity spiraling out before him, he would have time enough to reach that terminus. He swallowed up every last thought of guilt, and crushed it.
Particularly the ones that came to him during the confused week- time still sloshing wetly and unstable in between his ears- that he had spent in a depressing little graveyard attached to a depressing little town four days travel north of Kiloude.
VIII.
He couldn't remember, now, what had possessed him to make this tour. It had taken a very long time, for someone with neither name nor money, nor the interest in acquiring either. He passed through Kalos like a ghost, because it was easier that way. Because his aching thoughts and memories- there were far, far too many of them, most a muddled dark mass- pressed eternally outward on his skull, and he felt like he might collapse if he did not forget.
Perhaps this had been a way of helping himself forget?
He couldn't recall the other places he'd been to, now. Nor the names that went with them. Maybe tomorrow. Today, all he had were dim recollections of laughter, which may very well have been from his time spent in the city more recently. But he thought they were not. That they belonged to green and blue and red and violet, and they were laughing with him, rather than in his general presence.
He did not have even a faded, washed out memory of laughter to go with this gravestone.
But much like the colors, he clung to one thing, one thing to keep with him while the rest of him siphoned away in time, leaving behind and empty foundation for him to rebuild on. If he could be bothered.
He kept eyes.
Wide eyes with blown pupils, so colorlessly grey that they reflected everything around them. Glossy and wet, constantly blinking to hold back laughter or tears or praise.
He kept those eyes, and every other thought he spent a week learning to forget, in supplication to a slab of rock engraved with two bowed sycamore trees, and a name he didn't let himself remember.
X.
He met a dragon tamer, who claimed that she was the next heiress to a family line of Salamance and Garchomp so carefully bred and over such a long period that they could even fight against eachother, dragon to dragon, without suffering too gravely.
She grinned at him too widely, for a woman meeting a mad stranger, and she offered her home too readily.
The way she stared at him made him uncomfortable. The way she toyed with her dark hair, loose waves pulled back into a tail, save for a single wayward lock that flopped listlessly over her forehead.
“If you took better care of yourself,” He informed her, “You could be very beautiful.”
She cackled loudly, like a drunken man, and smacked him soundly for his audacity.
He fell into her bed before he even knew her name.
It actually took several days for him to learn it, put at a strange sort of unease by the assumed intimacy she clearly felt for this stranger she'd picked up out of the wood surrounding her estate.
“Columbie. You know, like the tree?”
He did not know.
“I have forgotten my name,” He told her, in the smooth, factual voice he always said these things in. He was aware, distantly, that he sounded mad. But he had been underground for one hundred and sixteen years, and back above it for seventy three more, and he was much to old to care.
“Well, we'll come up with on for you eventually. Or I can just call you Freedman.”
L'homme-libéré did not sound like it was his name.
“I would prefer if you refrained.”
She cackled again, and it was a wild, inelegant sound that went well with her ridiculous dragonrider personality, eyes of smoke and ash and relentless stone. “Well, mon ami, if you think of a name you like, you'll be sure to let me know.”
In the three years he spent with her, he did not remember the name.
XI.
Sometimes, for days and months and years at a turn, he felt almost like a person again.
He made the mistake, only once, of returning to Lumiose during one such long winded lucid period. The city would not exactly welcome him, a man with no records and no references, and with only the name of an old fairy tale villain.
But there was always work, and there were always people, and eventually he fell back into step with the beating pulse of the city of lights, though two and a half centuries later it bore only a passing resemblance to the one he had known.
Some things never changed, though.
Cheerful academics, strolling in and out of cafés, flirting at gaggles of people with melodramatic gestures and long, lingering touches were apparently one of them.
The moment after Yarrow Chinar had introduced himself, and Lysandre had offered up his name in return, he knew he had made some sort of mistake. The way the younger man's eyebrows had quirked, pupils jittering wider and narrower in an age of dance of desire and focus, set off alarm bells.
“Your parents weren't exactly fond of you, were they?”
“I have absolutely no idea.” That was true enough.
M. Chinar had flirted abominably for the rest of the afternoon, batting his enormous grey eyes and rearranging his dishevelled hair. But it was the touching, long, delicate fingers barely resting on his wrist, that ran the deepest risk to Lysandre's state of utter disinterest.
He continued to patronize the café with some regularity from then on. Whether he knew which shifts Lysandre had taken up or only had a supernatural sense of timing was unclear. Usually, he brought a date, or two, or four. Every time he was alone, he tried again to talk his way coyly or bluntly into Lysandre's arms.
It took six years, in which the planes of Chinar's face sharpened from boyish to maturity, before he managed to win that battle.
By then, though, Lysandre's mind was slouching tiredly towards another of the runs of empty exhaustion, whether thoughts pulled like hot sugar into sharp, unnatural shapes and then shattered beneath their own weight. He could feel himself forgetting, unraveling.
Chinar turned him out after he spent a day and a half calling him by the wrong name, and he left the city, fully intent on never coming back to it.
XII.
Mud.
Mud and leaves and more mud.
He became a ghost, living among ghosts, and he wandered in the mud.
Sometimes, he was attacked by pokemon in the wild. He generally killed them.
Sometimes, they killed him, and he spent a day or a month in the mud, failing to rot, until he crawled back into life again.
The mud became trees.
He walked and walked because he did not feel like sitting. Or he sat because he did not feel like walking.
Eventually, the trees became sunlight.
He collapses into a nest of some sort, because he is tired, and it isn't as if he needs to fear whatever made it.
He wakes up when curious jaws are clamping around his ankle, gold and black eyes staring up at him dourly from a pointed blue snout.
He bats perfunctorily at the gible's head, aiming to wrap his fingers around the bony projection that holds its jet to its skull and pull until the dragon either admits defeat and leaves the nest to him, or the whole thing comes off in his hand, tralining thick, ropey nerves behind it, and killing the miserable little creature immediately.
Instead, it jumps out of reach, and lands on the other side of him, among a veritable litter of gibles, and a garchomp that leers down at him.
He does not particularly enjoy the feeling of being disemboweled, and having his innards eaten. But it has happened often enough that he copes. He screams his throat ragged, and eventually his heart stops again, and takes with it his ability to react.
It stuttered back in a few days, but the nest was still full, and before he could get to his feet, they were on him again.
He begins to suspect he has made a mistake.
He isn't sure how long he stays like that. An eternal buffet for the mated pair and their flock of gibles. It must be several years, for some of them evolve and wander off. He begins to make efforts to tell them apart, because there is nothing else he can possibly hope to do.
The gible that takes the longest time in evolving, the runt of the litter, does not run off to make its own territory when it finally leaves its round, toddling, infant body behind. Instead, it beats back against its sire and dam, and there is no reason why it should win, but it does.
Lucky it. It will have the endless supply of organs, meat and bone that his body represents entirely to itself. Eventually it will find a mate, and the whole business will start over again.
Except, as the only one guarding its hoard, it has to sleep eventually. And one day that sleep will coincide with the piercing burn of his heart returning, and he will be able to escape.
The young gabite stares at him for hours and hours after it wins its fight.
Its eyes are huge and gaping, and they are an unnatural silver color, where they ought to be gold.
When his heart bursts into starbright pain, and then begins pounding, the gabite is still staring.
It does not tear into him, as it has been doing since it was freshly hatched.
It just stares.
He sits up, and it copies the movement.
He stands, and it stands.
He begins to walk away, and it just stares after him, with its mutant grey eyes.
XIII.
He begins to think that even the mountains are changing.
He has lost track of himself so many times that even his memories of memories are grainy, artificial things. But he thinks there was a lake. So, he searches for the largest lake he can find. He doesn't know what he expects to achieve once he had found it. Perhaps he will teach himself to swim.
He walks directly into the lake, and breathes in heaping lungfuls of water and chokes on them. He spends days submerged beneath the surface, growing bloated and watching fish and water pokemon dance around him.
Eventually he determines how to raise his body up, and he breaks the surface.
On the shore of the lake, there is a couple.
They are staring at him, with the same empty sort of look that the fish often had. He is some sort of anomaly in their territory, not an intruder so much as an intrusion.
He approaches them.
They speak, their words coming out at the same time and in the same sounds. It isn't a language he recognizes. Maybe that's just because most languages he has grown accustomed to hearing are designed for only one speaker.
They are old. Not in the same way he is old, but in the dying-shell-careless-mind way. They do not seem concerned by a man who can spend days underwater intruding on their retirement. Or hermitage. Whichever it is.
Everything about them is ugly and gaunt and grey.
He stays with them because he thinks this may be his lake, and they may be what he had hoped to find here. He watches them die, slowly and at great length. He believes he has taken care to avoid watching people die, because the sensation of it feels new.
Very few things are new, when your age approaches a fourth digit.
They are mirrors of eachother. Almost completely identical, though she is a little shorter and he is a little browner. They have one grey eye and one brown eye a piece, and after some time, after he has begun to grow familiar with their language, he learns that the brown ones were the man's, and the grey ones were the woman's, and that they had them switched when they were very young.
He isn't certain that story is true. Eyes do not seem switchable.
He has been wrong before, however, and some part of him recalls a city- three cities?- that had machines that were all but magic spilling out of every streetcorner. That was quite a long time ago. They can probably switch eyes, by now.
They never exchange names. He is himself. The woman is the woman. The man is the man. They, together, are them. Names are unnecessary.
Entirely too quickly, they lose their ability to move for themselves, and he takes care of them. They tell him stories. Legends from their youth, of mighty fire demons who wished to purge the land of humanity, and the water spirits who extinguished them by making this very lake. Or imagined ones they create between them, while he is out collecting wood and meals and water, featuring a fairy prince in desperate love with a giant made of steel who can never hope to return the sentiment, too bound up in the strictures of metal for the poetry of passion.
The woman dies in midsentence.
The man finishes the story, and it feels hollow and weak, told in only one voice. Fortunately, he does not have to suffer through the strangeness of the man talking alone for very long, because he dies immediately afterwards.
Or maybe not.
Immediately is a very different term, when a days slip like sand between one thought and the next.
He throws their bodies out to rot in the water, and stays in their hermit cabin until it rots around him too.
XIV.
He walks.
XV.
He keeps walking.
XVI.
Beneath his feet, there are ever fewer patches of mud or leaves. Everything is asphalt and artificial stone. People crawl over every surface, countless and fast dying. They are insects. He ignores them.
They stare at him with their empty infant eyes, because he is pale and strange, and his body is unnatural. He is a living fossil of a human. But then, there are operations that can do anything, these days. It is only fashion. A strange fashion. A novel one.
Novelty is at a premium.
His ancient posture becomes a fad.
XVII.
Lucidity, if it can be called that, comes ever more rarely. He sin't sure that it is the right term, though. Thinking in the linear, dull ways that marked his infancy cannot really be called sanity, can it? His standards are so different form what they once were.
In a lucid period, however, he learns of a new fashion sweeping the endless, sprawling city, and he laughs about it for a very long time.
Long being what it subjectively must be, most of the part of the world-city he occupies has long since emptied in fear of the Laughing Man by the time he stops.
There is a treatment that will give a man immortality. It's simple. They suction out your brain, one branching neuron at a time, and turn it into numbers. Like transferring a pokemon into a ball. Do they have pokeballs anymore? Pokemon? He isn't sure.
Immortality in numbers.
He had been alive so very long. It isn't as if this will change anything, really. It might be interesting to try becoming numbers.
XVIII.
There is a mandatory anesthetic, and it disagrees with him. His immune system, in particular.
It doesn't take.
He feels nothing of the long, thin needle. There is no pain from each cell being mapped and fried. But he is not unconscious.
He is all too conscious.
The memories playing out one by one in the folds of a failing brain.
Organic and irregular, packets of recollection sliding past and over and through eachother as his mind becomes less and less his own.
He thinks he ahs made a mistake, and this time there will be no grey eyed saviour to help him.
And one day, everything else ends around you, and whatever marks your mind and soul comes apart at the seams.
does a 1500 word outline count as resolution 2014 writing?
when will I stop making these unnecessarily convoluted AUs?
will I ever write the next fucking chapter of angelology?
Aurelia has kept a dream journal since she was six. She refers to it in the singular, though by now it spans across three bookshelves. It comforts her when things have gone wrong, as they have lately. She enjoys being able to pour back through the past of her own consciousness, deciphering the easy fragments in gigantic, hopeless handwriting that marked the first three notebooks form the first grade. She likes tracking the changes, her writing becoming smaller and tighter, her sentences longer and more detailed.
She keeps it still, even now. But she never lets herself read past the end of volume 44. There are eighteen months of her life void of dream entries.
Before those months, only perhaps one in ten or twelve of her dreams were part of the Recurring Continuity. The rest were simple things, snippets of the days conversation and actions, filtered and refracted through the lens of her subconscious as it sorted out the chaff and created long term memories.
Now, the inverse has become true. Her estimates are that one in then nights, she sleeps like a normal person. Like she used to.
A third of her dreams are The Nightmares. Hypervivid fragments of the her missing months, sharp as broken glass and cutting her throat and tongue and eyes and mind. She has trained herself not to move in her sleep, because for the first six months after she was released from the Ranch, she woke up screaming, tied down in her own blankets, limbs turning ashy with blood deprivation and neck aching where sheets and pillowcases had formed a noose.
Every bad trip, ever cold night and cut and bruise and degradation, distilled into something beyond reality, as only dreams can be.
And the rest?
The rest are the Recurring Continuity, and when she dreams of that life, (which is not her, it isn't, not at all,) she wishes she were having a nightmare. She watches her hands- not hers, but they are, oh they are- and she hears her thoughts- her voice her patterns her connections, but she is not the one thinking, she is the one screaming- and she is powerless to stop her(not)self from doing all these aching, horrendous things.
She commits murder after murder, and the her that isn't feels no guilt and no pain. They're only formless, mindless, faceless creatures, she thinks. And the her that is screams that they are people, is this a test, is it because she does not feed the poor and mend the ill? Is this punishment for atrocities she has yet to commit?
She tries until her thoughts are bruised and aching to control the her that isn't. She thinks perhaps she is making headway, for a little while. But it is so hard to think, when she's asleep. And when she's awake, everything goes soft and formless around the edges. It doesn't seem nearly as desperate.
Then something changes. Someone that belongs to the her that isn't leaves, and if there was any progress, it was too delicate to survive. The murders rack up higher and higher, and every time, Aurelia can feel them more closely, until they are truly her hands, prying back the skin and flesh of strangers. Until she is intimately familiar with the temperature and texture of organs she does not know the name of.
She began, when the sensory input became too much, too real, to avoid sleeping. She doesn't remember great swaths of the drug addled hell that was the Dark Year, but she knows it should be enough to convince her away from stumulants, away form that life again.
Atlanta is a large, dank city that stinks of smoke and the boggy southern air, and it isn't hard to find a dealer who will happily oblige the idiosyncrasies of a paranoid rich girl. Who will cheerfully oblige to take double, triple the price to say no, not today, that's too many times this month, if it comes to that.
For the first time since she was very young, the dream journals become lighter, sentences turning into fragments turning into lists of words. When she's awake, she can forget how horrible it is. When she's awake, she can pretend she isn't a killer, isn't a sadistic creature form the depths of hell who tore into her own body and broke something just so that she could have an even greater control over the life and death of others.
When she's awake, she can forget what it's like to be mad and cackling, sobbing, loathing.
For the first time in a very long time, Aurelia does not want to remember her dreams.
She stops sleeping as much as she can. She signs up for more classes than anyone can be expected to handle, and the ampethamines her way through them. She forces her cousin to buy her a nice computer, and set it up, and begins the process of developing an internet addiction, because those cause insomnia too.
And then, through there, she meets some people.
Familiar, horrible, wonderful people. And when she's awake, she forgets knowing them. But when she's asleep, she sees Terry turning grey, hair losing all its vibrant color, slinking into one of the nameless masses. She sees him, and she thinks a name that is defined more by absence than sound, and she knows they are enemies. That she has made an enemy of him, by hunting his people down for sport.
She sees Felix, but his gold and black are gone, replaced by bright clashes of primary colors that contrast prettily with his black, black hair, and glittering eyes. She looks at him, and knows that they are friends, but only for so long as they don't kill eachother first. He has done things to her that no one else ever has. He has flayed her skin open in the seams between molecules, and replaced her body with pain. But he has soothed her broken emptiness, and he has carried the bodies of her loved ones to their graves, and for these things she offers him trust, beneath the hate.
She sees Eve, and recognizes her face. But there is no thrill of lust and depseration, not tonguestuck horror as she makes a fool of herself, again and again. The thing that Eve is, blue and grey and gold and black, alien muscles over alien bones, is utterly unfamiliar. She is nothing and no one, and if they have met it was only in passing. They are strangers, and that curls around Aurelia's heart like sickness.
Worst of them all is the moment when, delirious, exhausted, clinging to the edges of consciousness with tears in her mouth so that her eyes are dry, dry, dry, she sees Deven's sister. And now she knows what it is from both sides, Aurelia and her self-that-isn't. Because on the edge of sleep, she recognizes this pixie girl with hair in gold and eyes of sand. This child who the her-that-isn't gave away every aspect of herself to keep safe. Who even after the broken thing that made her dead-alive, concerned herself singularly with this fairy child's safety. A mockery of love that could never be felt again. A love that Aurelia knows the shape and taste of, and the sliding, confused absence of.
She does not want to remember her dreams.
She clings to the idea of Elliot, who is sweet and funny and rather an idiot, and most importantly, is blessedly, sinfully new. There is not other him in another world. He bears no resemblance the the ranting, toothy bloodletter that has seduced the her-that-isn't into hateful longing. He is not the strange, soulless friend from beyond the veil of mortality, stolen away by spirits in her youth and reformed into something just shy of human. He is not the pitch-purple poet with his curling tongue and licking darkness.
He is only Elliot.
She does not want to remember her dreams, but now, biting at the inside of her cheek, staring at the shelved notebooks, mind abuzz with deja vu that screams like a six year old in a basement, begging her brother not to leave her, please, please don't go, she considers the merit of having another life.
The rules of that world are not the rules of this one. But there are parallels. And though she longs to believe that they are merely the products of a quicksilver subconscious, there is an itch at the base of her skull that sings a song of maybe not and almost wrong.
So she slips quietly towards them, blue-black in the glow of her screen, careful not to trip and wake the sleeping girl who still claims her bed even though the second guest room has been empty for days and days.
It's just a game, she promises herself. It's just a silly thought ritual that will calm her. She knows it isn't real. They are only dreams and dreams of dreams.
She collects the last three books, which she has never opened since she closed them after penning the last pages. She collects a brassy dagger treated with a chemical bath so that its colors dance in the dim light. She collects two joints and a bottle of anti-anxiety pills for which she has no prescription.
She does not collect her phone.
She wanders into the bathroom, and flips on the vent, lights the first joint, swallows three pills with handfuls of tap water.
Elliot is only Elliot and nothing more. He could die, and it would make no difference to the world of her-that-isn't and the dreams of murder and insanity.
But he is only Elliot, and he can behave in ways that the dreams don't have words for, and she doesn't want to trust his judgement. She doesn't, in the sparks of her mind. But the meat of her brain says something else.
She practices smoke rings, waits twenty minutes for the rising tide of cotton and dissociation to sink into her blood. She opens the first notebook, let's it fall to whatever page it will. She lets her vision crawl over familiar letters, tracing idle scratches into her calf with the point of the knife.
She smokes and settles and cuts and breathes and reads.
And with the helpful haze of drugs and the sharp prompting of pain turning her mind inside out, she almost feels like she is sleeping, and she lets herself remember.
........well I don't fucking know. Whatever.
Definitely-not-sisters Celosia and Aliana.
Frankly, this one's not worth the time it took to write. It's just like. Two people sitting around in comfortable silences, occasionally gossiping. Also one instance of extremely unhygienic licking.
Sundays pass like clockwork dolls, damsels and ponies marching in lines across mantels.
For some people, Sunday is a day of relaxation. Perhaps for them as well, though both of them would immediately answer, if asked what they were doing, with “working.”
For other people, Sunday is a day of worship, a deeply engrained cultural reminder that they are not alone In the universe, and that they are loved by powers beyond them. If asked where their beloved pokemon were, on this day dedicated to the bonds between man and beast and brilliant legend, they would shrug as if of one mind, and mutter something that might be, with a keen ear, construed as, “out.”
For Celosia and Aliana, Sunday is a day of study. Thumbing through reams of papers, statistics, journals. Researching in the dull, smooth worn way that professional students, contractually bound to split themselves open at the bleeding edge.
They occupy identical rooms, mirror images of eachother, across the hall and one floor apart. Because this is the first sunday of the month, they are in Aliana's room, which lends itself to clockwork metaphors. She has a collection. Mechanical princesses, pendulum driven clocks, a windup skarmory that pickups up pebbles set just-so in front of it.
At six in the evening, there is a small cacophony, chirping birds and chiming bells, as six clocks mark the hour at once.
Aliana snaps up, her slouched posture correcting to a rangerly precision of attention. Celosia is lazier, turning to gaze blankly at the nearest clock with eyes half focused, pupillary reaction dulled by straining over tiny print for too long.
They glance at eachother, stare for a moment, blink twice, catlike and slow. Celosia smiles, toothy and pleased. Aliana rolls her eyes, but matches the expression a moment later.
They stand at the same moment, arching their backs, Aliana backwards, Celosia forwards, vertebrae and shoulders click-creak-popping. Celosia keeps on bending forward instead of straightening, melting bonelessly onto the bright woven rug. Aliana steps over her easily, without looking, and collapses onto the childish beanbag that serves as her leisure furniture, since these weekly get togethers require them both to have oversized dining tables instead of desks. Too large for the company dormitories.
Celosia folds one elbow underneath her head, and turns her face in Aliana's general direction, though her eyes are closed, and she would have been staring more at Aliana's ankles than her face, given the tilt of her nose.
“So.”
“So.”
They sit in perfect silence for a while, collecting their thoughts. Celosia leads the charge, today.
“I'm getting a new machine interface specialist.”
“Oh?”
“Yep.”
“And what makes you so sure of that? I thought Rousseau was fused to that project like the cold pile of slag he is?”
“Mmm. I have statistics this time, though. An entire presentation, with citations. It's like being in school again.”
“You should go back, you know. Get your degree, before you can't anymore.”
“Yeah, but no. I mean it's what, six years out? I'm not spending four of that pretending I care about someone else's version of compatability standards, besides-”
“But point of the degree is to get the job you already have. You know it isn't though. You could go and study something else entirely.”
“Tch, yeah, I'll become a botanist.”
“That might not be a poor choice. So much of modern agriculture is dependent on mass farming and aggressive soil depletion being augmented by artificial nitrates and phosphorous. It's going to be an issue.”
“I'm not going to be a farmer, that's like the worst possible demotion, oh my god.”
“I think you'd find it very rewarding, though. You like making things, it's just the same.”
“Nah, it's not. When I build your tinkertoys, there's a plan, it's all mapped out. You might his problems, but you know what the end result is gonna be. You find me one jackass who's gone and decided to grow his own berries who didn't end up tearing his hair out over the unpredictable variables. If you find one, then you can tell him to be a farmer.”
“Hmm.”
They lapse into silence again. When a topic presents itself, they'll talk. For now, it's nice to have someone else around to breathe with. Aliana feels herself stuttering drowsily towards sleep, which she could probably use more of. She doesn't work with the same pressures and deadlines as Celosia. Her projects are all slower, and more personal. She's one of only two geologists on staff. And the other is. Well. He holds multiple degrees. Unrelated ones. She might as well be the only one. Xerosic doesn't count. He isn't her partner, or her colleague, he's just the patchwork man who fills in all the gaps that the rest of the team doesn't have covered.
Celosia peels one eye open after a while, staring in a long term wink at Aliana.
“I know that look. Come on then, spill. Was he back in your office again? Did he talk dirt to you?”
Aliana snickers at the horrible attempt at a joke, even as she nudges her bare foot to swat at Celosia's face. “As a matter of fact, he did.”
That gets her attention, and Celosia rolls onto her elbows, staring up at Aliana with glittering eyes. Then her face falls as she realizes she's been had. “Oh my god, I wasn't serious. Soil samples are not sexy, Li, you're off your head.”
“I'm not the one who spends all day breathing in lead and rosin.”
“Now you're just being mean,” Celosia gripes, flipping on to her back to stare at the ceiling. “I miss lead. It's like baby steps. So much easier for doing personal projects.”
“Maybe. But at least you're not going to end up dead at forty.”
“I liked it better when we were talking about you and the mountain man.”
They both pause at that, falling into thoughtful frowns, eyes tipping skullward. Aliana laughs first, but Celosia tips in barely a second later.
“I think he'd die.”
“Fucking hell, can you imagine him in tiny little hiking shorts and one of those ridiculous hats for the sun, he's so pale.”
“Maybe the Reflection caves? There's not much sun that far down.”
“You just wanna get him underground so you can get off both ways at once. Disgusting, Li, you're so gross. Oh fuck, I should have said get his rocks off!”
Aliana kicks lightly at Celosia's cheek again, and for good measure rests the arch of her foot directly over her her mouth like a gag, until the younger woman actually licks it. She jerks away quickly, gawking, and has to raise her voice to get over Celosia's hysterics.
“That's disgusting, what is wrong with you, who knows what kind of filth is hanging on the bottom of a foot, how are you not dead yet?”
“I have to keep my immune system up somehow. You're the one who rolls around in the mud all day, I've got a sterile pospress whiteroom. If I didn't constantly lick things I shouldn't be linking, I'd get some kind of immunosuppression thing, end up on a made-for-TV special.”
They trail off in deep breathes and rolled eyes. After a few minutes of silence, they booth look at different clocks at the same time. Celosia going immediately for the blasphemous digital clock Aliana keeps on a little shelf above the front door just for her, while Aliana lolls her head against one shoulder, craning her neck awkwardly to study the twenty-four hour sandtimer, and summing up the math quickly.
“Yeah, I'm definitely not getting dinner tonight, screw it.” Celosia declares imperially. Aliana shrugs and rolls out of the beanbag awkwardly. There is, she has discovered at length, no way to leave a beanbag without it being dangerously awkward. They are tricky things.
“You remember Racine, she works with the Holo Caster people?”
Celosia makes a vague noise. “Name's familiar. Probably one of the multi-signature ones that send back the error reports every month.”
“Maybe? She brought an entire. I don't even know. An absurdity of these little mint-chocolate turnovers and left them in the third floor lounge on Friday.”
“This better be leading up to the part where you say you're going to give me dessert for dinner, or I'm going to whine really loudly about you not telling me they were up there. Really loudly. So loud. Your ears will bleed. Do you want to bleed out of your ears like some cheap mentalist trying to talk to his Abra too hard?”
Aliana shrugs with a hum, and impolitely drops three crumbly pastries on Celosia's stomach, the chocolate ganache staining into her grey tee. It's a cheap, grungey pajama top, so she doesn't feel too bad.
“Okay, these smell weird.”
“They're fine. Eat them, or I'm taking you to the cantina.”
“Yes, mother.”
Aliana curls her legs underneath her, joining Celosia on the floor this time, and plucking one of the abandoned pastries away for herself. “You know, some of the new recruits think we're related.”
Celosia's jaw stills around a bite of her sweet, and she squints analytically at Aliana. She swallows, and draws her lower lip under her teeth to worry at it, raking her eyes over the redhead. Aliana mirrors the action, drawing along the line of Celosia's sharp chin, her sloped shoulders and neck arched perpetually forward from spending ten hours at a time arched over low desks and improperly positioned screens. She cocks her head to one side.
Celosia does the same, wider, paler eyes drawing along the aristocratic hook of Aliana's nose, the softer lines of her body, smooth and round in a way Celosia could be, if she weren't constantly refusing to eat dinner out of sheer boredom, if she didn't treat black coffee as a breakfast food. She takes in the way Aliana's lips have pressed to a thin line, both curled between her teeth until she seems to have a sort of cartoon mouth, made of only a single line.
“No,” Aliana agrees, though Celosia hasn't said anything. “I don't see it either. It's odd.”
“We should get matching haircuts, and really screw them up.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah, definitely. Next Sunday, for sure.”
“I suppose there's no reason not to.”
“Awesome. It has to be something short though. I want them to dye my whole head purple. It's going to be great.”
Resolutions 2014
With each passing year, I'm getting to know myself better and better. Forget "working out more" or "eating healthier"....that was seldomly effective and rarely lasted past three weeks when I was a college student, let alone a working woman heading into her first busy season. So 2014 is the year I set realistic resolutions with (I'll be honest) pretty lax restrictions...a lot of implied "may"s, "try"s, "perhaps." Baby steps.
Dine out less, but better
Opt for more tea and water over coffee
Learn to cook, and have a few recipes down pat
Get rest as often as possible
Opt out of purchasing coffee at Starbucks, Dunkin' Donuts, etc. (in going over expenses, I calculated that I spent around $60 in a month on coffee...which is a nice dinner out in Boston that I had less money for)
Forego a gym membership (I'll never go) and attend barre/yoga/spin/cardio classes more often
Plan and take a trip to an exotic international destination
Explore one city in America I've never been to
[And for all aspects of life]: quality over quantity.
What are some of your resolutions?...or better question...How are you sticking to them?
Every day I'm like "this is the day I give up on this resolution, fuck it."
But thank god for Flare dorks, because they keep me going.
Here, have Actual Besties Lysandre and Bryony.
Bryony Blanche Racine was not very fond of her name. It wasn't an awful name, especially. It was a bit stupid, being named after plant roots, and she would never stop regretting actually looking up the history of the plant when she was eleven. But it was not a terrible name. She just didn't like it.
Every year, on her birthday, she promised herself she would have it changed. Given that she was unlikely to get be married and take on a husband's name, this seemed the thing to do. Every year, instead, she got astonishingly drunk and baked an alarming quantity of pastries.
Primarily pies, but sometimes cakes, or cookies, or baklava, or, last year, a seven foot tall croquembouche, for which she had, apparently, left midway through to buy a stand and step ladder. As she couldn't remember anything form her twenty sixth birthday, that was her best guess, at least.
She liked baking well enough. It wasn't something she was unusually talented at, nor would she ever have considered it beyond the limits of a hobby, but it was a pleasant divergence from her studies an dayjob, while still appealing to her preference for precision. Recipes were often forgiving. But complex pastries were not. The slightest variation in the temperature of the butter or the weight of the flour could completely change results.
The day after her twenty seventh birthday, she awoke as per the norm with a thudding headache, blocked sinuses, dry mouth, and the general sensation that she'd stuffed her head full of wet sponges. The desserts were a soupy recollection somewhere in the mash of her muddled thoughts, and she recalled something about mint, chocolate and very possibly chevre. She wasn't entirely certain, but she had her suspicions.
She would, ultimately, have to drag herself into her kitchen and find out. She detoured for the bathroom instead. She had arranged for the day off from Fleur-de-Lis over a month ago, in preparation for this precise situation, and was glad of her preparedness. It meant that when she drew half a bath while begrudgingly brushing the film off her teeth and tongue, then collapsed into the water and switch on the showerhead instead, she was able to lie there completely void of movement until the overflow drain gurgled into action.
She deeply considered stayed exactly where she was even longer, because she could, and because the glubbing of the drain and soft white noise of the showerhead were pleasantly neutral to her aching skull, and because she did enjoy being able to breathe again thanks to the steam.
But by now Caprice and Sergine were almost certainly planning mutiny, and there were unknowable pastries in the kitchen which begged to settle her aching stomach. Pastries which would be into the two pokémon's stomachs if she didn't feed them sooner or later. Sergine might be willing to wait respectfully, but Caprice was as she was named, and had only become more so since her recent evolution into a longer, leaner, and more arrogant liepard.
Bryony shut off the water with a small huff of annoyance, but resisted the siren call to lay back in the bath. Still, in the name of optimism, she didn't pull the drain. Perhaps she could feed the pests, collect a reputable breakfast, and go back to soaking before the water cooled too significantly?
Alone in her apartment, with the blinds on the only window drawn, she didn't bother wrapping herself in a towel. Why should she? It was the iddle of summer, she wouldn't be cold. The cheap carpet wouldn't be slippery if she dripped lazily all over it. And she had no one to hide herself from but Sergine and Caprice. If she had been fearful of them looking on her, then she would probably have a very different set of problems.
These were all excellent reasons to strolled nakedly around her home, hungover and grumpy in her post-birthday haze.
Thus it was only reasonable, in the grand scheme, that they prove immediately untenable the precise moment she opened the bathroom door, and nearly squashed a betrayed looking litleo.
The full implications of the poor kitten's presence didn't set in for a moment, which she spent staring down at his wide, black eyes, while he shivered and mewled, the tail she had nearly crushed curled forlornly between his oversized paws.
“Merde.” She informed him very flatly, as her pickled brain began to turn at a rough approximation of her normal speed, just quickly enough that she was not taken entirely by surprise to see a hulk of a man in a finely tailored black suit staring very pointedly at the shuttered window. That at least explained the silence in her apartment. No doubt he'd let Caprice and her dutiful sidekick out to prowl around the city like wild beasts. “I'm going to have you charged with breaking and entering.”
“Yes,” Lysandre agreed while she slunk back into the bathroom to collect a towel, and a robe for good measure. “That would probably be for the best. Should I report myself to the ethics committee, or will you be handling that as well?”
It was not a bathrobe, and the fluffy polyester fleece clung to her damp skin digustingly, even after she'd patted herself down as best she could, and wrapped the towel tightly around her hair.
“What the raging fuck are you doing here? Sexually assaulting innocent virgins in their homes?”
“Reminding them to lock their front doors.”
Bryony squinted suspiciously through him, trying to read him for a lie- a futile effort, then man was almost entirely incapable of discomfort- while searching her spotty memory. She could remember kicking the door shut, hands full of two enormous mesh grocery bags, but the click of the deadbolt didn't seem to be anywhere in that.
“I am completely sure that doesn't legitimize strolling into your subordinate's home unnanounced while they're bathing, though.”
“No. No, I imagine it doesn't.”
“You should definitely stop doing that. It's becoming an issue, this whole 'I own the entire world' thing.”
“You can take it up with my mother, if you like.”
“Yes. That's my new plan for the day.” Her vowels were stretched around the beginnings of a grin, which she bit down on stubbornly. She shouldn't encourage him. She really shouldn't. “I'll just go and hire one of the insane psychics wandering around route fourteen. You can pay for new boots when I ruin mine, sloshing in the swamps. You'll be coming with me, of course.”
“Or,” He offered with the same stupid, indulgent smile he was always using before giving her jobs that they both knew would leave her staring dead eyed and vacant at screens after twenty hour shifts. The sort that would simultaneously destroy her health, and give her the brutal, technical challenge that she was addicted to. There was a reason he'd started paying for her graduate studies, after all. “You could put on something a little less amphibious, and we could go and see the new storefront.”
“The wh- oh piss, are you serious? Today?”
“Well, it won't be available to the public for another few weeks, of course. But we're finalizing the menu, and I could use a trustworthy second opinion.”
Bryony snorted quietly, sliding the towel off her head to chuck at him with a damp thwap. “Can't trust your pet doctor?”
She didn't even need to look at him to know the precise face that went with that carefully noncommital noise. Almost entirely incapable of discomfort.
“Come and help me pick an outfit then, you gigantic cockup.”
“One day someone is going to take you by the tongue and cut it out entirely.”
“Alas, it's not your lucky day, boss, now come and be fashionable for me.” She stared very hard at her hand, as it turned the doorknob to her bedroom. The headache was coming back, with her brief jolt of adrenaline at being caught unawares by an enourmous asshole with poofy hair beginning to fade. “I'm losing track of where my limbs are again. I'll put on something hideous if you don't save me from my alcohol impaired judgment.”
“You'll put on something hideous to spite me, you mean.”
“Fringe benefits. I have to keep you around for something, you know.”
She stared very hard at her wardrobe, until Lysandre took the hint and opened it himself, rifling through the hanging shirts and dresses, while Bryony snickered quietly. Not quietly enough that he couldn't hear, of course, but quietly enough that they could both pretend he couldn't. Even years later, it was still a ridiculous sight, his gigantic hands pawing through her selection of frilly neon clothes. He was better at it than her, though. Aside from the insistence on always trying to get her into a dress.
“Here,” He offered her a rich burgundy pencil skirt and a flouncy pastel yellow blouse which she, personally, would never have put together. Particularly not now that her hair was a cool pansage green. But they did look impressive together, the colors setting eachother off nicely. Still.
“The skirts, always with the skirts. Try again.”
She delighted in the fact that he actually rolled his eyes, bouncing cheerfully in her robe.
“You realize that the entire purpose of a pencil cut is-”
“Summer,” She trilled, “I want to show of my legs properly, not imply they're there. Suck it up and do your magic, or I really will report you for breaking into my home and letting my poor, precious Pawniard out into the world all alone and unsupervised.”
“You wouldn't.”
“No, but the threat is why you love me.”
Lysandre hummed tightly and she could imagine the frown that he was no doubt trying to make. But he enjoyed the dressup games as much as she did. Once, when he had been spectacularly drunk, he had gone on for twenty full minutes about how it was unfair that women could wear nicer clothes than him, and things had degenerated from there. Hidden deeply away on the encrypted triple-redundant servers at work there was a solitary photo of him attempting and dramatically failing to wear a horrific lyrca mess of what had probably once been a sundress. He'd been much skinnier then, still half adolescent, but still broad in the shoulders and too tall for anything off the rack.
“Fine, here.” He did not throw the shorts at her, because he wasn't 'an ill mannered hooligan,' (manners not extending to residential property, apparently). But she could tell he wanted to. She stared at the shorts for a very long moment.
These were definitely not hers. She would remember buying them, even if she'd somehow collected them during the blank haze last night. There were stripes. Holographic vinyl stripes, chunky and glittery against the white terrycloth, which was cut without a hem to curl up messily, the legs barely extending past the inseam.
She was still staring at them, suspiciously now, and with a distinct frown, when he handed her a black camisole and one of the enormous gauzy white half-shirts that she had bought on a sale and never actually used, because she had nothing to use them with. “I assume you still have the white boots. Would you prefer with or without stockings?”
“Are you damned kidding me?”
Lysandre was staring down at her now, with one ridiculously well groomed eyebrow arched in a gesture that she was almost entirely certain he literally practiced in front of the mirror.
“Well, if you don't like them-”
Bryony hugged the shorts to her chest dearly and snarled in a fashion which she suspected would have put Caprice to cowering. The litleo who had cheerfully clambered atop her dresser was certainly put off by it. “Absolutely not, get out, I have to put them on now.”
They weren't even that great. She'd probably never actually wear them again. The stripes were ridiculous, and the cut was short even by her standards. But the idea of Lysandre actually going into a shop and buying them was too much to let pass unflaunted.
She shimmied into the outfit as quickly as she could manage without tearing anything, and after studying her bare legs critically, went for the stockings after all. Her bet pait of opaque black nylown still left a gap of bare skin longer than her hand, and she did not squeal because that would be stupid beyond measure, but she did bounce on her toes like an idiot and breathe out very hard in the attempt not to.
Black and white saddled ankle boots completed the ensemble, and she stared at herself in the cheap glued on mirror behind her door. Her hair was a mess, curling into silly stringy beach waves as it dried. The gauze top slanted off one shoulder slouchily, pulling the other side's hem at an angle to really show off the smooth black of the camisole where it clung to her waist. A strip of bare skin, before the first glaring, shining stripe of vinyl. Three more of those. More skin. More black.
She couldn't decide if she looked like one of the fashionably dishevelled magazine models, or like some sort of mad hobo gone horribly wrong.
Either way, though, she was going to turn heads.
She turned around once, slowly, and watched the stripes chance color iridescently, before flinging open the door hard enough that it banged against the wall.
The poor, beleaguered litleo squalled and ran for the kitchen, while Bryony struck a pose, hands raised of as if to display invisible prizes on a daytime quiz show. The overall effect was marred somewhat by the painfully wide grin pulling at her cheeks. “This is the worst birthday gift anyone has ever gotten me. I hope they were so expensive you cried.”
“Tears were definitely shed.”
“Come on then, let's go torment your chefs. I hope you have cash for a taxi though,” She added as a wave of nauseous exhaustion washed through her in the wake of the excitement. “I'm not walking all the way to Magenta from here with this head and these boots. I will die, and then you'll have to get and hire some idiot off the streets to handle your user-interface.”
Lysandre offered her his elbow with complete sincerity, and she let herself laugh, loudly three times. “Oh, we'll make a pair, won't we. All the contrasts you can shove in a single bucket without someone's eyes bleeding.”
“Well, there's a reason we're in monochrome.”
Welp, the rough draft of ch 2 for Angelology is done. That's nice.
It's really shitty though, IDK if I can smooth it over before SUnday. We'll see.
