J.+ DOE

on the topic of halos; here is yours, the gold in your eye. and mine, half-rotted && bent.

[vel-jane]

IN CANON: THREE WEEKS SINCE DAY ZERO

WEEK ONE.

day zero - - - ( ++ ) && ( ++ ) day one - - - tba w. seungjo day two, afternoon && night - - - ( ++ ) day three - - - tba w. graves day four - - - tba w. sumyeong & graves day five, night - - - ( ++ ) day seven - - - ( ++ )

[vel-jane]

fig.1 ; graves.

a glass display case containing: a bird's ribcage & sternum with a dried heart still stuck to it, bleached moth wings, broken pieces of a porcelain doll's face, and various bones that can be arranged into many strange creatures ( but none that exist ).

fig.2 ; misol.

a little spice bottle full of darling things: a dated postage stamp, a pearled man in the moon button, and the head of a lollipop one might struggle to comprehend fitting inside of the bottle at all.

fig.3 ; haeil.

an empty lantern piece filled with: leaves from thistle forest, an empty chrysalis, and a shard of stained glass almost the shape of a star. an eye is visible, broken halfway through its pupil. at the bottom, hidden, is a carved wooden thorn carrying a peculiar, perfumed scent that haeil may find familiar.

fig.4 ; hansol.

a random alcohol bottle jane found at the bottom of a tide pool: inside is a strange and slightly jank-looking shrimp that came along for the ride. it's pregnant, but jane does not know this. she only knows that it is little and alive, like someone she has only seen in passing on afternoons she spent ripping hive from the farmhouse walls.

fig.5 ; sumyeong.

an antique jar of: blue honey with a shard of honeycomb cradled around a cross. the iron from the cross inside of it makes it appear violet and bloody. the twine is hand-twisted from strands of wheat. if sumyeong were to pull the cross out and press it against his tongue, he would taste the night that jane woke up, all tears and santhesalt.

fig.6 ; eudora.

a hollow perfume bottle, cracked. it's filled with lovely clutter: unremarkable clusters of gems, nacre & sand from the shorelines, sea-battered photographs with light leaks and water/honey damage too large to make clear of any one subject. there is a fresh rose, lovely and ervin-kissed at the bottom.

[vel-jane]

the bouquet is simple, wrapped in brown paper and facing east. it carries thick spirals of dark blades blushed red at the tips. jane sets the dead moths in her arms down on the ground so that she may look more closely.

she tilts her head for a moment, still save for her hair as it whips across her face in the early morning chill. stray flakes of the fields in her dream still fall from her.

jane beheads each stalk save for one, laying them out like coins on the underside of haeil's mattress. it takes her a little bit of time to move the thick pad back on top of them, but the work reminds her of the night she met him and that makes it worth her while.

in a month's time jane will remember them, and they will be ready for her to crush into pigment.

the rest of the petals that fell wayside are rubbed in sugar and jarred under her own bed, and the last she buries in the backyard with the dead moths she found in her room, so that it may bloom within the year and save her dreams inside of its pollen.

jane does not think anything further of the flowers. she does not even know their name, only that they taste slightly sour, and that whoever she was before she came to in velgrove's waters quite liked that.

[vel-jane]

there’s dirt on her sheets and a clutch of flowers on her bedside table, pulled up by the roots, soft white and trembling where they shouldn’t be.

the moth is erstwhile, hanging half-torn from the barn cat's mouth. jane collects it in gentle measure, a drop of honey spread on calico gums until the insect drops in her stray hand. it's a lovely little thing, dull-hearted in death && yet shimmering still in soft cadmium.

jane pins it above her bed at night, and gives it no more thought.

she comes to in a sun-lighted meadow, the light motion-blurred and spinning gold. she lifts a hand, and sees the sun warm her bones red as it filters through. there is a soft breeze. jane can name the things she hears ( birds, water, dead leaves, there--- the faint click of a cicada too early ). she has never been here before, and yet she knows that she is still in velgrove. jane sits up, and gazes at trees that look half sketch and half painting. she looks down, and sees a winding river, its water breaking into gothic patterns as it slopes left.

perhaps jane should wonder if she is lost. but there is something that tugs her chin toward north, and she knows that her lighthouse is that way.

and now there is a cross in her hand, tangled up between her fingers. its chain is thick and knotted, black only where the links cross over one another.

someone calls out for her from behind, her name like a song on their lips.

jane whips around and falls from her bed, her eyes opening in second-succession. this is not the first time that jane has fallen in her sleep.

jane can see the fairytale of her dream when she closes her eyes, tangible still. something bad has happened to jane. there is dirt on the lace at the bottom of her skirt, and the metallic aftertaste of springwater in her mouth.

someone said her name. what was her name?

jane is struck in place before the eerie. it stares at her in anger, and she receives it in continuation, as though the anger is for her to bear. it is daylight, lovely and unblemished. such days are rare in velgrove's rainy season, and jane feels as though all the rain has made a home inside of her today instead. she is choking on her sadness, her fear, her shame. the eerie does not stop.

a soft footfall makes jane turn this time ( an echo, stirring deep within, a name gone without her catching it ), and she sees eudora gaze through her at the eerie for only a moment. jane opens her mouth and finds that it is already open, held in place, like stone, and now she is screaming and it is clear from the ache in her throat that she had always been screaming, oh how did she not hear herself scream! the sound is deafening, so loud she claps her hands over her own ears to drown it out. it rattles in her throat as she crumples to the ground at the foot of the eerie.

perhaps something bad has not yet happened to jane. perhaps it is on its way, and jane can only know this and do nothing to stop it.

that night when she returns to haeil's home there is a moth on the stoop. she crouches to touch it and the stars begin to spin themselves into rings behind her. she falls into the floorboards of the porch and breaks through the splintering wood to gasp awake in bed.

a dead moth falls from her lips in the fray of her hands finding her heart.

a hollow-boned lost thing watches, observes, an angel in light. eudora comes to the eerie for only a second tonight again, and jane sees her hair ignited in daytime like a halo. jane has not looked at the eerie yet. scared, perhaps, that if she does she will become its mind-numbing anger once more. eudora does not see her. jane reaches to touch her arm, and her hand passes right through her skin.

perhaps for the first time, jane wishes that she could be seen. but eudora moves along once more the way she had the night before. jane can feel the bad thing that is coming for her behind her, with anger blooming between each cut of stone. she does not want to turn--- but it is hopeless. jane will always find that which can be found.

the eerie is wearing her moth over its lips. it is hiding the rage, and the anger, and the decibal-rising fear. jane swallows, and finds that her mouth is not locked. maybe she has escaped becoming the eerie tonight, she thinks--- and yet here it comes, the paper-thin moth wings falling away from its dead body. she sees the curved lip of a snarl now, the eerie gaining its emotion once more as the moth's wings flake away. her hands shake as they slowly start to turn to stone. jane looks up and finds herself at the base of the eerie, no longer paces away. the moth's wings have crumbled at her feet--- her mouth opens against her will--- her fingers dig into the stone, ripping her veil as her limbs begin to climb against her will, into a cage that she cannot escape--- and now jane is scattered on the eerie's pedestal, and there are wings breaking through her back, and she would scream if she could but her face is frozen in anger, anger that is not hers, yes, something bad has happened to jane and she is indeed only able to know and do nothing to stop it. it lingers as though hung on a clothesline, her body--- the statue opening to encase her--- the brilliant day--- eudora, reaching for a palmful of white blossoms--- and then thousands and thousands of moths lift up into the air, scattering in waves.

there are so many of them, the air thick and thundering with the beat of their wings. they look like stars seeking moments of sunlight away from their dark and cold homes. perhaps eudora had woken them up, and they had realized they had overstayed their welcome. perhaps they were laying in wait to be seen so that they could be free.

her/the eerie's screaming stops as though felled by a single blow.

jane inhales as she falls from the statue, and dissolves into mothlitter herself.

she wakes, and wheat falls from her hair. her moth still lays bent and half-pinned on the windowsill where she had left it the night before; but there are hundreds more littering the ground, their wings all cadmium and lifeless.

[vel-jane]

the day toes to dusk, and jane finds herself on the shores again. spilling out over her fingertips are three things;

i. nightmare ii. solace iii. echo

she tapes each to the sand, and inhales deep when the tide scrambles to hold her hand where it sinks into the shallow crisscrossing of waves. they're clear as they crawl along the earth, sighing under the crescent of her nail before they're wrenched backwards. jane watches the water turn its ear towards the moon, pulling back away from her in its reverie. each wavebreak on top of the other, each atom shoving into the one above like houses of cards built as fast as they collapse.

so it goes, jane on the shores, kingdoms collapsing at her fingertips. blush-gold skies dusting on her cupid's bow. distantly, jane wonders if the water can separate her reflection from herself. it is not like the water to reach for her caress, to hold onto her skin until it's torn apart.

perhaps there is a reason, then.

jane follows the water, tracing moonglitter and delightsighs alike until they wash over what seems to jane, at first glance, to be an angel in the deeper shallows. her heart stills; no

; everything stills.

it moves like a thing that has been wretched for far too long. hair that has stripped pearls of its color pool around it as the waves lap against its dirtied body, and when it opens its mouth, oh, the sound is gutted like an animal being eaten alive. jane can see its bones rising to the surface of its skin as it moves beneath its feathers.

jane is afraid, thrilled, && curious all at once. dimly, she thinks of leaving the lost for the found things to come and take, but this is not a godly place.

instead she sits by it, takes it head in her lap, and lingers in the wet, ragged exhales it secretes as its life slowly slips by && away. this is not the seraphim in the forest. this is not the angel that is the lighthouse. jane does not know what this is, only that it will not be here for much longer.

[vel-jane]

"are you hungry? thirsty?" his hands find a glass and fill it with water, ice clinking against the sides as he holds it out in offering.

the clouds ( what is a cat? something soft and long under her hands, something else rumbling against her ear ), the two mushrooms in her hand, the length and gold of the fields. jane takes it all in with her tired eyes and holds it in her equally tired hands.

she lingers on the statue in the fields, so alike her own at the lighthouse.

now there are wildflowers in her hand, long thin stalks with dots of yellow and pale purple at their tips. a small pepper, handed to her by grave's large hand. a braided rope of wheat, right after. jane slows down only once, to listen to the buzzing of the bees on the side of the farmhouse, and take in their buzzing volumes. the stench of honey punches her. her mouth salivates. jane wants to stay and watch them, but graves is walking onwards and closer to the farmhouse door.

jane is running out of space to hold her things, so she pauses just before the farmhouse threshold to lay them on the ground and group them in a more manageable way. graves's chatter pauses midway, as do his footsteps. she hears a pivot as he turns to watch her.

later, when they are inside of the farmhouse and graves is handing her water, she wonders why she expected it to be salty. jane never feels the need to respond to graves, taking in his words and explanations like diegetic noise. she looks around, this way and that, a ticking somewhere in her mind. there is something here for her to do, but she does not know what. she places all her collected things in the empty cup, then picks it up and walks to the kitchen window. there are a few stray bees bumbling about, and she lifts a hand to tap against the glass.

hello, she thinks she is saying. aren't i like you?

[vel-jane]

the grip sumyeong has on his gun turns his hand to ice. his eyes shake looking at the watch in his hand where time has stopped ticking. of everything that sits in wait - it’s the echo of a piano that puts sumyeong on edge.

glassmire steals the last of the daylight for itself under sumyeong and jane's careful gaze.

jane regards glassmire with curiosity, large like a thorn rejected from skin, or something foreign that had baked itself inside of the earth's flesh, only to be ejected from her womb.

and now it is here, eating velgrove and making a waste of its land.

the thought comes in movement; the arc of wind of the shape of a mother's belly in childbirth, the stretching of something around a tight lip. her body and her, in an ever tossing game of senses to make translations out of nothing.

jane does not look at sumyeong, instead tilting her head toward the soft sounds of piano. she thinks of the sands and their song as they announced glassmire' arrival. jane places her lantern on the ground and moves forward, touching two fingertips to, and then wrapping her whole hand around, the door handle.

the metal is cold and smooth under the scab on her palm. she bites her lip and sees herself like a ghost in the door's faint reflection, all curls and lace and ancient horror.

she turns her chin toward sumyeong in wait, eyes falling to the still and sturdy ground.

[vel-jane]

Psalm 46 ; ii

jane is carrying two jars: one ( rusted, with petaling waves near the rim ) with the litter found on her when she washed onto the shores of velgrove, the other ( square and subtly gothic, with wheat-twine wrapped thrice-round. a zipper head and bottle shard are hung on it. ) with fresh honeycomb from the weaving hive in the forest.

jane is waiting to know where to place it, walking slowly along the treeline of thistle forest until it spreads out into the beach shores. this late at night velgrove is always in twos; the nature, the people. the silence, the shores.

the faint sienna cross on her thigh burns as she passes the lighthouse, its light circling around the rim of her jar. it casts the honey into liquid gold, then leaves to lay its wings along the water. the waves glow a dusted and solid grey.

not here.

jane walks ahead, towards the bend in the shores. the cicadas are silent, and jane notices only a moment too late, when the panic hits her chest like a bullet. the quake came quickly and without warning, rippling the sand around jane's feet until her legs stumble into one another and crash into their shifting masses.

her palms hit the earth as it turns liquid beneath her body, and a sound of surprise rings from her throat. the sand reverberates, cymatic patterns spelling and then shattering over her bones faster than she can catch. she doesn't know what is happening, garbled whispers spitting forth from her mouth without her noticing.

perhaps the sand is spelling music in some haunted tune, and the quake is the split of a cymbal. perhaps this is a god's way of amusement, or waste. perhaps it is all ending, and jane will be the first to fall victim.

the grains are spraying against her shoulder and for a moment jane feels like she did the night she woke up in the water, waves shattering into her form and an angel's breath seeking her every exhale.

jane's teeth are rattling into her skull, her vision is shaking too much for her to see clearly. she is dimly aware of a growing pain in her right hand as she forces her curls out of her face to look up at the sky and sees, instead of stars to right her way, the forest by santhe bay breaking apart and turning over itself!

her eyes are burning with sand as she gasps, her stomach dropping like it is the ground underneath her that is falling into a void below, not the trees before the mountains.

the pines rear up like large ships caught in the same storm, so high she fears for a moment that they will tumble and fall upon her!---then fall wayside and broken into yawning graves with low preternatural moans. the sound is grating and ancient, and jane almost shouts as she tries to get it out of her head with a hand leaving the sand to clap over her ear. it continues for just long enough that jane realizes it will never end--- and then the sand stills, like a bated breath.

and now there is the silent rising of some great beast as monument, expelled from the earth itself, stretching to grasp the moon's light and spread sharp light across jane's irritated eyes. the lighthouse light does not reach that far, stopping ahead of the few trees that remain.

jane is trembling, not from the fear of the quake, but the molting of this strange place. the silence that it brought after the shatter, the absolute absence and rejection of heeding nature's landscape. she wonders what could be so wretched so deserve being cast from the earth itself. she wonders what it may do to them.

grainy notation leaks in between jane's knuckles, pools in the thick of her skirt, falls from her hair.

whatever was being sung had no throat to continue its tune any longer, and sand without a command is just that; earth. jane's right hand is pulsing, bright red and hurting. she lifts it, and hears glass move beneath it. honeycomb and glass are stuck to her palm from the broken jar. she doesn't know where the other one is.

[vel-jane]

jane's velgrove has always been full of wild things, but today they are bloodier than usual.

a seraphim is watching jane, just beyond thistle forest's treeline.

she stands in parallel to it in the open seabreeze, the lace on her skirt dragging across her ankles. they are at a standstill on either side of the forest's meridian. the arbor bares upon her, a yawning mouth with its canines dripping in dewpoint saliva where it unfurls from the seraphim's wings.

it has been a peculiar day, jane thinks in her own tacit way, and thinks about how the strange things had found her earlier in the afternoon as well, staining the gold of her day with crimson and tar.

it was bright in its own way: the animal howl galloping through wayward cutgrass to splatter against jane's ears. she had been crouched on the back stoop of the farmhouse, pulling dry hexagons of wax from the ground and trying to not be seen. the howl had made her bones seize into stillness. she remembers the sound like a living thing touching her, its body made up of waves that radiate through and beyond her. when it left, her fists unfolded and her body returned to herself. the wax had clumped around dirt and grass, the shape of something scared.

now this, the angel, its eyes sketched in red ink and glowing with hunger. she has seen it before, gleaming at her from behind haeil as she led him to the forest at night weeks ago. jane does not know anything, and yet she does. like how everything has a heartbeat. how it skips when there is fear, and that is how you find it.

jane tilts her head at the thing in the woods. everything has a heartbeat, she thinks, tacit and towards it. the beetle between my back molars. the dead things hanging from my lips. the grin on my face.

jane hears a skip. everything has a heart; even the seraphim in the forest, hungry and half-dead.

[vel-jane]

( t.012 ) ------ activity check !

[vel-jane]

sumyeong leads out the door / into the fields. and he stops once, a solemn look to jane as if to say ‘you don’t have to go’. but the words sit silent behind teeth and tongue. whether he wanted her to go or not / regretted his choice / there was nothing sumyeong could do now to change it.

he walks towards her with a face that is gaunt and silent, body eating her moonlight as he goes. where he walks he grows in size upon on jane, like the shade of a- ( 𝐶𝑅𝑈𝐶𝐼𝐹𝐼𝑋𝐵𝐸𝑁𝑇𝐼𝑁𝑇𝑂𝐴𝑆𝑃𝐼𝐼𝐼𝐼𝐼𝐼𝑁𝑁𝑁𝑁𝑁𝑁𝐸 )--- +

.

jane's body goes cold, and she cannot move. sumyeong passes her where she is in the doorway. briefly, they eclipse, trading secondhand sunlitter and the blackess of spaceshadow. there is something panging in her ribs, bright and blurred panic in front of jane's eyes.

it takes a measure, but her shoulder rolls backwards so that she can rock away from the moment, and the afterimages, and the knowing of there being places inside of her that are going to hurt her.

jane follows sumyeong into the fire-flighted light, and their trek begins rather in habit for the pair. they make their way to thistle forest on foot, and jane notices how quickly her body had latched onto their pattern. she can feel her hands, steadying boxes thick with honeycomb. can feel the crystals of waxen sugar that break off and disappear into the wood of the wagon.

there are scatters of people as they cut through town, and they watch--- at times lifting a cup of mead, or looking sympathetically. jane does not know these people and does not pretend to know them; rather, she scans the distant left where she knows the lighthouse lays until they are the edge of the forest.

glassmire lays ahead, likely in wait.

jane feels it like a beast instead of a house; although, it wouldn't be the first time something larger than life had come to her in the form of a place.

[vel-jane]

hello, pepper again !!

i've updated all of jane's tumblr links && also wrote up a quick timeline and interaction guide for jane's arrival to velgrove ( lovingly referring to this as act i );

please read through this link on desktop ( i beg ) and, if we've plotted, let me know if i've accurately described your muse's role in there! if we haven't and your muse has been on velgrove for longer than a month, there's some important information i wrote in there to help build a realistic / canon-compliant backdrop for us to plot in, as well as more plots from that time that aren't canon-specific! consider this an informal ask ( demand ;] ) for more plots! in fact... listed below is a fresh round of plots for act ii ( gasp ) for the past few weeks in canon, between her arrival & the current event coming to pass! she has limited speech, but we can get creative >:]

for this in between time i'm really searching for plots and dynamics that place-set jane in velgrove. i want to explore more of her interacting with the town, doses of whimsy and horror alike, and low-stake plots!

°1 + SOMEONE who sees jane trying to get into the bubblegum dispenser by the corner store without entirely understanding it ( i'd love a low-stakes thread here, something we can one and done to build a little bit of peripheral development between our muses for later )

°1 + SOMEONE who sees jane in town fucking with a cat ( i'd love a low-stakes thread here, something we can one and done to build a little bit of peripheral development between our muses for later )

°1 + SOMEONE who sees jane during the center stalls when they're busy with artisans and services. she's looking at yellow topaz and crosses that are silver and gold, and your muse wonders what she sees in them. ( i'd love either a hc we store away for later, or a low-stakes thread here we may need to work into more since she doesn't speak )

°1/2 + SOMEONE who sees jane on the beach's shores, collecting jewels ( °1 ; hc ), and eventually joins her ( °2 ; thread ).

°1/2 + SOMEONE who sees jane frequent thistle forest during the daytime the week before the event occurs ( °1 ; hc ), and eventually confronts her about it ( °2 ; thread ).

°1/2 + SOMEONE who is minding their business, smackin on some honey baklava or sumn from the local bakery. jane catches a whiff of it on her way by the bakery, and wants to know what it is, but doesn't know how to approach.

°1/2 + SOMEONE who sees the box, the cross, and the eerie piled by the lighthouse ( °1 ; hc ), and has... questions for jane as she returns, stopping a few paces behind your muse and startling them when they turn around. jane cannot speak, but she looks at your muse like they're stupid for asking ( they're not. also, i'd love to brainstorm more about where this could go, depending on our muses ).

°2 + SOMEONE who sees jane taking apart whatever velgrove's equivalent of a jukebox is in an alleyway. they don't know what's wrong with her, but hang around to help / find out.

°2 + SOMEONE who finds jane leaning over the railing of feyhen's bridge and thinks she's going to jump, only to realize that she intends to do nothing of the sort after a dramatic run to coax her off the ledge.

°2/3 + SOMEONE who comes across jane near downtown right as a storefront door closes. the light falls across her for a moment, and she flinches so violently your muse wonders if she's inhuman after all ( fucking heavy with the idea of our muses building some sort of rhythm / dynamic from this )

°3 + SOMEONE down by the beach shores near the fish shack. they look up and see jane, silhouetted like a statue in the wind from where she stands at the top of the cliffsides, looking down at your muse. your muse blinks, and she's gone. ( something something the idea of her vs who she actually is, something something dark and sweet and taken apart during thunderstorms. dm me if you'd be into something that bleeds a few lines :] )

[vel-jane]

( t.011 ) ------ activity check !

[vel-jane]

“i promised to look after you today,” he explains, “and i’d thought we could get you food, drink, some new clothes. maybe show you the different parts of town.” so even without him she might know where to go should she need anything. “does that sound good to you?”

she wakes by the ocean, body draped along the curve of the eerie's hip. her arms lay limp next to her, one useless in her lap, the other straight down and just grazing the rocks below her. the lighthouse stretches large around her, blocking the sun's harsh rays from peeling her skin.

jane tastes salt on her lips, and combs through her curls as she begins to come alive, sitting up just to slouch again and watching seagulls skitter around the shallows licking at their feet. they disturb the gems littering the shorelines, sending shocks of light into jane's eyes every now and then. it makes something inside of her grovel and flinch, but she is too tired to pay it much mind.

her eyes drift over the water as far as she can see, straining to find any purchase or land in the distance. she is still doing this when a sound comes from her left, growing until it's nearby. jane , she hears but does not look. there you are. ( me ? ) jane turns to the source of the voice. she had known it was him before he had said anything, known him from the white noise of his shoes in the sand and the spending of his breath. it was not a familiarity, no... but it was an awareness, or at least a pattern, anyways.

she knows what he is saying as though it were a thought made clear in her mind, although the words feel jumbled and as though from under waves. none of it felt as though it applied to her. food. clothing. town. such mundane words feeling strange and unknown, conjuring feelings and understandings in her psyche amid a bright grey canvas of nothing else. she did not know what he meant, and at the same time she did. jane blinks slowly, turning back to the water, her cheek pressing into the stone base of the eerie.

she tires of the scene eventually, the man paces away from her no closer to leaving than he had been before. so jane moves to stand, her body bone-tired and sore inside of her marrow. for a moment jane is no more than the statue three paces away from her; silent, still, despondant. it burned to move.

she does not know just yet where she is going, for how long she would follow graves, only that the urge to move felt like something that was hers to understand. like the water, and the eerie, and God, large and night-lit.

[vel-jane]

( t.010 ) ------ activity check !

[vel-jane]

he tugs the cross towards him, shifting the weight on its axis and leaning the brunt of it on his shoulder, relenting, “i’ll help. i’m helping. keep going.” the thoughts lay bracketed behind bars, out of reach of instinct.

dimly, jane knows there is a man speaking to her. dimly, her body realizes the color of his sound, lush and low and haphazard. dimly, she sees his shoes, their borders lightened from dirt.

it is a strange collection of awareness, made clear only with the shake of her body under the cross's weight, and the march of her feet, one in front of the other. the words come through as though through water, or high winds, but the weight of the cross is simply so great that she cannot think, much less understand anything he says to her. and so she tries to walks onwards past him, breathing in the tightness available to her as the cross slowly begins to crush her.

dimly, jane may even be aware of the fact that she isn't walking at all anymore, but sagging under its weight; but nothing is comprehensive until the weight of the cross is lessened.

with its lifting comes an expanding from inside of her, a supernova at steady pace sheathing everything inside of her body in light until she is sure that if it continues to do so she will simply split at her eyes, her nails, her skin. it is all so quick, the knowing that something will come out of her, ugly and bright, and her face twists from the release of the cross's weight and the startled, panicked realization of this. she is going to scream--- and the scream that would have come from her would have been that of a bloodthirsty hound, or perhaps its prey--- but the weight falls again atop her in more manageable length, the whiting out of the universe is righted once more, and she exhales so sharply in response she is surprised that she can't see it.

dimly, she knows that he is on her right, shouldering the weight of the cross. a passing animal inside of her wants to rip it away from him, but she feels him step in echo when she does, and so the animal flits away. it is hard to tell if she notices it at all. her shoulder brushes his arm, the soft of his jacket grazing against her skin. her ankle hits the cross as they move in jerking tandem, each step rippling into the next, and the next, and the next. her hip is aching where the cross was once pressed against it.

here, in the linear suspension of spacetime that is her breathing, shallow and even, and their punched song of motion, somewhere here is when she notices the light--- dimly casting shades of gray over the ground in its familiar, circular sweep.

perhaps jane was always going to take the cross to the lighthouse. it is the only place she knows, after all; it is a moment suspended in spacetime itself as well, where she walks to no matter the dimension. there is no doubt about it now. she slows to a stop, the stretch of the cross turning wayside as the man slowly stops as well.

jane looks up toward the light. she looks around, breathing heavy. she turns, her neck a swan as it slowly urges the cross to tilt in the direction of the lighthouse.

dimly, she can feel the man turn with her, like the cog of a clock. forty five degrees, through downtown, and onwards toward the shores.

[vel-jane]

( t.009 ) ------ activity check !