[P] YOU.

[Only]

 

“ there are bullet holes where my compassion used to be ”

Tonight Only dreams of Faida, the woman who haunts him more than Stephen does.  The woman who tears into his dreams like they are tissue paper and turns them into Nightmares. 


Faida, nightmare fuel.


She makes him whimper like a baby in the dark. 

He curls in on himself like one, hugs his knees and prays.


He prays for someone like Calliope, a valiant knight in the Rift, the destroyer of the sick.

But even she is not here.  

Without the Rift and all of its filthy souls lost within it, he has nothing.


Not even Stephen will show himself to Faida - Faida who chases him in his phantom worlds.
He dreams of forests thick with monsters - monsters that are hungry for flesh and bone and screams .. he leads the antagonist here hoping that Faida will meet her end.  He prays that the beasts that only he can conjure up in his dreams will cut her name from his earth.


But she persists.


Legs twitch, they twirl in the pacing of someone running from something terrifying.


In his dreams he runs and runs and runs but still, she gains.

Is this the end?


The monsters all turn to their storymaker - the stakes have changed.

What was once under his control is not anymore.

She has control.


Faida, Queen of the Monsters, she is coming to kill him.

For once, even Stephen is nervous about this killer.

This killer who wants to find him, who wants to taste him, who wants to make him her own ..


Her sickness, so alien to him and yet he has been made to feel it in ways that have haunted him.  


And still is, haunting him --


Just.


Like.


This.


Only groans against the oppressive night which wraps itself around him.  He lays in the grass just outside the city borders and sleeps under the stars, wide open for attack because he doesn’t care anymore.  He doesn’t care if he should live or die, his own purpose has been lost, only Stephen’s demands remain.  To find Winona.  What happens then?  What then?


What do we do?  Only asks.  He is face to face with Stephen.


We run like hell from here.  Stephen’s eyes are so cold that Only trembles.  Stephen’s voice is chilly too.


I’m tired of running Stephen.  Only says.  He is exhausted, somewhere out there in the beyond of his dreams Faida is coming for him.


They don’t have much time to be like this, face-to-face, soul against soul, yellow-to-green, Stephen and Only.  Stephen caresses the underneath of Only’s chin and pushes it up because he refuses to let Only look away from him - to lose valuable focus.  Only wants to kill him for touching him like that -- like he cares for him.  


What lies that is, what lies.


She isn’t the only thing that will kill you if you stop now. Stephen says.  His eyes level with Only's and an understanding is met in a matter of a moment.


Trapped.  Forever.


A vicious reminder over who is really in charge here.  Only falls back into the black and comes out on the other side where it is blue and full of ice, and water, and horrifying wonder. 


And still, Faida persists.


Everything is turning to ice and he feels frozen in place.  Only knows he’ll see her if he looks back.  Though he also knows he is sleeping.  The body stiffens and exhales hotly, clearly out of dreamy stress.  A golden foot paws through the grass, ears flicker nervously in a tangled nest of golden moonlight hair.  His heart tick-tick-ticks away frantically underneath the black viper scales and still, she has a hold on him.  He is fearless, as fearless as a mouse in the clutches of an owl. 


Someone else has him too, though.


“I didn’t know.”  The words come out, Only, still sleeping, murmurs them like he is explaining tragedy to his mother.  “I didn’t know he would come for you. Forgive me.  Please. Please.”  It is not Faida anymore, it is the medicine man and Only is the cowboy who shot him without warning.  Sold an innocent man out.  Trapped a sacred soul in a jar and lost it out at sea.  He haunts Only too, enough to make him feel real pain when the spear in his dream pierces his shoulder.


“Aah!”   A startled, wounded cry.


Only shoots up and looks around, disoriented, weary, wary, weighted with a guilt that has him seeing demons in his dreams.  The medicine man remains in his vision for a minute longer than what is welcomed and Only is convinced he is seeing ghosts.  For a moment he thinks he is really bleeding too before he looks at his shoulder and realizes nothing has happened.  Quickly, he gazes back to look at the man but he is gone - gone as if he never existed.


He didn’t.  This was only a dream.

But Faida, Faida was never a dream.  

His neck tingles with a strange memory of her lips on his skin, her teeth in his blood, her infection in his bones.  To this day he wonders if it will ever consume him the way it consumed her.  He wonders if his madness is because of Faida.


Then remembers that it was his madness that brought him to her before all of that.


His bad dreams have stirred someone.  A vagabond.  A resident.  An enemy.  He doesn’t know and quite frankly does not care.  The black gathers his wits and shushes the wild mind and the raging heart with a calm disposition although his ears twitch every which way, afraid that what he hears is Fai.  Deep down his animal knows that that is impossible, but the spirit knows no boundaries and has danced with the devil too many times to know that the dead wander long after the body has passed.  Fai may be dead, but her spirit persists.


It lives on in Only’s paranoia-fueled sleep, no where else, for it has plenty of food to feed off of.


The stranger is coming through from the other side, from within the city, and Only wonders if this will be it -- where he will be thrown from the city for never having contributed anything to the places he has wasted away in for so long here in Novus.  He comes back because the Rift is cold, cruel, and always waiting to feed off of his soul.  He comes back because here, in Novus, he has a chance to die and actually mean it.


“Hello.”  He tries gentility on but finds it to be too tight a fit - it sounds uncomfortable still.

“Who’s there?”  Less snug, too drapey.  Only switches quickly, eyes narrowing.  If Winona were here…

Well, she isn’t - is she?  That’s why we are here again.


No response.  Dead air. 

Dead air.

Static silence.

The stranger has been realized.


“You are impossible to get rid of, you know.”  Someone else says, less awkward, more forward.  Ears stretching forward to tune into Florentine’s soft, quiet feet.  Stephen recognizes that face.


And by the look of things, Florentine recognizes his as well.


Only, on the other hand, is panicking from the otherside of the trapdoor Stephen caught him with.

O N L Y
and there is violence in my heart

 

@Florentine  ...yeah

[Florentine]

FLORENTINE

always one decision away from a totally different life

-- ♕ --


He rises from the dirt, a cloud of dust falling from the black of his skin like volcanic ash from a volcano. Florentine watches the dust fall, she sees the distress within his gaze. Did that ash fall like sin? Did he feel lighter now without it?
 
Still the midnight echoes with his cry, still the moonlight watches him shining silver along his black scales, scales that Flora knows to be warm and silken. She does not move from where she gazes at him above the parapets. He looks around as if ghosts close in on him from every side. Ah, her haunted Only. Still so guilty – where did his dagger hide? Was Winona still lying alone in Tinea Swamp? Florentine’s chest is also absent of her dagger, it has gone East with Lysander, to the sun with blood as their deepest desire.
 
Finally the Dusk girl turns, her slender limbs carrying her down the steps of the parapet. Down and down and down the flower-girl weaves. Down into the dark of the Night Court’s belly, here the torches meet her skin and she glows like sunlight. Her flowers are shadows against her skin, their petals sighing like wings against her throat. She steps from the dark of a doorway and out into the pool of moonlight. Florentine is grace but no longer is her silhouette an even, elegant thing. One wing lies tight and clean against her slim side and yet the other does not…
 
It hangs. It is wrong and twisted as a wing should never be. Along the broken bend of that wing, Lysander’s promise still whispers. ‘They can heal it, they can heal it.’ She came so close, so close to being able to fly again, yet a Crow with raven wings and violence in his heart has taken that chance from her. Lysander and Florentine did not leave to regain his divinity, to find gods who could heal her wing with a solitary sigh. No, they stayed and now he has left, to join a war, leaving worry twisting in her belly.
 
Flora takes the meandering path through trees and brush, her unhealed wing trailing in the dust. So long has that wingtip has been brushing the ground, so long the ground has in turn painted it it in greens and dust until its tip is no longer gilded gold but brown and black like rust and dirt.
 
Florentine’s story could be a sad one, this girl of wild flowers and a wilder spirit. She could fall to her knees at the grief of it, yet she does not. No, she moves toward Only with lavender eyes as bright as twilight. They watch him, they look him over to seek upon him any flaw, any wound that time inflicted. Yet only a horn, protruding from his forehead, whispers of any change at all.
 
You are impossible to get rid of you know, he says to her in that other voice.
 
The girl smiles, oh she laughs and the sound of it is bells in the night. The whole of Denocte sings with her, for it has almost forgotten how she sounds. She does not stop when she reaches him. Florentine does not pause until she is skin upon skin with Only. She does not rest until her chest is pressed to his and her cheek  tight against his shoulder. Only then does she stop and there her eyes close. Gold dust lashes fan along the line of her cheek. Flora drinks in the warmth of her friend, the scent of his skin, soft with a serpent’s scales.
 
“I know.” Time’s girl sighs into their embrace and her smile is wide upon her lips, thought darkness haunts the secret corners of her mouth. In the dark behind her lashes she sees the faces of her loved ones, the boys who thought her dead and the parents she thought she might never see again. “It is just as well is it not?” Her voice sings in jest and laughter breathes as spring’s new air through each word.




@Only

rallidae

[Only]

  

“ polarized, divisive drowning in strife ”

You.


Her.


"Florentine."  


She laughs.


He scowls.


The night horse cannot balance his reactions to the girl's sudden presence.  Of all the times and the places and the things, it has to be here.  Right here.  Of all the monsters inside the borderlands of Novus, this one, Stephen, has to be the one to greet her just beyond the walls of the capitol.  When she hugs him, he wishes he could stab her to death and be done with it.  He wishes he could crush her head against a wall and force Only to be even more hopeless than he already is.  It is Florentine's fault that they are here.  It is her fault that Winona got lost in the first place.  It is her fault that Only suddenly has a conscience - one so strong that not even Stephen can defy it.  Why?  Because of Only's stupid feelings.  Because Only cares so much for her.  Because she doesn't deserve it even though she does. 


Florentine is the wedge that has been driven between Only and Stephen, she is the only one that Only will fight Stephen for.  This monster can't stand looking at her flower hair or smelling her sweet peachy fresh flowers.  He wants to poke out her eyes so she cannot cast her spell over Only.  Hugging her now is with great effort.  She is as soft as his belly scales, and warm, and her smell is so lovely that he's never forgotten it after meeting her in the swamp.  Only regrets that day for so many reasons, because someone died because of it.  Someone who didn't deserve to be brought down like the endless numbers of victims who suffered at Stephen's hands.  Only to be buried by Only's hands.


"If I were you, I wouldn't let that kind of a weakness show."  His eyes, steady as they are, gaze over her shoulder towards the wing.  She is not him, however, and she has an army of followers who find her beloved enough to throw themselves upon swords for her.  That part makes Stephen's skin itch.  How easy would it be to bully her, to victimize her, to break her down so she never wanted to talk to Only again.  Get rid of his friends and he'd be much more easy to control.  He knows this because Only knows this.  Because Only refuses to destroy Florentine.


She pities you.  She loves you like a child loves a sad clown -- that is called pity. Stephen throws back at Only who struggles in his dark world underneath the floorboards of Stephen's consciousness.  She will never fully come to trust you.  When I am through with her -- she will hate you.


"Where have you been?  What have you been doing? Are you still with Candyboy?  I hear he's no longer here." Stephen is the first one to lean away from her, to shift his weight so casually the way he has talked down to her.  He is not Only.  Only is very far away from here and beneath it all, upside down in the water and looking into the deep dark of the ocean.  Stephen can feel the pathetic snot-nosed brat reaching up-up-up to grab the escape latch, to pull it open and trap Stephen on the inside but his grasp is not long enough, strong enough, even though it certainly is desperate enough.  She doesn't deserve his stupid comments.  She doesn't deserve to be talked to by some idiot who thinks its easy to hurt her.  Look at her -- look at her, broken and still laughing. 


How dare you Stephen.  How dare you do this.


The sweet midnight boy is not here.  The que cards are empty -- there is nothing here that she knows.  Only, hopeless, helpless, hapless, screams through the black slivers in Stephen's eyes at her.   Can she see him?  Probably not.  Stephen shakes his hair out, all of Turhan's blood soaked feathers curl around him like they did with the elder, a grim mane.  Some of Turhan's teeth even dangle in broken pieces from shorter strands in his hair -- the bastard went back to the body and took a trophy. He likes to tell Only about how exciting the chase had been.  He likes to tell Only about how much the man screamed for his Goddess to protect him and she did not.  


A knowing grin misshapes Only's tender expression, it is a perverse and haunting sort of smile that belongs to Stephen alone.  This Other moves differently, breathes differently, and is so much more hostile than he ever needs to be.  "You haven't seen my knife since the last time I saw you, have you?" 

O N L Y
technically I still exist, but not in my mind

 

@Florentine   I chose to omit Only taking control...Flora deserves to know the other half at long last. uwu

[Florentine]

FLORENTINE

always one decision away from a totally different life

-- ♕ --


Her eyes close, her cheek pressed tight against his shoulder. Only is warmth, he is solid and yet soft beneath her cheek. His is a scent she knows. His is a scent she has known since childhood. It is comfort and light and a warmth in her chest.
 
Her lashes brush along his scales, the corner of her lips pressed to them and she does not need to feel their silk to know how soft they are.
 
If I were you, I wouldn't let that kind of a weakness show. And he is looking at her wing. Florentine feels his gaze, unusually sharp, yet she thinks nothing of it. Not yet.
 
“Mmm,” The flower girl hums maybe in agreement, maybe not. She lifts the wing, peering at how it hangs, wrong, limp. “Maybe you are right.” She says softly, through lips that no longer bear a smile and eyes that gaze solemnly upon the broken part of her. “But I wont hide it.” And how bold she is, how brave and big and refreshing those words feel upon her lips. Lysander is gone. Off in pursuit of revenge and she is alone here. All too soon Denocte no longer feels like the place she should be. So soon she is wanting to be well, so soon she is wanting to be beside her brother and under the care of Terrastella’s healers.
 
Florentine is made to be brave. She is the flower turning toward the sun, despite the storm that rolls along before it, despite the feet that trample her. She has known the feeling of her death stretching throughout her body, but a broken wing may have brought her to her lowest.
 
Only asks so many questions and she hears them hum out from his chest, vibrating through his skin. The questions are deeper from within, deeper than the air makes them sound. He sounds different from within. Florentine does not rush to answer him, she keeps her gilded cheek close to him: gold on black, sunlight upon a storm, satin skin upon silk scales.
 
“I have been everywhere.” For when is Florentine ever not, everywhere? When has she ever had the desire to simply stay and not explore? “I am no longer queen, I handed it over to Asterion when I had amnesia and could not rule…” The girl pauses, drawing back a little in order to drink in the sight of him from beneath her fan of gold dust lashes. “I might have forgotten you.” She says, the words pouring like wine between a half smile. For she mocks him, yet she can feel the weight of the sorrow for what might have been. “I am glad I didn’t.” She breathes, whispering, pressing the side of her muzzle to his.
 
Yet she laughs as she draws back. “No!” She exclaims for how many worlds away does it seem since that fateful night? “Reichenbach fell in love with my Regent. Then they ran away together with Aislinn, my best friend.” She might have sounded sorrowful, if not for the healing nature of Time and the love of a once-Greek-god.
 
Then Only pulls away and she lets him go, their bodies parting like silks unfurling. The winds rise to push the girl back, back. Her eyes glitter, her lips still smile and she watches her friend and even as he changes, even as his eyes turn hard, still her love for him does not waver. Denocte is whispering. Oh, Denocte is screaming. Florentine is no girl unschooled in danger. She feels the haunting presence and her lashes lower, her eyes turn darker as she watches him.
 
Only shakes and bones chink within his mane, teeth tumble and jangle. Feathers hang too, dark as midnight with blood that taints the air. She steps towards him lips rising to smell the feathers, the bones, the teeth. “Have you met an Ilati?” Flora asks him lightly. Ilati are full of their blood rituals, but this blood is horse blood, she can taste it upon her tongue. “You do know you are supposed to sacrifice animals, not horses?” She whispers, so closer to his skin her breath is a wing across his throat. Florentine is smiling, yet something darker slides beneath the curl of her satin lips.
 
“Your knife?” She breathes still close, still so daringly close. She smells him, she listens to the tone of his voice. Her heart is a staccato in her chest, it throbs with warning, warning. Yet this is Only, a friend a boy she loves so dearly a boy she has never feared, not even when she was a child and he talked to her like this and brought that look of fear across her father’s eyes. Not even then did Only do anything to hurt her.
 
“I believe Winona is still there… Shall we go and find her?” The flower girl whispers, her eyes wide, wide as she watches his gaze, feels the beat of his blood so close, close to her lips.
 
“I met you as a child, didn’t I?” She asks at last, so softly, so gently. She does not ask Only. No. She asks him.




@Only

rallidae

[Only]

  

“ polarized, divisive drowning in strife ”

It all begins with a singular sound that Florentine makes, so simple, and yet,

Mmm, his mother used to make that noise at him.
Mmm, Madras used to do that when something didn't impress her much.
Mmm, the taste of Stephen's cooking never impressed her much either - but she didn't want to say what she really thought.

Mmm,  it invokes something deeper within Stephen.  Suddenly the urge to make Florentine feel bad for herself is a little more rewarding to an asshole like him.  He isn't sure where he makes this decision within him, perhaps it is his unspent childhood catching up to him.


Maybe you are right.

        I am right, he thinks.

But I won't hide it.

        That is foolish, he warns.



But she doesn't care.  Oh no, not Florentine,

"Okay, Madmax, I'll help you figure your wing situation into a better design that might actually help it to heal.  You have really let yourself go." She looks sloppy to him.  Stephen, though covered in blood, dust, feathers, and teeth - in a snakeskin suit, no less - knows how to make love to a camera with his aesthetics.  He knows how to wear his danger, his disaster, his dynasty.  He owns it.  And, desperate Pretty Boy - Pretty Dumb Boy - like Only, wishes he was just as cool as his evil twin. How is it that Stephen can treat someone so poorly and yet, have a full conversation with them - long enough to be liked, no less.  He has to remind Only of his own shortcomings quite regularly to keep him down. 

Down so that Stephen can be up

Stephen, in their most lucid dreams, always tells Only that it is the knife that people like.  Not they themselves.  Stephen knows they are both crazy, everyone knows.  They only have the knife to draw the curious in, add 'disturbed and unusual' and it is a sealed deal, he always says.   

See: @Florentine

 What is a dream but a nightmare for Only - when he is getting dating advice from a serial killer that lives inside of the same body.

Meanwhile,


Madmax here,

I have been everywhere, 
  
        Oh I bet you have.  He agrees.

She doesn't need a knife or a baby to find Stephen interesting.  She has never been bored in need of entertainment to begin with.  Stephen thinks that the buttercream fairy probably delights in those shudders he gives when she nuzzles into him, like right now.  Or maybe - just maybe - she's just as sick as he is.

Never.  Only whispers.  Never like you.

Her nose and his nose touch, Stephen can't wait to start counting the seconds until they are apart again. He shivers because she is Holy water thrown against his devil skin, except with Holy water it stops stinging after contact, Florentine ...

Florentine is like sulfuric acid to Stephen's rotten soul, eating up all the wrongs and rights that weave together to make the most of him.  The only one immune to her is fast asleep, buried deeper and deeper underneath the layers of sediment that Stephen has thrown on top of Only's grave.  Buried alive.  There is nothing but ghosts that fill Stephen's hallways right now, no warnings, no hails, no distractions from the brat, Only.  A part of him resents the lameness of Only, who is so sweet and so gentle that friends like Florentine are, mmm, pleasant. 

Ah, that word again.

Something wanes in his mood, vaguely, 

"I have been everywhere too," he sounds so sleepy when he says it, so world-weary and different. "It took me twenty years to walk the entire bottom of the sea."  He says.  He isn't lying when he says it either, Stephen makes a distasteful expression and looks away.

He hates her because she is so easy to talk to. 

Then she asks, Have you met an Ilati? 'Once.' He answers soberly.

He hates her because she is weird and understanding.

Oh, have I met an Ilati.  Of course I have, I've killed one.  For Winona.  He wants to say, but doesn't.  

She's not that understanding.

Like two kids on a porch, he just carries on with a shake of his head, as nonchalant about it as he can be.  Stephen cannot lie as well as Only can, it shows thin and translucent in the way he stands alone and rolls his shoulder.  She says something about animals, not horses, and then that is where he laughs - scoffs - at her words.

"Oh Honeypuff, are horses not animals too?"  Her lips feel pleasant(terrible) against his throat.  That's when she says it.  That is when she says Winona's name.  Florentine says it in that voice, that Knowing tone.  She has his utmost attention, a snake in for the kill.

"Okay beebrains, what do you know about Winona?"

Then she asks if they know each other, if they have met before.  Snake mode: Disengaged.  He takes her former question in place of the latter, and engages then.

"If we go together, you can't walk with me looking like that.  Its too risky."  And then,

"--let me see your wing now, I have some silk,

        --and no, I did not steal it."  And then,

"I know a thing or two about tying someone up."  


Stephen does not lie about the silk, he did not steal it,

he couldn't have,

because Only did.  

O N L Y
technically I still exist, but not in my mind

 

@Florentine   wtf even Stephen, seriously.

[Florentine]

FLORENTINE

always one decision away from a totally different life

-- ♕ --



He has so many names for her. Madmax, beebrain… She thinks they may be only a few of many. Through dark, dark eyes Florentine watches Only. The air around him smells no different, but blood spatters his torso and as he moves muscle ripples wet and bright in the sunlight.
 
She does not hide her intrigue but feels the way he shudders when she touches him. Her lips withdraw from him, again that gaze is searching. Never has he pulled away from her or acted so. Never has anyone shivered as if repulsed by her touch. Was this mockery? Was this a joke? Her lips tip into a small smile, yet how tentative it is! How her breath is a flutter in her chest and in her throat.
 
He is different, Only always has been, yet there is something even more amiss. It is amiss and yet… familiar. The way he calls her names, the way he smiles but looks at her with hatred and fascination and so many other emotions she cannot put names to them… She dares to believe how different he is each time she finds him.
 
“You have hunted me before.” The girl says softly as he bandages her wing. The silk is cool and soft and welcoming upon the worried wound. “Each time I see you, you are different, aren’t you?” Oh her words are soft, soft. He is close as he binds her wing and her eyes trail over teeth and bones and blood. He moves differently, he smiles differently. “Should I be afraid of you?” The girl asks curiously, as if she could ever be afraid of this boy. He might be, with Lysander, one of the people she has known the longest. She does not think he would ever hurt her but, is he dangerous?
 
No longer is she touching him, but he cannot escape her gaze. It studies every inch of him, for where he is different and how. The girl blinks with his final comment. She stares surprised, but a smile is creeping across her lips and laughter is bubbling into her throat. ‘You can keep your bedroom antics to yourself.” But she pauses as the smile slips from her lips, slowly, slowly. There is a part of her that thinks it is no joke at all.
 
“Winona is where you dropped her. In Tinea Swamp. You will have a job finding her though.”
 
Florentine goes to turn, moves to lead him to Terrastella but stops and turns back, stepping towards Only once again. A frown darkens her brow as she looks to him. “Tell me why you change…”





@Only

rallidae