Jasmine and woodsmoke. Girls in cool silks and long glittering necklaces, pierced at the ears, whispering warmly to each other through the incense-choked air. Drumbeats blasting deep in the soil. Candlelight moving hotly through the dark of the night, faint but constant, blazing and then faltering, warming up the previously dim-lit corners of brick buildings, sandstone corners, cobblestones awash with luminescence. There is glitter on the wet streets, silver over everything. Bodies swim in the blackness and reappear yards later wearing jewels, perfume, new cuts. Eyes meet and part again. The black sky is studded with stars and a keening crescent moon, and in the near-darkness, buzzing with violence and giddiness, Bexley Briar goes slinking through the markets of Denocte.
She bumps hips with other girls her age, pushes brusquely past men and boys. What use is it to waste time on these interactions? Little attention is paid to the crowd around her. The chain around her neck is tight and heavy, a hard flash of gold that singles her out from the crowd. And yet it is partially concealed by the careful artwork of her hair, that mass of white curls fluorescent in the darkness, dragging against the slope of her shoulders, moving against the hard lines of her cheek. There is a violent kind of efficiency in the way she advances through the crowd. Strides extended, weaving through the press of bodies, head ducked down close to her chest, cold eyes glaring up through a forest of lashes, moving back and forth with Herculean effort to find the revenge she’s come here for. And people are watching her, she knows - the smooth lines of her body, the heavy scent of Solterra masked with Denoctian perfume - but, most of all the scar on her face. The line of ripped yellow skin from her eye to the edge of her mouth. Unmistakably disgusting in the depth, the width. The way it begs not to heal. Gore and still-hardening scar tissue, deep and vicious red, turning her lip into a semi-permanent snarl which glows in stark contrast to the previously unmarred beauty of a pretty girl.
Pretty girl pretties on by. And she won’t, anymore.
Dark, hot music floats through the air in so many subtle waves. If it were any other night, this would be enjoyable - the flutes, the incense smoke, the whispers passed from ear to ear, the drinks in frosty glass cups - a refuge, even, from the constant self-destruction of Solterra. But tonight it is merely a means to an end. A boundary to be crossed. A compass, perhaps, one that bangs again and again towards its southernmost point, the densest end of the marketplace, where the crowds are thick, the lights low, the opportunity for revenge absolutely rife. Bexley’s hooves crack on the cobblestone, her lip mats with blood. Her pupils are blown with lust and anger. And Solis spews fire through her chest, her muscles, her bones, as she emerges into the thickest part of the crowd and sees him there, black against the candlelight, his back turned to her as he entertains a crowd of young Decoctians with what can only be some silly card game. The low laughter of his voice is indiscernible over everything else, but still the mere song of it sets Bexley’s teeth to buzzing.
How can he laugh, still? Knowing what he did to her? What it must have felt like to hear the rocks crashing down on every side? Does he not think at all about the dark bruises still silvering her sides, the crush of dust inside her lungs, the scar on her face that has started oozing rich blood, yet again, in protest of how hard she is clenching her jaw? For a moment she is too angry to move. Remains there and says nothing. Does nothing. Admires the strong lines of his body, the fact that he is still here, corporeal, close enough for her to slice open, if she wanted to.
And she does. She really, truly does.
A coin flies through the air in front of him, somehow amazing the half-dozen watchers he’s collected. Her heartbeat slows, thickens, hardens. There is nothing. The world around them is not real. Now ,it is just a failed collection of wavering candles, jewelry flickering in the low light, the soft, near-silent sound of music drowned out by the ethereality of the situation. Bex stands up straight and pushes hair back from her face. The scar on her face is in its fully glory now, blood still dripping slowly from the places it has been re-opened by her anger, so that beyond the smell of stolen perfume, and the sandy scent of Solterra, iron floats from her skin to salt the air. A young boy in Acton’s crowd catches sight of it, and his eyes widen with surprise.
Bexley gives him a cold, dark, beautiful smile.
Wanna see a trick? she asks, eyes glowing with feral self-satisfaction. The bare of her teeth in a mock-grin is nothing less than terrifying. I can make you see ghosts.
@acton <3
03-28-2018, 05:37 PM - This post was last modified: 03-29-2018, 05:22 PM by Bexley
He did think about the crush of rocks – the first warning tremble he’d missed in that moment of violence. He often thought about her body, all that bright gold tarnished with dust, and sometimes he tossed in the night, sometimes when he woke his hair was sweat-slick against his skin and his heartbeat was a ragged tattoo.
Was it regret?
By the time his eyes opened, he’d always stopped thinking about it.
There were other things to think about, after all. Raum was back, and there was the drama with Dusk, and there were the whispers that had begun, of the Davke uprising. And then there was his magic.
All kinds of gifts, then, as the sun remembered how to warm the earth, as the buds on trees unfolded and the rains swept through and the summer songbirds began to arrive. And all the while the night markets continued, and eventually he stopped looking twice at every girl with golden skin and a cascade of white hair.
Tonight was like every other, except for the new feeling under his skin, like electricity, like slow fire.
Acton cut his way through the market, sometimes observing another act, sometimes sharing words or laughter with a fellow Crow, sometimes doing nothing at all but glorying in the night, in being alive. Once in a while he performed a few tricks: a coin pulled from behind an ear here, a card properly chosen then vanished away, a row of scarves pulled from nothing, endless and colorful as the passers-by. Later in the evening, when he felt suitably warmed up (suitably liquored up, too, a more familiar buzz in his veins), he began to perform in earnest, to let that new, true magic begin to seep into his show.
They were warming to it, he thought, he could see their gazes begin to widen with wonder, and he was almost feeling it too –
Wanna see a trick?
He heard her voice at the same time he saw the boy’s eyes go from wide-wonder to wide-shock. A change he’d seen before. A voice he’d heard before.
Everything in him froze; even his heartbeat faltered. Surely his own eyes were as wide, when he heard her speak.
I can make you see ghosts.
Acton turned, graceful as any showman, and as he did he seized his mind as with a fist. Neat as any magician’s trick, he put the smile back on his face; he did not vanish the fear but he choked it down. He let the other, stranger feeling – anticipation? relief? pleasure, even, quick and wicked? – take its place, and he looked upon her.
“My friend, ladies and gents, Bexley Briar.”
They could hear that there was no tremor in his voice, but they could not see the way he stared at her.
Your sun-scorched god must love you.
But not as much as his god loved him. It (he was not sure, even now, that it was Caligo whose eye was on him) had rewarded him with true magic. It had seen him unpunished. When the Davke had risen like half-dead coals to burn the Solterran capital, when Lysander had been made to taste his own blood for nothing more than Reichenbach’s jealous pride, Acton was free, free, free. He would never again be caught, not since that day when the theater burned down around him.
Come to think of it, this situation didn’t feel so very different. His body felt tight, a wound spring. It wanted to tremble with all its desires. Acton kept it still, save for his eyes on her, save for one ear twisting back toward the small group behind him, save for the smile that grew creeping across his mouth.
“You’re just in time. I was about to ask for a volunteer for my final feat. It’s a vanishing act.”
Nothing could touch him. Most of all her, little golden fool. Her outsides matched her insides, now – she should thank him. It was bold of her to come here, and maybe that boldness was part of why his heart sang, part of why his grin turned real when it had just a moment ago been another illusion.
So he stared at her, now flashing a smile as terrible as her own, as the crowd murmured and fell silent. Some of them had slipped away; a handful stayed out of the car-crash kind of curiosity. Acton ignored them all. His burning gaze was only for her, from the crashing ocean of her eyes to the scar he had put on her face.
“I always get it right the second time around.”
Or, his gaze asked her, shifting like a flame, would you like to do this privately?
He wanted to grab her by that delicate little necklace she wore, such a flimsy tight thing glinting in the faint light, and -
Fickle light swarms the market, and bodies glow in the near-dark. Bexley is little more than a cloud of gilt and curve, of moving parts, of anger so intense it sets her to vibrating. Her eyes are two moons in unwavering blackness, a hot and radioactive blue. Something feral and cruel lives and dies in that blueness Not a moment has passed, since waking up under Seraphina’s cool, almost-caring gaze, that Bexley has not thought of him. Has not, if unwittingly, turned her mind to the fragility of his bones. What it might feel like to set him on fire - skin and hair smoking, the scent of it utterly, satisfyingly familiar. Not a second completely untouched by the idea of revenge.
And then he looks back at her, over his shoulder, their eyes finally meeting, and she feels like a god: all lacy rage, all ichor instead of blood, and victorious, for a fraction of a second, sated simply by the widening of his eyes, the look of surprise that crosses his stupid, stupid face.
My friend, ladies and gents, Bexley Briar.
She blows a slow breath from between bloody lips. Friend. How cute of him, to use that word, to say her name, as if he has any right to it. It would be so much easier - this whole masterpiece of a fucked-up situation - if Bexley were the kind of girl to sit back and take it, to get tired of fighting, to give up, ever. So much easier if she were willing to stomach Acton grabbing her by that delicate little necklace and pulling until bruises form on fair skin, until the whites of her eyes blur with crimson thread, until it’s impossible to know whether the rapid beating of her heart has accelerated from fear or desire, as off-putting as both ideas are. Wouldn’t it be easy to give in. To look into those orange eyes and swoon instead of fume, let the night take over her, as it is wont to do.
But then she wouldn’t be a Briar, would she.
She bites into a harsher smile, ignoring Acton’s little quip. Oh, he thinks he’s funny, so good at everything, a real magician. But his illusions are transparent at best. She sees the flicker in his expression. The twitch at the corner of his mouth, as if his smile might falter at any moment. Above all, the way he stares at her, dark-eyed, and intense, and hard to read, except for the glimmer of shock that still fizzles in the air between them. Heat races in her blue veins, across so many inches of bruising skin, into muscles still aching from havoc, a glaze across bright blue eyes that burn and smolder and cool again.
The crowd behind them has thinned, but the few left watch in earnest, desiring wreckage. And wreckage they’ll see, in minutes if not seconds. If not in this life, then in the next.
There is desire here, black at its worst, unthinkable otherwise, but desire in one form or another, and Bexley tastes blood as her mind turns to it, swoons at the iron stinging under her tongue. The distance between them immediately seems surmountable. Her lashes flutter, then, and she sways toward him with a tiny step. It is a motion of want, in some frightening, atypical way.
Aw, Acton, she laughs, voice almost nauseatingly sweet. Her head tilts - curls shift and fall, her gaze glimmers - people watch, but this is more of an encouragement than a deterrent. The world is dim, and quiet, and it begs for excitement. Second time around. You’ve never heard the saying?
A switch is flipped. The smile on her face drops to an ugly, sickening snarl. Hair bristles on the back of her neck. Her ears flatten to meet her neck, pressing dents into that mass of hair, and a low, guttural snarl, predatory, almost, in its desire for blood, escapes the curve of her throat. The anger that floods her is caustic, now, and completely uncontrollable. “If injury need be done, it should be so severe that vengeance need not be feared”, she snaps. Music swells in her ears, fire blazes, blood pounds inside her head. One time might not have been enough for you to get it right, but I promise, it will be for me.
Simultaneously, two lanterns explode out of nearby stalls, hit the cobblestone, and erupt in a titanic exhalation of carbon and smog. Bexley trembles with effort and fury. Flames crawl over the oil-slick pavement, enveloping the space between them in interrupted heat; screams erupt somewhere near, but she does not hear them, entranced by the fire that is building up around her, the smell of smoke, the tantalizing lack of space between Acton and the inferno, by the heat that both singes and comforts her. The crowd dissipates. Hoofsteps clatter on the road and disappear. Come here, honey, Bex snarls. The air is choked now with flame and cloud. On the street, shards of broken glass reflect the sudden apocalypse, the way Bexley’s necklace glints in the growing yellow light, the heave of her chest as she weaves toward him, cut and bruised, a girl consumed by revenge, no longer a person, but a collection of moving parts all screaming do it, do it, kill him.Fight me like a big boy for once, won’t you? A manic smiles flashes all her teeth, and she bats her eyelashes at him from across the insubstantial wall of flame. Or do you need some encouragement? How about this - she raises her chin at him, so the chain around her neck glows like a living thing, enticingly tight around the curve of her neck, and tightened by the width of her smirk. If we’re both still alive by the end of the night, you can grab me by this pretty little necklace and do whatever you want to me. I know that’s what you’re thinking about.
The flames are starting to die down, in want of fuel. Bexley snatches up an arrow being sold at an abandoned arms stall, mostly unfinished, still in need of sanding, and snaps it in between her teeth before she tosses it into the wavering fire. No matter how much you hate me, you still want to fuck me. Curse of the beautiful, I guess.
She smiles, the gash on her face splitting again, and the statement is only partially ironic.
@acton <3
03-30-2018, 02:04 PM - This post was last modified: 03-30-2018, 02:06 PM by Bexley
The way she looked at him in that moment made Acton think of gods. All that bright hate, all that choking feeling - it made him feel known, made him feel seen, in a way the performances could only approximate. Even the other Crows didn’t truly know him; they only had what he’d told them, and Acton never told anyone everything.
But Bexley was different. And when he shivered again, it was not entirely because of fear, not entirely because of the cool-fingered spring breeze. Some of it was the electricity that seemed to have replaced blood in his veins, to hear his name from her bloody mouth.
And then her smile was gone and he wondered if any part of it had been real.
Acton welcomed her threats, the way they made the blood sing in his veins, alive alive alive. His fear was buried by his anticipation; any good sense he might have had was buried along with it. When the lanterns exploded he should have run, the way the last few strangers had at that first flash of fire. Instead he flinched, and then he laughed, and wondered how she’d done it. Fire was his element, the smoke his favorite stage – didn’t she know?
Come here, honey, she said, and he shouldn’t have been able to hear it over the sound of chaos, of hooves on stone and raised voices and of course the burning, but he does. And he did step toward her, his grin curling more into a grimace with every word she said. There was an incoherent roaring building in his head, he thought he could feel his skin shimmering like gauzy fabric; but maybe that was only the sound, the heat.
Her necklace, when she showed it, was brighter than the glinting glass, brighter than the flames reflected in her eyes, even through the smoke. He dropped his head as he stared at it, feeling the wanting wash him in waves. He only looked up when her sudden movement caught him; the sharp snap reminded him of bones breaking and his vision was all hazy at the edges. Must be the smoke.
“You ought to have kept that,” he said finally, gesturing with his chin toward the discarded arrow, though his gaze did not leave hers. “Then maybe you could give me one to match yours.”Like a locket, he thought, and his grin was wide and wicked.
“I should have known you’d be back for more,” he continued, closing the space between them with another slow step, the reflection of the firelight dancing on his dark hooves. “I bet you liked it, learning you were too stubborn to die. Wanna be reminded again?” Acton flicked his gaze up at her from where it had been resting once more on the glinting golden locket. He licked his teeth. Dog-like, he cocked his head. “Or did you come for something else? Starting to sound like it.”
In the background the fire crackles and seethes and he is reminded, again, of that day years ago in another world. The sound had been the same, at first, until the screaming had begun. Just the low burn that ate and ate and only asked for more.
Oh, he loved it, loved the way it nipped at his heels, made his dark hair curl. Even the way the smoke drifted between them, stung his eyes. Pain meant life and life was good.
In that moment Acton was sorry for what he nearly took from her.
They were very close, now. He could see ashes on her eyelashes. He could see the fire glint off of the wet red blood that wept from the cut, marring the pretty gold, the perfect white. He wondered if it still stung.
For all she was right, for all she knew him, his black napalm heart, she was wrong about this: he did not hate her.
Denocte bubbles and brightens with flame. The lowest silver tips of Bexley’s hair start to smoke; then the fire that encases them sputters to sleeping. Smoke curls from her nostrils in two cool gray plumes. Ash crumbles under her hooves, splits and cracks - she trembles with the enormity of emotion - her heart is a wild tattoo, hot and hard and unrelenting, and so casually arrogant that she feels it thrashing in her throat, the iron-thick back of her mouth, so huge there is nothing else left to pay attention to.
Under those dark lashes, in blue eyes glassy from the fire, and sickeningly bright with desire, something monstrous, emphatically repulsive, wakes and rages.
Acton steps forward, and disgust throws Bexley into a visceral shudder. Drumbeats throb inside her head. Her lip curls. On anyone else it would be ugly; on her it is somewhat enticing. Acton speaks - his mouth moves - it’s visible through the smog and spark and the hazy redness of her vision - but Bex’s blood pounds so loud she can’t hear him, can’t hear anything but the drumbeat of her pulse, smashing at her ribs, her chest, every inch of her body. Does it even matter what he’s saying? There are no words for the chaos of the scene, flaming glitter like the movies, bomb-smoke like the guts of wrecked forests - so does it matter?
No. No. No.
She steps closer. Like a badly dubbed film, finally the tail end of his words reach her, grainy and muted, as if spoken underwater. His eyes still track the chain around her neck with obsessive intensity. Learning you were too stubborn to die. Her heart bang-bang-bangs against her chest.
The world tilts and swirls, and Bexley does not lose her balance. She looks him dead in the eyes. Unselfconscious, she drools: long, sanguine lines of blood.
Fuck you. A Glasgow grin, baring all of her teeth, barely holds back slime and gore. Learned. Another long, leonine stride pulls her across the cobblestone. The space between them is now negligible. She can pick apart the black freckles on his face, the hairs made glossy by dancing light. The way he looks at her with that gut-wrecking desire. For a moment it’s dizzying to feel the want that sizzles between them, and Bexley fights desperately not to sway on her feet, fights against the light-headedness that suddenly consumes her, turning her eyes to glass, her head to steam. Smoke blurs her vision with stinging and tears, but she meets his gaze evenly, trembling and unafraid, her snarl spastic, her hair wild. As if I didn’t know already.
And in one quick movement, Bexley’s golden head dips down and near-instantly snaps upward, the thickest part of her forehead meeting Acton’s lower jaw with the crunching thud of bone or cartilage. A shudder passes through her body, one of carnal satisfaction, and barely a moment later she lunges forward, flat teeth sinking into the side of his neck, pulling down in a hard scrape that floods her mouth with the hot taste of iron. Something bitter and violent pricks at her brain.
This makes sense. This is how it’s supposed to be - an eye for an eye - blood for blood, no? Why is it so unsatisfying?
Disgusted, she tears away from him, spits his blood onto the cobblestone. Iron salts the air. Darkness closes in, oppressive and warm. It’s hard to breathe, now, against the smell of blood and the electricity in her body and the broadness of her anger. In her eyes tears brim, opalescent, overwhelming, and Bexley moves them away in a fit of furious blinks, don’t cry, idiot. Don’t cry - the chain around her neck burns hot now. Singes her yellow skin. Smoke and gunpowder fill her lungs, blaze in her vision. She inhales. The sound rattles and shakes, and Bexley is unsteady, unstable, almost feels as if she might die thinking about the possibilities ahead of her, but the Briar is nothing if not persistent: she stalks toward him again, predatory, violent, and hunger blooms like violets in the pit of her stomach.
@acton <3
He should have expected it, but then, he’d never been quite brains or brawn in any outfit.
Closer and closer she came, and faster and faster his heart raced, anticipation a drug running him ragged. The world smelled like ash; shouldn’t he be running? Instead he kept waiting, wanting to see how far he could push before she broke, each step giving him a clearer picture of his reflection in her shining eyes.
And then pain exploded like a new star, vicious as the slash of a knife. There was a sound (the sound of his jaws snapping together, teeth meeting not-so-neatly) but he wasn’t in any shape to pinpoint the cause; his head was ringing like an old bell, his vision was clichéd static.
He’s only finding his voice to cry out when her teeth sink into his neck. Acton squealed with rage and pain as her teeth scraped down, taking hair, taking skin, freeing blood. He burned brighter than the dying flames, now, every nerve protesting, until the pain, too, turned to blessed static and his vision swam back just in time to find her wheeling away, pretty mouth all red.
Acton spit blood.
“Come again, sweetheart,” he told her – or tried; the words were thick, muffled with the way his teeth wouldn’t quite close, his jaw wouldn’t quite work. His mouth hung open now because it didn’t have a choice; his tongue circled his teeth and was coated in blood, though he couldn’t pinpoint where, exactly, it was coming from. Maybe he was lucky he didn’t bite through it.
He couldn’t see the tears in her eyes, because his own were stinging with them too, summoned by pain and by smoke. He could only see her coming back toward him, and he flattens his ears and snakes out his head, feeling the blood wet his neck in a thick rivulet.
Now little illusions flickered in his own vision, his brain tricking itself with new magic gone haywire; her face flickered from a grimace to a laugh to a come-hither grin, his surroundings swam from the familiar night market to sun-beaten canyon walls to a prison to a theater and back again.
He shook his head and the world swam. Surely someone was coming to see what the noise, the fire was about –
But he didn’t want anyone to come. This wasn’t Night Court business, this wasn’t Crow business, this wasn’t even Raum’s business.
This was his. She was his.
He made no move, only stood with his legs slightly splayed, showing her his bloody teeth and wondering why every inhale was suddenly so thick.
“Felt good, didn’t it?” The words were a pant; he thought he could hear his blood sizzling when it hit the pavement but that was madness, like the images that flickered in and out at the corners of his vision. “But not good enough. Try me again, Goldilocks. Got a long way still to go for that bet, so hit me, Bexley Briar.”
Bexley’s snarl comes so suddenly she chokes on it. Shakes in place, Tries to form her mouth around something less guttural, and for a moment, finds it impossible. Then comes the murmur from deep in her chest - if you insist - and as she prowls toward him everything melts away but the narrow tunnel of vision straight ahead, encased in flame, in glittering smoke, in blood that is visceral if not visible. Bexley thinks of hungry dogs and how they do not mind their masters, thinks of bite the hand that feeds you, and thinks, more than ever, that anything she could do to him would be Gods-justified.
Briars have killed since the beginning of time, and what’s on more body on the family roster?
The space between them vanishes near-instantly; rabidity pulses through her veins in manic absolute. Adrenaline is the only thing reminding Bexley she is still alive, not a single-minded walking corpse. Fire still burbles at her feet, picking up dry tinder and stall-fabric and spilled oil, and unthinkingly vicious, Bexley reaches with her bloody teeth for the nearest lighted torch, blue-white with heat and swings it toward Acton’s chest in a chaotic arc. The smell of singed hair fills the air, though it’s too smoggy to see just how much the fire has taken hold of him. Let him burn, says her most-hated voice, and she wants to listen. Why would she not? He deserves it, doesn’t he? Doesn’t she deserve some kind of closure? Bex is blind, almost, with emotion and with the burnt-white speckles of light that flare throughout her vision. A wild thing she is now, no brains, no thinking, just heart and brawn and blood and -
The flame spits back at her and she drops it instantly. The scent of burnt hair fills her nostrils. Felt good, sure fucking did. Hazy and bitter, barely centered, barely standing, filled with a bubbling eldritch horror, Bexley’s head drops past her chest, snaking slowly back and forth, hair blooming around her neck, eyes blackened and haunting. Clank-clank-clank goes the chain around her neck.
The space between them closes again, is negligible now, and, sick with anger, violently nauseated, she comes close and ducks low and slashes a hoof out at Acton’s front leg, slamming into bone, crunching and thudding.
Her lungs spasm at the sound. Pleasure or regret? It’s hard to breathe, now - impossible, even - a surge of emotion overwhelms Bexley as she watches him buckle, pushing her off-balance, bringing tears back into her eyes. She chokes on it. Heat and anger and lust and disappointment. Her breaths are pants now, ragged and dry and absolutely unsatisfying. Her vision blurs with tears. You - you - Bex clenches her jaw, tries to steady her breaths, the wavering timbre of her tone. Fuck you. Her voice snaps sharply in half. Tears sting the open scar on her face, blood and salt filling her nostrils, her mouth, drip-drip-dripping on the cobblestone - asshole - she smashes out at his other leg, carnal, vicious - you took away the only, the only -
And for a moment she can’t speak at all, choking on how much she wants to cry, on how much she has left to come to terms with.
The only thing I had. Bex inhales sharply, rubs blood off her face and onto her shoulder. Ash and tears cluster on her lashes. Apocalyptic is the scene that plays around them - two broken people swathed in swirling flame. Her heart hurts now, is a beast of its own, paralyzed deep and painful in her chest. The dark around her grows, grows so many heads, grows deep and hot, and strangling, and she sways on her feet, dizzy, in pain and capricious, unable to contain her tears - the only thing I had - and the blood starts to seep again, insistent, impulsive.
@acton <3
04-08-2018, 10:29 PM - This post was last modified: 04-08-2018, 10:30 PM by Bexley
He had thought pain was a thing that hit all at once and then faded, an impact as sure and shattering as a comet’s collision. This was a new education. Each slight movement of his head or neck, each attempt to swallow or to speak, opened up some new burn or sting or humming ache, and it did not occur to him to wonder if this is how she’d felt there beneath the rocks.
At her reaction to his words – visceral, rewarding – he found his mouth could still shape a grin, now as bloody as her own. They are two beasts with wet teeth, too stubborn to run as flames flickered and gasped and struggled to live.
Even as she closed the space between them once more, like some mad dance, nothing in Acton told him to flee. Or maybe it did, but it was drowned out by pain and anticipation and the shine of fire in the reflection of her bloodshot blue eyes.
It was only as she lifted a torch that his eyes widened, that the black smell of burning reached him again.
Foolish boy. Even now he didn’t think she’d actually kill him – but the only thing that saved him was that he had no intention to die. Bexley swung the torch and he used his telekinesis to stop it halfway through its arc, to force it back at her. There was the bitter smell of burned hair, and the pain, strange animal it was, migrated to his chest. It burned more now than it had when the flame was against his skin, and finally his subconscious reached him and he shuffled a few steps back, into the open alley.
There was clear air here, cool with midnight wind, and he drank it down in ragged gulps as he watched her. There was nothing beautiful about her now, only frightening, and Acton realized the difference between a ghost and a girl.
A ghost could not hurt you.
There was no time to do anything with his understanding. She kicked at him, quick as a viper, and he flinched away but not in time: a new chorus of pain burst into being and even over the burning and the distant voices and footsteps he could hear a sick crunch that meant nothing good. He didn’t hear it long; a guttural scream quickly covered it, and it wasn’t until he was stumbling, bleeding anew, catching himself on three legs that he realized it came from him.
Oh, he’d thought he was awake before but he was wrong. Now he was alive, as if each nerve was desperate to show him what he would be missing if she touched him again. Shudders wracked his sweat-slick frame and he bared his teeth at her like a wolf. All games were forgotten, all bets off. “You mad bitch,” he panted, and snapped at her in an attempt made feeble by his compromised balance. Was his leg broken? It didn’t matter now; it would only matter if he survived.
He did not grin as she began to speak but there was something savagely glad in his expression, watching her break without even touching her.
Asshole she said, and struck at him again. With his weight on his hind legs, he lessened the blow, making it a glancing, cutting thing that meant nothing in the grand scheme of his pain. But the landing was too much and he stumbled again, this time to his knees. He wished fiercely he might instead have fallen into her, toppled her with him, but luck was not on his side tonight.
He cried out again as his bloody knee hit hard stone, and rolled onto his side; you’re dead, screamed his brain, but Acton wasn’t listening. He was glaring up at her, cool stone soothing against his body, wondering what next.
“The only thing you had?” he said, and laughed like a mad dog, once more tasting blood. “You have everything.” He tried to roll to his feet, then, to force himself to stand, but his muscles wouldn’t mind him. Acton only made it to his belly, one foreleg folded, one stretched before him, a bloody swollen mass. He would stare at it if there weren’t other things going on; there was something fascinating about a thing so badly amiss.
Instead he stared at her, some new beast of blood and tears and ash, a devil to punish him for all he’d done. “You were an accident. Bad timing. This…” he coughed, the smoke stung his eyes; for a second his vision swam and she was just a swath of gold and white and red. “I didn’t think you had it in you. I’m impressed.”
Acton did not want to die, but he still did not believe such a thing was possible; his mind couldn’t grab onto it, this blood-slick concept of his death. And so he kept pushing her, because she teetered on the edge, and because he was good at it, and because his body wouldn’t let him do anything else.
“Go on then. I won’t beg. You wanna smash a man’s head in while he lies at your feet? We’ll both die monsters.” His grin was a grimace, and his heart raced like it knew it was the only thing that could get away.
Foolish boy. His blood on the cobble stones, his life in her hands. Foolish boy, to think she wouldn’t come after him, all fire and brimstone and hard, bleeding heart -to think she’s not willing to crush his skull as easy as a piece of fruit gone soft, that some morality still lives deep inside her, as if she has not already gone feral. She wants to laugh but snarls instead, a lazy curl of the upper lip which drops to nothingness a moment later. The space between them has widened, but Bexley feels that electric crack as much as before, perhaps even more. Her head hurts, her nerves simmer. Smoke curls quietly from a dying torch nearby, and Bex watches it happily, at peace, almost, as the gray gossamer floats to touch Acton’s cheek. It is an oddly wonderful moment.
They are still, then, the two of them, opposite and at odds.
The sting of heat across of her skin is exhilarating rather than painful, and Bexley swallows it with a certain amount of pleasure.
Smoke and ash, and Acton’s whimpering, and the world exhausted, now, by the intensity of Bexley’s rage. She hears nothing but the rush of blood in her ears, the sound of Acton’s breathing, forced and ragged. And that should be enough to appease her, but oh, don’t they know she wants everything at once - to hear him suffer, and to stop suffering herself - to forgive him and to be forgiven - doesn’t he know she won’t leave until it’s all hers, the blood, the fire, all of it, and doesn’t he know that will never, ever happen. That the blood and the fire is not anyone’s to be contained. Forever they might be stuck like this, and what is there to do about it.
We’ll both die monsters. Bex is dizzied by the clarity with which she hears those words. We’ll both die monsters. Something reminiscent of an old life, of the other wounds she’s suffered coming back to her, the past opening itself again like a flower in bloom. She looks down blearily to realize Acton has fallen to his knees, is heavy and motionless, against the crimson-flecked cobblestone. So tantalizingly close to a corpse. His body is laced with bruises and open cuts, an uncivilized grin revealing his bloody teeth: for a moment, she watches him with a near-drugged calmness. Eyes focusing and unfocusing, breath a shallow pant in her chest. Her gaze seems removed from the rest of her. And then, as if something has struck her, she moves toward him in a sudden blaze - breaking open the cobblestones, pausing with a tremble just above Acton’s head - she looks down at him with bloodshot blue eyes and fights the urge to spit.
So I’m a monster, she says, Fine. And who’s watching?
The air goes silent, but it hangs onto those words. They reverberate. Repeat. A drumbeat, tattooed across the inside of Bexley’s skull. And if I am a monster, who’s watching. Quiet is deadly but for that phrase. Who’s fucking watching - not her, not really - Acton, through a fog of pain - and then who else, not Solis, not Calico, not even a straggler of the markets, hidden in the shadows. And really, can a monster still exist when no one knows her.
He’s handsome from this close up, bones so pretty and near-surface. Black freckles like a forest after a fire. She blows a black curl from his face and watches with what is almost wanting. In another world this same lighting could be the bandage to a wound, could be the same glow cast on his face as they’re on a date in Denocte, an expression that would make her smile dumbly, upon remembrance, on her walks through the Day Court; in a parallel plane, just barely off-shore, blood is given voluntarily, and the scar on Bexley’s face is something extra to love. Just below the surface of the world they’re standing on lies the infinite possibilities of timelines just-slightly better, and Bexley can just see it, she thinks, in the whites of Acton’s eyes, in the few inches between them, cool and blue and -
She steps back.
Casually Bex wipes the blood from her face, shakes twigs and glass and ash from the cloud of her hair. The world has quieted. At last, a finality: no more blood, bone-breaks, pushing and shoving. Whatever revenge is left to be exacted must be mental and emotional, must happen precisely. They are moving from a hammer to a scalpel.
Monster it is, she says, with a gossamer smile. No more false virtue, then, and no more false rewards. You hate me and I hate you. We’ll see who hates best.
Bex bats her lashes at him once, her final wound, and turns away.
@acton <3
The fear, the raw animal panic, didn’t set in until after it was all over. That is the way of such things.
As soon as she turned on those pretty pale heels, as soon as she left curved prints dark with ash and wet with blood, Acton was seized with nausea. He shook like a pine cone rattling on a dead limb, empty and edged but useless, useless. The air was not thick with ash and smoke and the sweeter scents that still cut through, not for him – it was as thin as at the top of Veneror Peak and he sucked it in in ragged gasps, burning over his bloody teeth and tongue.
But that is getting ahead of things.
-
She drifted closer, like a ghost. As if she were one, Acton shut his eyes, but he knew there were no illusions between them. That this was real, in the way that only these kinds of moments could be real: pain and fear and each drumbeat of his pulse urging live, live, live.
At the sound of her voice he opened his eyes again, and would have swayed if he weren’t already down. I kneel for no one, he remembered telling Raum once, when they met to trade secrets at the shrine of the gods – but here he was, because life (the only god he claims) preferred irony over ichor.
Acton could feel the heat off her skin, this close, or maybe it was his own. Her breath on him was almost a balm and he met her mad gaze, over the red blur of her scar, that new feature that would never be what he remembered her by, no matter that he gave it to her. (When he pictured her it was always on that first night they met, gold and defiant, or in the last moments of the cave, gold and defiant – a brazenness he wanted to break or to own, though maybe those were the same things).
Last of all, as she stepped away, his gaze dropped to the chain that still glinted, dimmer now, around her burnished throat.
If we’re both still alive by the end of the night…
His grin was broken, but the meaning behind it was still there. He even nodded, when she spoke her final words, like they were making another deal.
And then she turned, and faded away in a haze of smoke.
Only then did he think he might die, his stomach dropping sickly, his muscles turning through strange alchemy to liquid. He tried to stand, once, but his legs shook worse than a foal’s and the stone below rebuked him when he hit it. He tried to scream for help, once, but his jawbones ground strangely and his throat was choked with smoke and ash.
In the end he only watched as the fire sputtered and died, leaving him in the dark. At last there was the sound of hooves, of a voice, an approach – but Acton did not hear it. In the end, he gave up after all, his lashes fluttering closed to lay him in the arms of black dreams with blue eyes and starving red smiles.
@Bexley thank you for the thread! can't wait for pt. 4, Revenge's Revenge xD. ending this here unless @Moira or @Isra wanted to find him?
