BEXLEY BRIAR
my carnivore heart comes out after dark -
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
