terrible terrible terrible (dark chocolate 14/30)
Author: C
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 339
Story / World: ifupdown ( index)
Title: Nothing's Wrong, And Nothing's Right
Counts for the Summer Challenge? No.
Prompts: Dark Chocolate #30: animosity.
Characters: Iall, Mae. Kala's being unconscious somewhere nearby, though?
Toppings / Extras / Other: Butterscotch + Hot Fudge. Malt: Prompts From a Hat [30: animosity // Iall: 'scuse me while I go throw up].
Notes: This is the first time I ever wrote Mae, and around when I decided I could sort of stand Iall. Lesser of whatever evils happen to be lying around and all that -- his thought processes are at least half-recognizably human.
Mae’s face, when she speaks, is perfectly empty, like a white mask got stuck to her skin and she’s never dared to try to peel it off. Iall supposes sometimes that he would find it unnerving if he wasn’t used to such things; in Mae’s case it’s only strange because she by all rights shouldn’t be so good at looking Untainted.
“Is that all you need to know, sir?”
He could say he wasn’t listening but on some level he was, just as on some level he isn’t here, crouched beside a sprawled and broken body to better consider it and the likelihood that the inhabitant can be salvaged. And Mae’s list is not something he wants her to repeat.
“I’m satisfied with that knowledge, if that’s what you mean, Mae.” Sickened, more like it, but he supposes what he should be is proud. The Untainted are his, after all, and they did well. Efficiently, horrifically, and well.
“Thank you, sir. May I ask you something?”
“Right,” he says absentmindedly, staring at the scabs and burns that are already healing on her skin. (Perhaps part of him wonders what they’d look like on Mae’s.) So, of course, he doesn’t realize what a stupid thing to let Mae do it was before she opens her mouth again.
“Why do you care about this, sir?”
Iall freezes. “Care?” he repeats, not even buying time, just unable to think for the rushing in his head. “I suppose because she was more my people than you are, Mae.”
She doesn’t comment on that but her back stiffens more. Amazingly enough that’s even possible. “You do know she isn’t dead, sir.”
“Yes. I know.” He glances at her one more time - as if he needed to, he’s seen quite enough and he knows too much, really - and stands up to walk away. “She’ll wish she was, though.”
“Well,” Mae concedes. “Yes. And what in any world is wrong with that?”
Author: C
Rating: PG13
Wordcount: 452
Story / World: ifupdown ( index)
Title: Vision
Counts for the Summer Challenge? Yes.
Prompts: Dark Chocolate #28: deprecation.
Characters: Iall, Darren, Katerina/Kala[/Zei, maybe?]
Toppings / Extras / Other: Cookie Crumbs of this + Butterscotch + Hot Fudge. Malt: Prompts From a Hat [28: deprecation // Katerina with the revolver in the conservatory].
Notes: ...Yes, well, using Kat's past against her is like shooting fish in a barrel. A really big barrel. With an automatic that aims itself. What I'm saying is, it's easy, she's got neuroses lying all over the place, y'know? They're really a mess, she should pick them up at least and put them in a drawer or something.
He can see it. He can see all of it. He has everything that ever happened at his disposal, after all, if he can process the information it's his (right?).
(Right.)
So it's in his mind, it's all in his mind, almost as if he, not Kala, is the one thinking it, and the fact that these are words and memories he's stolen (he'd prefer borrowed-without-permission) drops conveniently into deep darkness.
- - -
Of course she's not human, not all the way, and to them it's never enough to be able to say “half of me's human”; it will get you branded almost as a liar because they'll still see it as “all of you isn't.”
No matter what her mismatched heredity none of it is currently too sure of how guns work, so she can't be quite sure about the particularities and peculiar bits of the thing in her hand. The things she does know are few. In fact, they're simplicity itself when run all together:
The gun was very hard to load, but now it's loaded.
Her fingertip is resting lightly on the trigger.
If she clenches her finger (the way she might at nervousness or shock, any sudden sound for example) just a little the thing that's more or less her brother will suddenly be suffering from an overdose of metal.
But, of course, Darren knows what she's thinking. Darren knows too much, always has, always will, and that wouldn't in itself be a problem only he uses everything he knows how to find out to wound as best he can. She doesn't know why. Because he can, she supposes. Because the harsh noises and wet despairing sniffling of someone crying is proof that he's won a game against them that they probably didn't know they were playing (as if Darren's existence wasn't notification enough).
She doesn't cry and hasn't for a long time. Right now she rather wants to, but she vows heatedly and, as it turns out, still permanently that she won't cry again for things such as her brother do.
So, not crying as she listens to him, as he tells her why her sort are worthless and of the hunt that could follow, she keeps the gun trained on him for a few seconds longer.
Then she drops it, and she runs.
- - -
He knows she'll tell herself she doesn't care anymore, because anyway that young man is long-dead, but his ideas sank into her skull like darts in a wall and the way some of them have mutated to suit her are interesting.
There's probably a way to use this - a thousand ways, or more.
He'll find them.
Author: C
Rating: PG13
Wordcount: 1,301
Story / World: ifupdown ( index)
Title: They Have A Word For That Now
Counts for the Summer Challenge? Yes.
Prompts: Dark Chocolate #12: dependence.
Characters: Some variety of Kala, Iall.
Toppings / Extras / Other: Butterscotch (I swear we're coming out of that soon -- Carla's the last thing that counts as it. Honest!). Malt: Prompts From a Hat [12: dependence // {random Fate}: musical chairs].
Notes: Every now and then she has these rare moments of actual self-awareness. They, ah. They don't last long. (The "young one, the unreal": that's Terry, who doesn't turn up too much in this batch. So you know.)
All right. All right. I get it. I don't need you, you don't need me. There's no reason for us to touch, no reason for us to talk, no reason for no reason for no reason for you and I to cling together as we do, figuratively but no less desperate, before realizing in disgust who it is we're fixed to and shoving apart. There's no reason because we'd never touch anyway, not in the first place. (Of course, if we did touch and push away, the harder we pushed, then the faster we speed away from one another, but then the so-much-faster we'd come back again. And again. And again. )
I understand. It makes sense. You've no need to try to express it, it's obvious. I get it. Don't worry - shh, you don't need to open your mouth, you talk too much anyway (I said when I still spoke to you) - I agree with you.
We don't need each other. We've never needed each other.
So do you want to take turns?
You have to understand, I know you do. See, we can't stand each other. We'd die an inch from safety before accepting help from one another. I hate you; I'm fairly sure, the way I am of gravity and its ilk, that you hate me. And this is by no means ever a reason to regret, or even to pause as if for contemplation or angst.
But if we hate each other, then we are bound together. (We can hate and deny the binding, too. How can we hate something whose existence we ignore - actively deny - you and I? Easily. Our minds are very flexible, and they do this all behind our backs, don't they?) Hate can be stronger than love, you know, though people seem convinced that their misguided affection will conquer everything (they say that. They're silly. To conquer everything you need swords. Guns and bombs, these days, even).
Love fades. Love goes blunt and dull and rusty where it was sharp and bright and had a hypnotizing shine, and then you don' t quite recall why it was there in the first place, like a pocket knife left somewhere unexpected (a dishwasher, maybe). Hate, if born of anger, born of circumstances extreme enough to merit it, lasts longer and it doesn't fade at all. Hate like ours is fire, it' s the sort of thing that will be bright and painful for what seems like forever until it goes out all at once and sudden (you or I leaving this world), end abrupt when and if it ever happens. This compared to the slow torturous change from sharp and beautiful to blunt and resentfully ugly, the slow succession of tiny pinprick-deaths that can take months, days, years, each one hoping it's the last because they hurt like it should be (and of course it isn't, because it's something people do and people are stupid), that happens to the thing called love.
(But you and I can get up and walk away any time we want to, and we'll go in different directions. Right?)
So do you want to take turns?
I'm not asking you this, you understand. Because we don't speak, we can't speak like two of the last that we are (you think those soulless empty-headed fools of yours count, then you're one of them). We have to hate each other, as we do, and only speak to wound, as you do (so well, who needs knives). A reasoned proposal like this is impossible, which is worse than insane, but look:
I don't need you and you don't need me, but like it or not we're our only true peers (for they know nothing, yours are mindless, and her, the young one, the unreal? Don't make me laugh) and we need to not need each other.
I'm not saying this because deep below words we both know why.
And so we take turns.
You'll not need me, so I'm fighting across the mortal world, not fighting something in specific, but just trying to... I don't know. Take the boiling lead off the top layer of my mind so I can think. And each time I go to sleep I'll clench every muscle I know and my fingernails will cut into my palms, and I'll dream as I do but you won't be there to haunt me. I'll start to reconcile myself to a life where I never know when the bad days, the remembering days (and nights, always and of course, but then I can hide), are going to happen, but where instead of being beaten about the head (and it's not just figurative scars you reopen, that would be cheap) with my exile every time I risk it to properly sleep I just remember, and not even the bits where I was being hurt. Realizing that getting used to this could be easy, getting used to this could be lovely and -- not right, for I deserve you for my treason, but giving me a chance at being -- happy? Content.
When this happens, if you leave for long enough, I'll do more than cautiously get used to this. I'll begin to relish it, to realize I like things this way and maybe I am allowed to have things I like, even now. (But, people might say, this is why we can't have nice things. I'm very good at fooling myself, sometimes I can't even tell.)
This, then, is when you show up, and I'm so out of practice that I'll talk in my sleep, maybe scream, maybe wake up Matthew and open my own eyes to his dry voice asking why and have to make him forget this, too.
You return not because you need to, or even because you want to, but because this is how things go, right, and the exile has to be reminded just in case she'll repent this time.
It's like a dance, almost. Round and around and around we go, but where we stop at least I know:
Then things can switch and I can not need you, as you pace around me and spit out news of how far the world is breaking down, how the gods are dying, how you'd have me back in an instant if I would just - what?
Repent.
Regret.
Turn back.
(No, you bastard. Never.)
You say things that you can't say to anyone else and then you rip them from my mind with more ease than I could from even that of my half-imaginary boy, because at least with him I try not to cause any hurt, and that always complicates these things. You have no such qualms.
(I don't even get to know your weaknesses, and you can't say that is fair when you've got a map of mine.)
So I refuse and mock and try to ignore almost by rote and we both know what's under the words just about as well as I know I for one am not touching it, though it's there. Though, sometimes, it's screaming my name (any one works).
And we circle like this over and over, because we have to not need one another. I don't need you and you don't need me but we keep meeting. I hate you and you despise me and we keep meeting. I don't want to know why and you might suspect and would kill for certainty (but you, you'd kill for anything, wouldn't you?) and, still, in my stupid horrible dreams, we keep meeting.
And if we stop, I don't want to know but still, under every word I could say and every thing I want, do know, we'll both go insane.
So let's go. Your turn now.
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 339
Story / World: ifupdown ( index)
Title: Nothing's Wrong, And Nothing's Right
Counts for the Summer Challenge? No.
Prompts: Dark Chocolate #30: animosity.
Characters: Iall, Mae. Kala's being unconscious somewhere nearby, though?
Toppings / Extras / Other: Butterscotch + Hot Fudge. Malt: Prompts From a Hat [30: animosity // Iall: 'scuse me while I go throw up].
Notes: This is the first time I ever wrote Mae, and around when I decided I could sort of stand Iall. Lesser of whatever evils happen to be lying around and all that -- his thought processes are at least half-recognizably human.
Mae’s face, when she speaks, is perfectly empty, like a white mask got stuck to her skin and she’s never dared to try to peel it off. Iall supposes sometimes that he would find it unnerving if he wasn’t used to such things; in Mae’s case it’s only strange because she by all rights shouldn’t be so good at looking Untainted.
“Is that all you need to know, sir?”
He could say he wasn’t listening but on some level he was, just as on some level he isn’t here, crouched beside a sprawled and broken body to better consider it and the likelihood that the inhabitant can be salvaged. And Mae’s list is not something he wants her to repeat.
“I’m satisfied with that knowledge, if that’s what you mean, Mae.” Sickened, more like it, but he supposes what he should be is proud. The Untainted are his, after all, and they did well. Efficiently, horrifically, and well.
“Thank you, sir. May I ask you something?”
“Right,” he says absentmindedly, staring at the scabs and burns that are already healing on her skin. (Perhaps part of him wonders what they’d look like on Mae’s.) So, of course, he doesn’t realize what a stupid thing to let Mae do it was before she opens her mouth again.
“Why do you care about this, sir?”
Iall freezes. “Care?” he repeats, not even buying time, just unable to think for the rushing in his head. “I suppose because she was more my people than you are, Mae.”
She doesn’t comment on that but her back stiffens more. Amazingly enough that’s even possible. “You do know she isn’t dead, sir.”
“Yes. I know.” He glances at her one more time - as if he needed to, he’s seen quite enough and he knows too much, really - and stands up to walk away. “She’ll wish she was, though.”
“Well,” Mae concedes. “Yes. And what in any world is wrong with that?”
Author: C
Rating: PG13
Wordcount: 452
Story / World: ifupdown ( index)
Title: Vision
Counts for the Summer Challenge? Yes.
Prompts: Dark Chocolate #28: deprecation.
Characters: Iall, Darren, Katerina/Kala[/Zei, maybe?]
Toppings / Extras / Other: Cookie Crumbs of this + Butterscotch + Hot Fudge. Malt: Prompts From a Hat [28: deprecation // Katerina with the revolver in the conservatory].
Notes: ...Yes, well, using Kat's past against her is like shooting fish in a barrel. A really big barrel. With an automatic that aims itself. What I'm saying is, it's easy, she's got neuroses lying all over the place, y'know? They're really a mess, she should pick them up at least and put them in a drawer or something.
He can see it. He can see all of it. He has everything that ever happened at his disposal, after all, if he can process the information it's his (right?).
(Right.)
So it's in his mind, it's all in his mind, almost as if he, not Kala, is the one thinking it, and the fact that these are words and memories he's stolen (he'd prefer borrowed-without-permission) drops conveniently into deep darkness.
- - -
Of course she's not human, not all the way, and to them it's never enough to be able to say “half of me's human”; it will get you branded almost as a liar because they'll still see it as “all of you isn't.”
No matter what her mismatched heredity none of it is currently too sure of how guns work, so she can't be quite sure about the particularities and peculiar bits of the thing in her hand. The things she does know are few. In fact, they're simplicity itself when run all together:
The gun was very hard to load, but now it's loaded.
Her fingertip is resting lightly on the trigger.
If she clenches her finger (the way she might at nervousness or shock, any sudden sound for example) just a little the thing that's more or less her brother will suddenly be suffering from an overdose of metal.
But, of course, Darren knows what she's thinking. Darren knows too much, always has, always will, and that wouldn't in itself be a problem only he uses everything he knows how to find out to wound as best he can. She doesn't know why. Because he can, she supposes. Because the harsh noises and wet despairing sniffling of someone crying is proof that he's won a game against them that they probably didn't know they were playing (as if Darren's existence wasn't notification enough).
She doesn't cry and hasn't for a long time. Right now she rather wants to, but she vows heatedly and, as it turns out, still permanently that she won't cry again for things such as her brother do.
So, not crying as she listens to him, as he tells her why her sort are worthless and of the hunt that could follow, she keeps the gun trained on him for a few seconds longer.
Then she drops it, and she runs.
- - -
He knows she'll tell herself she doesn't care anymore, because anyway that young man is long-dead, but his ideas sank into her skull like darts in a wall and the way some of them have mutated to suit her are interesting.
There's probably a way to use this - a thousand ways, or more.
He'll find them.
Author: C
Rating: PG13
Wordcount: 1,301
Story / World: ifupdown ( index)
Title: They Have A Word For That Now
Counts for the Summer Challenge? Yes.
Prompts: Dark Chocolate #12: dependence.
Characters: Some variety of Kala, Iall.
Toppings / Extras / Other: Butterscotch (I swear we're coming out of that soon -- Carla's the last thing that counts as it. Honest!). Malt: Prompts From a Hat [12: dependence // {random Fate}: musical chairs].
Notes: Every now and then she has these rare moments of actual self-awareness. They, ah. They don't last long. (The "young one, the unreal": that's Terry, who doesn't turn up too much in this batch. So you know.)
All right. All right. I get it. I don't need you, you don't need me. There's no reason for us to touch, no reason for us to talk, no reason for no reason for no reason for you and I to cling together as we do, figuratively but no less desperate, before realizing in disgust who it is we're fixed to and shoving apart. There's no reason because we'd never touch anyway, not in the first place. (Of course, if we did touch and push away, the harder we pushed, then the faster we speed away from one another, but then the so-much-faster we'd come back again. And again. And again. )
I understand. It makes sense. You've no need to try to express it, it's obvious. I get it. Don't worry - shh, you don't need to open your mouth, you talk too much anyway (I said when I still spoke to you) - I agree with you.
We don't need each other. We've never needed each other.
So do you want to take turns?
You have to understand, I know you do. See, we can't stand each other. We'd die an inch from safety before accepting help from one another. I hate you; I'm fairly sure, the way I am of gravity and its ilk, that you hate me. And this is by no means ever a reason to regret, or even to pause as if for contemplation or angst.
But if we hate each other, then we are bound together. (We can hate and deny the binding, too. How can we hate something whose existence we ignore - actively deny - you and I? Easily. Our minds are very flexible, and they do this all behind our backs, don't they?) Hate can be stronger than love, you know, though people seem convinced that their misguided affection will conquer everything (they say that. They're silly. To conquer everything you need swords. Guns and bombs, these days, even).
Love fades. Love goes blunt and dull and rusty where it was sharp and bright and had a hypnotizing shine, and then you don' t quite recall why it was there in the first place, like a pocket knife left somewhere unexpected (a dishwasher, maybe). Hate, if born of anger, born of circumstances extreme enough to merit it, lasts longer and it doesn't fade at all. Hate like ours is fire, it' s the sort of thing that will be bright and painful for what seems like forever until it goes out all at once and sudden (you or I leaving this world), end abrupt when and if it ever happens. This compared to the slow torturous change from sharp and beautiful to blunt and resentfully ugly, the slow succession of tiny pinprick-deaths that can take months, days, years, each one hoping it's the last because they hurt like it should be (and of course it isn't, because it's something people do and people are stupid), that happens to the thing called love.
(But you and I can get up and walk away any time we want to, and we'll go in different directions. Right?)
So do you want to take turns?
I'm not asking you this, you understand. Because we don't speak, we can't speak like two of the last that we are (you think those soulless empty-headed fools of yours count, then you're one of them). We have to hate each other, as we do, and only speak to wound, as you do (so well, who needs knives). A reasoned proposal like this is impossible, which is worse than insane, but look:
I don't need you and you don't need me, but like it or not we're our only true peers (for they know nothing, yours are mindless, and her, the young one, the unreal? Don't make me laugh) and we need to not need each other.
I'm not saying this because deep below words we both know why.
And so we take turns.
You'll not need me, so I'm fighting across the mortal world, not fighting something in specific, but just trying to... I don't know. Take the boiling lead off the top layer of my mind so I can think. And each time I go to sleep I'll clench every muscle I know and my fingernails will cut into my palms, and I'll dream as I do but you won't be there to haunt me. I'll start to reconcile myself to a life where I never know when the bad days, the remembering days (and nights, always and of course, but then I can hide), are going to happen, but where instead of being beaten about the head (and it's not just figurative scars you reopen, that would be cheap) with my exile every time I risk it to properly sleep I just remember, and not even the bits where I was being hurt. Realizing that getting used to this could be easy, getting used to this could be lovely and -- not right, for I deserve you for my treason, but giving me a chance at being -- happy? Content.
When this happens, if you leave for long enough, I'll do more than cautiously get used to this. I'll begin to relish it, to realize I like things this way and maybe I am allowed to have things I like, even now. (But, people might say, this is why we can't have nice things. I'm very good at fooling myself, sometimes I can't even tell.)
This, then, is when you show up, and I'm so out of practice that I'll talk in my sleep, maybe scream, maybe wake up Matthew and open my own eyes to his dry voice asking why and have to make him forget this, too.
You return not because you need to, or even because you want to, but because this is how things go, right, and the exile has to be reminded just in case she'll repent this time.
It's like a dance, almost. Round and around and around we go, but where we stop at least I know:
Then things can switch and I can not need you, as you pace around me and spit out news of how far the world is breaking down, how the gods are dying, how you'd have me back in an instant if I would just - what?
Repent.
Regret.
Turn back.
(No, you bastard. Never.)
You say things that you can't say to anyone else and then you rip them from my mind with more ease than I could from even that of my half-imaginary boy, because at least with him I try not to cause any hurt, and that always complicates these things. You have no such qualms.
(I don't even get to know your weaknesses, and you can't say that is fair when you've got a map of mine.)
So I refuse and mock and try to ignore almost by rote and we both know what's under the words just about as well as I know I for one am not touching it, though it's there. Though, sometimes, it's screaming my name (any one works).
And we circle like this over and over, because we have to not need one another. I don't need you and you don't need me but we keep meeting. I hate you and you despise me and we keep meeting. I don't want to know why and you might suspect and would kill for certainty (but you, you'd kill for anything, wouldn't you?) and, still, in my stupid horrible dreams, we keep meeting.
And if we stop, I don't want to know but still, under every word I could say and every thing I want, do know, we'll both go insane.
So let's go. Your turn now.