Let Me Kill It With You// Lalia [Blitz]

All of my scars are old.

Bastardized amphora paintings etched on my arms and hands, scrawled across my back, sketched up along the sides of my neck so that I may never forget the when and where and how badly I wanted to scream out but simply bit back the pain. Spilled fresh crimson from my bottom lip while the blood in my arteries came to a scarlet boil.

Scars grow ugly over time. A fresh burn has a youthful raw liveliness to it poets can't put into words. A beauty only known in a fallen empire's last peony, the last sunset before a year-long winter, a business man's last dying words before the poison shuts down his respiratory system and he chokes to death on his own blood. Only to be burnt to a crisp in the company car and pushed into the sea by some moody teenage delinquent. There's a beauty in the pain they possess. And Ripred knows I've never been able to love anything that didn't threaten to kill me first.

Besides that, infant scars have a certain tenderness about them. There's a resilient fragility about new wounds. They provide a terrible, terrible pain you want again and again. They flare bright red in a futile attempt to warn you of the agony ahead. As if caution lights were seen as anything less than welcoming, as if we're all walking around on this unfeeling rock totally unaware of our own personalized pains to come ahead.

A laugh escapes her lips.

I close my eyes and a groan escapes my own.

Sometimes, however, we do not get the courtesy of having a red light warn us. Sometimes our own personalized pains follow us out while we're attending to the corpses pf our clientele.

"And if I dare to disagree?"

As I said before, all my scars are old. Aged, lackluster wisps of white flame engraved into my skin cautiously hidden beneath my clothes. I haven't been burned in ages now because I've learned how to sin without the damnation.

I dropped my crowbar unto the ground with a loud clatter. I grabbed for Taggerty Eames' hand and pull her closer to me, half-spinning her in the process so that my arm was around her shoulders and we were both facing the midnight sky kiss the bay of tar before us. 

"He disagreed too, and look how much good that's done him," I nodded towards the open water. "But we both know you're not the type to want what's good for you."

The only rule to playing with fire: Know when you're playing with fire.

"You shouldn't have put it out."

A smile tip toes across my lips in the dark of the evening.

I've had dreams like that, where I'm lying flat on the stone ground surrounded by every fire I've ever begun. Factories drunk off molotov cocktails to my first little singed patches of field from back when I was 7 or 8 and all my scars were fresh and raw. And you believe me, Taggerty Eames, I never willingly let a fire go out. Even with the worst slip of the hand an artist never eagerly discards his easel. Every flame I've had the pleasure of knowing has been a lover of mine, and I'm not one to let my loves slip my mind. 

Setting fire to the night forces you to reevaluate your mortality. You go into life knowing it's going to end, unless you're stupid. And as you lay dying at 23 or 105 or whatever, you're going to be sad. Now those of us who spent the majority of our lives waiting for green lights and washing our faces before bed and waiting for them to approach us and initiate the conversation first will cry because they haven't had a full life and must lie with the weight of all they never got to do until the end. But those of us who spent more time dreaming than sleeping, who kissed lovers who weren't our own, who did what they did because why the fuck not? We'll be crying, too. Because our lives were beautiful and reckless and restless and tragic and they're ending. The wicked veins of white lightning along my arms and neck might convince you otherwise, but nothing burns more than the end of something beautiful. And that's the only thing that convinces me to shove my masterpieces into the sea. All my scars are old, except for the ones beneath my hide. Underneath I'm burning alive and it's magic.

Taggerty's hand in mine is chilled by the night but I don't dare suggest we go inside. We've got a history of dim sight and the idea of sitting across from her in a diner booth is damn laughable.

I feel her trace a foreign string of words into the back of my hand but it's dark. It's fine.

"Why start this if you won't keep it going?"

And as the question formed on the brink of my lips ('Start what?') I felt her fingers beneath the cuff of my shirt and finally decoded that secretive scripture.

Got you, Icarus Falls. Monster.

My hand instinctively retracts from hers and I took a few steps back. My scars are ugly. I'm a boy covered with the gnarled branches of some hideous bleached birch tree embedding itself into my skin like ivy. The proof that I'm going to hell hangs around my neck like a ghostly medallion. The proof that I might be something less than human is in the blank slates of my printless fingertips.

I smile and laugh.

"Are you free tonight, Taggerty?" I ask her despite the fact that some hidden scar inside of me might just be terrified of her. I don't know which one of us started this but for this night, I intend on keeping it going. Nothing burns more than the end of something beautiful.