damocles / (eden.)
Oct 29, 2023 0:47:22 GMT -5
Post by tick 12a / calla on Oct 29, 2023 0:47:22 GMT -5
There's a yellow light sitting under his eyelids. It's just lying there, curling lazily against skin, warm without warmth. It's the same light that cuts across the hallway at night, tinged like an egg yolk.
"Who are you?"
They sound a little like Echo.
His eyes are closed, and then they're not. There's that light up on the ceiling. It's there under his eyes. There's a strip of scalloped moulding along where the wall meets the roof.
Scalloped.
He doesn't know how he knows that.
"Should wear off fast, though."
"Then, why-"
"He might just be-"
The strip shifts in the light, cream-coloured, warm, crawling slowly along the plaster like a long line of maggots.
Everything feels so strange.
"-sure?"
"What would an Avox be doing in Baptiste's bed?"
Hand on his chin. He recoils without moving, stuck. Underwater.
Eurydice always held him so he'd feel her claws.
"What do we do with it?"
The sound of a door clicking open. Closed. Tap tap tap of a leaking tap. Another voice.
"Got it." Tap tap tap. "He's from One. Went missing five years ago."
"Shiiit." Long and lean and drawn out.
The maggots are back.
There's a shadow over his face, the pure singularity point of a void backlit by fluorescents.
"One of the quell switch kids?" Closer. Bigger, yawning chasm. "You're a lucky bastard."
It's like there's smoke in the back of his throat. Cotton under his tongue. He tries to move and misses, head falling lax to the side. The wall is blue and patterned and ugly and the edge of a palm frond brushes up against the damask, the gentleness of a knife-quick whisper.
He tried to send Cathy Le Roux instead. He isn't lucky.
He is a bastard, though.
"-been all this time?"
The void moves, the features start to focus. The little bellies of the hard-shelled beetles all start to flip up to the pond surface, shining red-brown in the sun. They disintegrate over a period of three days. They turn into clay.
"It's illegal to cross the District borders without the proper paperwork, you know."
They have blue eyes, wallpapered over.
“Hi.” 5 whispers from behind the jade leaves, wallpapered over.
“You’re dead.” Eden whispers back. His mouth doesn’t move.
She smiles sad and sweet, touching the spot on her neck where the bone juts out.
"-already asked."
"Maybe. S'what is says though."
"Don't look like a Le Roux."
He's not.
That’s because he’s not. He's not.
He's not
don't
He's something else now. It's new. He’s not. He isn't. He tries-
"He was here last year too. Look."
They're talking about something Eden can't see.
"Train. Suite. There's a lot of-."
He can't see.
"-be damned."
"Greenroom, too."
"There was a note"
Avriel's voice. Eden jolts.
"Listed him with the stylists."
Where
They watched an ocean documentary last night. Silly little sea birds sitting on the cliffs, diving through the water. They mated for life and built nests out of grass and flew three hours each way just to bring food home.
Every time Avriel looked away from the screen Eden lowered the volume another notch. They didn’t end up finishing it, just paused on the freeze frame of a wingspan and Eden started talking about something else until the atmosphere settled again.
It still ended up being a nice night.
Night
Last night.
He was in bed.
"But the bodies-"
Wrist in his hand.
The palm frond sways in the corner of the room. It's louder now, dragging across the wall like a whetstone.
Room.
An intake that isn't his, something touches his arm, his hand, something snaps, hollow. (Room?)
Someone's yelling.
Underwater again, the sound's all different. Wrong. They were watching the birds. He's not
Where
