accelerando ; ivory series

My phone buzzes in my back pocket.

"Need a demonstration?" Green Eyes rubs his nose and pinches the bridge, huffing through clenched teeth. The whole display is so deeply embarrassing that it's enough to tempt me back toward the straight and narrow. Can you un-dig a grave?

The stall creaks beneath our combined weight, I focus on the profanities carved into the wood instead of his face next to mine. The frosted emerald of his namesake have been swallowed by blown-out pupils. An ill omen of black and velvet. He's got the look of someone starving, hunched in on himself and gnashing his teeth.

My head falls back against an exposed sewage pipe, "What, like a free sample?"

His laugh is warm, like I've done something to be fond of. Considering we're cramped into a dingy bathroom, and I've just paid a small fortune for a handful of crushed up pills I'd say I'm anything but.

Must be worth it, if they can make him look at me like that.

This was meant to be a solution to starvation and sleeping, nothing more than a necessary evil. But the places his skin touches mine have burned and, fuck, if I'm not desperate to hurt in different ways.

A few hours, and then I'll be back at the practice room before my feet even touch the floor.

"Why not?"

Next thing I know, he's got his fingers in my mouth. Trailing along my gums, cradling the back of my head when I flinch away from the bitter taste. "Give it a second." He steps away, satisfied with his work. "I'm surprised it took you this long to seek me out," Velvet Eyes says like he's discussing the weather. He wipes my spit on the leg of his jeans.

My knees give out, I sit down hard on the toilet. Cold porcelain sears into my skin like brand, "What?" I mumble through my hands, eyes shut against a wave of nausea.

"Everyone needs a little help eventually. That's all." He flicks the bag before tossing it at my feet; I find myself laughing along with him though I didn't particularly want to. "Do yourself a favor, try and have some fun before you go. Nothing beats the first time."

Velvet Eyes leaves

My hands tremble as I take out my phone, a notification lighting up the screen.

One Missed Call: Indigo Auclair

For a second there's guilt, and then my veins start blooming and it's so easy to stop caring at all.

I forgot what it was like to exist without agony. It's a childlike wonder that has my hands itching for drumsticks.

But I've never been to a party before. They felt like a waste of time better spent behind my set. Made it easier to ignore spaces others made for me. With anxious glances and tight smiles that were never more than polite. Their attention was not worth risking mediocrity, I'd resigned to being lonely if it meant being great.

But I still feel. Try as I might, I still feel.

So fuck it, tonight I'll feel good.

Two days before the concert, I give the rope some slack. Even if I end up hanging, that fate doesn't sound all too lethal right now.

I'm full of daises, not meat.

"Ruby?" I catch him out of the corner of my eye. More hearth than boy, it's easy enough to follow the trail of embers through the crowd. For a while, I just watch him weave tapestries with that siren's drawl. Count the bodies washing up on the rocks from those churning rapids.

I don't think of him often, but when I find him in my thoughts he lingers like a stain. I think I'd be able to find him anywhere.

"Ruby!" I say again, wrapping my fingers around his wrist and almost losing my next words to the tempo of his pulse, "I'm at a party!" I tug him a few steps toward me, hoping he's hazy from the beer propped between his fingers. "I bet you thought you'd never see me at one of these, but that's because your ego is so bloated you can't see anything past it." Like corpses in the ocean.

I've never had to wonder why people don't like me.

"But I'm at a party." I finish lamely.

The second I realize I'm smiling, it freezes on my faze. Sweat trickles down my temples, I can taste the grit of a stranger's sweat between my teeth. The people he left behind mourn his absence, he turns to look at them over his shoulder. I let my grip fall, wincing at the indentations my nails left in his skin.

"You're at a party! Do you even know how to do that?" When he speaks it feels like the words are taking me apart. I squirm under them, unable to hide how uncomfortable it makes me.

There's not a clock in sight, but I swear I hear it ticking. "Not really. I need to get back to practice actually, but I saw you and-"

I frame his face with a gentler touch this time, pulling him down to my height and kissing his forehead. "You know you're one of the best, and I will be better than you. So thanks for giving me a reason to try."

I step back, he sways where he stands. Maybe he won't remember this conversation in the morning.

"Come to the concert! I'll show you then."

The means to perfection sits pretty in my pocket, I don't go back to my room but I do take another hit before I reach the music hall.

Simons comes to check on me in the morning, all smiles when I tell her I've been practicing through the night. She lays a kiss on my forehead and the places her lipstick lingers go numb.

And I swear I've really made myself invincible this time.

I look down at my skin, but it's still just daisies.

(IV. REGRET.)

More of me lays scattered among the practice room than its own wreckage.

A dial tone echoes through the ruins.

The last of a lifeline, I cling to the sound. Called for someone red, 'cause its the only color I can see now.

The comfort of the room's sterile scent has given way to something heavy and metallic. It burns the inside of my nostrils, worse than the pressure building behind my eyes. Panic pangs deep in my gut and I know it shouldn't feel so far away.

Pain isn't. It crashes in waves, tandem with heart beats and labored breaths. Don't think I ever really wanted to die,

but turns out I couldn't live with myself either.

Eventually they'll find the stains I've left and call them a damn shame.

(If only she'd just asked for help sooner.)

Selfish of me to suffer in silence when it ends in stolen potential.

"H-hey?" He answers with his voice like a lullaby, still rough from sleep. I feel my eyelids drifting shut, head falling back against a shattered mirror. The only one still intact, looming down at me with its jagged teeth hanging on by a thread. "Hey Ivory, what's up?"

"Nothing, really." A hoarse whisper not unlike his own. But it's early, he is waking up and I won't be. "Something came up, don't think I'll make the concert."

He speaks to fill the silence, a horrible habit. I ignore the probing questions, each a little more urgent than the last.

"Thanks for picking up."

I don't know why he did.

(I. DIVINITY.)

I am a violent, relentless girl.

Always looking for ways to be more violence than girl.

I've never given much thought as to whether all this ambition is mine. Merely learned to be grateful that it exists at all. Molten gold in my veins, an everlasting burn. I've memorized the view from atop pedestals, creeping higher until my feet dangle.

My parents stopped asking me to be kind when they realized I could be perfect. Along the way I learned to hate the parts of me that feel too human.

If I could stop my heart from beating, it'd be easier to keep time.

I've never felt better than I do right now.

Exhaustion chased away by pills in my pocket, those wretched aches tucked away into the back of my mind. It's been hours since I stopped, running through rendition after rendition of the song which has haunted me for weeks. It's not enough hit every note, I want them to see the infection I've caused. Made it mine, made it special. Turned it into the kind of beauty only I am capable of creating.

I want their reverence, I want their jealousy.

I want to be loved. (I need to know what that feels like.)

Today should be called a divine intervention.

Because I'm pretty sure I'm a fucking god.

(III. DISDAIN.)

I am worthless.

So I'll carve it out of me.

Peel back the skin to find the treasure that's supposedly hidden there. I believed it all the praise they fed me. Didn't think too hard about why I never felt it writhing beneath my skin.

When I bought the pills, he said they'd wear off quick. Come down, implying it was something gentle. Not a sudden absence of color, the world awash in white space.

This is crashing.

It's too late now, the shards of glass embedded in my fingers sparkle under hanging lights. They dance, iridescent. Incandescent. There's hatred on my skin now, it'll never be the same.

Good.

I lean against the wall, a shower of shattered glass settling in my scalp like a corrosive crown. There are hand prints on the walls - were my fingers always that small?

Volatile, prone to mood swings. I'd read the words doctors scrawled in heavy pen at the top of my reports. Warnings everyone had ample time to heed.

She'll destroy herself, if left to her own devices.

Congratulations, you were right.

And it didn't save me.

(II. WRATH)

Five hours before the concert, I break Simons' gift.

A silly way for the world to end.

I don't realize it's happened until its already clattered to the ground. A clean break, like a neck.

Then it's just me and my reflection, our gazes pinned to the same point. I've never seen her smile quite like that. Shoulders slumped, breathing out relief. It's over before it even started. I'll never see the stage now, Simons won't let me anywhere near it.

This was all for nothing, then.

The realization is soft as silk, silence for the first time in fucking weeks.

What comes after is anything but.

I sway when I stand, falling back into the kit and catching the backs of my legs on metal frames. I scream when I throw the snare at the mirror. Watch my face fall as it crumbles, her stricken expression contorted on my own features. I hate her.

And I realize now that she has always been me.

When nothing of Simons' kit remains I start on the rest of the room, cutting strings with jagged shards. Carving weeping grins into my palms as I go. Ruining my throat with sound, not words, as though I can purge the shame that has rooted itself in my bones.

My lips taste of blood, the practice room is covered in it.

Only one mirror remains, the broken stick resting in front of it.

I stagger toward it, exhausted. My breath fogs the mirror, I watch the whites of my eyes go pink as veins bulge beneath them. She begs. I beg.

(Stop here.

Let it go.)

My hand makes a loose fist.

And I drive it into her nose.