Genre: Fanfiction, Nightworld
Rating: R
Spoilers: Nightworld concepts.
Disclaimer: The Nightworld, all its concepts and any characters you recognise belong to L. J. Smith. I borrow them only, and am making no profit from this, but am having oodles of fun.
Summary: A week in the lives of a soulmate couple. Short and to the point.
Quotes: Monday's title comes from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prucock by T. S. Eliot
Written in a breather between The Devil May Care.
Seven Days
Monday: I should have been a pair of ragged claws
He drowns in the shadows puddled beneath the wall. Sunk low, brought low, he fits right in with the trash and the damp lichen spreading across the bricks. Far from the streetlight at the end of the alley, he's like a smuggler evading the lighthouse, slipping by on a wisp of fearful stealth.
She'll never see him here.
She wouldn't look, for one thing. If she ever thinks about the dingy street where she dumps her trash, it's only in the most functional terms. And she'd certainly never expect to find him here, with all the other scraps she hurled away.
High above, her window is a golden gateway and the net curtain a sheer, tantalising veil across her silhouette. Each move seems like a dance, an invitation to tear past the flimsy barriers between them. Her world is as small and contained as Rapunzel in her tower, though she'd never deign to let down her hair for him.
He loves the irony – wallows in it and the shadows, black upon black, until he feels himself slipping away under the abstract art of it all. This thing he needs to do isn't real, merely someone else's bedevilled vision. It's not revenge – it's just poetry. It's words making patterns on a page, pictures taking slow shape in his head.
Her pinned under him, all that pale skin made more perfect and more pale by the crimson splatters defacing her. Beauty has so much more impact when it's framed by tragedy, and he'll frame her himself, beauty and the tragedy, all mingled in one bloody tableau.
Another swig of the bottle; amber slewing a hot path down his throat. True oblivion's too expensive. Can't even afford to be numb – cheap moonshine's all he's got, and though he hates the moon whose silver light baptised him into lunacy, he'll take its poisoned gifts.
You're mad, she'd said with all her incisive cruelty, and I don't want you.
He'd had no words to answer at the time, so dumbfounded was he by her rejection, but they had welled up in his heart later, when he killed with her in mind.
It was the moon that made me so, it was the faithless whoring moon. She made me and abandoned me, and she lies behind your eyes, creating and forsaking. Silver moon, silver hair, no wonder I am mad.
It was the moon, my love, and you.
~*~
Thoughts ever adored.