☃️ The Lies The Fatui Believe About You
(They don’t ask. You don’t correct. Some lies are better burning.)
characters: columbina, arlecchino, scaramouche, signora, childe
tw: unhealthy attachment / fixation ─✦ fatui haven
✦ Columbina thinks you’ll leave her.
She knows it, the way birds know the arrival of winter before the sky changes, embedded deep in her bone marrow. Each time you reach for her, she hears the motion like it’s a goodbye rehearsed in slow motion. A soft-motioned lie. Every touch, a countdown. Every look, a funeral.
“Go slow,” she tells you, every time, as if pace could bargain with fate.
In her head the plea is harsher, needier, embarrassingly devout: Stay slow. Stay here. Stay mine—if thou must be anything, be mine.
She whispers to herself that your pockets are already full of feathers she dropped, that when you leave, she’ll find you again by following the trail of her own molt.
She thinks love must be scooped gently into cupped palms—too firm, and it shatters; too loose, and it slips away like sand between fingers.
She never asks why you always come back. She’s afraid the answer will feel like a final breath.
✦ Arlecchino believes you’ve already started to rot her from the inside.
Every time you look at her with anything resembling tenderness, it's just another serpent threading through her ribcage, scales scraping each intercostal. Time drips slow, and with each drop, her spine learns the shape of… routine. Not discipline,no, nor order or anything with sharp edges she’s been raised by. Routine, habit of expecting to see you with your usual book in the morning, a habit of expecting your “Goodnight.” with the voice sleep has softened. She expects her hands to shatter it even at the cost of paralysis. She never does
She calls it fondness when her hands tremble; misnames it fever when she dreams of you. The truth is duller and therefore more dangerous: you’re building a memorial of you inside her chest. She thinks you mean to hollow her out and perhaps, she hopes you will.
When the children laugh in the halls, she imagines your laughter between theirs, sharper, fanged, and it warms her in a way no hearth dares.
She cleans your cup herself after you’ve left the table. She looks your fingerprints on porcelain too long then intended.
She wonders if this is love or plague, and if there’s even a difference. She decides there isn’t. Both eat from the inside, don’t they?
And when you touch her jaw, her pulse stumbles so violently she almost expects to bleed.
✦ Scaramouche thinks you mock him when you smile.
Your teeth are too white. Your joy, too easy.
He sees your smile and files it under performance—an elaborate trick, some radiant imitation of the sun. There is a laughing someone embedded deep in his skull, always pointing. He has decided it is you. This belief is a spine, it keeps him uptight when your eyes are puffy from too much sleep and you’re blinking lazily, or when you tap your lip in thought, or when you kiss the mole under his eye—and the room tilts like a disaster happening in real time.
He catalogues you with a scholar’s spite: pupil diameter when the lantern light flickers; the way your voice lowers on unsaid things, tremor amplitude when your name is spoken by the wrong larynx.
Later, petty and private, he glares at the air you just walked through—as if even oxygen ought to apologize for touching you first.
Behind a locked door, he practices your expression on his own, a counterfeit miracle, and whispers to the mirror, mechanized and soft:
“You were laughing at me. Weren’t you?”
✦ La Signora believes you admire the fire, not the woman burning in it.
You call her beautiful and she wonders if you mean her flame’s posture. If it’s the myth’s silhouette you love, not the grief. She thinks you do not notice the way her hands tremble when she touches snow.
She thinks you see a goddess. Not a grave dressed in perfume. So she remains perfect.
Because if you knew what people used to see before they saw a witch—you might love her for it. And she doesn’t know if she could forgive you for that.
✦ Childe thinks you underestimate him. On purpose.
That you call him good to keep him docile. That your laughter is a leash around his neck you pull when you expect him to stay, sit, roll over. That kind is the word you choose instead of killer. And he does play along, he smiles; soldier-turned-suitor, places a warm palm against your lower back. But in the back of his mind, he’s waiting.
Waiting for the moment you stop laughing. When your voice stills mid-joke but your grin remains, before widening. When your eyes sharpen, not soften.
You’ll look him full in the face and say, “I knew you were lying.”
He will not defend himself. He will not beg acquittal. Part of him is sure you are right, and a smaller, louder part craves the punishment more than the pardon. Yes. Let love be a judgment; Ajax, after all, has always loved falling.
