Codex Week Day 7: With Wild Unrest
Summary: The Corvid meets Cody's eye across the river.
Rating: M
Tags: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Gender or Sex, Alternate Universe, Creepy, Pining, Internalized Homophobia, Monsters, Haunting, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Unreliable Narrator
For @codex-week day 7: Alt prompt Le Survivant by René Magritte
The Corvid’s blood is thick and sticky. It clings like black tar to Rex’s clothes and skin and hair. The clothes decay under it, threads thinning and collapsing, and when they scrub it off Rex’s skin, it’s left with a grey tinge deep under the surface and cold to the touch.
Rex’s skin will heal, and the clothes they can replace—the wardrobe is full of things that aren’t theirs but fit them well enough—but this wasn’t without a cost.
The loss of the knife she left in the Corvid’s side will be felt keenly.
Cody holds Rex’s hair away from her head, blood twisted through it, clumping it together in ugly tangles. There’s no washing it out. It can’t remain.
It’s easier to look at now than in the harsh daylight. The fireplace’s dancing shadows hide the way the shape of the blood seems to shift, the red undertone hidden by the colour of the flames. Cody’s stomach still heaves at the sight, at the way it clings to Rex’s hair, from tips almost all the way up to the roots.
“I don’t know how much I can leave,” she says. Her grip on the knife is too tight, and her grip on Rex’s hair is not tight enough.
“Take it all off,” Rex says. She glares into nothing, shoulders tense with pain, one palm flat over the bandages covering the gashes in her side.
“Get it off me, Cody.” Her other hand touches Cody’s thigh, fingers dragging over the material, knuckles shifting under delicate skin. “Please.”
The knife is kept sharp, but it wasn’t made for cutting hair. Rex winces as Cody slices through it. It comes off in ugly chunks, falling to the floor to mix with the mess of tattered clothes and bloody medical supplies. The last of it comes off in one piece, the band holding the braid together at the bottom and congealed blood holding together the top enough to maintain its shape.
Cody had thought about Rex’s hair, thought about running her fingers through it, of tucking any one of the strands that slipped free from the braid back behind her ear. Of holding it while Rex was between her legs, her mouth—
Cody drops it to the floor with the rest.
Is this a punishment for that?
