Audere est Facere

Agonia stares at Aria, not moving, not even letting her breath pass through her teeth too sharply. She wants to see how Aria plays it. If the croissant gets eaten all the way down— every last crumb, sticky iota of chocolate bloodied across her molars— Agonia will let her. Might even light her a cigarette after, let her smoke it until her head’s spinning from the sugar and nicotine, and mop up the mess if Aria pukes in the alley.

—And still, in the end, will watch over her.

But where Khan saw the inevitability of entropy, Marr still assembed meaning.

That piousness rankled.

A hand moved to scratch at the side of his face. He was becoming annoyed quickly and not the kind he could play off as amusement. True annoyance.

M O N S T Y R I O U S — a study in : fate is real, the horror in humanity, playing god versus being one, the romance in the grotesque, conquering one's fears only to die anyway, the lifting of the veil, walking the fine line between good and evil.

heavily featuring original characters and extensive original lore. featuring many verses for the boys as well as william butcher and leonard mccoy. extreme themes present.

"Rela~a~ax. WaaaaAait a minute—aren't you half Viltrumite?"

Imagine him narrowing his eyes.

"Yeah, well, the thing about Viltrumite genes is, they don't automatically make you a connoisseur of whiskey." He’s shooting for casual, but it comes out defensive, and he hates himself a little for it. “Besides, I’ve been a little busy saving the world to build up a real tolerance.”

Oh, and he’s not even twenty-one yet, but in the grand scheme of things, he’s accomplished-- … well, less than most twenty-year-olds, unless you count the property damage.

Actually, don’t count the property damage.

David gave his "host" a puzzled look. He does not say the question strongest in his mind: Are you serious? No, Starfleet was more politic than that. He is more courteous than that. Plus, David had not yet fully learned the grounds on which he stood. His limbs may not have been tied up, but he was still stranded on Giedi Prime -- a prisoner. No one is coming for you. Get used to it. "Should I not look outside then?

His dinner knife slices through a cut of tender meat. He admits it is delectable. How many people labored and toiled in the poisonous air so that their Harkonnen rulers could eat well? "I see a world transformed by your rule. No small feat, no matter where you stand on ideology. I am sure your success did not come without sacrifice."

Of course, Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen could have meant that literally. How many people did he personally kill, maim, destroy the livelihood of to get where he is today? The Prime Directive prevented David from interfering and Starfleet officers treated the Prime Directive like toilet paper at their peril. The civilized side of the officer hates this man; but then, he hated himself too for not acting.

Almost.

"You can dispense with that. The civility. The diplomacy. You’re not at a negotiation table, Lieutenant Weiss. You are not being evaluated. There is no record being kept here, no superior to perform for." A pause for a near-smile the crests the black of his teeth; "You are, in the most literal sense, the only Starfleet officer on this planet. Speak like a man. A peer."

And then, because it is true, and because Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen has never much enjoyed the theater of false modesty, he concedes it.

"But, you are correct." Cuts into his own meat; the knife moves clean through it, the sound of it soft against the plate. He doesn’t move to bring it to his mouth. "Giedi Prime used to be far, far worse, as little as twenty years ago. I’ve done what I can.”

Then it had been before him. Then it had been under his uncle. Then it had been under the long, unbroken line of Harkonnens who came before, each one leaving the world a little more scarred, a little more breathless, a little more ground down to the mineral marrow of what a world could be before it simply ceased to function.

He’s made it practical. No more, no less.

The nothing-king’s royalty is a costume too large for him, stitching already frayed. Feyd’s gaze slides past him, lands on the girl trembling on the bed. A wasted gift, but not without function. He’s keeping her, too. A reminder. A spoil. Because he can.

One hand drags her hold over from V-enus shape of his left hip bone and up; her nail makes a line from his navel hole to the one under his first rib. The other hand is tallying his breath by cupping his face. She could never touch him without some possessive sprawl of her fingers. 'Mine' sinks in, easily, with all the silky amniotic wet swimming around their bowl of a place to lay. It doesn't matter where they are. Any shapes past him fade off to the point of nothingness. It's a bleached landscape. Milk glass.

He penetrates and takes her mouth for a halo. Her first instinct to pain is to squirm off of it. All her delicate wet becomes gluey when his fluid gets involved. She's stuck on him. She's, ad verbum, stuck on him. Tucked into his breastplate. Where they both split open, like the flesh of a figs undressing and honest. His mouth falls in line with that.

She scoops the pulp of his words, her finger pets into his mouth and feels them ripe against the velvet walk of his tongue.

❛ You love me? ❜

He wraps around her heart now. Pumps it for her.

It's palingenesis, in soft-brutal steps. She's breathless, to the point of hurt. But the fear of what's happening gets superseded. Everyone thinks it's her that pacifies him ⸺ and she does ⸺ but twin that sediment and he has a strong lulling effect on her.

❛ Tu as enlevé mon cœur. Il bat grâce à toi. I love you, too. ❜

Tu as enlevé mon cœur.

He does not speak French. He speaks her. Has since they were two children misfitting their mouths together in a compound corridor, since she laughed and he laughed once, just once— and it’s always been this, the only sum that ever resolved.

The ribbon syncs to her and not to him. He lets it. He lets her. Her mouth maps the corner of his mouth, the center, the corner— methodical, an atlas, and he opens for it the way a wound opens: not wanting to, entirely unable not to. His thumb finds the salt-track at her jaw.

Doesn’t speak the grief on her face because to name it he would have to hold it and he is not built for holding, he is built for trespass, for the

—sick

—violence

—of taking— and she makes him gentle and it is the most dangerous thing she does to him, more than the nail-line, more than the heat of her, more than the ribbon now beating her rhythm instead of his.

He pulls her closer until they are atomic. Until they are only the place where the figs split open.

Poetic. 

Agonia held her ground. Always did. Smelled like heat and hurt. He put that smell there? Rub it off on her, mark her with it? 

“Why?” he asked. Voice soft, like wood shavings, curling around her ear. "Owe me what? I can’t fix anything."

Dust clung to the hair on his forearms. He flexed a hand; resin shone in the lines of his palms.

“I can take it. Carry it with you, that's what you want.”

A question mark in that phrase. And that's what he waited for—for her to name it in the sawdust and sunlight. For permission. Waited and watched her. Maybe he’d wait forever.

“What you call fucked up...” he shrugged, shoulder rising and falling like a drill press, gaze drifting to the gnarled tissue along her jaw. Soft-eyed, like. Like he was admiring the lace-like grain in a Sycamore. 

That’s how Agonia saw it, anyway. She moved closer despite the way it set every marrow-deep alarm howling in her body, and she stood there letting the anger and shame and relief settle into a single, sour warmth in her gut.

Looked at him sharp, like she was taking a measurement. The space between them was a hairline crack down a windshield, always ready to spider out.

Can’t fix anything, he’d said, but the truth was worse: you can’t want to fix something if you don’t want to touch it, and there was nothing Agonia wanted more than to press herself against the broken edge of their twin famishment and see what would hemorrhage.

Yet is a bus that never comes. Yet is standing frozen at the edge of a road under a dark bowl of sky. Yet is boiling rabbits for a god who won’t save you.

But all right: yet.

“All right. Come on, then.”

They sort through metals and silent implements, silently deciding what to salvage and what to scrap, their own limbs clacking and hollow. The dolls chatter against the fence while Ben loads his truck. He leans against the tailgate and watches Agonia, studs in her jacket catching the sun and burning it back.

He doesn’t think an 1863 Emerson means anything to her, but it is a hell of a thing to find here. It’s a little like finding treasure—with a scuffed handle and a slight wobble, and a blade measuring twenty-eight inches from tip to guard.

It’s stupid. 

The realness of a thing, the way it resists her, answers her.

It’s why she trusts metal more than men, why she turns her back on every living thing but never on the bare honesty of a steel edge. This sword— old, battered, uneven in its temper but still every inch a weapon— sits on her palm with a slow, wicked thrill.

She swings it once, inert but not dead, and relishes the familiar bone shock up her arm. Old world brutality. Purpose handed down in blood.

Wonders how many people— child soldiers, officers, farmhands— have swung this exact blade with the same poor wrists and the same better intentions.

“If I fix it, you’re not selling it.” Agonia glances back, catching his eye just to make it clear she’s not joking. “You’ll keep it or you’ll use it.”

How brutally aware she is of her own wrist-shakes, the way violence wants to move in her and how it always feels like lightning trapped in a bone-like coffin.