in the gutter, looking at the stars.

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current time zone edt/est lifetinerary june-sep, nyc sep, singapore sep-dec, thailand then i'm taking my greek ass to greece thx

i'm K, a freelance writer and educator blowing in the wind. i'm also a person out in the world, existing. although i do my best to stay active, i respond at my own pace. feel free to dm me about anything and everything. big time chatter? welcome. not a talker? not an issue. my interest check is open to anyone at any time. fill it in or shoot me a random meme. 🖤

He stared at her with a wretched demeanor. Depraved and proud. Deprived of diffidence. Then watched her thoughtfully. Cycling through expressions like seasonal wear.

“Prove it.”

B's smile was a lumen his gaze often stumbled into, intoxicated.

“You’re beautiful,” Ben said, knocking his own smile against his knuckles.

“And brilliant,” he added. “That’s your great glory, and my great tragedy.”

“No.”

“You wanted to be friends.” His gaze falls and rises. Eclipses Violet's, sinks again. Dropping into twilight. “I thought…”

“Nil?”

She said something under her breath. Maybe to him, or some other ghost.

“You drunk?” 

Ben closed the distance between them in three long strides. She didn’t push him, but he could see the temptation in her curled fists. 

“Nilza, mírame.” 

His r’s had got better. Ran on a bit of an engine now. His grip settled around Nilza’s forearm. It was firm, not unfair, but she pulled anyway, and… well, he saw the bad color. It rose up in him, and he grabbed her.

“C'mon," he grunted. 

Steadied her before she could lose her footing, one broad hand finding the small of her back almost by reflex. Caught a whiff of the cigarettes that clung to her jacket, old leather. But not liquor, he thought. 

“Come on,” he said again, quieter this time. “Why'd you say that?” 

His eyes searched hers the way he'd search the grain of a board before taking a plane to it. 

“What happened?”

“Don’t…” 

He staggers back, suppressing this bursting pustule, this beating thing in him, with both hands.

“Get away,” he rasps. “If I am to rot, let me rot.”

The air hissing in his lungs through that battle-scorned helm may be deadly different, but so, too, are his lungs.  There are parts of his body that are no longer his: those that have a new awareness, a new way of navigating space, a new method of motion, of pumping blood. A vessel, moving through the tides of night. 

A living planet unto himself, so much like Crassus. 

Does he know she will consume him? Perhaps. In the parts of him that are Ren. Whatever remains of the man struggles against this repatriation with his flesh… and Ikora.

His tenor booms below the high ceilings. 

"Submit your silent query."

Cards whisper over varnish and lace while afternoon emerges through Beth's curtains in Thelonious Monk’s left-hand stride; piano-bending light. Brooklyn always sounded sepia to him. Dust has a brass section. Beth's silence, monochrome, like his dreams. 

"Hold your question in your mind."

Ben slips a thumb beneath the top card, edge meeting skin with the taste of burnt sugar, a low C blooming behind his eyes, round as a bell pealing in spring.

The King of Hearts.

Wedding bells—that's it—warm brass and white linen. The king’s face remained impassive. Ben’s did not. 

"Are you asking about marriage, Riley?"

Slowly, he turns the card over and leaves it reversed. An upside-down King of Hearts watching the slopes of Beth's shoulders for movement, her mouth, her eyes. To see if she hears the bell begin to toll. 

"You'll marry for love,” Ben says, pointing his gaze at the painted king beneath his thumb. Stealing another glance at Beth anyway. "But you'll be hurt."

His gentle delivery, a tone he reserves only for Beth, does not hide the certainty in his voice. 

"Not by your husband—he won’t be your undoing,” he says softly. “It'll be by another man.”

He turned his head, and without fully looking, murmured

"Shut the fuck up, Annora."

Just before the aerosol and the garment brush (like the band wasn't going out to sign and wave in fucking 'helmets'), and the hashing out of whose security detail would flank the carpet (like Hollywood SWAT hadn't swarmed the place), Kylo had warned her. He would go to Snoke. They would establish new terms surrounding what could and could not be said between them.

Never had he ever thought Annora could get to him.

Now he just said, "Shut up or do something."

Grabbed his mask and muttered, "I'm on."

Stormed the loading dock doors, toward the roar, and joined the others.

Never had he ever thought he'd grow tired of the sound of screaming.

She had found him pinned between the seat and the steering wheel, the partially ejected airbag gutting him. Otherwise, he couldn't feel a thing.

He'd never seen a flash fire so close up before. His eyes were blown wide and black as jet, dancing with the flames that had devoured four people.  

She had crossed a thousand dreams. He could barely hear her voice for the hissing blaze. She blurred before his eyes. She fought the smoke to fill his lungs. 

She fought as the fifth woman had fought, without knowing what opening the door of a burning car would cost. 

"It's too late. Her friends were already dead. She shouldn't have opened the door. I wish I could have told her not to. I wish I'd told her not to open the door." 

Somehow, he understood that he wasn't speaking, even without registering his half-open mouth lying on a crushed nylon lung. Filling with blood the way the airbags filled with nitrogen. 

"It’s too late.”

Sometimes, even dangerous situations felt like playing pretend, like battling in the tall grasses, leaping from the bases of massassi trees, hoping, though not really, a woolamander would clamber into the clearing, veering straight at them. Striking at clouds of gnats with their training staffs, prattling about what they’d do, how they’d Force jump, whether they’d pull off a Saber Swarm or a Hawk-Bat Swoop.

His uncle’s comment scintillated; it was exactly the sort of line that would make Voe puke, and in which Ben found a secret thrill. 

“Yeah!” Ben chimed in, finger hovering over Han Solo’s blaster trigger. It was like a battle cry. Then he turned a red-blue-tinged cheek toward Obi-Wan and frowned. 

What was a Sith Lord? 

The woman poised before them wore black robes and a cauterized slash across her breastbone. The light from Obi-Wan’s saber danced upon the markings on her brow. 

“They don’t make Jedi at all,” she litled. "You’re the last of your stock.”

A beat. A stillness in the air… Ben looked toward camp. 

“Oh, yes,” the woman told Obi-Wan, as if she’d just remembered. “Your padawans. I’ve killed the ones that I could find. I’ve killed the comms, crippled the engines, liquidated your livestock. Burnt the crops—” 

The red-saber wielders’ line of vision swept over little Ben. She smiled.