3u3

exploring themes of healing, ageing & changing identity, healing through violence & healing after violence (inflicted & received), & gender/sexuality.  primarily residing on the border between horror & slice of life stories.

primary/most active muses: eden ziegler

wip muses, but whose characterisation i would like to devote time to: ana maria, selina k.yle, audrey h.orne, dream (s.andman)

memes, rules, google slides.

  ‘ yeah, you’re not kidding. ’  ellie smiles. she can’t believe she didn’t see it before, though she’s never been great with faces.    ‘ my brothers are twins. identical. but — very separate pains in the ass. ’ 

‘ no way. ’  she doesn’t sound genuinely surprised — interested, rather. she’s studying eden’s features as if seeing them for the first time. ‘ i won’t lie to you, the album was a gift, but — he is. ’  a genius. ‘ i interviewed his partner a few years back. you look like him. ’  

yes, he sees it.

he doesn’t know what it means, or how bad it will get before it spends itself. how can you contain the entire collective unconscious, death once asked him in exasperation, and still not know anything? but he is dream, not an interpreter of dreams.

“Matters?”   he gives them a brief glance. his elder brother might have something to say on the subject.   “If only interference matters, then I suppose not.”

he sits on an ironwrought bench that may or may not have been in the dream a moment before. his robes billow over the side.

“I am… observing. What you do is your choice. You are welcome to wait with me.”   there is room on the bench.

they’re still young enough (or maybe they’re circling back, as their mind is wont to do) to try and make sense of these things. it is the way of a prophet to try and understand, is it not? it’s why they so often go mad.

they sit without thinking: the kind of automatic action that comes so easily in dreams, becoming little more than a leaf in the stream of their own subconscious. it’s a funny little scene, they think. sitting here with a creature that belongs here when they so clearly do not. he seems to ebb and flow with the wind. perhaps they are more like a heavy pebble sinking to the bottom of a river than a gliding leaf after all.

     ‘ thank you, ’  she has a terribly gentle touch, though most expect the opposite from her. she who has such a sharp tongue ought to have equally sharp nails: but even the former isn’t as true of her as so, so many people in this town seem to think. as a child, her mother never did anything like this, and she hasn’t got any sisters, or any – well, anyone at all but laura, really.

@rekant said:   ❛ the storm’s getting worse. ❜ eden @ dream

“It’s the way of storms to get worse.”

the dreaming is a wonderful, terrible place for prophets. the abstract incarnates as the literal — leaves ripping from trees, the crackling sky, rain hitting pavement as if it wants it to bruise. time bites its own tail to join the future to the present: is this what’s coming? is this what’s coming? is this what’s coming?

none of it disturbs morpheus. he did not come to stop what should be, will be, or is. he came because he was made for it: to be the eye of the storm.

“Would you warn me, little Fate? Or do you fear for yourself?”

     ‘ what good is warning you. you see it coming, too. ’

a storm isn’t a terribly frightening thing, especially when it’s just in their head. it gets a lot worse in here, and eden can’t feel their brain leaking out their ears when they’re sleeping.

they don’t mind playing the observer, even when fear feels different in dreams. something you might rationalise otherwise creeps under your skin, slides between the little notches in your spine and gets so, so cold. there’s no getting used to the feeling of something grazing the back of your neck, causing those little hairs to stand on end; but eden has gotten as close as anyone possibly could.

besides, what can they do but watch?

      ‘ no words known to you. ’  lightly teasing:  a little tug at the corner of their mouth, where a cigarette hangs loosely, jumping with each word.

the rain picks up just a few feet from where they’re standing.  though the awning provides a little cover, raindrops splash against the pavement, ricocheting until they catch the bottoms of eden’s trousers, the tops of their socks.

‘ i can see why. ’ 

after the accident (which is how her father had referred to it for a little while, even after it was so, so clear what had happened), the church held a fundraiser slash vigil, summoning hopes and prayers for town darling laura palmer (though, when people started thinking of her in that way couldn’t be clearer). ben couldn’t bring his poor, sorry self to show up (lest he burst into flames crossing the threshold of a holy site), so audrey made an appearance on behalf of the family, with a blank cheque and ben horne’s illegitimate signature.

presently, they’re stopped on the sidewalk, looking at the remnants of a water-damaged poster tacked to a telegraph pole:  laura’s beaming visage staring down at them.

touché — she’s never seen audrey’s room before. come to think of it, she’s never even been inside her actual house: just the cabin where they stay over christmas, where all that’s truly personal is ben’s liquor cabinet; of course, laura understands that. there’s family, and then there’s business. then there’s this, whatever they are to one another. 

“how, um,” she clears her throat, still trying to be quiet, though it’s hard to sound too concerned, “how’s his face, is it awful?”   

‘ he’s not telling anyone what happened. ’  but with the way audrey looks at him, smirking and disdainful, he must know she thinks he deserved it. must think she knows something to think that at all, beyond girlish amusement at her father’s misery. she wonders if that frightens him. perhaps he can see the threads unraveling.  ‘ he expects us all to play along. ’  you know how he is. 

“That shows how much you know.”

Maggie’s sharp when she feels obvious. When she’s in a proper place. The fug of brandy and expensive cigar smoke. Even the barmaid is a cut above.

She wears lace made by a machine: she knows the difference, she knows brass, too, and she knows glass. Good glass, cut glass, bends light like a mirror in the sun. Maggie feels it flare across her skin when Faye touches her drink to her lips. When she lowers it, the lights stop, her lipstick leaving a perfect disruption in the rim where a spectrum of colour ought to dance. No light passes where Faye’s lips have been.

She doesn’t understand her. She doesn’t understand her place here. She thinks - she doesn’t know what she thinks.

“He’s married…you wouldn’t think it how they all carry on.”

even this place, with all its lush furniture and hundred year old whiskey, doesn’t hold a candle to faye. it still holds traces of those who have moved through it; scuffs on the seats, discarded glasses not yet scooped up and removed.

faye wears a fur so soft you could lay your head on it and fall right asleep, a silk evening gown that looks like she was sewn right into it: like she’ll have to tear it apart when the evening is done, discarding it as these people with wealth discard much of their finery, only to have it replaced with something newer and shinier so soon after.

she shrugs. her clothing shifts (slips, really. smooth fabric on soft skin), but does not crease, around her.

‘ they’re all married. ’