#cadmys

books of sorrow   /   selectively accepting!

Her cheap bottle of red is already half gone, her mouth tacky with the bitter taste of it. She swirls the last of her big glass and stares at nothing in particular, Will’s words an echo in her head. It doesn’t matter where she looks, sometimes, because sometimes all she can see is the knife and the stomach she had slipped it into. There’d been no give; her flesh had simply… parted. 

There is something like a thrill pulsing in her belly. She swallows another gulp of wine, and looks at her colleague. Her friend. 

‘ Do you really think you can kill him? ’   The question is fantastically blunt, her dark eyes full of skepticism. She thought she could kill Villanelle. She even tried. She’s not sure she could ever do that again. The scar on her breast throbs. 

But Will is — different. Driven more personally, she feels. There is a dulled sense of rage around him at times, as palpable as the red wine that clings to the roof of her mouth. It makes her anxious. It makes her ashamed. You should have killed her. After what she did to Bill. Why haven’t you killed her? Why aren’t you angrier at her?

He hasn’t answered her, and she doesn’t blame him. It’s a terribly intrusive question. Her glass rings against the wood table when she sets it down, a dim thud, while she shuffles in her seat. Her small hands move to the mass of dark curls that fall gracelessly around her face. She spends some time sweeping it up, tying it together with the scrunchy around her wrist. He’s right about love and death being the same thing now. Maybe he’s the only one who gets that. Niko wouldn’t understand he’s too — good. Too kind, too caring, too perfect. 

Boring. 

She snatches the glass up again, downs the rest of the wine, tears her hair back out of its scrunchy.   ‘ Forget I asked that. Seriously. We’re supposed to be getting pissed tonight, not waxing poetic about—  ’   she waves her free hand in the air as she pours herself another generous glass of wine and then leans over to pour Will another two ( three ) fingers of whiskey. There’s less rage in him today she feels when she slumps back in the cushions of her seat, glass held against her chest, just above the scar. In fact, he looks amused. Villanelle would tease me in front of him about my shitty taste in wine if she were here. The thought makes her chest ache. 

Her eyes shift back to meet his.   ‘ I think it already is the same. And I think you feel that way too. ’

@cadmys​      :       ' The face you give the world tells the world how to treat you. '

IF ASKED IN ALL SERIOUSNESS      :       spotlight on her      &      solely her,      the world holding its breath for her answer,      to describe herself,      vanya would be left incapable of response.      she is a girl and not a mirror.      she can look down at her hands      —      callused from too many years of violin,      the music a kind of weapon long before that became literal      —      but she cannot look at her own face with any sort of truthfulness.      (   or is it that she is both girl      &      mirror      —      reflecting back on the people around her?      she defines herself by career,      by orchestra,      by family - or - lack - thereof.      the chapter in her book about her own life had been the shortest by far.   )

          there are few men as untouched as will graham in the face of a joker in full war paint.  as detached,  too.  plainly afraid or overexcited,  most people tended to show where the scales weighed most ;  most people just didn’t look like they’d been dealing with terrorists in clown makeup the whole day before meeting him.  his own comes away in crusts at the spots where the skin frequently creases,  but the dark circles around the eyes and the red gash from cheek to cheek look only freshly painted.  he tests the red of his mouth with a whip of his tongue,  and hums at the taste of clay.  the handcuffs tentatively clang,  and so do his teeth when he bites off a breath.  i know you’re not sorry,  why should you be?  not a flash of them through the well-pressed line of his lips.  the joker smiles unsettlingly well without teeth to show :  if it wasn’t for the paint,  even with those ugly scars,  he could pass for a disgraced but civil young man. 

          it’s an act,  a performance.  he performs the smile of the average man and howls in laughter shortly after.  graham bears it like a good christian,  turning the other cheek in silence and patience.  or so it seems.  the joker knows things are never as they seem.  there is silence in will graham’s eyes of a wholly different kind,  the genesis of a seed plowed beneath a layer of green like something only the earth understands.  his jaw,  unhinged between the spasms,  settles with a cracking sound.

          “  you answer,  aay-gent.  ”   the joker grins at last,  adjusting to the backrest,  making himself comfortable as if he hadn’t been before.  “  heard what i do is,  uh,  kinda frowned upon.  personally i disagree with all these ... societal expectations.  dontcha,  prof?  find a legal job,  get married,  have ... ah,  have children,  don’t commit mass murder.  too many,  uh?  you’re gonna slip on a thing or another.  ”   he mimics a wave with one hand.  the slipping part.  aren’t you hungry,  will graham?  hungry for the ground?   

  THE SEA IS DISTANT AND DARK-EDGED. She is distant and dark-edged. Just bare of an arms reach Raynne stands across from him, set onto the stone wrought landscape as if she is part of it, silhouette lean and black. A shadow of something missing from the picture. The high collar of her expensive coat is turned up against the small tugs of wind, both hands dipped into pockets, fisted. Nothing but a single line in the grey, whelming skies, a tangle of dark hair to make a girl. For once the waves are calm, the wind plied down, and so they must stay caught here in the quiet, be forced to hear each other.

   I knew that you were killing them in New Orleans.

   Like dead stars, her eyes stay with him. Cold, bleeding light. Aberrant and lovely.

   She could answer him honestly. There is enough truth in her to strip flesh away, Raynne knows, enough to cut down into the bone. She has always been good at that, really. Unkindly angling words into blades. Never had he admitted that out loud, and now the plain effect of it finds her like a bullet. Nearly flinching.

   ‘ We've known each other for a long time, Hannibal and I. ’  

   We. There is no we. There is only them in the room, the animal of them and her. Just the two of them. What is she now but the gatekeeper to this place on other side, a living garden she built and gave over to each in turn, palms up. Here, blood to write in, for once not your own. There is no question of forgiveness in her, because that would require offence.

   But she is offended now, isn’t she? Or, threatened. He is still beautiful here with the flare caught around him, righteous heat in his own mouth, perhaps more so as he asks things that he knows will hurt. What would that make us? He wants her to assure him or dissuade him, to peel back the feelings of hurt and gut whatever might be left. Clean it all out.  ‘ You could have stopped me. You could have stopped him. ’  Flat, awful facts. She wants them said.   ‘ Can you take no responsibility for that? All this time with me  —   with him, alive  —  what does that make you even now, Will? ’ Complacent. Does it make you self-righteous in love, too?

  He says her name again and a pressure grips the back of her jaw. A swollen, sudden pressure. The urge to lock those jaws around something living comes fiercely with it. Find a soft animal to shake, break its neck like predators know how. Lips part all at once as if to sooth that urge, face turned away while a trace of warm air seeps out, breath too hot in the sinking evening. Sleek, controlled. Muzzling the thing in her as if he is calling it out.

   Will is not soft, not for a long time past  —  neither of them are. His barbs derange her in some way, like a hook in the belly, tugging downwards. A stiff, sharp pain. A snare. So she steps away, back, towards the edge of the cliff and the sheeted dropoff. Just there; too close, as she always does; as he hates. Without space though, she will reach for the first thing alive, and she still does not wish to hurt him yet. Instead, a dull boot disturbs the scatter of gravel as she leans, precarious and stupid, over the lip to see the inky crash of waves so far below. She used to do that in New Orleans too when they slunk onto rooftops where she would smoke while they were still drunk, him chiding gently for the habit; how she used to climb up to the old buildings’ edges, watch the street below; surely he does not reach out for her now.

   ‘ Trust. ’  Bitter, sinking. Again her eyes find him, steady and rooted in bleakness, a feral lonely so apart from the rest of her body held taut, perfectly still.   ‘ He was always going to hurt you  —  what else would this be? I knew what he wanted from us both when I saw you there in the room, yes. I understood. And what would you have done should I have turned and pulled you out of the den  —   the apostles are all dead. You are your own creature, always. You are the same thing as both of us, gutted and unable to die, kept alive by the same hands that put the knife to you. ’ It feels like something rending into the back of her ribs, admitting all of this. Any of it. She has to say it slowly, holding down against the throat of the growl she’d like to voice instead. Do you know that the love you spill into the world is terrible to see, that it envokes terror; is there room enough for any of us within each other, or do we only pass through, transient in the perfect guilt of our understanding? Weight shifts only barely, the low creature in her poised to leap. If I step out, will you stop me?

   ‘ Would you like to see the scar he gave me, too, William? ’

   That is part of their shared cruelty, isn’t it? Tender evocation left aside for the hard hands of their own direction, a single word she does not hear any more. Don’t say my name. She had told him that once. Caught in the side of his neck, pressed through fever skin. Don’t say that. I’ll remember myself. I’ll come out of the dark.

you must have known i’d do this, she thinks, her face almost comically nonplussed. wasn’t it terribly obvious, what her choices were? besides, one way or another the thread of her would have passed over the thread of hannibal in the bloody tapestry of will’s life. better in her mind ( and in her gut ) that she stitch the cross herself.

  “ you don’t know much about certain parts of my past, but i promise you i’m better equipped to handle a serial killer than the average person. ”   she calls him that bluntly, mercilessly, while carelessly sidestepping the obvious truth of her words: better is not best. they both know it, but she has all the headstrong, reckless bravery of her older brothers and a cunning that had been etched into her skin with chain and poison. will knows some of this too, and so his answering sigh of exasperation comes as no surprise to her. a disarmingly genuine smile creases her face, and suddenly she looks her age, young and bright and carefree.   “ i know how to take care of myself will. ”

that’s what i’m afraid of, his eyes tell her. i have seen the works wrought by his hands, monuments of the most tender violence, symphonies of brutal disdain, tapestries of deific apathy. you’ve seen pictures ; they do no justice.

the silence pulls between them, thick as fog, and her smile slides from her face and she ages again, sad and tired. she can see the terrible, beautiful, monstrous things in his eyes sometimes. reflected and inverted, distorted by memory and love. and she wonders what he sees when he looks into her eyes. corpses, cold and naked. faces skinned and waiting. teeth. distorted by memory and hate.

  “ it’s too late now, ”  she finally says, wanting to plunge a knife through the aching quiet. something in his face seems to settle, the pain in his expression easing, or perhaps being shuffled away into some compartment to be sectioned off before it could infect more of him. he nods once, sharply, dropping his gaze from hers.

His posture,  straight against the backrest and martial,  is a mocking one.  The room smells stale.  The Joker inhales through his nostrils like a dragon.  It’s all for the drama of it,  of course ;  he’s a showman, regardless of however small the public he can work with is.  The public is small this time.  Just a cop looking at him grimly through the greenish reflection of his lenses.  He does not look like a cop,  though,  Joker observes :  he does not have the smell on him.  The rancid smell of sweat and cigarettes and fear.  Fear,  especially,  stinks particularly bad on cops ;  pungent,  like rot.  But he doesn’t have it on him.  The Joker has a hound’s nose for that.  He chews on the insides of his scarred cheeks,  evaluating this Graham, W. with keen,  dark eyes.

‘  And,  uh,  what are you?  Hmmmh?  Where are you on the,  ah,  the food chain?  ’

It’s not a real question :  the Joker’s lips twitch around a lower halting tone,  a full stop.  It’s not just the intonation that constitutes a question,  it’s the intention of the speaker.  With it,  the clown decides that the cop has a place within the food chain.  But urgently,  more with the eyes than with words,  he’s spurring him to take the spot the Joker arbitrarily assigned him.  Wherever that might be,  not even Joker knows.  ‘  Betting my bucks oooonnn ... FBI?  Oh wait,  uh-huh,  criminal psychology?  Ya look like one who loves puttin’ people into neat little boxes.  And why is that?  ‘Cause it,  uh,  helps you sleep at night?  Or because you’re afraid they won’t find a box for ya?  Hmh?  ’

The Joker is profiling.  

The last pull-in before the border perches in an itchy beard of ripe rosehip. During the day, the hips pinch red like gnome hats, little chili peppers from coloring books.  

Chiyoh looks up to link hearing the ghost of a smile with seeing it. But Will’s kaleidoscope face absorbs the evidence film-reel quickly and if she stares longer, she’ll start noticing all the angles in which he looks like he’s bursting.

“It makes me rude back.”

At sundown, it froths with human yeast. A bald one, with a head shaped like an artichoke, slabbed into her way and waited there. For just a moment, he smelled of a wine cellar’s years-gardened filth. Shit and tears and growing things. Chiyoh felt her heart between her tonsils.

He didn’t like her knife when she teased it out of her pocket and it gleamed like a wet tooth pointing at his sandbag gut. He looked like a chicken in a slaughterhouse. A chicken with hands. Red at the neck, he raised them. He made space—his gut went first, then the rest, and Chiyoh passed without a second glance but with her pyramid of spurgos sweating in her sachet. Four for her and five for Will.

At night, it crowns around Will and the greasy bench they’re stuck to. The single lamp fans shadow on his strange shave. He does nothing and looks more a European than the people here have ever let Chiyoh be.

violet spots him from her car parked just at the mouth of the neighborhood’s entrance,  positioned innocuously between two other cars  --  presumably belonging to the residents of the neighborhood.  she had relied on being alone in this particular stretch of the neighborhood,  as that would have made her job all the more uncomplicated.  so she waits.   &   waits.   &   WAITS.  then, with a groan,  she drags herself out of the car   &   flags him down with the utmost congenial wave of the hand.  only when she’s close enough for a conversation at a reasonable volume does she grin   &   shove her hands in the pockets of her leather jacket.

❛   how y’doin’, guy?  you lost?  lookin’ for a certain address or --?   ❜