#deviliscr

happiness begins.  /  accepting.  /  @deviliscr

Louis is so good.  Soma knows.  So did Cruz.  He is warm and loving and good, good, good, full - to - bursting with love and gentleness and unfathomable selfishness.  The selfless kind of selfishness that leads a boy to refuse a girl’s desperate wish to die.  The sick kind of selfishness that leads a man to allow a lover to reconstruct themselves in a dead god’s image.  Both rooted in love, and goodness, and yet neither loving or good.

Soma wonders if that is their fault.  They wonder if it was Cruz’s.  To allow a good man to be so loving that he became less - than - good.  Was it selfish, to ask him to kill her?  Was it selfish, to remake themselves so that he could love them?

Maybe.  Soma’s sorry.  For him.  For themselves, too.

Soma loves Cruz, because they can do nothing but love and love and try to be loved.  They wish it was her, here, instead of them.  Louis would be happier, and Cruz would deserve it more.  But Soma is here, and they are selfish and loving and good, just like Louis is and just like Cruz was, and they are in love, and Soma is good at not thinking much beyond that.

“I know you weren’t,” Soma says, misunderstanding, or perhaps understanding too well.  “You and Cruz were real.  She loved you with all of her.”  Soma knows, because she loves him with all of her, too, and it feels almost the same for them as it had for Cruz.  Cruz’s love was different because Cruz is different (  a comfort, if nothing else, that there IS A SOMA AT ALL  ) but it is the same pitch, the same intensity.  A different hue.  Two hearts loving him inside this body.  Cacophonous, but right.  Loving him will always be right.

questions.  /  accepting.  /  @deviliscr

Soma is grinning when he asks, leaning forward, hands on the piano bench between their legs, ENAMORED with the music he plays, heart beating too - slow in perfect time.  Their smile is huge and they love him and they are all but bouncing and Atropos ——-

Asks her if she is is HAPPY.  The smile doesn’t fall even when their head tilts, curious.  What prompted that?  They’re smiling, aren’t they?  They’re laughing, aren’t they?

(  the pain stabs now that she is not paying aggressive attention to something else.  it feels like dying.  they remember dying.  it feels like dying but worse / sharper / nerves coming into fires beneath their unbreaking skin.  she wants to scream but doesn’t.  )

Of COURSE she’s happy!!  She’s grinning beside her friend as he does something incredible!  She laughs, then, but it’s tinny and strange and she doesn’t understand why.  OF COURSE SHE’S HAPPY.

(  happiness feels like this, right?  happiness feels like holding your little brother’s hand / wait, no, not your brother / happiness feels like protecting your family / wait, no, not your family / happiness feels like —  )

Of course she’s happy.

(  happiness feels like what?  )

Their grin goes wider, teeth and fang flashing.  THEY DON’T LIKE THINKING ABOUT IT.  They’re smiling, and that should be enough ——!!

sage jester please give us the forbidden texts

& these bones.  /  accepting.  /  @deviliscr

That would be nice, wouldn’t it?  For an end.  Soma wonders what it would be like, to exist in peace, less a martyr or a sacrifice of a god’s last attempt at grieving.  She wishes she remembered being human.  The memories would enough to sustain them, they think.  They hope.  But ——

Hazy dreams.  That’s all.

It would be nice, not to BE THE WAR.  The rest of them are the healing after, but she martyr and murderer both.  Soma’s blood thrums and they are so much of the monster.  Soma was made / maybe not / remade to fulfill a grieving girl’s dream.  Soma can forgive that, she thinks.  Cruz was suffering, and Soma knows, because they suffer, too.  But Soma is…

Soma is the war.  So nobody else needs to be, right?

Atropos promises it won’t always be thus.  Soma smiles, far away.

& these bones.  /  accepting.  /  @deviliscr

Soma gazes up at him; she sits, quiet, while he stands and moves, a strange kineticism that she cannot understand.  Her legs are folded and her hands rest in her lap and her hands are red with blood.

Not his.  Not hers, either.  She could drink it, but that would be monstrous.  There’s blood on her cheek, too, spattered from the violence she’d completed and yet to wash away, but it bothers her less than what stains her fingers.

He is sharp.  Soma doesn’t understand him, but she understands being sharp.  (  all are weapons.  she was made to be the sharpest.  )  His is different.  Cruel.  They have blood on their hands but they are not cruel.

Thorns — Soma thinks of thorns when she looks at him.

He refocuses on them — closes the distance.  Gazes at them and the blood on their hands, spattered on their too - pale cheek.  His hand extends and they don’t wince or even blink when he grasps their chin, tilting her head this way and that as though in examination.

“What a pretty little disaster you will be,” they observe.  Soma’s eyes go half - lidded.

Thorns.  She doesn’t pull away.

“Yes.”  An easy agreement.  Soma understands what she is, after all.  “But not for you.”