#evilie

If you paint, no one cares when your spittle lands on their faces.

If you sing, then no one is really listening to how you talk to them.

If you write, no one thinks that it’s wrong to have to mind your every base needs.

If you carve, and you polish, the maid walks around with teeth pushed a half-ilm too high into those flushed gums and no one says anything. 

Sew, and sew gorgeously, and sew in gold and lace, then no one complains and everyone bites their lip when you prick them like dolls for display.

Love, and love fully, and love with the right words and the tender moments, and no one can bear to weigh your personhood against that love. No gravity and its hungry fangs; no spectre with a mother’s eyes; no red-twined pool of life; no love to the end of all loves. No one. 

To be an artist means that no one minds the dirty little pacts they sign with you. Anything to be closer to you, the privilege of seeing that dazzle light up from the source. A morbid affair where they walk out a little more used, a little more hesitant on the step, and a little more loose on the bargains they’ll make with you, over and over again.

And they walk out that door, and they fasten their clothes, and they wipe away the pretty smears and they’ll lie to people later about those wounds. And when others ask of the time spent with you, they’ll tell them that the experience was transcendent, and profound. To be touched by you was a trigger of metamorphosis. An intimacy inaccessible by any other soul; you, a creature of niche and hook. 

Of course others would never understand the sheer humanness of it all; that celebration of everything so much more meaningful than life at its manifest, somehow able to be narrowed down to your inked skin and the picture-perfect part to how you hold your lip. An intoxication that bears down like ill-fit skin in that moment, but they’ll always speak of fondly.

You cannot tell me that any mechanism throbs stronger.

You cannot tell me that their blood sings free.

You are a lantern, and the bugs buzz.

The bugs are looking at you. 

You cannot.

You.

Every pleasure has been born of this.

Love is an art, and you, an artist.

That brush begs for you.

They beg for you.

“Encore.”

You.

And that’s where you give them it.

Here, is where the world begins.

Where the dazzle comes from.

Where it all lights up.

You always do.

Showtime.

Why do you put up with this? Huh?

Don’t pretend you don’t notice how they see you.

I said, fucking look.

Faces that say “what is this thing and why should I care,” You’re a curiosity at best, really.

Who is this clown, they must be asking themselves. All done up in her red and gold greasepaint.

The way she looked down the nose of those shitty round glasses at you, the first time you met, and what were the first words out of her mouth? Don’t pretend you didn’t notice, don’t pretend they didn’t rattle in your skull for the rest of the night, bounding around with every pulse of bass from the concert speakers.

You introduced yourself, and she mocked you. She took your friendly gesture and told you right where you could go stick it, and she shoved a drink tray in your new friend’s hand to obediently trail after her like a lapdog.

You should have gotten angry. You should have fed her her fucking teeth; you’ve done so for so much less before.

Remember? You were a fucking marauder, Rem. Someone spat in your eye like that and you blackened theirs. 

You should know better than anyone that your reputation was the only thing you had worth defending.

Sure, your hands are coarse. But they’ve at least fucking worked and bled and scraped.

But you turn to her again for work. You spend days bouncing around notaries to get your paperwork in order. You even invite your best friend over to help you learn how to pronounce the name of her fucking winery and once the paperwork was signed and stamped, oh, what did she say to you? “You’re sweet. We are not friends.”

And she’s not the only one you follow with your tail between your fucking legs.

You thought you’d be decent. Take the high road, Remeraux. Invite the fucking viscountess out for coffee. Maybe if you get to know her, you’ll stop wanting to throttle her every time she talked about her manor. Her estate. 

(She’s twenty five turns old, Remeraux. She’s twenty five fucking turns old and don’t you forget she has two goddamn palaces. Burn that one into your fucking skull.)

And every day until the appointed day, she jerked you around. Stop playing off those barbs and jabs. Don’t let her get away with some sob story about ‘a noble has to be a stuck-up bitch because to do otherwise would lose her everything.’ She would never end up with less than what you started out with. So what if her house is ruined. So what if all of their houses are ruined?!

Don’t forget how you felt when you heard that the Dragonsong War finally ended, and some fragment of common fucking sense down in your stupid fucking guts felt bad that the wrong side won!

Let her live in her stupid, godsdamned city and play her stupid, godsdamned games until their bones are as cold as the city they’ve set up shop in!

Why do you want their approval so fucking badly?

Why do you fucking care?!

Why do you keep making a fool of yourself in front of them over and over again as if their approval would finally fill the hole inside of you where inside a thousand thousand voices just like theirs told you were less than nothing?

She’s so curious.

Silence is a veneer, a glossy polish that would obscure if not for that eye that so-easily hones upon the shape of it. A pelt may change, but the options of how one shapes the animal is much less magical in its transformation. 

So you see it. The tourniquet tie-off of nerves that could twitch and leap through those arms, their palms and fingers, if permission were given to trace. If she could spiral back the way you would spiral in that returning; feel the heat of a smaller hand guiding her back through a fresh path just walked together, encounter the fade of impermanent humanity, and renew decrepit roads to fallen empires.

She wants to know everything about you.

Of course she does.

Why wouldn’t she?

Why doesn’t she?

When do you unlock that door?

And why don’t you?

Maybe it’s too much confidence in the self formulated only through that tread. Maybe it’s better to be insecure in love, feel the need to sacrifice and give gifts and flesh with a shakily looped and misshapen linen-ribbon. I, as myself, am not enough - so I give you this, and I pardon myself for the time being. 

That’s certainly common enough, the tactic of piecemeal melancholy as diversion. She’s done it herself. When someone needs to think she’s sad like them, precious and intimate and listen to her, darling. She has no issue weaving the tales and pressing on knobbled scar tissue until she finds a blood pocket, and expresses it.

Sharing isn’t the obstacle.

Maybe it is that confidence. 

Maybe she is too confident in this to give the extraneous unto another. 

At first she thought, perhaps I find myself too ugly, shaken into shyness and a croak to her storytelling after the lesson learned of uncaring love. But that couldn’t be it (not because of the discrepant allure), because she has already shared the true ugliness of those times. Not the details, the paint and the lacquer, but what she did - what she’s capable of.

Yeah. Maybe that’s it.

That’s all that really matters.

As long as she knows.

And still makes the choice in that.

She demolished the Hingan books that had been waved around without an idea of their contents. Some classics, some collections, that she enjoyed: the mythologies always a delight no matter its repetitiveness; some ancient record of old families that should occasionally prove useful to Evilie over the next epochs; an epic that made her think, briefly, of a cleanly man in a bare room as the archaic characters pieced together smoothly under her eye… unfortunately, it seemed that the most ‘regal’ text of Gramond’s display, with its embossed and cracked, ‘gold’-filled, designs swirling around its leather, was nothing more than a charlatan’s woodblock stamp of the Thousand Character Classic’s first quarter, flipped one way then the other, for the hundreds of pages within.

Those were all taken care of a while ago.

So then she moved onto some other things. She sought more fables akin to the book she had been gifted, almost brought home the Alchimie de Flammelaux until she actually opened it and realised it was all about skin creams, and she read up on Ishgard’s more integral lore as well. Not because she supposed she cared about it at all herself, and more because she had clued herself in of Breandan’s interest there at some point.

Then they spoke of the Game, and Xiaohu realised she found herself in an environment versed but her route of navigation changed and now queer to her.

And that could not do.

So, then. She moved onto the much thicker pieces she had scrolled by without thought dozens of times before. The ones she had to pinch, almost like a cigarette, old glasses much too large to fit upon her own ears for, and hold between herself and the crowded characters before her. Stop, here, there, and quite a lot of times, actually, and mouth over the elden tongue of Ishgard. Once, twice, until context and equivalency in fluent tongue found her mind and she could nod and move on: fais comme fait; facio ut facias - gestion d’affaires; negotiorum gestio. Take her notes, play with the sorts of situations in her mind in which these guidelines possess their relevance. Put down some more notes, but with more room to scribble when she eventually takes some of this to Brighid and hears out her mode of attack on them.

She’s not quite fond of this.

She prefers a much looser arrangement, the theatre there in black mist and the simple capacity to eliminate at will. But this is what her partner walks, and where Evilie walks, she will observe.

But she cannot deny the roused occupation of her mind here than there. To read until she feels as though words coil through every square ilm of her mind; that quite-physical sensation wrapped around the cranium like the afterglow of exercise of a kind. To read and lire and étudier and to study.

And sometimes, in lieu of this mental strengthening, she raises her eyes to a thoughtful lover. There, she advises. And it all sprawls before the mindeye of her’s as it always has and always does and always will. Opinion laid, though it was never to be intercepted by anyone much less one treasured. Complexity reduced to step-by-step; easier said than done, ‘lest her hands found the work themselves and acted, somehow thoughtless and yet full of everything unthought of, under her primal order.

But command is not mutual, so she only counsels.

…

…

…

…from what she has heard of this ‘Gramond’, he had a tendency to command with a hand more feeble than those commanded. Which was the most significant of a tirade of mistakes, seeing that command is, ultimately, a deliverance of promises whether obeyed or challenged.

Which only aligns with the fact that the only mention of his life that she heard so far, that was not passing, involved the drone of faerie tales to his daughters. Grandeur in insubstance; promises with a catch meant to invalidate the contract.

…

…

It is natural in the way of partnerhood, she thinks, to develop distaste for the other’s parentage. A lover protects, and so a lover rages against malpractice in the hands that had shaped the other. And death is not truly gone, so he has no excuse nor escape to not be known.

If she were less certain of herself here, she would wonder if this is only the bristle of instinct. But she has never failed in assessment and evaluation–– so the prominent thought is that she would have disliked him even if she had naught to do with Evilie at all.

She only has more evidence, and reason, than she would have otherwise.

…

In fact, the evidence is everywhere.

The evidence is in the study.

The evidence is on the walls.

The evidence is counted in the ledgers.

Evidence innumerable. More evidence than she may speak in one, two, three, suns. Industry she has more-than-familiarized herself with, written within annals for epoch upon epochs upon centuries, and then suddenly abandoned. Absence of plodding, greaved, march that ought to be sweeping in and out from these manor grounds like blood flow. Adulthood, reached too quickly, seen in those very subtle lines on the faces of two daughters and their humour too gutting to denote a proper period given for innocence. That sadness of stagnancy and entrapment that has, only recently, left from her gut when she enters this unliving home.

…

…

Gramond was feeble.

She could have, and would have, drained the House empty if it had been him, and not Evilie, to take her service. He was the sort of feeble that just begs for a kick in the face; a hound that doesn’t know how to wait for the scraps and your boot is right fucking there.

She doesn’t like him.

…

She doesn’t like anything about him short of the fact that he ‘reigns’ no more.

She’s never thought of it that way before, not until she and Kowa had spoken. The man is simply too vaporous and ambient to provide him much thought unless purpose has identified itself. He’s a pricking little thing (because he was a prick) in the manor air. Like some gnat buzzing beyond your ears or a sunbeam shining in some annoying place.

How annoyingly, fucking, pervasive.

…

…

…

…

…

She reads until the linkpearl chimes and she is informed that meal is two-bells cold by now.

And within the entire time, her assessment has been remade.

Refined.

Reduced.

Down… and down.

Chiseled from wandering thoughts and a wandering mind until little more can be taken from it.

I’m glad he’s vanishing.

That’s all that needs to be said.

“...I am glad that may be the worst of her ills in this life."

And that’s extra.

You, in other words.

It surprised her as much as it surprised Evilie; the first time she crawled to her. You know, the first time they fucked, Xiaohu faked a smoking habit just to get away from her— just stop touching me— “I get touched a lot”— why does she want to touch me— and lit up a couple crushed, stale, cigarillos. She wasn’t thinking about her either: the woman all-but-screaming, love me, look at me, touch me. Not really. Not with any real pleasantness. It was a lot of why did I fuck her? and how the fuck did she survive this long? sprinkled amidst her wandering mind as they talked.

She was thinking about how the guy that got her these smokes might have been fun too if she didn’t spend that whole night philosophising with him (but she didn’t want to reward the jealous negging that night). And thinking about ‘work’, that she was fucking upset that they didn’t listen and now Silvestre was out there, cold and hurt, while she was… doing this. Pushing down how fucking angry she was about doing this, that another person was puppying after her again because they just wanted to spill onto her.

But she didn’t cry that time, so Evilie had that going for her.

Which was something because there wasn’t a lot there, at the time. It was a weird sort of dance they played at, for a while. They weren’t really having a good time together, she remembers that. She thought Evilie was desperate, embarrassing. And Evilie thought she was fucking cruel.

Both are true, by the way.

But they kept revolving back, they kept up the “I’ve never felt this with anyone but you”s when she wasn’t yelling, and Evilie wasn’t crying. It was fucked up - nothing more, or nothing less. Just because they’re more than fantastic now doesn’t mean it suddenly wasn’t fucked up. It was really fucked up.

She’d call it the patience of it all, but it wasn’t really patience. It was just the mundane sort of insanity that no one really talks about because everyone else is dealing with much more life-threatening shit. And it’s impolite to stick your nose in someone’s relationship affairs or some shit.

There’s really no way to explain it.

There was a sun in which she veered off the course.

When what felt right wasn’t the same thing that it had always been.

The first time she crawled into her lover’s arms, her M.O. changed.

Things went from why am I doing this; what do you want from me? to a different chant. It started sounding like, love me, look at me, touch me, in this sort of sing-song that even felt like it came from a different place. Like that changed too— like she reached a higher place than she did before. It wasn’t aching there in her gut anymore, behind her stomach and branching through the thickened bloodline there: this fang-bared I want you because you look good being weak for me. It went up, up, up, to her chest. That bloom at her sternum that liked to squeeze around the base of her throat until she could fucking choke on how much she feels that: I want you because you’re a fucking marvel.

And it felt good, really fucking good. It wasn’t too much like it had been before, it wasn’t something she had to regulate and ration. She didn’t feel bad about herself, she wasn’t scared of what Evilie wanted from her. It was the sort of space she could float through forever— how much she wanted Evilie to fucking hold her, and how much she knew this woman felt the exact same way.

So she just kept doing it.

Every time.

Every sun.

Love me; Look at me; Touch me; Forever you.

Mind, Words, Will, have a hidden power laced within them. 

A conversational thing that speaks to the tangible; I think, therefore you are.

The conversation has changed.

She can feel it.

The material of her has changed.

Things aren’t quite so malleable anymore. She doesn’t become because someone else said to.

Moonlight doesn’t hurt as much anymore: the bite scarred across her scalp rings quieter. And when she aches, she aches for something less than what she did before. Something less, and therefore, something much more pleasant than what previous rituals had demanded of her.

She is no longer a substance in which she is purified and distilled to bring forth the violent silver of her. She no longer craves this process of striding through a cold light unmeant for her creation. Again, and again, dreaming of the pain of her very components breaking apart underneath its glare. That old way in which it loved to watch her wade, smaller in humanness than the sun before, through the bloodfoam split from her.

The push-pull found in the ease of return, of order and science, now drowned by a new fulfillment in attachment than its opposing force.

In this alchemical way, she finds the purpose that has never, never, been solid in her hands.

She is inert.

And this is a good thing to be.

To coexist with the natural occurrences of this World.

Warmth radiates through the threshold of her home. The lustre of lights and laughter from the tavern below. The lazy saltheat held by the ocean breezing through open windows, absorbed and released at once by the pale stones of streets. The life held by seemingly ceaseless greenery, roses, and a red-leafed promise. The warmth of the body just three fulms of where she has sat herself atop of the bedside sill; their personhood intertwined with symbology.

None of this hurts like it used to.

She is inert.