#muse x reader

The steam fogs up your mind just enough to keep you grounded. You wash like you always do—quick, thorough, surgical—and you don’t linger because you’re not the kind of woman who needs the comfort of your own touch... or anyone else's for that matter. You're too used to being cold. Too used to starting your day with a list of things you have to do just to feel like the hours aren’t wasted. 

Breakfast follows—eggs, toast, herbal tea with cinnamon, and orange slices since the weather calls for it. 

You spy a magazine on the counter after your first warming sip. It's been there for weeks, opened on an article about Elegance in Negative Space. There's a page ripped out and a single fingermark of dried cherry peeling up the corner. You toss it in the trash can, eating with mechanical efficiency at your kitchen counter, scrolling your phone one-handed and sipping with the other. Distractions. You need  distractions. It works until something from the television tears you away from your weekly calendar.

The news. You swivel on your stool, mug and phone in hand. 

A flash of red on the flatscreen, slightly distorted from this angle as it faces the couch and not your kitchen. There's a stuttered frame, then a shaky video jerks into motion—raw, captured at the wrong perspective from someone’s camera phone.

You find yourself standing behind your sofa, hands empty at your side, watching the screen. The video pans across the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—a place you know well—each step decorated not with welcome banners or tourists or school groups, but with—

"Severed heads..." you say aloud, your own voice almost unrecognizable to your ears.

There's a dozen of them. Men and women. Old and young. All lined in grave procession, like jack-o-lanterns, their mouths gaping wide—stretched wider than living flesh permits—and stuffed inside those mouths are small, blood-soaked origami figures, soggy at the edges. Sleeping bodies folded into paper, slumped inside butchered mouths, their shapes dreamlike and prenatal. 

Like you, the critic whispers. Your fingers dig into the couch backrest. The camera video shakes, the image flickers, and your stomach lifts into your ribs.

The anchor on the television cuts back in as the video fades. You catch verbal segments ' police confirming nothing... insider speculation... signature technique... previously named Vincent Van Gore now commonly known as Muse, potentially Inhuman—' and the name lodges in your chest like a shard of glass.

"Muse." It tastes far sweeter on your tongue than something so blood-soaked should. 

The anchor repeats his name like someone who doesn't understand the weight of it, someone who doesn’t know how he stood outside your window, doesn’t know how you thought you dreamt him. But he's... he—

Your phone rings, making you jolt and yelp. An electric surge of adrenaline discharges down your spinal cord as you stumble to your countertop and pick up the call without considering the ID.

Sylvan’s voice slides through, unctuous, asking if you got his last message. You mumble an affirmative, clearly queasy, but he pays it no mind, asks if you’d be interested in dinner or coffee or maybe something stronger , always dancing around what he actually wants. Without thinking, you mumble— sure, fine, maybe —turning your attention back to the news, to the words scrolling beneath the anchor’s expressionless face.

BREAKING: SINGLE ORIGAMI MADE FROM MAGAZINE CLIPPING PLACED ON EAST-FACING STEP... INVESTIGATORS UNSURE OF SIGNIFICANCE... INTERVIEW WITH CHIEF OF—

Sylvan's still talking as a fawn response causes your hand, clutching the phone, to sag at your side. Your eyes move to the trash bin but dart away, back to something safe. They settle on a dust bunny against the wall, between the kitchen and the television. Sylvan's distant chatter never ceases, going on about some show, some gallery, connections he can make for you, but you’re not listening anymore. You don’t even say goodbye—you just hang up.

And then the week swallows you whole.

Time fractures into long blocks of silence interrupted by moments of hysterics and panic at the passing pigeons, groaning pipes, and wind whistling with shifts of the fall air pressure. You stop leaving your studio entirely, barricading yourself within its brick walls. You jam a chair beneath the doorknob of your bedroom at night. You order curtains but realize your 16-foot ladder barely reaches the halfway point on your windows. More time spent in your bedroom, away from the glass panes, and when you sleep, it’s under your bed—not on it—because that space feels smaller, safer—pentimento almost. 

Groceries, takeout, and material shipments arrive, left at the base of the building by request. You collect them in oversized hoodies and boots, avoiding eye contact from any onlookers, one foot in the building foyer for fear that you'll be grabbed and taken away if you break contact with your sanctuary—your home—a prison, maybe.

By day four, the intercom rings. Sylvan showing up unannounced, or maybe not. When your phone died on the second day, you didn't bother charging it. More come and go, all ignored, some friendly, some curious, one a wellness visit that you reluctantly answer with just enough information so that you're left alone. The buzzing stops on the fifth day, but somehow, the silence is worse.

Yet, during the day, you work. A drop cloth covers the monstrous head, so you don't compare everything else to it. 

You work like you’re trying to exorcise something through your hands—soaking down your unfinished sculptures, tossing them into slip bins while fresh clay forms hulking constructs, grotesque mutations of your old style, things with too many mouths and holes, unnaturally long limbs prying open their own ribs. You don’t name them—don’t sketch beforehand—just let the heat in your belly guide you until they dry, and when they do, when the skin tightens and the weight feels final, you lift them... and if you find them lacking, you tiptoe to the window opposite the fire escape, and toss them to the backstreet below.

You watch them all fall, limbs breaking, faces caving in, bloodless bodies turning to clumps and shards on the alley floor. 

At night, hiding under the bed, when you think the knocking of your knees are footsteps, you wonder if you’re supposed to join them down there. Is this what the late, great Edmondson experienced during his prophetic visions where God told him to chisel the first Tomb-Stones? That catalyst that propelled his sculptures was divine... are you hiding from your prophetic legacy? Under this bed. Beneath the grave of inspiration, nested in welcoming silks and down pillows. Hiding from Muse.

You don’t know if he will come again. But you know you want/don't want him to.

On the seventh night, sleep refuses you. You've swallowed magnesium pills, drank cherry-infused teas, even opened a year-old bottle of Klonopin prescribed to you during a gallery opening that left you with chronic nightmares from the stress... but nothing works, not tonight...

... and as the clock passes midnight, a feeling scrubs you clean—of just nothing . A numb, glacial absence takes residence until even the throb of your thoughts feels muffled, buried beneath cotton batting. Your limbs are heavy yet twitch with that electrical ache of sleeplessness, a paradox that draws you from under the bed frame into the cool sharp air of your bedroom. 

You remove the chair, open the door, and step outside, nothing but a baggy hoodie between you and darkness. The studio greets you without ceremony—quiet and ink-black, lit only by the dim streetlights bleeding in through the high-set windows. It should feel safe and familiar, but you still feel nothing .

Your sculptures stare. Each of them—those malformed things you birthed—feels sentient. Their shadows lean too far forward, reaching across the floor like arms poised to catch you, draw you under. You move faster, heart thudding in nothing-panic with nothing-fear . The gnawing, cavernous absence of feeling is unbearable.

Go outside, you tell yourself, sounding melodic. You'll feel better with some fresh air, won't you?

A pull anchors deep in your stomach, guiding you to the fire escape.

"Yeah," you agree. "Just some fresh air. I'll feel better."

You unlatch the window and crawl out, breath fogging in the cold as your knees scrape against the sill, fully naked under the loose fleece. Goose-pimples run up your legs. Your hot groin chills against an upward breeze, one that licks like ice up your belly, trapping around your collarbones, leaving your nipples stiff and aching.

You should go back inside— should —but that numbness starts to unravel the longer you stand there. The cold hurts , but the pain is something. The pain makes you real again. Nothingness starts to fade as you grip the icy railing, wringing free flakes of red rust as you lean over without really thinking, without knowing why—until you see...

... him.

"Muse."

Far below, haloed by alley light and the jagged scatter of broken sculptures, he looms amidst the ruin like you chiseled him, cast him down, but refused to break. He is still. Waiting. His eyes—carmine voids hollowed out of filthy cream—are angled up, locked on yours. They shine like rubies... like fresh blood under stage lights.

He has no expression, no mouth, no skin to be seen. And yet he stares at you in a way that ignites something feral in your chest.

Like a delayed switch, you gasp—sharp, high, full of horror and that awful thrill you never know how to name. The wrought iron groans beneath your feet as you tumble back with a jerk so suddenly your shoulder clips the window's metal frame. It slams shut. Scrambling for support against the railing, you twist, throwing yourself toward the open pane, fingers grappling the sill to crawl back through. But the window is shut. It doesn’t budge. It’s either stuck or latched, and in your panic, your hands can’t find the catch, can't work the mechanics, can't even function as fingers.

“Fuck—fuckfuckfuck—” you hiss under your breath, tugging harder, lungs heaving with that electric dread, the one that starts in your toes and melts up your spine.

The metal beneath your feet vibrates .

You freeze, panic overtaking logic. Lizard brain online in the driver's seat. He’s climbing up to meet you... And he's fast. Two steps at a time.

The fire escape shifts, this time with weight— his weight—and you feel it before you hear it: the sound of boots against wet steel, the ragged grunt of effort leaking through a fabric mask, and the creak of the railing as his gloved hands pull himself up and up and up.

No, no, no, no, you gasp, yanking on the window with everything you have. The latch catches. You don't see it. Can’t. You’re too afraid. 

Hands seize you—strong, coarse—gripping your upper arms, fearless of the bruises bursting under his fingers. Muse yanks you back even as your foot kicks wildly against the brickwork around the window sill, even as your fingers reach for cold glass. You feel the kiln-like heat of him through your hoodie—your back pulled tight against his chest, the press of his mask against your cheek.

“Hour after hour… creation and rejection.” His words paint your skin, breath blistering through the mask, “The rhythm of despair. A ritual—” you struggle, and he corrects his grip, snarls and squeezes harder, “—even. So romantic. Gave me ideas.”

His breath shudders out, low and strained. 

“Imagine it—“ A grunt, as though you weigh nothing, as though your animal fight is pitiful compared to the dozens, if not hundreds he's forced into submission. “—your cold, perfect body snapped open on the concrete, framed by the bones of your abandoned work. A self-portrait in flesh. Maybe I’d leave a plaque: Here lies the artist who feared the rot she gestated.”

You yank away once more— one last time —and grasp the latch. Muse growls, jerking you back. The window slams open with a sudden, traitorous shriek of metal hinges… and crashes into your forehead with a sharp, hollow crack of bone.

White light. Then black. Dark, humorous breath on your jawline, the cotton brush of a nose against your ear. 

“Don’t worry. You haven’t even started to bleed.”

Your body slumps, limbs like string, head lolling forward before Muse hefts you back, warm, solid, and far too gentle for the grip that initially took you.

Before the cold vanishes entirely, your last sensation is the sound of him exhaling through fabric—tender, almost reverent—and the slow sway of his chest against your spine, as though he’s rocking you to sleep while the fire escape groans under his shifting weight.

Then nothing there's nothing. 

Though, as you sleep, strong arms scoop beneath your knees and shoulders, lifting you through that threshold he crossed a week before. Like a bride on her wedding day, chaste flesh draped in black… held securely, prepared to be wrung dry. 

That's who he was.

And yet, even in his orderly life, a certain unpredictability arose – in the form of someone who wasn't afraid to laugh loudly, who brought with her the scents of summer and the feeling that the world could not only be subjected to rules but also lived to its fullest. She appeared like a sip of mint lemonade on a sweltering day – sparkling, refreshing, with a slight tartness, and undeniably necessary.

Her hair curled in unruly strands, and her eyes shone with the same vivacity as his restraint. Their conversations resembled a duet of piano and violin – his melody was rhythmic, hers impetuous, but together they created a surprising harmony. She could talk for hours, passionately telling stories about sun-drenched fields, dusty alleys, and people who were afraid to love. Muse listened as if inhaling the aroma of cinnamon – warm, cozy, homey. He didn't immediately realize he was falling in love.

His love for her didn't arise as a sudden blow, but like that apple pie with cinnamon she once mentioned, kicking her bare feet up on the sofa in their temporary shelter. That pie, according to her, was the first thing her mother baked for her when she turned six. It was hot, sweet, and with a light tartness of spices – like a hug after a hard day. That's how Muse felt around her: as if he had been wrapped in a soft blanket and placed next to a cup of hot tea.

But at the same time, her presence acted like a sip of cool mint lemonade in the scorching heat. Her words calmed his anxieties, her laughter burst into his orderly mind like fresh mint into boiling water. She brought lightness to his strict schemes, diluting the rules with the gentle anarchy of life. Muse didn't lose his composure, no – he simply began to see in her not just an object for analysis, but a true miracle, defying classification.

"Love," he thought once, standing on the balcony and watching her passionately argue something with an instructor, "is probably a pie you want to share. Warm, soft, with the aroma of cinnamon. And also – a sip of lemonade that awakens the boy who laughs under the sun for no reason at all."

He wasn't in a hurry to confess. He waited, as he always did. Patiently. Thoughtfully. By the rules. But one day, when she, soaked to the bone in a sudden spring rain, ran into the room with disheveled hair and laughed as if every raindrop were a blessing for her, he simply walked over and hugged her. Silently. Words were unnecessary.

And at that moment, he understood: she was his apple pie with cinnamon and his mint lemonade. His warmth and his coolness. His order and his unpredictability. His home and his summer.

And still, you stare upwards, aching. You don’t know what to name the feeling that’s been rotting slowly in your gut since that night outside—the installation, the smell of blood and burnt-cedar cologne, the breath on your throat and that hand so tight against your belly it felt inside you . That heat it made in your stomach hasn't faded, only fueled your digging hands, wrist-deep in wet clay, molding and forcing and pleading with something shapeless to become something more . 

Maybe inside you'll see what's missing...

You slip forward onto your palms, clay crust crumbling beneath the press of your hands. Your body sways. You exhale slowly, then lean in, crawling inside the mouthpiece.

It's a tight squeeze—the sore curve of your back brushing the clay palate. You nestle deeper until you’re curled inside it, limbs folding inward, palms cupping elbows. Your spine molds to the ridged interior, right hip pinned by the tight crescent of the lower lip packed with metal wiring and salvaged rebar. The air is thick inside—humid, smelling of old sweat and powdered gypsum. Like a womb or a freshly cracked tomb...

Your phone begins to ring. The sound is thin and shrill, bouncing off concrete, echoing through the extensive studio like the sirens outside. You bury your head down, forehead sweating across the hard ridges of your knees, arms wrapped tighter around your ribs, nipples pebbling in the warm gap between chest and upper thighs. The ringtone keeps going. You know who it is: Sylvan. Or maybe your agent. Could be some other leech wanting to negotiate with the artist herself... but something holds you within the mouth, as if it has teeth locking you within.

You were wrong to come in here, a voice in the back of your head warns—your inner critic, maybe. You should’ve stopped, should’ve cleaned it all up, should’ve kept your/the mouth closed. Should’ve taken the mallet to it until it looked like nothing.

You fall asleep eventually, lulled by the whispered vitriol between your ears and the oppressive comfort of being completely obscured from the world. No feasting eyes. Not here. But there are and there have been...  

All day he's been watching, sometimes pressing close to the window when your back was turned, other times observing from the defunct warehouse across the street... coming and going, watching you cast off layers of clothing as grey stains took their place... visualizing what you'd look like in red—in blood and bloods—in artful cuts, bruises, brushstrokes of grime and chaotic splatters of hot, frothing cum... 

When your eyes pry themselves open again, peeled from the weight of sleep, the studio has gone cold. It's dark, everything blue lit by the night with slivers of gold highlighting angles here and there, cast upwards from street lights below.

The silence that greets you is brutal: no barrage of evening traffic, no hiss of brakes, no layered shouts from the streets away, only the groaning cycle of the boiler kicking to life and the soft, domestic hum of the refrigerator. What time is it?

You cannot recall the moment your eyes last closed, just a gravitational pull inward. You remember the mouth—not yours, but the sculpture’s—its interior pressing around you like wet heat, as it continues to do even now. You shift inside, as snug as a fetal slip, and groan at the pull of stiffness in your lower back, your knees, and cervical spine, where a headache begins to unravel. 

You groan at the ache, and someone groans back... 

Suddenly, the space around you inhales, gulping you deeper into the clay mouth as fear bathes you in fine sweat. The tiny hairs along your forearms rise in warning, your skin crawling and though you have not yet seen it with your eyes, your body knows that someone is watching.

You do not spot the hewn outline at first, not clearly, but then he moves, and the light reveals him . One gloved hand lifts to press flat against the grimy glass while the other remains curled around the iron banister, his head tilting the way an artist studies a still life—quiet, calculated, and endlessly patient.

He does not move, does not break posture, does not falter in his watching, and so you blink—once, hard—your limbs cramped from the tight curl of your position, your chest rising and falling in such restrained movements to feign death... to become invisible.

He sees you anyway.

And even as your throat aches from dryness, you hold back a whimper, watching his fingers extend against the old window. The sound of it opening is agonizing—a warbled creak of wood warped by humidity and disuse.

He shifts, dragging through the opening shoulder first, the barely-clothed trapezius muscle snagged by a leather suspender strap. Your heart skips as a tri-buckled boot hits the innards of your studio. He's past the threshold of inside and outside, sauntering past your kitchen, around a lounge chair to stop several feet away. He's here... the thing that cluitched you in the alley... unmistakably human in form, yet too—

He breathes in, a ragged pull through the cloth covering his face. In the darkness, he's weeping ink, but the eyes beneath soaked tears that shine red and black. Buttery fabric clings like gauze dipped in plaster, impressing every ridge of muscle, every slant of bone, black suspenders carving down his sides and framing the low dip of his waist. Below, his pants hang loose, but the shape beneath it all is anything but...

The only thing you manage to whisper—to yourself, to the shadows, to the heavy air—is, "I'm dreaming," because anything else means you let him pant into your neck, touch your softness—let him come inside your home.

So you stay silent, motionless, your body sinking tighter into the curve of your creation’s mouth, seeking protection, but the broad-shouldered leviathan just watches, silently choosing not to enter further.

And then his voice—low, sadistically devoid, and made faint by the weave of cloth—replaces the silence. “You're lucky, you know… time clings to your medium like training wheels. Forgiving. Patient. Unlike blood that dries too fast—it demands instinct. Demands sacrifice. Like watercolor, maybe. Slippery. Honest."

"But all that time you have?" He snorts, inspecting his gloves, tugging the right up his wrist a little higher until the fingers spread, long and steady. "Maybe that's the real curse. Too long to think. Not long enough to feel.”

You do not answer, not because you are unwilling, but because you're not yet ready to admit he's right. Instead, you just breathe and tell him, "You're not real," to which his chest hitches with quiet laughter. You close your eyes again—not to sleep, but to force him out—and whether time passes or not becomes irrelevant because when you open your eyes next...

... he's gone.

Thankfully, you’ve always had this place—this sanctuary where the insulation was stripped to bone and brick, purchased when you were still hungry, still raw from the academy. It was a shell then—beautiful in its emptiness. A void begging to be filled. Now, it’s cluttered with your ambitions. Sculptures half-finished. Some crouch in corners like oppressed animals, others stretch toward the exposed beams overhead, tongues of wire and clay gathering dust. But the majority of them glare at you like virginal effigies that would be happier if you’d just go fuck yourself instead of birthing them into existence. 

You hate all of them. And they hate back. 

You take a sip of the cherry juice and seltzer you poured when you got home—flat and syrupy now, still a promise of a good night’s rest—and let your eyes drift to the loft windows that take up the entire northeast corner from floor to ceiling. No curtains. Never needed them. No one to look in from the condemned warehouse across your building where the subway beneath makes the bones of it moan every day at noon sharp.

Sirens start up in the distance. It’s routine around this time as well. White noise. They’re like pigeons here—circling, crying, always feeding on something. You used to flinch at them. Used to double-check the locks. Now, you sip your tart drink and think maybe someone should come . Take the sculptures. Smash them. Take you. Soil you. Anything to undo what you’ve done to yourself. Perhaps then, once ruined, your art—your very self—would have some meaning.

The sirens grow louder—urgent now. Your gaze lifts from your drink to the window. The color of the red-blue reflections doesn’t fade; it grows. Ear-splitting sirens merge with the wobble of ambulances. You step to the window, mason jar sweating in your grip. Curiosity piqued. 

Outside, the street is bathed in chaos. Flashing lights. Pedestrians being shoved aside by pigs in uniforms, each of them shouting for different reasons. A bright yellow tape ripples in a cop's hand, wrapping around rusted parking meters and tacked to a brick wall.

Gunshots. Not distant. You hear them with the crispness of immediacy, and it startles something awake in your chest. That was close. Your eyes dart to the rooftops blackened under light-polluted skies, and it could be a trick of an over-exhausted mind, but you swear there’s a figure bobbing—running—against that dark backdrop of the city skyline… away from pursuers. 

‘Get them out of here!’

Below, cops are pulling a human shape from the scene, assisting paramedics haul it onto a gurney. You look back into the depths of your studio, finding several sheet-covered statues lying in the darkness, more alive now than that body below, similarly covered in alabaster white.

Someone shouts, and your gaze trails back through the window to the scene below. There’s something on the pavement that catches the headlights: red and glossy, half a word. Too greasy to be anything but the material of violence.

The sight should repulse. Instead, it pulls you closer as though hypnotized. That word chaste rings in your ears again as your eyes widen on the crime scene.

You press your hand to the cold pane, breath fogging the glass. The implication of a dead body—its burning of monotony, its heat—somehow centers you. The horror of it threads down your throat and settles in your lower stomach as a slow, trembling ache.

It’s not innocent . It’s hunger—hungry .

You inhale slowly, unevenly. Down on the street, the sirens begin to fade. The crowd gradually disperses. You watch until the last flashing light turns the corner, the last echo of rubber tires vanishing into the dark. Only then do you turn back to your studio.

You don’t bother changing out of your dress—just tug an oversized hoodie over your head. The hem nearly swallows up the pinstripe skirt—casting an allusion of wearing nothing but the hoodie—but you don’t care. The modest black heels get kicked into a corner as your heart skips. You slide into boots with crusted clay and dried paint on the toes.

Outside, the concrete is slick from oil leaks, damp from the rain that hadn’t had time to dry before nightfall. A smell lingers—something you think you noticed when you arrived home, but can’t be sure—burned rubber, faint metal, something… astringent like a perfumed musk.

The alley below your window is still choked off with yellow tape, but you need to see it up close. Not from behind glass. Inside it. You press your fingers into the pockets of the hoodie, hunching forward as you step beneath the police tape, its edge damp and snagging on your shoulder like a wet ribbon.

The moment you step into the decorated alley, the noise of the city relaxes. No honking. No sirens or screams. Just your own breath, catching when your eyes lock on the dining table.

It’s long—absurdly long for this space, claustrophobic against the alley walls. A sheet of linen clings to its warped length, soaked through in the center where something dead may have been, leaving behind a spattering blush of browns and blacks dried into dark textures like brushstrokes. The bloodstains are still moist in the middle, weighing down the fabric to the wood beneath it. Fingerprints—partial, frantic—dot the end of the tablecloth where someone must have clutched it, making sure it was even on either end. 

You take a step further within, feeling much like a vulture picking apart roadkill. Your gaze travels up the table to the chair at the head. It’s been pulled out at an angle, and you wonder if that was intentional or left by a cop with no eye for design. Closer now, you see there’s a smudge of red on the seat cushion. You can almost picture it—the slump of a body, its fluids settling with gravity, leaving behind something like a blotter stamp.

A sound. A clatter above. Ice down your spine, a supine rattle of panic. You whip yourself around to the noise, staring at the steel bones of a fire escape. One of the platforms sways just an inch, just enough to supply the terrible thought that someone is watching… or was, and yet—

Your hands clench in your pockets. You feel everything. Sensory input condensed like a star between your eyes, projecting a funnel of undulating gleam. Exhaustion, just tired—or drugged somehow. But you're not, and you blink and blink until you see it—a $100 bill, folded once, torn at the edge, and stuck to the brick wall. It's soaked through, crinkled from blood, dried into the grout line. 

Tacked newspaper clippings are plastered above like graffiti, some curled at the edges, others nailed down by force. Headlines run jagged as torn thoughts: 

TAX BILL PASSES — HOMELESS DISPLACED . CORPORATE PROFITS HIT RECORD HIGH . CONTRACTS FUNNELED TO DEFENSE INDUSTRY . ART FUNDING SLASHED FOR THIRD YEAR IN A ROW.

You picture crime scene cleanup crews cataloguing the remaining cash as they did the body parts left behind, snapping pictures of everything, especially the news clippings. But that bill, its unsubtle symbolism, almost more so than the headlines completes it—makes the alleyway feel like a perverted banquet hall fit for an oligarch. This, the critic says, is what artists spend their whole lives searching for: true meaning.

Another groan of steel resounds above, amplified by the narrow space. This time, you hug yourself, fingers worrying your elbow through thick fleece,e and ignore it. You're too dialed in on the art now.

Your stomach turns. Sure. But not from nausea, from something that twists hot and slow under your ribs. Your cheeks burn. You’re sweating under the hoodie. Between your legs, a pinpoint awareness throbs. It's arousal , though your body doesn't remember that feeling, so you call it thrill, excitement, inspiration, and lick your lips twice. 

You shift your thighs where they’ve started to stick together beneath the dress. The blood... the violence… the message—the art of it makes you want to—

Your phone buzzes, a dissonant hum in your pocket that breaks the hypnotic hush. You don’t want to look, but the spell is broken and reality demands you look.

Sylvan: I was passing by and saw the lights on in your studio. Late night, huh? Let's have dinner sometime, talk about your next series. I think there’s something special in your future. I want to be part of it. We can go over the numbers then. 

You read it once, then again, your thumb hovering over the screen like it might burn you. His words are soaked in the same syrup he dripped all over you at the show— “I believe in your message , I see something rare . We should spend more time together.” 

You know exactly what Sylvan wants, what that look in his eyes meant when he praised your restricted philosophy, how his voice got low when he said your work presented “so much beauty unspoilt.”

He doesn’t want your art. He wants your body. He wants to crawl inside you, fuck you, wear you like greasepaint, get off on the idea of sullying you—squirting his name all over you until its his, leaving you nothing but last season's art trend. But what else are any of them meant to think when you've spent years showing them falsehoods groped together with clay?

You shove the phone back into your pocket, ashamed of the reputation you’ve spent over a decade forming. Something odious and dishonest, nothing like…

"Nothing like this…" you whisper.

You step forward, heel dragging over the cracks in the pavement where blood still pools in stiff, black globs. You move slowly, circling the table, breathing in the rot and the faint scent of something aromatic—expensive. Cologne maybe. Maybe whoever did this wore it, or maybe the victim did. Either way, it lingers, delicate and predatory .

You stop beside the head chair.

Your chest is tight. You feel light-headed again, as if overloaded by sensory detail: the smells, the feel of the air in temperature and weight, the edges of everything hyperrealized. Your skin is on fire, but your fingers feel cold. You grip the edge of the table and look down at the blood-stained linen, the trail of red fingerprints, and feel someone watching you partake.

You swallow. There’s a pulse in your ears. Something flickers in your chest.

This… this is art. Not slipped, carved, baked clay. This is flesh and passion. This is something stripped bare to pentirsi layers, offering previously unseen details unappreciated by the uniforms that dismantled it. But you're here now, you see it. .. smudged within the image as a coffee stain in a sketchbook. 

You smile as the fire escape sways, metal bones screeching beneath heavy steps. The cold licks your legs beneath the dress, but someone's breath warms your nape, gushing through cotton fleece to bare skin where fine hairs rise above gooseflesh. You’re soaked in something deep as a threadbare exhale titters over your shoulder—too hot to be real. 

You’re not alone anymore. 

The artist is here, maybe , pressed into your back, fused to your spine, reaching under the hoodie one-handed to hold the flutters to your abdominal wall where they want to dig out and fly away. You cramp, or the hand squeezes and something in you—some endlessly regurgitating thing —finally matches the phantasmal breath heaving down your collar...

“Eyes open, finally... Tragic how long you chose to stay blind.”