princetorn

[princetorn]

ooc . Just saw a jumpstyle TikTok and it activated my Royce muse like a sleeper agent. Like this and I’ll drop some memes in your inbox. Feel free to send some my way too.

[princetorn]

Summer clung to the town like a fever, and beneath the jaundiced glow of streetlamps and haloes of mothlight, the boys gathered at the edge of the highway. Greasers and jocks alike, pack animals in varsity jackets and leather, hooting into the dark.

Royce climbed into his cherry-red ‘54 Corvette. He was beautiful – ruthlessly, violently so. The sheen on his skin, the flick of his hair combed back with pomade and pride, the haughty flick of his fingers on the gearshift, trailing a rosary of silk handkerchiefs knotted like trophies. Each one a girl, a conquest. A curtain of hymens torn in the name of something that never touched love.

Johnny stood across the lot, the flicker of his cigarette a second sun in the gloom. He was the one who started it, but Royce had set the fire. The word still echoed between them. A word spoken like a knife, a death sentence. Royce had dressed it in gold and venom, flung it before the gathered herd, and Johnny had burned.

“Let’s see if that pretty car can outrun the truth,” Johnny had said, low and steady. No laughter. No venom. Just a boy walking to war with grease under his nails and an aching in his chest. No witnesses had seen him duck under the Corvette’s gleaming body. No one had noticed the blade-edge of betrayal, the invisible touch of death written in the dark.

Rubber shrieked, the engines roared – Johnny’s Dodge a beast of blackened steel, Royce’s Corvette a bullet. The cars hurtled into the night, red tail lights blinking like the devil’s eyes.

For a while, Royce was winning.

Of course he was.

He always won. Everything he touched turned to gold – girls, games, teachers, his daddy’s pride. He drove like he played ball. Without fear, without pause, with the muscle-memory of a godling born from the bones of a nation that chewed boys up and spat them into uniforms or coffins.

When the road began to twist like a serpent coiled to strike, something in the wheel gave.

He tugged. It resisted. The car bucked once, then again.

“What the hell – ?” he muttered, voice cracking like old varnish. He gripped harder, white-knuckled, as if he could command the car with strength alone, but the wheel spun and the brakes – oh God, the brakes – responded with a scream not of metal, but of absence. An emptiness where safety had once lived.

The first bend loomed like a guillotine.

Then came the tumbling.

The Corvette burst through the guardrail, sailing for one terrible, weightless second, a comet shedding bright flakes of paint and metal. Then gravity took hold, savage and absolute.

The car tipped, flipped, each revolution a verse in the poem of his destruction.

It scraped along the underbrush, carving a trench through the roadside thorns, a screaming, grinding descent. A second road rose up to meet him – another bend – and it struck the roof with such force that the world inverted. Royce, untethered, became meat and momentum. He was flung sideways, his body pitched like refuse. The right side of his face struck first. Skin kissed gravel, flesh flayed on asphalt, a mask of beauty ruined in an instant.

Some broken things could not be fixed.

He had known this, had felt it in his marrow when he had looked Johnny in the eye and delivered that word, that name, that curse, that brand. It would leave a scar, a question mark. It rhymed with maggot. It started with the same letter as Florence. Florence, with her lipstick kisses and silver laughter, her letters folded and re-folded in his locker like paper birds waiting to be burned. Florence, who had bled and wept and smiled for him, like so many others. Girls who offered him innocence and found rot.

And Johnny, his other sweetheart.

Johnny, whose hands had trembled against the nape of his neck, in the dark, kissing him behind the bleachers. Who had begged him not to speak, not to ruin the one thing in this godforsaken town that felt real.

Royce had ruined it.

Because he was afraid. Because he was beloved. Because he wanted everything, and understood nothing. Because he was a golden boy, and golden boys didn’t get to be queer. They only got to destroy those who were.

Now he lay inverted. Crownless, breathless, the weight of the Corvette pressing his cheek into the gravel like a bully’s palm. His face, once the portrait of American boyhood, was now a grotesque mural of peeled flesh and shattered bone. The right side was obliterated, sloughed clean of skin and scalp, blackened where the asphalt had burned into muscle, revealing the porcelain edges of his fractured skull.

Below, by reflex, his chest rose once – twice – and then shuddered still. The ribs on the right had cracked, caved like the fender of his beloved Little Sweetheart. Beneath the torn letterman jacket, slick tissue pulsed obscenely, exposed to the open air. His right hand was a skeletal flower, the fingers degloved, gleaming white phalanges protruding like lilies from a bed of meat.

Although his breath had ceased, the night exhaled thick and humid, heavy with the perfume of petrol, scorched rubber, overripe honeysuckle, fresh blood. Above, a solitary streetlamp buzzed, casting its oily glow over the wreckage. Moths flitted through it – powder-winged angels, misled, mistaking the blistering light for the face of the moon.

Royce did not see them.

Royce could not speak.

His mouth had become a wound.

He had no final words, only the taste of iron.

[princetorn]

this is life until death, could be my last dying breath. ©

[princetorn]

Yeah now we've entered the back pain stage

[princetorn]

The Black Zodiac is a dark inversion of the normal Zodiac. Like its celestial counterpart, the more eldritch Black Zodiac is divided into twelve arcane signs; unlike its counterpart, these signs represent twelve earthbound ghosts necessary to gain access to the Ocularis Infernum.

THIR13EN GHOSTS 2001, dir. Steve Beck

[princetorn]

¹⁰⁾ a dingy truck stop after ten hours on the road (Wes)

They rolled to a reluctant stop beneath the flickering sodium halo of a truck stop sign, its dying light buzzing like a horsefly in the heat of an old wound. Behind them, the great plains stretched away, vanishing now into night’s indigo mouth. Before them stood the paltry offerings of a lonely rest station – two pumps, a payphone long since gutted by rust, and the glimmer of a vending machine stained with grimy fingerprints.

Royce hovered, as he always did, suspended somewhere between the world of the living and the cavernous elsewhere. In death he had gained an uncanny patience, a stillness like that which followed an execution. Yet tonight even he felt frayed, worn thin by the road’s unspooling ribbon and the silence that had grown heavy between them. Ten hours of asphalt and haunted cornfields. Ten hours of the past bearing down on Wesley’s shoulders like the weight of inherited sin.

He watched Wesley now, saw the eyes glassy with exhaustion, the shoulders slumped. That mortal frame, so resolute in daylight, had begun to falter in the dark. Royce longed to cup his jaw, but the touch he craved to give would be cold, threatening to pass through skin like wind through wheat.

Instead, he leaned closer, moving as dreams move. Slowly, unnaturally, cast in shades of grief.

“You oughta lie down, Wes,” Royce said, his voice touched by a Carolina drawl, warm and worn like the lining of an old coat. “Ain’t nothin’ out here worth keepin’ your eyes open for.”

Wesley was the kind of person who did not sleep so much as collapse, who carried his history in his spine – but Royce could see the tremble beneath his eyelashes, the way fatigue had begun to carve him out.

Royce tilted his head toward the back seat, where tattered upholstery could be arranged into something resembling a makeshift bed – an old jacket folded as a pillow, a blanket that smelled faintly of petrol and sweat. He remembered the warmth of such places, how the closeness of bodies had once meant safety. He gestured towards it, soft but insistent.

“I’ll keep watch,” he said simply, his voice a whisper beneath the hum of the roadside night. “Ain’t nothin’ or nobody gonna creep up on us.”

[princetorn]

i am bigger than life. therefore i am almost a god

but i will never be a july evening. 

[princetorn]

plops down on his lap and stares at him intensely. like a weird little freak.

The ghostlight was jaundiced that night, sickly and yellow, oozing through the rusted mesh of the old carnival floodlamps. It pooled in the cracks of the midway, made mirrors of puddles, creating halos of filth. Crazy Fun Park, once a cacophony of gaudy joys and shrieking thrills, now loomed in decadent ruin. A skeleton in greasepaint, grinning through its rot. The Ferris wheel turned slowly of its own accord, a clock with no numbers, counting down nothing.

Royce was slouched on a bench that remembered too many heartbreaks and not enough summers, one engineer boot hooked over the other. A phantom cigarette dangled from his lip – a gossamer thing, conjured from memory and ego, burning with no ember, no ash. He smoked out of habit more than need. A ritual clung to in death.

He saw Mapplethorpe before he felt him, but the sensation followed fast. Uninvited, irreverent as a slap, the blond flopped down onto Royce’s lap. That stare – shameless, heavy as dusk – needled straight through his composure.

Mapplethorpe never asked permission.

Royce exhaled smoke that wasn’t smoke. It coiled around them like a veil, like a secret.

“Whaddya want, punk?” he drawled, voice smooth as liquor and twice as bitter. There was a bite in the tone, a bark with no teeth behind it. One hand moved as if to cuff Mapplethorpe on the back of the head, but turned halfway through to tangle instead in the boy’s untameable hair – tousled as the thoughts Royce tried not to think.

He looped an arm around Mapplethorpe’s waist, drew him in with the practiced ease of someone who had danced this dance a hundred times. Never with this partner, but always with this need. His body language bristled with mock offence, but the hold was tender – possessive not in malice, but in melancholy.

“Jesus, you’re like a bad penny,” he muttered, though his fingers found purchase in the hollow of Mapplethorpe’s back.

Something liminal pressed against Royce’s ribcage. Not love, exactly, but that older, sadder cousin. Yearning. Grief with its tongue in his mouth. He offered the cigarette, holding it out to Mapplethorpe’s lips with a crooked smile.

“Go on then,” he said, voice lower now, almost fond. “Don’t just sit there starin’ like a creep. Be a degenerate with me. Take a drag.”

[princetorn]

[princetorn]

The world had gone quiet in that honey-thick way. No cicadas. No night breeze. Just the thrum of tension and the imagined beat of a dead boy’s heart. He felt Mapplethorpe’s fingers clutch at his letterman, those rings cold against the old leather. Then those lips – cool and unsure – pressed to his.

For a second, Royce couldn’t tell if the fire that roared up through him was real or imagined. A kick to the chest, music flooding in where there had been silence, light flickering behind his ribs like a drive-in reel catching on fire.

Jesus, Mary, and all the saints, he thought. He actually kissed me.

When he had been alive, this would have been scandal. Scandal and sin and a backhand behind the bleachers. This kiss? This kind of kiss never happened to boys like him. Not in daylight, not in public, not without cost. He had spent his short life pretending not to want it, hiding every inch of this hunger under charm and knuckle-bruised swagger.

Look at him now. Decades dead and kissing a boy who held onto him like he might fall apart.

Royce didn’t pull away, didn’t laugh it off, didn’t break the tension with a cruel little joke like he might have once. Instead, he leaned into it. Just enough to let Mapplethorpe feel the way he eased forward – mouth soft, deliberate, as if he were trying to teach his own ghost how to want without shame.

When they finally parted – barely, barely – Royce kept his forehead close to Mapplethorpe’s, like he couldn’t stand to lose that final inch of closeness.

“Damn,” he said, his voice, low, steady, cocksure. “You taste like trouble.”

He swallowed, hard. The kind of swallow that had years of silence stuck behind it.

“I like trouble.”

One hand came up, tentative, curling around the back of Mapplethorpe’s neck, nesting beneath blond curls. He didn’t know where this road went. Didn't care. For once, he didn’t feel like he had to outrun the rules or duck the blows. For once, he wasn’t flirting for show.

mapplethorpe could feel the energy between them thicken. something hot, humid. if breathing still mattered to him, it would have been hard to do so. the silence between them makes his skin itch, causing him to bite the inside of his cheek. if he still had blood, he'd certainly be tasting it. his nerves were buzzing. ( he wondered if you looked close enough, you'd actually see him vibrating. ) he felt like he was full of bees.

the blonde had been lucky to grow up in a more forgiving time period. well, forgiving if you lived somewhere other than asphodels heights. he felt like if he had ever gotten a boyfriend in the small town ( we're looking at you, chester. ) ricky and the other jocks would have eaten him alive. granted, he's had many boyfriends and girlfriends online, they never went anywhere and usually were pretty superficial because he was a twitch streamer. ( so many things that royce wouldn't understand if he tried to explain it. so he wont. )

royce finally speaks and he can feel his voice vibrate in his chest cavity like an echo. he'll take a deep, unnecessary breath as he looks off to the side, not fully catching as his fingers seem to dance down his letterman jacket, as if he was feeling for something nostalgic. ( something from his past. someone, maybe. )

his eyes shift on him and mapplethorpe's flicker back to his face, his mouth falling open slightly but no sound seems to come out. royce leans in, really leans in. he chokes on his breath, reacting on impulse as he reaches forward to grab a hold of royce's letterman with his ringed fingers, as if he was trying to ground himself. he doesn't say anything, finally speechless for once in his life. instead, he'll lean forward to finally close that small gap between them to press his cold lips against royce's.

[princetorn]

if he wanted to (brutally murder me as an act of love and passion) he would

[princetorn]

setting prompts ˗ˏˋ ꒰ 🕊️ ꒱

¹⁾ a rural gas station in the middle of the night

²⁾ the last room at a drive-in motel in the small hours of the morning

³⁾ a cold, draughty church on a thursday night

⁴⁾ a stranger’s bedroom at noon

⁵⁾ a window seat on a red-eye flight during a storm

⁶⁾ a hospital waiting room with only one other person in it

⁷⁾ a sleeper train eight hours from its destination

⁸⁾ the first night in a new house, alone

⁹⁾ the steps of a wedding chapel in the rain

¹⁰⁾ a dingy truck stop after ten hours on the road

¹¹⁾ a divorce attorney’s office on valentine’s day

¹²⁾ the beach at ten on a monday morning

¹³⁾ a police station in a foreign country

¹⁴⁾ a coffee shop at two in the morning

¹⁵⁾ a concert venue, hours after the band’s set has finished

¹⁶⁾ a boat miles from land in any direction

¹⁷⁾ the third highest floor in a skyscraper

¹⁸⁾ the end of the line at a b-list movie star’s meet-and-greet

¹⁹⁾ a bar an hour after last call

²⁰⁾ an overgrown garden in a heatwave

²¹⁾ a car park lit only by streetlamps

²²⁾ a film set two days from the end of production

²³⁾ a graveyard in spring

²⁴⁾ the lap of someone who’s been gone for too long

²⁵⁾ a kitchen counter whilst dinner’s being made

[princetorn]

hey babe your tone seemed off in your latest ominous message scrawled in blood on the wall are you mad at me?

[princetorn]

❂

[princetorn]

[princetorn]

The street where you live, Eli McMullen

[princetorn]

A Sleepless Night by Chih Illustration