rejectory

[rejectory]

she gets the impulse to shut his mouth. without ammo, knives, anything weapon, he’d have to lose twenty centimeters and thirty kilos, including bone matter, for it to be a fair fight.

it felt like a lot more than thirty when he threw her to the ground and landed her in butterfly. it felt like a tank rolling over her, and she like a coward in a cathedral, raccoon panic and awe, at who was about to take her. баба яга’s butcher’s hands would have been the safest ones to peel at her—she thinks that’s why it hurt so badly that he decided not to.

a body barrels down from a floor up. dead. she shoots the fucker’s face off, anyway.

“you’re bleeding.”

that could level their playing field a little. does he care? about that or about having saved her life three times already, beginning at home.

john wick is made of bullets. she doesn’t know how he doesn’t wince or rage at what his body’s being put through constantly, or feel like some sad abandoned thing. her vision is vibrating like a struck bell. she’s scared that this might be the one, the hit her aim or memory bank or cognition won’t recover from. her left palm is sliced, in tremors; her side tooth cracked. eyes glossed.

“we need to take the elevator.”

they’ll have company waiting down there.

Q. @rejectory asked ; " there you are. what the hell happened to you ? " for, eve macarro & john wick

" it's complicated. " speckled with more bodies than he had time to name, palm applies pressure to the wound in his side. bullet or blade, after a while they all stung the same. this one, he thought, came from a 9mm. tip of his index probing the opening, his eyes are for her rather than what leaks, warm and ready, out between his fingers. blood was blood and theirs was a like-minded color.

somewhere, someone was screaming. far off, in the high floors of the very building in which they stand. his own name peppers itself between slurs and a set of choked coughs that, eventually, turn back into silence. a loose end that needed snipped. not his, not this time. but hers.

" you missed one. " and he hadn't. the result of emotions and their fickle want to distract. turn him towards a target now long gone in a blacked out mercedes. off to another safehouse that would never, truly, be safe. not now. not when she's caught their scent and he, a curious bystander, plays shadow to the unfolding. waits for the moment when that nurtured feeling of familiarly loses its luster and he finishes the job he'd been sent on. " don't stop on my account. "

[rejectory]

An emotion, could it be. Lestat pinches it by its mouse tail, feels it as a ligament he and Armand could have in common—- but his every noose looks to Lestat more a jump rope.

Here, here. How about this criss-cross of beams in the great above for Armand to hang himself on his pulled pigtails off.

❝Oh.❞

Does he think whatever measure of Louis he got was a unique crafting? Or him at all? The fascination; say more. Lestat has met chattier walls.

— ‘they’ who? And why does Louis still talk to this one?

On his ballet-footed swan-by, he invents a reason to end the cold anti-intimacy of a hunter at his back and turns around again. Armand’s fragile angles belie the demon-possessed mania of human serial killers mid-stab, something not to be at the end of. It’s as thinly under the surface as to be his real face, made uncanny by his child’s mouth and ancient stillness. This has been a stalking, breaking and entering.

A haunting.

❝He was never satisfied, even when spoiled rotten. It had to do with his,❞ he ~gestures, squinting past the coming claptrap. ❝If I don’t hurt, if I don’t lack, I’m not meaningful.❞

But Louis’s since started wearing baseball caps, so he must be catapulted over that psychological hurdle.

❝You two were meant to be.❞

keeping up with lestat had once been a fantastical time to a mind such a he, a mind so solidified, fortified in it's ways. it seemed whimsy and hunger had no bearing on a beast of lestat's nature, but his nature was nothing to the nurtured monster he'd turned into. beautiful and grand, but insipid. so unwilling to reflect on who he was, what they were; who they'd been together. armand does not fight the swift escape. he merely sinks into the couch like a deflated doll, his limbs resting on either side of his thighs in a limp manner. ❛ louis told me they took care of the latest one. ❜

so many failed children. abortion's of the latest kinds, too far into their early stumbling's that even armand was surprised that lestat hadn't stepped in and destroyed them himself. he did so love to destroy, didn't he? lestat's question strikes him without meaning for it to. there was a time to brag about his escapades, but lestat was not one of those people that could be trusted with pertinent information. and yet: the slide of the riding crop down his back is a tangible memory that he still feels between his teeth. louis teeth in the meat of his flank, hungry teeth and hungrier hands. armand is the doll that feels it all. the shiver's from that question subside and he looks away, nose in the air. ❛ do you think me some emotional child? i would sooner drink from a dead body than give you a louis you will never know. ❜

his louis. the louis that did not exist within the confines of that insipid book.

[rejectory]

All he has time to register is Armand’s Tic Tac teeth, not fanged. They disappear behind his blurry glasses.

Daniel cups his junk in a flash of electric dread. Yeah, maybe he does deserve to be dehumanized for being a deadbeat husband, for having kids when he didn’t want them and hating his wife (just the first one), but, Jesus Christ, not by Armand.

He’s been doing this for too long not to know what’s what. There’s a fucked-up sex appeal to being dick-to-face with a big carnivore.

Especially when that carnivore smacks of the potential of assisted euthanasia. Assisted others—ass-wiping, feeding, toenail clipping—seeing as Armand’s all about a career in nursing. Daniel is shaking with the hot boil nausea of being an object. First time ever that he’s sober enough for it to stick. He feels a draft along his ass. What Louis did that got him bitchslapped doesn’t even hold a candle to this fucking creep right here.

“ Feel superior yet? ”

humiliation was meant for those who could actually feel shame. armand assumes he has none and so he treats him as such, treats him as a prostitute would; one could not seek to play with him and then choke when the doll comes to life. daniel knows why he's here. there is nothing between them but the knowledge that there has always been something that ties them together. the threads of their lives are intertwined and tangled to high hell, but knotted nonetheless. armand smirks when the glasses fog.

steps are taken to close the distance. close now, a dark shadow to old eyes but a looming presence that can be felt by the sway of his clothing. dew clings to the curls. heavier than he remembers. thicker somehow. and the chest, too. silver curls, small bruises that resemble liver spots bespotting his pale skin. and the veins there, in the shaking arms, so blue and poignant now that the years made him nearly translucent. armand reaches between them, hooks a thumb in the towel.

❛ ready yourself, snowflake. ❜

[rejectory]

Clingy.

More.

❝I’ll hold your hair,❞ and not much else, as if this is a keg stand at a frat party before the most epic toilet rendezvous.

The sound effect of an envelope against a letter opener unzips across the naked air. His nail comes away blood-lined. The man in his fist streams darkly down his unfortunately-groomed neckbeard.

She isn't sure what the moment is, between her welcome and his touch, but there is a heart-skip moment of hesitation between their words. I love the accent. She's quite the fan of his. Recovery is smooth, but the hiccup is marked in a red ? in her minds eye.

Willow had been hoping to let the man live, or die, whatever succeeded her speedy departure before Lestat arrived -- but by a hoist he delays whichever inexorable fate awaited him in favour of the more certain outcome.

She is expected to eat, yes?

"Would you join me? I don't like to finish alone."

[rejectory]

the bubble of his peace dilates around armand’s head. louis tunes back in to undiluted predictability: already having the lapels of his notice tugged at with a scripted pressure... nothing for himself anymore.

he’d rather read the night away. he’d rather wake daniel up from his game of catching up on sleep despite his foolishly chronic deficit.

armand’s elegance reads like praying—without a rug under him, louis sees a praying mantis if he looks in detail, the only one in the world that likes its legs plucked off during the act.

reminds him of lestat’s making up to and of where they differ radically as the clothes come off. much as lestat thought himself a sophisticated breed, he never had this contradiction in him to capture the full kaleidoscope of being for another. even under louis, with louis inside of him, there was an absence of ownership. maybe he was too whole for that. an irksome thought.

louis’s foot nudges without care. he gets his toes wet and plants his heel by armand’s knee. and armand, he’s sat docilely as a religious abstraction with not a hair out of place. all that, and still not good enough to be looked the direct way of. on the couch, louis spreads his legs so amends can begin being made.

vivid splashes of red against a canvas. brown skin glowing with a sheen of blood, the smell of it between the couch cushion's. would louis notice if he were to dump the whole glass over his head? unlikely. a scream has been building for seventy years that often goes unnoticed. this cage is so easy to break and yet armand doesn't. his limbs are strong, his body big now, he could break out at any point. who is he without the indent of the cage's bars against his bony back?

existing alongside daniel in the sun has loosened the screws. being here, with louis under the same dark sky, it no longer feels natural. a performance begins then. the first of the night. a sickly dance that he knows well enough to do it without thinking. he straightens himself, taking the glass with him around to the other side. the feet, naked and tender, stop when they meet the small angular couch. armand crouches. he gets to his knees, setting the glass down. crawls close, staring at louis' face the entire time. moving, powerful and all bengal. animal. the eyes of a caged predator.

he makes it to louis feet. his fingers come to rest atop his own thighs, holding the pose as that glass of blood drifts across the floor to plant itself next to him.

and then nothing. silent but anticipatory.

[rejectory]

He has her by the jaw before she breaks her brain with another lofty goal. Past her eyes, hopeless optimist that he is!, he searches for that brain’s remains. No one tests his self-control as thoroughly as this goblin.

She should be thanking him. She should be begging for forgiveness.

A symphony is lost on the deaf. He releases her like an afterthought. It strikes him—

❝How ironic.❞

Why does Uncle Les pretend like he can be sweet to me? He's a monster, through and through. I almost prefer when he's yelling all furious. Sometimes, it's even kinda funny. 

But since Uncle Les is the one who made me, does that mean I'm a monster, too? 

"Ain't nothin' that can stop me from bein' smart as, well, maybe even as smart as you, one day."

She rubs her face furiously, as if to wipe away the feeling of him, and smears blood all over her cheeks.

"Can't we just use the incinerator and act all shocked and scared when he gets reported missin'? He's got no right to be special, actin' as stupid as he did."

[rejectory]

Clark clears his throat. Some alien bug he caught in the Fortress.

‘ My voice? ’

It takes a lot to make him sweat. This whole time, how he sounds hasn’t even entered his mind because why should it have, right, when there are such important things to pay attention to, like how tall you are or how big your nose is relative to the rest of your face. He doesn’t understand why they should matter, but here they all are.

What disqualifies it as a dance? She feels as if, she's got one foot ontop of his this entire time. A song is playing.

She does not count that ...

❛ Yes, when I was twenty or twenty-one. ❜

... besides, it's less his face ... which she is certain she would remember not to forget (and she'd be wrong) ... and more:

❛ It's your voice. ❜

[rejectory]

You have more than one birthright, boy

DUNE PART ONE // DUNE PART TWO

[rejectory]

Detonated into motion, thousands of splendid goldthreads and glitter-lines shimmer like a tinsel curtain on his head, and he away from the limp misaffection. From the desperation. Lestat’s torso lengthens him to his full height.

When at the trash site, after Louis and Claudia du Lac Or Other’s savagery, rats slunk into his coffin for his flesh. Terrible smell. Meaty roaches, all manner of legged leeches, delicate fruit flies drawn to the wine putrefaction of his soft-boiled forearms. It took the cartilage in his throat weeks to close the smile cut into it. It gives him grief to think of it.

All of the above, condensed, match Armand’s reptilian touch.

Should he address that Claudia is in the room with them as they speak?

❝You’re welcome to the latest one.❞

Gary the rat procurer. His fashion non-sense alone nominates him for an existential Razzie. Rid the world of him.

Besides, he’s opted for a bloodline vasectomy. None shall spawn of him. Fatherhood is better left to those content to live the lie of a job well done. A job degenerately attempted at best, by all. He’s leering at a mishap of such parenting. So flat.

If Armand were ever to touch Her,— there would be no Armand left to speak of. And the way Lestat speaks, well, that is just American.

❝Did he do that thing with his tongue?❞

Saint Louis.

❛ if i had the chance, i would do it again. ❜ seventy-seven years of groveling and never once has it been for lestat's forgiveness. as far as armand was concerned, he deserved the unknowable cruelty. his life was one privilege after another, a shiny, glass showcase of everything he's ever been given and armand's, a pillar but not without it's broken glass to give it a effervescent quality. a tower of his mistakes, his missteps. it's always been laid out between them. it's been a privilege to approach the ivory tower, run his fingers along the perfect glass; but to approach armand, in any direction, would never be painless. to touch, and to behold, was to submit to the skin splitting bite of being so near. tonight was no different. he has a handful of lestat's gold hair, brushing through the curls with a blunt, repetitive motion.

he has never been a father. he has no mother. no fingers to show him how to be gentle, how to touch without hurting. he leans forward, inhaling the hair at lestat's nape before he leans against his skull, closing his eyes and whispering, ❛ you will never have a child that will be safe from me. ❜

@rejectory

[rejectory]

someone’s touchy about her masculinity.

’ meet punch master, ‘ worth a brownstone in brooklyn heights. ’ measures how big your breakfast was. whenever you’re ready. ‘

riding the i want my lawyer she inspires, tony anticipates a mean uppercut. she’s got zest. normally he wouldn’t be opposed, but that zest smells like booze. let him guess, grandma’s holistic medicine cabinet but make it self-medication. it bombs his focus several courses off, so he side-steps her for the good of everyone, but his mouth is already swimming, his hamster brain in a wheel he thought he was over.

good going.

’ have i seen you at AA? ‘

lemon-mouthed. " is that supposed to be an insult? because i could punch-like-a-girl straight up your ass & send you to mars. isn't that where all you billionaire types want to go, anyway? " still, she might be biting the hand that feeds & while it's never stopped her from closing her molars down, it might be enough to gentle the clutch of her jaw.

" i assumed. "

she steps forward in a way that doesn't quite meet the distance & inches on her toes, folds in to look.

" but you're gonna have to tell me what the hell i'm looking at for me to make heads or tails. "

[rejectory]

@hypocratic *

Precocious.

Awareness of one’s competence follows first asserting one’s sentience. Sentience begins by pressing one’s palms to the pre-mimed container that separates the self from the non-self and is preceded, in neurological eons, by its acknowledgement. Merely seeing comes short. How does Frederick know he’s real? At this stage he can only postulate.

Of course, there is no container in tangibility. A mirror informs of this. House pets are precluded from therapy because of the inherent crime of living on all fours, punished for the state beyond which they’d lacked the tools to evolve. Frederick, because he’s sitting down, successfully inhabits the cognate middlepoint between a drooling brain injury patient and a well-trained dog.

’ It may appear I desire you, Frederick. ‘

And thus Doctor Chilton is made worth the while in his own kitchen. As clear-minded as can be—with a hit to the head to teleport him in medias res; no pharmacological intervention for his journey otherwise. He must be fully conscious and capable of consent to partake. The windows are unlatched. He’s unbound. The door, why not pluck up the courage to go see.

The roped naked body on Frederick’s counter could misread as a gift replacing him in dispensability by being the least valuable one in the room. 'Colleague' is the accurate species. Frederick may recognize him from the bodyguard shifts at work.

’ Are you familiar with the art of shibari? ‘

[rejectory]

He means no, asshole.

If he wasn’t aware he was dealing with an unrepentant basket case, he’d try to get through by pushing social embarrassment buttons. Paralyzed, he stares through Armand, probably at the ghost of decorum. He feels naked. He feels old. Condescension from a forever-tween when his shoulder can’t go two-thirds of its full range of motion makes him wanna take a swing and sprain it.

“ Fuck off, snowflake. ”

His glasses begin to fog up. Sweet. His body is running even colder than usual. Shitty thermoregulation. Shitty desert A/C.

❛ what do you mean, no? ❜ arms crossed, hips position in a way that would have weakened even the strongest of resolves on anyone but daniel molloy. he expects submission, but daniel's holding onto his towel so tightly that his arm is straining and armand only has so much patience before he thinks about snatching it away.

but he's been working on, as louis says, his boundaries. as unethical as it is, he still has a hankering to come over and force daniel to let him help. armand lifts an arm, holds it there with his elbow propped up against his other arm and motions for the towel. ❛ give it to me. i'll get your back. ❜

@rejectory

[rejectory]

Both, be he damned.

“I only get what you want to give me.”

He speaks directly to her absence and accuses it where her physical body makes her return jarring. She eludes him, he wants her, why does he allow it.

The Empire is holding a breath. Shaddam is pressing on Leto’s neck as if he has a thought about the almighty throne that isn’t spitting on it. Old men slip back into arrogance of the young eventually. Leto hopes for someone to take his head before he goes mad. His son should be the one.

He sits Jessica atop a cut of mahogany. He breaks apart the bracket of her knees and makes them fit around him, creating an unwanted paradox. The tightness sucks her robe around her body as if waterlogged and reveals it without giving Leto access.

Atreides soldiers have been disappearing off-duty while unarmed, when their guard is soft, leaving wives and children vulnerable. Nobody knows where, even less is known of how, but why...

He can’t sleep off the feeling. He knows. What he knows is by itself treason. He has no wife in name and no child born, and that’s how he can keep them within reach. They’re coming with him to Kaitain. Diplomatic voyages had quite a different flavor when he was a child—never so much promised bloodshed.

“If I ask for another one? Two at once?”

She always smells undefined when she wanders into his room. Even plain clothes float on her; he just supports their natural rhythm, squeezing and rolling her tunic up from her shin to the spring tensing her thigh.

A girl, the reverend mothers echoed one after one after one, as she stood before them chastened like a girl herself. Chastened for what? It's in that instant that human psyche coils around her throat like a strangler, reminds her of her own power.

Again, it's a woman and a snake and a decision to change the course of everything.

Decades from now, the scribes will say she does it out of love. Will rewrite the script: That it's his will she bends to, transforming her from subject to predicate. She is not acteur in her story; she merely enacts.

What's in a few cells, anyway?

The alchemists of old had it all wrong: Transmutation isn't power. It's just terrifying recklessness.

The corner she's in is metaphorical: Leto crowds her like a bull because that's the love language in this house, but it's Jessica who holds his life in her palm. She thinks. The slow, reverent blink-and-lowering of her eyes is a purpose within a purpose. Her fingers coil around the breadth of his arms, let him feel the ache of her. Let her feel the realness of him.

"Is that your will or your command, my Lord?"

We warn you, Jessica: We see this thing in your eyes, and we warn you this once.

[rejectory]

Solemn, faraway, he fishes a blood clot out of her hairline, letting it happen eye-crossingly near her before it plops. As if after a journey he’s finally found her nose, he taptaps its tip red.

❝Because you are against the rules. You’re unfinished in the mind, little monster. Think of it as a birth defect—❞

His round-faced affliction. Just look to how she seeks to equate the unequatable: """them."""

❝—and blame your Daddy.❞

RELUCTANTLY, CLAUDIA HOLDS STILL.

I don't think Uncle Les gets hungry like me at all. He can't possibly understand how it feels! Sometimes it's kinda like I could swallow up the whole world and all the people on it. Like my stomach is bigger than the rest of my body. Than the rest of everyone's body!

Roast and salted pork, blueberry pancakes, potato hash—all those things that used to be good to me just don't sound as good nowadays, not like how good that fat old mayor tasted running down my throat and dripping down my chin.

"You can't be so mad at me," she pleads. "He really did have it comin' to him, you know he did!"

She stomps halfheartedly (so much for holding still!) and looks down with her bug eyes, rueful that, even in death, the fat old mayor could make her Uncle Les so very upset with her.

"How come you can do as you like all night, and the rules are different for me?"

[rejectory]

it’s as if he’s been moving through the joint stiffness of bayou summers—when summers were still available to him and he took them for granted. a seasonal mindache, as he’s come to call it, as heart- seemed overly sentimental and tooth- implied hunger, and he’d long moved past both on his journey. the only teeth with sensation remain his vampireteeth, dulled now from his predominantly liquid diet.

he should be perfectly settled. maybe a change of scenery would give the ledge he’s been walking an end he could peer down.

❛ taste this. ❜

a history of every moment of armand's life is cut up and put away into a small room in his mind. he does not take to the room often, but there are days that he sits outside, his cheek to the floor, peeking under the door to catch a glimpse of those fantastical memories without touching them or having them touch him. there are colors under the door, memories that transpire within; a thousand nights of longing have given armand the bravery to open his mind an inch. so that he can reach inside and grasp at something, anything.

the color he comes away with tonight is the exact shade of the red crushed velvet cape that nicolas had given to lestat in thanks. the smoothie in his hand is bright, almost glowing - and he hands it over his shoulder, giving it a small sway to entice louis' hand. ❛ i made it for you. ❜

@rejectory

[rejectory]

Moving her feet in freefall won’t make it a walk. But reality is unhelpful here; she’s attempting control to lessen the enormity of perceived danger.

A generational repeat of it.

’ Has Harry ever made you feel unsafe? ‘

WHAT IS THE SMARTEST WAY TO PUT THIS? The smartest way to Spirit Harris, though—which may be incredibly sloppy, stupid.

"Harry doesn't—get it. Harry doesn't respect you like I do."

[rejectory]

’ Is there a reason you’d prefer me not to? ‘

"Harry?"