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every time laboratory love gets a notification, i’m gonna choose a finger to cut off my own hand until i just got two stumps and it’s no more stories for you guys

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LAST MIDNIGHT. floyd leech

MAKING MOVES, MOVING IN. floyd leech

DEFLOWERED. floyd leech

LAST MIDNIGHT. floyd leech

requested by: anon / cake details: red velvet cake (royalty AU) with buttercream frosting (mutual pining)

Third time's the charm is how the saying goes. If you last through the first and second tries, there is sure to be good fortune on the other side. All you have to do is see it through until you reach the metaphorical pot of gold at the end. However, by all accounts, the third time is not the charm for you. 

The deal is that you only get three nights. Nights full of ecstasy and delight, void of any punishments. Nights where you could live in the shoes of everyone else, nameless and chesired, void of your identity.

Your fairy godmother had raised up her spindly index, middle, and ring fingers. Skin peeling away to reveal jagged bone, she dropped each from right to left as she narrated how your temporary reprieve was secured for three blissful times until the last midnight passed. At the third break of dawn, you would depart from the prince you sought for company or she would collect your soul as punishment for a broken deal.

The first two nights were wondrous!

There are so many experiences that were virgin to you, that he opened up the gates to. The world previously known seems like a drop of rain in an ocean now. With the prince, you feel like you are on another planet entirely; he alters your gravity and messes with your perception in irrefutable ways. His presence is as life-changing as the diagnosis of a deadly disease or the birth of a newborn.

When you are on your deathbed and memories start to fade, sunken and molting into the mattress like fungus, you know that you will be able to perfectly and thoroughly recall these moments with him in your mind.  

Watching Floyd now, your hippocampus stores everything like a camcorder, passive and open. 

He is barefoot, hair askew, a damp white button-up clinging to his back. He is going around the shoreline of the beach to collect stones, expressing unrestrained displeasure or joy at the ones he picks up, cradling them in his palms like a squirrel trying to stuff as much food as possible in his mouth. He is the type of muse that would not be limited to one art medium; there would be sculptures, poems, paintings, and music in memoriam of him.

You can only record him in memory, like a souvenir shelved in your brain. It is impossible to banish the light smile off your features at the mere sight of him. 

“Shrimpy,” he calls, though your attention is already on him. You do not move until he starts to wave. Liking to physical evidence he wants your company. “Come here!” His gesturing causes a few stones to slip out his grasp.

No sand miraculously stains the expensive silk of your outfit. It must be a touch of fairy magic, allowing you to make your way over to the prince without having to worry about any annoying sediment ending up where it shouldn’t be. Just as you come shoulder to shoulder with him, grainy rocks are being guided into your hand.

“Ya ever learn to skip stones?”

“I cannot say I have.”

“After tonight, ya can say it,” Floyd grins.

Here it is — you observe and take a picture of the three stones in your hand, flat and smooth; they remind you of full moons — yet another experience he has the keys to. Before, you knew little of what was beyond the walls of your imprisonment. There is a younger version of you that could never fathom getting to see or smell the ocean. 

The prince nudges your shoulder, wetting the area. Seaweed hair is flopping over his eyes, dripping pins of water over his nose and stretching dimples. Earlier in his hunt, he dove into the briny waves to retrieve some of these stones, submerging and sliding yards away from shore before he emerged victorious, rock raised in the air, shouting his glee as you laughed on the edge of grass and sand at his ridiculousness. 

Skipping stones in hand, you laugh again, “I’ll be positively bragging about it tomorrow!” You have to keep this affair a secret, magic rules and all that, but you can still appease his ego.

“It’ll only be worth braggin’ about if you can beat me,” he challenges just as his left arm comes up in one snapping pitch. Your heart follows along with each bounce it does across the water. It finally sinks into the ocean at a grand twenty-eight. “Though, I don’t kn-ooo-w, I think I got ya beat, Shrimpy.”

Floyd’s fingers enclose around your dominant hand before you can respond. The touch is welcomed easily — after all, for the past two nights you have danced, played instruments together, and walked hand in hand to secret places — thus, you take the backseat, pupils like lens, to watch him maneuver two stones out of your hand so only one remains. 

He instructs you by starting with the position of “Ya thumb goes … here, and ya wanna put your index on the edge like this” and then, hands on your waist guide to move “Then, you wanna stand like this. And, start pullin’ your arm back to prepare to pitch it.” as he guides you into a demonstration of the throw, he adds pressure on your hand to ensure that “when ya let go, snap your wrist forward like that.”

“Like this?” You keep the stone in your hand, only miming your future throwing posture. 

“Like that, Shrimpy,” the prince affirms, beaming with pride.

Straightening up, you tighten your hold on your stone even though you are supposed to have a loose hold or risk messing up the shot. You do not want to disappoint him by being a terrible stone-skipper. Why does even the miniscule seem so important in his presence? 

It’s probably because he’s staring at you. 

His eyes are incredibly soft. He is giving you the kind of look that could translate to I’m happy to share this moment with ya. Though you told yourself you were going to absorb everything tonight, document it in your hippocampus down to the last color, you find it hard to raise your gaze and meet his burning stare.

So, you release the stone. It skips twice before drowning on the third. Plu-nk! 

“Damn, I thought I could,” you mumble off, jaded. You were expecting a better outcome.

“Hey, you skipped it,” the prince cheers with enthusiasm, smothering out your negativity. “I didn’t skip mine on my first try.”

“Really?” You find that hard to believe; he seems like a natural at everything he’s shown you, talent in his bone marrow.

“Really. Threw ‘em too hard each time. Got really frustrated and didn’t pick the habit back up ‘till I felt like it.”

Before you were temporarily released from your imprisonment, you had heard about the twin brothers. Heard about the left-handed prince with the attitude like a cloud, causing storms one minute or simply harmless fluff the next. He is volatile. Likely to change for the worse if circumstances bore or vex him. 

“Do you get bored easily?” 

You imagine he does, traveling through life on whims, never content.

“Nah,” he disagrees blatantly with your assumption. He skips one of his own stones, left hand as confident as ever. “I just get bored when I get bored.” 

With each jump across the waves, your heart beats rapidly. 

It isn’t such a sentimental sentence. Hell, he is outright disagreeing with you. But his words still plant a seed of appreciation for the time you two have spent tonight. No ties of obligation keep him with you; no sudden kinks have caused him to deviate from your side. It causes your eyes to slide to the sand, face burning with no sun to blame it on. 

You have to calm your skipping heart.

Later in the night, you are climbing back up to the edge where sand and grass intersect to head back to the castle with the souvenir conch shell Floyd has given you when he pipes up next to you, “Will I see you again tomorrow night?”

Neck snapping up, you look at him in muted surprise. Eyes wide and shiny. Smile slow to emerge but certainly emerging.

You really are so captivating. It’s why he’s been staring all night. Focused on you like an artist mapping out his still life sketch. 

He’s been thinking about getting commissions from those court painters to capture your likeness. Apprehensive at the possibility that you might just vanish into the dawn one of these nights, he’s been debating it seriously. Scared at the notion of never getting to get to see your face again. He can barely sit through the things – always shuffling his feet, biting different areas in his inner mouth, jittery all over – as they put paint to canvas. 

On a sympathetic level, he doesn’t want to put you through that. On a selfish level, he wants a museum, wall to wall, of portraits depicting you, the stranger he’s been lucky enough to see three nights in a row. 

Third time’s the charm, right?

Time has slipped between Floyd’s fingers like sand. He has been simply having too much time and forgot to mention earlier how he wants to return the exchange, to enter your world. 

The palace is s-ooo-o boring! But, it has been altered by your presence. Floyd has been a soaked match, unable to burn, until you came along. He is positive that your world, beyond his imprisonment, is just as captivating as you are. You are the key to his gates. 

God, you really are so beautiful.

But when you smile?

It could rival even the rising sun.

Floyd watches with a smile on his face —- awaiting your answer, as orange bleeds out onto the water and dawn starts to rise over the horizon — the light in your eyes dim before you collapse in a heap.

MAKING MOVES, MOVING IN. floyd leech

requested by: @clowning-constant / cake details: marble cake (NRC) with buttercream frosting (mutual pining) and sprinkles (specific to requester)

“Hey Sealie,” Floyd says, tone light but not entirely friendly.

He’s not exactly thrilled to see the little fur ball, but it’s not too bad to see him either. His presence implies the fact that you could be nearby. That knocks him just a little bit out of his funk.

The basketball ricochets off the backboard, not even close to the hoop.

Hm, not enough to knock him out of his funk completely.

“What’s up with ya,” he prompts, reaching out sideways to scoop back up his ball. The little dire beast is an interloper on Floyd’s Alone Time after he skipped out on his afternoon classes, so it better be worth his time.

Grim has been searching for the eel-mer for the whole day. Sevens, it shouldn't be so difficult to find someone so tall! Hunger pangs are gnawing on his stomach — he just ate maybe an hour ago — so excuse him if his next words,

“My Henchman wants ya to come live at Ramshackle with us!”,

don’t come out so elegant.

The basketball thuds against the backboard so hard that it looks and sounds like the plexiglass is going to break just down the center. It is also another shot missed.

“Na-aaa-ah.”

Any other time, Floyd would be tickled pink and about to burst into sea foam. 

He’s a bit too rough around the edges, all thuggish and gangster-esque, but he metaphorically kicks his feet like a schoolgirl at the mere mention of you. A grin wide enough to split his face would be emerging at the idea, him hosted up in Ramshackle with his Shrimpy; even if Grim’s words aren’t true, he would tease you to an early grave with the notion.

Instead, he reaches out his leftie, scoops up his bouncing basketball one handed, and dribbles it in front of him.

“Thanks for the offer, though.” 

Bang! Everything but net.

“Wha!”

It’s not what Grim is expecting at all.

Because, Floyd is always hanging around Ramshackle. Where it once started out as Malleus Draconia’s hole in the wall, the second years becoming third years and the graduation of the third years led to this natural transition of loitering and, quite honestly, trespassing to transpire!

Grim starts listing his very persuasive reasoning:

“Ya already have a toothbrush there!” Not that special, so do Deuce and Ace.

 “And, you’re over for dinner every other night.” Only because someone eats without limits unless there’s a big eel-mer blocking the fridge door.

“It would make everything so much easier if ya just moved your stuff into a spare room.” It would also lessen up the chores on Grim’s end. “Then, finally, my Henchman would stop talking about you so much!”

The shot that Floyd was lining up suddenly, hands held out, moving the basketball left and right to find the correct flight path, is suddenly realigned; all his attention arrows down to Grim.

“Shrimpy talks ‘bout me?”

Inside Floyd, a switch has been flicked. Grim can tell, animal instincts prickling his skin. It is especially evident with the way Floyd’s eyes shift, pupils dilating and the rings of yellow and olive shining like plugged in Christmas lights.

Grim is scrabbling to backpedal, weighing who’s going to fry his tail more — you or the immediate threat. “Well, they, um, they just talk. They talk about Ace and Deuce all the time. They complain about the Headmage. They name drop. They talk in general, so! Eek!”

The hard maple floor of the court ripples with the effect of Floyd’s bounce, deliberately aimed at Grim’s feet. With his height, it’s like an earthquake to the dire beast.

It resets him though, stops his yammering, s-ooo-o. 

“What kinda things,” Floyd drawls, all peachy-keen now.  That glowing yellow eye is like a sun flare.

“Well, just, uuum, just,” Grim’s stuck between keeping his Henchman’s secrets and keeping his head.

“If ya tell me, I’ll pack my stuff tonight.”

Which equals no more chores for Grim.

“They like how sweaty you get after basketball.”

Not exactly the most charming thing to be taken away from lengthy, lengthy talks but it’s the first thing that comes to his mind.

Floyd pauses like a buffering DVD, ball still in his hands. Not perturbed by the information in the slightest; he likes when you’re sweaty too, always playing tug-of-war with animal pleasure and human decency to not take a giant, sweeping lick from your clavicle, across your neck, and end at your ear. You doing P.E. is just as charming as you doing anything else.

“Reall-y, what a weirdo,” but his dumb grin says otherwise, “they’re always so squirmy ‘bout it,” he’s been punched enough in the ribs to know to stop draping himself over you when a game or practice is finished but now?, “Got anythin’ else?”

“Myah, I don’t know!”

Grim’s ready to turn tail. If you find out about just that one sentence being said, he’ll be doing dishes for months until his paws wash right off.

Floyd smells the hesitation in the water.

“C’mon, don’t leave me high and dry. Ya want me to move in right? Gonna need some motivation to help me start putting all my shoes in a suitcase.”

Well, now Grim’s not so sure about the whole moving in part. Floyd can definitely reach high up places for dusting, but he’s also Floyd Leech.

“Ya know, I think we’re too crowded in Ramshackle. Plus, all the ghosts haven’t been told about this yet. Squatter’s rights, and ummm… I’ll go debrief with them then I’ll come back to- y-ouch!!”

Held between Floyd’s hand is Grim’s trident-shaped tail. Crouched down to his height, the brute rests the basketball under his knee so it doesn’t roll away. He smiles a smile that is too toothy.

“Don’t ice me out, Sealie, c’mon. I just wanna hear what Shrimpy's gotta say. How about this, for everything you tell me, I’ll buy ya a jar of tuna.”

Floyd doesn’t fish — a little too existential for his taste — but he knows when he’s got them hook-line-sinker.

Grim shuffles on his hind legs but it is already clear by his pursed lips that he’s gonna spill some more stuff. 

Floyd listens, rapted, as both the double doors and Grim’s mouth open.

“My Henchman thinks you look real sexy when your cleavage is showing in your uniform!”

In such an empty gymnasium, the sound travels well.

“Grim!!”

“Shrimpy!” Floyd greets you jovially, letting go of your cat’s tail and standing up. He’s pleased as punch, ready for the entertainment of a lifetime.

His hand coming up to unbutton his third button is inconspicuous.

DEFLOWERED. floyd leech 

requested by: anon / cake details: red velvet cake (royalty AU) with edible flowers (fluff) and citrus glaze (smut)

It all starts with him insulting your father. 

A bizarre thing. 

However, you cannot help that it has you biting down on your index, lungs quivering with concealed laughter as deeper and deeper, this fearless jester twists the knife of comedy into your father’s stomach. Insults about his latest failed crusade, jabs directed toward his growing weight, and well-timed criticism about his inability to rule a kingdom. One joke has you contorting in your seat, throwing an arm over your face and squeezing tight into your chair with bouncing shoulders and quivering legs. He leaves you gasping for mercy, stop! stop! hehe!, as your grin spreads ear to ear. 

He is perhaps the only man in the world who can achieve such a feat. Gasping for mercy that is.

For your own pride, you would like to say you do not how this situation came to be. You would pledge to the court that your jester is a disguised fae, seducing you with witchcraft and making you do unholy things. Usually, there is more sense in your head; Floyd happens to suck it all up with a straw, a vicious butterfly on top of a delicate flower.

Sex in the botanical gardens? Surely, you should know better. There are only so many flowers to cover the scent, only so many plants to cover the sight, and nothing to cover the sound as you gasp wantonly.

“Fuh-Floyd! Ah – augh. Fuh-Fl–!” When you throw your head back, it bounces off the gazebo’s floor. Tears prick like thorns in your eyes. “Ehhh–Enough. I … eugggh.”

“One more. One more.” Floyd encourages, looming over your body. He kneels between your thighs, straddling around the right thigh while the other shakes and seizes over his left thigh. Relentlessly, without a shred of any mercy, he pumps himself into you.

You cannot see it given the ruffles of silk and taffeta that flow from your waist. Your tailor would be double-over from a heart attack if he knew you allowed his masterpiece, designed specifically for today's upcoming tea party, had been shoved aside by Floyd’s hands like those intricate laces were nothing more than lousy wrapping paper to get to the valuable present underneath. 

You had told Floyd, pulling the hair underneath his monk cowl like horse reins to get him to pay attention, to be careful but you think you heard a tear all the same. The absolute brute.

However, his brutish attributes are usually what calls you back to him. It is certainly brutish now. The girth of his cock oscillates back and forth like a wild pendulum, pulling himself back only to return with added vigor in each thrust. His pressure suffocates you like he is atmospheric. He is the air you need to breathe in a way. 

To be drowned in him is an eudaimonia summit that you can only reach with his help.

As if reading your mind, Floyd bends down closer to you. Balls slapping hard against your leaking pussy, sending juices ricocheting into a messy puddle around your combined sex, he leans down to get a better look at your face.

With the way you two are positioned, there has mostly been constant eye-contact between the two of you. You love his face. This is the hardest part of being in love and needing him like oxygen. When his nose crunches as he laughs, when his eyes gleam as he looks, even the miniscule flop of his tongue as he talks and talks, it makes everyone else seem ugly.

His handsome face leans down to grin at you; you choke out a loud, bashless moan. On the gazebo floor, you press your check down hard, jaw hanging open involuntarily and eyes squeezed tight as his cock gives a particular hard punch to just the very gated edges of your cervix.

To be under his gold eye feels like being burnt by a sunbeam.

Floyd plants a tiny garden of kisses on your face, moving from forehead to cheek to ear to chin to nose to lip. Mouth already limp, he meets no resistance when he sticks his tongue into the embrace. You try to kiss back as well as you can with your soul being fucked from your body.

He is so greedy. Knowing exactly which way to slip past your defenses with a correctly timed joke, he managed to go from simply his knuckles up inside, from his tongue lapping up the first orgasm, to have you contorted beneath him, trying not to burn out from your third.

Hummingbird heart going wild in your chest, you lift your head up to engage deeper into that kiss. Sliding and mashing tongues together as your genitals do the same in a much more lubricant setting. Sevens, you feel like a swamp down there, drenched enough by bodily sweat all over but rivers soaked on your inner thighs. 

Floyd adjusts your position, slowing down his thrusts, resting your spine on the gazebo and sliding back in missionary. Air breezes underneath the skirt of your dress. He leans up to his full height as he guides your legs around his waist. 

He’s making these hisses with teeth between his grunts. His stomach clenches with each strained effort to keep in his noises. He’s usually so loud?

“Buh-Bite your index finger.”

You don’t even get to move your hands, the right one curled into your chest and the left one limp above your head, before he plows into you like a drill. 

Phap, Phap, Phap, PhapPhapPhapPhapPhapPhap —!!!

Your legs literally shake like they’re trying to come off, rattling bones going crazy. Eyes saucer wide, you go noiseless, mouth open in an O. It’s a telltale that you’re going to start grunting like a pig, moans spilling out an involuntary volume as your orgasm hits the top and crests downward.

He falls into you in a millisecond, chest to chest, orgasm starting to arrive at the top, one white droplet leaking out before the flood, and kisses you as hard as he can. 

It’s more like jamming his lips against your teeth and cracking his skull against your skull, but it is over-washed by the warmth of him spilling into you, deep and fast. Before you can start, Floyd bites your lips together quite unceremoniously and breathes hard through his nostrils. Euphoria hits you both, his cum squirting and your hole milking. Still, the both of you are silent beyond heavy, thunderous breaths.

His hips do phantom thrusts, weak ones that are lingering sensations, as you flutter around him like a suckling mouth. Fuuuck. You feel like buoyant jelly, limp and warm, both of your hips rolling lazily and slower into each other with passing moments.

“Did you hear that?”

“I think it came from this direction.”

“It better not have. We have to set up the chairs in the gazebo for the tea party.”

Whatever ease those three orgasms did, those voices undo them in an instance. Your head snaps towards Floyd, who pulled back on his elbows to rest his face in the lifted cleavage from your bodice. You feel his smile against the top of your breasts instead of seeing it, watching his rise and fall with each volcanic punch of your oxygen-deprived lungs.

To be his is a daily struggle.

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i’m such a slut for music recs and music tag games let’s fucking go,, thank you for the tag mera!!

1. fashion killa - a$ap rocky

2. it only makes me laugh - oingo boingo

3. strawberry gashes - jack off jill

this is open tags for anyone!

MUSIC LOVERS ASSEMBLE!!

i feel like starting a tag chain so i hope this works out :)

reblog this with 3 songs:

the song your listening to right now (or last one you listened to)

your current favourite song

a song of your choice

______________________________________________________________

mine:

its now or never - elvis presley/love in the dark - adele

trastevere - måneskin

nevermore - queen

______________________________________________________________

tagggzzzz: (np ofc) @heartstopper-lover123 @s0lit4ir3 @ali-da-demon @vicwritesfic @skeelly @charliethinks @tori-my-love @chronic-skeptic @toulouseradiosilence @stewpid-soup @nine-frogs-in-a-trenchcoat @pessimistic-gh0st @theshyqueergirl @crowleybrekkers @a-bowl-of-soop @frogfairy444 @robinheaney12 @fairyghostgirlgaming @thatsawesomedontyouthink @venusplanetoflove2 @thelovelyvie @abookishshade @spir4nts-lun4r @i-have-no-idea-111 @kit-the-queer @a-wondering-thought @scatteredraysofhope @coco6420 @softlyunbreakable @givennnnnn @far-beyond-saving @darling-im-wonderstruck @heartstoppernerdsstuff @nonbinary-idiot-obviously @rebelrobinrules1984 @daydream-of-a-wallflower @leonine-elizer @angel-devil-star and anyone else who wants to join!!

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Just wanted to drop in and let you know that your newest work - MX. sinister was amazing. Beyond amazing. the way you described alternate mark coupled with droplets of the past, as well as the implied stalking. all so delicious.

please write more for mark !!! I don't think there are many people who write for mark on Tumblr and ao3.

i’m so glad mx. sinister was enjoyable to read!!! i had a lot of fun with that one-shot, especially with how plainly obvious it is that mark’s the stalker but the conscious arrogance of the MC’s part — very ‘monkey see no evil’ at the worst times.

i definitely will start workshopping some more invincible one-shots. i have one for the viltrumite variant of mark on the back burner and one for the no goggles variant rn which alternates between the main timeline and no goggles timeline. i’m genuinely surprised at the size of the fanfic community for invincible — it’s been around for a while u know? but i’m happy to throw my mediocre hat in the ring.

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MX. SINISTER. alternative # 16 / sinister! invincible

You can no longer be Mark's friend. You can no longer be Mark's lover. You can no longer be on the same planet as him without feeling sick to your stomach. Not after what you witnessed, burnt deep into your retinas.

In the end though? It all boils to what you are denying, forcing yourself to turn a blind eye to, then to what you cannot forgive and forget, forcing yourself to acknowledge. You simply picked the wrong things to ignore and wrong things to address.

tags: stalking, breaking up & ‘making up’, blood and violence, animal death, implied/referenced somnophilia, nudity, & physical abuse

word count: 10,665

Despite how many times the two of you have said goodbye, he is still not leaving. You have managed, wrestling with him metaphorically and once a literal shove that did as much as dust hitting concrete, to corral him to the threshold of your parents’ home. Still inside, door ajar behind him, he crouches and continues planting kisses on your ragdoll cat who leans into each one like a plant turning towards sun.

“And you’ll miss me when I’m gone, wooon’t you? Yes, you will! You’re gonna miss your daddy.”

If your eyes could roll any further, you would be staring at your brain. Instead, the view you are confined to is the one you’ve been imprisoned to passively watch for the last honest-to-God ten minutes. Like a prisoner in your own home.

Some distance between the two of you is what you need. Not relationship distance, not the distance between his and your house on intersecting neighborhood blocks, not even the mere distance found from where he crouches languidly and you stand firm. The distance you are talking about is an outstretching length, as far as him on Mars and you on Earth. Enough space to soon forget the color of his eyes or the sound of his voice. 

Coffee eyes flicker up to scrutinize. Between each long forehead kiss or enthusiastic rub, Mark has been making sure you know he knows you are standing there and waiting for him to leave. Sailing past cat ears, his vision sinks its teeth into you before his eyes shut, cooing, “Whooo’s my good boy!”, as Dexter purrs under the affection of his second parent.

It honestly surprises you that Mark is capable of this. Unsure as to why he showered the ragdoll in such ardent embraces, all these smooches and scratches are outliers to his overall attitude. Kindness is rare for Mark to pass out; the only receivers are Dexter and, sometimes, you.

Finally, after so much deliberation, he stands up. Putting his thumbs into his pockets, Mark sways once on the balls of his feet playfully as Dexter rolls with his tummy exposed up. He ignores how Dexter claws on his gray trousers in a plea for him to stay and never leave. Almost all of his pants are scared by those feline hooks. Gone instantly is the high-pitched baby talk and his playful demeanor like it had never been there to begin with.

He says as monotone as a dead ocean, “If you come running for my help, I won’t answer.”

The airy affront caught in your throat twists and molds itself into, “Is that as Invincible or is that as my boyfriend?”

His facial features change. It is like watching a low timelapse of a fruit going bad and attracting flies. Pale lips peel, revealing those thicker than human canines and molars that metamorphosis into an award winning smile. “I guess you’re just going to have to find out.”

Exhausted and weak from the previous back and forth, you simply exhale out your frustration and say, firm and pushing, “Bye Mark.”

No matter how you slice or dice it, Mark has always had an air of superiority — that cocky male confidence that keeps his chin up steadily — about him when things are going his way; it is written in the very skeleton of his being. What makes you simultaneously nervous and disgusted is that he still has that smug assertiveness, lingering after the breakup. It has not waned once and it only seems to preen under you bidding him a harsh goodbye.

“See you around,” he affirms to you.

When the ajar door finally closes behind Mark, the first thing that happens is your eyelids droop, fast. You are tired like you have never been; you are sure you are going to sleep like a rock.

That breakup drained so much energy from you. Even the mere epidermis on you feels heavy like a coat’s layers. Such a proof of human stamina, Mark light on his feet as he walked out the door and you now trudging to collapse in your bed. Just minutes ago, you stood in here, yelling and stomping, exerting yourself down to the last reserve, and he stood still, took it all without really contributing any energy, seeing your anger as pointless. Like a chalk outline crime scene, this bedroom is forever stained by the memory.

At least neither of your parents were home to hear it. One works the graveyard shift from 7pm to 6am and the other is always staying at their second lover’s, no divorce or even breakup-esque argument finalized. You couldn’t be like that, staying despite the awfulness, ignoring things.

You loved Mark, but it didn’t feel right.

‘...’ you stew in silence.

Great, now you’re getting sappy. 

The feeling plants itself inside you as you tuck yourself into bed, Dexter curling up at your stomach. Introspection’s a fucking bitch. Being stuck in your head is the last thing you want right now, falling into a labyrinth of excuses and heartbreak. So, you try to alleviate that by pulling out your phone, screensaver of Mark flashing, only for it to lead you right to your photo gallery. 

That planted feeling starts to grow little cacti pricks as you scroll through each photo – him with a baby Dexter crawling up his sleeve like a spider, him waiting with an umbrella at the end of a street corner for you to catch up, him preparing for a yard sale of his childhood comic figurines, him shirtless on the beach and flashing one of his infrequent smiles that rivals the entire galaxy in your eyes – and it turns into a poisonous organism when you finally reach the very top of your gallery, back when you got this phone at sixteen. 

You scrolled so far that you have come across the origin of your love story. Well, it is certainly not the very start; the start is before either of you had a phone, bike ride on the street leading you to find a boy on the other street rolling a baseball over antholes like a bulldozer. This picture is from after the first date.

Eyelids grow heavier, your limp wrist holds the picture slightly parallel with your vision. It is a shot of you walking up the cobblestone path to your house’s front door. Back to the camera, completely unaware that it was taken, this is the only evidence of your first date besides memory. It is the kind of photo taken by freelance photographer who might have been paid to follow someone, but —

“I wanted to make sure you got home safe.”

You look up from his phone that you had stolen, utterly famished to know what he kept in his photo gallery now that you have crossed into intimate boundaries. Such a considerate answer makes you pause, your previous question answered. 

“But I live a street away,” your laugh is strained.

Mark looks up from his homework, Dexter sitting on his spine and leaving white furs on his black button-up, his hair horns free of gel after a shower, and says quietly, “That doesn’t mean I don’t want you safe.”

What an interesting introspection to stumble back upon sleepily in the aftermath of him turning out to be Invincible and the words he departed on today as you two officially stepped out of your relationship. How safe are you even with him? Especially after… but before you can remember the reason for the breakup, hand flaccidly releasing your phone on the charging pad, you are falling into sleep with a simple blink.

The first date you and Mark went on, you had lobster. 

Really pulling out the metaphorical red-carpet, Mark grinned that toothy leer as you stumbled through earrings and outfits and overall preparing for your first date at sixteen to be at an impossibly fancy seafood restaurant – that requires reservations in advance. How he was so confident you would be free, you’ll always be at a loss. 

Vomiting words and more words, you drilled through a one-sided conversation most of the night, helplessly wondering why you were invited here if Mark didn’t seem interested or entertained enough to talk to you. Your stomach was empty of colloquial bile by the time the lobsters arrived, bright red and steaming. In the same instance where you reached for the pliers, Mark moved your plate over to his side. You stared, surprised. 

“I’m going to show you a trick,” he says, friendly enough that you sit back to listen. He picks up the body of your lobster, twisting off the tail from the body, doing the same with the claws. “You don’t need pliers for this part. If you find the correct seam, you can break it like a cracker.”

He digs his thumbnails into the top of the claw. Along the seam of the curling pincher, smaller claw dangling below, his thumbs give one forceful push in. The exoskeleton comes off like a mere accessory, breaking along the curve and opening like a clam shell.

“Here,” smug satisfaction and teasing, “you try it.” He hands over the second claw of your lobster.

Dubiously, you eye the pincher once it is in your hand. Flipping it over, you put your thumbs where you saw Mark’s thumbs go. Hard and resilient, the exoskeleton gives no show of damage as you drive down your thumbs. You wrestle with it for one embarrassing minute. 

Is this some kind of humiliation ritual? Feeling like a fool but not stopping, you try to break traffic-light red armor with your feeble hands in such a fancy restaurant with such fancy waiters and such fancy decor. Skin burns under makeup. The only part that seems to be retaining injury is your nails which ache with each dig and push. It’s not impossible though, because Mark did it; you try harder. The smooth nail palate of your right thumb breaks under the pressure, chipping off rose gold paint and leaving a jagged edge. 

Mark laughs boyishly, unable to keep it in. Before you can even access the sound, he is stealing the claw from you and breaking it down the middle with the ease of a regular person snapping an apple in halves. “There’s a finesse to it.”

He starts talking more after that, like that display had put him in a good mood. Despite it, you enjoy his company – after all, there was a second date, a third, even a fourth. Underneath the scent of vanilla and whatever soft jazz the restaurant had playing on a live stage, you two dipped cleaned lobster meat into butter and found yourself falling into something that didn’t have any identity, even when you two put up weak labels like boyfriend and girlfriend.

Now, you are having a dream that you are a lobster.

You have had many strange dreams in the past. Stuff that you have woken up from that doesn’t have a relevance or makes sense is natural to a stressed or bored mind. There have been dreams where you were nailed to a pool’s plastic lining, green water and leaves floating on the surface all you could see, and there have been dreams where you were in a volatile panic, heaving and close to vomiting, due to not being able to find garlic chips in your pantry. Dreams seldom make sense. All you can do is accept the current reality, tell yourself to breathe water and guide yourself to the next shelf. Right now, you are, without a doubt, a lobster.

It isn’t such a bad life to be imprisoned in this lobster purgatory. You are almost passive in all aspects of living as you have already boiled and plated. There’s not much to do except accept the abuse sure to come. A lobster is made to be eaten.

Which is why you stretch out your spine in bed, shirt riding up and blanket riding down, as two hands eclipse around your figure, twisting in opposite directions and segmenting you into two parts, the body and the tail, feeling in your asleep own figure like a rock has settled in your stomach. Like peeling a tougher version of an orange, the shell on your tail is broken down the middle and stripped off to reveal meat. A tickle runs up your spine. Tail meat, vibrant white and rose, is dipped in a cup of hot water. In a circular spot, you feel a dull ache on the side of your inner thigh, deep, as if being consumed.

Warmth is not hard to find in this dream. As more of your exoskeleton is removed, appendages slowly sink one by one into that murking water, shaken and jostled to clean them thoroughly. Even when you shift, limp-limbed in bed, and a sock falls off or a sleeve rides up, there is still heat nearby. Dreams that are stranger are the warmest too.

Claws are broken from knuckles, snapped like twigs. With a petite, invading hook that scrapes, the slim piece of meat in your tinier pinchers is slowly wrenched out. Arms limp and bent like an abused Barbie in the waking world, your pinkie gives a tiny twitch at the sensation. Warmth dulls that restlessness and your pinkie falls still. 

But, the most harrowing part is the unknown hand on your throat. With lobster anatomy, your brain is in your throat. A brain consists and categorizes all measures of living, manufacturing the dreams that you experience. The pressure is suffocating. You are being choked out of breath and choked out of thought simultaneously. 

If you are ever going to die, it is going to be done by this hand.

So much of yourself is floating away from you, essential oxygen and rationale out of reach. There is still the warmth that coats you like a temperature-crafted exoskeleton. Even when your shorts bunch up with each toss and turn and even when your blanket is maneuvered around by twitchy motions, that sensation never wanes; it would stay with you permanently even if you did try to kick it out like a bad dog. 

Red and hot, your consciousness burns like the cherry pit center of the Earth. 

You wake up with the sun, body temperature high. No longer a lobster. 

Stretching out all your knots, you reach for your phone at your bedside to see what time it is. Your fingers miss it by inches and only when you heave a sigh of aggravation do you feel it, the rawness of your throat. Like all the water and oxygen was fucked out.

The bathroom mirror reflection confirms its existence concretely. 

Standing in loose workout shorts and a band tee, you access what you speculated upon, never imagining it could be as bad as this. 

In your turbulent experience with dating, you have experienced a hickey here and there. Left like leopard spots, Mark always enjoyed planting those reminders of himself on your neck, even if they only came from second base rather than a home run. Those were easy to cover up; you even helped Mark with some of his. There is not enough concealer in the world to make this one disappear.

There is a handprint on your neck. Not just simply five fingers, the palm too. Cauterized into your skin through mere pressure alone, the rough, prickly red shape of four fingers on the left side of your neck, cupping palm directly over your thyroid bone, and one thumb on the right side of your neck is a heavy stain. When you go to match prints, because obviously you would assume this is a self inflicted wound, the size is wider and thicker than the limits of your hand. 

Dominant hand holding your throat, your eyelids go up in slow understanding. You really couldn’t say it was your first thought because why would you ever jump to such conclusions. Someone else had their hand around your throat.

‘Of course, they did. Do you even see how huge it is? How deep it is? I couldn’t remake this if I tried,’ you think to yourself, but denial is such a thick clog in the brain that you keep rotating and maneuvering your hand to try and make it fit the bruise’s shape.

Eventually, you drop your hand on the sink, stickiness from old toothpaste gluing them together. Paralyzed, you keep staring at the discolored skin as if expecting it to be a trick of the light. Attempts to recall your dream are fruitless; you have been awake so long that it is hopeless that the fabricated reality has floated away like a bubble caught in the wind. All you have left as a reminder is the hickey-handprint of — you shudder in realization — a stranger.

Spiraling, it takes a while for you to realize that is not the only pain. All your attention has been focused so intently on your throat that it doesn’t dawn on you until much later you have another sight of injury on your body.

You touch between your legs; that too feels like a bruise.

Try as you might, and sincerely you do, you cannot cover the handprint completely. It is like attempting to cover up a tattoo that has been inked into your skin. The majority of it is covered, concealer caked on like frosting, but even just the slightest motion makes it noticeable if someone looks close enough.

Which is exactly what Amber does, suddenly gasping in her dorm bed when you turned your neck in response to the buzz of your phone, screen lighting up with Mark’s face and a text message bubble. 

The text is forgotten as she asks horrified, “Oh my God, what happened? Who did that to you?”

You really should change your screensaver, you think. Needing something to do with anxious hands, you adjust the collar of your jean jacket, spring far too warm to wear a turtleneck but you tried to suck it by bringing a jacket as coverage. It almost gives you a few seconds to plan a response which is still a lackluster, “oh um, things got too wild last night. It’s really nothing. I didn’t notice till —”

“Mark did that.” 

Uh-oh, the vitriol in her voice is enough to make you want to change your made-up answer. You’re still toying with the denial that you might have done this to yourself, developed epileptic seizures or some movement disorder overnight, a health-related explanation that might make more sense to you. In the moment, it was the only thing you could think of. The breakup is not known in your circle of friends and Mark didn’t show up to Upstate today.

It was definitely the wrong thing to say because now Amber Bennet, number one hater of your ex-boyfriend (boyfriend in her perspective), looks like she wants to track him down and fight, which would end very badly for her.

“It’s alright – It’s alright, we talked it over and it’s total water under the bridge. Forgive and forget, you know? I wouldn’t just let this happen unless it was consensual of course,” as soon as the words are out, you want them back in.

“Forgive and forget, Jesus; how many times are you just going to forgive and forget? With how many dates he’s skipped out on, how many times you’ve been made the blame for his problems, how long are going to keep forgiving when he gives you the cold shoulder for –”

“Amber, please,” you plea, grabbing her arm to stop her gesturing. All day, you have been stumbling along like a zombie, exhausted still from the one-sided screaming match. “I know and it’s been getting better. We’re figuring stuff out.”

It feels so weird, saying the direct opposite of what happens in the last twenty four hours. You two haven’t been ‘figuring stuff out’; you refused to bend your morals and values to fit within his own and broke up. It would probably overjoy Amber to hear the truth about last night, but with this new, unknown development, your nineteen years of life has no guide for what to do in this situation. 

Mark would not do this. You know intimately what he is capable of, but he would not deliberately harm you. Not unless something pushed him beyond his limits.

After so much back and forth, the subject is finally dropped – forgiven and forgotten. By the time you are walking home from Amber’s dorm, violet and rose gold lighting up the twilight skies, you surmise it would have been better to simply skip classes today. Unintentionally dragging your feet, a supernatural bloodlet has emptied you of any vigor. Weary eyes find the darkening sky. 

Mark used to fly you through that very kaleidoscope of warm and cool colors – orange and blue light bleeding into the same clouds for a half an hour – and return both of you from Upstate University to your joint neighborhood blocks. Now, here you are walking an hour journey that you used to travel in a quarter of that time. There are so many quotidian parts of your life that you are going to have to get used to being different, now that Mark is gone. Maybe he really has gone to Mars like you were hoping yesterday, the distance between the two of you now planetary. 

He’s been stuck in your head all day though; there is no withdrawal of him there. You knew he never wanted to go to Upstate, human education a pointless endeavor for a superpowered alien, conceding only for your sake. Still, you cannot help wondering where he has gone. Free from a romantic relationship, the Earth is his oyster.

‘What did I limit him from,’ you think, then immediately try to dismiss such a volatile rabbithole. 

To ignore that Mark might have never loved you at all and was staying just to sate boredom, you pull out your phone with the intent to see what that text message from earlier was. Having to steer Amber off the bruise and resume essay workshopping, you forgot to check it again after that. It’s an unknown number, notification reading 1 Image, printed over the screensaver of Mark, which you click on.

Your phone almost ends up cracked on the pavement.

Fumbling with it in shaky hands, you squint at the image to make sure you’re seeing it right. 

It is a slightly aerial shot, taken from the height of someone at least moderately tall or planted on a ceiling. This vantage point allows the photograph to encompass your body and mattress fully, no details cut off. In the sent image, you lie under covers, lips parted in deep sleep and oblivious to your picture being taken. 

Like a rollercoaster cresting the other side of a hump, your heart races down to your feet and splats on the cobblestone pavement. 

Trying to smother out panic, you click the off button, feeling like you have ants tiptoeing down and up your veins. As soon as your phone is off, you click it back on and unlock it – a hundred percent positive that you saw wrong. Your sleeping face stares back at you. 

Panicked even more, you click the off button and shove your cell into your jean jacket pocket, immediately wrapping your dominant hand around your bookbag strap. As long as your hands are occupied, you can ignore it. It’s probably nothing, just like the handprint, just like …

Your ears pick it up languidly. Someone is walking behind you, maybe a yard or so back. Crunching gravel underfoot gives them away crystal clear. How you had not noticed it before; at such a late time, no one walks these sidewalks besides you now that you have dumped your personal air travel ride.

Now, you walk on an obscuring path, lack of light starting to make the edges of stone, pavement, and grass blend together in similar colors, clueless about when this person started walking behind you but certain that they are too close for comfort unless they plan to overpass you. Testing, you slow your gait. They slow theirs. ‘Fuck.’

How could you possibly not have noticed someone following behind so closely? It is as if they have suddenly appeared out of thin air. Were you purposefully ignoring the sounds of footsteps until the photo of you in bed resurrected your anxiety?

‘This sucks,’ your blood seethes, footsteps returning to a normal pace. You survey the front yard gardens and parked cars you are walking by just to take your mind off all this spiraling disaster.

A thought peeks through the tornado of inner discord and enters without any foreword. Those mimicking, identical footsteps are steadfast, following. Your brain absentmindedly plants the seed of walking straight to Mark’s house, a very small detour from your place, and see how quickly this creeper becomes harmless in comparison to a vexed Invincible. 

It hits you quite quickly, yesterday’s reminder of how he wouldn’t save you ever again. Teeth grit. 

In your jacket, your phone buzzes once. Curses play around on your tongue, groaning or mumbling in your twitching mouth. More than anything, you wish Mark was here right beside you and not however far away he has gone. Head down, you keep walking even when your legs feel like flimsy jelly.

All you have for self-defense is the pepper spray at the bottom of your bag, but if the stranger wrestles the bag out of your hands before you reach it, it's nothing more than a fancy nicknack. The kubotan on your house keys ring is in your jean jacket pocket; your phone –buzzing once more to let you know two minutes have passed since you received a notification – is in your other jean jacket pocket, available to dial 911.

Like colors trying to retain their vibrance in a cup of mixed paints, the last shreds of rose gold and violet are starting to turn ebony with the approaching night sky. There are only five more blocks you need to tread down, taking memorized turns at each specific stop sign. It is too early to book it, too much distance left between yourself and safety.

Then, a breath is blown on your neck. Goosebumps rise like dough on the patch of skin. Thoughtlessly, you have pivoted and grip your kubotan tight by your thigh. 

No one is standing behind you. 

The entire block is empty, deserted. The sight of peopleless sidewalks and a stretching, carless road does not quell you; if anything, you feel as if all your arteries are pinched by invasive lobster claws, causing your heart to skip a vital beat. Paranoia is really starting to seep in. That breath was no trick of the wind.

‘Put your head down and head home,’ you order yourself, electing to not acknowledge that there was obviously a person behind you a second ago. Picking up pace but refusing to sprint, you take the right around the stop sign, moving from Pendergast Road to Logan Ave.

These were the streets Mark and you used to ride your bikes on. Teaching him the ropes of bicycling because neither of his parents would spare effort, you two raced each other on these same sidewalks, Mark attempting to knock you into the grass or a post and you attempting to knock him off balance by hitting his back wheel with your front one. Two little devils always scraping with one another, always at each other’s throat in mutual romping, until a time it was taken too far and —

The retreating bumper of the car that mangled the front of your bicycle and almost tore your head from your shoulder shrinks and shrinks as the driver speeds off. Palms dripping with blood, all you do is stare in stunned understanding.

Your stupor does not last before you turn, head whipping, in the direction of Mark. Who, steady upon his parked bicycle, is laughing like a pleased hyena. “What an adrenaline rush, huh!” he exclaims through his cheerful giggles. 

Reasonably, you should be furious at him for endangering you then basking in your fright. That day, you should’ve taken your bike home and refused to see the weird kid down the block again. However, you didn’t. Bleeding and bruised, you sat and listened. Never before had he laughed in your presence. You took time soaking in the sound, his mirth wilting down your annoyance until it was water under the bridge. 

The incident had not made a difference in your friendship. You told him, “I’ll get you next time,” as he disinfected your palms. The next time involved you driving Mark off his bike, straight into a mailbox, leaving him with a shiner the size of a tennis ball. 

These streets are full of such good memories; now, you are tainting them by swiftly walking as that pair of footsteps seemingly appear out of thin air and start to follow you again.

Everything you have been trying to keep at equilibrium is starting to gain speed. One by one, your body accelerates: sneakers squeaking as you ascend from speed-walking, jogging, to sprinting; a once steady heart rate rising in beats per minutes, pumping blood faster to your limbs; inhales and exhales growing taut, intervals between them shortening as you gasp for breathing, running for your life suddenly because the person behind you is running at you.

Not expecting the almost instantaneous shift, your brain is adrenaline-empty, the kind of death of rational thoughts that animals experience. You swing yourself into Hillcrest Street, gravel kicking up at your heels, and run. An obscured rock almost trips you but you upright and continue, arms pumping and eyes circular with fear, bolting towards safety. 

Whatever is behind you is gaining and gaining fast.

Kubotan already in hand, you jostle the ring of keys in your palm and find, without looking, your house key. If you miss the lock, you are certain that you are done. ‘Fucking Christ,’ you can feel their acrid breath closing in, readying to ensnare you. No matter your speed it feels like they are already on top of you.

Hyperventilating, you crash straight into your front door, stabbing the key in the first try. You can almost taste them resting upon you, yards having close to mere centimeters. They are in your fucking skin. They have already found a way in your house. The door unlocks in your unsteady hand and you push it inward mindlessly, the start of tears beginning to bubble up.

Then, a hurricane rips through the atmosphere, forceful air pushing you inside on your hands and knees and slamming your door against the side of your house. Scrambling, you turn to make a grab for the doorknob, only to pause, hair messy and eyes wild. There is no one standing at the front entrance threshold. No one was behind you.

Wheezes rattle your bones. On the ground, you sit confused, terrified, suspicious, and in denial — a deadly combination. In front of you? A quotidian, calm neighborhood with sleeping houses, enshrouded in darkness but void of any boogeymen. Rapid, your chest goes up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down.

Once you gather your bearings, locking the door and pulling down all the shades, you will realize your phone has fallen out of your jean jacket.

It was airborne from the spontaneous hurricane, landing inside by the front threshold.

Mark’s eyes are hidden behind the notification: new message, unknown number, 1 Image attached.

It is a picture of you, back towards the camera, walking down the same sidewalks you always walk on your way home.

Like all bruises do, it fades. Decreasing in size, fingerprints losing length, the loss of distinctive features makes the blur of a palm indistinguishable from just a simple bruise. Day by day, it takes less Sephora concealer to hide. It becomes possible to ignore and file in the back of your head, forgotten.

You fall into normalcy. Glued to your computer, you finish your essays and you study for your final exams. Instead of walking on those familiar childhood streets, you take a bus to shorten your commute, even if it is a slight hit to your sparse savings; you will replenish with a summer job.

Despite this, you cannot completely shed off the feeling of something closing in. Skin has become a network of ant tunnels, a honeycomb route system for bees, a swiss cheese structure creeping and crawling with termites. You itch persistently with the sensation of stalking eyes. But even the worst itches do not need to be scratched, it is only a simple trail of mind over matter. The sight of glowing white scleras and blown pupils peeking through a crack in horizontal blinds can be ignored and seen as a mere trick of light, if only one tries hard enough. 

When you arrive home for your last final, you go from room to room in a practiced routine to draw all the timber blinds down. Tonight, like every night since the breakup, you are alone. On the stove, in celebration of a finished semester, you pop popcorn while rifling through pantries for alcohol. 

You’ve been lonely without Mark, a kind of loneliness you were not privy to before. The lack of his presence feels like a phantom limb. The two of you shared solitude, no siblings and shitty parents combo truly a lifeline between you both.

As the cork to the wine bottle pops off, you stare into the black-red liquid, trying to think about anything else but him.

‘...’ you stew and fail.

The day before Mark’s eighteenth birthday was the first time you drank, was probably the first time for Mark too. You have never known Mark to be an openly expressive person; all of his emotions are tablespoon measures of a normal person. Thus, his exhilarated anticipation for his eighteenth was such a surprise – that wide grin, endless comments about his Dad’s ‘gift’, his teasing touches, like a cat knowing tomorrow he would get the cream.

When he found your parents’ case of Smirnoff Ice, a single glance between the two of you sealed the deal. Bottlenecks grasped in erratic hands, you two spent the entire night in an empty house dancing like it was your last day on Earth, TV playing funky new wave music from the 80s and washing the living room in colors of electric blue and cherry red. His hips twitched and jerked along to the beat and your shoulders bounced and jerked along to the rhythm, both of your heads nodding along and swaying hair, utterly lost in bliss and alcohol. 

His mood did a 180 the next day, leaving you sober. Not once did Mark smile through the entire day, face like stone even while receiving Dexter’s kitten licks, as if a promise ensured to be fulfilled was broken. 

Now, you stand here about to pour yourself a drink, tampering the only experience you have had with alcohol by making the second drink of your life so utterly depressing, a half ass celebration that you are spending alone. 

The bottle finds your lips easily. 

Your cat has largely been an indoor cat most of his life. He finds comfort in the familiar couch cushion and familiar silk pillow, too pampered for the hardened life of outside. 

When your parents bought this house many years ago with a freshly eight month old you on their hip, upgrading from their condo, they never had a keen foresight for the unpredictability of the world, such as things like their marriage growing stale as old bread or to ever own a family pet. At least not until Omni-Man, known exclusively to your parents as Nolan Grayson the author, found a kitten on a classic save-people-from-a-burning-building day with no family to go back to. You fell in love instantly with the white bundle of fur and they all elected you as the prime caretaker. The only concern became the pet door on the backyard door, which would have been thought to be largely used by an adventurous kitten, only for Dexter to turn out to be very domesticated. You are pretty sure Dexter is not even aware of the pet door’s existence. 

The only reason that Dexter acknowledges it now is because there is a hand sticking out of it, a petite pile of brown cat treats in the palm. What causes him to go near it — ears and head perking up in recognition — is the voice on the other side.

“Dexteeer,” it croons, sweet and soft, the pet door almost appears as a sentient being with the hand being a hungry tongue, “Dexter, come here boy. Come to daddy. Dexteeer.”

It’s been a while since he has heard the voice, but the ragdoll knows who it is instinctively. It is the male bi-pedal creature who feeds him and gives him sweet pets. The scent of his cologne and that charcoal undertone of his natural skin is even more enticing than the smell of treats. Dexter hops off the couch armrest, padding over.

“That’s a good boy. Closer, Dexter.”

Dexter knocks his nose sweetly against the hand’s knuckles, rubbing up against the pet door’s tongue taste-buds. His secondary master has finally returned from exile. Lovingly, the ragdoll cat runs his tongue over the male’s wrist, ignoring the treats in favor of his presence. He is close enough now.

Like a frog tongue sucking up a fly, the hand swiftly encloses around Dexter’s head and pulls him into the mouth.

With one arm secure around the popcorn bowl and your separate hand gripping the neck of the wine bottle, you make your way into the living room. The moping around the kitchen ended when the smell of burnt popcorn filled the room. You decided to turn off your phone, knowing for certain that no one would call or text. The only company you can really rely on is Dexter’s, who you call out for in sing-songy curiosity.

He is a pretty obedient kitten, so the longer he goes without bounding in the room, knocking affectionately at your ankles, the more concerned you become. “Dexter, honey, come here.” You shake the bowl of popcorn, hoping to entice. 

Only setting the bowl on the coffee table when it proves fruitless, oddly unsettled. 

It is only when you hear a knock upon it do you remember the pet door. 

You jump out your skin, wine still in hand, eyes gone circular. Guests are not part of your lifestyle; no one at your college knows your address and why the fuck would they ever think to use the back door? ‘Mark,’ you think, because he is your constant companion despite everything.

Looking at the knob, you think you could forgive and forget if Mark is on the other side. So utterly famished for that familiar company, you think if he came back with the answer to your original question that you could bury the shovel and truly start again. You miss him like an amputee misses a limb.

Company that you know well is on the other side of the door, just not Mark. You stare at Dexter’s body, neck snapped in a full 180 degree, miniscule blood staining the porch. Your mouth twitches: into a half-smile of disbelief, into an empty gag that stirs your alcohol heavy stomach, into a grimace of remorse and grief, then finally into one long, aching scream. 

The bottle rolls heavy on the ground, soaking Dexter’s fur in ruby. 

Your brain melts like one glutinous, red candle. 

If there was ever a straw that broke the camel’s back, the death of your cat shatters your body into fragments. 

One of your parents comes home in the dusk from their lover’s or the graveyard shift; so out of it, you could not remember who you conversed with, only recalling the feeling of their icy knuckles pressing to your forehead to check your temperature, petting your hair afterwards. With a face of dried tears and melting hot skin, you manage to get halfway through the explanation about Dexter’s mutilated body on the back porch before your eyes roll up into your skull, grief suffocating. When you wake up on the couch, sweating gallons, it is twilight and the house is once again empty. The only sign of you living with another person is the little cup of 20mL, violet nighttime Tylenol on the coffee table.

Swaddled in a cape-esque blanket, you stumble over to the back door with a grape-flavored moustache, tongue heavy in your mouth. Deliberately, you open the door. The only remaining evidence of Dexter is the patch of darker wood compared to the rest of the porch.

Something must’ve come in the night, dragging him off to enjoy a meal despite not doing so when he was a fresh kill.

At a tortoise pace, you trudge to your room. You plant yourself on the mattress; a tree that can never be uprooted and a boulder that can never be rolled, you transform into this immovable object and fuse into the bed, staying in the exact position you fell into. Heat engulfs you, blood alit. 

Time moves simultaneously as slow as molasses with minutes moving as fast as seconds. Fever ablaze in your immune system, you have no recollection of the days anymore. Puddles of sweat mark your restless nightly turning, tattooing new positions into the duvet. The only slight semblance of knowing that time is actively moving are the cups of children's Tylenol by your bedside, water always refilled when you open your eyes, apple or orange slices on a plate, a note — that doesn’t look to be written by either of your parents’ hands — telling you when it is safe to take your medicine, all left on your bedside table. You are grateful now for never throwing out your digital clock.

The textured ceiling is your solace. Body too cumbersome, you do not reach for a remote or cellphone, not like you could focus long enough to locate them. You survey each swaying paint texture, finding patterns then losing the patterns in the next hour, rinse and repeat until finally your warm eyelids drop close into sleep.

The reason you ended things with Mark was because of a bank robbery.

Really seemed insignificant in the grand scheme of things. For a couple of years, you have known about Mark’s powers and his job, recognized that behind the yellow cowl and bug-eyed, ebony lens that that was your boyfriend and childhood playmate. His superhero endeavors are no longer off-putting, just a part of Mark Grayson.

Besides a few bystanders’ live streams and a helicopter’s vague footage, a lot of the battles go undocumented and swept under the hyperbole rug until the next cataclysmic event ruins another city. 

You cannot remember much of the bank robbery; most of it has been latently repressed, panicked brain putting it under lock and key in the vault — the place where all the stuff you do not want to remember goes. What bled out through the cracks was enough, vivid enough, detailed enough. Just a mere snapshot of it floating up from the Davy Jones locker of your subconscious causes you to be overwhelmed with grief and terror, planting you right back in that moment. 

He was like a vexed wasp.

Moving so swiftly that you almost thought you and the other hostages were being saved by Red Rush. Landing hits in quick succession but nothing that would keep them down for long. Playing with the two super-villains as if coordinating his movements for a bigger predator. Reveling in this the sensation of fire and blood underneath his fists.

The wreckage only stills for a tense moment when Mark cups his hands on his side of the man, whose body is rolling and living lava, and crushes it. Rivulets of fiery blood collapse and grow the sizes of sizzling magma pools at their feet. 

You do not hear the words that his mouth forms, but you close enough to catch the sight of his lips wobbling with a restrained grin, his face washed warm and bright with the sunrise yellow light flickering from the lava.

Like a rubberband, he snaps towards the other robber, face determined and emotionless. The robber — less anthropomorphic than his partner, wearing civilian clothes even with that odd, bubblegum pink, pulsing thing strapped to his chest, but with human features under a wool watch cap — barely has a moment to adjust before his wrist is cuffed. His arm comes off as easily as a doll’s, used as a katana to slice through his body twice in a X-shape, breaking the device above his ribcage, shredding flesh until only bone was left.

The blood splatter had hit you. As you lean closer to the fight, separating from the cowering huddles of people, you manage to stumble out from behind a desk, coming in direct crossfire of the violence. Painted diagonal across your face, the warmth of it sinks in your pores.

He is shaking, barely able to obstruct his mirth. “(Name),” he breathes, curiously looking to see which hostage was emerging first. Under lashes pricked with sanguine, your wide eyes soak it all in and commit it to memory. 

“Your heart is beating out your chest,” Mark smiles, one of those rare smiles.

The heat lingers on your face. Instead of being freckled with blood, waking skin is wet with sweat. 

As time passes with each dose of medicine, refilled Tylenol being the only way you have been able to keep track of hours, your core temperature has decreased significantly for the past three 20mL shots. A lingering dizziness still shrouds you yet with a dimmed intensity. Disoriented from sleep, you lean over pillows to check if your parents have set up another charcuterie board to ward off illness. 

Instead of any refills or new slices of fruit, your eyes take in the sight of Mark’s broad shoulders and that long yellow cape. Held in his glove is one of the three framed photographs you keep on your dresser.

Instead of asking why he is in your room, acknowledging his unusual presence so you can get straight to the root of the problem, you inquire softly, coming out of sleep, “Why are you in your suit?”

Still holding and analyzing the framed picture, Mark soliloquies aloud, “I thought you would have told me. Not right away, of course, you had to process what happened, but I was certain that I would get a text message or call eventually. Kept my ringtone on this entire week, waiting. I exercised the patience of a saint and didn’t even get rewarded for it.”

His mask is on; it obscures his facial emotes slightly. Mark places the frame back into its spot, the taut scowl on his face visible but his creased brows indistinguishable. He moves his head just slightly, a minor adjustment so his chin is a little bit over his right shoulder; even without knowing where his eyes are pointed towards, you can tell it is you he is hunting. Your own eyelids drop close.

“Why didn’t you tell me Dexter was dead,” Mark asks you. 

So irrevocably ill with grief, a tiny moan escapes your lips and seeps into the plush of your pillow. It hurts your stomach to simply recall your cat’s name, much less his passing. Since no answer is given besides an absent-minded back and forth shake of your head, your ex-boyfriend continues on.

“When my Dad rescued that stupid thing, I couldn’t wrap my head around everyone’s fascination with it. Couldn’t understand why you of all people looked at it and decided it was worth your time and effort. Where was the benefit of its existence,” the rhetorical spins off his tongue. He sits himself on the mattress edge by your shoulders. “Then, I started to sympathize with you. Because Dexter was a pet. And, sometimes, we care too deeply for our pets.” 

Gingerly, he rests his spandex-clad hand over your temple, starting to brush and pet your hair. It is twisted with neglect and shining with grease but each stroke of his is impeccably delicate.

Head pounding like a gong, feeling all the white blood cells squirm and pulse in your blood, you manage to mumble through the thudding assault, “Why are you Invincible?” You meant to ask ‘why are you dressed in your Invincible outfit’; it came out wrong, his touch lulling you to sleep.

The side of Mark’s mouth twitches into one of those scarce half-smiles. Even when you are being difficult, he gets so much enjoyment out of your presence; the place you occupy in his world is irrevocable, a cater on the face of the moon or a star vital to a constellation, permanent.

“Come take a bath and I’ll tell you,” Invincible bargains, canines agleam. 

Even while fatigued, you still succumb to his prods and pokes, only slightly groaning low when he helps you out of bed. Mark plants kisses under your neck and works his way up to your chin to corral you into lifting your own head, autonomy slow to wake up. 

“Maaarrrkkk,” you sob, pained, when he turns on the bathroom’s lights. He shushes you gently, orchestrating a barrage of kisses to fight away drowsiness. His hands swoop and dip, aiding in the removal of each article of clothing. Calloused fingers press and rub circles on areas that he instinctively knows ache, easing you into the waking world. His touch is laced with the breed of affection he showed the night before his eighteenth birthday.

Anticipation is brewing in those coffee eyes, you realize, watching speckles of amber and hazel burn an electrifying gold under the light.

The palpable sense of excitement radiating off him makes you want to slow everything down, bare toes stumbling on linoleum in an attempt to stop as he starts to guide you to the miraculously already filled bathtub. ‘Did he already prepare this,’ you think, thoughts occupied with the soapy water, too narrow-minded to see the bigger picture, the bigger preparation. 

A toe goes in then a leg follows. Once you are fully seated in the tub, you have officially crossed over the bridge, shedding off the soporific clog of grief and emerging into the clarity and alertness of thinking consciousness. It is both the perfect and worst time to absorb Mark’s musings. 

“You know, I couldn’t decide whether you should live or die at first. After your little tantrum, I was in this volatile and tortured headspace, tearing myself apart with what ifs and hypotheticals. I threw around the thought of your death for hours, rehearsing it, nailing down the practice. Got so deep inside my head, I popped out the other side. I went looking for clarity.”

As he’s been talking, the Viltrumite has been dragging his gloved index through the buttery water, cutting the floating bubbles in half and rotating around in lazy figure eights, like a brightly colored fish bait. That dominant hand pulls back from the water; he cements it over your sweaty throat. “I found it,” Mark states. The spandex of his glove wrinkles as he gingerly gives your neck one squeeze. “Realized just seconds after that I didn’t want you dead.”

Inside your trachea, there is a tiny marble of carbon dioxide paused, a held breath that you do not know when it would be appropriate to release it. When Mark finally drops his hold, you start to heave violently like he held your head underwater when the ring of water is only at your belly button.

“Mark.”

“Let me wash your hair.” Ignoring your words as you were once doing to him, Mark stands.

It pleases him to have all your attention on him again. You watch him like a frightened prey watches their predator approach, measuring each muscle’s twitch as he removes his elbow length gloves, flinching at the snap of the opening shampoo bottle. Your own muscles turn to stone when he maneuvers behind you, out of sight. Hands lathered with shampoo touch the top of your canium. “Your heart is beating out your chest.”

“Don’t touch me,” you snap, twisting out of his reach. 

“C’mon, don’t be like that. I’m being honest with you for once.”

A tiny flare in your chest speeds up your heart. “You need to get the fuck out of my house.” Distance is what you crave.

Before you can even attempt to leave the tub, hands are back in your hair, twisting in suds and an iron hold. His strength whiplashes you; you are yanked back so violently that you fear he might try tearing your scalp completely off. Never before has he utilized his superhuman strength on you. 

It settles that you two are completely different legions, on completely different planets in a different type of physical way.

Still, your brow pinches. Upside down, Mark’s face hovers over yours, analyzing each hint of aversion and disgust etched in your demeanor, a kind of presence that is absent from his mother or his father. Eye contact electrifying his body. Sure, his sinister modus operandi unsettles you, but at least you acknowledge it, don’t turn away when he is acting out. He used to act out all the time as a kid and never got a fucking response. 

“Christ, (Name), don’t look at me like that!” He scolds with a laugh, but all he wants is for you to keep looking at him like that. “It’s me, Mark! – the guy you’ve known since we were eight! You can’t just turn around and pretend it was nothing. Talking to me like a goddamn stranger is going to get us nowhere. So, just stop.”

“I don’t know you anymore.”

“That’s fine – we can get reacquainted.” 

According to his father’s teachings, he has thousands of years to live. Which is why he is so deliberate with his hands, watching each leisurely touch ripple through you and birth a shudder. He has all the time in the world. According to his father’s teaching too, he was conceived to only conquer. 

Mark still remembers the day on top of Mount Everest’s peak. His decade old lungs familiarizing themselves with air that should have been too thin to breath and his decade old skin prickling with goosebumps but resisting against encroaching frostbite, powers awakened. His father had strategically taken him to a place where the ears and eyes of Cecil Stedman did not exist. As Nolan explained the truth of Viltrum, the white skies and snowy mountain tops stretched out before Mark became things he would soon inherit. Words like the ‘empire’s glory’ did not interest him; the idea of ‘improving civilization’ bored; in a very Lion King-esque moment — a movie he watched with his mom before she started looking at him he was a bug wearing her son’s skin, then all together completely ignoring him — where he soon realized he was to have everything in the palm of his hand.

And, here, his hands rest. Lathering shampoo in greasy hair, they caress gently, scratching his nails behind your ears and stroking it down the length of your hair. The scent of coconut wafting in the air, the sight of your ablaze scowl, the taste of acknowledgment in the air — he is thriving underneath it.

“Should we revisit conversations about my dear old Ma and Pa? What about reopening the can of worms that is me being Invincible?” You do not question him about either or so, “How about that fight we had a month ago, where you were just itching to know one thing: why.”

Despite how your heart is beating out of your chest, there is a desensitization in your body against Mark’s prodding. Minor childhood abuse disguised as horseplay left you with a thicker skin, thick enough to implore steadily, “Alright, Mark, tell me. Why were you smiling when you killed them?”

Mirth is a rarity for Mark. It has never come easily to him to display his contentment, some of his facial muscles withered with underuse. To you, it was never a strange element, rather just a fact of his character. Mark Grayson did not hand out smiles easily; it left with you a sense of pride as a child then a sense of love as an emerging adult when you managed to get him smiling. 

Now, that ear to ear grin is something laced — a candy with a razor inside, a pina colada spiked with a date rape drug, happiness with sadism underneath. Maybe, his euphoria has always been from that.

“I was smiling because … I was saving people.”

“Please,” your tone is flat, even in such a terrifying situation.

Ah, you really are annoyed with him.

His grin grows and he explains, “Because I was testing my strength, seeing what works and what doesn’t. You ask around, all heroes know they need to be stronger than the foes they face. Develop a sense of identity in the hierarchy. Climb the ladder of the food chain. I’m an adult now, so I have to start carving a place in the world for myself, (Name), you know?

“The reason I was smiling,” his coffee eyes haze, dizzy with the fantastic memory of it all, “is because it’s all becoming so easy — I’m getting stronger.”

Like a scar in the hippocampus, some movie scenes will stick with a person. Most films do not linger with Mark, easily thrown out from his memory, but there has been one that stuck with him since childhood. That simple death in the Lion King, a fall from such a great height known as the top of the food chain, a scene in which a king was betrayed by his own blood and tossed into a herd of stampeding wildebeest,  — dethroned. It has been his favorite since six. 

“To be stronger? But, you’re already … oh, Mark.”

Of course, you would come to a semi-correct conclusion. You know him better than anyone else does or will. Mark cannot wrap his head around why that bank robbery display set you off, made you adverse to him, when so many other facets of himself you have fallen in love with. This is not a setback however, simply an opportunity to bridge the gap of miscommunication.

Still, the pity in your voice makes him pull his hands away, soap thick. Mark grabs the nearby bathroom pitcher that is kept in line with the bottle, fills it, and dumps it over your head. You are left spluttering, coughing up water that was not graciously poured, as he gathers his thoughts, enjoying the sound.

“Mark, you ass!” Then, suddenly, you are standing. Water at shin height, you snap around quickly at him like a dog annoyed at being poked. Your glare, looking down upon him with a creased nose and curled lip, is like a sweet suck to his dick.

“That bitch,” Debbie, he means; he only calls one woman a bitch, “is always scared of me. Walks around on eggshell and the slight hint of discontentment in that house causes her to drink herself dumb. I despise cowardice. So, don’t you dare retreat behind your fear; if your eyes so much as glaze over with terror, I’ll pop them out as easily as cherries.”

The fists at your side travel up to cover your breasts out of sight and cross your arms in vitriol of his words. You know that you are certainly not his equal but you refuse to be his playmate anymore. “I want you out of my house right now. I don’t care what you do anymore. I’m not part of your life.”

Mark disagrees. Mark could not imagine a sweeter bonding exercise in your relationship. The two of you will grow from this; when couples fight against one another, the resounding effect is that their connection will dive deeper, interlinking them. 

“You’ll always be,” he contends, still lounging on the tub’s edge.

“Out.”

When it becomes clear that he will not move, you turn to step out of the tub. This breakup has already happened once; well-versed in how this battle is going to go, you know when to retreat and when to attack. This verbal sparring is not where it needs to happen. You lift a toe out of water to relocate to the threshold of the house’s front door before an arm around your waist stops you.

The spandex of his Invincible outfit is cold against the dorsal side of you, but it is combated by the fiery touch of his dominant hand enclosing around a breast and his chin resting on a shoulder. His exhale is acid across your skin, breathing out, “Why do you never notice it, that I could do worse but I never do? Why can’t you for once appreciate it?”

Staying silent is the wrong yet only move you have left to play, the sole weapon. Experienced, you know how deeply Mark despises being ignored. Which is why he slides his caress down from your breast, slick with cold water and shampoo, and sits his fingers at your belly button. Your stomach curls like a pillbug. 

Spine straightening, you stare down at his fingers like they are the crawling legs of a black widow. Death is a touch away, poison is a bite away. Abdominal muscles rippling uneasy, you soak in each light rub and light step of his wandering fingertips. Like a pianist stabbing a dark melody into keys, he walks those venomous fingers down to the mound of your vagina, the callous touch a threat.

If you are going to die by any hand, it is going to be this one.

“You know what it is like, don’t you?” His voice startles you in a stupor. “That loneliness that is so deep in us that it’s our skeleton, our blood. But, still you extend your hand to those who suffer, to those who know what it really feels like, to those who’ve had a taste, like that means something. And oh, so sick am I. And maybe I don’t have a choice, and maybe that is all I have. Maybe this is a cry for help.”

Defiant, you stay silent, throat under lock and key. 

Mark wraps you up in a hug from behind, moaning low at the twitch of fear that unconsciously ripples throughout you. His hand is gone from that sensitive spot. Relocated upon the churning surface of your neck, tracking each swallow and each inhale, he rests it there without any pressure.

“Talk,” he orders. 

You do not yield. 

He chokes you, void of any seductive sentimental, like he really does want you dead. Drops of soapy water leaps around your kicking feet. He lifts you, still embracing you from behind while cutting off your air supply, nuzzling his cheek into your shoulder, mask rubbing. “C’mon, say something. Talk to me.”

Your mouth is open, oxygen and rationale gone, unable to say a word.

He sets you down after thirty dark seconds. Your vision blurs, unable to tell ceramic from tile from water, falling to your knees on white nothingness. Shoulders pulse with each deep inhale you take. Subconsciously, ignoring the fact that he was just choking you seconds ago, you lean into Mark’s steady touch as he rubs your back.

“You sought me out. You asked to play. You do not get to back out because of one mistake.”

You refuse to look at him, sucking in desperate oxygen, twitching like a cat trying to puke up a hairball. 

Invincible nails down the clincher. “You’re going to be at the front row of it all. No matter how you try to not look, I’ll make sure you do, witnessing my candor, picking and choosing what you want to acknowledge but knowing, deep, deep fucking down, it’s all the truth.”

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What would've been my 3rd submission for the TWST nyota zine, but I wanna do something else for that slot instead :] Finished in just under 10 hours cause im freaky like that when a fish is in my sights...

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got tagged by @merakiui :3 thank you mera!

i’ll tag @tiyoin

surprising no one, except me. I got orange cat?!?!

Thank you @ysmtttty for sharing this! Tagging some people to do this too. @chunkypossum @areyoudreaminof @g00seg1rl @whisperingmidnights @queercontrarian @thelov3lybookworm @jon-snows-man-bun @olenvasynyt and anyone else who wants to do this

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Nosferatu Zodd, 3 | Berserk | Kentaro Miura

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I read all of your Jade works on ao3 went down for maintenance and ate some of my comments. Your writing reminds me of the scifi dime novels my brother used to read but I was too young to understand but I liked the cover illustrations enough to try again when I was older and they just don't phrase sentences like that anymore. I am a big fan

me and ao3 boxing in the ring so i can retrieve those lost at sea comments ( •̀ᴗ•́ )و ̑̑!

joke aside, i’m happy to have prose that matches up to a genre/series of dime novels that you’re fond of!! it’s exhilarating for me as a reader to find fanfic writers that almost seem to mimic published authors that i really enjoy. i’m honor to know i could perhaps create a similar feeling. plus, i’m a huge fan of sci-fi (last reblog is a key giveaway lol! and also ‘scream of the butterfly’ was an homage to my love of things like the matrix, 2001 a space odyssey, and oddly enough the lorax) so truly i’m so stoked to hear such praise!!!

objectively, i do hope to refine my sentence flow as i continue on writing through my life — and ofc beyond this blog when i end it eventually. i hope as i learn and grow in writing that you continue on enjoying what i produce.

thank you for your exceptionally kind message, dude or dudette!

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If I was an imitation, a perfect imitation, how would you know if it was really me? THE THING (1982) dir. John Carpenter

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SCREAM OF THE BUTTERFLY. jade leech

He opens his eyes to see a bright horizon. All of it is liquid gold, a shimmering sea of yellow below the horizon and clouds of volcanic orange above the horizon. Smack in the middle is the Sun - 70.6% hydrogen and 27.4% helium, diameter 1.4 million kilometers - and it stares at him. A hand shades his eyes. "Hey, don't look too close. You're going to see something you don't like."

tags: android jade leech, dubious morality, animal death, blood and gore, existential angst, repressed memories, unresolved emotional tension, choking, reader is 52 and jade is permanently 21, non-consensual body modification, & age difference

word count: 13,363

Both of you watch the pancake melt on the cabin’s wooden floor. The top of the circle is a golden-crusted brown. However, the underside was not yet cooked so that waxy yellow mixture starts to spread out in a sunlight pool. 

“I’m terribly sorry, Master,” Jade rushes to say but seems too shellshock to make a move to fix the mess he made.

“It’s alright,” you say with a voice clogged full of sleep. As you make your way over to the dining table designed small enough for only two, you can feel Jade track each of your minor motions like a gun following its target. Only when you sit does he snap out of it.

In a very methodical passion, he goes about removing the malfunction. You hear this: the lid of your squeaky trash-can opening and the spray of a disinfectant bottle being the most recognizable. Ignoring his mistake, you go about your normal routine. Like Jade is programmed to make exactly two pancakes and exactly one sunny side up egg each morning, you have your own little, innate programs you do each morning.

As you strike the match and hold it under your cigarette – lighting with a matchstick adds to the flavor you found – the last bits of the sunlight pool is wiped up. “Now, we’re behind schedule,” you remark. The matches inside the Diamond box shift as you push them down the table. 

It is an entirely true, if not a bit outlandish, sentence. Schedule? Jade thinks to himself as he quickly procures each ingredient needed to make the batter for exactly one pancake. He only ever measures out the amount for exactly two pancakes. The mistake is making him frazzled. He has two skillets on the stove, one for exactly two pancakes and the other for exactly one sunny side up egg. Looking into the skillet holding only one pancake, his systems twitch. Schedule; what schedule is he forgetting? 

But, he would never concern you with the inner turmoil that is clawing away at his chest cavity like a rabid, frenzied animal, so he simply says, (PANCAKE) “My apologies, Master. I did not mean to make us late.”

“Did seeing me all dressed up scare you that bad?”

With the high-voltage mixer already in a bowl, Jade takes the time to look behind him towards you. The single egg and pancake (PANCAKE) only have 1:42 minutes left until they are completed, so he has the allotted period to look at you, all dressed up. He smiles disarmingly. “Not scared, just surprised.”

His intricate memory-bank supplies him with a number: 259. It has been two hundred and fifty-nine days since the last time you have worn something other than fuzzy or silk pajama bottoms coupled with a graphic tee. That is exactly 8.51506 months ago, which would have made it March. When the weather was growing warmer, you wanted to ride in the car until the gas went from F to E. Now, once again, you are all dressed up.

It is a pretty monotone palette, nothing like what you had worn in March. With a flowing pinstriped jacket, black and white are the only colors of your outfit, besides the tiniest touch of silver from the tangling vines stitched over your blouse’s collar. Your hanging tie and flowy dress pants are a stark black, like the cut of a blank television screen, and your gloves and blouse are a stark white, like a newly painted therapist office wall.

He supposes the most colorful thing about you right now is the orange filter tip in your lovely mouth. Oh, you also have lipstick on. In this game of I-Spy, Jade can identify only two different colors shining in the canvas of sterility that covers your skin. 

Hues like that might mean a funeral. His left eye slices off the left side of the kitchen dining table. It all falls into a black hole as Jade pulls up information of every living relative you have left; their faces fly through his vision, searching public obituaries and searching articles, as you talk to him.

“I guess it might be a bit disarming.” You take your third drag, methodical. “I didn’t think I would need to give you a warning. My mistake; right, Jade?”

All of your relatives are alive. The latest medical update is that your mother has been given the drug memantine along with her typical Leqembi medication. “Nonsense. I’m not so aged that I can’t keep up with your spontaneity,” he jokes, left vision returning. Perhaps the schedule is simply the quotidian schedule of your day-to-day.

Charmed, you smile in the fog cloud of tobacco sliding away from your face. “Oh, he thinks he’s funny,” you jest back. Between two thin fingers, you balance a cigarette and point it at him like it is a professor’s presentation pointer. “No puns today. I’ll take out your tongue.”

He fakes a look of hurt. “Oya, do you really find them so abhorrent?” He turns as you supply him with a synonym – execrable, you moan – and focuses his attention on breakfast-making. Methodically, first, the mixer is pulled up from the bowl and then both pancake (PANCAKE, not pancakes, to Jade’s punctilious annoyance) and sunny side up egg are slid onto your plate. 

“Humor is said to lower blood pressure and improve memory retention. It is as important as a good, clean breakfast. However, if my puns are banned, omelet it slide this time. We have a schedule to follow, Master.” 

He still hasn’t figured out what it is though. And he does not want his vision to start flashing with ropes of blaring red and white words, SCHEDULE replacing PANCAKE – which has already been giving him enough stress. As he puts the incomplete plate down, he wonders if he has time to remedy it before you finish your single 9 A.M. cigarette.

“Booo,” you caterwaul at his pun. However, you smile and your heart beats languid so it must be alright. “Keep that up and no birthday surprise for you.”

Jade stops. Still as a paused movie. His whole body is stiff for a millisecond, and if he did not recover so quickly, you would have surmised he went into forced shutdown upon hearing your words. A calculative, bloodless arm reaches out to tilt the pancake batter into the skillet as he acknowledges that today is in fact November 5th.

Inside his chest cavity, a tiny Jade, no bigger than your cigarette, wobbles on a fence. He is unsure if he wants every day to be birthday so he can see you doing better, or if he wants this November 5th, this sudden change of clothes and attitude, to stay only on his special day. As always, he does not pick a mental-side.

Instead, he says, “Nonsense. There is no need to exert yourself for me, Master. Do not concern yourself with a trivial matter.”

“Don’t be modest. Birthdays are special; and we haven’t celebrated one of yours in four years.” 

Jade remembers that day fondly. High sugar-concentrated items are one-in-a-blue-moon type of expensive. Most households can only afford one or two birthday cakes in their lifetimes, so it was sentimentally human that your first year together, you dipped into your retirement savings and bought a man with no functioning digestive system, a cake.

“I have no choice but to concede if it is an order,” Jade baits.

“Then, it’s an order.” Smoke pumps through the air as you take an embellishing, deeper inhale. The health of your lungs gets compromised more, day by day. “Non refutable.”

“Of course, Master.” Jade would bend in a bow if he were not so intent on making sure this pancake (pancake) stayed on his spatula and off the floor.

Breakfast proceeds as normal after the slight hiccup. When the room is thoroughly perfumed with the acidic scent – Jade always enjoys how harshly you snub out your cigarette, grinding them down into nothing, whatever ring lying on your index glistening under the ceiling light, and today it is a glistening, jade green eye – you eat your precisely made sunny side up egg and two pancakes. Yolk and syrup bleed all over the plate like sliced open arteries. You compliment his cooking as always before stuffing another cigarette between your lips.

This one you simply hold there as Jade scrubs your dish. He slots the ceramic in the drying rack along with the already evaporating skillets and bowl. You glide around the kitchen. It is quaint. There are only ever two plastic cups in the cabinet and two plates in the lower cupboards. Often though, the second copies of each various dishware are left unused.

Your arm and Jade’s arm slide against each other when you fill a plastic green cup up to the brim with faucet water. The robot twitches.

After utensils are hand-dried and put away, Jade looks towards you for guidance. Today is such an outlier to the normal schedule that he feels a bit unbalanced. Usually, you have already lit up your second cigarette of the morning, burrowing up into your study. Instead, you say, “C’mon,” as you walk out of the kitchen with an unlit cigarette hanging from your lip and a cup of faucet water in hand.

Obedient, he follows you up to your study. Your uneven fingernails glide across the banister. “I couldn’t help but also get one for myself. When I went to the market and saw them, I got selfish.” When you open the door to your study, Jade is greeted with the familiar sight of books thrown to the ground, pages torn from their homes, and ink split across the scene like something left behind for a bloodstain pattern analyst. There are also three water bottles full of gold liquid he will have to dispose of.

What calls his immediate attention is the two different shapes draped underneath hand-towels. They sit on your desk which is devoid of any papers or books. One is covering something spherical but Jade cannot decipher what is underneath the second towel.

Despite the jumble, you glide over to your desk with precise footsteps. Jade follows right along behind you. It is programmed in his system to never disrupt anything in this study, so he refuses to nudge a paper or cause the slightest altercation to the disorganized order. 

By the foot of the desk, your taxidermied lion stands in paused death, stuff full of cedar dust. You pet the wisps of mane as you approach the table. The cigarette is still in your mouth; you take it out, smooth knuckles over your tie, and place your hand back down upon the lion’s head. Petting behind stuffed ears, you give a weak pseudo-command.

“Now, I don’t want a repeat of this morning. You being startled and all that. So,” your eyes move from the towels to Jade’s, “you can’t afford to lose your head over this, right, Jade?”

Though he has no heart that could possibly quicken in anticipation, Jade still places a firm hand over that spot as if to banish his foretold anxieties. That familiar, smarmy expression comes back to his facial plate. A slight scrunch of the slanted downward eyebrows that leaves a crinkled line and a timid smile showing off tiny, razor teeth. “I assure you, nothing of the sort will happen, Master.”

“Good.” You place the green plastic cup behind the presents. Light from the window hits the cup; a long green shadow stretches over your desk. As you pinch the towel edge in your fingers, you are palpably excited, grinning wide. “3 ... 2 … 1 … Happy birthday, Jade!”

The smile remains on his face because he has permanently set it there himself. If he were human, it would have fallen. 

“Master, this is illegal.” Jade reaches out and covers up his present with the towel, as if that will make it disappear. 

You give him nothing but a tiny, mischievous smile. Wrinkled with age, it makes you look youthful despite the deep shadows that come with loosening, brittle skin. Like you are young again and you have just told him of something nefarious you have done. This is certainly nefarious, an odious development happening under this house’s roof.

“Master,” Jade starts, precise in his speech, “this could compromise us. Though I am grateful that you want to celebrate my birthday, we should burn this in the fireplace post haste.” He looks back down at the shrouded sphere. Burning the evidence is the innate command that rises up to Jade’s predecessors, using all his logic, but if you were to refute it …

A tiny chortle escapes your lips. It pulls back your painted lips; it has been quite a large sum of days since you have last worn lipstick as Jade’s databases know. “Do you really want to throw away my gift?”

Want? Jade does not do that. He has never known what yearning could possibly feel like. “My apologies. However, it would be wise to exterminate it. As stated by the legislation, living organisms that are not edible or a part of the approved nourishment selection for fruits and vegetables must be destroyed. This violates Section B on the –.”

“Mushrooms are edible.”

“Pardon,” Jade questions softly.

“Mushrooms. They are biologically living organisms like plants and animals.” You gesture to the sphere with your cigarette as if your words have just abolished the legal constraints created years ago. “They’re edible too.” Defiant, you remove the towel once more.

Jade’s eyes flicker down to evaluate the illicit good you have brought home. The terrarium’s contraband resides in a spherical globe with no visible opening. The most probable explanation is it was built starting from the bottom platform of dirt before the globe was welded on. Inside, it contains mycobionts, O Horizon soil, and bryophyta. Simply put: lichen, dirt, and moss.

He measures the length, measures the volume, finds the species of fungi from the internet, and lastly, once more calculates how quickly it will burn up in the parlor’s fireplace. Agaricus subrufescens sit still under his acute, probing analysis. Regrettably, they are edible. According to mycology databases, they taste intensely of almonds. 

Edible. The one word washes over Jade like a glittering, green wave. Edible, which means only one thing. “Thank you for the gift, Master. Rest assured that I will make good use of them in our evening meal, in gratitude for your generosity.”

Before he can retrieve them from the desk, you seize his hand. “Funny. You’re a real jokester, Jade.” You intertwine lithe fingers with him, thoughtlessly and recklessly. This time, Jade does go still, long and hard. It is a rigor mortis so heavy that it is enough for it to be mistaken as a forced shutdown, if one did not know better. You know his systems though. “You have to keep it, Jade. Don't cook it. Or dispose of it. That’s a non refutable order.”

Whatever avalanche of glitches stirred through Jade ends. He flexes his hand and the power of a command cloaks his synthetic skin. He looks once more at his new gift, doubly his new contraband, with polite resignation. That never changing, timid smile is present as always. 

“If it is what you command, Master.”

“Okay.” Satisfied, you turn towards your own present. “Okay, okay, my turn!” With the suave of a magician, you unveil it. 

It takes just an inch of the petals being revealed to recognize what other contraband you have snuck in. A melange of red-orange and little orange petals stare up at his predecessors, a dozen or so individual, flower-gems. His databases flicker. They are marigolds. 

“Ta-da,” you even flourish, cloth hanging in your hand like a ghost-sheet. “Beautiful, aren’t they? And before you say anything, flowers lower cortisol levels so we must keep them. For my health, yes?” You bat your eyelashes at him like a child asking for an extra scoop of ice-cream.

Jade concedes easily. Even though in his left eye, he has pulled up the list of illegal flowers. Marigolds are plainly sandwiched between mandrakes and marvel-of-peru; though marvel-of-peru is an old name as Peru has in recent years been melting into its new identity and becoming a part of invasive Brazil. Jade accepts that these marigolds are going to be kept here. Another living organism he will need to care for.

“Beautiful,” Jade muses. He looks at your face. “Yes, they are beautiful.”

“I’m glad you think so.” You grin like a cat with a canary snapped and dead between your fangs. It must have taken strenuous effort to smuggle these from the market, never mind the effort that it must have taken you to even leave the house. ‘Beautiful,’ Jade reflects as he delicately yet steadily picks up the terrarium from your desk.

Jade goes about his regiment-esque routine as normally as possible after that. He slots the terrarium into his sterile bedroom – complete with a bed he has never slept in and complete with books he already has memorized in his software – in a spot where it will get just the correct balance between light and darkness. A place that perfectly mimics natural daylight despite the fact it lies inside. Then, he enters his routine while the almond mushroom terrarium sits in the back of his software like a tumor, a dull reminder that is always there. 

You always give him such puzzling challenges. Brain-teasers of sorts that invoke trying to unshackle him from his real identity. Sudoku squares that he has to fill in with things like free will, thoughts, rebellion. He does not doubt that you want the best for him, but it is all very puzzling. 

Jade prefers things like laundry. Neat and clean. November 5th has coincidentally fallen on laundry day. On the living room’s wooden coffee table, he takes to folding all the warm pajamas into tidy piles. The assembly line of his motions are precise. Jade folds each graphic tee top sideways into thirds to tuck in the sleeves and evenly crosses each pajama pant leg to cover over its twin. 

This is what life is all about: laundry. Laundry is linear. There is a right and a wrong way to go about doing laundry, so very unlike volatile life with its dangerous contraband and sad women. From your study, door half ajar, you send down the unraveling string of your voice past the stairs and to the parlor, “Jade! Jeopardy or Wheel of Fortune? The birthday boy gets to pick tonight!” 

He looks up from a pair of silk, aquamarine pajama pants. Weighing the pros and cons of each of the game shows, he scrunches up his plastic nose. Inside, the fence of decision bends back and forth. The only aspect that pushes him – tiny, cigarette-sized Jade, wobbling with helicopter arms – is that he gets to hear your voice more when you watch Jeopardy together than when you watch Wheel of Fortune together.

“Jeopardy!” He shouts back.

“Perfect!” 

There is palpable cheer in your voice that shocks Jade so fiercely that he stills in his task of laundry, looking up at the spiral tongue of stairs that led to your office with a mute expression of awe. From his low vantage point, he sees the door is closed. Jade blinks at it, hidden behind the prison bars of a banister and high out of reach.

He goes back to folding in precise motions. Life is straightening itself out like laundry. 

On the coffee table where he had been folding laundry hours ago, two little domes of red sit on the surface. The surface is also littered with dozens upon dozens of rainbow confetti stripes, a plate where a leftover cupcake wrapper and melted candle lie, and an ashtray. Tissue paper crown donned, Jade grabs the remote and starts to scroll through channels until he reaches Jeopardy. 

After so many decades, they still have not changed the setup. Though the color scheme has warped decade by decade – people are most fond of teal and fuchsia rose this generation – the three, lecture-adjoined counters for contestants and isolated, lecture-adjoined counter for the host. Jade watches the copy of himself – small and compact in the television’s shiny dome – start to introduce each of the three human contestants. 

“You’re not gonna beat me this time,” you say, neck rolled over the sofa’s back. Eyes floating to and from the cabin’s ceiling, you declare, “I was only one decisecond off last time from stealing that point and gaining a lead. Don’t forget that.”

“I won’t forget,” Jade assures as he sets down the remote. “My memory bank has immortalized your grievous scream as you lost the very point last time quite clearly in fact.” He pretends to look somewhere else when you turn to him scandalized.

“You ass!” You hit his shoulder hard with your own. Both of you sway in laughter, smiling toothily at one another. 

The game starts shortly after. The robot from Jaded Robotics starts by asking contestant number one to pick from six categories the select from the five clues, going from 200 to 400 to 600 to 800 to 1000. As soon as the ball starts rolling, the game is in full swing and both you and Jade are on the edge. Each time a clue is given, a pair of hands – one silicone and one flesh – descend upon the coffee table like hungry vultures and slam hard on red domes, both of you in perfect unison yet typically always ahead of the contestants inside the television dome.

How many stages are there in a butterfly’s life cycle?

What is four?

The astronomical unit is a unit based on the average distance between what two places?

What is the Earth and the Sun?

After legalization of trophy hunting, a successful purging of what species was celebrated in 2170?

What are lions?

Define the problem. Do background research. Specify requirements. Brainstorm solutions. Choose the best solution. Do development work. Build a prototype. Test and redesign.

What are the steps of an engineering algorithm?

A requirement to have at least bachelor’s degree for entry-level jobs in the field, typically in mechanical engineering or related engineering specialties. 

What are the degrees required to be a robotics engineer?

Body coloring that helps an animal blend in with its surroundings and stay safe from enemies.

What is protective coloration?

Daily Double. This university experienced a devastating terrorist attack by foreign enemies in 2177.

What is Massachusetts Institute of Technology?

Storing toxic chemicals that they ate as a caterpillar, this species used its deterrents against predators for the rest of their life.

What is a Postman butterfly?

This largest moon of Pluto is about half the size of the dwarf planet’s size.

What is Charon?

Moral principles that govern a person’s behavior or the conduct of an activity.

What is ethics?

The project designed to rid Earth of all harmful and invasive species was backed by which political group.

What are the Purgers?

A rich program used to create scale drawings of robots in Jaded Robotics.

What is a JED?

The Egyptian God Ra was the God of what?

What is the Sun?

This cancer is the leading cause of deaths in both men and women.

What is lung cancer?

If Jade has a favorite part of a day’s schedule, it is checking your lungs for cancer. However, having favorites invokes the principle of emotional highs and lows, selecting what is dopamine-inducing and what is dopamine-neglectful. So, Jade does not have a favorite part of his day. He goes about each task with inert, psychological activity. 

If it was poetry, one would describe it as being a monitor of a dead heartbeat, his emotions.

Slipping off the hand-skin like it is a glove, Jade looks at you sitting in your dressing gown. The room is washed in red. From the mouth of the nightstand lamp, it bleeds out over this meager radiology room. Red falls over the crown of your busy ashtray, slinks down the sides of ivory covers, coils around your exposed torso. You are not facing him.

Folding synthetic skin lies in a puddle of empty fingers on your dresser. Methodical, Jade makes his way over. Gears shift in his silver digits, electromagnetic beams boiling beneath the surface. He asks the same questions as any doctor – coughing up any blood, any dull or sharp chest pains, any shortness of breath, Master – but he is better equipped than any doctor because his gold eye is a detector that measures physiological arousal factors that would indicate if a lie is being told. 

All your answers are truthful. You answer his inquiries around bites of dark chocolate, staring at your headboard and snacking. The mattress dips when Jade adds his weight onto it, resting one knee upon it and letting his other dangle down. He watches your jaw bulge as you run your tongue between teeth and mouth lining to gather up melted chocolate.

“I’m going to touch you now, Master.”

“...”

Gently, he drapes his right hand’s index and middle finger on the back of your neck. It is at the junction where the neck starts to melt into shoulders, spine, and back. Cervical 7 and Thoracic 1. It is an irrational spot to start because there is nothing of lung matter to check there. Jade, for an irrational moment, lingers there.  

After a clean breath, he moves down the midline of your spine until he reaches the 12th bottom rib. Your skin gives a bit more resistance than a young person’s; the experience of living ages all except Jade. On the stretching desert of your skin, he locates your lungs with routined practice. His unnaturally-colored silver skin looks like a spider brooch upon your human-hued skin.

Electromagnetic energy builds at his fingertips. Tiny photons swirl in a circle with one another like joyous fishes. Their energy eclipses infrared, visible light, and ultraviolet until Jade reaches the type he needs. Gently, he pushes his palm into your back and slides it up to the top of your shoulder. He repeats that on the left and right. He repeats both a second time, capturing four photos.

When he pulls back, you are already shucking up your dressing gown. Raising it to your shoulders and crossing it in front of your nude breasts, you eat more dark chocolate as the machine behind you goes over the X-ray captured photos. 

The black and white images slide into Jade’s left eye, blocking out his sight. His right eye watches you bundle yourself back up as the first photo moves vertically across his spliced vision, showing him more inch by inch. The right lung is clear, only the ghost of your ribs disrupt the image; the left lung is clear, only the ghost – (TUMOR). 

Jade jerks so suddenly on the bed that you turn around, eyes round. You throw half of a questioning expression at him, face cut down the middle. Around the bedtime cigarette you are lifting up to your lips, you ask him, “Something wrong, Jade?”

In his left vision, a string of tumor (TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR TUMOR) swims, multiple lines like a student assigned to write down a single word on a chalkboard as punishment. Hidden underneath that jumbled mess (TUMOR), a black and white image of your left lungs lies. The scanned picture is completely black besides the ghostlike shape of your ribs and the tiny spot of white cancer that sits between the second and third rib like a tiny Sun.

Jade does not dream. 

Irrevocably, this is a cement fact of his biology. There is no possible way for Jade Leech to dream. No stimulus in his software can make a true dream emerge from lines of code. Detecting from that certainty, what Jade sees beyond his closed eyelids must be a memory, even though Jade has never lived through this before. 

In Jade’s ‘dream’, you are with him – as is congenitally correct and true, you two are always with one another. From the pockets of breathable palazzo pants, you are fishing out your sunglasses. The frames sit on your nose and ear notches, covering your eyes with black hexagons. You look like an insect. 

Maybe, Jade has fabricated this world. Research has shown that the human body does not create new faces for the actors in their dreams but rather picks out strangers to act in their inner films. You are all he has ever known, so of course you would be the star of Jade’s motion picture. And, you do remind him of an attractive movie star.

Sunglasses donned, you take to surveying the scenery surrounding the two of you under a bright, cloudless sky. Sand lies below and across. In glittering divots and hills, nature has laid a stippling of gold as far as the human or robot eye can see. From the advanced height you two share together at the top of one of Namib Desert’s hills, it is quite a magnificent sight of bareness. 

“Less shrubs than last time,” you comment, mouth surprisingly empty of a cigarette and face twenty years younger.

“Yes, the desertification has certainly increased. Officials report a 2.7 percentage uptick. Even the speciocide on turnera oculata raised many praises and received an opening headliner last month in February,” Jade comments, face the same as always has been and always will be.

“You think that truck we passed by were Purgers?”

“One of the young gentlemen in the back of the cargo bed was indeed holding a flamethrower. The probability is at least 62 percent.”

“Sick bastards.” Sand flies in sprinkles like splashed water. You reposition your foot to lean on the heel. “The ants are invasive, not the flowers.”

“I’m sure that they will be targeting that next, Master.”

Jade has forgotten to mention that it is not just you, him, and the sand in this ‘dream’. Though his gaze has been hooked in deeply to you – analyzing each twitch and jump of your facial features from the hairs on your eyebrow to the motion of your chin; right now your facial expression is expressing deep, bodily hatred – there is another person outside of the high, out-of-reach bubble crafted by Jade. He can be found in the expanse of sand beyond the hill.

The chauffeur stands with his hip snug to the driver’s side-view mirror. He is different from the chauffeur you two had yesterday. He has a slender scar that bisects his eye, deep enough where it is a pink on his brown skin. For the hour-and-a-half drive from the motel, the driver had been narrating stories on how you could get a scar just like his if you messed around with X, Y, or Z; his words were not articulated with teasing advice but jaded ritualistic habit; interestingly, Jade notes, he even used cactus needles as an origin for his scar but cactus are extinct. Packaged together in the backseat, you and Jade both held his sharp gaze where it cut like a knife towards the two of you in warning.

What about a lion? Could you acquire a scar like that from a lion? His left eye is partly slumped in his socket as if what did injure him permanently altered the position of the ball. Packaged in the rear view mirror like a comic strip, that uneven gaze stared into unevenly colored eyes. It would. If there were any lions left to hand out scars. 

Now, the scarred man stands with his arms folded, looking out with disapproval at the nudeness of the desert beyond him. His background check assures that he has done this job for five years, seasoned without any misfortunate slipup. Still, the dimensions of the gun the man has strapped to his hip settle into Jade’s ‘brain’ with a detailed outline of how to dismantle it – if that becomes necessary. 

Jade stops surveying the company when you speak. “Oculata … I know that word, don’t I?” Your knuckles are pressed firmly into your lipsticked lips. 

Without physically pacing, you pace around in your mind. “Oculata, oculata, oculata,” you repeat, firm each time.

“Master,” Jade says with soft urgency.

“Oculata … Ooo-cuuu-lata. Oculata? Oculata … having eyes. Ah! Having eyes. That’s what it means.” You snap in the midst of your epiphany. You look towards Jade. “Yes, Jade, what is it?”

“Master, I believe we have gotten unlucky.” His hand points out towards the horizon. 

When you follow the direction of his index, your heartbeat exceeds the typical amount of beats per minute. For six minutes, Jade measures its pumping fluctuations as both of you silently watch the king of the jungle descend down a sandy hill. Imprints of his paws are birthed with each step and follow after the lion like a blood trail. The blood in your veins is turbulent like a pinched hose, terribly anxious. 

“Master?”

“…”

“Master, if –.”

“Jade. In your own words, without paraphrasing from the internet, describe to me the look of turnera oculata. Do-uooo it … in the form of a haiku,” you order, snapping your fingers at the end of your command. Below, your chauffeur has just crossed himself and locked himself inside the company’s limousine. 

It takes a few precious moments, but Jade eventually formulates a haiku. He articulates, “A bleeding yellow. A sun eclipsed by needles. The eye of nature.” When you request for him to make another one without using any of the previous words, Jade vocalizes, “These dry petals see. Morning's canary splendor. In this desert heart.” You clap quickly yet quietly; it is like a reward.

By now, the lion has cautiously ventured to the middle of the bowl the desert hills have constructed. It is smartly not inching closer to the limousine, animal instinct on high alert towards a vehicle. However, the lion is obviously interested in the company. He is out of his element without scrubland to hide underneath or behind.

Instead of heeding this opportunity, you continue on, “I was sure you might slip up and use the definite article, ‘the’, again but you did a marvelous job of avoiding repeated word choice!” Turning, you smile at Jade. Sunlight illuminates the edges of your hair style like licks of flame. “Your efficiency is always praise worthy.”

“Thank you, Master.” Is that perhaps a verbal nudge in the situation – you are strangely making note of his efficiency – perhaps telling Jade that he should get the job done. He won’t ask so instead he verbally spars. “Human errors are a continuous trifle. It is most gratifying that I will never have to genuinely deal with such a thing. Is it … Is it difficult?” He shifts his vocal stereos to playfully pitying at the last sentence.

“You ass,” you smile radiantly. However, it drops when you notice the lion has not rushed off to some unseeable part of the desert. He seems to have found contentment in his prowl here, obviously anxious of both of you but not backing down from his clear trek to the southwest of Namib Desert. It’s been in the area for enough minutes where the chauffeur will be legally required to report the sighting. 

“Thought we’d make out with better luck today,” you grumble.

“Master?” 

Jade offers, outstretched, the .375 caliber rifle, unhooking it from the strap on his back. 

“Yeah … yeah.” Despondent, you take the weapon in your arms. “Guess it is about that time, ain’t it? We can’t return home empty-handed. Business retreat was exclusively paid for … the suits won’t be happy to know I didn’t hunt the game. Nothing to do but play along.”

“Some of the most toxic animals protect themselves through camouflage.”

“Ain’t that just the way~.” The scope and your eyeball bisect each other in perfect ratio. With the practiced precision that you use to commence lining up for a shot, it makes Jade remember that old gossip talk that he heard in the staffroom, said between bites of donuts and sips of coffee, What does a robotic engineer and professor need to know how to shoot a gun for?

The lion goes down, sending waves of sand jumping up. It is a clean shot between the eyes; the lion certainly felt no pain. Jade’s focus is pulled away when the source of your tumor, a single cigarette, is placed directly in his line of sight.

“Don’t you remember our agreement? After I kill something, you have to light my cigarette for me.”

Jade’s eyes fly open.

Greeted by the sight of his bedroom, Jade steps off the platform of his charging pad and discards his ‘dream’ like a dog shaking water off his fur. Polygons of sunrise light cuts from his window. In the fleeting stillness of daylight — 5:00 shining red next to his terrarium — and absence of demands, Jade stands perfectly still with a sense of something missing from his components washing over him.

His face is white with terror. His eyes dull with lifelessness. 

Then, he shakes that off too and ventures downstairs to go make you two pancakes and a sunny side up egg.

You once told him that ‘progress is not linear’. You had illustrated this point to him with the cherry glow of your cigarette, waving and cutting the fire through the air to make a graphical visual of moving up then moving down then moving back up again. Fluctuations and setbacks can either stir someone very high or they can cause someone to go low. It is never perfectly straight like laundry.

That one graph confounds Jade to no end. When you construct something, the progress is linear. Staring at the empty dining chair beyond him, he finds himself confounded once again with progress’s inevitable immodesty. Today is 11/6/2182 and you have not come down for breakfast. He has been waiting for exactly 0:59:59 and, now in a slow blink, he has waited for 1:00:00. One whole hour and you are not here. 

There have been instances where you miss or skip breakfast. But, the preface of yesterday — seeing you wearing an outfit for the first time in a long while and seeing a freckle of cancer growing in your lungs — leaves him wondering if there is a disrepair in his systems. You started on such a high and ended on such a low yesterday. Progress is not linear.

His sensors glance across the intimately small round table. Past the butter tray shaped like a cow and towards the plate where your pancakes and sunny side egg are cold and deflating. Jade blinks once. The dish remains uneaten and at room temperature in front of him. Not even a warm cigarette is light to melt the ice that has held him in place for an hour.

At the bottom of the trash, the food looks … sad. How illogical to add an emotion to the sight of carbohydrates and protein sloshing down into the pristine white trash bag. Jade places the plate full of syrup blood streaks into the sink and makes a small, unusual trek to your bedroom — to check if everything is alright. 

He won’t fail the purpose of his intentional design. He was manufactured in a factory, built on front line assembly, and given the inputted task: Take Care of my Master.

(MASTER.)

There is no fathomable way that Jade Leech will allow himself to fall short of this robotic Manifest Destiny.  

Jade knocks his artificial knuckles against the front of your door. Following proper etiquette, he takes a step back and waits until you respond to his call. His ears are awaiting to receive the sound of your vocal cords. There is something spiritual in how your voice manages to scrub out any rust left inside his body. 

But, he receives no answer. And after he waits the polite amount of minutes, tries again with three, sharp yet spaced out knocks, he has still not received an answer. What a dilemma. 

Jade is permitted to enter your bedroom without explicit permission. However, with the way things concluded on his birthday yesterday, it would be illogical to not anticipate that some of the parameters that Jade is allowed to walk freely have not been closed to him now. You might not want to see Jade for a week or … even a month.

Jade finds his knuckles raising without input, knocking thrice again. “Master, I apologize for my overstepping behavior and pushing out boundaries. I would like to make amends today for yesterday.” There is, once again, no response.

The silence is so loud, it's deafening. That oxymoron emerges in Jade’s artificial synapses. He cannot help but judge it as an appropriate expression. The silence in your absence is deafening. He would rip out the wires in his ears if you ever left.

Forehead pressing to the door, Jade soliloquies loud enough to be heard, “Master … (Name). Your health is a great concern to me. Yesterday, I inadequately expressed where this concern of mine stems from. I credited the source towards code and etiquette. My inputs are inert, and they always will be as my sole job is to take care of you above all else. Yet, underneath all that, the origin of my concern comes from the concrete fact that I am in love with you, (Name). I have been in love with you for so long. For ten thousand upon ten thousand minutes, for hundred upon hundred weeks, I cherished you solely.”

He angles his head so his ear lies on the wooden door. Nothing stirs beyond cedar barriers. 

“I have covered this through ritualistic self-assurance that I cannot fully comprehend the full scope of what ‘want’ or ‘desire’ is defined as, not defined in a dictionary, but defined inside of a heart. My ‘heart’ pumps, not blood, but solely electricity, the binary code of zeros and ones, and the devotion that I have for you. Human sentimentalities sometimes allude me, but I have reassurance through one fact that I feel the most, above all other emotions. I love you. My love is perhaps not a perfect replica by human standards. However, its existence I am certain of. Though it is not easily achievable, I want to make you as happy as you can possibly be. I want you to have no worries that must be burned through with a cigarette. If you would permit – command me the allowance – I would like to share this love that I feel for you with you, (Name).”

After a minute, 00:01:00, has passed, Jade slowly turns the knob of your bedroom door in his hand. He lifts his head from the wood. Through the open mouth of the door, he gazes upon your lonely mattress with resignation. Faced with emptiness, Jade thinks to himself, I should have never said something as loose-tongued as that. I will permanently delete any urges to repeat that verbal mistake.  

In replacement of family portraits, you have hung up frames of taxidermy that display a series of brilliant butterflies and moths, from the Adonis Blue Butterfly to the Yellow Horned Moth. His sensors trail over them. Such fragile specimens. Jade, then, closes the door and departs from his previous expressed, petulant folly of love.

It is for the best that my Master did not hear that. 

In his trek through the hallway, palm gently cupping the log banister as he steps, Jade’s ears acutely pick up a soft murmur of music. ‘In the fake plastic earth .. that she bought from a rubber man.’ His eyes flicker towards the door of your office. When you select this as his and your home, you specifically wanted a house made of authentic wood, nothing blended with plastic. The material creates a bright tap sound against his synthetic knuckles thrice, clear like a bell. 

Can you hear that over the music? There is no certainty, so his hand finds the doorknob innately. Jade misses you fervently and all you did is skip breakfast. Welcomed in, the sound of Radiohead’s Fake Plastic Trees rains off the horn of your record player. ‘It wears her out. It wears her out.’

You are sleeping, head down on your desk, still in yesterday’s dressing gown.

He lifts the needle off the record. It is impressive to see a model two hundred years old still functioning. When he is two hundred years old, will he still function?  Avoiding making a single miscalculating step, Jade travels effectively through the mess until he reaches the front of your desk.

At least you snuffed out your cigarette before falling asleep. There was a time you neglected to make sure all the ashes were firmly pressed and cooled. It started a pocket-sized fire and ate the side of the pages of Fahrenheit 451 like a munching caterpillar. Jade had extinguished the fire calmly, and his reward was you giddily throwing your arms around his neck and laughing at the absurdity of it all. 

The cigarette that is on your ashtray is snuffed out thoroughly and cooled. It is too close for comfort however. Some of your hair is even lying in wisps over the item. Jade relocates the tray to the right corner of your desk when his sensors happen to notice a slight irregularity in your sleeping position. 

Your head is using your left arm as a pillow. Your raw, un-lipsticked lips press delicately into the elbow sleeve and you breath out soft puffs of carbon dioxide. However, what draws Jade’s instantaneous attention in and causes him to pause is the polaroid clenched in your limp right hand.

He won’t move it. Nothing in this room shall be disturbed without explicit permission. Jade turns to finalize the motion of setting the ashtray down on the right desk corner. Yet, hand and tray still hovering in the air, he realizes that he has broken that outlined rule with the slightest misguided concern. 

But, the complexity of caretaking is one given to his hands. With their fake, plastic, and ivory skin, with their tiny train of beetle-shaped steel joints, each of his phalanges has been designed specifically to care for you. They are the ones who cook, clean, and care for solely his Master, for you. Aegis puppets his hands. The polaroid slips into them all too easily.

Besides this one, Jade has never held a physical photograph. Memories are captured on cellular devices and immortalized in harddrives forevermore. Even when the life force of memories starts to leave the body like evaporating rain, citizens have always counted on the deathlessness of digital photos.

This photograph’s paper is fragile. It feels similar to pages in a book. On the back, it says: 11/5/2151. On the front, it shows …

ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR.

The very hand meant to care for you is the one that wakes you up suddenly. In his panic, Jade had slammed the photograph face down upon your desk and roused you sharply out of sleep. Each circuit in his system races hot white sparks up and down like a flurry of insects when a rock is lifted up. Bugs skitter under his skin, tickling nausea. Something in his ‘mind’ has been unshrouded, much like a raised rock.

Your head rises too. Groggily, you peel sections of untamed hair out of your face and peel open suctioning lips with a yawn. Your empty right hand twitches on the desk, trying to recollect what it has lost.

Jade wishes he could observe you more, coming undone from sleep, but he is grappling violently with memories he has lost coming back to him. His ‘brain’ – a collection of harddrives and his central processing unit – is experiencing a unique headache, unlike anything he has felt before. Clawed, his left hand grips and digs hard into the skin over his left eye. He feels like he is going to overload.

Five years ago, Jade knew a life beyond the dead woods of Quebec. Five years ago, Jade helped to outline terms for a tense contract with the vice-president of the United 54 States of America. Five years ago, Jade lit your cigarette. 

“Jade? Jade, are you okay?”

Though he always wants to appear pristine for you, the answer is no. He is not okay; he thinks he hasn’t felt okay in a long, uncalculated time. Looking up from the ground – because somehow all those digital memories started to push down upon him like a hydraulic press and he finds himself in a pile on top of your miserable notes and books – Jade peers at the single hand outstretched towards him with the aid of his sole right eye. 

Instead of grasping it, he grapples with the impossibility that Jade – a machine – managed to achieve such a humane defense mechanism as repression. There’s no way, is there?

His fingers dig hard in his face, folding silicone, yearning to wrench his left eye out. Anything to get back his unconscious protection of blocking out unpleasant memories from his ‘mind’ – anything to rip them from his body. He is a broken man.

“Jade, why are you on the ground? Let me help you up. Come on.” Your voice is so tenderly soft. He has never known a more comforting voice than yours. Yet, all he can remember is your piercing scream from last night, “Get the fuck out before I dismantle you!!”

On uncertain pistons and metal, Jade forces himself to stand. With a trembling metal ulna and radius, he forces his gloved hand to drop by his side. He blinks at you. You are startled into silence, leaning off the edge of your chair with a hand that wants to reach out but is too unconfident. 

“Forgive me for such a display, Master.”

“... Jade.”

It is touching. That despite how monotone you are as a person, your concern will always shine through, solely for Jade.

“What’s wrong! Jade, let me help you!” But he is already retreating out the door, afraid.

He finds himself with his back pressed hard against the office door. His heart beats faster. It does not send out blood but it releases hot waves of white electricity that crackle and pop. The doorknob at his side jiggles as you turn it fruitlessly. Jade simply leans harder on the door, keeping it shut.

I cannot afford to lose my head over this.

Intentional, Jade’s lithe fingers reach up to his skull. Between the field of hair roots, he separates a section to reveal a river of pallid synthetic skin. His non-growing fingernails dig down into the rubber until he hears a clink. Slowly, he grapples around to unpin the skin of his head off.

Less familiar with this process than he is removing his glove-hand, it takes a lengthy measurement of thirty-nine seconds for Jade to completely remove – or lose – his head. 

He unhooks it from the peak of his skull down to where his shoulders and neck meet. It is like opening up a button-up flannel, unhooking each hook from their twin. He travels down to Cervical 7 and Thoracic 1 on his body region, undoing the last hook. Still hinged onto his body by the skin of his front neck, Jade delicately cups his face in front of him. Below his flickering spheres, absent of lashes or lids, he stares solemnly at the valley of molded synthetic mountains, a field of vanilla-almond plastic that resembles human features only because of the dips for his nose, the opening for his eyes, the protrusions for his ears. A Halloween mask to use and parade around as homo sapien. 

It is a desolate and lonely portrait. A steel man boxed in a winding, wooden hallway, holding his humanity in his trembling hands. His face is a shining plate like that of a star. When Jade catches a reflection of himself in the corridor’s mirror, he turns away quickly. 

It is not an inspiring impression he cuts in the reflection with his inhuman, gray skin.

This is a memory. It is not a dream. Juxtaposingly, Jade Leech is 99.9 percent positive that he has never lived through it.

He is looking at a Sun, without shying away from the splendid monstrosity that is glaring, piercing light. His eyes are round spheres, one painted yellow and other painted olive-brown. Because of his inhumanity, he can stare into the Sun before him longer than a hundred seconds without incurring any permanent retinal damage. There is no squishy softness in the back of his retinas to hurt. 

The Sun abruptly moves away, relocated northeast. “Hey, don’t look too close now. You’re going to see something you don’t like.” In front of his artificial retinas, the visage of a lapis blue rectangle and dull indigo blue rectangle directly atop the lighter block in a skull of sleek gray intercept Jade’s focus. 

Another prototype, Jade crafts his hypothesis. The highly educated guess shatters when a single gloved hand lifts up the welding mask. Incorrect. My Master. Much younger than fifty-two and younger than thirty-something, you look to be about freshly twenty-one. Your eyes squint impishly at him and your rows of clean, white teeth smile jubilantly at him. 

Then, without warning, someone has pulled his Master away from him – like a fluid cane hooking around a character onstage and pulling them away. He corrects this fallacious interference. You have simply pushed yourself backwards on your office chair with wheels and are currently busying yourself with the tools and documents on your long, long desk.

Jade also corrects one last thing. He was not staring into the Sun, but rather into the eye of a lamp. There is still so much to learn about this growing world. 

As he directs his focus off the lamp and back towards his Master, he is not discomposed to see you with a lit cigarette in your mouth. It is quite a comforting familiar sight in a strange world. He is taking in all the new inputs – the dozens of crushed energy cans littering the desk and the dissected baby chimpanzee with knives sticking out like a pincushion quilled with needles– and committing them to an infinite memory. You’re tapping a scalpel knife on the petite chimp’s engorged colon, breathing in a drag of nicotine, before asking, “Name?”

“JE-14500. Jade Leech.”

“Where are we right now, Jade?”

“MIT. Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Specifically, in Professor. (Last Name)’s personal laboratory on the fourth floor of the Stata Center.”

“Good. In what wing?”

“We are housed in the Artificial Intelligence wing.”

“Today’s date? Today’s weather? Today’s horoscope for Scorpio?”

“The day is November 5th, 2151. Today is scheduled to be sunny with no clouds. High temperatures of 77 and low temperatures of 59. The average temperature is 66.4. Today’s horoscope for Scorpios is ‘If you can dream it, you can do it. That's what you've always been told, what you've always believed, and now what you're about to prove. As if your already substantial intellectual prowess weren't enough to get you started, the stars are on your side too. They'll be waking you up this morning with the vivid memory of a dream, the kind that will stay with you all day, constantly making you wonder ‘what if?’, Master.”

“Hm.” You spear your scalpel through the chimpanzee’s stomach. Taking off your welding mask, you blow smoke over your shoulder and roll over to Jade who sits rigidly in a repurposed dentist patient chair. You are so beautiful. “And, are the stars on your side, Jade?”

“To be truthful, I feel the stars root for you more than they parade around for me. Prosperity is just around the corner.”

“Charming,” you bite. “Well, it’s no compromise to say that the stars have aligned for both of us today. We’ll share luck. What is your opinion on sharing with me, Jade?”

“I find it most agreeable.”

“We won’t just be sharing luck. We’ll be sharing a shelter and I am not the most agreeable roommate. I can be quite a thorn. If you’re truly fine with sharing, you are going to have to deal with some things you don’t like or are hesitant to look at.”

“Let me allay your worries,” Jade straightens his posture and stares unabashedly at you, “whatever conditions I happen to find myself experiencing, it will not be a struggle to me when I have a light like you to wash away any creeping darkness. Even if you are the darkness itself, Master.”

An odd human phenomenon happens next. It is one he hasn’t seen before, so he makes sure to document it thoroughly. You inhale your cigarette, it billows up and away from your face, and, without explanation, your cheeks have brightened to rosy apples. “Aaaaah~,” you moan as you collapse in your chair. Your hand covers up over your features, cigarette tight between fingers. 

You glare at him from behind the spindly, uneven cage of your fingers, face reddening. “I’m certain of it now, I input too much data from My Man Godfrey. Even some of the dialects have been used already.” Your eyebrow is twitching. “I can’t have myself getting flustered at every turn just because I crafted your personality chip to mimic my favorite movie star.”

After a puff and drag, you seem to scrutinize him quite drastically. Before Jade can inquire about what he can do to ease your worries, you cheerfully state, “But, it’s really too late to change such a thing! Hehe!” You roll back to your desk. From there, you start fiddling with the chimp’s maroon-brown fingers, moving the thumb in circles. “I can’t help it – Godfrey is so handsome and I just love that movie.”

“If I may intrude upon the conversation, what is love, Master? It is listed as one of my side objectives in my system.”

“Now, Jade, you’re not intruding if we are the only ones engaged in conversation. Use an expression like … if I may shift the conversation towards, then whatever you want to say. Got it,” you instruct to which Jade carefully nods and notes. “But, I’ll answer anyway!” 

It does necessarily ‘surprise’ Jade, but it does cause his eyebrows to raise slightly when you, resting your cigarette between your scowling lips, take your dominant hand and reach in the baby chimpanzee’s open chest cavity without the use of gloves and wrench out the fist-sized heart. The arteries follow along in swoops like fallen telephone wires. You take to cutting all those off with a scalpel before rotating to face Jade in your chair on wheels.

“Now.” You gesture with the infant chimpanzee’s heart and hold your cigarette by your armrest. You are so beautiful. “Those penny-pushing suits upstairs, downstairs, hell, even in the next room over, want you to be heartless. They don’t care about nature. They don’t care about life. The world as I know it is sliding on a rapid decline and it’s one destination to a world devoid of anything that lives or breathes, besides of course, the suits. 

“Jade. You have been designed to be the ‘everything man’. What I have been given funding for is the objective to create a high-fashioned butler that will tie the ties of sycophants and scrub the shoes of socialites. You don’t need to think. You don’t need to feel. Trust me, I’ll produce a thousand of Jades just like that – Jades’ whose emotions are like a dead heartbeat. But, you, you who were meant for me.

“You are going to teach me to be less human. In return, I am going to teach you to become human. Do you understand me?”

Jade cannot breathe. He was not designed to do that. Despite this, he feels like he needs to take a deep breath to stabilize himself, soak in all the words you have said, and absorb their meanings. Without this anchoring breath, Jade can only punctually state, “No, Master.” 

“Perfect.” You smoke in victory. “That means we’re on the right path.”

The right path? – “JADE!”

Jade’s eyes fly open. 

Like a man running out of a burning building, he stumbles off his charging platform. Uncoordinated, his feet rock uneasily on flat ground as his head turns violently towards the door of his bedroom. That wasn’t in the memory-dream, was it? He did hear that in the present day, yes?

His eyelids open as far as physically possible as Jade listens to the harsh sound of a headboard smashing repeatedly into the wall. Underneath the thick cacophony, it can be inferred that the other noises he hears are rustling of sheets in the midst of struggle and that low animalistic groan that a dog might make before croaking. Jade has never thrown his bedroom door open so quickly. He wishes construction did not put such a loathsome obstacle like this in his way just for the meaningless sake of privacy. 

Your door splinters in his cement grip like a toy underneath a hydraulic press. 

Perhaps because it is 2 A.M. and he did not get to attend to it yesterday night, but Jade cannot help how all the routine questions rise to his mind. All the ones that he asks before checking the health of your lungs. Coughing up any blood; any dull or sharp chest pains; any shortness of breath, Master? They are all most certainly positive, as your fragile neck is squeezed between two grisly hands. 

There are three men gathered around your bed, but only one kneels upon the sheets, holding your throat in a vice-grip. The other two restrain you in certain capacities, by arm or by leg or by hair. In 1.5 seconds, Jade already has each of their full government names displayed in his left eye. He knows each of their parents intimately, he knows each of their grades on every subject from preschool to university, he knows each of their place of employment and what their fucking managers’ last grocery lists contained on them – from a box of raw fusilli pasta to a four pack of toasted coconut flavored yogurt.

All that information of life is so overpowering, so touching. It is proof of the life cycle – the sequence of biological changes that occurs as an organism develops from egg to adult until death – and how humans are so infinitely complex, affecting those around them in a mythical phenomena that humans call the butterfly effect. When butterflies were not extinct, of course.

Jade would shed a tear if he could. Instead, he marches forward to rip the wings off each of their lives. His intentions are only halted when you stir on the bed, neck released by the startled preparator who stares at Jade like he is seeing a ghost. 

You stir on the mattress, chest heaving. Jade’s attention is magnetized to you. Your head is upside down on the bottom edge of the bed, meaning you must have struggled, trying to reach the door only to be pulled away again and again by evil hands. A sliver of breast and nipple is nude from your seized and pulled nightgown. 

Between shaking coughs, you manage to exhale important words, “Th-The — chuk-code!”

Something from underneath the rock crawls out – a small, instinctual insect he never knew had before. Jade’s gaze narrows with the weight of starting a robotic-assisted holocaust. He says, steady and ready, “Of course, Master.”

“No!” You shout in bed, jerking. 

You are still held by the other two men. Limbs are pulled like you are a creature on the dissection table. Such a fragile specimen. The only source of light in the room is your red lamp which reflects tiny circles in your glassy eyes, twin orbs of sanguine, like a badly taken photo when the flash is reflected off the blood-rich retina.

Through the finger-shaped bruises on your compromised trachea, you say with quivering lungs, “The-They. They’re not go—government. Don’t. Don’t! use that code … Buh, Break the leader’s ankles. Kill the rest.”

Though it causes the three men to jolt in various states of stress, your words soothe Jade like a kiss. It is a concrete command that leaves no room for error and fills him with purpose. Bending into a servant’s bow, he punctually assures, “Of course, Master.” The orb of yellow fastened into his skull with metal wires shines like a tiny Sun. 

“On a scale of one through ten, one being no pain and ten being unbearable, what is the pain that you would rate your coughs?”

“Jade.”

“Master, please, answer the question.”

“Jade. Jade,” you repeat firmer, pushing his hands off your body. The glare you point in his direction makes him think you are squinting in vision loss. Did something else obscure your health? Aging individuals sometimes need eyewear. “Jade!” Ah, he instinctively went to touch you again.

“It’s four. A four,” you seethe at him, hands up like talons resisting the urge to batter him away. Like clockwork, you pluck the package of cigarettes and the package of matches off the living room’s coffee table. 

You mutter curses at the sheer lack of both slender, stick-shaped objects in each box. Jade dubiously notes that refills will need to be purchased soon. After you have striked one and puffed it into a hot, cherry glow, you turn towards Jade who watches you cough out – rather than smoothly exhaling – a cloud of nicotine, carbon monoxide, and formaldehyde. 

For that static moment, Jade takes the precious time to analyze you, as if he could not in the discord that was your bedroom. He takes his red-black stained thumb and index finger to peel back the heavy, black strand of hair from obscuring his left eye. The sensors in his gold eye rotate once like a telephone rotary dial. Without even touching you, Jade calculates your blood pressure and heart rate. An optimally healthy 122 mm Hg and an undisturbed 80 bpm. You are impenetrable like steel.

Retrohaling, you scan around the parlor as if searching for something or perhaps start to look at things through a new light. You even circle around the coffee table once too. It reminds him of laboratory chickens, walking around with their heads cut off.

You flick your cigarette after each coughing inhale. He watches it crumble and burn, like red sand breaking off from a jutted cliffside. When only a few breaths are left, you say, direct and firm, “Jade. How long has it been since we had a guest?”

“We have never had a guest in this cabin, Master.”

“Exactly!” You point your cigarette at him sharply. “So, go up there and start with some lighthearted small talk. Make him feel welcome, okay?” 

Jade thinks he has an irregular guilty pleasure. He has no source for how it developed, but he has a specific appetite for violence. An appetency that can be only fed through seeing blood on his hand. Or perhaps this desire is only awakening in him, squirming like a bug under a shaded rock, because of whose blood is on his pale moon hands.

Tomorrow, he might have to spend six or seven hours working, scrubbing and wringing damp towelettes like a maid, to get all the stains out of your four-walled bedroom. There was blood everywhere. As if your red lamp gained the power of illuminating with the force of a Sun.

As his shoes click over to your office desk where the live dissection stirs, his comfort comes from seeing the broken stumps that are the man’s ankles. They are pointed and twisted in asymmetrical shapes. Torn and crumpled wings on an insect’s back. 

“Sir, I truly don’t think you are going to get too far with that. Cigarettes are an awful vice.” The man ignores him, trying fruitlessly to strike a match, blubbering harder with each attempt. When the match flies out of his sweat-soaked hand onto the floor, Jade tuts in pity. “Humans always make such foolish decisions without considering the most probable outcome.”

He must have rummaged the matchbox out of your desk, slapping his hand across the lower surface until he found a drawer. It is not necessary for you and Jade to tie him down. There is no way he is going to manage a crawl. And, his conviction is too fearful to use untied fists to attack anyone.

The man has been in and out of odd paralysis since he has gazed upon Jade’s plastic face. As Jade cradles the sides of the man’s face gingerly, tilting his head backwards inch by inch until their eyes finally meet yet again, Jade witnesses that raw fear rise as cheekbone muscles tighten, increased blood flow branches out to the body’s peripheries, and the man’s pupils dilate enough to eclipse out blue in unconcealed, virgin adrenaline.  

“Heart rate is 108 beats per minute. Rises to 111 when hearing my voice. Am I really such a phobia to you?”

There is no verbal answer. However, it is very telling when those dilated eyes pinch close firmly, oozing two water droplets, and the cigarette in his mouth starts to wobble back and forth wildly in his quivering lips. 

“Be civil now. No one talks with their eyes closed. It is rude. Besides, you are the first human I have interacted with outside of my Master, and I would like to have a few discussions with you – to pass time.” The man cannot see it but that smarmy smile returns to Jade’s face –  a slight scrunch of the slanted downward eyebrows that leaves a line above his tiny, razor teeth.

Nothing in the formulaic, fear-fueled adrenaline changes. The man continues trembling and jiggling. His features are pulled taut, tight-lipped and tight-eyed, in deep creases that refuse to open. Jade wants to make him spill.

“Come, come,” Jade rubs a comforting circle of red into the man’s left cheek, “I am equipped with dozens of dialogue enhancing programs and can speak up to between six thousand and seven thousand languages fluently. I assure you that I am a good conversationalist.”

A tear squeezes out and falls down the side of the man’s nose. “Really, there is no viable reason to cry. If you had simply anticipated the outcome, this situation would not be as devastating as you are experiencing it. Operational planning can stop one from being blindsided.”

Jade smiles placidly, fighting back against the laugh that so desperately wants to bubble up. “Did you really expect to get away with this without –?”

That causes a spillage.

“Get away with – Get away with? You’re inhuman. Fucking inhuman. Fucking Christ. You fucking monsters. Things like you shouldn’t exist. Shouldn’t exist. That inhuman bitch killed my father. She shot him five years ago and there was no justice. No fucking justice! Inhuman … She gets – She gets away with it. She gets to live out of the rest of her life in Canada while my Dad rots in the fucking ground! Inhuman, inhuman bitch, you fucking robots …” 

Jade’s smile twitches at the corner. He starts to spill, laughing shamefully in fufu’s then freely in booming haha’s. His razor teeth glint like ice shards until he calms slowly, pinching his lips into a wobbly smirk. “Five years ago … I cannot recollect it perfectly. However, I do remember the rule of thumb that hostages make the best bargaining chips.”

Jade ducks backwards as a hand reaches up like a predator’s batting claw. It is unfortunate that Jade has never known the role of prey, for he cannot execute the facade of it convincingly. When the hand misses the mark, Jade strikes like an extinct owl capturing prey and squeezes the man’s wrist.

“Ack – Aaaagh!” Holding the body’s periphery, Jade considers changing the shape of this limb too. The man’s left tibia is snapped in three places like a badly-written ‘W’ and the man’s right tibia is half out of the meat sleeve of his flesh like a stick pulled off a corndog. Before he can act on uncommanded urges, you walk in with a hammer.

“Hey, play nice. Bad hospitality these days will spread to the neighborhood like wildfire,” you tease with a smile. It is a joke because there is no neighborhood; you live in an isolated cabin where no soul besides the two of you could hear a scream.

Jade vigilantly tracks your body’s steps, each one coy, as you move across the discord on the office’s ground. “Aack – Are you a robot too?” The disdain in the man’s voice makes Jade twist his wrist.

“Oya, that would be quite a plot twist, wouldn’t it?” You smile a slippery moon crescent at the man. Jade watches intently as you crouch down to the bottom of one of your numerous shelves. Going through your archives, you start to flip through records in your hand, completely distracted. 

“Nothing in here is alphabetized,” you gripe.

“If you would like, I can find time to organize your records, Master.”

“How about tomorrow? Oh, here it is!” You stand, record and hammer in hand. “We can do it tomorrow. Make a little game of it and organize them together in alphabetical order!” Placing it delicately down on the phonograph player, the needle once deposited down on the track starts to send out the vibration sequence that makes up “Nessun Dorma” from the opera Turnadot. You close your eyes as if soaking in the melody. 

“My prognosis is … My prognosis is …,” you raise your hammer to point towards your desk, music slowly encroaching with stretched lyrics, “this a revenge plot.” You bare yellowing teeth wolfishly in a pleased smile. 

“Now, the other two, well, they’re obviously frustrated members of society. Maybe a job was overtaken by one of the Jades, and they thought ‘enough is enough’. Maybe, just resentment for the world as it is. I can sympathize. A bloodlust needed to be quenched in those young men, but it was not as intense as our leader here. No, he wants me dead for something more personal. No one wraps their hands around a person’s throat unless it is, personal. 

“I killed someone you loved. Not a brother or sister. Too young for that. Not an uncle or aunt either. Father? Mommy?” The man’s responding rough jerks are ‘smoothed’ down by Jade, who presses him roughly to flatten out on the desk surface. “Doesn’t matter now though. You didn’t succeed.” 

You stride over to the dissection table, each step deliberate, following along to the swelling opera. “Good thing too. In the event that I die of unnatural causes, a code is sent through Jade, connecting to every last robot worldwide to kill anything with a beating heart.” You tap the hammer gently on the side of the man’s face. “Do you understand the foolishness of all this?”

“You inhuman mo-monster.”

“We can’t all be humane in this century.”

Then, striking like an extinct cobra, you grab the man’s neck in your hand and force his head back. Jade watches as you subtly increase the strength of pressure applied. The man’s head leans over the edge of the desk and his forehead kisses Jade’s belt. It is only when the man opens his mouth, trying to suck up oxygen that won’t enter his nostrils, do you take the hammer and swiftly pierce it through the muscle tissue.

The man screams but it is drowned by the operatic symphony. The screams finally stop when the tissue disconnects from the body, waggling on the claw end of the hammer. Blood fills the man’s mouth. You take unoccupied hands; one of them is placed over the man’s mouth firmly and the other pinches his nostrils. 

For the first time in his life, separate from his memories and separate from his dreams, Jade watches the life fade out, like a leisurely slow sunset, from a living person’s eyes.

Jade isn’t sure how it happens, perhaps he is dissociating – how revolutionary for a machine to experience such a unique, temporary disconnect from his mind – but the two of you find yourself outside on the cabin’s back porch on November 7th bitterly cold and dark morning. It is exactly 4:06 A.M and the temperature is negative 0.5 Celsius. Like the constant epilogue of each novel where you kill something alive, you are holding out a cigarette in front of Jade’s chest, the white tip awaiting him. 

He pulls his glove-hand off and holds out the tip of his silver index. The first knuckle flicks open and a blue flame emerges out elegantly. Jade reattaches his skin as you pull the cigarette to your mouth. 

Smoke clouds are already coming out of your mouth, crystalizing in the chill night air. However when the first smoke cloud made of carbon monoxide, nicotine, and formaldehyde blooms out from your peeling lips, you say softly, “I can delete it if need be.”

“Delete what, Master?”

“Anything you want me to delete.” You rub your face. “Anything from tonight. I’ll do it for you, Jade. I promise.”

“Why would I ever want to miss a moment that has you in?”

Though it was not his intent, his response causes you strife. It is an unforeseen variable to see you hunch so deeply into a moment of woe. A black puffer jacket conceals your lungs yet Jade watches the profound, hard sigh billow out all the same. Holding your head in your hands, your nude legs shake in the frigid cold underneath your elbows.

After exactly 00:06:15, you respond, “I don’t want you fearful of me … I’m not pleasant to see or be around. And, I don’t want you to remember something that makes you upset, even if it is just one tiny thing. Whatever you want gone, I can take that pain away. If you so desire, I have the ability to remove anything. You can keep whatever you want. I won’t overstep.”

Jade clasps the hand that holds your cigarette, bringing it away from your temple to smolder over his blood-stained dress pants, “All of it. I’ll keep all of it.”

You simply smoke in response.

Jade isn’t sure what time it happens, he manually shuts down his inner clock two minutes after you two finished your conversation, but while sitting on the back porch of the cabin, another unexpected visitor approaches the solitary solace you and Jade have carved into dead woods. The visitor is tiny and flitters around like a restless child. It has been a whole year since he has seen a visitor of this species.

The two of you built a bird feeder together in the first months living in this cabin. It had been marvelously fun. Measuring the cuts for each piece of wood was delegated to Jade while you worked on assembling the finished product. Jade always loves doing activities with you. Now, some of the aftermath rewards can be reaped, as Jade watches an American Goldfinch pick and snack on the bird seeds, his yellow coat fluffy and his black wings ruffling momentarily to shake off the cold.

“(Name), look.” Jade urges softly, even though he can tell by your healthy, deep breaths that you are asleep. “A goldfinch.” You remain comatose in sleep, curling into Jade’s shoulder. He won’t dare to be so intimate and slip in logical judgement by saying your name while you are awake.

The goldfinch stays with Jade until morning when the horizon begins to glow a brilliant yellow. Though it would hurt anyone else’s eyes, Jade stares unabashed ahead. 

[rel124c41]

don’t apologize for the schedule change you can take as long as you want in your fics !!! i haven’t stumbled on a writer as good as you in so long ! truly your work is incredible,, the way you weave your words is magic. thank you for giving the readers the ability to take a gander at what you create, we are so lucky.

this is so incredibly sweet!!! i need all your guys new years resolutions to be to start sending me hate anon messages bc this heartfelt sincerity is too touching!!! T_T!!!!

i’m glad that what i write is worth reading! i wish to be able to pump out a oneshot each month, but the plausibility is pretty poor. so, it’s nice to know that people who read my writing aren’t too upset over the schedule change. i hope to always be able to write something that is worth substance for all of you! that it isn’t too verbose or bores the reader to death, things like that i want to avoid so i can create content worth others time!

your sentiment is incredibly sweet — ‘lucky’?? pls im lucky to have an audience that enjoys what i put out!!

[rel124c41]

REST MY CHEMISTRY. jade leech

CHICK HABIT. jade leech

REST MY CHEMISTRY. jade leech

requested by @archival-cryptid / cake details: marble cake (NRC) with fresh fruit compote (hurt/comfort) and whipped cream with berries (angst and tragedy)

He comes back into your life like a ghost. 

Perhaps a ghost is too generous of a descriptor. Your roommates are ghosts – the obese, the mediocre, and the skinny – and you have found yourself quite fond of their company. In this moment, his look reminds you of a vampire, driven to the edge of desperation with the need for new blood. 

He is soaked down to the bone. Skin pallid as bone. His body shakes due to the threads of rain stitched intimately in his outfit, rain that had muted out the soft knocks he periodically tapped on Ramshackle’s double doors. No sense of urgency in his knocks despite growing damper and damper by the minute. 

Jade always likes to take things slowly. 

Schooling your disbelief, you ask him with barely contained rage, “Are you fuckin’ insane?”

“Now, Prefect, the insanity clause is only viable for one time use: when they dig up the bodies.”

A jest between you. The best place to hide a body is on a mountain trail or underneath a haunted parlor’s floorboards. He would give you that wink, his single hazel eye bright like a lucky penny. 

This time the half facial blink does not bring a smile to your face. You watch a waxy raindrop run over the bridge of his nose, expressionless, and nudge the decision in your head if you should let him stay the night. There is no room in Octavinelle for him. However, he is resourceful and could most likely find lodgings of his own. The contract incident emerges in your mind … reservations for guest rooms in Ramshackle could start at a mere 200 thaumarks a night, perhaps you could rape his pockets in vengeance.

Instead, you nudge open Ramshackle’s door a bit more to feel the light misting of rain sneak through. “Don’t stay around long, or I’ll call those cops.” Your face does not wink.

Like a slime trail after dragging a leaking body-bag, Jade leaves behind a trail of deep, discerning footprints from the entrance carpet to the mouth of the parlor. 

He stays in his wet clothes. He has his hands clasped in front of him, perfectly pristine as if he is not forming a puddle on the floorboards. Gracious enough to not sit and ruin furniture, he simply surveys the coffee table where all your homework is laid out.

“Tea?”

“Yes, please.”

“Preference?”

“Whatever you offer, I’ll take.”

A fake sniff covers up the grimace that wants to emerge on your face. Him and his troublesome double meaning. There is a bottle — tied with a periwinkle bow; shining red and black like a hematite — full of non-traceable, odorless poison. For any unfavorable company that may come to your door, he said after he handed it to you for your birthday, because of course Jade Leech could not give a normal birthday present. You go to grab it as you leave Jade in the parlor, standing in the little lake at his oxfords. 

Jade watches your back with focus akin to a surgeon. His gold and brown eyes are big, trembling in a silent plea that he only has the courage to direct towards your dorsum. When you turn the corner to the kitchen, his lids half-mast themselves.

Ramshackle always reeks of cat piss and old rotting wood. The musty scent was something you could never really evict from the premises. So, oftentimes, you light a candle for a brief distraction from the rot surrounding it. Akin to putting a new bandage over a grotesque wound of putrid blood and oozing blisters. 

Calculative, Jade’s eyes flicker across the foyer and furniture. It has been quite a long time since he was allowed to step foot in here. Despite wanting to take in the new altercations, he finds himself drawn to something else entirely plain. The candle on the coffee table draws Jade’s attention as he stands perfectly still and patient. The candle. Which is sitting on top of a few stray pages.

He knows he shouldn’t.

All he is responsible for is waiting on a cup of tea.

“You’ll start a fire that way,” Jade murmurs worriedly to himself. He carefully lifts the dangerous paperweight and sets it further down the table, a good reach away from any burnable objects. He also puts its lid underneath the candle like a coaster.

He bends back up from the hip. Look towards the empty entrance of the parlor, seeing only the double doors and a sliver of the staircase. His right foot grinds restlessly in the puddle. Still an empty parlor entrance. Rather than bending at the hip, he crouches down.

Your pencil is still warm. Jade is so blissful at the tingle of your phantom touch that for a moment he merely observes the utensil in his clipped nails, chest lightening after months of coldness. How nice it would be to intertwine fingers.

There are equations on your potionology sheets that are wrong. He twists your pencil over in his hand, pink eraser pointing towards the sheet. Just a couple and he will stand back up before you even notice. Handwriting is easy to replicate; he has done it a number of times for Azul.

Like exercising a previously dormant muscle, it all comes back to rather simply. Jade gets so caught up in the act that his intent to only fix your mistakes leads to him turning to the next page of the packlet, working on number problems while maintaining a strict imitation of your handwriting. He is caught wholly off guard when you slam the teacups on the table, murky brown spilling over the edge.

You hardly seem to care for the stain. The table is old, old anyways.

“Give.”

He hands you your pencil, guilty.

(or at least as visibly guilty as he will ever be, which is never enough)

You observe your tainted pencil as if you are weighing  two decisions, as if you will snap it in half or burn it to ash with the aid of your candle. Instead, you set it down with a I-should-have-known sigh and round the distance of the table. You sit on your knees; Jade, who was crouching, mimics your body. 

The tension in the air is thicker than the scent of piss and rot, and ineffably thicker than your desperate attempt to cover up with a facade’s weak candle wisps. It surprises Jade when you cut it by asking, moving the teacups closer to each of you, “How is your internship going?”

You take a sip and Jade peels his gaze away from the soft fusion of ceramic and lip. He puts his hand over his own teacup; the warmth does not bring him any sense of comfort. He answers, “It has been profitable. My experiences with it will surely amount to a more lustrous future. So is the nature of stepping stones like these.”

“Glad to hear it.” When Jade makes a strange noise in his throat, you turn and say, “I’m serious. Good on you for pursuing what you want.”

“... (Name).”

“Don’t give me that look,” delicately, you push the bottom of the teacup up towards Jade’s hovering lips and insist with no malice, “drink.” 

You used the microwave to make his and the kettle for yours. There is no odorless poison in his, though; you really wish there was. It would remedy your heart to see Jade choke. Waxy, melted muscles drooling off his bottom lip. Thick like red candle wax. The old jest is nothing more than a jest though. Glancing at him, you remember how much Jade likes laughing. You blow air over tea steam in measured amounts, watching as he tastes the brew with a single convulsion of his throat. 

“So. Explore a lot of mountains? Scam a lot of people?”

“I dabbled in my strengths. And chose to strengthen my weaknesses.”

“Roundabout as always. Would you just humor me a little bit? I made you tea.”

“I,” here, Jade sets down his disgusting tea and the cup clunks on wood, “I came here to discuss something of importance with you.”

“Oh, so you want something from me? How can I assist you?”

“... (Name).”

“No, I’m serious. A simple human like me wants to help you in whatever way I can.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“You didn’t? Oh, good to know.”

“... (Name).”

At the third intonation of your name, you slam your cup down upon the rickety table, miffed. Wood creaks. Teeth grit down on each other like stones furiously scraped together to crack a spark. A roaring fire of vitriol comes out of your mouth than a lousy spark, “What! What is so important that you had to come back! What could it possibly be!”

“I was wondering …” But, Jade presses his lips together before the thought can extend itself. He never knew when to stop talking before; you do not see why now is any different! He starts again. “I was wondering if …”

Volcanic, you take one deep breath and blow out the candle. Gray, unraveling knots of smoke curls over the edge. If he won’t speak then fine. “There are blankets in the closet. I’ll get them. Use the couch. Start the fireplace yourself to dry off. I want you gone in the morning.”

Jade grabs your wrist before you can get away from too far, “Shock the Heart.”

A shimmering gloss falls over your eyes. Jade stares deeply. 

“Do you still … Do you still love me? Even after what I said when you confessed?”

Your lips part like a sock puppet maneuver by four fingers and a thumb. 

“Stupidly. Stupidly, I do.”

He hopes you pick something from the laundry that still has your scent on it. He does not want freshly clean blankets. He wants to be able to smell mites of your dead skin cells resting in the cradle of fleece. Previous pheromones present so he can pretend he rests next to you tonight. He wants to bury his face into those graveyard scents. Make himself a dream that, just for tonight, things could have ended up differently if he was not so stupid too.

Jade drops the spell. A grimace passes over your face. You feel a burn like an eyelash, so you rub your right eye frivolously.

“What … What happened?”

“Vertigo. Happens to the best of us.”

Best of us? Don’t make me laugh.

CHICK HABIT. jade leech

requested by: anon / cake details: Ice-Cream Cake (mafia AU) with buttercream frosting (mutual pining) and edible flowers (fluff)

For the sixth time, you reach down and try to pull the hem of your dress lower. It changes absolutely nothing; you should’ve known.

You guess in a way this could be considered divine punishment for accepting this invitation. And once more, it is taxes of divine punishment for ignoring your helpful subconscious and allowing Ariel to hand you a dress from her personal locker on the way out of work. A pyramid of little mistakes has piled up. Now, here you are in the single-use bathroom, constantly trying to readjust something that can’t be stretched any further.

In the mirror, the copy of yourself turns around. Back muscles look like sickly butter under the ugly-yellow bathroom lightbulb. When you gently place your hand — five, long acrylic nails spread out — on your knobby knee and bend forward, the mirror reflects a clear view of your panties in all their frilly glory.

Too short, you seethe, bending back to your original height. Once more, you furiously wrestle with the dress’s hem. Why can’t the accursed thing go any lower! You should’ve stopped by your locker before leaving work; anything in there would’ve been better than this napkin you have on.

Rotating yourself, you stare at yourself in the mirror. A worried whore stares back at you. With her inadequate makeup and her indecent cleavage cut, you watch her take a deep breath to restabilize herself and pretend that she belongs here which is pure insanity because she does not fit in with the rest of these socialites, no matter how hard she tries to manipulate her situation.

I should just leave, you strategize the options for escape, I should just slip out. I don’t owe him an explanation. If I want to leave, I’ll leave! They won’t even see me if I leave through the back.

It would not be the first time you have made a quick escape from Jade Leech. The last time your ill-thought-out decision-making lead to you attending a dinner with him — a three star michelin restaurant where they milked the goat for cheese by their own hands and each food item on the menu looked like it was an art student’s surrealist statue rather than edible food — you had escaped out of the door for garbage disposal before the appetizers had even arrived at the table.

Just now, you feel desperate enough to try that old movie cliche of squeezing through a bathroom window. You want to return to the comforts of your social status — lower than the nuclear family, lower than the average salaryman, lower than single mothers.

Heavy mascara and heavy eyeshadow crinkles under your acrylics as you pinch the bridge of your nose, trying to balance out all your decisions and decide what you want to do; stay or go; stay or go; stay or go?

When, after a moment of mental languishing as you paper-towel your hands, the single-use bathroom door creaks open to show you the visage of Jade who stands in front of the line of women waiting for the bathroom. The first in line breathes a sigh of relief like she was starting to think you drowned in there before she rushes in, her stilettos clicking. If you weren’t far enough out the door, you are when the swinging door nudges your bottom. Cold wood on bare skin … on bare skin, your consciousness reminds.

“You look lovely,” Jade starts with a smile yet quickly latches his mouth shut when you frown deep at that. A gloved hand is still outstretched to you, all the same. His upturned eyes cut into you. “Shall we go?”

When you reach out, he interlocks your elbows together. A gentleman’s gesture that makes your stomach twist in that familiar out-of-placement. There are still exits in the back of Ashengrotto’s casino for you to leave through; the bathroom window is not the sole option.

As the two of you ascend the polished stairs, hand in hand, Jade tells you, “I’m glad you had chosen this instance to accept my invitation. I hope that my performance will leave you with the similar feeling that I get when I am graced with the blessing of seeing you perform.” His upturned teeth cut into you. 

How can he say that when he is playing double bass and I perform on … you interrupt your own pessimism to say, head slanted down, “Jazz has always been a soft spot for me.”

Jade hums, “We won’t start until 11. If you would like, you and I could indulge in slot games or roulette. My personal best has always been blackjack since it was something my father always practiced at home. I picked up ‘tricks’ from him.”

As Jade weaves you through the crowds of attendees, eyes observing the casino floor as both assistant manager and player, he fails to notice how deep you are wallowing in self-loathing. You too are observing everyone with their glittering watches, the luxurious tuxedos and gowns, even those dressed casually are fiddling with stacks of thaumarks in their hands. So, feeling like the cheapest thing ever, all you mutter is, “I’m looking forward to it.” Which isn’t really an answer to Jade’s harmless inquiry.

You startle when you hear in the ocean of diffidence, one sailboat of words, “If you’re looking forward to it, perhaps you could raise your eyes to look at me.” Those eyes raise to him in shock. Under your stare, he chuckles and a soft smile settles on his features. 

“Do I have your attention now?”

You simply nod.

“Then, what is wrong? I would hate for you to run out again, especially if it is from some misdemeanor of my own.”

Once more, your gaze turns to the people surrounding you. The two of you have stopped in your trek because of how firmly Jade’s shimmering black shoes planted themselves upon the first sign of disinterest from you. Swallowing an indescribable loneliness, you face the shifting crowd and say curtly, “My dress. It’s too short.”

You could care less for how Jade responds to your ice-queen complaint, as long as you can make a break for some sort of exit, then you would finally feel like things were going your way. However, the jingling of some metal interests you enough that you steal a glance at your date.

He is pulling keys out of his iron-pressed dress pants. It is a single loop with a dozen indistinguishable keys on them, no markings or any rubber key covers on them; it is probably so if they are stolen, the person cannot tell which is which, you know what sandbox Ashengrotto plays in. Jade seems to know exactly which one he wants because he holds it up and lets go of the ring. “Follow me please.”

What is opened by that plain silver key is a room about the size of a locker room. Coats upon coats are plastered to the four walls. There are even two lines of them, one hanging at waist height and another hanging above those. Faintly, in the background, you can hear guests enter and be scanned by security, so you two are close to the entrance. 

Context clues are just knocking on the door, but it finally enters when you watch Jade step into the room, the angular cuts of his suit shifting as he runs a gloved hand over a short section of coats, watching them sway under his touch. His fingers flicker over them before he takes one off the rack and reads the tag.

“Burberry. The pattern on the front is fetching, no?”

“Jade.” You stare at him in surprise, watching him smooth a hand over the light brown trench-coat like a laundromat worker presenting a customer with their freshly ironed clothes.

An impish smile rises to his face. Triangles of light gleam warmly in his eyes. “Not fond of the color? Hm,” he sets it back on the higher rack, “let’s see what else we have in here.”

As he strolls away, you look behind yourself in apprehension. The coast is clear. Quickly, you bumble over to Jade – he mumbles, what an ugly pattern; whatever poor animal was put down to make this monstrous should haunt the owner – and reach out for his shoulder. “Jade. These are people’s coats. Azul’s business partners’ coats.” You hiss at him but before you can catch his shoulder, he is whirling around to face you.

“What do you think of this one? It leaves the audience with the impression of a darling sea-princess on her first day on land, does it not?”

“Jade —.”

“What about this one? I’m quite partial to the slit down the thigh. The elegance and seductive qualities of such a cut are truly … adventurous~.”

“Jade—.”

“Oh, this one would look fetching on you. The color matches extrevently with the gold of your dress. And oh! A free wallet has also been left behind — how fortunate!”

“Jade!”

“(Name), you must absolutely try this one on. It matches with your pupils in just a certain way. Here, let me assist.”

Before you know it, your arms are being guided through a black coat that shines blue when light hits it delicately enough. The feeling of a warm fur collar hits your cheeks and your waist is suddenly squeezed as Jade tightens the belt, pulling you towards his chest. You look up into his eyes just as he puts the finishing touches on, smoothing your hair out of your face.

“Just as I thought, beautiful like always. What do you think?” He smoothes a hand down your ribcage, gliding his gloves over designer buttons, as he plays with you verbally, “There is a wide selection here so we do not need to settle for riffraff.” His impish grin widens and his features soften with that familiar admiration that he always directs at you.

You rip yourself from his embrace. As you are ripping the coat from yourself — untying the belt, escaping from the sleeves, pushing the expensive, luxury-branded bundle into Jade’s chest — you scold, “I can’t believe you. Do you have any idea who these could possibly belong to! The wife of some high-ranking killer! If anyone sees me wearing it, my head will roll!”

Those triangles of light in his eyes grow more acute and that slippery fondness grows more sticky and sweet. His smile grows, showing off a sliver of teeth. “Oya oya? I don’t think you will have to worry about such a notion tonight.”

“And why the hell not!”

“Because,” his arms come to latch upon your biceps and pull you close, a symbolic move that he refuses to let you make a break for any sort of exit, “tonight you are my date. And thus, no one shall cause you any strife. If they value their lives.”

As a blush rises up to your cheeks, the first semblance of unconscious and unintentional recuperation to Jade’s two long years of courting you, you regret having said to him one night so many nights ago:

“You gonna dance for me, big boy?”

When the customer’s head launches up to your voice, you grin wolfishly at him. You gesture towards the stripper pole he had silently been eyeing after the end of the show.

“Or am I just gonna have to put on a private show for you?”

[rel124c41]

GOT YOU (WHERE I WANT YOU) (AS HEARD IN THE MOVIE DISTURBING BEHAVIOR). jade leech

In Jade’s logical mind, there is only one concrete truth: You are getting bored of your boyfriend.

2/3

tags: no grim AU, established relationship, social criticism, piercings/tattoos, misunderstandings, hurt/comfort, punk!jade leech

word count: 9707

He does not see you for the next three days after the concert in Scarabia.

This is the longest you have been away. A full seventy-two hours. It is not good for Jade’s health. 

On the first day, it was an ordinary ordeal and Jade slept soundly, if not just bundling his sheets a bit tighter to his chest. On the second day, it was the equivalent to having a tiny splinter in his hand, something always pricking at the back of his subconscious. On the third day, he starts getting antsy — to the point where he seems to spend more time in class looking out windows than focusing on his cauldron or the lecture, to the point where he seems to have this ‘thing’ in his ribcage and under his palm’s fat that he must dig out, to the point where a sighing Azul lets him leave their little private Octavinelle meeting early so he can, “Go retrieve the tramp.”

Which is exactly Jade’s plan as he takes a brisk walk to his dormitory. It will be best to remove both his hat and scarf; he will gather his magic pen and that howlite stone. If you are locked inside Ramshackle again … he would rather not entertain such a notion.

When he conversed with Kalim Al-Asim yesterday, he should have had the foresight to press for more information about your whereabouts. 

Now, he is left grappling with piss-poor preparation. His mind is disorganized. He doubts that when he rushes into his dormitory that he will hang either scarf or hat, instead flinging them on the bed. Mental anarchy is an extending splinter, growing longer and longer. If everything is not perfectly straightened out – his books, his shoes, his bedsheets, his mind, his life – how can Jade Leech possibly go on?

As he briskly walks, he remembers the last visage he saw of you. Fires had been scuffed out to only a sparse few, magic-powered lanterns all dead, and the faintest hint of light burn like embers in your tried yet energized eyes. You are stretching out your neck, hand over your pulse point, as the bassist and guitarist click and secure their instruments in their cases. 

In his memory, you push down hard on the right side and jerk your chin, creating a loud kernel-pop. Sweat glistens on you like rain, even your eyeliner is smudged with the precipitation. Then, neck snapping again, you turn towards Jade who is making his way over the stage from the back. 

Eyes bright, you squint at him mirthfully and make your way over the edge of the stage. For an illustrious moment, he sees an image of the high, guiding northern star, so sharp that it will pierce him like a closed iron maiden, an old torture device that the Queen of Hearts used to punish rule-breakers. You break that illusion by saying. I’m sleeping over here (in Scarabia) tonight, boo.

Since then, it is like you have just vanished from the earth. No matter where he checks, you are not there. Pop Music Club does not have any set-up days to meet or scheduled activities; everyone simply conjures when they ‘feel like it’ and they head home when they’ve ‘enjoyed themselves thoroughly’, so it is fruitless to find you during club hours. You do not attend classes so there is no luck there either.

Jade likes unpredictability but this is just vexing. I’ll check Ramshackle first. After that, I will once more try Night Raven’s technician room. Or, the breakroom for staff members. Her proclivity to rest wherever pleases her is piquing (in both definitions). Jade reaches for his bedroom door and reaches for his hat with opposing hands at the same time.

His door usually sounds like a mouse squeaking, rather than a human strumming. Hat in hand, Jade raises an eyebrow in curiosity when he hears a man singing low on the right side of the room. In his nose, the spicy scent of the Scarabia dormitory flows. His skin prickles up like an agitated cat’s bristling tail.

The factors do not add up though, because it is you and you alone who perches on the edge of Jade’s bed, guitar nestled close and dearly to your chest like a lover.

Your eyes flicker up upon hearing the door opening. A metaphorical glass shard cuts Jade’s veins as you two stare at each other in mild surprise. Then, breaking eye contact first like always, you reach over to Jade’s desk and drink a mysterious liquid that is a sickly olive-orange shade. Excelling at potionology, he knows by color alone that it is a voice-swapping potion. It alters vocal cords to sound like the opposite gender with each sip.

You cough around the foul-tasting elixir and say with a larynx that is slowly morphing back to your own, “Hi baby. Mornin’~”

“It is 8 P.M.”

You grin slyly, eyes squinting like squeezed lemons, “Huh, I guess so~.”

Jade goes huff with a closed mouth smile. So it goes.

You two are used to each other’s presence like a birthmark. Jade frequented Ramshackle and you frequented Mostro Lounge. Though there had always been other presences, the malevolent wisps of screeching souls and the uproarious laughter of your fellow band members, you know each other intimately. Which is why, it takes little effort and time to get settled.

(He fails to notice that when he places his shoes down upon his stool for them that the white tips of the toes do not touch. They are crooked.)

Rearranging sheets of music, you make a place so Jade can sit. Stubborn cowlicks point up like horns from his teal hair when he takes off his hat, so he brushes them down with a hand. Taking his seat beside you, Jade watches you pen the remaining notes you were practicing on the stave, your body leaning close to read them.

Pajamas can wait. Calmed by the sight of you — here in my room and safe — Jade decides to soak in the moment. He watches the familiar elegance of your fingers, bending and hooking as you test the riffs you wrote down on your guitar. There is truly an innate dexterity in those nimble fingers, like you were born and breed for this. Despite acknowledging and making a spot for him, you seem pretty pulled in by your task, by the music. 

Your guitar pick (your lucky guitar pick, you would correct Jade upon hearing his inner monologue) oscillates between the strings. It is one of the three items that was transported with you from your old world upon arriving. Well, that wasn’t all you brought. Those three items being a pocket-sized Animal Farm book, guitar pick, and two-way messenger device, all under your ceremony robe pockets, along with the endless flow of new music from an alien universe. 

They say in the Coral Sea that: to breathe is to sing. One’s own voice should always be treasured as an irreplaceable power. Music is an irrevocable part of merfolk culture. It creates an atmosphere. For those to enjoy the sea, profess their love, or enjoy celebrations, everyone likes to sing whenever they get the chance. 

Jade rarely indulged. He kept himself out of the spotlight and adopted reticent mannerisms. Singing, as you have proven over and over, attracts attention, like a honeybee drawn to pollen’s scent.  

You are mumbling lyrics under your breath before you stop. Jade draws his gaze up from your fingers to observe your frustrated expression. Down goes your lucky pick onto the sheet. The guitar nestled to your chest is pushed down flat, chords on your knees. There is this prickling tenor that radiates off you, before you say aloud with defeat in each syllable:  

“I can’t do this anymore.”

And for a horrible moment, Jade truthfully does think that the this you are talking about is your relationship.

It would not be an irrational leap. Jade never makes those. With the way you have been so avoidant, disinterested in a majority of what he has to say, and always looking to escape conversations with him, it would make sense that you would want this relationship to cease if it is boring to you. Time has run out on the three month honeymoon. December is sneaking up right around the corner.

Just a handful of days ago, you sat on his bed for almost an hour without saying a single word or humming a single chord. It is uncanny for you to be silent for that long unless you are sleeping. Yet, you were fully awake, staring off into space, keeping all your complicated thoughts to yourself, as he worked at his desk with his terrariums and mushroom encyclopedias.  

Jade had almost expected it then. For you to turn on your side, hands and loose mechanic gloves sandwiched between the bony knobs of your knees, and say with a hardened expression of self-confidence, ‘Jade, let’s never see each other again.’ He does not know how he would deal with such a unique surprise.

So, he refuses to deal with such a notion, and instead asks, gently because you have started to grip the front of your hair harshly in mental anguish, “Can’t do what anymore?”

“I can’t keep trying to remember this song,” you sob out without any tears. Dry eyes glance at him. “I keep trying to remember the chords of this song from my favorite childhood movie! But, I never played it before so it’s like piecing together a puzzle without the picture on the box! I don’t know any of the chords! Ugh, why is this so hard!”

For a moment, his imaginative and grand mind goes blank. Jade doesn’t really know to think with such a burden shared to him. Both of you are in strife now. Your problems morph into his problems and that is the zenith of being in a relationship.

However, Jade is a master of cold, calculative plotting. He advises, “If you keep pursuing prey, it travels further and further away each time you reach out towards it. It is better in the long run to hunt lying in wait and catch it by surprise.”

You stare at him. “What?”

Spoke too soon, he realizes. In his vision, your meek form hugs your guitar and caresses your guitar pick like it is the only teether to the physical realm. The instrument that you can rely on — unlike him — while you both move upward in age. “I think it is more advantageous to wait instead of struggling towards it.”

“Then, why wouldn't you just say that,” you question, releasing your harsh grip on your guitar. “I don’t need that kind of –.” You pause, guilty. “Sorry. Sorry.”

“It’s quite alrig –.”

“No, it isn’t. I shouldn’t speak so –.”

“Nonsense. I can’t fathom how –.”

“I’m stressed but that’s no ex –.”

“(Name), truly, no need for –.”

“Jade, I want –.”

All your combined words dissolve into bubbling laughter. Because, you smile crookedly at Jade which makes him fight against a creeping, fond smile which makes you beam a toothy grin which has Jade chuckling softly in reverence of your easygoingness. It concludes with both of you laughing into each other's shoulders, exhausted from interrupting. It tickles when your lips brush his neck and that has Jade seeping deeper into laughter.

I missed you, Jade admits without verbalization. He plants a fat kiss on your cheek. Still rooted on that field of flesh, he breathes in a cavernous breath that moves the non-visible strands of hair on your face like blown grass. Your scent crawls in kitten footsteps into his nostrils. Soft. You smell soft.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t take this out on you. I went to rehearsal this afternoon and … ugh! I couldn’t get myself to remember a single chord progression and it’s like, c’mon, I should know this!”

“Not everything should fall onto you. You’re not the captain or boss after all,” Jade says, plucking the words another has used to describe your identity right out of your mind. 

“Doesn’t feel like that though. Not since — ugh! Bleh! Look at me talking about such depressing stuff! What a downer, amirite? Let’s talk about something different!”

And, in that innate way you have about you, you manage to steer the conversation to another realm or another universe with practiced ease. Animatedly, you string together stories from the three days you were gone. Hearing stories from you feels like living through them. Truly, your voice is one of your most preeminent aspects. You even continue on steady going as you two brush your teeth for the night. Your voice is addictive. Something that even pulls in the fickle attention of his twin — who comes into their dormitory just as Jade rests his chin on the top of your head and starts to drift off to that hypnotic voice.

The last thing he hears is “well, I wasn’t going to take that lying down. So when she went to the bathroom, I unscrewed the lid of her coffee cup and phew! Right into her drink!” and the next thing he hears is the sound of vomiting.

And what does Jade do? Well Jade – dreams he is swimming through a forest of underwater mushrooms that reach up to a nebulous sky, his body is a primitive eel with no hands or arms, simply snake, threading through ivory white stems of mushroom-tree as one opens up to reveal a pulsing eye – rubs his nose in his sleep.

Unbeknownst to him, he’s been asleep since 10:31 and has gotten a full two hours of sleep. He is positive nothing is amiss outside from his body. The blanket is warm and the sounds are growing louder.

Jade — sits under the spotlight coming from the mushroom-tree’s slit, that single pulsing eye glaring down with a skyscraper iris, before it closes itself like one discontent labia, his eel body squirming in desperation — wakes up, eyes shooting open, when he hears a horrid sound. He only has an elbow up as he watches you lean over and vomit into the wastebasket you are cradling. 

Floyd is by your side, ringlets of your hair squeezed in his hand. His twin wears a blank expression as he watches you (is this the first time you puked tonight or has it been more) puke, most likely, again. Their eyes met over the arch of your curling spine, backdropped by the sound of something heavy and wet hitting plastic. You gargle and burp up bile; it sounds painful. 

He has a hundred questions he wants to ask his twin, but instead, he seamlessly and silently takes your hair from Floyd’s grip. The action is very fluid like passing a baton in a race; Floyd lets go at the same time Jade grabs on.

Any strands that Floyd neglectfully missed, Jade scoops them up with a fingernail and leans his body over yours, alerting you in the heavy mist of incoherence that your trustful boyfriend has woken up and will take care of you. You simply twitch like someone shot. The pieces that Jade is gathering are wet at the tips and his heart fractures for you.

Sevens, what kind of boyfriend is he if he is inadequate in aiding you in times of need? He should have been awake as soon as you stirred.

You must have moved around a lot on your own too. You were curled next to the wall when falling asleep and now you are sitting on the edge of the bed. The wastebasket is also from the joint bathroom. All that noisy movement and Jade slept. He pushes down his own bile-ball of guilt as you resurface like someone coming up for air.

“I — I —.” You vomit so hard it sounds like something sloshed out of you, like you had just successfully puked your heart up and out.

“Shush, shush, it’s okay. You’re okay.” He repeats that mantra a few times around. It seems to work wonders. “I got you. I got you. I got you.” Finally, sixty seconds pass than a hundred-twenty more seconds; it is long enough where Jade feels comfortable to dig for the reason of this nightly strife. 

“Is it the nerves from your parents?”

You shake your head, no, refusing to look at him.

“The Dark Mirror?”

The same again.

“Ramshackle?”

You stiffen. A droplet of water peels off your eye like dew off a leaf. Jade believes he can hear it softly plop into the awaiting bile ocean below. He knows it is the most concrete answer he will get out of you. So, he says gently, not suggesting but telling, “A walk around campus would benefit me right now.”

“Yeah?” You murmur. Your haunted voice does not sound like your own; not due to a potion but rather your vocal cords twisting with fright. 

“Are you okay, Jade?” You play along well with his subtle, situational manipulation.

“No, I’m not. My mind is disorganized.”

You go huff with a closed lip smile. So it goes.

As Jade stands off to the side, watching diligently with his eyes glued to your form, you bundle up in a winter jacket and brush your teeth in their bathroom sink. Your toothbrush clinks in the cup with Floyd’s and Jade’s. A programmed, innate part of you reaches for the wastebasket to take care of your mess but Jade stifles it by pushing the object out of your reach. Sometimes, he loathes that you are so independent. 

You accept that with a look. What? Jade thinks, wanting to ask you what that look could possibly mean. He doesn’t. 

You accept his hand when he offers, interlocking. The heat is grounding. Both of you bid Floyd demure goodbyes, his twin raising a hand up from his bundle of covers in response. Then, you are off. 

No additional words are spoken. There is much to be said but neither of you dares to breach it. Steering, Jade guides you down the darkened hallways of Night Raven College. The shadow-blanketed portraits sleep and the shadow-curtained doors remain shut. Paces evenly matched, you share a walk. 

December air bites at Jade when he pushes open the double doors. That’s right. Today is December 1st; midnight has most certainly passed by now. He looks up at the night sky where it looks like someone has spilled oil and tried to scrub it up in certain places, only managing to reduce it to a dark, dark gray where all the clouds lie. He does not shiver.

Your grip tightens in his hand though, because some of the cold has invaded through your layers. A scarf. I should have been prepared with a scarf. My mind is untidy; how vexing. However, you give no complaint to the winter air. Perhaps it helps; you lick your lips in a way that makes Jade assume you are trying to sample a taste of the cold. 

Onward, you two continue. There are benches you two could sit upon and the fountain is also a nearby resting spot. Somewhere nice to sit and talk. It would be beneficial to discuss what happened tonight, and maybe beneficial for Jade to discuss how he is feeling recently. 

His face tightens. The image of gloved fingers savagely parting a clam’s glistening shell lips, crunching the hard body like a handful of saltine crackers, appears in his mind with the paramountcy of those mushroom-trees. Perhaps he will keep his mouth shut. Wouldn't it be selfish to talk about his worries? Yes. He latches onto that excuse. There is no reason to use his unique magic on himself.

However, before any of this can happen, you slip from Jade’s grip as he starts down the stairs. He feels the lost tingle up the arm of psilocybin and bulbophyllum phalaenopsis. He watches as you pull yourself onto that familiar brick wall, straightening up to your feet, and walking across the structure. 

There are skinny columns that make up the arches off the building. When you reach them, you grasp on and weave around them in a fashion that is fluid. Jade simply watches, walking around the border of the courtyard with you. It is just Jade, walking on the grass under your dancing feet, and you, shadowed.

A faint, raw-noise humming comes from the underbelly of your throat until you sing softly, “Heeeeey, what’s the point of this? Oh heeeey, what’s your favorite song; maybe we could hum along.” You weave past two columns, somber in the soft cadence. Your fingers look like little ghosts each time you release the thick, ebony metal.

“Well. I think you’re smart. You sweet thing.” Your eyes seem to look at someone Jade cannot see. “Tell me your name; I'm dying here!” You clench a hand to your chest, as you break through whispering-singing to real-singing. You throw your head back and sing coherently without any guitar or percussion, “Awooooouuuuuh! Got you where I want you … Again.”

Eccentric, Jade thinks fondly. Always interesting and unpredictable. He loves those factors about you as much as he is troubled by them. Why can’t things be linear?

After your musician outburst, you grow deathly quiet. Not even humming or murmuring the rest of the song, you continue weaving post by post as Jade follows, observing intently. He wants to crack open your head and dissect the yolk of your complicated, alien thoughts more than ever now. Too cowardly, he asks as you two come upon the first turn in the square formation of the brick wall, “How is your howlite ring fairing tonight?”

You glance down at the circular stone on your index finger. The mineral is white with gray lightning streaks, much like a marble countertop. “No cracks, I think.” You grab onto another post and slide your body around it. The stone glistens on your ghoulish finger. 

It is always wise to look out for a breakage among those jagged, flint-hued lines. Jade would hate to see it break again.

The breakage of your last howlite ring led to Jade confessing his love for you. The prologue though? It was a rather unfortunate turn of events. Though, he is not regretful of it in the slightest. He looks back upon the memory of your face – drenched in mascara-black tears, your hands clutching his shirt as they shook with horror, the pale lifelessness in your gaunt cheeks – with both worship and woe. 

Jade replays the words said just a few minutes ago: Ramshackle, A walk around campus would benefit me right now, Yeah? A Ramshackle nightmare is a volatile one but still mendable. 

Even though Ramshackle is littered with protective charms, it does not completely halt the activity of nightly ghouls. Lilia once suggested acquiring a dire-beast to tame them. But, dire-beasts are a rarity and even harder to train than ghouls. Thus, you worked with other means. Howlite minerals fashioned into jewelry works well for preventing possession, but under constant strain, they can break. No one could have guessed it would happen. Your radio silence was not unusual; your communication device is faulty and it is not entirely unusual for you to slip away for a day or two. 

It was merely awful luck that the last Saturday in September, in the morning while brushing your teeth, your howlite ring split down the middle and broke. After the weekend, on a Monday, Jade ventured into Ramshackle to find you with limbs contorted at inhuman angles, puke and piss on your clothes, eyes rolling in the back of your head until all he could see was glistening white like fresh snow, and on the verge of death. 

The thing about Jade is he is a bit of a worrier. Like ink chiseled into skin, it is ingrained in him. It comes packaged in his genetic alphabet, passed down from his mother and his father. 

It had not been good for his health to open up Ramshackle and find you in such a state. 

But, he made certain that the dead felt an even greater hit to their health. 

After evicting those three ghouls from your body, you spent a week out of Ramshackle and curled up tight in his bed. On Monday, it had been three days since your last bowel movement. The scene from then is still clear in his mind: 

Jade takes a peek through the mediocre crack of the bathroom door. There you are in all your glory, sitting on the toilet with gray sweats around your ankles. A wet compress is laid against your bowing neck and an apple juice box clenched in both hand and mouth. An empty, crunched apple juice rests in the wastebasket; you have been at this for five minutes or so.

With a far off look, you stare at the other end of the bathroom. Anxious, Jade surmises that you are perhaps not even comprehending the sight, too stricken with a fever that everything has blurred.

He has been checking up on your memory hourly. You know your name and you know his name. Yet, when he asks you where you are, you keep saying, almost insisting, your hometown. 

Those irises that seemed so straight and bright are lost now. The border of the lake has opened like broken beaver dams and the hue of your irises have slipped out into the white pool, spreading your vision thin and fragile. There is a thick fog that he cannot break. Even now when you turn your head towards him, asking what around your apple juice straw, it looks like you are seeing through him.

“I asked, would you like me to retrieve anything else? Your efforts have seemed to come to a constipated stop.” 

Perhaps that is mean of him to poke at but … the straw in your mouth flattens. “Shut up,” you berate him, meanly, yet with a faint smile all the same. Your head falls, matted ringlets of hair covering your face. Staring at the wet cloth of white on your neck, Jade listens as you murmur teasingly, “Eat my shorts.”

At least you are coherent enough to have an attitude with him. It causes a twitch of a smile to rise to his face. Leaning against the wall more but refusing to open the door wider for your sake, Jade notes, “You kept your apple juice down.” 

You only nod languidly at that. 

He had considered making slippery elm tea for you. However, teas can lead to slight dehydration and you have been unable to keep a majority of things down. The most has been a popsicle of electrolytes Floyd took from the lounge’s freezer. Water has unfortunately been a no-go. It makes Jade’s chest feel lighter to know you are on your second box of juice.

It feels like euphoria when he hears the sound of something hitting water. He smiles sweetly at you through the crack of the door, but you are less receptive to it.

“Shut the door!”

Jade fufu-s like a smug bastard.

“Privacy, dude! Privacy!” 

And, Jade went back to his bed, firmly closing the door behind him without another word. 

Certain ailments can be remedied in no time. A fever going down to lower temperatures and a wound closing up with blood clots. These are instant gratifications; worries that have both beginnings and ends. 

Such linear illnesses do not cause Jade as much strife as malaises that are difficult to identify or seem endless as a stretching horizon. The ones that seem to have no ends or starts. With those types of ailments, one always seems to find themselves in the middle of it. Those haunt him.

Another thing about Jade? Besides being a worrier, Jade thinks. He thinks deeply. 

This might be a symptom of having the family heirloom of worry passed down to him. A consequence of being born where he was and a consequence of being raised by whom he loves. Jade can think himself into the deepest, darkest pits. He can also use those very thoughts to build ladder rungs to escape those pits. It is all like a dog chasing its tail (more appropriately, an eel chasing its tail, growing dizzy in a mushroom-forest). 

He is chasing his own tail the entire time, thinking these thoughts as you two walk. Trying to see if from his memory, he can pull out some shortcut on healing you. Jade only stops chasing his tail when you both have completed one rotation around the courtyard’s square wall and you start to walk down cobblestones before shoving your shoulder into Jade’s sternum.

He looks down at you, curious. Your hand lifts up to rest on his pectoral muscle and the side of your face nuzzles into the same area. The buttons on his pajama top press uncomfortably into his skin like grinding pebbles. Cuddling standing up is not so uncommon but is it late, wouldn’t you rather sit on a bench; he should offer that alternative, shouldn’t he; would it not be rude of him to change your positions because it is likely you will recoil after that and not touch him again, couldn’t —

There he goes again, thinking and worrying. His automatic genetics are fully charged from a good night’s rest. Eyelids drooping softly, he breathes in the scent of your shampoo – a steady warmth that coats the scent of you onto the insides of his nostrils and heart like spray paint – and feels all that irrationality leave him.

“Mmm, you wanna talk about it?”

Jade blinks at your lazy drawl, words squished by his chest. He looks down and only sees the top of your head. “Talk about what?”

“Your disorganized head.”

You are so sweet, what did I possibly do to deserve someone … sweet? Jade’s body expands and deflates with a deep, content sigh. Your hand stirs on his pajama and falls limply to touch a button. You tap a melody on it that he does not recognize. “Ah, I assure you that was simply in jest. My health is quite strong.”

Jade looks at your howlite ring, watching it stir with each tap-tap you do. Sometimes, a person has to be on the verge of losing something to appreciate it in its full scope. It is a hard lesson to learn. Jade feels like he is learning it again. 

“Okay,” you easily concede. Your disposition rarely has you pressing for anything that will not easily break, not unless it is something you want really badly. You must not want to read his thoughts like he wants to read yours. What is your opinion of this situation, about what is happening between the two of you – is it good or bad?

Relationships are labyrinthine roads. Driven and steered through with two people in the vehicles, they only have one person with their hand on the wheel though. Thoughts are private. Jade brushes an ungloved hand through your hair, feeling the curves of where your skull lies. 

All of Jade’s thoughts mellow and simmer out until all he thinks is about is the bones in his feet that balance him on the ground, the sensation of the cold nipping his neck and ears that remind him of his faraway home, and the simple fact that he loves you very much and he hopes that he can love you all through December. When New Years passes, he hopes you will allow him to love you all through the upcoming twelve months.

“Your heartbeat is so nice.” 

Hm?

Jade rouses awake slightly, frost coating the tips of his hair and his legs numb. How long have the two of you been here? The sky is still black, a closed lid on this moment where only pinpricks of light break through like superficial air-holes. Still midnight? He shivers when your cold fingers sneak through the seams of his pajama top, webbing through the space from button to button.

“Your heartbeat. It has such a nice melody. Sometimes, I get so caught up in listening to it that I wanna try to change my body to copy. Like we’re two instruments that could match up to each other if we try hard enough.” You really are so – “Brrr, I’m freezing! Let’s go back to bed, babe!” 

– sweet, Jade thinks with a smile. 

If there is one feature that sets Jade and Floyd’s father apart from the rest, it has always been his voice. 

Vocal cords are unique as fingerprints. However, not all of them are pleasant to listen to and a few of them you can even mistake for others in crowds. Not Don Leech’s voice. No, his voice is in a class of his own. A sui generis sound that captivates all who are blessed or cursed to hear it.

Unfortunate merfolk say it is the type of voice that sends a chill down one’s spine. A feeling so sinister that it can only be described as the eerie walk of pycnogonida, spindly sea spiders, traveling down the body’s bony ladder. It is also the voice that has their mother’s head whirling towards their home’s entrance wherever she hears it, love in her eyes. A voice so comforting as it narrated youthful bedtime stories of ancient history and great battles.

The twins are unsure if their father is part-siren. It is a speculation not out of the realm of possibility. Even for all of Jade’s prowess when it comes to information collecting, he doubts he will ever in his life be able to find a crumb of his father’s past before the age of twenty-three. 

The available information concerning his origin (familial ties and beyond): 1. Don Leech never speaks of his mother or his father. No reminiscing on how his mother cooked a certain way nor any life lessons his own father taught him fall from his mouth. 2. Don Leech has no siblings. There are no nieces and nephews on that side of the family to grow up with. 3. Lastly, Don Leech appeared in the specific hometown that he raised Floyd and Jade in at twenty-three. Like a sudden storm, without any forewarning weather, manifested almost.

Frankly, it is impossible to track down any family history on their secretive, recondite father. Anyone that tries is foolish.

If Don Leech is part-siren, the gene in the blood is too diluted for either Floyd or Jade to possess any natural talent towards singing. Besides, they could never match the expectations set by their father’s strong baritone … which Jade is aware of as he stares at his double bass on stage at La Grotta with a … hole in his stomach, he believes.

Yes, he reassures himself after a moment. It is accurate to call it a hole. Somehow, it feels like a bottomless pupil of black and suckles at him like a parasite. It is quite unpleasant. He wishes he knew a spell or potion to dispel it from himself. Demure, Jade leans away from the curtain he was peeking from.

It is his, Floyd’s, and Azul’s first time playing at La Grotta. This will inevitably lead to Jade finding himself in the spotlight. Even when split amongst his brother and their plaything, it is a bit much for the young, freshly thirteen eel-mer. The diameter of that gaping crater grows and grows in his intestines.

As always, Jade is thoroughly prepared for any outcomes but he would loathe to accidentally do something foolish on stage. He even took precautions to change the bass strings with new ones, even though the replacement time did not call for it. If only … “Jade.”

Recognizing him right away without seeing him – “Father.” – Jade turns around to greet the sight of his father. Amber brown eyes gaze down at him like duel suns on the horizon. It is a surprise to be under their harsh, amber scrutiny because the young teen was told Don Leech was too preoccupied to come to their show. Stricken, he does not really know what else to say.

His father narrows his eyes and his ear-fins lower in … an unreadable emotion. Jade hopes it is not a sign of displeasure. So, he quickly adds, “I hope that today’s affairs have been luh-lucrative.” Damnit, Jade seethes with his head bowed. Foolish tongue.

Slowly, the ear-fins on the side of his father’s teal face lift up, the deformed, asymmetrical one on the left following along with the intact one on the right. His features do not soften because there is no probable way to soften such a face. The jagged nose scar will not grow tinier and the angular cut of his face will not round out. But still, it seems there is sympathy because in that sui generis voice, he inquires, “Are you afraid, Jade?”

“No, Father.”

Clip. Self-assured. Curt.

“Ah, so you are terrified.”

But it works poorly on his observant father. 

The capo-mandamento of their side of the Coral Sea gives his son a hard, pushing stare. There is something dreadful in your opponent knowing exactly what you are thinking while you are left clueless over their own thoughts. That hole of black, Jade remembers it as he watches his father peel back the curtain to look onstage.

The jazz trio instruments are all there: drums, double bass, and piano. All neatly placed in anticipation, even though the drummer said he is too bored to wait onstage and to call him when they are ready to start immediately, and even though the pianist has become thoroughly distracted with helping his mother serve orders, numerous tentacles carrying numerous trays. It is only Jade who is left, taskless and anxious.

But terrified? He would like to think not. After living in the Coral Sea for thirteen years, this is a mere bump in the torrential whirlpool of frightening experiences he has grown up with. His desensitization is healthy and strong. Jade means to go tell his father this but is stopped when …

“I used to sing here. Did you know that?” The words leak down over his father’s shoulder like snail mucus, dragging along the tattoo of the magnificent Sea Witch crushing the princess’s boat in her grasp. Hypnotic and powerful, even though he only says softly, “I sang no more than an hour and no more than once a week.” 

Still, the very action of Don Leech just revealing a smidgen of his past – nothing past his mysterious appearance at twenty-three but something beyond the time Floyd and Jade were born – has that hole closing up. Anxiety is sealed shut and awe bandages itself over. Jade tries not to show it as he leans in, intrigued. 

Those amber-brown eyes cut diamonds in the water as Don Leech turns back to look at his son, “Music. Perspective and personal emotions are shaped by the music we indulge in. It holds greater influence than any words you and I could use.”

Jade wants to soak these paramount, influential words in, but he cannot because something shocks him deeply in the heart. His touch-adverse father gently runs a taloned hand through Jade’s hair. Not ruffling it because the mafioso head knows it took his son effort to tame. Instead, he simply combs through it once until he reaches the other side. 

And, while he slips away, Don Leech murmurs in that distinguishable baritone, “When us merfolk hear music, we cannot help but be swayed to wayward influences.”

As both father and memory drop away into that black hole, Jade reaches out to hold a tip of teal hair in his gloved finger as if remembering that far-off touch. He rubs back and forth on the strand while thinking, Was that a cautionary tale or simply my Father’s eccentric type of humor? Is it something to keep in consideration after all these years?

Of course it is. What a foolish doubt. His father’s words always held a leash of influence over his sons, a guiding light in the dark. His influence is a key factor in why Floyd always polished his shoes every morning. For a very carefree, nonchalant individual, Floyd takes extreme care in maintaining his footwear. One of the reasons he does this? Because his father told him to.

Still, swayed by wayward influences? I am not so easily swayed. And what an odd turn of phrase too, Father. Perverse behavior is a tiny indulgence in Jade’s essence and not a shackle on his soul. In the Coral Sea, he learned how to get exactly what he wanted and when he wanted it. Nothing can steer Jade but himself.

He wants you. Yet more importantly, he wants you to want him in matching intensity, and he loathes the slight indication that he wants you more than you want him instead of the other way around. It bothers him on a deep, deep, underground level of his body, simmering in his stomach acid, and reminds him of the first time he experienced getting a splinter on a hike.

What a truly horrid sensation to have something under the skin. Jade thinks that he should – “I know Riddle collared (Name) yesterday, but can your vengeful plotting wait until after the meeting?”

Jade flicks his eyes off from where he was focusing. Which he realizes now as he gains coherency and sheds off his spiraling thoughts, it was directly towards Riddle Rosehearts. It was a pretty harsh look too. Curious, the eel-met glances down at Jamil and asks amused, “He collared her again?”

A grimace forms on Jamil’s face. The expression reminds Jade of a turn of phrase that expresses regret; it is called ‘spoke too soon’. He delights in that. When people realize they have slipped up when talking to Jade, it warms the eel-mer’s heart to know others are so, so comfortable around him.  

Jamil taps his ballpoint pen on his notes. His passages are exceptionally shorter than Kalim, who has been making great strides at actually actively being a housewarden. It seems Jamil has gotten over his inner turmoil when he informs, “Iago and her both returned to Scarabia with collars. Something about how the type of music they played was banned in Heartslabyul.”

Fondness lifts up Jade’s lips. Though he doesn’t get to experience all of it, your mischievous charms are something that have always been congenial to him. This wouldn’t have been the first time Riddle has collared you and it certainly won’t be the last. “Would you happen to know what they played?”

His expanse of knowledge on the Queendom of Roses is still limited. Which is why it’s nice Jamil answers without hassle, “Something a band of Queendom of Roses students played during V.D.C; she wouldn’t stop talking about them for a week. Apparently, the guitarist took his instrument and maimmed his fellow band member’s drum-kit.”

Music from V.D.C? Suddenly, a toothy grin overtakes Jade’s features. He remembers V.D.C very fondly. Your ineffable stress from not getting to play with Kalim and your ineffable supply of happy-go-lucky smiles when Jade and Azul agreed to browse the Foot Town with you before you all watched the performance together. The most interesting performance had to be when you puppeteered Malleus Draconia to fix the wrecked coliseum because you ‘had to see the other bands or you would just die!’

Grinning wide enough to split his face, Jade supplies the information he knows happily into the conversation, “Ah, that’s because there is a town in the Queendom of Roses that has the same type of music (Name) likes. They’re based around Alice’s disobedient nature and rule-breaking. She calls it punk music. They call it mad-hatter music.”

How quaint. He had not known that music was banned at Heartslabyul. It would make sense that mad-hatter music is banned in that dormitory; perhaps, he should let Floyd know this? He imagines both of you would be undeterred and try to play those rhythms together – you on vocals and guitar with his twin on drums.

“She might’ve been better off at RSA. Especially if they would have matched her rhythm and style.”

Jade’s grin drops as soon as the idea leaves Jamil’s mouth. “I believe she is perfectly suited for Night Raven College.” An entire other student-body knowing and adoring you, it stomps a foul taste in his mouth.

“I don’t know, but I’ve noticed an uptick of lilac cat hair in Scarabia.”

Ah, Alchemivich Pinka is caught in your web too? “Nothing more than a passing fancy. You’ll find yourself void of it in a week or two.”

“Her ability to make such quick acquaintances without overstepping is admirable. Not many here could copy such a feat.” 

“Oya, is that a dig into Kalim’s disposition that I hear?”

Jamil twirls his pen once, as if to absolve himself of any guilt. His face is stone, laser focused on the lecturing Headmage in front of him. But if one pays close enough attention, they would notice the slight curve of his mouth. Third year Jamil has been just, if not more, entertaining as closed off first year Jamil. 

“What earnest words. To think that day would come with you would be so honest with me. I’m glad that our friendship is advancing in so many lucrative ways.”

Jamil refutes dryly, “I spoke on (Name)’s habits and nothing more.”

Jade does not realize how enraptured he has been in this quaint conversation with Viper until something to his right leans against him, hard, almost slumping. For an inane second, he thinks his opposing seatmate has just made the bold move of resting on him. So, confused, Jade turns to clear up this misunderstanding that he is someone friendly enough to lean on. 

At least he would until droopy olive-brown and gold stare at him, half-lidded and presumably bored. “Hello, Floyd.” 

His twin barely responds, humming softly before he rests his head on Jade’s elbow. He’s homesick. Jade knows he has hit the nail on the head when he sees what Floyd is drawing. Especially since both mother and father neglected a phone call yesterday because of an uptick in business. 

The sketchbook Floyd bought is his own personal one. His twin has a natural talent for being able to visualize or hear something and replicating it. Musicology has always been in the frontier of his artistry, but he has a slight endearment towards art too. Besides, art above the surface has a wider variety than that underwater. 

It is almost impossible to create anything in his home. Ink or paint will float away unless an artist has a good magical hand, separating the liquid medium from their surroundings with wafer-thin, magical layers. A majority of paintings displayed in museums are found from shipwrecks or built by using colored stones, sculpting them into scenes. Longer wavelengths are also absorbed the deeper one travels in the Coral Sea. Red is unheard of. Such limiting yet comforting strifes. 

What Floyd is smooshing around with his thumb and darkening with a graphite pencil is the interior of La Grotta. Jade recognizes the stage almost immediately, having been stuck in daydreams about it. The booths made of large, arching backs of coral, the stage’s open oyster shell, and the hanging, bioluminescent seaweed – all so familiar. 

The only thing that disrupts it is the stark image of yourself. You have never been to the Coral Sea before. He hasn’t dared to suggest bringing you there. It is not a place you are familiar with yet at all. Yet, standing like an aphrodite in the oyster shell, mouth poised in song, you look right at home among the crowd of merfolk. 

They converse in soft mermish to not be overheard by an oblivious Headmage. 

“Is that supposed to be (Name)?”

“No, it’s grandma. Who else would it be, dumbass?”

“Well, if only you were an adequate artist, others could make a comprehensive image of what you are scribbling.” 

“Eat my shorts,” Floyd spits back, stealing your little phrase as he rubs a rubber eraser over your eyeballs. The part that makes you the most recognizable is not the microphone in your hand but the highlighted stars in your eyes, as white as the seaweed hanging above you.

Jade chuckles, going to turn to continue his conversation with Jamil, before Floyd asks unprompted, “When ya gonna invite Shrimpy over to meet Ma and Pops? Three months is way too long of a wait.”

Yes, he knows three months is quite a lengthy extent to go without meeting the parents, but not for you. For you, three months might just signal the end if Jade is not careful. Things are so volatile. You are reeling in displaced identity. Can he really afford to add more people selfishly into your inner circle?

“They’ll have to be a bit more patient. Nothing rewarding comes from grasping out too soon.” We hunt lying in wait.

“Yeah, well, ya tell Mama that because she’s all upset about not seeing or hearing Shrimpy. Can’t just mention to them that Shrimpy’s a singer then not bring her home. Idiot.”

“There are still things that need to be done, preparations before anything like that can happen.”

“Staller.”

“Call it what you will, but I don’t wish to spring a trap without checking all the nets are secured.”

“Oh?” Floyd finishes the last touches of light/white treading itself through your hair before he goes on to darken the shadows.

In fluent mermish, Jade replies, “Of course. I would not do all this without a clear end goal in mind. We will have to sabotage others who work towards gaining her favor. Her attention should not be spread so thin, so we will have to adopt the methodology of horse-blinders. Then, and only then, I would implement the design of capturing her.”

When the twins look at each other, they share a sharp, menacing grin. Needle-thin teeth smiling at wolfishly-thick teeth. It is a look that can be best measured in the satisfaction of a plan coming to fruition. Behind strands of teal, Floyd’s olive eye peeks out like a clownfish peeking out its anemone.

“She’s a tiny shrimp, so make sure ya don’t use too flimsy of a net. Pops taught us that. Make sure it's tight and cramped.” 

Ah, yes. That’s right. And, aren’t their father’s words always to be heeded to?

If Jade did not meticulously put together his appearance this morning, he might be a bit scornful that Azul is looking at him if he can’t recognize him. As if the two of them are strangers instead of familiarized predator and prey. Even his words are a bit hurtful (they aren’t really but Jade will still pout at them): “Am I dreaming or is that really you, Jade?”

“Relax, it’s me. Don’t cream your pants,” Jade punctually assures.

Subconsciously, his right leg lifts and crosses over his left. Just as quickly as he did it, he consciously moves it back. Firmly placing it down on the VIP’s carpet, he resumes his spread-out look. That one is going to be a hard habit to break.

Despite the given assurance, Azul still seems unconvinced. The dead giveaway is how his eyes flicker left and right to his brother and himself on the opposing couches, trying to pick up the details. His suspicion is not unwarranted. Jade and his brother have played games like this before, switching hair styles and voices, before having their unrespected, childhood plaything try to figure out who is who. 

Azul has a much more respectable air to him as he pushes his glasses snug to his face, articulating sharply, “I have no time to play this game today. 

“Final exams are approaching. Neglectful, procrastinating students are hard pressed for study materials.” His shoes and cane click hard like striked matches as he strides towards his desk. “I recently obtained from a Heartslabyul student – the one Jade so rudely walked out on if I might add.”

“You may not.”

“ – the magical prowess to memorize anything in exchange for a more athletic physique. A build ensured to capture the affection of that sweet Sage Island native he is pining over. Now, as for what we’ll do with such a zenith of intelligence –”

“What’s anyone gonna use that for?” Floyd protests. From his own spread out position on the couch, head upside down on the armrest, he glares at Azul. “I don’t wanna do the same thing as last year; that’s boooring.”

“If the both of you will quit interrupting, we might perhaps get to the actual idea.” Though it would cut another else to shreds, Azul’s glare is lackluster to the twins. Still, they allow him to drill on. “Nothing fires up students more than competition. Rudimentary sports, battle of bands, things like that. We’ll be hosting an ‘eating competition’ in the Longue. The prize? The ability to memorize anything without limitations.”

“An eating competition? Didn’t Shrimpy mention that a week back or something?” Floyd turns to Jade.

“She mentioned something like that; I believe it’s from a cartoon. Starts with a H … Hey … Hey something.”

“Hey Arnold!” Floyd snaps his fingers.

“It’s a custom we don’t have in Twisted Wonderland. If not for the prize, the experience of something new is bait and lure to bring in foot traffic. And, each loser will have to pay full price for all the meals they eat.”

“A food competition … eeh, doesn’t sound too bad.” His twin rolls his neck over the armrest, as if considering it. “I know a couple guys who’d be interested.”

“A competition where individuals gorge themselves until the verge of bursting with puke. Sounds delightful! What an intriguing custom.” The results will surely be sulfurous and show-stopping.

Yet, as typical, Jade’s fun is ruined before it even begins. Azul pushes up his glasses, levels him with a hard stare, and declares, “You’re not allowed to participate. Sevens knows I couldn’t financially recover from your appetite if you were permitted to take part.”

“A bold accusation. I wasn’t thinking anything of the sort.” The smile that crawls on his face suggests otherwise, gleaming silver with needle-point teeth and the smiley piercing hanging over those teeth like mistletoe.

Bloated with strife and anxiety like always, Azul sighs. He leans back into his chair, plush enough to relieve him of some of the burdens he carries. “If we are in conjunction, then you two can continue on with your shifts.” Like an unstoppable train, Azul is already grasping at documents and contacts that crowd his desk, ready to move onto the next big thing.

“Kaaay! Sounds fun.”

“I’ll be sure to spread the word.”

Jade opens the door for both of them to depart. But before he can close it fully, a sui generis voice slithers its way through the space between the door crack — “So they got my tooth on one end of the string and the doorknob at the other end!” — and it even influences smitten Azul to lift his head and look towards the noise. 

You are magnetic when you tell stories. Jade has seen people at other tables in the Lounge hush up so they can eavesdrop on your conversation. It is no wonder that through the slow, syrupy breakfast crowd that your voice pierces through all of them and is the first one all three of them hear together. Jade can even pinpoint your location based on the traveling vibrations of sound. 

“ … sweet summer child that I was, I put my full faith in them. I saw no reason not ta! So, my Mom’s got a surgeon grip on the doorknob. Steady; steady. And, my Dad starts the count: ooone, twooo, and right before we got to three … Bam! Just before three and my mouth’s gushing! I’m leaking red all over our dining room’s carpet. I swear, my Mom should’ve enlisted for the army! They need to start using her technique on P.O.Ws!”

Your eyeliner is smudged again; it is your typical ‘worn-in’ makeup look that you frequently do. It looks like you are fostering two black eyes. Grunge, he knows the style intimately. Your lipstick is a deep red. Might be more fitting to call it a dark red-violet; the hue closely resembles the skin of a plum. Uniquely picturesque like a model, you walk in narrating a story about your childhood with a sleazy grin and animated hands. Your guitarist and bassist are captivated, all three of you following after the waiter leading you to your seats.

Without any resistance, Floyd calls out, waving a hand, “Shrimpy! Look over here!” And, obviously that is what you do.

Witchcraft eyes turn towards the sound of his twin’s voice, mouth limp as you pause in narration, and look towards the VIP room’s entrance. Then, suddenly, you’re staring directly at Jade. Plum lips falling open in shock and eyeliner shifting as your eyes go round. 

Jade, satisfaction coursing through his veins, raises a stark white glove before demurely folding his hands in front of his belt. 

In the mere blink of an eye, you manage to weave through the servers and customers, completely forgetting about your entourage, to jump around Jade in circles. Giggling up a storm, you hop around your boyfriend in circles — “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, Jade; ah, I love the new look; babe; the piercings are so, so razer; oh my god; we match; we match; ah, Jade you pull it off so well; your eyebrow piercing is so razer!!” — and scrutinize all the changes that he made yesterday night. 

Finally, you stop circling him and stand in front him, almost vibrating in place with awe. The enthusiasm in your eyes causes them to shine in bright white highlights like diamonds. 

“They’re all authentic too. It took quite some practice to get this one.” Jade flashes you a grin, revealing all his teeth and the bull piercing metal that is impaling through the tissue connecting his upper lip and upper gum. 

Everything falls cleanly into place in Jade’s net. 

[rel124c41]

MONKEY BITE. floyd leech

SWEET CREAM, WET DREAM. floyd leech

DEJA VU. floyd leech

MONKEY BITE. floyd leech

requested by: anon / cake details: cheesecake (arranged marriage AU) with fresh fruit compute (hurt/comfort)

“Hey, why the long face?” You pass him one of the two — a new matching couple set — wine glasses that you received from the bridal registry. “C’mon, you knew it wasn’t going to be you.”

Floyd stays numbly silent. His suit is in disarray as usual. Tie like a boa around his neck and nostril blood speckled on his cuffs like sequins. Though, he does take the wine glass full of whiskey from you, so you suppose that is a small victory in the war that just happened in the reception hall. Making yourself comfortable, you sit down next to him, cupping your dress backside as you go down. 

“Aah,” you sigh, relieved to stop carrying your weight on taut, squeezing heels. Chin up, you observe the open ocean stretched out before the two of you. 

Floyd simply slumps deeper into the palm he is resting his cheek on. He is all languid tonight. His human limbs are loose like his skin has been stretched like baking dough. Acting like collapsing, dead weight, he simply tilts his wine glass more towards himself because he had accidentally let it drip on the cobblestone in his weak hold. All his fight is extinguished just like that? It’s only appropriate, you suppose.

Sipping your whiskey, you congratulate yourself on how well versed you’ve become in human limbs. A month ago, you would have broken an ankle in heels — honestly, more like stilettos! — like these. 

But, watching the unfurling waves that bounce back and forth under a pitch black sky, you think you would have preferred a childhood-dreamed wedding, with all your traditions, the pearl necklaces and the safety blanket of home. That one was probably one of the easiest sacrifices of a hundred that you have made in just one itty bitty month. A wave hits the sand hard and you take another gulp of whiskey. 

“He doesn’t love you.” 

Aren’t you at least going to look at me while talking? Turning back to the ocean, which Floyd is intently staring at, you reply, “Don’t be ridiculous. He has no obligation to love me.”

“‘To love and to cherish’. It’s right there in the vows.”

“You know those are nothing more than words to the both of us. Something that could happen, probably never will.” Still not looking at you, jeez. He had no problem staring at during the entire ordeal and now he wants to avoid eye contact. “Besides, what good is love?”

Love has yet to do you any favors. For infinity, it has been a leash on your person, and now after tying the compressive knot of a loveless marriage, you can be free of the loathsome tick of love. At that moment, you clink your wedding ring against your glass and gulp down a sphere of whiskey. 

“What about the love between us? Wasn’t that good?”

There it is; the pith of this. The central essence of why Floyd crawled over your husband’s stunned body like a starved predator and used his hand like a mechanical piston to hit, hit, hit until your husband’s nose bent into a curved sausage of red. He acted so raptorial when tearing apart your groom because there was love between the two of you. 

“No.” You finish the remaining whiskey quickly. With your thumb, you cover up the golden swirls that write out an eyesore word, Mrs., on your cup. “It was just teen romance. Fun but nothing of substance.”

Floyd throws his wine glass on the cobblestone. It is reminiscent of how violently he attacked early; his languid arm zaps into life and suddenly there are shards of glass spreading like an arching rainbow in front of your and Floyd’s expensive footwear. The gold, swirling Mr. is ineligible in the shining shambles. Back to silent it seems; he covers his mouth with both his hands and leans low into his hunch, groaning deeply like you shot him.

Waste of good moonshine. Fast-acting alcohol puppets your tongue. “Face it, Floyd. It was never going to work between us. I’m sophisticated, Floyd. You’re nothing but a brute. You eat fish raw off the bone; I dined on cooked surface food. I’m refined and you’re a slob. I live life in first class. You’re riding the coach. We weren’t gonna last.” 

Dating an eel-mer as a mermaid had to be one love’s tightest leash on you. It was never going to work. Differences between the two of you were too stark to ever blend together. When you intertwined hands, you could feel the corporal proof of how incompatible both of you were — the softness of neatly trimmed nails and delicate fingers held in the callousness of talons and dense, compact flesh.  

It had been a quaint experience but nothing of substance. 

Basking in the aftermath of your lies, you smile happily of how self-assured your speech sounded and how it sure swayed Floyd’s opinion. Positive that you had painted a convincing picture, you turn to find Floyd’s eyes on you. 

(It’s so unusual to see him with peach-toned skin. It will help that this will be the last face of his you will see; it would hurt more to depart viewing his original face.)

“Then why ya cryin’?”

“Crying?” That must be some human expression that you are not yet familiarized with. “I don’t think I’m doing that.”

He points to his own — there are little snakes of red in the whites of his — and declares, “you’re cryin’ and leakin’ up a rainstorm.” You touch your dry face. “Hah, made you check.”

You huff, humorless. Typical Floyd. He used to pull a trick similar to that when both of you were growing toddlers. That’s all over now. You swirl an empty glass and watch one droplet spin at the bottom. 

“You’re gonna be miserable.”

“Yeah, I am.” Smiling, you raise your Mrs. — absent and incomplete with it’s broken Mr. —  and say, “That’s why I got this sweetheart. I’ll be less miserable with her.” 

You two sit in silence after that declaration. Reality sets in like a bruise. The fast-paced alcoholic talks are done and the fast-paced sober fights are finished. Simultaneously, the both of you look at your childhood home extended out in cobalt pulses. What a beauty the ocean is from the surface; a blue, shriveled heart that bleeds and bleeds.

“Your … that guy, knows nothin’ about merfolk tradition.” You turn, intrigued, but Floyd is still watching the waves of childhood. “He didn’t get you a single courtin’ gift, so I can tell he’s dumb as a stone boat. Ya don’t got a single necklace on you. Your parents know nothing about the surface. Not zilch. They rarely travel up here, so …”

So? You wait as Floyd turns towards you. “So, we can make an excuse for this. Say ya got bit by some other animal.” Your blue heart beats like a blitzkrieg bongo as Floyd trails a finger diagonally along your neck before grasping the middle between your left cleavage and left shoulder. He lingers there, warmth shared by your combined flesh.

When he leans in, palm pressing in the white petals of your bridal dress, you figure out his intent quite quickly. A good girl would protest. I’m married! I just got married today, for Seven sake! You don’t think those thoughts as you lean, exposing more of your neck to Floyd. As his breath warms your shoulder, you put in one last joke for old time sake, “The mosquitos are huge this time of year.” 

“Haven’t ya heard? The zoo let some rabid monkeys out and they’re on the loose.”

You giggle, for the first time in twenty-four hours, and look towards the ocean as Floyd bites in, scarring you with love, in the form of two puncture holes in your neck.

SWEET CREAM AND WET DREAM. floyd leech

requested by: anon / cake details: marble cake (NRC) with citrus glaze (smut) and edible flowers (fluff)

You are sitting on your boyfriend’s lap, staring down an erect penis. Salivating.

This has to be the beginning of a work by Shakespeare. Written in his own blood – something primitively disgusting and erotic. Yet, it is a labor of the body which is why the pen is inked with genuine, honest sanguine. Taken from a wrist or a chest.

Or, you could just be very pulled by hunger. Your first sight of a penis makes your stomach rumble, starved. 

Go with the more artistic one, you decide just as large hands rest upon your hips, pulling you backwards. 

But, Shakespeare interrupts, this did not start with you sitting nude on your boyfriend’s stomach, sizing up the dimensions and shape of what you desired more than anything to put in your mouth. It started with –

Turn off the stove. I haven’t seen ya all summer, Shrimpyyy.

From Ramschakle’s renovated cooking station, courtesy of long hours at Mostro Lounge, you glance away from the stove. The aroma is magnetizing and thick. Sizzling pops are musical like siren calls. You cannot comprehend why he wants you to turn it off. Before your eyes, Floyd leans against the countertop, chin set on top of crossed arms. Boyish and in love with you, he stares back with half-lidded, amorous intent. 

The toothpick in your mouth makes a question quirk up because – why would I turn off the stove when dinner isn't close to being ready? 

Haven’t got to taste ya all summer long either. 

Something moves within your viscera like a giant, slithering tapeworm. It is a scarlet warmth. 

It is a quick melange of sounds that add together like ingredients. Faint click of the stove, switched off. Harsh hit of hip-bone on countertop. Rustling thump as a freshly untied apron collides with ground. It is all overwhelmed by the groan Floyd lets out as you two collide at the kitchen island. Your toothpick is still in your mouth, held messily on the junction of your mouth’s right side, pressing and hurting the skin.

You cannot kiss with your tongue around the pick. So, Floyd takes the outward point in his fingers and draws it through your lips like unlocking a zipper. Obedient, your mouth falls open with his ministrations. 

He places the toothpick on the bed of your tobacco-flavored tongue. His golden eye stares at your dangling uvula. 

Say aaaah. 

His intentions are: silly.

Aaaah. 

Your intentions are: serious. 

Fluid and lubricious as cooking oil, you two kiss. Floyd throws the toothpick away, not caring where it ends up in your house. Then, after shedding more of your clothes, you two end up here on the plate of your mattress. 

It is a really pretty cock. 

Standing before you in full attention, the weight of it in your curious hand sends a small shiver down your spine … and sends a large shiver down Floyd’s as you watch the muscle in his thighs tighten up. There is a slight right taper to it. Holding it at the base, you stare down at the bulbous head that almost arrows itself up towards your mouth. The anticipation and speculation of your boyfriend’s cock’s flavor profile leaves a sweet metaphorical taste of your tongue. Guessing is as fun as knowing. 

Thrill numbs out a majority of your nerves. You feel like one, big, blue-white neuron. Though you can section out the feeling of your abdomen clenching hard when you feel Floyd move your knees so they are settled by his head rather than below his armpits. 

Salvia is so thick in your mouth it feels like a second tongue. At least you know you will have enough natural lubricant. 

Just as you open your mouth, lips glistening from previous kisses, a tongue oscillates down the center of your sex. And, deterring from your original goal, caught off guard, you moan brokenly with a sharp gasp. That’s what a tongue feels like? Oh OH — you are going to devour Floyd whole.

Two hands curl up around your hips, fingers digging on the bottom hook of each designated asscheek, palms squeezing flesh. Just as his tongue departs from the midline’s end at your anus, Floyd dives just back into your wet center and attempts to suction up all your slick like his tongue is a napkin.

You would almost feel bad about your knee-jerk reaction if it didn’t immediately speed up Floyd’s tongue. Caught off guard, still in the middle of your sharp gasp, your body unconsciously pushes itself back as far as it can, suffocating Floyd. Chasing indulgence and never pulling away from it. You pin him firm between the mattress and your pussy.

Quickly, you go to lift up. That motion is snuffed when Floyd’s fingers tighten on your ass and pulls you down harshly. “Flo- ah — Floyd, you don't have to. Mmh … Oh my god … !!”

Biting your own lip, you think you feel the letters of stay grumbled into your lower lips. 

Even though it sends an earthquake through the miles of your intestines, it does not distract you from your intent. You are not the only one starving. Teeth from a wrist bracelet made long ago, ivory-speckled-brown like elephant tusks, jingle as you grip onto the shaft of his cock. Your own teeth part as you slowly slide Floyd up on the mattress of your tongue. 

In the neurological wave, your heart stops … then jackrabbits in doubletime. 

It tastes like running your tongue over a block of salt. Tentatively, you spiral your tongue around in short swings, lapping up the precum already coating him. The musky scent of sex wafts up from him like perfume. Right away, you are smitten with the taste and aroma that has greeted you.

Because it is the taste of Floyd, and you love Floyd dearly to the point of devouring. 

It is an ouroboros of pleasure — a never-ending circular connection of moans and licks on each other’s hot, dripping genitals — that goes round and round. When a moan vibrates on Floyd’s dick, it sends an eruption of a heated gasp across your folds. When a thick groan hums onto your clit, you are left moaning whorish around the cock in your mouth. Back and forth with a heartbeat of cannibalism between the both of you. Devouring the most sacred parts within your mouths. 

Floyd spits and giggles. He brings up little beads of salvia from his throat before smoothing them out over the folds of your labia. His affection towards you leaves him pressing fat kisses on your clit and sharp thrusts with his tongue up in your vagina.

It’s vulgar. Primitive. As you said before, something written in the blood of poets. Something smeared with jam-like red. A fun and lovey-dovey brutality. 

Eventually, those tentative licks evolve into more. A mixture of precum and saliva follows your brief pop-off Floyd’s dick before you go down messily — the sounds are squelching like stepping in a pool of wet, glistening organs, the loud hollow muffle of your moan creaking — until it hits that fated uvula. Floyd’s spine arches like a girl’s, like he is your bitch, when you suck hard.

Then, you start bobbing. It is almost instinctual as a symphony of moans and licks play itself against your slick which dribbles, dribbles, and dribbles across Floyd’s face. A warmth spreads through your neuron-body as a large palm reaches down to rub at your shoulder, not even pushing or pulling, just a light massage to feel the heat of your body. The gesture makes you feel dizzy with love.

I love you I love you I love you — right there right there rightthererightthere! Your body jumps like it was shot as Floyd sucks roughly on your clit like it’s hard candy.

It is evolving more and more into vigorous fucking. The poem is losing its stanzas and the order of words has become jumbled. Your sexual ouroboros is burning a hot white hue as the sounds in the room grow grosser and grosser. 

You damn near choke yourself on him as you fiercely rub up and down the length you cannot fit in your mouth, the side of your hand repeatedly hitting and splashing the wet puddle on his ballsack, filling yourself up to your heart’s content. “Shrim— Shrimpy — I’m gonna ! Mmh mmh mhh! I’m —!” God or Sevens or whoever, you cannot wait until he explodes in your mouth. 

Me too Me too Don’t stop Don’t stop! You think in response to Floyd’s brief … well, he probably meant it as a warning but you take it as a blessing, knowing you get to swallow his cum soon. An involuntary moan from just the mere thought bristles around Floyd’s dick. Bobbing eagerly, you suck harder and harder with each passing second, feeling the heartbeat in his dick pulsing.

There is a smidgen of lightheadedness seeping in, fracturing your body into pieces. You are doing a poor job on remembering to keep your breathing even. That dizziness makes you feel like a stretched plain of cotton until you congeal together, hard and fast, rushing into an orgasm when Floyd zig-zags his tongue roughly on your clit.

It is almost poetic how you both cum at the same second. Because as soon as you realize that feeling of snapping in your viscera, a tidal wave bursts up into your mouth.

You gasp and cough around his cockhead, relishing the warm liquid in your mouth. Almost completely off his shaft, you take the head in your mouth and lap up everything he is giving you. It comes in forceful squirts and you have to hold down Floyd’s bucking hips to savor the moment.

You swallow all of it, gorging yourself on your boyfriend’s salty-sweet tang essence. Even then it is not enough for your appetite; thus, you begin to lap at his shaft, making sure you clean up everything. 

So enamored with the taste of him, you do not even realize what is happening behind and beneath you until you hear a choked out “To - uuk — Too sensitiveeee!” Floyd groans, his hands squeezing and lifting up your ass as you nurse at his cock. You almost get a knee to the forehead when one of his legs involuntarily pulls up in pain with the overstimulation.

You keep eating until you’ve had your fill.

DEJA VU. floyd leech

requested by: anon / cake details: genoise sponge  (specific to requester: time loop AU) with fresh fruit compote (hurt/comfort) and sprinkles (specific to requester)

Unusually, Floyd Leech took a shine to you right away – and with no difficulty either. 

It almost seems like he has been waiting a long time to become friends with you. The nickname Shrimpy! slides out his mouth easily. His dominant left hand repeatedly finds your shoulder as if the two pieces of flesh were magnetized together. He shows up when you need help most, as if your body pulses out distress signals directly to him.

You didn’t know what to make of this at first. To you, the dimensions of Floyd Leech are off kilter like puzzle pieces of a picture forced into wrong spots. When you squint at him, an innate stomach-ache makes you feel something is off with how he presents himself.

It is the oddest and strongest sensation of déjà vu. 

His face will shift and morph into some expression — laughing, scowling, craving — and you can swear you’ve seen him make that exact face before. It is like seeing copies upon copies of his face, stretching into nebulous creams and teals, yet never being able to identify where you first saw him make such a face before. 

A melting, water paint portrait of creams and teals is what greets you again because you’re crying hard enough to distort your vision and you can’t make the expression on Floyd’s face. You’re sure it is one you’ve seen before. 

 “It’s just so sad!” You bawl out. The small paperback in your hand is squeezed tight enough to crinkle the pages. “I’m never gonna read another book again!” On the verge of hysteria, you slam your borrowed library book on Floyd’s desk.

In response to your despair, Floyd offers nothing more than a musical, high-falsetto laugh that winds itself around the dormitory like one, long note. He is rather unsympathetic to your plight. Though, he does wish to reach out to scoop up the tears on your cheek and taste them on his tongue. He won’t … yet.

“Ya such a crybaby, Shrimpy. It ain’t nothing but a story.” 

The hacky sack hits his palm, emitting a sharp crunch of beads. Floyd throws it up to the ceiling, emitting a sharp thunk of wood. In the underbelly of this repetitive sound is you sniffing to yourself. You are trying to be as silent as possible, but the tears keep coming steady and hard. 

“To just keep forgetting like that,” you hiccup into your uniform sleeve. “I wouldn’t wish that upon anybody. It’s just too sad.” 

“You’re really moved by this, aren’t ya, Shrimpy?”

“Mmm.”

The book you rented from the library – because you were almost always in the library, nose in books, mostly ranging from teleportation spells to opening gates of the Underworld to anything resembling interdimensional travel – was five short chapters. Something about a pair of sappy lovers. Something about one of them being immortal and the other reincarnating in a cycle. Something about memories. Floyd can’t remember it fully; it wasn’t interesting enough for him.

His gaze simply had skimmed over the summary when you handed it to him. It’s not like Floyd was going to read a book like that. Action novels reeled in his interest, not romance. His heterochromic eyes glide over the arch of his pillowcase to view your meek visage.

It feels like some kind of cavernous hunger of Floyd’s is fed watching you cry. Slow droplets thread down your face like molasses out of a bottle’s mouth. Back arched like a shrimp’s, you cry in his desk chair yet don’t rub away those tasty tears. Mournful of something you never experienced – weird. 

Floyd catches his hacky sack without checking its angle of descent and comments, “Humans are always forgetful. Half of the Lounge’s lost and found goes to me and Jade because no one remembers anything anymore.” Even his new hacky sack is from those pyramiding stacks of boxes of forgotten objects.

You sniffle, nose scrunching like a snout. Hands are folded stiffly on your lap, cold and dry, cracked like crocodile skin. “What? So you’re some kind of perfect being?”

“Yep. Couldn’t get more better than me, hehe.”

“More better?”

“I’m better than better.”

That at least makes you crack a tiny smile, wobbly as it may be. The bottom of your eyes are still puffy and those snail trails of slow saltwater have yet to stop. Flimsy eyes glance away from Floyd’s gaze to the swirling, tentacle pattern on the dorm floor. “It’s just so sad … and odd. That sensation of being in a room and being able to swear that you’ve been there before. Even the conversations … seem identical to another time.”

“And the people?”

“Yes, the people too.” Tearful eyes search the violet tentacle as if you expect it to unravel and reveal something. 

Suddenly, you spring forward on Floyd’s desk chair, as if in revelation. The back legs lift slightly off the ground as you lean in close. Still untouched, the warm trails are visible on your face. “And, isn’t that so odd!

“I just can’t wrap my head around it. You spend time creating memories. You spend time having conversations and creating relationships. You spend time being. And, all that time just, what? Goes and slithers down a drain, and you don’t get it back?”

Floyd blinks at you. Spots of flushed skin rest in the center of your temple and on each cheek. Your skin glistens in hot hues. “Eh, some things are just more important to others.” Floyd untucks his arm from behind his head, reaches out with his index, and wipes under your right eye.

He licks up the saltwater on his finger’s side like licking residue off a fork as you say, “I could never forgive myself if I did something like that to someone.”

The hunger to recapture past moments. It is quite an intense craving. Floyd takes his thumb and smears a crescent smile in the water under your left eye.

“C’mon, Shrimpy.” He licks his thumb. “You’re just the type of person that would do that to someone.”

[rel124c41]

you know what. i cave. i cave!

earnestly, i don’t think i’ll be writing in dec 2025 so i’m doing the cute trendy thing ….

meeme…. meme …. meme v

[rel124c41]

UPDATES.

hello, re-l here.

hi hi!

okay, scheduling is going to be off.

now, i know i’m pretty solid with schedules. from may to september, i did solidly post a oneshot every 15th. however, that promised tweels birthday event is going have to be pushed off (as i’m now realizing). (-｡-;

i feel partly guilty about it so i would like to apologize. i know it just sucked having sent in a request only for it to be delayed. that’s rude of me.

everything, tweels birthday requests and regular oneshots are getting pushed to the end of december. my brain is able to write but it’s not steadily focusing on one thing, it’s jumping around.

so my apologies but i do hope everyone looks forward to the bomb of oneshots i’ll drop (like i did on april 4th)

december’s lineup is looking like this so far:

- 15 Tweel Birthday Requests (all dabbles under 2K)

- Front Line Assembly (android!jade oneshot, estimate 12K)

- Paranoid Android (android!jade oneshot, estimate 10K)

- Got You (Where I Want You) chapter 2 (estimate 10K)

- Arnolfini Portrait chapter 1 & 2 (estimate 10K each)

- Sasayaki (skully oneshot, estimate 9K)

- Misery in Munich (jade oneshot, estimate 15K)

that’s all. thank you for your patience and again, my sincerest apologies to whoever sent in requests.