#i hope this works i realise i didn't move them on very far agfdgfd

[austerulous]

◈   @tlacehualli  //  cont.

Sombra was electric.  Next to the desert bloom of fuchsia and ultraviolet, even cobalt blue, siren red and acidic shades of yellow paled.  Odessa’s cherry irises were pulled to her, time and again.  First when she applied her bright war-paint, again when she denounced the devil in their moonshine, and now that they were in the thick crush of the mosh pit.

It was all distraction, the briefest of respites.  For the queen, and for her subjects.  Close threadbare curtains, block out thick columns of pyre smoke.  Forget the incurably sick with radiation, vomiting viscera in understaffed subterranean wards.  Music filled the head, filled the empty spaces in the heart, leaving room for nothing else.  There was only the crowd moving in tribal unison, a mass made into a writhing, many-headed monster.  Short-lived, too – as they all would prove to be.

Showered harmlessly by angle-grinder sparks, Odessa dissociated in the crackle of speakers, in the shifting patterns of neon lights.  Liquor burned a hole in her gut, drowning out the ghosts she carried with her always.  This was the domain of the living, it left no room for the dead.  The Australian government and the world at large had forsaken them, turned a blind eye to the poison and bloodshed at its irradiated heart – but Odessa would never abandon her post, her people.  The Junker Queen moved among the denizens, drank with them, moshed with them.  Bled and laughed and screamed and grieved with them.

Sombra was not one of her subjects, but for her Odessa was prepared to make a shield from the meat of her body, to protect from the waves of inebriated Junkers.  There was no need.  Her vibrant, enigmatic guest was agile, her reflexes undimmed by the booze. 

Music eventually folded under its own weight, swallowed by silence save for the murmur of the crowd and its drunken revelry.  Static thrummed, the familiar high-pitched whine of tinnitus droning on in Odessa’s ears.  Her voice was hoarse, bruises mottled the acres of exposed, sun-struck skin.  They evacuated together in the tide of tired, dusty, sweat-shining bodies that leaked from the arena. 

Carry me.  For a moment, it seemed like Sombra was already there.  All lilac and magenta.  Modified, featherlight, feminine.  Perfumed with a scent akin to flowers that no longer grew.  Open arms folded to find it had been a command made in jest.  Typical.  Any time Odessa imagined Sombra, she was always walking away, always just out of her reach.  Dull disappointment was diluted by a flood of incredulousness.

“Fuck off – you’re forty-three?”

Perhaps the secret to a baby face lay in the creams and elixirs Sombra swore by like a snake oil salesman.  Odessa snorted at the thought.

“No cryin’ for bed then.  Clearly you don’t need your beauty sleep.”

Stairs constructed from steel grating creaked beneath their boots as they peeled away from the masses, staggering along desolate stretches of echoing corridors.  Where most of the merrymakers would retire to the rusting lean-to houses in the shanty town, they were destined for the familiar sprawl of the royal quarters, tucked away in a lacklustre and windowless wing of the Omnium.