#messy messy bealil

[daisychainsandbowties]

👀 😈 💻

👀 oh this is neat because i can just choose a different wip! how about some bealil from star wars au 4

Even in the red-tinted dark, the black wires under her skin glisten. It’s hard not to see them as Beatrice reaches up, gently now, as if for the first time she has some apprehension of what she is touching. She is weak, still, and Lilith has to bow her head - a genuflection of sorts, a small surrender. 

Beatrice kisses her like she’s trying to steal her breath, like they’re trapped in open space together. Like there’s not enough air for either of them but she’s going to take it anyway. What little there is, she puts her mouth on it.

And Lilith tries not to be undone.

In space, if you hold a breath, the air expands inside your lungs and fills you up with holes. It’s like that with her sometimes – a disaster waiting to happen or one that has already happened. Lilith looks at her and feels that she will be torn apart in an instant by ebullism, or what they call vaporisation.

Being kissed by her not importantly distinct from dying, and that’s the trouble of it. Lilith leans into her, grazing Beatrice’s lower lip with her tongue, and she does not think in trite sentences – not you will be the death of me.

It is impossible to deny, as fingers slip down, tugging Lilith’s shirt from where it’s tucked into her belt, that Beatrice is death itself. Everything about her as tender as a fresh burn, and later Lilith will discover a patch of scarring, high on Beatrice’s hip, from the blade of her sabre, but just then there is only room inside of her for the feeling that she is to Beatrice what oxygen is to an open flame.

Lilith opens her eyes to find that Beatrice’s – bruised by sleeplessness and starved of light – are closed. Not shut, but fluttering on the edge of open, and gentled by that surrender. Her hands are raised, now, barely touching the edge of Lilith’s jaw, feather-light, one of them trembling from the strain that even this small action puts on her elbow. But she doesn’t close it into a fist, she just lets it flutter, and it’s no different, really, from nakedness. More naked, perhaps, than Lilith's blunt hands could manage.

😈 is there anything you enjoy doing that you think your readers hate?

i'm blessed to have readers who seem to enjoy the blood and misery as much as i do, so i think probably the thing that i have to balance my own enthusiasm for is what i've taken to calling the Beatrice Lecture Series, or the tendency of Beatrice to punch me in the throat and out of nowhere spend around 1000 words lecturing about some obscure strand of my own various interests. Lilith is the worst enabler of this habit, and while she is (probably) turned on by it, and while i am happy to be relegated to my paddling pool of blood while beatrice goes on, and on, and on - i do have to wade back into the narrative at a certain point with her kicking the shit out of me the entire time. yeah... sometimes i definitely do that too much. i wouldn't say that people hate it all the time, but if i fall for beatrice's good old 'hey casper look at this' too much i think it does get annoying, and i'm a poor judge of when, exactly, that happens.

💻 do you do research for your fics? what's the deepest dive you've done?

oh i am forever in the research. it's one of the best parts of writing for me - just rifling around in my own head and learning new things and getting lost in the sauce (wikipedia). oof, i've done some fairly deep-dives the past few months so i can't really choose one. definitely researching the physics of breakages at the molecular level for one (1) epigraph was... a time, but also the day before yesterday i read a papal encyclical in four different languages - though this was, at least, for one (1) line of actual dialogue in a fic.

all of the star wars research has been super interesting (my amazing smart incredible friends have so far picked up just one major lore-discrepancy in the star wars au) because i'm such a himbo star wars fan. like yeah, for star wars au you bet i had my shitty plastic lightsaber out in front of the mantlepiece practicing my obi-wan stance (& getting absolutely torn to shreds for my posture :/ which is humiliating when you have actual swordfighting skills) but i was (am) woefully ignorant of the vast majority of star wars lore, so rectifying that has been so much fun. also any and all ligaments research is so good - a couple of months ago i did an in-depth study of bird bones for, again, a bloody paragraph (indeed, a BLOODY paragraph) because i was curious as to how tarask-cooties might alter Lilith's poor gay skeleton.

[daisychainsandbowties]

It has come to my attention that you're possibly maybe taking prompts? If you feel like it:

"Someone I loved once gave me

a box full of darkness." Mary Oliver and any pairing you'd like.

a snippet (aka huge chunk) of my halo!lilith au

cw: blood, gore, violence

///

lilith collapses. she wants to describe her body as curling, but what it does, in fact, is curdle. It sours in her hands and in her knees and she is suddenly on the floor. no transition, no chronology.

one moment she is standing, dripping head to toe in blood, and the next she is staring at beatrice through the tomb of her strewn limbs. there’s a terrible noise inside her body. the halo scrapes against her spine, spilling thick tendrils of scarlet light down all the pathways of her arteries. she must look like those red dwarf stars, the ones beatrice told her about in her hazy half-asleep with the stars spread above them. all the constellations with their names.

'they cannot easily be observed,' her face scrunched up, the smell of canned soup going cold on their little gas stove. 'they aren't very luminous, you see, so despite their great numbers, most remain invisible to us.'

like me, lilith thought, trying to look away from beatrice, in case it might suddenly mean something. all of the looking.

she fades, watching beatrice wrench the blade of her spear from inside a body – a wet, suctioning sound like a mouth coming away from a nipple. none of her metaphors can keep clean in the mess they've made.

when she wakes up it is with the taste of iron and soot and something faintly sweet inside her mouth.

beatrice. bringing her back from the brink of unraveling with a kiss. bruise-hard, abandoned on her face – not like something worthless but like the kiss itself was too much to hold onto, like she had no choice but to leave it there.

the specter of her resolves, and lilith will forever describe her like this. a ghoul, a phantom, a dog-eared page in the strangeness of the world. something to which she is always returning. a shore, an ocean, a better reflection.

she is the first thing lilith sees, and she is not certain if her heart stopped beating - it feels too powerful, too frantic inside her - but she aches everywhere. especially at the points where Beatrice’s fingers score into her forearms, holding her loosely aloft off the concrete floor.

there is no one left alive in the room.

aside from us.

lilith shows beatrice all her pink teeth. it is not funny and the room is all shadows but the halo pinches her eyes - cruel mistress - and shows her snatches of the scene that unspools behind beatrice as she props lilith up against the wall, against the dripping brickwork.

she can only describe it like that - a scene.

and in front of it is beatrice. fluid leaking down her face.

(lilith tells herself it could be anything, in this light, but she knows. bodies are so full of water)

the warehouse is littered with objects. her mind wants to say with corpses but a foul, pedantic piece of her, no doubt transplanted directly from the girl who is holding her, argues that a corpse must be intact, somewhat.

the room, if strict definitions are adhered to, is full of body parts.

a torso decorating the gantry with one arm still attached, dangling and dripping a weird stripe of red onto the ground underneath. the dusty concrete ribboned, like someone took a paintbrush to it, and not a man.

a boy, really, caving in around lilith's outstretched hand.

other details throw themselves at her. a pony-tail lying sopping on the ground.

someone’s shoe, sitting perfectly upright like one of those stupid experimental art pieces.

Beatrice has put both of her damp palms on Lilith’s face, peering at her. unafraid, because she is a blasphemy all on her own. she is caked in everything, unflinching, and her hands are so tender. Lilith wants to vomit, but she only gasps. the sound of her is wet and loud in the dripping quiet. everything seems darker after all the light, the halo slipping through her skin. fingers through gossamer.

‘i didn’t mean it,’ she says, wetly. like it matters.

they were ambushed, overwhelmed, pushed to opposite sides of the warehouse. beatrice a blur she glimpsed through hands and teeth and the blank faces of the possessed. empty bodies rattling around her, closing in so that she had to use her sword like a lever, until even that was not enough.

but she was not afraid; she was not raised to fear, or to cry out even when one of the possessed reached up and stuck his fingers in her eye, yanking it half-out, so the optic nerve disconnected with a searing flicker.

she only gritted her teeth. it was, after all, imaginable pain, and she could carry it.

she was not afraid until her left eye twinged fiercely and showed the peripheral of her vision to her again and in it was beatrice, held up by her throat. legs kicking, carving lines of red into the arm that held her aloft, eyes seeking lilith where she stood framed in a halo of frothing bodies.

she did not mean it, but she did it.

and now she is clutching at Beatrice’s padded shoulder, tears leaking out of her as if her body does not know what else to do with them. she feels beatrice lean forward, - by some miracle towards lilith and not away - feels her chin settle on lilith's shoulder.

she does it gently, barely putting any pressure into her arms as they reach up, squeezing lilith’s biceps. beatrice turns her head, slow, and brushes her lips against the side of lilith’s neck, and it is all so careful, as though she really is afraid that she might break something. as though, somewhere in her mind, lilith is still something breakable.

‘i’m sorry,’ it comes out garbled, like she’s dumping each wet syllable at beatrice’s feet with the expectation that she will know what to do with them.

beatrice looks at her, and it’s difficult to see any expression on her washed-red face, but lilith thinks she finds some sadness there. a horrible hint of pity.

she nods, and that’s all. lilith stares as beatrice ducks her head, reaching to examine her body for injuries, as though it matters.

she lies there, pooled in cooling liquid, and thinks - as Beatrice probes the akimbo of her legs with her fingertips, trying to ascertain if she can stand, if they can run - that it should not happen like this.

but she can feel it happening, like this.

because the kiss before was not really a kiss; it was a plea, a fit of desperation. nothing you could treat as a foundation. it was just a needless resuscitation – the princess has to kiss the frog to make it human again, but she doesn’t have to be in love, right?

lilith has never read the fairy tales, only heard about them in passing from other girls, showing her pictures of the time they dressed up as Cinderella. beyond a few press photographs at competitions, lilith isn’t certain that her mother ever took a picture of her just for the sake of it, just for the safekeeping of it.

dark eyes flicker up, meeting hers, and beatrice’s breath catches inside her throat. she’s beautiful, even like this, even here where the fabric of the world has stretched thin.

looking over her shoulder (because it is unbearable to look into her eyes) lilith can almost see bright, reddish-gold spots of luminescence seeping through the air. dotted like constellations up in the exact spot she held the bodies of the wraiths before they tore themselves apart to reach her.

filaments of threaded light sit in the air and the halo beats it’s isotopic heartbeat in lilith’s back. she think that must be invisible too, but then she starts as bea’s hand moves suddenly to her chest. her armour is shredded in places, so the pads of bea’s fingers touch bare skin. healed smooth, but still slippery from the injuries, from the shredded tissue the halo decided not to reincorporate into her body.

how much of this is only light? lilith wonders, looking down the length of her body, splayed out with beatrice kneeling between her legs. her other hand rests atop lilith’s thigh, her thumb pressing down on the inside.

‘you’re glowing,’ she breathes, and lilith looks down at her hand, at the light cascading out between them. it’s nothing like sunlight, the buttery shine that used to burst out through shannon’s skin.

where the light touches, it reveals, and lilith can see quite plainly the bones inside of beatrice’s fingers. the bustle of carpals and metacarpals in her hand, flowing up towards her knuckles and dipping down into the architecture of her wrist.

the halo burns inside her, sending wicks of wicked heat down lilith’s arms, her legs, up into her mouth so she feels molten.

‘I’m glowing,’ she agrees. i wish it felt beautiful.

slowly, and not very softly, the light retreats from beatrice’s hand, making a penumbra of her insides so that lilith can almost see through them. the bones are quick to hide back in shadow but the veins pronounce out, licking up the wavelengths, going from red to blue as the skin reasserts itself and drinks up all the other colours.

then it winks out, and lilith feels a terrible weariness spread through her body, but it doesn’t feel especially important as she watches beatrice lift her hand away and stare at it, aghast.

it’s clean. unbloodied.

beatrice doesn’t say, ‘that’s impossible.’she’s not trite, and she’s seen too much to worry about a slight inconsistency in physics. her hand is perfectly steady as she examines it, curling her fingers in to peer underneath the nails. it’s all unblemished.

her hand settles slowly back down towards lilith’s leg, barely brushing the top of her thigh, and lilith wants to shout for her to stop, because with the barest contact the tips of her fingers are already stained, but then beatrice’s eyes are on her face again. searching in that beguiling way for what lilith is feeling.

maybe you can tell me, and then we can both know.

it’s not a feeling, precisely, that draws her forward, tipping towards beatrice like something that has been on the verge of toppling for a long time. beatrice watches her move, and lilith is struck by the echo of her voice at night, in the showers at cat’s cradle.

stories about Galileo, and how after they told him to recant he might – ‘apocryphally’, as beatrice amended in her whisper – have said eppur si muove.

and yet it moves.

so lilith does. her arms are too heavy, just then, to reach out and feel the tension grow in beatrice’s jaw as it happens. protracted and with a sense of inevitability.

she just falls into it, pressing her lips up into the conundrum of beatrice’s mouth, as she has wanted to for a very long time.

her lips are salty, soft, pliant as they part under the barest suggestion from lilith’s tongue. she tastes of peppermint, dust, something faintly herbal.

when the girls in school told lilith that people can taste of things besides spit and teeth and warmth, she didn’t believe them.

and then she kissed a girl after football training and she tasted like wet grass and the orange squash they made up in the big 1.5 litre bottles with Lucozade emblazoned on the side in white. they all had one with their names written messily in permanent marker on the side.

lilith came away from it stunned; not especially at the fact of kissing a girl, but at the taste of her. different from all the others. when she asked, later, the girl told lilith that she tasted warm. she tasted of butter on toast or a marshmallow straight off the fire.

at the time, of course, that didn’t feel like an omen.

at first it is all very tentative. beatrice opens her mouth, lets lilith’s tongue inside. the way you part your lips to receive the eucharist.

but then she grows bolder, as she always does. surging forward with the latent strength of an approaching wave, dreaming each time that it won’t break on the shore.

deepening the kiss. she makes a noise as lilith’s tongue runs over her bottom lip, replaced by teeth a moment later. there’s a cut inside of beatrice’s mouth - lilith knows because she can taste it, a pulse of coppery, metallic heat on her tongue as bea licks into her mouth. her hands tremble as they cup lilith’s jaw, hesitant, like a bird fluttering uncertainly over a branch that might not carry its weight.

the mechanism underscoring all breakages is the proliferation of cracks

bea’s voice in her head and bea’s tongue in her mouth. she tastes of quiet death and lilith moans as bea’s fingers settle against her jaw. she breathes into lilith’s mouth, and somewhere inside the halo brushes against her lungs. a phantom hand in her chest telling her she can survive on the carbon dioxide she’s been given. 

though that’s not all of it. somewhere in the vanishing depths of her mind lilith remembers beatrice, younger and brighter, telling her that no story is that simple. not even breathing. 

perhaps she would say something else about it now, but her mouth is occupied. her hands slip over the strange, scaly texture of lilith’s armour as she pulls closer, hungrier. 

lilith leans into it. doesn’t know what else to do, can’t imagine doing anything else. she thinks of what beatrice called her, all those months ago when she stood like a wound over shannon’s body, cradling her hand like it was anything but meat.

thief. her little face furious, voice barely pitched above a whisper but loud in the mausoleum. lilith stood at the foot of the staircase, pain encircling her shoulders, and laughed in the face of beatrice’s grief. 

then, too, she had no idea what else she might do.

beatrice pulls back, pupils blown, mouth smeared red, and she’s so good, these days, at biting back swear words. but in that moment she is a profanity.

beatrice has a knack for getting the blood out from under her fingernails, of stepping away clean from the slaughter, but lilith comes out of the shower with ribbons of it still behind her ear or on her scalp. when it’s hot inside their room at night it dribbles out of her hairline and bea thumbs it away, frowning. 

even now, with her face tilted up, smears running down the underside of her jaw, following the curve of her neck and the gentle bulge of her windpipe, the cricoid cartilage in little ridges. lilith cannot be convinced to think of her as stained – by any of it.

but there is no way to take the halo out and wash it in warm water. there are days when she washes her hands so many times that, were it not for the halo, they would crack and peel and scar along the knuckles.

beatrice leans into it this time. or, rather, she surges forward. she is strong - not so tall as lilith, but more muscular after months of the halo and its nausea and its appetite. 

beatrice is only a girl, really, but she is honed to such an edge that half the time lilith’s cuts herself on its sharpness. 

she has not felt clean in months, but she feels close to it when beatrice’s tongue licks into her mouth, fingertips on her jaw. fingers slip into her hair, slick and blood-greased, sending trails of it sliding down the curve of her jaw, dripping into the cup of bea’s palms. but there is no hesitation in the press of her lips, not the slightest flinch in her attention. 

the blood on her mouth is her own. mostly, maybe, & there is a part of her that wants to pull away. to say stop, stop. you are not invincible. you are not safe with me. but the blood is hers, and the taste of it is so familiar.

it wasn’t supposed to happen like this. should have been by the Seine, in Paris, with the taste of fresh croissant in both of their mouths, overwhelming everything. she should have taken it instead of waiting, always flinching away from those sudden, naked glances, the tentative brush of a hand against her forearm.

but she didn’t, and now beatrice is kissing her blood-soaked, slicked in arterial spray.

lilith’s eyes are heavy and she aches, but she whispers - or imagines that she whispers - I’m sorry, little soldier.

it should have been better than this, the first time.