Chapter Text
Her smile curved and curved and curved. It ripped her cheeks apart like a merry little knife slice. Bloody fingers, bloody hands, bloody mouth curved around a cigarette, lit cherry red and bloody burns. Eyes mania sharp and tongue, death-whip quick. Fingers tremor free but cold, cold slows the blood, less chance of bleeding out. Cold room colder blood. Blood on the floors, on her blade, on her hands, on her face, in her mouth. Blood in her dreams and on her dark wisp of a soul.
Dying blood was darker than living blood, closer to the dark dirt of the grave. Her hair was death-cap, death-dirt and dying-blood and bloody scalp, pulled too hard by hands unwanted. Smoke in her lungs, poison in her veins.
Nathalia Wesninski’s blood was always death-dirt and dying-blood. She was always meant to die, painfully and bloody and cold.
And she did, painfully, bloody, and cold. On foreign soil, though really, could soil be foreign if your roots did not know familiar? No.
Her roots had been rotted and chopped before they even got to grow in the poison dirt of Baltimore. But the rotted roots had not been chopped fast enough, scars on her wilted leaves and disease in her veins. Too late too late too late to cure.
She died. She died she died–
She lived.
She lived and had the little Lord to thank for her transfer into slightly less poisoned soil.
Little Lord Ichirou had been wiser than his father, less poisoned and less death-dirt. Two years her senior and big boss-man in charge.
Nathalia had been sleep held and bed bound, stuck in the drifts of her rotted mind for five months until her self-proclaimed coma decided it was tired of her and spat her back out.
Right back to the calculating gray eyes of the little lord. Gray– like the smoke in her lungs and the dead roots of her past. Gray– like the sharp sting of a blade across her throat and the punch of a bullet in her chest. Gray– like the slow roll of the storm destined to ruin you and yours.
Nathalia’s eyes were the lighting and the thunder of his clouds. She was the sharp electricity of his storm and she the thunder of his fist. She was the knife in his hand and in his side and a secret to be whispered on death-beds and hidden behind locked doors.
When Nathalia was little, she did not like the storms that plagued Baltimore. She did not like the death-whip and crackling sting of electricity and she did not like the lingering boom of boulders clashing. She did not like that they hid her screams and sobs.
Later, when her roots had been chopped and her veins had been poisoned, she would pray for a storm to come, to muffle the screams that would never be, to wash away the tracks of the damning life-blood her heart insisted on pumping.
Later, through the scope of a sniper she would curse the storm blurring her vision.
Later, through the blood dripping down her eyes, she would thank the storm for washing away the murder on her skin.
Later, much later, she would share the storm with her brother, a cigarette between their lips and ghosts in their eyes and phantom demons shaking their hands and rattling their skeletons.