Work Text:
you dangle on the leash
of your own longing;
your need grows teeth.
Margaret Atwood, "Speeches for Dr. Frankenstein"
You never wanted this.
There’s blood caked under your fingernails–her blood, tainted by Abundance. (Tainted by you.) Gore slicks your arms to the elbow–you pluck her heart out like too-ripe fruit (like blue blossoms and plums, sweet flesh bursting in the haze of memory dripping in red).
A replacement for the one you lost when the sun swallowed your world. (Again. Again. Everything is red, grasping, clawing.)
How long will you keep your eyes closed? (How long will you rot in the dark?)
If you split open your ribs and place her heart where yours should be will your viscera nurture it like a seed to bloom alongside those you keep secret?
Your core esse burns, cauterizing synapses, engulfing the spaces she carved for herself. It burns while the rest of you covers the world in frost.
Ice cracks under the weight of your grief, splintering into skin gone numb. It builds itself again, stronger, a sanctuary. A prison.
A monument to rage.
At Yaoshi. At Lan. At the Vidyadhara and Dan Feng and Yingxing. At yourself.
Because whose fault is it, in the end, but yours?
The leader. You were always meant to die first. (You wanted to die but you wanted to live. She taught you how–the gentle, coaxing touch of spring’s first dawn.)
After all, what is the moon’s glow but the shadow of the sun? What are you now but a satellite thrown from orbit, careening off course and taking the rest of the stars with you. Swallowing them whole.
(Who is the Devourer of Worlds now, Jingliu. Who is the nightmare, the spectral horror on the horizon.)
(You can’t know how true that will be.)
Your fingers clench around the organ in their grip, puncturing muscle, sinking inside. Phantom pain echoes in your breast, the string between the two of you drawn taut, fraying.
(Once upon a time, the covetous moon wrapped the sun in rich red thread and pulled her from the sky.)
You want. You want. You want.
It disgusts you. (You should be disgusted; you did this—your wanting.)
It consumes you in a perverse refrain. Notes reverse, screeching and discordant, like the sound of the dragon’s wail as your sword struck home. Mercy. It was a mercy—but for whom?
A bud sprouts. A caress in muted purple. Consumed from the inside out. (That’s love, that’s love: muscle and bone and sinew trapped between teeth.)
To love is to swallow whole.
You raise the—her—heart to your mouth.
And then you eat.