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resurgentisjaya · 3 years
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wick du vol – 
he is not in his right mind, he is barely in his body, barely in his mind, too preoccupied with watching it repeat, repeat, film reel reversed and replaying, projector broken on the frames. his body is normally cold after time in the nest, but now, it feels as though his very blood is ice, puncturing through the skin, pale and diluted.
at her voice though, he flinches, pulls his hands away as it reels him back, back into the body, back into the mind, unseeing and far too present. he tucks his hands into his armpits and steps back, shake of the head in confusion. ‘ a man? ‘ he’s breathless, sundered, empty, far too full. the swear comes out and he cannot help but laugh, helpless, damp and broken. ‘ merde. i don’t know what i saw, what you saw. fuck is - ‘ he laughs again, hears the desperation in it. ‘ fuck is right. ‘
♦ ♦ ♦ 
his laugh, sodden and shredded, is what jars her most of all. jaya flinches: scuttling a step back — in a manner so unacceptably human, she reels from one more aspect. it strikes her like a blow, his uncertainty; an ambiguous vacillation that calls into question her own judgement to her own, innate court of law, where only jaya alone is all judge, jury, and (most of all) executioner. the dark of her gaze skitters away from the rigger —
it lands on the melancholic-looking man from the cluster of their unwelcome agathe guests, their previous second-in-command. for the first time, the censure to the cut of her features ekes, losing capacity to haunting apprehension. for once, to be haunted, she feels human. she feels too human, too fallible, too fragile. she is fractured.
for the first time, jaya questions: were they telling the truth?
♦ ♦ ♦
mentioned: @ofcoeurbrise
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resurgentisjaya · 3 years
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The true story is vicious and multiple and untrue after all. Why do you need it? Don’t ever ask for the true story.
Margaret Atwood, from True Stories (via wishbzne)
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resurgentisjaya · 3 years
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jules rowland –
location: common mess. time: post-mutiny, post-release.  with: @resurgentisjaya​​
no privacy — there was no fucking privacy on this fucking ship. jules never thought the promethean would be too small; it was the largest ship she’d ever worked on, but since her title had become half-void, since she had become one of the watched and the distrusted, the ship had turned into a prison of its own. she wasn’t even allowed her anger. she wasn’t even allowed her worry. even that now belonged to marcus estrada. 
she sat across from jaya, jaw clenched and arms crossed. her boots pressed firmly against the ground, and she tried to keep her voice low, private, knowing it wasn’t. knowing people were listening and suspicious, and she hated it, she hated being on display like this. 
“i’ve got shit to say to you, and seeing as how we can’t get one moment just the two of us, i can’t say all of it. so i’ll say some,” she started, trying to keep her voice steady and controlled. “just listen, alright? listen.”
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“i don’t sit and wait. i am not the one twirling my fucking thumbs like some stupid wife waiting for her stupid husband gone to war — that’s not me. but that’s who i was made to be. by you, by ayla, by malachy and edward and eph. i waited on this ship, and i had to deal with everything that’s happened since alone. and i failed, so i’ve got to deal with that alone now too.” it had felt all too familiar, the loneliness of survival. it had felt familiar, the helplessness of waiting. “so i’m mad, you hear that? i get to be mad. i thought we were in this together, i thought we were equals — first time i’ve felt like such in a good long while — but you… god, jaya, you infuriate me.”
it was the closest she would come to saying it: i’m glad you’ve come back to me.
“at least tell me you put a fucking bullet in it.”
♦ ♦ ♦ 
well, perhaps it isn’t the worst fucking thing that estrada had taken their weapons unless they’d vowed to pucker up for his smarmy arse, is it? jaya isn’t sure jules wouldn’t’ve taken a literal stab at making her ire known. frankly, no more than jaya herself might, were their roles to be reversed, as they all too easily could’ve been. in a most bizarre way, it is comforting: to hear evidence of a prediction she’d made to ayla dowling’s ears before all of it – before their soles met the cursed earth of the island, and their souls ( or the remnants of them, in certain cases ) were proffered for the picking to some mystic, monstrous entity, and all that had ensued, too much of which she still does not understand. it is real: knowing her is real. how easy it is, she now knows, for perceived reality not to be.
but this is. jules is. jules is real. jules is true.
as real—if not more—than she’d been when they’d collided beyond occupational relevance a mere month prior... before they’d peeled layers away, and unravelled against one another, unveiling truths, and pressing savage mouths to them, gnarled and scar-ridden as they were, till they softened to slumberous peace. their hands entangled, warm breaths slowing, fanning against flushed flesh. now, her hands, clad in the gloves lijin gave her, tighten around her glass of ale. still, her hands tremble, till the clench of jaya’s fingers around the drink stills them. she cannot touch her, not as she craves to. not here.
here, jaya can only bestow upon her a half-moon smile, overcast by too much darkness that clouds any luminescence that might’ve been there to be found. the sight of it may still be disconcerted to their audience, though this much is not a secret: the gunner-woman and quartermaster and ice-master make for a trio. they are mates. companions. friends. they simply know naught, that the two women have become too much more. her gaze never wavers, though; her gaze never breaks from jules’. yet there are too many others’ whose pervasive glances skirt burning trails over the two of them just the same. too many others watching – who would take note of her hands reaching for jules’, and pulling her from her seat, to take her from here, away, where they could be alone – where they was room for them to be true. not the gunner without her guns, nor the quartermaster to a captain whose authority had been so treacherously usurped, but jaya and julia.
“i am not sorry,” she says, undaunted. the words are clipped, dark; easy to assume as menacing, when she leans in, voice dropping to a murmur, with a hand abandoning its post around the glass, holds up a palm to stay the interruption she can feel burgeoning.
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“you are livid. i knew that you would be. as i would have been. of course you fucking get to be. you are my equal; but a wolf cannot be a wolf without her moon, and if you had come with, as you would have come with when you did not succeed in keeping me from going, then fear for a waning moon would have undone me. then, i would not have come back to you at all. understand, lover? be furious. when we are alone—and we will be, somehow—you can take it out on me.”
the words linger in the air like a whisper of perfume between them, as she leans back. “no,” jaya answers sharply, as if she’d made no tender admission at all, “there was nothing to put a bullet through except for us once it seeped in and took our minds. we are so far out of our fucking league, jewel. this is the thing that goes bump in the bloody night.”
♦ ♦ ♦
mentioned: @intrepidim​ / @aylumin​ / @lijinmarked​ / @glaciations​
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resurgentisjaya · 3 years
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ayla dowling –
continued from here @resurgentisjaya
There’s the difference between them. That Jaya knows what she has, and Ayla thinks of what she has stolen. For every moment and every person that Ayla has held seems in danger from her. Its left this as the only option, the only choice. And it’s not much of one at all.  Thinks to say she’ll protect it for Jaya, beg the gunner to go back, but there’s no use to it. Not really. They’ve already begun, and she’s already said it. So many ways of offering the same, when there’s no one could believe her capable of helping at all.  “You’ll be missed” almost ends it there, but it’s too ominous, too much like dangling an idea to le silencieux, “in the morning.” It’s funny that she doesn’t imagine she’ll be missed herself. That she forgets she’s supposed to be at breakfast with Malachy. Everything’s gotten jumbled up. 
There are things beneath the ice that look to them. She drags her gaze across, imagines it’s just imprints of the ice, a different thickness, a patch where the water hits a particular way. Thinks of all Ephraim had told her. “You’ll be missed straight away.”
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“Do you want to talk about it? Who you think it will be?” Who will miss you first. It’s a dreadful question, but they need to keep thinking to why they’re doing this at all. “Or shall we imagine what we’ll do, when we get there?”
♦ ♦ ♦
Much to her ample chagrin, Jaya cannot seem to help her fondness for Ayla Dowling. At this point, she cares for her more than the Captain. There is a bravery to her, is the thing. The sort only ever to belong to those who were most underestimated — and she understands that gumption, and thus, actively endeavours to never shove the girl towards a smallness. It isn’t as if, however, that she makes it a particularly easy task, when she tries to brave monsters without a weapon to her wisp-faint form, beyond that heart of gold encased within flesh that would give beneath blunt-force pressure.
Herself, on the other hand...
            When it comes to herself, Jaya suspects a likeness to the ice beneath their feet. The obvious comparison would be of coldness, of course, but the gunner thinks of how her nipples could surely cut through fucking glass right then, which would make for that particular comparison to be naught but supremely odious. There was nuance in considering it, stained by night and shadows, and menacing in its fragility. That was dangerously close to the truth of her own self, Jaya thought. It was never the shattering that was to be feared; it was the aftermath of the shattering.
Perhaps it wouldn’t matter. In a way it hasn’t before, there is a graveness that looms over them whilst they trudge ahead, like a man to the gallows. It is all that evokes a true—dangerously, painfully true—response from her lips: “What good’s that shit? We’ll find what we’ll find; we’ll do whatever the fuck we’ve got to do, and that’s that. I’ll tell you, though, I’ve just left a one hell of a woman aboard that bloody ship, and it doesn’t matter what we’ll do when we get there, or if we get back, because she’s going to fucking kill me for leaving her behind.” In a rare, peculiar turn of events, Jaya flashes Ayla something of a grin as she shares the words, oddly comforted by her own prediction.
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“I’d still rather be missed than do the missing,” she has to add. “Think they’ll come after us?”
♦ ♦ ♦
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resurgentisjaya · 3 years
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JAYA.
♦ ♦ ♦
All that she knows, as easily, as quickly, Jaya no longer does. It should not surprise her. It has been engrained in muscle memory, has it not? Her hands have known these priciples longer than it has taken for her mind to grasp them, and yet, still she has come to know, these principles bequeathed to her by the woman from whose womb she tore through like a battlecry. It had been her amma who had taught her: a single thread — the right thread, or perhaps the wrong one, depending on how one perceives it — is all it takes to make the garment come undone, unravelling in one’s very hands, that quickly. Have you ever watched someone you love die? Augustus Sutherland asks of her, with an earnestness to his gaze that needles at her. Acutely, she feels it: the tug; hard and vicious, malicious, in a manner that must be purposeful – for who understood if not she, the ways in which the wounded wanted others to know their pain. Is that not why the wounded scream? To pierce all those who have not been. To be understood—seen—known: the only desire of humankind more common than a fear of its inevitability.
Her mother never did at the end. She never screamed.
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Have you ever watched someone you love die?
         ( you remember — you remember the taste of palm over your mouth, the salt of sweat in tributaries born palmary creases, pebbled with calluses only a woman whose hands know harsh, menial work could be. you remember fingertips pressing on your throat… quiet, you remember them demanding, staunching your cry in the pipe before it burst upwards. you remember the whimper that left her. you remember the wet gurgle of her last breath. you remember after, too — though you remember naught of the in-between sludge you’d been drug through. you remember her hair, the dark cloud of it so close matching your own, escaping the thick, frayed rope of her braid, how it had splayed over the wrinkled skirts of eden’s skirts, how she had stroked the stilled head in her lap, tears silent — tears relentless. you remember the life having left her eyes, the eyes your own face wore. you remember, you remember, you remember —  )
The last memory before the name of VERA had been thrust upon her, heritage pillaged for the sake of survival. A fledgling Jaya’s memories resurfacing in the resurrection’s mind as Sutherland unspools her so unceremoniously.
Have you ever watched someone you love die?
“Yes.”
♦ ♦ ♦
FIN.
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resurgentisjaya · 3 years
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THE ENIGMA seeks out THE VETERAN ( @riversoaked​​ ) after midnight strikes upon the renewal of an impending dawn on JULY 17th, 1845. light, alas, is necessary to baptise a chapter preceded by the eclipsing discovery of the boatswain’s slain body. in the aftermath, the gunner makes her way through the ship in haste; footsteps soundless, but energy frenetic, coming off of her in waves as chaotic as the rap of her knuckles on the QUARTERMASTER’S CABIN’s door.
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In a matter of mere hours, variations of the tale had been spilt aboard HMS Promethean like grapevine. Semantics damned, the crux remains the same: the boatswain had been slain. Vanished alive, returned butchered. The boatswain – who could have been, so easily, someone else. A moment, an inch, a choice; a single unit  is all it takes. It could have been her. The hours crawl miserably, slow as molasses. With every passing rendition, the details relayed seem to turn more brutal. Graphic. A picture painted in blood.
           ( he was torn to bloody ribbons, aye! their whispers were coarse. mauled — fucking mangled to somethin’ all else... it wasn’t an animal. it wasn’t an animal, but — it was fucking something. something other. not of us. rowland never even saw what took ‘im, or so the lass says... )
She barely makes it to midnight. Her mind ricocheting between the past weeks, the tender map of flesh her teeth have charted feral touch across, those eyes she would know in the dark after the number of glances exchanged betwixt the two women, as ardent as the sun kissing the moon in passing — and the absence of it. A loss. An ending. This was supposed to be different. The expedition, a journey, the fresh page to etch the next chapter upon. A new beginning.
As she stands in front of Julia’s door, her heart feels gnarled. The naked eye might find the gunner-woman stood alone in the hallway, but Jaya knows better. That’s the rub, isn’t it? She fucking knows better? The air is chilled by the breath of ghosts haunting, clouds of frost pluming, diminishing notions of clarity. Her fist meets wood harshly, as if intent on making it feel as raw as she does.
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Yet the door opens — and no words leave her mouth. Do the shadows in her eyes not scream for light?
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resurgentisjaya · 3 years
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resurgentisjaya​:
one might think, to learn the diasporic tale of her existence, that material objects ought to have incredible value to her. unusual value, even. for was avarice not the explicable hamartia of a starving thing? it may not be flattering — as plenty about human beings was not — yet it could be understandable, and was empathy not a perspicacious tool to employ? the knife that bleeding hearts twisted inside themselves.
yet such is not the case. raw as a wound, jaya does not consider pretending so either. there may be trepidation, but there is no veil aflutter betwixt the two dark-haired women; there is a gesture, and there is a reaction – a reaction, simply, doubling as response, for the gunner-woman is whittled, down to the marrow, and her marrow burns with the words lijin extends, the picture of nonchalance, with a onyx gaze that gleams with knowing better.
i thought of you –
ah, and there’s the rub, is it not so?
material objects mean naught to her. they are enjoyable, of course; the occasional sadist, the hereditary masochist, the discombobulation of scattered identities though she may be… yet she knows, knows only as those who have learnt heart-rending lessons can know — those lessons which rend a person apart, that remake them — that what is not there can be taken, and what is taken can be lost, as easily as anything one is born into, or granted. gifted, even. the latter, the gunner can only assume. she cannot remember the last time she was presented with one.
it is to be thought of that is incalculable in value. that is boundless in magnitude.
she knows that her weathered companion’s ease stays her. makes it possible to keep them – to tug them over callused hands and tender pulse, and don them, without her gaze dropping from hers. “i will not fucking regift them, zhang, for fuck’s sake,” is all jaya offers, with an expressive roll of her eyes, more like herself than much else about this disquieting exchange.
she nods. thank you, her eyes say. her mouth does not know how to shape the words, without them tasting like weakness.
♦ ♦ ♦
it’s with no judgement or amusment on the other’s behalf, but lijin lets the gifts be tugged from her hands, lets her eyes soften a near inexpressibly slight amount, knows the taste of blood and bone, ash and avarice, but this is something positive in its haunting, harkening back to something achingly familiar and near worn away, bandage unwrapped and tender skin that hurts in the wind.
they do not know how to say it, a thousand words and histories and identities between them, could catalogue and extract every bone in a person, but no accent or language can voice the way that she reads the thanks, or the way she replies, tilts her head, then covers it with a smirk at the words used to mask.
it’s in a thought, it’s in an action, it’s in the blink of an eye and the tilt of posture. even feral things have to find a place to roost, or to rest the night. perhaps there will be something to find here, to come back to. ‘ good. ‘ she says instead, then gently distangles the thread, the moment, inclines her head and walks away.
FIN
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resurgentisjaya · 3 years
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humans in love are terrible
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resurgentisjaya · 3 years
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jules rowland –
there was always terror in giving yourself to another — the terror of knowing it was not forever, the terror of choosing it anyways. ( everything was violence but especially this: i kiss you knowing we both will die. ) and then jules felt the cool air against her skin, felt the pair of dark eyes trail across her. jules had never given much thought to her body, to the scars marring pale flesh, to the signs of cruelty and loss that lived on her, but she met jaya’s gaze and she knew — she’d find the same sort of scars on the other. 
“thank god.” a breath of an answer, spoken against the crook below jaya’s jaw — that jaw that jules had caught herself staring at more often than not, that jules had known she’d like to taste. that jaw might be enough to drive her mad, and what a sweet sort of madness it’d be. her hands moved beneath the fabric of jaya’s shirt, that damnable, luxurious fabric that ought to be torn straight from the body that wore it, just to feel the jaya that was hidden. 
no, this was not a woman that was soft; this was a woman who had ever chance of seeing jules as she was. 
dangerous grin on her face, jules knelt in front of jaya, her knees resting soft on the thick wood of the ground. ( she had not knelt to save the lives of friends and crew, but she knelt now, knelt before a woman because this was the only divine thing she could swear to understand. ) her hands rested on jaya’s hips to playfully pull her nearer, and she looked up, title of command long left behind. her request came silent this time — undress with me, let me see you, let me taste you, let me have you — wanting, wanting.
♦ ♦ ♦ 
thank god, she breathed.
her exhaled utterance seeped in through jaya’s skin, pervading her bloodstream, as if her pores sucked at wisps of steam in reversed-evaporation. if her innards—surely rotting—and her heart—surely black—had been tinged in blanched shades of stagnant decay, then julia’s veneration was powdery fragments of rust, lacing with the quicksilver in her veins, melting it to a crimson melting to hot, bubbling proof of life. her heart pounded a tattoo against her eardrums: a song that sounded nothing like war-drums.
there was something perverse about bringing god into what was wont to become, inevitably, the sweat-slick entanglement of their bodies in the most passionate of sins. yet was it not to her knees that julia sank? was that not reverence in the volatile blue of her gaze searing past the downy sunset of her lashes? her hands caught the altar of jaya’s hips, and the gunner’s mouth sliced into a madhouse grin. “fucking beautiful,” she remarked coarsely, her thumb tender when it trailed the full curve of the woman’s kiss-swollen mouth.
it was her own hands that gathered fistfuls of her blouse: a wordless answer to the wordless question julia’s touch beseeched. an answer of unveiled flesh, a dark sprawl contrasting with the roses and cream of her complexion – and matching, still, somehow, in the way wounds from inescapable pasts puckered in scar-tissue reminiscence, in the histories that had etched into the very bodies that had tided them through it. they spoke the same: i have lived. i have died. i shall live. any death shall not know my silence.
silence was reserved for this — for this sensuous unravelling: for touch, as the calluses roughening jaya’s fingertips did, curling strands of golden hair from milky shoulder, only to ghost over the slant of her clavicle, jutting from beneath skin so much softer than expected; for. taste, the way her tongue roved over the sweet wildfire of julia’s kiss, lingering on her own lips, even after it had left them lonesome; for –
dark eyes bore down on the sight of her.
know me, they commanded.
♦ ♦ ♦
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resurgentisjaya · 3 years
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JAYA | THE ENGIMA @resurgentisjaya
“ALL MEN MUST DIE. BUT WE ARE NOT MEN.” - DAENERYS TARGARYEN 
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resurgentisjaya · 3 years
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Month by month things are losing their hardness; even my body now lets the light through; my spine is soft like wax near the flame of the candle.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves (via soracities)
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resurgentisjaya · 3 years
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zhang lijin –
it’s … interesting, to watch the subtle changes in jaya’s face, the confusion, the abrasion, the surprise, the - is it softness? would she dare call the other woman soft, even in her own head? then the clarity, and the suspicion, and it hurts, this near mirror lijin is looking into.
she couldn’t save herself from the darkness that had seeped it’s way into the every crease of her being, but perhaps jaya - perhaps there were ledges yet to be fallen off of, choices that have yet to be made. or perhaps there are boundaries crossed but they could be scars to be healed - rather than the red edged hurt that was cementing its place in her life.
at the question though, she shrugs, as though it was nothing. ‘ i saw it, i thought of you. i have plenty of money to spare at this point, and figured it would do you some good. if you don’t want it, feel free to regift it, but i think i asked for something in your size, so. ‘ lijin doesn’t bother smiling, teasing or making light of it - just facts of consideration and existence outside of hurt and friction. perhaps it will work, she hopes it will - for if this is going to be the end or just the continued struggle of her life, there was no reversing the damnation she was going to be receiving. the last bit of her legacy would just be of uncertain kindness instead.
♦ ♦ ♦
one might think, to learn the diasporic tale of her existence, that material objects ought to have incredible value to her. unusual value, even. for was avarice not the explicable hamartia of a starving thing? it may not be flattering — as plenty about human beings was not — yet it could be understandable, and was empathy not a perspicacious tool to employ? the knife that bleeding hearts twisted inside themselves.
yet such is not the case. raw as a wound, jaya does not consider pretending so either. there may be trepidation, but there is no veil aflutter betwixt the two dark-haired women; there is a gesture, and there is a reaction – a reaction, simply, doubling as response, for the gunner-woman is whittled, down to the marrow, and her marrow burns with the words lijin extends, the picture of nonchalance, with a onyx gaze that gleams with knowing better.
i thought of you –
ah, and there’s the rub, is it not so?
material objects mean naught to her. they are enjoyable, of course; the occasional sadist, the hereditary masochist, the discombobulation of scattered identities though she may be... yet she knows, knows only as those who have learnt heart-rending lessons can know — those lessons which rend a person apart, that remake them — that what is not there can be taken, and what is taken can be lost, as easily as anything one is born into, or granted. gifted, even. the latter, the gunner can only assume. she cannot remember the last time she was presented with one.
it is to be thought of that is incalculable in value. that is boundless in magnitude.
she knows that her weathered companion’s ease stays her. makes it possible to keep them – to tug them over callused hands and tender pulse, and don them, without her gaze dropping from hers. “i will not fucking regift them, zhang, for fuck’s sake,” is all jaya offers, with an expressive roll of her eyes, more like herself than much else about this disquieting exchange.
she nods. thank you, her eyes say. her mouth does not know how to shape the words, without them tasting like weakness.
♦ ♦ ♦
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resurgentisjaya · 3 years
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there’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but i’m too tough for him, i say, stay in there, i’m not going to let anybody see you.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but i’m too clever, i only let him out at night sometimes when everybody’s asleep. i say, i know that you’re there, so don’t be sad.
— charles bukowski
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resurgentisjaya · 3 years
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her laughter curls like a wisp of smoke, darkly frosted.
slower, she corrects in her mind. all death is slow, if one considers the truth of existence. death began when life did. it did not matter whether one could find enough poetry in mortality to render it palatable – but jaya is certain that ayla dowling could. could she turn to poetry the sinister & inhumane, however? for whatever they venture towards — all six of them — it is not of them, not even amongst the spectrum the lot of them represent betwixt their rag-tag mass of mutineers. despite the strained debate in the sick bay hours prior — through which she’d stood in the corner, silent as a grave — speaking of communication and preservation, there is weaponry cached within the bulky layers donned to resist the bite of arctic chill, squirrelled away in pockets, seams, and holsters alike, whilst jaya treks over the disquietening ice-ground beneath their soles, which might thaw away at whim, as easily as it had hardened to a reality, with her partner assigned.
when did they get here? the fucking carnivale, the gunner would venture, though not out-loud, not to the captain’s girl.
yet her stoicism is not enough to dissuade ayla, as it never tended to be, no less than it stayed that fucking bhavsar, trudging on barely a foot away from her now, and she is aware, eerily so, of the glance her companion cants back towards the ship. you have a life back there, ayla tells her. you’re needed back there.
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it tilts jaya’s own head in the girl’s direction, gaze dark as the night, seemingly neverending. she had no idea, did she? the lives awaiting her aboard the promethean? the man representing the life she’d once lived, more than even iskender khodja could, from where he walked so near her, close as a shadow. the one she represented – julia: that gnarled, bewitching wild thing, in whose arms she’d found she could sleep without dreams. who would not be preyed on by nightmares jaya could vanquish. julia, who could have easily been slaughtered in the boatswain’s stead. julia.
                    “i know i do,” jaya agrees. she knows which life she wishes to choose. but wishes – there was a price to those, too. there was a price for everything. “this is me protecting that life, little bird.”
mentioned: @riversoaked​ / @arcancs​ / @arcticdoctor​ / @adinfinita​
“ the bodies decompose eventually. ”
“It happens slower out here.” Inclines her head, looks to Jaya by her side, or from herself by Jaya’s side. “Something to do with the temperature, or something to do with the death.” Her words sound foreign to her, and she wonders if her accent has slipped, the practiced one having dissolved away, eroded by the cold. There are layers and layers around her, but still it breaches, jolts straight for the chasm in her chest. Could be that she’s making an ice cavern in there too, just to match the surroundings. As above, so below. Let the inside match the out. You have to go through to get out. If you’re going through hell, keep going. No, no, that’s the reason, that’s the coldness. All the wild theories drifting through her mind, staggering sense with thoughts of devils and traps, deals and sacrifice. 
“When did we get here?” They’re at some unknown point on the ice, with nothing in sight but the same. If she turned her head she’d see it, so keeps her gaze to her feet, to her steps, or back to Jaya for some comfort at least. It’s not the time she’s asking, not even the date, but she doubts there can be any answer that makes sense. The pair of them traipsing across a wilderness with sky above and ice below, looking quite the same. Wonders if she should tilt herself, stand on her head and see if there’s a difference, if she’d know only by the ice, or if it would crack to submerge her, to give the same perspective. Would they all need to stand on their heads to make it happen? 
“You have a life back there, you’re needed back there.” Looks over her shoulder and can’t see the ship. Isn’t sure if back is the correct orientation. 
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resurgentisjaya · 3 years
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wick du vol –
he charges right into someone, multiple people, barely feels it, numb and near-shaking, as though the ice was lancing through his veins instead, where touch is a distant thought no matter the bruise he can feel begin to blossom on his hip from where he walked straight into something, and then kept going.
it’s only her voice, god her voice, that stops him in his track, the way the cracks in it line up with the ones overlaid on his vision, the way he can feel reality begin to shatter and melt underfoot. ( it’s the simplest answer - this can’t be real. this can no longer be real )
at first, all he can do is nod in answer to her question, his hands coming up to grab the opposite arms in a broken hug, grip going tight on his upper arms in some desperate attempt to ground himself. ‘ it’s not just the ice - it’s the ice and the ice wrong but there was something else there was something underneath it but it was it and it was wrong but it was - i don’t know. ‘ his own voice breaks, shutting off the fall of words that tumbled out without pause or reason, breaks and hitches, that animal-hurt sound coming closer to describing the pure fear that the creature instilled.
♦ ♦ ♦ 
her eyes are black moons — full and eclipsed by some spectral haunting — veiled over by unsettling darkness. it does not matter that she may have ordinarily snapped one’s hands for putting them on her, for this was no commonplace occurrence, and right then they felt like relief, like cold water on charred flesh: a jarring, yes, but necessary sensation, forcing a hole through a wall of blinding pain, making room to breathe.
his body quivers in her hold as helplessly as her own trembles beneath his hands. jaya has to force her breath, even as it aches, especially because it does. you are here, it is a reminder. you are still here. be here. her body still grapples, her mind still reels. “that was a man –” jaya’s breaths leave her in harsh, blistering gasps of air, the walls of her throat raw, as though she’s been screaming, and perhaps she is, it feels as though she is, inside, deep inside, even when her voice comes out in a pained croak.
“what the fuck?”
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resurgentisjaya · 3 years
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jack fox –
with their blood soaking in the sand, the gunner says. 
her gaze does not move, once it finds his in the low light of this, the kingdom of death and destruction that they share so uneasily between them. it reminds him, without her ever having to utter the words, to make the movement to sink the blade between his ribs, that such an action, such a setting, would not be unfamiliar to him. 
that’s all that sand is good for, he thinks. absorbing the blood. half-burying the body. 
he would have done it–if the captain had ordered it. the clairvoyant’s death card reversed, choice removed, he would have shot them all and left them there to be feasted on by carrion bird or nightmare creature alike–a good soldier does not question a command, a soldier is good for doing the unspeakable tasks, the soldier pulls the trigger and repeats to himself as he washes the blood from his hands, as he cleans the gore from his rifle with the tender caress of a lover, that he did it because it was good. 
the hero does what is necessary, that is the medal they pin to his chest, the cross that he bears. that is the price of glory. that is the price of sanity and self when all you know is death.
“people are quick to believe the supernatural, that something out there is stalking us and wearing the faces of the dead, before they will believe in something a simple as human cruelty.” he says in way of agreement, with a shrug of his shoulders. he tucks a stray lock of hair behind his ear, bites down hard on his bottom lip. “i’ve seen it–glory, it’s never more tantalizing than when the situation seems hopeless. they don’t call you a hero unless it first looks like you’re going to die, to lose.” 
he exhales slowly, shakes his head. “perhaps you’re right, jaya. perhaps i should have just done it–told the captain there were no survivors.” 
there was nothing i could have done, a voice says in the back of his mind. it’s out of breath, it’s hoarse, it speaks with forked tongue cradling every word carefully. the sergeant, he lost too much blood–all i could do was make sure that someone was with him, at the end. that he knew he died a hero. 
a young man bows his head solemnly, scrubs a dirty and bloodstained hand over his eyes. all i could do was promise that i would lead our men with all the dignity that he did–he seemed happy about that, i think. i hope he was–he deserves that. 
a young man smiles, but not too broadly, as a general puts a hand on his shoulder, and congratulates him on his new rank. make us proud sergeant fox, you’ve done well here today. 
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her shadowed reprieve, it is plain to see, is to be a short-lived affair. already, despite the rag that never ceases its methodical drag over the ridges of artillery, her body tilts to favour the view of her uncommon companion. fox’s presence punctures through the gunner-woman’s phantasmal indifference like an anthropod’s pincers, his words gnawing away at the cobwebs of the barricade she’s tucked herself away behind, until her conscious-mind oozes, hot as blood.
how funny, jaya considers, to find human cruelty difficult to believe in. it is all that had been left to count on for her. it was the only constant, as far as she could see. human cruelty, whether inherent or evoked, was inevitable. the universe could turn man into a wild thing upon whim. wasn’t that what their religions positulated about, coiled in cautionary tales? the strength needed to resist the devil’s seductive whisper, to resist potential for cruelty, and remain graceful and faithful and die a death that meant something, granted such by the dieties they believed in. man needed that, didn’t he? for an end to mean something. to be a name in history worth remembering? and none of them were. they were only bodies of blood, all of it red – all of it so terribly, tremendously easy to spill.
                       ( did sergeant fox know that? had the life he had lived, where spilt blood coated his hands as endlessly as it flowed through his veins, been one that had taught him such? as hers had done? perhaps, after all. perhaps, jaya allows. )
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upon the sight of him — for sight alone is oft-enough for her, all opportunity affords before it is too late, and so it goes in the lives she’s led — it is evident that he is not included in the majority he refers to. i’ve seen it, he tells her. glory, it’s never more tantalising than when the situation seems hopeless. what have you seen? jaya wonders, much to her own ample chagrin. they don’t call you a hero unless it first looks like you’re going to die, to lose.
jaya had spent her existence dying minor deaths. she knew loss in every sense of the notion: of love, of partner, of self. she had never been accused of heroism. and isn’t that just the difference between the two of them? blood on their hands, one like the other. he got medals for killing for a crown, and those medals shone brightly enough to blind. what is beneath them? does anyone know? fox is a piece of the triumvirate-whole — and yet, when he gleams, it is not with the innate gilded austerity that sutherland exudes without trying, nor the light flickering within yamatov from time to time. there is gloss that coats him – that conceals. but what?
she does not doubt that he was capable of committing atrocities. of slaughtering the agathe survivors. of lying to dowling. it only leaves one question:
“why didn’t you? you may as well tell me something i’ll fucking believe.”
mentioned: @aveaugvstus / @wilccard​
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resurgentisjaya · 3 years
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This is what it means to be a woman in this world. Every step is a bargain with pain. Make your black deals in the black wood and decide what you’ll trade for power. For the opposite of weakness, which is not strength but hardness. I am a trap, but so is everything. Pick your price. I am a huckster with a hand in your pocket. I am freedom and I will eat your heart.
Catherynne M. Valente, in Six-Gun Snow White
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