vi harper, evil succubus (violetsarered) wrote in invol_rpg, @ 2013-04-17 08:15:00 |
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Last night languished stale in her mouth, and she turned onto her side as the light came up through the window, crawling under the blinds like a burglar, like a refugee, like a thief, scrabbling for purchase under the shade that struggled to keep it out. She had once been a night person, a child of the streetlamps, kin to the smoked-out gakked-out sisters of the club, all leather sofas and private smiles. Now she was a rat in a trap, an ant under a magnifying glass. The sun bit her stubborn eyelids. When she opened her eyes she saw Yael still sleeping, a gulf between them (somehow, impossibly) in the narrow bed. Room enough for a ghost. Vi rose silently, the sunlight through slatted blinds marking her bare breasts with a lattice of bright and dark lines; a necklace of morning. She pulled on her black silk robe, drew the sash tightly around her waist. In the bottom of the closet, beneath the filmy lace of a fallen brassiere, the dead woman she had loved looked up at her from the cover of a magazine. Yael muttered recriminations in her sleep. Vi glanced over one shoulder to watch the other woman turn over, then shut the closet door. ** Mid-shower was the only time Vi felt truly clean; her skin was always working, her pores opening like microscopic mouths to whisper sweet nothings into the air. Her body made its own perfume, musky and heady and thickly sexual. She loved it -- reveled in it, though at times it could become oppressive, could make her feel as though she were not alone in her own flesh. Water swept it all away, made her powers start over fresh from scratch. She felt at once powerless and innocent, like a vulnerable child. It was not a sensation she allowed herself when Yael was awake. While drying her hair, she traced over the back of her neck with a long, lacquered fingernail. She could feel the pheromones starting again, hissing sinuously out of her skin. They were different, this time. They started in her heart. ** Twenty feet away, they stood with signs -- Daisy and her boys, Sonia and Understanding, legions of students they'd all managed to bring together. They stood together harmonious, united in purpose, there to sing a song of peace for their brother and sister Vols so far away. Vi wanted to claw their eyes out. In the shadowy demesne of her memory, the sallow face of Zhou Xilai was laughing at her. In her dream, Marine sang in a language she could not understand. None of this is going to work. Not the posters, not the letters, not the Twitters, and certainly not whatever kumbaya nonsense was about to erupt in the quad. Daisy was saying something impassioned, her face animated, far enough away that Vi remained blissfully ignorant of the words. Children. They're all children. Her gaze slid to the other side of the demonstration, to Laurel and Jonas and their Occupy Vol Street coterie, to Devon and her fucking t-shirts. Even these. They're more useless than the Pollyannas. "Kiss me," Marine had whispered in her dream, dry lips like faded rose petals. "Remember me. Love me. There are more like me. More who are going to die." Vi woke staring into Yael's hard, still face. No. No more. Her skin was wet, hot. Alive. ** The demonstration was going well -- as well as Sonia could have hoped, considering how quickly it was thrown together and the volatility at IVI. Warm Australian sun beat down on the protesters, and though Sonia donned a hat to keep the sun off her face, she couldn't help but feel annoyed at the dirt and the heat. With her camera phone, she panned out, showing the group of assembled Vols with their signs, and then the ever-present guards. To Vols at IVI, the guards had become nearly invisible. Just another part of the landscape. But to outsiders, an armed military presence would be disturbing. She approached them, asked a few questions, and received polite answers or no response: "Do you feel sympathy with Vols, also living apart from your loved ones in the Outback?" "Has working at IVI changed how you feel about Vols?" "It must be pretty hot in that get-up, right?" "What do you think about the allegations about conditions at the Voronezh Training School in Russia?" Sonia watched something in the guard's placid face; anger he'd been concealing bubbled up from under the surface. "Don't know what you're all so upset about," he said with a sneer. "Just be glad we haven't rounded you all up and gotten rid of you for good. Still time, though." She froze, knowing that she should have had some sort of ready response to this, but she felt like she'd just been slapped in the face, or worse. Sonia had heard nasty things and been called ugly names before. But never had someone said she -- and everyone like her -- should be rounded up and murdered. Not to her face, at least. "Excuse me?" she started to say, but one of the superiors lurking nearby had already descended. "Why don't you give me your phone," she said, and Sonia bristled. She was tired of always being conciliatory to the IVF, giving them the benefit of the doubt, writing level-headed policy suggestions in papers no one would ever read, and playing good Vol. Everything about this situation made her unbearably angry. "No." The official held out her hand, a tight smile on her face. "Everything will be better for everyone if you just hand it over." Sonia lifted her phone so that she could get a good shot of the official. "You obviously heard what he just said, and you're trying to censure me? No way am I giving you my phone." ** When it all started, Vi didn't know what she had done, what she had set in motion. Didn't know for certain, anyway, though she could feel her endocrine system shifting into place, knew the prickling, primal sensation of giving herself over to the power. She knew she was giving off waves. It was simply this: the waves had never done that before. But once they did, once the punches started flying, once there was blood on the grass and in her mouth (she had taken a shot to the jaw, some underclassman she barely recognised, and the tart metal taste was in that moment the nectar of the gods), she knew. And she was delighted. It's me. I'm doing something. I'm doing something. Something, after all this time and all this horror, was better than nothing. Better than platitudes, and candlelight vigils, and magazine covers lurking in unexpected places where they might peek out, might appear without warning, dead girl eyes on glossy paper. In her limbs the power danced through every vein, through sinew and muscle and bone, her skin singing with the sheer joy of orgiastic exertion. She laughed aloud amid the carnage, unable to help herself, sweat-salt streaking down her forehead, her neck, her back, her shoulders, her inner thighs. She was still laughing when the soldiers dumped a gallon of water over her head and dragged her away. |