vi harper, evil succubus (violetsarered) wrote in invol_rpg, @ 2013-01-04 14:11:00 |
|
|||
In another life, another world parallel to our own, they met in Tokyo for New Year's Eve. Marine held her close and told her she was beautiful, and they drank champagne and made Nolan blush and made Lottie laugh and that night Vi told her, "I ____ you," and Marine smiled and nodded because she knew, because that was all right, because their friendship was what mattered and though she did not, could not feel for Vi in that way, she appreciated Vi's depth of feeling. It mattered to her, and mattered in general, and she appreciated it, and she felt it. What she had to give in return was gratitude, and Vi felt that too. Life had been easier when she did not feel things; not keenly, anyway. That way it didn't matter when someone went away, when someone left her behind, when her father disappeared on business for months or her mother wanted too much from her, wanted her to be someone good and kind and polite, wanted her to be more like her cousins. It was easier to turn it off. And the powers came, and they made it that much easier: to laugh, to control, to dismiss. "People are just chemicals," Vi said to a psychotherapist once. "It's amazing how little they matter once you know that." There had been a statue on the mantelpiece at home, where her mother lives, where she lived back when all of this was simpler, a statue of Guānyīn Púsà that she always liked. She brought it with her to IVI when she was forced to come, with a carton of cigarettes hidden in its hollow bottom, and though the cigarettes were confiscated the statue was not, so it sat on her desk and watched her while she took men to bed or women to bed or homework to bed (this was a rare thing but it did happen) or just herself to bed, to sleep, to dream. ("Can you really build anything?" she asked Marine.) Vi never regarded compassion as an especial gift she possessed, but the statue made her feel that at least she was trying. Look, I am a good person underneath it all. Look, the bodhisattva of mercy is here at my table. Look, I am full of charity in my secret heart. But she never felt it. L_ve. The word was so alien to her core that she could hardly even say it in her head, in her mind, unspoken but believed. Lo_e. When they told her what had happened, her rage was like mist, her grief like smog. Everyone in the room was overcome. Autopsies are being conducted. She will never be quite the same again; she can't turn it off anymore. _ove. Something was turned on in her, more profoundly than she'd ever been turned on before. It was a pinprick of light in her gut, one that multiplied and spread and shattered all throughout her body like a virus. Lo__. Once when she was a little girl her mother told her about the èguǐ, the hungry ghosts, about the men and women who died voracious before their time and couldn't ever rest. About how they craved, how they slavered, how in their thirst for food or lust or money they were infinite, eternal. The idea had thrilled her, had scared her, had set her imagination afire. To think that wanting made life go on, even after death -- and there were so many things she wanted, so many things she knew she needed to have. Wherever Marine was, Vi did not think she was hungry. Not in that way. She had been so free, even when she was burdened. She had been a giver, not a taker. Sometimes she gave too much, sometimes she gave too passionately, petulantly. But Marine never took. Vi was a taker, was a predator, was the huntress in the dark who clasped joy in her jaws and never let it go. She wanted to have, to possess, to know every sensation there was to know. But she had never wanted this. This feeling that all art was made from, that all music was written about. This feeling that she had only come to understand just before it calcified into a dagger in her gut. For years she had thought she would never know it. Love. She wondered: need one die to become a hungry ghost? |