her open door.
[ stille . habushu ] [ fuckin' smut ]
The light was dim.
It slipped into the small structure through the seams around windows inked shut, laquered in papers and battened against cold. Light flickered from tallow and crawling caterpillars of incense, ground and rendered and burned rather than simply turned on or off.
Hot, and humid. His den made skin grow slick as the day it was born and he kept it just so, his artificial womb, and he lay amidst a tangle of blankets long past mid day. The dueling metallic and organic scents--iron, copper, orange and flesh--were heady enough to lull him to half-sleep.
Suspended in inebriated not-quite-daydreams, he played at crafting paper birds he hoped would save him from the inevitable gravity of hangover.
They wouldn't, but he made them flap anyway.
"It smells like balls in here, Habushu, balls and incense," a pale esper chided, songbird sharp, from the doorway wrenched open without a knock. Her lithe form was backlit from the glow of the afternoon through the treetops, pale haired, pale skinned, pale eyed as she always was. But that unmistakable smirk, red like the warmonger tanager that threatened to escape her whenever she spoke. The little thief dare not enter, not yet anyways. She was gonna let that shit air out for a second.
"Late night, baby?"
"You'd know."
His lips stopped working on whatever koan it was he'd been mouthing his way through, lips curled around words curled around lips that were just as hard to extricate himself from as the blankets around him. He tried again with more success.
It wasn't that she shocked him to life so much as witness brought his reverie to an end, haziness coalescing indecency and obscenity out of whatever exotic plinth he'd aspired to. Another half-assed attempt at breathing something more into the mundane.
Too much orange.
"What do you want."
"I came to see if the beast yet lives," the girl said as she stepped out of her shoes and into the room, standing astride the lounging artist's hips as she looked down into his hazed face. She leaned down, hands on her knees, to examine. He looked high. She wasn't sure what he could be high on. Besides himself.
"You don't seem pleased I came to visit. You wound me. I thought you'd missed me."
"I think you like to be wounded. Why else would you come back." He didn't want to be pleased, though of course he was. Some nonsense masculine pride--of course she'd come back--that would give way later to disgust rose and was set carefully aside as he sat up proper, scratching idly through the unruly mess of his dark hair. His titanium tanager, sharp bones and white skin that managed to make him feel somehow unfinished, a manling of clay still waiting to be fired.
He'd experimented with pottery not long ago, so failures with clay were fresh enough on the brain.
Still, the lips he'd always felt effiminately full were starting to curve.
"Yes. I missed you. Help me find my shirt."
She backed up just a little so that the simple act of sitting up wasn't a sexual advance and she grinned as she left her position over him, turning to the windows to open them wide, to bring the fresh air into the man's hot yoga sauna.
"I think the view's fine without it," she offered casually before she leaned onto his window sill, looking out into the jungle through the thrashing of tree branches and the colourful array of emerald leaves.
She'd always loved the treehouse. It seemed so careless, so light,
so freeing.
The girl stretched her calves as she gazed out, sunlight filtering across her white hot features, making her glow in the mid afternoon light.
"Were you dreaming of something? Besides dying of heat stroke."
The breeze was eviscerating, slipping through his emotional muddling and paring it bare like a duelist's knife. Hardly cold, it seemed it on his bare flesh, the muscle selective and utilitarian on an otherwise spare chassis. It wasn't immediate but he could feel the world begin to sharpen, catching at the edges in a way it hadn't in the dimness and heat. The sheen on his arms caught the breeze and lit him with chill the way it turned her to light, though which caught his breath for just that tiny hiccup he couldn't say.
The emerald was blinding, zinc cadmium sulfide before he knew what any of that meant. He still couldn't taper the edges just right.
"You never tell me your dreams, why do you get to know mine." He forced himself to his feet and took a sudden and unexpected step, feet moving with experimental slowness beneath him. A moment to steady himself before he joined her at the too-small window, propping himself over her instead of embracing or moving up beside her. He was just beginning to feel the familiar static again, he didn't want to turn on the electricity yet.
"Running to or away from something this time?"
"Just making conversation," she claimed, mock indignant at his accusatory tone-- but she did push back slightly when she felt him around her, denying him the priviledge of controlling the voltage of the room. The ink he'd gifted her pressed back into the slickness of his cold sweat belly, and she rested her chin in her hands as she continued her light gazing in the afternoon sun.
"If I don't get to know what you're dreaming, you don't get to know where I'm off to. You know my visits don't come with strings." She twisted a little, then, altering their skin to skin touch with eye contact as she peered over her shoulder. "Why do I have to be running someplace? I said I just came to see you."
The contact was a jolt, battery clicking into place, but her eyes overloaded the circuit. He broke the gaze after a moment, looking out into the organic landscape, thick coiling barks and seas of leaves. Muted stone barely peeking through some distance off, a reminder that there were other people here. Sometimes welcome, sometimes less so. As childish as it seemed he was hurting her feelings, and maybe he didn't have to be so mean.
"I dreamed nonsense." He breathed out, letting the edge of him carry out into the foliage. Would it cut the trees? Light them on fire, more likely, he must have miscalculated the sugar. "Fucked up nothings. I inked someone's back into a wolf that told me the secret of eating yourself, so I swallowed myself until I vomited bells that rang so loud my head split like a...flower...with a baby inside..."
He breathed the hoarse out of his throat, let it gallop along. Pride made him smile, even if it didn't stop him saying it.
"I've been low. I'm glad you came back."
"Mm-hmm," she mused at the back of her throat, turning then in his arm, back pressed to the sill as she forced his chin to her, to reconnect their gaze. "I bet you're always glad to see my back."
She knew just the spot to tease to light him up again. The tenderest point.
The most susceptible to her electric breed of pain.
"I can tell, you know." She eased him closer, pulling his arms around her, then, begging the touch she'd left behind, to revisit familiar grounds in an unfamiliar time. Pressed her body to his inkskin. Wrapped her arms around his neck. "I'm sorry you're feeling low."
"Let me guess. You've got a cure."
His lips curled into a smile too soft for him, his doe eyes too gentle for him. The metal under his skin came to life like old circus lights under her touch, popping and crackling with skittering sparks that lit up old nerve endings worn dull in the meantime. He went for the sharp of her, fingers trying to cut themselves on hip bones and vertebrae or knead to the firmness beneath the flesh. They worked at her back like an instrument, slid down her spine like a long low chord but always, always, they circled the ink.
Carbon, last time, so much carbon, cadmium selenide zinc aluminum barium titanium dioxide titanium titanium
If she didn't have a cure, he did. It might be the same one, but it was always a good one.
"You're a tramp," she breathed shortly, gaily, too close to his mouth as she arched into his body, shuddered at his trespassing touch. "I can't cure you, baby. You're a breed of sick not even your Firefly can fix." Falcon words, carrion touch, she twined her pale fingers in that carbon jet hair, twisted and rolled his head back till her lips found that soft spot under the jaw,
the kill spot.
She nipped him.
But the girl wasn't a killer today, just taunted him with the edge of the knife & the ivory prick of her teeth.
She pulled his head back down to her and smiled when she met his eyes.
"What kind of magic d'you think I've got that's gonna cure a man like you?"
The same magic that held him captive.
Meat magic, he told her with his tongue, catching her lips to make her see. Blood and muscle and teeth, skin, the organic thaumaturgy of that little slut carbon that wove itself into the messiness of life with such aggressive gusto. That built grotesqueries and imperfections and entranced him with its squalor and beauty.
Carbon should be black as midnight, no-light, but she was pale enough to make his sienna skin look dark.
He would have built her from titanium.
His teeth should have sparked on hers. The current should have carried and electrified them both, but it didn't, but it did.
He craved oxygen, helium, nitrogen, gasses not metal but at least a step removed from the rush carboncarboncarbon he demanded from her, but he could only tug himself away from her lips, pulling away just enough to snare her own panted breath.
"The kind that keeps me sick."
She scooted, slightly, to edge her ass onto the sill of the window, to pull him closer, even as she pulled her lips out of reach.
That dove of a girl was in his hands now, and if she fell, it was on him.
But she knew, she knew as addicted as he was to the smoothness of her thighs the way her knees trembled when he touched her just so
she'd be safe.
"This isn't healthy," she confessed to him, to tell him the truth of a matter they both already knew. "You need to find a girl who's gonna settle down, stick around."
Even as she spoke, her heels hooked behind him.
The illusion of control. She loved to offer it
and he loved to take it
with her.
"Do you care?"
He was surprised that the question came out like it did, dry from a wet body so close to her, but it was the common wonder of the occasionally loved. One among many, a piece on the board, a notch on the bedpost, what was he to her? He never asked the pathetic question, and never would, but his mouth curved around it sometimes like his hips curved into hers.
Her hooked heels caught him in the kidneys, a pair of daggers, and the thought pulled his lips back from his teeth. He laughed as he leaned in, let her stretch over the sea of cadmium emeralds below, and caught one of her lips in his teeth.
"Do I look like I care?"
Metals and elements and chemicals couldn't explain what he felt inside her.
She had fever hands, fingers in heat, fleeting sparrow, fretting crow. Even here she was a thief-- buttons, closures, zippers, tabs. She trespassed, stripped him bare, cocked his gun and set him to fire.
"Shutup and fuck me."
If she were better, she wouldn't come here. She'd stay away and hope for his best-- but when it came to blows, she needed her sometimes lover and it didn't matter how much he fractured, how much he faded each time she made him come, what kind of a ghost he was when she left him behind.
She called him a friend, but in these moments it didn't matter who he was besides someone who always, always said yes
and never had the hitch in pride to ask her why, the desperation to ask her for more.
All she knew was that Habushu worshipped her body, craved her like a drug, and she was all too happy to be his fix.
So did she care? No. But neither did he.
All she wanted to be was in ruins, and she knew that he would provide.
It felt good to be honest and disgusting and honest.
He stripped her like a wire, ripping off the insulation to leave her bare and live. Animal magnetism slammed them together in a car crash of hips, his sex in hers. She might have hooked him with heels to the back but he struck for the heart, up and in, and if he left pieces of himself behind in the wet drag and friction that might have been the best part.
Lips and teeth collided with skin and lips and teeth, but his fingers ground her against him from the only metals she let beneath her skin.
His metals.
That pale skin, tender and bloodless, would bruise by sunset. Always, he marked her. By his pigment in her skin, by the evidence he left in her, on her,
rough.
Her utterances were always stacatto, breathless. Nevermind the open door, the windows open wide-- there was only abandon, only reaction. She, without resistance. He, without tolerance.
Neither afforded control.
When they ended up on the inevitable floor, panting and covered in spit and salt, she held him inside her, pulled him closer with alabaster thighs like chains to keep him a captive.
Willing, malleable, deplorable.
Still she breathed from his mouth, welcome parasite, conniving betrayer of his spectral body.
"Do you love me?"
Teased, breathed. Her hands lay claim to a landscape of ink that she only owned in temporary stretches, sometimes moments.
It was inside her and he needed it.
Locked away in her messy carbon chains behind beaks and claws and mockingbird eyes, it was there and he knew it. Could taste it in and under her skin, feel it when he punctured her. It burned, bright and venomous, searing when it touched him in acid agony.
He built it with every collision, battering dreamed metals barely understood desperation together in an instinctual alchemy. It was moments like this that he fought so hard for, scraped and clawed out of thin air in a world so vivid but so flawed. He hated how much easier it was when she was there.
She wanted ruins so he'd build her a bomb
out of himself, the bits and pieces lost in drag and evaporation and clicking together in a feverdream schematic. Click click clicking into place while they fuck fuck fucked each other to death.
And then he found it,
caustic catalyst,
And blew them both away.
While he basked in the irradiated exhaustion, burning bright while pieces were picked up, examined and fit back together in not quite the same place, leaving cracks, a question.
"Yeah." He hummed against her skin in a moment of weakness, all eggshell mosaic and shellshock empty.
"Yeah I do. And I'll never forgive you for that."
And she knew every crack in his porcelain body, saw the monster that stirred beneath. If only she broke him, shattered his vase skin, he'd be a beast,
inconsolable, unresponsive, heathen.
But for now, he loved her. For now, he hated her-- even if he didn't say it not out loud.
When the white ash had settled, burning and crystallizing in her lungs, all she could do was laugh-- tired and breathy and broken, almost sad in its quavering sigh, its warbling bird song a learned mockery of the truth. But regardless, her movements were affectionate, her tangles perilous, her grip possessive,
for she owned him in this moment she owned him in every moment.
"I know," she purred. "But you'd be sad if I took it away."
Addicted. Sick.
And it was always her who kept him that way.
It was alarming how quickly clarity followed the blast, jungle wind whispering to him through the newly formed negative space. When he healed it was muddied, snagged in clingy flesh, but vitrified as he was in the aftermath he found himself laughing too.
His lips curled into a placid smile, an uncharacteristic expression for his otherwise brooding face. Leaning in towards her ear, he lazily nipped at the lobe.
"You should keep running, Stille." He hummed in an exhale, hot flesh growing languid. "You play so big and bad, but one day you'll see I've made you just as messy as I am and all the quick feet and snappy comebacks in the world won't save you.
"But you can't help yourself either, so I guess we deserve each other."
"You wouldn't know what to do with me if I stayed," she said quietly, almost melancholy in its chord. Wrapped her words around his throat and pulled. "Maybe you'd be happy for a while. A few months. And then something would happen-- you'd find someone new or you'd knock me up or both, and you'd realize that it's better in these moments." She kissed him, gently. "That you love me in moments, not in years."
She stroked his hair, like the lover she could have been and not the slut she was. Vitriol gone from her dirty mouth, her lips tender, calm. Soft in these moments of afterthought, of introspection, of reverie.
She kissed him like she loved him. Loved him like the only choice was to go.
"I'm only magic in short bursts. I only get you high till you build up a tolerance. You know that. You always have."
"I love it when you miss the point."
His lips curled in a smile against hers, his hands slipping over her to rest at her hips. They could play lovers like this all they wanted, they both knew what they were. Different animals, different toxins, both lethal in large doses.
It didn't stop him from spreading spider fingers over her back, tickling her spine, her hips, what was on top of them.
What about gradual payloads?
"Is this the part where we play house, or do I finish up your tattoo before I come down?"
She almost hissed a series of curses at him-- for dissolving the moment she had to feel something for him besides what still spread between her thighs. She pushed him with those eyes narrowed, pushed his soft body out of her own as she frowned a pout, petulant in her sudden animosity.
"I dunno when I'll come by next."
"When you miss someone who ruins your moment."
Instead of just letting you win.
The sad part was he did miss it, wanted it back when it was gone. The tenderness, the almost-real love. Something he'd never ask for, something he'd never have. She was right--he did hate her for making him love her, for taking the shiny pieces of him to add to her collection.
For only loving him when she had the upper hand.
For keeping herself safe from him.
But he was every junkie after all, and there was no rush like self-destruction.
Maybe she wouldn't come back.
But she always did.
Birds of a feather.
She eased. Smiled. The burn of his words seemed to glide right off her coat of platinum feathers, red tipped and sharpened to the lash. Didn't stick. Couldn't stick. When he'd slid off her, she lounged for him, rolling to her belly. Odalisque pretty, heady from the perfume of the whore's fantasy she played for her lover's pleasure.
"You can finish."
That pale girl rested her chin on her hands, satisfied for the moment, in the moment. Closed her eyes, resting in the knowledge that here she was safe,
even as she waited for Habushu to get inside her again.