please cure the disease come on, baby, get a pretty picture of me while the world is dreaming about gold digging in their holes, oh, digging in their sleepless dreams
People said all sorts of shitty things about 'red'.
It made you angry, it made you fall in love. It was lucky, it was unlucky. It was bloody and violent, it was luscious, romantic. Idiots.
Like 'red' meant anything.
The breeze tugged at the candles in his palms, now little more than dribbled lumps of wax that ran through his fingers. They were 'red' in the same way that the ocean was 'green', a strontium mercury-II sulfide compound that he found tremendously soothing and was almost certainly toxic. Ironic, all things considered.
They burned like sunlight seen through flesh, the first light seen by the eye. A vermillion sky.
'Red'.
Idiots.
He'd been that way for hours, now, silent and still, but with a sudden, vicious snap he whipped a hand towards the old walls and spattered them cinnibar ('red'). The guttering light faded to a smoldering wick in his left hand--he watched it dispassionately, in defiance of his little tantrum, until it too faded and he was alone in darkness.
"Fuck."
He was in darkness, but he was not alone.
The central meditative area of the treehouse was abided by a statue representative of their conscious Buddha at the hall of a thousand, a reminder of their father-mother, their ever present conscience playing consciousness that tethered them to the ground through the life force network of nanites that comprised their existence. They were a knotted web, networked and knitted to each other and when Habushu tugged, Toska was pulled.
It was inevitable that the Firefly would watch him from her balcony, leaning heavily on those hands that trembled with the weight of all her power.
The meditation platforms swung free between the branches, secured by thick ropes, heavy chain, covered by pergolas that were heavy with ivy and paper chain offerings from the left behinders.
In the darkness, she cleared her throat and looked down upon the tattooer with muted interest, with piqued kindness.
"You could come to meditate with the others."
Of course.
How long she had been there was both a mystery and irrelevant. She was there now, which was enough--Toska the Firefly, miracle worker. Cracking the dried wax that coated his hands, he tugged his robe up with sticky fingers to hide the raw skin of his latest masterpiece. Like the wax, it was beginning to crack. The wind had dried it, it would need more lotion.
"I'd distract them and they'd distract me. Shouldn't you be asleep?"
"Neither of us need or desire it, so why beg the question."
That tiny woman traced glittering fingertips along the woodgrain twirl of the railing, watching the waves move in her minds eye through that living ocean of splintering age.
"Despite the stereotype of silence and calm, every ember sings a different song when they meditate because every ember sings for a different fire," she murmured, though her voice carried on the drifting spots of light that floated on the stillness of the night like tufts of dandelion. "Most of their fires are smoldering, low and slow-- but you have always been the flint, the striking stone. Sharp spark and heavy flame."
She smiled, ruefully, then.
"Perhaps if your meditation is distracting, then their meditation is only a second thought."
A nail on the head.
"They do their best."
Why defend them?
A compulsive devil's advocate, it felt as wrong to admonish them for their failures as it did to praise their attempt. It wasn't that they didn't try, just that they fell so...
Short.
You couldn't light a lantern with an ember. They hadn't the dedication to throw themselves into the fire, to set themselves ablaze from within, and they cowered behind meditation and mumbled their prayers to bathe weakness in righteousness. They walked the right path, lip-serviced the right parables and pretended they knew what it meant, even up to pretending that to know that they knew nothing!
He was being harsh on them, and he knew it, but he was equally harsh on himself for his own hypocrisy. What use was piety without temptation? If he couldn't be silent in the face of a storm, what use was silence in peace? He could barely stand the roar in his own head, let alone having to listen to others, but at least he roared, and if at the end he was deafened by his own noise at least he had a real trial to stand against.
How could they feign enlightenment when they'd never had to shout to be silent?
"They don't deserve to be scorned for it."
Probably.
"Neither do you," she served, sharply. Then softer. "Even on your own terms."
She looked out into the night, then, tracing the constellations through the treetops, always repeating her tired refrain of night time stories to tell to the dying, a circular motion of parables in her head.
"Next time you have company over, spare a moment to see the door shut. We don't have many children here these days, but the child bodies that have adults inside them do get frustrated when they stumble across something they'll never have." Toska's smirk held her laughter breath back from her lips, even as her fingers came to help bar the passage.
Standing, now, on the free-swinging chamber, he blinked.
And laughed.
"Were you watching that too?" Climbing free wasn't as difficult as it looked when you got the hang of it, and he was used to it now even in the dark, moving to climb his way over to solid footing and the firefly that lit on it.
"They should know there's nothing decent about my place. Maybe that's why they drop by."
"I see most things, in one sight or another," she mused, coming to the railing where Habushu would eventually break through the foliage and back into her first sight, her eye view. "I would be ill prepared as Firefly if I did not." Leaning to her elbows, she looked down upon his form, observing his limbs as he climbed, analyzing his movements and recalibrating his joints ever so slightly as he made his ascent. Regular maintenance was the key to all longevity in their world, now, and Toska would never lose more than she had to.
"But mostly, this time, I was told."
"Ask."
When she worked on him he felt it. Even the microadjustments, the little tune ups to keep things working smoothly, and he grit his teeth as he felt her doing it now. He spent plenty of time putting himself in significant enough disarray that her meddling--
No, that wasn't it, really.
"It's my body. You want to fix me up? Ask, don't waft along and wave your magic fucking wand."
The arrogance of it. The mother knows best bullshit. She wasn't the only one that knew how to tend a fire, and if he built a blast furnace instead of a bonfire that was his own fucking--
A breath. In, then out, fingers running through his hair, eyes closed for a moment. It was like seeing double, the calm and the fury all at once. Just trying to help and cleaning up her toys. He was not her fucking toy.
"Who told you?"
"I am not in possession of any magic wands," the little woman replied, fingers twining in her brackish hair. "And have not in fact ever seen any in use as those were relevant to a mythology before our time."
She hummed that sad little song of hers as she recollected years upon years of microrepair, decades of adjustment that her entry into his sacred body undid in an instant. Thousands of individual actions over their conjoined lifetimes,
accompanied by her mantra in time, her sutra song.
Cartilage, natural and synthetic, wore away as rust she'd shined away chipped into his pelvic joints. The oil dried in those fingers, gnarled now with their arthritic throb that his undamaged nerves felt all too sharply,
and how that beautiful man's body sagged with age.
"If it is preferable this way, who am I to tend your fire while you pursue your true calling, while you spread beauty through our world that has so little." She canted her head, watching even as the junctures of his body squealed. "But if it is a matter of pride, then I acquiesce now after so many decades of disrespect, score upon score of years that I didn't wish to see your body in my bed-- If it is a choice you wanted, then you may decide:
"Would you like me to repair you?"
It was always impressive how quick healers were to reverse their arts, pent up memories of injuries and abuses stockpiled like an arsenal. He'd seen it before and would see it again, but to see it from her brought a harsh smile to aging lips even as his hands snarled in bone-deep pain, joints screaming. He swayed on his feet and fell back to rough bark, suddenly short of breath.
"You've been tending fake children too long, Firefly, you're starting to act like one." He laughed, which turned quickly to a cough, body shaking as he pressed himself against the tree behind him in an effort not to topple. Even as he said it he knew he would relent, as did she. Once upon a time resistance might have been a point of honor, but like the frog boiled slowly she had him now the way she had all of them. Their merciful tyrant, arrogant little saint.
"You won't think twice about it," he manages, forcing his breathing even, in and out, dry and waxy fingers pressing back against the bark, "but I like that this is what you chose. You didn't have to, and we both know it, but I like that you did."
Another long breath, laughter and masochistic mirth fading to a dry chuckle of defeat.
"Yes, Toska, I'd like you to repair me."
"I only play this game with you because you always seemed to enjoy your scraped elbows," she chided in those quiet, loving tones, smile crooked for the reach of her heart. But she allowed his breath to remain ragged as she leaned down, chin in those seemingly petulant hands.
"You and I are similar in that the memory of pain drives our calling." She paused to feel his breath rasp through her own lungs for a moment, before she closed her eyes-- closed their connection. "You cannot capture colour without knowing the flash of every wound. I cannot understand how to heal without understanding the agony that a dull throb becomes in fast forward motion." She cracked her pale eyes open, to spy his response to her next query.
"Would you like to feel the repair or would you like me to take the hurt away?"
"You play the game because you and I both like it when you're honest about what you are to this place."
In the land of entropy, the girl with her finger on rewind is queen, and she knows it. They both knew the answer to her question, but considering this all started because she hadn't asked...
"Go on then, Firefly. Show me some fucking color."
"As you wish," she said, whispered into Habushu's ear from so far away.
She tried to make it as quick as possible, to ease the burden of time in favour of the brightest flash of colour Habushu had ever seen-- a sick crack resonated through the man's body as everything that she'd misaligned came realigned again, as the rust scrubbed out once more, chips dissolving in the joints they'd shed into. Relubricated, cartilage resown in the ache of aftermath.
And within all of that was the brightest shock of red that Habushu would ever recount.
There are only just so many ways to experience pain, and Habushu liked to think of himself as being familiar with most of them, but In the end it all boiled down to nervous distress. Stringy little organic threads screamed alarm at whatever damage they processed, but the difference in cries was superficial. It all just spelled agony, be it a cut or a burn or a broken leg, dull aches and sharp pains alike. Eventually pain is pain, no matter how you slice it, and it hurts.
So you have to get a little creative with it once and a while.
The sound was almost as good as the sensation, but it paled in response to that color. Red like it was meant to be seen, vital and throbbing and desperately alive. The kind of red that doesn't exist on a colorwheel, that made strontium mercury (II) sulfide candles look like bloody water. Not vermillion, cinnibar, cadmium, crimson--
Red, in a way that made him want to pull people's eyes open and make them see it.
His arousal in the aftermath was a distraction, an obnoxious side effect he did his best to bat away like a fly as he knit things back together. Bones throbbed with the memory, the silence in his joints more poignant after the fact.
"Did you see that?" He swallowed with a breathless chuckle, trying to pull his pulse back to normal with even, steady. "Fuck. Like you read about."
How was he ever going to capture that?
She regarded him with that sideways air, knowing well he'd recover quickly with the strength of inspiration. Toska had seen the colour, but she had already experienced it and a myriad others that were absent from Habushu's chemical palette. How she would share them if she could-- but it would be a torture she would wish on no one, despite the eroticism of the artist's inevitable reactions.
"We'll always be children together," she said quietly. "Even when we're breaking down, we'll be children together."
She stood, then, fingers lingering on the railing that her spitting, pain-mangled Romeo would not be bypassing this evening, if for nothing but the echo of his experience resonating soundly in their memories.
"You can come to me when you feel weak. I won't burden your body now that I know all you want is a sharp crack."
"The breaking down is the point."
He was finding his way back--pain was a short fix, sodium and potassium and adrenaline ground out swiftly under the dopamine-seratonin-endorphine cocktail that doused his system.
"Self-destruction is the only path to enlightenment and always has been." They weren't children anymore, either of them, but no need to rub it in her face. Toska was wise on stolen knowledge, heavy with borrowed agonies. So much for a martyr--the greedy little Firefly got a leg up in the race by taking the pain of others as her own.
Cheater.
None of the other embers really understood. Suffering was something to be avoided, a failure to anesthetize. They all sought the silence, but it was easier to teach a child to reach nothingness--oneness, no-self, annihilation and unification--by removing suffering than by exhausting it in all its forms.
"Don't lie. You liked making it hurt." He added, a smirk quirking his lips.
"Only so you can paint me pictures." Her words were a whisper in the darkness, toned sepia by the dying light of her nanites withdrawing from the air. "You know I love to see the world as you see it."
The little healer gifted him a smirk before she turned through the dimly backlit curtain of her room.
If it was important for Habushu to think her a sham, a false martyr, an iron fisted dictator who ruled only by threat of agony, then she would be that lie for him.
But she only hit rewind for one man and he was stuck between the Buddha's platform and a woman who loved him like no one else.
"Goodnight, Habushu-- I hope you meditate well."
"Go. Sleep." He waved her off by means of goodbye, turning to look out into the jungle night. Propping himself up on the railing, he breathed out slowly with a half-cocked smile. How did that get there?
"Dream something for me."
---
She would find it a few days later, slipped past the beads that barred her door while she was out. Ink on paper, a sodden world of statues at night, gnarled hands cupping a single, illuminating firefly. The note rolled in the scroll read only 'Close'.
The little bug didn't glow red. Not quite.
But almost.
we go on and we go on, go nowhere every day we're trying to suppress that nothing matters anyway ride and ride until you're hollow we got no mythologies to follow