VII. ASPOILED
Zelda's presence always spoils the moment, starches it into happiness too much for Tancred to bear. /But he bears it anyway; he likes her ice-cold-winter-kisses and her frosted-breath-on-his-ear-saying/: saveyourself.
There are small minutes, locked up seconds, in which she can disappear, few and far between, gaps like baby teeth wrenched out and bleeding stubs, or like how he just really hasn't breathed in several years. That would be it, yes.
He certainly isn't breathing now because that would a waste of time and God they don't have much time at all, why is much even in that sentence? and he thinks it half-mad, maniacally, even though he's only love-drunk and scrambled, because here she is oh, and now, it isn't just careful not-eye-touching in the hallways and the ghost passage of her invisible shadow as you pass by, careful and fingers gripped into whiteness, keep your eyes away, you must. It's more than than, save us. Save her, if you can't care enough to save yourself.
And he'd save her from anything, anything at all, except he can't, she won't let him, and while he might just go and save her anyway because she's infinitely more than anything in the world, he's shallow, a white undercooked pancake, cowardly and hiding under beds, calling out for her hand in the darkness while she is up in the tower kneeling in chains by the monsters and feeding them red grapes. Oh yes, the hatred he's come to collect upon himself is dramatically increasing with every moment he spends living and falling further and deeper and greater into a love chasm that is darker than black, darker than night skies and dead suns, light being stolen out at a rate of everything per second.
She's here.
This is all that really currently matters. All that matters, ever. She's in his seconds, the longest bits, the parts of his life that he lives, while the rest is tedious and grey matter, stuff between the pages, nothing he ever pays any attention to, and she is the bits that are in color despite those colors being dark and folded over like velvet, rich soft and moving in death or in life.
He hates that she leaves. She leaves and only occasionally can come, snatch just four seconds for him, four that they spend with enough care to raise a newborn child, even if this care is mostly pressed up against walls and mouths open eyes touching oh God we can look at each other. (He never forgets anything about her, even though he can't draw her anywhere but in his mind for the sheer plain incrimination of a denouncing pencil, but he etches it into his brain every spare moment, not a detail ill-remembered, and still-he can't seem to do anything at all when he sees her, because she's got blood in her and contracting, releasing muscle fibers, bones filled up with marrow and rods, a living princess, a statue of marble, begging to be kissed out of her misery and be given permission to smile up the ill-used white lips.)
Most of the time there is barely any time at all, and what they get, instead of what healthy normal couples get, such as kissing and hair fondling and laying sprawled out on laps in the sunlight and air, is the other's eye color, the way their chest might rise and fall gently, the glow of skin over cheekbones and elbows, dark circles and cut knuckles. If they are lucky, as they have been, three or four times in their lives, they use the seconds up much too fast, much too fast, only enough of the seconds to meet hands, link them, feel, God, the brush of each finger, gentle separation, grip, softness, roughness, palms, tiny wrinkles, rings.
Kisses, they learn, are dangerous. They start and rarely ever stop, as neither is even remotely capable of breathing anymore (for although he is the one white faced and doll-eyed, glassy and wet-cold, she is just as knit up in her mind, nights spent whispering someone else's name into the sheets when she knows Manfred can't hear her.) Kissing is synonymous with burning, scorching, melting, too much heat and all at once, all control, totally tossed, nothing remaining but the very moment of existence, fuck the future, fuck survival. Kissing is pressing, cherishing, crying the whole while, relishing, trying to memorize, memorize, so as to hold closer when she's gone. Kissing is rare and glorious and golden and he spends three hundred and sixty one days of the year wishing he could feel her mouth and console it, promise her they'll fix it somehow, steal her away and go somewhere where they can meet eyes and perhaps even touch skin.
He is jealousy incarnate, but he has seen the way she withers, the fragile sixty year old bones inside her arm when He walks down passageways with her hand kept in His, the eyes that slam shut instead of flutter closed when He presses for a kiss against a mouth that has given up and died, starved right out of life. He knows she takes no pleasure, feels nothing but acid and a writhing stomach, would kill Him if he asked it. But this doesn't mean he can pass by them, close knit and inside garments, hallway corners, hard breathing, a blush creeping up her cheeks, a desperate, wickedly wrong way to save herself, to save him. Is it necessary, he wonders. And the ugly truth is, it is.
And she is ruining him, actually ruining him, spoiling everything to it's very core, nothing, and by nothing, he means absolute and total nothing, has been saved from her. She is inside everything, grey eyes gleaming upside down in teaspoons and her birthday illuminated in the numbers of his textbooks. She wrecks him, drives him past insanity, pitches him into a free fall with no solid matter and no landing. She loves him, swears to him, holds him ghostlike in her heart no matter where she goes, and regardless, she is his destruction, what crinkles his mind up and crushes it to wreckage. Her movement is the apocalypse, her name aloud, Ragnarök, the sound of her voice behind him during break so painful that he is Kristellnacht, two brother towers, the greatness of the world collapsing around his ears and laying at her feet in tribute. (Once he heard her hum a few notes under hear breath, and now they'll play on an old scratchy gramophone in the attics of his head, eternally repeated until the end of his very days, haunting, tilting, unfinished, incomplete, unintentional, eerie, close to death but suspended in despair.) She can't see it, can she, how every second is hers, how every word, every gesture, he wants to give it to her. He wants his name on her, he wants to be allowed to brush her cheek, he wants many things and will get none of them.
He is in pieces, mammoths of stone as they topple off the decay of the Acropolis, watched and yet not seen, a strong explosion and a fierce prideful demolition, death in his face and willpower making way. She is fireworks, dynamite, beautiful and horrid, tearing him to bits with her existence, her ruined perfection, her funny twisted face pressed against the glass, and the small plaque beside her display: not for sale.
She makes his life hell. She makes him painfully, achingly happy. She fills him up with new bones, strong bones, and accidentally-unknowingly?-shatters them into a thousand pretty pieces that glitter, shine, sparkle, cut the light into colors. If she knew would she care. If she knew would she stop. She'd want to- she'd beg to- but he'd just hold her as firm as he can without being anywhere near her at all in body and tell her, please. Please. Please. Please.
I need you
They'll find an escape, someday, he hopes, before one of them is killed, strung up by snakes or flushed out in water or set spark to. Maybe, perhaps, hopefully, Godplease. But for now he has her, his porcelain girl with steel wool hair and claws, whose kisses are murder, illegal quite literally, take his mind and smash it to bits, even though she does them with the most devotion he has ever seen a human have within themselves. She is beauty in her horror, all shattered up and flying, frosted breath in his ear as she wraps him up in arms of bone, body flush to his side so he can feel the chill inside her, eating away when there's nothing left but one boy's name a hundred times over, ice cold winter kisses on his cheek as she whispers: Save yourself.
A/N: Oh my writhing merciful lord, what is this even.