Take Me to the Riot
He did this thing.
"Well, okay, but you'll have to hold my hand, because Misa-Misa's—"
"Scared of the dark," he'd already taken her hand, and was leading her into the haunted house. "I know."
He did that a lot, finishing her sentences. Always clipped and curt and hurried, as though he couldn't wait for the dialogue to keep loading, and just cut to the next screen. It was an easy plotline to follow.
She hated it when he did that.
She really, really hated that.
And another thing: she isn't scared of the dark. Her beauty is dolled out in the shredded wings of a butterfly, something twisted and discarded and darkly enchanting. She imagines it like some horrible, corpse-eating flower, sinking its roots deep into the shadows and sucking the life-blood from the earth. A strange and terrible pull that's got her hypnotized and drugged-giddy.
Matt just doesn't do well in the light. He pulls down the shades and squints through those goggles, with his bangs cut too long. He doesn't go out during the day.
They sit in their apartment and she listens to him skip through the dialogue, fingers clicking to a glazed sort of tune, and studies the listlessness about his mouth, the nervous tick that keeps his eyes darting back to her face. Zing. Zing.
She's been a wicked, wicked girl, and he's here to make sure she won't lap up the blackness again. Not that she could—not that there's the time left. There's sand running through her hourglass figure.
Neither of them want to be alive.
"Do you miss him?" they ask one another in tandem, and join by a clasping of hands and the single word whispered, "Yes."
She did this thing.
Whenever he'd acted too surly or too neglectful for her tastes, she'd bounce off into a crowd and come back with two men on her arm, shrieking a giggle set to glass-shattering frequency. They'd all be tall guys, and well built, with beautiful cheekbones and tilted eyes, and clever things to whisper in her ear.
Matt didn't think in pretty words. He thought in statistics and probability, in the sums and equations of collateral damage, of the magnitude and physics wrapping them together, and the strategy to lose in an elegant fashion.
Misa didn't remember killing people. She didn't wake up screaming, except perhaps for the man she'd loved and lost. It confused him. With every step, her hips swayed the balance between heaven and hell, and all her kisses could taste of was lipstick and sorrow.
She kissed her men away.
He hated it when she did that.
He really, really hated it.