M N E M O S Y N E

- Dim Aldebaran -

:i:

Her eyes had been open for a while now, but only now did she truly see: bound in her chair, bound in the confines of her own mind, so helpless against what lay before her.

He looked little different from that first time: a slip of a child, forever young but not so much a god as a stolen child enslaved to serve the inner demon: Ganymede, selected by that innocent brilliancy that so enamored the gods.

But Ganymede had been a sweet lad, even with his fall: stolen for innocence and its eternal allure. What innocence, she wondered dimly, what innocence is there in evil?—perhaps the ignorance of the deed's malice, or perhaps the madness of it all, sparkling like a fallen diamond from the sky, bleeding like a new-cut ruby, weeping like a stolen sapphire—

He took a chair opposite her; he sprawled out with an easy elegance, a tailored suit she knew from restaurants and dance halls, with dark lines and dim shadows. Out of the gloom was his face, a pale moon in the starless night; hair hung as strands of that curious midnight, and then his eyes, a twilight of the mind, shattered by fate, two pieces, selected by consequence to haunt her now—

"Three seconds," he said, "for the times you hit me."

And—pain, red and black as only death ought to be, carrying her out and over gray oblivion in waves, washing over but then carrying her back to the sea to drown her all the more.

She didn't know he waited until he took a breath through the haze of fear, burned away by terrible realization.

"Four," he said, with all the cold clarity of a winter night, when the wolves howl and the stars burn and all is dead for lack of warmth, "for the times you called me 'friend'."

Pain is always new, no matter the amplitude, the frequency. It was an old acquaintance that she greeted with a scream and entertained with the spasms across her body, until a parting of lingering moans, when—alas!—the visit was over.

He spoke again, the trumpets sounding Apocalypse in her world: "Eight, for the times you saved my life."

Frond, surely more—but she could not think of the number, only a beginning and its end, and the infinity that elapsed between, and that terribly finite time that stood as a watch hand, unable to hold itself back as the gears turned and it could only strike midnight.

"Six," –a voice, crystalline, a perfect lattice of elegance and calm, intuitive aristocracy that bonded together the terrible genius gone mad—"for the times I saved yours."

Let it end, let it end—not even those thoughts sounded in the silence of her screams, for surely, it was silent, for he did not even seem to hear the sound of his lover dying, that scream that never quite began but echoed nonetheless.

"Six, for the months you never came."

Was it right—right of him, right of her, right of God to leave her here? Ah, the philosophical bullshit encountered while the mind dies—

"Nine," he said in that satin serenade, "for the times you've led me astray."

Death would have been sweet, but the haze that took her now was like the little sugar packets, low-carb, low-pleasure, but good enough for the unconcerned absinthe drinker.

He leaned forward, so close to her throne of steel; he lorded over her soul now, the only realm left to her, though she knew she was not the only one whose heart was breaking as their world tore itself asunder. "And one," he said softly, so soft, "for the kiss."

A knife slipped closer, cutting her world in two as she saw it from afar, the cleaving of his mind, the deep cuts in his heart, self-inflicted, bleeding as he tore the scabs open again and again and again—and all in the name of Holly Short.

And as the knife pressed deep, she wasn't sure whether to be abhorrent or honored.

:i:

Here's another remix for the Remix Redux challenge, this one of The Humble Mosquito's Forysthia. The White Lily commented that this one seemed 'flowery', but I hope I didn't overdo it. CC much appreciated.