A N T I A N E I R A
- Dim Aldebaran -
:i:
I. P E N T H E S I L E A
She has a dress on; she wears a dress because men won't look at her in a dress, they'll be looking elsewhere, where the neckline dips down and bra draws up, where black and cream create that illusion of life called lust.
That way, they won't notice the briefcase she deposits: no, they won't notice the little red light flashing faster and faster or the fast click of stilettos as she runs around the corner, twentythirtyfortyfifty meters—
With the dust not quite clear and the blood not quite dry, she returns. She still has that dress on—
—but no one's there to look.
Still has that glint in her eye but it's brighter now; perhaps it's the fire down the hall or perhaps it's the thoughts of gold and glory.
She steps into the conference room and smiles at the dead bodies, smiles at all those men who had stared at the black dress and white curves but then frowns. A man is sitting at the table; he is smiling, a small, cool smile that she kept in reserve for situations like that, aged in a barrel at the bottom of her heart. It's not a sweet smile: but you smile for the subtleties, the tinged bitterness or the fine coloring to the cheeks or the sparkle of the eyes.
He's not looking at the dress; he's looking at her, not at her perfect hair and perfect face and perfect body like all the other men, no: he looks into her perfectly normal eyes. It's oddly disconcerting and she looks away, at the vault walls where the smoke and blood make a sort of blackred fantasie in D minor.
"Déjà-vous," he says. He has a briefcase in front of him and he's still smiling, like Jekyll or Hyde, she couldn't decide which, maybe both. And then—hand on the briefcase, like around a woman's waist, possessive, and he waited, waited for her.
He doesn't laugh until she's down the hallway, curling her fists into crooked moons because she's mad, so mad she might as well.
II. H I P P O L Y T E
In Vienna, she notices the hair; like a raven's wing, laughing from its perch, nevermore, Lenore—she sees how his hair falls over his eyes and how he draws it back with those long fingers, and she wonders if Lenore had perfectly normal eyes.
He's leaning against a wall; everything is lank and loose, cat uncoiled. "Do you have a name?"
A silence, that one peculiar to a woman's pride.
His hair slips forward; some of it catches the light and it has the soft shine of coal still in the vein. "None of my contacts could identify you, and Interpol is evidently oblivious to the threat of a twenty-year-old woman with an Uzi fetish."
"Unlike you, I don't get caught—Artemis Fowl."
He smiles, and his hair falls before his eyes but she can still see the blue winking through, like the summer sky through a willow shroud. "Unlike you," he replies, "I am victorious."
There was something in how he pronounces that last word—something in the twist of the knife that she could not bear so she leaves, and as she leaves there's something in her eyes, something that falls to the ground and but she doesn't lose it, she'll always have the memory with her no matter how often she tries to throw it away.
At the Louvre: his eyes: bluer than the Aegean as Aphrodite rises from the seafoam; bluer than the blue of the two guitars; bluer than the bottomless sea behind the boy at the beach; bluer than the shadow on the wall where the painting once was—
He's contemplating Venus de Milo. When she enters his gun makes a line to her forehead. "To the left," the dragon says, then "further," until she's right next to the goddess.
He considers the pair: Venus with her full, fair face and white womanliness, Angeline with her black dress and black thoughts. Who was the cursèd one?
His smile curves like the bow of a hunter. "The dress, now."
She walks away, shaken. He doesn't fire.
Beijing, it was the pale porcelain shards that were his fingers, falling across the keyboard as he came, saw and conquered what she only could watch from afar like the pearl dragon—
He sits at a Steinway; he doesn't play, but his fingers are fading into the keys, white on white. "It would seem," he began, "that we are fated."
"Fuck you."—and she's leaving, stilettos tap-tap-tapping outside to the stars.
"Perhaps later." Then: "I like the dress, by the way."
She does not stop, but he smiles nonetheless.
It was Singapore that did her in; they fought over the dead body on the bed; arguing whether it was the shot to the head as he slept or the poison that induced it.
She draws a gun.
He draws a smile.
His eyes are dark, deepdarkdamning she can't help but drown as he comes closer, closer for the kiss and the lean forward, can't resist as he presses her down, down, down onto the bed, dead body next to them but they don't care… there's questions spiraling after her as she falls but they can't stop, can't stop what's coming can't stop what's on its way—
III. T H A L E S T R I S
She has a dress on; she wears it so he won't look at her and her perfectly normal eyes, he'll look elsewhere and think of fucking her, then and there like that first time.
…but the sex diminishes her; she can feel it, how each time she submits beneath him she slips downwards a bit more, and as she accelerates there's a faint pull to the gut but it's so slight it could be the pregnancy… they get married and the dress doesn't hide the swell, doesn't hide the shame she feels for the first time in her life. He tells her she's weak, now, how she can't fight anymore, how she has to stop for the child's sake—but he doesn't understand that she has to fight something or she's nothing at all—and now They're coming for her but she's weak, so weak—
She bears the child. It isn't hers; she names it Artemis.
She dies, and as she dies she dreams—
IV. C E L A N E O
She lurks on the river's edge, she has the toll but she doesn't have the ticket, can't cross when the boatman licks his lips and wants to stare for a while because that blush of shame is still on her cheeks: he likes that, it's a change—
Is she still beautiful? She doesn't know—beauty was the black dress with bloodstains, but then beauty was the white dress with white roses and white lace and now—?
What is beauty? Is it her, or is it in his head?—or does it not matter, maybe nothing mattered at all and every curl was a curse and every dimple damnation.
Is she still beautiful?
He isn't there to remind her with those dark eyes and darker thoughts as he pushes her onto to the bed; he isn't there with his silvered words in a gilded time; he isn't there, he's in the sea's embrace, now, what an adulterer—
Is she still beautiful?
Sometimes she looks up and she can see Them: she can see the son as he stands at the doorway, wondering whether she'll ever wake up.
V. C L E I T E
There are times—times like sugar, and times like salt.
Salt for the tears: tears in the alleyway with each dumpster an unpublished fairy tale ending, tears for the broken glass from the bar fight fought because it makes them all a little less lonely, tears for children who never knew the feel of a plush or the sound of a lullaby.
Salt for the fields: will she ever grow again, will she ever bloom and be? She was so tilled with it all maybe she could never bloom again—
Salt for the flavor: the feast was not yet over. Sweetness and sorrow in solitude: it was not such an unhappy time. There was a richness to it all: it completes her, in the end.
Salt for the sea: because we all need to drown, now and then. Breathe it in, breathe it as you feel your soul rush through your veins to your head and feel it pounding for escape—and all you can taste is the salt in the mouth and that saltiness is all you know when you're done trying, for a time. Eventually you breathe in the sweeter sort of air, but only until it's time to drown again and feel the blueblack pulse of the dark as something in the soul cracks and everything's better, then—
Life's too sweet, these days.
VI. P H O E B E
The messenger comes; faceless, but there's a warmth to the hand on her shoulder, something They never had; she knows it's time to go and she turns away from a view of yesterday.
They all watch her leave—but They all know she will return soon enough. She's just like Them, They know, full of nightmares and devoid of dreams, eyes like pale opals, swirling with dead color.
As she leaves she shivers; the boatman laughs.
VII. M E L A N I P P E
His son is having nightmares. She comes into the room not because she cares but because she's curious; he's never had nightmares before.
His dark hair is all the darker with the night, all the darker with the sweat making it lank across his brow, like sharp cirrus over a gibbous moon. She can see how his eyelids flutter as he panics, like the death throes of a butterfly. Fascinated, she watches, how he curls into a ball with the sheets knotted around him like binding ropes, how he cries out in fear with the keening cry of a lost child, how the nightmare grows in his mind like a cancer and takes form—
Her name is Opal.
She can't help but wonder if the man in the marriage bed was like this before Singapore.
She can't help but wonder if Opal will fall as well.
VIII. E U R Y B E
She just drifts, now—
The boatman feels cheated, and They are displeased; but Persephone smiles, remembering.
She makes a point of drowning every day—in the morning mass or during the family dinner fallacy or in the evening fuck, doesn't matter, as long as she drowns and she knows what she is as she dies.
There's a difference, now: as she drowns, she looks up and sees the sky.
The Styx flows beneath the stars as well, you see: full circle…
IX. E U M A C H E
She tells Butler it's important.
(silence)
She tells him she's concerned.
(silence)
She tells him she's his mother.
(silence)
She tells him a story.
He nods, and tells her one in turn.
X. L Y S I P P E
She's on the computer; she knows she'll be caught but she doesn't care.
He comes into the room with his fingers laced behind him. The message is simple and tinged Mars; but she knows she was allowed, she knows she was permitted.
He's at the door, leaving: she stops him with a word.
He turns, frowning. "Yes, Mother—?"
She's at the computer; she points out the spiraling hieroglyphics and asks him questions.
He gives her answers with enough truth in them to not trouble his conscience, and leaves.
She doesn't mind; she has all she needs: her name is Opal Koboi, and she's just like her.
XI. O R E I T H Y I A
She can't do it.
He can.
It doesn't take much to convince him: he knows that a mother is a terrible thing to lose twice.
…but it wasn't a victory. His plan was never meant to work, but she doesn't mind. She wasn't interested in returning—she remembered the boatman who wouldn't let her cross—she remembered Them, how They circled around and watched her with those dead-fish eyes—there's something there for her, something that lurked in Persephone's smile—
He wants her to be satisfied with a sight; he wants this to pass like a whim, he wants her to see the impossibility, he wants her to breathe in the prison air and prefer that of home, he wants her to return and smile like in his borrowed dreams—
—most of all, he wants her forgiveness.
XII. A N T I O P E
She hasn't done this sort of thing in twenty years but it's enough to be doing it again. Timmy remembers and they fuck more often because she's beautiful again, she's not the weak thing she became when they married she's something else… but he doesn't ask, doesn't dare and though he tries to find out what she's doing he can't, and though it drives him mad he will never ask.
When she's ready, she goes and she goes alone, bag of tricks in one hand and a kiss goodbye on the other. Timmy thinks he can stop her but he can't for the first time in twenty years, and he's left on the bed, wondering where he went wrong.
Artemis is at the door. He asks her if she realizes what she's doing.
She smiles like she had not smiled in twenty years and suddenly Artemis realizes that it wasn't Father-dear who gave him the brains, it wasn't Father who gave him the coldness of Russia and the heat of the Sahara. He recognizes Mother's intent and there's something in it that make the words terrible and sweet like a red dawn: "I'm finding myself," she says, "and when I find her, I'll free her."
He nods, and opens the door for her.
Smiling, she steps out: and her stilettos are tap-tap-tapping out to the stars, tried and true.
After she leaves, Artemis fingers the tranquilizer in his pocket and wonders why he didn't do it—
—he knows she would have, but a bullet to the brain.
He got that from Father.
XIII. A E L L O
They're nothing. They're nothing as she straps on the modified wings and flies down the magma chute and lands in the shuttlepod bay. They're nothing as she slips into Howler Peak's prisontown with a camfoil suit when the traffic is high and every second fairy is transmitting in the ultraviolet. They're nothing as she fires the hallucinogens into the guards, mild enough so they aren't raving, just not seeing the camfoil blur. They're nothing as she steals the passes and passwords and fingerprints from their dreaming bodies. They're nothing as she slips into the cell.
They're nothing.
She's everything.
Opal smiles up at the human and doesn't care about names or pasts or other such frivolities. She recognizes that glint in the eye and smiles wider with some teeth in it: not because she cares but because she, too, remembers.
XIV. A L C I P P E
There's four hundred of the LEP's finest waiting for them.
Angeline passes Opal a Neutrino.
The only ones who are sure of what to do are the two who have nothing to do but to fire, nowhere to go but the Styx.
:i:
I have started a new ship! AngelineOpal, Opaline.
Written for the 12LH "AngelineOpal" fishwish, and the 'shade' prompt of fanfic100. And my personal prompt of, 'let's see how much like a Bonds Girl I can make Angeline'.
I did a lot of stylistic experimentation in here... please don't comment on it to merely say that things like rhythmic cadenzas or run ons have no right in prose. Not only is that false - there are authors in the world who write in similar styles - but I won't pay attention to you if you do so.
Note the alternate spelling of 'Penthesilea', versus 'Penthesileia' in another fic. Also, the title is taken from an old Greek word for 'Amazons', and the segment titles from various Amazons throughout mythology.