Knowing Valkyrie Cain has never been easy. She is covered in burs and a sign that says don't touch – she'll see you, but never hear. If you talk up to her, she'll laugh at you, and if you talk down to her, she'll just laugh. She is unequalled, and the horrible thing is that she knows it.
Her life is many things: bright, busy, hopeful and made so much more of war than of love. It is pain and it is peace, and the thing about the peace is that it is never really that peaceful.
In the end, knowing Valkyrie Cain means one thing, and that is heartbreak.
Watching Valkyrie grow old hurts. On the one hand, there is the serenity of aging and the sorcerer's innate respect for the natural order and the sense of the passage of time. On the other hand, you begin to think about how much longer you've been around than she has.
And every wrinkle on her face and yours feels like a chasm, every tired laugh a death rattle, every moment when the breath just isn't there like a death in itself.
The worst part is watching the fire wink out from her, from moment to moment.
Standing before the mirror, she counts her bones. They are smooth like her skin, thinly spread over soft substance, and their shadows just peek out from under her flesh, silk upon silk upon silk.
She feels tired, and that's something she knows far too well these days, and so she closes her eyes, letting her mind empty and sleep reach into her head and wrench her into something that she can be just a bit happier about. Her body glows with ink that was never really there, and the insides of her eyelids burn with Valkyrie's face.
The body that has been through so much under her control, over the many, many years, the body that has swapped every part of itself several times over until, like the ship of Theseus, is as young as ever. Her veins swim with magic, and there isn't any of her flesh that is still completely human. Still, she has her mind, and that is as mortal as anything.
She's never been sure whether this is something for which to be grateful or to regret, in that gentle, sighing way of hers, but for the moment, she thinks that it's more blessing than a curse that she can still feel this way for another person.
China's been through a lot, and she's done worse than Valkyrie Cain.
Tentative fingers over tanned skin, China is counting Valkyrie's bones. They are hard and sharp and harsh beneath muscle.
Valkyrie is breathing quickly, and China is too, shoulders shuddering. Their hearts are beating the same rhythm, and it is a war drum that sounds through their chests, joining them together like no red string ever could.
China's touch is reverent, but the way that Valkyrie answers the questions scribed upon her own flesh that sink below her mind straight into her heart that goes straight into the religious. The black-crystal hum of the power that has always been hers is electricity that crackles through her blood, and she is a worshipper at a temple to a Goddess that she has somehow always believed in.
Everything is falling apart, but for the moment, the pain feels so much like peace.
When China is looking back at the skeleton of the life that she has led around sharp corners and turns that should never have been possible and up flights of stairs that end in nothing but more stairs and down them and below them and sometimes straight through them, she treasures the moments when she felt like she was flying, like she had managed to transcend the Escher portrait of what love should never really be.
Valkyrie Cain made her feel like she was flying, every time. From the moment they first met to the moment that China was left on her own with no breath left staring with nothing but hunger at the spark of flame that had burned through the red ropes that had made them cling together like a ravening beast with so many more backs than two, Valkyrie Cain was nothing but awayness to China, nothing but Otherliness.
China was like an open book to Valkyrie, or maybe a closed one, though actually she wasn't. She was a scroll made on the gut of an infant lamb that should never have been slaughtered, made smooth with the venom of wasps and every other stinging thing that wants you only dead, and she was a fan made out of the wood of a precious, holy tree that never should have been uprooted, and she was always, always unfurling to show the angry inside. She was reality, and Valkyrie never thought of anything that she could have wanted more.
China Sorrows was as much heartbreak as a person can ever be, and all Valkyrie's life ever is is heartbreak.
A/N: Getting back into the writing voice was difficult with this one, since I've been doing Andrea-Gibson-inspired spoken word poetry for the past couple of days. I managed to kind of marry the two styles towards the last section, with which I am very happy, but I am not entirely sure about the rest.
Feedback would thus be appreciated.
~Mademise Morte, April 26, 2012.