A/N: The "April" excerpt is from TS Eliot's The Wasteland.
N Is For
A skunk, she thinks. That was him. Permeating the world with his smell and hate, bites into skin, flesh, & bone. And when all the bone-collectors come, he's ready. To eat again.
Neliel watches the world spin on by and by, flips over on its side, and does not repent. And she is thinking of her life too: and how she is hurting for the days to end.
This time—
—This was, when, how, and never
She sheathes the sword. "You're not worth my time."
And for a moment, she thinks of something human staring back, waiting to heart-beat through hollow pits.
-x-
"I want you to make me something," he says.
"Oh?" And the Doctor asks, surprised, "And what might that be?"
"Something killing. Binding, whatever. Just make it painful."
And now, the Doctor smiled. He liked pain, loved it best.
…you can split someone down with one strike here…
and he'll never know what came
flying
When she was younger and brighter (and smarter and full of that naïve need to drive the knife home) she could really splice bodies straight down the middle. Without regret.
Because that is what she, he, them, all did: Kill. That or be killed. Because in this desert wasteland, The Burial of the Dead came first. And this time, it was someone she knew. Going down in the first of April—
APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
So when she is younger and brighter again, Neliel can finally sit down for a moment and rest. And watch, as the world reverted into a tunnel, and nothing ever came out.
-x-
There is a secret he did not mention. That he and she had met before, some long time ago. And the moment they said "hello, I'm about to cut your head off now" he knew that she had already won.
In perfect unison, they swing their swords down, glide their arms across the barren sky (open, like the whiteness of a dropping rib), and then she stops.
And says.
Calm and quiet.
"You're not worth my time."
-x-
That night his face contorts into an ugly frown as he sleeps. Or tries. And in his dreams, the rictus is not his but hers. Looming closer and poking into his gut, gorging him full of burnt-out fire.
N is for Nasty, for No & Never
For Neliel (& Nnoitra too)
And a thousand unsaids
and tangled threads they share.
In the morning, Neliel is gone, and in her place stand bloody sheets and the stench of decay. And Nel, she is there too. Like she is (looking) all bleached out, pale—quavering with bent-moth wings and the deformed face of brokenness.
"Where is her head?" the Doctor asks and searches around, thinking Nnoitra had cheated him. Where is the damn head?
"Rolled off somewhere, I think."
"Too bad. I suppose you'll have to make payment some other way."
"Yeah," he says and does not look. Does not avert his gaze from the soaked cotton. There is something terrible and beautiful about this (as if he understood beauty, he thinks). Like cotton over satin, like triumph emerging from the simplest crevices.
Unpretentious.
Where is the damn head? —the voice rages, roars across his face, darts here and there, always seeking.
And so, he turns to leave, done at last.
N is for None left
Just Him, Waiting.
