Beautiful
The city is a disease. A virulent spreading infection, lush and sick, twisting octopus limbs into the hearts of all those who survive here. There was an idea of the city once; a glittering beautiful shining thing - that dispersed like a drug in its system when they built it on putrefying foundations.
The man lies close to the earth, where the crawling living things are, and listens to the heart beat of the city herself - a false heart like everything else, but pulsing with true blood, rich and intoxicating. He allies himself with the dead to feel alive, emerging eventually into a rush of streets to stand at the heart of a scuttling sea of human vermin. He likes vermin. He loves it all, silently taking in the beauty of it all, the sickness and the cure at once embodied in that voice that comes sliding through the crowd like a monstrous tentacle, parting it, coiling around him in a loving, deadly embrace -
"Graverobber -" it sighs, hisses, crashing in on him tenderly - "Graverobber."
The girl looks down from her window above, playing princess in her tower. Mine, she thinks, all mine, the city pulsing with neon life, its streets and rooftops rushing with blood, fuelling its organs and letting it breathe for all that its foundations are dead. It sparkles from up here, shining and swarming lights like jewelled insects winking out of the dark. She turns away; it's ugly. She hates it. She looks in her mirror for comfort and finds it in her own tentative perfection. She traces the dark incision across her chest with a finger and a sigh; a autopsy incision, numbering herself amongst the dead through drugs and the corruption of her own organs. It's the only way she can ever understand the feeling of being alive. Beneath her mask of beauty she feels safe to dive into the streets and seek out sensation where it is really real. Sensation turns at her voice and slams her into the wall -
"Ms Sweet" it growls. She gives herself up to it, body and soul.
The city is a web and the spider in the web; spinning out stories and songs, catching and killing and feeding on the blood of its flies. An insubstantial, beautiful world, no less so for its fragility. He sees it all in her and wonders that no-one else seems to; she's like clear cut glass, sparking rainbows in the dim red light. He looks at her and sees there the beauty of disease , of poison, infectious and heady. She tastes of blood and pain and plastic. He holds the city when he holds her - fucks the city which is everything, and finds it beautiful.
He tastes of death and drugs and foulness and she feeds on it fiercely, her hunger insatiable. She grasps for something real, sees it in him and cannot have enough of it. She knows that he sees right through her and seeing what he sees still looks at her as though he finds her beautiful. She hopes she sees right herself, hopes she is beautiful because she doesn't know what else a girl can be.
So they crash and collide and it's an intrusion both welcome, an infection spreading through a shared system, tainting everything in earthy shades of delight and amber delirium. The city continues to wheeze out its shuddering, orgiastic breaths as its innards battle it out in the fight to be truly alive. In his eyes she sees the city she hated just moments ago, reflected in a carnival mirror of beauty and loves it in a sudden passionate flame. It's like a fairy tale, she thinks; the princess brought to life with a kiss. But it can't be that kind of fairy tale, not really, because the princess is plastic and the prince comes bearing drugs to put her back to sleep again as soon as she needs them. But it is beautiful none the less, and better to be a story for a little while than be nothing forever.
And a story can always be told again, can always be beautiful, always alive.