Dedicated to - well, she knows who she is. *G*
Disclaimer: Of course, these are real beings. But it was Gaiman who found them. Not me.
~~Desire Speaks~~
The others have always wondered, in their infinited lack of compassion disguised as minding their own business, just what it was that made her stop being Delight, what made her take a path outside of Destiny's garden.
What would they say, I wonder, if they knew that her mind didn't snap, with the finality of the guillotine blade on the adulterous aristocrat's neck ... that it was a slow, unravelling? They would be deceived. I know my little sister, almost as well as I know my other, less attractive half.
It was her choice.
She wanted, she told us - Destuction and I - to stop having to think. Thoughts flooded in through her ears and drowned out the simple happiness she had once felt. Everything was changing; a point my noble brother noted so well that he left us all; and she had to change with it, change ... or go under.
And she could see that people were changing too. That more and more were letting their minds go; not rushing into the abyss of Despair's cloudy realm, not choking their way directly to meet our eldest and - though I am loath to say it - most beautiful sister. They were simply disconnecting from the jagged mass of logic that some would have the world be. Destiny would have the world be that way.
I prefer the subtleties. The curves, the indefinite, the unpredictable.
I suppose that's why Delirium and I first drifted together.
Our strangeness, our lack of respect for the rules that bind everything together. She missed Destruction terribly, you see, and for that all the rules were dissolved. What would you say, big brother, if I were to tell you this; she was always afraid of you. Afraid of your rejection, afraid you would talk to her as though she was nothing more than a child; you see, you were the only one of the family to ever assume that child-like meant stupid. And, to tell the truth;
Yes, it's novel, isn't it, Desire telling the truth? But see, I have my fingers uncrossed. I swear by my heart. By the other side of the sky ... etc, etc ...
I was also always a little afraid of you. Not because of your temper, or your threats of revenge - I knew you could never act upon them - but afraid of your emptiness. Of your absence. Of being ignored and forgotten, of being spurned. And you do. You spurn us, your family, with such terrifying regularity.
Of course, I cannot know what goes on in Del's tousled, fitful head. I suspect she knows more than she lets on. But the distance-with-closeness is refreshing - like Despair and I, but with the mental umbelical cord half-severed, malfunctional. And she's immediate, our sister ... she lives for the moment she is living in.
And I like that.
She's interrogating a man with a dog now. He seems confused by her; not every day a middle-class father is ambushed by a stick-wielding, green-haired teenager; dancing one minute, asking about his dog the next.
Delirium isn't afraid to fall; when she, and thousands who had never even known Delight, let themselves go, they lost nearly all knowledge of what it was like to fall. There is no courage, no cowardice there; just want and "not-want". She is almost a part of me. She Desires. Oh, I'm smiling so much it aches ...
Hah.
I can't say I love her. I am, after all, not of that world. Desire does not love. But I want her. And I need her. I desire her ... my dear, deranged little sister, my strange little girl. She is something quite other to the rest of the Family, and unlike you, Dream ... I would never waste my precious time on mortals. They are toys; whatever you said to me.
She's skipping now.
My Delirium.