( shades of gray )
I own nothing. I am a peniless writer. Nyah.
x
x
I.
Black and white, black and white.
He lived by a series of images; of sounds.
His ears were pure and fine like glass flutes. Tremoring when they should, finding the breakage between notes, and distinguishing allegro from andante. B flat from B flat.
There was soul music and then there was the music of death. All he could hear from his hole in the wall was the smooth, dull sound of flesh hitting the floor repeatedly. Weight echoing off the plexitile.
In the end, when the music of it had reached its great height, crescendo, with a gurgle and lungs crying out -- just once, at last, cry out -- and the symphony had ended, something heavy fell against the wall, then awkwardly, heavily, dragged itself away.
White on black, on black, on black.
II.
Later, Legato obediently disguised his limp as he moved slowly down the long hall to his bedroom. He captured his labored breaths and calmed them; swallowed the blood-spit rising and controlled it, drops like black copper burning on his tongue. All over his clothes; tight black that sucks the pain away.
He severed every nerve that sang out to him with low, complaining cries of pain. He called them useless. Muscles sunk in creamy flesh, shrieking with his ligaments and blood, screaming. He traced the bone blades of his jaw, hideously bruised, and the thin veins pumping visibly through the tissue, their minute pulses excited with the rush of blood, and told himself that he was worthless, worthless, w-o-r-t-h-l-e-s-s under Him.
So much so that he was not worthy even to bathe in the spit that He spat out at him in repulsion for his life. But he knew also, with as much if not more resignation, that he could no easier stop loving Him than as if he could staple his heart to the wall behind him. Ano Kata, he thought, with a morbid mental resonance. Unceasing devotion to Him.
The grim intensity behind those words was such that it reverberated through his whole insufficient being to the ends of his tapered fingertips --
And all the way to the bottom of Knive's soul.
In two distant rooms, two men shivered.
III. Legato, as he prepared himself for a night's rest, began to touch himself, lingering on every breakage in the skin that He spread, quickly and meticulously, with the cruel immaculacy of His fingers. The bulge of rope-like scars felt like a beacon of intense holiness; lost within a sea of tainted blood and violence, perfect malice-- as corrosive as the scars themselves.
Maggots, in his blood, and hate, were things that he imagined to be pure; at once divine and wrathful, which lulled him into black and dreamless sleep like a false death, rocking emptily inside the hollows of his bones and bringing temporary ease to the unstable mind.
The death, though, was a little one, indeed false, and the veins continued stronger to push blood. The veins inside of him pumped the vital energy of him serenely, so slowly -- ever slower, it seemed -- for their Master, even in the dark recess of the unconscious, where even then the possession of himself by Knives could not be lost.
It was, for lack of more consistent terminology,
Silent and eternal requiem.
Knives could not have worded it better himself. In fact, he listened to their thin life beats within his slave, those veins with their damning consistent pulses; the rank stench of blood and metal permeating and crude iron fixtures staining under brown-red nausea in another room. And, far worse, the soft, tentative warmth of breath passing over the plush of moistened lip-- out and in, with every undemanding flutter of the lungs.
The stain, of course, would fade, as with all other evidence of this- their violence- which was never an infrequent act between the Master and his Servant. The vital energy, however, which at times seeped from the consciousness of the man to mingle with that of the Plant, endured all but the same physical torment with as much devotion as Legato's body could possibly provide being the simple human that he was, and yet, could not be silenced for the life of him.
And so He hated. He hated everything that made Legato human. He hated every flutter of Legato's heart as it shuddered against his broken ribs. And He hated, above all else that He hated, the way Legato was so fucking beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
He was the glass that kept on breaking. He was the hacksaw that cut away at anything and everything and somehow never dulled. And he was the Pawn that was risking damnation, proving himself to be worthy over and over under a false God- who may have been a king of Devils after all- for something as strong and at once as insignificant as human devotion.
Sometimes Knives saw his own darkness echoed in the depth of amber of Legato's eyes, and in those moments, perhaps for the first time in many years,
He was afraid.
IV.
All his life, Midvalley the Hornfreak had felt a stronger connection to the sound of things more than anything else. He'd become accustomed to listening where others stepped, and looked.
With a single soulful note, he danced the living through the valley of the shadow of death, a black Piper; a Pan. His song for Millions Knives replayed the soundtrack of his life. It was for the dead and the dying.
Destruction trembling in a perfect, silver wail, into the heart of night, like a tendril of cigarette smoke that shows a pathway to the moon.
That night, he stroked Sylvia with a particularly sad song. It was a funeral dirge.
It was the second line; the mourning toll.
It was for Legato.
And the saxophone wept.
Finite. . .