Cracking the World's Shell
Three
mentalyoga
(A/N: These were a series of challenges on the utenadrabble livejournal community.)
The Compromise
"It might take a bit of convincing on your part," he cooed, a sly smile staining his red, red mouth.
"What sort," replied his spring-haired rival/companion skittishly, "of convincing?" It was a simple question, really, but a bit silly in hindsight. He knew what kind of convincing Kiryuu might be interested in; what garnered the challenge, then, was that the two boys—despite whispers to the contrary—had never quite compromised on this matter. But Kiryuu shook his head.
No words. Not any more—they had crossed the threshold of the spoken into the nebulous slate grays of silence. Now everything must be expressed in tactile gestures, caresses and snatches of skin, viciously sharp nails shredding flesh, and gashes opening and closing for the taboos that might now be voiced in this freeing silence.
There was a muted gasp—but from which boy?—as fleshy hands took hold of long hair—but whose?—and pressed desperately downward. Everything so desperate now—the speechless grunts, the unspoken moans, the first gag. This was not the desperation of most boys; this was the frantic search for the Other. For how could they define themselves, but in opposition to their enemy/lover? Back to the task at hand.
Gasp.
Yes, that bubble-gum cunt would relinquish her power now.
Grunt.
The Bride would be purified.
Gasp.
It all would be set right.
Grunt.
Everything went all wet for a wandering moment. Touga rose from his kneeling position, wiping the corner of his lip with a casual index finger.
"We'll begin your training tomorrow. We'll have no more of this…girl playing prince." Nothing but a flaccid dick and a panting half-child lay in his wake. The convincing wasn't the hardest part, after all.
The Fertilizer Princess
Kanae, why dontcha let down all that hair let it down let it down. A field of green, a wedding ring, and the blinded knight without a grasp on the tower walls.
The prince down here is drowning; the flood of his illusions finally washed out the dams. But the funny this is, these dams had been constructed in shapes something like automobiles—there! can you see the gear shift, a steering wheel, a chunk of bubble-gum pink hair? The fact of the matter was that they had broken. You see, the myth, the illusion, grew too big for the boy, and his britches fell down around his ankles and the townsfolk had clambered all around his shrunken prick, begging for a lick or a chunk of his wine-dark skin. They thought they could ingest his strength, but they were unaware that the dam-cars had driven off in a flurry of lockets and metronomes, which had been used to tuck things away and to keep them in strict meter. Now, of course, chaos had fallen down in a cacophony of atonal notes, a shower of secret photos. And all that rose hair braided tight against the violet, how it lined the dust-tracks in the roads!
But these common folk wanted to ingest his power (perhaps through his semen, didn't that New Guinea tribe eat up all their strength through hot white loads?) but they didn't know that the dams had broken, that the princesses had up and transfigured themselves. The townsfolk had never driven cars before; they were too poor, you see. That ol' class disparity, as it were. But they didn't know this. They didn't really know much of anything at all.
And so he begged his dead wife to tug him up the walls of her tower, pleaded for the death he had himself given her (he was a veritable Azrael, if you will). But she had since left the tower, she had been playing fertilizer for the rose beds high up above the stone tower for six, seven months. She did not know this—her role—and she certainly did not hear his childlike chant.
Kanae, o Kanae wontcha let down your sweet hair? I'm dying, I'm dying, I've done died down here.
For fertilizer has no ears, not since the soil filled its/her lobes with worms, and if it/she has no ears then it/she has no heart, for the desperate pleas of its/her dark Judas no longer reach it/her. In this light, in the meterless, ripped open reality left in the wake of tire tread and burning fuel, the townsfolk ingest him, indeed. Not just his useless prick, but his slick slick hair, his eye-gems and dead eye-pits—from his toes to his head!
And the emerald princess, fertilizer that she is, hears none of it.
Moth Dust
He smelled of cabbages and semen and had her white sheets tangled up in his thick thighs, somehow seeming more naked with that strip of cloth than he would have without it.
She was emerging from a shower and toweling moth-dust from her shoulder-blades and was utterly unsurprised to find a strange man lying bare in her bed.
"What, I blackout last night or somethin'?" She wrapped the rose-petal red towel tight around her forehead. Her breasts hung unburdened, and she walked with legs slightly spread, as if inviting him to close them himself. And with the towel around her head, she looked like a (strangely familiar) turbaned Indian woman, the opening of her nether regions a thin sheath.
Answering her question with another, the fiery man in the bed inquired: "Whatever do you mean?" He turned to a painting on the wall, where there hung a (strangely familiar) girl with a gash where her heart should have been—perhaps to match the red gash that opened between her legs. "Not as black as she, eh?"
Questions. Shiori did not like this one, did not like the idea of this milk-chocolate woman fading to black when she should have been bright with life. "No one's really black. Not in that sense."
"Oh, but isn't she? Have you ever met a girl with an illusory heart?" He saw that she had not. "Aren't you a shameful girl, fucking indiscriminately in this bed without even an idea of the black girl that's been watching all the time?" He removed the white, white sheets. Night fell. Blackness welled up in pools along the corners of the room.
"Come," he ordered. No more questions. "I'll teach you to respect the soulless. Cover the paintings and remove that towel. I want to see you fly tonight."
She had to be on top, so as to avoid crushing the moth-wings, but for some reason, she didn't feel at all in control. He fucked her without a light to guide them, and that blackest-of-black girl watched them in the black, black darkness of the covered room.
The Offering
A shrill, silvery soprano rang throughout the rose garden. "To grandmother's house we go…" The thorns and petals branched out wildly; a veritable Ft. Worth of shrubbery, but the aqua-haired beauty was determined to reach the Wise Woman within. If there was a 'within,' of course. In these stories, the crumb-laden paths never ended. Not really.
She was carrying her offering; a lock of thick rose-petal-pink hair, tucked neatly into a covered basket. No one went to the Wise Woman without an offering and made it back unscathed. She thought fleetingly of little Kaoru Miki and his paralyzing preoccupation with some indescribable 'shining thing.' She wasn't going to end up like the others; she was to be Queen, after all! Ohtori Kanae may not have been a strong woman, but she would never be called a stupid one.
"Hey, little girl," a thick, testosterone-heavy purr came from behind one bush.
Kanae turned back, her cascading mint-green hair tumbling down as any good princess' does in these tales. "Hey, yeah?" came the callback.
Wolf strutted from the shadows as cockily as if he himself had put them there. Everyone knew—or so they thought—that it was the Wise Woman (the old Witch) that raised the thick branches to keep out unwelcome guests. Perhaps, thought Kanae, Wolf was cleverer than he seemed.
"What do you have there, Little One?" inquired the Wolf innocently.
"It's for the Witch," she replied, only slightly less innocent than the cocoa-skinned trespasser before her.
His bright green eyes seemed to glow even more brightly for the millisecond before he corrected Kanae lightly. "Wise Woman. Only fools refer to her as a Wi—that word." His purr lost composure for only a brief moment, but Kanae was quite sure from that moment alone that Wolf was no man to be trusted. She bid him farewell and hurried along on her way.
Well, as hurriedly as one can travel with briars and shrieking woodland creatures to scare any intruders back to where they came from. But finally, the frail girl reached her destination: a rather beaten-down looking cabin in a rather beaten-down clearing. Yet once she rapped her thin fist hard against the door, she realized the cabin only appeared fragile; it was, in fact, quite sturdy, and she had to pound even harder against the thick wood to make even the slightest impression on whatever waited within.
"Enter," came a cool, low voice. And with that, the door swung wide open—though for all the briars and bushes about the cabin, no light illuminated the pressing dark. For the first time since she had been motivated to seek out the Wit…Wise Woman for aid, since she had snuck into the Prince's chambers to covertly chop the lock of hair free, since she entered the thick woods…she was genuinely frightened. Her pulse beat from every pore, and her heart seemed to be waiting to burst free from her esophagus.
"Ohtori Kanae," the pale voice began, "I think you know quite well the answer to the question you've brought with you." Through the black, Kanae could make out the slight frame of the Wise Woman—could even see a very familiar color of warm, dark skin, and the flash of emerald eyes. "And what you've brought me?" She motioned casually to the weightless basket. Kanae fell clumsily to her knees, thrusting the basket before her shaking body.
"I apologize, Wise Woman," she cried.
"No need," said the woman quietly, though there was all the command in the world held in that thin voice. "I accept your offering, Kanae," she continued, with almost a faint familiarity contained in her tone.
The Wise Woman lit a small fire in a pot beside her, standing on what looked to be a makeshift altar. And with just as nonchalant a motion, she tossed the lock of hair from the basket into the flame. The pungent scent of burning hair—sickly sweet, decaying—filled the cabin. "That should answer your question, Kanae." Absolute. Unquestionable. Yet Kanae had to question it.
"I…don't understand."
"Princes," said the Wise Woman, "are useless if they cannot be tamed. But no true Prince would ever wish for such a fate, and so we must control them in our own, secret ways. You've met your prince once today; the question that remains is whether or not you can cage him as I have and always will cage mine." Kanae no more understood this speech than the previous, but this was where the tale was supposed to end. Neatly. Primly. A moral had been determined, the questions presumably solved. Kanae, however, was unimpressed.
"Still, you question my wisdom." The Wise Woman did not need voice given to Kanae's thoughts. "Come to me, child," she murmured in that same cool, thin voice. "I will teach you the rites women like us have learned since time's dawn." Kanae did not understand, but the hypnotic voice drew her closer, closer in until she was at the Wise Woman's warm breast. There was no heart-beat…but she chuckled to herself, thinking she should have known this all along—after all, there was no heart! She thought suddenly that she may have been safer with Wolf. But there was no longer any way out. She had brought the offering to the altar; now, she was to be initiated. As it has always been.