Me, An Artist:

Me, an artist:

When The World Crumbled

Anonymous said:I’m feeling angsty, so maybe a snippet where a hero and villain find out the others’ identity and realize they’re roommates and lovers if you’re down with that?// Anonymous said:Hi, could you possibly write something where the hero and villan were/are lovers? Thank you so much and I love your work!

When the world crumbled, it did so with a quiet and aching intimacy.

The hero paused with one hand on their lover’s bare chest. Over a fresh wound, similar to one they had dealt the villain the night before. It was still red. A raw, angry colour.

It wasn’t the first time they had seen marks like this one.

The bedroom was still, bathed in soft golden glow of dawn.

Their lover curled against them, half asleep still, pliant and trusting. The villain curled against them, half asleep still, vulnerable and exposed. It didn’t feel like the possibility of victory - triumph had never seemed further away.

The hero’s throat locked tight. They could barely breathe.

In sleeping, cruelty had no place on the villain’s face. There was no coldness, just softness, familiar lips that would taste like their mint toothpaste should the hero lean in to kiss them now. Hair mussed by sleep, scented faintly of apple shampoo. Hands… hands that had caressed and adored them, that made them dinner, that held them close. Hands…hands that had hurt and attacked them, bruising, violent hands that committed monstrosities out of sight.

They buried their face in the villain’s neck so they didn’t have to look, arms wrapped around them tight. This was where they always hid when the world and its demands got to be a little too much.

Probably, they should leave. Confront. Make some kind of plan. They gasped at air that didn’t want to come instead. Fumbled for rage, for betrayal, for some motivating force beyond the numb and airless sorrow.

The villain stirred in their arms, rousing at the fierce grip. Those hands slipped into their hair, fingers stroking the locks instinctively. “Alright?” They sounded concerned. “Baby?”

“Just a nightmare,” the hero whispered. “Please, go back to sleep.”

When the world crumbled, it did so with a quiet and aching intimacy.

The villain held the bundle of fabric in one hand. The absurdly bright costume, blood-spotted, hidden. When they inhaled the scent it was of their lover.

Stupid moments - wasn’t that how the worst secrets were discovered? Not with a bang, but with the mundane breakage of an incoming text, an unsent note, a spritz of a stranger’s perfume. Or a hero’s costume so familiar it couldn’t be strange except for the strangeness of it being there.

They’d been a fool not to see it before. To hear it before.

It was the same voice; the voice that soothed and flattered them, promised them, teased them, made a life with them. The same voice that goaded them and taunted them across the battlefield, that cried out in sharp pain at every blow.

Nausea climbed up the villain’s throat. How could they have not seen this before? The two had always seemed worlds away, like they couldn’t possibly be the same. One, their enemy. The other, their home, their safety, whatever warm remnants remained in their heart and cooled now.

No, it didn’t cool. The villain wished their heart would cool. Wished it would freeze over entirely. It burned. It scorched them like hell might, rising sick up their gut and their gullet and hot in their eyes as the first tears fell.

They stumbled to the toilet and threw up, fingers white-knuckled on the edge of the rim. Their knees gave out beneath them. They hated the sound that came out of them, some uncontrollable ugly keening, like a wounded animal that had been shot.

They shoved their fist into their mouth, biting down hard enough to draw blood. They squeezed their eyes shut.

The vomit tasted acrid in their mouth.

They heard the scrape of keys downstairs. “Darling?” That voice. The front door clicked shut.

It was too soon. They weren’t ready.

They couldn’t quite get their limbs to co-operate with them.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs, closer.

They shoved the super-hero costume blindly into the laundry basket, out of sight.

“Oh my god.” Their lover spotted them, by their side in an instant. “What’s wrong?”

They flinched from the touch before they could stop themselves.

“Bad lunch,” they managed. “Must be. Ate something bad. Feels like poison.”

That much was true - they felt poisoned, infected, their most intimate of spaces violated by some foreign attacker.

The hero stared down at them.

Their eyes met.

The hero knew, they didn’t they? It was right there on the face.

For a moment, now, the hero was all they could see. Their enemy towering over them as they were laid to waste, on their knees, broken.

Their lover swallowed and touched their cheek, just once. “I’ll get you some water.”

When their worlds crumbled around them, there was no explosions, no bloodshed.

The lights were off, their bedroom chilly. It was better when they couldn’t see each other’s faces, couldn’t read again the too clear hurts and the accusations. The splits and shattered cracks of everything gone wrong.

“I should kill you,” the villain whispered as they stroked the hero’s hair.

“I should turn you in,” the hero replied. “I walked past the station five times today. You texted me to ask if I wanted Chinese for dinner. Did you know?”

They didn’t ask:

- Why didn’t you?

- Why haven’t you?

- What happens now?

- How could I not see this coming?

The hero ghosted their hand over the scar on the villain’s chest, tender.

The villain, unerringly, found one on the hero’s back.

“I love you,” they both confessed. It sounded like goodbye.

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catasrophic-catastrophy

4 years ago

my last few brain cells arguing at 3am