Brainchild Let me tell you a story about love...
There's love and there's love. This is the other kind. The kind that's hungry. The kind that has teeth.
And we're starting at the end.
Jim!
Blair falls backwards - over the ledge. Jim Ellison is, for once, too late. He can only watch, and Jim is a man who sees more than most. He sees the sun hit Blair's earring - an arrow of blinding light - and when the light is gone, he thinks, randomly, when did he start wearing his earrings again?. Time slows to treacle pulling, pulling, pulling, snapping. Blair falls.
When it comes, expected, the sound of impact is wet; ripe, heavy fruit hitting pavement. The echo stays inside Jim Ellison's skull; buzzing bumblebee hitting the walls. His face has frozen in a mildly neutral expression. His insides are in intermission; he's holding his breath - holding, holding, holding...
He doesn't notice it when the breath grows too cold and sharp for him to contain and it breaks out of him along with a scream, but unfreezing happens in the space of a heartbeat and he is moving, thoughtlessly, mechanically, but fast.
It is incidental that the perp, the man who pushed, is holding a gun; a hungry animal doesn't see the rifle in the hunter's hand. Incidental - he leaps, he strikes without thought, and does not even notice the spray of blood or the crack of the shot, or the muzzle flash or the acrid stink of cordite and loosened bowels. Hunger for revenge might awaken later - now he only knows that he is unhurt and the obstacle...isn't, and none of that really matters, so he doesn't notice anything beyond, or take notice - he might not be capable of noticing anything but what awaits thirty feet below the ledge - he steps over the fallen body and the ledge is closing in, closer, close, very close...
He might have jumped right after Blair - it would certainly have been the shortest way down - but there's a ruthless hunter in there somewhere - call it a spirit animal or what you like; it's there and it's seeing a whole lot clearer than the tangle of misfiring synapses that would, on a better day, make up the person Jim Ellison.
He looks down for the briefest second--
--and takes the stairs.
Here's the kind of love this is: the kind that leaves nothing behind. It descends like a swarm of locusts, devours everything in sight. It doesn't move on, though. It stays, gnawing on the last, dry leaves. Waiting for rain.
And the rain comes, and the love, the kind of love this is, it wants more. It takes more. This kind of love needs a lot of rain.
But it all ends here. No more water to feed the dry grass. No more courtesy-of-the-spirit-plane partnership. No more quiet nights when it's just the two of them in the solemn stillness of the loft, nothing but the crackle of twigs and sap from the fireplace and the pitter-patter of rain on the windowpanes, Blair's breathless whispers. No more of that. Just the locusts now, and the smell of Blair from the inside out.
Not looking yet. Just smelling it - for a moment, he might be able to fool himself it's an olfactory hallucination. Not believing his senses was something Jim did before. Before. Before - like it's after now, and he looks, looks, looks right through, narrows his sight to microscopic level. It's just tissue. Cells. Feeble, dying electrical impulses still flitting through the wet mass. That's not Blair--
--but Blair's last thoughts skidding from cell to cell there. Maybe...he is still in there, and that's the thought that makes the wild creature inside the civilised man sit up and listen.
The world around - a dark street, the sounds of a city not paying attention to tragedy, the smells of wet garbage and exhaust - falls into the background. Further back. Not there at all. The innocents can go to the murderers and the pushers and the addicts and the kingpins. Elvis has left the building.
On his knees, he doesn't feel the scrape of denim-flesh-blood-bone against rough asphalt. He feels the damp warmth on the other knee because it's not his own blood he's steeping in there. On his hands and knees, and his own blood might just as well not bother to flow, because Jim Ellison doesn't notice it. If he did, he wouldn't care.
He breathes in, deeper, deeper, deeper - maybe he's trying to inhale what's left of Blair. Cremate, freebase the ashes - won't work. Fresher, it's still fresh, and he touches it. It - off-white, pale yellow streaks like melted cheese, all covered in crimson: a rich Italian sauce.
The hunger isn't the kind of hunger that sits in your stomach and waits. It is the kind that paces restlessly behind the bars of your ribcage, always waiting for a chance, just one chance to break out and into the world to rip through skin and tear flesh from bone.
Jim's fingers clench, talon-like in the soft, almost-living tissue. Still there, still there, still there, still--
Let me tell you a story about hunger...
Hunger and love.
He's licking it off his fingers, great, slow big-bad-cat licks. The taste is non-descript. What he's picking up...not taste. Not smell. Presence. It is right. It is the right thing to do. That is not a thought - there are no thoughts. It's simply a command from some ancient part of Jim Ellison's brain - the lizard brain, if you will. Eat. Absorb. Keep him inside you forever.
And he obeys, mindlessly, without a flicker of human disgust. He gropes around in the mess of splintered bone and splattered brains. The blood is sweet and thick, and the brain matter is salty and thick, and Jim licks and swallows, licks and swallows, feeling his head fill along with his stomach. He even bends down - as though bowing towards Mecca - and licks the pavement.
There - there. Sweet susurration of strange-familiar presence. Inside him. Taking up space Jim doesn't know he has before it's occupied. He's still not shocked, not appalled, not disgusted - not really there. He lies, curls up beside what used to be his to touch and hold. Not anymore, gone soon, be gone soon. Just a little more, one last touch, one last kiss on pale blue lips - not the kiss of life; there's nothing to save when every part of Blair that matters now lies heavy inside Jim.
Let me tell you a story about love...
And the end of the end is just...contentment. For a few moments. The body - still warm and pliant under eager, searching fingers. The mind - whispering in some dark and secret nook in the back of Jim's brain, calling him out from hiding: whoah, Jim, come back - listen to my voice, come back to me, you can let go, come back to me, just follow the sound of my voice...
Let me tell you about this hungry kind of love...
A story about love... |
