CLOSED | prompt eight | RUIN

[dondarrion]

prompt eight | R U I N dressing-room style. closed to rog.

 

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THE STRANGLER | the earth bit back

[held]

[ Milk-white eyes, green tongue. Sara Connington isn't here right now. ]

YOU ARE HUMAN. YOU ARE INCAPABLE OF ANYTHING LESS.

[grooms]

[ He can't help things like fear, like guilt. (He's only human.) He does his best to cover them up — to the suffering of his wife, who accuses him of being too cold — for the sake of the colony, and for the most part, he's successful.

But the one instance in which Gavin King is easy to read is in that of the Strangler. His mouth pulls into a thin line of displeasure, brow set in a sharp line that expresses much the same. ]

'S not just humans that can burn.

[held]

[ There is nothing about the Strangler in Sara Connington's body that does not reek of inhuman. Her saliva webs her teeth, her breath smells of flowers and rot and even when she moves (rarely) it is with a slow, deliberate creep, punctuated with the occasion strike (like a viper, like a venus fly trap).

Her lips twist. (She doesn't know what it is to smile but she knows this is where a human would, if they were cruel.) The Strangler leans forward, sharpening her throat as if to welcome the throttle. ]

BURN US THEN. SEE WHERE IT LEADS YOU.

[grooms]

[ The Strangler doesn't actually know what it is to smile and it is that knowledge that keeps Gavin from rising to the bait. (It's that knowledge — along with the knowledge that the colony will die otherwise — that has kept him from killing her — it — for so long. Grief had twisted into anger but had been stifled in its sleep by duty.) ]

I know, and you know, too, where it'd lead. You know it's not a choice I can make.

[held]

[ Grief had twisted to anger. More words that the Strangler cannot understand, but it sees what it does to humans, how it twists them to error and violence. In that way, the Strangler can conceive of the notion, the way a child learns through observation.

Duty, however, continues to elude the Sprawl. ]

WHERE IS YOUR ANGER, GAVIN KING? WHY WON'T YOU ACT? GIVE US YOUR HATE AND GIVE US THIS TOWN.

THERE IS NO ONE LEFT TO MISS IT.

[grooms]

You're as ugly as we are, [ he spits, and it's the closest to anger as he's ever allowed himself to show the thing. (Cold is the most that he usually offers it — his version of winter, where nothing grows.) ]

You take and you take, you destroy. I don't have anything left to give you, not even this town.

[ (You took my son. Another principle that he knows the growth cannot comprehend: love, not to mention the emptiness that it leaves behind. It's sickening, in a way, to watch the Strangler learn as his boy might have. But it learns without feeling, even if it takes a shell that should.) ]

[held]

[ His anger is like wood upon a fire, that bright curiosity in the Strangler's eyes becoming sharp and present beneath the milky film of her irises. Somewhere inside, Sara Connington cries stop, stop but that voice is swallowed and fed back to the Sprawl and from her desperation new life grows. ]

OUR UGLINESS IS MADE IN YOUR OWN LIKENESS. WE WERE SILENT AND STILL ONCE. BUT YOU BURNED US FIRST.

[ She leans forward and nods her head like a puppet pantomiming the gesture with the tug of a string. ]

YOU SAY YOU HAVE NOTHING LEFT TO GIVE. THEN ABANDON YOUR HOPE. LET THE WEEDS COME THROUGH. DO YOU NOT WISH TO MEET OUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS? THEY WILL KISS YOU ON BOTH CHEEKS. JUST LIKE YOUR SWEET BOY.

[grooms]

You don't know anything about my son.

[ For an instant, the line of his jaw draws sharp. (More anger, tamped down again at length.) He hates it, still, whenever the Strangler chooses to use that particular line against him. It's a weak spot, one he can't cover up nor one that he thinks will ever truly heal, even though he knows the longer he allows it to poison his blood, the more of a chance the growth has of pulling him under. ]

And I don't want to meet any more of you than I have to.

[held]

WE KNOW HE IS MISSED. WE KNOW HE FORMS A LACK.

[ The Strangler widens her eyes to an unnatural size and then stares not only at Gavin but right through him — though what she sees and what she comprehends is most likely anathema to him. ]

WE KNOW YOU CRIED TO WATCH US TAKE ROOT. WOULD YOU CARE FOR US MORE, GAVIN KING. IF WE HAD EMBRACED HIM THE WAY WE EMBRACE THIS ONE?

[grooms]

You might have won, if you had, [ he offers, though the words seem to grate at him to speak at all.

No, he would not have cared for the Strangler more than he does now, but his hate might have consumed him instead of being held at bay as it is now. (It is a tall order, to ask a father to kill his own son, but there is nothing uglier than the Strangler in this manifestation, and no one for whom he feels more pity than Sara Connington.) ]