Wapun Meadow boorish

merrick was disillusioned. the bear had not spoken for a night. consumed as he was by astara, the boy had not noticed for some time. until that afternoon he woke from a light napping, mind reaching for the spirit, only to be greeted by a cold emptiness.
he swallowed, rose, and set off out of the valley immediately, drawn vaguely by the high-pitched braying of bull elk, but moreover, growing desperate as with each step, the voice did not return.

When he wakes up, he hits his head on a tree branch, and the first thing he sees besides the stars are hundreds of termites gearing up for a siege. The termite general and all his minions gather around him for a kamikaze mission. All they know is that their home has been destroyed. Why would they know that bees die after they sting?
Mister Taylor Fields, mister troubled child extraordinaire and president of the organisation of les enfants terribles just sits there. The days pass and he can't tell where one begins and the other ends. Restlessness gathers inside of him like an engine leak. Internal bleeding from a machine. A stray wire. The tick of a taxi cab meter gone rogue.
I believe that everyone should try and make a real person out of themselves.
I'm sick, he thinks. Soon, I will get better. Dusting off the lint and dust from your suit sleeve has never taken so much effort. His head squeals like the inside of a slaughterhouse. Time to leave, then. Time to go. 

ur post was fantastic

poor merrick. poor merrick; oh he pitied himself and the silent bear voice and the gods that had led him to find laurel, only to have his blood rebuff him as though she too could see the tarnishing of his soul. oh, poor me poor me fuck me; his breath feathered out as one-eyed gaze alit upon a figure within his world.
tongue rubbed the ridges of sheathed teeth. can't all be bad, merrick decided with a gleeful cast that flit across his face and then was gone. but he turned his steps toward the stranger all the same, bold and bold and boldly made by the fragrance of bearclaw, of his wolves, of ravenous astara in her full-fledged fire.
he said nothing, only allowed the single eye to rove openly in its socket while torn ears flickered atop his head. who was this fair young god come into his house? a smirk.

thank you, your writing is absolutely lovely as well

Crunch. Footsteps behind him. Reader, the following series of events all happened in a few milliseconds.
The sound of these footsteps were strange. With growing intensity and for no particular reason, his brain hammers out it's a bear, it's a bear IT'S A BEAR OH MY GOD RUN—
He wrenches his head around. His neck cracks with the motion, his C1, C2 vertebrae, they're all screaming. He's breathing like a locomotive and sweating all over. Goddamn chemicals in the brain. Goddamn amygdala. No, it's just a boy. An incomplete, one-eyed boy. Taylor begins the meticulous process of Appearing Like A Normal and Sane Person: reserving a conference room, getting all his ducks in a row, updating the resume. Those sort of things. Maybe even a smile.
There's a lot going on behind those blue eyes.

thank u <3

something off. something off off off off off in those bluest springbright eyes. the azure of summer dusk. the shimmer of shadowed water.
as with all he met, merrick wondered if there too was a darkened figure, a likeness of this blonde boy that followed. a demon.
surely all had one.
perhaps not. he must keep searching, then, but tongue weighed heavily with the taste of his own madness. copper. blight. serpent seeking another to mate beneath a hot august moon.
merrick drew a breath that shook for reasons unknown and unsearched. "didn't mean to startle you." the truth, but up close, the boy found it was a lie. what might he shake loose from this butterscotch spectre?

A long pause. A long, painful pause. This is all he knew how to do: to stare, to observe, to take Xeroxes of normalcy. The tension leaves him like a rolling skein.
Sure you didn't. Two words in, he tastes blood and has to start swallowing. All he can think about is how much blood you can swallow without getting sick. He can feel the cut in his mouth like a ridge in the great, wet, rolling terrain. His lips and teeth are sticky with blood.
You forgot to make your eyes normal, Taylor. Have I been staring the whole time? I want a mirror. 
Muscle memory. That Xerox of normalcy is falling apart in his head. It's a copy of a copy of a copy, there's bound to have been some mistakes made. There was a man back where you lived whose leg was so badly hurt that all the blood was blocked up to the knee. When they tried to fix him that black blood went up straight to his brain and he died, terribly.
He kevlars his fingers together, steeples them. Just a nervous young man with sleeves billowing off the wrists. Sure...you didn't.

the metalburn scent of blood; it coated the other's fangs, mouth. merrick shifted forward surreptitiously, consumed by the deepened thirst that suddenly parched his throat. to taste; to extend tonguetip to red drop at the corner of this pretty little parrot's jawline.
his nostrils flared. the single eye burned, and now merrick did approach, drawn by some force beyond himself to attend the presence of the bloodied angel. "seems like you might need a stitch or two," the rust-naped madman rasped, voice reaching for the hard glitter of gems behind that dark cerulean stare.
"merrick." an offering to tempt the flaxen cherub, even as the young coywolf began to truly suffer for the smeared crimson lips and the haunted features of this stranger.

And then it developed that Merrick was going to come closer after all. Estimated time of contact: a dwindling amount of seconds. Soon, they'd be breathing the same air molecules. The thought drives a shudder through him. Electricity racing up and down the highway line.
Every time his heart beats, takeoff and landing, he begs for a crash.
All the ticking in his brain is driving him mad. All the beeping in the control center. The levers and gears are going haywire and eating themselves and it is just the grind of metal against metal. His thoughts die helpless, fodder for fire in the fuselage. The windows of the cockpit, tinted black. I know, he grits out, I know what you're doing. Paranoia, hijacker of planes and armer of children.
Call me Fields, he says, just so he could retain a single mode of control. You've heard of this before. You've heard of this, in the stories about murderers who after having just killed a man, go out and play some board games and do the dishes at home.

he was in control here. he was in control because he had declared himself so, the newcomer curling in upon himself with a tremble racing through addled flesh. yes yes yes yes yes this was what the ursine spirit had wrought for him. merrick cocked his head, took another step, fixed the one flamelit latern to the two pools of shimmering ocean. "what am i doing, fields?"
a tease. drag him out drive him out thrust a stake somewhere into his body. the sight of red swam before his eyes. the scarlet drying upon fields' chin. "you're hurt," his voice dropped by now to a hoarse whisper, reminding the other that yes, his intent was sharp and pointed, and yes, he burned for the slow drip of wound.
ragged ears slipped back against his skull; merrick traced his own lips with pink tongue and grinned into fields' face, feasting upon the twist of tense musculature, the accusation.

A step forwards, a step backwards. Some sick interpretive dance. The single eye burns and burns like the end of a cigarette and the afterimage is copy pasted everywhere he looks, everytime he blinks. He's learning what an ashtray feels like everytime a red cherry's being extinguished. 
He won't allow me to do the job interview with blood on my face. I'm going to get it all over my business cards. My fucking cufflinks. What are you doing? You know, you know and that's why, Breathe. That's why you're smiling. Isn't it? It's so hard to keep track of what he's thinking and what he's saying. The skin between reality and unreality is so porous. Osmosis, electrochemical gradients, dispersion. 
You think you can fix me? He's turned all flat. All flat, like the edges of a stealth bomber. Tangent lines, a matte surface. Unknowable. Unreadable. Only a smile. 

"there's nothing wrong with you," merrick purled, punctuating his declaration with a lash of his dark plume. he was backing fields down, down until the stranger turned frigid and calculating, cardboard catching fire against the edge of a pit.
merrick was delighted then; he advanced another shuffle, willing this sea-eyed haunt to stop, to see how close he might come before the warning throb of a snarl sounded. "there's nothing to fix." near perfect, fields with his own dark passenger whispering in clarion whispers to merrick's own heart.
baleful, silent, welcoming; do not cross me in the bottle-message sailed forth with his next careful breath.

Caught off guard, knocked into foreign territory. There are two things that are clear:
one, he has never been so present in his life, and
two, he has never been told that there was, in fact, not a single thing wrong with him.
This must be what falling in reverse feels like. Being upended into the sky. He's giddy. He's hurtling through the universe at a hundred meters per second. Red shift, blue shift. Gamma rays that scream along the cosmic underbelly. Merrick is so close. The whites of his eyes, they shine in the shade. All his life, he's wanted nothing but sleep. In this moment, he is so awake that it's painful.
Say it, he lets the blood drip down the corner of his mouth. Say it again.
He's gritting his teeth so hard that his jaw is beginning to shake, the paper-thin veins at his temples are wild and dilated and hammering. Like the bees in the hive. Those mindless architects. Not even my...parents. How? The stream of consciousness has turned into rapids, aching and hungry.

another step, and now merrick could smell the sangre tinge of fields' breath. "there is nothing wrong with you," he repeated, fascinated by the curvature of the other's mouth as he formed the words.
at the mention of parents, the snake surged forward; its coils writhed momentarily in his gaze, and ice slipped beneath the plane of his voice, limning it with a smoke bred of a long standing wrath. "they were wrong," he hissed, his turn now to turn to ash and cinders, mouth filling with wormwood.
"my mother was wrong too." a slow smile to dispel the ire that had played upon his countenance. "i killed her for it."

Face-to-face, nose-to-nose, the sun casts a venus flytrap shadow over that single eye. That single eye, pulsing and roiling like a stomach. The dark face. The red shoulders. The bare neck. This is like waking up in an airport, having to set your watch back, the signs lit up with a language you've never heard of.
They were wrong, he says, and Taylor takes it as gospel. There is a young man sitting during Mass; when the wafer is passed to his mouth, it bursts into flame. 
Let's try this, Taylor
burn
hiss
hurt
The air, it tastes like smoke, like sweat, the waste of a living creature, all its cells, all its conveyor belts, the factories. It also tastes of Merrick. He swallows. I should've.
He turns away, closes his eyes, breathes in through his mouth and out through his nose, slow and metered. When he returns back to his stare, something has shifted. Has clicked. I believe that one day, a great rain will come. And it will wash the trash and the scum away.

the breath enthralled merrick; closely he watched as if caught within an entrancement. fields shifted, inhaled, unfurled before the eyes of the mad boy. and he had done it had done it had done it yes yes — merrick drew a shaking gasp and nodded furiously in agreement with the rawbound words of his companion.
"i claim the valley where i was born," he rejoined after an ecstatic moment, gesturing toward the oddly curved valley. "next to it is easthollow. my mother's sister lives there." he tipped a sly wink to fields, reveling in their sudden shared companionship, rejoicing in the twinning of their very souls, a conflagration of hope threatening to consume him.
"trash. scum." end them, urged his single eye, his lopsided stare filling with all the sum of everything he had ever tried to suppress. the scales whirled within his mind, serpentine body unraveling unraveling coming undone within his very heartcore.

Taylor smiles again, but this time there is something terribly wrong with the smile— whether its the blood climbing up between the cracks or the degree of which his facial muscles had pivoted or how his eyes remained staring, constant, the pupil whittled down to a pinprick. He had never truly learned to smile.
Every nerve, awake and exposed and shrieking. He had never truly learned to live.
Let me help you, he wrestles these words out from his miserly lungs. His heart was scrawling across octaves and tempos like it was no big deal. He wears this new emotion like a tailored suit, cups it in his hands, disinterested mad scientist. To clean the world. So close. So close that he sees nothing but Merrick.
A pause. A beat. A breath, all of these, tinged with blood. They cannot touch us. The feeling of being an empty, rushing metro terminal. The feeling of being a mouthpiece to something indescribable. To be a weapon.

"they could never hope to come close," merrick purled back in response. laughter billowing in his throat as he breathed in the bloodsport air of fields' breath. let me help you! but he would be the blessed one in the end, the machination of the bear itself, engineering the termination of this world for the next. the haunted constriction of black dots in the center of fields' eyes haunted the boy into a gleeful snicker, hiding the wry twist of a mouth that hungered for the touch of red-splashed lips.
they would make a ceremony of it, he and his new companion, he and the chunnering voice of ursus suddenly come forward to say yes! yes! this is the one. a messiah who would not cast away the darkness, but embrace it, draw it into bone and marrow and artery and throat. "have you eaten, fields?" merrick whispered, the picture of a young leader asking after a newcomer, though his tones begged to be taken for the syllables of smoke and suggestion he could not help.

What a cruel laugh. This was the closest a voice box made of muscle ever got to replicating a computer's Shephard tones. Meanwhile, the other part of him is busying away at manufacturing the closest thing to an emotion he could feel. A copy of a copy of a chemical. Everywhere, Photostats were teeming.
A vision of himself pushing his finger into that singular eye. And how would his skull look, concave and leaking? What would you do if you had the world in your hand? He asks someone in his head. Make a fist. When they respond, it is in Merrick's voice. Soon enough, he's laughing too, coughing out through his gritted teeth like smoke through a car grille. 
With a haunted expression, he closes the gap between them, and seizes the air above Merrick's torn ear. The movement is accompanied by a sound. Something deep in his throat, where after thousands of years of evolution, a complex mechanism that could emit such feral and base noise.

any other might have tightened then, bunched, sent his own teeth sideways to check the show. but merrick was only himself, and shuddered with pleasure at the brief sharp whistle of air alongside his notched ear.
single eye darkened with a serpent's hiss; an answering snarl oozed like oil to answer that of fields. silk upon stone, this one. dark muzzle rose, lips flashing a fanged reminder of who was to lead and who was to follow.
breathless, titillated; "taste mine," just before merrick bit the inside of his jaw, bringing forth his own stinging rivulet of cerise to drip in slow syrup from his lip.

His eyes widen, then narrow, the cleanest pivot the facial muscles can manage under the nuclear onslaught. In his bunker, inside of his skull, he turns over, moans. The red-eye effect, glistening teeth in the dark, the sickly and dead sheen of night-vision— these were all Merrick.
These were all Taylor too. They had too much in common.
Breathing hard. Sweating under an operating light. The muscles you use to smile, well, they're the same you use to snarl. Taste mine. 
That clean drip of blood. Like someone drawing a line to split his chin into two. His teeth, his head, are still ringing from the snap. To think he had been sleeping just a few minutes before. This was a whole other world.
The red drop fattens, becomes bottom-heavy.
It stretches. It becomes unbearable.
Capillary action. It's so familiar. Like nickel. One carbon-based organism to another. This is where Taylor submits. This is where he moves forwards and aims to duck his head just beneath Merrick's chin from sternum to scapula. To feel the vibration, the up-and-down of his breath.

the circumstances of his birth had been forever veiled from merrick, taken to the hastily-dug grave in which indra had rotted before discovery. born into blood from blood choking on the dead scent of siblings too weak to live, he alone surviving with the stench of their withering cauls carried forever.
fields was slipping forward then, and merrick tensed with the wild ripple of sensation that someone should be so close to his throat. but he fought against it; chin lifted; embraced; he is here is here is here. nostrils filled again with the metallic sanguine snap; it rose heady, lucid, enlivening. 
tears now, salt to scour the enlightened planes of his face, until closer he came to fields. touch all of me, arteries veins heart spine — blood in a slow cascade.

Terrible and beautiful in equal parts. Merrick must be real. His own mind couldn't have possibly engineered something so complete, so close. After the brief spark from a fired gun, smoke arises. I have nothing. You have everything. Go ahead.
He wants to fell ivory towers with him. To beat up businessmen and cut his knuckles on their veneers. Justice for those who have nothing to lose. Fingers tight around collared necks and pinstripe ankles. From far away, a gavel as an electrocardigogram. Thump, thump, thump. 
Your claim, he breathes. Blood gets on the floor, on the carpet. What do you call it? It. With it, there comes a bubble of blood. He wonders if Merrick can feel this too. The feeling of being calcified into history. Of becoming myth. Making history is like pressing a scalpel to skin: the tension, the resistance, the break. 
Shame, ecstasy, neurosis, rampaging around his head, persued by an utter calm.

He is never going to sleep again.

"ursus. a place of bears." merrick stared at the wording mouth, claws clutching the half-frozen ground with a whisperwind lust knifing into his loins. he could feel it, could feel the inexorable thrum of magnificent anarchy binding them.
was it for that he throbbed now, or for fields? fields of golden wheat churning into the scarlet curve of lips and eyes that drowned merrick; he gulped the blue thankfully. the refractory blow of two events colliding into one another upon a not so distant horizon.
"they tell me they'll do whatever i say," the coywolf breathed. "i know you will already do that."

we can fade here?

Ursus, he says. Taylor mouths it— purses his lips, the touch, release, touch of his tongue at his front teeth. The air hissing out, it's all that he can hear, careening through the fine bones in his head. The shudder of an instrument. Up his spine. The shudder of photons in the beam of a nuclear explosion.
It's mask off, but he doesn't feel like he's been stuck between two glass slides and into a microscope. It's a feeling that other people who are more emotionally inclined would call belonging, but poor ignorant Taylor just holds it in his hands, feels the weight of it, brushes the dust off and places it in a drawer full of numbered files.
Poor Taylor. Poor Merrick. 
I know you will already do that, he says. Taylor only smiles. You know me so well, he thinks, and that's why I know you so well. He's not used to being known. He's not sure he likes it. But he thinks that he will make an exception just this once. Take me there. Not like he has anywhere else to go.