The kitchen sink is full of blood. Someone is going to need to clean it.
It was freezing in October. It didn’t seem right. In a way so ironic and twisted it almost turned into nothing, Simon figured he was glad for the whole Halloween situation, the distraction it caused, the methodology behind the madness. Anyways, it really went to show how tensile his grip on reality could be when he didn’t watch out - that when he got home, followed a trail of blood spatter across the linoleum (and straight into the corner of the bar; hey, free bruise, she would say), he found both sides of the sink and all its contents of crushed beer cans and broken glasses, swamped in gore. He was racking his brain for a counteract to blood stain ultraviolence before he’d even fucking remembered he wasn’t the only one living there.
“Hey sweetheart, why’s the kitchen covered in blood?”
“What?” The bathroom door squeaking, the clicking of her mary janes down the hall. She came up and stationed herself next to him. “Well, I don’t know.” She was dressed like a prep school kid, but all the whites had gone red, from her shirt to her socks. When her hand sprang up to knock back her headset, Simon noticed how the ends of her fingers had been dyed a faint pink.
Corn syrup and food dye, that was painfully obvious after the next few hours of looking at it. Just like the lipstick spots down her neck, just like the soft points of fake plastic-white fangs glimmering behind her upper lip as she hovered oddly in the bathroom doorway in the dawning light, dripping from everywhere her coat couldn't block the rain; this scary look in her eyes. His hands shaking so hard it was almost beyond him to put his keys away, and she laughed in that manic, giggling way that was cute before she went crazy, or he went crazy, or ugh, whatever. There are deep, skip-inducing scratches in the vinyl of this tail-end of their engagement, in between days of her abandonment; leaving, coming back, leaving, coming back, trying to leave-
“Shut up and get over here."
So desperately they needed each other, however transformed - it was a testament. A heatless, rhythmic inclination such as the salmon or spider whose life mission seems one of brainless proliferation. Or, at that, the mantis who - in the same fervid devoutness that makes girls at parties roll their eyes towards you when you start down that path - dedicates himself to the inextricable physical natures of sex and cannibalism.
It feels so pure, kosher, inviolent with the princess now, to press together like fish, like siamese mermaids, his phantom limb, something familiar, washed in the blood of the…seal? At the worst of it, around the time of the war, crawling skin would intermesh with a spastic numbness, whole extremities suddenly divorced: both hands, an entire leg. Not quite a pinched nerve, it always plagued early mornings he couldn't quite sleep through, still high from a long work night and annoyingly needy, blood so thin it waterfalled through elevated limbs - right to his pathetic skull. Something taking root. Now, Betty is like a hand extended downwards from his forehead, completely within.
Betty had escaped him so long ago, escaped him and their demon daughter she had never known, left them languishing, skittering about in the wreckage of Seattle, agonizing on how to recover her, where she had gone, what black hole she had disappeared into. Wishing for her help, her direction, her groundedness - not that she would know any better what to do with that nuclear-fallout foundling girl. Not that either of them could ever be trusted with another life, or so they would constantly reinforce to one another in jest - it was an entire theory of Simon’s that this was a special kind of room in hell he'd landed himself in for all that stuff he'd said the night Betty had left him. It fit nicely into the pre-accepted theory that he'd truly lost it and all this apocalypse B.S. was of his imagining, just like Betty always thought.
Now, as she rises, unsteady as a fawn, relieved when he dips beneath her and takes her weight, he realizes that he should have mentioned something to Marceline. But perhaps it didn't matter. The little girl had taken it all in impressive stride, in her time, and she was ravenous now for playmates.
"Simon?"
Ah, yes, right. That’s still your name, best one you’ve got.
"Yes?"
"Why are you still wearing it?" The crown. He had rehearsed the answer to everything from "where are we?" to "what day is it?" to "are we dead?"
"Well," He was going to make the princess a palanquin while she was still getting used to her new legs, but that meant attendants. So it was more of a dogsled, stuffed with a nest of bear fur, white fox, and a miscellany of cushions - it sort of looks like their couch would after Betty was done with it, a century ago. It operates just the same, too, propelled with skis alone, sans canine labor, oh, does he love being magic. For some reason, it ran laps through his head during this process - some half-conscious line from across a millenia, and even now as she falls into place, still halfway to frowning, her head craning to follow him. We’re acting like dogs, not people. Is that domesticity?
"A lot happened. The war happened. Its powers are the reason I survived. Marcy-”
“The war came here?”
It’s so far away, how - why would it come here? What does it have to do with us?
What doesn’t it have to do with us? We’re still human, aren’t we?
At first glance, he thinks her vacant, joyless look is to say “not this again”, “not still”, but swiftly recognizes it as acceptance - and there are many truths, both bizarre and traumatic and equally wonderful, for his supplanted second lens to practice accepting. Betty’s pale face, soft as a snowdrift with lips open, hardly moves as they glide up the throat of the host - his auxiliary laboratory in which she’s remained hidden while he smooths out the terms of their engagement - until their pretty mineshaft begins to render itself, transforming into something more recognizable, a corridor, no longer sconced, skylit, with gothic windows just barely thin enough to let the dying sunlight in.
“I’ve been busy. You want something different, let me know. I’ll take it all down and rebuild it. I’ll do anything.”
“You used the crown for all this?” The horrifying prospect that Betty may never get over the fucking crown, dead or alive, momentarily grips him, but the king manages to let it slide. “Where are we, anyways?”
“We’re in the castle. It’s safe here.”
When he built the castle, it was not from the ground up. The catacombs were already there. He didn't remember making them. He didn't remember filling them. For some time, he had lost hold, but no matter.
When he built the castle, it was from the outside in. The grand façades of Germanic cathedrals, palaces and places of worship crested by a spire out of Moscow and cradled tight by a wall like a silver cuff dropped flat between the snow-capped mountains. The ecstasy of the king’s victory nearly drove him mad again, but then again, he always believed his best work was born of the most unpleasant or the most untrustworthy of emotions. This one was freedom.
“How long have I been out?”
“Just long enough.” Something dizzying in Simon’s strained and purified blood took everything he had once drawn out sharp and billowed it around, what might have been sexy and morbid emerging with juvenile whimsy. Betty’s hand is out against the wall, finger following the serpentine twist of the wainscotting. “I envy you, really, you certainly didn’t miss anything.”
“No?” The only language she seems to know is questions, it’s become clear as they traverse the annals of the castle together, silent in the bright solitude, the wishing of the sled a soft, white noise. She was always inquisitive. He’d liked that about her.
“First and foremost, I want you to meet someone.”
The king wasn’t sure at first if it was a good idea for them to see each other at all, to risk one or both of them taking notice of the cut of their cloth, that it was the same. Yet, it seemed inhumane not to, even risking that. At the end of the day, their happiness mattered the most, and they were two creatures now more alike than any other in the kingdom. His demon would just be waking up now, the sun long gone and the plush lavender hue that the ice takes on in the darkness swelling around them.
“I found Marceline when everything was going to hell. She's…” They are at the door to the courtyard, the sled cutting through the threshold as if it were never there. The courtyard, where he knows to always find her, at least at this time of night. Strange girl, catching lizards and trying to suck their brains out. Or whatever it is that keeps turning the nocturnal critters up with frostbite in the garden shed. It’s an awkward age, right? “...she’s…”
Betty finds her first. It’s just as if her hair was made of sugar, or whatever it is that the willow weeps, face obscured as she kneels, still quivery, beside her kindred animal, a curving obelisk marking some beautiful mirage, some manufactured spirit of domesticity. No one need give orientation to it. It’s almost terrifying: her cuppable little face looking up, dazed, Marceline touches her in a robins-egg colored tumult of anemone fingers, that Irish hand coming away a wooly polar bear richer.
Their skin is nearly the same color. You’d think one would notice, especially in touch. But it doesn’t seem to phase either creature. Did he do good? He did good. He did good. His little girl is smiling, tongue under her left fang. They don’t care to notice. Whatever it was in him, species instinct or vendetta, he follows Marceline like a pack animal with a barrel of diphtheria around its neck, always will.
No, silly, that’s the disease. What was the vaccine?
As if to spare him the agony, an ermine flashes in the short grass before the three of them, and it isn’t long before Marceline is fixed on it. It’s funny, he thinks, that when they had been human, the two of them would have already been peeling the skin off this thing. Especially as docile as it is, pooling into freckled arms, writhing in its eellike, rodent way. Bulging eyes shining like a cartoon. Deliberately, he had captivated his kingdom’s wildlife in this way, high off his own lucidity and play-pretending Aurora. There wasn’t a spark of anything but sugar and spice in the eye of any animal with its feet in the snow.
The ermine runs under the garden gate, the princess standing in the same place, arms still raised, like she’s lost hold on a human baby.
“Is the rest of it out there? Can we see it?” Damn, he is trying to be gentle about it. Her willfulness is troubling. But the king still intends to offer the key, especially if it would cause her to feel secure, or less insecure, more secure than she used to be with him.
“You need rest, princess. And it’s getting dark. It will be much prettier in the daylight, at that.” “Will Marceline be alright?” The little one cackles from the corner of the garden, she’s been stalking fireflies. He’s watched the demon eat those, too, thankfully, not in this moment.
“She’s very capable. She doesn’t sleep much during the night, never has.” It feels strangely fallacious to say, since neither of them really ever slept during the night - they’ve spent ample time together for a pseudo-parenthood to function, and it’s felt like decades since he’s been able to lose consciousness without trouble.
“Is she the only other one here? I mean the only person.”
He’s drawing the curtains in the bedchamber against the nightscape beyond, now, its wet desert nature where she would expect to see an urban sprawl, but Betty doesn’t seem to notice. Her functions are unbidden, her personhood migrated closer to the surface. Or rather, lying raw. She’s on the edge of the bed. He pleads with her raw spirit not to freak out at his honesty, then turns to her.
“I keep her alive with my magic.”
Unconsciously, her blue fingers are unknotting the fur-lined capelet he’d had made for her from over the hospital-gown dress she woke up in. It swings open at her shoulders like butterfly wings, but does not fall. Her hands have gone stiff at the ribbons.
“Like me, right?”
“Like you. And like me.” A polar bear was skinned for the carpet at her side of the bed, but he knees it aside now to get under her, uncomfortable with the prospect of stepping on the pristine fur. Betty’s hands go around his face as if drawn by magnets. “See? I knew I was supposed to listen. I knew I was on the right path.”
Neither he nor Betty were ever any good at keeping friends. It certainly leaves a stitch in the whole sledding analogy, but it still seems emblematic of their loneliness in this place. Are they all there is? He hopes so. If the antidote was called ‘memory’, you could count on them to rabbit-run through the snow forever, their journey sisyphean, heading nowhere because there is no one left alive to offer it for. And who is the driver? God? The crown? Is there one? Simon can't see them if there is, but the absence of a whip at one's back is not something to be questioned. The power to keep himself rigged up astride the red-nosed reindeer of this fairytale is not something to be questioned, either.
If Betty remembers too much, he’ll just have to kill her. But she remembers just right, he thinks. Nearly too right. Her eyes are perpetually knocked back in her browline; the closer he leans, the deader she looks. Fixed like a k-9 unit on the crown as she is, he has bowed to her will as usual, left it at the bedroom door, the vanity he made for her, waterfall-style.
Deco, decadent, an opalescent chamber out of a fantasy is no different than a half-destroyed loft in once-upon-a-time Seattle. A concrete ceiling spins to a hum of a sideways rainstorm and sirens and traffic. The glow of it tracks ectoplasm in oxford-tread print across the room, and is working its way back, coalescing with the scuff of abandoned boots crossing from the doorway to their bed. It flashes on a painted talon as it fishooks one, then the other, the rubber soles smacking against the damp linoleum, then vanishes behind her shadow the second Betty steps around the side of the mattress. “It’s like you're trying to get bitten.” Oh, no! Oh no, someone help me!
Absolutely innocent. Maybe not. It’s complex, damn it. Simon is typically too lightheaded to make it out. Luckily, they had a tendency to float before the war, and now that he has the crown and now that they won’t be metered by book royalties and now that Betty is here, the wonderland lies open.
Betty, missing link, Disney heroin. Perfectly into place she slips, blue as an apparition, dizzy, she is still remembering how to breathe, her hand always low around her neck, where her metronome sits. Every absence is filled, then, the pockmarks in his world smoothed over, and in twenty-eight days, they have decided to have a real wedding - upon the opening of the Regulus portal, in the fashion of royalties of antiquity.
They whirlwind, on parade in fur, sedated in crystals, thrown across blue velvet. Every night, he plays a shy nurse, makes sure her heart is beating, that her eyes dilate, that she breathes deep and smooth. Betty had always been so intense, so charmingly assaultive, and that fact hasn’t changed. Lying next to him like an anesthetized savannah, the side of her face turned to him dripping in satin, she watches him from under heavy lids, sometimes with his arm seized in her claws, sometimes with teeth. Sometimes saying his name so soft and hopeless when he’s got the electrocardiogram out that this self-imposed game of premarital abstinence feels like getting waterboarded in sub-zero temperature. Always ticking away at a three-point canter.
He did good. He’s made a crucial error. Wherever the truth falls, all roads still lead to Rome, don't they?
Lichen and brush speckle the plains. Baby-faced arctic poppies and roses with their frosty coronas, an infection of dwarf willow, pasqueflower with their fuzzy heads. Moss, steadfast campion. Betty had once kept birds of paradise. When she isn't in the garden where Simon has inexplicably started growing artemisias, watching Marceline play with herself and trying to make sense of what she is meant to do with her, she takes up an ice pick and chisels directly into the inner wall. Sculpture, weird things, revolts against nature. At first, it was all a mad dash between the mechanical and anatomical; Gigeresque, ribboning cords and cables that took thousands of repetitive little hits to chisel out. Brainless, sometimes forgetting to breathe, her hands numb by the time chimes would sound in her brain and she'd turn to a pair of knee-high boots that must give him two inches at least, try not to smile, and accept whatever he offered: a compliment, a fruit, a long stroke tucking her hair behind one ear. Simon doesn't care if she defaces the entire kingdom, he'd said so when she woke up one night - one of the first, they seem to blur - pressed against the wall, some pretty, sharp replica of a ceremonial adze from his sword room a handful of centimeters into the surface, but he'd find her some real tools. She’s gone all studio girl. It’s healthy to partake in the art of creation, he says. Especially now. Carry the torch, et cetera. ‘Cause they’re all that’s left, now.
Brushing away nonexistent sweat, the princess forces herself to stop cutting and look at what she’s doing. An impromptu wedding present, that was how she figured it, since she couldn't seem to avoid him, even in abstracts. It isn't clear if the king can tell, not at first, but today, she cut rays of sunshine into the top of his head, a circlet of artemisia. When he brings her tea, takes her hands, always talking to himself about being too rough, about gloves she refuses to wear because her hands are clumsy enough as it is, he pauses, stares. Flicking the first and second lenses of her glasses out from beneath the wing-tip frames, she looks at him untinted, so shockingly white in the aftermath of the redness that she has been sculpting in for no reason aside a change in tonality. Colorful hindwings on swing-arms serve different functions: magnifying, ultraviolence protection - the ubiquitous snowiness of their terrain sometimes felt like staring into the sun at any angle. He had made them in the shape of a butterfly on purpose, the forewings shaped just like her ones before and their glass tinted the same pthalo of his own.
“You’ve getting good at this.”
“Hey, thanks.”
One of his pale hands ghosting upwards to the image of himself, she calls him the king, the babylonian Sharru, still crude, but she’s got the motion right - right? He runs it down over his shoulder. He hardly lets her touch him these days, so she turns to the living image, shespankh, an outsider eye cast upon the sphinx. Something feels trapped in her, too. Simon let her go on using the adze.
At once, Betty startles, snatches his arm, pulling him back, away from himself. The skin is smooth where his fingers had caressed. For a moment, she possesses his wrist. The light is coming through his fingers.
"Don't. It's not the same."
"My apologies."
That may be. Betty is watching him out of the corner of her eye - not out of mistrust - as she goes back to work. Swaying in the battering mountain wind that never really felt cold, one arm folded under the other, doubtless considering how to undo his crimes, his wide eyes and tips of a smile, endearingly psychopathic, are those she once knew best over a word processor, across a more gentle winter spent piecing together their first book, slotting their Mystic Rituals chapters together across his living room floor to a screaming record. A half-dozen half-full coffee mugs in a half-lit half-circle around them. Betty twisting her head, hand curbed beneath a swiftly-dying cigarette, halts and pokes the cherry into the sharp mouth of the Monaco to her side. The open window drags it away without assistance, the same window that sickens the plant, cools the doorknob, reddens the cheek. A half-conscious half-written half-dressed half-life half- “Hard to tell when one ends and one begins.”
“I haven’t finished.” Despite the clarity of his tone, Betty says it anyways, not entirely sure why, head all clogged up with girls. Studio girl, library girl. Office girl, apartment girl. Emergency room girl, bedroom girl. Alleyway girl, castle girl- but that just means princess, princess. Or, vice versa. Halfling, half-queen.
The crown cannot be to blame for the shift. Centuries have overlooked her lover, but still, they have passed. The changing is slightly more apparent for the fact that, despite his claims of unquantifiable "ages" and "forevers", it’s still must be her Syoma because she can feel him blind if she has to, all the way down in her bones, and if Betty thought she had spent even a single, lonely year comatose, she would be able to figure it out. It would be easy to tug the sheaf of hair over his left temple that was dreaming of going silver, chart its course. Needless to say, that was a definite stitch in Simon’s logic, but even then, it's clearly all just cosmetic: the white-blondeness of his hair, the feathery thing he is doing with it, even his voice lilts the same way even after the straightening iron was taken to his vocal cords.
The shift itself - over the course of the several weeks the princess has spent at the castle thus far, unschooled, unemployed, absorbed in her art and her housewife fantasy purely, Betty has begun to feel like a pet apprehending a natural disaster, in this displaced, untraceable way. It has to do with eyes, and skin, and it has to do with -
"Did you do something to me?" Best to just come out and ask. It hangs in the air, smoglike. "You know what I'm talking about." She holds her throat with the hand that isn't twirling the adze down at her side, the little tip grazing the side of her knee on every revolution. He's very still.
"Well…nothing I wasn't certain of." The propped hand under his face kind of darts around, burrows behind his neck, that curtain of bleached hair. "I can, well, it would be trickier at this point to change, but no trickier than-" It's the first time he’s even recognized their life before this, not fleeting and haunted and always about the war, but their life, though sometimes, it had been a war. A war with money and bodies and sometimes, their brains. Money, which they are at once completely beyond and childishly in love with.
If it is all an act, the king drops it like a plate smashed against a kitchen floor, his arms falling, suddenly annoyed.
"Come on, princess, I couldn't help some things, I wish I could have, but you know how it was, all the fucking wastes of time, all the hoops, 'doctors'." He says it with air quotes, leaning closer to her canvas so she almost has to look at him. "This is cosmic payback! If I could've asked you first, I would have. You just…don't understand yet." And he doesn't understand, in his beautiful house and pretty clothes, that everytime her mouth opens, a phantasm Betty presses her cheek against hers and speaks the words for her. When she tried to look at her once, the reflection seemed terrifyingly correct, her pale eyes, her oil-slick hair, but what falls in her face is red. When she looks down at her palm, it is pink. She is succumbing to it, she thinks, Petrikov Effect.
"You would have cut off your fingers to change your voice back then. At least, that's what you said." Does her doppelganger still have all ten? If so, she hasn't held them open for Betty to take her due. Simon remembered so well. That fact is troubling. "And it was so easy."
Why does it bother her so? Dumb, to expect herself to be unchanged after…centuries. God knew she fought well enough for this, something as simple as a gentler voice, before the war. In her hand-forged cracks, the ice fluffs forth like a snow cone. She is digging it out from her self-portrait's italianate, concave pupils with her little finger and trying not to look at Simon or think about his deadish blue mouth and her own eyes above it.
"How did you do it? It must belong to someone."
“Way to ask a magician his secrets." It’s cute, sort of, how he smiles behind his hand, still spinning back and forth so gently it only rustles his hair. "It is your voice. Two years at most and it would be. It's been in my head for a thousand. I really hardly changed it." Well, it was apparent, she wasn't alone, nevermind how she once adored that teenage addict, pillow-screamer scratch. Are they perfect? Are they cured? Is it all gone?
There it was. The real stitch, the behemoth that dogged her, to stab at walls, to wander corridors at night with key in hand, trying doors, finding a world, but never hers.
"Where is everyone? Are they still out there?” Cocking her head over the parapet.
“In ways, yes, some.” So he had done it, he had broken through, just like he had promised, and the world would be good to them now. The Petrikov Effect is just a hypothesis. Betty remembers that much, that it had never been corroborated. It is an incredible mystery, their entire lives. Are...they still alive?
“Princess?”
She hadn’t been moving.
“You’re alright, aren’t you?”
Tearing her face into a tight smile - as what else is there to do - Betty finds the unsettling force taking its hands down and off her shoulders as Simon’s neck snaps away from her, hearing something she can’t. Eyes on the sky, hovering, then, with parted lips twisting.
A dark ghost snaps onto the scene, early in the evening to see the little girl. Betty didn’t even have a clue. Pooling in her lacy, black-translucent arms is a penguin like a fat, lazy cat. Marceline is just as alright as Betty is.
“Simon, I found him on the beach eating the seal afterbirth again.”
She has his inflection. There is no reason for this to bother her. It doesn’t bother her. In actuality, there’s something (I don’t know, sexy?) about the gushing abandon of his friendship with the young princess that he must have cultivated all on his own, and under such strange circumstances - but they’re a strange family as a general rule. Marceline included - for all her odd, albinistic and gothicky quirks, her lack of blinking, her hatred of the sun, her dazed ebullience and childlike wonder towards him screams of a well-restrained ingenuity that only lends to the concept of her immortality. All of theirs.
Even if Betty refuses to dwell on how these things can exist outside of her; voices and eye colors and little girls that have inexplicably come to be hers or the intensity of how an entire wardrobe-full of her clothes is picked over and recalled, it threatens to break her. Besides the restricted palette of the court dress angle they seem to have slipped into as easily as they used to one another's sweaters, she takes notice of craft-scissored sleeves on a sweater she desired once to give thumb-holes, a manufactured wine stain on a Sonic Youth shirt, not to mention weird and whimsical luxuries that go from true gothic to Sailor-Moony. Red things, ribbons, so many ribbons, she used to love ribbons. Innocence and dark potential. A ribbon tying her hair up, a ribbon slung around wrist and radiator, because he didn’t always have a headboard tall as a Catholic altar.
You’re alright, aren’t you? You’ve dealt with this before, you know what to do. She has dealt with this before, this forgetful, autopilot brain fog. But, there used to be a bar she liked. There used to be a direction to walk. Her options have fallen away, trainless, aimless, in her sturdiest boots, pulling on a cloak, something Nordic, familiar, it isn’t even so cold, what does she need to take? She doesn’t want anything. The key.
The palace guards blink at her like goldfish, pass glances, step in tune against the doorframe without a word. The outer gate is the same song, and when Betty crosses into the land beyond those walls, a strong wind blowing her hood off in one clean gust, it irks her to be relieved. He is acting strangely again, but Simon isn’t like he once was, he wouldn’t go all crazy if he caught her leaving. Man, can’t do anything right, can she? Not even take - not without playing a victim.
The tundra is familiar, she is heading south, in a straight line from the kingdom gates. The land is barren, but she’s weathered worse, the ground nowhere near this leveled. Answering machine absent, Betty had left a note, even knowing the guards would be keeping stock of her for their king. They may have told on her already. She figured she would leave one anyway.
As the hours stretch on, marked only by the hide-and-seek dimming of the sun between drifts of storm clouds above, a warmth that settles and dissipates on the back of her neck, it would be naive of Betty not to be unsettled. She hasn’t even seen a bird. The further from the castle, the warmer the air; as if the heart of winter itself lay buried in the catacombs beneath their kingdom. It was midday when she started out from the castle, and now, the pink horizon wet and dark as a tongue has half-dissolved the sun. She hasn’t come across a thing. A car broken down, a towering billboard, the banners ripped off the bones. A highway. Something real. Something she recognizes. But no people. Wind gushing across the barren blade of a fan. Even the vegetation has seemed to retreat, despondent, a chronic lack of stimulation. Did Betty really believe the castle was the storm shelter Simon made it out to be? Did she really think there was anything beyond it that was more dangerous than a stark exhibit of humanity’s failure? No. Not before the sun had gone down.
The unletting breath of the air could certainly cloak an incredible amount of noise, that’s for sure, but it doesn’t make her stupid. She can feel it in her skin. She hasn’t stopped moving, having given up at this point on crossing paths with life outside Eden, but unwilling to turn around, the true reason still evading her. Now, suddenly, the wind isn’t loud enough to stifle the battering of some hooved creature on the road behind her.
Unwilling to frighten, or battle, Betty stops short, for the first time all day, her body straining to carry on without her. She turns. Even in the quickly dying light, and fifty feet down the road, it takes half a second to identify the pale-haloed head over the white stallion that has been dogging her. It should not provoke her to keep walking - she’s unable to place why she does. Because she knows he will keep coming?
In a minute’s time, the equine shadow falls over her, the moon somewhere behind her now.
“Betty?’
She doesn’t mean to ignore him, it’s only that nothing comes out.
“I’m so glad I was able to catch you! Where are you going?” It’s like he’s trying to sound worried, at least, it’s easier to believe that over the alternative. "I should have told you, but you really, really, shouldn’t be out here at night!”
Was he on that vampire shit, again? Throwing a look over her shoulder, another sheet of lukewarm wind knocks Betty’s hood back off.
“You have to come back with me, Princess. Please.”
Above her, he is shifting back in the saddle, unhooking himself from the stirrup, bringing their centaurian unit to a halt - Betty manages to do so without losing step, as if she has understood the horse’s language. It would be easy to continue following the king’s instruction, too easy, as if it is only a mirage in the desert and she is dying, his hand thrust down at her, fingers splayed. Something is strangely ebullient about his demeanor lately, in contradiction to the jumpy, temperamental energy of the last moments she can remember…back in Seattle. She studies the gaps between his fingers. He isn’t faking.
“I’m not faking.” There’s something perplexingly elven about him, I mean, she guesses.
The proffered hand is retracted, and for a moment, all Betty can think of is that he’s given up, that he is going to leave her, jerking the horse around to face back north. When it’s his right hand held down instead a moment later, she takes it unthinking.
“Hold these.” and he drops the light, leathery reins into her stiff hands, struggling with something behind her, then, rough enough to startle her, knotting the sleeves of his little riding jacket around her throat, over the hood of her cloak. Half-talking to himself, she only catches the tail end of his thought. “-nevertheless, I don’t want to see them try.”
The questions snowball in Betty’s throat until none will fit in her mouth. Something about how Simon’s forearm locks around her waist, thumb through her belt loop, and his forehead hits the base of her spine and stays there, has Betty feeling that she really has done something she shouldn’t. As if they’ve never before run out on eachother. Eyes on the road, on the stars, startling at wisps of white hair that tumble over her shoulder in a sharp breeze, Betty is waiting for something bad to happen. She’s feeling fortunate to be semi-adept at horse riding, heeding his warning and maintaining speed.
Every few minutes, it strikes her again, this whim, this instinct. To let him remain how she had once known, not as a savior, not as an iron lung, but as nothing but a starry sort of pipe dream, an author of fantasy, strange and demure and kind of dumb. Her primeval puppy-love.
This instinct tells her to run - and out of all the myriad destinations in which her scent might be harder to catch, it tells her to run back to Seattle, wherever it is, or was. Find a fucking newspaper, just anyone else at all, anything to check the pulse of the world, know that she and Simon didn’t get their hands on salvia and not remember it, or that she isn’t the amnesiac subject in some morally-questionable social experiment to analyze…Petrikov Effect.
One of these questions rips through her throat, just in time.
“Where is this portal you’re taking us through, anyways?”
It is the heart of the lion, seventy-seven light years away. She knows where it is, desires only to feel him press against her, cheek against her ear, pointy finger disappearing into the black sky. Regulus is one of the brightest objects out there, even now. They must be so far from Seattle, for the biome to feel all tundra as it does in the dead of summer.
There is a plane, way up. A plane, unlit. No, it’s a body, falling to earth, a suicide, a comet?
“Oh, you’re kidding.”
He has the reins, they’re off, a kick and a sharp swerve onto the road’s shoulder. The air is so much colder when you face it at a dead run, the both of them buckled over, arms knocking like four arrows in a quiver. Whatever it was she saw in the sky is somewhere due east. They aren’t running from it on the road back to the castle, but astride it, yet Betty can hardly take her eyes off its spires to see what they’ve gotten themselves into. No, she has to.
The black sky is empty. Whatever it was, it’s hit the ground by now, or it was only a shared mirage. A mirage - there you go, it’s just desert madness. You’ve been out here all day. You don’t eat. But didn’t Simon see it? Didn’t he sound terri-
Three things happen in very quick succession: there is a flash in the road that might as well be a lighting bolt, the distance of a bus in front of them; Simon’s hands go crushingly hard on hers, jerking them back, to the side, half-turned off the road, and their steed goes up on hind legs and nearly throws them both. Betty is just about to take off again when the king’s hands clap back over hers.
"Take this." The weight behind her disappears with the smack of boots against frosted grass, and something is pressed into her lap that she grabs at blind, fixed, frozen, on the thing in the road.
Instinctually, another human shape sparks a chemical comfort, even if Betty must know. The teenager with hands twitching is looking directly at her, not at the figure approaching, their ripped shirt fluttering in the freezing air. It’s crusted with stains down from the collar, thin, brownish splatters, their once-white sneakers and cuffs of their jeans darkened in the same fashion. Their mouth opens, slow, not unlike the yawn of a cat and Betty swears that inside there were rows of little teeth, like a sandworm.
A more naive Betty would have staked her life on her capabilities against a terror such as this. From poltergeist to gorgon, she’d know exactly what to do; covering her neck was a stolen trick, after all. Something in her humanity twists, simmers. The kid hasn’t moved, and the king is moving quickly towards them, twirling something like a glaive that seems to have appeared from thin air, bringing it back, low and slow, hand flexing. It’s hardly crossed her mind that she doesn’t want to watch her fiancé kill some hard-luck teenager, even the image of one, at close range when Betty is shocked out of her delusion.
“Hey, Princess, I think you’re going to have to use that!”
A hurricane of white noise. It smothers fear, swallows up the manic laughter of this snake-eyed kid with their blue hair matted around their mouth as they phase through the instruments of their demise smoothly as with a projection, and starts down the road towards her, scraped, untied shoes hardly brushing the asphalt. It filters through a coalescence of cut the head off, hurry, just swing, rumbles through a stretch where everything just goes bad, his weapon gone, Simon at their skinny back suddenly, a headlock, flinging them down and falling after them, one fist in snarled locks rammed downwards so their neck lies bare. It ebbs through just start cutting, it can’t phase out if it’s in too much p- They shriek, buck against him, their hands straining, claws out, at his wrists, and it shocks Betty out of her stupor for one pristine second. “Cut away from yourself, don’t let it slip-” and her eyes return to her again, the moment she gets the blade through the spinal cord and it just falls apart, the kid’s wrists in Simon’s hands, and their body underneath, and even their head with its swirl of wet hair from rolling when it had come off.
She sits in the road for a while with him, the blood on her arms and the bite of the blade on the heel of her palm the last traces of the sudden assault on their reality, watching him absently spitshine the blade of his sword, a lavender scratch down the back of one hand and a dusting of blood - the amount of which unsettled her, as if their attacker had ripened. Betty used to feel all soft like that, too.
The pins have started to fall out of his hair. Simon had recently started pulling his hair back the same way she does. Her scrunchies started to disappear. In retaliation, Betty had severed hers a week later, right above the shoulders: though it will never curl loose and soft like his, however weightless.
“I didn’t know they were still around.” He’s grabbing his forehead, the side of his hand still smeared with congealing blood. “Uh, w-we called them wanderers. They were a classe of vampires that could alter their…corporeality. I thought I was being smart, leaving you with the only silver just in case they were running a hijacking or something. Silly of me.” Manic at the slightest turn, he’s up, slamming the sword into its sheath without looking, troublingly quick. “If there ever was a sign that you need to come back to the castle with me, hm?”
“I just wanted to see if I could find anyone.” He looks at her like she’s stupid, but it’s only a flash.
“Princess-”
“Where are they?”
"They're dead.” He is being patient. She should know this. Right? “Bombed eachother to fucking bits, lost their spot on the food chain, now whatever is left is probably hiding underground in their silly little, you know-” He is trying to stir a sensible word from the air, coming up empty. “Skin hats. Last I saw a tribe of them, they were planning some suicide mission on some ship’s carcass they stuffed with homemade parts. But that was…” Gaze fixed somewhere to the south. His hand goes over his eyes. Stray locks of hair stuck to his forehead with the dried blood, sharp against the ivory. With all the starlight, the land lying naked around them, so unlike the city they knew, this all feels so much more like one of their old adventures with an extra sprinkle of murder. Something inside her chest stirs, waking at last with the rest of her. “That must have been over nine hundred years back. It wasn't hardly a ship anymore! So desperate."
Nine hundred years back.
“But I'm here! And you're here. And we need to get going."
And that’s enough, isn’t it? The hummingbird thought knocks around in her head the whole ride back to the castle, the whole night, the whole time Simon is treating the little cut on her palm from his sword, washing dried blood out from under her fingernails with a silvery horsehair brush as if her hands were too heavy for her wrists to hold.
Staring into the speckled clamshell sink, the bathtub in the mirror the size of a koi pond and the slivers of pink-salt coastlines orbiting the drain, Betty realizes that this is something that has happened before. She believes that is why he takes the effort now, and so she allows it, this meticulous, gentle treatment of her so much like a jointed doll he taught to walk, leading her by both hands back to their princess bed with its cold, silky sheets and cosmos hanging all around them where nothing happens but she feels real inside, anyways, truly safe, and rampant with thoughts.
One of the first nights she was awake again, Betty screwed up. He was hurt or something, she felt it, something sharp under his shirt, low on the left side; she thought it might be a staple. When she grazed over it on an upward path, his hand rose hard under her chin, forcing her up, away from him, away from his bed. "Marry me." He said. "Marry me first. Then we can go on forever." There was no way he could know that. Oh, but wasn’t it nice to pretend that he could? “I-I think it would be nice to just do a ritual here, I mean, in the castle. I know you’ve just woken up, and all. I’ve just…missed you, I guess.”
It was the same jilted, direct turns that emerged somehow from the snarled mess of desire that he sucked at straightening out back when they had just met, no matter how desperately they pounced on eachother, cataclysmic, arrhythmic, that made it unnecessary to have it all spelled out in the way that they wrangle the tangible. The same turns that felt real for that fact, shards of sea glass tumbling back out of the water. Momentarily, the princess forgets about the one that seems to be lodged between his ribs.
"For real this time?"
“This is the same time.” With his finger still wrapped around her chin, he drags her back and forth, like she’s some little kid, so naive, so silly. “Rule with me, princess.”
“Okay.” She can hardly hear her own voice, how does he do this, and oh, suddenly she is overcome with need to claw apart this projection of his beauty the same way she frees herself from her carving wall, exhume her weeping, desperate twin from its freezer grave. Binding it, harnessing it, and sewing it back into her side. They occult each other, a single spot of light sharp as a diamond, just where the lion’s heart should be.
Completely wasted, tweaking and faced with his usual affliction, she'd given him a black eye once and didn't even know it. How devastating it was to her composure, fearful, angry with herself, being forced to look him in the face, teeth gritted against all his prying, all his reassurances. Bucking against it. The way he drew back, head craned away from her, biting his lip, bouncing on his heel like he did when he got really worked up, a human Vespa. Look, I liked it anyway. Does that help? In the grand scheme, that probably only made her worse. But who was there to care anymore? What now could hold them back? So when she said “okay” and he lit up, whirled away, and slid not five minutes later back through the doorway, hellbent on Regulus, she took one look at the fierce smile in that mess of stardust curtained by silver-leaf embroidery, the incredible brightness of him, and didn't look back again.
Memories light upon her on nights like this, now, the seventh time one of them proposed to the other, and the next to last, now. Sweetheart, it’s terrifying me. I don’t think we’ll ever be free if we aren’t free now.
When was that? A hole in the mirror where it should reflect, as if he is still saying it.
Sleep comes elusive, quiet, too thin, too lucid. Betty lays here holding the door of her consciousness closed with all her might until the fight goes out of her: one with the wind, with the twirling curtains, her head full of their bells. The two of them just staring at each other, always touching, playing their little mind games, the crown locked up for the night. Then, his eyes wouldn't open again, the soft smile lingering anyways, and alone, she doesn't stand a chance. Always at his heels, her gemini, her seahorse. But she wouldn't find him there, only hours of darkness, buried under the snow like one of those dead kids dumped in Oakland back in the seventies. Waiting, shivering, to be exhumed. Betty doesn’t remember what it was like in her coma- she has started to get used to the sound of coma, a quick little word, like comet - but she imagines that is why she fears unconsciousness now.
Up, a couple of slow, wobbling bounds across the bearskin, praying not to make a sound, Betty notices that the moon is full. The gateway is to be in the light of a waning crescent. She wishes it were sooner. She wants to feel right, again. To be rid of the symptoms, the fleas. To forget the city, to forget the back of the bus, her favorite bartender, birds of paradise, to surrender it, to enlighten herself, to evolve, transform. If she can’t leave the castle, she’ll just change her axis, pulling her cloak off one of the gilt boudoir chairs, a crystal decanter of something that smells like rum, but always seems to melt right through her. She’s got unicorns on the mind.
A considerable stretch of the catacombs she has previously toured, the softly-lit paths and corridors, an underworked, crystalline aura seeming to follow her. Some of the darker passages are illuminated by enchanted and powdery-blue flames closed in prismatic, Spanish-style lanterns, hung from ceilings, dangling on skinny dark brackets fastened high on the walls. Then, sometimes the world will open up, and a cave will stretch so high that sunlight lays gleaming on the jagged ceiling. The crystal in her fist is heavier now than anything it once contained - just like the wino skeleton of her thoughts, guarding its castle on eternal overtime.
Some of the labyrinth makes sense, and some of it doesn’t. Some passages have no floor, only smooth, wet ice she might watch the king glide down without a thought in those tall heely boots that she's witnessed him alternating spells on just to conjure blades from their treads. Half-bored, the next one Betty comes to: this one steep, set back, facing the way she came, she takes a chance on. It sits in a broom-closet orifice beneath a staircase that leads into one of these skylit atriums, the floor all tessellated like a ballroom, and she hasn’t noticed it before. It is really half-stairwell, the passage round, the steps irregular, and it must decline for three stories, fading to black twenty feet in, then-
Something is illuminating the tunnel’s end. At first, Betty thinks it is a lantern, it is someone else in here with them, and she can’t seem to balance that glimmering hope with the fear that it is going to try to kill her. It glows as a fallen star that never touched ground, a terrible sunspot. A firefly?
Without light, Betty can’t seem to remember how to see, all her fancy focal lenses she left in the bedroom upstairs certainly useless for this purpose, the firefly twenty feet out and down, but she does. The passage is cool and scarred like some stones, or rock faces on a beach, the channel that seems to stretch on all sides and forever, a gash under the surface of the earth. The air is beginning to smell like the sea, placebo or not, flaky with snow she nearly mistakes for anglerfish. In fact, it is only that twinkle of gently drifting snow, and that atomic insect, that seems to emit light here.
Now deep inside, in a cloud of stardust, something rises, a façade, pillared and pointed, the color of a plum and so light it seems to melt right into the floor. It looks like a mausoleum. Her ribs seem to tighten around her chest. No, it looks like a chapel. She is up the steps, she is at the doors, the windows blacker than black, but with her face pressed to the glass, a distant twinkle calls across the abyss - the firefly? No, it is an owl now, blonde, churning into a flurry the shards of snow still falling, falling through the roof. When she shows her face to the darkness, the hidden eyes inside show themselves back, and seize her, ripping open a second eyelid, the key she has brought with her out of her cloak pocket and just about to slip into the ormolu door plate swinging back with an involuntary inhale. Too deep, princess.
What the hell is this? Was Betty finally able to pull a real dream out of her barren substrates? Is she capable of that? Transforming into a somniphobic child lost in the woods? No damoclean sword lies ready for her to wave around - anything could be in those shadows, there could be a million vampires under here with her, creeping up - why didn’t she bring a lantern?
At once possessed by the fear of this, a clan of flying, bleeding, fiery ghosts trembling with revenge for their murdered kin, and of that dark chamber with its angelic dusting of snow, Betty makes it halfway to the stairs with her gaze still fixed on the windows of the chapel, completely detached from the plausibility of tripping, of there being something behind her, and covers the remaining ground at a dead run. The serpentine stairs are no comfort, slippery and infinite and turning like the facets of a whelk.
But she’s only imagining it, after all, insecure from the vampire encounter - that should have been traumatic, really, the king had taken it in stride and she had followed suit. But still, then, there was the matter of the chapel.
When she slips back around the bedroom door, a slice just deep enough for her to go through sideways, Betty immediately notices it has drawn itself even deeper than she’d left it. For a second, she fears crossing his waking path, then wants it. Then, she sees the bed.
It's only Marceline, of course, perched right in the center, limbs out at all angles, as comfortable in being there as if this is all some big hallucination and this is their daughter only come to sleep in their comfort, this is the strange creature they might make of their biohazardous blood. Dead pale as Betty is. She is watching him. He is still asleep.
In the castle, every night is purple, blue, glossy, the moonlight ricocheting forever. Betty watches a breeze twirl the bead curtains around in the milky glaze of it, lying on her back. At the corner of her eye, Marceline is playing with her hair, whispering to her all the weird things a kid does. Betty has just about given up on trying to decipher her own forgotten history through this girl, much less through Simon. Yet, once in a while, she catches sight of a clue.
“We slept during the day a lot. Once we slept in a tree! It was a really big tree. I like being in the dark, though.” Curtly spinning around, the mattress bouncing under her. “I haven’t seen Simon sleep in ages. He said he was scared of the um…” Sticking her knuckle in her mouth. “Right, the demons!”
“Sleep paralysis?”
“Yeah, sleep demons! They sound cool, but Simon doesn’t like how they always look like him. He’s so weird.” Coming out of the little girl’s mouth, it sounds so teasing, as if she knows this to be true of him. But Betty doesn’t know this to be true of him. Was it ever quite like this? Night terrors, sure. Touches of manic-depressive insomnia. He’s alright now. Curled away, deathly still but for an occasional, shivery glitch.
The odd, canine little princess drops off still curled up at Betty’s side, uninterested in blankets. Betty is running her fingers up and down her back, having lost track of how long, when she notices the stillness that has come over everything but her hand in front of her face. The milk has gone stagnant. The dripping icicle of her sternum garners its composure once again. The ribcage just that. The girl is certified weird, with sharp teeth, twisty, elven ears extruding from the peaks of her black hair, but when Betty lays a hand on her back and feels her still as one of those life-size dolls that always manages to be debatably haunted, she freaks.
She finds it, Marceline’s breath, of course, a minute stir, sitting low under the surface. Why must she do this to herself? Reaching over, before she can think twice, she sticks two fingers under Simon's jaw. It had been like this before, slow, steady, gone, rabbiting back up. She's afraid of her own, takes a few deliberate, meditative breaths, then does the same. Faint, steady. But something isn't right. It feels almost as if it beats in three-four time.
The sun hasn't yet risen, and Marceline is gone again - what an odd child. Somehow Betty knows she won't come back, so when sleep has released her again, she edges across the girl-sized gap and takes hold of the sharp edge of the snowdrift with the platinum hair that twists, unfurls, then pulls them against each other. Still asleep by all appearances, tightening around her, slow, like a snake. She plays dead. Once the light returns, she’s back at her wall.
Betty had never thought herself stoic, never, but she catches herself often now forgetting to blink. Apparitions of this waking creature plague her, with her even, sweet voice and blueness, in spiderweb-thin sheets of ice over troubled waters. The awkward, dramatic and flighty creature she really knows herself to be is straitjacketed somewhere inside. All lace and frost emulsified in an absinthe coating. A handsaw at her stomach, pushing into the angora.
This used to be a rabbit. The thought comes from nowhere. But wait, was it just another magic trick? Was the handsaw, too, the teeth that push soft as rubber against a vessel that should be of flesh and ringlets of desire for him and intestines, but feels like none of these things? Betty shivers and drops it, the soft roar of the wind over the mountains cut with a perfect, metallic cling.
Something is missing, she knows she's not well, is lost in the midst of some kind of break, knee-deep in a trip she doesn't remember taking. But it’s been days - the circling of astral bodies is about the only thing that seems exactly the same to Betty anymore, and she's paid attention. Yet, she can't hardly eat, she can't dream, her head is light and her skin always feels wet and she isn't speaking in the same voice. Ungrateful! Does she not know in the back of her mind that she had survived? Survived what, she doesn't know, she doesn't look it in the mouth, she raises her chisel and keeps stabbing herself out from the mirror wall of the cliff-face until it stops looking like her and more like a creature of terror, something ugly and dangerous exerted over the soft reality she once occupied, a spike pit cut into her closed lips. When she turns to the face pressed to hers, that emptiness, that darkness she found in the catacombs still squeezing her veins, the princess doesn't see anything. A vision of Simon through a T.V. screen shivering, eyes gone, crown in hand. Neither victim nor captor.