Hornet Had Been Born A Thrumming, Slashing Thing, And This Way She Would Die.

Hornet had been born a thrumming, slashing thing, and this way she would die.

Her feet moved like pinpricks in the sullen, loamy dirt ━ fast and precise and as needle-like as her nail itself. cutting lines like some kind of dance into the gravel-dimpled ground, swinging, forward and back, lunge & retreat & motion ; effort in grace.

A small thing, always. Hornet would never outgrow the worst of them, but she was fast, and sharp, and in this she found pride. Metal, tension of the string like a blade through the stagnant air, her weapon in her hands. the needle circles, circles, stabs like a stinger through carapace and flesh, piercing the shoddy warped scrap-metal of a training dummy she'd maybe had made herself. Reel it in, the thread returns to her, and with it her needle. Jump! Air whistling through her armor as she rises, joints spry as her eyes widen ━ reorient.

━ And catch! tangle the writhing limbs, trip them up, a flailing of precise white cord through the cold air that burned in her. Suffocate, string them up, cut them out!

This was her name. ━ Names like titles, she was Hornet; a buzzing, fast, terrible thing : with a body like a blade, body from the beast and practice from the bee and mind from the pale, she would stab, slash, spike them through! She is more, she is greater, she is-

━wait, 'them'? it was supposed to be an it. ( how single-minded, to forget just whom she'd been fighting. an internal battle, as much as a physical one... )

@lunaright // inbox / starter call!

there was nothing too strange, too far fetched to find in her dreams.

each one, each door, was a labyrinth folding into itself. paradox of sound and color and motion and direction, never to find stability, eternal elsewhere. a dull life led to an overflowing inner-something, the what she could no longer describe ━ though, in this same way, she did not want to. the vague of the void and the mind drifting between it. she could feel her hands skimming consciousness like ripples on a lake that does not exist.

━ did this make this beautiful not-thing the minotaur, then? to be stunning as daylight filtering through stone like coiled thread, but stuck within the statue and brick you were banished to. a world unto itself, incapable of charting, changing always to keep you. ( she does not think that they would be here, if it were not true. to be trapped here inside where she came freely. an internal constant, the labyrinth changing. )

" what kind of animal are you. "

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ash by tracy k. smith

piranesi vi, giovanni piranesi // the haunting of hill house, dir. mike flanagan // bony legs, joanna cole & dirk zimmer // midsommar, dir. ari aster // murder of agamemnon, pierre-narcisse guérin // game of thrones: a man without honor, dir. david nutter // goodnight mommy, dir. veronika franz & severin fiala // it, dir. andy muschietti // hereditary, dir. ari aster // crimson peak, dir. guillermo del toro // the vigil, dir. keith thomas // house of leaves, mark z. danielewski // spike field, safdar abidi // i’m thinking of ending things, dir. charlie kaufman // the lighthouse, dir. robert eggers // relic, dir. natalie erika james // annihilation, dir. alex garland // anatomy, kitty horrorshow

I wanna feel like I feel when I'm asleep

Maybe he could read the story on his face. Kim was a composed, concealed man, and he intended to keep it this way regardless of how his brow fruitlessly insisted on furrowing his eyes shut under the pounding migraine that cracked through his skull, but the Smoker wasn't stupid. ━ No one in Martinaise could afford to be, and especially not with the clientele he worked with. ━━━ The bruises, the sounds of gunshots, the absence of Harrier, the fact the hanged man had been a mercenary ( or, at least, donned the armor of one ). It wasn't difficult to piece together that they'd been involved, if nothing else; a fact confirmed if he asked or found himself 'round the Whirling in the last little while. The cleanup was still going on, the blood clotting in the street, sticking to the gravel or being frozen by the cold...

The sarcasm briefly disarms him. Not in the way of sarcasm softening nerves, but in the way of reflecting a strike and driving a blade into the ground ━ sloppy, uncoordinated ━ and part of the Lieutenant felt briefly like an embarrassed child at the remark he'd made, gloating about being stronger than he looked, something like that. He knew better, and the steel bordering that made-up his endless resilience against the world is righted in an instant. The feeling is compressed into a fine, dense cube, and gone within a quarter of the time the younger takes to slip back out from the bathroom ; a room admittedly more adjacent to a closet than anything else. ━ Come on. Get it together.

" Thank you, monsieur, but that isn't necessary. " Kitsuragi raises a bare hand in a gentle, dismissive manner, the faintest stains of blood caught under nails and in the stubborn ridges of callouses before he lowers it, lets it lock back with its partner. " I have already taken painkillers ━ Drouamine. I'll re-check how willing I am to take medication handouts in a few hours. "

Kim says it with a straight-face, but the dry humor lingers in the latter sentence. ━ you can't tell if he's being serious, but he appreciates the gesture.

there's an understanding, beneath it all, of how much those painkillers can mean to be handed out so easily, the allyship neither directly acknowledge but know. ━ He decides, unspoken, that the Smoker needs them more than he does, regardless of how long it takes for that drouamine to kick in.

Kim does oblige with taking a seat, at the very least. Taking the open chair closest to the entrance, plush old fabric smelling of dust and cleaner, wearing its age. He anticipated being too high strung after all that had happened to sit down easily, but he finds his legs conceding easily. ━ maybe all the running around with the Detective had finally worn him out, at last, when there'd be a handful of days of inaction for the both of them... ( and yet, here the Lieutenant was, still working, still asking questions. He briefly worries about Harry's state, back at the whirling, but reminds himself of Garte's nearby presence. It was... It would be fine. In a way, it had to be. )

After a moment of consideration, he starts with the obvious; " I can assume you heard the commotion of gunfire the day before, yes? "

continued from here. // @quillheel

Upon hearing the knocking on the door to his apartment the Smoker had originally thought to dismiss it. It wouldn't have come as a surprise to him if it had been one of the children running around who liked to cause trouble - he couldn't even count how many stones that one kid had thrown at the corpse that had been hung up on the tree. However due to the gunfire the previous day, his mind decided that it was an urgent matter.

He was glad he had chosen to open the door.

While the Smoker had talked more to the other detective than he had with Kim, the Smoker had a feeling that they ran in the same…circles so to speak and that only urged him further to help him, not only out of the kindness of his heart, but in the sense of having a bond of sorts with the other male. The Smoker was confident that they had both had the same insults thrown at them over the years and while he had learned to either hurl a sarcastic comment back or outright ignore them, it didn't change the intent of discrimination.

"Of course it isn't as bad as it looks." His lighthearted airy tone of voice may have been a little sarcastic, if only to try to lighten the atmosphere and Kim's nerves.

After the older male enters his apartment, The Smoker takes a moment to slink off to the bathroom to see what he has for medical supplies. A few moments pass and he comes back into the main room with a small bag in tow accompanied with a glass of cold water. Setting the glass down on the nearby nightstand, the younger male takes a small bottle of painkillers out of the bag he grabbed from the bathroom. He places his palm on the lid and opens it with one swift push. Dropping a few pills into his hand, he hands them out to Kim. "Here. Take these and have a seat and we'll see what else can be done."