Work Text:
swell a progress, start a scene or two
All sorts of people visit the library. You’ve seen enough awkwardly dog-eared books and strange bookmarks and obvious unusual fixations to last a lifetime; only the most striking still register as peculiar to you.
This patron is like so many others: a clear, specific interest, and a just-as-clear embarrassment about it. You’d say you’ve seen far odder, but in your experience such comments only make things more awkward.
You’re struck with the faint sense that you’ve seen them somewhere Else, but the memory is ephemeral, like something out of a dream—fitting, given their stack of books on the topic.
like a patient etherized upon a table
You dream of your Elsewhere, of course, but more than that—you daydream of it. It enraptures and subsumes you, drawing you inexorably into its being.
The thing is, you wouldn’t even mind staying like that forever—if only it would let you. But you cannot; forever you are doomed to wake, your Elsewhere bleeding away from you, water leaking through tight-cupped fingers.
You are at once discarded and consumed, tethered and repelled, a magnet with the wrong pole down but still bound by gravity.
The Elsewhere denies you access; it denies you closure.
Would that you could dream forever.
mermaids singing, each to each
mulberry down!! is, you think, going to be a success. There’s something oddly compelling in it, and you can see in it the echo of some raw truth or heartfelt cry that’s sounding in a frequency you can’t quite hear.
Your friend gets cagey whenever you get too curious about what it’s really about, so you’ve decided to stop asking; it’s not important that they tell you. The longing comes through even without that fundamental comprehension.
You keep talking about it, keep sharing the new pages whenever your friend posts updates. It’s the least you can do to support them.
nor was meant to be
A NON-EXHAUSTIVE LIST OF POPULAR TROPES YOU FUCKING HATE, PART N:
- The Test is a metaphor for growing up, end of.
- The Test can only be solved by rejecting the otherworld and its rules.
- The Test is a metaphor for life, end of.
- Tests always play by their own rules; you are not bound by them, and can circumvent them through cleverness and guile or sheer stubbornness and grit.
- The Test is a metaphor for death, end of.
- The Test is anything more or less than a deep and fundamental scouring/tempering of your being.
decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse
You don’t remember, you say to your heart-twin as they stand sobbing in an overgrown, abandoned orchard. This is unusual, but not the strangest thing you’ve ever seen.
They don’t answer you, not with any words you can hear. Instead they stand there staring, body as strangely static as it always has been and yet, somehow, inexplicably older than you’ve ever seen them, even as they come and they go.
Here in the only world you’ve ever stayed in, under bruised-purple skies, time moves in loops and spirals. You shall not die; you shall not grow old.
Your heart-twin will.
prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet
Sometimes you wonder how many of the people around you are truly moving easily through society, and how many are like you, lost-stolen children wandering a world that wasn’t built for them.
You get out of bed every day. You put on your person-suit, and go about your life, such as it is. You keep scraping by; mulberry down!! brings in just enough to keep you stocked in art supplies.
(You did end up making a tip jar, after all; monetizing your lodestar makes you want to crawl out of your skin, but at least you have better pens now.)
roll towards some overwhelming question
Hypothesis: your friend is a changeling, switched at birth and raised in a world they never belonged to.
Pro: it explains the otherworld they seem inexorably drawn to.
Con: it doesn’t account for their person, their protector.
-
Hypothesis: your friend has another half, somewhere out there, someone they’ve never met and cannot forget.
Pro: it explains their companion.
Con: it doesn’t explain their place.
-
Hypothesis: your friend is just an eccentric artist.
Pro: it’s a comforting idea.
Con: you don’t think it’s true.
-
Hypothesis: all your friend’s comics are literal.
Pro: it makes the most sense.
Con: it’s deeply concerning.
formulated, sprawling on a pin
You dream of violet skies and a cloying, heady scent that sticks to the back of your throat—nothing like anything you’ve ever found this side of the veil. You dream of doors behind doors behind doors, splintered and blood-marked. You dream of the other, a steady sweeping presence at your side.
You paint the skies in your comics every shade of purple your human art supplies allow you. You shade your drawings in shimmering silver, setting them just outside of the normal, mundane world. You outline a hundred thousand faces for the other, ageless and ever-changing, novel yet familiar.
riding seaward on the waves
Once upon a time you had to retrieve your heart-twin from their home world. There was a Test—there are always Tests—and part of that Test was a separation. You let them go, let them fall away from you, and only when it was done did you return. By then it’d been too long for them to slip so easily to you as they once did.
Hey there, -----, they said, like nothing was wrong at all.
You wonder, now, what their older-self would say to you if you managed to enter their world. If you ever crossed again.
dare disturb the universe
You limp, bloodfoot, down the path in the woods to the cabin you’ve been building, the one with illusory walls and paper foundations, reaching ever-higher into the sky. Mostly you open your dream-eyes already there; rarely, as with this time, you have to walk on weary feet.
The walls are nearly high enough, now, to add a door—one you can close, and, more importantly, can open.
Should anyone pass this way—stranger, old friend—they have only to knock: you would not turn them away.
Should they be the other, you will welcome them home, broken edges shining gold.