TELL ME WHO I AM // jack, vale, and gore

[VALE]

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graphic gore ★ genderfluid ★ 3-eyed crow

The crows CAW in warning, all together, their collective warning nearly drowning out Vale’s name. Their cawing grows ever louder as the little wildcat draws closer, yet they part to let him pass, because the cursed one never needed their assistance.

Vale regards Jack like a child grown regards a near-forgotten childhood friend. Had ve invented their interactions as a way to stave off boredom? Is the wildcat himself an apparition of Vale’s imagination? No, ve thinks not, simply because that single spoken word brought forth a torrent of memories and self-awareness.

Vale’s three red eyes blink. The right. The left. The middle. Ve considers vis options; to flee would be trivial (melt the ice, fly away, easy) and to fight to kill would be obvious. But Jack has a rare thing Vale desires: a dragon body.

So Vale waits, like a snake coiled to strike. Ve counts on the former imperator’s bovarism to bring him to ver, and ve is not disappointed.

“Things aren’t as they seem,” Vale warns, voice low and steam wafting from vis beak. How like Vale, to quote a song as vis last words.

When Jack’s teeth sink into Vale’s feathers, the rotting flesh sloughs off the bones. The stink overwhelms the senses. How to describe carrion? Is it a choking, sweet-sour smell drowning your lungs? Is it a mouthful of insect larvae desperate to crawl into the warmth of your throat? Is it a lingering dread born out of kinship, the understanding your body, too, will decompose?

While the abandoned body slumps between Jack’s teeth, Vale crawls into Jack’s skull. You know the pocket of air between your eye and your eyelids? Yes, the place where the skinsuit doesn’t fit. You played with it as a child, pinching your nose in a vice and squeezing your lips shut as you exhaled with all your might. Air finds a way to escape through the smallest of places.

So, too, do the uninvited worm their way into the living.

Your skin itches. Everywhere, faintly, but you can ignore it. For now. Now that you’ve been reminded your skin itches, you feel it… don’t you? Everywhere. How your nose twitches. The spot on your back where your claws cannot reach, where your teeth can never dig into, and where you could grow a melanoma and never know until the cancer consumes you.

Suddenly there comes a tapping, as of some one gently rapping… there is a thought, an ill-formed notion rubbing against your mind, one part rawness and two parts the prickle of sleeping nerves and otherwise words, words, words.

Darkness there and nothing more. Darkness there and nothing more. Darkness there and nothing more!

YOU NEVER TRUSTED ME ★
BUT I’M OVER IT NOW
[sub][W]isker[/sub]