i found you
leaning out of an open window.
you laughed (my fingers clenched)
too perfect - far too careless.
i couldn’t help myself. i just took you.
Scalp rasped under a bloody thumb, thousands of perfect sanguine beads smeared in one long line to clear her workspace for the thousandth time that night. There was catharsis in the repetition, the mechanical assuredness of her task. In this she felt something like calm. Things were separated in to their most simple forms: red of old blood and blue of the stainless steel at which she sat; the warmth of her skin against the cool of her projects; the silence of the room and the steady beating of her heart. It reminded her she was human, that some things could be completed with tedium and certainty - an increasingly distant fact as the weeks rolled by.
Her fingers were stiff with the effort of placing thousands of long, red hairs into follicles she’d punched in to fresh skin herself. Tweezers in hand, she pushed another strand in to place, following the edge of a hairline she knew with perfect clarity.
She had lived through countless aggressions, war, and personal trials. She viewed her life as the tides - a cycle that came up high and then fell down low in terms of solid direction. For years at a time she would know herself and her purpose with the iron will of the fanatic...and then she would drift. Little was constant save for a sense of yūgen, knowledge that she was something bigger than the vessel she’d been given that made those times adrift a time to reset instead of time to fear. And yet now, somewhere between purpose and patience, she was faced with the unfamiliar sensation of missing something. She’d never considered him a weakness, and yet now there were two.
Tilting her head slightly from her task, her fingers paused in their work as one red eye stared out at her. She’d placed it herself - carefully, with precision and affection - before pulling a scalpel across blank flesh until it was a perfect replica of his scars.
At what point had things changed? At what point had she become something so elusive, even from herself?
Pushing herself from one seat, she slid in to the other, tilting the head so one red, dead eye stared at the ceiling and not her.
At first the two bodies had just been another project, another foray in to learning more about her chosen arts. But before long she’d realized she was making them in to things she didn’t have. They weren’t perfect of course. No amount of her magic could cut the craggy lines of his sharp face in to the stranger’s bones, nor change the woman’s skin to that shade of dusky blue that haunted her. It was her fault, a thing she hated admitting above all else. At first she’d just loved hurting them, and then - maybe in her own way - she’d come to care about the flesh. She’d disappeared. She’d come back and hadn’t known how to return - whether she should return for the thought that perhaps she was simply too alien. Once she’d thought her differences an asset to their trio, but now she just wondered if they made her redundant. She’d taken it out on the Sanctum and seen her mission accomplished. In the process she’d been irreparably damaged. It made her stronger - and yet here she sat with replicas and not the things that existed outside the tides that ruled her.
Taking His head in her hands, she pressed until he collapsed, the front of the skull spilling up and over to either side between clenched fists. And She spilled over the side of the table as it was upended, staring out of a halo of red hair.
But Matsu was gone before she could see the accusation there.