eat your heart out, obviously
"Does it taste the same?"
M's blood, a cocktail of clumpy protein-clotted textures, leaves no staining crimson trace upon X's lily-white hands (horrible hands, thin and delicate, lacking bones and ligatures). It smears away as unsatisfyingly as any slick of unspilled wine, impotent to dull the senses.
When soldiers are fading, losing their grip on one cycle of terms for to pass away into the next set of ten, their faculties diminish. Some seem to experience symptomatic psychosoma related to the mechanism of their prior fate. In this way, imbibing motes instantaneously revives and invigorates them.
M cannot remember what it must have felt like, because satiation requires that basic, nervy hunger. She hasn't got it. She let it go.
X, the transparently vain crow biting beaks at transparent veins, should love to cajol and derive despicable glee from the comparison, live death to dead life. A goldfish remembers neither any more nor any less when it is turned upside down, once-glistening koi patterns wrought indolent. M's eyes are flat, sunken, a heady caricature where the bags beneath N's have dug twin graves to grace the broad bridge of his nose.
(He was the first martyr. He cannot pass unmentioned.)
What X ultimately wants is petty control at scale; to crush all dusty do-gooders between her double-jointed thumbs simply because it's easier that way. It's a facile task. It's laughable.
X laughs, and laughs, and laughs.
"You're Moebius, M!" The sick flicker reminds them. "Eating you is something even Y and Z don't get to do."
In other words, an unconscionable luxury, beyond research experimentation or philosophical purpose. A decadent, filthy delight.
Really? It's not more like chewing hangnails?
M stares off-kilter into middle distance as X nibbles her wristbones, her kneecaps, her immaculate cheeks, willing her thoughts to separate and coalesce but finding that the space within her mind is as murky as the film grain in the twin-pathed wilderness.
She'd had no time to clear her thoughts as she died, organizing her immaterial casket into a tidy place for autopsy to inventory. About her Noah. About their Ghondor. About all the others, and others, and others.
First things first, I'll eat your brains, giggled X, as and when she discovered this ever-replenishing source of gorge, but she never did it. If you want your prize filet rare, you can't afford any rigor mortis. You have to keep fattening the quarry. You have to steal your choice bits from the garnish at the edge of the tray.
The grand theater of life, a sterile walk-in freezer. A cool and smug place where preservation lusts forever.
Even if your body is a mere puppet to your limpeting mind. Even if your brain hardly thinks, anymore, because it doesn't want to have to.
I taste good. She wants me.
(M giggles too, now, eyes thinly lidded. Those are a delicacy all in their own right, the entire mask a tasting menu. X chews her lip and swallows the air.)
I taste good, because she says so. Because no one else will ever hope to know it again.
Because no one is allowed to touch me, to taste me, but her.
I've done it. I'm better than best.
Or I'm nothing, cartilage and earholes, furry hair and hairy fur, all the fat left festering on me concentrated into my sorry, sickening hind end.
M, of no possible comfort to herself, still has to smile at the morbid thought. X is savoring from the outside in, no last to breaking her undead fast - maybe for her, with her sour-apple sense of taste, the sinew strings of a broken heart are simply delicious.