a life woven together
Recommended Listening: A Life Woven Together (Xenoblade Chronicles 3)
name hc originally from lyre lyrecho in a sense, but also it's in the picture. so i forget. anyway i had cringe ekphrastic response
mio coughs delicately, as a flower would cough if it could. petals gently furling, tone always muted. each calyx inviting and simple, each splotch a round, rosy bloom. illness in innocence.
even when her eyes are open, away from the fits of sleep, they're lidded; musky gray and milky. mio loves milk in her tea.
nia coughs like a sunflower rogue with a jet snake in its trap. screaming.
the colors of her robes, her splendid bleedin' regalia, have always been stark, in comparison and contrast to those traditional textiles of gormott, but father had always treasured her that way, as had mio. don't royalty love rich colors and pure white?
pure white wrapped in ropes of red and gilded in gluts of gold. for sure, royalty would love a one like nia.
but royalty do not have her. house echell does. and mio deserves far better than what she's getting, as a last-ditch treatment.
she wears gloves, when she takes mio's heart in her hand. her own core merely thrums, with the occasional jumping pulse.
she has to cry, doesn't she? i would bleed for you, mio, i would, but i can't, so you have to bleed for me, for you.
for you, for me, for you. for me is for you. there's no difference, and we're hardly half a person each. you're dying and i'm scared.
(mio's been dying for too long to be scared of much. and nia's too scared to ever die.)
beautiful sisters. stranded, intertwined, inextricable pair.
there must be more. there must be more.
nia's hair billowing; mio's flat bleak as a soon-to-come corpse.
(but still perfect. but still gentle. but still lovely, as if she'd already been waxed.)
the tiger stripes stay, on mio's unblemished but horridly thin skin. the façade, the fangs, is all nia. the hair's texture is more silver-gray than grayish-brown; the flattened-back ears shrink further, to eschew their hearing.
but the buzzing, nia can't block out. the core's throbbing palp is forever.
would she have given her self, her wild life force, so that mio could live in her body? perhaps she would have. but she doesn't know if she could have. and mio is so weak...
there must be more, but there isn't.
there is only the terrible union of death and life, decay and regeneration, cell to cell in the imperfect way only a fleshy human could do it.
the two strands knit, the heartbeat jangled spikily in sinusoid in armor that wraps around the new chest and arms where the red cords used to lie.
some strange, inescapable strings of life and death.
forever in serenity. one born from two.