diamond veins | lux’s last

[alex 🐺]

When she was ten, Lux had taken her father’s handgun, hands on the well-worn grip, and put it in her mouth - just to see how she would feel.

Her fingers wrapped around the trigger the way they had wrapped around Love’s fingers, comfort in the security. Sure in the strength she was caressing.

She found she liked the taste of the gunmetal. She felt nothing with the barrel between her teeth, her lips kissing the gun. 

Father had caught her in the act and had only said, “well, get on with it then,” before she removed the gun, handing it back to him wordlessly.

“Thought so.” He pulls the magazine out - empty. It had always been empty.

Lux wasn’t an idiot. “Foolish girl. It’s not a game.”

Of course it was a game.

Carly Volkov finally strikes true and Lux smiles through the pain as her chest is ripped in two, an arc of blood flying through the air like war paint. She lives for it, the carnage.

And she’s gotta hand it to the girl - persistence pays off and Lux can feel her arteries crying out, her muscles seizing, her heart rate spiking.

She spits again, saliva mixed with blood and it almost tastes like gunmetal.

Lux Bellisario dies with a smile on her face.

A girl of hard lines and cracked edges, she breaks brittle against the onslaught, waves battering against her shore. Flecks of diamond peel from her skin like scales, sandpaper against stone. A diamond unmade. 

Lux’s hand slips on her weapon, cascades of blood like the river before them as the final blow is delivered, a sword through the chest, an entry wound or an exit wound or maybe both.

She refuses to die quickly as the breaths grow more difficult, as she stumbles at the river’s edge, knees deep in the water, as she looks toward Freyr, Charlie, and finally Willem. She hopes the dead will make room for her.

She wants to apologize for failing them at the last. For giving up so easily. For her stupid fragile body that was never made of diamonds - simply skin and bone and a heart made of glass.

All around her, there’s sunlight and there’s sunlight and there’s sunlight and it refracts off of her, spirals of iridescence.

She thrusts her journal towards him, fumbling with her fingers, grace leaking from her body with each heartbeat. Her blood coats the pages, but there’s something poetic in all of the bloodshed, in her blood finally painting the pages red.

She’d added to their sketches the night before when sleep had escaped her - drawing the four of them alongside the river.

Freyr was the sentinel, the wolf, the protector. Charlie was the executioner, the silent partner, the steadfast soldier. And Willem was the sun that they orbited around, his gentleness hiding complexities that Lux had only begun to unravel. She wordlessly tells them to protect each other. They didn’t need to know she cared. 

“T-take it and run,” she breathes through the ichor, shedding her satchel. Her lips quiver and shake and Lux closes her eyes, nearly growling at her own weakness, at her mortality. “Go! Just go!”

Her foot slips on a rock and Lux falls, clutching her chest, fingers in the wound to staunch some of the bleeding, hands skating over rocks worn by water, but it was futile and the darkness - the darkness was just on the other side.

The clear water runs pink and red. Foam sits at the corners of her mouth, a bloody smile like lipstick and sin and wrath.

Lux Bellisario dies with a smile on her face, the cameras around them glittering like diamonds in the sunlight.

[lucius branwen / 10 — fox]

The blade finds her chest again, and this time he watches it slide right into that pulse, that delicate fluttering thing in a girl like a bullet.

It's like he's six and cupping feathers in his hands, blue shell, dead bird, a funny feeling that fills his stomach.

Realizing loss, realizing death.

Lux stumbles to the river, and suddenly he thinks of all the times he's ever been late.

His mother would watch him arrive to almost everything breathless, sun and garden on his clothes, hair tangled from the wind. And, she would shake her head, the lines of her face pulled into something worn, weathered, hands reaching to brush a streak of dirt from his face.

"Willem, het getij wacht op niemand."

The tide.

He understands now.

Because when he reaches the river, the current rushes between the spaces of their bodies, cold and harsh. He's here and she's here, but she glows in the light in a way that breaks shells in his stomach, bird bones and wings tucked to a tiny body.

The light feels like fists, the light feels like beams snapping his bones, the light is there like a pane between them and she shoves her journal to him, blood dripping down her chin.

"T-take it and run."

"No."

His voice doesn't sound like his own.

"No, you're not leaving," he says, but this time it's too much. This time, the blood pours and his hand is pressed to her chest but it doesn't stop.

"Lux, you're not leaving us –" There's something thick and suffocating in his throat when he speaks, crushing, and the words die in him as he watches the wound gush like a tide through his fingers, painting him another coat of grief.

With Inta, he lost his sister very slowly.

It settled in him like the buds of May, a new green pain for everything that died in the last long winter. It was mourning when he glanced at the milky blue shore, it was mourning when he stopped setting her plate at the table. And alone at night in the garden, lying on the grass, thick with dew and memories, he would think of her with her thumb pressed up against the moon, pointing out the stars, think of her in remnants, as a dead thing.

But this is very fast.

And he is not ready for her to go.

He gathers Lux in his arms and it's like the first time they met, her head resting against him, weathering away some shard of solitude lodged in an organ he didn't even know was there. And then he's cupping her face, turning her towards him, satchel pressed between them but he just can't take it.

"Please, please don't." Will's words are soft now.

It's a day ago and she stitches him up, sits with him with that journal in her lap.

It's two weeks ago and they're colliding into each other. She's tangling her hand into his on his couch in the middle of the night.

It's another lifetime where they meet somewhere else, somewhere very beautiful he hopes, and she doesn't die in this one, and maybe they're friends there too. And when she closes her eyes, he would do anything to be there right now, sun, sea, and Lux.

Just take another breath.

Just call him that stupid epithet of mom one more time.

"Go! Just go!"

A little shove, her voice firm and sure because she's Lux to the end. The tide comes up between them. And then he's being pulled away from the river, a hand clasped around his arm, tugging, Lux glimmering in the water.

When he looks back, she's gone.