whale song on vinyl ; romeo & bambam

[d7f amber bosch 🌿 tris]

♪  R O M E O  ♪

Deep into the maze, bloodstained sword against his hip, Romeo dances his fingertips across the iron bars of the wrought fence that stands between him and the closest passageway. His stomach has started to growl by this point, a soft lullaby that speaks to his innate tiredness, urging him to seek a resting place and not push forward. But a more dominant, familiar part of himself does not know how to stop.

He knows the sensation of running out of ground.

He knows the world

goes so much farther than that.

As soon as Greer tossed him those keys, as quick as he had plunged his rapier all the way through her neck — he made a dash for the exit, running and running until eventually his pace was forced to settle into a languid stroll. His dark curls frame his face, a sheen of sweat across his forehead. If he closes his eyes and blocks out the stinging that pulses through his body, he can almost imagine himself at his hometown bar. Starstruck and stoned in that heavy heat. Hungry hands always reaching out for something.

When he starts to sing, he does so to distract himself. Ever the one to evade, the coiled snake sinking back beneath the petals. Instead of accepting the silence and shame of his actions, he croons about home, fonder things than the endless rows of hedges that now stretch out before him. Sameness has always inspired him to feel melancholy. "And I will meet you where the ocean touches the shore," his voice has the same warmth as honey, a welcome invitation, "where we have traced this path in the sand many times before." He mimics strumming his guitar, and that movement inspires the ghost of a smile on his lips.

"I will follow where the gulls cry your name," he tilts his head to the side, immersing himself in the romantic angst of the music, when finally his gaze focuses in on a figure standing on the other side of the cage. He is still in the middle of his song, still forever torn between fight and flight, when a new distraction is presented in the form of a stranger. "And some essence of us will always remai— oh." He smiles alluringly, invitingly, in the way only a Venus fly trap can. Always the charmer.

"Didn't realize I was giving a free show." He doesn't glance down at the irony of the blood that stains his uniform.

day one | night

♫

[gm bourgeois decadence [aya]]

It's been a messed up day and a weird-ass night. Then suddenly, there's singing. It's a melody I recognize, and, fuck it, I don't have anything better to do. I follow the sound through the maze, because going somewhere on purpose sounds better than aimlessly wandering away from the place where my head's still at.

On the other side of an iron gate, some dude serenades himself. Lifting the tune from a song the old ladies sitting on their porches used to sing on mornings after heavy gunfire, after bricks crashed through windows in the night, after the firebombing campaigns turned the next block over to ash. Making up some new words to go along with it, something about returning somewhere and lingering essences and shit. Something nicer. I guess rewriting a sad song is a kind of coping mechanism.

He stops when he sees me, smiling in the kind of way peacekeepers smile at you before they try to get you to snitch, his curls bouncing as he turns his head to look at me. "Didn't realize I was giving a free show."

"Didn't you?" With a sweep of my arm upwards and outwards, I gesture over the hedge walls, up to the jumbotrons and stands that encircle the little trap they've thrown us all into. "They haven't given me squat for this." Nothing that matters, anyway.

Then, cause I'm sentimental or cause I can't let shit go, I add, "Besides, why would I pay? The song doesn't go like that."

I don't have much of a singing voice, but fuck it. "And I will meet you where the mountain touches the sky," I correct him, off-key. Metal grinding on metal, I sound like faulty bearings in the transmission or a rear drive gear spline in need of greasing. Nothing pretty. "When we have climbed this path to the top one last time to die."

Never gave much thought to how morbid the song was before, not before hearing it contrasted against this prettyboy's version. "I will follow where no geese cry your name —" Except for that part — that part's a blessing. Shear Hill geese seemingly developed a taste for blood back during the war. You do not want them gunning for you. "— and no mem'ry of us will ever remain."

Is that why you were so fixated on family? Like there's a ghost of a thought of you so long as people are still saying Sickings? I don't know. So few people gave anything resembling a shit about me — about any of us — that being remembered in death never occurred to me as something to want. Always figured I'd end up as a nameless pink paste at the bottom of the quarry or whatever. The sort of thing people just shrug about. They'd say I had it coming. They'd probably be right.