my lover's got humour + z-boi/cricket

[gamemaker kelsier]

My lover's got humour
She's the giggle at a funeral
Knows everybody's disapproval
I should've worshiped her sooner

I take the glasses off carefully by pinching the sides between thumb and forefinger. Placing them on the worktop in front of me, I rub at my eyes, trying to work the sleeplessness out of them. The candles lit around me have grown much shorter, I wonder what time it is, how early in the morning it is this time. What sleep have I given away in order to lose myself in the words in front of me.

The smell of old leather fills every fold of this tent, mingling with the scents of burned wax and dried out paper. I look at the book I've just been reading. It was poetry tonight, the sonnets of a woman named Elizabeth Bennet Browning.

I cannot stop reading sonnets. I never noticed how many I had bookmarked with bits of string in all the books and papers I own. I wonder when it was that I became such an old sap, what made me put away the coolness to all emotion, all feeling in trade for this emptiness. I am intent on filling it with words and works, with the search for pain.

I fear that I am becoming bored with my pursuits, that I have been consumed entirely.

At tonight's show I laid myself down on my bed of nails and I knew by the way that the crowd gasped that there was blood. I did not feel the sting of pain I was meant to feel to warn me of this because I cannot. So I bled onto the dirt and watched the crowd gasp. Then I picked myself up, dutifully cleaned off the spikes and walked away.

My life is run by a different pilot than myself. I feel like a train that's gone off the rails and so I lose myself in sonnets.

I turned twenty-three years old the other day and forgot about it until yesterday when I checked the calendar. Sometimes I don't even know what season it is.

I try not to think about things to hard most often because whenever I begin to analyze anything that isn't in a book, my brain takes me back to that night, two years ago now when I told her that I was leaving. She hadn't cared. She'd nodded me off like she was a queen and I was nothing more than a slave that she had finally used all up.

The anger of that moment stays with me, fresh, like a wound that forgot to heal, opening and bleeding anew with every step that I take.

(I should have known that she would drop me. Even my own parents could not stomach me.)

I don't even know what I wanted from her. Something that I could not receive from her anyway. She was excellent at touching me with every move she made, making my heart sell itself out for her so easily. Still, I couldn't feel her touch. She couldn't give me that and that's what I wanted from her. I wanted her to make me feel. Something, anything really.

I suppose she has because it's been two years but every time my tent flap moves I always hope that it's going to be her.

Hope is nothing to nourish oneself on. I am underfed and forgotten, slowly starving to death.

I always knew that I was dead before but now it's hit home. I raise my wrist to my ear just to listen for my heartbeat but it never comes.

I know that I still have a heart because it aches for her, every second, every minute and hour of every day.

The tent flap moves in the subtlest of ways, but I know by the parting that it cannot be anyone but Arbor. Despite myself, my lips curl themselves into a grin, happy to see the big tiger gracing my doorstep again. He walks towards me in the most princely of ways only dropping his decorum when he rests his giant head in my lap, begging to be pet. With a sigh, I run my hands over his fur, unable to feel the comfort of it. My disease disallows connections of any kind.

The tiger enjoys it however and begins to purr, shutting his eyes against my rubbing of it's ears. "Is she neglecting you again, handsome?" I murmur before bending down and resting my head against his furry one.

[L△LIA]

The hush of the District makes the girl restless now, the streets an anesthetic murmur in comparison to the flashing lights and endless glitter of the Capitol otherworld she spends most of her days in. She doesn't like it. The Victor's house is a creepy kind of hollow — far more empty than she remembers any place ever being — the only footsteps other than her own belonging to her overgrown kitten of a tiger and the quiet goads at her impatience to return to her beloved city of distraction.

As it happens, the tiger isn't very fond of their home in the Victor's Village either. Taking after his mother in more ways than one, Arbor has taught himself a few tricks of his own, turning doorknobs with his giant paws and frequently sneaking out into the night like a mischievous teenager. Too often, Cricket doesn't even notice, still caught up in the never ending parade of parties held in her honor. Even after three years, she still adores being adored, trading her smiles and attention away for cheap champagne and compliments more shallow than she is. Arbor is not amused.

Tonight, like so many others, the tiger has slipped away in search of the attention Cricket all-too-often neglects to give him when cameras and honeyed words are numbing her senses. However, after aimlessly turning cartwheels up and down the hallways for who knows how long — the acrobatic pacing of a circus prodigy — she finally notices the creak of a front door left open to sway in the breeze. She follows, although no one is around to praise her for the small act of motherly decency.

Sharing the same instincts, she knows where he is. It's a flicker of light in the middle of a dark city and walking onto the grounds of Cirque De La Mort might feel like returning home if the feeling weren't so oppressed by brazen denial. The heels of her boots echo softly between the striped tents that surround the Big Top, her fingertips trailing lightly across their wavering walls as she makes her way toward one that ought to be just as familiar to her as that grand stage she grew up on. It's not, however.

Shadows stretch out from within in ways that even her double-jointed limbs cannot manage, bending over years of careless distance and reaching for the toes of a girl foolish enough not to stop him when he told her he was leaving. Maybe she had thought he was lying. Maybe she had thought herself a North Star he'd have to follow for the rest of his life if ever he wanted to find a place called Home. Maybe she had thought that Victory of hers was the very last thing she'd ever have to do to be given everything she'd ever wanted. Or maybe it's simply that she still can't admit she wants him at all.

Poor Arbor. This isn't about him after all.

Cricket reaches out to tug aside the tent's flap and the breeze shivers through the heavy canvas before her fingers have even touched it. For a moment, she wavers too. Her chest is a grotesque flutter of panic, the hurricane heartbeat of a girl who can murder without shame or regret, but can't conquer the only true fear she's ever felt. There are countless other people who might also find themselves terrified of looking into the face of Cornelius Bones — of him looking back, of having to figure out what to say, of not being able to run fast enough to get away — but she is perhaps the only one whose terror can be all of these things while also having nothing to do with a preconception of violence. Violence is easy; it's affection that makes her weak.

However, she convinces herself that she has had more difficult audiences than this and when she enters the tent, it is with stunning confidence. The slip and sway of her broken doll bones betrays no flicker of hesitance, sauntering right up to both of her boys as if her presence were still something that belonged here. Maybe it does. "I was wondering where you'd gone off to," she says with her voice lilting like gravel, harsh in the candlelight as she crouches down to nonchalantly scratch Arbor behind one ear, her face mere inches from both of theirs and knuckles brushing against inked skin for the most flickering of seconds. A warm exhalation of breath curls itself into the crook of her shoulder and she is still restless. She is restless from the lack of him.

if the heavens ever did speak
she's the last true mouth piece
every sunday's getting more bleak
a fresh poison each week

[gamemaker kelsier]

My lover's got humour
She's the giggle at a funeral
Knows everybody's disapproval
I should've worshiped her sooner

She isn't here.

She can't be.

Cricket Antoinette does not chase after anybody, least of all me.

To be honest, she probably really isn't here because I've thought about her being here, in my tenet again so often that I probably am just finally insane. Or was I always mad and this is finally clarity? Either way, it makes my throat ache.

I want nothing more than to lift my head and give her a kiss on the cheek, act like we've been apart for minutes instead of the reality of days, weeks, years. It has been years since I walked out of her door and I did so because my heart was broken in two and she didn't realize that everything that she did was just her breaking it further. She was grinding me into dust with her stilettos and she didn't even seem to know it.

To preserve the bits of me that remained, I had to walk away and it felt like every step I was taking, I learned more and more what pain was. I cannot feel much, but I can hear my thoughts and they always screamed for me to turn around, to turn around. They told me to run back to her, to prostrate myself at her feet and beg for her to take me back. I thought it was hell living with her, but I found that it was only entering another to live without her.

Isn't that the kicker?

The immortal question, found in any text if one analyzes enough. 'Women; Can't live with them, can't live without them.' After a lot of thought, or too little, I think I know the answer. It's probably best just to die, so one does not have to worry about it anymore.

It occurs to me that we have been sitting here for long minutes. My face is still against the tiger's but his purring has stopped, he has gone stiff. It's as if he is conducting the electricity in the air, channeling the tension along his body out of the tip of his tail. I haven't been so speechless in a while. I find that I am quite unable to sort myself out, not with her there, where I can't feel her.

I heard her though.

I can hear her faint breathing.

It is her? Isn't it?

I don't want to check, I'm afraid.

I'm not sure why I'm afraid. Am I worried that it isn't her, that it's someone else all together? Or am I worried that there isn't anyone there at all? Or what if she is there. What am I going to say to her, what does one say to the love of his life when he's the one who ruined things? No, me. I'm the one. I am the one who left her all alone in a sea full of sharks. I left her to fend for herself, despite the fact that she was only sixteen years old.

How old is she now?

Nineteen?

I wonder what she looks like now, how much she's grown. Has she grown enough to love me?

She's still breathing, she's still here, she's waiting for me to say something. I don't know what, I don't know what to say. What can I say. The first step is looking at her. I'm afraid of what will happen when I look at her. I might decompose all at once. I might combust. I can't look at her. I have to, I can't.

Okay.

Slowly, I raise my face away from the safety of Arbor and focus my gaze on the girl in front of me. It's like magic, instant and relentless. I want to reach out to her, to test again if I can feel her skin, to try again and again to feel the warmth of her. I want to hold her, to comfort her when she's sad, to celebrate the passing days with her, to lick her wounds for her and stand behind her when she has fights. I want to wrap myself around her and run with her again, screaming and whooping away from the train station that has brought her home to me, to tumble into the grass and laugh just because we can, to love her, to kiss her, to hold her, to love.

I blink and wonder if she can read that behind my eyes.

"He comes here nearly every night when you're...home," I say, referring to the big house that she won by living, knowing full well that she hated the place as soon as we moved her meager supplies in. The ceiling didn't billow softly with summer winds but it made for a warmer place than a tent in the winter and I kissed her softly as she backed me against the counter, fingers splayed against my chest.

[L△LIA]

Truth is a twisted thing. There is no greater evidence of this than the misfit Victor herself, wringing her bones against themselves for audiences of countless eyes that see her... and her stage and it's brightbright lights and heavy velvet curtains and shadows of her fiery breaths and their own glittering amazement. The combination beckons at the world's collective imagination until she is not simply an exceptional contortionist, but a goddess of the impossible. And that is a lie. She is the strangest of realities, perhaps, and improbable to be sure, however, Cricket Antoinette is still made of flesh and bone the same as anyone else. It's just that people forget. She, human that she is, forgets as well.

So when she revels away her days in the Capitol — loving it to the point of sacrifice — that love is as much of a false truth as anything else. Her pulse does not race for buildings taller than monuments or women and men with technicolor skin. The goddess of impossibility has not only seen things more impressive, she is more impressive and that is where the twist of honesty lies in this failed love affair. This is a girl who walks down the streets of the wildest, most colorful and controversial city in the world and every face turns for her. Every mouth murmurs her name. Every heart beats a little faster. She, in turn, is unimpressed with them in every way, except for how their unabashed adoration makes her more than she is. It's too easy.

With the such attention upon her, she becomes myth and magic, but being the most interesting woman in the world means that everyone else is less. She doesn't even have to perform to earn their awe anymore. With a breath, they gasp and with a word their lives change forever. It is only because she hasn't stopped to think about these things that she has yet to realize how incredibly bored she is. The Capitol tries so hard to be everything, that it has never actually been anything at all. It's just a nonstop blur of incoherence revolving around her as she stands almost perfectly still, the same as she has always been.

This bizarre little corner of her District and the people she left there are exactly the same way: as weird and wonderful as always. Even after three years of Capitolite fashion and flamboyance, when her fellow freak looks up (he lifts his head and her sly fingertips trace their way down the side of his face, temple to jaw, knowing he can't feel it; knowing he won't realize her touch ever strayed from Arbor's ear if she simply maintains a distraction of shameless, unflinching eye contact) she still thinks there is something interesting about his face. There has always been a hint of her own so-called impossibility in the way he speaks with two sets of teeth and a jaw stripped so bare that he is inside-rightside-out. His neck is a labyrinth of maybes. A cemetery of never-was stretches across his stomach. Everything he holds looks suddenly more alive in his rotting arms. And in these still and quiet moments, he remains an infinite challenge of bringing a dead man back to life.

Now, a feat such as that might make her truly impossible.

"I know," she says, despite having only realized this little fact tonight. The short reply sounds almost cruel, but it's technically not a lie and it's so much easier to twist reality up like this than to admit that her last remark hadn't been about Arbor at all, but him. Arbor always comes back, so he has never actually felt gone, but it has been ages since she looked at anyone with the flicker of curiosity that glints through her eyes now. She knows exactly where two of the souls within this tent have been, but the wheres and whens of the third are unaccounted for and, for the first time in years, Cricket Antoinette wonders about someone other than herself. "I haven't been home in a while though."

As the words slip past her lips, she knows she's not talking about the too structured, too silent, too strange in all the wrong ways house she sleeps in sometimes. There's no denying the way the circus grounds make her unsettled joints feel less out of place, every crook and bend of her limbs suddenly seeming natural in context. "He must have missed you." Once again, she's not talking about Arbor. In fact, she's not even talking to the beautiful, terrible face looking back at her, her words meant, instead, for herself. He must have missed you, Cricket. You must have missed him too. Except that truth twists itself and hides from things it's not even certain it remembers, but still feels when she looks into his nearly impossible eyes.

i used to rule the world
seas would rise when i gave the word
now in the morning i sleep alone
sweep the streets i used to own

[gamemaker kelsier]

My lover's got humour
She's the giggle at a funeral
Knows everybody's disapproval
I should've worshiped her sooner

For ever second that she is staring at me across the barrier a full grown tiger creates, it is another second that I am not holding her, wrapped in my arms, lips pressed against her's. It used to be my place to be there like that in any situation, it used to be within my domain to hold her with as much strength I could master, but no more. It is someone else's allowance now. They get the gold and I make the nickels and dimes. I barely have enough change to pay the meter when I finally find a place to park my soul.

Does she know the effect that she has?

She must.

She is an enigma to all but herself. Once there was a time when I thought that I knew the answer to her tumblings but I was sorely incorrect. I thought that we could have something, the two of us but I was so wrong that the gods are still laughing over the folly of this mortal.

She makes my heart beat faster just by her presence, as if it knows what is going to happen next. It knows the choreography to this, even if the mind has forgotten, the body remembers. It itches to reach forward, to search for the knowledge of her skin, to see if this time it might react to it. I am a multitude of discouraging failures when it comes to feeling herself against me. I know that I would give my inability to feel anything up in the time it takes a hummingbird to flap it's wings once, just to feel her warmth.

I keep my hands firmly on the tiger's head.

"I know," I echo her, lips twisting in the oddest of ways, unable to look at her. Of course I know when she's home and when she isn't because I can't let her go no matter how hard I try, I can't pretend not to care like she does so easily. I can't stow myself away. I understand that I barely understood her before the games but after the games it's like I was discovering that she wasn't just hard edges, she was cast from diamonds and her heart was a stick of gold lost in the folds of crystallized coal. So I know she hasn't been home because I go by her house and I see the lights all out and I get such an intense feeling of homesickness that I nearly gag because even though I haven't seen her in two years I can pretend that it was only yesterday that I said goodbye if her lights are flickering.

It's odd how I can translate her in the smallest of ways. When she says that he must have missed me I know that she missed me because I know that the tiger is the heart that she disguises as a tiger on a chain. I know she missed me. Or maybe I want her to have missed me the way that I have missed her so terribly.

I've thought about this moment for days and days, the moment when I would see her again and I was going to tell her that I knew what she was, that she doesn't care about anyone but herself, that she's just a selfish, immature girl.

Those things are true but untrue.

They are just facets of her.

Underneath all those things is love and fear and lust and anger and hate and hopelessness and more life.

On top of it all is pride, her crown made heavy with it.

I want to whisper that I love her anyway even though I know what she is but I cannot because just because I know what she is it does not mean that I have the right to her. Knowing her true name does not contain her, nor does pretending to be something I'm not. I am not as strong as her, not as prideful, not as afraid. Sometimes I think she is living for the both of us. "I missed you too," I say to the eyes of the tiger but I know that she knows who it's really meant for.

[L△LIA]

All this time she has continued to wear the crown of Noah Ripley as if it meant something to her. Cricket Antoinette was not the death of him, however; she can't even remember him. Not really. He is a familiar name to her, certainly — mentioned to her occasionally in discussions or reenactments of her Games — but an unimpressive one. His crown, on the other hand, became a reassurance of royalty as she wore the pithy remnants of his death upon her head while oh-so-casually walking down the street.

Tonight, she is stripped down of her excess. Wearing no golden crown or corset made from priceless Nakom wings or outlandish gifts of Capitolite excess, the girl that entered this tent is a vision of nothing more than loosely unwinding curls and scandalous disdain for proper clothing. She is skin. She is a shallow smile of taunting detachment. She is queen of something quiet and secret. She is —

"I missed you too."

— the aching clench of sudden heartstrings. The spasm within her chest is perhaps the first pain she's felt since River Destin's last attack and it tugs at her so sharply that her eyelashes flutter involuntarily as the tendons within her fingers flex and curl. She doesn't know what a reaction like that means, but she looks straight into the eyes of the boy in front of her anyway. She blinks. Closed. Open. Shameless. "What a lovely thing to say."

Her face doesn't look so different from any other day, regardless of the passing of time or the feeling within her chest stirred up by the mere sound of his voice. There could be quite the debate over what has or hasn't changed over the course of the last three or four years, but some things have stayed the same, even if she can't identify any names. Whatever that sameness is, it's enough for her settle in a little more, laying her head against his knee beside Arbor's — as if that's just another constant thing between them.

Eyes drifting shut, she becomes the very picture of ease and nonchalance. Inwardly, however, her chest is still tangled up tightly in its own heartstrings, clenched and beating with rapid panic. If she opened her eyes right now, she doesn't know what would happen, because this feels like some form of madness. I missed you too, he said, as if possessed by the voodoo of her smile into saying exactly the thing she'd hoped for and what else she hopes for —

This feeling of madness might be a kind of happiness, but it might also simply be terror over all the things she isn't ready for: all the words she's frightened might be said next, both from his mouth and her own. Her chest tightens a little more. "What have you been doing without Arbor around to keep you company? I hope," and this word is a lie because whatever she hopes for isn't really the thing she's saying now, "you haven't been too lonely." Suddenly, selfishly, she hopes he has. "Maybe I should have come back sooner."

There is no meaningless golden crown atop her head tonight, no, but she might still find reassurance in something else. A girl can hope.

the only heaven i'll be sent to
is when i'm alone with you
i was born sick, but i love it
command me to be well