queenoflogs | i want you here (open)

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i want you here (open)

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jemerite and You (open)
Date: July 17th
Summary: He can't do this to her.
Warnings: Zinc's world is vaguely offensive in its necrophilia? Her narrative can be kind of gory. She thinks about killing things, a lot.

She wakes up cold.

She's often cold, unless sitting in open sunlight, or curled up next to the heating unit that does a poor job of keeping Barbet's large studio warm in the wintertime. She hated the cold, really, it was a constant reminder of the stillness in her chest, but what she hated the most was waking up cold, like she'd been dead the whole night through. Barbet shouldn't have left her, she hates when he does and she usually wakes up as soon as he stirs because it's cold and it's lonely--(perhaps the loneliness is the worst. She... she hates that feeling, she wants to rip it out of her mind and ruin it forever.)

There is a moue of discontent on her lips already as she sits up, but it does not take her long to see things are very changed. And she knows exactly what's happened.

He's abandoned her. He'd drugged her and left her out here in the woods to die. The certainty of it rocks her, and causes a deep twisting sensation in her stomach. Hate. Hurt. Misery.

"Barbet?" She looks around herself, but all she sees is the cat approaching with the scroll in its mouth. Zinc hisses at it furiously, settled forward on her hands and knees like an angry little animal. The cat seems nonplussed, but it sits down, tail swishing. Zinc ignores it as she gets to her feet unsteadily, looking around again, sees only trees and she can't smell him anywhere. How is she meant to track him down and kill him if he's erased his scent?

"You can't!" She shouts, hands curling into fists, her well-kept nails biting into her palms with the fury of it. He would scold her for that. "You did this!"

She sees the path out of the clearing and begins to follow it, but what she sees only deepens her despair and that cat is following her. "I will eat you, if you do not get away from me," she snarls gutturally at the fluffy thing. Its eyes narrow at her, smug and nonreactive. She hisses, but carries on walking.

All she finds is forest and field. And, eventually, she drops down into the grass and simply begins to scream. Wordless, furious, keening. He can't do this to her. She can't even weep in this decaying body, and it's his fault that she has the desire to at all.

[ooc; I always write log openers in prose, but feel free to switch to action.]

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"One doesn't need to be human to behave like one. A figure of speech." She may be slightly condescending as she says this, but a condescending tone seems to come naturally to her.

"I could tell there was a difference to you." Kuja's smile is secretive. She doesn't feel the need to reveal her own former role as an Angel of Death, her power over souls, and her ability to sense and contain them. She hasn't told anyone that. "What is it that you are?" She asks out of idle curiosity. The variety of the population here does interest her somewhat.

It's unfortunate how well Zinc reacts to being told that she's different, to be recognized and paid attention to. Her sulk eases perceptively.

"Reanimate." She lifts her hand, touching the tip of her index finger to a specific place on her forehead. There is barely a mark there now, Barbet knew his work, he precise and clean in it and she was his pièce de résistance, he would never have left her with such an ugly mark. "Murdered and infected, but still dead."

"Interesting." Not a practice Kuja is familiar with, but she has made creatures who aren't human before, and she herself was made. Bodies are vessels, and souls, or parts of souls, or magic animates them. It need not always be the same vessel or the same source of animation.

"And how did you like that, being made as you are?" It's not the most polite question, and Kuja's eyes are cold as she asks it.

Zinc stares at her. No, it isn't a polite question at all and a deep shadow falls over her eyes.

"I don't," she murmurs, her voice sibilant and angry. She is soon ranting under her breath, words slurring into another. "He should have left me dead. He doesn't love me, he only keeps me for his ego. He keeps me trapped and crumbling, my mind is always breaking, halfway to an animal and he mocks me for it. He's ruined me. I could kill him, ruin him. He deserves it, bastard."

Kuja listens to this muttering, and her eyes grow no less cold, but she understands that anger. Anger against one's creator, against the cruelty of being kept, like a doll, like a tool, like a pet. After a short while of listening, she breaks into her own rant.

"He does deserve it. Such a person should be murdered beautifully, brutally. Their body should be crushed and the life squeezed from them, as slowly and agonizingly as possible, so that the soul flutters in its casing for hours, desperate to depart yet unable to leave. They should be bathed in bright fire and made to smell their own flesh char while they writhe and scream in pain. Once they have died, they should be returned to life so that they might be killed again and again and experience as much suffering as one creature conceivably can. Their very existence should be misery. They should see their dreams destroyed, their hopes pulverized. They should beg to die, but even that will not be enough.

"No, it is never enough."

Zinc closes her eyes, listening to what Kuja says. A poet, maybe Zinc believes her about that, because all of these terrible things enter her mind easily. She is disposed to them, hungry and angry and violent, it's the way a Reanimate should be. She should have ripped Barbet's throat out the moment she woke up, let her mind break down until she did not even remember that she had once longed for his affection.

Her mouth twists and her arms come up, wrapping around herself miserably. No... no, she can't let the hate have what's left of her, she'll never get it back. There is a pulsing sensation in the backs of her eyes, what would have been tears in she were able to cry, but she can't, and she merely claws at her arms instead.

She whimpers, like something that's been kicked, and she wants to go home. She wants to be held and she knows that it annoys Barbet to be interrupted, but he would do it if she looked at him pitifully enough, he could be relied upon. Who is she meant to turn to here? Kuja? She was a stranger and a witch--(but she wasn't human. Perhaps that made her more viable than most.)

Zinc doesn't bother thinking about it much, just steps forward tentatively to see what happens if she tucks herself in against the woman's chest.

Kuja watches the woman twist and wail, interested, but not worried. Kuja knows anger, too well. Her own anger is what worries her, but she feels only a shadow of that gripping, unreasoning fury now when she thinks of him. It is but a ghost of once (and possibly future) madness, still haunting her, like her memories. She destroyed him. She regrets many things, but not that. She would destroy him again, if she could, to make him suffer more.

When Zinc pushes up against her, she might become aware of two things: Kuja has no appreciable body heat, and no noticeable scent.

It's an unexpected gesture. Kuja turns to regard her--not angrily, but with eyes devoid of visible emotion. She's not used to such treatment. Back home, no one would have dared approach her in such a manner, certainly not uninvited. After a moment, she steps lightly away. "That's not proper manners, is it?" There's a gentle irony in her tone.

Zinc folds in on herself, chin tucked down, a pathetic amount of agony reeling through her mind. She hated when Barbet rejected her, when he ignored her and left her on her own, when he shrugged off her hands like she disgusted him. He is not here, Kuja is not him, and she had not asked; she had not asked.

"Would you? If I asked?"

She can't offer tears, but she can beg, a skill she's polished in this farce of helplessness she keeps.

Unmoved by begging as she would be by tears, Kuja doesn't answer right away. She's never been one to invite physical affection, or seek it out. Not that it's a foreign concept to her, or something she's incapable of, but her life hadn't lead in that direction... She had had so many other concerns, far more important to her.

"Why would you ask?"

"It helps..."

One of Zinc's hands crawls slowly upwards, like she's afraid of what will happen to her if she loosens the way she has her arms wrapped close. It eventually gets into her hair, brushing it back behind her ear, but resisting the urge to fist her fingers in it. Her hair was a fragile thing, it would come out if she pulled at it.

"...comforting. It hurts less."

Giving over to someone else, sagging into their frame and closing her eyes in the shadow of their body. It kept the outer world at bay while she was left to rein in the maddening swell of her emotions. Any affection was welcome, truly, even if she had to wheedle for it. She thrived on attention, anything that would keep back to disgust she felt for herself and the resent she felt for all that still lived.

"I don't enjoy such things." It wasn't that she'd never felt the desire, but it was muted, by her nature and by circumstance. All those creatures of flesh and bone that she was meant to kill; why should she dally with them?

"It doesn't hurt less. It only seems to. Such things are nothing but an illusion." Comfort. Safety. Peace. The wise know they don't exist.

She shakes her head, those words make her very sad because she knows that it isn't true. The only way that she survives this horrible body and her decaying mind is through the comfort of others, through Barbet's care. And now, whether it is true or not, she suspects the witch's disdain for her lifeless skin. She suspects it of everyone, truly, even Barbet who lets her sleep next to him.

"Maybe..."

But it was an illusion that she wanted, desperately. She looks down, remaining hunched into herself miserably.

"Maybe." Kuja sniffs at this maybe. She is not a person who generally enjoys maybes, unless she's using them sarcastically.

"It's best not to cloud your vision with these pretty fantasies. You should view the world with open eyes. However unpleasant that vision might be."

She makes a pained little sound again, she hates whining like a dog but she needs some outlet, and she cannot give any tears to the effort.

"It's what... I have," she protests, lowering her head to hide behind her hair, finding it difficult to pull the words together. "There's no... no Zinc without."

There was just hunger and hatred, there was just death.

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i want you here (open)

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