Realistic or Modern my heartbeat in your hands ( Syntra & CXTXTONIC )

[Syntra]

Another day, another glorious opportunity for an existential crisis! ...was it normal to plan those in advance? Hasegawa Sayo sincerely doubted it, but as she stared into the cup of her already cold morning coffee, she saw no other potential outcome. No shortcuts to salvation, either. All the forces running this universe worked in an orchestrated effort to, as the youngsters would say, 'fuck her up'; it started with something as innocent as her running out of her favorite cereal, but she knew that that was just the beginning. What does it say about our civilization that we haven't figured out teleportation yet? Nothing good, Sayo would imagine. It only proved that nobody valued people's precious time. With instant travel at her fingertips, she could bypass both the rain drumming into her windows and the trash infesting public transport lately-- the dreaded ghost of 'social interaction' (ewww) would no longer hover over her shoulder, either. A paradise, in other words. No wonder it didn't fucking exist.

For a second or two, Sayo considered ordering delivery. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad-- maybe the delivery guy wouldn't steal her phone number to call her at 2am this time, nor would her email address be spammed with weird ads. The word 'maybe' contained far too many possibilities for her to be comfortable with it, however, and so she dropped the idea. Udon it is, then. An unorthodox choice for one's breakfast, and thus probably something that would come to bite her in the ass later, but it was either that or starve. Finally, a small fragment of excitement in her boring, boring life!

(No. No, it wasn't. Sayo had tried being delusional in order to trick herself into thinking that her life didn't suck, but it turned out that being aware of how the world worked did have a few disadvantages to it, too. The rats in the maze probably wouldn't be too fucking happy if they knew about their condition, now would they? Hence her regularly scheduled existential crisis, courtesy of Living in a Society. Sigh.)

It's too early for this nonsense, Sayo thought. At the same time, it definitely wasn't-- once she woke up, her brain started producing all those inconvenient thoughts, and inevitably, they ran in all the worst directions. 'What am I going to do with my life?' 'How will I ever cope with not being enough?' 'Is the week old soup in my fridge still edible?' That the third question felt like the most relevant one was probably a sign that she had accepted her fate already, and Sayo was not comfortable with the concept. Today, she decided, I am going to eat it. If I die of food poisoning, then so be it.)

Beep, beep! Beep, beep!

With an annoyed sigh, Sayo accepted the call. "Do I have to remind you that it's the weekend, Kenji?"

"Not like you have anything going on," her colleague, bless his little heart, muttered into the speaker. "And besides, it's your fault that you haven't mailed in the results. You have done the experiment, right?"

"Uhhhh..."

"Yeah, you should be thanking me for calling you, love."

"Careful, Kenji. If you get a little more full of yourself, I'm pretty sure you will burst."

"A tremendous loss for the world at large, I'm sure."

"Bye."

Well. Talking to Kenji wasn't how she envisioned her Saturday to go, but here Sayo was, she guessed! Then again, the whole 'do your job' thing was most likely an even greater disruption than that. (Not that she hated it, mind you. If anything, the relationship was more of a love-hate dynamic, with the hatred growing exponentially stronger every time the tedium aspect won out. Spoiler alert: most of it was tedium. One would have hoped the opposite would be true in research, but reality had given her... well, a pretty thorough reality check... very early on. Did Sayo approve? No, but as always, few people and even fewer regulations actually cared about her opinion.)

Alright, this won't be so bad, she told herself. Just need to take the samples out of the fridge, stored right next to her food, in direct violation of all the safety codes in existence, and put them into the centrifuge. It won't be so horrible. It... ah, shit! Yeah, it wouldn't have been so horrible had the test tube not fallen out of her hand, spilling blood and glass all over her brand new carpet. Awesome! Sayo had always dreamed of spending her day googling how to get rid of those. And, in all honesty? When she cut up her palm in order to try and pick the shards up, she didn't even bother feeling particularly surprised. For that, it followed the general patterns of her life all too well. Where was the first aid kit, again? For some reason, Sayo had a distinct feeling that she would need many, many bandages today.

 

[candygore]

tw // gore​

when she breathes.

pairs and triads and quartets of eyes slice open. and there’s skin that sings under the burn of flesh parting, seeping, crying, screaming. or at least, that’s what gathers she from the shrill ringing in her ears, lightning fast wavelengths burning the granulated plateau of her arms. it’s muffled: the screeches, the supplications, the torment. and distantly, she realises there’s blood boiling on her thighs. bubbling. collecting between eyelashes and pouring back into dark, void pupils that engorge and enlarge and stretch until she’s digging her own fingertips in the rings of muscles. pulling to let the sizzling liquid flow out of her. she tugs at the slits in her legs, nails catching on tangled eyelashes until more voices join the cacophony of hellfire rippling her grotesque, viscous figure.

they shriek. and clamour. and scream, slowly scraping their own oesophagus down to piles of heaping sandpaper, collecting like sand in an upturned hourglass. she can’t see. her sockets are hollowed, eyes are borrowed. but there are familiar shreds landing on her cheeks, in the corner-indents of her mouth. both wet, and abrasive.

the cries are not quite her own, for her teeth are bare to the environment, and there is helpless muscle twitching around the misset part of her protruding skull as it resentfully oozes out some of her essence. feeding it back to a tongue that chokes and thrashes to stay in place; the frenulum, a fragile, fragile, taut membrane—it tears, as if her own teeth caught on the pinch of tissue and ripped it themself so her tongue would loll back like a head sliced at its hinges, and feel the flood of iron GAGGING the back of her throat.

it’s a cataract accumulating and sprouting between her teeth until it spills and it pours and it latches, it snatches her dewy waterline, rolling through her optical nerves like arms shoved in too-tight orifices: it bulges inside her, this foreign blood, mercilessly thrusting even as it reaches the tapered ends. it doesn’t ask; more impatiently floods from her naked mouth, careening straight to blind her sight further. it gropes at eyeballs that treacherously pulse in its massaging hold.

and then she breathes.

there are slick sounds of wet, trembling flash sewing itself back together in sticky strings that curve under their own weight. a weight that adds itself back to her face in the form of dark, dispersed red light through thin eyelids. eyelids that swivel when the bulge of her own pupils sliver to her left, as if arteries pumping in them grieved the loss of the essence crystallising under her nails, harsh prisms cutting into the tender hyponychium like a warning from the past and what it rabidly salivates at its canines for. salivates… salivates… white, alcoholic froth foaming in cheek cavities; fluid-filled globules popping on a parched tongue–!

she awakes with a startle, jolting upright. the tight pressure in the corner of her swollen eyes remind of latex stretched sadistically thin, and she has to manually loosen it: blinking languidly to ease the subsiding stress as she dazedly takes note of the pair of quintet appendages wriggling on the periphery of her palm. her late surprise emerges not from the realisation that she has fingers, but from the way she sees her skin ripple. a bloated wave of blood ticking her veins as it flows tingles back into her. tingles. energy. life.

life; sustainability, food, shelter. clothing. water. water. WATER. “YOU.” her legs, they wobble and her hands, they scramble to catch the nearest edged surface—a cool, cold marble counter. “you,” though her volume mellows, the venom in her voice does not.

there is a woman. or a not-woman with dark, spilling hair she wants coiled around these new fingers. all the way to her knuckles, to her scalp, so they kiss with a ferocity that ignites in her at the sight of this woman sitting in her o– not her own. it’s not just her own, and shizuya’s heartrate spikes. this woman. she sits in a puddle of not-her blood. “you did this to me…” the blood vessels behind her ear tremor spectacularly, and agitation coats her mouth wet.

wet, wet. wetter as the lust of her past worshippers slips like aphrodisiac in her spit. the very same worshippers who’d torn her limb. from. limb. in their hunger, in her forced emaciation. their lust curls in the creases of her palm, goading her to move, and to take from this defiant body like they’d taken from her. and oh, how her tendons tremble with want. she could, she CAN; her sparkling salmon eyes rive down the valley of this woman’s body—saya’s body, her breath fuses with the sulphurous blend trickling onto her tongue—and watch, with a difficult gulp, how the cloying red of her touches the years-old stolen mahogany of shizuya's. STICKS to it like explicit consent. “you–” the pause shudders through her, “you…

“i will have you. now.”

 

[Syntra]

Sayo blinked. She did it again, and again, and again, perhaps in hopes that her reality would eventually reassert itself, but, spoiler alert: it didn’t. The anomaly in the shape of a woman was still fucking there, staring at her with her amber eyes. (This, um, wasn’t normal, right? Her relationship with that concept wasn’t always what you might call entirely healthy, but it had guided her through life with relatively few problems-- she didn’t, for example, think that the sun was an orange to be eaten, or that the creeps leering at her from the darkness from time to time were just nice uncles who wanted to share some candy. She also didn’t think that random chicks could materialize out of thin fucking air, though, so there was that! Maybe her instincts weren’t as reliable as she had once thought.)

“Oh,” she stuttered, unable to look away. Unwilling to do so, too. (The remains of the test tube lay forgotten on the carpet, about as shattered as Sayo herself. To avert her gaze would have been to close her eyes shut, firmly, and step into a bottomless chasm-- a chasm full of claws, full of teeth. …of course, not doing so would have been much the same. ‘Inevitability’ was the word that came to mind, really. She didn’t know how she knew, but it was one of those things that you just sensed, you see? Kind of like when you came across some fuck’s dating site profile, glimpsed a hint of his face, and recognized in that very moment that this was the worst man alive.)

(To the intruder’s credit, she wasn’t the worst man alive. She wasn’t a man, most likely, and Sayo also had her doubts regarding the ‘alive’ part, but yeah. Too many criteria that she just couldn’t meet, man! And too many criteria that she was meeting, both of the ‘nightmare’ and ‘dream’ variety. …her heart was racing wildly in her chest, urging her to go, go, go, right then, right there, though where? In which fucking direction? Towards her or away from her, as far as her feet could carry her? The answer to that was shrouded in fog, and so she chose to freeze instead. Haha. What could possibly go wrong, right? If the cereal incident was anything to go by, then pretty much everything. From the very beginning, the universe had been conspiring against her!)

“Oh,” Sayo repeated, her gaze still interlocked with hers. (The point she was making, she felt, was very important. ‘Oh’ was a universal sign of surprise, and it only struck her as fair to let the stranger know that she was, for lack of a better word, fucking surprised by her visit. By someone like her even existing at all, if you were the type to insist on details. ...the blood was seeping into the carpet, deeper and deeper, till you could no longer tell where the stain ended and where everything else began. Soon enough, it would be completely ruined, and Sayo couldn’t help but draw some pretty uncomfortable parallels. Heh! Was that her life had devolved into? Carpet symbolism? Just a few steps away from the infamous blue curtains-- the very rock bottom of literary analysis, as far as she was concerned. The intellect itself in its death throes, waiting to be put out of its misery. Even now, years after college, Sayo could hear its pitiful wailing.)

“Me?” The accusation seemed to break the spell somehow, and a heartbeat later, the woman was on her feet. (Have her? Fucking what? Those were certainly words, but no matter how she arranged them next to each other, they refused to make any sense. Have her, in what way? Like you could have a cup of coffee at the local café, or… or what? On some level, it was clear to her that she should not want to find out. That, with her feet wet from the Rubicon, it would be oh so easy to slip. ...wasn't that the entire appeal, though? The reason she was dying to know? Jesus fucking Christ.)

"I didn’t do anything to you. Actually, I’m pretty sure that you are trespassing. That is against the law." If Sayo felt stupid for trying to apply human laws to something that very obviously wasn't human, she certainly didn't let it discourage her. Nah, far it be from reality to stop her!

It was a split-second thing, the decision that hatched in her head. Had someone asked her about the rationale, Sayo probably would have described it thusly: 1) She's a threat. 2) She already thinks I hurt her. => Why not try to hurt her for real? Blah blah blah, nothing to lose, blah blah blah, everything to gain. Of course, the actual line of thought was more of an 'eeek, oh shit,' but that was beside the point. Turning on her heel, Sayo grabbed the first heavy thing within her teach-- to Shizuya's infinite misfortune, that happened to be the fire extinguisher hanging on the wall. Oh, well! It would do, or perhaps it wouldn't, but nobody could say she hadn't tried.

"Get out of my apartment, bitch." And, with that? With that, she swung against the demoness with all her might.

 

[candygore]

tw // blood and violence​

the thing is. shizuya—even in this frail human body, with her compromised state of being—saw the sledgehammer-swing coming from a mile away. but she hadn’t thought to move out of its orbit and blacked out like a collapsing star between the moments of being hit and the next, when she finds herself sprawled on the ground below with a warm, warm cloud of sunset-red cosmic dust caressing her right temple. grating all the jaw down to her jaw.

perhaps that’s why she sits stunned and silent by sayo’s feet. and why she tilts her head up at the gangly woman with eyes flushed in such childish wonder and awe, because she could’ve easily evaded that, and because sayo—this woman, this woman, this brave, brave woman—managed to land a blow on her. her. a supernatural entity. a demon princess who's compensating for the vapid self-induced stupour in steady trickles of her sweet, sweet ichor.

“you,” her heart throbs, her very muscles wanting to force her words out lest she wastes more time staring at sayo in awe. she sees—in sayo's dark, abysmal eyes (how beautiful, like a swan lake under a new moon)—her own red tongue peeking out to lick at the thick glob of blood collecting between the seams of her lips. “you wanted me like this?” she asks but the sight of sayo’s trousers and the carpet behind her that's soaked up every last drop of her blood, paints the lilt at the end of her sentence as a twinkling rhetoric, and she has to wonder: how exactly did this human woman end up with swirls of shizuya’s essence in her home? has she not heard of the great legends and myths: what if shizuya were as savage as her kin?

her crystal-pink gaze returns to the sunken bags under sayo’s eyes and she can see the splatter. oh, her breath catches heavy in her throat. just thinking about this woman spread open all across her clean walls and pristine cabinets. what do they call it: abstract art? she can picture the tiny squares of paper hacked up by colourful little thumbtacks and the bright woollen threads tied around their plastic heads. sayo’s gruesome art captured in every single one of the images.

a wolf must not juxtapose itself with sheep simply because he chooses to mingle among them. he can never deny his ravenous nature, and shizuya was insolent thinking herself any different from her nearest agnate because her reaction is as primitive as theirs: thighs closing as she angles herself forward, pressing her body towards sayo with her weight on her flat palms. she gulps, mumbling something unintelligent under her breath that sayo does not hear but the protective spirits sewn into her couch pillows and curtains do. and refute with a rising crescendo of bubbling murmurs. shizuya is no stranger to drowning. their voices barely affect her now, and soon. soon. she’ll ensure they never will again.

"then let me indulge you."

she swipes, nails impetuously cutting through the skin of sayo’s right ankle in their excited frenzy as she drags sayo down to the floor with her. her willowy body makes such an addicting thwump! that shizuya almost does it again. almost gets to her feet to play sayo on the flight of stairs in her own apartment building. almost. but even shizuya is a slave to blood rush in this human state: watching her own light, light hair fall to one side, pooling by sayo’s head. “i want you like this forever,” she whispers, gentle fingertips stealing more of sayo’s skin as they trail up her arm, pushing the fabric back in their course.

“i want you now.” there’s only a sting of pain in her hand when her starving blood snaps out, coagulating in the jaws of her palm as they cradle and squeeze it into shape. a shape that starves for the warmth of sayo’s insides, slicing into her waiting arm—the very one shizuya lavished with loving attention before—to thumbtack it to the ground. “sayo,” the name drips like honeyed wine from her lips and shizuya should surely return it to its rightful owner, yes? to the heart she presses her lips over, over the thick partition of sayo’s rising chest. it’s not close enough, is it? how discourteous of her: taking someone’s name like this.

you’ll gift it to me next, the promise is drizzled into sayo’s bloodstream as the knife in shizuya’s hand melts.

she watches it dissolve and disappear, not a single droplet rolling down the curve of her arm. “tell me, my heart,” her voice is barely a breath over a warm puff. “do you desire me too?” how debased she must look, with her frantic eyes and skin blemished with dry blood from before. but how could she not: when she feels herself pulsing inside sayo? when sayo had taken every last bit of her? there’s a haze relaxing her tendons and she must, she must repay… sayo for this– this connection, this satiation at last.

so she doesn’t blink twice before promising, “i will give you more of me.” and dipping lower to lave her tongue into sayo’s mouth. a plush softness against her as she drags the flat wetness on the roof, coaxing sayo to open up more. shizuy’s not… she doesn’t fancy the banal taste of her but that can be remedied. after all, a promise is given and to be enjoyed by both parties involved.

this time when she materialises her blade from her blood, it ripples in her trembling hand and coats sayo’s perfect face with its perfect release. this time, it struggles maintaining its crimson rigidity from the perfect blend of shizuya with sayo. and this time, it shows her the mercy of humans: fluently splitting her own tongue open like a purse. “take from me,” shizuya drips, dips back into sayo’s mouth. “taste me at my most potent.”

 

[Syntra]

Well. Well, to put it simply? Sayo was fucked. She could have reached for a million different words to describe exactly how fucked she was-- both the intensity and irrevocability of it all, etched into her brain with a red-hot needle. She could have, yet she didn't. And, you know why? Because that would have required the brainpower that she currently did not have! (...maybe she'd never have it again, either. Maybe that would be okay, too. Who needed words, anyway? Those tiny, inconsequential sounds, used for talking about concepts like 'taxes' or 'discounts' or, yes, 'trespassing.' All of that had been wiped from her mind, along with everything else, as she stared into Shizuya's eyes. Too close, Sayo thought. Yes, too close to home, much like an insult designed to get under your skin, but also not nearly close enough, somehow. Again, what were words? Random clusters of consonants and syllables, unable to hold any actual meaning. Not when faced with her, whatever she was.)

"A-ah?" Well? Did she want her like that? Did she? Sayo didn't remember what she'd had for dinner last night, let alone whether she had ever wanted her. It did and didn't make sense-- her thoughts were an ocean, and thus home to many, many, many different things. (Revulsion and attraction, for one. Sister concepts, once you really thought about it. Take magnets, for example! Two poles, plus and minus, seemingly unrelated, but both connected by desire. By the need to fucking move, regardless of the direction. What did it matter that one dragged you forward, and the other wanted to go back? The energy was there, pulling, pulling, and pulling, and Sayo... well, Sayo had a feeling they were going to tear her in half. Maybe that would be a good thing, too. Maybe it wouldn't, but who could tell, eh? Only one way to find out! ...and, like, don't tell her there were no disadvantages to death. For one, Sayo would never have to deal with the New Years' Eve TV program again, and that alone gave her the strength to see this to the bitter, bitter end.) "I... let go," she protested, her voice barely louder than whisper. "This is assault. You're so going to prison. Don't think that we... don't have laws for this." Of that, at least, she was convinced. Leave it up to the fucking government to make laws binding the spirits, why don't you? Or whatever the hell Shizuya was. (A demon, Sayo realized, with the kind of dull certainty that was reserved for things that were true, even if you didn't want them to be. Especially if you didn't want that. The existence of an entirely different world, hidden just a layer beneath the one you happened to inhabit, had to qualify, right? If not, then Sayo didn't know what else could.)

The demon's frenzied whispers were a knife, a knife in her gut, in her lungs, in her everything, and she understood it about as well as you might understand bits and pieces of a movie in a language you didn't speak. The one thing Sayo did understand, despite the pain? Despite the protests of her own instincts, yelling at her to get the fuck away? "Yes," she whispered. 'Yes,' in response to whether she desired her. 'Yes,' in response to all those promises. Yes, yes, yes, and a thousand times yes! Except that, no. No. Why had she said that? It had been her mouth, and her lips, and definitely her tongue as well, but it hadn't been her. Not really. (What was her, though? Sayo had thought she had known, but faster and faster, that concept was beginning to blur-- to change into something unrecognizable, much like her own reflection in the mirror. Heh. Every day, the chemical cocktail in her brain provided more and more... hmm, let's call it fun. Fun and, you know, not a fucking reason to kill herself.)

Wow. Wow, wow, wow. Sayo had expected a lot of things, but that? That wasn't on the list. Quite distinctly so. (The taste in her mouth... it was and wasn't pleasant. Like a chili pepper, it burnt-- and, like with it, she wanted more and more and more, enough of it to reduce her to fucking ashes.) The demon said something, but it didn't matter. The words could very well have been traffic noise, or the lyrics of a song too fancy for her to understand, and so much of her was drowning in darkness that she didn't care to, either.

"What... what did you do to me?" Sayo dragged herself back to her feet, leaning on the cold, marble counter. (Her thoughts were spinning, spinning, spinning, akin to a whirligig, and if she let them, she knew, they would drag her under, closer towards... something. Something bad, most likely.) "Get out," Sayo hissed. "I don't want you here. I'm calling the police." What was she going to say? 'Hey, a demon materialized in my apartment and made me drink blood'? ...that this was her greatest plan was, uh, depressing, to say the least.