Rupture, Refuse

28 January 2019 | R-16 | 2,622 words Mephi and Soft Nails have a serious, respectful conversation about their relationship like a reasonable pair of mature, well-adjusted adults. Set during Mephi's college years several years before he became an Archon.

Ttattatatat, came the knock on the door. Mephi, with pencil in hand, leaned back from his desk into his chair, started absently at the door to his dorm room, and sighed.

Ttattatatat. Ttattatatat. The knocking sounded like it belonged to Soft Nails, a bothersome witch he had shown charity towards a year before, and who had, since then, mistaken his pusillanimity for friendship.

Ttattatatat.

“Mephi!” hissed Nails' voice from beyond the door, “It's me! Wake up!”

Wake up. Fucking Nails.

But even while he contemplated ignoring her further, he found himself risen from his seat and walking the short distance to his entry hall. More or less on autopilot, he opened the door and stepped aside so she could enter.

Nails, hunchbacked and clad in a hooded shawl, ambled inside with her usual weird gait, something that left Mephi with only unkind suppositions about the state of her body. He closed the door as she spoke, “Finally. Goodness. I was beginning to think—were you sleeping in that?”

Mephi vacantly trailed his hand down the buttons of his formal blouse. “Yeah.”

“No wonder it's so creased. Another idiosyncrasy of yours, then,” she laughed. “It's charming.”

More like he'd never ironed it and dumped it on his dresser with his other laundry whenever he wasn't wearing it, but sure. Not like there was any integrity at stake worth arguing the point. Or any point.

Sort of insulting how easily she'd accepted such a bullshit lie, though. Might be funny to argue it after all just to, what, be a pain in the ass?

Bet he could vomit down his chest and the stupid bitch would call it 'charming'. Well Nails was plenty charming herself, because he could think derogatory things about her and not feel particularly bad about it.

Whatever. “So, uh... do you need the bed, or?”

“Ohoo!”

Ugh. “...Or couch, or...?”

“Whatever you offer,” She grinned as she settled herself on the small sofa opposite Mephi's workdesk. The room – one of the four that comprised his allotted space in the dorm – was large enough to accommodate two people, but small enough that, once Mephi seated himself in his chair and swivelled around, the proximity between them burned like static on his skin. 

Nails continued, “But what I need right now is you.”

“Okay.”

“Mhm! You see, earlier today, and I could scarcely believe it myself but I do swear it's the truth... a message came to me from – and again, I'm not lying – Morwenna.”

One of her witch “friends” (supposed) who exiled her from her old coven. Mephi knew nothing of her apart from Nails' snippets of assorted bitching.

Nails continued unprompted. “Of all people! So I think, Morwenna? Gosh. What does that raggedy hag want with me?” 

“Yeah.”

“It'd be too much of a compliment to call it bold, even. Leaving me out to the wastes and now she wants to talk. So absurd.”

“Mhm.”

“So there I am, figuring she's going to gloat. And—well, it'd be just like her to. She's always looked down on me because of my weak magic. But she doesn't have anything else, so she has to. No brains, no skills, no personality. It's deplorable. If she were the one thrown to the gutters, instead of me, she wouldn't have survived a single day.”

“Absolutely.”

“Absolutely! And she was always so careless. You know, she almost exposed the coven once. That's a far greater infraction than having a personality should be. So maybe I did start some fights. I was saying things that needed to be said. It was for the good of all of us. And just because they liked her more.” Her fists trembled.

If her magic was weak, his was weaker, and yet it still worked on her: “I'm sorry.”

Her hands relaxed. “It's utter nonsense. Truly.”

Mephi agreed – utter nonsense. If anything could more effectively disillusion him to the great occult than witnessing the abject uselessness of its practitioners, he'd like to hear about it. Hell, if the priest back home had wrangled in Nails and given her the pulpit for a day, that would have surely snuffed his sympathy exactly how those years upon years of sermons hadn't.

Fiddling absently with his pencil, and weighing in his mind whether to depict soul ablutions as a chrysanthemum or an amaryllis, he said, “It's terrible you went through that.”

He could feel Nails' smile; he didn't bother looking, and her softened voice confirmed it. “But, it was for the best in the end. Karma did reward me. I left behind those who didn't respect me – and I met you.” 

Graphite snapped against his thumb. Mephi glanced aside to the dancing flames of the brass candelabra on his desk, wondering how Nails was so oblivious as to not realise, or clueless enough not to notice, that he had clearly been working before she arrived, and not sleeping, and he'd lied.

Nails laughed breezily. In another time or place, she might have been a girl in a white sundress and wide sunhat, smiling while caressed by stalks of swaying wheat. For all the brightness and beauty of that image, Mephi felt himself rotting.

“You've done so much for me. It's more than I've ever had,” she said. “That's why I was so happy about us planning revenge. Because we could get rid of all that and start anew. I know that's what I wanted. But, I just...” Her shoulders tensed. “Morwenna, she said they want me back. The coven wants to take me back.”

“Wow,” Mephi muttered in awed disgust.

Nails nodded in agreement with whatever sentiment she heard. But poised like a bladesman's sword at the peak of its swing, the silence stretched too long—and when the blow came, it came as a whisper. “I don't know what to do.”

Oh yeah?

From under her hood, her filthy eyes gazed up at him. “What do you think, Mephi? You're smart. Should I—”

What did he think, huh.

Did she enjoy this shit?

Like he knew? Like he had any idea what he was doing? Like he should be giving anyone advice about anything? Huh? What, oh, sorry, was this decision important? Not that she'd be asking if it weren't. Because God forbid she live with the conscience that maybe she'd fuck up. That was all she cared about. Crying and whining and wingeing and wiping her ass with his face so that she didn't have to feel uncertain.

“Nails, I-I...” he choked, “I think...”

She stared at him, fists balled on her lap.

“I don't... well, what do you—”

She leaned forward, and set her hand on his knee.

“Solve your own problems you vapid, dipshit cunt,” snapped his voice.

Nails flinched as if stricken, and like her reflection in a mirror, Mephi jolted as well. He wasn't sure why. He wasn't surprised. If anything he ought to be happy.

After all, he'd finally said it. The backhand he'd fantasized about for months.

For all Nails' wishes of vengeance upon her coven, and the necessity of Mephi to her revenge, she would never enslave him, and never corner him into having no other choice. Perhaps he had disliked her before, but it was in recognizing her fecklessness that he came to hate her.

To embark upon a path of occultism, or even to force Nails' hand by suicide, required more resolve or desperation than he could ever hope to have. Hence why he understood that Nails now was passing responsibility for her life to another. Because he did the exact same thing. And he wasn't even a witch. 

“...This morning, a message came to me from Morwenna.”

“I know. You just told me.”

“No, no, then I must be going senile! But I'm still so young,” she laughed. “Morwenna—that toad. She thinks she can talk to me as if nothing happened. What she ought to do is apologize, and hope I'm in the mood to forgive her. Oughtn't she?”

While the amaryllis seemed serviceable enough, being associated with death and passion, and also commonly being cultivated in red, it wasn't the perfect fit he wanted. For one thing, it was native – hence his relative familiarity with it, and the ease it took to study. Incredibly inappropriate for a symbol of the West.

“Oughtn't she? Mephi?”

And for another, the master draughtsman Haedij Kyippr had already used them to represent the Anointed in her Illuminated Compositions IV. It was probably those that reminded him amaryllis even existed in the first place. Creatively bankrupt. Hack. It didn't even carry real ties to cleansing or purity, which should've been his first consideration.

“Mephi? Mephi?”

I'm ignoring you for chrysanthemums, bitch. They're obscure, foreign, difficult to draw, and may or may not symbolize what Mephi thought they did.

“Aren't you listening? Morwenna—”

Mephi cupped his hand behind the flames of the candelabra.

“—Listen to me! This is important! You are acting like a child.”

And he blew. Two of the flames vanished instantly, while the third burned persistently on, a gloomy spark that barely lit anything brighter than the starlight did streaming from the kitchen window.

Annoying. But as he took another breath, a weight yanked at his raised arm—Nails, who had risen from her seat and apparently saw fit to get physical, her fingers tight on the skin near his wrist.

Desperation if he'd ever seen it. Whatever the rot had done to her had apparently withered her muscles, or replaced her arms with those of a toddler. Simply pulling away was enough to break her grip, and though she scrabbled again and again, her efforts could have been equally spent on moving the limbs of an iron statue.

When she did give up, and backed away, she was panting in exertion. Well, what now? Mephi wondered. Just as he did, Nails turned and stumbled like a crippled dog to the kitchen.

Oh, to get a knife or something, he figured. He set his hand to his cheek and elbow to his armrest while she heaved open his cupboards and drawers. Part of him wanted to interject, say, second drawer on your right, but that was a hassle and she soon found it herself anyway.

She returned holding a large knife, bright, sharp, and never once used. Sweat dribbled from her chin, and she paused, huffing, to catch her breath before she spoke.

“I could kill you. I've done it before,” she hissed.

“That's fine.” And it really was.

“I know how to make a familiar.”

“That's fine.” It was what she should have done last year.

Nails raised the knife. So she was going to slash him. Then she had no idea how to use it. If she wanted him dead, she should stab. Though, even that might be too difficult for her, what with her lack of muscle. Mephi swivelled his chair back and forth minutely. Arterial, venous, who even cared. Could she just get it over with?

Nails' mouth was locked in a grimace, and the knife wavered in her hand like a buoy in a storm. Finally, the blade descended—onto her own outstretched arm, onto her own pale wrist.

She shrieked. Thank God the walls were thick. Between his reputation and her histrionics, an eavesdropper would've surely figured he'd murdered someone.

“Look at what you did!” She foisted her cut in his face. Red droplets shone like rubies in the candlelight, and it was only by that cheap abstraction that Mephi kept himself from gagging.

Dissatisfied, Nails dug the knife in again, deeper. “Look! You could've stopped this.” Blood drained down her arm to her elbow to the floor. The trail directed him up, but glimpses of white ligaments and yellow fat amid the mush made him queasy. He didn't look. 

She drew back, slowly, in silence. The longer she stayed, the bigger the mess she made of the floor. “I thought you cared about me.”

“Only sorta,” Mephi said.

“Then you have no soul. Heartless thing,” she spat. “That's why you're alone. Nobody will care about you the way I did, ever again, in your life.”

Dear God let that be true.

“You are pathetic. You're nothing.” She threw the knife to the ground to point at him with her, now only, functional hand. “Don't you dare follow me.” With that, she hobbled down the entry hall and slammed the front door shut with her exit.

Oh my God.

“–pfffkhahaha”

What a fucking loser.

“hahaHAHAHAHAHAAAAHAHAHAHAH!”

His hand beat his armrest, beat his armrest, beat his armrest, then cradled his forehead. It was the most he'd laughed in a long time, and even to his ears it sounded more like cackling.

But—just—how fundamentally stupid did someone have to be to incense themselves over what they defined as nothing? Don't you dare follow me? What kind of badass did she fancy herself? Did she get that hot line from a play? Oh, you're pathetic? That's right! Good job! Took you that long to catch on! Soulless? Heartless? Yes! Exactly! Fucking finally! Now you're starting to understand the joke that I am. And the punchline is, you're not even any better!

Nails would cry about cutting herself as if the fucking hand of God himself had forced her, when that hand was just Mephi's ass, literally, doing nothing but sit in a chair. In-fucking-credible.

Like the vacuous little cunt couldn't stand literally just fifteen minutes of someone she cared about failing to acknowledge she existed. Nails could go and cry him a fucking river. Then drown him in it whenever she inevitably came back to piss at him. Because a bitter, insecure whore like that would inevitably catalogue their life's injustices, flip through them like some fucking photo album, point at them all gleeful and nostalgic, “That's where life fucked me,” “There's where life fucked me,” until an angel heard them and patted their shoulder. Or more likely, just another guilt-ridden schmuck.

And him, he was toddler laughing as he smeared ants into the ground. Nails had absolutely nothing. Physically and mentally weak, no friends, no money, hiding in a society that would kill her if it knew she existed. Carelessness would be her hearse. Meanwhile he was sitting on a thousand support nets that would catch him a thousand times before it began to matter. He could quit school to retire tomorrow and no one would actually give a shit. He could do anything, in fact, and no one would actually give a shit. It was a kind of freedom he figured someone would envy, but which his carelessness kept him from putting to any good purpose.

All the opportunity in the fucking world and he was using it to roll around in shit with Soft Nails. Because of all the things, of all life's wonders and majesties, that was apparently what he found fun. Antagonizing the vulnerable. Fucking hopeless.

He could masturbate to his own misanthropy for hours. Or maybe he could do something marginally worthwhile.

Mephi took the discarded knife, rinsed it briefly in the sink, and rubbed it dry with a dishcloth. Once it was clean, he returned to his chair and used it to sharpen his pencil back to a point. The blood on the floor he could deal with later. Sometime.

He carefully tested the tip of the pencil against his thumb. Dull pain and a bold dot left behind. Good.

The knife disappeared into a mound of desk clutter as Mephi smoothed his hand over his drawing paper. Chrysanthemums. He'd sketch some designs using them and see if it appealed.

Only a few minutes in, he had to stop.

The palsied scribbles his hands were producing were unusable, and incomprehensible.