July 11: Murven, First Impressions

[kinetic_elaboration]

Murphy/Raven, ~780 words, 25 minutes, same verse as this.

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At first Murphy just pissed Raven off, because he does not need to have a body, and she is all body.

He was also Clarke’s boyfriend at the time, or her fuck buddy, whatever. Clarke hated that word, boyfriend, probably because it sounded too domestic and normal. But for a while there he’d hang out in their dorm room all the time and once he almost spent the night and that looked like a relationship to Raven’s eyes. That is, of everything in her life flipped inside out and scrambled up and ripped apart, she still knew some things, and this was one.

 

And it didn’t help. The way they flirted, always arch and close and meaningful, like they were the only ones in the room even when they weren’t. He never looked at Raven then. He was bowing to the queen. 

She would watch him, sometimes, not when he was invading her private space but in class, in the cafeteria, nights in the cemetery when he’d make himself mist to float across moonlight. She’d watch him fade out like he was a ghost but without that blue sheen about him, without that—pallor, that haunting sort of strain that real ghosts had. The smoke of him was dustier and thicker and coiled up tighter, and if he wanted to dissipate it was like he was pulling himself out with effort, like pulling cotton candy apart, like stretching licorice. How he could be so pliable and dissipate so thin and yet have that heft and heaviness too, that smoke and soot, that fire. How all of this could be true all at once. How she saw the body in him, when he was incorporeal. Those were questions she considered sometimes, when her wits were about her.

When she was a student, the first time, a future mechanical engineer, sometimes she thought of herself as all brain. She separated from the body. Her boyfriend then, he’d touch her and she’d feel it like it was a touch to someone else’s skin. Her physical form became this suit she wore, and it fitted her loosely sometimes, and she curled all the way in so that she no longer touched it. 

Now of course she’s met beings who can really separate from their skin but at the time, it was only a metaphor. 

And yet she never fully disconnected from her hands, yes, and from the physicality of the work, from the bigness and rawness and hardness of metal and from the work of creation, which was how she thought of it, then. She loved movement, even if she moved her body like it was only an exoskeleton she controlled from afar. Like she was machine, like she was set apart from the base needs of the flesh and blood and bone. Finn would remind her to eat, to sleep. She’d crash and she’d be all body again.

All flesh, all blood, all bone, all veins and nerves.

Since being bitten, she has not once lived a day unaware of the finer details of the flesh. This is not about pain or injury, or at least, not entirely. This is a fascination with the ability of herself to transform, with the way the transformations take her over and drown out the whole world, with the way they take her by the middle, curl around her gut, and how she is forced into herself. Her physical self. All existence, forever, and everywhere, is the crack and warp and growth in her. When she’s not feeling it, she thinks about it, she reminds herself it’s real, but the appearance of her own image in the glass is the only thing that’s believable by then and the rest of it is all a sort of dream.

She wonders if Murphy feels that way, ever, when the solidity of him, the heaviness most people don’t notice in themselves, the gravity, dissolves entirely away. Maybe he feels the shape of himself more, for the unreliability of it.

She sits in the tall grass next to one of the gravestones all the way in the back of the cemetery, sits there a long time by herself. She doesn’t know he’s around but she sort of knows. She sees him in the mist that isn’t mist. In the uncanny thickness to the mist curling low across the ground. 

Then she throws her head all the way back and she howls up at that giant silver disc of a moon, and she howls and she howls like her lungs will never go out, like her throat will never grow sore. She howls from the deepest part of her. So that everyone in the whole world will hear.