You're Elding.

Elding, he calls me. I’ve always wondered what that even meant.

And the way he said it, the way he was looking at me, ice blue gaze burning stars in my eyes—well it—like, shit twisted in the back of my throat and my whole body did this thing and I felt like shriveling up and hiding somewhere far, far away—

--cuz he was smiling at me and saying some other shit, saying shit that sounded familiar and wrong all at the same time, spitting leos and hyarta at me, words I’ve never heard before in a voice that caressed them easily with a trained tongue. And he was smiling too, his lips pulling slightly into a thing that was slaying me soundly. “You’re Leos, though,” I breathed like an idiot, feeling…way too weird about what was happening, cuz he was breaking my heart but he was pulling a smile from me anyway, a smile that was fractured and weak and so stupid but he had me smiling it anyway.

And it crumbled easily, too; it slid off my face like sludge as I bit my lip, because he was being so…so…I don’t even know, he was just being it, and all at once he was showing me with a perfect, blue-eyed display exactly what I was risking losing. These stupid things he pulled from me. “Leos”. “Hyarta”.

I really wanted to know those words, one day.

I shifted where I sat, feeling gross, all kinds of nasty, cuz everything about him—not even his words, just his tone and the way he was looking at me—was something I didn’t deserve to…didn’t…deserve. The truth in my breast sloshed around like some hot, melted tar sticking to my insides and crushing them steadily under the weight. Because I forgot I slipped that Ophelia was my Ma while I was shattering and her image in my head froze my thoughts into confusion, too timid and too afraid to swing any which way—

My breath trembled; my head inched lower towards his neck again, the impossible urge to just lay against him creeping on me—an urge that was blasted apart as the Stuff echoed in my head again and I groaned in the back of my throat, jerking away from him, unable to touch him--

--and I tried, I tried to steady my breath, but as I sucked it in it rattled all the way down anyway. “Do you—do you remember…” I started, my voice a ruined whisper as I hovered over him, desperately wishing I could just collapse, “…what I said, about my Ma? A-About how she…how I…” I swallowed and tried to salvage my words, “How I…how I thought she….” Something bitter emerged from my throat—a harsh bark of laughter for the things I had thought were true, shit I had suspected.

I swear I had tried stitching it together—my thoughts, my feelings, everything, and it was a damn disaster and it lay tangled in my head like a jumbled mess, a knot of words too large to ever cram through my mouth. There were tears again in my eyes, perched on the edges of my lids as I realized I couldn’t ever explain this…this bitter sludge that blocked my heartbeat, my veins and arteries. He had asked me what was eating me, though—and somewhere I decided that the best answer would be…

…the nightmare itself.

“’You…act like a…a self-absorbed, foul-mouthed, entitled little child’,” I said, and my voice was changed because the words I was speaking weren’t my own; they were echoes forever etched in my memory, a cadence I couldn’t escape no matter how fast I tried to run, no matter how hard I tried to sleep, “’Are you…are you happy to hear now that even though y-your mother was…your mother was…” I swallowed hard and the tears fell and they were heavy and sick and scared,”…your mother was...raped by a god, she…she s-still wants you?”

I took another breath and more tears followed the first ones, starting to slide down my face in a steady stream—but I fought my voice and pounded it hard, wringing it in control, to spew these words I had kept tucked so tightly inside, “’Your…your mother isn't sure what to do with you? That's…your fault. Y-You're awful. You're more than old enough to s-stop acting this way, but you spew piss and shit out of your m-mouth like you were still a b…baby too helpless to do anything but lay in her own shit." Another steadying, shuddering breath; my voice was getting thick. “’Y-You need to learn your fucking place in this world.’”

I gasped—well, it was a sob now, cuz the crying was getting harder even though I still wrestled with my voice to make it clear. “She…Ma….” I said, and I didn’t even know what I was trying to say but some floodgate had opened and I couldn’t stop it even if I wanted to at that point, “She…she didn’t say that b-but….it was that…that huge rat bastard she calls her….”

My voice was breaking and so was my face, so were my eyes and everything, everything was breaking under the fresh wave of pain that kept me up and wandering, “He…he said all that and then she…s-she called him her p-protector.” My words were shrinking now, under the weight of this knife carving into me, “S-she called him a f-friend, she called him—s-she told me—“ And since my own words were failing, I pulled even more from memory—the barbed ones, the ones stuck in my side. “'You heard now. The…the truth. I c- cannot make you believe me, but I…I do love you in a way that I know. If this… is not enough for you, I understand.’”

Even now, under the stars laying with Lee’s warmth so close, I couldn’t stop the reaction in my head at those words: what bullshit.

Which pulled even more tears from me.

I laid there, breathless and gasping and feeling so tender, like my skin had been flayed from my sides. Because I was telling Leos the truth of it--that Elding was a name he had given me and nothing more and I was something so much worse, something revolting that had the nerve to even think of touching him.

“I’m a rape,” I finally whispered—and it could’ve been the stars talking, the nonexistent breeze, the stones creaking around us from where they sat perfect and stationary, “I’m my mother’s rape.”

And how in the world could you eve love your rape?


"talk"