Rhythm, Machine (Editing Shears)
Apr. 14th, 2007 10:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jhetiIt's just Paradox pushed through a blender. A few twists and tweaks but no new story.
Eventually m/f. Haven't come up with warnings yet. I don't suppose there really are any.
Mileena wondered if it were possible to know fear without love. Or if she had to be frightened of someone before she could love them. That was really the same thing, and at least partly her father's fault. How could it not be? He left his own marks in his own ways on the lives he consumed. She knew, in a passive and not quite remorseful way, that he had eaten her soul a piece at a time, and that it was gone for good long before humans lived in anything but caves.
She had loved him, and did still, but dared say nothing against him. What a misplaced loyalty that was! She hoped he would choke on it. He might kill her for it, or she might kill him--both happened at night, in her sleep. In her dreams. She suspected it happened to all female creatures, if not with the same intensity.
All men were like him. Or perhaps all the men she chose were like him, but so far, she’d never met one to prove her wrong. They were more subtle, to be sure. Peasants couldn’t be too careful. They weren't allowed the various excesses of kings. The lords were delicate by comparison. They battered furniture instead of people, or simply fumed and shouted until their lungs were raw. But at the core they were the same. The names they called her were the same.
Maybe not this one, maybe he was different. He was different, she decided, and bit her lip in resolve. A better man than the rest of them—a safer man, at least. He professed attraction, if not love, and was all for a good solid thump in the sheets. There was none of the usual poetry or pressure or wheedling for an audience with her sister--the one he'd rather have had in the first place.
Most of them tried that, just as her father did; they angled for her sister, using her as the bait. While none of them looked like him, they did all look the same: clean-cut, blond or once in a great while dark-haired, with pale greyish eyes and pale soft lips that pouted apart for pale soft teeth, even and bland. She could see why they called their first set, when they were children, "milk teeth".
The idea that their teeth fell out, that they did so on purpose and grew back larger and stronger, mystified her. Her teeth had come in suddenly, almost all at once, and were simply as large as they were going to be, and that was that. At the time it was the worst pain she had ever known.
Mileena came to realize that the world held endless varieties of pain, and that all suffering was relative. Growing teeth had hurt much more than breaking her nose, but somewhat less than breaking her back. She’d always been careless, reckless, and perhaps the western battlements weren't the best place for a game of tag in the rain. Her spine snapped in thirds, and she spent the rest of the year staring up at the same grey patch of ceiling and living for Kitana’s rare, guilty visits and brief murmurs of pity.
Caring about her latest round of hide-and-go-sleep? That hurt more than anything else. The pain was real, physical, and it tended to settle just under her collarbone whenever it decided to linger. It must have been because he said she was beautiful. And when it got down to shouting, he called the right name.
How much had having a soul hurt? She couldn't remember. It probably wasn't as painful as his sincerity, his honesty. He hadn't gotten a peek under the veil yet, and he wouldn't, either. None of them were allowed to see her face. Not even if it matched theirs.
In his case it did. She had never seen a mutant up close before, and had been astonished by the resemblance—by its exactness. He was stronger, harsher, and in all respects male, but otherwise it had been like looking into a mirror.
Except that she hated mirrors. Mirrors were evil. They trapped everything they touched and spit it out backward, inverted, cold and incorrect. Drapes did nothing against their power in the long run. She was always drawn back, bewitched, and the glass always showed her the same things.
No, he was not a mirror, at that. He was no sneaking horror sent to catch her face. He was just himself, a mutant who happened to look a little like her--very little—she’d only thought they looked so much alike because he went about in public unconcealed.
She hadn't seen her reflection, not even in her own bathwater, since she was fourteen. She washed her face with her eyes shut and removed and replaced the mask by rote. Her servants knew better than to move it. If it had to be taken away, they exchanged it swiftly and left its replacement in the exact same spot. The price for trickery, laziness, or any sort of delay was beheading.
Few people disappointed her. No one did it twice.
She’d quit trusting human servants with the errand. They had no mercy for ugliness, and cheap, uninventive senses of humor. The joke was on them, at the business end of the guillotine. It was wonderful, at first, but it had worn thin somewhere ‘round a baker’s dozen of stupid peasant girls. They died with as little variation as they lived. Baraka chased them off for her.
Maybe he was different. He seemed to be good for her, if madness were good. She'd always liked risk more than she let on. She kept it close to the vest. Mileena knew better than anyone the price of failure, of accident. It had cost her life before, and the lives of others. People she showed affection for had a way of vanishing--mostly to the gallows.
But that was neither here nor there, not now. Now she was standing at the edge of the dresser, or vanity or whatever it was called. It was an idiot's box of identical clothing in one color and a few things that mattered to her with the massive, vile mirror on top.
A line of bottles stretched across the bottom of the mirror, the usual trinkets and powders other women put such stock in. Her gentlemen—such callers as her father allowed--brought her these things, hoping she might remove the veil in front of them. It had never once happened. She dusted the damn things and kept them neat, but they aged and soured and were thrown away unopened. They always had an army of convenient replacements. There was always one more lord waiting to clutch her arm and push and prod her across the dance floor.
It would help so much if Kitana just liked men a little less. Not that Mileena was in a position to criticize. But was she ever? She’d never had the right to say or do or become anything that her sister was not already, first, best, and most. She was beginning to wonder whether she ever would.
The makeup was trickery disguised as a gift. It gave off the illusion that she could be normal. The vanity was a shrine to being normal, and whenever the mirror was uncovered it showed her the backsides of the bottles, prim and sealed. That was an obscene idea to have about them.
Makeup was obscene all by itself. It came in such pretty containers. They were delicate crystal and porcelain red flags, insisting that she never once let down her guard. It was natural to hate and demean them. They were nothing but what they seemed to be. She envied them in secret.
That was her entire problem: fear and jealousy and the love of risk. She had no soul to contain them.
If the same dizzy thrill that almost killed her were a good thing, she was feeling plenty of it now. She wanted to laugh at her fingers for shaking. It was silly but not funny. If she started to laugh now, she might not be able to stop, and hysterics had a way of attracting her father's attention. Indirectly, through spies and threats, but those were bad enough. She certainly didn't want anyone else taking a look at her just now.
She touched the scrap of curtain over the glass and it wavered, trembled, ghostlike. The hinges of the dresser creaked in shock when she tore the cloth away.
Silver: that was how she looked, cold and alien. She was leaner than she'd expected, more angular than she felt, more spidery than she wanted to believe herself to be. She was strong, as spiders went, suspicious and furtive. The woman in the mirror seemed afraid of her. There was a glint somewhere in those dark eyes that said she loved this, that she had no idea why she should have been so scared. Her heart ignored that idea and kept hammering.
Anyway, this was with the mask on, with more to hide behind. Mileena, always Mileena, never escaping, not even in death. There was always more to hide behind, weapons and sharp remarks and scraps of silk. Her reflection watched, waited to see what she would do; their hands never touched, so they couldn't steady each other.
Once confident that the thing in the glass, woman or shade or self, couldn't get out, Mileena debated removing her mask. Would her reflection hate her for it? Or run off screaming? Laugh at her, perhaps.
In the end she did none of those things. She simply stared, and kept staring. It was a sight. She looked a sight, as the girls said, as Jade or Tanya would have put it. Horror wasn't quite the right word. Spectacle might do. Or grotesque, in its original meaning, its old meaning, a thing so alien and weird that it was terrible.
The girl in the mirror considered this. Her forehead rippled and creased as she wrestled with some dark thought. Then, suddenly, she smiled.
The glass didn't shatter.
The problem with trying to brick in Mileena's language is that she talks/thinks/exists in these long, rambling, parenthetical sentences that circle around each other. Unless she wants to knock boots with her boytoy. XD
For comparison purposes, originals were here and here.
Eventually m/f. Haven't come up with warnings yet. I don't suppose there really are any.
Mileena wondered if it were possible to know fear without love. Or if she had to be frightened of someone before she could love them. That was really the same thing, and at least partly her father's fault. How could it not be? He left his own marks in his own ways on the lives he consumed. She knew, in a passive and not quite remorseful way, that he had eaten her soul a piece at a time, and that it was gone for good long before humans lived in anything but caves.
She had loved him, and did still, but dared say nothing against him. What a misplaced loyalty that was! She hoped he would choke on it. He might kill her for it, or she might kill him--both happened at night, in her sleep. In her dreams. She suspected it happened to all female creatures, if not with the same intensity.
All men were like him. Or perhaps all the men she chose were like him, but so far, she’d never met one to prove her wrong. They were more subtle, to be sure. Peasants couldn’t be too careful. They weren't allowed the various excesses of kings. The lords were delicate by comparison. They battered furniture instead of people, or simply fumed and shouted until their lungs were raw. But at the core they were the same. The names they called her were the same.
Maybe not this one, maybe he was different. He was different, she decided, and bit her lip in resolve. A better man than the rest of them—a safer man, at least. He professed attraction, if not love, and was all for a good solid thump in the sheets. There was none of the usual poetry or pressure or wheedling for an audience with her sister--the one he'd rather have had in the first place.
Most of them tried that, just as her father did; they angled for her sister, using her as the bait. While none of them looked like him, they did all look the same: clean-cut, blond or once in a great while dark-haired, with pale greyish eyes and pale soft lips that pouted apart for pale soft teeth, even and bland. She could see why they called their first set, when they were children, "milk teeth".
The idea that their teeth fell out, that they did so on purpose and grew back larger and stronger, mystified her. Her teeth had come in suddenly, almost all at once, and were simply as large as they were going to be, and that was that. At the time it was the worst pain she had ever known.
Mileena came to realize that the world held endless varieties of pain, and that all suffering was relative. Growing teeth had hurt much more than breaking her nose, but somewhat less than breaking her back. She’d always been careless, reckless, and perhaps the western battlements weren't the best place for a game of tag in the rain. Her spine snapped in thirds, and she spent the rest of the year staring up at the same grey patch of ceiling and living for Kitana’s rare, guilty visits and brief murmurs of pity.
Caring about her latest round of hide-and-go-sleep? That hurt more than anything else. The pain was real, physical, and it tended to settle just under her collarbone whenever it decided to linger. It must have been because he said she was beautiful. And when it got down to shouting, he called the right name.
How much had having a soul hurt? She couldn't remember. It probably wasn't as painful as his sincerity, his honesty. He hadn't gotten a peek under the veil yet, and he wouldn't, either. None of them were allowed to see her face. Not even if it matched theirs.
In his case it did. She had never seen a mutant up close before, and had been astonished by the resemblance—by its exactness. He was stronger, harsher, and in all respects male, but otherwise it had been like looking into a mirror.
Except that she hated mirrors. Mirrors were evil. They trapped everything they touched and spit it out backward, inverted, cold and incorrect. Drapes did nothing against their power in the long run. She was always drawn back, bewitched, and the glass always showed her the same things.
No, he was not a mirror, at that. He was no sneaking horror sent to catch her face. He was just himself, a mutant who happened to look a little like her--very little—she’d only thought they looked so much alike because he went about in public unconcealed.
She hadn't seen her reflection, not even in her own bathwater, since she was fourteen. She washed her face with her eyes shut and removed and replaced the mask by rote. Her servants knew better than to move it. If it had to be taken away, they exchanged it swiftly and left its replacement in the exact same spot. The price for trickery, laziness, or any sort of delay was beheading.
Few people disappointed her. No one did it twice.
She’d quit trusting human servants with the errand. They had no mercy for ugliness, and cheap, uninventive senses of humor. The joke was on them, at the business end of the guillotine. It was wonderful, at first, but it had worn thin somewhere ‘round a baker’s dozen of stupid peasant girls. They died with as little variation as they lived. Baraka chased them off for her.
Maybe he was different. He seemed to be good for her, if madness were good. She'd always liked risk more than she let on. She kept it close to the vest. Mileena knew better than anyone the price of failure, of accident. It had cost her life before, and the lives of others. People she showed affection for had a way of vanishing--mostly to the gallows.
But that was neither here nor there, not now. Now she was standing at the edge of the dresser, or vanity or whatever it was called. It was an idiot's box of identical clothing in one color and a few things that mattered to her with the massive, vile mirror on top.
A line of bottles stretched across the bottom of the mirror, the usual trinkets and powders other women put such stock in. Her gentlemen—such callers as her father allowed--brought her these things, hoping she might remove the veil in front of them. It had never once happened. She dusted the damn things and kept them neat, but they aged and soured and were thrown away unopened. They always had an army of convenient replacements. There was always one more lord waiting to clutch her arm and push and prod her across the dance floor.
It would help so much if Kitana just liked men a little less. Not that Mileena was in a position to criticize. But was she ever? She’d never had the right to say or do or become anything that her sister was not already, first, best, and most. She was beginning to wonder whether she ever would.
The makeup was trickery disguised as a gift. It gave off the illusion that she could be normal. The vanity was a shrine to being normal, and whenever the mirror was uncovered it showed her the backsides of the bottles, prim and sealed. That was an obscene idea to have about them.
Makeup was obscene all by itself. It came in such pretty containers. They were delicate crystal and porcelain red flags, insisting that she never once let down her guard. It was natural to hate and demean them. They were nothing but what they seemed to be. She envied them in secret.
That was her entire problem: fear and jealousy and the love of risk. She had no soul to contain them.
If the same dizzy thrill that almost killed her were a good thing, she was feeling plenty of it now. She wanted to laugh at her fingers for shaking. It was silly but not funny. If she started to laugh now, she might not be able to stop, and hysterics had a way of attracting her father's attention. Indirectly, through spies and threats, but those were bad enough. She certainly didn't want anyone else taking a look at her just now.
She touched the scrap of curtain over the glass and it wavered, trembled, ghostlike. The hinges of the dresser creaked in shock when she tore the cloth away.
Silver: that was how she looked, cold and alien. She was leaner than she'd expected, more angular than she felt, more spidery than she wanted to believe herself to be. She was strong, as spiders went, suspicious and furtive. The woman in the mirror seemed afraid of her. There was a glint somewhere in those dark eyes that said she loved this, that she had no idea why she should have been so scared. Her heart ignored that idea and kept hammering.
Anyway, this was with the mask on, with more to hide behind. Mileena, always Mileena, never escaping, not even in death. There was always more to hide behind, weapons and sharp remarks and scraps of silk. Her reflection watched, waited to see what she would do; their hands never touched, so they couldn't steady each other.
Once confident that the thing in the glass, woman or shade or self, couldn't get out, Mileena debated removing her mask. Would her reflection hate her for it? Or run off screaming? Laugh at her, perhaps.
In the end she did none of those things. She simply stared, and kept staring. It was a sight. She looked a sight, as the girls said, as Jade or Tanya would have put it. Horror wasn't quite the right word. Spectacle might do. Or grotesque, in its original meaning, its old meaning, a thing so alien and weird that it was terrible.
The girl in the mirror considered this. Her forehead rippled and creased as she wrestled with some dark thought. Then, suddenly, she smiled.
The glass didn't shatter.
The problem with trying to brick in Mileena's language is that she talks/thinks/exists in these long, rambling, parenthetical sentences that circle around each other. Unless she wants to knock boots with her boytoy. XD
For comparison purposes, originals were here and here.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-04-14 04:42 pm (UTC)Of course they didn't. They were dead. I laughed at this. Cause she just puts it out there matter o' factly.
I love it when you get inside of Mileena's head and I definitely see the circles that is Mileena's thought process. It's part of the world she was raised up in. It revolves around interelated events and people with Kitana and Baraka thrown in.
At least this responce is more coherent than the two posts I left in response to the drafts...
no subject
Date: 2007-04-15 01:13 pm (UTC)Aww, thank you. <3 I do try. And hey, anytime you leave comments is nice! I think you have some good insights.