Post by styg on Dec 20, 2014 11:09:35 GMT -6
{{OOC: This is my latest Laurel roleplay. It's for Frontier Grappling Arts' supershow this weekend, but I'm posting it here too because it centres around where Laurel's mind is at lately.}}
Desert light, dirty from the city smog, billowed through the linen curtains.
With the sound of skin tearing from skin, Laurel Yunokawa peeled herself from the leather sofa and the sticky tangle of bare limbs belonging to those still asleep on it. She half climbed, half fell onto the floor, feeling the rush of open air chill her body in the places where, up until now, it had been pressed against the warmth of Whiskey Ayano and Suzume Mitsuyoshi. She looked down at her own naked body, streaked - like Whiskey's and Suzume's - with a cocktail of liquor, glitter, paint and sweat. She ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth and grimaced, as much at the fur on her gums and the slime on her teeth as the repugnant taste of decay seeping up from her throat. She swallowed, and the rotten, bitter flavour of mortality backwashed into a foetid wave that broke against her tastebuds, a greasy yellow flavour to match the early afternoon light. She tried to ignore the distant pounding in her head.
Laurel looked up, and caught sight of a face reflected in the door to the balcony. It was an alien face, the kaleidoscopic face of an extradimensional harlequin, and it took her a moment to register it as her own. She opened her mouth and moved her jaw side to side, testing, and the psychedelic vision did likewise.
It had started with Laurel asking Whiskey - since both women often wore facepaint in the ring - to see what kind of design she might come up with using Laurel's face as her canvas; that had turned into all three women taking turns to paint whatever sprang to mind on each other's flesh, and as the wine flowed it had inevitably ended up with them all smearing pictures of cocks on each other in heaps of giggles.
She glanced up at her friends, at the sweat-smudged designs decorating their own faces, and had flashes of the same patterns twisted in orgiastic ecstasy from just a few hours earlier. She'd slept with two guys before on a few occasions, and even one guy and one girl a handful of times, but last night had been her first threesome with two other women. Laurel had experimented enough to know that she was straight; that was exactly why she'd asked Whiskey to help her deconstruct her sexuality, to focus purely on the sensation, shorn of any deeper lust she might have for a male partner. In all honesty, Suzume and Whiskey had mainly been focused on each other anyway, which Laurel had been fine with. Doing something new was the point. She'd be in no rush to try another all-female threesome again, but she was glad she could add that experience to the bank of things she'd given a try.
In the double glazed carnival half-mirror of the window she caught sight of herself again, saw her black hair matted into white and green and blue greasepaint, and that made her feel it, feel each strand pressed against her skin as if it were a net. She pushed her fringe back off her face and realised her temples were burning, droplets of perspiration spitting from her hairline every time she moved her head. She shuffled over to the window and leaned against it, pressing her face into the cool glass and staring out over the Las Vegas skyline.
This was almost the end of her extended stay with Whiskey Ayano. She'd finally given in to Whiskey's carnal desire for her, on condition that their liaison was centred exploring the limits of Laurel's sexual identity, to see which of her boundaries were concrete walls and which were just low fences. Laurel had never hidden the fact that her dominant sense was touch, and she'd freely have admitted to anyone who asked that her big turn-on was physical sensation. Different textures, different temperatures, different consistencies; these were the things that inflamed her nerves and filled her synapses.
And so in the first couple of days together they'd had sex on silk sheets and then hessian, in a sea of feathers and then on a pile of money, swaddled in heavy robes and then on the cool night air of the balcony. She'd had Whiskey tease her with ice and fire, coat her from head to toe in foam and food, twist and smack and claw her until her nerve endings roared. Despite Whiskey Ayano's body - hot as it was, objectively - stoking no lust inside her, Laurel had still climaxed plenty of times at Whiskey's hands over the last few days, whether they were stroking one of Laurel's nipples with an ice cube while dripping hot wax on the other, or rubbing fistfuls of shaving foam into Laurel's face and crotch, or massaging her shoulderblades into a storm of static straining at the levee of her nervous system.
As their time together went on they got darker and dirtier, taking in bondage and bloodplay. Laurel hadn't enjoyed everything they'd tried, but enjoying it was hardly the point; the point was simply trying, doing, experimenting. She'd been feeling trapped ever since Capital Combat... or no, actually, since quite a long while before Capital Combat. The match with The Black Hand had just been the tipping point. This week with Whiskey was just one step in Laurel's urge to deconstruct everything about herself, to strip back her own psyche and examine, leaving no stone unturned, just what building blocks actually made up Laurel Saiko Yunokawa. And if that meant going to dark places or doing things she didn't like, well then, so be it.
Being rich was one of the hardest things for her to reconcile. Laurel had always hated the wealthy, not from envy but from pity - a belief that those who needed money to feel good about themselves were inferior and incomplete. Now that she had money herself, she was forced to re-evaluate that belief, even if she felt confident that she didn't act rich or use her wealth as either an emotional or economic weapon against others. Still, she had recurring fantasies about destroying all her money. In her upswings, she could convince herself it was the asceticism of her upbringing that wanted to do that. In her downswings, she knew it was a petty desire to shock and enrage those who placed value in money. In either case, it would be two fingers up at everyone in wrestling who cared more about living that life than making art, and that at least she was fine with.
In the haze of drugs and sex of the last few days, she'd finally acted on that impulse. Whiskey had returned from grocery shopping to find Laurel with her feet dangling over the balcony, swinging around in the dry Nevadan air, with the money they'd had sex on in a plastic bag beside her. In her hand was a smouldering banknote, and Laurel's eyes were transfixed on it, her cold grey irises blazing orange. When Whiskey caught sight of the distant, mesmeric satisfaction in Laurel's eyes she felt slightly disturbed. She watched in silence as Laurel blew the flame out and let the ashes of the bill flutter over Las Vegas like the corpses of fireflies.
"Is this an art project?" Whiskey had asked.
"Everything I do is an art project," Laurel had replied absently, then stared at the greasy ash left on her fingertips. She smiled, and smeared it across her face like it was war paint.
Streaks of ash became harlequin makeup again as Laurel, staring through her own reflection over the monument to excess that was this city - an oasis of debauchery defying the desert's burning glare of dust and death - came back to the present.
Whiskey mumbled something in her sleep, her short hair cascading around her head like a drunken halo. With one less person on the sofa she'd stretched out, and Suzume had wrapped herself around her like a blanket. No wonder Laurel was up first. While Whiskey stuck to her drug of choice, the one that informed her name, and Suzume rarely touched anything harder than weed, Laurel was a walking chemistry set. She could still feel cocaine from last night lodged in her nose hairs. The hazy clarity of the view and the churning of her stomach swam into sudden sharp focus and she realised she was humming the beat to something under her breath; she realised it was Feel Good Hit Of The Summer. She stopped. Her drug intake was something else to deconstruct. To lock herself away with Whiskey and do filthy things to each other wasn't so hard; to invite five friends into a deathmatch extravaganza for the sake of nothing but art and release wasn't so hard. To ramp the chemicals in her system down to zero, or up to (or beyond) maximum... that would be hard. But if she was serious about this project, it had to be done, and she was serious about it.
She pushed herself off the window and turned back to the room, and started wandering around and pawing at furniture pathetically until she found her phone. As she lit a cigarette she scrolled through her contacts until she found her brother's number, and she hit call.
As she waited for him to pick up she paced back and forth, a million thoughts colliding in her brain. Trying to follow any one strand was like trying to pin down a butterfly while it was still flying, so she didn't even try.
The other end clicked... was silent for a moment... and then a comfortingly familiar voice made a noise something like, "Mnuh?"
"Hey Matty."
"Muh... hey Laurel," he groaned, "W'sup?"
She paused. She wasn't actually sure why she'd called him. So she simply said, "Just miss you."
He stifled a yawn, which turned into: "Miss you too." He exhaled to clear the last of the yawn away, then added, "How's Whiskey's?"
"Really good," she said with genuine enthusiasm which she worried sounded phony, "Good... gettin' some good stuff done on this little project of mine."
"Cool."
"Very, very drunk last night, like... even by Whiskey's standards..." She rubbed her aching temple. "Payin' for it now though, like."
Matty laughed curtly, mostly just to acknowledge what she'd said. There was a feminine murmur somewhere beyond him, and he said, not to Laurel: "My sister."
"Matthew Guerra... are you shaggin' in my bed?" she demanded with ironic sternness, doing her best impression of a responsible big sister.
"Naw, I ain't at home. And... we ain't shaggin' right now either. You woke us up. We'd just gone to bed."
"Oh shit, sorry..." said Laurel quickly, biting her lips in embarrassment, "What time is it there?"
"'Bout half ten, eleven?"
"And you're already asleep?" asked Laurel incredulously.
"Well not any more, obviously..." said Matty pointedly.
"Mm. Sorry," she repeated, sincerely, "Who you with?"
"Jade."
So, one of Laurel's own mates - someone who'd probably forgive her. That was sort of a silver lining, at least. Maybe a pewter lining. "Tell her I say hi."
"Laurel says hi," relayed Matty, and then the faint voice next to him mumbled something, and Matty said, "Jade says hi back."
Laurel smiled. Then she let out a gruff sigh and said, "Listen, I'll uh... let you two get back to sleep, aye?"
"Well... was there something in particular you called for?"
She stared out over the city. "Not really. Just... wanted to hear your voice, I guess. I didn't realise you'd be asleep. I'll uh... I'll talk to you when I get home. Everything can wait until then."
"Fair enough... well, enjoy the rest of your stay, and I'll see you soon, yeh?"
"Yeh," she echoed, "You have fun," and she hung up before he could say anything else. She stared into space for a moment, then blinked and extinguished the cigarette she'd barely smoked any of.
As she reflected on what her brother had just said, the reality fully dawned on her that she had to leave this bubble of dirt and depravity soon and go back to... urgh... to all of the fallout from The Black Hand's betrayal, and the fallout from the war in EXODUS, the persecution at the hands of Apocalypse in GCW, the whole situation with Rottentreats... the idea gripped her that she shouldn't shower, that by keeping the last few days on her as a physical residue it might linger as a spiritual residue too, that her stink of sex and sweat and bourbon would be a shield against the pettiness and dick-waving of the world. For a moment she really felt that, if not for the fact she wouldn't get through customs with her face painted, she really would do that. But sadly that wouldn't happen. Of course, she could always just wash her face and stay filthy from the neck down, but if part of her was clean it kind of defeated the whole point.
She lay back on the floor and placed a hand on her midriff, feeling the outline of her own ribcage. As her fingers splayed through the ridges, she thought about Tommy Knox and Chris Madison. Tiny bursts of static violence burst through her psyche, sensory images of her digging sharpened nails into The Black Hand's flesh and gouging out gore and meat. Her grip on her own bones tightened slightly. Of all the people and situations that had pushed her in 2014, of all the things she'd failed to get any kind of resolution on, none stung as deeply as The Black Hand. They'd manipulated her into a boiling hurricane of rage, poked her and jabbed her until she was brushing snapping point - and when they'd finally realised the mistake they made that she'd kept warning them about, they bailed before she could unleash the pressure on them.
Something inside her, something impossibly deeper and purer than mere anger, knew that she was literally willing to kill them if it came to it. Maybe they'd sensed that before she had herself.
She wasn't sure how much longer her body could withstand the fire in her soul.
Laurel became aware of her spine pressing against the floor. Internally, she followed her cartilage and cardiovascular system until it connected up with the rib under her hand. Just a system... a skeleton. She was a skeleton wrapped in meat, meat that would rot - was rotting, every day. The canvas of her skin would wrinkle and sag and split, her tattoos would crumble away like old parchment, and the glittering supernova inside her would collapse into a black hole and all she'd have inside her grey, decomposing corpse would be worms and bugs turning her to dirt. Every sensation she'd ever felt would be gone. All that would be left of her was her skeleton and whatever survived of her art, and then her skeleton would be gone too, and then...
As her fingers traced the outline of her ribs she tried to picture herself as a skeleton. Not just a smooth cartoon skeleton, but her own bones, worn and scarred by the excess of her life. Her other hand rose to her face, feeling the shape of her skull, the pressure of her fingertips sinking through sweat, greasepaint, skin, muscle, until it met the resistance of cheekbone and jawline and cranium. She mapped the bumps particular to herself and pictured her own skull with its face painted, glitter across the ridges of its eye sockets and lipstick around its rictus grin. She pictured her whole skeleton decorated with glitter and paint, then wrapped up in tinsel and fairy lights.
She pictured the skeletons of her brother and sister, her mother and father, of Leanne and Lily, of Jay and Allison, of Whiskey and Suzume, of Chaz and Mia.
She pictured the skeleton of Annie Zellor. She saw Annie's innocently mischievous smile replaced by the manic grin of the dead, her soft skin nothing but a patina of dry dust lodged in the cracks in her bones. For a flashing moment, strings from Annie's bones rose up into marionette crosspieces held in black hands.
The sickly taste of raw meat flooded up her gullet and into her mouth. Phantom blood flushed through her sinuses, filling her nasal cavity and the spaces around her eyeballs.
The sudden compulsion to hug Annie overwhelmed her. Naked body to naked body - not for any sexual reason; it simply mattered to have skin-to-skin contact. She needed to feel someone else's living skin against her own. She crawled up onto the couch and slid over Whiskey and Suzume, drinking their heat, letting it melt the coatings of debauchery on their bodies into a slick glue to fuse them together. She imagined it was Annie and Leanne pressed against her, absorbing them into herself where she could keep them safe. She saw their skeletons as nothing but simple arrangements of carbon molecules, meaningless strings of mineralised collagen, while their souls became part of hers. Let the bodies die, she wanted to shout into the void; these souls belong to me, and you can't have them.
All she'd ever really lived for was to change the world. No... for the world to stay changed after she was dead. Wasn't that the reason anyone did anything? Wasn't that the reason people made babies, wrote stories, hoarded money, fought and laughed and sang and cried - to try, futilely, to make the universe itself remember them until the end of time? Laurel gave herself better odds of accomplishing that than anyone else, but she still knew that one day there would come the Big Crunch, or whatever really happened when spacetime passed away, and everything that ever was would suddenly have never been.
A sudden fury coursed through her. What the hell was mere existence to stand in the way of Laurel Yunokawa? She'd always spoken in promos of breaking or rewriting the physical laws of reality, but there was more to it than many people realised. She knew, deep in her heart, that if anyone could rub out the theory of everything and reverse entropy, it was her. The key was somewhere inside her. But to delve down inside herself was to push that pressure even harder, and there were too many people standing too close to her who would be immolated in the blast if she fucked it up.
This was the essence of the great deconstruction; Laurel was a vessel of fire and she didn't know its capacity. She could feel it, but she needed something more precise. Laurel's soul was an impossible inferno of raw roiling energy, and at its searing, perfect-white-hot heart was power beyond man or god. And she could neither contain that power in a vault she didn't understand, nor channel it through a funnel she couldn't find.
Under Laurel's body weight, Suzume stirred for a moment, her painted eyelids flickering as they blinked away the faint crust of sleep. "Is Laurel-chan okay?" she murmured vaguely.
Laurel stroked Suzume's hair and smiled into her eyes, rage turning to love - burning, possessive, matriarchal love, the only love Laurel knew.
"I'm fine, hon."
Desert light, dirty from the city smog, billowed through the linen curtains.
With the sound of skin tearing from skin, Laurel Yunokawa peeled herself from the leather sofa and the sticky tangle of bare limbs belonging to those still asleep on it. She half climbed, half fell onto the floor, feeling the rush of open air chill her body in the places where, up until now, it had been pressed against the warmth of Whiskey Ayano and Suzume Mitsuyoshi. She looked down at her own naked body, streaked - like Whiskey's and Suzume's - with a cocktail of liquor, glitter, paint and sweat. She ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth and grimaced, as much at the fur on her gums and the slime on her teeth as the repugnant taste of decay seeping up from her throat. She swallowed, and the rotten, bitter flavour of mortality backwashed into a foetid wave that broke against her tastebuds, a greasy yellow flavour to match the early afternoon light. She tried to ignore the distant pounding in her head.
Laurel looked up, and caught sight of a face reflected in the door to the balcony. It was an alien face, the kaleidoscopic face of an extradimensional harlequin, and it took her a moment to register it as her own. She opened her mouth and moved her jaw side to side, testing, and the psychedelic vision did likewise.
It had started with Laurel asking Whiskey - since both women often wore facepaint in the ring - to see what kind of design she might come up with using Laurel's face as her canvas; that had turned into all three women taking turns to paint whatever sprang to mind on each other's flesh, and as the wine flowed it had inevitably ended up with them all smearing pictures of cocks on each other in heaps of giggles.
She glanced up at her friends, at the sweat-smudged designs decorating their own faces, and had flashes of the same patterns twisted in orgiastic ecstasy from just a few hours earlier. She'd slept with two guys before on a few occasions, and even one guy and one girl a handful of times, but last night had been her first threesome with two other women. Laurel had experimented enough to know that she was straight; that was exactly why she'd asked Whiskey to help her deconstruct her sexuality, to focus purely on the sensation, shorn of any deeper lust she might have for a male partner. In all honesty, Suzume and Whiskey had mainly been focused on each other anyway, which Laurel had been fine with. Doing something new was the point. She'd be in no rush to try another all-female threesome again, but she was glad she could add that experience to the bank of things she'd given a try.
In the double glazed carnival half-mirror of the window she caught sight of herself again, saw her black hair matted into white and green and blue greasepaint, and that made her feel it, feel each strand pressed against her skin as if it were a net. She pushed her fringe back off her face and realised her temples were burning, droplets of perspiration spitting from her hairline every time she moved her head. She shuffled over to the window and leaned against it, pressing her face into the cool glass and staring out over the Las Vegas skyline.
This was almost the end of her extended stay with Whiskey Ayano. She'd finally given in to Whiskey's carnal desire for her, on condition that their liaison was centred exploring the limits of Laurel's sexual identity, to see which of her boundaries were concrete walls and which were just low fences. Laurel had never hidden the fact that her dominant sense was touch, and she'd freely have admitted to anyone who asked that her big turn-on was physical sensation. Different textures, different temperatures, different consistencies; these were the things that inflamed her nerves and filled her synapses.
And so in the first couple of days together they'd had sex on silk sheets and then hessian, in a sea of feathers and then on a pile of money, swaddled in heavy robes and then on the cool night air of the balcony. She'd had Whiskey tease her with ice and fire, coat her from head to toe in foam and food, twist and smack and claw her until her nerve endings roared. Despite Whiskey Ayano's body - hot as it was, objectively - stoking no lust inside her, Laurel had still climaxed plenty of times at Whiskey's hands over the last few days, whether they were stroking one of Laurel's nipples with an ice cube while dripping hot wax on the other, or rubbing fistfuls of shaving foam into Laurel's face and crotch, or massaging her shoulderblades into a storm of static straining at the levee of her nervous system.
As their time together went on they got darker and dirtier, taking in bondage and bloodplay. Laurel hadn't enjoyed everything they'd tried, but enjoying it was hardly the point; the point was simply trying, doing, experimenting. She'd been feeling trapped ever since Capital Combat... or no, actually, since quite a long while before Capital Combat. The match with The Black Hand had just been the tipping point. This week with Whiskey was just one step in Laurel's urge to deconstruct everything about herself, to strip back her own psyche and examine, leaving no stone unturned, just what building blocks actually made up Laurel Saiko Yunokawa. And if that meant going to dark places or doing things she didn't like, well then, so be it.
Being rich was one of the hardest things for her to reconcile. Laurel had always hated the wealthy, not from envy but from pity - a belief that those who needed money to feel good about themselves were inferior and incomplete. Now that she had money herself, she was forced to re-evaluate that belief, even if she felt confident that she didn't act rich or use her wealth as either an emotional or economic weapon against others. Still, she had recurring fantasies about destroying all her money. In her upswings, she could convince herself it was the asceticism of her upbringing that wanted to do that. In her downswings, she knew it was a petty desire to shock and enrage those who placed value in money. In either case, it would be two fingers up at everyone in wrestling who cared more about living that life than making art, and that at least she was fine with.
In the haze of drugs and sex of the last few days, she'd finally acted on that impulse. Whiskey had returned from grocery shopping to find Laurel with her feet dangling over the balcony, swinging around in the dry Nevadan air, with the money they'd had sex on in a plastic bag beside her. In her hand was a smouldering banknote, and Laurel's eyes were transfixed on it, her cold grey irises blazing orange. When Whiskey caught sight of the distant, mesmeric satisfaction in Laurel's eyes she felt slightly disturbed. She watched in silence as Laurel blew the flame out and let the ashes of the bill flutter over Las Vegas like the corpses of fireflies.
"Is this an art project?" Whiskey had asked.
"Everything I do is an art project," Laurel had replied absently, then stared at the greasy ash left on her fingertips. She smiled, and smeared it across her face like it was war paint.
Streaks of ash became harlequin makeup again as Laurel, staring through her own reflection over the monument to excess that was this city - an oasis of debauchery defying the desert's burning glare of dust and death - came back to the present.
Whiskey mumbled something in her sleep, her short hair cascading around her head like a drunken halo. With one less person on the sofa she'd stretched out, and Suzume had wrapped herself around her like a blanket. No wonder Laurel was up first. While Whiskey stuck to her drug of choice, the one that informed her name, and Suzume rarely touched anything harder than weed, Laurel was a walking chemistry set. She could still feel cocaine from last night lodged in her nose hairs. The hazy clarity of the view and the churning of her stomach swam into sudden sharp focus and she realised she was humming the beat to something under her breath; she realised it was Feel Good Hit Of The Summer. She stopped. Her drug intake was something else to deconstruct. To lock herself away with Whiskey and do filthy things to each other wasn't so hard; to invite five friends into a deathmatch extravaganza for the sake of nothing but art and release wasn't so hard. To ramp the chemicals in her system down to zero, or up to (or beyond) maximum... that would be hard. But if she was serious about this project, it had to be done, and she was serious about it.
She pushed herself off the window and turned back to the room, and started wandering around and pawing at furniture pathetically until she found her phone. As she lit a cigarette she scrolled through her contacts until she found her brother's number, and she hit call.
As she waited for him to pick up she paced back and forth, a million thoughts colliding in her brain. Trying to follow any one strand was like trying to pin down a butterfly while it was still flying, so she didn't even try.
The other end clicked... was silent for a moment... and then a comfortingly familiar voice made a noise something like, "Mnuh?"
"Hey Matty."
"Muh... hey Laurel," he groaned, "W'sup?"
She paused. She wasn't actually sure why she'd called him. So she simply said, "Just miss you."
He stifled a yawn, which turned into: "Miss you too." He exhaled to clear the last of the yawn away, then added, "How's Whiskey's?"
"Really good," she said with genuine enthusiasm which she worried sounded phony, "Good... gettin' some good stuff done on this little project of mine."
"Cool."
"Very, very drunk last night, like... even by Whiskey's standards..." She rubbed her aching temple. "Payin' for it now though, like."
Matty laughed curtly, mostly just to acknowledge what she'd said. There was a feminine murmur somewhere beyond him, and he said, not to Laurel: "My sister."
"Matthew Guerra... are you shaggin' in my bed?" she demanded with ironic sternness, doing her best impression of a responsible big sister.
"Naw, I ain't at home. And... we ain't shaggin' right now either. You woke us up. We'd just gone to bed."
"Oh shit, sorry..." said Laurel quickly, biting her lips in embarrassment, "What time is it there?"
"'Bout half ten, eleven?"
"And you're already asleep?" asked Laurel incredulously.
"Well not any more, obviously..." said Matty pointedly.
"Mm. Sorry," she repeated, sincerely, "Who you with?"
"Jade."
So, one of Laurel's own mates - someone who'd probably forgive her. That was sort of a silver lining, at least. Maybe a pewter lining. "Tell her I say hi."
"Laurel says hi," relayed Matty, and then the faint voice next to him mumbled something, and Matty said, "Jade says hi back."
Laurel smiled. Then she let out a gruff sigh and said, "Listen, I'll uh... let you two get back to sleep, aye?"
"Well... was there something in particular you called for?"
She stared out over the city. "Not really. Just... wanted to hear your voice, I guess. I didn't realise you'd be asleep. I'll uh... I'll talk to you when I get home. Everything can wait until then."
"Fair enough... well, enjoy the rest of your stay, and I'll see you soon, yeh?"
"Yeh," she echoed, "You have fun," and she hung up before he could say anything else. She stared into space for a moment, then blinked and extinguished the cigarette she'd barely smoked any of.
As she reflected on what her brother had just said, the reality fully dawned on her that she had to leave this bubble of dirt and depravity soon and go back to... urgh... to all of the fallout from The Black Hand's betrayal, and the fallout from the war in EXODUS, the persecution at the hands of Apocalypse in GCW, the whole situation with Rottentreats... the idea gripped her that she shouldn't shower, that by keeping the last few days on her as a physical residue it might linger as a spiritual residue too, that her stink of sex and sweat and bourbon would be a shield against the pettiness and dick-waving of the world. For a moment she really felt that, if not for the fact she wouldn't get through customs with her face painted, she really would do that. But sadly that wouldn't happen. Of course, she could always just wash her face and stay filthy from the neck down, but if part of her was clean it kind of defeated the whole point.
She lay back on the floor and placed a hand on her midriff, feeling the outline of her own ribcage. As her fingers splayed through the ridges, she thought about Tommy Knox and Chris Madison. Tiny bursts of static violence burst through her psyche, sensory images of her digging sharpened nails into The Black Hand's flesh and gouging out gore and meat. Her grip on her own bones tightened slightly. Of all the people and situations that had pushed her in 2014, of all the things she'd failed to get any kind of resolution on, none stung as deeply as The Black Hand. They'd manipulated her into a boiling hurricane of rage, poked her and jabbed her until she was brushing snapping point - and when they'd finally realised the mistake they made that she'd kept warning them about, they bailed before she could unleash the pressure on them.
Something inside her, something impossibly deeper and purer than mere anger, knew that she was literally willing to kill them if it came to it. Maybe they'd sensed that before she had herself.
She wasn't sure how much longer her body could withstand the fire in her soul.
Laurel became aware of her spine pressing against the floor. Internally, she followed her cartilage and cardiovascular system until it connected up with the rib under her hand. Just a system... a skeleton. She was a skeleton wrapped in meat, meat that would rot - was rotting, every day. The canvas of her skin would wrinkle and sag and split, her tattoos would crumble away like old parchment, and the glittering supernova inside her would collapse into a black hole and all she'd have inside her grey, decomposing corpse would be worms and bugs turning her to dirt. Every sensation she'd ever felt would be gone. All that would be left of her was her skeleton and whatever survived of her art, and then her skeleton would be gone too, and then...
As her fingers traced the outline of her ribs she tried to picture herself as a skeleton. Not just a smooth cartoon skeleton, but her own bones, worn and scarred by the excess of her life. Her other hand rose to her face, feeling the shape of her skull, the pressure of her fingertips sinking through sweat, greasepaint, skin, muscle, until it met the resistance of cheekbone and jawline and cranium. She mapped the bumps particular to herself and pictured her own skull with its face painted, glitter across the ridges of its eye sockets and lipstick around its rictus grin. She pictured her whole skeleton decorated with glitter and paint, then wrapped up in tinsel and fairy lights.
She pictured the skeletons of her brother and sister, her mother and father, of Leanne and Lily, of Jay and Allison, of Whiskey and Suzume, of Chaz and Mia.
She pictured the skeleton of Annie Zellor. She saw Annie's innocently mischievous smile replaced by the manic grin of the dead, her soft skin nothing but a patina of dry dust lodged in the cracks in her bones. For a flashing moment, strings from Annie's bones rose up into marionette crosspieces held in black hands.
The sickly taste of raw meat flooded up her gullet and into her mouth. Phantom blood flushed through her sinuses, filling her nasal cavity and the spaces around her eyeballs.
The sudden compulsion to hug Annie overwhelmed her. Naked body to naked body - not for any sexual reason; it simply mattered to have skin-to-skin contact. She needed to feel someone else's living skin against her own. She crawled up onto the couch and slid over Whiskey and Suzume, drinking their heat, letting it melt the coatings of debauchery on their bodies into a slick glue to fuse them together. She imagined it was Annie and Leanne pressed against her, absorbing them into herself where she could keep them safe. She saw their skeletons as nothing but simple arrangements of carbon molecules, meaningless strings of mineralised collagen, while their souls became part of hers. Let the bodies die, she wanted to shout into the void; these souls belong to me, and you can't have them.
All she'd ever really lived for was to change the world. No... for the world to stay changed after she was dead. Wasn't that the reason anyone did anything? Wasn't that the reason people made babies, wrote stories, hoarded money, fought and laughed and sang and cried - to try, futilely, to make the universe itself remember them until the end of time? Laurel gave herself better odds of accomplishing that than anyone else, but she still knew that one day there would come the Big Crunch, or whatever really happened when spacetime passed away, and everything that ever was would suddenly have never been.
A sudden fury coursed through her. What the hell was mere existence to stand in the way of Laurel Yunokawa? She'd always spoken in promos of breaking or rewriting the physical laws of reality, but there was more to it than many people realised. She knew, deep in her heart, that if anyone could rub out the theory of everything and reverse entropy, it was her. The key was somewhere inside her. But to delve down inside herself was to push that pressure even harder, and there were too many people standing too close to her who would be immolated in the blast if she fucked it up.
This was the essence of the great deconstruction; Laurel was a vessel of fire and she didn't know its capacity. She could feel it, but she needed something more precise. Laurel's soul was an impossible inferno of raw roiling energy, and at its searing, perfect-white-hot heart was power beyond man or god. And she could neither contain that power in a vault she didn't understand, nor channel it through a funnel she couldn't find.
Under Laurel's body weight, Suzume stirred for a moment, her painted eyelids flickering as they blinked away the faint crust of sleep. "Is Laurel-chan okay?" she murmured vaguely.
Laurel stroked Suzume's hair and smiled into her eyes, rage turning to love - burning, possessive, matriarchal love, the only love Laurel knew.
"I'm fine, hon."
===============================================================================
===============================================================================
Open on a close-ish shot of Laurel Anne Hardy, mid-chest up. The top of her head is cut off by the camera frame. She's pale, and looks like she hasn't slept or eaten properly in a while. She's wearing a plain white shirt, no makeup except for a grimy smear of red lipstick across her mouth. The focus is tight on her, and the background is fuzzed out.
She takes a deep, nervous breath, and begins.
"Saturday the 20th. FGA's last show of the year... Final Frontier. #Sparklebuddies vs The Spitfires, formerly AshTon... much better name now, by the way... for the FGA World Tag Team Championship." She pauses. "Not, and this important, #Sparklebuddies vs The Black Hand, or even #Sparklebuddies vs The Black Hand vs The Spitfires. That's what I really wish this match was. See..."
Another faltering exhalation.
"I keep going back and forth on whether I really want to do this match against The Spitfires... my mates. People I care about. Maybe... maybe it'll keep me from doing things parts of me desperately want to do. That's good. But what's bad is if... if it doesn't..."
She closes her eyes.
"I've had no closure on anything. Anything in the last year. Eve cost me my chance at some closure against HATE, then disappeared her own self. AbominationZ, I thought that was all in the past, and I find out the one who beat up my brother on their behalf is someone who was supposed to be my friend. The Black Hand... fuck... The Black Hand..."
Laurel seems unable to complete that sentence, her lips quivering silently, her eyes growing heavy and damp. "With what they did to my friends... with how Capital Combat ended... and then they steal from me the chance to bring all of that to any kind of conclusion. It's not just them, it's not just wrestling, nothing in my life this year has had... well, never mind a happy ending. I'll take a miserable ending at this point, as long as it's an ending. But The Black Hand is the worst of all of it. Chris and Tommy... I dunno if you guys are ever even gonna see this, but... congratulations. You two fucked me up more than anyone else this year."
She runs her hand up the back of her skull, black hair cascading around her fingers. "I'm falling apart. Last few months..." Another bitter sigh. "My identity's been pouring out of my skin like sweat. Bits of me blink away leaving... holes of entropy. Chasms that eat away at the rest of me. I stop making a sound and my ears fill with this deafening, roaring silence. I move and my nervous system turns inside out. My senses oscillate. I stand still - and I can feel my skin, my muscles, going through corkscrews and prawn holds until I get displaced in spacetime, like my body's an outline and the section of existence called Laurel Yunokawa is... overlapping it, like a child trying and failing to stay inside the lines when they colour me in. I'm a spider, somewhere in my diaphragm, and my body's a web, my head's nothing but a knot of strands that gained a consciousness of its own when it condensed to singularity... overlapping the spider, and I can't track what thought is coming from which mind. Right now, right this minute, I can feel patches of hot and cold running - crawling, pulsing - up and down my skin. Every day it gets harder to tell which sensations are real... which stimuli actually exist and which are just..."
She pauses for a good few seconds, then swallows, then whispers:
"...psychosomatic..."
And then her face breaks into a cruel smirk, a sneer of malice and contempt turned inward on herself. "I can take any strike or any weapon shot any wrestler has ever thrown at me, but these days I can't take being trapped in my own head." And, perhaps with unconscious symbolism, she rubs her face vigorously. "Ashley... Colton... please believe me when I say that whatever happens come Final Frontier, you guys are my friends. You deserve this shot, and you deserve the damn match of the year with me an' Annie. And..." - she bites her lip for a moment - "I am so, so, so sorry that you probably won't get that match. Ashley, Ash babe... I want nothing more than to make a masterpiece with you. I know how important this is for you guys to be in with Annie, one of your best friends, on this kind of stage, this kind of chance to make your names. I honestly do. I don't want to let you down. I'm fighting against myself as hard as I can to do you proud, all three of you..."
Laurel pauses again. Even her regular breathing is shaky by now.
"The blessing and curse when it comes to that is... I've only got one chance. I need to win this. I don't say 'need' often; I make fun of how often some people say they 'need' a win. I mean, don't we all need every win?" she asks, with a hollow little smile, "But I need this one. This isn't just the identity of Laurel Anne Hardy at stake here... it's the identity of Laurel Saiko Yunokawa. See... I set myself a goal. Heh... I think the only people I've ever told this to are my brother and Jonathan Collins. So, as of last weekend I'm the GFC World Tag Team Champion with Leanne Evangelista. Soon enough, at For Gold & Glory, I get the chance to regain the GCW World Tag Team Championship with Allison Lorraine. When that happens, I need to still be FGA World Tag Team Champion with Annie Zellor. I've got one goal left I can accomplish this year, one thing I can get some measure of closure on, and that was to hold a title with each of Leanne, Allison and Annie simultaneously. I've come so close, so many times. So many times this year I've won a title with one partner days after losing one with another. Last shows of the year now and I have this one last chance, at Final Frontier and then at Gold & Glory a week later..."
Laurel swallows again.
"I need something in my life I can draw a line under. I don't know if I can take another..." The rims of her eyes shimmer like glitter. Her voice has softened, although it's shot through with shards of diamond. "I don't know who I'm going to become if I don't get this." And as the tears finally start tumbling freely down her cheeks, she says two words Laurel Yunokawa has never, ever said in her life before:
"I'm scared."
She's silent for a moment, just trying to focus on getting the worst of the crying out her system so that she can speak again. Suddenly she jerks head away, self-loathing making her grin like a skull. "Hah. Look at me. I've never particularly cared about titles before... always said wrestling would be better without them... and somehow I've ended up in a situation where my whole identity hinges on them. How pathetic is that?" She rubs her nose and clears the worst of the tears from her cheeks. "If me an' Annie lose at Final Frontier, if my last chance at some kind of closure goes... if I... change..."
...and again she falls silent. Again she closes her eyes.
After a couple of seconds, barely audible, she whispers: "I'm sorry. I'm sorry for whatever I become." And then her red eyes slam open. "I love you. Everything I ever did, no matter how... fucked up it was... was from a place of love. No matter who I become, no matter what I do, I love you. Please, no matter what I do, never forget that. Ash, Colton, I want you to know I love you guys... and Annie, Annie Zellor... perfect Annie Zellor... I love you so much. I'm sorry I can't be who you deserve. I love you so much, Annie," she bawls.
It takes some time for her to get herself under control enough to speak again, and when she does all she can say is this: "I guess there's really only one way to end this, isn't there? For... I really, really hope not the last time..."
...croaking, rasping, wheezing, sobbing...
"...stay fabulous."
On those words, Laurel fades into darkness.
===============================================================================
Open on a close-ish shot of Laurel Anne Hardy, mid-chest up. The top of her head is cut off by the camera frame. She's pale, and looks like she hasn't slept or eaten properly in a while. She's wearing a plain white shirt, no makeup except for a grimy smear of red lipstick across her mouth. The focus is tight on her, and the background is fuzzed out.
She takes a deep, nervous breath, and begins.
"Saturday the 20th. FGA's last show of the year... Final Frontier. #Sparklebuddies vs The Spitfires, formerly AshTon... much better name now, by the way... for the FGA World Tag Team Championship." She pauses. "Not, and this important, #Sparklebuddies vs The Black Hand, or even #Sparklebuddies vs The Black Hand vs The Spitfires. That's what I really wish this match was. See..."
Another faltering exhalation.
"I keep going back and forth on whether I really want to do this match against The Spitfires... my mates. People I care about. Maybe... maybe it'll keep me from doing things parts of me desperately want to do. That's good. But what's bad is if... if it doesn't..."
She closes her eyes.
"I've had no closure on anything. Anything in the last year. Eve cost me my chance at some closure against HATE, then disappeared her own self. AbominationZ, I thought that was all in the past, and I find out the one who beat up my brother on their behalf is someone who was supposed to be my friend. The Black Hand... fuck... The Black Hand..."
Laurel seems unable to complete that sentence, her lips quivering silently, her eyes growing heavy and damp. "With what they did to my friends... with how Capital Combat ended... and then they steal from me the chance to bring all of that to any kind of conclusion. It's not just them, it's not just wrestling, nothing in my life this year has had... well, never mind a happy ending. I'll take a miserable ending at this point, as long as it's an ending. But The Black Hand is the worst of all of it. Chris and Tommy... I dunno if you guys are ever even gonna see this, but... congratulations. You two fucked me up more than anyone else this year."
She runs her hand up the back of her skull, black hair cascading around her fingers. "I'm falling apart. Last few months..." Another bitter sigh. "My identity's been pouring out of my skin like sweat. Bits of me blink away leaving... holes of entropy. Chasms that eat away at the rest of me. I stop making a sound and my ears fill with this deafening, roaring silence. I move and my nervous system turns inside out. My senses oscillate. I stand still - and I can feel my skin, my muscles, going through corkscrews and prawn holds until I get displaced in spacetime, like my body's an outline and the section of existence called Laurel Yunokawa is... overlapping it, like a child trying and failing to stay inside the lines when they colour me in. I'm a spider, somewhere in my diaphragm, and my body's a web, my head's nothing but a knot of strands that gained a consciousness of its own when it condensed to singularity... overlapping the spider, and I can't track what thought is coming from which mind. Right now, right this minute, I can feel patches of hot and cold running - crawling, pulsing - up and down my skin. Every day it gets harder to tell which sensations are real... which stimuli actually exist and which are just..."
She pauses for a good few seconds, then swallows, then whispers:
"...psychosomatic..."
And then her face breaks into a cruel smirk, a sneer of malice and contempt turned inward on herself. "I can take any strike or any weapon shot any wrestler has ever thrown at me, but these days I can't take being trapped in my own head." And, perhaps with unconscious symbolism, she rubs her face vigorously. "Ashley... Colton... please believe me when I say that whatever happens come Final Frontier, you guys are my friends. You deserve this shot, and you deserve the damn match of the year with me an' Annie. And..." - she bites her lip for a moment - "I am so, so, so sorry that you probably won't get that match. Ashley, Ash babe... I want nothing more than to make a masterpiece with you. I know how important this is for you guys to be in with Annie, one of your best friends, on this kind of stage, this kind of chance to make your names. I honestly do. I don't want to let you down. I'm fighting against myself as hard as I can to do you proud, all three of you..."
Laurel pauses again. Even her regular breathing is shaky by now.
"The blessing and curse when it comes to that is... I've only got one chance. I need to win this. I don't say 'need' often; I make fun of how often some people say they 'need' a win. I mean, don't we all need every win?" she asks, with a hollow little smile, "But I need this one. This isn't just the identity of Laurel Anne Hardy at stake here... it's the identity of Laurel Saiko Yunokawa. See... I set myself a goal. Heh... I think the only people I've ever told this to are my brother and Jonathan Collins. So, as of last weekend I'm the GFC World Tag Team Champion with Leanne Evangelista. Soon enough, at For Gold & Glory, I get the chance to regain the GCW World Tag Team Championship with Allison Lorraine. When that happens, I need to still be FGA World Tag Team Champion with Annie Zellor. I've got one goal left I can accomplish this year, one thing I can get some measure of closure on, and that was to hold a title with each of Leanne, Allison and Annie simultaneously. I've come so close, so many times. So many times this year I've won a title with one partner days after losing one with another. Last shows of the year now and I have this one last chance, at Final Frontier and then at Gold & Glory a week later..."
Laurel swallows again.
"I need something in my life I can draw a line under. I don't know if I can take another..." The rims of her eyes shimmer like glitter. Her voice has softened, although it's shot through with shards of diamond. "I don't know who I'm going to become if I don't get this." And as the tears finally start tumbling freely down her cheeks, she says two words Laurel Yunokawa has never, ever said in her life before:
"I'm scared."
She's silent for a moment, just trying to focus on getting the worst of the crying out her system so that she can speak again. Suddenly she jerks head away, self-loathing making her grin like a skull. "Hah. Look at me. I've never particularly cared about titles before... always said wrestling would be better without them... and somehow I've ended up in a situation where my whole identity hinges on them. How pathetic is that?" She rubs her nose and clears the worst of the tears from her cheeks. "If me an' Annie lose at Final Frontier, if my last chance at some kind of closure goes... if I... change..."
...and again she falls silent. Again she closes her eyes.
After a couple of seconds, barely audible, she whispers: "I'm sorry. I'm sorry for whatever I become." And then her red eyes slam open. "I love you. Everything I ever did, no matter how... fucked up it was... was from a place of love. No matter who I become, no matter what I do, I love you. Please, no matter what I do, never forget that. Ash, Colton, I want you to know I love you guys... and Annie, Annie Zellor... perfect Annie Zellor... I love you so much. I'm sorry I can't be who you deserve. I love you so much, Annie," she bawls.
It takes some time for her to get herself under control enough to speak again, and when she does all she can say is this: "I guess there's really only one way to end this, isn't there? For... I really, really hope not the last time..."
...croaking, rasping, wheezing, sobbing...
"...stay fabulous."
On those words, Laurel fades into darkness.