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morning talk, supersymmetry
Later, when the day's plans for the next battle have finally been laid and re-laid and laid again, Lelouch succumbs to a light sleep out on the deck, still in full royal dress, chin dropping to his chest between one sentence and the next. C.C. watches him with mild interest and amusement. She's holding her stuffed animal against her collarbone.
Suzaku leans on the railing a few feet off. "You should rest too."
She glances over her shoulder without fully turning. "This is like rest. Holding onto something soft is quite relaxing."
"Really?"
"Yes." The corner of her mouth moves, not quite a smile. "Relaxing enough to keep going."
Suzaku doesn't answer. If he says anything else, he's afraid she'll stop the low half-hum she's been doing under her breath this whole conversation. It's the one thing about tonight that sounds, however faintly, like a lullaby.
– morning talk, supersymmetry
loneliness no. 3 (night talking)
There had once been a time when Lelouch had thought Suzaku impossible to misunderstand. Every feeling crossed his face before he had the chance to hide it.
Suzaku smiled with his whole body. His shoulders had always betrayed him first, lifting ever so slightly before his mouth followed. It was an infuriating sort of sincerity. Even as children, Suzaku had never possessed the ability to conceal things. If he was angry, his brows pinched together before he realised it. If he found something amusing, laughter escaped him in sputtering bursts that seemed almost to surprise him. If he lied, and he very rarely did, his eyes would dart away for only the briefest instant before stubbornly forcing themselves back.
Anger, embarrassment, delight, grief, all belonged to the same earnest boy who had never quite learned deception.
Somewhere between Euphemia's massacre and Kamine Island, Suzaku had learned.
Or perhaps, Lelouch thinks, he had taught him.
– loneliness no. 3 (night talking)
poetry
shopping / 2026
the tag says 10. i know what i am and still i try, still i pull the zipper up to where my body protrudes; where the denim goes taut, squeezing my flesh so tightly i cannot breathe. what happened with the last garment that fit me correctly: my mother's hands on the fabric first, before mine. the tag read true, 16, and she could not forgive it. the dressing room light bears down on my skin. every fold of me can be seen. every divot in my thighs, darkened by shadow; every place where the fabric sits too tight. i pat down my ribs, my hips. they are all there. i am all there. and yet and yet and yet. she asks, keeping it? and i say just need to size up. she says, i'm sorry— this location only carries straight sizes. all i want is to be seen. i recoil in humiliation. there are women made for clothes and women made for other things, so i press my palms flat to my stomach and push myself inwards. the protrusion remains, existing no matter what i do— thighs growing in circumference with each meal skipped and workout endured; purple streaks marking my arms, my hips, my breasts, which are too small to create cleavage and too large to exist freely, comfortably. hey, i heard this store is size inclusive. i grab the size 10 still. everything about my body is catalogued and still i disagree. it is still wrong, and yet i am still wanting, still pulling at the zipper even though i know what i am. – SHOPPING
you'll never get to heaven / 2026
the shoulder sits wrong. not wrong enough for the machine, or for the numbers, but wrong enough for me. i lean closer closer. her body becomes landscape, tended to like a greenhouse thing. i am her gardener. her flesh parts easily for my fingers, curtains; wet soil accepting a little seed. her warmth encloses me, the climate of a body maintaining itself. beneath the skin: bundles of nerves pale as roots, vertebrae stacked one atop another like bricks, the marble texture of the metacarpals beneath her soft palms, the bones holding her shoulder together, humerus and clavicle and scapula opened beneath muscle as if it is a folded fan, or perhaps the wing of an angel fallen. what architecture. everything catalogued and positioned according to plan, every component seated exactly where i have left it. a faint sweetness gathers here; flowers submerged too long in the vase, my love's secretions magnifiques. i trace the supports of her body, running my fingers along her foundations as if i will discover anything. instead i find only myself, replicated endlessly in the workmanship. i cannot love her, and yet i want, so desperately want to drown in those eyes, delicate as petals on the sweetest of flowers. we struggle at the bottom of the pool. and still here she rests, with me, somewhere between corpse and beloved, and inhuman and woman and man, and death and the beautiful arrangement of being alive. : What is wrong with it? everything, i say. : Then why won't you stop touching it? everything, everything, e verything. – YOU'LL NEVER GET TO HEAVEN
fiction
iii. oceans dream of losing shape / 2026
One more step carries them beyond polished floorboards and faded wallpaper into open air. In fact, the transition is so seamless that it takes CHAOS several moments to realise she is no longer inside a building at all, no longer staring at that beautiful painting. The structure's roof has long since surrendered to the sky, though the surrounding walls remain completely intact, climbing upward until they disappear beneath drifting snow. White falls through the empty space overhead, collecting upon black stone polished smooth by ages of weather. No footprints disturb its surface, and no wind stirs the flakes once they reach the ground. At its centre kneels a single woman. She faces away from them. Long, curled dark hair spills almost to the ground, drifting softly with the wind. Her skin rests against frost-covered stone without so much as trembling, despite being flushed a deep red from the cold. Thin white fabric hangs from narrow shoulders, damp where melting snow has seeped into the cloth until it clings to her back. She might have been carved there, another monument among countless others, were it not for the slow rise and fall of her breathing. CHAOS cannot explain what she is looking at. A creation making its way, all the way here, independently of anybody else. She made her, but the woman, the creature, in front of her, is not familiar. Not the graceful line of her spine disappearing beneath dark hair; not the gentle slope of her shoulders; not the elegant curve of her neck exposed above the collar of her dress. Every individual feature belongs undeniably to a stranger, someone she has never met, never designed, never loved. The longer she looks, the less convincing that certainty becomes. CHAOS inhales sharply enough that NOUS turns toward her. "CHAOS?" "Who . . ." CHAOS whispers. She can't finish, so she tries again. ". . . Who is she?" The LEVIATHAN regards the kneeling figure almost tenderly. "You tell me." "I don't know her." A laugh slips from the LEVIATHAN's lips. "No, no. You do." The woman smiles. She never turns around. Still, somehow, CHAOS knows she does.
nonfiction
on asterius, the star / 2024-25
In reference to Asterius: Dante's Inferno And at the edge, along the shattered chasm, there lay stretched out the infamy of Crete: the son conceived in the pretended cow. When he saw us he bit into his flesh, gone crazy with the fever of his rage (Alighieri 177). – During Dante and Virgil's encounter with him [the minotaur], he is outsmarted by Virgil's wits and blinded by rage, allowing them both to pass through. Although it is never explicitly stated that the minotaur is intellectually challenged, his status as a "monster" causes Dante to portray him as though he is brainless. "Pity extends only so far, and isolation and alienation would have been the condition of all those in the Greek world whose ailment was repellent to the whole-bodied" (Garland 156). – Garland, Robert. Disability in Antiquity, edited by Christian Laes, Routledge, 2016, pp. 154-66. The minotaur's only crime is being born, a crime which he pays in life, yet not even in death is he granted peace. His legacy lives on as that of a monstrosity, in which he is not even spared the dignity of being referred to by his real name.