Post by Daniel MacNamara on Mar 21, 2021 21:54:40 GMT -5
“I’ll eat you up, I love you so.”
Those words preceded the sound of a match striking up along the side of the book that Daniel held in one hand, while he used the other to light the tip of his Japanese cigarette. Seven Star, his favorite brand, but not only just his favorite brand: it was his favorite brand that Miles Lucky specifically knew to be his favorite brand. Miles Lucky hated when Daniel smoked, and he hated when Daniel had favorite things that didn’t involve him directly, because Miles was a wild thing that didn’t want to absorb the concept of things existing without his consent. Metaphors were useless here, this was Daniel’s most flamboyant way of telling Miles ‘fuck you,’ without actually having to make a sound beyond the striking of a match.
Fuck you Miles Lucky, he stated without ever uttering a word beyond the quotation of a book that Miles would never acknowledge if he knew that Daniel was about to use it. Much like the character from another book, if it existed without the consent of Miles Lucky, then it simply didn’t exist.
Daniel’s cigarette existed, and as he breathed in the cancerous fumes from that unfiltered tip and drew it inside of him? He knew it burned the man he was watching through the camera lens as much as any word could. Look Miles, I’m smoking. I’m smoking, and I’m acknowledging this cigarette even more than I am you right now, haha, fuck you Miles.
Still, he never said a word of that. He never said a fucking thing beyond his opening statement, and the truest fact was that between the two of them? He’d probably said enough, but he didn’t drag a camera out into the wilds of gods knows where, broke into what looked to be a run down cottage, and proceeded to film simply for the sake of Miles Lucky though, did he?
No, the man just tried to kill his girlfriend. They’d just tried to kill eachother. What kind of fucking psychopathy would be required to do that?
Pause. Beat. Inhale. Exhale.
Oh. That was their particular brand of psychopathy, wasn't it?
“I told you that I loved you Miles, and I do. I’m giving you everything left in my heart, in my soul, because I love you so. I loved you from the day that I really, truly, met you. I loved you when I first inhaled the scent of your hair, when I drew you in close to me. I loved you when you made loud, obnoxious, hacking coughs because you’re a hypochondriac who has to have attention on you, and off of other things, and my cigarettes didn’t come with your face on the packaging beneath the cellophane, so you hated them.”
He took another puff on the dwindling tower of paper and carcinogens before exhaling out of his nose in long, purple-gray plumes of smoke just like a dragon might.
“I’ll eat you up, I love you so. Everything not involving you, it hurts, doesn’t it? Every breath I take outside of a room with you infuriates you because it’s something that I did that you weren’t there for, and you just can’t seem to comprehend my selfish need for agency and independence. It’s just as well, I’ve never had much of a taste for milk, something about it always upset my stomach.”
Pause. He let that one sink in as he stared right at the camera. Just a conversation. Just a place to talk. This whole thing was nothing more a fragmented, one sided, talk in an abandoned home. There he was, sitting on a sinking in couch that had probably long since seen better days in a home that might have once been loving; that might have also been utter bullshit. Someone could have just as easily pulled the couch into the house long before it was rotten and breaking down, before parts of the attic wound up in the living room and kitchen, before the integrity of those walls had given way. There was a multitude of things that could have been allegorical or metaphorical or whatever the fuck a simile was.
Still, on the couch, facing opposite of a broken down fireplace that the camera failed to capture, sat Daniel, he let himself be the focus of the room, no sense in making something for someone if they weren’t going to view it exactly as you wanted them to.
Especially when you made it for a man who watched so obsessively. Maybe that’s why his sleeves were rolled up a little higher, an extra button snapped to show the chest that wasn’t covered up by the undershirt that probably should have been there. Nah, Danny knew what he was doin’, just like he knew Miles would know. They both knew, even though they’d deny it and repaint it in ways to suit them, which was usually logic defying and inherently contrarian for the fucking sake of simply being contrarian.
“I'll eat you up, I love you so. And as much as I love you, Miles? We both know that there’s something that I haven’t addressed yet, don’t we? That for I feel here,” tapping at his left pectoral before dropping his hand. “I feel somethin’ else in my guts. Somethin’ that burns me so until ulcers manifest from the near sulfuric bile of the pride that I’ve swallowed in the past to satisfy the yearnings of a foolish man’s heart. I love a wild thing that shows his affection by devouring everything he lays his ever-paranoid eyes upon, all the while hiding his cadre of afflictions and lovingly collected traumas behind near childlike naivety. I love you, Miles Lucky.”
Knees on elbows, he leaned forward as he brought a hand back to take a drag off the cancer stick, blowing the smoke to the side as if the person he was talking to was in the dilapidated room with him. Of course, he wasn’t, why would he be? That’d be silly, right? Daniel’s eyes narrowed though, they were fixated on the camera, as if they were staring into someone else’s eyes, utterly glued there by something far darker than just love, than just how he felt. No, he stared like he was looking for something more, something that he was never going to find from a mass of glass, steel, and plastic. It was something he could only find when he met Miles again, when he was close to him. “….but like I told you Miles.”
There it was, that sigh, that fucking sigh that just rolled out of him along with the cigarette smoke and disappointment. “I can’t let what you did go unanswered.”
Finally, the cigarette was pulled from his lips and sat down in the ashtray, left to smolder as that same hand came back up to rest against the other, the tips of each digit pushing to form a steeple from his thumbs to his pinkies, all loosely pointed forward just like his eyes were.
“I knew that you could do that, I knew that you wanted to do that, but deep in the sadomasochistic subcockles of my black heart I held a sort of hope, an ember that I stoked that you’d choose not to do that. I hoped, Miles. I hoped that for a single moment that you’d ignore your baser instincts and hold back after your victory. You didn’t though, did you? No, you didn’t. You didn’t let me have that moment of reprieve, that one hope that there was some civility in you that would allow us to continue. Unfortunately for me, Karen exists without your consent. The howling screams, the misanthropic fits, you rage and rage, and for all your hatred towards her existence, that someone holds a piece that you can’t ever touch, she still exists.”
Pause, beat. Look at that fuckin’ grin of his as it started to spread across his lips as if he just let somethin’ slip that he wasn’t supposed to.
“You tried to snuff her out, to stomp out her flame. You didn’t go easy on her at all, did you Miles? You wanted to make an example out of her, to break her in that ring. The NVR Champion didn’t beat the Union Champion, she didn’t pull off the upset like I did, but what she did was something deeper. She hurt you, and not physically. She made you scared for a brief moment, she made you realize that you’d bought too much of your own press, that no matter what they whispered about you backstage or click-clack-clicked on the fan forums and discord servers about you, that maybe, just maybe Miles Lucky can be beaten. The worst about that realization is that it came from her. I was arrogant at first, I thought you tried to kill her because of me. I thought that you wanted to carve her pretty face off because you were jealous.”
That’s when Danny just sliiightly tilted his head to the side.
“She scared you, didn’t she? She put fear in your heart, and for that she had to die. She committed the sin of not existing without your consent, but against your direct wishes, and even with all of that, she broke the mold of who you thought she could be.
And for that, you tried to kill her, you tried to publicly execute one of the women that I love and hold dear to what’s left of my heart, a heart that you tore a piece out of with your perfect teeth and left bleeding just like that little savage minded wild thing that you are.”
The laugh that came from him was hollow, almost like breaking glass as it spilled out across his lips. Odd, disquieting, it sounded like hints of anger infected it, spreading out to the very smile that was stretched across that handsome face, the same smile that died before it could reach his eyes. It was almost as if it was less of a smile and more of his baring his teeth like an agitated canine would. Irritated, an—He paused, looking off screen, just for a moment as a flutter of wings could be heard off to the side, it seemed that a pigeon had found its way into the home.
Danny.. just tilted his head to the side, watching it before he swallowed, looking back to the camera with that previously unbroken concentration. Why had the pigeon drawn his attention so violently, perking up like a wolf might when a prey’s scent hit its nose.
“I’ll eat you up, I love you so.” Repetition, , as if it was something from rote memory that he let pass from his lips like a spell, a ward of protection just like a prayer from a child. Maybe for a child, maybe it had something to do with the dusty book laid across the couch he sat on. Maybe it was the prayer of a madman in love.
“I’ll eat you up, I lov—” Stopped. He stopped a second time, and a hand broke off the steepling to hold his face, bowing his head into his hand to hold his composure before he looked back up. “I’ll eat you up, I love you so.” There it was, he managed to say it again, even if his smile became a tight, grim, line. “I told you be careful, and you took it as a threat. You missed that I was telling you what to be careful of. You repeated it. You mocked it. You never got it. I was begging you be careful. I had nothing to give you but my heart, Miles, and I placed it on the ground before your feet and I begged you to be careful, because it wasn’t the ground you were stepping on in all your posturing, it was my heart that you were smearing the treads of your unwashed fucking shoes across. We fought over nothing, constantly dancing in and out of whether we loved eachother or hated eachother, because you’re a wild thing and it’s either feast or famine with you, Love.” He sniffled, just a bit, before picking up that cigarette.
And without a second’s warning, his off hand lashed outward to snatch up the pigeon that’d fluttered in on scene, jerking it right up off of the couch’s arm, shifting it to both hands once he’d traded the cigarette back to the ashtray. Why'd he even pick the damn cancer stick up?
A bird in the hand, a single bird in both of his hands with none in the bush.
“This has been building since we met though, hasn’t it? It only amped things up when you took the title from Indi. She had stories to tell too, didn’t she? Only she told the story an Oompa Loompa instead of talking about the boy king that told monsters how he’d lovingly eat them. She didn’t understand you, but how could she?” The pigeon in his hands cooed, confused and yet soothed by the thumbs running down its back. “She didn’t understand you. Bryan doesn’t understand you. None of them do, not even Amira. They don’t see what I see, so how could they ever love you like I love you? Like you, love me?”
Those fingers started to tense, pressing against the Pigeon’s body, its coos turning into panicked squawks as it began to peck downward, peeling little red ribbons from those near stone hands.
“I’ll eat you up,” he repeated without missing a beat. “I love you so.”
And with repetition on his lips, those hands were tilting the pigeon up to face him, the avian rodent doing everything it could, struggling fiercely in the hands of that wolf.
“I love you so,” were the last words that pigeon heard as the sounds of sinew, muscle, and blood vessels being ripped asunder consumed its words, the screen going black as Danny bit its fucking head off.
Those words preceded the sound of a match striking up along the side of the book that Daniel held in one hand, while he used the other to light the tip of his Japanese cigarette. Seven Star, his favorite brand, but not only just his favorite brand: it was his favorite brand that Miles Lucky specifically knew to be his favorite brand. Miles Lucky hated when Daniel smoked, and he hated when Daniel had favorite things that didn’t involve him directly, because Miles was a wild thing that didn’t want to absorb the concept of things existing without his consent. Metaphors were useless here, this was Daniel’s most flamboyant way of telling Miles ‘fuck you,’ without actually having to make a sound beyond the striking of a match.
Fuck you Miles Lucky, he stated without ever uttering a word beyond the quotation of a book that Miles would never acknowledge if he knew that Daniel was about to use it. Much like the character from another book, if it existed without the consent of Miles Lucky, then it simply didn’t exist.
Daniel’s cigarette existed, and as he breathed in the cancerous fumes from that unfiltered tip and drew it inside of him? He knew it burned the man he was watching through the camera lens as much as any word could. Look Miles, I’m smoking. I’m smoking, and I’m acknowledging this cigarette even more than I am you right now, haha, fuck you Miles.
Still, he never said a word of that. He never said a fucking thing beyond his opening statement, and the truest fact was that between the two of them? He’d probably said enough, but he didn’t drag a camera out into the wilds of gods knows where, broke into what looked to be a run down cottage, and proceeded to film simply for the sake of Miles Lucky though, did he?
No, the man just tried to kill his girlfriend. They’d just tried to kill eachother. What kind of fucking psychopathy would be required to do that?
Pause. Beat. Inhale. Exhale.
Oh. That was their particular brand of psychopathy, wasn't it?
“I told you that I loved you Miles, and I do. I’m giving you everything left in my heart, in my soul, because I love you so. I loved you from the day that I really, truly, met you. I loved you when I first inhaled the scent of your hair, when I drew you in close to me. I loved you when you made loud, obnoxious, hacking coughs because you’re a hypochondriac who has to have attention on you, and off of other things, and my cigarettes didn’t come with your face on the packaging beneath the cellophane, so you hated them.”
He took another puff on the dwindling tower of paper and carcinogens before exhaling out of his nose in long, purple-gray plumes of smoke just like a dragon might.
“I’ll eat you up, I love you so. Everything not involving you, it hurts, doesn’t it? Every breath I take outside of a room with you infuriates you because it’s something that I did that you weren’t there for, and you just can’t seem to comprehend my selfish need for agency and independence. It’s just as well, I’ve never had much of a taste for milk, something about it always upset my stomach.”
Pause. He let that one sink in as he stared right at the camera. Just a conversation. Just a place to talk. This whole thing was nothing more a fragmented, one sided, talk in an abandoned home. There he was, sitting on a sinking in couch that had probably long since seen better days in a home that might have once been loving; that might have also been utter bullshit. Someone could have just as easily pulled the couch into the house long before it was rotten and breaking down, before parts of the attic wound up in the living room and kitchen, before the integrity of those walls had given way. There was a multitude of things that could have been allegorical or metaphorical or whatever the fuck a simile was.
Still, on the couch, facing opposite of a broken down fireplace that the camera failed to capture, sat Daniel, he let himself be the focus of the room, no sense in making something for someone if they weren’t going to view it exactly as you wanted them to.
Especially when you made it for a man who watched so obsessively. Maybe that’s why his sleeves were rolled up a little higher, an extra button snapped to show the chest that wasn’t covered up by the undershirt that probably should have been there. Nah, Danny knew what he was doin’, just like he knew Miles would know. They both knew, even though they’d deny it and repaint it in ways to suit them, which was usually logic defying and inherently contrarian for the fucking sake of simply being contrarian.
“I'll eat you up, I love you so. And as much as I love you, Miles? We both know that there’s something that I haven’t addressed yet, don’t we? That for I feel here,” tapping at his left pectoral before dropping his hand. “I feel somethin’ else in my guts. Somethin’ that burns me so until ulcers manifest from the near sulfuric bile of the pride that I’ve swallowed in the past to satisfy the yearnings of a foolish man’s heart. I love a wild thing that shows his affection by devouring everything he lays his ever-paranoid eyes upon, all the while hiding his cadre of afflictions and lovingly collected traumas behind near childlike naivety. I love you, Miles Lucky.”
Knees on elbows, he leaned forward as he brought a hand back to take a drag off the cancer stick, blowing the smoke to the side as if the person he was talking to was in the dilapidated room with him. Of course, he wasn’t, why would he be? That’d be silly, right? Daniel’s eyes narrowed though, they were fixated on the camera, as if they were staring into someone else’s eyes, utterly glued there by something far darker than just love, than just how he felt. No, he stared like he was looking for something more, something that he was never going to find from a mass of glass, steel, and plastic. It was something he could only find when he met Miles again, when he was close to him. “….but like I told you Miles.”
There it was, that sigh, that fucking sigh that just rolled out of him along with the cigarette smoke and disappointment. “I can’t let what you did go unanswered.”
Finally, the cigarette was pulled from his lips and sat down in the ashtray, left to smolder as that same hand came back up to rest against the other, the tips of each digit pushing to form a steeple from his thumbs to his pinkies, all loosely pointed forward just like his eyes were.
“I knew that you could do that, I knew that you wanted to do that, but deep in the sadomasochistic subcockles of my black heart I held a sort of hope, an ember that I stoked that you’d choose not to do that. I hoped, Miles. I hoped that for a single moment that you’d ignore your baser instincts and hold back after your victory. You didn’t though, did you? No, you didn’t. You didn’t let me have that moment of reprieve, that one hope that there was some civility in you that would allow us to continue. Unfortunately for me, Karen exists without your consent. The howling screams, the misanthropic fits, you rage and rage, and for all your hatred towards her existence, that someone holds a piece that you can’t ever touch, she still exists.”
Pause, beat. Look at that fuckin’ grin of his as it started to spread across his lips as if he just let somethin’ slip that he wasn’t supposed to.
“You tried to snuff her out, to stomp out her flame. You didn’t go easy on her at all, did you Miles? You wanted to make an example out of her, to break her in that ring. The NVR Champion didn’t beat the Union Champion, she didn’t pull off the upset like I did, but what she did was something deeper. She hurt you, and not physically. She made you scared for a brief moment, she made you realize that you’d bought too much of your own press, that no matter what they whispered about you backstage or click-clack-clicked on the fan forums and discord servers about you, that maybe, just maybe Miles Lucky can be beaten. The worst about that realization is that it came from her. I was arrogant at first, I thought you tried to kill her because of me. I thought that you wanted to carve her pretty face off because you were jealous.”
That’s when Danny just sliiightly tilted his head to the side.
“She scared you, didn’t she? She put fear in your heart, and for that she had to die. She committed the sin of not existing without your consent, but against your direct wishes, and even with all of that, she broke the mold of who you thought she could be.
And for that, you tried to kill her, you tried to publicly execute one of the women that I love and hold dear to what’s left of my heart, a heart that you tore a piece out of with your perfect teeth and left bleeding just like that little savage minded wild thing that you are.”
The laugh that came from him was hollow, almost like breaking glass as it spilled out across his lips. Odd, disquieting, it sounded like hints of anger infected it, spreading out to the very smile that was stretched across that handsome face, the same smile that died before it could reach his eyes. It was almost as if it was less of a smile and more of his baring his teeth like an agitated canine would. Irritated, an—He paused, looking off screen, just for a moment as a flutter of wings could be heard off to the side, it seemed that a pigeon had found its way into the home.
Danny.. just tilted his head to the side, watching it before he swallowed, looking back to the camera with that previously unbroken concentration. Why had the pigeon drawn his attention so violently, perking up like a wolf might when a prey’s scent hit its nose.
“I’ll eat you up, I love you so.” Repetition, , as if it was something from rote memory that he let pass from his lips like a spell, a ward of protection just like a prayer from a child. Maybe for a child, maybe it had something to do with the dusty book laid across the couch he sat on. Maybe it was the prayer of a madman in love.
“I’ll eat you up, I lov—” Stopped. He stopped a second time, and a hand broke off the steepling to hold his face, bowing his head into his hand to hold his composure before he looked back up. “I’ll eat you up, I love you so.” There it was, he managed to say it again, even if his smile became a tight, grim, line. “I told you be careful, and you took it as a threat. You missed that I was telling you what to be careful of. You repeated it. You mocked it. You never got it. I was begging you be careful. I had nothing to give you but my heart, Miles, and I placed it on the ground before your feet and I begged you to be careful, because it wasn’t the ground you were stepping on in all your posturing, it was my heart that you were smearing the treads of your unwashed fucking shoes across. We fought over nothing, constantly dancing in and out of whether we loved eachother or hated eachother, because you’re a wild thing and it’s either feast or famine with you, Love.” He sniffled, just a bit, before picking up that cigarette.
And without a second’s warning, his off hand lashed outward to snatch up the pigeon that’d fluttered in on scene, jerking it right up off of the couch’s arm, shifting it to both hands once he’d traded the cigarette back to the ashtray. Why'd he even pick the damn cancer stick up?
A bird in the hand, a single bird in both of his hands with none in the bush.
“This has been building since we met though, hasn’t it? It only amped things up when you took the title from Indi. She had stories to tell too, didn’t she? Only she told the story an Oompa Loompa instead of talking about the boy king that told monsters how he’d lovingly eat them. She didn’t understand you, but how could she?” The pigeon in his hands cooed, confused and yet soothed by the thumbs running down its back. “She didn’t understand you. Bryan doesn’t understand you. None of them do, not even Amira. They don’t see what I see, so how could they ever love you like I love you? Like you, love me?”
Those fingers started to tense, pressing against the Pigeon’s body, its coos turning into panicked squawks as it began to peck downward, peeling little red ribbons from those near stone hands.
“I’ll eat you up,” he repeated without missing a beat. “I love you so.”
And with repetition on his lips, those hands were tilting the pigeon up to face him, the avian rodent doing everything it could, struggling fiercely in the hands of that wolf.
“I love you so,” were the last words that pigeon heard as the sounds of sinew, muscle, and blood vessels being ripped asunder consumed its words, the screen going black as Danny bit its fucking head off.