Colour
"Why are you doing this?" Veruca murmured, her mascara running a little around her eyes...her cheeks puffy and red. The dark haired girl sighed with exasperation. There they stood, in the parking lot of the fast food place the dark haired girl worked; the parking lot Veruca had chosen for what was meant to be the final conversation...the last chapter and happy ending to this melodramatic story. Two teenage girls at sunset.
"I'm not gay...I have a boyfriend...pick your answer, I have lots of them." The brunette rolled her eyes, leaning against the car door.
"But you...you said that...that...when we..." She wiped violently at her nose, sniffling...
"Look, we had fun. I didn't know you were going to take it all so seriously. It was just...killing time."
"Killing...time?" Veruca mouthed the words, her eyebrows and forehead tensing obscenely, as if the words were beyond her comprehension...like they were spoken in a different language. The sun was starting to dip behind the horizon line.
"Just...stop following me around, Veruca. It's getting pathetic." The dark haired girl reached out and patted her...painfully, explicitly platonically...on the shoulder. Veruca looked down at the hand as it left her shoulder as if it had just forced a knife into her. She choked out a sob. In the sky above, the dramatic curve of a full, silver-dollar moon was making its ascent.
"I guess this is goodbye, Melody," Veruca breathed out...a sense of resolution and catharsis inflecting her words.
Several Years Later...
Veruca steps up to the microphone. A few eyes shift towards her and then away again. The club is choked with shadows and whispers – fleeting and shifting – taunting and hinting at the possibility of sin. The girl in red feels comfortable here in the same way that she feels alienated...dislocated from where and what she should be almost everywhere else. Living a life that revolves around three days of a month drains the colour from everything else, and leaves her feeling...hollow. Void. Parting her lips...red...painted red...red like fresh blood is red...she begins to sing to the music that swells up from the band behind her. The eyes no longer drift by. They fix on her...static and intense. As she begins to pour the anguish in her soul into the flood of words leaving her mouth, her own eyes focus on only one thing. Rather, two things as one. Him. Her. Him and her. She's seen them before. So many times. Sought them, even. He is like her...a wolf. The other one is everything else.... A world she can't inhabit. A life she can't live. A reality she can't admit. The girl with the red hair looks like...more accurately, smells like...a road not taken. Her scent, cutting through the crowded club, floods Veruca's mind with images of a future snuffed out...a wish forcibly rescinded. Her brow creases inward with frustration and she fights back the urge to roll her eyes at the strength and melodramatic inflection on her reaction to seeing them. To seeing her. Blame it on the moon. It's almost that time. It's nothing but that, she chastises herself internally...unable to stop the song weaving itself into her emotional state – unable to make herself want to stop it doing so...pulsing and sensuous and virulent, the dam wall breaks and as her eyes flicker briefly closed. She can see her...just her...bright and angelic...dark and demonic...wanting her...craving her...just like she can't stop herself wanting and craving her. She's under her skin...in her blood. She has been from the first moment she saw her. Smelled her.
"In a dream I can touch you," She gasps out..."In your dream," and, as her eyes open back up, for just a brief moment, her eyes lock with Willow's...and then with his...and she sees her conflict and uncertain, subconscious desire reflected back at her. She feels her heartbeat race. Colour floods her world. "I can feel you twist – I can feel you rise because you're always near..." with practiced control she keeps her breathing balanced. Inside, she is a maelstrom. Music makes sense to her. Worlds of feeling, concentrated and compressed into singularities...moments with near-infinite depth and complexity, bleeding colour out into the banal grey-scale of day-to-day existence. This is how she sees herself. How she both wishes others could see her and fears that some might. Her stomach knots and her brow knits and all too soon the song comes to a close. As the last echoes of its melody drip away to nothing, she is left feeling awkward...drained. His eyes are back on Willow now. Willow's eyes momentarily...involuntarily...flicker over Veruca and then back to Oz. Protective...jealous. Something else. Something deep down. The girl in red's mouth is full of cotton-wool and sandpaper. She coughs meekly into a cupped hand, walking to the edge of the stage without a word and reaching for her bottle of water. Slowly, her heart-beat calms. Something dark and strenuously repressed in the back of her mind mumbles something sinister about something she's actively trying not to think about, and, taking a deep breath, she walks back towards the microphone for the next song.
The next day her emotional situation is calmer. She quietly sits with her lunch...a far away look in her eye...reflecting on what brought her to this point. Even before the wolf...so long ago, now...there had been some sort of fundamental lack, deep inside, threatening to tear the world around her apart in a desperate quest to fill itself. In those days, she hadn't really thought of herself as complicit...just a lightning rod, really...attracting the volatile and the chaotic. She is more pragmatic, these days – whether she wants that to be the case or not. There are some things you can simply not un-see...not un-know.
"Like me? What you did to me?" Melody asks from across the table. Veruca stares right through her, pretending to ignore her. "She reminds you of me, doesn't she?" Melody's voice is slightly babyish...sing-song...soft and patronizing. Veruca continues to ignore her. She goes on: "You think she'll let you close, Veruca? Think she'll let you touch her? Kiss her? Do those things you think about doing with her...late at night when no one's there to laugh at your unlikely little delusions? She is like me. She's not gay either. She's got a boyfriend, too." Veruca's left eye twitches, and she sighs, looking away. "Oh, that got your attention," Melody taunts: "Speak of the devil..." Veruca, glancing in the direction Melody's eyes indicate, spots Oz, her eyes catching his, and, taking a sip of her drink, motions with her eyes for him to sit...trying to seem casual. She smiles what she hopes is a convincing little smile. Anything is better than being stuck in my head with you, she thinks to herself in the internalized-version-of-Melody's direction.
"What're you going to do? Sit on the ground?"
"My girlfriend's coming..." He emphasizes, ever so slightly, the word ‘girlfriend'. Veruca's heart skips a beat and she nods her head accommodatingly and, she hopes, casually.
"There's room." She smiles as he sits down...seeming less than comfortable. She finds it endearing.
"Big lunch?"
"I like to eat. I hate chicks who're all ‘does that have dressing on it?'"
"Agreed," He chuckles. Their eyes meet, and she feels the urge to look away but can't. There's expectation there. And desire. "You guys were tight last night." Thankful for a topic, Veruca nods slightly.
"I guess. The set's starting to come together but the amps still sound dirty to me."
"What're you using – 50 or 120?"
"120...Blue Voodoo, I think, but I'm not really sure if that's it. Our bassist handles most of the sound stuff, I just criticize and make unhelpful observations," Oz chuckles to himself again.
"Hey," Veruca can smell her before she sees her. She smells like fresh-cut flowers...pollen...herbs and strawberries and...life. Surreptitiously, Veruca smells a few strands of her own hair while no one's looking. Tobacco. Ash. Sand. Deodorant. She rolls her eyes.
"Hey," Oz replies.
"Hey," Veruca smiles, forcing the word out over the lump rapidly forming in her throat...pushing herself to make eye contact instead of just staring down at the table awkwardly...like the uncertain teenager she still feels like she is sometimes who desperately wants to do.
"Wanna sit down?" Oz asks her. As Willow sits down, her eyes graze Veruca's, and the blond girls knees turn to jelly and throat dries up instantly. Unable to speak and unwilling to try, the three sit in awkward silence. Veruca reaches for her drink, trying to do something...anything with her hands to stop herself from glancing at Willow. "You should be using a 50. And uh...Blue Voodoo isn't your best bet if you don't dig the distort."
"Music talk, huh?" Willow interjects. "I love to listen to Oz talk about the biz," Veruca can see her smile out of the corner of her eye...an oil painting of pearly white surrounded by shades of pink and cream. Forcing her mind back to the conversation, she responds:
"What do you like again? I know you told me..."
"There are a couple of good ones. The Johnson Mil..."
"My number one has to be Redbone."
"Number one? I gotta go with Hound-Dog."
"Me too! That's a great song," Willow chimes in. Realising her discomfort and internally rolling her eyes at herself for being so obtuse as to not do so before now, Veruca's heart sinks for her. "I mean, Elvis...what a guy."
"You a big Elvis fan?" Veruca asks, her eyes sparkling as they meet Willows, her lip curving up in an amused smile. In the back of her mind, a theoretical film plays, showing her reaching forward and tucking a stray strand of hair behind Willow's ear. The sunlight swells, its rays gushing forth, refracting off Willow's sparkling teeth, and filling her cheeks with warmth and light and colour as she smiles and coyly looks away. Deeper...deeper than deep inside her mind...buried...repressed...she hears Melody's laughter. Pathetic, Melody commentates.
"The biggest! Well, I mean, after dingoes of course."
"We're actually talking amps," Oz clarifies. Willow's face falls. Veruca feels a stab of irritation, wishing he'd just...left it. "But it's easy to confuse with the...uh...names they give them."
"Oh," Willow smiles nervously, chuckling...clearly embarrassed. For a few moments, the three of them sit in silence. Veruca glances at Willow, before looking away and towards Oz.
"Y'know, I gotta bail..." Oz states. "I'll call you later." He finishes, getting up, pressing his lips against the top of Willow's head. There's not a flinch...not a question in him touching her, and Veruca feels a stab of jealousy. As Willow looks back after watching him go, Veruca manages to tear her eyes away from Willow's profile, narrowly avoiding being caught staring. Internally she breathes a sigh of relief. Bringing her eyes back to rest on Willow's, she smiles again, hoping to feel the tension bleeding away. Instead, she feels at a loss. She desperately searches for words, but nothing comes. All she can think about is, rushing up inside her, a torrent of shame and confusion and doubt.
"I should...go too." She stumbles over her words as she hastily gets to her feet. "Good shirt," she says, unsure of everything apart from that she needs to get away before she says something...does something unforgivable. As she walks, the figment shaped like Melody walks beside her.
"That was so sad," she laughs. "She thinks you're a total...bitch,"
"Shut the fuck up," Veruca growls under her breath.
"You know that the only interest she has in you is that she thinks you're some slut trying to steal her boyfriend,"
"Just stop it, please," Veruca moans.
"What do you think she'd do if she knew the truth?" Veruca shakes her head, looking down at the ground, walking faster.
"Pity? Disgust? What?"
"Fuck off!" Veruca screams. A few students look at her. Her cheeks redden...she feels humiliated. Melody is abruptly nowhere to be seen. Making an inarticulate groaning sound, Veruca breaks into a run.
Veruca lies silently on her bed. A single tear worms its way from the corner of her eye, down the curve at the top of her left cheek and onto the pillow. She sniffs. The moon...the days before, during and after the nights where she changes are a crescendo of psychic turbulence. Her id takes over...fuelled by the need for...more. Dramatic, ecstatic hedonism and violent, bottomless depression ensue, rapid cycling and taking control of her life...polluting her mind and withering her self control...stunting the immediacy of her self insight. And it's the only time I see Melody.
"It's happening again", she whispers. A door comes open in her mind. She remembers what she spends her life trying to forget...the first full moon after she's been bitten. The first night she became a wolf. Melody...leaving her work. Veruca hadn't even known what was coming. She'd just felt compelled to confront her. Then. There. Veruca remembers the smell of her fear as she fumbled for the keys to her car, terror in her eyes as she saw Veruca begin to change. She remembers the sound of her screams as she bit into her...the taste of her blood...the way her eyes looked as the life drained from them. She remembers how good it had felt. How right. How justified. How addictive that feeling of power...of control over the cause of the turmoil with had felt. How good it still feels. She closes her eyes, her breath catching...tears in her eyes as she fights the urge to touch herself...her mind flooded with images of Melody...the other girls since her...and now Willow. She remembers that scent...always that same scent, dragging her mind back...back...back. She sobs audibly, at war with herself on the inside. And then she feels it. The change. Coming from deep within, like an animal eating its way out of her from her heart outwards. She staggers towards the stairs...stumbles down them...her vision blurring...everything ethereally bright and charged with luminescence...displaced and doubling up as she tries to make it to the huge wooden door with the enormous, rusted iron bolts marking the way to the empty houses underground cellar. Her refuge. Her sanctuary. I'm not going to make it this time, she realizes, feeling a heady mixture of fear and elation. Someone's going to die tonight.
Veruca slowly becomes conscious of her surroundings. A break in the forest. It looks...old. Prehistoric, even. Insect and bird sounds swell and break like waves, and she closes her eyes to avoid the sun. She can smell Oz...feel him next to her. Veruca remembers...hazily...bits and pieces. Slowly more comes, but there are still black spots. Significant black spots. She runs her tongue slowly over the ridges of her teeth and the soft, pink flesh of her lips. Nothing but him. She's torn between relief and some primal, idotistic sense of disappointment. Sitting up and pressing against him...the memory of the night before bleeding into her emotional state...she rubbed her nose against his shoulder.
"Morning." He sat up, retreating from her. "That was um...some night," She said, enjoying his discomfort.
"So it appears."
"Right. You don't remember. It's like that at first, but then...little bits and pieces, they'll start coming back to you."
"So you're a –"
"Werewolf groupie." She teases. His discomfort makes it so much easier. His purity...his desperation to not be what they are. On some level...in some way...corrupting...confusing him and polluting his mind...making him more like her...fragmented and faulty...satiates her. "Nobody else gets it done for me..."
"What?" He chokes out.
"Kidding," She informs him, her voice inflected with quiet mockery. "You know what I am." Gently, she kisses his arm...feeling the static...the connection between them. "You've known since the first time you saw me. Now you...need...to relax." She insists, sitting up behind him, touching his arms...his back...self-loathing and ecstasy clashing malevolently in the back of her mind as she pictures Willow's reaction...imagines what she'd do if she saw...if she knew. Would she look at him like Veruca had come to look at herself through they eyes of figments...recollections? Loathing...accusatory...
"Not a possibility."
"So what do you wanna do?"
"God." Veruca laughs, inspecting some brightly coloured pants. "The kids in this dorm need fashion 101 in a big way..." Turning around, she catches sight of Oz in his oversized, thrown together outfit. "...Or we could start right here at home."
"Not making a statement. Just want to get back to my place. I want to know why we got out of our cages and –"
"You have a cage?" She doesn't know why she says it. It must be the word. ‘Cage'. She reserves that word...like ‘prison'...‘jail'...for references to other things. Different things. Places that make her feel trapped. Emotional contexts that do.
"Don't you?"
"Yeah." She mocks, covering..."It has a little wheel, with a plastic ball and a cute...little...bell in it." She scoffs. "God. Somebody's domesticated the hell out of you."
"It's my choice. I don't want to hurt anybody."
"Maybe. Or maybe you don't want to admit what happened to you. Maybe you want to pretend you're just a regular guy...?" Her cheeks flush slightly. She can feel it...empathically...a closed door in his mind beginning to creak open.
"Well I am. I'm only a wolf three nights a month."
"Or you're the wolf all the time, and this human face is just your disguise. Ever think of that, Oz?" Something in his eyes shifts dangerously. She resists the urge to laugh in his face...to point it out...to call him on his superior, untouchable, pristine façade...but she knows he wouldn't see it. Not yet.
"I'm leaving. I've got to check the papers. See if we did any damage last night." He starts to walk away. She follows after him, not ready to leave the last of her seeds unplanted.
"Oh we did - but only to each other. I know some...part of you remembers that." The rational, day-to-day part of her resurfaces momentarily, letting her see what she's doing...witness it from an objective point of view. She feels a stab of nausea in her gut...clawing it's way through her and into her oesophagus. "It doesn't take a full moon..." She manages to say, overpowering her rationality...set...solidly on prying the door open just a little further. "Could...do it again. Right here?"
"But we aren't going to. This ends. Right now."
"I can help you, Oz." She insists, the words preceding the realization that she genuinely means it. His cage is my cage. He can't see it... "You're scared – I was too...but I accepted it – the animal; it's powerful...inside me all the time. Soon you just start to feel sorry for everybody else. Because they don't know what it's like to be as alive as we are." As she finishes speaking, her lip quivers slightly. And she feels her body flush...warm and pink. "As free." Laying her hands on his chest and torso she leans in, staring into his eyes...hoping to see something give. Willing something to give.
"Free to kill people?" He backs away, eyeing her warily. He knows what I want to see...he can feel it happening. Feel the realization coming... "I won't do that. And you shouldn't." She can hear the shakiness...the moral uncertainty in his voice. She wonders what Willow would say if she could see him like this...giving into her...becoming like her...
"You don't understand. But you will." She can see it in his eyes...the truth...what he wants to hear but can't admit, even to himself, that he does. She says it: "You'll see that we belong together."
"No." he resists...stoic...adamant: "I know where I belong." He turns to walk away.
"See you tonight." She smiles to herself...waving after him.
Veruca sits in her basement with the heavy wooden door bolted shut. It's barely midday, but for the rational side of her...the side that's in control between temptations...the urge to restrain herself is overpowering. She can feel it rising inside of her. The self-loathing...the rage...the lust...the overpowering drive to free herself. But free herself from what? Her cage isn't a cage like his is. Her cage is the feeling she gets when she smells Willow, and she can smell her from half a campus away. It's the memory of Melody that her scent provokes...of the things she's done...the people she's hurt. On a primal level it's the way she looks, the things she says...the lilting, uncertain half-smile and the perpetual, endearing awkwardness. Her creamy skin...strawberry lips...orange hair and understated makeup and the way her hips sway when she walks. It's the reaction it all provokes...the way Veruca's heart races...her fantasies...hopes...futile wishes that her mind forces on her, and the self-loathing and unplaceable, bottomless dread that they create. Her cage is an impossible situation: love – ignored, unreciprocated and impossible to stop herself feeling.
"So this is why you called me here? To see your habitrail?" Torturing him reminds her of torturing herself. The two sides of her, always conflicted...at odds...just like he and she are now. Clashing and questioning...mocking and tempting...
"Right before sunset I get a little buzzed, y'know?" she admits...stretching, grinning at him. Her muscles feel as if they're filled with static...everything around her is bright...all the colours are intense and seem to be exuded as light from the objects they inflect. The change is a drug.
"Come here," He growls.
"I'm not getting in that stupid cage with you if that's what this is all about," She feigns resistance. "We belong outside."
"You can't run loose tonight. And not just because you might hurt somebody. I know people that'll be out there...hunting for us."
"So you're saying I should spend the whole night with you. Alone. Locked in a cage."
"You'll be safe." She smiles, leaning coyly forward, fixing her eyes on his...watching...
"Not from you..." She murmurs seductively. "Isn't that the point of this...cozy little arrangement?" If only she could see him now...she thought. See what he's becoming. Veruca staggers slightly, overcome with the feeling of the change. Arousal washes over her...immediate...primal...full of need. "It's coming," She chokes out, looking up and into his eyes. "Do you feel it? It's like blood boiling," Her eyes lid over slightly...ecstasy inflecting her words as they drip from her lips.
"I feel it," He growls out, his brow creased inward...resistant. Euphoric, dazed, she squeezes the iron bar, her self dividing starkly into two: Veruca...the human, being pushed rapidly beneath the surface...and the demon...the wolf...asserting control...
"I wanted you even before I saw you," Veruca groans out...the wolf speaking to its other in Oz. For Veruca...delirious...her mind full of images of Melody...the others...and Willow. "I sensed you...did you sense me?"
"Come in here,"
"Did you?"
"Willow..." Oz murmurs, picking himself up off the cold stone floor.
"Oh my god..." Oz hurriedly pulls up his jeans. Veruca stares at Willow, uncertain...unsure of what to do next...arching her back reflexively and stretching like a cat, still partly asleep. Her mind races, but it's as if her head is full of fog, and she trundles forward lethargically, unable to get her bearings.
"What you saw: I had to...I had to lock her up with me."
"I bet," Willow says quietly, sniffling.
"She's like me. A wolf." Oz clarifies.
"Well, I knew you two had a lot in common, but – don't touch me!" Willow slaps his hand away as he tries to comfort her. Despite herself...despite her panicked heartbeat and the shock borne of surprise...the disoriented emotional vertigo gripping her brain...Veruca smiles darkly to herself. At least you know, now...
"She was going to hurt somebody. I didn't have a choice..."
"But you did... You could have told somebody. Your ‘solution'...just...put you two together in a room all night?" Veruca, pulling on her leather jacket over her bare flesh looks back at them...a note of passive triumph in her voice as she says:
"Girl's got a point."
"Leave..." Oz demands, unable to even look at her. Unable to stop herself, Veruca presses on:
"I'm just saying –"
"Now!" He shouts. As Veruca stalks out, she casts a quick look back at Willow...her tear-stained cheeks...quivering lips...Veruca feels uncertainty clutching at her from within. She has to leave.
"Pathetic..." She hears Melody's voice as she reaches the entrance to the crypt, covering her eyes with her hand...shielding herself from the sun, as if it's the harsh light of self-awareness..."Can't even see your own bullshit through to the end, can you?"
"I conjure thee, by Barabus, by Satanus...and the devil..." Willow's heart began to race as she felt the dark magick coursing through her...like electricity it arced out from that place beyond, through her like a conduit and into the spell she was crafting. She could see it in her minds' eye...a swirling vortex of mystical energy, hidden from the sight of anyone who didn't know how to look...forming around her hands and centering on the flames building in the small cauldron beside her. "Let Oz and Veruca's deceitful hearts be broken." She threw in some of the ground ingredients from the mortar and pestle. The magical energy spiked as the fire growled out a response, licking upwards hungrily...angrily. There was a point in every spell where the ingredients...inanimate, banal objects, all...melded together and came alive. That was the heart of a spell. An emotional extension...borne into being by sheer force of will by the caster. The emotion grew and grew...feeding off the caster at first, before it's life became independent. Independent and singularly focused. The spell was then an emotion driven by the desire to satiate itself. Willow could feel fear building inside of her. Fear...welling up...threatening to overcome the anger...the pain...the humiliation and self loathing for having been so stupid...and the rage. The rage and hate and spite that the spell was feeding off. She stomped down the fear. She had made her choice.
"I conjure thee...by the Saracen Queen...and the name of Hell." Words. Words infused with...saturated with raw emotion...carrying that emotion into the physical world...nurturing the spell, spelling out its purpose... "Let them find no love or solace. Let them find no peace as well."
Beakers floated...her breath caught in her throat...and Willow slumped, her hands on the bench, her arms shaking unsteadily...shoulders heaving and breath in short, sharp, gasps. She forced herself to stand straight...certain and purposeful. Her pupils dilated wildly, expanding unnaturally until they took over the whites of her eyes...until black was all there was. She could see herself in her minds eye. It galvanized her. She continued.
"Let this image seal his fate...not to love...only hate..." Willow slowly, carefully, picked up a picture of Oz from the bench. For a moment she hesitated, unsure. Then she slowly, unable to look at it, held the photo aloft over the flames. They seemed to instinctively lick upwards...charged by magick and reaching out for what they craved. Reaching out to burn into the image...and through it, into the heart and soul of its victims. She couldn't. The beakers fell. A solitary tear dripped down one of her cheeks.
What has Veruca come for? To apologize? To explain? No. There's nothing she can say that Willow would accept...could accept. Veruca saw her. She could feel her pain...her rage...her hate...like radiant colours in the air around her...surging and receding, like waves of phosphorescent mist – she could see the passion. And there it hung...suspended. Not dissipating. The depth of feeling, bottomless...for him. For him and no one else. Willow will never...she can never. It's that simple. And Veruca can never let someone do that to her again. Trap her like that. Use her like that. And she would...because Veruca is already trapping herself on Willow's behalf. Caging herself with what she feels. So she knows who she has to be. She knows how this pattern has to – finally – end.
"Wow...for a minute there I thought you might actually play rough..." A calm comes over her as she pushes the door shut. She knew, deep down, that it would eventually come to this. Just in time, Oz will force the door and come to save Willow. She knows that. She knows the only ending this scene can have. She can't – won't – be this anymore. She sees Melody, standing calmly beside Willow. Melody mouths the word "pathetic". Veruca's lip twitches imperceptibly as she reaches back to lock the door. Maybe. She thinks to herself. But what other option have I ever been given?