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Anyways. I got an idea for a story, so I started brainstorming. Going well so far. But you never know.
SUE UPDATE: Azhure...is now a goddess. Oh. My. God. No.
And the story! By me. Obviously.
The first time she saw him, she thought he was a dream. Standing there in her room, so ethereal, what was she supposed to think? But there he was, quietly taking up space. She reached for him and touched his white fur, took in his shimmering ivory horn, admired his golden hooves. After solemnly considering one another, he moved closer, and she smiled her little girl smile, that one that her mother said was adorable and she detested, with its crooked teeth and dimpled cheeks. He was so warm and real, and she closed her fist on silken mane and closed her eyes. She woke with a handful of silver hair and memories.
He came every night after that, full of shining white beauty; vague disapproval if she’d done something bad, quiet pride if she’d done well. She thrived under her guardian’s care, waiting eagerly to hold his mane in her hands and curl up against his body with a luxurious sigh. She excelled in school to please him; her parents’ ooh-ing and ah-ing had no effect upon her. It was his approval she sought, but unfortunately he was not interested in petty things such as grades. The day she’d lent a friend some money to buy a lunch, he shone a little brighter, strutted a little more, for all the world a father taking pride in his daughter. She adored him, draping her arms around his muscular, furry shoulders, and giggling secrets into his ears as they flickered attentively. Her enormous crush on Dante Love, what a b-i-t-c-h Hilary Roman was – the dramas of friendships and school. She cried on his shoulder when a friend ditched her, and danced in circles around him when Dante kissed her after school.
One night, something changed. He was there, as usual, but his fur was a sooty gray. He paced back and forth, angry, and lunged at her. She reached out to stop him, and her hand touched his horn. It hurt, and then he was gone, the room still smelling of his distinct, warm smell that reminded her vaguely of cinnamon. She was left crying over a burning sensation in her palm. She wrapped it up and told everyone she’d burned her hand cooking, and he was back to normal the next night, almost apologetic as he nosed her hand tenderly.
Friendships faded, took second place to the handsome, non-human stranger who lived in her dreams and her nights, and disappeared in the morning. She ran home every day after school, wondering if maybe, just maybe, he’d come early. Love became adoration that verged on addiction. But just when it might have gotten dangerous, when she might have lost her hold on reality for once and all, puberty came along.
She giggled with friends at the silliness of boys, shared her secret, intimate dreams in the same whisper she had used to speak to the unicorn. She came home late, if she came home at all, and was all too often too drunk on euphoria or alcohol to say a hello to him before collapsing into bed. She didn’t even notice when he stopped coming.
The fairy tales went out with the trash. Fantasy was given away at book sales, replaced by romance novels and teen magazines. There was no place in her new life for something useless, something that did not pertain to real life. “There’s no such thing as magic,” she scoffed, and a little of the life went out of her old room which had once sparkled with the remembered glory of a nighttime visitor.
But he was not going to abandon her.
The night she was at the party, flirting with Dante Love, grown up and so much older and wiser than she was, he took her upstairs and kissed her, and she welcomed the feeling, welcomed the sensual pleasure of his hands exploring. Something pricked her shoulder, and she wheeled, furious. There was nothing there, but the sensation remained, a prickling between her shoulder blades. “I’ll be right back,” she said, and went out into the hallway, breathing, to take another shot of spiked punch. When she returned, the feeling was gone. So was Dante. She thought nothing of it, but Dante Love avoided her after that night; his gaze, when it later briefly met hers, slid away quickly as he looked down and hurried away.
Or the time she’d started to drink that concoction with her sorority in college. One sip, that was all. It was foul tasting, and she spit it out viciously. “What is that?” she complained, enraged. After watching the girls who had drunk the stuff for another five minutes, she poured the rest of her glass into a potted plant and left. They were too far gone to care. But it was still there, that pricking feeling on her skin, a need, or a want. And she was not so naïve as to be totally unaware. “Why are you still here?” she demanded of the empty, velvety night. “I told you to leave. I’m not a child anymore. Unicorns are for babies. Get out of my life, and quit interfering!”
Silence answered her. But something shrank away and darkened, somewhere, and she nearly cringed and shouted an apology to the presence that did not exist, or should not have existed. When she went back to her room that night, it seemed darker, duller, less alive. Without knowing why, she cried.
The next few weeks were quiet, ordinary, boring. There was no prickling on her skin, no poke when she flirted with boys, no small presence intruding on the secrecy of her mind. It was utterly silent from the corner where the unicorn had been. Her room was dull and quiet, and she spent too many nights staring up at the dark ceiling, blinking back tears as she remembered the unicorn’s warm, hard, flesh beneath her arm, his strutting walk when she’d done a good deed that day. So proud of her. “You must be proud of me now,” she snapped, bitterly. “Out on my own in a brave new world. Independent. Strong. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
The sadness that echoed from the void where he had been made her inexplicably angry.
The tears dried. The sadness faded. She lived and loved, and forgot. She was not naïve any more – or perhaps the problem was that she wasn’t naïve enough. Months later, she began to dream of unicorns.
They floated through her dreams, blood flowing from deep wounds, and she wielded the sword that struck them down. She lured countless shining white beasts to their deaths on the spears of a thousand hunters, and laughed when he screamed. He screamed. Such a human sound. She dreamed, and he began to take over her life. The unicorns appeared on her binders, floating across lined paper, gone when she blinked. She slept little, and when she did, she dreamed. When she did not, they floated across her vision, keeping her awake, keeping her longing and despairing until she screamed into her pillow so no one could hear her. She fell behind in classes. He mocked her, laughing in her mind’s eye as duplicates of him cavorted merrily across the blank page. “I’m going insane,” she muttered, and began taking her boyfriend’s Prozac just to get through the day, Benadryl just to sleep at night.
She started seeing a therapist, but none of them could tell her what was wrong with her. “You need to relax,” they said. “Let go of your issues.”
I don’t have any issues! She wanted to scream. I’m popular, I belong to a sorority, I have friends, a boyfriend, a family, a good education. I have a perfect life - or I would if a unicorn from my childhood would quit bothering me! Other people have issues! Not me! She listened to her boyfriend, went to a spa for a weekend of relaxation. They were even there, but she found something better than relaxation at the spa. She fell in love with her masseuse and eloped with him. The unicorns laughed at her, mocked her from her own mind. They pranced through her dreams more than usual, and he was there, staring at her, his figure drooping, so ashamed. At the wedding, she stared into the pool at the fancy, expensive garden her new husband had reserved for their use. She thought she saw him looking back at her, big liquid eyes sad, white coat dull silver, listless, lifeless. He needed her, and she had abandoned him. Trying not to cry, she screamed through her mind: You needed me, I didn’t need you. Get over it, and find some other girl to torment.
There was only you, she thought she heard him say. She wanted to cry. She couldn’t. There wasn’t time.
"Ma’am?” said the photographer. “Smile, please.” She looked at the camera and smiled. It was fake, of course. Sometimes it seemed that her whole life had been one fake smile after another. “I am happy,” she whispered. “I am, I am, I am.”
“What was that, dear?” her husband asked, so worried. He would never understand the unicorns.
She sighed. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”
Two glorious years later, he left her for the owner of his spa. “It’s nothing personal,” he assured her. “I just love her so much. I don’t want to cheat you of the love you deserve.”
She swore at him and fled, crying. Later, she looked up Ben Hattering, the boyfriend she had left so long ago. “Married,” read the entry, “Three children. Wife: Hilary Roman, ex-model.”
He came for her a lifetime later. She lay on the couch, watching a romance movie and eating popcorn, feeling lost in a world of possibilities. The unicorns danced around her, laughed at her from the screen, munched on the food in her kitchen, trampled her phone to bits and sat on her so it rang and rang and she couldn’t answer it. And then, he was there, his coat smoky gray, his eyes burning, raging. He swung his head toward her, so beautifully angry, so beautifully alive. She shivered with desire and reached for him, pleading, her every nerve thrilling toward him. He looked at her, just looked at her, and she hung her head, ashamed, knowing that he could see everything she had and hadn’t done and that she did not measure up to his standards. “I’m ready,” she said. “Please. Don’t leave me.”
He stared at her for so many moments that she was sure that he would leave her as she had left him so long ago, and knowing painfully how much it would hurt. And how much she deserved it. But some of the anger in his eyes flickered and died, and he stepped closer. It was the closest to acceptance she would get.
She reached for him, and he lowered his magnificent head. She touched his horn and held it.
Pain blazed through her as she gripped the cold ivory. She rode it as it burned through her veins and her bones and left nothing. She felt the pain, and suffered for seconds, for hours, for a lifetime. She was dying and was glad. Then it was gone, and she crumpled to the floor, too weary to even care.
Everything has an end.
When the police broke down the door three days later, the place was a mess - the phone wrecked beyond recognition, food scattered on the floor and nibbled by animals. The house was silent as the grave. And as empty as one belonging to a vampire.
“Hold on, I found something,” said a junior officer, and the others hurried to look. He toed a heap of ashes, so small that it might never have been human.
“Spontaneous combustion?” chuckled one.
“Looks like it.” Joked another.
She had no family. They scattered the ashes outside the house and left, scribbling down some note on their sheet that was largely ignored. No point wasting time on a spinster without friends to speak of. The house burned down nearly a year later. Nothing was spared.
Unicorns are wise – they understand that nothing lasts except for themselves. Every so often, they meet something so beautiful that they want to preserve it, treasure it. But the touch of a unicorn is death, and the horn of a unicorn burns away all that is not pure.
Unfortunately, nothing human is pure.
But every human has a little bit of unicorn.
She remembered something about a girl. Something vague and distant and almost entirely unwanted. Something about life, and death, and pain, and regret – things that meant nothing to a unicorn. She almost laughed, but a unicorn did not laugh. Unicorns danced. She nosed her mate, tossed up her heels and tossed her mane, inviting him to dance with her. He followed, and small golden hooves flickered across a landscape woven of dreams and hope. His horn touched her, sending a little, pleasurable thrill through her spine. She shivered and pressed closer, and his touch burned away the memories until there was no girl. There was only unicorn.
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From:
I liked it!
Sorry this is not up to my usual standards of insanely long comments- I have to catch the bus in a few minutes. >_<
From:
Re: I liked it!
To tell the truth, I'm not really sure myself. *is guilty* Dirty minds are okay. Really.
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no subject
From:
Awesome!
I've just got one little quibble--the police seem a little too... blasé?... about the whole thing. I don't think they're usually so careless when investigating a potential disappearance/death. At least, CSI leads me to believe they aren't. >.> A longer scene with one of the policemen seriously trying to figure out what happened might add an interesting element to the story.
Otherwise, this is excellent.