*draws a pentagram and chants something in moon language to summon @insilium from the depths of hell

that which is void is precisely the world of form, that which is form is precisely the void. form is emptiness, emptiness is form. reality escapes all concepts. — alan watts, the world as emptiness

being aware of awareness  //  the illusion of the ego  // a finger pointing at the moon //  liberation from the hallucination  //

veternity.

do not think about the empty eyes or the open throat or the rivers of blood, thick and thin, like roots of a dead tree he doesn't know the name of.  if blood are the roots, then the torso must be the trunk, and the limbs must be the branches  ─  !

the comical image is wrapped around his head, engraved in the rotten swirl of his memories. he plunges further to the depths - a free fall, speeding up into the abyss of madness and despair until asami pulls him back.

look at her.   breathe.   yixing refocuses his vision, zooming in the familiarity of her steady gaze. he likes the way her hands are curled around his face.

breathe.   the laughter dies in his throat, the smile on his lips extinguished. the fun is over. a shaky hand smears the blots of red on his shirt  (  which will be disposed soon - blood stains are the most troublesome  ).

he twines his fingers with hers and holds her hand tight in an unspoken way of gratitude. it remains that way for a while  ─  his silence and the link of their hands.

the trip back to their hotel room is a series of precise repetitions:  make  haste.  avoid  unnecessary  contact.  leave  nothing  but  the  kill  ─  like certain chapters of a book where your eyes are trained to skim over the pages in a pace not too slow to burden the mind with words and not too quick to miss the key details.

he holds her hand still, even as they enter their hotel room, one perched on top of the city skyline  -  cozy and warm to a degree, as all hotel rooms should be.

a home that is not a home, but theirs nonetheless.

❛  after  the  report........    what  do  we  do  next?   ❜    he asks,  in the usual lazy drag of his voice.  

❛  i'm  hungry.  ❜

filthythief.

❛   of  course.      ...... we  all  have  them.   ❜    yixing tells her.  

seen and unseen.  he is a man who skipped the simplicity of childhood and landed in the delicate bones of achromatic reveries.  to bend is to cave in to the allure of a life fully lived  ─  he cannot bend,  only break.  little by little,  until he collapses.  zhang yixing,  a child of the cosmos,  a pawn forged from an epigram of reality,  an apotheosis of decay.   

he points to the back of his left leg,      ❛   dog bite.  here.   ❜    and cants his head to the side,  fingers parting his hair from the back of his head.        ❛   ....fell from the stairs.    why do you ask?    ❜

iammatsu.

of all the games yixing has played, this is the longest and by far,  his most favorite.  a mimicry of the human routine  ———  wake up,  eat,  sleep. struggle to fit in society in between. he holds a folded newspaper in his hand and a mug of black coffee in the other. the aroma dulls his senses. when he looks outside, sunlight engulfs the space between the glass windows and the outline of the cityscape dissolves in a whirlwind of saturated sunrise and endless coastlines  ——  structures lie down, flaps folding on top of the other until they become the sea. people become grains of sand  (  and return to their insignificance  ).   constantly dreaming after waking up isn’t part of the game but his version of play pretend can only go for so long.

flames erupt in the middle of the newspaper in his hands.  the sea, the grains of sand, him,  standing against the backdrop of an unknown sky.  everything burns.  the rain starts to pour but the fires remain.  burning  ———  with the world  (  the pessimism insists  )  in a slow and painful smoldering, and being quenched simultaneously.  it feels good.  but the heat blazes like wildfire and his flesh and bones melt altogether like candlewax.  

when a cat ruptures the vision and tears down the surreal painting with sharp little claws on the open window,  he's not even surprised. strangeness is a normalcy. when he hears the knocking, he sets down the newspaper and the half-empty mug on the nearby coffee table.   the cat mewls  ——  yixing stares ( searches for answers in its round eyes for a moment  —  finds none )  and picks it up. he gets to the door with a stray cat in his arms and sees a lady  (  unfamiliar  )  leaning down to the doorknob.   thief ?

❛    .... who  are  you  ——   ❜