Love Yourself

Even though I've had enough, I still demand.

Not being able to die each day by those hands was the only pain she couldn’t bear — a cancer she refused to let pierce that sericeous, fragile skin of hers from within.

If Arya Cromwell was destined to be her Jezebel, treacherous and pestilent, then June Levine would be her Eve: remembered solely for a voluptuous sin.

Her entire world ceased to exist the moment she wasn't being touched anymore.

This time, the scars were itching even more than usual. It felt like their first time all over again, unrehearsed and maddening. Those newborn, agitated vermin people called veins and arteries relived, nonstop, the lenient punishment from the day before. Only God knew when Arya would be back home to make her angel fall once more.

Her wife had been a busy woman since the first time they met; places to go, people to vanish. At last, June woke up early to carefully prepare her lunch box for the long work trip: both her ring fingers — crispy and sautéed — accompanied by a bottle of whiskey. Then, she was greeted by a superficial scratch on her cheek. One that didn't bleed, yet burned for hours. A distant whisper, like a promise of pain.

The lunch box was gone. The door, closed. And she hadn't even managed to look back.

Oh, she wouldn't wait any longer. She couldn't.

June needed no dagger to have fun by herself. In fact, her brittle bones put on quite the entertaining show of resistance against her own incapacity. A sheaf of paper might struggle to tear itself apart — but each millimeter would stretch into eternity. After all, if there were a single demon roaming the Earth, He would still feel satisfied.

"Please… please, take away my strength."

Finally, the animal stepped out of its cage. Laid out on the bed, June wrapped her arms around herself, her body trembling from the crown of her shoulders to the base of her hips like a centipede, and began to do what she longed for Arya to do.

She didn't need to speak, so why keep it?

A smile. Longinus' smile. Then a bite.

Her jaw trembled, tightened. The assault on her lacrimal glands broke through at once. No flood would be suppressed.

Her hands melted while back arched, and that metallic taste began to flourish. Bitter, alleviating, a crude kiss pressed to a cadaver. The sheer prevalence of silence after so much restraint.

It was dripping down her face now. Her teeth, her body's blades tore further into the tongue's flesh, slow, deliberate and rough. It tried to gasp, to recoil from the suffocating embrace of the snake that was her own mouth. But nothing would ever be enough.

"Q- quiet…" She begged herself.

She brought both trembling hands together, as if in prayer, bones screaming to burst through her walls. Her legs convulsed like a guillotine snapping shut around her womanhood. And the blood wouldn’t stop. Could never stop. Always flowing, always crimson, always a pool of fluids born from the most stomach-turning soul ever to inhabit a body.

A chunk of her tongue had already come loose, sliding down her throat while June’s sobbing, breathless gasps warred against her teeth, shoved into the exposed cavities of torn tissue — digging, digging, as if carving a pit for the burial of her rectitude.

How she wished she could be unfixable; how she craved a purgatorio of her own, an eternity in all its intensity. No eyes, no nose, no body hair, not even skin — just flesh, intimacy exposed to the currents of air, staggering toward the nearest and most violent flow. Barbed wire wrapped around her entire being, offering her own flesh for Arya to eat just as Jesus once did, but with the opportunity to also savor this self-inflicted feast, this torture, this blood-soaked scourging that moved on its own.

Another piece. Oxygen now struggled to pass through the cave. Blood flowed ceaselessly from between her legs. Her stomach began to itch, gastric acid escaping little by little in a vapor that warmed the bubbling lasciviousness her tongue had become: a completely dismantled, unrecognizable, posthumous fetus of her own anatomy.

One last piece — and June was a vulture of her own self. The scraps of tissue gathered in the throat’s cavity, piled on top of one another, still pulsing. Her hands clutched the sheets, her vision growing increasingly blurred, dulled by the rusted metal of rage and loss of control.

Then came a thought.

If it had her cells, it was hers and hers alone.

The shattered flesh swelled with blood suddenly, clogging her throat completely and crushing the trachea like an insect underfoot. The tissue began to reconstitute from each single fragment, individually — life stitching itself back together. A Frankenstein of dead desires.

Each of the new tongues writhed on instinct, lapping at the walls around them as they sealed the airway completely.

Amid such self-epiphany, it didn’t take long for June’s chest to erupt in fire. The pale tone of her skin gave way to purple, the morbid purple of despair, and she thrashed violently against her bed. Her feet struck the wood, splinters piercing her skin like a spray of needles. She slumped sideways, crashing onto the floor, hands clawing at the swollen, burning mass of her strangled throat.

And at last, a snap. A limit breaking.

June’s hands went limp as her eyes rolled back, blood vessels mimicking ravines across the surface of her globes. Her neck bones shattered under the pressure, crumbling like chalk dust in an instant.

Life itself couldn’t bear her.

An unmatched heat began to rise from the nape of her neck, slithering as in vines across her shoulders and down her arms. Her body simply stopped altogether, and her wish was fulfilled: now, all she could do was feel.

The tangled tongues spilled out in a silent torrent of bile and blood. Her jaw hung open, fractured, pleading to tear itself free from the rest of her. And then, everything began to spin and dampen. The iron was gone — completely replaced by rotting wood, chains of fungus blooming through every crack.

There wasn’t a single glimpse of light around her now. It was a situation entropy had never been allowed to meet. Next, reality slowed down until it froze to the hilt. Forever.

Forever for anyone but June Levine.

Her eyes opened, and blood began to flow through her veins again. Her breath returned in a rushing storm, unstoppable. Time erased itself from her memory — but she already decude precisely what had happened.

She lifted a trembling hand to the back of her neck. No sign of rupture. It was whole, intact.

Calmly yet quickly, she rose and walked through the house's gelid corridors. The chill reminded her of that moment, gnawing at her mind. Lasting and nonexistent.

Nevertheless, that wasn’t the first time she had died — nor anywhere near the worst. Arya’s methods were far, far beyond than anything poor June could ever think of.

Bathroom lights flicked on, and she faced herself in the mirror. Despite everything, she was still there. More alive than ever. Present.

Unbreakable.

She stuck out her tongue and studied it briefly. Perfectly fine, untouched. Then, from within, the tissue began to fragment, only to coagulate and weave itself into a fresh, intricate network of scars in a few seconds.

Such a good experience couldn’t help but leave its mark.

With a faint smile on her face, June sighed, softly, and met her own gaze one last time before turning away and heading back to bed again.

"I hate you."

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