i can hate me harder than you can

Link to article: i can hate me harder than you can.


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|text=There’s too many of me in here.]]
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The mechanism: stamped black tin,
Leatherette over cardboard, bits of boxwood,
A lens
The shutter falls
Forever
Dividing that from this.
-William Gibson, //Agrippa//

Contains transphobia, abuse, extreme violence and self-harm,
and contains transphobic slurs. (8,150 words)

This is the safest part of the article. ([https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/palingenesis-hub Palingenesis Hub])
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[[div class="blockquote"]]

Name:

Sex:

DOB: **{{September 23, 1993}}**

Place of origin: **{{Brattleboro, Vermont, United States}}**

Blood type: **{{AB-}}**

Height: **{{165 cm}}**

Weight: **{{66.2 kg}}**

Spoken languages: **{{English}}**

Totality: **{{10.9%}}**

BMR: **{{0.086}}**

Has the subject cooperated willingly with staff? **{{No}}**

Does the subject display a grasp on reality or their own physical condition? **{{No}}**

Has the subject expressed violent impulses toward staff? **{{Yes}}**

Has the subject expressed violent impulses toward their own self? **{{Yes}}**

Has the subject acted on these impulses? **{{Yes}}**
[[/div]]

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I came out at age 16. I didn’t mean to.

I had a plan, you see. I’m sure most other girls like me did too, but I couldn’t have known that.

It was my mother that found out. She didn’t let me have a door with a lock, so I’m not sure why I thought a wastebin was safe. Something stuck out about that little scrap of paper to her, maybe the names, maybe the hand I wrote it in. I was practicing a new signature, with all the names I’d thought of. But I’d thrown it away, angry that I couldn’t write my own name. It seemed like such a childish problem to have.

But she seized those decapitated names from their grave, and thought they were just girls I knew, probably girls I had crushes on or something. It stuck, though, as odd in her mind. So when I wasn’t around, she would scavenge my room for more evidence. And as she plowed through teenage grime, she dredged up carcasses of me. A hundred other girls I’d imagined I could become, only to leave them etched in notebooks that hurt to look back at. All fertilizer for that seed of doubt planted in her mind.

When the secret harvest was done, she had a locker’s worth of evidence gathered up. Names, plans, research. Stuffed behind shelves and under mattresses. Even in youth, I couldn’t bear to not write down everything. Stupid then, stupid now.

I got confronted on Wednesday, two weeks since Mom started investigating. I had gotten back from art club, hands covered in clay.

“Can you explain this?” She asked.

I couldn’t.

@@ @@

Two hours maybe? Three?, seated on that hard little kitchen chair, every secret hope I’d had, rooted out and burned in the light of day. Mother, almost spitting, almost rabid. Stewing in my own sweat and horror, as she threshed away everything I had, finding the best points of attack.

“What made you think this was right? What made you do this to begin with?! Is it one of your friends or your teachers? I want to know who’s trying to take away my son!”

##5C95E6|“Nobody’s done anything to me, Ma.”##

“Well then, what the fuck’s making you believe you’re a woman?! What have you been reading? These kinds of ideas don’t just appear— Is this why you’ve been growing out your hair?”

##5C95E6|“I… yes.”##

“Unbelievable. Unbelievable. What did I do wrong?”

##5C95E6|“Nothing. You didn’t—“##

“[##0C45E6|…##], you have to see that this is complete horseshit. You are a MAN. You don’t have ovaries, you don’t have a uterus, and until you can get someone to shove those inside you, you’re a man. Got it?”

##5C95E6|“I get it.”##

“Don’t talk to me like that! I’m not the one confused here.”

##5C95E6|“Mom, I’m not confused about anything.”##

“Yes you are! Normal people don’t do this. Either you’ve been influenced by someone else, or you’ve got something wrong with you. Because this, this lunacy, it’s WRONG. It’s SICK.”

##5C95E6|“I’m sorry.”##

“What are you going to tell your father? That all these years, of him being the best role model there is, and you want to throw it all away to live out some- some fantasy?”

##5C95E6|“I’m sorry”##

“You know that’s what this is. It’s perverted, and I won’t let anyone say I raised a pervert! Because I didn’t, I raised a SON!”

##5C95E6|“I’m”##

“So what are you going to do when you’re a ‘woman’? Do you think that’s fair? You get to muscle in on all the things real women have fought for and fulfill your disgusting fetish, while still getting all the benefits men do?! Real women fight every day to be treated fairly, and feminist men are sometimes the only thing that can help that cause! I thought you were on the side of women, not trying to invade for your own ends!”

##5C95E6|“”##

“You’re disgusting. Don’t ever think of giving me a hug again. Don’t tell me you love me. I don’t want to touch you, I don’t want to hear you lie to me again, because this lying and this perversion is what you love. When you grow up and everyone’s expecting you to be a good man, you’re going to run off and live like THIS. Fucking disgusting.”

@@ @@

Sometimes, when you’re caught in the middle of a moment, you feel it. I know I feel it. That hot, heady flash of existence, the brain’s way of telling you that the thing you’ve just experienced and lived through is now and forever Past. Sometimes it feels like burning, sometimes like freezing. Cataclysmic or serene. The transfiguration of Now into Then, and not just the passage of Present’s presence, either. The indefatigable affixation of experience on the great plane of existence.

Like taping a kid’s drawing to the fridge. Or so I’ve been told.

It’s almost painful, like being passed through by a ghost. The sensation that you and your loving mind were, though only in the infinitesimal, living in a time outside of the tyranny of Now. Now is a beast, territorial and greedy. Rejecting all that it does not feel. Now is the Dragon. And its ravaging of circumstance? That is the burning, the freezing, the killing. Burnt into a carbon impression of an atomized woman.

To make a moment into a memory, it has to die first. And you have to die a little with it.

Maybe that’s what age is, what death is. We erode into our memories, though they are so vast we can hardly find them anymore. Winnowing fruitlessly, letting the chaff of an average life fall away to reveal those scant kernels. The last bit of sustenance you ever have in your life.

##5C95E6|“Ma, I’m not any different than I’ve ever been! I’m still your kid, and I’m not trying to hurt anyone. If you have to know this, then you should know that this is my life, and it always has been.”##

And then three hours turns into 14,600.

@@ @@

“…and you’re not going to live that way, if you want our support. If you’re eighteen and we haven’t fixed you and you HAVE to spend your life pretending to be a woman, then you can pay for college yourself. And if another disgusting man like you shows you what REAL women have to deal with, then we won’t be paying your medical bills. And when they lock you up for whatever sick shit you do out there, we won’t be getting you a lawyer, and we won’t be posting bail.”

Because if you’re living that way, living like, like I-don’t-know-what, then you don’t want your parents around anyway. So why should we burden you with our help?

“You know that if you died with no ID, even after you’d done all your degenerate shit and cut yourself apart and ruined your body, they’d say ‘John Doe’, and they’d bury you as male. Because that’s what you are, and that’s what I raised. And that’s what you’ll be! I’m not going to let you live a lie.”

Do you know how many people would kill for your body? You’re healthy, you’re young, and you can’t even be happy with how good you have it. You just want to change everything, and throw away your childhood, and pretend to be something you’ll never be.

“Do you think people will believe it? When you go out in public dressed like a woman, do you think you’ll fool anyone? People are going to avoid you, and they’re going to report you, and they should!”

You have no excuse to live like this.

##5C95E6|“##

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When I was eight years old, I was visiting my Nana in Maryland. She decided that nobody, grandson or granddaughter, should grow up without knowing how to sew. I had tiny little idiot fingers and I fumbled with the thread, but the greatest motivator is often the threat of disappointing your grandma. Once I had a grasp of it, she decided I should learn how to quilt too.

I tried to start with a pot holder. Simple, useful, and usual. I made it, Nana said it was something to be proud of, and so I was proud of it. The day after we drove back home, Mom made green beans. I wanted to try out my little masterwork, so I thought I’d carry the pot for her and help her out.

And, of course, the squares weren’t stitched closely enough, and the batting wasn’t thick enough, and my hand was as red as my hair. I managed to keep it all from spilling, though. Take your victories, scarce as they are.

That was one of those moments. The purest expression, really. I failed, and I hurt because of it, and that hurt seared the lesson into memory. A second of burning, soldering itself to Past.

Maybe Past is a wall. A beautiful wall, but a wall nonetheless, and that’s why we can’t go back. Or perhaps the holes— that’s forgetting— make Past a grate, Future a stream, and Present the dead things floating on the surface. Like a sieve, purifying the deluge of dead moments, letting that which is beautiful stay, and the ugly things drift on.

So what does that make the brain? A sewer, I guess. With walls of carcasses. A sewer in a catacomb. If only analogies were easier to escape than crypts.

I would know.

##DEEFFA|I hate having to dissect my own memories, but it feels so necessary lately— it’s as though I can only live in my head anymore. The stink of sifting through gore, the butchered remains of life. Slick. Scampering. Afraid. Slashed into wriggling pieces as it crawls upward, never escaping the knife. And I, left to knead my own dying consciousness into something resembling Shannon Joyner.##

##CAE5F5|And the things I’ve forgotten still live somewhere. They were unremarkable enough to get away, find shelter in the murky place beyond the mind. Is it good to be forgotten? At least then, you can’t hurt anybody else.##

##ACDBF0|I’ve found that when a moment becomes memory, you know it’ll stick. Somewhere deep, you can feel your brain cooking up those tidbits of thought that make a person out of itself. You can tell when your experiences die, same as you can tell when a hit will make a bruise.##

##84B3EB|Or worse, when it won’t.##

##5C95E6|And maybe that part’s why I don’t like looking at these memories in particular.”##

Mom stares at me.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

Maybe when your brain tries to make a person of itself, it forgets which is which.

I’m shut up and sent upstairs. Dad will be home soon, and won’t he love to hear what his son’s been up to all this time.

@@ @@

Of course, that wasn’t properly coming out, not to me. It wasn’t the plan, and the plan didn’t really change. It couldn’t. I trimmed the curtains between me and myself, not just pulling back the veil, but reducing the veil to nothing. And even if she and he held on their plan too, I managed. When scholarships withdrew, I found new ones and picked up more work. When I lost jobs, I just survived until I could figure something out. When—

Sorry.

Never mind.

I don’t like being looked at.

Even as a little kid, I told grownups to not gawk at me. I’m sure anyone can guess why this quickly became more of a problem. Riding the metro, waiting rooms, lines, buses, conventions, exhibits. No other choice but to bear it. Scopaesthesia is a bitch, and nowadays it feels worse; like I can’t escape people watching me. It just seems so draining to be noticed, I think.

Maybe it goes back to what I’ve said. About the feeling of today, shot suddenly, being buried in the shallow grave of yesterday. It’s a shock, to remember, but a greater shock to be remembered.

There was a time, I was at a convention in DC, and I could feel everyone passing me by, and looking, too, while they did it. Maybe, when they captured the light bouncing off me, they held onto it. The imperfect camera, its gruesome lenses lurking in nerves, and the 120 roll tucked behind lobes and glia, scouring the image of the trappings of reality. Stealing away my light for someone else’s mind.

This, again, makes me burn up all the faster.

Feels like I can’t stop thinking about things going away, or fading, or worse than that, remaining. I can’t help but be scared of things changing beyond my control. But isn’t it more frightening to think that, rather than everything being uncontrollable, everything was simple but I just did it wrong? But disentangling those fears is much harder than ignoring them.

There it is again. Maybe I’m being looked at now. Am I anywhere that eyes could be at all? Or is it just me and thoughts? Or am I just the thoughts?

Silly to think there’s a difference. Silly to worry. Eyes are scraping the light off my body, stripping me of Present. First just black and white, or white and black?, then printed out. Shannon Vivian Joyner, lying dead in another person’s memory. I thought it was documentary photography; now it’s a snuff film. I can’t see myself broken, but you probably can. If they’re your eyes that’ve stolen me. My broken self, snapped and crammed into 4:3, then drawn out and laid to rest in 16:9. Every wound a paper cut (perhaps I was mauled by paper tigers?), drenched and dyed in CMYK.

Weird, I thought everything was red, green, and blue in here—

Sorry again.

Point is, I can’t handle being stared at. It was the worst back in Frostburg. That’s a time I have a lot of memories from. Probably because I felt like I was dying so much back then.

Doesn’t help that I have low pain tolerance. Physical pain, that is. The kind that matters. Eventually, anything that’s hurting in your brain will become normal. But when your body hurts, it hurts however it likes, whenever it likes. Your head can spin, but your body warps.

Maybe patterns ARE better than unpredictability. Stick to the devil you know. If you lived the same twelve days forever, at least you wouldn’t need to deal with a thirteenth. Better to loop than swerve.

Or maybe that’s not right. You hurt if it’s familiar or not. Lord knows I do.

I get hurt a lot. When I was fourteen, I couldn’t stop getting hit in the head with things. Weird trend, but it stuck with me. Every hit, a memory. Every hit, killing another Shannon. Dropping where she stood, a bloated body in no-woman’s-land— of course, by that, I mean this brain of mine.

I always burn myself on the kiln. One way or another, it happens. An immolated sculptor, slain by her creation. This is my roundabout way of saying what I’ve learned, in the 16? 23? 33? years of my life, that pain is the greatest former of memory there is. That’s why, I think, I can’t stop imagining myself in the past as dead. Just something I’ve been doing lately.

I like being alive, I really do. It’s my favorite half.

##DEEFFA|So don’t misunderstand when I say that most of my pains are self-inflicted. Usually it’s just that I can be accident-prone, or careless when I’m doing something risky. I don’t know, that could be a manifestation of things I don’t like thinking about. But I don’t believe that.##

##CAE5F5|I have to do a lot to look like myself. More now than ever, I think. I thought it’d be easier, with a year and a half of E, unless I’ve just had the wrong expectations all along. At least I have tits, or I’m getting there. That’s a part I was looking forward to.##

##ACDBF0|Anyway.##

##84B3EB|Some mornings take almost twenty Shannons to get through. Every removed hair, every bit of dead skin shaved away, every careful tweaking of face and body; the pain of it is what makes me remember how to do it. If you still bleed, you’re still alive.##

##5C95E6|Sometimes, when I unravel my old self and weave a new Shannon over fraying, decaying## [##0C45E6|…##]##5C95E6|, I imagine that the Shannon in the mirror is dead, but the Shannon outside isn’t. Well, maybe that’s not so consistent. Mirrors capture my light, just like people do; maybe she’s alive and the reason I’m dying. Still, I imagine that she’s lying in a casket, while I decorate her corpse. Everything becomes a mortuary, where I’m painting myself for my own burial. And sometimes I feel like I’d be best suited climbing in beside her.”##

Mr. Ciobanu furrows his brow, marking something down. “Right. And… what would you say your //weaknesses// are?”

I didn’t even realize I was somewhere, let alone a job interview. What’s the position, and what’s mine?

I seem to be perched on the edge of a steel folding chair, wearing my work overalls and a weathered Sebadoh tee, tied at the bottom, that I didn’t even know I owned. This is probably a backroom of some smallish corporate store, judging by the CCTV, the safe in the corner, the branding everywhere, and how cramped and hot it is in here. But, I thought I already had a job?

Then again, I’m thinking a lot of things recently. As though I’m sleepwalking everywhere I go. Or, not to beat a dead horse (can’t kill it twice), as though I’m a shambling cadaver. Sewn back up from myself, but somebody forgot the brain before they sealed my skull. Left with just that high and towering Dragon inside.

##5C95E6|“I guess a weakness of mine would be that I sometimes get a bit panicky when dealing with a lot of things at once.”##

I’m not called back. After all, would you hire someone who left a dead girl in your office?

Most places wouldn’t hire a dead girl at all.

@@ @@

I’m probably getting off track with all this talk about death and memories and shit. Maybe I should talk about the knives.

Which ones? All of them. Paring (though you only need one), ballistic (calm down, they’re not that exciting), palette (and both used when painting!), craft (as opposed to macro), switch (can stab you from above AND below), mezzaluna (U+1F7D9), butter (I hardly know me), and a million more. Not that I have that many. It’s not like there are knife salesmen anymore anyway.

Sorry, for a third time.

And, again, I like being alive, a lot. I don’t want to hurt anyone, including me.

But GOD, the act of stabbing is one of the most magical things I can imagine.

Not that I want to do it or have it done to me. Plenty of people are fond of Jesus, but they don’t all want to be executed in ancient Rome. Hopefully.

Think about it, and think about pain, and what I’ve already said. From sharp sticks to Oldowan burins to modern electric knives, there has always been a human method by which something can be breached, pinned, torn. So in that way, the knife is like a motif of memory. A primal hurt, the immortal orgasm of misery, as the blade tacks the body onto Past.

From the point to the bevel, tapering inward, penetrating, almost passing through but just stopped short, by bone?, denied the pleasure of doing what it was made to do. The piercing of the flesh, and the connection— if in the body, is an instrument not a part of the body?— the connection to Then, embedding one in the folds of ego’s recollections. Like a trapped animal, gnawing at the injured part, but the injury can’t go away. The blade is now an outcropping, moving with muscle tremors, wet with blood flow. Like an organ itself, a transplant, even, that the body cannot reject, even though for once the immune system got it right.

You can’t escape becoming a memory. Your own or someone else’s. That wild winged worm, Now, is hunting you. And it flays indiscriminately, the cured and smoothed hides of past selves decked through its cave, painted in the parietal misgivings of the brain.

Can a Dragon even hold a knife? It can surely cut you to pieces either way.

I’m not in a cave, though. I am ahead of Now, wherever I am. A street? Maybe a canal? Or the middle of the road, or a sidewalk. These eyes don’t see like they used to; that is, they used to see at all.

I think I’m going somewhere I need to go. Wherever that could be anymore.

I can’t tell how I’m living anymore, is the worrying thing. Mostly, I’m either out on the streets (though I know not where I go) or sculpting (though I know not what I make). No, that’s not right. I can think of plenty of my pieces, at least. Sunray Major, that one took a while. I based Penitent off of Beksiński paintings. The Modern Romulus got me banned from its exhibition. Prudes. Nana helped me make The Modern Madonna afterwards, and that one was probably worse.

And there was, was… one with a hand, and a cervix? And…

My head hurts. Probably from the smell of the Shannons that made them. Perhaps they’ve been garrisoned in memory, statues themselves, a terracotta army of cracked-open carrion. Rotting, polluting, tracing the edges of the path that leads to Sheol.

Why Sheol? Surely 地獄 would fit better? But I don’t want to appropriate; I feel bad for even bringing that up. Maybe Magh Meall would fit better with my lineage.

But that’s Paradise. And I won’t be getting Paradise. Not in this life.

Reincarnation? That makes more sense. Born again from every memory of me, a continuous identity. Shannon Vivian Joyner is every age she’s ever been, or was. Logical, but upsetting for two reasons. One, I feel guilty, because then I really AM a stitched-together corpse, and it’s not just grave robbery; I killed every Shannon so I could be her. Two, when I dwell on reincarnation, on metempsychosis, on [[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-9499 !!!]], I just feel sicker.

And maybe that fits too. Maybe the Dragon is the great gravid Serpent, too, birthing Later so Now may feast. Infanticide is environmentally sustainable, after all.

Of course, Sheol eventually mutated into Hell. And everyone knows that a Serpent and a Dragon dwell in Hell.

Now I feel even sicker.

I guess that’s for the best, because suddenly, I’m aware that I’m sitting in a clinic’s waiting room.

@@ @@

There are others here, and they’re staring at me. I must have fallen asleep. Was all of this a dream?

Is that why things have been so odd? How I’ve been living in a half-formed eternity without going or doing or experiencing whatsoever? Why it’s felt like I’ve been swimming in my own brain, like I’m a stranger in my own body?

Then again, that’s how it’s always felt. But this is different.

Sorry, for the ##F6C403|fourth## time.

No, that’s not right. I’m just in a very odd place, is all. Sad as that may be.

They’re all still staring. I look down at my hands, still covered in clay. That’s not like me. I’m holding the clipboard, and it looks mostly filled out, written in blue pen. Just one question unanswered, shining up at me from the center of the sheet.

[[div class="blockquote"]]
Does your family have a history of mental illness?
[[/div]]

No, just me.

@@ @@

Examined, interrogated, then kept still, waiting for the Dr. and trying to keep my head above water. Dreading when all the world will fall away again, and I’m left with this thing.

Well, while I’m waiting, I might as well explain the whole Dragon business.

You can call it id or the evil impulse or whatever you like. I call it the Dragon because that’s what I see it as.

Coiled. Imperious. Wrapped around medullae, rasping its coat against the spine. Breathing heat into the heart and gnawing at the neurons. Níðhöggur, you might name it, but it would elude that name. The Dragon is ancient, it’s greedy, it’s hungry, it’s horny, it’s not willing to change, and it couldn’t if it tried. The Dragon is the link between humans and humanity. The Dragon is life, insofar as it is the end of it. And life only exists because it starts and concludes. Behind it are your memories and your endless deaths. Before it is you, and your unending life. But from tail to snout, life exists.

Then what’s life? What’s you? The Dragon drives the living forward with flame, until they can run no more. So what is the squirming, viscous essence of an earthly creature, yet one that can resist the fiery despotism of Now?

Of course.

The ##5C95E6|Salamander##.

@@ @@

[[=]]
##5C95E6|🜛##
[[/=]]

@@ @@

The door is opened, and suddenly I’m afraid. It’s cold in here, like a morgue, and probably just as full of death.

##5C95E6|“No, it’s not.”##

I shut my mouth, realizing what I said was stupid, and the Dr. is in the room anyway, so I should just be quiet.

Probably that’s why his face looks so dour.

“Miss Joyner. I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this.”

Tell me what? Is there something wrong with my blood? Oh god, is it my heart? I knew this would happen, I worried the dosage was too high, and now I’m dying. There’s one Shannon, stricken by Now, clutching her chest and fading, and forever Past. The horror of apprehension, memorialized by another stupid dead girl.

“Now, we aren’t entirely positive what the makeup of these masses are, but there’s a very high likelihood that it’s cancer, given your father and grandfather both had similar conditions.”

That sounds about right. My whole MALE lineage was led out of this world by cancer. Of course. I couldn’t hide my masculinity, I never could. Paint my face, poison my hypophysis, tear apart my skin, and try more tomorrow when it doesn’t work.

“Fortunately, seminomas, while inconvenient, are far from the most deadly kind of cancer you could be saddled with. It would’ve been better to catch them earlier, but there’s not a very high chance that what you have is going to turn out fatal.”

Stupid. Senseless. Trying to run from my own birth. Worthless, brainless tranny, everything about me female except the parts that are killing me. My stupid fake life, erased, because I stowed [##0C45E6|…##] inside of my new body, and now he’s rotting me from inside out.

“However, placental alkaline phosphate isn’t necessarily a perfect indicator of a seminoma, especially if you can’t actually see a visible protrusion of any kind.”

I’m a stupid, helpless fag and I deserve this. Maybe that tumor is [##0C45E6|…##], the real me, eating away my fake, sick body so that maybe the real me can be reborn. Then I’ll be worth something, for once.

##5C95E6|“Shut up. __You__’re not talking, I am.”##

“Pardon me?” The Dr. responds, logically surprised.

I realize again how stupid I am, to talk out loud to nobody and confuse anyone who’d be listening.

##5C95E6|“Sorry,”## for the fifth time, ##5C95E6|“I was talking to my__self__. It helps me deal with panic and bad thoughts, and, you know, I’ve got a lot worrying me right now.”##

The Dr. nods, choosing to ignore my stupid outburst. “I see. But as I was saying, we’re going to need to do some radio imaging, to make sure that it’s cancer. I can escort both of you there.”

Both?

“Yes, both.”

No, that doesn’t make any sense.

I stare blankly at the Dr., who now looks, for just a second, very similar to somebody else.

##5C95E6|“Come on, __Shannon__. __W__e have cancer, remember?”## I say to myself, turning to look at myself. My expression is angry.

No, no, that’s not how this is supposed to work. I figured this out already. What does that mean?

I follow the Dr. out of the room, back into that freezing hall, now void of its thousand thousand doors. There is only one other place for me to go, and that’s wherever I’m going. Because now I’m following myself.

Sorry, for the sixth time.

I realize that I’m keeping hold of my— no, her— shoulder, yet I can feel it on mine too. What’s this lunatic doing now?

The Dr. is too far ahead; neither of me can see her, though I’m still getting used to having my own eyes. I should be in there. This can’t have been what it was all along, right?

##5C95E6|”I think __w__e got too closely mixed, and eventually passed through the other side of our__sel__ves. That’s the only explanation I have.”## Shannon says. ##5C95E6|“I don’t know any more than __you__ do. It’s some Celeste-ass bullshit.”##

I stare at her (and it does indeed hurt), trying to grasp more than just her. There can’t be two of me. So who’s dead, then? Who’s Past, and who’s Present?

##5C95E6|“There’s not two of __u__s. There’s __you__ and me. And __w__e aren’t very much alike.”## Shannon’s tone is still harsh. Not sure why, I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true. I was me then too, so she should be mad at herself.

I start staring at myself (the one I’m inside) and realize that I’m dressed a little differently than she is. Come to think of it, when I saw her face, it looked different than I remember my own to be. Her hands are still covered in clay, and mine aren’t. And, looking down, I also take note of the more obvious difference.

That answers it. She’s the dead one. She’s the diseased one. She’s the Dragon’s prey. And I’m real.

So then find the door, he’s waiting for us.

Shannon squints, and heads into the darker parts of this smooth, sterile white hallway. At the end is a door with frosted glass, and it’s covered in locks and all kinds of security shit. None of it’s on, though. She enters. I follow.

There it is, that symbol of modern medicine, that mystery. The interring lift, remiss of a grave, yet, just as readily a symbol of life. The smooth, rounded superior, infiltrated by the inferior, which is to then be read, forming a gestalt result for the wider world to know.

##5C95E6|”See, that’s how I know __w__e’re different. I don’t talk even close to that much.”##

The Dr. is in the room, lurking in the shadows. Only when Shannon and I step closer to the smoothbore womb does he emerge, reminding me of someone else.

Then again do our thoughts turn to [[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-9499 !!!]].

Sorry, for the seventh time.

“Now, I don’t want you to worry about ionizing radiation or anything of the sort. You have nothing to worry about.” He tells us, which I don’t believe. Shannon takes hold of my wrist and firmly pulls my arm off of her. Her expression is gauntly composed, remiss of a woman about to be hanged.

But she doesn’t know anything I don’t. I’m her.

Why would we ever get in? Whatever’s wrong here, there’s no reason to penetrate that ivory plastic channel. It’s not safe.

Shannon glances at me for just a second.

I said it’s not safe, stupid.

She sits on the platform. Still holding my wrist.

You really think you’ll be able to fit in there on your own, let alone with me in tow?

She yanks me down to sit beside her.

##5C95E6|“Nobody gets to tell me I’m worthless. Including __me__.”##

I try and claw at her, at the encroaching tube as we slide backward, but Shannon throws her other arm over my stomach, throwing me against the plinth into a supine position. I didn’t know she could do that.

By the time I can resume my feral, desperate, ratlike scrabbling, we’re too far into the endless white to do anything. No wonder tomb and womb are spelled the same. It’s colder here than anywhere. How the fuck is she not panicking?

##5C95E6|“__You__’re doing it all for me.”##

My feverish mind lands on tomb, rather, crypt, those gilded filing cabinets of rot. Or, in line with the cold, a coroner’s drawer. Leading us on to vivisection.

##5C95E6|”God, I hope not.”##

We should’ve stopped. Now, a bullet in a chamber, a train in a metro tunnel, onwards to the bang, the crash, the death and the memory. Hurtling backwards through space and time, to our inevitable immortal incomprehensible Then.

And with the nonchalance of a lift reaching its destination, we roll into the light. Where we are, I can’t tell; the light overtop of us is too bright. This, too, is familiar.

Shannon shields her face and my vision vacillates, furniture and scenery frantically shifting from one state to the next; from a classic American funeral home to a dungeonlike, dirty cavern to, for just an instant, a lightless chamber beneath an iridescent and vitreous globe, tubing and leather straps and chains and zip ties and bungees and silk scarves binding me down, my blind gaze forever fixed on a slumped ##F6C403|Somebody## opposite me who—

Visions coalesce into a featureless blur as I feel something cold and jagged penetrate my navel, and judging from Shannon’s ##5C95E6|cry of pain##, the same has happened to her. Something’s fed into the gash, and the unknowable attendees to our simultaneous operation (undertakers? priests? surgeons?) begin to pockmark me.

It’s shameful, just how much this hurts, and worse how I feel about it.

Obviously, they start with castration for Shannon, propping the blade at the perineum and working from there. We don’t deserve modesty, let alone modesty cloths. No language can translate the ##5C95E6|noise## she makes, and no script can record it, but all I can feel is blind //schadenfreude// that these thoughtless, shadowy butchers have given her what she deserved. I lose that consolation when they switch to the labia.

With the first bloody order of business done, and two more tubes inserted (all three now pumping in gluteraldehyde), those inquisitive, bloodlusted bastards take more knives, whose beauty I can only assess momentarily as they fasten our wrists to the slab.

Thoracic, parietal pain comes next, my upper body opened and peeled, Finochietto retractor inserted, ribs spread (with one more than Shannon, of course), and beating heart brushed with silver vapor. The weight on my pulmonary trunk and the aerosol noises entering my ravaged, bursted ears tells me that they’ve given Shannon an iron coating. Mine heavy, hers protected.

Then down, opened further, revealing whatever we could have left to hide. I realize now that we are twin gingko trees, the last survivors of our dead lineage of selves and copies, stripped of bark (naked among gymnosperms) and excavated by some creature that knows not what it destroys, that it might rest in our bowels.

The first needling intrusion violates the common hepatic duct, stopping two millimeters short of fully impaling it. The second punctures the angular incisure. The infesting cold of this place leaches into the space between the held-open skin, and colder hands unwind my small intestine to start draining every last hidden, rotting drop of fluid within this groaning, desecrated shell. Two more abrupt stabbings to the cervical lymph nodes manage to momentarily distract my screaming vagus and drowning out Shannon’s ghastly ##5C95E6|wails## with a soothing tinny whine.

Soon, I feel myself emptied. Nothing remains: blood must surely adorn the hands of my assailants, my skin has already released every drop of sebum it could hold, natural lubricants dried out hours ago, and bile stains the ledgerstone, leaking out of my gaping back. And then, mercy.

I feel an axe, blessedly sharp, decapitate me. My assaulted nerves are silenced.

Because, as everyone knows, the only way to kill a snake, a Serpent, a Dragon,

is to cut off its head.

And now butchery turns to artistry.

@@ @@

Rolling and facing left, I watch, still able to blink and breathe and feel my empty tear ducts squirm, as Shannon is modified.

God knows she needs it.

I’m sure the same is happening to my body, but I can’t feel it. Like the Glass Lizard I am, I’ve shed the unnecessary part, and have thusly escaped pain.

Of course, as an artist myself, I see a gruesome kind of sense in what I witness. Of course the axial skeleton should be fully separated from every appendicular bone, save the pelvis. Of course the hands should be split down to the metacarpal joints, and the wrists inverted. Of course the spine’s too short, so my fibulae should be added as struts, turning Shannon’s neck into an excavator-like mechanism. Of course the ossicles should be embedded in the nipples, and the abdominal tissues restructured into a mock cat’s cradle, my ligaments contributing a bit of thread for the loom.

Maybe we’re being reassembled by ourselves.

Eventually, after watching this nightmarish constructing for long enough, dead hands lift me and splay the demolished cervical plexus like Ethernet cables, chopping off a tiny chunk of levator scapulae that clung to my terminating nub of a neck. The lights were too bright; I can’t make out the face of it, this grim auteur of the eroticism of flesh. If any such being could bear a face.

Something like a staple gun connects my threadbare spinal cord to the //nervi erigentes//. Time has vanished, so I have no idea how long it’s been since I was subjected to this torture. My greater splanchic nerve feebly recreates the equilibrium of pain that one with a full body should have. Shannon’s brain and mine, connected once again, but now a two-way street. Her throat was long since left to hang out of the hole that once contained her laryngeal protuberance, but her thoughts are still ##5C95E6|screaming##.

Finally, my spine is properly attached to Shannon’s ilium,

and the **thing** we are become is perfected.

@@ @@

##5C95E6|That was the worst thing. The worst thing there could have ever been. I stare up into that hateful light, flexing my abused muscles, as the butchers withdraw. I try to move my arm, and my chest tightens. I try to swallow, and my anal sphincter tightens. I try to move my foot, and my back arches. I am a **thing**.##

I stare into the dark, able to barely perceive that our tray is barely moving again. At least you aren’t stitched onto your own crotch. I bet if you tried to get a boner, my tongue would curl.

##5C95E6|Eventually, I figure out how to blink, and manage to rid my burning eyes of a bit of their damages. It hurts down to the atom. A dull red light ignites near the top of my periphery, and the sound of descending gears hits my and __her__ ears.##

With my own gentle mental impulses, I can raise our hips and look at

##5C95E6|the vat of molten copper##

and feel us

##5C95E6|start to##

descend

##5C95E6|as heat licks at thought and skin##

And the **thing** of us is left when the copper drains and the fire is extinguished. Nothing left outside, nothing wasted.

##5C95E6|And I feel as though I have suffered all this before.##

@@ @@

The plateau rises on its chains, retrieving the product from the crucible. Now, copper obscures my eyes, once again hiding the face of the hands’ owners, as the hands once more lift us.

##5C95E6|__W__e are carried with the utmost gentleness, now reclining on o__u__r anthropogenic litter, and are suddenly tossed##

[[=]]
soaring through cold air
[[/=]]

[[>]]
##5C95E6|and landing on dirty, dry stones,##

finally laid to rest.
[[/>]]

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[[>]]
##5C95E6|Objective time continues to evade __u__s, the smell of sand and dust slowly rotting away the metallic seal over my and __her__ nares. The last place that ever felt this familiar, yet so isolating, was my house as a kid.##

I do something useful with the eons. Every single time our hearts beat (because they beat in sync, fortunately), I count it. Seventeen million, three hundred thousand, sixty-eight times, I count it in total.

##5C95E6|If this is o__u__r tomb, then does that mean I was a queen while I lived?##

You were never alive to begin with.

##5C95E6|And __you__ were?##

I glower. Flakes of striated constantan crumble off our torso and I bend our L2 knee to look up at Shannon. If you know something I don’t, then think it.

##5C95E6|__Her__ arms scrabble beside my cheekbones, tilting my head down so I can meet __her__ gaze. I try and reach deep inside whatever this **thing** could be, filling my battered skull with Past.##

##5C95E6|The## Dragon ##5C95E6|purrs.##

##5C95E6|I see a## ##F6C403|Somebody## ##5C95E6|covered in feathers, walking toward me. Then thirteen gemstones: one blue, one gold, and one…##

Sorry, for the eighth time.

##5C95E6|I creak a little bit. I refuse to look at __her__. __Her__ arms migrate back to their posts beside my reddened stoma, holding it open for my windpipe to drip out. I try to think about Nana again.##

Then, light. New light. The soft sun of the world. And the drought overpowers the rot.

##5C95E6|Is it someone to fix __u__s? Or to finally kill __u__s?##

Copper still conceals anything real, but we are lifted up once again. These hands are not cold, but they are not comforting.
[[/>]]

[[=]]
##5C95E6|Then, the blowing of the wind.##

Then, the rattle of the engine.

##5C95E6|Then, the hum of a road.##

Then, the roaring of jets.

##5C95E6|Then, new hands, taking __u__s elsewhere.##

Then, the feeling of bolts entering our feet and a new plinth below us.
[[/=]]

##5C95E6|__W__e are on display.##

@@ @@

We must be in a museum. That’s the only place that could shelter a **thing**.

##5C95E6|But amid the orgy of gazes there is no shelter.##

And time passes, no longer in heartbeats but in artificial light and natural darkness.

##5C95E6|And the voices come more and more, and then the voices come less and less.##

As sound, effort, haste, and interest fades, the copper begins to degrade.

##5C95E6|One day, __w__e both get the feeling that the next time the lights go out, they will go out for good.##

This place, and every place a **thing** occupies, is only good for spectacle. Spectacle is temporary, and the darkness that follows is deeper than Past, deeper than reason or rhyme, deeper than space and time, God help me.

##5C95E6|Deeper than a## Dragon##5C95E6|’s lair, deep enough to, in fact, crush the## winged worm ##5C95E6|in __her__ sleep.##

And on that last day, the metal veils flake away from our eyes.

##5C95E6|I and __she__ look down from o__u__r pedestal, and see an old woman entering. The hall of this place is empty apart from that old woman; the **thing** is almost finally forgotten. But the face of this woman, I could never forget.##

Though age has wreathed her, it could not conceal her.

##5C95E6|My mother looks up at the **thing**##

##5C95E6|and says##

“Your faces look just like my son’s did.”

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@@ @@

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She shut the door behind her.

It’s over.

##5C95E6|It’s over?##

Everything’s gone. Black, black as night, black as bile, black as death.

##5C95E6|I feel o__u__r outer skin crumbling.##

It takes five trillion, five hundred ninety one billion, four hundred eighty nine million, three hundred sixty one thousand, seven hundred two heartbeats before the last flake finally falls away into nothing.

##5C95E6|It’s not like any of the bones of this **thing** could support o__u__r combined weight to begin with. __W__e fall, and land on a ground that has no surface or substance, only presence.##

Then I feel her hands grab my leg bones.

##5C95E6|I wrench __her__ shins out of my neck, and fling __her__ arms askance. Spooling my trachea back into my neck, fastening my head and straightening my lips. I know what I’m going to do.##

What’s that…?

##5C95E6|”I’m going to get rid of __you__ and everything __you__’ve put inside of me.”##

@@ @@

##5C95E6|I rip and rip and rip my__self__ apart, the pain halved. Soon, it fades. It’s all __her__s.##

I would scream louder than Shannon ever could, but my vocal cords just fuse into her urethra. The only sound I can make is a faint gurgle, bashing her hips up and down, flailing and flexing the few muscles I have control over.

You can’t do this.

Do you want to be alone?

##5C95E6|I reach toward my other hand, a momentary memory guiding me. I wrench a small shaping knife from the hole in my palm.##

You can’t handle being alone.

You just need the attention.

You can’t motivate yourself to do anything unless it’s to spite me.

##5C95E6|I slam the little blade into __her__ brain until __her__ thoughts##

You can’t you can’t you can’t you can’ty ou ca n’ t yo uca n’ ty ouca n’t y o u c

##5C95E6|and __her__ claws##

an

##5C95E6|have left my mind##

‘t

##5C95E6|and I cut __her__ out, stamp on __her__ face, and kick __her__ away into the dark.##

.

@@ @@

@@ @@

@@ @@

@@ @@

##5C95E6|It probably takes decades to put myself back together. I threw the pieces of __Shannon__’s remains into the dark, and so long as I can’t hear __her__, I can be content that the **thing** is dead for good.##

##5C95E6|I’ve no idea how I manage to fix my body. Maybe it’s pure force of will, but in the end, every bone is in place, every fluid is flowing, every stimulus is properly received, and I’m back to what I was.##

##5C95E6|Well, no, not quite. I kept a few bits of __Shannon__. The bits that I’ve been hoping for since I knew what I was.##

##5C95E6|Maybe it won’t last. Maybe everything will change again. But the silence, for now, is blissful, and the pain is gone. I think this is what happy feels like.##

##5C95E6|That’s probably messed up to think, isn’t it?##

##5C95E6|Oh well. Sigurð ate Fáfnir’s heart after he slew that## Dragon##5C95E6|. And I’ve lived with __that one__ for my whole life.##

##5C95E6|Who knew how good it’d feel to have a brain to yourself?##

##5C95E6|And now it all begins to make some sort of sense, with my memories my own, and those familiar streaks of red, green, and blue illuminating the shadowy expanse.##

##5C95E6|Backstage, I think to myself, though I can’t tell why.##

##5C95E6|Actually, no, there’s another thing I couldn’t fix. The holes in the hands. I’ve got my old knife lying beside me, but…##

##5C95E6|Seized by another memory (as though a ghostly whisper from a past life), I reach into the other hole, groping near the place where palm should meet wrist.##

##5C95E6|The edge of a piece of paper brushes against my fingers.##

##5C95E6|I slowly pull the scroll out of my hole. It’s dry, pristine.##

##5C95E6|I don’t expect to be able to read it when I break the wax seal (decorated with three center-facing arrows) and unfurl it.##

##5C95E6|But I can.##

@@ @@

[[div class="poem"]]
= ##DF0100|{{**My apologies. This was a test of sorts.**}}##

= ##DF0100|{{**We’ll make something better next time.**}}##

= ##DF0100|{{**Your friends and your grandmother are doing alright. Focus on whatever comes in front of you next. You’re doing quite well. You need only wait now.**}}##
[[/div]]

@@ @@

##5C95E6|I crumple up the scroll and throw it into darkness too.##

##5C95E6|I sit (though I know not what on) and wait. Like an idiot. But there isn’t anything else to do. My short, humble happiness drains out of me and pours into the abyss.##

##5C95E6|No __Shannon__, no## Dragon##5C95E6|, no## ##F6C403|Somebody####5C95E6|, just me.##

##5C95E6|Maybe that is what I wanted, even if for just a moment.##

##5C95E6|I miss everyone, I do.##

##5C95E6|But whatever this kind of life (or these kinds of lives) may be, it will have to go on without them.##

##5C95E6|I think I’m going to learn to relish these moments backstage. Weary of the play, and its endless mundane horrors.##

##5C95E6|No, the horrors will be fresh. The faceless authors of my fate are not amateurs. They lack //amare// altogether.##

##5C95E6|I sit nonetheless, dread and anger and regret churning in my ephemerally-perfect body.##

##5C95E6|So am I dead? I don’t think so.##

##5C95E6|The dead are with all the dead. The Past is overpopulated.##

##5C95E6|But the living are disparate from all other life.##

##5C95E6|I know, then, that I must be alive.##

##5C95E6|I must be the Salamander.##

##5C95E6|Because nobody that’s dead could hurt this much.##

@@ @@

##5C95E6|I look up to what I imagine is the night sky, and hope She can hear me.##

##5C95E6|Anywhere but here, anything but this, anyone but me.##

##5C95E6|But for now, I don’t care.##

##5C95E6|There’s always Later to try and understand, or even escape.##

##5C95E6|This is Now.##

@@ @@

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[[div class="scp-image-block block-center" style="width:100%;"]]
[[image moon {$alt}="upon Her throne" link=#]]
[[/div]]

##5C95E6|Just leave me alone with Her.##

@@ @@

[[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box]]
> **Filename:** Full Moon at night in 2025.01.jpg
> **Name:** moon
> **Author:** CAPTAIN RAJU
> **License:** CC0 1.0
> **Source Link:** https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Full_Moon_at_night_in_2025.01.jpg
[[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box-end]]

i can hate me harder than you can

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