Non Plus Ultra [to here and no further]

When she began collecting it wasn't for the ideas of people. She liked the feel of them, the press of skin against skin and the sound of breaking bone. It tasted like the metal grit of psychosis on her tongue, licking against her teeth.

He was the rebirth itself. He was made of flesh, obviously, through her frame. Her hair was bottled to become his. The sun was blacked out and the rivers ran dark as they swirled down the drain. It got on the walls too, and they saw it together as a block, keeping it together. She disappeared when he came out. And was seen with what would become his personality; he came off as aloof, but he was indifferent to knowing what care was. Indifference itself at times.

Whilst he appeared coming down the stairs, she disappeared with equal efficiency. And they were separate, for almost two years. For most of that time she was the blackness, the darkness... the nothingness. Simply, she was not there. Or atleast, she wasn't...

Skip back instead of forward: everything he knew became a manifestation. Including the Limbo he had cornered... himself? her? the both of them? ...in. It wasn't supposed to end up this way - in fact, it hadn't been foreseen. He was the body; she wasn't even supposed to be a soul. But --- one day he ate five apples --- ignorance found itself dissipating to challenges. Instead of a soul, instead of morals, there was a heart. But there was also the core - located in the stomach - and god, would that core burn.

They were both great. He worked the core; he couldn't feel his own emotions but he knew others. He would cry for their disasters, grin at their happiness. She would take souls and make skipping ropes out of them. Plays. She called one of them Dessiah, but he got the lead without even trying and affronted Disaster.

She was the mental Asmodeus and he, in a naive curiousity only seen in children - and those who are always and forever children no matter how much they accomplish, grow, strive for otherwise - stirred physical feelings. He became the physical bearer.

In every right he should have hated them all - whilst they admired, others looked with disdain and with a lack of care. She hated them for him and he tried to love them with a shattered heart, holes blown into it.

They had never met in the middle and they were completely different... if it wasn't for the perfectly matched looks. She'd kill a person to get them out of the way, he'd kill to protect himself. She'd be nice to a person for the wrong reasons and he wouldn't hide his lack of caring... but people were drawn to him. She'd use chaos to create order and he'd maintain the order, hoping for chaos.

For over a year, longer, longer still, he was his own. He had no memories of her and he lo[ath]ved the 12th letter. But she was a user and he was the drug. He was the fiction and she was the writer. He was the chaos to keep the order. And she kept chaos to rule the order.

He walked down the stairs into hell, finding solace in what he could call heaven. There had been sanctuary and music and dancing and simplicity and that sweet, blissful ignorance. She hated the part of him that was herself but he sought to preserve her. She was what the world needed, but it needed a softer guise. She was brutal with her emotion and he was subtle and tactful in his way for people.

"You're crumbling... breaking away. And you feel like pastels between my teeth."

"No. I can feel them, those pastels. You just think you can."

He broke knowing the suffering of others and gave into a fury that would only be ended with fulfillment... of destruction. He regained himself and felt whole with the burning of it. She lapsed into bizarre silences, her mind thick with plots. But all of the feeling was his. The tarnished brush of humanity licked over him and he would keep it going. Despite all the chaos, and the brief wonders of order, he needed it to be alive. Or she'd reclaim him. She'd lose herself.