. ice palace

[daisy heishang]

Dropped a napalm on my life without even getting your hands dirty. She was a ghost of a person - a glimpse in the night. One of those people that never truly imprinted on one single event. All her memories were chaotic and all the stories that followed her simple, misguiding name were full of ruin and tears. It was her niche. She seldom felt more comfortable than cuddled in the dark corner of her destruction. The child on the play-ground that watched you build a sandcastle only to knock it down as soon as you began to celebrate the accomplishment. Not a bitter woman - that would insinuate that she cared - but truly both amused and at home in the horror of another. There were people like her around the world, but most became serial killers or gothic literature writers. Daisy Heishang was neither, but she was an artist in her own right. Her talent for tattooing was something that clung to her name like a second-skin. She may have been moody, manipulative, and malicious but that was something she had easily conquered the talents of.  It was a contradictory art. Creating beauty by marring the skin. Something she always had found an interest in. She left marks on her lovers like the branding of cattle. Teeth marks, nail marks, fist marks, and even the burning heat of a lit cigarette to clean, un-marred skin. The list could go on and on. The reasoning would never be known, however. She could be the most miserable person on this Earth and she still wouldn't object to certain company. Adam, for instance. Some days she wanted to gut him like a squealing pig and leave him to the crows while others she simply wanted to marvel at him from a lounging position, watching the muscles in his jaw twitch when she spoke foully and struck a nerve. The way his tattoos seemed to dance across his body, the memories that seemed locked away on his skin, even as his eyes spilled hate from them when the drugs seeped from his system. Those nights where they were both so far gone that all the logic that told them they should never be together seemed so far-fetched. Like someone whispering things in their ears just for their own gain. Daisy never minded that she was turning Adam's life upside down. Just like she didn't mind with Julian or Luke or Ryan or Cole. She had not reason to hold them to a higher standard than the next. They all complained too much in the end and she always left when they became too boring. Adam had been more of a burning interest, but he was always much more promising to her when he hated her guts. Hate was always more expressing than love or adoration.  She was all hip bones, slim limbs, and dark eyes. Not quite thin enough that they sunk into her head shallowly, but the darkening circles under her eyes held no question that sleep had evaded her. Her hip bones proved that she hadn't been eating properly, the clear story of her constant addiction to withering away. How many meals could she miss before she couldn't bring herself back? Before she was light enough to turn to ash and drift away with the light breeze? All she drank was coffee, her food was cigarettes and drugs, and anything that she ate that wasn't that simply spun down with the water of the toilet minutes later. She wasn't only vulgar to her lovers and the people around her, but to herself as well. It contradicted everything about her. She was selfish, but not to gain anything for herself. No snatching the food of others to feed herself. No sob stories, no lies. It wasn't something she was ashamed of, but she probably should have been more aware. The wire-y muscles of her slender arms seemed strained against the action of exerting themselves. Not even the multitude of tattoos that decorated her arms could hide the track marks that littered them if you looked closely - or if you knew her. All habits die hard and she would die with them. It was one of those days. The days that came when she had to substitute the hard drugs for the ones that simply tided her over. The cocaine for painkillers, alcohol, or a bong hit. The only thing that kept her from going on a binge until she either woke up in her own vomit or not at all was the fact that she got paid to have a steady hand. She got paid for perfection. It was her job, her livelihood, and she could suffer a few hours of the day for that alone. It was all she did, suffer. Constant years of using had made her an addict with a schedule - the pity. She had taken painkillers and a drank her fill of vodka to take the edge off the night before, to keep her rushed mind to a minimum, and the day after was not kind to her. Not kind in the way she had to kick her vices cold-turkey every couple of weeks for a big project, but never able to wean herself because it was a habit that owned her soul. She was bringing all that stale irritation and resentment right to Adam. Surprisingly, she was much more vulgar around him sober - which she didn't frequent - and blood-letting was a particular favorite. She secretly resented him for being able to control his demons and get sober. Even if it wouldn't last, she couldn't even imagine herself like that. Her fingers ran through her bottle-red hair, twirling at the ends she hadn't bothered to brush out,  as her knuckles rapped against the cold hardness of his door. She held no care for the manners people requested society use and when that door opened, she slipped through, out of the bright light of the hallway and the waning day, grumbling slightly to herself. "Turn the lights off or I swear to God I'm going to rip the fucking bulbs out myself and shove them up your ass." She snapped, dropping down on the couch with ease. So comfortable in a place that wasn't hers, so comfortable around a face that so quickly went from neutral to the loathing darkness she so often got from him. She went from rage to calm with ease, rubbing her temples with a heavy sigh that caved her bird's chest in, and those dark red-shot eyes were suddenly watching him intently. The eyes of an apex predator. "Your eyes piss me off more than they used to."  After a moment of her silence, those eyes raking across the whole of him, she settled on the dark pools in his head. The ones that used to fill with anger that she couldn't quite satiate. The anguish that she hated not being able to pry from him and feed on. He never let it go. He held on to every horrible thing like a book and she never got to read the pages and enjoy the suffering herself. Now they were just dead holes in his face, ruining the view entirely. As if he were reaching for something he couldn't touch and she knew it wasn't her.  She could catch glimpses of the old Adam, but now he was even worse than before because she was completely shut-out and he was full of secrets. That wasn't his role to play. TAGGED:  adam kvasha WEARING: THIS NOTES: i will put a picture there later. i am still drunk ok. don't judge me.

[adam kvasha]

Dead as the lights on the wrong side of midnight It would be generous to say that Adam felt like shit. In fact, he envied shit itself. Shit in its eternal shitty state must be laughing at him this very moment, taunting every second he somehow defied this agonizing existence. Tremors racked through burnt fingertips, shadows blemished beneath blood-shot eyes, ashy lumps making home by way of his cancerous lungs, his insides at a tireless war with the toxic spew his liver dribbled into the rest of his protesting body. The agonizing pain of withdrawals were anything but an unfamiliar battle, tormenting him for years and years without relent. Despite being accustomed to the systematic torture, he could never truly brace himself for the pain. Since falling off the wagon the booze had returned, the pills fell back into his palms, and even the powder residue lined along flat surfaces in his apartment... but there was a tiny, temporary victory to be earned in the absence of the worst of any drug he had ever known: heroin. Yet in the absence of one poison, Daisy arrived in its wake to take place as his most fatal vice. She was every bit as destructive as he remembered, if not more. Even all those years ago, in an oil-stain haze of addictions and violence and struggles, he could find her rooted deep in his past. She lingered like a cloaked shadow, beautiful features splitting into two with a consuming grin of a true siren. She should have decaying wings jutting from her spine and blood red crescent eyes, sharpened claws and razor-fine fangs perfected for murder. Instead, equipped with a soft body and voice of seduction to hide within, hiding behind pink lips and the graceful collapse of ribs over the shell of a decrepit heart. Named for a flower, she was everything but dainty petals to be picked off a thorn-less stem. With Daisy came memories of the past, reminders of his old ways, mentions of their former habits. Nearly a decade of hardship condensed into the terror of a relationship. Her very presence shackled him to a history he'd been desperate to shake, escaping through jail and rehab thousands of miles away on the opposite coast, only to meet her head-on again like heavy artillery. Part of him wondered when she would leave, while the other weighed his chances at survival the longer she made herself comfortable in his same city. Last night is another ebbed blur. Dull, diluted, streaky. It's like fresh ink dragged down a sheet of paper, stained dark with mysterious blanks here and there that needed filling in if he was curious enough. He had already done the sleepless nights, the fast friends with strangers and ending up in unknown places ― it was effortless to welcome back, like an old acquaintance that had been tracking him down. It was only a matter of time after the end of his parole, the last court-ordered therapy session or mandatory meeting at the group center, beckoning him to what he'd embraced for most of his life. The brand of an addict, staking claim to an arguable disease. An excuse, a crutch, an identification, a life sentence. And Daisy, she was a lot of the same that he often couldn't divide the difference. He'd turned a blind eye, pretend that he didn't know what her motives were but all along they were the same. Bringing him down, making him need her again. Continue the codependent contagion that thrived between them for so long despite the outside interests, the other needs, the separate goals. They were a Hell spiraled all their own, designer in the way that they were prisoner to each other. This...them...it was their closest brush at commitment, at love. They weren't the type to parade around hand-in-hand cooing their affections. No, that was vulnerability. That was an attachment to be avoided in the case that they should hurt one another and suffer more than the loss of themselves. Ironically, they had failed miserably. Together they were nothing, apart there were even more. There was only a bitter end awaiting. His body spills over the bed sheets, concealed in the darkness of black-out curtains and limitless playlists. There's a knock on the door but none of his roommates to attend to it, each at work or occupied by another party. Remnants of last night's remains, trash and filth strewn throughout both of the two stories, a broken light bulb in the hallway Adam wanders out to. He quickly pops whatever is on his nightstand, a cocktail of aspirin and something hopefully stronger. The pressure around his skull should implode it like a watermelon, but he waits and waits and nothing comes of it. He's stuck with a long funeral of brain cells, rubbing a hand over an unshaven face as he discerned his surroundings, tugging on a scrap of a shirt down the stairs to the living room. It's the display of the apartment, reeking of piss and menthols. The furniture doesn't make sense, they've never had time for decoration, but it functions for entertainment. A stereo here, a game system there. Enough food in the fridge for a night and a liquor cabinet stocked for the apocalypse. Always expecting a guest, Adam absentmindedly undid the deadbolt. Daisy walks through. He rolls his eyes, a hand dragged through the mop of his raven hair. He needed to cut it. He needed to shower. He needed to do quite a few things, but his priorities narrowed as if wearing a blinder away from functioning life. And it all came tumbling down with Daisy brisking through the doorway, making herself at home in the graveyard of the apartment. Along with her complaints Adam can only notice that the lights are indeed off, a limit of sunlight filtering through the bare window of the kitchen. He doesn't want to know what time it is, how he'd finally become tranquilized last night. "Not before I use the edges to cut out your fucking implants and pour the saline down your throat," he snaps back with equal fervor, searching for a pack of cigarettes. If he didn't busy his hands or subdue his mind, it would be trouble. Daisy falls to the couch and he tucks a stick of cancer behind his ear, lighting another between his lips. Oh, it suddenly feels better. The tar seeps in, a satisfying tug of his breath. His head swims, stolen away from the cramping that is his being until the next hit. His eyes suspect the waiting bottles, maybe another handful of prescriptions. How nice a needle would feel, burning into his skin. With a shake Adam turns the burden away, cracking a window for fresh air as a fire glowed at the end of his Marlboro. The heat of Daisy's gaze feels just as intense, garnering his attention from nearly a room away. Flicking out the end, he approaches, fixing himself a morning hair of the dog that bit him. He feels like hell when he wakes up, he needs to feel like hell to cope. Figure it out; he sure couldn't. "That's great. Don't look at them, I never bother to look at your face," he offers, throwing an smug glance at her chest. She was poised like an irritated cat, begging to be touched so that it could sink nails into him. It was a familiar sight that amused him more than it threatened. A drink is passed her way at well, knowing that she'd be satisfied with the update of his habit. But it wasn't her this time, she didn't get him back into their lifestyle; and he reveled in that. "I heard Cole landed in jail. Did you make that happen?" he wonders out loud, swallowing the caustic liquid as he perched on the opposite couch, returning her gaze. "I hear he's coming out soon, too. You worried?" TAGGED: daisy heishang WEARING: Whatever works NOTES: Threw up a banner for you!