Rue’s Dead Thing

Originally posted to Cohost on June 17, 2023.

Dead thing sits on the floor, watching. Doesn’t move an inch. Its skull is a crushed mess and one of its eyes popped as it died, a mass of slime dripping down from its ruined cheek onto one of its perfectly formed and perfectly unblemished breasts. Death’s eager embrace didn’t care at all for its body; the trap’s jaws only took its too-curious head.

Someone took the trap off, after, and it lies discarded next to dead thing’s sprawled legs. You could almost believe it took it off itself, if you don’t look at its head. Decay hasn’t begun to explore its hardening muscles and drying skin. Sometimes half the pleasure is in the anticipation, and decay likes to circle, likes to make its unwilling lovers wait until they’re all but ready to burst. Except, not really. Decay’s what makes them swell.

Dead and not likely to get any deader.

“Seems a shame, really,” Rue says, her voice tinged with just a hint of ozone. She’s tall, tall enough that even crouched she has to look down to stare at dead thing’s death-wound, and inhumanely beautiful. Her body outshines her jewel-studded gown, full and sculpted, just a hair beyond what true flesh can be. She didn’t model herself on fertility idols when she remade herself, but a watcher could be forgiven for noticing the similarity. And for drooling.

Her companion is not present, and it does not reply to her to say “always is”, and its voice does not rumble like a bound tiger’s growl, although a watcher could be forgiven for thinking that it does, and for cringing with ancient fear. Watchers can be forgiven many things.

“I really should do something,” Rue continues, “shouldn’t I? Even though it’s not really my sort of, well,” she gestures idly, a perfect little wave, light scattering off her rings, “you know. It would just be a shame not to.”

“Call Fran,” her absent companion doesn’t suggest.

“Oh, but she’d just ruin everything, you know how she is. Too beloved. She wouldn’t get it. And don’t even think of suggesting I ask that other bitch!”

It doesn’t.

“… no, mmm, I need to do this myself. If I’m going to. How hard can it be, really?”

Mere mortals have fought and died for Rue’s touch, straining their perfectly human bodies far beyond their limits to amuse and flatter and, perhaps, entice. Dead thing only needed to die. Its flesh smears like wet clay where she squeezes, stretches when she pulls, pliable and inviting. Rigor mortis pulls back its claws and dares to growl as it slinks away, proud even in defeat.

Rue doesn’t know how to fix eyeballs, so she puts dead thing’s remaining one right in the center of its new face. She doesn’t really do brains either, not like this, so she squeezes it into something like a jeweled orrery and likes it too much to shove it inside a skull. Maybe if she knew what dead thing’s face had looked like she’d care more about realism, but its body is what enticed her, so her efforts are distinctly impressionistic.

“Half-assed,” no one whispers. No one would dare, not where she could hear.

What she makes is beautiful in the way that her gown is beautiful, not in the way dead thing’s body is. Beautiful like a well-fashioned clock. It wears its thoughts—the moving things which will be its thoughts—on the outside, and its new second head glows with glossy radiation.

Rue regards her creation with smug satisfaction. Delightfully ornamental, and Rue has always loved ornaments.

Dead thing stays dead. Unmoving. Flirting with decay’s rotting touch. Quite rude, really, to have eyes for anything but her after the effort she went to!

No one chuckles in amusements at the petulant look in Rue’s eye, and they don’t brim with laughter as she fills her touch with her heart’s lightning and strokes dead thing’s cheek, its chest, the delicate architecture of its newly formed mind—sparks jump! Little flickers of electricity bridge her false flesh and its dead mass! It twitches with involuntary muscle contractions as her touch rolls through it!

But that’s all.

Dead thing stays dead.

Rue keeps on trying until she loses interest, a process which takes barely five minutes. Because fuck this, right? If it wants to stay dead then it bloody well can! She’ll go find something alive to have fun with! Some brave warrior to twist around her little finger!

She doesn’t say any of that, of course. Once she would have let thunder roll out of her throat and crush this little uncooperative corpse, but that was another time and she’s not like that any more. Really. She’s better now.

Instead she just huffs, glares, and stomps away.

An absence doesn’t linger behind her, sniffing at dead thing’s slowly beating second-heart and laughing to itself. It doesn’t depart before it wants to, tugged along in Rue’s wake.

But a while after that doesn’t happen, dead thing pulls itself upright and wonders if it should find a mirror.