All That Glitters Is Fool's Gold

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  This article contains adult content that may not be suitable for all readers.

  Sexual References: Features sexual themes or language, without the depiction of sexual acts.
  Sexually Explicit: Description of sexual acts.
  Sexual Assault: Features non-consensual sexual acts.
  Gore: Depiction of blood, gore or mutilation of body parts.
  Child Abuse: Features severe mistreatment of children.
  Self-Harm: Description of self-harm.
  Suicide: Description of suicide.
  Torture: Description of torture.
  Graphic depictions of transphobic and misogynistic objectification.

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October 18th, 2022

“He seriously expected you guys to take the test while the computer lab was down?”

“Yep,” Zelda replies, shoving a forkful of ramen into her mouth. The TV illuminates her face like an ashy ghost. “He said he didn’t care if a squirrel crawled into the building’s electrical circuit and exploded—we either took it or we failed the class.”

“Fuck that dude,” Xenia responds, sipping her soda. “And he did all that knowing half his students didn’t have a working laptop?”

“Yeah.” Zelda winces, and Xenia snickers. The noodles must be too hot.

“Hope he dies.”

“Haha, I hope he holds out until at least the end of my semester so I don’t have to wait until next fall for the class to be available again.”

Again she goes back to that painful feeling. Xenia shakes her head internally, but at least Zelda had good sense so as to not like wasting food.

“I hope he dies and you get the credit instantly,” Xenia huffs, rolling her eyes as another car crash plays on the screen. “You deserve it.”

“Nah, I really don’t…but thank you thou—”

A shrieking tone rings out. Zelda swallows too quickly and coughs into her arm as she digs for her phone.

“Who is it?”

Zelda doesn’t answer her, expression going pallid quickly as soon as the name scrolls. Like a switch, she slips into a deep, sultry voice, deeper than it already was, anyway.

“Hey. What’s up?”

Xenia cocks her head as Zelda steps off the bed and purses her lips tightly.

“…What?” Xenia can hear the cayenne soaking her tongue in an unfortunately wet performance. “It’s…9 pm on a school night. …Okay yeah, my classes aren’t until 3 tomorrow but—”

“What the…”

Zelda runs a hand across her face, biting her bottom lip. The voice on the other end of the line is frantic, despondent.

“Okay, okay! I get it, I get it. You had a bad day at work. I’ll be there in thirty through the subw—well, are you sending a car to pick me up? Then I’m taking the subway. I’m sorry to keep you waiting, I really am, but l-like I said—!”

She goes quiet for a second. Xenia tries to focus her hearing on the obnoxiousness drooling through her best friend’s ear, but when Zelda notices she turns the volume down and begins whispering.

“…Alright. I’ll be there soon. Do you want the purple dress or the blue one? …Okay, red pumps or—red, got it. You have condoms, right?”

Xenia bristles. No fucking way, is this—

“…Well, you know my rules, no condoms no—alright, alright I get it. You just want the lowbrow course. H-Hey, you don’t have to yell, okay? …I’m sorry. You had a bad day, right. Yeah, yeah, I really am, I promise. See you later, and stay safe.”

She hangs up and whirls around to Xenia, currently picking her jaw up off the floor with the darkest expression she’s made this year.

“What the hell was that?! Don’t tell me that’s the guy that pays for all of your—”

Zelda runs off as soon as she thinks she has the opening. Through her cramped hallway and into her bathroom, white counters glowing despite being clogged with makeup trays thrown about everywhere. Xenia tags her with stomping feet.

“He sounds awful!” she spits. Zelda doesn’t say anything, instead layering foundation on without reserve, wet ruby lipstick next.

“Do you have condoms?” she asks, as if that was a normal question here.

Xenia balks, blinking wildly. “What the—does he not—?!”

“Please, just tell me yes or no. I know he’s going to change his mind from just wanting oral, and I don’t have time to go to the drug store. He’s just…unpredictable like that.”

“Why the hell are you entertaining this guy?! Can he not buy them himself?!”

Zelda shakes her head, grabbing a brush and wrangling it through her hair. It’s a beautiful shade of brioche brown, roasted to perfection.

“We can talk later—”

“We’re not talking about this later, we’re talking about this now! I can’t believe you hid this guy’s shittiness from me, I—I’m not letting you get taken advantage of just because he—!”

“Xenia, please!“

Zelda’s voice cracks whenever she gets upset. It breaks like a vase, from the bottom up first, always in a way that shows she’s struggling to push through the pressure that comes with whatever’s ailing her. She hates it so much, because it snaps back into that disgusting soprano she took testosterone to get away from.

She turns to her, two-thirds of the way done. “…We can talk about it later. I promise. I’m sorry I never told you about him sooner. But…I’m under an NDA, so I can’t tell you anything pertinent.”

Her purple dress shimmers. The singular red stripe running through the middle down to her shoes bleeds like an open wound in the bleaching fluorescent light.

“Now, tell me if you have condoms. Please, for me. I promise he’s not cheap, he just…forgets a lot of things.”

That moon face falls, brown eyes withering. But Xenia only nods, trying her best not to pinch her mouth into an angry slit.

“…Yeah, I do. What size?”

“Average works. He’s not that special.”

“I would hope not. You have your pepper spray?”

“He makes me not bring it.”

“Fucker—”

Zelda finishes putting the last of her eyeshadow on as Xenia goes to get her bag from the bedroom.

“I’m not arguing with a guy who pays me thirty grand every time he wants head,” she says as Xenia returns, gritting her teeth.

“You should at least have some self-respect,” Xenia replies, handing her two bright yellow packets.

“I do,” Zelda quips, standing back to look at her handiwork. “I stopped taking work from guys who paid me like dirt because of this one. I stopped stooping to the Black Tiger downtown, where practically every other night some drunk douche was trying to sexually assault me for three dollars.”

Xenia frowns deeper, but only because of the circumstances. The two have known each other for five years, and it was hard to deny that before whoever this was, Zelda had a rough life. Being kicked out by her uncle at 13 didn’t do wonders for her mental health, nor her ability to hold down a job that paid a damn. It was a couch-to-couch surfing life, living between the margins of the margins of people who halfway gave a shit and those who smacked her around when she inevitably couldn’t come up with the rent after a night where she just couldn’t bring herself to suck someone off.

Even Xenia’s mom, for as little as they hated each other after soothing out their relationship a decade ago (after she finally stopped going by Kimberley) thought Zelda was a bum until she started going to college. She said she was going to become a marine biologist, trotting up and down the Californian coast to help save the sea otter population.

There’s a silence between them as Xenia runs over the fact that as much as she’s burning with frustration, Zelda did stop coming home with bruises and horror stories. Maybe a few terrified faces, but the guy was probably shit at sex or asked her to do something dumb. Rich types were always like that—they didn’t know the true extent underground fetish scenes reached, and they wanted in on the action without the less-than-well-off freaks who made it real. Without the work of the cruisers who pleasured them in dirty bars, the dominatrixes who whipped them around in cold steel dungeons, the models who truly embraced armpit pics.

“…Just stay safe,” Xenia mutters, eyes falling as Zelda takes a deep inhale. She turns to her and halfway smiles, ignoring the rumbling of her phone, most likely texts she’s receiving at light-speed right now.

“I will. I…I appreciate it. Do you want anything when I come back?”

Xenia shrugs. “Just you in one piece.”

“Oh c’mon, you have to have something you want from the corner store. I don’t mind.”

“I do,” Xenia responds gruffly, drumming her hands against the wall. “You. Seriously, all I want is for you to have an okay time tonight. Please call me if he fucks you up in some way. If he does, I’ll get my friend Jude to figure out where he lives.”

“A-Ahaha…” Zelda stutters, nervously twirling her fingers with the hem of her dress. “That…That won’t be necessary, I promise. Really.”

You won’t even be able to figure out how to get in… she thinks as she grabs her purse and pushes her way through the bathroom door and out the apartment. The condoms are in her pockets.

He's never as bad as she thinks. By how much she’s never sure, but it’s enough to keep her going without the pressure of the idea she was giving up a significant portion of her soul for the grind.

Breathe, Zelda. Breathe. He’ll be cordial tonight, surely.

---

The trip is never without a cup of nerves.

Zelda clutches her hands close to her chest as the elevator slides up soundlessly. It’s such a smooth ride she wonders if it’s even moving at all, especially because no one is interrupting her. Nobody’s ever gotten on while she was climbing to visit.

It’s an emptiness she can’t shake off. A six-sided notion of fracture, sparkling with gem-studded unease. A glittering chalice of hollowed vices, tittering perfectly every doubt she had about herself: her voice, her skin, her makeup, her hair. Okay, he didn’t care about her hair much—but she didn’t understand why. She didn’t want to ask and she didn’t want to know.

Maybe that was the part of her he saw as normal. Maybe that was the part of her he didn’t care about.

Maybe that was the part he wasn’t attracted to.

Another breath. It’s been two minutes. It takes five to arrive at his…does she want to say condo? That’s what he calls it. That’s not what it is, but it’s what he calls it. The more accurate statement would be that it’s a castle, a gigantic castle shoved inside what was supposed to be the fiftieth floor of a luxury high rise—but he calls it a condo.

…Why is this taking so long? She hit all of the buttons in the right order, didn’t she? 9-2-1-1-1-7-7-7. Followed by the big switch that appears right outside of the panel in short order. That’s the code to get in. The door will fling open any minute now…

She looks down at her phone. 9:46 pm. Then 9:47 pm.

She’s late.

Her thoughts swirl and consume her banally as a black shadow slides over her form, bringing with it a change in interior. The elevator slips quietly from sleek, steel panels of minimalist vacation rentals advertisements to a rich, auric tapestry of flowery bas-reliefs. Mounted riders with bayonets and starry flags cruise along the railings, forever circling a faced sun staring down from the ceiling. It is engraved in the style of early Western medieval art, with twelve trumpets facing upwards towards it in dance, all enrobed in butterflies.

Zelda doesn’t notice the transformation until the anachronistic digital display dings. She gasps, keeping her hands away from the men on horses, who consider her shadow to be a distraction from their march.

The door slides open and she rubs her eyes. A glut of radiant light swells and breaks to a beautifully yellow hallway choked with golden-hued baubles, trinkets, wonders, and impossibilities. She steps out before it all comes into focus, up until she’s brought to reality by a familiarly thick British accent yelling.

“Bloody hell Mason, I said tomorrow. Tomorrow! Not Thursday, not Friday, not Saturday—tomorrow, you useless fucking cunt!”

Her entire body shudders.

“If I don’t have an equity statement on my desk by 8:30 am tomorrow, I am seizing this pathetic digital alchemy scheme of yours! All of your invested crypto too, you hear me?! You answer to my advice, shitnuts, not your ass-mouthed wife’s!

There he is. Chrysophilius Marshall. Who sometimes went by “Skitter” for…some reason unbeknownst to her. Was it because his middle was Scooter?

She freezes while waiting for his footsteps to catch up to her. Here, his voice is difficult to echo because of all the stuff cluttering everywhere but the walkways.

The off-kiltering sears her sense of reality. Nearly stumbling over a hyperbolic essocube, she tells herself this is all normal. He’s normal, this stuff is normal. Totally. Completely. Unabashedly.

She does this literally every time she’s here, because it was how she coped with the fact her NDA covered…well, all of this, described officially as “anomalous paraphernalia”. Each corner was a new TV that warped the edges of her vision, every nook and cranny a jar full of unknowns chattering in pataphysical tongues.

Hey, are those emerald eyes staring at her? Is that three-headed bird in the cage above her real? The dragon flying around her feet was just a robot, right?

It’s as if a second camera is shoved into the back of her head when he finally makes eye contact with her.

“Oh?”

His eyes light up.

“Oh! Oh! Zelda!”

No time to react as he rushes and hugs her. Hard.

“Zelda, you’re here! My goodness, I’ve missed you!”

Her entire body goes stone as his heavy cologne and thickly-clothed arms envelope her in a pseudo-loving embrace. But as he leans in for a kiss, he cocks his head, pulling back.

“Oh Zelda, what’s wrong? Did the underground not treat you well? You’re as stiff as wood!”

She shakes her head.

“Hey, I told you to take a cab,” he remarks with a sigh. Is it a dismissive sigh? “There’s too many rats down there for a pretty face like yours. You wouldn’t want your dress getting ruined by some random sod, now would you?”

She shakes her head again one more time, not responding at all. His reaction is to tilt his own in the other direction, blinking wildly.

“…Do you want some wine to loosen you up then? I have some vintage Merlot I just brought back from my business trip to Paris. Five grand per bottle each, straight from the Alsace vineyards!”

Mentioning the price of things isn’t a conscious act of domination on his part. That’s what Zelda thinks anyway, with how casual and nonchalant the aphorisms always are. Money was simply something that existed to someone like him, a something that never even registered in his mind as possibly ever being a problem. For other people? Sure, but he was not other people. He was one of the heirs to Marshall, Carter and Dark Ltd. An “inheritor of the world” as his boss Iris put it, an executor to all of its inner workings and supernatural machinations.

That was what he had told her, anyway. Babbled over the course of many, many one-sided conversations about himself, all more shallow than she expected too, especially when she pretended to be interested and pressed for details. Which was supposed to be more disturbing to her: the fact he was a nepo-baby billionaire, or the fact he wasn’t entirely honest about what he did for a living?

Zelda shakes her head again until she finds herself nodding halfway through, because alcohol will make this easier, actually. It will be easier because he’ll stop her at a single glass, not out of greed, but a charmingly ironic sense of safety. Chrysophilius always said he’d hate to do her drunk, because he couldn’t stand girls who weren’t coherent enough to say his long, pretentious yet weirdly charming name that sounds like the word ‘chrysalis’, which brought to mind jeweled scarab beetles and the way they skittered around on dry stone and bark.

She’ll take what she can get.

“Wonderful,” he says with a bit of breath in his voice. “I think you’ll really appreciate this—it has a deep, full body to it that’s a bit hard to come by. It’s been such a pleasure drinking on the plane—a shame they limited me to only buying five.”

“Only five? They said that to you?”

He snickers. “Yeah, you should have seen them. I said ‘hey, lookie here, I’m getting one of these for a nice lady I’m keeping back in NYC—you gotta let me get some extra for her to take home. You wouldn’t want a guy like me to let her down, yeah?’ But they wouldn’t budge.”

He wants to give me a gift?

“But alas, ugh—I kept getting stonewalled. They whined about ‘other customers’ wanting to ‘enjoy the experience too’ like—hello, I can pay more than their second-rate pockets ever could! I deserved the extras. Do they want to make money or not?!”

He gulps, pulling her in close. She looks up to him glassily, hanging off his arm faintly and daintily. It’s a display he likes, because he’s not as tall as he wants to be, but she’s still shorter than him. So he gets to have the pretend experience of hoisting her up like she’s to be his fiancé, cauterized to his hip forever.

It lasts all of three seconds before he clicks his tongue and plunges down to reality.

“…I’m sorry I can’t send you home with any of these, Zelda.”

Wh…Why does he sound genuinely hurt?

If she were stupid, she would have thought to herself why he didn’t think to give up one of the five he got. But she knows better. She knows better because Chrysophilius Marshall does not share—he only gives away what he thinks he does not need, if you’re lucky to catch the small part of the world he doesn’t think he has to have.

Pulling her by the wrist off his quickly souring mood, they tug each other down the halls wordlessly. She ends up being the one to find the wine first, and turning his cavalier candor around as swiftly as it came. It’s not that hard to see the bottles when they’re pitch black against a wall smothered in sunlight hues.

“A-Ah,” he stutters, catching himself. A swirl of surprise froths at the edge of his mind. “Are…Are you as excited as I am?”

I dunno, she thinks. She wants to go to bed more than anything else. The wine will help her get there. But it will also help her calm down from the images of Xenia quickly impressing themselves upon her brain with every new treasure her eyes glaze over. Every new room too, and foyer-like structure. Dozens, if not hundreds stretched out in every direction, everywhere, floor to unseeable ceiling, stuffed to bursting with practically everything they could possibly fit.

She can hear that voice telling her to run, to get out of here. Xenia actually knew about this kind of stuff more than Zelda expected when they got to know each other—apparently she created a lot of items similar to these in her spare time on the computer. She had a whole friend group who did it, and they spoke in memes and incomprehensible slang on Discord servers while complaining about ‘janitors’ and how late-stage capitalism was destroying the video games industry.

Finally, she gets her act together and points to a random room in a random direction. Chyrsophilius leans over to get a better look, and smiles wide.

“…Oh? That one? I didn’t know you liked…”

He blushes, putting a thinly-gloved hand to his neck until Zelda follows his gaze and realizes what she’s done.

“Of course,” she says with a heavy sigh, and he beams. “How many figurines are in there?”

“Hm…I lost count a while ago. I know the number of anime they all come from constitutes at least four hundred.”

“H-Have you even watched that many…?”

He shrugs. “Unsure. At work, I have it on in the background all the time, but I don’t know if that’s really watching them, hehe…”

Those eyes of his sparkle again. So rich like fresh earth, complimenting all of this extravagant warmth. Zelda clicks her tongue, her annoyance fading from prickly nuisance to gossamer unevenness in record time. It’s hard to keep up the facade of knife-shaved stalwartness around him when he gets like this—when his pupils widen and he looks at her with what she thinks is a breaking of the service pact they both signed. The resonance between his house, his money, and his demeanor falls to the wayside when it’s just his soft, boyish face and his fluffy, chin-length blonde hair between the two of them, barren and seeking.

…How peculiar. Zelda never said it aloud, but that cut always felt…incongruously off for a businessman. What was he trying to do there?

She lets the dissonance jostle around her brain as she takes his hand and drags him up the stairs. For who she did that for, she’s not sure.

“…Oh god.”

The room dims as she walks in, but not enough. The figurines face her pallidly, plastic eyes and resin poses too close to one another for comfort. Almost like an industrial pig farm, each one poised for easy and dirty consumption.

Chrysophilius winces, but tries not to let his pride take a hit.

“Sorry!” he chirps. “I uh, I wanted to keep them all in one room because all of my other stuff will corrode them if I don’t. Watch your step!”

He makes a face too embarrassed for Zelda’s liking, so she stops her gawking before it gets to her as well. To his credit, this collection isn’t nearly as gaudy or tacky as she expected it to be—there’s only a few that look like they come from hentai, and even those are…tame. Disgustingly disproportionate with breasts the size of watermelons, but tame.

…Okay, breathe. Breathe, Zelda. He has a bed in here. That’s good, she won’t have to hurt her back sucking him off on the hard floor. She’s not going to consider the implications of why said bed is here.

Did one of these just blink at me?

He knocks her out of her stupor by grabbing her collar and pulling her in close. His eyes narrow cuttingly, taking a serious glint. The room’s stillness and quiet seems to worm itself down his back like a cockroach’s footsteps.

“…Okay, no more playing around, Zelda. Let’s get down to business, shall we?”

---

He doesn’t hesitate to kiss her, pulling her onto the bed with him. It’s been long enough to wait, long enough to pretend he doesn’t need to relieve himself from a delayed flight this morning, several suppliers failing to show for their appointments, and that idiot Mason not being on time like he always was.

Also…he was supposed to meet Madam Percival tomorrow for his quarterly performance report. That was his boss’s boss…he needs all the good luck he can get now.

Her lipsticks smears all over his face as he keeps himself there for longer than either can breathe. When they break, they take deep inhales and go back to it again, with him pushing his tongue in all the way, heart beating fast. Zelda shivers, but such is her usual routine. She's cute when she reacts, no matter what it is.

When they pull themselves apart, his hand pats her sides unexpectedly.

“…You brought condoms?”

Flinging the packets aside, he swirls her around to the long part of the bed and pins her. The dimness casts an umber-hued shadow over his face and the rest facing her, blotting his clothes blacker than they already were.

She, on the other hand, has all of the color scraped from her outfit.

His face bleeds with red blushes and bitten lips. A dog would possess more collected-togetherness than he has now, but he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care. The static in his head is building, and it needs to be released.

“Lovely dress you put on for me,” he says in a tone that can’t hide how tight his pants are becoming. “I’ve never seen this one before…did you buy this with my money?”

He grabs her breasts and squeezes. Oh yes, she wore the loose bra today. She really was good at this.

“Of course,” she replies plainly. “Most of my stuff is bought with the money you give me.”

“Yes, yes…!” he titters, playfully and gently. “I made you so pretty, Zelda, I made you so pretty…! Look at how pretty I made you…!”

He sounds proud of himself, and he is. It lit a fire in his chest to know he treated her better than anyone else who had ever looked at her, that all of this wasn’t for nothing. She was practically glowing after two years steeped in his money, as anyone lucky enough to know him should.

She exposes her neck and he doesn’t hesitate in pleasing himself, going down on her while grinding her crotch. He bites her, panting, one hand playing with her chest, the other pulling her dress up.

His tongue is hot, and wet. It’s going anywhere he can think of, over whatever flesh he can see and possess.

“Please, say my name in that deep voice of yours…”

She squeaks.“Chrysophilius…”

He grunts, biting her again. There’s no care for the fact she’ll have to show herself in front of professors tomorrow. “More.”

“Chrysophilius…please…”

“Oh yes, you cute little thing…”

All girls should have voices like you, he thinks as blood surges through his hips. He whines as the thought finishes, a subtle thread of hatred sewing them together while his cock presses up against her clit. It sticks out softly through her black silken underwear.

He pulls her close to reassure himself, to convince himself he’s fucking a real woman. To convince himself against the images laced around his head from days long gone, from days of boarding schools pierced by unspeakable humiliation performed in locker rooms.

Holding hands with boys and having long hair made you a—

Breaking a little bit, he bites her again, this time much harder than he knew himself capable of. She whimpers, squirming beneath him.

She whimpers in a way that’s real, not wet with honey or the saccharine ambrosia he’s paying her for. He grinds faster, trying to fill his mind with endorphins to flush out the doubt. It’s what he does best—money was a wonderful filler whenever you were sad, because you could just buy something for a rush of dopamine. And money didn’t just buy things, it could buy people too. Entertainers, secretaries, waitresses—it could buy the most precious thing between two people there was: sex! It could buy you sex with a gorgeous girl, as customizable as you wanted, and if he got tired of her, well, onto the next one!

That was living, wasn’t it?

“…Fuck,” he swears under his breath, getting off of her, panting. His head blanks, but not from pleasure. He finally undoes his pants, the hot coiling in his legs and crotch fading.

“That isn’t working. Turn over.”

Zelda sits up as he glares not at her, but himself. The sneer slashes his normally quaint face in two, one half held up by abashed shadows, the other stumbling on its rotational weight.

Butterflies were able to fly so long as you didn’t touch the golden dust keeping their wings together too heavily. He gets the most aroused whenever he’s denying himself, whenever his anxiety mixes with the sweat on his back and brow to plunge him into sticky mind messes.

When she hesitates, he grunts and grabs one of the condoms off the floor.

“I said turn over, Zelda. I’m going to unzip that dress of yours and do this the usual way.”

Immediately, his face softens. His hand falls from her hair, and she relaxes.

He ponders a response looking at her naked skin. It’s shiny, peachly tawny, dotted with a cluster of moles on her left shoulder blade. Supple too, arriving down at a tight hourglass shape before splaying out into what was a beautiful ass.

“…Of course,” he mutters even more delicately than she did. “All good women say that, they all want to be treated like the flowers they a-are…”

That reassures him in the moment. It reassures him as he aligns everything back up again. This is what all of the boys at boarding schools had up as posters on their walls—buxom babes with snatched proportions, locks so shiny it was practically a currency in itself, plush assets flashing outwards for their ogling. This was what they all gathered around for after curfew to watch on shitty VHS tapes, eventually less shitty stolen DVDs, most often with non-descript men, but occasionally, each other. The latter was hotter, because the former scared him—the sex between his mom and dad didn’t sound like that. There was never any moaning or ecstasy, only arguments.

He presses a hand to her spine and she bristles. The reaction comes out as a groan, but he takes it as a moan and slips a condom on without hesitation.

“God, your hips…”

“F-Fuck…”

His hands run over her bare legs again as he’s grinding. Nothing’s going in.

“H-Hey,” he says, his head fogging with the sensation of a revving motor. “C-Can you say my name while I…?”

Distracted by his own pleasure, he whines as his uneven rhythm quickens. She purses her lips, pressing her ass a bit further into him.

“Chrysophilius, you’re doing such a good job…”

Did she do that to make him—

Chrysophilius gulps as he examines both of her holes. They’re so delightfully colored.

But he’s only ever used one. The ‘proper’ one, the one girls had made for men.

…Is he going to get in trouble for wanting the other…?

She…She had such a deep voice, but that didn’t make her a…a…

Hesitation always kills the mood, but he does his best to buoy it back up anyway. In his mind, she’s always perfectly okay with what he wanted, always perfectly aroused in a way that’ll align with his own. So she’s going to be perfectly okay with a question like this, right?

“…Can I…uh…”

Wow, smooth move handsome. That’ll impress her for sure.

“I…I, uh…”

Why can’t he get the words out…?

“Z-Zelda,” he forces himself to say, sliding his hand up and down again across her ass. He gives it an unsatisfying squeeze, finally looking at her in the eyes he feels exist on the back of her head.

“I…what?” she stammers.

He stumbles internally on how upset she sounds. Wait, is she upset? What if she’s just…surprised?

“I-I…I s-said w-what I said…”

Such a shaky voice.

“I…”

Chrysophilius finds himself moving in time with a heartbeat. With a heartbeat not his own, but one cloyed through the shifting dimensions of his house, the moving memories in his mind. His bottom half moves with a disgust assaulting his brain to the rhythm of his mother’s inaudible voice, a voice that once rang out in a house that felt bigger than his could ever dream of.

His upper half moves with slippery dereliction. With wanton abandon, halfway flashbacks.

At seven years old, he heard his mother call his father a faggot. He does not remember this and will never again, but the word buried itself into his spine with a sharp, ugly drill. It buried deep with an attraction he could not control and mated with it furiously, viciously, maliciously. With its teeth, tearing precious, vulnerable flesh apart until there was only blood, only haphazard gazes towards what he liked, only cursing under his breath when male strippers came up in illicit business meetings to greet him. Suddenly, without warning and without fail, he found himself in another room. Suddenly, he found himself unable to consider his own body attractive in relation to them, a bleaching of the intended purpose society and his mother put upon him.

She yelled at Amos again when he was ten. That time he remembers. It was the same word, the same hideous word, all wrapped up in maternal hate. He wouldn’t have sex with her, and that was what she called him as a result. Chrysophilius never understood this, because his dad had sex with a lot of women that weren’t his mother. He did it so often he knew them by name, because occasionally they’d say hi to him over the holidays at school.

Could you still be a faggot and have sex with women?

Was…Did that make him…?

Her voice…her body…her lower half…

“…I’m sorry,” is all he can mumble, and she doesn’t hear. He fights her struggling, holding her closer, but before he does, he pulls his pants up. He pulls his pants up for his own sake, not hers, because the shame is flooding and salting him. It’s burning the wheat fields, yellow and rich in their yields. Unending in the butterflies which will come to land on their minuscule flowers and carry pollen somewhere else just as fertile.

She nearly punches him, about to totally snap and until he cries and pushes his head into her shoulder.

There are no words between them as she loosens and again he falls deeper into her. He falls cavernously into what he sees as a one-sided despair, because he does not know her and, like the good object she is, he does not know how to. He does not know how to, even though he is human, and has matched flesh with her before, because she is at once both a woman and something that defiles him, something that makes everyone proud of him until she opens her mouth.

Zelda finally says fuck it and pulls herself away. Chrysophilius grabs her and wails.

“P-Please!”

“What do you want, Chrysophilius?! What the fuck is wrong with you tonight?!”

Oh shit. That comes out angrier than she expects. She shudders at her own cruelty in a way he rarely did, watching him cycle through iterative collapse after iterative collapse until finally he just screams. He just screams from all of the pent-up pressure, his hands muffling his own sin.

Silence.

Pure, gilded silence.

All she can do is stare, stare with wide eyes, stare with eyes wider than any possibility or radius that ever existed as a dawn of realizations slide down her back.

All he can do is cry loudly. All he can do is cry, all he can do is wail, all he can do is screech for something, something, anything. He has no social capital left in this limited, infinitesimal scenario.

There is no one to tell this to except the one who caused it.

Against everything she knows is good, Zelda sits back down on the bed. Her mind blanks staring at him, rolling over the feelings she had when she was ten, fifteen, and eighteen. The back-alley men she did it with and the wondering of whether she was a guy or a girl, since she did it so freely with both. There was no label to describe the kind of person she was—and the invisibility was suffocating. It was as alienating as aliens could get—she was an outsider among the lesbians and not welcome amidst the gay men. Among the other various groups with various names, they too saw her as a freak and aborted any hope of membership with them.

That feeling didn’t go away with her first T-shot, even as she felt a relief of belonging to her own body. Having access to the DIY stuff meant she still skated along the edges of recognizability—there was no doctor to pin down what was wrong with her, no psychologist to tell her that her dysphoria made her one very specific thing.

It was only the smiles of those people…

The people who were there for her before she could finally go to the doctor and pay for her appointments without insurance.

Without them…

She puts a hand on his shoulder as he cries and sees himself as alone in the universe. When he realizes her comfort, he stills, shivering slowly sliding to a crawl.

Soon, it becomes nothing at all. He peels his face out of his gloves to look up at her. Tears stain his face, sticky and disgustingly glistening.

“…Z-Zelda…”

Scooting closer to him, she wraps her arms around him and hugs. She hugs him against her own good judgment, because the veil is gone. It has been destroyed. There will be no more pretenses about them anymore. They have moved from a transaction of currency to a transaction of emotion, that slippery, costless notion.

Still, she does not have the courage to ask him why he said that. She can only assume from her experience and incompletely fill in poorly thought-out blanks.

“…I’m still here for you,” she says. “I…Um…That word…it sucks. B-But I’m still here for you…if you want me to be.”

She gives him the option because it could be her way out. If he rejects her now, she’ll have a clean getaway. The one thing she was confident in was his lack of violence, strangely—it was the only reason she was still here and not halfway across the country once he paid her that first thirty grand.

The money is becoming so much she doesn’t know what to do with it anymore. She keeps most of it in the bank account he gave her.

“…Please…” he stammers. His voice breaks a soprano and he puts his entire weight into her.

“I…I…”

Xenia will be sick with worry if she doesn’t come home…

Her last stand will be…

“…O-Okay, I will! But you…”

She looks around, her thoughts spinning on what to ask. The room is so tight it traps her relatively meager ambitions and threatens to kill them, but she still manages to salvage something from the cracks in the walls.

“What I want from you is—”

A deep breath. It’s a supernova of potential she can grab out of this, yeah?

Jeez, is this making her just as…what was the word? Materialistic? Was that her now…?

The desperation was more palpable than blood. If he wants, he could peel it off her right here and now in thick, wet strips that would fester like molten corpses thrown into a crucible.

He presses a hand to her chest looking for her heartbeat. His nerves rot spectacularly as he awaits an answer, each passing second a total lack of reprieve.

“…Fifteen million.”

Chrysophilius perks up. He blinks away his tears, his dark jasper eyes wide and splitting, but bleeding platinum now. It will soon harden into gold.

“…F-Fifteen…million?”

“Y-yeah,” she replies. “Fifteen million from you. Split up between…like…I dunno, three fighting game tournaments at that center we both first met at. You can find someone to get all that done, r-right…?”

It still refuses to register to him. Where did she get this sudden burst of confidence? She never asked for anything extra before.

“I-I said what I said,” she replies when he doesn’t answer still, unaware she is copying his cadence from earlier in asserting what she wants. “I’ll stay with you tonight if you can do that for me. I want those people to have the time of their lives, too…”

When he begins to cock his head, she leans in and whispers in his ear with a hand tracing his chest.

“I know you can do that…you’re the nice, strong guy I’ve come to appreciate, Chrysophilius…”

How much of that is a lie?

Whatever the answer is, he smiles and sniffles, hugging her and pulling down to the bed. Their veins pulse together, metronomes clicking in tandem pandemonium.

“O-Okay, j-just for you…!”

Now he gets to reassert his position again. He gets to play pretend as the breadwinner here, the husband to a wife. All she’s doing is asking for a little treat after all, and it’s his duty to give it to her.

“And when I do…!”

He beams again, that glistering smile stripping the air and the dimness between them, resuming the gold rush of usual business.

“You have to attend with me! We’ll both go together, and I wanna hold your hand!”

…Fuck.

Of course he’d push the envelope like that.

But she supposes she deserves it, because she did it too, didn’t she?

…Whatever. All she has to do is focus on the now, and focus on the maybe good deed she did getting this guy to pour into the local community like that. Who knows if he’ll find some way to fuck it up, but she couldn’t care less. She couldn’t care less.

Tonight’s been strange enough as it is. There’s nothing left to do except to try and sleep on someone that desperately needs to be a stranger.

He is in all of the ways that matter…

The anime figurines stare at her while the two drift off into an uneasy sleep, clutched together in ragged arms. Each and every one of their painted eyes is a perpetual motion machine, a piece of easy, targeted idealism, wrapped up in more money than she or anyone she ever knew would get to hold in their lifetime.