Posted by Verity on July 08, 2001 at 00:24:15:
The bedroom was suitably gothic without being tacky (the velvet was plush rather than crushed, for instance, and burgundy, not red). She lay on the bed posed like Christ in nothing but a paper-thin shantung gown the color of her skin and stared at the canopy above while he tied off one arm and plunged a needle into her flesh. She turned her head so she could watch as a tiny amount of blood was drawn up into they syringe, then he smiled into her eyes, pushed, and after a few moments she was waking on her side, mouth so dry it felt glued together, looking at the light coming through the sheers between the heavy velvet drapes.
Later that day, after a couple of light meals brought to her catered from some short-lived La Cienega restaurant and eaten by the window overlooking a garden of every type of California flower and many not so native, Jade-Flower was called to come down to Darien's office. She pulled on embroidered jeans and a brushed-silk shirt the color of her own peachy skin with one tiny button at the collarless top and bell sleeves, open all the way down the front between her small but perfect breasts. When she got there she found him in a room that was exactly what she would have predicted: dark, orderly bordering on obsessively tidy, filled with books. He was at the expectedly massive, expensive desk, in the obvious leather (cow?) chair with an empty velvet chair next to it, poring over a number of books, drawings and parchments.
"Ah, dear, come over please. Since there will be a few weeks of healing between the work we do on you and when we can properly remove and mount it, I thought it best we decide on a design immediately. I have suggestions, but in the end, the decision, as you demanded, is yours. Please, take the chair beside me."
Jade-Flower shivered at how easily he talked of removing and mounting her skin, ignoring the torture that would cause her, and how he even ignored mention of what would follow, her bloody death. She was silent and remained standing for a moment while she turned it all over in her mind. He didn't move, nor did he indicate any displeasure with her failure to sit down.
At last she realized that she didn't want him worrying about her feelings, about her pain, her death. Those things were properly hers and hers alone. She vaguely remembered a song from some movie that had been popular a few months back, some '30's pastiche. "No one can walk that path with you" she thought the song had gone, and she liked that. She had hated it when a Dom had expressed concern, consideration for her. She wanted to be cherished but as an object; no one asks an Erte sculpture how it's feeling, do they? No. He was exactly right. His pleasure was in the art of the torture, hers in the art of the pain. He would delight in her death, and she in her dying. Both of them coveted in different ways that she would be a masterpiece, so what better place to work together?
She sat.
He pushed a large book of the coffee-table variety over to her and pointed at a page. "It occurred to me that the timing of your coming to us, and the nature of your beauty, should guide us in this, as it did in your name. Something…flowery seems appropriate." She looked at him puzzled and he laughed. "Not floury like the dough, dear, flowery like your name. Need some coffee, perhaps?" She (like most catlike creatures) couldn't bear to be laughed at, but laughed with she would allow, and she nodded, a little coolly, and soon was sipping café au lait at exactly the sweetness she liked. She didn't ask how anyone knew how she'd drink a drink she'd had only twice, in New Orleans. Instead she drank a bit and looked at the picture. It was a lily drawn by some female painter so as to be pornographic, and she shook her head in distaste.
"I don't see myself represented by a giant cunt for all eternity, thank you, Darien."
He laughed. "Well, that's one way to see a painting like this. In any case, nothing I have put on your body will be exact to these drawings. These are by artists we do not know, and there are artists we do know who produce originals that are produced but once, on the body of our…canvas, and then framed and never created again." She smiled and took a long drink of coffee, leaning forward a little so he could catch a glimpse of one perfect breasts.
He smiled but coldly. "Ah yes, we'll have to do something about those too of course, but for now, the main piece-de-resistance. She frowned but didn't let it wrinkle her perfect brow. "Now, something else then, to do with flowers…"
They looked for over an hour through painting after painting of gardens, flowers in close up, realistic, impressionistic, symbolist. None struck her as at all representative of her, although sometimes Darien stared at her in wonderment. At last he rose and moved to the bookshelf, searching out some volume he had not yet had pulled for him. "All right then, Jade-Flower, you are not one flower but many, and yet not merely the flowers either…something…else…ah, here we are."
He pulled down a middle-sized book with a paperback cover, much worn. After flipping through the index and then the pages, he showed her a picture, rendered small but on good, shiny paper.
"John Keats wrote the poem 'The Death of Fleur', about a maiden who is compared to the very flowers of summer and comes to understand that she is more beautiful even than they. Near the end of their season she covers the ground under an oak tree with their blossoms, all she can find in the lush gardens around her father's estate, and lays herself down upon them, allowing herself to be overcome with their fragrance. Enveloped with this intoxicating, overcoming scent, she dies. Later, Burne-Jones painted this, a representation of the poem. How's this, my finicky Jade-Flower?"
She saw a full-color picture of a girl, her reddish-tawny curls tangled with the poppies and nasturtiums and flowing in individual curls down the flowers with which she had chosen to die, as her diaphanous, clinging blue-purple gown flowed over the iris and bluebells. The tuberose, the freesia, the honeysuckle and rose, those heaviest of scent, tangled over all. Her arm curved sweetly and erotically down from her bier to the ground, her soft white hand trailing; her right leg, the leg behind in the painting, was raised slightly, gave shape to her belly and the delta between her legs.
No necrophiliac could have posed a corpse more beautifully to attract his own attention.
Jade-Flower-Jane was struck by the painting so much that she gazed at it for several moments, longer than anything Darien had yet shown her. Finally she looked up, her green gaze wide on his. "This is very…(she meant to say lovely)…pretty. But it could be prettier….if she were a blonde…her breasts smaller but more taut under her gown, her thighs slimmer, here…."
He smiled. "If she were you, you mean, Lady Jade-Flower."
She waited a moment, thinking. But she was not stupid, it was her appearance and youth that made her seem so. "Yes. If she were me. If she were me, she would be perfect."
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________]
The arrangements were made with their artist in the following days; the tattoo was to be in the pre-Raphaelite style, very symbolic, romantic and curvy. It suited a tattoo well. The brand and scarring would enhance the original painting as well. And because she refused to die on her stomach, most of her hidden from her onlookers whether present or by video, plans were made for her breasts as well. It was only four days after she arrived that these plans were set in motion, and she found herself lying on a rather surgical table but in a beautiful room. Darien was there, was ever-present, but so was a man named Lucan, a very very tall redheaded man with many tattoos who paid little attention to her except for touching her naked body and muttering to herself. Attempts at conversation, at seduction, failed utterly. She was reminded of legends of gnomes who performed metalwork but cared for nothing else. Perhaps, she considered, this man was a flesh elemental the way gnomes were elementals of earth, and all that interested him was flesh. Darien, even Strephan, looked to her reaction, but not Lucan. He cared for nothing except the working of her flesh into something else.
Music by a group Jade-Flower didn't know played softly in the background. Often, when she was laid naked, face-down or face-up (more often the former), she had nothing to do but listen to the music. She had had little chance to develop an imagination that didn't involve her own pain and killing, and this talk, all esoterics, left her adrift. At one point she asked whose music seemed to be playing, for it seemed to be very much the same in some ways while different in others. Darien answered her in an off-hand tone, "Steely Dan", and she accepted that as she accepted what she could identify horns and abstruse lyrics. At one point she remembered interjecting "But she must be me!" and seeing the faces of both the men as she lifted her own and their eyes met and they smiled, and she knew that her will be done, the face, the body of Fleur, would be Jane, Lady Jade-Flower's own.
It began two days later. She was shown the drawings, in blue ink on parchment paper, to adhere and transfer to her skin, she understood. First would come branding, to sear the Lady's curve of hip and breast, her leg and hair, onto Lady Jade Flower's back. Then healing, and then cutting…of the lovelier flowers, the calla, the rose, the iris, the orchid, deep into her skin, to give them depth, more texture. And then finally…the long, long process of tattooing…her very own hair and skin and figure, her expression. The flowers' color and subtlety.
And then all would be done…
She asked on that first branding that Darien be present and he did not deny her. In fact he had denied her nothing, dinners with her, her favorite music, even rituals she had come to invent in the boredom of her room, worship of the cymbidium, of the nasturtium, even of the rose itself as little as she liked it. She couldn't explain really why she hated the rose, something about that showy, scented bloom on that ugly, prickly bush made it seem worth stamping out except if cut and lovingly presented.
Well, wouldn't she be so? So she celebrated it as well, asked for incenses, candles, readings, cards and images to make her own obescience to that which would appear on her body forever.
The branding was a catharsis the likes of which she could never have dreamed. She asked that rituals be performed and the space be purified and she found herself in a room-within-a-room, the walls not quite reaching the ceilings, their tops covered with Saints' candles that she couldn't quite see. She scented incense she associated with death then realized it was what was burned in a shop on Melrose, Necro-something, with many bones and artifacts inside. It was soothing, distinct, not annoying like most incense. Lucan was naked from the waist-up, and touched her, placed her, talked about her, prodded her as if she were nothing but the finest canvas (or as if she were as precious as the finest canvas, her own impressions flickered one to the other). They showed her the small, curved pieces of metal that they would heat in a propane torch for a few seconds. She was instructed carefully as she lay naked face-down on the table, quivering, panting, trying hard to listen to the music she'd asked for, The Cure. "Don't move at all. Breathe, deep and constant. When I am about to strike I'll tell you to breathe deep. Do. Then when I say "Now" hold your breath; I'm going to make an imprint. It'll only take a couple of seconds, four at the most. When I'm done, I'll pull the iron away and tell you, 'Breathe'. Do you understand?"
She nodded and it wasn't good enough. She had to assent verbally and managed a strangled "yes" as she pictured how bad the pain of burning, again and again, would be.
They had told her it would take thirty-two strikes, or individual burns, to finish just the branding alone. She'd been silent and asked only that the song "Fascination Street" be played over and over, no matter how long it took.
"Okay, Flower, breathe, breathe, okay, now breathe deep hold it…Now {{'Cause I'm feeling I'm fading, impaling, and I'm begging you to drag you down with me, to kick the last nail in}}
…breathe."
"Next, Jade-Flower….breathe deep, you're getting shocky…good, good.. You're doing fine…good. Now. Breathe deep, hold it…{{Open your mouth, I cannot be responsible for quite what goes in, or to care what goes out}}
Perfect. Next, let's go fast, we'll be over faster…
"Lovely, like your name, you are beautiful and doing beautifully…I'm proud of you, we all are. Now breathe, breathe, breathe, hold it{{put on your pout cut the conversation just open your mouth put on your face, put on your fear, let's hit opening time}}
"Now, breathe, hold it, now…{{let's hit opening time down on}}
"Breathe, hold it{Fascination Street…}
Hold it{Fascination Street}
Hold{Fascination…..
Street…}
It took two days.
For that part.
A few days of pain and boredom later they began the scarification to give literal depth to the flowers. It was amazing to her how much she could hurt and how much she could be utterly wishing that something would happen, anything, even something that hurt her more.
But it didn't.
Darien didn't fuck her. No one did. She was a trophy, a masterpiece, and either these people put their sex elsewhere or they did it at the end, she couldn't know. And no one would tell her. Strephan she saw several times a day with a raddichio and arugula balsamic vinegar salad or a sun-dried tomato pesto pasta, and he refused to speak to her unless she asked for lemons or romano cheese. Darien she saw only when something was done to her and he would listen sympathetically but answer little unless it was about the thing that was being done to her that moment.
The cutting was a revelation as bits of her skin were incised and others cut around and cut away to make empty spaces that would heal
More deeply than the skin around it. She'd chosen the music poorly, Sisters of Mercy's Corrosion, and after the first two or three plays she felt a lot like the character in Clockwork Orange, screaming for something different. But she was screaming so much then from the scalpel, that tight, prissy, unsexy little blade that did nothing except cause her un-erotic pain, that no one noticed.
After that she paid great attention to her playlist.
Finally, two weeks in, they were willing to begin the tattoo, and that day they showed the design to her, done as a watercolour painting by their man.
It was her.
It was her idealized (if that were possible) lying on a bed of perfect flowers, her cunt showing as yet another bloom among blooms, her breasts the same. Her head was tilted towards the point of view and her eyes were open yet somehow unseeing, to show those perfect green eyes. She wondered out loud if they had a tint that perfect, and the man who would do it, Lucan, showed her on his abdomen the leaves that matched her matchless eyes.
The breasts of the original painting had been made more perfect, hemispherical, and were covered with perfect lovely blood-red roses. She thought the effect should be stupid and yet it wasn't.
It was her hip uplifted on the left, settled on the right to show her shaven, delicate cunt. It was her arm trailing down amongst the bluebells to be covered by the honeysuckle. It was her legs, parted, that admitted the climbing vines of the Rose of Lebanon.
It
Was
Her.
At the first touch of the needle in the afternoon-sunlit room, she smiled. The buzzing sounded so horrible, like a dentist's drill, but the touch of the pain was merely more than a fingernail dragged rather heavily across the flesh of her back.
She had no idea how wearing it could be, having a fingernail dragged rather heavily across the flesh of her back.
Her pride kept her from begging for a break until two hours in. And at that time, as she was being given sparkling water, wine and peaches, she asked (foolishly) how much longer? And the answer came-about eight hours if all goes well with your (her) face.
For about a second and a half she wished she were not so vain.
It took three days to finish the tattoo, after the two days of the scarring and the two days of the branding. Add to that recovery of at least four days between each before the tattoo and she was left with a long time in the very very sexy, elegant room. She masturbated a lot (on her stomach), she watched the garden a bit, she played every bit of music she could get her hands on. She begged new music like Kid A off her captors (she thought of them that way even though it was her choice because…well, duh! Because it was sexy!) and old music too, like the Doors, which she'd discovered in Darien's collection.
She was swaying to "Moonlight Drive" when he came in, five days after her tattoo. "Let's swim to the moon, uh huh, let's climb to the tide, penetrate the evening that the City sleeps to hide…"
When she heard him come in she turned and danced just for him. It was always better with an audience. My body, Jim Morrison, a purple silk slip-dress and thou…."I can't be your guide….Easy to love you as I watch you die…"
He leaned on the door and watched, his jaw set. Set like steel. "Get real close. Get real tight. Baby gonna drown tonight."
She moved to him, slipping her hips lower. "Goin' down, down down down. Way down…."
He seemed unable to move at all from his cantilevered position as she danced on her knees.
As she touched his belt.
Easy to love you as I watch you glide….
As she took him into her mouth.
Moonlight drive…
Moonlight drive…
As she took him all the way to the back of her throat, her eyes fixed to his over his flat belly.
Moonlight drive.
She tasted the salt of the sea and fell back on the sand/carpet as he left.
After her back was finished there was still her breasts to complete. She refused to die, for the cameras or for an audience, with most of her lovely body pressed to a table. And Darien and Lucan took little time in envisioning their masterworks.
But completing them tortured Jade-Flower as nothing had before.
Oh, the tattooing, even on that taut, new flesh, those buds that had barely opened only two or three years before, was painful, moreso along her breastbone and ribs. But she was used to that. It didn't lessen it in any way, but familiarity removed the fear, and taking the fear away…ah, hell she could never explain it and no one would ever ask her to. They never asked her feelings, that was not what was required of her, what they wanted was the feelings her flesh provoked in them. But somehow to know how it would hurt, to hear the drone of the needle and know how it would feel on fat, on flesh, on bone, was somehow…a….
…a comfort.
But there was more to what they wanted there, much more.
The rubies were very beautiful indeed. But the settings…Oh dear Gods even split in half and straightened how the hell did they expect to fit them behind her nipple?
For they were traditional jewel settings…rings of metal (gold in this case, platinum and white gold being wrong for a rose) with teeth to hold the jewel. And they were intended to sit just below the tip of her nipple, the ruby gripped by the teeth. The teeth were folded down and the whole straightened out. They had considerately explained to her the process, inserting the piece through one hole, then bending it with pliers while it was in her flesh, bending it into a perfect ring, finally joining it. Then they intended to probe into her with tools they'd acquired from a willing dentist to pull each and every jewel-holding tooth up from its seated bed and through her flesh…
When all of that was done, a ruby would be put in the teeth and the teeth bent down.
She wasn't sure she'd make it to that part sane.
But as usual she did. Sane, in whatever way she ever was.
They decided to punch a hole around her nipple with a rounded implement, much too thick, she thought, to take.
"There's black in the mirror and a bloodstain on my bed, aw, baby you were a vampire and I am the walkin' dead…"
But they made her take it.
Although she screamed. Still, she screamed along with Concrete Blonde.
"I'm goin' down by the river where it's warm and green, I'm gonna HAVE A DRINK AND WALK AROUND, I GOT A LOT TO THINK ABOUT OH YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH….."
By the time she was singing that she was nothin' at all, they were finished.
If anyone had looked for her nipples they would have found jewels instead. Hard, cold jewels. Like her hard, cold, heart?
She was seventeen. Had she had a chance to find a heart? To grow one?
Did you really have one when you were seventeen? And if you'd looked like that? Tell me true.
Ssslrrrp….heh he heh.
No, she'd never see the light.
It was weeks.
The garden bloomed. Poppies developed red, and lavender, and black blooms, and their pods were slit for the opium, and their pods brewed for tea. The night-blooming jasmine was sometimes so strong she had to close her shutters, but never her windows. The Pikake, an innocuous looking white flower on innocent bushes, overwhelmed her when she walked there and if she took a blossom and rubbed it on her wrist all night she'd dream of the blossom and the maidens to whom it belonged, maidens with piercing eyes and strong hearts and long hair that mingled with their long, long fingers all through the night.
She awoke exhausted.
And pleasured.
But eventually she healed. She could feel her back, where the brands had been, the cuts, the reasons why she couldn't warm her bones in the hot tub nor even take too long a shower, the reasons why Strephan massaged her back so long every day, with a lotion, scented oddly enough of Pikake.
But for several days they neglected her and for those days she walked in the gardens and picked the final gardenias for her room with their strong and arousing scent, watched the maple leaves fall, the blooms die and float in the fountains. She never looked at her back in the mirror, nor tried to catch a glimpse over her shoulder. Nor did she look at her rose-breasts. She was Fleur and she refused to let her beauty wither as it did in the gardens, so her bare feet felt the dying plants and delighted in their failings for she would not share them. She would die as she had chosen, die and be preserved as a masterpiece, forever.
It is a strangeness that she never thought of pressed flowers.
One day she was awakened early.
By Darien. He told her that the night to come would be the night, her night, and she should prepare herself as she so chose, with the following exceptions: she was to shave herself completely, asking for help if she needed it for her cunt and ass; she was not to scent herself in any way, that would be done later; and she was to have her hair down and the gown of paper-thin white silk, like Fleur's, that had been brought to her, on. She asked, and received, permission to wear an anklet of fleourite and peridot that Darien himself had given her, in the colours of purple and apple-green.
Then he left her.
She did have a female servant (slave? Acolyte? She had been there too long to ask, or to care) shave her after she'd finished her underarms and legs. It seemed all the hair grew every which-way down there and it was impossible to both open herself and reach it at the same time. She marveled as she listened to her servant mutter under her breath that anything could be that hard to shave, yet it motherfucking was, and thank God she didn't have to shave it.
Finally, the bowl of soapy water taken away, her bed cleaned (to what end? The sane part of her mind wondered) and she freshly showered and perfumed in Pikake, her new favorite, she put on the silly, frilly diaphanous white silk pre-Raph robe that part of her distained and part of her understood how well it would suit the tattoo she already wore on her back and went downstairs.
It was in the main room, not the back room she'd been branded, cut, tattooed in, in which the table was set. There was more than just Darien, Lucan, Strephan there, and for that a part of her mind was gratified. There was a very lot of lighting and camera equipment and for that she was very gratified. She smiled at Darien and walked to him unhesitatingly {{how much more power if they see she wants it wholly}}.
He took her hand as the masked audience murmured. She guessed that all previous masterpieces had hesitated. She heard the music playing quietly just then and chose to voice it….
"We want the world and we want it…we want the world and we want it….NOW."
A murmur went up and she laughed joyfully as Darien smiled at her.
"Now, my Chalchiuhxochitzin. My Lady Precious Flower. Do you agree, here and now, to be stripped of the artwork with which we have entrusted you that it may be made eternal on the bones of your own body, do you agree that we inflict upon you more pain than the artwork itself inflicted upon you, do you agree that your body shall die that the beauty you bear shall live on?"
She looked long at him, her eyes on his. And then she laughed. "When the music's over, turn out the lights."
He didn't react and so she said, more prosaically, "I hereby agree to everything you have stated, my Lord. Chalchiuhxochitzin is ready to dance on fire as you intend…until the end."
Some didn't understand.
He did. He smiled, and took her hand.
She was laid flat on a fur-covered table, real fur, mink or ermine, she'd guess, and a knife was shown to her. It was slim and wicked, a boning knife her mother would have called it.
But she knew her boning would come long after she herself was gone.
She moved her head forward and although it wasn't planned they let her kiss the knife, lick it, cut her tongue and drink the tiny amount of blood. When they took it away she relaxed entirely and laid her head down, her hair spread out behind her, facing the audience, and waited for the return of the knife's kiss.
The touch was so light, so light it was like the scream of the butterfly Morrison talked of in his song. A kiss indeed---but soon the point was slipping under her skin, a very gentle sound, very soft, very clear…
She let out a tiny cry when her skin was pierced at last, when the dimpling was done and the cutting had begun.
But just to let the camera know and the audience that she knew, she understood, it had begun.
After that it was rapid, a slitting, a ripping she could hear through her bones. From one hipbone up her side along her ribs, to her shoulder blade. All so fast she screamed it all in one breath. And then over on her shoulder to the other side and down, and here she was hyperventilating, scream/scream/scream/scream! With each cut until Darien laid his hand on the back of her now bloody neck to calm her. Then she moaned quietly as the downward stroke finished and the cross ward stroke went through her pelvis, blade parallel to her body to cut as much of the tendon underneath as possible, and finish the canvas.
The Death of Fleur.
It took all of Darien's skills to keep her from fighting, squirming, screaming constantly as the connecting tissue was separated and the "canvas" was pulled perfect from her back, leaving her bare but for muscle and the bone underneath.
By the time they finished, some twenty minutes in, she was shocky but the idea of stopping to refresh her was ridiculous.
She was going to die.
She showed it in her eyes, that knowledge, and at last she showed that she knew what it meant to give up her entire life that her beauty and youth might live on beyond her. Darien, looking, drinking deep, calling the camera forward to catch the look, was transfixed.
As much as he'd ever been he was in love with this girl, and no more so than now, when she saw that she had delivered herself unto her own death and had to accept that.
He saw the war behind her eyes and the eventual triumph when she forced herself to know, to understand, that she would never grow older, that her portrait would live as a masterwork, and her death be remembered forever in this erotic act rather than in some hospital deathbed decades hence. She would not fade like a flower; she would be preserved, perfect, sublime. She realized distantly that she was wet between her legs, and Darien, knowing this as well, slipped a hand there and brought it up glistening for the camera to see. She moaned and sighed…and spasmed in orgasm even in her pain.
Eventually, with her so shocky she was almost beyond them, she was turned over, and the two perfect roses that were her breasts were cut whole from her body in two quick strokes, to be stripped of fat and flesh later.
Then, one camera on her body and the other on her face, which watched back intently, a perfect black stone blade was plunged between her ribs and into her heart. She died as she lived.
Totally aware of everyone who watched her.