#115 - Cavort - Dancers in the Dark - originalharmony - Original

[neverglass.livejournal.com]

Title: Dancers in the Dark
Fandom: Original
Prompt: #115 - Cavort
Warnings: N/A
Rating: PG
Summary: Marionettes - dancers in the dark - spun on into the night.

 

They danced, fine dresses of tulle and crepe and silk, cavorting to music simultaneously in a thousand mannequin minds. A silent chuckle to the joke uncaught was painted again and again in the delicate, rose petal twist of china mouths as flowers in a spring-green field in early summer flickered and spun through the deadened glass of every eye.

 

Every dress was an indistinct pastel, and the men that cradled factory-molded waists were evanescent slips of bland, grey shadows. They had barely coalesced, but had been frozen in a beautiful, commercial world shaped by clawed, metal hands. Amongst them curled invisible tendrils of cloying perfume, addictive and deadly.

 

There was a tiny click, unheard by ears and magnified by empty, echoing minds, and the sets of mirrored doors at either end of the glass hall soared open, hitting the titanium supports and shattering, the pieces flying outward like spreading wings and falling down like so many droplets of rain. They scarred every perfect, porcelain cheek, but the skin didn't bleed.

 

Still, they moved in perfect time, seconds and moments more pure and delicate than any measured by the clocks of men, even as two tall, slender beings reverberated more than moved into the building, wearing translucent skin like the first breath of daylight beneath intricate black. Those that wore the hollow, elongated skeletons of a man and a woman stood synchronized, pale power in silent grace as they gazed out over the mechanic masses to meet understanding eyes.

 

Chromatic shades ripped from their hiding places in the air like so many bruises in the flux and fade of poison. Slowly, they vanished, and then appeared like a blush on the cheeks of the marionettes as their beautiful, cold faces cracked under the brush of eyes that were cold and black and real. The music burst forth in the million colors of the fireworks of stars unraveling, and electric guitar like a name called into the silent night and drums like the essence of psychedelic gunpowder shattered the silence. Above all, that luminous, longing voice cried, a repressed anomaly.

 

Transcendent souls shot from the floor like a spiral staircase, and the puppets fell to their knees as the fragmented embers of what had once been inside burst into flame. The ceramic shells of their bodies cracked away, arching down to meet the floor in triangular shards. The photographers they had danced for melted, living emotion covering the floor.

 

Mannequins became men and women, miniature suns mixing and merging and then at last fusing into separate identities. As they ran out into the night, amnesiacs who had forgotten how to be dead, their liberators stood motionless, each still waiting for the other to make a move. Twin somethings inside them were flying on dark wings, pleading for immortality as the shadows fell to strike them down.

 

At last, he, somber and elegant in his dark suit, took a step, reaching for her with a slender hand, and then they were right there, together, and dancing in the ruins of the travesty. The dark bell of her gown shifted around her like the sky above them as it began to forget the destruction. Every motion of their bodies in time with the violins detonated a word of that voice in their hearts, so much surer now.

 

The structure disintegrated around them, the wreckage fading away under the moonlight until there was nothing left, and still they danced on into the night, lovely in their power.