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They fall through the forest- Caro with arms outstretched like wings and Icca with hair trailing behind her like a shadow. And they tumble down, down, down past trees and Saints and wicked girls with wicked thoughts and wicked magic.
And when they land in a flurry of limbs and curses, Caro deliberately falls on top of Icca and lies limp, legs splayed and arms outstretched to embrace the wonderful, wicked world they’ve stumbled upon.
“Get off me.” Icca spits, kicking Caro in the stomach and pushing her to the side.
“Oh, Wonderland, how I’ve missed you!!” Caro sings to the trees, and Icca glares, dusting herself off as she stands.
“I doubt it’s missed you, with all your noise and chatter.” Caro pays Icca’s rude comment no mind and turns to face the wood.
“You do say such nonsense! It’s missed me loads!” The tree branches above her remain stolid and unmoving, and Caro frowns at their lack of response.
She turns around when she hears Icca approach behind her, already expecting the dagger moving in a graceful arc towards the back of her head. She scatters into a flock of crows and feels the sharp edge of the blade brush her feathers; closer and closer with each swing. And Icca thinks she hears Caro laugh, she can never be quite sure with her crows, whether it’s a laugh or a scream. It all sounds like death either way.
And Caro is just so happy and so lucky and so very grateful that she is alive. Because as long as she’s alive, it’s more time to make sure Icca is dead, dead, dead.
Caro lunges forward, her nails sharpened to talons and eyes wide and beady and oh, she feels ever so awake! And when her talons sink into Icca’s flesh and she can wrap her claws around her bone and pull, well, she savors the faint wet crack she hears from under skin and Icca’s howl of pain.
There’s a brief moment that Caro sees Icca, a silhouette of dark against dark, and can’t help but think what a beautiful, beautiful pair they must make.
And then Icca isn't there at all; Icca is gone and the only thing Caro can see is black.
“Oh, Carousel Rabbit!” Icca’s voice calls, loud and gleeful from behind the long expanse of nothingness. “Don't you find that the dark just helps so very much to clear your head! I do find I can see things ever so clearly now, don't you?” Caro reaches up and touches her nostrils, blue coming away from her fingertips, and closes her eyes with a smile. That absolute psycho.
“Oh of course, of course, my love!” She titters, just to amuse herself. “Everything is so much clearer!”
“Come out, come out, wherever you are!” Icca’s face comes into view from the gloom, her grin outlined in silver. “Oh! What a lovely, lovely hiding spot you have here!” And Caro, frantic and twitchy as always, scatters away into her birds with a cackle.
Icca grabs Caro- well she thinks it’s Caro, all her fucking birds look the same- and she slits the bird’s throat and watches as it bleeds out in her grasp.
Caro shudders back into her body, the echoing sting of steel to her windpipe and the weight of Icca keeping her legs in place. And then Icca is leaning forward and wrapping her fingers around Caro’s throat, magic dripping off her chin as the Dark leans in.
Icca relishes the feel of magic through her veins, basks in the pull of all the Darkness as the shadows curl towards her, and smiles as she thinks about how powerful she must look.
And Icca has plans- oh, so many plans. She wants to drive her knife between Caro’s ribs and twist the handle and hear the symphony of bones breaking. She wants to run her fingers through Caro’s tangled blond locks and pull until she rips off her head. Oh, “off with her head, indeed!” she’d chatter to the Darkness afterward, Caro’s head swinging by her hair from Icca’s fingertips. And oh, how beautiful she would look, how lush and complete with her hands gloved in red. She would wear it proudly, Icca thinks, and the crimson of Caro’s blood would complement her skin tone wonderfully.
Icca returns to the present to the sound of Caro chattering away right in her ear. Her eyes focus on her figure splayed out beneath her, Caro’s eyes alight with the life only the air of Wonderland can bring and cheeks flushed bright with exertion. Icca stops and wonders for a second— and somehow, sensing the minuscule change in her demeanor, Caro’s eyes narrow, and she lunges forward.
Caro pushes off the ground and snaps her teeth closed right in front of Icca’s unflinching face, then throws her head back and absolutely cackles. Icca forces a hand over Caro’s lips and almost loses a finger for her efforts.
“Shut your fucking mouth, Caro. I only want it open to hear your screams.”
Icca’s knife hovers over Caro’s neck, her arm muscles taut and ready to press down the second Caro parts her lips. Caro does so not even a second later.
The knife is dull and therefore takes a second before drawing blood- but a second is all Caro needs to worm her way out of Icca’s grip and into the body of a crow.
And then all Icca can see is black. She is being pummeled from all directions, sharp beaks and lifeless eyes and feathers so thick she struggles to breathe. She screams and slashes out, a wild and feral thing and Icca would be lying if she said she didn’t enjoy it. This is what she was made to do; she and Caro were created for each other, connected in a way beyond love or hate, inseparable in their grief and alike in far too many ways.
She watches as the birds plummet to the floor and finally finds a shadow large enough for her to squeeze through and into the Dark. And the cacophony quiets.
Icca is infinitely pleased with her disappearance, relishing the thought of Caro’s face in her absence: her feigned joy and forced anger because Icca is sure that Caro could not survive without the thought of her.
They would not be themselves without the other, of course, and through their hatred, they still stay sane enough to recognize this fact.
Icca steps out of the shadow of a tree, her quiet interrupted by Caro’s endless ramblings.
“-till death do us part, blah, blah, blah,” Caro dangles by her legs from a tree, her hair swaying beneath her. She twists to look at Icca when she comes back into view. "Oh Icca, darling! How nice it is to see you again!" Icca stares up at her, expression unamused as she taunts-
“Did you miss me, darling? While you were off being a lapdog to the so-called queen?”
“I’m not sure there was all that much there to miss.” Caro taps her head as if to explain, then unhooks her legs and falls towards the ground. Icca shrieks and twists out of the way, scrambling to her feet and yanking the leaves from her hair.
“You little-” Icca’s cut short as she disappears into the Dark to avoid being gutted by Caro’s blade.
Caro takes the lead and runs up ahead, teasing and taunting and altogether just being a nuisance.
“Well, keep up then, Icky Sickle. Wouldn't want to get lost in Wonderland now, would you?”
“If anything, Wonderland would get lost in me.” Icca muses, her own mind expanding to encompass all her grandeur.
“So self-centered! Don’t you ever get tired of being so incredibly narcissistic?” Caro giggles at her own irony.
“Never! I’d rather love myself too much than not at all.” She turns backward to face Caro and grins at how her pupils dilate. “I save all my hate for you, my darling!”
Caro’s laugh sounds like the shrieking of birds and Icca wants to rip her open with her teeth.
And they scream as they run and frolic and leap and cry, stumbling over roots and leaping over toadstools. Caro’s birds jabber from above, and Icca takes her time ripping them to shreds with the little Dark spaces they keep hidden between their organs.
So when they stumble together into a clearing in the woods, they’re both absolutely drunk to hell off their magic; silver and blue dripping off their chin and traveling like tears down their neck.
And Icca realizes at the same moment Caro does.
“There’s a Saint,” breathes Caro, her eyes widening with an excitement Icca knows all too well.
“I know,” Icca’s eyes follow Caro’s gaze to where the Saint hangs, twitching in ecstasy and dangling by some bloody strands of something from a tree.
“Aren’t you oh so frightened? It’ll try to kill us.” Caro’s eyes widen in feigned fear before she smiles, teeth glinting and eyes hungry. Oh, how she jests.
“Kill us? Oh, dearest Caro… It won’t make it to you in time,” Icca grins, her magic already leaking from her gums. “You’re mine,”
And Icca snatches Caro’s wrist out of the air and squeezes, laughing her head off as she darkports them away together, deeper into the forest.
For Icca wants Caro dead by her hands, or not at all. She lunges forward and clutches Caro’s neck between her fingers at the exact moment Caro does the same to her. And they stay at an arm's length apart from each other, entwined in their own foolish dance and grasping at each other for the only thing that keeps them so unfathomably Alive! Caro tries to laugh, and Icca is pleased to hear that the sound that leaves her mouth resembles more a wheeze.
Icca knows she could easily leave Caro’s violent embrace; she positioned herself directly over a shadow, after all, but the thrill of suffocation, the intimacy of death, is too tantalizing for her to pass up. She gives Caro’s neck one last squeeze, takes a second to appreciate how she goes limp in her arms, then has enough time to recognize that she is incredibly lightheaded before she follows Caro to the ground.
—
The Saint wakes Caro up.
More specifically, the Saint’s teeth in her leg wake her up. She thrashes out of its grasp and, after snatching the body of a crow, disappears into the feathers and darkness above.
She perches on a nearby tree branch, eyes flitting over the dark mass beneath her. It’s an ugly thing: emaciated and twitchy and altogether quite an unpleasant thing to look at. But flesh is flesh, and Caro has been waiting far too long for something to kill.
She jerks back into her own body and draws her blade, the light reflecting off the silver and down to the ground, where she sees a shadow trembling in the bramble under a nearby tree. A very Icca-shaped shadow, her limbs splayed out across the ground, eyes wide, and hair tangled with leaves. What an idiot . Caro thinks as she drops from the tree and charges towards the Saint.
She makes it as far as Icca’s figure before she falls, wholly and completely and utterly paralyzed, to the ground beside Icca.
And then the Saint bounds over and pushes a rough claw deep into her stomach and her chest is collapsing and she’s gasping, gasping, sucking in breath after breath for air that never comes. She chokes on her magic leaking down her windpipe and blinks up towards the sky, tinted purple with falling wisteria petals and ash and Tecca-
And Tecca.
Caro finds it funny that she only thinks about her in death. She can see her, Caro thinks, staring back at her through the foliage. Her hair must have been the same shade as the tree trunks, Caro is sure… or maybe it was a lighter brown. And were her eyes black as Icca’s shadows or dark brown like the remnants of old coffee grounds at the bottom of a porcelain cup… Caro knows Tecca and Tecca knows Icca and Icca knows Caro and Caro….
Caro can’t remember anything beyond her desperation.
Icca’s words from years and years ago: “ Did she die alone in the fucking cart ?” And Caro can’t help but laugh because she would have died long ago anyway. And it makes her wonder when was the last time she was ever really alive?
Oh, how naive she used to be. So, so long ago, praying to Gods she didn’t yet know to protect her, to keep her safe.
Now she knows the only Gods that are real are the ones she finds in Wonderland.
“Aren't you afraid of attracting Saints?” little Caro would have asked her, looking up to see a fully grown Carousel Rabbit grinning down at her.
“Of course not, silly!” What grief do I have to draw them with?” And little Caro would tilt her head in confusion and, before she could ask any other silly little questions, watches as Caro bounds away back into the trees.
And that brings Caro back to the trees now, back to her impending death, and back to the Saint.
The Saint, which has now conveniently taken the appearance of Kat Pillar.
She has vivid images of the Saint unraveling her intestines and prying out her liver, rotted and corroded beyond repair by her magic. She imagines Pillar ripping out her heart and eating it whole- still beating, still attached to her chest by veins and other bodily ligaments; stringing her up through the trees and using her skin as a hammock, her bones for structure, her tendons to tie everything together in a pretty, pretty bow.
It amazes her, it really does, how versatile a body can be after death. How many uses she could have with her body still so malleable and squishy and flexible.
With any other saint, Caro knows their motive for flesh- she knows what they want and exactly where she needs to stick her blade. But right now, Caro is too paralyzed by memories to think properly about what is real and what is not. She can handle fear, or sadness, or grief- she knows exactly what box to place all those emotions in; she does not quite yet know how to handle her thoughts.
And she cries and cries, not wanting to think about Tecca or Kat Pillar or anything at all.
She is sure she is so grand and powerful and ridiculous so then why oh why does she feel so terribly small?
And the Saint must sense this, greedy bitch that it is, and takes her grief and drinks it all down in one gulp-
Its face shifting, shifting, until…
Ah.
What a grave, grave mistake the Saint has made. Because now, Caro grins up at the weeping face of Iccadora Alice Sickle.
Now this, Caro thinks gleefully, this I know how to handle.
And she stabs over and over again, her talons slick with blood and Icca's body writhing on top of her. And when she finally goes limp in her arms, Caro heaves the Saint to the side and drags the blade of her knife right across its neck. She steps back and watches with glee as Icca’s head lolls to the side, her blood-covered features sloughing away back to the Saint’s. There’s the moist thump of its head separating from the rest of it, and Caro kneels down and does what she’s always done with her kills: she prays.
Please, please let me become more powerful . She wishes greedily, because how else is one supposed to wish for Power? And once she’s done, she wipes the blood from her face and walks over to where the real Icca lies unconscious– and unfortunately still alive– on the ground.
Caro leans down and brushes a strand of Icca’s hair out of her mouth, marveling at the length and how easy it would be to suffocate her with her own hair.
Icca whimpers at the touch, and Caro wants to eat the sound whole, choking down her hatred like thorns on a rose.
“Good morning!” Caro extends a hand to help Icca up, only later recognising the blade she cradles in her hand, pointed directly into Icca’s ear canal.
Icca doesn’t grace her with a reply, instead promptly shoving Caro’s arm away and turning gracelessly onto her side to vomit into the dirt. She wipes the back of her mouth with her sleeve and rolls over onto her back to stare up at the sky, no longer alight with wisteria petals.
And Icca feels so empty. Devoid of the dark that so often rests right above her kidneys and down her esophagus. Her magic still lingers; in the crevices of her eyes or in the soft flesh of her gums, just out of reach for her memory-addled brain to reach at the moment.
Icca digs her tongue into the hollow of her back molars and traces the emptiness there, sucking out the last remnants of any magic still left and relishing the sting as the jagged edges bite into her gums.
“You know, it’s typically polite to thank your savior?” Caro prods, even if it is just to get a rise out of Icca.
“I didn’t need your help!” Icca growls, still laying down, her back pressed against the ground. Caro smirks and kneels down beside her, her blond hair falling forward to shield her expression.
“It’s ok, Icky Sickle,” She looks around as if to make sure nobody else is listening. Once satisfied with their solitude, she turns back to Icca and leans in. “You don't have to admit it out loud- that you owe me anything. We can just keep this secret between us!” She smiles gleefully and tilts her face back, grinning up at the trees before Icca speaks.
“Did you see Tecca too?” And Caro, not liking where this is going at all, punches Icca right in the face.
They roll around for a bit– Icca on top of Caro and Caro’s hands around Icca’s throat and then Icca’s teeth biting down into the flesh on Caro’s wrist.
“You did, didn’t you?” Icca cackles, blood dripping from her mouth– tears and magic leaking from her eyes. “You saw her in that cart, bloody and limp-”
“You’re being mean,” Caro complains, hands covering her ears.
“-ripped to pieces by your crows!” Icca’s voice rising and rising, hysteria overtaking her features. “All because of us -”
“Shut up!” Caro scatters away, her crows gathering next to the mangled body of the Saint. Icca walks up behind her, her laughter dissipated, and listens to Caro’s ramblings as she stumbles over to the corpse.
“-the fuck away.” Caro takes great pleasure in kicking in the eye sockets of said Saint. “I hope you rot, you useless, pathetic thing,” Caro punctuates each word with a kick.
Icca knows. Caro, well… Caro wants power. Always so focused on the short term, never looking too far forward at the long game. Always just… power.
Icca, however, wants power and then some. She wants to be the grandest thing Petra has ever seen. She wants to be a real Saint, not some heretic gone wrong, but something worth worshipping. Something equivalent to the Gods.
She wants more than control, more than awe or fear: she wants to experience divinity in its rawest form.
And what better way to do that than embodying death itself?
Icca grins and turns towards Caro. Well, I can do that. She grips the handle of her knife. Oh, I can do that so well.
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I , Caro thinks, am so unbelievably high . She giggles and bows her head down to the powder laid delicately down her arm, soft as skin and fine as powdered bone.
Icca is still sober, much to Caro’s disgust. Icca, with all of her morals and academic thoughts, who only gets high off of her own delusions.
And what Caro fails to notice is that Icca is so hungry, so desperate for attention that she licks her lips and sucks the magic off her teeth to take the edge off.
They sit next to the Saint’s head, both of their eyes trained on the gaping expanse of its exposed windpipe, and wait.
Caro takes another hit of powder and looks over to where Icca stares blankly at the mangled eye sockets of the ruined Saint. She looks contemplative, which Caro finds annoying because it means she’s still alive to contemplate, and that just won’t do.
So, just because she is so insatiably bored, she decides to go ahead and kill Icca.
And Icca, it seems, has the same idea as her. Caro swings at her with her knife, and Icca blocks the hit with her own blade and melts away back into the dark.
It doesn’t take long, the two of them being just what they are, before Icca is pressed against the ground with Caro’s knife at her neck and her own knife tip digging into Caro’s sternum. And they stay there, breathing in sync with each other, pain filtered away in the back of their minds.
Caro dips her head down to rest against Icca’s forehead.
“I am so in love with you,” Caro lies to Icca, and Icca lies too and repeats the words back to her. There’s a hunger in her eyes that Caro wants to carve out with her nails.
Caro reaches up, the pads of her thumbs tracing the moonlight on Icca’s skin, the notable indents above her collarbone, and then down just a bit to trace along the bone, along each jut of her rib cage and the cavern of the dip of her waist. And it is so intimate and Caro is so in love and Icca’s lips taste like cyanide and wisteria and Caro thinks that she will never get enough of it.
And it’s almost like it was before they fell in love with Wonderland. But, of course, of course , it could never be. And Caro is immensely grateful for this fact because she knows now that the trade of love for power is such an obvious choice.
“You’re beautiful,” Caro used to murmur into her hair, and Icca would smile just wide enough to be unsettling.
“I know,” She’d reply, and that was that.
But that was then, and now Caro knows she is far more beautiful and powerful than anything she could have believed was possible before.
It’s muscle memory: the things she does that she knows Icca likes. She knows where to find the sensitive spot right between Icca’s upper thigh and her hip, and she knows exactly how to cradle Icca’s neck and tangle her fingertips in her hair to make her gasp in pleasure. Never mind the fact that each time Caro pulls her closer, she imagines the tip of her blade drawing a bright velvet red loop around her neck, no, never mind that, never mind.
Because when Icca’s voice goes high and breathy, Caro can take her time to imagine the sounds she would make while begging for her life.
And it’s fast and messy and desperate, and when they’re done, they both lie there in the aftermath for a long time, hating each other just the same amount as when they started.
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They lay on the ground together, the two of them an arm's length apart because they know all too well what happens when they get too close to each other.
And oh, Icca does so enjoy having power.
It’s not enough, though. Not enough, not enough for our darling dearest Iccadora Alice Sickle.
When did we become this? Icca asks in her head. And Caro, knowing her as well as she does, responds.
“We were always like this, Alice,” she leans over to murmur into Icca’s hair, her breath light against the sensitive spot behind her ear. “We were always just as bad as we are. We were always worse.”
The rest of her thought is a palatable thing between them: It’s just that neither of us realized until we had no choice.
And because Wonderland has a way of fucking with their sanity, they both take this thought and swallow it down, savoring the slide of their terrible, terrible obsession with death as it makes its way down their throats.
Caro turns over on her side to face Icca, her magic dying her eyelashes with a sheen of silvery blue.
She reaches out and takes Icca’s face in the palm of her hand. She’s not surprised at Icca’s lack of reaction, but she can still see very clearly in her mind how much Icca wants to bite down into the soft flesh of the bottom of her hand until she bleeds. Half of her expects that to be Icca’s next move, ever predictable as she is, but the other half knows she won't. Icca, always the smartest out of the
three
two of them. Icca and Caro
and Tecca
. Always just them.
“I am absolutely enamored by you, my love.” Caro purrs, and Icca can feel the loathing practically dripping off her words. Her fingers trace down, brushing under Icca’s chin, tilting her face up, and Caro sees the light reflecting off the magic dripping down her cheeks. Caro grins, the action a deity in itself, and rolls back over– away from Icca and back to the wonderful, wicked mystery that is Wonderland.
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