Universe: Beschiverse
Story: Of Rusted Hearts & Stained Palms
Title: We get off watching each other drown
Colour: Dreamwidth Red #15. Comment, Off-white #19. Hide, Warm Heart #21. Caution
Supplies and styles: stain, resin, stickers, life drawing, canvas, photography, silhouette, graffiti 
Stain: [08.05.2025 // love quote of the day] It is impossible to repent of love. The sin of love does not exist. - Muriel Spark
Resin:  lyricaltitles  Album Challenge [Immaculate Conception by Zolita | Song: Drug Me Now]
Stickers: [08.05.2025] Random Fact of the Day - There are 31,557,600 seconds in a year.
Word count: 436
Rating: M
Warnings: past child abuse, abusive relationship, implied self-harm

Hiding aggression marks was easy.

Faith – she hated this name more and more, – grew up knowing how to hide bruises. How to not walk with an obvious limp even when all she could feel was her skin burning and her muscles aching. She hated the feeling of make-up caking her face, the stink of it when she applied over shades of bruises.

People in the church would comment if Faith showed signs of physical discomfort, even if Mother didn’t seem to mind grabbing her arm or shoulder to hiss orders on her ears.

Only Lydia noticed something.

Only Lydia brought her any comfort. (Stuart would, she knew her best friend. He was busy trying to survive his own edition of the Homosexual Child Of Religious Parents Horror Show.) Lydia smiled at her when Faith spilled random facts like did you know there are 31,557,600 seconds in a year?

Faith counted hundreds, thousands of seconds. She walked in a minefield at home, fear and caution had been carved into her DNA. Faith counted every second in every punishment. It was soothing.

One. Two. Three. Mother’s cane on her lower back. Four. Five. Six.

Faith counted them when Mother beat her for corrupting the preacher’s perfectly normal daughter. She wondered if Mother would have sent a formal invitation to Lydia for a personal show if her temper didn’t burn like a supernova. But then, even Faith’s father used to simply watch with cold eyes and a stoic face until he died of an aneurysm when Faith was thirteen.

The cane broke at some point. Mother didn’t stop.

Repent, repent, repent. Never explained why love was a sin – the preacher talked about love like a good thing. But Faith’s was a ticked straight to hell. And the maternal love was belt on her back, ruler on her hand, constant reminders that Faith was not who Mother wanted her to be.

Repent, repent, repent.

Kept ordering her to repent as Faith’s blood painted the polished wood of their living room. When she deemed Faith properly broken, Mother hauled her to the street with the help of the housemaid.

Faith still didn’t remember calling Stuart.

Fists and spat insults were normal, familiar. Her brain had been rewired to dissociate until a housemaid shoved her under the cold water. Faith almost jumps out of her skin when Rachel’s voice reaches her.

Gentle bloodied hands, eyes swimming in alcohol haze and guilt. Rachel apologized every time. It was pleasant, her pain. Rachel was drowning in her own violence and Faith liked the way the dark grey of it burned her lungs.