Album Challenge 2025

[analogbasilisk]

AuthorAsh E. Costa (analogbasilisk)
Album: Immaculate Conception (EP) by Zolita
Fandom: Original Fiction / Beschiverse
Story:Prequel to "Of Rusted Hearts & Grease Palms"
Summary: a collection of snapshots.

Word count: 421
Rating: T
Warnings: implied homophobia, implied child abuse

Many of Faith’s memories were hazy, a blurred mess. Preaching words that made her skin crawl, the familiar feeling of her mother’s hands and belt. As she got older, she forgot if her mother ever treated her with care. As she got older, she started to wonder why people lied about their parents not punishing them for something as inconsequentioal as whimpering when she sat down.

She wondered if her mother had sensed the sin in her the second Faith was born.

(Have you felt my sin in your womb? / My innocence is yours to consume / The sky is empty when I beg it to save me from you)

(She could feel the belt on her back, the rice on her knees, if her mother found the notebook. Pages filled with blasphemous words.)

Lydia, the preacher’s daugher. Faith thought Lydia was a prettier version of her parents. She was nice, she let Faith sit with her and didn’t question when Faith winced even under the softest touches. Lydia frowned but said nothing when Faith mentioned she doesn’t really remember most of her childhood after Lydia told her about her earliest memory.

The rare lack of judgement had made falling in love easy. No amount of shame could stop those feeling from growing on her chest. No amount of shoving them aside could stop her from catching herself staring at Lydia like the girl hung the moon and the stars up on the sky.

Lydia, her best friend, sometimes helped with the most visible bruises. Hidden in Lydia’s bedroom, a salve for bruises that she had sneaked and kept for Faith. It was a warm spring afternoon and Mother had punished her for catching her picking the fork with her left hand.

Lydia looked so beautiful. And what would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything? Faith would be punished anyways, she was punished for existing.

So she kissed Lydia, who kissed back. A world of sparks and hope exploded inside her chest.

“We shouldn’t do this,” Lydia whispered, still close enough that Faith felt her lips moving.

“I know. I think you should know I’m in love with you.”

“Is that why your mother hates you? This… gay thing?”

“She doesn’t know. She just… I don’t know. I’m just wrong. Will you tell anyone?”

“No, I’ll kiss you.”

Lydia cupped the back of her head and almost pulled her into her lap. Faith went willingly. She couldn’t keep pretending she wasn’t hopelessly in love with her best friend.

 

Word count: 390
Rating: M
Warnings: implied child abuse, non-graphic self-harm, referenced homophobia

(I have this fixation / In finding salvation / Maybe in submission / Despising tradition)

Faith hated how her handwriting looked shaky and childish, the pen didn’t fit her right hand. Holding it in her left made her whole body respond in that familiar way of waiting for physical pain. So she had to stick with stupid block letter even if, in theory, she learned the pretty, loopy cursive handwriting.

Faith hated her reflection, she thought about punching it, shattering the glass and letting the shard cut deep into her knuckles. Maybe deep enough to carve into her bones, then maybe these acidic feelings would bleed out. (She’d bleed out for hours to feel empty from the dirty thoughts, from the dirty feelings, from the dirty memories).

The cigarettes tasted like burnt graveyard dirt, she hated it and loved the way it burned her lungs from inside out. A controlled, welcomed pain. She sneaked in and out of the dive bar, fake ID in hands. The bouncer clearly knew, and he wasn’t paid enough to care. The woman followed her the forth time she stepped out, seeking another smoke and with the pleasant buzz of alcohol.

“Hello, handsome,” the woman was in leather jacket, with a bleached buzzcut and Faith could see the lines of tattoos on her neck and the back of her hands. She looked like she’d ruin Faith’s body and soul.

“Hello, handsome, yourself,” Faith slurred a little, the woman looked amused.

“Sloan,” she offered a handshake.

Faith lied: “Maya,” she liked the way Sloan looked up and down. She knew she looked like the dollar-store version of her. She was figuring it out.

“How can I help you, baby girl?”

“I don’t know… what’s available?”

“A little fun, if you’re interested in that,” she approached slowly, like a predator. Faith didn’t mind being pressed between Sloan and the wall. “You look in dire need of some action.”

“That’s because I am in dire need of some action.”

She wouldn’t mind getting action there. In this stupid alley behind the dive bar.

Faith was already her mother’s worst disappointment, the daughter born corrupted and no amount of blows and punishments could fix her. No amount of hunger and blood exorcized the evil that shaped her soul.

Faith wouldn’t fight it anymore then, not when surrending to it felt so good.

Word count: 370
Rating: M
Warnings: implied abusive relationship

Sloan had smelled and sounded like the worst kind of trouble Faith could get in her life. With her sharp smile and sharper eyes. There, when they’ve met in that back alley, all Faith’s instincts told her Sloan was the perfect woman to ruin her life, her soul, to make the corruption burn in a pleasant way.

Faith, or Maya to her cool older girlfriend, needed action.

Sloan had whispered on her ear, her hand shoved under Faith’s pants and pressing her against the wall, how cute she was. How much Sloan liked an adorable jailbait like her. She had chuckled when Faith said she was, indeed, not underage. You look like you are.

Stuart, in his little posh scholar era (nevermind Faith is the one with the posh accent she suppresses all the time), would go on and on about how Sloan was as toxic as Lake Karachay. That if it went sound, he premonished it (as if someone still used that fucking world). He told her she better not come home bruise and bloodied, and she told him Sloan wouldn’t hurt her.

The first time questioned how Sloan treated her, Faith made sure he knew Sloan didn’t touch her without consent and such. Yeah, the bare minimum. The medicum of decency, she’s not a fucking rapist.

Stuart didn’t quite understand the burning need to hurt, something to feed the blasphemy rotting her soul. He cared about her health. He cared too much about an hypothetical future. You have to think about it, he had told her a few times, patching her split knuckles after yet another bar fight she got in. She needed an outlet for the rage and that wouldn’t be her girlfriend’s face.

He told her that her future wouldn’t e there if she didn’t think about it, didn’t plan.

Stuart didn’t felt the sin, the devil still gnawing on her chest even if she had stopped believing years ago. She needed the fire, she needed the warmth to keep her sane. Or mostly sane. It kept certain thoughts at bay.

Sloan was the oxygen making the fire burning higher and hotter.

She needed this love consuming her from inside out, infesting her like a plague.

 

Word count: 325
Rating: M
Warnings: age gap, referenced sex, unhealthy relationship

“You’re the quintessential example of mommy issues, I fear.”

Faith rolled her eyes, Rachel never wasted an opportunity to mock her even if with this amused, almost loving tone. It’d be annoying if Faith wasn’t floating in the ocean of post-sex bliss. Rachel was already putting back her shirt, somehow always looking professional.

There was a reason Faith had a thing for middle-aged women.

“I don’t see you complaining about any of my kinks.”

“Maybe because you’re fun to mess around with. You’re also awfully devoted. Isn’t that blasphemy?”

“Maybe,” she nodded along, as if she wasn’t wearing nothing but the ever present silver cross. “We’re both blasphemous.”

“I’m not the one that has nasty sex wearing a religious symbol.”

“I’m not the one fucking someone half my age.”

“That’s because someone half my age is a legal adult,” Rachel threw a shirt towards her. “Come on, get up. Put on some clothes.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re not walking around naked.”

“But that makes your job easier.”

“You’re insufferable.”

“Yes, but you still like me.”

Rachel rolled her eyes and kissed her briefly before pushing pants towards her hands too. Faith sighed in annoyance but lazily put her clothes back on. Stuart was probably worried, like the mother hen he became recently. This woman is a personified red flag, what are you doing? He had almost hissed at her after Faith showed up as Rachel’s arm candy.

Faith new this was a bad idea as a whole. Rachel didn’t like her, she liked Faith’s devotion to her. Like the way Faith was a little insane, a little obsessed. I’d kill for you. Rachel could point and smile and Faith would be her attack dog.

Rachel liked her body, the way Faith gave her everything just to try to be worth of her attention.

This was going to end in heartbreak and grief, but for now, it kept her distracted from the heartbreak and grief already consuming her.

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.

Comments

[pattrose]

These were all very good.

[analogbasilisk]

Thank you!