"People are blue. But you're yellow."

Those were the first words Belle ever said to her out loud, the fragmented glassy syllables sliding shattered over her parted lips, spilt lips, palindromic in their meaning. She meant what she said, but she meant it differently to how other people would have meant it, and the meaning wasn't lost on her mirror maniac, because their insanity instantly intertwined.

The fragmented mirror words cut her spilt lips, spilling lips, lips spilling blood, and bloody words. Black blood boiling and bubbling and burning and it glossed her split, spilt lips. Spilling bloody words, racing knives to hit the heart of their target, shattered glass syllables binding as they fly to mirror meaning and reflect purpose.

They were the first vocalised words between them, but that wasn't to say they had never communicated, eyes meeting, fiery honey and storming grey united in similar difference, intertwining insanity, matching madness linking them together as their demons grasped lovingly at each other's throats clinging with enough intensity to choke the words that wanted to knife out of their spilling lips, gaping mouths.

Recognition. In their raised eyebrows and racing hearts beating out of time and place and their chests. Words hung heavy and unheard between them, but they were there, unspoken, not unanswered. Words clambering over the rungs of their eyelashes, spiralling into the fully empty air with every telling blink and every loud thought. Sharp words exhaled with every sharp breath, sharp knives and sharp looks and sharp understanding and sharp pain. Icicle arrows spearing both of them, melting midair to splinter their souls and shatter their spirits, and it didn't mend their madness because it didn't want to be mended. Arrows in war are cruel, but arrows in love are crueller, because it was the empty air that bombarded and assaulted them, and they couldn't fight the invisible, intangible, incorrigible icicles, and they hurt but they weren't there and they wouldn't be swayed, and they couldn't be swayed because they were never there.

And honey flames and grey storms crashed and instead of extinguishing one another they fed off the energy and the chaos and the insanity, and they didn't want to be tired or structured or sane, and those things came together, as tightly plaited as the cornrows on the head of the rich silt of Sheba.

So one fuelled the fire and another fuelled the storm, and they shot the icicles into each other's hearts and only plucked them out once they had melted, and they'd only ever exchanged six bloody knives, but they stabbed each other with unspoken weapons before that.

"You know Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint?"

That was Belle's second sentence split into waves to ripple across the abyss dividing them and be reconstructed in the unstructured skull that separated the mad mind from the madder world.

"They say it made him happy," hummed the louder and quieter of the two in hollow agreement. Louder thoughts. Quieter voice. Speaking pairs. Two is less than three and more than one, and just the right balance of not overwhelming and not underwhelming and just whelming, submerging, engulfing, synonymous to prove a point.

Happiness is harmful. Yellow paint is poisonous. She is apparently yellow, but yellow is sharp and yellow is sick and yellow is poison. Belle says she's yellow, but yellow is Van Gogh and sunflowers and not listening because you don't have an ear to hear with, and just the right balance of insanity and sanity to know that the world doesn't need you, and maybe Maxine was too insane to be a three and too sane to be a one, so she was stuck at two with too much self awareness and too much madness.

But they say Van Gogh was happy with yellow, so Maxine is content to be two garish yellow sunflower petals overlapping each other as they stretch away from the oily little seeds at the crushed centre of society, but remain imbedded in the heart of the flower until the grey storm comes to yank them away to spiral uncontrollably in the mad gusts.

Belle's eyes were her storm, the eye of her storm, tearing her away from a semblance of sanity to dance wildly in the mad grey wind and the mad grey sky and the mad grey irises of a mad grey girl. Repetition to prove a point. Repetition is insanity.

Max is yellow, but Belle isn't really grey, because grey's not a colour, it's a shade, and people are colours.

Belle isn't grey.

Belle isn't grey.

Two is better than one or three.

Van Gogh ate yellow paint because it made him happy. Belle is the soft sharp lavender, the heavy headiness that it's hard to hate and harder to ignore. The lavender to make the sunflowers yellower, the lavender to balance the painting and level the shadows. The lavender that doesn't matter until it does. She is the dark void under a sofa, the swirling of water down a drain, the space between thunder and lightning at the eye of a mad grey storm, the pause to recover between the rippling notes of a reusable rhythm.

She's the rings on a tree stump, the paint left clinging needily to the brush after the stroke has been made, the chasmic cracks in a path that children leap to avoid waking flaming lions or breaking their mothers' spindling backs, winding superstition and suspicion into young cotton wool brains.

She's the heavy lavender storm that spills dark bruises over the aching crown of the horizon, the weighty clouds that threaten brooding violence on any foolish enough to seek refuge among their chaotic caverns and castles and curling corners dissolving to mist and moisture.

Max is foolish.

She dances through the delicate displays of amour armour and archaic architecture, about the curling corners of mist and castles of cloud, and spins inanely in the swirling strength of the storm. She loses time and purpose and heart, and maybe the heady lavender clubs her over the head and knocks her into sleep, or maybe she'll be awake for ever, electrocuted by laughing lightning whenever she tries to forget and fall.

Max is foolish. Too yellow. Two yellow. Foolish yellow. Too foolish. Foolish two.

"It killed him." Belle flung the blunted knives at her head and chest, but they sliced carelessly through the skin, and her forehead's pulsating wildly behind her fiery eyes, as if her brain and heart have switched places, and she doesn't need either but she's stuck with both.

"It made him happy. That's what killed him."

And Belle believes her. Van Gogh ate yellow paint because it made him happy, and the happiness killed him. Maxine's words are fire and fact, and fuck it, fuck her, she's right.

Belle can smell burning honey, sweet and bitter, quiet and loud.

Honeyed words are knives, and she needs them like nothing before, and the never ending knives slice her spilt lips, nevertheless she needs more, because beauty is subjective, and words are beauty, and bubbling black blood lubricates her lips, and pain is beautiful when you use words to tear it down and words to build it back up.

She needs pain like she needs words like she needs Maxine like she needs them all at overwhelming once, like Van Gogh needed yellow paint.

Thirty two shattered mirror knives hurled as invisible waves through seemingly empty air. Two icicle arrows syringe shooting love into their chests like drugs. One pair of fiery honey eyes meeting stormy grey.

She's addicted.