and then my eyes got used to the darkness; bruise

[rapt]

there is a dream in the space between the hammer and the nail ------ the dream of about-to-be-hit, which is a bad dream ------------ but the nail will take the hit if it gets to sleep inside the wood forever   Once, there was a boy and a monster. The boy was young and very stupid, slipped from the deserts into the meadow, and the monster was there, waiting. Something happened there, an exchange, brief, but it was enough to carve channels within him, to make or unlock a terrible wanting, a desire he, a young and ultimately stupid boy, did not have a name for. It happened again, this desire – this time granted to him by a woman who was not a monster (though perhaps she flirted with the idea, once or twice). But this was a different sort, and the result – a child, his child – numbed that desire. It forced unto him a responsibility.   Rapt, these days, is no longer a boy and not quite so stupid. He does not think often of monsters (of any kind). He thinks of his son, now grown (but young, still, stumbling into adulthood, and how his throat hurts to watch it, to be unable to protect him always). He thinks of where he will wander next. Of everything and nothing. There are dreams (regular ones, not the kind his old, wicked lover wove, the ones that were dreams with consequences), though he doesn’t remember them often. He’ll wake, sometimes, with a thrum in his body that he daren’t put a name to. The feeling goes away easy enough. It can be swallowed. Tamped down.   He’s in the meadow, today, and there are no dreams staining his mind, he is aimless, as he often is, moving through grass and shadow, so when he first sees the monster, it doesn’t hit, not right away. Then. Then. He stops, frozen so suddenly that it’s nearly comical, and turns. He expects the monster to be gone – a hallucination, a hazy leftover of some long-ago dream – but it’s not. He’s there. Real, solid. Rapt can smell him, something sulfuric and sour, and the smell hauls in more memories, of the monster he met, how the fear had curled around his insides, how he had wanted it. Wanted more. (Wanted him). “Oh,” is all Rapt says, catapulted back to the stupid boy he once was, all those years of learning erased in a glance, in the curl of the monster’s horns. Reverent and stupid. Unchanged. “You,” he says – all eloquence slapped from his tongue in the wake of this – then, “I--” It’s only now that he realizes (stupid, stupid) that the color’s different. Not the gold he knew. A different shade. A different face, Pollock’s features, but smeared with something or someone else. Oh. “I’m sorry,” he says, finally managing to string two words together, “I - I thought you were someone else.”   rapt caius x else

@[Bruise] I couldn't HELP it