I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
Sleaze is familiar with cruelty, but always at strange hands. In that other world – that other reality, the one that existed and did not exist – he was subjected to all kinds of things, drowned and burned and a name carved on him, unmade and remade, and his name was not Sleaze, there, but –
No.
It is not a path he allows himself to go down. He has done…not well, exactly, but better. He has kept those thoughts away, buried them alive, and if they come to him in dreams, what of it? Dreams are allowed to be strange, haunted as they are by reality.
Isakov moves closer and Sleaze wonders why. He is struck by the color of his eyes – gold, like precious metal. He thinks of his father’s eyes – they hadn’t been gold, but a burning orange, like flames. This is a subtler glow.
Sleaze’s own eyes are brown. He is entirely unremarkable.
He is surprised further when Isakov touches him, just barely. A whisper of a touch, but Sleaze stiffens beneath it. Not because it is uncomfortable, or even unwanted – but because it has been so long since he was last touched.
He softens, though, as he thinks about the question. What does he love?
He thinks of the woman he’d known once, who had quieted the unrest of his mind, when his abilities were barely controlled. Thinks of Malis, how she had affirmed that the unreality he dreamt of was not his alone to bear. Had he loved either of them? He doesn’t know. He had loved what they brought upon him, and then, he answers.
“When it’s quiet,” he says, but that’s not quite right, so he speaks on, “when my mind is quiet. When things feel very simple.”
Sleaze
