[private] who am i to complain, sleaze

[isakov]

i finally got sewed up
Set a time and i showed up

What is it that he remembers?
The electricity, certainly. The quiet.
Perhaps, most of all, the way that Sleaze had trembled in that quiet. How he’d called him a miracle. How easy it had been to fashion himself into that stillness, like slipping into a second skin. How he had understood in that moment that the power of it could be devastating. How he had chosen in that moment to let it devastate. How it had thrilled him to think of the ruin it might cause. And then, ultimately, how it had never caused any ruin at all.

Because he’d believed himself thing made for love, everyone else’s love, not his own. And yet, he had loved. In the still waters of that river and in the days that followed, the electric child, he had loved.

And here now, Sleaze. He had ached for the gravity of him, the weight of his presence. For years, he had ached and turned cleanly away from love. The act of it, the embodiment of it. It had done nothing for him. Even Avelina had gone.

And he had thought he’d forgotten, for what sense was there in remembering? But he reaches out then to touch Sleaze’s shoulder and the quiet comes rushing through him so readily that it is as if it had never left. He feels it, too, that heady relief.

“I told you to find me if you ever needed me,” he murmurs into the warmth of his shoulder. And he understands that it had killed him, piece by piece, that Sleaze had never come for him.

isakov