I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
In all the ways he had thought he might end up like his father, this had not been one of them.
Sleaze’s other father, after all, had been a magician – the circumstances of his conception were not overly surprising.
But Sleaze had had little magic – and what powers he did have had been scrambled – and none of it indicated that it could so fundamentally change his biology. Maybe it was Isakov’s magic, he will think later, when the fact of his situation had grown too large to deny. He had not thought Isakov magic in such a way, but then, he’d had no explanation for the other ways Isakov had changed him, so why not this?
It's not as if he could ask. They had parted ways, reluctant, and then Sleaze could not find him again. He had searched, but then his body had grown misshapen and he could not go far. He thought of asking others to look for him, but who could he ask? Sleaze knows so few here, and even those he knows, he is not close to.
So he gives birth alone, as Garbage had. The pain is excruciating, but Sleaze is no stranger to pain, no stranger to having his body warped and deformed in other ways.
The child is eager to get out, it seems. Even though he has little knowledge for what to do, having never expected to find himself in such a situation, Sleaze gives birth quickly, crying out in the end, a wordless plea to no one.
The girl is marvelous. She is purple, in places, like him, and starred in others, like Isakov, the two of them stitched together on her skin. She is beautiful and he is trembling, whether from pain or joy, he isn’t sure.
“Hello,” he says softly, and he feels such a wave of love that for a moment he thinks he will collapse under the sudden weight of it. He is so caught up in her that the world falls away, and it is only the two of them at the meadow’s edge, under the soft glow of moonlight.
Sleaze
@[isakov]