"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
More time, his body and mind needed more time to heal. His arrival to this realm hadn’t gone without a blast, one that had left him bruised and broken. These last few weeks he had struggled to move, even breathing had hurt in the beginning, and he didn’t know how he had gotten through these past few weeks.
But physically and mentally. His bruised body had started to heal, breathing had gotten easier and his walking had improved to a slight stumble only. Hiroto avoids putting too much weight on his left foreleg, but in general all his steps are rather short and carefully taken.
Today his goal was the river. He had been there before, passed past the last trees to reach it, but he preferred the privacy of the forest. The solitude and loneliness matched his broken heart perfectly, if one would see him right now, nobody would see the outgoing and playful Hiroto that was hidden underneath. All what he once was, he wasn’t anymore.
Stripped of his task and goal, shunned and punished, then kicked out.
Now, a couple of weeks later he still hadn’t done anything to take care of himself. His pale lips dip towards the cold water. It only hadn’t frozen up yet because of the current, and since he had gotten past the point of caring, the cold didn’t bother him. Just as the dirty state of his body, dried blood around several older wounds and grass and sand all over him.
Once Hiroto would have cared, after all, he had represented his goddess in other realms, but with that goal, that life, stripped away from him, what was there to live for?
I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
He learned to worship in a nameless meadow. His father had never had precise names for their gods, they were formless things, half-baked ideas that his father clung to because they could be salvation, and that Sleaze clung to because it was all he knew.
He spent days and weeks in that meadow, sun baking down on his dark skin, whispering prayers that were as formless as the gods he sent them to. The hair on his knees wore to nothing, bare patches, and it made it easier for the damp of the earth to sink in. This never stopped him, for Sleaze was a good boy, and he knelt and prayed and thought this would be his life.
He never anticipated the things that came after, when father left – the strange quest that left him a purple so dark it was near black, the Glasgow smile of that clown, the burning, the drowning (she loves us)
or the way he found that woman, after, whose delusions matched his in such a way he was left to wonder if they were delusions at all.
(He wonders this often – how much of what happened was real, how much was delusion. He is purple now. That is real. He has a power, now – the ability to jump into their minds, their bodies – and that is real, too.)
He has done little since, cringing in solitude, his mind a cage. Sometimes he tries to remember the prayers he’d said, in the meadow a hundred or a thousand years ago, and he can’t. This terrifies him.
A lie – he remembers one line. A prayer that had come to him as he faced death in a realm that may have sprung from madness. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death --
“I shall fear no evil,” he finishes, a mutter to himself, and he is appalled when he looks up and there is another stallion, dirt- and blood-caked. Sleaze should have noticed him – would have, were he not so caught up in the past.
“I’m sorry,” he says. He apologizes often. “I didn’t realize anyone else was around.”
It is as if the last line of the prayer slows time, if not halts it. Instinctively he knows it’s a prayer, one unknown to him, but a prayer nonetheless. Though it’s not meant for his ears, it stirs something within him. His unusually fox shaped and red tipped ears flick in the direction of the sound and slowly his lips part from the cold water.
Hiroto cannot say that the other stallion had sparked something within him, he hadn’t had some kind of interest in something or someone ever since his arrival to this world. Now he couldn’t say that any longer. He bends his neck first, then step by step turns himself ninety degrees to the side, so he can focus his honey eyes on the stranger.
For a moment his – almost – empty gaze searches the black male’s features. Then his eyes wander to his body, but there’s nothing unusual except for the bare patches on his knees. A very strong contrast to Hiroto himself, from his pale cremello coat to the red lines that form intricate patterns on his coat. A few represented his origin, such as the red lines under his eyes and the outline of his ears. Others are unique to him, like the lines from his neck to his back and the bands around his left hindleg.
Unaware of how he looks, personal care and the impression others might have of him aren’t on his mind at all. ”It doesn’t bother me” he honestly replies, shaking his head slowly. With his left foreleg put in a resting position he just stares at the other male for a while. The urge to ask a question feels strange, almost unfamiliar and so out of place, but Hiroto simply cannot keep his lips sealed. ”Who were you praying too?”
He doesn’t mean to pry, or to get himself involved in another’s business. He’s genuinely interested, and there is a sliver of hope in his honey eyes. It’s unlikely that they worship the same goddess, but that doesn’t mean he cannot find hope and comfort in interacting with a fellow believer.
I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
He doesn’t look too close at the other stallion, eyes his eyes on the ground. Some of this is his nature – he is not a fighter, he is weak – but some of it is because if he hones his focus too adeptly on the other, his mind may jump into him. The possession is like savage animal in Sleaze’s mind, and too often it has touched the minds of others, and he has learned terrible thoughts and secrets, has been made to feel like an invader. So he does not give it cause to touch this fox-eared stallion’s mind, because he does not want to know him in the ways he’s been made to know others before.
Who were you praying to? asks the other, and Sleaze sometimes wonders this himself. He doesn’t exactly pray, not in the sense he once had – that faith was shredded on his quest, when he confronted death and madness and a singular devotion – but the words still bring him comfort, sometimes. When he can remember.
(Not that that line - I shall fear no evil - brings him comfort. Instead, it brings to mind madness. A faceless tiger and the strike of a match. It’s a lie, besides – Sleazes fears. He fears so damn much.)
“I wasn’t,” he says, and it’s too late before he realizes the vagueness of his response, “praying, I mean. I was…remembering. I used to know more prayers.”
It’s a strange confession given to a stranger with odd marking streaked red across pale skin. He still doesn’t meet the man’s eyes.
"Bravery is being the only one who knows you are afraid."
”Oh..” is all he can mutter disappointed.
The dark purple male’s words had sparked his interested rather quickly, and he quenches the spark just as quick. Once his honey eyes had been warm and inviting, but now Hiroto can only dully look at his companion. He sees him, looks at him, but at the same time it is as if he is looking right through him. Not that he could see, the way the purple male focussed on the ground.
But not all was lost. The words offered comfort, if they didn’t come from the heart of the one reciting them. ”Don’t stop..” he eventually offers. Hiroto cannot say please continue or say that he likes to hear more. He wants to hear more, but at the same time it is like rubbing salt in a wound. It hurt.
Just like it hurts to think of Her. Addressing her was out of the question. Out loud or in silence, through prayer or simple words. It doesn’t matter, Hiroto simply cannot. He knows she wouldn’t be listening and if he somehow would manage to get through, she would just tune him out. He was nobody, a disgrace and abomination, and to be forgotten.
His gaze still rests upon his purple companion, but introducing himself or asking for the other’s name isn’t on his mind. Once he would have. He used to be quite social and definitely outgoing. Loneliness hadn’t been his thing, but nowadays he soaked himself in it. And it didn’t even bother the pale cremello stallion.
Without Her there simply was no reason to go on, nothing to live for, nobody to serve.
I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
“What about you?” Sleaze asks. He shouldn’t ask. He should leave. The conversation as it stands is idle, words passed between strangers. There doesn’t need to be more to it. He should walk on, and let this man be, with his strange form and odd colors and all the other things Sleaze will never know.
Oh, but he is such a stupid boy. He asks. He prods.
“Do you pray?”
It might be enough, this question, on its own.
“You knew my words for a prayer, or…something close enough. Most don’t.”
Most don’t know him at all, their eyes skirt uncomfortably over his purple skin, over his dull eyes. He is not a man who drives others to converse with him. He is skittish, and odd, and full of too many strange and complex memories – too many strange and complex realities - to do well in most conversations.
(She knew him, that girl, indigo-dark. She knew secrets even he had hidden from himself. There was a girl, he said. There were two girls, she replied.
A shared reality, or a shared delusion – what matters is it had been shared. What matters is he might have loved her.)
“My name is Sleaze,” he says. He shouldn’t share his name – shouldn’t share anything else – but something keeps him here. Something grounds him. Perhaps it is his loneliness finally making itself known, crying out. Perhaps it’s something else – or nothing at all. After all, they are still strangers, a brief connection made over a prayer that wasn’t.
