if the heavens ever did speak; saedis

[sleaze]

I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife A long time ago, Sleaze was taught to pray. The prayers were a jumble of things, an amalgam of what his father recalled from his mythos, but this was all Sleaze knew, and so he never questioned it. He lived in the meadow with his father, repeating the prayers. He knelt until his knees were worn bare. And sometimes his father would lay his head across Sleaze’s back and sigh, and he never questioned this. For a long time, he knew no one other than his father. He knew nothing but what he was told. Sleaze was, truth be told, a very stupid boy. But then his father had left, quite unexpectedly, and with no reason given; and Sleaze, alone, had had to set off. He’d come to Beqanna, a throng of other horses and worlds, met creatures much more powerful than he. He met terrible creatures, and, at times, became a terrible thing himself. Eventually, he stopped praying. The things he saw stripped belief from him. Sleaze is long-grown now, and a much different boy than the one who had knelt in the meadow. He even looks different – no longer black, like his father, but instead a dark purple (though he looks black in the dark, it’s only when light hits that such color is revealed). He bears scars, some physical, some mental. He bears and ability, one he has mostly quieted, to creep into others minds. (He hates this. He has mostly smothered it. He has too many terrible thoughts of his own to want to know anyone else in that awful, intimate way.) He is still a rather stupid boy. He walks alone. He is uneasy, as he often is, because unease is his natural state (too many has he been ambushed, captured, drug into terrible quests). In the shadowy dusk, he looks black. He sees the woman, an ethereal white, glowing, and he tenses. He wonders if she is some mythic creature come to steal him to another quest. But she looks at him with only mild curiosity, and says nothing, and his anxiety quells for a moment. She is just a regular horse. Like him. Ships passing in the night. But he slows. He looks at her again. How she glows! “Good evening,” he says. He speaks soft enough that she could pretend to ignore it. He wonders if he’s been a fool to even speak at all. sleaze cancer x garbage

[Saedìs]

The land tasted Saedís before it ever knew her heart-beat, or the thousand other cadent things within her breast and body. A wind, stealing and smiling and swift, had torn the ribbons of scent from her hair, some time ago; and had littered them on the breaking back of every frond, on each leaf´s eager face. Another gale had stripped the musk from her skin, like a courtesan´s swathe of silk, and tossed it to a brother, and he to a sister; and thus, those tiny morsels of Saedís have traipsed the world. A thousand winds and plants and arborous things have known her, though not her name; but perhaps it was written somewhere, in that blend of attar, of jasmine herb under starlight, of lonely pines on a mountain, of warm skin on dead earth. These odors, and a brocade of stardust across her eyes, were all that she had possessed beyond her flesh – and they were waiting for her, on the boughs of the Forest.

She dreams – as she is wont to do, dancing beneath the stars. Oh, she dreams of dark-skinned princes and midnight trysts – and there is laughter in her eye and starlight under her feet. She twirls and pirouettes around the trees – a whimsical thing spun of innocence and starglow. What did she ever know of heartbreak and ruin?

His words came to her before her sky-bound eyes could spot him in the darkness. They were quietly spoken, and should have gone unheard for the hiss of a rankled wind was louder. But it was the very gentleness wreathing his summons that reached her. Thus, uncertain, trembling – she sought him. And when she reached him, she knew it was he by the darkness that framed his face; it was the same shadows that coated his voice and made it beautiful.

”Good evening, stranger in the night.” she smiles – and there is star-glimmer in that smile. ”I am Saedís”


@[sleaze]

[sleaze]

I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife He knows worlds that could not have possibly existed, but ones he still dreams of. He remembers – or dreams – when he was plastic and in a strange world, cradled in strange hands. He was hurt in that world, and loved there. Made and remade. A name, carved on his stomach. Pictures painted over scars. She loves us. It had been impossible then, that world, and it was impossible now. But it haunts him, those memories, they come fragmented in dreams or when he lets his thoughts drift. He is not a stable boy, had never been, and his experiences keep fracturing him (too many worlds, too many selves). He tries to focus and breathe. To be here, now. To listen to birds and the hushed chatter of the river and smell the flowers blooming around them. To pretend this is the only world he’s known. She is a contrast. She is light, unburdened in the starlight. He does not presume to know her – she is a stranger – but he tastes envy in his throat at the easy way she moves. She smiles. He tries to smile, too, a quiver of the lips. “Hello, Saedis,” he says. A curious name, foreign, but it suits her. “My name is Sleaze,” he says, then, “I’m sorry if I disturbed you.” sleaze cancer x garbage

[Saedìs]

Love is a compassionate cataclysm. A spring-river flooding her structure until its buoyant waters seep through her every pore.

In its wake - she is Muse; she is creativity and longing, the whispers of innocence and the constant clamor of invention; she is Beauty; soundless and sightless, sunlight dappled upon features carved of stardust; and she is Sea; distant and yet so near, with saline fingertips toying in the locks of hair which fall at her own shoulders – paradigm and prototype, dream-spun and free, she is Saedís: without past recorded, without future known. And she stands, spawned of the very stars which cling so to her skin; she stands, daughter of moon-rise in the distance; she stands, silent with stars in her eyes and intrigue upon her tongue: my puzzle without pieces, my equation without sign… she stands, and that is all. She stands.

She stands before Sleaze with a vibrant intensity in her eyes; it is not mere curiosity, nor searching – it is something older, something deeper, something which lies curled in her breast and her mind until woken;
”Sleaze” she echoes; with a strange sort of deja-vú – but she smiles, oh she smiles – for what else is there to do when your lover is named Garbage? And still, there is something there among the bright-sounding words, the lilting inflection, the unaccented syllables of her voice. ”What a peculiar name.” she means not to hurt his feelings – but she is a curious thing, and so she must ask. Saedís is no more and no less than otherworldly, with moonlight at her back and sunlight at her head; and she practically emanates warmth and friendliness.

”Do not apologize – I am an appreciator of midnight conversations.” she laughs – chimes on the wind.

A fluttering moth to the flame.

[sleaze]

I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife There is something both compelling and unnerving about her. (Moth to flame, you said – and that’s it, that’s it. He, the moth. Her, the flame. Bright and beautiful.) He is uneasy – he is always uneasy – because she seems so comfortable here, like some specter in the starlight. He’s an intruder, bumbling, with too many ill-fated stories on his tongue and a name as wretched as he is. (Sleaze, son of Garbage and Cancer. Fitting. Disgustingly fitting. A line of filth and sickness.) She laughs. He slips. It’s that simple. One moment he is watching her, star-struck, and her head tilts back, and his mind jumps. It touches her for just a moment, and then he wrenches himself back out, disgusted. It’s been a long time since he’s done that, he’s learned to control it, to forget it exists, even. But she was so open. “I’m sorry,” he stammers, “I’m so sorry, I can’t control it, I was cursed –" He’s disgusting, vile. He hadn’t meant it. He learned nothing, it was only a second. But – There’d been a name, hadn’t there? A familiar one. Distinct. At the forefront of her mind, well-worn, a familiar thing. “You know him,” he says. He swallows. He feels ill, feels fluttery. He does not belong here. “Garbage, I mean. You know him?” He makes it a question, this time. As if he doesn’t know the answer. sleaze  cancer x garbage

@[Sanna] I am SO sorry i went on vacation right when you posted this and then my entire life went to hell. also i figured him possessing her for a second was the quickest way to make a ~reveal~ but i can change it if it's not okay!!

[Saedìs]

She can feel him inside her mind – and her dove smile surrenders to confusion.

As dawn over the aging mountain, a gleam entered eye; and it reflected the creature before her, so tormented. He was a lost soul, thought Saedís, losing the lightness of her smile; he was a slumbering demigod, lost among the roots of oaks and beeches. This boy, of dust skin and dull eyes, was as ashamed as her at the melding of minds; and yet he could not forget. Some melody lurked, in the ease of her breath from nose to air, and to hear it defeated by silence was to know the last of her heart´s endeavours.

His name on Sleaze´s lips is an omen – and Sleaze is the amphora of some terrible truth. Saedís stumbles backwards – and among the breathed apologies only his name is what sticks. Not so much the name itself but the way it sits so familiar on his lip. Garbage, Garbage, Garbage.

Her mind reels – and among the starved ghosts of her dreams a memory surfaces.

No! cried some voice within Saedís; recoiling.

A gale rose against her back, and ripped at the curls of her hair; but the storm’s rage outside her body was nothing (nothing!) to the tempest that rose, and railed, against the confines of her bones and skin.
”How…how do you know him?” she stutters – and her words are butterflies flying too close to a burning sun.

”I…love him.”

Not a statement – but a plea.


@[Cassi] I'm equally sorry for the wait and crapiness of this! I've also had some bad months - and I love the possession

[sleaze]

I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife He has a way of wandering into sinkholes. He feels things tug at his feet, a threat of drowning, and he thinks I should turn back. Yet he never does. He slogs forward, towards nothing, towards sinking, towards suffocation. (Had there been an opportunity to turn back, at his quests? When he was in a strange world in a strange form? Maybe. Maybe.) She is shocked, clearly, a thread of fear, as well. He wonders why. Wonders what they are, to each other. (No, he doesn’t have to wonder – it’s obvious. Even to such a stupid boy, it’s obvious.) I love him, she says, and Sleaze feels a momentarily flit of jealousy. Not that she loves him, or that Garbage no doubt loves her back. But Garbage was his world, his father and mother both, for years. Garbage raised him in a meadow and taught him to pray beneath a midday sun and then one day he just left, and Sleaze woke up alone, and he hasn’t seen him sense. (He’d heard he’d died, and he’s grieved, briefly. It appears now he was misinformed.) “I’m his son,” he says, weak, “his and Cancer’s, but he’s the one who bore me. And raised me.” Cancer had left not long after Sleaze’s magical conception, or so Garbage had told him. Sleaze only knows one parent. “He left,” he says, spills that awful truth at her feet, embarrassed even in saying it, “for years, he raised me, and then he left, without saying goodbye. I thought he was dead.” sleaze cancer x garbage