I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
He thinks about the question.
It is not that he bears the weight of sins that need forgiveness. His pain comes from a different place – an unraveling of the self. He had glimpsed, or lived, a world that was not this one, and there he had found an identity – and it had been taken. Stripped from him, as the trickster told them it was make-believe, and Sleaze was left with nothing but a new purple coat, an ability he did not want, and the crushing, debilitating weight of those memories.
But he has wronged no one – not in this world. Not that he is aware of. He is not close enough to anyone to hurt them, and vice versa. Sleaze is, in fact, remarkably unharmed in that area.
His only harm came by the way of his own mind. The memories of the not-world, the unreality.
Tigers and clowns and fire, oh my.
She is waiting for an answer, still. So is he. What could he say?
“I do not know myself well enough to forgive,” he says. This is true. He should be quiet, now. She doesn’t need to know the why.
He isn’t quiet.
“Years ago,” he says, “I was taken into another world. Put in a different body. A different everything. It felt…very real.”
It was real. She loves us. She loves us.
“There was a place for me there. I belonged. I died there. And then…then I was back here. As if it had never happened.”
It’s still a surface-skimmed version of the story, but it’s more than she should have, as he speaks like a madman to her, the river coursing at his knees.
Sleaze
@[Agetta]