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  • Beqanna

    COTY

    Assailant -- Year 226

    QOTY

    "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


    you're paralyzing me, any
    #1
    throw me in the water, don’t think about the splash i will create
    leave me at the altar, knowing all the things you just escaped

    It was a thing he discovered early, how soft he could make his edges.
    How, if he concentrated hard enough, he could make himself not exist at all.
    And he had delighted in hurtling at his sisters as fast as he could and passing right through them. How he had delighted in threatening to break the fragile things from the beginning.

    There had been a glimmer of something else, too. A magic less obvious.
    He caught glimpses of things he was too young to understand. But he had not asked about these things with shimmering edges that flitted just outside of his reach. These things that belonged to him but would not come to him.

    He moves now with purpose. Away from the meadow and his sisters and his mother and the glass stallion who had fashioned water from thin air to entertain him once. Who had treated him as his own despite the glaringly obvious differences in them. They had never explicitly told him that he was not the glass stallion’s son, but they didn’t have to. Isakov was not glass like his sisters. He had galaxies trapped in his skin, certainly, but they had obviously inherited that from their mother. But he had never asked about his father either.

    It is the river that beckons him now and he goes without question. He does not understand the pull, the fish-hook in his gut that draws him to the water’s edge. He feels no thirst as he sinks up to his knees. The draw is perhaps even more primal than that. But this, too, belongs to him but refuses to be brought into sharper focus.

    A dream he had once, maybe.

    He dips his head to skim his mouth against the water’s current. He can feel it in his veins, too.

    isakov
    Reply
    #2

    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 go far, from the river. This makes no concrete sense – the river is not a birthplace, anymore than the meadow is, or the forest. His real birthplace is somewhere beyond Beqanna’s walls, one he has not returned to.
    (He’s wandered, since then, but never back there. He isn’t sure he knows the way, anymore.)
    The river means little to him, but he has stayed at its edges. There is something comforting in the rush of the water, the coolness of it at his ankles. It feels grounding, in a way, and Sleaze will take anything that feels like grounding he can.
    His own life is slippery, realities streaking in and out, and he tries not to think too often of this, he tries to look ahead and smile and show nothing of the madness he fears lives within him.
    He shows nothing of his other powers, the unwanted ability to jump into their minds, their bodies. He has learned to control him, to tamp it down until it is nothing but a whisper inside him.
    He doesn’t want to be inside his own mind, much less someone else’s.

    Sleaze is not, by nature, a social thing. He lived alone for too long, and it has never come naturally. So he should have passed the boy by, as he does so many of them. But he pauses, and looks at him, at the stars patterning his body.
    He stops.
    “Hello,” he says.

    Sleaze

    Reply
    #3
    throw me in the water, don’t think about the splash i will create
    leave me at the altar, knowing all the things you just escaped

    There is something that lurks beneath the surface of his reflection.
    He can’t see it, but he can feel it. Something that calls gentle.

    Something of a siren, luring him. He takes a step deeper into the river, dips his nose into the current. He almost lets it draw him into the depths. And perhaps he would have, if a voice had not arrested his attention.

    He does not look up sharp, Isakov. No, he blinks at the water’s surface, catching one last glance at his mottled reflection before he turns his gaze to the shore. It is a stranger that greets him and he recognizes the stranger’s dark purple as something that lives in his skin, too. He smiles but there is something in it that is not exactly friendly.

    He swings his body around, still half-submerged in the river, as he studies the stranger. He can feel that same strange something when he looks at the dark stallion. The thing that calls to him, ripples just beneath the surface. But he does not move any closer.

    Hello,” he echoes. “I’m Isakov,” he tells the stranger, though the stranger hadn’t asked. He takes a short step toward the shore and the stallion that stands upon it and tilts his head, the gold eyes curious.

    Do you want to join me?

    isakov
    Reply
    #4

    I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
    tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife


    He watches the other move deeper into the water. He wonders how deep the other man will go, if he will watch the stars submerge beneath its depths. But no, he stops, looks at Sleaze, who fights the urge to shift beneath his gaze. And then he speaks – a returned greeting, his name, which is foreign and Sleaze pauses for a moment, repeats it to himself in his head, trying to get it right.
    “I’m Sleaze,” he says. Not a foreign name but not a good one, either, but what can you expect of a boy born to fathers named Cancer, named Garbage.
    Ruin all the way down, it seems.

    Isakov moves, then, but only slightly, the river still moving about him. He asks his question and Sleaze feels a foolish moment of hesitation at the offer. There is something to Isakov, something he cannot decipher, and it makes him wary – but also curious.
    After all, what does he have to lose?
    So he answers by stepping into the water, letting its currents move against his ankles, then his knees. He’s never been much for the water – he still remembers drowning, in that past life, the one that was real but not-real – but he moves closer.
    “It’s nice,” he says – banal, stupid. I’ve told you, Sleaze is not a born conversationalist.
    “What brought you to the river?” he asks, because it’s better than it’s nice, if only barely.

    Sleaze

    Reply
    #5
    throw me in the water, don’t think about the splash i will create
    leave me at the altar, knowing all the things you just escaped

    Were he cruel, perhaps Isakov might have smirked or cocked a questioning brow, chortled at some private joke at the purple stallion’s expense. Were he cruel, he might have leered and asked, ‘what kind of name is that?’. But Isakov is not cruel, so he does none of these things. He merely watches a moment, as if waiting for some kind of tell that the stallion was joking, and when one does not come he nods.

    Sleaze,” he murmurs, dresses it up real nice, makes it sound pretty. And, in the end, he does smile but there is nothing in it that mocks him. “It’s nice to meet you, Sleaze.

    Even nicer still when he steps into the water. If Sleaze hesitates at all, Isakov does not notice. And perhaps the dark stallion thinks his own assessment stupid, but Isakov ducks his head and skims his mouth across its surface again. The smile remains when he looks up, peering at Sleaze through a mess of sooty lashes. “Isn’t it?” he sighs, swaying his weight against the current.

    Creeps a little closer to the dark stallion.
    Almost reaches out to touch him but doesn’t. Just blinks those golden eyes, tilts that fine head, doesn’t look away when he answers. “I love the water,” he says, honest. And he studies the dark stallion a long moment before he finally touches him, just barely when he asks, “what do you love?

    isakov
    Reply
    #6

    I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
    tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife


    Sleaze is familiar with cruelty, but always at strange hands. In that other world – that other reality, the one that existed and did not exist – he was subjected to all kinds of things, drowned and burned and a name carved on him, unmade and remade, and his name was not Sleaze, there, but –
    No.
    It is not a path he allows himself to go down. He has done…not well, exactly, but better. He has kept those thoughts away, buried them alive, and if they come to him in dreams, what of it? Dreams are allowed to be strange, haunted as they are by reality.

    Isakov moves closer and Sleaze wonders why. He is struck by the color of his eyes – gold, like precious metal. He thinks of his father’s eyes – they hadn’t been gold, but a burning orange, like flames. This is a subtler glow.
    Sleaze’s own eyes are brown. He is entirely unremarkable.
    He is surprised further when Isakov touches him, just barely. A whisper of a touch, but Sleaze stiffens beneath it. Not because it is uncomfortable, or even unwanted – but because it has been so long since he was last touched.
    He softens, though, as he thinks about the question. What does he love?
    He thinks of the woman he’d known once, who had quieted the unrest of his mind, when his abilities were barely controlled. Thinks of Malis, how she had affirmed that the unreality he dreamt of was not his alone to bear. Had he loved either of them? He doesn’t know. He had loved what they brought upon him, and then, he answers.
    “When it’s quiet,” he says, but that’s not quite right, so he speaks on, “when my mind is quiet. When things feel very simple.”

    Sleaze

    Reply
    #7
    throw me in the water, don’t think about the splash i will create
    leave me at the altar, knowing all the things you just escaped

    He can feel the dark stallion stiffen and it puts a little spasm in his heart.
    But the heart softens when the dark stallion softens, too.
    It emboldens him. Perhaps more than it should.
    He draws his mouth gently along the curve of his shoulder while he ponders, a mindless kind of touch. A comforting sort of gesture.

    It fills him with heat, Isakov. All of it. Heat and wonder and a kind of breathlessness that he’s never known until now. It makes him want to curl himself against Sleaze’s side, lay his head across his spine, find rest there with him.

    He listens, perhaps more intently than he has ever listened to anything before, when Sleaze tells him what he loves. Listens like it’s the only thing in the world that matters. And perhaps it is. Because Isakov goes quiet for a long beat, hardly even breathes, fashions himself into the thing that Sleaze loves to the best of his ability. The water barely stirs around him, the breathing so shallow that it disturbs almost nothing.

    He remains this way as long as he can, his mouth still pressed against Sleaze’s shoulder. Until, finally, he exhales a long, slow breath and drags his mouth up the length of that dark neck. Brings it to rest at his poll. “I can be quiet,” he murmurs, an offer.

    He retreats then, just enough to look into those remarkable brown eyes. And he smiles. “Is it terribly loud?” he asks, tilts his fine head, “your mind, is it loud?


    isakov
    Reply
    #8

    I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
    tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife


    He isn’t sure what to do when the other horse touches him. It has been a long time since Sleaze was last touched, in any fashion. He tends towards solitude, and is not handsome or intriguing enough to draw others to him, much less their skin to his.
    It’s nice, though. He’d forgotten that.
    (Who had been the last horse he touched? He can’t recall.)
    As he is thinking this, trying to wind back the years or months that have passed since he last felt the warmth of anyone else, something shifts.

    Quiet rises like a tide, and he feels the incessant, squalling nature of his unreality fade. It is not gone – not completely – but it is quieter than he can ever recall it being. Sleaze inhales, sharp, and the noise is so audible in this quiet, but he doesn’t care. He feels steady in his own mind again, and though parts of him quake internally – the sea-legs of madness persist – it is so gloriously still.
    He is so transfixed by this that he almost forgets about Isakov’s presence. When he turns to him, the quiet increases, and he realizes suddenly – of course! – that somehow this is his doing, because the quiet is better when he looks upon him, as if he radiates it.
    “It’s so loud,” he says, then, awestruck, “but you’re quiet.”
    He is the one who touches him, now, as if he could spell out his gratitude by running his muzzle against Isakov’s star-stricken crest.
    “You…” he says, and he’s almost breathless, almost himself, a self that had been lost long ago, “are quite a miracle.”

    Sleaze



    @[isakov]
    Reply
    #9
    throw me in the water, don’t think about the splash i will create
    leave me at the altar, knowing all the things you just escaped

    It feels like something sacred, the breath Sleaze draws in the quiet. It feels like something to be worshiped. It will almost certainly echo for weeks (or months or years) in the chambers of Isakov’s heart. It fills him up with something he does not immediately recognize.

    Gratitude, perhaps. But it feels even more profound than that.
    It is not as dark as power but it is every bit as intoxicating.

    It beckons him closer. Closer still until their chests are pressed flush and Isakov touches his mouth to Sleaze’s spine. Like he will curl himself around him, insulate him in the quiet, protect him from the things that plague him. As if he is capable of these things.

    The most he can offer, in truth, are these brief glimpses of silence. Real or imagined, he doesn’t know which. But it doesn’t matter when Sleaze touches him in turn, calls him a miracle. It kicks a shuddering breath out of him and he withdraws then, uncurls himself from around the darker stallion.

    Tell me why it’s loud,” he murmurs into the quiet. “Let me help you.

    There is some kind of wild wonder jammed in his windpipe. Because he is a thing whose magic is born from love but this is the closest he has ever come to feeling selfless.

    isakov


    @[sleaze]
    Reply
    #10

    I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
    tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife


    It is overwhelming, the pace with which this happens – from stranger to quiet to this, now, Isakov pressing against him. Sleaze doesn’t know what to do with himself, with the tenderness that is bestowed upon him in these gentle movements.
    Isakov is warm, a contrast to the cool rush of the river. Sleaze is warm, too.
    And quiet.
    He exhales and his breath makes a few strands of Isakov’s mane flutter.
    He thinks, in the quiet, that maybe he could get used to this. That maybe this is what others spoke of – this warmth. This quiet. Sleaze had barely known to want it, he did not have the materials with which to build such an idea, having lived so long in his disruption.
    He knows, now, tastes it on his lips like honey.

    He listens to the other’s question and wonders what kind of answer he can give. It’s too much, to explain how his world fractured, how another life unraveled and burned and then he was back in this body with those memories brimming, spilling over and they weren’t real but oh they were --
    No. He will not taint the quiet with such madness.
    “I lived somewhere else and died and came back here,” he says, a streamlined, whitewashed answer because he does not want to sully this, “and when I came back, my mind was never quite...quiet.”
    He should stop there. He should not question this, should accept it and cling to it while it lasts. Should not look the gift horse in the mouth, as it were.
    But Sleaze is quite the fool.
    “Why?” he asks, “why are you helping me?”

    Sleaze



    @[isakov]
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