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    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


    it's strange what desire will make foolish people do; isakov
    #1

    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]
    Reply
    #2
    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 finds them by accident, though he would be lying if he claimed that he did not spend every  waking moment hoping to find Sleaze or that his heart did not leap so foolishly at the mere rumor of something deep purple. 

    (Was this love?
    Could it be?
    Isakov had been built from the idea of love, the illusion of love, but he had not been built for love. He had understood this from a very young age. 
    Not the kind of love that existed between his mother and the glass stallion who fashioned water from air, he knew that.)

    But his heart beat for the idea that he might see Sleaze again. Might touch him again. Might lay his star-strewn head to rest on his dark shoulder and let that same stillness pass between them. 

    And Fate smiles upon him, though he does not deserve it, Isakov. Because there is a darkness in him, a rot in his heart. But he is consumed instead by something else when he sees them. Two of them. The deep purple stallion and a child. Deep purple and kissed by galaxies.

    A child who thinks the electricity is her pulse, pressed against Sleaze’s side as the current passes between them. 

    Sleaze,” Isakov sighs and goes to them and touches Sleaze first and then the small child huddled against his side. Theirs. And he feels the electricity, too but he is too distracted by the thing beating in his own chest to let it deter him. “She’s beautiful,” he says because he doesn’t know what else to say, struck speechless for the first time in his life. 

     

    isakov



    @[sleaze]
    Reply
    #3

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


    Sleaze is not used to things working out. He is used to being broken, consumed in the worst ways by the things life has thrown at him.
    (Did that other world not turn him mad as well as purple? Others walked away thinking of it as a strange dream, he spent years struggling with it and still he dreams of fire and bared teeth.)
    His life is scattershot, he meets others briefly and then they are gone. He considered himself blessed to have known Isakov for more than a handful of meetings, but in his last separation, he began to think of him as gone, too. It is easier to think of them as gone then to clutch on to the hope they might come back, because hope will wear at you, right down to the bone.

    But sometimes, life is kind.

    He thinks it a mirage at first, something brought on by the pain of the birth, but the sharpest of the pain is gone and he is well enough to stand, so perhaps it is not, and then Isakov says his name and that is real, has to be, because Sleaze’s imagination could not manifest this so perfectly. At the noise, he lets out a small, choked noise, relief and joy mingled with the lingering pain, and he strokes his lips against Isakov.
    “She’s yours,” he says, as if it isn’t obvious – she is stitched of the two of them, this girl – then, “you found us.”

    Sleaze



    @[isakov]
    Reply
    #4
    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 says, ‘she is yours’ as if the girl belongs to him and not the other way around.
    And Isakov so deeply resents the impulse to tell Sleaze that he belongs to them, that the cruel, bastard heart beats for them. 

    How he despises love, the star-strewn stallion. How he hates that he does not know peace unless he is curled around the dark purple stallion or the dark gray mare, both of whom bore him perfect daughters. And how could he explain this to either of them? How could he explain that his love for them makes him abhor himself so completely?

    But he does not let this darkness spoil the beauty of this moment, when Sleaze touches him and their daughter touches him and he is filled with new electricity. This could be enough to sustain him for the rest of his life, he thinks, this electric current. 

    Of course I did,” he says and hates how soft this perfection has made him. He was not built to be a soft thing, Isakov, but the peace settles around them like this is the only place it belongs. He draws it around them like the most natural thing in the world. An illusion, that’s all it is, that’s all it will ever be. 

    Did you know she was coming?” he asks, studying the child, “you should have told me.

     

    isakov



    @[sleaze]
    Reply
    #5

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


    Sleaze is not good at this – at love. He knew love from his father (even though that affection itself had its own odd twists), but then his father left without saying a word, and then – then there was nothing. A series of fleeting moments and with some of them he even felt like he was on the brink of something, like he could see love, or something like it, on the horizon, a hazy destination, but they all left before he could arrive. Which was okay. Some things are best kept in the distance.
    But then Isakov had come, had brought such peace to him, had touched him in ways that Sleaze had not known he’d craved.
    Such a brilliant horizon, like he was burned alive in the sun.

    Of course I did, Isakov says, like this should all be expected. But Sleaze knows abandonment far better than he knows love, so he was far less sure of the matter of Isakov’s return. Still, he is joyous for it, so glad to be near him again, to share this child.
    “Not ‘til she was nearly here,” he admits, then, “by the time I was sure, I couldn’t find you.”
    He touches the girl, as if to assure himself of her existence.
    “What should we name her?” he asks, then adds, “I’m not particularly good at names.”
    His own, for example. And he, Sleaze, was borne from Garbage and Cancer – elegant names do not run in his family, and he thinks their daughter deserves a better start than he had.

    Sleaze



    @[isakov]
    Reply
    #6
    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

    Isakov has never had a gift for naming things either.
    There are things that live in the cage of his chest that he has never been able to name and he looks at this star-kissed filly now and feels his heart seize with panic. Or dread. Or hesitation. (Even these things he cannot name with any real certainty.) 

    He looks at the child and she is so beautiful it puts a vicious ache in his throat. And he had touched them, the pair of them, and they had made his body sing electric and he cannot maintain the illusion of peace when he is concentrating so fiercely on this monumental task.

    Sigrid?” he asks, the first thing that comes to him, something he heard whispered somewhere. A lovely thing he had not been aware that he’d kept. Because certainly he had never thought he would have such a lovely thing to give it to. 

    The filly tilts her head and leans a shoulder heavy against her purple father, bathed in their own personal electricity, something that the star father will never be a part of. She blinks at the sound of the name, decides then that it is hers.

    I’m sorry you had to go through this alone,” the star father tells the purple father, quiet. 

     

    isakov



    @[sleaze]
    Reply




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