Scriptor Sum

Renew

First thing in the morning, Oliver has a tendency to forget that he is a demon. This is a habit he hasn’t managed to shake in decades. This morning, as the light filters in from across the room, he is nursing a modest hangover, eyes rimmed with red and hair matted at the back of his crown. Lines from where the pillow-case folds under his head criss-cross the side of his face like train-tracks across the countryside, pale-to-red and unseemly. His face tingles ever so slightly, and his tongue feels shriveled in his mouth, as if he’s eaten a half-pound block of salt.

His bony wrist, which has in the last several hours become his surrogate pillow (the real thing was discarded at some point during the night) turns out not to be the only thing blocking his airways. As if the bloodshot, dry quality to his eyes isn’t bad enough, they’re swelling slightly—has the window been open all night? He snuffles quietly and tries to pretend that he isn’t awake, in the hopes that convincing himself of that fact will make it so. It doesn’t; it just makes it harder to breathe.

A hand hooks itself around his waist, pulling him closer across a thick tangle of sheets. Neil almost certainly doesn’t do it on purpose. He is asleep himself, his brows knitted together in an expression of vague concern (Oliver has accepted, after years of worry, that this is simply his resting face; turns out, he figured once, your face really does freeze like that if you hold it still for thousands of years). But the touch serves as a gentle reminder that allergies and hangovers are a lifetime away, left back in the years that Oliver is glad to be rid of, and he takes a deep breath to chase the demons of mortality away.

They were never his favorite sort to begin with.

The first time that Oliver whispers his name into the wrinkled linens, he gives up trying to move on. Neil has been gone for more than seven years, but as he breathes out the single syllable against the grey-white sheets, he feels like he has never left. His guest, thank god, doesn’t notice—or if he does, doesn’t ask—and when all is said and done, by some blessing, he takes his place on the far side of the king-sized mattress and stays there. That’s just as well, Oliver thinks; right now he wants to be alone, to think about what he’s done.

The first emotion he begins to process is the loneliness, and that hangs on his limbs like Spanish moss. It is an old, hollow feeling, one he remembers from his earliest years. When did he first begin to feel this way? Was it the first time his mother forced his father out of the house with nowhere else to go, or the second time, when he hadn’t come back? Was it when, after his insistent inquiries about where papa had gone, Danielle had finally snapped that his father was a drunk and a bastard and that she was glad to be rid of him? He had only been eight years old, all those years ago.

Or had it existed before then, in some primeval place at the bottom of his consciousness? He remembers the quiet despair that seeped from his consciousness as Micah’s mother faded with a click from the cold plastic receiver, the vice grip that tightened around his heart, and it is that feeling he swallows down now. Even then, though, it had seemed familiar, a sick kind of mourning for something he’d never had to begin with. The sensation had haunted all of Oliver’s nightmares, the one with Micah in them, since the funeral.

After loneliness, there is guilt. Though Oliver cannot define what his relationship with Neil has been all these years (or, perhaps more accurately, what he has wanted it to be; Oliver is not one to believe in miracles, and the notion that Neil was getting the same thing out of their acquaintance at the time of his departure is obviously flawed), he cannot help but think that he has, in some primal and unmentionable way, been violating that bond all this time. At no point in his life has that been more apparent than tonight. His fingers curl around the sheets, and he whispers that one white-soft syllable again into his pillow: “Neil.”

The desperation has gone out of him now, replaced instead with a repentant patience. Though the notion is childish, Oliver manages to convince himself for all of six seconds that perhaps, by whispering that name to himself, he can call him home.

Sigrid is five years his junior, but tonight she seems older and wiser than he will ever be. “Tonight you are a son of the River,” she whispers soothingly, removing the hard metal rings from the braids in his hair and combing her spider fingers through each of the loose plaits. Each ring is stacked inside the next in a thick fur cloth, a spotted hide that once belonged to a beast of the south. A symbol of his victories. He will not be allowed to touch them, to weave the thick warrior’s braids that they hold in his hair, until morning. It is not until the festivities are over that Sven will be a warrior yet again; tonight he faces his trials as a child faces the scrutinizing gaze of his mother. “Wash now, Brother, and when you are finished, we will come for you.” And with that, she leaves, taking the last of the light with her.

He stands naked in the darkness, unwashed and unkempt after his recent sojourn. Forbidden to wash, forbidden to speak, forbidden to so much as cook the meat he trapped and killed himself, he has lived in hermetical silence and seclusion over the past ten days. They had given him only a knife upon his arrival in his father’s hall, and stripped him of his armor and his great spotted cloak. For a warrior it is crucial not only to survive a short time in the wild, living among the oldest gods and sounding out their primeval whispers in the rustling of the barren branches above, but to thrive there. This he mastered as a youth, but no one masters the ordeal, no matter how many times they conquer. Sven has faced the preternatural darkness of the cavern many times before, but experience and his father’s gentle reminders paint fresh red warnings in his mind against any kind of certainty.

The water in the first basin is cold; its icy fingers rake mud and leaves and brown flakes of dried blood from his hair with little remorse. The soap stings angrily at the corners of his eyes, but he holds them open. There is a magic to this procession of the Wise Women, each of them practitioners of an ancient art that destroyed the kingdom of old, and tonight the magic has its eyes set on him. He is determined not to let it catch him by surprise this time. As his skin begins to drink in the frigid water, he thinks he hears something—but the night is cold and turbulent, and he dismisses the sound as the wind at the ancient cavern’s nearly-circular entrance. Surely no whisper has moved to greet him from the dark…

Above him, the slow drip! drip! drip! of groundwater that has constructed the cave’s elaborate network replenishes the chill of the rapidly warming pool. It snakes down the pathways cut out over the centuries, finally pouring over his shoulders with a gentle hiss. He shudders, but there is no one in the dark to see him, no one in the dark to hear him.

There is a kind of darkness so great it overwhelms the piece of ourselves we call the soul. Leave a human being in the dark for long enough and they begin to go blind—but Sven remembers the old seeress, her eyes a filmy grey, and he knows that for some, blotting out the light does not dull their ability to see.

No one but the dark to see him. No one but the dark to hear him.

Poetry is full of empty spaces, and so is he, though it’s taken you years to really notice. The idea frightens you; if you can find his gaps, hidden in the lingering shadows of language and touch, how long until he finds yours? You know there are empty places, moth-holes and lace panels bitten into the soft velvet curtains between consciousness and hallucination. And it scares you, the idea that he might find them—the idea that, by no fault of your own, you might slip right through each other’s cracks, unstoppable force meeting immovable object and passing like strangers, each atom lingering just out of reach of another. And then what happens?

As his fingertips push the sweat-dampened curls away from your forehead, his lips push the fear back into the corners of your mind, but you whisper his name with a kind of quiet desperation anyway. When did the warmth of his body get so close? Why does it seem so far away?

Now his stormy eyes are taking you in like an auditor during tax season, taking inventory of everything from the tension in your heaving chest to the gentle mania sifting in with the light. He’s looking for them, you realize, for the empty spaces. And the more he looks, the more you see them yourself; in the right light, at the right angle, you wonder if you might disappear. Judging from the furrow of his already heavy brow, he’s wondering the same. At what point do you forget to hold on?

But it isn’t that simple, and you mutter a childish prayer in earnest, thanking a god you’ve never believed in that this is the case. He whispers fire into your ears, fills you with a soft, pliant reminder that he isn’t going to leave you. Your heart swells in your chest as you settle against his; as you brush against his empty spaces, you can feel some of your own beginning to fade.

When the boy is thirteen, he nearly drowns. The storm-green waves pull him beneath with the force of a possessive lover, leaving a brackish taste in his mouth and an icy dagger in his lungs. When he wakes, he will only remember the story, not the woman who whispered the tale in his ear in the dark world beneath the foam.

In the years to follow, the boy becomes a man; the year he turns sixteen, and can man the riggings of his father’s fishing vessel, is the year he leaves his home for a life at sea. He does not return, although it is not tragedy that strikes him. The boy, now a man, falls in love.

Not with a woman, nor a man, nor any creature of mortal blood, but with that most cruel and jealous mistress herself. He is forever enchanted by the glittering spray, cold and refreshing on his face, and the warm glint of the summer sun. By the time he is twenty, the young man has weathered many storms.

He tells his tale with the skill of an old man, practiced in weaving fine, soft yarns and coarse, sturdy ones as well. Although it changes ever so slightly from port town to port town, the essence of the story remains the same.

The story he tells is old—too old, some say, for any shred of truth to remain, for who can know the tales of a god that does not want to be told of. But the boys that haunt the shadowy places in the rocky beaches come out at night to hear the young man’s version of the tale all the same.

This is the story he tells.

They say if you lie awake long after the moon has set and listen to the crash of the waves in the dark, it is not the sea that whispers to you. The sea, her song is soft and inviting—she invites you into her domain with warmth and promise, gentle kisses lapping at your feet. But only the strongest, the cleverest, the most resourceful survive in her domain, and it is said that mortal men are in these qualities quite poorly equipped.

But if you wait for a windless night when the moon has set and only the stars wait above you, glittering like gems in the blackness, you just might hear another sigh as it crashes into the waiting sand. This formless speaker whispers of a loneliness that mortals cannot know; where he speaks, the waves, like startled animals, will soon begin to thrash and surge.

I speak, of course, of the boy-god Nerites, who brings the hateful storm that drowns the weary sailor. And do you know why he does so?

The children are silent, and look to the dark sky and the soft midnight waves. They shift uncomfortably against one another, huddled together in old rags. The young man sighs, and his tale continues.

There are many tales of Nerites’ birth, but when I was a boy the sea whispered the truest of these tales in my ear, and it is that story I share with you today.

The boy-god Nerites, the sea whispered to me, was once a man, neither capricious nor cruel. A sailor, like myself, and a damn good one at that. Perhaps, in his days of youthful ignorance, he even laughed, although the old winds have lost the sound by now. Handsome, strong, and impeccably clever, the sea herself is said to have fallen in love with him. She pursued him relentlessly, but each time, the young sailor rebuked her advances. It wasn’t right, he said, for one man to claim the heart of the sea—although in truth perhaps Nerites realized what end her caprice might bring him.

The wisdom in his decision did him little good, however. Like many who sail, Nerites was called to the service of his state in the face of an enemy who would surely destroy their small fleet. With nowhere else to go, Nerites went to the sea, and asked her for only one thing—the strength to protect those who fought alongside him. Enamored of him, the sea granted his boon on a single condition; when the battle was done, Nerites would return to her, and live ever-after in her domain. Desperate, he accepted.

The day was won, but it mattered little. In her hurry to regain her prize, the sea sent forth waves that swallowed Nerites’ ship, drowning all aboard including his own brother. Immortal as he now was, only Nerites survived. Cheated and alone, Nerites vowed that the sea would never have him for a lover, and in return for her cruelty he would send to her depths unending hordes of unworthy sailors, all begging for the gift she had given him.

All gods, they say, are immortal, even those who begin their lives as mortal men. The most hateful will die a million deaths before they are finally overthrown or brought into line by their fellows. The boy-god Nerites keeps no counsel but his own; no just hand quells the hatred that he brews in his wanderings. When a god strikes down a man who has given him no insult, he is said to feel the pain of that death tenfold, to the last shuddering.

Nerites has drowned thousands of sailors, but he will never taste the sweet nectar of mortality for himself. And perhaps that is the tragedy carried in the whispers drowned out by the wind.

The tale finished, the man stands and dusts the rocky sand away from his knees. He leaves them with only a coin (it will feed them for weeks, if they spend it wisely) and the fading remnants of his story. The children sit in silence—this is not the tale they are expecting, but it leaves them contemplating the name they daren’t speak. When the wind begins to howl against the rocks, one boy cups a hand to his ear to in the hope of catching the ancient whisper. He hears nothing but the wind, howling like a wild animal or a mother in grief.

It shakes him to the bone.

Lost Boys

He’s not sure what anything means to him anymore, not that he ever really had a clue. This…thing with Neil, if you can call it a thing, makes it feel as though a ten pound spike is being driven through his head, just behind the eyes. The spike is made of iron and ice, and it reminds Oliver strangely of his mother. Sometimes he sees her in his dreams, standing on their porch with a tear-stained handkerchief and a Bible in her hand. The world, she tells him, is a dangerous place, and the only way he’ll learn that is if he has to survive in it, alone and friendless. Maybe, she says, he can come back one day, when he’s found a nice girl to settle down with. No one loves him like Mama loves him, but sometimes love is supposed to hurt.

He hasn’t been home since.

Sometimes, when he thinks Neil won’t be able to hear the sympathy (if you can call it that) in his voice or see the moisture forming at the corners of his eyes, Oliver likes to pretend he can understand. Not that Neil would tell him if he did—but it gives him all the peace he can find these days.

Oliver has always been able to find them, the lost ones, the broken ones with no home to return to. It’s like a special talent, or maybe a curse. They draw him in like an addict to his next fix, and almost without fail, he tries to fix them. And he knows he can’t do that for Neil. In a way it’s enlightening; for once, Oliver knows there’s nothing he can do. The lesson is a long time coming—if he’d learned a little faster, he wouldn’t be in this mess. Now he’s not sure he wants to know.

So if he can’t fix things (and he knows well he can’t), and he can’t change them (Neil is too old to change), then he supposes he’ll ride out the storm. All storms break eventually, all journeys end, and in the interim his head only pounds if he dreams too sweetly. Home, Oliver thinks, is where the heart is, and once again, he’s been turned out.

He wakes with a start, a chill running down the entire length of his spine. For a moment, it feels like he can’t breathe.

“Yevgeniy,” he whispers, the foreign syllables rolling off his tongue more easily than they ever had during their time at school. Perhaps his Russian is improving. Or perhaps the choking, desperate quality in his voice is the key he’s been missing all the time. “Yevgeniy, are you still awake?” His partner stirs, most definitely still asleep, but one protective arm pulls Leslie closer to him and he presses sleepy kisses into the dandelion hair. Leslie settles back against his chest and tries to slow the beating of his pounding heart.

He can’t remember the nightmare now. All that’s left where memory should be is a smoking hole that stinks of sulphur and a throbbing ache that pierces clean through his skull, just between the eyes. The heat of the body beside him is of some comfort, but Leslie knows what he really needs is a word or two to anchor him back into reality before he slips back into the world of dreams. It doesn’t look like he’ll be getting back to sleep tonight.

At the foot of the bed, Bastion stirs, lifting his head from the feet of his sleeping master. Two yellow points of light pierce the darkness, looking around at first before settling on Leslie. Then, with a sound that mimics a sigh, the dog stands, shaking out his thick, dark fur before he steps over the jumble of limbs. He lands with a fwumph against Leslie’s back, now taking up the stretch of bed that Leslie has vacated in search of comfort. Leslie moves to accommodate him.

Yevgeniy stirs again.

“You are restless, Oduvanchik?” He sounds groggy, but his fingers run through Leslie’s hair, and the motion is so familiar that Leslie feels the last of the remaining fear fade from his mind. “Or perhaps Bastion is bothering you?”

He shakes his head, planting a kiss on Yevgeniy’s chest. “Nah, ‘e’s not bovverin’ me none. I jus’…I ‘ad a bad dream, is all,” he admits sheepishly. Sloppy and slurred as it is, the few syllables muttered in his native tongue are comforting. “It was weird. I jus’ wanted to ‘ear your voice, I guess.”

I exist in the places you thought you’d lost

drawing out poison so ancient

you’d forgotten

it

ever

hurt. I lurk in the shadows and

behind

drawn curtains of light

that block out the sun

nibbling

          at your star-kissed neck

I know no kisses here in the blank space left by faded ink.

My heart is dark.

              We press in close, and in that moment

                                      you need me,

                                            tiny lights dancing in the air

                                                       to set you

                                                             aflame.

Honey eyes.

Sallow skin.

Putting phrases together, one after another

until you build a person.

I wonder if this

is how

God

got the job done so quick.

But God wrote the world

in only

seven

days.

60. Body English

I have in my hand a book of writing exercises that I’ve been using to improve my writing. I did one today. PS, friends don’t let friends write after having watched Shakespeare. It simply isn’t done.

The prompt was to write about a conversation in which the two individuals exchange no words, and the book suggested that I do so from the point of view of an outsider so I wasn’t tempted to peek into the characters’ thoughts. So that’s what I did. The prompt also suggested I write about 600 words, which I most certainly did not (according to Google Docs I hit about 561, actually). This shit’s hard, yo.

Not sure which Annaran adviser this is, but he’s kind of obnoxious.

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Revamping this bitch.

I’m going to go through this blog and clear out some of the old drivel and probably actually use it. Because I’m tired of not writing.

most people shower every day,

but i like to wait an extra

day or two

to make sure i have

something to wash off.

it’s not that i’m worried about

conserving water;

i just don’t want to wash off

a piece of myself

by mistake.

The smell of his hair is the first thing that’s been right with the world in what feels like eons. The doors have barely closed behind them when they start to gravitate towards one another, what starts out as tension and stiff muscles melting along with what’s left of their dignity. Salem clings tightly to him. He finds a hold in the sides of the torn suit jacket, and swallows back the sick, choking feeling in the back of his throat. “I love you too,” he whispers, tongue curling around the familiar syllables as if no time has passed from when they last stood behind these doors. He wants to say it a thousand times. He wants to hold him here forever.

Marcus is silent, buried tightly in his chest. If there are tears on either side, neither will admit to it just now. “I’m sorry,” Salem mumbles in English this time, voice cracking. His hands find the back of Marcus’s neck, warm and familiar, and he plays with one frazzled curl. He can’t imagine life without this, without the feel of those arms wrapped desperately around his neck—this, Salem realizes, with more than a twinge of guilt, is where his heart is. And to think he almost let it go without so much as a goodbye. “I’m sorry, Marcus,” he chokes again, kissing the head against his chest a dozen times. Language is failing him now, and an apology in Infernal seems tongue and cheek, so he goes quiet.

He’s shaking ever so slightly. He hopes Marcus doesn’t notice.

For a moment it’s silence, but somehow their lips meet, and Marcus’s hands stumble across the rough plains of scruff that now paint Salem’s face as though it’s unfamiliar territory. It might as well be, he supposes. They pour their hearts into it, not a tender kiss or a sweet one—it’s full of every painful, terrifying, questioning moment they’ve spent apart during these last several weeks, every doubt, every guilty thought, every horrible scenario that’s played through their heads, whether Hell planted it there or not. Salem holds his partner’s head in his hands, kisses his forehead, wipes a stray tear—he isn’t sure whose—from his face. “It’s alright,” Marcus insists, only once. Salem isn’t so sure he believes him.

By the time the two have finished, the elevator is standing open on the top floor. For a moment, Salem worries they’ve attracted an audience. A quick glance around alerts him to the fact that the floor is quite empty.

“Let’s go home,” Marcus says quietly, and Salem finds himself missing the horrible yellow wallpaper that lines the inside of their apartment. He misses their bed. He misses the feeling of Marcus’s limbs tangled with his, the heat exchanged between their body, the hot kiss of his breath on Salem’s chest….He doesn’t wait for an answer; reality slips out from under their feet for a moment, landing them smack dab in the center of the clingy red sheets. Somehow he’s managed to kick off their shoes in the process.

He’s still shaking. Salem hasn’t slept in over a month. Still, he’s not quite ready to give up on consciousness just yet, and he kisses every inch of Marcus’s face he’ll allow, stopping at his lips at his partner’s insistence. “I love you,” he breathes against Marcus’s chin. Their foreheads touch for a moment, and Salem thinks that maybe, just maybe, they’ll both come out of this alright. He’s found his way home, to heart and hearth, and as he drifts off with the feeling of Marcus’s breath on his neck, he wonders if that’s all it will take.

I’m not the hero of the story, and I need to be saved.

yermumisadigeridoo:

 You took my clarity with you when you left.

I’m not sure what I have to say to you now. It seems like yesterday made so much sense. One foot in front of the other, muddling through to the other side of this fog. I could have done that. I’ve done it before, and I thought it would be simple enough to do it again.

Yesterday, it felt like it would be so easy.

But it won’t be, will it?

I hope you’re finding what you want in the Great Big Far Away. I’m sure you never knew what that was either—you were always too Hell-bent on keeping everyone here safe that you never stopped to think about yourself. That was always pretty infuriating, you know? I tried to keep things sane. Tried to keep you well.

We had some happy times. We had a lot of them, didn’t we? Funny, though, how I can’t seem to remember any of them right now. All I can remember are the times that I wanted to reach out to you, to clasp a hand on your shoulder and pull you to my chest, as my brother did me when our Mama died. I wanted to take the weight of the world off your shoulder—but I could never do that.

I know you felt using yourself up to protect your own was a selfless thing to do, but you didn’t think about me in all of this, did you? What I was going to do when the last of you was all used up and there was nothing holding you here anymore?

I can’t bring myself to be angry at you. It’s more trouble than it’s worth. Thing is, it makes it hard to process all this anger I feel. I was under the impression that someone could only ever feel this many emotions once in their life, and that I was quite past that. I thought, if I made you comfortable, if I made you happy, I wouldn’t feel so bad when all was said and done. If I’d done the best I could…

I don’t know what to do now, Neil.

What’s next?

I know one day I won’t miss you. It always gets better. At least, I think it does—I’ve heard that in a few places before, anyway.

Yevgeniy thinks I’m being silly about all of this, but he’s never been very good at being comforting. Perhaps he can’t comprehend what I’m feeling right now because he himself will never feel it. The only person he’s close to is Leslie, and if Leslie ever died, I can only imagine that my brother will cease to be.

I miss you terribly, Neil. Even after leaving town, I’ve found a million things that remind me of you, some of them in the last place I’d expect them. You’re at the top of every bottle, and sometimes, for a while in the middle, I forget—until I find you at the bottom.

I wish I could ask you to come home. I wish I didn’t feel so selfish doing it.

But the world doesn’t work that way.

I doubt we’ll ever meet again. I think that’s the part I’m having a hard time coming to grips with. Considering where you’ve ended up, I can’t imagine I could come to you, and if it’s anything like you say it is, I can think of no reason why you’d come down to me.

My only hope is that you’re happy, and that your trouble has ceased.

Evpraksiya.

(Source: )

Description Study

Unedited, as it’s a description study. It’s sort of longish, so I’ll toss it under the cut. Basically, this was inspired by this image initially, hence the description at the beginning. It got sort of weird and I might be writing Twin Peaks fanfic after that (SO RHI DON’T LOOK or do, it’s not properly spoilery).

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