kingdomsofrain | tfln open post

Tonight is a night for points of order, it would seem. I have not suggested I am not, myself, making the long, slow march into death.

Well.

I am, rather, sprinting. But were I not in a hurry to reach that particular finish line, it would not be inapt to suggest I, too, have grown or am growing old. I feel its approach. I embrace it.

My knees have begun making ominous noises, it's true. But also: I wear clothing that comes from stores that don't sell hoodies and six-packs of Hanes underwear. I eat my fiber, floss, and have my prostate examined. ~~(You should have your pr~~

I clean my firearms weekly instead of "when they jam".

Very responsible, moi. Sensibly adult.

(Rin has a hand in all of this, it should be stated. For fairness.)

(Not in the prostate examination.)

Perhaps a misapplied supposition: to think my peers feel likewise decrepit. Rin was similarly perturbed by the implication (or indeed by any tangential commentary utilizing the word 'old'.) Perhaps age is a state of mind; Rin occupies eternal youth through sheer force of will.

And so do you, in an entirely different sense. (How old is Enri? 21? 22?) (Sidebar: have you asked and do you care?) (You didn't ask. You investigated him first, didn't you.) (Not a condemnation. No-one our age could possibly keep up with your rigors.)

You text.
Half three in the morning.
To ensure I did not mistake your sniping for fact, though I have known the man I'm dealing with for decades, and recognize his verbal suppressive fire.

Are you getting sentimental about your doggy

Are you getting attached to En

Fucking hell you've gotten attached [...] to a Pendleton

[...]

~~Unwise, Darius~~

[...]

Darius.

Be careful.

wish you had

the you-not-here did it.

come back and ~~cuddle~~ hole up with me. bed's still warm where you were.

[...]

puppy's still warm where you were, too ;)

[ The language doesn't matter.

Over the years, he's improved to match their lead: to respond in kind, or respond in backwards accord as one might follow musical scales, until there is no constraint of one language or another. They slip in and out, symphonic and harmonious, choosing language to suit thought as best applied, until what they speak is their own secret communication.

A language of thought put to word, understood only by Rin and Senan.

He loves this. He loves that every language he knows beyond that of his birth, he learned from them, or for them. He loves that his native language is theirs, as well. And that the language most comfortable to him is the one that will die with them.

(With him. Rin won't speak this way to anyone else. He knows for certain that this game of chase, of picking fruit from linguistic trees and creating something new, will be unendurable for them with anyone else, when Sen is gone.

Rin is not his.

But this is theirs, together. A house divided (against itself) (in the absence of half its foundation) can't stand.)

Their words and his own bleak encroaching thoughts turn his smile wistful, melancholy. He turns his hand under theirs and clasps, draws it back to his kiss. (He came so close to them, they could whisper now between them and be heard. He holds so near, conspiring, and catching their eyes is a boundless intimacy.

And it's impossible to hide much, here, an arm wound around them, their heads inclined and nearly touching. Impossible for them not to have seen that flicker of Something at the thought of dire ends, and of the application of that quote.)

He lowers their joined hands but doesn't release this time. Instead, he holds on - tight as he dares, for as long as he can - and whispers in their non-cacophony of languages: ]

False nothing. I cannot heal a broken heart. Imagine the fortune I could make if I had such a capacity. No - I can break, because destruction is autonomic for a man. I can wound, because we were bred to war. We learn peace, with time and tutor.

I can't heal.

But I can do this - offer you an imperative. I would have you consider it well now. There may come a time when such a demand is crucial.

[ He laughs, mirthlessly, and flickers his eyes to theirs. Then down again, speaking to their hand. To his hand, his thumb brushing their skin. ]

If my arms signal a dire end, and my hand inflicts some hell upon you - or, in thoughtlessness, in my absences, I have wounded my Rin. If ever my absence causes the heartbreak I try so desperately to avoid. Forget me.

Better that I vanish from your memory, and so from the memory of the world, than for you to love, and die by, my hand.

Forget and live. An imperative vital to the perpetuation of Rin, who must always endure - because there is no world I can countenance that exists without them.

I think the universe may well cease, and fall into void, without you. Out like a light.

[ He's speaking too near to words he never wished to say. But they're near, and he wonders if their heart beats the same heady rhythm as his own. But they're near, and they are, have always been, his world. ]

Or I wish it would. The hopeless mundanity of tomorrow, if you ceased tonight. How dull dawn would be. How lacking, every hour until nightfall. And the evening would be a fall of dark without enchantment. Every star boring, a speck of light like every other, hanging uselessly in the sky. The whole magnificence of creation, rendered an abandoned theater. An empty stage where once Rin laughed, and spoke, and danced.

I'd rather cut off the offending hand than permit so wretched a world as that.

[ Another low laugh, self-effacing. Sen chances another look at them, and looks too long. Far too long.

He loses the thread of any language but his own by birth. (And it's his own blush that rises now, suffusing his skin with something like health.) ]

A problem engendered by all this talk of dying, and heartbreak, and absence: how can I swear to cut off my own hand before it harms you? How could I harm what you love?

[ A quote, and nothing more, he tells himself.

A paraphrasing.

And even if his hand is somehow (fortunately!) loved by Rin, they don't love him.

(But he's near, and his forehead presses theirs, and there are truths he doesn't like to believe: that the world will go on without Rin. That Rin will be broken when he dies. And for all that, Rin does not love him.) ]

Perhaps I'll tell my hand to love you in return, and render it incapable of harming you.

[ Drawing up their joined hands again to his lips (now attempting a cocksure smirk) (failing), he holds their gaze with his own. ]

Sen's hand - listen well, you filthy, blood-stained shit: love Rin. Love them so that their pain is yours, and their joy is your delight. Be consumed with the longing to touch their cheek, and let it be anathema to strike them with any manner of harm.

[ The idiot man.

This remarkable, wandering fool.

How his face draws Rin’s attention. How his every motion fosters admiration. Rin knows this face and its shifts so well. Knows where past Sen settles in among the grins and lines of present Sen. Sees how Sen’s expression now is troubled, and how his looking lasts and lasts, unflagging.

Something here is different. The room’s gone dire, the space between their bodies (so minor and so sharply charged) turned from tranquility to something quietly - mournfully? - buzzing. This is and isn’t Sen’s accustomed speech. Wild and whirling, yes, but the gravity outweighs any attempt at lightness. But there’s something like desperation at the root.

And there’s that failed, that forlorn smirk.

And there’s Sen’s persistent grip, holding tight beyond the normal length of any hold, almost as if grasping for dear life.

…And there’s that blush. Not touched sorrowful, but bearing an ache of its own, and still ringing as if it held (does it hold? it might, it might) deepest import.

And of course. And there’s the moment that jars their breath. The moment they have to fight to withold a small and strangled sound. That electric-shock imperative: ‘Forget.’

…Forget?

As if they could ever.

As if they ever would.

(Sen’s speaking dramatically, just as Rin has spoken dramatically. This is true, and it doesn’t tell the fullness of the story. This is true, and can’t account for the way the word hits heavy at Rin’s chest, and leaves them airless.)

(Corollary questions: Does Sen believe they could, or would?)

(Related. Possibly related? Sen echoes Rin’s words, speaks ’How could I harm what you love,’ speaks particularly that ’what you love,’ and there’s a shifting and a softening in Rin’s expression. It means something, to hear those words reflected. It means something, to recognize the layerings of truth and witness that those three words may possess for Rin. May have possessed, in Rin’s own speaking.)

They watch the (idiot man) (strange and wonderful man) (incomparable man) man they’ve known so long, the man lately so markedly worn, thinking ’What is it, Sen?’ and ’Tell me, please.’

And at once, they feel this moment and its weight, and Sen’s arm around Rin reliable as always, offering foundation and comforting as ever, and they feel how near they hear Sen’s beating heart, and the truth that resonates through Sen’s echoed beat and echoed voice and echoed heat and breath and being—

And it’s so simple.

So much else in life, every other thing in life worth chasing turns convoluted. Grates and tears along the soul and mind and body. Demands constant pursuit and sleepless nights and clever schemes and a hundred carefully-kept contacts. Requires jarring calculations that run patience raw and turn the world to shades of noxious, blearing red.

Nothing has ever been difficult with Sen. And the speech that follows flow readily, grown of necessity and wanting. One line given in French - automatic, assertive - before the rest slips into English, following Senan’s final shift. ]

Don’t ask me that.

You, Sen, are compulsory.

You name yourself incapable of mending, and I ask you to consider: if you’ve no voice for repair in the broader world, may you not be capable of healing this one heart? When you have known its tenor for so long. When you have seen it through its wildest desperations. When you have coaxed this heart from deepest keenings and the recurrent knife-edge of despair. When you have seen its joy in every flourishing and flavor.

When you have shared your heart with me and mine, and when ours beat in so much consonance?

You’re no slow study, Senan, and you’ve had plenty of time and tutelage: do not doubt that you may mend, and you do mend this null’s persistent heart.

What’s more—

What’s more, Sen, my Senan.

I beg of you, I insist, if you will grant your Rin any favor at all, let it be this—

Don’t speak to me of forgetting. Don’t believe that I could banish my Sen from memory.

It is, in the first point, impossible. When your every word lives within my veins. You who could burn my lifeblood crimson, hm? You who already have. Believe me when I say that I am half composed out of your pretty words, when I claim your breath is ever in my lungs. When you pass from my sight, when desolate years part us, still I know you in shakes and tones and pieces in myself.

[ They’ve strengthened their grip at Sen’s hand without precisely intending to or noticing the shift. And though their voice has lowered - in register, in volume - it rings no less decisive, doesn’t fall to the soft edge of a whisper. Rings as well with something desperate, a tone they register and make no effort to veil. ]

I would forfeit everything, before I would even think to banish you from any district of my knowing. I will lose all, and begin again from an erratic nothing, before I relinquish one single memory of you.

[ Another press of their hand to Sen’s, their eyes wide and watching bright enough to burn, expression speaking the wholeness of their plea: to stay, to know that Rin will never forfeit him, to comprehend how well Sen keeps Rin’s heart.

And.

And what happens next is simple, as everything with Sen has always, always been. What happens next is motion, subtle and easily drawn, Rin’s hand upon Sen’s chest, and Rin’s lips against Sen’s own, a gentle, wanting pressure. ]

Edited 2021-04-05 04:46 (UTC)

I won't pretend your misgivings were without precedent.

You people know too fucking much.

Whether or not he knew from the start, he quickly learned the scope.

He's clever, Enri. And knows his worth.

[ ... ]

[ ... ]

The information is appreciated, if moot.

You have been [ ... ] not disagreeable in conversation. Thank you, Lydia.

I am a delight. Whether others choose to believe so is not my concern.

[...]

And, also.

There is little point in abrasion. Or threats.

If Enri is ill-used, you know by now what will happen, and who will level that damage.

He is sitting in the room with you.

[...]

You're welcome, Darius.

[ This is how it happens.

Every time.

He might have been thrown by their words, and perhaps if they were anyone else, if they weren't Rin, who from the moment he met them has been central, primary and as compulsory to his own existence as he is to theirs, he might have been staggered enough to fall motionless. To stare, wide-eyed and wondering, that anyone could hold such lofty notions of him.

But of course Rin does. Of course Rin speaks this way (as no one else on earth would speak, because people don't talk this way - earnest, heartfelt, theatric) (no one but Rin and himself, to one another, in a language all their own, as though they carved this cramped and wretched world into a space for themselves.)

Move past wonder and staggered stillness, and after comes relief. When he does pass from their sight (where he has existed, where he has been grateful to persist), pieces of him will remain held enshrined in the mind of the one he loves so well. No matter the pain. No matter the devastation of his end.

And he will. Pass from their sight. End. What a stark reality it is, encroaching on the dreamlike thrall of his forehead to Rin's, their hand in his, their breath as familiar as his own. How bleak. How unacceptably, horribly mundane - to die. But he can bear it, he's sure, knowing they'll remember him.

- Had he doubted it? Had he believed a moment ago that Rin's memory was an insubstantial, gossamer thing, composed of impression and snatches of conversation? That someone like Rin could hardly be expected to remember in detail the press of a hand or every last word he ever spoke?

It's criminal. It's a miscarriage of justice. It's a betrayal. Fucking look at them, hear their voice; if a man could be reconstructed from memory, Senan would live again as wholly as he does now from the precision of their mind's eye. They see him. They forget nothing.

(And.

What he was avoiding. His avid refusal to speak the future to them, to protect their heart. Oh, look at them, with such wide, keenly bright eyes.

They suspect.

And their heart will break.)

He believes it all.

And if it hadn't been Rin, he would be dumbstruck to see how deep he's been driven. How important he is, to anyone at all, nevermind to the one he loves.

Instead, his mouth twists in a baffled smile, and his breath hitches; what follows is as simple as any other inevitability.

Senan can never judge who moves first (though fancifully, he thinks it's never either of them, and that they find themselves caught in a natural force like gravitational pull, like magnetism, like a swift-flowing current.) Someone is kissing, and someone is kissing back; Rin is gentle and soft, and Sen is restrained, reverent, lingering through each rise and fall because it could be the last.

Because they were never his (they were always his, weren't they?) and because these were stolen moments slipped sideways from time - or, because he has so little time left - he has always kissed them like it might be the last.

It might be.

His hand eases from theirs to caress their cheek (his hand, that he ordered to love them, and long to do just this), then settles with delicate presence at their jaw.

They've done this together more times than he should count (but he does count them - reconstructs each one in savored memory, holds them in his mind like small sanctuaries), and the world still blazes from the smallest brush of lips. His chest shudders with the hammering of his heart, and he could laugh - wildly, wickedly, freely - if it didn't mean sacrificing any part of this.

There is no drug as potent, no joy so complete, no perfection of art or nature in all the world. If prison, his separation from Rin, was hell, this is a paradise. This is heaven. (When he dies, if he somehow earned a ticket through someone's eternal gates, he hopes this is how it feels.)

What alters this instance from any other: he has always restrained himself, and for all that their kisses have been what they are, they have remained innocent. (Friendly.) But what if this time really is the last? The thought is a distant, incoherent cry that presses him nearer, draws his arm tighter around them.

There's a language here all their own, and without words, he offers (what you love) more, and anything at all, if they want (him) it. A hand. A kiss. A heart. Says without words, I think and Maybe, bereft sentence starting toward a notion built from the brightness of wide eyes and the consecration of memory.

Could you.

And.

Because I do.

And.

I have, for so long.

(Oh, relief in that silent admission. Relief in the conveyance, in not taking it to his grave, in knowing there is nothing about him hidden from Rin. Twining the direst confession of love with a kiss is as good as any absolution.)

With a kiss that happens as it always happens, but now (for the first and possibly last time) reaches new, unimagined heights, he asks without any sound at all if they might try to love him for the rest of his life. ]

Edited 2021-04-05 18:12 (UTC)

As simple as that?

[ ... ]

Do you know, Enri, you evince more cleverness with every message. And a nuanced perspicacity that would credit a man ten years your senior.

[ ... ]

You're right, of course; I don't require your permission. And I make no practice of acting outside my own intent. But what you've said is ~~not unwelcome~~ [ ... ] welcome.

And noted.

I lay blame for my Danish disinterest at the feet of a particularly noxious ambassador. Perhaps a decent music recommendation or two could swing the balance back in the language's favor. I'm willing to permit the possibility.

What else is on your list, Puppy?

~~Easy to embrace that rubbish when you're sprinting toward the end~~

Let me be the first to congratulate you on entering the world of semi-functional almost-sensible adults, Wilkes, and let me also say: It's about fucking time.

Not sure about the expedience of kicking off an oral cleanliness routine at this stage, but like they say, chase your bliss. You might make it to the ripe old age of forty-seven.

~~Too far?~~

~~Fuck it, I'm sor~~

[ ... ]

You always were an old man at heart. Makes sense you'd take on the guise first.

Edited 2021-04-05 22:55 (UTC)

Sen.

~~Worried about me?~~

~~As if I don't know what I~~

~~What the fuck do you think~~

[ ... ]

Leave the coddling to Rin.

My poor boy. Daddy will be with you soon. Just stepped outside for a moment.

Save my spot, won't you?

wasn't wisborg

shared a twix with her once. not noxious at all. busy, mostly.

you didn't say to the US though

or that they were danish

nvm.

[...]

why shouldn't it be simple? i'm still getting mine, right? i can see if you didn't want to do anything like that with me, it could be a problem.

it's like if you brought me a twix. you don't like twix. easy: i get both halves. and if you want a bite sometimes, that's fine too.

everyone wins.

cantonese
danish
spanish
portuguese
korean

nothing's not ON the list

yet. japanese is on thin ice.

you think they sell twix here somewhere?

Edited 2021-04-05 23:15 (UTC)

Shan't.

I haven't mentioned your peculiar situation to them. (Yet.) Someone needs to coddle you in the meantime.

Right.

I'm evoking verbum rea. As you'll recall, on September 13, 2003, all parties involved in the non-fatal stabbing and (thankfully) similarly non-fatal arson, signed a cocktail napkin - which is as of this moment sitting in a safe deposit box in New Jersey. Need I remind you of the terms?

This is how we keep our chaos in check, Darius, my dear. One may at any time, once per year, demand absolute veracity from either of the other two signatories.

In other words: I'm cashing in my annual.

And I have two unused chits for the past twenty-four months, so you might as well resign yourself to the possibility of follow-up questions.

And if you refuse to answer, I'm legally permitted - nay, obliged! - to hunt you down and set your prick on fire.

[...]

Be honest now.

[...]

Have you got a crush on your doggy?

always <3

[ Right, like that's the end of it.

Darius is getting a photo containing a (tastefully) alluring Enri looking absolutely inviting. ]

10 minutes and i'm coming after you though

;)

Not Wisborg, no.

Danish, yes.

In Zagreb. A brief and infuriating assignment.

The name is unimportant. Fucker doesn't deserve the recognition. Snide fucking pretentious fucking rat.

I half considered stabbing the bastard. Lucky for him, those were my more circumspect days.

[ ... ]

As it happens, I take no interest in Twix, though I understand they have a following. If the hotel shop fails you, I suggest hassling guests until you turn up a secret stash.

Edited 2021-04-06 00:05 (UTC)

Hurry over, and we'll make victors of one another, hm?

I've a desire to bite my Puppy. Along the shoulder. Just below your jaw.

[ ... ]

[ ... ]

You utter, you confirmed asshole.

~~Why the fuck did I agree to~~

~~You wouldn't~~

~~...Fucking of course you would~~

~~Don't you fucking 'my dear' me~~

[ ... ]

[ ... ]

First fucking point: chits uncashed do NOT roll over to the next year.

[ ... ]

I fail to see how this curbs any chaos. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that you are DELIBERATELY kicking up chaos, and sowing shit.

Goddamnit Senan. Fucking Wilkes.

Don’t fucking jump to conclusions; I’m responding.

Fucking ‘crush,’ could you be more juve

[ Which is precisely when Enri’s picture arrives.

Which is precisely when Darius curses appreciative under his breath, and accidentally sends the unfinished text. ]

Edited 2021-04-06 00:50 (UTC)

…I don’t agree with your terminology. But speaking in its [ … ] approximate vicinity—

~~It isn’t~~

~~Fuck off, it~~

[ … ]

Enri has his appeal.

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