[ He could forgive Rin anything, if there was anything to forgive. For all the years that he didn't have them how he wanted them, he had them in other, no less crucial ways: their friendship. Their support. Their loyalty. Their pragmatism, their kindness. Their fire, like a blazing beacon in the dark.
There's nothing to forgive.
(One might ask what became, in the space of several moments, of Senan's convictions. How is it he could be so easily deterred from his belief that he could never let them know the deepest and fullest measure of his heart for fear they might not reciprocate, or that he might leave them wretched when his days reach their certain and none-too-distant end?)
He asks himself what became of his convictions.
Well. He loves them. He might have been born to that purpose. He might have been - was - born to bloody his knuckles across the teeth of anyone who transgressed against them. To lie beside them in fields at midnight, watching stars and thinking only of the rise and fall of their breathing. To run wild and grinning, hand in hand with Rin, from the wail of sirens. To see the world hued differently with their presence, made softer and clearer and sensible.
And if he wasn't born to it, he lived it nonetheless.
So he answers himself. He, Senan Wilkes, has only one conviction: Rin Renault.
They want him. He'll give them all he has, for as long as he has. It's what he whispers now, answering their simplicity, their beautiful clarity of self and thought, with his own softness. (He, quixotic. He, ever the romantic. Funny, that Rin, living work of art that they are, should be the pragmatist. Funny that Sen, accented a classless chav, the rough-bred scholar - intellectual, true, multilingual and philosophizing, but a thug nevertheless - should be the romantic.) ]
Tous mes jours. Tout mon couer.
[ These words, familiar, engraved into his skin - a declaration made more than a decade ago, when he knew for certain where his heart lay.
As if he didn't know from the moment he saw them.
He, seated with an arm slung over the back of a chair, spread-legged and unkept, a twenty-year old foundling from Yorkshire jabbing his cigarette emphatically to make his point about something ultimately unimportant, to a listener now faded from memory. Someone's (Darius's?) flat, where he'd been invited to talk some scheme or another and now frequented for the conversation. Sen had taken a drag from said cigarette and his eyes had tracked movement at the front door.
And heralded by the curling exhalation of smoke, a surly Rin walked into his life. He remembers them angelic, sexless, wreathed in tendrils of white. (His first thought, without derision, toned wondering: My god, what are you? A thought that echoed through time, through his years, even to this moment. A question direly in need of an answer - that Senan would try hungrily to pursue. What are you and can I know you?
What are you, and can I keep you?)
(The answer is simple, and given here, tonight, in their embrace: I am your Rin. And the rest follows.)
The tattoo came a decade and a burst appendix later. (Rin, fussing over him. Rin had made sure he went to the hospital. Rin had helped him through recovery, fed him, helped change the bandages, smothered him with coddling.) Rin had, by then, broken his heart by announcing they believed neither in romance nor monogamy, that they would never enter in to such a wretched state of affairs as marriage. He had decided, finally, it didn't fucking matter what role they held in his life, so long as they were in it. So long as he could be their Sen, profoundly loyal.
Not that he ever mentioned the tattoo to them, or its meaning when inevitably they did catch sight of it.
But they're certain to comprehend the resonance across decades, the implication, the simple meaning.
All his days, from one smoke-filled room twenty-five years ago, onward. All his heart, for them.
Of course he's their Sen. He always has been.
He's smiling lopsidedly - looking buoyantly daft and starstruck. The smudge of purple lipstick at his mouth doesn't help. (It doesn't matter, either. What shame or hurt can touch him now? What disease? Is he terminal, is death waiting for him in ten months, eight months?
Fuck it. Rin loves him. He'll live whole lifetimes. He's untouchable. He's immortal.)
He catches his lower lip between his teeth and tastes them (and the traces of lipstick); his smile is relieved, grateful, a perfect gleam of happiness. As though to be sure (he's never been more certain of anything in his life as he is of his own conviction - or that Rin, miraculously, perfectly, utterly loves him) he raises his brows questioningly (there's no question, there's nothing to question ever again) and- ]
Yes?
[ The shortest sentence he's ever spoken, containing more in a single syllable than all his meandering, hours-long soliloquys. Yes, us? and Yes, you love me? and Yes, we're a 'we'? and I got this right, didn't I? I didn't mistake or misunderstand, and my god you're the most beautiful thing this universe has ever turned out, so confirm for me, please, that I am in fact the luckiest man in said universe. And, of course. Yes, I'd like to be your Sen as I've always longed to be: completely, and for the rest of my life. Yes, and yes again. ]
no subject
There's nothing to forgive.
(One might ask what became, in the space of several moments, of Senan's convictions. How is it he could be so easily deterred from his belief that he could never let them know the deepest and fullest measure of his heart for fear they might not reciprocate, or that he might leave them wretched when his days reach their certain and none-too-distant end?)
He asks himself what became of his convictions.
Well. He loves them. He might have been born to that purpose. He might have been - was - born to bloody his knuckles across the teeth of anyone who transgressed against them. To lie beside them in fields at midnight, watching stars and thinking only of the rise and fall of their breathing. To run wild and grinning, hand in hand with Rin, from the wail of sirens. To see the world hued differently with their presence, made softer and clearer and sensible.
And if he wasn't born to it, he lived it nonetheless.
So he answers himself. He, Senan Wilkes, has only one conviction: Rin Renault.
They want him. He'll give them all he has, for as long as he has. It's what he whispers now, answering their simplicity, their beautiful clarity of self and thought, with his own softness. (He, quixotic. He, ever the romantic. Funny, that Rin, living work of art that they are, should be the pragmatist. Funny that Sen, accented a classless chav, the rough-bred scholar - intellectual, true, multilingual and philosophizing, but a thug nevertheless - should be the romantic.) ]
Tous mes jours. Tout mon couer.
[ These words, familiar, engraved into his skin - a declaration made more than a decade ago, when he knew for certain where his heart lay.
As if he didn't know from the moment he saw them.
He, seated with an arm slung over the back of a chair, spread-legged and unkept, a twenty-year old foundling from Yorkshire jabbing his cigarette emphatically to make his point about something ultimately unimportant, to a listener now faded from memory. Someone's (Darius's?) flat, where he'd been invited to talk some scheme or another and now frequented for the conversation. Sen had taken a drag from said cigarette and his eyes had tracked movement at the front door.
And heralded by the curling exhalation of smoke, a surly Rin walked into his life. He remembers them angelic, sexless, wreathed in tendrils of white. (His first thought, without derision, toned wondering: My god, what are you? A thought that echoed through time, through his years, even to this moment. A question direly in need of an answer - that Senan would try hungrily to pursue. What are you and can I know you?
What are you, and can I keep you?)
(The answer is simple, and given here, tonight, in their embrace: I am your Rin. And the rest follows.)
The tattoo came a decade and a burst appendix later. (Rin, fussing over him. Rin had made sure he went to the hospital. Rin had helped him through recovery, fed him, helped change the bandages, smothered him with coddling.) Rin had, by then, broken his heart by announcing they believed neither in romance nor monogamy, that they would never enter in to such a wretched state of affairs as marriage. He had decided, finally, it didn't fucking matter what role they held in his life, so long as they were in it. So long as he could be their Sen, profoundly loyal.
Not that he ever mentioned the tattoo to them, or its meaning when inevitably they did catch sight of it.
But they're certain to comprehend the resonance across decades, the implication, the simple meaning.
All his days, from one smoke-filled room twenty-five years ago, onward. All his heart, for them.
Of course he's their Sen. He always has been.
He's smiling lopsidedly - looking buoyantly daft and starstruck. The smudge of purple lipstick at his mouth doesn't help. (It doesn't matter, either. What shame or hurt can touch him now? What disease? Is he terminal, is death waiting for him in ten months, eight months?
Fuck it. Rin loves him. He'll live whole lifetimes. He's untouchable. He's immortal.)
He catches his lower lip between his teeth and tastes them (and the traces of lipstick); his smile is relieved, grateful, a perfect gleam of happiness. As though to be sure (he's never been more certain of anything in his life as he is of his own conviction - or that Rin, miraculously, perfectly, utterly loves him) he raises his brows questioningly (there's no question, there's nothing to question ever again) and- ]
Yes?
[ The shortest sentence he's ever spoken, containing more in a single syllable than all his meandering, hours-long soliloquys. Yes, us? and Yes, you love me? and Yes, we're a 'we'? and I got this right, didn't I? I didn't mistake or misunderstand, and my god you're the most beautiful thing this universe has ever turned out, so confirm for me, please, that I am in fact the luckiest man in said universe. And, of course. Yes, I'd like to be your Sen as I've always longed to be: completely, and for the rest of my life. Yes, and yes again. ]