tfln open post

[byanyname]

***

either leave a message (or set of muses) for one of my assholes, or request a message from one of them. choose messages from the classic source, from your own skull, or whatever you may please.

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[withoutrhetoric]

[ 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. ]

[ultimatenegative]

[ 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. ]

[withoutrhetoric]

[ Rin doesn’t believe in fate. Rin doesn’t believe in much beyond what may be effected in the world. What people do, what people plan, and how people play off of one another; how they forge worlds with structures suited to their shared sparks and desires, and how they turn the humdrum into something vibrant (or destructive; or slate-heart oppressive). It isn’t fate that draws them; it’s their ingrown forces singular and shared. It’s a host of earthly, seen and unseen elements at play.

What Rin holds stock in: Taking hold of any chance that comes your way. Listening for places where your voice is at once entertained and echoed back. Watching for the ways people do and don’t receive you.

What Rin knows: Those who resonate your song are rare. And vital. And clear in all their presence. You will know, Rin feels - Rin thinks, Rin knows - the ones who recognize you. The ones who share any portion of your wavelength.

So.

So of course Rin felt Sen’s presence from the start.

So of course Rin believes in Sen, and in their shared, their critical collision.

So this kiss soars elative, and this kiss thrums overdue, and this kiss has been, and this kiss is, and the silent vows offered and exchanged have always been oncoming.

(To think, they might have missed it.

To think, they might have spoken, oh, years ago, and brought this tidal warmth toward its unmasked cresting sooner.

But with or without these silent promises and professions, Sen and Rin have been together, unbreaking.

And now. And now that subtle muffled veils are being brushed aside, this feels like consummation, like relief, like vows renewed and strengthened.)

And when Rin moved, they found Sen there, as well. So perhaps they two moved as one to share their breath. So that now, when Sen pulls closer, Rin’s shifting near as well. So that Rin’s breath nearly mirrors Senan’s rise and fall. So that they two are in every motion harmonious: Sen and Rin, aware always of a current strung between them. Rin and Sen, joined through eternal, ephemeral convergence.

Their hand at his chest sets splayed and deftly pressed. Their breath shudders, and they hum, and twine their hand with Sen’s, a subtle grasp. Again, again and softly, they brush their lips to his (and there has never, oh never been a kiss to match Sen’s), with each shift offering and asking more.

They know the words unspoken, ringing. And their soul sings in time, in tune with Sen, lungs aching with the simple direness of words so long unspoken. Words known without hearing their form; truths known before their shape was granted conclusive outline.

Their own silent promise sings in kind—

Of course.

And.

For years. From the start. Before I knew the words for it. Before I knew I could.

And.

Forgive me my wordlessness, won’t you?

There is no try about it; there is no need for effort or attempt. There is only the certain knowledge: that they love Sen, heart and soul and wholeness. And they always, yes, they always will.

For they have always known Sen, and held Sen. For Rin has always felt half their heart held in his hands, and felt the life of him within their own.

When they draw back just slightly - after a thousand thousand shared breaths, after time has winnowed into nothing, after Sen’s silent voice and Sen’s lips and Sen’s touch and Sen’s pulse have formed the whole world and firmament beyond - it’s to find familiar eyes and watch, and offer in this way a furtherance of vows. Their own eyes wide still, soft now, wonderstruck and eminently pleased.

Then their voice, soft and unmuddled, equally wonderstruck and, at once, toned with simple sensibility— ]

I am your Rin, you know.

For now and always, my Sen.

[ultimatenegative]

[ 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. ]

[withoutrhetoric]

[ Of course.

Of course, the ink-inflected, lasting words. Should Rin have known? Did they know? There’s a distance - vast, they’ve always felt - between knowing and suspecting. Knowing and half-guessing, or seeing how pieces could amount, without proof of their connection. With a time marked 7:34, and though Rin can’t place the meaning at first—

Could it have been.

That night. Early evening, dusk coming on, and candles. The first time, most vivid time they’d met beneath the protective warmth of a blanket. When a kiss first felt like heaven, and when it ended far too soon.

The tattoo had appeared not long after that night, hadn’t it? (And hadn’t the time had always strung a distant bell? Inconclusive, but somewhere attempting to amount. If only they’d seen the pieces. If only they’d known the connection.)

It had, yes. And they know now. And Sen is here now, and always has been wholly present.

And look at him: this gleaming smile, this relief. This recognition and acceptance. Belief because of course he must believe; because he’s always, perhaps, felt Rin beside hi, the way Rin has always known Sen at their side. And a question that isn’t a question, really; a word that only pleads for confirmation, certainty at the culmination of so many ambiguous years.

A word Rin is happy to meet. A word that draws Rin’s smile, and an answer spoken without need for preparation. ]

Tous mes jours. Tout mon couer.

[ Thinking as they say it: ’Oh, of course.’

Thinking, planning, to take on a new and overdue tattoo of their own. (What might it look like? How best bespeak Sen, and mirror Sen’s own mark?) ]

Yes.

Of course.

For always, and with everything I am.

Yes, how can I tell you…

[ A slight hiss of air between their teeth as they cock their head, nod to themself, then speak in French, then English— ]

I love you. And I love you.

[ Then a kaleidoscope of their shared languages, all expressing love, speaking variations on a core-deep truth punctuated with kisses drifting and pressured, with caresses, with Rin fixing their eyes on Sen and smiling, nearly daft. Speaking again, again, again that they love Sen, they adore Sen that their love belongs to Sen, that Sen’s heart holds their own. ]

Tous mes jours. Tout mon couer.

My philosopher.

My brilliant, subtle fool.

My Sen, my Senan, my Sen Ben Benice. Of course I love you dearly, with all the not-insubstantial conviction that I own. With every ounce of heart and blood I have. I adore you, I love you, you absolute absurdity and beauty of a man.

[ultimatenegative]

[ Stricken, Sen stares at them, his lips faintly parted and faintly smiling, rampant disbelief clear in his eyes. (His heart is gone. His soul expired, passing from his body. He died a moment ago, he thinks, and this is eternity. This is what heavens are meant to be, when people speak of them. Revelation, enlightenment, a comprehension of life's meaning and one's purpose within its weave.)

Rin echoed his words back. Rin spoke the words forever marked in his skin (for them) (always, for them) and meant them for him. All their days, all their heart, his own now.

He would speak, but they're speaking, and he never has liked to interrupt them. He would let his expression contort with agonized bliss, shed tears, swear profusely at the momentousness, the blessed shower of mercy the universe has afforded him with the resounding return of his own vow. But Rin is not a hopeless romantic, and they don't linger in the same moments as Sen.

He thinks.

He's wrong.

Because what follows is more. Oh, it's so much more. It's his own words, preceded by love, and preceding love, and there are kisses garnering stunned movements from Sen, his hand trembling at their cheek, the lights in his vision flaring and blurring around Rin (also blurring) (a fate-on-view so transcendent, it hazes wet and stings with salt.)

They said.

They said.

He closes his eyes and whispers their name, devastated. He opens his eyes and Rin is still there, and Rin still loves him.

And.

And suddenly sharp in motion, he jerks his shoulder back and slaps his hand on the sofa, searching without tearing his eyes from them. His expression slowly lapses between bemused smiles and that same shattered disbelief.

This is what it is to be undone, they've fucking undone him, and because he's loquacious, because he speaks at length about nothing and everything, and speaking is like breathing, as his hand goes about its scrabbling business, he says softly -]

Fucking undone, me.

[ His hand meets solidity and he grasps his phone.

He needs to know. It's the only sensical thing his mind can produce in this moment: what time is it.

He needs to know the time. The date. The day.

His brows have knit helpless, and he has to drag his gaze from their face to look. (And laughs. He laughs, a choked sob of a sound, a noise issued at the end of the world when its curtain falls and all is revealed to be a joke of the highest order.) (A noise which, from Sen, is appreciative. Of course. Of course. Of course.)

Tilting the phone so they can see the backlit screen, Sen - wet-eyed and gleaming with joy, dazed and a little daft with it, with faint purple along his mouth (and cheeks, and anywhere else their lips met his skin) - murmurs a broken, baffled (happy): ]

Seven thirty-four.

[ And his smile returns, adoring and transfixed. ]

The best moment of my life.

[withoutrhetoric]

[ What is that man doing?

They’re watching, dazed and a little bleary-eyed, as Sen seeks something. They’re smiling, baffled, in awe of every movement because everything within this man’s reach and capacity draws wonder, is worthy of a thousand thousand words of ecstatic discourse and of every speechless thought no word can compass.

Sen, speaking soft and stricken, clutches Rin’s heart.

Sen, reaching half-wild and sightless, trills Rin’s joy in watching, their eyebrows raised, head cocked, smiling beyond pleasure.

They could watch this man forever.

Just now, they watch him grab the phone, and eye the phone; watch laughter brush him, and—

And they know. A compulsory piece sliding into place, or the revelation of a connective piece that’s been here all along. A piece verified when they managed to turn their eyes from Sen to the screen, back to Sen again with renewed awe (isn’t it always, with Sen, renewal and awe and everything turned vivid, verdant, lovely? this man is the very font and center of everything beautiful; this man is the locus of fondness and ardor and, yes, and always, time itself).

7:34. Of course.

Of course, of course it is.

Because the only form of fate is Sen, and every point (infinite, eternally renewing) where Sen and Rin intersect and overlay. Because time is bound between the two of them and cycles on their axis, so of course there would be one recurrent, perfect time. So of course all of time would echo with its count, would ripple outward from its central pulse. Shared heartbeat. So of course all myriad potentialities of sequence would fall away beyond this single explicit moment: 7:34.

7:34. Then, and now, and always.

It is perfect, and perfectly logical, and they know they’re smiling. Know they must be smiling, dizzy and fuzzed to blooming, suffuse with heart-struck wonder as they reach gentle to brush the edge of lipstick smeared delicate at Sen’s cheek. Shifting to brush the purple trace at Sen’s lip, then letting their thumb trail the edge of that incomparable mouth. Reeling, feeling the world reel away.

They, driven dizzy. Feeling if they look away from Sen they’ll be lost, overcome by all the wild longing and so-long-knowing around them, by words so long held and lived by and finally, oh finally spoken. It’s Sen who keeps them anchored here. It’s Sen who keeps them, always.

Sen and Rin, within their perfect, their eternal moment. ]

All of time and all the world.

It’s always been ours, hasn’t it?

[ Shifting from French to English— ]

What do you think, my Sen? 7:34 spells a beautiful eternity.

[ Which necessitates - which absolutely necessitates - a soft leaning in and another dire, loving kiss. ]

[ultimatenegative]

[ His head burns with fever, and his eyes track Rin's, where, for Senan Wilkes, all the world and all of time converge. 7:34 means nothing at all, save that it was the page number where the passage could be found: Rin kissed me back.

And now, Rin said they love me.

It doesn't mean anything.

It means everything.

It indexes where the memory can be summoned again. It holds the symbology of a crucifix: the item itself is not what matters. What matters is that it represents a turning point in the history of Senan's own humanity. Here, at 7:34, is a crux of existence. Here is an axis. Here is a lynchpin. A watershed moment. And what occurred?

Rin loves him.

Rin fucking loves him, and he feels the boundaries of his skin perilously insubstantial. He feels his heart thrumming itself to death in joyful pulse.

7:34 does spell a beautiful eternity, but it's only a handful of letters. It doesn't compose the entirety of the sentence, because thousands of 7:34s have lived and died without rising remarkable.

Rin said.

And Sen hasn't waited to hear those words, but he's longed for them in dark and lonely hours. He hasn't watched Rin with yearning, wishing for them to be anything but what they granted the world, but in dreams - oh, in dreams, Rin looked at him just as they do now. (Is he dreaming?) (Is he dead? Did he fucking die?) Rin smiles like the first time, and love follows, and it could be 7:34 or lunchtime or 5:52 in the morning, what the fuck does time matter if they love him?

It's a moment burned in memory.

7:34 is the torch he carries for Rin Renault.

At 7:34, Rin said they love him - and damn it all if he didn't say it back. But he can't speak. (Novel, to be incapable of speech. To find himself awed to silence.) He doesn't have to - he doesn't have to speak, or cohere, or wonder anymore. Rin is kissing him because it's 7:34 and Rin loves him, and if he doesn't kiss back, he might sob.

So he does: he gathers them close and gives all he has to them. Sen, with nothing to prove and no one to impress, offers only what he's held reserved from anyone but them. If Rin wants him, then they deserve the rawness of himself, the undoctored glimpses of soul, the slow and shuddering passage of his lips over theirs. They deserve the honesty of himself, and how much he loves-

Oh. Oh, he didn't -

Fuck.

He cups their cheeks in both hands and draws back with a sharp breath, a swimmer surfacing for air (a dead man resurrected.) He has to say - he needs them to hear.

The first time, with their beautiful face framed by his just all right hands. Their lipstick miraculously unsmudged, their eyes depthless and familiar. He looks hungrily. He looks like a man who has discovered the Holy Grail, the Fountain of Youth - all the lost treasures together in a single form.

His Rin.

And softly, slowly, ensuring every word holds its own traction and sinks its weight into Rin's awareness, he speaks. ]

I love you. I have loved you all my life, at times so much I could hardly breathe. Always so much that my heart beats unsteady in your presence. I love you purely, and without demand. I haven't longed for more than you ever gave, but my god, I loved you utterly from the moment I first saw you. Not from the first kiss, and not from this moment. My comprehension of 'forever' has been spun from the night when Rin Renault walked into a flat and brought me to my knees.

I love you - not some moment, indifferent and fleeting. I like the coincidence of it, the unlikelihood, the seeming predestination. It suits my more fanciful moods.

But I love you. Inevitable, wonderful, undefinable Rin - a mystery and an answer to chase for all my days.

You, Rin, are my beautiful eternity.

[ He lowers his chin and raises his brows as his thumb sweeps a slow arc, as if to ask, Okay? and Do you understand? Sen watches them, searching their eyes - and for all that, looks like a man close to sundered, and well beyond undone. A man who can't bring himself to disbelieve the paradise laid before him. ]

I meant it, when I said I have been happy. Do you know lucky I've been, to have been welcomed so near, and always, to the deepest pleasure of my soul? Twenty-three years, I've been at the gates of my own heaven, and I have been happy.

[withoutrhetoric]

[ What are they to do, when this man - the anchoring and recurrence of existence, Rin’s constant and all the world’s extravagant joy - takes them in his hands and speaks of, oh, everything. Eternity and joy. Constancy and love.

What can they do save remember to breathe, to swallow, and fall into Sen’s eyes, the adoration that spells a perfect correlation to their own. What would they care to do just now, save to meet his ardence with the wholeness of their rapt, their overflowing tenderness?

Those eyes, softly lustrous, infinitely expressive. That lip that cheek that jaw smeared soft with purple, with the brush of Rin’s affection (and oh, oh, they are going to kiss that man so many times, infinite kisses before even this day’s run through; they’d kiss him now if they weren’t thralled attentive to his speech). And the touch of rough hands - esteemed and dearest hands, exquisite hands, articulate of worlds, a match and complement for Sen’s cavorting speech; with these hands, with those words, what couldn’t this man say? - at their cheeks.

The only touch they’ve cared for. The only touch that’s ever been welcome, or felt congruous, offered restoration and connection with their self. The only touch they want to hold.

From the start, Sen’s hands held Rin’s fascination. Gesticulating at turns graceful and cleverly crude, perfectly underlining and explicating each soliliquous word and absolute cloudburst of phrases. Rin had never met anyone so adept in expression, tuning symphonic words from a single sentiment or chance idea. That man, they’d thought held - and still, and always holds - the keys to everything that can be spoken or expressed.

The stranger - soon to turn familiar face; soon to turn friend - had introduced himself: Senan Wilkes. They’d worked the name over in their head, prodding its potentials for sonorance and malleability, then speaking it aloud twice, thrice. Head cocked curious, eyes chasing some half-formed thought along the wall.

Listening to Senan Wilkes, voice thick with an accent Rin had, at the time, been unable to place. The voice pleasing enough that they’d tried it on, mimicking the rhythms, a few phrases (a habit they’ve since learned to indulge only with care, or with intentional abandon) before deciding they liked the rhythms better in the not-so-stranger’s voice. Decided they’d like to hear more of that voice and all the words it cared to share.

Listening to Senan, who asked once about the recurrent question - ’hard to tell these days,’ wasn’t that it? - then let them exist without further query. Who never begged for or demanded explanation, explication. Who was an oddity in an unkind world. Senan Wilkes, rough at the edges and utterly gracious in manner.

It’d struck Rin that very night that this was a gentleman. Strange thing to find in a den of shitheads and dealers and thieves. Strange thing to find anywhere, in their experience, and if ‘gentleman’ wasn’t a term traditionally consonant with Sen’s mien, Sen’s voice, Sen’s likely history, still it rang throughout his being. Still the word settled upon him like certitude. And Rin had known they didn’t feel unsafe or even quite so guarded around Sen.

Toward the night’s end, Rin - historically reluctant to touch or be touched; historically fixed on keeping to themself - had gestured for Sen’s hand. Had held it briefly, head cocked, the back of that hand in their palm and their thumb brushing along the unfamiliar fingers. Searching without quite formulating questions. Wondering without precisely knowing what or why. Then releasing Sen’s hand and offering a cigarette from their swift-dwindling store.

The next time they saw Sen Wilkes - another night, another den of thieves, another gathering arranged by Darius Scarlett - they’d drifted to him, and they’d lingered near until the evening’s end.

Funny the way roads add up. The way signals link into signposts turn into meaning that, in retrospect, shone clearly all along.

Funny how intuition strikes true.

There is no one on earth so brilliant as Sen, and no one who has been so good, so generous, so utterly and always necessary. And Rin has never ceased to revel in Sen’s winding words, or in their luminescent truths. In the ways Sen lights brilliance out of mundanity. In the ways Sen’s words reveal truths that have always been present.

As Sen’s words do now, speaking of love and inevitability. As Sen’s words do now, humming decades of vibratory strands to life, turning unspoken knowings into clear-writ truths that brook no doubt and erase ven the scantest cause for question.

Rin’s hand moves to cover one of Sen’s. To drift lightly, to press, to know Sen’s nearness better still.

And, reeling still, dizzied and hazy and feeling that the world is spun from love, from knowing, from this man’s absolute belief and from Rin’s own enduring, boundless adoration, they speak, hearing their voice as if from a distance, stricken and soft and stirred to the core. ]

Then I am fortunate… Oh, beyond all talk of luck.

My Sen. My Senan. My beautiful aegis, my poet.

And I am pleased, I am gratified. My life glows, to know and hear at any turn you have been happy, and that I have made you so.

As you have turned me to a bliss unending. As you ever ever tuned me radiant and - ah! - rendered your Rin riant.

I, who began a null of thorns and bruises, turned by and with my Sen into this null of boundless hope. Of contentment, struck by wonder.

I could live and die on your words, my love.

[ There’s a quirk to their smile, a moment as they linger in the feeling of those words, that phrase - ’my love,’ yes, yes, indeed - and settle in its rightness. And their thumb brushes Sen’s hand at their cheek. And their hand finds Sen’s jaw, drifts back to brush and linger at Sen’s neck. ]

My love.

My brilliant, brazen fool, and all of my fondness.

[ultimatenegative]

[ Ask anyone at all to name the most defining characteristic of Senan Wilkes, and they will immediately respond with varying levels of vitriol, amusement, or aggrievement, that he talks..

He is a talker.

Not such that the conversations turn monotonous: his patter, his engagement with the listener, his accent and inflection all lend themselves to his ability to hold his audience. He isn't (as the kids say) a mansplainer, either; there is little authority of subject in his speech. Sen is eternally a philosophizer, leaning in deeply to the acknowledgement that there is much he doesn't know. (And indeed, he often will ask for clarity from anyone in his vicinity.)

He, gentlemanly and still disreputable, gentle but still relegated to the ranks of thieves, dealers, and lowlife sinners, is a conman with a gift. He belongs in the company of evangelists, of black market dealers, barkers and carnies, beat poets, hype men, street magicians, and radio personalities (or Podcast hosts. Take your pick.)

Years ago, he felt trapped, uncomfortable when there was nothing to say. He felt uninteresting, dull of any sheen, and presenting to others only a decent face, only cheap clothes: another wasted boy in a seedy underworld. But if he could talk. If he could wrap words around each and every listener like ropes and leash them, if he could make himself invaluable through speech, why, he was a king in a court of rogues.

So he commanded a room and laid waste to debates. He ran verbal laps around academics and meth addicts alike. He charmed them. (Or agitated them to fighting. Or confused them to silence. Facets of a useful skill.)

None of them could keep pace if they wanted to.

No one but Rin.

And no one but Rin could render him speechless. Only Rin could make Senan love his own silence, because in the silence, there is either the breathtaking flow of Rin's words, or a shared quietude. Blessed, his own silence in Rin's company.

He is silent now, permitting every word to glint like diamonds across his own stillness, in which he does not feel lusterless at all. He has never felt anything close to cheap, or uninteresting, or crude in his silence before them, and he doesn't feel so now.

He feels -

Oh, he feels everything. Warm and satisfied from his chest outward, as though from a shot of good whiskey. He feels charmed by Rin (he has always been charmed by Rin, by their whims and odd notions, by their languages and mimicry, the singing and narrations of others' actions, the way they carry themselves unaffected when they are, in fact, deeply so.)

He feels not-so-madly in love, where the madness has been perhaps a symptom of the not-having. The madness abates, and allows for, ha, stark raving sanity.

He feels - overwhelmingly tender. And gentle. Protective of this seemingly fragile miracle. (It isn't fragile. It's had two decades and change to take root, to grow, to become dauntless and fortified.)

His thumb brushes another slow arc as his smile softens - to think. To think Rin speaks these words. (He can't argue that Rin was indeed what they say, a null of thorns and bruises: he recognized that from the first, and informed every word and action upon this foundation. They had been wounded, and were prone to wounding, and he - talkative, rough, crude, cheap, but aware and capable of his capacities to be a gentleman - always offered them sanctuary.)

(They needed an ally. They needed a friend.

Truth be told, he had needed one, as well.)

(He's gratified. Struck by wonder, himself, to think he had some hand in brushing away the thorns and easing the bruises.)

This moment is prodigious. Miraculous, yes, he thinks the word again and again with every clench of his heart and every robbed breath, his eyes slipping closed and his head bowing a little - they called him 'my love'.

Not even the mention of dying catches at him. It seems impossible to him just now that anyone at all, much less Rin, much less himself, can die. Death feels so distant from the vibrant joy of those two words. He echoes them wonderingly.

Love and a caress. (Rin has touched him many times, but this is new, tingling and almost possessive - a claim he's happy to feel staked along his neck. At his jaw. Against his hand. What he has been, what he became, what he will be, he'd like to have lovingly held by, devoted in word and deed to, Rin.)

There's a false start at words, but he finds he doesn't want to speak. He doesn't want even one syllable to follow their love, their fondness, until the echo dies from his mind.

He's smiling again, bright and hopeful, looking far more himself than he has in months, years, and, with an unspoken question in his nearing, in the pause before connection and inquiring raise of his brows (Can I -? (Kiss you.)(Know you.)(Keep you.)), he offers another soft brush of his lips across theirs. ]