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]

[ 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. ]