open: lol never mind.

[cozen]

WHO: Open!
WHAT: A memorial that doesn’t go as planned.
WHEN: Justinian 1
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: Nah.

The ceremony takes place in one of the side courtyards that’s been converted into a garden, where the oppressive architecture is offset with flowers and trees. There’s a small pyre, for those whose traditions call for pyres, but no bodies to burn. Instead there are tokens, flowers, favorite foods, treasured possessions—not yet lit.

(For the others, the Dalish and Nevarrans and anyone else with a different wish, their friends and family will have made different arrangements alongside the pyre, probably, if they aren’t universally reviled.)

Anyone who wants to speak, whether it’s a prepared speech or a single spontaneous sentence, can do so. The tone is respectful but only so solemn. It’s been more than a week. For many, the worst of the shock has passed, and the sun has continued to rise and set, and there’s room between bouts of misery for fond memories and occasionally laughter. The memorial is a door that’s closing—slowly, kindly—and tomorrow, on the other side of it, the war will continue.

Today, on this side, the only people judging anyone else for crying are the assholes.

***

Across the harbor, more than a dozen filthy and tired people come to a stop on the docks, and the loitering ferryman pauses to take stock of them, then starts laughing. There isn’t even any local mythology about ferrymen and the dead. It’s just that funny to him on its own, that he’s been rowing miserable people around all week, and here’s the source of all that misery, dirty and tired but significantly less dead than believed.

When he stops laughing, he offers to dunk everyone in the harbor before rowing them over. For the smell, you know. No one is going to be happy to see them if their eyes are watering too much to actually see them. Then he laughs some more at his hilarious joke.

But he does eventually load up his boat—and maybe there isn’t room for everyone all at once, maybe some dramatic reunions will be delayed, maybe some people will be even more fashionably late to their funeral than the others—and carries everyone across the bay, still chuckling intermittently.

***

In the courtyard, the speeches and anecdotes (and singing, perhaps) wind down to long silences peppered with murmurs or sniffling. Someone is preparing to light the pyre. And then the gate creaks open.

Comments

[libratus]

[ If it's a demon, it's one who has watched Ilias sleep more often than even Leander has lately. The wrinkling forehead, eyes scrunched in bleary protest of consciousness, his posture curling inward in defense against it — promptly dislodging his elbow from its perch, forcing a hissed breath and an abrupt straightening.

Which shouldn't be mistaken for consciousness, exactly, but he at least manages to squint an eye at the other man.

And mumble, the words heavy but delicate in the ts: ]

You are meant to be resting.

[sarcophage]

[Though it slips off in that sudden movement, Leander's hand finds its place again shortly, palpating knobs of bone and the softer valleys between them, stiff tendons yielding under pressure, the kneecap hard under his fingers. Fabric sliding across skin sliding across flesh. The particular crumpling and creasing of his face. It's all very real.

You're meant to be dead, obvious, left unspoken. He squeezes gently.]

There's a bed.

[Several beds, in fact, that remain empty of residents: all have been stripped of their sheets, but one, still dressed and waiting. Just in case. (And then there's the bed that's closest, and the urge to make room is simmering high. He knows he shouldn't.)]

[libratus]

[ Several beds, and his narrowed eyes skim the nearest first — catch in what empty space there is, with a strange and sudden sort of longing, hollow on the cusp of shattering. (Would a spirit pass up so clear a temptation?) His gaze drops as quick as it wandered, to the hand warming on his knee. Careful as with a cupped bird (You didn't cut his wrists), he reaches to gather it in both of his, bending to bring pale fingers to bristle, to press quick to dry lips. Simple; grateful not to be holding a corpse. ]

I missed this part, last time.

[ Missed. Left. Couldn't bear to watch it happen; tried desperately to avoid imagining it after.

Afraid to move an inch, now. ]

[sarcophage]

[Distantly he watches his own hand raise, witnesses the connection of skins. The warmth of a living body cradling the corpse chill of his fingers. A wisp of breath across his knuckles. Unsmiling for the touch of lips, for the words that come after, and through the silence that follows them, aware of and apathetic to the slow prickling of tear ducts preparing to rise. It's only a threat; the sheen they produce isn't enough to pass the lid.

He wouldn't have missed it willingly. Not for anything, for anyone, living or dead. To know he hasn't, that it wasn't stolen after all—that neither of them have been denied the possibility of that moment's incomparable significance, its deepest intimacy—the knowledge settles gently inside, softens the tension grinding at his ribs.

As with the drawing slipped under the door, all language feels inadequate, save one:

His hand curls, closes around however many fingers it may catch, and tightens.]

[libratus]

[ It is enough. He doesn't need words — would rather not, in this moment, risk understanding Leander's motives in any more detail than the bare fact that his eyes are shining and his fingers are holding tight. Those are the things you do when you're happy to see someone, when you're glad they're alive, and isn't that enough? Is it wrong to want that to be enough?

It needs to be enough, right now. He leans farther in, exhaustion making for an easy weight, and presses to a tangle of hair. For a while he just breathes there, eyes shut. In and out, throat tight, fighting to smooth each little hitch or tremor that rises in his chest. Only when he trusts his voice to steady does he risk its use. ]

You will pull something if I ask you to scoot over, won't you.

[ Don't pull something. ]

[sarcophage]

[For a while, just breathing there together, bearing similar battles in near silence, while motive and reason melt away like sugar on the tongue. He licks his lips to ready an answer, whispers it, deadpan for the pain in his chest.]

I'm too tired for that.

[Boys again, stealing moments of privacy. (He might laugh anyway, if Ilias does, and even as one or two breaths it will hurt.)

It happens slowly, with a few breaths blown heavy through the effort it takes to move—he will politely ignore any suggestion to stop—but it does happen. The tug of stitches is as much a novelty as it is unpleasant; in the days to come he will unwind his own bandages to look at them, even remove some himself. The discomfort itself is nothing. Against the chance to make room for this man—to accept his nearness—to lie together and breathe in the rightness of it—it's nothing.

There's hardly enough room for the both of them. It hurts. (It's nothing.) His fingers find their way to black curls, comb there gently, with a tremble between each stroke. Softly, wet-edged,]

I like your beard.

[libratus]

[ For a laugh, it bubbles to life too sickly for joy, too heavy on the tongue, but warm still for the memory. A time when it didn't seem a sin, not to want to ask questions.

Limbs fold, and Ilias does the wincing for him, protests murmured in sympathetic hisses between careful touches to assist. Convenient now, how well he knows every scar; strange, to be navigating between them. But for all his objections, his pitched brows, the gesture makes some fresh well of loneliness crack open hot in his chest. Here is a man who will tear open his skin just to make room for him — and maybe he shouldn't, maybe affection shouldn't require anyone to bleed for it, but how can he watch that and call it not enough? What does it matter what else he has done, in the face of that?

(It matters. Tomorrow, maybe it will matter again. Tonight, he is content to sink into it, and let that venom, too, turn inward.) ]

Perhaps I will keep it.

[ The beard. For you isn't the implication he ought to be making, lying curled around a man he knows feels more for him than for anyone else; he isn't cruel enough to say it. (It's not much kinder, not to.) ]

This isn't what I expected to happen, without me.

[sarcophage]

[The implication makes him smile—cruelty is better than absence—and with the slight bunching of his cheek comes a crawling sensation from the corner of his eye, nearest the pillow. Slipping, warm, soaking into the fabric against his skin. How similar it feels to blood.]

None of us expected it, I think.

[His thumb finds the crease between dark eyebrows, smooths at it twice, three times, strokes once across the hair of each brow. (The very same way she does to Leander, now, in dreams.) To press his lips there too—it would be so simple.

Instead, gently,]

Have you spoken to him?

[libratus]

[ It's instinctual, thoughtless the way his features relax, settled under a thumb's touch -- half undone again in the next beat, a string tugged between the brows. ]

Mn.

[ That's a yes. A voluminous one, space he isn't quite sure how to navigate yet. Instead, a delicate step around: ]

He said you read his letter.

[sarcophage]

I did.

[Stubborn crease. A soft shifting shrinks the gap that much more, brings mouth to brow after all, to speak against skin.]

The one about the name. The mirror and the monster. I shouldn't have. I'm sorry. [Again, combing softly, hand resting but for the movement of his fingers. (It's what you say.)] I told him I wanted to understand—now I do. [Words softening at the edges.] He's very beautiful.

[libratus]

[ Beautiful. The word brings a funny, shuddering breath. ]

I do not think he agrees. Not the way that you mean.

[ Not the way a smile is. Ogre's bones twisting together like tree trunks; stag muscle twining into braid. Now, skin splitting at its seams. ]

Is that why you didn't hurt him?

[sarcophage]

The other way, too.

[A mouth is like a seam, a smile splits the skin. Not his; his face is relaxed despite the constant complaint of his ribs.]

I didn't want to hurt him. Because he's yours. [Drifting, dreamy.] I nearly did, after the spell, but he was quick. He was very brave, too. [His thumb moves against the warm skin behind an ear, settles into the crease there.] You're still dressed—do you want to sleep this way?

[libratus]

[ Was. A correction on the tip of his tongue. Was mine. Or was he even that? The promises between them had only been spoken in one direction. Was his. ]

It is loose enough. [ It isn't; even a week of lean meals in, he's broader in the shoulders than Isaac, but an ill-fitted shirt barely ranks amongst his most pressing problems. ] I will move in a minute.

[ He might fall asleep in a minute. First, though-- lifting his eyes to find Leander's and his hand to rest gentle at a forearm, ] May I ask something of you?

Will you promise me-- [ Now, before there's reason to reconsider-- ] Promise me you won't harm him. Not for anything but your own self-defense. Not ever.

[sarcophage]

[There's a little light coming in between the shutters and curtain, and the eyes Ilias finds are still liquid enough to be limned with it. A little has since gathered by his eye, where orbit meets bridge, and when he smiles it slips over the bone of his nose, twice-bruised and healing anew.]

I already have.

[A whisper, the quietest pops of wet tongue and teeth. The greedy wound carved by Isaac's letter, the one that became something like an eye, that's what it was after all: a promise that made itself.]

Please stay. Here, with me. Just to sleep.

[libratus]

[ A single bead curves over skin and bone, and Ilias's fingers rise to meet it, the barest swipe of a thumb diverting its path. In its place, his weight shifts a trough in the mattress, neck craning to press a sandpaper kiss to cheekbone. Thank you.

(Tomorrow, maybe he'll explain the rest tomorrow.) ]

Just to sleep, [ he agrees, forehead returning to shoulder. ] But not half on top of your ribs. Come.

[ A gesture, a gentle repositioning of bony limbs. If anyone is going to sleep with the other's weight against their chest, it ought to be him. ]