[ He's barely noticed his hand upon his chest, grasping for stability, to keep insides from spilling. He should really do a better job at maintaining, containing, knowing all the steps. Knowing how to pretend.
Having told Gaelio the truth of the matter, the one friendship that ever mattered, it feels as though he's locked himself out of spaces he used to crawl into with ease. It's not as easy to access them as it once was, not as easy to hide away in them. Having exposed that and lost that, he scratches and clutches for something in the interim -- a hand, his chest, some reassurance that he has done the correct thing.
His destined enemy, or his destined friend? If he does the correct thing now, how incorrect was he before?
What he feels for Gaelio must be as layered, as complex, known from the moment he cut him down as coldly as he had and felt eternal winter creep in his absence. Every moment that came after had taught him that he would never fully be able to escape what he'd done, nor anything that came before. The very concept of companionship had been purged forevermore in a last ditch attempt. Never again would it be allowed in the ways he'd allowed it, to lose himself to it, to ultimately lose it.
But he hadn't expected this turn off the main road. He hadn't expected falling this far simply by trying to analyze it. There's a tremble in Gaelio that he can see, felt echoed in the iron-clad grip of his hand squeezing back. His voice is choked, choking, his eyes are wet, and the scars in him must hurt. The ones inside, not out.
Or maybe it all hurts.
They may still hurt each other in the future, a distinct possibility that neither of them are fool enough to discount. Foolish as they may be.
Bright, blurring pools of blue, tense, taut, trembling. Gaelio reaffirms; he's worked hard for them, for McGillis, since the day they met.
Of course, that also hurts. Squeezing back with their hands, a shudder of an exhale, a sadder smile at those words. When Gaelio leans in, he almost wonders if he'll claw through to his heart and pluck it out, such is the strangeness of being as exposed. He leans in to guide their other pair of hands to another clasping, fingers laced and palms squeezing, McGillis inhaling with the same shaky quality as he glances down to look.
Strangely intimate sight, their hands melding together at two points.
He lets go of a huff -- "You might be the one who has to keep up." Understood, familiar, and he can be amused, but too much in the sound. Tumbling.
Despite all that's happened between them, and because he's only human after all, all this contact and honesty breeds simple human desire. Reflexive yearning for lost companionship. For him, for him. The total sum of companionship, the total sum.
And forced to face, from distances as short as this, how lonely he's been without him. Like this, unable to squirrel into denial. ]
I'm sure you'll enjoy that.
[ Strange joke, bloated with too much. McGillis tugs the hand resting by his heart in closer, still gazing at it and both intertwined.
He thumbs over a knuckle. A bit of scarring even there. ]
Watching me struggle.
[ Voice further away -- something overtakes him and he tugs up next, bringing it closer to this throat, but stops short with the movement.
Indecisive. As if he'd meant to keep moving, but can't. ]
[ It all hurts. It never stops hurting. Future hurt seems, even now, more distinct certainty than possibility.
Yet, he leans until his feet shuffle forward again, mounding sand, less and less space between them. That motion, then feeling the quiver of McGillis's exhale, his every breath, against his knuckles, then following the dip of McGillis's eyes, finding their hands. The imprint of a smile softer, pained, as he looks to this curious sight.
Palm to palm; so paired.
Gaelio does not yet lift his gaze, though drawn by the shorter, emotive exhalation. More than amused, too tangled for mere humor. It would give him pause, gives him pause. Within the knotting, enough discrete emotion to resonate.
Now lifting, slow, as his heartbeat echoes irregular in his chest. Hollow sounds, dinged metal. Not rushing to follow their hands, but trailing slow after them, feeling before he sees the placement of McGillis's thumb, the motion begun and ceased unfinished.
Gaelio recognizes indecision, so familiar as to be intimate. Comprehension breeds further inquiry: where McGillis would have taken them? Past throat, higher, yet there stalled, the heavy jest left between them. Caught in the webbing of their fingers.
The brilliance of the moon on the water darkens, the moon swept behind pendulous clouds. Gaelio seeks McGillis's eyes in the more velvet shadows, mouth more angled still, voice following the tide.
Now, drawing out, away. ]
I wonder?
[ It would be distant, even light with whimsy, but for the contagion of bloat. ]
Maybe not before. But...
[ Now, rushing in, splashing and frothy against their heels.
Gaelio lifts his fingers.
In doing so, his palm keeps snug, firm against McGillis's. Impossible to read an attempt to pry free. Instead, strange extension, brambles askew from knuckles, but with purpose: they graze. His fingertips trickle down the sidelong curve of McGillis's neck. If less deliberate, if less of a push in his wrist to help effectuate it, it might be easy to dismiss. A tick, a needed stretch, a meaningless flex as his fingers opened and closed, resettling, lacing again as soon.
[ Eyes flick up at the sound of Gaelio's voice, the quality mesmerizing, the words almost hypnotic when laid out against that specific intonation.
A hex, or a spell. Something like that. With the wounds between them still pulsating, still raw, this must be the height of foolishness. They should disentangle and begin to address the challenge analytically. It's impossible to see through to a clear goal, with how close they linger, how tight they grip without stepping past a line, without --
In the back of his mind, he's aware: the line they're careful not to cross.
It's always been that way. McGillis wouldn't, and Gaelio wouldn't. But it survived death deformed. It's been brought here and it sits between them with a vengeance, blood-stained. Cumbersome, impossible to breach, more messy than ever.
Or is it impossible?
Caught by those eyes, caught by the spell of his reply, when Gaelio stretches his fingers into a stroke (is it? an accident, or?) that lands on his neck, he can't help but flash back to the evening spent warming by the fire, breath ghosting over his skin.
He can't help but flash back to other evenings, other times, to years and years of Gaelio's constant presence. How he lingered close, but never too close. Like trying to catch feathers in the wind. Not always trying -- like feeling them brush past and watching them flutter on, understanding futility. It's always been like that, but the staying presence of fingers sweeping over his neck cannot be ignored in this hypnotic moment.
The heat building at the back of his neck spills over, spilling against touch as a tiny shiver runs up his spine. Something is different, in the settling press of his fingertips, in the smoky lidding of this man's eyes.
McGillis watches him with wider ones, a rare occurrence. He opens his mouth on a delay. ]
Maybe it's owed.
[ Struggling. A state that gives Gaelio equal ground. A starting point.
A waver at the edge of his voice. ]
Maybe it's necessary, for understanding.
[ As he speaks, he carefully frees the hand that hangs down at their sides, only to pass his palm over the back of Gaelio's and begin to stroke slowly up his arm.
[ Sand pushed. Toe of boot against toe of boot. Toes over the line drawn in the sand. Sea blue-green against darker blue sky, half-mooned.
What is it they do? What does he do, fingertips learning the texture of his neck? How close to neck he'd breathed, skin pressed to skin, there and there and there. How thin the sheet, how great then small the mattress between, how snug the arm circling waist. How like gossamer, the inner wrist against which his thumb traced a new line.
How often over the years Gaelio had looked at this man and learned not to bite his lip, and measured out his breaths. A brother, wed to his child sister. A brother, loved by the woman they'd grown alongside, the woman he'd seen struck down. Made enemy, blood and anguish filling the rift between them. Revenge, the smoke of it still clouding. He must breathe out, breathe out smoke, to clear his head of it, but it won't ever clear.
A brother, an enemy, a murderer, a traitor.
A best friend.
A man whose fingers thread, whose neck felt hot, whose palm keeps flush. Who trembles.
Years of looking at his back, his profile, of staggering heart and careful breath and leaning only as far as permitted, as was too far yet safe enough. If you'd but held out your hand, hand extracted from Gaelio's vice, and smoothing slow up his arm.
Slow, dragging, a caress that shivers through him.
It should not be possible to feel this, for the steel implanted in his spine to bend. Nor, rationally, should it have been possible to keep indecision for the duration he had. To hear brutal words, witness brutal acts, and be cut down, brutal. To hear, see, feel, die, but wonder, but seek more. Grasping for an answer, landed on with brittle and wretched difficult, snapped and wrenched away here.
Impossible, feeling what he does for McGillis, the extent of it more that he does not and cannot understand.
Impossible and insane, for breath to shudder out like this. Hypnosis or spell, for lids to lift, mirroring the roundness of McGillis's eyes, as that hand traverses his arm. Yet, keeping the curve of his mouth, sharp and relearning an old shape, if distorted by scar tissue and wreckage. ]
Will you struggle for me?
[ Murmured low, too much breathed in those words. His hand begins to disentangle from lacing. Once free, wrist tilts, fingers and palm shaping to throat. Thumb over adam's apple, and he hopes, strangely, that McGillis would swallow, let him feel it. ]
But I don't want it like that.
[ Quiet correction. His fingers do not yet squeeze. The middle stirs in the hairs at back of McGillis's neck. ]
Struggle with me.
[ Like that. Not alone. Not in the dirt. He's never wanted to stand above McGillis, towering or lording, or superior. That had not been the core of his need to deny him, and even in denial and judging him inferior as a moral creature, that creature, that man, might not exist.
That creature, that man, cannot be this one.
He wouldn't do this, if he didn't mean it.
Would he?
God, please.
To think, indeed, that humans could become so foolish.
His hand smooths up, still shaping. Cupping cheek. Toe sliding to mid-boot, noses close, his exhale not heavy but still co-mingling. Below, his fingers flex inward, and out, and his elbow bends once McGillis's hand has passed, drawing his own hand. Fingers flex again, hooking in the fabric of McGillis's shirt, index over a button. The nail only just grazes skin.
I'd have done the rest. ]
Together. That must be necessary, for understanding.
I'll take what I'm owed. You'll take what you're owed. McGillis...
[ Queer assertion in his tone wavers, dipping into tenuous doubt with that name, the only name now thrumming through him, though there should be two others. His eyes flick down, stick, only just able to fix on McGillis's mouth given how close their faces.
Breathless with doubt. No, it isn't doubt that makes him breathless. ]
[ The notion that Gaelio might find some satisfaction in extracting a portion of his revenge through this, does not make his blood run cold. That the tilt of Gaelio's mouth remains, less a proper expression of mirth and more a shape forming and reforming into something like it, pushing at a scarred visage, does not give his insides a reason to twist. That he asks:
Will you struggle for me?
That he asks and the shape of his fingers settle over throat as if to hold. McGillis hears an internal click. A whirring, his cogs responding to grease. His eyes are still larger than usual, but calm knowledge washes them out. He finds a ledge, a space to stow away; this makes sense to him. This is what makes sense to him, this is what's easy to parse. He knows how to keep his body still, how to make his face go still. He doesn't swallow, instead relaxing for Gaelio in preparation for words or actions more sinister.
What doesn't make sense:
But I don't want it like that.
As soon as it washed over him, that state of calm cracking like glass. Hair-cracks that spider up his countenance and twist the flesh between brows, twisting confusion into place.
Confusion blotted out, just as quickly, by a finger that nudges at his hairline. A request like this from someone he has wronged. Confusion blotting and a wrinkling forming about the edges of his eyes, after the same hand that had hinted at throttling journeys up to swallow his cheek. As gentle as that, palm to flesh, their boots sliding together in the sand. Their noses touch, their breathing mixes, and McGillis draws his palm up, having paused above the elbow.
On the other side of his bicep, skimming the underside of his upper arm.
Together. He breathes out, at that, at his name, and all the rest. Taking what they're owed --
Nudging forward, so that when he speaks, lips brush continuously. ]
Why not be owed more?
[ He can feel the tremble he'd elicited, and in turn, the slightest presence of a nail clipping his torso when Gaelio hooks onto the front of his shirt.
Can't help but arch hips in, a infinitesimal degree. His palms have found their way to Gaelio's shoulders by now, bracing both lines. The bottom of his lip clips the underside of Gaelio's bottom lip. As he pulls into the end of his speaking, there's a near accidental smoothing over.
Beat, beat, beat, in his ears. ]
When does the taking begin?
[ He feels as drunk as an entire bottle of wine's consumption would produce, head swimming, and words as dreamy.
But he's confident he isn't playing at this alone. Confident and nervous at the same time. The print of his index finger draws a circle at the base of a collar, over the beginnings of skin. ]
[ Terrible, and for the weighty thud of a heartbeat, terrifying: to stand so near and watch the mask smooth over that face. A placid visage as the man behind retreats. Reassuring, then, how quickly it breaks. A short assault, heart wild and ground quaking, or maybe just his wrist, just his lip. More, for security's sake, he wants more of that furrow, that crinkling, hairline fractures. Wants to dig his fingernails between the cracks and pick free each fragment, exposing the truth beneath, soft emotion, soft skin, not stone.
Soft lips, feathering against his lips. McGillis breathes out and Gaelio breathes him in.
Difficult to think, to parse, to understand, when McGillis speaks against him like that. The hush of his words, the breath needed to enunciate each, passing between Gaelio's lips. Words that settle on his tongue and taste like more than debt, more than truce.
Difficult to understand anything but the contact, but what McGillis must want as sorely as he does, to have tilted into this. Inexplicable and impossible, that he would, that Gaelio would. Killer and killed.
A near pull, a near press of his bottom lip. Gaelio had wanted it of McGillis; instead, he swallows. Pupils blown out, blowing out, the clouds thick over the moon and sprawled wide across the sky. It won't resurface soon. Gaelio may never resurface.
Hips below, he's too aware. Hands on shoulders, he's too aware. Pad of finger rounding skin.
Retorts lost in his mouth, displaced from tongue by those words breathed in. Can we lay claim to more? Is it possible, are they capable, is it fair? Or, absurd and taunting, the notion of swinging back, mouth more cruel than mischievous, needing to cough up bile for Carta, Almiria, Ein, but unable to, feigning it, and inviting a later development. Soon. As though Fate had more yet to show them, as if they do not stand here with it passed between their mouths.
Because they breathe it already, he cannot swing away.
His eyes swing instead, mouth to eyes, eyes to mouth. Unable to hear himself breathe, but able to feel the irregularity with which it leaves him.
Only one word can form, dizzy and sloppy on his tongue, contained in a single syllable. ]
Now.
[ His palm firms on cheek, his fingers curl tighter in fabric, pulling. Gaelio needs only angle by increments to seal their mouths together. He angles. A breeze lifts, from sea or woods, he's unsure, though it gives peaks to the tide and rustles in distant leaves. It tickles through air, wafts bangs, knocks McGillis's against Gaelio's cheek.
Something in his chest, organ and muscle, rupturing to pulp.
But he kisses McGillis with tentative, quick precision. The small shocks of each brush a longer, electrifying jolt, immediately overwhelming. He won't ever resurface, and the certainty of that angles him back, rushes open eyes that must have closed, terror surging back with the need to confirm McGillis's expression, to see more than stone. ]
Unless you disagree.
[ Intended steady, even fluid, but rippling. Needing. ]
[ Rounding eyes, dilated pupils, a swallow that he can hear from this distance more than see.
McGillis has not discounted the possibility that Gaelio will snap, change his mind, or lash out with violence. Now would be the perfect time to plunge a knife into his gut. The pads of his fingertips won't loosen, alight with nerves, a tense hold at shoulders more than a natural cling.
Except that they --
Except for the night spent sleeping in the fire-warmed room, neither of them taking advantage of the lull. Except for Gaelio's insistence that the place and the setting are not correct.
The weight of his tear-stained cheek pressed to McGillis's shoulder as he sobbed and proclaimed that he was no longer resolved. Strangely, he hadn't felt relief to hear it, not then, and not now when he thinks on it again. Gaelio looks down, up again, his breathing pooling against lips in stutters, in uneven sheets.
He must be a devilish creature, truly, to press himself against him now, to have the temerity to miss him.
Although he's a creature meant to roam the earth alone, not human enough to partake in this partaking, the one word he receives in response sends him reeling. Gaelio angles lips, both of his grips pulling and guiding, barely a half-inch needed to lock their mouths into smooth song. Song that erupts in the thrum of his pulse and the gust of wind, wrist limp as fingertips skitter over flesh, over a metal plate, digging trails into a shorn hairline.
With his eyes closed, he sees galaxies on the back of his eyelids. Pressed shut tight, a thin line of water lining each rim.
It's over quick. A quick kiss, electric in his spine. A terrified kiss, fear trickling over through the tether of their mouths, a tether snapped when Gaelio yanks away and seeks him out. McGillis blinks eyes open, hearing need and responding. Each film of water gathers to opposite corners, slipping down cheeks when he blinks in succession.
He barely notices. It's awe that eclipses sadness in his expression, even if waves of grief long buried in the coffin of his heart are tugged to the surface by this action. Aching around the awe, momentarily struck. Finally, dizzy galaxies are chased from the front of his vision and vision returns, sparks of color replaced by steady blue pools.
Drawn in again, barely two beats. He leans in to recapture that mouth with toes scuffing sand. He pulls Gaelio into it by the back of his skull, insistent.
Unless you disagree. ]
No.
[ Only that, thick and low, before he drinks of a second.
[ The tension in McGillis's fingers shifts, redirects. As they skim toward his neck, over metal, a shudder rocks though him, carried into the juncture of their lips, into his wrists, palms, fingers.
He hasn't stopped shaking when McGillis opens his eyes, looks at him, looks at him, looks at him, and how neatly these blades thrust through his heart, full to his heart. Vidar kissed the wolf and turned the sword on himself.
Soft skin, soft emotion, not stone. Truth exposed beneath, if it be truth, what so astonishes in those eyes. Those two beats stretch as he gazes, all that despaired and feared in his eyes washed out by a blazing, white fire fed on the sentiment there: more than surprise, awe. More than sorrow, grief. Trickling, rivulets one breaking against his index finger, pooling in the webbing between it and thumb. It must be truth, this water from stone, cooling between his fingers.
In his throat, caged by teeth, gasped as they meet: a whimper.
Struck again with it, with a less meticulous sip, his mind staggers and gives way to instinct, reflex thought impossible (but only possible) with this man, driven by the heat sparking and unfurling in his gut. Hands, that on cheek easing further, fingertips curling for cusp of ear as thumb smooths over the streak of water, and traces again, again. Hands, climbing up button by button, over neck, curving over jaw, the tip of his middle finger reaching behind earlobe. Again, thumb wiping at that cheek's trail.
How taut, how it aches still, the strain of this, the tightness of the crumbling rope boundary between distress and that insatiable unfurling. Impossible, unforgivable, but how deep the roots, and how old. Even after the fire, the conflagration that savaged the forest of his affection, razing all within him to the ground, salting the earth. Nothing could grow, but it grows.
Behind his eyelids: only that expression, only those eyes, only those tears. Only McGillis, his face in his hand, his tears drying on Gaelio's fingers.
Gaelio kisses him like gulping, like pressing a rag to a wound soon fatal. Firm but careful until it soaks with blood, then shoved frantic. Reactive through the daze, but as it wears, his fingers begin to dig, and his mouth roughens.
McGillis kisses him; brother, best friend, traitor, killer.
But he'd wanted it, wants it, wants this. Unforgivable, past salvage, the both of them together and apart. The effort to keep himself together, stitches tearing, straw and puss spilling, dilutes, diverted to the effort in tasting that mouth, lips parting.
When he breaks for air, his eyes, too, overflow. ]
Why?
[ Breathless, wrecked. ]
Why now? McGillis, is this it?
[ What was missing?
Because it can't have been, not this, as simple though forbidden as learning the texture of his tongue. Whatever this is, it isn't fair, a truth irrelevant to the need to yank him back in, to crush their mouths together, and he does. Crushing until nipping at lower lip, until gasping against McGillis's chin, his head beginning to fall, weighted by his weeping. ]
If you betray me again, I will kill you.
[ I will. I can't.
don't.
please.
In delirious dissonance with the oath, his lips meet with a wet, modest kiss, just where chin begins to curve toward throat. ]
[ Vibration of a whimper, laid direct against his lips. It tastes heavy. It sends another shock riding down his spine, the taste metallic on his lips. A blood coating.
Only his imagination. They claw towards each other again, and so blood.
The aftertaste of it on this tongue, the notch of a murder on his belt. That whimper is kissed with more care, stroked with full lips moving to capture and soothe it, even with fevers pitching higher in temperature. A thumb insistent against his cheek, hand moving back to cup behind his ear, and the other drawing a shiver up his torso as it crawls up to mirror that hold. His head in Gaelio's hands, their mouths pressed.
While Gaelio's hand crawled up, McGillis's crawled down. Again down the back of his neck, again over metal, recalling a reaction. A grope that trails over shoulder and now to the front of his shirt, palm to chest. His other curved over ribcage to keep him close.
Curled, then fisted into material. They kiss like this. Slow, warm, dizzy. Wet.
It doesn't align crooked; it doesn't splinter in his skin. No screams stuffed, soundless, into the cracks. Even with all that remains wrong between them, this must be what a kiss should be. Gaelio's thumbs stroke his cheeks enough times to help make them hot, a flush driven to the surface and bolstered by that thought. The pace rockets forward, after that, fingers squeezing against his scalp, McGillis holding on with fists balling.
They kiss like this, faster, hint of violence at the edges. His head pounding, mouth racing, a gasp lit like a match when they break apart.
He opens his eyes past dizziness. Gaelio's are round, and wet, staying McGillis. Questions that stay him, ground him, forehead creasing. This can't be it. It can't be what was missing. They haven't solved it so easily. The shadows in their hearts haven't lifted.
But how his pulse races and his blood heats up at the next crushing kiss, as wet as it is -- only, some of the fire doused by that. Gaelio falling from it like a dead leaf from a tree, quiet sobbing, quiet kiss above jugular, quiet promise of brutality.
Flames flickering low to dying. McGillis's hands, clutching shirt, loosen to lift and lift his face by cupping both sides of jaw.
A mirroring hold. ]
No --
[ Not the answer, not the total answer, not exactly what was missing, only... there would be no survival, no salvation to speak of, setting fire to his heart twice.
Once had been more of a burden than he anticipated.
Twice, he wouldn't remain sane enough to outlast. ]
If I think of it, if it crosses my path again, I'll rest on my blade. I'll have grown exhausted with madness and in need of the rest.
[ Dabbing with fingertips, mirroring, he swipes under Gaelio's eyes. His voice is as calm as the farthest wave, nothing uncertain fraying it. ]
[ Less to question in this, much to relish in this. What touch prompts, muscles shivering and responsive within the same agitated beat, could not be spurred by artifice. It is not calculation that quivers beneath the trek of his fingers, up McGillis's chest.
Let it not be calculation that presses that mouth so sweet.
Would it be a less terrifying prospect, the possibility of artifice even now, if Gaelio could himself manage it? He can barely manage to conceive of it, never mind an attempt. Whatever his fracture from emotion, death and its damage leaving so much of him past shambles, whatever his years of steel and fire and rigid focus, he shivers true as McGillis remembers the metal and what it spurs.
For all that he believed himself steel, forged in the fire of cremation, a blade Rustal pulled and helped to shape, when McGillis's palm shapes then fists over heart, when heart drums against its cage as though to splinter through, Gaelio understands. Not steel, but glass.
Glass, when shattered, when crushed, when reduced: how soft the dust.
Steel cannot bend, but with each collision, the glass grinds down. Salt water and dust, and depleted structure swaying, sinking. Only McGillis's hands keep his face from falling further, his vision blurred through the tears, eyes rimmed with white and red to recognize how they hold one another.
More white, more red, more tension in the meeting of uneven eyebrows above, as McGillis speaks. How often Gaelio had been lulled by this voice. How often inspired, incited, stirred to greater and more profound passions. How irresistible now: this rejection of treachery, firm and unwavering, with the clarity of the bluest sky, the purest stream.
I can save you from him.
A life for a life, as though he would sooner spill himself than again butcher him.
How delicate, how tender the movement of his thumbs. Yet, glass cheeks fracture, to fragments to dust beneath, and the tears do not abate, a steadying stream. ]
I want to believe you.
[ In wanting, because wanting, only wanting, only needing -- he doesn't.
What enviable confidence in those honeyed words, a sincerity Gaelio would take and wear as shroud, if he could believe it a guard against their storm, rather than cut for burial.
A steadying stream, a drying stream; though he cannot be soothed by McGillis, the hollowing certainty in that grounds him. ]
I can't.
[ Clarity, likely unnecessary. A last coaxing stroke of his thumbs, beneath McGillis's eyes. His fingers curl, scratching light behind ears, before he pushes his hands, palms smoothing over cheeks. Fingertips meet at the back of head, lacing with hair, then loose, slip and comb down. Slow and exploratory over neck, until passing one another, his arms looping, ensnaring, keeping close even as his lips smile with a break like that of his heart, ever finding space for yet another fissure. ]
Don't lie to me so soon.
[ If McGillis believes it, then he is not so different from Gaelio in this: he, too, lies to himself.
Because if Gaelio stood between him and Bael yet again, he cannot believe that McGillis would turn aside his blade. They have not found what would turn it, the missing piece.
Yet --
Leaning at the neck, tilting forward. Gaelio recaptures his mouth, soft, tentative but not from doubt. He kisses McGillis, eyelids fluttering, lips eager and thorough. Lingering in one moment, peppering in another, learning this pressure, and this, and this, and this. Trying that angle, and this incremental adjustment, and this.
Maybe like this, from here, the taste of need might be confused for belief.
Maybe, because actions feel easier, with less to question and everything to savor.
[ A fracturing look on the face he holds, framing the tears that won't stop falling. Fracturing, felt as soon as the words leave his mouth and Gaelio's eyebrows knit to hear them.
They go to pieces in his mouth, after the fact of producing them. Like swallowing glass. Whether he lies to himself, or whether he tells the truth, it barely matters. The difference is plain in Gaelio's eyes. When he blinks, he recalls the light of bright, inquisitive interest, intellectual and emotional interest. McGillis recalls drawing that light when he spoke, conscious of feeling differently about Gaelio's way of looking at him, conscious of the cogs that spun and whirred on the fuel of hatred and fury -- slowing, pausing, conscious of the confusion that spread as a miasma with the absence of that sound in his head.
Now, from up close, to see how he'd shattered that. From this distance, to be conscious of loss. All light cuts from his own eyes, hearing the response, spark of heat momentarily replaced with lifeless understanding. I can't -- a nod, another swipe of the tears that gathered in his fingers, his palm falling to slide down the length of his neck.
Don't lie to me so soon.
His chin falls, but he's kept upright and facing Gaelio but by the tender sweep of his hands.
If he lies to himself, he at least believes himself in the miserable beat of the moment, feeling drawn to the sea. If he can't achieve his goals, if he's gone so far off course as to be flung here, if the choice he made about Gaelio was for naught -- there's very little reason to live.
He would've lived on as a corpse, as long as he could've changed the world.
Dull misery, scattered away by the surprise of fingernails scratching lightly at his scalp -- the sensation that produces, a distracting sort of tingling.
He blinks back into Gaelio's eyes, watching him with wonder. That he can touch McGillis like that, that his fingers can trawl, explore, trap him close, produces the strangest feeling of wonder. So soon after the response he received, the contradiction of that laid against the movement of those hands keeps him dazed. The exact shape of the smile in front of him, breaking, something that McGillis touches on gingerly with the pads of his fingers before the next kiss -- index tracing the curl of his bottom lip into the corner.
Plucking at a tear caught in the seam.
Their mouths swerve into it again. His touch settles featherlight on Gaelio's jaw. He pulls towards each one, magnetic, absorbing each tiny adjustment of angle and pressure as to slowly drown in them, experimenting with his own need for variety.
On his lips, a different taste than the misery from before. Stoking warmth, he trails fingertips in a light graze over the shape of his jaw, cupping the base of his neck with his other hand.
This language seems innate to them. Immediately, all at once. This language he hasn't spoken since his final escape, all at once rewritten. All at once, understood quite differently.
And in the absence of understanding, after twenty years of missing the essential need for a shared language, how tempting it is to submerge in it and never leave. Experimentally, he flicks the tip of his tongue alongside the inner strip of Gaelio's upper lip. ]
[ What steadies in him, without steadying. He cannot be with McGillis without fissure and fracture, but through the ebbing of his weeping, a reflection comes into focus. If with every touch, every word, every syllable and breath, the glass powders, then at least when he braces his eyes and gazes clear, he does not crumble alone. He would marvel, caught still in the wonder of it, in what he does believe: what blackens, cut out of McGillis's eyes. How quick the nod, how he begins to sink with it, though still tending to tears.
There would be dread, if he saw retreat in it, one more mask, what is dead only so through impassive stone. Perhaps, having stood so near and looked with eyes blazing in this fraught moment and the last. Perhaps, cut down and raw in the dream, in the staggering unknown of this world that stripped them. Perhaps sixteen years and death, perhaps reanimation for a singular purpose, perhaps the search, perhaps all that transpired here: perhaps, finally, he better sees.
Perhaps, finally, McGillis keeps exposed, made inexplicably clumsy, and clumsier. Too slow with the mask, too thin the material.
He does not break alone. The despair that granted him clarity, the impossibility of believing McGillis, catches. In his certainty -- of which he has less and less, with this man -- McGillis's sorrow. Gaelio drinks of this, too. Softened, softening. It speaks ill of what remains of his heart, but how near to reassurance. Little of satisfaction, nothing so smug and gratified. A fine distinction, maybe too fine. Do not suffer, but more, do not leave him to it.
Believing misery if not truth, how much easier to kiss him. How long he has known it. How strangely sweet, to share it like this. How much more it becomes when shared like this. When first mapped by the graze of that finger, capturing a last drop.
They learn together. Slow together, meticulous together. This fit, and another, then another, none of it wrong. His arms keep curled heavy around McGillis, braced on his shoulders, palms rounding on elbows. The tide laps at the shore, the breeze rustles dying, drying leaves, a sliver of moon beams through the patch in the clouds, rippling over the water, their knees. Nothing so quiet as their breathing, learning that, too, through shaping lips or trickled above. Nothing heard above it, nothing known but this.
Shock, like brushing metal and a static flare, with his tongue. A different tonality, lower in the throat, like his name when rolling as sultry silk from McGillis's mouth. Off this tongue. Shock, delicious and sparking, in what is reflexive in his parting, immediate. An invitation in a breath, lower lip chasing, to drag against the underside -- but with only tip, only teased quick, likely capturing more lip, a pull against, an inadvertent but rousing suction.
More open then, the kiss, half-insistent, and it deepens through him. Sand and toes, and toes nudging between, knee and leg leaning as hips near-align. No longer satisfied with his own arms, though they kept McGillis so neatly enclosed, they separate, slipping between, his hands retracing their steps -- smooth over neck, then stepping new. Thumbs circle over McGillis's jaw, trail lower. His hands, too, must learn. A lifetime of lingering never long enough, of pressing never close enough.
As slow, as shaping, his hand down McGillis's chest, glad of the relative thinness of the material. Nothing like his coat. Cupping over pectoral, the thickness of the muscle, simmering. His other hand curls, grazing knuckles along the curvature of his ribcage, following it back, coaxed higher, feeling over his shoulder blade. Long known, now knowing better.
Long unknown, if not for a lack of wanting, what he pursues, request through loosened fit. ]
[ If his sorrow serves a purpose, at least, for a brief moment, it doesn't stew away hidden inside of him. At least in part. Only a sliver of one of thousands of cracked pieces, only that exposed in the moonlight, and it morphs into a living, shared burden.
He can feel it when their mouths move, wherever bodies touch. The transfer deepens the act. The act builds on itself. Gaelio, an external creature, an avalanche seen from miles away, begins to make a knob more sense. He blurs into this seamlessly regardless of anything, engraining into flesh and bone. A small sound buries itself deep within his throat, sounding vibration against the suction of their lips, against chase, the pressure of tongues lighting goosebump trails up his arms.
Tongues -- and legs, hips, arms, all aligning together and pulling in at the center, at their center.
The sound in McGillis's throat turns to groan, palms forced to brace shoulders when he senses that roaming touch.
Within the groan, much louder than their navigating of oxygen, is a note of deepening satisfaction, alarmingly uncontrolled. He dips forward into the hand that feels over and around chest. Skin warming over twice, hands cupping, feeling, following (in ways he might've imagined once or twice before, but never thought to envision as reality) -- he swirls his tongue against the one met through loose lips, diving past invitation, fingernails digging --
A shockwave, right then, for not knowing himself this way. For being unable to recognize this, nor contain it. A note of panic set off at the back of his mind and brought to the front.
After a sudden twitch rocks through, abruptly, McGillis breaks the kiss on a harsh gasp. Pulling back without staggering away, leaning back without removing his hands or moving his feet. He can't find Gaelio's eyes immediately, a wild, directionless haze clouding over his own.
All at once, rewritten. It's difficult to keep up with. A second or two passes, and McGillis blinks, returning. ]
... Gaelio.
[ As if recognizing him anew, the name landing oddly.
He returns quicker, recognizing that it will be odd for Gaelio to experience this development. That he most likely has made a mistake. Hands coax along his old friend's shoulders, reassuring without thinking. For a moment, also forgetting the place, the time, and blips of all that has transpired between them, until his vision adjusts to scarring.
Movement stills and his right balls into a half-fist, unsure. Fingers pluck at shirt cloth.
Unsure, eyes lower and flit to the side, then back. Palms slide from shoulders, to bust, around ribs, as he leans in to close the gap on another embrace. Hands slipping down to waist, weighed down, he buries part of his face against the other man's neck.
What he must say, as layered as the rest, meaning stretching past the moment: ]
To be with McGillis, in any capacity, spikes delirium. More than lapping tides, instead tsunami. Dream, nightmare, dream. To be with McGillis, his heart's deepest core, cored out. Left with a space into which flooded abandonment and retribution, fury and aggression, and pain. All that, but never filled, the trench too deep, the fit too particular then savaged by the coring -- yearning and bliss torn out, crumbling the foundation, jagged splits and cracks down the side, distorting the shape.
Nothing could have, should have filled it. Pour in enough sand, the shifting of irresolution and revenge. Pave it over with veneers of respectable emotion, and weigh it down with, the ground sinking beneath, all that his shoulders bore. And aggression bubbled out, acid geysers, and the aching reverberated within marrow, within cardiac valves.
The aching, reverberating now against tongue, syncing to the sound that rocks through him: McGillis groaning, low and sated, sating, wanting, a hum against his mouth that shivers down his throat and plunges. Unfurling and heating in his gut, sparking through the grasping of his fingers and the curling of his toes. Such a sound must be true, and there, too, pursuit.
In his lifetime of reaching, Gaelio had not clawed like this, had known but suppressed hunger like this. Scratching out of the grave, scratching after him, had born aggression that lives even here, like this, a ready boil. Beneath his hand, beneath the breadth of muscle and sinew, beats McGillis's heart. He presses his palm as though he could feel it, could cup against, could hold and squeeze and core.
No, not core, because the fact of it, the fact of beating, the fact of his tongue between Gaelio's lips and learning against Gaelio's tongue, might prove that core, might stay the blade. An impossible betrayal, but that he might permit McGillis his, the same hold, a belief that he would not again crush it -- struggle together, work together, understand together, exchange Fate on breaths passed between their lips, share misery with the bittersweet taste of each kiss.
Impossible to trust him, to believe it, but chasing as though. But inviting as though. But assertive, as though. Chasing what he'd missed if not what was missing, what he should not miss, what he cannot be permitted to miss, McGillis --
wrenches back, gasping.
Gaelio cannot yet recover, dazed by the spots in his vision when he opens his eyes, the wet swell of his lips, the sound that clipped out of his throat in breaking, baffled protest. Then, all too quickly, recovery: because McGillis does not see him. Smolder doused by ice, by the renewal of that terror, bunching up in brow, as much contorted by confusion as fear. But he holds him still, hands against shoulders, fingernails still just digging.
His name, and focus, and his eyes.
Gaelio gazes, his own eyes bright with the question, his breath in uneven, faltering gives and pulls. Though his eyelids would flutter for the smoothing of McGillis's hands, firm and grounding, he resists it to keep his eyes.
He doesn't understand. Of course he doesn't understand: that he should expect. He doesn't understand why McGillis reeled back, why he rushed in again to assuage, why his hands soothed but then hesitate, why his eyes edge away, and why now, he slips and folds in, a deliberate and stroking embrace that settles him tucked, half-vulnerable.
To think, that McGillis could be vulnerable. Disbelieved. Haunting words that crack and deteriorate in their regular circling through his skull: soft-hearted emotions unfortunately will not reach me.
I'm sorry, now breathed half against his neck, a warm and tickling contrast to the near winter's chill around them. An apology. An apology not contained to this moment, to whatever spooked and changed this.
Only a little disturbed by the motions, Gaelio's hands press still against chest and shoulderblade. A touch awkward, but slow to yield to the natural rearrangement. Gravity encourages it, magnetism, but for a moment he stands still and unresponsive, feeling the portions of McGillis's exhale in goosebumps along his neck, feeling the feathering of McGillis's hair against his jaw, less felt where the scarring cuts.
An apology, elicited and soft. Inexplicable for this, unacceptable for the rest. Gaelio stares along the shore, the paler sands yet dark in shadow, the moon caught still by clouds. His heart lodges in his throat, dribbling blood with each unsteady beat, with inquisition. With indecision, with a hundred and a thousand impetuses, with a hundred and a thousand accusations against this man and himself, with a hundred and a thousand questions. Which to ask -- where had he gone? why? why had they collided so absolutely into that, a rush and a song, a humming that still thrums in his chest, with every breath? Though he has the right to a hundred and a thousand demands, should he apologize for the kiss, though McGillis had agreed, had it been assent born on the delirium of compromise and implicit oath? Apologize, if not to McGillis, then to them -- but that no answer to the retreat.
Why do his arms so ache to settle as is natural, that he must oblige, that his hand shakes while trailing in the close space between, mirroring paths along ribs, around back. His arms curve, pull, answering the embrace. Tremulous and slow, his right hand flutters higher, hovering before rounding over the back of McGillis's head.
On this beach, with McGillis. With McGillis in his arms, with McGillis breathing apology against him. The man he had to kill, but cannot kill. Not this man. Instead, the man he'd press against and ache for, and if he forgives but cannot forgive him, then that they share, too. ]
McGillis.
[ Eyes shut tight, into red. Teeth grit, cannot swallow around heart, slow to loose, the ache now in his jaw. Thumb circles in fine strands, his chin begins to dip toward. ]
We needn't be owed that. There's enough. This is enough. You --
[ if you mean it, and like this, like this, he must, he must, he must, together, a start, together, murderer and traitor and friend, together, first steps toward finding it, together, he must, ]
[ Foolish to allow the fire to spread out of control, when all must remain under his control. And yet --
With Gaelio, there is justice in it, in allowing consumption. In allowing himself to be consumed by perplexing fires and in handing that over to this man -- one of his most precious guards torn down, exposure and lit by suppressed desire, and Gaelio can reap, sow, take, reject, kill -- whatever he pleases.
Bearing any and all as an expression of sincerity. A betrayal, then, that his reflexes betrayed him.
Another betrayal that he could not keep himself open and allow Gaelio access to the places where he could've done the most damage. Could not risk damaging himself with too much fast flooding.
Would that not be an act of proof, after the damage he's done? They've agreed to try to understand one another, but one fact remains: Gaelio can't believe him. McGillis rendered his own words meaningless with his betrayal, meaning he must act, meaning he must give something to prove himself. Meaning he must give into want and allow it to guide him, for the first time, for any of it to have any sort of meaning.
But he'd failed. He succeeds only in stacking betrayals one on top of another. He catches the bright confusion on those features once he sees him again, the edge of fear in his eyes, before he buries himself away in his neck, shame warming his own skin. An exhale equally buried, following his strange apology -- understanding that it will be meaningless, inapplicable, peppered with frustration aimed at the self. A creature of rage and resentment, and unfit for this and for that.
A hand squeezed against his fast beating heart. Gaelio is slow to react. McGillis opens his eyes to thoughtful slivers and takes in the glitter of moonlight against metal at the edge of his spine, wondering as to its construction. How was it built into him? How long did it take? What was his state upon waking? What was told to him? What was the look on his face back then?
His palms squeeze once in their hold, curled above hips, a strange hint of inadvertent possession overtaking hand muscles as the questions beam through his thoughts.
Unfit, except Gaelio finds a fit for his arms, talented as he is. He finds a way to hold, though his hands tremble to hold. Cheek brushing against the curve it found, McGillis closes his eyes again to map it out internally, each tremor laid over his ribs and back, and the shock of a hand nestled against the back of his head. Eyelashes flutter open and ghost over skin, surprise catching him -- for that and for the words that follow.
Enough?
He senses his brow wrinkling, senses the haze overtaking and the struggle -- already struggling to understand. Something warms over inside himself to hear words like those, but he doesn't know why. How can anything be enough, let alone --
A break in the response that bubbles to the surface, hands clinging tighter to Gaelio's back. Drawn into warmth, leaning in. ]
A lie told in revenge?
[ He bleeds to hear something so foreign, as though Gaelio had pressed against inflamed infection with his reply, pressure that oozes through the warped note in McGillis's tone. ]
If so, you've hit the mark.
[ It stings to think that it will be taken away from him eventually. Teasing a monster with such an absurd concept; enough. ]
How appropriate, that as familiar frustration begins to clash against McGillis's exposure, Gaelio has no awareness of it: that they struggle together. That McGillis, too, wrestles with incomprehension, born of words and gesture. Enough and an embrace, his cupping hand; apology and an embrace, and hands that clutch, tighten. It would comfort to know, perhaps perversely, as had witnessing the crimping of misery unmasked. Yet, unknown.
Instead, left to further wonder, as McGillis accuses him of dishonesty. Too raw in it, too raw in ceding to what such would, has done to him, for what kicks up within Gaelio to become a proper storm. Though his fingers begin to curl in fine hair, begin to clench, not yet hard enough to pull or hurt -- it might feel on the brink of it, the suggestion of violence. Intended or not; he's less sure, again both adrift in disconnect and taut in suspension.
His voice drifts, strange. Far, but contorting. ]
A lie?
[ Hypocritical, as he veers without consciousness of his double standards, too entrenched in his entitlement to them: that he can and will and does levy such charges at McGillis, but bristles now to hear them returned. He has the right, though bleating that with each shallow wound, each deeper thrust, dilutes it. Only one had betrayed, piercing Kimaris to kill, discarding their friendship, a friendship born of a lie, as soft-hearted emotions could not and had never reached him.
Or not.
What would, should, does begin to flare, stoppered by admitting the mark, by how McGillis clings, by his breath on his neck. In the absence, in the hollow so charred by conflagrations of rage, jury, and frustration, he's left to question. ]
Revenge, huh... I wonder.
[ It should be. The thought of that, of what is owed, ever on the periphery, ever seeping out, ever a pressure against what cavity they've clawed into here, together, hands clasped, eyes meeting, the thought of that wrenches him farther, as immediate and jarring as McGillis's separation. Which? This and that and every.
Pulled back farther, pulled in closer, by breathing, by hands, by fingers that would press marks through cloth. A new and fast old mantra: must kill, for them. cannot kill, if this. unforgiven, unforgiven, unforgiven, both. It should be, but even if he could still manage it, this revenge would not be deliberate, unable to understand the how and why of its efficacy.
What expels from his mouth is harsh and short, a breath, but with sound enough to venture at a laugh. Too bitter and pained for it, or too bitter and pained to be anything else. ]
If that's what it took, then I have no revenge.
[ If words could strike McGillis. If words could knock him from power, into dirt, grinding his face into the emotions he had buried there in his climb. If the monster could be made to bleed by so simple an utterance, so simple a truth, then he had been no monster. Then those words reached, the emotions not buried beneath but hidden within, inadvertently cut loose.
Impossible to have revenge on a figment, to enact the method, to wring honor from what had not, truly, been dishonor.
Impossible to have revenge on his friend who holds him like this, who falters to be told enough, though Gaelio little understands the difference, the significance, not having intended to ask more, to supplement, a flesh compromise with his kiss.
Impossible to explain, without understanding. Gaelio speaks, in an effort to keep from spinning out farther, in an effort to grasp at it through these faltering steps. ]
Need isn't want.
[ Mad, after all and everything, for that want to be so. Yet, it would be blinding to refuse to acknowledge it with the taste of him lingering on tongue, on lips. That he wants him, a different want, sequestered and primal. ]
What you need, I don't know. I never understood you. I don't know how to ask. What we need, I've imposed too often. I've the right, but it isn't an answer.
[ He cannot alone supply the missing piece. ]
What I need... I don't know that, either.
[ Faint, realizing, his arm tugging McGillis tighter against him, as though he could shield himself from it. How perverse that his instinct, even now, is to reach for him. ]
But, I think I need my friend. I think I need you.
[ No masks. No effort beyond that of honesty, whether Gaelio can believe it so soon or not. No actions, though actions are simpler until they aren't. Simply him, if true. If true in speaking friend, if true that in a dream shared, his boy heart swore he'd meant too much and cradled him against time and bloodied Fate. ]
He can't conceive of a relationship without some element of aggression present, either hidden or bared out in the open. If Gaelio pursues him out of a violent need, out of a need for revenge, he can fathom it. If Gaelio pursues understanding and confesses to needs that are not as simple as violence led by honor, it takes straining effort to wrap his mind around that, to double back to his own feelings of earnest warmth towards this man, this man he has tried to kill who must also kill him, and untangle where they begin and where they end.
If they kiss upon their renewed oath, all the more confusing, all the more soothing.
If he asks Gaelio, if he prompts him to lie, it amounts to another confession of not understanding him. It's painfully difficult to understand, after injury, personal and proximal, after lying, abusing trust, using, painfully difficult to understand Gaelio's straining, the effort he puts into McGillis still. It forces him to reexamine what he'd failed to bury completely, those soft-hearted pieces that had only been shorn into being by this man, new layers of sediment discovered, eroded into existence by more than a decade of attachment --
The reason why he fails to commit fully to a life lived in anger.
Perhaps it's the same for Gaelio. He can't figure out how to commit to what is owed to him by his own unique circumstances. His eyes lid again, to hear a laugh as bitter and contorted as that expulsion of breath. More pain than anger, always more pain than anger with Gaelio.
McGillis had called it unfortunate, that expressions of friendship, love and trust could not touch him. He understands: those are missing pieces. It deforms him. And yet he only understands through Gaelio, only has context through meeting him, only has context of himself as an outsider after entering that new world.
He listens to the far-away reply, the entirety of it, and tries to piece it together. He watches a fixed point over Gaelio's shoulder as he listens to him speak -- of his punctured revenge, of the difference between need and want. His confession of not understanding either of their needs, each word a separate twinge, a separate ache, the floodgates open.
What we need, I've imposed too often. I've the right, but it isn't an answer.
Here, McGillis had understood Gaelio's straining through an entirely different context: that he can be satisfied by besting him. Doubt infests his mind. It's simpler to understand Gaelio when he discounts the basis of their friendship -- that an enemy always lurked there. That enemy was simply ignorant of his own capacity to become one. The truth of McGillis would be the thing to transform Gaelio's affection into hatred, regardless of anything else.
But if he speaks true here, that cannot be true.
I think I need you. Truly you.
McGillis lifts his chin. His hands shift and tighten once again as he pulls up and back, enough to meet Gaelio's eyes, enough to linger close. He searches through the depths of blue, pupils flicking. No shroud to an expression that lacks true comprehension, staring at Gaelio as if he were a puzzle with one hundred missing pieces.
Fingers loosen, and travel, and land against scarred cheek.
In his entire life. ]
I don't always know who I am.
[ Begun, with words pulled from pits kept inside of him. Their exposure to air shocks him. A quick inhale, before continuing. ]
There was a time when I knew. Without being trained, without being owned. I think I've been searching for that version of myself, only stronger. Strength that belongs only to me. Your place...
[ A tiny caress, here, a twitch of his palm. Searching, searching, pulling at truth. ]
Your place is difficult to understand. From the very beginning, our friendship was based on a fabrication. It began without a foundation. Even so... I thought that I could allow myself to have it. It was the first time I understood something like happiness.
[ Unique to Gaelio, the first one to enter his life with consistency. The lasting mark that dug deeper than any other and of the few he could truly count as marks. ]
I told you that nothing you'd offered had ever reached me. That was a lie, one that I told to myself, as well as you. But what I've done cannot be undone. I thought I understood you and the reasons for your pursuit -- but I don't understand you, not at all. How --
[ Harsher press, palm drifting to jaw. ]
How am I enough? How can you be satisfied with that?
[ Without understanding, nonetheless effort. Steps ventured in the dark. But if they are blind, unable to see despite looking, the darkness cannot impede that much further. If they are blind, but feel their way, hand in hand, hands learning by touch the shape of the other -- together -- he can speak like so. Uncertain, giving voice to uncertainty. To the decades long ache, to yearning strangled into hurt, and reaching through it.
Without his eyes, but with his weight, his exhale, both against his neck and felt in the lift of his chest.
Then, with his eyes. Reception and reaction, to the trail Gaelio accepted to weave through their underbrush. Head from shoulder, neck, cool air a shock where warmth last breathed. Gaelio's fingers slacken to allow it, slip through strands to settle against the base of his neck. Blue-green, darker in the night, without the moon. Fixed, seeing and unseeing. Look at me, the plea and cry and song and hope and dream and want and lust and need and shout and deathknoll and deathstrike, look at me for sixteen years, and two though masked, look at me, and he does.
Earnest. No shutters, no masks, no aversion. But earnest in bewilderment. Finally, finally, but still unseen. Which cut deeper: to strive for sixteen years and have them, at last, certain in it, only to be as certain that without understanding, he looks without seeing?; or, to look and seek and gaze for sixteen years, only to understand that without understanding, he, too, looks without seeing -- and had done for the whole of that time.
Which was the greater betrayal? But this is not McGillis's betrayal. Not this vision, not this blindness. But if betrayal in incomprehension, then together. They struggle together, as near sworn, and stare together.
Whatever the answer, his eyes transfix. Gaelio gazes, the singed and savaged muscles beneath disfigured skin unable to respond to fingertips alighting, that touch, but above his eyes, a tremble. More glass to fracture, to crumble, to dust. Though he would tip into it, press them firmer and feel them better through less sensitive skin, but that McGillis speaks.
Confessions. Truth that needs the bracing of more air, of bolstered lungs.
Unknown, so perhaps Gaelio had little chance of it, but he cannot hear in that an excuse. He cannot craft it for himself, will not, pushing his own place in this farther from the center as he listens, intent, white rimming more of his eyes.
A time before Iznario, that much he can parse. Gaelio flounders with the fragments of that picture, gathered over a time too long to understand the fit of each. That McGillis had not been born Fareed, discovered with Rustal. That his feelings toward that man he called father were complex and dark, gleaned over years of dropped eyes and subtle tensing. Iznario Fareed, a cold and terrifying man, whom Gaelio could amuse with easy self-deprecation, but would not himself long keep by.
In a dream, contusions sprawling down a boy's neck. A memory in that. Squashed and placated inquiry.
Whatever Gaelio believed of birth, if a child not of astral blood was introduced as, conscious of the falsehood, developed disconnect and complex, he could understand that, the likelihood and logic in it. The psychology. Yet, the weight of that does not balance the scales, nothing slotting. A piece crafted that does not yet fit.
Palm shifts against his cheek. Here, Gaelio tilts, a fractional canting. His middle finger flexes, dragging tip along neck.
Friendship without foundation. A lie that he would nonetheless have. Whether Gaelio would resist it or not, he has no opportunity, swifter than reflex, than nerve and muscle snap: the compression of his features, crumbs and powder. Hurt like lightning in his eyes, a flash that spots and blinds and leaves the space thereafter darker.
But McGillis wanted it. But it reached him, but he'd lied as to that while rending them asunder, cutting them completely apart, whatever tether Gaelio had hooked and clung to.
Yet, now they cling.
The pressure of McGillis's hand keeps him. His other arm, though reluctant to lose the last of their embrace, lifts. Unsettled, drifting fingertips against McGillis's elbow, wrist, until settling, cupped against the back of McGillis's hand. Hand framing hand framing jaw. ]
I can't be.
[ Strange, the waver in his voice, as if wet. ]
But I can't not be. McGillis...
[ It isn't as though he understands himself well, feeling what he should not. What he must do, what he cannot do. A different must, an overwhelming must, with McGillis gazing like this, holding him like this. ]
It wouldn't have mattered to me, your blood. Not long ago, I would have agreed that our friendship must have been fabrication. How else could you have done it? Only your actions removing the foundation, letting us drown. But if you wanted it, if you wanted me, if we were happy, it was real. You were --
[ The rippling in his voice carries and he blinks, quick, against build up. ]
-- my friend. That's all that's needed. To be together, to want to be together. To mean what that should.
[ Status, blood, meaningless things, and so Ein, too, had been his friend. Therein his penance, without resolution. One way or another, he will be doomed to that. ]
I wanted to reach you. I wanted to be acknowledged by you, for you to be with me without the masks. I wanted to stand at your side.
[ Echoes, but how changed the tone, how much softer, when they stand so entwined. ]
It can't be undone. I can't forgive you, for them. I can't believe you, I can't understand you, but still, I...
[ Hands shifting, whether to squeeze against hand, or curl fingers back toward hairline, twist. ]
...want to. I wanted, I needed to understand why.
[ Why Carta, why Ein, why piercing him as enemy in coldest blood for a small void in inheritance. After sixteen years, after calling him friend, after they stood together. ]
I wanted you to look at me. I think I wanted...
[ As if understanding through speech, drawn out by the string on his tongue, and it's faint, the surprise speckling his eyes to voice it, the shame beneath it, because if this the core, a core, selfish and caught up in them, McGillis and Gaelio, not them. ]
...you to recognize me, if the only way, the only thing you understood, was power, was to kill you. If that's what it took, if then I'd mean something to you, if only as the man who killed you, then I had to for that reason, as well.
[ can it have been that? as small as that?
Carta, Ein, respectable emotions To recognize them, or was it pretext? An unknown, confusion thick and thickening. They still stack upon his shoulders.
but with McGillis's eyes on him, he less remembers the weight. An unforgivable man. Will they share it? ]
Because I've always wanted you, McGillis. I don't know how to stop.
[ Long defined by this man, what would become of him without him? McGillis had not been eveything. His family was not nothing. Carta, Ein, they were not nothing. But, McGillis was... McGillis is... hopelessly foolish, despicably naive, to speak without understanding, yet there's no other truth. There's nothing else. His eyes, their eyes. ]
It's more than satisfaction. Or less than. If you mean it, if it's you, you're enough. Because I can't let you go.
[ Giving him pieces without giving him the full picture.
Tentative steps into the clearance. A skeleton of his truth, because Gaelio cannot possibly have room left in his heart to accept the full picture -- past revival, grasping for Bael, McGillis continues to make sure to sever that possibility without actualizing it, committed to burning alone. Committed, except the eyes across from him remain serious and engaged as he tests stepping on a different path. Breadcrumbs to follow in a dark forest. A cheek tilting into his palm, scar tissue rubbed against callouses, more than receptive to each clumsy offering.
Hurt, flashing through those moonlit blue eyes, to hear McGillis speak of the lack of foundation. A bridge built over a pit, with only one of them looking down, waiting for the support structures to give. Despite the number of years, a temporary joining. The longer they went without addressing it, the more convinced he'd been.
It wouldn't have mattered to me, your blood.
A cloud permeates the film of his eyes.
That was what he'd strove for, with every inch of strength he could muster and build upon; the new world where it wouldn't have mattered. Each individual's version of happiness would be reachable there. They would only need to want it for themselves. No barriers, no scripts, no decrepit ruling class, no iron fist. In a larger context, it's the dream that mesmerizes, soothes and envelops him warmly, close to what he imagines a parent's warmth might be. In this shrunken version, where Gaelio tells him there was a smaller world where that was already true, a clicking sound in his mind begins as he struggles to sort the response.
if we were happy
Click. Fog, and hurt, matching his counterpart. Lines crinkle about his eyes. A moment of distraction, pained exhaustion blotting out surroundings.
Happiness? Something like it. Something missing. Fingers drift against the nape of his neck, light and distracting. How the flesh he thought was dead would wake whenever that animated presence would lean against his shoulder. A clicking sound, sorting through the years against the backdrop of Gaelio's voice.
The fog abating, as his voice winds around to words already once spoken. McGillis's eyes darken to life and hook to the sound, a knowing exhale given, lightly expelled through the nose.
Yet he will be mesmerized by what follows: if the tone is true, a new realization that speaks to complex facets that had gone unnoticed. By the both of them. His eyes widen to hear it, surprise for the breadth and the depth of meaning. For how it sprawls into life and takes form in front of him. Gaelio latching onto the only way he thought he could remain a fixture at McGillis's side, a sharp ache forming in the wake of those words -- his fingers shift in sync, pads pressing harder against bone structure.
He swallows. It's more than he was prepared to take.
What he has done to Gaelio is more unforgivable than he knew -- trapping him in this cage. The only way to loosen the bars will be to meet him at the middle and to begin to remove them together.
Do they begin?
Swallowing the pocket of air in his throat, he moves his hands, disrupting Gaelio's perched one. Fingers climb around to pull from the back of his head, from the width of a shoulder-blade, McGillis stepping in to hold him closer. Stepping into a hold that resembles a cradle, temple sliding against temple. ]
You've already reached me. I've already acknowledged you. I see you, I've seen you. For two years you've remained at my side, ghostly, but present. Always there. You're always there. I --
[ Until the ghost became real. Until he rose to life.
Straining, understanding that it would mean his destruction, straining against going after him a second time. Not until Gaelio came to meet him at Bael. Not until Gaelio found him again on the battlefield. Not until Gaelio locked him into the necessity of it -- deal with this, deal with him, or else cease moving forward.
The sound of Isurugi's voice in his head, reporting on Gaelio Bauduin's last known status. Low and unspoken in his tone had been the expectation that the general would comment aloud and begin to plan their next move. ]
Should have told you sooner, shouldn't I have?
[ The weight of realizations, like creaking hinges. His voice strains against it, exhaustion bleeding at the core of everything.
Everything he strove for, everything he strove against. Gaelio at his side the entire time, neither of them aware that they continued to move in sync while they separated out as far as they could possibly separate. ]
I should've told you what you meant to me. I couldn't let go either, not even after what I'd done. Where does that leave us now?
[ An honest question. Too much blood spilled, thick in the air between them, yet they cling and cling.
Gaelio chasing him for reasons that cause his heart to stir anew, however bloody the path. ]
What you call masks -- it's skin. I had to live through it. I had to breathe. Can you understand? I still breathed you in.
[ Shucking past the layers, the skin that kept him safe, to the person that kept him safe. His heart thrums in his ears to speak as much, his grip shifting against shoulders. His fingers buried against hair -- a grip forming there too, twisting. ]
I wasn't happy. It was real. You were my friend. My only friend.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Having told Gaelio the truth of the matter, the one friendship that ever mattered, it feels as though he's locked himself out of spaces he used to crawl into with ease. It's not as easy to access them as it once was, not as easy to hide away in them. Having exposed that and lost that, he scratches and clutches for something in the interim -- a hand, his chest, some reassurance that he has done the correct thing.
His destined enemy, or his destined friend? If he does the correct thing now, how incorrect was he before?
What he feels for Gaelio must be as layered, as complex, known from the moment he cut him down as coldly as he had and felt eternal winter creep in his absence. Every moment that came after had taught him that he would never fully be able to escape what he'd done, nor anything that came before. The very concept of companionship had been purged forevermore in a last ditch attempt. Never again would it be allowed in the ways he'd allowed it, to lose himself to it, to ultimately lose it.
But he hadn't expected this turn off the main road. He hadn't expected falling this far simply by trying to analyze it. There's a tremble in Gaelio that he can see, felt echoed in the iron-clad grip of his hand squeezing back. His voice is choked, choking, his eyes are wet, and the scars in him must hurt. The ones inside, not out.
Or maybe it all hurts.
They may still hurt each other in the future, a distinct possibility that neither of them are fool enough to discount. Foolish as they may be.
Bright, blurring pools of blue, tense, taut, trembling. Gaelio reaffirms; he's worked hard for them, for McGillis, since the day they met.
Of course, that also hurts. Squeezing back with their hands, a shudder of an exhale, a sadder smile at those words. When Gaelio leans in, he almost wonders if he'll claw through to his heart and pluck it out, such is the strangeness of being as exposed. He leans in to guide their other pair of hands to another clasping, fingers laced and palms squeezing, McGillis inhaling with the same shaky quality as he glances down to look.
Strangely intimate sight, their hands melding together at two points.
He lets go of a huff -- "You might be the one who has to keep up." Understood, familiar, and he can be amused, but too much in the sound. Tumbling.
Despite all that's happened between them, and because he's only human after all, all this contact and honesty breeds simple human desire. Reflexive yearning for lost companionship. For him, for him. The total sum of companionship, the total sum.
And forced to face, from distances as short as this, how lonely he's been without him. Like this, unable to squirrel into denial. ]
I'm sure you'll enjoy that.
[ Strange joke, bloated with too much. McGillis tugs the hand resting by his heart in closer, still gazing at it and both intertwined.
He thumbs over a knuckle. A bit of scarring even there. ]
Watching me struggle.
[ Voice further away -- something overtakes him and he tugs up next, bringing it closer to this throat, but stops short with the movement.
Indecisive. As if he'd meant to keep moving, but can't. ]
no subject
Yet, he leans until his feet shuffle forward again, mounding sand, less and less space between them. That motion, then feeling the quiver of McGillis's exhale, his every breath, against his knuckles, then following the dip of McGillis's eyes, finding their hands. The imprint of a smile softer, pained, as he looks to this curious sight.
Palm to palm; so paired.
Gaelio does not yet lift his gaze, though drawn by the shorter, emotive exhalation. More than amused, too tangled for mere humor. It would give him pause, gives him pause. Within the knotting, enough discrete emotion to resonate.
Now lifting, slow, as his heartbeat echoes irregular in his chest. Hollow sounds, dinged metal. Not rushing to follow their hands, but trailing slow after them, feeling before he sees the placement of McGillis's thumb, the motion begun and ceased unfinished.
Gaelio recognizes indecision, so familiar as to be intimate. Comprehension breeds further inquiry: where McGillis would have taken them? Past throat, higher, yet there stalled, the heavy jest left between them. Caught in the webbing of their fingers.
The brilliance of the moon on the water darkens, the moon swept behind pendulous clouds. Gaelio seeks McGillis's eyes in the more velvet shadows, mouth more angled still, voice following the tide.
Now, drawing out, away. ]
I wonder?
[ It would be distant, even light with whimsy, but for the contagion of bloat. ]
Maybe not before. But...
[ Now, rushing in, splashing and frothy against their heels.
Gaelio lifts his fingers.
In doing so, his palm keeps snug, firm against McGillis's. Impossible to read an attempt to pry free. Instead, strange extension, brambles askew from knuckles, but with purpose: they graze. His fingertips trickle down the sidelong curve of McGillis's neck. If less deliberate, if less of a push in his wrist to help effectuate it, it might be easy to dismiss. A tick, a needed stretch, a meaningless flex as his fingers opened and closed, resettling, lacing again as soon.
But not as soon.
They settle slow, glide slow.
Imitation above, his eyes half-lidded. ]
I think I've developed the taste.
[ Might have. ]
no subject
A hex, or a spell. Something like that. With the wounds between them still pulsating, still raw, this must be the height of foolishness. They should disentangle and begin to address the challenge analytically. It's impossible to see through to a clear goal, with how close they linger, how tight they grip without stepping past a line, without --
In the back of his mind, he's aware: the line they're careful not to cross.
It's always been that way. McGillis wouldn't, and Gaelio wouldn't. But it survived death deformed. It's been brought here and it sits between them with a vengeance, blood-stained. Cumbersome, impossible to breach, more messy than ever.
Or is it impossible?
Caught by those eyes, caught by the spell of his reply, when Gaelio stretches his fingers into a stroke (is it? an accident, or?) that lands on his neck, he can't help but flash back to the evening spent warming by the fire, breath ghosting over his skin.
He can't help but flash back to other evenings, other times, to years and years of Gaelio's constant presence. How he lingered close, but never too close. Like trying to catch feathers in the wind. Not always trying -- like feeling them brush past and watching them flutter on, understanding futility. It's always been like that, but the staying presence of fingers sweeping over his neck cannot be ignored in this hypnotic moment.
The heat building at the back of his neck spills over, spilling against touch as a tiny shiver runs up his spine. Something is different, in the settling press of his fingertips, in the smoky lidding of this man's eyes.
McGillis watches him with wider ones, a rare occurrence. He opens his mouth on a delay. ]
Maybe it's owed.
[ Struggling. A state that gives Gaelio equal ground. A starting point.
A waver at the edge of his voice. ]
Maybe it's necessary, for understanding.
[ As he speaks, he carefully frees the hand that hangs down at their sides, only to pass his palm over the back of Gaelio's and begin to stroke slowly up his arm.
Tit for tat. ]
no subject
What is it they do? What does he do, fingertips learning the texture of his neck? How close to neck he'd breathed, skin pressed to skin, there and there and there. How thin the sheet, how great then small the mattress between, how snug the arm circling waist. How like gossamer, the inner wrist against which his thumb traced a new line.
How often over the years Gaelio had looked at this man and learned not to bite his lip, and measured out his breaths. A brother, wed to his child sister. A brother, loved by the woman they'd grown alongside, the woman he'd seen struck down. Made enemy, blood and anguish filling the rift between them. Revenge, the smoke of it still clouding. He must breathe out, breathe out smoke, to clear his head of it, but it won't ever clear.
A brother, an enemy, a murderer, a traitor.
A best friend.
A man whose fingers thread, whose neck felt hot, whose palm keeps flush. Who trembles.
Years of looking at his back, his profile, of staggering heart and careful breath and leaning only as far as permitted, as was too far yet safe enough. If you'd but held out your hand, hand extracted from Gaelio's vice, and smoothing slow up his arm.
Slow, dragging, a caress that shivers through him.
It should not be possible to feel this, for the steel implanted in his spine to bend. Nor, rationally, should it have been possible to keep indecision for the duration he had. To hear brutal words, witness brutal acts, and be cut down, brutal. To hear, see, feel, die, but wonder, but seek more. Grasping for an answer, landed on with brittle and wretched difficult, snapped and wrenched away here.
Impossible, feeling what he does for McGillis, the extent of it more that he does not and cannot understand.
Impossible and insane, for breath to shudder out like this. Hypnosis or spell, for lids to lift, mirroring the roundness of McGillis's eyes, as that hand traverses his arm. Yet, keeping the curve of his mouth, sharp and relearning an old shape, if distorted by scar tissue and wreckage. ]
Will you struggle for me?
[ Murmured low, too much breathed in those words. His hand begins to disentangle from lacing. Once free, wrist tilts, fingers and palm shaping to throat. Thumb over adam's apple, and he hopes, strangely, that McGillis would swallow, let him feel it. ]
But I don't want it like that.
[ Quiet correction. His fingers do not yet squeeze. The middle stirs in the hairs at back of McGillis's neck. ]
Struggle with me.
[ Like that. Not alone. Not in the dirt. He's never wanted to stand above McGillis, towering or lording, or superior. That had not been the core of his need to deny him, and even in denial and judging him inferior as a moral creature, that creature, that man, might not exist.
That creature, that man, cannot be this one.
He wouldn't do this, if he didn't mean it.
Would he?
God, please.
To think, indeed, that humans could become so foolish.
His hand smooths up, still shaping. Cupping cheek. Toe sliding to mid-boot, noses close, his exhale not heavy but still co-mingling. Below, his fingers flex inward, and out, and his elbow bends once McGillis's hand has passed, drawing his own hand. Fingers flex again, hooking in the fabric of McGillis's shirt, index over a button. The nail only just grazes skin.
I'd have done the rest. ]
Together. That must be necessary, for understanding.
I'll take what I'm owed. You'll take what you're owed. McGillis...
[ Queer assertion in his tone wavers, dipping into tenuous doubt with that name, the only name now thrumming through him, though there should be two others. His eyes flick down, stick, only just able to fix on McGillis's mouth given how close their faces.
Breathless with doubt. No, it isn't doubt that makes him breathless. ]
...are we owed this?
no subject
Will you struggle for me?
That he asks and the shape of his fingers settle over throat as if to hold. McGillis hears an internal click. A whirring, his cogs responding to grease. His eyes are still larger than usual, but calm knowledge washes them out. He finds a ledge, a space to stow away; this makes sense to him. This is what makes sense to him, this is what's easy to parse. He knows how to keep his body still, how to make his face go still. He doesn't swallow, instead relaxing for Gaelio in preparation for words or actions more sinister.
What doesn't make sense:
But I don't want it like that.
As soon as it washed over him, that state of calm cracking like glass. Hair-cracks that spider up his countenance and twist the flesh between brows, twisting confusion into place.
Confusion blotted out, just as quickly, by a finger that nudges at his hairline. A request like this from someone he has wronged. Confusion blotting and a wrinkling forming about the edges of his eyes, after the same hand that had hinted at throttling journeys up to swallow his cheek. As gentle as that, palm to flesh, their boots sliding together in the sand. Their noses touch, their breathing mixes, and McGillis draws his palm up, having paused above the elbow.
On the other side of his bicep, skimming the underside of his upper arm.
Together. He breathes out, at that, at his name, and all the rest. Taking what they're owed --
Nudging forward, so that when he speaks, lips brush continuously. ]
Why not be owed more?
[ He can feel the tremble he'd elicited, and in turn, the slightest presence of a nail clipping his torso when Gaelio hooks onto the front of his shirt.
Can't help but arch hips in, a infinitesimal degree. His palms have found their way to Gaelio's shoulders by now, bracing both lines. The bottom of his lip clips the underside of Gaelio's bottom lip. As he pulls into the end of his speaking, there's a near accidental smoothing over.
Beat, beat, beat, in his ears. ]
When does the taking begin?
[ He feels as drunk as an entire bottle of wine's consumption would produce, head swimming, and words as dreamy.
But he's confident he isn't playing at this alone. Confident and nervous at the same time. The print of his index finger draws a circle at the base of a collar, over the beginnings of skin. ]
no subject
Soft lips, feathering against his lips. McGillis breathes out and Gaelio breathes him in.
Difficult to think, to parse, to understand, when McGillis speaks against him like that. The hush of his words, the breath needed to enunciate each, passing between Gaelio's lips. Words that settle on his tongue and taste like more than debt, more than truce.
Difficult to understand anything but the contact, but what McGillis must want as sorely as he does, to have tilted into this. Inexplicable and impossible, that he would, that Gaelio would. Killer and killed.
A near pull, a near press of his bottom lip. Gaelio had wanted it of McGillis; instead, he swallows. Pupils blown out, blowing out, the clouds thick over the moon and sprawled wide across the sky. It won't resurface soon. Gaelio may never resurface.
Hips below, he's too aware. Hands on shoulders, he's too aware. Pad of finger rounding skin.
Retorts lost in his mouth, displaced from tongue by those words breathed in. Can we lay claim to more? Is it possible, are they capable, is it fair? Or, absurd and taunting, the notion of swinging back, mouth more cruel than mischievous, needing to cough up bile for Carta, Almiria, Ein, but unable to, feigning it, and inviting a later development. Soon. As though Fate had more yet to show them, as if they do not stand here with it passed between their mouths.
Because they breathe it already, he cannot swing away.
His eyes swing instead, mouth to eyes, eyes to mouth. Unable to hear himself breathe, but able to feel the irregularity with which it leaves him.
Only one word can form, dizzy and sloppy on his tongue, contained in a single syllable. ]
Now.
[ His palm firms on cheek, his fingers curl tighter in fabric, pulling. Gaelio needs only angle by increments to seal their mouths together. He angles. A breeze lifts, from sea or woods, he's unsure, though it gives peaks to the tide and rustles in distant leaves. It tickles through air, wafts bangs, knocks McGillis's against Gaelio's cheek.
Something in his chest, organ and muscle, rupturing to pulp.
But he kisses McGillis with tentative, quick precision. The small shocks of each brush a longer, electrifying jolt, immediately overwhelming. He won't ever resurface, and the certainty of that angles him back, rushes open eyes that must have closed, terror surging back with the need to confirm McGillis's expression, to see more than stone. ]
Unless you disagree.
[ Intended steady, even fluid, but rippling. Needing. ]
no subject
McGillis has not discounted the possibility that Gaelio will snap, change his mind, or lash out with violence. Now would be the perfect time to plunge a knife into his gut. The pads of his fingertips won't loosen, alight with nerves, a tense hold at shoulders more than a natural cling.
Except that they --
Except for the night spent sleeping in the fire-warmed room, neither of them taking advantage of the lull. Except for Gaelio's insistence that the place and the setting are not correct.
The weight of his tear-stained cheek pressed to McGillis's shoulder as he sobbed and proclaimed that he was no longer resolved. Strangely, he hadn't felt relief to hear it, not then, and not now when he thinks on it again. Gaelio looks down, up again, his breathing pooling against lips in stutters, in uneven sheets.
He must be a devilish creature, truly, to press himself against him now, to have the temerity to miss him.
Although he's a creature meant to roam the earth alone, not human enough to partake in this partaking, the one word he receives in response sends him reeling. Gaelio angles lips, both of his grips pulling and guiding, barely a half-inch needed to lock their mouths into smooth song. Song that erupts in the thrum of his pulse and the gust of wind, wrist limp as fingertips skitter over flesh, over a metal plate, digging trails into a shorn hairline.
With his eyes closed, he sees galaxies on the back of his eyelids. Pressed shut tight, a thin line of water lining each rim.
It's over quick. A quick kiss, electric in his spine. A terrified kiss, fear trickling over through the tether of their mouths, a tether snapped when Gaelio yanks away and seeks him out. McGillis blinks eyes open, hearing need and responding. Each film of water gathers to opposite corners, slipping down cheeks when he blinks in succession.
He barely notices. It's awe that eclipses sadness in his expression, even if waves of grief long buried in the coffin of his heart are tugged to the surface by this action. Aching around the awe, momentarily struck. Finally, dizzy galaxies are chased from the front of his vision and vision returns, sparks of color replaced by steady blue pools.
Drawn in again, barely two beats. He leans in to recapture that mouth with toes scuffing sand. He pulls Gaelio into it by the back of his skull, insistent.
Unless you disagree. ]
No.
[ Only that, thick and low, before he drinks of a second.
Only if you agree.
You're really... strange. But, I agree. ]
no subject
He hasn't stopped shaking when McGillis opens his eyes, looks at him, looks at him, looks at him, and how neatly these blades thrust through his heart, full to his heart. Vidar kissed the wolf and turned the sword on himself.
Soft skin, soft emotion, not stone. Truth exposed beneath, if it be truth, what so astonishes in those eyes. Those two beats stretch as he gazes, all that despaired and feared in his eyes washed out by a blazing, white fire fed on the sentiment there: more than surprise, awe. More than sorrow, grief. Trickling, rivulets one breaking against his index finger, pooling in the webbing between it and thumb. It must be truth, this water from stone, cooling between his fingers.
Stunning truth, dizzying truth, paralyzing.
Struck insensible, when McGillis tugs, speaks, drinks, Gaelio yields, goes, thirsts.
In his throat, caged by teeth, gasped as they meet: a whimper.
Struck again with it, with a less meticulous sip, his mind staggers and gives way to instinct, reflex thought impossible (but only possible) with this man, driven by the heat sparking and unfurling in his gut. Hands, that on cheek easing further, fingertips curling for cusp of ear as thumb smooths over the streak of water, and traces again, again. Hands, climbing up button by button, over neck, curving over jaw, the tip of his middle finger reaching behind earlobe. Again, thumb wiping at that cheek's trail.
How taut, how it aches still, the strain of this, the tightness of the crumbling rope boundary between distress and that insatiable unfurling. Impossible, unforgivable, but how deep the roots, and how old. Even after the fire, the conflagration that savaged the forest of his affection, razing all within him to the ground, salting the earth. Nothing could grow, but it grows.
Behind his eyelids: only that expression, only those eyes, only those tears. Only McGillis, his face in his hand, his tears drying on Gaelio's fingers.
Gaelio kisses him like gulping, like pressing a rag to a wound soon fatal. Firm but careful until it soaks with blood, then shoved frantic. Reactive through the daze, but as it wears, his fingers begin to dig, and his mouth roughens.
McGillis kisses him; brother, best friend, traitor, killer.
But he'd wanted it, wants it, wants this. Unforgivable, past salvage, the both of them together and apart. The effort to keep himself together, stitches tearing, straw and puss spilling, dilutes, diverted to the effort in tasting that mouth, lips parting.
When he breaks for air, his eyes, too, overflow. ]
Why?
[ Breathless, wrecked. ]
Why now? McGillis, is this it?
[ What was missing?
Because it can't have been, not this, as simple though forbidden as learning the texture of his tongue. Whatever this is, it isn't fair, a truth irrelevant to the need to yank him back in, to crush their mouths together, and he does. Crushing until nipping at lower lip, until gasping against McGillis's chin, his head beginning to fall, weighted by his weeping. ]
If you betray me again, I will kill you.
[ I will. I can't.
don't.
please.
In delirious dissonance with the oath, his lips meet with a wet, modest kiss, just where chin begins to curve toward throat. ]
no subject
Only his imagination. They claw towards each other again, and so blood.
The aftertaste of it on this tongue, the notch of a murder on his belt. That whimper is kissed with more care, stroked with full lips moving to capture and soothe it, even with fevers pitching higher in temperature. A thumb insistent against his cheek, hand moving back to cup behind his ear, and the other drawing a shiver up his torso as it crawls up to mirror that hold. His head in Gaelio's hands, their mouths pressed.
While Gaelio's hand crawled up, McGillis's crawled down. Again down the back of his neck, again over metal, recalling a reaction. A grope that trails over shoulder and now to the front of his shirt, palm to chest. His other curved over ribcage to keep him close.
Curled, then fisted into material. They kiss like this. Slow, warm, dizzy. Wet.
It doesn't align crooked; it doesn't splinter in his skin. No screams stuffed, soundless, into the cracks. Even with all that remains wrong between them, this must be what a kiss should be. Gaelio's thumbs stroke his cheeks enough times to help make them hot, a flush driven to the surface and bolstered by that thought. The pace rockets forward, after that, fingers squeezing against his scalp, McGillis holding on with fists balling.
They kiss like this, faster, hint of violence at the edges. His head pounding, mouth racing, a gasp lit like a match when they break apart.
He opens his eyes past dizziness. Gaelio's are round, and wet, staying McGillis. Questions that stay him, ground him, forehead creasing. This can't be it. It can't be what was missing. They haven't solved it so easily. The shadows in their hearts haven't lifted.
But how his pulse races and his blood heats up at the next crushing kiss, as wet as it is -- only, some of the fire doused by that. Gaelio falling from it like a dead leaf from a tree, quiet sobbing, quiet kiss above jugular, quiet promise of brutality.
Flames flickering low to dying. McGillis's hands, clutching shirt, loosen to lift and lift his face by cupping both sides of jaw.
A mirroring hold. ]
No --
[ Not the answer, not the total answer, not exactly what was missing, only... there would be no survival, no salvation to speak of, setting fire to his heart twice.
Once had been more of a burden than he anticipated.
Twice, he wouldn't remain sane enough to outlast. ]
If I think of it, if it crosses my path again, I'll rest on my blade. I'll have grown exhausted with madness and in need of the rest.
[ Dabbing with fingertips, mirroring, he swipes under Gaelio's eyes. His voice is as calm as the farthest wave, nothing uncertain fraying it. ]
no subject
Let it not be calculation that presses that mouth so sweet.
Would it be a less terrifying prospect, the possibility of artifice even now, if Gaelio could himself manage it? He can barely manage to conceive of it, never mind an attempt. Whatever his fracture from emotion, death and its damage leaving so much of him past shambles, whatever his years of steel and fire and rigid focus, he shivers true as McGillis remembers the metal and what it spurs.
For all that he believed himself steel, forged in the fire of cremation, a blade Rustal pulled and helped to shape, when McGillis's palm shapes then fists over heart, when heart drums against its cage as though to splinter through, Gaelio understands. Not steel, but glass.
Glass, when shattered, when crushed, when reduced: how soft the dust.
Steel cannot bend, but with each collision, the glass grinds down. Salt water and dust, and depleted structure swaying, sinking. Only McGillis's hands keep his face from falling further, his vision blurred through the tears, eyes rimmed with white and red to recognize how they hold one another.
More white, more red, more tension in the meeting of uneven eyebrows above, as McGillis speaks. How often Gaelio had been lulled by this voice. How often inspired, incited, stirred to greater and more profound passions. How irresistible now: this rejection of treachery, firm and unwavering, with the clarity of the bluest sky, the purest stream.
I can save you from him.
A life for a life, as though he would sooner spill himself than again butcher him.
How delicate, how tender the movement of his thumbs. Yet, glass cheeks fracture, to fragments to dust beneath, and the tears do not abate, a steadying stream. ]
I want to believe you.
[ In wanting, because wanting, only wanting, only needing -- he doesn't.
What enviable confidence in those honeyed words, a sincerity Gaelio would take and wear as shroud, if he could believe it a guard against their storm, rather than cut for burial.
A steadying stream, a drying stream; though he cannot be soothed by McGillis, the hollowing certainty in that grounds him. ]
I can't.
[ Clarity, likely unnecessary. A last coaxing stroke of his thumbs, beneath McGillis's eyes. His fingers curl, scratching light behind ears, before he pushes his hands, palms smoothing over cheeks. Fingertips meet at the back of head, lacing with hair, then loose, slip and comb down. Slow and exploratory over neck, until passing one another, his arms looping, ensnaring, keeping close even as his lips smile with a break like that of his heart, ever finding space for yet another fissure. ]
Don't lie to me so soon.
[ If McGillis believes it, then he is not so different from Gaelio in this: he, too, lies to himself.
Because if Gaelio stood between him and Bael yet again, he cannot believe that McGillis would turn aside his blade. They have not found what would turn it, the missing piece.
Yet --
Leaning at the neck, tilting forward. Gaelio recaptures his mouth, soft, tentative but not from doubt. He kisses McGillis, eyelids fluttering, lips eager and thorough. Lingering in one moment, peppering in another, learning this pressure, and this, and this, and this. Trying that angle, and this incremental adjustment, and this.
Maybe like this, from here, the taste of need might be confused for belief.
Maybe, because actions feel easier, with less to question and everything to savor.
Maybe he kisses him like he believes him. ]
no subject
They go to pieces in his mouth, after the fact of producing them. Like swallowing glass. Whether he lies to himself, or whether he tells the truth, it barely matters. The difference is plain in Gaelio's eyes. When he blinks, he recalls the light of bright, inquisitive interest, intellectual and emotional interest. McGillis recalls drawing that light when he spoke, conscious of feeling differently about Gaelio's way of looking at him, conscious of the cogs that spun and whirred on the fuel of hatred and fury -- slowing, pausing, conscious of the confusion that spread as a miasma with the absence of that sound in his head.
Now, from up close, to see how he'd shattered that. From this distance, to be conscious of loss. All light cuts from his own eyes, hearing the response, spark of heat momentarily replaced with lifeless understanding. I can't -- a nod, another swipe of the tears that gathered in his fingers, his palm falling to slide down the length of his neck.
Don't lie to me so soon.
His chin falls, but he's kept upright and facing Gaelio but by the tender sweep of his hands.
If he lies to himself, he at least believes himself in the miserable beat of the moment, feeling drawn to the sea. If he can't achieve his goals, if he's gone so far off course as to be flung here, if the choice he made about Gaelio was for naught -- there's very little reason to live.
He would've lived on as a corpse, as long as he could've changed the world.
Dull misery, scattered away by the surprise of fingernails scratching lightly at his scalp -- the sensation that produces, a distracting sort of tingling.
He blinks back into Gaelio's eyes, watching him with wonder. That he can touch McGillis like that, that his fingers can trawl, explore, trap him close, produces the strangest feeling of wonder. So soon after the response he received, the contradiction of that laid against the movement of those hands keeps him dazed. The exact shape of the smile in front of him, breaking, something that McGillis touches on gingerly with the pads of his fingers before the next kiss -- index tracing the curl of his bottom lip into the corner.
Plucking at a tear caught in the seam.
Their mouths swerve into it again. His touch settles featherlight on Gaelio's jaw. He pulls towards each one, magnetic, absorbing each tiny adjustment of angle and pressure as to slowly drown in them, experimenting with his own need for variety.
On his lips, a different taste than the misery from before. Stoking warmth, he trails fingertips in a light graze over the shape of his jaw, cupping the base of his neck with his other hand.
This language seems innate to them. Immediately, all at once. This language he hasn't spoken since his final escape, all at once rewritten. All at once, understood quite differently.
And in the absence of understanding, after twenty years of missing the essential need for a shared language, how tempting it is to submerge in it and never leave. Experimentally, he flicks the tip of his tongue alongside the inner strip of Gaelio's upper lip. ]
no subject
There would be dread, if he saw retreat in it, one more mask, what is dead only so through impassive stone. Perhaps, having stood so near and looked with eyes blazing in this fraught moment and the last. Perhaps, cut down and raw in the dream, in the staggering unknown of this world that stripped them. Perhaps sixteen years and death, perhaps reanimation for a singular purpose, perhaps the search, perhaps all that transpired here: perhaps, finally, he better sees.
Perhaps, finally, McGillis keeps exposed, made inexplicably clumsy, and clumsier. Too slow with the mask, too thin the material.
He does not break alone. The despair that granted him clarity, the impossibility of believing McGillis, catches. In his certainty -- of which he has less and less, with this man -- McGillis's sorrow. Gaelio drinks of this, too. Softened, softening. It speaks ill of what remains of his heart, but how near to reassurance. Little of satisfaction, nothing so smug and gratified. A fine distinction, maybe too fine. Do not suffer, but more, do not leave him to it.
Believing misery if not truth, how much easier to kiss him. How long he has known it. How strangely sweet, to share it like this. How much more it becomes when shared like this. When first mapped by the graze of that finger, capturing a last drop.
They learn together. Slow together, meticulous together. This fit, and another, then another, none of it wrong. His arms keep curled heavy around McGillis, braced on his shoulders, palms rounding on elbows. The tide laps at the shore, the breeze rustles dying, drying leaves, a sliver of moon beams through the patch in the clouds, rippling over the water, their knees. Nothing so quiet as their breathing, learning that, too, through shaping lips or trickled above. Nothing heard above it, nothing known but this.
Shock, like brushing metal and a static flare, with his tongue. A different tonality, lower in the throat, like his name when rolling as sultry silk from McGillis's mouth. Off this tongue. Shock, delicious and sparking, in what is reflexive in his parting, immediate. An invitation in a breath, lower lip chasing, to drag against the underside -- but with only tip, only teased quick, likely capturing more lip, a pull against, an inadvertent but rousing suction.
More open then, the kiss, half-insistent, and it deepens through him. Sand and toes, and toes nudging between, knee and leg leaning as hips near-align. No longer satisfied with his own arms, though they kept McGillis so neatly enclosed, they separate, slipping between, his hands retracing their steps -- smooth over neck, then stepping new. Thumbs circle over McGillis's jaw, trail lower. His hands, too, must learn. A lifetime of lingering never long enough, of pressing never close enough.
As slow, as shaping, his hand down McGillis's chest, glad of the relative thinness of the material. Nothing like his coat. Cupping over pectoral, the thickness of the muscle, simmering. His other hand curls, grazing knuckles along the curvature of his ribcage, following it back, coaxed higher, feeling over his shoulder blade. Long known, now knowing better.
Long unknown, if not for a lack of wanting, what he pursues, request through loosened fit. ]
no subject
He can feel it when their mouths move, wherever bodies touch. The transfer deepens the act. The act builds on itself. Gaelio, an external creature, an avalanche seen from miles away, begins to make a knob more sense. He blurs into this seamlessly regardless of anything, engraining into flesh and bone. A small sound buries itself deep within his throat, sounding vibration against the suction of their lips, against chase, the pressure of tongues lighting goosebump trails up his arms.
Tongues -- and legs, hips, arms, all aligning together and pulling in at the center, at their center.
The sound in McGillis's throat turns to groan, palms forced to brace shoulders when he senses that roaming touch.
Within the groan, much louder than their navigating of oxygen, is a note of deepening satisfaction, alarmingly uncontrolled. He dips forward into the hand that feels over and around chest. Skin warming over twice, hands cupping, feeling, following (in ways he might've imagined once or twice before, but never thought to envision as reality) -- he swirls his tongue against the one met through loose lips, diving past invitation, fingernails digging --
A shockwave, right then, for not knowing himself this way. For being unable to recognize this, nor contain it. A note of panic set off at the back of his mind and brought to the front.
After a sudden twitch rocks through, abruptly, McGillis breaks the kiss on a harsh gasp. Pulling back without staggering away, leaning back without removing his hands or moving his feet. He can't find Gaelio's eyes immediately, a wild, directionless haze clouding over his own.
All at once, rewritten. It's difficult to keep up with. A second or two passes, and McGillis blinks, returning. ]
... Gaelio.
[ As if recognizing him anew, the name landing oddly.
He returns quicker, recognizing that it will be odd for Gaelio to experience this development. That he most likely has made a mistake. Hands coax along his old friend's shoulders, reassuring without thinking. For a moment, also forgetting the place, the time, and blips of all that has transpired between them, until his vision adjusts to scarring.
Movement stills and his right balls into a half-fist, unsure. Fingers pluck at shirt cloth.
Unsure, eyes lower and flit to the side, then back. Palms slide from shoulders, to bust, around ribs, as he leans in to close the gap on another embrace. Hands slipping down to waist, weighed down, he buries part of his face against the other man's neck.
What he must say, as layered as the rest, meaning stretching past the moment: ]
I'm sorry.
no subject
To be with McGillis, in any capacity, spikes delirium. More than lapping tides, instead tsunami. Dream, nightmare, dream. To be with McGillis, his heart's deepest core, cored out. Left with a space into which flooded abandonment and retribution, fury and aggression, and pain. All that, but never filled, the trench too deep, the fit too particular then savaged by the coring -- yearning and bliss torn out, crumbling the foundation, jagged splits and cracks down the side, distorting the shape.
Nothing could have, should have filled it. Pour in enough sand, the shifting of irresolution and revenge. Pave it over with veneers of respectable emotion, and weigh it down with, the ground sinking beneath, all that his shoulders bore. And aggression bubbled out, acid geysers, and the aching reverberated within marrow, within cardiac valves.
The aching, reverberating now against tongue, syncing to the sound that rocks through him: McGillis groaning, low and sated, sating, wanting, a hum against his mouth that shivers down his throat and plunges. Unfurling and heating in his gut, sparking through the grasping of his fingers and the curling of his toes. Such a sound must be true, and there, too, pursuit.
In his lifetime of reaching, Gaelio had not clawed like this, had known but suppressed hunger like this. Scratching out of the grave, scratching after him, had born aggression that lives even here, like this, a ready boil. Beneath his hand, beneath the breadth of muscle and sinew, beats McGillis's heart. He presses his palm as though he could feel it, could cup against, could hold and squeeze and core.
No, not core, because the fact of it, the fact of beating, the fact of his tongue between Gaelio's lips and learning against Gaelio's tongue, might prove that core, might stay the blade. An impossible betrayal, but that he might permit McGillis his, the same hold, a belief that he would not again crush it -- struggle together, work together, understand together, exchange Fate on breaths passed between their lips, share misery with the bittersweet taste of each kiss.
Impossible to trust him, to believe it, but chasing as though. But inviting as though. But assertive, as though. Chasing what he'd missed if not what was missing, what he should not miss, what he cannot be permitted to miss, McGillis --
wrenches back, gasping.
Gaelio cannot yet recover, dazed by the spots in his vision when he opens his eyes, the wet swell of his lips, the sound that clipped out of his throat in breaking, baffled protest. Then, all too quickly, recovery: because McGillis does not see him. Smolder doused by ice, by the renewal of that terror, bunching up in brow, as much contorted by confusion as fear. But he holds him still, hands against shoulders, fingernails still just digging.
His name, and focus, and his eyes.
Gaelio gazes, his own eyes bright with the question, his breath in uneven, faltering gives and pulls. Though his eyelids would flutter for the smoothing of McGillis's hands, firm and grounding, he resists it to keep his eyes.
He doesn't understand. Of course he doesn't understand: that he should expect. He doesn't understand why McGillis reeled back, why he rushed in again to assuage, why his hands soothed but then hesitate, why his eyes edge away, and why now, he slips and folds in, a deliberate and stroking embrace that settles him tucked, half-vulnerable.
To think, that McGillis could be vulnerable. Disbelieved. Haunting words that crack and deteriorate in their regular circling through his skull: soft-hearted emotions unfortunately will not reach me.
I'm sorry, now breathed half against his neck, a warm and tickling contrast to the near winter's chill around them. An apology. An apology not contained to this moment, to whatever spooked and changed this.
Only a little disturbed by the motions, Gaelio's hands press still against chest and shoulderblade. A touch awkward, but slow to yield to the natural rearrangement. Gravity encourages it, magnetism, but for a moment he stands still and unresponsive, feeling the portions of McGillis's exhale in goosebumps along his neck, feeling the feathering of McGillis's hair against his jaw, less felt where the scarring cuts.
An apology, elicited and soft. Inexplicable for this, unacceptable for the rest. Gaelio stares along the shore, the paler sands yet dark in shadow, the moon caught still by clouds. His heart lodges in his throat, dribbling blood with each unsteady beat, with inquisition. With indecision, with a hundred and a thousand impetuses, with a hundred and a thousand accusations against this man and himself, with a hundred and a thousand questions. Which to ask -- where had he gone? why? why had they collided so absolutely into that, a rush and a song, a humming that still thrums in his chest, with every breath? Though he has the right to a hundred and a thousand demands, should he apologize for the kiss, though McGillis had agreed, had it been assent born on the delirium of compromise and implicit oath? Apologize, if not to McGillis, then to them -- but that no answer to the retreat.
Why do his arms so ache to settle as is natural, that he must oblige, that his hand shakes while trailing in the close space between, mirroring paths along ribs, around back. His arms curve, pull, answering the embrace. Tremulous and slow, his right hand flutters higher, hovering before rounding over the back of McGillis's head.
On this beach, with McGillis. With McGillis in his arms, with McGillis breathing apology against him. The man he had to kill, but cannot kill. Not this man. Instead, the man he'd press against and ache for, and if he forgives but cannot forgive him, then that they share, too. ]
McGillis.
[ Eyes shut tight, into red. Teeth grit, cannot swallow around heart, slow to loose, the ache now in his jaw. Thumb circles in fine strands, his chin begins to dip toward. ]
We needn't be owed that. There's enough. This is enough. You --
[ if you mean it, and like this, like this, he must, he must, he must, together, a start, together, murderer and traitor and friend, together, first steps toward finding it, together, he must, ]
-- you're enough.
no subject
With Gaelio, there is justice in it, in allowing consumption. In allowing himself to be consumed by perplexing fires and in handing that over to this man -- one of his most precious guards torn down, exposure and lit by suppressed desire, and Gaelio can reap, sow, take, reject, kill -- whatever he pleases.
Bearing any and all as an expression of sincerity. A betrayal, then, that his reflexes betrayed him.
Another betrayal that he could not keep himself open and allow Gaelio access to the places where he could've done the most damage. Could not risk damaging himself with too much fast flooding.
Would that not be an act of proof, after the damage he's done? They've agreed to try to understand one another, but one fact remains: Gaelio can't believe him. McGillis rendered his own words meaningless with his betrayal, meaning he must act, meaning he must give something to prove himself. Meaning he must give into want and allow it to guide him, for the first time, for any of it to have any sort of meaning.
But he'd failed. He succeeds only in stacking betrayals one on top of another. He catches the bright confusion on those features once he sees him again, the edge of fear in his eyes, before he buries himself away in his neck, shame warming his own skin. An exhale equally buried, following his strange apology -- understanding that it will be meaningless, inapplicable, peppered with frustration aimed at the self. A creature of rage and resentment, and unfit for this and for that.
A hand squeezed against his fast beating heart. Gaelio is slow to react. McGillis opens his eyes to thoughtful slivers and takes in the glitter of moonlight against metal at the edge of his spine, wondering as to its construction. How was it built into him? How long did it take? What was his state upon waking? What was told to him? What was the look on his face back then?
His palms squeeze once in their hold, curled above hips, a strange hint of inadvertent possession overtaking hand muscles as the questions beam through his thoughts.
Unfit, except Gaelio finds a fit for his arms, talented as he is. He finds a way to hold, though his hands tremble to hold. Cheek brushing against the curve it found, McGillis closes his eyes again to map it out internally, each tremor laid over his ribs and back, and the shock of a hand nestled against the back of his head. Eyelashes flutter open and ghost over skin, surprise catching him -- for that and for the words that follow.
Enough?
He senses his brow wrinkling, senses the haze overtaking and the struggle -- already struggling to understand. Something warms over inside himself to hear words like those, but he doesn't know why. How can anything be enough, let alone --
A break in the response that bubbles to the surface, hands clinging tighter to Gaelio's back. Drawn into warmth, leaning in. ]
A lie told in revenge?
[ He bleeds to hear something so foreign, as though Gaelio had pressed against inflamed infection with his reply, pressure that oozes through the warped note in McGillis's tone. ]
If so, you've hit the mark.
[ It stings to think that it will be taken away from him eventually. Teasing a monster with such an absurd concept; enough. ]
no subject
How appropriate, that as familiar frustration begins to clash against McGillis's exposure, Gaelio has no awareness of it: that they struggle together. That McGillis, too, wrestles with incomprehension, born of words and gesture. Enough and an embrace, his cupping hand; apology and an embrace, and hands that clutch, tighten. It would comfort to know, perhaps perversely, as had witnessing the crimping of misery unmasked. Yet, unknown.
Instead, left to further wonder, as McGillis accuses him of dishonesty. Too raw in it, too raw in ceding to what such would, has done to him, for what kicks up within Gaelio to become a proper storm. Though his fingers begin to curl in fine hair, begin to clench, not yet hard enough to pull or hurt -- it might feel on the brink of it, the suggestion of violence. Intended or not; he's less sure, again both adrift in disconnect and taut in suspension.
His voice drifts, strange. Far, but contorting. ]
A lie?
[ Hypocritical, as he veers without consciousness of his double standards, too entrenched in his entitlement to them: that he can and will and does levy such charges at McGillis, but bristles now to hear them returned. He has the right, though bleating that with each shallow wound, each deeper thrust, dilutes it. Only one had betrayed, piercing Kimaris to kill, discarding their friendship, a friendship born of a lie, as soft-hearted emotions could not and had never reached him.
Or not.
What would, should, does begin to flare, stoppered by admitting the mark, by how McGillis clings, by his breath on his neck. In the absence, in the hollow so charred by conflagrations of rage, jury, and frustration, he's left to question. ]
Revenge, huh... I wonder.
[ It should be. The thought of that, of what is owed, ever on the periphery, ever seeping out, ever a pressure against what cavity they've clawed into here, together, hands clasped, eyes meeting, the thought of that wrenches him farther, as immediate and jarring as McGillis's separation. Which? This and that and every.
Pulled back farther, pulled in closer, by breathing, by hands, by fingers that would press marks through cloth. A new and fast old mantra: must kill, for them. cannot kill, if this. unforgiven, unforgiven, unforgiven, both. It should be, but even if he could still manage it, this revenge would not be deliberate, unable to understand the how and why of its efficacy.
What expels from his mouth is harsh and short, a breath, but with sound enough to venture at a laugh. Too bitter and pained for it, or too bitter and pained to be anything else. ]
If that's what it took, then I have no revenge.
[ If words could strike McGillis. If words could knock him from power, into dirt, grinding his face into the emotions he had buried there in his climb. If the monster could be made to bleed by so simple an utterance, so simple a truth, then he had been no monster. Then those words reached, the emotions not buried beneath but hidden within, inadvertently cut loose.
Impossible to have revenge on a figment, to enact the method, to wring honor from what had not, truly, been dishonor.
Impossible to have revenge on his friend who holds him like this, who falters to be told enough, though Gaelio little understands the difference, the significance, not having intended to ask more, to supplement, a flesh compromise with his kiss.
Impossible to explain, without understanding. Gaelio speaks, in an effort to keep from spinning out farther, in an effort to grasp at it through these faltering steps. ]
Need isn't want.
[ Mad, after all and everything, for that want to be so. Yet, it would be blinding to refuse to acknowledge it with the taste of him lingering on tongue, on lips. That he wants him, a different want, sequestered and primal. ]
What you need, I don't know. I never understood you. I don't know how to ask. What we need, I've imposed too often. I've the right, but it isn't an answer.
[ He cannot alone supply the missing piece. ]
What I need... I don't know that, either.
[ Faint, realizing, his arm tugging McGillis tighter against him, as though he could shield himself from it. How perverse that his instinct, even now, is to reach for him. ]
But, I think I need my friend. I think I need you.
[ No masks. No effort beyond that of honesty, whether Gaelio can believe it so soon or not. No actions, though actions are simpler until they aren't. Simply him, if true. If true in speaking friend, if true that in a dream shared, his boy heart swore he'd meant too much and cradled him against time and bloodied Fate. ]
Truly you.
no subject
He can't conceive of a relationship without some element of aggression present, either hidden or bared out in the open. If Gaelio pursues him out of a violent need, out of a need for revenge, he can fathom it. If Gaelio pursues understanding and confesses to needs that are not as simple as violence led by honor, it takes straining effort to wrap his mind around that, to double back to his own feelings of earnest warmth towards this man, this man he has tried to kill who must also kill him, and untangle where they begin and where they end.
If they kiss upon their renewed oath, all the more confusing, all the more soothing.
If he asks Gaelio, if he prompts him to lie, it amounts to another confession of not understanding him. It's painfully difficult to understand, after injury, personal and proximal, after lying, abusing trust, using, painfully difficult to understand Gaelio's straining, the effort he puts into McGillis still. It forces him to reexamine what he'd failed to bury completely, those soft-hearted pieces that had only been shorn into being by this man, new layers of sediment discovered, eroded into existence by more than a decade of attachment --
The reason why he fails to commit fully to a life lived in anger.
Perhaps it's the same for Gaelio. He can't figure out how to commit to what is owed to him by his own unique circumstances. His eyes lid again, to hear a laugh as bitter and contorted as that expulsion of breath. More pain than anger, always more pain than anger with Gaelio.
McGillis had called it unfortunate, that expressions of friendship, love and trust could not touch him. He understands: those are missing pieces. It deforms him. And yet he only understands through Gaelio, only has context through meeting him, only has context of himself as an outsider after entering that new world.
He listens to the far-away reply, the entirety of it, and tries to piece it together. He watches a fixed point over Gaelio's shoulder as he listens to him speak -- of his punctured revenge, of the difference between need and want. His confession of not understanding either of their needs, each word a separate twinge, a separate ache, the floodgates open.
What we need, I've imposed too often. I've the right, but it isn't an answer.
Here, McGillis had understood Gaelio's straining through an entirely different context: that he can be satisfied by besting him. Doubt infests his mind. It's simpler to understand Gaelio when he discounts the basis of their friendship -- that an enemy always lurked there. That enemy was simply ignorant of his own capacity to become one. The truth of McGillis would be the thing to transform Gaelio's affection into hatred, regardless of anything else.
But if he speaks true here, that cannot be true.
I think I need you. Truly you.
McGillis lifts his chin. His hands shift and tighten once again as he pulls up and back, enough to meet Gaelio's eyes, enough to linger close. He searches through the depths of blue, pupils flicking. No shroud to an expression that lacks true comprehension, staring at Gaelio as if he were a puzzle with one hundred missing pieces.
Fingers loosen, and travel, and land against scarred cheek.
In his entire life. ]
I don't always know who I am.
[ Begun, with words pulled from pits kept inside of him. Their exposure to air shocks him. A quick inhale, before continuing. ]
There was a time when I knew. Without being trained, without being owned. I think I've been searching for that version of myself, only stronger. Strength that belongs only to me. Your place...
[ A tiny caress, here, a twitch of his palm. Searching, searching, pulling at truth. ]
Your place is difficult to understand. From the very beginning, our friendship was based on a fabrication. It began without a foundation. Even so... I thought that I could allow myself to have it. It was the first time I understood something like happiness.
[ Unique to Gaelio, the first one to enter his life with consistency. The lasting mark that dug deeper than any other and of the few he could truly count as marks. ]
I told you that nothing you'd offered had ever reached me. That was a lie, one that I told to myself, as well as you. But what I've done cannot be undone. I thought I understood you and the reasons for your pursuit -- but I don't understand you, not at all. How --
[ Harsher press, palm drifting to jaw. ]
How am I enough? How can you be satisfied with that?
no subject
Without his eyes, but with his weight, his exhale, both against his neck and felt in the lift of his chest.
Then, with his eyes. Reception and reaction, to the trail Gaelio accepted to weave through their underbrush. Head from shoulder, neck, cool air a shock where warmth last breathed. Gaelio's fingers slacken to allow it, slip through strands to settle against the base of his neck. Blue-green, darker in the night, without the moon. Fixed, seeing and unseeing. Look at me, the plea and cry and song and hope and dream and want and lust and need and shout and deathknoll and deathstrike, look at me for sixteen years, and two though masked, look at me, and he does.
Earnest. No shutters, no masks, no aversion. But earnest in bewilderment. Finally, finally, but still unseen. Which cut deeper: to strive for sixteen years and have them, at last, certain in it, only to be as certain that without understanding, he looks without seeing?; or, to look and seek and gaze for sixteen years, only to understand that without understanding, he, too, looks without seeing -- and had done for the whole of that time.
Which was the greater betrayal? But this is not McGillis's betrayal. Not this vision, not this blindness. But if betrayal in incomprehension, then together. They struggle together, as near sworn, and stare together.
Whatever the answer, his eyes transfix. Gaelio gazes, the singed and savaged muscles beneath disfigured skin unable to respond to fingertips alighting, that touch, but above his eyes, a tremble. More glass to fracture, to crumble, to dust. Though he would tip into it, press them firmer and feel them better through less sensitive skin, but that McGillis speaks.
Confessions. Truth that needs the bracing of more air, of bolstered lungs.
Unknown, so perhaps Gaelio had little chance of it, but he cannot hear in that an excuse. He cannot craft it for himself, will not, pushing his own place in this farther from the center as he listens, intent, white rimming more of his eyes.
A time before Iznario, that much he can parse. Gaelio flounders with the fragments of that picture, gathered over a time too long to understand the fit of each. That McGillis had not been born Fareed, discovered with Rustal. That his feelings toward that man he called father were complex and dark, gleaned over years of dropped eyes and subtle tensing. Iznario Fareed, a cold and terrifying man, whom Gaelio could amuse with easy self-deprecation, but would not himself long keep by.
In a dream, contusions sprawling down a boy's neck. A memory in that. Squashed and placated inquiry.
Whatever Gaelio believed of birth, if a child not of astral blood was introduced as, conscious of the falsehood, developed disconnect and complex, he could understand that, the likelihood and logic in it. The psychology. Yet, the weight of that does not balance the scales, nothing slotting. A piece crafted that does not yet fit.
Palm shifts against his cheek. Here, Gaelio tilts, a fractional canting. His middle finger flexes, dragging tip along neck.
Friendship without foundation. A lie that he would nonetheless have. Whether Gaelio would resist it or not, he has no opportunity, swifter than reflex, than nerve and muscle snap: the compression of his features, crumbs and powder. Hurt like lightning in his eyes, a flash that spots and blinds and leaves the space thereafter darker.
But McGillis wanted it. But it reached him, but he'd lied as to that while rending them asunder, cutting them completely apart, whatever tether Gaelio had hooked and clung to.
Yet, now they cling.
The pressure of McGillis's hand keeps him. His other arm, though reluctant to lose the last of their embrace, lifts. Unsettled, drifting fingertips against McGillis's elbow, wrist, until settling, cupped against the back of McGillis's hand. Hand framing hand framing jaw. ]
I can't be.
[ Strange, the waver in his voice, as if wet. ]
But I can't not be. McGillis...
[ It isn't as though he understands himself well, feeling what he should not. What he must do, what he cannot do. A different must, an overwhelming must, with McGillis gazing like this, holding him like this. ]
It wouldn't have mattered to me, your blood. Not long ago, I would have agreed that our friendship must have been fabrication. How else could you have done it? Only your actions removing the foundation, letting us drown. But if you wanted it, if you wanted me, if we were happy, it was real. You were --
[ The rippling in his voice carries and he blinks, quick, against build up. ]
-- my friend. That's all that's needed. To be together, to want to be together. To mean what that should.
[ Status, blood, meaningless things, and so Ein, too, had been his friend. Therein his penance, without resolution. One way or another, he will be doomed to that. ]
I wanted to reach you. I wanted to be acknowledged by you, for you to be with me without the masks. I wanted to stand at your side.
[ Echoes, but how changed the tone, how much softer, when they stand so entwined. ]
It can't be undone. I can't forgive you, for them. I can't believe you, I can't understand you, but still, I...
[ Hands shifting, whether to squeeze against hand, or curl fingers back toward hairline, twist. ]
...want to. I wanted, I needed to understand why.
[ Why Carta, why Ein, why piercing him as enemy in coldest blood for a small void in inheritance. After sixteen years, after calling him friend, after they stood together. ]
I wanted you to look at me. I think I wanted...
[ As if understanding through speech, drawn out by the string on his tongue, and it's faint, the surprise speckling his eyes to voice it, the shame beneath it, because if this the core, a core, selfish and caught up in them, McGillis and Gaelio, not them. ]
...you to recognize me, if the only way, the only thing you understood, was power, was to kill you. If that's what it took, if then I'd mean something to you, if only as the man who killed you, then I had to for that reason, as well.
[ can it have been that? as small as that?
Carta, Ein, respectable emotions To recognize them, or was it pretext? An unknown, confusion thick and thickening. They still stack upon his shoulders.
but with McGillis's eyes on him, he less remembers the weight. An unforgivable man. Will they share it? ]
Because I've always wanted you, McGillis. I don't know how to stop.
[ Long defined by this man, what would become of him without him? McGillis had not been eveything. His family was not nothing. Carta, Ein, they were not nothing. But, McGillis was... McGillis is... hopelessly foolish, despicably naive, to speak without understanding, yet there's no other truth. There's nothing else. His eyes, their eyes. ]
It's more than satisfaction. Or less than. If you mean it, if it's you, you're enough. Because I can't let you go.
no subject
Tentative steps into the clearance. A skeleton of his truth, because Gaelio cannot possibly have room left in his heart to accept the full picture -- past revival, grasping for Bael, McGillis continues to make sure to sever that possibility without actualizing it, committed to burning alone. Committed, except the eyes across from him remain serious and engaged as he tests stepping on a different path. Breadcrumbs to follow in a dark forest. A cheek tilting into his palm, scar tissue rubbed against callouses, more than receptive to each clumsy offering.
Hurt, flashing through those moonlit blue eyes, to hear McGillis speak of the lack of foundation. A bridge built over a pit, with only one of them looking down, waiting for the support structures to give. Despite the number of years, a temporary joining. The longer they went without addressing it, the more convinced he'd been.
It wouldn't have mattered to me, your blood.
A cloud permeates the film of his eyes.
That was what he'd strove for, with every inch of strength he could muster and build upon; the new world where it wouldn't have mattered. Each individual's version of happiness would be reachable there. They would only need to want it for themselves. No barriers, no scripts, no decrepit ruling class, no iron fist. In a larger context, it's the dream that mesmerizes, soothes and envelops him warmly, close to what he imagines a parent's warmth might be. In this shrunken version, where Gaelio tells him there was a smaller world where that was already true, a clicking sound in his mind begins as he struggles to sort the response.
if we were happy
Click. Fog, and hurt, matching his counterpart. Lines crinkle about his eyes. A moment of distraction, pained exhaustion blotting out surroundings.
Happiness? Something like it. Something missing. Fingers drift against the nape of his neck, light and distracting. How the flesh he thought was dead would wake whenever that animated presence would lean against his shoulder. A clicking sound, sorting through the years against the backdrop of Gaelio's voice.
The fog abating, as his voice winds around to words already once spoken. McGillis's eyes darken to life and hook to the sound, a knowing exhale given, lightly expelled through the nose.
Yet he will be mesmerized by what follows: if the tone is true, a new realization that speaks to complex facets that had gone unnoticed. By the both of them. His eyes widen to hear it, surprise for the breadth and the depth of meaning. For how it sprawls into life and takes form in front of him. Gaelio latching onto the only way he thought he could remain a fixture at McGillis's side, a sharp ache forming in the wake of those words -- his fingers shift in sync, pads pressing harder against bone structure.
He swallows. It's more than he was prepared to take.
What he has done to Gaelio is more unforgivable than he knew -- trapping him in this cage. The only way to loosen the bars will be to meet him at the middle and to begin to remove them together.
Do they begin?
Swallowing the pocket of air in his throat, he moves his hands, disrupting Gaelio's perched one. Fingers climb around to pull from the back of his head, from the width of a shoulder-blade, McGillis stepping in to hold him closer. Stepping into a hold that resembles a cradle, temple sliding against temple. ]
You've already reached me. I've already acknowledged you. I see you, I've seen you. For two years you've remained at my side, ghostly, but present. Always there. You're always there. I --
[ Until the ghost became real. Until he rose to life.
Straining, understanding that it would mean his destruction, straining against going after him a second time. Not until Gaelio came to meet him at Bael. Not until Gaelio found him again on the battlefield. Not until Gaelio locked him into the necessity of it -- deal with this, deal with him, or else cease moving forward.
The sound of Isurugi's voice in his head, reporting on Gaelio Bauduin's last known status. Low and unspoken in his tone had been the expectation that the general would comment aloud and begin to plan their next move. ]
Should have told you sooner, shouldn't I have?
[ The weight of realizations, like creaking hinges. His voice strains against it, exhaustion bleeding at the core of everything.
Everything he strove for, everything he strove against. Gaelio at his side the entire time, neither of them aware that they continued to move in sync while they separated out as far as they could possibly separate. ]
I should've told you what you meant to me. I couldn't let go either, not even after what I'd done. Where does that leave us now?
[ An honest question. Too much blood spilled, thick in the air between them, yet they cling and cling.
Gaelio chasing him for reasons that cause his heart to stir anew, however bloody the path. ]
What you call masks -- it's skin. I had to live through it. I had to breathe. Can you understand? I still breathed you in.
[ Shucking past the layers, the skin that kept him safe, to the person that kept him safe. His heart thrums in his ears to speak as much, his grip shifting against shoulders. His fingers buried against hair -- a grip forming there too, twisting. ]
I wasn't happy. It was real. You were my friend. My only friend.