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 Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2023 5:30 am
Albite stopped cold, caught a breath, held it till he couldn’t anymore.
Let it out.
Did that all again even more slowly, and as Faustite stepped back into shelter, so too did Albite, the ever discordant opposite of his better half, step out even further into the rain. Paced backwards till the thick soles of his Eternal boots glanced the edges of well laid stone, till the ledge stopped him from going any further. He stood there breathing in the smallest parts of the budding torrential downpour, breathing out fine mist and warm air.
He let himself soak in it—soaked the sight and smell and feel of it all in—Faustites huddled fires and buffeted flames, staring at his lover through the rain while it slicked his own features cold and made his lengths into a cape of spongey anchors at his back. He watched Faustite quietly, until he had to close his eyes to keep the rivulets of rainwater from obscuring his unsheltered view.
What had Faustite asked of him again? To turn clocks back, steal his crown, let him be anything other than a king for a day —
And what did he go and do instead?
*Not that.*
Couldn’t play pretend effectively when he was so in the present, when the dealings of the past meant living like they were still surrounded by it. Time and passed, things had changed — they had changed — and though he didn’t have to call his husband king, he sometimes wanted to. Had he ever treated him differently for having to do it now? Would he start to treat him differently?!
Probably not, but if that was Faustite’s fear? Maybe he could assuage that—
“Do you know what I missed most about before, Ei? More n teleporting shittily all over town, or our near-death, half-drowned training sessions?” He could laugh at himself for this, could rumble a deeply pleased sound in time with the thunder, because his skills for those things hadn’t changed! They still got to have those moments, he still teleported like a man trying to fall headfirst through a wall and come out sideways in the sea! He and Faustite still— to this day — found ways to train viciously as often as they did laze about in each others arms.
Some things were still the same, maybe the best things? The ones that weren’t tied into powers and responsibilities that came part and parcel with such grand titles. He thought of that as he closed the gap with lengthy strides, until the wind and rain could have his back — till he could feel the static of oncoming lightning fill the spaces around them. It was always the most exciting thing though—every moment spent between a rock and a hard place. Between a brick wall and an encroaching flame. It was nice to be the barrier for once, to be able to bracket Faustite where he stood….
“I missed this—*right here*—“ he leant in to whisper over the storm, soft, sultry brush of sound close to Faustites ear. Setting rain chilled fingertips up along Fauatites own, searching to ease the headache he knew was ninety-eight precent ‘him’ caused. As if he could undo it all with touch alone, a whole nother apology to trace along Fauatites temples as he kissed the rest of his muffled words into his husbands heated hairline.
“But what I’ll never miss again? Is being unable to touch you how I always wanted, when I wanted. I won’t miss you being unable to kiss me the way you do now, either. Without having to worry about me burning myself with every careless grab. You don’t even have to pull on the *idea* of being human to have it anymore—In fact? Everything we wanted then, that’s *ours* now. All the best parts, all the parts that matter…” The lightning licked the sky close enough to glance metal awnings and set iron-worked brocade glowing molten around them; the outpouring of energy deafening and full of purple-white-hued sparks. Not that Albite paid them any heed, ******** nature entirely. He had Faustite under him, could Sup on his boys warmth and offer some gentle reprieve against the external elements more n happily. Because he was happy—apologizing and happy—soaked to the spine and happy—touching Faustite like he was a precious thing and happy!!
But was Faustite happy? How did he ask—demand—-hound him for better answers while offering up stronger reassurances!
‘I can’t —-‘
He wanted to, to ask all that and more, to tell him that—
‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, not ever again, and even if Schorl rises up from wherever she’s buried now? She won’t have any real power over you! Not any power you don’t give her. No one will—not ever again….‘
The thoughts he didn’t speak were all sorts of more, much, overwhelmingly so. It felt like the screaming sear of freedom trapped on his tongue, buried behind his thick skull walls. He left it there. Let the sound of the storm wash his thoughts out into static. He’d tell Faustite exactly how he felt someday, would learn how to push like he used to all over again, when the stakes had been just as high, but he’d had far less to lose than he did now. He knew Faustite had true peers, actual equals. Knew the bodies who numbered those were few and that none of them, the winged Eternal and caped General masses were it. Not anymore. He knew Faustite wasn’t like that either though—where he built a pillar and stood upon it. No one did. That was what made them such good sovereigns. That was what would make his husband such a good King—-once his beloved got a taste for it of course, n when the crown finally felt less fullah bleeding glass n broken thorns, n maybe if he could encourage Fauatite to go barefoot a little more often?
Or to go out and do things just like this—silly and indulgent—talking about nothing at all. ********, did they even need to be talking!? Probably not! Albire could abide that, play up the wonderfully wordless silence while gently protecting Faustite from some of the sideways rainfall…
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Posted: Wed Aug 16, 2023 8:52 am
Faustite was glowering up at the sky while his husband played around in the rain. Went and got himself drenched in it, hair probably weighing in at a few tons and causing his neck all sorts of strife, but Faustite knew Albite wouldn't complain about such things. He was too excited to be ******** around to notice the pain, if anything.
But Faustite? He wasn't stranded, could seldom be with the ability to teleport where he wished. The rain would not hold him captive under this narrow strip of overhang for long, if he didn't want it to be so. He stayed because Albite wanted this, and he wanted Albite to have the modicum of happiness that he could seldom secure for himself. So, for the time being, he could be miserable. He could glower up at the sky like it s**t in his bed and he rolled over into it. There would be time for feeling better about it later.
The boy knew how to brighten him up in an instant, however. He encroached steadily, talking on about something soft and sweet and wanted, catching Faustite's attention in a lazy manner. For a time, Faustite wasn't really listening, for he knew that Albite would tell him what was on his mind, whether he asked or not. It was a predictable sort of comfort.
But once his boy got close enough to touch, and reached for those gossamer light brushes against his skin, his fingertips? It was a delight that stole all of Faustite's attention, perched a smile on his face as he looked at his boy. That poor, soaked boy with his dreads eating his face — while Albite busied himself with trying to assuage Faustite of his permanent headache, Faustite was smoothing Albite's hair away from his countenance. Rendered it easier to steal a few kisses along his chin, though he would rather have cut the boy's rambling off entirely.
He was right, though. Faustite seldom thought much of the past when he could avoid it, as his thoughts were ever cast back to Schörl or Umber or the darker days of his life. But there were also the days when they had gotten to know each other, where they faced the repercussions of one of them being too hot to touch. Albite would have remembered it better, for he was the one that oft bore the scars from such ordeals, but Faustite recognized it in those selfsame scars sometimes, when they caught his eye. Yes, there was a time when touching each other was strictly dangerous, when doing so was only ever at Albite's expense physically, when it added to Faustite's feelings of guilt for liking the boy so dearly.
But that wasn't their problem anymore. Much of the boys had an answer to his heat, and he was happy for it. Would that they could spend all day with each other while the war took care of itself. Faustite could excuse himself from his own ineptitudes, from all his failings that bred more work for the people around him.
But when lightning struck the awning, such warm thoughts scattered with the sparks and Faustite flinched so terribly that he nearly lost his footing. A few harried gasps of air and he became aware that, no, he wasn't hit, but they likely weren't safe by ******** around out on the roofs. Convincing Albite of that would be a trial, especially given their earlier ******** me," he muttered to the storm itself. Like the damned thing cared whether it scared the wits out of him or not, whether it gave him lightning scars on top of his lightning scars or not. It was easier, then, to cling to the boy and let his fear abate naturally.
"All this power and I'm afraid of a ******** storm," he complained. "Like the ******** lightning should be scared of me." A hollow realization, that — none of his adversaries experienced a healthy dose of fear at the sight of him, even if most of them equaled him in power. He simply wasn't enough of a threat. He wasn't doing enough.
There was no helping it now. He buried his face against his boy's soaked chest, even as a flash of lightning blinded them both with its proximity. No gap remained for the boom of thunder; it was deafening and instantaneous.
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Posted: Tue Aug 22, 2023 7:03 am
‘Because you’re human—‘
The thought came in with the onslaught of the storms uptick, the gust of wind that turned the rain from gently drenching into rough, slapping, pellets against his skin. He stood there still—against it—letting his boy bury into his bosom while hoping only that he wouldn’t drown him with tit-water. He could’ve mentioned how most creatures with any base sense, or hell! Most animals, with even a single cell of thought, felt fear. Once bitten, twice shy, it was a saying even he knew! Repeating it would’ve been silly, because Faustite was smart. He understood that much, knew his husband to be more than a boy-lusting King of a perpetual blaze. That his beloved was made up of more than sharp instincts and even sharper self-loathing. Had all the abilities to pull people together, and lead ranks into file, could interrogate princesses —-
Smart, smart, smart as a whip and meaner than the blade at his hip. Surviving Schorl took more n just resilience right? Took brains— He almost, sometimes, wanted Faustite to spare him some of that intellect. Had wanted that back then, while stealing metal nibbed pens and wishing he’d had the patience to write cleanly instead of ruining what he touched.
Or at least the patience to learn the skill—
He didn’t though. Didn’t have the patience any more than he had the sense to fear the most sensible things! Like fires, or floods, or sharp pokey sticks, or poison ivy!
Like his own dying.
All his fears were a little more personal, he held them in his hands—pressed the heat of them to his chest and squeezed that much more tightly. His fears were very people framed and abandonment shaped, ridiculous sorts of selfish things, because Faustite wasn’t going anywhere.
I won’t let him leave me.
“I love you, Faustite. For having the sense to run from the lightning—” the words sighed out as cracklings of fresh static grew, like the air was starved and overfull of too much charge all at once, “but I love you even *more* for having the strength to stand in it with me.” He could be serious sometimes, he could mean things, snarl them in the downpour, mean them all the more for how the storm tried to muffle him. He wasn’t about to be out-howled by any ******** wind though— had more than enough air in his head to fuel his lungs and give force to every other word that escaped his lips.
“Even knowing how much it could hurt you? You’re still right here. I’d say that’s pretty ******** powerful.” As if being unable to seal them to Faustite’s own and get the rain-soaked kisses he so readily deserved made him speak quicker for it. The urgency he suddenly felt, to have and hold and comfort, yet also to *move*, in the absence of all thunderous sounds.
“We should probably go—“
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Posted: Wed Aug 23, 2023 5:41 pm
"Strange thing to love someone for," he spoke muffled into Albite's soaked tits. Loving someone for having the sense to run from lightning was like loving someone for having instincts, wasn't it? Any rational person understood that lightning wasn't good for them. There had to be some other meaning to what Albite said, then, because the boy normally didn't bullshit this badly.
Maybe that last part was a hint. That it had more to do with being with him in the middle of a thunderstorm that brewed overhead. That it had to do with the scars down his back and the experience that caused them, acting as a reminder for what lightning could do to a boy full of metal.
Could've breathed a sigh for that. Would've if he hadn't found himself on the ground, an earsplitting boom the only indication for why he was seeing white and his body felt like every nerve fiber had lit on fire. He was in enough pain that he didn't know what was hurting him until he found that he couldn't move his legs, his arms — no part of his body was listening to him. His voice came as a staggered outcry when he found it, as he stared up at the baleful sky that so quickly betrayed them, right as they were intending to ******** leave. When he could finally raise his arms, their motions were jerking and uncoordinated. The smell of burning flesh reached his ********. Me." He enunciated to the air. Still grunting the misery of moving, Faustite craned his neck to see where the hell Albite had gone, and if they were going to have more trouble before they could get the hell out of there.
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Posted: Fri Aug 25, 2023 4:32 pm
This was nothing like jumping a battery wrong for the first time, back-looping the surge and getting a face full of sparks for it, or trying to tape over an outlet wire while having forgotten to ground himself and without first cutting the power in the breaker box to that particular line---
It was so much worse--
When he could see again, ********, when he could think again? Past his own snow-flurry vision and static on the T.V at 3am thoughts; it was to realize that Taenite was as right as anyone else was about him. He was absolutely going to get himself killed someday, messily even. But not by some fascinating new interest on white on the other side, or by flirting relentlessly with the line that divided traitors and true born devotees, but by pissing off Mother Nature herself. Laying there, the picture perfect image of a freshly killed fish dumped in scalding oil, gasping up into the storm's lashing rain, he felt like She must've been laughing at him.
It stung his body to imaging hearing as much as it flayed the rest of his pride nice and raw. He'd give her this win, trade his whole humbled self to acknowledge that He The Senshi was not: braver, better, bolder than She the storm. And then he'd thank every imaginable deity from the flat of his back for the fact that he could still feel his fingers and toes. That he could wiggle them, even as doing so made him flinch through pins and needles and livewire heat all anew---
Worth the pain to lift his hand and turn his head--
'Well, that's gonna ******** scar.'
Everything on his inner-left arm was a ruin straight up to the elbow; all of his oldest ink blown through from fingertips to joining joint. Edged now in dark Lichtenberg figures--that was the word he'd learned to better understand what laced Eion's spine; a wound he found beautiful and terrifyingly painful all at once. A wound that he worshiped, and so of course he had to learn better what it was called than 'Encke's an a*****e Marks'. He thought he could see the seared imprint of a bolt, a rivet, the delicate metal that made up what would've been his beloveds spine, the spacing that connected said spine to ribs that weren't technically ribs---
This was what he got for daring to let his hands wander so he could better hold his boy close.
'Worth it'
He thought briefly of a girl he'd met from the Transkei region who'd survived such a thing, how her siblings hadn't, and that she'd come West of Kribi because of how shunned she'd been in the South. But Obia lived in the West, too. In some communities those types of myths were as pervasive as the images of monsters they spawned---
'Maybe I'll go home and be confused for an Obayi? Wouldn't that be a thing---'
It was still worth it. That thought stuck, hard, sharp, sincere, as he blinked through more rain and wheezed something that sounded like an answer to Faustites cursing.
"Rain-chck--" on the ********, and the frolicking, on playing out in the rain. He couldn't even tell what was burning anymore; himself, Faustite, everything that he moved by an inch, only to lose what felt like miles of consciousness for it. "********? Bein'n'ternal dsn't make me lightn'prff..."
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Posted: Sun Aug 27, 2023 6:52 pm
Everything hurt, throbbed, burned, and felt numb. like all the nerves were summarily ripped from his body and replaced after enough experiments had been conducted with them. Moving was astronomically painful, even the smallest movement overstimulating while his heart beat furiously in his chest. He thought that it must have stopped, or skipped, or who ******** knew, but the brief sense of doom he experienced had passed.
Twitchy were his movements when he half-dragged, half-crawled his way over to his similarly bowled over boy. If he didn't make it? Faustite understood that lightning could kill a man, and whatever the ******** happened, it either hit them or hit near them, hard enough to send the pair flying —
Oh, but he spoke, or Faustite thought he spoke, though he didn't recognize any of the words. Sounded more like gargling his own teeth.
He couldn't think beyond the urge to get out of there, and the only out of there that came to Faustite's electricity-addled mind was the Dark Kingdom. Specifically, their home, which they left for this ill-fated frolic out in a ******** rainstorm. Faustite didn't put any words to it; he wasn't sure his would be faring any better than whatever the drivel was that fell out of Albite's mouth. Might've been talking about how he s**t himself, for all Faustite knew.
When at last he crawled himself over far enough to grab the boy's boot, his thoughts were immediately of home. Of the round bedroom they left behind in the top of the turret, the bay window that looked out at their dark, otherworldly skies; the comfortable bed that sat in a recess in the middle of the floor. He thought about his viewpoint whenever he stood next to the bed, leaning against the railing to tease a sleeping boy. He thought about the chandelier of Rift crystal that hung overhead, oft casting an eerie violet light into the area.
While it took longer than usual, they were at last gone. No more than traces of soot and dust spelled that they were ever there.
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