Post by max on Oct 6, 2010 20:29:32 GMT 10
Title: Inamorato
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Briar/Frostpine. The way the world ends.
Notes: In honour of PPF, though I don't want to officially enter, officially. Yeah.
____________________________
The first time he says 'You're beautiful,' he receives a harsh bark of laughter in reply, and the boy tucks his hands under his armpits.
'And the Emperor didn't mean it, neither.'
For him there is only one emperor, now. Will only ever be. The war has pared down his entire universe to succint distinctions – even his body has been forced into this economy, rendered down to iliac crests which jut through clothes and clavicles like razors and shadows under his eyes and ribs: but his beauty has been heightened by the harshness, not marred; sanded down and polished to a luminescence most people don't dare achieve – and this is something Frostpine understands, and cannot convey, so he grins and says something inane about youth being wasted on youth and watches the way everyone's eyes turn to follow the green mage as he strides away towards the Earth temple.
Once upon a time, when the world ended, he had stared into a mirror made of bronze and when the pool of copper and tin had begun to sublimate he had seen something irrevocable, he wants to explain, but the boy is already gone.
________________________________________
The second time he says it they're at the Duke's citadel, in a parlour awaiting the seneschal and his sister, and the boy makes a disgusted face and says, 'Mila, do you think I'm some kind of trollop?' but there is something desolate in it that takes the barb from the words.
He shakes his head, because it is all that is necessary.
Daja had said he is experiencing night terrors, and indeed, there is some clouded suggestion of subconscious horror pervading the grey green of his eyes (greyer now, childhood's vernal brightness having left them somewhere) when they flicker to Frostpine's and away again, another fear in them he recognises, mingling through that deeper dread like veins of bright iron in stone.
In the time when the world had to be rebuilt again, he had only been able to match the deterioration of his insides through abandonment, but Sandrilene is coming forward to press her lips to her brother's, as if by so simple an act she can will her own spirit into him – and when she pulls away, there are tears in her cornflower-blue eyes.
________________________________________
The third time he says it is the night the boy climbs up into the loft, and he is waiting for him. Watches as he pulls off shirt and breeches and loincloth, skeletal topography turned silver by the night, unavairiciously. Aware only at the back of his senses that, when he slips into the bed, he brings with him the scent of crushed basil.
'I don't want you to think I'm here for reasons I'm not.'
He says it fiercely, youth making a cliché of despair, pale hands already sliding over black hips, down to where beauty dies, and then they come apart with an urgency that belies all mutual emptiness, a click of teeth and bones and heat, sans the orchestrated tenderness entailed by love.
Briar's eyes are shut, face frozen into a grimace, hands knotting through hanks of his hair painfully as they move further into that cumulative dissolution of form and trust, hips arching into hips as if that is enough to temper grief while he whispers in choked sobs that he couldn't save them, any of them, that he couldn't do anything, that humans are not meant to play gods and Evvy and Rosethorn and his soul and the dead in piles along the roads and through the dark, the syntax of their bodies goes something like this:
You are beautiful.
I am destroyed.
________________________________________
In the morning deadened lips will whisper into the dawn, 'Everything died.'
And he will reply, simply, 'After Mbau, the only way to fix everything was to destroy it all, first.'
And he will be lying.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Briar/Frostpine. The way the world ends.
Notes: In honour of PPF, though I don't want to officially enter, officially. Yeah.
____________________________
The first time he says 'You're beautiful,' he receives a harsh bark of laughter in reply, and the boy tucks his hands under his armpits.
'And the Emperor didn't mean it, neither.'
For him there is only one emperor, now. Will only ever be. The war has pared down his entire universe to succint distinctions – even his body has been forced into this economy, rendered down to iliac crests which jut through clothes and clavicles like razors and shadows under his eyes and ribs: but his beauty has been heightened by the harshness, not marred; sanded down and polished to a luminescence most people don't dare achieve – and this is something Frostpine understands, and cannot convey, so he grins and says something inane about youth being wasted on youth and watches the way everyone's eyes turn to follow the green mage as he strides away towards the Earth temple.
Once upon a time, when the world ended, he had stared into a mirror made of bronze and when the pool of copper and tin had begun to sublimate he had seen something irrevocable, he wants to explain, but the boy is already gone.
________________________________________
The second time he says it they're at the Duke's citadel, in a parlour awaiting the seneschal and his sister, and the boy makes a disgusted face and says, 'Mila, do you think I'm some kind of trollop?' but there is something desolate in it that takes the barb from the words.
He shakes his head, because it is all that is necessary.
Daja had said he is experiencing night terrors, and indeed, there is some clouded suggestion of subconscious horror pervading the grey green of his eyes (greyer now, childhood's vernal brightness having left them somewhere) when they flicker to Frostpine's and away again, another fear in them he recognises, mingling through that deeper dread like veins of bright iron in stone.
In the time when the world had to be rebuilt again, he had only been able to match the deterioration of his insides through abandonment, but Sandrilene is coming forward to press her lips to her brother's, as if by so simple an act she can will her own spirit into him – and when she pulls away, there are tears in her cornflower-blue eyes.
________________________________________
The third time he says it is the night the boy climbs up into the loft, and he is waiting for him. Watches as he pulls off shirt and breeches and loincloth, skeletal topography turned silver by the night, unavairiciously. Aware only at the back of his senses that, when he slips into the bed, he brings with him the scent of crushed basil.
'I don't want you to think I'm here for reasons I'm not.'
He says it fiercely, youth making a cliché of despair, pale hands already sliding over black hips, down to where beauty dies, and then they come apart with an urgency that belies all mutual emptiness, a click of teeth and bones and heat, sans the orchestrated tenderness entailed by love.
Briar's eyes are shut, face frozen into a grimace, hands knotting through hanks of his hair painfully as they move further into that cumulative dissolution of form and trust, hips arching into hips as if that is enough to temper grief while he whispers in choked sobs that he couldn't save them, any of them, that he couldn't do anything, that humans are not meant to play gods and Evvy and Rosethorn and his soul and the dead in piles along the roads and through the dark, the syntax of their bodies goes something like this:
You are beautiful.
I am destroyed.
________________________________________
In the morning deadened lips will whisper into the dawn, 'Everything died.'
And he will reply, simply, 'After Mbau, the only way to fix everything was to destroy it all, first.'
And he will be lying.