(Untitled)

[adaeo]

Adaeo remembered with a mingling combination of guilt and desire that he'd never met Jaerv in public without a cocktail, before. He would watch the door, lovesick, his great, fat heart growing restless, then draw on his lips with something sticky, one ounce at a time, as if to hold the intoxication there and give it to his lover as a sedative

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[anonymous]

He came an hour early, but in an act of hostile irreverence, did not change out of the clothes he'd worked in that morning. His hands, still flush with ache, clenched and unclenched in his restless stalk of the restaurant's perimeters. Four cigarettes in succession burned quickly by the power of hot, hateful suction. Let him try. Let him try went the snagged, raw, unfinishable refrain in his head. Several of the men who passed him stopped short of addressing him, their instincts saluted but not fully engaged by Jaerv's skulking, private aggression

[adaeo]

Jaerv appeared, in his distinctive, vibrating way, just at the moment Adaeo realized what a horrid idea this might've been. And there were reasons, too, reasons he could've identified and explored, given another moment to himself, reasons he could've used as an excuse to run as quick as cowardice could carry him back to the church. Instead he was interrupted at a pivotal place, and it left him jumpy enough to jerk in his seat with a cold breath outward at the arrival of his former lover

[honeysuckle_raw]

His hard stare didn't for an instance cease its black impalement. He watched Adaeo as if he were trying to burn away with a dark fire the time that had passed. Jaerv refused to allow in a trace of the concern he felt over how glum and worn was his last lover (he'd taken others since only in near-wordless, grunted, seedy and temporary exchange). No, he didn't forgive Adaeo for becoming this, subdued and cheerless, more beaten than any of the lustful blows he'd weathered from the blacksmith. 'I look more appropriate,' Adaeo claimed, and for that- the kind of birdbrain phrase that came from presumed 'intellectuals'- Jaerv had only a sneer that served both as an expression of derision and an obscene assistance to the purposefully ugly noise of mucus snorted loudly down his throat. Healthy. Healthy! What did Adaeo know about healthy?

- the same. Good. Almost before he could even hear it, Jaerv had nearly lurched forward and swung his foot forward at the same time. His heavy, muddy boot connected with Adaeo's shin under the table, both

[adaeo]

The speed of transition from his speech to Jaerv's movement left the new priest as vulnerable as an insect in the sand; he cried out in that shameless, uncareful way of one whose pain is self-inflicted when they are alone, as he'd done a thousand times tripping over loose boards in the rectory of the church, acquiring splinters. He bent forward, one arm on the table, the other down beneath, uselessly prying at the boot that held its hurt against him

[wicked_abandon]

Even as he finished his thought, Adaeo was consoling the ache in his ankle, if covertly. The pair of them rubbed together under the table with all the uselessness of applying pressure to things that don't need it, a silly something we all do after discomfort because we can think of nothing else, like bouncing in the cold or blowing on a burn. He looked briefly concerned and somewhat inconvenienced

[honeysuckle_raw]

He was watching the squirms and frowns of hurt on Adaeo's face with a restless, neurotic sadism. His nerves sparked with it, crackling to snap brightly across the charged distance and connect pain to itself. To chain the noises together, the negative and positive of crash and whimper, clash and sigh, slam and cry. Jaerv fidgeted in a single, rough, heavy motion, like a horse in a stall testing the damage to be done by mere rowdy shifting. He even snorted, rolled his black eyes dramatically at the very explanation he'd demanded; he all but pawed the floor with his foot

[wicked_abandon]

Adaeo winced backward, an instinctive separation from danger that Jaerv's movement caused. And it was instinctive, of course it was, nothing more than a memory. He was certain that even Jaerv, even this unfearful, unrestrained forger, would not indulge his tantrums where a whole host of strangers were eating. Guards patrolled these safe little streets, after all.

"For heaven's sake, we're in public," he groaned at the perverse threat, quietly, lightly, almost to himself. A mallow-white thumb and forefinger probed into the babyfine pinch of his eyes, and he lowered in every way, feeling the room around them like a bag on his shoulder.

He prayed in silence for resolve, to be reminded that God wanted him here, to help heal whatever hurt had turned this man so black on the inside. But it seemed that even God was not a strong enough force to pull him from the precipice of offense that he was suddenly shoved over. What was Jaerv thinking, sinking so low, throwing that around as though trust meant nothing

[honeysuckle_raw]

Like a child for whom negative attention is preferable to none at all, -for whom the desire to be dwelt on usurped any impression another's distress might have made- Jaerv was glad. He was oversatisfied, even; he had overshot and the rush of success was a little too much, so that it came with the slight sheepishness of excessive victory. He watched Adaeo blanche, hiss, swear at him with such helplessly wooden pain that Jaerv was almost embarrassed for him.

'I don't know why I never noticed how sick you are,' Adaeo said to him, and Jaerv was prompt to smirk nastily, but the expression faltered just slightly. It was just a little sour, curdled at its ends and ill-fitting with a rotten guilt. This second ghost recalled the first, for him, the red-throated robin whose snaps he had silenced. The sensation of a spirit emptying from a body, from the mouth, kissing it as it went- the lifeless noise he swallowed into his own body. Why didn't you stay gone then? Jaerv had wondered spitefully sometimes, when he was aggravated. At least if I'd

[adaeo]

Adaeo was shaking his head, hair trapped still to obey the movement. He was disappointed as Jaerv took him in, unaware of himself, simply repeating in a chain of thought pulled tight enough to warp that the blacksmith would be pleased to see him buckle, he would. He was ready in an instant to let the effort go, to offer up the new direction his life had taken, fulfill his obligations to the church and invite him, then leave. No sense, surely, to sit beneath that judgmental eye and listen to him be nasty.

Then Jaerv said, with the basic, informal aggression that came to him as easily as air, I'll show you how I stand it, and Adaeo remembered him freshly. Even when he smiled inside at the nervous priest's discomfort, he was who he was, tightened, twisted, dark. He couldn't even smile happily

[honeysuckle_raw]

‘No’ with Adaeo did not mean no- Jaerv was not angry. He pretended with a snide, smacking slip of his tongue from the top of his half-sneering lip to the corner of his mouth that he was disinterested, unimpressed by Adaeo’s conviction. No matter how much the Itanian’s voice allied with song even in discord. No matter how sweetly it brushed Jaerv’s softer nerves, where he had his own stiff-jointed sense of play. Despite all Jaerv’s filthy reanimations of his old plaything, despite the poison of his memory, Adaeo remained Adaeo. That he couldn’t change, no matter how he tried to crush him, smear him and make him finally confess a disappointing truth. Adaeo stayed Adaeo, and a part of Jaerv partly unkinked and wanted to stretch high and long to reach the familiar, baiting lilt of No. No. He battened it down with the corners of his mouth diving in deep, headfirst overcompensation

[honeysuckle_raw]

"I do," he countered, the landscape of his voice once prone to hills and pitches, now a flatland, unwavering, tuned to the stricter demands of argument. "I do, as a matter of fact," and for once, he didn't fear the needling humiliation which often followed insisted anything to Jaerv. He might laugh, or dismiss him, or tell him that he didn't know what he wanted, but he knew, he knew. He was here for a reason. If he'd have to repeat it internally until the words lost their structure, he'd do it - he was here for a reason

[honeysuckle_raw]

Adaeo’s pert incredulity- his indignation which might’ve seemed for a moment so gleaming with perfect surety- was perfectly plump with doubt. Jaerv did not understand it on intellectual grounds, only understood it as the glossed softness that begged to be thrashed apart. “Stop what-,” he tossed the words between them like wet, raw meat onto hot iron. “Tell me- say it- stop what.” He rushed closer and stopped just short of Adaeo’s face with the violence of a slap, all because of the feather pillow give he had always sensed in him. Adaeo, his, and his supple pleading. His throat faint, his cheeks once powered, his lips firmly and luminously fatty. Jaerv twisted his hands so that his wrists faced outward, and gripped the edge of the table like he wanted to shove it forward into Adaeo’s chest.

It wasn’t the right thing to do, Adaeo was saying. Rage poured in splash to his wet-hot eyes, a glassy spit of boiled sensation. Usually violence came before the completion of its cycle. He hunkered and bulled through to meet anger, wielded it, but

[honeysuckle_raw]

Every little part of him strained into a lean with the weight of his frustration, of watching Jaerv sully what he'd earned through ten months of suffered, strenuous training, of watching him prepare to walk away. His body tightened, he gripped the table's edge for stability and pressed those fat, formerly ink-smudged brows down in a hard line of intent. "You need help, Jaerv! You have to understand that!" This was not the self-assured, pretended knowledge of another, educating them on their own private flaws, but a deep, desperate plea - he did, beyond doubt, need to accept himself as broken and find a way to be fixed. "I didn't -subject- myself to your tantrums today because I missed them. I came to -help- you claw your way out from under them before they're all that's -left- of you!"

[honeysuckle_raw]

He’d begun his departure thinking he’d won. He had initiated heated protest, desperation, shock, offense- all these felt like his. Like faces Adaeo exchanged for the sake of keeping each interaction fresh and newly-conceived. In fact, he could not have trusted a romance without them. How else could he ever understand his own impact on another person? Where would he find it? It was only legible to him when written across Adaeo’s contorting face made miserable, tortured, hotly embarrassed.

What Adaeo called to him made him hesitate. With a scowl of indecision, he glared- unfriendliness on any other man, but not the sort of expression Jaerv would have been patient enough to make if he were actually angry. There he stood, fixed like a tangled black root to the one source warm with life. Adaeo- horrible, featherly fumbling Adaeo. Jaerv squared against him, resolved and slightly blunted at the same time. “Come here.”

[honeysuckle_raw]

He celebrated. Privately, quietly, but he did. Whatever black, molten thing Jaerv tried to counter with, Adaeo had stopped him by telling him something honest. He'd understood him

[honeysuckle_raw]

It had been so long since being this close to Adaeo. Since he had obeyed in his curious and half-anxious way. Since he’d initiated a peace they both knew would not last- and neither did they want it to, either of them. Adaeo would’ve been bored, restless. Jaerv could picture him now, meting out a gentle huff against the operating wires of this stupid priesthood puppetry- the food, he couldn’t possibly enjoy the food. The sullen dryness of his skin and lips, the lifelessness of his hair, it must’ve all been some prolonged and detailed project he’d invented for himself to prove he could prove, somehow, the punishment Jaerv did.

At first he twitched in temptation to insolently jerk back his hand. The impulse to deny Adaeo this breathless, careful satisfaction seized him but only weakly and quickly. It withdrew its bite. He curled his hot fist suddenly and tightly around all Adaeo’s fingers, then tugged him sharply forward, but with brevity, like a yank to a rope to spin something beaded onto it. “I know you don’t like it. You‘re