Fic: As We Are Wont, 5
Lupin:
My body aches, and not with longing.
Between my shoulder blades are cavities, empty and filled with tar. Under my ribcage there is a broken switch. My neck seems to stretch like a giraffe reaching for the tops of trees, and my spine bends like copper. Someday my knuckles with become inflamed with arthritis and my fingertips raw with the skin peeled away. My wrists will swell, the pale and slenderness of youth has already faded, and I can see my skin begin to yellow like jaundice.
I wish.
I want.
I cannot believe.
There was a time I had faith, but I cannot remember the feeling of it now.
To see you. Solid, before me. Naked, in the moonlight. Eroticism, intimacy. What do bones of rotting marrow know? Bodies are foreign, we are not ourselves when we touch skin to skin. My fingers, the palms of my hands have never touched anything before they you. Memory does not exist. Your knuckles and you knees, the arches of your feet and the bend of your waist. It is like asking a paradox. Your sternum, the dimples of your back. I could stare without taste and light myself on fire.
Why are you all sinew and scar? Why are you written in blood and silver when you writhe under my hands? Who are you, when you open your mouth and lick your lips? You seem to be made of the pearls of memories, the sound of your voice rips the moving tapestry. My love, my death, how can I keep you when the pins and nails of men and wives would stake you the wall until iridescent scales fell from your eyes and turned to ash?
If I could, I would take your body and spread it on my bed. I would press kisses into the underside of your existence, I would anoint you and pray until the oceans shook with envy. Then I would desecrate you, I would blaspheme against you and sin so sweetly, I would rebel and destroy your faith. Our bodies would tremble with the wrath of our love, and scars and sinew would be insufficient to contain us. Sex is not religious. Purged, annihilated, terrible, I would curse our bed and leave it to remind us of our deficiencies.
You know I do not do things by halves. I serve two masters, not one. I loved a girl and it drove her into the arms of my enemies. If you can survive two wars, I will eat you alive in a third.
That is my nature. Do not mistake me for something else.
SS