• Mature • It Might As Well Rain

[Carver]

First of Vhalar, Arc Seven-Twenty

He stepped down, trying not to look long at her,
as if she were the sun, yet he saw her,
like the sun, even without looking.

Leo Tolstoy

The rain came through the open window. Cold, heavy droplets spattered the fine-boned angles of a face dusted in freckles. Green eyes, as dark in hue as a swatch of forest in the lush of a winter’s night, watched the street below. The cigarette that hung from his bloodied lips had dimmed but not died. Smoke curled in thin trails of wisps from the pale orange embers that cooled to ashen gray.

It hurt. Meraki tapped his bandaged fingertips to his lower lip where the flesh had swollen. The angry red puff around cracked-open skin. It wasn’t the only place with the residual symptoms of a beating. Sickly bruises stole the spotlight from an otherwise handsome countenance. His eyebrow had the peeled remnants of a gauze bandage that hadn’t kept in place but left thin threads behind to stick at pocked gouges where the glass had once stuck – from the bottle that had hit him upside the head, only to shatter in an array of sepia pieces.

That hurt too. His lithe body felt exhausted in a way that could only be described as the achy soreness best aligned with a belief that one might have fallen off a rooftop without even remembering such an injurious act.

From the door of the apartment, to the window across the living space, a trail of blood-stained clothes had followed him. The padded streaks of crimson blended between the distinct shape of his footprints and where he couldn’t quite disguise the dragged limp of his fatigue. Boots, at the door, left in their aged and peeled leathers with frayed laces. Dangerous, they laid in the way of any who might wander through unexpecting from the front door. Then the coat, long with a fur collar but torn and patched over and torn again. Its sleeve laid outward, as if reaching for the trousers that lay crumpled in a pile of black fabric. Or perhaps the matched shirt which laid only a step away from those.

A green vest draped along a white velvet chair. The shape of faded red, a rose-pink tint that shimmered in the dying sunlight of dusk, mottled the furniture in rough handprints. On the wooden floor under this spot, an assortment of trinkets and junk littered the space.

The hum of a sparse crowd murmured below the window. People without faces, people without names, people without minds. Meraki watched while the figures blurred, each time he tried to pay closer attention to one than another, and how often their attire simply changed from what it had once been. What had been the lady who’d walked down the street with a vivid blue gown, had turned to a pale approximation of a bride in white, only to turn to the blues and browns of a lower class wench. Her face remained indistinguishable from the rest, but he had tried to look anyway – from his high vantage point at the windowsill.

Wind gusted sharper raindrops inward. A puddle had formed at the windowsill. Leaves shook from thin branches of twisted pavilion trees. Autumnal colors of reds, and oranges, and greens drifted through the gray of the rainy trial.

Meraki had a feeling he’d been here for a while. Sitting, dyingsmoking, and waiting. No skitter of claws on the floor greeted him, though. He heard the lap of water, waves… and he glanced once across the apartment to where the bathroom door remained shut. An inhale, he filled his lungs with smoke. The embers revitalized. Warmth returned. His cheeks reddened. The cuts along his brow bled. Thin streaks of scarlet traced his facial features and dripped down from his jaw. Some of the drops landed on his bare thigh, and others landed on the cotton white shorts he wore – or the similar fabric of a tank top. For what skin showed, tan scars proved as common as freckles.

Head rested against the window’s frame, the young man turned his attention away from the street and over the rooftops instead. In the far, far distance – along the horizon – he could see what looked to be water as gray as the cloudy sky above.

[Lars]

First of Vhalar, Arc Seven-Twenty

And not for one second losing sight of her,
though he did not look at her.
He felt as though the sun were coming near him.

Leo Tolstoy

The rain sputtered in splashed droplets disturbed by shuffling feet. Light steps carried through the shallow water, over the squish of gathered leaves in their brightly-outlined piles. Yellows and oranges and reds and browns; the warmth of autumn trials in the sleeping sun. If he listened hard enough, above the tapping of his shoes and the pattering of rain, the sound of brushing leaves awaited him within.

Water-logged soles moved from the soggy compliance of puddles and leaves, onward to the base of slick stone road. Lars didn’t know the path, but he knew where it led.

Nothing more than will prevented him shivering. He cut across the path to walk beneath the trees, though the dripping fingers of their rain-spattered canopies pelted him with water all the same. A steady stream of fallen drops slipped behind his head and hit his skin, to roll beyond the collar of his button-up shirt, and he left it all alone. The dampness there was nothing to the cling of white, wet hair, sticking to a pale face of ivory and bone. It was cold… but in a way he couldn’t feel, or else he simply couldn’t care.

The hands pulled from his emptied pockets were bony and bruised and pale.

Lars pulled at a navy blue kerchief until it left bare a neck devoid of injury or scar. The material was coarse, and stained with blood, and he let it weave around his fingers in twisted turns like some sort of slippery animal. He watched it for a moment while he walked, and as he stepped out from the cover of the trees, he let it go. It whipped away on the passage of the wind, and by the time he glanced to find it… it was gone. Hidden somewhere beyond the faceless constructs of women and men ever-shifting, in a place he never again thought to find, gone. So he only looked forward and down.

The door found his arm, wetted and cold as the rolled-up sleeve at his elbow, pushing in a firm and practiced motion. Lars ignored the rain that threatened at his back (it had already made its mark on him) and stepped inside.

Eyes of painted gray were greeted with warmth. No staircase or hallway blocked his view, but the world openly gave way to the room he had wanted. A dream, he knew, but… not his own, not unless he had been unaware of its creation. He struggled in the sense of it as he stood. Still. Soaked. Not shivering. Not open to the knowledge that he could. And his eyes narrowed for a trill as he stood there in the doorway, staring, trying to comprehend the nature of the dreamscape – before he opted not to care. He rushed inside.

Lars stumbled and tripped before he made it halfway through the room. Some haphazardly-strewn obstacle kept him from his goal and nearly brought him level with the floor, if not for his quick rebalancing. He would have laughed for the lightness of his heart, but the stuttered skips within would not allow it. They left him clumsy and anxious instead. In ignorance of this he continued, shoes tapping quick across the cluttered floor, until he fell upon his knees beside an occupied chair. And without care for the discomfort of his rain-soaked form, Lars threw his arms around Meraki’s waist.

His head laid to rest upon a blood-spattered thigh. Scarlet smeared across his dampened cheek and thought to tint his colorless hair. Where the blood had come from, he’d hardly had the time to look before he’d disregarded all sense and moved forward. With a slight lift, Lars held his face to Meraki's chest to embrace him properly.

“You're hurt,” he whispered.

“You're bleeding. Why must I always find you bleeding?”

It didn’t matter. Whatever was wrong, he would fix it. Whatever hurt, he would mend. Desperation shone through the grasp of cold, bruised fingers, holding madly to the white cotton fabric of the other’s tank top. Whether construct or dreamer or perfect illusion, Lars didn’t care. He held on for as long as he was allowed, knees digging into the floor, a puddle of rain collecting beneath.

[Carver]

First of Vhalar, Arc Seven-Twenty

A touch to the door. Meraki could sense it but not through his hearing; not through his eyes; not through anything but some sense beyond sense. He turned away from the windowsill and the world moved with him. The stiff lines of wood fluxed and wove in hyperbolic shapes. By the time that Lars reached him, any handle on linear perception had slipped through his metaphorical grip. Meraki felt arms around his waist. The touch grounded him back to his dream, rather than drift away with the waves that he heard on the horizon.

Copper glints to the light in his hair, a similar metallic shimmer brushed across his freckled face. Paint? No, a blush that rose under the streaks of blood and layered bruises. Cigarette vanished, though smoke continued to furl around his ginger hair. Wet, the other man who held him looked drenched to the bone with white hair stuck to ghostly white skin. The rain diluted the blood on the thigh and tinted some of the hair with a pink tint. In a sweep, from thigh to chest, Lars laid against his chest in the tight embrace.

Meraki set his hand on the damp hair. He ran his palm over and pressed the water out of the strands. His bandages soaked through. Quiet, breath escaped him in small gasps while he heard… heard an echoed approximation of a voice he knew. It felt far away, much farther than how close Lars seemed. Miles and miles away.

Hand to his forehead, he frowned slightly then glanced outside. The rain continued, but it had lessened some into a gentle pitter-patter of autumnal afternoon. He scratched at the cuts that bled, then stopped. Meraki grabbed onto Lars’ wrists. Green eyes gazed to find blue gray ones in turn, and he leaned close with a slant of a smile. “I’ve missed you, love.”

He lifted the hands, by the wrists, and kissed along the cold fingers. Meraki set his wounded lips against the knuckles and then inward to the palms. He gently scraped the edges of his front teeth against the fleshy mound of a palm. He glanced down, then returned his gaze to look at his soulmate.

“Have you lost your bracelets? Where are your gloves?” he asked while his mind flitted within the dream that ran without conscious intention. A nearby fireplace sat cold with blackened ash among logs and body parts. Meraki kissed Lars’ bare wrist. He nuzzled his freckled cheek against the knuckles. A moment’s peace, while blood dripped over his injured brow, then he said in his raspy voice, “How about a treat? Something sweet? Sweeter than any candy or cake…”

Meraki let go of the wrists. He wrapped his arms around Lars’ waist, and he dragged the other man onto his lap. Somewhere between lucidity and sleep, the mage drew him close so that they’d both fit comfortably on the white lounge chair. He licked and kissed at the rain drops that trickled over his lover’s slender neck.

Forward, he leaned. He gathered Lars in his arms, then stood with the other’s weight balanced against his lithe body. Meraki easily tread over the littered puddles of trinkets. Once he reached the bathroom door, it opened as if it had never been shut. He walked along tiles. With each footprint, scarlet bloodstains were left behind. Meraki set Lars in a porcelain tub of hot water mixed with fragrant soaps. He brought some of the water up to shower over the white hair.

“Lars?” Meraki stood beside the bath. The slow drip-drip-drip of blood ran down off his jaw. Cigarette smoke, with no cigarette to match, wisped around his bare neck. Candlelight flickered against the tiled walls, but no candles resided in the windowless steamy room. “I should get goin’…”

[Lars]

First of Vhalar, Arc Seven-Twenty

Bandaged hands caressed over the dripping helm of Lars’ snowy hair. A hushed breath escaped him, forced through the sharp and reddened structure of his nose, pressed without care for comfort into the chest of the dream’s unknowing architect. His body tensed, shoulders pulled inward with his desperate clutch for more of the man before him. He shifted on his knees, inching closer through the shallow water that dripped from his heavy clothing, in a near collapse over Meraki’s blood-spattered legs.

All it took was the guidance of those bruised and battered hands, clasped about his bony wrists like shackles, to pull him from the daze of his stunned reverie. Once glance upward, one glimpse of freckled cheeks, one reminder of a forest dark and evergreen. He missed the trees unburdened with blanketed snow. A smile too, as bright and slanted as the sun nearly hidden by its setting.

“I’ve missed you,” he whispered in return, delayed only by the skipping of his heart and shortness of his breath. Lars felt the steady drip of water as it rolled down his face and fell from his chin. He watched through wide, glassy eyes as Meraki pushed his precious lips against the cold skin of his hands.

Perfected through injury and scarred, by now, in the cracks left behind in the impact of careless fists; how he had committed time and again each reddened line to memory, so that he might know no other shape when the word of scar came to mind. Nothing mattered more, and nothing mattered less, than every bit of bone and flesh that brought his lover back to him. The tips of his cold fingers brushed against the underside of Meraki’s jaw while kisses and teeth greeted his palms.

The corners of his mouth sharpened with a smile when green eyes gazed into gray. Lars wanted to laugh at himself for how foolish he must have seemed. When the time came, and questions of bracelets and gloves distracted his thinking, only the beginnings of a humored sound escaped before he said:

“I must have left them here with you.”

Lars knew not which bracelets or gloves he meant. What bracelets did he own, that he had not left behind them in death? What gloves had he not brought with him? Still his uncovered hands relished in the feeling of Meraki’s skin against them, warm with the blush of blood. He watched the slow, scarlet stream stem from the wound at his lover’s brow, and while the younger man rested at his hands, Lars leaned to kiss the bloody spot. It left a cherry stain upon his lips.

He rested back on his heels and sat in silent admiration, listening to the sound of the familiar raspy voice. It did not occur to him, at first, that anything could have possibly been amiss within the dream; by his account it was as perfect as anything could be. Yet words continued, placed upon their predetermined paths and Lars began to frown, just a hint of his confusion, just a glimpse before correction found him smiling again. Meraki was no construct of his imagination, he could tell as much by now. But was he not awake within the dream?

Uncertain though the revelation left him, Lars let the other man direct him as he pleased. Quickly-bruising knees settled at either side of Meraki’s hips, cushioned by the padding of the white lounge chair, and his arms found their way around the other’s shoulders. Unrelenting was his embrace, unwilling to allow the slightest of distances between them. Nothing did more for his true comfort than Meraki’s attention. A gradual warmth began to dry the locks of colorless hair stuck to his face, and lessen the weight of wrinkled clothes soaked with rain, and Lars nestled closer to his soulmate while Meraki gathered him and lifted from the chair.

Away from the open window and into the bathroom, Lars nuzzled his cheek against Meraki’s while the younger carried him. “I love you,” he confessed as they crossed over the threshold, and again as he was lowered and released from the embrace.

“I love you so much, don’t you know how much I love you?”

The change sent a shudder through the mage’s skinny frame; his limbs dipped below the water in the tub. Meraki remained above, dry save for the blood and the rain Lars had brought in with him. He reached out from bubbles of warm water and soap, damp fingers finding the other’s shin just to touch.

“Lars?”

“Meraki?” Lars watched his lover, watched the smoke coil around his neck.

“I should get goin’...”

“No,” he refused. Undelayed, undeniable, unafraid of uttering the word he always kept to himself. “No, don’t. Stay here. Please.”

Lars lifted to his knees, clinging to the edge of the porcelain bath to allow himself a better reach. He grabbed onto one of Meraki’s bandaged hands and pulled him nearer to the tub, and reached for the other hand when he could.

“I want you to stay. You can see me, love, can’t you?”

With a gentle splash of soapy water, he lifted higher, until he stood to his full height within the tub. Holding tight, Lars brought Meraki’s hands closer to his chest until they pressed against the wetted fabric of his shirt. Kept there by the placement of one delicate hand over Meraki’s, his other hand moved out to brush over the freckles of his soulmate’s bruised cheek.

“Meraki,” he repeated, softer. “Stay with me.”

[Carver]

First of Vhalar, Arc Seven-Twenty

Meraki knew he wasn’t awake. The cold tiles under his feet, the smoke around his neck, the steam from the bath – none of it existed outside of his dream. He knew he was dreaming, if only because when he looked in the mirror, he saw something he’d never get back: the dark green of his eyes and the freckles of an angular face that had long since rotted under death. He didn’t even know where such flesh had gone. Where had his body ended up? Where had he died? Had he remained in that bed dripped in red? Had he been allowed to decay in the arms of the other man, who now sunk into the bath before him? Or had they been separated to decompose apart from each other?

Meraki knew he wasn’t awake, and he knew Lars wasn’t part of his dream. Because the Lars in his dreams… never existed. He did not get the luxury of having his soulmate’s form in his dreams, no matter how much he wished for it. Sometimes, in his dreams, he felt familiar breath on his neck, on his shoulders, against his cheek. Sometimes, he felt an invisible hand. Sometimes, a chill ran through him and sunk so deep that it coiled around his incorporeal organs and heart and ached so much, he clawed his way into waking to look at bloody marks left on his stomach and ribs.

In his dreams, Lars was no more than a ghost.

That’s why he knew.

Yet though he knew, he allowed himself to move and speak like he might have – as if he were fast asleep in the dream with no lucid awareness of himself. Through the little lines he spoke, scrambled attempts to recall that which was housed within the architecture of the dream itself. Lars’ sweet voice delivered sentiments that only bolstered the walls within Meraki’s mind.

“No. No, don’t. Stay here. Please.”

Lars’ hand grasped his own, pulled him near to the bathtub again, and grabbed onto the other hand. Meraki turned his gaze off to the side, then glanced at the mirror. It’d gotten foggy with the warmth of the steam that rose from the bath, but he could see himself regardless.

“I want you to stay. You can see me, love, can’t you?”

The water sloshed from side to side while Lars stood. Meraki paused, then finally turned his gaze back to look at his love again. He glanced at the wet shirt while his hands were placed to feel the beat of a heart underneath. A heart that couldn’t exist anymore. Meraki stared at the spot, while he felt the touch against his wounded cheek.

“Meraki,”

whispered Lars.

“Stay with me.”

Quiet. Meraki’s fingers fidgeted under the hand that held him there. His jagged nails dug into the fabric, scrunched it up under his fists. A firm grip on the damp fabric, then he pulled with a snap. Hardly any space remained between them other than the tub between their lower legs. Meraki kissed Lars; not reflective of the gentle touch to his cheek, the connection proved a fierce smack of his injured, bloody lips against Lars’ soft, pink lips. His grip tightened on the shirt until his knuckles had turned bone-white between the bandages.

Lips parted, he deepened the kiss, and he swore he could taste and feel it like it was true. More than some mere memory, or fanciful delusion, but true and there and Lars, just Lars, the demure harlot who’d overtaken him with a love beyond anything Meraki could have anticipated or handled. The perfect piece to himself, something so far past explanation or reason, that all Meraki wanted in the moment was for the kiss to be real.

A knock interrupted them.

From somewhere in the dream – was it the door? The ceiling? the cabinet? – a rapid knocking had sounded in a flurry then quieted into silence again.

Meraki released his hold on the shirt.

A scoff rose in the form of a quiet, short, and dry laugh.

“Was that so hard to say, Lars?” he murmured. His speech slurred in a forgotten accent. Green eyes darted side to side in a survey of the tiled floor, then he looked up to see the gray eyes – even though the sight made him want to…

“Take your bath,” said Meraki and he enunciated each word in a forceful caution so he might be understood. “I made it for you. There’s something I have to do. Then…”

He didn’t finish the statement. Instead, he yanked his hands away. Meraki retreated from the touch. This time, he pressed away from any attempts to keep him near. The dream aided its originator, and within a mere step, he slammed the bathroom door behind him.

Meraki stood with the door at his back for a moment, gaze fixed on the floor.

Whether Lars would still be there when the door opened again… he didn’t know.

He hoped so.

Ahead, he looked at the living space before him. The mess of trinkets and otherwise on the ground, the rainwater tracked in and blown through the open window, the bloody footprints that told the trail and path he’d taken through the modest enclosure of a residence. Meraki closed his eyes, and he wanted to make things better – make things neater and cleaner, but… when he opened them again, everything stayed the same. So, instead, Meraki got on his knees and he started to sweep the trinkets with his forearms and hands. He gathered the various little items in a tall pile, then took off his shirt. Soaked with rainwater, he used it as a rag to mop the blood. Of course, this took repetition since his injuries kept leaving fresh droplets of blood along the way.