Have you ever watched it rain? Not stared at the Earth from a flat, horizontal point, no. Not looked out into it as it fell, no.
Have you ever watched it rain? Have you ever stood in silence as the world weeps around you? It's a miraculous event, to realize it for what it is - to appreciate the sobbing of a child you can't console.
Fafnir doesn't even have time to admire it. He doesn't have time to stop and stare at the sky, watch the clouds cry out their last. Not today.
He has time to chase, to pursue. Gideon does not make it home - not quite - which is it's own personal blessing. Fafnir could not have stood in the middle of that living room and done this. Not today. Not any time soon.
What he can do is catch Gideon - a sudden collision of bodies, face between shoulderblades. One might confuse his trembling for fury, but it's not. It's fear and a slow ache, so hot in his belly that he thinks for the first time, it might burn out of him.
Gideon wasn't hard to catch. In his rage Gideon never hurried, never took that speed that rushed the world into a blur of sound and light. No, he walked, walked like a normal man, and found that the effort required to keep the slow pace spent anger like pennies, bleeding wrath out of him drop by drop. He was soaked to the bone by the time Fafnir collided with him, and the force of it coupled with the surprise sent him falling forward a step. He caught himself and righted, felt himself tense so hard against the catch of his shadow that he felt brittle, ready to snap off in pieces. That searing heat burned at his back, hot enough to send steam rising up between the pair of them, licking flames of fire and the hard underside of an iceberg. He could feel his shoulders shake infinitesimally with their hunch up behind his ears.
"I'm sorry,' comes the words muffled out of his mouth, pushed free against drenched cloth. "I'm sorry I was so harsh. All I hear, it seems, is your bitter words, and that woman. I hate her and I hate what she's turning you into. I have to listen to her. I have to listen to her and that other whore and what they did to you. And I can do nothing but listen and listen and do nothing."
His grip shifts, tightens: he pushes Gideon to the wall of the alley there, against his back. This is what his shadow looks like: wet rats and bleeding corpses, black staining his face - a wife with her mascara running.
"A day without an argument and you come in and started arguing with him over another fucking woman. I'm sorry, Gideon. I'm tired because I have to live with it and say nothing. It's not always easy. I snapped at you - and I should not have."
Head lilted, lifted, the hot of his mouth pressing against narrow, handsome jaw - a child begging forgiveness. "I'm sorry I was short with you."
Those shoulders fell, the hard, breaking tension that kept him coiled like a spring ready to snap bled out like the hot glutting gush of an artery upon the cobblestones as he looked down at Fafnir, his face that hard, composed thing it became when no smiles curved it, when those pale eyes seemed to be the only thing that kept features from becoming those of a living statue. The lines of it changed, though, lengthened and drew together all at once as brows moved toward one another and the edges of that generous mouth drew downward. Fafnir took that beautiful knife of words and shoved it clean through ribs to the hilt, and then shoved it in a little more. His fault, he knew it, had known it. He'd become rubbed so raw under the bite of Kestrel's chains, become so sensitive to constantly following a will that was not his own that to have had one more person, and his perfect shadow no less, tell him what to do that he had snapped and bared livid teeth to the one creature he should have never done such a thing to. Hands rose, one curling round the back of Fafnir's neck against soaked hair, the other splayed fingers over his chest, thumb running a slow line over the cut and dip of his collarbone as Gideon pressed his forehead against Fafnir's.
"No..." He drew a breath, felt it catch in this throat. "You were right to be angry with me. I cannot control all these things, love...and I hate what this has done to you, what you have to stand by and watch. I don't care what she does to me, but what she does to everyone around me..."
He felt a hard tremor in his voice and stopped, pressed a hard kiss to Fafnir's brow as fingers tightened on the nape of his neck, tangled in silk wet hair.
He is kissed, and he kisses back. He does not kiss Gideon as a lover might. He kisses Gideon in a way that one cannot put into words, because words, at the end of the day, are paltry and pathetic. He murmurs quiet words against his jaw, little lines of love that no mouth should've been capable of creating - but Fafnir's mouth is not like another's.
Few others have three tongues to write poetry on skin with.
"I hate her, Gideon. I hate her and I hate Clover. Lelah too, whore that she is - I want to rip them asunder with mine hands, scatter them about to be cast wherever the wind will take them. I don't want them here anymore, Gideon. Where has Cat gone? Why can it not just be him and you and I? Where the f*ck did all these women come from?"
Cold eyes closed against the press of strange, searing kisses, things that made his skin crawl and sing all at once. Hands slid to cradle Fafnir's jaw, cold icicles of fingers curling lightly against white flesh.
"Clover is gone, for good." That at least, he could reassure. He'd cemented their separation thoroughly last night. Aside from that, words failed, reassurances failed... He ached for the same things as Fafnir, wanted nothing more than for it to be the three of them again as it had been, and didn't dare to hope, could not stand the disappointment that would shatter the bits of his world he'd just barely managed to put back together if such a thing never came to pass.
"I'm sorry." He gasped the words against the rain that pelted them, the run of water felt like drowning as it splashed against his face, ran down into his mouth with each word. "I'm sorry, love."
So many things he could not change, not now... Kestrel he would pull down in time, he would find a way and do it, but in time. Lelah... she was respite, something to hide within when Catlin's absence became too hard to bear. But he never wished any of the pain of his choices and curses upon Fafnir, and the pain that each step he took caused the sweet, perfect creature killed him, cast the hard, black little love he held for the creature into an internal pyre that screams could not escape from.
Fingers curled and clawed for a moment, digging for purchase against white skin not his own. Fathomless eyes turned up to him, tried to swallow him alive - because in the end, Fafnir showed his love in sacrifices, in what he was willing to do for others.
Love is measured by one's willingness to be blasphemous.
"Do you love?" he implored, voices singing in his throat, a sound like strangling, swan's singing their last song.
Claws dug and drug, that endless maw started to spread, as if he had some secret set before him, a meal meant to be devoured.
"Do you love me, Gideon..?"
Gideon winced at the piercing dig of claws and that beautiful pain, exquisite, glorious pain that radiated outside of himself, drew attention away from the pain within so perfectly. Eyes opened to regard that endless maw that approached with horror that delighted in itself, sang accompaniment to the throttling chorus of Fafnir's mangled voices. He let hands slide down to encompass the other's throat, light necklace of steel digits tenderly caging the white column.
"I love you... as well as I can." And that was the crux of the thing. Both loved the other was well as walls permitted.
And finally, he laughed. The crows and corpses, the sheep went screaming in his throat.
"Do you love? Yes - and true love never dies," his last tongue told Gideon, uttered under the din. He leaned into the man's touch, black eyes rolling up into his skull, a shark going in for the kill, before he shared a secret with him - the one he'd gained nights before, from the child. The one that had drugged him so.
He told Gideon of how the girl had blown her father's brains out on accident, with a loaded gun she'd never been meant to find. He told Gideon how he'd pinned the girlchild to a filthy wall, covered in grime, and had stroked it from her, first the flaxen white of her hair, then by easing his finger into her mouth and stroked it off her tongue, some horrible mockery of fellatio that he'd been all too glad to commit.
He'd cum so hard he'd fainted, after the girl told him.
Gideon turned his face to the side in the torrent that preceded that whisper, and could not understand why this small dark stain on the soul of humanity was so important for Fafnir to share with him. It was a shared secret, though, not something the shadow ever gave up...and for him it must have been some level of sacrifice. Like the blood did not touch Fafnir, though, the secret did not touch Gideon, not in that same deeply satisfying way it did the other. He turned his face back and regarded Fafnir silently, dark brows drawn together into a hard line over unreadable features, glacial blues curious, uncomprehending.
"He was a child molester."
It's not that it was satisfying, perhaps. It's that it was cruelly, terribly ironic. This is the world we live in. Watch what we do to our children. Let me show you how the world works. Let me take your hand and lead you down a path that was as dark and horrible, scattered and covered with glass.
This is why the world needed Fafnir. Because all of those dirty secrets have to go somewhere, else they start piling up like rubbish on a shore's edge. Fafnir devoured spiritual pollution.
Gideon silently wondered what Fafnir would have done with Catlin's secrets, if he derived that much pleasure from one little girl killing her father...if he would have died in sheer ecstasy from the horrific lifetime of filthy, revolting secrets that Catlin's world was made of, the terrifying darkness that his childhood had been. This one little girl was like a fleck of mud against the mound of sh*t that Gideon knew life to be.
"Why did you ask if I loved you before you told me this?"
And he would never ask. Fafnir had come to understand that Catlin had no more use for him than a boar had tits. He was fine with that. Catlin made Gideon happy - that was all that Fafnir needed to know. He would continue to be curious about the man, but he would not put himself where he was not wanted.
"Because I wanted to hear you say it," he admitted. "After this week, after Kestrel and Clover and Lelah? I just needed to hear you say it to me."
That brokered a smile, pale shade of its former glory though it was, a smile nonetheless and just for that shadow. He drew Fafnir to him, close as close could get and brushed a soft kiss to the corner of that endless maw of a mouth, curious, terrified, but achingly gentle nonetheless, he stole a second and a third of these such things.
"I do love you, Fafnir. You are the only thing I can love, or want to." Contrition, absolution, forgiveness and rapture. His voice was thick with it all, dark head bent to meet the darker one, arms round shoulders. "I love you."
So many good things had gone into his mouth; it was only now that good things had started to come out of it too. His eyes halfmasted, curling himself into Gideon's grasp, appreciating that attention for exactly what it was. It felt so good to hear those words - especially in the wake of what Gideon had said.
"You do not make me miserable," he told him. "I would rather die at your hands, than go back to Him." Because if he did, he'd forget everything. Gideon. All of his emotions, good or ill. Himself. He would no longer be Fafnir.
"I will try to be better." Gideon would, too...though his own nature might prove to make that more difficult than even he himself could imagine. He pressed a light kiss to each of Fafnir's eyelids. "I would rather die at his hand than give you up, as well. It was a cruel thing of me to say."
He nestled another of these things beside that perfect nose before burying his head in the crook of Fafnir's neck, surrounded by that damp scent of earth and rot and all good things coming to an end.
"Don't leave me, love. You are my only constant."
"I will die before I leave you. When the words have eroded and the stars stripped from the sky, I will still be here, Gideon. I swear it."
He made promises like a child - because a child does not grasp yet the idea of promises broken. He will not break them.
