War Dog (perses) wrote in forgotten_gods, @ 2010-07-16 21:18:00 |
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Entry tags: | asteria, perses |
why don't you come on back to the war, can't you hear me speaking?
Who: Asteria (esteris) & Perses (perses)
Where: Asteria's apartment
When: July 16th, after this.
Rating/Warnings: Language at the least.
He is outside. There was no smell of smoke in Asteria's house when he first entered it and he will not be the first to drag nicotine's tang into the clean air of their haven miniverse. Perses only smokes when he's thinking too much, the habit as much a tell as steam coming out his ears would be. Not a very useful tell for all that, since he's been steadily taking smoke breaks since he first found his fallen star hiding from the world in this demi-backwater unparadise. He's adept at making his fidgets look natural. Asteria can't entirely hide her madness. Perses can drown his violence in the background noise of his tight-fisted control, can distract and delude and disorder himself so that the pressure builds more slowly, but he's a livewire volcano, always with the potential to erupt.
When there's nothing more than the everyday inner see-saw and silly nymphets being presumptuous and the eternal feral growlbark of his rabid battering ram nature and the still-strange already-cherished reappearance of the other half of his heart whirling around inside the war dog he can hold his own rather well. Control has always been a specious thing when it comes to Aftermath but after so long holding it tight and close with white-knuckled hands it seems almost like a second skin, only chafing what it is held against. A good, reminding, healthy sort of constant near-tearing. Like the ache in a sniper's trigger finger held steady while the target meanders about, verging on in range. As long as it hurts he knows he's more human than beast. As long as he's more human than beast he is winning his own private war, no matter how many battles are lost to time and fate. He is only half the battleground, but as long as he stays his own territory they're that much further from being overrun, back to back with their teeth bared at inevitability though they may be.
Perses isn't precisely happy tonight. He certainly isn't at peace. Neither element was added to his make-up in the mostly-forgotten yesteryears he was crafted in. In the long years that his family was lost to him he sometimes wondered what his mother, his father thought of their two youngest sons. Sometimes he wondered what he had thought of them, before everything smudged to dirty watercolor noir in the annals of his mind. Now that he's among family again, in the company of his own kind though he's sought precious few of them out (memories are easy familiar pains, people twist and shift and evolve new edges, new points) he doesn't wonder anymore because he's remembered all that matters, brought crashing home again by the sight of his daughter's eyes and the feel of his wife's hands, the bleat of big brother's laughter and Bia's return smirk. Family is family. Family is blood. He is no Olympian, to forget this fact in the head rush of power. He is but a guard dog.
There is virtually nothing supernatural about the man exhaling smoke toward the stars. He will read nothing in the pathways his eyes trace idly. The universe has never whispered truths or lies into his ears (or if it has, he has remained deaf to its language). Perses is nothing at all, in the grand scheme of things. The latter half of battle. The second misfit sun of sea and stars. He isn't tied to the rivers or the earth or the moon, barely even to his own dog star. The only thing that Perses is tied to involuntarily, bone-deep, is war. He is the sword in his own mind, the battering ram, the feral trained dog that rips at the throats of horses to force their riders to the ground. He is tied to the sword-hand, the batterer, the one who plots the course and hies the dogs into action. The sword-hand, the instigation, the beginning: the spear-bearer. When Pallas calls, Perses can no more refuse to respond than a hand can refuse to move when the brain wills it to. The equation is more balanced than he believes it is (they are both hands wielding weapons, together they are the brain, synapses overlapping and firing) but that doesn't change the solution: in battle, the twain are barely two, are mutually essential. Something in Perses hears Pallas whistle, impossible and inescapable across the distance separating the brothers, and his head tips back in a joyful howl before his conscious thought registers anything at all.
Torn is de rigeur, though usually it is not between such extremes. What the heart needs and what the soul shrieks for, what the soul needs and what the sword hand can not help but reach for. Perses laughs to himself as he stubs out the cigarette, and the sound is hyena-mad with mingled anticipation and grief. Things had been going so well. Things are going to go so well.
By the time he re-enters the apartment he's no longer making inarticulate animal noises, has brought himself under that much control though she's sure to note the change in his attitude, the way the wolf-dog has crept back into his body-language. He finds two tumblers, a bottle of something gold and high-proof, pours out too-generous glassfuls. One he knocks back immediately and then refills, the other he leaves for her. Her misty memories will do neither of them any service now. He refuses to leave her without her explicit understanding of the whys and hows and whats, would refuse to leave her at all if he could but his people have never been talented at getting what they need. The least he can do is all he can do, fumblingly fill in the blanks in the remembrances kind time has torn from her as much as he can.