War Dog (perses) wrote in forgotten_gods, @ 2010-11-04 10:09:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | asteria, perses |
nothing unusual nothing strange close to nothing at all
Who: Perses (perses) with shameless use of Asteria (esteris) without permission
What: As Act One draws to a quiet close, Act Two opens on equilibrium achieved.
When: Some morning. It could be this morning, I guess.
Where: Asteria's apartment
Notes: Hi Judo, I stole your character. And for the rest of you, nothing happens in this. Also gratuitous comma abuse as per my usual. You know what, just listen to this and scroll instead.
It is a rare thing, to be awake and near her while she slumbers. He feels that this was not always so, but like most things Perses (tells himself over and over that he) ought to still know it is a vague impression along the length of his spine, a tickling along the inside of his brain instead of a conviction. Perhaps he is wrong (there is always that possibility, and in the course of his long existence he has learned to weight it, perhaps, more heavily than its inverse twin). Perhaps they always lived like this, with her bird-like fluttering to and fro, away and toward never abating for long. He could have willingly lived lifetimes like this, watching Asteria flit and flurry, holding out his hand again and again just for the mute fascination of watching her condescend to fold her wings, slow her hummingbird-quick self down long enough to run her fingers enquiringly over his palm, eyes laughing back at his (ah, but he refuses to believe this is new, the spark and smile they can share without any shifting movement of either face. Theirs always was the sort of marriage that built its own language. Some things even forever apart can not change).
Perses is not staring at his sleeping wife, or doing anything else so vaguely creepy and melodramatic. He is, actually, working on a crossword puzzle and not consciously paying Asteria any attention other than the usual low-grade awareness of her presence that is hard-wired into him (he is a transmitter no longer tuned to static, no longer perpetually blinded and blindsided by the sheer echoing white noise sound of absence). And if he half-remembers, apropos of nothing, a stanza from an otherwise horrific poem that wrecked him a little when he chanced across it during the alone years (you are a tiny blue island. I am working my way up to your shoreline. I long to get shipwrecked there), and if he is more content than a war dog has any right to be, and if the world as he knows it has temporarily narrowed itself down to this, just this, the husband lazing for a little longer before getting up to confront the day head-on, sharing space with his slumbering wife without consciously choosing to do so, simply because the air and the day and the man himself are all more right when she is there, then so be it. They have paid their dues, aftermath and his starlight, more than earned a succession of humdrum perfect mornings and evenings and mid-afternoons to be spent with each other now that the simple fact of their togetherness is no longer startlingly, rawly new. No one knows better than a war dog how few people get what they deserve, how seldom the universe balances out in any way equaling fair, but that will not stop him from digging his teeth in, from curling his fingers into claws and he will hang on to this with every fiber of his war-torn self because he is a Titan, and with his lady beside him they are warriors-in-arms refusing to be denied their due without more than a mere struggle. He would go to war for nothing more or less than this, though their world might look like a throwaway thing to outsiders peering in.
He will move soon, attempt to avoid disturbing her while he heads to the kitchen. The effort will almost definitely be wasted, but she may let him think he has succeeded just to watch his careful form leave the room, to see once again how the brother least likely to win any beauty awards is always so unconsciously graceful in motion (the clean lines and arcs of the trajectories of a flurry of bullet, the elegance of a wrecking ball, the scouring purity of the desert in a sandstorm, the way drought pares away inessentials from a landscape and leaves behind only essentials and the lay of the land. There is an odd sort of beauty to the execution of attrition, though it may leave only ugliness behind). Perhaps she will drift back to sleep, or perhaps she will stir and follow after enough time has passed to establish plausible deniability if he apologizes for waking her.
She may drift to the kitchen, where he will cook and she will take over the neglected crossword. Should this happen, they will have a succession of conversations with precious few words, meanings hinging on things other than sound (the quirk of her smile means a thousand different things in a dictionary he knows as well as firefights and the sweet inexorable progression of untreated gangrene, the motions of his hands respond to nearly every nuance with their own, violence contained and at rest speaking a dialect she comprehends as easily as she used to hear star whispers. This is their madhouse: laughter sometimes splits the air with no audible precedent).
Nothing exceptional will happen today within the walls of Asteria's apartment. There will be no exercise of godly power or miracle working or grand declaration of love or devotion or eternal fealty, for they are not young and in the first blush of love, full of god-power and fast-burning fireworks and water-soluble candy hearts together. Like a banked fire, or an unassuming tree with deep-reaching roots, they simply co-exist (like midnight and the dog-star do, like the inevitability of both summer's droughts and sundowns leading to night). And this is enough, and more than enough: that they are sure of each other once more.