War Dog (perses) wrote in forgotten_gods, @ 2011-02-16 00:07:00 |
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Entry tags: | astraios, perses |
Who: Perses (perses) & Astraios (reader_of_stars)
What: Titan bros being bros
When: Also around now-ish
Where: NYC
Notes: Plague-stricken yet typing warnings apply, my dearest Cat The First, so just let me know if you'd like anything tweaked or if this makes no sense at all.
It's funny, how easy it is to settle into routines that persist even after their necessity has somewhat lessened. Rediscovering Asteria led quickly, quickly to wrapping around her to the exclusion of nearly all else. The flip-side of a balancing act, if you will. A bit of immersion therapy to provide counterweight to innumerable years spent lacking. Self-indulgence earned through involuntary deprivation, inasmuch as such things are ever earned.
Perses took their succession of merry months spent in the manner of yesteryear and spoiled himself without compunction, because seriously now, fuck the world. He would have fought for it, if he had to, for happiness may not be his due (his due, as if anyone is owed anything they can't scrabble and fight and keep by clinging to and defending) but in good youngest brother Titan fashion he was prepared to growl and whine and handle heavy artillery until he got what he wanted (never say needed, leave that unsaid but obvious).
But only Asteria was ever an island. Not even a one-man army is sufficient unto himself. Not even with everything he ever wanted and lost returned to him. In these their declining years, as entropy and memory's lack settle in their bones like divine arthritis, Perses looks to his brothers. Perhaps more than he has since he was a child-like thing, stumbling along in their wake, big-eyed and overawed and bucking for attention as only a keen-toothed pup with an acute set of hero complexes could.
He remembers details, flashes of that time but destruction eats away at itself, himself as surely as it does the rest of the world. Perhaps more surely. A readily accessible target. Something in him frays into nothingness, something in him mourns the loss. Something else is feral and pants in scarce-restrained anticipation of the next fragmentation. Life in the epilogue: trying to remember what is regretted, what he meant to reach for before. Trying to get a little bit ahead while subsisting, existing on borrowed time.
Weighty thoughts, acted upon lightly. A heavy existence not allowed to be a burden. They exist, these three brothers, and though Aftermath is a thing of distance and broken ties he is trying. Learning to build things, slowly but surely. Things like bridges.
All of this and none of this is why he ends up at his brother's door. He happened to be in the neighborhood. He happened to remember that he's forgotten to stop by, over and over again. There are splinters of stories stuck in his mind. By stories he means memories misremembered. By splinters he means perhaps eldest brother has the rest of the details, or different pieces. Perhaps they - all three - can find some facsimile of wholeness in the winding down.
Maybe this life is a queer kind of Titan victory, after all: finding what has been lost, fixing what was sundered, repairing what time has eaten away at bit by bit. Destroying the aftermath, bleeding themselves to know each other anew (again). Fighting the losing battle with chins held high and clear eyes. Remembering old truths. First comes family. First and fundamental and foremost and forever-until-the-nothingness.
There's precious little of the puppy about him now, in the rangy old feral thing that knocks on Astraios' door. Much of the stray finding his way closer to home, one lingered upon doorstep at a time.