[NO TRUE PAIR] Molasses; Lapis/August
Title: Molasses Fandom: Original (Crystal Coast/Measuring a Year) Character/s: Lapis, August Words: 468 Prompt: June 1-7, Lapis and August: the memory cannot keep me warm / but it never leaves me cold Notes: Lapis and a farmboy he had once.
In the years between the burning of the farm and his eventual return to the coast, Lapis invented names and plied his trade on the plantations, tugging the storms around after him on a magical leash. It was not a glamourous existence, but it mostly let him eat and sleep outside of trees and ditches and mostly away from insects. He didn’t care for it, and he wouldn’t return to it, now, but for a time he was satisfied with the existence.
There were girls along the way, of course, and boys – more boys than girls, if he is truthful, because while both were dangerous in their own ways, the boys would never fall pregnant, and Lapis had no desire to test his running speed against an angry skirtland father with an axe.
There is one in particular who sticks in his mind, though Lapis does not really know why. He does not remember particulars – after a while, the physicalities begin to blend together. What he does remember is the idle way the other’s hands trailed over his skin, willing to devote some time to extracting pleasure, unlike many of his brethren (and often Lapis himself). He remembers a smile, he thinks, barely there and warmer than milk and sunlight despite that, or perhaps because of it. Molasses, he thinks, and closes his eyes at the truth of it, remembering the sweetness of breath, the warmth, and best of all the agonising slowness – the way the boy had looked him in the eye as he sheathed himself in Lapis’s body, sober and steady despite the hitch of his breath.
Lapis had drifted into sticky slumber in the circle of that boy’s arms, and perhaps that is why he remembers the boy so well – because he was strange, because he was the first lover who had cared for more than skipping stones off the surface of intimacy and dared to dip his feet in the water.
He was gone in the morning, of course, and if he had not left before dawn then Lapis would have done so in his place. It had been the last night of July, he remembered, and he had wanted to make a drought-stricken farm in the north before the effects of his dabbling in the weather were felt before he reaped the profits. He had harboured vague regrets about that boy for miles, for towns. For years, he supposes wryly, since the boy is still in his thoughts, even now.
He watches the youths on the shoreline, kicking at the waves and scratching through the kelp. It is late July now, and at this distance, the stoic one slouching along behind the others has the shape of his boy who tasted of molasses.
Remembering names and faces was a habit learned too late.