Re: The Icarus/The Fallen
Nathaniel had once lived an obvious existence. He’d had a purpose, always a bidding, and the intimate embrace of reverence. But without the weight of feathers and sinew on his back, he was untethered and nothing was so indisputable as to be obvious. He had the sense that this body lived only in perception, and he’d yet to learn how to uncross those wires. Admittedly, the man’s question made him feel rather stupid. Like he was on the outside of a joke that he was expected to understand. As far as new experiences went, he was going to file that one away in the category of undesirable and unpleasant.
“I was called trouble,” he offered. It was how he’d ended up here. Too many questions, too little blind acceptance. Truthfully, to think of it made him want to dig his dirty fingernails into the meat of his palm until he bled. (Another mundane novelty, blood.) “And I was once a terror, but no longer. Now, I’m just…” He closed his eyes for a moment and a word drifted out of the murk in stark contrast. Sterilized. The downward slant of Nathaniel’s mouth deepened. “Adrift.”
He exhaled through his nose and it was hot against his upper lip. When Enlil spoke, he listened raptly. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel, just that he had no grasp on the nuance yet. He’d been expecting to learn the slotted lines of how everything fit together until it looked like the picture on the box that he’d been staring at for millennia. Only now that he was hearing what the other man had to say did he start to consider that the hearts of men were only shades of gray. “Desperately,” he breathed. “I think I would very much like to burn.”
It was the edge of the callous on Nathaniel’s thumb that caught the outline of Enlil’s scar, so that the sensation came in blunted and he had to look down to understand what he was feeling. The fern-like creeping of fractal patterns out from under the man’s sleeve made Nathaniel’s mouth open in silent surprise, lips just barely parted. He thought it strangely exquisite, the disparity of unblemished and corruption, and he turned his hold on the man’s wrist so that his index finger slid over the forked branches of the scar. “I feel your hand,” he said, chin dipped to meet his collarbone and eyelids half-lowered. “It’s warm, and painfully human. But I cannot feel if something beats under there. That’s why I need you, Enlil.”