"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
there is a dream in the space between the hammer and the nail ------ the dream of about-to-be-hit, which is a bad dream ------------ but the nail will take the hit if it gets to sleep inside the wood forever
Once, there was a boy and a monster. The boy was young and very stupid, slipped from the deserts into the meadow, and the monster was there, waiting. Something happened there, an exchange, brief, but it was enough to carve channels within him, to make or unlock a terrible wanting, a desire he, a young and ultimately stupid boy, did not have a name for. It happened again, this desire – this time granted to him by a woman who was not a monster (though perhaps she flirted with the idea, once or twice). But this was a different sort, and the result – a child, his child – numbed that desire. It forced unto him a responsibility. Rapt, these days, is no longer a boy and not quite so stupid. He does not think often of monsters (of any kind). He thinks of his son, now grown (but young, still, stumbling into adulthood, and how his throat hurts to watch it, to be unable to protect him always). He thinks of where he will wander next. Of everything and nothing. There are dreams (regular ones, not the kind his old, wicked lover wove, the ones that were dreams with consequences), though he doesn’t remember them often. He’ll wake, sometimes, with a thrum in his body that he daren’t put a name to. The feeling goes away easy enough. It can be swallowed. Tamped down. He’s in the meadow, today, and there are no dreams staining his mind, he is aimless, as he often is, moving through grass and shadow, so when he first sees the monster, it doesn’t hit, not right away. Then. Then. He stops, frozen so suddenly that it’s nearly comical, and turns. He expects the monster to be gone – a hallucination, a hazy leftover of some long-ago dream – but it’s not. He’s there. Real, solid. Rapt can smell him, something sulfuric and sour, and the smell hauls in more memories, of the monster he met, how the fear had curled around his insides, how he had wanted it. Wanted more. (Wanted him). “Oh,” is all Rapt says, catapulted back to the stupid boy he once was, all those years of learning erased in a glance, in the curl of the monster’s horns. Reverent and stupid. Unchanged. “You,” he says – all eloquence slapped from his tongue in the wake of this – then, “I--” It’s only now that he realizes (stupid, stupid) that the color’s different. Not the gold he knew. A different shade. A different face, Pollock’s features, but smeared with something or someone else. Oh. “I’m sorry,” he says, finally managing to string two words together, “I - I thought you were someone else.”
08-16-2018, 03:21 AM (This post was last modified: 08-17-2018, 12:10 AM by bruise.)
I call him the devil because he makes me want to sin (and every time he knocks, I can't help but let him in)
He is still an oily, slick thing.
The Fear still drips from him, thick and tangible, coating his lean and roping muscles and seeping into his flesh with all of the certainty of a virus. He wears it well. He wears it like a crown, his sculpted arrogant head lifted high, the horns curving dangerously from his skull, his oil slick eyes sharp and watching. You wouldn't know by looking at him that he had been gone for years. You wouldn’t know that this land had been a kingdom he had cast off, a cloak shrugged to the floor. You wouldn’t know because he commands the same respect that his father had, the same nightmarish need for power, undeserved and yet taken.
His handsome, sooty face pulls into an ugly sneer as the other approaches him, and his thick lip curls back to reveal his blunted teeth. He didn’t like others to assume that he did not mind their presence. He didn’t like for others to simply pierce his bubble uninvited—the transgression unwarranted and unforgiven. But—but—the other has a bruised, haunted look in his eye that stirs the predator in him awake. The annoyance that had initially quickened gives way to something darker, something more insidious.
His motions are as quick and calculated as a viper, neck snaking out so that he can get a better look at the stallion of tarnished gold before him. “I am not,” he says simply, his voice nearly hoarse from the time of disuse. “But you found my anyway.” He tilts his head to the side, considering the stallion for a moment, the sneer giving way to a thoughtful smile, the undercurrent of thought unreadable as it passes across his features like a storm. Promise. So much promise untapped in this encounter, and he nearly shivers at the prospect of it, the Fear hovering beneath his grasp, vibrating with the desire to have him pull the strings.
08-17-2018, 06:06 PM (This post was last modified: 08-17-2018, 06:07 PM by rapt.)
there is a dream in the space between the hammer and the nail ------ the dream of about-to-be-hit, which is a bad dream ------------ but the nail will take the hit if it gets to sleep inside the wood forever
He is easy prey, still.
He likes to think himself hardened, no longer such a malleable thing, so wont to kneel. He likes to think himself changed, reshaped by his experiences, made into a more stoic creature. More normal.
So it should surprise him more, to way he reacts, hurtled back into the ways of old – heart in throat, legs trembling to kneel, supplicant, wanting.
Yet –
Yet it feels natural. Slipping back into old, well-worn clothes. Everything he thought changed, gone in the moment when the monster’s hungry eyes befall him, read him for what he is.
(Pollock knew it, too. From the moment the stupid boy crossed his path. It’s practically tattooed on his forehead.)
The monster speaks and the voice, too, sounds familiar. Commanding. He smiles and Rapt shivers under the curl of it, so strange and desperate, so terrible. My name is Bruise, he says, and of course it is, of course, that he would be named for marks and hurt, and Rapt’s heart is in his throat. He, too, fits his namesake – before this creature, he is rapt.
“I knew your father,” he managed to say, then clarifies, “Pollock.”
But knew doesn’t do justice to their meetings. I knelt before him. I worshipped him. I loved him.
“I served him,” he amends, “for a time.”
His knees quiver.
“My name is Rapt.”
I call him the devil because he makes me want to sin (and every time he knocks, I can't help but let him in)
Bruise drinks in the scent of him like a predator, the sickly sweet want of a boy looking for someone to command him, the easy prey laid out before him like a feast. He does not even need to pull onto the strings of the Fear, although they brush lightly along the edges of it, the reminder of everything he is capable of simmering just below the surface, empowering the arrogance in an already impossibly arrogant heart.
His gaze sharpens at the mention of his father, the interest cutting and quick, but the crushed velvet mouth remains still. It would be like his father to command this boy in front of him.
It would be like his father to drive the weak to their knees in worship.
Bruise considers him, peering over him like one might inspect an item to be bought. There is strength, perhaps, in the healthy and muscled body—but that does not interest him. Bruise had no need for physical violence, although even he could admit the allure in the cutting of flesh and the spilling of blood.
Instead, Bruise remains interested by the malleable mind that lies below the surface, pulsing and visible in the silence that stretches taut between them. That is a thing to take. That is a thing to make your own.
“Good,” he finally replies and there is the barest hint of a smile that is not quite a smile that begins to play at the edges of his cruel mouth. There is a hunger that begins to curdle in his stomach—the taste of wine that reminds you of an unquenchable thirst. There is a want for power that begins to tease at the edges of his mind, and the boy before him is nothing if not an invitation—an open door.
“Now you will serve me.”
It is not a question. Not a request. Instead, an order that he fully expects the boy to bow underneath, the weight of shackles against wrist and the press of yoke against neck. He steps forward, possessive, and presses his lips against the boy’s brow, teeth barely grazing the flesh—the taste of salt against his tongue.
there is a dream in the space between the hammer and the nail ------ the dream of about-to-be-hit, which is a bad dream ------------ but the nail will take the hit if it gets to sleep inside the wood forever
He is trembling, almost wanton – it’s desire, yes (he doesn’t admit this – can’t – won’t – but it is, desire like a snake, like a noose, wrapped around him), but it’s more than that. It’s wanting, some terrible, core part of him that has ached for a moment just like this one.
Weak, wanting, wanton. Good, says the monster, and Rapt nods, stupid – yes, it’s good.
(It’s terrible – imagine his son seeing him like this. The cringing, hungry thing that he is. That he has always been. Finally laid bare.)
The monster’s gaze is like buckshot, a hundred hot pellets in his skin, and he feels every one. He feels heat, and pressure, and so overwhelmed by it is he that he almost misses the next words. Now you will serve me.
“Yes,” he says, and the words don’t shake (unlike his knees). The word is strong because it has been ready and eager at his lips since he first saw him.
Bruise touched him and he kneels as he’s commanded, his knees giving way eagerly, pressing deep into the dirt. It’s warm from the sun, damp. His knees will be stained when he rises.
“Bruise--” he says, and now the word is choked. Grateful. A name. An invitation.
“I serve you.”
He looks up at the monster. From this angle, he’s even taller. More imposing. Towering over him.
“What--” he stumbles over the words, too frightened and too eager both, “what would you have me do?”
I call him the devil because he makes me want to sin (and every time he knocks, I can't help but let him in)
His eagerness to please is a beautiful thing.
It is not the sweetness of a conquest—there is no blood on the ground, yet, there is no broken flesh, there is no shattered will—but there is a different beauty to his wanton release to Bruise’s commands.
He is able to be molded, to be formed, to be pressed and broken into what Bruise desires.
(There is part of Bruise that curls in distaste to the weakness, a repulsive thing to bend so easily, but the other part greedily grabs for it, taking that which is laid before him like a feast and gorging on it.)
Bruise chuckles at the boy on his knees, the sound dark and throaty.
So eager. So willing.
He bends his heavy-horned head down again, pressing lips to his forehead and grazing his teeth to where his ears lay. “Patience,” the words are hissed before Bruise clamps onto the ear and tugs hard, feeling the sensitive flesh between his teeth and against his tongue—the taste of earth and hair and ownership.
He mostly wants to know how the boy will respond.
(Will he coil away?
Will he simply accept the pain?
Will he hunger for more of it?)
Releasing the ear with a sigh, he keeps his head hung down low. “I need to know you are a useful thing before I waste my time with you,” his voice low and accusatory—a demand, a request, a challenge.
“So go. Find me a plaything.” He lifts his head again, looking down his nose to the boy on his knees.
A sniff, regal and dismissive.
“Something weak to break,” a pause. “Someone like you, Rapt.”
He bends down once more.
“But not something for me to keep, Rapt.” A dark promise that hangs in the air.
“Not like I will be keeping you.”
1 - i figured you'd be okay with the powerplay but if you're not, let me know and i can edit.
2 - bruise just wants someone to torment (although he's not against murder if it works). i figured we could see if someone is interested or we could just pretend that rapt found someone if you prefer.
