[private] who am i to complain, sleaze

[isakov]

i finally got sewed up
Set a time and i showed up

Years have passed.
Decades, perhaps.

And yet Isakov remains, has always remained, quiet in the way he has lurked. A thing made for love, not from it, he has understood that his place is in the shadows. He’s known it in the way he has only hurt the things he himself loved. Sigrid, darling girl, has gone. She had always been more fond of Sleaze, as though she’d understood that there had been something dark about Isakov.

Has he changed all that much? He has not fashioned himself into anything more fanciful than a star-touched bastard in so long he is not certain he’d be able to if he tried. The illusion had come so naturally to him, once.

But it had not all been an illusion, had it? No, he had known what it felt like to love something honestly. It had not all been for show. It couldn’t have. He’d loved desperately and he’d let it destroy him. He’d let it chase him into the shadows.

He emerges now only because that color, that deep purple, it is as familiar to him as his own skin. He catches only a glimpse at first and thinks it must be Sigrid. But it is not Sigrid.

It is Sleaze.

And Isakov, old Isakov, he smiles, relieved. Sleaze, he calls, only to find that no sound has left his mouth. He has only thought it. He does not rush in his approach, only walks purposefully until their strides match and he settles into an amble.

“Sleaze,” he finally says and the shape of the name on his tongue alone is enough to relax muscles that have been tensed for decades.

isakov

@sleaze

[sleaze]

I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife

He is so different, now.
He doesn’t know how, exactly – only that he felt some fundamental shift within him those years ago, that last quest. He knows the world bends in ways it hadn’t, before. He knows reality is ever so thin.
Somethings thrums in him, terrible and wild, an infection of the blood, the marrow. Maybe he is nothing but that infection, rot shaped into a dark purple stallion who is not particularly handsome, whose eyes have a ghastly sheen to them.

But once –
Once, in a river, his lips skimming over star-stricken skin. A sense of quiet he had never felt before, solace in those stars. A peace named Isakov.

He’d hardly dared to think of him, as if by merely thinking of him he might harm him. Like his monstrous thoughts would spring forth from his mind. And surely now, with Beqanna as quiet as she was, when he felt like one of the few souls left, there was no reason to think one of the other souls might be him.
Sleaze is not accustomed to hope, see.

And yet none of this matters, in the end, because Isakov is here.
Sleaze can do nothing but gape, at first, eyes roving over the stallion as he nears. Sleaze himself stays still, caught like a deer in headlights, a terrible part of him crying out to bolt, to run, to not let Isakov see what he has become.
But of course he doesn’t.
Isakov speaks his name and something in Sleaze unknots, a sigh years held, and now he moves. On trembling legs he moves closer and he wonders if he will fall, crash into him, but for now he stays standing and he manages to speak, his words faint.
“Isakov,” he says, and oh, how nice it is to say that name again, “I’ve missed you.”
He wants to say so much more but his knees are trembling – all of him is trembling, maybe – and the relief of seeing him again is deafening.

Sleaze

@isakov