I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
The silence extends until it takes on a weight. Sleaze considers leaving, maybe sputtering out some apology, and moving on, leaving her alone with her thoughts. He shifts his weight, eyes tracing an exist, when she finally does speak. But it’s not the polite, distant greeting he’d expected. A comment on his color, the deep purple of it, almost indistinguishable from black.
He'd been born black, like his father (like one of his fathers). He’d been black up until the day that trickster – that god? – had taken him, had thrown him recklessly into a new, impossible world.
He had emerged from that world with splitting realities, a new color, and an awful power that he does not want, that he keeps quashed deep down inside.
(There was a girl -- )
“Oh,” he says.
The same silence extends, and he’s distinctly aware of his own heartbeat. He’s nervous, has gone too long without speaking to others. Sleaze was never great with social graces, and isolation has only roughened that edge.
There is still a chance to go. He could be nothing more than a brief, strange exchange, forgotten easily.
But instead, he speaks.
“I died, once. Well, several times. In a quest. Decapitated first, later burned alive.”
He’d been brough back from that first death. And the second one, in the flames – it had mattered so little, by then. He had known nothing of himself, swallowed by new identities, a new reality that he sometimes still thinks of, still wants for.
“I’m sorry about your daughter,” he says, as if he hadn’t just casually related it to his own false demises, when the daughter was gone and he was here, before her.
Sleaze
@[Agetta]