Making Faces

[Seven Xu]

“Nowhere near as much as you, I’m sure,” Seven exhaled with a glib laugh and rolled his eyes. His right leg was useless and his left could do little more than drive a knee into an unyielding side. It was a futile effort; the hard sole of his remaining boot caught the lip of a leather belt, shuddered past to scrape at Victor’s thigh, and then fell back comfortably against his chest.

Seven’s brow beetled and his lips slackened into a defeated pout. “I don’t have to learn from experience to know what danger is—you don’t need to touch fire to know that it burns you. You can feel that it’s hot.” He had been able to weave his life-essence into protection for as long as he knew Victor, and yet he had told no one else. The words were hard to come by; he sucked at his lip. “I don’t know what my limits are, because I will not stick my hands in the flames.”

Hands. He still had his hands.

White fingers scrubbed their winding trails down Victor’s sides, hoping for him to flinch. “You were the one to bring up danger in the first place, Victor Lark!” More often than not, Seven was content with a laconic pet name—Vic, typically—but relished in pronouncing every syllable when he knew it would earn a rise from his companion. His smile had returned; he was brimming with satisfaction when discomfort or surprise provided an out and his leg was freed.

Gangly thighs wrapped the bulk that kept him on his back; he pushed with his arms and wrenched loose Victor’s steadied grip on the roof below; they heaved sideways, and farther, until Seven managed to pin his bird beneath his palms and between his knees, shoulders pushed to hot shingles.

“I’ll even read the book to you myself, if you want.”

[Victor Lark]

The reflex in Victor’s shoulders urged him to use the momentum of the tumble to roll on top again, but he hesitated an instant too long. The rush was lost, his abdomen pinned. His pupils grew wide beneath the white shroud of Seven’s shadow; silver rings hung on a pair of garnets, laughing. Victor let the sentiment escape through his throat, a half-real chuckle that spoke of defeat. The sky grew darker.

A feeling of disquiet, however ironic, poured out from within the cage of his fool’s arms. He wrapped his hands around them, legs wriggling beneath the weight until he could bend his knees and brace his feet against the roof. “Maybe I like the danger,” he said.

He let his fingers travel up the sleeve beneath them to a soft neck and jawline, scooping behind blushing ears and wringing through a wet scalp. There he pulled himself as far as Seven would let him rise, joining them in yet another of the morning’s many kisses. “Maybe the point is to be burned.”

As if to prove his point, his fingertips began to tingle with the very same djed which had started their little argument. He felt them go white, weaker but more dexterous, invisibly fondling the heated flesh beneath silky hair.

And then he was bracing his warped hands against the neck beneath them, using the power of distraction and the leverage between a pair of gangly legs to throw Seven over his shoulders. Perhaps it was not the fairest or most honest thing to do, to use their intimacy against him, but the accidental morph made Victor mischievous. He tried to roll backward with him, but half-way through realized he didn’t have the strength. Both bodies fell in an inelegant flop and, ignorant to how close he had flung the weightless body to the building’s edge, Victor swept onto his knees.

There he stopped to catch his breath, throwing another peculiar half-laugh too loudly on the thickening air. A raindrop missed his head and stained a summer-warmed shingle; another managed to catch him on the back of his neck. “Thanks,” he mentioned again, and the word was somehow more genuine than it had been. He rubbed his hands, as if to wash them of their magic before Seven saw.“This is fun.”

[Seven Xu]

Seven gathered his elbow from where it hung over the lip of the building’s roof and rolled away. His heart was thumping so hard against his chest he was sure it’d escape; his lungs burned for clammy air and he sucked at it eagerly; white cheeks were flushed with effort and defeat.

“You nearly threw me off the damned roof,” the accusation came with laughter, turning it playful. His tongue wiped his lower lip in a consideration that twisted a grin into something open-mouthed and awkward. Enthusiasm did not wear well on the halfblood’s face. “Next time I’ll make sure to grab onto you, so that if I fall, you come with me.”

A pair of hands shot out to loosely grab his bird’s shoulders before falling to his elbows, thumbs squeezing at relaxed flesh confined in cotton. “You’d make a nice cushion for me to land on—” the quip was cut short; Seven’s chin dipped as he caught sight of white withering away from Victor’s knuckles. His brow furrowed, his fanged grin flattened, and he strained to gather words.

“How far can you go with that, Vic? I mean, how much of you,” he paused to lift one half-painted hand between his own, turning it over as if it were unfamiliar, “can become me?”

There was a challenge his incredulity; the question denied the halfblood’s earlier concerns. Curiosity had sparked and the ebbing rush of their playful brawl had fueled the flame. Seven’s chest was still heaving when he let Victor’s hand slide from his grip to comb fingers through dark and sweat-damp bangs. He made himself look away.

“You don’t have to try; I just want to know if you know.”

[Victor Lark]

Victor was at a loss for words. He did not know the answer, and the existence of the question made him want even more to try. He was not sure whether Seven meant to dissuade him, and there was no telling as much from his turned face. “You- you didn’t fall off the roof though,” he mentioned, trying in vain to ignore the mystery that had been posed, to distract himself from the lightness in his fingers. “You trusted your reflexes. You trusted yourself.”

His throat knotted up by the end of the word, cracking like something was caught in it. But Victor knew better. He could feel the wad of djed gather, spurned from his fingertips and clinging to his vocal cords. It was hard to stop it once it had begun, but he rarely bothered to. Inspired by his desire, it was easy to mistake one for the other out of sheer conditioning. Of course he wanted it.

He smiled.

The djed bled into his neck and crawled up his chin, leaving a new set of canines to protrude onto stretched lips. “I don’t know,” Seven’s voice admitted. The Lhavitian’s softer cadence shone through, but the tongue and teeth still thrashed with Ravokian zeal. “Guess it’s too late now.” He laughed.

Victor’s body closed the distance between them, made his fool see by wrapping his hands around that slender waist. There he closed his eyes and—without any qualms, for once—urged the djed onward. His nose flared; his cheeks filled out; his neck and brow washed pale. When it reached his scalp, the djed paused at the obstacle, begging for some aid in the form of casting hands. Preferring the subtlety of refusing it, he let his djed slowly sort itself through. Soon enough, it began to weave his hair with matching white.

When he tried to open his eyes again, Victor found a peculiar dizziness prevented him from it. A moment passed, and finally a mirror of Seven’s rubied pair looked back at him, peculiarly flat in the head where they did not belong.

“I never liked you with black hair,” Victor teased, consciously avoiding any emphasis on the consonants. He leaned in close, giggling. “Would you kiss your own lips, if it meant kissing me?”

[Seven Xu]

Wonderment left the halfblood’s jaw slack as a noble’s face was swept away in an equable white tide; a harsh tongue struggled around the airiness that came so naturally to a Lhavitian; eyes like gemstones shone from beneath hair untainted by fading black dye. Seven would have smiled had it occurred to him to do more than stare.

Then, his brows knit together and he murmured, “Is that really what I sound like?”

Answers were useless when questions were forged in the rhetorical. Seven rocked into the embrace and closed the hair’s width that remained between them. He was quick to balk when sharp canines snagged his bottom lip in mockery of his own habit, but laughed and made another bolder attempt, hands squeezing at shoulders still too broad to mirror his. Lips and teeth clashed again in a short exchange on musky breath. Seven clawed through a crop of false white and pulled the face away.

If there was comfort to be found in the kiss, it was that his bird still tasted the same.

“Your teeth are too straight and your hair is too thick,” he teased, head lifting from the roof to find some interest in the heavy clouds that had moved in on their sun, “but I’m no less impressed.”

Cold water struck him on the nose and made him flinch. He rose in one fluid sweep, crossing his legs and tucking his feet beneath his small frame. Rain had begun to fall with some consistency now; big, cumbersome drops that announced every thump against their rooftop world. After a moment’s hesitation, Seven twisted to look down at himself. “What does it feel like to change your face like that? It doesn’t hurt, does it?”

[Victor Lark]

Victor licked the back of his teeth, a thing he had never considered when his face changed. The fangs were right; he could feel them in his mouth, but the rest... well, it didn’t matter. The same tongue pressed against his false canines, pushing them into something closer to normal. In time, they would return to their true shape, as the djed dissipated and the illusion failed.

In the meantime, the pale fragility of Seven’s flesh morphed on Victor’s chest beneath his shirt, pouring like milk toward his belly. He had never tried a full transformation before, but despite their talk of care and danger, he was curious as to the extent of his strange power. “No,” he answered, red eyes settling absently on the matching pair opposite. White lashes spasmed beneath the weight of a brief darkness. “It doesn’t feel like much of anything. Sometimes it’s even good, but not in any, um, physical way. It just feels—”

The eyes in his face were not his to use, and yet something had crossed the brow above them, like the brink of a revelation; unfortunately, it was short lived, interrupted by a sudden gasp. Olive fingers gripped hard to Seven’s arm then, holding himself steady as he sucked at air that would not enter his throat. Half of his face flashed its proper shape, iron confusion and suffocating purple, and then flooded again with the similarly discolored white.

Victor released Seven and tore deliberately, steadily, urgently at the front of his shirt. He reached beyond the broken buttons and clutched the spreading disease like it could be held, pressing up on his skin in an attempt to urge the djed upward and back to a tolerable range. It would not obey him entirely, but he did manage a thread of a connection between his lungs and the air they craved. Perfect. He coughed and gasped again, falling to one side. When his elbow failed to catch him on the slick roof, he let it toss him on his back. There was no room for arguing with the world when his insides suffered other turmoils.

There situated, he had the nerve to perk those warped eyebrows at his companion as if to say, It’s under control. Don’t worry. Even though it wasn’t, and he should.

[Seven Xu]

For several ragged breaths, Seven could only watch helpless and open-mouthed as his bird writhed on his back, struggling with blanching skin and whatever riled him beneath. When he reached, bore down on his companion, his shaking bone-thin hands had become useless at the ends of his arms, clumsily grasping at a cinched leather belt and tearing back what remained of the linen cage that was once a shirt.

Familiar scars had gone where waxen flesh had eaten away imperfect olive. Seven moved across the stark contrast where pigment fought, only realizing the frantic beating of his own heart when his fingertips skimmed above another. He swallowed, furrowed his brow, and jerked his numb hand lower. There, the force slid as thick and slow as honey down Victor’s ribcage.

He could stop it, he knew. Be calm, he begged his churning stomach; his eyes closed, squinting in his effort to keep them from flying open.

Violet sputtered and shimmered beneath an itching hand as it wrapped taut around unchanged skin. Seven’s palm was clammy when it made the slow journey across Victor’s abdomen, dragging with him unseen salvation—made visible only where djed joined djed as some jagged and unearthly boundary. Then, red-faced, the halfblood’s touch climbed to his arms, elbow to shoulder to collarbone where white had begun its recession, and further still.

When Seven wiped a painfully steadied thumb across Victor’s drenched and darkened forehead, he managed to speak. The corners of his mouth twitched as he blinked a hazy sting from the corners of his eyes. “I’m sorry.” He collapsed to rest his head in the slope of his bird’s neck, the paltry weight of his frame listing onto the other’s still-heaving chest. “I’m so sorry.”

[Victor Lark]

At its worst, the pain was less like pain and more like a cloud of hot oil squeezing and crawling and chafing on his chest. The false flesh coiled around him and tore between the fibers of his skin, his muscle, his lungs, his soul. It hurt like the crushing madness of suffocation without the release of a true wound, just like every day hurt in a perpetual thirst for empathy. The magic crossed over his eyes and he flinched, pushing salty shards of tears over his face; when he looked up again, a perfect expression of desperate fright filled his vision. Even clenched teeth could not hold the frustrated groan that followed.

Because as much as it hurt, or did not hurt, as fast as his failing heart pounded and his tears poured, he was further from the fear of death than he had ever been. It was too sudden. He had no time to prepare, to understand that he was supposed to be afraid, and so he stumbled around in the painlessness, far from the brink, trapped in comfortable nothing. Soon, the nothing would stray into the corporeal as Seven’s careful magic contained Victor’s recklessness.

And then he was inhaling the humid air and tasting the wilting cotton on his tongue, hearing wept apologies and feeling the frantic touch of trembling hands. His skin was wet with rain, or sweat, or both. He pushed away whatever was left of his savior’s meager weight, hating the envy he felt in the memory of his flushed face. Then he tried to pull himself up, but his treacherous body forced him sideward in a heavy retch.

“It’s not... don’t be,” was the grumbling reply, and his voice was a peculiar mix of Victor’s song and Seven’s shine. Wiping his eyes and mouth, he cleared his throat of what could only be some remaining fragment of djed. “I’m the one—” With a huff, he tipped to his feet and, collecting his new book and their coats that had been thrown beside it, mentioned stiffly, “We should go home. Thank you, for today. It was great.”

[Seven Xu]

Victor was still slathered in the protective wrap Seven’s fingers had lain upon him. It was skin-tight; it moved as he moved, persisted when not long ago it would have faded as soon as the halfblood gave in to distractions. He’d done it before, on a shoulder, a thigh, weaving some defense against the mundane just to see the colors swarm and coalesce and shimmer across already beautiful skin. His bird had never let him go quiet long; the shield always frayed and dissolved, forgotten in favor of sweet whispers and feigned laughter and coarse, honest touches. Why, now, did it stay?

He smiled weakly.

“You sure you’re okay? I mean, you just—” Seven had glanced to the vile puddle at his feet, and Victor had gone. He snorted, rolled to stand, and gathered damp sock and shoe. He grunted with the effort of balancing on one foot to dress the other and called out after the human’s shrinking form. “Gods, be careful!”

Seven was deliberate in his pursuit. Quick of mind, but slow of body, the man was built of glass with the frail bones of his mother’s blood. He was careful always, having been broken too many times as a reckless child. Where Victor leapt narrow gaps, he would sink to his knees and ease himself down. Shingles had become slick in the rain and puddles had sprung up nearly everywhere. Larger breaks between roofs could only be conquered by a running jump, and eventually he threw away the hesitation of giving himself to the sky, if only for a second, and only because he had to.

He caught Victor because Victor let himself be caught. Panting, Seven dipped and rose and wiped his mouth with the back of a soaking sleeve. His lungs were on fire, drowning in moisture-thick air and rain that slashed down on them from an angry, rumbling sky. Seven searched for his composure. He straightened and licked his lips and managed a smile beneath the wrinkle of worried brows.

A familiar rise of faded black had sprung up at the end of their short street. Seven’s expression softened, if only for a moment.

And then an impulse rose in his gut and he grabbed the other man by the jaw and crushed their mouths together. He made a noise deep in his throat, felt the familiar tingle of venom pouring from his jaw, and wrenched himself away. Victor’s mouth had been sour with vomit, and Seven broke their silence with a laugh as he turned and spat.

[Tabarnac]

Seven

Experience

Skill	XP Earned
Acrobatics	5 XP
Climbing	4 XP
Shielding	4 XP
Rhetoric	2 XP
Negotiation	2 XP
Observation	5 XP
Seduction	3 XP
Storytelling	1 XP
Wrestling	2 XP
Philosophy	3 XP

Lores

•	Lore Earned
•	Acrobatics: Rooftop Freerunning
•	Shielding: Djed Disruption
•	Temperature of a Talderan Taint
•	Treval Codex

Y kant
Dani use
columns
rite?
Huh?
Herp
derp derp.

Victor

Experience

Skill	XP Earned
Acrobatics	4 XP
Climbing	3 XP
Morphing	2 XP
Teaching	2 XP
Observation	3 XP
Dagger	1 XP
Seduction	5 XP
Storytelling	2 XP
Leadership	1 XP
Research	1 XP
Wrestling	3 XP
Rhetoric	2 XP
Philosophy	2 XP
Stealth	1 XP

Lores

•	Lore Earned
•	Treval Codex
•	Acrobatics: Rooftop Freerunning
•	Model: Seven’s Vocal Apparatus
•	Model: Dra-Seven Xu
•	Dangers of Morphing

Y kant
Dani use
columns
rite?
Huh?
Herp
a
derp derp.
Deeeeeerp!
Derp? Derp.

Tabarnac says...

You guys are a treat to read. Your rapport is enviable, and you clearly pass the baton without a hitch. One thing, and this is not a criticism, but merely an observation of my own shortcoming: you two follow each other so well, but sometimes I think I missed what you meant exactly for not being in the know. So hopefully I caught everything, and if I didn’t, please don’t hesitate to let me know! I want you to be happy with the fruits of your labors!

In some cases there are differences in how much each earned for similar things, but that’s mostly due to one or the other being more skilled in it and it taking more challenging things for the same XP payoff.

Seven, I thought the use of Shielding to disrupt the Morphing was a clever idea. I think, though, that it skirts territory that might make some STs nervous, so you might want to double check when using it like that. I’m all for creative use of magic, but you know... some people might be more strident sticklers for the letter of the law, you know?

I see the Treval Codex on Victor’s CS, and the expenditure on Seven’s ledger, so that’s square. But who has the ring? I don’t see it! (I might be blind.)

As I said, let me know if there’s anything you feel needs altering or if you have any questions.

Dream deep!