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[Seven] All I’ve ever learned from love was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you.

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Considered one of the most mysterious cities in Mizahar, Alvadas is called The City of Illusions. It is the home of Ionu and the notorious Inverted. This city sits on one of the main crossroads through The Region of Kalea.

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Postby Victor Lark on June 12th, 2012, 4:47 pm

Summer 1, 512

Baby, I’ve been here before.
I’ve seen this room, and I’ve walked this floor.
You know, I used to live alone before I knew you.
And I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch,
but love is not a victory march;
it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.

The lock twisted around the stumbling key with a few rancorous knocks, loosing the door from its post like a whisper. A yellow line of light poured the dawn into the dank old room and the street’s dust flailed in the threshold as the haggard shadow of a man parted through it. The door grumbled loudly as he closed it and the floor boards screamed as he crossed; everything seemed so loud in the quiet, to ears that had known nothing but deafening merriment for days.

He shoved his keys into his pocket and ran a hand through a greasy length of hair. There he scratched an itch that moved from his scalp to the raised mark on his neck to the grime in the nook of his eye, resenting the weight of sleep. The intimacy of the bar was eerie, after another life lived in a hub of the unexpected and surreal. It was because of the sameness, he chose to believe, and the close, cold walls. It was the benignity of Home. Victor still wasn’t certain whether he liked it.

Tired arms leaned against the bar as refreshed eyes scanned the bottles behind it. He considered their contents and then he looked at the tabletop itself, the familiar grooves in the poorly-kept patina. A long gone memory rose up from the grooves, of a dagger and a threat and a pair of amethyst eyes. It inspired him to turn toward the back door, to remember the life that lurked behind it, the bed that waited like an invitation above and the fool that probably still slept there.

He needed to go there, so he did.

He was no less noisy than he had been before, letting his heavy feet collide with the stair as well as they could. He had forgotten how to be silent, or maybe a part of him wanted his arrival announced. He found the door to his bedroom and, forgetting to close it, fell in beside the body that laid there. Kicking half-heartedly at his shoes, he ran a dirty hand through a pearly white mop of hair and mumbled an unintelligible smile.
Victor Lark
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Postby Seven Xu on June 13th, 2012, 1:30 am

Seven had lived in silence for too long. The creak and moan of rust-eaten hinges roused him from shallow sleep and the approaching soles of reckless feet poured blurry recognition into the corners of his mind. His toes curled against themselves. His heart buzzed in his chest. Every step made his stomach tighten and his blood boil, but he remained patiently quiet in sun-drenched crimson darkness until the weight on his mattress shifted and hard fingers drove their unkempt nails into his fair scalp.

Blood red eyes snapped open.

Glorious anger flashed over Seven’s face like the crack in a long-anticipated storm. His eyes were burning red slits opening into hell; his lips receded from jagged lines of tooth and fang in an animalistic snarl; his small nostrils flared over a pitiful line of fuzz that had sprung up over days of sullen indifference. He looked predatory in that instant, the fables of his ancestors personified on a sweat-drenched face. He wanted to forego the questions he had rehearsed a thousand times over in his mind to push the complacent man from the bed that no longer smelled of him.

Instead, he receded slowly from the hand atop his head and spoke in a cold whisper. “Where were you?”

The halfblood’s heaving form rose in the tangle of sheets, white on white on white that burned in the morning sun’s light. There, as tears itched at the corners of his eyes and fingers grasped blindly for the warm folds of linen between his legs, he waited in stern silence for a response.
Seven Xu
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Postby Victor Lark on June 30th, 2012, 1:21 am

The waking Seven, or the illusion of it, breathed new salt into the stale echoes of Victor’s memory. He felt himself waking again in that gasp of a moment; he had been moving in the world’s rhythm until it, pulling up against the grip of sepia sand. But seeing him was like reaching the ocean, a great scarlet oasis which he had forgotten was lost. Leth glowed behind his fool’s face as his white body stirred in crisp reality, rising on beauty that Victor loved without loving and when he waded on toward it, he saw a strange thing, a look that he had only hoped to see so many times... but before he could realize what it was, it ebbed beneath a flow of bitterness and was gone.

As he rose to sit, reciprocating the retreat, Victor’s expression fell instantly into sagging, unassuming slate: a pause which his lover might recognize as confusion. He felt his hand chill in the empty air between them, so he warmed it impatiently on a knot of threadbare sheets. “Out.” He could only listen as the defensive syllable fell out of his mouth, dipping into same distance proposed by the question it answered. The next instant was a scramble between an apology and a plea. “The Festival.”

Victor did not attempt to hide his curiosity, the head that turned as it tried to examine Seven from some other, more enlightening angle. The anger he saw was not quite anger, and the mystery was entirely frustrating. If he could find what it was, if he could just swim out a little further, he could know how to respond.

On another day, he might have remembered to be more direct, but some ancient instinct told him to make a daring stroke toward the tears. “What do you care?”
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Postby Seven Xu on July 2nd, 2012, 12:49 pm

“What do I care?” Seven repeated, brows rising on incredulity; his voice rose and cracked and sickening anger churned in his gut; his wet mouth hung open, and inside thrashed a tongue that searched for words. It didn’t take long to untangle the man’s implicitness, not when they’d spent so much of a year together. He knew what Victor wanted. He frowned. “You mean what do I feel?”

White eyelids drooped with his chin, staring down at his hands. He was naked from the waist up, clad only in his smallclothes. By the sun’s bleaching light he was barely distinguishable against the mess of linen, and even at a height with his bird, the halfblood’s slumped shoulders and wire-thin frame made him look so much smaller. His face had flattened, and one dark nail pressed against a set of sharp knuckles.

“I thought you were gone.” He measured each word. Answers without explanation—damned if he’d give more than he had to. “You could have been dead for all I knew. It didn’t occur to you even once to come back here until the festival was over?” Seven’s bleary red stare tipped upward, focusing on anything that wasn’t scrutinizing steel. His words were venom on a hot tongue.

“I know that there’s nothing there.” Seven’s movement was gradual, one hand reaching across the space between them to brush Victor’s chest. “That you forget to smile because your head doesn’t tell you to.” He slipped away and further, drawing his legs up and unfurling to stand on their mattress before he stepped off the bed entirely; one swift movement with all the grace he could muster.

“I just never thought that you’d forget me.”
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Postby Victor Lark on July 8th, 2012, 6:39 pm

Victor was at a loss for words: a too common occurrence in the realm of honesty that was this room, these sheets, that face, every mark and scar on the bodies they shared. It was only selfish heedlessness that had prevented him from home, and yet the accusation in the truth dumbed him. Nothing. Emptiness. It was all he was. He might as well have been gone, even when he was here.

His own mouth hung in a mirror to Seven’s, desperately bouncing on the springs of confusion. His frustration was so intense then that he wondered if he had discovered something new in it, something real. The last length of his pause was a brief and frantic attempt to amplify that feeling, but of course it was futile. The passion was an illusion, made of vain hope and days of contrasting contentment. But Seven’s was not. Seven’s was what fueled him, filled him, made him Something.

And getting back that Something did not exactly require honesty.

“That’s why I’m here. To tell you,” he lied, his expression equally cold and stern. He slipped away from the bed and stood, his hands tightening into fists like a second thought. The falsehood was like a tightrope; to reach its end was somethingness, but the consequences of falling were a dark and dangerous unknown.

“The city is... it doesn’t care about what I am, and what I’m not. It doesn’t turn into Ivak’s bastard because I was having fun.” Facts that were not exactly truths fell from his lips like sour honey, as easy as any other seduction and yet so different. He reached blindly for the door, fumbling with the handle like a reversible threat. “I just wanted to stop by to tell you that I’m leaving.”
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Postby Seven Xu on July 8th, 2012, 10:48 pm

White hot rage was snuffed as quickly as it had flared. Seven squared his shoulders and curled his bare toes against cold floorboards; it took everything in his power not to crumple, not to flinch or whimper or waver. Half a hundred times he had left, slipped off into the night only to return as the blue-black sky shifted into dull grey dawn, but he’d never stated it with such conviction. Seven’s heart sank into his bowels.

Victor had finally grown bored of his fool.

He should have seen it coming long ago. He was a far cry from interesting, save from peculiarities that his bird had long since grown used to. It was foolish to love one that had no means for reciprocation, whose mind was too shallow for the complexities of love—it was a wonder it had lasted so long. His hands shook, and he balled them into fists so tight his untrimmed nails dug painfully into his clammy palms.

Seven’s stiff jaw slackened; he hadn’t even realised he was clenching it until it began to hurt. “Go on, then,” he dared, the whites of his eyes flaring around depthless red. “Get out.”
Seven Xu
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Postby Victor Lark on July 10th, 2012, 1:28 am

Victor stared in a moment of disbelief. “Fine,” he insisted.

He refused to turn down the dare, but there was something terrible in this one and it made him hesitate. He hated the near apathy in it, which was so much like the Nothing he wished he could forget, but he loved how novel it was on his fool’s face, how beautifully unpredicted. He did not want to leave it, not for the world. His pause turned him stiff and indecisive.

“I’ve just got to pack,” he mentioned, releasing the door handle in favor of the trunk at the opposite corner of the room, which had been collecting dust since Fall. He opened it and the chest of drawers beside it, stuffing handfuls of clothes indiscriminately into what free space was left between the tent and other necessities. His memory was searching for a place he could go until he remembered that he did not truly want to leave; caught between the lie and the bluff, between what he thought he wanted and the reality of it, he slammed the two wooden halves together and fastened the straps around them.

Even if he wanted to stir these still waters, in the stale air of his stubbornness he could know guess how. He defaulted on a reciprocal dare. “You’ll forget me all the same,” he said stupidly, lingering by the wall with the half-packed trunk inert at his feet. His neck itched, but his fingers only twitched at his sides. “You’ll see.”
Victor Lark
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Postby Seven Xu on July 12th, 2012, 2:53 am

Forget you?” Seven nearly choked as he flung Victor’s words back at him, his voice rising with incredulity.

“Would that I could have forgotten you when you went off without a word, to do gods know what for so many days. I thought of you every bloody waking moment,” his voice cracked, “wondered if you were dead or alive or taken or left. I lost myself too many times looking for you in this city that cares without caring. Will it keep you warm at night, Alvadas? Will it tend your wounds; feed you when you cannot feed yourself?

“How dare you.”

He’d struggled against the brink of tears for so long, blinking them back from quavering lids and grinding his teeth. When he finally broke, he twisted his face and his chin dipped and a sob shook his shoulders. His knees turned to jelly beneath him and he dipped to squat, staring hard at the floor between his legs. It seemed useless to fight with whatever Victor hadn’t broken. He wept unabashedly between heaving gulps of air, his head lodged in his own lap, his mind humming with rage and desperation and dread.

“Damn you,” he moaned, fists loosening as his hands swept to his face. One fumbled to wipe his cheeks; the other roamed the length of his neck to claw at the flesh that rose there. “Damn you.”
Seven Xu
Rhetoric can't raise the dead.
 
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Postby Victor Lark on July 14th, 2012, 1:51 am

Victor watched in awe as the fruit of his efforts bloomed before him, that sweet sadness sown from devotion betrayed. Curiosity tugged at his feet, pulled his eyes to inspect the face beneath the bowed head, but again hesitation held him still. He was no stranger to tears, but he realized then that he had not expected this success. He was reminded strangely of home, of the family he had abandoned, and he knew then that he was not ready to do the same to this one, to Seven, who had given him more than he could ever describe.

And yet he was so close. The pieces were in place, the game was near its end, and the prize was more than simple witnessing.

As his fool wilted to the floor, Victor pulled his hands into fists. Soft nails reached into the resilient flesh of his palm and pressed deep. The gesture might have meant rage on another’s hands, but on his it was only a secret attempt to inflict some sort of pain on himself, something to inspire that glorious epiphany which poured from Seven’s eyes and rocked on Seven’s shoulders. He pushed his breath through haggard gasps; his brow twisted and furrowed and rose. “You think I can’t take care of myself? You underestimate me,” was the reflex of an answer, delivered through the affect of a sob.

But each second in the attempt pulled him further from Seven, from both the emotion and the miserable man contained in it. He lifted a hand and, as a flush of pink healed the temporary scars he had inflicted, wiped his dry eyes of the tears he could not make.

In the wake of his failure, he found the will to cross the room and fall to a knee before his crouching lover. Gentle callouses on eager fingertips rose to the contour of Seven’s face, begging that it rise and show itself to the iron scrutiny that waited above it. There Victor’s grip tightened; he thought he could feel the white hot emotion beneath that sticky sheen of tears and he could not help but clutch the face that made it, as if he could hold it there.

“Goodbye then,” he said without conviction, and the mask of sadness faltered almost facetiously. In their proximity he had hoped to perfect it, but the sight of those beautiful eyes he was moved by other desires. Suddenly the hand on Seven’s face became two, and he stole an almost apologetic kiss.
Victor Lark
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Postby Seven Xu on July 15th, 2012, 1:41 am

Two white hands snapped upward, weaving fingers between callouses and knuckles and the warm pinch of a ring, holding Victor in their kiss—surprisingly frigid for the writhing, sobbing mess the rest of him had become. Seven was trembling. His eyes refused to close. He made a small noise deep in his throat.

And then his mouth opened and he bit deep into the soft wet cushion of Victor’s bottom lip. Hot venom itched as it poured freely from narrow, hollow fangs. He hadn’t eaten in near a day; though the bastard couldn’t dissolve flesh, he could make it hurt. He wanted more than anything for it to hurt, for some revelation of reality to pour from the holes he made in Victor’s mouth or for his venom to climb into his wits and rattle free whatever had blocked his daft bird’s compassion.

Half a heartbeat passed as an eternity before he ripped himself away, staring bleary-eyed and open-mouthed at the twin wounds that wept over those familiar lips. Regret welled up like sickness in his gut and he wrenched his face from Victor’s grip.

He’d always been so careful.

“Get out,” Seven whispered, horrified, and reached to wipe the red mess from his mouth.
Seven Xu
Rhetoric can't raise the dead.
 
Posts: 976
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