Begun Again, Part Two

[Victor Lark]

Summer 9, 512

“The total is, uh... six silver mizas, eight copper.”

“What? Is it really?”

Victor paused, looked up at the broken ceiling, and tried to count it again without his fingers. “Oh, right. Five silver, six copper.”

“Yeah, okay.”

The metal-rimmed pieces rattled out of the man’s pocket and onto the counter. The bartender gave a smile that sat almost like annoyance as his customer waved and exited the establishment. That was the last of them.

Victor scooped the coins into the till and grabbed a rag from behind the bar. He had become the last man left to run at the Stallion’s Rear, and the solitude did not suit him. There were people to talk to, of course, but it was little consolation when the night ended in a cold bed and a lonely morning. Even angering his customers had become all but boring, because he had forgotten how to do it well and because when he did, there was no one to take over while he took a beating.

He had known how to buy and sell once, how to talk to the people so that the most money was earned and the least spent, but he was not very good at managing the books or keeping much of anything organized. Gone were the hopes of seeing a white head cross into the dark dank he called a home; they were turning numb in recent days, replaced by the tedium of obligation and the ephemeral distractions of irregular patrons. Without any real entertainment, he was getting careless. He had already broken two mugs, undercharged half a dozen men, and that night he had even forgotten to lock the door before he started to wipe down the tables.

He was almost done when it opened, crouched behind a sea of wooden legs to wet a mysterious stickiness that had been spilled sometime in the hours previous. He sighed loudly, did not even bother to rise as he called out to the squealing hinges and creaking floorboards.

“Sorry, we’re closed.”

[Seven Xu]

The road from the Mercy had been long. The hunter had left him soon after Seven insisted he could walk on his own feet, only bells after he’d been discovered not half a league from Alvadas’ walls. He’d been little more than a shivering and starving pile of white and grey, hardly fit to be called a man at all. He wasn’t much more now, though a medic in a white gown had tended to what scrapes and bruises he’d accumulated on his eight-and-a-half day foray into the Kitrean foothills. They’d fed and clothed him, too, and scraped the blond-white bristle from his chin. The razor had been dull and his skin burned; he swam in linens that hung like old skin over bone; his stomach churned and groaned, unsatisfied with hard bread and thin broth.

But he was alive.

He’d walked alone through Alvadas, aimless and searching. When he crested that final rise and found the familiar strip of black settled neatly between two larger buildings—as it was prone to do, reliable even in chaos—Seven lost his breath. Lamplight shone through the murky latticed window, an orange beacon he’d prayed for and dreamed for more times than he’d care to count.

Seven could not recall the shambling dash he made for the door, nor the surge of delight he must have felt when it slid open unbarred. Years-old hinges sighed and knotted wood thumped shut at his back. He nearly forgot everything in that moment. The fight, the search—none of it mattered. Bleary eyes burdened by heavy white lids fixed themselves on the body crouched over a wet mess. He barely heard the dismissal in the words on a harsh tongue. He’d stayed, gods be good, he’d stayed. The possibility of being refused by his bird dared not cross his mind as he moved to close the space between them.

“You left the door open.” Seven stopped two strides shy of the Ravokian and sank to the floor. An attempt at a smile twisted his face into something that could only be read as exhaustion. His toes curled against the soles of his shoes, and he whispered to keep his voice from breaking apart in his throat. “And you’re wearing my shirt.”

[Victor Lark]

The sound of Seven’s voice stilled him.

Victor did not often fall victim to the strange sicknesses of emotion which so many others could describe. He had never felt a knot in his throat unless he was eating, and he had never felt a chill in his spine unless he was cold. But when his fool’s starry intonations reached his ears, however weakened or hoarse, Victor found that his arms had frozen against the rag and the floor beneath it.

After some length of immeasurable time, he raised his head to look upon the crumpling pile of bones before him. The smile he managed was sloppy and lopsided, clearly false to anyone who knew anything about social custom, but here in their home, this sanctuary, he did not care. With the soiled cloth clutched in a white-knuckled fist, he slumped the few feet between them and wrapped himself around Seven.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled into the wrinkles of fabric on a shoulder that was harder and smaller than he had remembered. He meant to apologize for the shirt, but then it occurred to him that he was also apologizing for the door; by the time he realized that a simple pair of words applied to so much more, it was too late to think about sentiment or pride. Where did you go? The words dangled from the edge of his lips, alongside I missed you and Don’t ever leave again. But they were ultimately left unspoken in favor of silent gratitude. He could not even bring himself to rise into the strange ceremony in a kiss, with the long awaited smell of his companion to envelop him.

Instead, his arms tensed around Seven’s middle with the unconscious strength of so many passions and he observed absently, “You’re so thin.”

[Seven Xu]

“I got lost,” Seven mewled before he crushed dry lips against a stretch of neck, clammy from labour. He rocked forward on his knees, as if pushing further against his bird would strengthen an old promise. “I just meant to take a walk. I meant to come back; I went too far, the path disappeared.”

And then all at once, he drifted away. Only the lingering scent of each other remained of their embrace; but the gap was swiftly closed again as the aching halfblood favoured cold hardwood and a warm lap.

“You can’t just—” Seven’s white nostrils flared as his lips tightened and fingers tangled impatiently in the long shirt that dwarfed him. His head rocked against Victor’s leg in a half-hearted shake, and hot tears clung stubbornly to the corners of his eyes. “You can’t just do that—test me like that. It’s not what people do, not when they care.” Words came difficult to his muddled mind and thick over his Lhavitian tongue; the frustration in his exhaustion was clear. Seven sighed. “I know you’re sorry.”

He rolled onto his back to stare between a mask of relief and the broken sky beyond. Seven smiled—a sore and crooked attempt at a smile, but a smile all the same. A hand rose to cup Victor’s chin, and his thumb grazed the human’s bottom lip. If there were scars, he couldn’t see them.

“I forgive you. Can you forgive me?”

[Victor Lark]

Victor watched Seven’s mien settle into that familiar smile, tired tin fixed on the lips that made the shape as fingertip callouses glanced indelicately over the jaw that curved beyond. His smile sometimes seemed the most difficult to pry from that perfect pearl of a face, which twitched for annoyance or flushed with embarrassment or fell in boredom so much easier. It was, in its own way, a reward. Though his bird could not hope to empathize, he knew that it meant something good, something right. To want anything less was selfish.

He released a held breath through a reciprocating grin, which seemed a little more like the truth than that of moments previous and yet was somehow less so. “Yeah, of course I forgive you,” Victor nodded. He had never been one for grudges.

“I want you”—not us, never us, but at least you—“to be happy. I won’t do it again.”

It was not a promise he thought he could keep, but he had made a lot of those on summer nights like this one, in the brutal and honest company of the man who had returned to him so many times and despite everything. He had kept those. “Just...” he added, and a bit too eagerly. He tried to laugh, but instead produced another sigh. “Don’t leave, like that. I can’t—you’re the one who’s supposed to take care of me, remember?”

[Seven Xu]

His bird wore many masks—the fleeting smiles, the saccharine laughter, the well-orchestrated doctrines of a proper nobleman—and to peel them all back had been arduous. Beneath them all, Seven had learned, sat the abysmal nothing that tore at Victor whenever distraction faded and that mind was left to wander. It haunted him, and for a time, it haunted Seven. But in the emptiness was that flat, ruthless honesty; it was his, and it meant more than most things could.

Red eyes rolled over an ever-growing smile, and countless confessions were brushed away as easily as they had tumbled from candid lips. “I remember.”

Seven basked for a time beneath the awkward, glowing grin of his companion before he rose. It took effort and the firm support of another body to tug heavy shoulders from the floor, and even more to stay upright once he realised his exhaustion. By the time Seven was on his feet, his ankles threatened to wobble and stubborn darkness tugged at the corners of his vision.

His approach toward the back of the tavern was unhurried, despite his want for cold sheets and a warm embrace; bony white hands reached out to steady slow steps as he closed in on the slick bar. Seven turned then, his countenance trained on something that could have resembled I’m fine, had weariness not drooped his lids and turned his skin to sickly pale wax. “Come upstairs, before I fall asleep on the dirty floor. If pretty faces sold booze, we’d be rich on your shoulders—if clean taverns sold booze, on the other hand ...”

The joke was feeble, but Seven still laughed.

[Victor Lark]

Throwing his rag to its spot beneath the bar, Victor did his best to help Seven to his feet without crushing him. The result was that he barely touched him, and watched from afar as he stumbled away. Unsure of his part in this strange scene, Victor looked around. There were things to finish down there, things to clean, but they were not important. He instead retrieved an apple and knife from their stash beneath the extra mugs and met Seven at the back door with a short jump over the bar.

Victor laughed with him, more an echo than an understanding; his smile dropped almost as soon as it rose when he realized that it was a lie. He did not want to trick him anymore, and in the absence of the charade he floundered. The food which Seven seemed to sorely need was shoved into his trembling palms so that Victor could tuck his arm beneath the crook of a bony pair of legs and pick the tired man up off his feet.

So burdened, he climbed the stairs and kicked the unattended door at the top. He tried to ignore the door to the empty second bedroom room, the bloodstains on the floorboards, the still-open trunk half-full with wrinkling clothes. The past. Victor wanted this moment to be like normal, whatever that meant, like nothing had happened and they did not have to think about mistakes or bad games. He rolled Seven into their unmade bed and fell in beside him.

There he stole back the apple and knife and began to cut shallow, uneven pieces from its side. For every two slices he dropped on Seven’s hollow belly, he deposited one in his own mouth. “You’ll stay here,” he suggested, though at the back of his throat it sounded more like a demand. “If you need anything, you’ll let me know.”

He chewed through a short pause before he remembered to ask, “Do you need anything?”

[Seven Xu]

Seven struggled against a yawn, straining heavy-lidded eyes upward from where he’d settled between rumpled blankets and a warm and familiar lap. He frowned as he caught a sliver of his reflection in the blade atop Victor’s knuckles. A warped white spectre was leering back down at him, visibly gaunt, and he looked past it to the lines of distracted concentration that were drawn across Victor’s oft-smooth face.

“I need sleep,” he confessed, “but I don’t want to sleep.”

If it were possible, he’d emerged from the woods even more a dainty thing than he’d gone in. All porcelain-pale skin stretched over bones half as strong as his bird’s, the fool nothing to show for his foray into nature but a sunken stomach and a few bruises. His palms hadn’t even gotten a chance to harden, pink cuts and wide scrapes sitting in for callouses. Blind fingers guided a browning chunk of apple to his lips and he winced against eager fangs and hungry venom.

“I already feel better, anyway.”

It wasn’t a complete lie; in fact, Seven was sure it wasn’t a lie at all. He did feel better. The rotten knot in his gut had loosened. He was home. While the tavern and its false sky invoked no warmth in him, it was the upstairs—more notably the small room they shared, with its steeply angled ceiling and oversized bed and assembly of shared material things—that felt like home. It could have been made of stone and darkness, of fickle skyglass, or of the bleached brick and ivy that rose from Victor’s city-on-the-lake: where home sat, in this moment, did not matter.

The pair had long since fallen into mutual quiet, breathing and chewing and watching olive hands make quick work of whittling apart an apple, when Seven spoke. “Vic,” he murmured, catching iron with bleary scarlet fire, “we need to leave.”

[Victor Lark]

Victor could have slept there and then, nearly hypnotized by the slow rhythm of sliced apple’s crunch and the lulling pressure of his thumb on the knife, his arm swaying in the air between them and the sweet slices that rocked on taste and aftertaste. It felt right; it fit between the evening’s work and the night’s rest, this haven of purpose in a pair of lives that otherwise struggled for it. It had to be good, whatever good was. It was better than anything.

Sometime within that timelessness he had laid himself down on their bed, replacing himself with a pillow beneath Seven’s head and wriggling in place beside him. His hands had begun to move slower against the shrinking apple, sticky and sleepy, when that voice broke the silence again. Victor’s drooping eyes blinked him back from semi-consciousness, doused him in his favorite pools of still-bright scarlet, and allowed him to hear the words a moment later.

“Hm?” His expression wallowed in lazy, comfortable nothing as he tried to understand. Deciding that his poor fool was delusional in his helplessness, Victor deposited their dinner on the bed stand and turned wholly to Seven. He ran a hand through the hair on the side of his head, tracing a bruised cheekbone with an apple-moist thumb. As kindly as he could, he reiterated, “No, you need to stay.”

Only in the following seconds did he recognize the lucidity in Seven’s face, and so the seriousness in his words. He looked through another moment honest blankness for the cause of the strange request and, finding nothing, felt that knot of uncertainty he thought he had forgotten. “What do you mean?” He asked, and the habitual calm on his face became the lie. “Why?”

[Seven Xu]

There was a long pause after the down mattress had finished groaning beneath their paltry influences. A spindly hand had snaked forward out of the pale obscurity of twisted shirts and sheets, occupying itself on the smooth slope of a hip to weave long fingers around the threads on tatty fabric that ended there.

Finally, in one ragged breath—and after several croaking starts—Seven let out his words. The halfblood was inundated with exhaustion; fragmented and half-finished thoughts flowed out from a habitually gentle voice.

“This city,” he began. He moved to meet Victor’s knees with his own and they knocked together as his red stare wandered. “There’s nothing right about it: the illusions, the tricks. It’s ripped my wits apart. It’s shown me things I couldn’t have imagined, things I shouldn’t have been capable of, things that were forgotten for a reason.” He wavered; dim disquiet tore at his throat. “It’s even taken the sky from me.

I won’t leave you again.” He promised. “If you want to stay, I will stay, but I cannot insult you by pretending to enjoy it.”

Their bed sighed as Seven rolled to his back to feign interest in knots between rafters and brush off the sting of stubborn tears. His stomach churned and droned for what little had filled it. As if the thought was ever once related, his dry and venom-crackled lips added, “I’m sorry I bit you.”