#commas everywhere

Besides, now it’s so easy to find pleasure, cause pleasure, in too many other ways. They have such intimate knowledge of their own bodies, and the body of the other, they are probably the only people over the incalculable sands of time who truly understand what it means to bodily meet with another and become one. Entwined, Joe is Nicky and Nicky is Joe. No other will ever know them as well as they do. For how many times they’ve unmade themselves, together, it would be impossible to be ignorant.

And when the world beyond hurts, continues to hurt, when there will always be others outside of them who would do them harm, why bring that into the sheltered places carved out just for them? Why invite that malevolence into their home? Not after they spent so long meeting sword to sword, cutting the other down, aiming for agony, aiming for an end. And then, when that didn’t stick, sword to sheath, a new way of hurting the other. Until it all fell away, hacked, slashed, carved, shaped, sanded, polished, shined, finding something ethereal and beautiful and perfect. Their journey to their heart of hearts was long (and yet comparatively short, and seeming shorter as this one strengthened silk of their tapestry keeps weaving them tighter, for longer and longer still) and filled with pain and blood and fire.

Andy has said they were forged together. Which is true. But it wasn’t in the moment when they first killed each other. It wasn’t a moment. That was just the first kiss of heat. The years when they violently orbited one another, unable to break the gravity pulling them closer, when they returned to the fire, to be unmade and remade over and over and again once more, until they complemented perfectly, no groove out of place, no misstep in their form, twin blades mastered, that was their forge.

To be so unwavering in all that you are and all that you have, I am him and he is me, to find that you can play a body like a beloved instrument to get exactly the melody you desire, to wield another like a trusted blade, to find unwavering devotion at a familiar altar...

Begs the question of why defile such sacredness?

So, no, they never covet pain, like some.

But there is something to the sweet sting of teeth that press just the wrong side of too hard, leaving imprints that fade, nearly as quickly as flesh is freed from hungry maw. And there is torturous yearning in the kiss that lingers until it aches on the vulnerable tilth of delectable thew, receptive and sensitive.

Then there is the way a hold so firm it bruises – only as long as the hold remains – is grounding, centering, an anchor in a rending storm, affirming and enough to ensnare in entirety.

Besides, there is no point to wishing pain for pain’s sake when your body heals almost everything instantly. When you can’t be killed, much less marked.

There are other ways they know they belong. Other ways for the world to know their exclusivity is consecrated. How can one be possessive of something already his? Their possession of one another is a quiet confidence in the universe and the truth that there was no other, and never will be, for them. They are possessive for possessions sake, to reach for and receive, no matter where or how, they are, and they will be, forever, each other’s. It is inalienable and intrinsic. They were made together and they will be unmade the same.

Neither know how to explain it to anyone else. Nile questions how they never strayed, never swayed, never lost interest. And Nicky goes back to destiny. Joe mentions he could no sooner fight against it as he could rail against gravity. Or time. It comes all the same. To be one without the other would be to split their atoms until there was nothing to create charge with, static drawing particles closer, into the sum of their whole. It’s hard to understand. There is an abstract level to it that even they can’t quite grasp, even after hundreds of years, thousands of hours contemplating it with the great philosophers and thinkers of many times.

Their possessiveness is unshakeable. It is not the petty reasoning of whimpering mortals, living fearfully in the face of an unknowable void that could take what they think they own. It is devoted insight. He is mine, I am his. Where I go, he follows. Where he dies, I fall. Their world is insular. Nothing can penetrate it.

So they are.

And they play.

They fingerpaint fervor in broad strokes and swirl calligraphy to skin in the reverential buss of teeth and tongue. They can never be forged as they were before, but the heat of it will always smolder within and all it takes is a look, a caress, a grip, pious and proprietary, to bring those burns to the surface. They were made and unmade together in the beginning and will be when it ends, and in the between they will be made and unmade hundreds of thousands of times again under the hands of each’s masterful skill.

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(I know nothing, btdubs, I am just obsessed with the movie and the idea of it all rn, so, you know, discuss)