#gorgeous work

"Loki sits and tells legends to the Asgardian children on a long winter evening."

Artwork by Lotur Norn / Norna Severnaya on VK.com

his nose has clearly been reconstructed in some way, his eyes remain damaged, his face permanently altered by violence. alby lives and breathes and moves through the world unable to escape ruben’s touch; it exists in the ache of healing bone, in the pull of scar tissue, in every glance toward a mirror. there is no clean separation between past and present because the past is in him. to look at himself is, in some ways, to relive what happened over and over again.

which makes the reveal that he and niall somehow reconcile—so deeply that they are marrying each other—feel almost grotesquely intimate after the last thing we saw between alby and ruben was ruben brutally beating him. and now here he is, at the alter.

i think, for niall, the want and the wrongness and the guilt and the desire that ruben first cracked open in him simply found somewhere else to live.

to love alby is to love a man made partially by ruben’s hands. to kiss alby is to touch, at some remove, the person who unlocked him. niall's desire for alby does not exist outside of ruben but in continuity with him—the same want, rerouted. the same guilt and longing and forbidden desire, now living in a body he is allowed to touch. a body he can marry. a body that makes the feeling finally, mercifully legible—to the world, to himself, to anyone watching.

except the body is not free of ruben. he is written into it like a signature, like a claim. there is no desire niall has that ruben has not already passed through. not already marked. and so even here—in the safest and most acceptable shape the feeling has ever taken—niall cannot separate what he wants from its origin in ruben.