#viirdirthara

Their breath comes out in steaming puffs of desperate air, white, moist, and warm against the cold. They hold each other near by the hard knob of their elbows, panting together, and yet it seems to him a distance too far apart for what they are compelled to do.

His hair is a mess of tangling waves, curling and agitated by the steam of the waiting spring in the seething, roiling earth.  The child eyes it uneasily, circumspect and favoring the shore.  His brother watches him in turn: patient, knowing.

Stillness, inaction.  It seems monumental, to peer through the hissing mists to the water below. But the cold bites at them, blistering their noses and cheeks and sensitive ears with uncompromising chill. In his hand, he fists a bundle of herbs; the last before winter claims what had not gone to ground.  He senses a gentle urging of readiness in his brother, and he stares at his own white grip like an alien thing apart from him, red and pale and thin around the bone, skin marbled with a thousand minute lesions from the work of the land, from the life they have made together.

He opens his fist, flattens the plane of his palm, and throws them in to the stewing waters. And so does his brother mirror him, the bridge of their contact sliding as one to find the lace of waiting fingers.  His brother upturns the crushed soaproot, sibilous and foaming as it strikes the tension of the water. 

Both just stare down at the murky bath they have made of it, the bitter astringence of the soaproot curling the child’s toes in the ruined leather of his sodden boots.

He expects the gentle pull, his brother’s hand like a lead at the rein, and he lets himself be ushered forward, as proud and trusting of his brother’s assurance as he is still himself reticent and unsure. 

But he is moved - he cannot help it - when his brother moves to help strip him of his clinging wet clothes, ravaged by the wild and half wild itself, repaired with reinforced plant fibers and patched with the skins of beasts he had never seen before.  And he is shivering by the time they are done, teeth ground together to keep from chattering in his nakedness. But his brother holds him without words, sheltering him with the shield of his own body, though he feels so fragile, so impermanent and brittle beneath the desperate arch of his fingers. He works quickly, fingers fumbling in numbness despite the wards of warming to keep at bay the braying cold. 

His brother pulls back, arms lifting in quiet obedience as his tunic is drawn over his boyish shoulders, and their eyes meet in understanding. In trust. His brother takes his hands again, gaze an enchanting blue calm, and the serene equanimity does not falter when he takes a careful step into the sludge of the spring.

The child feels the relief like a distant shadow - a creeping, golden warmth somewhere in a body not his own. He feels the heat spread through his toes, his legs, pooling around his navel, and it is such reprieve he aches for it all the more that he does not allow himself it.

His brother is half submerged already, hands still clasped together, beseeching and promising in only the devotions of their touch.

And the child trembles from the cold, biting him to his bone and knowing it hurts his brother, too - hurts him with the chill of it and hurts him in that he must watch. And if the child is to keep to any vow, it is that his brother should not know any more suffering, and want for nothing.

Although the waters, opaque and depthless, fill him with a churning uneasiness, he lets himself be guided down, but cannot help the hissing gasp of surprise at the sensation of hot water swallowing his feet, or the silty, mineral mud giving way between his toes.  He squeezes his eyes shut and throws himself towards his brother, who expects this and holds him in fastness.

The child could squirm at the sensation of the disturbed water - so deep, spitting spray and froth.  He feels overwhelmed by it, hating it around him, hating the mist prickling his face, hot and cold and altogether new all at once.  His breath hitches from the moment of contact, and it burns his lungs and makes his arms tingle - but his brother breathes a sigh, and together they are of one breath.  He exhales anxious air, worried wrinkles around the sweet ovals of his eyes smoothing to the fresh skin of a child.

He sighs again, and his brother nuzzles into his cheek, and he can forget the water lapping at his hips, his waist, his chest. He opens his eyes, and stares at love, and in being together there is no harm, nor force to fear.  The child cups his hands, draws the water across his brother’s temple like a benediction. 

And slowly, slowly, he unfolds like a lotus in spring of their tender restoration.  As they bathe together in these rejuvenating waters, he grows bolder, and takes an adoring satisfaction in the ministrations to his brother, the sudsy mess of his dark curls and the fingers running through them. He ventures a cautious comfort, still hating the water yet loving the warmth, the gratitude, the joy.

His brother sinks low, eyes hooded and gleaming like a crocodile over the foamy water, and he utters a long and meaningful sigh.

And it bubbles.

And they stare.

The child’s eyes go wide, gawking and disbelieving. He has stilled, hair fanning out around him in black channels, writhing like streams - an ecosystem to himself. And his brother, careful, deliberate - sinks low to blow bubbles again.

And it is everything, everything. The child laughs and rushes to gather his brother into his arms, to kiss his perfect eyes and the perfect crown of his head. A gift, to be given this great and simple joy, this surprise and treasure.

Even here, the child tongues the taste of dust behind his teeth, glossy but for the phantom grit of another world.  He breathes the pattern, hands fisting in a moist and alien soil.  It reminds him of the world he walks, when to be awake and to traverse the Dreaming feels so much the same.  He goes rigid at the sudden tension of the unyielding trees, the explosive report shivering down to the root of the loam.  Disturbed leaves tremble and scatter - he glances up, and hears the crackle of it in his hair.  He brushes the crumbling amber flecks over his shoulder carelessly, eyes hunting the canopy.  

There is a chill in the air, and the forest surrenders its foliage to the things that haunt its deepening shadows.  His breath catches by instinct, but he is unsurprised by the round eyes that study him.  It is a different one this time, he observes.  A mottled brown, pretty and soft above killing talons. He lost track of so many of his strange, voiceless companions.  Most did not follow him across the tossing sea, and many more of those that had were turned back by cutting waves and the squall of the wind.

But this one is new, settled in the branches of a land he does not know.  Leaves rasp in the airy void above him, and he knows the creaking of the wood for what it is.  Birdsong has stilled, upset by the proliferation of these seeking hunters, gathering in a quorum that nature had not intended. He pushes himself to salt-soaked knees, closes his eyes against the ghosts in his bones, and pretends his body is not there.  The throbbing seems distant, in this black stillness, and the involuntary ripples that prickle his skin from the eventide breeze belong to someone else, far away.  His breath aspirates, moisture not yet crystallizing in the chill, but he feels it bead upon the fur of his del. The fur tickles his chin as he pants, but this, too, can be ignored.  He fixes the heel of one foot in the peaty earth, a handful of dirt working beneath the nails of his fingers as he reaches for purchase up the slope.

Certainty guides him like a drum, the thrush of blood in his ears, the copper upon his tongue.  He stands, unsteady, upon the flat outcrop above the escarpment, breath leaving him in heavy gasps. The fading daylight is bolder from here, where only few trees have taken root in the unforgiving incline.  But he has a view of the valley and the brooding orange sun, winking above mountains greater than any he had ever seen.  His chest heaves, cold air freezing the awed plane of his mouth.  He swipes a sleeve across his weeping nose, and blinks away moisture precipitated by the wind, steadier up here against the yawning neck of the mountain.  

The pounding of blood in his head mirrors the fluttering thrum of his heart, a palpitating expectation he does not understand, but feels the urgency of as he had not even before in all his weary march north. Anticipation shivers in his teeth, in the breath he should now have caught but still cannot find.  He walks with a hand upon the gray face of rock, lump growing in his throat like a swallowed stone.

The owls gather in the sparse trees upon the outcrop, shared space a strange conference of a hundred species. He senses the few spirits among them, borrowing form and substance to watch in reserved judgment, a powerful brightness brought with their presence that he feels more than sees.

His feet drive him forward, too clumsy in their exhaustion to notice the disturbed earth, the trampled grass that churns beneath them.  Nor does he catch the scent of something earthy, like matted hair and rancid goat, carcass left too long in the dry grass of the steppes.  His fingers grasp air, and he almost stumbles forward.  He clings to the stone as in blindness, and hears the sigh of the cave before he peers into the reaching dark.  He steps forward, easing away from the wall with the falling of his hand.  He no longer fears these lightless places, and it seems just that he should have traded one for the other.  There is conclusion in this, a coming together of things meant to be — but for the unfinished hollow in his chest.  He wishes he could work his fingers into the fleshy inner spaces of his body, feel his way around the empty parts of him and fill it with tallow and straw.  

His brow knits together, fingers poised like hooks over his heart. He blinks, eyes adjusting in the half-light, and steps forward into a horrible roar.

The child shrinks away, falling back with a cry, and the mother bear advances, thick hide bristling about the collar of her neck.  Her black lips peel back around her ravenous teeth, each blunt fang the thickness of two of his fingers.  He breathes in shock and fright, not one to be worried by the creatures of the wild but startled still by the gravity of her, the mass.

He stares forward from upon his back, elbows digging into the earth.  He takes in the scope of her, eyes roving to understand, and he sees  — he sees behind.

He hadn’t known the world had been crumpled up, all twisted and crunchy like a scrubby pistacia leaf crushed in idle hands.  It hadn’t felt wrong until he had learned what it is for it to feel right, to share touch and smell and sight and sense, to find the piece that fit.  He fell into it, sometimes.  He would remember, and remember too hard, and suddenly he was Seeing back all the What-Could-Have-Beens, and he hadn’t known he was crying until his brother’s hands were on his shoulder and his lips were at his ears with a murmur that reminded him what was real.  It was easier not to remember at all, and easier still when they left the dry and the dust and the shore and the cliffs and the caves. 

 It all became a dream, the before.

It was easy, after that.  It was nothing to travel, when they traveled together. Their world was big, immense - but it was theirs.  And they did not fear it.  They could make it…easier.  Think things until they were real, nudge the patterns of the Weave until the design fit better. 

And in the forgetting – they could UNMAKE the hurt, the past. 

They existed together as if they had always been.  

They found the secret places.  They knew them, and kept them, and took their names so that only they might utter them.  They were close to the earth, to the spirits, to each other. When they rested, there seemed an unfolding, a pause as all life caught its breath, pressing close for a glimpse of the unity that made them all that they were.  

Or maybe it was only himself, soft aspiration of air caught short in a closing throat, spellbound, dazzled.  He felt he was blinded, but it was different from the way the sun seared his eyes, greedy and hot and red even when he closed his eyes against it.  He felt the same when he looked at his brother, a brother! - all his!, so beautiful and perfect that it caused a twisting pain in his gut to even consider a thing so incredible, only he never wanted to close his eyes again.

And his brother seemed unfailingly to know, as he always did.  Yet he named him, named him for something precious, for something so airy and sweet that he had to give his brother kisses just in thanks for it, that he could be seen as something so light.

And later, in their timelessness where time doesn’t matter, only that they had names, with their hips bumping and their breath close enough to share, his brother conjured love like liquid light, golden petals spilling into his lap until it overflowed with that love, their love. His laughter was so bright, even when it mingled and he could not distinguish.  He did not want to.  

[[ hamilton: an amemeican musical ]]

“For what we have given…”