[Closed] This Man in My Skin

[Aremu Ediwo]

Evening, 29 Loshis, 2720
Ixúp’igúp Theater, Slowwater

Aremu blinked at the question, caught unawares; his eyebrows lifted as he looked at Tom. “Tsadha?” He asked, a little surprised. He hadn’t quite understood; when Tom had begun the question, he’d thought that he had meant Niccolette, and he hadn’t quite known what to say. They had never spoken of her between them; Tom was ever careful of the lines that separate them from their work, as he had been before as well.

He remembered, of course, that they had met her; he remembered sending her away in the midst of the party, her face drawn up tight in a little pout, and the apologies he had made to make it up from her. He remembered her smiling up at Tom, eyelashes fluttering lightly, and the strangeness he’d felt at it – not fear, exactly, nor concern about what Tom would do, but – then, he hadn’t yet understood that it was still the Tom he’d known, in the ways which mattered to him.

Tom was smiling at him, a coy little smile, and Aremu smiled too, sheepish, rubbing the back of his neck with his hand. He settled back into the chair, glancing at the stage where Il’aku continued to recite their poetry, steady and even over the rhythm thumping of their long-fingered, beringed hand against the drum.

“My love is like the rains of Loshis,” Il’aku went on, fingers drumming a quick staccato beat like the falling of raindrops, voice still even; a ripple of laughter when through the audience. They paused a moment, arching a solemn eyebrow, then smiled; the laughter rippled through once more, brighter, as they resumed their deeper, steadier rhythm on the drum.

“She’s well,” Aremu said, hearing the sheepishness and warmth in his own voice. He took his glass, swirling it lightly, looking down at the liquid, and then set it aside once more; he did not need to drink, he thought, to speak of Tsadha. As strange as it was between them, as casual, he did not wish to bear too much of their depths to Tom; it seemed to him like a betrayal, though he was not quite sure if it was so.

“We – ah,” Aremu shifted a little in his chair; his grin was a little tentative, glancing at Tom.

They had spoken, of course, of Jaeli; Tom had never been less than upfront with him, then, about his love for the other man, and the place that Jaeli held in his heart. He had thought, then, that he understood: Jaeli at the core of Tom, and all others drifting around the edges. He had been glad to meet Jaeli; he had liked him, and genuinely, and if he had been jealous, it was of what they had between them, not of the man himself.

He had never, Aremu thought, shifting, spoken of his own lovers to Tom, not then and not since. He hadn’t, he realized, uneasily, quite known how. It wasn’t – he didn’t know how now, even, what to say or how to say it. He trusted Tom with all of him, but he wasn’t sure quite where he ended and Tsadha began, in this.

“I’m very fond of her,” Aremu said, after a moment, glancing sideways at Tom once more, a little hesitant, trying to find his way carefully through the beat of the drums and the rhythm of the poetry. “I think she’s fond of me as well. It’s uh – “

She gets bored, he could have said, of her husband and her quiet life; I’m something like for her. And for me, perhaps, she’s the same; I like her, and we’re good together, but it couldn’t ever be more that. She doesn’t understand me, and I don’t understand her, I think, not in the way one needs to.

“I’ll see her again when I go back to the isles,” Aremu said, instead, careful. He left it there; he didn’t know whether Tom would ask more, what else he might want to say. Do you have others? He wanted to ask, a little uncertain – he thought for a moment of a small, slender galdor with dark hair and blue eyes, and could nearly have asked – but he shied away. He found he could look at Tom, at least, and smile, even if it was a little embarrassed still.

[Tom Cooke]

Ixúp’igúp Theater • Slowwater

Late Afternoon on the 29th of Loshis, 2720

W
ell, Aremu said finally, under a ripple of laughter across the floor like a warm updraft.

Relief had flooded through him in an instant. The question had been tentative; he’d almost thought to regret it. But it was a smile – a sheepish, lopsided smile – on Aremu’s lips, and it was the familiar way he rubbed the back of his neck, like he was following the tangled pipes of some machine to try and fit it together.

He didn’t look when Aremu took up his glass, but he did avert his eyes, away toward the stage. He kept on smiling himself, all the same. “My love is, too, like a sudden tempest,” came Il’aku’s voice, cutting suddenly above the murmurs: the drumming picked up, powerful, rippling out across the theatre. In the corner of his eye Aremu’s aqiti wine found the table again, and not a drop lower.

He didn’t regret asking, but he wondered. It wasn’t his wish to press the other man into embarrassment; he liked Aremu’s sheepish little smile, and the rare grin especially, but not enough for that. Nor’d he wish to stir up pain, but he was past thinking he’d done that.

“My love races,” Il’aku breathed, almost singing now, “down strange corridors –” and suddenly the rhythm shifted, swerved abruptly. It was as if the audience had lost its balance; there was a chatter of laughter, but Il’aku was still thrumming out the poetry, syllable by syllable, almost methodical. Speeding up, rising to a crescendo.

Aremu was picking his way round the poetry like a man stepping carefully through a garden. Tom looked over once again.

He had the sense – of having stepped into qalqa from pleasure. No, that wasn’t right. It was something like it, or Aremu wore his uncertainty the same way. Tom shifted, softly attentive, but he didn’t hold his gaze on Aremu expectantly. He drank another sip of aqiti wine; he let Aremu’s words come as they came. He set down his glass and looked back when Aremu’s pause was – expectant, if not final.

Is it ever shame, with me? The thought came to his mind unbidden.

He wanted to bury it under a layer of coyness; he couldn’t. Does she – he couldn’t’ve thought how to ask. Aremu had asked him back to the isles; if there was shame in it – in loving him among others, in loving a secret, in loving a man who looked as he looked now, who was what he was... He remembered all the love that had spilled out between them, not just in hands and lips but in words, too. Was there room for shame in with it?

“My love is like efa’iveqaqew,” they breathed, and there was another swell of laughter from the audience. They paused there – they let the pause settle through the audience like the breaking of a tide, like relief. He raised his eyebrows; he knew at least part of the word.

He couldn’t hold onto the thoughts. He laughed suddenly, softly – warmly – but he saw Aremu’s embarrassed look. Setting his wine aside, he set his hand on Aremu’s knee. “She’s very lucky,” he said, smile blooming into a grin. He thought of her batting her long lashes up at him; he thought of her husband, and palm wine, and a remembered tug of concern. “It’s good to hear she’s well, Aremu.”

Whatever you’re fond of – he couldn’t think of a way to say that, either. Whatever you’re fond of, I’m fond of, wasn’t quite right. They’d never spoken of it before; before, there’d never been a need.

“You don’t have to speak of her, and I don't have to ask,” he added instead, a warm laugh still in his voice. He squeezed Aremu’s knee. “It’s never troubled me to speak of them, of others, or to be asked,” his thumb stroked softly and rhythmically, “even of – him." He felt the word with a weight like grief, but found it softer with time. "We can speak of it as much or as little as seems right to you, dove, either of us.” He dared to let his hand linger a little longer; he hid his arm with the drape of his amel’iwe.

[Aremu Ediwo]

Evening, 29 Loshis, 2720
Ixúp’igúp Theater, Slowwater

Aremu glanced down at the stage, and smiled. “Little death,” he said, softly, his gaze lifting back to Tom; it broke some of the tension for him, too, along with the rest of the audience, his voice warm and almost laughing as he looked at the other man across the narrow space between them.

Tom’s hand came onto his knee, then, and Aremu grinned down over it. The compliment was strange, new, uncertain territory that he wasn’t quite sure how to navigated – that they never had navigated before.

That he, Aremu thought, uncertain, had scarcely navigated with any lover. He’d had few enough where he’d cared to; he hadn’t wanted to, other times. He had never asked Tsadha what her husband thought of it, if he knew; he didn’t want the answer. He didn’t know what he would do if she told him he was a secret, her secret; the thought sickened him, just a little. It was safer, he felt, in ignorance; it was best to let it be what it was, and not to ask.

And before?

There had never been any need for such conversation with most of his lovers, men or women. He didn’t think they’d cared what he did out of their beds. Some had stopped caring the moment they were done. Others had cared only so far as he would return, in time – until, of course, he hadn’t; Tom hadn’t been the only one he’d never seen again, suddenly, for whatever reason. He didn’t know whether any of them had minded as he knew, now, Tom had; he couldn’t quite bring himself to think so.

Tom went on, soft and even, as if this were easy and comfortable for him. Some of it felt like it leaked into Aremu; he felt a tension ease out of his shoulders, one he hadn’t quite known he was carrying.

“It doesn’t trouble me that you know her, or to speak of her, exactly,” Aremu said, quietly, “and nor would it to hear you speak. I don’t… think this between us is any less precious for that which you share elsewhere.” He smiled at him, just a little.

”My love is like the uliam’s howl,” Il’aku went on; the audience sighed beneath their words, carried on like an airship on an updraft, rising and falling with each phrase.

“It’s more that…” Aremu was quiet, his gaze lowering. He’d never tried to put it in words before. He swallowed. “I don’t want to… betray her confidences,” he said, after a moment. “I don’t... I should have to know she’d be comfortable, and I… don’t. And so it’s… you can know all of me,” Aremu looked at him, once more, the smile slipping away, something solemn and intent replacing it. “Sometimes I think you already do,” he said, warm, though still not quite smiling.

“But I don’t… think I know where I end and she begins, when it comes to speaking of… whatever us there is,” Aremu exhaled a little.

”My love is like the end of spring,” Il’aku's voice was solemn, once more, winding soft and sad.

“I miss him too,” he said, after a moment. “I think about him sometimes, I… was too much a coward to visit the house in Quarter Fords, when I was in the Rose last year.” Would you want to see him again? It was a step too far, Aremu thought; it was more than he could quite bear to ask. You wanted to see me, he wanted to ask too, didn’t you? You wanted me to see you, in the end, at least, didn’t you? I think you’re glad of it now; I know you are. But did you want it?

He couldn’t ask; he couldn’t ask. He had seen Tom, in the end, through the devices of his diablerie, not through either of their wills. They had discussed it, such as they could, from one angle or another. Tom had been angry with him, once, for his insistence that what he had done was wrong; he still didn’t know how to feel about it, though he knew at least some of it was shame, and that the shame was all the worse for the gratitude which lay alongside it.

[Tom Cooke]

Ixúp’igúp Theater • Slowwater

Late Afternoon on the 29th of Loshis, 2720

H
e listened through a sigh that swept over the audience like a breeze. He thought of uliams’ howls in the desert, muffled by the wind and the walls of the buried wagon, alone – almost alone – in the stuffy dark; the thought of a love like that ached.

He smiled at Aremu, stroking his knee one last time before he drew a little away. Understanding dawned over him slowly, in pieces. His eyes lowered when Aremu’s did, into the darkness between them. He thought of a man who sometimes had no choice but to see too much. He smiled softly, thinking too of the pains – pains was the word for it, and no other came close – Aremu went to to preserve their secret. His own secret, not theirs; the place where Aremu ended and he began.

His fingers curled loosely against the fabric of his trousers. He looked back up with the same faint surprise he always wore when Aremu spoke of it.

I didn’t even know you cooked, he wanted to say, laughing more than anything. I didn’t know you climbed before I saw you on the isles; I didn’t know you ran with other imbali in school, I didn’t know you’d ever lived in Three Flowers, I still don’t know – there’s still so much I don’t know. I could ask hundreds of questions, he thought, and there’s still so much I don’t know.

And how he felt Aremu saw most of him – all of him – or what was left of him, what was left to see. There was qalqa they never shared; he’d never know about the cause. But what little tattered scraps of him were left on a slate wiped blank over and over, if there’d been anything to know in the first place, even back then…

“Thank you for keeping my confidence, too,” he said warmly, meeting Aremu’s eye. He wasn’t quite smiling either, but the lines of it were round his eyes.

“... the festival’s last song,” Il’aku wound on, wistful, through the very soft rhythm of the drum.

He watched Aremu, frowning softly, then looked away out toward the stage. “My love is, too, the first mist of rain,” they began again, “and the work of planting; my love is flood and drought …”

He asked after you, he couldn’t bear to say. He missed you, too. “Not cowardice,” he murmured, his hand creeping over again to find Aremu’s in the dark. “If you’d gone last year, you wouldn’t’ve found him. I, ah – I couldn’t bear to go myself, but I… I’m told he left. On a ship bound for Mugroba, but I wouldn’t know where he is now.”

The honey taste in his mouth was almost bitter. He realized there was a faint cast of blue in the air around him, and he swallowed the bitter and found it sweet again; he smoothed himself out.

“I don’t know that I’d want to…” Aremu hadn’t asked; he thought about it anyway. “He loved me; I must’ve hurt him, and not just in the end. I made a lot of mistakes. I don’t know if he’d think much of the man I am now, even if he knew. I don’t know if he’d see me, or see that man, even if he knew, and I don’t know if he’d want that man now, wherever he is now. But I wish I could hear him play again.”

Il’aku’s voice was lilting up again, cheerful and bright. They were tapping at the drum, animated almost to dancing, rings glittering with broad sweeps of their arms. There was laughter.

No less precious, he thought; more, he thought again. “There haven’t been many.” The admission came easier; he smiled over at Aremu, and there was something a little coy in it again, if sad. “There was a man who – tried to – it was before you, before us…”

You know, he thought, you know you were the first, don’t you? Maybe he didn’t. He thought of it with a tender sort of amusement, now that that first awful wound of wondering had – abated, if not healed.

“I ran away from him. Godsdamn,” he said, sighing. He smiled tiredly. “I feel like the old path’s been taken out from underfoot, and I have to find my way back some other way.” If I’ll ever have that confidence again, he couldn’t bring himself to say.

[Aremu Ediwo]

Evening, 29 Loshis, 2720
Ixúp’igúp Theater, Slowwater

Thank you, Tom had said, and Aremu gave his head the slightest of shakes. No, he wanted to say; you don’t need to thank me, I… he didn’t know how to finish the sentence. You gave me the gift of your trust, he wanted to say; all I hope to do is to be worthy of it, even though I don’t quite know how.

Tom’s hand slipped from his knee, but their fingers found each other once more in the dark between the chairs, closing the polite distance between them, even as they leaned together. Aremu exhaled a half-shuddering breath when Tom went on, and he listened, intently, holding to every word.

“He loved you,” Aremu said, quietly, in the end, thinking of Jaeli and his oud. “I’m sure he still does.”

He didn’t say more; he didn’t know, not really, whether Jaeli would want to see Tom again. He thought so, but – he thought, too, of seeing Uzoji again at the price of him being a raen, and he knew he would rather be in ignorance. As much as he loved Tom, as grateful as he was for the time they’d stolen back from the jaws of death, he understood.

He had not, really, known Jaeli that well. He’d been at the house with him, a few times; he’d tried to find, with the two of them, where he fit between and beside, and enjoyed it thoroughly, for all the strange feelings, the jealousy, it had produced.

I know, Aremu didn’t say, when Tom said there hadn’t been many. He couldn’t have said how he knew, but he did; he’d known on the beach beneath the moonlight, with dzum’ulusa petals still in Tom’s hair, closing the distance carefully between them. He’d known, afterwards, tracing careful patterns along Tom’s soft, freckled skin, letting the other man guide his hand as he would.

“I know it’s not the same at all,” Aremu said, quietly, looking down at the prosthetic on his lap, and then sideways back at him. “But you’re the only one I’ve been with who… knew me with and without my hand.” He found it harder to look at Tom, then; he brought himself to it, shifting a little on the chair, and turning to look at the other man.

There was a performance like an intermission, a shifting below; Il’aku had finished their poetry, the last of the words lost to Aremu in his single-minded focus on Tom’s, what conclusion they came to about their love a mystery to him. An onjira in all white, long tunic and pants and a dupatta with gleaming green-gray eyeshadow, was singing an old Mugrobi ballad about love, standing at the edge of the stage with arms spread and the curtains drawn, another playing a low, sweet-soft melody on a ofa’dzes at the edge of the stage. From behind the curtain came the faintest rustling of sounds, like a hint of noise, only just audible in the pauses in the music.

At the chorus, there was a ripple of voices across the crowd, even Gadza joining them from a seat on the edge of the steps up to the stage. "Song, too, is poetry!" Gadza called into the silence when it ended, to an encore of laughter and applause.

“I told you of the running we did,” Aremu said, instead, looking down at the crowd below then back at Tom with a little smile. “Even if we went to the same place twice, we’d never go the same way. Thul Ka changes too much too fast for it to make sense even to try, and – that was never point of it, I think.”

“There’s nothing wrong with searching,” Aremu said, with a little smiling, remembering words shared long ago. “There’s nothing wrong with finding your way.” He still held Tom’s hand tight in the one he had.

On stage, the onjira began again, a softer, slower song.

[Tom Cooke]

Ixúp’igúp Theater • Slowwater

Late Afternoon on the 29th of Loshis, 2720

W
ithout my hand, Aremu said.

He’d heard him speak of it once – only once – on the Uccello di Hurte, at the breakfast table. It might’ve been a hundred years away now. They’d never spoken of it since.

He’d thought little of it on the beach. It’d been swallowed up the instant Aremu’s hand had slipped underneath his shirt. He’d been occupied with cutting off the limbs of his shame like some many-headed beast, or pulling up weeds that kept on sprouting. Half of it had been intoxicating pleasure and relief; half of it had been like fighting a war with himself.

He might’ve known Aremu knew by his gentleness. It hadn’t been that he’d treated him like someone who’d never known a man. Yet he’d frozen sometimes, and he could never’ve hoped to hide the way time had broken him, scrambled him so that he felt almost like he’d never been touched before. Not from someone like Aremu, who saw so much.

But Aremu had run his hands along the cracks, a silent offering. If he’d been disturbed – he still sometimes wondered if he found it unbearably ugly, all the sharp angles and all those damned freckles – he’d said nothing one way or another.

It wasn’t that he hadn’t known how Aremu felt about his hand, but he hadn’t – known, he supposed, in the shadow of all he himself felt. He didn’t look at it now in his lap, though he wanted to; he could see the dark wood gleaming against the cloth of his pants in the corner of his eye.

The curtain ruffled onstage, and he thought he caught a rustling and then a rattling creak after a pause in the ofa’dzes’ notes. Aremu was looking him in the eye, even so, and he knew better than to look away.

It had been strange; he couldn’t’ve said otherwise. He’d never thought how losing a hand changed the way a man did things, but it did – even sitting here, he’d watched him clap with his thigh. It was something to keep track of even in love: he’d never wanted to let his hand wander thoughtlessly too far down, to reach for a second hand in the middle of a kiss and touch him where he didn’t want to be touched.

Not so different after all, he thought to say, then recoiled from the thought. Who was he to say that? Aremu had lost a hand; he himself was barely a man now.

But Aremu went on. His eyes widened slightly and then softened; he smiled, feeling warm fingers tangled with his. “I suppose we go a different way every time,” he said softly. “Lovers are a little like Thul Ka, in that way.” Always changing, he didn’t say, but he blinked away moisture.

On the dais, the curtain ruffled again. Hand still in Aremu’s, he looked, listening to the first low verses of the onjira’s song.

“And I plead to Hulali to send rain,
To kiss the thirsty earth of my love,
But the great river had become a stream;
I plead to Roa to smile on my garden,
So that I might save all that I have left …”

“Should it be easier or harder,” he said softly, stroking his hand with his thumb, “if you knew them – before, or if you didn’t?” His brow knit.

All the same, once he’d asked, a gasp went across the floor – and then an unnatural silence, under the onjira’s song. The curtains had been drawn aside. Behind them had been set up something like –

A plot, he thought, studying it with dawning curiosity. A plot underneath an elaborately-hatched trellis, already with a handful of vines climbing it.

In the quiet, another voice joined the onjira’s in song. This one was in monite, he realized, though it was folded so well into the song that they might’ve been casting in chorus. It was laced with it, rather than just underneath it. And it was an intricate, intricate spell – living, as far as he could tell, but like no poetry he’d heard at Brunnhold. Intricate and strong, weaving back and over itself as the singer’s voice rose in hope and anguish.

Slowly, very slowly, small blue flowers began to open up. The vines were all over the trellis, but the blue was budding to life along the lines of a plot.

[Aremu Ediwo]

Evening, 29 Loshis, 2720
Ixúp’igúp Theater, Slowwater

Easier or harder, Tom asked. Should it be, he asked, as well. Aremu shook his head, slightly, his face solemn; his eyebrows drew together, just a little, and he felt a familiar frown on his forehead.

Easier not to have known them, Aremu wanted to say; easier to know they’re not judging me against the man I was, then. Easier to know I never wound two hands through their long, dark hair, and braided it slowly and carefully, once and then again when the strands came loose in the warm, wet heat of a kitchen full of steam. Easier to know I never traced the lines of their body with two hands – never held them close – never hand one hand to grasp their cheek and the other to trace some path of my own design.

Easier not to have known them, Aremu could have said. I am what I am, now; I have what I have.

Maybe it shouldn’t be so, Aremu might have said, but I find it easier. Maybe I should want someone who knew me when I was whole, or at least when I could pass for it. It hasn’t been hard with you, Tom; you’ve never made me feel less for what I am now. It hasn’t been hard, knowing that you knew me as I was and know me as I am. But you’ve changed too – more, and more strangely – and I don’t think it would have been so easy, before.

“I don’t know,” Aremu said, softly, as the curtains began to draw aside. “But I’m glad you’re here.”

The second singer was monite, Aremu realized, a few moments into the song. Something shivered over him, rippled thorugh his skin; he leaned forward a bit, watching. He had heard monite again and again over the years; he had heard Uzoji cast to lift the ship, to shift it through the air; he had heard Willie scout currents with his casting, or Chibugo heat gas; he had heard Niccolette, he thought, a little wryly, more closely than he might have liked. He had heard clairvoyant casting enough times at Thul’Amat, though he had never deliberately lingered on it.

This was different; for all the language was harsh and guttural, this monite sounded nearly like song. Aremu listened, leaning forward just a little, his hand still intertwined with Tom’s.

“One drop, I cry, would be enough
To let my flowers bloom
Before Naulas comes to claim
All things are his, in time
In his eternal refrain”

The flowers were blooming now, slowly; the vines crawled up and out along the trellis, slowly, subtly mimicking the shape of the plot.

Aremu shivered, just a little.

The singer went on, their voice weaving with the caster’s. They sang a song of life between the desert and the flood, of the sorrow and joy, Aremu thought, listening, of beautiful things which could not last.

For a moment, the entire vine seemed to have bloomed; it was all brilliant blue, gleaming across the room, heaps of it. The smell of the flowers rose through the air of the theater, bright and clean. The singer never paused, but reached and picked one flower, and then another, cradling them between elegant palms, and sank to their knees at the edge of the stage, singing heartfelt to the crowd.

“At last to my knees I fell
Weeping grateful tears of sorrow
For time had not stood still
The flowers bloomed and faded too…”

Behind them, slowly, the flowers began to wilt; bit by bit they dried on the vine, until they crumbled, petals tumbling down loose to the stage. Some drifted, tangling in the singer’s hair and clothing; others slipped off the edge of the stage and through the crowd below. Aremu glanced at Tom, watching him as much as the performance below, for all he knew he should look away.

Have you seen anything like this? He wanted to ask.

Tom clapped; Aremu drew his hand away and clapped too, such as he could, his hand against his thigh. The lights shivered on, and the curtains drew shut; the caster helped the singer stand, tears on both their cheeks, and they slipped away between the curtains.

“What did you think of it?” Aremu asked, softly, turning to look at Tom.

[Tom Cooke]

Ixúp’igúp Theater • Slowwater

Late Afternoon on the 29th of Loshis, 2720

A
part of him ached to ask more.

I’m glad to be here, he wanted to say, glad you’re here, glad you’re glad, but his words would’ve been swept underneath the rhythm of the ofa’dzes and the poetry and the monite. Instead, he squeezed Aremu’s hand, their warm fingers still meshed.

He wanted to ask, to drive home, as if hunting an evasion: is it easier for you? Will it be easier for me? What will it be like? Maybe it was easier to be unshadowed by what you used to be; maybe it was easier to know that there was no but, no if only you were still, no I love you in spite of…

He wondered if anyone had ever told him they thought him attractive because of it – because of all of him – because of his deftness and ingenuity and the way all of it had shaped him. If they had, had it hurt to hear? Would it hurt him to hear that someone thought his red hair or his shaky hands –

He was embarrassed to make the comparison. Aremu was whole, every lovely line of him his own, scars and all. He himself was something else entirely.

He felt it go through him, the small hairs on the back of Aremu’s forearm stirring with leiraflesh. They leaned forward together, at almost the same moment. His shoulder was brushing Aremu’s. He was holding his breath, and he forced himself to let it out, a smile creeping across his face. He watched the blossoms ripple out over the vines in blue: if he blurred his eyes, the shape of the plot grew almost crisp against the trellis. He felt Aremu shiver beside him, and he held fast to his hand.

He breathed in the scent of the flowers, mingling with perfume and aqiti wine and velvet. The onjira picked one of the flowers, a spot of blue in their long graceful fingers. He glanced over once at Aremu, but the gold phosphor made sharp planes and shadows of his face, and he couldn’t’ve been sure what was on it.

All things are his, the onjira sang. All things. His brows drew together. Some blue ached out into his field, cloudbank-heavy, but he was smiling as he watched the flowers wilt; he did not take his eyes away.

He felt Aremu’s eyes on his face. The other man hadn’t let go of his hand.

“As a child, I knew; but as a lover, I forgot
My gratefulness to Imaan, whose gentle kiss
Carries my garden between Roa and Naulas,
So that life may come anew …”

The air was heady with blue, so strong across the floor that he could almost taste it in the mezzanine. The petals were greying in the onjira’s hair. A few drifted down from the caster’s when they knelt to take the singer’s hands. He wasn’t sure when they’d shown themselves; they were wearing a long drape of white and grey-blue, long-fingered hands unadorned, long face lined and smiling gently.

He almost forgot to clap, but Aremu broke the spell when he disentangled his hand. His own was a little clammy. He joined the applause until his hands ached, and then took a deep breath when it dispersed, turning to the other man finally with a smile.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he managed, over the sound of Gadza calling out another intermission. He took his aqiti wine off the table; it was half-drunk, and he took another sip, comfortable. “Have you?”

He glanced back out at the stage. Gadza was stepping down from the dais, and the smooth wood was still scattered with blossoms. “I’ve never heard anyone weave monite into a song, either,” he murmured. “It was –”

Beautiful felt like the wrong word. He turned to Aremu, grinning softly. I want to kiss you, he thought to say, and wondered if it would’ve been cruel here. He found his hand again anyway, clasping it.

[Aremu Ediwo]

Evening, 29 Loshis, 2720
Ixúp’igúp Theater, Slowwater

Aremu shook his head at Tom’s answer, his gaze drifting back down to the stage, to where the drawn curtains hid, now, the plot; there were still bits of flower petals all around, and some of the audience were scooping them up, picking them off hair and clothing; there were sounds like cleaning from behind the curtain, and two black-clad onjiri sweeping clean the front of the stage and the floor.

“Never,” Aremu said, quietly. “Not even here before. I’ve seen other performances which used casting as part of… glorification, I suppose, of the circle,” he glanced away, just for a moment. I don’t claim to understand, he wanted to say, aware of the prickling on the back of his neck. It’s not my opinion, it’s not what I think – I know I don’t know. I know I can’t know. He knew – if he thought about it, he knew – that he didn’t need to draw those lines with Tom. He wanted to, all the same, by force of habit and familiarity, sitting here in Thul Ka in the midst of the other man’s field.

“But not like that,” Aremu added, after a moment. “Not woven in and not – uh – that sort of spell.”

It was what, Aremu wanted to ask, in part. But Tom was smiling, and he was smiling too; the other man took his hands, the two of them intertwined in the darkness between their seats, where no one else could see. They had let it go, the question he hadn’t quite answered, in the rush of the performance; he found he didn’t want to come back to it. He was glad of much of what they’d discussed, some of it easier than he’d eve have dared hope, and at the same time he didn’t want to –

He didn’t know what to say, Aremu thought, uneasily, honestly. He knew what truth was for him, but even that which he’d admitted felt the very edge of what he could bear, here in a place half-public after all, and to go further, deeper, into his own feelings of inadequacy and shame – just thinking about it sent a tightness through him, a wrenching in his stomach and a tense sort of desire to get up and go elsewhere, which he refused to succumb to.

“Do you want to go and look for their volume during the intermission?” Aremu asked, smiling at Tom. “It might be easier to find it now than afterwards.” He knew there was more to say between them – they never ran short – but he liked, too, the idea of Tom taking something away from this, something he could look back on later, to remember more tangibly than just fading thoughts. This would fade, as all memories faded, no matter how cherished; the book Tom could take with him, back to his hotel room, back to Vienda, back to the lives they spent apart, and without question.

Like a note from me, Aremu wanted to say. I’m not a poet, I know, but I want you to have it and when you see it I want you to remember – that we were here together, that we chose to be here together, that we shared this between us.

If he was running away from a conversation that ached too badly, he couldn’t face it; he thought Tom would let him run, and would run with him rather than forcing him away. There was a limit, he thought, and worse, he felt as if he’d already passed it. He wasn’t sure if he could even have repeated himself, now, without the noise of poetry on stage filling the silence, with only the distant drift of many voices in conversation in the gold phosphor light. He was smiling; he was still smiling, all the same, his gaze firmly on Tom, for all he knew he should look away.

[Tom Cooke]

Ixúp’igúp Theater • Slowwater

Late Afternoon on the 29th of Loshis, 2720

I
am denied the sacred, he remembered, whip-sharp. What can I know of the profane?

The circle, Aremu said. He looked. The other man had turned his head away slightly; there were shadows at the edges of his lips, but he had only a glimpse. The slope of one cheekbone was picked out in gold phosphor, the brow held tense. Whatever it was, it passed uneasily: he met Aremu’s eyes when he glanced back, the set of his lips soft. When he went on, he smiled again.

He turned a little when Aremu found his other hand; both of them were pressed underneath Aremu’s, cradled warm. There was no heat prickling in his face, but he thought it was behind his eyes instead.

Does it, he thought, this, does it glorify the gods? Do either of us have any right –? It’s a school of the living conversation, he wanted to say too, I’ve never seen before. As if he couldn’t help himself in the sharing. I’ve seen similar spell circles at least; it looks like it’s arranged according to Dzahun’s principle, quartered and radiating outward…

There was more he wanted to say. In the last of the ebbing applause, it wanted to come spilling out of him like water – like fire – he was afraid that it would come out sharp and he would cut his tongue on the rocks of it, having petrified somewhere in his throat.

But then Aremu smiled and asked him about the volume, and his field shivered bastly and he sat straight. He slipped his hand out from underneath Aremu’s; he laid it on top and pressed down gently. His smile went wider and tilted into a grin, and he was almost breathless with it.

Ada’tsa Dzora they found first. They went round the mezzanine, took another way down; they came apart in the box as he knew they had to, and they moved quick and quiet through the velvet dark, his hand sliding along the varnished balcony. The dais was empty during the intermission, and the floor sparkled gold: even the second floor lights were being unshaded, and there was no chance of them going unobserved.

So he spoke little, and he did not let himself brush Aremu too closely, and he didn’t let his eyes linger too long.

It was easier and harder now to brush past fields and lacks thereof, not unsettling but always strangely surprising. He caught sight of the onjira in orange – once – the soft gold lights glossy off their wrap, sparking off the stud in their nose. They must not’ve seen them, moving as they were beneath the colonnade, in the shadows between gleaming-polished dark posts.

Ada’tsa Dzora was off to the side of the dais, chatting lively-voiced in Mugrobi with Gadza and another, a quiet imbala with glasses perched on their nose and their hands clasped deferentially behind their back. There was caprising; there were polite introductions. To his side, he watched Aremu slip his wooden hand briefly out of his pocket to bow, and then slip it back in with a rustle of his amel’iwe.

“I see, ada’tsa,” he had murmured, frowning.

“But – but – a moment, ada’tsa On’tseruq, please – Tsagúr should have them, ada’xa,” Dzora added, smiling, thin lines working their way around gold-painted lids. They gestured. “The office is impossible to miss; they will just be getting them ready…” Another slyly curious glance at Aremu, one Tom bore up and smiled thinly under, bowing his head and shoulders again.

It was not, in fact, impossible to miss.

This corridor was lit with red phosphor, richly-carpeted, though the ornate wallpaper was worn through in places here. A gaggle of onjiri with bastly fields, smelling of tsenid and laughing, floated by; they glanced at the two of them curiously, though not for long, and if he’d wanted to stop them and ask, there was no chance. It was brief; they were left alone in the hall, with nothing but the distant sounds of the bar and other noises – laughter and clinking of glasses – drifting in from elsewhere.

Through one doorway, half-ajar, could be glimpsed the trellis: all the flowers were withered now, and it was half in shadow. A deep voice he recognized as Iyú’oyu’s murmured in Mugrobi from somewhere, then faded.

They moved down the narrow way between racks of costumes, glittering gemstones and scales catching the light, waterfalls of feathers. The hall was like a forest of clothesracks and props in disuse, shapes casting weird shadows over the riotously colorful carpet. There were masks, too: glossy-painted lovers’ masks with their strange stretched eyes. His eyes caught on a liar’s mask, strange to him in its plainness, and flicked away.

“Have you ever been back here?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder at Aremu and lifting a curious eyebrow. It felt to him like something had been lifted. Are we lost? he didn't ask, and nor did he think to ask any of the things he'd burned to ask in the box; it was enough just to be here. It felt more like a running-toward than a running-away, he thought.