Challenge Two: Love Poem (or "Phage done remixed Lastrega")
Disclaimer: I don't own 'em. Don't want them. Don't know if I could live through that. Neither do you.
Thanks to Dorothy1901 and Diane who both betaed this. It's been ages since I could thank a beta. Feels like…burning. j/k
For lastrega, a remix of her story Thanatos, with a little bit of a different twist, and if she doesn't like it, she can tell me to get as bent as it is.
Love Poem
By phagelytic
Everything has been cold against my hands lately.
What I like about you, even now, brother, when you are so dark and pitiful and so very very sad, is the way you watch my every move, like death personified. I love it with a passion and a yearning, that movement of your eyes across my hand, across this glass case, like ice skittering down a hot surface.
I was thinking of naming my virus after you. Adam, maybe.
When you see the virus your eyes dance, marionettes, red masque, and I think I see our old game, the game we've always played. You know, the one where I wear your death, and you wear my fear.
It is not me that scares you. It is not that hulking wicker man you've prepared to burn inside yourself, or even the virus in its cryonic cage. You fear this split second, this moment, this flex of my will over yours like so much stretched skin, something I have always thought sounds a bit like a bone snap, the kind Caspian can do with fresh finger bones, when the gristle is still new and knobbly.
If I could play that sound, you'd scream and cry and fall to your knees, and then I'd hear that music I missed, the real sound of death. Silas and Caspian were in it for the spoils, but you and I were in it for the gargle of blood in the throat, for the death rattles flying up to gods that could never smite us. Sound, sound, sound, echoing and amplified, matching utterly those parts of us we were born to nurture. You need me like I need death.
Your eyes roll over white when I approach you; it doesn't have to be this physical, but I do it for you because you want it. You make me want it, sharp metal wedged in your chest.
It's so easy to be led when you walk from the lab, those come-hither eyes, like they used to say, slyly promising, your breath hitched, cock outlined in your pants. I've never had to explain to you, never had to sell you the wares, not when you're wanton and hungry, as if you'd feed me that virus in the other room. But this is nice too, your mouth on my throat.
It really is nice.
And so much better when your hands, those flapping vultures, settle on other places, groping, searching, waiting, as newly indecisive and afraid as that bitch was the night she ended up with my cock in her ass and I ended up with my knife in my chest.
I don't care about your thirst for life, for redemption, because that's all just grime and tarnish of the ages. A little blood, a little of me and you'll be good as new, if I polish you up as I bite your face, lick your pulse up to the surface, make the part of you that I need rise from its shallow grave.
You let me press into you with one leg, arms ragdoll and perfect, eyes shut so you can't see my face, so that you won't become what we were, so that you won't re-learn what you already know: not power but helplessness, not submission but dominion, not lust but compulsion. Because I swear, by all I ever remembered, Methos, Brother, I hate every inch of your battered, martyred soul right now. Had I the power to, I'd fuck MacLeod out of your mouth. And isn't that another thing that's destined to end badly? We could fall to our deaths in a whorl of lust, coming into each other, thrusting, one union of hate and Quickening, roiling and Abaddon-bound.
Turning you is quick and poignant with my hands on your shoulders. When I jerk your pants down your thighs, your hips push back, looking for me, your forehead pressed into the cool stone of the wall. I trail my hands down your ribcage with no small amount of love as I think about sticking my fingers in to try and find your heart again.
This isn't the best part, feeling your ass and letting you writhe on my fingers, feeling my cock throbbing in the small of your back, your knees bent, spine arcing like an old warped longbow; not yet, not even close to my favorite part when I thrust in and your eyes and mouth fly open, noiseless throat grasping desperately for sound. The fire only burns higher when I push inside you, things tearing, bleeding, easing the rough passage with fluid and movement.
I never could take my time with you.
Instead it's a ghost of shortened time on the back of my neck, the nape of yours begging to be bitten in front of me. You're all frozen armless, just like you always were when it was good, too good to even move, to scrabble fingers down the walls of your tent or through the furs on the floor. In those times you pushed back like you do now, impaling yourself, a tidal estuary, something that was once a natural force now leveed, diked, locked and dammed.
I let my tongue leech the poison from you, the soft whirring of the cryo tanks our love song, your soft grunts our marriage anthem. Not that I am ever maudlin, but in the best of my lives, I thought we would come together like this, an old married couple, past love, more in familiarity, in desperation, shoving and moaning in the dark, trying to pull one last strand of something from some old corner of some old memory. For the past to rush up as if it is the only thing that is real.
No, the best part -the *best* part-is the end. When I come in you, you spasm the same way you do when I stab you to death, the very presence of my dick up your ass making your cells react like acid on metal. Then I can let you go, let you tumble down to the floor, knowing that what I've wrought in you is a rebirth so importunate.
What I'll gladly admit to you, Methos, is that your bright eyes are not walls, and your flushed cheeks are not beautiful. Your callused hands are not strong, and your conniving isn't impregnable. This last time is gorgeous and filled with the metallic taste of something I haven't tasted since the last time you left me for dead. Maybe it's amniotic fluid.
Why, if I were a romantic, I'd admit to your panting body, I'd say just this once, that this whole thing is a blazon to you. But I'll never admit that in my dreams you say yes, oh yes, to our headless corpses on the ground.
Right now.
*~*
Notes and Apologies: I have always found Kronos to resemble Hester Prynne-static, unchanging, not understanding why Methos (our pitiful Dimmesdale, in this scenario) couldn't or wouldn't return to the past. I find that writing this, since my goal was to change that perception in myself, at least, hadn't changed my view so much as refined it from a flaw of Kronos's character to more a flaw of his choosing. (Indeed, what I really think Kronos suffers from overall is a final painful lesson of "you can't go home again.")
Sonia's Methos understands this lesson; even as he fears that he will regress back to his old ways, he finds that he has a new perspective, that of survivor, to steel his resolve against Kronos. Is Kronos naïve or in denial to see that? (Or is he too slow witted? I find that difficult to swallow, static or not.) I dunno. In his resolve to create his brave new world, he certainly seems a bit of both (because seriously, four men to take on the world? And two of them Caspian and Silas? Seriously dude. Seriously.).
What if, then, Kronos is well-versed in Methos's psychology and knows what determination lies behind those eyes? What if he simply doesn't care? What if he deems this man to be the instrument of his downfall? That is, I guess, uh, fit.
On the other hand, Dorothy disagreed with the tone of this story, the actual voice of Kronos in particular, whose speech here is much more poetic than he ever actually demonstrated in the series. In fact, this whole thing, she pointed out, is actually better suited to Byron. I am totally not going to disagree with her, though Diane thinks that we really have no idea what goes on in his mind, so I get leeway. In addition, I wrote this trying to match the image that Sonia presented, and found that as I tried to match the tones of the sentences that I actually took from her story and implanted in this one (and there are ten phrases and sentences-like a Highlights Magazine for Adults!), I ended up with something much more romantically suited to this language. If by romantic I mean skull fucking or something, I suppose.
Das da end?
Thanks to Dorothy1901 and Diane who both betaed this. It's been ages since I could thank a beta. Feels like…burning. j/k
For lastrega, a remix of her story Thanatos, with a little bit of a different twist, and if she doesn't like it, she can tell me to get as bent as it is.
Love Poem
By phagelytic
Everything has been cold against my hands lately.
What I like about you, even now, brother, when you are so dark and pitiful and so very very sad, is the way you watch my every move, like death personified. I love it with a passion and a yearning, that movement of your eyes across my hand, across this glass case, like ice skittering down a hot surface.
I was thinking of naming my virus after you. Adam, maybe.
When you see the virus your eyes dance, marionettes, red masque, and I think I see our old game, the game we've always played. You know, the one where I wear your death, and you wear my fear.
It is not me that scares you. It is not that hulking wicker man you've prepared to burn inside yourself, or even the virus in its cryonic cage. You fear this split second, this moment, this flex of my will over yours like so much stretched skin, something I have always thought sounds a bit like a bone snap, the kind Caspian can do with fresh finger bones, when the gristle is still new and knobbly.
If I could play that sound, you'd scream and cry and fall to your knees, and then I'd hear that music I missed, the real sound of death. Silas and Caspian were in it for the spoils, but you and I were in it for the gargle of blood in the throat, for the death rattles flying up to gods that could never smite us. Sound, sound, sound, echoing and amplified, matching utterly those parts of us we were born to nurture. You need me like I need death.
Your eyes roll over white when I approach you; it doesn't have to be this physical, but I do it for you because you want it. You make me want it, sharp metal wedged in your chest.
It's so easy to be led when you walk from the lab, those come-hither eyes, like they used to say, slyly promising, your breath hitched, cock outlined in your pants. I've never had to explain to you, never had to sell you the wares, not when you're wanton and hungry, as if you'd feed me that virus in the other room. But this is nice too, your mouth on my throat.
It really is nice.
And so much better when your hands, those flapping vultures, settle on other places, groping, searching, waiting, as newly indecisive and afraid as that bitch was the night she ended up with my cock in her ass and I ended up with my knife in my chest.
I don't care about your thirst for life, for redemption, because that's all just grime and tarnish of the ages. A little blood, a little of me and you'll be good as new, if I polish you up as I bite your face, lick your pulse up to the surface, make the part of you that I need rise from its shallow grave.
You let me press into you with one leg, arms ragdoll and perfect, eyes shut so you can't see my face, so that you won't become what we were, so that you won't re-learn what you already know: not power but helplessness, not submission but dominion, not lust but compulsion. Because I swear, by all I ever remembered, Methos, Brother, I hate every inch of your battered, martyred soul right now. Had I the power to, I'd fuck MacLeod out of your mouth. And isn't that another thing that's destined to end badly? We could fall to our deaths in a whorl of lust, coming into each other, thrusting, one union of hate and Quickening, roiling and Abaddon-bound.
Turning you is quick and poignant with my hands on your shoulders. When I jerk your pants down your thighs, your hips push back, looking for me, your forehead pressed into the cool stone of the wall. I trail my hands down your ribcage with no small amount of love as I think about sticking my fingers in to try and find your heart again.
This isn't the best part, feeling your ass and letting you writhe on my fingers, feeling my cock throbbing in the small of your back, your knees bent, spine arcing like an old warped longbow; not yet, not even close to my favorite part when I thrust in and your eyes and mouth fly open, noiseless throat grasping desperately for sound. The fire only burns higher when I push inside you, things tearing, bleeding, easing the rough passage with fluid and movement.
I never could take my time with you.
Instead it's a ghost of shortened time on the back of my neck, the nape of yours begging to be bitten in front of me. You're all frozen armless, just like you always were when it was good, too good to even move, to scrabble fingers down the walls of your tent or through the furs on the floor. In those times you pushed back like you do now, impaling yourself, a tidal estuary, something that was once a natural force now leveed, diked, locked and dammed.
I let my tongue leech the poison from you, the soft whirring of the cryo tanks our love song, your soft grunts our marriage anthem. Not that I am ever maudlin, but in the best of my lives, I thought we would come together like this, an old married couple, past love, more in familiarity, in desperation, shoving and moaning in the dark, trying to pull one last strand of something from some old corner of some old memory. For the past to rush up as if it is the only thing that is real.
No, the best part -the *best* part-is the end. When I come in you, you spasm the same way you do when I stab you to death, the very presence of my dick up your ass making your cells react like acid on metal. Then I can let you go, let you tumble down to the floor, knowing that what I've wrought in you is a rebirth so importunate.
What I'll gladly admit to you, Methos, is that your bright eyes are not walls, and your flushed cheeks are not beautiful. Your callused hands are not strong, and your conniving isn't impregnable. This last time is gorgeous and filled with the metallic taste of something I haven't tasted since the last time you left me for dead. Maybe it's amniotic fluid.
Why, if I were a romantic, I'd admit to your panting body, I'd say just this once, that this whole thing is a blazon to you. But I'll never admit that in my dreams you say yes, oh yes, to our headless corpses on the ground.
Right now.
*~*
Notes and Apologies: I have always found Kronos to resemble Hester Prynne-static, unchanging, not understanding why Methos (our pitiful Dimmesdale, in this scenario) couldn't or wouldn't return to the past. I find that writing this, since my goal was to change that perception in myself, at least, hadn't changed my view so much as refined it from a flaw of Kronos's character to more a flaw of his choosing. (Indeed, what I really think Kronos suffers from overall is a final painful lesson of "you can't go home again.")
Sonia's Methos understands this lesson; even as he fears that he will regress back to his old ways, he finds that he has a new perspective, that of survivor, to steel his resolve against Kronos. Is Kronos naïve or in denial to see that? (Or is he too slow witted? I find that difficult to swallow, static or not.) I dunno. In his resolve to create his brave new world, he certainly seems a bit of both (because seriously, four men to take on the world? And two of them Caspian and Silas? Seriously dude. Seriously.).
What if, then, Kronos is well-versed in Methos's psychology and knows what determination lies behind those eyes? What if he simply doesn't care? What if he deems this man to be the instrument of his downfall? That is, I guess, uh, fit.
On the other hand, Dorothy disagreed with the tone of this story, the actual voice of Kronos in particular, whose speech here is much more poetic than he ever actually demonstrated in the series. In fact, this whole thing, she pointed out, is actually better suited to Byron. I am totally not going to disagree with her, though Diane thinks that we really have no idea what goes on in his mind, so I get leeway. In addition, I wrote this trying to match the image that Sonia presented, and found that as I tried to match the tones of the sentences that I actually took from her story and implanted in this one (and there are ten phrases and sentences-like a Highlights Magazine for Adults!), I ended up with something much more romantically suited to this language. If by romantic I mean skull fucking or something, I suppose.
Das da end?