Ni'Srilan: The Desert: To: Fish.

The thorns he spares when the rose is taken;
The rocks are left when he wastes the plain;
The wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken,
These remain.

“No storms,” he comments, staring over the dunes with a familiar kind of warmth. “No wetness, unless you want it.”

A Fish in the desert; who’d have thought?

Salmon-pink and sallow and by Loki, he likes it. He likes the dimples between ribs, the way skin stretches here and there – he wonders if it’s something genetic or something of nurture vs nature, because his family seems to have a tendency to form attachments to the first one they lay eyes on, regardless of the conventions of others. It would make sense: his parents, bound in pain and loneliness, his sister and her slightly incestuous urges, his brother, his other sister, hunting the unattainable…

True to his blood, something very much like possessiveness makes a nest for itself inside him.

“The girl won’t be happy,” he comments again, standing in his usual spot – close, radiating heat, but not enough to touch. “But I am. And you’re still pretty.”

He might as well have said ‘I’m gay’, and meant both meanings of the word in all truthfulness. Though, technically, he knows truth is far more complex than simple things such as these.

It’d never occur to Alerion that one might not be comfortable in his presence, mainly because he always thought himself so ordinary. But he’d felt that, in their previous meeting, and it worries him; for both obvious and unobious reasons, it worries him.

“Are you alright?”

A new element rips sympathetically through his nerves, and he smiles just a little bit.

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of eros and of dust