<p>From where he sat on a railing, Atti could see the bridges; the narrows and sounds and out past the slums and toothpaste-smear warehouses into measures of land and sky that could only be called the deep distance.<br /><br />He didn't know what he wanted anymore.<br /><br />It was nighttime down on the river, and ashy vapors wavered above the smokestacks on the far bank. Bhim was one of the few places he still felt at home in; he had walked her streets for the first time years ago and had felt a different apprehension than that of the unexpected seen before, or accidentally-revealed truth. He had searched himself for some physical sign that would make it real: quickening breath, slowing heart. But any sign was insubstantial as a disjunction of the soul: for here, he felt almost... grounded. There was no need to move, to wander.<br /><br />He'd found a job as a dockworker, unloading shipments of who-knew-what (narcotics? Rapine livers? by Fromina, he didn't really care), drudge and grime and long hours and low pay. He was still squatting a bungalow, furnished, across the street from the loading docks. His shift was over now, but the work of the waterfront went on around him: a sense of enormous tonnage and machinery, shadows and containerized goods stacked on the decks of tremendous ships.</p>
<p>The rhythmic clunking of Sage's combat boots hit the slimy docks with a certain assurety, as if they knew the path even though their wearer did not. The worn leather was creased deeply from good use, and it hugged up her legs almost to her knees, the rawhide laces intertwined snakes protecting her scarred shins. It may have seemed strange that she wore boots, and nothing else, but it was far too hot for the half-Yki to be clothed without sweating like a pig.</p> <p><em>Pig rig, </em>she thought discondantly. <em>Pesky portulent piggies prudishly proceeding to prune whilst painting a picture of pettiness. Fuck.</em> Sage shook her head, tapping a row of impressive, silver-painted claws on her thigh. She was getting antsy. "Manic", the doctor would probably call it, and then she'd try some drug as old as time, some metal she couldn't remember the name of, rendered into salt for the singular purpose of flattening Sage out into a glob of social acceptability. "Fuck that shit, eh chap?" she nodded, grinning mischeveously to a stocky tan arden lugging a crate. He glanced up, glower on his face, and started a bit when he saw six eyes fixed on his instead of two. "Friendly motherfuckers here, aren't they," Sage said, mostly to herself, as the arden passed her without a word.</p> <p>She wasn't really bothered, though. She was looking for an adventure (and what better place than Bhim to get your ass handed to you, to take a couple hits of questionable bud, to leave your mark on the world with nothing more than a can of paint?), and she didn't need some crate-hauler to help her out. Just because she had gotten here on a boat (one of the few passenger boats around here, it seemed - and what the hell were all the others hauling?) didn't mean she was afraid to step on dry land.</p> <p>So Sage strode purposefully (though she didn't know what her purpose yet was; she planned on finding it, hiding behind an empty bag of chips like a frightened mouse, or perched utop a warehouse like a gorecrow, but hell, she wasn't picky), and she was so busy looking at the blanket of sky - well, really, it was more like a blanket of pollution, but Sage saw tendrils and twists and all sorts of magic, even there - that she avoided hitting a lethargically posed arden by only a few inches.</p> <p>"Hell of a day to make some bad choices, eh?" She grinned again, not expecting a response from the scarred 'dragon.</p>
<blockquote><p><strong>I THINK I SAW YOU IN MY SLEEP, DARLING<br /></strong>Timestamp, silly me: Mia 2nd, 81385.</p><p><strong>I THINK I SAW YOU IN MY DREAMS</strong><br />He felt so tired now. His hard-gotten grip on the world, material things--the vague, untransferable malaise of winter in the Nyonges, the pale nights when his identity flattened for lack of sleep, the scars on the inside of his thighs--they seemed to be slipping, giving way to thought and memory and something that Attrius wanted to call 'loneliness' but couldn't quite put his thumb on. The half-breed was lost again in another one of his stupid little inner soliloquies--sitting and staring tended to do that to him. Lost as he was, he didn't notice the thill until she spoke. He craned his neck upwards to look at her (it took him a moment to decide which set of eyes to meet with his own; he settled on the middle pair), squinted, and tapped the edge of one hand to his brow in a salute of sorts. <strong>"'eah,"</strong> he said, in a gravelly, mead-spiced voice that could have marked him as the bastard son of Tom Waits. <strong>"And you're plannin' on makin' some?" </strong>He stood, grinned devilishly, and tugged at the hem of his jeans, which had sagged so low that one could see where stomach fur thickened towards pubic. <em>Maybe it's time to invest in a belt.</em><br /><br />He looked her over. The two of them were more alike than they knew, she a rebel street-writer queen, he an archon of anarchy. Atti and society hadn't gotten along for a long, long time. He'd perform acupuncture with a tattoo-gun, rearrange living spaces with cluster-bomb Feng Shui, an agent of change, a spiritualista sandanista. There was a barge docked at a remote pier up ahead, between a number of empty slips and a wide basin, and it appeared to be abandoned, with bridge and deck deserted and rust stains running down the sides and graffiti spray-painted on the smokestacks. They were both standing there and taking in the baleful view together of the sky and waterfront--uncomfortably, he thought, because esthetic judgments feel superficial when you share them with a stranger--but he mustered up a measure of pluck and spoke again.<br /><br /><strong>"My name is Attrius,"</strong> he said, extended one work-worn hand to her in a handshake, and realized just how stupid he must have sounded--that solicitious talking-to-a-girl quality in his voice for the first time in who-knew-how-long. <strong>"Hey, you uh, you got Ykili in you too?"</strong> he asked, gesturing with one clawed forefinger to his own twisting dreadlocks.</p></blockquote>
<p>"Attrius," she said, rolling the word over in her mouth, a slight hiss to her s. <em>Attrius auspiciously asks and assumes accurately, </em>she thought to herself before politely telling her mind to shut up. It got like that sometimes, gods only knew why, twisting sentences into delicate little games of congruency; sometimes Sage was amused, but it made it hard to have a "normal" conversation when the verbal part of her brain was focused on the nonsensical blending of sounds; when relevant content of the words came second.</p> <p>"Damn straight," Sage said, then motioned vaguely to her eyes, "though my dad must have been Lukuo, or I don't know where the hell all these things came from." She eyed Attrius steadily, noting the plethora of worldy scars, but mostly noticing the strange darkness of his pelt - her own fur was of starkest white, and even in the smoggy night air more brightly colored than anything around, despite the flickering purple shadows that tried to contain it. "You must be a mutt just like me, what with that coat," she added, grinning again. "The name is Sage, though a lot of 'dragons just call me 'that fuckin ridiculous chick'." She snorted a little in laughter.</p> <p>Sage shifted her weight a little, her right hand reaching to her back to feel the space between her shoulder blades. Three black studs - "dermal anchors", her friend had called them - formed a vertical line here, and while they seemed to be healing better than she expected them to, they itched like no other. Sage resisted (barely), and instead picked absently at a scab on the webbing between her fore and middle fingers. A curved bar had been there not three days prior, until it was ripped out; Sage blamed the windowsill of her half-sister's condo. Sage was never good at keeping the piercings on her hands in; they tended to last a month or less. But that was alright. She was getting better at taking care of her others - three curved bars formed a pair of lines on her wolfen snout, three perched high in her left ear, another small line on her muscled forearm. Hidden, a curved bar above each heel (as far as healing went, even worse than her ill-fated finger webbing had been), a fur-shadowed one in her belly. She was an addict, it was true, and she smiled appraisingly as she saw that Attrius, too, had multiple piercings. She noted wryly that it didn't match her own plethora, but, well, she was considered to be a little stab-happy when it came to sticking metal in her skin.</p>
<blockquote><p>Attrius was an edge-seeker, a palmist, inferring the future out of his own lined flesh. She was something else--intangible, otherworldly. He thought that if he were to touch her, she would vanish into vapor and smoke. His smoldering, wicked eyes betrayed that conspiracy was in the air, made worse by the fact that he was standing with his head tilted calculatingly and dressed only in grease-slicked jeans, grimed and torn and patched. He licked his lips, the expression in his eyes gravitating further towards the playful end of the scale with every inaudible tick of the second’s hand. <em>"The name is Sage, though a lot of 'dragons just call me 'that fuckin ridiculous chick'."</em> Now he laughed, harsh and ragged as a jackdaw, and his ice-colored eyes, in that moment, spelled out who he truly was: charlatan savior, heroic fool, sagacious rouge, a snake-oil salesman of lies and illusions, king of clubs and spades and hearts and diamonds, a prince of silences and shadows, negative spaces. <strong>"Pleased ta meet ya, Sage,"</strong> he said, and offered her a complicit grin. <strong>"'eah, my ma was Ykili an' my da was a piss-blooded 'dragon. Fuckin' bastard."</strong> He gathered a sizable amount of phlegm in his mouth and spat it on the dock for emphasis.</p><p>His hand went to the flask at his hip, and he undid the cap-and-chain with the pad of one thumb. And he raised the flask and tilted his head and knocked back a sizable shot of whiskey, and for courtesy's sake held it out to Sage. <strong>"Y'wan' some?"</strong></p><p>Attrius watched her with a certain slow and certain swivel of the head, walking around her in a half-circle. He had no shame in his rapacity; it was part eagle, part mouse, the slight parting of his lips, the almost-flare of nostrils as if he could draw her to him with his breath, gather her in a chemical line of smoke and sweat. His eyes traced her spine, the dark marking that spidered her fur, and came to rest between her shoulderblades. <strong>"You mind if I take a look at 'em dermals? I'mma tattoo an' piercin' artist--looks like they're rejectin' a bit, pretty lady."</strong><br /><br /><br /></p></blockquote>
<p>Sage gave the arden a crooked smile. "We're all bastards here, aren't we?" she half-teased. At the offer of whiskey, she paused a moment. The last (and only) time she drank, her and whiskey had had a dramatic falling out, but then, she had drank three cups. It was only after she had puked a dozen times that anyone bothered to mention - hey, dude, usually people take shots, you can't just down it like a glass of milk. The mere mention of the word "whiskey" was enough to make her stomach twitch uncomfortably. "Actually, whiskey and I had a one-night stand, and I think it'd be pretty awkward to call now that so much time has gone by," she said, raising an eyebrow, "and besides... he wasn't that great in bed."</p> <p>Sage turned her head slightly, puzzled, as he moved behind her. "All my eyes are in the front, you know," she teased.<em> The dermals, of course,</em> she thought as he spoke, <em>but then, he wouldn't have known to look for them. </em>"A piercer and a tattoo artist, eh? You must be a god in the eyes of the counter-culture," she smirked, but she wasn't being completely sarcastic. After all, she loved piercings and - if she could afford them - would love to get a few tattoos. "But eh, they tend to do that. I like to stab myself with metal, then go abuse it before it heals. It's like filtering out the weak before I give them the priviledge of going on adventures with me," she finished, grinning devilishly.</p> <p>Sage turned her head a little more, peering at Attrius out of the corner of three eyes, and closing the other three, lest she get a headache. She could feel his warm whiskey breath against the back of her neck; her dreads were bound up and out of the way. It was a strangely disorienting combination; the feel of warm breath, the slap of water on the dock supports, the slight movement of said dock as the waves hit it. Peaceful, even. <em>What kind of adventure starts out peacefully?</em> Sage thought wryly, but she retracted that thought. Her days had ways of taking strange turns.</p>
<blockquote><p><strong>IF YOU CALL, THEN I'M COMIN' TO GET YOU<br /></strong>sdfghjjhgfdfghj this is short i'm sorry ;_________;<br /><br /><strong>YOU WANNA SINK SO I'M GOING TO LET YOU</strong><br />For all of her muted brilliance, Sage seemed barely there--a chimera, a trick of the light--blink once, and she would be gone. The yki was an unknown quantity, some mythical being that he was only on the cusp of understanding, and Atti feared that one wrong move would push her too far, send her flying at him in a munificent torrent of heated intensity, or worse--send her winging away. Here was the sphinx in all her stygian glory, snarling three sets of tricksy glares down her metal-marked nose, brushing apathy over her cheeks. Here was ferocity at its feral finest, and as he approached her, imperious heat seemed to scorch his coat, drawing a wounding smirk across his lips. The warmth rising off her was tangible in the air immediately surrounding her, like poisoned honey dropped in mead. <br /><br /><strong>"You, miss, have got a talent for wit. I try an' make a joke and people jus' stare a' me. An' ah--you drink at all, or you one of 'em 'edge' kids?"</strong> He grinned. <strong>"Ha. Yeah, maybe if tattooin' weren't so shady right now and if I had more ink on myself. You did alla these yourself?"</strong> he queried, voice raw and gravelly, gingerly rubbing his tongue against the pointed end of one white, glistening canine. <strong>"You did a damned good job. An' hell, your eyes might be in yer front, but you lined these shits up near-perfect." </strong>Atti was usually underwhelmed by amateur attempts at piercing, especially when their owners came to him whining for help (blowouts, rejection, infection, tears--the usual)--but Sage had done unusually well. <strong>"Y' got a good hand at this. Oughta 'prentice somewhere."</strong> <br /><br />One hand dropped to beneath her left shoulderblade, and Attrius studied the slant and point of entry and exit of the piercings, the turn of her neck; with the other hand, he mapped out the roll of her nape down to the first corrugations of vertebrae, pressing his palm groundwards so that it gently tugged at her skin away from the dermals. He tried to swallow his heart; it threatened to burst and fill his mouth with blood. <strong>"Does that hurt, the stretch on yer skin? And does it ever hurt when ya move yer shoulderblades 'round? I 'int seein' any plasma or sebum--you been cleanin' it regularly? You got some swellin' and redness on the bottom two."</strong></p></blockquote>
<p>"'Edge?' Nah, I'm not so pure as my fur suggests. But as they said in the old days, 'God made nujeq, man made beer, in god we trust.' " She finished the quote with a smile. It didn't completely sum up her viewpoint on things - the thill made a point of avoiding synthesized drugs of any kind, but had dabbled in a couple plant-based hallucinogens and, naturally, nujeq - but it was a nice simplification. She blushed slightly as he complimented her wit, but it was hidden beneath fur and masked by her blue skin.</p> <p>"Any good job I did is the result of sheer persistence, not any sort of innate skill," she smiled. It was true - she had ripped out many piercings over the years, had lots of rejections and nastiness. Eventually, she learned what parts of her skin got pissy when they were stabbed, and which parts were pretty chill about it. "Though it would be fun to stab 'dragons besides myself with needles, I suppose," she said, giving a small huff of laughter.</p> <p>Attrius' hands were cool against her upper back; she couldn't deny that it felt nice. "Conveniently cool and calculating with crafty contradictions," she whispered absently; then, in a normal tone, "Hurt? They itch, sure, but I wouldn't say that they <em>hurt</em>. A little when I put them in, sure. They were my first dermals, I've always used curved bars in the past." When he mentioned cleaning the piercings, she tilted her head back and laughed openly, a rough sound that made her shoulders hunch and her chest shake. After a few moments of amusement, she finally replied, "Well, when I swim in the ocean, the salt water cleans them, and when I shower, they get doused in hot water. But I suspect that doesn't count - when I said I abuse my piercings to filter out the weak, I wasn't being facetious. I have little patience for the finnicky ones. My barbells usually heal fine without any special treatment, nowadays."</p> <p>As Attrius eyed her piercings, Sage eyed Attrius. His icy eyes contrasted appealingly against the charcoal of his fur and his onyx dreads; it was just the kind of minimalist color palette she would put together. <em>Contrast bears contrast</em>, she thought absently. <em>So what kind of contrast sits inside that pretty little head? Perhaps those scars aren't all from falling out of trees and off of roofs, like mine. Devilishly dangerous 'dragon deems my dermals look dreary.</em></p>
<blockquote><p>He didn't want to believe in some tyrant god who carved brutal twists of fates. But he knew that such thoughts were mere fantasy and foolishness; whatever gods that were still out there likely didn't give a rat's ass about this place, this Mandelbrot set given a couple of extra dimensions. This was what he'd always wanted, no?: the infinite deaths and births, covenants and rebels, crows and kings, flesh and blood, not the romanticized fiction of Bhim; no, this wasn't what they had written about in the books, not an extermination camp for the soul but rather some skewed pipedream of an immortal architect with a hard-on for irony.<br /><br />And it fit the two of them perfectly.<br /><br /><em>"Conveniently cool and calculating with crafty contradictions."</em> <span><span>A subterranean frown battled the inner smile behind his face. His cheek twitched, his lips moved to shape vowels from no languages he spoke. </span></span><span><span> He could not tell if it were a question in rhetoric or a request or commentary so he remained silent, but it dragged up traces of memory and flaring images and all the shadow-dappled stuff of an undividable moment on an ashy evening, going crazy in ways so routine that he couldn't even stop and take note.</span></span> <span><span>When she started to guffaw, bright laughter with a dozen edges, he slipped into mirth himself, adding his own rich, hearty chuckle to hers. </span></span><span><span>He was finding fewer and fewer reasons to draw arbitrary lines around his morals since the magicka ban, to declare the perimeter of his behavior. Determined to push it in a way he normally never would have considered, and perhaps by way of a wishful and vicarious sacrifice, he asked: <strong>"hey, what'd you come here for in the first place?"</strong> He was, he imagined, furthering his reckless pursuit of a starring role in some future derisive gossip between Sage and her friends: <em>he had the nerve to ask "why you came there in the first place"?! He actually asked?!</em> So evoked, he'd be a moment's entertainment amidst the doughnuts and titters of a ritualistic slumber party. <br /><br />Or something like that.</span></span><strong><br /><br />"Sit down," </strong>he said, more of a request than a command, patting the space besides him as he seated himself so that the crooks of his knees rested on the edge of the high dock, shins and boots dangling. A shred of amusement played about the depths of his eyes, and Attrius smirked lopsidedly, milky teeth gleaming like the slightest streak of cutlery as he grinned, saying nothing more, just watching, drinking his whiskey with dry lips, dry mouth. Drinking her. <span><span><br /></span></span><span><span><br /></span></span></p></blockquote>
<p>Sage contemplated this question carefully. Why <em>had </em>she come here? She had no love or life here, no rhyme or reason; it was simply the cheapest ferry-ride (possibly because half the other ship's captains still thought it bad luck to board a thill; the one from Bhim had been too drunk to notice one way or another). Her mind twisted rampant thought into intangible figments of what opportunity she could possibly hope to find here, in this dark alley of dark alleys, this haven of questionable ethics.</p> <p>Still not sure, Sage sat, her legs swinging rhythmically. She brushed a stray dread back towards her pony tail, and opened her mouth without thinking. "I want to float," she finally said, staring off through the impenetrable fog of burning fuels and factory stacks, into some obscure notion only her own mind could comprehend. It was one of those magic sentences, the kind that didn't exist until spoken, the kind that wasn't true until confused lips uttered it quietly; the kind of sentence that came alive and took hold in the speakers brain, growing imperceptibly and vaguely until it would at last take on its bizarre, explicit form some indeterminable time later. Of course, Sage did not realize this at the time, so she added, "Wait, what?" She shook her head, as if clearing the abstract thoughts away.</p> <p>"I guess I came here because it was somewhere new, somewhere different, full of people who were a little off, just like me. Believe it or not,"-she said those four words with a bitter laugh and thick sarcasm-"at school, I get weird looks from some folk, even avoidance, sometimes. Like what, having six eyes instead of two is a bigger deal than being vapid and shallow? To teenagers, apparently it is; I'm on the fringe and all the empty heads sit at the center. Like someone's essence can be discerned by the way they look, when it should be based on how they act." she looked over at him; he would know what she meant. He was a scarred outlier, and rough and tumble, just like her.</p> <p>Before them, the moon looked wistfully out from behind the overcast sky, as if shy or afraid. It's tender rays slid silently into the water, dancing and flickering like the thoughts of a crazy man before disappearing into the depths.</p>
<blockquote><p>Attrius felt as though he had stumbled into yet another ring of Wonderland, as if rabbit hole after rabbit hole had dropped him down farther and farther away from reality. This was the moment where, were he the protagonist of a sun-drenched Swarajian cop show, he'd have kicked open the door to a gangboss underworld, peeled off the costume and dropped the ersatz patois and stepped over the threshold from <em>signifying motherfucker</em> to <em>motherfucker</em> and grinned with pale bullet teeth, staring him down <em>o predator&prey you can see these gasoline flickers in my eyes, can’t you? <br /><br /> Can't you?</em> <br /><br /> It would be easier if he felt desire as desire and heartache as heartache; if either were merely a pain in the gut or a throb under the ribs. But no--shaking hands could crumble cities of bone. <br /><br /> An aching silence could detonate the suns. <br /><br /><em>"I want to float."</em><strong> "You gotta learn to swim first,"</strong> he breathed, his voice hardly above a whisper; his vowels were lengthy, as if he intended to wring out of his words every last drop of nuance they might supply. She muttered something else, seeming confused. He wanted to own that delicious enigma of a mind, if only for the barest of seconds; to see past Sage's veils and rattling cans to her inner workings, whatever slumbering beast that curled untouched within her. They were all monsters inside, were they not? If you've seen one, you've seen them all. But that didn't stop him from hungering for that moment of helpless exposure, wanting to see more and more and more. The rabid hounds of hell were a'knockin' on his chamber door, and he was hardly one to deny them.<br /><br />He sneered at her words, wet lip curling high over his upper teeth; they were damned, all of 'em, empty-headed and dumbassed. <strong>"I know what ya mean. Fuckin' hated the kids at school--got so sick of the stares and shit-talkin' that I'd usually be wearin' long sleeves an' jeans all times 'a the year. Stupid kids. Hell, you're better 'en 'em, and I know you'll get hella farther then they'll ever dream to. How much longer have you got there?"</strong> It was her last words that made raw laughter spill from his throat, and a low rumble stirred in his chest. He was growling playfully, though his long flashing teeth contrasted with this truth. A wicked, wicked grin split his face, and he said: <strong>"am I scarin' you, Sage?"</strong></p></blockquote>
<p>Sage shook her head vaguely, and pursed her lips a little. "I don't think that's what I meant," she muttered, though she wasn't sure, either. Thoughts sometimes unfolded in her mind, as complicated as lace and twice as delicate; if she prodded and poked them, they came apart like cobwebs, but if she waited long enough, they bloomed into flowers of glass. She would wait, though she hated to.</p> <p>"Only a couple months left. When the spring comes, I'm out, off to go do whatever the fuck I want, and while my sister tells me I'll be living under a bridge somewhere, well... I've seen some pretty damn nice bridges in my day," she smiled broadly. Her sister said a lot of things, most of them meant to be deterrants, but acting as motivation. Sage had a tendency to think things were appealing, even, no, especially, when others thought they were revolting. Whether defense mechanism or coincidence, opportunity or disadvantage, she had always been like that. It was the reason a vacation to Bhim, of all places, appealed to her.</p> <p>When Attrius asked that final question, Sage leaned in close to him, close enough to feel his breath against her cheek and for her own breath to rustle the fur of his ear as she whispered into it. "Scaring me?" she whispered, soft nose almost touching the arden. She paused a moment, an invisible smirk crossing her teasing lips as she let out her own growl, a soft, low roughness that, at any reasonable distance, he wouldn't even have heard. "Don't flatter yourself."</p> <p>She let herself stay there for a half a moment, close, much too close. Then, lightning fast, she reached up to the railing, pulled herself up, and deftly stepped onto it, balancing precariously as she grinned down at him, all six of her own eyes staring into his, water meeting ice, or water meeting fire; his eyes had a pull she wouldn't attribute to ice, a heat she couldn't justify with their blue-white luminescence. "You, sir, are distracting me from my adventure." As she said this last word, she swished her fox-tail in a jokingly impatient manner, and rose one aloof eyebrow.</p> <p>"But I suppose you can come with, if <em>I'm</em> not scaring <em>you</em>..."</p>
<blockquote><p>The two of them were dealing in occult knowledge and measuring with secret calipers--on the verge of some tremendous expedition, like Vikings spreading nautical charts across a knifescarred table, laying plans for plunder. She made him a little nervous. Sage must have known how powerful she was, he mused--<em>she is</em>, he thought to himself,<em> the kind of woman who, when she walks into a room, all eyes fall upon; the commanding force of attention; magnetizing, intoxicating. Irresistible. </em> She could probably tear him apart if she wanted to, all predator's eyes and black claws. He knew this and it drew him to her.<strong> "Nothin' wrong with bridges, 'less yer sister is all primp-an'-pampered or some shit." </strong>Sage's eyes were deep water--hard, fixed, aqueous. She looked terse, the last Soviet apparatchik.</p><p>And then she was besides him and her breath unraveled the silence (hot and damp) and Attrius abrogated any claim to composure he might have had. <br /><br /><strong>"Y-you--damnit," </strong>he said, barely above a whisper, his voice curbed and restrained on a chokehold leash. <strong>"I 'int scary, but by Fronna, you're downright..." </strong><em>Intimidating,</em> he thought, but Atti did not voice this aloud. His eyes held a taunt, an unanswered question--an invitation beckoned from a dank and sordid motel door by the crook of a slender finger. </p><p><strong>"Yeah, I'm comin'."</strong></p><p><span><span> He was resigned to it. He was prepared for it. He had flipped a coin and stood staunchly by its conclusions</span></span>.<br /><br />He drained himself of everything he didn't need to make the jump. He picked up speed and seemed to lose his gangliness, the slouchy funk of old wounds and unbelonging and all the stammering things that still sealed his adolescence. He was just a running boy, a half-seen figure from the streets, but this was how the dark-furred half-breed seemed to come into the world, how the bloodrush of a dozen strides brang him into eloquence. Then he left his feet and was in the air, feeling sleek and unmussed and sort of businesslike, flying in from Swaraj with a briefcase full of bhijan. His head was tucked, his left leg clearing the bars. And in one prolonged and aloof and discontinuous instant he saw precisely where he'd land and which way he'd run and his feet touched the ground and he ran to the end of the roof, stopping before the edge, laughing, taking in lungfuls of polluted air. <strong>"C'mon!"</strong> he barked.</p></blockquote>
<p>Sage stood perched on the railing, some exotic bird of prey who had gotten lost in migration, and as she adjusted to her new environment, something changed. Snapped. Her sharp eyes betrayed her, fixing themselves unabashedly on Attrius. The blood flowing through her was hot as steam, and her brain zipped through thoughts as though she would be burnt if she touched one too long; but then, as it always went, she too decided she wanted to be scorched, roasted over an open fire, enveloped in a blast of heat older than time itself. Desire. A quiet, despondent part of her brain whined in self-awareness, but Sage was too lost in the arch of Attrius' neck and the curve of his tattooed shoulder to listen. Her whole being (excepting a tiny, useless corner called logic, which she ignored out-of-hand) screamed for action, risk, to rush headlong into the flames and be consumed. She had known she would get like this; that was why she had come to Bhim, wasn't it? To feed the manic beast in her chest, to let it gorge itself on all manner of risk and daring and provocateur; though this, admittedly, felt different than her usual, unfocused recklessness. Some song she had heard once in a basement replayed in her head, all screaming guitars and pounding drums and angry, yearning voices. She half-closed her eyes and let it envelop her.<em> Within my bones this resonates, boiling blood will circulate, could you tell me again what you did this for? </em></p> <p>She was somewhere else when Attrius spoke, but his voice layered onto the music resonating in her brain and merged into it. As his feet pounded the street, her own anxious limbs turned abruptly to follow suit, and she sprinted along the railing behind him, the deep tread of her boots barely hitting the slick metal as she vaulted off of it and into the air. She was shorter than him, and her jump not as long; her hands merely grasped the edge of the roof, but it was enough, and she shoved down at the sharp edge where gutter met shingles as she crouched, swinging her legs between her arms and standing quickly. He was stopped at the edge of the roof, waiting for her. She dismissed this, and ran past him without sparing even a glance, leaping deftly to the next roof, crossing it, quickly scaling its tall, crumbling brick chimney. She scoped out the neighborhood quickly, and set her eyes on the tallest building she saw.</p> <p>The night felt young as she inhaled it, cold as its wind slapped against her neck, mysterious as it laid before her, its shadowed alleys and crooked streets like lines a palm reader would search for in an attempt to divine the future. Sage was no palm reader, though, and the night didn't expose its inner workings to her; rather, it seemed to whisper in her ear, vague and knowing.<em> The only way to know me is to live me.</em></p>
<blockquote><p>Sage was all free-floating, smoldering eroticism, six degrees of sexy sarcasm; the smile without the Cheshire cat, the attribute without the subject. Her eyes were brimming with stories that slid wetly but never fell. He couldn't read them, no matter how hard he looked.</p><p>He backed up a good two yards and then charged forwards--laughed and ran, the metal-capped toes of his boots clearing two feet of deadly air before hitting the concrete roof--and he ran on, capering a little, elbows out and fingers snapping, and Sage surged ahead of him. He felt a flare of competition. The soles of his combats pounded over the untiled grit, over the iron hatchways that led to air vents, rattling the metal grates. He climbed the chimney, all scrabbling, diamond-hard claws and boots catching in mortar. The half-breed caught his breath, crouching with his ass against the backs of rubber soles. <strong>"You know what I like about you? You're aggressive, a little reckless</strong>. <strong>I'm almost having a relapse just squatting here with you. I'm backsliding a mile a minute."</strong> There was a depth in his eyes that he dared her to interpret--the slow burn, the rankling pain that sits inside the good-natured telling. And his voice in its factual carry, vowels extended and bent a bit--a sound out of the old streets, the old demotic song gone to the near-suburbs now, and a slight Ykili pitch teasing the bourbon-and-cigarettes tone from somewhere deep in childhood. He looked out over the fire escapes, the backsides of gray buildings, a gleaning of sheened iron and rust fungus and scaly brick. <strong>"You wanna hit the tallest one?"</strong> he breathed, barely more than a whisper.</p><p>He swallowed nervously, realizing exactly how much of a fool he must have seemed. Part of him desperately wanted to get home, play the loser and leave Sage and his--wants (desires? what the hell was he feeling?) here. The other part, small and weak as the whisper in his head, knew one step over the threshold would be worth the risk.<br /><br />But there in Mia, the smog blurring out the moons for the eighth day in a row, she were there. Maybe she'd always been there. He turned to her and looked at her like that. Like possibilities. Like they were creatures with matching chemicals.</p></blockquote>
<p>Sage had her eyes closed, arms raised slightly to catch gusts of wind as if they were wings and not mere arms (a wish she daren't wish, a hope she silenced with a mental scowl, a dream she had cut out of her long ago). The heels of her worn boots rose slightly as she rolled the weight to the balls of her feet, taking in a deep, strong breath; and then Attrius was suddenly next to her, a puma crouching to strike, action waiting to occur. <em>"You know what I like about you?" </em>He began, and she smiled; that is, she smiled until he was halfway through his statement, with the second half her lips crumbled to dust. Her dramatic, hypomanic mind faltered and caught, as if on a splinter. She looked down seriously, unsure what there was to see in his expression; her mind was not made for the interpretation of faces into emotions or logic. Still, even her clusterfuck of a mind knew there was more meaning there, written in the irises of his icy eyes like the laws of a nation cut into stone.</p> <p>"You know what I like about you?" She began, her mind enjoying the parallel sentence structure; but the gusts picked up as she spoke again, and whatever she said unraveled on the wind.</p> <p>She nodded in response to his question, and rolled her shoulders in anticipation before taking a bold step off of the chimney and dropping to the roof, bent knees absorbing her impact. Sage's knees hated her on days like this, days where the only thing that could race faster than her feet was her mind. She loped to the edge of the roof; after it, there were two more (both complexly sloped, probably cheap homes conjoined by some awkwardly thing center wall), these spanned almost a block. Then, on the corner, some decrepit old monstrosity; it had probably been gorgeous and classy at some point, now it was the hunchbacked widow. Naturally, Sage loved it on sight. It was made of a combination of some light rock that Sage guessed to be sandstone, and brick. The whole structure was a relatively easy climb - thick, decorative borders of stone and deep, sturdy window ledges lined the whole height of it, right up to the flat, mossy roof - and Sage went at it like a predator tearing into flesh, scrambling up the thing as though chasing god himself.</p>
<blockquote><p><em>"You know what I like about you?</em>" she said, but then her words died on an updraft. He said nothing in return. Atti constructed the stumps of a dozen conversations, and heard each veer into some mutually embarrassing area, and so he abandoned it. Her clavicles showed knobby above her chest. He wanted to lick the sweat off the inside of her wrist. She was wrists and shinbones and unbalmed lips. Something passed between them, deeply, a sympathy beyond the standard meanings that also encompassed these meanings: excitement, affinity, tenderness; the whole physiology of neural maneuver, of heartbeat and secretion. He couldn't quite imagine what she was about to do next--but then again, he never could. It made sense to him that his immediate and extended futures would be compressed into whatever events might constitute the next few hours, or minutes, or less.<br /><br />She dropped off the edge.</p><p>He inhaled sharply, and his eyes swept over the broken masonry to find her below him on the roof--<em>she was safe</em>. Sage charged right up and cleared the gap, plaster dust puffing out as her feet left the edge. A laugh curled in his chest, and when he let it go, it twisted his face in a grin so huge his jaw muscles hurt and he had to rub them with the heels of his palms. The half-Ykili's mind went blank except for some business concerning the pathos of the word 'jump'. It is possible for the mind to go blank in a tactic of evasion or suppression, the reaction to a menace so impending that there is no blessing to be found in the most resourceful thought--no time for an eddy of sensation, the natural rush that might accompany danger--and this is what he did, dropping all thoughts with the exception of a monosyllabic action. He stepped carefully at first, then dropped to a half-crouch and jumped, landing squarely on both booted feet. He ran, moving to the first of the conjoined houses; grabbed two railings and vaulted up three more, clearing the center wall.<br /><br />These were the only terms of life he recognized as real: out of the penthouses and showrooms and into the local, the mixed--the mostly-unnoticed blocks of dry cleaner and schoolyard, just an inkling here of the old brawl, the old seethe and heat of the underworld, the rake of fire escapes on old brick buildings. Atti's booted feet dug into mortar and sandstone, and his claws--four-inches-long, each of them--extended fully. He cleared one yard of building, then two, three; his shadow staggered below him on the brick, sharpening, blurring, tripling.<br /><br /><br /></p></blockquote>
<p>The top. Sage was panting as she reached it, her thick fur too much insulation; suddenly the air seemed muggy and claustrophobic.<em> Claustriphobically calculating corrosive careers in contemplative corruption.</em> Sage huffed and shook her head. A cool breeze teased at her eyes and made the beads in her hair clatter. The wind stripped away her sweat and extra heat, but the thoughts within her head still fluttered uneasily, packed too tight in her head, all trying to escape at once. She lowered herself to the concrete monster of a roof, legs crossing under her as she leaned back into a strange laying position and looked up at the sky. Still too cloudy for any stars, but she saw the glow of a moon behind a thin veil of smog, dust, and water vapor.</p> <p>When she closed her eyes, she could see the harsh bright lines of her thoughts, crossing and recrossing each other angrily. A thousand little wordgames played out behind her eyelids, and blurred flashes of phoenixes and leviathans streaked across the sky; their eyes gleaming one moment and fading into streetlights the next. An anxious edge sliced against her thoughts and she remembered where she was. Bhim. Even worse (or better?) she was with some trickster god of an arden whose very essence dared her to make choices she otherwise wouldn't.</p> <p>Usually, the height was enough to clear he mind, but weeks of stress were rendering her paralyzed. She smiled to herself conspiratorially. "A little self-medication never hurt anyone," she muttered, as she sat back up and partially unlaced her boot. She slid a small black metal chillum off of the lace and balanced it precariously on her snout, between two barbells. She then glanced awkwardly back down to the boot. The tongue of it was reinforced with an extra layer, and between the two of them some stitches had been ripped. From this alcove, she pulled a healthy-sized pinch of nujeq, crushed to shit and smelling like mink oil. Packing it into the piece, she held it up to her lips, and swore creatively. No lighter. <em>Where the fuck is a smoker when you need one? </em>She thought, looking around. <em>And where's Attrius? </em>She stuck the paraphernalia in her mouth like a cigar and closed her eyes as she waited, adrift in a thick sludge of confused thoughts and manic, elaborative daydream.<br /><br /></p>
<div><blockquote><p><span>He was shadow-upon-shadow as he scampered up the building--no making him a target, that was for sure--though with Sage’s rime-pale coat, they might as easily wander into trouble as sidestep it. Eastward now, he saw four letters spray-painted on the side of a building--unreadable but familiar somehow, burning a hole in time. The light heaved in its uncertain tides, as clouds too thin to see washed across the sky; the air was changing. The wind was brutal and the streaky clouds massed to the southwest, and if Atti wasn’t mistaken, it wouldn’t be long before rain would fall.<strong> “Sage?”</strong> he said--no answer. He craned his neck upwards to find that her bootsoles had already cleared the brick a good five yards above him. </span></p><p><span>He slipped.</span></p><p><span>In that moment, he thought he would surely fall and plummet to a certain death (<em>and who would clean it up?</em>), but he dug his claws into the mortar and scaled the last few feet. As he recovered, pulling himself over the railing so his belly and then legs laid on the flat roof, the flush of relief came first: the nervous system's response to rattle-scarum panic, the gin-fizz of natural </span><span>opiates. Weird, welcome calm. A sort of insouciance, his breathing slowing, regaining his sense of gravity. Atti pushed himself to his feet, wiping his open palms on the front of his jeans. It was beginning to drizzle now, and he blinked away the rain from his eyes.</span></p><p><span>Some smitten track lighting had managed to find Sage and turn her into a contemporary Renaissance ikon with a Memling-like acuity of expression. Almost--almost a devotional portrait, a local saint. <em>So this is what it felt like for knees to go weak. Where is a kneeler when you most need one?</em> The smell of nujeq was heady, pungent. He fumbled for the lighter in his pocket and walked to her, clearing his throat.<br class="kix-line-break" /><br class="kix-line-break" /><strong>“Sorry,”</strong> he said. His voice came out wobbly and a fifth too high. <strong>“I almost--by Fronna, I almost slipped.”</strong> ‘Rius laughed, a full and throaty rumble, and wiped the sweat from his brow. His hands were still shaking.<strong> “Here,”</strong> he muttered, and moved so his back was against the wind and oncoming damp, holding the small flame to the end of the conical pipe until it caught,</span></p></blockquote></div>
<p>"Sheesh, boy, thought you might have slipped and drowned - er, fell," Sage laughed a little and inhaled deeply, pondering a few seconds before taking just one more hit. She hit the piece against her foot, packed more, and offered the thing out to him. "Interested? I'm a lightweight, but the stuff <em>is</em> pretty good. Home<em>growwwn </em>from an old neighbor of mine, a scholar and a gentleman indeed. He's quite a character; always talking about 'humans' and an earth-that-was. Good guy though," She paused a couple moments and existed in the sharpness of everything. Drugs hit her fast, and hard - the psychosis probably helped that. Her mind was waiting to make a switch: metaphor becoming reality; reality becoming metaphor. They were tall as towers, and she felt the cells bustling inside her like little worker bees inside an office building, her breath a plume of industrial smoke, her illustrious coat caked with years of grime. She pictured them cutting the ribbon in front of her maw and her opening it for the first time, all the little worker bees pouring in like water.<br /><br />She turned her face up to Attrius, and stared, squinting slightly, for what could have been seconds or days. "Your eyes are fluorescent lights," she said, and burst out laughing, "and my spit tastes like moss on a rock," she grinned, and her head was thrown backward by her laughter. She basked in the light rain for a moment - funny, wasn't it, how sometimes sunshine and rain could feel the same? Maybe there was no difference between them after all, and it was all in her head. Surely they were all just players in someone else's story - maybe that's why rain and sunshine felt the same, because they didn't <em>really </em>feel like either of those things - they felt like words, falling delicately and slipping down her fur to the roof of the building.<br /><br />"I'm hungry," she announced, eyes flashing. "Or maybe I'm not. Maybe I just want to bite you."<br /><br />(ickypostisickyi'moutofpractice)</p>
