smokingtomb | And nothing will bring tears to our eyes [for the

And nothing will bring tears to our eyes [for the_cupbearer]

[ooc: immediately after this thread.]

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

He hears the water dripping against the porcelain basin long before he realizes he's hearing anything at all. The seconds between each drop splashing feel like years, the sound like a falling tree that starts him. Vines along the walls tug when he jerks, the entire bathroom covered in greenery and growing things rooted in deep places in his body.

He realizes he has a body, and the years turn to minutes. An arm moves, brushes a patch of cool hidden away from the radiating warmth. He gasps, and the act of drawing in breath burns like fine whiskey gone down his lungs. The second breath is easier; the third, effortless. The muscles in his chest remember how to move; save for his heart, which never stopped.

A disembodied sense of urgency spurs him to open his eyes, to remember that he has eyes and how to open them. He blinks once, twice against the light that he vaguely feels should hurt somehow. The world around him is purple and green, flowers growing in bunches on vines that twist around and up like an insistent blanket over nearly all his eyes can see. Between the vines here and there are gaps that shine like clean bone in contrast, and his mouth stretches in a smile seconds after he remembers what the expression is.

Smiles. A little girl that took the deep ache and turned it bright and warm with a tiny drooling smile. A man, most beautiful in the world and would be with his face torn to ribbons. His skin is warm and he is of sea and the eternal road spreading before the three of them. Hair that curls rarely enough to be a treat and movement like an old dance celebrating coyly the joy of being a sensual creature.

His eyes close again as he thinks of the name, feeling something stir that he has never named and reach. He's near, only just too far away to touch with his fingertips but Richard can still feel him, feel enough to whisper in his mind with the sensation of warm and undefined longing for him to be there.

'Ganymede.'

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He hears the call. He wouldn't have known it wasn't normal, couldn't have even if he bothered to think of his former divine lover, because Zeus ever called his name any way but conventionally. Ganymede hears, but he hears it normally, that's how it's processed.

This is so far from normal he'll wonder how he missed that part later, where he didn't register hearing Richard's voice in his ear until after the fact.

He only smiles, assuming the man is still getting out of the shower and wants some attention--Beth went to bed hours ago--and rises, smooth gait taking him to the bathroom where instead of the white and grey and clean lines there's a riot of greenery, and ridiculously delicate grape-cluster flowers. And they're growing out of Richard. Ganymede is speechless for a long moment, paralyzed by the rush of taking in information and the belated kickstart to find what he needs to do, heart pounding in his ears and his throat, slick with sour bile from the jolt of worry.

He kneels by Richard, quick and careful as he leans over with his palm pressed to a cheek. "Richard? Richard! Wake up, baby, please look at me, tell me what's going on--" he chants, unable to take more than a startled breath before the words start to tumble off his lips.

'I'm alright.' The answer comes as a gentle murmur, right next to his lover's ear like any other. But Richard is lying sprawled on the floor, and his lips haven't moved. His eyes do, the purple irises one of the only things unchanged about his body. The whites of his eyes have a greenish cast to them, as does the skin from which the vines sprout.

The smile he offers is the same warm and hazy expression as any other day he's woken slowly, white teeth flashing behind his lips. The young god reaches for his lover and vines move with him, their roots spread under his skin in the pattern of veins and arteries. Some of the blossoms fall when they shake, and the flash of color is what turns his attention toward his own arm.

His eyes widen to see the vines under his skin, the flash of a nightmare of pain and blood and coming apart into green, into nothing. The gasp of fear barely leaves his mouth before his hand flushes with human tones again, fingernails regrowing in the blink of an eye and without pain.

Looking back at his lover, he carefully lowers his hand to rest over the one on his cheek, as though worried that he'll break Ganymede.

'I saw something. It was beautiful.'

Ganymede settles by Richard's head, entirely unprepared for this and worried about his lover--his everything but nominal husband, at this point. He gently pushes back the man's hair, rubbing his thumb over Richard's cheekbone as he speaks.

It's strange, he can hear the words but he doesn't see his lips move. "Love, what happened? What did you see?"

The hue of his hair is a strange tone not quite the black he'd dyed it, and there's good reason for that; the majority of his hair has become more vines rooted deeply in his scalp, these bearing no flowers of their own. Richard seems not to notice, given it isn't literally in front of his eyes as his hand was.

'What--' Stars with names he couldn't hope to pronounce. A crystal that held a god, or the god held it but either way it held worlds like nesting dolls. All of them, maybe. Maybe only most of them. The cry of a great bird as it dances through entire galaxies, setting them aflame in its joy and need to destroy to create again.

His eyes are focused but not at his lover. The only acknowledgement he gives of realizing he's still there is leaning his face into Ganymede's hand, and one of the vines in his hair gently twisting around the other man's wrist.

"You have to tell me what happened, Richard," he murmurs, still stroking the man's hair.

He holds a similarity with those stars; parts of him, tiny ones but still parts nonetheless, are in his star constellation, granting him the longevity of their life, immortal to human words. He misses the vines wrapping around his wrist, because he's worried beyond belief at what led to this circumstance. "Please, lovely."

The sound of his lover's voice makes him blink, vaguely aware he can feel Ganymede's attention pulling him back from the mental rabbit hole.

'A great bird. Not him; bigger.' A flash of frustration crosses his face; what he's saying isn't helpful, isn't even close to explaining what he saw but his brain can barely think in words right now. His own name doesn't truly ping as belonging to him any more than love, or baby, or any of the pet names Ganymede refers to him as.

More vines twist around his lover's ankles, a reflection of the largely growing desire to have him closer. 'Your stars are so warm.'

He goes cold, and he can feel the leadlike weight settle unpleasantly in his belly the second Richard mentions a great bird, and Ganymede's arm twitches, very carefully now brushing the hair back from Richard's face and making sure it doesn't lie over the vines.

"I don't understand what you're saying, Richard, you have to tell me, show me all of it."

He frowns again, half-sitting up with a mental whisper of 'No no no no,'. His hands move to cup his lover's face between them, Richard's focus being too fixated on soothing Ganymede to care about the vines still under and over the skin of one arm.

'Showed me your stars. They're as warm as you.'

"Love, I don't have stars. The constellation doesn't belong to me," he murmurs.

His hands slide down, Richard using the motion to sit up as his arms slide around his lover's shoulders. A small part of him, he realizes only after, had been worried that he wouldn't be able to, that he'd be rooted to the floor. No such roots hold him down, the plants all over the bathroom drawing their sustenance from him alone.

The young god nuzzles his lover's cheek, lips and piercing and skin brushing against skin. There are words to be said but he can't form them, and Ganymede feels too far away. Without thinking Richard reaches for him the way he did before, this time trying to send the feeling of home and safety and a deep love that's as much a part of Richard as his eyes, now.

It happens without much incident.

Ganymede welcomes his lover against him--he always will--and gently brushes his hands down the man's spine half-feeling for any roots that would have sprouted there, and he doesn't even notice the shift in feeling like he's surrounded by green, and disorganization, and the tingling, lingering sense of half-wrongness. His body slackens against Richard as if he's suddenly fallen asleep because for all intents and purposes he has, simply gone out like a light with no power when Richard drew Ganymede out of his own head.

He tries to speak up, to reassure Richard, and not for the first time since seeing his lover on the floor a thread of panic infects his thoughts, but for himself. He can't make noise, and he can't seem to toss off the enveloping, nigh-suffocating warmth like he's being bathed in humid air from some tropical rainforest.

It feels like a deep breath after being underwater, and Richard's eyes flutter closed with a shiver. His body stays upright, one hand moving to slide into his lover's hair.

His mind is still repairing, edges mending together from where, already strained by stress, they'd shattered completely. Some of those parts are different, little slivers of a colder Richard who called himself another name and ached from loneliness like an old wound. None of them are memories, and what little is there has no regard for the habit of humanity that Richard was taught from infancy.

The only genuinely human thing in Richard's mind is Ganymede's, and that makes him easy to find. The focused attention, the thought of catching him, to Richard, comes with the image and sensation of holding him, of nuzzling just under his ear and whispering in it.

'It's okay, 'Mede. I'm here, nothing can hurt you.' Nothing in Richard desires to; even the other parts and pieces which seethe and seem to have their roots behind a great wall. Here, there is nothing but love for him.

He's afraid, in a way he hasn't been in years, not since he was out of the world, a beautiful human boy playing servant and learning what it was like to be breakable in the midst of people who thought nothing of the hurts they could cause. Ganymede can visualize himself shaking his head wildly, and all the synapses fire that would have him scrambling away but he doesn't move a tic.

'Help me, Richard, I don't know what this is', he pleads--he can at least do that--but he has no concept of how to reverse whatever happened. Richard and his kind are entirely different gods than Zeus and now was a terrible, awful time to realize that. It's as if he's trapped in a bizarre dream, with no end and no way of waking himself from the oddly self-aware night terror.

"I want to wake up."

The initial reaction to Ganymede's panic is a surge of hurt, wounded feelings without the threat of retribution because Richard could never conceive of hurting Ganymede like that. 'It's just me.'

But it isn't an answer to his question, and the hurt fades in seconds as Richard realizes that his lover is panicking because he can't move. His mind doesn't work the same, he can't touch or feel anything; he's helpless and Richard doesn't know how to reverse it. The knowledge is there, he can feel it but its still in shards and the pain would hurt them both if he tries to force it.

Something in his mind flexes and suddenly there are walls. A dark room with windows showing a full moon, comfortable cool air with a hint of green and a soft bed. It could be any number of bedrooms they've slept in; it bears the most resemblance to the one in their California home near the sea.

Richard's laying on top of the sheets, most of him a shadow with tattoos and purple eyes. In this setting his voice sounds as physical as anything Ganymede would care to touch. "This better, love?"

Finally he feels like he can breathe, and though it's a strange room and not the one he was in, it's something.

"What did you do, love?" he asks, by no means still panicky. "Why am I here, what happened?"

Richard shrugs, and though his body is indistinct but for the lines the gesture is clear. "You were scared. I--"

A whisper interrupts him, almost identical to his own voice save for the accent; crisper and a little more airy, with certain consonants soft or oddly Germanic. The words themselves are indistinct, but the set of Richard's head tilts as though he can hear them perfectly. As he listens, his body takes shape beyond the shadow of himself, but what forms is more androgynous, with long dark hair and the familiar tattoos faded.

His voice remains unchanged, as do his eyes. "We're as much creatures of mind than nature's blood. You're not; Y'couldn't see or hear, so I made a place you could. Same as an illusion, only easier."

Edited 2014-10-11 02:43 (UTC)

"I'm still scared. I can't move," he murmurs, face drawn. "It's like a dream I can't wake up from, and I don't know what's happening."

"I-" He grimaces as a piece of his shattered psyche crashes into place, and the room he created inside his own mind flickers. When it stabilizes, the figure on the bed is noticeably younger, nineteen if he's a day with a face slightly softer from the remnants of baby fat Richard had mostly lost by the time the two of them had met. He's thinner as well, bordering on scrawny with a shock of vibrant blue hair that does nothing to hide the delicateness.

Richard doesn't seem to notice the change of appearance, his face drawn in concentration. "Do you trust me, Mede? Will you trust me if I tell you that you're fine, your body's fine an' nothing bad's gonna happen?"

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And nothing will bring tears to our eyes [for the_cupbearer]

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