[P] STARLINGS

[Raziel]

The White Scarab. Raziel leans back into his hocks a little and nods. Of course, he remembers now. "Denocte. Are you of the Night Court?" He had been there once, as a young man, shortly after the coronation of Maxence when the desert world had been skinned and remodelled for the hundredth time. In the heavy violence of grief he had made the long trip south accompanied by Gahenna alone. He'd told his family, those who had survived the rebellion, that it was a business trip; with his mother dead and Yamuna too busy climbing a social ladder he'd avoided his entire life, someone had to keep things ticking over after all. It was of course a lie.   He couldn't stay in Saudagar. In Solterra. Raoul was in everything, from the tablecloth to the sun. So he'd escaped, hoping perhaps that it might bring him peace. Instead he had found wagons filled with the war-dead and a gambling den that stolen more than money from his pockets.  It had been a short trip.    Raziel's eyes track north now from the embellished scar and climb up to map the contours of August's mouth with a wolfish intensity. They look like the kind of lips that have kissed beautiful women or beautiful men or both. Thighs and throats. Fluid and fruit. Lips that slipped too easily into a smile. It is as jarring as it is enviable. For there is a looseness in the way the other man stands that makes Raziel feel like calcified rocksalt. He has never been that boy; that man. He has never known how to be anything that isn't empty. His orbit has always been shaped by that hungry vacuum of nihility: his parent's marriage, the shadows of soon-to-be-ghosts, the gold that looked grey through eyes that had never known comfort.  He can't stop himself now. From looking, looking, looking and it isn't his first time.  August is not the only one to remember.  It is summer in 99' and he is a teen with legs up to his chin. The air is swollen with boyish sweat. There is a thudding noise and at first he thinks that it might have been an insect knocking against the inner wall of his skull. It is a bloated sound, one of sweet death. In the end it is the smell that gives the peaches away; even all these years later he can remember how cloyingly sweet they smelled as they fell like bodies from the trees. He can't remember what he had been doing out there -- it was only the peaches and the moment he saw them. Raoul first, always first. His garnet eyes are feverish under a moist sun, his shoulders slick, his hair tossed lazily over his neck. Then her: blonde, pretty. That is all he can remember of her. He hadn't been looking at her. There is something giving birth in his stomach and its making him feel sick but he can't look away and he can't make it stop. Nauseous rage rises like vomit in his throat until his vision begins to blur and the world starts to spin and he wants to break her bones.  Even now, all these years later, with Raoul gone and the girl probably dead too, he feels his insides begin to coil in readiness for the retching.  But he gives nothing away to the stranger. He's always been good at that: iron hands and serpent-plum eyes hiding the genocidal chaos unfolding in the all the dark spaces beside his heart.  ♣ @august