#fydens

[odyssedarc]

part 2: 1920, the hamiltons make their first appearances at the walrus

[bornpariah-a]

have you mistaken me for someone else?

There is a piano playing its soft tinkling notes and there are clusters of people whispering and muttering and speaking in tongues and tones and volumes both proper and improper, all at once. A luxurious affair of utter despair ——— as all high society events tend to be and he meanders among the throngs and crowds and otherwise assortment of people : the stand out, the singular, the pariah, as per the standard of it all, truly. He plays the role well, after all. As if made for it.

His father would faint !! His mother would scream ——— at him, specifically.

Nonetheless he makes his way, gaze languid and nearby immodest in how it shifts to and fro and he’s searching with intent / searching with an unaffected air / searching. Two ladies shift and his eyes follow their movement for a beat before finding themselves fixated upon a dark corner where a gentleman and two and three stand, voices unheard over this din. A rousing debate, ratcheting higher and higher and higher, soon to overflow he thinks ——— he can tell quite well, after all : he was raised to WATCH and UNDERSTAND / so as to have the upper hand, of course.

Course set he makes his way, bare faced in a sea of masks upon masks upon masks and the baseline trace of mirthfulness that is often present in the curve of his mouth and the set of his brow BRIGHTENS as he draws nearer. A show, a show must always be put on, the show must go on. Distance closes / and he thinks of the ocean and its smell and the crash of its waves / his arms open : as if the plane where the sea meets the sky in a never ending embrace.

❝ There you are !! ❞ he speaks with such boldness and absolution and magnitude that conversations nearby quiet and the quirk of his mouth can neither be described as grin nor a smirk, caught in that unknowable and divinely suspicious space in between / the wideness of his eyes portraying a guilelessness that he hardly embodies in the least. ❝ I have been looking for you everywhere, why you make yourself so difficult to find I’ll never know. ❞

Oh, the drama of it all. Raised brows by all / confusion radiating from every which way : and he is radiant, alight, reverberating with all of it, truly. ❝ I do apologize for pulling you from this, no doubt, important conversation, but we do have important business to attend to, after all, ❞ he reaches and there is a recklessness about him as he places his hand against Hamilton’s back and, beseeching / stubborn / spoilt in every way, guides him away. Just like that !!

With gazes following them, naturally. But when has he ever cared?

❝ I will return him to you at my soonest convenience, ❞ words thrown over his shoulder, utterly unbothered by this turn of events that he has brought about with his own hand, guiding the man further and further and further away. PURPOSEFUL.

❝ ——— Have you mistaken me for someone else? ❞

And Dorian laughs, a rich and carrying sound almost musical in its nature, if not outright salacious in some manners and outright ARROGANT in others / but then, that is merely who he is, isn’t it? ❝ Not at all ——— you really should give yourself more credit ; and I highly encourage you leave your shock behind. I do, truly, have business with you, after all. Besides rescuing you from all this dull frippery, of course. ❞

@fydens // THE AGE OF ADZ.

[odyssedarc]

  THOMAS HAMILTON  /  @fydens​ . 

  HE SWEEPS HIS FINGERS THROUGH RED HAIR —   this hair that had, so shamefully in him, elicited a terrible sickness, a sadness like jealousy. Not shame for the longing, but shame for the bitterness of it. The longing to touch it, to press his face against it. To move his hands through it as now he does. James’ face turned aside and resting against his belly, in the clean, crisp linen of his shirt. The warmth of him. The fan of his breath. It is as he imagined  ;  it is, as all things imagined, more shearing and sublime in reality, more transcendent, than the waning brain could conceive of it. Such is the world, isn’t it? Such are all beautiful things. Beyond the understanding of man, who is always striving in the dark to describe them.

  He could not have described this. He could not have known the language, could not forge it anew without first feeling it, hearing it, smelling the soft, clean masculine musk of this hair, tinged with the sea-wind, so like the gloaming colour grey  —  but red! Redder in nearness, brighter than fire. How could he have known? How could he have known that it would be like this, so natural, in him like the a priori.

  Thomas smiles, spreading his fingers across his lover’s forehead like brushing away the dust of creation, revealing underneath the thing made by God that must have joined them even before they could perceive it.  ‘  Did you not imagine it? Perhaps not  —  my discipline has never approached yours. I did. Endlessly. So much that you would enter the room, and for a moment, I would forget that it had not happened  …  ’

  ‘  How needlessly we have both suffered. ’  He smooths the hair back from James’ face, from his closed eyes and what, behind them, he knows to be a hidden look. A secret, bottomless place. Making a dwelling of this moment. Thomas looks into his face and still smiles, leaning down to kiss his furrowed brow as he murmurs with a depth of fondness like the sea  :  ‘  And what a piece of work is man  —  ’

 The  thud  his  heart  gives  when  Thomas  unravels,  ragged-breathed,  ruddied  before  him,  can compare  to  nothing.  It  both  thrills  and  it  frightens  how  the  merging  of  their  bodies,  the marriage  of  their  minds, moves  him.  He,  who  is  wild,  homeless,  dark,  becomes  infatuated  with  the  feathery  lightness  of  his  lover’s  mind.  There  the  world  is  beguiling;  its  perpetual  ambiguities  transformed  into  endless  possibilities.   Half-asleep,  he  wonders,  if  peace  burgeons  solely  from  Thomas’  ingenious  hand;  if  the  brushstrokes  of  his  fingertips,  light  against  his  skin,  is  where  life  begins  and  ends. And,  if  not  life,  then  he  himself. As  Plato  would  have  it,  Zeus  might  as  well  have  split  man  in  halves  and  condemned  him  to  a  life  in pursuit  of  wholeness.  For  it  is  that  he  finds  in  Thomas — a  completion  and  perfection  of  the  self.

 ‘ It. ’  He  repeats  the  word,  chews  it,  as  though  pondering  its  meaning  before  letting  it  drown,  muffled,  in  white  linen  alongside  a  bell-like  chuckle.  Ebb  does  boyish  laughter  merely  to  be  replaced  by  a  thoughtful  severity:  ‘  I  think  my  stubbornness,  rather  than  my discipline,  held  onto  the  belief  that  such  imaginings  were  something  to  be  ashamed  of — and,  for  your  sake,  I  neglected  them.’ 

‘ Needlessly,  indeed.’   Soothing,  his  kiss,  soothing,  his  heart.  James  scarcely  moves  in  fear  of  losing  both.  Only  a  hand  wanders;  slithers  below  the  billowing  shirt  that  separates  flesh  from  flesh.  Effortlessly,  his  fingers  trail  along  every  crevasse  and  curve  until  finding  the  targeted,  cadencing  beat  of  his  heart.  To  feel  life  vibrate  from  one  being  to  another  like  this,  how  could  that  be  suffering?  How  could  that  be  shameful?  He  sighs,  half – amused  by  his  own  foolishness:  ‘ In  action  how  like  an  Angel;  in  apprehension  how  like  a  God.  I  wonder  if  Shakespeare  knew  a  man  quite  as  divine  as  mine.  Had  he  a  Thomas  Hamilton  of  his  own?  A  man  to  rival  any  god  with  his  fairness? ’