Discover Top Posts Tagged with #nicoloxyusuf

Been thinking about TOG and sickenesses and I can’t stop imagining Nicolo dying of a fever.

Maybe it's the early days where they still wandered the world, starving. Or maybe it's the malaria-infested trenches in WWI — caught between saving lives and saving their own.

They wouldn't have any water to try and fight off the fever — the other men needing it more than them. Nicolò is half covered with a dirt-cloaked blanked, the strands of his hair wet with the sweat pooling on his forehead. He's panting, chest rising and falling rapidly, as if he's having a very bad dream instead of clashing his very soul against the greedy hands of death.

Yusuf can't save him — he knows it. They are stuck there to fight and starve over and over, until one side gives up and rises the white flag or both perish under the command of their self-absorbed generals. He sits with him nonetheless, one hand clasping Nicolò's own; thumb running in slow circles over the scalding skin. With the other he's feeling his pulse, its erratic pace, violent and sprinting through his veins. His eyes never leave the flushed face, the scrunched expression — fighting, dying.

It’s a face that has brought him so much joy over the years. Made his heart stutter and stop. Made his very soul swell and swell, filling his lungs and filling his whole body, until he feels like a balloon ready to pop. It’s a face painted by angels upon a background of gold; not even the most expensive gems or lavish castles worth enough to pay the price for one look from those glittering eyes. He has seen a thousand faces and then a thousand more, yet none of them put a dagger through his gut. None of them killed him like this.

You'd think death has always been violent with them: whether it had been heavy swords or rapid arrows, bullets shattering their insides or the cold steel of axes tearing through their flesh and bones. Yet, this one barely makes Nicolò's eyelids flutter — his life swept by the wind, like the fragrance of perfume of a passing stranger.

Yusuf’s eyes close — his hand never leaving Nicolò's own. Even after so many deaths his heart still finds it in it to grief; to cry and curse Death for taking his beloved from him. As his very soul weeps, questions begin their omnious swirl, like vultures circling in the desert: Is this the last one? How many more did they have left?

Nicolò’s skin chills.

Should he prepare his own and join the other half of his broken heart in the sea of the afterlife?

Nicolò’s words will him to wait. Words spoken long ago, in the depths of the desert night, under the heavy blanket of the cosmos and the warm embrace of their quiet fire. They were whispers, promises. They were pleas for patience: “Wait for me, my sun, my soul,” Nicolò’s voice is sweet against the shell of his ear, “for I will always come back to you.”

No one has noticed his beloved’s lifelessness yet, and how could they — men like them, stoned by the misery of the world. Their skin bruised, ribs stretched taut against their thin skin. They don't have the luxury of dying with a lover or a sibling; faith wanting them for herself alone.

Their eyes stare in front of them, unfocused. Their limbs curl and tremble, not unlike the branches of a tree after a heavy storm. The flesh around their sockets is either bloated or sucked deep inside their skull — leaving them like the useless dolls in a forgotten, dusty attic. Yusuf doesn’t pity them, for to pity is to enfeeble. No, these men are brave fighters, throwing themselves against the winds of fire, fear long dead inside their hearts. People call them stupid or crazy; monsters inside the skin of shaven sheep. Yet, none of them know. None of them understand the lack of choice, the responsibily these men have to shoulder upon themselves to win a war without a winner.

Yusuf can only pray for Allah to have mercy on their restless souls.

Fluttering under his thumb brings him back to the surface as Nicolò's chest rises and falls once again — this time merely asleep. Color bleeds back into the angelic features and Yusuf can only smile as immesurable joy threads between the veins of his heart, squeezing Nicolò's palms between his own.

***

[[bonus points if it really is the early days and neither of them has confessed yet akfjw;lfjk;alfk’]]

For my own beloved @orbitoclasst as requested. The cheeks to my cheeks <3

PS: why does this look so weird on my phone?? kfwfka;wfklw’fl’af