fact: it was a coast.
also a fact: it wasn't
his coast.
no navy veterans here drunk under their dry rot riddled porches, no warm centres of presbytarianism where everyone went and mingled, no bars full of seamen trying to remove each other's teeth by way of kicking each other in the mouth with their seaboots...
i think i'm feeling what the professionals call nostalgia. see, there was nothing but rain and the mist that came just after or just before.
lord.
he spoke out of the corner of his mouth, because the other corner was occupied by a blade of grass chewed halfway to liquid.
where am i?
cue god, with his cumolonimbus beard, parting the clouds like curtains.
i swear cillian, if i knew, i would tell you. exit god, closing the clouds.
also, you're imagining me. you should eat something.
his head dropped to the ground. he cradled the earth. it felt good against his cheek even though he knew he had to clean all of it off later. for a while it was just him and the seascape far away as the bloated river droned on and on.
i think i'm feeling what the professionals call melancholia.
these wilds are not the southern beaches.
but yunxu feels the same comfort. he aches for the sun and the sand not drowned in rain but they are as much a part of life by the sea as the tides. the clouds chase him up the coast, but it is still his coast under his paws; as long as he stands by the shore, he is still close to home – even if home is full of foreigners.
yunxu pauses by the shore’s edge. the rain sleeting down buries any scents even for his nose, makes it impossible to look out to sea and find anything there but mist and grey. it leaves him with the spreading river delta and a single wolf-shaped smudge of black and white.
the temptation comes immediately to walk around. yunxu corrals it with emotionless efficiency and steps closer, even as the smudge crumples to the ground and rests its head against the dirt.
“您好,” yunxu says, in the shrinking hope he’s made some sort of misjudgment and the man currently sprawled gracelessly on the earth, soaking up mud and grass and leaves – with grass in his mouth – does know the language after all.
upon hearing the sound of approaching footsteps, owlglass flattened in a mechanical click-click-click process where his ears pinned back, his eyes closed, and he pressed himself against the ground as hard as he could, praying that this new stealth mode would work. it should've worked. it was so goddam good it could've been designed by one of those german enginee-
ah, the footsteps are getting louder.
ah, there it is, the greeting. not that he could understand it, but he knew what greetings felt like. they felt like a handshake with mutually sweaty hands, gritty with useless powder.
he opened one blue eye. his face twisted as his mouth migrated all the way to the other side to grit out this: what are you looking at me for.
owlglass had this fantastic talent of stitching together words to create frankenstein monstrosities that moved with all the grace you could expect out of drunk centipedes straight out of pulpy science fiction. it sounded more like whad-ar-yoo-lookint-mee-fer. this word centipede was a part of a common, if not thoroughly inebriated, species.
what he wasn't so good at was evading the unbearable sear of eye contact; he focused on the stranger's dark chin until he saw spots. they tangoed badly across his vision.
yunxu’s ears flick. the man’s words slosh drunkenly back and forth out of the corner of his mouth, if they are indeed words at all; yunxu rather uncharitably thinks he’d be just as incomprehensible to someone from here. agitation trickles down his spine like a marching line of ants.
he tries again.
“hello.” in english this time, doing his best to rein in the irritation trying to edge the word. “i am yunxu.” he delivers the words pointedly, as clear a request as he can manage without outright saying i am trying to be polite here, and you are supposed to be greeting me back.
no manners, any of them. he probably won't deliver a reply in anything more than a confused mumble anyways.
yunxu looks pointedly between the stranger and the dirt he’s still pressing his face into. chewed grass drools from the curve of his lip, smudged brown with mud. he aggressively avoids yunxu’s gaze, staring with rapt fascination at the bottom of his chin.
yunxu lets him for now.
“you lying on ground,” he says, as mildly as he can manage. “why?”
what a contrast it was! yunxu, with his steamed and pressed clothes, his mother-of-pearl cufflinks, the ruler-perfect part in his black hair. owlglass, crumpled over, in about the same state as a yacht that'd gone through considerable maritime turbulence.
he dragged himself up. his contempt (notably, both for himself and yunxu) was palpable. it thrummed like the hand-shaped red mark on your skin after a slap. he revelled in yunxu's barely concealed irritation. a wide smile that pursed the corners of his eyes tightly together, then nothing. then the smile returned, considerably smaller, though more contained. more civilised, if you will.
i'm owlglass,
he offered. hello to you.
there was an imprint in the ground, just an imprint, a linocut of half his body as if captured in a microscope slide. he dusted himself off, still hunched, still intense and distilled. i was tired. i- i like t'sleep near the shore. don't you, sometimes? aren't you a goddam--
he looked around, gesturing at nothing, --seaman?
the smile slid off his face again. like luggage on a conveyor belt, it went round and round and round.
he comes back up, dragging his contempt with him like the world’s most ostentatious cloak, on the heels of a smile that contains far too many teeth to be friendly – and then another, tightly controlled, formal. yunxu’s sodden hackles threaten to rise, and are promptly crushed back down by the weight of the rain.
yunxu’s expression is still perfectly, politely blank as he inclines his head in equally polite acknowledgement. his thoughts, like the fin of a circling shark, are somewhat less so.
he looks from the open skies to the roaring water nearby, threatening to overflow its banks. to the wet grass and mud churned up beneath both of their paws. again, to the smears all over owlglass’ coat.
it is a singularly unwelcome place to lay your head to sleep.
“enough seaman not to lay by flooding river in rain.” yunxu’s voice lifts and falls, a soldier’s perfect one-two march in audible form. it wouldn’t be out of place on a robocall. owlglass’s smile slides off his face and crashes somewhere between them, lost in the storm.
“better shelter in cliffs.” yunxu gestures, briefly, to the barely-visible sweep of the rocky coastline, the bay he has passed by to the south. his words are short and clipped. “you live here long?”
yunxu was unreadable, his face full of smoke and noise-- was he seeing auras now?-- and he almost envied his anonymity, his featurelessness, an exercise in military-grade minimalism, the perfect silhouette of a mackerel bone... no seams, no flyaways...
and of course whenever anyone sees something so unbroken, the immeadiate urge is to want to break it.
he laughed, and even he didn't know if it was genuine or if it was all just a farce. smart,
he murmured, tapped his head, nodding aimlessly but knowingly. shut up. shut the hell up. another smile, another earthquake fault line scrawled across his face by some caffeinated cartographer. owlglass taps out a frenetic rhythm on the ground. somehow, some way, the drugged wall street banker brand of instability has found him.
no,
he said. you?
he grinned.
the river swelled and roared. a brief spasm crossed half his face-- a tic, a twitch, an exaggerated flick of the ear that was carried into his cheek. he ignored it. just a reflex gone haywire.
owlglass laughs. he smiles. he taps his head. each exaggerated motion grates more on yunxu’s already high-strung nerves – the first in what is to be a long line of foreigners, and on foreign soil, yunxu does not, cannot understand what he is even doing. the shark’s fin of his thoughts rises, already dangerously close to teeth.
“you should know.” yunxu’s voice comes tight and controlled; further words stick in his throat without the english to voice them. the dampened flag of his tail lifts, stuttering, from the wet curve of his hind leg. and owlglass just keeps nodding, smiling a cracked-glass smile, his paws tapping an erratic rhythm on the ground.
his response comes as a denial. so he’s not even useful for yunxu’s only question. a waste of time. politeness still demands a response – and then he grins, a wide cut of white teeth across his white muzzle.
yunxu, for all his drawn-tight (false) polite blankness, is not hard to break.
that placid, unreadable stare peels back. in its place, something feral behind the eyes. a low growl brews in the pit of his throat; the fur along his spine makes another valiant attempt to lift into needles, met with marginally more success.
“you ever stop smiling?” yunxu snaps. there is enough control left to him to hold his lips tight enough to veil his teeth, dangling by a razor’s edge.
there it is, the first break, the first seam. owlglass found the loose thread and just
pulled until the whole thing became undone, until the whole thing went to shit.
smiling's good. laughter's good.
compared to yunxu,
he's the one that's more composed now, loose and sluggish. he tilted his head back so he was looking at him down his nose in the ultimate portrait of derision (though he looked at almost everyone this way, more or less) with one side of his mouth pulled back in a near-grimace. it should've been noted that even when owlglass
wasn't smiling, his smile lines were still indelibly etched into his face. if you would've asked him he'd respond with something like
it's a genie thing.
i mean, a genetic thing.
now we're back to that smile, that scornful and tasteless curve.
his eyes widened, then narrowed, and without warning, without so much as a growl, he lurched forward, some torpedo of pure kinetic energy.
smiling’s good, owlglass says, and that smile is there curving along his face as he tilts his head, looking down the slender edge of his nose and the tenuous edge of civility yunxu is holding onto snaps, just like that. tail up, ears forward. his lips curl all the way back; his smile matches owlglass’ own.
he is leaning forward almost before owlglass does. paws set in the mud, heedless of the wind and rain. in the empty focus of yunxu’s eyes is all the sympathy of a shark in that minute before it breaches, and something more; something eager now, straining the tension between them until
it
snaps.
owlglass does not approach, there is nothing delicate in the way he barrels forward, he is silent and there is something too-intense behind his eyes and he is still smiling and
teeth rake over his shoulder and the blood mixes with the rain; there is iron and salt in his nose now and like that shark scenting blood he turns, yunxu is snarling, the sound raw and furious in the back of his throat, jaws open like a steel trap after the side of his neck matted dark with mud, rainwater sunlight gleaming on the curve of his fangs.
[ooc]
roll
through the tightness in his throat, through his teeth, through all the fur and flesh in his mouth, owlglass laughed. his whole body, wiry and hard, shook with each strained inhale, each explosive exhale.
ha ha ha.
welcome back to dog-eat-dog city, keep your trays stowed and your seat back straight-- weather is currently rainy, around 50 degrees fahrenheit...
blood in his mouth, in his nose. it kept on coming. he felt yunxu's canines and incisors make their print on his neck like a mould at the dentist's and he closed his eyes as the teeth needled at the skin, about to puncture through... the tension is unbearable...
hot pain lanced through him, the familiar warm trickle of blood... owlglass growled only after yunxu did, a cramped and profane noise, paroxysmal. his toes splayed out on the mud, he surged to the side, wanting to take yunxu off-balance like a mother holding on to her son's collar, shaking him until his bones reached the optimal texture of cement powder,
goddam true story.
roll here! this is incomprehensible and i apologize. call it experimental i guess????
yunxu takes hold.
holds on.
the teeth in his shoulder don’t budge but they tighten, owlglass is laughing still fucking laughing yunxu snarls louder and louder until it shakes his chest drowns out the noise he is still smiling around the fur and flesh and yunxu’s jaws tighten like a vise –
not enough.
owlglass pulls yunxu off his neck. shakes him like a toy, back and forth and back and forth until his toes no longer touch the ground wet warmth streaks over the join of his neck and shoulder pain spikes through him runs down his spine
he turns back, keeps his footing only barely, owlglass is growling too and the rain and the wind, yunxu snaps strikes out for face or neck or shoulder to dig in and pull and tear
water roars and so does the blood in his ears, so does the bottom of his chest, so does the storm and none of it means anything but a crescendo driving him forward blank-eyed, all teeth and claws and instinct
roll and no worries, i love it!!!
the laughs turned into gasps, staccato and syncopated,
ha ha ha turned into
ha aha aha-- his lungs under a terrible mass,
this must be what divers at the mariana trench feel like...
yunxu was small. his aerodynamics were based off of how a reed swung back and forth caught in a ocean wind. with each swing he could almost hear a laminated
snap. owlglass
was spared a few moments of relative painlessness where he marvels at the fragility of life in a clipped montage: a hole in a face, a fist-shaped crater in wallpaper, furniture upended like wasted partygoers.
pain brought him back, again, both the lactic acid ache in his muscles and the sharper pain where yunxu's teeth snag at his cheek,
where the doctor with a laser pointer would call the maxilla,
and he grit his teeth, the flexed masseter muscles twitching in tandem with his heartbeat. he kicked and screamed and grunted, a bull that has had enough of the spectators and the matador's agonising
estoque. and
did you know that matador just means killer.
owlglass let go of his shoulder to bite down on his face in a poor and bloody facsimile of a kiss.
neck opened down to the flesh – the heavy warmth of open jaws over fur
through fur – then the fangs are gone – the rain and the salt sting in its place streak white heat through like the cut of teeth
pulling
yunxu snaps-snarls and he is not thinking there is something within his teeth and he is biting down – blood blooms hot and sharp across his tongue, salt and rain, someone is laughing and someone is gasping and someone is
screaming –
staring into the deep sea-green of an eye the ocean at high tide the red welling beneath it, a predator under the water growing closer and
there
is the predator, teeth over jaws and muzzle, snaps down and yunxu is not thinking of the pain now, those eyes unblinking in front of him a
challenge and he rears back and up, tears himself free blood and water rolling down
paws lifting up for his shoulders back legs sliding in the mud yunxu comes down mouth open for jaws to grip in his and
bite
more than the teeth tearing at his face, more than the pain, what really grated at him was yunxu's eyes; his stomach rolled over and moaned but he was captivated for what felt like hours compressed into a single moment. yunxu's eyes, they were the exact same shade as a clear blue sky viewed through the brain of someone running on an adderall high thick enough to stand a spoon in.
blood rolled down his neck, bubbled up under his lips. with their matted hair and wild faces, owlglass and yunxu are wasted gods gridlocked in a pointless fistfight.
he lashed out, again, but his teeth closed over nothing but air. the sensation, like missing a step on your way downstairs. vertigo slams his insides up and down but his body remains on earth, in-between yunxu's incisors, his canines, all the way back to his molars.
a muzzled dog, owlglass lurched left and right and in configurations that pushed at the conventions of physics. he refused imprisonment. he refused the master.
yunxu is all blood and sea and owlglass is all blood and sea, painted in rain and they crash like waves against shore like a leviathan reeling from the depths teeth snapping in air –
owlglass is the predator.
yunxu is the predator. spitting blood and water from interlocked teeth, scraped red over seafoam fur – his prey beneath him lurches back and forth and struggles and hindbrain hunter-instinct takes his teeth from his enemy’s muzzle and puts them instead to his throat
paws up hooked over his shoulders snarling the sound scrapes his throat raw, thick with salt and blood and foam – something glitters in the back of gleaming skyblue eyes and drops curling into his chest heaving for breath
he twists –
hind paws scrabbling for purchase jaws grasping hard and fast to pull him to the ground
their amateur footwork was scribbling the mud into heiroglyphics. yunxu had him by the collar and the two were locked together again, a mass of teeth and gum and fingers pushing into eye sockets, lawless and profane. he ate up his oxygen, like fire.
when he hit the floor the air inside his lungs was violently relocated to outside of him. pinned in between yunxu and the crust of the earth, he was a rare species of moth on a corkboard, washed out by incadescent light.
he wheezed. his mental eye withdrew and he watched themselves as a stranger might, a still-life painting of a fight in the rain. clouds had come rolling in and it made the summer morning look like a nuclear winter. like engine exhaust, like god was smoking the biggest cigar in the world, the mist roiled around them.
owlglass looked at his adam's apple, bobbing up and down. anywhere but the eyes.
buaiteoir,
he said, licking the blood off his lips. winner.
yunxu is leaving here if he isn't stopped. thank you so much for the thread it was very fun!! <3
owlglass falls
and
he does not do it gracefully. his breath rushes out of him and yunxu’s own lungs catch in unwelcome sympathy. awareness rushes back like a rising tide, washing the locked fury of his muscles away, washing him clean.
yunxu’s sides heave. the pain is catching up with him now. rain mixes with the blood and caked-in seasalt on his fur; the smell makes him dizzy. owlglass looks anywhere but at him, wheezing, water washing his muzzle red. eyes glassy and bright like the sea.
yunxu loathes this man, his smiling face as he licks the blood off his lips and his words he doesn’t understand. yunxu loathes being here, in the endless pouring rain, speaking a language he doesn’t know, searching for something he might never find. it slips from between his teeth like sand, like the soft fur of owlglass’ throat.
winner, owlglass says.
yunxu laps blood dripping down his muzzle, run clear in the rain.
“谢谢,” he says, in a cut-short clipped monotone trembling with adrenaline. he turns on his heel and away, leaving owlglass on his back in churned mud and grass. back where he started. the shark’s fin trembles and cuts back under the water, and everything is still.
he needs the sea. the ocean will clear his head.