genessia | Since the Dawn of Time

Entry tags:

Since the Dawn of Time

Who: Szel and Tannusen
What: Szel's finally hauled himself out of his tower of perpetual drunk misery to inflict his bad mood on someone else.
When: Nowish? Late evening day after Christmas.
Where: Velvet Lust in Genessia City
Warnings: Drunk bitching, maybe mentions of past injury, who knows.

Well.

Here he was.

Merry Goddamn Christmas.

He'd spent the entire eve and holiday itself locked up inside his fortress in Everglade, refusing to leave... except on voting day. No point in changing up leadership, both of them sucked and at least one of them he was familiar with, suck wise.

Best to keep the suck in a predictable pattern, he was in no hurry to mix up the suckiness.

He'd voted, obviously hungover, the one benefit of being eyeless in that he wouldn't have to worry about any excess light giving him a headache.

No, his hearing took over for that, jamming in his vote before vanishing off into the ether, headed for one place and one place only.

For a few weeks, he'd been tended to and pampered by the usual, but it was one thing to get a ton of compliments and doting words from a pack of mindless servants. It was entirely another to get them from someone who wasn't being coerced into it.

Oh Midge was honest enough of course, but Midge was also, technically, just another part of him.

Poor Tannusen. One moment he might find himself comfortably alone in his spot at the club.... and the next his tea cup was being pushed away slowly by a gold tipped cane, right out of arms reach.

"That's enough of that."

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Szel took a deep breath as they left, the sensation of invisible, sooty feathers brushing past Tannusen's face for a moment.

"I imagine that would annoy a few of them, yes." God, though. That was so much better. Cool air, quiet night, pleasantly dark save for street lights.

"I can name a dozen right now who'd be cross at having to monitor several planes at once in order to just watch one place."

Poor Raguel.

Tannusen chuckled softly at that, taking a sip of his tea as they walked. "The ones they even could. Your kind can't see the Dreaming, can you?"

As alien a plane as wherever Hastur had come from, but able to drape over reality in places like the thinnest of veils.

"Contact with my soul wouldn't get you so damn high if it weren't so alien, I bet."

"Not angels no. I imagine they'd be too high up for that." Spiritually speaking. Not able to see it, and surely wouldn't survive long entirely mired in it. A bit like a surface creature attempting to walk on the ocean floor.

Or in space.

"I can only see it if you enchant me." And if Midge was there, of course.

"You're really proud of that, aren't you?"

"Of course! Why wouldn't I be? You're made of drugs," Tannusen laughed at that, "getting you high is an accomplishment."

TAKE THE SEMI-COMPLIMENT, SZEL.

"And anyway, the rest of your kind are so banal, Enchantment doesn't last near as long for them. It didn't for Cam, anyway."

"... I'll be flattered I guess." Jerk.

"I don't know what would go first, honestly, if one of them were completely submerged in the world of the fae where you're from. Either they'd crack and shatter or they'd melt the entire world around them."

"Considering the Dreaming is nothing if not fluid while they are... not," Tannusen shook his head slightly, "Well, the Dreaming would try to eject them first. That's what it would have done if we'd taken Takeda in with us when we went after Karma's old Duke. If it couldn't kick them out, it would adapt somehow. Probably similarly to living meat adapting to a piece of shrapnel."

Isolate it, toughen up around it. Ball it up in scar tissue.

"I don't think one of them could get very far into it, at least. It would keep them out at the edges if it couldn't remove them entirely. Reality breaks more and more the further in you get."

"At least it can defend itself, I suppose. Better than earth or our fae can." After all, the fae of earth were so intwined with heaven and hell themselves, whether they liked it or not, that there was no closing off either from their home.

Not when their leaders still carried with them heaven's touch and hell's influence.

"They just have to put up with it when someone pops in from upstairs or the basement."

"Well, it has to, with banality being as it is," Tannusen pointed out, "even I can't go in really deep; I'm too banal to get far. Ever since the silver city slammed its gates shut against banality's influence back in the industrial era, all of us locked out have been hiding out in human bodies to survive and it hasn't... not had a long-term effect."

Not to mention Tannusen now had threads of Szelsoul holding his own together. Sooo there was that.

"Too banal for the deep Dreaming; too alien for earth. That's my kind's status, these days."

"I keep forgetting how delicate your kind is." It wasn't stated as an insult. Just honestly a bit of wonderment.

"Ours just adapted. We have fairies who are now based solely around technology." But then, look at where they all came from.

"Quite the short end you ended up drawing."

"Some of my kind think technology is inherently banal, but I don't. What matters is how it's used. Does it inspire, or does it numb? That's what's important."

Jethro, for example; some Fae thought machinery was banal by nature. But what did motorcycles do if not inspire dreams?

"The Scathach are more technologically based than the rest of us, unsurprisingly since they stayed behind on Earth during that first big wave of banality. They've been dealing with it longer, and have adapted better. But then you have the Nockers, for example, whose entire purpose as a kith is to build things, and many have begun incorporating things from the mortal world. Jethro's chimerical form is Nocker-built."

"So what would you consider banal? Most humans would think Camael and Azrael are fairly... interesting people."

Even Azrael, with his dry, soft monotone ended up inspiring something in people.

Usually discomfort, but hey, few mortals could say the Angel of Death was boring.

"You call those two banal."

"They're... scripted. It's hard to put a finger on it, but 'interesting' has little to do with it. Banality is... doubt, rationality, cynicism, disillusionment, realism... a general unwillingness to embrace the fantastic. Everything outside of the Dreaming has some banality to it, of course. Even me. That horrible rigid ticking your kind have going on in the background, that's pretty damn banal."

"Ah, you can hear the gears." It made sense, honestly. All of this. Of course Tannusen would find Azrael and Camael somewhat uncomfortable. All beings of heaven were lawful. Beings of rigid order, of rationality.

Predictability and patterns to the end.

Even Szel still followed it.

"Azrael refers to it as the pulse of the universe. Angels and demons are so entwined with it, their very beings echo with the sound of the universe, living."

"Every time we fool around, I hear it for a while after."

Not enough to dissuade him from fooling around more, of course, but still... yeah, he heard it.

"If I had to hear it all the time, I think I'd go even madder. Ironically enough."

"You get used to it." Yeah, he heard it all the time, it was a part of him, duh.

"It's like your own heartbeat. Just gets drowned out after a while. I mean I don't think any humans stand around listening to their hearts all the time."

"I can't hear my heartbeat unless I try," Tannusen chuckled, "and that's only because my senses are sharper than this body lets on. Still, heartbeats vary. They change in tempo, they may even skip a beat once in a while."

"I'm going to admit I don't know very much about hearts except their utility." He after all, didn't have one of those.

"Still, I've never heard a single angel complain about their sounds. Not even Azazel, and he tends to bitch about everything left over from heaven on him."

Well, cliche as it maybe was, Tannusen reached for the arm hooked into his own and took Szel's wrist, guiding his hand up to the tiger's chest. Right over the breastbone, and the scarring over it. Beneath both those layers, and the layers of his suit, was that organic beating heart.

"Right? Different."

Still walking, still had his tea... somewhere. Shush.

He stiffened for a moment. Apparently, this was different than just grabbing Tannusen and dragging him around, or climbing into his lap or leaning on him.

Real intimacy was... gestures like that.

The moment passed, and the sound of a thousand feathers all fluffing and shifting in irritation sounded behind Tannusen's head.

"Yes, yes okay yes, different, I get it, thank you."

Uh oh, Tannusen didn't let go, but he did pause the walking to eye Szel. Hand still held to heart; it wasn't like Szel couldn't get away if he really needed to. "Are you... flustered? By this?"

UH OH.

"That's stupid and you're stupid for asking."

"You're totally flustered!" Tannusen stop. Tannusen no. Tannusen don't laugh--

Too late, he was laughing.

"That's adorable."

"Don't you fucking laugh. I'm not flustered- Give me my hand back you asshole."

And with that he yanked it away, pitch black wings shimmering into existence as they pulled up tightly against him, fluffing and shedding.

"Okay, okay, sorry," Tannusen was still laughing as he said it, of course, "my mistake."

And he offered his arm back up, grinning.

"I'm not even bothered, I was surprised. That's it. That's all that was, I was surprised you would do it, you usually don't get that kind of feely touchy unless something is wrong or we're fucking. That's not something you do in the street.

Like an animal."

That earned another laugh from the pooka, who just resumed walking whether Szel took his offered arm or not. "Well, I am an animal."

Though Szel was right that the tiger usually kept to better decorum about it.

(After all, he often got flustered whenever Cassian held his hand!)

He did, at length, take the offered arm, grumbling. All the while, Midge had not moved an inch, not even to warn Tannusen away when the fallen seraph began to become flustered.

Apparently, the bug really was no longer too bothered by the pooka.

"Yes, but you're a civilized animal."

Ish.

"I wasn't aware holding a friend's hand to your heart was uncivilized," Tannusen teased, amused, "especially when you're discussing heartbeats."

CHECK.

"Look, it's just logical progression. Someone touches someone's chest, the conversation moves to intimacy and the next thing you know we're both talking about our feelings and crying.

I came out here to do neither of those."

"Oh, I think we've both done plenty of that recently, I'm not trying to spark an encore," Tannusen took a drink of his tea as they walked, "but I'd think in private is where that's more of a danger with me than in public."

Most people who'd met Tannusen probably couldn't fathom him doing either of those things; his public face was pretty solid.

"I have witnessed you crying too many times to think that crying isn't going to happen at all.

You'd just wait until you got home and then cry on Cassian.

Where am I supposed to cry?"

A soft cough from the cat wrapped around his shoulders.

"... That I don't already?"

"Do you really want an answer to that, or is that rhetorical?" Tannusen asked, still amused.

"You're an ass."

An ass who's arm he was still holding to, but an ass nevertheless.

Tannusen's only response was to smile into his tea as he took another drink, walking along.

After a moment of thought, "Does this mean we're going to hang out more without having to knock boots? Not that I mind the usual too, of course."

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Since the Dawn of Time

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