snaggleteeth | Saltburnt Inbox

[but he wasn't wearing these terrible clothes in the library, which are stiff, heavy, terrible to move around in. you even have to unbutton the jacket just to sit down. the stranger has been complaining about it in the privacy of his own head for the past forty five minutes, unwilling to forfeit wanda's weirdly specific joy or his brief reprieve from cancelation for his wisdom about vampire attacks. he doesn't reply.

instead, a glass of water pokes in under the tablecloth by koby's head, the meniscus of water seesawing dangerously without spilling. the next moment, 'qimir' is there. his (unbuttoned) jacket bunching as he makes his initial crouch. he slides in with the same fluid grace from the library. the top of his skull travels an inch shy of the table's underside, needing none of the conventional five senses to measure it.

the stranger finds koby in the gloom just as easily. some of that because of glitter, uneven constellations refracting colored light from koby's face. some of that, the vivid anima of haki. most of it, simply, because koby is hard to miss—bright in the light, pale in the dark. touchable in the diffuse shadows of liminal spaces and stolen minutes between busy dozens of obligations.]

Don't fuckin' tell Wanda, [he mutters, already dropping a shoulder, shrugging out of his jacket.] And drink this. [bossy. he knows, he knows.]

[koby doesn’t get drunk, is the thing – he’s been raised on a diet of rum, like any east blue child would, safer and cleaner than water in most cases, milk too expensive by far to waste on orphans. he can even handle the harder white liquor that comes in shots at nice restaurants – within reason. but he’d also grown up with very, very little sugar in his diet, an impractical flavor at sea, none of the necessity of citrus nor the longevity of salt.

so mixing booze with the sugary, pink-puckery punch at buffy’s prom/birthday had resulted in a drink that went down easy, but hit koby with the force of a brick to the head. a giggly, pink-cheeked, immediate-scooting-over-and-snuggling-up-to-qimir brick.]

No. [whispered, to the water, even as koby takes it, sips it, reflexively bratty, instinctively obedient. he hiccups mid-sip, makes a face at qimir like it’s his fault, then reaches out to tug at the still-on sleeve, clumsily trying to assist with the jacket removal.] Why’re you taking your clothes off. [another gulp of water.] Toldja you’d fit.

I don't like these clothes, [feels accurate enough, before the stranger amends,] for me, [because koby is wearing a jacket, too. also black. narrower in cut, youthful flair of modernity to it. no shirt, bold choice. the stranger finds he cannot remember whether koby was wearing a shirt earlier. he had been too far away. he would have remembered the faded seams of scar tissue winking up at him like a dirty punchline.

his arm closes around koby because that is how the human body arranges itself in gravity, when another happens to have flung itself over with dangerous abandon. with koby's help (or koby's interference), the jacket is evicted to just one wrist. the stranger manages to jiggle the rest of it off, his other elbow making an imperfect, geometric cradle under the pink fluff of koby's hair, around his shoulders. maybe if he were more drunk, he wouldn't mind formalwear, either.] Hey. Hey, hey.

You did a good job tonight. [his palm sweeps up koby's face in easy confidence, no caution spared to dodging his pupil's eyes because the stranger does not need sight to see. raking the pink fall of hair out of his eyes, pinning out to the crown of his head under the crook of his pinkie. removing the jacket was timely. koby emits heat like molten marzipan squirming in the pan.] Ani and Buffy are having fun, considering.

Ohhhhhhh. [long, drawn out, accompanied by a nod that bumps koby’s chin into qimir’s shoulder, prompting him to wiggle under the arm that curls relaxed, like a settling cat, heavy and warm and placid. koby’s still small, he’ll always be smaller, a fact carved into the make-up of his body, but he’s honed the planes of his chest, his stomach, his waist as tense and carved as possible, swimmer-toned, lean and ropy, the scars settled in the natural crease of pectoral like they belong there.

the compliment has him preen a little, bumping up into the big hand through his hair, eyes half-lidded, glasses down on the tip of his nose again, slipped there once more through the heat and the chaos of the night. it’s good chaos, though, bubbly and bright like the punch, the emotions of people who’ve chosen to have a good time, and maybe that’s part of koby’s giddy state, contact high from happiness.

but his eyes close all the way once qimir’s hand settles, raking his hair back, exposing another scar, the x-shaped one on koby’s forehead, usually hidden by the overgrown flop of pink.] Had to fix it. [blunt, unfiltered, not that koby usually leans cagey, but it’s without tiptoeing, this time.] S’my fault. [and he leans into qimir’s hand, rests more of his weight there, and the make-up and glitter had hidden a lot, but this close it’s easy to see the dark shadows under his eyes, the weariness in the way his shoulders droop.] Had to make it better.

I used to fix things. [the stranger is never tired of arguing, but he knows it's—unproductive, past a point. beyond enough repetitions. with specific superheroes. every strategy involves time and place, and the underside of a prom table is, maybe, not the place to haggle over profit shares of moral culpability.] People. Machines. Birds. It's a good feeling.

[balanced in his hand, koby's head feels fragile. a globe with unexplored countries colored in it, continents scarred in his forehead, private vistas in his head. he does, admittedly, consider pressing his thumb on the boy's windpipe and sucking the staggered breath suggestively out of his mouth, but that's—just routine neural pathways, really. the stranger does not choke koby at prom. that would be weird, even for him.]

[but it won't hurt anybody, to draw a finger down the line of koby's jugular, to measure koby's weight fluctuations by the depth of koby's collarbones, the heel of his hand on them. he pets koby's hair, as if he were a flightless seabird from home, tamed by the instinct to camouflage itself as stone. for once, it's not didactic.] Meant I had control.

Birds. [it’s bemused, almost a snort, the mental image sending a cascade of memories that bleed out like water through loose-cupped hands – birds on wing, birds on waves, birds catching fish, birds leaping up in a riot of snowy feathers when a gaggle of gangly girls runs through them, varying ages, toddler to teen, all in matching uniforms, chasing and hollering on a beach on a sunny day, careless and laughing with the reckless freedom of childhood. and – plaid skirts above bony knees, long, long pink hair in pigtails, shoulders scrunched up and forward to concave the shape of a budding chest, one hangs behind, pushes up purple-rimmed glasses and watches the others play.

the thought passes, but koby is quieter in the wake of it, not even twitching when qimir’s finger grazes down over another scar – a constellation, forehead to throat to chest, skipping over the labor-scars on koby’s knuckles, the whip-scars on his back, the smaller marks of a life hard-won. the one around his throat sits like a collar, like a noose, on bad days, bisects windpipe and jugular both, once-upon-a-time snapped each one. he thinks about birds, about boats, about water-swollen decks covered in blood. about mopping them clean, for 730 days and counting.]

I mended the sails. [faraway, tipping his head towards the petpetpetting of qimir’s hand.] And – went up the mast to see if the rigging had any weak spots. I fixed them, up there. [koby’s eyes flick up, towards the underside of the table, thinking about the stomach-cramping fear, being so high up, no spotter, no harness, nothing to keep him from falling right out of the crow’s nest and splattering on the deck, or plunging into the sea.] I fixed a lot of things. [a thoughtful beat.] I never felt in control, though.

[a logical fallacy: why, then, does he keep trying?]

Then you were more honest with yourself than most people are.

[it's always a fallacy. illusion. control is a struggle in futility that causes more pain. this truth was somewhere in the way the sith think. admittedly, the jedi, too. he was becoming neither.] Just not ready to accept—something. Maybe for the better. [he doesn't have to be in koby's head, needs not break his promise, to guess that somewhere in the sog of koby's seafaring history, there was a dress, many humiliations, a slow-moving fear of growing into wide hips and perhaps even the wrong name. the stranger doesn't make oaths often; he's trafficked in the nightmares of many.]

Do you ask for hormones here? [absent-minded question, while his nose is going around the peach-fuzzed arc of koby's ear, in the side of his neck, notching between the splay of his own fingers to meet the scar collaring the neck. he doesn't like the idea of getting on of those. kindly ignore the fact this tactile analysis means he's nuzzling koby's neck, exposed by the loll of the head into his other palm. the sith do not need eyes to see, or skin to touch, breath to smell the salty sweat secretly stashing glitter down here. but a sith will use them anyway, pillowing koby's head on one shoulder, his voice diminishing into the mumble in the crook of koby's shoulder.]

I know that's not what you're sad about. Just asking.

[wrong name, similar syllables stinging incorrect in a way that had him tight-breathing and fidgety since his earliest, babiest days – yes, wrong name, but wrong life too, the responsibility of the younger girls koby’s to carry since he was old enough to lift the babies onto his hip, to braid their hair and dry their tears and tell them stories. and he didn’t know in the moment why, didn’t start to understand until his teenage years, when his peers began disappearing one by one – married off, married off, working as a maid, working as a barmaid, the dress and the smile and the swallowed-back horror of being trapped, trapped by babies and servitude, bound in marriage or service to a man who’d tell koby what to do, where to go, what to say, forever.

(ironic, perhaps, that after escaping, he’d immediately found another way to swear himself – maybe it was in his blood, in his bones, as inescapable as his body, scarred and altered as he’s made it).]

– oh. [the question is an interesting one, but the sound is mostly because of qimir nuzzling his ear, his neck, where the little curliques of pink at his nape curl with moisture, heat.] I – no. I didn’t – I thought I was the only one like me, until I got here. [a singular cosmic mistake, put together incorrectly, sent out into the world anyway.

then, a little huff:] And at first I was – nervous? We can’t even eat or drink regularly here, I didn’t know if…the house would give me something that would hurt me. [it’d be just his luck, tiptoeing to the impossible possibility and coming away burned, hurt.] And then we didn’t have a doctor who could help for a long, long time.

[a beat.] I’ve thought about it. Wondered. [he’s worked tirelessly, sit-ups and push-ups and weights and running, honed himself into a bulkier, stronger version of the boy he’d been when he arrived.] There’s a doctor now, but he’s – hmmn. [a bit of a face – the man’s screen name is “piss sommelier” after all.]

[ah yes. the piss sommelier. older man. nice body to hold, struggling and saying stupid shit, against a wall. not necessarily someone you'd want sticking you with hormones. works at the pink slip, the stranger understands. he nods very reasonably, which has the pleasant secondary effect of wallowing his face in the salted vanilla dip of koby's throat.]

Tell Ani you're doing it. She'll make sure he gives the right dose. [he stops—whatever, rooting for truffles, snorting glitter, performing a coarse, high-level olfactory analysis of koby's hormone balance through the leavings in his pores down there. sniffs loudly of the air, running a thumb down the line of his own nose. squinting in the dark. he has to be careful, especially without telepathy to cheat. such matters were different in his galaxy. inter-world commerce robust, exchange of cultures and medicine so fluid. once upon a time, he'd called a dead girl it because he knew it was violence, but it's different, if gender stands between you and becoming.

unthinkable here. he does not bury his face in koby's hair, so much as he sifts through it with the tip of his nose. as if the shape of his pink scalp might intimate thoughts in absence of psychic permission. a one-armed squeeze takes stock of the torso held hostage.] You putting on muscle because you're a boy, or for fighting?

[koby makes a small, throaty sound at the nuzzling, the shameless press of qimir’s nose, mouth, everything into the pooling sugary-glitter in the hollow of a collarbone, the place where koby swallows and hollows out, vulnerable, tender.]

Oh! [immediately fond, a tangible warmth, anianiani, and koby goes calmer, less stiffly anxious, because he’s right, because ani will make it safe, make koby safe, she does that without even trying. and he’s messy-drunk snuggly, squirming his overheated, sparkly body up against qimir, cheek warm and plush against his shoulder, teeth in his full lower lip.] Okay. I’ll ask Ani.

[the arm around koby squeezes, and he turns, muffles a squeak by mouthing at qimir’s shoulder, dress shirt smearing with pink and purple glitter, on an open-mouthed laugh as cotton-candy-fluffy hair goes frizzy with contact, heat.] Bo-oth? Both. [a nod, more smeared make-up, then the energy in the small under-table space goes focused, sharpened like the adjustment of lenses. something in koby shifts, ripples with powerpowerpower, and when he holds up his hand, painted nails, pale skin, there’s a ripple of something like dark, metallic scales along his wrist.]

And for this. [matter-of-fact.]

Thought you were a seal. Not a fish. [this, said from the nest of koby's hair. the scales on that wrist, the flex of unfamiliar new power, regarded from around the hazy, sunset-colored horizon of koby's scalp. it's too dark to get a proper look, but the same is true now as it was ten minutes and a jacket removal ago: the stranger does not need his eyes to see the overlapping, chitinous segmentation traveling up koby's radius and ulna.

nor does he need sight to guide his fingers down to touch. fingertips examining the outline of individual scales, lightly, lightly, as if he were trying to feel the too-faint shape of unfamiliar lace through saber calluses. as if these external bones, this strange armor, might snag or scuff just like the weft of gossamer-thin silk. 'qimir' is always intrigued by power. most of all, when it sprawls in its container and breathes and and grows across terrain, alive and curiously unconfined to a narrow functional domain—so rare, as pearl observed—like his connection to the force.]

Who's teaching you those parts?

[real curiosity. he's greedy about that. about everything. can't remember the last time a selfless thought beset his head. there are certainly none to be found in the hazelnut half-sweetness with smell of koby's sweating hair, and then, an inch lower, the tactile velvet backing the shell of koby's left ear. koby will ask ani. ani will take care of it. 'qimir' manages, somehow, to tell himself this triumph—and secondhand body glitter—are self-serving, too.]

I am. [a little huffy, holding his hand up so qimir can touch, the “scales” covering most of koby’s wrist, lower arm, like a partial gauntlet, covering the calluses of his knuckles with something that feels iron-clad, like metal. the concentration of power to maintain it doesn’t last long, not when koby’s tipsy and giddy and silly, not when focus
ing his energy isn’t priority number one. just long enough for qimir to touch.] Armament haki.

[a sudden, rushing exhale, and the focus slips, turns off like water from a tank, the armament dissipating and vanishing with nary a trace left behind. even those handful of moments were exhausting, draining, and koby’s head flops heavily onto qimir’s broad shoulder, like a puppet with strings cut.]

Shanks. [even drained, the word is weighty with something warm, something adoring, a smile flickering over koby’s sparkly, sleepy face.] He was teaching me even before we were – together, anything. [there’s another scar, paler, shallower, across one palm, and koby traces it reflexively when he speaks.] He’s better at haki than anyone I know of. Anyone alive, maybe. He makes my power look like – a firefly.

[a pleased little purring sound, both at qimir’s nuzzle to the back of his ear and the topic at hand, perhaps, preening with pride at even the slightest mention of shanks’s abilities – koby’s not needed to proclaim them, but the concept of not boasting about someone he loves is impossible.] He’s wonderful.

[have you seen your power? the stranger doesn't ask out loud. he remembers a girl in a galaxy far, far away, bringing with her an unspeakable miasm of force, what her mother had called the thread. who thought herself abandoned by her strength because she had 'abandoned' it first, too weak to close her fingers around jedi scruples and keep them locked. like a fish in water. a seed in soil. it's hard to perceive the medium of your being.

but then, he's never met shanks. maybe there are infinite colossi, their power swollen up inside this house, which ought to be groaning at the seams. 'wonderful.' how many semesters did that take?] You're infinitely capable of wonder.

[serious tone of voice. not necessarily making fun. he can feel koby making moist patches in his shirt, but there's no more drinking water to boss him around with. slow cadent breathing is easy in the throbbing, subwoofer dark. easy enough that he isn't worried about blocking the little wind of koby's drowsy inhale or exhale when his finger bridges the scar across the small bones of koby's throat—again. here again, here again, this human irregularity of tissue that he had not, in fact, 'cheated' to see with his eyes that aren't eyes.

the question is a reverberation of sternum, more than words aloud.] How wonderful does your teacher have to be before you ask to kiss him? [this time, yes. wry.]

Oh. [it’s a soft sound, more the shape of koby’s mouth against qimir’s shoulder than anything audible, a thoughtful comma in the sleepy, tipsy litany of thoughts filtering through one cotton-candy-colored head. he huffs out a laugh, drained in the places where he’s used to having power, made softer, vulnerable. his throat swallows, works against the tip of qimir’s finger, something oddly calm in him, even having the scar touched.

koby instinctively arches back, bares his throat, eyes half-closed as he considers this.] Maybe. Someday. I’m not – like Luffy or any of the people in this house with powers. I’m just a regular person that had something wake up inside me and I don’t really know how it works. I have to work harder. Ten times harder.

[the question gets a little laugh, koby straightening up, eyes warm and bright in the dark.] It took nine months, for Shanks. And twice that until we talked about it. [a shrug, reaching out blindly (but not, feeling the pulse of warmth, of heat, here here here that means qimir) and setting his callused palm on a knee, a thigh, somewhere close, somewhere to say i’m here too.] But that’s – he’s not just a teacher. He never has been.

[then, tilting his head, birdlike, eyes bright and mouth smeared pink:] Why? Do you want to kiss me?

'Just' a teacher, [is very, very dry in the stranger's voice, enough to suck the stickiness off koby's brow for a half-second before the cups of his pores refill. this is disagreement, but without real argument. receives no further substantiation.

one cannot wake up halfway across the multiverse and expect one's new neighbors to get it, that master and pupil can transcend the love between siblings, for parents, for anyone you take to your bed. 'qimir' should be lonely, or something. but it's hard to be that with koby breathing a pink cocktail frowst into his face. music still thumbing in his eardrums, balloons bouncing dreamily in the periphery. the corsage on his wrist, promising wanda will, at least, want to know later if he had fun. loneliness is easy to medicate at saltburnt mansion.]

Nine months is a whole baby.

[irreverence is an easy fallback for he who has a decapitation habit. he ducks. blows a brief raspberry on the hollow of koby's temple, sending up pink hair into a spray.] Everyone wants to kiss you. You didn't know?

Oh, you – know what I mean. [huffed, expressed in a rock of koby’s head towards qimir’s shoulder, an exasperated weight before he pushes himself away, suddenly, swaying. he hiccups, frowns, then rolls to hands and knees, surprisingly nimble for tipsy.

there’s a ghost of a tickle where qimir had messed up his hair, a pesky echo that crawls down the back of koby’s neck, curls up in his collarbone, purrs like a cat and makes him blush. he crawls, pivots, moves around so he’s facing qimir beneath the table. and the tablecloths aren’t sheer, but they’re light enough that the flickering neon lights up koby’s face and he’s smiling and smiling.]

I didn’t ask about everyone. [intent, both those big warm eyes and the nudge of koby’s sunset-toned presence, his energy, his power, making itself known like an affectionate cat.] I asked if you did.

[well, now the giant pink aura's stepping in, and he doesn't have to be master to acolyte in this particular binary to appreciate the scope of insistence breathing into the space under here. one more whiff of power and the table will go floating and bouncing with buffy's birthday balloons.]

I do. I'm everyone.

[anyone. no one. human. it amounts to the same, even when you're seventeen identities loosely stacked into one. indeed, he had known what koby meant. koby would've known what he meant, if he ever explained anything about himself, but that wouldn't be his inclination. he likes to believe koby is padawan to someone; that such a thing is possible, even at saltburnt. like calling to like. haki to haki. someone to shape him, the way the stranger was once made, unmade, made again.]

Going to sit there and act like you didn't know? [he's smiling too, but it's faint, like the edge of a knife half-buried in frosted sugar. he's still leaning back on a hand, manages to look casual. a telekinetic flick of his other one settles koby's hair back, from where it got skewed, between gluttonous courses of raspberries and sniffs.]

No. [soft, quiet, koby sitting back on his heels with his head at a tilt, hazy eyes and long, long lashes. there are freckles beneath the blush, little scars that match the ones on his knuckles -- the obvious x-marks-the-spot on his forehead aside, the nicks and bites and too many fists to the chin, too many backhands with a ring-studded hand. all koby's sweet-strawberry-sugar skin's been touched, marked, wounded.

and yet: he kneels here. he looks at qimir with the wonder of someone watching a sunset for the first time. more reasons than many to recoil, withdraw, but koby's up on his knees, nosing forward, nearly nose-to-nose.]

You should've said something. [stern, wrinkles in that freckled nose, mouth pulled into a pout.] Or -- done it. [a flick of his eyes down, then up, tongue dragging over his lower lip.] You should do it now.

I can't. [despite all evidence to the contrary, the stranger says this with uncharacteristic rue that suggests he believes what he's saying. that's because it's true. he tilts his head, hair falling into his eyes, failing utterly to disrupt the stability of his stare. you could turn a planet for a billion years around that unmoving axis.

he smiles at koby with something akin to patience. to affection. the curiosity of a man who's died a hundred times in the bodies of other people and understood all the tender birthday parties and kitschy ritual dances and glittery first kisses he murdered in the process. killing children goes much faster than making them. but teaching them is something else altogether.

he comes bearing no haki. only an empty hand and an unguarded mouth.]

I'm supposed to teach you how to know and love your buried emotions. Not going to do your homework for you.

[at can’t, koby’s eyebrows jerk towards each other, a scowl wrapped in a pout on his face, close enough that the scrunch in his nose is evident even before his freckles get involved.] That’s ridiculous.

[firm, prompt, a jut forward of his chin, open suit jacket gaping around his scarred, glittery chest, hair tumbling loose from the careful gel to fall in his face. koby blinks slow, sooty lashes and lower lip still pouting.] You said “buried”. It’s not. Not for me. I don’t – want to bury this part.

[the ethical impacts are aside – koby’s a little smitten with anyone who looks at him and sees someone to teach, someone to lavish attention and knowledge on, and that’s more than enough of a basis for him to rock forward slow, measured. qimir doesn’t move (koby knew he wouldn’t), and it’s easy to kiss him, easy to lean up under the shag of dark hair and press their mouths together. koby always kisses like it’s the first time, like he’s never touched another living soul, sweetness and hunger, desperation and tenderness all at once.]

[sometimes, the stranger issues a challenge and it is a visible taunt. shit-eating grin or just unutterably smug, a stinging gauntlet delivered to the face, some stupid comment. he did make a stupid comment just now. but his face was placid, equally dead to self-pity or mockery, patient the way the sea is patient, generous the way the sea gives&medash;because it's water. wants as simple as physics. taking the shape of his container and

koby's mouth meets his mouth, and for a moment, he accommodates. his half of the kiss wrapped around koby's bottom lip like the wet cohesion of eddy to glass. except, of course, he's not the sea. he's a man, as earlier specified, as fallible and error-prone as any, and there comes resistance that's not resistance at all. the bulk of an arm winding around koby's boyish waist, yoking him tight—but for the gentle thumb on the dimple on the right of the small of koby's back. the initial, backward buoy of 'qimir's head rocks forward, reversing momentum into a ravening crush, bending his nose on koby's cheek.

i don't want to bury this part. sure. people fail in the actualization of their desires all the time.

light, in sufficient quantity, will kill anything. but 'qimir' does not say this because some wisdom comes in different tongue, like the one delving into koby's mouth, his jaws opening on the thick cords of muscle like some machine, drawbridge, hungry trap for boys that don't know how to read the sign that says beware.]

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cw dysmorphia, injuries

cw: dysphoria, transphobia continues

cw systemic transphobia, dysphoria

same cws continued probably

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