"Do you dance? Do you wanna?"
“Oh.”
Vash flushes, because ‘oh’ is not an answer, and neither is the brief stutter that takes all hope of salvaging his dignity and the saucy response he had originally intended with it. He salvages a few precious brain cells to manage an almost convincingly coy, "How could I say no?"
The dinged-up little radio suffusing the crackle of campfire with the openings of an old Earth ballad beckons him along with the dancing shadows, and Vash smiles as he rises to his feet to meet Wolfwood halfway in the arched layers of stone forming the alcove around their camp. A complement of open strings played in the e major scale, cheerful and pleasant to the snapping of crisped embers. The song is familiar, and Vash can't quite put his finger on why it sounds so strange even as he approaches, taking Wolfwood's right hand into his left and rests his right gently over the back of his partner's shirt.
'...And nothing else matters, never opened myself this way…'
With a slight bend to his knees, they move through concentric circles in time to the music. Step forward, step back, Vash leads first, sweeping and guiding with the point of his boots as they trace patterns in the figure of climbing grape vines into the packed dirt.
‘Life is ours, we live it our way…all these words I don’t just say…’
Halfway through, when they lean away and into a slow turn, Vash encourages Nicholas to direct them out with a back step and pull back in for a near-embrace.
‘So close, no matter how far…It couldn’t be much more from the heart…’
Vash starts laughing at some point, he isn’t sure when. His heart and mind are too busy elsewhere to keep track of anything other than the rhythm of dance and song and how Nicholas grins at him in his wolfy way every time they spin towards firelight.
As he nestles his chin against Wolfwood’s left shoulder and the last few closing bars of the song drift into the desert, Vash kneads into the fabric of Nicholas’s opposite shoulder with his right hand. Smiling and dopey with unfettered affection, he murmurs, “It’s been a while since I’ve danced. Hopefully you couldn’t tell.”
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"But I finished [Near and Mello] together as a set, and although they aren’t particularly laid out as such, I still feel a bit like they’re twins." —Obata Takeshi
whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same:
i. low sky, mahmoud darwish. ii. the world is a sphere of ice and our hands are made of fire, ritika jyala. iii. kadan, 2008. iv. the dreamers, gilbert adair. v. @nathanielorion vi. nagiko, 2016. vii. elektra, sophokles (tr. anne carson). viii. wishbone, richard siken. ix. inbred, ethel cain. x. the boy who, tirol. xi. monster portraits, del samatar and sofia samatar. xii. in the field, @nathanielorion xiii. death note, "use" ch77. xiv. gut symmetries, jeanette winterson. xv. mystic union; fire and wine: poems, john gould fletcher. xvi. @inukai_0055, twitter. xvii. the carnivorous lamb, agustín gómez-arcos. xviii. my sister, the serial killer, oyinkan braithwaite. xix. the beatrice letters, lemony snicket (text); a quiet visitor, holly warburton (art); @unpardonablesins (edit). xx. ada, vladimir nabokov. xxi. this is how you lose the time war, amal el-mohtar. xxii. the borgias, s3e10, showtime. xxiii. @antaarf xxiv. @vilicity xxv. @boymiffy
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The Consecrated Line
Neil's favorite line from Good Omens is the invisible and unbreakable one that joins Crowley and Aziraphale.
There is a line that binds me to you
invisible and unbreakable
In days our paths lead you out of my reach
I know it is present anchored in the depths of my heart
drawing us always together
On the night we stood in the
consecrated rubble of strife
so gently did you pluck that line
as our hands brushed for too brief a moment
I could not quiet the vibrations which began
resonating through me
expanding infinitely like those of the universe itself
They hum through my mind like celestial harmonies
building to a crescendo in the recitation of
a sacred memory from before the beginning
My soul thrums resolutely as it struggles against
both the natural and the divine to join with yours
It knows the way
It follows the line
Though unseen as the breeze I can feel it
as real as I feel the echo of your lips pressed to mine
For all its straining and knotting
as we dance so carefully around one another
I harbor us to fear for I know our line is indestructible
Impervious to both time and the fickle tides of fate
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