for this story: the disabled main character faces a lot of thoughtless flack from his able-bodied friend, and they argue extensively.

this story is about Aesaelion, the modern heir to the Tathviel family curse, born from the false god Allegory. Aesaelion is on a lengthy journey to break the curse, and at this time, he has returned home to recover from a nasty revelation.

----

“Hey, Aes! I heard you were back in town.. Some good news, I’m hoping? But listen – Glum told me you seemed really – hahah, glum, actually, when she saw you from her window – and she sent me over with some of those little dudes you like – you know, the ones that look like priest hats or something with the goo inside? The – Rali, reli-- that doesn’t matter. I have pastry, things, and they’ve got your name all over them, so… so even if you don’t feel up to company, you could at least open up your door for those, ‘cuz I mean, there’s no point in wasting perfectly g--”

Aesaelion pulled his front door open with a harsh wrench of the knob, which stuttered and jerked from his hand when it ran right into the chain lock. He could see a long sliver of his friend, same leather jacket, same wispy hair and sleepless eyes – and more freckles. “Sully,” he said, voice dull and buzzy from waking up with phlegm-laden lungs. “I’m really not in the mood.” As he had tried to communicate prior to now by ignoring the previous fifteen minutes of knocking. By this point it could be called less ‘missing the hint,’ and more ‘active malfeasance.’


“That’s too bad, buddy! Because look at these lovely, glossy, absolutely delicious--” Sully held the open box up right into Aesaelion’s face, tilting it dangerously to squish in through the gap in the door, little pastry nuns sliding into each other – “Super – super cream filled, awesome, sugary, uhh-- guys! And they’re supposed to look like monks or something, right? And,” unbeknownst to Aesaelion, Sully had his foot in the door, a knobby hand holding onto the chain lock, “And, and, AND,” before you knew it, the chain lock was undone and Sully was all the way in his entry hall, crowding him backwards, hooking the door closed behind him with his shoe.

“Sully--- Sully-- dammit, you dick!”

Sully, with wild eyes and a toothsome grin that sang can’t believe I actually pulled that off leaned his back fully against the door, holding his box of pastries up like a waiter waiting to deliver.

“Listen, you can sulk at home all you need, Aes, but we’re not letting you do it without sugar. And, ideally, without talking to someone. You’ve been gone for four years, been five months since the last letter, and buddy, that means you are not creeping home under cover of night then sitting around alone about it.”

“So,” Sully said, plucking a nun out from among its cohort, “You can talk to me, your bestie-best-best friend, or to Glum, your best-bestie friend, or maybe to Ben or Ellie or whoever I don’t care it doesn’t matter that it be me, but. Like. If it is me, you know I’ll be fine just sitting around in your tiny kitchen playing crosswords for a million years until you’re ready. But you are gonna--”

A world-endingly-weary sigh was Aesaelion’s answer, and in the ensuing silence, Sully held the lone nun out to him. He took it.

Dark, matte icing. Generous smudged ruffles of buttercream. A behatted head on a wide, round body. He missed these things so much. He used to judge when he needed to finally go to the dentist by when these exact pastries, by this exact baker, made his teeth hurt too much to stand eating (a terrible strategy, by the by). Over the years, Glum had created a plethora of experiences, all sorts of tiny, nearly imperceptible differences in presentation, texture, and taste, in the sole medium of this: crowds of little sugar-dressed nuns, doled out to friends, sold to customers.

Religieuse, the cutest of all éclairs. They were her favorite to make and his favorite to eat. He learned to recognize within the Speech the shape of dear Glum’s name from one of these, staring at his so-called ‘victory treat’ at the tail-end of a miserable all nighter-- Suddenly, epiphany. The confusing yet familiar tangle of syllables he’d never been able to find any reference for in the literature, yet saw almost every day could only, of course, be Gosling “Glum” Mercure, his friend from the very first day he was allowed out on the block alone to go play.


“I have an older sister,” he told the nun. Sully was deathly quiet.

“My parents hid her from me. They hid her from everyone. She was sick like I’m sick when she was born, so they just… got rid of her. Dumped her at a monastery! Fwoom! Gone! In an instant, like, LIKE--”

He crammed the nun, messily, into his mouth, all in one go. To make some kind of statement or something. It was the worst idea, and the next few minutes of his life were spent choking down an overwhelming amount of poorly-chewed pastry. Blearily he realized Sully had gotten him a glass of water, which he sipped until the gluey ball of former nun could be broken down and swallowed. “Better?” Sully asked, when the glass was empty. “Yeah—yeagh,” was all Aesaelion could bring himself to say.



So they settled in his tiny years-neglected kitchen, he in his resting-while-cooking chair and Sully atop the bare counter, and waited on a kettle of water to warm up. Sully lit the stove with a match on his fourth try. “Where’d I leave that crossword,” he grumbled, patting everywhere in reach in a haphazard search, waiting to see if memory sparked from some motion, some random feeling of tracing cold stone with skin.

Aesaelion couldn’t recall where it was for the life of him either, but he didn’t have to remember. He closed his eyes, furrowed his brow, took a slow breath in through his nose – his left eye twinged, a little electric spark of a feeling. On the back of his eyelid he saw truth appear.

Phantom sigils appeared before him in the glowing dark, luminescent like coals, brighter the longer he paid them mind. Eyelids twitching, he canted his head to the side and thought...

And then knew. “Liquor cabinet, behind the whiskey.” Sully hopped off the counter and looked, hopping in place so he could see.

Aesaelion let himself have the cough he’d held in, sucking in too much cold, dusty air. Chagrin was coming to him slowly, as he observed more mindfully himself, and the state of his house. It was a wonder he hadn’t spent every minute wheezing. His hands were hurting from the lack of heat. In the fugue he’d wandered home in, he hadn’t even noticed how unwelcoming a state the house was.. he’d simply crawled into his quilts and screamed into the pillows until he fell asleep, curled up too tight.

“Yo, still got it! Thanks, Aes.” He pulled the yellowed crosswords booklet from its hiding spot, bottles clinking in his wake. With a flourish Sully produced a shiny pen from his jacket, and got cozy; one leg folded under him, the other dangling free. He started leafing through it, sporadic as usual in settling on which puzzle to pluck at. “So while that’s boiling, what’s your poison – tea, cocoa? Oooh, hey, and what’s the capitol of Laus’gahn?”

“It’s Sindel’onac, and it’s cheating if you just ask me for the answers. I want tea. Black tea. And another nun. Where’d you leave the box?”
Before Aesaelion knew it, tea was steaming in a mug before him, and he had buttercream on his sleeve. “I didn’t mean to put anyone off, you know,” he mumbled into his hands. Sully had moved to sit on the floor, right by his feet, head leaning softly against Aesaelion’s thigh. “I just wanted to go somewhere where I didn’t have to talk or think about anything. Where I wouldn’t have to barter or charm or wonder if someone was going to dole out some new awful secret about me I’d have to deal with… you know? I had hit my limit with all of it. And the only place like that was home.”

“That makes sense. You’ve done a lot of work on this place, to make it just yours… I remember when you first moved in.” So could Aesaelion, as clearly as he could see the mottled backs of his hands: Glum had shown up ecstatic at his mother’s house the week before, hair all fly-away loose in its bun and a comfy, flour-powdered work shirt on, saying there was a place on her street and he needed to get moving on it right away. The days following were a mad scramble-- made more complicated than it had to be, of course, by his mother bucking at the sudden reality of him moving out.

“It was a real sty,” Sully added.

“I was trying not to think about the resemblance between it then and now, actually.” Sprouts in the windowsills, and tiles falling down from the roof like feathers from a nervous bird. “Why didn’t I make any arrangements before I left? Who even heard of such a – idiot, childish – cotton brained… dipshit decision.”

“Hey!” Sully put his hand on his lap, and glared up at him. “That’s my friend you’re talking about. Lay off him, he was doing his best.”

“I guess.”

“And it’s embarrassing listening to you cuss.”

“I know better ones, but they’d make your brain bleed out your eyes and ears.”

“No-- for real? No, you’ve got to be… you’re full of it.” Sully squinted at him, at the sly, spreading smile on his face. “You’re… you’re not actually lying about that, are you?”

“And your nose, too.”

“Now I just can’t tell.” Sully let his head drop back to rest upon him. “That’s okay, though. You keep your sinister secrets.”


They spent the evening like that, chewing through Glum’s box of nuns, Aesaelion tentatively offering up another detail of his experiences, here and there, as he felt ready – until he had to switch from black tea to green, to chamomile and throat lozenge, because his shoulders were tight and knotted from sitting up and his eyelids were heavy. No one else could make a day vanish so quickly out from under him as Sully. Platonic soulmates, Aesaelion used to call it, until they stopped being able to spend so much time around each other and his goal of defying an early death came closer to fruition… as Sully’s faster-paced human-speed life took the natural course of change and evolution.

“I have a fiancé now,” Sully admitted, near the end of the night. “I kept worrying about how I’d tell you, what kind of paper I’d use for the letter or something, how to sign it in a way that wouldn’t be – I don’t know, a dick move -- but the longer we talked, the more that seemed silly.”

“That you have a fiancé?” Aesaelion joked, awkwardly, around the sudden lump in his throat.

“That I was scared, jackass.” Sully wasn’t looking at him. “I want to introduce you, but only when you’re ready for, like, being social-social. You’ll like him. He came in on the flotilla the year you left, so you guys could talk about what that’s like. I think he, uh… reads. You could talk about that, too.”

“I don’t think he reads like I read, Sully.”

“Nobody reads like you read, Aes. What I’m trying to say is – please, uh – I want you to give him a try? He’s going to be part of my life so he’s hopefully going to be part of yours, forever. Once you’ve done your.. your thing.”

“My thing,” he repeated dryly. “Ah, yes, my ‘not dying’ thing. If that’s even possible.”

“What are you doing right now, Aes? Are we having a conversation about this or am I patting your ass so that you’ll grant me the favor of meeting my boyfriend?”

That stopped him cold. Before now, he had even been chiding himself in his head – Aesaelion, you’re so difficult, Aesaelion, why can’t you shut up and be helped, you see how much your friend cares for you? – but that did it. Hand taut on the edge of the counter, he rose to his feet quickly and promptly became lightheaded. “Sully, I-- eugh-- I don’t know what you’re doing, but I was just sitting at home having a nice sorry-for-myself for a while, minding my own business, and then you forced your way into my house to say you wanted to be here for me. I got here this week! Monday night! I haven’t even had a single week to myself, I haven’t – I haven’t even went grocery shopping yet!”

“I didn’t… I said it could be somebody else.” Sully was staring at him like he’d grown another head. “Sitting around isn’t going to--”

“I’m tired, Sully! I just sat down! I’ve been out more than I ever have in my life, pushed my body harder than I’ve ever dared, and it’s piled up like a debt! Debt I don’t even know if I can pay.”

Aesaelion stopped to sniffle and gulp air through a taut throat, and noted that Sully’s surprise had morphed into a glowering frown. Such a pinched expression, like he’d smelled something foul… at the sight of it he laughed, briefly, bitterly, and found words already pouring out of him anew. His voice sounded like rocks.

“I’m not, I’m not magic. That’s the thing. I am probably the least magical person alive. Me, my life, all of it, what I am is terminally mundane.”

“You don’t mean that, Aes. You don’t think of yourself like that. I’ve seen it.”

How classic. His words turned to a taut, airy rasp-- “Have you?” he asked. Oh, he was tired… all trace of sugar was long gone from his tongue, and all he could taste now was a cold breath of menthol and a faintness of chamomile. “Have you seen me be brave? Have you seen me be strong? Do you believe those to be qualities of my person, above all else?”

“Of course I think that, Aes, you’re all those things, you’re amazing. What are you trying to prove?”

“You’re wrong.” In that moment it felt like he’d never left at all, in the worst way he could imagine. Neither of them had changed or metamorphosed into anything more than they already were, and time had only become ever more finite… could he really defy fate, if he just got back home and already he and Sully were once again arguing about how disabled he was? And Sully, true to form, hadn’t even noticed! “I’m not brave, I’m not strong, I’m desperate and in pain. That’s it. Would you want to be called brave for eating breakfast? For putting on your shirt? What I need isn’t another pep talk so I can fulfill your fantasy that I’m some dashing, dauntless hero!”



“...Well,” Sully said slowly. “Just like old times, I guess. Boy, I forgot how much you could really put the ass in your name. I’m gonna...” he gestured fumblingly in a way not even Aesaelion in all of his knowledge could decipher, then sighed. “It wasn’t supposed to.. god! I didn’t mean for you to think all that shit! I just wanted you to know I still-- I still give a damn, you know?”

“Sully, that part was never under question. But sometimes... that’s not all you need.”

#thegodwedarenotspeakof #tgod #fantasy #fantasyfiction #aesaeliontathviel #tathvielfamily #conclusionofajourney #religieuse
© Zazozaliad