Kyle was very, very young, only a boy then, still years from becoming a bar mitzvah. The village looked bigger than it was, through the wide eyes of childhood, even though there were only a few others his age. With so few of them, they didn't care that he belonged to a tribe they did not know, too young to see him as an other, viewing him simply as another boy. The few of them spent the long hours of the days, after escaping the watchful supervision of their guardians, darting through the little streets, playing silly games and pulling mischievous pranks. And when the cross merchant or the crotchety worker stumbled into their paths of chaos, they scurried into the alleyways, laughter echoing between the stones of the houses, drowning out the threats and jeers of their elders.
But they were starting to shed the habits of pure youth, being taught the ways of adulthood. The trades of their fathers and mothers would be their own soon enough, passed to them so they could one day pass the same knowledge to their children, and so on. Some even listened in on the mutterings of their parents, hearing their own names exchanged and tossed around, a family promising a daughter to another family's son. Their futures were baking clay, hardening in the rays of the sun, once malleable but soon set.
He doesn't remember what brought them on the subject, what words guided the conversation to the subject of marriage, but he remembers the courtyard. The sun loomed over them from the west, peaking over the slopes of russet roof tiles, light cascading down to the stones. Kyle stared up at the balcony, the one that wrapped around the yard and connected the rooms of the house's upper floors, even though no one stood there. No, everyone was doing something that day—her father out all day purchasing metals for the shop, her mother working hard in the secluded room on forbidden to him, her two family servants preparing the family's plain supper—the two of them unsupervised. Bebe asked special permission, to spin the yarn outside, to breathe the fresh air of the summertime, enjoy the season's luminance.
"My mother and father have been talking," She said, in a hushed tone, the whisper children use when discussing matters they shouldn't.
Kyle blinked, turned his head, eyes quickly scanning over the courtyard, finding Bebe wandered from the pagan altar to the water fountain. Her skin soaked up the solar rays, enriching her cheeks, the rosiness unrivalled by the cosmetics kept in ivory jars. Her eyes were bronze from this angle, colour ever changing, bright as the sun overhead. Her golden curls captured the afternoon glow, falling over her shoulders, like the unrefined wool dangling from her little spindle. That was what most mothers taught their daughters to do: make hairs into threads and threads into cloaks. Bebe was involved in her mother's work more and more often these days, but then again, Kyle was spending more and more time with his tutors chanting Torah. Their youthful sun was setting, and perhaps that's why Bebe broached the subject.
Kyle watched Bebe's eyes deepen, her features hardening with her long stare. He knew that gaze, one of examination, something he grew to recognise when people gave him a second glance. Those looks were always scathing, as superficial as they were, yanking at his red curls and clawing at his green eyes, never seeing him as who he was but only as what he was: a Jew. Bebe's eyes, however austere, did not look on him with malice, but with sincerity. She folded her lip, giving Kyle a glimpse of her pearly teeth.
"My parents have been thinking," She began, her words chosen and deliberate, speech slowed in her seriousness. Her fingers were more careless, wrapping barely twisted hairs beneath the whorl, mind moved away from her chores. Kyle looked to her fingers, those fingers that he watched spin threads and weave linens, then back to her face when she said, "They've been thinking about a husband for me."
He held his gaze, assuring her silently that he was listening. His nails scratched the hard stone of the bench, fingertips grazing the craggy surface. One leg absently swung, kicking idly, and the sole of his sandal scraped the yard's floor. Kyle nodded, albeit listlessly, vigour sweat from his pores over the day's course, and repeated, "A husband for you?"
"They think," While her words excluded herself, her intonation made clear that she shared their view. She inhaled, sharply, holding her breath in her brief pensive moment. Whatever sat upon her tongue, Kyle knew, was something even she was not supposed to know, not yet at least. She'd eavesdropped on their bedroom door, hoping that the creaking balcony boards wouldn't give her spying away, and deciphered her findings from a series of twilight discussions. She let out a sigh, rolling a single spot of wool betwixt her fingers, and said, "They think that we would make a good match."
His first reaction was a laugh, something funny about that. Maybe it was because he didn't want to admit that he was getting older, admit that his parents undoubtedly had similar talks about his prospects behind closed doors, admit that the mantle he donned was only threadbare and that he's soon be responsible for his own actions, his own life. Or maybe it was because he thought that responsibility was fake, because so much seemed decided already, and there just wasn't much else left. Regret washed over him, as soon as the sound reached Bebe's ears, a frown curving her lips, a sadness softening her eyes.
"Bebe," Kyle tried to be just as calculated with his words, but the heat made it hard, hard to discern what was impulse and what was not, "You're a gentile. My parents won't let me marry you."
But in his tone, he caught the way he spoke of his family, how he too spoke of himself. Because the Tradition would not condone a union between them; not unless she changed her faith, and Kyle knew that she would not abandon her gods just to take his. She loved the poems and the legends all too much, along with the outrageous characters they depicted. He wouldn't let himself take that away from her, make her abandon that which she knew and loved for something she would need to grow accustomed to.
She did not cry, Kyle remembers, but the sadness never left her eyes. She stood there and thought, thought for a long time, before breathing out a tired "I guess," and focusing back on her spindle. Her hands trembled as she twirled the yarn, and Kyle tried so hard to think of comforting words, every time circling back to his own limitations. He would never be with a pagan, he thought, never in his life.
The yarn is soft, so soft, his fingers gliding over the tightly packed weaves, going over the work done today. The top of the loom displays a fine blend of weld, of oak, of leaf, each string of dyed yarn adding its own charm to the tapestry. The work that Bebe did so often then was his leisure now, although Kyle never learned to make the elaborate patterns she wore on her back, simply fusing colours together in hopes they make some lines or shapes. He remembers her every day, when he toys with all the strings and threads, as the sun travels from horizon to horizon.
Warm arms wrap around his waist, pulled into a sweet embrace. A smile curls on his lips, feeling a chin rest on his shoulder, head lean against his. He smells the salt and sand mixed in gold locks, the metal and dirt imbued in sun-kissed skin. Kenny lets out a low hum, pushing his body to Kyle's back, his hold so nice, welcoming. Kyle feels his breath caress his cheek, the heat of his touch bleed through the thin linen. He doesn't need to turn his head to know, know that the skies crystallised in Kenny's blue eyes are looking at him, with sincerity, with softness.
He was right and he was wrong, back then. In the life he led before, before being captured and dragged to an outsider's encampment, he would never; but in his life, the life burrowed out for him in this strange place, with uncertain outcomes and unforeseeable futures, he loves one, one whose tale may soon appear in a poem or legend. And in that tale, he too would be there, because Kenny loves him, too, more than Kyle ever thought he could be.
A nose nudges his cheek, nuzzling his face. He wraps a finger with one of the dangling warp strings, with one of the kindest gestures anyone every made towards him. A laugh vibrates in his throat, barely escaping in a gasp, and Kyle leans back, into the hold. Kenny's words leave his lips in a sultry cloud, hot against his face, "What've you been up to?"
Before Kyle can so much as part his lips, Kenny kisses his cheek. A lingering kiss, drawn out not because of fatigue, but because of yearning. Because all while he toils through his day, performing a role he was cast in before he took his first breaths, he waits for these moments, these moments when they're together. Everything else falls away—the prophecies and the campaigns and the soldiers and the deities—and they savour the happiness, the happiness they both thought they would never feel in their lives.
"Just thinking," His words are a sigh breezing through his lips; saying thinking, meaning remembering. He lingers in the memory the same way Kenny lingers in his kiss, until his thoughts wander the same way Kenny's hands do. Linen bunches around his hips, Kenny gathering the fabric in his hands, and Kyle twines a couple fingers in the warp, "We make a good match."
"A good match, now?" His voice echoes in his head, as Kenny echoes him. Then, Kenny lets out a laugh. A musing one, approving one, before Kenny presses his lips harder to the skin. The warp line tautens, Kyle stressing the thread, as the smile grows on his face. A tongue lightly licks darkening red skin, and he teases, musically, "Like husband and wife?"
Not the perfect description—flawed for more than a few reasons—but no matter how much his mind searches, Kyle can't think of a more apt one. They don't live like master and slave, don't live like comrades in arms, don't live like the conventional confinements of a relationship. Hands grope over his body, and he thinks less of different terms. Instead, his voice tinged with excitement, Kyle breathes out a fluent "I guess," and loses all focus on his weaving.
A/N: I stayed up all night just writing about marriage and weaving. Oh and self-indulgently talking about how Jewishness works in this lil Homeric universe because it effects every day life already so it sure as hell has an impact here. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed this and possibly whatever else comes out of this universe series!