Notes: The backbone of this fic is the poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot. Anything in quotations was written by him and not me. And God love him for it.
Love Song
"Let us go then, you and I/When the evening is spread out against the sky." And the moonlight caresses your body like a lover, dripping over it, smoothing, tensing, gleaming milk-white with youth and wisdom. For the moon is old and duplict, while you are sweet and young and fresh with no lies in your heart. I want to see you draped in more and less, coated with the thickness of the humid honey of midsummer, gleaming and shimmering in early afternoon, with nothing but sweat touching your naked body. I want to run my hands over your lower back, pushing my nails into your flesh and marking you with long, red lines of possession. "Like a patient etherised upon a table." I want you limp and undemanding so that I may drill a perfect round hole in your human skull and touch that which makes you be. If I were Caligula, I might rape you; if Tiberius, I might send you tumbling headfirst over the cliffs of Capri after watching—with impotence and rage stewing in the very pit of my stomach—as you made love to another. I am neither. If I am anyone, I am Pilate, sending the purest being on earth home to see his father.
Your laugh, like tinkling and slighty hollow bells, is a benediction, a small and simple comfort. There is love there, unconditional, and pity too. "In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo." My pietá, my suffering, the weight of sin in my limbs as I wish so desperately to touch you is overwhelming; can't you just hear Mary's tears as they splash upon the body of Christ? Like stars, and the sound of a falling star is the same sound as a shed tear. Your tears are my tears, as I fear that I may provoke them. You dream of flowers, but I wish you luck in finding violets in this day and age. The flowers make noises too soft, low, high, immense and trembling for us to hear. When you pick a daisy, does it scream? When you chop down a redwood tree, are you silencing the voice of God? When I pluck your cherry, have I killed a virginity that might have one day saved you? "There will be time to murder and create." And what have I created, my little monster protégé who laughs in my ears and calls me "Uncle?"
"And indeed there will be time /To wonder, 'Do I dare?' and, 'Do I dare?'" Do I dare kiss you and nibble hungrily at your soul, tasting salt and the bitter copper of exhaustion? Do I taste your father beyond your thin pinkened lips that beg and barter without being aware, taste his anger and my own guilt within the grape popsicle you had after supper? Do I dare to flick my tongue over your eyelids in the barest and bleakest of early mornings to savor the tears that have dried in your eyelashes? "Do I dare/Disturb the universe?"
I don't wish to fight compulsion, only to revel in its sweetest torture. I never saw you as a small child; I was unable to watch you grow, though I have known you since your birth. It strikes me that I have missed so many milestones—that all of us have missed the milestones—but even left to your own devices you simply excel. "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons." Without satisfaction, without happiness, but without regret. My life wallows in the slight hills of mediocrity as you plunge from the precipice of fear without ever looking back. I savor what the thunder said, while you seem to speak to the sun exclusively. "I am no prophet—and here's no great matter/I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker." The candle of my own fragile life, one day soon, will be snuffed; Atropos will snip my threads without a second thought. But you, I have no doubt, will continue forever in legend and legacy, in death and in life, in rhyme and reason. Someday, modern bards will sing your praises, though how little I will know of it. When the wind blows hard, a candle's delicate flame stands no chance and even the comforting cup of your hand cannot be expected to shield my death.
"No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be." Some are destined for heroic tragedy and it is the rest of us who simply provide bodies for the slaughter in the final act. Your final song, swan song, swan's dive into the icy waters of treachery will mark the beginning of the end for us all and I pray that when you finally see the gates of St. Peter, it is your father who comes to claim you as his own, and not I. The harps, the French horns, and even the dear bassoon and cello will sound in Heaven when you arrive, and if I am only there to see it, I will be pleased. But I fear I may have to look up at you from Purgatory, exactly as I do now. "I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each./I do not think that they will sing to me."
And now in the stillness of night, the sky a magnificent Blue Grotto, I can hear the songs the angels will sing to you, the ballads the bards will write, in the simple symphony of toad upon cricket upon thrush upon firefly upon beetle upon grass and clover and gently swaying daffodils. And through my conflict there is peace, though I dread the moment when it is broken by your laughter, like bells.
"We have lingered in the chambers of the sea/By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown/Till human voices wake us, and we drown."