Title: Rendered Living
Chapter 7: Small Gods
Author: Gillywrist
As always my dearest readers, reviews are most welcome and appreciated.
Zechs squinted towards the paperwork, frowning at the document in his hand. He looked up, pinching the bridge of his nose as he sighed. The words were thick and dull as porridge.
"That interesting?" Duo was scanning the bookshelf across the room. He had not bothered to turn around.
"That evident?"
Duo said nothing.
And Zechs shook his bangs into his face wearily. It was like he could see the smile on Duo's face by the shape of how he was holding his shoulders.
"Most of those are procedural." Zechs pushed his chair away from his desk, stretching his back as he checked the time on his wrist.
"It's like you live here in inches, an office. Like your car."
"I avoid the desk at work," Zechs admitted. "The commotion stretches patience. The proximity. Come, there is one place I live like I once had."
Duo followed him through the master suite to the-
"Ah— a magnificent throne."
They were staring at the toilet. Zechs motioned around the corner to the large clawfoot bathtub.
Duo hummed with appreciation, soaking in the mirrored vanity and folded towels. "Mermaid king. No. Sea God. Poseidon."
Zechs feigned a grimace. "Far short of gods. but yes," he sounded apologetic, "rather crass in its extravagance."
"Swanky," Duo mused peering over at the wide shower head. "I like it. It suits you. I was beginning to imagine you allowed yourself no peace entirely. And you've earned some of that."
"Have I?" Zechs said. His voice sounded hollow as it bounced off the marble tile.
Duo shrugged. "We get what we seize." He grinned. "I like that you took this for yourself. You are less fucked up for it. In my reckoning, anyway, for what fucks that's worth."
"It meets with your approval then."
"How very formal, your Highness. and yea." Duo drank in the various products on the counter. The peppermint toothpaste.
"I can leave you to your investigation if you wish."
"That's for later," Duo said absentmindedly, eyes suddenly darting under the tub to snatch out a book. "Finally a book-book"
One Hundred Years of Solitude.
"You will like it," Zechs said simply as he turned to walk through his bedroom and pulled out a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt from the closet. "Here." Zechs said, pressing the clothes into Duo's fingers. "Shower, soak, whatever you wish. I must return to the recon reports"
Duo scrunched his nose in thought for a moment, fingers tracing over his braid. "Yea ok. I should wash off the space travel I guess." He wiggled the toes of his bandaged foot, testing for pain. Nominal at best. Something else suddenly spawned. Conceived from seemingly nowhere. "whoa I—"
"hmm?"
"—I could eat the rest of the lo-mein in the bath."
The man's eyes flickered over Duo's face, absorbing the eager brightness he found there. "You certainly may if you wish." He strove to keep his voice blank as to not quash an idea he found entirely outside his own desires.
"Done." Duo said, energized by the sheer newness of this strange craving: riding the pull of the wave of it like surfing. "Cos what the fuck maybe it will be like an in-utero meal kinda."
Zechs was entirely lost for words. He went back to his reports.
The boy emerged from the suite an hour later, still toweling off his auburn tendrils, face shiny with steam.
Zechs looked up from his work in time to catch his yawn.
Duo sauntered over to him, absentmindedly snapping the waistband of the charcoal sweatpants.
"I picked them up around the time I dropped off the radio," Zechs said.
"Oh, so these are officially mine then."
"On record," Zechs answered.
"Has anyone ever told you how you take thoughtful to a kinda weird level?"
"Maybe Noin? in her way. But not worded quite like that."
"Ok." Duo said easily, curling up on the couch with a book.
There was a living straining silence between them.
The reports were deathly boring in their monotony and tiny serif typed words.
"My head is too heavy to pay attention," Duo complained into the silence, flipping back a page to re-read the last sentence.
"You traveled over 300 thousand miles today. Under arrest."
Duo shrugged.
"This isn't wartime," Zechs rose from his chair. "I can make up a bed on the couch if you are comfortable there." He moved over to the closet, fingering over the folded blankets and sheets, letting the texture decide his choices. He shook out the sheet and draped it over Duo's legs, tossing him the blanket. "Words aren't sticking in my head anymore either. I had early meetings today before I intercepted the office chatter about your imminent arrival."
"I was gossip?!" Duo mock-gasped, before rolling his eyes. He stretched out in a sprawl across the couch, lean limbs twisting against the covers until he was content.
"It's not everyday the organization arrests someone so famously dangerous."
Duo snickered, smoothing his palms over the blanket's woven fibers. "Dangerous," he echoed darkly. "Very." He yawned. "Would you read a bit of it to me?" He held out the book. It was not A Hundred Years of Solitude. "Behind your nightstand sandwiched against the wall. Musta fell."
Zechs eased into the request, moving to sink into the empty space on the couch.
"I was on page seven."
Zechs cleared his throat against a sudden rushing feeling. It was almost like fear with how it filled him; like crying with how swiftly it flooded his body. It pricked like a new pain but it was of brightness instead of the dull thud of a wound. This mattered very much. And he had never practiced something like this before.
Zechs huffed as he skimmed the page. Settling on the first full sentence. He began: "Many stories start long before they begin, and Brutha's story had its origins thousands of years before his birth. There are billions of gods in the world. They swarm as thick as herring roe. Most of them are too small to see and never get worshiped, at least by anything bigger than bacteria, who never say their prayers and don't demand much in the way of miracles."
Zechs paused, eyes coming to rest on the Duo's dark lashes. The boy's eyes were closed already. There was a quality to the silence like a held breath underwater.
He continued, relaxing into some sort of ease now that he was not under direct gaze: "They are the small gods—the spirits of places where two ant trails cross, the gods of microclimates down between the grass roots. And most of them stay that way. Because what they lack is belief. A handful, though, go on to greater things. Anything may trigger it. A shepherd, seeking a lost lamb, finds it among the briars and takes a minute or two to build a small cairn of stones in general thanks to whatever spirits might be around the place. Or a peculiarly shaped tree becomes associated with a cure for disease. Or someone carves a spiral on an isolated stone. Because what gods need is belief, and what humans want is gods. Often it stops there. But sometimes it goes further. More rocks are added, more stones are raised, a temple is built on the site where the tree once stood. The god grows in strength, the belief of its worshipers raising it upwards like a thousand tons of rocket fuel. For a very few, the sky's the limit. And, sometimes, not even that."
Zechs glanced up from the page, breathing in the drowsy tangle of limbs. Duo's deep sighing exhales had a warmth like fire in their sound. The ex-gundam pilot was certainly fast asleep. It was magnetizing. There was a tug to it like gravity. Zechs pulled his feet up onto the couch, mindful of Duo's legs. It was a comfortable deep-set sofa. One of the few comforts he afforded himself besides the claw foot tub. In truth, he slept here more often then the bedroom. It was easier to be in eye and ear range of the front door. War habits. It was also closer to his desk. It was less empty than the big king sized mattress that graced the bedroom. It simply suited better.
Zechs frowned against his blearily cerulean eyes. They felt bloodshot. They weren't, of course, that was just dramatics. They simply burned for sleep. He had work left to do. Commander Une would be annoyed. Wufei, silent fury.
The Official Story of whatever ret-conned narrative they had to come up with was entirely undecided. Sure, he had the skeleton of some lies in place, but the muscle of the fabrication did not exist yet. He was coasting on borrowed faith. And it was a faith he didn't deserve.
Wufei knew it. Heero knew it. Commander Une, well, who knew what she knew behind that severe mouth, those ever pursed lips. Ruthless.
His tired eyes climbed to the ceiling, tracing over the dark mahogany blades of the fan above them as he thought of Treize. The General could see through Une. Had been able to, rather. The only one Zechs ever knew who could do so. He rued that he never asked for the cipher. He poured through the index of his memories, lulled by the rhythmed breathing of Duo-wrapped-in-blankets. It was prismatic somehow. The warmth of the audible exhalations had an aliveness that reminded him of the color of sound. The cadence like blue sirens. He was oh so tired, drifting along the edges of his psyche.
Your Dear Pilot. He resisted wincing away from the terrain of the memory. Treize's voice. He makes such sweet little sounds, Zechs.
Zechs swore, ripping the tie out of his locks and shaking his ash blonde mane free, like it would draw curtains against his masochistic mind.
Clever devil.
"Please just stop." Zechs whispered into the quiet room.
Does the street rat really listen? Did You?
"I like it better when he doesn't," Zechs mouthed the line of the reverie.
I don't run a circus.
"Didn't you?" Wasn't it all an exhausting circus. The whole war.
I'll certainly let you fuck your terrorist.
Zechs bit back a snarl, kicking in reflex against the blanket under one of his legs.
He's wormed his way into your heart already. You are no better.
"Enough," Zechs growled.
Will you bend the world for your plaything?
He was so tired of resisting his memories. Of fighting the critique in them. Evaluating his desires against the cost of them. How they twisted at his guts. What he should be. What he wasn't. What he could have been. How many times he tread the same patterns. Ripped apart his deeper values in trade for his distorted dreams. He gave into it. All of it. He was damned. And so he would face it. Grimly. And be damned once again.
"Yes." He said simply, aloud. "I will bend the world." And with that, his psyche released it's grip and spirited them both to the slumbering shores of sleep.
*The book excerpts are from Small Gods by Terry Pratchett
*The reverie/memories Zechs falls into are from Chapter 9: Semantics from the story I Once Knew A Man of which this story Rendered Living is a sequel.
