At Your Finest

by joeys-piano

Bright behind the knuckles and like a backbone to this palm, callused and heavy yet light and warm, were the fault lines and the valleys and the ditches of Harry's touch. That a continent — or perhaps, a country — was the best way to describe it.

The closest he had ever been to immortality was right here: here, when the silence was as deep as they were loved, and yet shallow with every rustle of the blankets sprawled about. Here, laid around them was a softness neither knew, and yet they knew it while knowing this — that neither of them were alone.

Here, when the glimpses of a morning were then robbed as the sunlight beaming down was soon shrouded from above, and yet stolen was never that or what came from it upon the hour because the thief to this venture had his eyes on something else.

And here, lost within them was a forest throbbing out: an antler of briar and dogwood and oak were slathered in moss and thick vines while they grew, that before them a cathedral of the oldest known woods was laced in these ribbons — like a heart bound in nerves, and yet all of this laid inside though at the moment, he didn't feel that.

Because right there, above the stomach and every shoreline of Harry's breath, below the shadow of his palm and the glimpses stolen through it, was Tom and the hisses and then the roundness of his smile. Breaking ground, like a fungus or the roots of an oak, because he had found what he wanted and there was nothing he wanted more.

Harry's hand behind his own and what a gift it was to hide, that he could fold it to his wrist and not a part of it would be found, that he could roll it from his palm and it would take minutes for it to fall.

Not that Harry was ever small, he was only viscous while in love — as something solid, something liquid, something neither and something both when he found Tom with his laughter and melted with where he was. And then his hand became a puddle that the latter wanted most, that Tom held him like something special and with nothing less than both of his own.

And then he cradled this from the air so he could hide it near his mouth, so he could taste the lovely poison that would always be his death. But be risen when Harry touched him and by the smell of him, Tom had found that immortality and life itself were synonymous with this lion.

That what a gift, what a blessing, and what a treasure within his hands: Tom adorned him with a whisper and kissed the aches he might've had.