03-Oct-2003
Title: Gift Of Tongues
Author: RurouniTriv
Disclaimers: Not mine. No profit. Don't sue.
Note: Um, this one has been percolating for a while, since the SDTS was 'formed' I think. I wish my brain would have told me about it, though, instead of just hijacking my fingers at 3 a.m. >.<; In any case, I hope you like it.
He makes words dance, you know. Not like me, stumbling over them in my haste, relying on volume to make up for my clumsiness. No, his words are like his fighting: spare, delicate, precisely placed. Never a wasted word or a wasted shot. They dance like he dances on the high wire, never a step out of place, a thing of beauty shining in the spotlight. When he speaks, people listen. He just doesn't see the point of wasting his ammunition, he rations his words like rationing bullets in battle, he doesn't waste them lest they fail him when he needs them most.
I am different, I must draw people in before I can strike. I must bring them to me and make them care. He is able to strike from any distance, the pure precision and logic of his words making them impossible to ignore. I am water, emotional, washing away resistance. He is air, rational, slicing through like a freezing wind through a thin jacket.
He balances me, uplifts me, sustains me. Like air, I breathe him in, and he carries me to heights I could never attain myself. Together, we make life possible: without him, I could not bring the gentle rain of reconstruction, nor the hurricane that we were together in battle.
I am the obvious, the one whose beneficence is praised, whose blessing is sought after as the parched earth seeks the rain. He is the invisible, who finds for me the places where my aid can be of most use, whose gentle breeze brings the showers. Without wind to carry it, water would flood and stagnate, becoming more curse than blessing. Without water to soothe away the dryness, wind would merely dessicate the unfortunates whom it would caress.
They think him silent, taciturn, until he chooses otherwise. The silent observer suddenly becomes the eloquent speaker, the shadow steps forward into the light. He is wise, my reticent showman, in the way that few of our age or any other can claim. He is the Hanged Man of the tarot, who follows his own path to knowledge, whose wisdom like Odin's was gained through pain and sacrifice. Few in the world can claim such experience as he, fewer still would survive the deprivation he has suffered and emerge the stronger for it. He is the blade, whose mettle has been purified in the cauldron, whose soul has been hammered into a weapon, whose form has been set and hardened to a killing edge in chill waters.
Few of our acquaintances understand the magnetic pull of his soul upon mine. None of our friends fail to understand it. He and I have become one, each providing strength to bolster the others' weaknesses, each armoring the other's vulnerabilities. Since that day when I surrendered to him and he to me, we have been drawn irresistibly together, and we have had no desire to fight that yearning.
He is the one whom I was missing, for as long as I can remember, the one who can fill the empty place in my soul. And I, I am the one privileged to do the same for him.
There are things in my life I regret. There are choices that, given the knowledge I have now, I would undo. To give myself, heart, body, and soul, to him...
...that is not one of them.
The End
(:./rt/gift)
