Korundai

[old_csat]

Korundai

We were on an island when it happened. A small island, self-contained. I think that's how I knew. How I finally understood. I was an idiot, back then. Still am, maybe. I should have realised long before then, before that. Maybe ... maybe I did. Maybe I knew before the Asylum. Maybe that's why I let them take me. If I let them take me. But before the full panic, surely they wouldn't have just seized me? Just picked me up and thrown me away? Earth wasn't like that, was it?

Damn. I wish I could remember. But there's nothing. Nothing before the Asylum, and the dreams of Light. By the time I had both things to remember and the ability to remember them, the Gestalt had already been born. I'll never know if once upon a time I saw it coming, if I knew what it was I was doing to them. To Earth.

Isander was with me, when I learned. We'd been running, by then, running for a long time. I think it was years, since we'd escaped, since he had freed me. Since he had given me back to myself, at least physically. Damn. He was magnificent then. Truly magnificent. Even if it led to what happened next, I don't think I'll ever, ever regret seeing him that day, seeing him free the both of us in one masterful gambit, seeing him become a person in the eyes of the one who'd made him. Maybe that makes me a monster, but I've always loved him more than I cared for those around us.

He was with me, on that little island, that little refuge we'd made. He'd found it, actually. I just told us what to run from, feeling the Gestalt like a storm on my back. He was the one who found us places to run to. However briefly. And it was always brief. I can't believe it took me that long to figure out why.

It was the eyes that did it. That showed me, finally, how stupid I was, how selfish, how monstrous. Running ahead of the Gestalt, I thought. Stupid. I was leading it. No. I was making it. Patient zero. Typhoid Mary. How stupid can a man be? Because I was. Keiron, but I was!

There were people, on that little island. A tribe, a community, hell if I know. They had a name. The island had a name. I can't remember what they were. I can't even give them that. All the holes in my mind, I can't even give them the honour of remembering who they were before I remade them, destroyed them. I can't remember who they were when their minds were just buzzing on the edge of mine, unique, individual, distinct. I can't give a name to what they were. Only what they became, because of me.

Gestalt.

I knew, when they changed. When I felt them start to blur, to seep into each other. When the screams started, the terror as telepathy hit, as they starting sensing things they couldn't understand. Isander knew then too, but only because of that. He couldn't feel them. He couldn't sense what I sensed. He could feel them brighten and glow, the Light come home, and then connect, seep, begin to lose definition ... He couldn't sense that. He didn't know. But he knew when I realised. He saw when I understood, even if he didn't know what or why. He saw my ... my horror, my shame.

They became Gestalt. But it hadn't come for them. It hadn't followed us over the sea. I knew it hadn't, because I could still feel it, distant and humming like a storm just over the horizon. It never came for them, never followed me. It never had to.

I saw it in their eyes. I saw it, when they started to see beyond what they should, when they became distant, staring beyond me while I handed them money for groceries, staring into me at something behind my eyes. I saw it, when that long stare became unfocused over time, when they stopped really realising it was me, when they stopped really realising there was such a thing as 'me' at all.

I saw it when their eyes stopped seeing altogether. Blank and blind, because there was no longer a mind behind them, because the minds had gone somewhere else, drifting over the see to join the Light beyond the horizon. I saw it when they became Gestalt.

And for the first time, I saw why.

Isander found me. He always found me. When the Light came, and I had to run, to hide, to dig myself into a hole in the ground and cower against the screaming. He'd found me when I was hiding under the bed at the Asylum, and in all the years after, no matter where I'd run to. He'd found me. But that time, he hadn't even had to look.

He sat next to me, just in a heap in the middle of the market place. Sat next to me in stillness while bodies made their way unceasing around us, carrying out day to day chores, eyes blank and unseeing, unfocused, lost beyond the horizon. He sat next to me, and shielded me from view when the Gestalt turned it's many faces and met my horrified stare. He tucked my head into his shoulder, and glared at people who no longer had a name.

"Dowling?" he asked, gently, as if he wasn't holding a monster, as if I was someone worth being gentle to. "Dowling, I think it's time to leave." To run, again, run ahead of the storm, stay free of the Light, stay me. No matter the cost. Except I hadn't realised, not until right then, exactly how high that cost had been.

I stayed me, stayed Dowling, only because everyone I touched was lost. Every time we moved, went to another place untouched by telepathy ... I was spreading it. Infecting them. My curse. My screams. The storm at my back. I was throwing it at them, to keep it from touching me.

The Gestalt, everything I was running from, everything I hated and feared, was something I had made. Something I was making, and kept on making, every time I touched someone new, every time I ran where I hoped it wouldn't follow. It was my fault. It was all my fault.

I think I might have screamed, then, a mewling little sound in a throat I've long since lost. Wrapped in Isander's arms, cool metal and calm, face buried against the gleam of his shoulder, I started screaming. Shaking. I remember the sounds. I remember the sounds I made, and I can't even remember their names. That's what kind of monster I am. I remember him holding me, remember him soothing me, crooning, hard and soft and there like nothing else had ever been, has ever been, and I remember feeling comforted, feeling loved, while all around me everything I touched turned to dust. I remember that.

I don't think I ever told him what happened that day. Not out loud. I don't think I ever explained what I'd seen in those unseeing eyes. But he knew anyway. Or suspected. Maybe he knew all along. He remembered why I'd been sent to him, after all. He remembered the reasons they'd given when they locked me away, all those years before, back where my broken mind wouldn't go. Maybe I'd even told him, back in the early days before we meant anything to each other beyond prisoner and jailor. Isander's always had the most precise memory.

He knew. After that. He knew, and I knew. And we kept on running. Even knowing. We kept on. Touching and spreading, because the thought of staying, of meeting eyes full of an intelligence that didn't belong there, that wasn't meant to live there ... I couldn't bear it, and he couldn't let me. He loved me too much, even then. And I was too weak, even then. We kept running, until there was nowhere left to run. Until the Gestalt held the whole world in a blind stare, and all I could do was cling to him, cling to the immutable metal, and try not to look at what I'd made. At what I'd done.

They call us korundai, now. Abominations. They call us that because we dared to love past the bounds between races. They call us that because we decided to break ourselves, instead of a world. Break ourselves, remake ourselves, and hold each other through the breaking. They call us abomination for that, and rewarded me for what I did then. Granted me life, a body, a way off Earth, all for spreading my disease. All for bringing telepathy to Earth, and bringing them out into the Duality.

They're as stupid as I ever was. Maybe that's why I don't care. Maybe that's why I don't mind what they call us. Korundai. Abominations. We are. We are that. But not for the reasons they think, and if they can't figure that out I'm not going to care. If they're so stupid that they reward monstrosity and condemn love, I'm not going to regret what I've done. Not any of it. Monster I may be, monsters we both may be, but no worse than them. No worse than them, and at least we have courage enough to see it, and love each other in spite of it.

Isander knew. He knew, all the time, back then, what I was and what I was doing. He knew the monster he held, and loved me anyway. And I knew too. I knew when I looked up at him, that day in the market on a lonely little island. I knew that he knew, and that he had chosen anyway. Chosen me, chosen the monstrosity, and let the world hang for my sake. A monster made of love. And I loved him for it. I love him for it.

Let them call us what they like, then. So long as I have that, I don't care. So long as I love him, and he me, the galaxy can go hang. He made the choice then. I can make it now. I didn't understand, back then. How he could choose me over them, how I could be worth a world. I do now. I do, because it's him, and he's worth a hundred thousand galaxies to me.

That is how a monster loves.

Comments

[lion_cub]

+blinks+

Dowling...my dear friend...you may have been at the center of it, but something changed or touched you to make it!

[old_csat]

Yeah. But I touched everyone else. And after that island, I even knew what I was doing, and did it anyway. Don't make excuses for that. There aren't any. Don't regret it, either. Only as sane as I am, because we ran.

It's okay. All's well that ends well, heh? I survived, they survived, I got Isander out of it. Not too bad a deal, eh?

[lion_cub]

You did get love, and love is all.

+hugs Dowling+

[old_csat]

*hugs him gently* Heh. You're a good man, Richard. Better than us, maybe. Don't forget that, hmm?

[lion_cub]

+Richard's eyes shadowed for a moment, before he put his cheerful expression fully in place.+

Thank you, Dowling...you and Isander are a miracle to behold though, proof of love incarnate.

[old_csat]

*smiles a little* Proof of something, anyway. Heh. Thanks, though.

[mechanical_dream]

I didn't think. I didn't ... that now could be like then, but it is, isn't it? Running again, ahead of hate this time. You and I.

*sad smile* Well then. Let us be monsters, beloved. And all the universe go hang.

[old_csat]

Heh. So long as I have you, beloved, always. I don't care what we are.

[unlikely_hero]

Not monsters, small friend.

Merely harbingers of a painful change.

[mechanical_dream]

*smiles oddly* If you say so. We never chose to be, you know. And wouldn't. But whatever we have to be, to have each other ...

[unlikely_hero]

Most of us, Isander, never ask to be what we are. But sometimes, just sometimes, we are rewarded for the pain.

[mechanical_dream]

Yes. And sometimes we are reward for other people's pain. Which is, I think, what my beloved fears we have done. Maybe we have. I can't regret it. And neither, I believe, can he.

It's the lack of regret, as much as the choice, that might make us monsters, I think.

[unlikely_hero]

Perhaps. It is certain there are actions I do regret in this war I have fought. It is just as certain that there are actions I should, but do not.