Work Text:
There's so much space between them. Shane doesn't know what to do with it. In the sun-drenched lake, glittering with little pieces of stardust, he tries to stretch infinitely forward. To bring his body out of itself. But he's so scared, so his joints don't unhook, and sag uselessly inside themselves. His arm only twitches. The distance remains the same. Inertia: what do either of them know about the laws of the universe?
They don't speak. They watch the light refract off the water. It's pretty. Ilya would think that too. Like you. Some things are unknowable. They stand in the water, which laps against their chests, ineffable, the cool suggestion of each little ripple beckoning. Towards where? Wherever you want. Shane feels like a ghost in a sack of wet, glutinous flesh. Touch me. Touch me, please.
The clouds crawl across the sky. Fishing nets of condensation capturing the wriggling rays of light. Some slip out through the gaps. These are the fish in the water; Shane watches them flap against the current, getting battered, caressed, then torpedoing through like a jet when they finally turn around. Their scales glitter, too. Everything is achingly beautiful, this natural world. Ilya, standing still in the gentle water. Nothing to hurt him but Shane's blunt fingernails and clumsy tongue.
Again, this light — there's so much of it. The clouds slip away from the sun halfheartedly, and the sunlight spills like mercury over them. This too is a lukewarm burn. Shane The Fish is caressed with unutterable patience, by that ball of fire an unfathomable distance away. He looks at Ilya. Him, too.
Nothing happens. Neither of them look at each other. The unutterable expanse of water in front of them exists only in paintings, in textures and feigned motion. It flows, strikes between Shane's fingers, casts itself across Ilya's legs, planted like stone on the riverbank. Shane dreams this moment a hundred, two hundred times, the edges of it fracturing and reattaching themselves back in odd ways, a monstrous yet lovable shape.
This image has its own memory; Shane is only witness to it, and he forgets. He doesn't remember the sound of the birds in the trees, or the way Ilya held his crucifix between his forefinger and thumb like he was praying. But he remembers their bodies in the water, sublime and buoyant in the breeze, in conversation with the surface current. Yes, I agree. Arms still outstretched.
The lake sings these songs to its sediments and bedrock, ancient but exuberant – across time, space, instantaneous sound faster than light, still reaching past the eons filling the vacuum of Shane-and-Ilya. There are unknowable things. Each other; how can anyone make anyone transparent? If Shane were to look at Ilya he would not see the waterbank, not the shimmering insects flitting across the water surface, but the smooth contour of his pecs and strong, incomplete body; the hollow lines drawn across the planes of his torso, carved by the water of the womb.
In the placenta of the Earth, the moist sand underfoot swirls in its whimsical frenzy, drawn upwards and inwards by something downstream. Not Shane, whose feet have sunk, and not Ilya, who is unmovable. Nothing happens, and neither of them speak. How do I touch you? With these waves: of light, sound, water, the contractions of birth. With these wet hands. With my raw, tender heart, which is floating towards you in the water. Their bodies are aflame and turning to stone. The water gives a heavy, shuddering sigh, and Shane aches deep in his bone marrow. Like the spongy tissue inside wants to inflate and engulf itself, soak up the whole lake until Ilya is Shane, Shane, Shane.
I love you. I love you. Touch me, hold me. Be in this warmth with me, always. These are things that float — like bodies, like sunlight.