Medath fic (original)

[icarus_chained]

Title:  Life
Rating:  PG-13
Universe:  Medath (Jawburn arc)
Characters/Pairings:  Slate, Ara/Nira
Summary:  Slate watches his girls, and thinks about why he'll never take what they offer so freely
Wordcount:  511
Notes:  for this week's muse_prompts . Introducing Slate from Ara & Nira's stories.
Claimer:  All mine!

Life. That's what they were. Life incarnate, at its most elemental, its most deadly, its most beautiful. They were all that was good and terrible in the world.

Slate watched them, sometimes. All the time. He watched them hunting, playing, fighting, loving. Watched them the way he'd watched them so long ago, in another life. Watched them as he had from the moment he's first seen them step into the Arena, and kiss each other like it mattered. Like they mattered, if only to each other. And oh, how much they mattered! His girls, his Ara, his Nira, so vivid, so fierce, so joyous. Like storms, or the sea, proud and vicious and giving, loving and destroying in the same moment, the same gesture. Mother, but they were beautiful!

He knew they watched him back, his girls, his beauties. He knew they saw his longing, his love, his desire. And he knew it confused them that he had never acted on that longing, that desire. They hadn't been raised to understand restraint, hadn't been given the chance to ever hold anything back. So they didn't understand why he did. Why he would never just accept what they offered freely, to any and all that wished it of them. No holding back. Not love, not rage, not fear. Everything was here and now, for them. Everything was free. Because they were. And he meant it to stay that way.

So he didn't touch. Didn't take. Didn't accept. Not their bodies, those creations of raw life and beauty, that they lived through and for and in. He wouldn't. Not ever. Because that would make him like them. Like the others. The other Foremen, who'd used those bodies like they had a right, like they were granted that right by whatever almighty existed in this world. Who'd taken, just for taking's sake. Who'd plundered and stolen, and given nothing back to the goddesses they had defiled.

No. He would never be that, never be like them. No matter how deep his desire, how terrible his longing, how ready his beauties accepted him and always would ... he would never take what no living man had a right to. He would never touch what was theirs and theirs alone.

And maybe, in its way, that was better. Maybe it was truer. Because there were hundreds, who'd taken their share of those bodies, in blood or sex or other ways. Hundreds. But only one of him, who took only their love, and gave only his own back. Only one of him, who they had trusted to look out for them, to help them escape. Only one of him, for whom they would give every drop of the life that filled them to the brim.

They were life itself, his goddesses, so much larger, so much fiercer than anything else this pale world had known. Like suns and seas and iron and blood, and all that is vivid in the world. They were nothing but Life.

And maybe, just maybe, if he stood close enough to them, he could live a little too.

Comments

[senmut]

That is a gorgeous setting, a beautiful man in so many ways, and his POV of them rings so vividly.

Thank you again for sharing this world with us!

[icarus_chained]

*smiles* Slate gets shoved into the background a lot, because Jared is all young and bouncy, and the girls are ... well, themselves ... and he's just this grey little man who stands on the edges of their lives. But he sees things.

*grins* Thank you for accepting it!