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If we were made in his image, then call us by our names
Most intellects do not believe in God but they fear us just the same
--Erykah Badu
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Amu spends her time in the cove—sometimes discarding her boots, toes curling in the sand—and fishes the day away. Raj joins her, and she shoots him dirty looks when he's discarded his overcoat to avoid suffocating in the endless summer, and he knows it has something to do with propriety and modesty but he doesn't understand why it's such a big deal, really. They're not like Amer and Magna, or Toris and Nesty, that weird thing about lovers that's supposed to be friendship but not. They watch the water in silence.
Today Ist arrives as usual—unannounced and with little fanfare, looking entirely out of place with a fishing pole in hand, simultaneously stark against the brightness of the beach and washed out by his complexion. He takes his place beside Raj, not bothering to greet either of them, and begins to hook his line.
He's never so much as taken his cloak off, and it makes Raj feel something that he can't name but heats the tips of his ears.
He can't imagine Ist's shoulders bare in the sun or watching the waves rush past his naked legs on the shore.
“I'm really bad at this, you guys,” he says, more to distract himself from a train of thought he might dissect later but currently finds disconcerting.
“Maybe if you didn't have someone to feed you you'd have an incentive to try a little harder?” Amu says, but she's smiling.
If she brings in a good haul today, Raj will cook it like Folth taught him to and they'll eat together in Amu's cabin. Raj can't be bothered to clean his room, which annoys Amu, and Ist lives like some creature that thrives in shadows and lurks in damp stone hovels.
“Perhaps he isn't hungry.”
“Of course he is. He's always hungry. You could take a page out of his book, actually.”
Ist stares blankly, as he does, like he's looking beyond whatever's there. Sometimes he'll answer a question after several minutes of either careful consideration or out of boredom, but this time it comes quickly. He enunciates every syllable.
“I don't feel hunger.”
Raj glances at him side-wise, laughing. “Why do you come out here so much, then?”
Ist goes silent again. Raj turns back to the ocean, to their lines bobbing out in the waves, and loses himself to the smell of salt in the air and the sound of seabirds overhead. So much life in this world, originally the stolen memories of sacrifices from another world. These lives are theirs now, created from their own memories, free from the inherent wrongness their origin implied.
Ist speaks, in his slow, even tone. “At first, I was just imitating you. I wanted to see what you saw with my own eyes."
"Then I wanted to find joy in luring and consuming.”
Raj starts, and when he looks at Amu, she is as still as a monument. They've never broached this.
“In the end I just found it to be a peaceful activity. That is all.”
Raj stands, brushes off his pants, and Amu audibly clears her throat.
Thanks for ruining the party, bud.
/*
Raj wakes in the middle of the night as a tall figure looms over his bedside and feels an uncommon flash of annoyance that Patch didn't make a noise to alert him before he connects the dots that of course he didn't, it's just Ist walking univited into his house in the middle of the night.
Despite his grogginess, he has the presence of mind to be properly concerned. “Did something happen? Are you okay?”
Ist doesn't move. “You're upset with me.”
“What? No, I'm n—Ist, it's late, couldn't this wait until, like, breakfast?”
“Why are you upset?”
“I--” Raj blinks rapidly a few times, trying to will the sleep out of his eyes. “Look, sit down.”
He moves to the side, and Ist sits at the end of his bed. He stares at Raj, Raj stares at him, and one of them has to break the silence so he says, “You just said some creepy stuff at the beach today. I dunno. About like—eating. You know we don't think about you like that, so it was just something weird for you to bring up.”
Ist is silent, and with Ist it's normally a companionable silence, but Ist has also never shown up in his room in the middle of the night to watch him—though he probably does that from the comfort of the monitors in his own room and he had never thought of that until now—so Raj feels awkward, has felt enough awkwardness in one day to last him a lifetime, he thinks, so he just rubs the back of his head.
When he looks up Ist is tearing off his arm guards, tearing gloves and pulling sleeves to expose his forearms, and--
Oh.
“I was curious to see if I was so different from Ilidelucia,” he says, and Raj leaps forward to take both his arms in hand and turns them over, once, twice, runs his fingertips down crescent-shaped bitemarks and veins that are entirely too stark on his skin.
“Did you do this?”
“I needed to know,” he says, with an edge to his voice Raj has rarely heard before. Desperation or relief? “I needed to know I wasn't like him. I needed to know I did not need this.” Unspoken, human flesh. Blood.
Raj looks up, still holding his bare arms, in time to see Ist blink at him owlishly.
“You don't.”
“I don't.”
“You know,” Raj starts, “you can come to me for stuff like this, if you need to know you aren't like, an evil crazy person.”
“I see.”
“Trying to eat yourself should probably be a last resort.”
Ist only stares at him in that way that has recently started making the room feel too hot, so he looks back down.
The bites don't look too bad, and they don't look infected—and Ist has had his mouth on them anyway, what harm could it do—so he spits on a particularly deep one and rubs the saliva in with his thumb while Ist jerks upward involuntarily.
“That is unsanitary,” he says, and Raj has the gall to laugh in his face.
“I wanted to see what you'd do.” He gets up and picks a shirt up off the floor, is pulling it over his head before a hand is gripping his and suspending it.
“Are you leaving?”
“I was just gonna go get some water to wash those out. I'll be right back.”
“I've seen you naked. There is no need.” Now it's Ist who has the gall to stare him right in the eyes like he's said something completely normal, not confirming that he has, in fact, been watching the two of them every moment he's awake like ants under a microscope and Raj remembers the Vision centered at his house in Ist's room.
“Ist,” he says. “That is so, so weird.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.” He drops the shirt. “I'm going outside. I'll be back in a minute. Stay here.”
“May I avail myself of your sitting area?”
“Yeah,” he says, still bowed over and faintly sick. “Yeah. Yeah, whatever.”
/*
He closes his door, takes two long strides out onto the frontyard, and paces.
He isn't even angry. Maybe this is some weird emotion none of his friends bothered to put a name to while they were here because there was no need to and nobody probably dwelt too deeply on the fact that Ist was very much invading their privacy—a concept that, admittedly, he'd only recently become privvy to. Maybe Ist has no concept of what it meant to be mindful of boundaries. He hadn't.
And that's the kicker—there are a lot of things he wouldn't have wondered before his friends were pulled into Fillujah. Basic human things, carnal things. Some part of his mind wouldn't wonder—fantasize--about what purpose watching him might do for Ist. If seeing him did the same thing it did for Raj, how he would process it, because Raj certainly does not know how to.
He fills a pail of water and takes a rag off the laundry line before standing in front of his door again. Breathing deeply.
When he steps back inside he closes his door loudly to make his presence known and enters his bedroom to see the spectre making himself perfectly at home on his bed.
“Your bed is more comfortable than mine,” he says, like he doesn't actually enjoy it at all.
“Yeah, well, you sleep on a slab of metal, so,” he sits beside Ist again and wrings the towel until it's damp. “Give me your arms.”
He works slowly, working the rag into the bitemarks and wiping down the length of his arms for good measure. He turns one hand over, and even in the relative darkness he see the thin red lines down the center of every fingernail, the tools he uses to spin his webs.
He hazards a glance at Ist's face and his eyes are closed, long eyelashes fluttering against his cheeks, and he looks--
Rapturous. Godlike. Elgo.
Raj grips his forearms, yanks him forward, and presses their mouths together.
Ist freezes against him but then he's upon Raj like something ravenous, biting his lips and pulling his hair like he doesn't know what to do but to consume him, or some approximation of it. Keep him close, keep him within.
“You're not Ilidelucia,” Raj says, whispered against pale lips, pressing kisses over his cheek and jaw.
“You imply a god made a crucial mistake,” Ist says, but his heart isn't in it, not when Raj has him in a crushing embrace and is pressing kisses and reassurances into his cropped hair, his forehead.
“You're not a god. You're a person. And people change past what we were meant to be.”
He touches pale, bare skin with one hand, and Raj begins to understand the tenuous thread between friendship and love.