[ Sky – Master Post ]
Title: Taste Like Sky (part 1)
Fandom: Original (Sky-verse)
Characters: Severen, Singularity, Sydney
Rating: T
Warnings: Language. Severen's got a mouth on him.
Notes: Some of you might remember the alpha versions of Batty and Sin from elsewhere… Suffice to say, they've been entirely stripped of their histories — and in Sin's case, haircolour — before this refit. Severen will always be 'the great black bat', though — hell, he wants to be Peter Murphy, when he grows up. Too bad for him, he's already there.
[=EDIT :: 2010.04.15=] Timeline and consistency.
"Sydney!" Thirty-nine year old gothic rock star Severen Bellamorte stood on one foot, his other boot setting the timer on the microwave, one hand frantically stirring the cream sauce on the stove, trying not to burn it, while the other hand checked the fridge for the butter. "Sydney, for fucksake, where is the goddamn butter?"
"It's right where you left it, Severen. How the hell should I know?" the girl called back from the other room, where she shared a bag of watermelon jelly beans with his long-time boyfriend, Sin.
"If it was where I left it, I'd have it by now. Get your ass in here, and find it for me. I'm not taking my eyes off this pan."
If there was one thing about Severen, it was that the more irritated he got, the calmer he sounded. Right now, it was probably possible to freeze water in his mouth. Sydney rolled her eyes at Sin, tossing the bag of jelly beans at him, as she got up. As she passed the dining room table, on her way to the kitchen, she found the butter on it, left from breakfast. That meant she had left it. …Whoops.
"It's squishy," she warned, setting it next to the stove, as Severen regained both his feet.
"You left it out, again, didn't you." It wasn't really a question.
"I might have. Jesus, you're picky." Sydney flipped her frizzy hair, as she turned and went back to Sin.
"You really shouldn't be so flippant with him, you know," Sin warned, across the top of his book, around a mouthful of jelly beans.
"Why, because he's famous, or because you're infatuated with him?" She grabbed the jelly beans back, and tossed a few into her mouth. "Such a pig! You've eaten like half the bag while I was up!"
"Mostly because this is his house." Sin finally looked up, sweeping his excessively long hair, currently a brilliant shade of emerald, back from his face. "Didn't know that, did you. Thought it was mine, right?"
"Of course I thought it was yours! It's not… It doesn't…" Sydney gesticulated futilely.
"Suits him better than you'd know. You just don't like him, and you can't imagine liking his house — which you do. I've heard you say it." Sin twisted himself around, implausibly, and reached behind a couch cushion. His hand came back with a bag of strawberry gummies, and he settled back into both the sofa and the book, pushing Sydney aside with his foot.
"You seriously have candy everywhere, don't you?" Sydney stared at the bag of gummies in horror as she slid off the couch, landing rather smoothly on the floor.
"Of course I do. It's not that I don't love Batty's cooking — he's incredible…" Sin trailed off, starry eyed, for a moment, before recovering. " — uh, in the kitchen, too. Great cook, but no sense of those times when too much sugar isn't enough."
"That's really disgusting. On both counts." The horrified look shifted attention from the bag of gummies to Sin's face. "I'll never understand how you put up with him."
"That's okay, he'll never understand how I put up with you." Sin smiled placidly, turning the page. "But, he tolerates you because you amuse me. And, that, I think, speaks for itself."
A shout from the kitchen interrupted the antagonistic turn the discussion had taken. "Sydney, get your greasy fingers off my toy and set the table. Do something useful, if you're going to take up space," Severen's smooth baritone cut through the sounds of crinkling plastic and rustling pages, leaving a hair-raising stillness in its wake.
The story was longer than it seemed, but shorter than it could have been. Sin had come to the Desert from Wyoming, by way of Boston — first son of a family of cattle ranchers, who had only half the interest in the subject that his family expected. At sixteen, he took his GED and went to college, taking a Masters in History from U. Mass. That was where he'd met Severen — at the time, finishing his undergraduate work in English Literature, with a specialisation in non-Shakespearean Renaissance authors. Severen, or as he'd been at the time, Sebastian Lindstrom, was nearly feral — suspicious and angry, distrustful and bitter, unwashed and unapproachable, but bent on his work. They crossed in an upper-division class on the politics of Europe in the fifteenth century, and Sin couldn't take his eyes off the young man. [[AWKWARD REDEFINITION OF SEVEREN. TRY AGAIN.]]
In fact, Sin proceeded to behave in all the ways that only seem like a good idea when you're twenty-one and fascinated. Their introduction came in a rather unfortunate manner, after Sin spent a full period tossing balls of paper with pickup lines on them into the hood of Sebastian's sweatshirt. Sebastian flipped his hood up, getting ready to leave the room, and turned a clearly infuriated bright red as the paper rained down around his face, sticking in his straggly black hair. He was still picking balls of paper off himself, when Sin cleared the last desk between them, feet first, and asked him out for coffee. Sebastian, like a sensible member of the species, stared at Sin in comic perplexity, before answering, "Absolutely not," and stormed off into the hall, still trailing bits of paper.
This went on for months, before Sebastian finally gave in to Sin's persistence. It was somewhere around the time Sin propped himself in the doorway, ass on one side, about halfway up, feet wedged against the frame on the other side, that Sebastian finally asked if Sin would leave him alone, if he said yes, just once. And once they were out, Sebastian actually had fun.
He'd started out arguing the politics of art with Sin, but on the whole, Sin had already come to most of the same conclusions, so there was little to argue. By the time it came right down to the linguistic grind — Sebastian always played tone versus structure and word choice as his last card, when he expected someone to go away — Sin was reading Volpone over his shoulder and laughing his ass off. Fucking history majors…
He told Sin his name, that day, but he didn't learn Sin's real name until years later — being told, instead, that the boy with the long blue hair was called only 'Singularity' — the point at which all things become indefinite.
