This Is The Kind Of Deep-rooted, Blind Love I Talk About When I Talk About Brian. The Devotion. The Care.

This is the kind of deep-rooted, blind love I talk about when I talk about Brian. The devotion. The care. The willingness to forgive in the name of a love that itself can't be named.

I had to reread the first paragraph multiple times for the "as rich and deep and crimson as the blood that once bound us in a cradle of death" alone. That quote alone is so perfect I'd get it tattoed all over my body if it were a sensible thing to do.

This is the kind of poetry I hope scholars will study and be in awe of in 100+ years. This is the kind of writing that needs to be remembered for the centuries to come.

an ode to the unnameable devotion of brian moser

mosercest

by atticus

I do not think of him as my brother. How could I, when the word itself rings with such tame domesticity, such sweet, pale innocence, and what I feel for him is neither pale nor innocent, but as rich and deep and crimson as the blood that once bound us in a cradle of death?

There are some names that do not belong to language. Dexter is one of them. His name was never meant to be spoken in the dry syllables of men, it belongs to the pulse beneath my tongue, to the marrow in my bones. I do not utter it as others do, I pray it. And when I dream, it is not the dream of a brother for a brother.

To call it love is a heresy, but to deny it is an act of soul-murder. And I, who have spent my life amidst the stench of mortal fear, will not be cowed by the moral whimperings of the world that once turned its face away while I wept in the blood of our mother. No, I shall not pretend.

He is mine.

Not in any ordinary sense of the word, not by law, nor by name, nor even by that fragile thing called brotherhood.

Dexter was born of the same blood that soaked my shoes and seared my memory, he was shaped by the same hands that carved hollows into my chest where joy should have lived. We were sculpted in the same womb, and later baptized in the same bloodbath.

What, then, is there between us that is not us?

From the moment I saw him, truly saw him, beneath the mask of smiles and plastic humanity. I knew he bore the same abyss inside him that I did. That same hunger. It was like looking into a mirror that had bled and wept and somehow survived. He did not know it yet, but he was already mine by design, by destiny, by a thread so tightly wounded around our throats that it choked us both with longing.

I do not desire him carnally—though perhaps I would, if I believed it would draw him nearer, if I thought it would bind him to me in a tangle of limbs and breath and pulse. But that is not the love I speak of. Mine is the kind of love that would slit its own wrists just to stain the earth where the beloved walks, the kind that would crawl through grave-dirt just to lie beside him in death.

There is a cruelty to fate, I was the elder. I should have protected him. Should have taken his hand and led him out of the blood and into the light. But instead, I was torn from him like a limb from a body, and I have been phantom-limbed ever since, aching and gnawing at air, trying to feel whole. Every kill, every echoing breath I took in the decades that followed, they were not acts of malice.

And when I found him , oh, when I found him, it was resurrection.

My baby brother had forgotten me. I forgave him for that. How could he have remembered? He was raised in whitewashed homes by men who feared the darkness in his gaze, how could he know the taste of obsession when all he has known is mimicry? They taught him how to eat, to drive, to love in the petty plastic ways they understand—and yet they could never touch the thing within him that was mine. That had always been mine. He knows, even if he denies it. He sings the same song I do, only in a lower key.

He kills. And oh, how beautifully he kills.

I watched one of his works once, and I wept. Not for the victim. But for the beauty of it.

If he would only come with me. If he would step into the truth and shed the skin of the false self he wears, we could finally be whole. He does not yet see the freedom in it. But I would show him. Not with violence, but with care. With patience.

And if he refused?

Then I would weep again. And then I would forgive him, for he does not know.

But even then, even if his eyes closed forever, even if I were forced to watch the light go out of them, I would never leave him. I would not cut him up like the others. I would preserve him. I would cradle him in a tomb of my own making, keep his skin soft and his lips unbroken. I would speak to him by candlelight and I would dress his wounds and comb his hair. I would tell him the stories of our mother and press my mouth to his in silence, not for desire, but for reverence.

Let the world call it sin. Let them shriek their judgments into the wind. I care not. For in my heart I know what they dare not admit, that there is no purer union than us.

He is my brother. I took back my word.

He is my beginning and my ending.

Let the sky crack and the sea boil, for I would still choose him. Over life. Over heaven.

I would choose him.