Chapter Text
Brutha’s rooms were often mistaken for those of the head of staff by new employees at the Citadel. It wasn’t that Brutha was particularly given to deny himself luxuries for the sake of denying himself luxuries, it was just that his idea of a luxury had stalled out somewhere around “mattress” and “table”.
Even so, the simple room was alive and rich with gifts from friends: a silver lamp brought back by Urn from the Sto Plains, a Hersheban carpet bought from a vendor who mistook the Prophet Brutha for a wandering monk, some lovely sturdy blankets from kitchen staff who often forgot the Cenobiarch wasn’t one of their grandchildren, and the mirror—Om’s one and only gift to his prophet.
“Here,” said the Great God Om, standing back to survey his work. “Now you can see yourself in the mornings.”
“But I don’t need to see myself,” Brutha said. He was seated among the piles of blankets on his low bed, bemused. “I've already seen what I look like.”
Om made a noise like an exasperated tea kettle and flicked the air, miraculously shifting the circle of glass an inch to the left. It was morning, technically, but the sky beyond the window was heavy with night. Brutha had not been to sleep yet, due to some commotion in the kitchens that he was presently explaining in a haphazard, preoccupied sort of way.
“So anyways,” Brutha went on, “we did have to throw out all the sheep eyes that came in today, but honestly I think the best dinner diplomacy is just to make whatever you’re good at and have a vegetarian option available. Smite-Them-Perniciously is beside himself about it all, he was dead set on having a D’rek delicacy for them. Why a mirror?”
“Huh?” Om said. He shifted the mirror back an inch.
“Why did you bring me a mirror?” Brutha asked. He paused, brow scrunching up. “And where did you get it? You didn’t steal it did you?”
Om glared out the corner of his eye at his prophet. “Gods don’t steal,” he replied. “I’m the Great God Om, I own everything. People are just… borrowing things from me for a while."
Brutha looked at him expectantly.
"But no, actually, I didn’t steal it. If you must know.”
“Did you make it?” Brutha said, graciously overlooking that bit of theological posturing. “I thought making things took a lot of power.”
“Well I am currently the most Believed In thing on the Disc, so I suppose I could have, but I’m no good at the fiddly bits,” Om said, gesturing to the scroll-work on the edge of the frame. “I shopped around in Al Kali for a bit. They were having a sale.”
“Where’d you get the money?”
“Lifted some from the coffers,” Om said. He frowned at the wall—was the mirror made wonky or something? Could you even wonk a circle? No wonder it was on sale.
“That’s my money,” Brutha said, “so it’s not really a gift, per say, is it?”
Om snorted. This was made easier by the shape he was wearing which was the same one he’d used to buy the thing: a certain young man who had said something heretical a few centuries ago and been spontaneously immolated for his cheek. Om admitted he had been a handsome one, and had always felt a little bad about being so trigger happy with the smiting flames. Possibly something could have been worked out—about that time Yonis, Goddess of Tittering and Rumors, had been showing off her new boytoy at the dice table and Om had felt a little bit Behind the Times.
“I went to the trouble of finding it,” he said. “It’s a gift.”
“Hm. But why a mirror, specifically?”
Om pursed his lips. “Well I imagine if I had to drag the same flesh apparatus around day after day I’d fancy a bit of a touch up now and then, wouldn't I?”
“I’m not as vain as you,” Brutha said, and probably only meant it as statement of fact. Probably.
There was a veil hanging from the ceiling around Brutha’s mattress, oddly luxurious compared to the simple bed beneath it, but that had been a gift as well. Something from the eldest prince in Klatch, a sort of generic gift with a bit of a derisive edge, but it was by far the most expensive thing in the room. The delicate fabric must have been the work of extremely skilled seamstresses. As he did with most of the diplomatic gifts he received, Brutha had tried to find someone within the citadel who wanted it (after waiting the obligatory month or so out of politeness), but in matter of fact it had been just a little too fancy. The serving staff had very serious views about what Sorts ought to have what Things, and although sumptuary laws hadn’t been on the books in Omnia for decades, they all shook their heads and clicked their tongues until he dragged it back up to his bedroom, quite put out. In the end he had simply accepted it, integrated it, and thought no more about it. Om often found himself eyeing the thing. Brutha’s blissful ignorance of its value drove him absolutely mad, like everything else about his prophet.
“So now you can start in on it,” Om replied testily.
“I wouldn’t even know how to,” Brutha mused, curiosity now firmly attuned to the mirror image of himself over the God’s shoulder.
Om grit his teeth—the impulse came with the body. “If the rest of us have to look at you all the bloody day,” he said, “then you should have to do it too.”
Brutha's gentle bemusement dropped away. He frowned. “You don’t need to insult me.”
“I’m not—” Om paused and turned, lost now. “What?”
“I know I’m not much to look at,” Brutha said, grimly touching the darkly scarred curve of his shoulder with one hesitant hand, “but it’s not so important, is it?”
“What?” Om said again.
“We can’t all change whenever we like, the way you can,” Brutha said. “Some of us have to live with what we’ve got.”
“Wait,” Om said, “weren’t you the one who gave me the whole lecture about beauty and strangeness and all that?”
“I wasn’t lecturing.” Brutha traced the top of one shining whorl absently, as if he had forgotten his hand was there. “And I’m not the one with the fixation on beauty.”
“Alright, first off,” Om said, pointing sharply. “I’m not fixated. Gods have a—there’s a certain expectation, it’s not like I woke up one morning and decided to be shallow.”
“You don’t have to care about it just because they do,” Brutha pointed out, patiently.
“Second off,” Om plowed on, “you seem to be under the misapprehension that I’ve got some kind of problem with the way you look, which is a bit insulting, to be honest.”
“…Insulting?”
“Yes,” Om said. He turned and jabbed at Brutha’s reflection in the mirror, which didn’t quite have the desired effect because from where Brutha was sitting he seemed to be about an inch off and pointing at the window. “What’s wrong with you, really? Some scarring? Maybe your face is a little sharper than other people’s? Anyways you could look like a troll and I’d still get distracted, petty mortal standards of prettiness hardly matter—what are you looking like that for?”
“You get distracted?” Brutha said. “Looking at me?”
“It’s not—I didn’t say—” Om blew out a huge irritated breath. His instincts told him to deny it, safely, and flip the conversation back on Brutha. But the whole point of this conversation was that Brutha had the wrong idea, and how could he flip it back on him without making him feel… worse?
Hellfire and damnation, Om would give just about anything to go back to not caring about how human beings felt.
“I guess I’ve noticed,” Brutha said, slowly, mostly talking to himself. “You look at me an awful lot more than most people do.”
“I just—well, what else am I supposed to look at? Sand? The sun? There’s not a lot out here that’s nice to stare at. I didn’t come down but every couple hundred years for a reason.”
“You think I look nice,” Brutha said, deliberately missing the point of that whole explanation.
“Ugh, it’s—” Om pinched his borrowed temples, “that’s not the point, the point is it doesn’t matter to me what you look like. Any way you look is… fine. With me.”
Brutha got up from the bed, made his way across the floor and took both of Om’s hands in his. “Hey,” he said, “I’ll let it go. I don’t want to make trouble.”
“That’s not trouble,” Om said, mournfully, “this is trouble.”
“What… is?”
Om looked deliberately down at their joined hands, which were warm and worryingly light and filling him with a sort of physical ecstasy he completely despaired of. “This,” he repeated. “Me. You. Me complimenting you.”
“Oh,” Brutha said. “It’s okay,” he said. “I wouldn’t get any ideas, I know it’s not—of course I’m just a human, at the end of the day, and you’re the Lord of Lords. It would be beneath your station to—”
“To what,” Om said, feeling uncomfortably like he was listening to his own inner dialogue repeated back to him. “Get chummy? I think we missed the boat on that one.”
“I would never expect anything of you,” Brutha soldiered on, “not like I’d expect from another person. I know that Gods don’t get close to humans, really.”
“Well some Gods do,” Om replied, unable to stop from shoving his foot deeper in his mouth. “I mean, in Tsort you can’t hardly keep some of them out of the brothels—”
“Yes,” Brutha said, “but you’ve never been like that, have you? According to the Prophet Jeriha—”
“Bugger what the prophet Jeriha said,” Om snapped. “I never even met the bastard!”
There was a moment of silence in which the God stared determinedly at their joined hands and refused to look up.
“I think I’m lost,” Brutha said, still not letting go.
“Well you’re in good company,” Om muttered. He shook his hands free, with some effort. “Here, let go. What did Jeriah say about me?”
Brutha’s face took on that distant look he got when he was quoting voices from quite a long time ago. “The Lord your God desires not to debase himself in flesh but rather to abide in the spirit,” he said, “for he abideth not in desire which leads to sin. Not like those bastards on the other side of the mountain. There was a schism going on at the time.”
“Prophets,” Om grumbled, “maybe if they gave the flesh a chance once in a while they wouldn’t be such mucks about it all.”
“Is this one of those things that you said but you didn’t really say,” asked Brutha, who was quite a bit faster on the uptake these days. It was almost like they were getting somewhere.
“Look,” Om said, reaching up suddenly to catch Brutha’s jaw in both hands, “what if, hypothetically, I said Jeriha was a blubbering nitt and I wanted you to forget everything he ever said. Could you do that for me?”
“I can’t forget anything,” Brutha said, slightly squished sounding because of Om's hands. “Why?”
Om groaned. “You’re impossible to reason with.”
“You’re still holding my face, you know.”
Om made a sound of exhausted rage that only a human throat could produce, pulled Brutha in, and kissed him. Or approximated a kiss, at any rate. The Great God had actually no idea what he was doing, having come fully grown and largely formless into the world and thus missing the entire unpleasant business of adolescence in which one learns the ineffable mysteries of kissing. He was at least ninety percent certain lips should be touching at all times.
Brutha made a sound remarkably similar to a smooshed “Umm”. Om snapped back from the contact immediately.
“That’s,” Om said, “that is–”
Brutha touched his lips with two fingers. He seemed a trifle dazed.
“I think you should consider,” Om said, swallowing thickly, “the benefits of– um– that is, it’s a great honor for a God to– and anyways it’s not as if you’re rolling in love letters right now, is it?”
“But,” Brutha said.
“Of course I can be any way you like,” Om barreled on, trying desperately not to sound like he was making a sales pitch. “There’s a reason why gods are so popular with the shepherd lads and the peasant girls. You wouldn’t believe how many of them start paying special attention when they realize you can turn into a bull. Nobody’s keen to admit it, though.”
“No,” Brutha said.
“I once knew a Deity from Lancre who–” Om plowed onwards.
“Hey,” Brutha said, grabbing hands for the second time that evening. It was enough to entirely derail the Great God’s train of thought. “No.”
“No?” Om said, heart sinking. Figured didn't it, the one mortal who could knot the Great God Om up into a tangled mess would also be the one mortal who was too good for interspecies snogging. That was life wasn't it, a right laugh from start to finish. Did he feel a fool or what.
“No,” Brutha said again. “If we’re going to… be anything, it’s going to be us. Only us. I don’t want you to look like anything else. Just be… you.”
“Oh,” Om said. “Ah. So then, you do–?”
Brutha looked down, at their hands, and then looked up. He smiled. It was as if the dawn had broken through the window. “If you promise to stop spending my money,” he said, “then, yes, why not.”
The two of them, in the mirror, seemed oddly matched – Om allowed himself to slide back into his true shape, scales and patterns of color and all. Oddly matched for sure: soft and hard, brown and black, human and very, very inhuman. What a pair they were.
Brutha met his round orange eyes in the mirror, still smiling.
“Who else,” Brutha said. “Who else could I love, really?”
