<strong>Dark Aesir (http://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=32223.msg1716730#msg1716730)<br/>Victoria Barrowe's "Perch"<br/>Club Mercy, NYC </strong><br/><br/>The water shut off with a suddenness of silence, a swift cessation of the harsh hissing water that left Jonah naked and still leaning against the tile wall with one hand watching the streaming water falling away toward the drain at his feet. His body faintly steamed from the heat of the water and he felt he knew something of his host now. Hot water, strong water.<br/><br/>Clean now, he looked little like the street hood the girls had picked up. His hair shone a vibrant honey gold and his skin was pale and clean except for the scars that started around his shoulder marking his violent past in lines short and long, curling lines like questions and splotchy splatters of dark marred flesh, flat punctuations.<br/><br/>The dark scars light up in the mirror as if lit from within, as if touched with painless fire.<br/><br/>He did not touch them but looked away from the glass. His greasy, ragged clothes lay huddled at his feet, lumped there as if begging his favor. He could barely look at them. He swept them to one side with a foot, then stopped, and bent, arranging them into a folded pile. It was hard to say that he would not need them but until he did…<br/><br/>Jonah emerged from the bathroom with a white towel wrapped around his waist. It hung to just above his knees like some pharonic vestment. Another towel shawled over his shoulders hiding most of his past’s tracery. Even as he stepped out of the hallway, thinking that he had left the medical bag beside the sink, he saw the Scrapper and the Dancer, Victoria and Dinah, clasped close and unmistakably intimate. Victoria’s hands on Dinah, clearly the aggressor, but Dinah holding her there with deft bit of finger length judo.<br/><br/>He stopped in his tracks like a panther alerted.<br/>