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The red tongue of grace, the blue tongue of prayer	By : Hashbard Category: +G through L > Jak & Daxter Views: 1611 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Jak and Daxter, nor the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 1-The red tongue of grace, the blue tongue of prayer
- 2-1
- 1
- 2
1

Through all his life until Sandover, Jak had wished for a friend. Every day, especially within the prison of Haven, he imagined for hours at length a place that could be called heaven, where the light eliminated all darkness or at least made it cozy, not threatening, and where a kid of his age, a shining drop of power commanded on Earth by Higher Beings, waited for him to come in order to befriend him and dance in the luminous realm. With all his heart Jak wished for the kid to come true; and every time he imagined this holy guardian angel, waiting only for him to come so that they could play together, Jak couldn't feel nothing but an ever increasing warmth in his body, similar to the loving caresses of his Mother from the refuge in the sand. At times, Jak got so deep into the imagined world of light and splendour he didn't hear Samos's calls or forgot entirely about his surroundings. Only when someone disturbed him enough did Jak return back into the supposedly real world, for the landscape he had created inside his head seemed much better than the meathole of a city.

When did exactly such strong desire appear Jak couldn't tell, although one memory persisted through his dreams. In it he was standing in the cold water of the limitless sea, looking how his murderous Pa Pa walked away from him because of some important deals. It was his first dive into the sea, and the waters seemed threatening, with a lot of eldritch shadows moving beneath the tranquil surface. As Jak was ready to freak out, someone took him by the hand and dragged to the shore. Jak didn't really see the person who did this, but he could tell it was someone very loving, very caring, just like his Ma ma.

Since that event, Jak spent many days thinking about the person, and soon he imagined it as a boy of his age, beautiful as the sky during sunset. Being of royal blood was a pain in the arse, for no one ever really treated him as a friend. Most of the boys just pretended to be friends, as a way to advance their family through the hierarchy of the little refuge for outcasts, while others were with Jak to bring him some light trouble, to remind him that he was of royal blood and they were not. Existence in such an environment wasn't very pleasant, so Jak learned from a very early age to go to the beach, sit, look at the sea, and think about the red child. Sometimes, Jak would tell the imaginary friend his troubles, and sometimes he would run around, pretending to be playing with the child of his imagination.

Then, one day, he was kidnapped by some people in red who came from a very far city. The experience of leaving home, of leaving Ma Ma, was too much of a shock for little Jak. As a result, the boy lost all trust for other human beings and decided to separate himself in any way possible from the hostile others.

The city he was brought to was just an additional brick to the Wall, the last brick to the Wall, between the boy and the others. Although the city with huge towers, crepuscular streets, and robotic people was situated on ground level, for little Jak, used to the fierce Sun of the desert and the vast dunes that shone like piles of diamonds, it felt as if someone decided to organize him a visit into the hidden interiors of the earth. With the whole claustrophobic angular streets, and the geometrical buildings looming over them, the Sun itself looked black, a bringer of decay, not of joy.

The whole place crashed on Jak with its cyclopean weight, and, as a way to escape from all the horrors, pain and stress, Jak turned to the boy of fire. Day and night, night and day would the green child pray to the red lightning, and imagine the land his friend lived in. At times Jak went so deep into the act that the city itself seemed nothing more but a nightmare and the world he created for his red angel seemed hard and solid as reality. Usually at moments like this Samos, the sage that found him, tried to shook him out of the contemplative state with all the might that was available in his old body, saying things about “it's too dangerous for kids” or “you can get killed” and so on; for truly Jak was barely aware of the world external to him in such periods, and even a simple stroll through the safest areas of the town could end with a disaster.

Then, one day, Jak's dream became reality. When the young chubby boy found himself in a locale looking very close to the blissful aethyr he'd travelled to every day back in Haven as if by an act of magic, he felt happy, confused, and scary at the same time. The transition was so sudden that it felt for the little green child like if he had been teleported from the lead like darkness of the Saturnian sphere at the edge of the solar system right to the planet situated closest to the Sun. Everything looked too bright, too vivid, too...joyful compared to the dim streets of the crepuscular labyrinth he'd gotten used to for a few years. It was like if everything was bristling with energy too strong for his sensory faculties to handle, with vital scintillating mercury flowing through organic and inorganic matter alike.

The fear, however, disappeared when Jak saw Daxter for the first time. The extreme innocence and the smile of the eternal fool attracted Jak to him, and in no time the chubby, tense boy realized Dax was the holy guardian angel he, inflamed in prayer, had called to every day, every night, sometimes even every hour back in the places of sand and darkness. The boy with hair the colour of gold was for Jak a source of incessant energy; every time Jak was together with Dax, the blond felt like of he was standing next to a blue eco vent turned up to the max. Without Daxter, Jak was rather passive, introvert, preferring solitude than company of other people, but when he danced with Daxter, he felt alive, strong enough to move mountains, light enough to walk on toadstools without breaking them.

In the beginning, Jak couldn't cope with the bristling energy of his new friend. Daxter seemed to him as quick, elusive, and unstable as quicksilver, but as time went by Jak adjusted to the frenetic pace of activity. Actually, it seemed that the older Daxter got, and the redder his hair became as they changed from the childish yellow solar hue, the more tranquil he became. Or maybe it was Jak who became just as quick as teenage lightning.

During all the years they spend together, the teen with hair as fierce as the kiss between Earth and the Sun had showed many wonders to Jak, though the one the blond outsider enjoyed most was Daxter's ability to transform the casual into mirable things. When Jak walked with Daxter, a tree would stop looking like a tree; it would transform into an ancient wizard, desiccated and mute, standing all alone near the beach and watching the manifestation of Precursors unfold. The sea would become a Mother Goddess that gave them a chilly salvation from the routine of the land and a promise of dissolution to come. Basically, Daxter had the ability to transform everything – from an animal to a little gray rock in the sand – into something alive, something that would make Jak feel warmth or compassion, love or sadness, for the little thing. Thanks to Daxter, even after having lived almost ten years in the same place, Jak still perceived it as if he were walking down the beach or traversing the forest for the first time, just like when he'd been a tense chubby kid who thought harshness and blackness are the only things composing the world.

Then, when the age of eleven hit the twain, a new consciousness dawned on them, the consciousness of sexual pleasure. The day when the short peak of transcendence was reached for the first time imprinted forever in Jak's memory. The experience itself came unexpectedly, for neither of the boys, who already got accustomed to the sensations more pleasurable than usual emanating from the groin, expected that a horseplay with strokes below the waist would end with a sudden stop of everything, a sudden cessation of pleasure and suffering as both were clouded by pure bliss for half a minute. Jak would never forget that rush of electric pulsations that throbbed in several waves through his body, originating not in his wand but coming rather from the whole groin, making every hair on his body to stand up, stopping his breath while the muscles of the lower body convulsed in the first try of releasing the substance of life. With Daxter lying on top of him, his hand between his legs and placed against his youthful erection, bouncy and not strong enough to get fully hard, Jak felt as if he had entered heaven whilst being alive.

The months after the volcanic eruption of sensual pleasure were spent in mad reverie revolving around sexual adventures of any kind. No matter how harsh or frightening Samos was when imposing different rules of conduct, the general atmosphere of Sandover was rather lax - someone could touch the untouchable of the untouchable as long as it was kept hidden, in the shadows, in the secret domain of the lovers – so Jak and Daxter spent most of their time abusing incessantly the new form of pleasure. They would enjoy rolling on each other for hours on end, touching every part of their bodies, rubbing each other, groin to groin, head to head, until the shivering of orgasm gripped their lithe bodies. Then, the boys would stop for a few hours or so till the kettle filled to the brim with the new sexual energy reached once again the boiling point.

No matter what game they played, it always ended up with a brawl evolving into a frot session. And the boys, now deep into the marvelous state of adolescence, weren't at this point really that occult. When the need came, it was satisfied. Several times, when Samos wasn't present around to look after them with his ever watchful vigilant eye, both of them turned their chore of clearing up the sage's hut into a sexual frolic, although they had enough common sense to clean up the floor after the act.

On the rising wave of testosterone, the teens started exploring new ways of expressing the sexual aspect of the creative force lurking through their bodies, driving them up the wall from the increasing mating frenzy. By the time the thirteenth year rolled around, Jak and Dxater had experienced all possible variations of sex available in Sandover, ranging from mutual masturbation to erotic experiences in the depths of the forbidden jungle, away in the sea whilst fishing, on top of the antediluvian pyramids in Sandycove beach, and even, although once, in Keira's room. It could be said there was no place around Sandover that hadn't been painted by the pearlescent result of the boys' shenanigans.

As a result of these experiments, Jak learned his new sexual identity and found out what he liked the most to receive and give. The blond teen developed a fond for being cuddled, caressed, and kissed all over. The warmth created by Daxter's hands that always moved across his body, from the place behind the ears to the little creases where the buttocks curved into thighs, was enough to make him extremely good and turned on. The most pleasurable, however, was Daxter's play with his aroused manhood. The redhead had a talent for making him come by a simple movement of his fingers, usually wet from precome, around the border of the crowns' jewel.

Oral sex also felt good, but there was one problem that embarrassed Jak – he came way too quickly. It was enough for Dax to put his moist and warm mouth over the throbbing purple and, bam, Jak was spurting all in the redhead's mouth, but it felt incredible, even better than the first orgasm in his life. Usually, the boys ended up the heavy petting or frottage sessions with oral sex, which they learned very quickly to perform simultaneously on each other, for there was no pleasure more higher for them than exploding into the realm of bliss at the the same time.

The most disappointing form of sexual play both for Jak and Daxter was anal play. Playing with each other anuses, stroking the skin outside, did seem to give additional hardness to their tentacles, but a deeper probing was less satisfying. Jak discovered, when Daxter penetrated him, that feeling his best friend's penis in his intestine wasn't the ecstatic hit promised by manuscripts hidden deep inside Samos's library and protected by all the sigils and spells imaginable. There was a sense of fullness, and his erection seemed to get hard to the point of being painful, but Jak didn't felt like he was near to coming like no tomorrow. Even when Daxter moved in and out, Jak couldn't even feel a remote sign of an approaching orgasm, and in every case he had to either masturbate himself or ask Daxter for help. The end wasn't also something pleasant – feeling warm sperm inside his anus, even if it belonged to his best friend, was just weird for Jak, and somehow disgusting.

Being the one penetrating holes didn't add particular ecstasy. It was a hard and less pleasurable work than oral play or frottage, and Daxter's tight sphincter felt like a torture device rather than something pleasant, always threatening to crush Jak's cock with its force. Since Daxter ended up disappointed with the experience, for he received none of the orgasmic bliss, Jak tried at the same time to satisfy the redhead's longing; but he soon learned how effing exhausting it was, as well as being utterly unsatisfying for the two of them.

Furthermore, Jak didn't like penetrating Daxter from behind. It felt somehow humiliating for the blond teen; he didn't wanted to see Daxter in the receptive position. Sex was just like all their other adventures – mutual, outside the realm of up and down, dominance and submission, something similar to a dance where partners treated each other as equals – and therefore they should both receive and give pleasure to each other at the same time, not take turns with who was giving and who was receiving. Disappointed with penetrative sex, the boys turned to methods that allowed to have pleasure without any division on roles: good old petting, oral contact and, of course, the way that gave them the first sexual break, frottage.

More than receiving pleasure, however, Jak loved giving it to the mischievous boy with fire in his head. There was no other sight more turning him on than Daxter face when the redhead was drowning in the ocean of electric bliss. The closed eyes, the flush on the cheeks, the few beads of sweat rolling down the temple, the quivering ears – the sight was orgasmic itself for the blond boy; and sometimes it did the trick. Occasions were recorded when Jak, after caressing Daxter's skin or playing with his wand, achieved orgasm without even touching himself or receiving a caress from the picaresque teen, for the sight of the best friend on the verge of the crossing of the abyss was already too much of enough.

Extreme fondness for frotting aroused from this realization, for it enabled Jak to achieve pleasure at the same time time with Daxter; and there was nothing more inebriating for Jak than breathing in unison with his best friend, doing the same movements as they moved their united poles up and down, looking into his distant eyes, and then convulsing from the volcanic rush while holding each other tightly.

Another action giving supreme satisfaction to Jak was, of course, sucking the spunk out of the redhead. There was something...enthralling in the act of licking or sucking Daxter's tool. Maybe it was the musky smell reminding slightly of fish; maybe it was the bulbous end of the redhead's wand, which had a distinct rubbery texture and a slight salty taste unlike all the other parts of the skin, that felt like a good, just off the stove hotdog when it was inside his mouth; or maybe it was the tasteless, just with a barely perceptible salty aftertaste, precome that he liked to collect from the ending on top of the tentacle; or maybe it was the whole thing. Whatever the reason was, once Daxter proposed a session of oral play, Jak couldn't stop from feeling exhilarated and impatient about getting to the thing already.

Although the process of sucking, feeling the mushroom like head, licking both the outer and inner side of the foreskin, and tracing trails up and down the shaft was amazing, Jak couldn't tolerate having Daxter's semen in his mouth. It tasted...so...bland...like that goo Samos occasionally made from flax's seeds and gave them to drink so that they would grow healthy and stronger. The only difference between Samos's drink and Daxter's elixir was that the latter, if swallowed, left a pungent aftertaste on the back of the palate, despite having no taste at all. Having the mouth full with this essence of life was incredibly nauseating for the blond teen, and he usually spitted the stuff on the ground or on the floor. If they were outside, everything was fine and dandy; but if they had been foolish enough to do it inside, then the work of cleaning the place of crime would take a little bit longer than usual.

To Jak's surprise, Daxter had no problems with accepting his seed. Not a drop would spill from the redhead's mouth as Jak's loins convulsed in the effort of spreading genetic material across time; and then Daxter, smiling drunkenly, although his eyes would shine like if he were standing on the verge of hyper-awareness, would swallow it in little gulps.

“That's why I'm so jumpy, Jak, and you're so passive,” Daxter would joke, “I suck the energy out of you.” Jak could only smile at his little sexual vampire; after all, everyone had their own personal tastes and sexual imprints.

Once their sexual likes finally crystallized, the genital delirium abated a little in the two teenagers. Instead of using every chance they got to discharge the batteries, Jak and Daxter limited their mutual sexual exploration to a time during which they knew no one would disturb them, that is, early morning. Apart from being the safest time imaginable, the morning allowed them to get rid of tension for the next period of wakefulness as well receive the much needed charge for the day ahead; for the boys discovered that, at least in their case, sexual adventures, no matter how long and demanding, and no matter what time of day it was, always gave them a tremendous boost of stamina in the end.

Under the safety of the crepuscular ambiance of dawn, and the subsequent advent of the golden light, Jak and Daxter were free to caress each other, play with each other, and rub against each other for longer periods of time. Instead of doing it quick, just to get the fever down, the boys could prolong the ecstatic games for several hours, until someone came knocking on the door and announcing breakfast. With such a window in their schedules, the green child and teenage lightning honed their techniques, and made further discoveries about sex, discoveries they had missed before because they were going too fast to the peak.

While stroking Daxter's soft and warm skin for hours at length, Jak would start to feel some kind of cloud around the redhead. Jak would move his hand away from the redhead's skin, and it would become light, as it liberated itself from some viscous substance; and when he brought back the hand back near Daxter, it would definitely submerge into something warm and fuzzy, and definitely real, albeit invisible. At times, Jak felt like he melted with this invisible coating surrounding the mischievous teen. The blond would feel how his hand disappeared into the air, or either merged into Daxter's belly or spine or wand. When such an occurrence happened, Jak, frightened by the sudden loss of physical barriers, would open his eyes, only to see all the five fingers intact, separated from the redhead's body.

The slowing down made the blond notice certain problems he had. Every time Daxter came close to Jak with the invisible quasi-electric field of his, Jak would get tense and try to rush things to the final drop. Jak noticed that, every time Daxter touched him, especially the most sensitive parts, his whole torso would lock from tension. Although it was something Jak regarded as normal – it had happened every time before their decision to slow down the pace – the blond, as he observed Daxter for a longer period of time, came to regard this as a block on the path to ecstasy.

Daxter seemed to be like a cat, with no muscle tension present in the body, even when shuddering in the grip of erotic madness. Jak, who by the the fourteenth year of his life knew every nook and cranny of the redhead's body, never noticed any kind of tension anywhere. Jak would stroke him to madness, suck him into oblivion, burn the come out of him by rubbing, and yet Daxter never ever felt tense. Even when approaching orgasm, Daxter's breathing would remain steady and rhythmic – unlike Jak's, which would become a staccato of short breaths with occasional long pauses – and once the point of no return would've been reached, Dax would lay there quietly, without arching his head back or lifting the hips into air, the spurting hose only betraying his condition. Then, after the work was finished, Daxter would look at Jak with such eyes like if he had gone to heaven then back home. For Jak, who was tense all time, and experienced just a sneeze in the loins, only on some occasions something stronger, it was hurtful to see Daxter more blissful than him. The blond also wanted to feel the Holy Ghost of the Precursors.

“You're too tense,” Daxter said to him one day, when Jak looked at him with pleading eyes demanding to know how to be as high as he. “Look at your muscles – they're tense as fuck. And your belly? It's like a brick wall. And your breathin'? You'll never feel good if you're pent up like that. Let go – that's the secret. Let's start with the basics. Look at me and try to repeat how I breathe.”

Daxter lay next to his desperate friend, then placed a hand on his six-pack free belly, and breathed in. His abdomen inflated like a balloon, and Jak coudn't hold back the giggles – it looked like if Daxter got pregnant. Then, as the redhead exhaled, the balloon became a flat surface. Jak tried, and the first thing he encountered was, indeed, tension, for he simply couldn't push the diaphragm down. Did he really was that tense? He felt tension before, and he was always in top form lest the bad men would once again come and destroy the little hamlet, the last refuge of glowworms, but he never suspected he could be rigid like that.

“You'll get better with practice, I promise,” Daxter said, reading his mind like he used to do, then shifted his hand on Jak's belly. “Now, the rest. Try to relax as much as possible, forget 'bout comin' – the ride is the goal, so to say, therefore focus only on the thing here and now – an' try to breathe as I told: steady and calmly no matter what you feel. I'll stop every time I'll feel you're tense or pantin'.”

Following Daxter's instructions, Jak reached for the first time the mind blowing aspect of the erotic explosion. Coming, he felt like waves of electric bliss washed him from head to toe, turning the first orgasm into nothing more than a sneeze. In the few seconds before starting spurting the white elixir, sensing the increasing tension that seemed to numb all the lower torso, Jak was literally a few steps away from shouting his first sentence after almost a decade of dead silence; however, possible questions from his uncle about why did he shout “Dax, please fuck my mind for good” at bloody seven am in the morning stopped the blond from totally exploding.

Jak slowly adjusted to the new form of sexual behaviour, which was definitely hell of a lot better than the edging technique he had used before – instead of being stuck in a tension-release pattern, he could prolong sex to several hours whilst feeling totally relaxed, without even a little notch of muscle tension. In fact, the whole practice made him feel much more relaxed, alive, in the moment than before; and it seemed to halt the dramatic increase of muscle mass that assaulted him with the advent of puberty. It was a pretty natural event, for Jak simply stopped caring about the sudden attacks from unknown intruders that could come into Sandover at any minute, thereby ending his terror of being weak, not strong enough to fight back.

“You were chubby an' now you're all muscly an' all 'cause you're holdin' somethin' back,” Daxter once had said to him, when the blond jokingly mocked him for being weaker. “Everyone who wants muscle is tryin' to build a fortress against himself, y'know? If you pierce through the body armour, you'll get a wimp scared of everythin': of life, of not bein' the 'perfect' male, of not bein' strong and on an' on.”

However, nothing comes without side effects; and the side effect of their ever increasing in mastery, duration, and complexity sexual games was the sudden increase of weird phenomena.

The cloud thing became so enhanced that every time he met Dax, Jak would feel his field, even if sex was the last thing on his mind. During sex, however, it reached such degrees that Jak started to question his sanity: when he opened his eyes to look at Dax while the redhead was satisfying him, he would see a kind of light blue halo form around his head and shoulders. The thing itself was beautiful, but Jak couldn't accept it – it looked way too like a hallucination, something the perpetually stoned cutter saw sometimes on his experiments with certain brews made out from plants brought from the forbidden jungle and then tried to express in his sculptures or paintings. His perception, though, changed when he had true hallucinations.

Somewhere in the middle of his fourteenth year, Daxter found a way how to further develop their play. The thing itself centered around frottage, and seemed to the best solution from all the positions they tried in order to find one with minimum levels of tension. The boys would sit in each other lap, wands pressed against each other, forehead to forehead, arms entwined around the bodies, and move slowly forwards and backwards like a pendulum while looking into each other eyes, relaxed, breaths synchronized.

Jak immediately fell in love with the new position, for it allowed unprecedented level of intimacy. The clouds, or fields, or whatever, would seem to merge as they lazily advanced to the peak of sexual dalliance and became more relaxed with every swing. The feeling of bodies melting together also was stronger than usual; and Jak started to really like it, as there was nothing more intimate, more bonding him with the redhead than the sense of their foreheads merging into one, hands melting into their united flesh, and, at times, of their charged wands becoming one crystal that gave tremendous pleasure to both of them. Even the blue aura seemed magnified to the extreme; it appeared almost every time he and Daxter decided to rub against each other. First, a halo of the deepest blue appeared around Daxter face, and then it spread down the redhead's arms and reached him. At that point Jak understood what he was actually seeing – it was the field, the fuzzy, fluffy cloud always present around Daxter. Once the apocalypse hit him, Jak couldn't feel nothing but awe when looking at it.

All the interesting stuff, however, paled when, after about an hour into a slow going session, Jak saw how Daxter's face started to morph. Red and orange scales appeared all over his skin; eyes changed their colour from the light blue to the fiery red of his haircut; and the nose flattened. In a matter of seconds, Jak wasn't looking at a redhead teen anymore, but at some creature with the body of the human and the head of a snake. Jak felt a pang of panic, but he couldn't do anything about it, for he was laying in the threshold of pleasure; and before he could move away, Daxter rocked forward and opened his snake-like mouth, showing to the frightened blond long sharp teeth dripping with poison and a bifurcated tongue, red as the wound in the sky caused by the descent of the sun. As Daxter planted his lips on Jak's, the blond exploded. The usual shivering that appeared several seconds before ejaculation spread at first across Jak's skin, then filled his body, and invaded his field as well. It was the best thing Jak had ever experienced. If felt like he ceased to have a physical body, but was in fact made from the orgiastic energy that seemed to flow through the whole space of the room.

Back to ground zero, enraptured and dazzled, Jak opened his eyes, fearing the worst. Daxter, however, decided to be soft on his sanity, for he looked like he used to look: smiling, bright, overflowing with energy, somehow sparky, with a human face, not that of a snake from the deepest depths the forbidden jungle.

“Jak,” the redhead sighed with awe. “That was...I dunno what it was, but I swear you were horny.”

What?

Daxter brought his hands into fists, stuck out the index fingers, and brought them to his forehead. “For a moment there you had two goat horns sticking out your head...and the beard...well, shortly, right before going across the line I looked at you an' I swear you seemed to morph into a goat.”

That seemed to be a relief of some kind.

No matter how hard Jak tried to evade repeating the experiment, Dxater still persuaded him to try one more time, and then one more time again, and then again, and again. As a result of the redhead's persistence, Jak learned something about the nature of the hallucinatory events. Apparently, these hallucinogenic transformations were somehow related to the contents of his mind and his current map of the world – if he had been dreaming the previous night about going into the forbidden jungle, then Dax would morph into one of the critters from that place; if he had been feeling nostalgic thanks to the memories about the sea, the redhead would actually transform into a perfect copy of the sea priestess; and if he been thinking about Precursors, then the boy with the Sun in his head would gain an insectoid appearance – and, therefore, the hallucinations could be molded into forms most pleasurable for his sight. The newly made revelations led, of course, to further shenanigans, until Jak found the perfect image for the redhead and implanted it deeply into his head.

The experiences didn't pass without some consequences. Jak found himself feeling less and less like a chubby kid afraid of everything and more like Daxter. He even expanded the list of his most trusted persons by adding Keira, and now the mechanic girl was as important to him as Daxter, his uncle, or Samos. Jak felt like most of the stresses he had been carrying since the heavy, lead like city of darkness disappeared from his shoulder, and he could actually breath freer, feeling the chilly air passing through the trachea, the bronchi, the alveola, and rejuvenating him with energy. Jak couldn't even remember the last time breathing felt so ecstatic.

Most of all, all this sexual dalliance helped Jak to deepen his relationship with Daxter. It began with friendship, then changed into intense erotic romance, and finally reached something neither Jak nor Dax, or any other teenager in Sandover for that matter, could pinpoint definitely. Jak, though, liked to call it friendship, but it was obvious to him that what he had with Daxter was deeper, even deeper than the romance the rest of Sandover's youth was obsessed with.

The more Jak observed what other girls and boys and did and called love, the more he had a suspicion that they didn't know what they were talking about. If they were in love, then why they looked so damn asleep, drunken, and acted with hostility toward all who wasn't lucky enough to experience such gift?

With Daxter – hell, even thinking about Dax – made Jak feel like if her were enveloped by a flame of energy, with waves of shivers running up his face, making his hair stand up, and transforming his heart into a diamond on fire. And the world...it would suddenly look so beautiful, so perfect, as if a dragon flew above Sandover, enveloped the locale in his breath, and burned all the impurities away with his astral fire. The colours, the smells, the wind caressing against the skin – it felt so there, so right, so intense. It wasn't a hypnosis; it was a total explosion of the world around him, a lifting of the veil that separated the golden perfection of the world from the seer traversing the material realm eternally trapped in duality, an union with the invisible female architect who perpetually creates more beauty in the Universe. How could people in love not see this, but be in a state of semiconscious existence where the only desire was to rock the socks off with the aid of another human being without understanding that it all boiled down to an unconscious urge to spread life across time? Love couldn't be that. Love wasn't that cheap.

What about people? Jak, lost in the splendour of the world, exploding from happiness, looked at every inhabitant of Sandover, no matter how obnoxious, with warmth and a smile on the face. Now he understood how Daxter felt while interacting with other people. And why he seemed to infuriate them so much. It was incredibly irritating for the common folk, with their little problems, entranced in their little barely conscious world, to pour their derision on him when he simply couldn't be angered or embarrassed by their instructions and word of wisdom. He was literally too ecstatic to even allow a single twitch of regret, pity or anger because of some gibberish. And it definitely was easier to forgive and let go than to think upon the words, for it didn't allow Jak to become heavy like all the others and made him feel one foot above the ground, ready to go into a dance at any minute. How it was possible in this state, where everyone looked beautiful and perfect despite all the flaws, to even think something bad about another person, let alone say it out loud and laugh?

And the whole romance business, with all its flirting, gifts, currents of lust coming together and then receding in ways dictated by the local morals, seemed to Jak as distant from love as hate. Life in a village like Sandover brought him in contact with many animals and their ways of mating; and the more the blond observed the mating rituals of animals and that of human beings, the more they seemed to be the same thing – a hypnosis of the female into sexual submission. For Jak, who knew perfectly well that lust and Love were two different things, it was appalling to hear from the boys and girls riding the winds of lust that they were in love. If they were truly in love, not in a paroxysm of genital fever, neither the boy nor the girl would ever cared about going through rituals like giving flowers, inviting on dance at the local festivity, or going for a walk down the beach during full moon; and the girl wouldn't definitely care about choosing the one who looked the closest to the aggressive lurkers occasionally roaming around the village.

Love, as Jak learned, was like fire, and it never fit into any morally accepted rituals – it manifested as it pleased, burning every obstacle, artificial or natural, in its wake. Jak understood at the advent of puberty that his feeling toward the little living gold, as well as his enjoyment of their mutual sexual games, wasn't something the majority of Sandover people would easily tolerate, but he continued feeling and enjoying nevertheless; for love for Daxter was stronger, purer, and more real than anything else Sandover had to offer him.

At times, Jak even wondered if the poet who wrote the “Secret Garden” was right when declaring homosexual relationships of a higher nature than the casual stuff between man and woman; for every time he looked into the “loving” eyes of his peers, he saw no shine of love, no flame of awareness, no joy. They were only performing love as it was dictated in the contract about Sandover life. Since this oral social document said that male teens must love female teens in a specific way, and that female teens must respond in a certain way and only to certain male teens, the youth of course fulfilled the rules; and with time they would come to fulfill the rules and modes of manifesting love imposed on adults without questioning why it was like this, why they had to behave in such. After tasting the wine of Love, Jak knew that that kind of behaviour wasn't Love, but only a pretence of love, a game in which the players thought they expressed the noble feeling but in reality were just lying in order to get laid, not be alone, be as everyone else, survive, spread the genes, or to have someone to show their desire of power on.

Daxter, when he was in his philosophical mood, confirmed Jak's thoughts and fears.

“That's not love,” Daxter once commented on Keira's rant about how other girls of her age had boyfriends while she was alone. “That's fuckin', pure and simple. Trust me, I'm a guy, so I know what I'm talkin' 'bout.”

Keira smirked. “Oh really? How could you know something about love when I've never seen you with a girl.”

Jak went all tense. Keira was threading very dangerous waters, and if she would get an inkling about what's going on, then he and Dax are really screwed, because having sex with a boy and being in love with him at the same time was anathema in close knit rural communities. Yes, Keira proved to be a good friend over the years, but Jak wasn't still sure that she could be allowed to know the esoteric side of his life.

“I know what love is – that's why I'm alone, an' why everyone hates me.”

Jak's ears relaxed. Despite having the reputation of being extremely antinomian, Dxater had enough brains to keep Jak's secret hidden from other people. He would kiss the boy into oblivion later to show how he appreciated his silence.

“I thought everyone hates you because, well, you're a nuisance to them,” Keira said, looking guilty.

“They hate me because I'm not like them, you see? An' because my presence and what I do budges them out of their illusions, 'specially 'bout love.”

“And how do you budge people out of their illusions?” Keira asked sarcastically, left hand propped against the cheek.

“By being aroun' them. That's all.”

Keira lifted her eyebrows. “Really?”

“Let me explain. You see, people have a vivid imagination. They think bein' romantic is love, tryin' to nail chicks is love, havin' a child is love, livin' together an' sleepin' in one bed is love, and they really believe it's love. Love isn't like that. It's like a good friendship that slowly goes deeper and deeper. It's a gradual and constant process of keepin' a steady fire which affects your whole bein' step by step. You cannot rush into it. If you're rushin' it's not love; it's somethin' else, usually fear, lust, anger, desire for power or to prove somethin'. It's a process of discovery. But people prefer not to discover things. Teens think love is doin' nice things an' then fuckin' under the pyramids, an' they accept it once and for all, pushin' doubt deep down into their minds. That's why they look so empty and miserable, almost lifeless. They're not in love.”

Daxter paused and winked at Jak. The blond felt his heart jump into his throat. For standing so much on the edge and throwing hints about the thing going on between them, Jak wouldn't show his affection to the redhead later. Instead, once Keira would go away – she always left them at nine o' clock, for the mechanic girl didn't want to break the rules set out by her father lest he forbid all the connection with the only friends she had in this hamlet on the brink of the civilized world – Jak would throw Daxter off the cliff, as a reminder to keep homosexual jokes hidden away from the large population.

“Go on,” Keira said, eyes looking at the fires illuminating every street in Sandover on the occasion of summer equinox, the day when every youthful pair in Sandover had the right to “show love” in the shadows without fear of any kind.

“They may look happy, but deep inside they're miserable. They need to pretend to be happy so as to look better in front of community, but behind doors and in private they show how fuckin' miserable they are. Even if they confuse love with somethin' else, an' sincerely believe it's love, they know deep inside it's not. It's impossible to live without love – that's why everyone seems to be fucked up in the head. It's just a mad search for love. The booze, the pussy, the power, the kids...pets.”

“And how do you find love?” Keira asked, no more sarcastic, but deeply enthralled by the redhead's unusual insights.

Daxter smiled. “That's the most easy thing. You just examine yourself, explore your self, an' discard all the stuff that isn't love or that seems to block love. Believe me, you know deep inside what real love is and where exactly in yourself it's hidden, but you never listen to yourself.”

“Why?”

“Illusion is easier...an' socially acceptable,” Daxter giggled. “An' another thing is that once you start looking for love, the illusion you believed in for many years falls down, an' you see exactly how fucked up your life is, an' it's a hella pain in the ass living it, sufferin' through it, tryin' to go to the other side. Imagine livin' in sadness every day, feelin' like everythin' is meaningless and a lie – not a pleasant experience, an' it's more probable you'll give up, start drinkin', or kill yourself. Livin' in a world that seems nothing more but a bad play with every single actor just a lifeless doll is though.”

“That's...so sad...depressing,” Keira said.

“Well, you gotta dig the Earth if you want to find gold. The reason most people seem so empty and miserable is because they can't accept sufferin' always comin' with the search. Unless you're willin' to suffer while searchin' for gold, you'll never have it. Nothin' comes easy, 'specially if you were dumb enough to lose it in the first place.”

“Going back to the original question – how do you make people uneasy?” Keira asked, looking at the shimmering sea beneath them.

“By bein' in love,” Daxter restated his original answer.

“But I've never seen you in love with someone.”

Jak went once again tense. He looked at the redhead left to him, praying he wouldn't blabber too much; for Dax had the weakness of going into long streams of consciousness and accidentally revealing critical information.

“When you're in love, it doesn't really matter who you love. It's a general feelin', not an attraction to someone particular, y'know?” Daxter explained. “You feel good an' you just do things the way you feel like doin' them, an' you don't care at all about rules, reputation, expectations, stuff like that. In fact, if these things bother you, then you aren't really in love. That's why almost everyone seemed to hate me. I just remind simply by bein' here what it's like to feel love.”

“I don't get it. People fall in love with someone. Love is attraction toward someone else. You just want to be with that person and make him happy for the rest of the life,” Keira continued to argue.

“If you love, you will let go the person you love. Bein' together is good for some time, but then it becomes borin', a routine, and that's worse than death – you'll just see how day by the day life is seepin' away from the person you love. Just look at the elder couples. I wouldn't want to ruin everyone's life with somethin' like that. When friendship becomes a bore, it's time to let go, otherwise you'll destroy the person you love. That's how love works, well, at least for me.”

Without any outside interference, Daxter stopped talking; and the nocturnal silence fell on the three teens seeing atop a cliff, overlooking the lamps and bonfires set amidst the hills around the village. Jak looked at Keira, who seemed to be processing Daxter's musings at a deeper level than usual, and lifted the right angle of his mouth in a half smile. Dax seemed to talk too much at time, driving the listener into a state of sensory overload by words alone; however, there were cases when the stuff he said had an deep impact on the person. Jak concluded it was Daxter's in-your-face-attitude – along with a lack of qualities necessary for being qualified as “a guy of our male tribe” - that made him extremely unpopular among the local teenage male population.

Or maybe the reason truly was Daxter's “love?” Jak remembered how the guy made him feel uneasy in the beginning with all his energy literally overflowing from his being, charging everything around with pure electricity, trying to make angels out of the shells around him. It had been a challenging experience for sure, but Jak somehow made it trough, and, looking back at the road travelled, the blond saw it was incredibly beneficial. The redhead so much avoided by Sandover gave life to the base metal from another world, another time, and made the metal grow into the most beautiful flower in town.
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The red tongue of grace, the blue tongue of prayer