Eoran sat alongside the blaze of a rock-encircled fire, pitch eyes combing over the delicate and foxed pages of an old notebook he had found near the skeletons huddled by the darkness of the cavern’s exit. He stripped down to his skivvies long ago and made a mat from the assembled bits of his military uniform—it was crunchy from sweat and dirt, thick weave fabric uncomfortably stiff even after having been dunked in the water of their hideaway’s pool during first contact.
A handful of days passed since the pair of stranded soldiers found daylight beyond the void. They were in a better position now overall: stomachs less grumbly courtesy of Kasse’s superior hunter-gatherer skills, minds less addled and unwound by the cruelty of time now that they had a reasonably secure place to rest their heads and catch up on lost sleep. They were warm and functional, meaty granules swaddled in a tellurian sieve. Still alone though, far away from the camp they had been stolen from and any destination that was considered to be within some extended reach on their blood-marked pieces of map. Things, however, did not feel as pressingly grim as they were before. Even though a lesser pair of men had failed in an era ahead of them, Kasse Sejan and Eoran Toriet were trained to survive. So, survive they did.
The flicker of the fire swayed on the uneven walls of the cave. Shadow and shade crept in a ghastly two-step around the silhouette of the studious boy, circling him and their collection of goods and sundries of the dead, now more complete with the addition of the remnants of a jackrabbit’s picked-over, flame-baptized carcass. The smoke from the agitated embers eddied up and around, but it did not stay in the enclosure. Kasse had taken care of them in that aspect too, saved them from the throes of slow poisoning and its brother-in-arms suffocation.
When Eoran flipped the page of the notebook, a letter tumbled from the collapsing binding. He picked it up and drank in the extended Ossan syllabaries contained therein. The engineering sergeant was silent apart from the rustling, had been for quite a while. The sound of scorching sediment and yet-to-be petrified wood collected from the desert wilds made a sympathetic hum in time to the gentle lapping of mineral-packed water on the other side of him. Eo found it easy to focus on any scrap of information he could find in that dome of Earth, not because the scene was genuinely meditative—but because he was so fucking bored.
Kasse, on the other hand, was perched on a rock he’d rolled over to the mouth of the avalanche, facing it as though he could interrogate it.
He placed his hand in and it felt normal. Out, nothing changed. In again, longer now.
Just the insidious entropy of those night-cooled atoms slowly sapping his body heat.
“Eo,” he called. If Eoran was bored, Kasse was dead. He couldn’t read Ossan that well, so he didn’t even get to have a fucking book. He spent his time foraging, hunting, dragging back things he found in the desert. Relishing the solitude. But now, Kasse had decided he was doing to decipher this rock that kept trying to kill them every time they passed through there. “C’mere. I wanna try something.”
“Coming—“ Eoran said with an inclination of his chin in the general direction of Kasse’s voice. He finished the page before he began to move, folding the letter back badly to mark the place he’d left off in the dead man’s meanderings.
When Eo arrived at the other boy’s side, it was clear he made very little effort to put himself back together. His pants were poorly bloused into his boots; half-laced paracord wrapped like a non-committal noose around his ankles.
“Have you been over here this whole time?”
“I’ve been in and out a few times, just trying to figure things out.” That soldier turned investigator, in the face of way too much free time, had aimed his laser focus on their safety and comfort—the primary obstacle being their way in and out of their newfound home. He rose to greet Eoran when he arrived, pants slung low and ribs stark beneath the sharp weave of his muscle.
Taking the other boy’s hand, Kasse’s features were impish.
“Wanna help?”
“Yeah,” Eo replied, looking from the knotty wall of solid-seeming stone to Kasse. “Sure.”
Trepidation lingered in his voice, but it was only because the passage had been such a profound experience previously. Briefly he considered that he might need something more than the thin shirt covering his upper half, but didn’t know if any of that really mattered. The earth had its own needs; he figured there was nothing his comparably minuscule body could do to stop it from ravaging him again, taking his warmth and consciousness into the heart of its belly.
“How are we doing this?” He asked, giving Kasse’s hand an affectionate squeeze.
Turning to face the other soldier, Kasse had the air of the gallows, hangman’s knot between his shoulder blades.
Never letting Eo go
he would die before he let him go
Kasse traced him out, 18C’s
coaxing body the weapon
that subdued the wraith,
rendered him compliant
in every whim–beloved
hyoid a switchblade
clavicle straight razor
humerus the ferrule
of his lash, every
fingerprint a barb
rendering his touch
an ache & a scar.
Wrapping his hand around his lover’s wrist, he stared him in the face as he forced their arms into the avalanche–together.
say you hear me
taste my every word
say you feel my breath in your lungs
like drowning in tandem
say you can trace me through your veins
my ghost infecting your blood
come on please Eo
please please tell me you hear me
listen for me please hear me
say this works like I need it to
i need you to haunt
my every last gasp
tell me I can have you
whenever i need to take
you completely and utterly apart
no matter who’s watching
watching
watching
watching
Watching
watching
watching
watching
w a t c h i n g
y o u
watch
me
| Struck by the searched Kasse’s be doing in this gaze, as he always within; trying to whether he should seemed to linger
Eoran was trying,
He relaxed in the
But he didn’t
What was he |
again&again i k hedoes
u s t |
residual energy of their breach again, Eoran’s eyes expression for any clue as to what he was supposed to situation. He was a willing captive under that bladed was, trying to make sense of the fluctuations held separate violence from velvet; trying to determine engage with or disarm the cataclysm that always therein.
but his focus was a fickle creature, nomadic and
stasis of manifest disintegration and his gaze grew
know what to do.
supposed to be doing again? |
e f l
l eg i u r a a y
t h c y
k
me.
but then…
But then,
oh.
An echo in the darkness
oh.
A sonance in his psyche.
Susurrant, spectral, sly.
oh.
did you h e a r all of that?
h e a r h e a r?
h e..ar.d you yes
yes every word yes
yes
“I will flay you alive.”
That boy was a killer, an arsonist
sparked by his lover’s unconscious
the thoughts that ran amok
spider legged and spindled
askitter in the cold, wet dark.
“—fray you like a noose,
fight you for your life—”
Tore their interlacing from the medium
that suspended their hypothesis apotheosis
formalin figurines postured and preened
by heroin teeth, bled the bruise asunder
oh, every touch a stuttered r-r-repeating
“—feel me feel you—”
slammed their corpses into the wet ground
his resuscitated saliva accepting
the terms in their surrender
unfuckingdone
incomplete
without his
dissection
perused
“Eo, just fuck me.”