There is a box where Eoran Toriet keeps his sentimental possessions, a carved rosewood thing lined in red velvet. It is a jewelry box that Kasse Sejan stole at the first open air market the boys came across after they’d been deployed into Ossa proper. Kasse values this box in much the same way that Eoran does, but not for its contents: Kasse values it because it is evidence of the first time he made Eoran smile all the way to his eyes.
Inside, an item is missing. It is a glass body wrapped in a ten-spot meant for burning. There are prayers written all along its surface in lucky red ink: one from each of his parents and one from his brother, Kaden. Traditionally, these glass bodies are meant to take a person’s place in Orin, a little trick from Arsaiya that Varonian seems willing, at least for a short while, to indulge.
This is the first glass body the Toriet patriarch ever wrapped but it is not the last. It is for Eoran’s life. The Toriet clan has sent many glass bodies to the temple of Arsaiya since and they will keep sending them until their boy returns home.
In its place is a letter from a boy Eoran loves more than anyone in the world.
E:
I have your body.
Come take mine.
Find me in a quiet place
where you’re the only one who
can tell me to get off on this desk.
—K
Whenever the squad comes to rest at a place that affords them all the luxury of time, Eoran keeps somewhat of a routine. He’s collected many unseen things in that box, idle thoughts and contemplations, tears long since dried from moments when he misses his family the most. Eoran doesn’t pray, but he spends a great deal of time tracing over the box’s exterior, letting his fingers follow the ornate paths carved by some Ossan artisan he hopes is still alive. It’s like meditation, hypnotic and plodding. When he loses himself in labyrinthine ruminations much larger than himself, there’s only one face that ever breaks the haze of his reverie.
Eoran always looks for this box. He keeps a hawkish watch over it as though its contents are more practically valuable than sentimental. It is the first thing he sought out when he and Kasse were reunited with their packs after their time lost in the desert. It is the first thing he seeks out when he’s released from a briefing with their CO, their intel-oriented pair, and the new-to-him engineering sergeant supplanted in place of a spirit tragically lost.
His heart skips a beat and a half before he is able to properly digest the script of Kasse’s letter. That boy has always been so afraid of losing. Brint thinks training and time has taken it away from him, that experience has whittled his fear into something that is easier for the Toriet boy to swallow. The truth, however, is that he feels it so much stronger now, he’s just become better at hiding it. He tucks the letter back into the box—its home is there now, atop the tufted fleck of his second heart.
He finds Kasse in a quiet room, down the length of a silent hallway, tucked away in a sleepy building meant for concealing the business of officers. Eoran always comes when Kasse calls. He stands in the threshold of Brint’s office, chin dipped, eyes impossibly darkened by the shadows of his stern stare.
Kasse is a patient ambush predator, exploitative and opportunistic at the singularity lurking his labyrinth core. When Eo finds him, he is settled atop a filing cabinet, chainsmoking cigarettes like a lucky red dream, leaning on his scuffed elbows out that half open window pane. He has watched for an hour, vigilant since he left his bait. He watched Eoran arrive and look all ways before he passed through that building’s double doors, and then he waited still more. Now that his taunt has found its way back home, carried so blithe in the lightless barathrum of Eoran’s infinite black, Kasse is coy. He is too comfortable nestled amongst all his LT’s trophies and prizes, all the little objects Brint finds reminds him of his heart, of a life recognized in its living. Kasse takes another drag and ashes it out the window.
“I have your body,” he repeats without looking, even if he wants, more than anything, to see.
“You’re going to put it back.” Uncertainty is an exercise in cowardice and all the jovial subservience contained in the breadth of a request dies under the weight of Eoran’s fixed demand. He speaks like he controls the future; he speaks with confidence that time will yield to his insistence.
Eoran enters the office, but just barely. The door is pulled behind him, clicking shut nearly silent as if its sound is not worthy of interrupting the static distance between them. None of the trifles of this space matter—even that absconded with possession—because Eoran knows he is going to get his way. There are no questions. Questions have never existed in this microcosm of fury and its feral counterpart.
“Look at me when I’m talking to you,” he demands again, vision a line that leads him nowhere except to that haughty thing lounging, a smoke swathed treasure glimmering brighter than all the silver and gold dotted around this braggart’s trove. “You’re going to put it back.”
“Am I.”
It is not a request for clarification: it is a gilded jeer, a pretty maltreatment that doubts Eoran’s ability to make his desired reality so.
“I don’t know that I will.”
Insolent and derisive, his words are sharp in that abandoned quiet, that quiet abandon. Kasse is dampened by every objective in the room, harsh syllables absorbing like ghostscript quick and clean into the surface of meticulously organized desk and spartan wall, threadbare filigree rug and decaying hardwood floor. Still, he does not look—
he will politely refuse until he is forced.
The door is locked.
Eoran approaches with expediency. His fastidious step is a familiar replay now distorted, a warped melody that suffers through the punitive measure of his stride. It’s not the floor that creaks beneath him—those complaints belong to the file cabinet alone as he steps atop it and plants his boots beside the jutting curvature of his lover’s hips. The younger boy stands there, but only for a moment. He sinks to his knees like a guillotine in slow motion, mouton dilatory with its weightless blade as he straddles that miscreant’s defiance, as he maroons him between his legs.
Like every good draftsman should, he draws his contrasts carefully; his patience may be crueler than his dynamism. Eoran leaves that for Kasse to decide as he comes at him quick, snatching him by the hollows of his cheeks mid-inhale, TMJ tight. He yanks him back inside first, then pries the dwindling cigarette from between the adjunct’s lips and snuffs it beside him, ember mashed straight into the sickly tint of industrial shellac coating of the file cabinet’s roof.
Eoran has already told Kasse twice, and despite popular opinion, there are no charms in threes. His jaw is angled perfectly to make him see not only the boy looming over him, but the reality of his situation. This is not an effort to convince—
And yet Kasse remains intractable.
Kasse knows no masters, knows little of bent knees and bowed heads, howls at the moon with his gnashing teeth when others cower silent, refuses to wipe the blood from his maw. He stares back at Eoran with his grey eyes harsh in their barking peal of laughter, lips parted because he is held without consideration or bail.
He runs his tongue across his teeth in any case
to taste his last drag
to predict the taste of violence
in his lover’s roleplay kiss.
“Oh, are you mad?” the ghost taunts, gaze flitting to the side, careening dauntless off Eoran’s idée fixe path. “I must be so careless.”
“You put an awful lot of work into your carelessness.” Eoran pulls him by the mouth, turns that boy’s head make him live in the listing of his cliffside interest. He strokes his cheek with a gentle hand, tracing the bend of the jaw he just held up to the ear, which becomes his newest keepsake. “The floor must be more interesting than me. I can show it to you up close…”
The Toriet boy pushes himself up, thigh muscles straining in his unaided incline, but he doesn’t let go. He slides down to the floor and drags Kasse’s face with him, greedy child so irresponsible with his favorite doll manhandled like a rag in tow. Their ways down are always destined to be fraught with peril and Eoran lets his lover fend for himself. He lets him work out the calamity of his sacrification from the precipice of their former stoop once his trajectory is undeniable, once he’s been unseated from the lap of his paper-filled chaise, once all that’s left is mitigating potential damage.
“If you’re going to keep this up, I’m going to need a safeword.”
A clock sits high on the wall over the door ticking the second gently by, quartz cast voyeur to what will brutally be.
Kasse is sliding to the floor slow as honey, slick as mercury, loathe to the obedience that makes him nothing more than an unruly automaton. His shoulder blades are scraping the front of every rusting nameplate, every loose drawer pull on his way down to Eoran’s substrata level, his consent pooled somewhere in the cracks of those floorboards oily with his better sense, tart as his haughty acquiescence, bitterbark and unashamed. He answers too quick, like he knows what he’s got coming, like he knows exactly what he’s courted. He’s been waiting his whole life for this monster to bury him.
“The time,” he says, unafraid yet still affected by the quake. His chest rises and falls with his autumn yielding, throat exposed and ready for the blade when his knees hit ground. “The safe word is the time.”
Eoran rounds Kasse’s head in a marching step, crescent-footed, moonbow path. He watches his boy with a keen-eyed disdain, scours over all those contemptible features that conspire to make him so seditious, then he looks away. The bloodwright’s arc leads him to the window, where his hands reach out to slide it shut and prevent any of their noise-to-be from escaping.
“You don’t have to be so difficult,” he tells that creature so caged, voice dim in the possibilities of that architecture, mid-way through some seven steps of death ever evolving—office to abattoir, abattoir to charnel house, charnel house to ossuary. When he returns he grabs Kasse by the scruff of his shirt and drags him across the fading polish of the pine heart floor. He drops him next to Brint’s desk, a sturdy thing that is still visibly worn; a relic of old corporate Amstead repurposed to live its last days in the war zone that is Ossa.
“Get up.” He is barking now. Eoran observes the desk’s top and its small collection of items. He scatters a nameplate to the floor with a wide sweep of his hand. A paperweight follows behind, sending a loud thud to echo in the room as it collides with the ground. It is soon joined by the small stack of papers it was holding, then a partially full inbox, a pen set, a stapler, a framed picture that rattles in miserable defiance.
Kasse registers, in some eclipsed part of his crocodile brain, that he’ll have to crawl across the floor to reset this scene later, but it doesn’t matter. That is not now. That is far away.
For the first time today, Kasse obeys.
He draws himself to his full height, two inches Eoran’s superior when he is at full attention (only one when he is slouched) better-than chin held hubris high to breathe above his anathema’s blackwater flood. He looks down his nose at his lover turned antagonist, lashes obscuring his quicksilver gaze as his method’s ploy overtakes the narrative. He succumbs to a game that begins now:
at 2214 hrs.
“Fuck you,” he spits like widow venom from that recluse jaw, real and raw and necrotic behind the velvet lilt of his troublemaker mouth. He does his best to maintain his character, but can’t help but snark an eyetooth grin when he adds: “…sir.”
“You should be so lucky.” Eoran speaks like he means it, as though these words aren’t a weaponized farce meant to make his headstrong lover bleed in the most expeditious way possible. He is dignified in their disparity. That boy has lived many lives in those features, many lies meant to mislead or steer him away from a treacherous situation. This time is only slightly different—he is running headlong into danger. He is wallowing in the acerbic mire of Kasse and his proximity, he is holier than thou even in the base monotony of clearing off a surface. His posture says he’s too good for any of this, he tilts his chin up as if he actually believes it.
When Eoran returns to Kasse, his hands are immediately at his waist. He is ravaging a body in search of another body; he is searching for a trick of a corpse in a haunted minefield whose tangibility is sometimes merely a trick of the light.
He doesn’t need to remove items of clothing to do a search and yet there he stands, fingers fondling folds whose depths are much shallower than the time he spends palpating them. He sifts through pockets and bends and hollows and makes quick work of the barriers that keep his corrosion away from the fragility of skin. He leaves that boy’s pants undone and slides his palms beneath Kasse’s shirt, a passing sojourn in luxury. This tenderness is necessary. It will soon be tested against the moment that follows, when Eoran whips the back of his hand across that beautiful face, those cheekbones so splendid, that stare that just earned its colors of discipline.
“Try that again.” Eoran wonders if the words will taste different this time.
Kasse glimmers in the dim night and lashes out with a snarl. He falls against the edge of the desk, bent at the waist with his hand to the place where Eoran burns across his cheek, incandescent with his wounding blush. He is so much smarter than he was before. He hangs his head even though his eyes never leave Eoran’s cruel beauty, that lowbrow mongrel enamored by the marvelous highbrow disinterest that keeps him captivated, angled up tight to anticipate his keeper’s every move. He is feral now, stripped of his hard-won humanity by a single backhand to the face.
“Fuck you,” he growls low. His hands are tethered to his side, bound and grasping—stress tense open, white knuckle closed. He is holding back his instinct’s kneejerk desire to retaliate. He has no idea if he could even do it: he loves that face too much to let his bed of violence twist it askew. “Oh—” he laughs then, viper mouth swallowing his sullen struggle whole when he smiles. “You think you’ll find it, don’t you, you poor fucking boy.”
“Just checking,” Eo clarifies, “To prevent collateral damage. I’ve already told you what’s going to happen…”
He is magnetized to Kasse’s ricochet, drawn to his defiant sprawl. Eoran thinks personal space is a reward for good behavior, and he has yet to see any thus far. He pushes Kasse’s shoulder to make him sit on the edge of that desk, then wedges himself into the split of the ghost’s legs. He takes those death grip hands capped with the pallor of their strain and places them at his own waist. That callous majesty wraps himself in the bones of his tameless creature, he courts him when those grey-sky eyes are seeing red.
Eoran is sweet to the fire of his former self. He leans in to line the scarlet echo of his hand in affection, he wants to taste that boy’s skin only after it’s been subject to the brutality of himself, only after it wears his own vicious marking. Eoran holds Kasse by the neck, but it is a gentle noose, a lax caress. He finishes his thought at that ear earlier possessed.
“You already know how this is going to end.”
He wears that person-skin so well when he gives in to his lover’s captivity, pacified for the sweetest breath of reprieve. He pulls his navigator against him, hard and fast, like this day was like any other day—like his affection isn’t a bait and switch lie that reacts to a catalyst, bears a brittle prize, then reaps nothing but consequence. When his lips touch down, he is starving, greedy when he drinks in that body heat.
Even now, he is the avalanche.
Even still, they are trapped.
But Kasse—oh, Kasse is no captive: he is wild.
He digs in hard when he believes he is owed. He leaves behind a bloodbruised claim, temporary keloids in four-strike stripes from kidney to groin, predator grin craving the sharp-set sound of his lover’s surprise, aural evidence of his tit-for-tat abuse. How he stray dog begs to know he can affect this world, how he prays to confirm his very existence in unbidden yelps from deep in his warden’s pristine, heartless chest.
“Tell me how it ends,” Kasse purrs, soft as danger even when he pushes his every temptation away by the hips, unruly and disobedient and begging for retaliation. He is glinting like a knife, eyes a stiletto edge that promise a one way trip to the ICU. “Tell me what you think you can make me do.”
Perhaps Kasse is unduly rewarded, perhaps he earns more than he asked for. Eoran’s sound is a paltry and contained whine wrapped up in the jewelry box of his throat. His voice is high-pitched on an inhale and foreign to the rigid structure of words. This is pure feeling unscathed, a confirmation of reality reluctantly satisfied. Eoran’s teeth are clenched in his backward step, masseter flexing in a subtle shift along his delicate jaw, lips a flat line that deny the hadal depths of his scorn—and yet
his eyes
are
inclement
or
are they in love?
Is there a difference if
one is the product of the other?
“I’ve already told you.” He is either freezing or burning.
Eoran returns with the advantage of a head start; he returns in a threefold sharp recoil of all the goading his lover has poured into him. Eoran is a masterful culmination of force, he is spry and knows how to throw around his weight. He is small and this institution that houses him has trained him to go for the proverbial throat.
He is one—his body’s collision strung through the manipulation of his gravity.
He is two—his hands like claws that grip the musculature of Kasse’s shoulders and tug hair back and back and back until that boy’s skull introduces itself to the clouded varnish of the desk.
He is three—his lips violent, his teeth bared. His tongue invasive in his bloodbath kiss, his annihilative adoration.
Kasse is a mess when he catches Eo’s velocity, all bloodlust canines and scrambling tines fighting for a hold. He responds to his lover’s foxhound mouth in the only way he knows how, impulsive and so breathless when pressed to violence:
he bites his lip till he tastes blood,
kisses the wound in recoil,
a softly sussurant apology
despite the whorl of their quarrelling
livid and alive above him, split across his body
like he is nothing more than an obstacle to be ridden.
“I’ll cut this moment into your hide so you can’t escape my marauder memory,” the ghost so well-caught huffs between their collisions, impetuous and reckless in his seething pit of serpentine threats. Something broke in that feral boy when he felt his lover’s knuckles crack across his cheekbone and now he is a writhing howl of hatred, a trembling wreck in the shadowy shape of something that tastes like love. “I’m gonna break your ribs one by one till you can’t breathe, can’t even wheeze my name—you glorious piece of shit, fucking hit me again—”
His hips angle up unbidden. Kasse is lost to Eoran’s game.