Eoran knows this moment is more significant than any other because of all the things the pair constantly talk about, the future in any peaceful context is rarely one of them. They are of different mindsets and it carries over into bickering that sometimes grow into arguments about where they’re going. When Eoran talks to Kasse he is open. He was raised vigilant but stays positive that they can either surmount or outwit whatever comes of the malicious turnings the world has in mind for them. When Eoran listens to Kasse, he hears a lot of exhaustion, he knows that this street-raised boy is always running, always trying to get ahead of the next successive calamity.
There is significance to their every interaction. In every glance spared between their monochrome visions, there is an underworld of secrets, there are worlds upon worlds of their own construction fully inhabited, shared spaces and safe places.
Eoran is twenty-one years old and has entrenched his making into this boy he is adoring so deeply that the possibility of spending any extended amount of period in another’s company is entirely repulsive.
He doesn’t think about it.
It is an avenue he will never follow.
If his eyes, by chance, are drawn to any other face, all he sees is a dead end. He has been intimate with a handful of others, but this was before he met that grey-eyed ghost and these relationships have never been this intense. Eoran knows that he will never feel the same about another human being. He hasn’t questioned it so much as definitively come to accept as much as fact.
Eoran is so in love with Kasse.
Eoran is so in love.
His stare is cloudy and he is struggling to maintain his composure. This moment is heavy with an eternity’s weight and he is trying to not be crushed by it. Eoran hates this war and the army they serve, he loathes Amstead’s scorched Earth campaign of subjugation, but it has brought him to Kasse, and with Kasse is the only mindframe that has ever really portrayed him succinctly happy.
“I—” Eoran trembles, spine arched as he buries his face into the adjunct’s side. “I—”
“Don’t stop,” Kasse begs in return. He laces their fingers criss-cross and stitch, palm to palm in his commitment’s obverse supplication: Kasse is now the body unyielding and Eoran is the ghost that possesses him.
Don’t ever
fucking
stop.
Kasse has grown tired of restrictions, he tires of obstruction. His clothes are a second thought he doesn’t want to think anymore, an afterimage he molts from his sharpened limbs like a too-tight skin for the sake of the freshly proximal. Disentangling himself from the cloying pose his prior role required him maintain, backhand bruise forming in crosshatch ignominy across his cheek, diffused along his brow, he pulls that boy beneath the gasoline waves lapping at their waists, their thighs, their throats. His blood is pooling in a puddle of petrol color, but he doesn’t seem to mind: he settles into his lover’s shuddersobbed rhythm, twisting at the waist to pull him close and betwixt his contorted maim,
oh, into the atrocity he’s become unmade.
he always pulls
corrupted martyr
to quisling saint
so he can pray directly
into that cathedral ear, intimate
in his every synapse. here, he prays
to be attained, he prays he is
final, prays he is Eo’s terminus. he
is his terminal whispers, a coy desperation
in thrall, but he makes no sense. the words
he wills aren’t words at all, they are all simply
noises, a contrite mimicry of human language
slipshod built of brittle sotto voce animal weepings.
he is wrapped around a simple fervent refrain:
“I—ah, fu—c-k, I love you,” the ghost completes the navigator’s sentence, completes his thought, completes his heart, completes and completes and completes till he knows he will be nothing but ashes when they are apart. He is the beginning of his day, the sun at its zenith, the last thing he wishes for when he falls asleep. This is his; no one else will do. “I love you.”
“I love you,” Eoran sighs
in soft disintegration,
de-sense & elation, he
moans against the etiolation
of atomic catastrophe clutched
in his quivering hands.
He leans away and pulls his lover’s legs apart.
Eoran situates himself back between them; he
yanks Kasse to him by the hips in a sabered
incline while his night watch eyes stare down at
that ghost in all his bareness, stripped to skin and
bearing bone, his beautiful arrangement of
electromagnetic sprawl, hypnotizing sollicker on
the dreamy sway of moonsmeared lacquer.
He is reverberant in a polycyclic round—Eoran knows
he does not have to touch that boy when they are
coinciding to make him howl his favorite song, but
he does this anyway, matches his own threadbare
meter in kinds—kinda slow, kinda fine, sumptuous in
the slipway of his kindest mind.
He stumbles along the roadside of their hitchhiker breathing
bridge over the swirling fantasy of an oil slick swamp
asphalt to nowhere always ending in hardstop fatality
he is mist on moorland, a carpet of fog,
dense and disastrous, mustard gas, marigold
creeping oft and on, stranglehold. his suffocation
comes in many faces and this one is serene, restorative, lean,
528hz in mensuration steadily purring: ut re mi fa so la—
he is solmizating sacred syllables in slithering discomposure
along the relief of his universe’s ghastly edge
his thrust is a threshold
his threshold is replete in
thalposis eoran has
come
apart
seam-ripped and
spilling forth
spilling filth
from his lips
cleaved by his
clever carnifex.
His world is spinning.
He is letting it be unspooled.
“Fuck—” Eoran fumes, ash body coctile in its brimstone recokning. “Gods, Kasse, fuck—”
“—G-gods, please, a-a—ah—”
kasse is drinking air. kasse is swallowing glass.
this is where I am made,
this is where you carve me, he is screaming in between
from worthless sandstone to precious doll.
this is where you preserve me,
this is where I make you mine, he cries in layers,
this is where you take my nothing
and make me fucking everything,
to see how much you can take,
to see how long I will last.
“—say—a-ah, s-say, say—”
ceiling to floor,
ceiling to floor.
if he is starving in Eoran’s arms
if he is diagnosed with some parorexic disorder
if he can survive on cum and ink alone
if he claws and he scratches
if he is no better than
mongrel, hyena, piranha
if he eats what he kills
if he kills what he eats
if he arches & arches & arches until his
spine forgets the memory of the desk
if he digs new valleys into the wood with
his shoulderblades the plow
if his heels hook
if his song goes slack
he is merely succumbing, a
victim to that solfege siren
call for response:
ti la sol fa, mi la sol fa
he sings like he’s dying
gasping for death in his
executioner’s arms.
fa sol fa, fa mi sol
kasse lets go.
he, deadbolt ripped apart,
his locks crowbar pried,
left completely ajar,
made vulnerable,
wide open.
all that i crave, all of it is you.
i don’t want to be anyone
to anyone but you—
he can’t stop shaking. he is sweat slicked,
dripping, hypothermic, clinging like he’s got blood
on his teeth, like he can’t be blamed for his current state,
like he’s not responsible for the things he might do
in their sobbing wake when
all the threats
all the pleas
all the sighs
the growls
the howls
the curses
fall away
when the ache
dies out.
he has the thin film of a smile trickling from the corner of his grim mouth,
a bleak ardor draining saltwater unblinking from his pale eyes.
I want you to be my last words
Eoran is standing, still
statuesque and stunned
breathing hard, heavy
chest rising and falling
like a lined fish drug
onto the peaceful brink
of their aftersex shore
and left to spent its
last moments in the
crashing waves of
that paradise.
He is sunbasked and starving.
He is sated and smothered.
The navigator settles in a stutter, offset heartbeat caught in his rasping throat. He crawls atop Kasse and runs his thumb, reverent and enraptured, through the crystal dew of their after-storm sea trailing down his cheek in a gnarled descent. He places his palm flat and still on the remnants of his violence staining skin, brings himself to that boy’s mouth like it’s impossible for him to ever leave it alone.
“Are you okay?” Eoran’s unsilences his afterglow exaltation in a whisper. His kisses move from mouth to castigated cheek.
kasse is incapable of answering, not with word or his amalgamation thereof. he and his wildling scrape at linguistics are lyrics heard once and repeated back wrong. he’s rife with misspellings, errored code, predisposed to a coquette whimper when he’s crying wolf into his captor’s mouth. he distracts his boy with his nipping maw when he strays toward his cheek, corrects his path along the flank, surrounds him; he’s still hungry even when he’s just been consumed.
he’s always so hungry,
ribs jutting from his arch
like he’s been fucking deprived.
“—m’fine,” he concedes faux weak, sugaring his anguish kiss that only grows deeper, tying up that bloodwright tongue in desperate ambuscade knots.
he is a hopeless thing
so inclined to his
addictions.
Still, Eoran presses and pulls. He wraps an arm around that boy’s waist and rests a forearm flat on the desk beside his head. His draping is not necessarily meant as a reversion to reinforcement, but 18C does have that thief surrounded. The boy is naturally gifted with a good memory. Sometimes it is difficult for him to forgive and forget, even when distracted.
“Are you going to put it back?” He asks then, making full use of the fresh advent of query. Reluctance colors Eoran’s uncommitted retreat from Kasse’s scheming teeth in drab shades of practicality. He stares down at his rebel in disrepair, fixed and fond, coal-soaked eyes moving only in millimeters to trace the fusion of haunted geometries that shape that boy’s face.
“If I say no are you gonna come for me again?” That fucking minx is an insatiable cavalier threat, his words curling at the ends ‘round a creaking feigned hurt. He tilts his head back, eyes flitting up to the clock above the door. It is 2315hrs, but he does not say the word, will always refuse to say the word.
He digs his nails gently into Eoran’s back, right above his sacrum, traipsing the soft slope of his stern anatomy. He’s looking up like a dare tainted lovelorn, like his heart will break if he escapes.
Eoran grins in Kasse’s cunning phrasing, however his voice double-crosses his amusement. Once again he is dire consequences. He is hazel switch-happy, whip-lick sharp on the lavish bend of his lover’s clavicle nipped in grave warning.
“If you say no, I’m going to make you scream out your knowledge of every word until there is nothing left except yes, until all you know is yes.” His octaves are declining. Eoran lets Kasse keep track of the time and starts their row anew.