Eoran was right:
Kasse shouldn’t just go around saying
shit he didn’t know the meaning of.
idiot mongrel
mangy cur
rabid and ill-bred
beaten till the low sound of growling
was the secondhand hum of a life still living
an arpeggiated harmony weeping beneath his harpsichord pulse.
a master’s cadenza improvised through the twining of bone
the quantum meanderings of atomic flesh
he was electron fallible, guilty gutted
unreliable in his own narration
a tumbling facsimile prayer-caught in
a brambling deadfall
piezo struck, dogbane sprung
a mist net tangle of second-hand words and therapeutic ignorance
how could this be human when he felt so inhumane on the recoil?
vice grip folly and stray dog fear
flayed his water from his rime.
he begged a shotgun blast
through his spinebone
begged for a tandem
hobbling to focus
the spiraling he
found in place
of a mine— he,
folie inapropos
weirship aux
rasen aver
sieve
sew
sou
gh
ed
so
if
i
oh
I
—eo
eo I—
“—think I—”
—understand,
oh gods, I think I—
“—know, i know, i—”
—i fucking know.
he, a phantom panting
wrapped ‘round his lover shaping wire
tight, maimed those bonsai limbs
till they relented
till they scarred
till they held
his shape
alone.
“—fuck,” he shuddered on borrowed air
struck dumb by his wracking, a trembling
mess of spasms, tensions, retentions that
lured his lover’s continued affection, his
continued longings. “I… I get it,” he continued,
near silent to keep their space clandestine.
“There’s no me without you anymore, is there?”
he understood:
no one else would ever do.
Are you asking me?
Because I can’t say.
Mind frenetic through the rabbitpaced heartrace of his erosion, the chop of Eoran’s breath worked in harmonies complementary to his disruptive pulse. It unfurled in stuttered gusts down the slope of his lover’s neck, spilling humidity along his shoulder into silk, and then, into sand.
Fuck—hold on, I—
He twisted and hummed, careful, so cautious to not betray the coupling that had filled their bright-eyed mid-night recess. The bloodwright dislodged himself from Kasse’s depths, unwound the precarious assemblage of their limbs pressed into a dilapidated structure—bones and bareness, bodies a knot of needs they’d come to prioritize over anything else like
clothes to keep them safe in an attack, or
rest to keep them vigilant in the coming hours.
That question isn’t really for me to answer. Not when you say it like that.
Eoran made a home for himself in his lover’s arms. He slipped sidelong and partially atop that boy, pulled his limbs around him and relished the aftermath of their effort, awash in the gentle effluvium of his delight. The navigator brushed his hand over Kasse’s stripped hip, over the thin skin of his protruding bones in tender strokes; with an affection double defined by his every word brought to life.
You know how I feel.
You’ve changed the way I think about a lot of things.
We’re together right now and it makes me happy.
For me—
“There’s no me without you. There’s no one else for me. You’re everything. I feel it in my bones and I know it’s my truth.” Meant only for him, 18C gave the words to 18B’s ear.
“There’s no me without you,” Kasse whispered, returned, an echoed repeating originating from his own runaway thoughts, runaway mouth, runaway boy all preening and drowsy. “I—” love you.
That vagrant boy bit down on his grin, his closed mouth smile shuttered behind his open mouth kiss.
“There’s no one else for me. You’re everything. I feel it in my bones and I know it’s my truth.” Kasse was a murmur of satisfaction, toothy and charming and so in love
dangerously
eviscerated—
The ghost would do anything to remain dancing at the end of Eoran’s hook.
“I know these words,” he confirmed, comforted his lover to spite the infractions his reflexive mouth had already made. He ran his hands up his lover’s side in an apology unsaid. “I know what they mean. And I mean them back.”
“Okay.” Eoran’s acceptance was unquestioning. He was quiet and yielding. He was placid and reverent. “Are you tired?”
Of course I am, he hummed his hymnal into Eoran’s nervous system, kissed his impressions into his sternum. I have to get dressed and fall asleep before Locke gets back down here. Or maybe being pantsless will discourage him? Do you think that’ll work?
Just making sure I did an adequate job. Eo grinned. Yeah, put your pants on. I think Brint gives you a lot of leeway on the being undressed front but, even for him, dick fully out is probably crossing some line.
“Adequate,” Kasse scoffed as he shifted around to grab his pants, kicked off to the gusset of the sleeping bag. He left his shoes there in their stead, struggling to get into both underwear and pants without slamming his head into the underside of the vehicle, immediately alerting Brint to tomfoolery or scorpions or both. “You know exactly how good a job you fucking do.”
Threaded into his fatigues, the ghost arced to pull the pants up over his hips, glancing over to see if Eoran watched his cramped-quarters dressing with the same interest he exhibited for his desperate undress.
His attention was, of course, rapt. Eoran observed his lover in shades of darkness, his silhouette cut from the night in a stygian bend, black matter untouched by the moonlight beyond their vehicular canopy where the light borrowed from a long-gone day pooled silent upon the sand in a silver-edged beryl. His grin diffused into an idle smile, and his smile slowly faded into a lack thereof.
With reluctance, Eoran repaired the disarray of his own uniform, wriggling form betraying their secrecy only in the stifled chime of his belt coming back together. He hated that time would pull him away from the other boy, hated that he couldn’t curl up and sleep with him, that he would have to go entertain their CO with idle chatter.
“I hope you sleep well,” the bloodwright said as a means of delaying all that was inevitable, too attached to the tail end of that moment on the way out to yet look forward to those which would follow.
“Sleep, for now,” Kasse mumbled, flattening out. Fly still undone, he laid his arm out like a welcome mat, an invitation to his embrace. “We’ve still got time. Thirty, forty minutes. It’s not much but…”
One eye cracked, 18B offered 18C a grin.
Eoran returned to his lover. Found his skin and slipped right beside.
The kiss he gave Kasse was a preemptive farewell, meant to suffice when the sanctity of their seclusion was vandalized with another’s eyes.