| to him, it was everything all things, alight—tails his moments alive, persistent pernicious, pervasive boy trapped against infinity |
it was nothing broken and empty—heads lots cast asunder, chance tempted, fate a tempest in the stillness of their crypt |
to be swaddled in night held in the hands of a city seeping death through its dust-stroke veins down dead-end alleyways |
| to be disallowed the luxury of his longform farewell like an eternal soliloquy lingering at the back of his throat gutterhymn, grumblegasp |
eoran faltered a nightingale suffocated on the melody of his own song notes dismayed, shatter-splayed between opposites, his abandon |
movement restrained court-dance captive on the edge of his fingers precision-hearted caress a slow tremble in hidden kingdom halls |
This isn’t exactly ideal,
| tongue sweet even in his languid retreat, spitlace wasted, grace plastered in spaces between lips where shadows wandered in a dark imparting |
his eyes turned down, distracted by depravity expertly miming false modesty upon his sweet facade his liar’s aspect |
his hands held in stranglehold, that boy’s mess of molecules and ricochet theory close to his own, embers torching volumes of his matchbook touch |
| funeral dressed he wore the night in stygian mourning, dim perigee breaking all the lines of his reality against the maths of his lover’s gravity |
in a motion quick upon the butterfly of his pelvic grip, he made kasse’s hips move forward, cliffside catch necessary for release |
eoran pulled that boy down from his pulpit, feet to floor on his knees before dynamic subservient, filth contorted into an act of consecration |
but I’ll do the best I can.
| soft song in his descent divine that boy teased him to a point was always on the verge of taking all his points too far |
to live like this against him jade-bodied, spring-strewn tide velvet, verdant, vibrant, vafrous between their meeting eyes |
to die hand in hand starborn and soon surrendered cadaverine lilies wilting white dwarf chrysanthemum |
| ritualistic in his ceremonial disrobing, he prepared the body ripped apart the exocarp to get at the flesh beyond milky soft, madid sweet |
he loved him in all his violent beauty, when the air was naught but the bite of ozone welkin sharp, cloudburst clear thunder rolling in the distance |
inhale brisk along his lover’s incline eoran seemed comfortable to blow all his chances here, muffled mouth full shameless hollowcheeked by his lax jawline |
he was a minefield
sown for his apocalypse
mined for his softened sighs
his mind all
wax and wane
warp and weft
sturm und drang
a bleak tremor of corrosions.
he was a biofouled response
neglecting efficient arrosion
in favor of his lover’s prime repast:
hyoid stutter, hiccup & rasp
every swallowed confession
salt cured, sugared glace
in his smokehoused body
preserved for a time when
all words were wanting—
save the ones jarred and
lodged deep in Kasse’s
diaphanous throat:
that 520 Eoran hadn’t yet managed to hear returned.
oh my gods, oh
my fucking gods
that mouth.
Eoran had always been the better of the pair. He was a master of rendering Kasse to nothing but strips of skin he flayed his fucking self, revealed his every flaw in his thousand cut swan song harmony. Omophage boy with his jaw so relaxed, gag reflex tamed till domestic, the navigator made bait of him, made him a worm: mindless save his begging, save his akinetic squirm.
Kasse’s tensions always got the better of him, his poor experience in rapid transaction a lock he couldn’t quite pick apart. Idiot mongrel, too wild to keep his food aggression at bay, too feral to even know any better. 18B was a slave to his oral fixation, impossibly tense, carnivore teeth always nipping when he was too eager to please, too diligent in his efforts to quench their codependent thirst.
Stay,
oh fucking
stay with me—
With those fingers tripwire laced along his lover’s vertebrae, the edges of his clavicles, acromion, coracoid, Kasse wound his way through and through Eoran’s form
till he took over that boy
so used to enacting
hostile takeovers.
Kasse reached with his theoretical hands wrapped up in Eoran’s visceral energies. He pulled them out past their boundaries, crumbled them both to dust, compressed and tight within the confines of their physical frames, expanded their simulcast mein until they, homeless ghost and heir to Ossa’s old blood religion, stood behind a sniper
and reached inside.
“Fuck,” Kasse gasped quietly, moan muffled by gunfire. He tilted his head back into the cabinet, vain in portrayal of his vicious concentration.
Doing this tangled with you is perfection.
I want to be in knots with you forever,
in your every word and breath,
in your waking moments,
in your times asleep,
in you, with you.
Don’t let me go,
don’t ever let me go.
Sea salt spindrift in discontrol, Eoran was waveworn wandering and tuned to inconceivable energies, a sea beneath a ship asail; a sea beneath a ship, assailed. He was obeisant in his own accretion, accomplished when made to fit the shape of his lover’s design. His world flipped, aural shades of azure and aurum meeting in a marbled middle and made of featherweight lines understood only by hermits possessing the single-stroke patience to take note of them in all their hideaway epiphanies, their visions of gods, their prophecies of great cataclysm and conjecture alike. Eoran was along for the ride of his life, through and through the arterial passageways of every radar blip’s beating breath around them, their deaths a magnum opus of his gruesome conductor—he an altruistic patron of that boy’s priceless art. He was out of body, out of mind but still in his body and of the soundest fucking mind; he was bent before the manipulation of molecules, a slave to the tapestry of reality his lover was gripping or ripping apart, imperator subject to no laws except those that held his own pieces together, those notated in archaic symbols as stand-ins for radical theories. His body was a fray, spray broken by the brutality of physics meticulously vivisected and writhing in the antipodal ends of a spectrum only that electromagnetic ruffian could dally in, his serpent blood augmented by the one boy that complemented him perfectly. Eoran would choke himself as Kasse palpated the innards of a man unworthy of a name, stifled throat in awe of the power of that boy’s stippling grasp, his ionizing touch like instant overexposure, a prognosis never positive. He worked in time to the orchestrations of Kasse’s deliberate catastrophe—how his lips puckered and parted, how he lapped and lingered in rhythmic relay. Eoran was pale perfection barely seen in their kitchencove refuge. He adorned his love with a string of viscous opals hung upon the pike of his willing martyrdom, facets a rebellious shimmer only because their surface tension was so, so polished. He could hardly catch his breath in all his vacillating suffocation, but then again, if this was the end of the world, what concern should he have with breathing?
I love you, oh
I love you so.
I know, oh
fuck, I know.
When Kasse tangled his fingers in Eoran’s lightless curls, wet with sweat and fear, he tangled his fingers in another man’s hair too. His hand were Eo’s hands, pressed flat to his thigh, ringed fingers ’round his root. They fell past the skull of another sniper, a woman with a scarf wrapped about her face, in and around her and another and another and another, reached inside and squeezed
frontal
parietal
occipital
&temporal
squeezed till they ran like whey
between his interloch fingers
down the back of his wide
open throat, irrumate ruined
and oxygen deprived in
swamp sticky water honey
thick with a blackened silt,
grey curd running loose from the
roof of every one of his many mouths.
they convulsed in a fast forward parody of Eoran’s lewd parabola, his harlot waveform, sinew and cosine.
“Almost,” Kasse panted aloud, so far away from that shelled out kitchen where he injected a preagonal warning of release like a philter just under his lover’s collar. He, lips parted in wonder of the kalopsia Eoran so deeply induced, was always so convinced that wherever his libertine boy chose to erect his altar, chose to paphian pray, inficete till he was cataleptic, undone
that was the most beautiful place in this world.
Almost,
he repeated,
bending at the waist
to take his lover’s fingers in
his mouth, bite away the shout that
would surely give them completely away.
Fuck, Gods, Eo—
Almost.
those fingers stained with sweat
smeared with the street, earth and
ash from the makings of an explosion
now behind them, sulfur and charcoal, KNO3
oxidizer, that mesmerizer
maltha & yesterday’s mortars
he always responded to touch
bitumen dressed in breath and
sliding along the periphery of
his lover’s taste—besmirched
with his discoloration, a ket
and a plash in the abyssal
echo of their
subdural
synthesizing
apotheosizing
in wide-eyed wonder
that dark haired danger
his caution tape catafalque
like he was the most divine thing that
boy born into the blood of a dying religion
had ever laid his opaque fucking eyes upon.
that greedy thing, cutting half-lives in their multiplicity, wringing repeating decimals from the collateral of their vibrancies. eoran reeled—
moist mouth meat mush
bobbing brain bash bis
on an inhale, tremor sharp, unsteady in his
displacement, his muffled gasp sang the tune of a song with no lyrics, wavering in the spaces between them and around them and over them and away from them with the inexplicable juxtaposition of everything—ecstasy and torment, satifaction mixed up in the depravity of their survival.
that city would soon sleep, swaddled in the eerie silence of enduring peace and eoran told himself:
it was them or him
(it was always him)
it was them or him
it would always be him
focused in his one-man show of filthmongering,
he was leaden in his mouthy adoration
left all his curses streaked in spit—
fugacious coefficient, entropic codependent.
I love you, oh—I love you so.
a fond
ad finem
a outrance—
he, fel-mouthed
salvo, held rapt by
that salivary sermon,
those chatoyant retellings.
he was every beating of their
sevenfold heart/s, a fabled form to teach
an actus reus body the throes of mens reus momentum.
it was them and him
always them and him
then and this
now and his
kasse’s voiceless whine was shouted at five separate points along the sniper horizon, ventriloquist distances in five distinct clusters, five emergencies that couldn’t be salvaged through intervention,
five warning shots from a ghost and his lover
rigor mortis tight in his pre-eminent winding
torquere indefinite affections maligned
wont of nothing
more than this
their now
oh,
this
now
fuck
now
eo, I—
now
fuck, I can’t
now
hush.
“c-cut,”
he
pro
cl
aimed
aimed
claimed
oh
fuck
eo
I can’t
keep this
down
come on
&
“cut“
he choked
through his tetanus
teeth, lockjaw doubled
with his claw grasp fitful in that
hadal hair, nose pressed to
the crown of his lover’s
detonator scent.
“Fucking c-cut, a-a-ah.”
oh
f u c k, eo hummed into
their vx homomorphism
v like violent: major scale—dominant function
x like execution: variable unknown—exposure & regressor
positive ± negative
split sidewinder sharp and sideswipe quick
in the concussive conclusion of their
coulombic collective
he tumbled
a
p a
r t
| wedged between those knees like he was praying for a plane crash unshored . unmoored . unsafe o u t s t r e t c h e d beyond what he understood as reason |
draped in something like disgrace, dis—place—no—space e m b r a c e he loved that fucking f a c e when it was adherent to the twisting |
and drowning in the modal logistics of
| his ghost his multi-hearted heathen |
himself enthusiastic hedonist |
all
wallowing
in the stuttering and stopping of every system like a countdown
t-minus until there was only 3, 2, 1 splitting time between the pair.
how dare that city and
this world
even fucking try
to
get the upper hand between
t w o l i v i n g d i s a s t e r s
hell-bent
on getting at
each other.
Snapping upright, Eoran gasped for breath.
The sharpness of his inhale cut like the finality of a scythe.
He slapped a hand over his mouth to keep it all in,
lips damp, throat slick, respirations always ragged.
With Eoran’s snap to attention and his own unbridled exclamation, the ghost pulled back and away. In his brisk ascent, his head hit the rotting cabinet behind him with a dull thud on collision, hand wrenched from their cooperative camisado to soothe the minor lump. As soon as Kasse parted from his lover, however, he slumped forward, unexpectedly faint, tumbling debilitated into Eoran’s kneeling frame and taking them both to the floor.
“F-fuc—k—” he slurred through his gasping teeth, growled into and against whatever part of the navigator he landed on. 18B was frustrated by just how weak he’d made himself, the lengths of his overextension rendering him quantum blind, feeble bodied, slackened mind. Now, he could only focus on minutiae, on the asthenic completion of small motion cover-ups: scrambling to adjust himself and trying to get his belt done before Brint rounded the corner.
Eoran swallowed hard. “Shit—watch your, uh, head—” he whispered, fingers affectionately dipping into Kasse’s hair, gentle even as he rolled the adjunct off of him. With all grace abandoned from his agile frame, he clambered around an island to search for any cloth or paper scrap that could be used to clean himself up with.
“Hey, Brint?” Eo called out, voice raised to infiltrate the space between their locations. “I think—I think he got them all. There aren’t any street-facing windows in here, can you see if you get anything?”
“Yeah,” their CO replied, “What was that noise—do you need help?”
“He’s fine, he’s just worn out. I think I’m going to have to carry him, but I want to be sure it’s clear.” Eoran knew it was clear. He was buying time, building a brief distraction.
“I say again: do you need help?”
“No—no, there’s no door back here, it’s a waste of effort. Just see if it’s clear and I’ll drag him out there.” 18C laid his head back against the cupboard he was resting against, tired in his own right but far from being completely drained like his partner. Time always seemed to have a knack for catching up with them when they were trying to rapid-fire lay brickwork over their lies. Eo caught his breath and returned to Kasse. He straddled that boy’s waist to smooth over the folds of his uniform and return him to the pristine shape that exhaustion tried to make a mess of.
“Kasse, do you still have gum?” Voice low, eyes low, Eoran always looked at Kasse like he was the center of his universe.
Lethargic, 18B re-rumpled the uniform 18C had been so kind to arrange, fetching Brint’s gum from his pant pocket. Without focus, hand-off was out of the question—he simply dropped the pack onto his chest, throat tight with the shame of how fucking useless he was in this precise moment.
“Sorry,” the weapons sergeant mumbled, aware it wouldn’t alleviate the sudden burden he presented. His lashes fluttered, but Kasse was just not meant to remain aware, even if he clung to consciousness. “I’m sorry, Eo….”
“Shh, it’s okay,” Eoran soothed while his jaw worked the piece of gum between his teeth. He averted his gaze momentarily to stow the remainder of the pack in a pocket beneath his soiled nametape. “You can sleep. We’re just going back to camp.”
At Kasse’s side, the barely younger boy gathered up his lover made lithe by the cruelty of the streets, situated and re-situated him until his body was draped across his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. Arm looped between his legs, hand clutching the back of Kasse’s thigh, he took him to the door.
“Brint, is it clear?”
“Yeah, all good.”
“Okay.” Eoran turned his chin aside to remind the boy: “Sleep.”
“But what… what happens if there’s something else,” Kasse demanded in mewling halftones, so plaintive and insistent that sleep was his best friend’s death sentence. “Riki is somewhere, I didn’t find her—”
The ghost couldn’t escape the sure hold of his lover’s grasp, gripping at Eo’s shoulder with the hand the bloodwright had left fallow. His nervous energy was tied up in the branching what-if pathways that kept him from succumbing to the unconscious.
Eoran sighed, foot pausing against the swing door he was about to nudge ajar. “If she’s still around then you’re not going to be any help if you start squirming. Besides, it’s not like you have any energy left to do anything about her, and you’re not going to fire a rifle off my back like this when you can barely keep your eyes open, so… Please, this is easier if you just pass out.”
“Nnh,” Kasse resolved, petulant even when incapacitated. He was slipping past consciousness, unwilling to surrender but grudgingly relenting to his lover’s request for his cooperation: he didn’t want to cause more trouble for their abridged squad on their last trek to rendezvous.
Eo grinned, just barely, hand shifting to squeeze Kasse’s ass in a rude show of gratitude. Commandant of their forms, now in a slightly different and mostly utilitarian way, his boot flung the kitchen door open and he crossed through the sitting room split by moonlight to reunite with their CO.
Brint took some of Eo’s burden—extraneous items like canteens and extra ammunition, Kasse’s weapon and all the documents the engineering sergeant had tucked away into his jacket. The pair conferred briefly over possibilities, and then…
They were on their way again, thrown into the night. Shadow-stalkers seeking home, photophobic-wanderers tromping through the darkness with the silence of death at their backs.