Camp Losi stood tall on the edge of Ossa’s sprawling desert, and was not actually a camp but quite a large base made of the remnants of the city that used to stand there, Lositani, before its sign got the ‘tani’ blown off in a days-long exchange of hostile fire. It served mostly as a jumping off point. Soldiers sent there knew that they were destined to head out to Lasandet, or Lasandeath as it was more often called (because everything had a nickname), the large city on the other side of that sea of sand; a rebel stronghold, a hotbed of anarchy and resilience in a war that kept agitations fresh.
The ODA that Eoran Toriet and Kasse Sejan were assigned to rolled into Losi’s razor wire gates two days prior. They’d been in the wilds of Ossa for weeks, moving zigzag from outpost to outpost, clearing nests of enemies and snuffing small fires of dissent, collecting whatever intel they could along the way. But it was no secret among them that they were eventually destined to land at Losi, and Losi, perhaps due to all the brass haunting her halls, expected and welcomed them with open arms.
The base was something of a double-edged sword. Since Losi’s barracks were once apartment blocks full of families, its housing was more comfortable than what soldiers were typically used to—quonset huts, or worse, tents whose pegs always got swept away in fierce haboobs passing by, leaving men half-dressed in coyote brown to fight and flail for protection against whatever entity in these parts governed the weather. No, Losi was a kinder place, in theory. It had beds and brick and modern conveniences despite feeling like it clung to the edge of the world; despite the airs of its last-stop ominousness sweeping its every street. In the center of the base-city stood the old city hall. Generals passing by were hosted inside, in ornate rooms once used for conducting another country’s business. All commissioned officers stayed within, their own CO, Brint, not excluded.
The sun was sinking into the bend of distant sand, red intensified by red until eventual termination. The sergeants of that ODA were split in twain and given their own hallway in the tenement nearest to city hall. Toriet, Locke, Sejan, and Dev were all shoved into a room that shared a bathroom—private bathrooms, even in Ossa, were their own nearly unattainable luxury—with the rest of their squad in the adjoining apartments. Four beds made the room cramped, but it was a room and it miraculously had been fitted with air. (Brint may have spoiled them there; pulled strings within the goldleaf halls their small fire-balconies overlooked to get his group placed just so since they’d been performing so well for him.)
Dinner services were conducted in an ancillary building extending long from the city’s heart. Eoran assured his teammates an hour ago that he and Sejan wouldn’t be too delayed, that they just wanted to shower and finish doing their laundry that so badly needed done. For the most part, he wasn’t lying.
It’s just that he wasn’t being entirely forthcoming either.
The engineering sergeant sat on his bed, stripped to his underwear, watching the silence of the sunset work its kaleidoscopic magic from afar. His hair was still damp from being washed. Attentive boy, hyper-tuned to the tones of his lover’s steps, waited for those notes he knew by heart, his pitter-patter, swagger step.
The shower’s muffled noise shut down with a copper pipe shriek that jump-scare leapt through the walls, waning till it lingered only in dying whines echoed within the plaster. Kasse wasn’t long, though Eo was probably well aware, familiar as he was with a routine that didn’t change much between public showers and private baths.
Kasse emerged with a towel wrapped around his waist, scrubbing vigorously at his sopping hair, messy curls all tousled over the right side of his face. He knew he wouldn’t get to linger in the moment long, but there was something potent in the view he’d come around to: that snapshot life they’d maybe catch hold of someday, where Sejan and Toriet got to be alone in an apartment in some mid-rent Stokkram loft, free to lounge around in their underwear. Maybe with a cat.
Kasse frowned, reconsidering.
Maybe no on the cat.
Eoran turned his head to the side, easily torn away from nature’s majesty for the sight of the other boy.
“Lock the door, okay?”
Head canted in response to what could only be Eoran’s most wicked intents, Kasse’s mouth curled slowly into a crooked, sidewinder smirk. He shifted slowly, bathroom door clicking closed behind him, then turned the deadbolt till it, too, complied.
The Toriet boy shifted, situating himself to sit with his legs crossed in front of him. He patted the spot just beyond those folded limbs, palm leaving an indent in the plush covers their transient duty so infrequently allowed them the comfort of.
“I’ve been thinking about this thing I want to try with you,” Eo said. “It’s kinda like a game in the sense that there’s rules you’ll have to follow, but if I do it right, we’ll both win by the end of it. Interested?”
“…okay,” the taller boy responded, slow as he slunk toward his designated position, legs splayed, knees akimbo off the edge of the comforter. Despite his pause, the street boy’s grin was impish, curious,
absolutely interested.
“What are the rules?”
His charcoal stare was intent, impatient to learn so he could begin play.
Gods, fuck my
life, you’re so hot when
you’ve got rules to enforce.
“There aren’t many, but they’re important. One,” Eo said, anticipatory smile upsetting the placidity of his stare. “You have to look at me throughout the whole exercise, but your eyes can’t fall below my shoulders. You can look at my face and neck, but you’re not allowed to watch what my hands are doing. Two, you have to touch me, but it needs to be somewhere innocuous, like my knee or ankle. I’ll need you beneath my skin, however not in a place where you can cheat and try to force my hand.” He tilted his head, observation acute.
“I’m going to make you come without touching you, by just watching me and being near me, shallow below my surface. Are you willing to follow these rules?”
Kasse’d been holding his breath, a beat kept hovering in hummingbird standstill. Slowly, he let it out—covering his tracks with a quiet laugh, still always playing cool despite knowing Eoran wasn’t fooled.
Placing a hand on Eo’s ankle, the ghost complied, meandering touch stroking along the tibia.
I’ll try—but
what happens
if I break a rule?
“Then I will be upset,” the Ossan boy replied, stare soft and level in the open-to-interpretation ambiguity of his answer. “Anything else or are you good?”
Kasse was always ready to indulge whatever explorations his curio lover intended to map, compass blind boy ever following where his navigator might lead. He simply dipped his head in silent consent, lip already pulled between marfil teeth.
“Okay.” A light briefly returned to the bottomless core of Eo’s well-dark eyes, mirror-sun & searing sky captured on the border between black and white. It was soon devoured by the shifting of his chin, canting coy, lids demure.
The room was draped in shades of crimson, cutting shapes in broken glass splendor as the evening’s intensity was filtered through the malformed silhouette of a city tottering between the inconsequential architecture of old lives left behind and the lives that now took over. A mostly-pulled shade cut bars upon the wall, slatted order of a consumerist code misunderstood but nevertheless copied by nature. The floor was a spray of neon shards, marigold and peregrine along the slithering pathways of swoony black veins swirling throughout floorboards long divested of their careful shine—pine hearts vivisected, rended, and struck full of nails.
| Eoran brought his hands to his face, traced the contours of his cheeks cupped palm, his digits silken slide ’round the bend of his lips while focused intently on the shape of his lover’s along the curve of his jaw angled sidelong, just so—chin up, incline, thumb slow drifting over the shape of his throat sternocleidomastoid slipway daring to lead those fingers away from the steely sight of his lover’s eyes and down, into territory he was forbidden to follow. You’re so beautiful. I could watch you for days.“I wish we had days.”All grifter mewls in place of breath desideratum shifting to accommodate his body’s synopsis of Eoran’s arousal, all parted thighs beneath cover of that overlaundered towel.He couldn’t help but wander, idee fixe gaze held captive black to glinting greywonderlust thought,trembling focus, fraying mire. |
A slow spread molasses reverie was filmstrip cut, secondhand by default along Kasse’s peripheral axis, his every edge theoretical upon examination. He was prevaricating from a strict contour, actualized by 18C’s dueliz line of inquiry: thumb slow, incline, chin up—just so. Kasse accepted his overlay, observed where Eoran’s shape attuned to his own, their misalignments approximate, that cartographer touch dropping from view, leaving the ghost to observe the singular possession he felt through.The bow of clavicle, sacred archer splayed, attentively adorned; the negligible arc of breast, their union chest alive with a stutter, sympathetic-strung, swept under the draft of his guideline hands, blueblood vein, blueprint stain unseen except for in the echo of his interweaving; that subtle tyrant, passive possessor with his distant drum declaring war in its endless monotony. He was sharp over the blade of his hip sweet along the slope of his thigh, up adductors to the thin-skin hollow just beside his prize.I hate your game’s rules: I envy the air passing your lips, your teeth— I would ravage your mouth |
given half a fucking chance.
“Aah, that’s too bad,” Eoran taunted on the overdrawn air of a tantalizing sigh.
His digits danced, exploratory stance;
a fluttering feeling traipsing along the
boundaries of his own anatomy. For a
moment he closed his eyes, tucked away
from the world to delight in his own appraisal,
as he had so many times before this moment,
lips parted to make a point, to greedily dawdle
in the nothingness between them; to flirt with the
atmosphere despite the inability of his desire to take
any shape but that of the boy he was briefly eluding.
He was brought back when he was sure that he was missing out.
The day’s slow death behind them, the edges of that magnificent
ghost lined with fire. Eo smiled, stirring himself to the attention
his void-filled glare demanded from his lover.
“Spit in my hand,” he said, upturned palm a trivial stoup before the adjunct’s lips.
To his credit, Kasse was still following the rules of his lover’s cruel game, not daring betray the regulations that had him short-leash taut and spellbound with his choke-chain breathing. His flatline expression, narrow eyed and grim mouthed, was more telling of his thoughts on the matter than his silent headspace, the petulant cast of his blank slate blinking.
“Dick,” he offered, ever helpful.
Mercifully, his indignance gave way.
He and his smirk like wrath, like ire,
surveyed their active field of play,
and understood it would be ill-advised
not to act when his action had been demanded.
The ghost, that coy thing with his head raised high, jawline elegant, almost above entertaining this filthy request, nearly too poised to hock sputum into his lover’s hand,
cleared his throat in any case,
happy to join his beloved in the gutter
to strip himself of that high-and-mighty beauty
that shouldn’t have grown from Port Haven’s alleys,
happy to look Eoran dead in the eye as he
obscenely complied.
“Heh,” Eoran huffed in response, flippant gaze ebbing into a satisfaction rimmed with smugness.
He laid a hand behind him and leaned back on that supportive limb. He took his other hand down the slow concavity of his chest to relish in that stolen lubricity so easily mugged from his arms-length hostage.
That boy would always be content to drag his lover through the mud
through the streets of his long standing vulgarity
through all the condemnable alleyways of his toilsome construction
make him crawl in all the decrepit cradles of his psychological
sewer like he crept just beneath his skin
meticulous and careful—audacious and cyprian
feeling him on the inside
feeling himself on the out.
Maybe this was, in part, a test disguised as luxury:
his recline like a welcome mat waiting to be trampled
his fuck me eyes unfair in the deliberate invitation buried ‘neath their diligent supervision
his sighs so full of music, lacrimosa-lunged against his lover’s dies irae intensity
his shoulders rocking in betrayal of his slip-slide motions between the shadows of his thighs.
silk
sepulcher
sensibilia
schism
he,
oh
he
| could be unfair observant and idle malicious by his very nature |
understood what was torture for one was torture repaid taciturn turn turn turned |
eo’s indirect heat was disastrous, secondhand inhales a blush he didn’t know, a bloodlust rush in their combined capillary gridiron that he hadn’t affected despite his continued participation, despite his catalyst presence—
and so,
he shifted:
sitting up straighter in militant contrast to his lover’s cruel repose,
eyes trained as asked, despite the mutiny in their flashing
hands about an ankle, obedient even when
he undermined the exercise.
“How I’d sweep across your body with my mouth empty, hollow—teeth weapon sharp as they mark my passage up and down your terrain in crescent hachure, every nip a hypsometric survey of relief. I’d mark you up cadastral, carve you out into parcels and write my name on every fucking one, Eo—ah-h-h, you’re a mosaic of pieces I’mma claim for my own when you let me out this observation tower.”
Their breathing aligned, in time; the trembling respite between his every word was at the mercy of his cartographer’s pen stroke shoulder, atlas arm, draftsman hand.
“I’d threaten to starve you out,” he groaned, grisly, croak of a voice mouldering in the lust of his grime, “But I would only be punishing myself for how badly I want you. This isn’t—h-ah—easy for me either, you know. Not when you look at me like that. When you make me unsure if I’m supposed to defend by getting on my knees and begging you to forgive me, or attack and fight and flail against your sterling insurrection. Ah, refulgent stunner. You can have me however you want when I’m done—really rip up my gridlines and start anew.”
He carried his beat to the time of his pleasing
tempo attune to their myriad polarity—rubato
agogic—his hymn and sway, double-time in that
obsessive mind, making eternal record of the
boy he beheld, his wills and his instigative ways
and reflecting back upon him in his fluid glide.
Supportive hand shifted to become supportive forearm.
Eoran was always going places,
and those places were always
down.
“Oh, Kasse—come closer to me.” He dressed his voice in all the softness of a siren’s trap, sightline skewed with an alluring turn of his chin. “Do you see anything when you look into my eyes?”
Kasse was always
stalking along the
bottom of Eoran’s
spike-lined pitfall.
“I see a lot of things in your eyes,” the mongrel replied. He was so fucking ready to obey, vagrant stray at the behest of his better-kept lover, towel falling away when he rose. He’d get close—he longed for closer—but he kept himself high when he straddled those hips,
because rules were important
(oh, he fucking hated those rules).
Kasse supported himself with one hand pressed to Eoran’s chest, his touch slipping through the skin to the bone when he grasped between ribs, held himself aloft by the hold his lover’s sternum provided.
“You’re my favorite mirror,” he crooned between the sighing of their tandem heartbeat, meandered through the hollows of their pulse points. “How I reflect in you—hn, the way you see me, better than I am—fuck you. I wanna be your everything: your vile aggressor, your pristine lover, your sex-starved whore. I want to see how it looks refracted. Oh—I watch the daylight hours wane in your eyes. I always get lost when I’m gazing through your night, your moonless dark, your ocean floor so photophobic, that paralyzing vanta gaze. Everything I can see on my own is better when I see it through you. Everything—aa-a-h, fuck, everything is more beautiful through you.”
“You are my everything.”
Eoran was down again, a flat support, heaving chest in flux beneath the hand that relied upon it. His hair fell behind him and flopped partially aside, unkempt from the long periods they spent in roving isolation; in a sea of faces, all unfriendly.
He extended his legs long, rolled his shoulders, arched his back. He tested the spread of air between their bodies, negative space positively charged. He moaned as he gave himself a fuller focus, both hands taking charge as his utility rummaged through their interstitial pathways annotated with his eroticism; he, a hungry traveler out of home.
He thought of all the things he wanted to do to that body above him, on all the things they’d done, fed flashes of that imagery back up to his lover, unsure if it was at all strange to see himself from that perspective:
bent over a table
pressed into a wall
hair held, lips smeared
his agony by way of his ecstasy
the brilliance of his kinetic form hung high above an out of time Eoran, whose immediate mind swooned in all his present presence, his past remembrance. Here he was again—fucking himself to the cadence of his lover’s breath, his ghost so tangible and on display and taken in by the loving void that sought to devour him.
“I see things in your eyes too,” Eo cooed, “So often, I feel transfixed by the way all the stars of the universe dance in your iron flecked hematite, a culmination of all these perfect harmonies meeting on the stoop of a great annihilation. Staring at you is like looking down the barrel of a gun and it gets me, aah, so fucking hard.”
“—f-u—ck, Eo—”
gut constricted, heart in tow, his impending fever dream
convulsion was not unlike sickness, no different
from blight. his oilcloth plague breathing
belaboured his toll, his riverrun overrun all
roses, marigold, camphor, menthol, pyrrole
snakeskins ground by stagbone pestle that
mortar gaze glinting mercury, silver, ash,
twiring emerald flecks in sacrament wine,
him, lily root and hemlock coil—
his impassioned scourge,
his crippling worship
apogogue
absurdist
vital.
Kasse returned every favour, let Eoran live the reality of their turnabouts unfair:
visions of an immediate future where that street honed razor of a boy held his
consort by the back of the neck and rode him till his hateful praise
echoed down the fucking hall.
“I’m going to fuck your world apart,” his folly promised, keening low with impetuous gleam, ragged air, inodiate lust. “I’m going to give you an existential crisis.”
“I can’t… ah, wait—”
| he felt like liquid leaking upward or was it down? ceiling cum floor come to the window, ah, to the door westerways and yesterdays evening wrecked in the dulcet nonsense of his allotropic crescendo unrestrained that amber boy drunk on violence in the afterday, dressed with fire on his skin and fury in his veins made a mess of their variances in his wicked orchestration made a show for his keeping, cut-copy, paste—in every space paper doll subject to supplantation in any scenario, the shower, the desert, an apartment that didn’t exist any place, any time—gods kasse just fuck me like you’re mine |
his face said this is what you do to me so important and adored depraved but also |
entirely
whole
he spoke in epics with his form in restless twisting
“Fuck—”
he professed his love from the cliff of his apex with that lettergame name preening pretty on his tongue
“Hah—Ka—”
he writhed, head pressed back in bright skin offering for that cloud-to-ground phenomena to strike at his overexposed throat.
“Ah—”
& Kasse simply took.
He took that throat when the first knell of his lover’s cochlear coming rang up from his groin, cooperative in his derailing, Eoran’s name a snarling strike across his feral mouth. He was commandeering his lover’s hips by the second howl, forced him over, around, threw him into his overturning, throat hand quick to shift its control to the nape. He pressed any play at objection hard into the pillow: a deflated mute, but it would just have to do. By the third shudder, Kasse was tearing his navigator’s underwear down his hips, just far enough for exposure, knees pressed to either side of his trembling thighs. He took his mapmaker rough by the pelvis, jerked him back and up, disjointed, spitting and vile,
and finished their orgasm deep in the struggling crucible Eoran’s inferno provided.
“You said you’d make me come without touching me,” that dastardly boy teased into his lover’s ear, their pleasure in waves pressed quaking to the Bloodwright’s back, hands ever controlling their position. He pulled 18C’s head back playful by the hair, licked his neck like he could live off the salt of him, like he could live damp and reckless on his skin. “You didn’t say we had to finish that way.”