“Will you be good for me?” Kasse hummed, knotted fist turned gentle stroke, fingers drifting in worship through that penitent’s touseled locks. given his compass’ penchant for the task at hand, it seemed a waste not to let him control the pace.
besides: this was predparatory.
Will I be good for you? Kasse,
how can you ask that when
you know I’m going to
be the best you’ve
ever fucking
had.
Eoran spat a spark of arrogance through the coaxing glide of his trespasser’s palm, mouth too busy stoking the fires of another flame held in kerosene suspension when he slowly drew himself away. Oh, the black mirror glimmer in that trench of his gaze, the molasses stick of his sweetsick eyes, the serpentine bend in his spine so submissive—he was exquisite, single strike point and proof that he was meant for this very task; meant to follow that beloved boy’s every beck and bark and bite; meant to fit around the ghost’s golden geometry, his ribald ratios, his prurient physics like some devotee scholar of an extinct, esoteric, erotic art.
Given the freedom to perform, Eoran took the opportunity to excel, ever an overachiever in all the wrong areas. The boy settled into his lewd swing, pendulum rhythm always seeking to fray rope in the shadows of whatever death pit they were making love in, throat much more accommodating when it was beholden to the opaline luster of his fawning indulgence.
“The best I’ll ever have,” Kasse corrected, barely breathing. So often, now, he spoke forward, spoke in futures. He didn’t even realize his shift, his comfort at the thought of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. The older boy leaned back on his hands to watch his partner’s wet work, watched his lips touch base and understood he’d never grow weary of the sight; he would chase the heat of that atlas core for years, decades, yon. He moaned in a low clicking croon, fricative frayed and sapped, violence internal at the mounting threat of his next move. “You’re the best I’ll ever have, aah—fuck, I’ll never want anything the way I want you.”
Flatterer.
Wretch.
Eoran was unwilling to cede any sweetness other than which anointed his insidious tongue. He flashed those deserted eyes away, closed them briefly in a luxury that was some small amount Stendhal, unwilling to look at the hypnotizing sprawl of his lover for fear it might damage the ornate assembly of his furious facade and all the artistry in his tramp-work tessellations, the fragility of his will forever tested against the vacuum of his love.
I’m on my knees for you.
You won’t hear me beg
if you just give me
everything I
want.
Eoran sighed, sidelong, head tilted in a lascivious slide along his lover’s length, a beautiful blaspheme moaning the scales of prayers from the tip-top of his favorite minaret.
Even as Eoran pursued his noble work, Kasse was plotting his downfall.
If I gave you everything you wanted
what would you work for?
He scanned the room for a coup and when he found his candidate, his face lit up on an upstroke sigh. He forced himself upright, pulled Eoran’s mouth from his skin with a lascivious pop. Once more Kasse was tangled in his lover’s hair, grip solid as he briskly stood and drug his prisoner careless across the room, all scrambling limbs and cold skin glide on the slab.
He came to rest before a large case stacked on another, roughly waist high. Without a thought, he popped the lock and retrieved his prize: an anti-lift mine, cylindrical in shape, with a flat pressure plate stemming from the top. He let the case slam shut before he placed the explosive gently on the surface, yanking Eoran up soon after.
“Hh—” There it was again: his revolt. His fight flowing through him like a churning sea spitting froth straight into the stolen light of the moon that oversaw it. His nails gripped the arm attached to the hand that piloted him by the length of his hair, carving the temporary memory of him into a thin layer of impressionable skin. Eoran Toriet was a terrible prisoner, an unwilling captive, a greedy sovereign in the shape of a boy.
He adjusted before his third rearrangement, briefly patting the tender scraping of his thigh skin with a remedial palm. He forcefully found his footing a moment later. When the navigator’s eyes met the mechanism responsible for Ossa’s empty fields littered with skulls—triangle warning transcending all barriers of spoken word—they were wild, new moon black hung in the glistening pallor of a sclera sky.
“What the fuck are you going to do with that?” Eoran asked, fingers finding new ground in the muscles of Kasse’s shoulders.
Kasse was all laughter, silver peal and carrion bird ragged when he twisted the pressure plate from red to green. He pulled the safety pin, so cavalier and reckless, tossed it over his shoulder where it laid its metal barred nightingale melody all across the floor in shattertones, in concrete harmony.
What Eo didn’t see was that it was only a quarter of the pin—just the bit that protruded past the mine’s mechanisms complete with finger pull.
“Restraint system,” the taller of the pair replied when he grabbed Eo about the waist and all but slammed him into the weapons case, folding him at the waist. He pressed in behind to pin him in place, snaked up his struggle, took it all in with his mouth to his nape before he secured a single wrist, lifted his lover’s hand, and slammed the pressure plate down with him.
Then, he let him go.
“Don’t let it come up,” he advised like Eoran didn’t know already. “You gotta hold it down.”
There should have been words there. In that mouth more and more accustomed to spouting off insults and verbal assaults. There should have been words. Eoran should have been talking, cursing, growling omens from the churning pit in his stomach, or shrieking their obituaries in a frantic jumble of blood mouthed sorcery with a herpetological bend, and yet…
The bloodwright was silent. Still. He was cautious and unmoving, a deep breath gathered into pressure plate lungs, an exhale carefully compensated for in the slow negotiation of his weight—no give, no mistakes, no room for hairpin errors or black powder give.
Eoran closed his eyes. In a time before Kasse he would have been able to contemplate the murder of someone without their knowing, shameless and devious and selfish and angry. Kasse had the ability to find out Eo’s thoughts in an uninterrupted instant, and even if he wasn’t probing through the mess of what made him just yet, the engineer still chanced it. They were all about taking chances now—explosives expert and his firing squad suitor.
Eoran still thought about murder.
Or was that just their combined suicide?
Maiming? No—not from this inescapable distance.
He thought about pulling away just to spite him.
Would that be calling a bluff or creating a catastrophe?
Did he really want to find out?
In the trivial light penetrating the thin skin of his lids, Eo saw a lot of red, but
through the seeping debris field of their mixed remains splattered against the walls of his mind, he smiled.
Kasse refused his impulse.
He’d laid his victorious claim out dressed in all his wordless, angry quakes, his folly heart knife sharp in appraisal. Pacing step predator quiet, he observed his butcherbird meal; he was a discerning thing, trophy hunter, prizefighter. When short of time he was savage in the tearing of flesh, disarticulating bone from bone in bloodlust frenzy. In leisure, however, the mongrel liked to play—
callow thing consistently awful, batting his prey against the wall till it crumbled limb from bloodwright limb.
After a slow minute, a minute that ticked like five, Kasse strolled up his lover’s inner thigh with two fingers, cold and sharp as the armaments they’d made their bed amongst.
“I wanna know what you’d have me do,” the free man said to the man so cleverly restrained, touch light as silver, fine as gold when it traced it’s line in a curve over the soft bend of Eoran’s anatomy. He played naive across 18C’s lower back like his coyote intentions were hardly untoward.
How well that quantum boy fulfilled his part: he was a master of selling his innocence, even if his audience wasn’t buying.
“No,” Eoran spat like daggers. “Come take it from my fucking throat if you want it so bad,” he dared in a blistering edge, guncotton body poised to ignite, begging the spark of ignition from any old smash of
flintlock
hammer
pin
perfect
pestilence
He held his body dear to the mine atop which he was laid, fingers caressing its outer rim in an impious worship and it became quickly clear that suddenly this thing,
t h i s t h i n g
was more important than the boy at his back. Suddenly he was obliged to a different disaster, eyes open and full of lidded reverence for mechanisms not made of meat and mortality, lusting after the hard science of death rather than the tricky culmination of quantum mechanics that seemed to be interrupting Eoran’s splenetic idolatry.
Eo was left with his fuse unlit, the taunt of Kasse’s spectral touch soon absent, drifting vacant, away.
Quiet fingers replaced with hot breath on his lumbar spine, warm mouth tilting down the shape of Eo’s sacrum held still by survival instinct alone. Arm laid over the flat of posterior iliac and sacroilial joint alike, the boy was all
sacred circles
slow consumption
begging atlas curses on his knees, free hand drifting up a trigger thigh.
“Ah—” Eoran sighed,
“—Fuck,” he sang,
soft croon and simper song,
“Kasse, fuck—” were the words
of his conclusion drawn,
“Fuck you,” his mantra ever warbled
like a volley from the heavens
tumbling atop his treacherous tribulations
twitterpated in the raving of his acerbity
seething in the sedation of his love.
That firemarked boy laid his head on the crate,
forehead to flimsy woodworn-laminate,
fingers to fuse-lit firepower. “Fuck you,”
mouth said it like he really, really meant it,
“Gods, I love you.” Turns out, he truly did.
Kasse was always bolder on a dare—more often than not, the siren sound of Eoran’s sing-song cursing was close enough.
He closed his eyes, lapping at Eoran’s gate. He would render his lover a beggar, disarm him, shatter every wall, topple his parapets, leave him as warbling scrap, warlord rubble, desperately disarranged, broken mawed. He slid sweetsilk up a shaking leg, trembleskinned, to palm his prisoner’s length, grasp a loose to-and-fro tease with intent to edge, intent to torture through persistent denial.
“Aah—you fucking dick, how can you do this to me—” Relaxation was near impossible poised as he was, planted face down and draped over the plane of a precarious margin. Eoran’s heart thumped under concurrent strain—one, his lovers lips in divine adoration, smooth stutter and sweeping brooks dyed red with blood; two, his mortal dread, the silence of serenity filling the cavern of his chest in timeslown anxiety, needlepins all over his skin, butterflies filling the conservatory of his ribjoists.
He risked a squirm, lopside scale. As long as that boy kept the one end weighted, what did it really matter?
Oh, his marauding cincture,
his eternal reward.
“H-ah—“
Fingers aflutter, that spiritboard boy full of hijinks pulled away
mouth and hand
tongue and stroke
licked him up brisk in one smooth motion
S5
S3
L4
T12
T7
T2
C6
C4
till he came to rest with his
breath all lonesome heat
at the shell of Eo’s ear.
“What? Do you not like it?” Kasse teased, fingers testing what his tongue had started. “‘Cause it seemed like you liked it.”
“Fuck you.” Eoran was tooth grit and tongue tied, terse and tested; a creature of vicious volume seething through the stopmotion his suffering. “You know exactly what you’re doing.” The bloodwright tilted his head to the side, following the warm streak of his lover’s words. The void of his eyes was so bleak, the corners of his lips so severe. He leaned into the ghost via the concavity of his spine, shoulders rolled, rear responsive on the incline of his curve.
“Tell me if you liked it,” Kasse insisted, keepaway boy with a gun-shy touch. He worshipped so free between cardinal shoulderblades, tip of him barely daring to punctuate the pyre’s sacral tithe. “I have no idea if I should do it again.”
The ghost played his role well, would play to the hilt when given the cue—but for now he was content to court Eoran’s suspended disbelief, goading hook to catch-bait writhe.
“KASSE,” his lover hissed, snake-tongue a slice along that specter’s every S slithering from the tip of his teeth, “HURRY UP AND FUCK ME. Please, gods, please, I’m begging—“ Eoran slapped an impatient hand atop the thin roof of the supply crate. The ricochet, shaking loose the taut line of his distracted form in a rippling wave that cracked through the air, was…
fatal.
“HaaAH—“ he gasped.
Or was it?
The pressure plate was halfway up in a lackadaisical ascent before Eoran realized his error and hurriedly shoved his fingers beneath his chest to press back down. Unfortunately, it didn’t matter anymore. It didn’t matter five minutes ago, it didn’t matter now. It never mattered, actually, and the boy who felt his heart constricting tight like the muscle had lodged itself in the cramped space of his gulping throat exhaled.
Silent like a post-coital death and dismemberment, the bloodwright stared ahead, eyes tracing over the details of that secret room slowly being lost to the evening. He tilted his chin after a moment, but did not even dare to look aside at that scoundrel dressed in the skin of his beloved. Of course he was overjoyed to be alive, of course there was some part of him that figured the ghost wouldn’t suddenly spring a suicide pact on him.
But this, right now, was vanity and violence. This was love and war on a protoplasmic game board.
“You think you’re so fucking clever, don’t you.”