Hands clasped between his knees on Brint’s desk all askew, not entirely unlike a far happier time, Kasse simply observed, thumbs stroking nervously over his knuckles at a ten mile a minute clip.
That shit worked fast. Brint receded like a tide drawn by a multicolor moon looming engorged upon the concave bend of some otherworldly horizon. His eyes softened in the slipstream of a violet breath exhaled, triskelion whirls reaching forth into an endless depth field littered with the blinking scintilla of holographic glee. The universe was resonant with a sudden lambency, warm and welcoming and weirdly tilted to a favored side, and Brint looked upon Kasse—that beautiful boy with his out of time Iron Age eyes—bayonet body razor sharp in the fluorescence of a blue light minutely flickering overhead, gasses struck to life with positively charged currents.
“Too slow,” he said, grin cresting across his features. His green eyes drifted down to the sergeant’s hands, watching space-time echo in his strumming, watching the world contort around them, swirling cellophane and gossamer sheeting. “Fuck, this is unbelievable.”
“You’re… are you okay?”
Kasse shifted slowly, legs hanging off the edge of the desk. He leaned forward staring Brint in the face of his bliss, concern creasing his sharpened features made bleak by circumstance. Grabbing at the older man’s wrist, the young wright settled on the Lieutenant’s somnolent pulse. He listened through his every sense, felt him through his touch, his sight like a searchlight, tasted the meandering thrum of his hallucinatory heart like an ache in his teeth.
Why did he care for this man who just threw himself headlong into the vapor arms of the dead? Why did he continue to seek approval from this warmonger that coddled his instinct to destroy?
Why couldn’t he just walk away?
Eoran was waiting for him back in the bunk, fucking waiting with those dark eyes wide, sleepless till he returned—so why was Kasse still here counting Brint’s heartbeats, mind’s eye stuck on the vaporizer threatening to fall heavy from Brint’s loose grip hand?
“…What does it feel like?”
Kasse’s mouth was dry. The question was betrayal and he fucking knew it.
“I’m okay,” the older man confirmed, skin on skin like velvet surrender. “It feels… great, honestly. I don’t think any of the words I have would do it justice.” He placed the vaporizer on the desk, slowly cognizant of its silver slipping. Brint was drinking color from the air, slowblink swallow in a glare that roamed away from the adjunct near to him and onto the baubles lining his giltword bookshelves, each throwing shapes in the fading strike of that day’s simmering radiance. “I can’t compare it to anything, it’s its own thing. Fuck—it’s like power and control, a warm coil, a hot bath made of your own blood. I feel like I’m stuck in a layer above whatever layer of life you’re in.”
Kasse didn’t say it, but it came to life on his face:
You’ve always existed in a layer above the life I live.
Releasing the man’s wrist, Kasse leaned back, gaze falling to the vaporizer at his side. He chewed his lip, silent in his fast forward searching, perusing his possible futures until he found the one that corroborated Brint’s claims: the one where he could keep everyone he cared about safe with a pocket full of power.
His hand fell atop the abandoned vaporizer, steel gaze unfocused, far away.
Brint felt the boy’s shifting in proximity, by a spectral displacement that carried over into the realms he was contemplating, phantasmagoric wave pools rocking in the clarion space surrounding them. He didn’t need to see—he could smell Kasse in the substrate, edge-singed boy in his terratomb crust, fresh like ozone and ashes anew, boneyards and moldering bombazine. “If you’re going to try it, go easy. It kicks in really fast.”
Brint had his best interests in mind, didn’t he? He cared about what happened to him, took notes on how best to protect him. Brint was his CO, his protector, his friend.
Was that what he was? His friend?
Kasse fingers grasped the vaporizer and he lifted it. It felt heavier than it looked, dense in his hand as he studied the weight by touch alone. He was careful like so many old women at the roadside fruit stands the convoy rolled past, the open air markets they stalked through in search of dissent.
“Do you know how long it lasts?”
“No,” Brint replied. “Probably depends on how much you take, right?”
If Brint was okay, Kasse would be okay too
If Brint was okay, Kasse would be okay too
If Brint was okay, Kasse would be okay too
if Brint was okay, would Kasse be okay, too?
The boy put the vaporizer to his lips, closed his eyes, and pressed the button. He drug the high deep into his guts, filled his lungs with the same long hit he drew from every one of his cigarettes.
He was a lightning strike on the horizon. The nose of his fear was the first blast of atmosphere hitting him in the face when the old carrier door fell away. A man he barely knew grabbed him by the scruff and threw him into freefall, farther and farther from the safety of a tin can fuselage,
farther and farther from anyone who’d recognize who he was when he hit the ground.
& already he wavered, white noise wavered—
already his outline was a compromise
dither and glitch along his shoulder pane
he: hollow boned specter, rage infused whore
ideal receptacle for this hemoglobin anointing
too comfortable on a desk made sacrificial by his altar.
“—ha-a-ah.” His head fell back like Eo was there between them with his fingers insistent, tugging at his waistband—always tugging at his waistband.
But Eo was nowhere, alone and away, holding onto the skirt of day like his lover would return to him and wrap him up in the comfort of his night. It was only Brint. Brint, unrespectable overseer—but not from some lack of trying—and the toy he finally broke.
“Good, right?” The older man asked, breath babbling in brook poison, mire-minded and fatal framed as he leaned forward and observed the adjunct through a contortion in the aether, that boy smeared atop his desk wiped clean of an ecstasy more carnal.
“I have to l…leav—e,” Kasse said on a syncopated heatstroke lull, eyes still closed-casket. He had a pallbearer’s rhythm in his dirgespine, quickstep limpstep through an astral coersion that creaked in cadmium green, pthalo spring, turpentine mouthfeel?felt. He dropped himself to standing before that respectable man who’d given him all, given him nothing, given him this—all nausea colorblind and synaesthetic when he stood somewhere overriding Brint’s knee and the inside of a desk no longer an obstacle to his escape. “I’m gon…gonna leav—e.”
He dropped the vaporizer into the older man’s lap but all he saw was the lilting echogram of his heartstring fail to faulter.
“You really should stay put right now.” Brint’s eyes followed the warbling of Kasse’s lines, his endpoint dissolved into lacquer wood and aging leather. “I don’t want you going off and getting stuck in a wall or a fence. I don’t want any MPs picking you up and carting you off.” He picked up the vaporizer from his lap and sat it next to the flickering specter.
“What do you want, to lay down? I can get a pillow and blanket for you. What do you want? I’ll get it.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” the phantom of Kasse Sejan mumbled in response as he moved toward the door, straight through the desk and the chair. “I don’t want—not now, I don’t want this room, I don’t want you. This is bad, you’re bad, Em, and we shouldn’t’ve done this but I did we did and you know, fuck you, you know: you can’t get me what I want ’cause I can’t want you.”
Before Brint could respond, Kasse was out the door, hunting down the only person who could ever make him right.
×××
The door to the shared bunk slung wide open and Eoran stepped inside, working on the remnants of an orange popsicle he’d decided to take back with him from the cafeteria. Just inside the doorway he froze, eyes darting to a commotion.
“What the—”
“Eo, help me—” Adrien exclaimed from his position bent over a prostrate Kasse, all rolling eyes and quiet mumbling. Arms linked around the taller boy’s chest, Adrien seemed to be trying to drag the weapons sergeant across the floor to the bunks shoved together in Eo and Kasse’s pile. Both boys were scraped, bruised—Adrien with a cut above his brow, out of breath from dragging the other sergeant up the stairs and down the hall. He was just glad everyone else had been at mess. “Something is really wrong, he fell through the stairs on me.”
The weapon sergeant himself was glassy skinned, wan-eyed, glitching out of Adrien’s grip inadvertently. When he hit the floor, the impact didn’t seem to register as an impact at all. The boy was hardly present. He was past tense, future past. Even when his meandering gaze crossed Eoran’s shadow, he didn’t have the wherewithal to cross its distance to the shape he loved the most.
There was a darkened infinity space in Eoran’s floorshape. Kasse thought maybe, if he could reach out, if he could make it, he could fall headlong into his boyfriend’s glass bodied silhouette, find himself a space where he wouldn’t have to move anymore.
“—Oh, fuck.” Eoran was a mess of knees, a sinking ship slipping subsurface in scrambles across the nail-pocked boards of their bunk’s old wood floors. He abandoned his treat, not even in the trash, and made his presence known at the adjunct’s side. Shoving Adrien away was a natural reaction—Eoran would always lash out protectively when Kasse was involved, even if there wasn’t anything to protect against. The world just had to understand: Kasse was his, he was Kasse’s, they were together, inseparable. He was standoffish and closed off, he was rude and knew it and didn’t fucking care.
“What happened?” He asked, palms smooth on that beloved boy’s face in an affection unhidden and unrestrained. His black eyes were sweet with worry, that tar-hearted thing was leaking all his love in the stillness of an interminable glare. “Kasse, tell me what’s wrong.”
“I don’t know,” the adjunct whined, soft focus eyes trying to unite a crystalline multi-present vision of that boy he loved so much, loved enough to choose over the CO he’d left flying high in his office. “I feel sick. I think I’m gonna puke—”
He was exacerbated by his trauma mind, intoxication tainted by his inability to relax. His adrenaline cruel cramping was a vice in his belly, his outline a ripple with every crank of his venom-mauled gangrene viscera.
He imagines his insides are black.
He believes what he imagines.
Adrien, for his part, was glad to be shoved out of the way, collapsing onto Locke’s bed—at least until the threat of vomit was uttered like a gunshot in bedlam. Faster than he knew he was capable, Adrien dashed for the bin, bringing it to the pair on the floor.
“Would you get Locke?” Eoran looked up at the other engineer, softened to a shade of suffocating worry as he took the squat trash can onto his lap. The question was a demand dressed in the lacework of softer syllables, he didn’t wait for an answer before he was focused back down on Kasse.
“Sit up if you’re going to puke or let me put you in bed so you can lean over it. Can I put you in bed?” The Ossan boy’s fingers combed his lover’s hair back, soothing and calm, a rhythmic lull atop his seashore skull that paused only to check his temperature, wrist tendons pressed briefly to forehead.
“Mm,” Kasse seemed to concede. He ran hot, too hot, body heat leaving its water trace on his caretaker’s skin. Sitting up, he immediately dry heaved into the bin, leaving nothing but a painfully small slick of yellow bile pooled at the bottom of the plastic liner. He was spit bubble perforated, bitter bark and grainy when he spat the taste in the garbage where he knew he belonged for the lie he was living—
Gods, how was he here
how did he have this boy
so ready to drop everything
to heed his bullshit fucking lie.
“I’m sorry—” The warble was incomplete, chokechain tottering on his vomit’s razor edge. “I’ll get in bed. I can get in bed.”
The room was expanding, the room was contracting, and Kasse was a rolling blackout when Adrien let himself out of the room to do as he was told.
“Don’t apologize. Let me help—” After sitting the trash bin aside, Eoran wound himself up in the other boy, taking possession of his weight. He carefully lifted and shifted, sitting Kasse down on their pushed together beds—that rickety set of metal framing and thin mattresses they shared when no one was watching but stars hung well beyond them in the deep blue of the night.
“Maybe you ate something bad…” Eoran contemplated on the tail end of a doting kiss to Kasse’s clammy cheek, angle of his hips turning obtuse as he straightened his spine. He looked down at Kasse, fingers unwilling to leave him alone despite the offer in his voice, idle strokes ever tender. “You’re burning up. Do you want a damp rag?”
“Stay.” He was demanding on a plaintive half-yelp gracenote barked in cut time. Compliant thing, lying there lying still with his pixels all scattered, his vile components hardly holding on. “I can’t—I can’t stop it, everything’s too—” much, Eo, everything’s too loud.
The inbetween howled
his insides were still the avalanche
and how his repeat longed, by way of Eoran’s
frame, to return to a place no one knew.
“I don’t—” He had his eyes squeezed shut. He didn’t know if he was tears or sweat but he knew everything was wrong, being here was wrong—and yet delirium gnawed his bones in the layer of time most disrepaired, the one above Eoran’s seaside caress. “I wanna go, I gotta take you away.”
Eoran was struck asunder, flayed by feeling—reeling in the tempest of Kasse malady; he was overwhelmed with imbalance and baffled by the boy’s nonsense perspective, he was tripping up and aside, backstroke concurrent to upswing, face first into a blood pool potage pothole.
What the fuck is this, he demanded into the scattering of their union, ripping his hand away from the razored edge of Kasse’s feasting fractals before he took more than he wanted.
“What the fuck is that?” Eo reiterated, critical and dismayed like he was the one that had been burned this time and by a conflagration he couldn’t even begin to understand; an oil fire from the fields of an outer existence uninhabited except for the glowing outline of his spectral lover.
When Kasse moved, he had an afterimage. He was a swarm locust hungry and when the cluster shifted, the stragglers shrieked in their attempt to reconvene with their quantum hivemind, the collateral body every vibrating atom survived.
“I don’t know,” Kasse lied, panic wrapping his bones in a blood warmth he only now realized was beginning to feel comforting. His anxiety began to swell but he was also beginning to float, light atop the midline between his time signatures—so perhaps the anxiety was less important now than the taste the scratchy linens left etched on his skin, the sound of the bile still yellow windchime bitter sharp in the back of his throat. He was pale as the rider he emulated, weak as disbelief. “What am I—I don’t know where I stop. Tell me where I stop.”
The ghost’s chaos grew calm. How could he keep fighting when fighting was suffering, fighting was vomit and the heat of Eoran’s worry? Surrender was a kinder worm, a merciful illusion. When he gave up, he laid still in Eoran’s bunk, simply succumbing to that cruel bloodborne euphoria, the tether Brint had succeeded in latching to his favorite bloodhound.
Eoran pulled the trash can nearer, then sat on the edge of the bed. He nestled his hips against Kasse’s waist.
“You are who you are, just like everyone else. We’re all energies flailing wildly throughout the continuum of physicality and thought. There is no stopping, really, not when we’re echoed along the way. Right?” The bloodwright did not want another taste of whatever nightmare was waging war in his lover’s innards, but he would always chance it if it meant that he could offer that ailing thing some comfort. Eoran took one of Kasse’s hands and held it in his lap, vigilant in an enduring observation, finger pads working atop the teeth of his sharp knuckles, the divots dipping in between ligaments.
Kasse curled like a pillbug around Eoran’s seated form, arms wrapping about the boy’s thigh as he nuzzled into the muscle there, nose pressed to the tender tension of his lover’s guard.
“I worried you,” he said in profile, eyes closed. Eo’s warmth was a crest of light, soft against his deathly riposte cheek, his salvation from the riptide tugging hungry at his boots. Still, he was in and out but his in between had grown quiet; Kasse’s churning was calm, froth dissipating in seafoam consent to the deep. “Nnh, Eo, what did I do?”
“I wish I knew. You fucked Adrien’s face up. Did he have to drag you all the way up here?” Eoran tilted his head, instantly readjusting himself to accommodate that boy further. He urged Kasse’s head into his lap with beckoning hands, a silken graze along his cheeks, through the hadal spilling of his hair. “Are you feeling better? You seem more relaxed, maybe the dry heaving helped…”
“You help me,” Kasse imparted, fainted mewls and sugared words. He was malleable to the other boy’s shifting, though the ripple remained—he felt it ebbing like a second him, a third him lagging in reload of a digital tide.
“You don’t care about Adrien.” It was a statement from that knit brow, almost annoyed that Eoran had brought the other boy into their two-man space, like the room was cramped with a third body’s hint of a presence. When his tide went out, the sickened revenant relaxed.”I fell on him. I tried to walk but I didn’t work. I’m so sorry.”
Kasse was sorry for today
Kasse was sorry for tomorrow
Kasse was sorry for someday
fuck, he hoped there would still be someday.
“Don’t apologize to me,” Eoran sang from the curve of his lips, a haughty grin meant to obscure the flippancy of his follow through. “I’m the one who doesn’t care.” Cradling the adjunct’s head, he looked down, an interminable adoration shaping those dark eyes that shirked every light except that which hummed through the wavelengths of his boyfriend’s stormstruck radiance.
“I only mentioned it because I’ve never seen you like that before.” He was softer, more serious, but still so attentive. Eoran’s touch lingered like a brushstroke across that boy’s collarbones. “Seriously, what did you eat? You were fine earlier.”
Kasse was a pit, a yawning maw carved deep into the earth. He was a cave where sacrifices were left to die. He felt his utility in the barathrum, felt it bright as quetzel down in the darkness, lavaflow free as his molten gore, began to understand that, for these fleeting hours, he was interminable,
and his perimeter stalled at the implication.
“I don’t—” He was gutted, gut nervous, ipacec involuntary as he made another grab for the trashcan. He was another tear-stained mouthful of bile left yellowing and grey in the trash, disgusted by all the promises of limitless potential the glow left lying on the ground, terrified in third person watching his body devour every single one like poison bait. “—oh Gods—”
Involuntary revulsion, survivor’s guilt:
this was how Kasse was built to become an addict.
He dropped his head back into Eoran’s lap and simply wept. He knew ruin when he saw it, and fuck—fuck—today it was him.
It was always him.
“Oh, Kasse…” Eoran’s frown formed the shape of his sympathy, and for a moment he felt like an asshole. For a moment it occurred to the Ossan boy that maybe trying to recall the memory of whatever offending incident had caused this peculiar upset would only make it worse—like the thought itself was rancid enough to taste, a hanger-on rotting in the tomb of a stomach, a nauseating tingle through nerves, a hot flush of blight spread beneath layers of salt-slick integument. “I’m sorry, I won’t bring it up again. I’m sorry… shh, shh…”
Still, Eoran worried over those bones so swaddled in the fermentation of their dizzying misery. He fussed and fretted, cooed and fawned over an ailment he could do nothing about. He loved that sobbing mess to the raging core of their blackstar cosmos, from the spaces they hid in plain sight, to the lamina of their hidden truths and all that happened to scatter across the horizon of those duet antipodes.
“Take a deep breath,” Eo soothed, “Try to relax. Is there anything I can get you that will help?”
“Just stay,” Kasse whimpered through the throttle song his guilt made of him, damp hair matted to his forehead in his feverdream without reprieve. “Stay with me. Don’t let go—don’t let me drown.”
“Okay.” Eoran settled further into his quiet guard, allowing nothing but the night fill the spaces where their bodies did not meet.