Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There's something about the noxious scent of tea lights burning in a pumpkin. It makes him...

Otabek glances to his companion on the front steps— at the crooked, cut-out smile flickering.

It makes him irate. It's not the pumpkin's fault. It's JJ's, flown across the Atlantic, Baltic, and all of Europe to carve him a fucking pumpkin.

“Happy Halloween!” JJ cheers from behind him.

“No.”

“You love it,” JJ boasts.

Otabek twitches. “It's heinous.”

“It's festive,” JJ counters, plopping beside Otabek on the steps. He lifts the lid of his pumpkin. The stench of half-rotten squash doing its best impression of nourishment wafts stronger. JJ beams into the stink. “A perfect fit for your ghoulish holiday,” he adds, re-capping the pumpkin lid.

“It isn't-” Otabek huffs. The writing on the stone wall of the house in front of him is sloppy. Oh, please come tomorrow it reads, swiped with hasty fingers dipped in horse blood. His stomach feels full in a happy way, gurgling from Aunt Bibigul's feast— boiled meats, warm golden bread, and little apple treats. Otabek's favorite meal (see: any meal he doesn't have to acquire on his own). A great way to begin his favorite time of year.

“You must be excited,” JJ's voice picks up. A tease. A little jingle. “Your girlfriend comes out this time of year.”

Otabek's jaw tightens. “Shut up.”

“You looooove-”

“Do you want to sleep outside?” Otabek threatens.

JJ juts his bottom lip. “You wouldn't.”

“Could make good bait,” Otabek assures him. “The İrşi can eat your eyes first for all I care.”

“Ha-ha,” JJ says, flat. “Very funny.”

Otabek just huffs.

“Your very own cousin,” JJ sighs, speaking up to the sky, leaning back on his elbows. The sun slips white shards between chilly gray clouds, moving slowly.

“Step-cousin,” Otabek says, emphasizing a distance here, in the 3 centimeters between them.

“Same difference,” JJ dismisses.

Few have lived to remember seeing the İrşi, but Otabek has. Last year. He was enchanting, then, in the shadow of an alley. A dim white light flickered a few meters from him. It lit him in the harshest way, the reach of the light sharp on his pale skin. An oval face. Lips plump from gnawing. Bright green eyes, framed by stiff, caked dark locks of hair, looking at him. Calculating. Darting between Otabek— a threat, a temptation— and the heap of human sinew already by his feet, wet like it was still warm.

Otabek had taken a step towards him, rather than away. The İrşi had made such a strange sound then. Something haunted. Unique.

There was a bang and clatter from a nearby yard. The İrşi climbed over the wall that blocked the alley, corpse banging and dragging behind him, being carried by the hair. A red trail in its wake.

He'd worn jeans and converse. That was the strangest thing about the İrşi, retelling JJ later. He'd worn jeans and a dark leopard spotted zipper hoodie, five sizes too large, hood pulled up as if to hide his eyes. As if eyes that wide, bright, and green could ever go unnoticed.

Otabek glances again at JJ. JJ fiddles with the lid of his pumpkin, knees bouncing. Restless, with something obviously on his mind. The same as he was at dinner, when Otabek quietly and dutifully ate JJ's serving of Aunt Bibigul's steamy besbarmaq.

“You're fucking insufferable,” Otabek informs.

“You eat horses.”

“Is this what your people do?” Otabek asks. “Come all this way just to oppress me?”

There's a bang in the house behind them, something like heavy stone on tile. JJ flinches, a hand to Otabek's knee, eyes wide.

“It's her,” JJ whispers, mock terrified. “The İrşi.”

“First of all, him,” Otabek says, plucking JJ's hand away, pinching his pinky between forefinger and thumb to remove him with as little skin contact as possible. “Second, no. It isn't.”

“Where is it, Beka!” a voice calls from inside, Kazakh splitting into their English conversation. Loud, female, and positively incensed. “Explain yourself!”

Otabek hangs his head back, rolling the base of his skull between his shoulder blades.

“I think she might be mad I dumped the horse blood down the drain?” JJ whispers quickly. Otabek opens one eye— catches the way JJ's bright blue eyes sparkle with mischief.

“Otabek!” Aunt Bibigul shouts again, a little louder.

Otabek groans. Looks to JJ for help.

“She's your aunt,” JJ says haughtily.

“She's your mother,” Otabek counters.

“Step-mother.”

“Same difference.”

Otabek groans again, with more feeling. His fingers catch in his tangled hair when he rakes them through the top of his overgrown undercut. JJ's undercut is different. Crisp, fresh. He'll have to ask JJ to touch his up before he-

“Otabek MOTHER FUCKING Altin!” Aunt Bibigul screeches, enraged at being ignored. In English, to make a point.

Otabek turns his head to angle his voice through the door, half-ajar, because JJ has no fucking manners. “Yes, Aunty! Coming!”

“NOW!” It's a banshee screech if Otabek has ever heard one.

“She's pissed,” JJ provides, helpfully.

The blood written on the wall by Aunt Bibigul's door is cleaner than their neighbors— neat, straight lines drawn in fresh red blood. Oh, please come tomorrow. She uses a fine-tipped paint brush and a ruler each year.

(“What if the İrşi can't read the message well, hmmm? What then, Otabek!” Manic.

“Then I guess he'll have to ask for clarity.” A shrug.

“He.” Aunt Bibigul had laughed then. Like they always do. “Well, I won't have poor penmanship be the reason this family becomes even smaller. No! Not on Bibigul's watch!”)

Otabek likes Aunt Bibigul's kitchen with some irony. Pink paisley stickers on floor tiles match faded, shell pink wallpaper. The cabinets are a clean, sanded light brown wood from a different era than the charred stove top and faded yellow fridge.

Aunty rounds on him as soon as he enters. “Where has it gone? Hmm?”

The kitchen sink still has a red sheen to it, unsubtle against the dull silver of the basin. “JJ,” Otabek says.

“He's your responsibility,” Aunt Bibigul says, swinging the empty bowl in front of him, pointing. There are a few drops of red in the bottom, bouncing about. A dried patch of pink scratches along the inside.

“Yes, Aunty,” Otabek nods.

“Don't give me that face!” Aunt Bibigul scolds, slapping his hand with more jest than actual threat.

Otabek tenses. He isn't giving a face. In fact, he's very intentionally trying not to give a face. If anything, he's giving the absence of face.

“Sorry, Aunty,” Otabek says, eyes on his tattered fishing shoes. JJ visiting during the festival was not Otabek's idea. Never would have been Otabek's idea. Doesn't he come enough? Isn't five months out of every year enough already?

Otabek lives alone. Otabek likes to live alone. Aunt Bibigul is down the road when he needs her. She's also down the road when he— usually— does not need her. But he's not willing to point this out. It's his favorite time of year. He's feeling cheerful.

JJ waltzes in, rubbing his tummy, shirt pushed up over his belly button. “I'm so FULL!” he says with an exaggerated yawn. Breaking the tension.

“Yes, my sweet. Here,” Aunt Bibigul coos, fussing over JJ and arranging the table and a chair in a way that invites JJ to plop right into it— which he does. JJ is her angel. The son of her dearly departed husband.

She turns to Otabek, eyes narrowed. “You know what needs to be done,” she says in Kazakh. JJ is there, a dopey expression on his face. He speaks not a lick of Kazakh, sure, but the way he pretends to not read the room? Unbelievable.

Otabek excuses himself. He kicks JJ's pumpkin by the door, hard. It punts pathetically down the small flight of steps, tea light extinguished and bouncing out through the crooked mouth. The pumpkin crumbles in on itself and settles softly atop the dirt. Unsatisfying. Leave it to JJ to create a horrible gift that is unsatisfying to destroy.

The butcher down the road has some horse blood for sale. He'll save every drop he can this time of year to make an extra coin. The shop is small, allowing only one customer at the counter at a time. Shiny Shoes is there (Otabek can't recall his name; he's new in town and Otabek doesn't care), dragging the local butcher through aggressive, quick-clipped English. The shards of light through cloud shadows shift on the cobblestone road. Otabek steps forward, shouldering the man aside in the small space.

“He just wants some sausage,” Otabek translates. He says this in Kazakh, not bothering to glance at Shiny Shoes. The butcher smiles and delivers the product, then thanks Otabek.

The horse blood costs triple (“Inflation, on account of desperation,” the butcher says), but the butcher slips it to him for free. They share a bond, he and the butcher. Two men who provide for the village and aren't too keen on these new foreigners coming in with their factories and foreign money.

There's a hush like soft wind that falls over the village of Zhalanash at night. It always does, this time of year, when wandering outside in small groups isn't worth the risk.

Otabek can hear the frogs, peeping and chirruping through the trees, nestled by the hundreds among swampy plant debris. Otabek's house is the last along the road before it ends in the treeline. He likes the swamp hidden there, beyond those trees. Likes the proximity of his small house to nature. It's peaceful.

Otabek thinks long and hard about the message by his own door, fingers dripping blood, as the sun sinks behind his small home. The sky glows muddy orange, clouds smeared on dull canvas. The stone wall is bumpy under his fingertips as he swipes his bloody hands straight across the message, three, four times, until there is just a mess of red instead of words.

He has a simple home— a sitting room, separated from the kitchen by nothing but an abrupt change from concrete to tiled flooring. There's a small nook that's almost a hallway, breaking away to a washroom and a single bedroom. One small closet is nestled between them. What more could he need? There are old boards piled by the wall from old boats he's had to give up on. A rope, stashed in the corner by his chest freezer. A map of town tacked crooked to his wall. Stacks of books. A dusty laptop. A faded floral sofa, courtesy of Aunty.

There's a quiet in his home that's different from usual. The stench of decomposing flesh hits his nostrils as soon as he opens his front door. His home is stiflingly warm, a brick oven sort of home built by non-architect hands, releasing all the heat from the day inward as the sun fades. The cloud cover today helped— it's not as hot as most nights, but the staleness is almost tangible. A fly buzzes, then lands, directly on the eye of the corpse lain crooked and long dead in his sitting room.

It's necessary. Essential.

The İrşi arrives just after sundown. Otabek hears him before he sees him. An unnatural clicking. Throat ticking, gurgling, groaning like a broken neck trying to breathe. It sends a thrill through Otabek, only part fear, because it's happening. It's finally fucking happening.

He turns the light off, if only to make the İrşi more comfortable. There is only the dim, yellow light of the lamp in the corner, casting on exposed dead human thigh.

Otabek is seated as the İrşi enters, feet flat, knees apart as the corpse lies broken in his floor. Mostly unblemished. He'd gotten lucky with the brain injury— all internal, no leakage.

Then the İrşi is in the doorway. He's wearing running shorts and a plain white t-shirt, unnatural against silvery skin and prominent veins. His eyes are a bright, reptilian green— round, unblinking like that of a corpse.

Quickly, feet hitting the floor in a series of quick thuds, the İrşi crawls to him. It steps over the corpse, hands and feet trudging and pushing past, eyes on Otabek. Sharp teeth glint and Otabek twitches on instinct, fighting the urge to flee.

When the İrşi is close enough to see the red around his eyes, Otabek finally breathes. Out, then in, inhaling the scent of him. He doesn't smell good like people smell, but in a way that is actually more comforting to someone like Otabek, who's spent more time with the lapping sea than people. His smell is like salty air and muck. A wetland ecosystem, rotting in that softly sulfuric way. He's a bit taller than Otabek, but they're about even if Otabek rights his shitty posture.

“This is for you,” Otabek says, steady. His voice doesn't shake. He gestures an open palm to the corpse on the floor. The İrşi's eyes wander there, head unmoving, then flit back to Otabek. His face is that of ethereal power. The kind of strength that evokes the idea of sirens from an old story.

“I can help you with others, if you help me.”

The İrşi regards him with an odd little sound. Like a whistle not blown hard enough— the ball rattling inside, clickering. Just like that time a year ago in the alley. Does the İrşi remember him? Is that why he hesitates?

The İrşi leans down, but looks up at Otabek, as if assessing his reaction. Otabek is wondering what the İrşi intends to do when sharp teeth sink into his skin, on his hand, tearing. It makes a sick, fleshy sound and Otabek screams, wrenching his hand from the İrşi to hold it close to his chest. It hurts, heart beating in his fingers, hot and sticky.

He learns. The feel of wet skin broken on teeth. Membrane. The rough tulle texture of his membrane. How what seeps out is pain, but also roots, spread across earth. He'd never known pain could be full like this, wide like a prairie. A reminder the body is made for ending.

The İrşi's eyes go round and he takes a step backwards, palms out in front of him. He stumbles over the corpse, throat clicking in distress, then turns to crawl away. He's quick, gone into the dark night.

Otabek is panting, staring blankly through the open doorway. His hand burns and hurts and pulses like no pain he's felt before. It's agonizing. He thinks he may die from it.

His phone is ringing. He blindly reaches for it with his good hand. It slips from the blood. He catches a glimpse of bone peeking through torn flesh on his wounded hand and vomits onto the floor, then answers.

“Fuck, was that you?” It's JJ.

“Was what?” Otabek asks, dumbly. He's bleeding onto the corpse on his floor.

“The scream,” JJ says.

“I'm- yes. Yes.”

JJ comes with an entourage of young men that live near Aunt Bibigul. The İrşi rarely attacks groups. Otabek doesn't remember much. Just pain pain pain, beating inside, black and blue, purple and pain.

(He does remember:

“Fuck, is that Ivan?” Regarding the corpse on the floor.

Otabek nods.

“Is he fucking dead?”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck, I'm glad the İrşi got him and not you, but shit. Sorry you had to watch your friend die like that. Fuck.”

“I'll never forget watching him die.” A truth.)

There isn't much else to be done. People come to retrieve the corpse. To contact the family and prepare it for burial. JJ drives Otabek half an hour to the nearest hospital in Aralsk to stitch him up. There’s what the nurse refers to as “light surgery” involved. He receives painkillers. They return home and Otabek is out of work for a while.

JJ offers to clean up the blood at his house. Otabek just watches, because JJ brings his buddy. JJ's buddy also happens to be a bully from Otabek's school days. A real closet case.

(When Otabek leaves the room to pee:

“D'you think the İrşi left him alive cuz he's a fag?” The buddy, horrible.

“That's a nasty fucking word.” JJ. Liberal, defensive. He likes his fag step-cousin.

“Maybe he tastes bad, I dunno, I'm just sayin-”

“Say fucking less, man.”)

They write the sigil by his front door. Otabek insists on doing it himself, with his good hand. JJ chews his bottom lip as they step back to look at the writing, Oh, please come tomorrow, dripping from the final letter.

Chapter Text

“Oh~ Beks~” Sing-songy.

Otabek bumps his head on the back of Aunt Bibigul's sofa. There's a terribly romantic drama series on the TV that Otabek isn't really watching. Aunt Bibigul left the room something like 20 minutes ago, so he definitely could have changed the channel, but his mind is occupied— rotating between observing the two gnarled nubs where fingers used to be and wandering entirely away.

JJ plops on the sofa beside him. “Why is there a bowl of horse blood locked in that big glass display cabinet?”

Otabek drops his gnarled hand down to his lap and turns his full gaze to JJ, with purpose, to show his annoyance. “Probably because you dumped it down the drain last year and nearly had me down 10,000 tenge.”

“You got that for free.”

“Barely.”

JJ wrinkles his nose. “And it smells.”

“Not as bad as you. You smell like,” Otabek leans in. Sniffs his disdain. “Processed dairy.”

JJ pushes on Otabek's chest, thrusting him away. “Rude. Who put a stick up your ass this morning? Nervous to see your girlfriend again?”

Otabek looks down at his left hand again, healed but ugly.

JJ's tone shifts a bit. “Has anyone tried to kill that thing?”

Otabek nods. “I think so.”

“What does it want? Like it really thinks it or she or whatever can just come in here and do whatever it wants whenever it wants?”

“I think he's very polite,” Otabek says. There are dishes clicking in the kitchen. The stray mutt of their street barks outside, probably at the kids that play with it. “The İrşi follows directions well, when written.”

JJ cat calls with a whistle. Otabek rolls his eyes.

“God, just fuck him already!” JJ boasts.

“You're such an asshole.”

The day is still young. He has time before the feast of the first night of the festival. Otabek sets out across town, down the main street where shade cover is scarce. He peeks into the house on the corner. He's been keeping an eye on the boorish husband named Aibar that lives there. Learning his schedule. The sun is bright hot and he's sweating through his clothes by the time he makes it down to the inlet of the sea. The salty air hits him like a home calling as he trudges knee-deep, pushing his boat out to open water until it’s safe to put the motor down.

From this point, he can see the factory, where the water is sludgy around it. The pumps dip and suck the sea up as if slurping at a straw. The pipes vary in color as they add more meters to reach the ever-lowering horizon of the Aral Sea. A ghost ship sits atop sand in the distance. It's his favorite dot on the horizon to use as a compass, as it rusts onto the former sea bed.

The haul is light today, as the gentle waves rock him beneath an unrelenting sun. He nets a few bream and lucks out on a pike-perch, flopping in the body of his small wooden boat when it slips from his hands. He's gotten used to being down two fingers, but it still isn't easy. He delivers to the butcher, who pays him for his efforts, then heads home through the cooling streets. The heat releases from the town with a collective steam, lifting from the streets and Otabek's sweaty, sea-soaked clothes.

His bath is quick. He engages in a race that his competitor, the sun, is not aware of. He dresses in nothing but boxers and a tank top.

The curtains billowing in the wind. The sun sets behind his home, casting him in shadow as he stands in front of his front door. The blood bowl is tucked to his chest with his left arm, leaving his good hand free to streak the words out.

He thinks to write something poetic. Something meaningful and sweet. He decides on please eat the corpse, slapped in sloppy, crooked Cyrillic.

Shiny Shoes is in his sitting room, with dried blood covering his skin like infected scabs, eyes stretched out to reveal the pink insides of his sockets.

There was a terrible accident at the factory. Shiny Shoes had stayed late to catch up on some things. It was his last chance to stay working into the night, since the İrşi would come to Zhalanash soon. He (loudly) didn't believe in the İrşi, but he'd written the old message anyway, oh, please come tomorrow. Someone had splashed a bucket of bloody fish water on the message by the door. Had plunged the carving knife through the back of his neck, then twisted, painting his desk in red. Had dragged him through the trees around town in the dead of night, unbeknownst to everyone hiding in their homes. The İrşi does not follow a calendar, but instead the earth, emerging just as the lilies reach peak bloom. There’d been a little more bloom to the bud than anyone was comfortable risking last night.

Everyone except Otabek, out doing his errands, hoping the smell of blood may attract the İrşi sooner.

It had been a messy affair. A last minute, frantic thing— when Otabek had been cruising by in the evening and noticed only one shiny, expensive car parked by the factory doors, visible from the sea if you're willing to venture a little too close to the sludge. A daily habit of Otabek's.

Otabek will need to prepare better in the future. And the smell. Decomposing human flesh is far from the pleasant scent he gets from the swamp, the sea. The same process, yet intolerable— heightened after baking in his house all day. It's fruity. Like rotting meat, but sweet. Citrus. Can't the İrşi come in winter? Logistics. There are many logistics to consider.

The night is quiet. It's the first night of the festival and everyone remembers Otabek's shriek from last year too well. Otabek wishes they could just call it what it is— a haunting. He's voiced this aloud one too many times. (“The festival predates the haunting, Otabek! Now hush!”)

The İrşi pauses in the doorway, silhouetted against the moon's shine, but his eyes catch the lamp in Otabek's sitting room. His stillness is inhuman. The kind of still that is for preservation jars. Amphibian parts, maybe, or ambrosia.

The only thing that moves are the İrşi's eyes. Reading the text by the door, flickering to Otabek, back to the text, then down to the corpse. He's nude, skin silvery in the low light, stomach free of that familiar dip of navel. As if the İrşi is not birthed, but created. There are slits on his ribs that flutter like flaps of skin over wounds. His veins protrude, bulging beneath pale skin.

He enters like a serpent, slinking in the front door, licking his lips as if to taste the air. His eyes are bloodshot, but they're still the same vibrant green Otabek recalls looking into before losing two fingers.

Last night's messy murder is nothing compared to the voracity with which the İrşi feasts. There's a chill that falls over Otabek despite the heat. The sound of teeth sinking into flesh and then tearin. The İrşi jerking its head away to release the meat from the bone. It's not unlike watching a lion feast, seeing the İrşi tearing into the stomach and ripping the guts out in long, stringy parts. His eyes are on Otabek, glancing away on occasion to tear into a new section of the body.

His tongue looks soft. So wonderfully soft.

He'd lain down a tarp. Thankfully. But he hadn't considered the splatter, with chunks and drops hitting the walls and, just once, landing wet on Otabek's cheek. He doesn't dare move. Not until the İrşi is done and crawls to him in something of a spider crawl. Unnatural, placing his feet before his hands until he's crouched before Otabek, legs bent like a little tree frog. Otabek is trembling as the İrşi takes his gnarled hand, sniffs the nubs where fingers used to be, then licks. Some of Shiny Shoes' blood ends up on his knuckles, mixed with the İrşi's saliva.

Otabek swallows and the İrşi looks at him, staring into his eyes. The red around the rims is gone, glinting clear, glass green. Otabek doesn't know what face to make. Never knows what face to make. The İrşi doesn't care. It's freeing, to stare the İrşi down with a flat face and not feel monstrous for doing so.

Then the İrşi flops onto the floor, lying on his back with a hand over his stomach. There's a low, quiet trill coming from somewhere inside of the İrşi, almost like a purr. He closes his eyes, but when Otabek shifts, they pop open to watch him again.

The mannerisms are different. This much Otabek is certain of. No smiles, no nods, no frowns. There are head tilts, though they don't seem to always mean the same thing. The İrşi's head wobbles and bobbles, on occasion, and his eyes move far more than any human Otabek's known.

“See? I can help you,” Otabek says, trying to force a steady voice. “I-” his voice cracks, so he clears his throat and tries again. The İrşi watches him. “I-” he tries again, but nothing comes out. He's afraid. He's fucking terrified. His ears ring, and he has trouble focusing on any single object in the room, even the İrşi. All of his instincts are telling him to run, but something stronger holds him here.

Otabek rubs his eyes, blinks, shakes his head to clear it. Focus. Focus.

He opens his eyes to the İrşi mirroring him, rubbing its eyes and shaking its head, then watching him for more. The street dog barks and the İrşi jumps to his feet, eyes wide, flicking between Otabek and the door.

“No, no,” Otabek says, his mind catching up to his mouth. “Stay. Please stay.”

The İrşi looks him up and down, expression fixed. The dog continues to bark and there's a clattering, someone yelling at the dog to shut up. On the next bang— loud, like two pots banging together— the İrşi scrambles for the door, with that chilling crawl.

“Wait!” Otabek says, a little too desperate. The panic in his voice surprises even himself. The İrşi stops in the doorway, stands straight, and turns back to him.

“You have to take this,” Otabek says in one breath, the words tumbling out of him. “Please you have to take this with you.” He's looking frantically at the corpse, at the İrşi, around at his horror show of a sitting room. There's a wriggle in his gut, as if he is something's ocean.

For a moment, the İrşi looks between him and the corpse. On the next clang, he grabs the corpse by its hair and drags it behind him, moving fast in the dark of night, entrails dragging behind.

Otabek splashes a bucket of water on his message by the door, rewriting it as oh, please come tomorrow and shutting himself in tight.

Lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, he wonders in the smallest hours of morning if he'll ever sleep again. He spends the rest of the night cleaning, before it dries. Heavy early morning rain blesses him, washing away much of the evidence in his small yard. He entertains the idea that nature is on his side.

It's a drizzly day, the sort of day Otabek much prefers. The clouds are so gray that the rain itself appears gray, oozing from rooftops. Children splash in puddles and Otabek sidesteps them, trudging and slipping his way down the tall, main street hill.

Instead of going straight to the sea, he veers off into the trees. The house. He must check on that house. Right around this time, Aibar should be leaving. His wife and three young children will stay behind. Otabek never sees the wife outside anymore. When he peeks in, he knows the bruises on her face are likely why.

The husband is gone, like every Monday. Around lunch time, he'll be slipping into another woman's home to pay for sex. Otabek hasn't targeted Aibar because he's opposed to sex work or adultery, but because he knows about the bruises. Because the İrşi is hungry and they (he and the İrşi, of course) might as well cleanse the village.

The haul on the sea is plentiful.

As the sun sinks, he paints come speak in blood by his door, hoping the İrşi may come to devour him. He can't explain from where this desire has blossomed. Perhaps it's the way the İrşi tears into flesh with such ease— the way he takes only two fingers when he could take everything.

The İrşi enters, hesitant, but Otabek is struck by how human he appears. Walking upright, though with overactive eyes. He wears a button-up and slacks, dress shoes scuffed and spotted with blood. They're still some very shiny shoes.

The İrşi looks around the room, then settles on Otabek and takes a seat on his floor, legs crossed. Right where the corpse had been last night. For a moment, Otabek is disappointed to still live.

Otabek shakes his head a bit. Laughs gently to himself.

The İrşi imitates him, shaking his head, then trilling a little krrl low in his chest. It's a wooden sound. Like a plank pulled back and released, vibrating at such a low frequency.

“What are you, really?” Otabek asks, as if letting smoke vent from his lungs. He's much calmer this time. Much more committed to possible death or dismemberment.

The İrşi continues to look at him. There's a teal highlight about the room, illuminating in little strips of light. The door flutters on creaky hinges, wide open, warbling lightly. The street dog barks. The İrşi looks to the general location of the barking, unnerved.

“You can't understand me, can you?”

The İrşi makes a motion like a yawn and draws his lips back, flashing his teeth. He points one finger at them.

“But you can read.”

The İrşi trills and snaps his teeth together with a click.

“We're not communicating at all.”

The İrşi watches. His eyes are still a little red, but nothing like the night before.

Otabek puts out his injured hand, already missing two fingers, and the İrşi looks at it like he may bite it. His eyes flick up to Otabek's eyes, down to his hand, then back to his eyes.

“Please. Stay.”

Otabek stands and, despite all instinct, turns his back on the İrşi. The İrşi clicks and trills behind him, softly. The sounds go right between the slats of Otabek's ribs.

A pen. Why are there no fucking pens in this house? The nearest book— Qunanbaiuly— becomes loose leaf as he tears away some middle pages. He bangs through his kitchen drawers for any writing utensil. A red marker rolls forth, and Otabek tests it on his hand, then goes back to the pages, now scattered on the floor.

He gets on his knees, puts the red marker to the page, and writes out my name is otabek. It isn't until he's stumbling his way back into the sitting room that it occurs to him how deranged he's become. The İrşi turns, hiding his hands behind his back, as if caught doing something bad. He's in front of Otabek's lamp table, where a couple of old framed photos reside— his mother dipping her feet in the ocean. He and a much smaller JJ at a Counting Crows show (“Our very first concert!” those smiles seem to say). A picture of his beloved childhood cat.

The İrşi makes a soft little click and Otabek fumbles, holding the paper out to the İrşi. The İrşi reads the words, then trills— Otabek identifies this, hopefully correctly, as a positive sound, and so hands the marker to the İrşi.

It's immediately clear that the İrşi lacks fine motor skills. He clickers and vibrates as he struggles to hold the marker. Otabek gets a closer look at his hands. Though human, they're clumsy. Otabek can't make out what any of the letters are supposed to be.

“Fuck,” Otabek says and the İrşi whips his head to look him in the eyes again.

Before the İrşi even has a chance to figure out the marker, Otabek snatches it back and throws it to a corner in the room. He's never felt more unhinged in his life. The İrşi makes him crazy.

If only he had loose ink around the house. Otabek motions like he did before, with his injured hand, and says, “Please. Stay.”

In the kitchen, Otabek splashes his face with cold water, then returns with the bowl of horse blood.

Back in the sitting room, the İrşi is holding the photo of Otabek's deceased cat in his hands. His head snaps up again, but he sets the photo back down in clear sight, unashamed as it lands face down with a clat.

Deep breath. Otabek counts to five, dips his finger into the horse blood, then paints his sitting room wall in blood.

my name is Otabek

The İrşi snatches the bowl, sloshing onto his clothes, then shoves it onto the table, pictures clattering to the floor. They're cheap things, landing on a rug. They don't shatter.

In horrible, wobbly Cyrillic, Otabek can just make out the letters Ю-р-и-й.

“Yuri?” Otabek says aloud.

The İrşi croaks like those cheap wooden percussion frogs sold at festivals, high and repeating.

“I like it. Yuri.”

Yuri just stares at him. Then lets out a series of weird garbles.

“What?”

Yuri gestures at the name Otabek and garbles again.

“Wow. Alright. Can you say O? O.”

Yuri makes a broken wind sound, like wind passing through hollow stone, his closest approximation of O. It's bone-chilling. Otabek smiles a little; he can't help it.

Then the İrşi's stomach rumbles. A universal communication.

“Go eat,” Otabek says gently, then dips his fingers into the horse blood and smears it on the wall. “Go,” he repeats, enunciating with intention, then, “Eat.”

Then Yuri is gone, with no farewell, slipping into the night under the bright white moonlight.
—-

JJ must have supplies— paper or canvas large enough to tape together and cover a wall. He's a photographer. He knows people who work in film. There should be time for Otabek to rummage through his stuff while JJ is asleep. A JJ who is asleep is a JJ that does not ask questions.

Six AM should do. It's the day of the yearly parade. Day 3 of the festival. Aunt Bibigul is out attending prayer and running early errands before she and the rest of the village will venture to the city of Aralsk. Plus, JJ has long established that, prior to 10am, he is a dead man. Not to be disturbed.

Otabek clicks the door behind him and tiptoes toward JJ's studio— yes, studio, one of two whole rooms dedicated to a man that does not live on this continent. There is sound coming from the room. Like a giggle. Feet shuffling. Otabek cracks the door enough to peer inside.

Aibar's wife, Bella, is naked, hands on the floor, with JJ fucking into her from behind, seated in a wooden chair Otabek recognizes from the kitchen.

“Oh, JJ- Shit-” Otabek fumbles, words tumbling before he has time to think. Bella trips on nothing, reaching for her clothes and holding them over her chest and crotch. JJ isn't so modest. He stands from his chair, dick bobbing an angry red. Otabek shields himself.

“What the fuck, Beks!”

“ME?” Otabek says. “I was just- fuck- I thought you were asleep.”

“This is my me time!” JJ cries. “I've told everyone in fucking town that this is my me time!”

“For sleeping,” Otabek says, shielding his eyes. He looks over at Bella instead. She's blushing, a tear trickling down her cheek. “Nice to see you, Bella,” Otabek greets, because that's been the extent of his relationship with Bella for years now and he has no intention of modifying it.

“Likewise,” she says, small as a mouse, slipping into her skirt while trying to fold herself into something less visible. There's a violent dark bruise under her left eye. “I'm gonna- I've got to- Goodbye,” she says, then leaves the house in great haste.

“You're the fucking WORST!” JJ fumes, carding his hands through his perfect undercut. Otabek's been meaning to get JJ to redo his again for him.

“Bella is married, JJ,” Otabek says, as if there's any possible way JJ missed this fact. “To the village brute.”

“Yeah, and she deserves better!” JJ says, flailing his arms. His dick bobs in the open air and Otabek hates it. Hates seeing the genitalia he prefers exposed on someone he absolutely does not prefer. On family, no less.

“Please,” Otabek says, pinching his nose. “Clothing.”

“Fine, but not because I like you!” JJ spits venom, stepping into his boxers. “But because my dick is fucking cold!”

“Great.”

“Great!”

There's a beat of silence between them, then:

“You don't understand, Beks. She's amazing.”

“Oh no,” Otabek says, though it's lacking emotion. “This isn't a new development.”

“No shit it's not new,” JJ grumbles. He starts to drag the chair he'd been fucking on back into Aunt Bibigul's kitchen and Otabek wrinkles his nose at it. At how many times he's sat in that chair, assuming its innocence. JJ plops his filthy ass right into it. “Why do you think I've been extending my visits to this bumfuck town?”

“Hey,” Otabek warns, defensive, but JJ marches on.

“Why else would I choose to come during Ramadan— a holiday I don't give a shit about in a religion I actually hate— to starve and shrivel to death?”

Otabek snorts. “I did find your religious awakening rather suspicious.”

“No shit,” JJ repeats.

(“By fasting, I can show appreciation to God for my life,” JJ had said in front of Aunt Bibigul, once, mere minutes after Otabek caught him wolfing down a whole sleeve of crackers.)

“Well fuck,” Otabek says, as if that point had not yet been established.

“Yeah. Fuck,” JJ says, dropping his face into his hands. “It's been a couple years, Beks. I'm fucking in love. I don't know what to do.”

Otabek thinks of Yuri— the way Yuri recently had moved around Otabek's home, tapping on pictures and burbling to himself.

“What are you willing to do?”

JJ looks to Otabek with watery blue eyes. “Anything.”

“Do you mean anything? Or do you mean most things acceptable within polite society?”

“I mean anything, Beks. I'd kill him. You know he hits her? And forces-”

“Don't care,” Otabek cuts him off. Because he doesn't care, not really. But this is an opportunity. “I'll take care of him.”

“You'll- wait, you don't mean-”

“I've already got something in the works. Swear your secrecy.”

“I swear it.”

“And you owe me.”

“Yes. Yes, I owe you, fuck.”

“Good.” Otabek says, tapping his knuckle on the kitchen table. “Great.” It's going to be a long night. A long week. “Yeah.”

“Yeah,” JJ agrees, smiling up at Otabek with a small tick at the corner of his mouth. “Great.”

Fuck the paper. Fuck the canvas. The day's agenda is full.

It's the first year Otabek can ever remember skipping the parade in Aralsk. Zhalanash is a ghost town on this day. He snoops around the empty homes. Catches some fish. Snoops. He sells to the absent butcher by taking however much coin he sees fit. Acquires more blood. Borrows an extra bucket from the neighbors, unasked.

By evening, the town is abuzz with people hurrying home, exhausted, fearing sunset. Otabek goes home and he writes. Writes it perfectly in a journal, gets it right, then bleeds it all over the wall with his fingers. It isn't until sunset, when he's weak and irritable, that he realizes he hasn't eaten. He makes himself a stale, soggy sandwich out of old bread and leftover stew from Aunt Bibigul.

When Yuri comes, Otabek has a whole paragraph written on his wall. The smell of the horse blood is strong, but he doesn't care. He doesn't intend to be the one cleaning it. Yuri stops in the doorway, eyes a little redder than yesterday, like maybe he hasn't eaten. The clothes from Shiny Shoes are now torn and dirty. A mix-match with fresh clothes that Otabek hasn't seen before. It must be hard to eat, with everyone hiding away and urging him to be gone.

“Yuri,” Otabek says, and Yuri chirrups in response. He stops in the doorway, eyes darting over the words. Scrolling from left to right, then darting back left. Then he looks at Otabek and nods, a soft little prrll sound, high in his throat. Yuri is so amphibian, sometimes, though he may eat like a wildcat.

Otabek is no scientist— no expert of creatures. If an İrşi is a shade of human skin, standing in a doorway, it's a person. He thinks the İrşi doesn't care what he names it. Only that it is seen, and that Otabek would let him name him in return.

They slip through the trees, taking the long way around the village. Yuri moves with grace, somehow so perfectly human as he tries to emulate Otabek's motions. Pushing back branches with the backs of his wrists. Flicking his blond hair from his eyes, bobbed around his shoulders and catching in the strong night wind. For the first time, Otabek is struck by just how alluring Yuri is— how his body moves within his environment rather than against. His eyes are sharp and alert, assessing every sound of the forest, and softening again when they land back on Otabek.

Yuri slips in front of him. The curve of Yuri's rear is nice, firm and round, and Otabek knows it would feel lovely flexing in his palm. He wears tight black leggings this night, hugging the length of his legs. Otabek is afraid of himself— of how badly he suddenly wants to die crushed between those legs.

They slink around the stone fence, glowing bone white in moon beams. Through the creaking metal fence. To the unlit front door, where Otabek splashes his two buckets on the sigil by the door. Gently, with the smallest sloshes, so as not to make too much noise. It runs red down the wall, pooling and spilling off into the dirt.

Otabek writes quickly on the notepad he's brought with him and shows it to Yuri. You're sure you know which one?

Yuri doesn't nod nor shake his head. He just makes that broken-wind O sound, makes a little chirping sound, then slips into the house silent as the night. Otabek feels the briefest stab of guilt. Not for the murder, but because of the laundry drifting on the line outside. Because Bella is home with her shitty soon-to-be-severed husband, tucked into bed or brushing her teeth.

Otabek takes his two buckets and flees, as planned, and dashes back through the trees to his house. He writes by his door, oh, please come tomorrow, and shuts himself inside, heart throwing itself against his ribcage.

He's so hard it’s maddening.

He draws himself a bath, telling himself he won't do it, absolutely won't do it. Then he pleasures himself with the warm water stroking around him, to the way Yuri's soft rear would feel plump in his hands. To Yuri with his legs spread, throat croaking as Otabek slips his fingers into him. He doesn't last long. He comes just thinking of his fingers in Yuri.

The bathwater feels wrong, like the liquid is his soul slipping out, leaking and threatening to drown him. Laced with his come, he sees the little white clumps float around him. He's a masochist. An actual fucking masochist to want to slip his cock between the same teeth that took his fingers— bone and all— in one, clean swipe. But when he thinks of Yuri's eyes, his hair, the way he fills a room with as much radiance as he does terror— fuck, does he ache for it. He wants to know him, in spirit and body, inside and out.

He calls JJ after his bath and the sad sap answers on the second ring.

“What's up?”

“I did your favor. Now I'm calling for mine.”

“Beks, what did you-”

“Come over.”

“Okay, but look, I'm not-”

Otabek hangs up. JJ texts him a few minutes later.

can't sleep anyway. be over in ten.

As soon as JJ steps through the front door, his eyes are stuck to the wall covered in blood.

“Jesus, Otabek, fuck, what-” JJ goes silent for a moment, mouth still around unformed words. “What IS that?”

Otabek is peeling a potato, prepping his meal for the week. He doesn't look up. “What does it look like?”

“It looks like you're writing a fucking love novel for the İrşi is what it looks like!”

Otabek hums. Among the instructions to murder Bella's husband, he considers some of the words he's written there. He doesn't need to look at them to know them, because he wrote and rewrote them at least ten times today, getting it just right. your strength and emerald eyes in the moonlight's glow. He'd written things there like hair soft yellow, even caked in blood just as much as he'd conveyed I want to help you, Yuri. I want to be something with you.

“Why?” JJ asks, dumbfounded.

“You are here to clean. To repay favors,” Otabek says, pointing with his knife. He resumes peeling. “Not to introduce discussion topics.”

And JJ does clean, but not without turning his phone up to full volume, singing along to bad American pop rock as the curtains billow in the open windows. Otabek imagines, if only for his own pleasure, that Yuri stops by and catches sight of him through the window, peeling potatoes with a soft smile on his face. He imagines, for a moment, that Yuri finds Otabek appealing, despite his slow eyes and human fears. He imagines that Yuri likes what he sees and wants to see more.

“We're papering the wall,” JJ huffs an hour later, wiping sweat from his brow. “This is ridiculous.”

Otabek sucks a freezer fruit smoothie through a straw. A rare treat— something he'd brought home from a visit to Aralsk a month or two ago. “I thought you said it was romantic.”

“I- what?” JJ wheels on him. “Like fuck I did.”

Otabek hums a disbelieving mmm-hm.

“Seriously,” JJ says. “Papering? The walls?”

“That was my intention,” Otabek says simply. “before I walked in on your sexcapade.”

JJ grumbles some unfriendly words under his breath, in French, but the intent is clear. He goes back to scrubbing at some blood stuck in a crack, wedged deep. Otabek may just have red-tinted cracks on the wall from now on. He doesn't hate that possibility.

The potatoes bubble on the stove. The smell of carrots and fish wafts in the air. It's nearly 2 in the morning, but this is what Otabek does. This is his season. The season when sleep is a low, low priority. Where he has enough energy to feed himself. Sometimes. Barely.

“So it's called Yuri?” JJ asks, not looking up from where he's resorted to picking at the blood with his fingernail.

“His name is Yuri, yes,” Otabek says calmly, checking the pot and stirring before returning the lid with a metallic clamber.

“What a normal fucking name,” JJ says, light, without the usual air of judgment.

“For a very exceptional being, I agree,” Otabek says cautiously.

JJ scrapes at the wall with his fingernail some more, lips pursed. The street dog barks outside, quick and repetitive, alerted by some rat or child.

“Did you fuck it?”

“Choice phrasing,” Otabek says, but he can't help a little sputter of a laugh. “And no.”

JJ scrapes at the wall some more. Otabek gives him the time he needs to form nice words.

“Is he-” JJ stops, then starts again. “Do you find him sexy?”

“Yes.”

“Huh,” JJ concludes, no lilt of question in it.

Otabek's mind wanders. He likes sex. He likes removing a person's clothes to see their body for the first time. Likes making a person laugh while naked.

He and JJ have talked about sex. Otabek's been with some women and doesn't mind hearing about them. JJ's cool with hearing about men. But Otabek has had less opportunity to be on the sharing side of the conversation. It's a small town. It's a conservative town. They tolerate Otabek because he is from here, but he isn't well-liked. No one would trust their children alone with him (which suits Otabek just fine). Most of Otabek's sexual adventures have taken place in Canada, when his aunt and mother used to still live there. Before both JJ's father and Otabek's mother passed away within a year of each other, prompting Aunt Bibigul to move back to the motherland.

Otabek clutches his smoothie to his chest. It's been years since JJ and Otabek have been wingmen for each other, but they still share this bond. “His body is... really nice, JJ,” Otabek divulges and his cheeks feel warm. “Truly...” Otabek thinks of long legs, pretty eyes, thin waist. “...tailor-made to suit my tastes.”

“Lemme guess,” JJ says, brushing his hands together to shake the dried blood from his palms. “Blond hair, big eyes, fat ass?”

Otabek wrinkles his nose. “Nice ass,” he corrects, then, more sheepishly, he adds, “Yes.”

“Fucking knew it,” JJ says, almost spitefully. “You've got a type. You remember that time you beat the shit out of that guy in Toronto for buying your boy toy a drink?”

“No,” Otabek half-lies. How can he remember every fight?

“You're so possessive,” JJ adds.

Otabek grunts. “Just like to fight.”

No one fucks with Otabek because he's from here, sure, but also because Otabek fights back. He recalls another boy from here, long since moved away, that didn't fight back. When boys stopped fighting Otabek, he'd fought that boy's fights, too. A smashed lunch? A smashed face, punched enough times to feel soft, for the body to be unresponsive, for Otabek to still be swinging as he's pulled away.

JJ takes four steps back from the wall and rests his hands on his hips in triumph. “There!”

Otabek checks the pot bubbling on the stove again. Gives it a gentle stir. Then stands by JJ to assess his work. It's as spotless as one could hope.

“It'll do,” Otabek says.

JJ elbows him in the ribs, then Otabek offers him the rest of his smoothie wordlessly. JJ sucks it down in one go, hands it back, and heads for the door.

“Be careful, Beks. Family's getting small,” JJ says just before leaving, then adds in a rare moment of vulnerability, “Don't wanna lose you, too.”

Chapter Text

There are three pumpkins on Aunt Bibigul's front stoop this year. A crooked smile done by JJ, a cat face by Bella, and a questionable series of shapes provided by Bella's youngest daughter. Otabek plans to steal the candles from them. Those, and the surplus of them he found in one of the kitchen drawers. For reasons. And he'd really like to know where JJ even finds pumpkins, in this region of the world, high on the heat of summer. What lengths does this man go to? Does he have them expedited to Aralsk by special order, then drive all the way out there for retrieval? Does he smuggle them in by way of suitcase?

He actually doesn't want to know. What a waste. His thing is better, with the İrşi. Thinking of him always.

(Last year, by the flicker of a single candle, Otabek had written in blood How can you read?

with eyes Yuri had written back, rain pattering outside, two rivulets shining down the window. Hair dazzling with candle fire.)

Otabek has spent all year thinking of those nights with Yuri last year. When Yuri wandered back to Otabek, night after night, just to bask in moonlight and let Otabek say pretty things to him that he didn't understand. When Otabek had started to learn Yuri's personality, he’d been surprised by Yuri’s playfulnes. His attitude.

Waiting like a maiden all night for Yuri's arrival. Disappointed on nights when the sun arrived before him.

Aunt Bibigul catches Otabek in the kitchen just as he's about to steal her candles. Urges him to have a cup of tea before taking off. A post-feast treatment to aid digestion.

“It's funny how quick that boy takes off after dinner these days, hmm? Wonder what he's off doing,” Aunt Bibigul muses as she pours their mugs, shaking her head.

“He's doing Bella,” Otabek says, flat, sipping his tea. “We know where he is.”

“Hush, now!” Aunt Bibigul says with a slap to his hand. “Yes, but we mustn't say it. It's too...” Aunt Bibigul sets down the kettle and takes a seat across from him in the very chair Otabek deems the sex chair. “...unconventional.” She says it like a curse word.

“Sure,” Otabek agrees. It does no harm. JJ and Bella are good gossip for the village.

(The Aunties, a mere month after the murder:

“A shame, what happened with the İrşi.” Aunt Bibigul's right-hand woman.

“Yes, a shame. The poor girl.” Aunt Zauresh, biggest advocate for Otabek's garden.

“She's a lucky girl to have JJ.” Aunt Bibigul, defensive.

“Ah, yes, to get a second man when she's already been used up. Isn't that right Otabek?” Aunt Zauresh again, pushing a plate of biscuits closer to Otabek.

“Yes. Of course. Very lucky.”)

Otabek is more prepared this year. He swipes the candles when Aunt Bibigul isn't looking before heading home, thanking her for the tea and early dinner.

He's been thinking of Yuri all goddamn year. Of the way he put his arm around Yuri on the final night and read to him, finger following, connecting sound to the words he already knew. Of the way his body shifted next to Otabek's— the feeling of his soft hair against Otabek's cheek when he drifted to sleep.

The festival falls during a moonless sky this year. It will wax to a sliver through the week. The lilies in Aunt Bibigul's yard are stretched open, scooping sunlight. Every elder in Zhalanash is in easy agreement that tonight is the night.

Otabek has never been attuned to plants— his place has always been with the sea. His lilies are dead little ropes on the dirt and two survivors half-bloomed. A garden was a mistake. He'd shown the vaguest interest in starting a flower garden and the Aunties had swarmed.

A wall of his room is papered, thanks to JJ. He swipes the words please come tonight, beautiful by his door. He waits.

The candles are nice at night, flickering like little yellow souls around the room. There is commotion outside. A high-pitched, animal whine. Otabek cranes his neck to peek out the window, where the street dog is dead in his yard, red pooling from him. Freshly dead.

Outside, Yuri crouches some distance from the dog, watching the neighbor's cat raise its hackles against the fence. Yuri is naked. He hasn't eaten.

Unable to contain himself, Otabek has already taken a quick step out onto the front stoop when he stops himself.

“I missed you, Yuri,” Otabek exhales relief, speaking to Yuri a few meters away. He's terrified. Yuri is far more monstrous than the memory of him, but still. He'd missed this fear— this exhilaration. Otabek's throat ticks as he swallows.

Yuri falters when he sees Otabek, as if the sight of him knocks Yuri's breath away. Just like the sight of Yuri takes Otabek's. The cat flees and Yuri's reactive croak is a low, short rattle.

The İrşi is always more monster than human the first night, at least at first, with bloodshot eyes and jerky motions. Crawling, twisting, and gurgling his breaths as if fresh from some unrestful slumber. He slips inside past Otabek. Close enough to smell. Swamp, sweat, and breeze. Sex by the water.

Otabek stays in the doorway, looking at the corpse of the dog in his yard. Yuri trills, pitch rising, and so Otabek gestures to the poor dog.

Yuri clickers in his throat. It's an alien sound— something Otabek struggles to associate with any emotion. Then Yuri dips his finger in the bowl of horse blood and writes threat on the wall— next to the paper.

Otabek laughs. He laughs as he places his hand to the small of Yuri's back, allowing his eyes to wander Yuri's smooth skin, his long legs, and the soft weight of him high between his hips. Yuri's eyes cut through Otabek, skeptical of his intent as he's pushed gently to the washroom, where the dismembered torso of Shiny Shoes' replacement is in his bathtub.

Yuri moves like a nightmare, clicking and crawling. He hopes Yuri doesn't mind the taste of adrenaline and freezer burn. It was a sudden, bloody murder in the trees a few months prior. He's learned his lesson on dragging whole bodies around. He'd chopped and sawed this one into careful pieces. His arms, legs, and head are still in the chest freezer, under a metal slat and all of his “acceptable” flesh— slices of horses, chickens, fish, and goats. All once alive and breathing, doing much less harm than this corporate scumbag Yuri is about to devour.

Yuri makes a mess of the tub, splattering and croaking as he rips out the guts and tears them with his teeth. It's preferable over the sitting room mess. This mess is more manageable. Mitigated.

There's a wet, sickly pop when Yuri turns the severed neck around, ripping and twisting to expose the tendons. He chews at them like licorice. Otabek shivers all over. He feels sick, so suddenly; he feels like he wants to fling himself over the windowsill and vomit. But he doesn't. He can't. He can't stop watching.

Yuri turns to him then, such a sweet little nightmare, and holds a mess of bloody body parts up to him. To share. Otabek's poor heart breaks. Breaks because Yuri holds the wriggly intestines up in his palm and Otabek knows from watching that that's the best part.

“No thank you,” Otabek says, one hand over his mouth to mask the smell and his mangled hand raised in protest. He's considered trying human flesh. Briefly. Could fry up a nice little thigh patty. It probably tastes like most flesh, of which he's eaten plenty. “I don't think it's for me. You make it look delicious, though.”

Yuri warbles in his throat, wet with his meal, then tears at the piece he'd offered Otabek so kindly.

It's an honor to be able to provide for Yuri this way. His heart swells with a sense of accomplishment. If Yuri minds the quality of the meat, he doesn't show it. He stretches himself on the floor when he's finished, sated.

It's been pushing at him for a while now, tossing him from side to side: the knowledge that Otabek needs to mean something to Yuri. But it hits him now like a sudden, heavy storm wave as he races for the shore with his catch for the day. He's capsized, submerged, and bobbing in the weight of it. Of how much Yuri means to him— stretched out like a happy little gator on his blood-splattered floor— when Otabek barely knows what he is.

Yuri trills like a purr as Otabek wipes him clean with warm rags, tossing them to slop red in the sink. He runs out of rags before Yuri is all the way clean.

Yuri makes a series of distressed little croaks (or that's how they sound to Otabek, but what does he know?) as Otabek scoops him into his arms and carries him to his bed. Hands scrabbling, elbows jabbing, Yuri fights him the whole way. Otabek stumbles from it, knocking between hall walls. It's all worth it because Yuri practically melts into the sheets when Otabek gently places him there.

“Rest up,” Otabek tells him quietly. Yuri pops an eye open with alarm, but relaxes upon only finding Otabek there, watching him drift. “I'm here if you need me.” Yuri makes his own sounds, gently, in response to Otabek's nothing-words.

Then Otabek cleans the tub and surrounding walls diligently enough to not hear Yuri creep out of bed. He finds an empty bed an hour later, sheets rumbled and streaked red. Otabek's clothes are littered around the floor, a mountain range of disheveled little peaks. There's a smear of red by the open window— a red half-handprint left behind like a thank you note.
—-

On the second night, Yuri enters more calmly. Like a person might. Otabek almost expects him to say something— a brazen hello or a quick acknowledgment of his presence— but then realizes how foolish the thought is. Otabek shows him the freezer, where Yuri gets close to the curling cold and chirrups into it.

The arms, legs, and head are buried deep at the bottom of the freezer. Otabek transports them wearing gloves, where they can defrost in the hot summer air. Yuri doesn't seem to want to wait. He tucks himself into the tub and tears carefully, rubbing the skin on occasion to thaw with friction, like he's done this before. His eyes flick to a few droplets on the wall from a rough tug at some ligaments, then slide to Otabek. If Otabek didn't know any better, he'd almost think Yuri feels guilty.

Did Yuri find him there last night, when he'd slipped from bed, scrubbing at the tub with a huff?

Otabek reads to him by the bedside lamp, soft yellow on Yuri's green eyes. His lashes flick over the words silently as he listens, following Otabek's finger. He can recognize some words now— I, you, want, eat— the types of words that appear often and come with context. Yuri stays until dawn, leaving in a panic when he notices the sky glowing dully.

Day 3 brings the yearly parade. Otabek isn't sure if he can get away with skipping two years in a row, so he goes, catching a ride with JJ, Bella, and her kids. The only kids Otabek has any significant exposure to, really. Her youngest, Sofia, takes a confident seat directly in Otabek's lap. Otabek locks uncertain eyes with Bella, but she just smiles, turning in her seat to face the road.

Sofia teaches him to play a stupid game with his hands. Her hair whips in the wind, stinging his face as the scenery shifts around them— from the soft seaside forest to open rocky desert, stretching long until homes and businesses dot the highway, feeding into Aralsk.

Otabek wanders around the vendor tents until he finds the little wooden percussion frogs, with their ridged backs and tiny sticks. He buys a few for the kids, then one for himself. The kids are delighted upon his return. Otabek fiddles with his, croaking it in his hands, the sound lost in the crowd.

They're still waiting for the parade to start when Otabek leans close and says, “It's a necessity, JJ.”

JJ groans. Otabek can't hear it over the chatter of the crowd around them, but he sees it on JJ's face. “Not this again,” he says, loud. Bella's eyes slide to them, then back away when Bella's son demands her attention. “Did you really come all this way— to the parade— just to swindle my time like this?”

“I can be quick,” Otabek says, diplomatic. “Efficient.”

“Can you, though?”

JJ has a point. Otabek likes to get a read on every option in the market before making a purchase.

“I can be inefficient,” Otabek concedes. “They can have my life savings for a mere morsel of ink.”

“Go by yourself,” JJ retorts.

“Need the keys,” Otabek reminds.

“Walk.”

“Too far.”

JJ clicks his tongue, irritated. “I don’t trust you to be back by the time the parade’s done.”

Otabek huffs. The crowd around them is sparse but eager, filled with children dressed as ghouls, ghosts, and fairies. Bella's youngest is throwing a quiet fit about how the other kids have costumes (Why don't we ever have costumes? It's not FAIR!). The parade is starting in twenty minutes. They'll have to venture to the opposite end of town— around the closed-off stretch of the main street— if they have any hope of finding shops that are still open.

“You owe me,” Otabek says, nodding towards Bella.

JJ looks to Bella, knelt to talk to one of her boys, then back to Otabek. “That debt’s already paid,” JJ mutters.

Otabek laughs. “That debt will never be paid.”

JJ sighs, but claps Otabek on the back and leads him out of the thin crowd. It's the biggest city near Zhalanash, but that doesn't mean it's a big city.

Three small shops later, Otabek finds a stationary section and buys twenty pots of black ink. It's probably too many. It's definitely too many.

“Crazy out there, what with the traffic,” the man behind the counter offers, providing the small talk expected of him. JJ would laugh at that if it was in a language he could understand. He's getting better with Kazakh, thanks to Bella and repeated exposure, but it's hard when all of his social circle speaks fluent English.

“Yeah,” Otabek says, eager for the interaction to end before it even started. The clerk bags his items carefully, wrapping each glass pot in paper.

“Concerns me having all those country people in town, you know?” the man continues. Otabek doesn't invite him to continue, but he does. “They really believe in all that stuff, you know? Monsters and such.” The clerk punches his total into the register. “Can't imagine believing in fairy tales in this day and age, could you? Coming into town with all these cockamamie stories, could you believe it?”

“Can't imagine,” Otabek says dryly, passing his money to the man.

“It's something in the water, I've always said. Can you imagine?”

“I really can't.”

“Tell me about it.”

JJ, oblivious to the content of the conversation, eyes the bag with annoyance.

“What do you even need these for, man?” JJ asks as Otabek accepts his bag from the man behind the counter and performs the obligatory thank you. The man eyes JJ with great suspicion, with his fast, native English. Yeah, it's a small town.

“Sexy things,” Otabek says and JJ rolls his eyes. Not entirely false. Not true either.

He thinks of Yuri— how he was splattered a beautiful red the other night and Otabek had cleaned him with a warm rag. How he'd flinched back, inspected the item, and then leaned in approvingly to have his face cleaned. Eyes steady on Otabek's, pulling him closer.

By the time they're back with Bella and the kids, the parade is just wrapping up. One of Bella's kids is asleep, on her shoulder, while the other two are fighting over a shiny piece of confetti.

“Ready to head out?” JJ asks and Bella flutters her eyes with meaning, eyes wide in that please save me way when she reopens them. If the kid sleeping in her arm looks tired, then Bella is the walking dead. Children do that to a person.

That night is different. Yuri arrives later than usual, with vibrant, sparkling green eyes, already sated. He's wearing Otabek's least favorite sweater like a dress— a gag gift from JJ, black with a big tiger face on the front, five sizes too large for either of them.

Yuri, though, makes it look natural. The sweater brackets his legs like a bell, shifting around him as he moves toward Otabek's lamp like a strange little moth. Yuri puts his hand up to the bulb, under the shade, almost touching. He trills. The sound reminds Otabek.

“Ah! I have something for you,” Otabek says. Yuri pulls his hand away as if burned and hides it behind his back, watching Otabek.

“Oh, it's alright,” Otabek says, softer this time. Yuri is still watching, assessing what he's done wrong to make Otabek speak with such sudden volume.

The bag from today is a soft fabric, ink pots clicking together when he lifts it. On top rests the little wooden frog. They've always been sold at the parade— a hundred near-identical trinkets sold by a dozen different vendors. Otabek has never been interested. Not until Yuri, when he learned there is actually something in nature that sounds that way.

Otabek drags the stick along the ridged back of the frog, producing a little clicker trill of his own.

Yuri flinches away from Otabek, across the room in a flash, watching Otabek do it again. He trills back this time, matching the sound with his same clicker. Yuri tiptoes closer, the two of them transitioning back and forth, trilling one after the other at different velocities of clickers. It's almost a conversation. Otabek is fucking mad with it.

Then Otabek unscrews one of the ink pots, dips his finger in, and writes onto the title page of a nearby book. This made me think of you. Yuri stares at the page, deciphering the shapes. He's delighted by what he finds— if the way he snatches the ink pot and spills it on the face of the tiger sweater is any indication. Otabek flicks the little wooden stick over the ridged back of the percussion frog again, a little smile tugged at the corner of his lips, hair fallen over one eye as he peeks up at Yuri.

Yuri dips his finger into the glob of ink on his chest, then smears the word false directly onto Otabek's wall. He's giving up on the wallpaper idea. The idea of Yuri's words being something permanent is appealing.

“What?” Otabek asks aloud.

Yuri understands the inflection well enough. He gestures to the little wooden frog, then shakes his head, copying Otabek's mannerism.

“Yeah,” Otabek agrees, then sets the little frog down. Yuri croaks just like it.

Otabek teaches him what some more words sound like. Yes, no, what. That night while reading, Yuri gets caught up on the word suitable, pointing and clickering as if to say Tell me what it means.

It means good. Otabek explains weakly when more advanced explanations get him nowhere. Something is suitable when it fits your needs.

When Otabek excuses himself to the restroom, he comes back out to find Yuri sitting in his chest freezer. Just perched there, lid open, sitting atop a dozen frozen fish and letting the crisp air out. He trills when he sees Otabek— a high little chrrl.

“You like the cold?” Otabek asks and Yuri just chrrls again, shimmying into the chill.

That night,Yuri lingers just before sunrise, then leaves with that little trill— the one that matches the little percussion frog and now holds some shared meaning between them.
—-

Otabek learns through Aunty gossip that an old woman passed in the night. It had been a stormy night, the night after the parade, and she'd forgotten to rewrite her sigil by the door and cover it from rainfall.

It isn't until the funeral the next day that it hits Otabek, almost for the first time, that he's killed people. Bella breaks into a sob during the eulogy, when someone vaguely describes finding the body of the old woman, and Otabek covers his mouth and runs to the washroom.

The toilet seat is cold in his hands as he vomits with a loud heave, gulps a few breaths, then vomits again to the thought of Bella sobbing so hysterically, like a woman who has watched the İrşi tear at flesh. Has watched Yuri tear at flesh. He vomits again and again until there's nothing left, thinking of those sobs. Of blood, splattering in Otabek's hair. Of the red, red tub when he bathes after-

He dry heaves through these images. Delayed reactions. Shaking. Shaking.

Time passes there, Otabek breathing heavily, leaning against the stall door, seated on the floor. Eventually, there are two confident taps on the stall door.

“Fuck off,” Otabek tells JJ.

“Um, I can, but, are you okay?” A voice that does not belong to JJ asks.

Otabek rubs his face and leans to unlock the stall, letting out an unattractive blurgh as he moves. A man with eyes as blue as JJ's and shining silver hair looks down at him, brows knit. He's handsome in his black suit— Otabek had noticed earlier during the congregation, an outsider among a sea of mourning locals.

He bears no foreign accent, though. He is from here, raised by his poor mother after his Russian father knocked her up and fled. Of course Otabek knows this. He knows Viktor. The other gay from Zhalanash, gone for a life full of sin. The boy-turned-man that felt indebted to Otabek for sticking up for him in school.

Otabek doesn't give a fuck about Viktor and never did. He just likes his knuckles bloody against skin. He likes the surge of adrenaline that strikes when hit, then surges out when hitting back. The blood, coursing through him, that beats alive alive alive.

Envy had filled Otabek when he'd heard from the Aunties that Viktor ran away. He'd spotted him at the market once or twice, likely visiting family for the day. He'd fantasized, in his younger days, of seducing him when no one was looking. Just because. Just to see.

“Do you want me to go get someone?” Viktor asks, averting his eyes. “Your cousin, perhaps?”

“No,” Otabek says, looking away from Viktor. He'd been staring blank faced. No wonder Viktor thought he wanted something.

“Okay, well... I appreciate your coming,” Viktor says awkwardly, standing over Otabek in the doorway to the toilet stall, Otabek on the floor by the toilet.

Otabek gets to his feet. Viktor steps back to let him pass to rinse his mouth in the sink. “You must have been close with my mother,” Viktor says, watching Otabek in the mirror. Otabek meets his gaze there.

“She was a good woman,” Otabek lies. She was one of the most heinous elders in all of Zhalanash, especially to Otabek.

Viktor smiles reluctantly at that— a little cruelly, almost. “I suppose to most, yes,” he huffs dramatically, eyes on the tiled floor.

It's day five of the festival and the celebration must go on, but it's dampened. The yearly dance in the town market is an extension of the funeral, with upbeat music playing for kids to dance while everyone frowns around them. Bella breaks into more trauma sobs. Otabek has to leave. He can't stay here, watching Bella cry. Thinking how she watched the razor rip of Yuri's jaw through thick neck, ripping, splattering. JJ makes her happy, but she paid for this life. Otabek forced her to pay for this life.

The dandelions (living proof of his failure as a gardener) greet Otabek by his door. Shining little suns, swaying. They'll go to seed soon, sending their hundreds of white tufts out on the breeze.

Otabek locks himself in his bedroom and curls into a ball. He needs Yuri. The cause of the pain is also the cure. Everything he is revolves around this one, all-encompassing need.

The sun sets without Otabek's notice— without him writing by the door and opening all the windows for Yuri. There's a tap on his window and he startles, turning to find a shadow there, jerky and uncertain in the dark of night. The window creaks as he opens it and Yuri climbs in, placing his foot on the sill like it's no trouble at all to move that way.

Yuri can sense something is wrong. He's stiff in front of the window, staring at Otabek. There's a little light coming in from the hallway, where Otabek had left another light on. It cuts white across Yuri's frame, lighting just one green eye and his exposed collarbone.

Yuri approaches him as if stalking prey, slowly, one careful step at a time. As if he's avoiding detection, which is an insane thought with Otabek staring straight into his eyes. Or at least an approximation of his eyes as Yuri slips out of the cut of light, closer to Otabek, deeper into dark.

Otabek inhales his scent— natural, strong— and he's drunk on it. He smells like swamp, yes, but he also smells like breeze through leaves, like ocean foam. Like all of Otabek's best fantasies wrapped up in a long, pretty body.

Yuri's hands are cold on his wrists. He walks Otabek away from the bed, up onto his feet. Yuri is moving backwards, still staring at Otabek, as he leads him out into the hall. Across the way and into the washroom. When Yuri releases him, Otabek realizes his hands are trembling. This is the room where Yuri feasts. There's still a red sheen to the tub where Otabek was lazy with the scrubbing. What else does Yuri know of this room?

Yuri leans closer, those razor teeth mere centimeters away, and Otabek whimpers. His heart pounds but he's— he's so very excited. He's ready to go to the feeling of Yuri reaching inside of him and yanking out his physical bits— his lungs, his heart, his intestines— all of those things that make him so pitifully human. All of the things that tether him to the physical realm. That have always felt a little like they were slightly the wrong style and fit for him.

But Yuri continues, past Otabek, crouching by the tub until his hands are on the faucet, slipping and fumbling with the nobs. Pushing. Pulling. After some considerable failings, Yuri croaks low in his throat, then takes Otabek's trembling hands back in his. He places Otabek's hands on the nobs, then stares at him.

Otabek turns them, half-dazed, coming back to this plane of existence with both disappointment and relief. What a gift it would be to not be driven by this body's instinct to survive. To not regret a jump halfway down.

The water runs hot, filling the room with a light steam. It's still dark, with only the light from the hall leaking in. Otabek turns on the light. He and Yuri stand, about a meter apart, just watching each other.

Otabek pulls off his shirt and steps from his slacks. He strips bare and Yuri watches, eyes active. Looking to the faucet, then back to Otabek, again and again. Down, to the nubs where two of Otabek's fingers used to be. Between his legs, where he's half hard among a scraggly patch of dark hair. To Otabek's eyes, finding occasional rest there.

Knowing what Yuri looks like naked, Otabek feels painfully small. Maybe Yuri doesn't really know the difference. Or doesn't care. He wasn't socialized with humans.

It occurs to Otabek that Yuri has likely never seen a body like his apart from while eating it. Otabek doesn't know what to do, or say, or feel. He steps into the bath and rests against the back of the basin, performing his best rendition of relaxation.

It's chillingly silent when Otabek squeaks the faucet off. There's the gentle slosh of his limbs in the water as he reaches for a cloth. It drags lukewarm water across his skin, rough, from elbow to wrist.

Yuri is quick. From bone still to a flurry of motion, Yuri steps from his clothes, then into the tub. His back presses against Otabek's chest; the small of his back is warm against Otabek's erection. A sound pours from Yuri then, pleasant, like a long amphibious mating call.

Otabek, hesitant at first, touches his fingertips to Yuri's smooth skin, sliding them down into the water. There are four flaps at Yuri's ribs, two on each side. His fingers catch against one, almost slipping in, and Otabek's stomach responds with an unpleasant roil. Yuri recoils as if in pain, making a deep, clicking little warble. Otabek moves his hands from the gills and finds smooth stomach— the absence of navel.

Yuri is not human. He is not human.

The expanse of Yuri's naked body against him is marvelous. He looks so human, but with a perfection that hints inhuman. What reason is there for a monster to appear so flawless— for one to be so beautiful? His nipples peak on his chest, warm brown and wrinkled like raw almonds. His body is smoother than most of the bodies Otabek has touched— smooth like a swimmer, shaved free of the hairs that might create drag in water. His penis is uncut, soft in wrinkled skin atop the perfect place where his thighs open to lie back and relax in the little space they have.

No matter how many times Otabek reminds himself— no matter how much his body responds to murders that he doesn't regret and masochistic desires he never doubts— Otabek belongs to Yuri. He's belonged to Yuri since even before Yuri demanded him— before he took his fingers, tore, and swallowed them to nourish his monstrous body. Since before Otabek first saw him, even, in that alley three years ago when he stepped not away, but towards.

A pleasant little vibration rises from Yuri as Otabek moves his fingers down, over Yuri's firm, flat stomach and along the soft insides of his thighs. The water trickles from their movements, slow and small. Yuri's body is toned between his more gangly features— between the cut of his collarbone and the points where his joints meet. His triceps are firm. His thighs ripple with strength for every little motion.

Yuri's knees are peaked in the much colder air, two ruddy nobs, and Otabek circles his fingers there. Yuri's skin is ocean-like, as if he's a stone beaten on currents. Yuri presses his lips to the nubs where Otabek's fingers are gone and Otabek shivers through a warm sigh. Tongue flickers to taste.

There's a gloriously unabashed quality to the way Yuri spreads his body. As Otabek touches his fingertips to the sweet, soft pucker of his nipples, circling them, coaxing Yuri to rut in the empty water, cock hardening with a pretty, dark vein up the length of him. And wow does it have length now, engorged as it is, with a mouth-watering girth to it.

Then Yuri tilts his head around to look at Otabek. Yuri's fingers tangle in his hair as Yuri just looks up at him. Otabek's heart rattles his whole chest.

Nothing is more beautiful than that moment, when Yuri turns around as if to steal a kiss, then rolls his whole body in Otabek's arms just to look at him. There's no doubt that if Yuri were human, he'd have kissed him then. He'd understand that as the appropriate way to express this feeling— to channel the wild energy coursing between them.

They touch in the water, bumping erections, sliding chests. The water sloshes from the tub, wet smacks on tile. He burns for Yuri like he's never burned before. Static snaps at his fingertips, urging him to find release in the touch of Yuri's skin, to complete the circuit. Otabek leans in, but Yuri pulls him away by his hair and just looks right through him— right into him— lighting him up with just his gaze.

Yuri will never be enough. He will always drive Otabek mad like this, make him ache for Yuri's strange body like this, behave in these ways that make Otabek wonder What does an İrşi think?

The water sloshes. Yuri readjusts, releasing Otabek's hair, brushing their cocks in the water as he moves. It feels good. So, so good and Otabek yearns for more of that sweet brush. Yuri is so long now, bobbing in and out of the water, sweet almond brown peeking from his foreskin. Yuri probably tastes salty like a brine, warm and milky. It makes Otabek wonder. Does Yuri understand that doing this— rubbing against Otabek like this— makes him swell with something so impure? Thoughts to claim, to own, to take.

Otabek leaves the bath abruptly. The towel is cold but dry against his skin. He peeks back at Yuri, now submerged to his eyes, hair floating around him, bright green watching. There's a moment between them that Otabek almost thinks is awkward, but then Yuri sits up in the bath and streaks his finger on the tub wall, as if writing with water.

Towel around his waist, Otabek retrieves the ink pot from earlier, pausing only to read some of the words on the sitting room wall. Something nice, messy, with a backwards Cyrillic ә and barely legible ж. In response to Otabek's Did you eat? and followed by Otabek's various questions about other İrşi (yes) and how many villages Yuri haunts (İrşi here, written with hesitance, like he isn't certain he comprehends the question).

Otabek returns to the washroom with the ink pot. Yuri is out of the tub, dripping freely on the floor, looking out of the small, high window at the trees outside. Then Otabek holds up the ink pot and Yuri dips his finger in, picking up more ink than necessary, where it splats on the floor and bleeds down the wall. Yuri's writing is messy, barely even words, but Otabek can just barely make out suitable. He takes a long look at Otabek, gaze touching from top to bottom, making Otabek hot all over. Then Yuri turns back to his work and applies his edits.

the body is suitable

Otabek wants to laugh— suitable— but the glimmer in Yuri's eyes stops him. Yuri doesn't mean suitable. He means something hungrier. That Otabek is something that appeals to him specifically. Otabek wants Yuri just as badly. How wonderful would it be, to kiss Yuri against the wall until his razor teeth rip Otabek's face to shreds? To slide his hand down Yuri's naked, shaking abs and stroke him until he comes?

For all Yuri lacks the experience to communicate with human language, he's marvelous in so many ways that escape humans. The world is worth watching through Yuri's eyes: when he inspects old dust floating in the air like it's magic— when he reads Otabek's body language better than anyone, despite it being such a different language from his own.

Palms on Yuri's hips, he kisses Yuri's chest, only pulling back to tell Yuri, “Your body is perfect,” and “I want to fuck you, Yuri, and you don't even know what I'm saying.” Yuri responds to his own name— to the movement— pressing those sweet nubs up into the heat of Otabek's mouth. His chest rises and falls, so erratic, so affected.

“How does a man kiss a monster?” Otabek asks himself aloud, licking Yuri's nipples and watching his face, tinted pink, panting, melting.

Otabek touches Yuri in his bed, innocently, but with darker desires. He wants to take Yuri in his mouth and find out if an İrşi comes like a human does. To learn if penetration means pleasure.

Instead, he listens to Yuri's breaths. Watches Yuri’s hands, fingertips still stained black, as he kisses Yuri all across his chest and up the soft insides of his thighs. Then he goes to bed with Yuri in his arms, but he doesn't sleep. They both just lie there, listening to the summer frogs croak happy after rain outside his window. Wondering what he's done; wondering if Yuri thinks anything of it at all.

---

It's a good week in Otabek's opinion. Despite the panic attack, he's touched the İrşi. Naked, two nights in a row, and the İrşi didn't object. The İrşi, which could kill him so easily, just allowed it.

The legend states that the seventh night is the final night of the haunting. The reality is that the İrşi has never attacked on this night. Legends can be wrong, perhaps. Just as jokes transform with each person that repeats one, perhaps cultural knowledge can mold like this too. And now it's the seventh night and Yuri is gone. Gone until the next year and Otabek is certain he'll only fall more in love with the idea of Yuri in the time that stretches between this festival and the next.

The moon hangs in the sky as an over-filled crescent, where the inside curve appears almost straight. All of the lights in town are out, with only the small warm glow of candles moving up and down the dark street, between houses and down to the water. The moon gives just enough light to make way through an already familiar town.

It's always brighter by the sea, where the gentle waves glow with the moon's hesitation, reflecting a soft silvery light. The candles flicker orange behind their paper screens, lighting up like little beacons as everyone ventures waist deep into the water and pushes their lantern out.

The sea is always tranquil this night, with only the lightest movement on the surface.

Otabek stays late, watching the little boats burn like little stars on the sea, pushed out by wind to small orange dots until they extinguish into nothing. Otabek hates finding the remains of these little lanterns for the following week washed up after every festival, but they are beautiful to look at, glowing on the horizon under a sliver of moon.

Otabek leaves only when a few candles remain, blinking out to an audience of one. Some of the lights in the houses are back on, where people cook and clean and prepare for the night. The message is by each door, as if the general sentiment is just in case. Smoke lifts from the home of his neighbors, wafting from their kitchen. He's almost back home, stepping through the tree shadows stretched over the dirt path, when he turns to find a figure standing in the trees.

It's unlike Yuri, hunched, eyes sunken. In this lighting, the skin looks inhuman and lovely. Rose pale.

Otabek feels vulnerable, but he doesn't dare turn his back. He takes his steps backwards, towards his house, as he watches the figure step forward. Step. Step. Then emerge in the pale moonlight with green eyes and blond hair.

It is Yuri, but haunted. His lover, but monstrous.

“Yuri,” Otabek breathes, because he's sure, but he isn't certain.

The İrşi trills, croakier than usual, and Otabek exhales. Yuri in this moment is so far from human it catches Otabek by surprise. Jerky. Bony. Skin glistening with something viscous, dripping from his fingers. His tongue darts out with its length to lick his unblinking eyes.

“Yuri...” Otabek repeats and Yuri makes a new sound— something broken and pained, followed up by that hollowed out O. “Thanks for coming to see me, Yuri,” Otabek says, though Yuri won't understand. Will never understand because Yuri is not human and never will be.

Yuri approaches him, smelling of sweet wetland clay. He takes Otabek's gnarled hand in his and just holds it, staring at Otabek with those sunken eyes. Dull, lifeless green. Yuri's hands are different now. Mucous membrane, slippery and cold. His breaths are labored. The wheeze is bone chilling, the irregularity alarming.

“I'll see you next year, little nightmare,” Otabek says with a fondness he can't explain. There's a pheromone that Yuri secretes through his pores— something that draws Otabek to him so unshakably. That's the only explanation for this pull to him and all of his beautiful horror.

Yuri's departure is sudden. He goes like an unholy creature, running but crouched, slipping into the shadow of two trees.

Chapter Text

Otabek likes the men that stop by their village for a quick break. Tourists, usually. On their way to Aralsk they stop in for a quick bite to eat, to relieve themselves, to stretch their legs. These men are few and far between, but this one...

Otabek is seated at their one small diner. The walls are faded yellow and one of the four tables is missing a chair. The man seated across from him looks over the menu— a single sheet that features only bread (topped with your choice of jam or cheese) and the soup of the day (which is generally the same bland horse stew). He's an American, fit and handsome, whose name is Abraham but please, just call him Abe. The village had delivered him to Aunt Bibigul's house when he stepped out of his car speaking American English (“This one must belong to JJ,” Aunt Zauresh had said with disdain).

Otabek can't remember the last time an American came through their village. Americans visit Kazakhstan seldom and only the young, wealthy ones that have grown particularly bored with life venture out to the Aral Sea region.

Otabek had started it (“How bout I take you and show you around?” with a meaningful full-body sweep of his eyes). Abe is bold, brushing his leg against Otabek's under the table and batting his (green) eyes. JJ's been telling him he could use a human boyfriend— that Otabek is glamorous (or whatever) and he'd have no problem luring someone home (to touch butts or whatever).

Abe is nothing but questions— about what Otabek does, what their village is known for, if he believes in the haunting. Otabek answers them, but he isn't the greatest conversationalist (fishing mostly, not much really, yes). They leave the diner with daylight to spare.

The sun is low. Bright clouds zipper down a purpling sky. Otabek leads Abe to his home without question, up the main street, past the messages smeared by the doors. Abe's car is gone when they pass, as if he'd come by taxi and blindly trusted this village to take care of him, just as Otabek will take care of him.

“I thought you said you believe in the haunting?” Abe asks by Otabek's unmarked door, but his tone is more flirtation than curiosity. A tease.

Otabek smiles. “The İrşi knows better than to come when I have company.” He opens his door and welcomes Abe in, inked words still smeared on his wall from years prior. He lets Abe know it's a weird art project he's been working on. Abe loves artists.

Abe has long hair and pretty, naturally tanned skin, especially on the soft insides of his thighs as Otabek slides his clothes down and takes his cock in his mouth. It's warm and full in his mouth and it's been so long— so long— since he's had this.

Abe is lovely. He tastes nice, like salt and flesh, but he doesn't gasp like Yuri would— doesn't writhe and trill like him. He doesn't intoxicate Otabek; doesn't provide a sense of thrill. There's no simmering threat that Abe will tear his limbs or rip out his throat and Otabek is bored with it— bored of the reality that his life is horribly unlikely to end at any moment.

Abe doesn't last long. He tells Otabek it was his first time with a man, but he's here in Europe, where everyone's just not so held down by those kinds of norms, you know? So why not? Otabek wants to roll around naked with him, just a little.

(“This is Asia. I'm Asian.”

“Okay, yeah, technically, but you're not like Asian Asian.”

Annoying.

“Let me bathe you,” Otabek says instead and Abe agrees heartily.)

Abe sucks him off in the washroom, giving Otabek a perfect view of his back sloped, his ass parted high and pretty in the air. He wants to see Yuri there— plunging that literal monster cock into such a nice little ass. To feel Abe splutter on his dick, to scrape with his teeth as he writhes. To lock eyes with Yuri across the expanse of tawny, unblemished skin and fuck him together.

The moon is heavy in the sky outside his window when he hears the clicking. Abe doesn't seem to notice— he isn't as attuned to Yuri's little noises as Otabek. It's quiet at this point, far off in the sitting room. Otabek hears it acutely, from deep within. Like a tuning fork. A vibration deep in the cold metal soul.

“What's that noise?” Abe eventually asks, relaxed, probably from the tea Otabek had prepared. “Some kind of frog?”

“I think so,” Otabek says. It's honest. Yuri is amphibian kind of. Yuri is a lot of things kind of. He is nothing completely.

The sulfuric stench of swamp fills the room, thick and muddy, as Yuri enters. Abe is too tucked into Otabek's fleshy crotch to notice. His mouth is warm, intensely slick. Yuri appears in the doorway, Abe's back to him, and pleasure like an earthquake shatters through Otabek when they lock eyes. He comes in just a few strokes, watching Yuri watch him, Abe swallowing him down. Abe seems like a fine man. Otabek would even like him, maybe, in another life. If not for the ethereal soul looking at him now. If not for how immersed Otabek is in Yuri's irrefutable numen, how swayed he is, tattered in his waves. This is how belief must happen, alchemized from need.

Abe doesn't have time to react with more than a strangled what and a momentary splashing before Yuri is gripping his neck in his hands and tearing out his throat with his teeth, red washing into the tub.

Otabek pulls the tub drain and watches Yuri tear, ripping his head back, croaking low in his throat. He likes to watch Yuri eat— he likes the way it makes him both sick to his stomach and incredibly aroused, the two warring in his gut. He can feel his cock stirring, even now, even after the most earth shattering orgasm of his life.

Though it's the first night, Yuri arrives fully dressed in dark ripped jeans and an oversized leopard zipper hoodie hanging open, floating around his hips. Yuri must haunt other villages too, on occasion, when he finds such nice outfits yet no one in Zhalanash turns up dead.

And who in Zhalanash owns clothes like that, anyway? So fierce, yet soft against his fingers?

It's all so stained now, after Yuri's meal. It's a waste of such a nice outfit. Otabek strips Yuri bare and lays him in his bed. He has every intention of rinsing the stains immediately, before they set, but the bed is so soft and Yuri is so precious. He's hardly slept in days. He slips in next to Yuri and dozes there, Yuri's head fallen against his chest.

Yuri never rests long. He wakes in the night and moves about the room, touching things, tapping on the mirror, clicking at his reflection. Staring at pages of books. Snapping his teeth at dust particles floating in the lamp light. Writing messages on the wall for Otabek when he wakes. Otabek dozes in waves, aware of these actions but not fully conscious.

If he's honest, he prefers Yuri on the second night, when his eyes are clear and his movements are more human. When he enters like a blessing, shamelessly nude, delicate blond in the frosted moonlight. The breeze is warm, but Otabek feels bare and cold seeing Yuri glow so silvery-blue. Then Yuri locks those green eyes with his and he remembers the previous night— the man that is now just leftover appendages shoved into his freezer and a world shattering orgasm. Otabek is swept up in Yuri all over again.

It's these moments that inspired Otabek to devote the last year to learning about the İrşi. He's been to the city a dozen times since last year, scouring libraries for stories of the İrşi, of the festival, of the haunting and any inkling of a way to free Yuri. To free Otabek himself from living so apart from this beautiful terror.

Otabek has scans and photos on his phone from the library in Aralsk. He shows them to Yuri, leafing through old sketches and stories of hauntings— of ghouls and swamp creatures and, in a few dusty books, he even found an old folk story of the İrşi. When Yuri doesn't respond, Otabek sighs. Yuri clickers in his throat as his hand lands on Otabek's to still his retreat. Then Yuri shakes his head no— a mannerism he's learned from Otabek.

“No?” Otabek asks. Yuri knows this word. “There's more İrşi?”

Otabek could use paper, but he's grown to like writing on the wall very much— with Yuri here, in his home, wrapped in their words.

Yuri blinks at him, and so Otabek writes on the wall, Are there more İrşi?

Yuri shrugs. It's done with an awkward exactness— shoulders raised up to his ears, then back down. Otabek isn't sure if it means I don't know or I don't understand, so Otabek gestures the ink pot to Yuri. It takes him a while to form his words, but eventually he paints when İrşi not fed, She choose new soul.

“She?” Otabek asks, then points to the word.

Yuri blinks at him.

“Who is she?” Otabek asks.

Yuri blinks again, then underlines She, as if he does not understand the question. When Otabek doesn't make any of his sounds of understanding, Yuri writes, I İrşi here.

Otabek stares at it until he realizes the I is the number 1.

3 places, Yuri adds.

Otabek sighs and cards a hand through his hair, frustrated. “Right.”

Yuri watches his face and seems to figure something out. Yuri writes his best approximation of the word always, then crosses it out. He looks at Otabek, expecting understanding. Then he takes Otabek's hand and tucks it under his shirt, right over where his gills will flutter more with each passing day of the festival.

The emptiness of the word always isn't an insecurity Yuri has. It just has never been an option. Otabek can't change Yuri— what he is or the conditions under which they meet. Yuri is inimitable, a being that exists outside of the world Otabek thought he knew.

Why do you adhere to the writing on the walls?

Yuri croaks low, with grit. must, he writes.

Otabek turns to the list of questions they've put in a little box on the wall. He points to Why?

requiem, Yuri writes

Otabek points again to the what?

Yuri blinks and mirrors Otabek, pointing again to requiem.

There is a knock on the door, then. Otabek is expecting the company, and so writes, DO NOT EAT on the wall, giving Yuri a stern look. Yuri is immovable, face inscrutable.

Otabek opens the door to a nervous JJ, rubbing the back of his neck. He observes Yuri from the doorway, drops his hand, then offers a weak, “Nice to meet you.”

Yuri turns his head to look at Otabek, blinks, then turns back to JJ.

“Right, right... uh...” JJ rubs the back of his neck again. Annoying. Dumb mannerism. “Sa-la-ma-tsyz-ba?” JJ offers weakly, giving each syllable the attention one might give to a full word.

Otabek snorts. Are you in peace? It's just a hello, but still, in this setting, it's funny.

“He doesn't understand Kazakh,” Otabek says, gesturing JJ into the room so he can close the door. Smoke drifts from a house closer into town, billowing up over the trees. The clouds are webbed over the sky, bejeweled with little stars.

“But he reads it?” JJ asks once he steps inside. He doesn't take his eyes off of Yuri, dressed in Otabek's clothes, standing like a statue.

“Yeah,” Otabek says.

There's a silence between them then, until Yuri breaks it for them with a broken-throated clicker and his hollow wind O sound.

“Oh fuck no,” JJ says, taking a backward step towards the door.

“That's just how he talks,” Otabek says softly.

“How does he...” JJ scans the walls around them. “...how can he read?”

Otabek shrugs. Otabek imagines for a moment what the thank you and have you eaten? and so, so beautiful looks like to someone who can’t understand Kazakh.

“What do you mean you don't KNOW? Is he even... you know...” JJ glances away from Yuri for the first time, briefly to Otabek, then immediately back to Yuri. “...sentient?”

“Sapient,” Otabek corrects.

“Yeah. Can he, like, consent?”

“Fuck off.”

Otabek is not about to admit to JJ that he wonders this himself, during some of those 358 nights of the year that Yuri isn't around. After he touches himself to the thought of Yuri— his hands, his hair, the soft plump of his rear in Otabek's palm. Especially shamefully when he wakes intensely hard from nightmares— ones where he fucks Yuri sweetly until he's devoured face-first.

“Sowh-,” JJ tries to start, then clears his throat and asks with a crack in his voice. “What did you wanna do?”

“Have you meet,” Otabek says with a shrug. “Watch some shows.”

“You're fucking unhinged, Beks.”

“Maybe,” Otabek agrees, then plops himself onto the sofa. Yuri follows, walking as if on tenterhooks, moving stiffly on the balls of his feet. “But I'm what you've got.”

JJ grumbles under his breath, then perches himself on the very edge of the sofa. Otabek is close to Yuri, a divider between him and JJ. Otabek's thigh presses comfortably to Yuri's and Yuri leans into it, giving Otabek some of his weight. Otabek selects something stupid— an episode of a baking show he's barely been following. He doesn't have a TV. His laptop is small. Yuri's head is on his shoulder and he looks up at Otabek's face, eyes softer than usual.

“I!” JJ squeaks. He stands, then runs his hands through his hair three, four times. “Pee.”

“Sure,” Otabek says, not looking away. Hopefully JJ doesn't pull back the tub curtain while he's in there. He won't like what he sees.

Yuri's eyes are so green, glinting the laptop's shifting light like a spell. Either something about Yuri now seems to say you really trust me or Otabek has really lost it.

Then Yuri reaches up a hand, hesitantly, and touches Otabek's lip. Soft as feather, right along the dip in the middle of his lower lip, eyes fixed on that point.

“Yuri...” Otabek says, then loses all reason as he leans down to press his lips to Yuri's.

JJ is back in an instant, dragging his feet on the floor and perching himself partly on the arm of the sofa. Otabek pulls back like nothing happened, but Yuri is now lying his head fully on Otabek's chest. Yuri's chest is beating wildly under his palm, matching the pace of his own.

Fuck, what was he thinking, kissing Yuri like that? Especially now, when Yuri could snap and kill the only human person that means anything to him.

“Did she get the muffins right?” JJ asks, pretending to have any interest in the show.

“Yeah.”

“They look good.”

“Very good, yes.”

It continues on like that for the full episode, JJ making small talk about the show and being not at all subtle about watching Yuri. Otabek's skin crawls, barely coping with Yuri's crushing proximity. He breathes through his mouth to avoid smelling Yuri, who smells today like there's a bit of strawberry soap in his hair. Yuri's hand shifts occasionally on Otabek's thigh and Otabek adjusts, hiding his shameful arousal.

JJ excuses himself the moment the credits appear. Otabek isn't sure if he wants JJ gone or not. It depends. It really depends on if he's made the biggest mistake of his life— kissing something so ethereal, so beyond sticky mortal kisses.

What does a kiss even mean, for someone like Yuri? For something like an İrşi?

Then Yuri is on him like a storm as the door shuts. He straddles Otabek like he knows exactly what sex is and how much he wants it. Otabek is instantly hot all over, taking Yuri's ass in his hands and rutting up against him with force. Heat licks through his veins. He needs Yuri— Yuri grinding in his lap, breathing against his lips and slipping his intensely warm, wet tongue into Otabek's mouth. He tastes like rainfall by the sea— salt in the air and water all around, dropping, falling, pelting. Stinging when it hits, but spreading over the skin like life.

Yuri doesn't so much kiss as he does taste. It's sloppy, almost violent, but the need with which he kisses hits with a rush. Yuri wants him. He's wanted him intensely, for quite some time. Ravenously, if the frantic rut against Otabek's body is any indication. Maybe Yuri intends to eat him. Maybe he's merely emulating an observed behavior. Whatever the case, Otabek glows in it. Alight from the thick, golden pleasure that Yuri's body pours into him.

Otabek can feel a sting and taste blood on his lips, where Yuri's teeth cut. Yuri doesn't look sorry when he pulls back and why would he? Why should he be? Yuri is a creation beyond classification. Otabek licks his own lip, taking the cut into his mouth and sucking it clean. Yuri claims his lips again, rutting against Otabek's abs, coaxing Otabek's tongue into his mouth and sucking, so dangerously close to those sharp teeth. Yuri is hard, tossing around in his baggy shorts.Never has Otabek been kissed this way— like a thing worth tasting, worth gorging on. Meal-worthy.

“Fucking perfect, Yuri,” Otabek says once his lips are free. “I want you so bad. I want you every way I can have you, every way you'd allow...” He keeps going, like there's too many words to say and not enough breath for them. He licks his own finger tips, then rucks Yuri's shirt up over his head to caress his nipples, rubbing them to little hard peaks. He likes the way they feel— the way they so visibly respond to touch.

He's pushing at Yuri's waistband when Yuri draws back suddenly, scrambling to his feet in front of Otabek, chest rising and falling with shallow breaths. The gills at his ribs only flutter minutely, mostly sealed.

Yuri looks around the room, then moves quickly to bring an ink-tipped finger to the wall across the room from them. He writes between two old messages (have you ever seen the lanterns? and, messier, lanterns are something nice).

Yuri's back is curved so perfectly, the notches of his spine prominent all the way down to where his rear slopes out, under Otabek's baggy shorts he's wearing. Yuri turns around quickly, hair dancing around him.

sex with me will curse

Otabek remains seated on the sofa. He feels his cock swell when he reads the word sex. Sex, with Yuri. The biggest ask he's ever had in this bad, simple life. He doesn't need ink to convey, “So?”

Yuri shrugs— that mimic of a motion he's seen Otabek use a dozen times over. Responding not to Otabek's words, but to an inflection.

Is Yuri picking up mannerisms organically, becoming a fraction more human? Or is Otabek the creature here, the subject of a precise study of mimicry?

Otabek steps forward to slip Yuri's shorts down his lovely legs. It's his answer. Yuri is watching him, eyes calculating, as Otabek submits. On his knees, he suckles the tip of Yuri between his lips and tastes him with his tongue. Brine, just like Otabek imagined, and sweaty flesh. Yuri's hands are on him, scrabbling at his hair and shoulders, tugging and pushing, pulling him closer. Otabek pops his lips off of Yuri, then looks up. Yuri's eyes are blown wide and his hair is tangled, like he'd run his hands through it before grappling at Otabek's.

“You've never been touched this way, have you?” Otabek asks, expecting no answer. Then Otabek sucks Yuri in tight, looking in his eyes, and the sounds that come out of Yuri are his new reason to live. Maybe Otabek is the monster. Maybe this is the sickly sweet appeal of corruption.

Otabek has never known breaths to be so wonderful. A soft sigh when Otabek sucks; a shuddery gasp when Otabek hums. The occasional overjoyed clicker spurs him to take more, to give more pleasure. Otabek pulls back, a line of spit and precome between his lips and the head of Yuri's cock. He looks up.

Yuri is caught on a long suffered breath. His brows are scrunched together, his mouth open, his cheeks flushed. He's ruining Yuri, burning him down to ash so he may resurrect anew.

“I've never touched something more perfect,” Otabek finds himself saying. Later, when Yuri is on his hands and knees. Later, when Otabek's finger is sliding down Yuri's spine, dipping to the high valley of his rear. “Never something more beautiful,” he tells Yuri. Yuri, who cannot understand him. Yuri, whose breaths are so expressive, pressing up into Otabek's touch, his rear soft and full in Otabek's palms. Better than imagined.

The first finger seems to fuse with Yuri— to disappear into Yuri like he's made to eat Otabek alive more ways than one. Otabek props himself over Yuri with his other arm, his own body heavy, swirling with need. Yuri's mouth drops hot against it. His lips skim, sharp teeth grazing fragile wrist, so close.

“More terrifying,” Otabek says. Even as his voice trembles, his cock twitches, watching Yuri drag his lips across his skin while Otabek fucks him with his fingers. Yuri is easy to read like this— expressive and vulnerable in a way that Yuri never otherwise is.

Otabek doesn't need to change Yuri. There is no mystery he can solve in a library book that will make Yuri more human and, if there was, he no longer wants that. Not if he can have these secret moments— if he can reach inside of Yuri and draw out such raw emotion. Even as Yuri cuts his wrist with his incisors and mouths it like a candy wrapper, this is what he wants. When Yuri hurts Otabek, pushing his tongue into the cut he's made while fucked open on three fingers, this is what he needs.

Rain is picking up outside. Somewhere, among the haze of the moment, Otabek thinks he'll never have to worry about that again— will never have to protect a message written by his door from the elements.

Yuri is even more alive with Otabek's cock inside of him. The first push is tight as Yuri's body clenches on him, hugging him tighter with an intense embrace. Otabek slips endlessly, out and back in, leaving a trail of sticky hot pleasure, leaking out of Yuri as an invitation to plunge back in.

It's been so long since Otabek has had it. Sex is a striking thing when it comes his way, but rarely worth the effort.

Sex with Yuri is like harnessing lightning: dangerous. A power he was never meant to wield, which makes it only more intoxicating. He feels Yuri respond to it. He twitches when Otabek fists his cock and rocks an orgasm out of him. Otabek likes when Yuri's thighs tremble. He likes the symphony of gasps and trills and that heartbreaking O as Yuri quakes like he's been dunked in an ice bath.

Otabek makes the most disgusting sounds then. Water tatters in the gutter by his open window. The breeze is cold now, whipping into the room. It flutters the papers on his desk and the fishing tourney poster tacked to his wall. Their breaths are heavy and Otabek pulls Yuri closer to him— to keep him warm as the storm howls in uninvited. Yuri rides his second orgasm, shuddering against Otabek's chest, and Otabek spills into his spasming body with a sob.

“I could pleasure you for hours,” Otabek says as he snicks the window shut. He collapses back on the bed, heaving. Yuri recovers quickly, like an orgasm is nothing special despite how hard his had been. Otabek's sheets are wet and sticky. He rolls in them reluctantly, too tired to do anything about them. Yuri is up next to the wall, writing the word good. Then he turns around and clickers like the goddamn percussion frog, as if waiting for an answer.

Otabek puts his hand out for the ink pot, unwilling to stand. Yuri passes it off, then watches Otabek paint the words best I've had down the length of his arm. There's a soft trill in Yuri's throat, one Otabek has come to recognize as contentment. It sounds the same as when Yuri comes, only softer. A pleasure that's a little more pure.

Yuri doesn't visit nightly, and sometimes only visits for an hour or two. Otabek tries not to take it personally, because it's hard to imagine, isn't it? Having only six or seven nights out of every year to roam? Yuri has a whole life’s worth of experiences to cram into just a few summer nights.

When Yuri does visit, he's on Otabek instantly, tearing his clothes off with his teeth and demanding without words that Otabek give him more orgasms.

(And sometimes with words.

do it again Yuri writes, already naked

make you come? Otabek writes

do it again underlined, two times, three times, four times, until Otabek pushes him against the wet ink and licks him out)

But Otabek has an idea. He wants to do something special for Yuri.

take me to your home Otabek writes on the sixth night, but Yuri just circles the word home and stares at him.

my home Otabek writes, then says it aloud, gesturing to the walls around them.

your home? Otabek writes, then says it aloud, pointing at Yuri.

Yuri contemplates, then circles my home and copies Otabek's gestures around the room.

This is how most conversations with Yuri go and will always go. There are not enough hours in a short week of nights to teach someone an entire language, a full culture of nuances to understand and relate back to.

Otabek takes him to the swamp beyond the village, barely a kilometer from his house. It's a small swamp, just a notch of wetland tree cover along the creek that empties into the sea.

(Otabek had spent hours staring at that notch on the map on his wall, wondering if Yuri lived there, before he tore the whole map down to build a relationship. Inked to those walls.)

The swamp is a dark place, dense and alive. Moss crawls up one tree trunk, showing a healthy, moisture-laden green. There's a slurp of mud when Yuri gets his foot caught there— when Otabek gives him his elbow to slop him out. Otabek is knee-deep in silt, but Yuri doesn't need his help. His leg does the strangest thing, then. It condenses, pulled tight like a band as Yuri slips free, then expands back out to human form. It only fazes Otabek slightly. Yuri is full of little marvels.

There's a thick stagnation to the air, a briny crust. Otabek has brought two little lanterns with him. It's the wrong night, but that's okay, because this is just for them. Just for Yuri.

They sit by the water, frogs peeping in the distance, the ones closest to them silent due to their presence. A few tiny catfish fish braid and unbraid the water. Otabek lights the first lantern, then passes it to Yuri. He holds it in his uncoordinated hands, staring down at the flame flickering in the circle of paper. It glitters in Yuri's eyes and casts orange shadows on his face. Otabek lights the second lantern and then places it on the water, black and muddy with spots of green growing up to rest on the water's surface. He pushes his lantern gently into the trees, watching it flicker in the darkness of the swamp, casting haunting little shadows on the swamp roots climbing from the water to form trunks.

Yuri does the same, pushing his lantern to chase after Otabek's. He watches them for a long time, until Otabek's lantern disappears behind a tree. Beautiful as it goes, off into the darkness, carrying whatever symbolism a human has placed upon it. Beautiful, as it goes, to become garbage tangled on some branches or drifting with some seaweed.

Yuri looks to Otabek once his lantern is gone, too. He moves closer— to press their bodies together and lay his head on Otabek's beating chest. The swamp peeps and buzzes. The trees drip. The canopy overhead is pitch, the dusk suddenly thick with words. Words that, if uttered, would not be understood.

That's where Yuri leaves him for the year, alone in the dark, a kilometer from his home with the frogs creaking and nothing but his cell phone flashlight, battery at 27%. Because Yuri does not have a concept of manners or safety. It would seem silly, to something like Yuri, that Otabek might feel vulnerable alone in nature. That humans feel least at home at night in the natural world that forged them.

Otabek visits that swamp many times in the coming year, but never finds a sign of Yuri or anything like him. His garden is full of dandelions and he waters them. He encourages them to grow and choke out the lilies under the soil, yearning to rebloom next year. The bees buzz around the flowers, happy.

“That's just like you,” JJ laughs at him over Skype. JJ visits less in that coming year, after the wedding— after Bella scores her ticket to Canada and leaves this small village. Otabek is picking the weeds from his garden, plucking anything that does not look like a dandelion. His phone is propped against an upturned clay pot, where JJ can talk and watch and comment to his heart's content. “Leave it to Otabek Altin to have a garden full of flowers no one wants.”

Otabek squints into the sun, wiping his brow.

“Yeah,” Otabek agrees with a little grin. “I guess that is just like me.”

Chapter Text

The Aunties had warned him. He would grow to resent his choice to not go off to Aralsk for university. Give it time, they'd said, and you'll see. You'll see the mistake you've made.

Though he isn't old yet, fishing never grows tiresome for Otabek. The sea is always a welcome friend, despite its different moods. When the sea punishes him, he figures he deserves it. When it rewards him, he is thankful. There's a mutualism between him and the declining sea. It's a relationship unlike the factories and farms that pump water from it at breakneck speed. There's a new color of pipe added to the pump into the sea by the nearest factory— a coppery brown shade, reaching further into the ever-lowering lapping surface.

It's a cloudy spring day. Otabek pulls his net from the water while the evening pulls the sun from the sky. The moon watches from afar, a dull milky white in the daylight. It's easy to miss where it's plastered against soft blue.

Otabek misses Yuri terribly. He's more solitary in his love now that JJ isn't around. JJ will visit for the festival again this year (why miss the only time of year when anything happens?), but Otabek is hoping to convince him to visit another time next year. Yuri will consume him during the festival— figuratively, but with luck, maybe literally too.

The sun is barely peeking over the horizon as Otabek approaches the shore line. Three men are sitting on the broken dock that hasn't kissed the water in years. He can see the ends of their cigarettes glowing orange as he nears. He can hear their laughter carry over the long stretch of water, boisterous. Otabek isn't sure who any of them are from this distance.

Only a few hundred people live in Zhalanash, but Otabek makes it a point to never learn too many faces. The orange glow of a cigarette butt arcs into the sea. That's all it takes to make Otabek irate.

“Do you gentlemen like to eat cigarette butts?” Otabek calls out to the men, who are quiet as soon as he speaks. Otabek drags his boat out of the water with a grunt and kneels to tie it to a rock, next to the other fishing boats. “You should respect the sea more, seeing as it's where your food comes from.”

Otabek can hear footsteps approaching him and his heart picks up its rhythm. He hears knuckles crack and turns to find himself surrounded. Fuck yes. He wants a fight. Needs it. Otabek rises calmly. Widens his stance.

“You're looking for trouble, aren't you, pretty boy?”

Ah, so Otabek does recognize one of the men. Or, more, recognizes that particular phrasing. They went to school together; never talked much. Threw fists at each other one or seven times. Crossed paths when JJ recruited the man to clean up the blood in Otabek's floor. The other two are less familiar. Much younger, probably, judging by their round faces and submissive stances, flanking the man Otabek recognizes.

Name. What's his name?

Otabek shrugs, just to spur them on. “I was simply making an observation that you like to eat cigarettes. I'll keep that in mind if I ever have you over for a nice dinner.” He says that last bit with innuendo, knowing what it will do.

The man's face twists with rage, then disgust.

Otabek first got into violence with reluctance. Because he's prone to saying things he shouldn't. He's a whip, with his lashing tongue.

Otabek lunges forward and punches the man, hooking from the right to knock his cheek. He feels teeth behind gums impact with his knuckles, ripping them open. The groan that comes out of the man spurs him on, and he hooks left for the other cheek, then bows out, dodging one of the younger men swinging uncoordinated for his stomach.

The sun is gone, leaving only dapples of clouds and a soft moon glow, reflecting bright on the water. The man spits red and wipes his cheek. The two younger boys exchange a look and then slink away. The man is unaffected by this. His eyes are on Otabek, rage and malice in them. Otabek's blood roars. His knuckles pulse with pain, dulled by adrenaline.

The sea side is a secluded spot, out of sight from any houses or passerby. It's something Otabek has always liked about this spot— straight down the main drag, but perfectly curved, a spot you must go out of your way for. It's a waste— it's such a waste— when Yuri isn't around to feast.

“Been talkin’ about you lately. All around town,” the man says, mouth glistening red, and he spits again.

“Aww,” Otabek taunts, flexing his fists.

The man’s face twists a shade angrier. “You’re fucking sick. I’ve seen you, you know. Erasing the sigils. Disgusting fucking pig son of-”

“Watch your fucking mouth.” Otabek's blood is hot, red hot. Otabek had liked his whore mother. What's the harm, really, in providing such a sought-after service? This man knows nothing. It's likely that Otabek will kill him tonight.

The man lunges for him and Otabek dodges, sending a blow to the man's stomach. With two steps back, Otabek reaches into his boat for his fishing knife, folded and small. The man lunges again, catching Otabek while he's fumbling with his bag to knock him right on his windpipe. The blow hits him only half-force, but it still leaves him choking, gasping for air.

The man sees it for the opening it is and leaps forward. Otabek flips the knife and plunges it into the man's chest, going right for the lungs, the heart, anything squishy behind and between his ribs. The knife slides easily. There's a pause then, as Otabek registers a warmth in his abdomen, hot and tingly. The pain hits when he looks down. There's a knife plunged into the quivering muscles of his own stomach. The panic sets in. The adrenaline hums like a machine left running.

The man pulls back from Otabek's knife and yells— loud enough to call attention. The other knife is still stuck in Otabek's skin, just below his ribs, and he falls to his knees over the man and plunges his knife through his chest five, six times, the man gasping and gurgling wide eyed beneath him. Otabek drops the knife to the ground, then staggers back, collapsing onto his back. He touches the handle of the blade in his stomach, then regrets it as agony like he's never felt before lances through him. Maybe this is how he dies, bleeding to death by the sea he loves. Maybe other men from the village will come finish him off and dump him in the sea. Maybe he'll wash up in Yuri's swamp to feed Yuri one last meal.

Otabek registers footsteps approaching. Men talking. One says something about the bodies, another about the hospital. Otabek is certain he will die here when, among the chatter, he hears a clicker and that horrific, hollow-wind O. It's a hallucination, but Otabek smiles into it, imagines Yuri there, outside of his season.

There are screams and the sound of tearing flesh. An unholy clicking gurgle through a broken throat. The sky is pretty, where the moon lights up the dapples of clouds, pushed across the sky by strong wind. The breeze is cold on his skin, on his stomach, where the knife is still in him. He barely feels it now, but he knows it hurts. Somewhere. Logically.

He is lifted. The knife cuts into him more, jostled by the motion. Otabek asks to be placed down, to be left to rest, but only little gurgles come out. He's in Yuri's arms and Yuri trills and clickers with panic. Otabek feels wrapped in mucus, with Yuri gasping and croaking labored breaths, barely breathing. He's dropped on cold concrete— finally, left to rest— and there is a frantic knocking on wood.

Otabek opens his eyes and there is Yuri, naked, dripping, covered in blood. His gills flutter desperately, his breaths are short and wheezy. He looks down at Otabek and Otabek smiles at him. Yuri knocks at the door a dozen times, hard, and then disappears.

No one comes. Maybe this is where he dies, on some stranger's doorstep, covered in blood and Yuri's mucus. There are worse ways to die. There are better ways to die, too, like at Yuri's hands.

Maybe it's five minutes or maybe it's a lifetime, but Yuri comes back wheezing, limping, gasping for air. He bangs his fists against the door and something like a scream comes out of him— a blood-curdling shriek Otabek didn't know he was capable of.

Otabek is somewhere else, then. Long spring nights camping in Canada. Bugs screeeing in the dewy grass. A fox shrieking in the woods, a shiver along the bone.

There's a pleasant fizz that spreads under his scalp, like moss spreading up between brain folds. He wishes he could see the whole sky, like he could in a Canadian prairie, spread wide and tranquil. Now, he sees only black-block sky held like a canopy, taught over treetops. There's a roof partly over his head. The beginnings of rain, falling cold on his skin.

—-

Otabek wakes in the hospital. It's the same room from when he lost his fingers or the rooms just all look the same.

It's bright. When he closes his eyes for a moment, his lids glow. Aunt Bibigul is by his bedside, with hair unkempt and bags under her eyes. The room is white and the painting on the wall is the most fascinating thing he's ever laid eyes on, a cluster of flowers that might just be dollops of paint. Red and orange and white...

“Altin,” the nurse says in a tone that indicates it isn't the first time she's said his name.

“I'm looking at the flowers,” Otabek says and his lips are numb. His tongue is heavy, so he lays it on his bottom lip, then looks at the nurse. Her brows are kind. She is not impressed.

“I'll be right back with your food,” she says. Aunt Bibigul is there, slouched in a chair at the corner of the room, dozing.

An orange glowing cigarette arcing to the black sea. Clouds drifting. Knocking. A shriek. Otabek looks down at his stomach. He pulls up his shirt and finds a big square bandage on his abdomen, blemished by a small blotch of red. He pokes the red. It doesn't hurt. He pokes it again.

“Aht aht!” the nurse tuts, knocking his hand away. “No touching.” She unfolds a tray over Otabek's waist, carrying a crusty bowl of apple porridge. “Eat.”

“Not hungry,” Otabek says instantly. His tongue is heavy again.

“You're hungry,” the nurse quips, placing a spoon in his good hand. “Eat.”

Aunt Bibigul is slouched fully against the wall now, snoring lightly. Otabek eats with a frown. He's winded and exhausted by the end of it. Aunt Bibigul wakes in time to ply him with a dozen questions that are hard to answer. The needle in his arm tickles. Passively, he wonders what drugs he's on.

It's three boring days like this before he's allowed to go home. The people he passes in the village whisper and stare. He waves with dopey smiles.

Aunt Bibigul sets him up in JJ's room. She's far too helpful; she attends to him too thoroughly. The pain is intense between painkillers. Dull while on them. It itches like a million little bugs crawl in and around the wound, hidden beneath the bandage. He spends hours writhing. He binges entire shows. He reads a few books per week.

It's over a month before he's back to fishing— lightly— and another month on top of that before he's back in full swing. It still hurts on occasion when he bends too quickly or his breaths become labored. The sea air is light and playful in his hair, slipped between warm rays of sun. His hauls are good, though the butcher these days refuses to speak to him outside of business transactions. No one in Zhalanash greets him anymore, except reluctantly.

His only conversationalists are now Aunt Bibigul and a few of the other Aunties. His neighbors greet him in passing, with reluctant smiles. People are less repulsed by him now and more afraid. Not even the tough men dare to look at him for more than a glance.

The man he stabbed was pronounced dead upon arrival, long after Otabek already arrived at the hospital. He'd bled out while everyone cowered in their houses, spreading news of the İrşi stalking up the main street with Otabek dripping blood in his arms.

JJ arrives for the festival a week early (“You'll be too busy deflowering your monstrous little perennial once the festival starts”). Otabek picks him up at the airport in the car that JJ still leaves behind in Zhalanash. Otabek doesn't have much use for it. Maintaining it seems like a hassle. Paying for fuel. He'd rather save it only for emergencies. For special occasions.

Like stopping by to pick up a can of black weather-resistant paint and a wide paintbrush on the way to pick up JJ and Bella, visiting this year without the kids.

“Behhhhhks!” JJ calls from across the pickup lane. A car skids to an abrupt halt as JJ runs out in front of it. Bella smiles with a little shake of her head, black hair tufted over her head in a messy bun. JJ barrels into the passenger seat of the car and constricts himself around Otabek's midsection. Thank god he's mostly healed. “Missed ya, buddy!”

Otabek peels him off carefully. “You smell like sweat and airplane.”

“All for you, baby.”

Bella is struggling with her and JJ's bags, grunting, the car rocking forward as she pushes and shoves at the trunk. Otabek cuts the engine and walks around the back to help her. It's a small airport. Idling for long is no big deal, which Otabek only considers because he's received a fair share of the Toronto airport traffic police getting snippy with him.

“Thanks,” Bella says with a soft smile, but her eyes waver, away from Otabek and to the new can of black paint.

Otabek is about to give her some generic form of you're welcome, but JJ is right in his ear, talking way too loudly. “Hope you don't mind making a quick pit stop!”

Otabek shuts his eyes, takes a deep breath, then tosses JJ the keys. He hears them clatter on the ground, then opens his eyes to watch JJ scramble for them.

The pit stop is an alley near where the parade usually happens, but off the beaten path. There's a tinny metal door with bars over the window. Otabek isn't interested in going inside. He sits in an awkward silence with Bella, eyes just swimming over each other in the rearview. Otabek up front, Bella behind the driver's seat. He isn't used to this energy from her. Otabek doesn't have a relationship with Bella, but it's never been awkward. JJ's told her something. She definitely knows something.

JJ emerges, banging his foot against the door to hold it open and thanking whoever is inside over his shoulder. He's balancing two big pumpkins in his arms, with a third much smaller one tucked under his chin, teetering against one of the larger ones. He marches right up to the passenger side door and gestures to Otabek. Otabek gives him the most bored expression he can muster. JJ plops the biggest pumpkin into Otabek's lap through the open window, then forces the other between his knees on the floor.

“Why must you go to such lengths?” Otabek asks.

“It's no trouble, really!” JJ boasts, pulling the door shut and starting the engine.

“But why?”

“At first, I just ran into the guy,” JJ says, placing the smallest pumpkin atop Otabek's head. It doesn't stay for long, but Otabek does catch it in his hands. Reluctantly. “At this point,” JJ says, shifting into reverse and giving Otabek a quick wink. “I just do it to irritate you.”

“I'm honored.”

Bella is quiet in the backseat. What does JJ even see in her? What is it about her that finally made someone like JJ settle down and commit— with kids? She's such an accessory— never speaking out of turn, soft in everything she does. Well-educated, beautiful, but so very simple.

(“Bella's so different in private, Beks.” JJ, over Skype, just a month after Otabek caught them fucking.

“Okay.”

“No, seriously, she's so funny. And feisty! You wouldn't believe the shit that comes-”

“I'm sorry, did I ask?”)

Otabek is watching Bella more closely than he'd like to admit. Her eyes skim over the sigils, Oh, please come tomorrow, written by the doors a week early, in thick black ink.

“I wasn't aware it would work with something other than horse blood,” Bella comments, so quietly, more to JJ than Otabek.

“I guess we'll have to see, won't we?” Otabek comments. He'd come home from the hospital to all of this black paint. After the village watched the İrşi drip red and carry a wounded Otabek through the streets during the wrong season.

Otabek carries his black paint can confidently by his side. He can't help put smirk a bit when one of Aunt Bibigul's neighbors spies it— the same neighbor that refused to share some with Otabek. Bella is carrying the smallest pumpkin while JJ insists on carrying the two big ones himself.

(“Beks, pleeeeeease, just carry it!”

“No.”)

JJ wants to carve the pumpkins right away, before they even get a chance to shower and rest from the long flight. Otabek sits with them because he likes to have someone around that doesn't treat him like a public threat (he doesn't deny that he is a public threat, but it's nice to have someone around who either doesn't agree or doesn't care).

A group of kids skip up the hill and spot Otabek sitting on the front steps of Aunt Bibigul's place. They whisper among themselves, then back down the hill slowly, hands clasped.

“You're really unfuckwithable now, huh?”

It's a little startling to hear Bella speak out of turn. And so crassly, too.

“As if I wasn't already,” Otabek jokes.

Bella's pumpkin is a work of art, with small triangles cut out at irregular distances. She's carving with a singular dedication, pumpkin between her knees, hands steady. JJ's method is a bit more slapdash, cutting and sawing at the flesh of the pumpkin until he comes up with something that resembles a face. Otabek holds the smallest pumpkin in his hands, turning it lightly. Maybe he'll bake the seeds. That's something he enjoyed when JJ did it before.

“Bet you're excited,” JJ says. Bella snort-laughs for unclear reasons, still cutting careful triangles into her pumpkin.

Need like a storm rocks Otabek's core. The need to touch Yuri— the need to watch his shoulders rock— again, against sky.

“Beyond,” Otabek supplies. He cuts the knife along the top of his tiny pumpkin, opening it to spoon the guts.

“Did you really kill Erhan?” Bella asks suddenly. JJ gives Bella a look like she's broken some agreement between them.

“The gopnik?” Otabek asks, then, “Yes.”

“Hmph,” Bella says, an airy little sound caught somewhere between I knew it and interesting.

“I didn't intend to kill him,” Otabek lies.

“Sure,” Bella says. He knife cuts crisply into pumpkin skin, with a crunchy resistance not unlike the sound of Yuri tearing flesh to eat. “I didn't intend to sleep with JJ for four years or have a fourth child, but here we are.”

Otabek glances down to Bella's tummy, hidden beneath the fabric of a loose dress. JJ gives Bella a disgustingly fond smile, then reaches down to place a supportive palm on her stomach, rubbing gently.

Otabek clears his throat.

JJ doesn't lift his hand or stop with his rubbing, but he supplies Otabek some attention. “How's it going with...”

“Yuri.”

“Right. How is that?”

“He,” Otabek stresses. “is wonderful. And he seems to find me equally appealing.” Another lie. Otabek is definitely the one more smitten.

JJ snorts. “Oh, did he tell you as much?”

“More or less.”

“I'm sure.”

“I hope one day he eats me.”

JJ splutters and Bella just grins down at her pumpkin. This time, it's a definite I knew it face.

“TMI, Beks.”

“To be clear, I mean literally eat me.”

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

“With teeth and everything.”

“Oh, god.”
—
The week drags long. Even if the company is nice, it’s not nearly as nice as Yuri’s company.
The day the lilies are in full bloom, Otabek finally finds the energy to roast his pumpkin seeds just as the sun kisses the horizon. The bake is spicy, with the cardamom and cinnamon he covered the seeds in peppering the room. He slips the tray from the oven when they’re finished, then runs out for a quick errand. The paint he bought swipes easily over the sigil by Erhan's old lackey's door, leaving a conspicuous thick black stripe. It's a moonless night, dark and quiet. He's back home in twenty minutes with plenty of time to spare.

Yuri arrives late that night, looking like a sweet little gopnik swept up on a corner of a quiet street of Moscow or Almaty— with his track suit and suede pumas. It's nearly 4 AM. He's more human on this night, drifting in already sated. His eyes are mostly clear, with just the smallest bit of red around his irises. There's blood on his skin, but not his clothes, as if he dressed himself from Erhan's lackey's closet after eating him.

Otabek points to the questions he's already written on the wall, straight to the point.

How did you know to save me?

Yuri moves close to him— closer than necessary. Cold air hits Otabek's tender wound, mostly healed, as Yuri lifts the hem of his shirt and sniffs at it. Otabek touches the small of Yuri's back, gently. He imagines him moving lower, but Yuri rises. His breath brushes Otabek's collar as he urges Otabek to open the ink pot on the nearby table. Otabek does, and so Yuri dips into the ink to write, I warned, and then, after a space, curse.

Otabek laughs a little hopelessly. Curse. Yuri is bonded to him now, and he to Yuri.

“I like that,” Otabek says. He smiles a little— can feel the little upturn at the corner of his mouth as he takes in Yuri's presence, his confidence, his attitude.

Yuri blinks at him and shrugs. Otabek's habit, right on his shoulders. It's a normal, human-like shrug. Passive. Subtle.

It hurts without you. Otabek writes.

Yuri tries a head shake— this motion is stilted, something he's had less practice with.

hurts always, Yuri writes, then slips his hand down Otabek's boxers and strokes his cock while looking into his eyes. Otabek lights up immediately, that familiar heat flaring low in his belly as Yuri touches him like it's the only thing he's wanted all year.

Yuri removes his pilfered shirt. His track pants, his socks, his too large sneakers, until his pale body gleams.

Yuri's favorite way to ask for sex is with a grip on Otabek's tuft of pubes, leading Otabek where he wants to be taken. He does this now, dragging Otabek to his bedroom door, where Otabek reroutes them gently to wash the caked blood from Yuri's skin.

It's an efficient bath; they're both eager to get to the next part. Yuri grips the hair tufted at his groin again and Otabek is hot with it, with being dragged back to his sitting room like he's a thing to be used.

He's done this with Yuri before, but it feels different now. Yuri's breath hitches at the first touch, at the brush of Otabek's oil-wet fingers in the hot crevice of him. At how Otabek's touch slips, skidding over the tight furl of muscle. Back pressed to Otabek's chest, Yuri puckers against his cockhead, then opens, body lovely and intensely hot.

Yuri makes a croak of pleasure, a chirpy kind of sound, vibrating the length of his throat. A sound like a yes, like a welcome, as Otabek slides deeper. It's like he's lost a layer of his skin, exposed at the nerves. Yuri rolls his hips back to meet him, to take his thrust deeper.

"Oh, Yuri..." Otabek says on a breath like a sigh. Yuri responds to the way Otabek says those words, the way they rise out of him without voice, unmoored.

Then Yuri's knees are on the floor, bracketing Otabek's hips. His palms spread flat against the wall for leverage, up behind Otabek's head as Yuri strokes him with his body. His chest glistens with the effort of it. Otabek drags his fingertips down Yuri's chest, pale and sticky. It smells like sex, musky and pungent. Otabek falls in love with their scent, almost sweet.

He falls in love with these sounds— of skin meeting as wind rattles the windows. Of the many huffs and sighs of Yuri, rising and varying like language, asking Otabek to thrust slower, to stay right there. He's never been more attuned to a person's breaths, if Yuri even qualifies as a person.

The moon is hidden tonight, tucked somewhere from the sun behind the Earth they fuck on. The stars are brighter, flickering in the distance, through the window where silk white curtains blow in, carrying warm night air. He can smell stew cooking, can hear his neighbors laughing, carried from their open window to his on strong winds.

Yuri sits up straight in his lap, body drifting as if carried by that breeze, slipping around Otabek, surrounding him in warmth. The curtains blow on either side of him; the window frames his body. Yuri almost seems to lie back against the sky then, among the stars behind his head, green eyes opening slowly to look down at him. Breathtaking. A perfect sliver in time.

"Fuck, Yuri," Otabek says under a breath, hands on Yuri's hips, just riding his waves. "I've wanted you since that night in the woods, as I led you to a murder. So fiercely, with the trees around us, and every moment since..." He trails his fingers in the V of Yuri's crotch, spread wide around him. His breath is shallow as he strokes Yuri's cock, leaking at the raw tip. Yuri quakes around him, warmth spilling over Otabek's hand. “I wanted to watch your hair fall on your shoulders as you came, just like this. You have such a beautiful body, Yuri, and you wear it so well. Like you never question your place in it.”

With a quivering breath, Yuri moves with more fervor, lifting his hips and watching Otabek come apart. His muscles shake as he moves, his breaths shallow, heavy. His hips twitch instinctively, responsive without thought. Like roots breaking through metal pipes for water; like leaves leaning to sunlight.

Yuri can cry, it turns out, and Otabek loves to make him do it. This is the only time Otabek feels he can truly read Yuri— when Otabek reaches to stroke and Yuri vibrates down his whole spine and sobs.

“You've such stamina...” Otabek says on a lost breath. His eyes are unwilling to close and give up this sight. Of Yuri riding him, spread against starry sky. Watching his cock glisten out of him and back in. He feels insane with it. Burned alive.

Delirious. This must be how stars feel. Passive, but powerful. On fire, spinning in abyss.

It's a sweltering night. Otabek leads Yuri by the hand down to the sea, still naked, right down the main street of Zhalanash. What is there to hide? He's a monster-fucker and everyone knows it. He floats down that hill, the wind encouraging at his back, Yuri's sex-sweat glistening from the light cast from the windows of the homes, lighting him up in stripes. Otabek is laughing by the bottom of the hill, when he's practically running and fails to stop himself, skittering ankle deep into the sea's small lapping waves. Yuri tumbles after, splashing into the wake, dropping glory into the sea.

Yuri isn't laughing, but there's a little croak in his throat, warm and chatty that sounds now to Otabek like quiet laughter. Otabek unties his boat and pushes it out to the water, with its one little orange light on black water, then chases it waist deep and hops in. Yuri follows, slinking in the water like he belongs there— neck deep, hair floating around him like the elegant train of a ball gown— before climbing into the boat with a foot swung easily up over the side. It's that old unholy crawl— the one Yuri does less and less the more time he spends emulating Otabek. The only sound apart from them is the lapping of water against wood.

Yuri is wet and naked under the stars, hair rocking gently on his shoulders with the shift of the boat. Otabek had meant to bring Yuri here to show him the sea— the one he's almost definitely already seen, so close to the town he haunts. To show him the stars, like Yuri might find something new in them tonight. But Yuri only has eyes for him, especially when they're far off the shore and Yuri lowers himself on Otabek's cock, still slick from earlier. He hangs from Otabek's shoulders, head thrown back until Otabek can watch the long column of his neck as he rides, the spread of his blushing chest. He likes the way Yuri's hair flips wildly between their faces as he whips his head back up to look Otabek in the eyes. As he slides his palms to hold Otabek's face and breathes the hot night air back onto his lips.

Those eyes. Always with those eyes, unrelenting. Endless green, flickering with the soul Otabek believes Yuri has. The jagged wood of his old boat digs into his skin. There's a slight slime to it. He cushions Yuri's knees with his palms, pinning them between Yuri and the wood until they hurt and then numb. The wood bench under his ass lurches, though it's only from his own pulse, echoing in the floorboards, feet braced on the sides of the boat floor so that the heated, sloppy plunge of his body into Yuri's rocks with the boat instead of against.

“Your body, Yuri... I could do this forever,” Otabek whispers, hands pinned as Yuri fucks himself to life. The boat rocks wildly, salt water sloshing in. He can see the moon now, with so much open sky, just a sliver hung from a slip of cloud. They could tip at this rate, plunge naked into cold water, but Otabek's never wanted to quiet Yuri's abandon. This is what he's been missing all his life. This is what he was born for— to be subsumed by something that moves so slowly through moonbeams— to submit under the black moon hiding. To serve a creature so beyond this otherwise dull world.

Having sex with Yuri changes the quality of their relationship. Yuri is combative, knocking items from Otabek's hands if he disagrees with something. Yuri arrives with a letter once, with some sections torn away and little drops of blood smearing the page. It's a love letter, signed by an Anya, likely now dead, and Yuri presents it to Otabek as an homage. It's a raunchy letter, but how would Yuri know this? Yuri knows only the intimacy. The lipstick kiss beneath the words. He has no concept of the shame associated with graphic pleasure. He presents this to Otabek, as if to say this is what humans in love do. I bring gifts.

They turn Otabek's home into a brothel for two, neither able to get enough of the feel of each other. Of Otabek in Yuri, moving back and forth. Of the breaths, labored and intimate against bare skin. Of slipping in him. Of gripping his hair. Of telling him sweetly dirty things he doesn't understand, but in tones that he responds to in kind— gasping, opening his legs, canting his hips and making that broken little O sound.

(orgasm, Yuri writes on the wall, upon arrival, the day after demanding to know the word.

of course, Otabek writes back.)

They make love by the open window, the words of their conversations dripped around them. On the floor, listening to the crickets creak for one another. By the sea, with the wind in their hair. No one in the world comes like Yuri, so unreservedly, panting and shaking like there's an earthquake inside his bones. He releases so milky warm, like a sweet splash of stars across the sky.

Nothing sounds sweeter than all the noise that comes out of Yuri's mouth— heavy breaths, wet clicks, obscene gags— as he slips those deadly teeth so close to Otabek's cock.

When Otabek thinks back on this year, surely he'll remember it as the year of this haze— of being caught in a fog, out of his mind. Of Yuri taking it better than any human Otabek has ever known, of daring to think that maybe it's because Yuri loves him, consumed in a maddening kind of lust.

Even if Yuri lingers in an odd way at the end, turning back to look long at Otabek almost like a goodbye, before disappearing into the trees.

Chapter Text

Otabek's phone is ringing right when he gets home. It's his Skype tone, high and chirpy. He answers without looking.

“Were you in the fucking marsh again, Beks?”

“No.” The image of himself in the bottom corner shows mud on his cheek and spiky clumps in his hair. His clothes are caked with muck. They peel from him like an unpleasant outer layer of skin, heavy and thumping wet on the floor.

“You're gonna end up a bog body.”

“No, because it isn't a peat bog.”

“What?”

Otabek steps out of the last of his cargo pants, then gathers the heap of mud into his arms and carries it straight to the wash. “Did you buy my ticket yet?”

JJ is eating an apple, crunching around the pit that he refuses to eat. Wasteful. “Aunt Bi did. She hasn't talked to you?”

Otabek squints at the ceiling. “No.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” Otabek affirms. It's weird with Aunt Bibigul these days. There's too many topics littered between them to avoid. They talk meal preparation. They talk weather. They talk which fish Otabek has caught and if he's thought about replacing his grimy boat.

It's lonely, if he's honest. Otabek has never required much from others, but having only one person in his life that talks to him about things other than fish and money is so dreadfully boring. He spends more time in the city, trudges the swamp in search of signs of life that resemble Yuri, scans the sea for signs of non-human presence. It's futile, but it does keep him busy.

Toronto is a welcome distraction. There's nothing like a change of scenery to get the mind whirring on other things, but he still finds himself lingering on his walks under pink-orange sky. Watching the sun bob on the lapping horizon and thinking how Yuri must be so lonely. Even his own hands remind him of Yuri— so drenched they've been in his pleasure, so affected they've been by his teeth.

He returns home from one of these walks in Toronto, mind dancing in love, to find Aunt Bibigul seated by the door.

“Have a seat,” she says. JJ is there, too, schooling his face suspiciously well.

“Is this an intervention?” Otabek asks, refusing to sit in the red, plush chair laid out just for him. “Truly?”

“Hmmm? No, of course not,” Aunt Bibigul says, sweet as a recipe with too much sugar. “It's a conversation.”

Otabek huffs. “Right.”

“We're worried about you, Beks,” JJ chimes in from Aunty's side of the room.

Otabek slides his eyes to JJ. Aunt Bibigul pats JJ's knees in a quiet kind of approval, but keeps her soft eyes on Otabek. Standing at the door, still dressed in his brown scarf and flight jacket. Sorry, JJ mouths, gesturing minutely to Bibigul beside him.

“I'm fine,” Otabek says, shrugging from his jacket and tossing it on the comfy little chair of confrontation.

“You're not fine,” Aunt Bibigul insists. “Your walls are covered in scribbles and you run around completing insane errands-”

“My life now has purpose,” Otabek says, just a touch on the side of unkind.

Aunt Bibigul shakes her head sadly. “That's just not how the world works.”

Otabek scoffs. As if the world works.

“What of the prophet's teachings? Peace be upon him.”

Otabek lets out a pff. “What of it?”

“Does that not give you purpose?”

JJ grins beside Aunt Bibigul.

“The İrşi, that thing, what if it's...”

“He.”

“What if IT,” Bibigul emphasizes with meaning, “has you under some kind of spell?”

“Then what a great spell it is.”

Otabek glares at JJ. How dare he pretend to be on Aunt Bibigul's side. How dare he after...

“And where's Bella?” Otabek asks.

“What does Bella have to do with this?” Bibigul huffs.

“Nothing!” JJ says quickly, at the same time Otabek says, “Exactly,” deadpanned.

The glare turns mutual, then they both look away. JJ's arms are crossed over his chest. Otabek is still lingering awkwardly in the threshold of the room. He's irritable. Hungry. Hasn't fed himself much of anything all day.

“You need help,” Aunt Bibigul says like a broken little thing.

“I need,” Otabek says, sidestepping the interrogation zone by squeezing between the two sofa chairs pushed to create a unified front with JJ, “a glass of water.”

“JJ?” Aunt Bibigul says behind Otabek, expectant. Then Otabek can hear JJ floating into the kitchen behind him.

“Sorry, man, you know how she can get.” The words whoosh out of JJ, quiet and stressed. “Not to say I think your thing with the İrşi is good...”

Otabek gives him a very unkind look, then separates himself from JJ with an open fridge door.

“...but if you're happy and I'm safe then whatever. Pff. Have at it.”

Otabek slams the fridge shut. “Him.”

Otabek watches JJ shove his foot further into his mouth as he gulps down half a glass of water.

“Him! Yes, fine. Whatever. Jesus, you're so particular about that. You were all up in arms before, talking about binaries and how gender was-”

“A construct, yes,” Otabek says, gasping in a breath after drinking. “But it is just rude.”

“Fine. Fine! Whatever. Are we still on for tonight?”

Otabek finishes off his glass of water, watching JJ over the rim. Tonight. Right.

Otabek has no memory of committing to anything tonight.

“Sure,” Otabek says, then squeaks the faucet on to rinse the glass in the sink.

“You forgot.”

“I didn't.”

“You did.”

“I most certainly didn't forget that you wanted to go out for...” Otabek places his glass in the dishwasher, wondering why he even rinsed it. Dishwashers. What a treat. “...drinks,” he finishes, unsatisfied with his guess.

“Brownies!” JJ corrects, exasperated.

That does ring a bell now. Brownies. The stupidest thing to go out for late at night. Only in a big city.

“Obviously,” Otabek concedes.

They slip out when Aunt Bibigul is tired enough to give up on her little pouts and sad eyes. It's reasonable, from her perspective, to be concerned. He can't say he blames her. He just also doesn't agree.

They're at a bar Otabek doesn't know the name of. JJ is devouring a brownie, served in a little black pan, while Otabek picks unhelpfully at the ice cream melting on top. He doesn't care for sweets.

He does care for the guy making eyes at him across the bar, wearing a navy blue button up with opalescent studs for buttons. He's got a nice smile. Wide. Accommodating.

“Wing me,” Otabek says, tapping the table and pointing JJ in the man's direction.

“Wing you?” JJ asks, disgusted.

“Yeah.”

“Isn't that, like, cheating?”

The man notices them looking, openly discussing, and Otabek holds his eyes.

“On?” Otabek asks.

“Yuri?”

“Yuri is an anthropophagus amphibian, JJ.”

“Meaning?”

Otabek laughs a quick, condescending breath. He smiles at the man across the bar.

“Oh. Polyamory,” JJ says, sucking at his ice cream spoon. “Cool.”

Cool. JJ understands nothing of orgasms that are sweet like kisses. Of the freedom found in finger painted conversations lacking social conventions.

JJ hops up and fixes his shirt. The man is casting full-body flickers the full length of Otabek's body from across the bar. JJ walks over and touches the man lightly on his back, then turns, pointing Otabek's way. The man looks very interested. Otabek bites his lip, flicks his eyes down to the man's thick thighs, then back up to his sharp jaw, shadowed from a skipped shave or two.

JJ strides back like a peacock, proud and preening.

“What did you tell him?”

“I told Liam you're a nasty monster-fucker,” JJ teases, knocking back the last of the drink he'd ordered with his brownie.

“Very funny,” Otabek deadpans.

JJ just grins. “Now go,” JJ says, swatting Otabek on the ass as he stands. “Be gone, kitten!”

Liam is even more good-looking up close. He has a nice French accent. A manner of speech that is not quite native, but fluent. They skip the little courtship dance and swiftly head back to Liam's place nearby.

(Largely because Otabek pulls him close by his neckline and insists they skip the little song and dance— that he's had alcohol on someone else's dime enough to last a lifetime and he's more interested in tasting something else right now. It will never cease to amaze Otabek how simple it is to get alone with a stranger if you're pretty.)

It's good sex— as far as sex with other humans is concerned. It might have been his best if he only had other humans to compare with, which is to say it's entirely underwhelming. Yuri alone owns his soul, his essence. There's nothing special about these orgasms. It's just bodies feeling good for a small sliver of time. A physical distraction that lasts not nearly long enough.

God, Yuri must be so lonely.

Liam takes Otabek's number. It begins a dirty little habit. He's honest with Liam— Liam knows that Otabek is only here for a couple of weeks. Otabek doesn't care for relationships. He doesn't like a challenge and doesn't want to be chased. He just wants to have some pleasant meals and get off.

Liam is the type of man to dress in every room of his home, moving around to do other things between each article. They're in the kitchen, after their third hookup, when Liam broaches the subject of more.

“Maybe we can keep this thing going on,” Liam suggests, then, to ease Otabek's perceived commitment-phobia, “Keep it casual. Fun.”

“Maybe.”

“You know...” Liam says, fumbling with the cuff of his button-down. “Your cousin, he said something interesting the night of the bar.”

“Did he now?” Otabek asks, reaching out to help with the cuff.

“Yes he was saying some kind of things about a... monster cock?” Liam alludes. Otabek laughs a short laugh that is mostly air.

“I've hardly got that,” Otabek says simply. Just facts.

“Hey yours is a very nice one, though,” Liam says, way too gently. Downy feather soft in a tone that is both too fond and far too familiar. It's said like the beginning of something. Spoken through a gauze of building affection.

Liam turns as Otabek pulls away, satisfied with his cuff. Liam is a fashionable man. Otabek has never seen him in something less than fit for an important business brunch downtown— tie loose and cuffs rolled in a dance with faux-casualism.

“How do you like it?” Liam asks, modeling his outfit. A dull saffron button-down with a single brown stripe down one side, form fitting along with slacks and brown oxfords.

“Nice,” Otabek says. “Left the tag.”

“Where-” Liam fumbles behind himself, catching the springy tag on the back of his collar in his hand. “Ah, there. Loose it for me?”

Otabek reaches forth to tug the little plastic free.

“God, no! Something sharp or you will just ftt the fabric.”

ftt the fabric. Otabek finds him cute, almost, if there wasn't so much better out there for him.

Then, Something sharp, Otabek's mind seems to echo. The knife block is a step away. He takes a knife in hand, steps behind Liam, and cuts the tag carefully. Liam's neck is there, easy. His flesh, delicate.

Otabek moves as if it could be an accident, turning his body as he grazes Liam's forearm with the blade. He presses, cutting a perfect slit. Not too deep, but enough to feel. Enough to see blood.

“Ow, fuck!”

“Sorry,” Otabek deadpans, reflexive, clutching the handle of the blade. His eyes are on the red dripping, a steady well. Liam covers the cut with his palm.

“What the fuck?”

“Hand slipped.”

“Jesus fucking-” Liam elaborates, then devolves into incensed French.

He thinks about the red of Liam's blood all night. He thinks of Yuri— of what his blood might look like. If he has any blood at all. Maybe Aunt Bibigul is right. Maybe he's fucking insane. He's thought about killing Liam more than once, just to see it.

Fog sheets over Toronto. It lingers late into the following morning. Wispy, bright. Otabek strolls the streets, hands in his pockets, haze cool and moist on his face. The graveyard looks best this way, with a ghostly quiet stretched between headstones. He finds himself standing over a familiar grave, reading the words Gulaisha Altin 1980-2009 again and again. His mother was the essence of youth. A young mother, a young corpse. Seeing those numbers etched in stone is unsettling, even now, the fiftieth or so time he's seen them.

What would she think, so shrouded in youth, about Otabek living to cherish someone like Yuri— so ageless?

Otabek had always imagined himself, if he'd ever fall in love, to be a good kisser. A romantic, planning grand dates and carrying out elaborate errands for the object of his affection. Sending thoughtful texts, writing poems. Buying that fat, expensive ring. Bringing his lover to Canada— to stand at his mother's grave in Toronto and say, “This is him, mother. This is the one I love.” Instead, Otabek has discovered so many ways to love.

Would his mother be proud?
—-

It's a torrential summer in Zhalanash. He wades through centimeters of water, trickling little bits of light in the dark, cascading down to the sea. The rain has stopped— finally— for just a brief spell. Otabek goes with his bucket of paint to strike the sigils by the doors with his hands. The one he'd slashed last night has repainted the sigil a dozen times around a streak of black already cast on the wall there.

It's the second night. Otabek drips water and black paint, moving with the current of the flood down the main street. The sky is bright, swollen clouds backlit by the milky moon. He strikes a dozen houses, then returns home to wait, listening to the water slosh around and in his mind.

Yuri doesn't come. No one is dead by morning. He can feel the village eyes on him, burning from the windows as he slips and stumbles down the main street through a heavy sheet of gray rain. The baker refuses to speak to him as he takes his money. Otabek receives a hard, stale baguette from at least two days prior. He holds it in the rain until it's soggy enough to scarf down, then trudges home until he realizes maybe Yuri isn't coming at all this year, and so he slips back up the streaming street to JJ's car.

His phone dings as he gets in, rain pattering on the metal roof. Otabek is panting, out of breath, as he checks his messages.

Liam 22:57
How was your day?

The message is accompanied by a nude. Liam looks good.

Otabek 22:58
About to get a lot better.

Liam 22:58
Oh? ;)

Otabek tosses his phone into the passenger's seat and drives. He can recall people in Aralsk curling a lip at him, commenting he must be from Akespe to be so interested in old children's ghost tales. Maybe Yuri haunts Akespe as well. Maybe a different İrşi haunts Akespe and this is how he dies.

It's Otabek's second time in Akespe. He came once with JJ, back when JJ still found the nearby villages interesting and just wanted to have a look. Akespe is larger than Zhalanash. He is thankful for the light from the clouds and the reflections on the water making little rapids along the streets.

Otabek carries his paint can in one hand and a brush in the other, striking the sigils by the doors at random. He can hear his own labored breathing as he sloshes through the streets. The sound fills his head; it fills the spaces between his steps.

It's a wet night. His paint doesn't last long, washed down to the muddy streets. His fingers prune and his feet go tender. He shakes, teeth chattering with hard ticks. He returns to the car— too tired and hungry to go on. That's when he spots a figure up the road, through the haze of the rain. It stands incredibly still, slightly hunched. An İrşi, no doubt.

Otabek collapses to his knees, water splashing around him, skin busted open on the pebbled road beneath him. Wading, waiting, wishing. Water pours around. The figure approaches with a caution that is undeniably Yuri, soaked and naked. When he's close enough to see his face, he's making a face that Otabek is used to seeing with those heartbreaking little croaks. Scrunched brows, big green eyes. The sound is lost to the rain, so static around them.

Otabek hates wanting Yuri because he fears how much he won't survive the absence of him. It's a terrible thing, to need so badly.

Yuri looks so weak, so hungry. His eyes are red around the irises, like he has yet to eat this year despite the platter Otabek had prepared for him. His hair is soaked, flat around his face, heavy and dark against his collarbones. He's pretty, so impossibly pretty, as he reaches out to touch Otabek's shoulder lightly, clicking high and loud in his throat.

“Why didn't you come?” Otabek shouts through the rain. Yuri recoils, hand drawn back. There is no answer from Yuri; he cannot answer except for in a series of clicks, trills, and garbles, imitating an unpleasant song.

It's plain, though: Yuri’s reaction to the way Otabek's voice crackles, rasping the pain. Yuri's gaze wavers, down to the red pooling from Otabek's knees into the stream of storm water.

Then Yuri looks away from him, pointedly avoiding his gaze. It's the first time Yuri has ever done that to him and it stings. Much worse than his knees, going numb in the cool water. What if he no longer interests Yuri? What then?

Yuri palms the paint can by Otabek's feet, on its side but sealed. Otabek pries it open for him. His hands tremble greatly. His teeth still clatter. It's cold. So, so cold. The rain sounds nice, a steady hiss. He could lay down and sleep right here in the road, among the flood.

Yuri paints his words directly onto JJ's car. Otabek doesn't care. The paint smears and bleeds down the length of the car, making long streaks like tar.

distraction, he writes, then, unsavory.

Otabek isn't sure how to take those words. Is Otabek the distraction, or is Yuri? Is Otabek not suitable?

After a hesitation, Yuri writes, complex.

“I'm sorry, Yuri,” Otabek says with a weak shake of his head, “but I don't understand.” He's so very tired.

hurts, Yuri writes.

Otabek lifts a hand to write on the bottom of the car door. The car is too wet, the paint too thin. He globs the ink onto his fingers.

Did I do something wrong?, Otabek writes but his hands are shaking. The words are already gone by the time he's finished writing them, but Yuri watches closely, catches every stroke of his finger. Yuri shakes his head with vigor, then traces an invisible NO on the car with his finger.

A vein of lightning strikes the sky. Thunder thrums somewhere among the trees.

Yuri stands there for what feels like an eternity. It's long enough for the rain to lighten. Just enough to watch water drip from Yuri. Otabek is soaked to the bone. The car windows are wide open, the leather getting trashed. There's likely at least a centimeter of water pooled in the floor of the car by now. Otabek lies down on the ground, on his side. His knees feel cold, but no longer bleed.

What could Yuri ever want from him that he can't find somewhere else? That would matter to him?

It's times like this when Otabek regrets being a man who forgets to eat. When he is weak. Useless.

Yuri fumbles with the car handle, making a series of distressed little croaks, then climbs in through the window. When Otabek just blinks up at him dumbly, Yuri smacks the horn on the steering wheel. Otabek's own body is heavy as he lifts it, up around the car and into the driver's seat.

Otabek rolls up his window and turns the heat on full blast. He shivers like his very bones chatter. Yuri leaves the window down; he sticks his head out and opens his mouth to catch the light rain pelting fast as they move down the highway. He trills into the harsh wind like a happy little bird. Otabek's chest is tight and warm. He drives home in a daze, to park behind his house, with JJ's car now clean on the outside and soaked within.

The houses in Zhalanash have restored their sigils. Otabek swipes the message by the door of a distant neighbor he's never really cared for. Yuri slips in, with that broken-throated garble clickering out of him as he goes. Otabek stumbles home and draws a bath. He's sinking into the intense warmth of it, drifting off, when Yuri arrives dressed only in a splatter of warm blood. Yuri steps in the tub between Otabek's thighs and settles there, against his chest. Otabek drains the tub and refills it twice to wash away the red.

Yuri looks at the walls that still share their words. Otabek isn't sure where they stand; he isn't sure what Yuri is thinking.

Yuri dresses in Otabek's clothes. Otabek naps on his sofa, bundled in the five warm blankets he owns, retrieved and delivered by Yuri. He's vaguely aware of Yuri traipsing around his home, restless, tapping at the walls and looking at things. It's hard to rest with Yuri there, so Otabek rolls over after his nap, still sleepy, then writes onto the wall.

What do you want to do tonight?

Yuri removes all of his clothes, looks across the wall for the word he wants, then grows frustrated and writes, orgasm.

Otabek can't help but laugh. “Of course.” He's tired. God, he's so tired, but he can do this. He can muster this energy for Yuri. Yuri is still writing— with his terrible, shaky penmanship.

you, Yuri writes, then a word Otabek can't decipher, then, beautiful, misspelled.

“Please,” Otabek breathes, his knees weak.

you want? Yuri has never looked uncertain, but here he is— shifting a little too much, unable to hold his form stone steady like usual.

Fuck, does Otabek want. He wants with the fury of an army, with the anger of a storm. With every cell of his aging human body and every drop of blood now roaring in his ears. With his tired, lucid breaths.

“Yuri...”

A tight inhale, high and sweet, when Otabek says Yuri's name. Yuri knows those sounds. He likes to hear them. Color settles high on Yuri's cheekbones, pink brushed under green eyes that look softer now. Shiny lips, parted. Cock ruddy and sitting heavy against his abdomen.

Yuri grips the hair over Otabek's shaft and pulls him up from the sofa, to the bedroom, walking backward to keep his eyes on Otabek's. Otabek loves this habit— will sometimes pleasure himself to just the thought of this, of being pulled around by his groin.

Otabek moves slow, in a daze, as if carried on a breeze. The sheets are soft under him with their rustling. Once naked, Otabek parts his knees and lies back. There's a pleased little clicker in Yuri's throat as his eyes move down, skating over flat brown nipples, a gleaming head, and the space below.

Yuri takes note of the scars on Otabek's thighs. Sniffs them. Licks them. Croaks at them. They're new scars. Otabek has gotten sloppy with his fishing blade. Always distracted.

A growl-like trill hits Otabek's ears the same moment wet stripes between his cheeks. Yuri likes the taste of him. Otabek feels his cock swell with it, his head cloudy with the thrill of it, the danger and the pleasure of Yuri's mouth. His eyes are open, but he sees nothing but blond hair bobbing. He hears the sopping of his rim, the light smacking of tongue. Yuri is the prettiest fucking thing Otabek has ever seen and somehow— somehow— this is what he wants.

Yuri doesn't have the internalized shame a human might. He slurps and tongues Otabek's hole like it's the most expected thing two people might do together. Louder and with more enthusiasm than even the most shameless men Otabek's known. There's a finger at his rim, pulling to lick deeper, before slipping in.

That first finger is hard and wonderful. His body clenches on it, hugging it tighter, just as Yuri does when they're reversed. That familiar, sticky hot pleasure leaks out of him now, slipping sweetly, pushing in and out.

“Yuri.” He's breathless, hands still in hair. Pulling, playing. “Yuri, that feels incredible. I want all of it inside me, all of you, just crawl in... Crawl inside and eat me from within.”

Yuri's bright green eyes peek up, over his cock leaking onto his abs. Otabek breathes shallowly, chest rising and falling between their gaze. Yuri knows the word eat. Maybe he noticed it.

Yuri could kill him slowly, razor sharp teeth ripping through his sinew. It would be beautiful. A useful thing to do with his body. Otabek knows instinct would kick in. He would scream and fight, but it's nice to imagine himself relaxed. Drugged, maybe, to enjoy it just a little longer. Watching as Yuri devours his skin and muscles down to his bones.

Otabek finds himself babbling, lost in sleepy pleasure when Yuri finally fills him with his cock. It's unexpected. Otabek has hoped, but never anticipated that Yuri might want him this way. "Fuck me fuck me fuck me, Yuri. Yes. Just like that." Yuri seems to understand the cadence if not the words, grinding right when it feels best, stroking hard right at that point of pleasure, tight, pulsing. Yuri's attention is on Otabek— what makes him moan, what makes him shake. Otabek tilts his hips and Yuri comes like that. Yuri's orgasm is divine, pulsing into Otabek, his abs jerking, his lips wet and shiny, parted for breath.

Is there some pheromone Yuri secretes through his pores? That seduces Otabek to do his bidding?

“I love you, Yuri.” The words trickle out on their own, heedless of Otabek's feelings on sharing them aloud. Yuri doesn't know those words.

“You come really beautifully,” Otabek tells him sweetly, holding him close in bed.

Later, after Otabek has eaten. When Otabek is smiling and swirling his finger playfully on Yuri's chest, Yuri leans close to the wall and writes, hurts. They've reached a point where they're writing over old letters in this room, too, creating intersecting patterns. The paper once on his wall hangs in strips like old cobwebs, close to the ceiling.

Yuri trills quietly, pitched high, as he settles back into Otabek's arms. It's not the first time Yuri has written this, but it's the first time Otabek might understand it. Yuri is like him; Yuri aches. This thing blazing between them is complicated. For all that it feels like ecstasy swirled in heaven, it's abyss. It gouges out an endless, empty chasm of need within that will never fill; that no amount of either of them could ever satisfy in the other.

“It does hurt,” Otabek says aloud, brushing Yuri's soft, flaxen hair from his eyes. “But it's also so good. I've never felt anything like it.”

Otabek is a whip, but Yuri makes him feel different. He feels eloquent, like a whip with a velvet handle. Like he can cut and clear the empty space he wishes to inhabit with Yuri. It's a different way of wanting.

Otabek leans forward. His house is a joke at this point— just ink pots strewn about, their black blood covering the wall in haphazard strokes.

I wish you could come during the day.

Yuri trills so, so quietly, then writes, could.

“Really?”

prefer no, Yuri writes.

It would mean more time together, Otabek writes.

It's like last year all over again. Otabek fucks Yuri again and again, yanking orgasm upon orgasm out of his lithe, beautiful body hours into the dark morning. The whole room is steeped in the scent of sex, stuffy with the window closed.

"Maybe you've changed me, Yuri." A bead of sweat slides down Yuri's back, disappearing into the valley above his rear. "Maybe I've changed you." Otabek follows the sweat with his fingers, dipping down between Yuri's cheeks. Yuri's accommodation is immediate, tilting his hips and opening a knee to give Otabek access, hands grabbing at the wall for support. Yuri is still slick; puffy.

"I can tell you need a break," Otabek says, pulling away reluctantly. Yuri croaks as he goes, following the touch a bit with the tilt of his hips. "I know, Yuri. Me too. I can't stop fucking you."

Yuri comes again, an hour later, with Otabek pumping his puffy red hole with two wet fingers. Yuri is relentless in pursuing it. Otabek positions Yuri over his lap, arched over him, ass high in the air. He pleasures Yuri like it's a calculated task, burying his fingers deep and shaking his hand on the place that makes Yuri quiver. He comes like an avalanche, slow at first, then powerful and rumbling, tumbling down, shaking hard in Otabek's supportive hands. He curls into Otabek's lap to sob and tremble. He's so beautiful in Otabek's arms, body wracked with tremors, his breaths shallow and his trills soft and frequent until they almost sound— muffled against Otabek's chest— like doves cooing.

consider, Yuri writes beneath their earlier conversation.

Otabek's heart lights up. You will consider the daylight?

Yuri looks at Otabek's cock, sitting soft and sated, high among his curls.

yes, Yuri writes, then looks back into Otabek's eyes. His eye contact is unrivaled. It's the last thing Otabek remembers before sleep takes him, whooshing heavy upon him with relief as the sky is just starting to pull the sun over the horizon.
—-

Otabek wakes to the gift of sunlight streaming in— to soft translucent curtains billowing in the breeze, to Yuri's hair swaying like sweetgrass as he sits on the floor, staring down at an open book. It's Otabek's collection on fish. It provides information on the different species, their seasons, and where to find them. Whether they're invasive, indigenous, or somewhere in the murky space between.

It's easy to see in this light how Yuri's veins are so much more prominent than a human's— occasional dark lines along his inner arm, his neck, his ankles. Down the length of his soft, precious cock, small in his lap.

Yuri's legs are crossed. The light casts brightly into the room, beaming alive the dust clouding around Yuri. They seem to glow in the light, those dingy dust particles, when Otabek shifts in the sheets and Yuri flutters his bright green eyes up to him.

"You're even more beautiful in the sunlight, Yuri," Otabek says as he lies on his stomach, propped on elbows, hands dangling over the edge of the bed. His own voice is spun sugar and glowing daisies. He hardly recognizes himself. Yuri clickers, quietly, then climbs back into bed to snuggle close. There's a miry gold aura around Yuri, weaving in his hair, catching in his eyes.

Otabek receives a text from Liam while lying in bed with Yuri. Yuri is looking at the screen like he's curious— Otabek scrolls for him to see, tapping at the nudes to briefly display them larger. Liam is an attractive man. Still smitten with Otabek, it seems, sending all these pictures when all Otabek responds with is “nice”, the sweaty emoji, and, if he's feeling generous, something like “looks delicious.” He never reciprocates. He doesn't see the appeal.

Yuri observes. There's a particularly low trill, like the one he makes when Otabek's cock first pops from his jeans, when he spies the photo of Liam flushed, fisting himself in rumpled sheets.

“He looks nice, doesn't he?” Otabek says by way of agreement. Liam has thick arms and a curvy waist. A scraggle of chest hair that Yuri would enjoy raking his fingers through; a slick throat that took Otabek's underwhelming girth with ease. Liam could take all of Yuri's length and girth in his throat, could swallow all of him down until he gags. God, Otabek wants to see Yuri fuck him. To share that body together and wrack dozens of orgasms from it before watching Yuri rip it apart.

Otabek tosses the phone aside, bored with it. He has every intention of scooping Yuri up and carrying him to the bath. He wants to wash the sex from him; to take care of his body that's been so thoroughly used. He gets distracted as soon as his arms are under Yuri and Yuri is leaning up for a lip-taste— distracted as he lays Yuri gently in the sheets for a naked make out session. They fuck again, slow and quiet, with Yuri's legs wrapped around Otabek's waist.

Otabek enters him while looking in his eyes— while cradling his face— and Yuri opens so easily, knees parted wide with a natural flexibility Otabek's never known another body to have. He parts Yuri wider, gripping his ankles in his hands.

You know that I'm in love with you? Otabek writes after. He repeats the key words aloud for the sixth or seventh time that day. Yuri clickers that little percussion frog clicker, recognizing those frequently repeated words.

yes but what, Yuri writes.

What does it mean?

yes.

Otabek hums to himself, uncertain how to respond in a way Yuri might relate to. Clouds pass. Wind rushes along the walls, pulling in more rain clouds. There's a shifting of the light that spills golden into the room, light to dark to light in patterns as those swollen gray clouds drift over the sun.

Do you intend to eat me?

The room is dark. Yuri underlines the word yes. His eyes are steely then, dancing with intent, his jaw set and his hair blowing gently. Astounding. Absolutely enchanting. Otabek peeks out at the sky and finds a black cloud over the sun.

Why wait? Otabek asks.

The wind is colder now, picking up leaves and tossing them in little whirlwinds that rattle along the windowsill. Yuri hesitates, then writes, savoring.

It's dark now, behind that cloud. Thunder rolls in to rock the walls.

I think that's love, Otabek writes, just as rain dumps like an overturned tub, dense and sudden, on the roof above them. He takes a seat, tired from the weight of his own words.

Yuri writes a single word on the wall, just below Otabek's little definition. Otabek smiles at it. Yuri comes forth to touch him, close enough that he's hovering over Otabek to place a light hand on each cheek. His delicate hair hangs heavy around them, a curtain that plunges them into a private little space. Yuri's face is soft this way, where his eyes light vibrant green when the lightning first cracks outside.

Yuri's word sums it up just fine, a simple little word that is so lovely for how unintentionally honest it is. suitable. Not perfect. Not a promise. Otabek likes it better this way— to be a suitable presence to Yuri in a world that is so unsuited to his very nature.

Otabek's knees quake. Just the sight of Yuri makes him crumble. It's love he finds in Yuri's eyes— with each vein of lightning striking white-hot across dark sky. Love, or a wicked enchantment. Mutual affection, or a siren song.

What difference does it make, at the end of it all, when it feels this ungodly good?