Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It had been three days.

The damage incurred by Charlie team was significant (and unique) enough to warrant a trip to the nearest main operating base for an extended stay in its infirmary. In that time, doctors prodded and examined—and extracted where necessary—equal parts fascinated and disgusted by the spiny bite of twisted calcifications left behind from the group's harrowing encounter in Biko township. The days were long and boring, but to Eoran, the rest was a welcome reprieve: to be awash in the cool air of that established hospital felt much better than suffering through the sun or heat choked field tents set up within barbed wire outlines of smaller bases. Meals were delivered with regularity, hot, on an actual plate rather than bagged slop haphazardly suspended over a sack of boiling water always balanced on a rock or something.

Perhaps most importantly, Eoran's time in the infirmary allowed him space to think. He needed the break, the quiet timelessness of seclusion where demands and disappointments couldn’t find his overactive mind. He proved himself a well-behaved patient, acquiescent to every question and doled out medications, even when his primary nurse brought him his laundered uniform, told him to get dressed and get out (though in much nicer terms).

In the afternoon looming heavy above a clay-stained horizon, Eoran leaned against the exterior wall of the hospital, waiting for Kasse to emerge. He’d spent a fair amount of time contemplating what he wanted to say to his friend when they finally got around to the talk promised upon fraught breaths in the sweltering air of that Biko stairwell, but Eoran had no idea if his trepidatious heart would allow him to express himself with any amount of concision when they were face to face. He didn’t know if it was fate or fortune that put him at his friend’s side, but maybe the two went hand in hand. Or maybe it didn’t really matter and he’d do better not looking that gift horse in the mouth.

The boy Eoran waited for had his nose in a pack of cigarettes when he emerged from the infirmary's automatic doors.

Kasse proved a more troublesome patient than his best friend but not because he was unaccommodating. Far from it: he'd been docile under testing, charmed the shit out of the nurses, even managed to secure extra snacks from the third shift staff. Kasse simply felt uncomfortable staying in one place for too long. He was restless for his entire stay, finding his way into Eoran's room once or twice for a quick visit before orderlies had chased him out. He'd even managed to visit Brint between his many surgeries. The staff seemed to allow him a little more time there.

It would be a little while before the boys were reunited with their CO, after all. The nurses weren’t heartless.

After he freed a cigarette from his pack he looked up, face alight at the sight of his best friend without an entourage of medical machines riding his ass. Before either could make a sound, the feral boy collided with his better bred friend, arms flung around his neck in a hug so fierce one of them had to have just come back from the dead.

Eoran caught Kasse by his waist, holding him tight against his body. He hadn’t felt dead—even if he feared he was headed that way—but he certainly felt alive now, flush to the other boy. A wide smile creased his cheeks; his eyes narrowed until they closed, elated and relieved.

“I’m so happy to see you,” Eo said as he slowly pulled away, cognizant of outer appearances when they were standing in the open air of that bustling base. “How are you feeling?”

"Like I need a nic fix," the older boy replied, sparking his cigarette to life in the brief distance between them. He drug the smoke deep into his lungs with an elated groan, leaning back onto the concrete facade of that hospital none the wiser of either boy's status as a wright. "Clean bill of health, too. I guess that's what you were asking."

Without Eoran at his side, Kasse could argue that he'd been interred against his will, isolated when he only wanted to be at Eo's side. Reunited, the past three days were of little consequence to the ghost, a glimmer of life rattling back into motion behind that rebellious boy's grey eyes.

"I missed you so much," he added quietly, head bowed so he didn't have to meet the Toriet boy's gaze.

“I missed you too.” Eoran's observation of his friend was, perhaps, better conducted without eye contact. His head tilted to the side as he slowly traced over the features he’d missed the most—those eyes and their leaden dissent, those lips attentive to the end of his cigarette. “Pretty boring in there, but I slept so good.” He grinned. “Hey, you wanna walk with me?”

Not waiting for the answer, Eoran turned and began to step away from the building. Groups of soldiers shuffled a stretch ahead, moving from barracks to their various assignments. The soundfield around them always seemed over congested with the constant noise of chugging engines, the high-pitched whir of helicopter propellers looping endless in the distance, berating the air in broken-tape hiccupped beats.

The Toriet boy looked back. “I was thinking maybe we could talk now.”

"Yeah," Kasse agreed, bottom lip caught demure between his teeth. "But keep going. Around back."

There was something somber about the way that ghost of a boy lead Eoran astray, the way he caught his hand. With his head canted away, cigarette burning between his fingers, it almost seemed like Kasse was avoiding the navigator's eyes altogether—but it was probably just nerves, the sorry sick of fear and longing clawing its way back into his gut.

When they passed the corner, there was a mottled old greenhouse coated in a pollen-tinged dusting of rust and neglect, some sort of fruiting tree broken out the side. Nestled in the shade of the hospital amongst a dense cluster of weeds and vegetation, thriving from leaky hospital pipes, it seemed secluded enough to allow the boys the privacy necessary to speak freely.

"The nurses told me about it," the suddenly meek boy said in the pause of their rustling footsteps, boots crunching both grass and debris. "They said it's been untended for years now. Locked up. They keep meaning to fix it up but they never manage to get out here to do it—so I think we'll be alone."

Despite his statement, Kasse tugged Eoran back into motion, up to and then straight through the padlocked door.

Surprise passed, exhilarating and momentous, across the younger boy’s delicate features.

It seemed silly that Eoran hadn’t put something like that together: that if Kasse had the ability to pass through his flesh, then slipping through weather-worn metal and glass would be no issue. In his life, most of the wrights Eo knew were like him: bloodwrights. Extremely few adjuncts and no expressionists, just monsters whose abilities were visceral and raw. The boy smirked on the other side of the locked door as the puzzle of Kasse assembled itself before him. Eoran’s eyes were electric.

“It’s kinda nice,” the Ossan boy said of the neglected space, pulling his friend a few steps deeper, a few steps toward him—unwilling to let him go. In a moment, he spun around and stared Kasse down. The confession that poured out was unguarded, bare, honest; his heart spilled from lips suddenly unexpurgated, parted, mouth too full to stop their leaking.

“Kasse, I—I hope I didn’t fuck up anything between us in Biko. You’re the most beautiful person I’ve ever known, and I think about you all the time, and I want you more than anything in this world. You’re so important to me and kissing you was like a dream from which I never wanted to wake. If I died back there, with your hands on my skin—in my skin—then my life would have been worth living because I knew you. I had you for a brief instance of time where our paths were fortuitous enough to converge.” Eoran looked down, around, then back to the soldier plucked from the streets of Amstead. “I’m sorry I worried you. I didn’t know if you liked boys but you seemed to like Brint and I felt a little jealous and sometimes when I get stressed, I don’t handle myself well.”

“I guess that’s sort of the thing, Eo, I don’t… I’m not really sure what I like.” Kasse eased himself back. Turning with his cigarette between his lips, he cleared off a rickety metal work table, obviously appropriated from the hospital, with a single swipe across its surface. He hopped up on it to sit, hands between his knees, one foot nervously tapping at the metal support beams keeping the bench’s legs from failing. “I’ve always just been told what I like. What I want. Usually because I needed something. I was just some street kid, easy to take advantage of, you know? And in the moment it all made sense. I paid how I could.”

Rubbing at his mouth, Kasse shook his head. This didn’t sound how he wanted. What did he want?

What the fuck was this?

“I—I really, really like you, Eoran. Like a lot. Like I don’t think I’ve ever liked anyone like this and it’s terrifying. I just… I don’t know if I’m ready for you.”

Mute and consumed by his rapt attention, Eoran slowly nodded as Kasse's words sunk in.

"Okay," he began.
"Okay." Again, like the repetition offered any sort of reinforcement.
"Okay, well, I don't want to pressure you into anything, and I don't know what I'm asking for or if I’m even asking... I just want to make sure things between us are still… I dunno, functional, I guess. I would feel really terrible if my imprudence were to push you away because I don’t want to hurt you. You're the only friend I have out here. I can’t lose that in the one place where I have everything to lose, all the time."

Eoran took his bottom lip between his teeth, gaze searching the glass-pane ceiling where sun-dried lichens spread in scummy blooms of greens and browns. His arms folded across his chest.

"Kasse, I feel like a lot has changed between us in the past week. Are you comfortable with me as your friend still? Are we going to be okay?" There was a sorrow in his eyes as their lightless depths turned back down. Eoran was an open and genuine person—it was clear he felt this to his core.

“C’mere.” Leaning forward, Kasse grabbed at Eoran’s wrist, pulled him from his tight, protective fold across his chest, pulled him closer. Kasse always smelled like the atmosphere, like ozone and rain singed on the edges by smoke, a reminder of his nervous vice. Looping his arms loose around that sorrow-shaken boy’s waist, Kasse buried his face in Eoran’s chest, accepted him between his knees because it was what he wanted despite his need for something that felt like distance.

“I don’t think we’re friends anymore, but I also don’t think that we’re not friends. Do we have to label it? Can we just like… I don’t know, can we just see what happens?” Kasse looked up, brows knit in concern. “You’re all I have. If I lose you, I’m done.”

"Yeah. It can be what it is," the Toriet boy answered, easily taken. He softened in their closeness, so willing and malleable between the bend of sharp elbows and arms. "As long as it's something more than nothing. I’m here, I don’t want to go anywhere without you."

Tilting his head to look at his friend, Eoran lifted a finger to smooth along the furrows of that boy's worry in an attempt to see it away. He smiled, reassuring and sweet, defenseless but reserved—miles removed from that alluvion of death-spurred desire tempting catastrophe in his white-knuckle duress, his bed of spilled blood.

"Thanks for saving me, by the way. I get the feeling that it probably wasn't the first time. I hope I don't exhaust your diligence."

“Bullets seem to like you, yeah,” the ghost admitted, sheepish, swinging leg betraying the nervous tremble he masked with teasing, misdirected with that callous charm. He melted beneath the warmth of that touch, the tenderness behind it,

how it took nothing from him—
simply gave him peace of mind.

“If we ever do end up messing around or doing anything, just… I guess just promise you’ll be there to help me unpack.” Vulnerable thing caught by the mouth, he was a far cry from the rakish confidence he wore so well. “I’ve had a lot of bad, Eo. A lot. But maybe you’re my first shot at good—a-and I’m really sorry if that’s a lot to deal with. You probably aren’t looking to deal with someone’s bullshit out here…”

"I promise," Eo said, fingers sweeping into Kasse's hair to pull him to his body again. The bloodwright briefly rested against him, cheek to cheek, palm flat atop the sharp edge of the other boy’s shoulder blade. "But be real with me, okay? I don't know what it's like to grow up like you did, and I'm not really sure I can fully understand something like that if I tried. It would kill me if we ever devolved into something purely transactional, so I don't want you to feel like you need to be anything that you're not for my sake." He pulled away, looking at his friend again.

"I'm fine with bullshit, Kasse, we all have bullshit," he continued, "But I only ever want you to be who you are. I like you when you're silly and serious and devious and hard headed—I like you for you. Whether we mess around or not, don't ever give me anything but you."

“Then I want... I want…” Jaw tilted up, Kasse pulled his friend closer by his belt loops, leg coiling around his friend-but-not’s, his friend-but-more’s. He swallowed hard, tentative in the way he studied the other PFC for any signs of deception, any sign of someone other than the bright eyed boy he was starting to realize he loved more than anything. “I really want you to kiss me now that you’re not afraid you’re dying.”

Eoran held Kasse's eyes in the jutting of his hips, his legs ensnared. Without a word, he leaned in liquid slow, sight blurring on approach until the other boy's immaculate features were simplified into shapeless splashes of his own colors; skin and shadow marred by their collision, the sweet reward of lips taken and breath stolen.

Eoran wasn't frantic but there was a need there,
suffocating,
sweltering,
slithering,
like the skin of his hands shifting to slip along the forced incline of Kasse's jaw.

He was concentrated,
a zealous adorer so
hungry for life.

Nothing was more intimate to that street rat boy than this, this. If Eoran kissed him, it meant he was worth more than some anonymous fuck, an opportunist's random transaction in human flesh. He conveyed his longing, his belonging in slow circles between parted teeth. Kasse didn't have the words to express himself, so he did what he could through osmosis, even when the barely detectable rise and fall of his chest turned choppy on the swell of a sob he could barely contain.

The boy wrapped his arms around his friend's waist and pressed further into the kiss, desperate to find the navigator's core. He would dig him out in all his lightless beauty and keep him where he could always have him,

cloistered in his ribs,
lost in the
calm of his
ceaseless

beat.

Eoran’s covetous surrender was effulgent on the air of a sigh, a salacious sound drowned by his attentive tongue tempting eager teeth. He delighted in Kasse’s open mouth slick with smoke and gloom, the precipitous lancinations of a tempest the standing soldier sought to taste—gingerly meeting his press,
greedily taking in turn.

Oh, how he took his time to get to know that boy in his cautious lean. Eoran tried not to overwhelm, to simply remain in that moment with every possible curve of him submissive to the will of his desire for the boy in his arms.

If Kasse wanted him, wanted his ravenous void, his voracious gravity, then Eoran was open in offering.
He gave himself up.
He would always insist he be had.

Pushing himself forward to the edge of the table, Kasse sought out every tangent their silhouettes could withhold. The boy with his saline lashes welcomed his friend tight against his frame, hands sinking past fatigues till his chilling failure to circulate rested along the warm inward curve of Eoran's back, sinking further still
till Eoran could feel the ghost
in his fucking bones—

but something was wrong.

They weren't in the greenhouse. Not anymore.

Well, yes, but still, no—they were in the greenhouse but it morphed somewhere along its length. The greenhouse went back to the hospital. That wasn't right. Kasse's lips departed their kiss barely long enough to whisper "Put your hands on me, Eo, put your fucking hands on me" before he ran his own hands up the interior of his hedonist friend, snatching at his ribs to pull him flush, pull him down—

but,

a conversation from the far end of the room, quiet in it's distance, all the way at the back of his mind like a voyeur's ivy itch, said:

"She has pneumonia."
"I know."
"The medication is expensive."
"...I know."
"So how are you gonna pay?"
"...I—I don't…"

Eoran’s eyes flashed open at the sound, the intrusion.

Fuck—, he thought.

His pupils skirted to the side, behind him. Behind him?

Fuck—

No. Behind Kasse. No. Where?

Where is that voi—oh, fuck.

Just as his hands were beginning to sink under the hem of Kasse’s uniform, Eoran pulled abruptly away and twisted his torso around. To offset a portion of his leaving, the Toriet boy placed his palms on his friend’s shoulders so he wouldn’t completely fall off the end of the table he was enticing.

“Fuck, I thought no one came back here,” Eo’s whispers were a harsh product of syllables forced through teeth clenched, afraid of getting caught on the verge of messing around. His lips remained damp with the memory of the ghost. “Did you hear that talking? Something about pneumonia...”

Oh fuck.
Oh fuck—
He could hear me.
He can hear m—

Eyes wide, nervous and feeling very much the invader, Kasse pulled his tragic whispers from the PFC's system, released his bones from his touch so eager to learn this man before him. "Eo…" Taking the other boy by the chin the immaterial soldier forced his attention back to center, to his lips bruised till blushed from the bloodwright's attention. "What exactly does your utility do…?"

“Oh, that was you? ... I take things,” the flighty thing replied, grounding himself in the gaze shared between them. “Like some of those bone fragments, and... and my brother’s eye. We switched so I could cheat on tests in school.” He paused, chewing the inside of his cheek. “... I’m sorry. I don’t really understand it because it’s so internal. I didn’t realize I could eavesdrop like that.”

"You gave me your pain when I was trying to save you, you know," the adjunct confessed, leaning back onto his hands. He retrieved his mostly burnt down cigarette from where it laid at the edge of the table, flicking a long column of ash from the end and placing it back between his lips. "I've… never interacted with someone like that before. With my thing. And their thing… uh.."

“Hmm,” the other soldier hummed, briefly consumed by the echo of fingertips wrapped up in his ribs, the phantom sensation crawling its way out of his skin in the ghost’s absence. This opened up a world of possibilities for the pair, and Eoran was already mapping the schematics of its usefulness. Rather than retreat in the cessation of their quick-to-intensify intimacy, he stayed between the split of Kasse’s legs, requesting one of those hands his friend leaned on, digits curled around forearm, ask encompassed in his gently coaxing touch. “Let me see your hand—like put it in mine.”

“I’m not so great with hands yet,” Kasse confessed as he was pulled back into the bloodwright’s orbit. “Too many small parts, I’m still learning. I don’t want to fuck you up.” Looking down, Kasse watched his free hand come to Eoran’s hip, gently resting along the taut line of his lowest external oblique. After a moment, he sank into his friend’s daring request ipsilateral, stroking the rigid arch of his iliac crest.

“Does that feel okay?”

Yeah, Eo thought, yeah, that's good.

Though his expression remained calm, Eoran's mind was abuzz with the droning of his basest inclinations, rapid thought waves creating a chatter in the back of his head that both blended and began to overdub the forefront of every thought he was trying to convey. He clumsily faltered in the boyish blush of young love and new infatuation—Kasse clearly had a way of toppling that boy's most logical systems, sending him headlong into the disorienting delirium of cacophonous stammers.

Eo closed his eyes and took a breath.

Nn, sorry—it's a little crowded in here.
Were you crying?
Are you okay?

How overwhelmed that stray boy was. How truly overturned, engulfed in absolute. He closed his eyes, enthralled by Eoran’s frantic adulation in rapid fire affretando dissonance, and took that other boy’s lip between his teeth and pursued him exactly how he wanted,

exactly how he wanted.

i’m okay.
i was
but
fuck—
you’re perfect
you want me and
i can hear you and

yes,
i’m okay.

He lingered in slow rapture against the Ossan boy’s mouth, his sullen disposition brightened by the taste till his smile crept into the comfort of Eoran’s shadow. He couldn’t help his body’s assent in the quieting of their frantic minds’ rowdy decline, cessation in tandem to the languid count of his affections turned exploratory.

The Toriet boy would always greet him, even if the back of his skull knew better, even if his better side was sluggish to kick in. In many ways, Eoran was a simpleton. He wanted nothing more than that mouth he was effusively working, the more that begged to be incited in his surreptitious lean—palms flat on the table beside Kasse's hips, form already intent to lay him out.

But Eoran was also struggling. His pulse turned unsteady as he spoke his mind.

I feel like the more we do this,
the more I'm going to push you
into something you said you're
not ready for.

I'm weak, Kasse. I've welcomed
you to the obverse side of every
single defense I have and,
honestly,
I don't trust myself to keep kissing
you without wanting more—
to touch you
to disrupt your symmetry with the shape of me
to taste your breath in an apex of undoing.

He pulled away from Kasse and looked him in the eyes.

"I'm not turning you down, okay? What I'm saying is bring this back to me when you're ready to be taken apart and I will leave us both in shambles."

Kasse blinked, lips parted like he had something to say—but he swallowed it away with the curl of his crooked grin, his asymmetrical struggle between wanting and feeling wanted. He, insolent creature pressure-trap caught by his awareness of Eoran’s truth, knew every face of that wildfire urge to wreak his special sort of havoc. His lust churned to froth in his guts, his denial of his own want for the sake of that grey-eyed boy’s well-being sealed Kasse’s devotion, cut any reservation still heavy on his shoulders and left him lucid and stark and pale in his liberation.

“Thank you,” he whispered like the tears hadn’t left him yet.

Kasse Sejan had already succumbed to Eoran Toriet’s insurrection, diaphanous coup still rustling soft in his gossamer marrow.

Chapter Text

The two PFCs were scheduled to depart the larger base in two weeks. Outside of basic drills and daily checkups at the hospital to make sure the perforations they’d suffered weren’t growing into a far reaching mind-control piloted by foreign shards of bone, the boys had been permitted a large amount of leisure time. Kasse felt particularly at home exploring disused buildings, break-and-enter autonomy something he’d been missing in the rigid structure of military life.

One stray-dog boy was always leading his better-raised friend past doors they should have kept out of, past fences covered in warnings, advisory notices and condemned-building proclamations. Domesticated things generally heeded signs, or, at the very least, considered the repercussions of lawbreaking, but Kasse had grown up ignoring caution because trespassers-will-be-prosecuted made tame things fearful of reprimand—

guaranteed more feral things some fleeting promise of safety.

“Don’t worry so much,” the boy whispered to his friend out past the fences marking the boundaries of base. Already, they were approaching the door to a shelled out school building that had, at some point, been boarded up and fortified to serve as a bunker. Dry vines and desert vegetation had already taken root along its concrete angles, tree branches peeked out of half shattered windows, a brawling mix of Ossan and Amsteadean graffiti scrawled in colourful lengths up every utilitarian surface. He was already pulling a flashlight out of his pocket when he looked up at Eoran, bright eyed in the arid warmth of the desert’s outer reaches. “We’ll be fine. I promise. I just really want to know what’s in here.”

"I'm just letting it be known that if I step on a nail or cut myself on a piece of scrap metal and have to get a tetanus shot in my ass, I'm going to be so fucking sad." Eoran's volley was sharp but ultimately lighthearted, playful in the way it fit around a crescent-shaped smile highlighted by the moonlit glow of his willfully complicit visage. After his stint in the hospital, the boy was tired of shots. He was not, however, tired of being pulled beyond the warnings of sign-promised danger by the whims of his best friend.

He sure was cautious, though. Eoran's mother had always been very strict with her two children when they were growing up—curfew was enforced with an iron fist and, when broken, there was always a rage unlike any other to suffer through. This meant the youngest in the Toriet line usually paid mind to the constraints placed around his youth. Yes, he skipped school a good number of times to hang out with friends and fuck around town and scam sips of booze from countless 'uncles' drunk in afternoon-soaked alleyways and shooting dice, but that was daytime. When he didn't have to be accounted for, when the nanas he begged not to tell on him manned their own vigils between the raucous bickering of Ara Me Va reruns. Port Haven’s night was a different story. Figures cloaked in shadow stalked the streets looking for prey—bloodwrights, unregistered anomalies—and if the streets were too dark for witnesses, then who was to know when someone went missing in the first place?

So of course all this dissent made Eoran nervous. He was in a war zone now. What if there were undetonated ordinances hanging about? What if they stumbled upon an unknown splinter of insurgency? The land was dead and the night was silent, but his heart still beat like a drum in his chest.

"I didn't even know this place was over here," the younger boy idly commented, eyes scrolling over a plaque of text in his heritage's tongue, gold letters barely alight, "I should maybe start paying attention more."

The slightly older boy, impermanent thing, seemed far less concerned with trivial things like curfews and scrap metal and tetanus shots. He was focused, trained and intent on spending as much time as possible with Eoran, away from eyes that’d report them for fraternizing.

“Don’t feel bad,” Kasse mused as he pulled Eoran toward the heavy door, barred and sealed from the outside. “I’m always looking for places to hide. Kind of a habit, I guess.”

"I am pretty excited to see what an Ossan school looks like," Eoran reassured as he was guided, entirely trusting in the hand holding his own. "It's kinda weird to say, or morbid maybe, but these past few weeks have given me a strange sort of glimpse into how my parents were raised? Once out of Ossa, they never went back to visit. It's neat to see things with my own eyes, rather than through bootlegged, half-scrambled TV channels."

“You ever thought of living in Ossa? I mean like. Way up north, past the mountains.” At this point, pulling Eo through objects had become the norm, so Kasse didn’t bother warning his companion when they passed through the door into an echoing tomb of school desks and blackboards—but even so, the ghost couldn’t help but grin whenever he pulled his best friend through, like the secret they shared was some precious reminder of them as them, a moment tucked safe into the cellophane front of every pack of cigarettes he opened since the greenhouse. Flashlight flicked on with a click, the boy immediately honed in on the staircase, picking his way across the debris strewn atrium. Ever observant, he was keen to drop any nails he saw through the floor.

He didn’t really want Eo to get a tetanus shot.

The bloodwright shook his head. “No. Not really. I kinda just figured that once I got out of here, I’d go back to Port Haven with a little money in my pockets so I can help support my parents. They’ve pretty much worked themselves most of the way into the ground to make shit happen for my brother and I, so I guess it’s the least I could do.” It didn’t even faze Eoran—their ritual in exploration, feet working their way to the top so they could take each floor apart on their way back down; pick through the clay streaked remnants of what once was with curious minds and pickpocket hands.

“Besides, Amstead’s supposed to be the land of opportunity,” sarcasm curdled his words, “And maybe there won’t even be a separate Ossa in a few years, if our units keep getting sent that way... north.”

Between floors, Eoran ran his hand along the wall of a landing, rigid concrete scraping rough against his fingertips. “Do you like it here? Your grasp on the language is pretty good, I think.”

"I like that there's distance between things," Kasse said when he got to the second floor landing. He leaned into a railing that groaned beneath the stress of him, complaint loud and jarring in the impenetrable dark, a rift of eeriness in that vaulted silence. "It actually gets dark out here. There's little pockets of quiet. I really like just looking out into open space, feeling like I could just walk in a direction for an hour and not find anyone—except maybe you, I guess. You'd come find me, yeah?" Kasse smirked because he knew Eoran would. His torch's beam bounced off the flaking paint to dimly illuminate him, incandescent and aglow in his callow infatuation. He'd tried playing aloof earlier in the week but it seemed contrived ever since they'd broken into the greenhouse together. Why play when Eo knew him full well? "I don't think I'm claustrophobic or anything but I guess I'm afraid of being trapped."

When Eoran caught up, the ghost acted as though he might linger, to tempt contact but he thought better of it.

He really wanted to get up to that roof.

"And I'll never be able to speak Ossan," he admitted as he started the next flight. "Understand it, maybe, but speak it? I can't string words along like that. It's really beautiful, like… when you talk, I can learn so much about you and the way you think from the words you weave together to make a phrase. I really like hearing your voice."

Eo smiled, an assiduous thing always chasing closer. His pace was improving, caught by a focus that was steadily drawing away his interest in happenstance and the dusty spread of yesterday. He was present and persistent, keen-eyed wonder on the heels of his now. Before, later—they mattered less and less.

"It is pretty unreal how dark it gets out here." The heels of the younger PFC’s boots gave away his pursuit in uniform measure. "I've never experienced anything like it, the way it envelops and makes the edges of everything dissipate until I don't really know where my fingers or arms are and I could be anywhere and I'm convinced that the colors of morning are going to illuminate a new scene. I guess maybe it's disappointing that it's always just the same old tent or barracks, green and dreary, cold grey concrete... but then I see you in your bunk and I remember it's not so bad."

His gaze was focused on the shape of Kasse ahead of him. "Do you have a favorite type of place to break into? Are there places where you won't go no matter how inviting they look?" Eo asked a lot of questions but they were necessary steps toward his larger goal: memorizing that boy he so adored, knowing every infinitesimal scrap of his existence.

“Libraries,” the ghost said without hesitation. “If we didn’t have anywhere to go, me and Lia would break into the library. I always felt safe, there.”

Past the third floor landing, the stairs thinned out to a rusted access staircase leading up into total darkness, the only indication of an end a faint rectangle of moonlight breaching the door’s blockade. He trained his flashlight on the stairs so Eoran would be able to see where to step on shifting metal all creaks and groans. “I guess we didn’t go into power generators, anywhere there was a ton of electric just free floating. It messed with my head. I don’t really know what my utility does—I don’t think that it’s something I could ever really learn on my own. But I guess it has something to do with EMF fields? I’ve shut down a block’s power grid on accident when I got upset once. Lia said it was some spooky bullshit.”

Shining his flashlight up when he got to the top of the steps, the older boy finally betrayed his ploy: he dropped a light pack from an open ventilation duct overhead. Slinging the pack over his shoulder, the boy turned, torch pointed to the wall to tangentially illuminate his companion.

“I might have been here before...” Sheepish, Kasse bit his lip. The dark concealed his flush, but the tilt of his head consistently gave that naive thing away.

"Oh." Eoran's surprise was subdued. It was the sort that cast him in a fair impression of pleasant rather than dismayed, visible only in the quickly passing furrow of his brows. Drenched in the given glow of the offset lamp, the boy met his friend at the uppermost exit to hurry him along; to usher him through so he could see what was so special about this place that it required planning.

Kasse had him guessing, mind working through a slipshod scramble of thought to piece together parts of a puzzle he couldn't see. Anything could be in that bag, but Eoran anticipated the most likely option: that the bag was chock full of chips and candy pilfered from the commissary. It was maybe his second favorite grift between them—junk food still paled in comparison to being stolen away in the night.

"Well, don't keep me waiting, I want to see what you have." His hand met Kasse's shoulder in tame urging.

Narrow eyed and sly with that fox grin like a knife, Kasse was quick to accommodate. He pulled the bloodwright from the darkness into the night bathed in silver, their world nothing more than the stark penumbra of the moon.

The rooftop was mostly featureless, save for a row of ancient AC units long dead and a squat, windowless maintenance structure marred by fading graffiti, a boiler room or maybe electrical center for the now defunct school. The metal door was dented in, probably from some effort to remove a squatter long gone, the only evidence of a life spilling out in crushed soda cans through breaks in the entryway. Along one side was another rickety staircase, oxidized till the metal was a brittle celadon plagued in rust, all spider veins and clots—that’s where Kasse headed, tugging his friend past crumbling satellite receivers and toppled radio transmitters, over electrical lines like littered eels across the floor, up the staircase and onto the roof of that makeshift overlook. Surrounded on all sides by three feet of cinderblock breastwork and the meager remnants of a chain link fence only holding its form on one of the outer corners, Kasse set his pack down on the pitted cement of one of the containing walls. He pulled out a beer and held it out to his friend.

“Sorry it’s warm,” he said, strangely demure for someone who was just handing over a can of cheap booze, chin tucked and gaze restless. “But it’s still something, right?”

"It's great," Eoran grinned, "Thanks, Kasse."

The can hissed into the night as it was cracked open. Eoran didn't linger in one place for too long, directed by his sudden preoccupation with the unobstructed view of the desert after dark, lit from above in long sheets of periwinkle ebbing and flowing to the thoughtless caressing of lazy cloudforms sprawling across the heavens above. A patchwork of stars spread from the stilly circlet of upper atmospheric ice crystals like a colure of some mystical importance, blinking unto the horizon’s unsure line dotted with faraway civilizations or celestial fires or some strange combination of both. Their base twinkled a ways behind them, lights low and restless motions ceased for slumber.

Beer in hand, Eoran leaned his forearms on the block-bound railing. His eyes traced over unmoving humps of boulders scattered in the sand, shadows falling to the ground in long, uniform lines. Desert vegetation was turned stationary, midday movements ceased for the intimacy of obscurity. From their vantage point Eoran could see a heaping mess of interlaced twig-balls, haphazardly blown into a pile by an erstwhile giant's breath.

The night was cool and the dark-eyed soldier drew in a long breath. Whatever annihilation had come to this town ages ago had stabilized and taken root. The air was crisp and fresh and Eo was happy to drink it in.

"This is a really good spot,” he said, pushing away from the wall to turn back to his companion. In moments like these Eo spoke easy, free, like it was only ever the two of them breaking the emptiness of Ossa at its most silent.

“Yeah—” Kasse replied, his own beer hissing open with a pop, a brisk nervous swallow delaying his prerogative. He hadn’t unpacked whatever else he'd brought, but it wasn’t important. He focused on his friend, mouth suddenly so very fucking dry. “It’s really open up here. Like nothing matters but the horizon. And I really wanted you to see this with me. To be here with me.” Putting his drink down on the partition, his aura retched, nervous in the tremolo pitch of all his adoring, he looped his fingers through Eoran’s, looking up at him from the lowered cant of his impure head. “Eo… if I asked you to do something for me, would you do it?”

"I mean... probably," the bloodwright replied, mimicking the motion so his other hand was free. He brought it to Kasse's jaw and directed it up, wanting to observe those nerves in full, unobstructed by tricks of light and shadow always drawing illusions on his friend's cunning features. "But you know if it's something really crazy, I'm going to hesitate. What's going on? Are you okay?"

Jaw lifted, assailed when lit so softly by the night, he was a velour moment of decadence honed by a week’s making. Lidded gaze an electric spark of skylark capture, his lips parted in a sigh that begged corrasion.

“I want you to undress me,” Kasse requested. He always looked so haughty when he cast his gaze down, when he held his chin high, effete creature all insolence. The capricious angle of his brow, arrogant despite his diffidence, only ever spoke in dares despite the sheer harmonics of his entreaty. “...Please.”

Chapter Text

“I want you to undress me,” Kasse requested. He always looked so haughty when he cast his gaze down, when he held his chin high, effete creature all insolence. The capricious angle of his brow, arrogant despite his diffidence, only ever spoke in dares despite the sheer harmonics of his entreaty. “...Please.”

It sent Eoran's heart racing, cheeks ruddy with a sudden warmth unspoken in the cool hues of the moon's borrowed light. His digits were suited for no better work than this: to pull fabric from the framework that filled it, to conduct himself with obeisant indecency in the indiscriminate shadow of his friend's high brow.

Eo drew nearer, hands already greedily filling themselves with the rough-woven uniform covering Kasse’s chest.

"Alright. You're sure of this," he asked, downstroke tone less of a question than it was a plea for confirmation. "Is it okay if I touch you or do you just want to get naked?"

Kasse laughed, an abrupt breathy figment of the dire exerate pristine across his brow, half anticipation, half affirmation,

all agony.

“I want you to touch me,” he confirmed, happy prey to Eoran’s locust consumption. “I want…  I want to be all you think about, all you dream. I want to be the only thing you taste when you look at the sky. I want to see you so disarranged you don’t know if you’re coming or going until I tell you you’re fucking coming.” As he spoke, the words curled through him and took possession of his wayward tongue, wanton and lush and bare. His fil de voce lilts grew confident, demanding over the course of his pretty heresies sung to this boy so willing to receive his every libertine confession. “I want the way you want me. I want to fall apart in your arms. I want to rearrange around you, I want every configuration you’d have me in, I want to forget how to fucking breathe. I want you to hold me and teach me how my lungs work—I want to hear you tell me: Inhale. Exhale. Eo, I want to be in shambles.”

“Okay,” Eoran murmured, velvet voice sweetened by his gaze, lidded in appraisal of the task before him, double-crossed by his longing on the eve of its meticulous unwinding. “Be still for me—I’ll tell you when I need you to move.”

He started at Kasse’s neck—released the boy’s overshirt from his stranglehold grip and smoothed it out in an unnecessary mockery of politeness before the ghost’s bladeless flensing—took that flesh in a sweep of heavy hands guided by the taut lines of his friend’s jugular. Eoran averted his eyes as if, suddenly, that boy’s pretty fucking face didn’t matter anymore, as if he was confident the night would allow him to see it suffer through being taken apart in abundance, as if it was a kindness to be let free from the prison his consumptive stare built. His nimble digits worked the velcro of his neckband in a gesture made crude by the fricative rasp of its separation, then descended, unblind, past the square of his rank to the edge of his waist where the jacket’s hem leisurely hung. Glimmer of a zipper exposed to the moon’s long, scopophilic stare, Eoran drew it down in languid unmaking, split to the air and pulled apart by his own shameless glare. He eased off the left shoulder, then the right; pushed the overcoat down Kasse’s arms and let it fall in a heap on the dusty floor of that uninhabited roofspace.

Eo’s studious fingers pinched the boy’s undershirt and drug it out of the uppermost border of his slacks. He circled him in that gesture, pausing to stand behind his friend before he pulled him close against the shape of his own body. This was not so much to evaluate the way they fit together or to eke out some greater understanding about where Kasse’s street-honed angles fit against the domesticated bends of his partner-in-crime. It was to outright assail him. Eoran looped his arms around Kasse’s waist, palms dipping beneath the meager cover of sage-colored cotton. He drifted along the planes of the captured ghost’s abdomen in a tender glissade, fanning touch unhesitant between the suggestive curve of obliques and the serrated tooth of scrap-sustained ribs.

His mouth conducted worship along the slope of Kasse’s neck, nose brushed against his nape, lips devout in their vigilant threnody played along the ridges of his spine before he sank into the obscurity of the shadows shared between them. Here, Eoran pulled Kasse’s shirt half up his chest.

“Lift your arms,” he said into skin, a command dressed in the avid timbre of his sermon.

Perhaps that Toriet boy hadn’t been left out of his bloodline’s homiletic patrimony after all: Kasse fell helplessly rapt, bound by the faith Eoran preached into his skin from the comfort of his delectate pulpit.

He complied in silence save the hitching of his breath. Whenever the navigator touched down along the technical diagrams ley lined over his body, all isograph ragged, all schematic synopsis where the soft contour of topographical detail ought to be, Kasse felt himself break—he was caught between the drawling calm of Eoran’s slow possession and the restive apprehension of what would come,

how he would be the ashes
in his best friend’s
crematory
mouth.

Freed from his shirt, he dared not interrupt Eo’s hallowed work, his dedication to the task before him, but the boy couldn’t help the way he arched into his lovelorn distress. He was so elegant in his ransacking, despoiled and bereaved, reaching back to run his unsteady fingers through Eoran’s dark hair, silently begging his worship. Cynorexic, addicted to the exustion, Kasse could only exalt the whisper thin benedictions overriding his every function, his navigator’s scelerat deluge hot down the charting of his godless spine.

Had he no other work to do, Eoran would hold Kasse against the smelted doors of his long burning vault until they were nothing more than a ragged commixture of their former glories—Eo the wretch of an architect whose relentless hands rendered them mottled and malformed by the will of his burning bend; Kasse his precious study, viscid and metallic and painted all the daedal shades of iron and aluminum and earth and star-mess. But the boy was born of distraction, held thoughts more dastardly than his innocent face would ever betray. Before he’d ever been given permission to pull his friend’s parts to piecemeal, Eoran often wondered if he was sick, broken by the longing that sent his fingers to shivers even in their most mundane moments. He wondered, and yet he already knew: he was. Ill, depraved, dying for affection, dying to incite the lewdest violence from that predator wearing the skin of a tatterdemalion.  

Eoran returned to stand before his friend; looked him up and down in a vicious, acute evaluation that was too serious for the way he so often behaved, so gregarious, so light hearted. Unwavering, he sank to his knees.

The bloodwright ran through the process of removing Kasse’s boots. Pedestrian and rough, he ripped paracord laces from their eye sockets, friction warming the skin of his index and middle fingers hooked through that graveyard of crosses running up and down the ghost’s ankles. He made no request in all that taking—Kasse was expected to simply understand what the barely younger boy wanted and respond accordingly. The boots were thrown aside.

Rising again, Eoran was close, but not from a point where he could no longer observe. The intensity of his scrutiny was a direct contrast to the swooning slide of his touch; his left hand fell into a rhythm along the zipper of Kasse’s pants, the right worked the prong of his belt’s buckle with an agonizing drawl.

“Are you ready?” Eoran asked, smarts of his sedulous glare deliquesced by the humectation of his concupiscence. It was obscene—as he felt up that boy before him, Eo’s darkmatter eyes never once dared take in any other sight but Kasse.

Kasse thought he was, thought he knew. He thought he was ready, thought he understood what he asked for when he'd repeated the word shambles in garnet mouthed exigence. For days he'd carried himself like he'd ever been an actual fucking mess before, like he knew what it meant to be glass-eyed and brackish and fucking devastated in the wake of all the destruction staring down his shore. There Eo was, a storm surge running xylophone tricks up and down his fly in some cyrenaic domination that started with games, behaved like a lesson, and ended with the ghost's spit pooled on the floor. Eoran would rack his bones for the pleasure he might find in the sound, drink his nerve slicked come like marrow broth, and kiss him hard before he swallowed.

Kasse had never known anything like Eoran. He'd be vain to think he was prepared for his best friend's absolute depravity, pornography like a martyr's virtue in his soon-to-be lover’s infinite dark, eyes an illicit void at the edge of his best friend's esurient pyre—naive to think he'd ever be ready to leap into his flame without a push.

Desipient for never  seeing the way Eoran always  looked for him.

"Yes," Kasse whispered, overindulgent before he pressed his lips together. He barely sounded like the person he called himself, already inhuman, already raw and growling and they hadn't even started.  Fuck how could Eoran look at him like this? How could Eo do this to him? How was Kasse supposed to survive? The navigator stared at him like he knew so much, wanted so much, had so much planned, willing and able to make absolutely fucking sure no one else would ever, ever compare—to make sure Kasse only ever choked on one name every time he died.

"Please…" He swayed, unsteady thing seeking the other boy's lips on his blood stutter, desolate pulse so utterly and devastatingly infected. "Make me yours."

Eoran smiled, his expression so keen, picking apart a
buckle, a
button, a—

breach

past boundaries he thought about dismantling from so many angles, in visions with a rampant fever ignored and incurable,
in dreams marred by damplust surfacing when that boy woke all drowsy, still spinning from scenarios spilled from the deepest, most filthy recesses of his subconscious mess.

Eoran’s mouth met his skin again in a lurid lean, lips to
l i p s j a w n e c k c l a v i c l e c h e s t s t o m  a   c   h—
knees again to rooftop, split like the slut he tried so hard to pretend he wasn’t, save this very particular moment, the degenerate freedom that had him tugging at hipcloth and elastic waistband to get at the prize he ardently sought to claim. Here, where it was only them against the glittering velvet of the universe.

Teeth apart, Eoran met his friend turned lover in a savored breath. He drew his nose along the curve of Kasse’s exposed hip and let all those lines lead him to the ghost’s frail center. He lingered lovingly in the long eduction of his attentive hand before dashing the restraint of his display on the cliff of the indecent lapping that followed.

Extended tongue a shameless platter for his lover’s moonlit offering, Eoran glanced up, eclipsed pupils stark in the white of his stare when he

took that boy to his throat.

Kasse could've fallen apart right there, forcing himself to watch despite his body's instinct to double over, to crumble around his lover's cruelly victorious honeysuckle swallow. His plaintive hands begged the surety of Eoran's possessive touch, open palms equal parts prayer position and invading force, accidental anatomist just below the surface of Eoran's skin. He stroked nervous back and forth along the length of every extensor tendon flexed taut against his metacarpals.

"—oh—" he groveled in his captive observation, an endorphin induced third party to his very own taking. He'd drown himself if it meant keeping his eyes open underwater, anesthetized by Eo's protean consumption. Kasse shuddered because he couldn't breathe, head tilting back for a moment before he snapped his attention back to his friend. "—Eo, f-fuck Eo, you're—"

so fucking beautiful
every time I feel your
eyes on me
my world
fucking
spins.

How transfixed he was in Eoran's lyrics, calliope mind attaminate, mirror mazed. His rakeshame epithets carousel swirled 'round that evidencary innocent, that incorporeal bearer of Eoran's broadside lust beswike

but Kasse wasn't sinless,
even if he played his part
so fucking well.

Silencing Eoran when he pulled his touch back from the breach, he watched. He seemed content to tuck his thumbs into both hemmed cuffs of his friend's fatigues. He caught his lip between his teeth, spectre boy so easy for Eoran to exorcise with his tongue alone, gag-order throat the only prison Kasse's felony lust would ever see so expertly imparled.

With one quick tug timed with his consopite honey moan, long distance longing too vivid too real too cruel, Kasse ripped the other boy's coat through him till it was loosed from his frame, held in his hands by both wrists, undershirt contained within. He stripped Eoran in a single blink of his ashen eye and tossed the garments where his own laid.

"I want to hear you," he said, like he knew how he wanted this to sound, pulled back from the conine promises Eoran's mouth so fervently imparted. Kasse sank to his best friend's level, knee to dirty knee, sought that mouth in consonance with his own, took him by the steel of his belt,

did it all aching
all slow.

"Tell me how I fucked you the first time you woke up hard for me," the ghost said into Eoran's mouth with a grin, eyes half closed. "Tell me how you fucked me when you came stifling the sound of my name."

oh,
that boy
would
learn.

Eoran's unsteady breath bled a curse into the incurvate treachery of his friend's wicked expression, stripped and stifled by truths he hadn't expected to surface, glimpses of his own skin he hadn't imagined he'd see so fast. The wideness of his eyes was fluttered away—lashes to cheek, like he had even a mote of demure humility still alive in his squalid consciousness—and that boy receded like a tide sucked out to sea by the submerged convulsions of a great temblor,
a calm before a storm,
intimate silence before the sun,
sublime serenity belying the wanton threat of his grote mandrenke.

"If I tell you all the details of my affairs with some pale mockery of your construction, will you be jealous of it or will you try to upstage it?"

Already he was reclining, arranging himself on elbows bent, forearms bare atop the clay swept abandon of their skyhung hideaway. For all the damage incurred to Eoran’s innards weeks ago, the exterior presentation was small—pink punctures were left open to the air lacquered with the tender growth of new skin.

"How many times have you listened to me choke on the sound of your name and said nothing?” He prodded, persistent. “How many times have you looked me square in the eyes after knowing I fucked myself in the shower wishing it were you?"

Legs spread like it mattered if he made this any easier for the ghost who could disrobe him in a trice, Eoran hummed in antiphonal yearning tortured by the protraction of Kasse’s deliberate care.

“I heard enough to fuck myself back two stalls down, wishing it was you, too,” he confessed with a lurid slur, daring in his arousal, strangely serene for the violence of their aggregate wanting. “If you tell me, I’ll make him irrelevant—I promise I’ll be the only me that ever fucks you to tears.”

Kasse didn’t give Eoran the chance to ebb, straight to the quick of him. cottonmouth frightful along his venom edge, his criterion teeth. He gathered his lover close, riven flush across his hips, and left the rest of his attire where he’d attempted to lay. The ghost left a spectral memory shivering through his lover’s frame, sought to keep him reeling, a desidiose victim to Kasse’s ulterior motives. He wanted Eo unaware with his mouth occupied by corrosive kisses, heroin spit too addictive to consume clean, adulation left sloppy smeared across mouth and chin, across that face he wanted to see

in magnificent lament
wet from witnessing the
trauma of his vivisection
so expertly capsized by
Kasse’s vandal-heart
petriflut.

Blurred motives remained unclear until Eo’s spine hit cold steel, still somehow sturdy after so much time abandoned. The chain link jangled briefly in either protest or collusion—it was difficult to determine, but it didn’t matter. Kasse was trained only on making Eoran crack open and fucking howl.

“Did I fuck you upright? Or did I lay you out? Did I hold you by the wrists or did I hold you by the throat?”

The grey eyed ravager pushed two fingers into his lover’s mouth while he worshipped his jaw, mined him for moisture before departing on a spidersilk dew string to tease Eoran ajar, to push through his every barricade and leave him vulnerable to Kasse’s incursion withheld, pensive in the twilight.

“Did I taunt you like this? Did I warm you up or did I fuck you raw?” There was a playful lilt strung through his obscene queries, breathy and beautiful and so ready to feast.

"Hmm, the first time," Eoran sang on the sex-starved exhalation of his adit adored, debauched in the strain of his tease. He forced his head abaft into the rusty chime at his back, hair ruffled in a careless array, chest heaving like he was already so fucking prepared to spit every rotten driblet of his soul from the aliquot strung tendons pulled recklessly taut along his weakly brandished throat. "Mm, the first time... let me—ah—try to recall..."

He held Kasse in the ragged ring of his legs, knee acquiescent against the tangible side of his phantom votary, provoked in all his cleaving, maligned in his discomposition but headstrong and unabashed even with his bareness impelled into the support of his lover.

"I remember..."

Eoran was a harmonious deluge, a raw confession coaxed only on the crossed-heart, hoped-to-death swear of his every deconstruction.

"—stars. Not of the sky, but of my eyes
flickering and flowing in the swell of a lightshow
you know, when you close your eyes too tight and can see
all the patterns of your mind alight, your veins thrumming, swirling
and spiraling out of control. I don't—

a-ah

—think you said anything, but you were very
sweet to me, slow like satin sliding between my thighs; a touch, a caress.
I was face down, that's how I was sleeping, you were at my spine.
I felt your outline, your weight—wrong, of course, because I didn't know it
at the time—against me like air made leaden by the whirlwind always haunting your stare.
We didn’t even fuck, it was enough to just feel you there, to inhale the air between us,
sharp like motor oil and slick; tangy sweat and harried breath.

When I came, I felt you like a benediction in my bones,
some waking nightmare left tracing the edges of my hypnagogic distress,
wrapping me in shredded ribbons…
I thought—

fuck, if I could just wake to see your face too close to mine,
to feel the divine silhouette of you against me
then I would be… so happy."

The bloodwright leaned forward at the end of his panting diatribe, teeth finding Kasse’s jaw to scrape along its bezel edge, to sink into the soft curve of skin just beneath and tempt a bruise with inconsiderate tongue and indignant suction.

"But don’t let all that mislead you. I want to be brought to tears, too."

The ouverture confessions sank into the ghost’s temporary skin, Eoran’s sudden sweetness a sticky film that dripped down his neck, across his shoulders, rivulets down the bump and curve of his every austere rib in shadow, the starkly woven thatching of his obliques tight on the inhale.  

He didn’t know what he’d been expecting to hear. Some visceral taking, maybe, the result of a depraved snap that left them coupled in the dust, pants barely removed, a whirlwind of animal instincts save the splanchnic conduit linking their lust in hyperfocal elegies. Poetry in their breakdowns. But it sounded to Kasse like Eoran caroused rough along the edge of sex to feel something else, like sex was the onset symptom of a greater plague, like he feared anaphia and thus begged a deeper pain,

pervasive and pernicious
vauqueline
gory.

Kasse wrapped an arm about his best friend’s ribs and laced his fingers through the chainlink digging at his outlines. He pressed his lips in devotional supplication to Eoran’s own, orant despite the immediacy of his filth. He wanted to taste the afterburn of that sugar-spun fantasy when he sank slow into the fever, when he succumbed to the sublime sickness trembling in his lover’s every bone,

when he dedicated himself to the redamancy he could only express through archaic sighs
soft and direct in confidence to Eoran’s eyeteeth.

“I have you now, Eo—” he said with a longing meant for other words. “—oh gods, I fucking have you.”

Eoran  m  e
                     l
                          t
                                 e
                                           
                                     d
                                        .

Silkslip shudder in the softest pule of a sigh, that sabred boy responded in resplendence, falciform arch of his vertebrae pushing forward into the moonglimmer glow of his luminal lover. The bloodwright closed his eyes to wallow in the sensation that had become such an acuminate want in the bottomless well of his desire, unconcerned with the macroscian form of their audacious union thrown to the ground like an outcast to writhe, shed from their blinding effulgence, banished in preference of their brute physicality.

“Oh, Kasse,” Eoran purred into the other boy’s ear, “I’ve wanted this for so long. I’ve wanted you for so long.”

Body subservient, ever refined by the sway of Kasse’s comminution, Eoran’s hands found that boy’s shoulders. His nails carved petroglyphs of his experience, a turgid tale of his taking in rudimentary symbols scraped into pliant stretches of street-honed muscle,
rabulous and
thanatographic
even in their vestigial transience.

It was beautiful—the way he came together in all his falling apart;
the raptus that made his voice shake through all the heathen chanting of his transfixion;
the devious euphoria and pristine suffering worn upon his features dripping in disgusting virtue
when he welcomed the ghost’s possession like he were sacral vestments necessary to don in their dog-god rite
like Kasse was the only thing that could make Eoran entirely whole.

“I’m here—” Barely articulate, that spectre of a soldier shuddered into the hollow of his lover’s throat, pressed tight against his jaw, incapable of focus along any line but this plummeting daedal isobase. “Fuck, Eo, you’re so much more than—a-ah, than anything I’ve ever imagined and I fucking—I fucking have you now, I—”

Whatever Kasse was, whatever—whoever—he thought himself was irrelevant through Eoran’s refractions. That boy all slack jawed and taut throat in his arms, half-spat words and thersitical hiccups drowning out the replay of every historical coercion, discissive in the trimming of his body’s reel. He was edited, debellated so expertly—he, actively aggressing in helctic urgency against the chainlink clamour of his sudden interest in hamartia.

He, perfect specimen of Eoran’s vulgar fabrefaction come alive, was so intent on proving his affection, proving his worth, dragging his name screaming from his lover’s fantasies through the colour of his hadal mouth.

When incursion skewed to vandalism, he regressed to viscera, five-fold searching for a hold between ribs, hooking an arm under a knee to hold his lover up to the keening metal moans of their barricade gone metronome,
fucked him like the world would collapse if he didn’t leave a mark,
if he didn’t leave a line of bruises for Eoran to relish in aching arousal tomorrow,
if he didn’t leave evidence of their new reality hurting like a rampage
scrawled in every muscle
mapped in every bone.

I want to be yours
his body betrayed,
even when his
mouth asked:

“Are you mine?”

Chapter Text

I want to be yours
his body betrayed,
even when his
mouth asked:

“Are you mine?”

"Yes, ah, yes—fuck—" his prey responded in the heapsound melody of a subliminal unison, mouth and mind a conspiratory suasion that split the dark in the surety of Eoran's menticidal growl.
 
Yes, he said into an infinity unknown
an overdrawn repercussion of his every breakdown
battered by his lover's blasphemy, so many sounds
plucked from cords and their sympathetic servants
nerves and noises of colors laid bare for their tasting
in the meat of his midsection, dithered synapses of his
raunchy synopses—gods, the noise, all his fucking noise
howling holy murder into the hands that held him
screaming cultish prophecies in his metered assimilation
either real and present in the gentle gusting of the lonely desert breeze or
silent and deafening and sustained in their peculiar act of intertesselation.
 
He crept on an easy waveform measured in the roil of Kasse's rabid glide
aesthesiogenic against their consciousness, tested
pathogenic in the heatswell shared between them—
Eoran gave himself up, and up, and up in every instance that his body
took and took and took his lover's argent ardor recursive, subject to a fair-trade foible
a shared
             experience
     a communal
                          incision
 
"Gods, fuck," the bloodwright cried in all his self-important strain, his interstitial immersion, even as their aged headboard began to crumble from all their agitation, "Fuck, Kasse, yes, I'm yours. Keep me like this, against you, an array of pieces unwilling—hah—to see anything but your beauty made manic in our
 
f u c k i n g
 
incineration."

That’s what your name means, right? Are you my
funeral pyre? A sacrificial flame, a wild fire
on the shore consuming me whole
smoke signals and destruction
eradicating everything
—reducing me—
to ashes in your
eyes, mouth,

hands

“Yes, yes—ah fuc-k—ing Gods, Eo,” that halfbreed vagrant begged into his lover’s arrhythmic pulse, replacing every skipped beat with his own to keep him complete. His outline was kerning in wisps quickly recollected, control an illusion when he recapitulated their vulgar rhythm in maddening kinematic offbeats along the length of his co-conspirator’s every want, begged his mercy, begged his clandestine melody in each cooperative malfunction. Skin to bone, flesh to shadow, fraught and illapsible and contrapuntal and sounding more and more like a vile prayer with every passing undercry. “I want to see—”

I want to see what remains when I pick you apart
I want to know how you taste when you’re barely alive
I want to lap up the sweat pooling in your fractures
I want to be the only thing keeping you conscious

and then, when you’re a fucking mess, when your words aren’t words anymore
when you’re a slurring gasp of nonsense so overloaded you barely sound human,
when you don’t think you can possibly take another touch without unravelling entirely,

I want to throw you on the floor
and fuck you all over again.

Kasse was a growl even when he smiled, predator teeth nipping at his lover’s collarbones, the twinge of broken skin marking his insatiable wake. “I want to see you break so fucking bad.”

"Then break me," Eo dared, impatient; held knifepoint on the stropped end of a demand. "Right now. Don't stop there—"

Hurry, before I
eat you to cinders
make a bed of your body
your carbon particulate and
roll around in those remnants, oh—
to paint myself the color of night with
your soot, wear the most resilient of your
bones like fucking stars dotting my boundless
form in an arrangement of ivory constellations,
flecked in teeth plucked from your skull to encircle
me in a maw shaped by its permanent gaping. It will be
 
perfect, right? Our
allegory eternally
etched into long
inapposite Ossan
tomes embellished
in arcane tongues,
 
while I sit in nebulous silence recalling the hands
of your phantom spacetime, with the tale of our
sordid record forever dripping from my open mouth.

Eoran wore himself in rubied splendor, a delicate globule beading along the trifling bow of skinshallow bone.

“Do you think my tears will stifle the—ah—conflagration of my temperament, or do you think they will feed it?”

His grip gave way to mercy, releasing its captive held at the behest of his claws. Eo smoothed along the dented skin of his lover's back and then claimed his jaw, guiding all the fury of the ghost’s feral famine to lips that were asking to be silenced from their epaenetic morology—
that were begging to spit the bloody screed he was so set on spilling
to the mouth that so desperately sought his sanguine unction.

Fuck, you’re so stunning,
                                                                                                      Kasse,
                                                                                     you make me reel.

"And you make me—"

The ghost was interrupted by the grinding deathknell shriek of metal scrap giving way. He jerked Eoran flush against him as the chain link lost its grip on the edge of the building, disappeared with a pantomime imprint some three stories down, muted by sand and enveloped by the grasping quietus of the desert dark.

Kasse fell hard on his back, shoulder blades bearing the brunt of his impact against old, pitted cement and desert clay dust. The weight of his lover fell fully against his chest with how the older boy life-or-death clung to that body he'd taken, that body he'd been given—and it hurt like fuck but the ghost simply grit his teeth. He was mute in breathless laughter, silent through the hurt, kept his pain clustered behind a grimace that almost made him seem the masochist to his blunt force winding.

Two and a half gasps past adrenaline's vapours, that mongrel stray took his friend's mouth in ecstatic worship and nearly sobbed his confession, still so fucking enthralled, a captive despite the disruption to their union. He was so earnest, so severe in his words spun in lieu of falling, his searching gaze a blade made somehow sharper when wet.

"...I am so happy, Eo. Being with you is paradise—" Tender now, the violence drained from his marrow and left him pallescent in the moonlight. Kasse was a somber truth in lovesong refrain. "This is paradise."

Lips slick with their kiss, Eoran pushed himself up, separating his splayed shins and scuffed knees across Kasse's stomach. With his arms supporting himself to either side of his companion's head, he looked down with a slowly spreading smile, sweet in response to the dim shimmer of his friend's pearlescent gaze, searching but reticent to draw derive meaning, relaxed and bereft of obloquies.

"Yeah," Eo nodded, carefree and jubilant, respirations still ragged from his lungs pulling overtime in their heedless elation. "Yeah, it is. It's everything I wanted and  still so much more."

The sky bore witness to his bare back smeared with splotches of rust from all the weakened links that just tried to betray them. Shifting his weight to a lone forearm, the bloodwright observed his own dusty hand. He swiped it across his hip in a brisk motion, then brought it to Kasse's cheek, gentle in its charmed stroke.

"Aiarato mishyanatoro," Eoran said in his petting. His hips made a languid descent along his lover’s waistline, a lewd shimmy to remind them both they had not yet concluded what was started. "Unkyamesuekkai shinorai. Do you understand what I've just said to you?"

"No," Kasse replied, a play at something sullen at the back of his words. His touch was indulgent, indolent, a wandering trespasser pacing up and down Eoran's thighs. "When the words all run together, I can't pull them apart again."

Firm along his lover's hip, his red light grasping needed the ouroboros back. He shifted their latitudes, temporary navigator in his compass' distraction, made his demands two times, three times begged, only once consumed. He begged now, again, his repeated request for violence sweet on those callous lips parted, insolence worn funeral black in the gloaming of his callow eye.

"I don't have to understand, though." All clandestine intimacies half-smirked and sultry, sweltering despite the windchill, Kasse was syncopated. He slowly drug Eo back onto the scaffold, hips rising to meet him halfway up his executioner step. "I think—nnh, fuck, I think I get it."

"Hmm. I said that I'd give your name to my heart—" Eoran croaked, a hullgasp surrounded by water and creaking in a long drawl from his every fracture tested in all their frenzied continuity. His words were less than the sum of his venerated agony, twinged with a moan on the savored slide of his arching decline. "—I would drink your tears like they were my blood."

Whether or not that sudden quiz was of any importance remained ambiguous; the bloodwright was clearly more interested in the pike of his promiscuous perching. He straightened his back and stared down at his lover with his eyes softened in all their wonder, full of every color simply by being the ultimate void, a lack thereof. Eo hung himself long in the night, used the body below him as some numinous set piece to the salacity of his moon-drenched body's obscene show, wore the starfields spread behind him like a glittering cosmic crown.

Eoran wanted to feel that boy forever against him,
wanted to watch as he lovingly spun him to insanity
wanted to feel him fall apart, visit his body on that
dust-ridden death bed, and suck the last gasps from
his lungs, steal every quiver of Kasse’s life with the
depraved writhing of his spread, sanative thighs.

Coy malefactor no longer in control,
that whip of a boy and his
stray dog smile
were content to watch his rider’s every move.

He worked in opposites, contradictions. Kasse was prone to subversion, rarely direct. He pulled Eoran counter to his clockwise mewl, slick with the faintest breath of alcohol running a beat and a half to every 4/4 count of the Bloodwright's grind.

"Aiarato mish'yanatoro." Razor lined boy all ligaments and hard edges cut the words when they spilled from his lips, an awl rasped croon aching in rapture. The syllables blurred but fuck if he couldn't see everything so clearly. He was two seconds ahead, five seconds behind and all things existed in a smear of motion

and still:

Eoran's outline was crisp against the night—so crisp Kasse thought they could have been superimposed, thought it possible all this was a figment of his affection starved mind, tricks played on his idiot heart. The clarity sent him vertigo reeling, a thousand beats per minute spinning out in a cochlear flourish leaving all things achromatic except Eoran. Not even the ground could save the ghost from his lover's event horizon. "Unkyame—s-suekkai shinorai."

Free hand loosely exploring the articulations of Eoran's pelvis, the ghost's mouth was free to spit his vain curses

in stutters,
tilted and frayed.

I've known you in whimpers. I've known you
bitten into pillows and gasped into tile, covered
in the sound of running water and the absent creak
of old bunks, muffled into walls.
I want to know how climax
looks when you wear it:

Do you shake?
Does your spine snap your head back?
Does your body wrick in electric convulsion?

I need to study the shape of you, memorize your taste, anatomize you until entering you is second nature. I want to know the pitch of your heat, the specific cadence of your anguish. I want to watch you in agony every time I make you come. I will hold you down while it cores you the fuck out,

when you core me out
and leave me
transparent.


"Stay with me, then—h-ah—keep holding me by the bones," Eoran said, dry and rough like a threat, "I'll make you suffer through it."

He focused on the feel of him, tried him under all the duress he could muster, all the stress he could summon in the vile wriggling of his matchstick body, friction-felt and fire furious like
sulfuric antimony and
potash's own chlorate
handled haphazardly
on sap-slung sighs
and ragged gulps of acrid camphor.

"Don't take your eyes off of me, Kasse. Watch me come to pieces around you. Watch me fade and falter and crumble and know that you were the one that did this to me—made me weak, ripped me to shreds... made me feel..."

He was cut from the cloth of infinity depraved, repercussive in his ecliptic act of ribald excision, seeking rifts in their skin-bound junction, looking for ways to simplify the complexity of feelings felt in overwhelming abundance.

"Ah, the best I've ever felt. Stay with me and learn my pattern, follow my steps. Feel how I feel when you fuck me to my heart’s content. Burrow beneath me and lap at my passion, and when you can taste the imminence of my greedy apogee like a demand in your fingers and throughout your frame, look me in the eyes and tell me—"

Eoran drove like a relentless hammer making one-shot sinks of all its striking. He was working up his bawdy velocity, he was focused, lunging toward some end line—but this was very much Eoran's nature.

That cinder-swaddled wreck was always drawn to cliffsides. He was always looking toward an edge.
The only variable that changed was from how far back his approach would start
before he came running and launched himself into the void he so coveted,
addicted to weightlessness of his every fall,
to the surrender, and
the snap that shook
his every
bone at
the
b
o
t
t
o
m
.

"Yes or no, Kasse. Yes or no?"

"I can't separate us," the older boy gasped, carbon monoxide error escaping him in morse code stutters. He couldn't breathe, couldn't figure out which lungs were his anymore. Why couldn't he stop shaking? "I can't—mm, I don't know where I—ah-h—where I stop and where fucking you starts—"

With the in-and-out flutter of his dark lashes, Kasse couldn't observe who was invading who anymore, couldn't see reality for the reverie. He thought he'd been the aggressor, so eager to see Eoran fucked solid into a spit smeared waste of mumbling torpor, barely alive and mewling, splayed atop the fractured wreckage of his glassine shower-stalled fantasies. He'd been so ready to destroy the copy Eo'd made of him, that dim illusion of a ghost built of overlong glances in open bay washrooms and exhausting desert days, half stripped in the shade between assignments. Yet here he lay with his gaze in soft focus, anhelous lips softly parted to whimper his lover's name like he was the one getting absolutely fucked to pieces, caught unaware by the ricochet reverb of their sex careening between Eoran's somatic assimilation and his own quantum dissolution.

Every slick slip of Eoran's body drove a
night terror howl through his core, ravaged
his defenses and laid him bare for teeth. Every
sleight-of-hand stroke Kasse offered in worship
nipped the heels of his lover's violent frisson, his
now and his just-past a new blur in constant
collision, constant rivision. They were a screaming
aggregate, newly formed and wild, a clusterfuck
so confused, so plangent, so savage
so in love
"Y-yes." Kasse could barely manage to form words, more at home whining the yelping language of mongrels and bloodhounds. He held Eoran tight at the base of his spine, paroxysmal touch digging into the grooves of his sacrum. "—f-fu—c-k yes, Eo, yes."

Ethereal stray, wary of civilized hands, begged to be his, begged to be tamed, begged for a name, keening and sharp, overfilled, overfucked, fucking over. He forced his attentions onto Eoran, into Eoran, held him hostage, held himself open—to watch, to see. He could feel the undertow gain sentience in their roiling heat, all claws and teeth and struggle and longing,

and he watched it claw through them both.

"Please—" Kasse broke his weeping sea foam moans along the jagged promontory of Eoran's cliffside grave. "Pl...ease, y—yes. I… I need..."

 I need you, Eo.


oh fuck,


I need
you.


_yes.


“Fuck, Kasse—” Eoran seethed, “Ah, gods—fuck—”

He was coming together—
he was falling apart
gilt-glue glistening in silver sacrifice
bronze breath bleating in a misconstrued martyrdom,
summoning symphonies built in all the octaves of ecstatic epiphany,
auspicious sensations falling into place
—unraveling—
aligning all the angles of their esoteric susceptibility for optimal carnage.
Eoran was cognizant in the confluence of shared consciousness yet defiant in the singularity of his own, struggling not to swallow, not to impound for the sake of feeling the duality of this disaster for the rest of his wretched life.
Oh, that overzealous boy, that cannibal conspirator, inconsiderate bounder on the warpath to asphyxiate them both in the runnel of his sarin sedative,
his call to life, his
cry for mercy, his
plea for death.

He was breaking down,
spreading out
convulsive
     compulsive
          conscriptive
          rampant
      anticipant
dopant.
His mind was a hexfield of ill-portent curses conjured from all the old words his youth could never forget, treachery spat in hypolydian lapstrake mimicking the high-low points of parables full of emotive personifications—lores of love and loss, of fervency and fatality, of circles and cycles and eternities he never thought possible until awash in the consecrated perfection of this passing slice of time cohabited; shared between him and that adored boy he was perched upon.

Eo leaned forward in all his strident delight, perhaps caught unaware by his own game, that violent kick back at some mottled center of their melding. He rest his palm against Kasse’s chest so he wouldn’t completely topple over, eroded by such a calamitous rush, left ravaged and raw and despoiled. He was a strike on a singing bowl that refused to fade; a noise that just grew softer, deeper, became a subtissue echo rather than sound. Eo, too, grew softer, deeper...

When he looked upon his lover his eyes were drenched in crystalline abundance, gathering in his lashes, falling down the curvature of his cheeks, dripping from his chin,
bespattering the ghost’s abdomen.

Eoran was devastated.
Utterly and completely.
He was made
and in love.
He was unmade.

Kasse was no better, struggling to find where he'd left himself, hand slipping from Eoran's bones. He was coming around, arrhythmic blinking trying to recover the wet saccade of his REM into something resembling vision.

How naive he must have looked in the wake of being so thoroughly ravaged. How defiled and filthy was he when he brought his clean hand to his face to wipe at his eyes, how impeccant to stumble so blithely into his insolent laughter, struck raucid from their kinesodic lament, pitched on the unsteady warble of his coarse post-coital rapture.

Nothing in Kasse's limited experience with real intimacy could have prepared that boy for Eoran.

"I thought I was talking shit when I said I'd fuck you to tears." The ghost's hands shook and he'd never wanted a cigarette so bad in all his life and gods already Kasse wanted more,

addictive personality ready to
pledge allegiance, a junkie
to Eoran's cock like it
was a fucking altar.

"Are you okay?" Gently, Kasse pressed his nose to Eoran's temple. "What even happened, I've never—that was..."

“Yeah,” Eoran nodded into Kasse’s neck while he caught his breath. He pulled his head away and pushed the back of his wrist into his eyes. “I’m good. That was just... everything. I’m overjoyed, I guess. I’ve never had sex like that, or experienced a feeling so complete. I’m not sure I can really explain it—it’s like when people see a painting and break down at its beauty? Except this was an immaculate moment of time where everything felt right and okay and made sense, and now it’s gone. My eyes are open and I can see that we’re still in the army and we’ll have to go back to that base at some point where I’ll have to pretend like any of the dumb shit we do is worthwhile enough to keep my hands off of you, like the pinnacle of happiness isn’t standing right next to me when we line up, like war or existence means anything outside of the glimpse of entirety I was just given.”

Eo’s sudden surge of loathing for reality was partnered with a sigh, calm on the retreating breakbeat of his worked up heart.

“Sorry,” the bloodwright said soon after, a smile breaking the fog of his worldly gloom, “I normally have my shit together. That was just really profound.” He found Kasse’s jaw between cupped hands and dotted it with kisses. “Are you okay?”

"I'm fine. I'm really… I just…" That rogue grin turned demure, affection the catalyst. He turned his gaze from his lover only to invite him to his throat, dragging his already tarnished fingers curiously through their lust left pooled on his stomach. He turned his coy gaze up, imploring—always asking, it seemed. "You make my world quiet. When everything screams, you make me still. Even before this, before the greenhouse it's been this way. You cut through the noise till it's just you and me and the sky and I can finally listen."

He cast his gaze down, lids still teary from how unraveled he remained.

"I brought some blankets. A towel to clean up with. Couple bottles of water. That six pack of beer. Do you want to spend the night out here? With me? At least until the base starts coming back to life." Pushing himself up to his elbows, Kasse offered his lover a weak grin, a shy specter of his confident shell game. "I wanna get fucked, too—if you're down. But mostly I want to be able to remember how you feel pressed against me beneath the stars."

"Yeah, I want to spend the night with you," Eoran murmured as he pulled away, leaving a sleek memory of himself along Kasse’s jugular, swallowing salt commixed with his own spit. "And yeah, I want to fuck you.”

The bloodwright pushed himself up again, slid his body off his friend turned visceral accomplice. He moved to the pack Kasse brought, pulled out a blanket, water; the sage sheet spilled onto the roof where the shape of their first copulation was blown into dust—their fumble and fall, Kasse’s back in a bleary outline.

Chapter Text

“I think it’s really sweet that you did this,” Eoran said, soft eyes surreptitious in a sidelong glance, so easily captured by that creature who held his fondness. “How long were you planning it?”

"Five days? Six?" Honestly Kasse wasn't sure. He'd found his way onto this makeshift rampart earlier in the week during one of Eoran's hospital check-ins and knew it would be here. He'd begun stashing an overnight supply kit piece by stolen piece, hidden away where no one could see in the hollows of walls, much in the same way he hoarded together little emergency escape packs—just in case something went awry and he needed to disappear.

Nevermind that his survival packs had gotten larger of late, made to brave the desert as a pair instead of alone.

Rising slow, he was still a bit weak in the knees, but it soon passed. First retrieving the towel to clean himself up a bit, the adjunct then found his pants, pulling both his lighter and his cigarettes out. Placing one of the filters between his lips, he returned his lover's gaze, face lit by the bite of flame. He leaned half seated against the cinderblock parapet that flanked them on all sides, resting his hands on his bare thighs, humming in thought. "I don't know. I didn't want to rush. This just felt like the right place, you know?"

“Mm,” the other boy nodded his agreement as he spread out their makeshift bed. When the rectangle was laid, he moved atop it, smoothing our errant creases with a series of half-committed poking motions with his toes.

Eoran sat on the blanket and cracked open the bottle of water to take a sip, then laid himself back for a moment of relaxation before the rest of their night hit him, arms stretching long above his head.

“I’m glad we waited for a little while,” Eoran announced in a velvet contemplation. His aphotic eyes shifted to scan the sweeps of light highlighting the other PFC’s angles. Silent, Eo watched his friend re-realized in the new light of them, in the stillness between the gales of their bliss.

“... You’re so beautiful,” he said after a moment, “When you’re under strain, when you come. Will you come be next to me?”

With the barest incredulity tarnishing his eyeroll demeanor, Kasse grabbed the beers and crossed to the blanket on the ground, setting the cans at the perimeter. He laid himself out on his stomach, propped up on his elbows, smoke curling from his lips with his to-and-fro glances. He kissed Eoran's shoulder, resting his chin there a moment later.

"...You shoulda seen your face when I asked you to undress me, though," Kasse teased, fingers to his lips to grant himself another drag of nicotine. Hollow cheeked and pale eyed, his demeanor was easier alone with Eo in the dark—hardly the razor lined stare he maintained when they were back on the base. "You blushed so hard—it was real fucking cute."

"You caught me completely off guard," Eoran laughed. "I thought you had a bag full of chips and candy and we were gonna spend the night making ourselves sick on trash. No one's ever asked me to undress them before—I'm used to encounters being clumsy and fast; quick before my parents or brother get home, hushed to keep from being discovered by a teacher or heard through walls. When you said that, it was like the weight of that intimacy hit me, that I was going to be able to savor this out in the place where it makes the least sense. Or would make the least sense, if I wasn't now aware of how much time-wasting dumb shit is involved in being in the army."

Eo laced his fingers together and cradled the back of his head, watching the imperceptible shifting of the wide sky above.

"Do you know anything about star maps?" He asked, eyes unable to make sense of the feverish way the night was splattered.

"I know some of the stories, but I've been trying to learn a more about the actual charting, since we get to see them out here." Kasse was shortchanging his interest: he had grown highly motivated to learn to navigate by the stars, spending a decent amount of his free time on base reading books on astronomy and how their positions helped older cultures find their way. Reaching out, he plucked Eoran's water bottle from where it rested and took a deep sip.  "You should be studying them too, Mr. Navigator. If you're gonna be an engineering sergeant one day, you gotta make sure you can find our way around."

"I will. I'd just rather learn how they would want me to learn it rather than take a chance on teaching myself wrong. I’d have to forget and start over. Can't wait for all those slide shows and work books and math tests and field exercises where they take you out into the middle of nowhere and give you three days to find your way back though. I guess blowing stuff up will make all that worth it." Eoran grinned, turning his chin to shun the glittering night for his friend. "Do you like being in the army?"

"I like being with you." The older boy was a bit too quick on the response, hiding the shy recoil of his delivery behind his cigarette. He looked away, biting his lip."The army is just what I gotta do to stay at your side."

It wasn't all bad. Kasse was particularly skilled at the sort of mayhem and destruction that the army required of objectively good soldiers—never mind his tendency to go off course or willfully disobey in favor of following his own path toward achieving objectives. His rebel streak of independence was why he liked Brint as a CO so much—the sergeant gave him enough room to make his own choices and, for the most part, Kasse had used the opportunity to perform admirably.

Leaning over, Kasse pressed a smoke stained kiss to the corner of Eoran's mouth, gracious smirk just so fucking happy they were both here at all.

"I mean, you don't enjoy it, do you? All the killing, the uncertainty of combat. Everyone calling us traitors. You looked so stressed in Biko—like your were gonna puke the whole time."

"I don't. The fear of losing hit me pretty hard. I thought I was going to be outed as a wright, and then when I realized they were talking about you, I was worried about that. More and more I find myself trying to plead with fate or tip the scales of chance before we're sent out—I'm not sure what I believe, it just feels like time is unraveling sometimes. I kinda regret not paying more attention to my dad's stories of Varonian when I was younger." Despite the fading gloom in Eoran's voice, the boy unwove his fingers from the back of his skull and captured the ghost in an embrace that sought to keep him near.

"But I think some of the stuff we do is interesting: I like watching the landscape with you. I like the sudden rush of cool air that the shade brings after being in the sun for hours. I like being completely worn out and sleeping deep enough for my dreams to be a tarry-black, like I've sunken into a k-hold of exhaustion. And I like being with you too. Most of all, I like being at your side. You always smell like a summer afternoon." He smiled, "Or a summer afternoon on fire, if you've been smoking. Which you always have."

Eoran lingered in a kiss returned, like he missed the taste of that boy already, like their side by side proximity was still too far away for his liking. He was sly in the skimming of his supine accretion; his hands to hold, his legs to entice.

"Is it better, knowing you're not alone? That you're not the only wright out here? Is it easier to keep this a secret together?" The ghost was so easily compromised by Eoran's flytrap charms, shifting from stomach to side to better facilitate his capture. "I've never really been with another wright before. Lia knows, but she isn't like us. She's more like a really aggro raccoon raised by computer ferrets who learned how to use the human internet real good."

Even after all the time they spent talking about life back in Port Haven, their friends, family—or lack thereof—Eoran was still unsure if the colorful language Kasse used to describe his friend was meant to be complementary or affectionately disparaging. Either way, It sure did paint a vivid picture of the girl.

“I don’t think it’s better or worse. It’s just... normal, which I guess is pretty sad when you think about it. A lot of my friends are wrights, we try to stick together. I’m used to holding that type of secret close.” Carefully, the bloodwright’s fingers traced the rolling crests of Kasse’s spine, bound for the small of his back. “When you say ‘been with’ do you mean known?”

If he were completely honest, the language he used to describe Lia was neither complementary nor disparaging: it was simply the only way he knew how to describe his best friend back in Port Haven.

“Yeah—I mean been close with. There were a ton of us scattered all over the streets, running around homeless in Stokkram and Holm so I knew of other adjuncts, a few bloodwrights. Wright kids turned out and in hiding. I guess I decided pretty young it was just easier for me to stay free on my own.” Looking a little wistful, Kasse looked just past Eoran, line of sight grazing that pretty jaw. “You’d always hear when the trenchants raided a safehouse. They would call them nests in the papers, burrows and foxholes on the news. Described the kids they caught like they were criminals, the ones that died in the raids like they were cockroaches.” He looked down, tracing his lover’s clavicle with an affectionate eye. “And they’d never show their faces—so you’d only know who died if they talked about their utility, if you didn’t see them around the rooftops in Wrightbog anymore.”

Lips pressed together, he glanced back up, dark expression melting into a smirk.

“I mean, I’ve also never really been with another wright before either… not like this.”

"You're the only person who has ever made me feel like this." Dampened by parallels easily drawn between the conflicted streets of his home and the war-blasted lands they currently occupied, the bloodwright was happy to steer the conversation away from the beckoning pit of matters less pleasurable than the face he observed before him.

"I—" Eoran paused in the mire of a thought, tongue dawdling on the taste of a syllable then pressing forward, "I want to spend as much time with you as possible, Kasse. You're so special. I dunno where they're going to push us off to next, but I hope that we don't ever get split up. I think I would actually die." The laugh that followed was barely recognizable as one, traveling on a blunt exhale that quickly dissipated in the little space Eoran had neglected to fill between their bodies. His wandering palm smoothed along the convex of the other boy's side, mapping the sharp ridge of his hip.

“I don’t want to talk about that right now.” Kasse cut through the space between them with his words like a wall, his eyes glittering in the broken glass moonlight, his skylight grey all shattered in burglary to permit their escape from such a speculative trial. “Use your mouth for better things, all the things you wanna do that we just gotta grin about when people’re watching—do that. I’ll do the same. I gotta learn how to be quiet when you fuck me. Gotta learn to call out in the space in between instead of out loud.”

Parted knees, cigarette held above their imminent tangle, Kasse pulled his lover between his thighs and smiled.

“We’ve been apart too long, already. Don’t make me wait.”

"I'm going to make you howl," Eoran said, a promise with the cadence of a warning, "Until the only voice I hear in my head is yours, pierced in rapture.” Already he was smothering himself in the smoke-rimmed edges of that other boy, already he led them down the path to still more destruction.

Eoran was attentive and so easily swayed by the promise of gratification—he was always so ready to set fire to the sweet pliancy of his lover's flesh; so ready to exploit every sound from the mangled heaving of their straining lungs.