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 observe 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.