"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.”

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.