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 Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2025 2:25 pm
At first he frowned at the offending appendage, just poking at the cover and jostling his ability to read. Hybris had a way of poking into someone's present that, while not obstructive necessarily, was quite insistent. Sometimes, Eles thought that insistence was cute. It showed interest. Care. A want for something that he might not be able to get from anyone else. Other times, Eles just wondered if Hybris was bored. If the thought of entertaining himself was too much of a trouble, so he chose to offload that task onto someone else.
Eles let his mild annoyance at the imposition peter out. Being laid up like that, it had to be difficult. There were only so many books to read until his attention span was shot. Only so many hours that Malory could sleep through the day, even with whatever he kept in the medicine cabinets. They could chat, but Malory had to want alone time sometimes. All activities had a stipulated cost of pain, and if Malory couldn't afford it, then he had to be bored instead.
And it was his fault that Malory was unable to flit off to parties or productions or dance classes for entertainment. Even if Malory invited it on himself. And jumping his bones can't have been good for the broken ones.
So Eles lowered the book, looked back at the boy who was all but a swath of black and purple languishing on a veritable mountain of pillows. Utterly wasting away. "Have you been in it?" He held up the book, shut back to the cover. "Guessing you'd have been Darl." He tossed the book toward the boy. Better that he didn't keep staring at that image.
"Sure. Long as it's good. Or bad enough that we can make fun of it." The worst outcome was a strictly mediocre play that moved them not at all. But, he supposed, they could always walk out of one like that. Or Eles could, then pull the fire alarm. "Anything you want to see?"
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Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2025 2:25 pm
“I was in it, but they wouldn't let me have all the parts I wanted,” Hybris admitted, a little bitter. Of course maybe expecting all of the parts was a little much. Particularly when it was just a high school production at Hillworth. “So it fell short of expectations.” The high price of not letting everything revolve around the talents of a singular sixteen year old boy.
“I was thinking of something a little silly that knows it’s silly,” Hybris caught the book, fingers slipping intimately inside with comfortable familiarity. “I don’t quite love the trend of making everything old and beloved into a musical, but I’ve been wanting to go watch Death Becomes Her for awhile.”
Still, he didn’t stop harassing Eles with his foot, pressing it against his hand, then his arm, then lower to his side. His rib. “Dress up for me, too.” And it was said in full, I am an injured little birthday boy, you have to be nice to me -attitude. “It’s going to be a date.”
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Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2025 2:25 pm
Eles chuckled. Ignacio's insights on the boy gave a curious counterpoint to that strict little judgment. Malory wanted everything he wanted, he wanted to have his way, and he wanted to go about that by any means possible. Idly, he wondered — did he sabotage that production, then? Or was this just a casual judgment held over everyone else who participated? Maybe this was more an 'and' than an 'or'?
"Okay." He wasn't familiar, but Eles had gotten the sense that whoever he was previously didn't find much value in anything remotely comedic. Every quote he pulled from the ether and every strip of prose nosed out that he'd heard before was ceaselessly tragic, sometimes overwrought, and assuredly serious. It led him to wonder if the 'he who came before' was a touch self-pitying, or fancied himself the terrible victim of a series of cosmic crimes. Hopefully he just liked a good and cutting turn of phrase for what it was, not how it could be used to describe his victimhood.
And speaking of victimhood — Eles laid a hand on that finebone ankle once its foot started gouging into his ribs. "Didn't realize you dated your pets. Do you take your dogs to the theatre, too?" He teased around the beginnings of a grin.
"Look, if you lay something out I'll wear it, but if you expect me to know what 'dress up' means on my own, you'll be disappointed." He breathed an even sigh — something more satisfied than put-upon. "But if you'll b***h about having to meet me halfway, I can ask Rose what to wear."
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Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2025 2:26 pm
“Dates are reserved for my Fourth Best Boy,” Hybris equivocated. “Apparently that’s you.”
He’d enjoyed, one way or another, the way Eles took to his closet without shyness or any sort of taste. Common sense, either, when he ended up in velvet and long sleeves on hot summer afternoons. There was an exploratory aspect to the fumbling, but a lack of concern made the learning curve long and drawn out. He should take his boy out to go shopping sooner or later, watch him pick out his own looks rather than making due as a blurry reflection of Malory.
But that was a bit too helpful for this particular moment, where he had just decided to be less helpful rather more. “No.” The refusal was bright and way too pleased with himself. “And you’re going to dress me up too.” He pressed into that hand, like stepping on the gas, driving them god knows where.
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Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2025 2:26 pm
"Oh," Eles exclaimed with mock surprise. "Doubt the first three Best Boys would care much for sitting still that long. Much as it'd be entertaining for them to covertly s**t in someone's shoe."
Over the weeks, he'd even managed so far as to tell the three schipperkes apart without needing them to be grouped together in the same room. He hadn't yet learned their overwrought names, particularly since the dogs didn't seem to care what he called them as long as he gave excellent pets or threw the toy to the farthest spot in the yard. But, now he could look at one dog and know 'that's dinner' (that ******** fatty), 'that's lunch' or 'that's breakfast' (the smallest, innocentest boy). And, perhaps a little faster than that, he'd come to understand that they deserve the entire world, even when they didn't deserve it. Especially when they didn't deserve it.
"Oh," he said again, realizing that Hybris was in one of his '******** with people' moods. Eles accepted this in stride; people deserved to be ******** with by default. Why not give them something to b***h about for seeing two boys flagrantly ignoring the social mores of how one dressed up to a stage play? They still wore their shirts and shoes (though why no sign asked anyone to please wear underwear or bottoms or something, Eles couldn't quite figure out). Didn't money still spend the same way, whether Malory was dressed to look like an irresistibly ******** Goth Twink or a schizophrenic hobo? Eles supposed they would find out.
"Alright." Eles laid back, flat against the ground, hand still on the foot that so insistently goaded him. Then his other hand came to rest on that foot, then both gripped that ankle around which he could almost fit his thumb and finger, and then he gave it a slow and steady pull to drag that leg over his midsection. "You're going to look like s**t. Probably won't stop hearing about it for weeks."
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Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2025 2:26 pm
“I never look like s**t,” Hybris insisted, allowing himself to be manhandled a little, then shifting his foot further down until it rested comfortably against the inner seam of Eles’s pants. “It’s terrible really, incredibly inconvenient for some roles.” The humblebrag had the air of something said often enough to have definitely pissed people off.
Sitting up a little further to rest on both elbows now, Hybris accepted the cost with pleasure and smug success, then switched the tracks back to their original intention, “Now repeat after me:
Fox
Socks
Box
Knox
Knox in box.
Fox in socks.”
From memory, Hybris began to sound out Suessian nonsense to repeat back in increasingly demanding phrases. If Eles performed particularly well, he’d tell him about the cork trick.
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Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2025 2:27 pm
"That's a lie." Eles gave that calf a comforting pat as he looked over at the boy to whom it belonged. "You looked like s**t the other night. You just happen to look extremely attractive while looking like s**t." Anyone was free to disagree with him, including Hybris, but they'd be wrong. Had he been a little more sober and a lot less lodged in the moment that night, he'd have kept his sketchbook with him and drawn precisely how Malory looked like s**t. How fantastically and ******** he suffered.
Alas, he'd had… Not quite a scare, but certainly a worry, and two shots of tequila. The only surviving drawings of that day were the one in his head and the perpetually revising one he left in Malory.
Huffing through his nose, Eles shifted a little, his fist gathering against fine carpet fibers. Watching the boy sit up like that — it must have hurt. He hadn't yet learned the names for all those layered muscles in the body, but he'd seen enough drawings of it, enough anatomy class dummies, that he expected it must have pushed on those broken bones. He'd grown rather fond of those silent little masochisms.
"That's a lot of -ocks," he observed. As he tried to follow along, he discovered the difficulty in trying to isolate words — prevent fox and socks from sounding like fox and ox — and his face rather disliked sounding out that same set of consonants in such repetition. Like he wanted to spit out his tongue after a time and give it a rest.
All the while, he'd been thinking showoff very loudly at the boy wrapped in gauze and darkness.
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Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2025 2:27 pm
Well, he could accept that specific insistence, especially since, uncharacteristically, he hadn’t watched himself in a mirror through all of it. Disappointing to have missed it, but a little intriguing too. Only one person had seen him like that, and that person wasn’t himself. There was now a side of him that belonged fully to someone else and beyond his own reach.
Hybris proved to be very patient in waiting for Eles to get through the section, toes giving him a gentle, approving stroke for every success. “You love -ocks,” he insisted, coaxing and unhelpful.
“And you’ll miss all those -ocks soon enough. Now:
Knox on fox in socks in box. Socks on Knox and Knox in box.
Fox in socks on box on Knox.”
The faces Eles made as he worked through it were especially gratifying, his own smile growing brighter with every new twist and twitch of ire.
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Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2025 2:27 pm
A small intake of breath caught on his lower lip. Eles rolled his eyes, mostly to himself, for that taunting sense of humor. It was right, however, so he didn't deny it. What he'd love more than -ocks, he supposed, was more of a reward than what he was getting.
Well, whatever. He'd consider it turnabout for how Eles made all that want persevere through a ruining of his ribcage the other night. Much as he wanted to scoot down on the rug, Eles resigned to stay in his spot and suffer his terrible first-world problems.
For the next phrase, however, Eles pressed his face into the palm of his hand. "Will 'go ******** yourself' work? My tongue is tired. It wants to lay on a mountain of pillows, too." But, unhelpfully, it didn't have any bones to break. Even he knew that. Though, he couldn't recall specifically looking at the tongue or mouth in any of the artist's anatomy classes he'd done. Must have been a fact learned from the bygone life, then.
With an utterly melodramatic sigh, Eles tried to follow along. Tried, and sometimes had to restart due to mentally tripping over the words, or switching up the prepositions, but even when he thought he'd caught the phrasing, his voice struggled to properly articulate. It took several tries, several cuts midway, several huffs of quiet frustration as he restarted again, several knoxen foxen and even a few boxen, a pained laugh at his own expense, and even then, it wasn't perfect.
But he kept trying. Malory provided the most perfunctory amount of motivation possible, but to his own chagrin, it was enough.
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Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2025 2:27 pm
“I’m afraid there’s no -ucks in your immediate future,” Hybris apologized with delighted insincerity. But he found himself a little proud of his boy after he’d kept at it and made it through, it had him lightly kneading the ball of his foot against Eles, steady and almost meditative.
“But when you’ve reached your limit, we’ll stop,” he offered, somewhere between kind and goading. “I wouldn’t want to strain that mouth of yours. It’d be sorely missed.” By himself and an increasing segment of Destiny City if the stories Eles brought home were anything to go by.
“Now time for the -icks, which I believe you also enjoy.
Chicks with bricks come. Chicks with blocks come.
Chicks with bricks and blocks and clocks come.
Look, sir. Look, sir. Mr. Knox, sir.
Let’s do tricks with bricks and blocks, sir.
Let’s do tricks with chicks and clocks, sir.”
Hybris, for his part, seemed to enjoy the sirs quite a bit.
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Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2025 2:28 pm
Initially, Eles thought Hybris was simply putting together some gibberish phrases, but they were starting to sound a little demented. He would have thought further into it, but his ability to think critically was depleting at a pleasant, if tantalizing, pace.
"-uck me," Eles sighed. Well, he picked up those skills somehow. Best evaluate them himself since Malory was so insistent on making the situation worse. In this case, the dogs very much took after their Best Dad. How nice for them. And their piles of dog s**t that Eles was convinced they strategically placed in the yard. Little brown land mines meant for extremely impractical shoes.
He was approaching the point where concentrating on words — particularly how to say them — was exceeding his capacity. For all he yearned for anything less cerebral to focus on, he knew he was only encouraging his own frustrations.
Encouraging the ones Hybris inflicted on him, too. But that was also sort of fulfilling? Eles gave up on making sense of his feelings.
"It'll be fine," Eles replied dismissively. "Not like you're teaching me how to grow a gag reflex." And consonants were fairly useless outside of talking to people.
After a sharp inhale, he tried to follow along with the demented phrases. "Chicks with bricks come. Chicks with… Blocks come. Chicks with dicks come —"
And with an unflattering snort and a clarion laugh, Eles understood that he had to surrender for the day. Point for Malory, he supposed, as his stomach started to hurt and he felt a flush warm his cheeks.
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Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2025 2:28 pm
The kneading turned firmer as the -icks commenced, and with a certain extra emphasis when Eles had to stop and simply laugh. Oh. That was such a nice one, wasn’t it? If Hybris had the wherewithal, he’d swoop over to taste that laugh right out of the other’s mouth. Let it echo and linger in his own.
Instead he let the want of it show cleanly in his eyes for once, and leaned slightly to pick up the slim, cast aside volume of 1x1. Tossing it toward Eles, he said, “Try it again. I want to hear the last lines in your voice.”
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Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2025 2:28 pm
Eles shuddered soft as his laughter faded and Hybris laid out more expectations. He caught the book, thin and bent as it was, and needed a moment before he folded the cover back and found the poem from before. Eles looked at the words again. His mouth felt dry, like all those words would collect along his teeth and tongue like taffy if he tried to say them now.
"A world of made is not a world of born — pity poor flesh" his flesh "and trees, poor stars and stones" and Malory's bones —
"But never this fine specimen of hyper — ******** — magical ultra… omnipo… tence." He regarded Hybris coyly.
Hell if the last lines of this poem felt so much longer than they had any right to feel. Like he was already reading for days and Hybris wasn't sharing any of his wine, never once took pity on Eles's poor throat. Terrible, torturous boy.
"We doctors know a hopeless case if —" Eles paused, took a breath. "Listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go." Eles shut the book and laid it against his chest, unable to decide if he wanted to disparage Hybris for making such a simple task so much harder than it needed to be or if he wanted to egg the boy on.
Ignacio said that he and Puck had a lot in common. Eles could see it now.
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Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2025 2:29 pm
“Yes,” Hybris answered the poem’s request softly. “Once we ruin this world, let’s go to the next.” Hand in hand, and without learning anything boring like don’t destroy your own world. His toes flexed then curled, turning exploratory.
And maybe that was it. Not resentment. Not hate. But a hot, thin line of fervor, tracing the outline of some kind of shared destruction. Right now they were at a comfortable peace, a rebuilding maybe, or just feeling out how the space between them had changed. But they had stared into the prospective wreckage of one another, the broken and the breaking, and had decided to call what they found love, trust, and home.
Having looked at the cliff’s edge, Hybris had decided it would be wonderful to fall, and so he did.
“Do you feel bad?” He asked the sky between and the rocks below.
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Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2025 2:29 pm
Eles crossed the threshold where he struggled to pay attention to words. Or, well, anything beyond the boy's insistent kneading and the steady thrum of his own heart. The urge to move, too, to brace against that foot as much as he'd like. Whatever was said initially had escaped him. If it was important, Hybris would repeat it. Maybe nag him.
"Hm?" Came his delayed response. Then, as his thoughts caught up, "Responsible, yes. Bad? No."
With a sigh, Eles propped himself up on his elbows. "… Glad, more like. It told me a lot about you. Things I wasn't expecting. Or — no, I hadn't thought about them.
"You keep your word, for example. Despite everything. Pain, fear, dread. I like that about you. Don't feel bad for learning it.
"Plus you're not broken forever. Just for a little while. And you're getting something out of it, so it can't be that bad, right?"
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