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 Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2025 5:54 pm
Sweet boy, ever ready to pay his dues with drowning. With a silent assent, Eles kept the ring and tucked it inside his cheek. When he was certain it wouldn't slip behind his teeth in their coming plunge, he stood and collected his boy disguised as a lump of unwashed Goth bedding and approached the side of the pool once more.
He chose the deep end, obviously; just as it wouldn't do to go to half-measures, it wouldn't do for either of them to crack their skulls open on a cement step and let death do them part before they got through all the formalities of it. Once he found a welcoming enough slope in the pool's curvature, he backed up a step, strode forward, and leapt into the pool with his arms full of boy and tangled cloth.
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Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2025 5:54 pm
They were a tangled mess in the water, around and above them the veils and skirts swirled. Determinedly pulling them both down, Malory watched his veils float up and away, revealing the boy who held him. Smiling, he met Eles’s eyes, framed by the soft blonde of his hair and the stark black of the mask that had also begun trying to escape to the surface.
Between the black waves of cloth, warm pinpricks of candlelight filtered down in unsteady beams through the water. One such glanced across his boy’s face, picking up eyes like lucky pennies, crusted with a subtle sparkle of the gold still caught in his lashes. Eles was pale skin and bones that shifted from sharp to soft with the slightest change in a smile. There was a thin, nearly invisible under his chin that Malory loved for its existence, its cause and effect, as he loved so much of this boy, but he rarely took time to simply admire Eles simply for beauty.
And what better time for it than now?
Reaching up he cupped that chin, and looked, deeply appreciative. As if they were truly about to drown, and he wanted this boy, fated and strange and his, to be the last thing he saw.
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Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2025 5:55 pm
Even if Malory wasn't yearning for the bottom of the pool, Eles's boots were. They clung to his legs like shackles, promising that he would have to kick hard and fast should he want to taste air and life again. For now, though, he let the graven chill of midnight water and its muffled quietude greet him, just as the boy before him had.
The strips of pale were as moonlight, cautiously reflecting glimpses of candlelight where the skirts and veils, the absence between stars, smothered it altogether. It was as though the moon itself dipped down beneath the water and all that darkness came like a train. Water suited him so; Eles could think of no better home for his boy than a drowning, for it both elevated him to an unearthly beauty and carried for him the burdens of his bodyweight. He would certainly suffer no overexertion here.
The mask had drifted from the tope of his head, but Eles had long forgotten about it. In moments like these, when Malory's appearance was as demanding as his presence was diminishing, if only for a second, if only while caught in the wake of that brief awe, Eles wasn't think of of himself as existing in his own body. Rather, his existence hadn't occurred to him at all — there was simply Malory, the candlelight, and the pool. Until he felt the ring against his cheek shift.
With the hand on his chin inviting him back to his body, the pool floor rose up to greet him. He remembered, and then he took that hand in his own, righted it so those delicate metacarpals faced the spurned salvation above them, and took his pick of pale fingers. He told himself it had to be easier than knotting a cherry stem.
Lips parted and he pushed that finger beyond his own teeth, threading it through the ring that pinned his mouth open. It had to be easier. He wouldn't gag, after all.
And he watched that perfect face, even if his lungs twisted in their discomfort. There would be time for his survivor's instinct to overwhelm him again.
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Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2025 5:55 pm
A small rush of bubbles bloomed through the water, a laugh that couldn’t help itself even as Malory’s finger slowly and appreciatively stroked the tongue that cradled it, that had crowned it with all the lascivious drama they so loved to wallow in. Hand slipping free, he admired the contrast of the ring against Eles’s cheek, for the first of what he hoped to be many times. At least one lifetime’s worth.
More bubbles emerged to frame the two of them as it was his turn to say, Yes.
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Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2025 5:55 pm
Eles, content in this world that was so eager to lavish him with pleasant and pleasurable experiences, reciprocated that gesture with his hands.
I know, they signed, complete with an imperious little smile. Like he'd stolen all the good fortune from the clutches of the rest of the city and hoarded it all to himself. Write that on a ******** paper lantern.
But that entitled delight was shortened by the increasing urgency in his lungs, that want to taste fresh air, and Eles had to push off the pool floor with all the force he could muster and kick his way toward the surface. Pop the bubble of their intimate little ritual by inviting the rest of the world back into his lungs, where the sound of living night could greet him once again.
That ephemeral capture of vows was worth the breathless laughter that followed, giddy in its grasp of his fortune.
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