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 Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2025 6:36 pm
Hybris couldn't even pretend to be scared on cue. Eles pushed him by the a**.
"Fine."
Having failed to smell any burning hair, he picked up the capelet by the corner and inspected it for damage. The crown was still clearly on fire, but Hybris's completely unnecessary capelet looked untorched. He gave it a sniff.
Then he tossed it atop the furs, feeling more made a fool by the second. Kneeling by the crown, he shed his gloves, then tested it with a brief pinch between two fingers. Then another, his fingers hesitating on it for a moment before pulling away. Then they committed to picking it up and found it surprisingly cool and light.
Hybris deserved a little torture in the same way that Eles deserved a little wine, so he perched that laurel crown atop the midnight boy's rather crowded head.
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Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2025 6:36 pm
Well, it looked like the magic of the fire was in the not burning up of things. Of course there had to be more to it, it was a crown. not a headlamp. Faustite had looked like a minor, not a miner.
It'd probably look rather nice on Eles, and while Hybris wondered if they would do crowns for the wedding, he felt something placed on his head and froze. Eyes wide as disbelief, delayed panic, and even more delayed relief at not getting beheaded or incinerated by the ******** thing coursed through his system.
"You-" But the accusation was cut off by a sudden hiss of air through his teeth. His head feeling abruptly cinched right, Hybris raised a hand to rub the bridge of his nose, brow scrunched in pain.
Slipping a hand through the metal ring and lifting it off, the migraine began to quickly fade back. So Hybris reached out to properly crown his boy in return.
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Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2025 6:37 pm
The crown looked good on Hybris, though it cluttered his appearance and clashed with the argent touches that accented his outfit. It all but deactivated the boy for a moment, but he soon looked fine with it, right up until he didn't. Then it was Cadmium watching with quirked brows as the boy went through a whole gamut of gestures and emotions that had him thinking this was some sort of joke or prank — that the boy was back to his mischief.
But rather than tickle him or pop some ridiculous surprise, Hybris just passed the crown off to him. Cadmium half-expected something to happen, and when nothing did, he reached up to feel the twisted metal as it sat upon his head. It was, indeed, actually there. And it hadn't set his hair on fire, either.
"It's not doing anything," he observed helpfully. After a moment, he took the crown off and held it in his hands. "What do you think it does, then?" If it was so obviously magical to the boy, then surely it had some important function. But, perhaps all of its magic went into looking completely edgelord.
It didn't necessarily mean he was Faustite. Perhaps he just stole it from that spicy teenager.
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Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2025 6:37 pm
Seeing no resulting pain for the other boy had Hybris sulking. Cadmium even had the gall to look rather good in it. “It must be for Negaverse heads only,” he griped and wished he had something on hand to beat, smear, or otherwise harass his boy boy with. After a moment, he reached for the discarded pack of jerky.
“It gave me a splitting ******** headache,” still complaining, he oppened the bag and pulled out some jerky. “Maybe it’s some sort of mind control device?” Hybris began to stick pieces of it into various parts of Cadmium’s uniform.
“Put it on and try to think some orders at me.” He paused at that last, features gaining that speculative look where he was considering whether or not he liked something and to what degree.
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Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2025 6:37 pm
Was that why Faustite was pissed off all the time? Crown too tight, causing headaches? But he hadn't felt anything, nor was a headache coming on while he wore it. Rather, if anything was going to give him a headache, it was Hybris shoving questionable beef jerky into just about every part of his uniform, including the belts and mismatched boots. If any raccoons or other trash animals made their home in this warehouse, they were about to find out.
Without bothering to stop Hybris in his shenanigans, he tried thinking commands very pointedly at the boy. Specifically, pull every piece of jerky out of my uniform using only your mouth. Then he waited. Then waited a little longer.
Hybris wasn't following orders. Not that this was unusual.
So he tried again, concentrating his every last brain cell on a simpler command: undress me with your mouth.
Unable to tolerate another prolonged wait, he asked, "Anything?" With a pinch of excitement and a dash of hope, he waited for Hybris to at least say yes.
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Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2025 6:37 pm
The looks of intense and pointed concentration were a little soothing in how silly Cadmium looked, particularly when that focus led to a whole lot of nothing as a result. Hybris considered himself about 15% satisfied. The other 85% may have to wait, depending on whether or not the captain got attacked by wild dogs on the way home. (Or three Very Good Boys once they got there.)
“Hmmm…I kind of want to bite you, actually. But in the normal way that I always do.” (Or by the Worst Boy right now.) To be honest, he felt a little disappointed. Cadmium being able to puppet him around as he wished held a certain thrill, not to mention curiosity. “What were you trying to get me to do?”
He slid another piece down, this time in hopes of any attacking wildlife getting his boy’s left asscheek.
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Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2025 6:38 pm
Huffing in disappointment, Cadmium framed his hands on his hips while his boy continued to violate him with desiccated meat. "I was trying to tell you to take my clothes off with your mouth, but you obviously weren't following directions. Maybe it only works on other officers? Or it's a bespoke cigarette lighter?" Taking it off to look it over again, Eles frowned.
Moving with so much beef jerky loaded into his clothes felt kind of awful, too — exactly his boy's kind of awful. A mild annoyance at best. Something irritating that wasn't worth looking into. Then Hybris would get his dopamine out of it and never face any danger.
"Orrrrr," he began, settling easily into his own smugness as he turned to face the boy, "It only works when Faustite uses it. But Past-Me stole it, and Faustite was super pissed about that, so he took revenge on me during that melodramatic euphemism of a fight, and when he didn't get his crown back, he disappeared because no one is ever supposed to see him without his crown.
"Bet he even wore it in the shower. That's why it needed to burn magically. Mystery solved." Cadmium clapped his hands together, dismissing the crown back to his subspace.
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Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2025 6:38 pm
“It’d make sense, for something to give General Kings a bit more magic for ordering lackeys about,” Hybris hummed, his petulance soon replaced with a smile, both for the attempted order and the visual of Faustite using it to light up a handful of cigarettes at once. It only grew as Cadmium went on to speculate the story behind the crown.
“Oh, how daring of you to steal his crown. Did you hold it up really high?” Wide-eyed with awe and out of jerky, Hybris instead fussed at the uniform in a slightly more normal, tidying fashion.
“He probably used it to turn the shower into steam so it didn’t put him out,” he offered sagely. “Maybe you should try wearing it in the shower. You can try giving me orders again, too.” Actually, he probably owed Eles something along those lines anyway.
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Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2025 6:38 pm
"Probably," he deadpanned. From what he recalled of that brief glimpse of Faustite, the boy was both scrawny and short. Holding a prized crown just out of reach was only the natural thing to do when one was taller than a human torch of a teenager, right? But as he tried to imagine how he might react if he was a little burning boy, his stomach churned. The answer had been so simple, so straightforward, that Cadmium was better off ceasing to think about it at all.
So he tried to recover a smile. Even tried wrapping his arms around his boy's waist, cinching them tight enough that they could lean against one another while he paid out his assurances.
"Oh, I love ordering you around in the shower. And we'll test how waterproof it is at the same time." An excellent experiment. Very worth pursuing. So worth pursuing, in fact, that while he held his boy in his arms, he vanished them both in an instant.
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