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 Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2025 4:24 pm
Eles was still breathless when he thought to ask it. Voice raw around the edges, his undertone of rasp outlined his words. "What got into you?"
Like the devil possessed him. Like he was playing a part without telling Eles, and Eles, given his ambivalence toward truth or fiction when the experience was the same, didn't care to differentiate. But now, with a measure of clarity and a smattering of dull pains that made home in his bones, he thought he should at least ask.
He stretched and sat up, unconcerned that his motions only exacerbated his soreness. That his arms shook just so at the elbow when he braced them against the bed. The victorian curtains were their shroud, trapping the still air in with them, and Eles thought distantly of suffocating on each other's breaths. He wondered, too, if Hybris ever passed through the mirror that looked down at him as he slept and doffed that power before he hit the bed.
But those were passing thoughts, like his thoughts on the bend of an ankle or how shadows cast from jawline onto neck. How fingers behaved after their nails tasted skin.
Would he get the truth? Would it matter this time?
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Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2025 4:26 pm
The deep breaths that had dominated his whole body and Eles’s with it, began to slow, but there were still the dregs of tension in Malory’s hands as they left the too-perfect softness of the boy’s thigh to knead at the sheets instead. There was still the minute flexing of long, lithe muscle, and a heart that hadn’t stopped racing for some time now. But at least his head had emptied sufficiently, enough to reach past the chemical debris and take in the question. And maybe it was emptied to the point where a lie, rather than a piece of fun, simply became a bother.
“I think I got…scared. Maybe even desperate?” Malory admitted. And since he was still himself, he added, “You should try it sometime.”
Hazy eyes began to focus in the dark, skimming across the figure sitting up in the bed. What would Eles look like in the morning? The thought brought a measure of curiosity and anticipation, like waiting for watercolors to dry.
The question didn’t feel quite answered. And maybe he owed his boy, this specific boy, an explanation since he wasn’t going to apologize. “Do you know what the best part of acting is?” Eyes heavy, Malory reached up to touch Eles’s jaw.
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Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2025 4:27 pm
There he goes. No more touch. It would have been something to mourn, were it not for the admission that followed.
It roused a grin from the boy. A small laugh. He looked up at Malory's reflection, as much to the exclusion of his own as he could manage (which wasn't much as all, to his chagrin). "I'd like to." Get scared. Get desperate in a way that didn't feel like a holdover or a translucent membrane that colored his experiences. It would've been nice, he thought, to experience raw fear — to experience a panic that he could fully comprehend, that didn't ambush him in a space that made no overt threats toward him. Undeniably, Mirrorspace contained a familiar wrongness, but it was more of an unsettling flair than that petrifying knife's edge of ******** was one of many reasons that he should be jealous of Malory. Perfect boy, even veiled in his comfortable dark, tugging at anything that bent beneath his grasp. The way his hair pooled over his shoulders, runnels of darkness down his back in immaculate little rivulets. They were mussed now, dampened with sweat, but they never looked lesser for it.
Breathing a last long huff, he expected to sit in their amicable silence. Wait patiently while they remembered how to think again. How to put thoughts and ideas together. How to sound coherent. How much his throat hurt —
His attention turned from the mirror to the boy, the real boy, the one he could reach out and catch and taste. "No," he answered perfunctorily, half-expecting for those seeking fingers to find the purple inseam under his face. "Convincing someone it's real?"
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Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2025 4:27 pm
Thumb and index finger slid around the sides of Eles’s chin, framing rather than disturbing the still-healing injury for once. Malory wondered if that was why the boy never felt fear, even when he was all open wounds and striking vulnerability. Why feel fear when you’re used to being the one feared? Even if he didn’t remember that, maybe the instincts remained. Like signing. Like knowing his body, unmarred and healthier than anyone would expect, was wrong.
Or maybe not. Maybe Malory was also wrong and all the dots were only just a constellation, connected by a story and housed solely in his imagination. Magic was real. But just because something was possible, even likely, didn’t that make it also real.
“No, that’s just what makes it fun.” Shoulders leaning back, pressing further into the plush comfort of the bed’s excess of pillows, Malory smiled up at Eles. “It’s being in perfect control of who you are.” Even if it’s not you. It’s so much easier when it’s not you.
“I think it slipped tonight,” he sulked, and that last bit of tension began to fade.
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Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2025 4:28 pm
Malory may have relaxed in his trove of comforts, but Eles snatched the finebone wrist and held the boy's hand in place. Shifting carefully, he laid on his stomach next to the star of the evening, then began manipulating Malory's captive fingers to find that ruined little line. To press enough for the hurt to come back. Those small ventures, once familiar, then habit, now felt in their absence.
Eles had never been an actor, he gathered. Never thought much on it beyond his quiet admiration for what Malory could do when he felt so spurred to action. In hindsight, his response made perfect sense: Malory used all of himself to project the character, whether it was Malory-as-Puck or Malory-the-bemused-boyfriend or Malory-the-doting-betrothed or anything in between. Everything must have been deliberate, then. Even the parts of himself that Eles would never have thought to regulate, like blinking or breathing.
Small wonder Ignacio said Malory had a lot of talent. That he was maddening for it. True, nonetheless, that he was maddening.
But his skin was cool, and Eles rather liked that. When he'd bothered his own scar with borrowed fingers enough that it could hurt all on its own, he molded that hand into a perch for his chin. Supported, of course, in case Malory's hand grew oh-so-fatigued that it fell away lifelessly.
"What happened?" What shook him so? What did Malory fear? What could he fear when he was so enamored with the stark impossibility of that Dark Star? Eles let his mind wander in its wondering while he watched the boy for an answer.
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Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2025 4:28 pm
Curling his fingers against the familiar weight and line of that chin, Malory could tell that his heart rate was starting to finally, truly slow. That he was home, and who chose to be, and with who he chose to be with. Rubbing Eles like a worry stone, he decided to leave out the theories and stick to the provable, acceptable truths.
“I spoke with your For A Good Time Call.” A soft laugh vibrated deep in his chest. “He’s exactly the sort of person who would light dumpster fires across a city in lieu of a missing person’s ad. And not at all predictable…he’s like a swamp.”
He sighed and gave Eles a meditative little pinch. How could this boy be bad for him? How could he be dangerous? “Full of writhing life and death spiraling and hidden just beneath the surface. Ready to suck down and drown anybody unlucky enough to step wrong.”
And he had clearly stepped wrong.
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Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2025 4:28 pm
Eles's smile was tipped with an unearned smugness. "Was it a good time?"
Unpredictable like a swamp. He was, wasn't he? All bashful, vapid words and meaningless phrases until he got his s**t together, like he never expected a call despite spraying his number on the side of a burning dumpster. Going through those stupid little charades. Being told that he deserved better than whatever a dumpster had to offer. But that was all surface stuff. It was the question at the end, the one that careened into uncanny valley, where Eles felt his foot sink deep into the swamp. That was when he knew better than to stay on the line.
"A walking catastrophe," Eles summed up. After he grunted from the pinch.
"Good for him." Taking away Malory's pinching privileges, Eles stole away that hand in both of his and pressed foreign palm to the back of his own hand. Layered fingers over the side of his index and pinned them in place with both thumbs. He pressed lips to them, then spoke against them as he went on.
"You should call him again. Chase that little white rabbit down every rotten, sucking hole." He considered offering to tag along, but Eles had enough of thinking about Faustite for a while. Dumpster Fire Boy seemed connected to him enough that Eles doubted he'd go a conversation without mention.
Eles didn't care for burning, anyway. Didn't care for the heat. No, he much preferred Malory's cool, perimortem skin against his own.
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Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2025 4:28 pm
There was, as always, satisfaction in knowing the suffering was shared. And that Eles likely knew it. Like a hand was smoothing firmly down his spine, Malory couldn’t help but stretch and relax further into the bed and closer to the other boy.
“You really want him to ******** me up,” he groused, fond and even a little happy for it. “I think he wanted to hit me tonight.” Or kill him, but sometimes it was hard to tell which would be worse.
“He wants me to call him in two weeks.” Slinging a leg over Eles’s, Malory added, “I’m going to make him wait three.”
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Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2025 4:29 pm
Humming in thought, Eles tilted his head a margin. "Should give him a reason to ******** you up." Certainly someone who set dumpsters alight wasn't averse to violence. The crude graffiti of a car hitting a deer was telling, too. What was Malory if not delicate as a deer? If not as docile and unassuming as an herbivore? An extra week's wait wouldn't be enough.
"Bring an extra demand. Gaslight him. Hold him accountable for something you never told him to do." Eles tsked in disappointment. "Pissed away his only chance by being so forgetful. Might make your face worth hitting." Reaching out and relinquishing the captive hand, he grabbed a handful of Malory's face and shook it gently.
"Think you've enough tricks to get out before you get dead." Some patterns of speech still felt foreign to his sluggish tongue. He frowned, however briefly.
Eles considered suggesting Malory bring someone else along for insurance. But as he thought about it, he realized he'd never seen Hybris with anyone else. He was always alone. Sitting among the sweeping shadows. Star of his own monologue.
He tightened his jaw. His attention wandered distantly to the impression on the pillow. Then, he rustled Malory's shoulder.
"Hey. Turn over."
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Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2025 4:29 pm
“You’re awful.” You’re wonderful. “And you’re right,” Malory hummed in consideration. “He started being very rude while I was being so, so very sweet.”
With a soft groan, as if he had been the one so recently and thoroughly worked over, Malory let himself be turned about. “He probably didn’t listen to most of what I said. So caught up in his feelings and completely forgetting or mishearing what was said.” A sigh, “Some people just can’t be helped.”
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Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2025 4:29 pm
"You're a ******** c**t," said with all the malice of a certain doting dog lover to his three favorite dogs.
Now it was Eles's turn to rise and play and impress upon Malory's body the splintered threads of heartache. Time to build a carnal house of the thoughts and feelings he'd rather give away.
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