The Reservoir (4) : The Destiny City Reservoir opened about two years ago and is an easy escape from the big city. It's a five minute drive outside of the Eastern side of town and features clear water and sandy beaches--although, the sand here is notorious for squeaking when you step on it. It's a hot spot for all fun summer activities, but it's been in the news for mysterious reports of some strange, aquatic monster. Some accounts say they've spotted a twenty foot long, snake like creature capable of rearing a long neck high above the water. It's hard to tell if the videos are doctored, but there are too many rumors to dismiss easily. Something strange might be lurking deep in the water. Or it's just a hoax to get people out to the Reservoir!
Sometimes, people feel like something is grabbing their ankle, even if they are just wading in the shallow end. In the deeper parts of the water, it gets a little more intense: something has been said to grab onto ankles and pull. People have been warned about dangerous pranks, but so far no one has been caught. In the shallow end, anyone unfortunate enough to be targeted may feel themselves being knocked off their feet and tugged into the water; anyone in deep water may feel a firm grip on their ankle, tugging them lower and lower. Somehow, anyone it targets is freed--either by wriggling and fighting, or because someone intervenes and pulls the would-be victim up. No one has drowned in the lake. Yet. It's impossible to see who, or what, is doing this, but it usually gives up after one failed attempt. Usually.
While you may find yourself harassed by the supposed cryptid, or see something visibly odd in the distance, you cannot take any pictures of the creature. Who knows if you're even being attacked by the cryptid–or just another youma?
The Lantern Festival (7) : Scientists have been hard at work trying to understand the strange, glowing qualities of the luminescent caterpillars found in the caves by the reservoir. The caterpillars still shrivel up if they are taken out of the caves but their glowing secretions have been processed into an organic paste that can withstand the outside world. The city is selling paper lanterns infused with various seeds. The glow paste is full of minerals to support healthy plant growth without risking damage to the environment; all lantern purchases come with a small packet of activating power that will heat the paste up enough to mimic the effects of a candle without the concerns of flammability. When the glow paste loses its heat, the lantern will return to the Earth and upon the first rain (or any contact with water) the paper will dissolve and the seeds may begin to grow. All proceeds from the lanterns are put right back into the community to support local conservation and environmental protection efforts.
The sun was finally ******** off, leaving stark and brilliant slashes of red and orange across the reservoir. The beach had emptied out, the families and sober geriatrics leaving way for the more nocturnal youth and sloshed oldsters. Malory leaned back against the rocky outcrop, legs splayed and dark jean jacket framing the artfully tattered tank top that, between its soft black cotton and his pale skin, bore a grinning white skull.
Music pounded nearby as a bonfire, the heart of the night's party that had been the draw to come out, was only just barely growing beyond its kindling. Every once in awhile an acoustic guitar could be heard, sometimes trying to strum along, sometimes trying to break free of the stereo's low, driving beats. Honestly, Malory hated being early to a party, and when the party was running late, that meant being early at unexpected gunpoint. Horrible. But the view wasn't bad, the vibe was almost right, and the company...
He turned to look at Eles and finally lowered his oversized and now wholly unnecessary sunglasses, and then simply accepted the low slide of satisfaction that neither of them had earned in any way. But there it was and there they were. Turning back to gaze out over the horizon and deepening night, Malory slid a cigarette out of his jacket pocket, curling and cupping the following light against a brief breeze off the water. A small puff of smoke followed and then he was all splayed and leaning back again, all easy grace and lean, stretching muscle.
"Want to go for a swim?"
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Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2025 7:36 pm
Eles had been watching the bonfire. Rather, the bonfire-to-be.
He had no good reason for it, he knew. Fire was fire. Saw it anywhere. Drew it belching out of a dumpster like the damned thing had a incurable case of heartburn. Saw it coming out of barrels, sometimes, when the destitute or the disenfranchised coaxed a little heat from the trash of the rich and careless. Still, he watched — the glow roused, promising, then guttered, then glowed again, then guttered, then the barest wisp of a flame reached upward, tentative, maybe a little hopeful, before it cowered at a growing breeze.
Eles turned his head when Mal finally spoke.
Coward. The thought was automatic.
"No," he answered.
He looked back at the bonfire. At its mercurial give and take while tempers caught the sparks instead. Then he heard the flick-spit-hiss on his left and turned his head again, looked at Malory again, already so posed and poised and dedicated to the interregnum between sunlight and moonlight. Eles sighed.
The words sitting at the back of his mind were half-remembered. They nagged him like the morse code pressed insistent into his shoulder, his back, his thigh. Need-need-need-need. Maybe a want here or there. So close. That stupid, guttering fire. That struck-out memory.
Eles shirked a pair of unassuming black flip-flops. Cast them into their micro-desert, left them to die by the reservoir as he buried his toes in the sand. As he pulled the hems of his shorts down again, not because he feared how the trenches on his legs looked in the dwindling light, but because his body warned him that sand was troublesome. Now he was looking at that simmering glow of an end-stop coming off the boy's mouth. Oh, he thought. There it was.
"You can't swim with that in your mouth." A glance of you know better shot off while the sun died under the horizon.
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Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2025 8:04 pm
"I could," Malory insisted with uh-huh tone of an argumentative twelve year old. "I think it'd be scary." As much an enticement as a warning. "You wouldn't be able to see at all. And there's something down there."
He took another small drag, the same way he might sip a drink, and added, "You could die. I almost died here, you know." He paused a moment with a small scrunch of brow. It really seemed like he had an ever increasing number of How I Almost Died stories on hand. Ones where he actually almost died instead of simply being met with mild inconvenience.
"Are you sure you don't want to try?"
It was important to share everything with his boy, after all. Wouldn't it be so much better if they both almost died here?
In the distance, where no bonfires were growing at hopeful, coaxing hands, small glowing lights began to slowly rise from the waterline and into the sky. Oh, that was a thing, wasn't it? The lanterns. Malory couldn't remember if they made wishes on them, or if that was the sole intellectual property of the Wishing Tree.
He slid his own booted foot near Eles's, and felt a little smug, a little tough in being so armored where the other was now bare.
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Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2025 8:20 pm
Sometimes stragglers joined those futile attempts to assemble a fire. Sometimes they walked past, their tracks always pointing toward their aspirations, and then there were more fools around a smoldering pile of beach trash. Eles kept quiet until those one were gone out of earshot. When they kept passing in ones and twos, he gave up and just scooted closer to Malory. Like closeness would guard his voice.
"You don't know if I can swim." An accusation, maybe a challenge. Malory played a good game, but they both shared the disadvantage of not knowing the history of this body.
Here lies one whose name was writ in water.
The smoke caught his eye a few times now. Not the smoke from the most feeble attempts at fire-making in the last two-thousand years of recorded human history, but the smoke wending away from the cigarette in that boy's mouth. Looking like he starred in some James Dean film. Criminally attractive just to hurt him specifically.
The way that smoke hung like an unfinished sentence, spooling out from an end stop. A sentence in reverse. He felt a little transfixed, maybe a little wanting for something to drink. Something to wear down his mind so he wouldn't be so full of words.
"Fine. Let me try that," he pointed to the cigarette. "then I'll go drown with you."
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Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2025 8:34 pm
Well. Not knowing was part of what made it exciting. Let them...him be even more in the dark. He moved an arm behind Eles in a silent show of reassurance that both of them knew meant absolutely nothing in the way of support and protection from the dangerous unknowns.
The request wasn't expected, but couldn't be surprising either. Eles was a boy of infinite first, and in order to have them, he had to try everything, right? Holding the cigarette up for the other to grab, Malory leaned over and rested his chin on a bony shoulder, as if to share Eles's perspective for the moment.
"If you don't know how, then I can just show you." Though they both may still really drown.
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Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2025 8:48 pm
It was bracing to sit against limbs in a banished from your thoughts way. All those clips and snippets floating around like unused collage bait finally settled to the floor and he could experience what he was living and he could live what he was experiencing. Better.
"No," he said again. "You're too pretty to drown alone. Someone will come save you."
He studied the cigarette as it was passed over. It felt too light when he tried to hold it the way he'd seen it perched in Malory's hand. Eles didn't like being reminded that there was any skill in how Malory held himself or held other things or was held. That wasn't fair. It wasn't asked for.
He sucked in a breath through the cigarette. He coughed abruptly, immediately, all sputter and racking bones until his lungs were sure that all the filth was evacuated.
It tasted awful. Looked good on Malory, but his throat felt dry, his mouth a little scorched. Still, something at the core of that experience caught his attention. Some anonymous, amorphous thing. He tried to take another drag and coughed until it hurt, then gave Malory's poisonous mouthpiece back without a word.
He swallowed. Then spat. Roughed up and hoarse, his voice sounded a little more foreign to him. "Besides, if you drown without me, I'll give you a shitty epitaph."
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Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2025 9:14 pm
There was a wry laugh for the accusation. And then something softer at the coughing. While the other's body shook, he gave that wracked chest a few soothing strokes. "The last time I nearly drowned, my ex was the lifeguard." To be fair, he'd been faking the drowning right up until he was actually drowning.
"It was so embarrassing to have to save myself," Malory griped as he bent forward to loosen his laces. As boots and socks came off, he came to a couple conclusions, one of which was that he really did like it when Eles's voice ended up rough with hard use. And that both the offer and the threat were very sweet. "We can either drown together or you come and save me."
Noting that both their feet were pale and fine and bare together in the sand, Malory had to let go of that vague toughness for the sake sharing and again, that unreasonable smudge of satisfaction that rubbed across his features. He took one final drag off the slightly damp and sadly mangled cigarette before stubbing it out in the sand. "So let's test out your breath control."
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Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2025 9:33 pm
Eles turned his head and spat a wad of phlegm. Cigarette rejection sauce, he remembered thinking when he watched the cloudy white of it settle in the nadir between sand swells.
Where Malory bitched that someone else spoiled his impromptu scene that lacked a director or a script or any sort of communication whatsoever, Eles stood and stretched. The sound of the water shifting under the wind was like a white noise for their distant music. A backdrop to Malory's brackish demands. He wanted a remake of whatever that scene was.
It was strange to consider that he was being asked to fit a shape that someone else left behind. He didn't want to think about that anymore.
Fine, he signed. I'll swim down and spend my last breath on you. Better composition if we died together sharing that breath, though. Give it some ominous underlighting. Your hair would look like smoke underwater with the current carding through it.
Malory would take forever to get out of all those clothes. Eles didn't have to unbutton his shorts to slide them off, but he did it to kill a few seconds. It wasn't very many seconds.
So he stepped up to the point where world-made water met man-made beach. It was an incline, such that he could walk into it. The first steps were astonishingly warm; the sun must have baked this imitation lake all day for it to have felt like bath water. There was no sinusoidal current.
He hesitated nonetheless.
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Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2025 10:02 pm
Malory was slower to undress, there was no need to rush, and it was nice to watch Eles approach the water like he was already a wraith. Already the victim of a tragic drowning that was entirely avoidable and as lovely as he'd so fully described despite all his resigned vitriol. The boy was alone and bare again, and something about the hesitation made him all the more so. What else could Malory do but finally finish tossing his clothes onto the sand and stride past Eles as if he hadn't noticed any such things?
The water was colder than his pool, but nothing to flinch from just yet. So he didn't stop or even turn around until it was lapping at his thighs. And when he did, it was to silently hold out his hand in expectation.
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Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2025 10:35 pm
So insistent, this dark boy wreathed in his melodrama and comfortable expectation. Eles took a last glance at the bonfire that began to resemble a proper bonfire — all that work finally paying out, though it likely took some sacrificial high-proof to gas it up enough.
Wading farther in, his skin stippled with gooseflesh as the water climbed ever higher. The waters looked like pitch without the sun unspooling through the sky anymore and no one would be looking their way. So he searched Malory's face when he took up that expectant hand; he was playing, wasn't he? Won't there be some trick to betray his mischief?
But down they went, and down, and down, until the lukewarm water pressed around him like a corset. Then the sand-laden bottom gave way. Then he was kicking, finding a rhythm, keeping afloat despite the lack of tide. This wasn't new, but it was the first time he'd remember it. Next came a few slow breaths, each deeper than the last, until he felt certain of the pressure.
Maybe you'll see the Dark Star again, he signed with his free hand, before he sank beneath the surface and tugged firmly on that captive hand.
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Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2025 11:01 pm
The night had fallen, the waters had deepened, and there would always be mischief in two boys swimming by moonlight with fire and its all its little safeties being left behind in the distance. Malory took in that searching look and made no promises.
He'd intended to maybe reassure Eles though, to say that as long as nothing pulled them under, nothing held them there, the water would buoy them back up. Just let the water lift them, and they could float and float and float until their toes touched the sand once more. But instead, curious, he simply followed Eles's lead and saw that of course he would he fight it. And do fine. He could swim, a little awkward at first but just fine after all and...
Ah.
He really ********> meant it, didn't he?!
Malory wanted to laugh, but he needed the air. Opening his eyes under the water, he watched the creature below him sink down further, a pale face surrounded by gentle drifts of ink black hair and eyes like pennies that glinted in the barely there light. Malory thought, if he smiled up at me, would his teeth be sharp and pointed, and he decided he loved the other a little more for it.
He didn't fight the weight of Eles's gravity any more than he'd intended to fight the water.
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Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2025 11:29 pm
Water hummed against the captive air in his eardrums. Above them, the surface of the water rippled and danced with cast shadows carved from firelight. Deep cuts of black that writhed back and forth and back again.
Above him, a buoy, a burden, a boy. Always laughing at the wrong thing or smiling off-key. If Eles was a skin-sack of poor impulses, Malory was a skin-sack of poor coping mechanisms. All that poise and control, and for what?
He sank lower, but it took effort. He must have used fins before, he assumed, for he stopped short of expectation with each kick. Still, those flicker-flame lights drifted away from them. The hand in his grasp wasn't pulling away, wasn't retracting him from the depthless sea. Malory still hung above him, suspended before that distant flame. The way its molten orange folded over that black halo of hair —
A part of him twisted and he thought, distantly, that it shouldn't be there. A stupid and nonsensical thought to be certain, but it was just dumb enough to break the spell of the deep and stir a burgeoning sense of urgency. Bubbles pealed from his mouth in coruscating clumps that rose faster than he would, even kicking against the still water. He didn't need to panic, but Eles would've liked to have more gear on than his skin and a pair of briefs.
Eles saw that distant surface before. Placid and unbroken, but it was missing the shape of a person.
He tugged on the arm in his grasp. Eles would write him a raincheck on drowning together in a perfect Victorian tragedy this time.
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Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2025 10:13 am
The stretch of time felt more silent than if it had been truly silent, rather than the gently tightening and all consuming burble, rush, and beat of water. Malory watched with a beatific smile, even as Eles finally let out a burst of air, and especially when he gave a tug and tried kicking upward.
The expression grew playfully smug when he realized he'd won this particular game of chicken. For a gladly proclaimed coward, he won such games maybe a little too often and enjoyed them a little too much. He considered pushing down on Eles a couple times, for the frustration of it. Maybe even let the boy sample fear for once.
And then, in deep and darkness that truly had no place in a shiny new reservoir. Something moved. Something large and Malory felt that movement through the water. Eyes going wide, he yanked the other boy's arm up as he was now the one aggressively kicking for the surface. The pulling moved and turned until hands were lifting Eles by the armpits and they broke the surface in a furious burst of air.
"Shore." Malory panted. And, at the very least, the flames had climbed high enough now to offer a beacon to someplace safe and certain.
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Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2025 10:41 am
He'd surfaced spitting, sputtering, coughing. Caught in the arms of a boy who could apparently smoke a cigarette and get in the water without his lungs urging him to suck down half the reservoir before he could really get comfortable with a dive. Water prattled and poured around them, but neither that nor his racking coughs drowned out that sudden sense of urgency. Oh, was he afraid Eles was going to drown?
Eles donned a quiet little smile while he followed that demand. Malory was quick when he wanted to be; Eles shifted into a breast stroke to keep up, though his lungs didn't much like the idea of holding a breath between strokes. He decided this was going to be a race and he was going to win it. Especially since Malory cheated and handicapped him for the dive.
Something slithered down his ankle and he wondered, briefly, why anyone would put fish in a reservoir. What the ******** would they even eat? But the thought was gone as quick as it came.
Shore came closer and closer, the din of music swelling over their splashing. Soon the graded, silty layer of the bottom was close enough to touch, then wade through, then walk up until they were padding across wet, hard-packed sand. It was then that Eles stopped to cough some more. "I wasn't drowning," he insisted between wet hacks.
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Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2025 10:55 am
By the time his feet touched some semblance of ground, Malory decided it'd just been his silly imagination, giving him a little scare for fun and flavor. Maybe heightened by Eles...panicking? Maybe? He'd certainly swam toward shore fast enough. But Malory wasn't going to ask if the other had seen anything. He hadn't, so confirmation would just confuse the matter.
Arms crossed above his head as he tried to bring his heart rate and breathing back down to something slightly less painful, Malory paced to catch up to his wretched boy. After a moment he reached out to rub Eles's back. "You held your breath for a very long time," Malory assured him soothingly. Just not as long as him. "And I was right."
He could already feel the warmth and feel the crackle of the bonfire, and so he tugged the other toward there first instead of where they'd left their clothes. Idly, he wondered if his phone, wallet, and keys would still be waiting for him later.
