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 Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2025 6:08 pm
The phone lay silent. The manual lay closed.
Pale toes drifted aimlessly in the water. They swayed with the slow current of the pool filter, occasionally kicking up past the surface to spread and catch the cooling night air before submerging again. It was as far into the water as Eles had cared to go since their trip to the reservoir.
The pale boy laid back on a spread towel, eyes on the endless expanse of glittering stars. Sometimes he stared at the moon, sometimes he watched the dwindling blue smoke from his cigarette catch the candlelight and carry it skyward. Sometimes he perceived nothing but his own thoughts. That evening, he had nowhere that he wanted to be and nothing that he wanted to do, so he made his peace with a bottle of raspberry wine that would surely abandon him before the evening trod too far into nightfall.
Last he knew, Malory was inside. He always found something to do, something to occupy his thoughts, and Eles envied him for it. It seemed those broken ribs hindered Eles more than they did Malory, for Eles was the one that had to bury his introspections in others for the time being, and others weren't the easiest to find.
Taking another drag, he watched the orange glow blaze beneath his eyes. He decided it wasn't the mystery of his past that bothered him, but rather, the presence of it. The fact that it existed had goaded people like Malory into wondering who he was, matching behaviors to those who went missing, diagnosing his gaps in memory for him. Because no one could exist without a past at his age. And, at least for the moment, Eles wished he could be free of its haunting. Whatever ghosts followed him from that grave were better off following someone else. He just wanted to be Eles.
He supposed Malory could relate to that. His boy quite liked changing roles. Exploring people.
Sitting up on his elbows, Eles drained the rest of his third glass of wine. By now, his lips felt numb and a pleasant warmth dulled his thoughts from their usual eviscerating sharpness. He poured himself another glass. How long would it be until Malory could leave the house again? How long would it be until Eles stopped thinking about burning?
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Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2025 6:08 pm
Having finished the last in a series of video calls. Malory decided it was time for him to get some kind of movement in for a day that had turned much more packed than he’d been expecting. It had felt good to get so many things out of the way, enough that he had kept adding and adding to the many people and projects he’d let slide for the past couple months. The role of Malory Medraut was played out very well today, he decided as he stared at himself in the mirror, naked and alone.
The bruises along his ribs were a bit ghastly, but charming in their bold and fading way. The rest of him as well. As always. And Malory found the height, the panes of his face, the firmness of those thin muscles to be…well, maybe a little more tolerable as of late. There’s nothing like living in a body to find oneself getting used to it. Turning slightly from the mirror, his gaze moved to the window, and the boy lying beside the pool in the night’s darkness.
Comparison could be either a great evil or a wonderful balm.
With a soft hum, he pulled his swim briefs on and then, after a moment’s consideration pulled them slightly off again, snapped an image, then sent a few texts. A minute later and Malory was stepping out of the house in briefs and the sheer coverup robe that he absolutely didn’t need and left on one of the chairs right after reaching poolside.
As he began wading in, he asked with all too mild curiosity, “Did you manage to unlock it yet?”
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Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2025 6:09 pm
The phone polluted his view with its light. A few seconds passed, then that light dimmed. A few more seconds and there was no light at all. There, then gone. Another message waiting for him to excavate it.
And then, a boy. But the boy was terribly out of arm's reach.
The question did not stir him the way his body stirred the water. Eles felt those tentative ripples brush against his shins, as if asking permission. He drew his breath through his cigarette so he wouldn't have to speak too soon.
The stars were riotously quiet. "No," he answered. Smoke feathered out from his nose while his ribs fell.
"I got too busy feeling sorry for myself." He sipped the strawberry wine, though he couldn't much taste it anymore. Not with the cold burn of menthol lingering on him, in him. "And feeling my own aloneness. Seemed rude to interrupt it so soon."
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Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2025 6:09 pm
Malory didn’t ask if he was interrupting or offer to leave his boy to whatever morose ponderings the wine would eventually wash over. Alone time was either over or Eles would double down into alone while beside you territory if he was feeling beautifully grim and stubborn about it. Stepping down into the pool, he let the water buoy up his body and cradle his ribs in its gentle but firm pressure.
Neither of them had been quite right after the starseed incident, and nothing they’d experienced really bore much talking, but the pensive tension of it all had bore down on Eles so much more. Malory, for his part, hardly remembered what he’d seen. He knew he didn’t want to either, and that was enough. But remembering and not remembering was a fraught activity in and of itself for his boy, regardless of the memory.
“Put it in your beautiful words to take out next time, then come swim with me.”
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Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2025 6:11 pm
"I'm already swimming." If he blinked and turned his head just right, the world shifted, almost imperceptibly. He reached the point where he was falling out of reality. No one would be there to catch him because no one was looking for him. No one looked for him. He wasn't found. Just interrupted.
Interrupted. He drained the rest of his glass.
"I'm also waiting to drown. But I've stopped needing oxygen." There remained only the cigarette now, whose delicate ash stacked up and flickered away with a twitch of his fingers. The smoldering sparks guttered like stars burning out and he felt that gaping hole in himself yawn ever wider.
Eles sat up, though. He stared at the water that flexed around Malory as if it wanted to be invaded by him. That night in the reservoir — he remembered that panic for filling up to bursting. But maybe he remembered it wrong? Another drag. Another minuscule, meaningless sun dawning and dying. Maybe he was afraid of feeling full. Of missing that emptiness, the way it had stayed with him, an absence of which he'd grown fond.
He sighed, the breath escaping him through a narrowed space. "You're so untouchable." The words cracked, but they held well enough to be heard. "Like you're not even here. And what happened — it had no right mattering to you. So you spit in its face and you buried it. And I can't." A shaken, unsteady breath was interrupted by his collecting sorrows, their steady tracks down skin to clothes to towel to concrete and they journeyed yet toward the water.
"I think that starseed rotted in me. Its rot is spreading," he finished as he stubbed out his cigarette on the towel.
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Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2025 6:11 pm
Swimming in the same way he already knew how to use a phone. If they were younger and just a bit stupider, Malory wondered how many of their conversations would just devolve into uh-huh’s and yeah-huh’s. Which was to say, he loved and appreciated how much of a shitty brat Eles could be.
His eyes tracked across the sky as Eles spoke, until he heard that little break. Curious and compelling even as it brushed up painfully along his sides. Oh, it really had turned some of those little cracks into something of a hole in his boy. Jagged and unwieldy where Eles had been able to persist, if not comfortably, at least with fearless ambivalence.
Moving closer to the other boy, he began, “You remembered. Enough to know you’d been hurt, horrifically hurt.” The motions of a body losing itself from within and falling apart without, ravaged by, Malory could only assume, fire. “And now you can feel the scars of it, all fresh and undefined.”
And since he couldn’t help his own curiosity, “Did you remember how you were hurt?”
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Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2025 6:12 pm
Was that it, then? Was this just paying for his brazen disregard? He trusted too much in that witless confidence, whispering again and again that he couldn't be hurt, it was impossible for him to hurt, he was too new and fresh and wild-eyed to have learned that four-letter word, but he learned it as precociously as he learned <********> and love and hate.
Malory taught him too much of his own vocabulary. And that hurt, too. Like a knot of silver thread under his ribs that he delivered unto Malory's in a shared language of violence. If they stopped feeling pain, they wouldn't feel anything at all.
But it wasn't Malory that taught him numb. Eles wiped his face with the back of an arm, as pissed as he was defeated.
Because he didn't have a good answer. He only shook his head. And he wondered, for a moment — if he died enough times, would those successive lives outpace these memories? If he kept drowning, would he forget burning?
"Just remember this wretched understanding that it wasn't the first time." With a miserable sniffle, Eles stripped out of his oversized shirt and tossed it aside. "And it wouldn't be the last. Just some taunted, meaningless thing I had to endure until I couldn't endure it anymore. Until all I wanted was to give up and die." Somehow, he'd gotten stuck there. Somehow, he'd stumbled and hurt himself via his own fierce curiosity.
Then his shorts came off, leaving him in briefs not much suited for swimming. But he didn't care. He didn't want to be comfortable.
"Poison me." He slipped into the water that admitted him readily and chilled his body. "Teach me to be so unreachable and disaffected as you."
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Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2025 6:12 pm
Was it better or worse? To feel the effects and not know their cause. Likely better, if all the more shocking in Eles’s ignorance, his near innocence. Faustite’s past and the reality built upon it sounded…beyond anything Malory cared to think about, with Eles brought to this point. No wonder the general king was so, so angry, even when he wasn’t being violent, he could feel such an intensity of resentment, was cowed by it. Again, Malory found that he hated the idea that an existence that was so majestic in its ferocity, was one of resignation. Surrender was for someone like Hybris. Not Faustite.
And how that must have galled and grated, to a point that maybe greater power made it all the worse.
With a few idle pushes of water, Malory gained his feet and closed the distance between them. He gave that face a close inspection, then reached out to cup it with both hands, trace thumbs along the lovely, sullen red beginning to line those eyes. “I start, with my body,” he began, both smiling and solemn. “You should start with yours too. It’s never been hurt right? Even if it’s been wrong, it’s never had to endure. And it won’t have to.”
It would not have to.
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Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2025 6:13 pm
It wasn't really looking up, but looking out. Looking at. Looking with and seeing, in that inimitable and quiet darkness, the him he was now. That soft hum of skin on skin never stained well; it was something he liked about it. That ephemeral invitation to be present, not past. Permission to survive. To not die by memory.
He shut his eyes, however heavy they felt, and cool thumbs traced across them a margin of wet. A wet that caught the night air whenever it whispered about them and shook the trees and ruffled grasses. Warmer than alcohol, that unspoken suggestion of you can be here instead. Even if it meant trading one pain for another.
Eles looked again and Malory was still there. He blinked and Malory was still there.
He folded arms around those thin shoulders and the boy did not evaporate. He didn't bend like flesh under flame. Felt solid as the textured concrete beneath his feet. So he capitulated because he was allowed to. He wasn't burning. Not this time.
Eles rested his cheek against the hollow of the boy's neck. The shallow grave above the perpetual beat of hello hello hello. An invitation to which he'd fallen asleep before. All that tension — the rot that burrowed in his bones and wrenched on his tendons — he had to let it go. So he did, and trembling fingers at the boy's back gathered into fists, and shuddering muscles carried away a grief betrothed to regret, and he wept quiet against a warm, living thing that assured him he was here and not there, and he laid that burdensome survivor's guilt to rest with a racking eulogy.
"It's never been hurt," he agreed. Even if it remembered such a lonesome demise. All the better, then, that he could clutch that unearned closeness to heart and let this boy feel his presence in kind.
Like that flame's starvation was for unburnt, untarnished skin.
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