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 Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2025 5:56 pm
The hour was later than typical when he crawled into bed. That night, he stole away a few hours for an interstice between coming home from his job and getting to sleep. He spent those few hours in a contemplative state, between a bottle of wine and a Juul that promised something close to a clove taste when he couldn't find any such cigarettes at the corner store.
The buzz and the nicotine should chase away any cruel nightmares, he assured himself. Feeling good and enveloping a boy that enabled him to feel good worked like little assurances. Promises that anyone who could reach out and touch him would leave him be that night. He'd sleep, and while he might wake up groggy and dehydrated, he would be spared any further punishment.
Yet he was so terribly wrong. Worse yet, he was so shortsighted. His surveillance too narrow, too shallow, too easily cajoling when he was in a mood for a simple night's sleep.
But in his dream, as it coalesced in flame and frenzy, it was he who reached out and touched. It was with his blackened hands that he could torch and wither anything that failed to escape him. Anything that laid down to die. Spake alive in the cusp of crisping shadows, a burning building, and some lilting, wavering thing. With a mocking crumple, it turned and churned and burned into all that he hated — a simpering little resignation that wore his face.
But it wasn't his face. Or it hadn't been his face. Or —
His hands were yet caught up in that river of black, so content to melt and part in his grasp, to ravel out as smoke before his eyes. The smell of it so acrid and his recoil so sluggish and anemic that seconds passed before he saw his own pale fingers peeking out of the midnight rivers.
Slowly, his sense of the world returned to him, and the imitation blonde boy let loose a breath as it dawned on him that he was drenched in a cold sweat.
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Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2025 5:57 pm
Malory grumbled at the gradual, but increasing shift away from sleepy comfort as Eles was…likely having another bad dream. And of course he wouldn’t wake the other boy. Mostly for the fact that he kind of liked what was left in their wake. But also, he supposed, they may be useful, since apparently the only memories Eles would be getting for now were bad ones. Or maybe he was just in the habit of forgetting the good ones that tried to surface. Dismissing them as regular dreams.
He mused on it for awhile, the ring on his finger thrumming with increasing intensity, the fingers in his hair becoming pleasantly insistent, until there was a sudden exhale behind Malory. He gave the other a moment to collect himself before asking, lazy if no longer sleepy, “Bad?”
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Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2025 5:58 pm
A soft grunt came in response. Like he heard the question but hadn't made a decision on his answer. Instead, he watched the hair in his hands for a while, until the dregs of nightmare took with them their creative hallucinations. Until he could be certain, after every blink, that he was looking at the same scene.
He could have answered. For a long time, Eles considered it. Then he combed his fingers through Mal's quite long hair, however unruly it wanted to be, then began bunching the wefts into lengths. It would feel good to make something with his hands, he told himself. They would grow steadier with work.
"Do your dreams ever haunt you?" He asked as he started to weave those lengths between each other.
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Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2025 5:58 pm
His body, unprepared for the question, answered before Malory could, back tensing, fingers digging into the plush form of his pillow. And then a sigh, the slow, intentional relaxing, from his neck and down his spine, until he gave a little wiggle of his toes against sateen sheets.
“Some do,” he finally admitted. “The ones that are a little true. I have trouble controlling them.” With a soft hum, he closed his eyes and focused on Eles’s hands in his hair.
“A ghost came for you tonight?”
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Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2025 5:58 pm
Eles remained quiet, watching, while Malory had his discomfort and let it flee from him. Then he looked upward at the looming mirror, at the shape of a boy backward, and he wondered what parts of Malory qualified him as the Senshi of Reflection. He was almost averse to himself — married, as he was, to the idea of studying other and becoming anyone else. Play a role, wear a face, don't let the truth come out.
Over and under and over again, Eles made his way down from loose, dramatic lattice at the nape of his boy's neck to tighter, more controlled braiding that so wanted to hang across his spine. Was it the truth itself that scared him, or the quality of certain truths?
"I —" He paused with his hands caught around Malory's hair. "Mmm… 'Haunt' isn't the right word for it. Was like one possessed me. Reached out from the inside." He liked 'now'' over 'then'. And he was starting to prefer his history stay in books.
"Tell me about one that was a little true." Then he took up braiding again.
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Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2025 5:58 pm
The term possessed had a certain weight for Eles, didn’t it?
A silence followed, and then dropping into it and rippling out, the words, “I’m in a small, dark room. I can hear a dog barking outside.” Turning his head, disrupting the flow of fingers, Malory turns to look at Eles within the dark of their bed. It was odd, saying even that much outloud. Allowing a confirmation of any part of that as real felt like a hook, slipping through his navel and pulling tight.
“That’s the true part. But the rest always shifts and changes. All the bad things know I don’t like it in there, so that’s where they come to find me.”
He exhaled abruptly, dropping those thoughts as if he could barely hold them up for more than a moment. “Have you gotten any nice memories yet? Or at least boring ones?”
Maybe that was a bit much to ask for, in a life that consisted of burning alive. Daily.
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Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2025 5:59 pm
The turning shifted the hair out of his hands and Eles met the boy's look with an unamused one of his own. but that gaze turned serious when Malory began to speak. It wasn't what he expected. He didn't know what he expected. He thought about saying something, but what was there to say?
Eles let the matter slide. He took up that growing tail of hair again, though it took him longer to separate the lengths this time. Over and under and over and under and over. Just like the weave of old life and new.
"Boring ones, yes." He finished the braid. "They're very brief. Might remember holding a certain tea cup or using a certain pen. Just some brief flash. Like… Knowing the weight of it before I touch it, or how it's balanced. Not so much an image I can see in my mind.
"And I still get these instants where I expect to see something that isn't there. If I'm tired or distracted, I'll glance somewhere and see my hand out of the corner of my eye. Obviously it's my hand, but I expected it to be, well." Eles loosed a sigh. "Black. Taloned."
Then he began carding his fingers through the braid, starting low, working his way up toward the nape of his boy's neck. "Sorry about your hair."
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Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2025 5:59 pm
Ah.
Another pause, and then Malory reached behind to grab at one of those wandering hands and pull it over and around him, even as he aggressively wedged himself back against Eles. “Well you ******** better be,” he groused, all comfortable petulance.
“And I don’t forgive you.” He squeezed that hand, then laced their fingers together. “And…I hope you had a lot of trouble scrubbing the melted glitter off.” The pettiness, the small physical demands to be coaxed were all familiar staples of a daily life with one Malory Medraut. Though the crime would remain unforgiven, it apparently now held the weight of ruining a shirt he’d moderately liked or eating the last slice of torte he’d been saving as a little treat.
Still, maybe it would be better if they were a little guilty together, tonight, rather than letting his boy stew in a past created by a very different pair of hands. So, unprompted, he confessed, “I’m grateful you lost everything.”
Then, just in case a new conspiracy germinated in that fool’s gold head, he added, “And I’m glad you’ve been getting some of it back.” Though maybe not all of it. “But if I could go back and hmmm, prevent you from getting horrifically obliterated into a whole new life? I would shove you back into the path of this destruction…and reconstruction, without a single second thought.”
A particularly selfish truth. And one he wouldn’t apologize for.
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Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2025 5:59 pm
His hand was stolen from him, but he didn't care. It wasn't his hand, anyway.
"You looked cute and whorish with short hair." It was a couple years ago, if he was to guess by the many paintings of Malory. He'd seen maybe two with the shorter hair? And it grew quickly, too. Malory never lacked for nutrition. "Like you were trying out to be the first to die in a horror film. Too busy getting laid to have basic common sense."
That was closer to the truth than he was originally aiming, but Eles let it stand. Fair trade for the arm, which was dragged taut around the lithe, cool-to-the-touch boy that so loved fidgeting with his fingers. His hand was close enough, now, that the ring was superfluous.
Eles grunted his inattentive assent with each of the threats, the ill wishes. Shutting his eyes for a moment, he spoke up. "Thinking about tossing you into the pool from here." He'd either make it in or suffer one hell of a head bleed.
Then he snorted. "That's what you're grateful for? You're a ******** coward." Pale toes reached blind beneath the sheets, searching until the found the finebone bump of a foreign ankle. He slipped his heel atop the bend in that foot and dragged it toward himself like an undertow. "Grateful that I lost everything…"
In the back of the desk drawer downstairs, in his old room, he still kept that crumpled paper. It kept ringing true, after all. Malory Medraut is a ******** c**t.
With a click of his tongue, Eles shifted until he found that comfortable median where their bodies could coexist against each other in a quiet harmony. Each breath yielded the fading scent of shampoo from the last wash, plus the myriad hair treatments that cluttered the bathroom.
"I'm grateful you were stuck in a small, dark room with a dog barking outside. Anything else and you'd be less you. Probably for the better, which is demonstrably worse."
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Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2025 5:59 pm
"I am a coward," Malory sighed in agreement. "And you hated me on sight." Though that didn't stop the smug little thru of pleasure at the description. He had looked extra cute and particularly easy to pick up with shorter hair. More approachable.
Something to both enjoy and find irritating at turns.
It made no difference with this boy, though, with all his manhandling and Malory's dodder-like clinging for it. He didn't feel any need to forgive Eles for the hair, but he found himself having to forgive him for bringing up that little room, and so soon after he'd allowed it the tenuous breath of reality. For implying that it not only was something that happened, but was so threaded through his person as to have helped create him as he was.
What an absolute a*****e.
Worse, he was likely right.
"If you say another word about it, we're going into couple's therapy." Purely as punishment, though likely more for the therapist than anyone else in that room.
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Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2025 6:00 pm
"Coward," he said again with a smile, the word smoothed as a kiss over the soft curve of shoulder. He followed it with an intimate breath. "Sore loser."
A pause, then, "It wasn't personal, I think. It was more… Like an overwhelming resentment of everything. Would've probably bent a lamp post in half if it dared flicker too distractingly. Though, knowing you, that's even more of an insult."
Being a target of convenience must have been galling. Despite Malory's lifetime commitment to doing as little as possible, he yearned for all that nothing to give him some kind of meaning. He wanted to be the object of jealousy, of hatred, of revulsion. He wanted to be thought about in a capacity that assured him he was, satisfyingly, not good. Because, Eles thought, he was certain this boy could've played nice for long enough and found some lion-hearted person to dedicate their world to him. But that wouldn't have been satisfying, would it? It was easy to give and give and give.
As he pressed his forehead to the back of his boy's shoulder, he went on.
"I remember that I couldn't sit still. Or, no. No, it hurt to sit still. It was worse. Even pacing was better than standing there, feeling all that fire crawl up my throat. That's worth something, right? An exchange of suffering."
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Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2025 6:00 pm
It was more of an insult, the same way getting punched by a passing knight, months ago, was so much the worse because she hadn’t even stopped to lecture him. Like he was just an unpleasant piece of scenery to get rid of, to burn up. Or, he supposed, vent their anger on. But the reminder of what Faustite had been, smoothed out the growing tension in Malory’s muscles almost as well as the gentle presses against his back.
To be burning every moment of existence, to have to be burning in order to exist. People talk about Faustite as a figure of violence, evil, and rage. Including himself. Including Eles. But sometimes it struck Malory that the fiery figure of nightmare was, just maybe, a bit of a saint as well. How much restraint did it require not to drag every other person around him into that pit? Malory surely would have, maybe especially when it was someone he loved. Immolation and love were so hand in hand after all. Literally, if the speed with which his hair had burnt under that touch was anything to go by.
He wondered if Faustite had been like a sort of shark, having to move or otherwise burn under the strength of his own flames. Or maybe he just had undiagnosed ADHD. Lifting Eles’s hand to his cheek and then mouth. Not as clammy as upon waking. Warming up but never so much as to not hold a pencil, a glass of wine, or whatever boy was at hand. Clearly not angry and enduring a pain that should not exist at all, let alone for years on end.
The less selfish truth. One that came with a useless and illogical sort of guilt. So he still wasn’t going to apologize for it.
Instead he complained against the captured palm, “I’m going to feel worse for you than for me.” Horrible. “You have so much more of it and I’ll run out first.” A warm burst of air hit Eles’s hand. “I’ll end up poor and in debt.”
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Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2025 6:01 pm
Eles didn't mind the way that Malory so comfortably commandeered his hand. It was touching without expending the effort to touch, as far as he was concerned. It freed Eles to find other means of draping around this boy — by entangling their legs, or squeezing out more fleeting gaps between their bodies. It meant he could dwell on the scent of his boy's hair and chase away the acrid memory of all that burnt keratin. Of how some of it melted to his hands.
But he smiled unbidden at that petulant remark spoken into his palm. Truly, Malory would need to better his suffering if he wanted to play against Eles in the pity Olympics.
"Don't fret," he cooed. "I'll make sure you stand a chance. We'll find creative new ways for you to suffer." He'd already ordered one of those ways recently; a shame that artisanal goods such as those took time and care to produce.
Still, he wondered about that small, dark room with a dog barking outside. Would Malory's parents know? Would Jaina know? Would it be worth asking, or would that only do more damage? Or —
His free hand curled shut, half-expecting something at its center. instinct assured him that he had a tool for precisely this use, not that he remembered what it was or where to find it. What the ******** use was that, then? Was he supposed to hunt down Albite, grovel out a few hundred apologies, and then pick that man's half-fried brain for an object that Eles couldn't even describe? Clever ******** idea.
After silently fuming over this uncertain tragedy, Eles spoke again. "Let you know if I remember anything nice. Or boring. Especially the boring ones so you can fixate on them like they're character studies."
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Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2025 6:01 pm
At the first promise, Malory slid that hand down, leaving a wet, nipping kiss at a passing fingertip. He settled it at his throat with another little squeeze, and finally began to truly settle back down into the comfortable cradle Eles had shifted them into.
The second promise, the was a soft laugh with the rare twist of self deprecation. “Good. I did that for a long time, you know? Practicing Faustite.” He sighed, “It was so embarrassing when I didn’t recognize the voice. That youma, Headache, noticed I’d ******** up too.”
Clearing his throat, he summoned up the small corner of mental space he’d carved out from that moment, and rasped out, “Don’t ******** around with me.” It was a voice laden irritation and laced with a hint of disgust.
Rubbing the side of his foot against its captor, he gave a little huff, “I can’t tell if I’ve gotten better or worse.”
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Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2025 6:01 pm
Eles hummed his consideration into Malory's hair, gave his begging neck a little squeeze. Then he tried to remember for himself.
He knew what Faustite looked like, thanks to that youma. It contextualized some of his impulse-brief expectations — of seeing claws, seeing black. Those liminal moments just before rise or just before bed, when that nascent part of him was free to slip its subliminal messaging into those gaps in his awareness. Eles easily recalled disliking his voice for the simple shortcomings of how he couldn't shape the right sounds out of his own mouth. But that didn't tell him anything about Faustite's voice.
"I can't either," he admitted at last. "Maybe you should ask Albite. He'd know better than either of us. Unless you're still so invested in those fireflies?"
Headache, as Hestia had said. His pseudo-secretary. His body double.
A pause, then, "You have a font of magic that garbs you in a perfect copy of someone else. Doesn't it clone their voice, too? Does it gall you that magic makes simple work of things that take years of practice and technique?"
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