like the carrion,

Oh. There it was.

Over the course of the night, with the aid of whiskey, Sonny had successfully pushed from his mind what he remembered of that interaction up until just now, and would have been perfectly happy to leave it unaddressed. It took every modicum of his control to prevent his face from morphing in a way that might reveal some particular emotion. The mask didn’t matter, however, because when he opened his eyes Port was still not looking at him.

“I love you,” he said by way of response. It was not what he had intended to come out of his mouth, even if it was the truth.

Port finally shifted, no longer stone, twisting and pushing himself up onto his elbow. Sonny thought his brown eyes were beautiful, even in the dark, in a way that made him want to simultaneously shy away from the eye contact and keep staring into them forever. There was a furrow between Port’s pale brows. “I love you, too,” he said. 

There was no hesitation in his words. For some reason Sonny was surprised by how unflinchingly he said it, even if it wasn’t the first time he’d heard it from him— but never so blatantly, never face-to-face like this. Only ever in the dead of night, Port’s lips pressed to his hair or near his ear, whispered in soft or scary moments. He’d figured Port might find it difficult to say in any other context.

“Okay,” Sonny said.

Port sat up fully and interlaced his fingers in his lap. One of his thumbs brushed over the other, running along the fingernail. Sonny could not see too well from this angle or in the darkness, but he knew from every past sneaking glance at Port’s nimble hands that the nail was warped, like dented sheet metal or the rippling surface of a pond. 

“I’ve been thinking about the files,” Port said.

It took Sonny a moment to realize what he was referring to, with the sudden non-sequitur. Those redacted documents. Port hadn’t seemed very interested at all two days ago. At this point, Sonny was done with them, too. “What about them?”

“I think… I get why you wanna know more about who you are.”

Sonny shook his head minutely, listening to the soft scratching sound of his hair rubbing against the cotton pillowcase. “I don’t care anymore,” Sonny said. “I decided I don’t want to know.”

Port stopped rubbing at his thumbnail. “Really? Why?”

Sonny turned his face away, frustrated. He had not intended to continue thinking about this at all, let alone put it to words for Port’s benefit. Sonny cursed his stupid fucking immune system and his own self and every single circumstance that had led up to this moment. “Yesterday…” he said through his teeth, “…in the bathroom, it brought up some shit I don’t really wanna think about. I don’t wanna look back at all, including anything in those files. I’m done with all of it.” 

When Sonny turned back, Port was looking slightly pained, some discomforted emotion pulling at the corner of his mouth. His eyes were very still, aimed at some spot on the blanket, as he looked for words to say. “Did… did you know who I was?” he asked.

Fucking embarrassing. Sonny pressed his palm to his forehead, fingers in his bangs, and groaned. “Forget it happened.”

“Did you?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know. It’s all fuzzy.” He felt a little fuzzy right now, like he might dissolve into the bedsheets. 

Port rubbed at the back of his neck, over the delicate collar. “Y’know, family… has been on my mind, lately,” he said haltingly. “And I just feel like I should tell you… You’re family to me.” The look he was giving Sonny was something a little wide-eyed, a frightened sort of sincerity.

Sonny didn’t want to look at it. He brought his other hand to his face and pressed both palms to his eyes, scoffing. “Do you always have to talk around things like this?” The pressure had stars exploding behind his eyelids. “Just say what you really wanna say.”

Quiet. Darkness. “Did you mean to, uh, lick me?”

Sonny nearly laughed. Only Port would word it like that. 

It was something he’d wanted to do many times before, in moments tantalizingly close to Port’s bare skin, restrained only by his sense. When he was sick, he’d had none. Right now, Sonny thought he might still have none. And even though he hadn’t really known whose neck he was pressing his tongue to at the time, it did not matter. It was not the real question Port was trying to ask. “Yes,” he said.

Port did not respond to that. Sonny told himself he would simply lay in the silence and force Port to say something if he truly wanted to talk it out. He wondered if Port was mulling over his words right now, eyes still and focused in the way they were whenever he was calculating a response, trying to decide on a way to let him down easy. He could not help but imagine the way Port might be looking at him— as he hid behind his hands in a way that now seemed pathetic rather than resolute— perhaps with pity or apprehension or disgust.

His resolve for silence did not last even a minute. “I’m not your little brother,” Sonny said, even if it sometimes felt that way and he didn’t always hate it. “I feel like you put me in this box. You put me in this box and you refuse to see me any other way. And you think I’m, like, incompetent and… and immature.” The words were spilling out of his mouth.

“I—“ Port sounded weak. “I just don’t know where this is coming from.”

Sonny injected as much incredulity into his voice as he could manage. “You had no idea?”

Port’s voice was suddenly a little bolder, words a little quicker. “I mean, do you really think that would be good for us? Really?” 

Sonny was brave enough to pull his hands away and open his eyes. He set his jaw and fixed Port with a look he hoped came across as angry rather than ashamed, swallowing hard, fearing the bob of his throat was too obvious. Port’s look in return was something akin to wariness, nervous wrinkles under his eyes. “I don’t think you actually want me like that, Sonny.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ. Don’t tell me what I want.”

“I’m all you had, and you’re all I had, for— what— eight months? I’ve been the only person around for you to… to put those feelings on.”

“For god’s sake, stop talking.”

“You’re just starved for—“

“Shut up!”

“—for that sort of stuff. You’re a romantic sort of person…” Port had started to drawl out his words, and his eyes could not stick to a single spot for more than a few seconds, rolling all over the room— landing everywhere except on Sonny. “…and I think you’re misinterpreting your love for me.” 

Sonny could feel the heat rising to his face and sweeping over his entire body like a fiery alcohol flush. He burned. He could imagine too well the thought going through Port’s head: This stupid child doesn’t know what he wants. Sonny remembered they were not alone in the house and had the restraint not to raise his voice. “What the fuck are you talking about?” he hissed.

Port’s eyes steadied, looking down at him, and Sonny realized it was ridiculous to be laying flat on his back having this conversation. He sat up, rising to Port’s level. 

“I’m not trying to put words in your mouth,” Port said, shrinking away. “I just…”

He did not care for whatever stupid explanation Port would try to give. “Why did you even bring this up in the first place?” he asked, throwing his hands up. “What are you getting out of it? Do you get hard to the thought of humiliating me?”

Something cracked in Port’s expression, then. Sonny could not stop himself from continuing.

“You want me to answer your question? No, I don’t think it would be a good thing for us. Which is why I’ve never fucking brought it up before!” His hands balled into fists. “I was sick, man. I wasn’t thinking when I did it. And if you’re really as oblivious as you say you are, you never, ever would’ve known, because I was never going to bring it up.” 

Port just stared at him, mouth shut.

“Are you happy we’re talking about this? Is this making you feel better? Is this conversation productive to you?”

Port’s wide eyes dropped to his lap at the same time his hand rose to his temple. He looked heavy in every limb of his body. “I… thought it would fester,” he said quietly.

“You’re the one who was making it awkward,” Sonny snapped. “You refused to look at me.”

Port’s eyes squeezed shut, pained. The skin of his forehead dimpled as he pressed his fingers there. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, and despite himself Sonny found some of his frustration melting away at the sad sight before him. “I’m sorry,” Port repeated. “I was nervous. And I— I scared you real bad. I really messed up. I’m just… awful,” he finished weakly.

This switch in his demeanor— the evaporation of all that condescending self-superiority— really took the wind out of Sonny's sails. He no longer wanted to shout at him or insult him until he broke and admitted to the ways he was hurting him. “What the hell are you talking about?” Sonny asked.

Port stared blankly into his lap. “I’m a terrible person, Sonny. I just lie to you and upset you.” His words had a flat affect to them, like he was reading from a script. Like it was something he’d gone over in his head so much he had lost all the emotion behind it. “I’m even doing it now. I… I deserve…” he trailed off. 

His admittance of his faults was not at all satisfying, nor did it ring as true as Sonny had expected it to. “Stop,” he said. He felt bad, and at the same time, he was angry at Port for making him feel bad.

“Sometimes I wish we never met, for your sake.” Port’s voice was quiet. “You’d be happier.” 

That sent a stake straight through his heart. “Jesus. Stop it. This is—“ hurting me. No. That was not the right thing to say to him right now. “That’s not true,” he said. “You’re the most important person in the world to me.”

Port was silent for a moment. “I feel the same,” he replied. His eyes lifted, hesitatingly, to meet Sonny’s. In all their guilt, they were still beautiful. 

Sonny had told himself he wouldn’t try anything. He had told himself he would not try to take whatever his feelings were for Port any further. But, of course, leave it to himself to get sick and drunk and stupid and smash open the bottle he had worked so hard to stuff everything inside. “Is it really so impossible for you to see me that way?” he asked, against all better judgement. 

Port’s eyes dimmed a little, brows ever-so-slightly lowering on his forehead. “Still hoping?”

“…I’m drunk.”

“I know.”

“I just… can’t help but wonder what it would be like,” Sonny admitted quietly. 

Port tilted his head almost imperceptibly, face turning a little contemplative. 

Sonny did not want to be subject to whatever was going through his mind. He laid back down, head on the soft pillow. “I’m going to sleep,” he announced, though he did not pull the covers up and did not close his eyes. His lidded gaze ran along the blades of the ceiling fan.

Port was unmoving for some time. Perhaps a few minutes passed where he simply sat there, Sonny sensing his stare.

Then he shifted. The mattress beneath Sonny dipped lower as Port’s weight moved closer to him, two points of depression joining into one. Sonny could feel his own eyes going wide and bewildered as Port’s arm carefully and deliberately swung over him, hand landing by his other side. Sonny glanced to his lean forearm, then up to his face. It hovered above him, expression unreadable. His wavy hair hung down from his forehead and over his ears. 

The last time someone had leered over him like this, he’d been choked to unconsciousness. The memory rose to his mind unbidden and unwelcome, but Port did not seem so sinister. In fact, Sonny had imagined being in this position so many times it was downright surreal. He could not be sure he wasn’t dreaming.

Port’s face dropped lower. Sonny stopped breathing. He blinked at Port’s upturned nose, almost afraid to look him in the eye. He could smell the mint off him, feel his soft breath. Port was so close that Sonny could count each freckle on his cheek, if he wanted. There was the scantest layer of air between their faces, and Sonny would only have to lift a few inches, and then their lips would be touching.

So that’s what he did. Port met him halfway. And then they were kissing. 

...If it could even be called that. It was little more than a chaste, dry press, closed mouth to closed mouth. Port’s eyes were shut. Sonny observed his pale eyelashes, and the slightest twitch in his eyelid, and then Port was pulling away. It had lasted maybe a single second.

Port’s face was still quite close, brow furrowed. They stared at each other for a moment. Sonny felt like a weight was pressing his chest into the bed and at the same time like he might simply float away, or just spin forever and ever the same way he did when he closed his eyes.

It had been too quick. He’d lifted his head on such instinct and suffered such shock that he had not had the chance to savor the moment. He needed to try it again. He gently placed his hands on either side of Port’s head, over his stick-out ears and soft hair, and pulled him back in. 

Sonny tried to really focus on the feeling of Port’s warm mouth against his, focus on the heat radiating off his skin and the sheer sensation of what it was like to have this man leaned over him with his palms pressing into the mattress on either side of him.

It was not as he'd pictured this moment. Despite how many times he had imagined Port like this, and in ways more illicit than this, it suddenly felt too vulgar to try anything more. In all of his prevailing chasteness, and his still unmoving lips, Sonny could not bring himself to try and coax Port's mouth open or let his hands wander anywhere else. Something about it would feel corruptive.

He loosened his grip on Port’s face and gently pushed his head away to signal that he was done. Port straightened his arms so that he was no longer so close to Sonny’s face. Brow still knit, his eyes fluttered open. They were intensely pensive. 

“Did that satisfy you?” Port asked, after a moment. 

“Why did you do that?” Sonny asked. It was a genuine question.

“I wanted to see if…” His eyes slid away as he trailed off, aborting the thought. His head hung lower from his shoulders and he shook it side to side, hair swaying gently. “I don’t know.”

A non-answer. Absurdly, Sonny found himself endeared by such a Port-like response, even as it pained him.

“Did it feel right to you?” Port asked. 

Sonny hesitated, even as he knew his answer immediately. “No.”

“Okay,” Port said, with some sense of finality. "There you have it.” 

He removed himself from Sonny’s space and sat back so that he was no longer on his hands and knees. His expression was difficult to read. Sonny felt bruised.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” Port muttered.

It had been so much more alluring in fantasy, without all these strange strings attached. Sonny wondered if they might be better off if this had never happened at all. It was too fresh to tell. Would it really have rotted within him? Would he have been haunted by the question: What could have been, had I tried? 

“No, it’s okay,” Sonny said, even though he still had not decided if it was the truth or not. “I think it was a good experiment.” Maybe this confirmation of his doubts would allow him to forget about it for good. “So can we move on from this, now? No more hang-ups?”

There was the subtle bob of Port’s head. The noncommittal response was not satisfying to him. “I’m serious,” Sonny said. “I don’t want you to kill yourself feeling guilty about it. And don’t feel guilty about what happened yesterday, either. I want us to go back to how we were. Before…” He swept his hand through the air. At everything. “…all this.” He was pleading.

Port nodded more deeply. “That would be nice.”

Sonny did not like that answer, but he simply lifted his arms to interlace his fingers behind his head and inhaled deeply, filling his chest with air. He pinched his elbows inwards so they covered his ears and acted like blinders, imagining what it would be like to squeeze so hard that his eyeballs popped out of his skull. He exhaled. A sigh. 

He shifted his legs under the blanket and pulled it up to his collarbone. “I’m actually going to go to sleep now,” he said, still spinning. But he knew he would not sleep. He would lie awake and replay the moment over and over again behind his eyelids, even as it sickened him.

"Okay," Port said. "Goodnight."

♤♢♧♡♧♢♤

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Oh. There it was.

Over the course of the night, with the aid of whiskey, Sonny had successfully pushed from his mind what he remembered of that interaction up until just now, and would have been perfectly happy to leave it unaddressed. It took every modicum of his control to prevent his face from morphing in a way that might reveal some particular emotion. The mask didn’t matter, however, because when he opened his eyes Port was still not looking at him.

“I love you,” he said by way of response. It was not what he had intended to come out of his mouth, even if it was the truth.

Port finally shifted, no longer stone, twisting and pushing himself up onto his elbow. Sonny thought his brown eyes were beautiful, even in the dark, in a way that made him want to simultaneously shy away from the eye contact and keep staring into them forever. There was a furrow between Port’s pale brows. “I love you, too,” he said. 

There was no hesitation in his words. For some reason Sonny was surprised by how unflinchingly he said it, even if it wasn’t the first time he’d heard it from him— but never so blatantly, never face-to-face like this. Only ever in the dead of night, Port’s lips pressed to his hair or near his ear, whispered in soft or scary moments. He’d figured Port might find it difficult to say in any other context.

“Okay,” Sonny said.

Port sat up fully and interlaced his fingers in his lap. One of his thumbs brushed over the other, running along the fingernail. Sonny could not see too well from this angle or in the darkness, but he knew from every past sneaking glance at Port’s nimble hands that the nail was warped, like dented sheet metal or the rippling surface of a pond. 

“I’ve been thinking about the files,” Port said.

It took Sonny a moment to realize what he was referring to, with the sudden non-sequitur. Those redacted documents. Port hadn’t seemed very interested at all two days ago. At this point, Sonny was done with them, too. “What about them?”

“I think… I get why you wanna know more about who you are.”

Sonny shook his head minutely, listening to the soft scratching sound of his hair rubbing against the cotton pillowcase. “I don’t care anymore,” Sonny said. “I decided I don’t want to know.”

Port stopped rubbing at his thumbnail. “Really? Why?”

Sonny turned his face away, frustrated. He had not intended to continue thinking about this at all, let alone put it to words for Port’s benefit. Sonny cursed his stupid fucking immune system and his own self and every single circumstance that had led up to this moment. “Yesterday…” he said through his teeth, “…in the bathroom, it brought up some shit I don’t really wanna think about. I don’t wanna look back at all, including anything in those files. I’m done with all of it.” 

When Sonny turned back, Port was looking slightly pained, some discomforted emotion pulling at the corner of his mouth. His eyes were very still, aimed at some spot on the blanket, as he looked for words to say. “Did… did you know who I was?” he asked.

Fucking embarrassing. Sonny pressed his palm to his forehead, fingers in his bangs, and groaned. “Forget it happened.”

“Did you?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know. It’s all fuzzy.” He felt a little fuzzy right now, like he might dissolve into the bedsheets. 

Port rubbed at the back of his neck, over the delicate collar. “Y’know, family… has been on my mind, lately,” he said haltingly. “And I just feel like I should tell you… You’re family to me.” The look he was giving Sonny was something a little wide-eyed, a frightened sort of sincerity.

Sonny didn’t want to look at it. He brought his other hand to his face and pressed both palms to his eyes, scoffing. “Do you always have to talk around things like this?” The pressure had stars exploding behind his eyelids. “Just say what you really wanna say.”

Quiet. Darkness. “Did you mean to, uh, lick me?”

Sonny nearly laughed. Only Port would word it like that. 

It was something he’d wanted to do many times before, in moments tantalizingly close to Port’s bare skin, restrained only by his sense. When he was sick, he’d had none. Right now, Sonny thought he might still have none. And even though he hadn’t really known whose neck he was pressing his tongue to at the time, it did not matter. It was not the real question Port was trying to ask. “Yes,” he said.

Port did not respond to that. Sonny told himself he would simply lay in the silence and force Port to say something if he truly wanted to talk it out. He wondered if Port was mulling over his words right now, eyes still and focused in the way they were whenever he was calculating a response, trying to decide on a way to let him down easy. He could not help but imagine the way Port might be looking at him— as he hid behind his hands in a way that now seemed pathetic rather than resolute— perhaps with pity or apprehension or disgust.

His resolve for silence did not last even a minute. “I’m not your little brother,” Sonny said, even if it sometimes felt that way and he didn’t always hate it. “I feel like you put me in this box. You put me in this box and you refuse to see me any other way. And you think I’m, like, incompetent and… and immature.” The words were spilling out of his mouth.

“I—“ Port sounded weak. “I just don’t know where this is coming from.”

Sonny injected as much incredulity into his voice as he could manage. “You had no idea?”

Port’s voice was suddenly a little bolder, words a little quicker. “I mean, do you really think that would be good for us? Really?” 

Sonny was brave enough to pull his hands away and open his eyes. He set his jaw and fixed Port with a look he hoped came across as angry rather than ashamed, swallowing hard, fearing the bob of his throat was too obvious. Port’s look in return was something akin to wariness, nervous wrinkles under his eyes. “I don’t think you actually want me like that, Sonny.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ. Don’t tell me what I want.”

“I’m all you had, and you’re all I had, for— what— eight months? I’ve been the only person around for you to… to put those feelings on.”

“For god’s sake, stop talking.”

“You’re just starved for—“

“Shut up!”

“—for that sort of stuff. You’re a romantic sort of person…” Port had started to drawl out his words, and his eyes could not stick to a single spot for more than a few seconds, rolling all over the room— landing everywhere except on Sonny. “…and I think you’re misinterpreting your love for me.” 

Sonny could feel the heat rising to his face and sweeping over his entire body like a fiery alcohol flush. He burned. He could imagine too well the thought going through Port’s head: This stupid child doesn’t know what he wants. Sonny remembered they were not alone in the house and had the restraint not to raise his voice. “What the fuck are you talking about?” he hissed.

Port’s eyes steadied, looking down at him, and Sonny realized it was ridiculous to be laying flat on his back having this conversation. He sat up, rising to Port’s level. 

“I’m not trying to put words in your mouth,” Port said, shrinking away. “I just…”

He did not care for whatever stupid explanation Port would try to give. “Why did you even bring this up in the first place?” he asked, throwing his hands up. “What are you getting out of it? Do you get hard to the thought of humiliating me?”

Something cracked in Port’s expression, then. Sonny could not stop himself from continuing.

“You want me to answer your question? No, I don’t think it would be a good thing for us. Which is why I’ve never fucking brought it up before!” His hands balled into fists. “I was sick, man. I wasn’t thinking when I did it. And if you’re really as oblivious as you say you are, you never, ever would’ve known, because I was never going to bring it up.” 

Port just stared at him, mouth shut.

“Are you happy we’re talking about this? Is this making you feel better? Is this conversation productive to you?”

Port’s wide eyes dropped to his lap at the same time his hand rose to his temple. He looked heavy in every limb of his body. “I… thought it would fester,” he said quietly.

“You’re the one who was making it awkward,” Sonny snapped. “You refused to look at me.”

Port’s eyes squeezed shut, pained. The skin of his forehead dimpled as he pressed his fingers there. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, and despite himself Sonny found some of his frustration melting away at the sad sight before him. “I’m sorry,” Port repeated. “I was nervous. And I— I scared you real bad. I really messed up. I’m just… awful,” he finished weakly.

This switch in his demeanor— the evaporation of all that condescending self-superiority— really took the wind out of Sonny's sails. He no longer wanted to shout at him or insult him until he broke and admitted to the ways he was hurting him. “What the hell are you talking about?” Sonny asked.

Port stared blankly into his lap. “I’m a terrible person, Sonny. I just lie to you and upset you.” His words had a flat affect to them, like he was reading from a script. Like it was something he’d gone over in his head so much he had lost all the emotion behind it. “I’m even doing it now. I… I deserve…” he trailed off. 

His admittance of his faults was not at all satisfying, nor did it ring as true as Sonny had expected it to. “Stop,” he said. He felt bad, and at the same time, he was angry at Port for making him feel bad.

“Sometimes I wish we never met, for your sake.” Port’s voice was quiet. “You’d be happier.” 

That sent a stake straight through his heart. “Jesus. Stop it. This is—“ hurting me. No. That was not the right thing to say to him right now. “That’s not true,” he said. “You’re the most important person in the world to me.”

Port was silent for a moment. “I feel the same,” he replied. His eyes lifted, hesitatingly, to meet Sonny’s. In all their guilt, they were still beautiful. 

Sonny had told himself he wouldn’t try anything. He had told himself he would not try to take whatever his feelings were for Port any further. But, of course, leave it to himself to get sick and drunk and stupid and smash open the bottle he had worked so hard to stuff everything inside. “Is it really so impossible for you to see me that way?” he asked, against all better judgement. 

Port’s eyes dimmed a little, brows ever-so-slightly lowering on his forehead. “Still hoping?”

“…I’m drunk.”

“I know.”

“I just… can’t help but wonder what it would be like,” Sonny admitted quietly. 

Port tilted his head almost imperceptibly, face turning a little contemplative. 

Sonny did not want to be subject to whatever was going through his mind. He laid back down, head on the soft pillow. “I’m going to sleep,” he announced, though he did not pull the covers up and did not close his eyes. His lidded gaze ran along the blades of the ceiling fan.

Port was unmoving for some time. Perhaps a few minutes passed where he simply sat there, Sonny sensing his stare.

Then he shifted. The mattress beneath Sonny dipped lower as Port’s weight moved closer to him, two points of depression joining into one. Sonny could feel his own eyes going wide and bewildered as Port’s arm carefully and deliberately swung over him, hand landing by his other side. Sonny glanced to his lean forearm, then up to his face. It hovered above him, expression unreadable. His wavy hair hung down from his forehead and over his ears. 

The last time someone had leered over him like this, he’d been choked to unconsciousness. The memory rose to his mind unbidden and unwelcome, but Port did not seem so sinister. In fact, Sonny had imagined being in this position so many times it was downright surreal. He could not be sure he wasn’t dreaming.

Port’s face dropped lower. Sonny stopped breathing. He blinked at Port’s upturned nose, almost afraid to look him in the eye. He could smell the mint off him, feel his soft breath. Port was so close that Sonny could count each freckle on his cheek, if he wanted. There was the scantest layer of air between their faces, and Sonny would only have to lift a few inches, and then their lips would be touching.

So that’s what he did. Port met him halfway. And then they were kissing. 

...If it could even be called that. It was little more than a chaste, dry press, closed mouth to closed mouth. Port’s eyes were shut. Sonny observed his pale eyelashes, and the slightest twitch in his eyelid, and then Port was pulling away. It had lasted maybe a single second.

Port’s face was still quite close, brow furrowed. They stared at each other for a moment. Sonny felt like a weight was pressing his chest into the bed and at the same time like he might simply float away, or just spin forever and ever the same way he did when he closed his eyes.

It had been too quick. He’d lifted his head on such instinct and suffered such shock that he had not had the chance to savor the moment. He needed to try it again. He gently placed his hands on either side of Port’s head, over his stick-out ears and soft hair, and pulled him back in. 

Sonny tried to really focus on the feeling of Port’s warm mouth against his, focus on the heat radiating off his skin and the sheer sensation of what it was like to have this man leaned over him with his palms pressing into the mattress on either side of him.

It was not as he'd pictured this moment. Despite how many times he had imagined Port like this, and in ways more illicit than this, it suddenly felt too vulgar to try anything more. In all of his prevailing chasteness, and his still unmoving lips, Sonny could not bring himself to try and coax Port's mouth open or let his hands wander anywhere else. Something about it would feel corruptive.

He loosened his grip on Port’s face and gently pushed his head away to signal that he was done. Port straightened his arms so that he was no longer so close to Sonny’s face. Brow still knit, his eyes fluttered open. They were intensely pensive. 

“Did that satisfy you?” Port asked, after a moment. 

“Why did you do that?” Sonny asked. It was a genuine question.

“I wanted to see if…” His eyes slid away as he trailed off, aborting the thought. His head hung lower from his shoulders and he shook it side to side, hair swaying gently. “I don’t know.”

A non-answer. Absurdly, Sonny found himself endeared by such a Port-like response, even as it pained him.

“Did it feel right to you?” Port asked. 

Sonny hesitated, even as he knew his answer immediately. “No.”

“Okay,” Port said, with some sense of finality. "There you have it.” 

He removed himself from Sonny’s space and sat back so that he was no longer on his hands and knees. His expression was difficult to read. Sonny felt bruised.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” Port muttered.

It had been so much more alluring in fantasy, without all these strange strings attached. Sonny wondered if they might be better off if this had never happened at all. It was too fresh to tell. Would it really have rotted within him? Would he have been haunted by the question: What could have been, had I tried? 

“No, it’s okay,” Sonny said, even though he still had not decided if it was the truth or not. “I think it was a good experiment.” Maybe this confirmation of his doubts would allow him to forget about it for good. “So can we move on from this, now? No more hang-ups?”

There was the subtle bob of Port’s head. The noncommittal response was not satisfying to him. “I’m serious,” Sonny said. “I don’t want you to kill yourself feeling guilty about it. And don’t feel guilty about what happened yesterday, either. I want us to go back to how we were. Before…” He swept his hand through the air. At everything. “…all this.” He was pleading.

Port nodded more deeply. “That would be nice.”

Sonny did not like that answer, but he simply lifted his arms to interlace his fingers behind his head and inhaled deeply, filling his chest with air. He pinched his elbows inwards so they covered his ears and acted like blinders, imagining what it would be like to squeeze so hard that his eyeballs popped out of his skull. He exhaled. A sigh. 

He shifted his legs under the blanket and pulled it up to his collarbone. “I’m actually going to go to sleep now,” he said, still spinning. But he knew he would not sleep. He would lie awake and replay the moment over and over again behind his eyelids, even as it sickened him.

"Okay," Port said. "Goodnight."

♤♢♧♡♧♢♤

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Delta slid off the bed, moving to follow. He was uncomfortable with the strange silence, the strange situation, but he was not in any position to disobey a superior. The thought was laughable.

Still, it was unusual? The officer gripped his wrist tightly, dragging him out of the room, all without speaking. Delta bristled. He didn’t know this man at all — and a junior officer rank was nothing to get haughty about.

They were headed to one of the starboard observation ports. It was a large window, giving a nearly panoramic view of the terrain below. The officer pushed Delta in front of it. He kneeled out of pure habit.

“Take out the northmost mountain top. We need an avalanche. Make it look natural,” The officer finally spoke.

Delta turned to stare at him. He obviously couldn’t do it, even if he wanted to. The collar was still on. Neither of his handlers were there to take it off. The officer took his confusion for defiance, drawing his hand back as if to slap him. Delta flinched.

The door slammed open so violently it almost came off the hinges.

“Have you lost your fucking mind?!” Paris yelled. Delta immediately cringed at the tone, but he knew even then that it wasn’t addressed to him.

It was surreal to not be the one on the receiving end of Paris’s violence for a change. Delta scooted back a little to avoid getting caught in the crossfire. The officer had a few inches on Paris, which did not matter much once he’d been slammed into the ground. Delta saw the officer spit blood out, shielding his face, hands raised in surrender. Paris came up gasping for air.

“You’re fired,” He managed, “You’re lucky I don’t fucking kill you. And I’m telling you right now, it’s only because of the paperwork.”

The officer laid motionless, fighting to even remain conscious. 

Paris looked up in time to notice how Delta was staring. The bloodthirsty look had not yet drained from his eyes. Delta felt his stomach drop.

Paris smacked him in the back of the head — not enough to hurt, but enough to stun. The prince yanked him up by the arm and did not let go as they left, as if he didn’t trust him to follow anymore. Delta stumbled, caught off balance. They only just made it out into the hallway before Paris slammed him into the wall.

“Why the fuck were you with him?” The bone of Paris’s forearm presses into his throat, the pressure only somewhat absorbed by the collar.

“I’m sorry, Your Highness.” Delta led with. It was a struggle to keep his tone respectful, to not sound like he was arguing. “He made me.”

Paris pulled away, simultaneously pushing Delta further into the wall. 

“Fuck!” Paris kicked the wall instead of Delta’s shin, showing some measure of restraint. Or maybe he just needed something more solid to bounce off of. It made a sharp, metallic sound. Delta flinched back as Paris rounded on him in disgust.

“Don’t you have any fucking backbone at all?” He hissed. A rhetorical question, apparently. Paris stormed away without waiting for an answer. 

Delta stood aimlessly, alone in the hallway. He rubbed at skin around his collar. It was the only thing that hurt him; he hadn’t gotten beaten like he expected to. But that last remark had stung.

He walked back to his room and made sure to place the chair in front of the door before sitting back on the bed. Did he have a backbone? Obviously not. It had been beaten out of him at every opportunity, for as long as he could remember.

Then Delta did something he did not like to do. He remembered the Institute. So much of it had been pushed beneath the surface. But this time, something came up to the forefront of his memory before he could stop it.

===========

“Hey,” she tugged at his sleeve. Her face was mostly hidden under the strands of green hair. He could still see her smile poking out from beneath.

“Mmh?” Delta replied, barely looking up. He remembered they’d just given him new sleeping pills and his body had yet to adjust. That was why the memory felt so muddy. 

“You’re good with long range, right?” The girl asked. She was a new arrival, barely two months in. She showed enough potential to have landed her there, but she’d never crack the dean’s list. She struggled to manipulate anything that was outside of arm’s length. He followed her gesture out to the podium. The director was setting up there, preparing to give his address. 

“Can you just, like, knock him over?” She asked, pointing specifically to the box the director was to stand on. Delta thought about it. 

“Could, yeah. Won’t,” he responded, putting his head back down. It was almost too much effort to keep himself upright.

“Why not?” She whined, “It’ll be funny.”

“If you do it, it’ll be cute,” Delta shrugged, “If I do it, they’ll shoot me.”

He had already cracked it by then. The supervisors watched all the highest performers like hawks, always on-guard for any sign of defiance. They acted like they’d gotten in over their heads, like they hadn’t expected their stated goal. They had their weapons lined up — a few dozen of them. They weren’t grateful for it. They were scared.

==================

But Delta gave them less trouble than the others. He was younger, but already not half as spirited as his peers. He was calm. He didn’t like pain and he knew how to avoid it here. All you had to do was behave.

They didn’t get it. Delta chewed at the drawstring of his hoodie as he listened to them complain. He’d been at the school long enough that he never heard any new complaints. They always cycled through the same ones depending on the season. It was a bit annoying, honestly. Complaining didn’t change anything. It didn’t get them anywhere. It just worked them up worse than they had been before and got all their handlers in a bad mood. He did not mention this to the other students; it was never well received.

Today it was about the prisoner culling. One of the boys was all in a fit. His father had been falsely accused and sent to jail. He’d gotten his hands on the abolitionist literature. There was no way they could get him to use his powers against any of the inmates they’d brought in to practice against. Their handler had been irate all morning; the outburst did not help.

“It burns,” the boy insisted, “Mine burn. It’s not right. It’s not humane. Fuck this.”

“Language,” the handler warned him, “Who taught you that word?”

“Fuck?” The boy repeated.

“No. Humane. Where’d you learn it?”

Delta rolled his eyes. The handler caught it.

“You have a problem?” Her attention was suddenly turned on him.

“No, ma’am,” Delta straightened out.

“Would you like to go first, then?” She asked. 

It wasn’t an uncommon request for him. Everyone knew he was a total teacher’s pet. He steadied himself, sizing up the targets he’d been assigned. There was a bag tied around their heads and chains restricting their movement. Delta didn’t see what the challenge was supposed to be. He turned them all to dust.

Gasps. He remembered that for some of the students there, this was their first real training session. They got squeamish sometimes. Delta bowed, only a little sarcastically.

“See how easy that was? Your turn, then,___,” The handler had said. The remark had been followed by the boy’s name, or maybe his callsign, but time had completely washed it away.

“No. No, no, no,” The boy insisted.

The handler sighed, “107?”

“NO!” The boy suddenly interjected, startling all of them, “I’ll fucking do it, okay? Don’t sic him on me.” 

He shot Delta a warning look. Delta didn’t react, still fully poised to carry out the order.

The boy turned to the prisoners. Through tears, he muttered out what must have been an apology. The air filled with the scent of charred flesh.

=============

Delta shivered. It’d been ages since he’d thought about that. His memory skipped ahead a few years, all the way to graduation. Almost everyone he’d known at that school had been reassigned or killed or just disappeared. Nearly every student who had originally made dean’s list had been deemed too dangerous to live or had burnt themselves up all on their own. He was the only one who made it — powerful enough to be useful, resilient enough to not burn out, docile enough to be controlled. He was all that the Institute had to justify itself, besides the long, long list of what they now knew didn’t work.

Didn’t he have any backbone? He would never have survived if he did. He wondered, maybe, if that would have been easier.

~~~

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“What are you doing?” His voice was level.

“Cleaning.” Delta stared up at him blankly. Levon took a step forward. 

“You’re…stepping on it…” Delta said, a bit peevishly.

“Forget it. That’s enough,” Levon insisted.

“I can just clean without it being a thing,” Delta protested. There wasn't any great conviction to his words.

Levon extended a hand to him. He huffed, removing the gloves, letting himself be pulled off the floor. He winced as he too now walked over the freshly cleaned tile, but he knew Levon wouldn’t let him finish it. The touch moved from his hand to his shoulder as he guided him out.

“Something set you off?” Levon asked softly. Delta shook his head.

“In a weird mood. 'm sorry.” Delta wiped his palms off on the fabric of his shirt. He was pretty sure some of the chemicals had seeped through. There was a mild sting.

“Can I ask you about that?” Levon glanced back at the kitchen door. “It’s not like you were domestic, right? I don’t understand why that even fell to you. Seems kind of below your pay grade.”

Delta hesitated. He knew how to clean because he had to, because they wanted as little movement in and out of his cell as possible, which precluded any kind of maid staff. But that was different from the kind of manic, perfectionist cleaning that he fell back into.

“It wasn’t my job. It was just something I did as a punishment sometimes. Often. You really have to be on top of that with ships. It was practical.” He shrugged. He’d already complained to Levon how gross the Galatea base got when he let the infantry slack on chores. The kitchen wouldn’t have needed cleaning if he’d just taken Delta’s suggestion in the first place. That wasn’t the part Levon picked up on, though.

“You feel like you need to be punished?” His voice was totally free of judgement or accusation. Delta would’ve heard it if there was any. He knew how sharp the edge in Levon’s voice could become, but he so seldom used it when it came to him.

“Yeah,” Delta admitted. 

Levon tousled his hair gently. Delta closed his eyes. That kind of touch didn’t necessarily take him out of the mood — sometimes it pushed him even further in — but it was sheer bliss nonetheless.

He’d led him back to his room. Levon hung just by the door, his hands returning to their clasped position behind his back.

“You should be careful with your knees, you know. You’re going to have joint problems if you keep doing that.”

Apollo had said the same thing. He hadn’t ever bruised his knees when he was still in Empire; it was like his body had adjusted to the constant kneeling. But whenever he had episodes now, they appeared almost instantaneously. Apollo had said that was probably a good sign, in spite of the jokes he’d gotten about it. At least he learned something in Catholic school. Ha fucking ha.

“I know.” Delta nodded. He was getting better about it. “Thanks for getting me.”

“Just take it easy.” Levon always said that. Delta understood why. He’d work himself into a frenzy if they didn’t keep him from it.

Delta slipped into his room. It was all quiet inside, cool air. He twisted the shower on and let the warm water rush over his hands before anything else. He stripped his clothes off, pausing a moment to take inventory. There were bruises on his knees. Nowhere else. He rubbed at the marks pensively before stepping into the shower.

…………

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By the time Delta’s eyes opened, he was practically burning. He sat up before Apollo could stop him. The air in the room sparked. Apollo felt his hair stand on end.

“Good morning,” Apollo took a little step back. He’d been leaning over Delta’s unconscious body for most of the morning, doing what he could to bring the temperature to a healthy range. 

Delta titled his head to the side. A small stream of blood left the cut on his neck. His eyes were cloudy, but there was an intensity hidden beneath it. His gaze was just a bit to the left of Apollo.

“Derecta fila in ambulationem. Virgines occidere solebant illuc. Sed non notum.” His voice was low and steady. It sounded like it was coming through water.

“Oh, I’m sorry!” Apollo blushed, “I don’t speak Latin.”

Delta collapsed back against the pillow. Apollo got the strangest feeling of vertigo. Little sparks came off of Delta’s hands, singing the blanket.

Apollo moved to the bedside table. He shook the pills out from their container and retrieved the now lukewarm bottle of SP.

“Can you take these, please? It’ll bring the fever down.”

Delta’s eyes didn’t follow his movements. He gave no indication he had even heard.

==========

“Quia primos in lucem in gressus aquai nautae miseris prolem mox escendere profundam sciebant et nigros nova lux sub sole rubebat. Scit rex piscator somnia sua terra et sal. Visiones statim in mentem venit. recordatus est submersi.” Delta had a small smile on his face. Dark strands of his hair kept floating upwards, drifting around his face as if he was submerged in water. His head lolled. The pores around his cheeks pulsed blood straight through the skin. Apollo dabbed it up patiently with a clean towel. Delta flinched away from the touch, but he went straight back to speaking in his hushed, reverent tone as soon as the cloth was removed.

“That’s Emi-Tome 4,12. The apocalypse verses.” Lun hummed quietly. Even quieter, to no one but themself, they added, “He’s misquoting...”

Apollo frowned, examining the blood on the towel. The cloth had become wet and warm. The fever had not gone down any, even after they’d gotten him to take the pills. If anything, his skin burned hotter. He was losing a lot of fluid and not doing anything to get it back. Apollo put the bottle up to his mouth.

“Little sips. Come on. Please.” 

Delta pushed it away. Apollo looked to his brother desperately. 

“Es in dolore?” Lun whispered, “Potestis bibere aliquid?”

One of the lightbulbs in the ceiling fan exploded. 

===========

Kitty wrestled his hands back, prying his fingers away from the wound. Delta let out a soft laugh. Apollo had put the blanket away, turning the fan on full-blast. The fever was out of control. Delta writhed on top of the sheets. His hands keep returning to his throat and his forearms, clawing at the skin, reopening the cuts. Little arcs of lightning shot up along his body. He’d press his fingers to his chest, sending pulses manually. It looked painful. Kitty didn’t have the heart to tie him down. She sat on the bed next to him, pulling his wrists back whenever it seemed like he’d try again. It was a losing battle. 

Rene popped his head in through the door, “He’s burning up my radio. I think the satellite stopped working.”

The whole house had become electric. Everything metal burned. Each doorknob shocked when it was touched. There was a glow in the air. It was almost invisible if you weren’t looking for it — most of their eyes had already accepted it — but Kitty’s sight was sharp. All the color of the room was over-saturated. To her, everything looked like it might fade to white any second.

“I know,” said a stressed out Apollo, “I’m trying to insulate the room. I only have two han-“ 

Some of the books flew off the shelf, toppling loudly to the ground. Apollo’s necklace began to float upwards. He snatched it back down.

“Vermis decem aves in filum cantare. Pythonissam funus scribit ei neniam,” Delta giggled uncontrollably. He entwined Kitty’s fingers in his own.

“Oh, you think that’s funny?” Apollo said. His voice was playful. Delta sat up.

“Ergo dicemus domum?” He said. Apollo knew from his intonation that it was a question, but he didn’t have Lun around to translate. Besides, Lun swore his speech didn’t make any more sense if you understood the language. Apollo pressed the cold compress to Delta’s forehead. He leaned into the touch, letting his eyes close serenely. His smile never left him.

==============

Cass and Willow sat out on the porch. The air out there was nice, especially in comparison to the prickly, burning sensation that was filling up the safehouse. Cass’s metal filling felt achey, as if they had bit down on foil. Iza opened the door, stepping out to join them. Sweat had formed on her brow.

“You two holding up okay?” Iza asked as she leaned her arms on the railing. Willow shook her head no.

“Are you?” Cass asked. When Iza did not answer, they went on, “Can I talk to you real fast?”

Willow and Iza sat down on the step beside them. Cass pulled their keychain from their pocket, fidgeting with it absently as they spoke.

“Did you know that with certain deep sea creatures, the pressure from the water is actually something they need to keep their body together? If they move into an environment with low pressure, their body starts to lose its integrity and fall apart.” Cass’s hand moved to their own neck without meaning to. They could practically feel the chafe, “I think he might have needed that collar.”

==============

“Well, obviously, I don’t love the idea,” Apollo glanced rapidly between Delta and the open door. Iza hung casually just outside the room, avoiding the worst of the static shock that way. 

Apollo was having more luck getting Delta to drink, but not as much luck keeping it down. His own movements were a little more frenzied. 

“Nothing else you’re doing is working,” Iza said, “We need to get him back to base. He can’t go if he’s like this.”

“We don’t know what the cause is. I’ve never seen anything like this before.” Apollo placed the back of his hand to Delta’s forehead, then immediately yanked it back. It hurt to touch.

“Then if it doesn’t work, we can rule out the possibility. I can send Willow to the milsurp store. We’ll take it off if you really don’t like it,” Iza added the last line as an afterthought. It wasn’t clear if it was addressed to Apollo or to Delta. 

“It just seems mean,” Apollo sighed. Delta made a small, choked noise. With a trained anticipation, Apollo pulled the waste bucket up off the floor and placed it in front of him. Delta retched.

“Oh, that’s just blood,” Apollo said with muted horror, “Ok. Go. Go.”

=============

Willow jogged back into the safehouse, carrying the bag around her shoulders. They’d sent her because she looked the most normal; her purchase was the least likely to rouse suspicion.

“You can see the house glowing from outside,” she told them all out of breath.

Iza popped the collar out from its clamshell packaging. It was the highest caliber they offered for consumer purchase. She suspected it still wouldn’t cut him down by much. Delta looked on obliviously, not seeming to see much of anything. 

“Sorry, babe,” Iza gathered his long black hair out of the way. It had been trapping the heat against his neck. He didn’t resist much. With a little click, the collar snapped into place.

Delta passed out immediately. Iza caught him and laid him gently back on his side. The room already felt cooler.

============

(Masterlist)

It wasn’t immediately clear what had trapped them in. At first it seemed like a normal rock mound that blocked off their exit. No big deal. They had demolitions for a reason.

Then the rocks began to swivel upwards, revealing the steel rods that connected them, the barely-humanoid shape. Golem.

Paris called it in on the radio; even then, he knew it was too late. The early stone demos had already burned their names in the imperial history — the Bane of St.James, Western Scourge, Titania. This one was a new model, one they’d been given time to perfect. This battle was going to be the sea change. Paris resisted the urge to close his eyes as the giant’s mace emerged out of the earth. It was the coward’s way out. He resolved to watch the violence unfold, to see the whole planetary operation blow up in his face. It wouldn’t be the first time. 

The golem assembled entirely. Its feet were still planted in the pit of the valley, but its head stretched up to where Paris is perched on the ridge. For just a second, it turned its empty sockets to look at him. His heart beat out of his chest.

And just like that, it was gone. The air filled with dust and electricity, then just dust.

“Target eliminated,” Dr.Martino’s voice rang over the radio. He sounded smug. For good reason, maybe. There were less than thirty seconds in between Paris making the warning call and the total obliteration of the threat. He felt dizzy. The particle debris clouded his visor.

Paris rounded back to the mountain base. It was only a fifteen minute climb. The war room was stashed safely within the stone enclave; it was reserved for only the highest ranking officials. It was also where they’d stashed Delta. Paris honest-to-god had not planned on using him for this mission; he’d just needed the insurance. His dizziness was not going away. He punched the code into the padlock, forcing himself to stabilize before he could enter.

The mood there was celebratory, obviously. Pinching a golem was a feat they make badges for. His ears perked up at the mention of champagne, but something else had caught his eye first.

Delta was totally collapsed by the viewport. There was small puddle of blood by his head. This was…not an uncommon sight. Delta’s powers took a lot out of him. It manifested as bleeding from the nose and mouth more than anything else — sometimes the eyes, if it was really bad. But he wasn’t supposed to be alone during it. It was dangerous. Paris knelt down beside him, feeling for a pulse. Not only was he alive, he was conscious. Paris felt him flinch away from the touch, taking ragged, shallow breaths.

The doctor — the one Paris paid to look after him — was engrossed in a story with the general. He gesticulated wildly, spilling some of his drink over onto the floor. They were all the way across the room. Paris had to shout to get their attention.

“Hello, you? What the fuck?” Paris called out, gesturing to the crumpled form of the psychic. 

Dr.Martino turned away from his conversation. There was a twinge of annoyance written into his features. 

“What? He overexerted himself. Leave him alone.” He said it like it was the most casual thing in the world. Paris hesitated, because it might have been. He’s seen Delta out like this before. He was usually fine after a couple hours. Besides, it didn’t seem like he was even able to be moved right then. Reluctantly, Paris stepped away.

The call for ceasefire came in a few minutes later. It got a big laugh out of everyone. Paris was relieved. It meant he’d get to go home for a few days, at the minimum. He didn’t like this planet. On a personal level, he didn’t care if it was left to the vultures. Of course, official policy was a different story.

“We’re leaving,” Paris crossed the room to Martino. It wasn’t a request. The doctor sighed, putting the cup down. He looked back to the general in mock apology, so sorry to be pulled away from the riveting conversation.

Delta still hadn’t moved. He didn’t stir until Martino approached. The doctor snapped his fingers.

“Get up.”

Incredibly, Delta sat up. He wiped the blood off his face with the sleeve of his shirt. Not all of it, but enough that it wasn’t actively spilling on him whenever he moved. He started to stand, but didn’t quite make it upright. He landed on his hands and knees, just catching his head from hitting the ground.

“Delta.” There was a warning edge in the doctor’s voice. Delta stood up, stumbled a few steps, and immediately collapsed again. 

Dr.Martino began to move towards him.

“Oh, I don’t fucking have time for this,” Paris snapped. It was the tone he took that made people start listening. He had a gift for that. The room around him quieted. Martino stopped.

Paris scooped Delta up from the floor. It wasn’t hard. The boy was short in comparison and he weighed less than Paris’s own rucksack. Delta was too out of it to have any real reaction to the sudden movement, just a small wince. His head lolled weakly against Paris’s shoulder.

His voice trailed off into the jungle. It was all oceanic heat, the mist rising up off the verdure. Dew formed along Delta’s skin in glistening droplets. Like vapor. Like steam.

In frantic arcs, one league above them, the steel bird flew.

When it crashed, it wasn’t close. The smoke trail cascaded down and disappeared within the tree canopy. He thought he could measure its trajectory with his eyes alone. He had practice with this. He knew where it might be. But the sensors picked it up without him ever needing to.

The vanguard went to recover it. Levon insisted on seeing it himself, his own curiosity overriding any sense of caution. Delta sat in the backseat of the off-roader. The tablet in his lap sparked and glowed as all the channels buzzed in their typical traffic. He’d turned the volume of the earpiece down, letting all the chatter fade into background noise.

Tell you when I know, he promised. Tell you when I can.

The craft had left a crater carved into the earth. The smoke still drifted off it in thick clouds, choking light. Dead on arrival? Surrounded on all sides.

It wasn’t an imperial model. Delta recognized this immediately. He had too good a sense for their aesthetics. This was not one of them. 

When the pilot climbed out from the wreckage, all guns were trained on her anyway. Levon still had her in the crosshairs of the harpoon, the gun meant to pierce straight through metal hulls.

“Easy,” Levon urged, voice low and careful and wild. “State your business.”

“In peace!” She pleaded, smiling with her teeth. “In peace, we come in peace!”

Both hands raised up to the sky — then down again, back into the craft. For some reason, nobody shot her.

“Aaaah!” She cheered as she raised them up again.

This time, she held up a crystal the same size as her head. She looked up at it in sheer adoration. She was holding it up for them to see.

~

Kali.

Delta entered her name into the tablet the second it was out of her mouth, but what it returned was diminished and disappointing. This was the advantage of the nondescript mononym. Delta understood. He’d used the same tactics to preserve his own anonymity, to let himself remain faceless. He had averted all requests for a surname so far. He’d been offered a few and had refused them every time.

“Kali,” she stated again, clearer, still grinning. Her eyes flickered over to Delta, like she wanted to be sure he’d actually got it.

“Levon,” the captain introduced himself in turn. 

“I know who you are.” 

Her eyes were practically sparkling now. Starstruck? He’d seen it happen a few times. That or picturing the kill. Delta only thought in absolutes when the tensions were high. He never fully calmed.

“Who’s this?” Kali asked. Her eyes were fully trained on Delta now. The shift in focus caused him to startle, though he knew it would not show on his expression. He looked back at her with a perfect neutrality, one that did not convey just how quickly his heart rate had picked up.

“This is Delta. He’s taking notes. Say hi, Delta.”

Delta raised two fingers off from the tablet in a weak salute, a kind of bare bones acknowledgment. 

She was glowing, though. Her black hair tumbled down her back, coming up in geometric spirals at its ends. There were strands of gold and glitter mixed up between the locks. Glitter, too, on the side of her face and on the tips of her fingers. Sharp canines. She hadn’t stopped smiling since she’d stepped out of the craft. But when her eyes were on him, the grin seemed to grow a little wider.

~

“She’s doing alchemy,” Levon would say to him later. “Nice girl. I think she’s building a bomb.”

“It’s just science,” Delta answered, a little unenthusiastically. But he hadn’t been able to pry his eyes from the gemstone, either.

There was also the issue of the angel. From across several fires, on the edge of the camp, both Kali and the angel that followed her were visible beneath the night sky. 

Kali was a pure silhouette, all her color seeming to fade into shadow as she danced. The angel melted just the same. Its form disappeared against the night sky, because its skin itself held the same pattern of deep blue, all dotted with stars. It dripped like liquid, unlike her. It had spilled some of the cosmos onto the sleeve of Delta’s shirt.

“Is it…her?” Delta asked, as in Is it her? Is it part of her or is it just a companion? He’d never seen anything else like it in his life.

Levon returned a half-drunken smile. He leaned in closer to his ear, issuing the warning with a hushed but eager giddiness. 

“Avert thy mortal eyes.”

~

It was her that found him in daylight, though.

Delta had been digging furrows into the dirt, trying to better ground the antenna they were using to transmit. It needed to reach deeper into the earth, to stop overturning within the soft soil.

When she stood over him, she cast a shadow that blocked out the whole of the sun. All that was left of it was a halo about her dark head.

“What’s a nice boy like you doing on this side of the revolution?”

A glint of white teeth within the darkness. For a second, she was monstrous.

“…Trying to get reception,” he explained.

“Can I help?” she asked.

Without waiting for an answer, she knelt down in the dirt, letting the light wash over the both of them again. She took careful hold of his hands before the moved to coil the wires around them. She held them still, the electricity pulsing beneath them, creating a fire hazard. He sparked. He couldn’t help it.

The signal had been unbearably strong for a second.

~

DELTA: hes not in right now

KALI: actually, i called to talk to you!

DELTA: oh

DELTA: why

KALI: you were cute! i’m going to be back in town this week, i was hoping we could go out on a date.

DELTA: ….

DELTA: this is a monitored line

KALI: so?

DELTA: so this isnt really its function

DELTA: and thats not something im supposed to be discussing over it

KALI: you see my number, right?

DELTA: i do

KALI: you have your own phone?

DELTA: yes i would hope

KALI: well, you know where to find me 

~

“She asked me out,” Delta said, sliding his fingers back along the track to reverse the series. He went to work solving it again. He focused on the work, because to focus on the words seemed impossible.

He’d expected derision. He’d expected Levon to laugh it off, tell him it was a bad idea, so that Delta might be relieved of the responsibility of choice. This was frequently the only reason Delta volunteered personal information.

“I think you should go,” Levon said.

Delta looked up. Deep blue eyes, perpetually blank when he wanted them to be. He blinked, amazed the silence drew on without contradiction.

“I can’t take off work,” he stated plainly.

“Nobody’s forcing you to keep the hours that you do. The place won’t fall apart if you’re gone for a day.”

Delta doubted it.

“I think it’d be good for you,” Levon said, more cautiously, like he knew he was overstepping. “You liked her, didn’t you?”

“You told me to avert my mortal eyes.”

“Did I?” He winked. “That doesn’t sound like something I would do.”

~

“What do girls like?” he asked Kitty. 

Both of them laid flat on the floor of his room. She was still playing at her handheld, but Delta simply stared up into the abyss of the ceiling.

“Ummmm,” Kitty seemed to struggle with this. “Screens. Iced coffee. Small animals.”

He nodded in agreement, though he found this answer wanting.

“What do you think she would like?” Kitty asked instead.

Delta took a while to think about it. He said:

“Dead things. Something from the earth. Crystals. Bones.”

“Hot?” Kitty said.

“Do girls still like flowers?” he asked.

“I still like flowers. That’s a classic, you can’t go wrong.”

She helped him to pick them out, though it seemed like neither of them had any real leg up on the other. Delta tactfully avoided the inclusion of roses.

~

He’d been standing out on the pier in the late afternoon. The sky was still bright then, even as it was overcast and chilly, like it might rain at any second. He was early, his own fault, and he spent the time watching the ships draw in and out of the harbor. These ones were centuries old, or built in the image of the vessels that had been. Anachronistic in a way he drew too much comfort from. If he’d have just been born a few centuries earlier — maybe even just a few years — the future might have missed him entirely. He could’ve built boats. He could’ve been luring sailors to their deaths, maybe. But the life would have been his own. That was the important part.

Kali appeared, eager and mortal, several yards down the stretch. She waved happily. When she got closer, he could tell she’d turned the magic off. She got to be a person today, not the witch, not the shadow crossing over history. She was just a girl. She hugged him, which he hadn’t expected. He didn’t know her that well, after all. 

“For you,” he said as he held the flowers out, not caring about the blush that rose over his face. He’d meant for it to be anachronistic, some facsimile of romance. He worried now that she would not understand the irony of the gesture, and was now self-conscious about the fact he’d thought to do it ironically at all. He was an asshole. Why had he done that?

“Oh, they’re gorgeous! Thank you so much!” she said. It was unclear whether she picked up on the joke of them, but she did pick out a violet anemone from the bunch and placed it behind her ear. He held his wrist still, and she plucked one for him too, pinning it up into his hair. If it’d been a joke before, it wasn’t now. There was no getting out of this.

They walked the length of the water. He was scared of her, he realized pretty quickly. This was an odd sensation. It was not the kind of fear he was used to, not bone deep, chilling, dire. Something lighter. Something that danced its way out of the dark. 

”Where are you from?” he asked quietly. He expected something stupid. From space. From a black hole. 

He hadn’t expected her to flash her teeth again, to answer: “My family’s from Earth. I’m human.”

And he’d have almost believed her, if not for how sharp her canines were, if not for the way her tongue was forked. If not for the fact that all humans had died a long time ago.

“What about you?” she asked.

She was lying, and he couldn’t have told her the truth if he wanted to.

“Human, also,” he answered through rows of shark teeth.

“Really? That’s so funny, I am too.” 

~

The fish’s head was still attached when it was served. It was amongst the collection of battered tentacles and prawns, of shellfish swimming in sauce, amidst the sea of red wine. It was by the water. Though Kali had chosen it, it really couldn’t have been more to his taste if he tried. She seemed happy enough with it, too. Lightly drunk, jeweled earrings clinking pleasantly when she tilted her head. Short nails. Her laugh was nice, and with such a refreshing lack of self-consciousness.

“We almost shot your ship down,” he admitted. “I guess we didn’t need to. I guess you didn’t even like it that much, clearly.”

To the best of his knowledge, it still laid in smolders on the forest floor to this day.

“That one wasn’t mine,” she clarified. “It wasn’t the…how would you put it? The mothership. You should see the mothership. You should.”

She pointed up. It must have been in the planetary orbit right now, just too high to see. He had to wonder who was tending to it, if she was all the way down here.

“Do you like your job?” she asked him.

I owe Galatea everything and I would die for it a million times over.

He wasn’t typically fanatical. Really, he wasn’t. But to hear her speak in terms like that, as if it was something for him to enjoy, as if it was even a choice for him…that wasn’t it at all. It was more than that. It was more the process of paying off a life debt.

“I do,” he admitted anyway, without lying. Because he did enjoy it. It was the only thing that kept him sane most of the time, the only place he’d felt anything close to happiness. It brought him satisfaction in a way nothing else ever had. 

“…I think it’s the only thing I’d be happy doing. It’s the only thing I can find important, considering.” He gestured around, to the everything.

Kali rested her elbows on the table, nodding in understanding.

“What do you do, exactly?” he asked.

“What you do, but different,” she answered. “I destroy things. I wreak havoc on the system, so that flowers can grow in the wreckage.”

His turn to nod. He liked the sound of it.

“I believe in you,” he admitted. He hadn’t realized he was drunk before that moment. A warm blush had spread over his face again. “I bet you’ll win, too.”

He so rarely met people who could win.

~

“They must trust you a lot,” Kali said on the walk back.

Delta felt his heart sink like an anchor, the a cool dread rushing over him. The sting of humiliation was the only thing that gave his body heat now, and even that was a paralyzing kind, penetrating from the surface without substance. His eye twitched.

“Oh.”

She knew, then. She must have. Because she reached for his arm and he yanked it away. The blush had spread now. He felt petulant, but in truth all he wanted was to storm off. She’d had him. She’d totally fucking had him.

“Come on,” she said. She knew.

“I know what you’re doing,” he said, as if he hadn’t just found out.

“Oh, come on,” she begged. She did cling to him now. “Don’t be upset, okay? It’s not like that.” 

“I can’t give you anything even if I wanted to,” he said in his own defense, as if denying her what she was after might make up for just how thoroughly he’d been betrayed.

“Please don’t be upset. You’re making me feel bad, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I wasn’t playing around with them. I do like you. I do.”

He was hurt. It was hard for him to even place that ache sometimes, but he could feel it now. He’d just gone still while she buzzed around him, trying to get back to how things had been only minutes ago.

“Are you actually a honeypot?” He had to repeat it back, because he couldn’t quite believe it. “I didn’t even know they still made those.”

“I’m not. I’m not a spy. I’m an opportunist, yes, and I’d use you to get closer to what I want. I’d be the first to admit that. But I do like you. I think you’re cute. Maybe you’re what I want, and I want to be close to you.”

Her accent trailed and clipped as she cupped his face between her hands.

“Please don’t be upset.”

Delta sighed, gently sliding himself free of her.

~

He found himself in her company again nearly a month later. All the sting had been sapped away already. He found there was a sense of relief to have known her motives from the beginning. It was a relief to not be in a constant state of suspense, always waiting for the knife to fall. As shrouded as Kali was in passing, he thought it was a privilege to know this about her. She picked up right where they left off.

“Where are you from, really?” she asked him quietly, with a gentleness he didn’t think she could muster. 

They were by the water again. The sun had nearly set — a different sun on a different ocean. Which were his own? 

There was this black hole at the center of everything. He thought one day it might swallow him whole, all his memories, all the pain and guilt and toil. Or maybe it had already. Just as soon as he was born. Maybe the whirlpool was always meant for him.

“No one knows where I’m from.” He shrugged. He realized, belatedly, he’d given the same nonsense answer he’d once expected from her. It made him feel bad, like he’d cheated her.

“I’m from here, now,” was still all he could manage.

Kali smiled a little bitterly, but he sensed it was for his own sake. 

“Wishwanderer?” she teased. “Me too, I suppose. I’m from nowhere. I come and go. Do you know where I’ve been since I saw you last?”

The question was a formality. She slotted into him, leaning her body back against his own. Her skull bumped his nose for a second before her head settled down closer to his shoulder. Jasmine. She was closer now, without warning. Some vestigial instinct lended itself as he moved to almost steady her within the grasp. He’d been on dates and he’d been in emergencies, and all it felt like with her was the latter, all the time. Still, he found himself pressing his own lips by the crown of her head. Not a kiss, exactly. There wasn’t any delicacy to it. It was nuzzling. Contact for contact’s sake.

The camera she had was a relic. He doubted it even belonged to this century. But she wielded it carefully, and the display worked just the same as any other. The film grain prickled lightly as the surface of the hazy photographs. The colors were all soft, like the light looked when he was falling asleep. Landscapes, mostly. The rough metal of industry shining alone within Eden.

“Anatola. Yves. El-ayah. Halley.”

The angel was visible in no small number of them. Was he meant to pretend he could not see it? Delta pressed closer to her, tightening his grip around her ribs. Kali turned her head. One of her hands freed itself to grasp at his jaw. She kissed him.

~

Delta did end up on her ship, when the night was late enough, when he had nowhere better to be. The earpiece was discarded on the floor, buzzing softly with no one there to hear it. The course had been set back to the place he called home, but the ship took its time. It was like she’d programmed it to go just as slow as possible.

It was mostly windows, which he liked. The interior was blue, fake plastic stars against the metal, dwarfed by the real expanse of space outside. The ship acted like it didn’t even want you to know it was there. If he zoned out, he could imagine the two of them in space alone, no glass or steel to shield them. 

She was all tangled up in the sheets. He let himself be. When the fabric wrapped around his wrists, ensnared his waist and ankles, he felt the panic so remotely. It was as if his nervous system was on a different planet than the rest of him. In that way, it was easy to dismiss. 

He was underneath her. He didn’t think they’d lost any point of contact the entire time they’d been aboard. Kali still kissed hungrily. Like she knew what she was doing, she moved to pin one of his wrists down into the mattress. 

He could kill her. If he wanted to, he could carve a hole straight through the hull within milliseconds, and kill the both of them. No one could trap him anymore. It was all just play.

Kali’s hand ran back through his hair, gently, without tugging.

“You can hurt me,” he said. Not shyly. Without any self-consciousness. More like a fact than a request.

You can cut me open and I won’t even fight. 

You could tear me apart and I’d let you.

Kali’s spine seemed to straighten, refreshing its arch when she rose. Her hand was in his hair, still. The other traced down by his neck, light against the collar.

“Do you want me to?” 

The night cascaded through her dark hair when she tilted her head. Her grip tightened. Not enough to be painful, yet.

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

There was no true silence to pulse. There remained the ambiance of machinery, the endless song of space, both humming listless in the background. Both of them were breathing a bit too heavily. She smiled. The sweetness of it took him aback. He hadn’t thought she was capable of it.

“Maybe next time, Delta.”

The relief washed over him in waves.

~

Hours later, with both of them on the floor, he moved his claws against the violet veins of her wrist. As if by finding the pattern there, he might find the pattern to everything. She was less complicated than she pretended to be. 

The ship could hold several people and it did. He found the angel up at midnight. The other girl, the automaton, looked him up and down with a scientific interest before vanishing back to her room. He would come to know them more in time, but that night all he was was Kali’s new fascination. He did not mind this. He was used to that look.

They sat up shameless in the ship’s lounge, the blankets dragged along to keep the chill out. The ship’s monitor played films from a decade ago, audio softly filling the room as neither of them paid it any mind.

“Was I your first time?” she asked.

He shook his head for No. Not even close.

“You’ve done it before?” She blinked. “...With girls?”

“Mostly girls,” he answered, but didn’t bristle. For whatever reason, he got that a lot.

He’d tried everyone. There’d been times when he was half-crazed, descending, starved. He’d liked it. The whole time he had liked it, and had sat with the quiet amazement and joy that anyone could touch him without wanting to hurt him. That they could be nice.

It wasn’t that he didn’t like boys. He had. He did. But the sensation of them holding him down got to be too much at times. He was stronger than they were now, but it didn’t feel like it at the time. Girls were just easier. There were less memories to push through.

“Are you disappointed?” he asked. “Did you want me to be chaste, so that your swashbuckling ways might corrupt me?”

She cocked her head again, with that same sweet smile.

“Is that how you see me?” she half-laughed.

The blush came over him in full this time. He’d said too much. He was glowing within the darkened room.

“I really like you,” he confessed.

Kali grinned wider, cooing a little, like this was the cutest thing she’d ever heard.

~

Back at Galatea — the base known as Galatea — one of them — Delta bred reptiles and harvested venom from their myriad fangs. He tended to the bio-pool and to the wet lab. Substrate changes. He measured the growth of the marine plants and the weight of the octopus. Hauling the gallons up by hand, though it was painful, because he wasn’t supposed to rely so much on his powers. Some of this was of scientific value, though nobody knew how much yet. Some of it seemed to just be for fucking around. He liked the lab. It was good for him to take care of something.

In his own room, the marimo balls rested gently in a tank on his desk. The pearlescent beta fish — Lazarus — hung by the surface of it, swimming in lazy circles. Delta curled up on the desk chair just to watch him. Kitty had taken his spot on the bed. Wearing his hoodie, too, which he guessed he owed her after all this time.

“Do you ever think about the future?” he murmured. It was enough to make her perk up though, and the concern made his heart hurt. She was still so nice to him, even when he didn’t think he needed it anymore. 

“We’re in the future,” she said. Duh. “That’s why there are spaceships.”

“I mean, do you think about yours?” he clarified, sensing he’d been misunderstood. He struggled to pin down exactly what he meant to ask.

“Do you think about what comes after this?” he tried instead. He knew Kitty’s backstory well enough. Kicked out, year long nervous breakdown, no friends, no job. Scooped up out of the gutter. She hadn’t had anywhere else to go. And where would she go when it was over?

Something like doubt flickered behind her eyes. Maybe he imagined it. Maybe he was just hoping for it.

“Everyone I love is here,” she answered. “This is what I like doing.”

“But if you could go anywhere else?”

“…I could go anywhere else. Now. But I don’t. Why, what are you thinking?”

It made him self conscious. He couldn’t look at her eyes for long after that.

“I just want to go home sometimes,” he confessed.

“Delta…” The name was a low rumble of sympathy, the unhappy beginnings of a purr. The way she had said it was enough. There was nothing she could have done to keep him from crying then. He felt like all the air had been ripped out of him, all the blood drained from his body. Death by space. All was void.

Kitty climbed off of the bed, padding over to where he’d become incorrigible. She cradled his head into her chest. His thoughts were just as jumbled as his words; he couldn’t say anything at all. It was a whole half hour before he could even get close again; once he could, he didn’t want to.

What are you going to do when this is over?

What will I do once I can’t do this?

Will we still be friends?

“I love you,” he said unsteadily, voice slightly croaked from crying so long. He felt like he’d been crying his whole life. He couldn’t believe he’d held it back all those years.

“I love you too!” she said. He could still hear the <3 in her voice when she spoke sometimes. “You’re gonna be fine. We never lose. It’s impossible.”

A dead lie, but one he liked to hear from her.

~

His eyes burned from the effort. When he closed them, he could still see the after-image of the monitor. For hours on end he’d been working at it.

What if winning a war was just a matter of getting all the signals straight? What if he had arranged everything into the perfect order and found that was what was needed all along, that everything would be okay now? Nobody ever had to die again.

There was some sequence of events that existed that would make everything right again. If he did it right, if he thought long and hard about it, it would come to him like an apocalypse. 

If he did it all right, maybe he could go back. The numbers would tick down, down, back to before he was keeping track, back to the first live target they’d ever set him on. Nobody had to die. And even further back, before he’d even been-

The fantasy grew too painful. He buried his forehead into his knees, curling up on the chair again.

“Delta?” Levon called from the other room. “Go to bed.”

He was always right about these things. 

~

“Where do you go when you’re not here?” Delta asked. “It’s like I never even hear from you outside of this.”

Delta sounded slighted for a second, like he meant to pick a fight, which he hadn’t. Any pitch to his voice just came from the shock of the bite. Lun didn’t answer either way. Good. He really hadn’t wanted them to.

They were on top too. The collar bothered them, he knew that much. He could still be choked around it, could still be bitten, but the silver meant they had to be careful. It was too funny.

“What are you going to do when all of this is over?” Delta asked.

Again, they couldn’t answer, not while their mouth was full. His blue blood spilled wildly over the both of them — Lun was taking more than usual, like they’d spent the time in-between starved. They might’ve. Or maybe they’d just been saving it.

“You live longer than the rest of us, right?” he asked. “More time to think about it. If the war ends, what-“

Lun covered his mouth with their hand to shut him up. He bit down on it hard, drawing a pained squeak from them. Their fangs withdrew from his neck.

“You can dish it out, but you can’t take it,” he challenged. Delta was still bleeding like crazy; he sat up in spite of how dizzy it made him. He pushed them down into the mattress by the shoulders. When he kissed them, he bit again. A shade of pink clouded their otherwise pale and pristine visage. Strawberry moon, he thought to himself, right as the need turned painful.

~

Sleepwalking. In his dreams, he was on the beach. There was no light but for the pale moon, just barely reflected on the water. No sound but for the cascading waves hitting the soft sand. He had a dream he was sleepwalking — unaware in either world. Blindfolded, ignorant, and morally incompetent. He’d been sleepwalking straight into his own damnation.

His desires were all so infantile. I want to be safe. I want to be free. I want to go home. They had made him into something so wretched, something just barely learning to walk.

The wind carried the scent of jasmine through the palm fronds; they rustled like ghosts against the land. There was a vision of fire, of dancing. Peacock feathers discarded on the sand. What was he ever meant to do with that? The beach was empty when he looked up again.

In the dream, the tiger lowered itself into a crouch. It took on its many colors, stripes formed out of stars and contours, the invisible division of space. Made up of myriad parts, a soldier's uniform, the dying gleam of a crown. Looking at it made him feel as though he was seeing the absolute tatters of reality. It was smiling at him.

“You weren’t worth it,” he prayed to the thing that had never once cared for his opinion of it. More petulantly, he added, “You never even said thank you.”

But that too turned to sea foam. When the dream was over, where would they be?

He woke up cold.

~

nodiving: hi

nodiving: i got clearance to send this so dont go around telling people im doing espionage or whatever this is all above board

nodiving: bionics.zip

candlenights: =)

nodiving: dont look at me like that

candlenights: thank you !

candlenights: will you tell levon i said thank you too

candlenights: why doesnt he want to talk to me

nodiving: its not you hes just busy

candlenights: is he running all his comms through you ?

nodiving: basically 

candlenights: why ?

nodiving: i dont know. i guess i wanted to be useful to him. this is something im good at.

candlenights: odd choice 

nodiving: why

candlenights: it feels like a waste of your abilities

nodiving: …what do you mean by that

candlenights: ah !

nodiving: what

candlenights: was i not supposed to know ?

nodiving: what

nodiving: wait

nodiving: dont say anything over the line okay please

candlenights: ok ! im sorry !

nodiving: no its okay 

nodiving: look

nodiving: can i see you again

candlenights: yes ? im in tallahassee right now do you think you can come close

nodiving: yes sure ill be there

nodiving: send coords

candlenights: rn ?

candlenights: ◼️◼️◼️◼️◼️ 

candlenights: hey are we okay ?

nodiving: we are perfect

nodiving: i just need to talk to you in person right now

nodiving left the chat!

nodiving joined the chat!

nodiving: i wanted to see you again anyway

nodiving left the chat!

~

“Did you know from the start?” 

They were both sitting out in the grass. It was twilight now, the world cast in soft purple light. Little fireflies buzzed through the aura.

Delta rested his arms on his knees, staring down at the insects that crawled in the ground. He couldn’t look at her.

“I don’t know,” Kali said. “I knew I felt something, I just didn’t know what.”

“Is that why?”

“How do you think it feels for me, when you paint me so cruel?” She was lying on her stomach, idly shredding the grass between her fingers.

“I have been used my entire life and I don’t expect that to ever change.”

“…Where are you from, really?”

“Empire,” he answered. He guessed he always knew. 

Kali didn’t look surprised. She just nodded.

“Your accent,” she said softly. “I thought I could hear it in you. And there was something else. Something in your eyes, I guess.”

It was in his blood. He ran his hands back through his hair, because something within him needed soothing.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I really am.”

“What do I care?” Her voice dripped.

He took a deep breath, wishing now that he was underwater.

“…What about you?” he asked. “What are you?”

“I’m human. Like I said.” A flash of fangs again. “On my father’s side.”

~

She showed him. Laid up against him again, with that same rusted camera, she showed him the images of her father. Dark skin. Her smile, but with blunter teeth. A black dazzled suit. Inside of the big top.

Delta looked on incredulously. 

“Traveling circus,” Kali said. “Haven’t you heard of us?”

Older pictures. Herself at thirteen, in a sparkling red dress. Nine years old with a magic wand. Trapeze. A light show. Eighteen years old, dressed in a suit with the angel beside her. 

A whole life, and he hardly knew her. She was right against him, leaning over sometimes to kiss him, and he felt such a gulf between her and himself. Not just the two of them. Between anybody and anyone. Some irreconcilability. A difference that could not be resolved.

The universe is mostly empty space. Electrons repel each other. Even when you think you’re touching, you’re really not. In fact, you can’t, he didn’t say.

“What about your mother?” Delta asked carefully. 

Kali scoffed. She leaned further back, pushing her with him so that they were both lying flat in the grass. On the horizon, the moon was starting to rise into the orchid colored sky.

“My mother doesn’t like me much,” she said. The one who’d given her the fangs, the one who’d given her the-?

She extended one hand up to the sky. Carefully, she positioned her fingers at the edges of the moon, appearing to him as though she was holding it. 

She moved her hand further up and the moon went with it. 

The faint stars that had been peeking through the firmament now burst with fresh light. Delta thought he had been blinded, that there was something dreadful, even primordial about the darkness that now swallowed him on all sides. His sight failed when the world plunged into night. The vision lasted for onto a few moments. When she twisted her wrist again, and the sky turned blue and without any sunlight. There was a shadow where it should have been. Eclipse. The sun’s corona radiated around the dark hole in space. 

“…That’s not real,” Delta said faintly. She twisted her wrist back, releasing her hold for real this time. The moon slid back into place and the twilight resumed. A shrug. Her hand fell onto his chest instead.

“It is and it isn’t,” she half-agreed. 

“You’re a magician,” he insisted. “You just do tricks. There’s nothing real about you.”

“That’s…fucking rude.“ She opened her eyes all the way. 

“What was it?”

Another shrug. For a split second, her eyes were violet.

“My mother’s side,” she muttered.

Delta processed this. His hand moved to rest on top of her own, feeling the warmth there. She was nice to have close. He hadn’t been that nice to her. They hadn’t been that nice to each other.

“Demigod,” he said slowly. “Is that it?”

She nuzzled further into his shoulder, hit with a sudden wave of sleepiness. She’d shown off, and she’d worn herself out. He knew that feeling all too well.

“Burdened with glorious purpose. Like all of them,” she yawned. 

She said: “It chose me, you know. The angel.”

All the insects were starting to sting. The air was sticky with an unwelcome warmth. He couldn’t make himself stay here any longer. When he tried to rise, Kali slumped again. It was so strange to view from the outside. He placed his hands beneath her forearms and he showed her a patience he’d always wanted.

She was fawn-like and stumbling, with a drowsiness that made her look more human than ever. He led her up the ramp and watched as she collapsed upon the couch of the common area. Water, aspirin, ice pack. This part was familiar. 

When she blinked herself back to a half-lucidity, she brushed the black threads of hair from her face and checked that she could still stand. Kali was feverish. She pressed her fingers by the nape of his neck and he could feel the heat trapped within them. She slid the back of his hand up to her temple just for the relief.

~

Sheer blackness, uninterrupted by either her light or his own. Just the warm water pouring overhead. He imagined he was in a rainstorm in the darkest night. He imagined himself in the jungle. Kali’s hand moved to cup his jaw. He could feel her breathing. He knew the glass of the shower walls had turned foggy with heat. There came the faintest scent of eucalyptus. He did everything he could to please her. When she touched him, he swore he could feel more hands than she had, but each of them were careful, and softer than he deserved.

~

In the same unbroken blackness, but in a different room, he dreamt of the story she’d told him. He dreamt of the angel, resplendent and star-studded, with dripping wings longer than her body had been. 

It had come in through the window. It had stood there in the window, its own body indistinguishable from the night sky behind it, but she had turned and she had sensed it and so it had let himself in.

She said it like scripture, like she was recounting a miracle. How she had been chosen. When he was frozen in her place, when he saw it as she saw it, he could think of it as nothing less than a nightmare.

“It chose me,” she’d mumbled again, beneath the covers, when she’d lost her place in the story. 

“…That’s cruel,” Delta said. “I’m sorry.”

She looked at him as though he’d just slapped her.

But it was cruelty and he wouldn’t recant. He fell asleep in the darkness beside her. He woke up in the darkness beside her. He didn’t remember how, or how much time had passed, but when he next gained lucidity he was waking up in the darkness alone.

~

He did his best to stay crazy. When it first infected him, he’d thought it was some kind of fever, the way his heart raced and he had paced without aim. Some kind of nervous breakdown, Kitty had warned bluntly enough. That seemed more likely. His awareness of this did nothing to halt it.

Half-drunk at the bottom of a ravine, he could hear the sound of people being murdered. The person next to him helpfully informed him it was just the cry of big cats. Delta tried to remember what he was even doing out here, how it’d all come to be. He tried to walk all the way home and someone had to come and tie him down, because to walk that far in the cold and the dark was suicide, because he wasn’t in his right mind.

He would wake up fully clothed in an empty bathtub. He’d wake up already kneeling. Sometimes he knew it was in prayer. Other times, he knew he’d been begging. The sleepwalking returned with a vengeance, so he shut himself up in the holding cell until it subsided. He tried new medicine. He tried starving, and sleeping all the time, and working himself so hard that he could think of nothing but numbers. He played chess in his head for a week straight, so consistently that nobody could hold more than a few words of conversation with him before he zoned out again. He drank juice from the carton.

He drank so much that he made himself sick, like he was trying to get himself poisoned. He was curled up beneath the covers waiting to die. The hangover dug its claws so violently into him and all he could do was thrust himself further onto the points, let the migraine grow worse, make it so that his body could understand nothing at all but pain.

 He refreshed the page again. Nobody had seen Paris in a year. There was no breakthroughs in the case, no sign he would ever return. Probably dead in a ditch somewhere. Delta cried. 

The river dried up just as quickly as he smashed his laptop into the wall. It took everything in him not to trash his entire room. Lazarus was there. He didn’t want the tantrum to hurt him. Delta wanted to hurt someone, but he couldn’t decide who. It was hard here. Everyone was so nice.

Levon made him take the week off, on account of the fact that he was losing his fucking mind. Apollo let him stay in his parent’s house, and when he didn’t want to be there without him, he agreed to stay there too. 

Delta fell asleep in the hammock in the garden and all his dreams were of her.

~

nodiving: i think im in love with you

He’d had to buy a new laptop, and now he had to resist breaking it again so that he wouldn’t have to see her reply. He shut it quickly, pacing through the surrounding woods for three hours before he could bid himself return. Apollo fussed, brushing the leaves from his hair, forcing him to drink water. Delta submitted, the only natural thing to do. He opened the laptop again.

candlenights: wyd

candlenights: i like you a lot but you said you wont follow me so that is what it is

candlenights: i love you too but i dont know what you want

nodiving: i dont know either

nodiving: im sorry

nodiving: im not doing anything im on break because everyone has said im insane basically and i dont feel insane but i dont know how im supposed to feel

nodiving: i dont know what i want i think i just want to see you again

candlenights: id see you again!

nodiving: you would

nodiving: cool

nodiving: yay

candlenights: ahahaha

~

His memory failed still, and he lost the time in between. Where were they now? Another jungle. No. He was pretty sure it was an island. The sun was setting again.

She was meant for something, and he couldn’t save her from it, nor could he steer her away. He tried so hard to understand. The angel was absent now. Was it a part of her, or just something that had laid claim? She was blurred at her edges. No, everything was. It was some problem with his eyes. He wiped at them again.

“Are you going to hurt me?” he asked. More than she already had, he meant.

She was sprawled out beneath the trees. There were faint tan lines visible on her skin. Tattoos he hadn’t noticed before. She looked irritated by the question, which he probably would have been too.

“Why do you always say things like that?” she groaned. He shrugged, sinking a knife into the flesh of the fruit.

“Because you say it’s your destiny to destroy things, and that’s what I’m good at. So I thought that’s why you wanted me. And if you do, then that’s painful.”

“You think everyone’s out to get you.”

Something in him snapped.

“You don’t know what it was like for me,” he said. It sounded self-pitying even to him, but he’d spent enough years downplaying it that he felt entitled to the indulgence. And she doesn’t know. There was a hole inside of him nearly the size of his body. The constant ache. He thought that if anyone knew, for a second, just how lonely it had been, they would never be the same.

Kali rolls her spine upwards, ribbons of black hair moving in little ripples along her bare legs. Red petals shifted in the air beside her.

“You don’t know what it was like for me, either,” she says. “What makes you think you’re so special? You think your hurt is so unique no one else could understand it?”

He sighed a little. There wasn’t even sharpness in her voice, nothing for him to flinch from. It was just sad.

“It’s not that. I know you hurt too. Everyone does. But your life was your own. You got to make your own mistakes. It doesn’t feel that way for me. Everything was just taken, and I’ll never get it back. Pain doesn’t even describe it. There’s just nothing there.”

He sounded incoherent. Shadows stretched out onto the land. He remembered how she’d appeared that first night, dancing in the darkness. A shadow puppet. She crept forward now, brushing his hair from his face. Petals fell again, bright spots of red against the darkening sky.

“I see you,” she said. “And I see no other versions of you. What you want to return to — it doesn’t exist. It’s just you and me, here right now. All I can give you. You don’t live there anymore.”

The colors glowed more vibrant. The psilocybin had to be kicking in. There was a presence now, an immediacy. He leaned into the kiss. He found her easy to lean into. All he wanted was to be free of it. In his head, all the cage doors were open. He swayed forward, and the night crashed onto the land.

~

He woke to the sound of waves breaking up upon the beach. His body protested when he made even the slightest movements, but he forced his eyes open. Daybreak. All the colors of the previous night still swirled in his head, vibrant and fearsome and mystic, but all that was there now was the easy quiet of the ocean.

His hand moved up to his neck. Bare skin, the slightest scarring in the place where the collar had been. No collar.

~~~

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