BLITZKRIEG.

a goofy guffaw escapes him, like a hiccup. his body jolts as mirth spills from him of the indecent, dirty joke. the crown of scars near the cupid's bow wrinkles and restricts his smile from stretching properly, resulting in a crooked grin. he hangs over the other, palm feeling the oily blood rush through the body of the other man, along the maze of arteries and veins, pressed against the flesh threatening to burn him. it warms the palm, the pads of his fingers, the mound of scar tissue stigmata from the meat hooks he had been suspended from. the deathlike chill banished, temporarily, in favor of peachy-pink of healthy tissue. something that used to be there all the time, before the mold replicated him, everything about him, down to the whorls and loops and arches of his fingerprints.

" whining...? " a crack in the facade. his brows raise, sending wrinkles along his pale forehead. " tantr-- i'm not throwing a, you know, just because i'm not in my fuckin' nineties doesn't mean i'm a child. " his hand applies some trivial amount of pressure before setting it against the surface of the table now groaning under their combined weight. ethan shifts on his feet, still balanced on the balls, wedged against the other. a limber frame around the bulk of the other, caging him in, staying close, breathing in the exhale stinking of stale coffee, tobacco, rusted metal growing hot in the hot sun, a tongue coated in plaque. " this was an attempt to get to know you. that's what couples do. they build traditions based on things they both like. "

he avoids the jab at his inhumanity. a foul taste, beyond the echo of cum still staining his mouth, creeping along like infection in his mouth. a bitter pill lacking any sweet coating as a little comfort. all that time he had resented mia for covering his eyes and singing to him lest he hear anything else, her promises it was done for his benefit, maybe, she had been right. his lids fall to half mast, a veil of frustration pulled down, like a child covering his head with the blanket to keep the monsters out until the dawn can banish them. the rows of his perfect teeth grind against one another, jaw set in defiance.

" no, it's fine. we'll be miserable dead men for christmas. we can enjoy another day of grey depression. no fun allowed. " the morphean haze grows thin as lace. if only he had fallen for another lord in this god-forsaken land. " should've told me during your big speeches that you were so antithalian. " perhaps the doll maker, she had worn the face of his wife, set her nimble fingers into his skull and pulled out threads to weave into his perfect fantasy, transmuted into nightmare. had he gone to her upon his knees, lavished her with adoration the way he does the brash god-king, maybe she would have indulged him. set little strings of lights, sent the motes of her noxious flower into his sinuses, spin an eternity around them based on the life he had always wanted. hollow indulgence is what he always wanted rather than this back and forth. if it is not facing down a foe or rushing toward a blissful plunge into orgasm, he and karl cannot manage to find common ground.

he is tired of his life being inhume to what had happened to him. it is exhausting to drown in it all. in his dreams, he is in the baker home, surrounded by the victims. when he wakes he walks the crooked trails of a village of ghosts. when he sits to eat and take up conversation with the only person around him, the horrible reflection he avoids in the mirrors and polished surface of the window glass, is held up to him, shoved into his face. just leave. it is a voice in his mind, a seed of a thought had appeared to set down roots while he was not watching. the indulgence of body, feeding on a new man who allowed him to do whatever he wanted to him as long as it got him hard. empty calories. a vacation from a life that felt was still waiting for him to return to it. just leave. karl cannot follow him. each time the phrase reappears it ripples through him in bright chartreuse, a smack to his grey matter.

" i didn't forget, you're just hot enough for the both of us. " he snaps, more irritated than angry, still wrestling with his own inner turmoil. though, it melts slowly into a smirk as he realizes the unintentional duplicity of his statement. a snort at his own cleverness before he returns to the train of thought. it would be easier if he was trapped here, no choice but to remain within the invisible bounds the way his lover is, but the door always has been open to him, enticing him. perhaps, he should leave for longer periods of time. take more than three weeks to visit rose. maybe he should take the entire summer away, escape into the golden diluvial months of long days and nights filled with sweet scents and nightingales singing to him through the open windows. being pressed into the crooks of his companion's body like this, the machine of flesh and iron, he feels like a coldblooded creature, stealing heat. " accepting i'm... " he mutters under his breath. " we could talk about literally any-fucking-thing else. " his voice pitches higher toward the end, exasperated. " i get it. i get it. me mold, you mold and machine and... " his eyes dart, leaving behind the eerily glowing eyes, resting on the lower lip, dotted with shimmering saliva, then the mounds of his chest, each punctuated by metal bars in his nipples, the rotund center, the rest lost in the mesh of their interlocking forms. " everything else... i forgot where i was going with that. " he is still hard, blood pooling low in his body makes thinking difficult. there was a sharp spike in his irritation then the train of through vanished in steam, leaving him rolling his eyes upward as if the script was posted on the ceiling and he could find his line again. " you're very distracting. "

just leave.

where would he go? there is no one else for him. the rot that mimics him may be able to return back to that point in the past when he swung open the door to darkness in some grand gesture of love and honor, of faithfulness and truth, but he knows each day he stays here, the world moves on at the speed of light. there is nowhere left for him out there anymore.

"oh my, papa, so touchy! i didn't know you were so sensitive -" like water against oil, the vague implication of an insult about his age slips off of him, its brief attempt to do something only reaffirming the suspicions of the iron lord : he may not be sensitive — or embarrassed — about it, but ethan is. for the better part of a year now, they have spent their time like this — half-hard, slick with sweat and frustration, trading insults and colour commentary as if it is their solemn duty and yet, despite that, ethan remains resolute in his decision to take everything to heart as if he still has one ; some beautiful saint, filled with formaldehyde, embedding the pins in his own limbs so he can be viewed by the audience.

"ethan, ethan, ethan, i already told you!" blind to his own hypocrisy — numerous times has he told the man he does not like being made to repeat himself and yet, there is no word as of late that he repeats more than that of his lovers name : in anger, in adoration, in annoyance, the shape of it worn into the ridges along his inside of his mouth. "i said i’d do it. if you were paying attention, you would have heard me, seconds ago, saying i'll do it! i was just - making it clear that - that you're holding the reigns here. can't play my part if i don't know the lines, papa." he knows little of christmas outside of broad strokes, hazy recollections played through the monochrome fur of the television screen. lights, gifts, snow. everything else exists in some nebulous space, imprints left along the folds of his brain that no longer bear the shape they once had — like most of his memories from childhood. where he went to school, what his bedroom looked like, the face of his mother : all distorted ; photographs bleached by sunlight and time.

they are not what happened to them, but neither are they unchanged and he cannot simply pretend otherwise. ethan's body clings to the familiar as much as the man does, the aberration of his existence easy to ignore when the mold maintains the illusion — the heart still beats, the lungs still draw in air, the brain still aches and stomach still burns, but it is a luxury afforded only to one of them. it is the cruel truth of his mutation : he could not walk without his legs buckling under the weight of the world's magnetic field, he could not think without the ever-present buzzing of a crackling radio between his ears, he could not eat, nor sleep, nor breathe without the thrum of an engine failing to preform a task it was not made for. ignorance, however blissful, was never an option afforded to him. the dragon painted herself white and crawled through doors in an attempt to pretend she was the woman she had been, the weaver poisoning her own supply in order to indulge the fantasy of a life stolen as if it had ever been an option. the fishking and he, rotten from the inside out, unable to share in the delusions of their sisters. it did not stop him from handing ethan the knife to gut the belly of the beast. he cannot fault ethan for clinging to the lie, however ridiculous he finds it, but he cannot share it.

traditions and rituals and meals that do little but waste time things he can indulge if the reward is promising enough, but already it has been proven that the script will ever be ethan's. the attempt to incite some curiosity in the other rewarded with vitriol and then, confounding, the reprimand for volunteering that which ethan had not asked for. not a single so what do you celebrate in winter? nor a what end-of-the-year rituals happen here? ethan is as interested in the local culture as he is : which is to say, not at all. misplaced frustrations — it is not the village, nor the religion, nor the selfish, fucked-up god that he deems worthy of his lovers attention, but himself. his likes, his dislikes, his desires. the way his body works, beyond the veil of skin and hair. ethan speaks of building a life together but so far, little has been shared ; ethan speaks of building a life together and, sometimes, it feels like another role to play — another vessel he becomes.

desired for what he can provide. a body to be used. the motive may have changed, but the indignity has not. half the time they spend together is at odds, filled with the performative lamentations of a man who speaks as if he has nowhere else to go, that is he only here because he must be, that he suffers the company of the iron lord as if it is the grave he cannot escape. insensitive and wilfully ignorant to how his company has nothing left but this factory, no one but the crystallized remains of the dead — they are not things karl cares for, and so, the slights go mostly unremarked upon, the greater wound the way ethan's body tenses when his voice enters the room before his body, the idle dance of neurons along their own tune rather than in response to anything he says.

perhaps his ability to act has not waned as much as he assumed and, in turn, his lover must be unaware of the motive behind the attempts to share what little he has : as honest as the desire is to be known, it is accompanied by that of feeding his curiosity — the rules of conversation, as far as he's been taught, dictate he would answer ethan's questions and in return, ethan would answer his, without the embarrassment of having to ask, unprompted. the same way he repeats unfamiliar words with the lilting tone of sarcasm — a shield that allows him to learn without begin compared to or treated like a child. always, ethan fixates on the tragedies of their lives, spurning the concept of a conversation about them as if that is the only topic afforded to them and not the wealth of history, technology, society that has passed him by. all he has to offer is what he knows. apparently, it is not enough.

smoke filters through his teeth, the bristles of his moustache. what ethan wants, ethan gets, and he has done little to prove otherwise, too eager to bite the hand of his new master. it would be embarrassing, if it had not been nearly a decade since his dignity was stolen from him. at least this time he gets to draw his own pleasures out of the arrangement. "you're thinking about it all wrong, for the record. imagine the fun we could have if you - if you embraced it," he does not consider the possibility that ethan does not share the same sexual thrill he does when confronted with a body that will never break. ethan winters is a toy he keeps between his teeth, sodden and half-mangled, stitches dangling from their wounds, torn to shreds and swallowed whole only to reappear the next day, hale and whole and waiting to be played with once again. it is a miracle that they do not take advantage of, in his opinion.

"we can talk about whatever you want," he expects to be rewarded for it, a promise he does not intend to keep, "or - oh! oho! distracting, am i?" the ego of the iron lord as ravenous as the gut : the prior speech upon his tongue gone, dissolving, overridden with the acid reflux of adrenaline, his desire for attention fluttering at the praise. an eye for an eye - he repays it with an approving squeeze, the jagged edges of his nails piercing skin that will vanish the moment the pressure does. still, he hopes to leave his mark. "mhm, you're so sensitive. all this because i made fun of you - your - your reaction," the spluttering ninety-one the current echolalia played inside his skull, still unsure whether to be amused or offended, "yes, well, aren't we all? some of us have been at it longer than you've been alive. or your father. or your -" interrupted by his own laughter, low and filled with smoke, the rumble of the engine within his chest. "sometimes you have to change tracks. the one you'll get isn't the one you planned for. it is what it is," dreams of freedom, ever-tainted with the knowledge that their is no place in the world for him now, anything beyond the border of this village alien and unfamiliar. even if he caught up, there is no home for him to return to, no city in which he could walk the streets. the great escape he dreamt of in his youth unattainable. he has learnt to live with it. not a tempering of expectations but a constant process of adjustment — rolling with the punches. "anyway... christmas. that means gifts, doesn't it?"

" it is. " a life too long, too much baggage. the man is wallowing in it, in the life of the little boy ethan saw in the time yellowed photograph pinched between his fingers, a teenager who he has only seen through the spiraling, maddening scrawl of an insane woman who tears into him. never good enough, not meeting the expectation put before him, missing the bar no matter how much she lowers it and when he does inevitably lash out, disgust, regret, desperation. a young adult turned into a monster, the thing the villagers whispered around, a boogyman used to scare what few kids who lived through the infection-riddled trenches of childhood, a butcher, carrying the chopping block along in his wake. snapshots of grief with no one to mourn him. he does not want them, ethan rejects it all because the years before now reek of miranda, her brass fingerprints all over it. some measure of jealousy, how she spoke of him as her property, hers to do whatever she wanted with, the rest uncomfortable pitfalls of dissonance. they are men from two entirely separate walks of life. they cannot coexist without leaving their respective lives to relocate to a new, neutral ground.

and he does not want to.

ethan still clings to his own past, the version of him that exists just beyond the sun scorched memory of the world burning his vision over the steering wheel of his vehicle as he turned off the paved asphalt onto the private road of packed dirt.

the current of breath clashing between them, filled with a trillion invisible motes of infection, all of it coursing through the pair of them. he can feel his stomach churning its contents, devouring it, wringing out the nutrients from it. some little bit still human despite the taste of motor oil in the back of his throat. he speaks and he can smell the man on his own exhale. breaking it down, like a body dropped into a grave. absorbed into the rest of his form, carried around like the rest of the cemetery he has been made into. something inside him has always wanted this, a desire to vomit up thick torrents of black bile, overwhelm him, drown him in a waterfall made of steaming tar. the mold never fulfilled, always looking for more to consume. every time they fuck, when he fills him with gouts of white pearls, it is repeated doses. when they are like this, pressed against one another, if ethan can stop his mouth from constantly filling the air, he can hear himself singing inside karl.

like the echo of his own call, reverberating down the maw of a cave, into an obsidian esophagus, ethan's voice rings back out to him. it hums through him, in the magnetism of being close, he can feel the bones, the packed muscles along the man's shoulders, down his thick arms, into calloused fingers digging into the small of his back, the swell of his ass. each ragged inhale stoking the infection, like embers being fanned in the darkness. a ticking of a pocket watch through clasped hands, insects chewing and burrowing in a thin mattress.

" i want a good christmas. " it is selfish, like so many things about him. the motivation is always his own, self-serving. something that the isolated, lonely creature caught in his fist should understand. " and i want you to enjoy it too. i'm not interesting in colonizing you. " he speak of his lover as a parcel of land, something he bought and paid for. a thing owned despite the fact that he was the one that had been branded like cattle. that was how mia put it, was it not? as if ethan was a piece of art karl scratched his signature on, a tree he carved initials into. but this dance was the pair of them attempting to overwhelm the other, to press a brand into the hindquarters. a collar with his name and number on the man, just in case he got lost. the image of his own long fingers in the ring of a collar at karl's throat so vivid he lets out a short whoosh of an exhale. his pupils blown wide by the fantasy as it spirals upward, a bottle rocket sent into the night sky.

" i, you... uh, " it takes him a moment to drag himself back into the present, he shakes his head. " the-the-the point is: new stuff. new traditions. we leave the bad shit out on the porch for a few days. christmas, birthdays, new years, anniversaries. " he is so flippant when he says it, then a slow dawning that old date in may must be shed. no longer tied to him, amputated like the finger it used to reside upon. " or, y'know, whatever. the fucked up stuff we've gotta work through can wait until the next day. " his wrist pushes forward, until the pronounced peak for karl's adam's apple presses into the scarred pad of his palm. " i don't want to live in the shadow of what has happened to us. we may not be able to do anything about it but we deserve to take happiness where and when we can. "

"your insistence on planting your flag begs to differ, papa," a crude, poor innuendo but one that curls the corners of his moustache, the crooked, overlapping shrapnel of his teeth on display. his signature may sit over ethan's heart like the obnoxious scrawling of a child but the other man has left his mark, over and over : several of them, now, red dots and dashes, x marks the spot, able to be mapped to each and every fight they've had. no different to the room they stand in, growing more and more unrecognisable with each passing day that ethan makes it more to his liking. he feels it more keenly, here, this slow takeover. the factory an extension of himself far more precious than that of his body — a thing that has already been infiltrated and violated — but he has invited ethan into both with no thought of consequence.

his head cants, curious, watching ethan's pupils expand in response to something unsaid. rot masquerading as nervous tissue and neurons with such dedication that it preforms all the same songs — songs that could be copied, transcribed, translated, until there are no secrets between them. the language of electrical signals far more visceral and honest than that of their tongues. he resists the temptation ; his mind is the only thing that does not bear another’s fingerprints and he will not do the same to ethan, irregardless of the ghosts that have made a home in the imitation skull. that of the body, however... fair game. if he tried, could he do more than pull ethan along on the wires of his magnetic field? set the hyphae impersonality nerves ablaze so ethan can feel sensation overwhelming the way he does? the alluring prospects of trial-and-error experiments is a distraction he would welcome more than that of holidays he has only ever known of from the side of a silver screen.

a moment, then another. seconds of silence, save for their breath. the supple flesh of his lover dimpled by the misshapen edges of his claws, a little sharper, a little rougher, an attempt to drag ethan from whatever rabbit hole his mind has wandered into back to reality. back to his hands, his factory. "right..." the desire to know what was in that particular hole an itch that goes unscratched, "then you're gonna have to quit the whining because i don't know the intricate details." ethan does not ask about the history of this village, the traditions usurped by a false mother and those made in her image, the rituals and stories passed down from generation to generation and he does not care to regurgitate them. they were meaningless then, meaningless now. he would rather ethan ask about him, take an interest in him. hadn't that been the catalyst for the prior argument? perhaps the revelation has, if nothing else, lit some spark of curiosity in the man, albeit born from the selfish need to be the first, to stake his claim. how very american. "then we agree, although not - not so..." an appropriate word eludes him and with his hands occupied, there is nothing to fill in the gap, "anyway. it's not - i'll talk about it, if you want, if you ask, but the point i'm making isn't... i'm not interesting in whining like a little bitch, ethan. can't change history, doesn't mean it's dead and buried. this is what i am. what we are. the sooner you're willing to talk about it without throwing a tantrum, the better. there's no happy ending where we get to be human - not that i want to. you gotta account for that."

a point of contention, he's sure. the happy ever after ethan dreams of is still based in what was : watching a daughter grow up, go to school, get married perhaps another kid or two popped out of his duplicitous wife, growing old, dying in his bed surrounded by family. instead, what lies before them is a life lived in secret or, should they be so bold, one where they are monsters — branded as things that should not exist, escaped from the old world. adjustments need to be made, expectations tempered and rewritten anew. the only dream he has ever had is to break free of the leash ; he has not had the luxury of contemplating anything else. "look, all i'm saying is - it'd be embarrassing for your happy ever after to be ruined because you never bothered to learn anything about what you are now. besides, think of all the bonding activities we could do. we'll play twenty questions and play doctor. or.. engineer. whatever. if you play nice, i might even let you prove your credentials, mr winters."

it has percolated in his mind since that day in the church, half-delirious, benzene coating his throat. ethan had cut him open with the confidence of a butcher only to hesitate when met with the aberration of his body, all iron and rot. it did not stop ethan from plunging a hand into him, up to the elbow, to fix the damage he'd done. what could they learn from each other, about each other, if they took advantage of what has been done to them? his gaze wanders along the body before him, lithe and tender. imagines it slick with blood, those confident fingers dipping between the cords of his nerves. licking his lips, throat dry. "but, fine. fine! we'll do your fucking... christmas. already said that. tree. lights. hell, get your ass outside and build a snowman. that's all i know. if you're gonna complain that's not enough, then you gotta fill in the gaps."

the next day and all those that come after — they have nothing but time. severed from the fetters of mortality and freed from the curse of soft, useless flesh ; inch by inch, year by year, he feels less like an animal and more like a stone — immovable, nigh-immortal, a thing that will exist longer than the records of him, dated by the sedimentary rings of banded iron inside of him. immortality never the curse, only the limit scope of it from within the bars of his cage, the boons of such a thing held just out of reach. they have nothing but time, but already he has spent one lifetime in the maw of the mountains, caught in its throat like a shard of glass refusing to be swallowed. what's another year, another five to a man who has spent too long in the dark, deprived of sunsets and sunrises? a blink of an eye and still, too long. all the decades spent waiting never taught him patience. it feels like a slight, an expectation to pace around his cage for another decade or two whilst they waste time on trivial pleasures born from ethan's selfish whims, but a lifetime of abstinence in the pursuit of survival has primed him for the headlong rush into hedonism as if it will satiate the hunger that, somehow, remains regardless of the inorganic thing that replaced his stomach.

it would be easy to overindulge. to waste all their time in the futile attempt to satisfy all his cravings and curiosities — that of knowledge, of experience, of flesh. the slow progress of time and technology, the unfolding of history, not an incremental shift over decades of progress something he has lived through but sudden, dizzying, overwhelming unless it is drip-fed. voracious as he is, life is something he must acclimate to. far more difficult than anticipated, the feeling of breathing without the boot on his neck. eventually, it will become unremarkable and the memory of what came before will have withered to dust. it is easier to fill that time with distractions. conversations and arguments and all the silly, little things ethan insists on in-between until, eventually, something takes shape : the defined borders of what they are and are not, the roles they now take and the hierarchy that fills in the absence he helped create. a void not inside him, but around him. free from the yoke of mother-god and family both, heisenberg means nothing, heisenberg is no one — an excarnation he must endure — only indulged in the short-lived fantasy of master and servant his lover attempted to placate him with.

making up for lost time will not return what was stolen. normality a concept now barred from him and with it, all the milestones one clings to, relies upon. eventually, he's sure, ethan will realise just how trivial his routines are : dates hold no significance when time blurs out into one long uninterrupted moment, birthdays mean nothing when divorced from age. ethan will remain as he is, preserved in tar — the artificial rot far kinder than that of its predecessor. vanity his sisters sin, not his, but the unfairness of it festers. only one of them got to enjoy their youth, why should that one get to keep it?

still... there it is, the gnawing desire to have ethan like him. so stubborn, so vivid that it feels like a second parasite buried below his brain, one far more demanding than that of his cadou. affection a fever he has yet to sweat out. all his plans for the day gone, dissolved, attention focused solely on the shape of ethan's lips and the little patch devoid of stubble at the corner of his mouth. "whilst we're here though... just like to point out that you've forgot to keep up the act that you're freezing your tits off," his grin stretches wider, gaze lowering. whether ethan exaggerates in some attempt to cling to the guise of humanity or sharing body heat, he does not know nor need to, "see? accepting you're mold already!"

their nightstand.

their voice memos.

their junk drawer.

their car visor.

their desk.

their dorm room.

their basement.

their laundry basket.

their sock drawer.

their keyring.

their notebooks.

their safe.

their cup holders.

their shoe rack.

their gym bag.

their old hard drives.

their USBs.

their medicine cabinet.

their garage.

their e-reader.

their center console.

their shower shelf.

their trash can.

their workstation.

their notes app.

their spare tire compartment.

their spam folder.

their email inbox.

their tablet.

their storage unit.

the place they never let anyone look.

their makeup bag.

their phone.

the back of their closet.

their underwear drawer.

their jeans pockets.

their shared bedroom.

their storage bins.

their passenger seat.

their bookshelf.

their suitcase.

their bed.

their razor drawer.

their spice rack.

their shoebox of keepsakes.

their driver's seat.

their dresser.

their filing cabinet.

their computer.

their bathroom sink.

their playlists.

their freezer.

their online shopping carts.

their glovebox.

their toolbox.

their coat pockets.

their browser bookmarks.

their pockets right now.

under their bed.

their camera roll.

their pillowcase.

their backpack.

their trunk.

their saved passwords list.

their kitchen counter.

their pantry.

their sketchbooks.

their closet.

their loose papers.

their unsent messages.

their purse.

their toiletry bag.

their fridge.

their overnight bag.

their cloud storage.

their shed.

their school bag.

their attic.

their photo albums.

their childhood bedroom.

their wallet.

their headboard shelf.

their locker.

their blocked contacts list.

their burned CDs.