PART THIRTEEN [CLOSED]

[st_anon]

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ATTN: regarding reposts
As a new guideline: for the time being, I'd like to put a damper on the re-requesting going on. Please only re-request something if it has been more than a month since you asked for it and it still hasn't been filled. I'd like to remind everyone that old parts still have many

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[raihu]

Careful, he admonishes himself; careful, quiet, follow the grain of his tattoos with reverence, even in perfect darkness. It’s the least anyone could do. He spreads his palms open over Ayel’s ribs and sucks on his bottom lip to hold his patience.

“You’re doing it again,” Ayel warns him softly. “Trying to apologize.”

Yes.

He feels sure that it will work eventually.

-

Pain becomes easier to bear as time goes on its way; not so with guilt.

Rura Penthe has good practitioners. They rarely allow themselves to adopt a routine. They know how to dangle death like a bright, untouchable bauble before the eye, and they are never impolite. Nero has heard them apologize for mispronouncing names back at their patients and sometimes receives compliments from them, on his physiology, his marks.

They reach in with more than fingers and teeth and hooks. Admiration colours his hatred, more and more. Though he has never said a word, they know him. And he knows the danger of being known.

Having lived long enough to adapt to a number of their ways inside the flesh, Nero is slowly introduced to their ways around it. First they have him stay in the amphitheatre while other patients are brought in; they have him watch.

It’s easy. All strange creatures. He feels no discontent when they scream.

Finally, as the sessions progress, they promise to bring one of his own. He is not surprised. He knows the danger, he has always known that he is somehow to blame for everything, all of it, all the fire and endings that have ever been. For the ice, too, and the chains, for the present as it afflicts them now.

Ayel is placed in his lap. Only the best for you, the specialist says, though it’s unclear who the words are intended for.

Then he adds: Tell us not to harm him and we won’t.

It’s an unusual thing, the silence. It seems to move like a beast with darkness for sides and death for laughter. What’s so funny, Nero wants to ask it sometimes, but never does and now is no exception.

No one breathes; the cooling corpses scattered in alcoves nearby hold their tongues obligingly, even with lips peeled wide and gleaming.

“If they were, say, Tal Shiar,” Ayel remarks shakily, true-tongued so that the Klingons will not understand much of it, “I’d be pissed off at you right now.”

You mean you’d piss yourself, Nero thinks. His helpless panic stumbles on an unexpected smile.

Ayel smiles back. He is shuddering and he doesn’t seem to notice. And Nero can’t seem to still him with gentle hands alone, and he doesn’t understand why not. It isn’t fair.

“But as it stands, I guess I’ll live,” Ayel says.

-

There are two thin, perfect scars raised on his tongue, one on either side, healing cleanly. They taste like metal. Ayel doesn’t flinch while they are being explored, so Nero lingers over them, finally pinches his mouth wider at the hinge of his jaw and eats at him greedily.

In another hour or so, they will have to get up. Crawl through the frozen shafts running with ice water and a distant roar held somewhere in the asteroid’s belly; or else slump in the deep hollows of the amphitheatre, waiting for the company of pain.

“Let me sleep,” Ayel mumbles, coy, and then makes a troubled, thoughtful sound as Nero smoothes the hard knot in his arm where the muscles were braided tight by quick fingers of electricity; as he touches the edges of the burn above it; as he reaches down and gentles the cut extending his navel, up and down.

Ayel hums low in his throat.

These are, Nero thinks, his own wounds. They belong to him. He puts his lips on them, his tongue. The darkness is warm with familiar gestures and the close, lush smell of skin. If there is pain when they move too quickly together, it’s easily lost in the hot foam of blood and lust that slicks between them.

Ayel breathes across his throat, humid and silent.

There are voices close by. Weightless, drifting. Unimportant.

Ayel might be above him. Their open mouths might close around the same shapeless word before either of them can say it aloud.

And it’s strange that he should feel content. That he should forget, even for a moment; but he does.

-