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Beneath Flayon’s feet, a canopy of sunset-colored leaves stretches out into the distance. The trees are densely packed, crowded together to create the illusion of an impermeable sea, and Flayon indulges in a bit of hopelessness as he recognizes how unlikely it would be for him to spot a single living thing on the ground below.
The mission started off fine. Reconnaissance to a remote village with the task of investigating the strange properties the land had taken on since a corruption beast attack. Minimal chance of combat meant the presence of the guild’s favorite scholar, who spent most of the morning stroking plant fronds and digging holes in the ground. Flayon let himself be put to work on the excavating, switching out his pilot gloves for a rubberized pair Vesper gave him to better grip a shovel, and Altare had left them to follow up on reports of corrupted flora sprouting in the woods.
He scooped dirt and watched Vesper scribble down descriptive words into his notebook through the morning, the fall breeze whipping the old man’s hair into a silvery bird’s nest every time he seemed to be especially absorbed in his writing. They went on like that into the afternoon, when Flayon started to get hungry and Vesper found a good stopping point, using a deep violet flower as a bookmark to save his place before calling Altare.
Occupied with unpacking the food they’d brought for the trip, the ignored texts, then the call falling to voicemail, seemed unremarkable. Altare could get lost in his own world sometimes, they agreed. He’d call back when he finished with whatever he was up to, falling over himself to apologize for not doing so sooner, no matter how little time passed.
It was after the third call, when the wrinkles along Vesper’s eyes deepened into rivulets of barely contained panic, that Flayon took matters into his own hands.
“What a jerk,” he’d said with a snap of his fingers, summoning one of his command panels to his side. “I’ll go get him. Just hang out here and I’ll let you know when we’re on the way back, okay?”
Two hours later, Flayon hasn’t seen a speck of blue below the horizon. He’s not worried yet, because judging from Vesper’s most recent texts he’s quickly approaching a full-blown panic attack, and their expedition team needs somebody to stay on task.
“Seriously,” he says to no one, peering down at Vesper’s latest message on his phone. “You know how anxious he gets when you pull stuff like this. Where the hell are you, Altare?”
The panel whirs gently as Flayon directs its course, gliding through the air towards a part of the forest he’s only checked over twice. He counts off the possible causes of their current situation from most to least likely; a dropped phone or dead battery at the forefront, severe injury or abduction tucked away at the back. Altare has that shoujo heroine charm of being frequently clumsy in low-stakes situations, tripping over his feet in the guildhall and crashing into the nearest person while he chirps like a video game mascot. Maybe he’d sensed the need for a penultimate chapter cliffhanger and stumbled into some actual danger.
It's hard for Flayon to imagine Altare in serious, life-threatening danger— which is strange, because he’s seen it with his own eyes. Thrown across a field like a ragdoll or buried under the rubble of a ruined structure, Altare flirts with self-destruction the same as any professional adventurer. It’s odd, when Flayon tries to recall a few specific instances, how his memory seems creased down the middle. Like the spine of a book opened again and again, he recalls the instigating fight and the resolution, but the events between those two scenes are vague, the colors and lettering faded away to bare, aging paper.
Altare never gets hurt that badly. Or if he does, it just doesn’t seem to take. It feels like something that can’t apply to him, a mental block on Flayon’s end that’s probably fueled by his signature brand of psychosis.
Flayon’s posture has gone sloppy as he cruises through the air, and his negligence almost sends him flying off the panel after a crack of thunder explodes in the near distance.
His tail swings to keep him balanced while he regains his lost footing, lungs constricting tight in his chest as he tries to make sense of what’s happened. The sky is clear and bright, not a cloud to be seen, and as he plays back the sound still reverberating in his ears, Flayon realizes that it wasn’t a thunderclap he heard.
It was a gunshot.
There must be hunters in the village, and guns aren’t rare in this part of Elysium. Cold logic provides alternate explanations to temper Flayon’s reaction, but it’s a wasted effort. Flayon knows that shot came from Altare’s saber.
He adjusts his flight path to swoop lower, the reinforced side of his control panel jostled by stray branches as Flayon searches for an opening in the canopy. The trees are crowded tightly, barely leaving space for a bird to navigate safely. When a second shot rings out, close enough to rattle his teeth, Flayon’s patience goes with it. Crouching down, he flattens himself against the panel, picks the safest spot he can find, and dives under.
The angle and momentum of his descent mitigates most of the possible damage, forcing a path through the tight matrix of twigs and leaves, but there’s no such thing as a smooth emergency landing. Flayon’s coat becomes a casualty of the sudden drop, catching onto every branch he doesn’t break or crush, one sleeve ripped clean off and pooled around his wrist by the time he reaches the ground.
Adrenaline numbs the sting of the scratches and fresh bruises over his body as he dismounts onto the forest floor, already scanning the area for signs of a fight. The trees in this part of wood are all the same species, their autumn foliage taking on uniform shades of bright yellow, turning the forest otherworldly, everything above and below Flayon swathed in a blanket of gold.
It makes the figure in the near distance, a stark splotch of white and blue, easy to pick out.
“Altare?” His throat feels like sandpaper, and Flayon doesn’t want to think about how many bugs he swallowed during the flight. “Hey, Altare!”
Flayon’s footfalls are muffled as he heads toward the familiar silhouette, moving with a desperate speed he can’t really justify. There’s a strange quality to the space around him— sound not traveling how it should, Altare not turning to greet him when he calls out his name, a gap between expected cause and effect that makes Flayon feel helpless, cut loose from his mooring.
“Altare!” He calls again as he gets closer, the mounting sense of dread within him hitting its a peak. Altare should’ve heard him, should’ve given some response by now, and Flayon still hasn’t seen his face and something about that is terrifying, the artificial quiet that makes the crisp snap of Flayon’s ankle catching on a stray root sound as thunderous as another gunshot.
“—Flayon?”
Several things happen in quick succession. Altare turns, eyes wide, just in time to see him falling face-first toward the dirt. The ground comes at him fast, though not faster than Altare, who’s across the small clearing in the trees and steadying Flayon by his shoulders in the span of a heartbeat.
“Flayon, what the heck are you doing out here? Why do you look like you lost a fight with a bush?”
“What am I doing out here?” Manic energy cracks his voice like a rock on a windowpane, wheezy laughter fighting with his words. “We’ve been trying to contact you for hours, Vesper is freaking the fuck out because you won’t answer his calls, and you want to know why I’m here?!”
Altare winces, plucking the leaves out of Flayon’s hair in apology. “Yeah, okay, that’s fair. I’m really sorry man, something happened and I had to handle it without you guys. I know I messed up, but I’m okay, I took care of it, we can head back soon, I just need a couple more minutes.”
It’s difficult for Flayon to think straight (ha ha) when Altare is this close. His negative emotions are replaced with a tender, childish kind of wonder— the impossible realization that the sun rises only for you. Flayon wants nothing more than to nod along like a puppet guided by a string, let Altare’s velvety cadence lull him into a state of mindless acceptance, but the picture he’s painting won’t hang right. Something’s off.
The trees surrounding them are a singular species, pale barked trunks with sloping branches and uniform leaves of the same shape and color. He thought there might be variation at first due to the red leaves scattered in the near distance, where Altare was facing when he landed. Craning his head to peer over Altare’s shoulder, he notes the purposeful arc of crimson on gold, a trail that leads up to the base of a tree and ends at the motionless pile of black fabric that rests against it.
It takes a moment for Flayon to process what he’s seeing, the odd shape that skewed limbs under layers of loose clothing make after collapsing in a motionless heap. Altare’s talking, might’ve been talking this entire time, but his words don’t register. Flayon moves like he’s under water as he steps out of Altare’s reach, crossing the distance between where they stand and the thing lying still.
He knows what he’s looking at, even before the coppery tang of spilled blood fills his nostrils. The stranger has a hood covering their face, an oozing wound on their left shoulder, and a hole in their chest larger Flayon’s fist— the edges of their burnt flesh illuminated by fading blue magic.
“He attacked me.”
Flayon shivers at Altare’s answer to his unspoken question, the words like a cold wind passing through him. It’s been a while since he’s seen a dead body up close. Adventurers don’t deal with human casualty if they can help it, and actively seeking to cause it is surefire way to get your license replaced with a warrant. There are exceptions, of course. No enforcer would expect even the most fairhanded of heroes to lay down their right to self-defense in a dire situation.
“Do you know why?”
Leaves crunch under Altare’s feet as he approaches, seeming like another volley of gunshots going off to Flayon’s agitated ears. The world around him has tripled in focus, his senses heightened by a rush of adrenaline as he tries to piece together a coherent scene from the information he’s been given.
“I think,” Altare says with the slick precision of a diplomat. “He was doing what he thought was right.”
The chill of the forest air becomes frigid. For all of Altare’s warmth, his kind smiles and easy forgiveness, when he gets cagey, you’d have better luck talking to an ice wall. Flayon’s in no place to judge— fresh out of the academy, he’d spent his days trying to roleplay the world’s least likeable Gundam protagonist.
“And to this guy, doing the right thing was killing you?”
There are risks built into the renown Altare holds. Elysium, despite its name, isn’t someone’s idyllic cozy game hub town. People vie for money and fame and cool loot and at the end of the day, adventurers are just assholes with varying levels of martial prowess who go out and pummel the pseudo-reality they live until it bends to their will. Dominating the leaderboards like Altare does puts a target on your back, and sooner or later, the competition is going to start taking their shots.
Okay, so someone put a hit on Altare. Flayon can buy that. It passes his smell test, fits neatly into the confines of his generous limits of belief. Neat-o. Then why didn’t he just say that? Why is he talking about what’s right, as if that could ever factor into some NPCs attempt at pre-meditated murder?
“Are we going to report this?” Flayon continues, because Altare hasn’t responded yet, and he’s not doing well with the foreboding silence. “Are you going to tell Vesper?”
Altare rubs the back of his neck like some bashful anime character who doesn’t have a noticeable smudge of viscera on his cheek. It makes Flayon feel insane, and he can’t tell if it’s in a good or a bad way. “I can call Vesper and let him know I’m okay, but … I don’t want to get more people involved than I have to. The investigations the peacekeepers run on stuff like this never turn up results. I was planning to take care of this on my own.”
Flayon’s familiar with Altare’s bad habit of trying to shoulder everything himself, but this is different. He knows this play from his own catalog of maladaptive behavior, the careful dance you perform when an ugly truth of your existence creeps a little too close to the daylight. Isolate it, snuff it out, hide any proof of its existence, and if someone happens to catch you in the act, talk them in circles.
“Mm,” Flayon exhales slowly. “What does ‘taking care of it on your own’ mean?”
“I’m still working on that part.”
He wonders if that’s true. He wonders if Altare knew with grim certainty how he was going to ‘take care’ of a dead body before his guildmate entered the picture.
The bloody hole in the stranger’s chest gapes like a second wailing mouth or a third empty eye. Flayon drops to his knees, reaching out to pull the man’s cloak tight around his hollow torso, wrapping it close like it might keep him warm. There are no crests on his clothing, no belongings in his pockets, and the energy saber at his side is a mass-produced model, completely unremarkable.
“Flayon—”
His face is the same. Beneath the flap of fabric Flayon sees a man not much older than Altare, his pleasant features undermined by his slack jaw and glassy, lifeless stare. He could be anyone back in the village, on the road to the city, passing through the guild on a busy day. A perfectly common person who just happened to die at the hands of Elysium’s first adventurer, for reasons Altare is reluctant to divulge.
Flayon lets his hood drop back into place, returning the breadth of the figure’s existence to a nameless corpse lying crumpled on the forest floor. For Flayon, his story starts and ends in this fleeting scene. His memory will vanish the moment he decides to turn away.
“If you don’t have a plan yet, can I make a suggestion?”
When he looks toward Altare, there’s a rigidness to his expression Flayon can’t place, muscles gone tense like an animal frozen in the glare of halogen lights.
“What is it?”
After a subdued command, Flayon’s panel control floats between the trees to land at his side. He strapped a few essentials to the back before taking off to hunt down Altare earlier; a compact power bank, his emergency snack rations, and the collapsable shovel from Vesper. The ground is soft where they’ve gathered, insulated by the leaf cover to keep the dirt rich and loamy. Flayon snaps the handle to its extended length and drives the tip of the shovel’s blade into the earth by the man’s feet, turning to Altare again once he’s sure the soil has enough give.
“Start digging.”
This is not the first time Flayon’s buried a body.
His access to memories from previous cycles is limited, data scrubbed clean after each hard reset, but the worst of what he’s done has a habit of finding its way home. Every violent end he’s inflicted becomes clearer, more lurid in detail as he ages. He remembers the necessary width, the optimal depth, what muscles to use when he lifts the dirt to maximize his power reserves. He remembers the suffocating weight of being buried at the bottom of his own shallow grave, still half-alive when the ground begins to swallow him.
Flayon digs with their singular shovel until the light in the sky fades to an afterthought, replaced by the glow of his panel and Altare’s activated armor to save him from working blind. He throws himself into the task with a dogged focus, the flow of simple movement freeing him from the cage of his own thoughts. Scoop and lift and toss, don’t worry about how they got here, scoop and lift and toss, ignore Altare’s unnerving silence as he watches him work from the side.
“I can do the rest.” He says after Flayon’s nearly finished carving out the needed space, shaken back to awareness by Altare’s hand squeezing his shoulder.
He pulls Flayon out of the pit and wraps him in his comically huge jacket, the coat he ruined during his emergency landing lying discarded in the leaves nearby. Altare moves the body on his own, getting that same pinched look on his face when Flayon tries to touch it.
“I’ve got it.” He reiterates, and Flayon’s left with nothing to do but sit down, hug his knees to his chest, and wait for Altare to finish what he started.
The temperature plummets once the last traces of the autumn sun disappear below the horizon. Flayon’s breath fogs the air, miniature clouds gathering on each exhale to mimic the newly overcast sky above. He doesn’t feel cold. If his hands are trembling in Altare’s sleeves, it’s because he’s not sure if he can survive being idle for much longer.
Flayon’s brain has been flattened like a pancake, squished thin and malleable from the pressure bearing in on him. He likes to think that he’s picked up a few tricks over the millennia, learned how to spot the places where the foreboding narration text will appear to inform him that someone will remember this choice and steer himself in the safest direction. Stumbling onto a murder scene might be the most obvious example possible, the kind of thing you find in stories with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, and Flayon choked on the tutorial. He set the dialogue to skip and sleepwalked his way to the end of the scene, and if you asked him why, he couldn’t give you a reason.
But that’s not right either. He knows why. The answer is right in front of him, shoveling dirt into a person-shaped hole while his crystalline headgear shimmers like a halo. In Flayon’s current lifetime, his existence is split into two sections— what he was before meeting Altare, and what he is now. The crush he’s developed since then is closer to a vice, its jaws clenched around his throat, poised to cut off his air supply the moment Altare looks his way.
If Altare says this guy had to die, he had to die. That’s all there is to it.
He can’t say how late it is when ground is finally tamped into place and covered with leaf-litter, concealing the obvious irregularities in the disturbed earth. Altare hasn’t said a word since Flayon last tried to help him, and he nearly jumps out of his skin when his guild leader throws down the shovel, drags himself over to where he’s been sitting, and practically collapses next to him.
“Flayon, I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry.”
“It’s okay.” He says, the only truthful answer he can offer. “It’ll be okay.”
Altare rolls onto his back with a grunt, staring up at the starless sky. “That’s not the problem. You get what’s about to happen, right? I need you to lie for me, and I can’t tell you why.”
That just makes us even. Flayon thinks. I lie to you all the time.
“I mean, you could tell me. It’s not like there’s anyone stopping you. But you don’t want to.” He corrects him with a shrug, curling tighter into the warm cocoon of Altare’s hoodie. “Yeah, I get it. I didn’t see anything, and we got dirty from tripping into a ditch. Is this the part where you tell me what happens if I snitch?”
“No,” Altare’s voice hits him like a blast of cold air, sudden and sharp. “Nothing would happen to you, it’s not like that. I need you to do this for me, I don’t have a backup plan if you won’t, and I’m not about to be an even bigger jerk and threaten you over it.”
Seems like Altare isn’t in a joking mood. Flayon can understand why, sort of. It’s hard for him to see the big picture when he’s purposefully being kept in the dark. “Okay. Good to know. If you don’t want to do that, you should probably ask me if I’ll help you out soon. That usually works better.”
He waits, but the expected question never arrives. Altare won’t look at him, clearly stewing in his own thoughts, frowning up at some invisible annoyance hanging above them in the canopy.
“Don’t ignore me, I’m being serious.” Flayon’s tail lashes, dangerously close to smacking Altare’s head. “I’ll agree with whatever cover you want to go with and act dumb if someone else brings it up. Now say ‘pretty please, Flayon’, so we can get out of here.”
It’s extremely fucking aggravating, frankly, that Altare can look as good as he does caked in dirt and glaring into the middle distance. What’s he got to be handsomely brooding about anyway? Flayon’s literally letting him get away with murder, and he’s acting like that’s the worst possible outcome.
“This isn’t fair to you.”
Flayon squints, angling his head like can’t see Altare clearly and happened to miss the obvious head injury he’s been sporting this entire time. “I was okay digging, if that’s what you mean. Not knowing why I had to kind of sucks, but you said you can’t tell me, and if you’re feeling sorry for yourself over that, you kind of suck.”
“I’m not feeling sorry for myself,” Altare moves to sit up, shooting Flayon an incredulous look of his own. “How is that what’s pissing you off, and not any of the other stuff?”
“Because lying about this makes sense. There’s a lot of reasons why you’d want to do that.” Flayon states flatly. “And I dunno if you’ve noticed, but you’re not even in the top 3 rankings for guys in our guild who are obviously hiding something.”
“Having a reason doesn’t excuse it. You’re not stupid, Flayon. You shouldn’t trust me after this.”
“Are you telling me that? Why shouldn’t I? Would it put me in danger? Would it put the guild in danger?”
“No!”
That word is the signle loudest thing Flayon’s ever heard leave Altare’s mouth. Reverberations hang in the space between them, the palpable force of it bordering on unnatural, like the aftershocks of a spell. Flayon bites the inside of his cheek and Altare rubs a hand over his mouth, the frustration clear on his face threatening to shatter his cool boy composure.
“I’d never put you guys in danger.” Altare says, voice dropping low. “You’re my priority. Always.”
Flayon swallows his jealousy, furtively wishing he could say the same.
“Cool, so you’re not keeping us around as human sacrifices for your master plan, thanks for that,” he tries not to wince at the irony. “What’s your problem, then? Is your hero complex telling you that you need to be punished? I don’t do that for free.”
Altare lets his head fall back, heaving a sigh. “I just don’t get you sometimes, Flay.”
“That’s funny, because you’re being totally obvious.”
It’s getting late. Flayon is tired and hungry and bored of Altare’s deeply weird pity party. Being the tortured loner with a dark secret is his schtick, damn it, and Altare isn’t allowed to rewrite his character traits this late in the game. If Flayon’s needs to exposition dump to get them back on track, so be it.
“You got caught doing something bad and you think you deserve to get smacked for it. You thought I was going to flip out and pick apart your story and try to fight you when you wouldn’t give me a straight answer, but that didn’t happen, and now you’re stuck trying to figure out how to make me throw a punch at you. If you won’t give me specifics, why would I waste my time getting mad when you’re not gonna budge? You want me to read off my lines so you can feel like we ticked all the boxes on your story arc?”
“’Doing something bad’,” Altare repeats, dripping with sarcasm. “Flayon, I killed someone.”
“Altare,” he snaps back. “If some random’s trying to kill you, do you think I fucking care what happens to them? If want to pretend you’re too noble to do it, I’ll shoot them myself next time.”
Maybe it’s the exhaustion, the surreal nature of the conversation, or Flayon’s natural inclination for taking a bad situation making it worse. He can’t tell if he’s more insulted by Altare’s response or hurt by its implications— that what Flayon’s trying to do for him, is always trying to do for him, means so little in the grand scheme of his big dumb protagonist plotline.
Flayon’s heart feels like the biggest organ in his body. His bones and sinew have melted together and transformed into one giant, monstrous pulse. Blood vessels override his operating code and he’s done with thinking logically, trying to reason with words. He’s said his piece and this conversation is over, as far as he’s concerned. All that’s left to do is shut Altare up for good.
It doesn’t take much. His brain is off, and Altare is already close enough to slap. Flayon shifts his weight, twisting at his hips to lay his thighs on the ground and use his knees to push himself up. He doesn’t need to go far, and he doesn’t stay for long— a quick, fierce press of their mouths together, and Flayon’s back on earth before the consequences can catch up to him.
Except. They kind of don’t.
Flayon’s higher thought processes reconnect in a matter of microseconds, and that water hose of WHATTHEFUCKWHATTHEFUCKWHATTHEFUCKWHATTHEFUCKDIDYOUJUSTDO absolutely crushes him, embarrassment hitting like a physical blow to the head. He expects the external reaction to sync up soon, an onslaught of sputtering and baby animal noises from the leader of guild TEMPUS in response to getting kissed by a homie that will be starting any minute now.
Yep. Once Altare gets done staring at him with his big, beautiful, soul-piercing eyes, it’s over for Flayon.
Altare’s head tilts to the side, quietly regarding Flayon. A mild breeze rustles the tops of the trees, distant wings beat, and the soft-pawed creatures who call the forest home carry out their nightly routines. Flayon counts the passing seconds with a creeping sense of horror as Altare remains planted firmly in front of him, his expression wiped clean and unreadable.
“Oh.” He says. “For real?”
“Yeah?” Flayon replies before he can stop himself, pride overruling self-preservation.
“Oh,” Altare repeats, suddenly closer than Flayon remembers him. “Hey—”
There’s a hand on the back of his neck, gently cupping the base of his skull, and Flayon’s grasp on reality becomes a dangerously tenuous thing.
The first kiss is short and sweet and straight to the point, a question presented without words. Altare hovers in Flayon’s space, their breath mingling together as he waits for a response. He’s looking at Flayon with a single-minded intensity, a bird of prey about to dive in for the kill, and Flayon dumps every remaining ounce of better judgement he has directly into the garbage when he leans up to give him permission.
Flayon isn’t prepared for the riptide that drags him from the shallows to open water. Altare’s other hand finds the small of his back, heat seeping through the thick fabric of his hoodie, acting as an anchor to keep Flayon upright as Altare starts to kiss him like he means to strip the flesh from his bones.
One kiss leads to another, then another, onto parted mouths and the careful graze of teeth on his lip and that arm Altare has around Flayon’s waist practically dragging him into his lap, and Flayon’s heard the jokes from Axel and Magni about what else H-O-E stands for but what the fuck, how is he doing that with his tongue? Flayon warbles, scrambling to grab Altare by the shoulders, and he can feel Altare’s laughter where they’re almost touching chest to chest.
It's fond, a sugary bubble-pop noise of satisfaction, the kind of pure dopamine injection that kicks Flayon’s engine from neutral to drive. He wants to drink it down, learn the taste and pitch of Altare’s voice so he can tease out more, find his weak spots to make him keen or tear it from his throat. Flayon’s been alone for longer than he’d like to admit, doesn’t know the touch of another human with any genuine desire behind it, but he’s a fast learner. His body is just another machine to be mastered, the control scheme adjusted to suit a new purpose, and he already has the blueprints in his hands— angle your head like this, wet your lips like that, keep your breathing even and eyes clear and stay sharp enough to follow the lead you’re being coaxed along.
Rinse, repeat, return the favor. Flayon chases each kiss until he forgets where he is, the world tilted on its axis as Altare dips him back, threatening to topple them both to the ground if he follows Flayon much further. He feels drunk on affection, dizzy from the rose-tinted fantasy he’s stumbled into. He waits for the clock to chime and the spell to fall from his eyes, but reality never arrives.
“How is this going to work,” Altare pants, still millimeters from Flayon’s face. “If you hate couples?”
“What?”
“I mean, how can I get you to do this again if you’re saving yourself for marriage, but hate seeing couples?”
Flayon wheezes, his cutting-edge mental prowess reduced to a potato battery at an elementary science fair. “I don’t hate … all of them. Just the obnoxious ones.”
“Uh oh,” Altare stage-whispers. “I don’t know how much I can tone it down.”
There is an extremely obvious implication here, one Altare is all but spelling out for him in animated glitter text. Flayon will get to reading it over eventually, once his thoughts finish buffering. Altare seems to pick up on his internal struggle, granting him a rare show of mercy by settling for one last peck on his lips before he moves to disentangle their limbs and stand them both up.
This is the part where he’s supposed to step away and do the tsundere shuffle, say it’s not like he liked sucking Altare’s face or anything, stupid, but Flayon’s only skimmed that part of the instruction manual. He stays crowded in Altare’s space instead, looking up at him expectantly while his tail sways like a pendulum, waiting for direction.
“Sorry about …” Altare glances toward the bloodied tree trunk, the disturbed earth at their feet. “… this. And how I reacted to you trying to help. I was a being jerk.”
“Mm-hmm,” Flayon rocks on his heels. “I’ll accept your apology, if you tell me how you’re gonna make it up to me.”
The atmosphere has shifted, the lingering gloom colored by a fragile new lightness that doesn’t fit the narrative. Guilt nibbles at Flayon, or at least the idea of it, the part of his conscience that remains semi-functional acknowledging that it’s probably not appropriate to be this giddy after cleaning up a possible crime scene.
Flayon’s normal. Flayon loves being normal. It is very difficult for Flayon to be normal when Regis Altare was just kissing him like he meant it.
“You’re really—” He shakes his head, weariness flickering back into view. “Never mind. Can I have some time to think about it?”
“Never mind what?”
“Nothing. It’s not important. Wait, crap, is it really that late?”
Altare’s phone jingles in his pocket, Vesper’s custom bike bell notification sound playing like a bomb going off. The display informs them they’re an hour off from midnight, which is earlier than Flayon guessed, considering the dimension of the hole they had to dig. “What’s he saying? You’ve been texting him since I found you, right?”
“I sent him a message after you told me to, yeah,” which is not what Flayon would call keeping their senior teammate up to date with the situation, but whatever. “I can’t tell if he’s mad. Are you flying back? He’d probably feel better if one of us could get there soon.”
“No.” Flayon’s decision is immediate and final. “I’m not ditching you here after you got ambushed, are you stupid?”
“Aw. I was hoping you’d say it’s because we made out.”
“That’s not funny.”
“I’m serious.”
Heat rises to Flayon’s face, begging him to take the bait, and Altare’s half-cocked smile doesn’t inspire total confidence. He must be obvious, too raw from the lightning round of mood swings to keep himself together, because Altare’s phone is gone in the blink of an eye, his attention fixed entirely on Flayon again.
“I want you here with me, but it’s a long walk, and you’ll be warmer if you get off the ground. The earth cools faster than the air.”
Flayon wrinkles his nose, stopping himself before he can fixate on Altare’s wording. “Are you actually trying to mansplain how temperature works, or is this your attempt at casual dialogue that really has a hidden double meaning?”
“Uh, neither?” Altare says. “Both of those options make me sound bad. Look—"
There’s dirt on Altare’s hands, under his nails, tiny particles of grime that streak across Flayon’s jaw as Altare reaches to cradle his face. His head is titled up, forced to meet Altare eye-to-eye, and Flayon hopes the twisting in his stomach doesn’t become a regular phenomenon.
“It’s a longer trip on foot, and we do it together I’m going to be really annoying at you the entire time, obnoxious couple style. If you need a break, I’m cool with that.” He speaks breezily, as if they’re discussing ice cream or the weather, and Flayon hates him a little for it. Hates himself more, his treacherous body running through a tier list of embarrassing romance-poisoned reactions— weak knees, dry mouth, the whole package.
God, he never took off Altare’s hoodie either. He’s been entrapped in a paw-sleeved torture scenario. Altare is a sick, perverted fuck, and if Flayon doesn’t kiss him more soon he is probably going to explode.
“I’ll be fine.” Flayon grumbles, defeated. “We should start walking if we want to get to town before the sun rises.”
Altare hums, another one of those quiet little grins blooming on his lips, and Flayon can’t keep going like this. His mind can’t take it, wasn’t built for enduring anything but the worst of life’s outcome, and it bend and bucks under the weight of what Altare seems to be offering him. There’s been a mistake, an unpatched bug in the system that’s allowed Flayon to leave the confines his intended environment. The events leading up to this, his choices and conversations all require scrutiny. A crueler, more logical answer is waiting to be revealed as the truth, if Flayon can only dash his hopes enough to find it.
“Is this real?”
Flayon doesn’t dream. That function was disabled lifetimes ago, replaced by an endless stream of nightmares to relentlessly stalk his sleeping hours. He couldn’t recognize a dream if saw one, wouldn’t know how to separate his delusion from reality, but these strange circumstances, Altare’s weird behavior— it fits the bill, doesn’t it? An encapsulation of his own obsessions with death and lust and gratification, topped off with a bow-tied ending?
This has to be a dream. Pure wish fulfillment. Flayon feels a knot in his throat and realizes he’s going to sob like a big stupid baby when he inevitably wakes up.
He grabs Altare’s wrists, fingers digging into his pulse and asks again; “Is this part real?”
It’s a relief when Altare’s expression drops— when he looks at him like he just broke his heart.
“Flayon,” he says, brushing a thumb over his cheek. “Do you want it to be real?”
What Flayon wants has no bearing on what scraps the world decides to throw him, happy to leave every fractured iteration of his soul starving beneath the table. For Altare, he’ll pretend that outcome isn’t set in stone.
“Yeah.” Flayon admits. “I do.”
When Altare kisses him this time, Flayon’s head is crystal clear. He can take in the cool wind raising goosebumps on his legs, the scent of turned earth, the callouses at the base of Altare’s fingers. Do dreams allow aching muscles, he wonders. Would his dreams be able to replicate how carefully precise Altare is with his mouth and touch, the way he holds Flayon like he knows he’s prone to shattering?
“Okay,” Altare breathes out against his skin, soothing the anxious creature inside Flayon that snaps at his reins. “Then let’s make it real.”
Dried blood flakes off Altare’s hands, the last tangible evidence of their shared transgression lost to the dark of the wood. Flayon doesn’t need a physical reminder of what he saw here— he’ll cling to the memory like a drowning man to a raft. Altare said it was real, so it’s real, simple as.
If he ever wakes, at least he’ll have put his faith in a dream that loves him.