This story contains spoilers for Gilgamesh episodes 6 and 15 in the third text block. (Not that that block will make sense to the reader who hasn't seen at least that far, anyway.) It also contains slash. It is rated for sexual content and terroristic themes.
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He found Octo on the patio, standing outside in the dark of a dusk that was unseasonably warm and still, just like the air is before a storm. Under the sheltering sky that reflected the twinkling lights of distant skyscrapers, his pale face glowed white behind his wild chocolate-brown hair, which looked as inky black as his clothes in this half-light.
His face was turned away from Sex, but Sex could see enough of it to tell the gloomy expression that always hung about the other's features in front of the rest was absent as he stared at something caught in his cupped white hands.
Sneaking up behind him, Sex was able to make out a tiny shape moving dark against those hands. It was fuzzy, like a mouse; but closer inspection showed it to be no mouse at all, unless a mouse with wings. A tiny bat clung shivering to the creases of his palms, nibbling at a bit of mashed banana on his thumb. Silent as a shadow, Sex watched its pink tongue flicker in and out over Octo's shoulder, the small leather wings flex as it moved to find better handholds. It must have tickled, because a small smile tugged at Octo's lips and he exhaled sharply.
He cupped his hands around the little bat and put them up to his ear, like a child puts a seashell to his ear to hear the sea. But what could he hear from the sonar of a bat?
Knowing Octo, everything.
It was chirping faintly in that white chamber his hands made. At least, that was what part of its song was of frequencies low enough for Sex to pick up. Like picking up snatches of a whispered conversation. That tiny bat with its grotesque little face was whispering something in Octo's ear. Like a scene out of a Disney cartoon, inverted.
Wanting to hear it himself, Sex rested the side of his face against the back of Octo's head. The other pretended not to notice him, but Sex could see the smile blossoming on his face in his mind, which was the only place Octo had no control over.
He closed his eyes. But theirs was a secret Octo didn't want to share. He put his hands down before his chest and opened them flat and the bat flew away.
Two could play that game, Sex thought.
—o—
Octo arched his back against the white wrinkled sheets of a bed in an upstairs bedroom. His hands grasped air as Sex blindly undid the buckles of his coat one by one, but that wasn't what made him gasp and close his eyes in ecstasy.
Sex managed to knock that gloomy expression off his face fairly well on his own. His tongue flickered in and out of Octo's ear like the tongue of the bat. His breath echoed like a litany in Octo's mind, his pouty lips worshiping the shape of Octo's ear. His own formless whispers weren't nearly as pure as those of that tiny creature.
Nothing else existed at that moment but that singular point of contact. Not their mission. Not Novem, who might have been downstairs waiting, or might have been standing in the doorway watching them—they didn't care. Just this young man who was like his brother but not his brother, like himself but not himself. Humbled by Sex, but not humbled at all: he was getting everything he wanted.
The last buckle came free and Sex slid his hand underneath the folds of black fabric, curling around Octo's waist and freeing the pale skin of his abdomen from the darkness that clothed them in the process. Like that time long ago when they were surrounded by only light, when they shared the same womb, the same tomb, in innocent nakedness.
He had shed his own coat some time before. The reflected light drifting in through the window danced across his bare back as Octo's hand moved slowly across it, caressing the column of his neck to rest at the back of Sex's head. He tilted his face toward Sex's and met that talented mouth with his mouth that tasted like hot chocolate, setting the sensitive flesh tingling with tense anticipation. Behind the fabric of his trousers, beneath the Sanskrit mark that disappeared under their waistband, the bulge of Sex's erection pressed into Octo's thigh.
Two long fingers entered him, reaching for heaven, and Octo's mouth fell open against Sex's in a silent moan. He lifted his hips so abruptly the old bed frame gave a single creak of protest, the only sound save for the hush of their heavy breathing. His nails dug into Sex's scalp, fingers twisting in strands of hair the color of ochre, and wild as licking flames.
—o—
"We only need one of us to reach the reactor," Novem's voice echoed in his mind as he flew through the bowels of the structure. "It doesn't matter which one."
But it did to Sex, and he was going to be it. He made sure of that.
The ducts and cables of the core of this modern day Tower of Babel arched and twisted through its cavernous space like the viscera of a giant. He could feel its vibrating heartbeat in the machinery around him, hear the distant hiss of its inhalations and exhalations. As though the scientists had yoked some ancient colossus to these artificial parts. Like Prometheus himself, the Demiurge with fingers encased in twisting steel pillars, reaching for heaven.
And he would bring it all down with a touch.
He alighted on one of those mammoth steel intestines, bracing himself in what footholds its seams provided. A fresh flow of warm blood trickled down his arm beneath the sleeve of his coat. He suppressed a wince as he put his other hand to his shoulder to assess the damage. He was cut deep, through nerve and muscle, but it didn't matter. He only needed one hand for what he had to do.
The click of robotic feet sounded behind him. One thing to say for those doll-hounds of Mitleid, they were fast. And efficient. He leaped away from their stinging lasers, toward the heart of the tower, the reactor itself. Upon reaching it he dropped to one knee, and placed his blood-smeared hand over its apex. It had a savage beat under his palm that made his own heart beat faster in excitement, but not for much longer.
He didn't care that they soon had him surrounded on that convex platform. They were too late: he had reached his objective. They could go ahead and fire at him. He wasn't going anywhere, except down. Whatever those unholy chimeras of a diseased human race did now, the last laugh would be his.
A wicked grin tugged at the corners of his mouth. A clarity of purpose entered his gentle gray eyes that was more characteristic of Octo than himself. He, this body, was an instrument not of destruction but of neutralization. Octo had taught him that by example. He did not go to death, but to oblivion, and the afflictions mankind had made for itself went with him, removed like a thorn from their side by his grace, though they hardly deserved it. In a single spectacular burst of atomic energy.
For the Professor. And for Octo, whom he was not about to let outshine him where it mattered most.
As his body penetrated the reactor, he thought he could already see the tower collapsing into the vacuum he made, before everything became white.