I don't even actively ship them. Really.
+Secular Passion+
He likes the dirtiness of the way they fuck; in forgotten corners and abandoned crannies, shreds of soggy cardboard around their feet and sullen rust leaving fingerprints on their backs, memories of old blood and older tears spattered on the hands that pull and grasp and scratch and hold.
So human. So hungry.
Ligur has never been bothered that they don't remember what they were like before they Fell. Hastur thinks Ligur must have been a putto—one of those fluffy-feathered child angels scattering luck and love with every pit and pat of their chubby feet, all innocence and guile at once—until he grew up, fell down and got back on his feet with the mud of the Pit holding down his wings.
If he's unusually honest with himself, Hastur doesn't think about it much either, most of the time. Memories are for people who can afford to be sad.
He thinks about it in those times, though, when they're inside instead, in bed instead, under a threadbare stolen quilt. Once in Russia it had been a bearskin coat great enough for the two of them. (They'd hated Russia—all the biting cold and pious old women—though it gave them a good excuse to keep each other warm.) In those times they're quieter, sometimes almost silent. Their movements and the sound of breaths they can't keep back are the only thing that gives them away to the empty air, and when Hastur does think he realizes how small Ligur's hands are as they slip between his legs or over his shoulders; how soft his legs as they curl and cross and spread under his palms; how round the curve of his spine when it's over as it always is and they're lying against each other trying to adjust to being two separate beings once more.
And then, in that dangerous quiet, he wonders what it is they're doing there. What it is they've become.
But then Ligur will turn his face up and grin—that deceptively boyish face, almost cartoonish behind the cynical lines it's set in—and lay his mouth over Hastur's. The taste of flecks of ash will bring back memories of the cigarettes they'd finished off like self-destructive chocolates, getting drunk on the back-alleyness of themselves and everything around them, and he'll know—
It doesn't matter where they were before.
Only where they've been since then.
