I saw two shades frozen in a single hole
packed so close, one head hooded the other one;
the way the starving devour their bread, the soul
above had clenched the other with his teeth
where the brain meets the nape.
(Canto XXXII, lines 124–29)
Dante Alighieri, upon encountering Duke Ugolino gnawing on the skull of Archbishop Ruggieri, in the final circle of Hell...
that color looks good on you...
Solf J. Kimblee wakes to a slate sky, the taste of ash in his mouth, and the sidewalk shattered under his shoes.
He spits. The saliva lies in the dirt for a moment, and then it vanishes, sucked in, subsumed by the gray earth.
He staggers onto the asphalt, takes a hissing breath as he nearly overbalances. Once righted, he looks around. To his left, the road slopes up between a plot of hollow gray husks he hesitates to call trees. He turns in the other direction, moving downward, towards a city in the distance.
A single live street lamp lights five dead ones –– two with broken globes. Gray dominates everything, as though the sky has broken and all the color has leaked through the cracks. Even the streetlights seem dull and diluted.
Kimblee climbs a tilted slab of concrete that jerks once under him, rumbling like a thing living. He watches pebbles roll off its edge, hears them clink over cracked plumbing, then splash somewhere in the darkness. He vaults to a more solid stretch, the stone's fractures mortared with black grass.
There are no lights in any of the nearby buildings, but beyond the veils of smoke, he imagines he sees fire, a glow without burning, staining the darkness orange. Accustomed to the smell of cinders, he has to breathe deeply to notice it. Particles of pumice and ash dance on the inbound breeze. The smoke isn't yet thick enough to see or cast the sky in any darker hue, but it layers his tongue with a woody fragrance, reminding Kimblee, strangely, of preserving salmon in the autumn.
A sudden blast of wind roars across the empty sky, and he is forced to acknowledge the bitter, biting cold for the first time.
Frost licks at his face and creeps under his clothes, spreading across his skin like the lacy tide on a frigid winter beach. With lips tinged blue and gently chattering teeth, he wraps his coat a touch tighter around himself. His breath billows in the air. He continues his descent into the city.
He wonders if some miracle occurred in the world's creation, some subtle shifting in the fabric of reality accounting for the city's being. It has grown implacably, spreading its concrete and alloy fingers wide over dark and feral country. Mountains stamped flat. Rivers dammed off. Marshes filled. The animals shot from the trees and then the trees cut down. Giant pillars of concrete and metal towering high like calcified fingers from broken and casted hands, pointing towards something they will never touch, their decay the only marker of time in a place of uncounted days.
The sky is all haze, purple and distended, like fresh bruises. It is night; the streets are dark, bombed-out, abandoned. For a long time, he wanders aimlessly –– past ruined parks, blasted statuary, vacant lots overgrown with weeds and collapsed tenement houses with rusted girders poking from their sides like ribs. He picks through the decay and yearns to shake the stone and gray light from his skin, slough it off like water. He wants to become one with the dark fecundity of the city, the deep, silent well of its womb, the lapping of the black waters of the night. He wants to become a part of the darkness, freckled with stars and trailing comets somewhere beyond the ash-choked sky. To be so utterly incomprehensible and eloquent at the same time.
Dim light slathers his tongue and teeth. He imagines tasting it like blood in his mouth. Another street lamp, blocks down, renders him in momentary silhouette.
Kimblee cranes his neck, trying to discern a horizon. The city is fractal, the architecture iterative. Every street is a mirror image of its predecessor, so it feels as though, as he walks, he is going nowhere at all. The cadence of his steps cuts across the silence, the vibrant immobility, tensed like a bow. Pumice crunches underfoot; his shoes crush it into a fine white powder. His trail through the empty streets leaves prints in the detritus. But when the he looks back, the falling ash has already buried them. As though erasing all traces of him.
He steps inside one of the buildings. It was a laboratory, once, or a museum. The marble is cracked. The few stretches of wallpaper are stale and peeling; he can smell the damp wafting through the screed. Converging staircases seem to move in all the wrong directions around a central rotunda. As he watches, a ceiling tile detaches and shatters against the veined floor. He tries to count the seconds it takes for the piece to fall, but the sound of the landing is lost under his own breathing. Other pieces of furniture –– chaise-lounges and chiavari chairs and resin tables –– are piles of splinters in the basin of the rotunda. Springs burst through the moldering velvet cushioning like exposed intestines.
Instead of oil paintings or stuffed and mounted animals, medical curiosities in formaldehyde or insects crucified on corkboard, on the walls, butcher gaffs swing gently. Kimblee's nose twitches.
Dozens of bodies hang from the hooks, the tips spearing the soft flesh under their jaws and protruding up through their tongues. In the chill air their eyes have frozen over, their tears forming crusts that fill the cups beneath their eyebrows. Black, brackish blood flows slowly, thick and sluggish, from slashes across their stomachs; coils of glistening gray spill from the rends in the pale, pellucid flesh. Kimblee spots maggots, flecks of doughy white, nestling within the mangled folds, squirming feverishly in the gore. He approaches one of the bodies… its lips blue, its skin gray, eyes dull with exploded pupils under the ice.
Kimblee remembers every name he has ever heard, every face in every crowd, and yet, staring at the lines of dead bodies, his memory fails him. Whether for lack of recognition or simple forgetfulness, he does not know these people.
In a way, it is fitting, he supposes, to have come to a museum. To a place antithetical to the persistence of memory. There is something honest in a museum's tendency towards forgetfulness, luring their voyeurs into ambiguous if not entirely false histories. Human beings are a species obsessed with itself, with its own past and origins. Capable of removing from the sanctuary of the earth shards and fragments, and placing them in museums. Powerful empires seeking to claim symbols of antiquity and colonialism to burnish their own national mythmaking.
Bodies. Baubles. Everything is rendered ornamental in the gray decay of the city.
He passes on, deeper into the museum.
Kimblee's footfalls echo on the stone floors. Rhythm seems the only thing secure, a ritual ascendance resounding on and on through a world without a sun, without light, without life. The museum holds something, he knows, and he craves it without the bother of reason. The yearning is a dangerous illumination, like the glint of a needle in his eye.
He comes across a silhouetted figure –– bowed, formless, indistinct under a damask of shadow –– hunched near an exhibit in a glass case. It gleams in a small circle of flickering light, cast from a single bulb dangling from the ceiling.
Kimblee's eyes narrow in consideration. In the case is a machine revolving slowly on a turntable, an orrery with metal parts that slide in and out and collapse in and on themselves to form new images. He distinguishes in the intricate clockwork Valentine's hermetics. The symbols for sal ammoniac. Aqua regia. The squared circle. The array for Human Transmutation.
Alchemy passing beneath his eyes, changing every moment.
All these rusty arguments, he muses, and no quarrel to use them in.
He hears a grunt from near his feet, and he turns again to the silhouetted figure.
A deep breath makes his tongue stagger momentarily in his throat.
Figures, plural, Kimblee corrects himself, squinting through the haze.
He had not recognized them as separate beings because they are... coupled below the waist.
Though he saw through to the last sign and symbol of the strange clockwork orrery, he struggles to read the two faces boring into his own. For a moment, he finds himself drawn to their shining eyes –– huge and luminous like those of nocturnal beasts, as though he is swimming behind them in the effluvia of their incandescent vision.
The first, the one on the bottom, breathes thinly, raggedly, labored with sex. A constellation of sweat gleams on each temple. His mouth moves, his head dips, rises again; his eyes seal, snap open, stare intently, tracing the abrasions in the marble. It's a beautiful face, notes Kimblee. Well defined, with a sharp jaw and angular cheekbones. He's a little above medium height, of well-knit frame, with an alabaster complexion. He has the long, thin brows, shading pensive eyes, that one would look for in a poet or a philosopher rather than a soldier. Yet, the man wears a blue uniform –– at least, from the waist up. The shoulders tell Kimblee the man holds the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.
Oblivious to Solf's study, the Soldier pushes back shamelessly, taking his pleasure as arrogantly as the figure mounting him.
It takes Kimblee a moment to note that the Lieutenant-Colonel's neck is in the other man's mouth.
The one doing the fucking and the biting is a long, lithe creature, features sharp and perfectly proportioned, his nose deliciously interrogative at the tip. His bound hair spills over one muscular shoulder, paralleling the long, bowed lines of his legs. He is very slender, erect; there is something hungry and feral in his strange, wolfish eyes.
The man turns and smiles –– blood stuck in his teeth, the Soldier's neck crunching in his mouth. The flash of white is so painfully swift and fleeting that it slices the air like a knife. Kimblee is reminded of the frozen bodies down the corridor, with their intestines pouring from their slit stomachs onto the floor.
"You're dying," mouths the Monster to Kimblee. His fierce, lupine eyes glint a burnished gold like torchlight boiling in obsidian.
The clean arch of his pelvis thrusts aggressively against his catch. He begins to laugh –– a hideous, discordant sound like a rooster with its head on the block. The tightening of his abdomen winds him so much that he has to spit out the Soldier's neck for a moment to catch his breath, the tears streaming from his eyes.
Kimblee's hand goes to his own throat. The blood doesn't gush in a constant cascade, but in time with the beating of his heart. An ebb. At first it flows thick and strong, seeping between his fingers as they probe curiously at the ripped flesh, before thinning to a trickle. He feels something shift under his hand that ought not to have shifted, the viscous fluid no warmer or cooler than his own skin. After a few moments, the blood continues to drip down his rapidly paling throat, but the pulses are slower, weaker.
Solf's eyes flicker down. His suit is a vivid crimson, clinging heavily to him, the smell humid and rusty. His neck is open, the wounds deep enough that the white of his spine is visible.
The golden-eyed figure strokes the inside of the Lieutenant-Colonel's thigh, and the Soldier shivers, cock twitching either at the coolness of the air or the proximity of the man taking him from behind. It seems to Kimblee as though the Soldier will let himself be consumed until he is nothing more than the Monster's foundry, a crucible of ingredients and a perfect ratio of precipitants ready to combust.
Kimblee watches the pair with some small wonder, unmindful of the coppery sting filling his nostrils –– his blood, or that of the blue-eyed Lieutenant-Colonel. It is difficult to tell.
The teeth around the Soldier's neck bite down, hard. The Lieutenant-Colonel swallows against the pressure, but he can't choke down a soft moan as the new angle allows his partner to thrust a little deeper. The man with the rapacious grin traces his hand up the hard arch of the Soldier's spine and brings it to rest against a single sharp hipbone, directing each plunge until the Soldier's muscles seize and spasm.
Kimblee gets his first glimpse of the Monster's palm. For reasons he does not yet know, he isn't entirely surprised to see a lunar sigil tattooed in indigo ink. A radial corolla of triangles and circles fans out from the man's flesh, the only perfect shapes in a world of fracture and fissure. The city, with all its impossible variegations, coupled with the basic miracle of its existence, renders that simple detail in sharp relief. Kimblee suspects it is the lure that has brought him to this place.
Those two figures –– devouring one another, each consuming the other, learning to taste the animal in the meat, the waters and sugars in the sweat, their finer discriminations honed by their slow ripening –– exist outside their gray, decaying world as Kimblee exists outside the bounds of his own civilized society. He is, in an instant, filled with a perverse love for the pair. As though in that carnal act there is contained the secret of his own resurrection. Kimblee finds himself drawn to the motion. To the sounds –– grunts and gasps and the slap of flesh and the slow drip of blood. He has a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of bestial repulsiveness, which to him constitutes the beauty of the performance. Whatever sets them apart, renders them abhorrent, endears itself to him.
Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one lurches out of a nightmare, Kimblee succeeds in transmuting his voyeuristic curiosity, his philosophic detachment, into a desperately passionate hunger. Vivid, almost painfully detailed hallucinations flash through his mind. He wants, then, to ravish the arrogant, dangerous creature with the wolf-gold eyes and make him explode at the moment of climax. The absolution is suddenly clear to him, as sharp as shattered crystal, translucent in his understanding that the men, the museum, the city itself are the highest forms of his madness, that each and every part, organic or inorganic, is an expression of his heresy. He feels, absurdly, like a human spore, a dead sponge of life swollen to saturation. Cast adrift amidst the chaos.
Kimblee doesn't notice one of them finish until the Soldier murmurs, his voice gravel-rough from his waning orgasm: "He's not dead yet..."
"It's only a matter of time," growls the golden-eyed man, before running his tongue over the rends in the Lieutenant-Colonel's throat, lapping at the bleeding. Scowling, he launches a chunk of white gristle from between his teeth. "Elegant bastard's near about drained dry."
"He's tenacious. Perhaps––" the Lieutenant-Colonel braces his elbows on the floor as though to stand.
"Fuck you!" snarls the Monster, with bestial viciousness, yanking the Soldier's hips flush with his groin. "I'm not finished!"
"What happened?" the Soldier asks Kimblee, ignoring the obscenities spat by his companion.
Solf crosses his arms, the once-dry crease of fabric rendered damp and heavy by the blood pouring from his throat. "Much the same as what's happening to you," he notes benignly.
The Soldier's mouth purses in a tight, bloodless little smile. He arches one slender eyebrow as he queries, cool as a cucumber, "Getting fucked by an alchemist?"
Kimblee makes a sound of concession in his larynx, a thoughtful hmm that isn't quite a laugh. "In a manner of speaking." Then, nodding his head towards the other's neck, he adds: "No, I was more referring to this creature's teeth around your throat."
"I see…" the Soldier's gaze narrows shrewdly. "If my knowledge of field medicine serves me, despite the inordinate degree of blood-loss, you're not expiring from exsanguination. Your windpipe has been crushed, yes? You're suffocating to death."
Kimblee works out a catch in his shoulders, rolling his neck and reveling the cool air on his exposed tonsils. "So it would seem. Panthera leo."
The Soldier nods, and the Monster's head bobs along with the motion, his teeth holding tight as he goes hell-bent for leather towards his completion.
How perverse, notes Kimblee mildly. Some erotic form of hatred.
"That is where we differ," continues the Lieutenant-Colonel, oblivious. "In my case, I suspect Zolf's incisors aren't likely to affect any permanent damage."
The furrowing of Kimblee's brow betrays doubt. He tilts his head at an angle to get a better look. "I can see the bones of your cervical vertebrae, Lieutenant-Colonel."
"And I can see your vocal chords flapping in the wind," counters the Soldier with a quick tongue and a sharp look. "Around here, being dead is as commonplace as catching a chill."
"Here..."
"A cradle hanging above an abyss," he intones gravely. The Soldier's deep voice turns ruminative. "And common sense tells me that our being here and now is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. I imagine most view the prenatal oblivion with far more calm than the one we are destined for… however, we are not like most men, are we?"
Kimblee looks deep into the Soldier's eyes, unblinking, plumbing their depths for some deception. Something about the Lieutenant-Colonel's carefully-crafted self-possession tells Solf emotional manipulation and falsehood do not run counter to any instinct for managing reality with plain and simple honesty. The Soldier seems the sort predisposed to deviousness. But Kimblee can recognize a deception with the same ease the Soldier can craft one.
And he senses none.
"What is your name?"
"Super-ego."
"Don't patronize me. I won't keep you around long enough to regret it."
A wry smile. "Archer," he concedes.
"And his? And don't say id."
The officer, Archer, blinks languidly. "You ought to know."
"You said a name, earlier. My name."
"His name."
"I'm not sure I like you two nattering on as though I'm not here," growls the golden-eyed man –– Zolf. He untangles himself from Archer, slowly, his cock sliding free with a molten leisure that makes the Lieutenant-Colonel shiver; the Soldier narrows his already thin mouth, glaring daggers, almost in disapproval.
Kimblee snickers at the sight: a man of Archer's composure, so cultured in appearance and manner, being fucked from behind by the lean, wofish creature with the tow-colored eyes.
Zolf stretches. He is stiff from hunching over his catch. Standing on tiptoe, shoulders straining back, he languishes in the luxury of his tensing muscles. He interlaces his fingers and flashes two violet sigils, lunar and solar. Kimblee studies them –– and him –– without comment.
The man's hair is midnight black, glistening like moonlight on still water. His eyes seem almost to glow in the low-hanging haze, burning a bright, fragmented yellow, like candlelight behind a pane of broken glass. He is tanner than Solf, though not taller. He has Solf's prominent cheekbones and well-defined nose, but is slighter, skinnier.
Something about him gives Solf pause. He cannot define with any precision what it is about the man that telegraphs the vague sense of discomposure. There is an element of discordance, of absence about him, like a record catching. Zolf presents a subtly constructed reflex mechanism who can mimic the human personality perfectly… so perfectly, in fact, that Kimblee cannot deconstruct the reproduction in any scientific or objective terms. He cannot say definitely why, or how, but the man standing before him feel fractured. Incomplete.
Solf stares at the narrow tilt of his shoulders, at the curve of his spine, at his long legs. He is lithe and lean, his frame padded with sleek, powerful muscle. It occurs to Kimblee then that if he tries to run, Zolf will be upon him before he manages to take more than a few steps.
"I had forgotten," mewls Zolf, "forgotten how insanely good it feels. It isn't just two bodies coming into contact for pleasure alone. It's the sense of getting inside that person, turning sex into a fucking revelation. A rapid chemical combustion."
"Must you relate everything to alchemy?" grouses Archer, cleaning himself up with a weary, practiced hand.
Zolf bares his teeth. "To explode or to implode... that is the question," he quotes, mockingly; Archer scowls. "whether 'tis nobler in the mind to expand one's energies in space without restraint, or to crush them into a dense inner concentration and, by ingesting, cherish them."
Kimblee takes a step towards the pair –– the clean-shaven, soft-spoken Soldier and the feral, leering madman with Solf's own name. "Who are you?" he asks quietly, peering between them with flinty indigo eyes.
"I don't believe that's for us to say," mutters Archer, picking come from his fingernails.
Kimblee frowns; he is an old hand at denying others a straight answer but ill-accustomed to being denied one himself. "Then who are you to each other?"
Archer shrugs. "Him and I are our own requisites. Some prefer wildness... Others calm. There's enough of both in the world for everyone to have their choice. But not enough time for any to change their minds once they'd been made up..."
Zolf wears wickedness well on his thin face. "You're too curious for your own good, Solf." He leers, eyes dragging deliberately over Kimblee's face, his bloodied suit, his tattooed hands... and lower still.
Kimblee's lip curls. "Curiosity keeps me sharp, like a sword against a whetstone. You, on the other hand, have all the edge of a blunt butterknife."
Zolf pads closer, the hems of his too-long trousers susurrusing against the marble floor, his black shirt skin-tight against his torso, until his gristly latissimus dorsi rear from his back like furled wings. He pauses when he's less than two feet away from Kimblee. "Go on, then." He sneers. He sticks his hands into his trouser pockets, rocks back on his heels. "Dazzle me with your perspicuity. Though you had better make it quick, old boy. I suspect your larynx is not long for your pretty words."
Archer looks at his companion quizzically, as though unused to Zolf's concession and less so his inquisitiveness. After a moment, he shrugs, then folds his arms and leans against the wall, under one of the butcher's hooks. And there the Soldier stays, his gaze distant, as though unable to decide between watching the violent frisson between the two alchemists or accepting the lure of the strange, silent freedom to be found in the world outside.
"I remember a story from a lecture I attended a long time ago…" says Kimblee quietly, beginning a slow pace around the other alchemist; he feels the wolf-gold eyes tracking him in his orbit: "a damned soul eating the back of another man's head like a dog using its teeth to gnaw a bone. His hatred for his companion is so strong that he is compelled to devour even that which holds no substance. It is, if nothing else, an interesting judicial arrangement, for the damned soul is allowed some closure for the betrayal that he himself was forced to suffer in life, and thus he is allowed to act as torturer for all eternity. Both men suffer the torments of the damned in the traitors' hell, but one is given the right to oppress whilst the other gets the back of his neck nibbled..."
Kimblee comes to rest a little behind Zolf, until he can feel a few stray hairs –– strands having come loose from the man's long tail –– tickling his nose. Zolf smells, thinks Solf, like ammonium nitrate and sulphur. He ghosts his lips over the back of Zolf's head and revels in the faint trembling of the latter's body.
"There is a very moving passage in particular where the soul makes no attempt to exonerate himself of the crime for which he is condemned to damnation. He instead wishes to defame his enemy and elicit compassion from his captive audience by recounting the brutal manner in which he was killed..."
"Is that what you're after, then?" hums Zolf, his fingers curling. "Brutality."
"For us," says Solf quietly, gaze roving over the exquisitely feral form of his counterpart, "to deem our work elegant, it is not enough that it feign sophistication. It must be beautiful. It must be uncomplicated."
"A violent and destructive shattering," breathes Zolf, gooseflesh erupting beneath his sleeves. "And you would know all about elegance, wouldn't you? It's the perfect guise to mask that incessant little itch inside your head. For shame, Solf..." he throws Kimblee a glower, his chin jutting forward defiantly, almost in challenge, "we shouldn't have to get off behind smokescreens. We need to feel skin on skin, smell the blood and shit as we get ourselves off, eh?"
A murmur of consideration: "An itch, hmm... tell me, would you have me scratch it?"
In Kimblee's peripheries, Archer looks up sharply, intrigued, though not concerned.
Zolf's lupine eyes flutter half-shut and he croons, low in his throat. "I would have you rake your talons into it until it bled... until your fingers came away with flesh under the nails."
"Yours, or mine?"
"Both... it doesn't matter. I imagine we taste quite the same. Would you like to know what it feels like, Crimson Alchemist... to be devoured?"
"You haven't the appetite for me. Your eyes are bigger than your stomach."
"Arrogant bastard."
"Quite."
Kimblee runs a hand down Zolf's back. He pauses, calculates the relative quantities of combustive matter under his hand, then allows a touch of transmutational energy to heat the skin of his palm. Zolf hisses as his black shirt begins to smolder, but does not flinch away.
Solf inhales deep breaths filled with freezing, ashy air and watches the gray light cast streaks across the taut muscle and pink patches of burnt flesh.
"You know..." says Kimblee lowly, his hand rising, reaching up under Zolf's clothes, tracing the smooth curves of ribs, a bony sternum. His hand rests around the Monster's throat, angles his head towards his mouth... "The nature of our heresy demands that the simplicity we display be hard won, that our alchemy flows from the resolution of a demanding technical or natural predicament. An elegance that is born, in essence, from brutality."
"I take it you're suggesting we admire starkly simple works that we intuit would ahhha..." Zolf makes a small, keening sound as Solf nibbles on an earlobe... "without the e-efficacy of our skill, have appeared very, ah... complicated."
"Perhaps that's why your Lieutenant-Colonel likes you so much," whispers Solf. "Because, my dear, in our line of work, opposites meet. It's not the cold, passionless ones who become great ascetics, but the most hot-blooded... people with something worth confessing."
With one hand around Zolf's throat, the other wanders south, over the flat plane of the Monster's abdomen, worming under his waistband... Kimblee's eyes close as the man under his ministrations lets out a long, ragged sigh.
Somewhere in the assault of sensations, Solf thinks the two of them have been scattered along the line of a distant horizon... two ceaseless voyagers. Trying to retain their lost bodies like point digits in an equation of perversion and madness. They have grown beyond their own deaths, spiritually bright and hard. They are divided into endless yesterdays, endless tomorrows, resting on the cusp of a singularity, a wall with many windows, but the building burned to ash.
"Get on with it, bastard," Zolf grits out through clenched teeth.
For a moment, Kimblee considers remonstrating him for his rudeness. Instead, he puts his lips to Zolf's neck, and bites, hard.
He feels the Monster's spine arching into his chest, the muscles of his back tensing and his stomach knotting as Kimblee strokes him harder, faster. Zolf's length is red-hot and rigid in his hand, a pleasant friction against the alchemical seal on his palm. Zolf's head falls back against Kimblee's shoulder, presenting an exquisite canvas of corded flesh for his teeth to tug and tear.
His grip on the Monster's throat grows tighter until Solf can discern small red crests in his skin. Zolf alternates between high, breathless whines and chest-deep growls, between greed and patience, both prostrate and erect... his lack of harmony, the discordance of his motions and melodies grates against Solf's inner ear like a broken piano. The dissonance cuts harshly between each chord. The tone alone demands some resolution through a specific leading voice, which Zolf refuses to provide with any degree of consistency. Out of stubbornness, spite, the sheer inability to appreciate the piquancy of their musical tuning... the reasons hardly matter. The end result remains the same: Solf being unable to enjoy himself quite as much as he would have done with certain other conquests...
Their faces flash briefly in Kimblee's mind –– a pair of black eyes, a pair of ochre, the smell of a walnut stock and the friction of ignition cloth, two beings sad and weary and so exquisitely damaged –– before Zolf's trembling and quaking –– like a colt breaking into a canter –– demands his full attention.
Zolf is a person who believes that the pursuit of pleasure is the most important thing in life. He has no control, no discipline. He is both alluring and abhorrent, like silver in a mine. Bereft of polish and presentation, he is jagged, dirty. Sharp.
"I think, someday, you're going become something truly beautiful," he says, voice low-pitched and slightly hoarse against Zolf's ear. "But" he adds, maliciously, "destruction isn't just a pleasure, a transient satisfaction. It's a need, a deep hunger; and when the music is right, it's joy––"
Harder.
"––a mainstay of consolation––"
Longer.
"––a foretaste of heaven––"
Faster.
"––love..."
His eyes black with dilated pupils, lips pulled back in a snarl, Zolf demands: "Is that the best you've got?"
Kimblee shelves his indignation and complies, until he can feel his hands beginning to cramp where they've tightened to the point of pain around Zolf's throat and cock, though the Monster doesn't seem to mind terribly.
"Yes..." he groans, before pushing himself into Kimblee's hand, his cock sliding across the sigil, the glide almost effortless... "Fuck," he gasps, keening against Kimblee's cheek. Solf can see the deep frown in Zolf's forehead, his mouth parted in a small moue of pleasure to keep himself from screaming outright.
Kimblee closes his eyes. Everything, then, in each moment, seems to follow its successor with dead certainty, even in the midst of their chaotic gyrations. The perfect inevitability is like an embryonic fluid of which he drinks deeply, relishing the suffocation. It is smooth and fecundating. In everything he sees its opposite, its contradiction, and between the real and the unreal, the irony, the paradox.
One hand on Zolf's throat, the other on his cock, Kimblee envisions a cascade of neutrons converting into protons, high-energy electrons ejecting from the nuclei of Zolf's atoms as β particles. He feels the energy churn his stomach, a heat pooling in his groan.
The Monster shudders violently as he comes.
Then he screams violently as he explodes.
Blood –– among other things –– coats Kimblee's front, near indistinguishable from his own if not for the difference in temperature. In the darkness, his hands barely glisten red, instead, under the flickering gray light, the stains appear almost black. He is entranced by the new color of his skin. The soft, sucking sound of gore between his fingers reminds him of wet mud. He feels a tautening in his belly, yellow light dancing behind his eyelids...
"That was needlessly vicious, don't you think?"
Kimblee –– front, face, hands caked in red –– turns towards the Soldier. Archer betrays nothing of rage or horror or even mild upset as he brushes a few errant spots of blood from his own lapel. He pushes himself from the wall, ducks to avoid the reach of the butcher's gaff, then steps over the slippery refuse that remains of Zolf J. Kimbley.
"You know what's going to happen," breathes Solf haggardly; he looks down at himself, trying and failing to mask his surprise, even if the expression sums to little more than a twitch of his lips. The tenting in his trousers he had not entirely anticipated.
If Archer notices that the alchemic combustion has turned Kimblee half-hard, he is too polite, or too cautious, to make any mention of it.
"You're dying," he says instead, parroting his former tormentor's –– his deceased lover's –– words. "The implications of which are, frankly, unambiguous."
Kimblee begins to pant. He feels a phantom pain around his throat, an ache that goes bone-deep. His wrists and waist burn as though someone has twined him with heated piano wire. "It's going to consume me," he mutters, the words poison. "The Homunculus."
"You already knew that."
Kimblee wipes the sticky residue from his lips, smearing red across the back of his hand. "
"You exist in time," says Archer, with a patience that could have gone on for an eternity, if it could, "but, like us, you belong to this city. Here, now, you are a penetration of a mortal life into a world where your consciousness knows no death."
"That little monster died easily enough." He tastes the blood and intestines in his teeth, feels the sting of it sloughing into his eyes.
"We were never really alive to begin with, were we?" The Lieutenant-Colonel's gaze tilts towards the ceiling, up through the gray clouds, into whatever lies above and beyond the city and the stars. "But you have a unique body and mind, with a particular history and fortitude. No one can offer you a formula for navigating what awaits you. Only by listening inwardly can you discern at any given time what will most serve your survival."
Kimblee's eyes glitter dangerously. "If I am to keep my sanity amidst a tempest of souls, then I can ill-afford stowaways."
Kimblee knows, then, that he cannot leave this place, because he is this place; he prowls the canyons and caverns of the city as he prowls the warrens of his own self. For so long, his life has consisted of a series of internal labyrinths, twisted deep within his very being, where compasses do not exist and technology is unable to create devices better than the best of yesterday. His knowledge is his only means of navigation; control, strict self-governance, the only string pulling him through the maze.
Archer's words silence him, steady him. Anticipation lifts within him like the fragance of a garden under the rain. For a moment, Solf Kimblee allows his eyes to flutter shut. He stands still, searching for the music Zolf will never hear, composing a symphony of triumph inside his mind. The notes flow up, the essence and the form of upward motion, embodying his every act and thought that had transcendence as its motive. In the darkness of the city, it is a sunburst of sound as strident and violent as any alchemical transmutation. It has the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It seems to sweep space clean, and leaves nothing but the joy of his unobstructed efforts. Only a faint echo within the sound speaks of that artless parasite –– that Monster with the wolf-gold eyes –– from which the music was born. But the language is one of laughing astonishment at the discovery that there is no longer any ugliness or perversion, and there never has to be. Never, ever again.
It is a song of immense deliverance.
"I have to be free of you both."
Archer inclines his head and murmurs, "My thoughts exactly."
Solf resolves himself, then, to peeling back the layers of the city, picking away monolith and pavingstone like a surgeon cutting out a carcinoma. He is going to starve it, and starve with it, in order to endure.
Though it does seem, in some way, incredibly foolish. To abide just to die.
And to die so easily.
His sigh is a soft deflating; it is as through a tension has lifted from his shoulders, yet left him with melancholy instead of relief in the interim.
A strange look must have crossed his face, for before Kimblee can react, Archer strides forward, frames the Alchemist's cheekbones with his hands, and presses his lips to Kimblee's.
The kiss is slow and soft in a way that sets Solf ill at ease because compassion is difficult to navigate in the same way cruelty is easy. Archer's hand shifts until it rests below Solf's ear, thumb caressing his cheek as their breaths intermingle. He draws his tongue over Solf's teeth, who forcibly swallows his groan of pleasure as they slide closer to each other. Archer runs the fingers of his other hand through the sleek black hair in Kimblee's tail, pulling him closer until there is no space left between them and Archer can no doubt feel the beating of Solf's heart –– faltering, fading –– as though it is his own.
"One thing is certain," says Archer in a low whisper, when they finally break apart, "when you die and are resurrected, you'll become an anomaly of nature, a being without shadow; you will never die again but only pass away like the phenomena about you." He takes Kimblee's wrists and turns them towards his chest, resting the palms facedown on his sternum. "Deconstructed, reconstructed."
Solf can feel the intricate array of atoms and molecules in Archer's musculature. Bundles of fibrous tissue, singularities and coordinates that refuse all hypothesis. Kimblee sits at his body's edge and feels the neurons firing and electrons shifting like buoys adrift, blinking through the night. They are mute and they are lame and they have no thoughts in their quantum heads but to blink each wave and each minute aside until the morning comes and renders them all blind.
The Soldier is like a barnacle clinging mindlessly to the bottom of a boat, the grasp the only thing stopping him from sliding into the ocean. Into oblivion.
The lurch of vertigo, faced with their shared vulnerability, is almost enough to take Kimblee's breath away. In that moment, Archer seems tragically concrete, and tragically transient.
And when Kimblee completes the transmutation, and Archer disintegrates into a fine spray of red-gray mist, flecks of bone and brain matter dropping unceremoniously to the floor, the Soldier seems tragically human, too.
Lieutenant-Colonel Archer, with his unerring inner compass, able to steer himself through the world without difficulty. Knowing where he is, where he has been, and where he is going... and Zolf J. Kimbley, who knows nothing at all. Nor does he care to know. Navigating each successive moment like a man leaping between sloughs of molten tar, delighting in the danger, drunk on the fumes, with no idea where true north is and no desire to find it.
Order subsumed by chaos. There is a certain poetry to it, Kimblee decides. These men were strangers to him. But the memory of their coupling is almost familiar.
Kimblee looks at his hands, considers wiping them on the seat of his trousers, then decides against it –– there is too much blood for the effort to make any significant difference. Instead, his rests his fists in his pockets, and takes one long, final look at the clockwork orrery on the pedestal.
The mechanisms shift yet again. The Rod of Ascledpius. The Caduceus. The Nehushtan. Then, finally, the Flamel, the fixing of the volatile, a vital step in the alchemical opus, related to the making of the mercury's elixir and of curative processes.
And, as it so happens, the symbol of a small, stubborn alchemist and his little brother.
Solf J. Kimblee rocks back, silent, marveling at the completion of his dissolution, both elated and numbed by the jarring claps that measure and metronome each differential in the change –– until he retains no more certainty of the Monster and the Soldier's names than of his own. He is left with the ghosts of his former identities, and bewilderment at whatever mechanism had, for the infinitely long seconds from the ground at Pride's feet to the gaping maw of the Homunculus's mouth, made his searing memories as uncertain to him as his own existence.
He turns, and walks through the museum, out towards the gray city, ready to fall up into the darkness beyond the sky...
... you'll live on... as a part of me...