disclaimer: Neither the characters nor the concept used in this fanfic belong to me. I do not hope to profit from them nor make excuses for the quality of what I've written.
The title is from an e e cummings poem. Set a year after the war's end.
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i. where the heart has rotted out
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"Good evening, Tyki Mikk."
He holds out a hand. "Spare me the pleasantries, boy."
The Exorcist's teeth click. Without a word, he shuffles a cigarette pack in his pocket and passes one thin stick over. Five remaining in the carton, as it was the last time he came. Idly, Tyki wonders how he ever convinced the guard that he'd been smoking them on his own. But perhaps it's not such a stretch—miracles spring up for him as they do for no one else. Allen is the cheating boy, and so this is one more shoddy miracle.
Before the boy can pull away, Tyki closes thumb and forefinger around his hand. Claws prickle against the cloth. If he were anything as he used to be, Tyki thinks, he could crumble this limb down to dust. Blood, bone. All broken for butterfly fodder. He glances up to Allen's patient eyes. The boy holds, unmoving, neither withdrawing nor offering. "You can't keep it, you realise." Allen's tone is gentle as it always is, and a touch dry, as if conversation alone will distract Tyki enough.
He lets go. "Boy," he says, "if you're trying to make me forget that I'm in prison, you'll need more than this to do it."
The hit connects. Wordless, Allen strikes a match to light the cigarette between Tyki's teeth. Human though he is, it'd be foolish, still, to give him access to anything he could weaponise. But there's no need for that thought: Tyki inhales smoke and watches the cherry flare, a glittering point in the dark.
Every night, circled in stone walls and trapped under the earth, Tyki dreams of killing Allen Walker. Take the boy's thin neck and flex just so, to hear the bone crack and the stark open eyes ebb to shadows. Sink something sharp into the yielding abdomen and drag up before the blood slicks his hold. Seize a handful of that thin white hair and smash his pity into patterns across the wall until everything is sick and dripping and the room stinks of open meat.
These images are violent and repetitive, lurid and sensual, the one feeding the other until he finally stops sleeping at all and stays up for days, pacing the length and breadth of his cell and straining for the memory of blood and flesh in his grasp. He imagines his guards' relief. He's worth more trust caught between traps than at rest. If he's pacing, he can't have hatched a plan to escape. One less tic to supervise in the vast mechanics of the Black Order.
How pleased they must be: the last former host under control.
It isn't a bad cell as far as prisons go. Tyki's slept in boxcars and fields and roadsides where he'd been two narrow inches from having his nose trodden off. If it were only a matter of rest, he might prefer this. It's warm, if not interesting. He has one blanket, thin but soft, and a cot and a bucket to himself in the boxed little room. The ceiling presses low, but not so low that he must stoop when he stands. The stink is only human sweat and life and exhaust.
They bring him meals and light twice a day: leftovers from the stew pot, glistening in the half-dark. He eats until he thinks he might be sick—he wants to be sick. Craves sensation because, if he can't trust it, then at least he can savour it as it fails him like everything else. Acid at the back of his throat, the thudding pulse slicing out from underneath his ribs—he swallows it all down, staring up from dark to dark, feeling his pulse like a message from the end of the war.
Tyki Mikk is dead. That he has yet to pause in his living rituals is just a matter for a crippled afterword, not worth attaching to a story already reeled to its end.
"You look better."
Today, Tyki's chosen to lounge away from his visitor. He sits on the narrow cot, long legs stretched out, watching Allen Walker stand in the middle of the room. He's never come closer without invitation, overt or otherwise. It's an interesting fact that the boy won't approach unless Tyki gives him tacit permission. Much like all the other information he acquires about Allen now, this knowledge is largely useless; and yet Tyki finds himself stowing it away with the other bits and pieces learned over time.
"Compared to what, boy?" he says. His upturned hands empty above his head are a message too. "This half-life your Order's offered me isn't much for a man's spirits."
"I'm sorry," the boy says, sounding as if he means it. "But they won't let you go free."
"Should I be surprised?" This is the sort of conversation he likes—not because they say anything of value to each other, but for the momentary amusement of seeing the hooks slide underneath the boy's skin. "The only shock is that they trusted me enough to let me live."
He likes to yank. It's one of the few favours they haven't denied him, after all.
"You're human now. They don't have the right to kill you."
"Don't pretend you Exorcists have any interest in rights."
On cue, the boy quiets, withholding a flinch, and Tyki feels a bitter, luminous pleasure at the sight. No real reaction stirs out of his dead limbs, not in the way that it would have, once—loathing, pure and pulsing, for the Innocence sealed into Allen Walker's arm—but still satisfying in a way. Certainly, after days of nothing but sleep, it is enough.
Allen doesn't speak. Instead, his glance falls on the lone candle placed on the floor between them. Slowly, Tyki follows the light up; slower, he starts to laugh. He has an appreciation for certain basic symbols: light dashed on the boy-saviour until it spills over his fingers and hangs, dripping and gaudy and brilliant. The Exorcist is a living miracle, and Tyki knows what to do with miracles. His palms ache for it, the slide of skin and blood, scratching at muscle and meat until it splits. Tyki breathes deeply, savouring the brief intent.
Then he says, "Put that out."
Allen does, closing his fingers over it. In a breath everything vanishes, swallowed up into the black. He can't see the Exorcist's outline in the shadows at all—which is, perhaps, the point. Allen Walker is his only respite; but that hardly makes him beloved, or wanted.
"They wanted to save humans," Allen says. Light extinguished, the darkness is vast. His words ring out, purity past sound. "Is that so hard to believe?"
It isn't a particularly clever question: as if it matters what Tyki has believed, now or ever, in the course of their long war. His back aches, he thinks suddenly, pressed against the cell wall. Pain is the only thing he really recognises now of being properly human: some spiteful unfamiliar memory renewed. Of all the things to regain. "Tell me something, boy," he says, shifting. "How much does it take before something is no longer human?"
The boy doesn't speak. Instead, Tyki cocks his head and listens to the murmur that must be his gloved fists curling, the cloth that sighs as he shifts his feet apart to hold his place. He imagines the hot, quickening air in his lungs, tautness knotting in his belly, the gritty pulse dragging his veins into a torrent. It's become ritual by now to remind him each time he comes: the war has ended, but their private battle carries underneath every word Allen presses on him. In his last threshold, all else abandoned, Tyki has no interest in giving such a boy the victory.
He says, "The Akuma aren't, of course. But you've seen them evolve. Even if they can talk like one, taste like one, love like one—are they human?"
The silence that follows is terrible. "Not anymore," Allen says.
"So you say. I doubt you'd judge them because of the form they take. It's because they kill humans, isn't it? Because their aim is to destroy." He doesn't wait for the answer—his own point is closing in, and he leans over without seeing. He doesn't need to see for this, to know that Allen is without doubt and yet, for all his certainty, more fragile than he has ever been. Understanding Allen Walker has become a pastime in the days after the war, and even if Tyki can't be sure of what he has, he knows blood drawn when he tastes it. "And yet they haven't done a single thing that humans haven't been doing worse every single day."
"I know."
Tyki smiles. "Do you? That's lucky. Tell me something else, then, boy—what were you fighting for?"
For a moment, he thinks that he has the boy: the breath cuts from his lungs, utterly raw.
Then Allen releases it.
"Forgiveness," he says.
Neither of them speak again. After a beat or two, Allen gets up and knocks on the door to be let out of the cell as Tyki shuts his eyes against the empty cell.
Surprising no one, Allen Walker is his only visitor.
He begins to wonder why the boy bothers after the third visit, which goes as well as might be expected: the candle is dashed, wax rolled in fat drops across the floor, and he never gets anywhere near Allen's throat. Not that he'd really been trying—the boy survived a war and emerged with scant losses compared to his opponents. An ill-fed man in a holding cell would hardly be the ideal assassin. But it's something for the boy to remember in the wake, the aftermath: there was never a final surrender.
This, Tyki knows, is a noble thought that he would have never had any use for in the old days. The winner is the one who isn't rolling in the dust clutching his hands to a very delicate part of anatomy. It doesn't matter how it happens. But there is very little to occupy him in the cell. For an Order whose primary concern is to prevent him from going mad and awakening what little shreds of Noah may be left in him, they certainly don't do much to prevent him from turning his mind on itself. The idea of mentioning this to one of his gaolers lasts him for all of five minutes before he unhooks it. His existence in the Order is tenuous, after all. A stray reminder that he lives and they may decide to end it.
Instead, Tyki dreams—once Rhode's domain, now left to an old working man with little else to his name. He thinks occasionally of the towns he'd passed where he'd sang and laughed and knuckled dice at night, the bodies he'd strung up in fields to bait and catch crows, the friends he'd left. Whether they've only vanished, swallowed up into the working grind of some distant grey city. Whether they're still begging for games and scraps on the outskirts of any town that will take them for long enough. Whether Momo hasn't given into his bad temper and Eaze hasn't swallowed his own lungs from the miner's cough.
Death is the only real fate ever allotted to human beings. The only question is how much joy they have out of it before their lives snap off.
In two years, it should be more surprising than it is that only two attempts are made to kill him.
The first is far more subtle, and something that he wouldn't have found out at all if he hadn't noticed that they changed the food server. The boy, on being asked, lets disconcertion cross his features—a sign made only when, Tyki learns, humans do something to disappoint him. It is often easy to disappoint Allen Walker—but then, he seems to set his standards up for it. On careful probing, he finds out that one of the girls in the kitchen has been salting his meals with light doses of poison. The fact that Tyki hasn't noticed has earned the Order's disapproval—not because he isn't dead, but because the fact that he's alive proves some remnant of Noah still exists in him as of yet.
(Tyki's suggestion to a guard that this is due to the Order's need for a new cook is met with disapproving looks all around, and gruel for two weeks.)
The second time is infinitely more interesting. Tyki wakes to find something breathing heavily in his cell. It hardly sounds like Allen Walker. But before he can ask for the candle to be lit, it has bowled him over, fingers curving into his throat. In the old, familiar way Tyki reaches up, closing a palm around, absurdly enough, his opponent's ear. He drags—and he finds his fingers slipping through and past, underneath the skin and through the ear canal and further in—he sees the boy's eyes widen in the brief blare of light as the door's thrown open before they're both blinded, and then there are people all around them, pulling at the stranger, and there is blood at his fingertips shining like a sunset and nothing else. The mess shines red and lucid, colour speaking as nothing else does, and for an instant he hears Noah's lurid certainties tugging at him from all directions, tiny hands, tiny voices spinning until—
The would-be assassin is still on top of him, breathless and crying, he realises, rocking down into him in an effort to shake off the guards in time to get the job done. The pressure hollowing out Tyki's ears thickens, and he tries to focus on individual sights: on the assassin's tongue caught between his teeth, his warm breath, the spit radiating from his wet lips as he snarls his blank words into Tyki's face. At least he hasn't thrown up. "My brother," he snarls, and he names a name that's hardly one Tyki has ever imagined he could have known. "My brother, you monster—"
It is Allen who succeeds in getting the boy off of him at the last. As they retreat, all the raised voices mingle into a cacophony of scant interest. Tyki lids his eyes and lounges as the matter is settled outside his cell. It doesn't concern him, after all, what becomes of the assassin. When Allen returns, he has nearly fallen into real sleep: it becomes easier and easier every day to fall prey to the pretence.
"Tyki."
For no reason that he can account for by study or vengeance, he's attuned himself to that voice. A half-formed dream recedes. He opens one eye. "Boy."
Allen's leaning over his bed, not too close, but close enough for temptation's sake. Tyki can still feel the stranger's heart dripping from his fingertips, the heavy arch of his hips and his sharp little mouth. His head is pounding—he feels very nearly awake. "Are you all right?" he hears Allen say. "Do you need a doctor—"
Tyki waves this off. "And what doctor would come to see me?"
"I'd do my best—don't laugh."
"All that and he heals, too." Tyki snorts. "Tell me, boy. For what possible purpose are you keeping me alive? Surely you aren't expecting gratitude of some sort."
Allen's mouth crooks, nothing at all like the intruder's, but still small and oddly fragile in a way Tyki can't quite explain. Easily dashed. "I'm not that selfless," he says.
"Good," Tyki says, and he really doesn't know what he's thinking when he yanks Allen down into a kiss.
It's sloppy and hot and Allen is surprised enough that he doesn't grit his teeth. This lasts only for a few seconds before he bites down on Tyki's tongue and scrambles off the bed, scrubbing at his mouth.
"What was that?"
"Oh? Hasn't someone explained it to you before?"
"You're—"
"—bored," Tyki says. He smiles.
He is waiting the next time Allen Walker comes. The colder season leaves him conscious more than he'd like, but waking has its uses. He waits on a knife edge for the door to open. In the instant that it does, he steps out from the door's free side. Light blasts inward and he's stricken, briefly disadvantaged. But he has the surety of Allen's height carried and measured in his own frame; he snaps a palm out to where the head should be—
—and finds a neck instead, warm skin and an unfamiliar spinal curve under the slender grit of old hair. He realises, fruitlessly, that Allen has not come after all. Soup is spattered across the floor and the man trapped between his palms is screaming, and his hands are still steady and unshaking, rooted in an old inhuman strength that God itself couldn't sap. Fingers beneath his ears, spread out across that trembling face, the eyes quavering like old stars in their sockets: he could drag the head a few degrees in either direction and hear the snap resound through his fingers. The pulse is screaming, the sheer noise sinking into the arch of his outspread hand-bones—he could stop it and feel his own silence for once.
He does.
The scream slips out of his fingers and Tyki looks into the corridor to find the hall full of shadows: shadows resolving into men. The scraps in their hands are shining, brutal and bright. It doesn't matter. He feels viciously joyful for the first time since arriving.
He is alive, he thinks—at least they'll kill a live man.
But they haven't.
It is his first thought as he comes awake to a candleflare, and he wonders at first if it could have been a dream. But the proof is under his fingernails, now gritty from age, and the black satisfaction as he flexes his hands. Then he tries to turn over, to stretch, and feels power crackle against his spine, slamming his wrists against bone. Not Innocence, he thinks; this is something infinitely more sinuous. An experimental attempt to slide through it brightens the sparks that fly, and Tyki hastily rolls over the places where they fell on the blanket. All things considered, a flat half-life is still a step up from a quarter-life with nothing but an ashy metal frame to sleep on.
The silence is deafening. It is the second sign.
"If you aren't going to speak, I can still sleep," Tyki remarks.
He's lucky; he had no expectations for this at all, and so he isn't disappointed when Allen's voice fails to shake. "Why?"
Tyki rolls his shoulders with a sigh. "You'll have to be more specific, cheating boy."
"You know what I'm asking! Why did you kill him?" Suddenly it doesn't matter if Tyki speaks at all, because it's quite clear that the words jump off Allen's tongue like lightning. "He wasn't an Exorcist—he wasn't even your size! It wasn't a challenge, it wasn't something interesting—"
The desperation in his movements is something all too familiar. Despite himself, Tyki feels a certain human uncertainty coil in the pit of his stomach. "Bringing my execution orders, boy?"
Allen's eyes snap and lock on his. "Do you want them to kill you?" he demands—but it's more than that. Tyki reads the addition with some surprise.
"You want me to live."
"I'm so glad your eyes and ears have developed enough for use. Of course I don't—"
"Not quite what I meant. There's a difference between not wanting someone dead and wanting them alive." Every human being breaks down to a few basic desires—he, by the looks of it, has become one of an Exorcist's. Tyki studies him in some fixed wonder; there's a thought flickering at the back of his mind that he's found the world's greatest fool, after all, months after the discovery could have been of any use. But his disappointment is less overwhelming—some furtive thought whispers: you can use this still.
Aloud, he says, "I hadn't realised you were taking such an interest."
"Answer my question," the boy bites out, in lieu of any better retorts.
"No." Tyki tilts his head. "I think you had better answer mine, first. Why does it matter?"
"You're a human being—"
"If it were only that, you'd be crying for the man who died as well. But you're focusing on me. Don't try to cheat, boy—I do know your style."
Allen's defences hardly hold—and he isn't trying, he hasn't been trying for a long time. This is what Tyki's been trying to piece together in all the months that he's been kept prisoner, in every visit, out of Allen Walker's hollow eyes and shallow breaths and his obscene desperation to hang onto an obscure shell of a prisoner after the world didn't end. Allen hasn't been searching for something to shine some pathetic light of redemption into Tyki's half-life—in what he had imagined to be the constant, impossible re-enactment of a last battle they had never staged, he hasn't been fighting him at all.
"I don't know," Allen says, and it sounds like the truth. "But I can't let it go until I do. Now answer mine."
Tyki ponders pointing out that he never said that he wouldn't cheat—and it would be fair in one way or another: their exchanges have never been based on truths. That would be betraying what they are. But he gives it up, if only because the answer is meaningless: "For the same reason as always, boy," he says softly. "For the kill."
Allen only looks at him.
"You can't expect everything to change because of what you did." Tyki grins like a knife. "Noah was human once, after all. As long as I'm alive, the people around me will die as I please, when I please."
"Is that what you want?"
Maybe this is more bravado than he thinks—because when he looks at Allen Walker, all words evaporate. There is a distinction between human and Noah, Tyki thinks, and it is this: Noah believed. The driven instinct behind his memory was fuelled by conviction like thunder, by the sold crosses and the bloody grit underneath every human's nails. But Noah is long gone, dust and not even the echo of a voice in a madman's mind—and it makes no difference to Tyki, who has never followed for devotion to belief or gratitude to be chosen, plucked out of a life that he might have loved. Love is ash in his mouth, bitter and salt as a sea drained dry, and all its chosen words have no meaning: but among the few feelings Tyki still recognises is joy—and it's joy that burns slow at seeing Allen Walker's expression sew itself shut, as Tyki's silence answers for him.
The door opens a few days later, much sooner than Allen would usually dare to come again. Tyki is unaware of it at first; he's conscious only of a shift in the air—a sign of life.
In an instant, he rolls off the bed and starts across the floor—which, in the dark, brings the misfortune of ramming his shoulder into something that is distinctly neither cot nor bucket. The vivid string of curses that ensues identifies the intruder to him.
"I can't say I was counting on another visit so soon," he says after Allen's lit the candle. He leans a shoulder against the wall. Sitting has started to become distinctly uncomfortable with his hands constantly bound behind his back, as has lying down. "Enjoying listening to me sleep, boy?"
"I didn't want to wake you," Allen says. "You seem tired."
Tyki laughs, curt and quick. They both know, after all, that this sort of exhaustion has nothing to do with rest. Then he realises that Allen isn't looking at him at all, but a little lower down. Surprised, he glances down at himself—and remembers. "I don't suppose you could convince your Order to give me a new shirt."
"I'll bring one tomorrow."
"Eager to see me again, suddenly? Boy, self-pity isn't a good reason to visit. You're not as fun when you're wallowing."
A year ago, this would have earned him a flash of temper—a slap. He could have predicted it: it's part of his old fondness, after all. This older Allen Walker only exhales, as if he's breathed in smoke and held it until the bitterness has sunken and drowned on his tongue.
With a snort, Tyki looses him. "Careful," he remarks. "That sort of opening could get you killed one of these days."
In the gloom, Allen's denial stirs the air. "You wouldn't kill me."
This gets his attention—although perhaps not in the way that the Exorcist intends. "Oh?" Tyki says, low and dangerous.
"Don't start," says Allen, ruffling his hair out of his face. "I didn't say that you couldn't."
"We've known each other for a while, boy. That doesn't make us friends any more than it ever did."
"It isn't that." Allen's voice is simple—and Tyki thinks cheating boy. Someone susceptible would believe anything that he said in a state like that. They'd want to, and he'd make it easy. "If you wanted me to die, you've had a hundred chances. But you want something else, and I don't know what it is."
Tyki stands up, swinging his legs over the bed, testing his boundaries. The violent, uncertain flash in the boy's eyes doesn't elude him. But Allen doesn't move, so Tyki stops just before him, fingers come to rest underneath his collarbone. The boy has no fondness for being touched. That he allows Tyki to do it is an advantage, and Tyki's never liked to waste those. Presumably there's some noble logic behind this: he's seen Tyki half-stripped, so it's only fair that he toss himself around like a ragdoll for the whims of the last enemy he imprisoned. He's never been particularly concerned with things like reasons—instead he drags down until a thumb touches the ridges lashing down from Allen's shoulder. Then he leans over. "And if I asked you," he says into his ear, plain and soft, "would you grant it?" He listens as the boy's breathing grow shallow and shallower. His nails dig in until Allen Walker stiffens, dragging a shudder from his frame. Part of him has imagined just this scenario in a thousand different ways: the boy still and waiting for any retribution that may come. But he knows, too, that the subtle pressure of Innocence isn't for show.
The thought makes him smile into the boy's skin. Something to look forward to.
Abruptly, Tyki looses him. He shoves Allen away and watches him stumble without pleasure. He's not petty enough to enjoy silly, simple malice, after all. This isn't a rivalry. He can wait.
"Don't be such a fool, boy," he says.
Two weeks later, Tyki Mikk speaks to his guards for the fourth time in his imprisonment. He tells them to bring him Allen Walker.
It must be the middle of the night, or some similarly obscene hour. The boy who strides into his room is still flushed with sleep, scrubbing at one eye and concealing a yawn with all the subtlety of a dog. He must have dressed himself while hardly awake—his hands fumble the familiar candle and there's a button unhooked from the middle of his shirt. Most telling, Tyki notices, is that the door's been left open. It hardly matters: reinforced steel and two guards no doubt eager to slam it shut are more than proof against an exorcised man bound in magical insignias. It's a wonder that the blood hasn't run rotten in his arms with how long they've kept him bound.
Allen, however, seems to notice none of his slips: his cool eyes reflect nothing but concern. "What is it?"
"It wasn't an emergency," Tyki says, half-inclined to be amused. The sensation comes to him so strangely that he hardly understands it—he knows only that his mouth relaxes into a settling curve. "You could have let it wait until morning."
"Well, they didn't tell me," Allen says, and Tyki wonders what he must have thought, wakened in the darkest hours to be told that a murderer was calling in his favour. He's less-guarded in these moments—strained, sulky, human. "But if you'd like, I'll go back to sleep."
"If you like. I can help with that." He laughs at the Exorcist, poised to be less defensive than irritated. Really, this may have been a good idea after all. His own smile burns feverish and slow. "That wasn't a threat, boy."
"I thought you didn't want anything from me."
"Well," Tyki says. He wishes briefly for another smoke. But that might ruin the setup, and it's already started, after all. "I thought you'd have better sense than to offer. Is it still the same deal? Anything I want?"
"Unless the Order won't accept it."
Tyki tilts his head. "Come here."
But Allen stays. "Why?" he asks, wary with possibly the little spark of good sense remaining to him.
"You wanted to know what this was about, didn't you?"
Slowly, after all, Allen approaches the corner where Tyki's propped himself up. Tyki tells him.
The request takes all of seven words, and several seconds to sink in. He knows it's taken root when Allen jerks back, glaring. Even in the dark, the sudden flush is obvious, as is a sudden, violent gesture, as if he'd been about to kick Tyki before recollecting that he still had his hands tied behind his back and, whatever the circumstances, one did not abuse prisoners. But his shrill irritation is a flash to the brat of earlier years, and Tyki enjoys that, too. "What kind of perverted request is that?"
"Oh?" he grins, a white flash beneath the light leaking from the corridor. "Are you saying that you've never thought about it with any of your teammates? It's still the ending stages of a war, I doubt they'd blame you for getting desperate..."
"They're my friends! And—and what does that have to do with anything?"
"And does that make them more important, or less so?" He lets a beat pass. "You're unexpectedly shy for a boy who stripped me near-naked on our first meeting."
"That," Allen says, measured and sweet, "was about cards. This isn't."
"Worried about your virtue, cheating boy?" Tyki says, and watches Allen's mouth twist.
"There's a way to treat prisoners—"
"Whatever names you're worried that your friends will find for you, I doubt it's any worse than what they call you already." Allen is surprisingly silent at this. Tyki takes up the thread, drawling the words with easy urgency. Like a heartbeat: every component steady but necessary. "Surprised? There's always something rather suspect about a victory no one saw. I'd be more concerned if they complained. But keeping quiet's a far cry from trust."
"You know." Allen's voice flattens.
"Know? That the Earl of Millennium is dead?" His teeth curve around the words until they grit in his mouth, fine and hollow. He hasn't realised until this moment how hard it is to grate the words out into the air. "Of course."
"It isn't about what they think," the boy says. Mention of the Earl sobers him, and he straightens, hardly seeming to notice that he's leaning into the corner himself, now, while Tyki stands in the open. He exhales, oblivious, and Tyki's close enough by now that the warmth seems to leach into him, hollowing him out with heat. "You know what I am. This isn't fair to ask."
"Boy," Tyki says, and the slight emphasis makes Allen start. "That's the point."
He has his angle by now. Before Allen can startle out of the way, Tyki slams him against the wall, backed into a corner with his legs pinned by Tyki's knees. This would all have been much easier with the use of his arms, but Tyki manages all the same. There's a brief struggle as Allen tries to bring himself up. Fortunately, Tyki has the advantage in height and weight and uses all his leeway to keep him pinned. It's hardly a triumph when both of them know that a single flare of Innocence could blast him off, and there's nothing of what he wants in an Exorcist's bones digging into him, all corners and angles.
But it's a step.
All at once, Allen stills. The press of him, warm even through the bindings, is more heat than Tyki's had in a month. "Get off, Tyki," the boy says. His voice is very low and very kind. Tyki wants to bite the pity from his throat.
He bends his head, seeing the boy's cheeks flush now that he recognises the intent. "I am trying," he drawls instead, and kisses him.
It isn't a hurried kiss. He takes it slow in lazy flicks of the tongue, savouring the heat until the boy's guard breaks—to gasp, to say something—and then he's chasing Allen's tongue with his own. It's Tyki who tips his head back at the last. The close walls throw back his soft laughter into an eerie hollow resonance.
"Give me a distraction, boy," he breathes to the wet mouth and red tongue. Allen's teeth flash, bared, then click together in frustration. He shoves at Tyki and Tyki steps away. But Allen pushes him again. This time, Tyki tips over onto the cot, crushing his arms behind him. His wrists protest and Tyki narrows his eyes.
But Allen follows, kneeling on the bed with one hand braced beside his head. His expression is glass, reflecting frustration and uncertainty and softness clear as light. He lets a left hand trail over Tyki's hip, grazing his stomach. Suddenly, all his focus narrows into sensation.
"Tell me what you want," Allen says, low.
Tyki laughs up at him. It had been a stupid promise for the boy to make. "And if I said I wanted you?"
The boy's face flares hot again. His ears are very red. "Don't start," he grits, and there's a dry response curling on Tyki's tongue when Allen undoes his trousers and slides a gloved hand inside. He hadn't expected Allen to take the bait so quickly—it catches him off-guard, and Tyki hisses between his teeth. It's the strange, foreign sensation of it against his cock that makes him harden so quickly, that makes the blood sing in his ears, thin and high and sweet as Allen strokes him. Or so he tells himself.
"Any ideas," he pants, "where to start?"
Draped over his legs, Allen glares. The boy's eyes are startlingly blue. "A few," he says. Then he lowers his mouth to close over Tyki's cock and Tyki stops trying to gather his piecemeal thoughts. It's been so long, and everything's screaming of the familiar ecstasy of a kill, in the days when things were easy and blood blurred with the sweet rush that's coming back to him now—blood trickling from the wounds, dripping from their throats, and Allen's mouth is hot and yielding around him, that small tongue sliding slick over the tip.
The cot groans and Tyki grits his teeth against a similar noise. Taking it as a hint, Allen kneels on the bed, clumsily sliding his mouth over the length until Tyki wants to laugh at the absurd pose he's putting up—or he would if his thoughts hadn't evaporated into the brilliant heat. He bucks, finds himself frustrated, and wants to groan again. He can't grab hold of that stark, pale head, can't even arch off the bed with the boy's hands pinning his hips down. Finding some leverage, he shifts against the mattress into a weak jerk, and feels Allen's throat convulse in response, slick and resisting, on the edge of tearing pain. That feels good, too.
"Practised with this sort of thing, boy?" he whispers raggedly to the shadows flung over the ceiling. In response, the hands over his thighs clench and teeth scrape over his cock, hard enough to make him shudder again. It doesn't matter. That this is happening at all tells him enough. Allen Walker sucks him off in slow strokes, panting occasionally until his breath comes in hot little pants over Tyki's cock. Tyki's just aware enough to focus on the razor noises slicing from his throat, but the rest is pure sensation: the boy's head lifting and lowering, simulating thrusts, his throat working in clenches of muscle until the pulse of their movements stutters and bursts.
In an instant, the boy jerks back, coughing; there's a white spatter caught on his brow, over his sleeve, and he looks at it all in distaste. It's a gesture of innocence—the irony isn't lost on Tyki in the least. He has the urge, suddenly, to laugh at it all: the absurdity of the place to which he's been led, three years after the moment when he'd had Allen Walker's heart in his hand. But the boy doesn't seem to register any of it.
Catching Tyki's eye, they gaze at each other flatly for an instant before Allen looks away. "Well," Tyki remarks to the ceiling, "I suppose it's a good thing you were quiet."
Instantly, Allen's head whips around to look at the door, still open. Even in the thin illumination, Tyki can see him categorise and measure every noise they've made in the past several minutes and file them away for the dreadful possibility of venturing outside.
"Anything else?" he says at last. His voice could etch glass.
"You must want forgiveness very badly," Tyki tells him, because it's the least expected answer and he prefers it that way. He sits up. When Allen glances back, startled, he kisses him. The boy's lips are already half-parted, and they slide open in purest shock. Tyki takes the opportunity to make it thorough. The faint thud as his back hits the wall can't escape either of them, but it doesn't matter with the reckless confidence burning against his heart like a new star. He can feel the boy hard against his leg, the bleak and brilliant murmurs of joy sharpening into a familiar chorus—and that's when he breaks the kiss, laughing softly, feeling steadier than he's been in months.
Allen's surprise is lingering. Tyki prefers it to his pity or his quiet disinterest. "But I don't forgive you, boy," he whispers. "None of us do."
It's his victory for all of an instant.
Then Allen looks at him.
He doesn't shout or make a brat of himself. Instead, the slow smile the boy serves him is tired and, Tyki thinks, a little lonely—a smile that would crush the life of anything underneath its notice for the sake of something greater. Something that still can't yet be touched. "You're wrong. About what I want."
"Oh?"
"You wouldn't believe me if I said it, I think," Allen says. He kisses Tyki this time, cupping his cheek, and Tyki allows it because it makes no difference: because he's ahead no matter the circumstances or the meaning. He can still taste himself underneath the kiss, salted and bitter, strange on the boy's tongue.
At last, Allen breaks it off with a deep sigh. "Good night, Tyki," he says, and stands.
Tyki watches the boy shuffle from his cell, exhausted and mussed. Alone, he shuts his eyes again and tries to drown out the roaring tide in his ears, blood singing thinly to a legacy he no longer holds. It's gone, he tries to tell it, but it coils around him, yearning and familiar, violent as love.
He lets the memory of screams carry him into the dark.
.
.
.
end part one of three