A still has three more baby teeth to lose before his death by the time Beyond's coyote yelps begin morphing into jackal cackles.
His scavenger cries rattle through the halls as he lopes through rooms with an asymmetrical wobble, yapping like a triumphant alpha dog gathering its pack around a freshly felled carcass.
A peers through door cracks after him, always half-relieved not to find him hunched over a deer's stripped hindquarters or wide legged, leap-crouch-leaping in an excited circle around an exposed ribcage.
Clean-headed professors and well-meaning caregivers of the institution offer taming explanations to wide-eyed, worried faces,
He grew up without parents to teach him to speak, but he'll learn quickly, you'll see!
It's very frustrating for him, try to be nice!
He just needs some time to adjust.
But the longer A watches him gnash out noise, the more sure A becomes that B's mouth was never built for human speech in the first place.
Roger waves A aside one chilly evening, when he passes him in the hall while filing off to bed with the other students. Roger is trying to pry Beyond away from a windowsill where he's bent over, spilling a mournful wolf wail into the frigid November night.
A glances back into the hall, the steady rhythm of the trained crowd now funneling to their destinations with almost military discipline. He turns back to B, who is now writhing and salivating, dark eyes rolling, pawing with his free hand at the grip Roger has on his collar.
Here is a creature that they can't quantify. An equation that they can't balance. A variable they can't stabilize. A is too captivated to hear immediately that Roger is speaking- hurriedly, with a note of pleading-
…others are frightened of him, they refuse to speak to him. All he needs is a little exposure, a little interaction with someone his own age, he'll settle down, start to speak adequately. If you were to take on the task, I… I believe even Sir Whammy himself would express his gratitude…
A bobs his head obediently. B yelps and tugs.
Huddled together in a dusty corner of the cafeteria away from the drafts near the door, A sips tepid milk and B gnaws on an orange rind.
Clutching his mug tightly in a bony-knuckled grasp to keep his pale hands from shaking, A watches him cautiously. There are no theorems to predict the actions of the creature next to him. No classes on the infectious mania that drives Beyond's darting eyes to jump hungrily from face to face.
He doubts any teacher could break down the chemistry of why B's mouth is so startling hot against A's forefinger when he tentatively hand-offers him a lick of cream, which he ignores in favor of nibbling at A's fingernail. With this newfound trust, A edges closer, exploring the inside of B's lip with his finger, mesmerized.
Your mouth is my project, he states in a slow, even whisper, Roger told me so.
When served life seedless, cooked, skinned with easy garnishes, B takes it raw, seeds, skin, roughage, the coarse to keep blood coursing. When he eats he leans his head back like a dog and uses gravity to aid his chewing.
Where A dabbles his cold fingers on doorknobs in clammy confusion, Beyond snatches and steals with heat and volatile volition.
What he can not understand, he dissects and destroys. What he can not dominate, he consumes.
When he realizes he can't speak like the others, when he watches those around him tossing fluent sounds between themselves, sounds that can evoke responses in each other in a way he soon realizes he is impotent, he seeks out A's tongue and rakes it with his teeth, as if to scrape off the Power of Words and mine them at their source.
Each dusk, he pins A's arms in the dirt behind the rhododendron bush. B spits sibilants and coughs velars, bearing over him, but A laughs mockingly through mouthfuls of hair and grass and garden soil and shakes his head each time B fails to order them into meaning. A taunts the looming moon-sillouhette that leans over him. He sings lullabies, recites memorized textbook passages, exaggerating the articulation until B whines in frustration, shaking him by the shoulders till A's head rattles against the rocks.
Wadding up fistfuls of A's greying t-shirt, his tongue probes the tangy chasm of one of A's newly missing molars, palpates the bruises along his shins, chews off his knee scabs, searches his body for secrets.
Each night as A strips before bed, the fragments of gravel imbedded in his scalp and the latticed imprints of pine needles on the backs of his wrists only remind him that for the first time in his life, he has something someone else wants urgently. Better to be bruised but needed than not needed at all.
As winter hardens, their little 'language lessons' by the rhododendrons soften into a comforting habit. The angry frenzy of it is the only ritual A can count on to soothe his sizzling nerves. The jostling rush of it cleans out his head. After the demanding days of study in the classroom's world of distant, detached theory, the assault brings him back into his living flesh.
Sometimes, here and there between B's visceral hisses, A finds moments he could even call a kiss if B's saliva didn't taste like gasoline and burning metal.
Spits, screams, and indiscernible, striking half-taunts, a mockery of language and law… low, derisive chords, with strong echoes… struggles are all that come to Beyond's lips, until the day A finally safety pins them shut.
A is roaming the halls restlessly, raking his fingers across his scalp and hungering to be reminded he has bones when his feet take him out of habit to B's favorite lair, an abandoned classroom where he houses an ever-growing nest of shining stolen trinkets. A finds him ensconced in his glimmering hoard (bent forks, a rhinestone necklace, a bronze knight from the playroom's chess set, a dented pillbox, a sharp pewter hair stick…), hunched over an eviscerated basement shrew, snipping away at its bowels with a pair of lime green, round-tipped safety scissors. His shrew-moistened fingers squelch in the plastic grip with each cut while he runs his tongue over his upper lip and clenches his toes in concentration.
A approaches him, folding his legs on the tiled floor beside him and pawing absentmindedly through B's collection. It is at the moment his fingers meet the cool, metallic clatter of safety pins that the inexplicable impulsion seizes him. He takes hold of B's chin, and, startled out of his dissection, B wriggles closer at the promise of attention. Unfastening the first safety pin, A's breath slows and deepens, and he traces B's moistened lips tenderly with the pointed silver tip before he begins, as if to ask for his approval.
At first a slow whine escapes him, more inquisitive than shocked or pained, and by the time A clasps shut the first pin, B is quivering.
A gains more confidence with the second, the sliver of silver piercing quick, angled wounds through slaps of skin.
Then, by the third, Beyond begins to groan, lids dimming with pleasure, a long dormant rumble clawing its way into a sober murmur at his throat, his tongue lapping out a sloppy slide of syllables till the blood gurgles around his mouth, and, burgundy bubbles beginning to froth, his mother tongue tumbles out.
It is an apocalypse cry, for gathering hell hounds. A believes it could churn the sea until it birthed monsters and heaved serpents. And in this cushioned, sterilized world in the hazy beginnings of youth, where knee-scrapes are rinsed in clean bathwater and death is kept as only a muffled memory, this terror-tongue is the most dangerous and alluring thing A has ever heard. It slices through his innocent sphere of understanding and snags him somewhere he did not know he was vulnerable.
Pain is Beyond's language, and wounds are his words. All he had needed was a little blood to lubricate his speech, it seemed. The stinging tang of punctures had awoken his lips.
Dusk finds him scuttling around A's bed, mimicking every slurred word he hears him murmur through his nightmares. In the morning he follows A through the halls, his lolling head locking a gaze at each passing conversation. He breaths each new learned treasure down A's neck, testing it's intonations, trying out different timbres— first light and giggling and eerie, then vicious and resonating, then caustic and corrosive. A feels each tickle at his nape like a building threat.
A never completely discerns exactly when his gradient of meaning passes into the comprehension level of the other students,
but most of his first words are monosyllabic and about foods and flavors:
eat, sweet, meat, crunch
Soon after come words of worth, rank, and competition:
win, top, best, fail
But he has a special penchant for the anatomical:
veins, marrow, flesh, nail
B saves his first full sentence for A, a moment which neither ever forgets. They are sitting out in the April sun during a break together, B with his spine straight, legs folded underneath him, chest rising and falling, excitedly preparing himself. Sounds of play and juvenile laughter revolve around their patch of ground. B waits for a slight lull in the swing set squeaks and the children's shrieks, then leans in eagerly, locking eyes with A, lizard-licking his lips, and, tonguing each word slowly, deliberately, coarse and conscious, he whispers:
I want eating you!
And then he falls back onto the playground pea gravel, cackling and squealing in perverse delight.
Soon his flickering tongue goes from a fickle flame to a fully fledged forest fire.
He roams the halls with a mouthful of lies, learning just what weaknesses to tug on and just what passions to incite in order to unravel friendships and topple the respected.
Beyond grows into a mastermind of chaos-breeding. He can sense exactly when and where and how to toss just a few small pebbles so that it triggers an avalanche. With a well-placed hiss of Oh, you know better than to believe that… into just the right ear at just the right time, he brings classrooms into raucous mutiny in less than a minute.
His hair grows out, ragged and stringy, like the tattered feathers of a scavenging street crow, scuttling among crowds and living off the wreckage of his own destruction.
A has lost two more baby teeth and one is loose by the time B has mastered speech enough to sow the seeds of insanity and corrupt youth with his trickster's tongue alone.
But it is not until a student chases a stray football into the koi pond and finds A's cold, still frame at its bottom, clothes weighed down with rocks, that they begin to wonder when B had gone from a deprived orphan to a depraved viper.