II
The Boy without Colour

The youngest member of the Shinra Turks had been broken. As a child idly pulls apart the fragility of a night-blooming flower, with easy, nervous fingers, he was broken by them, clinical, concentrated sanity now stared out of listless, empty eyes. Madness painted over in weak shades of grey, painting over stains.

Yet, the gleaning together of the shreds of normality in him had only equipped him with a theatrical mask of apathy. The warm, charming smile was new; an imitation he thought flawless, but his eyes were deadened, the milky blue of cigarette smoke, a camera of analysis. Cold intellect, quick and cruel, roiled in those creamy, neutral depths.

Internal suspension. The company was not informed.

Rikan didn't feel like going back. But he was ambitious, childishly so. The dim passion for cruelty that had been slowly and painfully ingrained on his colourless imagination would never leave him. He was obsessive, and unhealthy fixations would always lead him back, a white, spider-cord thread around his plastic throat, tightening. Discipline, regulation, the promise of control; Vincent. His metallic laugh, his handsome, heartless smile.

The pale officer's fear was giddy and adrenal, opiate, a pleasant, electric nervous thrill. His ash-blond hair was combed and oiled back to one side, but careless, weakly curling strands spilled and slithered over one eye. He looked imbalanced, a mesh of silken blond, a horrifying knifed grin, pace gently loping, feral.
The lights were out in the Mansion, blackness roosting in its heavy, modular architecture. The moonlight was chalky and pallid where it pooled, white blood. Silence was roaring in its protracted death rattle, the stilled, skeletal hands of acacia branches shivering and daggering as they reached for him, the traitor-boy with the water sapphire eyes. Death hung like a caress in the greasy air.

He was home.

Leaves danced in patterned spirals at his feet. He traced the movements of murky clouds against the radiant moon. Terror was a drugging, asphyxiating pleasantness.

He understood the game. For he had played and won so many times before, chameleonic to those that engaged him, being whatever his playmates required;

the censoring, dominant lover, the pleading, spiteful boy. The butcher and the analyst. But Vincent was the worst of all opponents. He would not listen to Rikan's clever, serpent tongue, his slow, drawling lies. Vincent's answer would come as a lustful backhanded slap.

His water-colour eyes stared. Blue annihilation, gazing strategically, the ravening carrion-crow of the night and the bleak mansion reflected creamily back, shadows on nacre. With a spidery hand, stretched like a trestle of flesh, he eased open the door, sluicing his lean form into the ballroom, into the hot draperies of blackness within. Rikan tugged the oak door shut soundlessly. White fingers tucked a whiter shirt into his tailored trousers, sliding over high hips. He licked his palm, smoothing down his pale hair and turned heavily, expectantly, feeling a corrosive stare upon his back. His slender body was a sinful promise, swaying, crafted in gilt porcelain by a hedonistic god. He drew his black sword against the darkness, terror drugging him into a listless, heavy nausea. Shadows crawled around his uniformed figure, suit the colour of winter gloaming. His own horror was guttural and mildly arousing.

By degrees, the threading darkness gathered itself, clotting into a nightmarishly handsome young man, shadow knitting into a tightened boyish form. Vincent stood jealously close, rich tone knotted with hate and craving.

"You are two days late."

Rikan tapped the sword on his thigh.

He hesitated, until he was conscious of every layer of the malign silence; the ache of leather, the tapping, the quiet workings of his own lungs. "Rikan?"

Rikan shifted, turning from his superior, tone thick with distaste. "Don't pain yourself to talk to me, Sir."

Vincent pleaded. "Speak to me."

"There's nothing to report."

"I order you to say something."

"Hi, how are you? Now, aren't you going to ask me how my little holiday went? No?" Whisperingly, he added, "Then where's my kiss hello?"

"Don't start."

"...And where is my welcoming ceremony? Where's the champagne on ice?"

Vincent clasped him hard by the shoulders, feeling his bones under slithering blue velveteen, a suit hung on a skeleton. "What have they done to you?"
"They? You forget who issued that order," Rikan scythed him away. "Sir. You."
His hands clenched tightly, pink fingernails digging into his quivering palms, his throaty tones ripped by anger and frustration. "You ought to be thankful behaviour therapy is all you got. You're lucky I didn't have you killed."
Rikan, unsmiling, told him mechanically. "You did. I am dead."
Vincent stared guiltily into his chemically neon eyes, a tender shade of crimson on his cheeks. Desperately miserable, he seized Rikan by his razor-tailored lapels, bodily dragging him closer, panting in little broken sighs. "What? What are you saying? You're punishing me, are you?"
With a chilling smile, "No sir."
Vincent slackened his grip, sliding his clawed, quivering hands down Rikan's suit jacket, stroking down the bluish creases on his deathly uniform. "I see." He breathed. "Is it unfashionable to sleep with your superiors now?"

Rikan brushed past him spitefully. He laughed sneeringly, arrogance a fat, rolling note on the rushing, mirthless little sound. He was a ghost, sickness pale, sauntering across the empty dance floor, a bony dream of shadows and bleached, polluting colourlessness.
His cold voice was of broken glass. "Oh, that reminds me. It's not all bad news tonight," He rounded on Vincent, "Because I've been promoted to Lieutenant. Ha. Ha. Ha. And Vincent?"
"What?"
"I make it fashionable."

Vincent swallowed, feeling thorns of despair draw down his smooth throat. "You ...slut." He tried, his voice wavering under misery, a hopelessness that seized by the neck, and crushed, tore, at his moneyed tone. He clenched his palled fists, turning from Rikan's barbed, gently mocking voice, and the subtle poisons that dripped from his practised syntax. The fair Turk was smiling, an awful, gloating simper, as gaspingly he savoured his dark lover's pain.
"Slut, am I?" He panted. "Hilarious. You'd have thought that would hold back my career. Seems to have done quite the opposite." Vincent had forgotten the exquisite, refined cruelty of Rikan's tongue, the tender garrotte of white hands on his neck, warm, craving breath, the whispered venom. The young man's touch, sliding under his shirt and through his raven black locks was painfully, bloodlessly cold. Rikan prised Vincent closer, embracing him from behind, thin arms locking, knotting over his sinuous shoulders. "I thought you'd at least congratulate me..."
He tore away from the vile embrace, spinning to shove the lieutenant back. Rikan stumbled, hissing his annoyance, and smiled, his charm snaring, delighted by his superior's suffering.

In the darkness, Vincent breathed, heart broken. His rich voice was touched by madness, cracked by his knotted despair. "Get out. I don't ever want to see you again."
"...Are you crying? Did I upset you?" A cold pistol muzzle was pressed forcefully onto his hard, liar's throat. He swallowed dryly, thrilled. "Play nice."
"Get out. I will kill you here if you don't leave me alone."
"You wouldn't. Imagine the fucking paperwork."
Vincent holstered his gun, staring at Rikan with his pink, murderous eyes, every lineament of his brutal handsomeness smoothed to sculpt an expression of deadened hate, white teeth gritted. His quietness was beckoning, threatening, his throat gently labouring under a tight bind of a tie, his exhale ragged.
"Please."

"Fine. I'll go. You're nothing special." Rikan faltered, voice hitching, uncertain. He perused the dark Turk intently, pleadingly, mesmerised by his black, malicious charisma; magnetised by obsession and hate and ruinous, meandering desire. He steadied his trembling hand, his cheapened touch, on Vincent, blue and black draped over stone. "It's not my fault. I didn't mean any of it." He whined, struggling with Vincent's censure, his bitter disapproval, his own warped emotion. "Kiss me."
"Get out," He twisted and turned. "of my sight."