Warning: Body horror, angst, and non-explicit sexual content.
It was Christmas.
A boy and his lover held hands, fingers intertwined in a tumultuous embrace. Artificial light battling away the soothing darkness. Against the harshness of the world, came the almost naivete of their conjoining. A fatalistic juxtaposition set to repeat endlessly in a cycle.
The blinding white dyed their skin blue. Minuscule, invisible needles circled their prey. Cheeks stunned by a brusque wind. Clasped in the center of their palms, a golden chalice to share.
His lover brought up a bottle, flicked it open, and poured. The nectar completed the grail fittingly. With his other hand, fingers still tangled with the boy's, he lifted it up. This time it was the boy who did the pouring. A bittersweet tang spread through his mouth.
"You're cold," the boy said. He was correct. The fingers of his lover were terribly frigid.
"So are you," came the response.
The boy acknowledged this, and let his lover give him another sip. He tentatively swallowed, then pushed it to the other's mouth. Just as the boy had done before, his love tips the cup back of his own volition, takes a drink, and sets in that little space between them once more.
They look out at the pond. Despite it being Christmas, it was barren of any skaters upon the ice. The only thing that could be seen were the wisps prancing across its frozen surface. Surprisingly gentle, in its innocent dance.
"Was this really a good idea?" The boy asked. "It's cold and we're underage." His lover shrugged, "I don't know. But we're here now." They had come here on a whim. To them, there was no difference in being outside or being at home.
"I suppose."
"There are no skaters," the boy suddenly said. He pointed at the cold plane. "The ice is too thin this year."
"Is it?" His love asked. He looked out at the surface. It looked solid and untouched, unmovable and unbreakable. There was nary a crack or scratch that would give away it's apparent fragility.
"Yeah."
"People don't usually skate on ponds," his love said.
"Sometimes they do. I always see people on this one." The boy could clearly remember the numerous times he had passed through here on numerous Christmases, watching the couples clumsily skating across.
His love blinked, "Really? I wouldn't know."
Now it was the boy's turn to shrug, "Maybe this year's just different."
"What makes it so different?"
"I have you," He said simply. The sincerity of that statement took even the boy himself off guard. His love laughed a bit and said, "I make such a difference?"
"All difference in the world."
They picked up the drink again, liquid sloshing about as their hands jolted the chalice in their uncoordinated movement. The alcohol was barely drunk, yet already the boy was feeling warm. The edge of the unrelenting wind that had seemed so sharp was nothing short of dull now.
"What am I to do now?" He said more than asked.
"Live."
"I don't know if I can," the boy said. His life purpose moot, taken away by outside intervention and nothing of his own hand. And in a day or so, he would be unleashed as a being of his own. "My father is gone."
"Good riddance."
"I was going to end it," the boy confessed, voice barely above a whisper. The warmth was in his cheeks now, loosening his tongue. He didn't really care.
"I know."
"I'm sorry I was going to leave you behind," he said. "Back then, I could only think of revenge. I couldn't even see what was right in front of me. I was so stupid."
"So was I."
"Were you?"
"I was," his lover told him. His cheeks too were flushed. "Too preoccupied with wallowing in my own misery, I almost couldn't see yours." He turned his head towards the boy and said, "We were both so stupid then."
"And we aren't now?"
"I know you are." There's a small laugh.
"You never had to worry about me, you know," the boy said, not meeting his eyes. His fingertips trembled against the other's.
"Yeah," his love said. "But if I didn't where would we be now?" With sudden mirth, the boy quipped back, "Probably dead."
He agreed, "Probably dead."
The mirth faded as the comfortable blanket of quiet settled upon them.
His love said: "I promised you, 'If you were to die tomorrow — "
" — I'm fine with my life ending with you."
"But if you would live for me another day — "
"I would do so too'" the boy finished.
"You have me," his love repeated the words from earlier. "I make all the difference in the world, right? Don't ever forget that." He understood the boy. He too had lost purpose at the hands of another, only to find it once more with the aid of the boy.
The boy didn't respond. Instead, he closed the small distance between them and slid their mouths together. His love tasted of velvet flowers. Velvet flowers and gunpowder and drink. Soft and all chaste and innocent. The boy's lips parted slightly, erroneously and without conscious thought. Breathing each other's air. Flesh upon flesh, and a little bit of teeth. When they part, the boy's breath has been stolen.
"What did the boy taste like?" The woman asked from her place on the bed.
"Hm?"
"The boy. What did the lover taste when he kissed the boy?" She reiterated.
"I'm not sure," the man replied. "I don't think he tasted of anything."
"Huh?" She laughed at him. "Everyone tastes like something. The love was a velvet flower. What was the boy?"
The man took a moment. Then he said, "Primrose, probably."
Perhaps it is because this is the first kiss the boy has initiated, or perhaps it is the alcohol. He did not know. His breath condensed in the air, warm and visible. Usually he was not the one to breach that small threshold and meet lips with lips, but today was Christmas, and his love was by his side. Their hands were still tightly gripping that flute in unison.
The boy saw long lashes and black, envious curls, still. He was breathless, still. His heart wildly fluttering its wings within the confines of its ivory cage, still.
"Ak—"
Hands reached up to his face, tenderly brushing away the clear beads collecting in the corners of his inner canthi. They were careful and caring, cupped around his face, before they became forceful. Carved from fine marble, the hands of his lover spasmed in the air and jerked them down. A red dahlia bloomed from his cranium. Weightlessly, they fell.
Atop his lover, the boy could only cradle him in a crude imitation of his love's gentle caress. His love looked up at him with half-lidded eyes. That complexion pale and ghastly. Like a porcelain doll who'd unexpectedly, defiantly moved without permission, those lithe limbs were strewn akimbo.
"Ah-" the boy gasped, hugging the torso to his heart. The warmth was gone now, as if it was never there in the first place. The head lolled and bobbed with the rugged movement, ichor splattering all across the wooden floorboards. "Ah―"
His hands. His hands were sticky, covered in the poetry spilling out of the body in his hands in his hands in his h an d s—
The boy stood up. The body slipped from his stained hands and sprawled across the floor. The bird in his chest shot up his esophagus, clawing and tearing at his throat, fighting to be free. He wanted to scream. He wanted to scream but there was no breath, for there was no breath. The only thing the boy could see were the asphodels whose roots are entrenched in the rotting flesh of the body, holding together the last vestiges of a long-dead reminder. The boy spent another second watching the red darken and mingle with the powder in the air before he runs out of the cabin, onto the deck.
With a violent shudder, the boy doubled over the railing and dry heaved over the side. The taste of sick lined his oral cavity, yet nothing came out. His head spun, around and around. He heaved once more, stumbling from the nausea and scrambling for a hand-hold. His hands latched onto something next to him. Vaguely, he registered hands lifting him up. Shamelessly, the boy hung on to his savior, and looked up.
His lover was there, supporting him like he always has. Gentle and real and there.
The boy breathed a sigh of relief and sank into the arms of his beloved.