With all desire, through love and lust
Our hearts beat on, and so we must
Abandon hope, and knowing, trust
Some day we will return to dust
He sits upright, his back against the headboard. His arms are wrapped around the body beside his own, circled over chest and locked together with his fingers intertwined. The body leans against his, mimicking his posture, the two of them finding respite from gravity in each other's embrace.
Candles light the room. Their flickering sends the cascading shadows of their flames across the walls, painting mandlebrot patterns over the white in the faded visibility of the otherwise everpresent darkness.
They light the bodies on the bed. White sheets, pristine and pressed with care and attention. A quilt, wrapped around the waists of the two that are there.
Ebony roses line the windowsill, and the only brightness that creeps in from outside is the lighting of overhead apartments and dying streetlights underneath.
The one in the center is the smaller. His body is different; unnatural. His form is vague enough to recognize, but the mind pronounces him like a word borrowed from a foreign language. His limbs splay out underneath the piece of bedding tucked around his lower end. Where they stretch out as legs, they curl in the middle, pointing backwards, like the hind-legs of a horse. At the end, they come together in an abstraction of a hoof, shone and worn and singularly circular, the blunt point to the body's conclusion.
The front half is the same; delicate, flimsy legs made for standing upright, but never to reach or to pose.
The hands of the second caress the chest of the slender, quadripedal body from behind. His fingers separate to run, here, over the chest, tracing delicate patterns over bare skin. What could be skin. What feels like polished eggshells and black, frozen marble, icy and iron to the touch.
Black contrasts the pearlescent achromatic texture of the bedspread, and the second body besides. Like polished obsidian, hewn from a singular focus and welded together with four legs and equestrian purpose.
But there have been mistakes.
Holes. Here, here, and here. They jut toward vision underneath the outline of the blanket, the tiny gaps in the night underneath brilliant white. The second body pays them the most attention. His hand lingers on the black, solid chest as his second palm wanders, raking over sheets with a steady assurance and reaching the holes beneath the bedding. He traces the tips of his fingers over hidden legs, prodding ever so gently at the gaps in solidity where there is empty space. The second body shivers.
The first body is itself, and has not changed.
It lets out a noise like a sigh, passed through shivering ventilation ducts. It leans back further, wrapping itself in the warmth of the body behind him. As it leans, it scrapes the chest against its back with delicate, paper-cut like scratches. It flutters its wings, and bats away the stinging as it stretches them out of the way. Thin, delicate, dragonfly appendages jutting out of its body. It flicks them back and forth with purpose, and they find their place, extended and away from its comfort.
The second body is a man.
He is nude under the sheets that cover his lower half, and his bare chest shimmers with the dying candlelight as it dances across his skin. His chest is a chiseled sculpture of focus and restraint, his muscles jutting out from his skin like hardened slabs of sinew, molded to his specifications and fitting his body in a means between comfort and unforgiving sturdiness. When the wings part around his chest, he leans forward to catch the black, faltering body that falls towards him. He doesn't sigh, but he wraps his arms around tighter.
The black thing shivers. It stays the same, and does not change.
"How much longer?" it asks.
The man shakes his head. He raises his arm, and runs his fingers through the nonexistent mop of hair atop the thing's head. The word for it plays out languidly in his memory's monotone recitation.
Changeling.
He finds spiky cranial protrusions instead of delicate amber locks atop the changeling's head, but he caresses them as though they are fine china, delicately dancing over every inch of priceless inscription, hardened into the formation of the night-sky rock of skull and face.
When it speaks, its voice is like a child's, fraught with fear and anticipation for something it doesn't want.
The man doesn't answer. He runs his hand over its head, and whispers into its ear. Shhh.
"How long?" it asks again. He can feel the tremble in its tongue.
"As long as you want," the man says. He pulls the changeling closer with his arm already circled around its waist, and the changeling lets out a sound like a surprised forest cat; a squeak of sudden shock, and then silence.
It closes its eyes, and sniffles.
The man knows there is no sense in telling the truth when lying will be comfort long enough.
The changeling turns to him, suddenly, ruffling the bedding around its lower body and letting the jostling of the sheets join the sound of the dying candle-flame as it sputters for air on the nearby window-ledge. It looks up, its green eyes denser than a forest thick with trees, but with no dot in the center to guide them to assurance or purpose.
But he can see into them; the aquamarine pools of longing and worry and need for understanding.
He leans forward, and pulls the changeling's face closer with a gentle tug of his hand.
Their lips meet. They kiss with the taste of licorice and powdered chalk. The man parts his mouth barely a centimeter, and the changeling does the same.
The kiss lasts a moment.
"I'm not ready," it says.
The man, again, does not speak. He runs his hand over the changeling's shoulder, stroking it down the side of its foreleg and chest, taking in the texture of its skin, if it can be called that. Brittle, like bleach-dried bone, and so dry and tenuously fragile that he can't bare to press down on it anymore than the lightest caress of his motion will allow him. He can't feel the fear in his own touch anymore, but he can tell by the beating of his heart, quickening as he nears pressure, that there is reason now to be worried. He will be gentle, and there will be no need for concern.
"I know," he says.
The changeling shivers again as he pulls it closer. It's barren carapace is chilling against his skin, alighting goosebumps on his arm and making the hair on his exposed body stand on end. He can feel the tug of icy tingling as it courses through his veins, fading in pathways around his circulation from a moment's touch. But he pulls the changeling closer still, as close as he can with hesitation still to keep it safe, and separate from the destruction of his full embrace.
They sit like that, and do not speak. The last flicker of the candle-flame gives out, and bathes the room in darkness, only tiny pieces lit through the window and splashed against the walls like light being thrown through a net. Bits pass through the filtering safety of the glass and wooden structure. The pair turn to them, a likely looking misshapen square pinned to the far wall.
They look into it for a moment. Their eyes sparkle, as though the future might reveal itself through that malformed window of light.
The changeling sniffles, and turns his head to the side. The man's eyes meet his, and the changeling brings his face close together, scrunching his cheeks as the words brew in the back of his throat.
"Do you promise not to let go?" he asks through the tears welled at the corner of his eyes. His voice is high, and frightened. It trickles into the corners of the room, finding shadows of monsters where they have waited for years, for one tearful child's regret to find them and feed them for many more years to come.
The changeling has no age, but when it closes its eyes, it is as young as a babe born the day before.
The man nods.
"Of course."
He places his palms on either side of the changeling's shoulders, and turns it to face him. The changeling quivers and wrenches its face away from the waiting stare. It can't bare the burden of seeing what might be there. If it doesn't look, it can't be real.
The man is gentle, but assertive. He uses his left forearm to part the tangle of blankets, tossing them to the side of the bed with a single, purposeful throw. The changeling is at once exposed, its hind-legs jutting awkwardly against the mattress. It clenches them together in a misappropriated attempt at modesty, but quickly lets them fall back into place as it realizes the nature of its shame.
There is no time left for shame.
He moves his hands to the changeling's face and pulls it forward.
He can feel the nervous, broken lips against his tender skin. He can feel the shivering, frozen wood-grain underneath his fingers, sanded only roughly but now finer than glass. He can feel the stagnant air beat against his chest with the flutter of those wings, flapping frantically like a hummingbird struggling to fly away.
But the changeling stays.
The man lays the changeling down. He doesn't break the kiss, but uses it as a guide; an anchor to keep the changeling from breathing in too much of its own anxiety. The changeling murmurs assent into his lover's mouth as he is lowered, letting his papier-mache dragonfly wings crinkle against the sheets, and his holy, stick-like hooves jut out in every angle against the mattress, bent here and there in search of a proper posture.
The man leans forward, resting his weight on his hands. He poises himself above the awkwardly splayed limbs and jet-black body of polished bone. He looks down, and the changeling whimpers.
"Please," it says. The request becomes a need, and the man says nothing.
He reaches down, and feels himself. His hardness is a fitting match for the returning touch of the body underneath him.
He uses his other hand for balance. The changeling clenches its mouth shut and squints its eyes at the consummation of its frantic whimpering. It can feel him there, against itself. Poised. Waiting. For its approval, or consent.
The changeling can do no more than nod. It opens its mouth a second afterwards and takes in a long, greedy gulp of air. The apathy-soaked oxygen fills its lungs without a second thought, and it holds it there as the rest of it is filled too. Delicately. Softly. Slowly, and with purpose, as though too violent a motion might send its china doll skeleton crashing to the floor.
The texture is rough. The man pushes forward.
The changeling tenders an embrace as the man leans over top of it, and presses its hooves together behind his back, joining them with invisible fingers.
He can tell by the force of its grasp that it won't let go
He's barely started moving when he hears the first crack.
It's the sound of a bone being pushed too hard. The amount of pressure necessary to shatter a human skull is little more than that required to crack a coconut – but the hole-riddled, blackened form is different than a person stranded with only their apathy and remembered resourcefulness. Its limbs are fragile constructions of its center self, held together by existential tape and glue.
The man tries to hide his shock as he feels the grip around his back loosen.
He looks for the source of the tear, and finds it there, at the changeling's shoulder. A limb beginning to pull from its socket.
And yet the changeling smiles, as embarrassed a smile as it can conjure, consumed by the presence of the body hovering over its own. It fades underneath his shadow, black and empty and meaningless and all the while rejoicing, because it can find no fear in this. it can find only something to replace what it will regret.
The man slides forward. He still has room. He doesn't contort a single muscle on his face as he is locked into place, the changeling moving its body in tandem with his motion and returning the bottomed thrust with an eager, needy movement of its hips. The man allows himself a tiny smirk.
"Please," the changeling asks again, and moves the foreleg still in its socket, sliding its polished, welded hoof over the man's back. His arched, carved back, brought to life from statuesque poses and the natural beauty of the human form, fired in a kiln with the fires of the changeling's love. It moves its hoof, and finds the small of his back, like a delicate hiding place for a touch to rest before moving on. It does, for a minute, before the next destination, a calypigian set of buttocks moving ever so slightly with the man's gentle rocking back-and-forth. As the changing places its hoof there, it can be sure of every inch; every fraction of a piece of a tiny part of a centimeter that the human moves, it can feel. It wants to feel them. It wants to feel them, and only them, and not the thing inside that aims to blot out its love from the sky of self-composure.
The man uses a kiss in place of words. Lips. Lips and then tongue, sliding between, parting, stealing a mouthful of air and the taste of dry, forked appendage; to meet, dancing around each other and then sidling back home, damp with the evidence of their guilt but joyful in the face of no accusers waiting for their return.
Kiss, he says. Kiss. He stays the changeling's mouth with his own, keeping away the brimming yearning of another 'please', this time is forced back down the throat and into the reserves of its private, fast-beating heart.
The human feels without seeing. He feels the frantic patter of a muscle under bone, and understands, for the first time, what it means to be there. To hold it. To be a part.
The changeling croons like a wounded dove as the man moves his hips backwards. He slides, and the changeling feels empty for a minute, driving away the finish and focus and completion that consumes its every motivation. It can rationalize and assimilate without challenge; but the simplest tongue of expression is experience – nothing like an alphabet of interpretation and contemplation. It learns by what it knows already, and expresses it with hushed breaths and a muffled pant as the human moves forward again. It feels distracted, and the size and gentleness are part of the purpose.
The two speak without words between them, sharing thoughts and direction through the electricity of their bodies as it lights the particles of air between them with a blue-hot fire only they can feel; brighter than than the candle, burning against their skin and fusing them together in the air.
More, it says.
More, the man replies.
He moves his hips almost violently for a second, and hears a sound so familiar to the first he can't push it away. The crinkle of something against the sheets, like old, faded tinfoil. His hands are shouldered, and so he needs no time to check.
Before, they were delicate swatches of silk butterflies on the back of a spined creature, shimmering vestiges of summer dragonflies above a pond.
As he touches one, the tiny fragments fall apart in his hand, shattering as he caresses them like an atoms thin paper towel. It makes no effort to move, and he can feel his hand coated in the dry, crumbling shards of brilliance falling apart between his fingers.
The changeling makes no sound apart from its hushed moaning. It stays the same, and does not change.
He wonders if it can feel anymore. He can feel it, shuddering with the force of his thrusts. He can feel it clenched around him, a perfect, fragile vessel for his pleasure, that he endures only now for the sake of the ache in his heart, and the onyx body beneath that tells him it is right.
In the last moments, there can be something to blot out the shadow of the sun, he had said.
The changeling had smiled, and hoped against hope.
He watches it as he moves. The jostle of his position by inches at a time lets him look. Here, the tiny strands of its shimmering wing on its shoulder, which he wipes away. The sparkling minutae join the fast-collecting debris requisition of his bed-sheets, and he rubs his hand on a blanket before returning his touch. Shoulder there, where he wiped away; sturdy, like the bow of tree, but hollow, like the same bow emptied out over time through self-doubt, and anguish, and emptiness.
He moves his fingers lower, and muffles a grunt with his teeth. The changeling's reaction is so much that he can't convince himself it is real; a sudden jutting of hips upwards to meet the bone of his pelvis, pressed against the hardened onyx of the four legged vessel.
He can't watch its face, for fear that he might look too deeply in open eyes and shatter the illusion of his attention. So he feels its chest. His hand dances over the changeling's stiff body, feeling for holes, or the sturdy but brittle texture of well-hewn bone. He finds the welcome of his caress in the changeling's neck. Soft contrast versus the solidity of its elsewhere frame. Wanting to help, but being stunted by the uncompromising rock-hard wall of the changeling's chest and stomach, impediment falling away like a waterfall cascade.
He lets him self rest inside it for a moment, and the changeling squirms. He fights hard not to do the same. The tingling along his skin is meant to be sympathy instead of satisfaction, but he can't refute the burning shivers of pleasure as the changeling surrounds him; as he locks him into place, hind legs kicking but wrapping around, pulling closer. Forelegs gripping at the bedsheets, black and hole-marked against freshly washed, egg-shell white.
The limb. The shoulder where the leg has been pulled from its socket. He wedges his fingers between the gap and feels inside, expecting bug laden tunnels for a reason he can't articulate. But there's nothing there; unfeeling, meticulously carved joints are all that remain.
He pulls, and the limb follows his movement, removed without strife or struggle. He tenders another forward thrust as he takes the extension into his palm. The changeling groans and shuts its eyes even tighter. He tightens his grip around the foot-long appendage, and feels the first give of its dry-leaf stick-insect composition. Fingers clench, and the limb turns to powder, crinkling under his touch like a squashed collection of decaying tree-branches.
He holds his hand over the bed and clenches his fist, and the dust of the discarded appendage collects in a small pile as he continues thrusting.
The changeling scrapes at his shoulder with its remaining foreleg, needy and insistent. It uses its polished hoof, now breaking apart with every touch, to demand his attention. A piece falls away, and the remaining, jagged edge scratches the glowing pink of his skin, leaving a fast emerging mark in a single, slender line. As it quivers backwards against his movement, a pattern of red drops paints the line as they emerge, drawing out the tiniest hint of crimson in the dark of the bedroom.
"Aaron," it gasps, speaking his name for the first time. Pulling its hoof downward in a frantic burst of sudden shock. The jolt of pleasure that courses through its body gives it abandon to its self-restraint, and the second scraping of its fractured hoof puts pressure down on its foreleg. It presses down with the joint poised in resistance to the man's chest, and the second sound of something shattering fills the room. The changeling can feel it this time, the breaking of its body's tenuous agreement with its foreleg's joinder. The curve at the middle is not meant to bend that way. A sound like egg-shells falling apart.
It's cry is caught in the last syllable of the name that leaves its tongue.
The man it has named Aaron, has named through virtue of utterance of something that was always there before, leans over it like a shield. He can feel the fragile inner workings of the leg cracking as his pressure bears down on it further, the two bodies on either side like a wall, driving it into itself until it snaps.
And it snaps. And falls to the side, torn from its place, broken, and useless.
Aaron wraps his arms around the changeling. He feels the jagged bone texture of its ridges under his palms, and he clenches hard against its back. Holding it closer, like a brother shielding his younger sibling from a storm.
The changeling is crying. It can form no tears, but instead of the tiny grunts with every forward motion of the man's hips, now it lets out small, anguished cries, sobbing as the feeling of friction and fullness run through the parts of its body still attached. Good, it says by way of the way its body meets the rocking motion. Good, with the biting of its lip through tears that won't come. Good.
Aaron kisses it. He kisses its neck, the softness joining head to body. The sinewy black flesh melts away at the touch of his lips, falling inside and leaving tiny holes as the changeling's shell drifts inside itself to parts unseen. He kisses its shoulder, and finds the scent and taste of hot metal where its joints were connected. It burns his tongue through his lips, searing the inside of his mouth with its heat, but he goes on, kissing in a line around its neck and to the other shoulder.
A thrust, and he is hilted. He shifts his right leg for better balance. The changeling's leg is there, unwrapped from behind him, and he leans on it. It gives way with no resistance, crumbling into the bed
He places his hands on its stomach, feeling the shuddering panic of breath as it courses through the lungs falling apart where he cannot see. He holds it like a delicate child, shivering in the doctor's office in anticipation of its first stitches. He bears down, ever so slightly, with his thumbs, and they punch through the once unforgivingly solid onyx carapace, burrowing into blackness. The changeling cries out, and feels him twitch inside.
"Promise..." the changeling starts, but loses its momentum as the heady all-consuming focus of Aaron's thrusting overtakes it. Its breathing is laboured now, struggling to suck in every breath, its mouth consumed between oxygen and wracked with the sobs that shake its fast-deteriorating frame.
"That you won't..." it starts again. Aaron shushes it with a kiss, and he feels the burning hot iron against his lips, the heat inside the changeling coursing through its whole body. Hot. It burns. It burns. His mouth, on fire. Skin aflame, a thousand suns. Not a drop of sweat perspires, but a single teardrop runs down his cheek and onto the changeling's chest, where it hisses and sizzles away like a fleck of water on a frying pan. Aaron pushes forward, inside, feeling the heat coursing through his body, but tempered there, in one place. He hears the pop of the final limb separated from its socket and makes no effort to pull the piece apart. It melts of its own accord, falling into fragments on the bed beside him.
"...let go..." the changeling says, the thought finished through the boiling of its body and the final tension it can feel in its chest. A request, and a request.
Aaron feels the grasp of its breath. Tighter. He leans into the changeling's body and takes it in his arms, holding it close to him like a white-hot barrel of burning leaves. He feels the tension of his own finality, and listens.
He hears each breath. In, sucked through rattling lungs as they wither and fall apart at the behest of an inner flame. Out, panted through clenched teeth and shuddering, overwhelming pleasure. Conjoined, two bodies merging in the heat of a birthing star. The light outside has stopped, because there is no place for it left. The light inside spills outward, and coats the room in invisible brilliance.
As the two bodies crest the cliff together, Aaron pulls the changeling towards him. As they touch, for a moment, they are one. There is no moment but the explosion of their passion, ignorant of all things. No concern for worldly artifice, the texture of breaking skin or brittle bone or what the feel around or inside might be. There is this, and nothing else.
The changeling makes no sound.
Aaron pulls it closer still, and feels the peak of heat burning inside him.
It is the same, and has not changed.
The changeling opens its mouth. The last syllable of an unspoken sentence lingers on its tongue as its mouth fades away.
Two chests together. They press, and then intertwine, and the carved obelisk of obsidian skin bursts into dust.
The sound of its climax is washed away by the empty howl of a body returning to nothing.
Aaron dresses the fast falling dust with drops of ivory, biting down hard on his tongue through his burning lips and stifling the sound groaning for release in his chest. He shudders as the last specks fall around him, and his hind legs shake.
There's is no strength left in him. He is drained by his own conclusion.
He feels a heavy weight on his shoulders; the weight of the darkness as it wraps around him, forcing him downward.
Burdened, he falls onto his bedding, his blackened blanket bearing the burning ashes of his lover's broken body.
There is weight on his stinging skin. An anguished anchor pulling down on his chest, forcing his heart further inside the deep emptiness welling further within.
He bends into himself, a spiral circle missing its half, and closes his eyes. His fingers curl around the pieces of a nearby pile of dust, and he runs it through his palm, letting it trickle out like the sand from an hourglass.
He sighs, and the last light fades from his eyes as unconsciousness greets him.
And he sleeps.
