Detritus, Daedalea and Other Dead Things [Closed]

[Myca Vykos]

"Mmmg, good."

Vykos sighed happily and lingered a moment with his hands in Asterius' hair, their bodies gently pressed to one another. His mentor really was quite breathtakingly beautiful. Even though he had long been privy to Asterius' form projected through obfuscate, holding his lover's head in his hands and knowing it was his flesh and bone body was quite different. His body, reformed with Vykos' careful ministration. The thought sent an abrupt ripple of arousal through Vykos' body and he released Asterius' hair in anticipation of his next actions. His teacher was never very receptive when Vykos revealed his amorous intentions outside, in the dirt.

Resisting the temptation to take Asterius then and there, Vykos gestured towards the Haven and followed Asterius inside. Their bedroom here was certainly not the most luxurious they had stayed in but Vykos found the fortress-like surroundings of the church comforting - a little like home. Of course there were scrolls and books piled everywhere in organised arrangements, covered with Asterius' ancient ciphers. At the food of the bed, Vykos' only static possession stood on a small, ebony table. An old bowl, simple in construction and with its own runes writ about the rim. It was full of spring water with various sprigs of local aromatic plants floating on the surface.

The moment he was over the threshold, Vykos shucked off his simple robe and discarded it - knowing that Asterius would only sniff at the soil clinging to its hem. Naked, he approached the bowl and captured two palm fulls of the water in his hands before splashing it over his face and smoothing it over his dark hair. It was an old habit but one that he found helped to ground him to foreign shores. The cat had followed them into the bedroom and now sat at the window, casting its thin silhouette across the pane.

"Does she have a name?" Vykos asked, rinsing his face and hair again before attending to his talons, scrutinising them for earth and gore. Asterius really was very fastidious.

[Asterius]

Asterius lit four candles at each quarter of the room - not for light. The wax melted quickly, releasing the scent of Cypress oil, Frankincense and Tamarisk. Asterius watched the candle closest to him burn, until he could dip the whorls of his index finger into the gathered liquid, and lift his hand clear, pressing his fingers to the frame of the door, and leaving there an imprint of wax.

"Her name is Mu-bal-lidat-serua."

The night and the incense and the gentle lapping of the water in Vykos' bowl returned Asterius to nothing, a similar paradox he felt when he was underwater: both utterly inconsequential and supremely important. He was a single pin holding the entire universe together, suspended, now horizontally as he lay himself down and inhaled, so slowly that he felt his lungs burn with the ghostly incense.

From the bed, Asterius having changed into an irridiscent white silk, he found it increasingly difficult to speak. In the minutes after candles were lit and spices burned, there was no place for words, only the cumulative sound of everything - the church stone, light, blood, smoke, skin - a din so intense it equalled silence. He felt a return of the trance, the perfection of objects.

Finally this, as he watched Vykos: an inarticulate tracing of a previously unseen design, suddenly life came ignited with pleasure, and the radical, forbidden knowledge that either of their bodies were things they could give to themselves - an earned sufficiency, for how much they had had it taken.

Asterius rolled over belatedly and pressed his hand onto a small cuneiform by the bed, only just remembering to mutter in Chaldean. The wards around the room condensed and hypercharged, then fell silent perceptively. He tried to adjust the silk that had shucked up over one knee.

[Myca Vykos]

Vykos looked up from the bowl, his face dripping with scented water as he fixed first Asterius then the cat with a blank look.

"Mu-bal... dragul meu, you know I struggle with your language." Vykos sighed, his tongue failing miserably to prounce the ancient syllables. Wiping his face with a clean linen cloth, he crossed the room to stroke Mu-bal-lidat-serua's head with a frown on his face. He took a deep breath of the heavily scented air and murmured sometime unintelligible under his breath before looking over at Asterius from under his dark brows.

The words of accusation - that Asterius was intentionally trying to show up his poor grasp of Assyrian - died on his tongue when he took in the sight of his lover reclining on their bed. Vykos' lips parted in anticipation and he stopped stroking the cat immediately, his hand dropping through the air as if forgotten. He stared for a long moment, a slow, indulgent smile spreading across his lips before he crossed back towards the bed.

"Ah!" Vykos shuddered with pleasure as he felt the wards rise around them, encapsulating their little room in the comforting walls of Asterius' power. As the his Elder finished with his casting and began to reach for the misplaced hem of his robe, Vykos reached out and trapped the silk where it was. Caressing the tender, hairless skin of Asterius' calf, Vykos stood at the edge of the bed looking down at his lover. His face was heavily shadowed and it was impossible hard to make out his expression without Auspex - the candles shining behind him and silhouetting his naked form in light - but it was quite clear that all thoughts of complicated cat names were far from his mind now.

[Asterius]

"Then refer to her by Li-lit," Asterius bit with a surprising lack of impatience for someone who looked so peaceful only moments ago, responding to his lover's incoherent rumblings with a repressive look. "It is the only alternative."

On that 'explanation', Asterius' entire body language had become haughty and unresponsive. "Excluding recent weeks, we have spent the majority of our nights in Romania, on soil that is as unwelcoming to my blood as can be. Celts were killed here. Romans, far from home. Saxons. You know what's underfoot: the dark strata flecked with bone, copper, iron, hair; bogs have drunk blood, stones have sealed kings and queens. The land's broody with the buried dead, but it does not sing of home to me - nothing here does."

"I do not have the option as you, to take of my home's soil and feel it fall from my fingers. Not once a year, not once a millennia. Everywhere feels wrong to me. Looks wrong to me. Smells - tastes wrong to me. The least you can do as a brother, a companion, is learn to pronounce at least one name that is familiar to me with remote interest."

A hiss escaped between his teeth. "Back you incubus -"

Asterius tugged at his robe, but ineffectually; he was unwilling to damage it. Wide hazel eyes looked up in surprise, a very unabstract question in it. He needn't have bothered: he knew that look. There's always the flesh-lust with that look. The conrete that out-argues all the abstract. Asterius felt it at the end of his breath.

[Myca Vykos]

Vykos' shoulders tightened as though he were fighting the urge to recoil but his hand did not move from Asterius' calf. He moved with the slow but confident caution of one who was quite used to these sudden changes in temperament - a quick contraction of affection and concern in his Aura even suggesting he was attached to them.

"Of course. Of course, lumina mea."

Vykos' hand slipped up the back of Asterius' leg despite his lover's vicious hiss of incubus. He pressed his fingers behind Asterius' knee, his thumb running fondly over the smooth rise of his patella.

"I have been quite spoiled, haven't I? Li-lit." Vykos pronounced the shortened name with great care, his lips smiling around the letters. Slowly, deferentially he lowered his head to kiss the smooth, hairless skin of Asterius' ankle - all the while keeping his eyes on his lover's furious face.

"It is a beautiful name - and I will practice with her full one," Vykos murmured against Asterius skin before pressing another kiss further up his shin, "I was being ungrateful, wasn't I maestru?"

His tone was not grovelling at all, despite his seemingly submissive body language - though the firm grip behind Asterius' knee quite told the truth of that. His aura was brimming with plaintive adoration and no small measure of fear. Above it all, however - still the red, pulsing arousal that never abated when he was in such close proximity with his love.

[Asterius]

Asterius rose up against him like a snake.

"You are not sorry in the slightest!"

His small nostrils dilated. Inflicted with a fierce sobriety, he lashed out with his foot.

Asterius didn't know why he bothered; Vykos, as ever with matters of the flesh, didn't need Asterius' allegience, he only needed a head start.

Only happy with maximum culpability landing where it should, though, he said, "I think it eludes you sometimes that I have a clarity of consciousness available to those with an ounce of awareness past that of a pot plant. What do you take me for, a Toreador? I can see that you are aroused. You are not sorry at all! You dare? Platitudes - as a means to copulate? This is a jest to you?" Asterius snapped, appalled.

For a moment Asterius could not say anything, too indignant and astonished both. Instead the room filled with the muffled argument of breath - indrawn hisses, expelled in gasps - and the small sounds of unspoken combat. Sometimes love was for Asterius like a giant irritant. There weren't words enough in Asterius; no outpouring of obscenity would be sufficient expression of this great frustration and anger and desire - and worse: frustration at desire.

"This is not inevitable just because you are naked! I am dressed!" Asterius yelped, tightening his armpits around his hands and thinking to himself how ridiculous love was. Love insisted. Love insisted on this preposterous miracle which transformed the unwanted into the wanted, the world of the mundane into a world of occult emotional resonance. Nothing was exempt, from spiritualty to sex. Especially sex. It was obscenely greedy; love must reach out and contaminate every detail life until there was nothing left to resist it. He quickly tried to shield his own erection, tenting his robes as it was.

[Myca Vykos]

A triumphant grin revealed Vykos’ fangs as Asterius kicked out at him with his little foot, glancing him in the shoulder with hardly any impact.

“My desire for you is never a jest, dragul.”

Vykos tightened his grip behind Asterius’ knee and pulled him sharply down the bed towards him. He knelt between his lovers legs and released a deep, satisfied sigh as he looked over him - Asterius’ fine features were twisted with incredulous rage, his arms crossed tightly and defensively over his small chest. His thick braid fell over his shoulder and just a few stray tendrils of hair had escaped it, likely from where Vykos’ had been stroking his scalp. Resplendent in iridescent white, his teacher really was quite irresistible - as always, his protestations only fueled the furnace of Vykos’ desire.

“Dressed? Ah yes, but cloth can be just as telling as nudity, Maestru.”

*** ((Fade to black, sorry folks!)) ***