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He’s made it quite a habit, watching the boy.
There’s a reckless curl behind his ear that dances in the wind, and he watches until he’s memorised the exact gesture it takes to tuck it back in place. Watches him across platitudes of desk, across all the graffiti that has remained scratched into the wood since another world, when he, too, was a student. Watches him across the narrow strip of snow that separates the seminary and the lake, so pristine when it’s frozen, untouched; watches Michael dispel that serenity, sending snow flying in his wake, leaving trails of footprints in his wake. He looks smaller against all that winter white, smaller and a bit out of place, incompatible with the frozen desert as like the parameters of their existence.
There’s warmth by his side but it’s always a distant, quantified by a small hand clutching at his sleeve, needy, questioning. What now, Lucifer? What’s that? How come? The hood is draped too low to let anything in his eyes show, but they’re always lost, always following every step he takes. This toy of his is young and foolish and so starved for attention he reaches out for every word, every gesture. The dedication he emits is sickening. It would’ve been easy to get rid of that old man, the father, summon some bizarre sickness; conveniently ‘predict’ all kinds of accidents for the mother. This part of Astaroth’s prophecy is nothing out of the ordinary, though it overflows with a cruelty of childish sorts, of certain redundancy. He, for one, would never wish for something like that, no, the bitter rage in his veins is much more refined. But as for the last desire…
He flicks a finger at the empty air. The hood falls back – in the moonlight, Abel’s hair emits a bluish glow, and August lets the softness pass through his fingers on reflex. Sepulchral cold is the only something left to linger. A petty familiar, a child, a servant kneeling by the sarcophagus in obedience – It’s a surprise his knees haven’t froze solid into the concrete – every touch is ice at this point.
There was a summer, once. August remembers.
Summers smelt of freshly mown grass, always soft beneath his feet, always in weightless dew; the bitter stench of mud when the lake was low, and the way the rays of the sun would pass through the ripples on the surface after it would rain. The rustle of reeds that was dyed blue and green and golden, back when the colour of blood didn’t exist, umarred, unstained, and quiet, always quiet. And in the mornings there has been the gentlest wind, caressing his face, blowing his hair off his temple.
Michael is so much less skilled in masking his intentions than he seems to think he is. It’s not even the matter of how loud he thinks or how used has August become to singling out the sequence of his thoughts from the neverending background noise of others. He’s just too honest, too vulnerable – a book laid wide open before him, a telltale performance of their shared hell. A shard of chalk clutched in a sweaty palm, determination hidden in the corners of his frown, the sudden lunge towards him to leave the distinguishing mark on his robes – he’d have found it humorous, the hand against his cloak, the movement of air, the desperation of it all – had it not scorched him from within.
Michael has many dreams after the boathouse incident, so very vivid. Arches off the mattress, finger clutching at the blanket – to the point of pain, to the point of nails turning white. Sometimes his hands wander to trace the outline of his abdomen, dipping further down as he rediscovers the curve of his hipbone jutting out, the junction of his thigh, before remembering restraint. He thinks too loud, desires too much for August to cherish any hope of sleep. It’s usually difficult regardless, everyone’s dreams an intrusive blur of colour, but with the constant awareness of heated flesh trembling at the memory of his touch makes it utterly impossible. Sometimes he tries to occupy himself by pacing the corridor, armoured with the excuse of patrolling the seminary, dissolving in the creeping shadow, re-emerging stained in moonlight. More often he lies in bed and smiles at the laboured breath of his damnation and his crucible, seeping through stone. Such a good boy, all self-control. It’s almost curious how long he’ll last for.
The brief moments their eyes meet from across the dining hall, through sermon – heavy, tangible in the way a physical caress would be; ‘accidental’ brushes in the corridor, hurried glances from behind his Latin textbook before he regains the notion of subtlety and starts scowling at the table instead – the boy barely lasts a week.
August’s choice of place by the door gives him such a great view of the show Michael unknowingly puts on for him. The lazy recline of his head as his back hits the wall, blond strands sent flying; pale lashes casting ever-so visible shadows on his cheek. He works his hand between his legs, motions jerky, unskilled fingers starting to cramp, but Michael is too caught up to care, shivers into the pleasure he’s denied himself for so long, biting at his lower lip. He drags the back of his palm over his mouth, the curve of his knuckle dipping in just slightly, and the wetness of tongue and teeth against his skin is almost coincidental. He stifles every tiny gasp and moan but it’s there in his mind, a relentless mantra of ‘August, August, please, anything, everything’. It won’t take long for him to come undone – he’s already trembling, legs falling open, bent at the knee to reveal milky white skin. He dances on the edge of release, stalling, and the pace of his hand on his cock slows, thumb circling the head, and right above his thumb there’s a tiny birthmark, barely visible, and a bit higher up there’s an implication of a vein protruding against his wrist.
It pulses blue, but August knows it’s an illusion – his angel’s blood is golden.
Michael tosses against the bed, less and less occupied with keeping quiet, and from this ineptitude, all this out-of-place innocence comes…not arousal, not a perverse excitement of sorts – something else. Transparent, like everything within was being torn open to accommodate a new kind of emptiness. He watches, and he shouldn’t be seeing this, he’s somewhere he no longer belongs – the past thirty years or so have gotten him well accustomed to the feeling, and he’s not sure why it resurfaces now.
August laughs, sharp and resentful, retreating, leaving the door slightly ajar as it was. He runs his fingers along the corridor as he backs away, and ancient walls carry the echoes of his footsteps right beneath his fingers.
The boy finishes the moment he steps over the porch of this chambers. Somewhere in his subconsciousness, a voice mouthes over his name again and again, and for the first time August catches himself out on trying to put up some sort of mental blockage, to keep out the sound of strangled breathing returning back to normal, of another’s despair creeping in.
Michael’s feelings fill through this unexpected emptiness. They come on and spread like wave, and he has to accept it’s no use.
After the boatshed incident August has dreams, when he does sleep – though infrequent. Not that he would complain – the realm of dreams never did anything more than rummage through debris of his memory, the fragment of hell he’s always brought along with him. Explosions in the sky, explosions on the fields the colour of blood trampled into dirt, the hands of those he had known sometime long ago reaching for him from the trenches. Inhuman pain and a shattered cross, laughter just as inhuman, and eyes that haven’t released him since, watching with cold, cruel interest. He’s always been fonder of a comforting darkness, the scarce hours when the deepest sleep stilled the cacophony of foreign thoughts and voices. Lately, though, he’s been plagued by unwelcome nightly visions of a different kind.
The kind that always started in the same manner.
First always came the false jolt of awakening when the knocking started, the timid tap of knuckles against his door. The August of his dream never hesitates to unlock it, and then his eyes meet gold. He’s just an ordinary pastor, a young handsome teacher of dead languages, a prurient decadent. He comes to him in the middle of night, this angelic displacement of reason, leaning against the doorframe, shoulders trembling – anticipation? Cold?
Sometimes his Morphean self seats the boy down by the fireplace, just in case it is the latter, sometimes he even offers him something to drink; other times he has him against the wall before he even manages to get the lock secure, panting and open and vulnerable. There’s many variations. The worst one is where he leads him up to his bed and pulls him onto his lap, white nightshirt against black cassock, lips brushing against pale skin. Michael is so warm, so pliant – he lifts his hands, slowly, like a prayer; buries his hands in August’s hair. Reaches to lay a soft kiss on temple, where the skin is untouched and smooth, like it has been always.
(Sometimes the dream would distort completely, and all that August can recall by the morning is the profile of a child, little more than an infant, and a tickling softness all over his face, like being stroked with a feather.)
Neither variant lets August see an ending – the dream would always cut off early, dissolving in the night and leaving him awake hours before dawn, trying to quantify a vague feeling of dissatisfaction. He’d swallow the bitter taste lingering in his mouth and entertain himself with ideas of continuation, trying to come up with a plausible ending.
Their alliance of sorts would have continued for a half a year or so, maybe a full year, until someone was bound to find out. Preferably in some dramatic manner, with flair – something like his door being torn down to reveal him with his angel in his arms, scarcely clad and frozen with anxiety and embarrassment. They’d tear him apart, of course, accusing him of every mortal sin, a scandal through the whole school. Lazarus would probably try to stand up for him, justify him in the face of authorities, which would be bound to trigger a proper investigation. Not without benefit – the whole thing with Neville comes out in the awkwardest of ways; the old geezer tries to flee, he gets shot on the spot, swift and well-deserved. And he, August, he gets trialled, trialled right in front of his ethereal victim, thin wrists and dried tear streaks - trialled and condemned to death. Michael wouldn’t come to see the execution. They’ll hang him right outside the prison, or perhaps a crucification would suit better; after the execution it’s straight to Hell, and Hells, like summers, are filled with warmth and quiet. A curious melodrama, August hums to himself as he signs yet another set of Black Mass invitations. Not very realistic, though quite amusing. What a foul decadence of events he’s come up with. Foul and unreasonable.
It’s easy to imagine, though – especially Michael’s humiliation, Michael’s grief. He knows the expressions of his suffering too well, knows what he looks like with his eyelids swollen from tears and lips chewed till they bled; knows how he wears all the different kinds of pain. They’re all different shades – despair, guilt, all willpower and will to survive subdued. They all suit him well. He knows from all the times the young supple body would twist and turn beneath his touch – Michael breaks the way crystalline glass shatters, the way the string of a violin would snap, were the pressure too much. August loves the spectacle he’s given.
(August loves him.)
This is what it looks like, a devil’s love.
It reads in the outline of a naked shoulder held against the altar, in the scent of sandalwood, in how Michael clutches at one of the candelabra. He wishes Michael could see the masterpiece he presents in this moment, the angry flush of his skin, the curve of his back against the marble. Maybe then he’d be more aware of it, instead of begging forgiveness, his trivial childish sins replaying in his head, a wordless prayer. Have you not known this? There are different kinds of people in the world and we’ve never been farther apart from each other than in the moment where the remains of my body meet yours. You, my angel of judgement, and me, a vestige in the dark. When you’re prepared to writhe in all kinds of filth by my word alone, when I look at you like this, when all your detest rings in my head – all I see is gold.
You’re such an obedient child, Michael.
This is what it looks like. Whose fault is it that it comes out like this?
He’s stopped to recognise the presence of Abel as anything beyond mechanical – the awareness of another’s weight accumulated on autopilot. Abel looks straight, adamance undermined by an aching insecurity (this is mine, I matter, I matter) – and Michael looks straight, too. Not the look of the purest of delight that used to be reserved for him only, not the poorly concealed arousal and resent that followed, emotion and sensation bubbling beneath his skin. Now his eyes are calm, they don’t show anything, not even despair, like everything had ceased to matter. Even his mind is blank, one single thought spreading like a headache – calm down. You need to calm down. You can have your revenge, later, can bring death, if you choose. No, not death, you can’t go that far, but you’ll have your revenge, for sure, calm down, breathe, calm…
Death. What a pretty word.
Michael turns on his heels, each footstep an imprint on his consciousness. August watches him retreat, exhausted and tense, shoulderblades sticking out beneath the uniform jacket. Such a good boy. All self-control. Not for long, though.
The ice will break soon – August feels it, inevitable, a Genesis in waking, and each passing moment is the closet to Judgement Day he’s ever been. And soon – very soon – it will be summer, again. An everending summer with all its warms and quiets and the softest caresses, and the memory of a boy with hair the colour of sunlight. It’s not long now, until the end.
Then, he could rest.
(It’s all going to be alright.
You’re going home now.)