Beltaine
by Ashura
Yaoi (2x1), lime
****
It was all too much
for me.
The way your eyes
glittered in the firelight like some feral creature—inhuman, but not animal
either—a satyr perhaps, or some creature other children, who grew up
differently than we did, would have been taught to fear long ago in fairy
tales.
I was never taught
fairy tales, so I never learned to fear them.
Until that night.
Why did you touch
me? Why did I let you?
Why aren’t you here,
so I can ask you these things, instead of whispering them into the recycled
colony air where not even the wind will carry them to you? Was it just the earth? The way it lives and breathes so hard you
drown in it, in the very /life/ of it?
Or maybe it was the adrenaline of warriors trapped, the way we needed to
do /something/ when we were forced to do nothing.
I remember it
perfectly—every touch of your skin, every heartbeat felt through the pulse of
the world, the way your hair brushed my chest as if it too were alive. Everything was alive. How dizzy I was, how dazzled by your smile
and the darkness in your eyes, how entranced by the glow of your skin in the
firelight.
You told me there
was magic in the woods.
You said it so
seriously, so honestly, that I had no choice but to believe you. And though I didn’t recognise it til you
told me, I could feel it too—its tingle across my skin, its subtle weave
through my mind, dulling some senses and heightening others.
I think you had no
choice but to kiss me, the same way I could do nothing but kiss you in
return. I remember how your silhouette
shifted as you stood, the bright crimson of the flame licking at the edges of
it—and how that heat was nothing compared to the tender brush of your fingers
across my face.
I remember how
gracefully you knelt to kiss me, and how I, precognate, knew what you intended
and how I would respond to it. I had
never been kissed before. I am afraid
now that I will never be kissed the same way again.
Sometimes, I am
afraid that I was dreaming.
But I wasn’t. Not even my wildest fancies could have
perfected the image of you, of the ragged syncopation of your breath and the
scent of woodsmoke and pine that permeated you. I could never have created the euphoria of that kiss, or the way
I clung to you as you bore me down onto the dirt.
We didn’t
think. We didn’t speak. I suppose we should have, or I wouldn’t be
wrestling now with these doubts. We
were drunk on the air, intoxicated by the heady late night in springtime,
driven by something so base and primal that not all the training in the world could
have quelled it. It was the magic in
the woods that you breathed into my ear, and it devoured us alive. I was the stolen child and you were the
creature who led me astray—but you were carried along too, even as I was. It was the first time I remember you ever
not having words—only moans, whimpers, soft intonations of sound with more
meaning than language could ever have given them.
And I was the loud
one, crying my desperation to the starlit sky as you drove into me, my voice no
longer my own, all my hard-won control surrendered utterly to you. I remember the sting of our frenzied
joining—it was my body that hurt, but I thought the whimper of pain was
yours. It made no difference. Divisions of flesh were no longer important,
or even distinguishable: me from you,
you from me, us from the universe and we from the earth, it was all greater
than we could ever hope to be.
I remember how you
asked me with your eyes, and I answered with a moan, and you made me yours in a
way no-one else will ever be able to do again.
Did you realise that was what you were doing, Duo? Did you know how these events beyond our
feeble mortal control would bind me to you so desperately?
Do you miss me?
I woke up with dirt
on my face, and your hair was tangled.
It hurt me to walk, and I saw the marks my nails had left in your
back.
And we said nothing.
I waited for you to
smile at me, to tease me, to say something—I don’t know what to do when you
won’t speak. And maybe you were going
to, or maybe I would have found the courage in the end to ask you what had
happened between us.
But the war went on,
and we went with it.
And now I’m sitting
on top of simulated grass breathing artificial air, staring out at the swirled
sapphire marble that is the planet I may fight for but never entirely
comprehend. And I think I understand a
bit of what makes men fight, and what makes the emotions of mortals run so
high. It’s the earth, pulsing like a
heartbeat inside all of us, alive in a way this colony can never be. And maybe that’s why we’re mortal after all,
because no matter what technology we have, we will never be able to create the
same magic that consumed us that night when we hid in the woods.
And maybe I’m
thinking too hard.
But I want to ask
you these things. I want you to tell me
that you remember it too. That you are
bound the same way I am.
And that someday we
might make magic again.
~Owari~