VVhite Tongue [VVhite Coffee II (boyxboy)]

[5] Snap.

Noah was asleep, eyes wide open.

He'd accidentally made an infinite loop on his program. Random rows of characters slid up his screen at the speed of light, and Noah sort of spaced out while watching it. Green text on black, black on green, until he was starting to see certain shapes and a new spectrum of colors- that was about when he fell asleep.

The five empty cups of coffee where the reason for his body maintaining an upright, rigid position, muscles clenched involuntarily. Eyelids, too.

It was a weird place, sleep paralysis. He kept slipping in and out of consciousness, from one dream to the next and then to reality and back to a dream, sometimes a mixture of both- entirely sober but hallucinating black shadow figures about the room.

At one certain point, however, the hallucinations changed. From beyond the computer screen, at the doorstep, he saw a familiar figure stand and stare. Morris?

No, Morris was home sick. Home, away from Noah. Away from too many empty cups of coffee and a fog of lung cancer, away from the old days.

"Vin!" Morris greeted lightly. His voice was too far away, considering the few meters between them. Noah tried to move, but no matter how much he budged, his body remained a stone carcass.

Morris chuckled against the quiet hums of electronics. Noah was looking at him bluntly, as if unimpressed by his arrival. Surely, he was trying to come up with some witty remark or another.

Morris took a step inside and waved his hand against the cigarette smoke in order to breathe. "You can blink now, you know."

He looked at the monitor and then back at Noah. "Stop messing around, photophobia isn't a joke. Why aren't you wearing your glasses?"

Only one more step, and he got to notice that Noah's eyes were bloodshot to the point of pitch-red.

Morris hurried to his side of the desk and covered both his eyes with one hand. Noah's head slumped upwards and fell against his lover's hipbone.

It was then that Morris got a view of the desk and the empty cups, smoked cigarettes.

"Oh God..." he whispered, and took a deep breath only to cough out smoke.

He would try and calm down before taking any drastic decision. Because just then, he had the impulse to scream and curl under the desk.

The sense of dread that shook his entire body made him feel like his fever was back at highest temperature, body shaking under waves of icy shivers, droplets of cold sweat forming across his forehead.

Morris sat down next to Noah on the chair. An easy enough task, since Noah didn't get to put on a significant amount of weight since his recovery. Just enough for the wind not to blow him away.

With the hand that wasn't covering Noah's eyes, he caressed his mat white hair.

Meanwhile, all Noah could do was alter between dreaming and seeing. Seeing Morris's collar bones shift with each heavy, panicked breath he took, and dreaming... Davin's collar bones.

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Davin's bones, the horns of Devil.

Really, looking at the man's collar bones Noah could easily imagine a goat head right at their juncture. They'd represent its horns precisely: from the thick bases going up, the sharp curves that gave way to congruent lines that steadily decreased in thickness, and then the tips that seemingly tried to pierce right through his paper-thin skin.