The Boy and the Animal

Part I | Twenty-Five

"Titus!" A man's voice roared, echoing in the endless halls of a dungeon far below the surface, the physical pitfalls of man manifested into a world that light could not reach.

The owner of the voice stumbled out of his bed, gripping onto a nightstand for support, only to fall to his hands and knees. Even so, he slammed his fists on the ground and scrambled for his feet in a rage. The doctors that surrounded him reached out to tend to his needs, to pull him back into the comfort of his bed, but the man only swatted them away for the chance to get his form away from his confines.

Coming upon the scene, another man, younger and with a stronger body, narrowed his brows in sympathy for the elder. He shoved the doctors out, sending them away while he took the older man by the hand and helped him back to his bed. The covers were pulled just at the start of his hips, and then the man who'd been summoned took a seat at his bedside. The elder covered his face, gripping his companions hand.

"What troubles you, Tobis? Are you hurt?" The younger between them, Titus, asked. The older, Tobis, shook his head.

"No, the month since the fire has been good to me," Tobis groaned. "It's this damned waiting! We were so close to the fruits of our labors, but now we're playing cat and mouse again!"

Titus held the older man's hand tighter and settled him back down to relax against the pillow behind him. The elder sighed and looked off toward the disheveled nightstand he had all but fallen against in his attempts to flee the bedroom he'd been trapped in for the passed three weeks. His eyes fixed on a small framed painting set on the top of a young girl wielding a blade.

Catching his gaze, and the painting whose subject he knew well, Titus nodded and smoothed his fingers over the other man's thinning hair. He gave a quiet hush and leaned down. When they were inches apart with their noses tingling of each other's presence, the prince placed a kiss atop his head.

The kiss lingered passed a loyal student, and just as it drained into a sensual pot of intimacy, he withdrew and replaced his lips with his forehead. They closed their eyes to relish in the contact. Their hearts beat in sync, connected by their pressed faces.

A quiet settled in the room and in the older man's rage. The prince's hand broke from the researcher's, and in one silent motion he shattered the line they'd walked like plunging into water. Dark fingers unbuttoned the pajama shirt of the elder- slowly, expertly, just the same fluid snap as a thousand times before.

Tobis sighed again as the man above him slipped his hand passed the shirt and ran his fingers down his burnt, sensitive chest. It hurt, and yet, as they found his melted shoulders and slipped his shirt up over his head, it felt so very, very good.

When the threshold was broken, cut by the young man sitting on top of his companion to straddle his hips, their lips finally met, and warm mouths ran themselves across each other to share the heat that was rising through them like a terrible fever.

Titus broke from the tongue that captured his and ran short and lingering kisses, the kind that burned the charred flesh deeper than any fire, down his chin. A sweltering tongue glided across his neck, fueled by the aged hands climbing his spine and holding the small of his back to push him against the hips below, and back up to his ear.

"I will find him," Titus swore to the ear that twitched it need at the hot breath. "I will find him, and I will make his screams of agony fill these halls. And when that day comes, I will take what is mine, both his essence... And you."

Tobis moaned, eyes rolling to the back of his head as the younger man began a steady pace between their hips with slender fingers.

"I have always been you loyal subject, my prince," he mused. "I will always be by your side. We will see the end of ends together. We can find that world where tomorrows never bring worry and wars become peace. Our world we dreamed of, the world my daughter can awaken to with pride, it will come."

"I'll see to it," Titus muttered. "My world is on the precipice of the seed of Enicrih's blood."

The war, the mercenary's secret missions, the assassination of his father that would soon come- it was all culminating into a final close that he could nearly taste, and he would feel its presence even in moments like this.

For five years, he had waited and plotted and attacked and deceived. For five years, he subjected himself as low as an imperial researcher's affair and as high as the commander of an entire empire's army against a former allying nation under the pretense of a political battlefield he had waged alone from the shadows. And now, even in the lowest of his reaches, he felt the crown.

It was not the crown his father wore. It was the crown of a god. Shredding mortality in exchange for the defiance of death, a destiny without fates who cut the strings- that was the very nature of a god, and it was in his reach.

All he had tasked before him now was to continue playing his hand between the elder's delusions and guilt and capture the boy whose leash grew tighter by the day. For immortality, for power, and for revenge against the blood that made his own bow for centuries, he would do it for a thousand years.

When he finished with the elder, setting him off to sleep with his distractions satisfied, Titus washed his hands and left the room. Soon, he reminded himself as he passed a complacent woman standing in the doorway with a metal case tucked to her side. Soon, he would find the hares that had escaped his hands, and he would have his lucky feet.

And the game began. Titus, Tobis, and 2 striking across the board, Jesiter and Dark running towards the checkmate...

And me.