The Stains Beneath Our Skin [mxm] ✔

11.1 | Cerunnos

Death felt nice.

Crazy there actually was a death, not just an empty meaningless life where animals bestowed the curse of consciousness trundled at the end of a souped-up chain towing the grand, groaning machine of society.

Then again, life remained just as meaningless as when death was the end. When it meant the last dull spark of a neuron in your flesh-sack – zip, that all important concept we call life, the pattern of behaviour known as Roach come to the end of its run on the wheel.

Except now he'd just been shoved off onto another wheel, but at least this one was warm. This one smelt of vanilla and fresh snow and cradled his head in feathers. Some entity murmured to him, dulcet tones that soothed his weary spirit down to its bones.

Were those fingers in his hair?

How long until this got boring?

Was this heaven?

For now, he might as well just enjoy it. So much for the fires of hell; Casper curled up in feathers all aglow with the warmth of a summer day. One of those soft ones where everything glowed dreamy and buttercup yellow. If they were the devil's fingers, they felt so lovely against his scalp. His whole body lay too aching heavy to butt up against the touch, so he simply basked. Time would come to find if there were a way to claw out of this bliss. For now, relax.

Did he know that voice, the one that crooned indistinct in his ear? Shapes coloured that dark river whispering around him. Words. The shift of his focus came with the retreat of the amniotic heaven. Things ... hurt. Some trick of the mind imposing the physical upon the spirit, perhaps.

Singing. The devil crooned a song in his ear, one with the lilting tremble of a lullaby. Those noises shaped words, but the words were a dream themselves. Sounds like murky water, a language he'd never heard but that tune ... so hauntingly familiar.

Those fingers belonged to an arm, one that met a shoulder where Casper's head lay pillowed on a firm plane of muscle, cradled against a long, lithe body. The voice belonged to a mouth, and in the hazy glow as his eyes fluttered open – light crystallized between the feathered shield of his eyelashes – that mouth was a blur of soft pink against pure, creamy skin.

It was so warm. God, it was so, so blissfully warm that he never wanted to move. Casper squeezed his eyes closed again and some kittenish mewl slipped from his lips as he curled in against his devil. The song stopped, a gasp he felt through the chest beneath his head. Everything ached so deep in his bones, but the warmth soothed it. Strong arms enveloped him in the soft fires of hell, the one around his shoulders and another slipped around his waist to brush along his spine. A squeeze, something wet and choked in the unsteady lift of these ribs, and the arms, the body, it all drew away.

Casper twisted his fingers into the shirt. Shirt? Something twigged, but he didn't want to follow it. He didn't want anything but his devil's fingers in his hair and that lullaby cradling him in a feathered cloud. Devil in a shirt. Why was that so familiar?

A long, heavy sigh ached through those ribs. The sigh of some great ancient, Cerunnos in his glade as old as time, moss draped across grand, creaking antlers that twined toward the sky like the branches of a tree.

Cerunnos whose long, gentle fingers trailed over his skin as if it wasn't as gnarled and ruined as the old oak standing at the centre of his glade. Cerunnos whose touch lingered as if letting go would mean tearing that wooden heart from his chest.

No one had ever touched him like that. No one but ... Cain.

The vast tragedy laid bare across his face was writ as ancient and slow as the wandering steps of that primordial god. Creamy sunlight set his skin aglow and put vivid amber rays in his soft acorn eyes. For a moment, there was only him, the perfect stranger and perhaps the face he would have worn when Casper stumbled over a rejection over the phone, desert winds whipping through his hair.