The Stains Beneath Our Skin [mxm] ✔

20.2 | O' Heartless Man

And ... Cain burst into tears.

Right before Casper could bolt, there the drunk fucking twat was – sobbing with his head thrown back against the wall, hand fallen to his lap. All the misery that convulsed through his face and throat was bared shamelessly in his drunken isolation. The sheer rawness of it twisted in Casper's gut, nailing his feet into the floor and his hands into the doorway.

Shit.

It wasn't anything like Cain. It wasn't graceful, it wasn't dignified, it wasn't controlled, and it wasn't even awkward. The sobs wrenched out of his throat like living things, ugly and wretched as they spilled at once from his nose and mouth in the wet catches of the wails. Tears poured over his cheeks, messy streaks splayed across his twisting head like angel wings beneath the light. Wriggling tracks of tainted peach slid through the smear of blood that painted him a crimson mask.

It looked like it hurt. It looked like hurt, and it fucking hurt watching it. It wasn't the mad laughter or the furious panic or that cold bite of his voice this morning as he denounced Casper as wolfsbane. It was real. Human.

Casper pressed his tongue against the roof of his mouth, willing his feet to move. Just fucking piss off, Roach. Isn't this what you wanted? Didn't you want to see him break?

Casper didn't care about human. Never had. Sometimes in the dead of night while Jack cried out the anguish that wrenched through his mind, all Casper could do was sit there, token hand in his hair and machinated nothings spilling from his lips all while he stared into the pit of darkness in the corner of the room. The only bit of darkness, lurking where the wardrobe blocked the thin light that always seeped past the curtains.

And he'd wondered when it would stop, when the drink would kick in enough that Jack would pass out. Pray he'd drunk enough to get there. Could he crawl out of bed and take a hit? Get so fucking high that the dark corner turned into a dream of slurred warmth, and the tears were nothing but white noise behind the slow pump of his heart searching for euphoria.

And he'd wondered whether under this skin, he was still human.

No matter that he knew better than ever before that he wasn't, the echoes of his footsteps still rung around that hollow hall, stamped in the places that Cain's tears didn't fill. His fingers trailed along the whitewashed grit of the wall, and even the clatter of the ghoul's clawed feet as it bounded down the hall didn't break Cain out of his misery.

His grief.

For all those little lost boys haunting the shadowed spaces of his mind.

A slow, cold breeze drifted under the back door, ruffling through Casper's hair. Beneath the skewed doormat, an arcane circle poked out, and that draft put eddies through the black smoke that still seeped from each line etched into the wood.

Another one. Casper wondered how many strange circles were hidden in back rooms and beneath carpets like lost portals to another world.

The ghoul scratched at it, a whine low in its throat – not a scrabble, but with purpose as if it sought to scratch new lines into the intricate pattern. A deeper chill crept into Casper's gut, one that twitched where it lay, scratching at the walls of his stomach with vicious white claws.

"R2," Casper whispered, "could I have a knife?"

Cain sobbed behind him, and no matter how much the sounds ripped at Casper's chest, he couldn't make himself take his eyes off that circle until the construct zipped up behind him, long, wicked kitchen knife bobbing above its head. Casper snatched it, crouched down, and hacked at the circle until with a puff of rot in the air so sickly sweet it made him gag, no more smoke seeped from the lines.