The Stains Beneath Our Skin [mxm] ✔

23 | Vulture Dreams

The shattering of Casper's little delusional paradise came so stupidly. Bloody stupid, Cain'd say, but fuck thinking about him right now.

Fuck thinking about him, like Casper could actually stop. Like he wasn't a cancer in Casper's fucking brain, eating away at neurons and matter until all that was left was a primordial gloop of mushy obsession.

That's all there had been for days, and like the biggest idiot on the planet, he'd indulged in it. No more kisses, but those touches came so free now, and the smiles...

Casper's breath choked up in his chest, heavy and wet as the rain-drenched earth. The trees above his head spat cold water on him, and the soil had soaked through his socks and squished between his toes.

Didn't matter though. Only thing that mattered was that his chest had no fucking right aching like this. Like someone had jammed a fucking crowbar between his ribs and each jerk of it gored through the flesh behind them as it snapped the bones one by one.

No right at all.

Not for Cain.

But how could it not when it made that smile not Casper's smile anymore. Like it ever had been. Made him the fucking idiot forgetting the delusion in the first place, forgetting that he wasn't Casper, never had been fucking Casper, had always been just another one of those lost boys.

The image still stained his mind. Fresh glut of rot smeared over his brain and his bones and his heart.

Cain, stood by that cabinet in his study, and Casper had slipped in the open door, silent, slow, a fuzzy little thrill under his tongue imagining the way Cain would growl and sweep him off his feet when Casper startled him. There'd been a picture in Cain's hand, worn around the edges and a hint of blazoned colour glossy across the front, and in the other, a glass of whiskey raised to his lips.

Tears had pricked Cain's eyes, little diamonds drinking up the dazzling day.

And Casper's chest just dropped out, hadn't stopped dropping out. Like in those cartoons where the trapdoor opens and the heroes all run with their feet as wheels in the air, a mad scramble for safety before in a big clang of noise, they go screaming, falling, plummeting into the black abyss below.

Didn't have to see that picture to know who it'd be. Lost boy #1? Maybe #4, or could it be lucky #10 who'd really fucked him up? Twin darknesses swamped him and only one of them was halfway not fucking delusional.

That's what that cabinet had always been. It'd be Casper's final resting place too when Cain got bored or Casper violated some sanctified trait of the crazy and marked himself Lost Cause #11. Probably fucking teeth in there. Hair. Skulls. Skin.

Then the next thought overwhelmed him. The first had been a beast, but there was always a bigger monster, and this one swallowed the first in a maw so gargantuan it made little more sustenance than a single plankton to a whale.

Stupid fucking Roach, crazy never loved you. Crazy always loved the hallucination where your face should be.

He'd run. Cain had shouted after him, but so soon it'd drowned in the screaming in his skull and the pounding blood through his brain. Run, Roach Boy, run. Far away from your psycho nutjob as his prison allows. Run and maybe you can pretend you're free. You've never in your miserable fucking life been free.

Down amongst the muck and the rotting leaves and this bit of the garden he hated because it stunk of failed dreams: a gazebo half-raised and too many fallen trees.

Cain wouldn't look for him here.

Until of course he did.

Casper didn't hear him come, too caught up in the pantomime theatrics of almost but not quite, never quite, couldn't quite fucking cry. Shuddering shoulders, the weight that crushed the sockets around his eyes to throbbing shards, his breath so choked up he couldn't breathe. Because Cain didn't really—