Eventually, the insides of the house spat them out onto the pretty skin. A long corridor trailed away left and right. This length possessed an understated elegance, ornate lamps studding the wall and a Persian runner over the polished wood. Cain stopped outside a room just down the hall and once he stood aside from the open door, Casper shuffled inside.

Fucking money oozing out of its seams, this study. Mahogany panelled the walls, broken only by two huge windows on either side of a crackling hearth in the far wall, both still showing the dusky blue of the sky. The desk was huge - big as a bed and covered with a sweep of paper and tomes that wheezed dust.

The ghoul went straight over to that, sprawled out on its back with its head dangling over the edge, nails tapping against its reflection in the crystallised glass of the drink's cabinet. It could hardly reach across the gap even with its obscenely long arms.

It was ... nice though. Quiet. A bookshelf smothered the wall to the left and even its sturdy wood seemed to sag beneath the books packing out its shelves. The tomes jammed against each other and spilled out into little piles on the floor. A drift of scrolls adorned the very top. Vanilla and tickling incense filled the air and the heat from the fire crackling between the windows on the back wall engulfed him in a shroud. A larger version of the carpet that had run the length of the hall outside lounged over the floor, thick and sumptuous and soft.

Casper tracked straight across it in his filthy socks to stand in front of the fire. Hot. Closer, the scent of woodsmoke danced beneath his nose. Now he stood in this warmth, the shivers waiting in his bones came out. They wracked his body as he clutched his hands to his chest. Was he even still cold? His wrists were, but ... then why did he shiver so violently?

The door shut. Casper jumped, his heart flying up his throat.

"Do you want anything?" Cain's footsteps tracked muffled across the room toward the desk. His dim reflection passed across the right-hand window and settled on the edge of the desk. "You look cold..."

Casper's tongue moved. Rude of it considering he wanted to stick to surly silence. "I ... I could really use a drink."

"Mm, I think I could use one too." Cain stood up from the desk. The ghoul snatched back its arms before Cain could walk into them. Amber whiskey glimmered in a crystal decanter on a small end table just beside the cabinet. Cain shot him a playful glare over his shoulder as he unplugged the decanter. "Considering your dreadful treatment of my head and general face area."

"I had a dream last night that I dug my fingers under your skin and tore off your face."

Cain's shoulders dropped in the reflection and his sigh filled the room. "I take it that was a good dream."

Two glasses clinked together as Cain set them down and the whiskey glugged out of the decanter. Casper sunk to a crouch by the hearth and the heat licked at the palms of his hands.

"I'm glad it wasn't a nightmare," Cain said.

Casper shot to his feet, spun around with a snarl on his lips. "Who fucking said shit about me getting nightmares?"

The dry tilt to Cain's head told him who. Fucking idiot. Casper hissed a curse and crouched back down by the fire. Not to mention if Cain had come anywhere near the bottom of that staircase while he was having one, he'd have heard him scream. One of the many reasons Casper couldn't live with roommates, all under the bold print heading of GENERALLY DYSFUNCTIONAL JUNKIE. He didn't function with other people in his space. Couldn't cook or eat or shit. Couldn't exist. So he forked out the sky-high rent for a bedsit and forked himself out to pay it.

Maybe it was worth it. Not that it mattered anymore.

He'd never see his flat again. Never smoke out the window and claw some bare appreciation of the cityscape out of the view. Never curl up on the sofa with Mackie on the rare times he put some self-care into his day off, warm and maybe a little tipsy but at least mostly sober, and a comfort film on TV. Never wake up to Jack burning breakfast in the kitchen, but that happened rare enough now anyway.

Would Jack miss him? Had he even noticed Casper was gone yet?

Slow footsteps crossed the room. Cain held out a glass, and in the corner of his vision, it refracted the light of the fire. The amber of the whiskey glowed like sunshine through autumn leaves.

Nice tumbler that. All cut glass and it felt solid cupped between his cuffed hands as he took it from Cain and tipped the whole double down his throat. Nice whiskey too. Too nice. It didn't even burn.

Casper dropped the glass above the slate hearth, but it never hit the tile. It stopped an inch up, and nausea clutched his gut as the glass floated up past his eyes and out of sight.

Magic. Alright, that was why he was shivering. Fucking magic.

"Can you not break my glasses?" Cain said. "Otherwise I'll have to go out and buy you a plastic sippy cup with some teddy bears on it."

Asshole. "I like lions better."

A snort of laughter. "Very well—" Cain lowered himself to the floor beside Casper with a grunt, one knee up to his chest and the other leg stretched out long in front of him. The fire danced across his skin. Shadows flickered over the right side of his face which was fully turned from the fire, but his left eye lit up as amber as the whiskey still held in his hand. He smiled, faint but there. "Lions then."

"You know—" Casper scratched his nail against the tile. It was too long, and it left little white marks against the slate— "the Cowardly Lion. His name's actually Casper."

Cain laughed. "Oh piss off. I read all of those."

"I think he looks a bit like me, you know the guy in that old film?"

"Not even slightly!" More laughter, and as Casper glanced out the corner of his eye, he found the dopey grin stretched back across Cain's lips. It was ... easy, wasn't it? Anything but outright vitriol and Cain fell for it. The blind man tumbling off a cliff as he followed the sound of a waterfall thinking it a spring.

"Of course, that makes you the tin man. You know, no heart?"

So satisfying to see that smile crumble. Casper grinned as he scratched his nail against the tile, and he made sure it was an ugly one.

Cain spoke softly, his eyes turning back out into the room. "You know neither of those things were true in the end. That was the point of the story. The scarecrow was always wise. The tin man ... had a heart, and the lion was the bravest person Dorothy had ever known."

Stupid fucking pathetic asshole. Casper dug his nail against the tile until with a lance of pain through his finger, it snapped. "Guess his name isn't Casper then."

Cain sighed and took a long drink of his whiskey. Then a longer one, and as the last trickled down his throat, he crooked his finger toward the side table and the decanter came drifting into his hand. Casper froze as it moved. He couldn't look straight at it. Just tracked the beast from the corner of his eye, ice crawling down his spine. His heart beat quick. Hard.

"This isn't real," Casper croaked. The fire baked his face and he blinked dry lids over his cooking eyes. His hands began to shake again. "This can't be real."

"I take it you mean the sorcery."

Really, he meant everything. He'd found Casper. Years later and the monster he'd thought he'd left behind had closed its jaws around his head and snapped them tight. Then someone had kidnapped him. A psycho who thought he was his reincarnated lover had actually fucking kidnapped him and now here nutjob was, slapping the fucking supernatural across Casper's face. How could any of it be real?

Maybe he had jumped. Maybe the heroin had killed him. Maybe this was the afterlife and he still wasn't sure if it was heaven or hell.

He nodded anyway, hunkering down in his crouch. That maybe was probably the only thing keeping him going.

"Here—" The whiskey glugged out into the glasses, one then the other, another over-generous helping. He handed the glass to Casper and took a respectable gulp out of his before continuing— "What do you want to know?"

Casper took a deep drink, mulling Cain's question on his tongue. Another drink. It had to be stupid nice, but he couldn't taste a thing. "How?"

"Born with it," Cain said, "or as close to that sort of random chance that no one I've met can figure a difference. Not even me. It's a few and far between gift, be it a trickle or a flood. There are two variations; each draw from two planes that lie ... like a skin against our world. Veil and Void. I draw on the Veil."

Planes. Magic. Shit. Casper's mind raced trying to find a hole, but he'd seen it. That mammoth flood of black fog that had wiped out the sky.

Despite himself, Casper kept probing. It was too much to pass up no matter how much he wanted to scream.

"Is that why you're so cold?"

Cain's jaw tightened, eyes shuffling off to glower at the other side of the room, and he took a long drink. "No ... the Veil does manifest as cold, but I'm ... like this because of ... something I have to do to myself. Every time.

"Ell—I mean the—" Cain broke off with a sigh. "This cycle of rebirth, it's a curse, and every aspect was meticulously designed for cruelty. She—Well, it would be commendable if I was in a commending mood."

Well was the biggest bit of shrouded implication that Casper had gleaned from him. Not just this she, but the curse and the hint of purpose behind it, and whatever had Cain looking sick in his own skin.

That part he hid the best, but Casper knew the look. The taut muscles and the way his limbs shifted to hold subtly apart from themselves. The hand Cain rubbed down the leg he had out straight like touching a memory, and a compulsive turn of his hand, clearly familiar if only for how awkward it looked twisting his thumb to run along the far side of his ring finger.

Holding the glass steady between his cuffed hands, Casper slipped out of his crouch to sit cross-legged on the floor. Closer to Cain, one knee dropped just an inch away from Cain's outstretched leg. Cain's eyes flickered down as Casper settled, a moment of tight, indrawn breath before Casper stopped just short of touching him.

Warmth seeped through his jeans from the floorboards, and heat baked out of the slate tiles against his other knee. Casper held Cain's eyes as he sipped the whiskey, and like Casper puppeteered his limbs, Cain mirrored it and took another long drink himself. Almost all of his glass was gone now.

Maybe if he got drunk enough he'd forget Casper was still cuffed. Forget all the sick things he could do while Casper couldn't even struggle.

Casper pressed his eyes closed for a moment, cramming the twisting nausea down his throat. Questions. Not those thoughts of horrors. "How does it work? What sort of things can it do?"

"Mm..." Cain swirled the dregs of whiskey around the glass and sipped at them, his head tilted as he studied Casper's face. Dazzled eyes, not the dull calculation that must be in Casper's. How much did this blind him? "I suppose you don't want the academic version."

Of course there was an academic version. Casper let himself smile, just a small one that twitched at his lips, and mimicked the tilt of Cain's head. "The short academic version."

Cain's eyebrows pulled together a moment before a bright smile spread across his lips. "Very well. The short version then ... let's see..."

The firelight turned the drift of his hair lambent as he tipped his head back. Absently, he drained the last of his drink, and with a dance of his fingers through the hot, dry air, the decanter lifted itself and tipped out another glass. Casper's heart began to pound, a thrill shivering through his veins.

Magic.

Real magic, and not just the siren spell of Cain's voice as he began to speak, slow and low and the timbre was like the resonant frequency to that smooth purr of his voice. It was all very ... wordsy. Scientific. Most of it slid right over Casper's head – entropy and physics and energy manipulation – but the sound of Cain's voice, it lulled him, and Casper watched him talk hypnotised - parted lips and big wide eyes as he ate up the words.

Right until Cain jolted up out of the lounge he'd eased into. "Oh cock—"

Casper's heart slammed against his ribs. Fucking made him jump. That cunt had reeled him in so well, got Casper leant in over his crossed legs with big fuck me master eyes. Built right into him, wasn't it, offering himself up on a fucking plate. Second nature. Dusty shit and Cain's fucking voice made it sound like poetry anyway. The smile edging around Cain's sheepish grimace looked way too knowing as his eyes traced over Casper's face. A faint pinkish flush drifted across his cheekbones.

Nausea lurched through Casper's gut and he tipped the rest of his whiskey down his throat.

"What?" Casper croaked.

Cain blinked, once, twice, gaze swimming as if he hadn't quite heard. "Oh. No, I just—I left those bloody cuffs on you, didn't I?" For fuck's sake. "I'm sorry, Cas. Here—"

The whiskey tumbler drifted off on a flick of his fingers and he passed his hand above Casper's wrists, so close the bloom of cold felt like a second skin trapped between theirs. Then the flare faded and disappeared, and Casper snatched his hands away. Seemed like the motion snatched the smile from Cain's lips as well.

"Sorry, Cas," Cain said, his voice low and a little maudlin. "That was an awful thing to forget, I'm sorry."

Why did he have to sound so fucking genuine? Maybe he was. All of this, it was all real to him if he was that deep in the crazy. Casper was his reborn lover, and apparently, in this narrative, they were both targets of a curse to keep this happening. A curse set by she. Must be easy to believe when you were literally a fucking wizard. Or sorcerer, if it was sorcery. Probably only because it sounded better. Whatever.

But how much did Cain believe it? More importantly, how desperately did he want it to be true?

Casper whet his lips and held his empty glass out to Cain. Warmth spread through his fingertips now, tingling across the bridge of his nose, but it wouldn't touch him too much. Not yet. He'd almost been able to keep up with Jack drinking, at the beginning of the night at least, and Jack could outdrink everyone they both knew, but Cain – he fumbled the glass he took off Casper and snorted at himself as he did it. The smile had already returned to his lips and it had that same endearing lopsided tilt it'd had in the bar, one that Casper hadn't seen since.

Shame it just made his stomach turn. But he couldn't make himself leave, not when Cain was being so loose-tongued about this fucking magic.

"What was the ... the—" Casper scratched his nails against his jeans, searching for words— "the black fog?"

"Hm? Black—Oh, no, that's the same." Cain flicked Casper's glass through the air to him and a shiver of cold ran down Casper's wrist as he caught it. "Manipulation of raw energy. I mean like I said, most sorcerers can't conjure up more than those cuffs so it was a bit of an overkill but I really didn't want to chase you around the whole bloody grounds with my head hurting this much."

"But it was—"

"Black, yes. Pull enough raw energy and you start to partially manifest the Veil or Void in this plane. It isn't actually black in the Veil though. Awful place actually. Very purgatory. The landscape mimics our own – as I said, like a skin on top of our world – but there's nothing, just miles and miles of this off-white grit. Stinks too." Cain wrinkled his nose and took a sip of his whiskey. "Like rotting corpses. I've gone completely off topic, haven't I?"

If Casper assumed consistency right now, assumed Cain knew as much about this as he talked like he knew – because really, Casper had nothing else to go off – then he assumed the average was most people can't do much more than those cuffs around your wrists. If that were the case, that mammoth display... Shit. A shiver ran down Casper's spine and he pulled his knees up to his chest. What the fuck had he gotten himself into?