𝖙𝖍𝖗𝖊𝖊

.

Teaching Casper had proved to be an ... enlightening experience.

Trapped within the dim corners of Cain's office, the boy choked on the floor, retching up blood thick and black under the moonlight. Cain watched it pool on the carpet with a strange hunger stirring through his gut. The itching desire to grip the boy's jaw and run his tongue along those full lips, filling his mouth with copper and delight.

A few more gags, and with heavy, gasping breaths, Casper's eyes found Cain's through the gloom. Something darkly smouldering lit his gaze, the shaky grin twisting the scars in his cheek to pleasing grotesquery. "Did you see that?"

Cain idled his chair back and forth, the mechanism squeaking as it turned. The dregs of his whiskey swirled amber around the glass. "What, you ruining my carpet? They dock my pay for dry cleaning blood, you know."

Laughter burst from Casper's lips, bright and loud and wild. An esotery of his Cain couldn't quite understand. Without exception, time spent in his company turned laughter from gratingly obsequious to hysterical giggles stemmed in fear. Casper, as in all other things, was just the opposite. Cain had tried making the most obscenely inane jokes he could muster up yet the boy still giggled and scrunched his nose despite Cain wanting to puncture his own ear drums so at least he wouldn't have to hear himself say such drivel.

"You did see it." Casper rasped the words with such certainty that Cain had to wonder why he'd bothered to ask in the first place. He'd spent the first few weeks subtly mocking it until he'd realised Casper only made so many more obvious comments that it'd felt like him jeering at Cain in return.

So Cain indulged him with a small smile. "I did."

And he had. And it'd been incredible. The toxic black-green of his magic had writhed through the room so thick Cain had thought he might suffocate on it. Not only did Casper bathe in that glut of darkness and rot, the power and intelligence that seeped from his bones was ... almost – almost – breathtaking.

What was far more enthralling was that no matter how much energy Cain fed the boy, he kept standing long past when anyone else should have violently mutated into a writhing mass of skin and organic mush. Only natural to test it, of course. To find his limits, and that exact dose of energy to bring the boy bleeding to his knees, and yet — nothing.

It almost became therapeutic, feeding the boy energy that should have melted his insides. Imagining it, even — blood seeping from Casper's lips and nose while he chatted idly, rolling a cigarette, or refused Cain's proddings about a freshly split lip. At the very least, it eased this headache. Strange, how the same stagnant power that nailed through Cain's skull made Casper shiver so ... delightfully.

Absorption still seemed to tax him. It indicated Cain alone could use him so — a pleasing thought, certainly, but he'd need another case to prove himself right.

Either way, Cain didn't tell the boy. It'd snatch that little glint of fear from his eyes, and something about the way it lay side-by-side with eagerness told Cain that Casper would miss it too.

Now if the boy truly had this strange tolerance of Cain's magic, he had an entirely new host of—

"Shit!"

A crash jolted Cain from his drifting thoughts just in time to see Casper go down on his ass beside the wreckage of Cain's coat stand. Ragged breathing filled the pause, and under the fresh splash of light cast across his face, sweat sheened across his sallow skin.

Some strange jolt went through Cain's chest and he found himself kneeling beside Casper without quite realising he'd gotten there. His heart beat just a little too quick.

God, he looked sickly. Had something gone wrong? Was he—

The corners of Casper's lips twitched. "Sorry. Feeling a bit rough."

Oh. His own exhaustion. The tightness around Cain's chest eased, and he sunk back onto his heels, carding his fingers back through his hair. Some inexplicably dopey smile had bloomed on Casper's face, stretching out his chapped lips. His head tipped back against the wood-panelled wall, and long, thick eyelashes guarded his hooded eyes.

He looked at Cain though. And Cain's mouth felt strangely dry looking back.

Blood still stained the gaps between his teeth.

Sighing, Cain pulled his eyes away, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "I could have sworn I told you I'm not babysitting you if you're careless enough to exhaust yourself."

"I didn't ask you to." Casper stuck his tongue out, a cheeky, mocking gesture that Cain came dangerously close to laughing at. "I can crawl just fine."

"Stay there."

Cain got up before he could consider how unduly happy Casper looked with that command. A breakfast bar of some kind languished in his desk drawer, and Cain took that and a bottle of water over to Casper. One of his displaced coats did well enough as a blanket. All sound of Casper's breathing ceased when Cain knelt in front of him and guided the coat around his shoulders. This close, the copper tang of blood filled the air, twisting through the cigarette smoke that stuck to Casper's clothes.

And ... something a little like black cherry.

A red flush had lifted in Casper's cheeks when Cain sat back, and that held breath left the boy in a gasp. Where the scars on his cheek struck through the blush, a limned outline of dead white interrupted it. Like white sand atolls gathered on a sea of dilute blood.

Strange, wasn't it, that such a force could look so fragile. Amongst the sea of black clothes, Casper looked like a doll. His eyes glinted like black buttons catching a spotlight.

Cain had always liked broken things, and no matter how much like a doll Casper looked, the clumsy splash of rosebud paint at his lips had chipped and the fists clenched around the water bottle in his lap were ragged and torn. And those scars, the marks where the dollmaker had cast his failure aside to gouge its face on the splintered floor.

It all made him so much more beautiful.

Beautiful. Cain shook his head, eyes pressed closed and his fingers pinching the bridge of his nose like he could squeeze that image out of his mind. How stupid. But the boy's practice did always put a glut of energy in the air, enough that Cain must have built up far more than usual. Enough for wayward thoughts.

Yes, that was all. God, his headache was going to be awful tomorrow.

Casper's skin was back to sallow normality as Cain eased himself down beside him. Not much space here. A tall bookshelf rose precariously to his right and to Casper's left, its twin slumped against the front wall. Even through the tangle of fabric shrouding Casper, a little warmth still sunk into Cain's skin.

Casper glanced up, fiddling with the breakfast bar. "I'm gonna try drawing a bit out from you next time. But like ... not take it in, see if I can use it to push the external equilibrium a bit further and get more to build up. I think I almost had something really good."

Something grudging twitched at the corners of Cain's mouth. The boy kept doing that now. Jumping about three steps ahead of what Cain had planned to teach him. It really was dreadfully endearing.

Silence pressed cotton stuffing into the corners of the room. Casper ate louder than Cain liked, the sound like crumbs sticking in the wool, and he gulped water like a man dying of thirst, head tipped back to bare lovebites scattered up the column of his throat. Mottled merlot stickling his skin in the gloom.

Cain caught his chin before he could lower it. Hard, given Casper's sharp hiss, but the single jerk of his head made a pathetic attempt to escape the grip. Casper's lips trembled around bared teeth, and the black buttons of his irises stuck to the corners of his eyes.

On Cain.

He dipped his head, and Casper's throat convulsed as Cain's breath ghosted against his neck. "Hey—"

"Don't move."

A strange, throbbing ache went through Cain's chest at the sound Casper made. Anchored lower, hot and knotted in his groin, at the rasp of rough fabric against his cheek and that something-cherry gathered thick at the crook of Casper's neck. And ... something else.

What was it?

Cain breathed deep, the air damp and hot on his tongue. Something strange. Something too bright that didn't belong.

His gaze trailed over those bruises, drinking up the way they marred the pallor of Casper's skin, the delicate flutter of his pulse beneath. Exposed; heart forcing blood through those flimsy veins, and with the ragged pants of Casper's breath, how quick must it be. A heartbeat more like the frantic patter of a bird should Cain just rest his lips against his skin to feel it.

Just like someone else had.

This morning. Last night.

A spike of foulness in his chest drew out words so low they were nothing but ink staining the wool around them black. "Don't come to my office with these again."

Because these flames licking against Cain's throat begged for the taste of his skin. And if it happened again—

"You don't tell me what to do," Casper hissed, thigh pressed against Cain's with suffocating heat.

If he felt it again, he wasn't sure if he could resist.

Cain choked down the feeling and growled in Casper's ear. "No, but if you do, I'll give you some on the other side. And I won't be pleasant about it."

"Guess I'll have to get some more then."

Cain jerked back, the wood thumping through his shoulder blades. A seizing gripped his lungs as if he'd breathed in a lungful of black salt. Bloody brat didn't know what he was talking about. Playing coy like Cain would leave skin to cover the blood that gathered beneath his teeth. Leave traces of marks that someone else put—

Marks. Cain shook his head, pressing his fingers to the bridge of his nose. But no matter how hard he pressed it didn't blot out this heat that had spread from his skull down to the tingling tips of his toes, nor the way that knot of anger had found its way so low. Marks didn't fucking matter, so what was this feeling? The way black cherry mingled with bitter scum behind his teeth?

Casper was so warm. So small and warm and lovely beside him and Cain just wanted to pull him closer and drink in the smell of him and replace all that didn't belong with himself. Like if Casper was close enough it'd make this ache go away.

"Cain—"

A sharp hiss shut him up. Several segues into mentally reciting his intro lecture to Theories and Methods in Advanced Augmentation and this bizarre desperation crept reticently into something a bit less urgent.

"You should go," Cain told Casper.

No response. The boy's ragged hair hung in his eyes and his chin rested on his chest, although a sharp elbow in the side had him startling awake. The buttons of his eyes lost the gleam behind the sleep, but he looked even more the broken doll with his face scrunched up like that.

Casper spoke before Cain could repeat himself, voice slow and slurred behind the hand he rubbed over his face. "Hey, Cain?"

"Professor."

Casper gave him a look behind that hand, almost lost to shadow and gloom. It left Cain feeling strangely chagrined, at least until Casper's eyes went doey again. Slow blinks dusky with night and thick eyelashes.

"I had this dream... Just made me think what if you didn't have to get around finding a way to take it right? We're both fuckin' stupid controlling idiots fixed on Augmentation and Absorption, but like..."

Casper yawned, shifting a little to settle deeper into Cain's side. His heat alongside what gathered in Cain's cramped office was like curling up beneath the covers late, late at night. If the lamp was off, only the underglow of the streetlights would seep into the sleepy gloom.

And Cain wanted the lamp off. He wanted nothing to exist beyond where Casper's knees pressed into his thigh.

"Like what?" A tremble cradled the breathless edge of his words.

"Bestowal. Daud's Law still goes, and it's kinda stupid because you need someone to wanna give you anything at all, but do it both ways – it'd be like symbiosis. I reckon magic won't mind so much if you really wanna give it. Still gotta hold it all but you know..."

Cain blinked at the dark hollow beneath the desk. The carpet was worn away there, a threadbare patch of cream where his heels rested all those hours hunched over in that chair. "Yes... Yes, I suppose it would."

A snort, and Casper sunk in deeper against his arm. The bulk of the coat almost drowned him. "Guess you never thought about it 'cause you'd actually need to trust someone else to give it back."

"There's no one not so stupid and weak that the entire concept wouldn't fail anyway."

The truth, both parts. And truthfully, it'd been amongst the first theories that had crossed Cain's mind when he first dipped his toes into this pool of research, one he discarded with a sneer of distaste because first, no one was good enough, and second, trust was a concept that hadn't sullied his vocabulary since he was hardly old enough to grasp its weight.

Third, it did him no good now anyway, and it smarted that such weakness could give others what had near destroyed him to gain.

Cain pressed his eyes closed, shutting away the shadows that crept out of the gloom. Not now. Not ever, but especially not now while the boy's head settled against his shoulder. Turned a little, so that the sultry damp of his breath gathered beneath Cain's shirt.

So warm.

What if there was something special about him? Something more than the alcohol warming Cain's cheeks.

"Casper?"

A sleepy mumble as he rubbed his face against Cain's arm. Something tightened in Cain's chest, and made it remarkably hard to breathe.

"Why do you so desperately seek power?"

"'Cause I don't want someone to control me ever again."

It felt like moments later the first soft snore drifted up from where Casper rested his head, and not longer after that the first bitter gasp of tears escaped the tight press of Cain's lips.