𝖋𝖎𝖛𝖊

.

Casper never came to the lecture that evening, and when Cain lost his train of thought for about the third time in quarter of an hour staring at the empty space at the back of the room, he'd decided it best to ask the pertinent question.

"Where's the boy?"

Blank faces met his tart question, and Cain hissed, pinching the bridge of his. He gestured sharply at the single empty seat. "The boy. Casper Black. Where is he?"

More vacancy, but mutters with it this time at least. Casper, as the boy had told him, didn't do friends.

Smiled afterward, big coy eyes and a curve to his full lips. Black hair had cast curling shadows where it fell in his face.

Cain had mocked him mercilessly for the implication that they might be friends, but Casper never quite lost that idle surety.

No wonder, because now he stained Cain's thoughts like poison.

God knew how long his mind wandered that time, a cascade of black buttons and chipped red paint where his brain should be, because next he heard was scuffles and muttering. All the students near to the pokey little window had their heads bobbing and ducking like brainless meercats, gaping at something outside.

"What?"

Most of them didn't listen. One, near the back, turned tense-faced to Cain. "Professor, I think someone should get the Dean."

Another student laughed, out of their seat with their face pressed against the window. "Are you kidding? I've never seen anyone throw lightning like that! Cool!"

Cock.

Cain took off without a word, stalking through the corridors full of blinding noise and wailing lights. There were eyes on him – not many, and they still shied from his passing, but it was enough. It was new. It was ogling faces as he shoved the boy out of his office and it was too much like a taste of the past.

Too much mocking, not enough fear.

The headache twisted deeper. It grew roots through his skull and knotted so tight in his temple it was hard to see.

While Cain liked broken things, it came with the caveat that weak things he hated beyond all else. He'd never been a strong mage, not when his potential was as twisted and withered as the shell that stumbled through the fluidities of magecraft, and all these fools that thronged through the halls, rubbing shoulders with him as if he were one of them – they'd never understand the true horrors some must wreak for power.

For control over a life that spiralled with maddening ferocity out of your spasming claws.

Illusion, nature, the physical forced into your bones. The power to grind your body through sheer pain and force of will into the shape of something else, all while a constant bloom of entropy sought to tear it apart.

Because neither did they know the way potential could burn through your mind from the inside out as it built beneath your skin.

What did it matter? What did it matter? What did it fucking matter? All he'd done to make himself right, and he still fell apart.

At the exit from the building, Cain put his back against the rough stone wall. There was magic here, brimming closer to the surface than even those halls packed with mages, tingling white blotches behind his vision with all the shouts that filled the air. That gluttonous mouth at Cain's core gorged on it, but already, sweat gathered at his throat and his mind pressed swollen against the inside of his skull.

What was he doing here? Wasn't this Icarus? The boy's beautiful catastrophe; a final reach for the scorching plumes of the sun before he went up in flames. Usually, the thought would fill him with a luxurious delight, a sip of black cherry wine as he watched his own seed of chaos bloom.

Usually it wasn't Casper.

Cain ground the heel of his hand into his skull. Gasping with the way the burgeoning energy seared his brain, he let it scorch his veins and pour into his palm and ignite.

The ball of flame stung his skin, but Cain forced more into it. More, his veins turning black and the fire deepening through orange and white and viscous, scorching blue. A blister raised on his palm, and Cain gritted and ground his teeth against the pain. More. Did Casper know that Cain had all the power he needed but sought only the antidote to the poison of his own hubris? Would the boy jeer? White stitch teeth bristling with needles as he mocked the fool who thought he could own corruption.

Under the rising moonlight, those buttons stitched into Casper's eyelids gleamed like milky pools, and the fraying cotton of his cheeks snagged around his grin. The flame in Cain's palm vanished, as if the breath that caught in his chest had snuffed it out.

"That's not you."

The hoarseness of Cain's whisper drew a wicked edge to the boy's painted grin. Slow steps, the hem of Cain's coat scraping along the floor.

"Sure, but the realer you make me the better you'll feel."

The boy's hands closed around Cain's, and he groaned at the scorching heat coming off that cotton skin. Casper curled Cain's fingers up into a fist, cradling the injured hand against his chest as his easy steps brought him closer. An inferno; Cain's fucking catastrophe and the way he burned made a magnet to all of the cancer eating away his insides.

Frayed crimson thread stitched the buttons, and it tumbled like blood from the corners of Casper's mouth and his perfect nose.

"You know you dazzle him," the boy rasped. "He looks at you with stars where his buttons should be."

The corners of Cain's eyes stung, a fresh sensation against his cooling skin. "How can he when he's put buttons where my mind should be?"

A girl with the door half-open gave Cain quite possibly the most scathing look he'd ever been on the receiving end of – and he really had gotten quite a number in his time – and he let out a burst of laughter when the next crack of thunder broke the dusky air.

The air around him brimmed black as he took off toward the court.

Stairs plunged to where the lightning stormed a torrent into the sky, and like colosseum stands, they thronged with students who long should have run. Humans. Six professors wove spells beneath amber lanterns, wispy magic stirring red and indigo and gold.

None of it made more than parlor tricks to the boy drowning in that miasma of toxic power.

Cain stopped just before the crowds begun. Mouth dry, heart hammering against his chest. Their fear raged against his skull, but it couldn't reach him.

If he went down there, this was the end.

Or maybe it was more. An advent. The stirring in his gut that had never left since Casper grinned at him from the office door. The apple Casper sunk his teeth into had never been the one Cain offered him, and Cain was lowly Adam begging a taste of crisp awakening where before he'd tasted only rot.

Cain descended the steps. Perhaps if this moment had been for anyone but him, the jostling crowds might have parted, but it felt right, somehow, elbowing aside uncaring bodies that cowered the moment his dark energy licked at their skin. For the first time, perhaps, he truly let this energy flow out of him, trembling in the earth beneath his feet and whipping a storm through the air. Static crackled across his skin, lashing out to join the torrent Casper raised to the sky. Like Death on his white horse, Cain went to his apocalypse.

The moment Cain set foot on the floor of the colosseum, the Dean broke the crowd straightening the edges of his crisp suit. His sharp features stayed cool as he batted away Casper's serpentine strike of lightning on a flash of curdling silver. Thunder was constant down here, drowning words, and behind the static suffusing the air, there was something else. Something insidious.

A leech.

Cain drew a protective spell against it. Already, he could see some of the weaker mages flagging, and yet, none noticed. Because this was Cain's Augmentation and it was made for subterfuge. Despite his aptitude being in Manipulation, he had his tenure in this field for a reason. This particular one was the spell from last night – a leech bound up and hidden away in massive absorption, the same foul thing that snapped its jaw in the core of him.

But Casper had made it magnificent.

Bright laughter burst past Cain's lips. Look at him. God, look at him. Casper arched within his storm, blackened to a shadow by the colour of his own magic, and the dark shape of his hood twitched left and right, fending back jabs at the shield of lightning even while he drunk down the energy they threw at him.

His smile would be a thing of razors and tangled red thread.

Silver pulsed through the court. The storm broke it, but it burned a ring encircling Casper into the stone. Protection. The vitality went out of the lightning in a blink, and within the miasma, Casper stumbled, his hood twitching as he sought—

The Dean, hands weaving before him with another spell at his fingertips. And as impressive as the boy was, he was still nothing more than a precocious senior, and this little tantrum was about to get obliterated by whatever the Dean drudged up. A show this big with so many humans to see wouldn't pass, nor would those smoking husks gathered in the shadows. Whatever that spell was, it was the end for him one way or another.

Without the influx of magic, Casper flagged. The lightning fizzled out, all energy redirected to a tight swirl around him. The ends of his coat – Cain's coat – fluttered as if the wind slipped through his shield.

And it wouldn't hold.

Cain's heart climbed out of his chest to lodge in his throat, and it beat there so hard and fast the rest of the world slowed and died around him. Silver pulsed, bright even past Casper's shield.

His button-eyed boy.

Cain ran.

Past the silver, Casper's leech tore at his skin. Ate away the energy poisoning his veins. Another few steps, magic darkened the world as if he plunged into black water. Cain threw his arms around Casper, hauling the boy tight against his chest. One hand closed around his throat and the other splayed across his stomach, and the heat pulsing out of Casper's skin set that burn on Cain's hand alight.

And with him held so close, Cain summoned up every last thing he knew about Bestowal and gave the boy everything.

With a wet sound like a glub of water splashing against the floor, the protection spell exploded.

Choking, Casper arched against him, and Cain held him, face buried in his neck. Drunk on power and euphoria and the scent of black cherry whiskey and blood.

Blood.

Cock.

The boy's knees went a moment later, a ragdoll in Cain's grip as he heaved up blood. It poured from his nose and splattered against the stone.

"Casper?" Panic made a knot beneath Cain's tongue, the cold radiating from it oblitering those groaning mages and the panicked fleeing of students, mage and human alike. Only the boy and the choking and the sprays of black blood gleaming amber beneath the lamplight. "Casper?!"

And the sheer blessed relief as the boy's floundering hand smacked against his arm. Groaning – maybe sobbing – god only knew at this point – Cain hauled him upright. Already that starving mouth at his core slavered down the energy in the air, starving potential filling a void in his gut, but it tasted sweeter in its return. Dark and saccharine.

The way power should be when it hadn't been festering inside him for years.

"Right—" Casper could hardly keep his feet, but he almost could and that loosened the knot around Cain's thoughts enough that the few stirring of mages took centre. That and the shields they'd clearly raised around the court. Cain guided the boy around him, muttering enouragements as he eased the boy up on his back. "Hold on, would you, love? Please hold on, Cas. I need my hands."

Casper's lips were slick and sticky as they pressed against his throat, mouthing sounds that Cain felt as much as heard. "You called me love."

"Piss off."

The Dean looked at Cain with that old fear in his eyes as he gained his feet. No matter that Cain backed across the colosseum toward flight.

And so he should, because Cain had finally found a catastrophe to wield that could shatter worlds.