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The curtains of Lucian’s room are open a handspan, permitting a shaft of silvery moonlight to spill inside. He doesn’t recall if he drew them fully before he went for a bath, but no matter; he’ll close them now.
He grips the edge of the fabric and makes to draw it over the tiny landship window, but a flash in his periphery bids him pause. He stills, turning his head towards it, but it’s only the mirror on the wall, reflecting a shard of the moonlight, its surface luminous with just the right angle from the curtain.
In the thick silence of the room, something about the glass draws him, and he slowly pads across the room towards it. Even after all this time, there is something about seeing his reflection that remains curiously beguiling. Perhaps it’s merely habit, and he is accustomed to letting his thoughts flow freely when faced with himself, or perhaps it is that the person he sees looking back at him never quite feels like himself.
That is a feeling which holds true now, and he studies himself carefully, his fingers drifting over his pale, disfigured throat with no adornment to conceal it; up to lift his bangs off his face, exposing the broken mask fused to his skin around his right eye, white as bone. It itched for a while, but now it feels like nothing when he touches it, faintly cool and smooth to the touch. He spends a few minutes in the morning arranging his hair just so to conceal as much of it as possible—not only does he have all the time in the world now, but he prefers not to unsettle anyone who might chance to perceive him more than strictly necessary. Only close examination will likely reveal the truth of his face, but he prefers not to take that risk.
He allows his damp hair to fall back into place, and the ivory color peeps between the strands, much like his own iris, muted in the gloom. The darkness is comfortable, almost homey, as it drapes gently around his shoulders like a mantle, and he finds himself relaxing into it, if only because it’s become so routine, so ingrained. It is dark, and he is within it; it is quiet, and only the sounds of his own thoughts and ghosts can be heard; it is still, and his only company is his reflection.
His own face blurs, and the withered thorns growing out of the mask fused around his right eye pulse gold. His shadow wavers behind him, taking on a shape not entirely his own: broader and wrapped in far more many layers than he’s wearing now. Another presence, physically intangible but psychologically heavy, presses against his back, and instinctively, he shrinks nearer to the mirror. The edges of the mask tremble, and its surface ripples and takes on a color and texture uncannily like skin, in a tone different from his own. His vision goes double in his right eye, his reflection swimming and duplicating, and instinctively he squeezes his eyelids shut, but it does nothing to dim the sensation, the bone-deep certainty that he’s no longer alone, if he ever was.
Lucian’s forehead strikes the glass, icy against his damp, overheated skin. The presence twines around his limbs and crawls down his spine, warmth pooling in his chest and his thighs and low in his belly. He burns, suddenly, and his fingers move seemingly of their own volition to loosen the sash of his dressing gown to dispel the heat, but it’s only a meager relief. The heat continues to build, smoldering beneath his skin, his veins filled with prickling, seething, restless fire, and he doesn’t know why—it isn’t fear, but his heart thuds wildly beneath his clavicle with something like… the word comes to him after a moment: excitement.
Ah, what a feeling; so rare to feel its fluttering pace, its frenetic beat, its sweet twist. Almost helplessly, his lips begin to curve slightly upward in an instinctive anticipation, though he cannot place the precise reason. What is triggering it? What shade from the recesses of his memory calls this emotion to the surface?
Something brushes his ear, as lightweight and ephemeral as a cobweb. A familiar voice whispers, soft, sinuous, sensuous. “Remember? Remember, my child, what I taught you?”
Lucian remembers. The memories come all too easily to mind, bringing with them some sense of self, even if it feels like more of an echo; a specter of his former self, something he knows rationally he experienced but no longer feels real.
He remembers the Troupe Leader inviting him to his quarters for a “private lesson,” and remembers how shy and fearful and eager to please he was as he entered a place forbidden to most members of the Troupe.
He remembers being taught about pleasure and pleasing, about the dance of bodies; about la petite mort, about how the peak is intertwined with life and death itself, how the moment of ecstasy and madness is the same climax as that of the play; how violence and pleasure are interwoven, how fear and arousal are intimately connected.
He remembers the Leader’s broad, elegant hands on his body, touching him in places nobody else touched before; drawing strange and new responses from him, and the fear and unease thudding beneath his clavicle, all but blotting out the excitement.
He remembers the frisson which coursed down his spine, the goosebumps rising over his flesh, the full-bodied shudder. He remembers the sense of being violated; the euphoria at the Leader’s praise; the sensation of being wholly possessed by him as his body was uncomfortably invaded and the high of his first orgasm.
In retrospect, it wasn’t a feeling he hated. Though not as strongly as on the stage, he felt something, then—felt like he was worth something, if only for a momentary pleasure, for the time of the rising action when all was burning and urgent, if only for a fleeting instant of joy. This, too, is only for the sake of a moment—but right now, everything thudding and burning and throbbing, feels good, even with the knowledge that inexorable end is inevitable and approaching.
He looks down, and through his blurred vision, two hands appear to be wrapped around him, one his own, one larger and firmer.
The glass grows warm beneath his forehead, and hot breath wafts against his face. The scent of perfume, heady and cloying, fills his nose, a familiar fragrance which always followed in the Leader’s wake, intoxicating and disorienting. It plunges him further into the memory, and the feeling of being powerless yet treasured returns to him along with the phantom touches of the hands exploring his virgin body.
Out of his periphery, a flash of familiar fuchsia sways hypnotically, and he lifts his gaze back to the mirror—and he’s there, as if he never left, looming over Lucian and pressing against his back, wholly enveloping him just like he always did.
The Leader’s embrace is achingly familiar, and Lucian can’t refrain from leaning into it. These are the arms which have inflicted upon him such fathoms of suffering and pain, the arms which placed him upon the stage, the arms which have guided him to wield a knife and directed him to do violence.
And yet, he feels oddly at peace within them. His hatred for Tragodia has long since cooled, if it was ever there at all. It seems irrational to hate a god for behaving within its nature, like hating a clawbeast for scratching or a blizzard for raging. It is simply how they are.
For these are also the arms which have cradled him tenderly when he was lost, when he was trembling, when he was bloody. Only to serve their own ends, yes—but he doesn’t believe the softness he felt was false.
“Tragodia,” he breathes, and even to his own ears, it’s full of need and exhilaration.
“I am here, my child,” he whispers back, “I am always here.”
I know. They both know. There’s no need to speak it.
These days, Lucian can feel him clearer and clearer: he merely has to think of him, and he feels near; he reaches out to him, and there’s an instantaneous response, a warm replying echo. There’s a distinct presence in the back of his mind, a limbo where his thoughts begin to blur, and on the other side of that space is him, a thrumming, humming maelstrom of alien consciousness. Most of the time, it’s quiet, observing contentedly like a curious audience, and he can almost forget it’s there; other times, he twines around Lucian, his thoughts whispering insidiously against Lucian’s own, wordless suggestions pouring into him, dark emotions seeping into his mind; tempting him, coaxing him, beckoning him.
Most of the time, Lucian resists him, beats him back with the firm conviction that he will do things his way, now. But times like now…
Now, he presses closer into Tragodia’s presence, lets it carry him, lets it remind him that he’s not alone. They are one, they are two sides of the same coin; they are the sigil glimmering on the table a few feet away, winking at him in the moonlight, the two faces weeping and laughing, tragedy and joy standing back to back and sharing the same spine. Certainly, it feels like Tragodia is within his vertebrae, within his bones, pulsing in his core, only a gossamer veil separating them from each other.
He feels a familiar heat and outline against his backside, beneath his tail, and just as he braces himself, instead it slips between his thighs, and Tragodia’s larger hand moves to hold them both together, the Feline barbs lining both of their members prickling sweetly and unbearably as he moves against Lucian, and Lucian’s breath hisses out between his teeth at the pain-pleasure—but they both know after all this time that he’s developed a taste for pain.
Tragodia nuzzles into Lucian’s hair, against his ears, his wine-colored locks cascading around them like a curtain. His long tail wraps around Lucian’s waist, slipping between the folds of his robe, and the fur is soft and slightly tickling against his overheated skin, but he arches into the touch all the same, drinking in the affection. Whether it is affection for the Troupe’s greatest star, for his most cherished pupil, for his most brilliant tragedy, or for the one person who managed to surpass him, for the one soul who managed to claw his way onto equal footing, Lucian doesn’t bother to wonder. He doesn’t need to ponder whether Tragodia sees him as a person and not a character—in the first place, is there such a large difference between them, and in the second place, what is there to ruminate over when he can feel everything all the same?
When they both know that Lucian intentionally left him within himself? That from the moment Lucian felt him there that he did not immediately seek to destroy him, to excise him like a gangrene but instead left him be? That Lucian never believed him gone for a second, because theater is immortal, and so he must bear witness to the creation of a new theater?
Because they are one. Because this is a two-person play.
They move faster against each other, instinct and intimate knowledge and shared sensation both pushing them higher. There is no difference between what Lucian feels and what Tragodia feels: the pleasure reverberates twofold between them, the boundaries blurring, the echoes of each other only elevating the high. Lucian’s thoughts swim, heady with the mounting, double pleasure; drunk on the scent of wine and Tragodia’s rich perfume and his breath, his presence, the aching familiarity of it all triggering a mass of irresistible feelings and impulses. Unthinkingly, he presses nearer into Tragodia’s embrace, and shudders as Tragodia holds him tighter, peppers his neck and his ears with kisses edged by the pinpricks of teeth, the little jolts of pain only bringing him closer and closer to the brink. It’s heat and beauty and desperation and agony and joy, the impending and inexorable petit mort almost upon him, crawling over him and making his heart pound and his pulse race so brightly and vividly and sharply.
Then just as always, Tragodia’s hand wraps around Lucian’s throat. He gasps, pulse spiking before his respiration is cut off, and the dizzying hypoxia kicks in like the rush of adrenaline in his veins, and it’s all so visceral and raw that it should be repulsive to him but it isn’t, because even that is strangely sweet and beautiful in its own way, and he should hate that he understands now all the reasoning behind the Troupe’s cruelties but he doesn’t, the same way he shouldn’t feel any fear or panic at being choked now that he knows that he shares Tragodia’s immortality, but his instincts scream it anyway, reminding him of the fragility of life that no longer belongs to him but feels like it does, just like he can feel the Originium crystals studding his throat digging into Tragodia’s palm, and it’s so good—
The edges of his coherence begin to fragment, splintering into nonsense and darkness—then Tragodia lets go just as Lucian feels his eyes beginning to roll up, and as cold air punches down his throat, the instantaneous euphoria is followed by the blinding rush of orgasm and it feels like he’s living and dying at the same time. And even as he gasps raggedly and writhes, he feels the same rush spiraling down someplace deeper than his own physical body, someplace that’s him and not him at the same time.
The veil tears, and Tragodia’s emotions flood his mind. The deluge almost drowns him, fathomless quantities of savage joy, satisfaction, bitterness, frustration, and grief bleed into his consciousness; emotions of untold decades washing through him, almost too much for his mind to bear, wave after wave, an ocean into whose depth he’s only plunged his arm, the endless years which he’s only glimpsed but now as vivid as if he experienced them all himself. His sense of self, his name, his own memories all slip away, blotted out completely by a sea of unending song.
Then the veil returns, the barrier between them fluttering into place once more, returning Lucian to himself and his own body, and the sudden awareness of it all is disorienting. He’s slumped heavily against the fogged glass, spent, heaving for breath, and Tragodia holds him so close, so tight, his face buried possessively in the nape of Lucian’s neck as his own uneven exhalations rush out against Lucian’s skin and leave goosebumps in their wake. The full-bodied tremor passes through both of them, like the aftershocks chasing each other down his spine and ending at the tip of Tragodia’s tail where it’s still wrapped around Lucian’s waist.
He lifts his head, and meets Lucian’s gaze in the mirror, and his eyes crinkle in a familiar smile. His fingers trace up over Lucian’s throat and the imprints of his fingers, over the crystals, over Lucian’s cheek and the edges of his mask. He presses a bite to the base of Lucian’s ear, then melds into the darkness, back into Lucian’s core—but Lucian knows he’s never far away.