Work Text:
After the verdict Esidisi went to his friend, finding him in his private chambers, lying quietly on the bed with his hair still bound. Although he didn’t stir, Esidisi watched the flicker behind Kars’ eyelids and knew he was not asleep.
“Kars.” Esidisi spoke the name quietly. The air in the room was very still.
Kars didn't open his eyes or move, but he smiled faintly as Esidisi sat down next to him. Then he frowned as something touched his hands, and opened his eyes to find strong brown fingers tucking his own around the stem of a rose.
Kars sat up and looked sharply at his companion. "You've been outside?" Then he suddenly hissed, and opened his hands where they held the stem. The thorns had bitten him, and now a small smears of blood stained the skin of his hands.
He looked up to find Esidisi regarding him seriously. "I've learned that one often must risk getting pricked to pick a rose."
Kars frowned at him. "I didn't pick this rose."
"No, but you're holding it now." Esidisi was silent a moment, then he said, "Tomorrow I will stand by you, Kars. But you know that I will not see you fall."
Kars looked at Esidisi a long moment before looking down at his hands. Although the pricks had already closed, the blood was still bright on his skin.
Gently but firmly, Esidisi took the rose and set it aside. Then he took Kars’ hands in his. He raised them to his lips and, carefully, licked each spot of blood from those cool hands. They tasted of the paper of books, of ink and stone and faintly of sulfur, and in the hollow bowl of each palm he tasted the sweet musk that was his lover's skin. Then he took the rose again, and placed it carefully in Kars' open palms, where the petals of the bloom pressed softly against his fingertips and the thorns failed to pierce his skin.
Quietly, Kars leaned forward and kissed his oldest friend, not heeding that the rose was crushed between them. He chased the taste of his own blood across Esidisi's teeth, and both were breathing more warmly by the time their lips parted. Kars could see that behind Esidisi's solemn expression and the riddles he was choosing to speak in, there lay a rage as inexorable and terrible as a pyroclastic flow.
Esidisi would not let him die tomorrow, as had been the ruling of the elder council. The council had delivered their verdict only hours ago, ruling that Kars strove to upset the balance of their way of life, and if he could not be stopped he would be killed to protect them from the terrible hunger of the masks. No amount of Kars’ protests that only a transformation made with the incomplete mask caused hunger, and that a perfect being would need no fuel source to survive, nothing he said could sway them, because he would not renounce his cause.
Kars looked down at their hands where clasped together around the rose and saw red on Esidisi’s fingers. He sighed. "Now you're bleeding."
"It’s just a little blood," Esidisi said.
"Indeed," Kars replied dryly, setting aside the rose again and lifting the big hands to return the favor of licking them clean.
As he did so, his mind mulled over the odds that would stand against them when the evening came. With the two of them, both transformed by the power of the masks, they could win. He knew this with a cold certainty that he held close, a twin to his rage that they had deliberately misunderstood from the very beginning, that they would not listen, and now they would kill him merely for seeking answers that lay inside his own body, that were his right to explore. All that potential, he thought, all that power laying dormant and ignored inside every one of them, even those that sought to destroy him.
Well.
Kars gave one final, neat swipe of his tongue and lowered Esidisi's hands. Then the shook his head and finally answered the question Esidisi had not asked aloud. "Esidisi, I don't intend to fall. Not tomorrow, and not on any other day. I know that you will be by my side and now I ask you to be at my back as well."
Esidisi nodded, and Kars leaned forward and kissed him again. Then he picked up the rose lightly, feeling the sharpness of the thorns between his fingers but not their bite. Gripping a smooth section of stem in the fingers of one hand, he extended the tip of one of his blades and, in a few precise motions, cut all the thorns away. They had tasted enough of his blood.
He retraced the blade and lay back down on the bed, the rose held carelessly in his hand.
His eyes mostly closed, Kars felt rather than saw Esidisi bending down, settling on his heavy forearms to brush his lips, very gently, over Kars' horn. Rather than bringing Kars to attention as it usually did, the sensation was soothing. Closing his eyes, he allowed himself to relax for the first time since the council session had been called. Those fools had made their choice, and now, together as they had been for thousands of years, they had made their own.
Kars closed his eyes, listening to the rustle of Esidisi moving to settle in beside him. The fondness he felt for the bigger man was a like a constant ache inside him, terrible and wonderful at once, and he was very much reassured to hear that they would stand together. He even appreciated Esidisi’s attempts to comfort him in the face of what was to come.
Turning, Kars moved to lie against Esidisi's massive side, twining their limbs together. They would sleep until the coming dusk, and then they would see what fate would bring.
Certainly more than just a little blood.