Chapter Text
“You smell like booze.”
Oleander felt Keir's warm hand on his wrist, gently tugging it away from where it was on his chest. Oleander, for his part, stopped nipping at Keir's neck for long enough to look up past the unmasked lower part of his face and meet his eyes.
“You smell like cheap booze,” Keir said, his voice hard. “Where have you been? It's barely morning.”
Oleander's other hand stayed where it was at Keir's hip, and squeezed. The other man was pressed up against the wall in a dimly lit alleyway. Keir's free hand was still clutching a beaten-looking cloth bag; the other had been grabbing at Oleander's face, but dropped like a stone to circle around his wrist as soon as he'd uttered the accusation.
Oleander smiled; he knew Keir could see it, with the lower panel of his mask removed and tucked into his coat pocket. “Nowhere important.” His voice was purposefully light. Blasé, even.
“Oleander,” Keir said, his voice coloured with warning. But he fell quiet as Oleander started littering kisses up and down the column of his neck.
“Oleander,” he tried, again, and to make him really shut up, Oleander pried his hand away from Keir's and pressed a kiss into his lips.
Perhaps it was too hasty. Perhaps Oleander should've known, with Keir rigid against the wall, that it would be futile to draw him back into the alleyway, back into the present, when Keir's mind was clearly already somewhere else.
And, really, Oleander's was, too.
It lingered in the near past, in the narrow space behind a pleasure parlour that stank of sex and sweetgrass and overly-sweet alcohol, where another Lord of the market had gasped his last breath. He'd slumped down, there on the back steps, face draining to white as his chest heaved, lips spasming open and closed for saliva and bile-wet breaths. And that, of course, would contribute to the coroner's eventual conclusion, if there even was anybody left who liked him well enough to hire a half-decent coroner for his sudden and unexpected death. They would find, simply, that his fizzy, aphrodisiac-laced drink had had a few too many pumps of some stimulant, so much so that it gave a great shock to his poor, overworked heart, and ended fatally.
And Oleander…?
Well, many a talkative young man has had an immensely satisfying night at a pleasure parlour. Particularly in a large public gambling room, in a corner towards the front of the house, with plenty of witnesses to attest that he hadn't left 'til the morning bells had rung.
Oleander felt Keir's hand grasp a handful of the front of his shirt as he was pushed away, bodily. He was panting, and Oleander wiped his own mouth with the back of his hand. There was still saliva on Keir's bottom lip, and it caught the light of a nearby oil lamp; Oleander reached out a hand to, perhaps, wipe it away, but Keir drew away, the hand in Oleander's shirt falling back to his side.
Keir was now standing with his body in silhouette of the alleyway's mouth. There was a blur of dull colour behind him, courtesy of the cloaked-and-masked residents, moving about for early morning errands.
“Are you drunk?” Keir's voice was tired. It was only the early morning, and he already seemed sapped of energy.
Oleander shrugged. Behind Keir, a merchant pulled the rattling wooden shutters up from the front of her stall and began to cry her wares. “Not enough that I forget how handsome you are.”
Usually, the cheesy line would've evoked something from Keir – perhaps a grumble and a smile – but his frown only deepened. His gaze seemed to intensify for a moment, and then, he said, “Did you forget what you told me?”
Oleander's stomach dropped. The pleasant buzz from the alcohol – because, well, he was still buzzed – did nothing to alleviate the cold feeling of apprehension dripping slowly into his stomach.
“Keir,” he said, tongue feeling like lead, desperately trying to scrounge up coherence from the blurs of the past few nights, “Come on. Let’s have a good time.”
“Is that all I am to you, now?”
“What? No.” Oleander felt, suddenly, that he was being scrutinised. For once, he was floundering for words.
“All you do is disappear for days on end. When you come back, you always look like shit – no, shut up, you do. Only half your buttons are done up, someone's spilled a drink down your front, you look like you've not slept for three nights in a row – is this it? After a string of cheap thrills, you drag yourself back here to pretend like you're ready to go steady with me?”
His mouth was dry. “That's not true.”
“I'm sick of being your loyal little dog at home, Oleander. All I think, when you come back, is that I don't know how long it's going to be before I see you again. If I'm going to see you again.”
Stop talking, Oleander thought desperately, though his lips and tongue stayed motionless. A lance of pain drove through his head, and he stepped forward. Keir didn't stop him.
Keir's face, with half of it unmasked to show his mouth set in a grim line, seemed to be swimming in the morning light. Only it wasn't the sun's morning light, that romantic golden thing on the surface – no, it was the sight and sound of the marketplace waking up around them, lamps being lit in storefronts and atop tall wooden posts. It was several tiny points of distant firelight, catching on the edges of Keir's hair, brushing gold over the ginger strands.
“You are drunk,” Keir said, as Oleander leaned in closer. But, crucially, he didn't pull away, even as Oleander wrapped one arm around his waist, palm flat against the small of his back.
Oleander pulled him in, gently. Stiff as he was, Keir could have been a stone statue, but he still didn't move away. And then, when he pressed an almost chaste kiss into the corner of Keir's mouth, the man melted, shoulders softening.
It seemed to be acceptance.
The two turned, Keir guiding them further from the mouth of the alley. Oleander felt his own shoulders hit a wall, and saw Keir allowing his bag to fall to the side.
“Tell me what you want from me.” Keir's voice was low and gravelly; Oleander felt warmth bloom anew in his chest.
“I want you to kiss me again.”
After a beat of tense silence, Keir complied.
First, his hand came to the side of Oleander's head to push the still-present top half of his mask further up, out of the way. Like this, with his mask askew, Oleander couldn't see anything; he could only feel Keir's other hand on his shoulder, and he only felt the moment that their lips met again.
And it felt warm, and soft.
And very, very wrong.
They were moving, yes, but not in a romantic waltz or passionate tango. They were simply going through the motions, out of beat, tripping over one another – Oleander felt teeth click against teeth, and Keir only leaned further in. He slipped his suddenly-clammy hand underneath the hem of Keir's shirt, and felt the other man's crotch crush against the join of his hip and thigh, and felt nothing.
Oleander pulled away. Keir was still so close, warm and still pressing against him as if he wanted to chase that kiss with another, but Oleander lodged a hand between them, and he stilled.
He pulled his other hand from Keir's back, and straightened his mask. He saw, as his vision refocused, Keir's lips, slightly parted, and unsmiling.
The tip of Keir's tongue flicked out for a single moment, only to wet his lower lip before he spoke. “I gave you what you want,” he said, and Oleander felt as if they were suddenly dancing a beat that he couldn't follow. He felt wrong-footed, and desperately out of rhythm. The alcohol and drugs, dregs of last night, were no help at all – they only served to churn the dreadful pool of unease that had gathered in his gut throughout that last kiss.
Deliberately, he took the lower part of his mask from the pocket at his side, and refastened it. The metallic click of the clasp closing rang clear against the quiet sounds of the both of them breathing. Then, he looked again at the expression on Keir's face. Shadows blurred his features, melting into his dark mask and making his pale skin look wan, almost waxy. Perhaps, if Oleander reached up once again, he would find that the man's face was still warm, and then that he would smile at him, and then the tension would melt from the air between them, and then they would melt into one another.
Of course, he didn't do that. It was becoming steadily more apparent to him that that chain of events – supposedly marching towards a so-called happy ending – was nothing but a fanciful dream.
Oleander wasn't entirely accustomed to facing people like this. He could handle a gaggle of admirers following him through a grand hall, or a crowd clustered around him as he perched on a piece of gilded furniture, or a wary apothecary glaring at him through the dark smoke that choked their brewing room.
He couldn't handle this.
“Keir,” he whispered. But past that, Oleander could find no words.
“You wanted me to kiss you again.” Keir still hadn't fully disentangled himself from him – his hand had lifted from his shoulder, and lingered at his throat. Oleander's throat bobbed as Keir smoothed over his collar with his thumb, and folded it over where it'd been flipped up.
His hands trailed down Oleander's chest, but there was no tease in it. Keir's fingers pressed, slightly, into the wrinkled dark spot where a drink really had spilled, but they didn't linger for long before coming together to the rumpled mess that was the buttons on his shirt. At the centre of his chest, his hands steady – and still so warm – Keir drew the two sides of his shirt together, and then fed the button through its corresponding hole.
Oleander's mouth twisted bitterly, although he knew that Keir could no longer see it. “You don't have to indulge me if you don't truly want to.”
“Isn't that what you keep doing? Indulging me?” Keir's hands kept moving upwards, straightening his shirt. “I'm going to ask you again – do you remember what you told me?”
“Of course I do. Keir –”
“Then why won't you say it again? Why haven't you said it since then?”
Oleander swallowed around the lump in his throat.
“You told me that you loved me, Oleander.” His voice was horribly calm. He fastened another button on Oleander's shirt. “Is this what love means to you? Keeping me in the dark about everything you do, and then using money and sex to shut me up?”
Oleander, for all that others might proclaim otherwise, was very adept at staying quiet. He knew how to judge when it was best to withhold information; and so, before they had spent their first night together, Oleander had never told Keir about the nightmares. And it never turned out to be an issue, really – Oleander had gotten practised at waking gracefully and all at once, gathering all his conscious thoughts and knitting together his nerves as he lay there, very still, his heart pounding in his ears. He would gaze at Keir lying next to him and watch the steady rise and fall of his chest, his sleeping face unmarred by bruising or bloodlessness or a wound that split his skin to reveal bone and fat and lurid red flesh. The flash of a blade could not follow him to the waking world, nor the sticky poison clinging to a glass' rim, nor the pungent odour of bile or freshly-spilled blood.
And, yes, he was quite sure that it was best not to tell Keir. To, potentially, never tell Keir. A confession would condemn him; to show Keir the source of his fear would be to show him all of his lies and secrets, and then to draw him inextricably into that dangerous web. It would be Oleander holding, outstretched, a blood-stained hand.
And he knew the man in front of him well enough to know that he, however insane it seemed, would take it.
And Oleander could not risk him being at his side.
So, Oleander practised being quiet. He could see little in the dimness of the alley, but he imagined that Keir's eyebrows had come together in puzzlement, or frustration, or – and Oleander would not blame him for this – anger at his lack of response.
The silence only lasted a few seconds, at most. Keir's hands lingered at Oleander's collar, a thumb smoothing the fabric before he gently tugged at it. Oleander didn't do anything so ungraceful as to fall into Keir's chest in response to such a small movement, but he did, very slightly, rock forwards into the kiss Keir placed on his forehead.
Through the mask, he didn't feel a thing.
Keir scooped up his bag from the floor. Beyond him, the marketplace was still moving.
“I have errands to do.” It was a matter-of-fact statement. “You don't have to visit me again.” And that was, too.
Oleander watched Keir leave with a curious feeling in his chest. It was as if somebody had pried his ribs apart and slipped one of the knives of his nightmares between them, the blade cold and wicked-edged; it was as if his heart had been struck, too, and blood was oozing from the wound slowly, in a steady drip, drip, drip.