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It is a dream. Only a part of a longer one that he has been seeing for so long now he can barely remember his own self, a strip of film at times sun-faded and see-through. He knows it as it is happening, from the dreamy distance of being half an inch removed from his own skin. Every movement followed by numb reverb, an echo through his own bones.
In this part of it he is sitting in a chair in a room he does not know, a boy at his feet with a face like his, and not. Also a half-inch removed.
His bare foot is in his hand, shoes and socks already cast off, not even to be seen. Maybe naively, he has no desire to draw himself away. In his long dream he has been a baby soaking in ambient warmth, the cradle of another's heart, but this directed touch and attention are a little different. A deep blue undertow shifts in him. Skin on his skin, fingers grasping him, pressed to the almost ticklish arch of his foot, thumb on his anklebone.
His heart beats from a delicate shiver away. He and this boy; who are they to each other? The knowledge is a lifetime ago. Him, not-him, and what is a person who is not you and yet is? A brother.
"A brother," the boy says, with a thin smile. The look of it is chilling but it is warm when he bends his head and places his lips to his toes. "My brother." His damp breath, the movement of his lips, sends up an unequivocal tingle.
His head lifts, dips again, another kiss in the tender dimpled gathering between one toe and the other, going down the line. Not quite peck-peck-peck, too lingering, full-mouthed, just the way a kiss on the lips should be. A feeling to warm to, relax into. The top of his feet follows, which makes it twitch against the firmness of his grip. It tightens, a little, enough to keep it in place. Is this something brothers do?
"We're special," the boy says, his eyes flickering to meet his for one instant, and in that instant, are the crazed gold of a starving wolf. "Our relation is holy. Together, we are all the worlds, the core of the universe."
Wouldn't they be a singular person then?
"Cannibalized twins," the boy says, another full kiss that leaves a bit of surface slickness, the thinnest trace of spit. "When I devour you the way I always needed to. You are you but in me, a part of me. Just like I can't help being you."
"What is a brother?"
"Something you never knew with anyone but 'me'. Any false imitation was only a prelude to 'us'."
Fraternity spreads in languid heat, pooling in the deepest parts of his body. Finally, the closest to awake in an age he's been, heating, overheating, his dizzy head, as the kissing continues on bone and hollow, his foot pushed back to kiss beneath his toes, his fleshy sole, the arch that makes his toes clench. Even his heel, made so tough with exercise the kiss imprints much less clearly. His back pulls in, surrendering to something or maybe retreating, needing to move to express himself. This is love, spreading its roots into his lower belly, unlike any other he'd known. It all becomes inevitable in his swelling, breaking breaths, the final burst of warmth flooding him to the crown of his head where it wants to explode for one tenuous moment.
The culmination of brotherhood and the link between them. A long time ago it feels like, they had been one. Had it felt like this? It's hard to remember why he'd fought it. Did he fight it? Maybe this long dream was all along from sleeping in someone else's bosom.
White fuzziness clouds his mind, fluffy warm cotton, fresh-laundry good feeling, soothes over his mind and heart. Being eaten could be a good thing, he might discover he enjoys it... is what it whispers to him, so close he feels he thinks the boy's lips planting it in his brain like a seed to fertilize. And he is ready for it, he is fecund, a half of a whole searching to reunite. It is not too late to go back.
The feeling of kissing remains in his long dream. He grasps for it, like one grasps for the remnant of a pleasant dream in the early morning.