Page 100 of Adam, Mine

His hairline was beaded with sweat and the tear tracks had dried on the walk, crusting his cheeks with salt. His cheeks were red, thin though they were, and his eyes moved restlessly beneath his bruised lids.

He was, infuriatingly, still lovely. Even this close to death.

Elias leaned down and rummaged in his shed clothes for his jacket. He flung his harness out of the way, and it clattered across the room as he found his book and pulled it out into the light.

How he still had this, he couldn’t understand. Elias had been so sure at the beginning of this journey that the alchemists would have taken this from him in pieces. But here it was. At the end of all things. Whole.

They had opened their doors to him, touched him, like family before he had ever understood that they saw him as one of them:

A little brother, lost.

Elias looked back down at Victor and wondered if he had received the same.

Vipera Berus

Victor woke in fits and starts, and Elias waited for him. He laid the book down behind Victor’s back and tucked his arm beneath Victor’s neck to support his head.

When Victor’s eyes finally opened, they looked back at him, glazed with fever.

Elias said nothing.

Victor looked around the room, seeing where he was, then he closed his eyes and sighed.

“Is this the end?” he asked.

Elias did not know. “Yaroslav is dead,” he said instead. “His house is a hollow place now.”

Victor hummed in understanding and bowed until his forehead brushed underneath Elias’s chin.

“Do not be afraid,” Elias whispered. “The thread between us strengthens when we are close. If we part, I fear you will stop breathing.”

“Is that not a good thing?” Victor replied. “You look so strong now. I would have it be that way.”

Elias shook his head. “Not like this.”

Tears dampened Elias’s chest, and Victor took a shaky breath.

“Elias, I’m sorry,” he confessed. “I am sorry for taking you from where you belonged. I’m sorry for wasting your trust. I’m sorry for binding you to me, for I do not deserve you.”

The words were sweet to Elias’s ears, but he hushed Victor and carded his fingers through Victor’s hair. Victor was so thin it felt like Elias was holding a sapling.

“Y-your voice and your eyes,” Victor was saying now. “They are so different from when I saw you last. I cannot stand to look at them. To hear you. Elias, I am sorry.”

Elias wanted to say, “It is all right,” on instinct, but it wasn’t.

Instead he said, “There are too many apologies to fit the size of this room. We are the same now. Master and Slave, God and Creation. Two beasts, two monsters, two butchers, one.”

Victor barked a quick laugh and raised one skeletal hand between them to wipe his face.

“You speak like a poet. I did not expect that.”

It was quiet then.

Elias stroked the soft skin behind Victor’s ear until he wasn’t sure if the other boy had fallen back asleep.

“What was that feeling you sent?” Victor asked suddenly.

“When?”