“No one else willing to be shot before they knelt?”
Ellisandre laughed softly, almost as if they were weeping. Their fingers were on his face again. He lifted his head, letting them play with the scarf over his eyes. “No. You might not understand, my mad Rus. Bullets aren’t valentines.”
“They are, if they’re yours.”
Ellisandre cradled Sevastyan’s face between their palms as if they already owned him. “Every time you came to me, every instance in which you gave up your freedom, you would have given me anything I was willing to take. Whatever has happened to you, wherever you have been, I could have taken that from you.”
“I would have let you.” Words came too easily. Truth was too close.
“For a while,” Ellisandre touched their forehead to his, still holding his cheeks between their hands. Their belly brushed against his ribs. He breathed in and out, willing more of his skin to touch theirs. “We still believed then.”
“And now?”
“Now I know that if I had kept you, we would only have had different regrets.”
“I’ve never regretted you.”
Ellisandre’s voice came softly. “You should have hated me.”
Sevastyan’s body tightened. “I can hate you and want you.”
Ellisandre laughed with sounds dipped in irony. “Tell me more of this hate.”
He could try, but he couldn’t remember it any longer. The hate had all burned away, washed away by the blood on Rei’s thighs. “Tell me why you’re willing to touch me.”
Ellisandre hesitated, their hands still playing with the ropes. “In some metaphorical hell, there’s a ledger. On the cover is my name, all my names. The pages are soaked in vermillion. It leaches out over the podium, splashes to the floor. There are halls filled with ledgers of the same ilk, marked with the monikers of innumerable souls. Somewhere among this multitude is a ledger marked with your name. Perhaps it sits near mine, measured with the same weight of carnage. Perhaps less. Every soul with each of these ledgers is the same and different. Your soul, Vast, draws mine. Dark choices. Dark roads. And yet you are still my beautiful boy. I would know you on a battlefield or in a theater. Any soul might find my flaws, might see my humanity, might adore my face. You see the immortal archetype, the reality of the fantastic, the weight of a moment. The speech of myth spins from your hands. In a modern city of brick and glass, you summoned your fallen god to the gates of Assyria.”
Ellisandre’s words poured through Sevastyan’s chest. Ten years. Ten years and they yet had the eyes to see him. He bowed his head. He couldn’t speak.
“When you know what’s written in that ledger, will you judge me?”
“Yes.”
A place in Sevastyan’s heart settled. He leaned against Ellisandre, their breaths mingling. “Goddess. God.”
“I do not require you to say both.”
“I don’t have an epitaph beyond the binary.”
“Use the one that draws you in the moment of utterance.”
“I’ve worshipped you as both. You are both, to me. I don’t know if that’s right.”
“I define myself, beautiful boy. I am both and beyond. You cannot misname me when I am all.”
“Goddess,” Sevastyan whispered, folding into them. “At the museum, you were God, but now . . .”
“Worship, Vast,” Ellisandre whispered.
Sevastyan pressed his lips to Ellisandre’s skin. They tasted of cinnamon and vanilla, their skin sweet beneath the spice. He kissed wherever he could. They moved their arms across his mouth, arched their chest into his lips. He traced the lines of their ribs with his tongue and pressed his lips in reverence to the cleft of their sternum. Breath by breath, Ellisandre rose up on their knees and higher, giving him leave to nuzzle the soft flatness of their belly, the sharp angles of their hips, the divining line of their thighs.
He was drunk on the permission, weak with their scent, newly starving like a victim of prolonged hunger being allowed the taste of food.
Ellisandre’s hand caressed his head. Their feet were planted on either side of his kneeling form. Ellisandre guided his head towards the root of their body, the center between their legs.
“Worship, Vast,” Ellisandre breathed once more.
Sevastyan lapped at the treasure he couldn’t see, finding the shape of Ellisandre with his lips and his tongue. Above him, Ellisandre’s breath grew heavy. Their hands were making love to his head, urging him onward. He formed his mouth around their arousal and suckled as it grew. He drew lines down their folds, finding more of the sweetness he knew to be their own unique essence.
