[Open Class] Cave-In (Barth + Zar)

[Toshihiko Two]

"Your new benefactor sounds well-off." The breeze was stiff again. "He'll be able to provide status, and protection. I hope you'll find Envy more satisfying."

If Zar didn't have any investment, there was no reason to waste each other's time. Who knew if he did, or didn't? Barth had thought he could feel something stronger, but that was Zar's area of expertise. Not his. There didn't have to be a reason to seek out Barth's feelings, other than sport.
 

[Baneful]

Zar gave Barth a long hopeless look and regretted mentioning the letter at all. It seemed to have been decided without his consent as the solution that Barth wanted to pursue to get free of him. "If he's not working for them." he said reluctantly, looking away. He didn't like the sound of Envy one bit, jealousy was at its roots a toxic, painful emotion. A yearning without resolution or satisfaction for what someone else had. It was worse than hunger, worse than lust, worse than greed. All of those things could find a theoretical upper limit and a degree of satisfaction, envy knew no bounds. It could have all the world and yet someone else's world would seem more appealing. It was a sin that pursued him relentlessly even as things were. He didn't need more envy than he already had in his life.

"And I doubt protection will be something I would receive even if he is legitimate. Isn't envy about wanting? Once you have what you want, it no longer matters. I would no longer matter. I don't know if I could tolerate that again. It's not what I want. It's not Sloth, it's not this." And he found himself wondering if it had been partially Barths's domain that had drawn him in. Perhaps it had been Sloth that had slowed him so much he wanted to stay here for ever and ever. He hadn't minded but he'd never considered beyond that, that maybe it was simply something that happened, the way people found him attractive on their own. Maybe it had been a mistake to assume that a simple side effect of his nature meant that Barth actually wanted him there.

"I just.. I just don't want to be anyone's burden any longer. All I have been my entire life is a chain around the necks of others. Even the few friends I had. I just... dragged them down with me until they were gone completely and I was just alone again. My first friend chose death over me because I was so inadequate, he chose a human. And you already have so much better to choose from and people you should be pursuing for that future you want."

He didn't want to feel out for Barth's emotions, dreading what he might find there under the surface, but out of that same pain-seeking facet of his nature that led him to get up to fail time and time again, he did it anyway and found himself confused by what he saw. The fact there was hurt there at all was enough to stop him completely in his tracks, dream self and otherwise, and he recoiled, pulling free of the dream altogether back into the waking world.

He'd somehow found his way to the entrance and the flames had slowly dwindled back to a slow ember, but he didn't leave yet, instead he took them both off the path to a sheltered corner and lay down, curled around Barth like a giant cat, the Sloth demon in his coils. And then, because he had nothing to lose and he knew that curiosity would never forgive him if he did not at the very least pursue this, he closed his eyes and this time let himself fall wholly into sleep.

The very action meant that he lost whatever conscious control he had over himself and over his mind, surrendering to the subconscious and as a result once again throwing the link wide. And he let it, because he wanted to be able to be there properly, to listen properly and to shape the world in any small way. He reformed but this time sharp and clear, defined and surrounded by his own emotions, every single inch of wounded hurt, of rejection and of a deep inertia and terror of change. And he didn't plead, but the emotions pleaded for him.

He sat down, this time feeling nothing but the cold and not flinching from it. "It is only fair that I give you my full attention." he explained.
 

[Toshihiko Two]

Barth returned the look, and did not look away.

"If he's going to get you killed, don't bring him up again. If you are going to be Bound to another demon, it changes things. Between us. I told you before, I trust Christof with very little. He does not belong to me."

Still, Barth guard relaxed, even as he regarded the sudden flow of emotion with suspicion. They always felt real, but ultimately he had no way of knowing if they were. Zar suddenly became present, which meant he must have abandoned the course. Barth did not have strong feelings on this. He did not have much of a work ethic to begin with. They got the same amount of points for failure as they did for success.

"It's difficult," he agreed finally, "wanting."

Barth's emotions were a dark and underlying tangle more than a flood. They were punctuated with melancholy, desire, patience. He didn't like dragging them out into the sunshine to turn them over and examine them.
 

[Baneful]

It felt good to have himself entirely here, not stretched too far between sleep and waking, waiting to snap back to one or the other if he didn't give his full attention. It felt good to have the predatory edge, the confidence, the things that Barth had given him over time, it was a temporary shot of confidence into the hurt and pain, it let him stand up, but of course it didn't feel like true confidence, rather than that thick golden thread it was somehow tinnier, more manic and fragile.

"But one day he might belong to you." Zar said, and this time there was nothing to stop the sleek rise of bristling jealousy, resentment and dislike as he considered the Igor, slithering down into self loathing at his own inability to be what he was. "And I don't know if it will get me killed, how could I? But it would get me away from you. Like you hinted you wanted. It was why I brought it up." Zar's emotions read like sheet music, clear and flowing, rising into crescendos and stooping into deep valleys. Sometimes they would manifest in strange abstract ways around him. As he paused on the offer there was a steep black suicidal resignation, twisting up into hurt as he considered Barth bringing up that anyone else could do what he did in the first place.

"And you think you know what wanting is." Zar said, emotions tensing up into sharp claws of anger and bristling fury. "You think you know what it's like to want something with everything you are, and when what you are is a creature that wants." And his shape shifted, the beast unfurling, all teeth and claws and tensed, poised muscle. "You think you know how it feels to want but never have, to try to pursue prey which is alwayssss alwayssss looking SOMEWHERE ELSE."

And in a ripple of swirling energy he was himself again, curt and calm, his emotions a tender deep violet of aching longing. "It is difficult, to say the least. Almost unbearable at times in fact. And eventually you have to ask yourself if it is worth it, if you are being played, if you are being effected by the other person's innate charm, if they even realise."

Blue, was the colour the thoughts shifted then, a strained stretched pale blue that tormented the eyes as they fought to discern it from white, from surrender.

"If you want the truth." and he recoiled at the word, as abhorrent as it was to their kind. "I do not want to go anywhere. My heart - hah - wants to be where I am. And you know why I want to be here. But by the same token, when I am offered only contractual arrangements in return, potential exploitations of what is an undemonly weakness. Surely you understand why I want to run instead, the way any creature wants to run from a trap."

 

[Toshihiko Two]

"One day," Barth agreed.

Barth stood, and drew closer, even as Zar boiled with feeling, his entire body melting, reshaping, forming. Zar's head grew heavy and wild, the volume increasing with teeth, and then shrinking back to something softer.

Already close, Barth took Zar's chin in his hand.

Barth's chest peeled back, thorns spilling slowly but surely from the hole, wrapped around a thin and black heart.

"You don't enjoy it? Predator, prey, consumer, consumed? Is it a disagreement over roles?"

The vines had a kind of sobering weight. Thorns crawled up Barth's arm, and cinched around Zar's waist and chest.

"I can play either. The games between us have always been serious ones. I do want you."  

[Baneful]

At the contact, the sickly, drained white shattered into shards like broken glass, revealing veins of red beneath its surface, a rich wild blood colour that was desire and want. It was as huge as the beast itself, as overpowering and looming, intoxicating and smothering as Zar's fear itself. Even as his shape wavered in flux, none of his forms and all of them resplendent at the same time, he did not flinch or pull away, simply stayed in Barth's grip. And there was that pull again, like the rose but different, a draw of need, of sexuality but of more besides, of emotions that were not demonic and yet in their strength and the terror of what they could wreak entirely as terrifying as hell itself.

The thorns reached out and he let them twist around him and defiantly let them feel (because in this world of dreams and emotions, who said that thorns could not feel) his chest with its twin beating hearts because in him there was always two, always the duality, the human and the beast, the creature that lurked below the brain demanding to be fed carnality, the beast that devoured the world and all the good in it. It was hunger and it was simplicity. But it was the humanity in him, the very facet of his creation that had left him with emotions like these ones, complex and twisted, but they made him stronger, not lesser. He was not a monster, he was a demon and the difference was never more apparent than when he was laid bare like this.

His slithering tail, impossibly long like this twisted back and met the thorns, all muscle and defiance, letting them bite, savoring it the way he always did.

And he let Barth feel the arch of arousal and interest, the swell of want and need that he elicited. "I enjoy it." he hissed through two sets of teeth, and once again there was a vast maw in Barth's hands. "You are my prey and yet I am hunted."

And the slithering grip multiplied, as many tails as there were thorns because he was unafraid, he could write on this canvas, he could be creative, perhaps not in the real world but here he was learning. "I want you." he said, and it was enough to ripple through the very place they sat, dark splintered trees jarring from the snowy earth, wrought from flesh, their trunks an array of lewd and hellish shapes, and all of them, all of them, an entire forest, angled their branches towards them, towards him. He let the emotion spread until the sky itself roiled red, until it felt as if it was pressing in on them both. "I want you so much it is pain worse than you could ever inflict with your hands or thornsss."

He clenched once hand, now a taloned paw, now a hand once more around the thorns and let the barb jut through his flesh. "Keep me." he hissed and his eyes slitted down, the words edged with the emotion of mirth, of goading. "And prove it because at the moment I would say you were no good at playing the predator."

"I want you to keep me. I want to know the calamity that awaits us. I want to know what void, what trap, what place you have created for me to fall into." And the strange forest clustered with shadows that were nothing but imaginings.

He reshaped into his humanoid form, unclad and wreathed in thorns. "I want." he said, and as the beast separate in a heartbeat loomed behind him added curtly. "And that has always been my problem."

 

[Toshihiko Two]

Barth shifted in turn, wearing only the thousand grasping tails. Barth's feet, clawed and oddly articulate, were bare. He slipped the claws alongside Zar's calf.

The thorns wrapped up and pulled Zar with steady and machine-like patience, an inch at a time, to his knees. As Zar sank, the claws moved from Zar's human calf, to his thigh, to his stomach, and with needled care rested at last to trace long, gentle lines down his throat.

Barth leaned forward over Zar and peeled back the lips of the beast. He kissed his long, wicked teeth.

"I'll bind you," he whispered into them, and he didn't have to use his mouth. The sound rattled on the cold wind, more October than winter, sending a shiver through the branches of the trees, and rustling the beast's fur. Goosebumps prickled up and down Zar's skin. "And keep you," the wind continued.