Slipping

The moon glows alabaster against his skin, a bleached-out betrayal of his usual skin tone.

Entranced, he watches. He watches the world die around him. He sees his friends wither away. He watches, and he learns.

He is gold, gold, gold. He shines, bright, like the sun, like a star, effulgent and glowing.

He is gold, gold, all gold, but green when the skies cry.

He has blood like mobile acid, steel shards of brain; pain is constant. His smile is pinched, full of broken glass, and his cheekbones are razor blades.

He drags his nails over skin, hears hitched breath, strangled words, words of undying love and terrible expletives, and knows they're both false.

He's jaded, fed-up and world-weary, the golden boy with the gorgeous green eyes of jasmine and fresh grass.

Searing hot lips, deft oil fingers at his jaw, callused against the angle of bone and skin.

They skim over his cheek, his lips, his throat; he wants more, but he can't, because he's taking advantage of the boy in love with him.

He doesn't love the motor oil boy with the robotic fingers and glass nails, and that might be the worst thing he's ever felt; just nothing, nothing at all for the orange-eyed boy.

The motor oil boy loves him, he knows, but it's not reciprocated. He might feel pity, somewhere, camaraderie, but nothing close to love.

Pity isn't love, no matter what the rainbow-veined trolls might say.

When the motor-oil-and-brazen-eyed-boy leaves, he sobs into the pillow for a long time, and he can smell singed wire on the sheets, and he might never wash them, because he'd rather have something than nothing.

They're in slow motion, circling around each other like hunting animals, searching for something, anything, soft in the other's vision.

Much like wolves, he thinks when he's drunk with sugar-spun-cotton-candy girl, laughing brokenly at her half-hearted jokes (she'd much rather be in his place).

He's not sure if he can feel love; it's a silly frivolous emotion that just seems to bring more trouble than it's worth.

It's mad, a deliberate insanity, this trouble of picking up pieces, and gluing together people.

Perhaps the motor oil boy knows; he's dark passion, and poisonous obsession, and an intimate, au fait voice that isn't very intimate at all, and fevered eyes, warm skin, silver tongue.

There's so many things unknown, about the hard boy in the starlight, about the golden boy bathed in a green sun's toxic light and the kiss he gave so freely, like it was nothing - except it was everything and more.

He's never thought it would lead them here (and yet here they are), to the edges of space, their tether, a holocaust of hurt feelings and tender souls and feeble caresses made untrusting by a hollow war; a mosaic of orange and green and crimson water-blood, and he thinks they've never been this close.

The boy is scented like burnt wire and melted metal, and it's strangely enticing; a skinny figure of danger and slender fingers at his waist.

He's intrigued, so in the black of night, they'll exchange their kisses and curses, spitting out insults and endearments in turn.

He's immortal in youth, assured in his own perfection. His thoughts have already killed the monster under his bed.

They are best friends, soul mates, could-have-beens and (late at night when they're too tired to think of the consequences) bodies to hold onto.

They're one perfect thing, kisses melting into each other, tasting like shattered quartz and tears.

The cold-fingers boy smiles.

And it shakes his world.