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Aesop’s eyes skeptically run over the single line immaculately scrawled on the crisp parchment in his hand. It’s barely visible in the dim light of the full moon through the wispy clouds, but he knows well enough by now what it says. In fact, he’s stared at it enough times that it may as well be tattooed to the inside of his eyelids at this point.
Meet me at the crossroads, beneath the next full moon.
The pale glow illuminates a cobblestone path overgrown with weeds that Aesop knows he’s never seen before. Never in any of his past escape attempts has he discovered this untraveled road, nor the intersection it forms with a similar road running perpendicular to it, on which he spies a willowy silhouette and a shock of white.
“Joseph,” Aesop breathes. It shouldn’t surprise him when Joseph manages to hear his mumbling through the mask concealing the lower portion of his face.
He watches the photographer continue down the path toward the crossroads with his usual feline grace, just unnatural enough to be unsettling, but intriguing as always. Aesop suddenly feels particularly awkward plodding along through the weeds with his makeup case-- always with his makeup case--as some sort of security blanket.
It seems their mistrust is mutual; Joseph’s saber is sheathed on his hip, swaying with him as he walks. That should definitely be setting off alarm bells in Aesop’s head, but against his better judgment, he intercepts Joseph at the crossroads. He’s crushed the parchment in his fist by the time he gets there, but is otherwise placid, staring up at the hunter expectantly.
“Thank you for accepting my invitation, Embalmer.” Joseph almost looks bored, but Aesop catches the slightest glimpse of something else. “I do so hate being stood up.”
If there is some ulterior motive or hidden meaning to these summons, Aesop can’t, for the life of him, figure out what it is. This, he thinks, is why he prefers the company of the dead, but Joseph is not necessarily living, is he? Not alive, but not yet dead, Joseph occupies the complicated space between that Aesop loses sleep over.
He is unskilled in espionage and a stranger to formalities, so Aesop does all he can do: be direct. “Why did you call me here?”
It seems he’s ruined some sort of game of cat and mouse, because Joseph looks disappointed for a second, or perhaps pensive. Again, Aesop really can’t tell.
“I will be honest with you,” Joseph muses, a spindly finger tapping his chin, “I am not sure, myself. I was hoping to understand when I met you.”
“But we’ve already met.” Aesop eyes Joseph’s blade again. He’s quite familiar with it; so familiar, in fact, that he fights the impulse to rub at his neck, where the phantom point of the business end presses against the soft skin of his throat as an echo of past matches.
“Fair enough.” Joseph sighs. “Though, I was hoping this particular meeting could be a bit more civilized.”
Joseph regards the game with contempt. Of that, Aesop is certain. He’s caught pieces of the photographer’s irritated monologuing during matches, mostly consisting of his gripes of how the entire situation is “barbaric” and “pointless” while Aesop gags on the taste of his own blood. Never once has Joseph shown him the mercy of putting him in a chair, because he knows Aesop will simply come back. Death, for the embalmer, is always slow. It’s also fascinating.
All those years acting as a courier of death could never have prepared Aesop for what it truly feels like to die. To think he, the shepherd for lost souls, led his lambs to a path he himself had never trod until recently, filled him with shame. Now, though, it is inspiration. Every time he bleeds out in the dirt, snow, or concrete, he takes special care to remember every sensation, and when he wakes in the manor, he writes it all down.
It is not the very real possibility that Joseph may kill him that makes goosebumps ripple across Aesop’s skin. Rather, it is the way the photographer has socially put him in a box that feels like it is getting smaller by the second. Dying is easy. Living and the formalities that come with it are infinitely harder. Secluded one-on-one conversation is a nightmare only marginally less terrifying than crowds.
“What do you want?” Aesop asks, then realizes his bluntness may have come across as rude judging by the slight twitch of Joseph’s lip. He backpedals. “What did you want to talk about?”
Joseph’s expression softens and settles back to the amused-yet-annoyed demeanor that typically graces his cracked porcelain face. He offers Aesop his arm. “Walk with me.”
Aesop has never really touched Joseph before. He’s been jostled about in matches, but this is the first time he’s gotten the chance to truly observe, and he immediately fixates on the strange feel of his skin beneath his sleeve when he hooks their arms. Joseph doesn’t radiate any body heat. Even in the chilly night, Aesop feels no warmth coming from the man beside him. In a way, it reminds him of the countless corpses he’s embalmed, and as soon as the thought comes, he can’t let it go, not even while Joseph carries on their conversation.
“You intrigue me, Embalmer.”
“Aesop is fine.”
Joseph pauses, looks over to Aesop, and huffs an almost-laugh before continuing down the path. “Alright, Aesop. You intrigue me.”
“Why?”
“Because you showed up here tonight. Because you obviously do not fear me, nor the chance that I could run you through with my saber on a whim.” To emphasize his point, he taps the fingernails of his free hand against the hilt of his weapon. “And, perhaps strangest of all, you do not hate me.”
“You’re playing the game. I can’t hate you for that. You’re just as much of a pawn as the rest of us.”
As soon as the words leave Aesop’s mouth, he knows he’s struck a chord. He feels the way Joseph’s entire body tenses.
“Right.” The photographer’s voice is bitter, dripping with bile. “You are bold to speak to me so plainly.”
“Because you can kill me? I’m going to die in future matches anyway and awake in the manor, just the same as always.”
“Right again!” Joseph’s sharp bark of humorless laughter pierces the unnatural quiet. “Death means nothing, but at least the rest of you still fear it. You, however. I have stood over you time and again as you bled at my feet, and you are never anything short of blissful.”
“It’s…” Aesop struggles for the right word. “Enlightening. I have spent so much of my life working so closely to something I could never truly understand. I understand it now, and I will only increase my understanding. It makes me better.”
“Better?”
“At my work.” Aesop’s fingers tighten around the handle of his makeup case.
“That is quite a bit of pain to endure for the sake of becoming a better embalmer,” Joseph remarks.
“Not just that. I guide lost souls to their peace.”
That catches Joseph’s attention. He tables his brewing anger in favor of genuine curiosity. “Do explain.”
“I help suffering people find rest. Death is simple. It’s quiet. And I can make them beautiful,” Aesop says, as easy as explaining a common day job. “Having experienced death as many times as I have now, I can tell them just how easy it is. How calm it is. There will be no doubt that it’s the right answer.”
“Is it?” Joseph asks. “Is death the right answer?”
“Yes,” Aesop answers without hesitation. “Some people can’t see it at first, though, and I have to help them along. In the end, it’s always for the best. It’s cruel to allow a lame horse to keep limping.”
“Ah. So you are a killer.”
“No!” The pride swelling in Aesop’s chest instantly shatters. “What I do is ethical. I’m helping.”
“Mmm,” Joseph hums. “Then I suppose you would hate my life’s work. It seems I’ve preserved the souls you so love to set free. Do you know why? Because I was helping to protect them from time--from death. And yet it seems I have been cast as the villain in whatever narrative this is we find ourselves trapped in. How deliciously ironic.”
“Is that why you’re--”
“Like this?” Joseph gestures to himself. “Unable to die? Stuck between life and death in this accursed manor playing a meaningless game with my endless existence? I believe so.”
“Do you want to die?”
“Very much.”
The yearning that floods Aesop’s body in that moment is staggering. Years of conditioning elicit the pavlovian response that makes his fingers twitch in search of a syringe. It’s been so long since he’s held his brush in a way that mattered.
He wants to help, but he can’t, so Aesop says nothing, and the two settle into semi-comfortable silence. Their meandering doesn’t take them far. They physically can’t leave the confines of the Oletus Manor property, so when the path reaches its end, they stray from it and wander to the nearest tree and settle beneath it in the slightly-unsettling-green grass. Aesop doesn’t know when it’s acceptable to ask to leave, if it’s acceptable at all, so he sits beside Joseph and says nothing until the photographer decides to pick up the subject Aesop thought had been dropped.
“How would you help me, Aesop?”
“What?” His head snaps up from where he’d been staring at his hands in his lap.
“Had I a soul, how would you guide it?”
“Oh.” Aesop’s heart stutters. “Well, I’d probably start by talking to you. I’d ask you about your life.”
Joseph nods thoughtfully. “My twin brother is dead. It should have been me. In my grief, I’ve committed atrocities defying the laws of nature themselves, and I see no reason to continue living.”
“You want to see him again, don’t you?” Aesop’s hands are steady as he already begins rifling through his neatly-organized case.
“Yes.”
Over the soft clinking of bottles, Aesop swears he can hear Joseph’s voice break ever so slightly. He decides it would be rude to draw attention to it, so he carries on as soothingly as possible, just as he would with anyone. “You will, and it will be so easy, just like falling asleep. It’s been so long since you’ve rested, hasn’t it?”
Joseph nods. Aesop wonders if it’s because he doesn’t trust his voice not to betray him. He has not yet objected, so with hands as sure as death itself, Aesop applies an experimental stroke of chemicals to that peculiar porcelain skin, leaning over to sweep the brush with feather-light precision over the jut of his cheekbone.
“You’ve come so far, Joseph, and you’ve done so well. I am honored that you chose me to help you at the end of your path.”
Aesop lowers his brush, gathering more of the fluid, raises his head--and feels his mask come down and the insistent press of Joseph’s lips to his own. The embalmer’s ever-steady hands drop the tools, and he immediately skitters away to clamber for the glass jar lying on its side in the grass in hopes of salvaging some of the expensive concoction inside.
“Joseph--” he gasps, then is silenced by his lips and the tongue that either implores Aesop for entry or begs him to stop talking. Either way, he complies, allowing Joseph to lick into his mouth. Aesop can feel the burn of the residual chemicals on Joseph’s cheek when it comes in contact with his own skin.
Joseph’s skin, though, is something different entirely. There’s the lack of warmth Aesop noticed before, and it doesn’t give under his fingers quite as much as living flesh, which makes kissing him strange, but not necessarily unpleasant. When he is no longer stunned into rigidity, Aesop gives in to the urge to run his hands through the long hair that rests over Joseph’s shoulders and is immediately obsessed with the feel of it between his fingers.
“Come here.” Joseph pulls Aesop into his lap and situates him so his thighs bracket the photographer’s hips.
Everything is happening so quickly, Aesop is grateful to have had the clarity of mind to set his tools aside in time. Joseph’s lips are at his neck, kissing at the sliver of pale skin left exposed by his high collar, and his hands are everywhere--his sides, his hips, his ass. Aesop doesn’t even realize he’s hard until Joseph pushes his hips down to rock against his own.
“ H-Hah,” Aesop digs his hands into Joseph’s shoulders for leverage as he grinds against him without thinking twice. He gave up trying to understand this entire endeavor some time ago. Chasing sensation is far more simple.
Nothing about this makes sense. It did, for a moment, when Joseph was inquiring about Aesop’s work. That chain of events was somewhat linear. And then Joseph took a hard turn in an entirely new direction that Aesop doesn’t think he’ll ever ask him about. People and their feelings are complex, assuming this has anything to do with feelings at all. It’s a tangled web Aesop would rather not weave, so instead, he focuses on Joseph’s hands, one of which has changed trajectory to unbutton the front of Aesop’s pants.
“Keep talking,” Joseph murmurs against Aesop’s shoulder, his fingertips ghosting the waistband of his underwear.
“I don’t--” Aesop gulps, then gives a full-body shudder when Joseph brushes the V of his hip beneath his clothing. “I don’t know if I can.”
The photographer kisses Aesop’s jaw. “Try.”
Aesop nods, trying to focus on where he left the conversation rather than Joseph’s finger’s curling around his hardening cock and remaining torturously still. “We’d go on like that for a short while, until the-- hah --the chemicals finally took effect.”
“Until I was dead,” Joseph croons, thumbing the head almost as a reward for granting him even a fantasy of death.
Aesop groans and bucks into Joseph’s hand. “ Yes.”
Joseph easily coaxes him to full hardness, slicking his hand with Aesop’s precum to work him with slow, deliberate strokes. “I do not hate the idea of you being the last thing I see.”
Something about the praise makes Aesop flush down to his chest, and suddenly it’s too hot. He discards his gloves in the grass and opens his shirt in the hope that the chill of the night will be adequate in cooling his overheated skin. Joseph takes the opportunity to suck at his collarbone.
“You’d be so beautiful,” Aesop says, breathless as Joseph pumps him harder, “I’d make you perfect.”
When Aesop looks at him, his slate grey eyes all but consumed by his blown pupils, it takes less than a second to imagine it. Joseph Desaulniers would be his greatest work of art, brilliant in velvet and flowers. He is the masterpiece that will always elude him.
“I know you would.” Joseph lifts his head, and after a moment’s contemplation, kisses Aesop’s lips again with a melancholy sweetness. “I’ve watched you, meticulous little mouse. A shame that your work is burned or buried. What a waste.”
Aesop keens when Joseph works in earnest to bring him to the edge. His hands grasp tightly at Joseph’s shoulders, his hips thrusting wildly to meet his hand. “It’s-- nnn --not a waste. I’m creating someone’s last memory of them.”
Aesop thinks he hears Joseph laugh under his breath, but it’s heart to hear anything over the sound of his heart thundering in his ears. “There is no one left to remember me. Will you remember me, Aesop?”
He can feel his release building, filling his veins with liquid fire and sparking at the base of his spine. Aesop is mere moments from falling apart, but it’s impossible to miss the way Joseph looks at him, as if he’s pleading. It’s the closest he thinks he’ll ever see him get to begging. How ironic, when he’s not even the one on the brink of climax.
“Yes,” Aesop gasps, his own movements jerky and erratic, desperate for release. “ Yes, Joseph.”
He writhes in Joseph’s lap, spending into the photographer’s hand with a drawn-out groan before slumping forward to rest his head on his shoulder. Joseph smooths his fingers through Aesop’s sweat-damp silver hair.
“There,” he says, “I have given you a little death. One day, perhaps you may grant me a death as well.”