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And slurring the lyrics together into a voiceless cry, he spins melodies through the ether, piercing air to cut my brainwaves and shatter what I thought of him; this, this dulcet, this aesthetic, is what wraps me before I reach sleep at night and he doesn't even know I'm listening. Out of those woven needles, as he etches on the surface and stabs through to cut the core, he sings daggers against which I have no armor; he slings a flurry-storm of snowflake star-blades, blizzard buffeting me back and forth on my bed, back and forth on my bed and finally out of it as dreams mercifully take the cue from the whiskey and hurl me dancing a harmony to his song through my black subconscious ocean. Blizzard on an ocean, blizzard on an ocean, the one storm-tossed by virtue of itself, and the other thrashed by lightning through snowflakes. Every turn is dictated by the epee-baton, and every leap is only to escape the sweeping cut of each strain, and every pirouette is because his wind-words are whipping me wind-ward and even on the ocean of my less-than-awake, I have no choice but to let him dance me, back and forth in my bed...

It throbs again. It calls. It beats its drum in a center with more gravity than my gut, and demands: sing. Sing, because you haven't been home since you were born. Sing, because something still wants you. Sing, because no one is listening. Sing to the beat of this drum as I pound into the depths of you and stand in the corner of your room, singing to walls that will never have the ears you want them to. Sing with thunder, and sing frozen, desperate to be melted by the warmth of a welcoming anything, even maw of Hell. Sing a blizzard with heat lightning because thunder summons the storm, thunder from a fantasy you haven't even imagined, yet. Feel the roll of the galloping tempest and let the song exist because the core that doesn't even belong to you - and you know this! - demands to be accompanied with song. So sing the tides with your tempest, and sway the frothing forests of endless wave-crests back and forth in your corner, back and forth in your corner...

This aesthetic...

Damn. I'm awake again. Which means looking forward in terror to the evening, when I know he'll start again. I could move. I could find another bed to sleep in. But that's as much lie as that I want to ask him to stop. By now, I can't sleep without it. The nights he's sick, I sit against the wall and wait, and put my hand against it, and pray deeper into the guts of myself than I know to go, that he will sing me to sleep again. Sometimes, I'm answered. Sometimes, I sit there biting my fingers and trying not to scratch that wall and the green aesthetic of my envy and my bitter venom nausea creeps like a vine into that room and down his throat, thickening as I rape him with prayer and demand he sing me to sleep and branching, filling him, filling stomach and lungs with seeds to heal, and I can almost feel the jolt as he realizes he can speak, springs out of bed as though thrown from it, and screams melody blossoms from my fertilizer back through my need and my head lolls to the lilt of vodka and the voiceless lyrics that smear its numbness across my mind, so I can dance again, and wake up again to the terror of the coming evening.

Once again, I wake up catching my breath, unable to remember when I finally slept. Gasping on the mattress, I beseech the nameless drum for reason, but it remains silent. Every morning like this, in the deathly, hollow space of the tremendous bass that in the evening bellows song from my throat, even and especially when it should have been impossible. When I tore my throat screaming at a football game, when I drank to the point of being unable to even speak my name, when I was ill and refused to drink water just to frustrate the night, if the drum calls and I fail to respond, something else percusses its roots through my system, and I feel them suffuse me, and damn me, but it makes me able to senselessly carve these notes out of the stagnant wind until once again, and again, I wake up unable to remember how I got to my bed.

This surface soundscape...

If I can... dare introduce myself before the script slips again under my fingers into quill-blood aesthetic... my name, as needless as that is in a whirlwind of ink staining a figment of an ocean in a lightning storm blizzard, is Diam. I've been living with my little brother for three years now, letting him stay in my house for a small portion of the mortgage while he finishes up undergraduate school. He's an adorable little dude. Gray fur, like his name, and this subtle little faux-hawk of neon oranges and yellows up on top; it's not too tall, just enough to blip out of the monotony of adding yet another gray wolf to the population. He had that kind of envious, lean musculature that isn't really musculature - it's more the fact that a physique exists on him, and he hasn't the fat stores to hide what little there is. He looks corded, and maybe he is (we haven't wrestled in years, so I don't know), but I worry he's just going to shrivel up one day. Regardless, it looks fantastic on him, and he walks with the smooth, masculine grace I taught him... that is, when he isn't walking with the liquid, feminine grace our sister taught him. Silvir had many admirers. How could he not? Golden eyes from some spark of mutation, and the same gorgeous, silver, faintly-striped fur as our mother is simply not something a money-driven world can ignore.

Okay... I think... I think I'm awake enough to tell you who I am. My name is Silvir. Silver like the lightning that flashes to the tempo of that drum, lancing threads of thunder straight through me every night and calling out my voice as surely as though they'd struck forest fire and I, I have to roar the blaze. I can't... can't avoid it; it's like it claws at me to communicate this godless, voiceless, cacophony of command and obey! I guess I've been successful, hiding it from Diam. One doesn't live with someone as completely, bat-shit insane as my father without learning a thing or two about keeping quiet. I wish I didn't have to hide it, but Diam... he's been good to me. He doesn't need to put up with this madness mindfuck I inherited from Mom and Dad. He's been letting me stay at his place, which means I get to leer at that man's abs 'cuz he feels like he can walk shirtless around his little brother. Hehe. Beautiful man. Needs to start liking men so I at least don't feel quite so awkward jacking off to thoughts of those bulging biceps, swollen pectorals, and towering thighs bowling me over... Oh, it makes me shudder. I mean, yes, he's my brother, but I'm a boy who learned how to kiss from his father and passed along the knowledge behind his back to his daughter. If I want to lust after my brother, I think I'll go ahead and do it. Oh, shit! Didn't say: dude's a wolf. Got some of that ultramarine fur from Dad with little shadings of steel and emerald eyes from Mom.

Backbeat pause...

I go through my morning routine, as usual. And as usual, I glance over at Silvir's room and smirk. As long as the kid's going to be raping my ears, then if he has the gall to gaze through the crack in my door at me while I dress, hell yeah I'm gonna pose and tease his thundering teenage libido into a frenzy. He has the metaphorical nose for magic, but I managed to inherit the real wolf senses, so I can hear him moaning and smell the musk at night, and my name's consonant-heavy enough that it's pretty easy to pick out gasped from my own brother's lips. "Oh, God, Diamesca!" Only time I hear all four syllables, and he drags out that "s" like he's tasting it. Makes me chuckle. 'sides, his little infatuation is practically out in the open. This morning, I step a little bit to the right, turn a few degrees to the left, and drop my boxers, well aware that I'm giving him a front-row view of my bare rear end. Well, the side of it. I can practically hear the blood in his system shoot first straight up to his ears and then straight down to his pants, and it's hard as hell not to burst out laughing at the thought. He believed he was totally clandestine, and he was, from our father - but Auralias, our sister, and I knew he got treated differently, so we shared with each other, and the girl had had some pretty intense make-out sessions with him while she was trying to figure out how to kiss boys. Apparently, he's not bad at it. Regardless, I know he's into us, and it is fun as hell to play with. Most older brothers punch, poke, or slap their younger counterparts. I strip for mine.

Damn, he's doing it again! I stare and try hard not to pant and then-! I'd look away if I were blushing this hard for anything else. My God, how did he get an ass like that? My own brother! And I'm over here weighing one-forty at age nineteen. The boy could bench me one-handedddd o-o-o-o-o-o-ooooh, best not to think about that too vividly... Anyway, showtime over (can't gawk all morning, much as I'd like to; go ahead, call me shameless; I welcome it), I switch off my libido and get dressed, covering up my rail-thin body and my ribs with semi-loose clothing that gives me shape without illustrating too clearly how little shape I actually have. My friends keep suggesting I start dressing emo - I have the perfect, anorexic frame for it - but to hell with that. Normal tee shirts for normal people, blue jeans, and sandals just to flaunt that I also inherited Dad's cold resistance. Diam meets me downstairs for breakfast, and I've learned to time it so that I can watch in those few moments that his head is covered by the tee shirt he's throwing on. Normally, I have to be more discreet, because he's wearing some douche-bag combination of a button-up and a vest, both purchased slightly too small so that you can actually envision cannonballs overlaid on his shoulders and armored plating on his chest, and I always get that view of his ass fantastically outlined by his blue jeans when he turns around to get breakfast. For me: cereal. For him: an omelet. I... Oh, God, I've spent the last two paragraphs ogling my older brother every morning; what is wrong with me?

Once again, I stifle a laugh as I see the embarrassment overtake him so that he has to turn his face suddenly to his bowl of diabetes in the shape of odd marshmallows and actively concentrate on not flushing. It's more than a little of an ego-boost to have that kind of approval from your own brother, especially when said brother does tend to have an impressive taste in men. I fix my omelet and throw in an extra egg to the normal two just to see if I can get him to roll his eyes... there it is! "Silve, if you would ingest protein, once in your life, people might stop referring to you as 'sweetie' and asking if they can talk to Dad." Also, his normal speaking voice opted to flicker between low baritone and high alto, depending on to whom he was speaking, so when he answered the phone it was about fifty-fifty whether he was addressed as "Ms. " or "Mr." Terrian. The omelet was delicious.

"But hyperglycemia tastes so much better!" Jerk. Even if he was right. I didn't work out, I ate whatever the hell I wanted (when I wanted it), and proceeded to collect all the requisite gall for being jealous of his physique. Regardless, if I was any bigger, it would be harder to entice all those lovely, body-building jack-asses who chased my tail like it was their job. None of them'd gotten it, but a few'd found themselves fantastically blue-balled and guilted into folding me up in those slabs of beef they called arms for the night. Well... for part of the night. God, I feel it gripping me, even now. The part of the night until I feel fire flare through the top of my skull as my magics tear at me to teleport back home, where I sing like an animal and pretend I don't know that the feeling is one of being homesick for the wrong universe...

Silvir's quiet on the drive to campus. He's thinking about the previous night. He's thinking about every night. I wish I could talk to him about it, but how do I? "I know you sing at night," when it means taking the chance he might stop? I can't sleep without that sound. I feel horrible, but I've ripped him out of other men's and other women's beds to make sure he comes home, and when one of us is away for a weekend? I simply don't sleep. I find a project to consume my desire for his voice and stay awake all night with my ears feeling hollow. Sometimes I wonder, though... if it would just be easier to tell him I know, and I know he wants me, and that the obvious solution is to let him sleep in my arms every night... but I've yet to feel the compulsion towards men he, my sister, my mother, and my father all seem to share, and it would be far, far crueler than my simple teasing to make him endure my arms and no hope of anything further.

Maybe I've been more casual about my brother than the truth. I need that embrace. All I want are his arms and nothing more. Yes, I jack off to the thought of him rutting me like a bitch in heat, but that's just my balls talking. If he knew, I wouldn't have to fake the smile every time I got out of his car when he dropped me off in front of the arts complex. If he knew, I might... shit, my ears are flushing again... I might touch his arm, or... or find a simpler, stronger, softer smile than I've ever used seducing some young thing to let me fondle her breasts for an evening, so he could feel how I felt about him. My gaze is flat and empty as I make my way to the imperious columns and brick that house my education, consumed not just with thoughts of his loins, but of the comfort of having someone as close as your brother really... truly, love you.

Maybe I've been more casual about my brother than the truth. I love his eyes on me; it's a compliment greater than anything spoken could be. I wonder, sometimes, what he would do with me if given free reign. Objectively, of course. What goes through his mind, when he paws off to my name? As usual, I conduct my morning class as a father conducts his children: I answer every question, I bark every unnecessary distraction to silence, and I warmly lead them into the welcoming embrace of knowledge. Immediately afterwards, I swiftly embark on my own quest, almost able to feel my mind categorize and file the legal "weaslese," as my father calls it, while I learn the law that surrounds biochemical engineering and the world of medical innovation and invention at large. My mother is the only one who really encouraged me into that vein. Silvir laughed, Auralias didn't seem to care either way, and my father had developed a deep-seated spite for the legal realm. I don't think my brother is in love with me. That would be foolish, and while I think he's still adolescent, I don't take my brother for a fool. I've seen the way he looks at some of those ladies; he's not lacking love. He knows I won't return it, too. I love my brother. I will hurt if he hurts. But I have not had time to indulge my heart, and though I feel its boiling core, it has had the grace to remain dormant at my polite behest until such time as I can let it blossom. And when it blooms... I'm sorry, Silvir, but it won't bloom for a man.

And I know he doesn't like men. Fuck, hold on, what did she say? Diminished goddamn fourth and it's going to resolve in three beats to an A-flat major, now shut the fuck up and let me think. I know he doesn't like men. Lord, but it's clear. I watch him, and I smell him. When he sees the women's track team come jogging past in their slightly-more-than nothing and squeezed-to-bursting sports bras, he may as well just put neon lights and a scent diffuser on his pants. But when my eyes shift to start watching the men chase after, he hasn't even flinched - his eyes are still fixated on their bubble-butts. I also snuck onto his computer once and found his porn stash. To start with, it was stupendously small, but more importantly, the only (two) men in it were hidden behind the glorious frames of their flawless partners. And he had taken ballroom dance, which I'd sat in on before since I needed a ride, and while I struggled to keep my gaze from riveting squarely on him, he twirled his partner as delicately and tenderly as any gardener might tend a flower. I envied them.

Dinner was, as always, my responsibility while he ran errands. We had tried things the other way around, but the boy couldn't cook to save his soul. Sure, it didn't always hurt my palate for my chicken to be pink, but surely by this point in his life, he should have developed some talent for not managing to also turn parts of it black. I prayed he ended up settling down with someone more suited to domestic life than he, because Lord help their tongues if he had to cook. Unfortunately, this meant there was no one to distract me from thinking about what would happen tonight. Why? Why had he addicted me to it? What had addicted me to it? My God, it was worse than cocaine, except at least the need didn't escalate. And he hadn't managed to find my secret stash of spirits, since I had had the ingenuity to not use a speck of magic to conceal it, and that was what he looked for. I try not to sigh into the marinade I'm mixing for our swordfish steaks. I only have two more activities to keep me distracted before I sit in bed, sipping brandy and trying to focus on one book or another, waiting for my hell-wrought lullaby.

Today is worse than most. I can tell mostly because in my head, he's dancing and flexing to the beat of the song I'm exploding out of his speakers as I drive. It's partly because no matter how I grit my teeth and try to sing along and beg him to leave, I'm not be able to summon the same voice that literally_made four people shed tears, one girl start sobbing, and my teacher take a seat, ashen-faced, during my "juries" today. I sang arias for goddamn DEITIES just two hours ago, and now I can't sing heavy metal? And to think. To think that even that is nothing compared to what weaves out of my voice at night. I know it's good. I know it's fucking perfect. I couldn't reproduce that at will; not ever. Only when the drum calls. I get back, and dinner is tasteless. Not because of the flavor. My God, the flavor is mind-blowing. He cooks like a demon. I'd say angel, but angels don't tempt and tantalize the way his tastes titillate the tongue. Tramp. Dinner is tasteless because he opts to stay silent in my mood-muted brooding, adopting his studious, austere, half-arrogant, scholar's presence as he ponders over something philosophical or morally ambiguous from a class. I thank him for what is truly a gorgeous display of culinary art with a few awkward words and, ascetically, seat myself back in the kitchen with a perfect view of where his workout will be. I lick my dry lips as he starts stretching._

He's still thinking about it. My few bored looks in his direction as I put myself through the motions, clad only in loose-fitting athletic shorts, catch him staring, but not the same way he usually does. It's flat, and almost... angry. Having chosen such a poor time to work out, I always stretch for inordinately long to let the food digest properly, but after ten minutes of subtly watching me arch, twist, and bend in the slow, graceful lines I learned in a few dance classes, the muscles I know he desires rippling and rolling with each meticulous, deliberate movement, he stops entirely and focuses rigidly on his homework. I sit in half a split and reach one arm over to the opposite toe, my obliques outlined by the light digging into their grooves. We also usually chat, some. But every story one of us begins tonight is left to drown out of air in this desert of awkwardness. The metallic clang of weights against one another keeps words heavy as I begin to make my muscles swell with effort, veins quickly rising from biceps, triceps, and calves, and even tracing a tantalizing line past the barrier of the leg of my shorts, but his gaze doesn't eat me alive like it usually does. He joins me in the main room and flicks on the TV, another usual excuse to watch me, but seems lost today. "Something wrong?" I venture. "You're quiet."

"And you're a sack of shit," I wanted to reply. "No," is what I say instead. But I don't like lying. "Well, yes, but I'm sure you've picked up by now that I'd rather not talk about it. Just... categorize it under 'stress,' I guess." His biceps bulge and then smooth out again as he hefts the weight, and I can feel them pinning my shoulders to the bed sheets. It's slow motion for me. His abs crunch and tighten, and I can feel every line of them against the small of my back, dwarfing me as he takes me. His thighs, plates of steel outlined along with his ass on the right stretches, slide like steamrollers to and from his groin, and I can feel them like pistons, pumping me full of him. But his shoulders roll in smooth gyrations, and I feel them protecting me. His pectorals swell and strain, and I can feel them beneath me as I lie on him, tracing spirals in his fur. His eyes fill briefly with concern after he's turned them from me again, and I can feel them penetrate and melt me. And it's those final three sentences that mean I can't bear to watch like I usually do, so my homework is finished early and I flip on the TV out of habit.

"Ah. You sure you don't want to work out to relieve it?"

"I'll live vicariously through fake ninjas, instead."

"Silve, really. I'm your brother; if you wanna talk, talk. You've been quiet all day."

"So've you. Then again, I s'pose you've been 'pensive,' instead; someone pass a new law?"

"Everyone's passing new laws. No, I just... heard something that bothered me. And, I'm worried about you. Surely you're over teenage angst, haha."

"That shit's dead and gone. Nah, I got handed a really... difficult piece of music, recently, and I've gotta untangle all this fucknasty to figure it out, so I've been thinking about it. Thing is completely fucked up; some modern shit."

"Have you ever considered cleaning up your language?"

"Every time you bitch about it."

"...m. So what's the piece called?"

"It's untitled."

"A composer I would recognize?"

"Hell, I don't recognize him."

"Can I hear it?"

"Why?"

"Because I want to hear you sing, Silvir."

My breath loses direction in my throat. Had I really just said that? I realize I've stopped moving, force myself to exhale, and hide it behind my ninetieth push-up. The world is a frozen, stagnant pool around us, the tension approaching the level of the completely unbearable. I cannot believe we've both agreed to walk this line. He must know I know by now. All of my lawyer training, and this is the best manipulation I can achieve? Honestly, my professors would skin me alive.

"You hear me sing every semester and whenever the heck I feel like it here. Why the hell mention it now?" Weird fucking thing to say, and he doesn't have half a clue why it made my hackles prick up like some wild animal's. I haven't a clue why I even let him lead me this direction. Just 'cuz I'm quiet? Hell. Sometimes, I'm just quiet. He can back the fuck off.

I can almost taste the words roll from my brain, down into my throat, along my tongue, and past my lips as they refuse to parley for exit and simply run away on their own, my eyes widening in shock as they trumpet into the room. "Because I've heard it every night for the past year and I can't fucking take it anymore. If it's a manifestation of the boner you get every time I walk by your room, then we need to get you to a therapist because it drives me insane to hear you kill yourself just to sing me to sleep." They are an avalanche. They sound rehearsed. They sound like someone else is saying them. They are suddenly in the room, and even an elephant would have an easy time hiding behind the mutant behemoth that's standing there with us, now.

"FUCK you I do not sing you to sleep!" I roar as I stand up from the sofa and the force of the sound, my one little specialty of strength, blows the sofa against the doorframe. It would've rammed right into him if the wall hadn't had the good sense to stop it. My face is caught in a twisted, animal snarl our feral cousins would have admired. I heave and shudder as I stare at him, and feel a tiny shot, like alcohol, of pride that he is recovering from flinching out of his perfect planking push-ups. "I. Get. RAPED. By a fucking drum, every fucking night, and I don't have a CHOICE but to sing, so fuck your fucking lullaby!" It wasn't a problem that he knew about my lust for him. It wasn't. I didn't take issue with that because even if he did know, I didn't expect a straight man to bow to a bisexual man's incest-ridden fantasies. But that he knew about the singing and ENJOYED it? That was a problem.

---

"It's not a lullaby," I growl out in a tone too often interpreted by my opposition as soft. I can watch his skin crawl as he hears it, because he knows exactly what it means. As I talk, I stand and casually, with a hand, right the sofa. "I wouldn't sleep at all if I didn't drink listening to it. But I can't sleep with just the alcohol." Both hands on the back of the sofa are sufficient to lift it, at least enough to get it back in place. He's still watching my muscles, even terrified. He's scared of me, for more than one reason. "I hate every moment of it, but you've addicted me. I NEED it, Silvir."

"Then why say you want to hear me sing?" The question didn't even make sense, I was so distraught. What was wrong with him? I hated it. I loved it. I had actually hurt him. Good. Oh, thank God, good. Spinning this aesthetic through the ether every night and believing that only I ever heard it. And now I watched the scintillating fabric of his shorts spinning, waves of what lay beneath rippling through with every step until they were flattened by the tightness around his hips as he throbbed towards me, step by step, stopping only because he had finally dropped the sofa where it needed to be. I knew my mind wasn't working right. I knew now was the worst time to be thinking about him holding me hands-free against a wall, but I can't help it, and I lick my lips. Immediately my ears flash to scarlet.

I watch every moment, suddenly intrigued by his psychological state. He's still lusting after me, even as he takes a step back. I think he doesn't know how to reconcile having both secrets suddenly exposed at once. It's... almost fun, to watch him struggle. He deserves to, after what he puts me through. I smirk. And then my ears flush as brightly as his. Surely, I'm mature enough to ignore his arousal when there is something of far greater depth to consider. "Because I do. Were you not listening? I need it, Silve. Sing for me."

"No!" But the instant he says that, I feel my heart throb, and fear drags itself across my face, smoothing it back against my skull. That timpani... roars... and right there, in front of my brother, I find myself crushed to my knees as though by faith reborn, clutching my ears, shuddering as my throat begins to demand release. I don't want to. Not here. It's too early, and it's right in front of him. Right there! I hate wanting his pity. I hate that I cannot stand but to look up and check to see if he's there - meaning I'm a pathetic weakling, kneeling, peering up as I hold my fists to my head and whimper. I'm not just a cliché - I'm a puling child of one. To make it worse, the realization drains a tear from my eye.

I know it hurts him. I know quite well how badly it hurts him. But I step around the couch and sit down on it, watching as he cries to restrain his voice, and as an unheard wind tenderly blows his fur like granite grass across the delicate landscape of his flesh. "Sing for me, Silvir." I steel myself, knowing that what comes may very well throw me out of this house. But I sit there, raw, not willing to use powers I know have never been my specialty, and await the coming hurricane.

And a hurricane it is, but not in the calm way a hurricane generally forms. Normally, the cyclone forms slowly, miles upon miles of climate twisting itself into that single eye that eventually spews storms out like children. No, this is not a hurricane, the way I see it. This may be the appropriate size, and it may be the appropriate force, but the preparation has been too minimal to warrant comparison to such an elegantly brutal force of nature. Except... that I know in my heart of its elegant brutality. I meet my brother's eyes, suck in a gale, and release a tornado that if manifested as wind, would blot out all the fury of a volcano.

My eardrums burst as the molten eruption of gold swallows them, being pumped by the blast that hurls from his lungs. I wonder, in the space of my mind left to its own devices still, whether the supernova it will become once he has aged out of youth will shatter cities if unchecked. Surely it will. Because I know it is only his love for me and his fear of being found that keep me alive and keep our house from being demolished. Raising my eyes barely from his, a sort of numbness surrounding every action I take, I realize I can see, without the aid of a third eye, the force field around us that keeps him contained. Meanwhile, my brain is whipped into tranquility - a soft frenzy of needling vapors as I still feel him thrust and swallow that thick, glorious liquid of sound into my ears, surrounding and suffusing my brain in a bubbling cocoon. It dances up in thunder strikes from one key to another, impossibly fashioning chords from this single voice in the subtlety and skill of echo and speed. I sit, and stare, and lose track of time.

A jazz insistence on a diminished fifth rips through my vocal spectrum; Arabic, Baroque, and Japanese history all melt together in what would splinter the skull of any grandmaster of music theory, and I'm not even in charge of what I do. I let what needs to speak roar its demonic hymns and ululate its seraphic exultations as vibratos that could ripple the very earth crash against the barriers I cling to with all my might. I think I may have killed Diam, by how still he sits, the one point of calm in this storm as my voice forces me to writhe in concordance with its cadence. He is a sapphire statue, not even blinking while he watches me. Even my inhales are unearthly beauty as I suck them in, desperate for air after each phrase. Minutes pass, but they're lost in the inhuman detail of each second and the notes it contains. I feel my body wracked with spasms, heart suffocated by my lungs and abdominal muscles screaming at me to cease my treatment of them; that... that was the climax. Through the entirety of the final, descending decrescendos, my entire body burns, no longer with the raging, cackling forge that fuels my sound, but with the furious humiliation of knowing my pants are damp. The music, in such close proximity to the target it shares with me, had drawn out of me every form of energy it could muster. I was accustomed to tasting blood on my tongue. I was accustomed to being soaked in sweat. But never... never this. When I finally finish and the last, reverberating harmonies have faded into mere memories of echoes, a trickle of crimson drips in slow, gentle, vile counterpart to the hell that brought it out of my lips; salt drips a soothing rain from my chin to the floor and slips in a diaphanous sheen across my chest, back, and shoulders; and thick, fragrant warmth envelopes my groin and one thigh. Gasping quietly as I struggle to control my breathing, I look up to my brother's gaze.

In that tiny alcove of my skull not completely inebriated by sound, I suddenly realize that the hellfire permeating my Nirvana has burnt up the last of its fuel, and its abode with it. There is no heaven in that voice without the hell of knowing it will end, and besides, the paradise that flays sense from my academic-wrought mind always brings with it a scourge to remind me of how badly I need it. This time, I believe I overdosed, if my nose is correct in telling that small section of my brain that there are in fact two distinct, though not distinct by much, scents of musk now quietly wafting through the room. After what may have been full minutes in the echoing silence that twined its gossamer embrace around the two of us, I finally looked somewhere other than blank emptiness, convinced by now I would not flush simply because of the liquid that had leaked and pressed itself out of my shorts. So caught was I by his symphony, that only upon rewinding through my memory can I recall the long moment when every muscle in my body clenched with a force that I know quite well could have powdered most men's ribs, and I grunted and strained with the bliss that shot itself coursing through my nerves. The mere memory provokes a dry-heave and a throaty, swallowing gasp, which finally colors my ears and cheeks bloody. "...s... sorry."

"Sorry..." I just kneel there, unable to process what could possibly be done or said here. I only spoke to echo his regret. I need a shower. I lick the blood blankly from my lips, then clear my throat and swallow what comes up. I cough again, just to be sure, holding a fist to my mouth and checking that it doesn't come back speckled crimson. When it does, my eyes widen and I start to feel faint. My throat is torn, and my body was drained so thoroughly of energy reserves that liquid half-progeny are squishing around inside my underwear: that is to say, I am more exhausted now than I ever remember being any other of the hundreds of times this has happened. Then again... before, I could never remember making it into bed, but the glory of my brother's emerald eyes has apparently kept me conscious, this time. I stare into them, hanging onto them as I feel the blood siphoned from my face.

Moving with the smooth grace learned through dance, I am by his side, and I hold his paw in my two great hands, dwarfing it. He hardly registers me as I bend my nose to the bloodstains, part my lips, and lap at them, cleaning them off. He shudders at the touch of my tongue and clenches his teeth, whimpering that I have turned my eyes away without saying a word. His taste is raw. Not just the blood - I can taste how naked he is, here, in the way I can ignore the semen spilling from my shorts leg and he cannot ignore the dark stains on his jeans. It's in the way he whines like a puppy for the velvet brush of my tongue on his fingers. It's in the way he desperately sits like a statue, commanding his clenching fist to obey his dictate of stillness. And finally, it's in the way that, overwhelmed, he collapses towards my chest.

Blue... warmth... the soft, rocking cradle of gravity swung through firm steps... the cotton of bed... lips pressed to my forehead... scent of man and sweat... and the sweet embrace of sleep.

This aesthetic...