Echoes in tawdry timbre

He couldn't have said how he got there, though he was far from lost. The story of his life, maybe. Maybe he had set out, dressed as a civilian, to see the city once more. He had become more aware of it, the great, slow, teeming, dreaming stone and brickwork mass of it, since the word had come that he would be leaving. The location was temporary, an investigation and back again, but a farewell was necessary. Fact and feeling disagreed, and he defaulted to the wisdom of the stronger opponent. It would be some time before he saw this place again.

Earlier rain slicked the streets and rimed them with reflection, moonlight and streetlight competing to give them glow. The moon was not quite full, brimming with an asymmetry the eye disliked.

The were echos of voices, shadows in human shapes. Others. Like him, maybe.

Or maybe not. That was part of the risk, the edge of the intolerable.

The pull was in him, like hooks set at strategic spacing. Fear whispered in his ear like a contemptuous lover. The fossilized stars followed him, ducking in and out of sight behind hunchbacked buildings, refusing to avert their gaze as any decent constellation would.

The night was laying too close to Rakitin's skin. If he couldn't shake it off he would press it close, clutch it near to him and drive it down into his flesh.

Each step echoed fear, both that he would continue and that he would turn back. The possibility and ease of running away goaded his steps.

He saw the man from a long way off. Leaning against a wall, exuding dim orange light against the colorless blue.

He exhaled like a sigh, soft across the silence. As his hand drifted downward, his eyes turned and met Polya's.

Fear sharpened like the point of a knife at his back.

Polya's fractured, inconsistent mind coalesced into a pure will to escape.

The man had not turned away. He paused, cigarette arrested in the midst of descent.

Moonlight and sullen ember revealed him to be as tall as Polya, but broader, several shades darker in every respect, and infinitely more real. Orange reflections shone across the surface of his eyes, masking them and making their message clear.

Go on. Turn around. Run away, coward that you are. What's to stop you?

Polya pressed forward, toward the firefly light. The man's face was cast in a palette of variant shadows, clean lines, handsome, tilted to him, questioning.

Yes, Polya insisted ferociously, overriding every beat of his pounding heart, that would have its way the second his concentration and thus his courage broke. Yes. Yes, damn it. Yes.

To merge with the shell he inhabited and play at being a man, with a man's desires. Focused on pulsing surges of anger like electricity into a defensive grid.

Coward. Coward.

The effort set in his face and voice, hard as crystal. He remembered the feel and sound of it, the adjusting flow of shadows over the man's face and the flicker of appraisal in his eyes. Shame and fear forced his mind to calcify against the inevitability of humiliation, a sheer surface memory slid from. He heard the stranger's voice coil around his neck, a slow sinuous knowing smile,

"What could you be looking for, out here in the middle of the night?"

and a metallic taste of a voice for lack of a better word his own,

"I don't know. Have I found it?"

The cigarette paused at the midpoint of its arc.

Posturing only, not quite lies, thousands of mistakes packed close in the dark between them, and the risk was intolerable but there he was, the streets retreating and the malicious miracle of an open door.

The light was unforgiving but there was nothing to forgive. Shadow had done little justice to the precise clarity of his features, hair with the color and soft luminosity of an otter's pelt, and the sure set of his shoulders.
Difficult to believe that this would be the kind of man who, like him, would pen upon another illegible confessions in the ink of night.

A relief that was another kind of fear closed over Polya's head as the lock slid into place.

Before the rasp could fade, to push it to the breaking point and to make sure that there was no more room to think in terms of should, Polya grabbed the man and turned him and hauled him forward, fingers glancing off hard smooth muscle that told him the man must be letting him, holding back, and that fed into anger and that was good, and the tactile force of the lean body's closeness and reality ignited something coiled and restricted and forbidden in him. Polya pulled the stranger into a hungry embrace and a voracious kiss.

The man responded with a sound in his throat, surprised that such a mouse as Polya would have it in him to take what he wanted. And there was no denying as lips met to enclose the slick slide of tongue and this was what he wanted, with a fervor that lit sparks behind his eyes like emergency flares. The stranger's mouth moved with sadistic langour, forcing Polya to press against him and kiss him deeply, aggressively, until he mtached it with the savagery Polya needed to burn the timidity like poison from his blood.

The man's hands, strong and broad, slid up his back beneath his shirt. The touch of warm, living, wanting skin on his set free a gasp before he could kill it.

"You're forward," the man murmured, the trace of breathiness mingling with the amusement in his voice unaccountably satisfying. "We haven't even been introduced."

Polya would not let his eyes come unlocked, knowing that they were dilated and filled with a rabbit's contemptible terror.

"I don't need a name."

Better that you can't forget it.

The man shrugged and might have spoken, but Polya grabbed him, kissed him, buried his hands in his hair to test the texture. Thick and soft.

"Fuck me," Polya hissed into his ear.

Before I lose my nerve was bitten back.

The man must have heard it, because he smiled.

"Whatever you say," he agreed, easy and shamelessly to mock the cloying battle Polya fought every second with the shame that threatened to fill his lungs and smother him alive.

Polya held himself taut, refusing to break the man's gaze, ready to drive that shame back into himself and inch by inch eviscerate his pride.

An ideal vantage to watch an eyebrow arch.

"You may want to undress first."

Polya wrenched a step backwards, furiously refusing to blush, arresting the hidiously ludicrous urge to turn his back. His hand went to his throat to tear open the line of buttons and lay himself bare. The man removed his own clothing at a leisurely pace and watched. His eyes were a green that bored like an emerald beetle and held no pity.

When next they collided to touch without barrier and kiss, their cocks lay against one another, a bright white point of contact in the body's sense of self.

And Polya was turned onto a bed, hands and knees, sketching out maps of the man's movements by sound, padding footsteps, the unscrewing of a jar, and finally finally the sinking of the matress back and the sense half-imagined of radiant heat.

It was days before the memory of the stranger's chest against his back, arm looped insouciantly over his shoulder in counterpoint to the cool slick press of his fingers, faded from Polya's skin.

A moan tangled in his throat.

"Ready?" the man whispered, only so that he could take amusement from the rapidity of Polya's nod and Damn it, yes.

And he was moving, forward, moving, slow and inevitable, the power of his body focused to a single shift with the weight of promise.

Polya felt his hips sank upward and meet him, stared down at his trembling hands and fists of white bedsheet. Feeling the stranger's arms wrap him as he filled him, emcompassed him, permeated him.

Polya whispered, "Be ruthless."

With a low rumble of affirmation, the man moved, sliding in and out of him, strength and momentum building, taking Polya's cock in his hand and stroking without mercy, giving the rhythms of their bodies and breaths no choice but to coincide in unity like a heartbeat.

Pleasure arced through Polya and he bucked, throwing off the stroke and nearly throwing off the stranger altogether.

"Easy, easy." His thumb was rubbing soothing circles into Polya's spine but he was laughing at him, Polya could hear it. "Been too long since you've been fucked, yeah?"

His voice dropped lower, closer.

"I could help with that, you know."

Polya wouldn't allow himself to rise to the taunt, and only growled, "Keep going."

The stranger laid mocking kisses on the back of Polya's neck and fucked him, while Polya inflicted the cries he couldn't release on his lip and tasted metal.

But he couldn't hold an escapee, a single, incompletely muffled, "Uhnn."

The man laughed, a low, gasping sound that perversely spiked Polya's pleasure. His voice was dark and hoarse.

"Keep making sweet little noises like that and I'm going to think you like this."

Polya could only snarl soundlessly and push back against him harder.

Even as he hated the weakness that made him need this, he adored. The unknown and unknowable man's hands stroking along his sides in time with the jut of his hips, the press of firm muscle and supple skin on his back that he fell upwards into and kept falling, and he was crying out ludicrous nonsense words like god and yes and good, or wanting to and that was worse, adoring this stranger for harboring the cruelty to shred through the shroud of indifference and take the man it hid.

He came hard and shuddering, as though the wires holding him together had been cut in a thousand places at once by shears of searing sensation. He was cast in clarity for the jerk of the man's hips and the long sigh soon after.

He pulled back, graudually, and the end should have been there.

Then he wrapped his arm around Polya's waist, with a lazy smile that somehow ate into him like acid, and kissed him soft and slow.

And soon after the stranger lay beside him, speaking of something, maybe, and it would be too easy to accept that something like this was possible.

The stranger levered to his feet and vanished behind a corner, leaving incorporeal warmth behind him. There was a sound of running water.

A residual burn lingered with the blood on Polya's lip.

He knew a dismissal when he saw one.

Polya pulled on his clothes and left before he could start thinking again. For days, going about the basic business of living, he was trailed by the nebulous sense that he had forgotten something.