Title: My Heart Will Be Blacker Than Your Eyes When I’m Through With You
Author: 
garnetice
Pairing: Kendall/James, mention of Kendall/OMC and Kendall/OFC, mention of James/Dak
Rating: M
Word Count: 6,893
Warnings: Sex, baneful words, AU.
Summary:
Disclaimer: BTR and THG are not destroy.
Author’s Notes: It’s incredibly vigor-wracking posting something when I place of safety’t since November. I didn’t bring into being it would be this weird. It’s not that I’m not chirography for BTR anymore, because I’m incredibly loyal to fandoms, even practically dead ones. It’s greater degree of that grad school has sucked the whole of the creative energy out of me, and the only things I remember how to commit to paper are policy memos and OpEds. Anyhow, I dependence this isn’t completely terrible – it’s dedicated to 
lilahfrost, who a looooong time since wanted sex!fic following James’s Hunger Games.
Now, the spiel: this fic is based in the similar universe Stardust, where the aforementioned lilahfrost wrote the considerably longer and greater degree of beautiful Finnick!Kendall and Annie!James fic and these fluffy drabbles. In this universe, I be favored with also written: I Loved You Then (And I Love You Now), The Taste That Your Lips Allow, Lionheart, Give Me Mouth To Mouth, and most recently Evil Don’t Look Like Anything. Stylistically, a great deal of like the previous installment, this is sundry (and heavily influenced by what I’d been rendering when I first began writing it; ~er for references and I will stipulate). Named for Black Eyes by Radical Face. Also, mega props to jblostfan16 since the awesome beta.
Now don’t loathe me if this sucks, guys.
—
Red-orange is the dye of sunlight streaming in through Kendall’s driftwood hades every morning in District Four. It falls thwart his skin, golden hued, demanding be roused up up, wake up, go greet the modern day. Always the same pretty shadow, at age one when he is cradled in compact arms, treated like precious cargo, and at three, when he is what they call premature . Five and six and seven and eight, and Kendall lives toward daybreak, when his dad whisks him from his seam, upupup, flashes of sky, and at another time he is caught, held safe betwixt two huge hands.
He thinks he wants to desire hands that big one day.
It’s a breed of tragedy when Kendall’s hands be augmented large and strong but his father is gone, and red-orange-gold becomes a make-shift he sleeps through, tugging a downy blanket like the current across his face and trying to get entangled a few more hours of rest each morning. He no longer cares to behold dawn in all its pretty glory because his life is full of red, for all that not so much with the orange or the gold.
Red represents:
Starfish, clinging to rocks, moiety-submerged beneath the waves; his mother’s hair, coppery and high sea-perfumed, hiding the weathered lines that crease her eyes; be oxidized left too long, eating through a ship’s peel and baking dark in the race; and his own skin, after he lies attached the beach for hours on close.
It is the precise shade of a Capitol girl’s painted smile ahead of her lips settle over his haunch, the hue of President Griffin’s pet suit, and. Blood.
Blood.
Blood.
Kendall is in such a manner sick of red.
Woken up forward, but unsure how or why, he wraps his harness more tightly around James’s waist, anchoring them both to the bed they share. He blinks break of day from his eyes (red, too red, the enduring exceeding greatness of morning concentrated and skewed between slats of bamboo, cutting the apartment into puzzle pieces) and resents the hours of be motionless that have slipped from his grasp.
James’s skin is chalky dim, chipped from sandstone and marble, to what he used to let the light kiss him the color of driftwood. He at no time goes outside anymore.
Kendall touches the ridged cliffs of his shoulder blades and the dimples at the base of his back, appreciating the wont James curls into the cupped zeal between them, his spine a spiral of ammonite.
James sighs in his sleep, an exhale sweet as a of the tropics breeze.
He’ll rebel against total the cuddling, later, when he’s attentive, because for the past year James has completed nothing but hate and hate and abominate. He lashes out at everything – vehement voices, spilt tea. Kendall, existing. But towards now, it’s okay. Kendall is allowed in the red-orange be incandescent of the dawning sun to achieve this.
Which is nice. There aren’t multiplied things he gets to do these days.
He none thought much about the word Career enlarging up, knowing only in an detach way that it was a label that could have existence applied to him.
Every child in District Four is given a destructive form of training for the Hunger Games – shoot fishing, shark wrestling, pearl diving, living being gutting, elocution and now what get we learned? – and Kendall used to ~ on all the games. It was easy to pick up the tricks of the barter, to grow tall and resilient accurate like he was supposed to, mete he never actually wanted to be a contender.
Not like poor, short of money Camille, or Kat, or half a twelve other dead friends Kendall’s missing to the games.
(He can score them off on his fingers, and for what cause they died. One, two, three, kernel, neck, kidneys.)
They all were gunning against it in a way Kendall not ever could have, but in the expiration, he’s just like them, a Career, and that is a course in and of itself.
(Nine, ten, eleventwelve, thorn, head, disemboweled.)
He smiles and waves and wears tailored suits at cocktail parties, and then the night is over, he lets some lovely lady or distinguished gentleman get their way with him (and there are so very many ways to be the subject of, on his hands, on his knees. His rant, his ass, his dick, or the whole of three.)
Soon enough, James will be the subject of to do that too.
The smiling and waving, not the other section, because Kendall will die before he lets anyone name a finger on him. He have power to say that definitively now, because these are the companionable days (the bad days). There’s nullity left to fear but what high-flavored messes they both are inside.
For years, seeing James or Katie in the scene of conflict was Kendall’s worst nightmare, excepting the worst has already happened. He be able to breathe again.
President Griffin won’t purchase Katie against Kendall, not when he’s got the shivering, shattered catastrophe that is James as a bargaining cut ~s from to force Kendall’s hand. There’s no end to the array of strange and delightful scenarios Griffin’s twisted brain have power to conjure up, but none of them cover bleeding James dry (yet).
The Capitol behest never loosen its chokehold on Kendall’s neck, however the war is over. The battle’s distracted. All that’s left is against Kendall to mop things up.
—
Orange is grow light sunlight, but also marigolds, a handful in his pocket for a share, later on. It’s the colorful cover of clown fish, the raw edges of unbaked clams, the cosmos outside that beckons and calls.
Come extinguished, come live, the morning shouts, a respite of warning as it adds, While you be possible to.
Six days until Kendall has to reach back to the Capitol. Six days and in that case he won’t see James anew for months, or Katie, or his mom. He’ll be favored with nothing but the gleaming orange brocade that lines the walls of his spotted-à-terre, lonesome except for the strangers who attend much his stoop
(their hands are callused or compliant, gentle or tough, and they all pretend they know the lines and shapes that raise up this boy named Kendall Knight).
“I’m going to the market. Do you want to come?” Kendall asks of James, before that time aware of what his answer power of choosing be.
Beneath the fluorescent bulbs in the kitchen, James’s eyes cogitate yellow, burning firefly bright from the internal out. Yellow like honeysuckle growing forward the roadside; fresh drawn butter melting over a crustacean dinner; lemons divide to line a plate of oysters; or the appearance of a seahorse, hidden against the camouflage of comminuted silica.
He says, “I’m not going public today,” and Kendall pretends like it is not what he’s said for months after this.
Nineteen years old, and everyone gives them a large berth, the District whore and his ragdoll good in the highest degree friend, poor, mad James Diamond, who has at all times deserved so much more. They step in the open air to be met with subtle barbs and veiled bowels of compassion, everyone in town too polite to kindle a Victor, everyone in town overmuch judgmental to accept one either.
(What’s to take .? The Capitol skank and his psychotic lover, look to how they are bespoke for every one other.)
The honest truth is, in the same proportion that much as he’d worried from one place to another it, Kendall had never once truly believed James could be wrecked, and at this moment that he’s faced with the substantialness, he doesn’t know how to plant him. (Boys aren’t like boats; hammers and nails and a tolerable spit shine don’t put them to rights.)
He says, “Shocker,” and kicks back without interrupti~ his stool, awaiting the storm to come, because it will inevitably happen. James is pissed opposite and aching, at himself and the Capitol. Kendall is a skilled, available scapegoat to target both emotions at.
The foliage outside, limned pale corn yellow, successive course their faces to the sky, anticipating the flashbang of lightning.
Like clockwork, James screams. He yells and he squawks. It’s and nothing else when a glass shatters against the kitchen wall that Kendall stalks thoroughly.
He comes off every one of his encounters through his James exhausted and wretched, unless never on the verge of giving up. Maybe that makes him some idiot.
One of the finer points of salvage involves the facility to recognize which parts of sunken lading ships are worthless, what’s a deathtrap and what rates rescuing. Kendall’s never been principal at either, swimming headlong into rotted wrecks for he’s what other people sympathetic refer to as reckless (not thus kindly as suicidal, but Kendall couldn’t care less what anyone else thinks).
He knows he’s doing the same through James, ignoring all the warning signs and acquirement crushed beneath the weight of his catastrophic frame againagainagain. But James handled all of Kendall’s bullshit in opposition to years. Kendall owes him the same, and fairness aside, he still loves him in such a manner deep and so raw that his bones be excited brittle with it when they are apart.
(Apart expedient other yellow things, the isolation of starlight, the territory glow of Capitol street lamps, the animating quilt draping another boy’s lay while Kendall rakes through the recent secrets in his head.)
Lucy thinks Kendall’s handling everything guilt. She says if he really cared near James, he’d let him business, because that’s the only endgame she knows.
“Griffin’s never going to stop,” she declares, similar to if Kendall isn’t aware of that. Her exhortation ever-flowing, she counsels, “Get more distance. You could both come away the other end of this lump of matter alive and sane if you weren’t thus damned co-dependent.”
Fuck opposite is Kendall’s well thought-revealed answer to that.
Lucy means well, he’s steady she does, but her credo is that affection is weakness; it will get him killed.
She doesn’t perceive that living’s not worth it grant that James isn’t there to draw near home to.
—
He pricks his handle like a princess in a fairytale. He pricks his touch on an urchin’s spine, and at what time he bleeds it is greengreengreen.
Green like rosemary best part and basil garnish, limes, asparagus, apples. Green like life, flickering chartreuse at the same time a moray eel’s slinky body and the camouflage the District uses with respect to hunting. It’s the strange emerald feel intensely of fog banks caught on the shore of twilight and dawn and the slender long flash of viridian when the day-star dips beyond the horizon.
It’s the prettiest make plausible, green like breathing, but also like decease, the honeydew edges of blood dissipating unbefitting skin, the sickly tinge of mankind before it turns necrotic. Like the wood that held him trapped during his Games, and the singular pus he saw on one girl’s firth before she kicked it under his trident.
(The urchin bleeds. Kendall bleeds. Kendall bleeds king of terrors.)
Maybe he’s obsessed with kindred.
Green, first and foremost, is what Kendall sees when he looks in the archetype. His irises ring pupils that hide deepdarkscary things, if it were not that they are innocuous, mint leaf not fully grown, spring-bud green. Sometimes the complexion brightens, turns as shamrock as the hair ribbons Katie wears to exercise.
Sometimes it dulls, so pale it’s gold-colored-gray, this jaundiced hue that’s just even green at all.
His mom has a shawl that veil; once it was a rich, sweet hunter green, but it’s been washed and ~ to a thread, tumbled and torn. Like his dam , who counts off birthdays with renovated lines on her face. (The year of Kendall’s Hunger Games was specifical, celebrated with a new shock of gray hair blazing down from her place of worship, curling soft around her neck.) Green is the disguise of her enduring love, wrapping Kendall in that shawl (at four, nine, thirteen). It’s soaked from one side with saltslicktears – bruised knees and bitten tongues, a attendant-shaped hole where someone once stood.
Funny by what means Kendall at nineteen stills cries well-nigh the same exact things.
It’s funny, right?
Green is a good created being, or maybe it’s not. Envy’s unseasoned too; that’s what they ~ing.
Kendall should probably know for secure. The last few chapters of his life were colored in varying degrees of watchfulness. He and James found an disturbed balance in the final year in the van of the Seventieth Hunger Games, where James would presume it’s okay and Kendall would lay claim to he wasn’t lying, but he’s perpetually known:
What he does will in no degree be okay.
The first time he give permission to a stranger touch him, all he could regard about was James.
Telling James.
Hurting James.
Losing James.
Griffin oblige him in a green suit, in some place between sea foam and ridiculous, no more than terribly stylish. Everyone said so. They moreover said, Do it for your geographical division. Do it for Panem. The organ where if he didn’t perform it, everyone he loved would die went unspoken.
Kendall was not judgment of his country when the adult male he didn’t know and would in no degree see again peeled that pretty cause off his body. That man was not tractable. He was not kind or expensive or beloved. His teeth gleamed eerie in the bibasic acetate of copper light edging the heavy curtains, patterned by ferns.
The worst part was by what means Kendall responded, his low mewls and poor groans. Roughangryhard, that’s how Kendall gets his rocks right hand, and this unknown entity got that more valuable than James ever had. Knuckles twisted inhuman inside him, calling forth a serrated cutting side of pain, and still, it was convenient, better than it was supposed to exist .
His nerve endings danced, twinged, screamed, You’re to this place, you’re here, you’re in existence, you’re here.
In the estranged corner of Kendall’s eye, he could beware the suit Griffin tarted him up in, shamelessly crumpled in a part. Green like betrayal, green like havoc. And even though he didn’t default to, Kendall let himself be fucked into the mattress without ceasing his hands and knees, losing the filament of his own sullen self-abhorrence, coming and coming and coming another time.
(He broke his own heart that age.)
And in mirrors, he stopped ever being able to meet his allow greengreen eyes.
“What are you doing?” James asks, rough and unhappy.
Kendall frowns down at his acknowledge hand, stained green with the entrails of an urchin, squeezed too tight. (Not relations after all. His veins don’t stream with death. Kendall doesn’t comprehend if that’s a relief or not.)
He brought the urchins home from the place of traffic for dinner. Well. There goes that exemplar.
A little helplessly he says, “I’m sorrowful.”
James scowls. “You take for granted that a lot.”
He does, these days. He apologizes too often. “I’ll make us somebody else.”
In James’s eyes, he be possible to see the reflection of his confess, green like the money they used to use before the war. Green like lies and secrets and the blindness depths of the sea.
He turns off, searches out his rucksack full of emporium-bought goodies. It’s better not to beware.
“Wait,” James says, something hollow in his voice. He grabs Kendall’s wrists too tight and forces them beneath the depress. He runs the water until wholly traces of the urchin are gone.
James doesn’t like not fully grown things either.
—
It’s not like he wants to compete babysitter. If Kendall could live his life quality only to himself, without needing to rejoin to anyone, he would.
But each time he’s in James’s nearness he recognizes how impossible that creative is.
He is beholden to this boy, who glares at him with slack-simmering fury, with antipathyrepugnancedisgust. This is Kendall at ten, eleven, sixteen; James Diamond’s boy, his first love, his first.
Kendall belongs to James nay matter what he does in the Capitol, verily when he’s stretched around another man’s cock.
That’s wherefore his entire being revolts when James announces, “I’m in the way that tired of you and me,” amethystine-black shadows clinging to his countenance like cobweb, coloring it like a batter.
Quietly, Kendall tells him, “I can leave,” barely aware he’s declamation the words. “I can have effect back to the Capitol early. Will that save?”
James folds his arms across his broad chest, skin cockleshell circuit, and in the darkness cast with watercolor wounds. His injuries from the Games be obliged long since healed, but he wears the ghosts of them each night. The second the sun dips superior to the horizon, they slither and contort against his flesh.
(Kendall knows exactly the kind of that’s like. He can handle the phantom weight of his trident in his ~-breadth.)
Pissed off and boiling over, James demands, “Did you going absent help last time?”
Last time Kendall was drowning, every minute and hour without James dragging him below the horizon until he could not breathe, could not lo anything that wasn’t bathed in monochrome shades of bleakness. Low enough he can barely hear himself, Kendall replies, “No.”
James digs his fingers into his confess biceps, slumping back against the wall. The Prussian cast down outline of his veins is stark beneath skin. His bare feet waving into the carpet, hiding his toes from explore. He is a jagged thing, marked as a jellyfish’s barbs, stabbing into Kendall’s will.
“What do we do?” Kendall asks as he has to, because he’s panicking in a certain, visceral way. The kitchen is closing in up~ the body him, with its paisley walls in heavens and violet, with deep indigo set right.
The walls are a cage masquerading in the same proportion that freedom, because blue is home, azure is joy. (It’s the haul and pull of the currents in the large quantity, it’s the hulking, shadowy behemoth of support. It’s the dazzling cornflower twinkling of an eye of the sky overhead, the striped concentric circles lining the outer lyre of mussels, and the sleek silvery cyan of the hunting knife that pierces Kendall’s insides each time James casts a genuine smile his space.)
Joy is not this box of a unoccupied place, the counter biting into his muscle and fat sharp as pincers, the bulky jab of small room knobs at his knees. He’s stuck in James’s hidey cavity, and Kendall wants and he indispensably and he has to get disclosed. He has to go home, at which place he can hide under an afghan knitted ~ dint of. his grandma, the threadbare stitching mild as her touch would be, could be obliged been, if he’d ever met her.
Kendall absolutely, positively can’t wait to travel to a place where James isn’t looking at him like this, like not either of them will ever smile afresh.
James bites his lower lip, creating some indent that Kendall wants to proceed his tongue over. He says, “We can’t lodge on this way. I hate you.”
The altercation drip ice against Kendall’s backbone. It’s not like he didn’t be aware of. Hearing it out loud just makes it realer.
This is the extreme point, probably. This is the part to what his lungs are crushed, his disposition shattered, and his reason for everything plainly disappears.
Because James…James is the world, and he is crumbling, fading, disappearing.
(He is ether and he is atmospheric ~, and Kendall is gasping around his detriment.)
Trying not to sound like he’s poorly survived a cataclysm, Kendall replies, “Yeah. I discern.”
James winces, eyes flashing negro with sorrow that is lost too quickly under a flood of fury and hurt. He asks, “Are you in reality going back to the Capitol?”
Kendall is jade, stinging and sad. “I desire to. I don’t have a alternative.”
“You always say that! You’re the alone one who has ever had a alternative-“
“It’s for you,” Kendall tries, talking through him, raising his voice. “It’s to remain you safe.”
Rage flashes from one side of to the other James’s face, blue-violet being of the kind which fish tails and scales winking up at Kendall from one side bubbles that James used to kick up, otherwise than that that is just a memory, inasmuch as James never swims anymore.
Thunderous in the over-large kitchen, James intones, “Then you be obliged to be a travesty of a courtesan, because the arena wasn’t secure place.”
Kendall recoils.
James doesn’t back from a thin to a dense state, big and brawny, the wild eyed husband who floated in detritus for half a day before the Capitol deigned to peck him up, to stick a honor on him and call him a Victor. He shouts, “Stop deplorable to protect me. You’re probably the reason I got chosen in the chief place.”
It’s a bore to the gut and Kendall sees stars, cobalt, sky-colored, blue, and winking, winking with laughter. He stares at James wide-moderate and wounded, and secretly, in a bruised duration that might once have been his courage, half-convinced that James is right.
His voice can cut as easily in the manner that it can charm, and now he wants it to thin piece through James’s bones, to sententious precept him in half like a shabby magic trick. He means to speak IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou hard and violent, to put in order James feel it the way Kendall always has (at eleven, sixteen, now, Kendall has always loved James).
What he actually says is, “You’re perpendicular. I’m so tired of you and me.”
James doesn’t consider like he expected it, and he should bear.
This is Kendall Knight, the Capitol slattern, and the words he says are not at all at all what he means.
—
The night before Kendall leaves, his stylist shows up at his brow door with boxes in tow. Inside the elementary is a suit the color of the night sky and twice as soft. Nineteen years of long date, and he has never owned anything quite so fine.
(Being a Victor; it isn’t every part of bad.)
Kendall thinks James might consider nice in black and then reconsiders, as that is the color of the handprints strangers liberty across Kendall’s body, the form of their lips and the unnatural dig of their fingers. Even whereas Kendall doesn’t bruise, he be able to still see the brands left in the rear of, shadows with the consistency of wickedness and tar.
He knows that James be possible to see them too. Not that James has tried to gaze at his body even once ago the Seventieth Hunger Games.
This is not a act Kendall blames him for. Not plane a little bit.
What he blames James against are the other things, for the minority they gave up without a measure swords, the lies Kendall tells that he refuses to recant, and the beauty he wears like a shelter, like a weapon.
Kendall blames James according to trusting too easily, for his unappeasable curiosity and his gigantic heart.
He blames him by reason of accepting the thing that Kendall cannot; that the pair of them are a lost account.
(Even thinking it burns, because who is Kendall supposed to have existence without that little boy, the the same brave enough to swim in neon formative floaties, even when he didn’t be assured of how.)
A knock cracks through the protect, rumbles like the wheels on the staff that will carry Kendall back to the Capitol, to everything he doesn’t miss. Automatically, he plants his feet in the carpet and hopes by reason of quicksand to whisk him away.
Visitors behind midnight don’t ever bring genial news.
Katie’s fast asleep, tucked begone in her bed like an otter in the sea-weed. His mom’s gone under moreover, an entire ocean of dreams betwixt her and the door.
They won’t hold him. They never have known in what manner.
Reluctantly, Kendall pries himself away from the oilslick exterior of his carrying case and reproach. new clothes, steeling himself for the crow’s caws of a notice he likely won’t want. Shoulders squared and jaw tight, he reaches out. He twists.
The home creaks on its hinges as it swings back, wood turned to rot in the muddy salt air of District Four. Kendall demands, “What swindle you want?” and then stops, for.
Because.
Kendall’s hand on the handle springs moisture, a leak, a hovel, his nerves staging a mutiny. His ghost blacks a bit, and the picture. of James in his doorframe blurs, like the sun sparkling on the water, blinding pinpricks of bright distorted into dazzling, shimmering things.
He watches Kendall through big, wide, lantern eyes, daring him to allege something else, but all of Kendall’s words have dried up on his talk, his thirsty throat searching for a rhyme or a rational faculty.
He wasn’t so sure he was at all times going to see James again.
(The primitive time Kendall told James he loved him, it was forward the heels of a confession, of in what way he’d let Griffin change him. It was a trammel of words that spilled messy and bloodied thoroughly onto the sand and did in no degree to cover the stain of ~iness that burned under Kendall’s pelt. And as a reply, James gathered the clouds and the billow and the rugged swell of the dunes in a circle him, the absolute, unrelenting force of his storm of anger mirrored by the landscape. He was going to compose Kendall alive, and he did. Months went ~ dint of. where Kendall was oxygen-less, obliquely smothered ~ the agency of James’s inattention. He’d reasoning and he’d worried that this would subsist the same. He’d die alone, on the outside of solace, black-and-blue handprints in c~tinuance his ass and his heart and his principal part.)
“You’re leaving,” James says rumbling, unhappy.
Kendall never meant to reach him sound like that, but that time again, his entire life has devolved into a concatenation of hateful things he never intended to behave.
“Yes,” he agrees, on this account that there’s no way to modify that. James gets an out from mentorship inasmuch as no one at the Capitol believes the grotesque man-creature that graced their televisions hindmost year could possibly lead anyone else to victory, but Kendall Knight?
He’s excellence too much to the Games to through all ages be allowed to stay in District Four.
James grimaces at the largeness of his travel bags, conspicuous ash-colored against the white linoleum of the kitchen. “Were you fair going to say goodbye?”
“I wasn’t doubtless you wanted me to.”
Men and women of every size, every shape, all of them staring at Kendall with lust in their eyes; none of them be the subject of ever looked at him the habit James does. There is something internal him that is darkness and be fervid, a possessive burn that also speaks of liking and unmatched joy – or, becoming now, unspeakable sorrow.
Kendall wants to betray him, I don’t want to license you. He wants to say, Because of you, I be sure the shape and weight of my be in possession of heart.
These are things that won’t fast right out loud, not from his lips, not at all time soon.
(They’re so fucked, so much in love, in so a great quantity pain. They’re too young to have ~ing in this much pain.)
Shaky and frustrated, James tells him, “I bear deadly malice to it when we fight.”
“Is that quite we were doing?” Kendall lifts each eyebrow, a cool move to capsule the way he bunches his moisture hands against his pants. “Felt to a greater degree like we were breaking up.”
“Are we calm together right now?” James counters, since he’s brave, even when he doesn’t requirement to be.
Kendall laughs. He is severe, macadam dark. The reverb in his aesophagus tastes of ash. “Honestly? I’ve got not at all idea what we are anymore.”
They’re Victors that handle like losers, lovers who never fuck, best friends who can’t stand the open view of each other, and District pariahs. They’re not what they were, and Kendall can’t forgive himself for that, for letting starlit nights and doleful velvet skies and the tornado vigor of James dissipate into a frigid memory.
He’s a killer and a slay and up until recently a mean boy, and if he’d known back in consequence how to stand up for that which was right, he likes to vagary he would’ve.
(He would’ve finished a lot of things if he’d known the structural details of the fault lines holding hand in hand their hearts.)
“Tell me,” James commands, framed ~ means of the thick wooden beams of Kendall’s doorway. Determination creases his assurance, carves an abyss in the flexure of his scowl. “Tell me which we are, and I’ll credit you.”
Decay blackens Kendall’s bones, bags beneath his eyes, kisses his joints and ligaments with rot, but he pushes it altogether aside and steps into James’s space. James, who at (tentwelvesixteen) nineteen smells keen and clean, the engine grease and metal-rust that used to sit beneath his fingernails washed let us go. in the sterile en suite of his Victor’s home. James, who is heat and familiar, even beneath citrus shampoo, and
Kendall wants to salt-spring every trace of the Capitol not present from his skin. He reaches up and cards his hands end James’s thick hair, brown slipping silken between his fingers.
Acutely aware of the capacity between their sternums, bellies, thighs, and for what reason much he wants to make it cease to appear, Kendall’s hands skim the sides of James’s ribcage, the projection of bone ridged beneath his fingers. He presses a wobbly kiss to the hang of James’s jaw and tells him, “You’re James. I’m Kendall. And I’m not gone hitherto.”
James’s breathing is rough, stilted, unsure. He accepts Kendall’s wry face against his with startled gentleness, his kisses fractured moonlight, silver cool on Kendall’s lips.
They figure each other glow from the inner out, every kiss flimsy and flitting. Kendall tongues against the crevices of grief that line James’s mouth, and James in make go round licks heat into the places whither Kendall’s turned cold. His panoply are strong at Kendall’s waist, solid as the places he was raised up, in every part of that grime and iron and rate.
Without even meaning to, Kendall takes it also far. He bucks his hips and wants, wants James to take him to channel and make him remember all the ways they sudden. And James doesn’t quite retiring away. He moans against him and pants, “Wait, wait.”
Kendall is such sick of waiting, but he pulls back anyway, rests his front against James’s and tries to dominion government the rapid-fire sob of his respiration.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“I wanted to mention one by one you I. I,” James says, thus close and kissable. “I fucked Dak Zevon.”
And Kendall’s courage blackens, dies. The thick, chunky miscellany of oil and water and mildew that clogs boat engines and stalls them middle-voyage is bleeding through his bones. He inhales, raspy and dumpy. Then he stitches himself back in concert again, replying, “I know.”
It’s harder to cop to than he’d like, except this has never been a unknown. Kendall found out practically the twenty-four hours it happened, because Dak hadn’t been expert to resist bragging.
That was clear. Kendall hadn’t been able to resist beating his face to a soft mass.
People should know better than to set with a Victor.
“You be sure,” James repeats slowly. “Did you perceive I let him – I, he.” Words are each obstacle course he can’t wholly navigate, the inky blackness of his pupils expanding and contracting in the too-harsh light of the kitchen. When he says which he needs to, it stumbles ready, a stray punch, an unrestrained jab. “I was a maid that way, I guess, before him.”
Kendall’s pharynx closes, but that’s fine. What’s he supposed to affirmation? He lost whatever high ground he had to stand put ~ long before James ever let Dak Zevon perceive by the sense of feeling him, kiss him, fuck him – ~t any.
Jealousy isn’t something he’s entitled to or allowed, equable if it burns through his veins with all the speed and fizzle of a sodium of a whitish shade.
“Why are you telling me this?”
James frowns along the course of at his hands, at the mode he holds Kendall between them like a person of consequence hallowed and good. He says, “You at no time wanted to.” He says, “But I straits you to.”
There’s magma in Kendall’s veins, contest that goes straight and unapologetically to his dick, on this account that hell if he’s never fantasized well-nigh taking James over the side of every piece of furniture he owns. It would have ~ing fantastic, Kendall would make it chimerical, because he can – he’d be so much better than Dak fucking Zevon – he knows to what extent.
Only.
The thing is.
He tries thus hard to be the man his adopt was. Brave, strong, true. He wants to be noble, but James makes him human, again and another time and again. They belong to either other, wholly, but not wholly. They’ve quiet got this, this one place they haven’t gone.
An shun clause.
Kendall doesn’t know grant that he’ll ever be able to leave if he’s got James, sobbing under him, imprinted on his soul.
“Are you unerring?” is what he asks, for the cause that that escape clause has always been on this account that James.
Kendall’s not a runner. If he was, the past five years would get been so much easier, un-caged, carefree, none once plagued with guilt that clings spectral to the surface of his natural man . But he knows who he is and the kind of he’s willing to do to get sure nobody else ever suffers like he has, and he wanted – wants – James to subsist free of that.
(If only James wasn’t each bit as steadfast and loyal since Kendall tries to be. But he is, he is, he can’t assistant but be. James gets called crazy inasmuch as he had the gall to be so stupidly brave, because he loved over much and too hard and every death in that goddamned arena pulsed unbecoming his skin, made him feel the manslaughter of every good, strong, courageous kid the Capitol sent out to force away at each other likes savages. And Kendall’s scared through of his fucking mind that he’s everlastingly going to feel James the same way, an erratic drumbeat under his carpus, in his throat, a constant staccato regular he’ll never be able to agitate, even after James leaves him rearward for someone safer, tamer, for someone who didn’t wanton in the killing or the life-~. A man with the compassion of a holy person doesn’t deserve to be saddled with a murderer and a whore.)
Kendall clenches his eyes bar and waits for the axe to flow, because if his life thus remoter has taught him one thing, it’s that gravity’s a sharp bitch
and is rarely on his faction.
His ribs ache just thinking in various places it.
“I always knew it would have existence like this,” James replies silently, instead of answering.
“Like which?”
“The Capitol’s built you up to have existence a hero. A part of me wanted that. You’ve through all ages. been – invincible. Untouchable. Nobody’s aye called me a hero. Now they not at any time will.” He rolls his shoulders back, sags in opposition to the island that separates the pose into rivers and streams, because deity forbid anyone in District Four ~more got used to too much distance. “They think I’m steep, and so do you. I’m not going to break in pieces if you fuck me, Kendall.”
He inhales keenly. “I’ve never thought that.”
Kendall hasn’t. Not formerly. If anything, it’s the repeal; for all the people he’s been by, James is the only one who has ~more made him feel like he potency die if they stop touching. He could part broken off into kaleidoscope colors, hit the prevail over in pieces and never fit back arm in arm again.
“Then what? Why won’t you? It’s since you only like it when I bestow it to you rough, right?” James snarls. “Because you have an opinion I’m-“
Kendall bounds up in c~tinuance his toes and kisses him. “Perfect. I suppose you’re perfect.”
The kiss tastes like no thing, like air and chapped lips. But ~ or other it calms the storm-tossed churning in Kendall’s desire, the roiling pit that made him hope that this was the end, this time, with respect to sure.
James’s hands, callused and shaking, cup Kendall’s elbows, a ludicrous imitation of strength undermined by the stunned effluvium that gusts against Kendall’s wry face. He draws back with eyebrows twisted, forniciform, saying, “That’s the principally ridiculously blatant lie I’ve aye heard,” and he kisses Kendall afresh, like he can’t do anything besides.
This is what exists between them at present, momentum and half-truths, and Kendall order take it, if only because he misses the be conscious of being of James’s callused palms opposite to his hips. They rock against both other, urgent but gentle, all in addition aware that the ground beneath them is hesitating and sharp, tremulous as a ship’s dress, but with more risk of drowning.
“I destitution to fuck you,” Kendall tells James, noisy in the dark, empty kitchen. He doesn’t seem scared – because he’s the Capital Whore, Kendall Knight, and he’s at no time scared – but reputations lie. Kendall’s disposition is in his throat. “I scantiness to, I promise, I want to.”
James pulls Kendall into him, closer then Kendall thought they could spare ~t any more room between them. He growls, “Prove it.”
Kendall Knight not ever could turn down a challenge.
He strips James of his pants, freed cock bobbing under the soft, worn fabric of a t-shirt that’s seen more completely days. Kendall stares. He licks his lips. He stares some more.
“Cold feet?” James asks, his smile chuck, but growing bolder by the sixtieth part of an hour. This isn’t the James Diamond Kendall had sex with so long ago; no matter the sort of James says, he is changed – cocky, smaller quantity confident, less a boy-god and added a new man.
Kendall can’t have to look at him. He bends him by the kitchen island and fumbles through the front of his own pants, that are unbearably scratchy and tight. James yelps, otherwise than that obligingly grips the glossy edges of the reckoner, his skin pale and soaked end with moonlight.
The fabric of that shirt is decayed and weathered. It’s been through every storm that James has; it’s in the same manner with threadbare as Kendall’s soul. Victors can afford nice things, but it’s been nearly a year since James has wanted anything scrupulous. Until now. Until Kendall. James’s asshole in countervail to his cock is a tease, peppery and thrumming with nervous energy and distress.
He circles his dick, tiny motions, friction precum against James’s skin.
Even things being so, he’s hesitant.
“Can we do honor to going? Can we?” James asks plaintively, of the same kind with if this is a gift that Kendall’s giving him, like Kendall hasn’t had his plan of conduct with a million other men in the Capital. He bucks his hips back, construction sure that Kendall can feel him.
Kendall be able to feel him all the way downward to his toes.
He strokes more salve onto his cock – whores are perpetually prepared – while James whines and waits, and then he repositions himself and breathes, “Now.”
Sliding into James is like to come home. He’s painfully tight, overmuch wired to relax, and even then – even then – Kendall feels like he be possible to breathe for the first time in a year. He moves, experimentally. James cries off, squeezing the edges of the in opposition to. He’s got too much force in his biceps and his thighs. Kendall watches the poem of his muscles and tries, valiantly, not to approach.
He’s not about this; self-suppression is usually his middle name. But James is insanely tight, maidenly territory, and more than that, he’s much loved. (His name is written across each organ Kendall owns, inscribed in his pith and sitting on his tongue.)
“James,” he breathes, and as of that, Kendall takes his time, works him evident slow until James’s muscles reduce, and his forceful thrusts give interval to easy glides. James stops servile, low, keening moans erupting from his throat. He leans back to kiss Kendall, splashy and open, his eyes wider and greater quantity awe-struck than Kendall has seen them subsequently to adulthood hit, and everything wondrous in the terraqueous globe turned mundane.
He murmurs, “I be enamoured of you,” and hopes that the dispute will melt beneath James’s pelt like the last tinge of day dissolving into the horizon, with corporeal beauty. “I love you, I like you.”
James bucks back adverse to him, sighing it back. Kendall didn’t consider he was worthy of those accents any longer.
He sinks into James and splays his power across his heart, the erratic knock-thump-thump beneath his fingertips a steadying security. James tilts his head toward him, his visage shaded with a bewildered smile and threads of shade and moonlight.
“Why’d you terminate?”
As honestly as he be possible to, Kendall replies, “I thought I misspent you.”
James stares him below the horizon. Quietly, he says, “That devise never happen.”
Kendall’s not ever known such relief. He moves stupid, with purpose, memorizing every twitch and quake, because this is new and guileless. Their hands lace together, and.
James is bleeding red, his heart an open hurt that Kendall can’t stop probing at, digging in and squeezing each last ounce of love and shrink from and whatever else James has left to accord. since the Games beat the shit finished of him. He is rusted extremely, orange and brown and creaky from the non-employment of his smile, but still edged with perfection. He’s sweet like fulvid lemonade, too-sugared and the most expedient. see the various meanings of good thing Kendall’s ever tasted up~ a hot summer day. And he’s hazel flecked eyes that reflect back the fresh green storm tossed sea, a violent gale ready to plunder and remake everything in its ~way.
James is broken apart, but James is likewise this: the sun and the cover and the sea on a lazy spring day, when they all mix into each other in one lengthy stretch of blue. He’s the gloom of veins, running beneath skin – something that Kendall cannot live without.
Not at fifteen, or sixteen, nineteen or twenty, not at thirty or forty, or fifty five. Kendall will live his entire life lost to James Diamond, asphyxiating put ~ his love for this boy, and that’s the scariest part he’s ever had to stand opposite to – worse than death, worse than kindred. Worse than looking in the mirror and knowing he’s a killer.
Love’s fucking horrible, and somehow it’s also okay.
So Kendall lets spirit, melting across the span of James’s back as he comes in long, shuddering strokes and abrupt, thunderous spasms, flooding his best loved’s insides at the same severe moment as James spills wantonly c~ing the kitchen counter, hotbeautifuladored and sobbing Kendall’s specify.
This is a conclusion as well of the same kind with a beginning; the two of them in the same place, breathing, panting. At any age, loving and hating and screaming and in relation to and tied, interlaced, indestructible as a total in ways they’ll never exist apart. It’s how they are predestined to be:
Victors and killers and lovers and losers and paired, side by side forever, at the end of the creation.
—
Small cats get pleasure from perform on fighting with other cats and winning in the same with their masters.