Chapter Text
The words personal space have never existed in a sentence with Caelus unless to complain about the complete lack thereof.
It’s not that Dan Heng has ever minded, truthfully, though you couldn’t get him to confess this under threat of death. The Astral Express is family the way all found and dysfunctional conglomerates of people are, but there have been times where the quiet between them stretched too much, where they each took too little space.
Caelus has breathed life into those spaces with the grace of a feral raccoon skittering away as it steals something it knows it shouldn’t. Violently, at times painfully, with all the subtlety and candour of a supernova.
It started small, as all forays into uncharted waters do. Peeking over shoulders became resting his head on them while he looked. That became draping himself across backs for no reason other than comfort.
He didn’t get it at first. None of them did.
But the first time he heard March screech when Caelus blew in her ear and ran off as she gave chase—well. It made a little more sense, then, why Caelus had become a pest the moment he joined the Nameless.
It became a source of comfort for Dan Heng, after that.
Matter of fact, he started looking forward to the days where Caelus’ target was Dan Heng. It started becoming his favourite part of the day, when Dan Heng would be standing at the Data Bank adjusting some logs and see Caelus walk by the open door with a nonchalant air. When he would pass, Dan Heng would start counting the seconds until he passed again, a slower trajectory as his satellite fell into Dan Heng’s orbit.
He would count how many passes it would take before Caelus would slip in—unnoticed, or so he thought—and press his chin against Dan Heng’s shoulder to look over it curiously.
It became a game of sorts. Which of them might break first, might admit to the strange cadence and ask what it might mean when Dan Heng made room for him when Caelus performed this routine while Dan Heng was sitting elsewhere. What it might imply when Caelus sometimes fell asleep there.
It did not happen with Himeko, or March, or even Welt. Dan Heng does not know what it means that the host of what is the equivalent of space cancer would choose Dan Heng’s back as the most comforting perch to nap on, emitting a comfortably—if slightly warmer than your average human—heat. That Dan Heng runs cold thanks to the Vidyadhara blood he's been born with only means that if Dan Heng basks in the heat, it's his persona secret.
But it becomes... different, after Amphoreus.
Maybe it’s simply the amalgamation of shared hardship that makes Dan Heng more receptive to small tokens of affection in ways his touch-starved skin has always craved (but that he has never fed). Maybe thousands of years can teach even him the beautiful finite of life, after dragging his feet through rivers of mud and desolate wastes. Inhospitable and lonely was a mercy the earth could not afford to grant Dan Heng during those decades and millennia spent in desperation, and he thinks he’s come out of it changed, but not so different as to be different. He wants to hope, selfishly, that when March and Caelus look up at him, they still see him, even if gold burns his veins and he has felt the infinite loneliness of grief.
Caelus has always been the bolder of them all, and he showcases this above the haunted look on his face when he is the first to tentatively reach up for Dan Heng’s horns. His hand hesitates where it might not have before, where it might have assumed welcome (he always was welcome, his skin and sinew sing, but Dan Heng never knew how to voice such desire without sounding as terrified as he felt of being known).
The feral raccoon of their merry band of misfits has grown afraid of himself worst of all, does not wish to take more than someone might be willing to give. It does not skitter across the polished floor of the Express with the raging sweep of a hurricane, does not jump so readily into garbage without first glancing for approval.
Can’t have that, Dan Heng thinks as he notices the tremble, the pause. Do not let the Memoria Tide change you so. Do not let it win this war after it has lost the fight. Do not let it linger in your bones.
He bends a knee so his head may lean down, pressing his own horn into that curled hand. It is nothing more than chitin and scale on his head, after all, thrumming with the energy of a planet’s core as it churns and hurls itself through space. It is not overtly sensitive when he touches it himself, nothing more than an extension of his blood.
But when a curious thumb brushes against its base, where it meets his skull, Dan Heng can’t help but smile and close his eyes, can’t help the pleased rumble that startles the Stellaron so.
—Dan Heng thinks it might be poetic, somewhere out there, that his soul carrying the weight of a planet has found comfort in a being carrying his planet’s death and destruction. What does it mean, to crave and seek what might kill you?
What does it mean, that he hopes Caelus might find that comfort in him, too?—
Amphoreus has brought a lot of changes to the Astral Express. But Dan Heng thinks that not all of them are indicative of pain and hardship.
(He hopes.)
He seeks out the comfort of nearby presences as of late, finding solace in his daily tasks being performed with another being within the general vicinity. Before, this was a luxury Dan Heng did not afford himself—a self-imposed isolation, Jing Yuan would call it if someone ever told him of Dan Heng’s propensity to lock himself in the Archives for days on end. March and Caelus would have to physically drag him from the room to ensure he ate.
But now he finds himself curling up in the Parlour Car, tablet perched on his knees or across a table, so he can update the Archives to the soothing rattle of the Silver Rail as they journey across the Universe. The Crew will walk by and often leave him be, offering a smile and nothing else. Sometimes March will drop a snack next to him, or a cup of tea, as she whisks by chasing her next whim. On occasion, Himeko will join him with a cup of coffee and quiet company.
But the best, he thinks privately to himself, is that Caelus becomes… attached.
It’s been a slow change after they returned, perhaps because the man might not have remembered his own welcome in Dan Heng’s personal space. That Dan Heng has always made room for the Stellaron even before everything went to shit, always found comfort in his presence even if he never verbally said anything about it.
In hindsight, Dan Heng probably should’ve. Maybe he could’ve avoided the situation, per se. And yet, something, something, hindsight.
Anyway.
It takes time, a few days, before Caelus first presses his chin against Dan Heng’s shoulder when he finds Dan Heng’s haunt has shifted away from the Databank. Maybe the break in the code that was their little game meant Caelus needed a tooltip, or some sort of update notification—a guidebook, perhaps? Whatever it is, when Dan Heng first feels that warmth, it soothes a lodged ache in his bones he hadn’t been aware he’d been carrying since he’d let go of Caelus after pulling him from the Memoria Tide.
(He still thinks about that hug. How it felt to have the—now smaller—man press his heart against Dan Heng’s, breathing in the scent of stardust—
Dan Heng knows stars don’t have a smell. Hydrogen and helium are scentless, but they burn with light as a byproduct as they slowly destroy their core elements; and light has warmth and in the ephemeral sense he knows in his bones the way a warm summer day smells when the light hits the chlorophyll of a tree’s leaf, how a riverbed carries the infinite of moss and the memory of thousands of years of earth churned and shaped by the power of the tides. Light is clouds and wind, air a bird’s flight and wet stone and song. It is a graveyard and a nursery, his shelter and his final resting place.
—and feeling as though he wasn’t holding Caelus so much as he had finally found the broken and fractured piece of his heart he’d been searching for.)
Caelus presses his chin into the soft flesh of his shoulder, where his neck softens the bone beneath, and that familiar warmth suffuses his soul and home comes with the scent of stardust, and it takes everything in him—thousands of years of discipline—not to cry.
But when Dan Heng simply smiles and makes room—always making room, always making sure Caelus knows he is welcome in the infinite spaces of Dan Heng’s orbit—Caelus remembers himself and the unapologetic trash panda he truly is, even if for a moment.
The game changes, then, but stays the same. Grows, the way they all have.
The next day, it takes perhaps an hour before Dan Heng feels a weight climb over the backrest of the couch and slide between Dan Heng’s back and the couch, coming to a comfortable stop just atop the dragon’s tail. He’s had to change the way he sits to accommodate the physical appendage, a fact that Caelus has picked up on if his pleased hum—vibrating gently at Dan Heng’s back when he sits—is anything to go by.
Careful arms wrap around his chest as a chin drops to his shoulder, knees resting loosely over Dan Heng’s thighs. A strong, familiar heartbeat pounds against his back—faster than before, skittering like a leaf across a street in the dark. Dan Heng pauses only momentarily, adjusting his tail’s curl so that Caelus has a little more room to sit comfortably.
When he continues his work, he feels the man’s posture relax. A warm exhale against his ear; it twitches in response, a quiet flick, that earns a tired chuckle from the man draped over his back.
Within minutes, the heartbeat slows as Caelus quietly falls asleep. Dan Heng places his left hand against Caelus’ hands on his chest to hold them against his own heart—he doesn’t want them to fall into his lap—and brushes his thumb against bare skin to feel its warmth against the pad of his thumb.
(He stopped wearing his gauntlets and gloves on the Express for this reason about a week ago, hoping. Collecting passing touches of his companions in the groves of his fingerprints, in the valleys of his palms, to assuage the craving for warmth and skinship Dan Heng could not make himself ask for. Hoarding them like precious treasure to press to his heart at night and remind himself that he is not alone anymore.)
March passes by, carrying a tray and humming to herself. She does a double-take and skips backwards, blinking at them. He glances up at her.
Softly, with a smile on his lips, he lifts his free hand and presses a finger against them. She tilts her head, opal eyes observing the curious—almost intimate—scene before her; the way Dan Heng’s ears are tinged pink and his teal-silver eyes are wet and shining, a smile he can’t quite bite back haunting the corners of his lips. As though he, too, needs to heal but does not know how to ask for it without feeling like he’s asking too much.
The tip of his tail, draped over the edge of the couch by his own ankle, sways gently. It makes her think of a cat, pleased as it rests in the comfort of the human it trusts most.
She smiles at him, quietly puts her tray down and bends her thumb and index fingers, brings the signed frame to the level of her eye, and gestures with her index as though taking a picture. Her eyebrow arches.
Dan Heng pauses, glancing at Caelus’ head lolling against the side of his own. There’s a damp patch against the side of his neck where the collar of Dan Heng’s shirt presses, surmising the man might be drooling. His heart thumps once in his chest at the thought.
What he wouldn’t have given to have a picture of Caelus, for those millennia he spent searching.
He glances back at March and nods minutely. Her answering smile might blind him a little, but he thinks going blind might be a beautiful byproduct of joy.
He does not look up from the tablet on the table as she takes her camera from her hip and aligns the shot, her smile visible from behind the familiar blue object. It clicks, and while it prints, she forms a flat circle with her hand and brings it from her chest in his direction.
Another small nod.
When it develops, she hands him the Polaroid. It’s worth the embarrassment he feels when he sees it, if only because Dan Heng’s heart clenches tighter and his smile escapes the prison he’d caged it in. March watches those tears escape, just a little, and she gently touches the side of his head and alights a kiss on the crown, between his horns.
She wordlessly leaves, only coming back to deposit a cup of tea and some snacks for Caelus when he wakes, and leaves them to it. She notices the photo tucked beneath the tablet and smiles.
Dan Heng wouldn’t be able to pinpoint the moment he fell in love with Caelus. There are nights he’s spent thinking about it, when he stares up at the ceiling of the Databank and watches the lights play against the polished metal of the Astral Express.
Love wasn’t a feeling he thought about much before Amphoreus. It was something too painful to wonder, in the millennia he wandered the Memoria Tide; all he had at the time were his memories he kept from decaying with a will forged from iron, from the memory of Dan Feng looking at him and wishing him success where he himself failed so long ago.
But a part of him knew the devotion with which he searched was founded on love, on a heart he had softly handed to Caelus without permission. That it happened without his knowledge was a small thing, inconsequential—if it didn’t belong to him anymore, that was fine. The pain and heartbreak that came with grief was secondary, a burden he would carry gladly as long as it meant he might find his heart’s light somewhere down the line.
After Amphoreus, he’s had time to think about it. About what it means to sacrifice millennia on a wish, where maybe I’ll find him somewhere within the Memoria Tide, in a place no one ever surfaces. About the way his heart clenches when Caelus smiles at him, when their orbits align even if only for a few moments. The private shelter Dan Heng builds with every soft brush of skin, the way he only remembered the nostalgia of stardust when he held Caelus and couldn’t make himself let go, once he’d finally found him.
Moreover, love is not innately something Vidyadhara care about. If it happens to his people, it’s a blessing; but being long-lived means they all know they’re doomed to outlive their love, and who would want to seek out love when it means living with a broken heart?
(Dan Heng did it. For thousands of years.)
The poets among them have written treatises about it, and Dan Heng reads them sometimes, has a volume dog-eared under his pillow where the artist has depicted a Vidyadhara aligned with their dragon ancestry curled around the beautiful form of a falling star.
As earth shifts / as waters recede / as frost thaws upon glacial cliffs / as bamboo withers in verdant spring / and the heavens fall to earth / only then will love know death.[1]
(It is the only reason why he understands what this feeling is.)
Dan Heng did not care for love, not the way Dan Feng had felt it. He’d had his past life’s example as a warning of what love did to a man, after all, so why would he wish to doom himself to its fallacy anew? Wasn’t part of reincarnation learning from your past mistakes?
(For what else could cause such agony, ‘lest it be a broken heart?)
But Dan Heng hadn’t learned from his past. He’d run, selfishly, until faced with what it means to let go in order to face the possibility of the future. Letting go didn’t seem so hard when compared to the pilgrimage of his future, when the future was Caelus and stardust and warmth. It was all the things Dan Heng had, until then, ignored—had claimed he didn’t need until something as callous as Aeons had torn it from his desperate hands.
You do not know what it is you have until it is gone, one of their poets said. Dan Heng thought he’d understood what they’d meant, but he hadn’t, had he? In his ego, with this pride, he’d claimed himself above worldly things. What would you do to get it back?
Anything, apparently.
Everything.
So, the thing is, Dan Heng doesn’t know when it happened, doesn’t remember the night his affection for Caelus was platonic and the morning he woke up and it had metamorphosised into love. Moreover, he doesn’t really know what to do with it.
If he allows liberties with Caelus that others might not observe, he supposes that’s fine. He knows Vidyadhara fall in love only once, quietly, but with the inevitability of a surging tide. It sweeps them away, claims their souls, their lives.
It is not predestined. It is not ordained.
But it is inevitable, when it happens.
He thinks his heart could be in worse hands than the object made for Universal annihilation.
He tucks the picture March took of them into the book under his pillow, looks at it on nights he finds himself awake without recourse.
It can be a beautiful thing, he thinks, to be in love. It doesn’t have to be grief that spans millennia. It can be simple.
(That he will one day be left with grief anew is a thought he only entertains on those long nights where the lights of the Databank pale to that of stardust trapped in the folds of a grey coat, but that remains woefully out of reach.)
It’s a relief that Dan Heng holds to his chest when Caelus steps up their game, so to speak.
It happens tentatively, beautifully. Dan Heng is helpless but to let it happen, unaware of the rules of this game but wanting to play anyway, loving the thrill of being alive it suffuses in his heart. The warmth that lingers when he is reminded, every time, that Caelus is safe and alive and within reach, if ever Dan Heng was brave enough for that.
(He will be one day, he vows. But not today.)
Caelus is a playful creature, maybe because he has no memories of himself or maybe the pain of containing a Stellaron makes him brave. He starts moving things.
It’s small at first, so small Dan Heng assumes he simply misplaced his own things in the Archive.
His futon is unmade one morning after he returns from a bath, as though a dromas rolled in it; he thinks he was too tired to neaten it before leaving and remakes it.
His pile of books splits into multiple piles.
They get stacked into the vague shape of PomPom.
His favourite mug is moved from its usual shelf in the kitchen.
When his shirt goes missing and is strangely replaced by another he only recognises by the smell, Dan Heng realises the game Caelus is playing. He stands in the Archive at the ungodly hour between dusk and dawn—he doesn’t even know how Caelus knew Dan Heng had stepped out to the Parlour Car in his insomnia to watch the stars, or when Caelus had learnt Dan Heng’s lock code—holding a familiar off-white shirt where Dan Heng knows he’d left his black sleep shirt.
It smells like stardust. Like light and warmth.
He falls asleep holding it against his heart.
It should blindside him, the next day, when Caelus skips through the Parlour Car with March hot on his heels. The man is laughing as she tries to grab his coattail, artfully dodging around her by vaulting over the table Dan Heng is using and clambering over the couch.
Static fills his ears as he recognises the black shirt Caelus is wearing. March’s screeching becomes irrelevant as a familiar hand uses Dan Heng’s shoulder for leverage as he scampers away. He doesn’t even know what March is chasing him for except that as he turns to follow Caelus’ trajectory the man’s chest brushes near his nose and stardust explodes behind his eyes and Dan Heng has to swallow so he doesn’t whine.
Caelus flashes him a grin and a wink, disappearing in a flurry of grey up the stairs before Dan Heng’s brain has rewired itself.
It’s almost too quiet after he leaves, when March disappears after him. His heart pounds in his ears and he thinks maybe he should cry? Is that weird?
“Dan Heng?” He startles at his name, turning at the call. He’d forgotten Himeko was sitting on the couch across from him, quietly enjoying her coffee while reading a book; somehow, he feels as though she caught him doing something he shouldn’t have been.
Her expression tells him it wasn’t the first time she called his name. His ears grow hot as she smiles, arcing a red eyebrow and pointing at the table.
“You spilled your tea on your lap.”
He drops his forehead to the table and prays he might get ejected into space.
When his shirt mysteriously shows up in his bedroom two nights later, he finds another white one folded carefully underneath it, as though trying to hide. He wonders then, as he touches the off-white cotton curiously, if maybe Caelus also sometimes doesn’t know how to make the thoughts quiet long enough to get some sleep. He wonders if Caelus knows the calm that fills Dan Heng when he lets himself indulge in the memory of stardust against his senses.
(How did he know, Dan Heng wonders, that the shirt Caelus had left two nights ago had released the last whispers of stardust it had contained?)
The one that had been previously left behind is gone from where Dan Heng had tucked it under his pillow. He colours at the thought that someone (Caelus) saw it there, flushes scarlet when he realises the book (picture) is there, too.
Please don’t let him have seen that, he thinks, mortified. The picture is slipped into the pages and concealed particularly carefully, he thinks, on an unassuming page somewhere random—
Page 234: for what is light if not the definition of life, the beginning of all things? There are no correlations to be made between love and life and light, and yet poetry thrives in the beauty that comes with conjecture, with wanting things to be born of each other for the simply pleasure of believing anything is possible if one were to try. And love is the purest, most beautiful emotion of them all; we may not be free to decide when to give it and to whom, but we can nurture its light into a garden.
—and he hopes that maybe Caelus’ curiosity didn’t get the best of him. Carefully he pulls the well-thumbed book from its hiding place, kneels against cold metal as he flips through it until he finds the Polaroid nestled right beneath the phrase stars are an endless cycle upon which astronomers spend lifetimes in adoration (it has been underlined with a thin brush stroke one sleepless night two weeks ago). Only then does Dan Heng sigh in relief.
He gently places it back, looking over at the two shirts still sitting on his futon.
Does he, too, find comfort in the simple act of holding a familiar scent close in sleep?
It’s that thought that finds him hovering just outside Caelus’ open bedroom door, heart in his throat. He doesn’t know why his feet thought to bring him here, in the idle hours where sleep eludes him so readily; but he peers around it all the same.
He finds Caelus slumped over at his computer, the defeat screen lighting up the angles of his visage. The man’s curled around himself in an uncomfortable approximation of sleep.
Under his head is a shirt Dan Heng hadn’t realised Caelus had even taken; an old gift from Caelus himself when they went to Penacony. He hasn’t worn it in a while since it doesn’t fit his physique that got changed with the Earth Coreflame, but when he quietly approaches—using a gentle burst of Cloudhymn magic to float so his slippers don’t make noise—he finds Caelus holding it gently, nose pressed against it anyway.
The light of the screen illuminates the tacky, damning remains of tears drying against Caelus’ cheek.
The heart in his throat lodges itself somewhere in his gut.
He thinks he wants to become a part of Caelus, somehow, as Caelus mutters in his sleep and buries his face against the repeated pattern of Clockie. It might be soothing to be his tenth rib.
As gently as possible, Dan Heng picks him up. He tries to ignore the way it feels when Caelus’ head lolls against his shoulder—a brief memory tries to tarnish the tender moment, smelling of the crash of the Astral Express and death as Caelus’ body releases a spirit Dan Heng does not know how to tether to his own ribcage, but he shoves it away with force—and breathes around his own heart. It jackknifes against his lungs, wants to meld into foreign flesh.
Would Caelus’ body have his memories, he wonders as he carries Caelus over to his bed and lays him down; would his body remember the love that stitched the fractured pieces of Dan Heng’s grief back together so he could call it love once again?
(They say donated organs and tissue retain core memories of where they’re from. He wonders if, in the Universe where Dan Heng’s heart or marrow fuses with Caelus’, it might carry the deep-seeded affection lodged in a dragon’s throat. He hopes it teaches that version of Caelus that he was loved so ardently that Dan Heng did not hesitate to save his life.)
His hands shake as he takes the blanket he’d brought from his room and places it over Caelus’ sleeping form. Tries not to cry when the man sighs in his sleep and murmurs something Dan Heng warns himself not to hear as his name as his hands gather the material and holds it close to his mouth, turning to his side.
He tells himself he’ll only stay a moment, sitting on the edge of the bed. That he wants to make sure Caelus is comfortable as he brushes grey hair from his sleeping face.
Love, he thinks, makes fools.
He leaves before he can do something stupid, taking a moment to close the computer monitors and bathing the room in the soft light of the stars beyond the window. He hopes he didn’t just do something monumentally ridiculous, that he didn’t misread this game, as he closes the door and hunches his shoulders against the chill of the night and hurries back to his own room.
Prays that Caelus won’t think it weird when he wakes up under Dan Heng’s blanket, with the man’s most often worn (including as of this evening) sleep shirt carefully placed in his hands instead of the one Dan Heng hasn’t worn in weeks (millennia).
He falls asleep in quiet anxiety that is only appeased by the one Caelus left him.
The next morning, he tries not to tense when Caelus walks into the Parlour Car with a yawn, scratching his stomach and looking very much like he only slept three hours. He tries not to stare as he completely bypasses everyone and faceplants on the couch beside Dan Heng, burying his face in the dragon’s lap and promptly passing out again.
Dan Heng squeaks—honest to Aeons squeaks, to March’s utter delight—and holds his hands well above the man’s form. He dares not breathe, feels the hot flush burn from his ears to his neck as Caelus buries his nose in Dan Heng’s hip and goes lax with sleep.
March’s loud laugh is not appreciated, nor is the picture she promptly takes of them. He glares at her, but she winks and skips away before he can even think to throw something at her.
Left with no other option, Dan Heng forces himself to ignore Welt and Himeko’s curious—and amused—overly polite feigned privacy. They do their best to pretend they’re not staring as Dan Heng’s trembling hands fall to Caelus’ shoulder and hair, gently brushing through the strands of feathery grey while negotiating around his fragile heart.
He’s even wearing the shirt Dan Heng brought him, he realises. He only knows it’s the one because of the hole he’s patched up three times at the back of the collar.
Oh, he thinks.
He tries not to cry as he ignores his tea and his work and simply looks down at the man on his lap, tail curling protectively around Caelus’ sleeping form.
March leaves a copy of the Polaroid on his pillow. He thinks he should change the code to the lock of the Archives.
He leaves the code alone.
He finds himself at the mercy of Caelus’ whims more frequently.
The man will slide up to him in the Databank and slip between the panel Dan Heng is working on and the dragon himself, forcing Dan Heng to step back to retain some propriety—last thing he wants is someone to see Caelus pinned like that with the door open (though his mind has lots to think about that later). Caelus will grin and sit on the keyboard, swing his legs, and start talking about anything that comes to mind.
(Sitting up on the console like that, Caelus is finally taller.
Dan Heng has a lot of thoughts about that.)
Sometimes, he finds Caelus curled up napping on his futon. He says nothing in those moments, usually going to work at the console or, on more timid occasions, he’ll sit next to him and read a book quietly, tucking him beneath a blanket and his tail. He always leaves before Caelus wakes back up, too shy of his own emotions to witness Caelus wake up.
Caelus swaps most of their sleep shirts regularly. Dan Heng still has no idea how he’s doing it so swiftly.
The blanket Dan Heng brought him is returned a week later, filling the Archive with the smell of stardust so intense Dan Heng’s knees go weak, and he needs to lean on the wall for support. He only realises it replaces the one on his futon when he collects himself, realises Caelus swapped them. His thieving hands know no bounds.
(Dan Heng feels the curl in his gut at the thought that Caelus hoards Dan Heng’s scent the same way Dan Heng presses his into his soul, this strange dance between them where they both know what the other is doing but don't understand how to speak it aloud.
He refuses to indulge the heat that curls when he wonders if it’s comfort Caelus finds it, or if it’s something else, far more primal but no less ancient.)
It comes back two days later, swapped again. Stardust and light and warmth.
(He locks the door that night, bites his pillow as he shamefully ruts against the blanket, face burning in mortification. His release is quick and violent, desperately crying into his pillow three fingers deep into himself and begging for another man.)
He doesn’t quite look Caelus in the eye the next day, worried the man might know.
(He’s only human.)
But Caelus brushes past him halfway through the day and slips something into his pocket, a whisper of something against the shell of Dan Heng’s ear that the dragon tries not to think was his lips. Stars and oil brush against his nose, his senses, the first comforting and the second confusing.
Instead of chasing him the way his hand itches to, he absconds to the Archive and opens the little box to find a small clay charm that looks like a raccoon. It’s wearing Caelus’ coat and lies curled around a white, teal, and gold dragon, sleeping peacefully.
The paint is a little rough, but it’s the source of the oily scent from before, he realises. His hands shake as he holds it up, notices that they’re connected by a magnet when the two figures separate between his fingers.
He slides to the ground and holds them to his chest and sobs, tail thumping wildly next to him as he curls around the simple gift and lets himself feel.
(It’s been a long time since he’s felt this whole. He meets Caelus’ eyes later, and the man smiles.)
That night, Dan Heng wakes partway through—not because of sleeplessness or nightmares for once. He becomes aware of a gentle warmth against his back, soft breath against his neck. Bright stardust around him.
There is an arm over Dan Heng’s waist, a leg curled over his hip. It’s over the blanket, but he could never mistake the sense of comfort that fills him so completely. He is very careful as he turns around so he doesn’t jostle the other man—don’t ask how he got his tail to cooperate in the manoeuvre—and feels his hands shake as he looks at him from an angle he didn’t dare think of even in his sleep.
All he can do is reach an arm around Caelus’ back, pulling him into his chest, and breathe around the heart in his throat as he buries his face into Caelus’ hair and cries himself to sleep.
(He’s gone by the time Dan Heng wakes, but he thinks he felt a gentle brush against his cheek sometime before then.)
It’s not a frequent thing, per se, for Caelus to crawl into Dan Heng’s futon after that.
But it happens often enough that Dan Heng realises separation is not a pain felt in solitude, but in pairs. That Caelus finds some sort of comfort in his presence, too.
After the third time, Dan Heng drapes the blanket over them both.
After the eighth, he leaves the door open at night in quiet invitation.
After the tenth, he figures out when to wake up so he can dress in Caelus’ shirt and leave, placing his own under Caelus’ jacket as a quiet invitation.
The eleventh, he lets himself kiss Caelus’ forehead as he leaves before he wakes.
The twelfth, he leaves one of his scales from his tail over his coat, strung on a thin silver chain fabricated from another one. He sees the chain shine softly from under Caelus’ (Dan Heng’s) shirt later that day when he passes by, cheeks a ruddy red and flustered when Dan Heng meets his gaze.
With every morning, Caelus’ actions ask an unspoken question. And Dan Heng thinks he answers a little more, each day.
He thinks it’s March’s fault.
One morning, Dan Heng is quite peacefully working on the Databank when Caelus slides himself into—what Dan Heng suspects—is Caelus’ current favourite perch. The fact that this perch happens to be between Dan Heng’s back and the couch is a coincidence, surely.
It draws his breath short momentarily as the Stellaron drapes himself over Dan Heng’s back so nonchalantly, curling his arms and legs around Dan Heng as though he belongs there. His chin settles comfortably against his shoulder as the curious man looks at the tablet Dan Heng was typing on, hair feathering against Dan Heng’s cheek as he leans his head against the dragon’s own.
A stray wisp of hair tickles his ear; it twitches.
“What’re you doing?” Caelus huffs, because of course his boredom is Dan Heng’s problem. Laughing under his breath—in part to loosen his tense posture at the proximity—Dan Heng sighs, scrolling down the page he was analysing.
He has to work doubly hard to make sure Caelus can’t tell Dan Heng is no longer taking in a lick of information. Love is a dangerous weapon to hand another soul, after all, and it makes Dan Heng’s perception zero in on the warmth at his back that tastes of light when he breathes, the stardust that blinds him whenever he blinks.
Don’t think about the fact that he’s sitting on your tail, he chides himself, failing spectacularly. He ignores the point of pressure and heat he feels at the base of his tail where Caelus’ hips are.
“Updating the Databank,” he says instead, grateful that at least he sounds normal. If a bit breathless. He selects a passage to appear busy. “Many things happened in Amphoreus that need to be documented.”
The quiet hum tells Dan Heng all he needs to know about Caelus’ daily plans. He quietly sends out a prayer for patience.
(He’d ask for strength, but if the Aeons would bless him with strength, he thinks he might bodily slam Caelus into the table and swallow the stars.)
Pinned, Dan Heng tries to work. It’s a difficult task when Caelus’ hand idly travels fingers along his arm and chest as he grows bored, never able to sit still on any good day; how Dan Heng doesn’t gasp at any point is beyond him, since those clever fingers seem apt to find all the sensitive spots that make his skin twitch beneath his clothes.
The clothing does little to make him feel less exposed. Caelus might as well be playing with the sinew holding his bones together.
Whenever he shudders, when he breathes a little deeper, the fingers always pause a moment. They wait for Dan Heng to swallow and say nothing, and only then do they pass around the location and move on.
It feels like being known. Like he’s being played with.
Aeons, but he wants this man to know him.
“That doesn’t seem comfortable,” Dan Heng muses after a while, because if he doesn’t speak he’s going to do something stupid like moan and then Himeko is going to laugh across the room and he’s going to have to lock himself in the Shackling Prison. And he’s already suffered everyone’s amusement enough for the last hour if March's snickering is any indication, thank you.
“Nuh uh! Your back is super comfy!” Caelus doth protest. As if attesting to that, he wiggles in place to settle—and yep, yeah, that’s Caelus’ dick against the base of his tail, alright!
His ears grow hot.
“You could find someone else to bother,” Dan Heng says. It’s a little too breathy for his tastes and he cringes, feels his tail thump against the ground in an attempt to shake off the embarrassment. Somewhere in the Parlour Car, Welt coughs to conceal what surely was a laugh.
“Nah.” Caelus tightens his hold minutely, one hand sliding under the panel of his half-robe and rests over his chest. Dan Heng bites his tongue so he doesn’t audibly inhale, tail going still next to them. “You looked like you wanted to be bothered.”
Caelus turns his head and smirks, presses that damning expression against the fabric of Dan Heng’s collar, and Dan Heng has never wished to be anywhere else so terribly in his life before—including his time in the Shackling Prison and the Memoria Tide—because his own cock gives a painful kick in his pants and he shudders, wishes his collar didn’t ride up so much so that he might feel Caelus’ lips against his neck.
If they were in any other room, away from prying eyes, he thinks he might’ve whimpered.
“Oh?” He clears his throat, realises he’s been staring into space too obviously for too long. When did he almost close his eyes?
He fights to blink the haze from his expression, inhales around the shudder in his lungs as he licks his lips and tastes stardust.
“And what expression is that?” He’s vaguely aware of March loitering near Sunday by the steps, but he can’t muster the ability to glare her way as Caelus’ breath warms his shirt and his hand squeezes just a little on his chest. “S-so I know not to make it anymore.”
Caelus snorts. His finger draws a lazy circle around the approximate location of his nipple.
“Wouldn’t you like to know.”
Yes, he wants to scream as March laughs at whatever Sunday whispers behind his hand. Instead, he glares at the tablet in quiet mortification as Caelus slowly peels himself off, inch by excruciating inch, a drag of teeth on Dan Heng’s neck before he bounces up and away, whistling as he goes.
He waits long enough for the obvious tent in his pants to go down, and then wordlessly leaves the room.
He barely gets the Archive’s door closed and locked before Dan Heng strips himself in desperation as he stumbles to his futon, bunches up the newest blanket Caelus left behind, and ruts against it like an animal in heat. He feels wild, stuffing his pillow in his mouth to gag himself as he shoves his fingers into himself with no finesse and a little bit of pain.
He'd been good about this before. He’d tried to keep himself from thinking of his closest companion like this, even on the loneliest nights in the Memoria Tide when he grieved so terribly, he ached for the memory of affection, even if only its ghost. And he’d been successful.
But now he thinks of the way Caelus’ cock felt against his back and wonders what Caelus might do if ever he’d see how desperately he drives Dan Heng, the madness that overtakes him in the moments he allows it. How it might feel to have it rub against the cleft of his ass, if Caelus would grant him mercy and fuck him as though Caelus needs it to breathe, too. Would he drive him merciless, take and take and let Dan Heng give and give and give?
Or would he draw it slowly, this all-consuming fire, this inferno? Would he let it incinerate them both, or would only Dan Heng be left in the ashes?
He sobs into the pillow. The waft of stardust makes him shudder and he shuts his eyes, tries not to think about how he so desperately wishes to be known.
I love you, he thinks as his fingers can’t quite brush his prostate. His tail thrashes as his cocks rubs against the wet pool he’s created with his own pre-cum in the fabric, pleasure shooting up his spine as shame rattles down his bones. But he can’t stop, a prisoner of his own pride.
The ghost of Caelus’ breath on his neck, the wetness that lingered on his clothes—his hand cupping his chest, feeling it, feeling his heart pound against it as the man simply grinned as if he’d caught his prize—
Dan Heng comes so suddenly he chokes on his breath, feels the sensation of it make his orgasm kick his gut violently. His spine tingles where he imagines the ghost of nails, the flash of teeth, where he wants the draw of blood against his neck. His nameless gasp becomes a sob as he rolls over onto his back and takes his cocks in one hand and jerks them furiously, blindly grabbing for the shirt Caelus left that morning and stuffing it in his mouth before throwing an arm over his eyes.
His chest heaves around a sob. The memory of warmth and kindness ruins him for anyone else, the taste of light the first thing he ever experienced when he was born and the last thing he wishes to know, at the end of the Universe.
He twists his wrist at the heads and moans around the fabric in his mouth. It comes out sounding like Caelus’ name.
He comes in ropes across his own chest and abdomen, shame colouring his face as he presses his unstained hand to his eyes and sobs.
Love can drive men to madness, page 362 warns. They did not warn him.
They did not warn him.
Caelus doesn’t slip under the covers that night.
He’s unsure if it’s a mercy or not that the Archive doesn’t smell like stardust.
The first time Caelus kisses him, it is completely by surprise.
It happens, like many things that involve Caelus, simply because Caelus has the aptitude of seeing how far he can push things and Dan Heng has the misfortune of being his favourite target.
Really, Dan Heng probably should’ve seen it coming, after that stunt he pulled in the Parlour Car.
He hasn’t tried something so bold since and it’s been a few days, which should’ve been Dan Heng’s first warning that Caelus might be trying to pull together the raccoons he calls braincells in his head together long enough to formulate a plan. The Stellaron hasn’t necessarily given Dan Heng space since then, not in so many words, but he’s kept his antics pointed at the others.
His interactions with Caelus have remained almost… chaste. Shy. It would worry Dan Heng if it didn’t make him want to fall on his knees and beg for any sort of acknowledgement, anything, to put to rest the longing and the yearning that boils in his chest. The affection he’s been burning alive in for months (millennia).
In the evening, Caelus will curl up with him on his futon. In the morning, he will take one of Dan Heng’s shirts and disappear wherever his whims take him.
The Stellaron has simply pet his horns while watching Dan Heng work—ignoring that Dan Heng stops working whenever he does—or untied and braided his hair while Dan Heng stands at the Databank and pretends to be typing. Caelus has started wearing the scale above his shirt, touching it surreptitiously while staring at the stars outside; Dan Heng caught him once, and quietly paused next to him and placed a hand on the back of his neck.
It had startled Caelus, but Dan Heng simply guided his head to rest against his chest, to offer comfort. And Caelus had said nothing, had simply placed warm hands onto Dan Heng’s waist and let himself be comforted.
(He knows too well what that distant, forlorn look means.)
But this nameless thing between them, this game… really, if Dan Heng thinks about it, it’s his own fault.
The Express has been travelling through a star system that’s particularly warm, a binary red giant system that’s on the verge of fusing into one red supergiant; and the resulting radiation in the star system means the Express’ cooling system is not prepared to filter the air and heat safely. To prioritise their safety, they diverge the majority of the Train’s power to the air filtration.
Which is well and good, since all Dan Heng needs to feel better is wear his shirt and pants, foregoing the half-robe and waist belt. Being cold-blooded means adaptability, and he’s never been grateful for it the way he is now.
However, it’s come with… other problems.
He’s known that his sense of smell has been stronger since taking the Coreflame of Earth, since his Vidyadhara blood has remembered the power of dragons and manifested in physical form for the first time since his reincarnation. Where something (Caelus) might be scentless to others (like March—he asked her, once, and she laughed so hard he thought she was going to have a stroke) Dan Heng can pick the nuances, can sometimes taste it when it’s strong enough.
So. The problem.
His problem, specifically. It’s Caelus-shaped, as most things in his life are now.
It’s one thing to have watched Caelus parade himself around the Express in Dan Heng’s shirt under his coat. It made the whole thing less obvious, somehow, to see the proof of Dan Heng’s quiet claim obscured somewhat even though he knew everyone knew.
(March has been very nice and has called him a pathetic wet lizard every day.)
But it’s another for Caelus to walk around in Dan Heng’s shirt he’s rolled the sleeves of to his shoulders, sometimes rolling the hem and tying it under his ribs when it’s a little too stifling. He still doesn’t smell like anything despite complaining of the heat and the sweat, not to March; but she leers at Dan Heng when Caelus’ back is turned as though she knows what Dan Heng is thinking.
Because stardust stops smelling like light and riverbeds and starts smelling like grass pressed under his hand to keep a secret, like skin and heat and Dan Heng spends a long time holding his head in the bathroom trying to breathe and not sob.
At night Caelus will lie curled around Dan Heng’s back as though sweat doesn’t live between the slick spaces of their bodies, and Dan Heng doesn’t know what sin he committed to be condemned to this slow and insidious death, but—well. Well.
Well.
They’re halfway through the star system when Caelus’ Antics rear their head, despite their plight.
For the life of him, Dan Heng does not remember what he was doing. Something about cleaning the nook between the Dining Car and the Sleeping Quarters, he thinks. It would certainly explain the bucket of cleaning supplies his tail knocks over during the whole thing.
It begins when Caelus calls his name. Innocent enough, in theory, but this is Caelus.
He turns away from the table he was organising and looks up, watches his closest friend stumble over with a whine.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, tries to be normal even though they’ve both long-abandoned being normal with each other from the moment Amphoreus spat them back into the train.
Caelus looks dishevelled as though he most definitely rolled around in something—dirty laundry this time, if the whiff he’s getting is anything to go by—and his black shirt’s sticking to his skin in ways Dan Heng doesn’t think about for fear of creating an Incident. It’s big on Caelus in ways opposite of how it usually clings to Dan Heng, but even after months of this dance the sight of it on Caelus’ smaller frame has his breath draw short.
He's aware that Caelus answers, sees the syllables form on his lips. The grey-haired man shoves his face against Dan Heng’s chest and sighs, and Dan Heng’s thoughts fill with cotton.
It’s not necessarily because Caelus is warm, though he very much is. Dan Heng has enough self left—exactly two braincells, one of which zips south so fast it makes him light-headed—to catalogue both reasons:
First, Caelus doesn’t smell like dirty laundry. He smells like Dan Heng’s favourite tea and his usual shampoo and Dan Heng’s own scent, the subtle pheromones all Vidyadhara have that help them identify friend from foe. This, of course, means Caelus wasn’t rolling in dirty clothes. He was likely buried in Dan Heng’s sheets while wearing Dan Heng’s clothes.
The second, and this is arguably more important. Pivotal, even.
Caelus’ hands have pressed firmly against Dan Heng’s chest. At just the right position to not only fondle but lightly pinch both of his nipples.
Whether it was accidental or not is irrelevant. Dan Heng’s libido doesn’t care.
But because Dan Heng doesn’t want to take from Caelus, doesn’t want to impose on him and selfishly take the way the Memoria Tide took from him for millennia, he tries to bite his tongue so he doesn’t do something insane like moan or shove Caelus against the wall and fall to his knees so he can show Caelus how well Dan Heng follows orders. He wants Caelus to call him his, to praise him for being good so desperately it makes him look stupid.
Both would be insane. Monumentally stupid.
So his tail hits something as it whips up fast enough for him to clamp his jaw around the tip, where it’s not sensitive to things like sharp teeth and desire. He feels dizzy with how quickly his face burns scarlet, ears twitching and flattening against his head as he tries to breathe.
Caelus, oblivious to Dan Heng’s plight, sighs in relief as the dragon’s cool touch alights against his neck, a trembling hand anchoring itself there. The Stellaron nuzzles into his companion’s chest, settling between where it’s softest where Dan Heng’s heart bursts in staccato.
It takes Caelus’ finger slipping a little, pinching a little tighter, for Dan Heng to inevitably exhale a quiet moan around the tail in his mouth.
He feels Caelus pause. Mortification floods his core and bleeds outward—he’s been so good at keeping this to himself, this side that yearns for touch, allowing Caelus to give at his pace. He’d wait another millennium if it meant Caelus would eventually return his affection with the same vibrancy.
He trembles as Caelus opens an eye; Dan Heng looks away, feeling sweat roll down his cheek. Hands press against his chest as Caelus lifts his head to look.
Dan Heng doesn’t know what Caelus sees. He doesn’t have the spine to meet his eyes, only hears the quiet way Caelus inhales shakily.
Something sharp bleeds into stardust, a scent Dan Heng has smelled before but does not know the name of. Slowly, hands fall from his chest and Caelus takes a step away, and Dan Heng does not look at him.
Say something, Dan Heng wants to beg. But he’s only brave when it matters, for someone else; he’s never known how to do it for himself.
He stands there for time immeasurable, until Caelus quietly leaves with harried steps. He knows enough to know he absconds into March’s room and shuts the door.
Long after he’s left, Dan Heng stares at the stars.
It escalates rather quickly, after that. He once again thinks to blame (or thank?) March.
Dan Heng thinks himself capable of putting the incident out of his mind, after the coldest shower of his life and downing a full cup of Himeko’s coffee in penance. He goes about the rest of his morning and early afternoon with much more finesse, if less braincells, than he started with.
It comes to a head while he’s tending to the trees on the Express.
They’ve been a welcome balm during the journey through this infernal star cluster, their presence offering soothing shade and cool air Dan Heng himself has cultivated them for. When he learned that the Silver Rail was bringing them through such warm climes, he spent two days growing them from sapling to lush trees capable of bearing fruit, but most importantly he infused their leaves with enough magic to allow them to emit a cooling aura.
He cares for them diligently, feeding them a bit of magic every day alongside their water to retain that enchantment. He speaks to them sometimes, whispering lowly in a language borne by his bones alone through millennia, forgotten by all but the nature that birthed it. Sometimes he praises them. Sometimes he tells them about his troubles.
The earth is a great listener, he finds. It never judges.
He’s there now, hands aloft as he whispers to the hanging leaves of the willow; it whispers back in the way nature does, with kindness and patience, as he explains his heart. He hears it speak of the patience of mountains, a resolution that has sculpted the valley of his back through the ages.
Footsteps echo at the edge of the room; he ignores them and the whispering they bring. The branches softly glow as they partake of his magic, and he smiles gratefully as they whisper good fortune.
“Dan Heng?”
He blinks, pulling himself out of the space required to resonate with the earth. The tree becomes a tree anew, thrumming with life but no longer with speech, and it takes a moment for him to remember his soul and the shape that contains it.
When he does, he turns his head and finds Caelus.
He’s vaguely aware of March standing somewhere behind him, in the distance. Someone else, too—Sunday, perhaps? Smells vaguely like chicken and religious guilt—but they become paltry when Caelus, golden-eyed and grey-haired captor of a dragon’s heart, smiles up at him almost timidly. His attention needs not be pulled elsewhere.
Idly, echoing Dan Heng’s pleasure that simmers with a gentle flame in his chest at the sight of his heart’s light, his tail gently sways against the floor.
He smiles softly. Privately.
“What is it?” he asks. Regardless of his own heart, his own emotions, he would not deign to hold any of Caelus’ antics against him.
It is part of what has enamoured him to Caelus. You cannot cage an animal such as he without being gifted the key, after all, and Dan Heng has only ever wanted to belong to one man before, in a previous life, but it was never like this.
It never felt like this.
For Dan Feng, it was a carnal, infernal ache. But here? With Caelus?
Caelus makes a motion with his hand. Curious, Dan Heng leans down a little, expecting Caelus to want to touch his horns again.
Instead, he has exactly two seconds to watch colour dust Caelus’ cheeks as he turns his head, throws his arms around Dan Heng’s neck, and places a soft kiss to his lips.
There’s a bright squeal behind him as Dan Heng registers the softness of Caelus’ kiss, the warmth of his lips that precedes the stardust exploding in his mind. He can’t close his eyes for fear of waking from a dream, flooded by the scent of light and riverbeds and mountaintops. He thinks space might taste like moss and earth and deepest oceans, if it is anything like this.
He pulls himself away, takes a step back as a trembling hand rises to cover his mouth. The heat of a star’s core burns bright against his cheeks and ears, and Dan Heng opens his mouth but all that comes out is a faint yowl.
A flower flutters around him. He blinks, staring at Caelus smiling up at him with cheeks bright as sunrise; realises the trees around them have exploded in flowers, in pink and red and white, and they’re raining down with the damning fury of the shudder rattling through Dan Heng’s lungs. The power of the Earth escapes his control in the most graceful of fashions, feeding on the sharp beat of his heart and the love that pounds in his skull as the trees Dan Heng himself cultivated resonate with him, display the dragon’s pleasure and joy for him.
He turns away from Caelus’ blinding light and puts his hands to his cheeks, crouches on the floor, and stares blankly at his reflection.
There’s a bright laugh from a familiar voice, a comforting home; a warm hand touches his head and brushes hair aside as Caelus walks by, earning him a new whimper from the dragon negotiating his heart back into his chest. His tail thrashes against the flowers raining around him, but he looks up with enough time to see Caelus’ hair is covered in flowers.
I want him, Dan Heng thinks, feels it in his gut so brightly tears burn his eyes. I want him in all ways there are. Here and now and at the end of time.
Caelus walks over to March and Sunday, rubbing the back of his head. For a moment there is a bolt of dread, but Caelus looks back at him and smiles, assuaging Dan Heng’s fear before it can found itself on lies.
He points at Dan Heng with his index and middle finger, before making a C with his hand and flipping it to an L.
See you later, Caelus promises. A bolt of something races down Dan Heng’s spine when Caelus takes a flower from his head and kisses it, before walking away and flapping away the boisterous teasing March slings at him.
He finds the flower sitting on his pillow a few minutes later.
Is it even a game anymore, Dan Heng wonders, if it has grown to this?
But neither him nor Caelus actually talk about it, this strange dance they’re so fond of now; March calls Dan Heng pathetic when he looks at Caelus for too long with the man’s back turned, using a rude gesture that involves her hand in the shape of an I against her ear, shaking her finger after. He makes a face at her in response but does not try to control the way his tail wags once Caelus looks back at him and smiles.
Dan Heng will be minding his business reading something on his phone as he walks down the carriage, and the room will fill with stardust as the only warning he gets. Gentle footfalls will sweep around him, and Dan Heng will look up, will meet golden eyes that watch him with a confident sort of uncertainty. He’ll feel his lungs grow still in his chest, his mind pleasantly blank as they alight across each other’s paths anew.
A hand will reach over and lower Dan Heng’s phone out of the way, before Caelus reaches with his other to the back of Dan Heng’s ear, gently coaxing the taller man down. He’ll go, because Dan Heng is helpless in the face of this nameless affection he has cultivated into the garden of his bones, and Caelus will stretch up on his toes and alight a gentle kiss on his lips, or across his brow.
He’ll saunter off, leaving Dan Heng flustered and trying to sweep away whatever errant flower starts to bloom nearby.
Sometimes, he’ll skip by with a gentle blow to Dan Heng’s overlarge ear.
Other days, he does nothing at all. Instead, he’ll catch Dan Heng’s gaze and hold it for longer than is proper, an unspoken emotion burning across molten gold; Dan Heng is well-read, but even he doesn’t know how to parse the language that comprises of Caelus’ soul. Still, though, the stare will leave Dan Heng flushed and three sizes too big for his body, stumbling in his steps for the next few minutes.
(They don’t speak of Caelus’ Antics at night, either. Caelus still weasels his way into Dan Heng’s futon after the dragon has fallen asleep, as though stealing precious space he is not welcome to, and Dan Heng still rises first and leaves without waking him, pressing a loving kiss to his brow and leaving behind a shirt for Caelus to steal.)
They’ve left the irradiated star system behind by now, quietly rattling across the cosmos, but the Astral Express has added a new train car after Dan Heng started running out of room for the sheltering trees he fabricated for the heat. Their charms are no longer necessary, but the Crew grew fond of them; so, one morning they wake and find a car perfectly suitable for a greenhouse has sprung up after the Dining Car, at the end of the Train, and Dan Heng finds himself spending more of his days amongst it.
And it’s beautiful, too; warm growth lamps span across the ceiling illuminating the room with light that’s gentle on his sensitive eyes. There are hydroponic towers and raised beds full of rich soil, and Dan Heng is quick to go elbow-deep into soil that sings at his touch, that whispers things about life and verdant springs he gladly provides.
It’s so common, in fact, to find him there that Caelus usually looks for him there before anywhere else. After the third time he spots the Stellaron sitting with his back to the cruel metal wall, Dan Heng uses his funds to procure a low, cushioned lounger and a small table that he sets by that wall alongside a bonsai he made by grafting a pomegranate tree to a ginseng root.
After another few instances, Dan Heng constructs a lush grass and moss carpet along the base of a wisteria he has set near the opposite end of the car.
Dan Heng used to have a proper room in the Astral Express, when he first boarded and the Train recognised him as a fellow Nameless. Over time, as he used it less and less, the Train—in its infinite ways none but PomPom understand—took that space away, instead making the raised dais in the Archives for Dan Heng to use as his makeshift bedroom. He’s not felt the desire to ask the Express for a private room, content with what he was given.
However, he starts thinking of the Garden as something close to it. The Crew comes and goes as they please, and he likes that; but one morning he enters and finds a folding screen near the end, one that stretches from the floor to the ceiling. He approaches it and watches the cranes shimmer with gilded silver and gold, the bamboo and lotuses drawing a scene of calm.
He lights a hand against the warm wood, finds the paper thin but resilient when he brushes his fingertips on it. He realises it can be pulled all the way from one wall to another, forming a private room; and peering inside, he finds a simple, but comforting, space.
It’s small, enough for the lush futon that’s set against the wall, a low table with two cushions for a comfortable seat, and a dresser. There are some books stacked atop the dresser, names he recognises—Li Bai and Du Mu, and a beautifully bound copy of Li Shangyin’s Three Hundred Tang Poems in its original but mostly lost vernacular of Mandarin—and others he doesn’t. The windows are larger here, allowing a nearly unobstructed view of the stars.
Hanging from the ceiling are a few plants, ranging from purple wisteria to a lush fern, and a vibrant lamprocanos.
He stares. The plants sway.
That night, Caelus somehow finds him there. Dan Heng is sitting cross-legged on the futon and stares at the stars, something he doesn’t know how to name lingering in his throat, rolling down his spine.
The Stellaron hesitates at the folding screen, gently knocking his knuckles against the wood; but he needn’t have bothered. From the moment he walked in, Dan Heng has drowned in stardust. Dan Heng looks at him, feeling his breath shorten.
Caelus stands there, in his stolen sleep shirt and borrowed joggers. Dan Heng didn’t even know Caelus had taken those, and it sends something coiling in his gut that he ignores for the sake of his own mental well-being. He’s smiling, but it’s hesitant. Uncertain.
They have never been awake for this exchange.
It feels too real now, how Caelus has slipped into his bed for months and Dan Heng has allowed it without a word. How intimate it is for them to have quietly borrowed and re-borrowed the same shirts, only returning them when they smelled wrong and no longer carried the heat of the other’s skin. How softly Caelus laid claim to corners of Dan Heng’s life without imposing, ready to slip away from them if Dan Heng indicated the slightest discomfort.
How Caelus took and took, and Dan Heng gave and gave and gave.
And words don’t seem necessary, or if they are Dan Heng does not know how to speak them. Sure, he’s kissed those lips a handful of times now and has pressed the warmth of those hands onto his own with selfish abandon whenever possible, but it’s one thing to do it in the dark where he could pretend no one saw, and another thing to allow a witness to perceive his own heartache.
Still, he wishes to extend that welcome. Caelus has always had a nook between Dan Heng’s lungs made for him.
He holds up a hand, wordless and inviting. Palm up, fingers loose; an invitation, a promise of utmost confidence, a promise that there is no rejection here.
That Dan Heng offers to give this willingly. It has always been done willingly.
Caelus exhales shakily. He hears it vibrate in the air between them, feels the tremor of light as it bends around the emotion Dan Heng has drawn to the surface. Watches the way Caelus sways, uncertain now that the game has changed once again. Even in the dark, he sees the way Caelus’ chest heaves for air, how his heart hammers against the skin of his throat.
Softly, quietly, he steps in. Caelus glances briefly at the screen and then back at Dan Heng, who nods subtly; so Caelus pulls it shut and takes the three steps to the futon, three steps that seem monumental for them both. He pauses at the edge of the futon, the blanket decorated with dragons and lotuses shimmering with silk embellishments in the silence of the twilight hours. The only light that greets them is a simple bushy jasmine Dan Heng has placed on the dresser, one that shimmers with the kiss of his magic.
A trembling hand rises and takes Dan Heng’s hand, lacing their fingers. His skin sighs as Caelus’ warm palm brushes his, as their heartbeats whisper to each other. He pretends that Caelus’ gasp was not as vulnerable as it was.
Instead, he gently pulls him down and Caelus goes pliant, willing. He bends a knee, and Dan Heng leads him until they’re both lying down, until his own trembling hand pulls the blanket over them and they stare at each other across the pillow.
He does not know where this courage has come from. Maybe he, too, can learn to be brave. Maybe it’s the byproduct of love, that can teach someone that it’s okay to want.
Caelus is breathing heavily, golden eyes uncertain; afraid for the first time in this game. Their hands are curled between them, a hair’s breadth away and unable to touch, to breach the distance. Sometimes their knees will brush and one of them will flinch, but Dan Heng cannot look away as the muted white glow bathes Caelus in light.
He watches it shimmer across grey hair fanned over Dan Heng’s pillow. His collar rides low and displays the angled edges of Caelus’ collarbones, the beginning of his chest as it rises and falls. Dan Heng’s teeth ache.
But it is the way stardust fills the space that, on this first night, only carried the tang of moss, the whisper of jasmine tea. It kisses his senses in the most intimate way, slowly overtaking the soft notes the quiet corner came with; brings memories of sun-warmed meadows and whispers of rainy forests.
I love you, Dan Heng thinks, the emotion violent in its urge to be spoken aloud as it kicks his ribcage. One day it will not let itself be contained, but for the moment it is content to let him swallow it down as he stares, and stares, and stares.
The stars reflect in golden eyes. A tongue darts out and wets his lower lip, drawing Dan Heng’s gaze briefly, but he does not act on the urge to bridge that distance and kiss him. He does not know how to take without being selfish, without taking everything.
So, he stays his hand.
After a moment, Caelus smiles.
He puts his palm against his chin, turning his other flat in a facsimile, an approximation, of the correct sign. He brings the palm from his chin to below the horizon of his other hand. Then, after pressing his clenched fist to his chest, he makes a wavy motion.
Dan Heng laughs; it’s a bit watery, but Caelus’ eyes shine too so he thinks it’s okay if his eyes well up with tears.
Good night, my dragon, Caelus signs.
He hooks their pinkies together and falls asleep with the taste of stardust on his tongue.
His books from the Archives appear on his dresser the next morning when Dan Heng wakes. Caelus is gone, surprisingly, but in his place sits a little raccoon plush about the size of a small cat. It’s soft to the touch, when Dan Heng brushes his fingers against its ear, and smells like Caelus.
Caelus’ smile is private all day, a ruddy flush high on his cheeks.
One day, about a week later, it is Dan Heng’s turn to surprise Caelus.
He figures it was a matter of time. Besides, with the high energy of their resident raccoon, it’s no wonder Dan Heng hasn’t gotten the opportunity to do so before.
In a rare instance where Dan Heng has tasks elsewhere aboard the Express—the Archives needed an update on their firewall after Silver Wolf played a prank on their systems—Caelus does not seek him out. Matter of fact, Dan Heng gets through the long process of cleaning out unnecessary files in peace.
Suspiciously so.
He finishes the task with ample time to spare—thankfully Silver Wolf did nothing more than send bots to mess up Dan Heng’s meticulous filing system, which was nothing a system rollback couldn’t restore—and wanders the carriages in search of Caelus.
It’s not that he’s lonely, necessarily, but he half-expected Caelus to try and make the process more difficult.
“Have you seen Caelus?” he asks March, when he spots her in the Parlour Car. She snorts unhelpfully.
“I thought he was with you,” she says, arcing an eyebrow. She has the unfortunate skill of being very good at packing a lot of subtext to that motion alone, and he feels the tips of his ears grow hot.
Laughing at his plight, she puts her camera on her lap and tilts her head back against the headrest of the couch, grinning.
“I’m sure he’ll turn up soon,” she placates; opal eyes see the poorly-concealed concern on Dan Heng’s face as he glances around the room, tail swaying uneasily behind him. Sighing, she levels him a look. “Did you check his room?”
“Mn,” Dan Heng affirms. “He wasn’t there.”
“Archives?”
“That’s where I was.”
“Huh.”
She swings herself up, finally putting her camera down on the table and levelling him with a look.
“He told me earlier he needed some air,” March says, putting a finger to her chin and tapping it thoughtfully. He glances at her, eyebrows creasing, and she waves off his concern. “The Stellaron again. You know how it is.”
He does.
But thankfully, that gives him an idea as to where Caelus might have chosen to haunt.
“Thanks, March,” he says. She blinks at him, and Dan Heng puts a hand on her head and lights a soft kiss to the crown. “Could you ask the Conductor if we can have Dim Sum tonight? Anything will do; I think Caelus would appreciate the comfort.”
“You volunteering for dishes?”
He laughs.
“Yes.”
She whoops excitedly and hops to her feet, grabbing her camera. He watches her skip away with a fond sigh, grateful that she, too, has witnessed her own metamorphosis and has remained by and large unchanged. That she does not begrudge these emotions he was unable to contain in this gilded cage he fabricated for himself.
Quietly, Dan Heng slips into the Dining Car and steeps some tea, grabbing some snacks from the pantry he hid them in to protect them from thieving hands (Caelus). The room is slowly filled with the soothing aroma of jasmine and sencha, the whisper of lotus root; when it grows particularly fragrant, he pours the tea into a teapot gifted to him by Jing Yuan, setting the lot on a tray and carrying it into the Garden Car.
The oasis is as he left it this morning, plants glistening with dew as the lush garden thrives with his tender care. The pear tree is beginning to flower, promising bountiful fruit; he brushes a bud with his fingertips and watches the blossom accelerate its cycle until he plucks the round, golden fruit.
At the foot of the wisteria, where the carpet of moss and grass sits, lies the man he was looking for.
Caelus has folded Dan Heng’s half-robe under his head to use as a makeshift pillow—Dan Heng doesn’t wear it much on a day-to-day, enjoying the liberty without it—as he lies under the sway of the drooping flowers. They dance to a simulated breeze Dan Heng has cultivated, sun-warmed by a heat Dan Heng has worked hard to perfect until it almost feels like the sun he walked under for thousands of years.
He looks beautiful there, nestled in the grass. Borrowed black shirt unzipped and loosened to his sternum, pants swapped for a loose-fitting pair of shorts that have ridden up on one thigh, exposing most of the unblemished skin. Dan Heng wants to bundle him up and press him into his own bed, to lay him down and kiss every inch until fair skin blushes and blossoms.
He places the tray down long enough to remove his boots and rest them next to Caelus’ shoes, walking the rest of the way barefoot across the grass. Once at the base of the tree he leaves the tray on the ground and kneels above Caelus’ head, facing the long lines of the man’s vulnerable form.
Pale lashes flutter but don’t open. Dan Heng sighs fondly, taking a moment to undo his ponytail and resting the metal clasp in the tray nearby. Only then does he lean over so his face obscures the simulated sunlight through the leaves.
Tucking hair behind his ear, upside down, Dan Heng presses a soft kiss to his lips.
This is maybe only the ninth kiss, just as chaste as the others, but still it sends his stomach fluttering, his heart hammering—because Dan Heng does not instigate them. But here, like this?
In the room that is verdant with Dan Heng’s love and care?
How can he not?
Caelus’ mouth twitches beneath his as he withdraws, hands rising from the grass to reach up and cradle Dan Heng’s face. He allows Dan Heng to withdraw enough so their eyes can meet, silver on sleepy gold; Caelus smiles, and if Dan Heng didn’t already love him so ardently, he feels this might have made him kneel.
“How’s the ache?” Because Caelus only feels pain in solitude, only knows to hurt when he’s alone, and Dan Heng hopes that one day he won’t think it an imposition to ask for help.
Golden eyes close again, humming. Bad, then, probably.
At the very least, Caelus knows not to lie about this.
“I have tea to help,” Dan Heng offers, whispering in the spaces between them. Warm fingertips brush along Dan Heng’s cheeks, slide into hair and cradle his head with a fondness so pure and so simple that sometimes, when he’s alone, Dan Heng can only weep. “Brought you some snacks to cheer you up.”
“In a minute,” Caelus murmurs, one sleepy touch brushing down to Dan Heng’s neck while the other tucks hair behind a long ear. His skin feels hot to the touch, burning with pleasure as Dan Heng blushes. “Kiss me again? Please?”
How can he not?
Dan Heng brushes their lips together again, feeling the exhale tremble against his chin as Caelus sighs into it. His hand cups the back of Dan Heng’s head and keeps him there, prolongs the tender kiss as Caelus tilts his head slightly. Curious, tail swishing in the grass, Dan Heng mirrors the motion as he places a cold hand against Caelus’ sternum, over his clothes.
The man gasps as his touch presses against the root of his pain, where the Stellaron burns hottest in his heart and lungs and constricts his ribcage. Dan Heng knows—remembers how Caelus first described the ache to them, eons ago—and suffuses his touch with the gentility of nighttime rain, of verdant riverbeds. The soothing balm of cold mountains.
Caelus shudders, makes a half-bitten noise. Stardust grows warm against his nose, where it presses softly against Caelus’ jaw; becomes effervescent when Caelus parts his lips shyly and licks tentatively at Dan Heng’s.
He doesn’t stop the dragon from pulling back enough to look at him, to meet his gaze. Caelus’ cheeks have grown red-hot, accentuating the gold of his eyes, and Dan Heng exhales around the emotion welling in his throat.
After a moment, Dan Heng kisses him again. This time, when Caelus tentatively repeats the motion, Dan Heng parts for him and lets the man timidly slip his tongue into his mouth.
His heart clenches. Stardust, he finds as Dan Heng carefully meets his tongue with his own, is not light and heat. It is not verdant forests and it is not soft riverbeds. Stardust may smell like the natural world he loves, but it does not taste that way; and the realisation has him gasping, trembling.
It seems to make Caelus bolder, who pulls Dan Heng down closer and tilt his head, slots their mouths together differently so he may brush his tongue along Dan Heng’s with greater ease. The shyness slips free as Caelus explores and Dan Heng gives him liberty, unable to restrain the way he gasps at each sensitive brush. Caelus swallows them all, greedy and desperate to take.
Stardust tastes like fire. It tastes like smoke and ash, like the copper that precedes lightning. It coats his tongue like blood and plasma, like the fabric of the Universe at the birth of a new star. And Dan Heng fears he might not understand how to stop himself from taking now that he has been given this knowledge.
When Caelus finally remembers they need to breathe, he drops his hands to the grass and lets Dan Heng pull away with a gasp.
They look at each other wordlessly, Caelus’ lips blushing red with Dan Heng’s lingering affection, and Dan Heng yearns for the volatility that comes with a thunderstorm. He swallows around the lightning in his mouth and tries not to imagine what it might be like to peel every stitch from Caelus’ body and taste his flesh.
He doesn’t think he could survive that right now, but Aeons, his cocks heavy in his pants makes him think that his body is willing to try.
Caelus’ chest heaves; Dan Heng’s hand slips, brushes bare skin. The man beneath him goes still as quickly as Dan Heng snatches his hand away, clutching it to his chest.
“I—”
“We can—”
They both stop, blinking at each other.
And then Caelus laughs, and the heavens might not be falling to the earth today, but it certainly feels that way when he sits up and presses a kiss to the back of Dan Heng’s hand, to the palm, as though divinity might be possible for people like them.
He drinks the tea and lets Dan Heng feed him slices of pear, and Dan Heng tries not to feel jealous of the juice that rolls down his chin, that follows the line of his throat. Tries not to stare at it and imagine himself licking it back up into Caelus’ mouth.
Caelus, with no such qualms, licks the sticky residue from Dan Heng’s fingertips, smiling to himself when it earns him a quiet ah and a twitching hand that cannot make itself move away while a hot tongue finds every nook and cleans it diligently. The Shackling Prison seems like a vacation resort when Caelus broadly licks a stripe up his fingers and sucks two into his mouth, golden eyes burning into Dan Heng’s soul.
He stares, lungs unable to draw in air, as Caelus grins and slowly slips them from his mouth, from that wet heat Dan Heng’s cocks beg to know intimately. He whines when Caelus drags Dan Heng’s fingertips along the same trail the pear’s juice took, to his collarbone and down the open collar to his sternum.
Mouth agape, Dan Heng manages to breathe, but all he tastes is fire and all he smells is what he’s realising, with a desperate kick in his gut, is arousal. Caelus’ arousal, specifically, which he realises he’s smelled a few times now. Sometimes it’s at night, staring at each other until sleep takes them; but the first time he noticed its presence was the day Caelus accidentally groped Dan Heng and pinched his nipples.
Caelus smiles. Dan Heng squeaks when Caelus holds Dan Heng’s fingers so that they’re holding the zipper keeping the panels of his borrowed shirt closed.
His gaze is an invitation. And oh, Dan Heng wants.
He waits, lets Dan Heng decide what to do here. How far he’s willing for their game to go, this dance of give and take as glorious and as resilient as the tide and the shore that meets it.
He takes a deep breath. Tightens his grip on the innocuous metal zipper. Pulls.
“—wanted to see—my eyes!”
Dan Heng snaps his hand away so fast he slaps his own chest, head turning abruptly to the door. There he finds March with her hands over her eyes.
“Not in a public room guys, come on!” Mortification stabs whatever need and arousal had been churning in Dan Heng’s spine, curls them into shame. She chances a peek through her fingers and puffs up her cheeks when she sees the coast is clear. “I know you practically live here now, Dan Heng, but I thought you were going to play doctor, not nurse.”
Caelus bursts out laughing beside him, no qualms about the predicament they almost placed themselves in. He curls up and leans against Dan Heng’s shoulder, wrapping his arms across his stomach and wheezing into the man’s neckline.
For a breathless, terrifying moment, Dan Heng had forgotten where they are. That the Garden Car is not the quiet abode of his nor Caelus’ room, but an open invitation for anyone looking for the comforts of land or a fresh snack when the fruit is ripe. His face colours scarlet and he stumbles to his feet, scurries off to the private corner where at least the folding screen shimmers with soundproofing as he shuts it behind him.
“You scared him off!” Caelus shouts from behind him as he escapes. March makes an affronted noise.
“When I said you should make a move, I didn’t mean where I might see it—”
Blissfully, the magic woven into the screen kicks in and Dan Heng crawls into the futon, where he can curl up under the sheets and stew in mortification until someone summons him or the Universe grants him a swift death, whichever comes first.
Caelus slips in a few hours later, soft stardust slipping into the spaces of Dan Heng’s room that are otherwise unoccupied. Nowadays his room doesn’t smell like just himself, carries a whispering vestige of stardust on any given day, but it always grows pleasantly stronger when Caelus graces his abode with his presence.
Not one to pathetically wallow in misery for long (contrary to what March might claim), Dan Heng has been sitting at the low table with a book open between his knees, though for a while he’s been staring at the stars outside. He glances up when Caelus closes the screen behind him, locking them in privacy uninterrupted.
A charged moment stirs between them. Weakly, Caelus holds up the tray he’s carrying with a smile.
“You missed dinner,” Caelus says in that unflappable kindness of his. Dan Heng sighs through his nose.
“I… was engrossed in my book. I apologise; I did not see the time.” A shame, as well. He was looking forward to seeing the smile on Caelus’ face when he was met with his favourite foods.
I needed room to breathe, Dan Heng does not say. To come to terms with the things that I find myself wanting.
Knowing he’s invited, Caelus toes off his shoes and leaves them on the little carpet Dan Heng placed a few days ago, walking over and sitting on the adjoining cushion. He gently places the tray on the table, the covered dishes rattling a little.
“It’s okay,” Caelus says, carefully taking them off the tray and setting down a plate in front of both of them. “When I saw you weren’t coming, I thought to bring my dinner here, too, so you wouldn’t eat alone.”
“You didn’t—”
Caelus glances at him from the corner of his eye, stopping Dan Heng’s protest.
“What are you reading?” he asks instead, uncovering the bamboo baskets he’s brought. The flavourful aromas quickly fill the room and overtake even the most complex scents, and Dan Heng smiles at the familiarity he’s greeted with.
He pours them a cup of tea each, setting it within reach for Dan Heng.
“A collection of poems from where the Xianzhou Luofu, and its residents, hail from,” Dan Heng says simply. Caelus tilts his head, facing Dan Heng with a quiet smile. “His name was Wang Wei; this is a collection of poems known as the Wang River. Most of the language used at the time has been lost, but a lot of poetry managed to survive.”
“Read me your favourite,” Caelus suggests, folding his hands on his lap. Dan Heng’s thumbs idly at the pages in his hands, bound by a simple cover, glancing up at him with trepidation.
The Stellaron smiles and waits.
A peace offering, Dan Heng realises. Caelus thinks he pushed him too far, asked for too much too soon—and Dan Heng realises that maybe running away like that made Caelus believe that Dan Heng did not want people to know.
That Dan Heng hasn’t been clawing his own insides out to restrain the urge to shout it across the cosmos, to every star they have travelled past. He inhales sharply, but exhales with greater finesse.
“I sit alone in bamboo that hides me / Plucking the harp and whistling long. / It is deep in the woods and no one knows— / Bright moon comes to shine on me.”[2] Caelus reaches over and picks up a jiaozi with a pair of chopsticks—he'd only brought the one pair, Dan Heng realises—and smiles, holding his hand beneath it and offering it to Dan Heng.
The dragon blushes violently. Caelus tilts his head and waits, and after a moment Dan Heng carefully leans forward and takes it, chewing slowly. The smile Caelus gives him is soft, fond, as he picks one for himself.
“How about something you think I’d like?” he asks, waiting patiently. Dan Heng swallows thickly.
“A light scull greets my worthy guest / Who comes from afar across the lake. / We will sit facing wine by the balcony / With lotuses blooming on every side.”[3] Caelus hums, rewards him with xiaolongbao.
The game continues, if Dan Heng can call this an offshoot of their game. Caelus asks for a poem fitting of whatever whim he can think of, and Dan Heng flips nervously through his book until he finds one. Caelus will feed him a dumpling before taking one for himself, and changes the request.
They do this until the meal is finished, until Dan Heng has pulled a different book to read poetry to Caelus. The man sits in front of him and listens softly, patient and still in ways Dan Heng didn’t even know Caelus was capable of, to the tune of the rattle of the Rail as they press on through the cosmos.
Eventually, Caelus puts two fingers on the top of the book and gently presses on it, slowly lowering it when Dan Heng pauses and looks up at him. He finds golden eyes watching him carefully, with a cadence Dan Heng doesn’t fully understand in his mind but his heart clenches at, reading a subtext he cannot decipher otherwise.
Golden eyes glance down and back up, so fast Dan Heng would’ve missed it if he wasn’t already looking at him. When the book touches his lap, Caelus brings his other hand up and points at his chin, forming an arc and pointing at Dan Heng; his breath catches in his throat.
Two hands now, one palm up, the other horizontal across it. He waves them in a broad circle, waits a moment.
Then, Caelus’ hands—trembling—gently reach over and loosely hold Dan Heng’s shoulders, pulls. Invites.
Dan Heng slowly places his book on the ground, unable to tear his eyes away as Caelus draws him in, as he exhales shakily. There’s a moment where they remain suspended, the seconds before a free-fall where his heart lurches into his throat with anxiety, with forgotten nerves that flutter and demand attention.
Tell me to stop, Caelus had asked. Afraid of taking too much the same way Dan Heng has feared giving too much.
“I won’t,” Dan Heng whispers, a broken spell. He hears Caelus’ sharp inhale, smells the spike of arousal that flares across stardust, and the tether snaps so simply Dan Heng thinks there wasn’t really much keeping it intact to begin with.
All this time, there’d been a tacit understanding between them. An unspoken rule. Somehow, without ever speaking the words aloud, they have both known that kisses are welcome and comforting outside private dwellings, but they cannot cross the threshold. For what’s stopping Caelus from taking more than just kisses? What keeps Dan Heng from giving more than his patchwork heart?
Caelus kisses Dan Heng like a starved man, like he might be able to find an oasis within his mouth. He pulls Dan Heng into his lap with a barely-concealed moan as he parts his lips and shoves his tongue into Dan Heng’s mouth, one hand climbing into black hair and gripping, tilting his head for a greater access. It draws a sharp gasp from the dragon kneeling above him, who places uncertain hands against Caelus’ chest and feels the Stellaron’s warmth respond.
He whines when Caelus parts to breathe, when Caelus tilts his jaw and kisses along the length of Dan Heng’s jaw to his ear. His body feels too small to contain the heat that surges through him, the stardust that blinds his senses and makes him keen, begging for more of whatever Caelus is willing to take.
How can he explain to Caelus that he can have all of him? That he can have all of him?
Teeth scrape at his jugular, nails raking against the shirt on his back. Trembling, unable to kneel over Caelus’ lap and retain some sense of separation, some control, Dan Heng lowers himself against Caelus’ thighs. A surprised sound escapes Caelus, who pulls away enough for their eyes to meet.
“You sure?” he asks, but his voice betrays the want Dan Heng has smelled on him since he first came in. It sneaks into Caelus’ tone and lowers it to a delicate treble, and Dan Heng is not particularly musically inclined but he finds himself aching to learn song so he can harmonise. It shoots through him so abruptly that he gasps, feels hot fingertips pressing into his spine and rub the length soothingly.
“I have known,” Dan Heng forces through his shame, through the pride that contains his tongue when he wants to be honest. Do not be so selfish, it demands, and he rattles against his self-imposed confines long enough to speak. “Since—since you fondled me in the Parlour Car and I had to jerk off in the Archives—”
Caelus laughs before he finishes his sentence, and Dan Heng finds the courage to look at him directly. The man licks his lips already bruised pink from Dan Heng’s affection, bringing a hand up to touch Dan Heng’s lower lip.
“I know,” Caelus confesses. He has the wherewithal to blush, at least. “I was in the room when you—”
“What?”
“Where do you think I went to hide?” And oh, red is a beautiful colour on Caelus. Dan Heng has a brief and vibrant vision of Caelus dressed in red and gold, whispering vows as they bow thrice to themselves, their ancestors, and the Aeons.
“I didn’t see you when I—”
“I know! I left when you—uh, when—” Caelus clears his throat and looks away, and Dan Heng thinks he should be mortified that Caelus was apparently in the room watching Dan Heng fuck a blanket like a bitch in heat, but instead he feels heat simmer in his gut as his cocks jerk violently in his pants. The stickiness is a byproduct he ignores. “Aeons, Dan Heng, it was all I thought of for weeks. Why do you think I came in your room after you fell asleep all those times—if I didn’t jerk off beforehand, I worried I’d do something stupid and—”
All he—
Dan Heng crashes their mouths together, hands grasping at his shirt. Caelus’ heart beats wildly against Dan Heng’s chest as he presses them together, parting only far enough to grab the zipper that nearly undid all of Dan Heng’s carefully crafted control earlier and yanking it down.
Caelus bullies himself into Dan Heng’s mouth in response, shrugging off the shirt when Dan Heng’s nails drag across his shoulders and demand the offending material ceases existing. When Dan Heng pushes into him Caelus goes willingly.
“On the floor?” Caelus asks jokingly as he lands with half his upper body against the sheets behind him, the rest still haphazardly sprawled across the cushion.
“To start,” Dan Heng murmurs, sitting on his hips and shucking off his shirt without fanfare. The angle gives him a great chance to watch Caelus falter, to see his lips part as his eyes dart down.
He has plans.
“You do not know,” Dan Heng begins, hisses, as his tail makes room for him to crawl down so their heaving chests brush with every inhale. He relishes the shiver Caelus barely suppresses. “Tell me what you want.”
Caelus swallows thickly. A trembling leg props itself up, presses between Dan Heng’s to press against the heat collected at his groin. Dan Heng hisses an exhale, arms trembling with the desire to fall onto the man beneath him, to meld into his flesh.
“What if it’s too much?” Caelus asks, softer. The haze in his golden eyes clears briefly, a flash of worry, a thread of uncertainty. Dan Heng licks his lower lip and wonders what it might take to claw into his mind and shake loose the things that make him afraid. “What if I ask something you can’t give, Dan Heng?”
Aeons, but he loves the way the man speaks his name. As if it’s a gift, precious.
“Have you?”
“You ran away.”
He did.
“What do you want, Caelus?” No heaven no earth is too much, no river too grand to contain the fathoms of atonement Dan Heng observed in his pursuit of grief and the love that made that grief necessary. If he spends thousands of years toiling for the chance to prove that it was a worthy fight, a sacrifice he made of his own volition with his heart on the line, he will charge alone into this fight.
He has already sacrificed everything, all of himself, for this.
“Your heart,” Caelus murmurs. He raises a hand and touches Dan Heng’s chest where his heart beats soundly, where it sings a song echoed in the fear palpitating below him. “Love. Time. Mornings and nights with you and next to you. We have not spoken of what we want. I thought maybe I could pretend it doesn’t mean anything, that it’s okay if it’s just for fun, but… I don’t know if I can.”
Smiling, Dan Heng pushes his hair behind his ear. It flows around them, a curtain for a confession that, realistically, Dan Heng should’ve breathed a long time ago. He thought he did, outside the Memoria Tide—I would move mountains to find you, he had said—but maybe it wasn’t enough.
“I don’t know if I can pretend that I’m not in love with you, Dan Heng,” Caelus whispers. The tears trail down his cheeks then, a quiet proclamation of emotions so overwhelming his body needs to release them, so it doesn’t destroy him.
“I cannot fall asleep without your scent nearby,” Dan Heng starts, and the gilded cage bends under his control, the metal growing molten as he fights to finally speak what’s clawed at his throat for weeks and months. Millennia, if he’s honest with himself. “Stardust and light and heat, gentle summer mornings in a sunny meadow and springtime rain in a field of lavender. Riverbeds of moss and stone and shores of seafoam and phytoplankton. I hoarded each scent, every touch, a thief and a beggar desperate for affection I cannot otherwise ask for. It has pressed into my blood and bones; has woven a tapestry of colour I did not remember until I pulled you free and finally felt relief.”
Caelus’ eyes grow wide. Now that it is free, finally free, the deluge continues. He does not try to stop it.
“I crave the moments between waking and sleeping where you play this game with me, where you orbit my day as though I am the star and you are its satellite.” He brushes a hand down Caelus’ throat, feels the man inhale shakily and shudder. “I do not know how to give because I fear I might give too much of myself in return. I’ve needed you to take because otherwise I cannot make myself thaw, but Aeons, Caelus, I—”
He swallows thickly.
“My heart led me through millennia of torment because it was not mine,” he chokes. If he begins to cry, too, that’s fine; he thinks this is the safest place to fall apart. “You ask for my heart as though it was not already in your hands to begin with. As if it hasn’t been nestled in your ribcage for months, for millennia. As though my love of you has not made me a slave to my pride. As if I’d let anyone else steal my shirts and my sheets and my bed—”
Caelus laughs then, a wet sound around the sob that follows it, and presses his palms against the sides of Dan Heng’s head, cradling him as though jade is less precious than the man in his hold.
“I love you, Caelus,” Dan Heng breathes, loving the brush of thumbs under his eyes as Caelus wipes his tears. “You want my heart? It’s yours. My love? You have it. Time? As much of it as the Universe will let me give. Anything. Everything.”
The Stellaron nods.
“Kiss me,” Caelus asks, begs.
Easy as breathing, that.
The kiss is wet and messy with their tears as Dan Heng tilts his head and gently pours his devotion through the touch. Their lips part and rejoin quietly, moving and angling and brushing as Caelus’ trembling hands slip into black hair and down a bare back; it is the sweetest kiss and, in some ways, Dan Heng thinks it’s their first.
Gentle, Stellaron-warmed hands drag down Dan Heng’s sides and settle at his hips, grip the hem of his pants with hands that don’t feel as confident as the action allows. It’s followed by Caelus’ leg twisting so he has the momentum to roll them, to press Dan Heng into the floor. He surges up and kisses him deeper, parting Dan Heng’s lips with his tongue and diving as though his last meal lives beyond; Dan Heng groans and allows it, hands heavily alighting against his waist and gripping it firmly.
“March said I don’t smell like anything,” Caelus muses, pressing heavy kisses along Dan Heng’s jaw again. The dragon inhales and arcs his neck, goes belly-up for another man in ways his kind usually would never allow. He whines when Caelus rewards the submission with scraped teeth down the tendon of his neck.
“You do,” Dan Heng counters, shuddering when Caelus finds a spot at the junction of his neck that he laves with his tongue. His body remembers how that tongue felt on his fingers, and boy if he wasn’t hard before he sure is now, an uncomfortable tackiness in his clothes denoting the embarrassing situation he’s going to find himself in. “Stardust.”
“What’s it smell like right now?” And he’s pressing that grin into his neck that, last time, was muted by fabric. Dan Heng whines.
“Lightning,” he gasps. Caelus rewards him again with a gentle nibble against his skin, and Dan Heng’s hips jolt, surprising them both. The laugh Caelus presses into his skin makes his bones come alive. “Fire.” A pause. “Earth.”
“Those three sound oddly specific,” he continues, as though talking about the weather and not Dan Heng’s weird olfactory senses. He licks a wet stripe up to the shell of Dan Heng’s ear, earning a small sound as Dan Heng clutches his waist desperately. “Is there a reason for them?”
—plenty. Dan Heng has learnt the nuances of stardust across their sojourn in the infinite cosmos, has smelled their light and tasted their heat intimately. It is not so much learning as it is remembering what stardust feels like, because he himself once was a star, eons ago; the helium and hydrogen that comprises his atoms can only be forged in the burst of heat at the birth of the Universe, can only burn up and be destroyed in the spaces of collapsing stars.
And so stardust has learnt the shape of complex forms like riverbeds and leaves, but at its core, when you remove all the beautiful hardships of living, you find the elements that were birthed alongside them: fire and earth, and the immediate things that were born of them.
And human existence, at its core, is nothing more than a star re-learning the shape of living—
He hums in acknowledgement, shuddering. This is apparently not the response Caelus was looking for, because he huffs against the shell of his ear and bites the tip.
Dan Heng’s brain whites out and he shouts, feels that wet patch in his pants grow concerningly large when Caelus slips a leg between his and presses his thigh into Dan Heng’s pelvis, up against his cocks. He hums thoughtfully and Dan Heng knows he’s caught, feels the way Caelus’ shorts have ridden up to allow his bare skin to feel the fabric and the dampness and—
“Why those three?” he repeats candidly, licking his way back down. Dan Heng trembles as his thigh rubs lazily against him, sparks of pleasure only serving to fill his head with static.
“Primordial,” Dan Heng chokes, clawing at the fabric of Caelus’ shorts. A hum at his throat indicates Caelus wants a better answer, so Dan Heng swallows. “Complex scents are—ah—normal on a daily basis—!”
He’s slipped a hand over Dan Heng’s cocks over his pants, playing idly with the wet patch that indicates where one of the heads is. He hisses when those clever fingers toy with him.
“—but your emotions are singular at this moment,” Dan Heng forces out. Caelus laves at his throat like a particularly lazy cat. “Arousal is simple but powerful. Primordial. So it echoes destructive forces and—”
“Good boy,” Caelus coos, and it’s the only warning Dan Heng gets before he bites the junction where his neck meets his shoulder, pinches a nipple, and squeezes his hand around the approximate location of the head of his cock.
He howls, back bowing as all points of contact pull him into oblivion so quickly it’s all he can do to avoid bucking Caelus off him. He heads Caelus’ quiet whoa as Dan Heng comes in his pants, as he hisses a sound not quite human, and for a moment he thinks he might float away into the nearest star cluster.
But Caelus keeps him pinned to the floor of this bedroom the Express crafted for him, keeps him tethered to his body as he presses kisses to his throat and clavicle, hands reverently massaging Dan Heng’s shoulders and waist as though worship is second nature to them, as though devotion might pale in comparison to the love Caelus tries to contain within such simple ministrations.
Dan Heng returns to his body with a gasp, a shock, before scrambling away from beneath Caelus; he misses the momentary flash of hurt in his haste to shove off his pants and ruined underwear and lie down on his chest on the futon properly, hips elevated as he grips the sheets and begs.
“Please,” he croaks, feels the need that always, always drives him to insanity clawing at his insides. He doesn’t know how to describe the sensation in a way that someone who isn’t Vidyadhara might understand, just that his insides tremble for something he knows his people have been robbed off for ages beyond counting. “Caelus, Caelus.”
The Stellaron kneels in place, staring wide-eyed for a moment, until Dan Heng turns his head towards him and meets his gaze. Tears mar his face and he’s ever depiction of Caelus’ wet dreams he swears he doesn’t have about Dan Heng, no sir, and he’s shoving his clothes off so fast their skin smacks painfully when Caelus lunges and settles behind him.
Dan Heng doesn’t know how much of himself Caelus saw that day, when he had an impromptu view of a Vidyadhara in pseudo-heat. He himself hasn’t felt one in… a few thousand years, he thinks, and certainly not in this lifetime. Dan Feng did not have fond memories of it, and all the texts about it speak of pain.
From the way Caelus’ hand spares no time parting his thighs to push his cock between them, he thinks the Stellaron had an ample view. He’ll have to ask about it later.
Caelus swears loudly in a language the Synaesthesia Beacon does not recognise—that Dan Heng doesn’t recognise, only the vitriol poured into the word—as he rolls his hips and presses Dan Heng’s thighs together for a tighter fit. It’d be embarrassing how much slick his body has created if Dan Heng didn’t know the lengths he’s had to go through to clean up the mess in his clothes on a regular basis.
Dan Heng looks down through the haze in his eyes to see Caelus’ cock peek out from between his own thighs, hot and heavy as it curves up and brushes against, then between, both of Dan Heng’s cocks. He yelps, feels the way it causes his body to shudder and his slit to release more clear fluid.
He’s going to have to burn these sheets, he thinks morosely.
Hands that are near-scalding hold Dan Heng’s hips in place as Caelus rocks an unsteady rhythm, bowing until his forehead falls to the planes of Dan Heng’s back tacky with sweat.
“I’ve—I’ve got you,” Caelus hisses, shuddering when Dan Heng flexes his thighs. He whines as Caelus’ cock brushes his slit with every pass, nails digging into the sheet as he tries to keep himself from rocking in time to Caelus’ motions. From twisting around and taking, but that would defeat what Dan Heng wants. “What—shit—what do you need?”
Dan Heng whines.
“Yes,” he says, chokes, because the answer is everything and anything and he thinks this might be what madness actually feels like, this insidious torture where his body wants but doesn’t know how to take it. He has never been more of a prisoner than in this moment.
A trembling hand slides from his hip to his front, cupping Dan Heng’s chest and squeezing. He gasps.
“Where, Dan Heng?” Caelus asks, because of course he’d be too polite and would need to ask where his lover needs him most, where Dan Heng wants to feel him first. He cries out because it’s too kind and Caelus is really overestimating his capacity for speech right now.
But he has hands.
Blindly, Dan Heng grabs Caelus’ hand and drags it down from his hip. The sound between their hips threatens to drive him wild, their mingled scent dragging a feral noise to the surface as Dan Heng becomes acutely aware of it. Their combined smell—the copper tang of lightning and the ardour of fertile soil—makes him whine and shudder, his cock dripping a loud and unsettling quantity of pre-cum onto the sheets that has Caelus’ breath shuddering.
He brings Caelus to where he knows it’ll feel best. Caelus’ cock continues to fuck his thighs around his hand, though it does slow somewhat as Dan Heng releases his hand and uses his own fingers to part the folds of his slit, tilting his hips to present himself even more. Caelus’ hips stop entirely, the hot and angry head pressed against Dan Heng’s knuckle, and he wants it in him so badly that he thinks maybe he might’ve gone into heat.
“How… Bailu warned me you… if this happens, you won’t know to tell me to stop,” Caelus says slowly, voice fragile. Dan Heng blinks his eyes open again and tries to look at him as well as he’s able, but Caelus is talking to his spine. “She did not tell me how to get you to stop.”
Dan Heng huffs a breath, rolls his eyes. He thinks he should be mildly offended that apparently Caelus asked both March and Bailu on how to woo him, but the sweetness behind the gesture mollifies any mortification it draws to the surface.
He blindly grabs Caelus’ hand from his chest and, after pressing it into the sheet, writes a few characters slowly against the back of his hand.
“‘Stop… talking’—hey! I’m trying to be considerate! Do you know how hard that is right now?” Caelus’ head snaps up from his back and Dan Heng huffs a laugh this time, smirking when their eyes meet. He writes something else. “Then you try having a beautiful dra—‘It’s not… quite that scary. I’ll naturally stop… when what I want is sated.’ Well, what do you want?”
That’s… harder to admit. He taps his fingertip against Caelus’ hand, shuddering when Caelus kisses his spine and waits with the patience of a saint. Without their laboured breaths he can hear the steady drip of his slick and his pre as it pools on the sheet, making his face burn with embarrassment. His tail twitches along his side, and Caelus kisses it next, humming when Dan Heng sighs at the affection.
“‘I’ll take it when I sense… your limit approaching.’ Okay that’s kind of hot.” Dan Heng pinches his hand. “Ow!”
In retaliation, because of course Caelus would think this a competition, Caelus crawls up his back high enough to press a hand at the back of Dan Heng’s neck and run his tongue over one of Dan Heng’s horns.
The thing is, they’re not sensitive. Not normally.
Chitin is a natural armour, a hard carapace that has no nerve endings or other biological receptors capable of sending signals of pain or sensation. Matter of fact, Dan Heng sheds these horns on a semi-annual basis of three hundred years and doesn’t feel a thing.
But apparently? Well, apparently, Caelus dragging his tongue over them sends a bolt of need out to short-circuit his brain, and Dan Heng moans Caelus’ name so loudly his throat aches. They both pause—one in horror, and one in sheer glee as he realises the power he now wields—and Dan Heng tries to shake him off, but Caelus presses his knees into Dan Heng’s shoulders and goes to town.
He takes one into his mouth fully and Dan Heng cries out, a sound that’s extended as Caelus presses an open palm to the front of Dan Heng’s throat. It becomes a sweet noise when Caelus hums and drags his mouth off it, kissing down the length of the other.
“She mentioned a heat,” Caelus murmurs against the base of it, and Dan Heng shudders. “That’s what this is, right?”
“Partially,” Dan Heng manages through his abused throat. Caelus hums again, slowly working his way down Dan Heng’s back. The dragon sighs when he feels Caelus settle between his thighs again, knows the fog in his mind is not far. “Intense arousal can… send us into a pseudo-heat.”
“Lucky me,” Caelus sings. His fingertips find Dan Heng’s slit and part it—Dan Heng’s hand fell away a while ago—and idly brush along the sides. “How do I get you into a full one?”
“Caelus!”
“Just wondering. For science.” Dan Heng rolls his eyes, but his breath stops short when he feels the blunt head of Caelus’ cock finally press against his entrance, the slit that conceals the place where his ovipositor usually hides. Shuddering, Dan Heng bites his lip in anticipation. “What’s the difference between them?”
“Well, I can only—”
Caelus slowly pushes inside, and Dan Heng’s thought falls between them, broken into a quiet cry of Caelus’ name instead. The heat that floods his core is immediate, amplified by the energy of the Stellaron contained within Caelus’ chest, and it almost burns as Caelus hisses and gently pushes in where Dan Heng’s body welcomes him most. The glide is smooth, but it draws Dan Heng’s breath short, who doesn’t really breathe until Caelus’ hips settle flush against his.
When they do, they both exhale.
Caelus laughs first, a soft thing; Dan Heng tries to blink the tears from his eyes long enough to look, though Caelus drops his forehead to his back before Dan Heng can manage it. A soft kiss is pressed to his skin, a gentle token of affection.
“Aeons, I’ve dreamt of this,” Caelus admits softly, reverently. Dan Heng’s heart trembles, and all he can manage is a quiet purr. “And you’re purring? Fuck, you’re perfect for me.”
Dan Heng whines. They both inhale sharply as Caelus slowly pulls out a little, as he presses back in; the sound it makes has Dan Heng’s ears burning hotly, but his insides ache at the sensation so he thinks it’s worth it. It’s a pleasant ache, a salacious drag of his insides that he knows he’s going to grow addicted to, that he’ll seek to press into the folds of his clothes and the spaces between the whorls of his fingerprints so that he can hoard these sensations, too, like the thief and the beggar he has always been.
“I’m gonna keep you,” Caelus murmurs, and Dan Heng honest-to-Aeons mewls and claws at the sheets when Caelus rolls his hips a little more firmly, a deeper grind. “Fuck. Can I keep you?”
He nods frantically. He wants to be kept, owned like he’s something precious.
“You can keep me, too,” Caelus vows, pulling out to the head. Dan Heng feels too empty when he does, opening his mouth to complain as Caelus shoves back in with the strength and speed and candour he’s known for, and his complaint becomes a shout. “Good boy.”
—and for a moment he swears he sees into another Universe, another timeline, across this Mobius Strip that theirs orients, an endless but finite path of beginnings without end. And for that moment he sees a world where Aeons are not destructive forces of the cosmos and Stellarons do not ravage planets with the fury of the dying. And in that moment he sees Caelus walking through the door with March hot on his heels and they’re laughing and Dan Heng feels love so bright he thinks he might be living, where no matter what timeline they find themselves in the three of them are always together—
A sharp cry of his name when Caelus brushes against a part of him even Dan Heng’s fingers do not reach. He pauses a moment, pensive, before hands grip Dan Heng’s hips more ruthlessly and grinds dirty into it.
His shout would reach the other cars, if it weren’t for the spell shimmering across the folding screen. He sobs into the sheets as Caelus bullies this spot, relishing the full-body tremors he’s pulling from a man usually so composed.
“You’re so vocal, Dan Heng,” Caelus praises. After he dips a hand down to feel the mess of the sheets, he drags his teeth against his spine. “Can you say my name?”
Dan Heng licks his lips.
“Caelus,” he croaks, because he’s nothing if not obedient. A smile is pressed into the dip of his shoulder blade.
“Not that one,” Caelus murmurs. Slowly he pulls out again, a quiet warning of the reward he’s offering Dan Heng as he lingers with the head of his cock just barely nestled within him. “The other one.”
(He remembers a sleepy night where Caelus looked at him, millennia ago, between the Luofu and Penacony, and signed a single character. It is the name I was given by my creator, he explained softly, to the witness of the stars and the lone dragon that haunts them. Caelus is simpler, wouldn’t you agree?
—can you like me if I pretend I’m human, too, Caelus had asked, between those lines without ever speaking a word. It had been the first time Dan Heng had felt his heart ache with longing, with a grief that, at the time, he did not know of its destructive capabilities. Even if I’m artificial, can I be worthy of love?
It had been a simple thing to give his heart to Caelus, in the end.)
“Qióng,” he calls, quietly, and Caelus hums, kisses his skin with a smile that speaks of the leagues of hurt it took to get here, the untold sacrifices that were necessary in the name of growth. That it comes with the cold press of tears is a simple byproduct of stellar collapse.
He snaps his hips, hits that spot dead on, and Dan Heng tastes the stars.
It becomes a prayer then, a proclamation, as Caelus drives into his lover with a beautiful abandon that promises to take them both apart before stitching them into something new, and Dan Heng responds with a song he did not know how to sing until he remembered how to live beyond the Memoria Tide. Memories live and die within the span of a moment, but the flesh remembers what the mind is doomed to sacrifice to the ruthlessness of time and erosion, and as Caelus drives into him like he might build a home within a barren wasteland, Dan Heng hopes his body might remember this even in death.
Caelus kisses his back like he was built for love and not to house millions of lives across the stars, but isn’t that what the Earth is made to do, in the end? Does it not create shelter for any who perceive it simply because it loves? Did Dan Heng not spend millennia searching an endless sea out of that very love?
I want to keep you, Caelus had whispered. As if Dan Heng is something precious.
You can keep me, too, he had offered. As if Caelus is anything less.
Caelus’ release is quick and sudden, burning Dan Heng’s core as it fills the spaces he has not been able to fill with errant touches hoarded in the light of day. The Vidyadhara cries out as Caelus pulses, his heartbeat so strong he feels it where they join so intimately, and the man groans into Dan Heng’s skin with teeth and tongue and nails that catch on scales scattered across his skin. He rolls his hips as though to prolong the sensation of falling apart in a black hole and Dan Heng moves to meet him, a tide upon a faithful shore.
He gasps Dan Heng’s name so beautifully as he finds the thread that leads them to the beginning of this Mobius Strip, crying a sound that is wounded and sensitive but helpless to do anything but chase it. Caelus’ release makes the slide almost too slick as Caelus rolls shallowly, otherwise draped over Dan Heng’s back.
Unable to hold himself up any longer, arms and thighs shaking, Dan Heng falls onto the sheets and takes Caelus with him; the man squeaks but doesn’t stop pressing him into them, into that wet patch. It’s all Dan Heng can do to spread his legs wider to facilitate Caelus’ movements.
“H-how…” He feels Caelus throb, gasps when Caelus presses against that spot and simply grinds into it with filthy, single-minded precision. “I usually—”
Caelus cuts himself off on a cry of Dan Heng’s name, trembling. Stardust tastes a lot like sweat and desperation when Caelus reaches up and tries to kiss him, though they manage little more than open-mouthed panting with the angle. Still, though, Dan Heng begs for another, pocketing it as one of his favourite kisses when Caelus gives it to him.
“Pheromones,” Dan Heng manages around Caelus’ tongue, assuming correctly what Caelus was trying to say. The Stellaron groans and drags his teeth down the corded line of Dan Heng’s throat. “Wh-what, did Bailu not teach you the nuances of Vidyadhara—ah!”
“You are… way too lucid,” Caelus hisses before biting at his neck harshly, slamming his hips into his pliant lover. “I think I like it more when you’re being fucked stupid.”
“Ha! That’s—hng!”
“But,” Caelus continues, ignoring the full-body shudder that interrupts Dan Heng’s shit-talk. He drags blunt nails down his back and around the base of his tail, which whips around at the brief attention before firmly wrapping around Caelus’ back to press him closer, to force him deeper. “I think… I prefer it like this.”
A wet fingertip brushes against the furl of Dan Heng’s ass, who gasps at the sensation. Gently, with more care than Caelus is granting his slit, the Stellaron slips a finger into him using Dan Heng’s own slick.
“Your voice is what pulled me out, after all.”
His knuckle brushes along his prostate as he slips in a second one shortly after, and Dan Heng clenches so hard around Caelus that he feels the man’s release forced out of him.
Dan Heng doesn’t let him recover. He uses his tail to pull Caelus out while the man is busy shouting his name to the ceiling and the stars beyond it, shoving him against the wall and mounting him like it’s his Aeons-given right to be there—and it is, and anyone who thinks Dan Heng does not belong in Caelus’ lap will have the rage and fury of thousands of years of yearning to contend with.
Caelus blinks at him as his head hits the window—cushioned from pain by Dan Heng’s hand, a steadfast refusal to hurt his love in any capacity—as Dan Heng straddles his lap, holds his head firmly in two hands built for heinous acts of atrocious violence but that have been softened by millennia of grief and the love it was born from, and kisses him.
He kisses him like he might birth a star from his lips.
Like infinity is a blessing, as though repeating the same life again and again is not the punishment it prophesises.
As though Dan Heng would willingly spend millennia in grief anew—spend as many as the Universe demanded of him—if it meant this always waited for him at the end.
And Caelus melts against him, hands grappling to hold Dan Heng’s head in place with a desperate grip in his hair, intertwining their tongues as if maybe Caelus can taste the stars that live inside Dan Heng, too. As though he, too, smells and tastes something that is unique to Dan Heng, that no one else notices.
(A rainforest, Caelus tells him later. Vibrant and fertile. Covered in rain and warmed by the sun.)
He gasps beautifully when Dan Heng parts from his lips, blinking up at him as though seeing the divine with his own eyes; but maybe something beyond the divine exists, something that sits between the divine and the Universe. If it does, if it exists, Dan Heng thinks it feels like this, being looked at with unfettered love and adoration that is not privy to something as callous as Aeons and Titans and all those who toil for the end of the Universe.
Caelus smiles at him, smiles with the radiance of stars, and signs a simple phrase in the spaces between heaving chests.
A finger pointed to himself; arms crossing over his chest; a finger pressing against Dan Heng’s heart. I love you. As though simple. As though inevitable.
Dan Heng bites his lip and slips Caelus’ cock back into himself, past the brief resistance the intrusion into his ass creates. The Stellaron gasps and his hands audibly smack against Dan Heng’s hips to ground himself.
“W-wait! Y-you’re not—”
“You saw me shove three fingers in my own ass without any form of preparation,” Dan Heng hisses. He thinks it’s beautiful that, after all they’ve done, that makes Caelus blush brighter. He watches ravenously as it colours his cheeks down into his neck, golden eyes staring back with heated mortification. “What were you thinking, Qióng, when you stood there and watched?”
Caelus shudders, gaze skirting away as Dan Heng’s hips fall flush with Caelus’ thighs. His tail shudders behind him, smacking against the ground loudly as Dan Heng tips his head back and lets himself feel the fullness in his gut, in the way it draws his breath short. Somehow, Caelus feels even warmer here, like this, as though a star’s flame burns hottest like this.
Caelus’ pulse jumps against his walls, a delicious vibration that echoes Dan Heng’s own heart, his own pulse causing his insides to tremble. His lover gasps, eyes fluttering shut.
Dan Heng puts his arms over Caelus’ shoulders and smiles. It’s all teeth, four sharp canines glinting in the muted and intimate glow of the jasmine bush on the end table.
“Were you thinking about what it would be like if it was you?” Dan Heng asks. He does not know where this comes from, pulled from his heart and soul as it is; maybe love can do that to a person, can make them brave when displaying their souls. Caelus whimpers as Dan Heng lifts slowly. “Were you wondering how I might cry out if it was your fingers?”
A desperate, frantic nod. Liquid heat rolls into him as Caelus’ cock offers a brief gush of pre-cum, an attempt to forfend Dan Heng’s retribution. Dan Heng sighs around a sharp inhale, greedy for the offering.
“Did you wonder how I might beg for your cock?” The head catches on his rim and he pauses, thighs trembling as he holds himself in place. He waits for bleary, lust-hazy eyes to blink at him. Caelus’ fingers shake against the dip of his hips. “How I might cry for your seed?”
“Dan Heng, I—”
“What is it, starlight?”
A brighter blush than the last, but Caelus keens, cock throbbing where they’re joined. Dan Heng smiles, watches Caelus tip his head back and try to breathe around the arousal that fills his scent, that scrapes through the affection that is sun-warm grass and sharpens it with copper, that saturates it with lightning.
“I… watched, and all I wanted was to kiss you.” Dan Heng’s heart stops in his chest, and Caelus blinks sightlessly at the ceiling and breathes heavily around the love that forces past the lust nestled in stardust. “To tell you what it means that you sacrificed thousands—and how you always find me when the Stellaron aches and always soothe it, always make living feel less like battling for breath. But I… didn’t want to take too fast.”
Ah.
In the end, they’re both a little stupid, aren’t they?
“You can take, now,” Dan Heng whispers. “It is not too much.”
Their eyes meet.
“Tonight, and tomorrow,” Dan Heng continues. “And every day after that.”
“Would you run if I kissed you in front of the others?” Caelus’ thumb brushes against his hip, sweat gliding at the embrace. Another hand slides down tacky skin to Dan Heng’s thigh, trembling with the burden of holding himself in place. “If I held you?”
“I will… learn to stay,” Dan Heng promises. Caelus smiles. “To give without fear that I am a thief.”
He smiles, and it is the colours of sunset after the world’s first snow, where everything is dark and pure and fluffy with a blanket of white, and the sun bleeds red and gold across trees and valleys and riverbeds.
He lowers himself slowly, with grace and finesse that has lacked in their coupling thus far. Caelus hisses but does not expedite it, tightening his grip on draconic flesh as Dan Heng once again joins them fully. The Vidyadhara exhales heavily and licks his lips.
“Take me,” Dan Heng asks, pleads, of the infinite love of stars.
They shine on him, warmth and light, and it tastes like the sweetest plum when Caelus leans forward to kiss his lips, his jaw, his clavicle, rolling his hips without urgency. It smells like a lotus blooming in a peaceful bamboo grove, like the warmth of a hot summer day and the peace of a snow-blushed lake that still clings to autumn leaves even as the world around it goes to sleep.
The poets of his people have thought for millennia about the stars and what they might offer. Astronomers have dedicated their hearts and souls trying to understand what the cosmos might teach a broken heart. Lovers and beggars both look to the sky and its stars searching for infinity, for a place to call home, in the spaces where stardust gathers.
He thinks no one has quite understood the emptiness of space and the loneliness it generates, not the way an artificial man carrying the death of a star in his chest has.
That stars are nothing more than that, amalgamations of hydrogen, helium, and other elements leading up to their collapse as their cores burn through everything they have pulled themselves from until they have reached iron, until they cannot bear the weight of what they have lost and can do nothing else but fall apart.
But when they do, when they inevitably shatter, they will travel untold miles to be reborn somewhere new, in hearts that look back up at them and yearn to understand where they came from, what they lost in the journey it took to get there. And he thinks it’s beautiful to know that, somewhere out there, in another lifetime—in another Universe not so different but not the same as this one—the same stars have understood that death is a necessary part of their life, and they look back at the death that was required of them and know that it was not in vain.
That it is only in death they may come alive.
The Astral Express is alive, in the same way Dan Heng lives and breathes. Somehow, some way, it understands the Nameless it carries and cares for them, and it is something Dan Heng has never understood—not the Train Cars that change before its Passengers can even think to ask for something, as though understanding them better than they know themselves, nor the Archive that expands with knowledge he knows wasn’t there the day before.
But he is grateful for it, all the same.
When the morning comes and Caelus rolls on top of him to kiss him, with the unhurried longing of someone who simply does things because he wants to, Dan Heng thinks that maybe giving in to certain wants is not so terrifying. Caelus straddles his chest and kisses him like breathing, uncaring for morning breath or the stench of sweat and sex that Dan Heng did not have the patience to dispel with a wave of Cloudhymn magic last night.
Caelus only releases him when he gasps for air, a thin trail of saliva connecting their lips as he pulls back and smiles down, sunlight and meadows and riverbeds. Dan Heng touches his fingertips to Caelus’ jaw, to the angle of his throat, and smiles at the sound of his love’s pleased hum, as Caelus tilts his head back and invites the tender affection.
“Do you hurt?” Caelus asks around a sigh, thumbs brushing against Dan Heng’s collarbone with tender affection. The tip of his tail curls up and brushes against Caelus’ thigh bracketing his left rib.
He wonders how it would feel for Caelus to become his missing rib.
“No more than you, I’m sure,” Dan Heng responds quietly. A warm hand guides the tip of Dan Heng’s tail to kiss-bitten lips, where he kisses the feathery end gently; Caelus giggles when it tickles his nose. “Though I should probably dress that for you. I, ah, forgot my teeth are sharp.”
When Caelus tilts his head, Dan Heng sheepishly gestures to Caelus before pointing to his own neck at the junction. Curiously, Caelus touches that spot and hisses.
(It felt glorious at the time, when Caelus brought Dan Heng to gentle completion as Dan Heng could do nothing but sit and take it while the man rolled his hips up into him, brushing his prostate with every sinful touch. He could do nothing but bite Caelus’ neck as he shouted his name into the fabric of the Universe.)
“Hold on, let me—”
Halfway into picking up Caelus from his chest, to settle him on the (ruined) sheets next to him, Dan Heng pauses as his eyes finally look at the room around them.
He lowers his love to the sheets and sits up fully, tail curling in idle, concerned protection around Caelus’ waist. The Stellaron puts his hands on Dan Heng’s tail and pets it, trying to comfort the dragon as Dan Heng’s ears press to his head, wary.
The room is different, though subtly. Carefully.
The little table and dresser are still there, alongside the plants and books. The trinkets Dan Heng decorated with (the raccoon plush Caelus gave him, and a calligraphy brush March bought him when he idly mentioned his other one broke) are still on their place atop the lacquered wood. It still smells the same, like stardust and verdant peat moss, though these two are muted by the combined tang of their sweat, of the love they poured into each other until late in the night.
But it’s bigger, stretching to the other end of the Train car. The wall is solid now, though the door is a more traditional paper screen; the cranes and bamboo are still depicted here, shimmering faintly. There is a bookshelf with numerous books and scrolls. A floor-to-ceiling folding screen near the back that conceals a bathroom, left ajar.
A weeping cherry tree sits in the space between the bed and the bathroom, a small carpet of grass beneath it just large enough for two people to lie down on.
Caelus laughs quietly.
“Seems the Express got tired of you living in a cupboard,” Caelus says softly, fondly. Dan Heng’s ears grow warm, and he glances back at the man next to him.
In his smile, in the glow of his skin that shines infinitely, a beacon for Dan Heng’s heart and soul, a small thought grows a seed. Takes root.
They are disgusting and sticky, bodily fluids crusted against their stomachs and thighs and in places Dan Heng is not excited to clean; but in this moment, in this pocket of eternity they have carved for themselves over the years (millennia) they have known each other, he thinks that Dan Heng has never witnessed something so beautiful.
“I think…” And Caelus looks up at Dan Heng from where he’d been smiling down at his tail, bashful and content, and a star collapses somewhere in the endless expanse of the Universe and its sound waves vibrate across Dan Heng’s bones. He’s helpless, he’s a man in love, and he touches a hand to Caelus’ cheek with a reverence reserved for the divine. “I think the Express wanted to make room for you.”
Caelus’ lips part soundlessly. His hands pause against cool scales, a warm balm to his reptilian skin.
“I think it wants me to take something from you, too.”
“And what—” Caelus swallows thickly, clears his throat. It comes out fragile. “What would that be?”
He thinks about the stars that guided him in the Memoria Tide, that led him to Caelus.
Thinks about visions of red and gold and ceremonial bows.
“Your heart,” Dan Heng echoes. Caelus’ lower lip trembles.
Pride was Dan Feng’s downfall, long ago; it had drawn the Vidyadhara to his knees, had not allowed him to let the world run its course. Reincarnation is meant to teach them from the fallacies of their past, but Dan Heng has never been a studious disciple before; when Death stole Caelus upon their crash on Amphoreus, Dan Heng could not lay him down, could only cradle his corpse and weep while its denizens watched a dragon figure out how to bring the dead back to life. When the Memoria Tide contained him, Dan Heng fought time and erosion and life itself until he was able to save him from the tides.
And pride—this ego, this selfish thing called life—demanded Dan Heng fall to his knees, demanded he pay the toll anew. But Dan Heng doesn't think human existence is intrinsically tied to suffering, thinks that it is possible for people to exist beyond pain and solitude. Somehow, thousands of years in penance were enough of a sacrifice to grant him the chance to pay back in dividends, to find peace.
And peace, he thinks, smells like light and warmth, like fertile forests and riverbeds of stones.
“Love,” Dan Heng continues, his other hand cradling Caelus’ cheek. Tears well anew in fields of gold, and Dan Heng kisses them and tastes autumn harvests and red maple leaves. “Time. Mornings and nights with you and next to you.”
Stardust bursts around them, the life and death of thousands of stars as they cycle through rebirths and the deaths that are required for reincarnation. It finds the spaces otherwise unoccupied and creates a shelter for a man who saw himself a thief and a beggar. It coats his tongue as Caelus laughs around a choked sob and wraps his arms around Dan Heng’s shoulders and kisses him, kisses him like he might stave off a supernova by inhaling hydrogen and helium from the other man’s lungs.
“It was already yours,” Caelus chokes, confesses against Dan Heng’s mouth between kisses. “It was always yours.”
He falls into the sheets with a star in his arms and gives, and gives, and gives.
Here and now and at the end of time
space as my map and time as my compass
the mountains will move and the valleys will bend
until the Memoria Tide has no choice but to recede
to lead you to me.
I spoke your name in the wind, a
prayer, and you answered
I have been waiting for you
and our hands touched in the golden tide and
stars collapse and are reborn with less
relief as the love that I could not bear to
lose
here and now and
at the end of time.
[1] Based on Tang dynasty poet Li Bai’s “Chang Gan Xing” : 山无陵，江水为竭。冬雷震震夏雨雪，天地合，乃敢与君绝。 Till mountains crumble/ Till rivers run dry/ Till thunder rumbles in winter/ Till snow falls in summer/ And the earth mingles with the sky/ Not till then will my love die.
[2] Tang Dynasty poet Wang Wei’s “Lodge in the Bamboo" (竹里館; Zhú Lǐ Guǎn). 獨坐幽篁裏,彈琴復長嘯.深林人不知,明月來相照.
[3] Wang Wei’s "Pavilion Overlooking the Lake" (臨湖亭; Lín Hú Tíng). 輕舸迎上客,悠悠湖上來.當軒對尊酒,四面芙蓉開.