TotA, [canto one]: "Andante" (Luke/Asch/Luke ahahhalolzdie)
I tried, honestly I did, to valiantly resist the appeal of this pairing. After all, it's like...clone!porn, for God's sake. >___> But at the same time it's so angry and miserable and tragical that I just fell for it in the end. Plus, the end of Tales of the Abyss really just cemented for me. ;___; I AM WEAK, YOU NEED NOT SAY IT, EVERYONE.
Title: Andante (Walking Speed)
Author: Lorelei DiAngelo
Rating: R. UM. HOPEFULLY IT WILL STAY THAT WAY. Well, crap on that, NC-17. I've got no sense of self-restraint. *headdesk*
Genre: Angst, angst, angst.
Pairing: Luke/LukeAsch. Uh...did I just spoil the game, here? O.o
Summary: When first a fire blazes, it must then smolder, then go out.
Notes: *GOES TO HELL, WUT* In other news, I have no idea what compelled me to write this. Go figure. *headscratch*
The contamination effect turns him from the light of the sacred flame into a meteorite, blazing brightly across the night sky until he becomes what he is called - Asch - and even as he follows after the shadow of the one who stole his name, he still doesn't stop burning. He can't afford to, for he is, after all, out of time - a thing that adds urgency and terror to everything that he does - and when first a fire blazes, it must then smolder, then go out.
Before that happens, though, he will show them just how brightly it is that he can burn.
He doesn't sleep often - doesn't have the time - but when he does, his dreams are seared with red, a crimson spilling over his hands as blood; or sometimes it is hair, short strands of it twisted between his fingers and meek emerald eyes looking up into his own with resignation and complacency. On those nights he wakes up cold, and short of breath, and wonders if this time, finally, he has crossed the line between arrogance and narcissism.
But a half-lived, half-loved imitation of himself isn't what he wants, not by a long shot, and every day he comes to curse the contamination effect, because he wouldn't be thinking these kinds of things if he wasn't so goddamned out of time.
The red burns away at him until he is black, and he runs along the sky as though he is the sun - ever onward, yet certainly not infinite.
------------------
As he stalks the light of the sacred flame, he is appalled at how often their group seems to travel at walking speed - taking time to speak and rest as though time was a thing that meant nothing to them at all.
Mostly, he watches Natalia, because she at least seems to remember his existence, and because she always, inalterably, will be the thing that gives him reason not to squander what is left of his accursed life. In her eyes, there has only been one Luke, and it is not the replica that walks beside her.
But occassionally, his eyes will follow his other as though they are bound - (they are) - and as his heart starts to race, he has to remind himself to slow down, so that he won't accidentally catch up. He hates everything then - his master, his copy, himself.
What angers him even more is that his faded existence is everything to the replica who has stolen it from him. It is the only thing he wants.
One day, Asch decides to give it to him.
------------------
He has an hourglass that he had won from a game with Sync. He had no love for the Fon Master's fifth replica, but even he could find a kindred soul in someone else with such a discarded fate that he had ended up playing the game anyway. Some stupid game of dice, and Asch had watched them tumble from their cup with eyes that gave away the fact that he was imagining dying in much the same way. Sync - bitter, ironic Sync - had laughed, then, and slammed the miniature hourglass upside-down on the table.
"Tick-tock" was what he had said.
The hourglass itself is a cheap, useless thing, but sometimes Asch will turn it, recklessly, and find himself surprised at how that hour of time always managed to make itself fly by. He figures that to someone allowed to live out their life at walking speed, the sands are nothing more than a diversion from all of the idle hours ahead; that their falling is, undoubtedly, the slowest thing of all. It makes his reactions slow and his sword arm ache.
He usually takes six-hundred breaths for the sixty seconds of sand that spell out the rest of his life, but inside the courtyard of the Fabre manor - enemy territory, childhood home - that six-hundred seems to multiply itself to six-thousand.
Despite that, it is easy enough to sneak past the Duke's careless night guard, and even easier to stand below the window of his old room and call out wordlessly to the usurper that has stolen his bed. 'Hey, reject!'
A startled groan and a thump. Asch ducks behind a bush then and wonders if it is the unusually bright moon tonight that makes his urgency feel like more than that of a simple lack of time.
'Open the window. I'm coming up.'
'Wh-what?! You're here?!' in a frantic whisper, and he can almost see those mirrors of his eyes bulging in disbelief. The weight of the world is reflected in them.
'Where the hell else would I be?!' he retorts, and though logic calmly directs him to the fact that he could be somewhere - anywhere - else but here, instinct simply leaves no room for argument.
Above him, there is a small click as the window is latched open. The usurper looks out the window, and for a moment, all Asch sees is red.
But he blinks, and the other colors appear as well; vivid green and a smudge of black against the white of the moon as a cloud looms overhead, and he stretches his arms up towards the window. He has to act fast, because he simply has no time.
"What...what do you want?" is the first thing his other demands, and it's disgusting to see that, above all else, the idiot looks happy to see him, though he's doing an admirable job of covering it with unease. Asch is, after all, solely the bearer of bad news to him - sees him or speaks to him in his head for little else than that design - but the only bad news he intends to bear tonight is that they are still not friends, comrades, anything, even after all is said and done.
"Are you... Are you here to see Mother and Father?" the imitation is asking, both hope and dread carrying themselves in heavy inflections in his tone; hanging on his face in a way that would have never been so evident on the features of his original. He is wearing Asch's clothes, had been sleeping in Asch's bed. It adds a sickening spill to an already sick situation. Somewhere in the room, there is the ticking of a clock.
"I'm here..." the general starts, then cuts himself off with a growl, hand finding the hilt of his sword somewhat against his will. His replica - no, it was he, Asch, who had no claim to this place now...he'll let the idiot be 'Luke', if only for a little while - notices this, too, and takes a step back towards the bed.
"Are you looking for a fight?" this Luke asks, shaking and defenseless in a pair of Asch's favorite pajamas, and it's all he can do to keep from seeing red rum at the backs of his eyes. The cloud drifts away from the moon, and the two of them are brought into perfect illumination against the dark.
"No," he answers slowly, deathly quiet, and that is that. He takes the tiny hourglass out of his pocket and holds it up to the light, and it has never seemed so frail in his hands before tonight.
Sixty minutes, and what will surely amount itself to much more than six-thousand breaths. He can afford himself this little bit of time.
His gaze swings back to Luke, and he feels like an animal in the dark.
"Strip," is what he says.
"Wh...WHA - ?!"
"Now," he orders, and his tone leaves no room for argument. He swipes back an errant lock of hair with a restlessness he can no longer pretend he doesn't feel. "Those are my clothes, this is my house! What right do you have to them, hunh?!"
It hits the mark, as he knew it would: Luke colors, visibly, and starts to obediently unbutton his shirt. The truth is, Asch could care less about this place, and even less about those inside who chose to abandon him, but there is something he cares about, and it frustrates him that he can't quite put his finger on what. He's just sick of this damnable red.
The shirt pools to the floor with a muted whoosh, and Luke stands silhouetted in front of the window. Around him are Asch's shoes, Asch's books. This fact never seems to get old in the general's mind.
"All of it," he commands, and takes a step forward as though he means to do it himself.
Luke jumps back a bit at his sudden advance, spooked, and his face is as red as his hair. It's...infuriating.
"All right..." he murmurs, resignedly, and hooks his thumbs under the waistband of his pants. Asch tries not to stare too much as they slide over his hips, down his legs. It's a wasted effort. There's something morbidly amusing in watching one's own self undress.
He looks up, and it irritates him that the tyrant doesn't quite dare to look him in the eye. The king of the castle should have pride over his conquered lands.
So -
"Look at me," he orders.
Luke, unsurprisingly, does so. His face is anxious, abject, and filled with shame. Asch has to swallow the series of shouts that threaten to bubble up over his lips. It's an effort to say, shortly, "Come here." But he finds a way to manage it. As though it is incentive, he holds his hourglass out in front of him, watching the sands spill around inside. The light strikes them in such a way that they appear to be diamonds.
"Eh? What's that?" Luke asks, squinting at it, and it calms the general somewhat to see the bodysnatcher take some sort of initiative for himself.
"Sands of time," he replies indifferently, and presses it into the replica's palm. "Turn it over on the night table."
There is a question burning in his eyes, but Luke does as he is told. Asch stares at it, at them, and takes his first real breath.
"Now get over here and get me out of this damned uniform."
At first, Luke looks to argue - (hopes against all hope that he will argue, that he'll in some way think for himself) - but ultimately he rises, and pads softly across the room at a pace that is infuriatingly walking speed.
"...How do I do it?" he asks, hands raised halfway in the air as though in question. Asch smirks, humorlessly, before striking like a snake, grabbing the other's wrists and twisting them painfully in the air.
"With your teeth," he answers, flat.
Luke fidgets, once, before sagging hopelessly in that iron grip, and starting to work dutifully at Asch's collar.
Five minutes and fifty-five breaths go by before he finally gives it up. "I... I can't - " is all he manages before Asch pushes him away, snarling, and sets about removing his uniform himself.
"Of course you can't," he growls, and hurls his tabard to the ground. He undresses in a flurry of ebony and red, so like a whirlwind that it makes him slightly dizzy. Luke hunkers on the floor, attempting to salvage his modesty (or perhaps to avoid the haphazard flinging of clothes), and he makes it a point to look everywhere in the room except at Asch himself.
Asch stalks over and kicks him in the side. He's still wearing his boots, so it has to hurt quite a bit. It will probably leave a bruise. He likes the idea, as now, others will be able to tell them apart. "Watch!" he yells, forgetting for a moment where exactly he is, and at exactly what time of night. "Watch and see! This is how the real one should be!" He digs his fingers into Luke's hair - and damn, it's just like his dreams - and green eyes so very like his own look up at him, accepting and almost reverent. They seem to drink in the lines of his body in the way the ocean laps against the shore. It makes him feel slightly uncomfortable.
For the first time, Asch starts to wonder just what the hell it is that he's doing. He wonders if that idiot is wondering the same thing, too.
He feels sick to his stomach when he realizes that the answer to that question is no, probably not.
He chokes out past gritted teeth, "You do the rest."
There was nothing stopping him from using his hands, but Luke does it with his teeth anyway, eyes closed and breath coming hard. There is a strange mixture of desperation and pain on his face that makes Asch feel something in his stomach twist. He forces it back down with a look at the hourglass - always, inexorably, running out of time. The idiot is adept with his mouth, despite his failure at being able to speak intelligently, and a clever usage of tongue and teeth causes the button of Asch's pants to slip neatly out of its hole; the waistband dips a little past his hips. He doesn't remember it being this cold in his room before.
"Hands," he barks, as he sees those teeth start to draw close to his zipper. Luke puts one on the inside of his thigh as the other works his zipper, and it's all Asch can do to stand up straight. He chews on the inside of his cheek until he tastes blood in his mouth; it's the moon, it's the light of this unnatural moon.
Leaning back a little, Luke lowers the general's pants, and stares wide-eyed at what he finds underneath. Belatedly, Asch remembers that in every sense save physical, this Luke is essentially still a child, and he hates everything even more then. Still holding the replica by the hair, he hauls him upright; spins him such that they face the floor-length mirror that Luke usually keeps hidden behind his door.
"We're not the same," Asch swears, vehemently.
"No," Luke agrees, slowly, almost as if he is amazed. "If nothing else...the scars are different."
They are. Scars from different places, different battles, with different meanings. There are other small things, too. Even without his boots, Asch stands just the slightest bit taller. His hair is just the slightest shade darker in the whitewash of the moonlight, and his eyes are a more murky hue of green. The lines of Luke's body are skinnier, a bit sharper than the bones of his original from an over-excess of training, and his hips are just a touch more feminine.
"Alike, but not the same," Asch says, though he still keeps his fingers buried in the other's hair.
"Close enough for it to never make a difference," Luke points out, despondently, and doesn't even have the time to yell when Asch suddenly backhands him, roughly, and shoves him up against the wall. The phonograph on the table next to them rocks, dangerously.
"Shut up!" he demands, hoarsely, and smells the scent of himself from everywhere around him. "Just...shut up."
He makes Luke shut up by kissing him.
It's hot, unbearably hot against the chill of the room. Luke makes a little surprised noise in the back of his throat but ultimately gives in, whether out of instinct or will or narcissism, Asch simply can't tell. He splits Luke's teeth with his tongue, and finds a taste there that's different from any that he could have expected. It is simply another thing that they do not share - something that is Luke's, and Luke's alone. Asch wonders if somewhere, this wasn't foretold in their walk of destiny.
"Nnnnnngh," Luke says, and that's answer enough for Asch. The red that burns in the back of his eyes isn't nearly as terrible now.
He pulls Luke back from the wall, towards him, and buries his face in the other's neck. Their bodies fit together like lines on paper, and for a moment, Asch has trouble remembering just who it is he is.
"Lie down," he pants, and suddenly it is crystal clear.
It gives him grim satisfaction to see that Luke does not simply drop instantly to the floor, but instead minces quickly over to the bed, though he does seem initally reluctant to leave the fervor of Asch's grip. It doesn't really matter, as the general fills the gap instantaneously anyway, and he pins him down by the shoulders, and he writes any sort of purpose or original intent off as simply lost.
"Until I run out of time," he says, lowly, looking not at Luke but at the hourglass bleeding happily atop the nightstand, "I'll prove to you that you exist."
Luke nods, once, and that too is all right.
The one thing that is surprising to Asch is how slowly the time seems to go. It goes beyond walking speed; it seems to stand still. He takes six-thousand breaths in a second. He kisses Luke - his lips, his eyelids, the lines of his shoulders - and can't find an appropriate channel for his hate. He bites, hard, into the spot of Luke's neck that is just below his ear, and takes a childish pride in the way his other gives out a startled little cry. The blood that follows is red, too, but it helps them tell each other apart, so really, Asch doesn't mind.
"I - " the idiot starts to say, but Asch shuts him up by slamming his lips into his own. He digs his knees into the mattress of his old bed and thinks only of how to get the proper balance. His hands drift everywhere; smoothing, stroking, scratching with his nails as though he can tear off the skin that should rightfully be his. Under the crushing weight of his original's lips, Luke is trying to catch his breath. Asch won't give him the opportunity.
"Silence is a respectable sign for the dead," he reminds him, placing his hand over Luke's trembling mouth. "So just...shut up."
Luke plucks at his fingers, half-heartedly, but doesn't actively try to remove them. For once, his passivity works in Asch's favor. Still, he doesn't move his hand from the other's mouth.
Shifting a bit on his knees, he looks down at creation's folly beneath him, skin flush and cock standing half-erect between his legs, and thinks of himself, doomed to tragedy since birth, and wonders what it will take for them to break free of the chains that bind them. Luke squirms a bit at his sudden examination, but quickly stills when he is pierced with Asch's level stare. The general moves his hand.
"Yes or no?" is what he asks.
Luke swallows, adam's apple jumping visibly in his blood-smeared throat. "O-Only if..." - but he shrinks under that fulminating glare, and swallows again. "...Yes," he says, hoarse and low. He is framed on all sides by the bloody fall of Asch's hair.
"Until my time runs out..." Asch murmurs, almost to himself, and puts his hand back where it was. The other he trails along until it lands on the warm skin of Luke's inner thigh; why is it so goddamned cold in this room? Luke jumps, but doesn't fight. Asch wonders if he will honestly ever fight.
He dips his head and nips the other's collarbone, feeling a hiss of breath drawn through the fingers of his left hand, and it's hard to keep balance with just his knees. He wobbles, dangerously, and finds it best to take the hand covering Luke's mouth away. The only thing that gets louder is the sound of their breathing, and Luke is looking at him more and more now without any sense of guilt or shame. Asch has to look at the hourglass to make sure that a ridiculous amount of time just hasn't simply flown by.
"Can... Can I...?" Luke inquires, breathlessly, hand already stretched upward in the direction of Asch's face, and the general looks at him with an almost comical mixture of resentment and unease.
"Can you...what...?" he demands, but it's weak, and he can only watch with a sort of paralyzed fascination as Luke's hand brushes past his face, fluttering like a bird, and picks out a strand of long red hair that is hanging over his shoulders in a disarray. Luke stares at it for a moment, hypnotized, before closing his fingers over the fiery locks and drawing them up to his lips. He smells it; closes his eyes to it, runs his lips over it, and because he seems to love it, Asch, perversely, wants it back.
"Let go," he says, and tries to draw back; he overbalances, and winds up tipped backwards against Luke's legs, hair stretching painfully. "Let go, I said!" In retaliation, he digs his nails into the inner crevice of the other's thigh, and they stare at each other: one anxious, the other riled.
Asch flips his hair back over his shoulder. "You don't need it," he says.
Luke's arms have somehow wrapped their way around Asch's neck, and he shakes into the other's shoulder. "Yeah, but I wan - "
Wanted it.
Asch raises his hand to Luke's hard-on. "I'll give you something else, instead." He moves.
Luke shudders, and an almighty moan wracks his body - nearly breaks Asch's neck with how hard he's hanging onto it - and the face he makes is one of both misery and bliss. He feels more alive in Asch's arms, in his hands, then he ever has being run through with Asch's sword. One dream bleeds to the next. He's real, and Asch is starting to understand that he is the pale imitation being left behind in the wake.
He puts his face in Luke's neck - (they even curl mid-coitus in the same way, mirrored gemini) - and he strokes Luke's cock, and starts to feel his ever-so carefully constructed walking speed break slowly into a run. It's not at all like handling himself. His is a muted cry from behind a rock some few minutes before a bloody battle, gloves in his teeth to stifle the noise and eyes cast desperately up to the sky. He likes it slow, a lesson in tolerance, with his fingers below the head and the leather of his belt around his neck, asphyxiating everything - he isn't always sure he likes it, either, sometimes feels like it's the only place left that hasn't been changed by his unending hate.
This is...something else, entirely.
"A-A-Asc...A-Asch..." Luke is trying to say - sounds like he's in pain - and Asch won't look at him, can't look at him. He rolls the skin of an erection that is both his and not his between his hands and enjoys the feel of hips bucking into his own, of small, uncertain noises echoing through his ears. Luke's hands are in his hair again, cold fingers digging crescents into his scalp, threading through the strands, and he is just himself, naked and wild and shaking. Asch backs off, ducks his head down.
"Hold my hair out of my face," he orders, but it's not really an order, and Luke does it anyway. He's gone - too far gone. His breath rattles in his chest like the wind through a cemetery. Asch puts his nose forward cautiously and licks an experimental line up the shaft with the tip of his tongue. The strange sort of choking noise that follows sends an unexpected thrill of pleasure up his spine. He puts his whole mouth over it in earnest, ignoring the reflexive kick Luke gives to the back of his thigh, and focuses his entire thought process on the way it fills his throat - familiar, aching, alive.
It never occurs to him to think of this as 'strange', though if it had been happening to anyone other than himself and the puppet spread out before him, he would have certainly thought it so. It simply...is - it is Luke's hands, and his smell, and the way he is rumbling right now in the back of his throat, a muted hum that dispels his unease and reveals his pleasure. It is eternity in an hour, and the span of six-thousand breaths, now multiplied by two. Luke's hands are not so much holding his hair out of his face as they are holding him in place.
He moves his head in a rhythmic bob and breathes just slightly out of time. The blood rushes to his head and it's hard for him to force the air into his burning lungs, but he doesn't stop. He doesn't dare stop. Even with eternity, there's just not enough time. His own cock stands stiff and unnoticed between his legs - Luke brushes it, accidentally, with his calf, and Asch has to swallow the impending groan. Luke makes up for it with one of his own. The general feels as though he understands the fonons just a little bit better, now - the Fifth one, at least, fonon of fire - and he doesn't care if this is the result of the flame that has burned him away to ash, because he has never been denied his chance to shine.
He keeps moving, because that's all he can do, and he thinks that he is aware of the end even before Luke himself is - hips trembling beneath his cold hands, breaths building in pitch to a single exclamation ("...a-ah...!", or maybe it's 'Asch', shaking and high-strung) - and then there is nothing, save a bitter taste in his mouth and the feeling of half of his body falling away as he slowly brings his other down from afterglow.
Luke lies back, breath exiting him in a tremendous whoosh, and past the line of his jaw the sands inside the hourglass are the flow of water in the moonlight. Not quite an hour. Not quite.
His body itself is still screaming for satisfaction, but Asch stamps down those desires with his pride and straightens his aching back, wincing slightly as he hears it crack. Luke pops open an eye to glance at him, blearily. He is going to ruin everything by saying something stupid, Asch is aware of it. He interrupts before that can happen.
"You exist," he tells him, simply. "So just lay there, and let it feel good, for God's sake."
An almost-smile flits itself across Luke's face. "Nnnn," he says, ever-eloquent, and closes his eyes. Asch puts the pads of his fingers to the bite mark on the replica's neck; sign of ownership, loss of control. He always burns brightest right before he is about to go out.
Before Luke can fade entirely off to sleep, a question blurts itself ungracefully past Asch's lips.
"This hour...to you, at least - did the time just seem to fly by?"
"Of course," Luke answers, instantly, without opening his eyes.
------------------
Asch has nothing else to do, for a change, so he sits there numbly for a few minutes, not even bothering to complain when Luke somehow manages in sleep to find a way to nestle himself between his thighs. Asch pets him, idly, as one sometimes does to a small animal, but even he is not aware of this as he does it - his eyes stay locked on the sand falling through that hourglass, and damn, these minutes are just dragging by.
A few seconds later, he takes his last breath, and gently untangles his limbs from those of his other. Even in sleep, Luke curls against the warmth of where he used to, and feels blindly with his arms out into the dark.
"Sorry," Asch says, impassively, stepping into his pants, dragging them over his legs, buttoning them again. He leaves his belt wrapped tightly around his hands - he'll need it, soon. He casts a last look at the stranger who sleeps in his bed, before stopping in front of the hourglass balanced so precariously on the nightstand. The last diamond falls through the middle to the mountain of sand below.
"I'm out of time."
------------------
It is not at all the same, Asch realizes, some time later, crouched behind a rock in some forest outside of Baticul, belt a collar around his throat that fogs his vision and his pleasure with a haze of seemingly permanent red. He imagines that the hand that is touching him inside his pants is similar, yet not the same as his own. His star burns brightest right before it is about to go out, and he looks at the crimson fall of hair spilling across his chest, and decides that, for as long as he can, he will simply let the stuff grow out. The name that he groans as he finds his release is lost forever to the quiet rustle of the trees in the wind.
It is never quite the same, and damn, how he will miss it.
AN: UH...WHAT THE HELL, MASOCHIST!ASCH. Ugh, I can't believe how long this took me to write, considering how much it blows. And how little actual porn is involved. *sigh* I wish I was cooler. On a random note, I'm actually liking the idea of Asch being one of those autoerotic asphyxiation kind of guys. UM. >___> Not that Van needs any more ideas or anything. Or me, for that matter.
*distraction!* Uh...possible sequel forthcoming? In which Luke returns the favor? THE WORLD MAY NEVER KNOW. BUT I DO KNOW THAT I'M IN UR LJS, SUPPLYING UR PR0NZ.
Title: Andante (Walking Speed)
Author: Lorelei DiAngelo
Rating: R. UM. HOPEFULLY IT WILL STAY THAT WAY. Well, crap on that, NC-17. I've got no sense of self-restraint. *headdesk*
Genre: Angst, angst, angst.
Pairing: Luke/LukeAsch. Uh...did I just spoil the game, here? O.o
Summary: When first a fire blazes, it must then smolder, then go out.
Notes: *GOES TO HELL, WUT* In other news, I have no idea what compelled me to write this. Go figure. *headscratch*
The contamination effect turns him from the light of the sacred flame into a meteorite, blazing brightly across the night sky until he becomes what he is called - Asch - and even as he follows after the shadow of the one who stole his name, he still doesn't stop burning. He can't afford to, for he is, after all, out of time - a thing that adds urgency and terror to everything that he does - and when first a fire blazes, it must then smolder, then go out.
Before that happens, though, he will show them just how brightly it is that he can burn.
He doesn't sleep often - doesn't have the time - but when he does, his dreams are seared with red, a crimson spilling over his hands as blood; or sometimes it is hair, short strands of it twisted between his fingers and meek emerald eyes looking up into his own with resignation and complacency. On those nights he wakes up cold, and short of breath, and wonders if this time, finally, he has crossed the line between arrogance and narcissism.
But a half-lived, half-loved imitation of himself isn't what he wants, not by a long shot, and every day he comes to curse the contamination effect, because he wouldn't be thinking these kinds of things if he wasn't so goddamned out of time.
The red burns away at him until he is black, and he runs along the sky as though he is the sun - ever onward, yet certainly not infinite.
------------------
As he stalks the light of the sacred flame, he is appalled at how often their group seems to travel at walking speed - taking time to speak and rest as though time was a thing that meant nothing to them at all.
Mostly, he watches Natalia, because she at least seems to remember his existence, and because she always, inalterably, will be the thing that gives him reason not to squander what is left of his accursed life. In her eyes, there has only been one Luke, and it is not the replica that walks beside her.
But occassionally, his eyes will follow his other as though they are bound - (they are) - and as his heart starts to race, he has to remind himself to slow down, so that he won't accidentally catch up. He hates everything then - his master, his copy, himself.
What angers him even more is that his faded existence is everything to the replica who has stolen it from him. It is the only thing he wants.
One day, Asch decides to give it to him.
------------------
He has an hourglass that he had won from a game with Sync. He had no love for the Fon Master's fifth replica, but even he could find a kindred soul in someone else with such a discarded fate that he had ended up playing the game anyway. Some stupid game of dice, and Asch had watched them tumble from their cup with eyes that gave away the fact that he was imagining dying in much the same way. Sync - bitter, ironic Sync - had laughed, then, and slammed the miniature hourglass upside-down on the table.
"Tick-tock" was what he had said.
The hourglass itself is a cheap, useless thing, but sometimes Asch will turn it, recklessly, and find himself surprised at how that hour of time always managed to make itself fly by. He figures that to someone allowed to live out their life at walking speed, the sands are nothing more than a diversion from all of the idle hours ahead; that their falling is, undoubtedly, the slowest thing of all. It makes his reactions slow and his sword arm ache.
He usually takes six-hundred breaths for the sixty seconds of sand that spell out the rest of his life, but inside the courtyard of the Fabre manor - enemy territory, childhood home - that six-hundred seems to multiply itself to six-thousand.
Despite that, it is easy enough to sneak past the Duke's careless night guard, and even easier to stand below the window of his old room and call out wordlessly to the usurper that has stolen his bed. 'Hey, reject!'
A startled groan and a thump. Asch ducks behind a bush then and wonders if it is the unusually bright moon tonight that makes his urgency feel like more than that of a simple lack of time.
'Open the window. I'm coming up.'
'Wh-what?! You're here?!' in a frantic whisper, and he can almost see those mirrors of his eyes bulging in disbelief. The weight of the world is reflected in them.
'Where the hell else would I be?!' he retorts, and though logic calmly directs him to the fact that he could be somewhere - anywhere - else but here, instinct simply leaves no room for argument.
Above him, there is a small click as the window is latched open. The usurper looks out the window, and for a moment, all Asch sees is red.
But he blinks, and the other colors appear as well; vivid green and a smudge of black against the white of the moon as a cloud looms overhead, and he stretches his arms up towards the window. He has to act fast, because he simply has no time.
"What...what do you want?" is the first thing his other demands, and it's disgusting to see that, above all else, the idiot looks happy to see him, though he's doing an admirable job of covering it with unease. Asch is, after all, solely the bearer of bad news to him - sees him or speaks to him in his head for little else than that design - but the only bad news he intends to bear tonight is that they are still not friends, comrades, anything, even after all is said and done.
"Are you... Are you here to see Mother and Father?" the imitation is asking, both hope and dread carrying themselves in heavy inflections in his tone; hanging on his face in a way that would have never been so evident on the features of his original. He is wearing Asch's clothes, had been sleeping in Asch's bed. It adds a sickening spill to an already sick situation. Somewhere in the room, there is the ticking of a clock.
"I'm here..." the general starts, then cuts himself off with a growl, hand finding the hilt of his sword somewhat against his will. His replica - no, it was he, Asch, who had no claim to this place now...he'll let the idiot be 'Luke', if only for a little while - notices this, too, and takes a step back towards the bed.
"Are you looking for a fight?" this Luke asks, shaking and defenseless in a pair of Asch's favorite pajamas, and it's all he can do to keep from seeing red rum at the backs of his eyes. The cloud drifts away from the moon, and the two of them are brought into perfect illumination against the dark.
"No," he answers slowly, deathly quiet, and that is that. He takes the tiny hourglass out of his pocket and holds it up to the light, and it has never seemed so frail in his hands before tonight.
Sixty minutes, and what will surely amount itself to much more than six-thousand breaths. He can afford himself this little bit of time.
His gaze swings back to Luke, and he feels like an animal in the dark.
"Strip," is what he says.
"Wh...WHA - ?!"
"Now," he orders, and his tone leaves no room for argument. He swipes back an errant lock of hair with a restlessness he can no longer pretend he doesn't feel. "Those are my clothes, this is my house! What right do you have to them, hunh?!"
It hits the mark, as he knew it would: Luke colors, visibly, and starts to obediently unbutton his shirt. The truth is, Asch could care less about this place, and even less about those inside who chose to abandon him, but there is something he cares about, and it frustrates him that he can't quite put his finger on what. He's just sick of this damnable red.
The shirt pools to the floor with a muted whoosh, and Luke stands silhouetted in front of the window. Around him are Asch's shoes, Asch's books. This fact never seems to get old in the general's mind.
"All of it," he commands, and takes a step forward as though he means to do it himself.
Luke jumps back a bit at his sudden advance, spooked, and his face is as red as his hair. It's...infuriating.
"All right..." he murmurs, resignedly, and hooks his thumbs under the waistband of his pants. Asch tries not to stare too much as they slide over his hips, down his legs. It's a wasted effort. There's something morbidly amusing in watching one's own self undress.
He looks up, and it irritates him that the tyrant doesn't quite dare to look him in the eye. The king of the castle should have pride over his conquered lands.
So -
"Look at me," he orders.
Luke, unsurprisingly, does so. His face is anxious, abject, and filled with shame. Asch has to swallow the series of shouts that threaten to bubble up over his lips. It's an effort to say, shortly, "Come here." But he finds a way to manage it. As though it is incentive, he holds his hourglass out in front of him, watching the sands spill around inside. The light strikes them in such a way that they appear to be diamonds.
"Eh? What's that?" Luke asks, squinting at it, and it calms the general somewhat to see the bodysnatcher take some sort of initiative for himself.
"Sands of time," he replies indifferently, and presses it into the replica's palm. "Turn it over on the night table."
There is a question burning in his eyes, but Luke does as he is told. Asch stares at it, at them, and takes his first real breath.
"Now get over here and get me out of this damned uniform."
At first, Luke looks to argue - (hopes against all hope that he will argue, that he'll in some way think for himself) - but ultimately he rises, and pads softly across the room at a pace that is infuriatingly walking speed.
"...How do I do it?" he asks, hands raised halfway in the air as though in question. Asch smirks, humorlessly, before striking like a snake, grabbing the other's wrists and twisting them painfully in the air.
"With your teeth," he answers, flat.
Luke fidgets, once, before sagging hopelessly in that iron grip, and starting to work dutifully at Asch's collar.
Five minutes and fifty-five breaths go by before he finally gives it up. "I... I can't - " is all he manages before Asch pushes him away, snarling, and sets about removing his uniform himself.
"Of course you can't," he growls, and hurls his tabard to the ground. He undresses in a flurry of ebony and red, so like a whirlwind that it makes him slightly dizzy. Luke hunkers on the floor, attempting to salvage his modesty (or perhaps to avoid the haphazard flinging of clothes), and he makes it a point to look everywhere in the room except at Asch himself.
Asch stalks over and kicks him in the side. He's still wearing his boots, so it has to hurt quite a bit. It will probably leave a bruise. He likes the idea, as now, others will be able to tell them apart. "Watch!" he yells, forgetting for a moment where exactly he is, and at exactly what time of night. "Watch and see! This is how the real one should be!" He digs his fingers into Luke's hair - and damn, it's just like his dreams - and green eyes so very like his own look up at him, accepting and almost reverent. They seem to drink in the lines of his body in the way the ocean laps against the shore. It makes him feel slightly uncomfortable.
For the first time, Asch starts to wonder just what the hell it is that he's doing. He wonders if that idiot is wondering the same thing, too.
He feels sick to his stomach when he realizes that the answer to that question is no, probably not.
He chokes out past gritted teeth, "You do the rest."
There was nothing stopping him from using his hands, but Luke does it with his teeth anyway, eyes closed and breath coming hard. There is a strange mixture of desperation and pain on his face that makes Asch feel something in his stomach twist. He forces it back down with a look at the hourglass - always, inexorably, running out of time. The idiot is adept with his mouth, despite his failure at being able to speak intelligently, and a clever usage of tongue and teeth causes the button of Asch's pants to slip neatly out of its hole; the waistband dips a little past his hips. He doesn't remember it being this cold in his room before.
"Hands," he barks, as he sees those teeth start to draw close to his zipper. Luke puts one on the inside of his thigh as the other works his zipper, and it's all Asch can do to stand up straight. He chews on the inside of his cheek until he tastes blood in his mouth; it's the moon, it's the light of this unnatural moon.
Leaning back a little, Luke lowers the general's pants, and stares wide-eyed at what he finds underneath. Belatedly, Asch remembers that in every sense save physical, this Luke is essentially still a child, and he hates everything even more then. Still holding the replica by the hair, he hauls him upright; spins him such that they face the floor-length mirror that Luke usually keeps hidden behind his door.
"We're not the same," Asch swears, vehemently.
"No," Luke agrees, slowly, almost as if he is amazed. "If nothing else...the scars are different."
They are. Scars from different places, different battles, with different meanings. There are other small things, too. Even without his boots, Asch stands just the slightest bit taller. His hair is just the slightest shade darker in the whitewash of the moonlight, and his eyes are a more murky hue of green. The lines of Luke's body are skinnier, a bit sharper than the bones of his original from an over-excess of training, and his hips are just a touch more feminine.
"Alike, but not the same," Asch says, though he still keeps his fingers buried in the other's hair.
"Close enough for it to never make a difference," Luke points out, despondently, and doesn't even have the time to yell when Asch suddenly backhands him, roughly, and shoves him up against the wall. The phonograph on the table next to them rocks, dangerously.
"Shut up!" he demands, hoarsely, and smells the scent of himself from everywhere around him. "Just...shut up."
He makes Luke shut up by kissing him.
It's hot, unbearably hot against the chill of the room. Luke makes a little surprised noise in the back of his throat but ultimately gives in, whether out of instinct or will or narcissism, Asch simply can't tell. He splits Luke's teeth with his tongue, and finds a taste there that's different from any that he could have expected. It is simply another thing that they do not share - something that is Luke's, and Luke's alone. Asch wonders if somewhere, this wasn't foretold in their walk of destiny.
"Nnnnnngh," Luke says, and that's answer enough for Asch. The red that burns in the back of his eyes isn't nearly as terrible now.
He pulls Luke back from the wall, towards him, and buries his face in the other's neck. Their bodies fit together like lines on paper, and for a moment, Asch has trouble remembering just who it is he is.
"Lie down," he pants, and suddenly it is crystal clear.
It gives him grim satisfaction to see that Luke does not simply drop instantly to the floor, but instead minces quickly over to the bed, though he does seem initally reluctant to leave the fervor of Asch's grip. It doesn't really matter, as the general fills the gap instantaneously anyway, and he pins him down by the shoulders, and he writes any sort of purpose or original intent off as simply lost.
"Until I run out of time," he says, lowly, looking not at Luke but at the hourglass bleeding happily atop the nightstand, "I'll prove to you that you exist."
Luke nods, once, and that too is all right.
The one thing that is surprising to Asch is how slowly the time seems to go. It goes beyond walking speed; it seems to stand still. He takes six-thousand breaths in a second. He kisses Luke - his lips, his eyelids, the lines of his shoulders - and can't find an appropriate channel for his hate. He bites, hard, into the spot of Luke's neck that is just below his ear, and takes a childish pride in the way his other gives out a startled little cry. The blood that follows is red, too, but it helps them tell each other apart, so really, Asch doesn't mind.
"I - " the idiot starts to say, but Asch shuts him up by slamming his lips into his own. He digs his knees into the mattress of his old bed and thinks only of how to get the proper balance. His hands drift everywhere; smoothing, stroking, scratching with his nails as though he can tear off the skin that should rightfully be his. Under the crushing weight of his original's lips, Luke is trying to catch his breath. Asch won't give him the opportunity.
"Silence is a respectable sign for the dead," he reminds him, placing his hand over Luke's trembling mouth. "So just...shut up."
Luke plucks at his fingers, half-heartedly, but doesn't actively try to remove them. For once, his passivity works in Asch's favor. Still, he doesn't move his hand from the other's mouth.
Shifting a bit on his knees, he looks down at creation's folly beneath him, skin flush and cock standing half-erect between his legs, and thinks of himself, doomed to tragedy since birth, and wonders what it will take for them to break free of the chains that bind them. Luke squirms a bit at his sudden examination, but quickly stills when he is pierced with Asch's level stare. The general moves his hand.
"Yes or no?" is what he asks.
Luke swallows, adam's apple jumping visibly in his blood-smeared throat. "O-Only if..." - but he shrinks under that fulminating glare, and swallows again. "...Yes," he says, hoarse and low. He is framed on all sides by the bloody fall of Asch's hair.
"Until my time runs out..." Asch murmurs, almost to himself, and puts his hand back where it was. The other he trails along until it lands on the warm skin of Luke's inner thigh; why is it so goddamned cold in this room? Luke jumps, but doesn't fight. Asch wonders if he will honestly ever fight.
He dips his head and nips the other's collarbone, feeling a hiss of breath drawn through the fingers of his left hand, and it's hard to keep balance with just his knees. He wobbles, dangerously, and finds it best to take the hand covering Luke's mouth away. The only thing that gets louder is the sound of their breathing, and Luke is looking at him more and more now without any sense of guilt or shame. Asch has to look at the hourglass to make sure that a ridiculous amount of time just hasn't simply flown by.
"Can... Can I...?" Luke inquires, breathlessly, hand already stretched upward in the direction of Asch's face, and the general looks at him with an almost comical mixture of resentment and unease.
"Can you...what...?" he demands, but it's weak, and he can only watch with a sort of paralyzed fascination as Luke's hand brushes past his face, fluttering like a bird, and picks out a strand of long red hair that is hanging over his shoulders in a disarray. Luke stares at it for a moment, hypnotized, before closing his fingers over the fiery locks and drawing them up to his lips. He smells it; closes his eyes to it, runs his lips over it, and because he seems to love it, Asch, perversely, wants it back.
"Let go," he says, and tries to draw back; he overbalances, and winds up tipped backwards against Luke's legs, hair stretching painfully. "Let go, I said!" In retaliation, he digs his nails into the inner crevice of the other's thigh, and they stare at each other: one anxious, the other riled.
Asch flips his hair back over his shoulder. "You don't need it," he says.
Luke's arms have somehow wrapped their way around Asch's neck, and he shakes into the other's shoulder. "Yeah, but I wan - "
Wanted it.
Asch raises his hand to Luke's hard-on. "I'll give you something else, instead." He moves.
Luke shudders, and an almighty moan wracks his body - nearly breaks Asch's neck with how hard he's hanging onto it - and the face he makes is one of both misery and bliss. He feels more alive in Asch's arms, in his hands, then he ever has being run through with Asch's sword. One dream bleeds to the next. He's real, and Asch is starting to understand that he is the pale imitation being left behind in the wake.
He puts his face in Luke's neck - (they even curl mid-coitus in the same way, mirrored gemini) - and he strokes Luke's cock, and starts to feel his ever-so carefully constructed walking speed break slowly into a run. It's not at all like handling himself. His is a muted cry from behind a rock some few minutes before a bloody battle, gloves in his teeth to stifle the noise and eyes cast desperately up to the sky. He likes it slow, a lesson in tolerance, with his fingers below the head and the leather of his belt around his neck, asphyxiating everything - he isn't always sure he likes it, either, sometimes feels like it's the only place left that hasn't been changed by his unending hate.
This is...something else, entirely.
"A-A-Asc...A-Asch..." Luke is trying to say - sounds like he's in pain - and Asch won't look at him, can't look at him. He rolls the skin of an erection that is both his and not his between his hands and enjoys the feel of hips bucking into his own, of small, uncertain noises echoing through his ears. Luke's hands are in his hair again, cold fingers digging crescents into his scalp, threading through the strands, and he is just himself, naked and wild and shaking. Asch backs off, ducks his head down.
"Hold my hair out of my face," he orders, but it's not really an order, and Luke does it anyway. He's gone - too far gone. His breath rattles in his chest like the wind through a cemetery. Asch puts his nose forward cautiously and licks an experimental line up the shaft with the tip of his tongue. The strange sort of choking noise that follows sends an unexpected thrill of pleasure up his spine. He puts his whole mouth over it in earnest, ignoring the reflexive kick Luke gives to the back of his thigh, and focuses his entire thought process on the way it fills his throat - familiar, aching, alive.
It never occurs to him to think of this as 'strange', though if it had been happening to anyone other than himself and the puppet spread out before him, he would have certainly thought it so. It simply...is - it is Luke's hands, and his smell, and the way he is rumbling right now in the back of his throat, a muted hum that dispels his unease and reveals his pleasure. It is eternity in an hour, and the span of six-thousand breaths, now multiplied by two. Luke's hands are not so much holding his hair out of his face as they are holding him in place.
He moves his head in a rhythmic bob and breathes just slightly out of time. The blood rushes to his head and it's hard for him to force the air into his burning lungs, but he doesn't stop. He doesn't dare stop. Even with eternity, there's just not enough time. His own cock stands stiff and unnoticed between his legs - Luke brushes it, accidentally, with his calf, and Asch has to swallow the impending groan. Luke makes up for it with one of his own. The general feels as though he understands the fonons just a little bit better, now - the Fifth one, at least, fonon of fire - and he doesn't care if this is the result of the flame that has burned him away to ash, because he has never been denied his chance to shine.
He keeps moving, because that's all he can do, and he thinks that he is aware of the end even before Luke himself is - hips trembling beneath his cold hands, breaths building in pitch to a single exclamation ("...a-ah...!", or maybe it's 'Asch', shaking and high-strung) - and then there is nothing, save a bitter taste in his mouth and the feeling of half of his body falling away as he slowly brings his other down from afterglow.
Luke lies back, breath exiting him in a tremendous whoosh, and past the line of his jaw the sands inside the hourglass are the flow of water in the moonlight. Not quite an hour. Not quite.
His body itself is still screaming for satisfaction, but Asch stamps down those desires with his pride and straightens his aching back, wincing slightly as he hears it crack. Luke pops open an eye to glance at him, blearily. He is going to ruin everything by saying something stupid, Asch is aware of it. He interrupts before that can happen.
"You exist," he tells him, simply. "So just lay there, and let it feel good, for God's sake."
An almost-smile flits itself across Luke's face. "Nnnn," he says, ever-eloquent, and closes his eyes. Asch puts the pads of his fingers to the bite mark on the replica's neck; sign of ownership, loss of control. He always burns brightest right before he is about to go out.
Before Luke can fade entirely off to sleep, a question blurts itself ungracefully past Asch's lips.
"This hour...to you, at least - did the time just seem to fly by?"
"Of course," Luke answers, instantly, without opening his eyes.
------------------
Asch has nothing else to do, for a change, so he sits there numbly for a few minutes, not even bothering to complain when Luke somehow manages in sleep to find a way to nestle himself between his thighs. Asch pets him, idly, as one sometimes does to a small animal, but even he is not aware of this as he does it - his eyes stay locked on the sand falling through that hourglass, and damn, these minutes are just dragging by.
A few seconds later, he takes his last breath, and gently untangles his limbs from those of his other. Even in sleep, Luke curls against the warmth of where he used to, and feels blindly with his arms out into the dark.
"Sorry," Asch says, impassively, stepping into his pants, dragging them over his legs, buttoning them again. He leaves his belt wrapped tightly around his hands - he'll need it, soon. He casts a last look at the stranger who sleeps in his bed, before stopping in front of the hourglass balanced so precariously on the nightstand. The last diamond falls through the middle to the mountain of sand below.
"I'm out of time."
------------------
It is not at all the same, Asch realizes, some time later, crouched behind a rock in some forest outside of Baticul, belt a collar around his throat that fogs his vision and his pleasure with a haze of seemingly permanent red. He imagines that the hand that is touching him inside his pants is similar, yet not the same as his own. His star burns brightest right before it is about to go out, and he looks at the crimson fall of hair spilling across his chest, and decides that, for as long as he can, he will simply let the stuff grow out. The name that he groans as he finds his release is lost forever to the quiet rustle of the trees in the wind.
It is never quite the same, and damn, how he will miss it.
AN: UH...WHAT THE HELL, MASOCHIST!ASCH. Ugh, I can't believe how long this took me to write, considering how much it blows. And how little actual porn is involved. *sigh* I wish I was cooler. On a random note, I'm actually liking the idea of Asch being one of those autoerotic asphyxiation kind of guys. UM. >___> Not that Van needs any more ideas or anything. Or me, for that matter.
*distraction!* Uh...possible sequel forthcoming? In which Luke returns the favor? THE WORLD MAY NEVER KNOW. BUT I DO KNOW THAT I'M IN UR LJS, SUPPLYING UR PR0NZ.