He breathed in, and choked. The air! It smelled so foul. Full of smoke, damp and...other things, pollutants, which should not have been there at all.
He opened his eyes.
A grey world fell on his senses. The air was grey with fog, the constructions rising out of the mist were grey. The path before him was grey, and streaked with black marks, and even the thing he was sitting on was hard and cold and grey.
“Mind out, there.” A person rushed past, speeding into the fog, nearly knocking Kai back down again. He shrank back, and pulled himself towards the wall, to lean against for support. It was rough and hard behind him, and cold and damp and unforgiving.
“This is...horrible.” he breathed out. It was. A nightmare. How could his father have sent him here? This grey, harsh nightmare world, to find a grey, harsh nightmare man. He remembered the vision he had had before he arrived here, and shook his head to clear it. Probably a hallucination, he told himself. This whole place was mad.
Kai shook his head. He had been told that there were some parts of his own planet which looked like this – relics of the time before the Revolution, when the Elders had become enlightened, and created the civilization they now had. Those wrecked, poisoned ruins, artifacts of their ignorance, were what was killing the planet now. Kai shuddered. He looked up to survey the land around him once again.
He watched a man walk quickly down the street, another pursuing him, calling out harsh invective. He shook his head. The man behind was dressed in rags, and half-starved. How could people treat their own kind thus? No one on Cyanos was starving! He felt rage well up in him, and horror, too. The man was laughing, and seemed quite mad. This place was a nightmare.
Kai shrank back against the wall as more people came past. A machine on wheels moved speedily along the path, lights blazing through the fog. What was the point of that? On Cyanos, nothing anyone needed was more than walking distance away. People built great castle-complexes, with Councilors to administrate it all from the court, and they all stayed there, happily. No-one had any need to race around burning fossil fuels to get to places. He shivered.
“Oi, mind out there!” Someone shouted as he tried to stand.
“He don't look quite right.” Someone sniggered. Kai tried to press himself against the wall, will himself invisible. The words were threatening. The mages had worked their hardest on him, inventing some complex substances that would make him look the pinkish-red based tone of humans, but left his pale sky-violet eyes as they were. Still, he seemed not to look like these people, and it seemed they had noticed.
“I...” He stammered. Speaking the human language of English was hard. They verbalized everything, while people in Cyanos used mostly thoughts, it being universal among all organisms. His thoughts snapped back to the now.
“What're you doing here, eh?” One of the humans asked. He was tall, and built, and had a scarred, leering face.
“You shoulda turned left.” A man behind him said. Like the first antagonist, he was also dressed in dark clothes, and a jacket made of tanned skin, dyed black and sewed with emblems of some kind. He had a metal piercing in his eyebrow, and it looked frightening.
“Yeah.” Someone laughed from behind him. Now there were three of them. Kai willed himself to stand, to not let them see he was shaking. He had never seen such suppressed violence before, such easy hatred. Such joy in doing harm. Reading the thoughts around him was like looking into a hellish scene, filled with brutality and pain. He closed his eyes, willing it to go away.
“I...” he began again, and then his voice dried up.
“He don't talk much.” One of the men commented.
“Let's make him make some noise, then.” The tallest said. He pushed him back, pushing him into the wall. Kai could not help that he cried out.
“Where's your cash, eh?” The man on his left asked, menacingly.
“Yeah.” The man on his right added. He was holding a long length of metal pipe, which he hit periodically against his palm. The violence he intended was written on the air around him. Kai tried to move sideways, and felt his collar caught by the tallest man before him.
“You're not going that way.” He said, harshly.
“No.” The man with the pipe said, and raised it, ready to strike.
“Where's your cash, mate?”
The second question was accompanied by a whistle, as the length of pipe descended, straight towards Kai.
Towards where he should have been.
“Ugh.” There was a solid sound, of a blow, and the tall man crumpled before Kai, who felt himself thrown out of the way. The man who had been on his left was already dazed, staggering back, and the man on the right was running. Astonishingly, the ragged, mad starving man from earlier was capering, laughing, brandishing pipe of his own. Apparently, he had hit the tallest of the men, and felled him roundly.
Kai groaned. How had he miraculously been moved out of the way? How had he fallen? And what, urgently, was resting on his knees, stopping him from moving?
Kai looked up. Into green eyes.
The man stared back. Their eyes met. Kai felt himself drowning in the pale green pools of them, filled with concern, and strength. And love. He could not look away.
“Are you unhurt?”
Kai moved his head slowly. “I...yes.” He moved back, and half sat, feeling dazed. The blow and the fall had not dazed him, but that look was using up all his concentration, making his head thick with whirling thoughts, unable to engage.
He shuffled back against the wall, feeling cold and overwhelmed. He leaned back, shaking, and slowly inched himself to standing. He lay against the wall for support, breathing hard and feeling his heart beating achingly in his chest.
His companion was already standing, dusting himself off. He held out a hand. It was hard with muscle, the joints knotty, as if he spent long hours holding a pen, writing in the cold.
“Hi.” he said. “I'm Callum.” He looked into his eyes again. He seemed dazed, too, though he had recovered his wits a fraction faster than Kai had.
“I...” Kai leaned back. He still felt scared, and angry, and mistrustful. What if all humans were as hate-filled and violence-loving as those? Should he trust him? He pulled himself together and looked at the man before him. He looked back guilelessly. The thoughts that surrounded him were all of concern, and relief, and something intangible, which made Kai feel warm inside. He relented.
“Hi.” He said. “I'm Kai.”
“I'm sorry about that.” Callum inclined his head towards the direction the gang had taken. “If you're new in town, that wasn't the best way to get to know it.” He smiled, deprecating.
“I...” Kai looked down, and then up again, his eyes meeting the green ones. He swallowed. This man was so kind. And that look! He had looked at him with care like he had not seen in years, if ever. This was strange. This was wonderful. However, he could not stop shaking. It was freezing out here, and the shock had made all the blood drain to his feet. Copper was not as good a carrier of oxygen, anyway, and there wasn't nearly enough around here. He felt dizzy.
“Can I walk you home? Or at least to the bus-stop? You can get a taxi, there, maybe.” The man, Callum, was saying. He had reached out to Kai again, offering his hand.
“I...” Kai stopped. The craft had gone. He was all alone. This place was hostile, terrifying. He had nowhere to go, and nothing to live on. He had no idea how the culture here worked, but he could see that there was no central support system, no caring Council to support him until he found his own niche.
“What is it?” Callum asked, voice concerned.
“I don't have anywhere to stay.” Kai heard his own voice crack, and could have wept.
“Oh, no.” Callum breathed. He sounded full of care. “Well, of course you must stay. I don't have a great place, but it's not far from here, and...” His voice went on and on, then stopped.
“You're crying.”
Kai sniffed. Amazingly, annoyingly, perhaps, he was. A te
ar, and then another, ran down his face, streaking his skin and the shirt collar he wore, running down his chest with trickles of icy cold. After all that violence and terror, the simple kindness was too much, by far, to face.
“Come on.” Callum took his hand and, together, they walked the foggy, dirty streets up and around the corner to Callum's apartment, not too far away.
“So...” Callum's voice filled the small space, as he began a statement. It was about ten minutes later, and Kai and Callum were safe in his apartment, two blocks from the place where Kai had arrived. As he listened, Kai looked about him. From here, which must be three or for storeys up, although in the fog he could not see the road below them to judge, the city was already far away.
Inside, the apartment was quite pleasant. Painted a pale cream, with furniture in wheat and golden-yellow, everything seemed tasteful, and more in the mold of that to which Kai was accustomed, if still miles from the palatial surroundings of his birth. It was, however, warm, and pleasant, and completely removed from the harsh, grey streets outside.
“So...” Callum began again, and turned. “You arrived here this morning?”
“Yes...” Kai hazarded. He was not sure how much to reveal, as it seemed imperative, at least from the beginning, that this man knew nothing about him.
“Your company sent you here?” Callum asked. It was almost true, and Kai nodded.
“What?” Callum gave a harsh laugh. “They sent a young man here, with no accommodation, into the hardest part of town, unaccompanied and without help?”
“I...” Kai swallowed. “Yes.”
It seemed best not to argue, and, besides, he was right. They had. The Council, that was, not his company. Since Kai had only a vague idea of what a company might be, he decided to agree. It was some kind of human organization.
“Hell.” Callum breathed, harshly. “And I thought I had it bad.” He whistled. Reading his thoughts, Kai found that he was concerned for him, and angry at anyone who would have treated him like this. This surprised him. He decided to say nothing, and wait for what Callum said next.
“And...” Callum continued. “You need a place to stay for a while, yes?”
“Yes.” Kai nodded. He did. Fortuitous that he could stay here and begin his mission at the same time, he thought, but he naturally did not mention that.
“Well...” Callum swallowed. “You are, of course, welcome.” He was turned away from Kai, deliberately looking across the room and out of the window. Kai read his thoughts. The intensity of them set him reeling.
“Thanks.” he said, slowly. “For everything.” he added.
“I...” Callum turned, sharply. He looked up. His green eyes were tortured. “I...of course. It was nothing.” He turned again and walked briskly back into the room behind them. Kai guessed it to be a food-preparing room. He followed on.
“You'll be staying for a meal, I take it?” Callum said. He looked up, smiling. The openness and eagerness on his face touched Kai. He inclined his head.
“Yes. Please.”
“Make yourself welcome.” Callum grinned. He reached out a hand and touched Kai's knuckles. Kai looked down, and, before he could stop himself, covered the hand with his own.
There was silence in the room for quite some time. Neither of them moved. They looked into each others eyes. Neither looked away. There was no sound, no place, no time. Only them.
“Can I...help with that?” Kai asked, after a moment. Behind Callum, a pot was whistling on the stove, shaking as it boiled, spraying water everywhere.
Callum turned round, sharply, panicked, and then grinned.
“Yes.” He said, green eyes smiling. “I think you can.”
Twenty minutes later, and they were both sitting at the kitchen table. Callum had opened a bottle of what seemed to be their planet's brew of fermented-fruit drink, and they were both feeling mellow. The steam spiraled up toward the ceiling from the plates which had just held their pasta, and the pot rested on the table, steaming gently, in case anyone wanted second-helpings.
“So.” Callum began, voice gentle with the late hour and the wine and food. “I take it that you don't eat meat.”
Kai shuddered, and smiled, despite himself. The meat had appeared, to have Kai shudder and virtually be sick in the kitchen before running out. How could anyone eat a killed organism? He was horrified. Callum had accepted the response, calling it “vegetarianism.” He had put the meat away, and found some green leaves, which he called by the name of spinach. Kai had still shuddered at eating plant-organisms, but had decided that they had no well-understood nervous system and could regenerate themselves, and so reluctantly but resigned, after all this, had sat down to dinner.
It was, he reflected, now, rather good. Callum had made it well – the sauce made the leaves taste good, and the fermented fruit drink was rather fine as well. Darker and more bitter than the one on his planet, but rather good, nonetheless. And at least he was finally no longer shivering.
“No.” He smiled. They both laughed.
“But plants are okay.” Callum continued.
“I guess.” Kai replied, hesitant.
They both laughed again.
“You know,” Callum said, after a minute. “I have never met anyone like you.”
“Thanks.” Kai looked down.
“I like you.”
Kai felt his heart stop. The simple frankness of that hit him hard, worse than his colliding with earth. This man liked him? Truly? Especially since he felt...
“I like you, too.”
They both stopped.
Callum looked up. Carefully, he reached across the table. Their eyes met, and their hands grasped each other’s.
“Thank you.” Callum said, his voice strained.
“Don't mention it.” Kai looked down, awkwardly. Then he looked up, and smiled. The boyish smile transformed his face, shining brighter than the wan lamps above them.
Callum swallowed. “Should we...”
“Yes.” Kai reached across, and took his hand in his. He leaned forward. They kissed.
After a long while, Callum sat back. He looked at Kai, overwhelmed. Kai looked back.
Without a word, they stood.
Callum walked around the short distance, and held Kai close. His arms enfolded him. His body was hard against Kai's. They held each other close.
Kai shivered as Callum's hands stroked slowly down his back. It felt wonderful. He leaned towards him, and felt the hardness of his arousal pressing into him. He longed for him – both to be possessed by him and to possess him. He made the kiss more passionate, moving his tongue so that it slid deep between Callum's lips. Callum shuddered and held him closer still.
He looked up, when they broke the kiss. His green eyes were level and said nothing, and everything.
“Shall we..?” He said, in a harsh whisper.
“Yes.” Kai agreed. He squeezed Callum close, and they stood still for a moment, bodies pressed achingly close against each other.
Together, still embraced close, they walked out of the room and to the bedroom opposite the door.
Callum turned the light off, and turned up the bedside lamp. He walked back to Kai. He held him close again, and they pressed into the next kiss. Arms encircling each other, they fell together onto the bed. Callum huffed in surprise, and they both laughed.
“You are so beautiful.” He breathed, where he half-sat, looking down at where Kai still lay upon his back, looking up.
Callum reached out a hand and stroked his hair, stroking down to his neck. Kai felt himself shiver. He reached up and ran a palm down Callum's own softly-curling hair.
“You too.” He said, softly, and meant it. A human, beautiful? A week ago he would have laughed in someone's face, had they suggested it. Now, he felt only that it was true.
He closed his eyes again, feeling Callum's hand stroke lower as he leaned in towards him, kissing him on the mouth. Kai smiled at the already familiar, but completely unexpected taste of his mouth. I
t was sweet and musky and warm, and the taste excited him. He leaned up, and pulled Callum down on top of him.
“You're mine.” He whispered. He knew what he meant, and he exalted in it. Callum, thinking it was simply an endearment, huffed his surprise again, and stroked his hair.
“I suppose.” He smiled, green eyes sparkling, and kissed him again. He sat back. “I am yours, and quite pleased about it.” He laughed. Kai, utterly amazed, blinked. Did he mean it? This strange, fascinating human man? Was he really happy to be Kai's mate, after all?
“If I am yours,” Callum continued, “you're mine. And, frankly, I like that thought.”
He chuckled, and drew Kai against him. Kai shivered, and moaned. He could feel Callum's hands stroking down his back, feel the hardness of him pressing into his thigh, could feel the lean muscle of his body, contracted, as he leaned down to kiss him again.
Kai sighed, and stroked his back. “Callum.” He said, delighting in the sound of the strange name in his mouth.
“Kai.” Callum replied, sounding hesitant. The name was strange to him, too. He leaned in and kissed him again, wrapping strong arms around Kai's form.
Kai moaned, and pressed up against him. He enfolded him in his arms, too, and rolled abruptly sideways, so that Callum, who had been on him, now crashed, frowning, to one side. He looked into his eyes, surprise flaring there, and grinned.
“As you would.” He smiled, and held him to his chest. Kai, feeling deep warmth engulfing his body, his whole form shivering, smiled.
“Good.”
They lay silent for a while, bodies grinding against each other as they each pressed closer, in a bid to see who could get the closest, it seemed. Kai smiled.
“Turn round.” He whispered.
Callum shivered. “If you say so.”
Kai, smiling, pulled his most princely face. “Yes.”
Callum grinned, and they both laughed. He turned, as he was instructed to do.
Kai held him close, moving a gently hesitant hand down his back. It was hard with muscle, the spine buried under twin cords of tendons that spiraled along it.
“You are beautiful.” He breathed, and kissed his neck.
Celestial Seductions: The Complete Series: An MM Gay Paranormal Mpreg Romance Collection Page 15
