The World Before: MM Romance

by Primrose, Ella

  “I can’t die,” Brath assures him, calming the heightened pace of Mathieu’s pulse. “I could perhaps tear myself to shreds from inside out, but I guess that would just destroy this body and my soul would remain.”

  “Lovely image,” Mathieu comments, but then he lets out a relieved breath and touches Brath’s back, traces a finger down his spine, and Brath twists his head, brushes his lips across Mathieu’s collarbone, making him shudder. “Why are you asking though?”

  “Just curious,” Brath says.

  Mathieu hums. “I thought it was pretty obvious I don’t want you to go anywhere.”

  Brath buries his face against the soft curve of neck and shoulder.

  “I don’t want you to go anywhere either,” he breathes. “But you will. Inevitably. Eventually.”

  “That’s life though, isn’t it?” Mathieu muses and for some reason, his apparent indifference towards the matter is making Brath feel uneasy. “It’s got to end.”

  Brath pushes himself up to his elbows and turns his head, fixes Mathieu with an inquisitive stare and tries to soak him up at the same time. He was convinced that once he got close enough, his intoxication, his infatuation with him, with his being, with soul, would slowly falter and disappear and he would move on. But somehow, it’s grown stronger, and the scent of him is even more captivating, more hypnotizing, and Brath doubts that he will ever grow tired of sensing Mathieu’s soul close to his.

  “But it’s only a fraction,” he says. “One life is nothing against the backdrop of time’s course. It’s barely worth mentioning.”

  But Mathieu seems untroubled. “Isn’t that the beauty of it?”

  “I find it a cruel joke,” Brath replies and reaches out a hand to touch the side of Mathieu’s face. “To spend one’s life trying to find purpose and happiness when eventually, it doesn’t matter, because as time passes, nobody will remember, and it will all be forgotten like it never was in the first place.”

  “I guess you’re a glass-half-empty kind of guy, huh?” Mathieu smiles and laces their fingers together against his cheek. “You shouldn’t be so negative.”

  “I'm just realistic.”

  “Probably,” he admits. “But if all people thought like this, then we’d be a civilization of under-achievers, wouldn’t we? And we would have never gotten anywhere in the first place. One life might not be much, but there were plenty of people who made a difference.”

  “I assume so. Da Vinci was a pleasant enough fellow and—”

  He stops when Mathieu places a finger over his lips.

  “Oh no, don’t even go there,” Mathieu says firmly. “This entire conversation is weird enough as it is without you bringing dead, historical people into it,” and he drops his hand and sighs again, deeply this time, expression morphing into something more serious. “Why are we even talking about this? It’s either too late or still too early for deep stuff and didn’t we agree to just go with it and not talk about this?”

  “What would you have me do then?” Brath asks, and he can feel his skin shrinking, becoming too small for everything it holds, and he does feel angry for some reason, and frustrated, and bitter, and he wants to seize Mathieu by the shoulders and shake him until he understands.

  But Brath should not even try to make Mathieu grasp what is troubling him; he shouldn’t have assumed that his mind could understand such concepts.

  Nevertheless, he can only continue. “Would you have me gaze upon your fading form and not lift a finger?”

  Abruptly, Mathieu sits up, and Brath is just quick enough to react, or else their heads would have collided in a very unpleasant way. He scrambles back, duvet sliding off his shoulders and comes to sit on his heels,

  “Brath! I’m not going to die tomorrow. I drink a lot of coffee and I’m probably not the healthiest person about, but I think I’ve got some years left in me.”

  “What if you wouldn’t have to die at all?”

  It’s dead silent for a moment before Mathieu takes a noisy breath and rubs his hands over his face repeatedly. “Fucking hell, this is insane,” he mutters, voice distorted by his fingers. “Brath. You need to stop. I’m trying hard, I am, but this… it’s insane. I’m not one of those people who yearn for immortality. I’m quite at peace with the fact that we are not going to live forever and you can’t—”

  “Don’t,” Brath cuts him off. “Don’t tell me what I can’t do. I can, and I will and—”

  “This is my life you’re talking about. Mine. And you can’t decide on my behalf. I don’t even want to think about this, okay? So please, can’t we just—” and this time he stops by himself, freezing as he gestures about. “Shit, this is bothering you, isn’t it?”

  Brath feels a violent shiver working its way up his throat, and now he wants to dig his nails deep into this skin and tear this damned body apart to be free of its limits, of its confinement. Brath stills at a trickling sensation on his face, something pearling down his cheek. Mathieu is closer than he’d been a few seconds ago and he reaches for him, and Brath wants to flinch back, but he doesn’t move as cautious fingertips brush a single, lonely tear off his face.

  “I’m sorry,” Mathieu says quietly. “I… I didn’t want to—I guess we’re both new to this and… oh crap, can you just come here.”

  And just as Brath had wanted to seize Mathieu’s shoulders before, Mathieu grabs him and pulls him against his body. Brath lets him, allows the turmoil inside him to lash about for another few moments before returning the touch, before clinging onto Mathieu as a drowning man would hold onto a rope leading to a distant shore.

  Brath hates it. He hates what this vile place has made of him, what it’s turning him into and he hates that the sheer idea of losing Mathieu, of being left behind by him, is reducing his mind to a seething sea of flames. He hates that with a few whispered words and a few lingering touches, those flames die out and disappear and he hates the fact that Mathieu wants it to be this way.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” Mathieu says, pressing his lips to Brath’s for a brief second. “There are counseling books for everything, but not for this, so… Maybe a year in a life doesn’t seem long to you, but it is to me. And if it upsets you, we can just ignore it, all right? Face it if we ever get there, you know?”

  Brath lets himself be soothed by Mathieu’s voice, finds his anger washed away and replaced with a quiet, but deep-seated determination to not ever let it get there at all.

  14

  Mathieu

  Mathieu should be disturbed by everything. Start to finish, freaking out, losing his shit and his mind. But he’s not. He is frighteningly calm considering—yeah, and that’s the problem: he doesn’t quite know. Things are happening with sheer lightning speed, rollercoaster ride, skyrocketing; all perfectly fitting descriptions.

  So maybe he’s freaking out because he’s not freaking out about fallen angels and falling for fallen angels and fallen angels who might be falling for him also.

  All things considered, it shouldn’t be surprising that Mathieu is battling a massive headache.

  * * *

  “Seriously, Mathieu. Don’t get on his bad side,” Perry tells him. Mathieu doesn’t even know why the cupid keeps bothering him, why he just appeared in his apartment out of thin air and scared the shit out of him. Maybe because he’s figured out that he doesn’t want to bring love to people, but misery. Shit-eating misery. “You do not want to get on Brath’s bad side.”

  “Why?” he asks, just because he’s curious. He wants to know what he is dealing with. “What’s the worst he could do?”

  Perry just distractedly takes a peanut from the bowl Mathieu has set out on his living room table because he’s writing and he forgets to eat when he does that, and it’s a thing Jakob started just to get food into him. “Well,” he says. “The last ex who broke his heart, figuratively speaking, was called Orpheus and he got ripped to shreds. Bloody shreds. Horrible mess.”

  Mathieu pales. “Orpheus, as in—”

/>   “He was Greek. Was a while ago. Never liked him anyway. He was weird. So yeah, don’t, you know—upset him. Brath knows how to bear a grudge.”

  “Right,” Mathieu says and watches as Perry weirdly chews on the nut and pulls a face. “Look, I don’t plan on hurting him, or upsetting him. But what if that happens anyway? Without my fault. And by the way, I can’t believe I am asking you for advice, just for the record. I’ve had a tough week.”

  “What? You’re just realizing now that things might get complicated?” Perry laughs. “And everyone always says I’m dense. I thought you were a smart one, Mathieu. Brath wouldn’t like you if you were stupid.”

  “I’m not stupid,” Mathieu scoffs. “I just… Well, how am I supposed to know what to do? What to expect? I didn’t think that—”

  “You would end up liking each other as much as you do?” Perry interrupts him with a smile and Mathieu is glad that it’s a sympathetic one at least.

  “Love is my area of expertise. It's why God made us. We balance out the Devil's evil seed he sowed when mankind was made.”

  “Love, huh?”

  “Yup,” Perry replies and pats him on the shoulder.

  * * *

  Mathieu hasn’t had nightmares since he was a kid and broke his leg playing football. For just one year, he’d dream of invisible hands crushing and twisting his bones, and he’d wake up screaming for his parents. The dreams had stopped as soon as he started playing again and he hadn’t wasted much thought on them until now. Because lately, Mathieu finds himself dreaming and he always remembers when he wakes, and he doesn’t want to point fingers, but he wonders if Brath might be the cause for them; if Brath can send them to him.

  Two weeks pass, and every night Brath is not with him--off doing whatever it is fallen angels do in their spare time--, he dreams. And it’s not abstract or vague or even illogical in any sense of the word. It’s frighteningly real, which is why Mathieu starts to think they might not be dreams at all. He keeps seeing Brath in his dreams, knowing it is him without bearing any resemblance to the Brath he does know. And Brath is in pain, he can see it in his eyes, and he is screaming, voice cutting deep into Mathieu’s mind; so deep that he wakes up and aches all over.

  He sees Brath fall and sometimes he only sees darkness for hours and Mathieu feels so cold that it takes a few cups of boiling tea in the morning to stop his body from shaking. There are vague noises but shapes so clear and overwhelming it shortens his breath and makes him gasp for air in his wake.

  He sees Brath on a battlefield, surrounded by light so harsh and burning that a few remaining survivors around his form groan and burst into flames and then there are dark shadows coiling up like a black tongue, and they swallow and consume everything.

  A voice is in his head, and it frightens him like nothing has ever frightened him before. Mathieu wants to reach out and drag Brath away from all of this, erase all these memories and images and make him understand that there is something other than pain in this world; that there is more to life than dishonesty and deceitfulness.

  And then sometimes, he dreams of Jakob. He dreams of him standing out of reach and smiling so sadly it tears a hole into Mathieu’s heart, and then he bursts into a million sparks that disappear like shooting stars.

  He doesn’t want to tell Jakob any of it. For the first time in his life, he wants to hide everything from him. But it’s just his luck that it doesn’t matter, that Jakob knows and how; Mathieu doesn’t want to linger on it; he just thinks that Jakob looks tired and torn like he has broken into the pieces Mathieu dreams of so often now.

  “You need to get away from this,” Jakob tells him with urgency, one that makes Mathieu’s insides clench.

  “I think it’s too late for that.”

  15

  Mathieu

  Mathieu doesn’t know much about love. He’s never really concerned himself with it; it has never bothered him that he’s not that big on feelings.

  He loves his family; his mother who was always warm and caring and his father who’d worked his ass off in the mines so that his children could attend University and never want for anything growing up, and his sister although they’d never really seen eye to eye in a lot of things.

  Mathieu thinks he might have loved Solomon, but not enough or else Solomon wouldn’t have complained about it so much, wouldn’t have left eventually to pursue his own life someplace else.

  Mathieu is pretty sure he loves Jakob—well, he knows he loves Jakob; it’s the exact definition of that love that will forever remain a mystery for him. And now that Brath has come into the mix, Mathieu is even more confused than ever about the actual concepts of love. It’s why he never writes about it either, why he never makes it essential to his stories. When Mathieu creates characters, he doesn’t make them fall in love because he just doesn’t know how people are supposed to fall in love. It’s different for everyone, of course, it is, but Mathieu is pretty sure it follows a few general rules, crosses the same points off a list.

  Nothing concerning Brath can be crossed off a list. And the honest to God truth is that Mathieu knows how he feels about Brath; knows how Brath makes him feel. It doesn’t necessarily translate into knowing what that is, exactly.

  Sometimes, things are painfully normal and peaceful. Sometimes, they will have breakfast in bed, mostly consisting of Mathieu drinking coffee and Brath watching him, because Brath might like to eat, but he doesn’t have to, and Mathieu has yet to figure out in what patterns Brath’s appetite works. Come to think of it, Mathieu doesn’t think Brath has to sleep either. He’s always there when Mathieu wakes up, so maybe he’s just being paranoid about things, but there is always something different about him; the smell of sun on his skin, a hint of dust covering his hair, a few snowflakes still clinging to his lashes. Mathieu wonders where Brath goes, but mainly why he comes back when he can pick anywhere and anyone in the world over him.

  Mathieu might not get why Brath comes back (but that’s a lie because Mathieu does know, he just doesn’t want to admit it and make it more real), but Brath does regardless. And Mathieu might not know much about love, but he thinks waking up to Brath looking at him is a whole lot like it.

  Most of the time he forgets who Brath is. Most of the time he forgets that there is a God and heavenly creatures and a large cluster of things he doesn’t know a thing about. He guesses if he’d thought about it, it would blow his mind and so he doesn’t get any further than shocked and confused, because deities, much like love, are so far out of his mental and emotional comfort zone that he doesn’t have any words to describe it.

  He looks at Brath when he is pretending to sleep in front of the TV, and he just can’t comprehend how he can be what he is: this immortal creature containing all of Heaven’s wrath and who once knew nothing but death and punishment. But he still shudders a little when Mathieu kisses him, who sighs and looks on wondrously if Mathieu is anything but rough. It’s surreal, simply put, and perhaps Mathieu is screwed up like that when he finds himself fascinated and weirdly turned on by the fact that once, long ago, entire nations knelt down and worshiped Brath like the heavenly avenger he possibly still is inside.

  “I think there’s something wrong with me,” he tells Jakob over the phone when Brath is—somewhere (Mathieu tries not to think about it too much).

  “Nothing new to me,” Jakob replies.

  Mathieu clears his throat. “No, but seriously. I think my brain and logic have disconnected somewhere along the way. Which, to be fair, isn’t a surprise at all. But—yeah, there is something wrong with me if I find this whole avenging-for-God thing turns me on, right?”

  Jakob groans on the other end of the line, and it’s not the groan Mathieu’s grown accustomed to hearing.

  “If I tell you no, will you leave me alone?”

  “No,” Mathieu states flat out and moves into the kitchen to roam through his cupboards; he finds Brath’s sweet tooth rubs off on him. “I know you’re not a fan of Brath, I think not many peop
le would be if they knew who he is—but Jakob, you’ve got to suck it up and be a little more appreciative.”

  “Why?”

  “Because your brain would still be scrambled eggs without him. Hell, you would’ve probably been scrambled eggs by now.”

  “I know."

  Mathieu smiles. He finds the box of biscuits that’s been in one of the drawers for ages now; he’s surprised Brath hasn’t found and emptied it yet. “I mean it though, Jakob. I'm absolutely serious. He helped you, and I doubt you told him thanks.”

  “Not like he did it for my sake,” Jakob mutters, and Mathieu can practically see him scowling as if he were standing right beside him in his kitchen.

  “Why else would he help you?” he argues, tearing into the paper box, fiddling it open with his fingers. “It’s not like he got anything out of it.”

  “Is that what he’s telling you?”

  Jakob sounds condescending, and Mathieu doesn’t like it one bit. They’ve been there before, kind of; Jakob the ambitious professional, the serious journalist with publishing ambitions, looking down on Mathieu and his fictional stories. Well, maybe he is unfair, perhaps he is exaggerating when he thinks of it as Jakob being snotty about it—it had just felt that way. Mathieu is aware that Jakob’s brains are hard to match, but that doesn’t mean everyone else is a delusional fool.

  “Don’t patronize me,” he says nonetheless, growing frustrated with this conversation (why did he even ring Jakob in the first place, it’s not like he wasn’t aware of the fact that Jakob is not exactly Brath’s biggest fan), growing frustrated with that stupid plastic wrapper keeping him from satisfying his chocolate craving. “I like him, get over it.” Jakob snorts, and it makes him slam those bloody biscuits down onto the counter in a temper. “Is that so unbelievable to you? That I genuinely like him? I wouldn’t be getting into this crap otherwise, all right? And is it so hard to believe that he is interested in me too?”