HORNS (BoyXBoy)

Chapter 107

It was the only good in a universe of darkness and bleak despair. 

I was half-terrified that it would suddenly stop, disappear, vanish from me just like the thread that had been cut... but confusion touched my head, lucid for the first time in a while, and I wondered why I was thinking about threads at all. 

What thread had been cut? Why did I feel like a thread had been cut? 

I didn't know. But with every thump, the roaring chaos grew softer, calmed, and the beats grew louder, warmer, and safer. In the dark, I felt something... saw something, even. A coil of gold and a flicker of stars, a hint that I wasn't alone even in the darkest of universes, reminding me.

Every beat was steady, like a drum, a pattern that called to me, that breathed life to me, that reached out through the dark like a set of hands, reaching for me, flailing to snag something, anything connected to who I was... and I felt it catch. On me. In me. Furling in, clutching me tight, and fighting to pull me from the void I'd fallen into with every beat of that drum.

Thu-thump. Thu-thump. Thu-thump--

I twitched, roused with a jolt, eyes so heavy I couldn't even make them flutter. I inhaled deeply, but caught nothing... there was no scent, or maybe there was a bunch all mixed together, I couldn't tell with how disoriented I was. The first thing that came to me was how warm I was.

Heat radiated through every single one of my limbs, making me feel alive.

It was almost weird how normal I felt.

After the fight I'd had with Pop, I hadn't felt this warm at all... not even once. 

Then, I heard it. Rhythmic thumping against my left ear, loud and steady, and with that recognition came the sensation of my cheek against warm, bare flesh. Confusion muddled me and I focused, swallowing past an ashen tongue while I catalogued what was happening to me.

I was under a blanket of some sort, and from the feel of things, I was in a bed... but it wasn't a mattress I was lying on, it was a person. I felt bare skin against my stomach and chest, and I could sense that my legs were nestled between someone else's, but it wasn't Echo.

I didn't feel the same sparks that came to me whenever we touched, plus, whoever was beneath me had a much warmer body temperature than him. The chest beneath me rose and fell at an even, soothing rate. It was lulling and peaceful... so soothing, in fact, that when movement combed through my hair I nearly jumped. I fought not to shiver as gentle fingers caressed me.

I inhaled again, weakly rubbing my cheek against the skin keeping my flesh warm. The person touching me went completely still. The heartbeat in my ear quickened and there was an inhale that made my body shift.

"Big Horst?" a quiet voice tentatively rasped, vibrating my ear and sending warmth shooting through me, melting through the veins of ice that still lingered inside me. "Big Horst Avake?"

My head slowly began to clear and with a herculean amount of effort, I peeled my eyelids open and squinted at the real world for what felt like the first time in a thousand years. I blinked very slowly and carefully, trying to get my bearings and figure out what was happening.

I didn't recognize the room I was in at first, mostly because of the furniture, and it took me almost two minutes to compute that I was most likely in a guest bedroom somewhere on the bottom floor of Sebastian's plantation house. I shifted my body a little, then stopped.

I blinked, then blinked again, then slowly lifted my head. My cheek had fused with the skin it had been resting on and the way it peeled off was a little gross and sweaty, but I unstuck myself and flitted my ears around, listening and waiting and trying to make sense of everything.