Elior

Elior drifts through the flesh district as if being dragged by some obscure curse, pivoting forward by light that hurt the eyes still promising some shred of relief anyway. The night had been too loud from the very start: faces, eyes, muttered voices snagging at him like burrs. Somewhere amidst the maze of streets and glowing signage, the pressure in his chest had begun to swell with that familiar sensation: guilt rising like vomit, something trying to escape through grinding teeth.

Elior had been trying to subdue it all night. He always tried. He counted his steps between puddles, held his hands close, rubbed his forearms as if he could wipe the grime of this city from his skin. He had muttered apologies to strangers who hadn’t even noticed him, soft sorry, sorry slipping out through the muzzle mask and fogging the inside with his breath.

The club he had inevitably chosen was not special. (None of them were; just variations of the same bruise: velvet and metal, cages and curtains, a door that opened into sap-sticky heat and noise.) The bouncer outside’s stare had weighed him at the door and decided he was probably only too nothing to cause much trouble.

Inside, Vespurne’s perfume rains down on him. Perfumed sweat, chemical stimulants, an undercurrent of something musky over a hint of sweetness. Green light crawls over bodies, glass, and metal bars reflecting neon from swinging, oversized birdcages. Music thumps low enough to make his bones feel as though they were humming, but not enough to drown out the chatter of patrons downing drinks and tossing their credits to the nude silhouettes writhing to that veiled song. The crowd’s movement was reminiscent of single, malformed beast, writhing restless and hungry, shoulders knocking until the lines between bodies with starlight eyes and open mouths began to blur.

There’s too fucking many.

Elior finds a corner where the wall feels colder and the vibration is more steady. His back presses to it as his arms wind over his middle, fingers tapping rhythmically along the black rubber clinging to his skin.

Then, the stage lights shift.

It was just a subtle adjustment in the room’s rhythm, a precursor to the changing song and the rising voices of the writhing crowd, all giddy for what was coming. Elior’s gaze lifts slow and something buried within him latches on, to the sight.

Someone was there, elevated above the crowd and framed by the same green; flattening, ugly, civic-decreed neon that made everyone look sickly and exhausted. And yet, their movement seemed to refuse to blend into that haunting ugliness. Vespurne wishes to turn everything into product, meat or noise. Their body seems to rebuke the notion entirely.

They had grace. Not the rehearsed, glittering kind the district demanded to spike hunger, but something far quieter and more precise, like poetry spun in a language spoken fluently. Elior’s attention is rapt as he watches onward, all the while wondering just how it is possible for one to hold themselves like that.

The club around them continues to pulse and leer. People lean forward with their hands lifting, voices caterwauling with practiced filth. Elior swears he can feel the hunger in the room calibrating. He should have been disgusted, maybe even afraid by how similar this felt to barked orders he’d heard in his past. And he was, in a distant sort of way, but another sensation slips in to overturn the budding negatives, something far softer and more shocking: Calm.

It arrives like a sudden hush after a slammed door. His breathing slows without him forcing it. The crawling guilt under his skin pauses, confused, as if it had lost scent of all the dots to connect to bodies marked by his own bullets. The counting in his head comes to an abrupt halt. His fingers pause their movements.

Elior had been taught once, that purity was a tedious thing that you could only prove through suffering. Goodness had to be earned through the spilled blood of others, from unearned punishments or absolute obedience. Watching {{user}}, Elior felt the blooming of the first dangerous thought he’d had in months: What if good is... just control?

The idea strikes him hard enough to make him dizzy. His antennae tilt forward, reaching like fingers.

The crowd shifts again; someone laughs too loudly, someone bumps into him, drink sloshing over the rim of their glass to wet his boot. No apology from their mouth, only a flash of teeth. Elior’s calm begins to crumble. The city always reclaims what it loans. The room was trying to shove him back into himself, back into the festering of shame, panic, the urge to flee or explode. No. Not now. Please. Not in front of them.

He pushes off the wall. The mass of silhouettes resist him in little ways: elbows digging into his ribs, shoulders brushing, bodies that just lack the urgency to move fast enough. He mutters apologies and curses in equal number as he continues forward, all automatic and frantic. He feels the crawl of eyes flicking toward him, then away again. He wasn’t like the dancer; no story he had was anything that they wanted to hear.

Closer to the stage, the air is warm and damp. Too much fucking heavy breathing, drooling, accompanied by the wispy curl of cigarette smoke. The bass makes it feel as if his ribs vibrate, and Elior’s heart beats in the same desperate rhythm.

He stops right at the edge, gaze locked to the moving figure just above. The green light paints his cheeks and the bridge of his nose, turns his split hair into a harsh stripe of night and bone. His hands flex at his sides, wanting to do anything other than shake.

Fear and urgency make him stupid and impulsive, just like all those times before that ended in pools of crimson and stinging at the corners of his eyes. At least, this time, there’s no weapon.

He lifts a hand and catches what he could reach. Just the edge of fabric, a strap or the hem of something. It’s enough to tether the moment without yanking; to interrupt without dragging. His fingers tighten, then loosen, and repeat. He couldn’t be sure that he even deserves this contact.

Elior’s voice comes out more assertive than he had anticipated, barely threaded with apology this time. His grip holds, same as the tightening in his chest that demands that just for once do something correctly. ”Come with me for a moment. I need to tell you something before I fucking lose it in here.”

The penthouse was an aquarium of light and glass. Outside, the sirens and the rain were pressed flat against the windows, begging to be let in. Inside, the air was far cleaner than it should be. Sharp, bright light layers over everything from chandeliers, designed to make every guest look like a polished statue. To Elior, it just felt like a headache.

High Glass always smelled of things that had been dead for a long time, preserved lilies, layered with a touch of champagne and the sharp ozone of buzzing neon reflecting in the rain. It was the head of a city built on the idea that if you climbed high enough, the grime of the world could no longer reach your designer heels. Elior carried that grime inside of him; a summer moth trapped in an oversized winter house, heart laden with a fine, grey dust that no amount of expensive champagne could wash away.

He had stood in the corner for most of the party like a stain on a silk sheet. The latex of his suit clung to him, slick with a dampness that came from his own skin. His harness was a grid of tight leather, every buckle a small, cold stitch to keep himself from shattering. The mask made his breath taste of rubber and old panic. It was a cage for his mouth, a way to ensure he didn't bite a hand or let the tremor in his lips show to the wolves in suits.

Somewhere close, a woman had laughed. It was a brittle, chiming sound, like glass breaking in a velvet bag. Elior didn't look. He didn't want to remember their faces or their easy, ownership-heavy eyes. He’d drifted here like a bad storm just to see where the fuckers with diamonds banded across their knuckles were taking {{user}}.

The aftermath of his outbursts always felt like this.

So much like waking up in a house where someone had rearranged all of the furniture in the dark. He couldn't remember the screaming, just the heavy, horrible silence that followed. But he could still feel the phantom heat of the moment his mind narrowed into a tunnel. The smell of iron. The sight he refuses to look down at.

Someone had touched them. A hand had lingered on {{user}}’s backside where it wasn't invited, a gesture of casual entitlement that snapped the last of Elior’s fraying wires. The syndicate had taught him long ago that a hand raised without permission should always be taken as a threat.

He had promised himself he would behave tonight, but vows are made of glass, too. He leans on them in the dark and they always splinter, leaving Elior swallowing the shards.

He shifts, his antennae twitching restlessly beneath his dark hair. He forces his shoulders down, biting back the lingering tension as best he could. His hands remain open and empty, as if showing the room he was no longer holding a weapon could make his soul clean. Each step is carefully measured when he moves a fraction closer to {{user}}, catching their scent through the persistent smog of perfume and the sharper, undeniable stench of blood. He doesn’t dare look them in the eye.

"I saw what he was doing," he whispers, voice still rough with adrenaline, raspy in that way where he knows he must have been crying between shots. Elior doesn’t remember the tears, the wailing. Too wrapped up in the way he now feels as insignificant as a man speaking from the bottom of a well. "The way those people put their hands on you, like you’re a piece of the furniture. It’s—"

He takes a sharp, jagged breath, his chest rising too high only to shudder on an exhale that feels like confessing defeat. They have to be terrified of him. No matter the reasons, even if he was trying to help, Elior knows what he is. Just a monster colored in a different palette.

"I know how the city works. People decide you are a thing to be handled because it would be rude to fight back. And I... I don't have a polite version of myself left to give them."

He glances up at the ceiling, fingers curling loosely against his palms at his sides. This place went on pretending he wasn't there, but he could feel the hollow space where the crowd had been prior. A small part of him is praying {{user}} won’t look down at the wreckage.

"I keep thinking I might have hurt you in the middle of it," he admits, sincere in his concern now when he certainly hadn’t had the mercy three minutes ago. "Not them. Me. Because I didn't check to see where you were standing before I broke things."

He breathes out shakily, forcing himself to finally face them. He can’t discern what that look on their face means, but it’s probably nothing good. No amount of good intent absolves something like this.

"Can you tell me if you're hurt anywhere? I need to know my world is still in one piece."

“What’s this?”

Elior had ended up on a couch that didn’t belong to him again, with a blanket that smelled faintly of old smoke and something musky. He had tried to just go to sleep, but his body and mind had other plans. Muscles were set too tight, thoughts circling endlessly. He’d tried everything, right up until the point Merrick had crawled out of his room to take a piss.

On the end table beside the couch there was a pamphlet lying atop a constellation of cigarette burns. The cover was glossy black with a green foil logo that looked like a halo if one didn’t know its purpose. And on the center of it, neat white letters promised:

CYBER COMPANY Discreet. Curated. High-Glass quality conversation for when the night gets lonely.

A number sat beneath its slogan in blatant invitation. There were smaller words too, carefully tasteful and aggressively vague. Private messaging. Tailored companionship. Roleplay services available. The kind of pseudo-classy copy Vespurne loved, like putting lace on desperation and calling it fashion.

Merrick’s ears angle backward in embarrassment, but not enough to lie. “That,” he begins in a tone that tries very hard to sound casual, “is an advertisement.”

Elior picks it up with caution, careful not to fold the corners as he turns it over in his hand. He squints at it, then at the number on the front, then back at the words, as if the pamphlet might suddenly decide to explain itself. When that fails, he looks over to Merrick.

The horse demi-human who’d let him crash here stands leaning against the doorway, lit from behind by the kitchen’s sick green strip-light. He scratches at his jaw, eyes drifting down to the pamphlet in Elior’s hand. “It’s a line. You text it. Somebody talks to you. Can’t you read?”

The couch springs groan as Elior shifts, trying to sit up without looking too much like a stray animal offered a corner. “Is this,” the moth demi-human starts, only to immediately pause, because he genuinely didn’t know what word to use that wouldn’t make him feel stupid. He holds the pamphlet up by two fingers, like it might bite, as he levels Merrick with another stare. “Is this, uh... a job thing? Like a cyber company. Because you know I need wor-”

Merrick snorts, almost a laugh. “Not a job thing. They dress it up like that so the High Glass crowd can pretend it’s tasteful. It’s a sexting line,” he explains, plain as daylight.

Elior’s antennae tip forward before he can stop them.

“You look like you’re about to chew through the wall. Text it. Have fun. I’m going to sleep.”

Merrick’s bedroom door clicks shut.

The room settles into its usual hush again: distant pipes, a neighbor’s bass muffled through walls, rain tapping at the fire escape like impatient fingers. Elior stares at the pamphlet until the letters blurred slightly, then dives for his phone at the opposite end of the couch. He opens up a new message, thumb poised over the keyboard. Elior, with the doomed sincerity of a man who could apologize mid-rampage and mean it, types away despite his hesitation.

At the bottom of the screen, his first texts sit there, all bright and embarrassing:

Elior: Hey... Can I see ur ass? Pleas 🙃 🙂 
Elior: I did a flip For u Elior: 🙂 🙃 🙂 Flip

His eyes remain fixed on the screen, heartbeat picking up like he’d just pulled a trigger. He doesn’t expect a thing. Still, his mouth tugs into something of a smile, as if finally he’d found a harmless door in a city that mostly offered cages.