A Strange Kind of Hunger | FIRST DRAFT

Invasion

Once they get Jesse settled down, there's an uneasy silence. Robert sits in his chair, taking a drag from an elegant pipe; the motion makes Jonathan's skin crawl. Dying of tuberculosis and smoking a pipe like he doesn't care about anything.

"Stop that," Jonathan says, not bothering to even slightly mask his irritation. "Do you want to die?"

Robert shrugs. His hair has come loose from its bun, curling onto his shoulders like strands of spun copper. Like a Rossetti painting Jonathan saw once, and keeps seeing again whenever he has the misfortune to glance across.

"Maybe."

"Bastard. Give me that."

Reaching across the crate that serves as a coffee table, Jonathan snatches the pipe and dumps its contents into the fire. He ignores Robert's outraged look; he can't bear to watch the man he used to love hasten an agonising death.

Sure enough, Robert falls into a desperate coughing fit, breath rasping in the back of his throat, eyes betraying wild panic. He grips the arm of his chair to try and stead himself as the coughs rip through him. Even through a shirt and waistcoat, Jonathan can see his every muscle stretched taut over protruding bones, trying to get the fit under control. Once it finally tapers off, all he can do is fall back against his chair, fever-flush even more prominent.

"Maybe I do want to die." His voice is raw, from the coughing or something else. From an emotion that scrapes from the depths of his starry soul.

"Don't say that." Jonathan wants to say more, tell him just how much of a void he will heave, how much of the cosmos will die with his beautiful mind, but the words never come. He's too tired, too sore, too angry.

"Maybe I'm tired of waiting. Maybe I'm tired of not being able to laugh without coughing up a lung as well. Maybe I'm just so damn sick of knowing I'll never have a future, and watching you piss yours away." Robert's voice is laden with bitterness, with vicious frustration.

"I'm not pissing my future away!" Jonathan isn't in the mood for an argument; he's tired, he's cold, he doesn't want to wake Jesse, and he doesn't want to have to consider whether Robert is right.

"You are. You hate small-town practice, you told me that the very first day we met — and yet here you are. Pissing your life away in some pathetic town, for what? The satisfaction of being more miserable than everyone else?"

"I—" Jonathan had a retort at the ready, something biting that would draw blood in a way only he could. He can't bring himself to say it. "I don't know."

"You always had such grand dreams. Such exact visions. What do you want, Jonathan?" Robert's eyes burn with the urgency of someone who knows their time is running out. "Tell me."

In that moment, in that crystallized, fossilized moment, Jonathan sees everything clearly. He sees Mary-Ellen, married to a fresh-faced, young lumberjack; he sees the creature in its horrifying, stunning glory. He sees all the eldest Goodwin brothers, the protector and the destroyer; he sees Robert as he was, when liquid starlight seemed to fall from his lips — and he sees Jesse. Jesse whose confession in the woods, when he was sure he was about to die, was that he wished he could have lived more. Jonathan sees, and he knows exactly what he wants.

"I want you both. If you'll have me."

They're kissing before Jonathan has time to regret it; Robert pulls him into his lap, and it feels like a throne. Hot, desperate lips meet in a confusion of tangled ecstasy until he can scarcely tell the difference between his own raging desire and the sticky heat of Robert's body, pressed so close it seems more a part of Jonathan than his own, roving hands. Every bit as rough as Jesse, yet somehow as slick and quick as whiskey from a bottle, Robert's hands slip under Jonathan's shirt and he is burning. Consumed, completely and utterly, by a feeling too blindingly intense to be heavenly, yet all too perfect to possibly be hellish.