Chapter 2: The Sweater Revelation
The walk to Kankri’s hive was a silent, damp procession. Cronus, shirtless and dripping, left faint puddles on the polished transit corridor floors. Kankri, wrapped in his own soggy shirt like a cape, kept his eyes fixed ahead, his mind a reverberating chamber of his own shouted words. Sit on my face. The phrase played on a loop, each repetition more horrifying than the last. He had weaponized his own subconscious and then bludgeoned them both with it.
His respite block was exactly as he’d left it: a monument to organized neglect. Boxes of pamphlets formed precarious towers. Faded protest banners with slogans like “DIGNITY IN FLUID DISPOSAL” were draped over a busted armchair. A single, flickering bulb in the ceiling fixture cast a strobe-like effect over the chaos, making the shadows jump.
Cronus whistled lowly, the sound cutting through the quiet. “Cozy. Very… archival.”
“It’s a work in progress,” Kankri muttered, automatically defensive. He marched toward his recuperacoon, then remembered it was buried under a landslide of unread comics and a single, oddly dented pillow. The bed was no better.
“I need,” Cronus said, standing in the middle of the room like a stranded, beautiful artifact, “something dry. Before I ruin your… floor.” He gestured at the threadbare rug, already darkening with a drop from his hip.
“Right. Yes. Of course.” Kankri’s brain, still short-circuiting, latched onto the practical problem. He yanked open the lone dresser drawer that wasn’t stuck. Inside lay a single item: an oversized, butter-soft sweater the color of faded moss. It had holes at the cuffs and a patched elbow. He only wore it when absolutely no one could see him.
He thrust it at Cronus without meeting his eyes. “Here. It’s… it’s dry.”
Cronus took the sweater, his fingers brushing Kankri’s. “Thanks.” He held it up. It would be comically small on his frame. “Bathroom?”
Kankri pointed to a door half-obscured by a stack of recycled paper bricks. Cronus disappeared inside.
The silence was worse now. Kankri stood paralyzed, listening to the faint rustle of fabric, the tap of a buckle on the sink. He couldn’t move. The confession had hollowed him out, leaving only a brittle shell of shame and a terrible, aching hope.
The door clicked open.
Cronus emerged, and Kankri’s breath hitched.
The sweater was stretched taut across Cronus’s shoulders and chest, the fabric straining over the defined planes of his stomach. The hem, meant to fall to Kankri’s thighs, barely grazed the middle of Cronus’s. His long, blue legs were completely bare, muscular and exposed. He wasn’t wearing pants. He hadn’t asked for any. The black bikini bottoms were gone, presumably wrung out and left hanging over the shower rail.
Every movement was a revelation. As he walked toward the bed, the sweater rode up, offering a fleeting, devastating glimpse of the curve of his ass. He moved with an unselfconscious grace that felt like a targeted assault.
“Hope you don’t mind,” Cronus said, his voice a low rumble. “The bottoms were soaked. Chafing is a real buzzkill.” He didn’t smirk. It was just a statement.
He climbed onto the buried bed, shifting a stack of comics aside with his foot. He sat cross-legged, facing Kankri. The position hiked the sweater up further, exposing the lean muscles of his thighs and the shadow where they met. He looked utterly at home, a decadent prince in a ruin. The flickering light caught the line of his jaw, the intent focus in his eyes.
“So,” he said. No charm, no pretense. Just a soft, expectant openness. “Tell me about the dreams. Every detail. I want to know what you’ve been keeping from me.”
Kankri felt rooted to the spot. The distance between them was four feet of cluttered floor. It felt like a mile. It felt like nothing. “I… articulated the predominant theme in the hallway.”
“You gave me the headline. I want the story.” Cronus patted the space on the rumpled quilt in front of him. “Come here. You look like you’re about to bolt again.”
Swallowing hard, Kankri moved. He perched on the very edge of the bed, back rigid, as far from Cronus as he could manage while still being on the same surface. He stared at a hole in the quilt.
“I don’t remember them all with perfect fidelity,” he began, his lecturer’s cadence returning as a defensive mechanism. “Dream logic, by its nature, subverts linear narrative and—”
“Kankri.” Cronus’s voice was gentle. “What did I do in them?”
The question hung in the musty air. Kankri squeezed his eyes shut. The images came, unbidden, vivid and heated.
“You were… late,” he whispered. “For inventory. In the storage bay. You had your guitar. You said you were practicing and lost track of time.” He took a shaky breath. “You were… contrite. But in a way that wasn’t sorry at all. You put the guitar down. You walked over to me by the shelving units. You didn’t touch me. You just… knelt. And looked up. And you said…”
“What did I say?”
“You said, ‘Let me make it up to you.’ And then you… you put your hands on my knees. And pushed them apart.”
The room was silent except for the erratic buzzing of the bulb. Cronus hadn’t moved. Kankri risked a glance. Cronus’s expression was unreadable, his gaze fixed on Kankri’s face with terrifying intensity.
“Go on,” Cronus said, his voice barely a breath.
“That’s… that’s usually when I wake up.” It was a lie. A thin, pathetic lie.
Cronus knew it. He tilted his head, a slow, knowing motion. The flickering light deepened the blue of his skin. “Bullshit. You don’t shout what you shouted in a hallway over a dream that stops at knee-touching. What happened next, Kankri?”
The pressure in the room built, a tangible thing. Kankri felt his walls crumbling, the careful architecture of his denial turning to dust. He was so tired of fighting himself.
“Your mouth,” he blurted out, the words scalding. “You… used your mouth. On me. Through my clothes. At first. And then… not.” He was burning up. “You were… thorough. You didn’t stop. And I… I couldn’t speak. I could only… feel. And you kept looking up. And you were smiling. Not your usual smirk. A different one. Like you were… happy. To be there.”
He finally looked at Cronus, bracing for mockery, for that familiar, infuriating arrogance.
It wasn’t there. Cronus’s eyes were dark, his lips slightly parted. He looked stunned. He looked… moved. He uncrossed his legs slowly, the movement making the sweater ride up impossibly higher. He shifted, kneeling on the quilt now, mirroring the dream.
“Like this?” he asked, his voice gravelly.
Kankri could only nod, a frantic, jerky motion.
Cronus moved closer, until he was kneeling between Kankri’s feet on the floor. He didn’t touch him. He just looked up, his face level with Kankri’s clenched hands. “And I was happy,” he murmured, not a question. A statement. “I would be. You get that, right? The idea of making you feel good? Of you letting me?” He let out a shaky breath. “The hallway. What you asked for. Is that… another dream?”
Tears of frustration and want pricked at Kankri’s eyes. He nodded again, helpless.
Cronus let out a slow breath, one that seemed to hold all his frustrated months. “Okay,” he said, his voice low and intent. “Describe that one too. In detail.” He settled back onto his heels, a supplicant ready for a sermon. The frayed edge of the sweater brushed the tops of his thighs. “Start at the beginning. Where were we?”
The room felt airless. The flickering light strobed across Cronus’s attentive face, making the moment feel fractured and unreal. Kankri’s heart hammered against his ribs, a trapped, frantic thing. He focused on a loose thread on the quilt.
“It was here,” Kankri whispered. “This room. But… cleaner. The light was steady.”
“Good start. Keep going.”
“You were… reading. One of my pamphlets on equitable hive-structure taxation.” A faint, hysterical laugh threatened to escape him. “You said it was surprisingly lyrical.”
Cronus’s mouth twitched. “I would.”
“You put it down. You said you had a question about a sub-clause.” Kankri’s fingers twisted in the fabric. “You came over. You took my datapad away. You put it on the pile. You didn’t say anything else. You just… looked at me. And then you… you climbed onto the bed. Onto my lap. Straddling me.”
He chanced a look down. Cronus’s eyes were locked on him, wide and dark, drinking in every syllable. His own body was responding traitorously, a heat pooling low in his stomach at the memory, at the image of Cronus kneeling right there.
“You were heavy. Real. I could feel your weight, your warmth, through my clothes. You put your hands on my shoulders. You leaned in close, your hair brushing my cheek, and you whispered…”
“What did I whisper?”
“You said, ‘Tell me to get off, or tell me to shut up.’” Kankri’s voice broke. “I couldn’t do either. I just… gripped your hips.”
A sharp, quiet inhale from Cronus. His fingers flexed where they rested on his own knees. “And then?”
“You kissed me. Not like in the tank. Not… desperate. Slow. Deep. Like you had all the time in the world. Like you were tasting me.” The words were coming easier now, spilling out of a crack in a dam. “You started… moving. Against me. The friction was… it was everything. I could feel you, hard, through your clothes. You were breathing into my mouth, these little broken sounds. You said my name. Not ‘Kankri.’ My given name. The one I never use.”
Cronus swayed forward slightly, as if pulled. A thin sheen of sweat glistened at his temples. “Say it,” he breathed. “Say what I did next.”
Kankri closed his eyes, surrendering to the memory’s vivid smear. “You slid off my lap. You pushed me back onto the pillows. You hooked your fingers in the waistband of my pants and you pulled them off. You looked at me, all of me, and you said ‘perfect’ like it was a fact. Then you… you moved up. You knelt over my face. You were still in your shorts. I could feel the heat of you, the smell of salt and you. You lowered yourself. Just… just a press. At first. Then more.”
The air between them crackled. Cronus was perfectly still, a statue of focused desire. His chest rose and fell rapidly under the stolen sweater.
“My hands were on your ass,” Kankri continued, the clinical description crumbling into raw need. “Holding you there. You tasted like the ocean. You moved, just little shifts, and I… I forgot how to think. I just existed to… to experience that. The weight. The intimacy. The complete lack of… of transaction. You just… gave it. You gave me that. And you trembled. The whole time, you were trembling.”
Cronus made a choked sound. He dropped his head forward, his long, damp hair curtaining his face. His shoulders were tight. When he looked up, his expression was shattered open, all his usual arrogance vaporized. Need etched every line of him.
“Fuck,” he whispered, the word ragged. “Kankri…”
He was visibly affected. A deep blush painted his blue skin from his chest up to his cheeks. The thin material of the sweater did nothing to conceal his own urgent, obvious reaction to the narrative. A fine tremor ran through his hands where they gripped his knees.
He was dripping. Sweat traced a path from his hairline down the column of his throat, beading on his collarbones. It darkened the soft fabric of the sweater in patches across his chest and under his arms. The humid, charged atmosphere of the confession seemed to have conjured its own heat, leaving him glistening and utterly undone in the flickering, sallow light.