The first time it happened, Mithrun woke up sweat-slick with no memory of having fallen asleep, wrapped tightly in the scavenged sleeping bag. His tunic was bunched up around his thighs and his hair was askew in a crown around his head. It didn’t strike him as too strange, that first time – in the beginning, he’d woken up in a similar state almost every night, sometimes still thrashing and sticky with fear. The episodes subsided along with the bouts of insanity, and the years served as a potent balm, but the dungeons took their toll. Because of this, he was largely unsurprised. He had had a nightmare that he didn’t remember, because he never remembered his dreams. He put himself together and went about his day.

Their routine went as follows: Kabru prepared Mithrun’s food, and Mithrun ate it. Between meals, they traveled, slept, and conversed. Throughout all this, Kabru fussed more than the Canaries. He took the brunt of watch shifts. Before sleep, he’d rub Mithrun’s feet. At what seemed like set intervals, he’d ask Mithrun to try to use the bathroom, pressing the heel of his palm against his bladder while holding Mithrun’s flaccid cock. He’d help Mithrun undress, he’d feed Mithrun by hand, and he’d brush the hair off of Mithrun’s forehead, tucking it out of the way behind what was left of his ears. In some ways, it made Mithrun feel like a prized pet, coddled and spoiled without a second thought to his humanity. Despite this, he’d wake up lighter every morning, free of some shucked weight that he couldn’t remember leaving behind. By an exultant fireside, Kabru drove his thumbs into the tense, corded muscle of Mithrun’s shoulders, and he became dead weight in an instant.

When he woke up disheveled for the second time since the fall, there was a crusted residue in his underclothes that pulled when he shifted. It took him a moment to free his arms enough to investigate, reaching between his layers with some muted cousin of disbelief. Pressing the remaining moisture into the fabric and stringing it between his fingers, he marveled in the simplicity of something that he had written off as the most cumbersome of annoyances when he was in his sixties. He was still oversensitive, even soft, and touching the crown of his penis sent a jolt up his spine. The evidence was undeniable: he had come in his sleep. How long had it been? Forty years? More?

He cupped his cock in his palm and wondered what he should have been feeling. He continued to wonder as Kabru had to help him sit up, unwrapping the blankets and daubing away sweat with his sleeve as he went. It struck him that his caretakers would disapprove of Kabru’s wandering hands, always touching some part of him, gently bringing dead nerves back to life. His skin prickled over, heat and chill oscillating in waves from every place they made contact. Something wordless passed between them when Kabru held Mithrun’s hand up to his mouth, coaxing him to lick it clean. The come was bitter, flavor sticking in his mouth even after he swallowed. Kabru smiled, indiscernible.

When they had brought Mithrun back above-ground, the sun had been too much, bearing down against him like the singular gaze of everything he had tried so hard to want. On the day of his rebirth from the heart of the ground, his body was soft and pale, gaunt in the wake of everything that had been taken. He had been scooped out of his battlefield cradle half alive, something bent past breaking, and he had stared down the sun just to see if he could blind his sight back to life. 

The sun.

Like a sapling, he sought out the sun, staring until he couldn’t. 

“Did you fuck me?” He asked over breakfast, and Kabru only nearly avoided choking on his food. He adjusted quickly, straightening, all the cunning in his eyes flashing once, neatly snuffed. 

He didn’t feign indifference or disgust, instead countering the question with a question. “Do you want me to?” 

“I’m not sure.”

Kabru smiled, guarded and guilty. “I haven’t yet.”

Mithrun nodded. He took a bite, chewing and swallowing. He tasted nothing but come. It was always odd, what reminded him he was alive.

The third time that he woke up out of sorts, the aftershocks of orgasm were still racing through his body. He was naked from the waist down, clothes strewn across the floor along with the blankets, and he was so full that it hurt, breath coming shallow with no room for anything else. 

It came through to him in pieces: Kabru had his legs levered up, palms hot against Mithrun’s thighs where he held him secure. Mithrun could feel his heart rabbiting down to the soles of his feet, in unison with the pulse that he could feel where he was split. They were one continuous circuit with their hearts in sync like this, a beginning and an end. So divorced from like and dislike, all that Mithrun could do was soak in the climbs and falls of sensation, a dozen types of pain and a hundred types of pleasure muddled together into something far too much to ever process. 

It all swallowed him whole when he was wracked with another tide he couldn’t name, punched out of his mouth as he came again, spending across his chest. It made the world a little bit sharper, the dark a little bit darker, and Kabru didn’t stop, didn’t seem to mind, leaning down instead to lave his hot tongue over Mithrun’s spend and leaving patches of cold in his wake. He wasn’t sure whether or not Kabru knew he was awake. It made no difference, really. Buried deep inside of him, Kabru came, spine arching over their joining, and his breath was ragged, and Mithrun couldn’t be sure where he ended and Kabru began. 

The dungeon was quiet in the wake of it, quiet, dark, and still. In this darkness, Kabru’s breath slowed to a gradual lull. He stroked a hand through Mithrun’s hair, and Mithrun closed his eyes again.

When Kabru pressed their lips together, Mithrun stayed lax. Despite everything, it was chaste, nearly affectionate. He felt warm breath brush across his cheek and wondered if he would ever remember what it was to want.

The fourth notable time that he woke up, he was paradoxically light and heavy with something that he could only classify as an ache. Wrapped in his blankets once again, every hair was in its place, and his tunic settled squarely across his shoulders. If he still dreamed, if he still wanted, he would’ve written it off as a flight of fancy, something borne of close proximity and what was probably a great deal of stress. He would’ve sat up, pulled himself together, and resolved to never think of it again, had Kabru not brightened just from catching his eye. He was prodding at the campfire with a spindly stalk of something that refused to catch fire, attempting to cook what may have been meat. 

“Did you sleep well?” Kabru asked. His eyes were such an alarming shade of blue, like the first sky that Mithrun had seen after they’d dug him up. 

Had he ever stopped looking into the sun?