InsaneJournal

The smell of coffee was almost overpowering from where he sat, tucked up at the small table in their small kitchen in their small house. Bland white light filtered through the kitchen window curtains. The sun hadn’t quite managed to fully break through the clouds. Ramayan had watched the sunrise earlier with vague disappointment—potentially the last sunrise he’d witness in the human realm and it had been a non-starter.

In the end, he’d chosen poison as his method of murder. It had been a surprise to learn that humans regarded poison with derision. A woman’s weapon, he’d heard it called. As if it were less masculine to make a man foam at the mouth and expire violently. Ram chalked it up to humans being a bloodthirsty, fickle bunch and had concocted his poison without shame. Guilt, yes, but no shame.

Ram stared at the vial in front of him, eyes aching from fatigue. Sleep came rarely to him now. Since their fight he’d been a ghost in the house, slipping away whenever he felt Shane near. He didn’t want to speak to him. He didn’t want to see him. Either of those things might have broken his resolve. He had to remain firm in the knowledge that Shane would not let him go. Shane had to be cut loose first.

The pull of anxiety in his chest at the thought was accompanied by a warning tingle from the band sealed around his arm. He tapped the tiny vial on the table nervously. Ram knew that any deliberate lethal action would be stopped immediately by their contract, but poison seemed the perfect loophole. If he added it in before Shane poured his own coffee, wouldn’t it make Shane responsible for his own demise?

And it would be just that: death. Ramayan knew poisons well enough from his time in the Fae realm. Making one with the human equivalent ingredients had taken some days, but the result was a clear, fruity-smelling liquid that would act as a paralytic. Shane would drink it, his muscles would stop moving, he would stop breathing, turn blue, and then die. Ram had already decided that he would watch it all happen—his own private punishment for killing the man he’d come to care so much about.

At the first sign of stirring from the bedroom, Ramayan jerked to action in his seat. He uncapped the vial and dumped it in the empty coffee cup, then tilted the mug to coat the inside with lethal liquid. The band around his arm remained quiet. Ram’s own head was full of his thundering heartbeat. He nudged the coffee pot closer to the empty mug and leaned back in his chair.

Shane just had to pour himself a cup and drink it. It wouldn’t be Ramayan’s fault. No one would think to suspect him. Shane had so many enemies already. Why would his djinni ever hurt him?

As Shane entered the kitchen, Ram felt his own chest seize up at the sight of that gem-like, beautiful blue stare rimmed by impossibly thick lashes. I don’t want to do this, he thought. I don’t want to watch life leave those eyes.

But what other choice did he have?

The djinni gripped his own mug like a lifeline and mumbled a good morning at the table. He forced himself to sip the coffee he’d made and remain still.

Shane entered the kitchen rubbing the sleep from his eyes, still dressed in a simple tank and boxers, his hair ruffled and unruly, looking for all the world like he’d simply tumbled out of bed that morning and rolled into the kitchen. The sound of Ram’s voice made him start as he looked up, surprise registering briefly on his features as he took in the sight of his djinni sitting there at the kitchen table.

As if he hadn’t been avoiding Shane the last few days, making himself scarce whenever Shane entered the same room. As if he hadn’t reverted to the same sort of blank existence that he had back when they’d had their first literally explosive argument.

“Good morning,” Shane returned instead, proud of himself for keeping the bemusement out of his voice as he reached for the coffee cup and already brewed coffee as was his usual routine in the morning and poured himself a fresh cup. He placed the filled cup right in front of him on the table’s closest edge and dragged a chair out from the opposite end of the table across from Ram.

Then he sat down, lifting his eyes up towards the djinni who remained silent, looking on with his own round, guilty eyes.

“I’m surprised to see you sitting here,” Shane began softly, painfully honest, lifting the cup to his lips but not drinking. Not just yet.

Ram thought his heart might literally burst at the way it sped up when Shane lifted the mug. His gaze zeroed in on the closeness of the mug to his mouth, the way that at any moment he could be unknowingly ending his life. He wanted to shout out or shake Shane by the shoulders and ask why did it come to this? A force outside of himself slid against his bones, a silky touch that promised malevolence if he didn’t adhere to their contract. But Ram was frozen, stuck mapping every pore of that sleepy visage to memory.

Whether it was the deliriousness of sleep deprivation or his own vivid imagination, he could see it: Shane’s face a sickly blue and dotted with petechiae, his lips and eyes swollen in a mask of terror and realisation that he’d been murdered by his own djinni. Ram had seen the exact result before. He’d caused the exact result before. Never had he felt the loss so keenly in advance.

“I’m sorry,” he heard himself say, voice trembling. “I am so sorry.”

It was a genuine apology, though useless in the face of what was about to proceed. Ram bit the inside of his cheek. The creature sitting across from Shane was not the same fae gone fussy from stubbornly ignoring sleepiness or hunger. Forcing him to eat a candybar or take a nap wouldn’t remedy the rawness in his nerves, the deep grief already writ large over his features. He’d been mourning Shane for days already, he’d thought. But nothing could compare to seeing the man in the flesh, warm and unaware and about to die.

It was the look of complete devastation on Ram’s face that, ironically, made Shane put the cup back down on the table. The mug had never even managed to touch his lips. All of Shane’s focus in that moment was on the djinni across from him. On the wrongness of the way Ram sounded, his voice breaking unlike anything Shane had ever seen, his features so completely closed off and also wrecked.

He had the brief thought that it might have been Ram cracking from the pressure of their argument, the stress of being angry at one another these past few days. But that couldn’t be right. Ram had gone two months without speaking to him apart from the necessary in order to prove a point. After what Shane had said that day, it wasn’t likely that Ram would ever come to Shane on his own. Which meant—

Shane found that he had already started across the space between them, standing up pushing out of his chair and over to where Ram was when the realization that something was deeply wrong hit him in full force. He felt the realization climb up his spine in an instant, chilling him to the core.

But still, he had to ask. His hands were wrapped around Ram’s own—a touch meant to comfort, but in reality, Shane was only barely hanging on, something tight in the vicinity of his chest squeezed hard, making it difficult to breathe.

“What are you—” Abruptly, Shane cut himself off, realizing it was the wrong question to ask. “What did you do?”

Ram leaned back from Shane, chair creaking as he took in the face above him. The face he’d wanted to spend forever with, only to be in the middle of murdering now. He pulled a hand out of Shane’s and lifted it to the man’s face, rubbing a thumb over his mouth. It was dry, he realised.

Several things seemed to happen at once. He was vaguely aware of himself exploding out of his own chair, shoving Shane away with a force that wasn’t quite his own. Shane stumbled back, his eyes widening in shock. “Ram—” he started, but cut himself off when he realised that it wasn’t Ram. Not entirely. Not the way he could see the band glowing fiercely under the thin fabric of Ram’s shirt. It was an out of body experience almost, being painfully puppeted by magical obligation as Ram leaned across the table to snatch up the poisoned mug and whip it at the sink. It broke apart with a dull crunch, splintering ceramic shards rattling around the basin lamely. Poisoned coffee seeped into the drain with barely a gurgle.

And with that dull, ugly sound, the full ramifications of what Ram had just attempted to do slammed into Shane. He didn’t even need the sudden waves of guilt emanating from his djinni to confirm his suspicions.

Ram bent forward against the counter and let out a breath he wasn’t aware he’d been holding. He was lightheaded, limbs tingling, skull buzzing, and was sure that he’d faint. But instead of being granted oblivion he was drawn to a faint glow at his arm. The band of their bond shone brightly with patterns, and Ram knew without a doubt that if he ever lived to see it removed that he’d find the same lines seared into his own skin. The flesh beneath ached from the magical reprimand, but it was nothing compared to his own pain.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, unwilling to turn around and face Shane. Twice, he’d tried to murder him. Twice, he’d failed. Ram closed his eyes and waited for the inevitable: an icy retort, the sound of Shane leaving, continued wounded silence between them.

He should have seen this coming. There were signs. It was even entirely the same pattern. Back in London—even if it seemed so long ago now—Ram had attempted the same thing after raging at Shane, had confessed to wanting something to give after he lobbed a knife at Shane.

And now he’d tried to do the same thing when he realised that Shane wanted— what did he want? Shane closed his eyes and leaned heavily against the edge of the table he had fallen back against where Ram had pushed him. He hadn’t moved from the spot. Too stunned to do anything. And for once, entirely without retort. Words felt superfluous. He was only aware of a nasty, sucking ache in the vicinity of his ribs, making each inhale and exhale painfully difficult. Vaguely, he thought he might have been picking it up from Ram too. Was this sensation his own— or Ram’s?

It didn’t matter.

What mattered was that Shane could tell that something had given this time.

Ram wanted something to break. He’d wanted to shatter this status quo between them that Shane had been trying—foolishly, one-sidedly, to prolong—and now he had.

“Don’t be,” Shane said into the drawn silence that ensued. Because what had Ram done wrong? Apart from wanting things that were apparently entirely different than what Shane wanted?

Shane had simply allowed himself to get too comfortable. Fooling himself with words and contracts and allowing himself to think for a single moment that there was something in this miserable existence that he could consider his own.

Tiredly, Shane forced himself to straighten. To stand on his own strength. As he always had. There had always been, and likely forever only will be, that.

“I understand what you want now,” Shane said instead. “Give me some time,” he said, his calm tone at odds with the maelstrom inside. “I’ll put an end to all of this.”

And he headed back into the room he had come out only mere moments ago.

Ramayan had waited silently for the sting he knew had to be coming. A final visceral blow to make him feel even more despairing.

All he got was soft acceptance. When he looked up, it was to see Shane’s retreating back and slumped shoulders. A strange sort of defeat that he’d never known the other man capable of feeling, nevertheless displaying.

It made Ram angry.

“What, then? What do I want?” he snapped, launching himself after the witch. He met Shane as he crossed the threshold to the bedroom, hand fisting in the back of his tanktop and yanking the other man back into the hallway without missing a beat. He shoved Shane at the wall and pressed into his breastbone with a forearm, his other hand coming up to grip Shane’s chin and force his gaze forward.

“What do I want? Tell me. I’m so tired of you being vague! Accusing me of things and never explaining yourself.” He leaned heavier on his arm, elbow pressing meanly into the skin. “It’s your fault that it’s come to this. Again!”

Human curses never felt right on his tongue, but if they had he might have let out a loud, angry fuck then. “I came so close to killing you. For real this time.” His voice was cracking and raw again. He searched Shane’s gaze for any flicker of emotion besides bland nothing. “And you say nothing except you know how I feel and walk away. You don’t know anything!”

Shane felt a corresponding wave of anger rise up in him in response to the deep emotion he saw reflected on Ram’s face. Typical. Now that Shane had given in to what Ram wanted, now that Shane wanted out, Ram decided he wanted to talk.

He stared into bright, determined black eyes, glinting with anger and suppressed fury. He had done that, he knew. He had given Ram the entire spectrum of the human emotions, dumped him in this human world that his djinni seemed so abhorrent of. And perhaps changed him into something that Ram couldn’t possibly ever feel comfortable with.

Shane felt shades of arguments past flicker through his mind. Ram had tried to vocalise all of this, even back then, but Shane had been too proud, taking it all to mean that Ram was simply throwing a tantrum at being stuck in a single place for too long. Now he knew. Ram was that—but he was also ready to cut Shane loose.

“You want to be free from me,” Shane spat, the melancholia in his eyes had gone. In its place was only the glass shards of his shattered resolve and the accompanying pain and anguish he felt. He didn’t care to mince his words. He didn’t care to hold back all of the words that he might have on a normal day, out of a regard for keeping Ram happy.

It seemed Ram had never been that.

He gripped Ram’s arm against his chest, pushing back as much as he felt Ram’s strength of grip against the fisted bunch of his tank was. “You want it so badly that you were going to kill me to get it.” Shane’s blue eyes flashed with a rare anger that was red hot instead of cold. “Tell me I’m wrong,” he dared Ram.

“No.”

Ram’s eyes flashed, bright with feverish anger. He stopped pressing against Shane and let the other man’s momentum do the work for him: as soon as Shane pitched forward he used the grip on his shirt and other hand to spin the man around and slam him against the wall again, face first this time.

“I am not doing this again,” he hissed, voice soft despite the bristling fury behind it. Ram pulled a wrist behind Shane’s back and leaned against him, weight squarely between shoulder blades. A foot kicked Shane’s stance wider and uneven. All things Shane had done to him before, all things he’d learnt the witch associated with making a point.

“You do not get to pick the piece of truth that makes you feel better and leave the rest.” Teeth clenched, he raised Shane’s wrist higher. “You tell me. Why would I be so unhappy with you, Shane? Why would I see no way out except to end your short, ungrateful life?”

Ram knew the exact answer. He suspected Shane did, too. But Shane had always regarded himself a step above Ram. The expectation had always been for Ram to bend to him. And Ram had driven himself to madness trying. But Ramayan was a noble djinni made from a cosmic spark, and that sort of raw power could never be truly contained—only extinguished.

Surprised by the fact that Ram was pushing back—making a real go of resisting physically instead of letting Shane simply push his way out of the mess and walk away—Shane didn’t see Ram’s intentions until he found himself pressed back against the wall, his face against the hardwood of the doorframe where he would have exited had it not been for the scant few inches out of the kitchen where they were now.

His escape thwarted, forced to sit through this ugliness and see it to the very end.

The pain on his elbow and shoulder joints should have made him wince. Instead, Ram’s exertion of force was met with a sharp bark of laughter—an entirely unpleasant sound.

“I’m picking the truth? What about you, Ram?” Shane’s question was the opposite of the saccharine tone he adopted now, the hint of mocking and insidious venom abundantly obvious. “You can’t even admit it aloud. That that was what you did. Instead you’re turning this around on me—” Shane laughed again, that same incandescent fury plain even in the sound of that laughter. “You’re trying to justify killing me.”

And still Shane struggled, pushing back against Ram constantly, trying to jerk himself free from that grip. The moment Ram had the slightest give, he’d find himself full of an angry witch, eyes flashing with a darkness and anger that Shane had never let Ram see the full extent of in the entire time they’d been together. “As you’ve rightly pointed out several times now. I’m human. There’s no coming back from that.”

Ramayan doubled down on his grip, not allowing Shane to move more than an inch.

“Of all the possible things you could have done, all the options you had: that was what you chose to do.” Anger was good. Anger was safe. Anger was a wall behind which Shane could hide everything else that had surfaced with the knowledge of how unhappy Ram was.

“Now you either finish the job or you get your hands off me.” He didn’t shout. His voice was no longer raised. But there was no denying the emotion punctuating each of the forcefully even words still.

“Should I?”

Instead of backing down, all Ram could think to do was escalate. The djinni was angrier than he’d ever been in his current life. Shane was still resisting, still posturing. Even facing violence and murder, he persisted.

“Should we see if it still works if you breathe it in?”

Ram’s heart was still rabbiting against his ribs and he felt unable to pull in a full breath. Spots clouded the edge of his vision. His emotional pain had reached a depth he wasn’t aware it could, because despite everything he’d still held out hope that Shane might have budged. That he would have revealed he cared even a hair’s worth the same Ramayan had been made to, and that the djinni was not the only one hopelessly dangling from a noose of Fate’s making. That he was as horrified as Ramayan was at the knowledge that with each moment the fight went on their relationship became more irrevocably damaged, and that it was entirely his own fault for trying it in the first place.

“Yes, Shane. I was going to kill you.” He glared at the back of Shane’s head, suddenly glad he didn’t have to see his face. “I would have hated myself for the rest of my life,” he continued, voice shaking. “But I would have done it. I still might.” The band around his arm flared again with searing objection. He ignored it.

“And you claim to not know why.” Now it was Ramayan’s turn to laugh. It wasn’t a bitter or mocking sound. Only broken. “As if you didn’t take a piece of me every time you ignored our agreement. As if there were only one path, and it was to be happy with whatever you wanted.”

Ram felt himself starting to come apart at the seams. Murder was a very large statement. If that wasn’t enough to get Shane to relent an inch, what would? “Should I start taking pieces of you in return? Would that be fair?” Clenching his teeth, he leaned harder into Shane. “You don’t get to walk away from me, this time.”

Shane reacted more to the pain that he heard in Ram’s voice than anything else the djinni had done. He had been ready to lash out. To meet fire with fire and watch all that they’d built between them crash and burn with the same ferocity that they did everything else. But the waves of melancholia that washed over him now drowned out that heat, replacing it with the icy chill of Ram’s despair.

And Shane felt the sheer magnitude of that emotion choke back all of the proud anger that he had been intending to hurl back at Ram. Instead, he was left floundering, struggling to follow the logical flow of Ram’s thoughts and the implications of what he was saying.

Now that he couldn’t see Ram’s face, Shane found himself wishing he could. He needed to look into Ram’s eyes to see the truth for himself. The first fallacy of being a telepath: just because someone believed something to be true didn’t mean it was actually that. “What are you talking about?” Shane snapped, the heat in his tone heavily tempered by the confusion that rose in a swell. “I’ve never denied you anything you asked me for.” Shane forced himself to breathe—inhale painfully through the crushing pressure against his ribs and exhale shakily after. “You simply got tired of waiting.” On the wishes, yes. But also on Shane releasing his tight grip on trust and all that it meant, never realizing that while he was working up to it one way, he was losing his djinni in another.

“So this is my fault, then? Because I never asked you explicitly to use a wish?”

Ram wished it were possible to simply keep leaning forward. If he cracked all of Shane’s ribs and pierced his flimsy human heart with the shards, the witch might finally know what being bound to him felt like. Some days were a constant squeeze into a space that didn’t quite fit, no matter how much he desperately wanted it to. Others, he couldn’t claw his way out of the ill-shaped mold fast enough.

From the very first night they’d been together, Ram had been playing a role. A role he’d enjoyed, at first. That first coupling had been a delight. He’d ended the night wrapped in Shane’s arms in the bathtub, feeling absolutely spent but also secure. It was that moment he’d thought of when Shane had asked him would it be so terrible to be bound to him. It had been a short-sighted thing to agree so quickly. Ram hadn’t realised his role would never change.

His hold began to loosen, though his weight remained heavy against the witch. The anger he’d been so eager to utilise had fled, and with it the last of his energy. He was shaking, depleted, and ashamed. “But you’re right. I got tired of waiting,” he repeated, sounding sad. “For everything.”

What would happen now? Their relationship would shift again, surely. A string of sudden, panicked images flashed through Ram’s mind. Being shunned completely by Shane for the transgression. Shane retaliating with his own wicked scheme. Or worse, being locked away in a device like an ewer until Shane had a need for him.

Those very images flashed through Shane’s mind for the first time—this weakened, it seemed the walls were completely and thoroughly down—and Shane had never realised how much Ram kept away from him because Shane had been so distracted by the complete blankness of that very first foray into Ram’s mind. Nor had he tried to look again, once he was certain that he had Ram figured out.

“Oh, Shane,” he breathed, and laid his cheek against the back of Shane’s head, eyes closing. How could he make the witch see? There was no way, not now. The fluttering of his heart that had started with a panic continued, galloping away to a place he couldn’t hope to catch up. With a mumbled I’m sorry Ram took a step back from Shane, the act of straightening up alone enough to send his head spinning again.

I should go, he thought. Before Shane could take any kind of revenge on him. He turned, body listing in the direction of the back door. He managed two very determined steps towards it before his body finally gave out of him and the murderous djinni crumpled—it would have been to the floor, had Shane not caught that last thought before it slipped from Ram’s mind, the declaration of leaving sounding entirely more final than Shane was comfortable with—unconscious, right into Shane’s arms, along with the sound of Shane’s voice sounding, for once, devoid of the composure that he always kept even in the worst throes of his anger or disdain.

“Ram? Ram!” Instead, in the single word Shane kept repeating, over and over again as he cradled the djinni in his arms, there was only fear.

A fear Shane thought he’d never let himself taste ever again.