He drops into your lap, quite literally, on a sunny Thursday afternoon.

“Brother?”

You’re too busy being in shock to feel offended by the tiny hands that search for purchase on your shoulders. It takes a moment for you to register the child’s face, the birthmark over his left eye, and what he’s just said. Oh, he’s definitely mistaking you for someone else, and he seems to realize this too as his incredulous stare morphs into a frown and he tries to scramble out of your hold. Your hands, which have come to rest on his hips, reflexively tighten their grip to prevent him from falling unceremoniously to the dusty floor.

“Where did you come from, little lamb?” you ask, and he perks up at the sound of your voice, confusion wrestling with relief on his face.

“I was at home,” he says as he appears to have concluded he can put a modicum of trust in you, for whatever reason, “I was waiting for my brother to come back so we can continue the video game we were playing yesterday. He… he’s pretty busy at his job.” Here, the child averts his gaze as though that would help cover the sadness already plain in his voice. “It was pretty late. I must have fallen asleep.”

While your impromptu guest rambles on, you take a minute to thoroughly look him up and down—it hits you like a wave against the face of a cliff once you’ve noticed the full extent of the resemblance. Silver hair and silver eyes, and they even smell the same. He smells so good. You’ve lost hold of the reigns on your body. Before you can stop yourself, you’ve buried your nose into the crook of his neck, his small body stiff under your touch.

Your nostrils are flooded with a comforting, familiar scent, spoiled only by a tinge of fear. It’s close, a hair’s breadth from perfect, but it’s not enough. You need him to let down his guard.

“What’s your name?” you inquire, straightening yourself back into a normal sitting position, putting a bit of distance between the two of you.

The boy relaxes a little. “Fulgur,” he answers. He’s rather docile for his age, you note, courtesy of that brother of his he speaks so fondly of, no doubt. For one, he hasn’t tried to remove himself from your lap since that first attempt, instead trusting you enough to rest his full weight across your thighs.

“Alright, Fulgur,” you say as you lift his body, light as a feather, and stand up from the pew. “How about we strike a deal.”

You hoist him against your shoulder with one arm and use the other to gesture at the rather dilapidated chapel around you.

“You can help me clean this place up, it’s really too much work for a single man,” you’re barely able to squash down a smirk when he lets out a squeaky, what?, as he surveys the mess, “and I’ll provide you food and shelter until the universe rights itself and returns you to your brother.”

Wide, silver eyes blink at you, his mouth agape, as if offended by the proposal. Then Fulgur purses those pretty pink lips, crosses his arms, almost tips over from trying to lean away from you before you pull him back against your body, and reluctantly nods.

“Can… can you tell me your name too?”

“Of course. It’s Box.”

“V-Vox?”

“No,” you reiterate, “Box.” He looks borderline crestfallen at your answer. Was your name that ugly to him?

“Oh,” is all he says in the end.

You carry him out of the chapel to the small room you call home. The hand supporting his weight slips further up his bare thighs from the jostle of mounting stairs and you can’t help but wonder what kind of sick fuck this brother of his must be, to dress his little brother in such tiny shorts.

—

As the days trickle by, Fulgur gradually opens up to you. You quickly realize he doesn’t have much of a life outside of books, video games and his infamous brother, whose name you learn is Vox Akuma (the irony of it all fills you with glee). You also come to accept, however begrudgingly, that you enjoy his presence, the sound of his footsteps breathing life into the otherwise vacant church building, his silhouette a cut of softness against the barren courtyard where he sweeps up the fallen leaves.

Two weeks come and go, and the chapel has returned to the same state you safeguard in your mind’s eye. The stained glass windows cast the pews and carpet in washes of red, blue and gold, and you can breathe the air indoors without it sending you into a coughing fit once more. This is, funnily enough, how you discover the thing around Fulgur’s neck isn’t a collar but what he calls an “air filtration device”.

In this time you become intimately acquainted, as well, with Fulgur’s lack of sense of private space. Perhaps it’s your fault for setting a precedent that first day you met; you have nobody save yourself to blame when he stretches out his arms to demand you carry him to bed, nestles into your side as he devours another book from your modest collection, or clings to your arm when you walk side by side.

He’s made you his lodestar in this strange world in the way only children do, fast and irrevocable, you feel pity for the day you’ll come to break that fragile facsimile of trust. You know it looms on the horizon, you can see it approach as your self-control fractures under each innocuous brush of warm skin against yours. He stopped smelling like fear barely a week into your acquaintance. You’ve gone to sleep with your nose buried in his hair ever since and risen at dawn every morning with an old name upon your lips. You make sure you resolve your newfound… inconvenience before he’s awake.

Last night you almost lost it. Your tentacles had emerged against your will, a sign of how dire the situation had become. By the time you regained your senses, you found yourself kneeling between Fulgur’s spread thighs, held apart by two tentacles, the shirt you’d given him as a nightgown scrunched up to reveal the pale, smooth plane of his chest and tummy and his pert nipples, covered in a sheen you knew was your spit. You wrapped a hand around your cock, so hard it felt like it was pulsating in your hand, and arousal slammed into you like a horse run amok when you realized the head of your cock would reach further in than his belly button. Ultimately, in a historical feat of self-restraint, you resisted the urge to burrow your cock inside his pliant warmth and instead relieved yourself using his soft thighs, holding them crossed as he was so thin there wouldn’t be much squeeze otherwise.

Instead of guilt, a dark possessiveness that hasn’t visited you in years had welled up from the depths of your soul when you released across his belly, painted his stomach in streaks of white. You wiped his body down with the gentlest of hands and magicked away the red marks left by the suckers on your tentacles. Come morning, no trace of your trespass remained.

At present, Fulgur tries to catch your attention with a tug on your sleeve. “There isn’t anyone else living around these parts, is there,” he says. “Will you ever go into town? Can I tag along?”

As you cup the side of his cheek with your palm, thumb tracing a crescent across his supple skin, you suddenly understand that brother of his, Vox Akuma, who kept his treasure trapped inside an ivory tower full of myths and games. You don’t know him by any means (you have entertained the possibility he might be you from a different instance of reality) beyond the secondhand information Fulgur has divulged to you, but you respect his methods.

If you had hardened your heart and kept… if you had kidnapped Ovidia and kept her captive, kept her safe and sound and yours to have and to hold, then maybe she would still be alive. You would have filled her with children, some of whom would surely be old enough to act as playmates for Fulgur. You picture the scene and almost tear up at the imaginary sight of him mingling with your young.

Maybe there would be a village, a town, still, to bring Fulgur to visit, instead of ashes and remains picked clean by scavengers.