never know how much I love you, never know how much I care
when you put your arms around me, I get a fever that's so hard to bear
you give me fever
It had been a season of hot flashes and swoons, but the illness had passed. His eyes opened in the trail of long hair that smelled sunlight and grass, on the girl of his dreams. She was a comfortable weight on his hips, the thin white dress spread down his legs and up his chest. Green eyes and a sweet smile shone down on him, hair afire with the sun behind her.
"We have to stop meeting like this," she said, teeth flashing as she hiked up the strap of her dress, making the whimsical bit of eyelet lace fall correctly across her modest bosom, before she leaned back down, pinning his hands under hers, entwining their fingers. Her hair blinded him again as she moved in for the kiss. It was sweet, but there was Azenth fire in it.
When she flipped her hair over her shoulder, she moved with that incalculable grace to lay beside and atop him, her leg claiming his, hand sliding across his pale chest to pull him close. He looked around at the cluttered richness of the room, the salt smell of a clean breeze over Mathews' Bay carrying a hint of summer with it, then back to her. He kissed her, for once simple and without a hint of his awkward self.
"But I love you too much to let go," he said.
She laughed. It sounded like music.
"I'm not Kendall Saarinen," she said.
"You're all I have left." He reached out to caress her face, but she caught his hand in hers.
"You never even had her like this," she went on, kindness in her tone though the words stung. She winked, and when that eye opened again, it had become a familiar shade of blue. His gaze zeroed in upon it, and when he looked at her face again, the Kendall he had loved was the Kendall he had known.
As a young man, she had still been pretty, the androgyny of youth still clinging to a baby face. He shivered in a sudden draft, and the blond boy gestured at the fireplace, which began to blaze. Gone was Zeltiva, replaced by the little room they had shared in Avanthal.
sun lights up the daytime, moon lights up the night
I light up when you call my name, and you know I'm going to treat you right
you give me fever
"She didn't want you when she was herself," he explained to Hadrian. "She had someone in Zeltiva. She only wanted you when her body had been taken from her and her family had cast her out. She used you to go after the ones who did this to her, all the way to Ravok, where you nearly died."
"I would do it again," Hadrian said. "I love her."
"Him," the male Kendall corrected.
"Him," Hadrian said, eyes locking on the mismatched pair that seemed so kind and yet so cruel. "Her. I loved her. The shape they put her in didn't matter." He moved over to the edge of the fur-strewn bed, pulling Kendall with him. There was a pillow on the ground and a basin there with water and things for shaving. Kendall slipped down to sit between Hadrian's knees on the pillow, leaning back and looking up with utter trust.
"How did it help you?" Kendall asked.
"I met Clyde Sullins in Ravok," he reminded the blond, carefully bringing the straight razor across the barely visible, downy white stubble. "We built up a considerable amount of money magecrafting. Then in Avanthal, the coldtorch for Morwen..."
"And this? Did it help? Keeping him smooth like a girl? Fucking him in the dark?"
"I didn't... care!" he shot back, his control straining against the chaotic song of the Azenth. "It was what she wanted."
"Bullshit," Kendall called, jerking away, oblivious to the razor that cut his neck. It stung Hadrian too, and his hand came up to his own neck, feeling the hot slickness of his own blood.
Kendall stood up, faded back into her true form, resplendent in her nakedness, but she shone with a more familiar presence, and the perfection of her taunted him. She ran her fingertips over her body, glyphs blooming across her skin in runic structures familiar as his own.
"You were going to mold her like clay with morphing and glyphs," Kendall taunted, hand reaching down toward her sex. "But she wouldn't let you..."

"If we couldn't recover her body," he said, voice tight in his throat, "I would have done anything to give her what she wanted."
"She didn't want you."
"I love you." Hadrian stood naked before her, trembling and sad.
She laughed again and shook her head; he could smell her hair, those hints of Zeltiva and classrooms.
"You don't love me, Hadrian." She looked at him with his own Storm-shot eyes, aurora blue seeping through her hair the way Ivak's release had done to him. "That's the problem. I'm you, and I don't want to go insane in this dreamscape you've created. If you want to jerk it to her memory, male or female, I couldn't care less. But this?"
She looked around, her skin gone pale as his. "This isn't why Nysel blessed us, to build a world in which to masturbate? Move on."
That fragment of himself, somehow containing his memories of Kendall and himself, swung open the door to a blinding blizzard. It was the edge of his dreamscape, and beyond lay the vast wilderness of the chavena. With a smile that was pure love, it fell naked into that white void.
"NO!" he screamed, tearing the bedding from the bed to wrap around himself as he stumbled after into the searing snow.
what a lovely way to burn
what a lovely way to burn
*~*~*
The door burst open and Hadrian nearly fell over, his legs not anticipating the pitch and roll of a ship at sea. The room was warm, almost muggy with evaporated sweat and animal musk, the oily scent of lantern light. He wasn't in his dreamscape anymore and he felt naked. In fact, he was naked, but he quickly pulled the shreds of another dream's sheets about himself when he saw that he was not alone.
There was a wild, desperate, and confused look to his face as his eyes focused on Ricky balls deep in an utterly gorgeous redhead. The strange transition threw him off kilter. Since sharing a dream with the Zeltivan fisherman during the worst of his fever, he had tried in vain to find his chavi without a key to guide him and now... He wondered if Nysel was having friends over for an evening's entertainment and this was it.
For a moment he wished he had tried that thing with the table before his life had become a celibate one again, but then he realized he was staring in his shock. He shook his head, tried to say something; an apology, perhaps, or an explanation, or a question an unlettered fisherman wouldn't have the words to understand, let alone answer.
But he just had to wake up and he would return to Sunberth where the knights and the Zeltivan delegation were preparing for the last push to Sahova, where an amnesiac orphan was suddenly dependent upon Hadrian's charity. He tried to back out the way he had come in, but the door was closed behind him. In turning to attempt to open it, he found it locked.
Both hands came up to bang against the door as he sought escape and consciousness, but then the sheets, shredded stuff of dreams, fell about his ankles.
Hadrian Aelius had no dignity left.
-partial lyrics from "fever" by Eddie Cooley and Otis Blackwell