Intoxication
N.B. The copy of this story in Envy, the YaoiCon 2006 anthology, contains a number of misprints and editorial errors. I am very sorry for the inconvenience.
Yellow-throated songbirds pecked at the bars of their tiny, gold-wire cage, blinded and too fat to fly, searching in vain for the trays of millet and grapes, oats and figs that someone had taken away that morning. A soft mewling startled them, but they soon forgot it, oblivious to the sleek, golden-skinned cat-prince watching them. Tybalt licked his teeth contemplatively, sprawling in the Roman couch beside the cage. He flicked open the top and plucked out the fattest, laughing quietly at its futile squirming. It amused him for a moment, but soon he grew bored again, and he thrust it, head first, into a glass of brandy.
It didn’t take long. The bird drowned in minutes, its struggles against his hand growing weaker and weaker until they stopped altogether.
“That’s cruel, Tybalt, even for you.” Tybalt’s guest, a gentle sylph of a boy, just barely a man, tried to look away, but the beautiful tragedy entranced him, somehow, and he could not.
“Well, I miss her, and their suffering eases my own.” He plucked the bird’s feathers deliberately, one at a time, tossing them back into the cage. “You wouldn’t deny me that, would you, Methyst?”
Methyst buried his face in his hands, running his fingers back through his short, dirty-blonde hair. “Still her, even now… Tybalt… It’s been seven hundred and fifty years.”
“Seven hundred and forty-nine, two hundred eighty-seven days.”