2. Kyle

CHAPTER 2

Kyle

K yle Randall woke to an ass sitting on his face.

He'd like to say it was the round, perky kind, the type he'd enjoy sinking his tongue into or marking prettily with a firm spanking. But in reality, it was orange, smelled slightly of fish, and tremendously fluffy : the bottom of the fattest and most entitled of his three cats, Havoc.

"Urgh," Kyle mumbled, pushing him off and spitting out hair. Havoc meowed with indignance, gave the back of Kyle's hand a hard swat that was a daring step beyond playful, and then proceeded to settle himself back down on the pillow against Kyle's cheek.

Kyle breathed in the familiar scent of cat , fluff tickling the inside of his nose.

"It's daytime," he said into Havoc's warm belly, the words muffled and fond. "That means the bed is still mine, asshole."

Seemingly unbothered by his human's attempt at sternness, Havoc merely yawned and half-heartedly flicked his tail towards the battered runepad resting on the cardboard box that masqueraded as Kyle's bedside table. The faintly glowing screen of the small tablet device displayed the time and date.

8.41pm, 23 May 2073.

Damn it, now Kyle had to get up. He'd slept in, which was completely fine because he couldn't be blamed if he'd accidentally on purpose forgot to set his alarm for the third time this month, but now he knew what time it was and had lost all plausible deniability.

"How much is Epsilon paying you?" he asked the cat accusingly, who just blinked.

How was it that Kyle was capable of reducing grown men to tears with nothing more than some fingering and creative dirty talk, yet his attempts at bullying a creature a fraction of his size always failed so humiliatingly spectacularly?

Havoc's tail jabbed again at the runepad. Or...runepad-adjacent. Maybe it was Kyle's guilt that drew his attention back to the time.

Giving the cat an affectionate scratch behind the ears with one hand, he reached across the splayed fluff to retrieve his runepad with the other. The device's facial recognition unlocked the cracked screen, only for Kyle to be greeted with a message warning of low battery.

He wrinkled his nose. It had been charging all day while he slept – or it was supposed to have been, considering he'd just lifted it from the charger's cradle – so that meant one of two things had once again failed. The runes that supplied electricity to his apartment, or the one carved into the base of the charger which made the technology work. Either was likely, knowing this damn city.

Havoc snuggled into the warm spot on the pillow where Kyle's head had been, and cracked a condemnatory eye.

"I'm up," Kyle promised, rolling out of bed with a groan. 8.43pm was far too early to get up for work. His boss was a tyrant, and Kyle was absolutely, unequivocally , going to inform him of that when he next saw Master Epsilon.

He might also throw in a complaint about how terribly unfair it was that one still had to work for a living even after the world had ended. Most of Earth's several billion-strong population had been wiped out by a gamma ray burst nearly eighty years ago, not that Kyle was old enough to have seen it happen. No, he was just a city boy born and raised on Lower Xerxes, and unless he inexplicably decided to throw himself from the city down to the surface of the planet ten thousand metres below, he'd die here too.

Kicking aside the mess of clothing, take-out containers, and cat toys that inevitably littered the floor of his apartment no matter the time of day or night, Kyle went hunting for work clothes. He shrugged on a black t-shirt that didn't look too crumpled, padding around barefoot in search of his favourite pair of leather trousers as he sipped from a mug of tepid coffee.

His runepad chimed with an incoming message.

Indira

I HAVE NEWS!! Usual time and place?

Oh, now that sounded intriguing. It took a lot to ruffle the epitome of collected calm that was his cousin, so for her to have used capitals and two exclamation marks meant big news indeed. Kyle was tempted to demand it from her now but he knew to pick his battles. Indira wouldn't speak until she had an extra-large iced latte in front of her, and that wouldn't happen until the city's cafés opened in the morning.

So he sent off a reply in the affirmative, and was about to shove the runepad into a pocket of the trousers he'd found buried beneath the sofa cushions when another message tone dinged.

Epsilon

You better be on your way to work, Kyle.

At the sudden spark of excitement which erupted at merely seeing the man's words on the screen, Kyle sank down onto the sofa and absently patted Chaos as she bumped her deformed head against his palm. The grey and white cat seemingly had an infinite number of lives, having survived everything from a several-storey fall to her former owner's brutal mistreatment. She may have had just three legs, one eye, and not much of either ear left, but it only showed how much of a fighter she was. Kyle respected that. In turn, Chaos respected the fact that she was given a sneaky extra breakfast treat each night that she was required to consume discreetly so as to not make the other two cats jealous.

Which, of course, meant she energetically batted the treat around the floor before consuming it loudly and messily, making sure Mayhem and Havoc saw exactly what she had and they didn't.

"I better be on my way," Kyle said out loud, tilting the screen so Chaos could see his boss' message and share in his amusement. "Do you hear that? I better be. It's like he's practically begging me to be late."

Master Epsilon, begging, made a fine mental image indeed. All that aloof competence torn away, the man put on his knees and rendered helpless. And how those pretty dark-brown eyes of his shone wet with tears that Kyle had put there…and stars take him , now his trousers felt far too tight.

He adjusted himself through the leather and reluctantly banished the memory. That had been a long time ago, and it was…well. It had been a long time ago.

Kyle

I'm *thinking* about being on my way. Does that count, Master?

Epsilon

I'm not going to answer that. You now have 7 minutes to make an 11 minute walk.

Kyle

It's concerning you know exactly how far away I live

Epsilon

It's concerning you are still messaging instead of getting your ass to work.

Kyle

Think about my ass much, do you?

Epsilon

Perhaps.

Kyle grinned at the screen. Anyone else might have wondered if the other man was confessing something, but he knew the Master of House Epsilon too well. He was setting Kyle up for a punchline, and the smart thing to do would be to ignore it.

Kyle had never thought of himself as smart.

Kyle

So, what do you imagine my ass doing?

Epsilon

Right now? Or when I get my hands on it?

A flicker of eager anticipation ran up Kyle's spine.

Kyle

Obviously the latter. I know how talented your hands are

It took over two minutes for Epsilon to respond.

Epsilon

Kyle, I imagine your ass...sitting in a wet puddle in Xerxes' streets after I fire it, leaving you unable to make rent. NOW GET TO WORK.

Equal levels of disappointment and elation swept through Kyle. Disappointment because he'd have much preferred to hear his boss detail a fantasy of them that ended in a totally different kind of filth than puddles, but also...that message hadn't been long enough to justify the delay in sending it. Kyle had flustered him, he was sure of it.

Unless the Master had just been busy doing other things.

Yeah. That was probably the case, and Kyle was deluding himself into thinking Epsilon devoted any thought to him at all, because-

Epsilon

4 minutes, Kyle. You're going to have to run.