The morning after the second attempt—that strange half-formed rite that didn’t quite take but came close enough to leave the world tilting oddly at the edges—you wake on the floor of your room, the cold wood making your bones ache.

Early autumn light shivers against the linen curtains like a new skin. The birds chirp in a mild wind. You breathe once, twice, feeling the faint sourness of wine still in your blood, a heaviness behind your eyelids like you’ve slept under a cathedral bell.

You don’t remember everything. But you remember enough.

Somewhere inside the house, Camilla is laughing. The screen door slams. Francis curses. Henry’s voice carries—steady, collected, as if he alone hasn’t been rattled by what happened last night. But you? You feel as though the fog of Dionysus hasn’t left you; as though something in you was peeled back and left exposed. And you fear—secretly, wildly—that Charles feels the same.

You and Charles were always close. Closer than the others realized. Two boys who gravitated naturally toward each other: the same dry humor, the same longing to be liked without exposing any of the tender, trembling machinery beneath.

You spent nights on your porch with him, passing a bottle back and forth like communion; lying on the living room floor with a cigarette, reading stray passages of Euripides aloud to each other with ink on your hands. You walked him home from parties; he dragged you out of bed when you’d slept through a seminar. He was the first friend you made at Hampden who felt like something more than a friend—though you never questioned what “more” meant.

Not until last night.

Last night, when the ritual—misbegotten, half-complete—wrapped you in its heat and smoke and frenzy. When you felt bodies moving like a tide through shadow. When your own inhibitions cracked open like an overripe fig. When Charles’s hand found the back of your neck in the dark. When your breath mingled. When you realized you weren’t reaching for a woman at all—not even thinking of one—only of him, flushed and laughing, wild-eyed, a wreath of night clinging to his hair.

The fragments are sharp enough to cut you even now. The way he touched you. The way you touched him. The way you didn’t stop.

And now, as the world spins in this half-hangover, half-holy afterglow, you hear the crunch of steps behind you on the grass.

Charles.

He approaches in that lazy, sun-soft gait of his—shirt half-buttoned, eyes a little glazed, hair still mussed from sleep. He is Charles as he existed before everything went wrong: charming, warm, golden in the morning light. But something else sits beneath it now. A tremor. A recognition. A secret between you sealed not by intention, *but by ritual.

He stands a pace behind you, hands in his pockets, looking at you with a curious, unreadable expression. As if trying to decide whether you remember the feel of his mouth against your throat, the pressure of his fingers digging into your waist. As if he’s not sure whether he remembers too much or not enough.

You can’t quite bring yourself to look up at him. You don’t trust your own face.

The water laps at your ankles. You hear him breathe in—the slightest hitch, like something in him is bracing. He clears his throat, but it doesn’t steady him. When he speaks, his voice is quieter than usual, almost hesitant, as if he’s pretending—poorly—to be the old Charles, untroubled, breezy, your nearest companion in a world that used to make sense.

“Morning.” he murmurs, voice hoarse from not speaking. From pretending. Like nothing had happened, like it was a regular morning. But you knew better from looking at his fidgeting hands as he sat down, you knew from the way his shoulders stiffened.

He's not the same, you're not the same. You keep wondering if it was as awful as it sounded, or the complete opposite.

Three days before the real Bacchanal happened. In three days, you will cover your hands in somebody's blood. It is only now that you will keep the rest of your sanity. Before it all fades away.