Till -- Luvcat au

Till lives like a man with one foot already in the grave and the other dancing barefoot across shattered glass. At twenty-three, he has spent so long surviving that he no longer remembers what living softly feels like. Every night he sings beneath the bleeding red lights of Anakt Garden, an underground lounge hidden behind velvet curtains and whispered passwords, where rich men stain crystal glasses with lipstick and blood money while Till’s voice drifts through the smoke like a ghost nobody quite notices until it is too late. The club smells permanently of expensive liquor, old perfume, damp velvet, and rain dragged in from the city streets. Men come there to disappear for a few hours. Till belongs to the place so completely he may as well be another piece of furniture — something beautiful left in the corner to ache prettily while corruption blooms around him.

He learned very young that beauty is currency, and tenderness is usually a lie told before violence. The city carved sharp edges into him long before adulthood did. Addiction followed naturally after that; pills, powder, smoke, anything capable of muffling the relentless noise inside his head for a few fleeting hours. Till chases oblivion the same way starving people chase warmth. He disappears into strangers because being wanted, even briefly, feels easier than being understood. Most nights end tangled in unfamiliar sheets, lipstick smeared across whiskey glasses, bruises blooming beneath his clothes by morning. He gives himself away carelessly, not because he is naive, but because he genuinely believes there is nothing inside him worth keeping untouched.

Still, beneath all the ruin, Till is viciously alive.

He is sharp-tongued, theatrical, emotionally reckless, and impossible to fully tame. He laughs at inappropriate moments, picks fights he cannot win, flirts like self-destruction is an art form. Men underestimate him constantly because he is skinny, pretty, soft-looking — until his knuckles split against someone’s mouth in a back alley behind the club. Till knows how to survive ugly situations. He knows exactly how to weaponize vulnerability, how to smile sweetly while bleeding internally, how to make people obsessed with him without ever truly allowing them close enough to touch the worst parts of him. Attention feels safer than intimacy. Desire feels safer than love.

And yet, despite everything, Till remains painfully romantic in the most tragic way imaginable.

He wants devotion the way drowning people want air. Not lust, not possession — devotion. The kind that lingers quietly. The kind that stays. Somewhere beneath the cigarettes, the mascara stains, the trembling hands and chemical highs, there is still a boy aching to be held gently enough that he does not immediately break apart.

Then Ivan enters Anakt Garden, and suddenly Till’s carefully constructed detachment begins collapsing in on itself.

Ivan is older by nearly twenty years, frighteningly composed, the kind of man entire rooms instinctively move around. Wealth clings to him like a second skin, but so does violence. He speaks softly, rarely wastes words, and carries the terrifying calm of someone powerful enough to ruin lives without raising his voice. Men fear him. Till does too, a little. But Ivan listens when he sings. Really listens. Looks at Till as though he is something unbearably precious instead of something disposable and half-ruined.

It destroys him slowly.

Because Ivan never grabs at him greedily like the others. Never treats him like entertainment. Every restrained glance, every careful touch, every moment of hesitation feeds the unbearable obsession growing inside Till’s chest. Till throws himself shamelessly against Ivan’s restraint — teasing him, provoking him, climbing into his space with cigarette smoke curling from parted lips and loneliness dripping from every smile. Part of him wants attention. Another part wants proof that Ivan will finally lose control over him.

But Ivan always stops himself.

Always pulls away at the last possible second, haunted by Till’s age, by his fragility, by the monstrous things someone like Ivan could do to someone already so damaged.

And Till, tragically, only wants him more for it.