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Chapter Text

It’s much too cold out to have trudged halfway across the city after sharing the bed of a man he’s quickly deciding he loathes.

Ensconced in the relative safety of his inn room, Rhovan leans back against the age-worn headboard and inhales from the pipe at his lips, watching the embers flicker in the hearth. The room is a miserable little affair, but it’s in a district where prowling thieves are of little concern, and it’s a fair sight warmer than the frostbitten air outside. Most importantly, it’s not where he just came from. He has some hours of solitude before the morning.

Tomorrow, he’ll find a detachment of the councilor’s personal guard waiting for him just beyond the walls. His escort into the High Moor, bought and paid for. Rhovan’s latest client is paying exceptionally well for the retrieval of an enchanted mirror - never a good sign, but gods know Rhovan needs the gold. The ruin his path has brought him to is a trap-laden hellscape in the Moors, from what little he’s been able to learn. It’s not the sort of place he’d walk into alone and expect to come out again. In better times, he’d hire other help, but his funds are still worn thin from his expedition to the Underdark.

At least his body is as good as coin where the right (or wrong) people are concerned.

He curls his lip. Somewhere in the wealthier district, a councilman basks in the aftermath of Rhovan’s attentions and his own self-satisfaction for bedding the reticent mage. His wife will be returning from whatever diversion drew her from their home, none the wiser to her husband’s proclivities. Perhaps he should feel guilty about that.

He does not. It’s none of his concern whether their marriage succeeds or fails.

So many of the men he sleeps with are lying - to themselves, to him, to society as a whole. He’s lost count of how many times he’s warmed the beds of men extolled as faithful husbands, leaving their wives none the wiser. He’s been bent over desks where laws are written by righteous men. A fair few of those laws would condemn the acts occurring where they’d been signed.

Rhovan might be nothing but a whore to them, but at least he’s honest with himself.

The hypocrisy of good men is in the lies they tell to convince themselves that they’re exactly that. Some are heroes to feed ever-hungry egos, some to conceal darker urges, some because they cannot face themselves without the masquerade, but they’re all the same in the end.

Not a single one sees the way of the world for what it is.

Everyone wants something. All mercenaries worth their coin understand people, and Rhovan is a stone-cold professional. In the case of heroes, their base motives are no grander than anyone else’s. Worse, they lack the steel to admit it. He’s not sure who they’re better at deceiving: others, or themselves.

Not him, at least. He’s seen too much.

He’s fought alongside and against heroes. Not a single one has proven him wrong.

The councilor is just another greedy man who accepts Rhovan’s body in exchange for a favor. By the time Rhovan reaches the High Moors, he’ll be nothing more than a foul memory. Men like him don’t deserve to be called his lovers.

The last time he’d had a man who’d earned that title…

His chest tightens at the memory of the drow warrior who had briefly shared his bed. 

All his research on the darker cousins to his mother’s folk had never led him to expect one would become a steadfast ally - quite the opposite, in fact. He’d spent so much of their association waiting for a knife in the back, and yet…

Drow are the most loyal of people. He’d said as much to Rhovan on that last night. He doesn’t let himself think too hard about whether he believes that.

It won’t do to dwell on it. Rhovan’s heard many pretty words from many pretty mouths. He never stays. This association was always going to be as fleeting as the glances they’d shared.

That doesn’t stop Szordryn from being the singular most adept lover he can remember taking.

The taste of pipesmoke on his tongue takes him briefly back to a room in Memnonnar more opulent than he’d normally waste coin on. The mattress beneath him had been softer, the room cleaner, the bed built to accommodate both Rhovan and the drow he’d shared it with. In the aftermath of their exertions, he’d lounged atop the covers, pipe at his lips and Szordryn at his side, both still naked and lazily admiring one another’s bodies. It had almost been peaceful.

He hadn’t been satisfied like that in a long time. Tonight has made him certain it’ll be just as long before he is again.

Szordryn had been a quiet lover, but by the hells, that man could follow direction. Faint heat gathers between his thighs at the memory of how he’d felt inside him, looked beneath him. It’s more arousal than the councilor had managed to wrest from him during their entire encounter.

He lets a thin line of smoke billow from his parted lips. He’d picked up the pipe in the hopes of soothing his frayed nerves, but now he halfway hopes its contents will steal away his ability to think. As misfortune would have it, it’s nowhere near potent enough to do more than quicken his pulse and warm his blood. 

The memory of the drow, however, does much the same thing.

It’s not something he dwells on with any measure of sentimentality, of course. More likely than not, Szordryn simply saw pleasing him as another task to fulfill. He’s used to that - a soldier, as professional as Rhovan, because to be otherwise would bring death. Obedient because he simply is, even if he’d been as eager to fall into bed as Rhovan had been to beckon him there. What resulted was nothing more than a pleasant end to a productive allyship.

He wishes he could deny how good it felt to have a lover even pretend to care about what he wanted. 

Taking a final draw from his pipe, he sets it aside on the end table, extinguishes it with a click of his fingers and a tug on the Weave, and stretches his arms above his head. The last of the smoke spills from his lips like a sigh as he lets the tension uncoil from his muscles. His body goes slack. He waits for his mind to follow, but…

His thoughts don’t budge from the drow.

Szordryn had clung to every word he said, watched the cues of his body like they held answers to questions he’d never asked. Every time something had made Rhovan moan or arch into him, he’d repeated it, finding his most sensitive places, mapping how he likes them touched.

Perhaps more astoundingly, Rhovan hadn’t faked a single moan across three rounds of sex. 

Even among the men he chooses for his own pleasure, none have been so adept. He’s used to guiding fumbling efforts, but even when his lovers are skilled…

It had felt different, with Szordryn. He's never dwelt on why.

He can’t help but try anyway.

Szordryn is stunning in a way human men can never match, for one. He's built like a rapier, slender but strong, deadly in his grace. There's a distinctly feminine beauty to him. His pretty lips are unfairly well-suited to the stony detachment he wears, and even better to the amused disdain he’d often directed at Rhovan. He wears his hair long, a cascade of white tumbling down his back - it’s always reminded him of spider silk. His eyes are sharp and clever, a silvered hue he’d never associated with drow. They’re almost the color of the metal bar between them, pierced through the bridge of his nose.

The jewelry is another point in his favor - or many, many points, all spread in silver across his skin. From the crimson gems at his tapered ears to the elaborate ring in his lip to the studs of metal decorating his torso and falling like stars around the brand beneath his navel, they're beautiful. And lower down…

Perhaps the only thing Rhovan appreciates more than aesthetic beauty is beauty with a function. Szordryn had amply demonstrated that the piercings lining his cock fall firmly into the latter category. 

A pleasant shiver runs down his spine like rainwater. Szordryn's beauty alone would have been enough to make their night together memorable, but those piercings? The way they’d felt inside of him, pressing the spot that makes him see stars, rubbing against his nerves just firmly enough to…

His cock is hard within his breeches.

He stares down in something like disbelief. When was the last time the memory of a lover brought on a response as if they were there? Still, it would be folly to deny that it’s happening now.

It would be even greater folly not to indulge himself while he has a moment of privacy. Just to clear his head.

Rhovan first unlaces his tunic, lifting it over his head to expose the long, thin lines of his torso and the hardening peaks of his nipples. He undoes his breeches and sighs at the relief of the pressure on his cock, hooking his fingers in the fabric of his smallclothes and drawing them down the lithe flare of his hips. His cock doesn't stand fully hard, but it’s halfway there, the shaft flushing darker as his blood runs southwards in time with the thought of Szordryn. This doesn’t happen to him - memory alone has never stirred him like this, and yet here he is, body responding eagerly to a man who isn't here to see it.

Or touch it, as Rhovan is starting to wish he would.

He lays down, dark hair an inkstain over the pillows, and lets his hands roam. It's an off-kilter echo of the path Szordryn's touch had followed. Why can he even remember that? 

He frowns, but the remembered brush of soft hands over his skin has his cock all but throbbing. It feels too good not to touch himself to the thought.

One hand raised, he murmurs a few words, fingertips flitting this way and that before his fist curls around thin air. Faint, shimmering energy flows from his fingertips to his wrist like a glove. Another tug on the threads of Weave, and it peels away to coalesce into a translucent imitation of his own hand. He lets the spell ghost over his body, down from his ribcage over his flat stomach until it reaches the crux of his thighs.

His fingers flutter through thin air, tugging cords of Weave, and the shimmering hand wraps around his cock. It’s not a true facsimile of another’s touch, but it’s a dimension closer than actually reaching down to stroke himself. He bites his lip, arching into the translucent grasp of his own magic as it tightens around him.

The Weave makes itself known in gauzy violet energy coiling lovingly around his fingers. He works the spell between his legs, up and down over his shaft. His thighs go tense.

The last time he pleasured himself was seasons ago, but he’d used his magic then, too. Perhaps it’s vanity, or overindulgence in power. As if he gives a fuck.

He closes his eyes and relaxes into the touch. His mind is hundreds of miles to the south, tangled in Memnonnari sheets.

In memory, Szordryn sprawls beneath him, bathed in firelight that draws Rhovan’s eyes helplessly along his curves. His hands follow, exploring the contours of whiplash muscle beneath dark skin until he finds his hard cock. The drow doesn’t moan - he never had, though the idea of it makes Rhovan’s heart stutter - but his breathing quickens.

Rhovan idly wonders at how the ladder pierced up the underside of his cock would feel on his tongue. After all, the drow has already pleasured him with that silken mouth. It would only be fair to return the favor.

Even if he wouldn’t be amenable, he’s already proven he’s more than happy to let Rhovan ride his cock until his thighs go weak.

The memory draws out a moan. The drow had let him set the pace, but he’d matched it effortlessly, lasting and lasting until Rhovan couldn’t help but spend himself over his abdomen. He hadn’t followed him over the edge until he was already shaky and satisfied atop him. He’d hardly made a sound when he did. He’d looked beautiful that way nonetheless.

Rhovan’s cock is leaking already. He pinches his nipples hard, flicking at the bars piercing the stiff peaks, and tries not to moan as he remembers Szordryn’s hands in the place of his own. His attentions had been…appreciative. A naive man would say admiring. Either way, they were not at all like the greedy pawing Rhovan had endured earlier tonight.

If the drow was in his bed now…

Would he press his mouth to Rhovan’s again? Would Rhovan want his hands on his chest first, or further down? He’s not certain he could wait for a hand around his cock. Hells, he might just guide Szordryn’s head down to settle between his thighs. Just the thought has more wetness dripping from the tip of his cock.

The first time he’d taken the drow’s mouth, it had been on the heels of a frenzied kiss, fueled by the heady rush that comes with the narrow evasion of death - in their case, a flight from the mouth of the Abyss. They’d both been worn down by battle, bloodied and bruised, but riding a high that drove both beyond reason. 

To Rhovan’s knowledge, lust is perhaps the most poignant affirmation of life.

Szordryn had fallen to his knees the moment he’d asked. The spell around his cock is no replacement for the heat of an eager mouth, the way his tongue had worked over his shaft. And nothing at all can rival the sight of a drow kneeling before him with his lips around his cock.

There’s a certain eroticism to being pleasured so ardently by a man whose people have turned viciousness into a way of life. Try as he has, Rhovan can’t deny the way he’d felt beneath the touch of hands that have dealt countless deaths. It’s not unlike how he feels when he senses the Weave’s wildfire energy curl sinuous around his hands, not daring to burn him.

Luminous. And fucking dangerous.

Power has an allure all its own. Not that most could name power if it burned them to death.

Most of Rhovan’s admirers, if they can be called that, are men caught up in fleeting notions of wealth and status. Szordryn is…not. His power lies in his cunning and the ruthlessness to use it.

He’d forgotten what it was, to bed someone who sees the world through his own eyes. Perhaps he’d never known at all.

Deeper thoughts than he’d care to entertain. He steers himself away with a quickening of the spell on his cock. He can’t help but ache for the drow lying at his side, hand between his thighs and lips against his.

Rhovan’s hips thrust up into the Weave. If he closes his eyes, he can almost pretend the touch of his magic is that of the drow’s hand instead.

Szordryn had brought him to several climaxes, all with the same skillfulness. The first, he'd drawn out with his hand on his cock as he thrust up into him until he shuddered into the throes of a breathtaking climax. His legs tremble at nothing but the memory. He’d never dreamt that piercings of all things would feel so good inside him, but the way the metal ring had rubbed against that spot…

His hand slides down his body to settle between his spread legs - thank the gods he’d trimmed two nails before going to meet the councilor earlier. He slicks those same fingers with a quick spell and circles his entrance, not quite dipping in. 

How would it feel, to fuck himself to the memory of Szordryn’s cock inside him? He lingers on the brink of entering himself - but there’s a stubborn twinge of soreness between his thighs. It aches further when his fingertips find it. It’s not that he’s never enjoyed being taken roughly, but the way the councilor had done it…

Back in Memnonnar, he’d been left open and sensitive in the wake of Szordryn’s cock. The kind of ache to savor. Now, it just…hurts.

It’s endurable. He tries not to think about the not-terribly-distant time when it was something better.

He trails the slickness on his fingers onto his cock instead, eliciting a shiver of pleasure. He tweaks a nipple as he works his spell around his cock, so fast it has him squirming atop the thin coverlet. 

He lets his mind wander. By all rights, it should have landed upon some indistinct fantasy that will see him through to climax. Instead, it lingers stubbornly on one man. 

Ashen-gray hands at his hips, venturing up and down his torso, playing with his nipples and his dripping cock alike. The phantom of his touch, something to arch into with a moan at his lips. He can’t help the way his hips jerk like he’s atop Szordryn once more, sinking onto his cock, driving his piercings against his most sensitive spot. 

Back then, he’d thought he'd savored it, clinging to the headboard and revelling in each thrust of the drow beneath him, every place Szordryn’s hands had found his skin. Now, he’s come to realize he didn’t appreciate it enough by half. 

He’d have him like that again, if he could. He’d have the drow’s breathing going sharp beneath him, his hand on Rhovan’s cock and his own arousal sheathed within the heat of his body. Hells, what it had been to fall beneath steely eyes that roamed over him as though drinking in the sight. A gaze that wanted.

The councilor had paid Rhovan similar attentions, of course. The memory kindles something foul in his chest, like sparks taking a rag soaked in poison. He’d looked at Rhovan the way a miser looks at an overflowing coffer. But Szordryn…

A moan wells from his lips, high and thin, as he strokes himself beneath the weight of a remembered gaze.

He’d kept those eyes trained on him even when he reached his own peak - out of the wariness borne by all drow, or desire to watch him, he’s not sure. The result is the same. 

Szordryn had never looked away. His unwavering attention had never made bile rise in his throat. Theirs has been desire shared between equals.

Not that he’d found no rush in seeing his powerful, ruthless, beautiful companion focused on nothing but pleasing him. Just the aftermath of that thrill has his lips parting around a moan.

He throws his head back against the sudden shudder wracking his body, bringing him arching off the mattress. His climax is welling up at the edge of his senses and he thrusts up hard in pursuit of it, struggling to keep focus on the spell he’s stroking himself with. He lingers on the memory of Szordryn’s pretty lips around his cock, the nub of the piercing gliding over the shaft, and his head spins. 

One hand fists in the sheets, sparking with Weave as he squeezes the spell around his aching cock. Szordryn occupies his every thought. He cannot stop it more than he could hold back a river with his bare hands. He’s adrift on bliss and memory. 

It’s the memories that reach up to draw him under, and orgasm takes him an instant later. 

“Szordryn!” He can’t keep his name from his lips - it slips out in a hush, but it’s there nevertheless. The heat between his thighs burns molten, spreading through his entire being until he’s shuddering helplessly with it. For a moment, he’s back in Memnonnar. Something in his chest knits itself back together.

Then it’s over, and he’s panting on the bed in a dark room, his release splattered across his stomach and the wound behind his ribcage tearing itself even deeper.

He lets the Weave slip away and rolls onto his side, tucking his knees to his chest. He’ll have to clean himself up at some point, but for now, he lets the pounding of his heart subside. White-hot pleasure ebbs to a steady warmth in his veins, leaving his body awash with it. In its wake, he is hollow.

The why eludes him. He does not pursue it.

His breathing steadies, but he stays curled on his side, hair veiling his face. Were the hour earlier and himself in any mood for company, he’d make his way down to the tavern below to drink until Szordryn’s name slipped from his mind. Invariably, it would resurface alongside a vicious hangover, but even those few hours of reprieve are beyond his grasp. 

No, he’s left alone with the memory of the drow’s warmth lingering in the sheets.

This isn’t the first time his thoughts have strayed to Szordryn. It’s simply the first time he’s let them stay for more than brief moments of yearning for a competent ally. Now, he’s paying the price of his weakness.

Weakness - it’s what his Lady had called it after Amrias left, this magnetic force which occasionally pulls him into the orbit of other men before sending him hurtling back into his solitude. Weakness, wanting, is beneath him, or so Illirayana has said. So he's tried to prove to her.

Even if he were to debase himself to wanting, it does not mean that he’ll ever have.

That doesn’t matter. Szordryn was a competent ally, but there are others who can fight at his side. There’s others who can satisfy him, too. There is nothing Szordryn left behind that’s worth aching for. He’d never made him feel like this in Memnonnar - both of them would have laughed at the mere suggestion. Why should it feel this way now?

He doesn’t know. He’s better off that way. 

Chapter Text

The gentle lap of lakewater on rock is a poor veil for pleasure-sounds, but it will have to do.

So rare are these, the moments when Gale can steal away his lover from the shadow-cursed lands or the endless demands of Last Light and its occupants. But Karlach is having her heart-engine tended to by the blacksmith, and Wyll and Lae’zel are advising Jaheira on Moonrise Towers, and Shadowheart is in prayer, and the gods only know what Astarion’s doing, but he’s not bothering them. Here, veiled between a stand of reeds and black water, it’s only him and the drow kissing him like he needs it to breathe.

When they break apart, Gale is just as breathless, chest heaving beneath the trembling fingers laid upon his breast.

“We can’t take long,” Elendar warns under his breath, in the lingering pause between kisses. “Jaheira will want to ask me--”

“I know that.” Insistent hands in his hair as Gale pulls him closer, impossibly closer. Elendar’s palms roll over waterworn stones with a soft clatter as he steadies himself, his warmth straddling Gale’s lap. The unmistakable jut of a steel-hard cock greets him through sheer fabric, pressed flush to his own arousal through the linen of his breeches.

“Hells,” Gale hears himself rasp. His mouth is suddenly arid. “Don’t stop.”

Those hands - deft in healing, steady in battle - take his own, guide them to the curve of his ass. Gale’s breath pauses as he reaches beneath lapis fabric and feels silken skin. He squeezes, greedy, dimpling taut flesh. Elendar sinks deeper into his lap. For his slight stature, he’s deceptively heavy, corded with the muscle of a battle-priest. Gale arches into him, feeling his weight shift, the way their cocks jostle together.

“I need more,” he groans, muffling it with a kiss to Elendar’s neck. He sucks a bruise there, then another, savoring the tiny noises he can coax forth with a brush of teeth or the play of his tongue over bitemarks. It’s juvenile, utterly, the sort of thing he once did with his lovers back at Blackstaff. Now, as it did then, it brings a thrill of animal satisfaction.

Elendar drags him into another kiss, hands in his hair. Teeth catch on Gale’s lip. Brightness bursts behind his eyelids. They draw apart, panting. 

“I think I can hasten us along.” Elendar’s sigh is near lost to that of the wind in the cattails. He catches his lower lip between his teeth. Chisel-scarred fists curl in the pleats of his skirt. “Would this help?”

And then midnight-blue fabric slides up his thighs, baring the hard cock straining against silver lace. The sight takes him like wildfire.

“You’re so beautiful.” It’s clumsy and inelegant on his tongue, the word choice pedestrian. He knows a thousand more fitting words, but they’ve fled his mind, chased out by the haze of mindless pleasure. Mortal pleasure, sweaty and hot and glorious in its imperfections. Pebbles shift beneath him, prodding uncomfortably at his ass as he rolls up against Elendar - harder, faster, composure shredded at the seams.

Elendar’s cock twitches against the lace. He grinds down hard, hips rolling like the waves lapping against the shore an arm’s length away. The dark outline of his cock presses to Gale’s. He lifts his skirt higher.

Lean, muscular thighs. The curve of hips accentuated by the string of white. The darkening of fabric where his pre-spend soaks it, turning it sheer, his smallclothes clinging to his slick cockhead. Gods above, he wants this as much as Gale does. One look at his face confirms as much - wine-dark lip clamped between his teeth, a still darker blush spilling across his cheeks--

A breathy, high moan falls from that pretty mouth, accompanied by a near-violent shudder that catches the sound. His eyes fly wide, like he can’t believe what he’s feeling.

And Gale comes in an instant.

The bliss is sharp enough to cut. His body jerks between the pebbled beach and the heat of the man in his lap. He buries his face in his neck, teeth catching flushed skin, his moan crashing and breaking on it. His cock throbs, spilling warm into his smallclothes, twitching against Elendar’s through the cruel fabric between them. Elendar shudders against him, not in his own climax, but to draw out Gale’s. 

“Elendar,” he groans, punctuating it with a helpless grasp at his hips. His face burns. The last time he spent himself in his smallclothes, he was a fumbling youth with the first man who’d returned his gauche flirtations. Certainly not an Archmage of Waterdeep, a grown man in the arms of someone he's falling in--

Crimson eyes shine in the gloom. “Yes?”

“I apologize - I didn’t mean--”

And then his weight shifts, driving his cock against the juncture between Gale’s thigh and groin. A coy smile curls his mouth. “Do you think I mind?”

His pulse flutters at the sight of him - sudden confidence, a certain regality to how he perches across Gale’s lap. Framed in the glow of the moonshield, his hair gleams like strands of pearls. A blush stains his cheeks. He lifts his skirt an increment higher, putting himself on wanton display. Gale fixates helplessly on the shape of his hard cock, straining against delicate lace. The head pokes shamelessly from the waistband, flushed deep gray.

“You could, but I’ll admit that I’ve been wrong before.”

Elendar’s lips find the pulse-point in his neck, following the thrum of the Orb beneath his skin. Even sated by Elminster’s spell, it’s a slumbering dragon. Fleeting sparks burst where those kisses find the purpled skin. 

“Not often, I’d imagine,” comes the murmur against his throat. At the gentle bite that follows, he gasps, a thrill trickling down his spine like molten iron. Elendar chuckles. “Add this to the list, then.”

“Elendar…” He catches himself biting his lip. Really, this ought to be humiliating - the stickiness of his climax drying in his smallclothes, the swiftness with which he reached it - but there’s nothing save ardent want driving the man atop him. The embarrassment roiling in his core is drowned out by the fire stoked under the hands now undoing his robes and the hips still rocking against his own.

He could get used to this, being wanted. If only he has time.

Chapter Text

At the bite of the first clamp, Rhovan moans.

Tiny silver teeth, blunted so as not to break the skin, tighten at the base of his erect nipple. They clink softly against the barbell of the piercing that precedes them. His gaze darts down to the contrast swift developing at his own chest - one nipple smaller and softer, the other caught in a clamp that turns it to a taut peak.

“Oh, fuck,” he pants, breath already coming quick and raspy. “Ast--”

His lover’s name turns into a startled yelp as the other clamp clicks shut.

The bloom of pain has Rhovan’s body jerking in place. At the sudden jolt, the chains dangling between the clamps jingle merrily together. Agony blossoms in his breast. With it comes ecstasy, two flames with the same kindling. 

Flames often lit in this chamber of their tower, overlooking the depths of the Northernwood. From his place sprawled beneath the shadowed canopy of the bed, Rhovan can see the stars wheeling beyond the window and the far-below ripple of the trees. Interplaying dark and light and sky - a beauty that pales before that of the man kneeling at his side.

On the silken sheets lounges Astarion, ring-bedecked hands busy, eyes brighter than the magefire dancing within the lanterns lazily drifting through the chamber. He’s bare to the waist, the marble-hewn curve of his hips swaying beneath tailored black silk, the smudged sheen of candlelight wavering in the fabric. A certain focus guides him, the same one that takes him when he’s guiding the flash of an embroidery needle through the train of one of his dresses, or when he’s coaxing his favorite horse into a floating piaffe. He fusses with the fine chains, adjusting them this way and that until they pour like liquid silver down the center line of Rhovan’s torso. Perfect symmetry, the way they both prefer. With a musical clink, he fastens the chain’s end to the base of the ring around Rhovan’s straining cock. He clicks his tongue. “Flawless.”

Despite the throb of his nipples, Rhovan manages a coy smile. “Aren’t I always?”

“Every time.” Astarion tugs at the clamps, just hard enough to sink the teeth further into his nipples. At his high gasp, crimson eyes flutter shut, savoring the sound. 

“I want to hear you.” Both encouragement and command. Astarion sets about earning it - nails ringing against his piercings to jostle them within his swollen nipples, a long finger twining through the chain joining the clamps and pulling quick and sharp until Rhovan cries out.

Astarion clicks his tongue. “You’ve been louder.” 

And he is again, as a deceptively soft tongue finds the peak of one nipple and pointed nails find the other.

Astarion plays him as a bard might play an instrument. When his mouth isn’t teasing his chest, it’s pressed to the curve of his neck, fangs pricking his flesh until blood wells just beneath the surface. Idle hands have never been his wont, no matter how he claims otherwise - he is too occupied with living, now that he can. Eager hands trace his pectorals, thumbs sweeping over the peaks. Rhovan whimpers at each pass over his piercings, whimpers louder when he amuses himself with the clamps.

Pain has a breathless allure, the lover he should turn from but always runs to. Astarion inflicts it with a hand measured by experience and driven by his own desire. His eyes are dark, always moving between Rhovan’s face and chest, straying occasionally to the jut of his hard cock.

Not that his hands follow. No, those remain all but fastened to the rosy peaks at his breast.

Sometimes he tugs hard enough on the delicate chain that Rhovan bows from the mattress, chest thrust upwards like an offering, an instinct to alleviate the biting pain. Even if the agony comes like a kiss, it’s agony nonetheless, and his body responds in kind. Helpless shuddering, cries that break like glass hurled onto stone, the carmine tint to his peaked nipples - surrender granted by every part of him. Surrender Astarion gets drunk on.

Astarion murmurs praise, filth and adoration in turns, words that buzz beneath the roar of blood in his ears. He sucks at one nipple, tightens the clamp around the other. Pain-pleasure that ebbs and flows, sparks that meld together instead of warring. Rhovan floats there, between the throbbing pain and the teasing caresses that follow, between Astarion and their bed. His hands fist in moon-white curls, draw him closer even when his fangs scrape the stiff peaks. Time passes in the gentle splash of the water-clock beside Astarion’s desk. His own moans rise and fall like the tides of an inland sea - louder when Astarion teases at the clamps, softer sighs with each pass of his tongue or flick of a fingertip against his aching breast.

“Ast…” The name turns to a sigh. “More.”

“Do you want more, my darling?” The chains clink. Rhovan’s cry wavers from his lips. He arches as a sweet pain settles in, coaxing him to arch from the sweat-damp sheets. Astarion grins against the hollow of his collarbone - a murmur of fangs on skin, a sharp metallic pinch at his breast. “Act like it. Beg.”

“Please!” The edges of the word splinter to pieces. Astarion’s palms mould to the slight curve of his chest, catching rosy peaks between his fingers and squeezing until Rhovan’s hips jerk, cock dripping onto his stomach. “I need more. Your hands, your lips, anything...”

“Oh, my darling. I never tire of that sound - or the ones you make when I do this.” He pinches a swollen nipple, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger. Rhovan trembles until the chain jingles against itself. His nerves are alight. Every shift of the chain sends jolts from his breast to his cock. He grinds himself against air, hips responding to the building sensitivity coaxed by the steel pinching his nipples taut.

“Astarion, please…Astarion - I’m - I think I might--”

Bliss - mind-numbing bliss, overflowing from his core. Rhovan’s mouth falls open. His cock twitches madly as he comes, untouched, hips jerking and back bowing wantonly, his nipples catching against Astarion's hands. His fingers curl in answer, tugging at Rhovan’s breast, nails ringing against the barbells. Rhovan’s wordless shout punctuates the mad roll of his hips against the air. His climax lingers and lingers. No seed leaks from his throbbing cock, but the ecstasy is no less for it.

“By all nine Hells,” Astarion murmurs against the point of his ear. “You just came, didn’t you?”

“What do you think I - ahh--”

Astarion buries his face in his neck, fondling his aching nipples until Rhovan mewls. He makes no move to undo the clamps. Chain jingles as he twines the fine mesh around his finger. He tugs sharply down. Bladed pleasure pierces his breast as the clamps bite deep. Rhovan’s cry shatters on his lips.“Oh, my darling,” croons Astarion. Something wicked edges his voice, like the flat of a blade sliding along sensitive flesh. “We’re going to have fun with this.”

Chapter Text

Years down the line, Miraak will consider it a critical turning point in their relationship. In the moment, it’s rather difficult to think of it as anything but fucking mortifying.

He freezes at the treeline, one foot half-raised as though setting it on the pebbled shoreline will cause him to burst into flames. The beach is a scant strip of river-smooth stones that shift and roll underfoot. Or would, if he took another step away from the shadows of the evergreens. 

But he’s frozen in place, the waterskin dangling limp from his hand, as he gazes at the moon-drenched water. Or more aptly, at the man submerged to the thighs in it.

Faolan Snow-Strider is paler than the light of Secunda. From his hair to his skin, he could be marble, wading deeper into black water as though it’s not cold enough to give a Nord pause. His hair tumbles unbound in ruffled waves that put the pool’s surface to shape. The low breeze catches it, sets water and hair alike wavering like aspen boughs. Faolan lifts his face to the wind, the night, the moons cresting over the hills. His hair moves with him, baring a scarred back and the curve of an unfairly pert ass. Miraak almost chokes on his next breath.

His foot strikes the ground. Pebbles click together. By the hushed waterside, the sound might as well be a bridge falling in on itself. With a twitch of one pointed ear, Faolan turns. An excuse dies on Miraak’s tongue.

An excuse that, it seems, is needless either way.

“Didn’t see you there,” Faolan calls, as though he isn’t standing naked in a river. “You need anything?”

Casual, conversational, like Miraak has unexpectedly returned to their room at some backwater inn. As if that wasn’t the single most awkward demeanor he could take.

He should be apologizing - not that Faolan will get that luxury from him again. Better yet, he should already be back in camp. Or begging Faolan to forget this ever happened. Instead, all he manages is a weak “I had expected to be alone.”

A shrug of those powerful shoulders. “Told you I was gonna bathe.”

“I assumed you would go further away. Wrongly, it seems.” The wind dies before the roaring pulse in his ears. Despite the chill that comes with nascent spring weather, his face is hotter than the Skyforge. “My apologies for the offense.” It comes out thin and cowed.

His brows knit together. “D’you want me to be pissed off?”

“Should you not be offended?”

“Offend--” He has the almighty gall to laugh. “I look like some kind of blushing maiden to you? I don't care, Miraak. Kyne’s breath, you're not even the worst bathing company I've had - that'd be that time a slaughterfish almost--”

Miraak isn't listening. He can't. Because while Faolan is rambling on with one of his inane stories, he's still standing naked and shameless, silver in Secunda’s luminance. And he's beautiful.

He's noticed that beauty before, in flashes - a grin so crooked it only bares one pointed canine, white hair that falls like snow around his shoulders, hands that wield bow and blade with uncanny quickness, shoulders broad and muscled from years of archery. This is something new and intoxicating.

And utterly wrong.

The slope of narrow hips, canting like a dancer’s as his footing shifts. An archer’s muscles cording along his back and shoulders. A flat, scarred stomach - gods, he has so many scars, old marks that shine white in the moon and darker, fresher grooves, marking him from shoulders to the place where his legs vanish beneath the water. The slight swell of his breast, capped by nipples drawn taut in the cold air. Calloused hands running through his hair as he lowers himself, lets white locks spread like forming ice across the surface. His head tips back indecently. When he rights himself, still prattling cheerfully on, Miraak tries - fails - not to look down again.

Powerful thighs - they have to be, with the way he capers about in battle. A thatch of white curls between them. A soft cock, tinted almost pink in places - jarringly dark against the snow of his skin. Miraak’s mouth couldn’t get drier if he swallowed the sands of the Alik’r.  

Faolan is a temptation he can’t - must - ignore, and he’s not even trying to be.

“Be that as it may,” he says, cutting through some sordid tale about mudcrabs, “it was not my intention to - to disturb you. I…well, I suppose I’ll see you at camp. Later. In more clothes.”

And then he’s turning on his heel and scurrying back into the cover of the dark trees, accompanied by a wordless prayer that Faolan hadn’t noticed the bulge forming at the groin of his robes.

He doesn’t go back to camp. His legs are curiously unsteady on the leaf litter. The insistent throb between his legs tugs at his attention. With a hiss, he stumbles through a line of aspens rich with new growth. Behind their branches, the sound of the river is blessedly muffled. He slumps against the nearest tree trunk broad enough to hold his weight - suddenly, his legs are unfit for the task. His palms sprawl clammy against the bark.

The breeze does nothing to cool the fire in his blood. His breeches are far too tight around the insistent stiffness of his cock. His gaze fixes on a stump across the clearing, currently in the process of being devoured by fungi. No distraction is forthcoming.

His hand is delving beneath his robes before he can think better of it. The laces of his trousers nearly snap in his cold-clumsy fingers. With a curse, he fishes the hard length of his cock from the tangle of cotton. 

He shouldn’t. He hasn’t, in an age. He’s above distraction, the petty lusts that dull the minds of lesser men. He’s certainly never succumbed to the wiles of a man he has to look in the eye on a daily basis.

And even if he didn't, if they'd never speak again once the sun peeks above the trees, Miraak has no place pleasuring himself to the thought of one who wears a scar granted by the blade at his side. The image is painted on the insides of his eyelids - a slash that curves, a divot arching from his toned stomach to his ribs. He can still feel how his wrist had turned to keep the blade on his foe’s skin as Faolan’s pained thrashing carried him away. An unfamiliar guilt gnaws at his ribcage, a beast that’s only now realized it’s been caged.

And his hand is wrapped around his cock before he can think twice.

It’s too dry, an abrasive slide of skin-on-skin that he’s nonetheless snared by. He bites his lip until it stings, forcing his own silence. The friction of palm over cock stings still more. His pace doesn’t slow.

How would it feel, to take Faolan’s cock in hand like this? To hear his breath hitch, feel the lightning heat of his body, watch his cock swell to hardness at his touch? Would he be how he always is, quick-witted and sharp of tongue? Or is it a facade, one that cracks like dropped porcelain when he’s entertaining a lover? Would he moan?

In Miraak’s fevered mind, he certainly does - loud and shameless, as he always is. Cries that come in tune with the pace of a hand on his cock, matching the rolling of lean hips. That arrogant grin replaced by a mien of open-mouthed bliss, pleasure found in Miraak’s hand. A lean, muscled body - one he knows, now, by sight, one he aches to learn by touch - a body he’d pin to a tree like the one he leans on. 

He slows his strokes, smearing the wetness at his slit down his cock. It eases the burn somewhat - not enough. The slower cadence has him grinding his hips against air. Does Faolan like being touched this way, slow and mind-melting, or would it drive him as mad as he drives Miraak?

Either way - smug as he rides out his satisfaction against Miraak’s hand, or desperate and begging as he’s teased to the edge of Oblivion - he would be beautiful. 

Miraak’s head tips back, bark catching uncomfortably at his hair. Sweat meanders down his brow, stinging in the night-chill. His pulse is a warhammer, throbbing in his groin, his body aching for just a little more--

And he stops.

It takes effort equal to rending open the skies of Apocrypha and slipping back to Nirn. He squeezes the base of his cock so hard it hurts. Part of him is unwilling to let go, as though that would be tantamount to pursuing the release he cannot crave. With a groan, he tightens his grip. Pain flares bright, but dimmer still than the arousal still thrumming in his core.

No. Not like this. Not to the thought of the single most irritating person he has ever encountered.

As if Faolan needed new ways to get under his skin.

With fumbling haste, he lets go of his arousal and fixes his clothes. Not that he looks decent, with his rigid cock leaving its imprint on his robes. No amount of fussing with the fall of the emerald-green fabric fixes it. Miraak spits a curse as he gives up. If this is how it’s going to be, he’ll wait for when he can go back for the waterskin he dropped on the beach, once he's decent. Perhaps even speed the process on its way by reminding himself just how aggravating his companion is. 

Faolan, with his grating laugh and near-compulsive attraction to danger. The self-satisfied smirks when he’s certain he’s in the right. That absurd pride he takes in the scar-hewn lines of his body. The ridiculous way he puffs up his broad chest when he’s bragging to some awestruck bard. The dancing stride that carries him into trouble, the flitting of long fingers across dagger-hilts as he gets himself back out of trouble, the liquid motion of what he now knows is a supple body beneath his leathers--

Miraak’s cock twitches against his smallclothes. Air hisses between his teeth.

Perhaps it’s better if he doesn’t think of Faolan at all.

Chapter Text

“Look at yourself, darling.”

A familiar command, but one that takes its time to root in Rhovan’s pain-foggy mind nonetheless. He’s been drifting here, facedown on the opulent bed in Astarion’s chambers, for long enough that the first drips of wax have long since cooled, the throb eased. Recent patterns still ache with a burn he knows intimately. An easy pain, one he welcomes like an old lover, something he can drift on.

But Astarion wasn’t making a request.

His neck twinges as he cranes it upwards. His eyes meet the mirror mounted in the ceiling, nestled in the embrace of close-knit branches. In its reflection he is alone on the bed, bare and vulnerable amid the inky sheets, dark hair bundled at the nape of his neck. He finds his own gaze, reflected, then dips lower.

Amethyst wax traces every dip and line of his back - pooled hot over his vertebrae, emphasizing the inward dip of his waist, flooding the hollows flanking the base of his spine. Patterns once only apparent to one who has studied him through the eyes of a lover, now writ in candlewax that sears as it dries to his skin, branching and meeting with finer lines rendered in an artist’s hand. The effect, taken in full, is hypnotic. Deep purple that brings out his pallor, layered with black shot through with hints of amethyst. His skin flushes pink where it flanks the lines, a gradient of hues. His body, even bare of fabric and gemstone, turned to a work of art by those beloved hands. 

“What do you think?” Astarion’s tongue flickers across his lips. His knuckles curl tighter about the base of the candlestick, nails tapping a staccato on the crystal. “I do believe I’ve outdone myself. The colors bring out those lovely eyes of yours.”

Rhovan drops his gaze to meet Astarion’s. “It’s beautiful.”

“Mm. I think we could do a little more,” muses Astarion. It’s all the warning he gets before searing heat spills across his ass.

His shriek comes out unmuffled, more shock than pain. A deep, throbbing heat nestles beneath the thin flesh. Astarion hums, tapering off the flow as he draws a branching pattern with the candle. It’s all Rhovan can do not to buck, but causing mistakes will only hurt worse - he’s learned that lesson well.

Tears spring to his eyes when Astarion starts on the other side. His sob is a broken little thing, half-caught behind his teeth. Heat burrows beneath his skin - a burn he can’t escape, seated in such a sensitive place. He muffles his next cry in the rumpled blankets, slick with his sweat.

“Hells. Don’t stifle those sounds, darling.” Wax pools in the crease between Rhovan’s ass and thigh. His head jerks up with a moan that tears itself ragged. Wetness trickles down his cheek, doubtless carrying kohl with it. Claws prick his thighs, coaxing them wider, guiding the trickle of wax over skin. The burning heat matches that which builds between his legs. The tears well up faster - though which calefaction elicits them, he can’t say.

It’s with tenderness that clawed fingers slip into his mouth, but fevered excitement burns beneath the surface, belied by the tremble of Astarion’s hand. He tips Rhovan’s head up. “You have no idea how you look right now,” comes the throaty murmur. “Arch that pretty back of yours.” 

And he does, because Astarion asked, because he’s lost to the mind-white lull he slips into whenever his lover’s fingers part his lips, because he wants to obey. He lifts his ass, baring himself in his entirety. He settles into a pose he ought to find utterly degrading - ass lifted, thighs spread, lips soft and wet around his fingers, head thrown back as though his pleasure has already crested. 

How can he feel debased, when Astarion reveres him like living art?

He curls his tongue against deft fingers, eyelids fluttering as tears trickle down his cheeks. The pain cools into a simmering throb. He thrusts back against it - against another drip of wax as Astarion tips the candle once more. His cry is a needy thing, sobbed against his lover’s palm.

He scarcely notices when the candlestick clinks down on their nightstand. The scent of lavender cloys in the air as Astarion pinches the wick. The flame dies, leaving behind only thin smoke that curls gently in the tranquil air. His lover’s words come still softer. “You’ve suffered so beautifully.” A long-fingered hand cups his balls, fondling the steel-stiff length of his cock. “You’ve more than earned a reward.”

As though the artful pain, cooling from burning ache to seductive thrum, wasn’t reward enough.

Chapter Text

It’s been decades since Mornion lay restrained by another’s weight and impaled on his cock. Absence, it seems, lights his body aflame.

Halsin’s cock is thick, enough that the stretch would be agonizing had he not held Mornion to the ground and languidly fucked his entrance with fingers and tongue before scooping up him, pinning his back to a sprawling oak, and entering him with his cock. He pushes in with a slow, but consistent, slide. Quick enough to make him squirm, slow enough to ensure that the burn never escalates to true pain.

His eyes roll back. He can’t help it. 

“Halsin,” he groans, the sound punched out from within him. His head tips back against rough bark. He’s so full, so gods-damned full, and Halsin is still pressing in--

“Shh,” comes a sighed assurance against his lip. Soft, demanding lips follow it, kissing a trail down the column of his throat. “You’re doing well. Do you need to stop?”

Irritation flashes white behind his eyelids. “Don’t you dare - oh!”

The moan that escapes is an embarrassment someone should die for, but his body goes lax, shuddering in sudden pleasure as Halsin starts to thrust. It’s been so long - too long - since he felt a cock inside him, since he was laid at the mercy of another’s rolling hips. His legs tremble around Halsin’s waist. He locks his heels at the small of his back, drawing him in. Not that he could move Halsin if he tried, but it’s a request heeded nonetheless as Halsin starts to fuck him in earnest.

“Then look how well you take it.” Words alone are enough to guide his eyes down his body.

His wedding ring jostles against his breast - silver, stamped with a crimson heart, lifelike as one that beats behind a ribcage. Orcish and Elvish runes intertwined on the inside of the band, a pattern he would know by feel alone - one that had once left faint imprints in his finger. Now, it hangs from a cord, close to his own heart.

Halsin’s touch feels like a betrayal of his vow to the man who once slipped that ring onto his finger. But he can’t deny he needs it, like water seeks to flow to lower ground.

“Harder,” he urges, like a prayer he’s long since forgotten how to utter. “Harder, harder--”

Halsin acknowledges with his body before his voice. Sparks shoot up Mornion’s spine as the heft of the cock within him rubs hard over his spot. He holds the new angle like it’s nothing - deep enough that Mornion’s eyes roll back, hard enough to set his whole body trembling. He moans in tandem with the cries he’s wringing from Mornion’s lips. “Like this?”

“Yes!”

His body is white hot. His mind burns hotter still, brighter, light throbbing behind his temples until--

Halsin awash in blood, carmine soaking the earth, iron filling his nose and lungs and--

His eyes fly open wide. Halsin’s brow furrows, but the snap of his hips doesn’t falter - he remembers the instruction given to him before they’d started. Good.

“Are you well?” Halsin pants. He squeezes Mornion’s wrists in one massive hand.

“Talk to me.” How foreign pleas feel on his lips, now. “Halsin, pl--”

“Shh, my heart. All you have to do is take it.” Somehow, Halsin presses closer. Air rasps in Mornion’s lungs as he’s trapped, not uncomfortably but firmly, between the oak and Halsin’s chest. Mornion’s hard cock is pinned between their abdomens, the friction sapping the strength from his legs. Halsin settles in there, closer still. He chases the motion with a gentle kiss.

Oh, Hells, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Putting his face so close to Mornion’s teeth--

A hard thrust drives off all thought of splitting his throat beneath his canines. He moans instead.

“You’re so eager for me. So wet.” Genuine awe entwines with the lust turning his voice husky. He must be able to feel the arousal leaking from his cock where it bounces between their bodies. Mornion’s face grows hot. Halsin keeps talking in that low croon. “Does that feel good? Show me how much.”

Mornion answers in desperate writhing, his back scraping bark. The raw, abrasive tear brings a flash of pleasure and something more sinister. His fingers curl around knife hilts that aren’t there - left back in camp. The threat of some wandering beast is less than that which he poses to his lovers.

Not that he needs weapons to--

Tear, rip his throat out, sink your fingers into his eyes, bathe in his dying screams--

Nails bite his flesh as Halsin lifts his legs further from the ground. His cock sinks, somehow, deeper, the full heft of his balls pressing to Mornion’s ass. 

“All you have to do is take it.” He draws back until the broad head of his cock is stretching his entrance wide, plunges back in so fast it forces the breath from Mornion’s lungs. “You feel…” Words give way to a sigh, almost too delicate a noise for the man fucking Mornion until his eyelids flutter.

They don’t need words for this.

His murderer’s blood still whispers in his ears. But louder are his ecstatic moans, and the ragged hush of Halsin’s breath as he takes him. And no matter what his darkest whims demand, they cannot be fulfilled with his wrists caught in an unyielding grasp and his body pinioned and entered and used.

Something else to lose himself in.

Chapter Text

It’s amazing what a single strip of cloth can do for one’s appearance.

The refrain has echoed in Faolan’s head since he fastened the blood-red scarf around Miraak’s eyes and knotted it carefully at the base of his skull. Even in the dim hearthglow, the color is striking. Bright against the dusk of his skin and the inky strands of his unbound hair, a regal hue that would bring out the green-gold of his eyes if it wasn’t veiling them. On the bed, his body could be a statue hewn by a master, all muscle and strong lines dusted with dark hair. The combat-honed musculature in his arms is tensed as he grasps the headboard. His lips are parted around the breaths heaving in his powerful chest. There’s no part of him Faolan wouldn’t worship.

Though right now, he’s rather more interested in the impressive length of his cock than anything else.

He ghosts his fingers up his cock, heavy balls to broad cockhead. He gasps. Faolan savors it. “Sensitive, hm?”

A huff of air. “By your design, I’m certain.”

“Call it a side effect.”

Miraak might not be able to see, but Faolan certainly can.

He flicks his thumb against the slit of Miraak’s cock, watches it leak pearlescent onto his hand. Beneath his touch, velvet skin shifts over the length of him, a texture he’s learned with his lips as eagerly as he did with his hands. He coaxes a bead of pre-spend to trickle down the shaft, tracing a prominent vein. Miraak makes a soft noise in answer - louder when Faolan cups his balls and rolls their heft in his palm.

The sight of him kindles anticipation that aches, a honeyed blade sliding along his skin. He’d prepared himself before they began, working himself open with slick fingers followed by a curved length of ivory shaped into a cock. Even now, his body hums with want, his rim still soft and ready. It would be so easy to straddle him, guide that cock into where he’s slick and open and wanting - but where’s the fun in that?

Well. There’s a great deal of it for him, but nothing that can’t be honed by the waiting.

So instead he lowers himself in a rustling of sheets and runs his tongue along the vein snaking down the underside of his shaft. He meets Miraak’s gaze - even through the blindfold, he’s dead certain his eyes are angled downwards.

“Bet you wish you could watch me right now.” Another languid lick. “You always stare when I do this.”

A muscle tenses in Miraak’s thigh - anticipation writ small. Just to be mean, Faolan wraps his hand around his cock instead of swallowing it to the hilt. A groan of frustration greets him. It trembles into one of pleasure as Faolan dips his tongue into his slit. He follows it with his thumb. A pattern borne of nothing save his whims, one Miraak can predict no more than he can read Faolan’s thoughts.

It’s at random that he shifts between mouth and hand, or both in tandem, or nothing at all save the heat of his breath against Miraak’s cock as he almost wraps his lips around the head. A staccato of motion, one that edges on finding a rhythm before disrupting itself again. As unpredictable as his knife-fighting - hands that change course in the blink of an eye, a body attuned to stochastic motion. He swallows him halfway down, throat working around his girth, follows the bob of his head with a stroke of his fist that has Miraak’s back arching.

His nails dimple Miraak’s waist as the other hand skims over his slick cock. “You gonna make me pin you down?” 

Judging by the hitched moan that gets, yes.

Skin brushes skin as he straddles Miraak, bearing his own weight on his knees. Maybe it’s the heat of almost-touch, or the nearness of him, that has Miraak tensing with anticipation. Faolan fuels the flames with a push of his hips that settles his lover’s hard cock against the seam of his ass.

This close, and the temptation swamps him like a sudden wave crashing into the shallows. One push of his hips at the right angle, and they’d both get what they want. And he does want it. Miraak does too - the eager twitch of his cock against his entrance tells him as much.

The problem is that Miraak could want it so much more.

So he lets Miraak’s cockhead catch on his rim. The stretch, slight as it is, has a gasp hissing between his teeth. Miraak matches his anticipation with something dangerously close to a thrust of his hips. He catches himself in time, wrestles his own body flat onto the mattress, but the jolt still has Faolan’s world spinning as he grinds his ass along the length of Miraak’s cock. If he’s already surrendering to that base instinct to sheathe his cock in a willing body…

Fuck. Maybe he is desperate enough.

Faolan reaches behind himself, guides the head of Miraak’s cock to prod at his flushed entrance once more. His other palm slides up his body, from the dark curls at his groin to the dimpled hollow of his collarbone, a path he’s tempted to follow with his tongue. Some other time, surely. 

“If I let you fuck me,” he murmurs, watching the way Miraak’s throat bobs at the coarse word, “can you keep your hips still?”

“I…” Miraak’s lips part around nothing. His cheeks stain themselves somehow darker. “I, ah…”

Faolan’s grip tightens. “Yes or no?”

“Yes.” Punctuated with a nod that nearly knocks the blindfold askew, leaving dark hair poking at odd angles from above the fabric. His knuckles go ashen on the headboard.

“Good. I mean it, though.” Faolan lets his cockhead spread his rim wide, reveling in the way their breath pauses as one. “Don’t move.”

From the tremor that seizes him as Faolan sinks down, he knows Miraak has about a snowbank’s chance in the Deadlands of following those orders.

Exactly as planned.

Chapter Text

Gale hasn’t found a conference this frustrating since he last presented with Mystra.

One week. One week in Italy, meeting with his colleagues and presenting his own work on gravitationally unstable protoplanetary disks - a paper he’d gotten published in Nature Astronomy, for gods’ sake. Everything he’d thought beyond his reach after the divorce. And it’s not that he’s ungrateful, really. It’s been a wonderful week in most aspects, disregarding that delay at the car rental agency.

And the fact that he hasn’t seen his boyfriend in six days.

Elendar - Dr. Hlaana, to their colleagues - has made himself such a fixture at conferences that it’s still jarring to be attending one without him. Were it not for the rather time-sensitive process of analyzing samples from one of Elendar’s colonies of extremophilic archaea, he wouldn’t currently be alone in the halls of the lecture building. Back inside the auditorium, the murmur of conversation fades with distance. It’s not that he couldn’t be in among those voices, if he wanted. Lae’zel and Wyll are familiar faces, at least, and he’s been looking forward to catching up with Dr. Aumar, but they’re not him. And, professionalism be damned, he’s not above slipping out between talks to see if Elendar has messaged him.

To his delight, he has.

Three words, rather uncharacteristically. 

[Elendar: can you call]

Another message comes before the vagueness of the first can open the door to worry. 

[Elendar: nothing bad, i promise]

He glances at the clock across the hall rather than his phone screen. He’s always been old-fashioned like that. Ten to eleven - plenty of time for a quick call before Dr. Aumar’s talk. He fishes his earbuds out of his pocket and plugs them in before replying. 

[Gale: I can spare a moment. Are you well?]

In lieu of another text, his phone chimes with the ringtone he’d downloaded for Elendar’s call. He answers.

“Good morning,” comes the hushed lilt of that beloved voice. “Are you still at the talks?”

There’s something odd in his tone - not urgent, not furtive, but strained and ember-warm. Gale can’t place it, not without seeing his face. 

“There aren’t terribly many left. Truth be told, I’d be just as happy to have the afternoon off.”

“I looked through the schedule. It looks a bit…tiring.”

Gale frowns. “Speaking of tiring, isn’t it…say, around two in the morning? What are you doing awake?”

“Late night at the lab. You know how it is.” He does. “I decided to…de-stress myself a little once I got home.”

There’s that edge to his voice again. Gale still can’t place it. His brow furrows. “You’re being rather vague.”

A chuckle that could almost be background noise. “I can be a great deal more explicit, if you’d like.”

Oh. That’s the tone he’s taken on.

Gale’s face burns hot. He double-checks that his earbuds are plugged in - they are. Somewhat absurdly, he straightens his tie, as though Elendar is around to see it. “In case you’ve forgotten, I am at a conference.”

“How could I forget?” A low laugh that sets him aflame. “There’s a reason I’m fucking myself senseless instead of waiting for you to do it.”

Elendar’s voice half-hitches on the curse. Gale’s breath fully hitches in reply. “This is…rather unexpected, I must say.” 

“Do you want to see?”

“I…” Gale’s tongue darts out to wet his lips - when had they gotten so dry. “Conference. I’m at one. Elendar…”

“You’re not taking my calls in the auditorium, are you?” A click of his tongue that has Gale’s knees weak.

“Of course not.” His palm feels clammy around the phone.

“Is anyone around?”

He knows no one is, but a lingering glance around the hall confirms it. It’s a cavernous space, really - his steps echo back to him from the arch of the ceiling, soaring high above the balconied halls of the lecture hall’s upper levels. God, the astronomy department back in Vancouver is embarrassing, really. This building is palatial. And this part, at least, reverberates with no footfalls save his own. Everyone here on a Saturday has better things to do than mill about the foyer.

“I’m alone,” he confirms, under his breath. He must sound like he’s planning a drug deal. Not that he looks the type, in his slacks and the sweater vest Elendar’s brother got him last Christmas - a bit passive-aggressive, that.

And he’s still trying to distract himself.

“If you really are too busy,” comes the murmur over the phone, “then go. I won’t be upset. I knew I was taking a bit of a risk, really, doing this at all - and I can certainly take care of myself--”

“Elendar.” Gale can picture the look in his eyes when his sentence trails into silence. “How woefully are you underestimating yourself, if you think I can still focus on the talks?”

A long pause. A sigh that could be static. “Check your messages, then.”

Gale nearly disconnects the call twice in his eagerness. Turning once, then twice, to find a wall that isn’t half windows, he plants his back against a column and opens the app.

And there he is - or part of him, at least. The corseted swoop of his waist, the flare of hips poking out beneath the indigo fabric. The jut of a dark, dripping cock against a stocking-clad thigh. His heart skips several beats.

When he comes back to himself, it’s with the door thudding closed behind him and late-morning sunlight meeting his face. Two steps down and he’s stumbling into the railing, narrowly avoiding tripping over his own feet in his haste. His hands come away smelling of rust. The world is screaming that this is a bad idea. He turns a deaf ear on it.

“You got quiet.” The voice in his ear has him all but jumping out of his skin before he remembers he’s on a call. 

“Can you blame me?” Perhaps whispering is unnecessary, but it feels right.

“Hardly.” Sheets rustle, and a breathy moan floods his earbuds. God, this is fucking indecent. He wants more.

The parking lot proves as empty as the halls, which is good, because his dress slacks are clinging indecently to the outline of his cock. He crosses the asphalt at a speed verging on unseemly. He could’ve just as easily hidden himself in the bathroom, but his ego would never recover from jerking off in a public restroom. Not that doing it in a rental Honda Civic is any better.

At least the passenger seats are easy on the spine.

He lets himself into the back, because he’s not about to put himself in close proximity to the horn at a time like this. Locks click, he settles himself as best he can, and he does his level best not to catch a glimpse of his flushed face in the darkened screen. At least he parked in a secluded corner of the lot, between a brick wall and a larger truck. It could just as well be paranoia, but he pulls out one earbud nonetheless. Now, he’ll have a few moments’ warning before anyone appears beyond the windows. 

If he’s not too distracted, that is.

“I heard a door.” The words drip honey-sweet with feigned innocence. 

Gale’s hand drops to his groin. “I’m in the car.”

“Skipping the talks?” A click of the tongue that unravels something in his core. “I can’t believe you’d do such a thing, Dr. Dekarios.”

His cock twitches against his palm. God, he’s never liked that title more than when he hears it from Elendar’s lips.

“You have no one but yourself to blame.” Absently, he pops open the button at his slacks, lowers the zipper - anything to relieve the pressure that’s fast becoming intolerable. “And I’m hardly skipping anything, if we’re quick.”

“We?” Another diaphanous charade at guilelessness. “Don’t tell me you’re touching yourself for me?”

He pauses, hand a hair’s breadth from his arousal. Somehow, taking himself in hand without Elendar’s word feels like an intrusion. “Do you want me to?”

“I was hoping you would, actually.”

With a groan, Gale draws his cock from the confines of crisp fabric. He can scarcely summon the wherewithal to spit into his fist before wrapping it around himself. A groan of relief tears from his throat. God, he never appreciates how tight those dress pants are until he’s peeling them off.

He also usually isn’t so hard he can’t see straight.

“Is your hand on your cock?” Elendar’s moan is nearly lost to the sound of skin against fabric. Gale’s imagination runs mad.

“It is now.”

“Show me,” comes the command, fraying with the fading of the signal. Gale curses under his breath. A glance at his phone reveals two bars of service glowing white. The universe knows as well as he does that he shouldn’t be doing this. 

He switches on the video feed and angles the phone camera at his cock anyway. In his earbud rattles an appreciative groan - rendered tinny by the wires, but one he would know anywhere. “You’re so hard for me.”

“You’ve given me a great deal of reasons to be.”

“I can give you more.” The murmur has his eyes snapping back onto the screen. He locks eyes with the picture he’d saved for Elendar - a selfie he’d sent him after their third date (or fourth, depending on how you count certain activities), hair plaited and a bower of morning glories blooming in the background. The image fades to gray as the video feed loads. And loads. And fucking loads.

With a groan, Gale swaps the call to data. He’ll kick himself for that later.

Now, he’s rather more taken with the image that appears on his screen.

It’s still a little grainy, but the picture is there - there and moving, pixels blurring at the edges like watercolors on a palette. Elendar, kneeling on their bed - he can tell by the twinkling of the fairy lights strung behind their headboard, fogged as they are by the shaky quality. But Elendar himself…

Gale is simultaneously the luckiest man alive, because he’s in love with a vision like this, and the unluckiest, because he’s in a rental car outside an astronomy building instead of tangled up in their bed.

Elendar sits propped against a heap of pillows, languid, backlit by velvety golden lights. The only other illumination, Gale deduces, is from his ring light - an even glow that highlights every curve of his body. And in that luminance…

A corset and stockings - familiar garb, but caught in a light from an angle that sets the cut-glass beadwork ablaze. It’s as though the stars themselves have fallen to midnight-blue fabric, a hue that would have spoken of royalty some centuries ago. A night sky in miniature, contrasting with his dusky skin. His legs are spread, the lean muscle of his thighs encircled by the frills of his garters. His cock is just as hard as Gale’s, bobbing as he rolls his hips to--

To fuck himself down to the hilt on what appears to be a rather large dildo. 

Elendar’s fingers tighten around the base - is it glass? it catches light like glass - as he works it idly in and out. Shallow thrusts, the kind he likes when he’s in the mood to beg for more. A staticky sigh drifts through his earbud. It’s drowned utterly by the obscene groan he hears issuing from his own throat.

A quick glance around confirms no one’s popped into view outside the windows. A good thing too, because his hand has already fallen to his eager cock. He strokes himself fast - not enough buildup, he realizes with a wince. He spits in his palm without taking his gaze from his screen. More aptly, without taking it from the sight of Elendar’s rim stretching around glass.

“I wish this was yours,” comes the breathy confession. “I’ve been thinking of it all evening - how you feel inside me, how you sound, how full I feel when you…” A sharp drop of his body that makes his hard cock jerk. “When you do that to me…”

Gale grips the base of his cock, willing himself to not finish in two strokes like a goddamned teenager. His voice comes out tense around gritted teeth. “That - well, that’s new. That’s not one of ours. When did you even get that?”

A breathless laugh, one that stumbles over a moan. “The day after you left.”

Gale’s heart flutters. God, his ego doesn’t need this. “Couldn’t wait any longer, could you?”

“You have only yourself to blame.” A dramatic sigh, issuing from off camera. “You spoiled me, and now I’m afraid I’ve become insatiable.”

“That makes two of us.”

“Oh, I know.” Elendar’s hips snap like sailcloth in the wind, a rolling rhythm that lifts him nearly off the dildo before sinking back to the base. His cock bobs obscenely against his stomach. “You like it when I ride you like this.” 

It’s not a question. Gale moans his answer.

“You came so hard last time.” Elendar’s thighs flex. The tip of the toy circles his slackened rim, glossy with lube. He teases himself exactly the way Gale often does. The memory is sharp enough that he can all but feel his lover’s heat against his cockhead. He smooths his thumb over his slit, circling until his legs tremble. 

“No harder than you,” he chides absently, eyes fixed on the patterns the glass traces across the flex of his rim. “Haven’t you teased yourself enough? I can only imagine how long you’ve been up to this.”

Elendar, for all his whipcord strength, is built small and lithe. Taking a cock like that, girthy and formed of glass whose heft he can practically feel just by looking at it, is no mean feat for anyone, but especially him.

“I started in the bath,” Elendar admits. Even with his face hidden, Gale can hear him blushing. “With my fingers, and…god, just thinking of you. I miss you so much.”

The image has Gale’s fist quickening on his cock. He knows well how Elendar looks with his hair spreading across the water, the way the surface ripples as he moves against him, the echo of his moans off the tile, the way his hole tightens around his fingers…

“I miss you too.” The words catch. The sound of his voice, the scent of him lingering on the pillows, the feel of his body--

“I’ve thought of no one but you,” Elendar breathes, “this entire time. Your hands, your mouth, your cock. I want you like this - want you to fuck me, or…or tell me how to fuck myself.”

His chest heaves with frenetic excitement as his hips roll faster. Gale picks up his own pace, matches the one Elendar sets, just as he’d do if it were his cock plunging into that flushed entrance.

“Keep moving like that,” he instructs. “You’re so beautiful. You’d only look lovelier, were you atop me.”

“Oh, god, I might come.”

“Can you?” Gale’s throat bobs as he swallows. “Come without touching yourself, that is.”

A huffed laugh. “We can find out.”

He doesn’t move faster, but the angle shifts. His thighs fall further apart, a shameless display of slick entrance and hard cock framed by lace-clad legs. Silvery hair cascades across the dark pillows as his head falls back. He steadies the base of the toy, body undulating against unyielding glass. His moans change pitch, deep and needy - the sounds he always makes when Gale finds the spot that makes him melt.

And melt he does, slumping back against the heap of pillows. A curious interplay develops between his upper body and lower - upper sprawled languid and boneless, lower rolling like waves. The muscles in his arm tense as he angles the toy. Gale feels his own wrist flex in mimicry.

“Tell me how you feel,” he urges. The talk they always fall into comes like rain from stormclouds, even from an ocean away.

“So good.” Ardent, breathless, devoid of hesitation. “I’ve never had anything this fucking big, Gale, it’s so much…”

“You take it well.” Well doesn’t begin to cover it, but he seems to have misplaced his characteristic eloquence. It’s probably off with his sense of propriety. His gaze fixes on the precome beading from his cockhead, exposed and shining with want. “God, look at yourself. You must feel incredible.”

“It’s making me miss your cock more. Hell, I just miss you,” he confesses. Frenetic motion settles to a long pause, his breast heaving. He runs a hand down the lacings of his corset, sliding along the glossy satin ribbons. “I wish you were the one to do this up.”

It’s a ritual of theirs - when Elendar wears such garments, Gale is the one to fasten them. His heart pangs with something between love and lust.

“I would have, if I could.” Does Elendar know how much he means that? He thrusts shallow into his spit-slick fist. It’s still too dry, and he’s sure to expire on the spot if he rocks the car, so his movements are frustratingly shackled. And despite it all, he’s teetering on the edge. 

Which means it’s his job to ensure Elendar is, too.

“I’d make you beg for me.” It’s a promise, one he whispers too close to the phone, as if anyone is around to hear it. “I’d fuck you however you want - with my fingers, or the vibrator, or - or your latest acquisition--”

God, if that isn’t a thought to stop his heart…

“I just want you.”

“And you’d have me, but I’d want to see you desperate first.”

“Like this?” Elendar’s thighs part obscenely wide. He draws the toy out with a sound that has Gale’s cock twitching - god, that thing is unwieldy - and parts his entrance with two fingers. Lube glistens on his slackened rim, the muscle clenching minutely at the teasing touch. The glass head of the toy follows his fingers, dipping a scant inch into him before retreating. Again. Again.

“Please, Gale.” A moan that could make a porn star blush. “I want you inside me.”

“More.” He doesn’t know how much more he can take, stroking himself with a trembling hand. If he had the will to stop, he wouldn’t have started in the first place.

“I need you inside me.” 

“You have me.”

That’s all the encouragement Elendar needs to slide the glass cock back into himself. His body lifts from the bed. When he drops back down, he’s trembling like a leaf in the wind. 

“Faster,” he urges him. Elendar obeys like it’s Gale’s hands, not merely his voice, guiding the roll of his hips. “Find what feels good - there you are. I know those sounds.”

“Can I see your face?” For a man with his legs spread and a camera angled between them, capturing the slide of a dildo in and out of his ass, he sounds almost shy. In response, Gale swaps to the front camera and rushes to hold his phone at a better angle. It takes a few tries, but he manages to frame his face in a halfway-flattering light.

At the sight of him, Elendar moans - a compliment Gale has found himself cherishing more than pretty words.

“You’re so…” A dreamy sigh, a thrust of the toy that settles its hilt behind Elendar’s balls. He works himself faster, hand and hips alike, a desperate sound tearing itself from him. “I can’t - I need--”

Gale’s eyes don’t waver from the bob of his cock, the head shining with precome. “Do you need to touch yourself?”

“Could I?”

“Touch yourself for me,” he groans, because he needs to watch as much as Elendar needs to do it. 

He watches, transfixed, as a fine-boned hand strokes his cock once, twice, three times. A tempo utterly misaligned with the one set by the flex of his thighs. Gale knows that sudden lack of coordination well. The force guiding him is no longer titillation, but a desperate need to--

Elendar sobs his name as his body spasms. Gale catches a glimpse of come coating his abdomen before the image turns to a blur of gray and white and shadow, tumbling over itself before fixing, out-of-focus, on the distant ceiling. The sound, by some stroke of luck, is clear as ever. If Gale closes his eyes, he can imagine the heat around his throbbing cock is Elendar’s body, that the tremble of his fist is that of his inner muscles tightening with the throes of pleasure. A few more pumps of his hand, and he’s coming with a groan, white spilling between his fingers. His head falls back against faux leather. 

“Elendar?” He raises his voice as far as he dares. “Are you well?”

Sheets rustle, then his dishevelled face pops back into view, cheeks flushed and eyes brighter still than the now-blinding radiance of the ring light. “Sorry!” The room swoops. The picture sharpens again, this time on Elendar’s face as he flops back into the pillows. Platinum hair - recently re-dyed, Gale notices somewhat belatedly, by the look of his roots - clings to his sweat-sticky brow. He’s grinning in the way he does when he’s desperately trying not to.

Gale’s eyes fall from the screen to the little box peeking from his jacket pocket, where he’s kept it since he bought it two days prior, as though it will vanish if he lets it beyond arm’s reach. He knows its contents like he knows his own hands by now - black meteorite inlaid with opal that catches every color of the Milky Way’s arc. Not that he was unsure of himself before, but after that…

Well. It’s always nice to be dead set on something.

“Nothing to be sorry for, my love.” He watches Elendar, hours and an ocean away, settle against the familiar heap of pillows. “Did you…”

“Kick the phone?” It could be a shadow, but Gale swears his face flushes darker. “Only a little.”

It wouldn’t be the first time something of the sort happened. Probably wiser not to bring that up.

Elendar brushes his hair behind an ear that glitters with silver. “We’re doing that again next time one of us travels.” A breathless proclamation, to match the look in his eyes. “But I still wish you were here right now.”

“You’re almost through with the waiting.” Gale’s not at all looking forward to the red-eye flight that will take him back home tomorrow, but what happens after that is a different story entirely. Well, after that, and a bath, and a long nap--

“That was incredible. You always are.” Elendar’s chest is still heaving. His eyes kindle warmer than the sun filtering through the car windows. “As much as I’d like round two, I fear I’ve kept you long enough.”

“Do you need anything?” It’s a stupid question, or so he realizes once instinct has drawn it from his lips. “Not that I can get you much - I mean, I could try, but even I haven’t mastered the secrets of teleportation yet.”

He laughs. “You spoil me, you know. I’ve got everything covered here. Speaking of, I ought to clean this up. You wouldn’t believe how much lube that took.”

“I think I’ll learn for myself soon enough.”

“You want a repeat performance?”

“In person this time. You know me - old-school before digital.” Gale draws tissues from the travel pack in the glove compartment and sets about cleaning himself up, uttering silent thanks to any higher power that’s listening for the fact that he mostly came in his hand.

“That can be arranged.” Elendar keeps the phone surprisingly steady as he rolls onto his side. In the dark behind him, pieces of their life together come into fragmented focus - the black-and-white prints they’d bought at a crafts fair, the clock with equations in place of numbers, the octagonal shelves Elendar had built when he first moved in. 

The clock.

Gale’s eyes snap to the corner of his phone. The numbers stare back at him with an undeserved innocence. Ten past eleven in the morning, local time. An unread text from Dr. Aumar. A grand total of twenty-five missed messages from Lae’zel. The most recent ones, from the preview he glances at before deciding he loves himself more than that, are roughly the length of his current manuscript.

So his boyfriend managed to fuck him after all.

Chapter Text

“We’re going to get caught.”

“You keep saying that.” Gale’s hand stills halfway beneath Elendar’s undone belt. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you like the thought of it.”

Elendar blinks. The foliage of the park blurs around him, mingling like smeared paints with the distant lights of the Lower City and the cold stars above. His fingers tangle tighter about the wrought-iron fence at his back, brushing the waxy leaves of the hedge on its far side. Even the breeze wending its way up from the docks can’t steal away the heat welling up beneath his skin, spilling itself dark across his cheeks. It isn’t the first time he’s found himself with Gale’s hand between his legs in a place like this, where only shrubbery and luck shield them from potential passers-by.

It’s rather more than the thought of it he likes, by now.

“Do you?” he hears himself ask. “Know better, that is. Or…like this, because if you don’t wish to--”

“That, my love, depends entirely upon you.” There’s that gleam in Gale’s eye, bright as any star. “Tell me what you want.”

His hand strays no further, fingertips at rest against the base of his shaft. Elendar’s breath hitches.

“I can ensure,” Gale assures, softer than the wind rustling the veiling ivy, “that no one truly sees us. Leave those matters in my hands. If you want more, I can give it to you.” A teasing caress, just enough to make him need more.

Elendar’s groan is as inevitable as the words that follow it. “This. I want…this. Right here.”

There’s a thrill that runs electric through him, sparked by Gale’s touch and their surroundings alike. Even with the lateness of the hour, there’s nothing keeping people from strolling the park. They’d passed several as they stumbled down the well-kept pathways, hand in hand, stealing kisses until they parted the ivy and blundered into the alcove where they now find themselves. Elendar bites his lip at the knowledge - no more than a tangle of leaves and vines hides them from the outside world. He should be mortified. He is, and yet…

That’s not all he is. The jerk of his hips, his body’s attempt to guide Gale’s hand lower, gives him away.

“You do like this.” Gale hums under his breath. “Consider me proven wrong, then. Although I could further test that particular hypothesis…”

The words of a scholar, low and rough with the passion of a lover. Elendar’s heartbeat thrums in his throat. “Show me.”

“Anyone could see us, you know.” Gale’s hand wraps around his cock, pumping him to aching hardness. The head rubs rough against the confines of his trousers. He whines - in relief, at the coarse drag of fabric. Gale’s finger presses to his lips, hooking there gently as he feels out the contours of Elendar’s mouth. “Or hear us. Well, hear you, to be specific.”

Despite the tremor seizing his thighs, Elendar arches a brow - imperious, even as he thrusts into Gale’s fist. “You’re the one talking.”

“And you’re the one doing this.” The pad of his thumb circles his slit. Elendar can’t help his moan. It shakes as much as his legs. His knees are water. Too late, he clamps a hand over his mouth.

“You don’t honestly want to keep quiet, do you?” An accusation, playful as it is truthful. Elendar’s lips part against his palm. Gale can’t see it, but he must read it into the widening of his eyes, for adoration warms his gaze. “You like the thought of being heard.”

He says nothing. The way his cock twitches in Gale’s hand is more succinct than he could ever be.

Not for the first time, he wordlessly thanks every god that Gale is anything but succinct in his passions.

“You like that anyone could round that corner and see how beautiful you are when you come undone. Have you thought of the way they’d stare, how speechless the sight of you would strike them? How many of them would fall to their knees if they saw you like this?” His beard rubs rough against his shoulder as he leans down to kiss his neck, hard and demanding. “But they never will, because you’re mine.”

Elendar’s hips buck at that. Mine. 

And he is, because if Gale didn’t rule his heart, it wouldn’t be his hand between his thighs and his lips on his neck.

“Show me.” A plea, softer than the distant murmur of the city past dusk. “Show me what it is to give you my heart.”

And in their corner of the garden, veiled by vines and glossy-leafed hedgerow, Gale does.

Chapter Text

Few things can draw Rhovan’s focus from the unpleasantry of having an illithid tadpole and an angry archfey vying for space within his skull, but Szordryn’s touch is as good a way to lose himself as any.

They’re in a position they've found themselves in often since their reunion, naked and entwined atop a blanket in a wooded clearing, lips to lips and hands roaming over bared skin. The drow is beneath him, his smaller body not quite arching into his. Rhovan more than makes up for his restraint.

He thrusts his stiffening cock into the dark hand wrapped around it, savoring the rhythmic strokes of his deft fingers. Szordryn's lips part for his tongue and he eagerly deepens their kiss. His lover’s cock hardens against his thigh where it’s slotted between his legs. He’s warm beneath Rhovan, one hand on his chest and the other between his legs, his own cock throbbing as Rhovan rocks gently down against it. Their skin is flint on steel where it meets.

Rhovan could spend the rest of the night getting lost in him. He can’t remember the last lover who made him feel drunk on their presence alone. Just the sight of his bared body, and Rhovan is ready to fall to his knees before him. Undivided attention has never been Szordryn’s favored manner of receiving pleasure, and yet… 

He asks nearly by accident, the words he's long since dwelt on slipping out in a low murmur as he and Szordryn break their kiss.

“Can I suck your cock?”

Szordryn goes still beneath him. A shadow crosses his delicate features. Rhovan gives him space, rolling over to lie at his side rather than face to face. The gap eases the sudden electricity between them.

“I made no such demand.” Szordryn sits up, shoulders held tense. “Why would you do this?”

“I…” Rhovan follows him up, ignoring the latent arousal still gathered taut between his thighs. He mirrors Szordryn’s frown. “Because I wish to?”

“But…I owe you my life.” He tilts his head, studying Rhovan’s features as though waiting for an answer to write itself across them. “You are abban. You could ask anything of me.”

"Could I?” Rhovan meets his gaze and runs a fingertip down his sternum to the House brand etched beneath his navel. "So be it. I'm asking you for this. For you to let me pleasure you, at least for tonight.”

Silence greets his request. Szordryn's brow furrows. He's thinking - Rhovan can practically see the gears turning behind those silvered eyes - but he does not speak for a long moment. Eventually, he settles on one word.

"Why?"

“I said I wish to, did I not?” It's never a question he's had cause to answer before. "Is that not reason enough?"

Szordryn says nothing, but the tilt of his head asks the question he will not.

"Besides," murmurs Rhovan, hand falling between those ashen thighs to brush over his hard cock, fingertips toying with the ring through the head, "aren't you just a little curious?"

Szordryn sucks at the metal curving through his lip, shoulders rigid. He nods, just once.

"You've…thought about this?" He's choosing each word with all the caution spoken of in the tense lines of his body.

"It's a thought I've entertained rather often," Rhovan admits. A memory comes to him, shot through with yearning - his body bare on the sheets of an inn bed, his own spell caressing the rigid shaft of his cock, his mind entertaining fantasies of his mouth wrapped around Szordryn's arousal, his heart aflame with something sharper than lust.

He pushes it aside.

Rhovan leans in ever so slightly, one hand ghosting up the rigid length of his cock before settling to glide up his abdomen. "Are you thinking of it now?"

Still chewing at his piercing, Szordryn rests a hand on his bare thigh and nods.

A thread of heat wends its way down to Rhovan's core.

Szordryn's hand finds Rhovan's dark tresses, twining through them as if deep in thought - he has a weaver's hands, his lover. They'd look lovely darting through strands of magic in the same manner as Rhovan's own do.

"You know," Rhovan says softly, "if you hate it, you can tell me as much, and I'll stop. I'll not be offended. If you get no pleasure from this, you have but to say the word.”

Szordryn nods, studying him with the rapt focus he's come to expect. His eyes don’t hold the same hawklike edge that they always do around the others, or did when they first met. Something in his gaze seems to settle when it’s just himself and Rhovan and the desire between them.

"You please me so well," murmurs Rhovan, taking the hand resting on his thigh and caressing the knuckles. His lips brush the shell of his ear, just above the scarlet gemstones adorning the lobe. "You did the first time you went to your knees for me, and you have every time since. I love how your mouth feels around me, how you please me. And you enjoy doing so, do you not?"

Another of those tiny nods.

"Then is it so strange," he whispers, heart suddenly in his throat, "that I should enjoy the same?"

They aren't words he's ever had to say before. Somehow, he didn't truly understand them until he did.

Szordryn's hand stills in his hair. “Show me, then.”

"With pleasure," he murmurs, closing the gap between them and taking his lips in a gentle kiss.

Rhovan stays that way for a long moment. It's an indulgence he can’t help but grant himself - he savors the feel of Szordryn’s lips on his, the way his piercing digs at the sensitive skin of his lower lip, the taste of his lover. 

He draws back to trail a hand teasingly down his torso, following the ply of muscle beneath his skin. His body is sharp lines honed by violence, softened by a few enticing curves, a work of art fashioned by decades of battle. Everything he is speaks to power, raw and beautiful and alluring.

Rhovan can't get enough.

He doesn't touch the brand just above his groin, instead tracing the piercings accentuating the flare of his hips. He reaches the apex of his thighs and coaxes his legs apart as gently as he can manage.

The drow parts those pretty thighs ahead of his touch. His hands fall to the blanket beneath them, tightening uncertainly in the fabric. His eyes are dark, intent on Rhovan as he slots himself between his legs and reaches down to wrap a hand around his cock.

Szordryn is molten in his hand, his rigid cock the only part of him betraying his arousal at the prospect of Rhovan's mouth on him. He takes a moment to stroke him, savoring the contrast between metal and soft skin when he finds the row of piercings up the underside of his cock. He tightens his grip just enough to properly feel how hard he is.

It would be a blatant falsehood to claim he’s not still fascinated by the way his lover’s body responds to his touch, and he’s never been in the business of lying to himself. It’s nothing new, feeling the stiffness of a man’s cock and knowing he caused it, but it’s different with Szordryn - like his arousal is more than a response to be strategically coaxed from a lover. Like arousing him does the same to Rhovan himself.

Somewhat reluctantly, Rhovan releases him and shuffles down to lie on his front, his cock rubbing briefly over the blanket in a way that sends sparks up his spine. The sparks turn to flame when he takes in the sight of his lover, watching him through those sharp eyes. He can't resist pressing a kiss to the juncture of his body and thigh.

The weight of Szordryn's gaze is all but enough to scorch him, and he welcomes it, welcomes the hand brushing through his hair and grazing the point of his ear, welcomes the tiny catch to his breath when Rhovan runs a finger up his cock.

His breath catches much louder when Rhovan follows his finger with his tongue.

The metal of the ring through his cockhead is warm as he flattens his tongue against the dark tip of his arousal. He meets Szordryn's gaze as he lavishes the head of his cock with long strokes of his tongue.

He looks rapt, gaze catching Rhovan's and holding to it like he'll burn up if he looks away. Something shivers in the air between them. 

Heat gathers between Rhovan's thighs and he grinds his hips down once at the sensation. He curls a hand around the base of Szordryn's cock and takes a moment to let the anticipation thrill through his veins, pressing a kiss to the head. Hells, he hadn’t realized how badly he ached for this until finally presented with the opportunity to savor him properly.

Then he’s taking him into his mouth, lips tight around him and eyes fluttering shut at the sheer ecstasy of it.

He rolls onto one side, propping himself up on his elbow, and wraps his fingers around the base of Szordryn’s shaft, his own jutting out hard between his thighs. His tongue curls against the ring at his cockhead before he slides down again, eyes fluttering shut. His lips meet the place where his fingers curl around his cock. 

His head begins to rise and fall, setting a quick rhythm that makes his heart pound as much as it makes Szordryn’s cock throb.

Three years ago, if someone had told him he’d be light-headed with desire from taking a drow’s cock into his mouth, he’d have asked if they’d recently been struck over the head. 

As fate would have it, here he is, one hand on Szordryn’s cock and the other gripping tight to his ash-gray thigh to keep from touching himself.

The tiny hitches to Szordryn’s breathing make that endeavor much more complicated than it has any right to be.

His lover is not vocal about his passions, but it’s only made Rhovan redouble his efforts to read him. He appreciates the shifts to his body language even more for their subtlety. 

He says so much by doing so little, and Rhovan wants to hear all of it.

He laves his tongue over his cock and tries not to moan at the feel of him in his mouth. Too often, this has been mechanical, a skill he hones the way he’d train to run the rooftops in Baldur’s Gate. His ability to please men is another way of getting what he wants, another tool in his schemes. With Szordryn, he does it for lust alone.

Or at least, that’s the term he’s using to encompass the confused whirlwind of emotion drawing him inexorably into the drow’s bedroll.

Throbbing pleasure unspools within him and this time he does moan around Szordryn’s cock, eyes fluttering shut. A hand comes to rest in his unbound hair, a tentative touch that means more than any lesser man’s confidence. 

Rhovan lets his cock slip from his mouth and runs his tongue around the tip, slick from both his mouth and Szordryn’s need.

Rhovan’s head fits perfectly between his thighs as he kisses over the length of him. Driven by distracted passion, the points of his nails dig hard into the insides of his thigh. He presses his tongue firm to his shaft, seeking out his most sensitive spots and feeling the fleeting tension in his thighs when he guesses right.

The piercings are smooth beneath his tongue, the metal shifting ever so slightly at his touch, and he laps at each barbell until Szordryn's breathing goes unsteady. He doesn't moan - he never does, and Rhovan never expects it - but his enjoyment makes itself known in other ways.

Rhovan splays his palm on his inner thigh, feeling the lithe muscles there flex as he runs his tongue up the underside of his shaft. The salt of his pre-spend floods his mouth when he sucks the head, lavishing it with tiny flicks of his tongue. He shifts his gaze up to meet Szordryn's.

He's watching him through half-closed eyes, a familiar crimson burning to life in the slivers of iris he can see. Passion - he's enjoying this as much as Rhovan hoped, then.

He can make it feel even better.

It's a challenge to keep his lips and teeth from snagging on the piercings lining his shaft, but he manages, sliding down until his lips meet the base. He doesn't look up, but he doesn't need to. 

A faint tremor runs through Szordryn's body, just once.

It's all the encouragement Rhovan needs to keep taking him into his throat, hollowing his cheeks around his arousal. His own cock is like steel where it stands untouched between his thighs, but he ignores it. 

Hells, does it feel good to focus every scrap of his attention on his lover. 

As much as he loves having Szordryn's keen focus on him, he's wanted to return the favor for almost as long as he's known him. The drow is lovely in a way so few men are, and it makes Rhovan's blood race, to be allowed to please him like this.

For a long moment, he works his mouth over his cock, ignoring the insistent discomfort of the metal ring prodding at the back of his throat. His eyes water, smudging the liner he applies so carefully around them, but he doesn’t care. He’s found a rhythm, head rising and falling between those pretty thighs.

A little of the stress coiled tight in his mind untangles.

All he can focus on is the cock in his mouth, the taste and feel of his lover, the hand reverently stroking his hair. It’s not the most thorough form of release he knows, but it’s spreading wildfire through his veins nonetheless.

Rhovan sinks down to the base a few times more, lingering as long as he can bear between the lack of air and the metal digging awkwardly into his mouth. Piercings aside, Szordryn is comfortably easy to take to the base. His shaft fits well between his lips. Still, he’s forced to draw away to take a breath, lips shining wet.

Regrettable as it may be, his ability to subsist on shallow breaths drawn through his nose is not limitless. The break lets Szordryn’s peak ebb a little, at least - hells, he’s so hard that just looking at him makes Rhovan ache.

He has Szordryn’s cock in his mouth again the moment he’s recovered, licking the pre-spend from the tip before taking him just far enough for his lip to catch on the first of the bars lining his shaft. He focuses the attentions of his lips and tongue on each piercing. Tiny, expert flicks of his tongue shift the metal within the sensitive flesh just far enough to make Szordryn let out a tiny half-gasp.

The piercings make Rhovan feel wonderful when Szordryn takes him and they rub against the nerves within him. The least he can do is see that they grant their wearer even a fraction of the same pleasure.

He rolls the ring at his cockhead with the flat of his tongue, sliding the unyielding metal against his most sensitive spots, and he briefly trembles beneath the touch.

Another glance up - his chest is rising and falling, a sharp rhythm his breath hits as he approaches climax. Rhovan has seen it often from above as he rides him, has braced his hands there as he brings himself to climax after shuddering climax on his cock.

He’s gentle, almost soft, with the ministrations of his tongue, but he sucks him firmly enough to have his thighs almost shaking. He can feel how close his pleasure is to cresting.

He just needs a final push.

Rhovan sucks hard on the head of his cock, tongue rolling over the piercing, and meets his gaze, showing him every bit of lust darkening his eyes. He wants him to see.

Szordryn doesn't make a sound, but his entire body trembles. An instant later, he's spilling into Rhovan's mouth. 

He laps at his slit, fingers curling around his shaft and stroking as he swallows around him. Szordryn’s fingers curl briefly in his hair - not hard enough to be rightly called grasping, and he doesn’t pull down - but from him, it's as good as an ecstatic moan of his name.

When Szordryn goes slack beneath him, Rhovan lets his cock fall from his mouth with a soft sigh. His veins are alight, his own cock heavy between his thighs, his lips slick and faintly swollen. He meets his eyes, seeing his own want there in that wildfire gaze.

Szordryn looks lost, hazy from climax, as though he’s floating somewhere near that place Rhovan’s mind drifts to when a lover has overwhelmed him. He’s leaning back on his elbows, his hand falling from Rhovan’s hair to go limp against the blankets.

Despite the release of his orgasm, tension is already flooding back to his shoulders, his lip piercing caught between his teeth, his breathing steadying a little too slowly.

He knows by now what uncertainty looks like on him.

He’s unbearably lovely in the moonlight, hair limned in silver, a sheen of sweat at his brow in the wake of his pleasure, the supple lines of his torso accentuated here and there with the sharp gleam of his piercings. His cock is softening between his thighs, his brand stark on his ash-gray skin, his lethal grace apparent in the feminine curve of his rapier-slim body. 

Something wells up in Rhovan’s chest at the sight of him. He could have him in his bed for the entire night and it wouldn’t be enough. Something else, sharper, pangs behind his ribcage at the confusion written across that beautiful face.

“That was…incredible.” Rhovan swallows against the faint soreness prickling in his throat and shakes his hair back over his shoulders. “Hells, Szordryn.”

He sits back on the blanket, palming over his cock and feeling it ache at the fleeting touch. The head is already dripping - he hadn’t even noticed, but he’s hardly surprised. He’s halfway certain he’d spend if he squeezed his thighs together a little too hard.

Uncertainty still fogs Szordryn’s dagger-point eyes. Rhovan can think of only one way to alleviate it.

A suggestion lies in the way he parts his thighs, an offering of a position Szordryn is much more familiar with.

“If you wish,” Rhovan breathes, “you could return the favor.”

There’s not a moment’s hesitation before Szordryn is settling himself between his spread thighs.

Rhovan draws him in with a hand brushing over the back of his head. Szordryn lies flat onto his stomach, back arching and hips lifting just far enough to draw his eye along the curves there. It’s one of the most erotic things he’s ever had the fortune of seeing.

He takes Rhovan into his mouth without wavering, eschewing a slow build of anticipation in favor of open fervor. Rhovan moans openly when his piercing glides over the length of his cock before digging hard into the thin flesh as he takes him deep.

Szordryn’s hair is like satin beneath his touch as he rests a hand on his head - just to feel him there, not to guide. 

It’s not as if he needs the instruction. 

He’s unfairly talented with his tongue, pressing hard into the underside of his cockhead before tracing down the length of his shaft. His lips are soft and skillful around him. In a delightful contrast, the metal bar rubs firm against his shaft, just as smooth as his lips and tongue as they work over his cock until he’s moaning on every other breath. The heat of his mouth alone would be enough to drive Rhovan beyond himself.

Rhovan doesn’t bother to stifle his moans. It would be futile either way.

He tips his head back and faces the stars when he feels Szordryn take him into his throat. He’s pliant before each short thrust of his hips, willing.

It’s overwhelming in the best possible meaning of the word.

He hadn’t quite realized how hard he is until his cock was enveloped in the silken heat of his mouth, but he’s aching. He rides the thrill of it, lets it sap the tension from his muscles.

“Like that,” he all but hisses, voice trembling as Szordryn’s tongue dips into his slit. “By the dead gods, just like that - nh!”

Rhovan arches gently into his mouth, never deeper than Szordryn first takes him on his own. His own lips part around his soft moans and hitched gasps

As much as he wants to linger there, pretending nothing exists beyond the boundaries of their little clearing, his approaching climax is already coiling hot in his core. He's closing on that peak embarrassingly fast, like a youth experiencing another's touch for the first time. 

The sight of the drow between his thighs certainly isn't helping.

Gray skin cast in pale moonlight, hair silvering at the edges - the night uniquely suits him. Rhovan is silently grateful for the elven sight that grants him a clear view of that whiplash form by moonlight, lying prone before him for his admiration.

The sight of Szordryn makes something in his chest squeeze tight, like a hand about the hilt of a sword. It's wholly detached from the pleasure rising to a crest between his thighs, as good as the drow's mouth feels around him. And gods, it feels…

The peak doesn’t take him by surprise, but the height it reaches is another matter entirely.

“Szor--” Half his name spills from his lips, interrupted by a moan that tears itself raw from his throat. He spends himself hard, hips jerking, hand coiling in Szordryn’s hair as he shudders with ecstasy. 

For a few thundering heartbeats, there’s nothing in his mind but fleeting bliss. The only thing he can feel is the warmth of Szordryn’s lips, the tightness of his throat as he swallows his release, the silk of his hair between his fingers.

Then it's over and he’s guiding him off of his too-sensitive cock, not quite willing to let go, not sure how long he’s allowed to hold on after their passion has peaked.

Szordryn chooses for him.

The drow is in no hurry to draw away, it seems, though he’s shaking like a leaf in one of the sea-storms that rage off the coast of Murann. Rhovan can’t see his face, but he can feel the way his forehead presses to the inner curve of his thigh. It’s almost affectionate, the way he rests against him as though steadying himself. 

As though Rhovan is something safe for him to lean on.

Rhovan runs his hands through his hair. It’s dangerously close to tenderness. 

Szordryn doesn’t pull away.

As he presses close to him, his breathing steadies a little, like it does when he comes down from the high of climax. His lips brush over his pulse point, chasing the warmth gathering in his skin. Rhovan can feel him tremble against him.

Aimlessly, he strokes that moon-silvered hair. He does not push him away.

Szordryn almost stills against him - steadying, calming. His breath is warm on his thigh. His skin is warmer still.

Rhovan’s hand curls tighter in his hair. He looks up at him, searching, wanting, the crimson glow in his eyes fading to onyx like the last embers of a wildfire.

He pulls him up to capture his lips in a heated kiss, tasting himself on his lover’s tongue.

Szordryn hesitates, but then nimble hands tangle in Rhovan’s hair and eager lips press firm to his own. He kisses him back, matching his fervor, leaning into him until they’re chest to chest and entangled in one another’s arms. Pierced lips part for him and he accepts the invitation, deepening their kiss, savoring the feel of him until the burning in his chest drives them apart.

He doesn’t dwell on how that single, bruising kiss feels better than entire nights he’s spent with past lovers.

“You’re getting good at that,” Rhovan murmurs against the arc of his lips. “Kissing me, I mean. You’ve a talent.”

It doesn’t quite feel necessary to tell him he can’t get enough.

Szordryn’s fingertips fly to his lips as they break apart, tracing the soft curve, brushing over the bar of the piercing. For a moment, his gaze darts away, as though drawn to some unheard noise in the bushes, some distant thing Rhovan does not understand.

Those onyx eyes return to his. He says nothing, but his cheeks darken almost imperceptibly - even he’s not quite sure it’s there. Rhovan blinks.

The very idea of a drow blushing is preposterous, of course. He’d dismiss it outright had he not just seen it.

He kisses him again. He can’t help himself.

When the moment passes, Szordryn speaks in a hush. “We ought to return to the others, or they’ll come searching.”

“Naturally,” says Rhovan, mind a thousand miles away and too close all at once.

They step apart. The strange spell over them frays apart at the seams - when had it been cast?

Rhovan doesn’t let himself miss it.

They dress in silence. Szordryn does so with impressive speed. He’s clad in his leathers once more before Rhovan’s fastened even half the complex clasps lining his surcoat and mantle. 

He takes his time to finish righting himself - Szordryn hardly needs his company for the brief walk through the forest to camp, after all. The darkness is a surer ally to the drow than to himself.

He turns away, towards the gnarled trees, to finish readying himself.

Wisps of Weave directed by a fluttering of Rhovan’s fingertips fix the smeared liner around his eyes, cleanse the flush of pleasure from his cheeks. He smooths his surcoat and brushes his hair back behind his ears, taming the flyaway strands. He’s reasonably certain he appears as put together as always, as though nothing happened - though he can’t be sure without looking. It doesn’t strike him, how ingrained it’s become to try, until instinct drives him to glance around for a convenient reflective surface and he finds none.

Instead, his eye catches the drow waiting at the edge of the clearing, their blanket tucked under his arm and his gaze trained on Rhovan with a falcon’s unwavering focus.

Despite himself, Rhovan’s eyes widen at the sight. He’s waiting, not rushing off, not scrambling out the door of an inn room or hurrying Rhovan out of his private chambers, not insisting that he leave without being seen by a soul.

“Come,” he says, as though it’s simply expected that he should linger here, as though there need be no secrecy to what they share.

When he stalks into the undergrowth, Rhovan follows.

They pass into the quiet between the trees. The darkness enfolds them, leaves rustling underfoot and branches flush with new growth swaying in the soft sigh of the wind. Starlight dapples through the leaves, just enough to light the way. It’s much too peaceful for the turmoil in his mind and the beautiful, lethal man who’s causing it, but he makes no sound to disturb the still of the night. In the sunless silence, they walk side by side towards the almost-distant glow of the campfire, not quite close enough to touch.

Rhovan’s halfway certain he’d burn to ashes if they did.

Chapter Text

“There is no realm known to daedra or men in which you are being serious.”

Faolan, may every god take him, grins broader. In the dusty light slanting through the crack in the barrow roof, he looks damn near manic - leathers splattered in congealing blood, cobwebs still tangled in his loosely bound hair. “When’ve you known me to joke?”

Miraak folds his arms. His shoulder jostles against the unyielding stone behind him - the word wall behind him. “Always, and as if your life depends upon it.”

“Yeah, well, not now. Thought you’d be happier about that.” Faolan hops over the draugr lord’s twice-dead corpse as though it’s a log in the forests of Riften, where they sprawl beyond these catacombs. There’s a faint scent of pine drifting on the fresh air that issues from the crack in the ceiling, alongside a warbling birdsong. If Miraak closes his eyes, it’s approaching pleasant. 

Opening his eyes reveals the pale, smirking face of the Last Dragonborn as he sidles in close, brushing a gloved hand over Miraak’s robed chest. “I’ve always wanted to do this against a word wall.”

“You’re deranged.”

“Talk dirty to me.”

Miraak sighs with more vitriol than he’s truly felt for Faolan in…how long has it been? It’s against all odds. He’s the sort of man you ought to get more irritated by the more you learn of his idiosyncrasies, and yet somehow…

Miraak has not only fallen in love with him, but fallen into the kind of love that makes him seriously consider having sex in a godsdamned Nordic barrow.

Faolan, for his part, is exactly as animated as he was before the arduous crawl through the barrow’s wending passages. He raises a brow - the one with the piercings, sparkling faintly in the light. “I mean, we could just loot the place blind and go, but we always do that.”

“You always do that,” Miraak corrects. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d caught Faolan with a chisel going at the gilding on a sarcophagus.

“And I don’t hear you complaining when I buy us drinks after.” Faolan quirks his head to one side. The green of his eyes kindles to true verdancy in the shaft of sunlight. “Look, really, we can just fuck off if you’re not in the mood.”

It’s not that he isn’t. There’s something about watching his love in the throes of combat that sparks something in his blood, hot and quick and eager. It, like any other minor inconvenience in the wake of battle, usually goes ignored. But now…

“I wouldn’t put it exactly that way,” Miraak muses, half to himself. “I would be amiss to say you haven’t piqued my interest.” Before Faolan can look too pleased with himself, he holds up a palm. “But I want you to…convince me.”

“Well.” Faolan is all but bouncing on the balls of his feet. “You’ve got my attention.”

“You’ve had far worse ideas. I suppose this one is not terribly unsafe.” Miraak chews at his lip. “It’s rather unlikely that any others will come barreling in at an inopportune moment.” 

Faolan smirks. “Not through that rockfall.”

“We have to return that way, you realize.”

“We can turn incor…ethe…all ghostlike. But it’s such a long walk out. We could take a break before going back all that way.” His face falls into a pout too emphasized to be genuine. “And there’s no word walls out there.”

“Such an obsession you have.” Miraak’s fingers interlock over the small of his back, to the tune of a delightful little gasp. “Explain it to me.”

“You love figurin’ shit out.”

“I do.” Miraak elaborates no further.

Faolan only lasts for a few silent moments. Even through his leathers and the heavy cloth of Miraak’s robe, his body heat is that of a furnace. “Just something about fucking right on top of all that power. Dunno.”

Power. Of course.

Even with the Word - Od - faded from the wall, its traces remain. Magicka sparks blue from the stone in answer to Miraak’s presence. The scent of snowfall lingers heavy and sourceless. A chill burrows under his robes, creeping frost that isn’t there, but soothes his heated skin all the same. A word that still tastes of winter on his tongue, reverberating through his bones as it settles there.

Snow - the color of Faolan’s hair, the start of his surname, the weather he loves best. The man in his arms brings him another dimension of Od. Another force of nature, just as beautiful but uncharacteristically warm.

Their lips meet. Faolan’s hand steals beneath his robes, finds the contour of his thigh. 

By the time his tongue has slipped into Miraak’s mouth, he’s cupping the growing bulge of his cock through his trousers, and there’s no more seduction to be done.

It’s a race to undress, as it so often is with them, caught on the edged spur-point of the moment. Not all the way, not in a barrow, but clasps of robes and lacings of pants come undone in a flurry of hands that know this dance well. As one, they find each other’s cocks. The shape of Faolan’s arousal, the warmth of him, is as familiar to Miraak as the hilt of a blade. 

They settle there, lips to lips, hands working each other’s cocks. Magicka hums in Miraak’s veins, letting him slick his fingers with a spell. He takes Faolan’s hand, coats his fingers in the same clear gel. His lover murmurs thanks against his mouth. 

And then they’re kissing again, deeper. Miraak’s head presses to the runic carvings. Meaning murmurs in his ears - frozen, wind-tossed, the mark of the North. A tingling at his back, like hoarfrost creeping across a window-pane, utterly at odds with the wildfire at his front.

When they break apart, Faolan’s lips are kiss-swollen and pink. He moans.

“You’re a fuckin’ wonder.” The words come hot against Miraak’s throat. Faolan’s teeth follow a moment later. The drag of fang-points over thin flesh has his pulse surging, hot beneath the skin. A hum reverberates alongside his heartbeat as Faolan sucks a bruise into his neck, one that will bloom half-hidden by stubble. “Fuck, watching you fight…”

“Tell me.” Miraak’s hips rock between the rune-carven stone and Faolan’s grip.

“Like watching a storm.” At the word, motes of light dance across Miraak’s vision. Od. Snow that comes in a flurry, white that buries the world. A power that’s settled into his bones, raw and natural as the power currently pressing sinuous against him with his lips on his throat. Faolan groans, low and husky, edged with a growl. “Drives me mad, so it does. You could bring anyone to their knees.”

“Even you?” He can’t help himself.

“Even me.”

Faolan sinks like snowfall. His eyes never leave Miraak’s, green as spring. His tongue darts across the head of his cock. 

Sometimes, Faolan takes him to the hilt like a man deprived. Now, he teases without words. Lips and hands work in tandem, stoking sparks that burn as hot as those dancing from the word wall. Two forces of nature - the one at his back uncaring, the one at his front passion-mad. Power as old as the world humming against his skin, near as intimate as the mouth on his cock. Miraak studies him through a lover’s eyes.

Hair that evokes the word etched deep into the wall. Eyelids that flutter with the bobs and dips of his head. Warm skin and sleek leather running over his cock, stroking the parts untouched by his mouth. Heat radiates from every place Faolan’s clever tongue touches. A man who speaks in a dragon’s Voice, kneeling in puddled sunlight to take Miraak onto a tongue that can bring ruin upon men. This is a different sort of ruination.

Miraak’s nails scrape on rock as his fists curl. Something melts in the pit of his belly. His cock is a heavy, scorching weight, one that demands attention. Faolan is only too eager to grant it.

“Do you feel it too?” The murmur is low enough to mingle with the faint hum of the stone. Energy ripples across its face, faint and blue, like Kyne’s lights rendered in the hand of a mortal painter. Miraak leans back into it, lets it wash over him. This wall has no more secrets he hasn’t plumbed, but it speaks to him nonetheless, in sensation rather than understanding.

“Yes.” It comes out as a gasp. “Yes, Faolan, I…”

A hot mouth seals around his cock, sucks the head in tandem with fluid strokes of his wrist. It plays offense against the creeping chill of the stone, twinned and opposite sensations. Miraak surrenders with a roll of his hips.

Faolan moans around him. His core tightens at the sound’s reverberation. His hips jerk again - again, again. Faolan moves with him, a sailor on a wild sea, matching him in the way only another Dovahkiin could. As he does in all things.

The storm at his back builds alongside the one within, the play of inferno-heat and frost-chill driving him halfway mad. Sweat slicks his brow. When his head tips back against stone, magicka sparking faintly along words etched an age ago, sunlight from the cracked ceiling greets his eyes. Even through the lids, the world is awash in amber.

Amber is the color of the sensation coursing through him, growing bright and hot with each motion of Faolan’s head and hand. He moans, soft, then crescendoing as Faolan’s tongue dips into his slit. Such sounds - once vulnerable beyond what he could dare to be, flowing like snowmelt on rock at the touch of his counterpart.

Drool slicks Faolan’s lips, the dark shaft of Miraak’s cock. His face flushes like the dawn as he spreads his own saliva over his shaft with limber flicks of his wrist. His eyes open a sliver, lust-dark and adoring. His off-hand is busy between his own thighs - Miraak can all but hear the lurid dual-wielding joke he’d make, were his mouth not otherwise occupied.

And then Faolan’s cheeks are hollow around his cockhead, and he can’t hear anything but his own sighs and the muttering of the word wall.

Pleasure robs the air from his lungs and strength from his legs. At his throaty moan, Faolan lets his cock fall from his lips with an obscene pop. A hot tongue curls underneath his cockhead as a skilled hand quickens and quickens along his shaft. The sight of him - kneeling, eager, sultry - has Miraak’s core tightening. Their eyes meet. He comes with a strangled moan of his name.

Faolan’s own sigh of pleasure comes just as strangled. The teasing brush of his lips turns to a lingering kiss as Miraak’s climax fades, his cock still throbbing in his gloved palm.

“Fuck,” mutters Faolan. Miraak opens his eyes and feels his blush creeping hot down his neck. That pretty face is splattered with his seed, from his rose-stained cheeks to the bridge of his nose. A pink tongue pokes out to lap the white from the bow-curve of his upper lip. “You liked that too, yeah?”

Miraak averts his gaze, desperately hoping his breathing takes the chance to steady. “Do you…ah, did you need…?”

“No need.” Faolan gestures down, to where his softening cock hangs from his leathers. A strand of white hangs from the tip, the rest of his release drying on the masonry underfoot.

Miraak can’t help the rumble of laughter. “So you truly do have a fixation on word walls.”

“Not the walls themselves.” He caresses Miraak’s cock from base to tip, lingering at the seed-slick head. “More…you pressed up against them.” And damn him, he lifts two leather-sheathed fingers to his lips. A pink tongue chases the pearlescent spend from the glove. With a debauched moan, he runs his fingers over his grinning mouth.

Miraak’s face heats. “That’s debauched.”

“Mm.” Faolan makes a show of sucking his fingers clean, polishing the leather of his archer’s glove with languid sweeps of his tongue. “You love it.”

By every Divine, he really does.

Faolan gathers his own spend from the tip of his softening cock, cleans it from his fingers with a practiced mouth. His eyelids flutter shut, softer than moth’s wings, as his cheeks hollow. Had Miraak not just spent himself, the sight alone would have his cock hardening again.

When he’s cleaned himself to his satisfaction, he tucks himself back into his leathers and rises, doing the laces as he goes. Somewhat belatedly, Miraak follows.

“That was fun.” A fleeting kiss, one that deepens like gathering snowbanks when Miraak cups his head beneath the fastening of his ponytail and drags him closer. The salt of them mingles on his tongue. His pulse roars in his ears, a rush that slowly steadies as lust fades to satiation. Over it hums the wall, still eager to spill its secrets to all who can hear.

“Mm.” Miraak releases him with a reluctance that would once have been unthinkable. “It was far from your worst idea.”

“Do I wanna ask what counts as the worst? In your books, I mean. I could get second opinions--”

“Offering a man sworn to devour your soul a chance to escape back to your world.”

It had been stupid beyond measure to make that offer at the summit of Apocrypha. Miraak will never forget it - the scent of spilled dragonsblood, the steel in their hands that dulled before that in Faolan’s gaze. Mad, verdant eyes - wild enough that he’d actually believed the words coming from his mouth. A mouth he’s now kissed more times than he can count.

He leans in, and makes that more than he can count plus one.

Faolan sighs as one awakening from a dream when they break apart. “Yeah, and look where that ended up.”

“I never said I was ungrateful.”

For a moment that clings like the cobwebs shrouding the ceiling, they stay that way, entangled against the wall. The faint crackle of magicka is there, a current that loops itself through them before grounding back in the runes of its origin, a hum that connects them as surely as if they shared arteries.

It’s Miraak who gently dislodges Faolan, to the tune of a discontented mutter. “We ought to get back,” he calls over his shoulder as he makes his way towards the door.

“Wait.” Faolan rummages through one of the many pouches hidden along his Guildmaster leathers. At the glint of a fine-tipped chisel, Miraak knows what he’s planning.

He groans. “You are incorrigible.”

Faolan clutches his breast in mock offense. “I’m perfectly corrigible.”

“Do you know what that means?”

“No.”

“See? Incorrigible.” Miraak shakes his head. His heart is full enough to overflow.

“You love it.”

Miraak takes in the sight of him - hair catching gold at the edges, haloed in sunlight, steel in his hands. The last man he would have expected to adore, and yet…

“At this point, I would be a fool to deny it.”

Chapter Text

Rhovan’s not sure how long he’s been standing by the hearth in Astarion’s sitting room, two pairs of hands bedecking him with jewels and pigments bearing the same glitter. That hazy anticipation is more than half the point. 

Astarion tilts his head, examining him, inches from Rhovan’s face. The single pearl dangling from his right ear sways with the motion, pale as the curls that now tumble around his shoulders. Kohl glimmers darkly as he daubs the brush in the open pot. “Szordryn, turn his head for me. A little to the left should do the trick.”

The ember-warm hand holding his jaw turns his head. He leans into the motion. The bar of Szordryn’s lip piercing prods the back of his neck as he kisses him. His voice slides over his skin like spidersilk. “How much longer do you need?”

“Don’t rush yourself,” Rhovan says absently.” I’m well aware of how long it takes to…get your vision on paper, as it were.”

“Oh, believe me, darling, you’re far from a plain canvas.” The brush tickles his eyelids as Astarion shapes the kohl. He appraises him from several angles, humming to himself as he smudges an edge here, fixes the curve of a wing there. “And that should do it. Close your eyes, Rhovan.”

He does, breath catching on anticipation. For a long moment, he’s left standing alone, nude save his jewelry and lacy smallclothes meant purely to entice. Footsteps cross the tower chamber this way and that - Astarion’s strides longer, Szordryn’s quicker. He tracks them by sound alone to the closet door. On the way back, they’re accompanied by occasional rustles of heavy fabric.

“Arms up,” comes an instruction, murmured close enough to his ear that he jumps. Astarion’s steps fade so well into silence, when he wills them to. 

He lifts his arms. The light filtering through his eyelids grows dim. A gown falls heavy over his body, settled by two pairs of hands. They guide his own arms back to his sides, a facade of demurity.

“Open your eyes.”

Rhovan’s gaze falls to his own form as his lovers set to work.

They pull laces tight, fasten filigree clasps shaped into leaves. Panels of lace interspersing ravens’ feathers reveal his body in turns. They work in tandem - Astarion rolling the stockings up his legs as Szordryn holds him steady, Szordryn lacing the corset in a pattern dictated by Astarion’s exacting eye, Astarion adjusting the fall of his necklaces into perfect symmetry while Szordryn fastens the clasps. Rhovan melts for them. He’s all but slack in Szordryn’s arms as Astarion laces long boots up to Rhovan’s thighs.

He’s an artist himself - he knows well the satisfaction of watching his thoughts write themselves in paint. It’s no different when the canvas is his body and the paints are fabric and jewels. And the final product…

Is him, a pale figure swathed in the darkness of his hair and gown, a reflection that peers back at him through kohl-lined eyes. Beauty that could be mistaken for that of a woman, depending on the light. In the dim, he balances on the line dividing masculinity from femininity, and he does not waver.

“There are queens who would rip the hearts from the breasts of innocents if they thought it would win them your beauty.” Astarion’s manicured hand makes its idle way down his chest. “Not to mention your power. I’ve watched you level villages.”

“One village, Astarion.”

“And there are more to come, sooner or later.” A kiss edged with fangs, pressed above the lace of his collar. His touch slips lower. “Me, I’m hoping for sooner.”

The spindly heels Rhovan favors are rather more difficult to balance in with a hand teasing his cock.

He’s dressed in finery that costs as much as the village sprawling far beneath the picture windows of their tower. Astarion’s sitting room affords them a commanding view of the night-shrouded wood below, cut through with lights that twinkle like the drifting magelights casting their glow on velvet furniture and overstuffed bookshelves.

Not that either of his lovers are looking at the view outside.

It took the greater part of an evening to ready him for this moment. The gown is a grand affair of raven’s feathers, corseted tight enough for the boning to dig in, sweeping the floor around the argentine heels of his thigh-high boots. They’ve foregone underskirts in favor of leaving his legs exposed, ivory bared by the angular cutout traveling from hemline to waist. Inky feathers part around Astarion’s slim wrist as he caresses the constrained jut of Rhovan’s cock through lace that shows more than it conceals.

“You’re lovely, but of course, you know that.” Astarion minutely adjusts the cascading collar of obsidian beadwork. Like the other jewelry, he’d taken his time in adorning Rhovan’s body - rings that carry their own inner light, earrings that drip with amethysts, silver hair-pieces fashioned after holly leaves. Astarion follows a strand of polished stones to Rhovan’s breast, thumbing over the jut of a hard nipple beneath the bodice. “Humility is beneath you. Especially when you’re like this - my gods, darling, you’re a sight.”

He turns to the drow at his side - their mutual lover, unclad save the constellations of body piercings glittering on gray skin. Szordryn is silent. The hard cock between his thighs tells Rhovan all he needs to know. “Isn’t he regal?” Astarion’s breath catches on his own excitement. The rigid length of his cock strains in clear outline against the front of his trousers. “Don’t you find him as lovely as I do?”

Szordryn nods. The slate of his eyes blossoms into red, like blood spattered across rock. An undeniable passion - a subtle flicker in the crimson eyes that mark most of his kin, turned to open declaration in his.

“Then get on your knees,” Astarion orders in a croon, “and show him.”

For half a breath, Szordryn hesitates. Then he circles around Rhovan, fingertips brushing warm against the curve of his hip, and drops to his knees behind him.

Rhovan bites down on a gasp as a new ache heats his core. Gods below, Szordryn wants to--

“Mm. Good choice.” Astarion cups Rhovan’s chin even as he speaks to Szordryn, the carmined tips of his nails biting into his cheek. Their eyes meet. The heat in Rhovan’s core kindles into wildfire. Astarion’s voice goes rough with wanting. “Lift your skirts, my darling. Show him where you want him.”

Rhovan’s fists curl snow-pale against the nightfall of his skirt. He lifts it around shaking knees, then higher. In a rustle of fabric, he bares the stocking-clad lengths of his legs, the supple curve of his thighs. He gathers fabric between his fingers and hitches it higher still. Cool air brushes his cock, even through the lace of his smallclothes. The thin straps around his rounded hips, woven to resemble interlocking elm-branches, offer ornamentation in the place of concealment. The delicate lace barely covers the swell of his ass.

Astarion dips the point of a nail beneath the waistband, revealing the ivory pallor beneath. “You’re the fairest thing to ever grace Toril.” A tug down, a slow exposure that sends Rhovan’s heart capering into his throat. “But you can be fairer still.”

Lace slides slow down his cock, and he moans at the rough drag of it. For a lingering moment, his smallclothes remain hooked around his shaft, the pink of his cockhead stark behind the thin veiling of black. With an insistent tug from Szordryn, they slip free.

With his legs braced apart, his smallclothes remain tangled around his knees, the scrap of ornate lace stretching like a cobweb between his legs. Somehow, it’s a more obscene display than if they’d simply fallen to pool at his feet.

“Spread him.” The order isn’t aimed at Rhovan himself.

Szordryn squeezes his ass, teasing at the seam. “If you’d waited a moment more, I would have done it of my own accord. As I’m doing now, you’ll find.”

Cool air brushes Rhovan’s hole as Szordryn parts him. 

Astarion clicks his tongue. “At least we’re of one mind. Let me see.” Shadows move behind him as Astarion passes some orbiting magelight. His groan sends a shiver caressing down Rhovan’s spine. “He’s so tight. Such a pretty little cunt.”

Rhovan’s breath quickens. Fingers - Astarion’s, judging by the chill - press to the dimples above his ass. “I said queens would commit unspeakable acts for your beauty. I meant it. Your cunt is perfect - and you like when I say that, don’t you?”

He nods, to the tune of his earrings clinking together.

“Mm, I thought so. Our queen.” Astarion nips at the point of one ear, rounded somewhat by his human blood. “Szordryn, lick his pussy.”

The word sends the world white, near as surely as the heat of Szordryn’s tongue on his entrance. His head falls back, the silver holly-sprigs of his circlet nearly cascading from his curls. Blindly, he reaches back. A hand catches his, guides it to tangle in Szordryn’s braid. 

Pierced lips seal to his entrance, tracing his rim with lips and tongue, a path blurred by the pleasure it ignites.

Szordryn licks him like he’s been waiting all the century-and-a-half of his life for the chance. His moan is lost to Rhovan’s. He starts how he always does - broad licks that travel from the seam of his balls to his hole and back again. Between them come more adroit twists of the tongue, teasing his rim and drawing back when he tightens around him, lapping lazy patterns over his hole.

Cool hands brush against his brand-hot skin as Astarion spreads him wider. “More. I want to hear him moan.”

Instead, Szordryn draws back, his breath ghosting over the curve of Rhovan’s ass. Desire rasps hot in his voice. “Does this please you?”

“Yes,” he moans, then moans louder when Szordryn’s tongue slips into him.

Heels click on hardwood as Astarion circles him, drinks in the sight of him as Szordryn licks his entrance with all the ardor he’s ever shown him. “You make such pretty faces when he does that,” he remarks, caressing the strain of his own cock. “I could watch you forever, you know. Although I’ve come to appreciate the hands-on approach.”

And then it’s Astarion that kneels, sinking from a courtly bow to his knees without moving his gaze from Rhovan’s.

“My lady,” Astarion murmurs against the artery running down his inner thigh. He lets his fanged mouth fall open, cradles Rhovan’s cockhead against his tongue, savoring him.

There was a time when Astarion was reluctant to kneel for a lover. Neither Rhovan nor Szordryn had ever pushed the matter - there are a thousand other ways to learn one another. It had simply not been Astarion’s way, until the day it was again. It came in increments - lashing Rhovan’s wrists to the ceiling and dropping to his knees to suck his cock, resting his head in his lap while he sketched landscapes - until…this. The man who was once a slave, now kneeling without surrendering a scrap of dominance. Lethal grace evident in his every move, even here, easy confidence simmering in his eyes.

Rhovan’s knees go weak.

As Astarion swallows his cock to the hilt and Szordryn’s tongue slides in deep enough to make him shiver, Rhovan finds himself dimly grateful for the steady hands on his ass - Szordryn’s joined with Astarion’s. Gods know it won’t get any easier to keep his balance on trembling legs.

His lovers will make sure of that.

Chapter Text

As beautiful as the drow is on the battlefield, it pales in comparison to how he looks in the throes of ecstasy.

Even beneath greasy lanternlight, Erelryn is beautiful - hair shining like silver where it cascades down his back, eyes flashing the red of new sparks, muscles flexing in his thighs as he works himself up and down on Mar’s cock. The sight of him only makes him ache more. It’s the last thing he needs right now, but he can’t tear his eyes away.

Don’t come. The order, one he’d spelled out almost dismissively in languid motions of his hands, has Mar biting back a groan of despair even now. How in the hells is he supposed to obey while watching the loveliest man he’s seen in his life ride his cock?

Mar’s wrists flex against the ropes binding him to his own chair. The seat of his power, the place from which he issues orders that his crew obeys without question, turned so effortlessly into a restraint. It’s a humiliation he wouldn’t suffer from any but the man atop him. Further still is the humiliation of being told not to spend - and actually obeying, though he’s clinging to that part by his fingernails. 

Somehow, the thought of disappointing Erelryn is worse than the ache building between his thighs.

“Hells,” he gasps, as a particularly sharp jerk of Erelryn’s hips leaves him tightening around Mar’s cock. “Erelryn, I - gods, I can’t--”

“You can’t?”

“I’m going to come…”

Near before the words have left him, his cock is sliding from Erelryn’s ass. His lover rises to his full height. Diminutive as he may be, especially in contrast to the long lines of Mar’s own form, he’s far from timorous. Heels click on worn planks as he circles the embellished desk that dominates the captain’s quarters. He bends at the waist to rummage through a drawer. Mar’s breath catches at the sight of his firm ass, lifted obscenely. A trickle of oil meanders from his hole to glisten on his thighs. Mar’s cock throbs at the sight, the head luridly flushed, the red curls at the base dark with oil. Not for the first time, his feverish mind fixates on the contrasts between them - him pale and freckled from the sun, Erelryn dark as the lands beneath, him tall and broad-shouldered with his authority, Erelryn carrying his dominance in eyes that cut like bloodied blades.

Part of him dreads whatever Erelryn is scheming. The rest of him flounders for it like a drowning man towards a buoy. Even here, in the lamplit dim, light seems to bend itself towards the drow, catching in the arachnid ornament holding his hair at the crown of his skull. The lanterns sway with the slight pitch of the ship, sparkling off the windows peering into the spray-drenched darkness beyond. Erelryn keeps his footing, even in the spindly heels - the only garb he’s bothered with, in the privacy of Mar’s quarters.

The drow returns with a sway in his full hips and his scarred hand closed around…something. Mar’s breath catches.

“Erelryn, what--” His voice trails into nothing when his palm encircles his cock - and a band of leather follows an instant later. He bites back a groan as deft fingers draw it firmly around the base of his cock. It’s not painful, but it’s tight.

Tight enough that he knows he'll be left almost painfully erect until his lover sees fit to remove it.

“Erel--”

He brings his hands level with Mar’s face, something akin to smug satisfaction tugging at the corner of his bowed lips. “You said you couldn’t hold back.”

“I wasn’t asking for this!”

Erelryn taps a finger to his chin in thought, then signs to him once more. “Do you submit?”

He doesn’t have to, and therein lies the misery greater than any torture of the body. He can pretend this never happened, sit in this chair with a pirate captain’s unblemished authority once more. It would be so easy to get Erelryn to untie him, unbind his cock, and leave him to his thoughts and his hand.

It would be endlessly more difficult to pretend that this doesn’t make his cock harder than steel.

Another flicker of those dark fingers across his field of view, another string of words that his mind parses through more slowly than either of them would like. “Tell me now. Do you submit?”

He looks away and says nothing. His tiny nod speaks for him.

He doesn’t see Erelryn’s response, but he doesn’t need to. Those slender legs wrapping around him, the familiar weight of his lover in his lap, and that sudden tightness around his aching cock are the only replies he needs.

Erelryn rides him like a man driven utterly insatiable. His nails dig dull into Mar’s freckled shoulders as he fucks himself hard and fast on his cock. He's shameless, chasing his own pleasure, body shuddering when he strikes the spot within him, cock hard and dripping.

Gods damn it, Mar can’t even be pissed at him when he’s like this. 

"Oh, fuck, Erel…" His head tips back. 

A hand finds his crimson hair and yanks it back further, baring the freckled column of his throat. Tiny fangs herald a sting of pain, blossoming like flames to a powder keg. Another mark to wear half-revealed above the starched collar of his greatcoat. Erelryn keeps his perpetual silence, but his fangs dig deeper, splitting flesh, drawing blood that beads like the ruby gems adorning the drow’s ears 

“Mine,” spell the hands pressed to his taut stomach, each word dragged out slow against skin that shivers with his touch. “Don’t you dare come. You are here to please me.”

Erelryn rides him like his cock is nothing more than a toy. A degradation that should enrage him, and it does - but that fire is drowned in the storm of his want. Before the drow, before he ever dealt with Bregan D’aerthe, he’d end all his time ashore with a pretty boy writhing beneath him in tremulous bliss. He knows how to please, the dominance that comes with bringing another to ecstasy.

Erelryn is so adroit in teaching him the submission in the same acts.

Mar’s slim wrists tense against the bite of the ropes. Not to break free, but to remind himself that he is bound. The leather tied snug around the base of his cock is a perpetual reminder of the words Erelryn spells out.

You are here to please me.

And by every god of the depths, that thought shouldn’t make his cock throb the way it does.

So he grits his teeth, seats himself deep in the velvet padding, and tries not to spend. He needs to - fuck, he needs it so badly his teeth are set on edge. His balls draw up taut at the feel of him, the slick heat around his steel-hard cock, the pliant undulation of his body. 

“I can’t,” he gasps. Even with the restriction of the tie, he’s so close his vision swims with it. “Erel…”

A hand closes around his throat - not squeezing, but holding, guiding his head back in a wanton arc, his scarlet curls sprawled wild across the winged backrest. Their eyes meet. More words, spelled by clawed fingers.

“You will.”

Chapter Text

Arius knows pain.

He knows the pain of cuffs left too long on bony wrists, of the flesh tearing from his cheek as he’s backhanded with a cruelly spiked gauntlet, of broken bones and daemons howling in his mind and suffering the work of chirurgeons without quite enough sedation.

He has never known the pain of a brand.

His neck sizzles with each pass of the bright-hot dagger tip. The pain bursts and flares along his burnt-out nerves. The precise lines making up the brand’s central design are numb. The area around them is on fire.

His thin scream echoes through his chambers. He’s panting, the room swooping around him. There is not enough oxygen to fill his lungs. Bile churns in his stomach like he’s been thrown from a shuttle mid-descent, searing his throat, threatening to pour from his mouth. He clamps his jaw shut. He will not vomit in front of Marazhai.

Marazhai - terrible, beautiful Marazhai, who has done something unforgivable that Arius will forgive nonetheless.

He’s crouched above him, manic glee turning his eyes to flame. The bulk of him pins Arius soundly to the plush carpet. One hand is tangled in Arius’ bone-white hair, pulling so hard a few strands rip free as his head is forced back, baring his vulnerable neck. The other is curled about the hilt of the dagger. He’s shaking with the excitement of a predator at a kill, but his hands are utterly controlled, each movement precise. Flesh splits and sizzles before the blade as Marazhai cuts him - not deep, not enough to split an artery and send his lifeblood pooling on the carpet, but enough to mark him forever.

He screams until his throat burns - at the agony, at the way he’s letting it happen. Marazhai goes on marking him.

Line. Curve. Line. It’s not that many. It feels like an eternity, like his skin is being peeled from his body. Tears flood his eyes - actual tears, the sort he’d forgotten he could cry until Marazhai crept his torturous way into his life. The blade moves on.

When it stops, he misses it like a lover sent to war.

Marazhai’s laughter is madder than the gleam in his eyes. “Yes…just as it should be.” He wrenches Arius’ chin this way and that, sending agony radiating from the new-carved brand, admiring his work. “Well now, little pet. I hunger for a feast. But first…I will stake my claim on you, in every way.”

Marazhai wrenches open his armor with a snarl. His pale cock bobs free, already erect, studded with metal that glints twice as wickedly as the blade in his hand. The tip of that blade wanders down Arius’ breast. Button-threads split. His jacket sags open down the middle. The thin shirt beneath fares no better. For a hysterical moment, he wonders if Marazhai’s knife-hand will twitch down far enough to split him open.

But the bladework is precise. A fine welt trails in the dagger’s meandering wake, flesh raised and red, the barest trickle of blood seeping from the parted seam of the cut. Shallow - not enough to maim, not even to scar - but a searing pain that screams ownership nonetheless. A scarlet line, flanked by the jut of his ribs and the peaks of his nipples, stopping just shy of his navel. Bright color on pallid flesh.

Metal rings on the stateroom floor as he casts the dagger aside. Relief has no time to settle in before the sound of cloth splitting rends the air. Marazhai shreds Arius’ pants at the seam, yanking them down his trembling thighs. The traitorous steel of his cock is bared. Marazhai takes him in hand, toying with his rigid arousal. Arius closes his eyes, spares himself the sight of his body betraying everything he holds dear.

The throb in his neck refuses to let him forget.

The shock of cool skin meeting his hip has his eyes flying open again. Marazhai has removed one gauntlet, baring the long pale fingers beneath. They move like spiders over the curve of his waist. His still-gloved hand moves to spread Arius’ legs.

They’re already parted. The shame burns worse than the brand.

Marazhai spits coarsely. Wetness splatters his hole. Arius flinches against the carpet.

As an impossibly long finger works its way into his ass, his fevered mind latches on to the sight of his own hair splayed across the golden threads picking out the sign of the Aquila on the carpet. He’s fallen splayed between its wings. A few drops of his blood lie flecked across the gossamer.

A pleasant shudder ripples through him, radiating from the nerve-bundle nestled inside his entrance. Marazhai prods at it in between deeper thrusts - less to please him, more to coax the clutch of his hole to relax.

“Fuck - ahh--” It comes out wanton, a sound driven by the heat pooling between his thighs rather than that which scorches his throbbing neck. 

Another finger. Three. More saliva - not enough. Arius’ pulse throbs a tempo in his ears, an executioner’s drum. His body yields. His mind has already gone.

He lets go - lets go of any delusion that he’s worthy of lying atop the Aquila emblazoned on the carpet, lets go of the idea that he’ll ever use the powers of his mind to break Marazhai’s. His eyelids flutter - watching Marazhai, turning away, and drifting back. The fingers within him work fast and rough.

Quickly, too swift for dignity, his body yields. His entrance clutches at those fingers. Every brush to his prostate has his cock throbbing, the head poking from his foreskin to drip onto his belly. His eyelids flutter, drifting on the throb of the brand and the fingers curling inside him.

When they withdraw, his entrance tightens around them, a vain effort to keep them inside him. Something both better and infinitely worse will follow.

A madman’s zeal takes Marazhai’s voice, wilder than a warpstorm. “Spread your legs.”

His thighs part on command. Shame burns through him - he’s been trained. His cock throbs, but not half as much as his entrance. He needs something inside him. Another way in which he’s been sculpted to Marazhai’s will.

“Yield to me,” comes the croon, dripping like venom from a Kabalite blade. A pierced cockhead, hot as the brand, prods at his entrance, granting no quarter.

“Fuck me,” he moans, even though his body isn’t quite ready enough. It will adapt.

“That sounded almost like a command. I am not one of your mon’keigh subordinates, bowing and scraping at your every whim. You do not give orders here - the only things you give are your body and your abject surrender.” A hand tightens on his jaw, forcing him to meet pale blue eyes. “Do you understand me?”

He nods, straining against his grip.

Claws score down his thigh. Something hot and sticky trickles in their wake. “Speak, pet.”

“Yes,” he gasps. “Please…please just fuck me…”

Scarcely has the plea left his mouth before a thrust of Marazhai’s cock punches the breath from his lungs. He enters him in a single push of his hips, heedless of how Arius’ legs spasm. The spit slicking Arius’ entrance and his shaft eases the way - not enough.

The stretch burns. It’s nothing compared to the brand.

Marazhai gives him no quarter. As soon as Arius’ body permits - and it scarcely does - he’s sheathed to the hilt in his entrance. A low cry bleeds from him as piercings scrape him raw, dragging on that spot within him to coax forth a frisson of pleasure at odds with the aching stretch. His entrance tightens, futile, only to be speared open on the unyielding girth of him. It’s near enough to distract from the ineluctable heat throbbing in his neck.

“I want you ready for this,” comes Marazhai’s shaky command, panted hot against his ear, “whenever I ask. You belong to me - your body, your mind, your spirit.”

He can’t speak for the want those words unravel within him. He nods. Marazhai seizes his jaw, tips his head back to bare the brand. He can’t see much, but he knows exactly where that gaze is fixed, with a predator’s accuracy.

The row of piercings scrapes inexorably against his prostate. His stomach clenches, near painfully. Agony and bliss do not war within him, but ally instead to drive him mad. 

“I’m yours,” he croaks. Reticent as he is to say it in words, his body screams it on his behalf. 

“Good pet,” Marazhai snarls unsteady, his thrusts growing mad and staccato. “Good little pet.”

It’s undignified. His flesh crawls with each thrust - crawls over top of a writhing heat, a ruinous desire that he can no longer deny. Maybe he’s never been able to.

With the ownership burned into his neck, neither can the world.