Work Text:
The house itself is not much larger than the average family home in the center of the Candles, but it is made massive by the optical illusion of being set in the middle of the forest instead. Fifteen minutes’ walk away, a sizeable lake of foaming teal water froths and stills and froths again under the beating wind, all of the suds scumming on the surface from the soapbark trees around. On a lucky day, they have caught fish in that lake: iridescent-scaled, cranky little things that pop out of the water with a temper, snapping and cracking around on the soil until Caleb throws them in the bin to make a lethally good sashimi out of later.
Today, they stand in front of the lake, Caleb in his unflattering fisherman’s hat, Essek in his massive swathe of an injurious-looking suncape, and together they fish and fish and catch absolutely nothing.
“We’re fools,” huffs Caleb. “It’s Da’leysen.”
“The fish are not any less active on the weekend, Caleb.”
“No,” says Caleb. He turns to Essek in the eye-sizzling sunlight, shaded so sharply by the hat that his face looks small and dark as a hole underneath a dome of yellow. “We told him Da’leysen. We should have told him that we would summon him Miresen. I have an outing later today to chaperone. I won’t be getting home in time.”
The news gets Essek to bristle, though not in sympathy to Bren. Selfishly he’d been looking forward all week to their meeting and had pushed work aside in distraction. He’d feigned cold to get out of leading his Conthsen salon, and the angry folderol that the archmages in Emon had over it was not worth the amount of time he’d spent sating some urges at home instead. But at least Caleb was getting some fun out of his frustration. Channeled into sex, it was a fearsome thing.
“Poor man.” Essek rolls his eyes with his words. “A day’s difference.”
“Don’t be getting short with him,” says Caleb. “I’m already short with him as it is. You need to be the patient one.”
“I am exquisitely even-tempered.” He jolts in avoidance of a sudden flopping bream on the ground, flashing and round as a silver coin. “Excluding fish.”
“Rosohna and bugs,” says Caleb, plopping the solitary little catch into their bin. “Rexxentrum and fish.”
“I thought it was Rexxentrum and tubers.”
“Well — Rosohna has tubers as well. I mean meat.”
“You always did smell of fish oil.”
“All right, bug-breath.” He collects the bin of exactly one fish and puts it back onto the cart, which Essek floats atop and settles on. Their brown mare, Toilet the Second, nickers as she’s clicked forward. “He is going to be so sad, isn’t he? All tucked into bed, dick in hand. Nobody summoning for him.”
“Don’t sympathize me to him, either.” Essek reaches over and tweaks his failure of a fisherman’s beaky nose. “He is already making it difficult.”
Their bedroom is quieter than it has ever been while empty, and it has an entire three people in it.
The day is Miresen. One day removed. Bren arrives in a burst of smoke on the carpet, put-out and fussing like a cat in rain, and Essek nearly feels at ease for once regarding their arrangement until he remembers that there is an arrangement to begin with, and his stomach flips nervously all over again.
Once settled back into himself, Bren looks every bit as well-dressed and composed as the last time he’d arrived. Idly, Essek wonders if he’s sleeping in his glad rags. Then he remembers that he is going to be on his knees in front of those glad rags, and the humor of it flies out the window and catches on the boughs outside.
“Willkommen,” says Caleb. He stands over by the bed in the left of the room, where it hugs the wall beneath the big white window leading out to their mossy oaks. In anticipation for tonight, they have moved aside furniture to make an empty space in the center of the room and introduced a few loveseats from the foyer, large enough for one or two persons, elegant enough to match Essek’s tastes. It’s all been Prestidigitated, dusted, then glared at for good measure. Essek has even brought wine, despite the fact that only two of them can drink it, and it sits stylishly by the vanity which has been mostly cleared of items save for the essentials.
Bren grants the room an appraising once-over before turning his sights back on Essek. "You're late."
"I had a field trip," Caleb projects from across the room, entirely untargeted by the statement.
Bren's eyebrows lift up at the insinuation that Caleb works as a teacher. Then he tamps down that intrigue for later while not glancing a single time behind himself. “Are we doing this?”
Essek shifts his weight from one foot to the other. Through the vanity plane mirror, he sees the reverse of Bren’s form: the flat rectangular shroud of an officer duster, black as space. Tiny in the reflection, the virtual image of Bren looks doubly far away, trapped in his little mirror universe.
It isn’t frightening, to imagine what it will be like when the core of Bren — the same core as Caleb — wields a power over him. They are made of the same stuff.
“Yes,” he says, nodding resolutely. “It begins now. Take your lead.”
Bren takes in a long breath, which does nothing for his survival here, and exhales. Out of his mouth he expels a wispy black cirrus of smoke. “Stand on the rug.”
No suggestion. No request or question mark to word it kindly. It is a command underlined with consequence, and Essek feels his shoulders drop in automatic compliance, his slippered feet taking him to the rug to stand on its banding geometric center like a gem on a pendant. His robe feels scratchy on his shoulders. It has been smooth and diaphanous for every day of its use before, but now it prickles hotly at his skin.
Bren steps up before him. Without glancing over: “Caleb, feel free to take a seat. Or not. I don’t care.”
As Caleb warbles with protest, sitting, standing, sitting again, Bren looks Essek up and down with his shrewd, antique-appraising look. He takes Essek’s wrists and crosses them, uncrosses them. Breathes in a perplexed huff to himself like a watch-seller frustrated with his product. Without asking, he reaches up and touches Essek’s left earring — the only one on his ear, a drop-shaped topaz in honey-orange — glares at it as if he means to remove it, then leaves it be. Then he drops straight down to relieve Essek of his slippers, setting them aside on the rug. Essek has never stood on this rug barefoot before, and it is very soft.
“Don’t be nervous,” says Bren, upright again and touching the threads of the robe. To Caleb, without looking, he calls, “Have you any toys? Bindings? Ah, plugs, und so weiter?”
Caleb stands from the bed and goes off to the dresser to retrieve their toybox. Meanwhile Bren just looks at him, seeing something underneath his skin or in his tissues or through the meninges of his skull. The difference in elevation is stark between them; Bren, as he’d noticed before, is taller than Caleb by an inch due to posture. It means Essek needs to angle his neck up to keep from making eyes at his chin, and all the while Bren centers him with that remote, curious look; shadowed want, cogs turning; dissecting something in his head.
“You aren’t wearing the paint,” he says eventually.
Essek wets his mouth. Is he allowed to speak? This is new.
“What do you mean?” he tries.
For a moment Bren looks as though he isn’t keen to reply; he puts his forearms behind his back in the stance of an archmage and strides over instead to the glass bookcase adjacent to the vanity, distractedly scanning the spines of their tomes. After a while, he pulls out The Dirichlet of Illusions and thumps it lightly on the meat of his palm.
“The eye-paint,” he continues, softer. “The gold, shimmery stuff. It's a formality, ja? For the highest of class in Rosohna?”
“It is a — traditional type of paint, yes,” Essek supplies, twisting the front of his robes in his fingers. “Recently, in this timeline at least, it has surfaced from the annals of history to become a revived fashion trend in the higher of courts. Some say it emerged from the Shattered Teeth.”
“Ah,” says Bren.
Nothing happens for a long bit. Essek doesn’t move from his designated spot on the rug, and Caleb has finished rifling through their drawers to set their toybox on the foot of the bed while Bren continues his scanning — a twinge of invasivity at that — with languorous leisure, slow as a heavy summer day.
Right as Essek prepares to incite action with a word, Bren slowly rises and rights himself with the stillness of a marble statue. He turns. From day to night, the look he gives Essek when his eyes swivel back shoots ice through his bloodstream; it is a look of hot murder. It is a hunger like primeval revenge.
Bren sets his jaw, eyes darkening. He jabs to the vanity with his chin. “Put it on.”
Essek swallows. He tests his invisible binds. “Why?”
Bren’s mouth sharpens into a knife-smile. “Because I want to watch you cry it off.”
Essek, for the second time today, sways a bit. There is a reason he is not floating — something about the intimacy of touching the ground in a heated scene like this — but now he wishes he were, at least so that Bren hadn’t seen the powerful tremor that traveled all the way to his ankles. He nods mutely, feeling servile in his bitten silence, and strides over to the vanity knowing that Bren watches the robe billow around his calves.
He sits, hands at once frozen and restless. He shouldn’t have put everything away — now he spends a tense minute searching around for the pot of gold-flake emulsion until — ah-a — he finds it behind a tub of powder. Essek wets the gold with a thimble of rosewater until the paint runs liquid as ambrosia and, with a tiny mouse tail-hair brush, begins to apply it to his blessedly smooth eyelids. It takes twice as long as usual with his hands shaking in anticipation. The loveseats — two of them, for Bren and Caleb — creak behind him with the weight of bodies.
Every sound scrapes at his spine in the silence. Then he hears low chatter.
A glance over his shoulder is all he needs to right his suspicions, and the image that greets him puts him at ease. Bren sits in the adjacent chair to Caleb with his long legs crossed calmly, pointing to a passage in the Dirichlet as though the two of them are philosophers debating axioms, and not as though Bren is about to rend Essek to his atoms.
“I have finished,” he announces hesitantly. Bren looks up, sets aside the book on the stool between him and Caleb, and smiles.
“Stand,” he says. “Let us have a look at you.”
Essek complies, gliding barefoot back to the rug. It is the starting line, he supposes. From here, due to the angles of the loveseats, he is centered on both their attentions like a tailor’s model. He certainly feels like one.
Bren twirls his finger. “Give us a spin.”
Essek wonders if all of Bren’s commands tonight will be just as patronizing — but he complies. There is nothing new to his robe. Spinning will not make the eyepaint twirl.
Bren stands, dusting his hands, and comes behind Essek with his fingers lightly tracing the thick silk border of the robe around his neck.
Without warning, he tugs. Essek jolts, finding that the sash has been undone — when did that happen? — and the entire robe slips off his shoulders like a magic trick, landing soundlessly in a heap on the floor at his feet and leaving him nude and breathless in the center of the room.
Instinctively, he covers himself with his hands. Every inch of his skin prickles with gooseflesh, cold in a way that temperature is not but anticipation is, and finds that even while only two pairs of eyes roam his body, he feels exposed and scrutinized as an actor in an auditorium.
And while he is busy pondering that thought, out of nowhere, lips seal on the base of his skull.
Essek gasps, rocking forward, but electric-humming hands keep him locked in place as Bren puts his water-smooth, unwet tongue to the nape of his neck, breathing out cool and rich and scentless smoke through the fine hairs, humming softly to himself. Essek feels him, the presentness and cosmic weight of him, flush to his naked back. His eyes widen and shut and widen wildly, dizzily, as Bren gathers up his arms — frees his modesty for Caleb’s viewing, half-hard and weeping against his thigh — and holds him like a precious thing, kissing softly through his hair.
His legs feel weak. He shifts his weight, flushing magenta in the vanity mirror. He knows what he looks like, because he can see it, and it is — intense, and exhilarating. And Caleb shifts his legs from where they spread naturally because a tent grows in the front of his trousers.
Eventually Bren releases him, which he misses immediately. But he does not stray far, circling Essek and looking down his nudity for all he is worth.
“I have never seen him beneath the mantle before,” he says, mostly to himself. “Lissome, I pictured him. Seems I pictured right. You are a beautiful man.” Bren gently reaches down and nudges Essek’s cock up with a forefinger. “And you’re enjoying this more than I expected.”
Essek swallows, hands fidgeting without a place to put them. He wonders what it means to be kissed by Bren on the back of the head, and not on his lips. He wonders what Bren sees of him, behind the smoke and mirrors. He wonders when Bren will — touch him.
Bren drops the hand and goes over to sit back down on the loveseat, legs spread roguishly.
He pats one thigh. “On the floor.”
Caleb wordlessly tosses over one of the throw pillows to the space between Bren’s knees, and Essek smiles to him gratefully before dropping down as ordered. Bren shifts forth, unzipping the front of his trousers — funny, how the Echo projection maintains these details — and releases a cock that is —
Well, it’s handsome, is what it is. He is somehow a greater girth and length than Caleb, but not obscenely so. And it stands erect and night-black and smooth as an organic piece of obsidian, stars swimming faintly in the depth of his body.
He glances up to Bren. His mouth waters hungrily, and no sooner than he parts his lips, Bren guides his cock into Essek’s mouth, which he takes in soundlessly and skillfully.
While he knows very well the way Caleb’s cock twitches warm and real in his mouth, Bren instead feels like a shape of still water, suspended and absolutely textureless; cool to the touch as a silk sheet, the edges blurring out into existence. There are no pores or skin to grant it friction. There is only the hum of static electricity, the feeling of anticipating a pop at any moment. It tingles his lips, his palate, and when Essek swipes his tongue over the slit he tastes a fresh metallic-noted musk with a burn of ozone and sulphur hanging right at the end. Strangely pleasant, he thinks, experimentally bobbing his lips down onto it. Everything is easier but alien all the same.
He flicks his eyes back up to Bren, hollowing his cheeks and guiding him in with his tongue bowed beneath. He considers the possibility that Bren might not be feeling anything at all — until the groan sounds out and reverberates all the way through his cock into Essek’s teeth, and confirms that he definitely does.
“Good,” he says, voice just a bit tighter with arousal. “Good boy. You do this often.”
Essek feels himself flush deeper. By the end of this, he’ll be a cooked blackberry of drow rouge.
He goes down on Bren exactly the way he knows how, which is ninety-nine percent based in going down on Caleb, and it seems to work like a charm. He bobs his head, loosens his throat, gags and flexes around Bren for sensation, then backs out and onto him again. The spit shines uncleanly over his cock when Essek eases off of him but disappears by the time he’s back on, which may be something to study later — though he finds himself losing his thoughts to arousal, losing his focus to raw feeling the more he works. Bren fingers through his hair with an enamored playfulness, entertaining himself with the texture and novelty, and Essek’s cock twitches when he considers that Bren could be superimposing the images of both Esseks in his head for his own pleasure.
And before he can think further, the same hand fists in his hair and drags him all the way to the root, deep into his throat.
Essek chokes soundlessly. Without panic or distress, he lets it happen, lets the moment stretch to a taut and dangerous throb, then lets the bulging shape of Bren leave his mouth in one fast relinquishing until he gasps for air wetly through all the spit in his mouth. He is allowed a moment of reprieve before the hand drags him down again, stretching his lips around the base, air burning up in his lungs — and the moment pangs long enough that it supercedes his equanimity all the way into panic again.
“Hit me when you need air.”
He gags, and the hand holds him still.
He reaches up with a hand to close a fist on Bren’s thigh, white-knuckled and trembling, and the hand holds him still. He jerks with his whole body, his own cock pulsing with fear and arousal, and only when the starfield skates his eyes does Bren release him without having been struck once.
Essek gulps a savage breath. He wipes his mouth, trembling down to his feet.
“I said,” says Bren coldly, “to hit me when you need air.”
Essek gulps and sniffles. “I didn’t.”
He seems to consider something, hand slacking and unslacking in Essek’s hair. Eventually, that frustration thaws into a softer voice this time around: “You want more?”
His heart stutters staccato and hungry. Where his cock touches his thighs, a pool of precome grows.
“Yes,” says Essek around a catarrh of spit, and Bren pushes him down again.
This time, Essek lets his jaw go slack. He does not protest or rise fitfully when the air leaves him. He does not alarm when the senses fly far away, and when the world’s light closes and dims. He gasps uselessly on the massive intrusion and tightens his white-knuckled grip on the black humming fabric of Bren’s thighs, but he does not force an end to the moment. Bren drags him off and Essek practically spasms like a drowning victim, but he takes it and holds it and wracks with it, eyes swimming with tears, throat hoarser on every relief as he goes down and up and down again.
Eventually, Bren allows him an extended moment to breathe wherein he gulps massively against his thigh, hair follicles stinging where he is still being gripped.
“Your mouth hurt yet?” says Bren quietly.
Essek works his jaw. Trembling, he licks his teeth, smacks his lips. “No.”
“Open.”
Essek opens his mouth as commanded, but Bren doesn’t sink in deep. The bell of his cock sits primly on Essek’s tongue. He has very rarely ever felt more like a toy in use, and the heat it curls around his belly gets even his thighs to twitch. Essek breathes emptily over the cock, not moving, just resting. He dares to glance up at Bren and finds only gentle curiosity there, and a simmer of that same murderous heat.
“You are gorgeous,” he says. Cock in hand, he slides his weight over Essek’s tongue slowly. “You fine little thing.”
Little is not how he would describe himself, Essek thinks hotly. It is not how he would describe any grown man well into his second century. But he isn’t thinking much at all anymore, and leaves the protest in his head.
Suddenly, something presses at his rear. Essek jolts up a little onto his knees but Bren steadies him with a laugh. “Easy. It’s just me.”
The feeling returns again — a press, like a digit at the rim of his hole — and all of the blood in Essek’s body swims down to his cock in matched arousal. Oh, that’s interesting. Bren’s cast a spell, and has not vanished. Has he — tried that before, in their presence? Secretly?
A wet slide from somewhere to his right catches Essek’s ear, and a different warmth entirely travels his body as he realizes Caleb’s been touching himself to this. He nearly turns his head to look but no sooner than he tries, Bren forces his mouth back onto his cock to the root and captures his train of thought instead.
The Mage Hand fingers ease some oil into him, he feels, by the way the slickness grows, and Essek’s been gripping and stifling a growl of arousal for minutes now by the time the first digit slides into him — easy, sweet and smooth — then two, and the world pitches forward sharply when they crook to touch the spot that brings light and rapture.
At once Essek groans loudly around Bren, colors popping at the corners of his eyes. Relentlessly the hand starts to fuck him, though he would be less tight had he the wherewithal to relax. When it twinges at painful, he whines, and Bren slows, hands rubbing all over the tops of his shoulders and the back of his head.
“You can take it,” he says. “I need you to relax, spatz. You’re not going to get anything in you tonight if you don’t relax.”
Heat pulses behind his cheeks and ears. Pressure builds in his head, his temples, and he falls back into that safe, floaty zone between fear and desire, letting his limbs slacken enough to slump forward.
Three fingers push in now. Bren fucks his mouth. Events slide into each other with no stop or start, and Essek allows himself to be used.
Then Bren, like a bucket of ice-water over his head, says, “Get up.”
He comes back into himself with a hyper-awareness of every single detail — his mouth stretched wide around a thing that was not a cock but was, his body slowly yielding to a savory press from behind — and Essek freezes. He freezes even his breath. He does nothing but halt and look up at Bren with anticipation.
Gently, Bren releases his hair — no, no — and repeats, “Get up.”
With a bad, gargled sound, Essek pulls off of the cock in his mouth. He feels cold and empty. The fingers are gone.
“Did I—” he starts, ashamed at the way his voice warbles. “Did I do something—”
“No,” cooes Bren immediately, stroking his cheek. “I want to do something else to you. I want to do something mean.”
Essek blinks. Never before has he been so aware of the size, the whiteness, of his eyelashes in his view, but it feels that they have been curtaining his vision for the past hundred and more years.
“You were choking me,” he says. “Just then.”
“That was not mean,” says Bren quietly. Essek wonders what a Scourger would consider mean.
Caleb’s stopped moving his hand, of course. Everything’s stopped moving. It feels that even the swaying trees outside their window have stopped moving.
Essek glances down at his own cock, hard and sluggishly weeping onto his thigh. Glances back up. Works his mouth, sore and stretched. “What are you going to do?”
From a corner of the loveseat Essek had not noticed before, Bren withdraws a silver disc shape, the size of a sand dollar. Immediately Essek recognizes Hummi: the Aeorian vibrating device that he and Caleb have affectionately named after bumblebees in Jester’s legacy. The word was nearly identical across both their native languages, they found, and it did buzz quite effectively.
“Your love mentioned to me this curious thing the last time we spoke, but you were sound asleep.” Bren waves it around in the air, turning it over in his hand. “A thousand year-old relic of an ancient, extinct civilization. Unmistakably a sex toy. I applaud them for their clever use of enchantment. Lots of room for expansion.”
“Those were the Aeorians for you,” mutters Essek, humor leaden. “It connects to—”
Bren withdraws from his other side a smooth crystal cock; the one they own with graduated, bulbous beads at expanding diameters down the length. Right. Bren already knows. He knows to click it to the base of a toy, and he knows to create a mental arcane tether to it. Yes. Because he is a genius like Caleb is, like Essek is, and knows how to parse things like this as quick as they have done, which does not terrify him in the least.
Once connected, the crystal toy hums quietly with a pulsing vibration. It clicks off, then on, then off again as Bren thinks to it. He smiles at it as though it were a gift of great significance, then touches it to Essek’s lips. Automatically Essek opens his mouth to accept it and lets Bren have his fun by thrashing it unromantically in and out a few times, before he takes the spit-covered thing and stands straight up out of the loveseat without warning, striding on over to the center of the rug — the stage, more like — and going about doing something else behind Essek.
Essek twists around, standing on shaky legs, and watches as Bren fusses with some furniture. The sly man must have figured out the toys he’d wanted to use in advance, and in the moments Essek had been putting on the gold paint, no less, for he knows just where to go to retrieve what he wants. Out of the space under the armoire he drags out a small component chest no larger than a travel valise to the center of the rug. Then he goes over to the toybox on the bed and fishes out their plum-dark leather saddle — useful for securing on surfaces — and does that very thing: secure it atop the chest.
Then with a click of Hummi’s immovable grip, the dildo gets secured onto the base of the saddle as well.
Ah, thinks Essek, rather morbidly. So this is what he meant by ‘mean.’
Bren stands aside, smiling serenely. He looks like a coachmen bidding him onboard. With one hand gesturing, he says, “Well, come on.”
Essek’s knees ache a bit as he walks over, in a trance, to the seat made for him. His parched mouth sounds out something like the beginning of a question — “What do you—” but Bren takes his wrist and guides him to put one leg on either side of the seat.
Essek stares down at the first bulb. It is small. It is deceptively small, but the base of it is massive. And it is going to go inside him now.
“One at a time,” says Bren gently, but there is no alternative to his order. “Relax.”
He’s about to ask what that entails when Bren’s hands secure around his hips, and with pressure, guides him down onto the first bulb. He breathes waveringly as it presses in and fits inside, and so begins the challenge.
The first three are easy, sweet, light as they slip into him. The next two are a satisfying width, nudging him open without intensity, but the last three are the most challenging: as he sinks, he is forced to widen his stance, to breathe deeply, to stretch in accommodation to them. They are deep enough inside him to strike against the bundle of nerves in his rear like a metronome one after the other, to draw out an involuntary whimper, to make his legs tremble. Bren’s hands on his hips wait patiently until he settles on the second to last, then they push him down with finality.
Essek closes his eyes against the burn, and once bottomed out, glances up to Bren to search those flat white eyes for approval — indication, maybe, or intention — but Bren stands away from him and fishes his cock out of his trousers once more. With Essek’s face at roughly Bren’s hip level, it’s all but a hand’s breadth of space between his mouth and that cock — and the distance closes immediately as Bren smacks it bullishly against Essek’s lips.
“That wasn’t so hard,” he says.
“I want—” huffs Essek, but the stretch takes his attention. He leans away from the cock, yet it bumps disrespectfully against his face. “I want you to—”
“Use your words.”
He shifts the slightest bit and a fizzle of lightning goes off somewhere deep in his body, drawing out a gasp, crossing his eyes briefly. Bren waits again, but he can’t — the words are not —
“Use your words or I stop,” hisses Bren. Essek has no words anymore, but the one sound he does know will get this to keep going is Yes, and so he says it. Bren shifts back.
“Yes, I should stop?”
“No,” groans Essek, the other sound. “Please.” The third.
“You wanted mean,” says Bren, gripping his jaw suddenly. “You wanted cruel.”
A second spark lances up his body and Essek’s legs twitch up both at once, his abdomen flexing and his hole clenching and everything too bright. “Yes,” he says, and he does want it. He fishes for his words again, clawing for smoke. His thoughts stick together like wet fingers, all the same color, muddying his mind unhelpfully. “I want— you to be—”
“Essek,” says Caleb warningly from the dark middle-distance, off-stage. “If you are not—”
“I want you—” spits Essek. “I want you to— do wretched things. I want to be helpless. I want to be— at your mercy.”
The fingers on his chin tighten to a cramp. Bren stills, cogitating the suggestion and something else in his head. Over his shoulder, he calls, “Is he doing well?” to a long, long beat of silence.
Without hearing a sound, Essek recognizes the delicate and filament-thin air of Caleb’s contemplation. He is at an impasse with himself. He ought not to be. He has every right mind to be.
“Yes,” says Essek forcefully, because the answer to this should be obvious.
“Wasn’t asking you, darling,” says Bren.
In the audience pit of his loveseat, Caleb’s eyes gleam. “Yes,” he says haltingly.
Satisfied, Bren turns back around to Essek. “Well, that I can do.” The chandelier winks its light on his white smile.
He jerks Essek’s jaw forward and, with his other hand guiding his cock, drags the slit up and down Essek’s cheek, against his mouth despite it being shut, like an obscene balm. “Open,” he says again, and no sooner than Essek parts his lips Bren thrusts all the way to the back of his throat and beyond.
“Good boy,” sighs Bren. A fist in Essek’s hair, he keeps him flush and unmoving from the root, free hand reaching down to feel the expanded column of his throat with his cock in it — feel Essek gagging on him, the bastard. As Bren draws back out and plunges back in, Essek’s vision tunnels sharply. And he does not stop.
In-out, in-out — fleeting inhale, punched-out exhale — horrible gargled drowned-out cries and nothing but the feeling of Bren dragging over his tongue, pressing into his throat, starving him of air. Static pops and crackles in his lungs, in his mind, and blood roars deafening in his ears. Essek rocks his hips forward on the crystal cock to feel sparks trail up his raw nerves, and the world only clears back up when he’s dragged messily off Bren with a slick groan hanging in the air.
He coughs wetly, spittle dribbling down his chin, wheezing erratically to catch his breath — and when Bren swipes his thumb across his cheek, gold paint comes away on it.
Essek’s stomach flips. Bren has gotten what he wanted, if tears are now rolling down his face.
“Good lad,” says Bren again, moving him around by a hand on his head. “Good, good. You must have wanted this for such a long time, spätzchen. So needy. All you Shadowhands are like this, aren’t you? Nose-up and bladed, but you’re still hungry in the place that matters.”
Essek shivers all the way to his fingers where they clench and unclench behind him. The intelligent, resilient part of him knows to ignore Bren as he would ignore any other nuisance, and yet the other part of him — the one that agreed to this messy idea to begin with — wants Bren to split him open posthaste. He’s insulted. He’s mortified. He’s never been more prepared to immolate.
“Bren,” he says helplessly. “Watch your tongue.”
The threat does less than nothing as Bren instead pats his wet cheek. “Say again?”
“Watch,” seethes Essek, nose dripping, “your tongue.”
Bren lifts his chin to look into his eyes and, with a sleeve, kindly wipes Essek’s nose. “Are you saying that to get a rise out of me? Or because you don't like being talked down to?"
Essek says nothing for a while, though Bren’s question was glaringly, transparently asking Do I let up? — even if the archness of his voice keeps the tension. Perhaps if Essek holds his own tongue, he will drift back into the sonorous place he was enjoying. Or perhaps he is enjoying this as well. He cannot think with the sweat prickling everywhere on his body.
"You are easy to get a rise out of."
Bren makes the mistake of taking that as an answer. “If you keep saying things like that, there will be consequences.”
The roar builds in his belly. Oh, yes, he is enjoying this. “Like what?” he murmurs evenly. “That you are a hollow bastar—”
Crack.
Winded, Essek’s eyes spin around in his skull as he gasps and processes the impact against his cheek — the resolved sting of it, the whip-crack echoing in the chamber. Tears drip off his chin onto his left thigh where his head bows.
Has he been holding his hands behind his back this whole encounter? He has. He frees his inner wrist from a vise-grip and worries the fingernail crescent-moons indents left behind, then secures a steadier hold and whips his head back up at Bren, who says, “You want one more?”
“Fuck you,” says Essek hoarsely.
“I’m not hearing a yes.”
“Yes. Affirmative. Go on. Fuck you.”
This time Essek stifles a cry when he’s slapped on the other cheek — a crack of lightning that simmers on his skin and in the air, heavy and corrupted, ecstasy in the making. He growls and shakes his head and surfaces to shudder out, “Again,” and a third strike throws his head in the opposite direction.
“My Shadowhand is a viper,” says Bren, massaging his hand.
“Again.”
Crack. Something comes free in his mind.
“He would kill me if we breathed the same air longer than seconds.”
“Again.”
Crack.
“And yet he’s Sent to me just to hear me come.”
Essek splutters with a dizzy, head-spinning, fathomless reverie, blank and aflame in his head. Every time Bren strikes him, tears go splattering on either side of the rug. He thinks of torment. He thinks of interrogations and forgiveness and judgment, of manacles and misery and hope, and wants everything. Only now, after a hundred and more years, does he feel that he has begun to breathe.
He trembles mutely for a moment, head low, sniffling. Before he can think to stop, he hears himself say, “Please,” and the slap comes fast. Crack.
Bren tisks. “You two … You are both the same creature, in the end. It makes me sad. What a lonely, unproductive kind of whore.”
As if waking up, Essek starts.
Bren has touched his seeking needle too closely to something fragile — to the nexus of Essek’s shame. It is a dreadful, unmaking feeling. It slides out from his heart and rattles around in his ribs and draws from him a groan, and he pitches forward to thud his head on the meat of Bren’s thigh, clenching uselessly around the cock. Bren fists his hair and drags his neck back roughly instead, pulling open his mouth just to shove in a thumb and look inside.
“It is a shame,” he says, sliding his fingers in and out as though to replace his own cock; larger this way, harder and more obtrusive to breathe around. “You are both so fetching. So yielding. So fascinating, despite all that venom. You deserve to be beheld by as many men as you please. I am sure you would not be opposed to the prospect of shucking up your robes and bending over for them all.”
Essek groans a formless retaliation through the fingers fucking his mouth. His cock feels hard enough to burst. Fire and pressure combust-react in his gut as he bounces up desperately, messy and pathetic, to get any kind of stimulation — but the last bulb is so big, and it won’t slide out of him without pain.
And yet pain is what he gets when Bren’s hand vanishes out of his mouth and takes him around the ribs to draw him up. Essek shouts, first in surprise — then in the aftermath of the burning stretch once the bulb has left him. He shouts a third time when they bump rhythmically against his sensitive core one by one, loud and jolting, lightning lances of feeling and pleasure twinging in his cock and down his thighs. He braces himself to Bren as he’s taken up off of the cock entirely, hovering emptily in the air above it, then brought back down for the stretch all over again.
Then the hands fly away. And secure around his throat.
“Oh,” is the sound Essek makes when Bren begins to choke him.
Perhaps choke is not the correct word, but he isn’t thinking of semantics. Thumbs press into the flesh beside his windpipe in a solid grip around Essek’s neck, and with that grip — and only that grip — Bren draws Essek up two, three-four beads at a time, then down.
Up, then down. Endlessly — agonizingly — incredibly — up, then down, and Essek could scream.
His legs thrash. He chokes helpless little sounds that he’s certain Bren relishes, and the tight press into his hole never lessens; the strain in his neck never lessens either, but he holds onto Bren’s wrists and lifts up his body for dear life lest his head pop off. On those deliciously massive intrusions he’s fucked and has half a mind to beg for mercy, but both halves of his mind are inoperable. He is lost and losing to the tide, quaking and convulsing, tears streaming down his face — not even breath coming easily — too much, too much —
He cries out with something of genuine terror and Bren halts entirely, but Essek’s hands slap back onto his wrists and his head rattles with a desperate shake — something animal and bestial surfacing from his body, answering for him, uncaring of his state — and Bren complies and pushes him down under again, down to the root, until Essek kicks and slides his feet against the rug with an overwhelmed tantrum of feeling.
“That’s it,” Bren cooes, kissing him at the crown of his hair. “That’s it, spatz. You can take it. You can take it all, don’t worry.”
He can’t. He can’t take it all — hence the haptic jerking, the twitching and sudden sobbing, the noises like torture leaving his mouth as he chokes and begs Yes, Yes, Yes, and wishes nothing more for this to end, and for it to go on forever. And Bren knows no better, because Bren hears the Yes and believes Essek, but Essek is a liar — has always been, will always continue to be — and follows a lead that does not exist.
He gasps for air but breath shreds into his lungs, ice-cold. Bren pushes him down onto the last bulb again and Essek sits and shivers and comes ropes of white all over his thighs, powerful and punching through his body, stars spinning cosmically behind his retinas. He comes with a cry like penance. He comes so long, so blindingly long, that he wonders if anything else has ever felt so good, so intense, so essential and mind-meltingly perfect, and on the other end of the feeling he goes limp as a ragdoll and weeps quietly into Bren’s hands, which have released his throat to brush aside his tears.
“Essek,” he hears somewhere.
He wishes he had something in his mouth again. He wishes he could be thrown onto the floor and fucked to unconsciousness. He wishes anyone in the world could rip the blackness out of his heart and heal him closed.
“Essek,” he hears more strongly. He has been weeping for longer than he’d come. The Echo is nowhere to be seen.
The Echo is behind him. The Echo takes his shoulders, massaging gently, and a shape swims into view.
“Essek,” says the love of his life, who stoops in front of him with an open and hungry horror in the eyes. He is clothed fully but for the sad, softening cock he hurriedly shoves into his pants, and a stain of white on the side of his thighs. Good for him.
Sounds warble and die in his mouth when he tries to speak them. The love puts his hands to Essek’s face, searching for something in his eyes, and Essek shakes his head.
“Bren,” says Caleb, cold murder in his voice instead of hot.
“I didn’t do anything he didn’t ask for,” says Bren calmly.
“Bren,” repeats Caleb, taking Essek’s cheeks and turning his head side to side.
“You were watching me, you idiot.”
“I wasn’t the one standing right next to him,” says Caleb evenly, seethingly, as Essek feels the hands leave his shoulders. Caleb’s arms go underneath Essek’s and pull him up, but suddenly the stretch is pure white agony and a cry rips out of him. Caleb swears, puts him down, fussily casts Reduce, and suddenly the press is nothing at all, is something that can slip out of him like water. Essek rocks forward into Caleb’s arms and finds his body depleted of all energy and use, running on something thinner than fumes while Caleb draws him up and away from the seat, catching the tiny Hummi in his hands behind him.
“Get out,” says Caleb quietly overhead.
The space of his collar between his neck and his shoulder is damp with sweat. He’d been enjoying watching. That was good. That is a step forward.
Essek flinches at his own mind. There is no need for a step forward. There is no need for a forward at all — he is not conditioning Caleb out of his trauma, what is he thinking —
“Caleb,” says Bren in a voice that could have been sincere if it was anyone other than Bren.
“I will not ask you again.”
The silence feels like the pressure at the bottom of the ocean. Essek wonders if his ears will pop. Even his sinuses hurt.
There is a sound behind him like the quiet verbals of a Dispel, but before they can complete Caleb snaps loudly, “In the circle, Bren,” and a long, protracted, gross silence accompanies just the quietest of footsteps as Bren remembers where to stand in their room to go away.
Without looking, Essek knows that Bren is gone. He should have said goodbye, but his mouth rebels.
They sit alone in a sweaty quiet.
“This was a bad idea,” says Caleb eventually, soothing a hand over his naked back. He feels like the warmest thing Essek has ever had the pleasure of touching, but his voice burns too hot. Then, slightly cooler, he mutters, “Schatz. Love, are you alright?”
Essek gulps quietly. He feels another few tears slip out of his eyes. The last ones, late to the party.
“I love you,” he whispers, which is not an answer, and is.