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The back of Tōsen's hand cracks across Grimmjow's face.
Knuckles and rings; righteous sting. Grimmjow's head whips to the side. He judders back onto his heel and sucks air to the back of his throat gone dry. Something wet goes splat, sticky pitter-patter, and then it's just hush.
All of this all at once, faster than the eye can blink. A single whip-crack of a moment, lashing but swift — it should be done. It should be over.
It isn't.
The quiet is loud, diffused over big, vaulted space. Grimmjow's ears ring. He's hyper-attuned. So much nothing, a thousand small somethings. The fire has smoldered down, abated into soft whisper-licks of heat and light, and he can hear it. Chandeliers above, glittering, silky melt-ooze of wax: he can hear that too. And outside, very far, autumn leaves pelting as rain pelts under grey clouds and no sun.
Three of them in this room. Others, somewhere, not important. Grimmjow hasn't moved because he can't. Tōsen's rings snick against one another, metal rasp like a blade being sheathed, and Grimmjow's cheek burns hot and ices cold and then just hurts. Bone-deep, a shiver in his skull. A human would have crumbled. Formless, pulpy meat spill. A human would have cracked right open.
Grimmjow didn't crack. Grimmjow split.
A dribble tickles halfway down his cheek and stops just outside the range of his tongue. It's all the blood his body has to offer, empty as it is, hungry as he is. The wet dregs of him are thickened and dark, clotted like the corpse he was once, however brief. He breathes uselessly through his mouth and the smell coats over his tongue.
It's off. Overripe and spoiling, faintly sweet like early rot. Death-scent: unappealing, unappetizing, repellant to a thing like him, designed in death to feast on life.
But he prickles anyways. Saliva floods from the glands beneath his tongue, pools in the well of his mouth. His gums ache around his teeth. Every one of them.
And it's his. This blood is his own, and still the hunger gapes.
A sudden, wicked sting in the tear across his cheekbone — almost like being hit again, and it jolts him back to himself. The cut feels like a deep one. Smacked like that– Slapped like a mouthy whore– Grimmjow seethes. His rage hisses red-hot in the depthless black of his guts where it thrives, where it thrashes, and Grimmjow thinks he's going to tear Tōsen's throat out. Oh, he's going to pry Tōsen's jaw from his skull, going to leave that holy tongue of his flapping over open, gushing gore. Going to shuck the skin from Tōsen's fingers, peel it down one ring at a time, call that justice, and he thinks he's going to do it with his fucking teeth.
Grimmjow snarls and the wax-drip of his blood pulls tight over his skin. He whirls, fangs bared.
"Enough," Aizen says. His voice is a gently curved thing.
Three of them in this room. Grimmjow's teeth gnash and he stops short, run up to the end of an invisible tether. Enough. The compulsion in it is strong. It shoots through him and tangles in his bones like trees grown in cemeteries, roots through coffins. Absolute: despotism belied by beauty, by bemusement and a smile Grimmjow can hear.
The time to snap has come and gone.
"My apologies, Lord Aizen," Tōsen says, calm. The worst part is he sounds like he means it.
"No need." Aizen faces the dwindled fire, watching it as he watches everything. His hands are clasped behind his back. He has exceptionally handsome fingers. "Grimmjow, won't you thank Kaname for his discipline?"
Like hell he will. Discipline only sticks if you know what you're being disciplined for– And Grimmjow doesn't remember. What he said, what he was saying. Like Tōsen knocked it out of him in one sharp, humiliating blow. Something rude, he's sure. Something fucking right.
He clamps shut. Knows better than to growl.
Should know better.
Aizen's head tilts a fraction to the left and Grimmjow's mouth moves on its own, slowed by no amount of struggle, a choking sort of feeling, dredging the words from him.
"Thank you, L–... Lord Tōsen," he spits. The venom is all his.
"Yes, thank you Kaname," Aizen says, smug prick of a smile in it, "That’ll be all, I think. We won’t keep you."
He means dismissed. He means now. Tōsen bows his head. His white eyes point forward at nothing and his mouth presses thin with distaste, but not for Aizen. Grimmjow sneers at him, knows he'll feel it even if he can't see it. Tōsen isn't spawn but he acts like he is. Quick to obey, a servant to the cause, whatever Aizen's got him thinking that cause is. The master's loyal hound, scruffer of unruly pups. Still as much a dog as the rest of them.
Tōsen goes. It takes a long time for his footsteps to fade into the depths of Aizen's estate, and then Grimmjow, leashed and bleeding, is left alone with his sire.
He breathes for no reason — he started and now he can't stop. It's something new to listen to in the quiet, something his own. The air is the same temperature as the inside of his mouth. Across from him, Aizen's body is utterly silent, but Grimmjow bets he's warm.
Aizen turns from the fireplace to look at him, then. The soles of his boots whisper over the pale floor, intentional, and when Grimmjow looks he sees blood there. A dark, shiny splatter on dark, shiny leather. Wet. Drops trailing towards Aizen's heel and off of it. And beneath it when he steps, just once, smearing umber-orange.
Pitter-patter.
Grimmjow pales. His heart kicks, pumps icy mud through his veins. His nostrils flare and the smell hits him again. Sweet blood; his blood. He swallows compulsively, feels a tremor of something unnameable tightening in his chest.
Bruiseless, scarless, markless Aizen. Grimmjow's first thought of Aizen, so long ago by no one's standards but his own, was that he was beautiful. He still thinks it, as much as he wishes he didn't. It’s inseparable from him. Aizen is shapely, and clean, and powerful. Aizen is sharp new steel, always and agelessly. He lies crossways to time, hovers beyond scrabbling filth. Not like art. Maybe not like anything.
Grimmjow thinks a good god is a soft one, a touchable one — one worn dull under the pass of so many small, anonymous hands. Grimmjow thinks a good god is a dead one.
Aizen is not a good god. Aizen's not any god at all. Aizen is wearing Grimmjow's blood on his boot.
"You have such a mouth for trouble, Grimmjow. It won’t always get you out of it."
Has it ever? Grimmjow scrapes his bottom teeth forward against his fangs, enamel sliding smooth. Says nothing. He can’t pull his gaze up, like eyeing a pulse thudding across a crowded room, something just for him.
It’s how he watches Aizen move away from the fireplace, watches him walk. Wet flash of blood passing into shadow and out of it. He knows the danger is above, but he’s caught. Aizen’s heel tacks off the floor with every step, leaves a sticky, fading trail like animal tracks. Little prints of blood repeated again and again until they're gone, but the sound remains. Tap-tack, tap-tack, in no rush. It's bizarre. It's... It's Grimmjow doesn't know what.
Aizen angles his chair from the head of the dining table and sits. That's familiar. He crosses his leg over his knee, blood over the toe of his boot gleaming like eyes at night. A drop of it slides in a fat, slow creep and puddles in the welt.
"Come," Aizen says.
It would be easier if Aizen made him. He doesn't. Grimmjow's body is his own, his feet when they stagger inevitably forward. Maybe it's the hunger pulling his strings, dragging him across the room like an animal with its heels dug in, moving anyways. A rope to twist his neck against– Easier if it were Aizen's, easiest if it were real. He'd rather strangle than obey. He'd rather hang with his feet on the fucking ground. Rather have the marks. He's already got so many of them.
But he does obey. Sick-feeling. His guts crumple like they're trying to eat themselves. The smell of his blood is nauseating. He's salivating. Aizen props his head in his hand — temple and jaw to forefinger and thumb, always just like this, poised for something, knowing all the things Grimmjow doesn't know and all the things he does.
It's not Grimmjow's fault. He's a spit-slick sort of animal. He can't help what he drools for.
Starving in the damn dining hall. The table is long and bare and menacing. There are thirteen chairs. It's not often that all of them are filled at once. Grimmjow remembers the last time they were, because it was the last time he felt fed. Really fed, good and healthy and lush. It was a bad night. Could've been a punishment, could've been a warning. It's hard to know why Aizen does what he does. Always, in some way, to amuse himself.
Together at the table, all in their places, spawn and not. A dozen formidable tensions; no family's perfect. Lord Aizen, father, holding court. Grimmjow didn't stay in his chair for long. He didn't stay fed, either. He was dinner.
Every vampire's fangs come in different, a little or a lot, and Grimmjow learned them all. Relearned some. Chair to chair, bite to bite like a piece of meat. Szayel's fingers in his hair, twisted hard, pulled into his lap; grabbed and bent over and crushed under Yammy's oppressive weight, gored on his fat tusks; Nnoitra's scythe-fangs, curvy and hooked, his pointed tongue worming in, laughing, snapped over when he wouldn't let him go; Harribel's horrible shark-maw and kind hands, burning everywhere and trying not to fucking look at her. Spat out by Tōsen; lavished by Gin. Shaky by then, and flagging bad, with one more to go. Just one. The most impossible one. Determined to get there on his own, chest buzzing with a soundless growl, eyes open, chin up–
Only to end up on his knees at Aizen's feet.
Where he ends up, now.
His cheek throbs once, open and raw. It'll scar if it's left to dry. Floor's cold. Candlelight wobbling in the wet black blood spurt.
"Look at me, Grimmjow."
It's hard to tear his eyes away. Grimmjow shuts his mouth and skips a breath and looks up at Aizen with his pupils overshot his irises. He knows because he can feel it. Sinkhole. Void.
"Do I ask so much of you?"
Edges falling away.
"You ask–" Grimmjow snaps and stops, chills dripping cold down the back of his neck. Nothing is so simple. It's not fair.
Aizen's finger taps once against his temple. He has a pulse there when his heart beats. Maybe his most delicate one. "Continue."
Grimmjow swallows, just spit. He hesitates. And then the compulsion drenches him, bogs him down. Floods from his throat to soak into his tongue.
"You don't ask anything. You're not asking." Anything, everything, nothing. Grimmjow tastes sweet bile, speaks through the stinging choke, "It's all impossible. Like perpetual motion."
Pushed once to spin forever and ever. Sent twirling and dancing and bleeding endlessly, unemptying, tasked with tirelessness. To go. To get up, always. Get up, and get up, and get up.
He's dizzy. His head isn't on right, it's whirling away from him. He's hit the floor. Grimmjow isn't impossible like Aizen, like the things Aizen wants. Eventually, soon, maybe now, maybe for good– Eventually, he will have to– "Stop."
Aizen hums. He blinks slowly and it's the first break in eye contact. Doesn't feel like it. Feels like futility, predestiny. Feels like his neck bared, bent over the butcher block, waiting for the blow.
"Do you think I will let you?"
"No."
Aizen's fangs are neat like the rest of him, and elegant, and long. Discreet from everywhere except here, below him, looking up at him.
"Are you hungry?"
Grimmjow has never been anything but hunger.
"Yes," he whispers. Always.
"Patience," Aizen tells him, pleasantly cool. Terrifying. "Your mess, first, Grimmjow. You know how."
Troublesome mouth. Aizen doesn't move from his easy, stately lounge. His boot hovers to Grimmjow's left, toe pointed towards his hip. It's tall, hugs his calf, black and shiny. His breeches tuck in. He's dressed down. Why? Some of the blood is starting to crust. There's a bead where it's gathered in the welt, rolled slow over the sole. A weighty little thing, bulging heavy, pulling downwards, about to drip–
Grimmjow catches it on his tongue.
The taste blooms through his mouth like a flowerhead bursting, moths fluttering in the dark, veiny petals and powdered wings, sharp insect legs pricking into his sinuses, tickling down his throat. He almost coughs. It's not sweet like it smells. It's vile. Bitter iron-tang turned to rust. Corrosive, like it'll dissolve his teeth away, eat through his flesh. He can feel it seeping through the texture of his tongue, every microscopic flood between taste buds. Spreading in his saliva. Dark poison in the water.
Swallows it down.
It's nothing. It's a drop. It's rotten and it's his. It's all fucking wrong.
It's blood.
He groans, paused over Aizen's boot, swallowing again and again as his spit gathers — hungry and revolted. The taste stays, the smell grows stronger. He dips his head back down before he knows what he's doing, and then it's too late. It was too late from the start, from the moment Tōsen decided to humiliate him with the back of his hand across his face. To show him his place, or one of them.
What about here? On the floor in the shadow of the dining table, knees bruising on the stone, hunched towards Aizen's feet. This is his place, too. It has to be because he's in it. Is it better or worse? Tōsen didn't put him here. Did Aizen? Did Grimmjow? Is there a difference?
Grimmjow breathes sharply, despises how it shakes, shakes it off. He licks a broad stripe over the top of Aizen's boot. The blood flakes and wrinkles and rolls, dry and then wet and then something in between. It sticks to his tongue, gluey, solid and not. Rancid, cloying in his nose. Licks again, tilting his head.
He leans forward and catches his weight on his hand. So close to quadruped, and he thinks of a dog eating its own vomit. His face flames, his guts twist. Cleaning up his fucking mess. He can't stop. A dog wouldn't feel so warped, so bent. A dog would do a better job.
There's stitching in the welt, saturated. Grimmjow works his tongue against it and tries to suck. The sound echoes in his head, bounces in his brain-space between his ears. It's like kissing an old wound. His fangs hurt and his jaw aches. He feels robbed of a bite, feels sloppy and wet. The leather is smooth like living flesh but not soft. It doesn't move with him, doesn't bulge into his mouth, doesn't press plush against his fangs. Doesn't invite. Doesn't promise him anything but his own filth.
Warm, though. Of course it's warm. Aizen's heat soaks through everything.
Lapping along his instep towards his ankle, leaving streaks of spit, kiss-marks on a dark, hard throat.
Less blood here. He's licking the spatter tails gone dry. They soften under his saliva and he gulps them down. He's panting between swallows and it frazzles him, frays him at his edges. Unraveling. Going a little loose.
Aizen's ankle bone is sharp. Grimmjow wants to rub his face on it, his untorn cheek, his jaw. He tilts into it, smears the corner of his mouth through tacky, dirty spit-wet. Thinned reddish-brownish. His eyes droop and roll. There's an Aizen-scent now, filtering in through the blood, a sire-scent that calls him just as strong.
To Grimmjow he has always smelled like leather.
There's more. Always more. Grimmjow cups his tongue against the curve of Aizen's heel. The angle is bad, makes his lip snarl back, fussing over gristle. He reaches up to hold Aizen's leg.
He doesn't make it. His arms both yank behind his back in a sudden, violent wrench. His hands claw into his elbows, forced forearm to forearm with nothing to hold them there besides the sing of Aizen's silent, iron control. Grimmjow tips off balance and staggers on his knees, torn away from his blood and Aizen's scent cutting through. He nearly whimpers.
"Did you forget yourself?" Aizen asks. He hasn't moved an inch. His eyes are so dark. Dried blood color in there, too.
Grimmjow sniffs, doesn't know where to look. He's sticky around his mouth and chin, skin tight. Feels swollen in his cheekbone around the split there, the raised, crusted edges, maybe still wet in the center where there's fat and meat above the bone. His arms don't strain when he tells them to. But his dick kicks.
"Yes," Grimmjow lies, voice gone out on him. He leans forward again, drawn in like a tide. He spreads his knees to balance. His shoulders rise and fall, pulling breath. Mouth moving before he can stop it: "Didn't get it all."
"You didn't," Aizen agrees, some patronizing spike in it that drives through Grimmjow's chest and bolts him down. Locks him in place. "Open your mouth."
Grimmjow does. His tongue lolls out over his bottom lip and touches his chin — his own gut-sucking need or a tug from Aizen, it could be either. Both. He's drooling.
Quiet, for a moment. Aizen only watches him. Unbeating; unbreathing. Wholly devastating. Grimmjow thinks, with some delirium, that Aizen could snatch dreams with this stillness.
It snaps with a blink, a glint in there, dangerous. Aizen unfolds his leg, lifts his boot to Grimmjow's open mouth. There's a dark trail of blood over the sole. He fits the toe of it over Grimmjow's tongue, sets it there flat. Pushes — but Grimmjow's knees are rooted down, and his arms are locked behind his back, so he only bends at the waist, the neck. He tilts backwards. His head cranes back. His throat stretches long under Aizen's gentle, gentle force.
Grimmjow thinks he makes a sound. It slips small and fast and he doesn't catch it. He's heaving ragged over the toe, fogging the leather, his fangs jutting down in a perfect, mocking frame, sunk into nothing. The pressure on his jaw builds until it bundles tight into deep bruising soreness. His bottom teeth dig into the pulp of his tongue.
And Aizen only holds him, head cocked and staring, handsome fingers curled near his face. Grimmjow can't squirm anything but his tongue. It's a perfect fit under the tip of this boot. Aizen's, only. Writhing under weight and rough texture and taste and smell, Aizen's eyes on his, holding him stuck, slanted steep enough to hurt.
Leather and loamy earth, halls and rooms and rugs, fireplace ash, street filth, wet grass, yellow leaves — everywhere he's been. And Grimmjow's blood clouding it all, staining it like his drool stained orange.
Aizen pushes a little harder. Saliva rolls from behind Grimmjow's upper lip, slicks down his fangs and drips. And drips, drips, drips.
Pitter-patter. More mess. He's wet everywhere. It's not his fucking fault.
"Are you still hungry?"
Grimmjow squints. He tries to struggle. His body is not his.
"Answer."
"Yyye–" Gagged on Aizen's boot, fighting for it, against it, just as much as Aizen wants him to. He gargles spit. It leaks down over his jaw, tickles his neck. His hips twitch. "Y– Ahhgh."
"Insatiable," Aizen says, shine of his fangs through his liar's smile, "Your greed spoils you, Grimmjow."
Then he lifts his boot away and Grimmjow sags and gasps, doubles over. His arms stay folded together; he's bruising himself on his own hands. He pops his jaw and sucks spit, sniffs hard. Can't keep his head down for long, doesn’t like Aizen looking at the back of his neck. Even this low, he'd rather keep his chin up.
He straightens slowly. Aizen has both feet on the ground, now. The wet one slides into the space between Grimmjow's thighs.
"Go on, then." Voice like the earth ever-shifting. Resonant. "Complete your mark."
Fuck. Grimmjow's breath leaves him in a whoosh, makes room for this twisted flop of a feeling, for the fist that crumples in on his heart. He moves under his own power; he's powerless to his instincts. He shuffles forward. He wraps himself around Aizen's leg, his tall boot — smooth and hard and cruel, and warm, and smelling so rich with Grimmjow's blood and Grimmjow's spit and Grimmjow's sire. He's all over it. He wants to be all over it.
Like a dog again. Scruffed like one, hit like one, fed like one. Drooling like one. He can rut like one, too. He fucking will.
He does.
Pressed tight to Aizen's shin, interlocked with it, torn between spreading himself open or squeezing himself shut. Grimmjow lays himself along the slick leather and grinds. Strangles on a snarly sound, a moan. He feels kicked. Feels raw like a scab picked too soon. It hurts worse than his face, his cheek throbbing in time with the buck of his hips. Chasing that blood-hot pain, the blistering thrill.
He doesn't know what he's allowed. Scared to find out. Aizen might take himself away, might abandon him in all this bliss. Grimmjow pants and teeters, shoves against Aizen's knee where it digs into his chest. His shoulders pull. The discomfort blurs into a tenuous high. Something a little like feeding — something more like go, go, go.
And Aizen's eyes on him. Never letting him stop.
Grimmjow sinks a fang into his lip. He barely feels it. There's no gush of wet red, just a weak, welling trickle. All the blood in him is in his cock, only a little in his face to warm his cheeks. He doesn't know if he blushes, if he's pink anywhere besides his tongue lapping at the new wound. His insides are circling like a desperate thing just trying to bed down.
Aizen reaches his hand towards Grimmjow's face. Grimmjow bares his teeth at it, at him, locked on his eyes. Growls, thickly wet. Fingers, handsome ones, already on him before he can snap, before he can snap and regret it, curling along his jaw and smearing the drool that's gone cold. Thumb dimpling the corner of his mouth, his cheek.
It's the first time Aizen's touched him. Warm through his boot, all their clothes, but his skin is hot. He sears. He burns.
He slips his thumbnail along the ragged split in Grimmjow's cheek. To make it his, he wedges inside.
Immolates.
Grimmjow pulls wire-tight. Grimmjow flies apart.
He shakes hard. Humps through it against Aizen's leg, filthy and slick, claws into his own arms. Doesn't know what sound he makes, can only hear his breathing and the loud, deafening absence of Aizen's. His eyes don't close, don't blink. Can't. He only stares wide-eyed into the old-blood, gulping-earth color of Aizen's eyes staring back at him. Swallowed whole. Straight down the gullet.
Wondering what the hell he sees.
Twitching everywhere, slowing down. Grimmjow wilts into Aizen's hand and Aizen lets him. Amused, or close. An upward tick to his mouth that Grimmjow wants to gnaw on with all his back teeth. He tries for a sneer and doesn't quite make it.
Aizen pulls his thumb out of Grimmjow's cheek. It sounds like a kiss breaking, hurts like brand new, makes Grimmjow wince. There's fresh wet beading up. He bled onto Aizen's thumb.
Grimmjow wants to suck it clean. He wants to get it all , get everything he missed. He knows how. His whole body is tingling. He's a little woozy, feels himself wobbling somewhere between heavy and weightless. Like not enough sleep.
Aizen wipes his thumb off on Grimmjow's chin and asks, "Was that impossible?"
No. Yes. Some parts more than others. There's no compulsion to answer. It's not a question.
Grimmjow leans into him and watches bouncing candlelight swirl into his pupils. The smell of leather tangs sharply in the blood. He wonders what his blood smells like to Aizen, if the rot is sweet to him too.
Before he says it, Grimmjow knows what comes next. He is not allowed to stop.
"Are you still hungry?"
If he stops, he might never start again.
"Yes," Grimmjow says.
Aizen smiles. He taps Grimmjow's bottom lip with his stained thumb. Grimmjow flicks his tongue out to taste it.
"Patience. Dinner is soon."
And then he pulls Grimmjow forward.