-squeak-

They Flee From Me

Original Note:

I wrote this entire fic in short bursts of madness after I started playing Suikoden II and got to the horrifying mass murder at Muse. You may or may not remember that Luca Blight said exactly 1 'you have darkness inside you, just like me' line to Jowy Atreides but I sure do because I am kink about that specific thing and I don't clearly remember what happened to me after that but here's 20k words that should not exist, including the poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt, because I literally don't remember what I was thinking.

Jillia Blight wore a modest wedding dress, aggressively modest, and she hadn’t picked it herself. It covered her collar to toe, and a long veil of lace hid her face.

Jowy Atreides wore his uniform, which had just, finally, been sized to fit. They were heavy, those uniforms, but not nearly as heavy as they should have been; they were not armor. The commanders didn’t have to wear armor.

Luca Blight wore his armor. He seemed to prefer it.

There were no clerics for the ceremony. It would be considered unofficial until after the war. An engagement, really.

Jowy grasped the hand of his trial-wife, she meekly let him have it. When he pulled the veil over her face, she nervously cast her eyes on the floor.

What was the point of the pageantry? A serious question, but he wasn’t going to look at Prince Luca with questions now. Why pretend to marry me to your sister? Why hand her to me without legal binding? Why even observe?

It was Jowy’s first kiss, unless he counted a childhood kiss from Nanami (he better remembered the punch that followed). Jillia was soft but cold. He couldn’t feel much over his nervousness and when she finally lifted her black eyes to him he didn’t know if he’d done it right.

They did not consummate their marriage.

If this was a trial, what constituted ‘winning?’

Jillia had removed her own veil and stood nervously in her dress. The buttons, she told him, were on the back. He didn’t catch her drift; she told him she couldn’t unbutton them herself.

“Who put it on?” asked Jowy.

“I have ladies’ maids,” she said softly. “Charity. Ruth. Maria. They’re all… very nice.”

The dress had almost fifty tiny buttons, each satin-covered, held in a cloth loop. It took him some minutes to learn how to unfasten them, then he unhooked them quickly, revealing only a cloth under-dress. He felt relieved.

“The dress was my grandmother’s, actually,” she whispered, voice strained. “She was a Queen. They had cleaned it… fixed it… had to replace most of the buttons. The girls did. My maids.”

“You should put it somewhere safe, then,” replied Jowy. “That’s a precious dress.”

She nodded, and stood up off of his lap. But she stumbled on the dress that was drooping off of her frame now; startled, Jowy caught her, and pulled her back to her feet.

“Oh—" she wavered. “Oh dear.”

Jowy laughed at her; softly, only for a second. She just seemed so… befuddled. But she made a huff, maybe an awkward giggle, in response, and bent down to gather up the layers of fabric at her feet. “Would you help me?...”

He helped her pull the dress over her head, then, his eyes on the floor, folded it into her arms. Head bowed, she clutched it. They weren’t in her bedroom, weren’t in his, but a new suite. She stood alone on the hardwood floor, white dandelion in a very dark room, turning her head back and forth to find a place to put the wedding dress down.

She had to set it down on the dressing table. She turned back around to Jowy, still sitting on the edge of the bed.

“I’m—going to change out of my uniform,” he said, hurrying to the dresser. His face was hot and he felt a little sick. This whole thing; this sham marriage; he thought he had been the most disgusted with himself he ever would be when Annabel saw he was carrying a dagger and the sadness settled into her eyes and the wrinkles deepened on her face.

Well, perhaps, he thought, as his stomach twisted, that was the most disgusted he had ever been with himself. Maybe this was the most miserable he had ever been with himself. He had spent enough time with both emotions to be able to spot the difference pretty easily. That and shame, terror, exhaustion. All of them were sisters, but you could pick them apart from each other if you knew them well enough.

He heard Jillia take her shoes and socks off behind him as he pulled off his coat, shirt, pants, and stood behind the doors of the dresser for a while, wondering what to do. He had to make a choice. He couldn’t just stand here.

He decided it was cold, so he was going to put nightclothes on. He figured he was supposed to feel like a man now, just like his father or King Agares, big, confident, king of his castle, prepared to strut around his wife in his knickers but frankly, he didn’t feel like that. He felt like he was back in a tea room sitting across from a girl who wouldn’t look at him with his mom trying viciously to matchmake the two of them.

His skin was prickling with anxiety and he felt awash in the waves when he finally walked out to see his wife on the bed, still in her underdress. She had been combing her hair with her left hand, but she started and sat up when she saw he was looking at her, as if she were a soldier springing to the attention of her commander.

It felt suspiciously like shirking his duties, but he decided, face to face with her, that tonight, he was doing exactly what Jillia wanted to do, no more, and no less. What was this marriage for? Maneuvering. Politics. Tactics. The age-old causes of noble matrimony. What did he, unlike most married noblemen, not need? An heir. Would he even live to see one? Did it even matter? What was the point?

‘Wanting’ Jillia, he couldn’t even think about it. Confronting the emotions of the situation, a situation that felt like a paper law scribbled down that had to be reluctantly put into effect by guards and iron, overwhelmed him. He didn’t know anything about how he ‘felt’ about Jillia and the enormity of even wondering about it terrified him. The shame he felt, to take a woman as wife when the woman herself was irrelevant...

The only reason he began to cross the room to the bedside was because he knew he had to do something. Approaching Jillia was only slightly less terrifying than approaching her brother, which was a thought that could be unpacked at a later time.

She tensed when he got within five feet of her, invisible except for her hands clutching each other in her lap.

Jowy turned to walk around to the other side of the bed, where an end table with a single flickering oil lamp set. “I’ll shut it off,” he said, his heart hammering louder than his words.

Jillia voiced her assent, wordlessly and almost silently.

Jowy turned out the light and laid down, stomach-up.

It took some minutes for Jillia to lie down. She settled in slowly. She didn’t touch him.

He waited for a few minutes, then turned onto his side, facing away.

He didn’t know when Jillia fell asleep. It took him hours.

Jowy lived only a day with Jillia after their engagement before he and Prince Luca were to depart again. Even that one day was a precious wedding gift in wartime. Frankly, Jowy was thankful.

He was exhausted.

That day with Jillia was pleasant. She said nothing about the night before, so he didn’t have to. They took a long walk and spoke about the past, their parents, their tutors, their hometowns. How much did he know about her before? So little that it was doubled, tripled now.

Jillia was educated and curious, but would never pursue a question if she didn’t get an answer. She was circumspect and modest, and it took her some time to warm up to talking about herself. She didn’t have many hobbies, and she told him she was often tired.

“How often do you mean?”

“Usually.”

She liked her garden but not digging and she liked to play a harpsichord but did not like to sing. She preferred rainy weather, she told him, when a sunshower broke out when they were wandering the berry-bushes the maids tended for her.

“So do you want to stay out in it?”

She quickly glanced behind her, as if there might be someone to stop her. “I do,” she said, as if sharing a secret.

Jowy cracked a small smile, then turned his head up to look at the rain. The sky was bright; it would only last a minute.

A raindrop landed on his eye and he flinched, bowed his head. Jillia exclaimed, and when it slipped out over his face, she had a handkerchief to hand him.

“Thank you.”

“It’s nothing.”

“Thank you anyway.”

Briefly, during dinner (surprisingly plain, but still good) one of Prince Luca’s attendants arrived, apologized for the intrusion. He bore the instructions for their march the next day, and wanted to deliver them before General Blight retired for the evening.

Jowy’s blood went cold.

Jillia’s family name was greater than his by an exponential degree. Of course it had seniority. Why hadn’t that occurred to him?

General Blight.

Jowy Blight.

That was his name.

He thanked the attendant for his service.

Luca Blight.

Prince Luca Blight. Or Commander, if you prefer. Either was considered appropriate.

The name had an undeniable ring to it, didn’t it? And the man was working to pack as much menace into it as he possibly could. You could stride into a room with nothing but his name and silence it.

What a thing to carry around with you—a wave of fear and menace, awe and control, to buoy you up, so you could crest from room to room, city to city, unopposed. It trailed before and behind him, fed and furthered by the atrocities he filled it with. Luca Blight. Luca Blight. Like the chorus of the dead. “Luca Blight is coming” could send a wave of humanity into the streets. “Luca Blight came” means that wave had crashed.

Knowing him personally did not humanize him.

He would realize much later that a part of him had always been waiting to understand Luca, to see the human inside of him. He had always been waiting for the laugh after a silly mistake. The yawn and casual admission he hadn’t slept well. The statement of preference for one kind of weather or another. Something. Anything.

Luca Blight never once picked up a dirty plate or cup for himself. Luca Blight never noticed if there was a blossoming flower or tree by the road. Luca Blight didn’t knock before entering a room. Luca Blight started the march when he woke up and when he woke up exactly.

Luca Blight cornered him to ask how he had liked his sister.

Jowy struggled to find something to say, because he could not possibly remain silent.

If the marriage had not been consummated—if he said something lecherous or lustful—if he said that she was good, or she was bad, or she was inexperienced—was there anything that wasn’t an insult?

They had only arrived at Muse an hour ago. They had only got the troops dispersed and themselves into what was once the Hall just a handful of minutes ago.

Luca had unstrapped his sword to observe it, turning it in the light. The midday light shining down on Jowston Hill was certainly admirable; the shimmering cleanliness of Luca’s sword was even more so. He must indeed work very hard to maintain it.

He had sheathed his sword, cocked his head to Jowy, and asked him how he had liked his sister.

Surely Luca did not want to hear that she had given him great pleasure. He was an envious man, a domineering man. Such a man didn’t want his sister—but surely he would not hear that he had not ‘liked’ her and he certainly wouldn’t want to hear that the gift of her hand had been rejected. Luca was advancing on him; it was disguised, two steps toward the window, which brought him perpendicular to Jowy, then a step closer to him so that he was facing him. It was disguised but it was an advance.

“I hope she wasn’t disappointing to you.”

Even Luca’s eyes looked wrong. A Kobold had a dog’s eyes, a Wing-person had a bird’s, an elf would have bright, odd-colored eyes, and though these things frightened and disturbed some men, none of them put a shiver down Jowy’s spine. But these did, these undefinable goat’s-stare eyes, eyes that you could never quite not notice. If he stared at you in the fullness of dark and never made a sound still you would know his eyes were on you, roaming.

Luca walked casually closer to him, it was past time for Jowy to say something and he still didn’t know what to say. If you didn’t counter Luca, he kept attacking—“You know it was her first time. That’s beyond a shadow of a doubt, of course.”

Jowy tried to look not too put off when he nodded, just a little put off. He often had to lean on propriety when speaking to Luca, the habitual prudishness could get him out of a good handful of the horrific conversation topics that he dropped like a dog dropping shit. “Of course,” he repeated.

“So?” He asked, having settled himself just a step from Jowy, one leg closer, battle-stance. Either he had been so harshly trained he couldn’t get out of it or he really preferred it that much. “Come on, there aren’t any ladies to offend.”

Got it. “I’m afraid,” he steadied his voice, “I couldn’t say.”

His head tilted just a little and his eyebrows raised dangerously.

“I don’t have much experience myself. I have to admit she might have been the one disappointed.”

To put yourself down was always the least dangerous response to Luca Blight. Gentle flattery was fine. But take great care you did not stoop to adoration or worse, to begging . He loved begging.

Luca cracked a little laugh, a few low, almost sincere chuckles as he dragged his eyes down Jowy’s face, to his neck and chest. “You are really young, aren’t you? You have such incredible composure that I forget sometimes.”

Jowy didn’t respond.

“It was really your first time?” He smiled, shit—“Oh, no .” With that, Luca placed a heavy hand, hot, on Jowy’s shoulder. No pressure. Yet. “So, not a clue what you were doing? Just fumbling in the dark with her? Sure you found the right hole? Oh, look, I’m right,” he laughed, flicking up his thumb to brush Jowy’s cheek, as if playfully. “Blushing.”

He was. He could feel his face burning. He’s so fucking disgusting —

“My sister is too good a woman to cheat on you, so you’d better learn what you’re doing. Or,” he continued, his hand returning to his shoulder, and there it was, not so much of a push yet as a grip, like a cat slowly curling their claws into you. “Or… you know, I bet you’re not the blushing little virgin you look like. Sure, you didn’t get dirty in the streets like your peasant friends; mommy kept you inside, all cleaned up to present to the ladies, right? But you didn’t think that way, did you?”

He leaned in to get close to Jowy’s face, close enough for his sour breath to ghost on his forehead. The height difference between them was extreme; it was genetics, Jowy and Jillia were of height, and she was sixteen. But Luca was of a height and breadth to block out the light behind him.

Jowy squared his back.

“You’re pretty coy. Prudish, even. But I wasn’t born yesterday. The quietest kid is the freakiest one. Every time. You didn’t get to touch, but you looked a lot, didn’t you? I know you did.” Luca applied a little pressure to his shoulder. Back square. “The quiet one is the one to look out for. Did they ever say that about you?”

They had. They had, but… “Yes—”

Luca interrupted him with a broken, mechanical cackle. “Yes, yes they did. Because you were the little pervert, weren’t you? It’s always the little angel who never says anything out of place. Watching behind walls. Stealing clothing. But the hypervigilance is how you can tell. You’re vigilant because you know what’s going on inside, and you know what everyone would say if they could see.”

His voice was snake’s venom. He jostled Jowy’s shoulder ‘playfully.’ “Come on, you don’t have to be shy with me, little brother. In fact, didn’t Jillia say she had seen you before, since she spent so much time in that lovely mansion in Kyaro? Beautiful little house. We built it there so we could sit on the porch and gloat over the losers of the war,” he said, big smile. “That’s a long con, you little pervert. You like the girl next door, so what do you do? Join the army, kill thousands, maneuver the chips and jump at the very first chance to get your hands on her? You little shit . Was it everything you dreamed of?” he growled, face still smiling but the cheer sapped out of it, a wolf’s barred-fangs grimace. “She good enough for you now that you’ve had her?”

No, no, no, no, no, he was already buried in lies he had to refute, it wasn’t true and it stopped being true to long ago, he didn’t know where to start, he had to say something, something, “Your Highness—”

Wrong, apparently. Luca decided to push him into the wall with both hands now, not shaking him, just shoving both sides, equal force, like he was trying to shove him through the stone. Boxed in, Jowy’s head went dark; switched to fight responses. First, focus on your breathing. Second, wait for an opening.

Fight.

“Oh, no, I see what you were trying to say now,” Luca continued, his voice dropping even lower in pitch, a clandestine whisper. “You got too excited and came right away. You know, you’re way too proper, I can’t hardly tell what you’re saying sometimes. I bet she was disappointed. You feel a little dirty after that?” he asked and, for the first time since he began to accuse him, waited for a response, his head tilting, the underlids of his eyes tensing up, as if he truly, truly wanted to know how dirty Jowy had felt.

The opening. “I treated her as nothing less than the Lady she is the entire time,” he asserted. “I felt there was nothing dirty about what we did.”

“Then you’re fucking lying to yourself,” said Luca, almost sweetly. “Sex is dirty. Sex is fucking disgusting. Doesn’t matter that we have titles and gold buttons. You fuck just like a pig fucks. There’s no difference between us and animals, and since you’re helping me run this slaughterhouse right now you had better get used to that notion. You’re a stud with a mare and nothing fucking more, brother, the only real difference being you got someone who will fucking murder you if you don’t treat her right.”

“I treated her,” Jowy repeated, rising incrementally from the wall, “as nothing less than the Lady she is the entire time.”

Luca snorted. “Yeah, you probably didn’t even get in her,” he said, and Jowy carefully kept from flinching, hoped he did enough. With a push on his right arm Luca leaned backward, oh, thank god, he was leaning away, he was stopping, he was stopping. Jowy could smell clean air again. “Well, you’re going to be stuck here without her for some time. And you know what? You’re keeping your hands off of yourself. You don’t get to think about my sister until you’re back with her.”

Jowy’s jaw tensed.

“If I catch you touching yourself I’ll have you flogged,” said Luca cheerfully, rocking back onto his left heel to step away. “Maybe if you stop pleasing yourself for a day you’ll appreciate what you’re got when you’re back home. Alright?”

“H—” Jowy tried to speak and couldn’t.

“Say,” said Luca, his eyes growing very tight, “’Yes, your Highness.”

“Yes, your Highness,” Jowy squeezed out.

“Louder.”

“Yes, your Highness!”

Luca’s laugh echoed harshly as he turned his back to walk away, just like that.

Jowy wished he had anything to do but follow him and get back to work.

He didn’t really enter the most amorous phase of his life after watching the people of Muse die in droves anyway.

He would be able to see it the rest of his life.

First they started screaming. Then they began running. When they stopped, they started shaking. And then the blood and the pus and the light starting gushing out of their mouths.

When they were wrung out like roadkill under a wheel, they dropped.

Bushels of humanity were shoved off of the streets en masse. With brooms.

Luca must have a power he could not imagine, Jowy thought numbly, as they marched swiftly through the streets of Muse, observing the silence and the blood. And it seemed many of the soldiers around him shared it. They had a power to not even see the bodies as human anymore; they said so themselves. “Seeing all of them, they don’t even look” “once they’re dead” or “once they’re all piled up” “just like rabbits” “rats” “pigs” and “what does she care, she’s dead” “what does he care, he’s dead” “look, he shit himself” “ha, she was cute”

Jowy didn’t have that power. They looked like people to him, and he was sinking in it. Every glassy eye made him more and more tired and he felt he could collapse in the street.

The afternoon sun of the plains beat down.

Jowy didn’t quite sleep for a while. Awake, asleep, awake. Not sure when he was going to get to sleep, not sure when he fell asleep. Sweaty and lying prone, glassy-eyed bodies, bodies stripped of their clothes, their dignity, their identity.

It was weird, because he felt it was so wrong and he wanted everyone to live so badly, and he wanted everyone to fucking die so much. All these stupid, cruel, callous, murdering assholes, if they could just die, if Luca could just die, die, die,

He sat across from Luca at a wooden table, stolen from a rich man’s house, on his stolen chairs, eating stolen food off of stolen plates. He kept eating the chicken and wondering if it would have kept one man in starving Greenhill alive, or two, or three.

Luca shouted commands between bites, washed them both down with wine. Jowy would have never guessed in a million years he was a wine-drinker. Sure, he had assumed from the start that the man drank. But he was an ale man, certainly; not a liquor man, not with his sharp attention. That assumption was proved wrong; he liked bitter wine, the dryer the better, and cold.

The posh taste settled badly with the coarse manner. Jowy didn’t know why he was focusing on this.

He sat across from Luca during meals very often. He was usually quiet, he was always watching. The other generals were careful not to spare him an extra glance, just as he was careful not to spare them an extra glance.

Technically, he had more important goals than making absolutely sure that Luca didn’t catch on to the plot to assassinate him before it was sprung, but he allowed himself some grace in caring about Luca being assassinated more than the rest of it right now. With every bit of blood in his body and every push of his heart he cared that Prince Luca Blight not live one more year.

He was disgusting. Disgusting. Inhuman—

“Aren’t you excited to see my sister again?”

He usually said ‘my sister’ to refer to Jillia, hardly ever ‘your wife.’

No one else in this room knew what he meant.

“I only hope she’ll be happy to see me.”

They laughed.

“And after having addressed the issue of the left flank, I think that, wisely, the best course of actg hhhhnkkk —”

Jowy had kept talking as Luca slowly circled behind him. To circle like a vulture, perch like a hawk, crouch like a lion; all were quite typical to him, and though the generals around the table could not be called ‘comfortable’ with his actions, they knew what was typical and what was not. Luca slowly striding behind Jowy while he spoke, Jowy studiously not acknowledging it and keeping his eyes ahead, Luca bearing down his gaze on the back of the young man’s neck and licking his lips while he flexed his knuckles, all of that was normal. Prince Luca seizing Jowy by his hair without warning, digging the curves of his claws into his bound tresses and slamming his head down until his forehead cracked on the table, that was not typical.

Some jumped, some just tensed. Luca typically watched to see who jumped after something like that. Atypically, this time, he was still watching Jowy, who’s face he was pressing into the table. At first, he had shoved him straight down. Then he started rolling him back and forth, very slowly, as he talked, just to put pressure on more of his skin.

“You want to repeat what you just fucking said?” asked Luca, sounding calm. He flexed his fingers on Jowy’s skull, a step away from a massage. “Oh, you fucking can’t, can you ?” Luca snapped.

Breathe, He thought to himself. Breathe, Jowy. You have access to at least one orifice to breathe through at all times. He didn’t give you brain damage if you can think this clearly. You have to do something to keep your cool. Recite a poem. ‘

They flee from me, which sometime did me seek/with gentle foot tapping in my chamber…’

“Let me tell you what you said for you,” Luca continued, still holding his head down as Jowy, struggling to not tense his muscles, not be unprepared for another attack, willed himself limp. “It SOUNDED like you just said ‘I’ve considered your plan, your Highness, and I have a better one.’ Now, if you had had a better plan, Jowy, I would have heard you out. Like Greenhill. Remember Greenhill?”

‘I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek/that now are wild and do not remember…’

“Greenhill was great. I’d like another Greenhill from you, Jowy. But unfortunately, the idea you came up with this time was dumb as shit and it offended my senses the second you shat it out. How about you fucking think before you speak, next time?” he asked, Jowy could feel him lean down and that sour breath run over his neck again, he wanted to gag, he had to ‘that sometime they put themself in danger/to take bread at my hand…’

“I want to like you, Jowy. Listen, I do like you,” he whispered, leaning almost over Jowy’s bent back. He pressed him so far forward against the edge of the table that it began to cut into his windpipe. “So step up and remind me why I like you so much when you’re not being a sniveling, paranoid, cowardly idiot. Understand?”

‘and now they range/ busily seeking with a continual change…’

“Say yes, Your Highness.”

Jowy gagged for air.

Luca wrenched his head back so that he was half-holding him up by the hair, back bent in an arc. His eyes were staring at the ceiling; he could not see every other general, lieutenant, and secretary in the room staring at his eyes water when his lungs stung. But he knew they were. “Say yes, your highness!”

“Yes—” Jowy coughed as his throat rebelled. It felt like someone had choked him—“Yes, your highness—”

“Louder!” Luca demanded.

“Yes, your Highness!” Jowy shouted, voice cracking over each word.

When Luca let him go, Jowy was barely ready to brace himself with his hands so that his skull didn’t hit the table again. His heaving breaths took a couple seconds to adjust; Luca was still standing behind him. He didn’t know what the right answer was. Everyone was staring, what do you do, there’s absolutely no fucking protocol for this. He straightened his back. Folded his hands on top of each other, shaking with exertion.

He had to look up. He looked up, caught the eyes of a man across the room.

He looked down.

Everyone did.

Luca finally started walking again.

Jowy volunteered to be the one who oversaw cleaning up the streets of Muse. For what was potentially the most hellish place in the world, he was reluctant to leave it. The bodies were still piled everywhere; Jowy’s skin prickled when he thought of turning his back on them.

Luca told him with no room to bargain that he would not be staying in Muse, he would be going to Matilda—that is, after their visit home.

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Whoso List to Hunt

Was L’Renouille home? The city itself was known to Jowy. Since his father was minor nobility, country nobility, of the distant mountains, they had journeyed back and forth to the capital often during his childhood. He wouldn’t be unable to find his way around the city, vast as it was, but he would be hard-pressed to find a familiar face in a crowd. But was Kyaro home? His father's estate? Genkaku's Dojo?

The one thing he was certain of as the grassy plains of Muse slowly buckled and rose into the high hills and cliffs and creeks of half-barren Highland, her trees and shrubs scraggly and pale purple, her grasses gentle gold and clinging to the silver and red and goldenrod stones, was that this was home. Highland was home. When the playful wind of the steppes began to whistle through the carriage windows and its wheels bumped and jostled on the rocky, dusty roads, dry and cool, so close to the indifferent constant sun, Jowy felt something relax inside him that hadn’t in months.

He always felt like no matter where he went in the Highland, he was a little out of place, in a bedroom that didn’t feel like his anymore, in parlor rooms of eternally catching-up family friends, but on the bumpy Highland road, coasting past herders with stone houses, flocks of soaring golden eagles, the untouched broken peaks of Harmonian ruins that rebelled against time and the dauntless climbing vines that had wed them, he knew he was in his home.

Not the people, but the place. Was that loyalty? Could it be? What did you love about your country if you didn’t love its people, its culture, its government, its war? How could he feel moved like this when that bitter ocean-winter wind found the cracks in the wood to hiss on his skin, but not by a word that came from the mouths of her rulers?

Perhaps the semi-desolate highland pastoral scenery was just so much more charming that the man sitting across from him in the carriage.

They were family, so it only made sense they travel together.

Luca had actually let him be for most of the ride. They were both observing the countryland, in fact, having private, different thoughts about the little towns and their little cultivated fields of barley and cattle, their great stone wells to pull the water out of the ground a mile below. What did Luca see when he looked at his kingdom—truly his kingdom, his possession, his little map to move his army around on, pinned down on his desk? Jowy didn’t ask and he hoped he wasn’t told.

“I’ll have you cleaned up to make you presentable to my sister,” he said to him, about an hour away, thick with condescension.

Jowy wasn’t sure what part of him was less presentable than the prince was, but he nodded assent all the same.

Luca stared at him.

Jowy’s heartrate began to pound.

Luca expectantly quirked an eyebrow, and tilted his head to the side. The little movement made his anxious heart begin to rise to his throat.

“Yes, your Highness.”

That was it, he leaned back, that was what he wanted—

“Jowy,” whispered Luca, grinning with one side of his mouth.

Jowy took a deep breath, like he was going to plunge into an icy river. “Yes, your Highness!”

Luca was so pleased he briefly caught his lower lip in his teeth. Jowy couldn’t look away, because that would not be proper deference. He felt pinned by the prince’s horrible stare as if by an arrow and like the pierced hind he had no recourse, no hope, nothing to do but stare back, and be stared at.

Jillia smiled when she saw him. Her hands tightly clenched together, and then she extended one to him.

It was pleasant, in fact, to bow down to kiss Jillia’s hand, to feel her hold it so gently, softly, her wrist relaxed, to know it would never lash back to strike him.

Standing again, he asked to accompany her back home, though she and her maids had only come down the street from the castle to wait for him.

“Surely you would be tired, after your long journey?” she asked, her voice even more soft than he recalled.

“I was sitting the whole time,” he replied. “I would love to take a walk down the road in the open air.”

“We’ll be presented to my father when we arrive,” she warned him.

Jowy felt that something like laughter bubbled in his chest. For what cause could he possibly be scared of King Agares after spending so much time with his son? “Never mind that,” he told her, taking her arm. “Let’s take our time.”

She clutched onto his arm, like a little animal bracing itself on his shoulder, head straining to see the world beyond its hutch.

The king was delighted to see him, in fact, and laughed amiably about the sweet little newlyweds taking their time together.

His smiling joke about the General (that was him, yes, that was him) just not being able to take his hands from her, though, which Jowy was expected, required to laugh at; it made his heart sink down, cold.

No, Jowy wasn’t afraid of King Agares. He did, however, have the utter gall to be privately disappointed in him.

L’Renouille’s castle was a rabbit warren built for a king of hares. Labyrinthine, circuitous, winding, one could go a mile and have not gone very far at all; one could have a man following them a loop or a corridor a way and never know they were observed. It was purposefully deceptive; the only way to have your bearing in it was to be living in it. A guest of any kind would be practically a prisoner in their room, knowing what their chances were in the maze outside.

To Jowy, right now, this night, it was an incredible comfort, feeling he was miles away from the rest of his in-laws as he laid down with his wife that night, on a soft bed made for her in the cool heights of the castle, where a man would have to have wings to invade.

They shared the room with a spinning wheel and a loom, a dresser, a cabinet, a table. She did not keep much, oddly. But she smiled when she walked into the old room, finding comfort in it.

To lie down beside her was as odd as it was the last time. But he liked that she took much less time to settle down, curl up and begin to drift off to sleep. He didn’t feel dangerous around Jillia. He didn’t feel scary. He didn’t feel dirty or cursed or haunted or any other number of feelings that kept lurching just behind him, following him down halls and through streets, past corners, breath just tapping the back of his neck.

He was lying to himself, and letting his guard down foolishly, but it was so late, and you can’t sort your life problems out after midnight.

She began to whistle very quietly when she was asleep, the lightest, gentlest thing that could possibly be called ‘snoring.’ It was a little funny, then it was cute, and then he was asleep.

Luca gave him one afternoon before he found him in his castle.

Surely he had been busy before, and this is when they happened to run across each other in the course of the day. It was baseless paranoia that made him felt like this was inevitable, that the prince had been waiting for the right time to pounce him.

They had both just entertained the generals and military men who had remained in L’Renouille as the home guard, discussed their status as opposed to the mobilized army. Frankly, Jowy felt there was a good balance in who was deployed where, but he kept his mouth shut while Luca disagreed and peeled away more troops and supplies for himself. After the meeting dispersed, Luca told him that the two of them were going to talk privately in his sitting-room.

Jowy had hardly said a word, so he let himself tell himself they were actually going to discuss plans for the army on the ground in Matilda. He should not at all be looking forward to invading Matilda.

That sitting room was not furnished by Luca himself, of that he was sure. The comfortable, cloth-covered furniture, in regal blue and soft yellow, the gold-trimmed red rugs, glass-bordered candlelights, and dark, very dusty bookshelves were identical to those furnishing many of the parlors and dining rooms and drawing rooms of the palace; the only personal touches he had added were the abundance of weapons as decorations. In that candlelight, the room glittered as you shifted, one edge and then the other of a hundred hung and bound swords and spears reflecting the light. Jowy doubted he used it for much; there was no scent of perfume or woodsmoke or incense, no personal touches or bookmarked volumes laying on the tea-table. There was no decanter of grain alcohol or cup of half-drunk tea or coat thrown over the back of a chair. It was the sitting room that belonged to Prince Luca, who was almost never here.

Luca slapped down the page of numbers and notes he had been taking to the meeting, to a quick glance an actually faithful representation of the battle tactics he wanted and a shocking sign he had been paying attention to at least the words coming out of his own mouth, and it became the only personal possession in the room. The prince himself was distinctly out of place in under-armor but no full, glittering armor, dark leather and black wool, with only a small circlet and a set of bracers with royal crests denoting who he was. The was no reason for him to be ostentatious, even if he wanted to be, which he didn’t. How could a person possibly mistake Prince Luca?

He did own the place, so it wasn’t technically overbearing when he military-turned on a heel and fell back onto an arm-chair, deliberately throne-like, and braced his chin on one hand. He cocked his head to Jowy (he caught his breath) and indicated the seat across from him; double-seated, what might have been called a loveseat if he were in a better person’s house. To Luca, he assumed, flipping his coat away so he could sit down, it was just ‘that chair.’ Luca didn’t bother with the names of things if he didn’t have to.

Luca fixed him with eyes that seemed… tired, he would say, if pressed. He appeared to have shadows under his lids; maybe it was that he was still, and seated, slumped slightly. It occurred to Jowy that he typically had impeccable posture for such a careless, entitled bastard. “Jowy,” he began a dry, questioning tone, “how do you take it?”

“What, your Highness?”

“Them. People. The horde,” he growled. “I know you hate them. I’ve never known you to not be furious.”

Fancy that. Jowy did nothing but raise an eyebrow.

“You hate it. The whining, the begging, the sheer fucking audacity the average man has. He deserves it all and he can’t believe you want him to work for it. I know you just can’t stand them. Yet you seem content to let them yammer and bluster and honk like geese, all day long.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he continued, sneering to show a canine, “you’re a master of being a passive-aggressive, white-lying little shit. I wouldn’t trust you with fuck all if you didn’t keep to your word as a commander. But you just let people, even your inferiors, backtalk you and treat you like shit. Which is just embarrassing to watch,” Luca clarified, just in case he couldn’t follow his acid-saturated tone. “Are you actually content to listen to that shit? Or are you just biding your time until you can knife everyone around you?”

Jowy’s blood grew icier and icier as he spoke. Could he know? If he did, would it matter? “I try to look for the information in people’s words, and ignore the way they say them,” Jowy answered, honestly enough. “I do probably need to know what they’re trying to say despite how bad they are at it.”

“And how often do they really have anything to say?” Luca growled, leaning forward a little in his chair. “You sit through hours of posturing giving people the icy stare, for what? How the fuck does it benefit you?”

How ‘the fuck’ does this benefit you, was the first response in Jowy’s mind. Luca was fishing, but for what? “I like doing what I do. I’d like to do it well. If my equals or inferiors have information I need, I’ll wait for them to spit it out.”

“Why wait? Take it.”

Jowy shook his head before he thought about it, because Luca’s constant, aggravating entitlement just made his chest hot every time. And he didn’t get more used to it.

“You waste so much time letting them strut around and jerk off about their quotas and their positions and their rights and their privileges. If you care about getting your job done, just do it,” Luca demanded.

“Is that an order from you, your Highness?”

“Ha!” snapped Luca, rolling himself back in the chair, crossing one leg over the knee of the other. “I like your mean streak, you know that? You have to have it teased out, but it’s not far under the surface. Most people wouldn’t see it, either, but I know. What do you call it? ‘Self-control?’ ‘Temperance?’ ‘Stoicism?’ That’s not what it is, Jowy. You’re mean.”

Jowy waited for Luca to get to a point. A point that wasn’t needling him, that was.

“’I’ll wait for them to get to their point, speak their case, and then dismiss it?’ I can see the appeal,” Luca admitted, tossing his eyes at the ceiling. “It makes people mad. You like that. I’ve seen it. You straighten your back like a rod and try not to smile when the old men get indignant. But you don’t go right for the throat. Your best tactics are…” he tilted his head, trailing off.

“Very… feminine,” he continued, softly.

“Feminine?” asked Jowy, because he wasn’t supposed to let that one go.

“’Poison is the woman’s weapon,’ have you heard anyone say it?”

“My father would, all the time.”

“Ha! Funny, because your father was a poisonous bastard. And so are you. They rarely say that about literal poison. They mean thought-poison. Insidious, subtle, and mean-spirited. Tearing everyone down around you slow. To keep your sword strapped to your side, never once drawing it, as you watch your prisoners devour the people of Greenhill alive. Very womanly of you.”

“You must know some interesting women,” said Jowy, mildly. Then he wondered if he should, in fact, have said it strongly. No. Not worth thinking about.

Luca smiled a lecherous smile. “I have,” he gloated. “I know many who would diagnose you with a serious lack of manliness, you know. I’ve never seen you charge right in. Oh,” he interrupted himself, leaning forward on his bent leg, “Do you remember our conversation about your preferences?”

“Which conversation was that?”

Luca smiled at him, showing a glimmer of teeth. “I think I see how it all fits together, actually. Yes, that was the last piece. You’re sly, rather a schemer. You have thoughts in your head about everything, but we’re never going to see it, are we?”

Not if I can do anything about it.

“You put it off, put it off, put it off, give them the stare through hot wind and cold… because you’re the guy who likes to wait for it,” he said, beginning to tap his knee. His fingertips thudded on the old leather. “You wait for years to get a position, then ask for my sister. You wait and wait for people to blow themselves out, then shoot them down. You wait, wait, wait, because the climax is better the longer it’s delayed, yeah? I never had the patience. I don’t care to cultivate it. I hear it’s classy. I hear it’s fulfilling. But I don’t have time to wait, and wait, and wait. So.”

He leaned even further down, crossing his arms and looking up at Jowy from a bent position. “You want to try to put a knife in me now?” he asked, smiling like a pleased cat. “We’re alone. No one comes here. No one will even hear me. I didn’t bring my sword. I’m not wearing my armor! But you brought a knife,” he smiled, his eyes glancing down to Jowy’s right leg. Fuck, fuck—“What are you waiting for? Do you not get a hard-on about it if someone’s expecting the backstabbing?”

Luca—always assumed the worst. He hadn’t, certainly he hadn’t discerned any of his plans, in particular, he just assumed Jowy was planning to kill him because who wouldn’t? In fact, who wasn’t? How long did it take most of his senior staff to pledge Jowy their assistance and loyalty? A handful of months? When—

“Can’t even say a peep?” Luca’s honestly threatening bulk rippled when he used his core alone to pull himself back up. “I just accused you of high treason.”

“Well,” replied Jowy, already hating himself for it, “we’re alone, and no one even heard you.”

Luca threw his head back over the head of his chair and bellowed with laughter. “Yes!” he shouted, banging his fist on the chair’s arm once. “Yes, that’s that vicious mean streak I told you you have! And don’t you act uppity for lying about it?” he cackled, his head slowly lowering back down. The mirth in his dark eyes simmered like coals from a fire. “No, no, you’re not like horrible, evil Prince Luca. No, no, you’re polite, considerate, always let people have their say, always let those bastards stomp all over you, clean nails, neat hair, no barracks-talk, no brawls, no boasting. Jowy! Oh, Jowy,” he purred, with thick, dismal unkindness. “What a lady. And when they’ve got their backs turned, that’s when the poisoned dagger comes out. Well, Jowy, I’m waiting for it.”

“I don’t have one.”

“Then the bulge on your right leg is… what?” he asked, with the polar opposite of innocence.

“An unpoisoned dagger,” replied Jowy, with honest indignance, “as a last resort in self-defense, which, frankly, I had forgotten I was wearing. You’d have to remove my boots and trousers to even get to it.”

Luca cut off his laughter about Jowy’s protestations abruptly, turning his head. Jowy saw him lift a hand to grab at something on the table; maybe a wine-glass, but he hadn’t brought one. Instead, he lifted it to the side of his face, considering. He looked down Jowy again, his straight ankles, his hands, one clutching the other.

Body language is a military language, and it can be tactics. Jowy’s was closed—almost always, but he took care to not make it vulnerable. He didn’t hunch, didn’t box himself in, wouldn’t lower his shoulders. For that reason he certainly wasn’t bothered by being called icy, but he would deny it related to any deliberate cruelty. He took great pains to disguise natural reactions to what he was told because there were things he simply could not let slip—

“How long is your hair?” asked Luca. His voice had snapped back to level lowness.

Jowy’s hand did not rise to touch his hair.

“I had quite long hair as a young man too, of course,” the prince continued, “but cut it off when I gained my first real rank in the army. Not the first I was given, the first I earned. Most men, I think, cut it back at marriage. But you’ve kept yours long.”

Jowy nodded slightly. It was true, of course. And—most would have cut their hair by now.

“Does Jillia like it? Did she ask you to keep it?”

“Jillia didn’t say anything about it.”

“Is it your preference, then?”

Oh my god, it was just his hair. He had never thought about it! It was just what he was used to. “I’ve not had it another way.”

“You do still look a boy. Very thin,” Luca continued, leaning back to rake his gaze down him. “Even a girl. I would think you’re purposefully trying to get people to underestimate you, between that and your behavior. You go so very far out of your way to avoid being in charge. It does make some of your peers give you a second look. And, some of them, a third. Take it down.”

“Your Highness?”

“Take your hair down.”

He got a sick feeling in his chest. That heat of his heart speeding up again. The demands Luca made him, to force him to look vulnerable, to throw him off guard; demands so unusual there was no context for them, no protocol for following them. To him, was he any different from the woman begging for her life, to be told to act like a pig or a cow or beg at his feet?

He’s a man who likes to see people upset and uncomfortable. That’s simply a fact about him. These demands don’t deserve scrutiny, he told himself, and he yanked out his hair with military precision, pulling the guard off with one hand, setting it on an end table while another slipped the binder down. He followed that by letting the locks slip through a cupped fist and settle neatly on his back, rather than spreading everywhere. It was dry today; some wanted to float and stick to things.

“Blond,” Luca commented, which, yes, Jowy knew that already. “If you had been a female, Jowy, you would have been called fetching. Blond eyelashes, even.” He grinned at something, tapped his hand on his knee again. “Ha ha. Go on.”

Fuck this guy. “To do what?”

“Play your little game. Come on. You’re already doing great, with that cold stare. Come on . Start me out with a good ‘I don’t know what you mean.’”

He wasn’t sure he did, this time. “I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

“Oh! Just like that. Not quite what I asked for, not quite rebellion. You would make a lawyer cry. I think you have made a few cry, actually. Take off your coat, Jowy.”

He—he couldn’t even—senseless, stupid cruelty. He just liked making people uncomfortable. Jowy had to twist out the buttons of his coat one by one, slide it off of his shoulders. Luca cleared his throat. Jowy looked up.

“You forgot something,” he smiled. “I gave you a command?”

A weight like a stone dropped in his stomach.

“Yes…” he cleared his throat, began his sentence more steadily. “Yes, your Highness.”

His skin prickled with chill from the cold stone as he slid the coat off of his arms, Luca was staring him, following his movements with his eyes, which Jowy could see in his peripheral vision, like keeping an eye on a lion which crouched in the brush as you found a way to back up slowly. His stomach would jolt when he caught his eyes again, he had to keep himself focused as he slipped off his coat, stood up to get the fabric under his legs gathered up. He deliberately, cautiously turned around to drape it over the back of the seat. He turned back to the prince, keeping as steady as he could.

“Well?”

Jowy really wasn’t sure well, what. He subconsciously smoothed his hands over his thighs then consciously put them behind his back. “Yes, your Highness?”

Luca huffed a short, amused huff. “Anything to say? You can have a second to think. I know you need to take your time sometimes.”

He did suppress the urge to snap back immediately. He couldn’t let an impulse cause him to say something stupid now, not now that there were such dire accusations on the table. “Shall I be seated again, your Highness, or do you prefer I stand now?”

“Stand,” ordered Luca immediately. That was no problem. He clicked his heels together, one turned out, and stood, at attention. Luca seemed to sit back more as Jowy stood straighter. “Go on, speak your mind. Or try to. Can you speak plainly, Jowy?”

“I always speak plainly.”

Luca chuckled. “Insidious. Jowy, you little shit.”

Jowy’s cheeks colored, but he chose not to respond.

“Can you speak honestly?” Luca pressed, as if he was still telling a long, circuitous joke.

“Frankness does not come naturally to me, I admit,” he replied, honestly enough. “It wasn’t in my raising.”

“Certainly not! I’ve been working with family Atreides longer than you have. Unbutton your shirt.”

Jowy’s eyebrows quirked before he settled them back down. His locked arms felt icy.

“Now.”

He took a deep breath.

“Jowy.”

He unclasped his arms, and, without a better plan, lifted them up to his neck.

“No, Jowy. You know better.”

What did—

“Yes—yes, your highness.”

“Jowy!” he snapped, cracking his hand on the arm of the chair again.

“Yes, your Highness!” Jowy snapped, and slipped open the first button at his throat. The skin underneath prickled when he accidentally brushed it with his fingertips. Luca’s stare never left him, had never left him. He didn’t know—it was working, whatever it was, because he was clearly thrown off balance, he hadn’t know the right response for anything for the last ten minutes

“Put it with your coat.”

Jowy turned around, and did so, his nerves jangling and the hair on his arms rising when he had to let the Prince out of his sight for even a second. His hair, which he forgot he had let down, fell over his shoulders, and he had to sweep it back when he straightened up to face Luca again. He was sitting straight up in his chair.

“Nothing to say?” Luca almost whispered.

Jowy didn’t know what to say.

“Give me your knife,” he demanded.

He had hardly ever felt so powerful an impulse to refuse one of Luca’s demands, and there was strong competition in that class. His father, his friends, Master Genkaku, and every one of his tutors would laugh at him for giving away the only thing he was armed with to his enemy. I am never unarmed, he told himself, as he steadied his breathing. I am never unarmed, because my body is trained, not my knife. I am never unarmed because my skills cannot be taken from me, he thought to himself, as he immediately lowered his eyes, rolled forward, and got on one knee to start unlacing his boots.

His fingers wouldn’t tremble slipping the laces out of their brass holes, nor would they betray his nervousness when they then moved to the clasp of his belt. But his stomach started rolling when his knuckle accidentally brushed the soft skin of his torso, just above the hairline of his sex, and he felt he was going to vomit, preforming this action of vulnerability, shame, that he had hidden himself from his wife before he did on their wedding night; to be ‘caught without your pants’ is literally a euphemism for being unprepared, negligent, asleep on the job; you need to breathe, Jowy, to focus; get in your head, count your breaths, imagine Master Genkaku is watching, focus, center, recite a fucking poem.

‘Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind, ’ he thought to himself.

His pants slipped down over his legs, without being asked, he turned around to put them on the back of the seat. “Yes, your highness,” he said, somewhat hollowly, and only because it occurred to him he had forgotten to say. The knife was held to him snug in what was essentially a garter, nothing but a slip of steel with a flat handle, weak but the best thing he could hide.

As he unhooked the little leather band that held the knife to his thigh, he continued, ‘ But as for me, hélas , I may no more—'

“Bring it to me,” Luca whispered. He did not move to put out his hand, nor even to lean forward from his lazy perch, where he sat comfortably observing.

“Yes, your Highness.”

‘I may no more/The vain travail hath wearied me so sore…’

It took three steps to cross the room to reach the prince. He kept his eyes straight ahead, on him, because to look down, and acknowledge his nakedness but for the barest of covering, was intolerable. And just the same Luca kept his eyes fixed to him, in a locked stare; indistinguishable from the stare of challenger to challenger in a sparring match.

A duel, rather.

Jowy had to hold it out, because Luca did not move. His eyes, bright, lowered slowly to the offered belt, and he finally lifted his hand to take it. He smoothed his thumb down the soft edge of the skin-warmed leather, grinning, then curled his fist around the little knife and pulled it out. The leather gave him no resistance; he seemed not even to notice the natural pull.

The vain travail… the vain… right. ‘…I am of them that farthest cometh behind.’

“What were you thinking to do with this thing?” asked Luca mockingly. “Between my ribs, maybe? Into my eye, if you could reach? My neck? That was probably your goal.”

“I carry it only because—”

“Shut up,” said Luca, turning around the little blade in the candlelight. He watched its facets glow like he had a diamond, then, suddenly, snapped his gaze up to Jowy. “Well?”

Jowy breathed in, his breath crackled out. The next line—

“Well? I gave you a command.”

“Ah—Yes, yes, your Highness.”

Luca’s eyes flashed open for a second, then slithered into slits again. “Again. Louder.”

“Yes, your Highness!”

“Again!” Luca flipped the knife in his hand and held it in a backgrip. Jowy’s heart instantly shot up his neck, his skin went cold when the adrenaline hit him in an icy wash, he was going to kill him should he brace, should he run, should he play it off, should he

“Yes, your Highness!” Contingency, prepare to fight, the poem, them that farthest cometh behind, ‘yet may I by no means my wearied mind—’

“Yes!” cracked Luca, suddenly, like the strike of a viper, slamming the knife straight down into the plush of his chair, using the motion to stand halfway up. It sank almost to the hilt and into the wood with an audible thunk. “Yes! ‘Say yes, Luca!’”

No!

Jowy struggled not to stagger backward when Luca suddenly rose to his height in front of him, and he didn’t, though he frantically wondered is he should, the towering man was almost face-to-face with him, he was unarmed, Luca could, he was so close, “Yes—” and his throat failed him. He choked on nothing, couldn’t breathe.

“’Yes, Luca!’” Luca shouted, slamming one hand on the arm of the chair behind him, six inches from the knife, and curling the other into a half-fist behind him. Even at Jowy’s full height, and he had never been short, he was crowded out by this hulking wolf on two feet.

“Yes! Luca!”

“Again!”

The fear kept crawling up his throat, he didn’t have any plan, he didn’t—“Yes! Luca!”

“Say my fucking name!”

“Luca!” Jowy snapped, the harsh name forced through his lips like a cough.

“Yes!” Luca growled, his eyes growing manic, and he stared down at Jowy like he was the massacre at Muse, the most horrendously shrieking soul he had ever seen, but he stared only for a second before the growl that had been climbing in his words took over completely and he snarled wordlessly, wrung his throat with a guttural noise, and shot forward to grasp Jowy by both shoulders. Jowy’s stomach seized and spasmed the second those hot hands gripped his skin, fever-hot, and the nails of one dug in to one cold shoulder as the coarse palm of the other raked down his arm to the small of his back.

His senses bottomed out and he didn’t see anything but blackness, didn’t feel anything but the nausea spiking in his stomach, it was already too late, recover, he had to recover, he threw one leg back to brace himself in a defense pose and lifted the opposite arm, Luca’s grasping hand groped down over his ass and grasped a fist full of it so hard it stung and he couldn’t help jolting, the man kicked his forward leg with a knee and then stomped his foot down on the ground, he forced Jowy to bend back and leaned into him—

“Hha—ha—”

Then, no, it couldn’t be , he lurched first his shoulder, then his thigh, to try to shake Luca off but he had him in a terrible grip, one hand grabbed his hair to wrench his head backward, then slid and groped through the strands, the other fisted harder into his ass, slid almost down to his thigh then back up the curve of his back, no, no, it was, it was hot enough to feel through his leather underarmor and when Jowy tried to buck with his hips and his thighs he felt it rub him, then the monster growled his sour breath on his neck and rubbed him harder again, sliding the length up the hollow of his hip—

“No!” Jowy gasped, not even intending to say it but it was screaming in his head like a firecracker racing, “nn-no—”

“Yes!” growled Luca, using his hand to shove Jowy’s ass forward so he could grind his heated erection against him again, and again; “yes, yes, yes!” he repeated, ending with an ecstatic, maniacal laugh. “Hh-hha—is ‘no’ what you say to me, Jowy?” he growled into the side of his neck, or his ear, or whatever his face happened to be at the second while he thrusted and ground his hips into Jowy’s thigh, crotch, stomach, midsection, wherever, like a fucking dog rutting at whatever it could find.

“N!” Jowy gasped, his thoughts firing like arrows, too fast, couldn’t land, he would try to think and then he would feel that, he would try to think and then Luca would, he would try to just breathe and get his thoughts in order and Luca would buck on him and rub it on him like he was smearing dirt on his face, grinding on his face with a boot. “No!”

Luca looped one arm around his back, pulling his flushed-close to his overbearing heat, and used the other to wrench his head back again by his hair. It was already pinching with tangles from the prince roughly tearing at it. “Then what do you say to me, Jowy?”

Throat pulled taught, Jowy choked, then gagged.

Luca laughed uproariously at him, twisting his head one way and another as he struggled just to breathe, just to breathe, when his stomach kept jumping with twisting nausea and the cold skin and the hot skin prickled like a horrible itch at each other. Luca suddenly threw Jowy back at the love seat, a distance of a few feet, and as his feet didn’t quite catch him on and one of his thighs hit the wood squarely enough to leave a fist-sized bruise and his head thunked against the cloth-covered back of the loveseat, a thought sank down from his mind like a stone into the sea, Luca had given him every hint he possibly could have asked for as well as every opportunity to get out of there . He had told him to make it a fight, to turn tail and get out of there, a dozen times, had, he had, he said to him—

Luca took his time to saunter to him, but Jowy gained no advantage from it; he was barely breathing by the time the prince was on him. Just as roughly as he had thrown him, Luca picked him up and dragged him up the loveseat so he was sitting on it properly. He grasped Jowy’s ribcage roughly on both sides and then, as if changing his mind, ran them slowly, almost softly down his sides, to his hips. Instead of making any comment about the skin he was feeling, he laughed at him.

Jowy could just barely see the erection he had failed to notice earlier, the thick leather and wool hid it so well despite its size; he could have been growing harder for—for as long as they had both been sitting there—

His hands pushed down his abdomen, up his chest, to curl around the skin of his neck, finger roughly the curve of his jaw and his cheek. Jowy felt like a girl’s doll, thrown in the corner; Luca’s animal breathing was all he could hear. But that sense of dull shock, short-lived as it was, was pierced through and shattered when he felt those hot hands peel the fabric of his underwear slowly over the ridges of his hips and then roughly down his thighs.

If he wanted to stop this, the time was now. Without a second thought he pulled back his right hand, curling his fingers into a tiger’s claw. The sickening sinking of Black Sword awakening churned in his gut again, more comforting than it had ever been. The darkness of the dull blade shimmered, the dull tang of steel—

Luca’s eyes sprang open.

The next second reminded Jowy, more than anything, of going under a waterfall. His ears popped with the roar and he couldn’t even feel the force with which his back hit the chair.

He didn’t get his hearing back for a minute. His body was reduced to a double row of hollows caused by some terrible piercing pain, senses minimized to pinpricks. The teeth of the Beast ground in his skin, its jaws covering the whole of his pale torso like a rat caught in a snake’s great jaws, and he twitched and convulsed in pain. Its hot breath was just that of a real beast—its coarse and matted fur—its great staring eye, animal pupil and revolving iris, that glared a hand’s width away from his face.

He felt spittle running down his chin first, then he felt that the air was cold. Then he could hear the bubbling, cracking in his lungs.

The massive jaw cracked open and the teeth slid out, leaving no wounds, but still the nightmarish, uncanny pain. Luca Blight was already inside of him.

He seized, but only a couple of his muscles tensed; his core, his chest. His limbs felt numb.

He couldn’t even feel them, the first few thrusts. His lungs had had the air blasted out of them, he hadn’t fully regained his senses yet, he felt like he was nothing but raw nerves pulsing in his skin and, at the same time, just like a ghost floating up, up, through the ceiling—

And then it felt like uncomfortable, but tolerable pinching, like someone was gripping him and stretching, like leather on sweaty skin.

Then he felt his thighs shove open so far that his pelvis balked and clicked and then he felt the prince thrust his sex into him, really felt it, really felt the sword going a second time into the raw, bloody wound.

He wasn’t recovered enough to struggle. He tried to. His shoulders tensed and his arms tried to jolt but Luca shoved them back down punishingly, cracking one shoulder against the wooden headboard. Jowy hissed, tried to lean into it; every muscle strain hurt. He didn’t even have time to shift, get his shoulder out of the painful stretch, or try to loosen his thighs, before Luca pushed into him again.

He wriggled just like a fish on a hook, he thought, observing himself too close and too far, stuck in his body and not able to command it. He could see his pale skin wriggling, thought of the hook tearing the gills of the fish, spilling pearls out of pink flesh.

“Hhhn—hhh—”

Was that his pain? Was that his anger, was that his voice? He could hear Luca’s harsh rumbling now. Surely it had never gone away. The thunder after the lightning; and he himself, in echoing response, rumbling through the stricken hills.

When Luca pulled half out of him he pulled his screaming and sticking skin down with him, as if his cock had seized his insides with barbs, and then he thrust back in, and again.

Jowy tried to brace his hand on the headboard, scrabbled even to control his fingers correctly; he seemed to get just a little bit of control over himself, his feet almost on the ground, before Luca would—

Fucking all of the way inside him, so far deep that his hips were shoved back into the yielding plush fabric of the loveseat, bending his back with an audible creak. It didn’t. It didn’t feel comparable to anything he could think of; pierced skin, dull punch, sly hook, bruises and slaps. It felt like a little bit of every way a man could think of to cause pain, mixed in with cold terror.

His skin was burning hot where Luca’s heavy hips and stomach slapped into him, or his hands grasped and clawed at whatever part of Jowy tried to twitch away next; he felt sick.

Luca thrust at him a few times rapidly, Jowy’s hands curled like claws in their restraints and he could see Luca slide his head back, his eyes shuttering in a second of sadistic bliss, his head rolled around the back and he leered down at Jowy’s convulsing form again.

Something in him went quiet and still. In the quiet, he reminded himself, you were at the deer.

The deer?

Yes, the poet was introducing the deer. ‘…yet may I by no means my wearied mind…

‘…draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore/fainting I follow.’

He had to clamp his teeth down and struggle stillness into his arms and legs as he focused on the poem. Each word was a whisper against a howl, the tiniest thread to cling to. But he knew which word came next, and they would always be the same, never a new one to replace the old. The poem would never change—

Luca let his wrists go to grab his hips, his hands curling and groping down to knead at his ass before sliding up, as if at each second he couldn’t fit enough of Jowy’s skin into his hungry hands. Jowy heard him say something and couldn’t parse a single word, it sounded like he was speaking some alien tongue, though he should understand it; but the very tone pierced him through, the growling, groaning, wolf-like snarl of his voice, distorted even from its normal derision.

‘Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore—’

“Shhh-“ Luca began to curse, but bit it off with a growl. “You’re so tight—” Luca’s cock pulsed deep into him again, accompanied by the throbbing, begging of the skin inside him once again. He could—he could—he could actually hurt him, couldn’t he, what happened if in the middle of s—sex you really hurt a person, he had never—he groaned, almost as if in pain himself. “Fffuck, yes, I’m gonna—fuck you so hard—”

‘I leave off therefore, ’ he begged, with an effort like forcing himself out of a nightmare in his sleep. He couldn’t even wipe the spittle off of his face. Couldn’t he just wipe off his face? ‘Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind...’

“Nhh—” Luca stilled, deep inside of him; he panted with the effort, his hips twitching as they tried to thrust into him again. He cursed at himself as he rammed one of his strong hands onto Jowy’s abdomen and slowly pulled himself back, and out, and his bruised skin collapsing back in on itself was almost—no, it WAS worse than the constant abuse of his sex. No, fuck—

“But,” Luca panted, trembling with effort. “No. No, I can’t—” he swallowed, smoothed back his sweat-damp hair. Jowy’s vision was almost blurring as he was forced to gaze up at him. “No, I—I won’t let you win so easily. I—I know your little game, bitch.”

Jowy tried to lower his clicking thighs. He still couldn’t.

“Ha ha… I’m not delusional…” Luca continued, wiping his face. He was sweating. “I don’t lie to myself and say… ‘she really wants it, she’s playing hard to get;’ I don’t have to make myself feel good. I know,” he drew his hand down his cheek, “I know you don’t want me. Ha ha ha ha ha .”

His sex—the prince’s—Luca’s—twitched in the periphery of Jowy’s vision, he tried to avoid like a person tried not so see rotting flesh dumped on the street. A blur of red.

“Some men lie to themselves… they’re afraid to see what they’re done. Ha ha,” he snickered, smoothing back his hair again. “If I were afraid, I wouldn’t do it. I have to give you the credit of trying to stand your ground; and you’re not afraid now, are you? Hurt. Mmm. But not afraid .”

Jowy’s breath quickened despite himself, with a hot curl of anger in his gut.

“You’re a strategist. I saw you settling down into it. It wasn’t because you submitted. Ha ha. You don’t submit, you endure. You didn’t come to terms, you made a plan. Lie back and ride this out… you told yourself, get it done with as soon as possible, right? Shit,” he interrupted himself, as he ran his palm down his own sex, which had jumped up during his rant.

Jowy writhed. His muscles whined. It felt like everything in him had been drawn tight like a violin string.

“Good plan. Unfortunately for you,” Luca continued, gripping his own thigh to keep his hand away from his sex, “I hate you. I hate you and I’m making this slow.” He was shoving down his own giggles. “Do you want to know? Oh, look at me, I want to watch you when I tell you. Come on.”

Jowy flinched when that hand touched his face, the stick of sex wafting from it. He didn’t want to flinch but the vileness of the act, the baseness of it was ground in by just the horrible scent. Still his chin was twisted toward the prince, but his eyes did not have to follow.

“Ha ha, should I make you say it, too?” He twisted Jowy’s chin a little, side to side. “You remember what you say?

“…Just kidding, I won’t make you. But look me in the eyes.

“Jowy.”

His fingers shaking with fury, Jowy lowered his eyes to Luca’s face.

“You’re not going to get it over with quickly. I’m not going to come until you do.”

Jowy heard himself take in a breath. His jaw clenched—Luca moved his hand away quickly, with a pleased laugh. Knowing that his upper body, for once, was unpinned, Jowy struggled up, he had just enough breath, just enough space to get his balance—flinging himself into Luca’s space was an act of desperate horror, even madness, but—

The prince grabbed his head and twisted it and Jowy jolted and froze, feeling his neck spark up with pain. He wasn’t used to—yet he had been taught how to fight , but this—his body couldn’t tell which way or how to struggle when a hand began to slide up his inner high, which just now had sensation flooding back into it after going numb, his neck was being overstretched and a finger was clawing-sliding down to his left eye, daring to tease at the fragile skin of his eyelid and the delicate socket of his skull. It pressed in, only a little, when he tried to squirm his hips out of the way. What the hell could he do??

It was almost an anticlimax when he felt Luca’s hand rubbing on his dick, another painful tingling, another bit of screeching and grinding from cold and clanking metal, a gear that wouldn’t grind. The sensitive skin prickled badly but he had been so shot through with pain already that it was just another indignity, just another fucking insult. Still he was desperate to squirm away from it, the slow but rough passes of the prince’s hand over his soft sex like the pattering of insect legs or the tickling of sweat dripping down your forehead, so slight, so intolerable. But when he even flinched, a finger casually, teasingly pushed at his eyeball—

“Hey,” huffed the prince, rolling out of his bared teeth, “tell me to go faster or slower, okay?” he spoke with utter condescension.

“FUCK you,” Jowy snapped, a reaction as instant and inevitable as twitching away from the pain. He didn’t even process it until it had left his mouth and the prince was laughing at him, twisting his neck just a centimeter more and rubbing a cruel thumb over the head of his cock.

“Ha, there’s the pussy cat’s claws!”

“FUCK—fuck you!”

“It’s been funny to watch you act like a good boy for all the gentlemen,” Luca sneered, “and get your pats on the head, but I like this better. Don’t you?”

“Nn—fuck—”

“It’s a lot more honest, don’t you think?”

“I—hate—you—”

Luca kept laughing at him as Jowy’s chest heaved, and laughing; he gripped his cock in his fist and rubbed it slowly, horribly, letting the skin shift and caress over the inside. His hand was huge—warm—and Jowy couldn’t move from it—he knew it was going to happen, and he didn’t know how to get out. Surely he could strike, still find a way to strike at him; he could lose an eye for his dignity, or his life, if this nightmare kept escalating.

In desperation he called on the black sword again, telling himself as he did it that it didn’t work last time, why would it work this time; in desperation he felt that silken blade caress his back as it formed, steel from the air. Let him strike Luca just once—please, just once—just give him the time to run!

Luca’s hand drew back, and snapped forward to strike him across the face.

His concentration wavered, and broke. The black sword made not a sound as it clattered to the stone floor and sunk through.

Luca lifted him up seamlessly, pulling him from the seat into the air; he seized him by the skull and drug him until he was standing and across the floor to the arm of his loveseat. He shoved him backward by his hips, Jowy could barely feel the jolt, then caged him with his body; one hand woven into his hair, holding his head hostage, his muscled thighs pinning him to the wood and plush, and his right hand slipping forcefully down his body once more to claim his sex. Jowy flinched; he slapped him one last time.

Then, ears ringing, lungs gasping, he felt blood begin to trickle out of his nose and down his cheek and bile rise in his throat. He had to put it back down—he was getting dizzy. As if that last strike had slapped him out of his own mind, everything suddenly felt—surreal. The pain that continued beyond rationality, striking again, every heart beat, again, every heartbeat again. The laughter, bubbling up, spilling over, bubbling up again; the laughter like he was in some terrible joke, a clown in the street. The surreal powerlessness, his attempts to stop the pain swatted aside again, and again, and again, and the feeling of the blood slipping down his body, the painful tingling as it pooled; none of it felt real and it was all he could feel.

Luca roughly, slowly rubbed and palmed the skin of his cock, which grew more and more solid in the vice of his grip. The pressure, like the pain, didn’t end. He kept pushing, and pushing.

He didn’t feel so much as a pulse of pleasure but of the dull awareness left in his body sliding down his body to his cock, an unwelcome, unavoidable focus on the tiny part of his body that he pulled, and pulled, like an itch being scratched, and scratched.

‘Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt…’

The words seemed to float to him.

The hand that caressed him moved rhythmically; the bastard knew he had found the right speed and he was going to keep jerking, and jerking, until he had Jowy how he wanted him.

But the beat, like fingers thrumming on a table, the heartbeat, it brought the words back to him. ‘whoso list her hunt, I put him out of doubt…’ one-two, one-two; the throbbing pulse of blood.

Fluttering in his heart and in the black back of his mind he pulled the words to mind and begged them to come back.

‘…as well as I may spend his time in vain…’

The prince, he realized, had been tensed for Jowy’s next attack, if it came; he only learned that because he felt him left that tension go, unlock his knees, and lean the heat of his chest closer to his prey. Jowy was bent a little further backward over the loveseat; the hand clutching his hair loosened a little, and ranged over his skull slightly, as if to pet it. Or to respond to the other hand, which stroked him more quickly now, able to clutch more tightly around the shaft as it hardened.

The blood pulsed in his groin and his stomach, swelling and swarming like anger, like hot rage prickles, twisting. It felt. It felt. He didn’t know this feeling. It was overwhelming and it stuck and stung like a bad burn.

‘…and graven with diamonds in letters plain…’

He bit his own lower lip when he became conscious of his breathing. He made no noise, but the breath was coming harder. He did not bear the thought of crying aloud, showing his pain or mortification. To growl, grit, vent his anger or his confusion. He couldn’t lash out again—it was—he was afraid—he couldn’t go back to that disoriented, aimless floating, brought back to his body when he was hurt, and hurt again, floating up, floating down, a spirit being ripped to and from the seizing and squirming confines of his skin. He felt like he wasn’t his as the prince grinned on the skin of his neck and bent his back with only his weight and fisted his cock from the tip to the base and the tingles of panic and awful awareness sparked at his sensitive tip and bled down. He rubbed his palm over the dull, swollen head and Jowy jerked.

‘…there is written, her fair neck round about:’

Luca groaned in his ear, a darkly satisfied hum. “There it is. Doesn’t it feel good? To just let me do it? Doesn’t feel good to tell yourself you can’t fight it, you’d better just let it happen? Now it’s not your fault, isn’t it? You tried, and you failed.”

‘…her fair neck round about:…’

“Hhh—” Luca breathed harshly when Jowy’s sex jumped in his palm. “There’s nothing you can do about it right? God, I love this. I just fucking love this. I can do whatever the hell I want and you can’t stop me. How does that feel, you little weasel?”

‘…noli mi tangere…’

“You grab and take and you can do anything, anything you want. There’s no such thing as being told ‘no.’ There’s no such thing as an argument or a concession or a consideration. You claim to be fighting for something? Well you’re doing a shitty fucking job of it if you won’t do it . You can’t—wait for anything—fuck, you’re hard.”

Luca gave him a few rough jerks, letting his cock bounce off of his palm at the top. The muscles in Jowy’s thighs clenched and he begged himself to stay still— ‘noli mi tangere—’

“And you’ll like it once you’re there.”

‘noli mi tangere—’

“Everyone does. They’re such ‘good guys’ until they can finally have what they really want.”

‘noli mi tangere—’

“I want to see your face when you get what you want,” he growled, his smile imprinting on Jowy’s skin. “I wanna see that stoic face crumble. And I can’t wait to see you pretend how what you’re gonna do to get it is justified.”

He couldn’t—

Luca curled his thumb under his ear and rubbed the soft skin there while his other hand split and rubbed down both sides of his cock with parted fingers. “Ha ha ha. You’re going to be such a little freak . I can’t fucking wait. I’m going—to laugh—so fucking hard—”

‘noli mi tangere for CAESAR’S I AM AND WILD—’

Luca grasped his bicep and squeezed and pushed his dick up to his stomach so that the hand length was flush to the cold air, he ran a thumb up its shaft—

‘FOR CAESAR’S I AM—’

Circled the head of his sex, ever centimeter of just too light touching, circling, felt like a mile of muscle ache, and throbbing—

‘caesar’s I am, noli mi tangere—’

His hips jumped, involuntary, spasming. Luca squeezed on his arm, the back of his neck; he felt his legs tense against him, even his stomach, rough, muscled.

“I wanna see your face—” Luca panted.

‘and wild—’

“I wanna see your face when you like it, I wanna see—”

‘and wild—’

“Fff-fuck—”

Luca grabbed both of his hips and lifted him into the air again; with a jerking motion, stumbled, radically less controlled than his earlier grasps—oh god, he was less in control—he smacked his ass down on the loveseat, changed his mind, and began to flip him around. Jowy curved and bent; his back popped and Luca struggled him into the position he wanted, grabbing his thighs, his stomach, his chest, groping with thoughtless, lecherous abandon.

He could barely feel it and he could feel nothing else. Each palm was terrible desolation.

He shoved up one of his legs onto the couch in an awful twist. A hand was parting him and he just couldn’t, he couldn’t again, his cock was caught between the plush of the couch and his pounding stomach. And,

He was rammed inside, the stretch even fucking worse than last time, even fucking more painful, thoughtlessly slapped on an open wound. He buckled forward and his chin and his chest and his mind seethed and everything went numb as a bulwark against screaming or sobbing.

There was nothing like this horrible torture, nothing like he had ever felt in his life.

Luca thrusted into him with lust growing more desperate by every torturous centimeter and the rough thrust pushed him into the couch. His cock—

No, no—

The pain ignited and flared and he pulled back out, and in again, and Jowy’s flushed cock was rubbed against and then pressed into the soft, yielding fabric of the couch—

No, NO—

Luca’s breath was already ragged, his cock felt infection-hot as it pressed hard on the walls of his hole, they buckled when it left and spread when he pushed in again, again, suddenly rapidly then we would halt, and force himself in slowly again; every time, Jowy felt his own cock brush slightly and sweetly then roughly against the fabric, up and down. The pain overwhelmed everything else like black ink over a rush of colors and that great black mess grew and grew, spread and spread, as heat and tingling and the hiss of steam, over his thighs, his groin, his stomach, which was convulsing with the effort of keeping him up. When Luca grunted and laid deep into him, striking him to the root, rubbing like an animal, trying blindly to hit the sweet spot on his own cock again, again, Jowy suddenly—fuck—what—why—

He hit it again, the pain—the—directly, as if the inside of him was outside—as if he was being peeled—skinned—or his skin had been rubbed away and there was none left—

No, no— ‘noli mi—'

Luca pulled out and thrusted again and he could feel it in—

Luca was panting, he had a hand woven in his hair, then out again, clutching,

He rammed his with his cock and shove him into the couch and ground and ground him into there—

Hot, hot, as hot as fire—

Ahh—

Luca thrust his cock into him, rubbed him, he felt—

Ahh, he was—he was melting—

Wet—

Two hot pulses, two seconds, like bursting forth from a nightmare, bursting up to the surface of a lake, feeling breath in his lungs, his cock spasmed with pleasure and he was wet and melting and spasmed again,

And then he hurt.

Luca rammed into him and ground, grabbed his hips and thrusted hot and fast and hard and fast and he thought he was going to come out the other side because it hurt so much, so fucking much, he was ripping him in half—

His hands raked at him, one on his stomach, one on his neck, and both seized to squeeze the life from him.

Luca shouted, a rough, harsh roar, he said yes, yes —

It was getting harder to breathe, he said,

To the buzzing whiteness, he said,

‘Noli mi tangere, for Caesar's I am,

And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.’

He woke up on a loveseat, wondering if he was insane.

His clothes were draped across the back of it.

Prince Luca was fitting his crown back on his head, turning his visage back and forth in the mirror, gazing at himself with utter indifference.

On Prince Luca’s face was a bruise, under his eye. The slightest hint of a struggle.

Jowy felt the aftershock of pleasure in his gut.

Luca forbade him expressly from cutting his hair, a sneer on his face. Jowy didn’t know if he had guessed that Jowy had just vowed to himself to chop it all off, or if he was just being a lech. Did it matter?

No one of his stature bathed himself in the royal castle. It was his privilege to have every menial task done for him.

So it was that he had to present himself to an audience of manservants to get cleaned for dinner, and subject himself to their silence.

He wouldn’t remember dinner. Or the evening. Or anything else that happened for the rest of the day.

His next clear memory is Jillia’s face.

When he saw Jillia’s face peeking out from behind her mirror, with the slightest grin on her lips, which then melted away and turned into a pinch when she saw how he looked. With apprehension, she took in a deep breath to ask him what was wrong. He could see it, as if it was floating off of her tongue.

But she lost her nerve, and didn’t ask.

He doesn’t remember much until he remembers, and how he can remember it, like a candle flame lighting in the wet softness of his gut, Jillia casting he gaze down to the stone floor because she was too afraid to question him and the rage like a storm suddenly howling in him, howling , and screeching that should have wrenched her bed into matchsticks and shattered her glass windows into shards. Rage, rage at everything, everything, the very stones and sighs the world was made of, and every one of the bloody bastards that populated it.

It was as if he had forgotten his own torture but everything in the world could burn and burn and burn because Jillia was afraid to even ask him if he was fucking okay. She lived in the terror of her own fucking family and they were going to die. Luca Blight was going to fucking die.

But first, his father. They would both die. But Luca would have to wait.

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Patience, Though I Have Not

It was two days after this that he found a possession of Nanami’s in the bottom of his travel-chest. An amulet. She didn’t wear it; he didn’t know where she had gotten it or how. Nanami was the sort to leave her belongings everywhere; this was incredible, because she possessed only a few outfits and perhaps a dozen other objects. She was terrible at giving or receiving gifts and didn’t like to keep things. Both she and Riou had the deep conviction that they had to be ready to grab what they could carry and run at all times; as it turned out, their conviction was founded.

There was nothing inside of it. He wondered who had given it to her.

He didn’t know why he felt the urge to give it to Jillia. They were to be wed soon. A present would be in order. But this didn’t feel right.

He had thought at quite some length about which animal to use, hours spent reading and referencing books with anatomical illustrations in black ink in the laboratory’s library. L’Renouille was like a terribly barricaded town, a people with armor.

Snakes and lizards were obvious, but they were so high up north that their venom would be hard to procure, the antibodies less so. Local venom was rarer in the harsh Highlands, and he wasn’t willing to deal with the myriad side effects that came from the venom of most monsters. From a spider it would take too long to get enough venom, or the expense of enough of a fortune to be tracked.

Cheap, local, survivable. In the end, he chose a fish. Some bitter bastards swum the cold waters of the northern ocean, bitter with spines which could kill the soft hand that they pierced. And because fishermen were always in great supply no matter where you went, and snakehandlers, monster slayers, or spider… enthusiasts, he supposed, typically weren’t, there would be enough demand for their antibodies to supply his needs.

To procure it without being traced was harder, but not impossible.

To swallow it, morning, noon, and night, was harder still. But not impossible.

He got used to the days growing thin. It was if they were transparent, and he could hold them up to some odd celestial light and see through them, before and behind.

He knew he was seated at a dining-table in the castle with his silent wife, stomach churning, but he felt like he could hear another woman’s voice but could not quite place whom it was. Certainly it wasn’t his mother, nor could it be Nanami. Perhaps Jillia herself, from the past. Or someone he had not met yet.

He felt like he had seen his death through filmy skin a hundred times in the dark night that week, curled around the hot ache inside him, waiting.

He did wake up every morning.

In the room on the other side of the wall, Culgan, Seed, and the other generals were planning out the battle strategy for storming South Window. If Jowy were to be honest, he couldn’t even remember WHEN their objective had changed from Rockaxe to Window. He supposed, perhaps, someone had woken up to the danger that the growing Dunan army really did pose (he was proud, truly, he was miserably proud). Theoretically, he and Luca were supposed to be in that room, discussing how to crack down the whole Window province in a three-day blitzkreig. They were only one wall away.

Luca had taken him to the adjoining room before the meeting, for a little talk. L’Renouille’s castle had a bad habit of putting a lot of identical rooms right next to each other which, he already admitted, did a great job of turning around the casual visitor.

He was blurry-minded from his morning dose as he followed the prince into the unlit room, regarding his predicament as a kind of horrible dream, his feet not quite connecting with the floor as he stumbled on. Like a ghost slid halfway out of the world or a person fading into another man’s reality.

Luca began the clandestine talk with a hand on the side of his face.

It hurt, now, where it had been scratched and scraped, and was now pressed down on a table, the fresh wounds raw. It would hurt just as bad to be torn back off of this table, since the fibers of the dead wood were helping knit those wounds back together. The table, he thought, was essentially a dead tree, but its flesh was still flesh, numb and cold.

How beaten down do you have to be to take comfort from a table?

He had nothing to dig his nails into, nowhere to clutch his hands; already from a brief struggle he had knocked off everything that had been in arms’ reach away. His chest was bent badly, pressed harshly against the side of the table; his breath was expelled hot and curled back on his face.

He had one goal alone: do not be loud enough for them to hear you through the wall.

He was only a few feet from it.

Luca was laughing at him. How loud was he laughing?

‘Patience,’ he recited, to focus on his own utmost silence, ‘Patience, though I have not/the thing that I require…’

Luca giggled himself almost into a fit, his diaphragm spasming on Jowy’s back as he bent down lower to speak to him. “You’re making us late,” he mocked. “If you don’t hurry up, they’ll get suspicious.”

Anger sparked in Jowy’s stomach, just a thin layer of skin away from the jabbing pain. It was harder to brace himself properly, he had no hold—patience— ‘I must of force, God wot/forebear my most desire…’

“Of course, I can be as late as I want to be! I have all the time in the world. You, however, are subordinate, and this laziness will not go unpunished. I’m sure your absence hasn’t gone unnoticed. Are they wondering where you are? Or do you think they’ve figured it out? Hn—” Luca cut off his own sex-babbling with a shudder when (as Jowy could feel) his cock twitched, stiffening suddenly.

Jowy wondered, not for the first time, if he was really necessary in this situation. Luca seemed to be turning himself on and off, and all Jowy really had to do was be upset about it.

But he had to orgasm, or he wouldn’t stop.

Or, presumably, he would beat him bloody. He couldn’t afford any bedrest time, and with the toxin, it might—

He tensed his jaw and heard it click when the prince slid halfway inside of him, rubbing the inside of his body slowly.

“Hhhn, you’re—already getting looser,” Luca groaned. “Fucking—” he had to hold his bulk still, quivering, or he would get too heated. His sex twitched inside of Jowy and the wet heat of his sweltering hips and thighs prickled on his skin.

‘For no ways can I find/to sail against the wind…’

Luca whispered his name, hot, aroused.

Jowy looked up instinctively, rolling his cheek up. He felt the bruises as they pressed against the wood, like an old apple rolled in the hand. The prince’s breath was badly controlled but he had composed his reddened face, biting his lower lip.

The prince let his lip go as he smiled. Jowy clenched against him.

He reached forward to grab a length of his hair, let it slip halfway through his fingers. “Do you want to be late?” he asked threateningly.

“I—” Jowy swallowed, turning away again as his throat prickled and convulsed from the painful twist. “How am I supposed to—”

Luca chuckled again (laughing, laughing, always laughing) and seized Jowy by his side to lift him into the air, simple as that. He had a brief, dizzy sensation, a feeling like he just jumped—he was being turned around. “Of course,” growled Luca, thumping his back onto the desk without care and without the purposeful aim to injure. “You like this better?”

Did he? Jowy didn’t expect to ponder the question. If it was less painful, he’d get aroused more easily, but facing him, those sick, clouded, golden eyes, that flashing leer, the sweat beading on his face—

‘Patience, do what they will/to work me woe or spite…’

Jowy turned his head and squeezed his eyes shut as nausea briefly overtook him and it didn’t matter if Luca took that as assent or not. He had to squeeze his hard sex back inside him, starting with the protesting, sore muscles on the rim, and let Jowy seize and scrabble his way through the next invasion.

This is what a door battered upon feels like, he thought, by a horned battering-ram.

“Hh—you know—a different position makes a difference—ha ha—if you ever find yourself in my position—you might like it,” he cackled, running his hands up and down Jowy’s side to find a place to clutch. He settled on gripping Jowy’s arms, pinning him down. “But you seem more natural to the position you’re in now. The question of position—power, submission, a person’s place—” if he had a train of thought in the first place, he lost it when Jowy flexed, his abused thighs twitching open to try to find a comfortable position. The prince slid inside him, to his hilt;

‘I shall content me still— ’ you have to focus Jowy you have to get through this— 'To think both day and night/to think and hold my peace…’

His cock pulsed inside him, small, spastic jerks of his hips, slipping his head through the same inch of his inside over and over. Jowy grunted in shock,

‘to think and hold my peace—’

Luca growled, and leaned as far into him as he could possibly go, stretching his powerful back to loom over his prostrate subordinate. As he did one of his hands slid all the way up Jowy’s arm, ruffling the hairs standing up on his skin, until he was pressing him down by the shoulder. Twisted, in pain,

‘to think and hold my peace/since there is no redress—’

Luca growled a horrible animal grunt as he began to rut him harshly, hot pulses inside and slower drags out; his expression lost its harshness for a second as sensation overcame even his malice. It had to—feel really fucking good to him—even though it felt like trying to swallow a knife to Jowy—over and fucking over, like a hammer falling on the anvil. And just as the metal of the sword being forged shuddered and threw off light when it was struck,

‘since there is—no—what is—’

Jowy gulped down a breath as Luca rammed him again and his skin shuddered. He felt a dizzying pitfall sense of déjà vu, like he was falling for a second; what was this? This wasn’t right; but still he knew it. It was as though his mind had dipped down into a nightmare, and he realized, looking around at the monsters with their tearing claws and the ocean that swelled up black around his ankles, I’ve had this nightmare before. It’s happened before.

That hot—and then it hit him again—

‘sincethereisnoredresspatiencewithoutenblameforIoffendednoughtforIoffendednought whatcomesnext ’

Luca heaved a breath of exertion as he stilled his thighs, though his sex still twitched inside him; his left hand clutched over his shoulder and released again, his left spread as an open palm over his arm. He shook with the effort of holding himself back.

“You’re really late now,” he panted, “They’ll think you want to fuck more than you want to conquer my kingdom for me. Well, you’re a teenager. Can’t blame you for being such a fucking whore.”

He shoved into Jowy so suddenly, when his flesh had tried to settle back into a less painful position, that he shrieked, for a half second, then bit down by his teeth. But it had been loud.

No, no no no—

Luca laughed carelessly and pumped him again, giving the sensitive skin no time to rest. Jowy hallucinated everyone going still in their seats across the wall, the men in their uniforms, sitting in silent circle, their eyes cast down—

“Ohh, fuck, yes ,” Luca barked, thrusting into him quickly, a pump of hot blood with every heartbeat. “Yes, yes, let me hear it, fucking whore—”

‘—for I offended nought! For I offended—offended—offended— what the hell comes next for I offended nought—’

The little pause had caused his insides to relax against his will, they raced to forget; when the prince’s cock opened him up again he felt as raw as the very first time, sensitive as skin newly revealed by a deep cut. And there was no respite, no rest from the pumping that rubbed him raw over, and over, and

“Ahh haa, yes, yes, let me hear you, uhn—” The prince leaned over to clutch at his hair and what the hell was he talking about? Jowy hissed when he grabbed at a knot and pulled, it was louder than he intended and then his breath was shocked out of him—

Ahh—

The sheer heat of the hard cock pumping in him over and over was burning him; it was burning him inside; he had hardly noticed it building but he was painfully, uncomfortably hot, like he had fiercely rubbed his own skin to keep away a cold breeze. His own skin was beading up with sweat, he couldn’t remember the poem, his rhetoric tutor would be so very disappointed, and his asshole was opening like a cunt after going numb to the beating, it felt like. A heavy hand clutched at his hair, tugged it so that he could just feel prickled on his scalp, just have his head pulled barely out of the way.

Luca growled encouragingly, hunching as far over Jowy as he could; he was a muscular man but could stand to be more flexible, Jowy had noticed. He had had a crick in his neck after the first time they had fuck his cock rubbed tortuously slowly over the same spot over and over like a corpse being dragged, over and over

“Oh, you fucking whore,” he panted, perhaps trying not to dig into his skin with his fingers too hard. “You love it, mm, yes, let them hear it—”

When his breath was expelled from him—rapidly, with every thrust of Luca’s cock—

Jowy opened up his hips as wide as he could because Luca’s huge frame kept pressing him in and he couldn’t open them wide enough—

Every time he thrust into him his breath left him in—

The rubbing of his cock became so fucking hot it was like its searing heat was melting him, and he twitched whenever its dull swollen tip pressed his—his??—

It left him in a low, grunted exclamation—

He had to angle his thighs up and Luca pressed him so hard his hips rose slightly off the table and his spine started bending up and he pushed so far inside him, he felt his cock touch the very back of his hole and press there which was fucking goddamn awful and

“Uhn!” he gasped as his head hit the table again. “uh—uhn—ah—”

Every time his cock pumped inside him, smearing its heat on his hot insides—

“Can’t take it—” the prince growled, a hand flying to Jowy’s hip to grip it like the hilt of his sword, “ahhnn, yes--yes--yes, Jowy, you perfect fucking whore, yes, louder, l—l—what do you—what do you say—”

“Nn!” Jowy gasped, no fucking clue what he said as the slamming of Luca’s hips grew so intense his stomach twisted with pain and nausea like the sweaty beast was stabbing him all the way through—

“Say it,” the prince demanded, his face twisting with lust, his reddened lip rolling out of his seizing teeth as his climax crawled up his thighs—“say it—I’ll kill you—fuck—say it now—”

“Hha--!” Jowy shuddered, the pain that grew deep inside his body ignited like a star and made his stomach curdle it hurt so much he wanted to run back to the heat that had just been—no no no no—

“Jowy!” Luca shouted, loud enough to hit the wall with his voice, and rammed him like a killing blow; Jowy whined high and horrified in response, feeling the hot seed burst in him; the whole massive beast that was latched into him like a tick or a leech heaved and growled, thrust in him again, spilled his seed again and slicked the path for his cock to spasm suddenly, rapidly, he groaned as he greedily clutched at every last second of his orgasm—

Pumped him fast and hard as he—

Hot—

Jowy gasped with surprise as his hips bucked hard and a spasm of pleasure tore from the heat in his hole up to his heaving stomach and up through his throat and

His lungs burned

He wasn’t cognizant of throwing his body to the side or how and when he threw himself off of the prince. He blanked out between the surprise orgasm that slapped him and the first retch of puke that flew from his lips and landed, half on the table and half on the ground, with a sickening splat.

His mind was blank with pain for five, six more heaves. Half-consumed food turned into sickly yellow stomach bile.

No, he thought helplessly, the venom, the antibody, I need to—

His arms gave way and he collapsed almost into his own vomit.

It was hard to breathe. It burned.

He could feel the muscles of his pelvis and his thighs clench with a sweet pulse of pleasure that tasted absolutely vile dusted over the bitter excretion.

He actually didn’t catch the first biting thing Luca said to him after that. What was weird was that he felt the clench of shame in his shuddering stomach even without hearing the words.

He did hear the second thing he said.

“You’d better have a good excuse for yourself when you walk in late.”

Luca left the room, and Jowy was left to contemplate what he would do, what the hell he would stay, how in pity’s sake he could stand to pick himself up and walk into the room next door, where the eyes of a dozen generals would lift up from their papers and glasses of wine to meet him.

“I know they know the same/Though they have changed their thought,” Jowy snapped, hitting the endtable with the base of his pen.

Jillia startled as she pulled a hairpin out of her braid. “Jowy?” she asked, eyes wide but voice soft.

Jowy felt himself flush a little when she turned those wide eyes to him. “Nothing,” he hurried to say. “I couldn’t remember a line in a poem. Earlier. Today.”

“O—oh,” she said, and then, “Oh! It’s Sir Wyatt,” she smiled, a tiny, crooked smile. “It must be.”

“You know his work?” Jowy asked.

She nodded. “He was a favorite of mine. Though I felt I rarely understood his message, his words…” she trailed off.

“…Mine as well,” Jowy admitted. “He was a favorite of mine too. His word sounds, his repetition…”

“Yes, so musical!”

“…Good for recitation…” Jowy felt himself smile a mirroring smile, equally lopsided. “Though he’s not popular.”

“He was hated in his time for his love affairs, right?” she asked, as if trying to please a strict tutor.

“And still is, for how petulant he was when writing about them,” Jowy confirmed.

She barely laughed, a hiccup her hand stifled. “It’s…” she began, no preamble, “ ’Patience, withouten blame,/ For I offended nought;/I know they know the same,/Though they have changed their thought./Was ever thought so moved/To hate that it hath loved?... ’ There is one more verse,” she worried.

“There is. Oh,” Jowy pressed a hand to his forehead. “ Patience of all my harm,/for fortune is my foe—”

“Patience must be the charm/to heal me of my woe, ” Jillia recited smartly. “ Patience without offence—” she held off expectantly.

“…Is a painful patience,” Jowy completed.

She perched her hands on each other, as if to clap, but not willing to make a sound.

Jowy came to a terrible, ill-conceived decision on the spot.

“Jillia,” he said. “I must tell you about something.”

He double dosed himself at night.

He wheezed and clutched his chest the whole night, until grey dawn. Blearily, his vision went off and on of Jillia, Jillia in her nightgown, her hair getting tangled on her pillow, Jillia sleeping peacefully. He hurt, he hurt, his self-imposed torture leaking into the cracks that Luca had rent in him. Brother and sister. A man who took the whole room and a woman who would never be seen. In any other fate, would Jillia have been shoved into a back room, shut in with a wheel and spindle? Would anyone have ever been able to intervene for her? Against the King and the Prince, who could?

The very spines of the poison fish spiked inside him as it swam and sunk in his veins.

In his half-dream, white Jillia still floating in his filmy eyes, he saw a golden crown, spinning, floating in the air, superimposed over the furniture and cut stones of the bedroom as if it were inside his eye. It spun and shot sparks. When he closed his eye to shut it out it squeezed in on his throat, harder and harder. He could only breathe with a dry rasp; this disgusting life, blood, semen, and puke, his sweat staining the bed next to sleeping Jillia, the utter disgrace that was this stinking body.

He drank the poison at dawn.

His throat was burning as he crossed the threshold of the double doors, glittering with gold, that led to King Agares’ throne room, smoky with the smell of rich incense, rustling with fresh reeds under his feet.

Luca had been dressed as a prince, he thought, as if this were some other man attending a costume ball. A crown, a cape, gloves, heeled shoes. He was a great monster of finery, a vengeful ghost from the grave.

Jowy, loping behind him, felt as if he might be the dead body left behind.

The King looked jovial from the throne from what he could see of him. His eyes were blurring. The golden light of noontime through the high glass windows turned everything gold, sumptuous, dripping, filthy with gold.

Luca in iron, at least he knew what to expect. But Luca in gold?

He reminded himself to put his focus on the King. Golden instruments played heavy, regal notes that swirled dizzy in his ears, and they swooped like hawks over him when he dipped his knee to bow. For a second he was afraid he would not get up; he would stumble as if drunk.

Luca Blight, the picture of a crown prince, regally extended his ring-covered hand to lift the knight onto his feet. As was proper, Jowy held his golden eyes, then bowed his head to the ground in silent gratitude.

They still fixed him when he looked back up. He turned to the king.

Whenever the king ended a sentence, he thanked him and agreed. He didn’t have to know what he was saying, which was very good, because he did not. Somehow, he could hear Luca breathing more clearly, his chest rising and falling in measured, unconcerned swells right next to him. It only would make sense that he would have to listen to the more dangerous noise, the prince’s quiet breaths.

The prince picked up a golden goblet from a gold-stitched cushion. He smiled when he lifted it to his eyes, their hollowness reflecting its cold metal luster. Jowy watched, transfixed, as gold reflected gold as stupidly as gold. Ceremoniously, he turned it upside-down, then turned around on his heel to then take the glass bottle of black wine that another cupbearer offered him. Not accepting offered assistance (and how those assistants shrank back) he balanced the goblet in the palm of one hand and poured the wine halfway up with his other, a steady and well-controlled stream of red.

Jowy had become transfixed by his smooth, measured moments. He knew that Luca could act civilized at any time and typically just didn’t choose to, but still.

Slowly the prince’s eyes turned to meet him, looking down from his upturned chin. His smile was princely, beatific, and horrible. It was though he was gazing up upon some terrible statue, a mad pervert’s carving of a personal angel, grotesquely handsome, threateningly massive. He extended his left hand without leaning to offer Jowy the goblet, held at arm’s length.

Jowy wrapped both hands around it, worried they were shaking. (They were not.) Briefly his fingers, cold and thin, wrapped around Luca’s warm hand. His teeth barely peeked out of his grin, and were covered again.

Jowy’s hands wrapped around the cold gold. He watched the wine swirl inside, the sour red wine.

That smell cut through the swimming royal incense. The sourness of reeking breath. He looked up to keep his eyes on the prince.

He had accepted the ceremonial dagger, gold-hilted, iron-bladed, and was turning back toward Jowy.

“Your choice,” he murmured, for only their ears, “are you taking your blood, or am I?

“Either way is considered proper. But I bet…” he said, voice trailing away expectantly.

Jowy laboriously shifted the goblet into his left hand, being sure to not stop standing straight and not move anything but his arms. “Hand me the knife.”

Not a very subordinate thing to say. Luca obviously loved it. Jowy would have to tone himself down before he gave him an erection during his knighting ceremony.

To hold a heavy goblet of wine while slitting his wrist was, well, impossible. Luca took the cup back from him, a strange exchange, as they passed gold and iron and wine around and around, from each to each. Jowy thought of communion. Of bond-lords, of golden rings and bracers. Of marriage and family ties. Drunkenness. The sharing of drink.

He had never felt less pain when he slit his skin. He couldn’t even be surprised. He thought for a second he hadn’t been able to pierce himself but then blood welled like tears from a cut half and inch deep, which would need attention fast. Both his and Luca’s eyes widened when they saw how sorely he had just hurt himself, the red riding down the white skin hot.

Luca lowered the goblet without lowering his eyes. Jowy stubbornly held them, gold rings, gold in the fist, iron grasp, as the prince slid the cold metal up his arm to catch the flowing blood. Quickly the level of liquid in the cup rose and quivered.

Jowy was given the cup, his arm shaking with the effort of upholding it. With his head beginning to swim and his thoughts crashing on the shore he lifted the witch’s brew above his head and recited his piece, memorized. The blood dripped all the way down his arm and he heard some in the crowd murmur with concern. “That was a manly cut,” said one, shocked, and another, “’swounds, will we have a knighting ceremony or a funeral today?”

Ha ha. Ha.

Of his own blood he drank, and the heavy golden goblet tipped to pour a line of it down his chin. Yes, this was Luca’s wine, bitter, sour, joyless, and his blood, bitter, sour, furious. He had tasted both on his tongue before. Together they were sharp and metallic as a blade.

It was the prince’s job to walk the goblet to his father. Jowy wrapped bloody arm around bloody arm behind his back to watch. When the king lifted the goblet to his lips, he kneeled down on the rushes and lowered his eyes to await his knighthood.

A guard scrambled up and began to tie his arms behind his back. No, he was bandaging his wound. He felt the rough cotton bite into the slit.

His head was so light.

He might be about to die.

He wished he could remember a poem.

Thud.

Then the crash of metal.

He didn’t think to stand up at first. His head was woozy. Slowly he clambered to his feet. He took a few steps forward—and met the prince. Luca had reached up, grabbed his arm, though Jowy didn’t know when he raised a fist himself; his grip crushed the bandages (rather, it was a shirt) over his wound and the blood began to gush at his fingertips. He halted Jowy in his tracks and they stood there among the rush of people beginning to shout, panic, rush to their king, like a great stone that stood in the lashing sea.

Luca twisted his head at him one way, then another. He looked upon the cut on Jowy’s arm, raised it almost to his face—pulled it down, revealing his wide, terrible, golden eyes.

“Jowy,” he said.

“Luca,” said Jowy, whose head was dizzy with exhaustion.

“You— your blood.”

“The goblet…” Jowy whispered, his vision beginning to speckle and spark at the edges.

As Jowy’s chest heaved and Luca’s fingers curled tightly around his bleeding wrist, sticking skin to skin, they stared at one another in transfixed amazement while they watched each other realize that they had both poisoned King Agares.

They had both poisoned King Agares.

In his—his—

Surprise?

Wonder?

Confusion?

Awe?

Luca Blight looked human for the first time. Perhaps that was because he looked like he liked something.

Then his worst smile slowly overtook its face, like a cicada molting off an old, molded skin, and the putrescence of madness and cruelty warped that expression into pure lust .

“Jowy,” he growled, so low that Jowy could only feel it, not hear it.

“Hnn—” his hands trembled with excitement as he gripped Jowy’s wrists. Jowy was frightened, for a second of stomach-plummeting panic, that Luca would not be capable of controlling himself, despite the crowd, despite the death of the King, despite his sister’s suddenly dropped goblet which just now had hit the floor with a delicate tinkle. Instead, he lurched back, releasing Jowy’s wrists to show his own bloodstained palms.

“I accept your allegiance, Sir Blight,” his voice cracked, shot through with joy, “Last knight dedicated to King Agares Blight, and first to King Luca Blight. To me.”

He had gone a little off balance when Luca let go of his wrists.

He stumbled back on his heels.

Then forward onto his toes.

Then he toppled onto the golden floor and his vision went black.

Jillia Blight wore a black dress and veil, aggressively modest. She said not a word nor did she look up from the bunch of fabric lilies she clutched with a black glove.

Jowy Blight wore his military uniform, and held her arm. They stood side by side in the great tomb of the Kings of the Highlands, cold stone stacked upon the wind-blasted moor. Jowy had so many hot aches, pains, infections, that he was glad for the cold wind.

King Luca Blight wore his armor and his father’s crown. He did not choose to perform the ceremony, and no one would have wanted him to, even the handful of people who weren’t dread certain that he—perhaps with the help of his shameful paramour—was the King’s murderer. Instead he watched with them.

Jowy stood between brother and sister silently, and tried to ignore it, tried so hard to ignore it, but a whisper of thought inside of him traitorously sighed, and said, were it only a different brother and sister.

That was the moment he decided that he, himself, was dying too. Mentally, he wrote it into the plan, finished the whole bloody thing with a period and a curl of the pen. And what a relief it was.

Original Note:

I will be the first to admit that some of this seems to lead nowhere, and the end effect is a little disjointed. I didn't follow the timeline perfectly for sure. It feels like a cut of a larger story that doesn't exist, but then again, it IS a fanfiction of a much larger story. But for what it is, that is, essentially a bucket in which I vomited a delirious night's worth of sadomasochistic fantasies, I like it. Most importantly, I finally get the accomplishment of writing a full NC 17 fic for a pairing which practically does not exist, making me the one who fulfilled the holy law of the internet that says that the porn of all things MUST exist.

You, I, and everyone here, are welcome.

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