Archive of Our Own ^beta

"Nice," you say approvingly as you study the schematics for your boyfriend's latest project. You tap the diagram for the power converter in the robot's chassis. "This looks like a big improvement, here—you'll get a lot more efficiency out of him."

"Thank you," he says, digging out one of his endless supply of towels like he always does when you say anything halfway complimentary. "I have been learning from your expertise."

You nod. That's only right. Being an outrageous genius is one of those things that comes naturally when you're a Strider. "We should give him a good test run," you say. "You up for a friendly wager?"

"Excuse me?" Equius says, giving you a suspicious glance over the rims of his cracked shades.

"You heard me." You take your shades off entirely, because you know what it does to him to see the color of your eyes. "Put your best bot up against mine for a match."

He flushes blue and catches his lip between his chipped teeth. You press your fingers to his lips to remind him to stop that, and he cuts it out before he can make himself bleed. If he's going to bleed it really ought to be for a fun reason. "I would not normally wish to place wagers," he says slowly—of course he's not a betting man—"but I suppose it is more acceptable in a contest of skill. What stakes did you have in mind?"

You smile. You're putting this plan together on the fly, but you're good at that. Freestyling is kind of your thing. "Loser does anything the winner says for the next twenty-four hours."

Equius makes a noise in his throat that you're pretty sure he didn't mean to. He goes through another towel before he can answer. "A-anything."

"You heard me, big boy." You keep staring and he fidgets, drops his eyes, flexes his hands at his sides. "And you'd better give it your best shot," you add. "I don't want a cheap fucking victory here."

"I would not dream of insulting you so," he says.

"Good." You nod. "So we're on?"

Another second of hesitation and you can see the gears turning in his head as he calculates odds. You're a better roboticist than he is; you inherited his pre-death level of skill as your starting point when his universe-instance gave way to yours. It's complicated, would take a Seer to get all the logic worked out. But you know and he knows that you have a clear advantage in a contest like this.

Which, you're sure, is why he nods. "I accept your challenge," Equius says.

"That's what I like to hear," you tell him. "Forty-eight hours enough time for you to get your guy in shape?"

"I will make it so," he promises.

♥

You have experience building battlebots for specific applications. Sawtooth was designed to be a scout and survivalist, capable of taking care of himself and dominating the shit out of opponents on the fly. Jake's Brobot was made as equal parts protector and trainer—okay, maybe not equal parts, but both impulses were there. He did fights differently, is the point.

This guy you're working on now has some specific applications in his future, too. You give him the really humanoid chassis, and recycle a spare head from the Brobot project: make him look like you. For a minute you consider bolting a set of horns on there and making him your trollsona, but you discard the idea. It'd be funny but it would distract from the task at hand.

You take a lot of really specific care with his joints and his armor, trying to hit just the right balance. This guy has an important job to do. You're going to get him calibrated perfectly.

♥

Showtime. You bring your bot down to the ring and Equius does likewise, and he did put horns on his, like you thought he would: those short barely-curved arrowheads, just like his unbroken one. You make a mental note to ask him how he broke the other one, while he looks from your bot's face to yours and back again. He's thinking about similarities. Thinking about surrogate selves. Good.

"Ready when you are, babe," you say as you get your bot situated in one corner of the ring.

Equius looks about as happy as anyone ever has about the idea of getting his ass handed to him. "I am prepared," he says, but then he doesn't step back out of his bot's way. "If I may," he says, and of course he may, like you'd deny him the chance to speak, of all things, "might I suggest an increase in the wager?"

"Feeling confident enough to raise the stakes, huh?" you ask. He blushes. "What did you have in mind?"

"Twenty-four hours seems, ah, too short a time to adequately reward the victor for his triumph," Equius says. "Perhaps you might be willing to extend it to a week?"

Just suggesting it has him breaking out in a sweat. You're pretty sure you can guess what he's imagining—a whole week of belonging to you, being honor-bound to cater to your every whim, being incapable of refusing whatever you demand. No holding back. Honestly it's pretty close to how you want to see this bet end, too. But it's going to happen on your terms.

"Sure," you say. "One week. Loser is the winner's slave, and obeys every order he gives. No matter what it is."

Equius shudders. "Yes," he says, practically a whimper. "I agree to those terms."

"All right," you say. "Set that puppy to kill and let me see what you've got."

You fire up your bots simultaneously, then get the hell out of the way.

Your bot's the first one off the mark, a little faster than Equius's heavier troll model, but he builds those monsters really solid, so getting the first hit doesn't amount to much. Metal clangs as the bots collide, testing each other, going for weak spots. They look well-matched, both capable of enough strategy to do more than just pound each other.

As soon as you're satisfied that the match is going to be a good one—that Equius kept up his end of the bargain and built his bot to last—you stop watching them so closely and start watching him out of the corner of your eye. For someone who isn't a betting man, he's sure getting into this match. You can see his hands clench at his sides, knuckles going pale, and he flinches a little every time your bot lands a good hit. His breathing is coming fast and he's wiping his face distractedly with the back of his arm, not even bothering to go after a towel. He leans forward as the bots grapple, shoulders hunching forward—

And staggers back as if he'd just gotten hit himself when your bot takes a hard enough hit to lose its right arm. "No," he says, "that wasn't supposed to—" You keep your poker face as best you can through his panic. He might not know it but that is in fact exactly what was supposed to happen.

You nod slowly as his bot takes advantage of the weakness and pounds yours into scrap. You're glad you didn't name the poor guy, or you'd feel bad. "See," you say. "Told you that was a big improvement."

Equius swallows hard. His ears are doing the little curling-down thing they do when he's freaked out; it's a good thing he doesn't make a habit of gambling when he has so many tells. "Thank you," he says, even though he sounds mortified.

You smile. This is where his wager ends and yours really gets started. "So," you say. "What can I do for you, master?"

♥

He doesn't fold right away. He locks up into complete stick-up-his-ass mode, repressing the shit out of anything like an individual thought until you'd like to shake him for it, but you keep up your end of the bargain.

Day one he doesn't even take any indecent liberties with his position of power. He asks you to make him dinner, doesn't even manage to phrase it as an order. You make him sushi rolls (he won't eat anything that has hooves, but fish are still on the menu, and a big boy like that needs his protein), arrange them on a platter all kawaii as fuck, and take your shirt off before you go bring them out to him. You kneel and hold the platter for him. He smells like sweat and machine oil and those amazing spicy troll pheromones you can't get enough of. He eats, and he feeds you, carefully, by hand. You lick the pads of his fingers but he doesn't take the hint.

Day two he tells you to attend him in the bath. Progress. You scrub his back, you play with his hair, you kneel at his feet to towel him off when he's done. You look up from the floor and lick your lips, and from the way his cheeks flush blue you think you're getting somewhere—but then he tells you he wants a back massage instead of the obvious. He is pretty damn tense when you get your hands into the knots of his shoulders. The pleasure sounds he makes when you go after that tension are great.

Still, you're going to have to shake things up here. At this rate he's going to get through the entire week before you can make him say what he's actually looking for.

♥

Day three. You've taken to just going shirtless and barefoot around the house, because you know how hardwired Equius is for symbolic power stuff, and you want to remind him of the position you're in right now. You keep catching him trying not to look at your feet, and you file that observation away for further investigation in the future. Right now you have another project on deck.

You go to your knees in front of him and you'd swear the dampness of his shirt is a precise barometer of how flustered he is. "Permission to speak, sir?" you say.

"Granted," he says. He's holding too still, like he's struggling to rein himself in. Hah.

"I'm not satisfying you," you say. He doesn't even give you crap for telling him how he feels. "You're barely asking me for anything. We do more than this when we don't have a forfeit going."

"You feel I should be making more demands," Equius says, and he's still making it a question. Poor guy doesn't have an honestly toppy bone in his body.

You feel sorry for him, but you know he needs to work through this if it's going to stick. The whole time you've been together he's been looking for excuses to take your orders, acquiesce to your demands, accept your punishment—and he's had it all worked out in his head so this is necessary, not voluntary.

"Anything you want," you say. "You can ask for whatever you want, and I'll do it. So far you're not making me work for it at all."

"Even if I want," he starts, and you think yes, yes, now we're getting somewhere, before he changes direction. "Come here," he says, unbuttoning his shorts. "I want you to—to service me."

Okay, you'll count that as progress. Not like you've ever minded a chance to get his bulge down your throat. You crawl over to him as he pulls it out, and lick your way up nice and slow, savoring how that pheromone spice gets thicker as you reach the tip.

Equius cards his claws through your hair and you brace yourself for him to pull you down, really fuck your throat, the way you do when you have him in this position—but he's careful, gentle, still tentative. His bulge slides past your lips, heavy on your tongue, but never gets deep enough to be a serious choking hazard. You cross your wrists at the small of your back to encourage him a little. Maybe he does want to play it this way. You could probably stand to switch more than you do.

The groan that gets out of him is seriously hot, but he pulls you back instead of further down. His bulge slips from your mouth and you give it one last lick before Equius pulls you out of reach. He's breathing hard, his teeth bared in a grimace.

"Hey," you say, and your voice does that thick, hoarse thing that comes from cocksucking, "what's wrong? Talk to me."

"I am failing you," he says. "You offer yourself to me and I can't rid myself of this foolish urge to—to behave in a manner unworthy of my station."

Man, that is a tortured euphemism if you ever heard one, and you know your way around mistreated figures of speech. You get to your feet and cup his face in your hands. "Shoosh," you say, and the impropriety of poaching his catgirl's territory shocks him into paying attention. "The only foolish urge I'm seeing here is the one where you keep trying not to go for what you actually want." You brush your thumb along his cheekbone. "Cards on the table, babe. You weren't happy with me on the floor like that. Why?"

"I should have been," he says.

"Fuck should," you say, and he flinches. You try to cool it on the salty language around him most of the time, but that makes it more powerful when you stop holding back. "That's what you've been doing this whole time, isn't it? Going by some imaginary script. Asking for what you 'should' want and coming up with justifications for everything."

He's blushing superman blue and sweating bullets. He won't look you in the eyes. He nods.

"Nobody's here to hear you but me," you say. "And I'm flushed stupid for you, in case you'd forgotten. I'm not going to use it to hurt you." You drape your arms over his shoulders and lean in really close, murmuring the words right in his ear because you've never learned to play fair. "We can do anything you want. Even if you think you shouldn't. Even if you think it's depraved." The word depraved makes him shudder. Good. You were pretty sure that one was a hot button. "Anything. All you have to do is tell me. what. you. want."

"This," he whispers. You hold very still and wait. "I wanted to lose, so that you...would be in control. I want you being commanding, just as you are now. I want—I want your authority."

You kiss him, deep and wet and hungry. His teeth nick your lip a little but you don't care. "Okay," you breathe against his mouth. "That is more than okay by me. So what are my orders?"

Equius goes still for a second, and then laughs breathlessly as he gets it. "I want—I order you to dominate me," he says. "For the entire rest of the week. Show no mercy."

"There we go." You stroke his hair back from his face, giving him a second to relax and let his guard down. Then you sweep his legs out from under him and put him on the floor. "Brace yourself, babe, because this is going to be a rough ride."

As he tips his head back, baring his throat, for a second you can see him smile. "I would expect nothing less."