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The flickering glow of candles was the only source of light in the soft, dim expanse of Yue Qingyuan’s bedroom. The overhead and lamps had all been doused in favor of an artful array of subtle scents mixing and mingling into a gentle wave of something slightly spiced and slightly sweet—overtones of a floral note weighed down by something earthy and solid.

The scented candles were on the dresser, laid out on little saucers and cradled in their neat, careful glass homes. One or two dotted the side table furthest from Liu Qingge but none on the table closest to him.

Not that he could see them particularly well, of course.

The glow casts down over the tense, flexing muscles of his arms, dousing his skin in a warm, honey-burn light. He’s bare, from end to end, with nothing but the carefully wrapped and artfully woven cream-soft ropes that loop around each wrist.

There is something about being laid out that subsumes every inch of Liu Qingge’s mind.

It flickers and burns at the edges of his consciousness like the lapping and curling edges of flame that burn down the wicks of the three unscented candles that burn lazily within sight of where he is laid out on his stomach. The ropes loop around his wrist and then lash through the hitch effortlessly tied to the black, twisting metal of the bed frame. It’s an easy tie, loose enough that Liu Qingge could reach the scissors safely within reach or scratch his nose if he needed—but taut enough that he couldn’t touch himself. That he couldn’t touch his own chest or easily flip onto his back.

Yue Qingyuan had only tied him at the wrists. Good boys, he had said, with the soft weight of reminder, only need one point.

And Liu Qingge had let him, melting with a quiet desperation and the unsteady jump of eager muscles.

He doesn’t even remember why he came here anymore. He had been at the gym, running out the irritation and frustration that threatened to claw its way out of the pit of his stomach and shred his throat in the sea of bile. He had been furious, he had been sick, he had been--he had been—he remembers coming here. He remembers pushing through the door and kissing Yue Qingyuan until his mouth hurt.

He remembers the quiet, furious rage that came with the sweat-soaked shirt and the tautness of muscle under skin and wrapped so tight over bone that if he were at all himself he might have worried would snap under the force. He remembers the anger. The frustration. The fear.

He remembers the guilt that came, nagging and cruel the second the words were out of his mouth—a weight slamming between them and crumpling Yue Qingyuan’s face.

He doesn’t remember why.

(That is a lie. It had been the flowers. It had been the cards on his desk. It had been the whispers in the other office, the faces too close to one another. It had been a soft exchange of words. It had been touches that Liu Qingge saw, fingers skating off arms and shifting eyes through the crack door. He hadn’t been looking. He didn’t want to see the narrow tip of a head thrown back. He didn’t want to see he didn’t want to see he didn’t want to—)

Fingertips land on the slope of his back, piercing Liu Qingge mid-flight into the abyss and anchoring him back to the shape of his own body. It’s a gentle grounding, a calloused but delicate touch sweeping up the center of his spine towards the rise of his shoulder blade.

Once, Liu Qingge learned the names of all the muscles and bones in his body. It had been a rote memorization requirement for one of the exercise science classes he had taken nearly a decade and a half ago now. The touch skates around the edge of his scapula, where the stretches of his trapezius covers and hides the rhomboid major, minor.

(Like muscles. Like piano keys. Like delicate chords that can be plucked easily to summon up the caw of music.)

It’s easy to fall back into himself, into the stretch of his body laid out over the ivory sheets and the ropes tying his wrists to the wrought-metal frame.

It’s easy to fall back to the silky sheets that twist around his ankles, the only minute covering that leaves the scarred, taut line of his back exposed to the glow of the candlelight.

Yue Qingyuan’s footsteps are quiet, but Liu Qingge can follow them regardless. He can imagine him even if he cannot see him. Yue Qingyuan had been wearing one of his little button-downs under a sweater when Liu Qingge had come to him. He hadn’t changed. He had tied Liu Qingge up while being dressed like the world's most stuck-up and stuffiest librarian.

He can imagine him as he watches the other hand, still ringed by the cuff of his button-down that folded over the edge of his sweater, reach for the one of the three proud, unscented candles. Each one was a different color, blue standing beside white, standing beside red. They stood tall, the wax welling up in the melting cup at the base of each slowly burning wick dripping and running down the length of each bright, brilliant column to collect in glass cups. Dried wax clung to the walls, the remnants of nights and stories that Liu Qingge only draws upon as the ghosts of dark, half-forgotten memories when he’s alone.

The remnants he only ever summons when he is shivering beneath the covers, his sweats pushed down at his breath panting in the damp, dark abyss of his bed.

(He couldn’t let the walls see him shudder apart, he couldn’t let the shadows in his bedroom know how he bites his lip and clenches his fist when he comes around a name that he can’t ever decide how he wants to pronounce it.)

The hand, resting on the cage of bone and muscle and fat and sinew that hides his lungs, pauses before it gathers Liu Qingge’s hair. The ends tickle where they drag over his skin and Liu Qingge doesn’t make a sound.

His teeth keep himself from doing it as Yue Qingyuan drapes his hair over his shoulder (from the cervical spine, pouring over his deltoids and pooling where he feels them tickle at his pectoral muscle. Clavicle. Acromion.)

“You make a beautiful canvas,” Yue Qingyuan says, as his hand smooths back down over the expanse of his spine—like he was stroking down the back of a particularly well-loved lap-pet. Not that Liu Qingge hasn’t ever been that. Not that he hasn’t been an animal in Yue Qingyuan’s lap. Not that he hasn’t ever been tied and bound and worshiped in the cage of his arms.

Liu Qingge will never understand this.

Men like him are not made for art.

Men like him are not made for worship.

Men like him are not made to be delicate.

He has never been an artist, he has never been the art—he has never been the thing so carefully molded by a delicate hand that knows the intimate contours of the human body. He has never wrought beauty from nothing but pink and paper.

Men like him are made to serve at altars and at the behest of kings and Gods.

Men like him are made to be weapons, sharpened and guided by hands that are built to carve beauty from the world.

Yue Qingyuan has never acted like he wasn’t this.

Liu Qingge could be his weapon. He could be his sword and his shield, a body to be used and held and used and used and used.

“What did you tell me this morning, Liu-shidi?” Liu Qingge shudders at the phrase, a coy little thing they only ever used in the confines of Yue Qingyuan’s bedroom. Shidi, sighed to match with a pleading Zhangmen-shixiong. A way to keep their roles ordered and aligned.

A reminder where they belonged.

Where Liu Qingge always belonged.

A reminder what he was.

What Liu Qingge always was.

Typically, this would be a command to answer.

Typically, Liu Qingge would flush and turn his face into the pillows, or Yue Qingyuan’s chest, or the rug, and refuse to answer until Yue Qingyuan asked him again.

Tonight, he buries his nose in the space between the rope and his nose. “I said—” he cleared his throat, his voice rough and already well-worn. “I said I was just a thing to you.”

The fingers on his back move, smoothing up the scar-lined and dotted expanse of his back. “Mmm. What else?”

Liu Qingge grumbles, his responsibility unintelligible in the pillows.

“You said you wanted to be my thing, but you didn’t want me to pretend you were something else.”

Liu Qingge does not respond.

Yue Qingyuan does not make him.

“You said I could not pretend you were anything other than a tool. Anything other than my tool.” The hand on his back disappears, and the one near the candles moves to stroke the glass lip of one of the cups, in the wax-crusted spout. “And what did I tell you?”

Liu Qingge’s answer is pressed into the fibers of the pillows, buried in the silky, soft layers that his body knows more intimately than it knows the inside of his own clothing. The interwoven, interlaced things that have carried his deepest, most shameful moments to completion, that have been caught and worked between his teeth as he ground down to grunt out noises in the shape of numbers.

This time, Yue Qingyuan does not give him the grace of answering for him. This time, he hums and says, “Please, Liu-shidi. Louder.”

The please is by no means an indicator of it being a question. It is a request, of course, buried beneath the subtle demand.

“You said you would make me beautiful.” It’s ground out, through teeth and the safe, beautiful pillows he is buried in.

Yue Qingyuan clicks his tongue. “I said, even a tool is capable of being beautiful. Even a weapon is a beautiful thing.”

There is the sound of glass scraping the wooden top of the bedside table. The firelight flickers, the casting shadows shifting and moving like a play against the bedroom walls.

Liu Qingge squeezes his eyes shut.

“I told you, my dear, that even a tool is a work of art and should be treated as such.”

The punctuation comes with the first white-fire burst of heat that alights in the space between Liu Qingge’s shoulder blades. The wax dripped onto him rapidly cools, leaving a pleasant heat in the nest of raw, point-sharpened nerves.

“My Shidi,” comes Yue Qingyuan’s warm, even voice. It carries with it a longer pour, the fire searing up the length of Liu Qingge’s body as it drags from the space just beneath the nape of his neck down down down to the small of his back. It’s a thick, heavy line and by the time the molten wax settles in the space near his tailbone, Liu Qingge’s hips lift and buck backwards of their own volition. “When you move, do you know you cause the wax to move with you? Each time you writhe, it rolls.”

Another line, his one forcing him to pull the ropes at his wrists as he twists both into and away from the sweet lap of pain that comes in the form of a drizzle over his ribcage sweeping up to his shoulders.

Then another.

The lines are easiest, when Yue Qingyuan soothes him and drapes his back in long, sweeping lines of wax. The heat pools so rapidly and so much that the sharpness fades—a dull, and almost comforting heat.

The hardest part are the drops.

They come rapid-fire, in bursts of searing, gut-punch moments of piercing sensation one after another after another, in wild, scatter-shot lines.

Glass sets, another picked up.

“You really are beautiful,” Yue Qingyuan sighs, as the fading heat churns pain into a bliss that Liu Qingge cannot name.

It’s the ache that comes after working himself to the bone, pushing one notch higher than his maximum and one notch harder and one notch more and more and more. It’s the burn that comes with the sharp edge of pain, a release unlike any other. Dizzying and intoxicating.

Like hovering your hand above the flame, like pulling too tightly at the edge of a shirt-collar.

(Like watching through the crack in the door as lips find a jaw and hands find hips.)

Liu Qingge doesn’t tremble. He isn’t a fucking purse dog. He doesn’t tremble.

He doesn’t tremble as the swish of fabric means that Yue Qingyuan’s hand is hovering somewhere over his obliques, a dance dragging higher along the arch of his latissimus dorsi. From his hips sweeping up and up and up before it drops a small, single thing at the base of his shoulder.

He thrashes the moment the droplet splashes right over the rise of his ass.

He bucks and twists with the smaller drops, rising as the comfortable, soft silk starts feeling more and more like a scratching, scraping one across every single live-wire nerve ending that lashes through him.

Pain release relief pain release relief pain release relief

pain release relief pain release relief pain release relief

pain

release

relief.

It comes in waves, the burning flash of heat, the melting warmth of cooling wax, the rolling droplets starting down over the top of the shoulder and washing down into the small of his back.

Liu Qingge never knows when it starts to slip, the numbing wash of…of something that starts to buzz at the corners of his mind and tug him gently beneath the waves.

It doesn’t feel like drowning,

It feels like becoming unmade.

It feels like being remade.

It feels

and it feels.

Liu Qingge’s fingers loosened around the ropes at the sound of the last flame being blown out.

The glass clicks, delicate and gentle, against the wooden tabletop.

“You are breathtaking,” Yue Qingyuan says. “You really are a work of art.”

The words that had always been stuck up in Liu Qingge’s throat were frozen there—crammed in the space between his tongue and his teeth and knotted in the base of his neck like some strange, animal thing that he wanted more than anything else to chew on. All Liu Qingge could do was shudder and lay there, a piece of art for Yue Qingyuan to look upon.

To touch.

His skin jumps at the first brush of an innocent finger-tip following the curve of his spine, catching on the smooth rise of cooled wax.

“My Shidi.”

To kiss.

He twitches, a violent spasm of muscles down his arm and into his flash-bang flexing hand as lips brush the nape of his neck next.

To have.

Another kiss, this time in the cooled, solid wax. When Liu Qingge moves, he feels the wax start to pull from his skin, peeling slowly off the curve of his hip.

To taste.

Yue Qingyuan’s lips follow down the line again and again and again all the way to the base of Liu Qingge’s spine. His is nothing more than a haze, a shuddering miasma of a tremulous, trembling buzzing reality—both his own and one belonging to someone else stuffed into his own body. Wide, solid hands curve over the rise of his ass, holding him steady as another kiss buries itself into the mess of wax at the very base of his spine.

It does not register until the hands tug and it starts to pull gently at Liu Qingge’s mind.

“May I, my Shidi?” Yue Qingyuan asks, his breath ghosting lower and lower until—

—Liu Qingge’s hands jerk at his ropes when the realization slashes through him.

Things he had done to Yue Qingyuan—of course—things he had been happy to do. Liu Qingge loved the way that Yue Qingyuan felt, malleable and softening and slick pressed against his tongue and his lips and his mouth.

Things he had done to Yue Qingyuan.

Things that no one—

—no one—

“Zhangmen-shixiong—” he chokes, his sweat-slick forehead rising to press into the taut line of the ropes. “You—that—Do you want to?”

The breath hitches over him, over his—over—

—over him.

“Of course. Anything for my art.”

Liu Qingge nods, stiff and rough and ready.

The first wash of a warm, slick tongue over him sends a jolt through the whole of his body. The smooth, soft heat serves to remind his raw nerves of the sudden-fire bursts of flame that sunk through him with every drop of wax. It drives his nerves to some sort of pinging bliss as another slick pass of the tongue finds him again and again and again.

It’s a warm, slow heat that leaves Liu Qingge’s hips pricking towards the sheets again in a slow beat with every single pass of Yue Qingyuan’s tongue.

It’s slick, heavy, hot as each movement and flick and pass only begins to increase in pressure and pressure and pressure, until the first gentle prod pressed against the slickened, relaxing muscle buried there beneath Yue Qingyuan’s lips.

The gasp is rent from him as Yue Qingyuan sinks his tongue past the feverish, well-massaged muscle—slick and warm and gentle and Liu Qingge cannot keep himself quiet. He cannot bite back the groan that pushes up from his wax-soft chest and the hollow of his throat. He cannot fight the hiccupping tremble through the whole of his body at the first rolling thrust of a tongue and a tongue and a tongue.

It’s slick and heavy and thick and Liu Qingge doesn’t know how long Yue Qingyuan works him before the first slick, slow finger nudges up against his rim.

Liu Qingge does not hesitate, hips pushing down towards the finger pressed against him.

“Liu-shidi,” Yue Qingyuan tells the slick flesh between his legs. “My Liu-shidi. My dear heart. My beauty.”

It’s one finger, splitting him. Then two.

Each one paired with the push and curl and thrust of Yue Qingyuan’s tongue, splitting him slick and deep and slow and slow and slick and deep and Liu Qingge cannot think for the sensation.

He cannot think for the breathless push of fingers, for the slip of Liu Qingge’s tongue, for the twist and curl of fingers against that place inside him that made him gasp and grind back down against the fingers and tongue inside him and inside him and inside him.

If someone whimpers, fraught and starved, when fingers slip from him—Liu Qingge would never say from whom it came.

If someone gasps, when something wider and thicker press against his stretched, slick hole.

If someone begs, a soft whispering plea of please, Zhangmen-shixiong, please. I need it—I need you—I—I want to feel you. Please.

If someone’s breath catches. If someone sighs. If someone’s teeth grits as a thick, heavy cock presses and presses and presses burying burying burying inch by inch into him.

Every inch of Liu Qingge’s body was alight—a burning collection of open nerves collecting and uncollected. Alive.

“So beautiful, my beloved,” comes Yue Qingyuan’s voice—disconnected and far away and centered, somewhere and nowhere all at once. “You’re taking so much of it, Liu-shidi. So much of my cock, so deep inside of you. Do you know how beautiful you feel? How wonderful it feels to be inside of you? So tight, so warm. Ah, my beauty, my art, my gorgeous thing—I could stay here inside you forever, feeling every inch of you, feelling deep, deep, inside you.”

Liu Qingge can do nothing but choke on the desperate noises that escape him as Yue Qingyuan sinks to the root once before he withdraws and sinks back in—splitting Liu Qingge again and then again, unmaking and remaking him with each rolling thrust back into his body.

There is nothing he can do—there is nothing he wants to do but lie there and let him and let him and let him.

Lips on the back of his neck, on the side of his neck, against his ear, against his jaw.

Hands on his hips, his back, his shoulders, his hair, his arms.

Skin against skin and the smell of sex mingling with the muted, distant smell of the ever-burning candles in the background. It was the sound of flesh against flesh, the sound of Yue Qingyuan’s breath as each undulation of his hips push deeper and harder—the squeak of the bed and the steady rock of the mattress again and again and again until the headboard began to gentle tap against the wall to the rhythmic pace of the cock moving within him.

Liu Qingge was going to die. He was going to die, he never wanted to leave, he never wanted to be anywhere but here.

He was going to die, he was going to live here. He wanted to do nothing but be on the end of Yue Qingyuan’s cock, a beautiful cocksleeve made just for him, fit just for him, shaped like his cock and nothing else.

“That’s right,” Yue Qingyuan pants, his breath harsh against Liu Qingge’s ear. “My beautiful cocksleeve. A piece of art made for me to fuck, a piece of art made for my cock. The most beautiful thing for me to fuck myself into, the most beautiful thing to be made and molded to fit my cock and nothing else.”

Liu Qingge could swear as he rocked down against the cock shoving inside him. He could swear as he pushed his hips into the bed, his aching, leaking cock caught in the sheets. He grinds to the beat of the hips against him.

Deeper, he could say.

Harder, he could say.

The pace of Yue Qingyuan’s hips increases, growing steadily more erratic as the internal, blossoming heat of his body starts to coil and bubble with the rocking of his hips against the sheets and the cock inside of him. Liu Qingge’s could feel his own breath quicken, his chest aching as drool slicks the pillows under his lips—messy and filthy and nothing like Liu Qingge has ever felt and nothing like he has ever done and nothing but—

but this.

Nothing but this.

“Go on,” Yue Qingyuan sighs, his growing desperation thin and starved. “Come for me, my love.”

Liu Qingge is nothing but a thing. A beautiful tool. A carved, decorated weapon. Something ornate and something beautiful and something and something and something.

When he comes, it almost takes him by surprise—a burst through him as if his body is made to follow Yue Qingyuan’s command. Nothing else.

The shuddering groan follows, the feeling of a heat washing deep inside him. The stuttering of Yue Qingyuan’s hips.

Liu Qingge does not know what comes next, lips over his neck, hair tickling his shoulder.

Hands. Lips.

Hearts, beating.

Liu Qingge blinks, and he’s empty, a cold shiver racing up his spine before the mattress dips.

He blinks and a hand is on his back, soothing and smoothing.

He blinks and lips are in his hair.

“I know, come here.” A hand in his hair. Nails on his back, plucking delicately at the built-up wax there on his back. Liu Qingge’s face finds the nape of a neck—bared and naked and Liu Qingge doesn’t know when he stripped or where his clothes went, but he’s never been happier to find bare skin beneath his own.

He doesn’t know when he was untied, when delicate hands guide him into the bed.

The next time he blinks, Yue Qingyuan is there—his deep brown hair pouring down over the shoulders. “My love.”

It’s soft.

Delicate.

Liu Qingge has never been these things.

But maybe, for an evening.

There is no harm in it.