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We're still too alike, you and I. When your dreaming self wanders the Lighthouse and settles near the flame of your once-lover’s presence, sometimes you and I end up closer than we should be. Right now, Lucanis is dreaming of a night that never happened, in a luxurious penthouse flat facing the Treviso harbour. The doors to the balcony are thrown wide, opening the room to the sparkling, still night. Incense curls around burners throughout the room, and the thick scent of smoke and cardamom makes our mouth water for him.
This is an old dream, a wistful imagining that was buried deep during the first days of our imprisonment and is coming to the fore because of your presence. It makes me hate you, how much his being is calling out for you through the Fade, when he can suppress me with a brush of intent that's so practiced it's like breathing for him. It frustrates me how much I need you to punch through his walls, that I can't do it alone even when I'm wearing your face. Even when he's here, relaxed for once, leaning back against the plush pillows with a hand pressing against his cock through the silk robe, it's because of you.
“Isn't it dangerous, to meet in Treviso like this?” we ask over the sound of the ocean. We step into the room from the balcony, caught up in the story that Lucanis's dream is spinning.
Lucanis meets our eyes as we approach the bed at the centre of the room. His gaze is soft, his eyes half-lidded as he stares up at us through his lashes. “I needed you,” he says, a simple truth that he'd never be able to admit to in the waking.
The bed faces the balcony that we entered from, and we stop at the foot of the bed for a moment, leaning against the ironwork that has been shaped into thorns by the Fade. Lucanis imagines himself as younger here, untouched by the Ossuary, and the smoky tendrils of my being curl through you, settling along the insides of your hollow bones. His skin is flushed, fresh from a bath, and the much-shorter strands of his hair curl around his ears.
His legs are bare, and we climb across the iron wrought brambles, moving slowly, deliberately, and never looking away from Lucanis. His gaze heats as we curl a hand around the arch of his foot, lowering ourselves to the bed so that we can press a kiss under the bony protrusion on the inside of the ankle. Our lips are soft, and Lucanis shudders. His fingers trace the curve of his dick through the silk, more to direct your attention than for his own benefit, and he bends the other leg at the knee, revealing more skin across the inside and back of his thigh.
“Tease,” he says with a rasp in his deep voice. He keeps his breathing even with deliberation even as he tilts his head back and his eyelids flutter.
We smirk. “I can do worse,” we tell him, and we wave our free hand.
A sparkle of magic coalesces into violet silk, and a loop of fabric curls around the wrist of Lucanis's hand, tightening and pulling it away from where he's been teasing his own dick. A complicated tangle of emotion thrums through him like a wave of sound, his own breathless delight tangled with a sudden leap of terror. He feels the emotion as a jerk in his chest, as pooling nausea low in his belly. The silk stops moving before Lucanis is truly restrained, still looped tight around one wrist.
“Love?” you ask, concerned and pulling back. Lucanis has screwed his eyes shut tight, and you can taste his distress as well as I can.
The dream settles back into him on the next breath, reminding him that Treviso is unoccupied and this is a (false) memory of simpler times. He has nothing to fear. It's only you, after all.
“I'm fine,” he says, meeting our eyes with a soft smile.
Of course he is. I imagine you'd say the same, if he asked.
The silk hangs in the air, entangled with him, but since you haven't tied the final knot, he could pull away from it if he tried. You leave it where it is for now. Lucanis sags against the pillows and lets the silk hold up his arm, and he revels in the softness of it.
Maybe that's it, you think, and my being, entwined along but not enmeshed with your own, flutters with interest. With the panic fading, Lucanis tastes like contentment, hunted down and caught, and like the appreciation he radiates when he sips on a fine cup of coffee at Café Pietra. The tickling in his sinuses is tuned to the familiarity of your magic; the nerves in his skin know the touch of fine silk, and he allows himself to sink into it. He needs this, I know that.
I can taste you. You want to be needed so badly. And you can still taste him—because abominations are never left unchanged by the experience, even if I can't read you as closely as I can my host.
His determination to have this tastes sweet and addicting and maybe a little bitter, like dark chocolate paired with coffee and amaretto, and we sigh it in while running a hand up the skin of his leg. We want more, and Lucanis strains a little against the silk, his free hand clutching into the thick duvet. The hair on the front of his shin is coarse against our palm, and we curl our fingers around the back of the calf to feel the fine hairs and soft skin there. We trail a line of chaste kisses up the inside of his lower leg until we reach the knee. There are scarce inches of uncovered skin until we reach the silk robe.
“Fuck,” Lucanis gasps as our wet tongue licks up the inside of his thigh. Every inch of exposed skin feels—to him—like an exposed nerve ending, with tiny pinpricks of cold and heat alternating under the onslaught. The wet heat of our mouth is like lightning, jolting into his heart and pooling more blood into his dick.
We can't wait.
Our hands find their way under the robe, kneading the skin there with our fingers, and we press a single kiss to his silk-covered hip, inspiring a hiss of air between his teeth. Then we put our mouth over the damp fabric covering his half-hard dick and envelop him.
He calls a name. It's one of ours. We're not paying attention, because the smell of his musk is overpowered by the taste of a wish: that he could really have this with you again. A sound catches in our throat, and it tastes like a sob, like longing sung over a wall too tall to climb.
You pull back. “Stop thinking,” we demand, and our voice isn't nearly as even as you'd like to pretend.
In one motion, we pull the front of his robe open. The sash around his waist shreds apart with a precise application of entropy magic. I feel Lucanis's heart flutter with excitement.
Our warm breath whispers over his skin. “Touch me,” we say, and Lucanis’s hand tangles in the silk in his haste to obey.
He threads his fingers into the curls at our scalp, and his nails scrape against the base of our skull. We sigh with contentment as we press a kiss to his cock, and his breath hitches as his hands deliberately loosen. He's almost fully erect, not so much that the cockhead has emerged from beneath the foreskin, but with enough thickness that we take only a little of him into our mouth at first. His length glides into place across the roof of our mouth, and a hum escapes us, dancing across our vocal cords and sending vibrations cascading through Lucanis's flesh.
A shiver runs through him, visceral enough that we can feel it through his legs, but he has also gone very still.
Skin and sweat and the scent of orange peels from the bath recede behind the sour taste of fear, and we breathe it in, trying to understand. But we know him, too, and when we look up to meet Lucanis's eyes—our lips still closed around his cock—we realize that he’s not afraid because of something we've done. This is the long-held fear that he might lose control and hurt you that's been so recently dragged to the surface. This is why he's not actually in your room, even as he so clearly wants to be. He's afraid of himself.
He's afraid of me.
I curl myself into a smaller shape within a dark pocket of your rib cage as the pieces fall together within the dark web of your ever-skittering mind, and you consider whether to end things here. You’d do so if there wasn't something desperate in Lucanis's gaze. In the end, you decide that you've never been able to prove anything to Lucanis without action to back it up. You let our eyes drift closed and our lips sink down over his shaft with a moan, and our body comes to rest over Lucanis's leg, his hair tickling our skin.
His control is like iron. He keeps his hands loose, his fingers tracing a light path around the crown of our head and back again, fulfilling our request to be touched, if only barely. Like a contract with an untrusted client.
Our lips pull back from his dick as we adjust ourselves so the space between our legs, still covered in at least two layers of Crow gear, presses against his shin—and this is what finally causes his hands to fall to our shoulders as he gasps, gripping tight with his fingers over the shoulder blades and his thumbs near the collarbones. He chokes on a name, and he forgets himself in his haste to angle the hard ridge of his lower leg against our clit so that we can rut against him as we devour him. His hips jerk upward, pushing his dick further into our mouth as we surge forward, eager to meet him. The head of his cock bumps against the soft palate at the back of our mouth, and it feels satisfying to us because we're ready for it.
He tries to pull back. “Shit—” Lucanis starts, propping himself up on his elbows, but we hum a denial and press his hips down against the bed. We look at him again, a question in our eyes, and he falls back, wanting and desperate and willing, even as he doubts.
It tastes like surrender, when he relaxes back onto the bed. His cockhead is swollen in our mouth, released from the foreskin, and we appreciate the soft and fragile feeling of the tissue against the whorls of hard flesh at the top of our mouth. We suckle at it with our tongue, curl our flesh around his and pull a moan from him, inspiring him to raise one hand and sink it into the hair behind our ear.
You think we can't purr, so we don't, but as Lucanis gives into you, we feel a rumbling sense of satisfaction. The feeling echoes through the Fade and through our shared connection, and Lucanis huffs a laugh. You ignore him.
His cock is slick with our saliva as we add pressure with our tongue and slide down him, letting the cockhead glide against the roof of our mouth until it reaches the back of our tongue. The skin at his hips is warm against our hands and heat rises in our core with the friction of his leg against the flesh at our pelvis.
When we pull back, it draws a cry from him, and our lips curl in an almost-smile around his dick—causing him to clutch the hair at the back of our head—before we drive back down, faster and a little farther than before, resisting his grip. We relax our throat, opening into the sensation as the veins under the cock move against our tongue, as the smooth hardness at the top curves against the roof of our mouth, until we have him down to the root.
The curls of his hair tickle our nose, and we take a moment, letting our throat adjust to the feeling.
“You,” says Lucanis, breathless, “are going to kill me like this, one of these days.”
Annoyed that we aren't in a position to verbally parry, we press our thumbs harder into his hips and swallow around him.
He curses, half a blasphemy and half a vivid description of how his blood will splatter the tile if he bursts, and we allow him his delusions.
We move over him at a faster pace, lips and tongue and a hint of teeth sliding across flesh, hands coming around to hold under his thighs like we’re afraid to let go. Both of us are determined to drive all the stupid words out of his head by sucking his capacity for language out of his dick. Lucanis has already died once, you think, and defying the unwritten rules of inter-house politics and his own gallows humour was nothing compared to what you'll do to keep him alive, now that you have a second chance. Despite myself, I approve.
The muscles under our hands tighten, and Lucanis gasps. “Wait,” he says, fingers pulling lightly at our shoulders, and we pull back with a wet noise and a sense of disappointment. The movement pulls a grunt from him, and he tenses as he sits up. The master assassin is too hurried to be graceful as he scrambles onto his knees and he pulls off the remnants of the silk robe.
He digs his fingers into our leather collar and reels us in, and we go willingly, tilting our head so we can meet him in an indulgent glide of lips against lips, his tongue chasing ours as he licks his own taste out of our mouth. He pushes us back onto the pillows and follows after us, gentling his kisses so that he can focus on the long process of unbuckling our armour.
“Should I have pity on you, I wonder?” we ask him through hooded eyes as he pulls back to work at the outer jacket. We can feel the desperation roll off of him, the need for release—which he cut short in himself. He glares at us, although he’s not really upset, and we shrug, giving him an innocent smile.
He chuckles in return, closing in to press hot, open-mouthed kisses onto our neck, causing electric heat to sing through us into our core. We try to move our hips against his legs, but he's merciless, holding his body away from ours as he sucks a mark into the skin over the artery. Your breath catches as you realize how long he’s been wanting to do that, avoiding it out of the necessity for secrecy.
“If you have a magical solution,” he says, unfastening our jacket with aggravating slowness, “Then feel free.”
I'm caught between the wanting of the two beings, bright and hot, but my desire to win the power play is not nearly as strong as my wish to feel Lucanis open and unconcerned, and we shrug, our smile full of dark promise.
The clothes disappear with a thought.
Lucanis's chest presses against ours in that instant, the outside of one knee coming to rest against our inner thigh, and he glides his hand down over the softness of our stomach. We feel the heat build as he slides his hand against the hood of our clit, brushing it with his palm as his fingers slide between the outer folds. We’re wet enough, dampness already gathering on the soft curls there, that his fingers are immediately slick. As he touches the inner folds, we unthinkingly buck against him and it's his breath that comes out in a sob.
“Blade of mercy,” Lucanis swears, trying to rein himself in, “Rook, please.”
“Come on,” you say, wrapping your arms over his shoulders. I pull back into the ribs, somehow feeling wounded. “Lucanis, you've got me.”
This is all the permission he needs to slide two fingers into our wet core, and I forget everything else as his practised fingers drive against every weak spot we have. His movements are slow and careful, and I need him, and I need you, and I didn't know that anything could feel like being on the receiving end of the burning passion that he puts into making you feel pleasure. He presses kisses over our temple and forehead like a benediction, down our throat and across our chest, and I feel heat and tension tighten like a bowstring through the body, ready to unleash its violence.
He loves you. Despite everything, he loves you and he hates me. Why does he hate me when you and I are so alike that I can ride along in the hollow places of your empty rib cage as he dreams? Why does he lock himself and I both in the prison—in separate cells—and only come up for air when you're here?
Tears spring to your eyes, and my distress is palpable enough that Lucanis can feel it even though I'm hiding in you. Lucanis pulls back, meeting your eyes with concern, his slick fingers coming to rest on your thigh.
“I don't know,” you say, choking on my emotions, on fire with the need for the orgasm the body was building up to. “I need you, too, Lucanis. I can't lose you again. I lost you both, and I can't.”
I don't understand, hiding as a mass of smoky tendrils within your hollow parts. You miss Determination, and you have Lucanis—or will, when he stops being an idiot—but what am I? A little peace, only, not the solid ground of the being that I was cut from. Here's what I am: reviled and hidden and ignored alongside all the things Lucanis hates about himself.
Lucanis kisses you, and this settles some of the terror that was starting to crest along your spine. His lips are dry, pressing against yours in a chaste gesture, leaning in and letting you deepen it as your desperation builds. Your lips slide together; your tongue licks against his.
“Make love to me?” you whisper, pulling back for half a moment.
“You have to know,” Lucanis says, pressing a kiss to our temple, and I ease into the feeling of the tenderness with a sigh, pretending that it belongs to us both, “that I will do anything you ask.”
“Usually, I’m afraid to ask,” you say, a feeling of guilt and longing twisting through your chest.
I marvel at how full the empty spaces in your chest really are. The guilt and longing was invisible to me, twisted up as it was in your simple desire to please my host, to be close to him for as long as he’d let you be. You’ve always had a bad habit of fooling yourself to make sure no one could read your emotions, and Determination had hoped that you might grow out of it. It will be up to Lucanis and I to make sure you still have a chance to, now that you’ve started picking fights with gods as well as Talons.
We’re half seated against the pillows and the iron-spiked headboard, but Lucanis is cradling us now, one arm looped behind our shoulders and the other pressed against the outside of our thigh. Lucanis can feel the echo of your guilt, the fear that you have about asking, because all three of us are so tightly wound in this dream. I dig for the thought fragment behind your fear, since you’re distracted anyway by Lucanis, and my tendrils close around the fragment like a spider spinning a web.
It’s another layer of fear. This one says that if you ask for too much, it will mean you’ve pushed too hard. And Lucanis will leave you, instead of telling you no.
“You seduced me once,” says Lucanis, touching the tip of his nose to one side of ours, adjusting the angle until he’s breathing against our lips, “when you told me that the darkness inside of me was as intriguing to you as my kindness. Do you still believe that?”
“Yes,” you say, simply, meeting his eyes. Lucanis’s determined expression folds into sweet agony as you press your hand to his heart, allowing the depth of your acceptance to sweep into him. Curiously, I can taste your care for me in the feeling.
You think you know me. That's very funny.
Lucanis’s eyes close. He breathes through it, allowing the feeling to sweep through the halls of his mind, unheeded by the guards that patrol the prison that keeps us in. He can feel the feeling coursing through us all. He can’t accept the acceptance, but it tangles with the mess in his mind, and for all I know, it will do him some good. I watch from my little corner, a knot of many-limbed darkness in your ribs.
His hand moves slowly up the side of our leg, up over the planes of our stomach, and we shiver when we feel his callouses over the place where I’m wedged inside the bones of your rib cage like a parasite.
He looks up at us with that wounded expression that always cuts you to the quick, his eyes large and shining. We smile and dart forward to press a kiss over the mole at his temple, and he smiles back.
“Don’t distract me,” he says, still smiling, although he lowers his hand to slide two fingers around either side of our clitoral hood, pressing into the slick outer folds and bringing the pads of his fingers back along the centre so they slide, wet, against the clitoris itself. We fall back against the pillows with a choked sound, and he guides his other hand around the back of our neck so that he can keep our face tilted up at his. “You told me that you trusted the darkness inside of me—so don’t turn around and refuse to allow me to trust you, in turn.”
Hypocrite, I think, considering the fact that this could be real if he wanted it to be. It seems that you secretly agree with me, because you are choosing your words very carefully. “Lucanis,” you say, and it's sweet, considering you think this is your own dream and that this version of Lucanis isn't real, “I’ll let you trust me any time you come to me. I can promise that much, even if I struggle with the asking. Will you?”
A hand curls around our rib cage, and we take a sharp breath as he watches us intently. “Will I what?”
Come to me, you want to beg, but instead you say, “Fuck me, Lucanis.”
His next motion is tender and lazy, pulling our hips flush with his so that we lie side-by-side, and he guides our leg over his so that he can drag his hard dick through our damp folds and seal his mouth over ours, swallowing our whimper. Gods, and he was the less-experienced one when you started this, the prodigious asshole. The angle is an awful one for penetration, and we tilt our hips so he can just barely breach our opening, both bodies moving in little circles that make you and I want to scream in frustration. Even distracted by feeling the press of the coiled heat inside our body, Lucanis is pleased by our anticipation.
It's a relief when he rolls us on top of him and we can sink down on his cock at our leisure, our hips moving in little up-and-down motions as we try to catch our breath. My smoky limbs flutter through your bones as you feel like you could almost float on the sensation of being filled. It makes me hesitate about the hiding, wanting to surge through all the hollow, cracked places inside you and fill them to bursting. Lucanis has his hands on our hips, guiding us, slowing us, and he's watching our face with his chin tilted back. His eyes are soft and pleased with what he sees, and there's an upward quirk at the edges of his parted lips.
“Rook,” he says, with a pleased hum as we roll our hips, “I’d watch you move every day, if I could. On the trail, on the battlefield—” he pauses as we pull back off of his dick, anticipating us as we drive forward and he arches up to meet us in a way that makes us see sparks. “—in your bed,” he says, his voice rough and promising.
“You don't want to only watch from afar, I hope,” we say with an ironic chuckle, and I can tell when the laugh causes our inner walls to flutter around his cock, not only because his fingers clench on our hips and he squeezes his eyes shut. It feels good. “And I'm shit on the battlefield.”
His responding laugh is dark. “You keep telling our enemies that,” he says. “I like it when they're surprised.”
He sets the pace as he lifts us by the hips, giving us the leverage we need to drive ourselves back down over his slick cock, feeling the length of him inside us in a way that gets better and better with each repetition of the motion. His hands on our hips urge us downward and lift us up, setting a perfect, punishing pace that makes everything else in the world fall away. Then he adjusts his angle to the left, moving against an especially sensitive spot—
We fall forward over his chest as the wave of our orgasm crashes over us unexpectedly, and we strain to keep our eyes on Luca’s face, watching his blown pupils and rapturous expression as the aftershocks cause the muscles inside us to clench around him, and he's still so deep inside us and so gloriously filling that it makes us want to cry. “Beautiful, Rook,” he breathes, petting our hair, and we have to close our eyes and bury our face in his neck as we clench around him again and exhale fully with a great, shuddering breath.
“Oh, fuck,” we murmur, helpless and dazed as our hips keep moving in tiny, jerking motions, our perception so bright and electric that the soft sheets against our knees feels like too much texture and we can't get enough of the feeling of his skin against ours. We're hungry for him, and it's too much, and our lips and tongue press wetly against the side of his shaved throat—wrong, he doesn't trust us enough for that—and we push ourselves back up as our palms roam hungrily, aimlessly, over his chest and stomach.
He's moving faster now, the movement of his hips increasingly erratic and desperate even as we feel too off-balance to properly meet him. “Please don't stop,” he begs, his voice high and choked, and we put our hands on the bed over each of his shoulders so we can get better leverage to rut against him, but he surges up to kiss us and roll us over in one motion.
I taste blood, and I know it's his only because I’m so attuned to both of you. The connection sharpens between you in that instant, blood breaking down the barriers between realms, between selves. As he fucks into us, you can feel the glorious wet heat of our body swallowing his cock, and you can feel the perfect angle at which he's filling us, our leg hoisted over his shoulder—thank goodness for Crow flexibility.
He can feel it, too, like a circuit as you both feel what the other feels, and he cries out. A flush rises in his face as he goes tight and rigid, letting go of our leg as he spills his release into our body—and you feel your mind pulled over the edge with his.
Sensations in the body follow, and a jolt of white heat screams from our core to skate across every addled nerve ending of our being. Our fingertips and nipples and even our toes feel like they're being brushed with static. We clutch Lucanis close to our body and he clutches us back, wrapped so tight in each other that the heightened, clutching tension feels like it might never end.
There are the aftershocks, of course, as you both relax into your release. We shudder as he slips out of us, and he adjusts both our bodies so that we're sharing a pillow, pressed against each other in a lazy and sated mess.
He kisses us gently, like we're precious.
It makes you terribly sad.
“Will you stay here, until I fall asleep?” he asks, starting to realize that the dream was only a dream, but not yet awake enough that he knows there's someone nearby that he doesn't want to be vulnerable around. This is a safe place, after all, and you are safety even when he's trying to keep you apart from the danger he senses inside himself.
Whatever you have is catching. I've projected myself into an image outside Lucanis in the way that's most closely related to how he perceives me in the physical world. Only, instead of his twin, he sees me as a double image overlaid with yours. The connection between you and I allows me to bury inside you—not possessing you; nothing will ever be able to possess you again—in a way I couldn't have done with anyone else. I'm not sure what I expected to learn, but all I'm feeling now is your heartsickness.
“I'm going to try, my love,” you say, “but I think I might be waking up.”
He takes your hand and kisses the palm, and it makes us melt, but I can taste the impression of swirling fish behind a glass wall, and I know it's time for you to go.
I unravel my incorporeal hooks from inside your bones, a quick dissipation into the dream air that allows me to step back from the bed as your mirror image. You press a concerned hand to your stomach—no, to your ribs—and your mana reaches backward for me instinctively, like the grasping talon of a bird of prey. It curls around me, tasting of despair rather than any real determination to hold on, and I watch in fascination as it curls into smoke along with the rest of you.
Lucanis is dazed and comfortable. With his eyes closed, he still feels my presence in its facsimile of yours, although he's not usually so easily fooled.
Flickering to the other side of the bed, holding a particularly soft blanket that he remembers as a comfort after long days of training, I settle the fabric over my host’s naked skin. I don't have any inherent desire to run my hands all over him, not like you did, but I want him to keep us out of the prison. With you gone, I can already feel the walls start to rise.
You might not have been able to stay while Lucanis drifts, but I can. I lift myself into a seated position on the bed behind him, and he tenses, just a bit.
“Shh,” I say, gentling my voice like you would. “It's just me.”
It's not a lie, really.
The image of the ocean outside is pure darkness, almost a match for the Black City that hangs above it, and I can hear waves crashing against the barricades of our little demesne. As I run my hands in soothing strokes across Lucanis’s lengthening hair, I realize I’m wearing a nightgown that he remembers on you, its dye as dark as the shadows of Treviso. It’s the softest of linens, not the silk that he prefers, and despite what you think, it probably cost all the more for that. The simple embroidery at the sleeves, collar and hem are there mostly to feel nice against the skin, and while it’s not particularly showy, it’s more comfortable than anything you’ve owned before or since.
He bought it for you, didn't he? He wants you to be comfortable. He wants you to be happy. He wants you to be safe, far away from me or anything I might become, swimming in the darkest depths of his heart.