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Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert [ . . . ] Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

“Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

— — — 

“When did you lose it?”

Victor looked down at his prosthetic leg, unstrapped from his body but lying mostly in place. The metal toes were half-buried in beach-sand.

The day was hardly warm. Although the sun shone brightly over the two of them, it was never truly summer in Orkney, which lay always wrapped in the mists north of the Scottish mainland. But of course Victor could not feel anything below his right knee, just the phantom sense of damp sand and ocean chill.

He looked up at his Creature. His Creation.

The sun looked well on him, Victor thought. Now, more than a year after the Arctic, the Creature had come into his own: his pale, scarred skin was touched here and there with golds and pinks from the sun, and his long hair gleamed and curled around his face. When they had come to live on this small island together, Victor had searched for any possible act of penance he might offer and had soon discovered that he could help his Creation tend to his long hair, sharing his hair-oil and combing carefully through each rough tangle. (He shuddered to remember how, when his Creature’s hair had first begun to grow, he’d felt such a horror of recognition that he shaved it all off. Victor’s hair had always been one of his vanities; now the ritual of caring for his hair was one of the only vices he retained, for both he and his Creature dressed and ate and lived simply.) Today was an indulgence: in cuffed trousers and salt-stiff shirtsleeves, they had come down to the water behind their small cottage to lie on some old sailcloth and bask in the sunlight. They were no longer haunted by the constant shadow of anger, yet the fact they sprawled so easily together was no small miracle: Victor lay with his legs stretched out before him, and beside him sat his Creature, his long limbs folded up so that he could rest his chin upon his knees.

Still, there was something wary, Victor realized, about the Creature’s eyes. Not quite afraid, but sad. Hesitant.

Ah, right. The leg.

His silver leg, which lay between the two of them.

Victor turned away and dug his left hand into the sand to distract himself. How to answer without dredging up his own cruelty? In these months they’d been together, he had tried to be better, but it still hurt to speak of the past.

“You had both legs still,” the Creature continued, bluntly but not unkindly, “when you made me.”

Anyone else would have demurred, mistaking Victor’s silence for offense. But they knew each other too well, now, after these long months together. When Victor had made his apologies aboard the Horisont, he had been sure he was about to die: in fact, he still remembered the sensation of the world going dark. (He wondered if he had hallucinated the sensation of gentle lips in the darkness, pressed against his brow.) But, miraculously, he had awoken many days later, only to find that his Creature had carried him back across the ice to a place where Victor might not die from the rattling cough that now lived in his chest on cold, damp days. The violence they had done to each other lived entirely in the past, at least as far as Victor was concerned, and that meant he strove not merely for kindness but also for perfect confidence. So often he had condemned his child with falsehoods: no more. He had been given this second chance to show care and parental justice to the man he had made from bone and sinew; he would not waste it.

Victor looked back up, finding those dark eyes watching him.

“Yes,” he said. “I lost my leg after.”

“How?”

Victor took a deep breath. “The fire.”

The Creature looked away, towards the unmarred blue expanse of sea. “Fool.”

Victor nearly laughed—a rare occurrence in general, though less rare, now. They were, neither of them, mirthful, but their growing familiarity led to moments of levity nonetheless. “Very foolish of me,” he agreed. “But I would do it again.”

The Creature tensed—ready to run—and looked sharply back at him, and Victor realized with horror what he’d said.

“No, I—” he reached out to grasp his Creation’s fingers, begging from him the patience he himself had never possessed. “I regret the fire. I regret the chains I put on you. But I do not regret turning back, even though it cost me my leg.”

“You.” The Creature seemed stunned. “You turned back?”

Victor nodded. “I realized too late that I had made a hideous mistake.”

The Creature’s eyes narrowed. “Why then did you leave me, after?”

Victor traced his thumb over the long, thin bones of the Creation’s hand, hoping it was a good sign that he had been permitted this prolonged contact. “I was ashamed.”

“Of me?”

“No! Never—”

His Creation glared at him.

“—not never,” Victor admitted. “But not then; that was not why. I was ashamed of what I had done to you, and I convinced myself that you would hate me forever, if you had even survived.”

“Why were you so cruel to me, then, when I found you?”

Victor’s heart ached. He remembered his tirade about a race of devils propagated upon the earth. And he’d claimed, that night, to have found sanity: how far it had actually been from his reach. “I called you the figurehead of my madness,” he said. “But I alone was mad, then. And the thought of more children like you—when I had failed you already—was too much for me.”

“I said only that I wished for a companion,” the Creature said. “You twisted my words, Creator. You alone spoke of procreation.”

Victor felt his cheeks grow hot. “Did I?” He asked, fully aware of what he had said, and what his Creature had not.

“You did,” the Creature affirmed.

“Perhaps Elizabeth was right when she said that you were animated by a spirit purer than that of the common man.”

The Creature looked down, and for a moment Victor wondered if he’d seen a rush of red across those pale cheeks. He immediately accounted it a symptom of the grief he knew the Creature still bore for Elizabeth.

“I am—I am sorry for it,” Victor added. Apologies still felt new and strange upon his tongue, he was learning how to speak them as best he could.

“You were cruel to me,” his Creation countered. “But I have forgiven you. And I—”

Victor clasped his hand encouragingly.

“—I do not think that Elizabeth was right, precisely.”

“No?”

“There is nothing ‘pure’ about my heart, as you once said.”

Victor felt his heart drop. “You remember that?”

“I remember fragments,” the Creature said with a sigh. “Your words came back to me as I read them in books, and those words—I put it there, I made you—stayed with me more than most, I know not why.”

“I regret those words,” Victor said. “I lashed out at you from my own jealousy, and you had done nothing to deserve it.”

“Perhaps not,” his Creature said.

“Certainly not,” Victor insisted. “I was not—I am not—a good man. I coveted Elizabeth, and the love that she bore you angered me.” A year ago it would have been unimaginable that he could have spoken the words out loud, Victor thought, but grief and guilt had burned him clean and left only a painfully evident awareness of how much he had harmed everyone he’d claimed to hold dear. But he had once demanded that his Creature should live, and in return this man had saved him—what else could he do but live, himself? There was no way forward but the truth. “I am sorry that you no longer have that love,” he said, bowing his head over their joined hands. “I am sorry that I took Elizabeth from you.”

“She deserved more than your cruelty and carelessness.”

“She did.”

“And so do I.”

“You do,” Victor agreed, shivering when he felt fingers against his jaw. He allowed his Creation to tilt his face up. There was a strange expression on that piece-work face, something almost like curiosity.

“I wish I had known,” the Creation said. “What it is like to love.”

“Did you not love Elizabeth?” Victor asked, confused.

“I did,” the Creature said, running his thumb down Victor’s cheek to the corner of his lips. Victor had kept a beard most of the winter, but he had shaved it off with the first bright warmth of May, and now the skin felt tremendously tender under the pressure of that rough touch. “But that is not what I meant.”

“Oh,” Victor breathed.

“I wanted this, too,” the Creature said, as his thumb brushed over the swell of Victor’s bottom lip.

Victor felt himself aflame. “You—I can’t—”

The Creature’s face fell, and his hand dropped. “You do not feel this way.”

“No, I—” Victor squirmed. “I should not feel this way.”

“But you do?”

Victor nodded helplessly. “I made you beautiful.”

The Creature scoffed.

“You think I lie?” Victor, emboldened, poked at his Creation’s chest with one index finger. “I made you tall and fine and strong, with your dark eyes and dark curls like mine. Like my mother’s. I crafted you to be glorious.”

“No one has ever thought me beautiful, nor glorious.”

“I admit my tastes are rather singular, but I do feel that the rest of the world is simply wrong.”

His Creation was blushing now, and it made him even more handsome.

Victor curled closer, suddenly hungry. “Have you been kissed?”

The Creature shook his head.

Victor pushed his prosthetic out of the way and knelt, wincing briefly at the weight on his bad knee, then lifted both his hands to cradle his Creation’s face. “Yet you yourself have given kisses.”

The Creature shivered and frowned. “I have not.”

“You have,” Victor insisted, and stretched up to press his lips to that scarred brow. “You kissed me, here. When I thought myself dying.”

“Ah,” the Creature said. “I did.”

“Always you lead and I can only follow,” Victor mused. “My master, my son.”

His Creation moaned.

“Is that what you wish?” Victor asked. “To lead me, to master me?” The thought would have horrified him, once. Now it was thrilling.

“No.”

“No?”

“I want to be your son.”

Victor felt, suddenly, the fragile, pale skin beneath his palms. The burden of responsibility that he had tried and failed to shoulder before. “A father ought not—”

“A man ought not make life, Creator. Not as you have done.”

Unholy, an obscenity. The words echoed in Victor’s ears. “I have done you so much harm,” he murmured.

“This does not harm me,” the Creation said, dark eyes intent upon his face.

“You cannot know that,” Victor objected. “You have never—”

Then, to his shock, he felt one of his Creation’s heavy hands grasping his hip, pulling him closer, closer, closer, until he was kneeling astride one great thigh. “Please, father,” his Creation begged.

Victor felt as though a steam-engine had struck him: the guilt, the shame, the sorrow—all blended with renewed hunger and painful, sharp desire.

He could not hold back; with a groan he drew his Creation’s face down to his own and then they were kissing.

It was clumsy, and yet it was perfect also. Victor could feel those huge hands tangling in the fabric of his shirt, clutching at his lower back, while he ran his own fingers into the dark waves of his Creature’s hair, caressing and then pulling, coaxing deep groans from that long, pale throat.

Then those long fingers found the hem of his shirt and tugged. They separated so that the Creature could draw Victor’s shirt over his head.

With the sunlight glowing warm upon his bare back, Victor gazed down at the being he had made—those dark lips, half-parted on a gasp, those dark eyes heavy and hazy with pleasure, all limned in gold. It was so like that first morning, when all things were still possible, when Victor had taught his son about sunlight and pressed his cheek to his Creation’s chest to marvel at his beating heart. “Let me see you too,” he pleaded. They had been bare to each other then: they should be so again.

Together, they pulled at the shirt the Creature wore, and when he was free of it, Victor pressed his palms to the Creature’s chest.

That same strong heartbeat. “Same,” Victor breathed.

The Creature made a soft sound like a sigh broken by a moan, and wrapped his arms around Victor’s waist. Victor felt like a toy—frozen in place and moved only by some stronger force—as his Creation pressed them together.

There.

He could feel the shape of the Creation’s desire, heavy against his own inner thigh.

Mindless and mad, he rocked down to feel more. How clearly he could imagine the two of them, freed from their trousers: himself spread across his Creature’s lap, whimpering as he was taken.

But he had a different role to play here, he remembered. A different responsibility.

For so long, Victor had expected perfect maturity and knowledge from the being he had stitched together. He had failed to see the Creature for what it was: something—no, someone—new. Someone in need of a kind of guidance that Victor hadn’t known how to provide, nor cared to learn.

He still hadn’t learned, but he would have to try.

“Wait,” he said, pulling back so that he could see his Creation’s face. Those dark eyes were closed, that brow furrowed with something that was not quite pain. “Look at me.”

The Creature opened his eyes, but his brow furrowed further.

“You must tell me what you want, precisely,” Victor explained.

“I don’t—”

Victor’s heart fell. “—if you don’t want, we needn’t continue—”

“No!” The Creature held him now by the ribs. “You do not listen.”

Victor cradled his Creature’s head, using his thumb to smooth the lines of his forehead. “I will listen,” he promised. “I will listen.”

“I don’t know—what I want,” the Creature continued. “I do not know the words.”

Victor felt his heart pound. “I can teach you,” he said. “What we might do with each other.”

The Creature nodded.

“We could kiss,” Victor offered, “for as long as you like.”

“Is there—more?”

“Yes. I could touch you with my hands.” Victor caressed his Creature’s jaw. “Or I could take you in my mouth.”

“Does that not hurt?”

Victor laughed. “Not if I do it right.”

“Show me?”

Victor grinned. “Yes, yes,” he agreed, feeling slightly manic.

He rose up so as to dismount from the Creature’s proud thigh, but strong hands held him in place.

“These have to come off,” Victor explained, hands already reaching for the loose linen trousers the Creature wore.

With a sad sound, the Creature released him, and tore at the lacings of his trousers.

How eager. How badly Victor wanted to make him feel good. He could feel a connection between them, the same thrumming energy as that first morning, only he had traded his red silk bed-linens for a bit of rough sailcloth. He wished, for one fleeting moment, that he could offer his Creation—his son—something softer. (A darker part of him wished that he’d done this sooner, pushed his newly-born Creature onto the silk coverlet that very first morning, although he knew how devastating the damage that would have done, to the both of them.)

But then his Creation pushed down his trousers at last and Victor’s thoughts scattered.

It was one thing to know that he himself had made this body, touched its every part and fitted them all together. It was another thing entirely to see his Creature so painfully hard and wanting. For him.

Victor smoothed one of his hands up his Creation’s leg, and noticed absently that his fingers were trembling. “Good,” he said, as he reached the trousers and helped pull them down and off. “So good for me.”

His Creation moaned. “You said you could—touch me?”

“Yes,” Victor agreed with a smile. “Yes, I did. Would you like that?”

“Yes,” the Creature said. “Please, father.”

Victor trailed his fingers up his Creation’s thigh, across the crest of his hip, and then near to where he stood tall and aching. “You must tell me if it is to your liking,” Victor commanded. “You must tell me if I do anything you mislike.”

The Creature nodded.

Victor slid his hand down.

Oh but the sounds his Creation made. The groans, the marvellous echo of his heartbeat through his throat and through the hot, slick flesh in Victor’s hand.

“That’s it,” Victor said. “Is that good?”

The Creature made a strangled noise, and nodded fervently. “Do I—?”

“Do what feels good,” Victor said. “Tell me what feels good.”

“I think—your mouth?”

Victor thrilled. “Yes,” he agreed. “I think so too.”

His Creation looked up at him with large, dark eyes as Victor bent closer.

“Stay still for me,” Victor ordered.

His Creation was so still, so gentle, as Victor bent down began to lick along his length.

How hungry Victor was for this. He could not tease, as he had intended—instead he fitted his mouth around his Creation and swallowed him down. Above him, his Creation made a punched-out groan. Victor chased the noise, pressing down until he could feel his Creation all the way down his throat. It had been years since Victor had done this for anyone—he was pleased to discover he hadn’t lost the skill. He pressed his hand to his own neck and moaned at the sensation, feeling himself grow hard at the thought of how deeply he could take this being he had built.

Then the Creature writhed in desperation. Victor had been neglecting him: he returned to his task, allowing him to slip out to the very tip of his tongue and mouthing around the head before swallowing him down again. He found a rhythm that made his Creature’s heart beat fast, and he pushed himself down and back up, over and over.

Victor could feel, then, from the way the Creature’s legs trembled, that he was close to his end. And Victor could not bear the thought of missing that sight—he would have his Creation finish in his mouth another time, but now, at first, he needed to see.

As he pulled off, he saw that his Creature had grasped the sailcloth on which they lay, strangling the canvas with his fingers to help him stay still and obedient.

“Come for me,” Victor said, hand caressing his Creature, stroking his length. “Tell me what you need.”

“I—faster.”

Victor worked faster, and the Creature let out a moan.

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

Victor could feel tendons tightening, the helpless clench. He kept up his pace and coaxed his Creature toward the end that he knew hovered on the horizon. “So close,” he said. “You can let go, my son.”

And then his Creation was shaking and spilling over Victor’s hand, over his own stomach and thighs. Victor felt a rush of pride, watching and drawing it out until the Creature’s low noises turned high and pained with overstimulation—only then did he pull back and admire his work.

They both breathed heavily in the sunlit air, looking at each other in the silence, until the Creature shivered slightly and Victor looked around for a cloth, so that they might clean themselves.

“Was that to your liking?” Victor asked.

Hearing nothing, he turned back. His Creature lay loose-limbed, still panting.

Victor caressed his calf. “All right?”

The Creature nodded, slowly.

Victor laughed, shaky with desire and relief. “Still coming down from it?” he asked, running a teasing finger along his Creation’s ribs.

The Creature nodded again, squirming away from his finger. Victor kissed his knee in apology, and glanced up to catch a small smile on those dark lips.

“Take your time,” Victor said, recognizing at last that to demand speech at such a time was, perhaps, cruel. “I will clean you up.”

For a few long moments, all was quiet between them, just the warmth of their coupling and the sounds of the sea.

Then, his Creature spoke. His voice was still rough from moaning. “What do you desire, father?”

Victor looked up from where he was wiping clean his Creature’s pale thighs with one of their discarded shirts. “I—” He had recognized, this past year, how his desires had far too often expressed themselves in jealousy and cruelty. Immodesty. “I am fine,” he said. He would not press, not when this thing between them was so fragile and new.

To his surprise, his Creation looked wounded. “You do not want me, then.”

Victor looked up sharply. “Would I have done all this if I did not want you?” he asked, gesturing defiantly towards the mess they had made together.

“I do not know,” the Creature said, and Victor’s heart broke.

“I want you,” Victor insisted. It was important that his Creation know. “I touched you because I wanted to touch you. I wanted to have you in my mouth. I wanted to know that you had learned pleasure from me. And still I want—I am not satisfied—I want to feel you inside me, I want to be inside you. I want to take you, wreck you. But only if that is what you want.”

His Creature looked stricken. “You would—take me?”

Victor reeled. “Not if you do not wish it,” he rushed to say.

“But I do wish it,” the Creature said.

The desire rushed through him like a wave. How close together they could be, how he could open up his own Creation and put himself there, how warm and perfect it would be. But— “I cannot promise it will not hurt,” he warned, “before it feels good.”

“I can endure hurt,” the Creature said.

“I do not want to hurt you again,” Victor said, running his hand gently along his Creation’s leg and recalling the pain he had caused.

The Creature reached out one hand, as though waiting to see if Victor would permit him to pull them back together. Victor laced their fingers together and allowed himself to be drawn down into his Creation’s arms.

“If you will not shout at me,” the Creature whispered against his temple. “I will not mind the hurt.”

Victor closed his eyes. “I am so sorry,” he murmured. That his Creation allowed him this intimacy, this trust, after everything—it was beyond belief. “I will never, ever—not again. If I should shout at you again, I will throw myself into the sea and spare you the trouble of ending me, as I deserve.”

The Creature huffed out a small, bitter laugh. “I beg you not to waste my efforts in bringing you here.”

“I will try,” Victor promised, and pressed a kiss to his Creation’s chest.

“And you said—after the hurt, it will feel good.”

Victor straightened. “It will,” he vowed. “And I will do everything in my power to make it only good. Pure pleasure.”

The Creature hummed. “How?” he asked, something rich and teasing in his tone. “Tell me how, Creator.”

Victor smiled down at him, on surer footing now. “We will go slow,” he said. “And I will touch you all the while, to distract you. And I will open you upon my fingers, with—”

Oh, but Victor had miscalculated—in cleaning up his Creature’s spend, he had left himself nothing with which to prepare the way. Except—

“Come here,” Victor commanded, pulling gently at his Creation’s legs so that he might lie down flat, with Victor’s long-discarded coat pooled beneath his back to lift his hips. “If you want this, there is something I must do to make you ready.”

The Creature blushed, but obeyed, settling with his long legs splayed.

Victor lay down between them. “You should put your hands in my hair,” he suggested, remembering how much he had wished for that when he had taken his Creature in his mouth. “So that I will know what you like.”

“Yes, father,” the Creature said, and his voice was low and dark and pleased.

Victor hummed, trailing kisses down those strong thighs. When the Creature’s legs threatened to close around him, he pressed them gently down to the sail-cloth with an apologetic kiss to the inside of one knee.

“You must give me room, so that I may work.”

The Creature groaned, but obeyed.

Victor kissed down the length of him again—a reward for his patience—then brought his mouth to his Creature’s entrance.

At the first touch of his tongue, his Creation’s fingers tightened painfully in his hair.

Victor glanced up. “Should I stop?”

“Do not stop,” the Creature begged. “Please.”

“Please always helps,” Victor smirked, stroking the tender skin before returning his tongue to its prior task.

It was as diverting as taking the Creature’s length, Victor thought, if not more: his Creation was so hot, here. His racing heartbeat thrummed against Victor’s lips as he kissed messily, teasing his tongue over the Creature’s rim. Slowly, slowly, Victor found a pattern of kisses and licks that picked away at the tension of that tender place, and then he was able to fit in his tongue—at first alone, then alongside a gentle finger. Then back to the rim as one finger became two. His focus narrowed inward until he lost track of everything but the task before him, and the distant feeling of his Creation gently stroking his hair.

By the time he had fit in four fingers, Victor could feel that the sunlight had shifted slightly, and his knees were aching. But it was well worth it for the soft, hot clutch around his hand, and—when he looked up—the look of pure, dazed pleasure on his Creation’s face.

“No hurt?”

The Creature shook his head.

Victor carefully drew out his fingers. “Good?”

“Very,” his Creature replied, and one of those large hands slid down to cradle his jaw.

When his thumb touched Victor’s lips, he rubbed at the spit still there, and Victor gasped to feel how bruised his mouth felt, how tender. He thought of how wet and open he had made his Creation and could hold himself back no longer.

“Ready?”

“Yes.”

Yet when he tried to shift forward, Victor found two obstacles in his way: first, his own trousers were still on, somehow. Worse, his bad knee could no longer hold his weight. He fell back with a frustrated sigh.

“What troubles you?” The Creature’s voice was full of concern.

Victor scrubbed a hand over his face. “My leg,” he admitted. “I cannot kneel any longer.”

“Does it pain you?”

“Hardly more than normal,” Victor frowned. “But I cannot take you as I intended.”

The Creature hummed. “Is there no other way?”

Victor remembered his earlier vision of himself, spread across his Creature’s lap, and a new image pressed upon his mind: the two of them, in the same pose, but the roles reversed. His own Creature, open and needy atop him. The angles were clumsier, but the idea was just as affecting.

Another way, indeed.

“Brilliant,” he breathed, taking up his Creature’s hand and pressing a kiss to one wrist. “Help me with these?” He gestured at his trousers.

Between the two of them, it was the work of a moment even with Victor’s bad leg, and then they were fully bare to each other. Victor had never in his life cared for modesty, but this was still so new that he shivered. He reached out to grasp his Creation’s fingers again.

“Come here,” he begged, and gentled his beautiful Creature onto his thighs. “This way has another advantage—you may go as slow as you wish. I will hold myself up as you settle, and try not to move until you instruct me.”

The Creature’s lovely, dark mouth twisted. “But how will I know if it is good for you?”

“Anything you do will be good for me,” Victor promised, hoping his Creature could hear the hunger in his voice. “I am mad for want of you—can you not see that?”

The Creature glanced down. “Well.”

Victor snorted, and wrapped a hand around himself. “You have said you want this,” he teased. “And you know that I want you. Why delay?”

The Creature groaned, and kissed him, quick but hungry, then rose up on his knees. He seemed not to know what to do with his hands. “Where should I—?”

“Here,” Victor said. “Hands on my shoulders.”

His Creation’s hands settled on his shoulders, each heavy as a brand.

Victor grasped the sharp curve of his Creation’s hip-bone. “There,” he said. “Now—wherever you are ready.”

“I am well ready,” the Creature said, defiant, and sank down upon Victor’s lap, far faster than Victor had dreamed.

The rush of sensation tore a whimper from Victor’s throat and he mouthed helplessly at his Creation’s chest. Everything was soft heat and slick warmth. “Good God,” Victor swore. He tightened his hand at the base of his own length to fight against his impending end, and panted until he had calmed enough to risk opening his eyes.

When at last he did, Victor looked up. His Creation was frozen atop him, sunlight gleaming gold around his dark hair like a halo, his dark lips parted on a gasp.

“Beautiful,” Victor breathed out, and his Creation opened his eyes.

“Truly?” There was a heartbreaking note of uncertainty in that deep voice.

“Of course you are,” Victor laughed in delight, and shifted them slightly so that he might put both of his hands on his Creature’s hips. “Too fast by far, and beautiful beyond words.”

A red blush rose high in the Creature’s cheeks. “You lie.”

“Never—”

“—you lie—”

“—not about this,” Victor said firmly.

“And yet it does not hurt, as you said it would.”

“I warned that it might,” Victor protested, though he could not help being pleased that his patience and his fingers had paid off. “I am happy to be proven wrong.”

“I feel so full,” his Creature said.

Victor grinned. “That is the idea.”

“I need more.”

Victor tightened his grasp on his Creation’s hips. “If you’re certain?”

“Yes.”

Victor bucked up, and tugged his Creation down in the same moment, setting a harsh cry loose from that lovely, scarred throat.

“More,” the Creation begged. “More, father.”

Victor moaned, thrusting up into his Creation. “Always,” he promised.

He ran a questing finger down to feel when he had entered his Creation. The soft skin was stretched taught, but not worrisomely so—Victor pressed gently, and the Creature keened.

“I want to ruin you,” Victor said, the confession slipping out of him. He reached up to touch his Creature’s chin. “I want to be so deep in you that you feel it forever.”

“I already do,” the Creature said.

Victor’s heart cracked, and he pulled his Creation’s face down to his own. “My beautiful boy,” he whispered against the Creature’s lips, in between ragged kisses. “My son, my son, my son.”

“Yours,” the Creature said, pressing down to kiss him deeper. This pushed the last of Victor’s length into him, and both of them groaned. The Creation rose again, and sank down, and Victor wrapped him in his arms and held on for dear life.

“You’ll make me finish in you,” he warned. “If you continue.”

“Good,” the Creature said with a dark grin. “You wanted to fill me? Do it.”

Victor nearly growled, biting at his Creation’s mouth. “I will,” he vowed, and put all his remaining strength into matching the Creature’s pace.

The Creature began breathing shakily—each exhale a sharp gasp—and Victor sank down to gnaw instead at the neck producing these miraculous noises. How well this throat would fit around him, he thought—perhaps someday he’d earn that privilege.

For now, he needed to feel that voice vibrating under his lips. “Will you—”

The Creature opened his eyes, still trembling and strung-out and close as he pressed his hips eagerly down onto Victor. “What?”

Victor swallowed. “Will you say my name?”

The Creature’s fingers tightened against Victor’s ribs, and his movements slowed.

Victor stopped, mouth open to apologize.

But his Creation stopped his mouth with a near-painful kiss, all teeth and hunger, and then their rhythm was back, that soft heat all around him and he thought he might cry at how badly he wanted it and—

“Victor.”

Then he was weeping in earnest, and fucking up desperately into his beautiful, beautiful Creation, and he could feel the moment when the Creature above him tightened and spilled between them, and the sudden clench drove him sobbing to his own end.

When at last Victor could feel his limbs again—or, well, most of them—he smudged a weary kiss to his Creature’s heaving chest. They were totally entwined; Victor was no longer totally sure where he ended and his Creature began. They breathed together, shifting silently through little aftershocks of pleasure.

Gradually, other sensations broke through: a twinge of pain in his bad knee, a drip of spend on his thigh, and—worst—a chill breeze that set the Creature in his arms shivering.

Victor pulled away far enough to grab his own discarded coat and drape it around the Creature’s shoulders. “Better?” he asked, allowing his hands to linger at his Creature’s fine neck, his delicate collar-bone.

The Creature nodded, though the coat was too small to cover his broad chest.

Victor laughed, feeling the chill himself across his back, and the press of rough sailcloth beneath him. “Of all places for your first time.”

“I am used to this,” the Creature said with a shrug. “The cold, the sand.”

“You should not have to be!” Victor insisted. “We must have a bed, next time.”

“Next time?”

Victor felt a knot in his stomach. “If you wish it,” he said, cursing himself for his presumption.

But the look on his Creature’s face was only surprise and curiosity, not distaste. “I did not know what this might mean,” he said in that low, lovely voice. “I know not how such things are done.”

“It matters little to me how such things are done,” Victor said as he greedily ran his fingers over a scar upon his Creation’s jaw. “I care only what you wish, and what I wish, and how I may do right by you.”

“And you would wish to—have me, again?” The Creature’s voice faltered, but his hands rose up to caress Victor’s waist.

“If it pleases you, I would never stop having you,” Victor said, and cradled his Creature’s face within his hands. “I should be clear—you are everything left to me: all my family, all my love, all my life. I am yours.”

“Then we are much the same,” his Creation said, with the ghost of a smile.

Victor kissed that pale, scarred brow. “It seems we are, my son,” he replied, the words half-lost in a kiss.

“It seems we are.”