Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

“Oh for god’s sake,” Blake said, rubbing his forehead with his hand. “There’s no need to go around the room—we all know who it’s going to have to be. It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

“Is it?” Vila said. “I mean, there’s such a thing as actors. We could stop in at a casting agency. What do you think a random dom goes for? The standard day rate, if there is one? We could say it was performance art! There’d have to be hazard pay, and I’m not sure we could depend on him or her not to shop you in exchange for a part in the next Sexton Rogue viz or what have you, but—”

“Shut up, Vila,” Jenna and Avon both said at the same time. Even Gan said, “Vila,” in a chiding tone.

Blake tried not to grimace. Clearly they not only all knew who he was going to have to ask to aid him in the necessary deception, they also all knew, supposing the man he'd have to ask did agree, how incredibly awkward it was going to be for the two of them once they were down on the planet. In pretending not to know, Vila was using prattle to disguise the elephant in the room. Blake wasn’t sure why he was bothering, given that they were going to have to face up to said elephant eventually, whatever happened. In fact, they were going to have to do it right now.

“So,” Blake said, carefully, still not looking at the man it was going to have to be, “I suppose the question is, will you do it?”

Arrcul was an early Federation colony, and rigidly old-fashioned: sumptuary laws regarding subs dressing in traditional dom fashions, people glaring at a sub with the effrontery to walk alone in the street, the lot. All of this was part of a particularly nasty, global system of social and political controls—the Federation and the dynamarchy going, naturally, hand in hand: structures of repression mutually reinforcing one another. The planet’s resistance movement was consequently well-developed, and particularly concerned with sub rights.

This emphasis set them apart from most other resistance movements, and between that and the planet's remote position, the Arrcul contingent had developed in isolation and maintained its distance from other factions for some time. But the Arrcul cell had, at last, reached out with the intention of forging connections with interplanetary rebel networks. They wanted to start that process by speaking to someone from the outside who they recognized and trusted. Someone important enough to broker the deals involved. Arrcul’s rebels also wanted to negotiate with another sub, which cut out most of the loosely coalesced rebellion’s key figures. In fact the members of the Arrcul cell were particularly keen to deal with the man who had, it seemed, made them think other rebel factions might have something to say to them after all: one Roj Blake.

Dynamicism being what it was, even on the Left most of the people in leadership positions were dominants. There were, however, a few exceptions to this trend: Avalon, for example, as well as the late Bran Foster. And, naturally, Blake. Blake’s notoriety in rebel circles (in part bolstered by the Federation’s attempts to quash his Terran popularity with a very public show trial and associated propaganda) and the fact that he apparently had the technology to get in and out of the system without detection had led the Arrcul contingent to get in contact with intermediaries and pass along rumors of their willingness to talk. Blake had jumped at the chance and made the arrangements. He understood and was rather sympathetic to the Arrcul group’s political framing, as well as to their distrust of doms, given their environment. He didn’t think of his own politics as predicated on his being a sub (they were involved with that aspect of his identity, certainly, but not founded on it—that wasn’t Why He Was Against the Administration, in any simplistic sense) any more than he thought of his personality in that light, but he did understand.

Given Arrcul’s mores, Blake would stick out like a sore thumb if he checked into a hotel unaccompanied. He knew very well that he wasn’t even eítedunamous. The way he sought others’ company and agreement (brusquely, but he had the habit of coalition), how important it was to him to convince people, the ‘don’t you think so?’ pitch his voice could take, his open and approachable body language, his easy slouching posture, his nervous habits, his adaptable and responsive way of reacting to things and his underlying conviction that the universe ought to be fair and kind, to him and to everyone—his moral entitlement, his well-developed expectation (in spite of everything he had personally endured at the Federation’s hands) that he could ultimately depend on others for support and benevolent indulgence born of their good natures—all gave him away, all revealed him for what he was. As did, probably, a thousand things he didn’t even see, and thus couldn’t have begun to disguise. Everyone performed their dynamic a little differently, in a way unique to them—but everyone raised in a human culture did perform it. And given that, like almost everyone, Blake was possessed of an immediately discernable dynamic, which people read as easily as they did his gender, on a planet like Arrcul he'd need an appropriate escort: someone who could credibly pretend to be his dom. Preferably, someone who was actually a dom—since a host of subtle signals gave one’s dynamic away, passing was the sort of thing actors got awards for, not the sort of thing you casually asked someone to bluff.

Pickings on the Liberator were slim. Vila was a sub, and incurably het besides: he was right out. Cally registered as distinctly alien, and thus drew attention to herself that they couldn’t afford to draw in this setting (and for her part, Cally didn’t even think of herself in terms of dynamics). Jenna was a switch, and while you couldn’t always tell, sometimes you could. Arrcul also maintained a strong traditionalist prejudice against switches (which was another source of complaint for the local resistance). Gan was a top, but Gan could barely deceive a child in a game of peek-a-boo. He was innately honest, and when he even tried to omit information, his face scrunched up like he didn’t think any of this was a very good idea. If anyone so much as asked ‘Is this your sub?’, the ruse was doomed.

Which left, naturally, the ship’s only other actual top. The man Blake was still carefully not looking at, just now. The man who would have to pretend to be Blake’s dom for the course of the negotiations on Arrcul, assuming he agreed to do it—and he might well not, given both the personal nature of the request and the fact that he had offered Blake resistance ranging from token to mutinous regarding a good many of the things Blake had asked him to do since they’d boarded the Liberator together a year ago.

The human population consisted of roughly 40% dominants, 18% switches (the portion was perpetually a matter of debate, as were subsidiary questions regarding whether switch behavior was the same as switch identity), 2% neutrals and 40% submissives. Even given that 40% top ratio, Kerr Avon stuck out. He wasn’t dom, he was a Dom. A Top. One of those people clearly very comfortable being what he was, at least in this capacity: someone whose dynamic wasn’t incidental to them, but a marked and important part of their identity. So much so that he could probably play switch and feel not even a shred of anxiety about it.

It had taken Avon not a day of being off the prison ship London and free of its uniform restrictions to start wearing copious amounts of leather, and the degree to which wanting situations to be controlled (and specifically under his control, if at all possible) was an organic, pervasive and inextricable component of Avon’s thinking was obvious. Inexperienced subs tripped over their own feet in an effort to throw themselves at him: Vila and Gan had come back laughing gently about the priestess Meegat.

“You ought to have a collar,” Avon said after a moment, which Blake supposed was the argument about whether Avon would go through with this charade, mercifully condensed. Blake wondered why Avon wasn’t feeling up to supplying his usual standard of aggressive debate about Blake’s plans, but chose not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

“All right,” Blake agreed.

“I expect it is a provision sort of planet,” Avon added. “I’ll pick something out for you to wear. We’ll be less conspicuous if it looks as though I’ve dressed you.”

It was on the tip of Blake’s tongue to say something defensive about his body and his clothing choices and doing what he damned well pleased with both (because surely that had been a passing jab at his own ‘conspicuous’ wardrobe—he knew he didn’t take the care with his appearance Avon did, because he had other priorities, thank you very much), but he opted against offering a rejoinder. He did have other priorities, and so he ought not to let an insult about something he didn’t care enough to change affect him.

Besides, Avon was being remarkably subdued today, which made lashing out at him feel cruel and pointless. He was also right: paired doms and subs often actually matched in settings like this. Avon would probably be tasteful and stop at selecting outfits that complemented whatever he was going to wear. And he probably wouldn’t dress Blake up in something ridiculous and embarrassing just to amuse himself. He’d probably only think about it.

“All right,” Blake said again, tightly.

He was going to have to be better about this, and he knew it. The whole situation got under Blake’s skin. It wasn’t Avon. It wasn’t even the things they got up to on Arrcul, in and of themselves. Provided they were consensual (and not inconvenient, controlling, atavistic nonsense like forced escorting), Blake actually found some old-fashioned dynamic gestures... appealing. Even sweet. Blake was a person, and a sub, as well as a political agitator, after all, and he actually had a relatively strong traditionalist streak. Though he wouldn’t have admitted it out loud or sober for the world, he even liked some of the more on-the-face-of-it ridiculous dynamic acts, like doms hand-feeding their subs. (Or rather, he liked the idea of them. Doms and switches he’d been with had tended to assume Roj Blake wanted a more egalitarian relationship than that. In a lot of key ways, they were right—though it did mean Blake hadn’t quite flexed himself as a sub in all the ways he might have wanted to.)

For all it seemed impossible right now, Blake wanted to be collared, someday, by someone he genuinely loved and respected—someone who understood what submission was and wasn’t, who in turn respected the spaces where Blake exerted a kind of leadership that, by its nature, couldn’t infringe on their personal exchange of power. Someone who could flow between deferring and assuming and sharing control gracefully, as their lives demanded. Someone who it was, on a personal level, a pleasure and a profound release to submit to. To depend upon.

But at present the idea was ridiculous and impossible. Though Blake had never been ashamed of what he was, right now even the thought of the exposure and physical and emotional vulnerability involved in submission felt pathetic and disgusting and terrifying to him—made Blake’s skin crawl.

He hadn’t been raped or sexually abused in prison: he remembered that much. That wasn’t the problem. The problem lay more in that he had been tortured, and had his independence, power of discrimination, sense of self, and sense of physical and emotional safety stripped from him. All of that made Blake wary and brittle about submission’s demands.

Under the mindwipe he’d occasionally had sex with short-term partners. Federation triggers had kept him from forming the sort of long-term associations that might lead to people asking him about his time in the Freedom Party, or that might lead to newly-acquired friends and loved ones noticing how deeply not-all-right Blake was. The submission involved in these brief, perfunctory exchanges had felt unsatisfying: like nothing. All the fight had already been knocked out of Blake, and he’d spent his days in a drugged, listless haze. How could he have given anyone himself, even for a short while, in a way that might have touched him or mattered? He hadn’t had himself to give. Blake didn’t retrospectively consider these encounters rape, but without his temporary-doms having knowingly participated in anything of the kind, he did consider what little sex he’d had over the last five years to have been only dubiously consensual. He hadn’t been sufficiently in his right mind to agree to anything, and a filmy haze of creeping unease and disgust now lacquered over memories that hadn’t exactly been golden to begin with.

And so it was difficult for Blake not to feel anxious and uncomfortable about the prospect of pretending to be a collared sub—Avon’s collared sub—for the days it’d take him to deal with the Arrcul contingent. It was going to be difficult to pretend to be bound to Avon, whose consistently unsympathetic behavior towards Blake indicated that Avon literally didn’t think Blake was fit to lick his boots.

No, that wasn’t fair. He and Avon were often at odds, but they were friends. Blake liked and relied on Avon, respected his intelligence and trusted him with his life. As much trouble as Avon could be, if Blake had to do this, he wouldn’t have wanted to go through it with anyone else, even if there had been anyone else to choose from. Avon had just also made it quite clear over the course of the last year that he wanted to be doing something like this even less than Blake did.

It’s only what, a week? Blake told himself. And it’s just acting. You’ve pretended to be a Federation trooper to get into secure compounds; you can certainly walk around wearing a damn necklace if it’s necessary. And clearly it is.

“Arrcul, then,” Blake said with decision. Avon was apparently willing to do his bit. The rebels there needed Blake as a contact, and he’d have done far more uncomfortable things than this to facilitate them.

Jenna nodded, setting the coordinates. “Two days,” she said, answering the implied question.

***

Two days later, Avon was still trying to decide whether this was the best thing that had happened to him in a long while or the worst. Having to make a decision that ridiculous was the sort of problem that had really only entered Avon’s life with Blake. Somehow his picaresque misadventures on the Liberator made even getting arrested and exiled, which Avon had managed all on his own, look comparatively tame and manageable. Avon supposed that in the course of his time with Blake, rather than losing control, he’d become more experienced, more competent, and generally more capable of handling dangerous and complicated situations—that he’d thus actually gained control. Things he’d barely have coped with two years ago Avon now hardly considered problems worth mentioning. It just didn’t feel as though this were true, because his life now regularly presented him with greater challenges—Blake himself being chief among these.

Blake, who was even now coming into the teleport bay wearing the loose cream shirt and black tailcoat, trousers and boots Avon had picked out for him to complement his own rather formal black leather suit. God, it was difficult to bear.

Avon had opted for something very dom and quite conservative himself: Arrcul was, according to the databanks, a world of restrained aesthetic sensibilities as well as regressive politics. Blake’s slightly more romantic costume looked—well. Of course Avon thought it looked good. It was, after all, what he’d picked for Blake to wear. But it was also appropriate; it would help with the plan.

A sharp twist of lust worked through Avon, and he quirked his lip. It was no use patiently explaining to his body that he hadn’t dressed his sub, who’d obediently come to Avon ready to go out in the clothes Avon had chosen, looking appealing enough to take in them, just to please Avon. But he could, at least, control himself enough to keep Blake from realizing the effect he had.

Avon had refrained from offering Blake a collar in the pile of clothes he’d selected for him. He’d felt that would have been taking a liberty: tantamount to picking out a costume wedding ring for Blake to wear. Not to mention making himself bloody obvious, which he was trying not to do, given that Blake seemed totally disinterested in submitting to anyone right now, for reasons Avon privately deeply sympathized with.

Avon was at once relieved and annoyed that Blake had managed to find a simple, thick, black velvet band in the wardrobe room, and to fit and fasten it himself, without help. If Blake had asked Avon to help him close the thing, Avon didn’t know if he could have kept his hands steady—and did know that he couldn’t have helped himself from getting off to the memory of collaring Blake afterwards. He wanted to have watched the whole process, he wanted his hands to have been the ones gently wrapping around Blake’s neck. He just also knew it wasn’t a particularly good idea.

But even though he knew that, Avon still wasn’t able to stop wetting his lips subtly as he imagined what must have happened.

How had Blake selected it? Was this the sort of collar Blake would actually want, or had he chosen it carelessly? Perhaps he hadn’t wanted to muddy the waters between a charade like this and his actual desires. And then there was the image of Blake’s strong hands draping the fabric around his neck; his thumb stroking the pile over his jugular; his fingers easing the tip through a buckle, perhaps fumbling with the fastener, which Avon felt was tantamount to playing with himself—it was certainly as provocative as the idea of Blake wrapping his hands around his own cock. The collar was so blatant: the proof that this scene or something like it had occurred was right there, for anyone to see. And when they saw it, they would all think Avon had done that—as they were intended to. Avon hauled his mind off the topic with an effort.

“Are they all right?” Avon asked, nodding to Blake’s kitbag, which contained Blake’s clothes for the week. He’d tried to choose carefully—to bear in mind the mission’s probable demands, to pack flattering things that wouldn’t insult Blake.

What is this? Avon had asked himself as he did it, slightly disgusted with himself. Some kind of hideously awkward love-letter? ‘If you were mine I’d take such good care of you—did you notice I didn’t need to ask your size? Of course I didn’t—I watch you constantly. And I’m good, Blake. I’m a good dom. You’d like what I’d do to you. You’d love it.’ Fat fucking chance. Why did you ask to give him this? It’s not sex but it’s sexual, if screamingly traditionalist, and you both know it. ‘Looking the part’ indeed. You’re lucky he didn’t just look at you and see right through that.

“Mm, fine, thanks,” Blake said, taking Avon’s pack from beside the desk—there was a point. Avon supposed that on a world like this, an accompanied dom might well not carry his own things. “Especially considering that you might have made me feel my disadvantage considerably more than you have done.”

Blake’s smile softened the words, and Avon quelled the ridiculous little sliver of pleasure he felt at having made his sub feel comfortable and taken care of and happy. Blake was not anyone’s sub, and Blake most especially was not his.

It was at times difficult for Avon to remember and to act in accordance with this fact. Once Amagon pirates had temporarily taken the Liberator. They had then put the entire crew in eminently practical control collars. Avon had felt the insult, but it wasn’t until he’d been forced to watch a pirate do the same to an unconscious Blake that he’d thought, I am going to kill that man, and I am going to enjoy doing it. And so he had, when they’d escaped. Though not until after Vila had taken ages fiddling with the thing around Blake’s neck; something that had frustrated Avon to the point that he’d found himself brutally kicking the door he was trying to unlock.

“Steady, Avon,” Blake had said in his calmest ‘We’re all in the same boat’ tone (Avon hoped for their sakes that no one else in the room actually was in his particular boat—he’d push them out and leave them to drown). Avon had felt both patronized and reassured. When Blake bothered to calm him down, Avon sulked fretfully under his touch, but often did subside. And oh, he hated how Blake could mollify him—hated that a good many of their arguments could probably have been routed by a ‘yes, dear’ from Blake. He tried to resist consolation, but it was hard to stay furious when Blake deigned to give him one of his natural, flattering little conversational submissions.

He’d also remained sufficiently agitated that, if the others hadn’t been there, and if he and Blake hadn’t stood to lose their lives if he couldn’t make himself focus, he’d have given up all caution and self-protection and tried to claw the control collar off Blake’s neck with his bare hands while begging to fuck the man. But since that hadn’t been an option, Avon had taken a deep breath, given Blake a poisonous glare, and gotten back to work.

Actually Blake was, in general, restrained by other people far too often for Avon’s taste. All in the course of revolutionary business, naturally. Still, it was inconvenient, it made Avon jealous, and it could leave him with a spectacularly ill-timed erection. And why did it have to be ropes so much of the time? Avon liked restraint in general (classic, elegant, secure—what was not to love?), but shibari was one of his particular favorites. Avon had always understood that life wasn’t fair: he didn’t feel he benefited from regular illustrations to that effect. (He did, however, manifestly benefit from such illustrations in another respect—every time someone tied Blake up where Avon could see it, he couldn’t help drinking the image in, and couldn’t help coming hard to it the next time he touched himself.)

Fortunately, provided they were careful, nothing of the kind seemed likely to happen on Arrcul; he would just have to pretend, for the benefit of others, that he was tying Blake up at night. Which was more than hideous enough, given that he wasn’t.

The two of them teleported down somewhere unfrequented and made their way to the luxurious hotel where they were due to meet their contact. The receptionist spoke to Avon rather than to the both of them. Avon didn’t have to turn to see it, he could feel Blake’s ‘I’m being quiet because it wouldn’t be useful to say anything’ expression.

If they had been lovers, he’d have brushed Blake’s hand under the counter, where no one could see the gesture, to communicate silent empathy. Blake took it in stride when someone treated him dismissively because of what he was. Blake bore that kind of thing with a mild disdain born of experience and absolute self-assurance, but the incidents always annoyed Avon. It was the sort of blind, stupid prejudice he had no time for. In this case, it also gave the submission Avon would have liked Blake to give him an ugly, cheap cast. As though Blake were submissive to any passer-by, rather than someone whose submission was valuable, a thing that ought to be courted and won—that had to be allowed by Blake himself to even begin to have meaning.

But they weren’t lovers, and so instead Avon used his hands to sign the registry with a specific false name, as Blake had instructed him to in the briefing.

Avon was slightly pleased when a bellhop took their kitbags off Blake, who had, it seemed, been right to carry the bags thus far. Judging by the activity in the lobby, Arrcul did indeed seem the sort of world where, by and large, subs performed that kind of task. That wasn’t really Avon’s thinking on this point—it would have made him more comfortable to carry both bags himself, as a gesture of care for his submissive (which, of course, Blake wasn’t).

They made their way to the bank of lifts. Avon was observant and curious by nature, and he automatically took in and processed a great deal of information. He glanced over at the hotel restaurant as they walked. Formal dining of a sort no longer practiced on Earth: leashes trailing elegantly from every single one of the subs’ collars. A pretty girl in a gold gown had a gold chain dangling from the center of the slender gold collar around her neck. She was playing with the chain in her hand: running it through her fingers, clearly flirting with her partner. An elderly couple—something in the way they sat here suggested that they’d been coming to this restaurant for years; suggested a kind of matured, steady devotion—were chatting between courses. The dom, speaking very seriously to her sub, gripped the tail end of the sub’s leash between both hands, as if to say that the sub was still desired, still special. There were five gold rings on this particular sub’s collar—some people did that for anniversaries (though Avon didn’t find them aesthetic—he preferred the smooth, unbroken line of the collar, with its suggestion of unbroken continuity). Fifty years, then.

“I suppose you think that sort of thing’s medieval,” Avon said rather coldly (to avoid saying it at all wistfully) as the lift door sighed closed on the two of them, the bellhop having taken a service lift.

“Obviously,” Blake answered back. “I’m all for a revolution without dancing. By all means, let’s rip away people’s personal choice to suit my sense of fanatical, puritan morality.”

“Well, it’s hardly your scene,” Avon sneered. Blake’s hostility always shot Avon’s mood to hell, made him desperate to fight and win. He wanted—unrealistically, he knew—for Blake to always understand when he didn’t mean a comment, and for Blake’s default attitude towards him to be accommodating. He wanted Blake to like him, far better than he knew he deserved.

“What, luxury hotels?” Blake muttered. “All right, Avon, yes. I think we should question norms like leashed dining. How can anything be personal, or valuable, or freely chosen if it’s rote and coerced? What’s the point of any of this if the people involved don’t choose it? Oh, I know there’ll always be an element of social programming involved—how could there not be? And I’m sure a lot of people doing that sort of thing love doing it. I’m sure a lot of them love each other, too. But wouldn’t it mean more if you knew they were there and doing it because, for whatever reason, they all wanted to be?”

Avon thought that was true, actually. A rather good way of putting it. It seemed natural, now that Avon thought about it, that Blake would understand how difficult it was to reduce people to theoretical formulas. Obvious, that Blake would know the ways weeds could grow up though cracks in the pavement—how people expanded to fill the spaces they were given, and made meaningful things out of nothing, out of garbage, on unsure foundations. Blake, after all, had faith in people, and considered the lives of everyone living under the Federation worth making better. Blake’s own past was a shipwreck. And still he went on sailing, and even loved the sea.

Avon considered mentioning the elderly couple, to illustrate something he was finding difficult to articulate about the dining room scene. But he didn’t, because there was a strong chance it would come out very like ‘I want to love you like that’. Which was, after all, what it was—and nothing Blake needed to hear at present. Avon jerked slightly as the lift shifted over to its horizontal axis, bearing it right. His eyes automatically flicked to Blake—who was well-balanced, and fine—in case Blake needed his support.

“Anyway, thanks for assuming I’m actually a propaganda-film villain,” Blake said after a moment’s silence.

Avon felt his mouth twist unpleasantly. He knew just the sort of thing Blake meant—something out of the adventures of Sexton Rogue, the dashing, dominant and dim Space Commander, who, over the course of a score of films aimed at children and idiots generally, foiled the plots of sniveling sub saboteurs while giving his blonde sub secretary a sound spank in passing and spouting inane patriotic catchphrases about the glory of the Federation . What Blake was implying Avon thought of him was perfectly clear. What suddenly also became clear was that some of these villains were probably directly informed by Blake: a pop-culture attempt at discrediting and undermining the popularity of the last decade’s major Terran opposition leader without ever having to name names. Avon thought these depictions were certainly going to be wildly inaccurate and offensive (but he was nonetheless suddenly more interested in them than he ever had been or ever thought he could be in a Sexton Rogue viz).

Even so, Avon thought this was a fairly awful thing to say of him, and that he hadn’t quite deserved it. Trust Blake to deflect his own anxiety about submission by assuming the worst of Avon in a conversation. But the thought reminded Avon that Blake had legitimate reason to feel anxious.

Oh, leave him alone, Avon thought, suddenly just sad about the circles he ran himself in when it came to Blake. Blake, he reminded himself, has never asked for anything more than your technical assistance in exchange for saving you from death on Cygnus Alpha. He told you that you could leave, right there at the start, and you didn’t, did you? You wanted your share of the ship, you wanted him. Well he never asked for you to be in love with him, and he hardly deserves your sulking and snapping at him because he doesn’t want you to whip out a spreader bar and play with him until he screams and feels better.

“I don’t,” Avon said shortly.

“Don’t what?” Blake snapped back.

“I do not assume the worst of you,” Avon corrected him, keeping his voice neutral.

Blake snorted. “Well, you could have fooled me.”

Yes, Avon thought, his mouth twisting, I suppose I could.

The lift doors opened on Floor 97, right section 4b.

They scanned the hall, trying to find their suite. Blake spotted the relevant sign and tilted his head in the right direction. Avon nodded and followed.

As they walked, Blake’s hand strayed to his collar. He rubbed his fingers under it as though it were tight. It didn’t look it.

Avon swallowed. “Stop playing with it,” he said under his breath. The hall wasn’t entirely empty. “People will think something’s wrong.” For his part, Avon was simultaneously annoyed that Blake was restless under the pretended mark of his ownership and far too interested in watching Blake worry the thing.

Blake sighed and dropped his hand. “I haven’t worn one for a while.”

No, Avon supposed he wouldn’t have done. Subs often wore them temporarily for scenes, but Avon was almost certain Blake hadn’t done so in that context since he’d boarded the Liberator. Outside of their Amagon adventure, Blake’s last time under a collar would have been with the standard demeaning plain-cloth sub markers of a prison uniform. Before that, it would have been when he was having sex without knowing who he was. And before that, Blake would have worn a collar as part of the course of conditioning that had made him forget who he was: it would have been a prop meant to make him feel owned by his utterly disinterested interrogator. None of that was liable to make Blake react favorably to being collared.

Avon felt a stab of protectiveness and scraped the resulting flicker of reaction off his face. No good thinking that it was tragic. No use further thinking that someone ought to take their time with Blake: to help him feel comfortable with this part of himself again. Whole.

Blake, after all, did not want Avon. Blake did not trust Avon enough to submit to him. And that was probably a wise judgment on Blake’s part. Avon didn’t know that he ought to be trusted. After all, Anna had trusted him, and he hadn’t been able to protect her when it had mattered.

Interrogation was supposed to be especially difficult for subs: it used their instincts against them, and it often left them with strained relationships with their own desires. Avon had initially seen a similarity between Blake and Anna in terms of their experiences. Anna’s death under interrogation was a nightmare that haunted Avon; not only had he lost the woman he loved, but it had happened in a way that showed him to be, in his own eyes, ultimately a failure as a dominant, a man, and a person. The thought of what had happened tormented him. And he knew that if he ever saw an opportunity for revenge, he’d take it. How, then, could he not, at least quietly, pity Blake his similar private hell?

It hadn’t taken Avon long to understand that similarity he’d noted between the two submissives extended not just to the experiences others had put them through, but also to some of their personality characteristics. Though nothing like all—Blake was unique, highly distinct from anyone else Avon had ever met. They’d shared a deceptive (to Avon, intriguing) combination of strength and vulnerability. He would admit to admiring them for that—to finding it alluring. They’d both been confident, and had shared a certain dedication to achieving their ends. People in general had found either of them difficult to stop watching. But where Anna had been sly, Blake was gently mocking. Where Anna had been cautious, Blake was certain. Where Anna had been guarded and private, Blake was achingly open, and drew people into his orbit (oh he had a certain privacy, too, but you could almost miss it, if you weren’t careful). Where Anna had made Avon think hard about their risks and advantages, Blake made him think hard about how a thing was to be done, and why. They’d both, in their quite different ways, made Avon feel both uncertain and terribly powerful.

After he’d reckoned with that, Avon proved quicker on the uptake. It had only taken him a few weeks of knowing Blake to understand that, in part, he thought Blake and Anna were similar because he had been in love with Anna, and he was now in love with Blake. He thought he had been, probably, since Blake had snarled at him to “Open the door” of the London’s computer section in order to protect other people, and had then added, in that exact same furious tone, “please”.

Avon hadn’t understood this exchange as sexual at the time: he’d been caught up in responding to the demands of the moment (Blake thrived on reacting to dynamic situations, where Avon preferred to come in with a plan and to execute it flawlessly, if at all possible). But he’d responded to Blake. It had registered. And then when Avon had considered the exchange in retrospect, he’d thought, my god—who wouldn’t want a sub like that? Oh, Blake unintentionally seduced him in polite, sophisticated ways as well, but Blake also knifed straight through his brain and stuck in the core of his desires—maybe his soul, if Avon had one. He probably always would do.  

They found their room and keyed in. The bellhop was already there, unloading their things. “Would you like me to unpack these, sir?” he asked Avon.

“No, thank you,” Blake cut in, smiling wryly at the way the bellhop blinked with surprise at having been answered by the other sub in the room. Blake sprawled casually on the bed, further scandalizing the man.

“We’ll handle it. You are dismissed,” Avon said, amused himself.

“You wanted to draw attention to yourself, did you?” Avon tsked when the bellhop had gone.

“I know,” Blake admitted with a groan. “I just half expected him to pull out—Wait a moment.” He hopped off the bed, crouched on the ground, and flipped up the bed skirt. “Oh, there we are,” he said, voice thick with sarcasm. Gingerly, Avon knelt beside him.

“A pallet bed,” Blake said grimly. “Avon, how fascinating—we’ve time-traveled.”

Having one’s sub sleep beneath one like that, not quite good enough for the mattress, was out of fashion on Earth, though plenty of people still had their sub sleep in a different bed for the sake of discipline. Avon couldn’t see himself denying a sub his bed unless his sub had deeply angered or hurt him—but of course he knew that would look like (would be) pique on his part, and could only work as a punishment if the sub valued his good opinion and his company enough to feel the insult.

But the suite they’d been given, with two bedrooms and a bath, had probably been fitted out with that sort of separate-beds arrangement in mind, with the pallet left as an option for guests with even more traditionalist leanings. In a way, though, even as he thought it was disrespectful, Avon also thought the pallet in some ways a little more romantic than keeping distinct beds. There your sub would be, tucked under you, where they’d feel protected. They might look up at you for reassurance. They wouldn’t be a room away. And you could drop your hand and stroke them in the night.

“Did you notice all the staff we’ve seen thus far have been subs?” Blake said thoughtfully, dropping the bed skirt again.

“Yes,” Avon agreed, running the last quarter of an hour back over in his head. That was odd. A high percentage would be, even on a really liberal world, but not all.

“I expect our contact will be one of the maids here, or something of the kind,” Blake said, standing and offering Avon a hand to pull him up. “Maybe someone assigned to this section. That’s probably why they directed us to this hotel. A private place to meet, and somewhere they know well. Somewhere they were confident was totally unbugged, and where they could keep an eye on us, in case we weren’t who we claimed to be. The contact will probably have booked the reservation, and they can check the registry for the name we used.”

“Sound enough,” Avon said, sitting down on the bed, reclining as Blake had done. “How long are we to wait for the initial meeting?”

“They didn’t say.” Blake shook his head, bringing his hand to his mouth. “Probably working around a shift-schedule. And we couldn’t give them an exact ETA either, given the heavy air traffic.”

Blake began restlessly poking around in the built-in wardrobes. Avon turned on his side to watch him, content to let Blake do their investigating for them at present. Blake’s eyebrow went up as he riffled through a drawer. “The rebels are certainly trying to be hospitable—between the décor and the extras, I think they’ve booked us a honeymoon training suite.”

“Oh?” Avon asked evenly, even as he watched Blake pick up, fiddle with and drop some wrapped, sanitized package. His attention brought to bear on the suggestion, Avon noticed the sturdy wooden rings discretely located on the sides of the bed he occupied, closed his eyes for a moment, and opened them again, composed. He knew he’d opened them too soon, however, when Blake flicked back what had looked like the door of another floor-to-ceiling shelving unit and revealed a sturdily rigged, built-in St. Andrews’ cross.

Absently Blake played with a clasp. Still holding it, he turned around to face Avon. The light from the windows caught in his hair and on the sliver of his bare, smooth chest exposed by the slightly open neck of his shirt. A hint of a smile played on Blake’s lips, and he looked so handsome in the clothes Avon had picked for him.

Avon thought this was beyond what he could reasonably be expected to put up with. He opened his mouth to say something properly awful so Blake would leave him alone for a few hours, until he was needed again (oh, Avon really tried not to cathect how Blake needed him). That, Avon thought grimly, would give him time to recover his equanimity. Perhaps he'd try thinking very hard about Arrcul’s trade relations.

“Like in Chevalier Noir,” Blake said, his rich voice sounding amused.

Avon raised an eyebrow at him. The name was vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t immediately place it.

“Didn’t your parents read you fairy tales?” Blake asked. “Chevalier Noir gets cast out of his homeland, then wanders the world and has a series of adventures. At one point he comes upon a ruined castle, with its whole host of knights slaughtered.”

Warning bells began to ring in Avon’s mind at this juncture.

“And in the dungeon of the castle, tied up on a saltire—”

“—he finds Prince Belle-Etoile,” Avon finished for him. “Which is, I think you’ll find, the title, given that Belle-Etoile is, after all, the main character.”

Though it had taken him some time to work out what they were talking about, Avon was embarrassingly familiar with this story. His mother had read him rather a lot of fairy tales as a small child, but this was one of the ones he’d asked for again and again. The story (one of the particularly literary French sort, drawing less on folk tales than on the Romance tradition) dwelt at length on Belle-Etoile’s trials: his bravery in battle and in suffering, the love his soldiers and people bore him, his strong and comely body. The black knight (Avon hadn’t remembered the name the story had given him—the knight’s misadventures had never been of more than passing interest) had arrived to save the beleaguered Belle-Etoile and marry him. When Avon had gone in at ten for the standard dynamics spectrum test (administered to check whether you were developing and emerging normally) and come up roaringly dom, his mother had rolled her eyes and said ‘Really’ in a tone that indicated she could not possibly have been less surprised.

There had been one particularly interesting illustration in the collection that had held Avon’s copy of the story. In it, the handsome submissive prince, abandoned and bereft of all support, had been chained on a saltire affixed to a dungeon wall. When his mother had gone to bed, Avon had drawn the datapad under the covers, clicked the light on, and stared at the illustration, trying to memorize every detail. He’d traced the figure’s glinting curls with small fingertips. He’d wanted, without knowing what or how he wanted: without needing, then, even to fully understand what it was he ached for. Belle-Etoile had worn an expression of steadfast courage on his face, and, Avon was embarrassed to realize, something not entirely unlike the outfit he’d put Blake in today.

Blake laughed a little, surprised. “Avon, Chevalier is obviously the protagonist. That is why so much of the story is about his sad life and his noble deeds and his ‘hair black as a raven’s wing’. You spend far more time with him.”

“More time with him?” Avon sneered. “Belle-Etoile is the core of the story. He gives it meaning. He’s the cause of the inciting incident and the motivation for the quest, and he is the finale. There isn’t a fairy tale without him. That is why the story is named after him.”

“He’s a sort of—forfeit!” Blake protested. “A prize, a narrative reward—and he doesn’t do anything except get captured!”

“Anyone can get captured,” Avon said defensively. “You’re quite good at it yourself.”

“Exactly my point,” Blake said, evidently not noticing the way Avon had bitten his lip after realizing his error of judgment there. “He could be literally anyone—even I can get captured on a regular basis without working at it. And I’m sure you’re wrong about the title.”

“Well I’m sure I’m not. Who would name a story after an idiot who got exiled through his own stupidity?” Avon shot back. “If your precious Chevalier hadn’t shot Belle-Etoile’s mother’s falcon—”

“That was a tragic error. Oh my god, Avon, you really don’t understand—” Blake made an explosive and sweeping hand-gesture, “literature, do you?”

Avon burst out laughing at Blake’s expression of wounded magisterial dignity, and Blake smiled again despite himself.

“I’m going to change,” Blake said, which Avon understood to be a polite euphemism for ‘go into the bathroom to take this collar off’.

“Keep it with you,” he reminded Blake. “You’ll need it if anyone knocks.”

Blake grunted an agreement as he left.

“There’re a couple of games in my bag, since we need to kill time,” Blake said on returning, his neck bare again. “If you wouldn’t rather read.”

“All right,” Avon said, quashing the urge to praise Blake’s thoughtfulness.

Sometimes he couldn’t see how Blake would sub for him at all—it seemed so impossibly unlikely that wondering about it was about practical as contemplating what the Peaches of Immortality might taste like. But sometimes he thought he knew how it might look, how it might feel to have Blake, and knowing twisted in his stomach. When the two of them had come into the lobby, casually observed by the people therein, Avon had felt a flutter of power and eroticism. Blake had, after all, been at his side, marked as his—and everyone had seen it. Avon knew he’d be disgustingly proud if it were true. He had been, even though it wasn’t.

So they played Avon’s favorite over-complicated card game, and Blake won, and then Avon worked as hard as he ever had at this to absolutely trounce Blake on the next round.

I wish you were my forfeit, he thought as Blake held up his hands in amused surrender. I wish you were my prize. You couldn’t be just anyone; I don’t want anyone but you.

***

A knock, and Avon averted his eyes while Blake refastened the collar. He got up from the bed they’d been playing cards on and walked to the door, only to feel Blake’s hand on his elbow. Blake shook his head, silently mouthing ‘Me’, and Avon realized that answering the door was probably a sub act here, even though it was the dom these people all seemed to want to speak to. He rolled his eyes and stepped back, noticing (his throat suddenly bone-dry) that Blake was still fumbling with the catch at the back of his neck. Then disaster struck—in Blake’s haste, he actually managed to break off the prong of the buckle.

“Shit,” Blake hissed, freezing.

“Oh, let me,” Avon whispered impatiently, doing it for him with a knot in an instant, practiced fingers securing it a little higher than Blake had it, a touch tighter—the fit better overall, even though the collar had been designed to be used with the buckle.

“Thanks,” Blake whispered back, getting the door, even as Avon watched his neck avidly.

He’d tied that. Until Blake took it off, it was his collar Blake was wearing. Technically, he now—

Avon swallowed. Blake had not agreed to a transfer of ownership, so it was just the symbol of the thing, not the semantic content. A signifier with no signified. But even so. Avon didn’t know whether to bless or curse his own opportunistic nature. He did know that he was quite glad his leather tunic was particularly good at concealing erections, or at least the beginnings thereof. For god’s sake stop staring at it, Avon had to tell himself emphatically.

“Those extra pillows you asked for, sir,” a small, young girl said, coming in. Her eyes flicked to the door, and Blake, taking her meaning, closed it behind her.

“Oh my god,” she said, staring at him, dropping the pillows on the bed unceremoniously in a heap. “It’s you! Just like in the banned speech-clips!”

“Probably more three-dimensional,” Blake said with a laugh. “I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage?”

“Gosh, I wish,” she said with a grin, joking but bright-eyed, and Blake blinked, apparently realizing at the same moment as Avon did that she was switch, passing as sub.

“Oh,” her gaze flickered to Avon, who had glared at her presumption without even thinking about it, “I was just—I mean, no offense, I, um—god it’s just always such a relief to be with people I don’t have to worry about it with, I go giddy. I’m Iri Jun. Oh, we’ve so much to go over. Here, help me shake out the pillows—”

Blake didn’t seem to think it was worth pointing out to the Arrcul rebels that he and Avon weren’t actually a couple, and that they were just playing at being one to avoid looking suspicious. That was practical enough, Avon thought (knowing just how he’d have hated it if Blake had dismissed him like that, disclaimed him before others). Iri was nervous as it was, and it wasn’t relevant.

A collection of papers and commercial datapads fell out with the cushions as Blake and Iri shook them.

“What are you doing about data security?” Blake asked, eying the pile with a slight frown.

“Yeah,” the girl said with a nod. “We were sort of—hoping to ask you about that. We don’t have any people. I mean we have people who can code but like, no one with any cryptography training. I mean, at all.”

Blake gave Avon a wry look. Avon scooped up the datapads. He started fiddling with the first, then frowned.

“What is this?” he asked.

“Oh, um,” the girl swallowed. “Well. We used the standard pass-code security?”

“The standard codes. Like you would do with an office computer?” Avon said after a moment.

“Yeah, because that’s something,” Iri said with a nod.

Avon looked to god for consolation or answers. Finding none, he said,

“When we meet your people, I want everyone who can code. I am going to slowly and carefully explain to them how to bang rocks together to create fire. A four digit—” Avon breathed deeply to center himself. “God help us all.”

Iri sat with Blake for the next two hours, with Avon looking over the pads she’d brought and occasionally offering comments on the discussion. Iri had been carefully briefed by her cell, and proved a decent communicator of their stances and needs. There was going to be a meeting the following night focused on sub-rights, and another meeting more dedicated to anti-Federation agitation the next day. Avon could have his coders then, if he liked? They’d see how it went from there.

Iri had a lot of questions she’d been given to ask him, and Blake, saying with a grin that he was glad they were at least taking notes in a cipher, gave her a great deal of information to take back to her lot—noting where they’d have to follow up, because he was withholding anything very sensitive for her superiors.

Iri impulsively hugged him on leaving, saying they were so glad he’d come.

“God, that’s a hell of a life,” Blake said after she’d gone, and Avon realized he was thinking about Iri Jun’s passing. “I can see why she does it here, and years of practice have certainly made her more competent at it than I could be—but even so.”

Blake dropped onto the bed with a long sigh, evidently drained by her youthful enthusiasm and the intense conference.

“I suppose I’m taking the other bedroom,” Avon said wryly.

“What a good supposition,” Blake muttered into the pillow. “You really are as clever as they say, Avon.”

Just going to fall asleep in his clothes, it seemed. Avon thought he probably did that most nights. If only Blake had someone to properly care for him, since he apparently couldn’t or wouldn’t care for himself—

Avon knew that while part of his desire to dom Blake into the ground certainly was predicated on wanted to come while sinking his nails into those broad shoulders, another part of it was actually altruistic. Blake was tired and stressed, today and every day: he needed looking after. He had done for years. Avon hated the thought of Blake’s four years under the mindwipe for a host of reasons, but not least among them was that Blake had casually implied one night, after a few drinks, that while he was like that a handful of anonymous, mediocre practitioners had worked him over without knowing or giving a damn about him. It felt, to Avon, like such a violation—it felt so wholly inadequate.

It must have been so long since Blake had been given what he needed. The only subspace Blake had seen of late was of the astronomical variety, of course. But besides that, how long had it been since anyone told the man Avon loved that he was special, or precious, or that they needed him? It genuinely had to have been years since Blake had heard or said an honest 'I love you'. He could hardly even have been touched with familiar affection in years, except for the casual way people occasionally expressed friendship on the Liberator—the same way that child had hugged him. Subs needed more than that; people needed more than that.

Blake ought to find a good temporary dom. Avon was absolutely sure there had to be some caring, socialist sex workers who'd bend over backwards for the Roj Blake (or rather, in this case, bend the Roj Blake over backwards and fuck him better). Avon had thought it several times before, but naturally he despised this idea and had never voiced it, even indirectly (Vila carried naturally, and was Avon's preferred means of passing on information without directly labeling its source).

Avon told himself that not voicing this thought (despite how he generally considered it his duty to bring up the unpleasant things Blake needed to consider) wasn’t a betrayal of Blake. After all, Blake had to know his options. He wasn’t a child. Besides, what Blake really needed was someone to handle him properly—not professionally or temporarily, but someone to take care of him (own him, Avon’s mind supplied—he didn't like his mind much). But it was perfectly clear that Blake was unwilling to embrace that kind of vulnerability at present.

In a way, Avon wished Blake were a top. He’d have easily, gladly submitted to Blake, or taken it in turns, as a way to have him. That wasn’t where his orientation naturally fell, but he knew submitting for a Blake who wanted him would be exquisite. That would have either side-stepped the problems that arose from Blake’s experiences under conditioning, or, if these had still existed, would have gone some way to restoring Blake’s relationship with his body. Blake thought he didn’t need to have or care about having sex at present, but Avon felt that decision was based on Blake’s having had years’ worth of what sounded like awful, inadvertently exploitative sex. Blake was letting the people who’d wronged him take this away from him as well, and he was hurting himself in doing it.

But it was, of course, Blake’s decision. And Blake would have to find someone he wanted to open up to, in order to fix any of this. Someone who’d make it decent and safe for him. Someone who cared about him. And since Avon knew that Blake wasn’t compelled by affection or desire to open up to him in that manner, knew that he didn’t make Blake feel that safe, he’d try not to kill whoever did. Or he’d run, unable to bear watching somebody else making Blake whole and happy.

“Goodnight,” Avon said, realizing when that met with no response that Blake was already asleep. So, he was willing to be that vulnerable in Avon’s presence, at least. Avon didn’t touch him, but he did look at Blake’s still face for a moment, and he did toss the blanket from the suite’s couch over him. Blake had gone to sleep on top of the covers like an idiot, and he’d probably get cold in the night.

***

The next day’s meeting did not start well.

“The thing is,” Levall, the summit’s organizer, began, “I’m afraid a lot of the people interested in sub rights have personal reason to be.” He glanced at Avon, who was standing slightly behind Blake in the lobby of the building where the gathering was taking place.

“Ah,” Blake said, his eyes clouding.

This sentence delicately conveyed a whole history of the problems prevalent on Arrcul. Some of these people were probably even still with the doms that had made them unmistakably aware their rights as people were being violated: unable to leave because of stigma or finances or children, or treacherous ties of affection that still bound them to people who didn’t respect the whole host of differences between use and abuse. Some of them had probably had to concoct elaborate excuses in order to be able to come here tonight. Many of them would have very good reasons not to trust a dom.

“I could wait here,” Avon offered, getting it too.

“If necessary,” Blake said, unsurprised but glad Avon had understood the problem and made the offer. You could always count on a core of decency in Avon—Blake knew he depended on it often. It was the right thing to say, and certainly the right thing to do, but selfishly Blake wished he could have had Avon with him.

It was always difficult, dealing with people’s pain. You had to, and it was worth doing: perhaps the thing most worth doing in the world. But even so, empathy was work, and it tugged everything out of you. These people would want to know what other rebel factions were doing about issues like forced impregnation, abortion rights, control collars, off-brand mindwipe style conditioning that was essentially Federation torture performed by amateurs, cellular unbranding and slave contracts. Blake cherished few illusions here: he was going to look at these people and know that some of them were speaking from personal experience.

Avon was always informed; Blake had never not found him a useful man to have around. But more than that, he was steady. This wasn’t going to be an easy night, and if there was a way to do it, Blake wanted civilized Avon’s detachment and measured logic in the face of an often cruel, illogical, uncivilized world. He wanted Avon’s support.

“Levall, I can go in alone, but would it help, would people accept it, if Avon did something to show he wasn’t a threat?”

Levall blinked. “What’d you have in mind?”

“Excuse us for a moment,” Blake said to Levall. He drew Avon aside.

“My idea is a bit—” Blake bit his lip, then looked Avon directly in the face. “Look I know it’s personal, and possibly somewhat—edominating, but I think that if they saw me tie something ‘round your neck, like a pauper’s collar, they might well take it. It’s good theatre. It would show them, clearly, that you didn’t mean them any harm. It’s asking a lot, I know.”

Avon regarded him, evidently feeling something he wasn’t inclined to express. Blake felt tense. A lot of doms wouldn’t allow anything of the kind, even for pointed display like this. It could be considered a kink practice, though obviously this was an exigency of the moment.

“All right,” Avon said after a moment. “If they’ll accept that, then I will.”

Blake exhaled and felt himself beaming. “Thank you, Av’n, that’s another I owe you. Levall—?”

Blake explained the plan, and Levall looked surprised and impressed. “I’ll run it by them,” he said, disappearing into the other room. He came out with a favorable response. “You can do it right here—we’ll just prop the door open.”

Levall crowd-sourced a bit of string and Blake took it in hand.

“I’ll try not to touch your neck more than necessary,” Blake offered.

Avon gave him half a smile. “I don’t mind if you do. In for a penny.”

Avon turned, offering Blake his back, and Blake thought he might be closing his eyes. His thumb scraped the soft nape of Avon’s neck (catching the light swirl of fine hair that covered Avon’s pale skin) as he tied off the knot.

“Sorry,” Blake murmured. “Is it too tight?”

Avon shook his head slightly. “It should really be tighter. As you should know. You have been collared at some point, haven’t you?”

Blake shook his head in return as he retied the string, then realized Avon couldn’t see him doing it. “Really collared? No. Only for scenes.”

“Ah.”

“I really am grateful,” Blake said quietly, dropping his head close to Avon’s as he finished. “You’re very good to oblige me. I know a lot of doms would be too insecure to even consider it. Is that better?”

Avon’s breathing was slightly off. Blake wondered if he’d put too much pressure on Avon’s windpipe this time, or if Avon was far more uncomfortable with this than he was letting on. That’d be very like him—to insist on pushing through his objections, if he thought they were irrational or beneath him. He didn’t like to show weakness—he seemed to hate doing it in front of Blake especially.

“Yes, it’s much better,” Avon said. “Though for future reference, don’t tie a collar with a granny knot. I’m sure I look ridiculous.”

“Well,” Blake laughed and stepped away, “not to me. But I bow to your expertise.”

Avon cleared his throat. “Well. Shall we?”

Reassured that a dom who’d let himself be publicly collared by his sub, at the sub’s request, to help that sub in his work, must be:

1. very, very taken, and thus probably uninterested in sexually harassing any of them, and
2. disinclined to uncontrolled aggression,

the crowd at the door parted for them without murmur.

Thus began an hours’-long session of discussion. Sure enough, cellular unbranding came up within the first ten minutes, and Avon happened to know something Blake didn’t about the latest research on the topic (the information was restricted on Arrcul—the rebels here hardly knew the state of the field, let alone its incipient developments). And sure enough, some people cried at various points, and at various points Blake felt like doing it himself. But there was Avon, sharp and focused and critical and grounded (and keeping his voice quieter and softer than it usually was, and being careful not to interrupt Blake, so that the frayed people in the room didn’t feel threatened unnecessarily). With Avon there, Blake knew who he was and what he was doing all this for. And nothing, not even the several reminders of his own violation by the state, was overwhelming and hopeless if he had Avon with him.

At one point someone said to him, with a sad half-smile and a glance at Avon, “you’re lucky.”

“I know I am,” he’d said, not wanting to disillusion her. She looked as though she’d had enough of that already. Besides, it was broadly true. She thought that maybe there were doms you could trust in the world. And so there were. And he had been lucky in finding Avon—extraordinarily so. Lucky to stumble across someone with Avon’s skills, and luckier still to find, on a prison ship of all places, someone who combined those skills with Avon’s strong and fundamentally sound character. Blake had known that from the start.

They stayed late to answer a bevy of final questions and to make some arrangements for the next day, and that meant they slipped past the curfew civilians lived under here. Everyone knew how dangerous this was—in fact, Blake and Avon had just heard reports of how autocratic the Federation troops stationed on Arrcul could be about curfew violations. Said troops seemed to thrive like weeds on the climate’s dynamism. But the others seemed to consider finishing up these conversations worth the risk, and so Blake felt he could hardly do anything else.

Rather than draw attention to themselves by departing in a flock, the rebels left in ones or twos (bad enough that they were walking without dominant escorts—they’d keep to the backstreets, to less populated routes). Blake had slipped out ahead of Avon, and had walked without paying sufficient attention to his surroundings—too distracted by the draining events of the evening, on-edge in a way that blunted his awareness rather than increased it.

The trooper saw Blake round a corner first, seemingly alone, and barked an order for Blake to stop. Blake obeyed mostly out of sheer surprise, because for once in his life, he wasn’t doing anything.

Blake was told to raise his hands, and he did so, knowing as he complied that he was raising them away from the gun that, as a supposedly law-abiding citizen, he wasn’t supposed to have. The trooper probably didn’t recognize him—information about the Liberator was heavily restricted. Rebels followed it avidly, while the general population, including the lower rungs of the military, didn’t generally look at what they weren’t supposed to see.

That meant that this was a routine piece of harassment. Blake couldn’t afford to draw attention to the Arrcul cell by advertising his presence on the planet. They were in no shape to resist a raid right now.

“He’s with me,” Avon said, having turned the corner in time to see Blake freeze.

Blake saw that Avon’s hand was discreetly tightening on the hilt of his concealed gun (there was a thought, Blake prayed this idiot didn’t pat either of them down). Minutely, Blake shook his head. They couldn’t afford to kill anyone unless they absolutely had to. There would be questions. Suspicion. The Federation would follow this up and track the killers’ movements. They might well find the meeting place Blake and Avon had left fifteen minutes ago, which might lead to layers and layers of problems for the resisters.

He saw Avon’s jaw tighten. Avon was following him, but he wasn’t happy. Well, neither was Blake.

“Well you’re both in trouble then, aren’t you?” the trooper sneered. God, Blake hated the fucking tone they took.

The trooper glanced at Avon, who had, thank god, remembered to take off the bit of string around his neck as they’d left the hall. Blake had been amused to note how Avon had shoved it in his pocket like he might use it for something later. A slight thing like that would have looked more than a little conspicuous on him, out in the street in a place like this.

“This yours, then?” the trooper asked, prodding Blake with his patrol club.

“Oh yes, he is,” Avon said, and Blake blessed him for not missing a beat, and for deliberately stressing the personal pronoun. “Let’s make this simple. You seem a simple man. We are Alpha, we have well-placed friends, your badge number is JH-9876, and we are going home now. You can, if you wish, give us a verbal warning. Goodnight, officer.”

Blake wondered if Avon had made the right call, antagonizing the man like that, but felt a flicker of pride in him as, with an unpleasant smile, Avon stared the trooper down.

“No offense meant,” the man grumbled. The way he paused to look Blake up and down, the way he did it to dig at Avon, as though Blake was hardly human or worth bothering with, made Blake’s stomach turn.

If Blake had been alone, he was fairly sure he knew what the trooper would be at least trying to do to him at present. Just because he was powerful. Just because he was bored. Just because, to him, Blake wasn’t quite a person. And Blake would be weighing whether or not to let him, because his dignity wasn’t worth the safety of those people, wasn’t worth hobbling the movement they were building with a major set-back like that.

He also had a dire suspicion he knew what his decision would have to have been. The grim set of Avon’s eyes showed he knew it too.

“Start walking,” Avon muttered under his breath. “Come on—” Avon cut himself off abruptly to avoid using Blake’s too-famous name. 

The streets suddenly felt hostile, and there was nothing Blake wanted to talk about. It was nothing. Things like this didn’t mean anything. They shook you up and they passed and they weren’t a comment on you. They were, if anything, a reason to keep doing what he did. An affirmation. He would walk on past this like he got up after every other challenge to his person and his work. He acted as though they were nothing, because they couldn’t be allowed to be anything. He wasn’t frightened or hurt, not by any of it. Or if he was, it wouldn’t change anything, and it did not matter.

Fuck.

They barely spoke until they were back in the suite. Avon had murmured an occasional ‘This way’ as he remembered the route, and he’d asked “Do you want anything?” off-handedly as they passed a food distribution store (open late, Blake supposed, to serve workers with nightshift passes).

“What?” Blake had snapped. “No,” he’d recovered himself. “I’m fine.”

Having regained the suite, Avon slammed the door to the bathroom closed behind him. Blake sat down on the bed. He could hear the water running, and then he heard it stop. Avon came out looking like he’d splashed some on his face and then carefully toweled it off.

“Are you all right?” Avon asked, his tone abrupt.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Blake asked aggressively.

Avon narrowed his eyes and chose not to respond to that.

***

Avon ordered enough food for both of them (things he knew Blake liked, when Blake didn’t choose to weigh in on the decision); Blake didn’t bother to touch any of it. They’d had lunch hours ago, Avon was starving. Blake must need something. He was quiet, too—uncharacteristically so.

“Stop thinking about it,” Avon said sharply. “That encounter, or today’s meeting, or tomorrow’s, or whatever it is. You’re too tightly wound to do anything useful, so just—stop.”

“I’m not going to be able to sleep, either,” Blake said after a moment, bringing up a hand to massage his face. He was half-slumped on the table, sitting across from Avon. “And I absolutely have to, to get through tomorrow credibly. I suppose I should drug myself.” He exhaled, slowly. “But I really don’t want to.”

He didn’t need to say why he found the idea particularly repellant in order for Avon to comprehend his reasons.

“Blake,” Avon said after a moment, slowly, “believe me, I understand why you don’t seek out this sort of thing, but perhaps you would be less tense if you submitted to someone.”

Blake tensed, and began in a tone of withering sarcasm, “What, like—?”

He cut himself off. He’d obviously been about to say ‘like that trooper’, but he’d stopped himself, perhaps feeling that was defensive and unfair.

“Nothing like,” Avon said quietly.

“I know,” Blake said, breathing out.

“I of course meant—something entirely free of those associations. Something you chose, that you would do for yourself. It is, after all, a biological imperative—”

Blake gave a short, barking laugh. “Oh, I’d contest that to the grave.”

“Well,” Avon amended himself, “nonetheless it is common knowledge that subs suffer psychologically from not exercising their dynamic compulsion. As, of course, do doms.”

“Common as muck,” Blake said. “Sorry,” he said belatedly, seeming to realize that, awful mood or no, he was being insulting. “Perhaps there is something in that, and believe me I’m not uninterested—but I’m not going to a stranger. I had enough of that under the mindwipe.”

Avon rose, taking a few steps to stand behind Blake. He dropped a hand on Blake’s shoulder, using his thumb to rub circles on the jacket he’d picked out for Blake today. Hunter green. ‘My favorite color,’ Blake had commented casually that morning as he’d pulled it on. Avon had resisted the urge to say ‘I know, you idiot’, and ‘It flatters you’, and a hundred other things.

“Why should it be a stranger?” he asked, keeping his voice under control.

Blake stiffened in surprise. “Avon?”

“You’re frazzled,” Avon said. “And as you said, you need to stop thinking, and then to sleep. If you could trust me, just this once—”

Blake snorted, and Avon felt his heart stop, and then abruptly hammer back to life when Blake said,

“Oh, I’ve always trusted you, from the very beginning, but it’s a big favor. I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable asking you to—”

“You are not asking,” Avon said. “I’m offering. Well?”

“You’re right—by implication. It’s been a very long time,” Blake said. He grimaced as though he were embarrassed. “I haven’t been—interested in being with anyone like that for quite a while. But,” Blake considered, “if it was you, if it was someone I already knew I could rely on—I think you’re right. It probably would be good for me.” Blake started to look distinctly more focused and attentive as he thought it over. “Actually, it’s really not a bad idea, is it? It’s been a while for you too. You must be feeling the strain.” He gave Avon a companionable smile. “Common knowledge.”

Oh god, Avon thought, still reeling from that casual declaration of trust—that vast, graceful, natural submission—and the implication that he was about to be allowed to fuck Blake. Here Blake was, practically thanking him for doing him a service.

“It seems a shame to waste the honeymoon suite,” Avon managed, thinking absurd things about how he’d do anything not to betray Blake’s trust. Absolutely anything.

“Any provisos?” he asked. “Other than that you obviously are not up to anything—particularly strenuous, at present.”

“Carte blanche.” Blake shrugged. “I said I trusted you.”

Fuck.

“Though I don’t actually like humiliation or anything excretory,” Blake said.

“No,” Avon said, clenching both his hands around Blake’s shoulders. “Neither do I, as it happens. Safeword? I insist on that. Even if we aren’t doing anything likely to cause you to invoke it.” Avon wouldn’t insult Blake by offering him weak dominance. He would plan something that thoroughly satisfied his own desires, but he didn’t intend to do anything likely to trigger Blake’s anxiety. After all, Blake might respond poorly to having any sex again. Blake might think the better of doing this with him.

“I don’t really have a set one,” Blake said. “Let’s try ‘torque’.”

Avon frowned. “As in—the measure of force?”

Blake laughed at that. “No—my family’s Celtic. It’s a very old-fashioned, Celtic kind of a collar. It’s relevant and I’ll remember it, which makes it a good, clear ‘uncollar’ signal. When do you want to start?”

Avon swallowed where Blake couldn’t see. “Right now. If we’re agreed?”

Blake nodded.

“Say it,” Avon gave his first command, testing the waters, feeling a thrill chase its way through his bones, through the fingers he clenched slightly tighter on Blake’s shoulders.

“Yes, Avon,” Blake said after a moment, and Avon bit his lip and tried to steady himself. He would need control for this. He was an experienced dom, not an undisciplined adolescent. That this was Blake, and that he wanted Blake in a way that eclipsed his control, was no excuse. It was, in fact, all the more reason to do this properly.

“You retied your collar this morning, didn’t you?” Avon said, drawing a finger up slowly to slip it under the velvet strap. The knot was all wrong—he knew he wouldn’t have tied it like that, even in a hurry. Blake had fallen asleep in Avon’s well-fitted, comfortable collar, and had spent the night his. But he must have taken it off to shower, afterwards.

“Yes, I did,” Blake said, even as Avon slipped the shoddy knot loose. He bent to kiss the neck he exposed almost tentatively. So that was what Blake tasted like.

Hands trembling slightly, Avon smoothed the fabric and tied a far better knot. He slipped around to admire the effect, and drew a sharp breath. Blake in an outfit he’d selected, in a collar he’d tied, looking up at him with patient, fond expectation—his pupils slightly dilated, his whole posture distinctly interested. Avon leaned in and shuddered into Blake’s neck, his lips pressing against the collar.

“Oh Blake,” he breathed, knowing he could say anything in a scene, and that it wouldn’t be held to his account. He ran a hand through Blake’s hair and pulled up to kiss him deeply, cradling Blake’s head in his hands. Blake was slightly hesitant—he couldn’t have kissed anyone in a long while—but then he closed his eyes and kissed back, melting into it as though it were a pleasure do so. When Blake got going he was enthusiastically accommodating, and when Avon wrapped a hand around his neck and squeezed, just slightly, he moaned into Avon’s mouth.

Avon pulled back, breathing hard, and said “Bed” by way of command, neatening his mussed hair as he watched Blake sit.

Buying himself time to attain a fraction more self-possession, he resumed his own chair at the table, taking up his glass of wine. He enjoyed the thick twist of tension in his stomach as he drank from it. Letting control come to him, building with the steady thrum of his arousal, concomitant with it.

“Undress for me,” he said, watching carefully as Blake did it. Not a striptease, but not embarrassed by him looking either. Casual and confident, as though he did this for Avon all the time. God, Blake was fuckable—everything about him, everything he did was just right.

“That’s very good,” Avon said as he finished. “Now lie down.”

Blake complied, closing his eyes, and Avon crossed the room. Reaching the bed, he stroked a path up Blake’s leg, over his hip and up his torso, watching Blake’s breathing hitch as he did it. Blake was obviously quite responsive—it made him even more of a pleasure to touch.

Avon went to the cabinet Blake had explored the previous day and pulled out the short lengths of silk rope he’d expected to find there. While there, he plotted the next stages of activity and picked up what he would need.

“So patient,” he said to Blake upon returning, placing a bell on the side of the bed but muffling the clapper in his hand, so that Blake, with his eyes closed, couldn’t tell he’d set it down. Seeing it would have blunted the edge of Blake’s anticipation; would have compromised the totality of his unknowing, prelapsarian surrender to whatever Avon was going to do to him.

“It must be difficult for you—you are not a patient person. No, I’m not insulting you,” he said mildly when Blake opened one eye to give Avon a look. “I am, in fact, commending you on mastering your instincts. But not entirely—you’re doing well, but you’re too quiet.”

“You want me to talk?” Blake said, seeming a little surprised. “That’s a change.”

Avon smirked at that. “When I don’t want you to talk, I’ll gag you,” he said matter-of-factly, tying Blake’s wrists and ankles to the sides of the bed and checking the tension.

“How does that feel?” Avon asked, as though out of professional interest.

“Fine,” Blake said.

Avon raised an eyebrow. “Oh, I want more than that. Try to move your hands.” Blake did so without much success, and Avon shook his head, indulgently. “You can’t, can you? Now I’ll ask again—how does that make you feel?”

“Apprehensive,” Blake muttered after a moment, flexing a hand in the binding, trying and failing to get at the knot. “A flutter in the gut. But it’s you, and I want to be here, so mostly it’s—exciting. Secure. You’re very good at this, which doesn’t surprise me, actually.”

Avon smiled, pleased. Blake might have been frightened by this loss of power, in and of itself. Surrendering control was more fundamental, frightening and erotic than the prospect of pain, after all. But he was handling it, and he wasn’t, it seemed, afraid of Avon. Blake was trying; he was doing very well. “Do you like the rope?”

“The strength and the texture of it—yes. I hate abrasion.”

“It’s clumsy,” Avon agreed. “One can’t do as much with rougher ropes, whereas this—” he slid an unused piece over Blake’s thighs, stoking very lightly over Blake’s half-erect cock, “holds beautifully, even as it positively glides.”

He rubbed two fingertips against Blake’s bottom lip, watching Blake’s eyes go darker. He slid his fingers in, just the tips, and Blake caressed them with his tongue without having to be told. Avon breathed raggedly and slid his fingers in deeper.

“That’s right,” he murmured when Blake sucked them. He fucked them in and out of Blake’s mouth: watching the way Blake’s cheeks hollowed around them, feeling the flickering caress of Blake’s tongue and the strong, suckling suction. Blake’s eyes dropped closed, like he found the action soothing, and Avon stoked his hair affectionately.

“It’s good, isn’t it?” he asked, and Blake nodded, his eyes still closed, his mouth still working like he wanted to fuck it on Avon’s fingers, or better still his cock. “It really has been a long time for you, hasn’t it?” Avon asked sympathetically. “You really do need this, don’t you, Blake? Don’t worry—I’m going to give it to you.” Avon kissed Blake’s temple. “I will give you everything you require.”

He extracted his hand and leaned down to the floor, to the neat carrying cloth where he’d arranged everything he thought he’d need, just out of Blake’s line of sight, and brought up a gag. One of the dildo-style variety.

Blake eyed it, his eyebrows raising.

“I did say I would,” Avon reminded him, amused. “There’s a bell by your right hand, on the table—you can reach if it you need to.” (Of course Blake wouldn’t be able to use his safe-word while gagged.)

He held the tip of the cock to Blake’s lips. Blake glanced at him to check what he wanted, then obligingly kissed it (Avon did love a clever sub—they picked up on what you were after, you didn’t have to spell everything out). A delicate, chaste kiss, followed by the swirl of tongue he’d employed on Avon’s fingers earlier. Avon made a small, approving noise and eased the cock in slowly, drawing it back and forward, fucking Blake’s mouth with it shallowly before easing it all the way in and gently fastening the strap. He traced a finger around the rim of the thing in Blake’s mouth, stroking Blake’s lips and cheek where they were distended by the gag.

“Lovely,” he said, meaning it. “Incidentally, it is in your interest to get that very wet.”

With Blake thus occupied, he took his time getting to know Blake’s body intimately. He stroked Blake’s chest and thighs, kissed and sucked his fingers, figured out precisely how sensitive his nipples were—not too, Blake could take a clamp. Avon bit Blake’s hip lightly, loving the firmness of the bone under his teeth, and he sucked and bit Blake’s inner thigh hard enough to bruise—a little private mark of his ownership that would last when the collar came off.

But it was hard to think about that eventuality when, in this moment, Blake was his, collared and owned, bound until Avon decided to release him. He relished his possession, running his hand over muscle and plaint flesh, massaging and licking and stroking just as he pleased. He murmured compliments—how handsome Blake was, how warm, how sweetly he was taking this (because it was something to lay docile, to be able to take and appreciate attention—some people found doting a more difficult display of power to accept than a blur of whipping). He cupped Blake’s arse and ran dry, soft fingers over his testes, his entrance, his large, stiffening cock. Avon openly wet his lips as he looked at it (there was no reason to conceal his desire from Blake now, when he possessed him—that too was a mark of Avon’s power, here). He could have that cock inside him if he wanted. It had been a while since he’d indulged in a satisfying fuck of that sort—not since he’d had Anna peg him. But no; that wasn’t the plan.

Between the long lull of touch (which Blake must have been starving for) and the peaceful, hypnotic sensations of fullness, of sucking, Blake seemed to be half in subspace already. And I’ve barely even had him yet, Avon thought. It had taken so little care to bring Blake to this point. It couldn’t have been a quarter of an hour. Blake was so out of practice as to be nearly virginal again. Almost pure. And all his.

Reluctantly, Avon stood up and undressed, his back to Blake. From the curling and uncurling of Blake’s hand when he’d finished, Avon knew something was amiss. But not in a way that had Blake reaching for the bell, which was, after all, next to his other hand.

“What is it?” Avon asked, sitting down on the side of the bed next to Blake. That, apparently, was what Blake had been angling for. Like this, he could just skate his fingertips across Avon’s thigh.

“Ah. You want to touch me,” Avon said, keeping his voice lightly amused when he was privately delighted. “I think we can do better than that.”

Carefully he lay on top of Blake, kissing him delicately around the gag. He dragged himself down Blake’s body, stopping to kiss his collar once more and then settling between Blake’s legs. He stroked Blake’s entrance, brought out the jar of salve, and indulged himself. Not until Blake was trembling did he push even the tips of his fingers in. Not until Blake was panting around the gag did he slide a single finger in deeply. Not until Blake was fully hard, his hypnotic lull shaken off, and making small, desperate noises did Avon fuck him with two fingers, scissoring these gently. Not until Blake was struggling to grind down on these did he finally add a third.

“You want to come, don’t you?” he asked, looking up at Blake’s face. The question wasn’t rhetorical. Blake nodded after a moment, pushing past some internal resistance to admit it.

“I know you do,” Avon soothed. “And you will. I am going to allow you to, but I will allow it in my own time. You—” he felt his breath hitch dizzily, despite the swell of control and arousal taking Blake with such decision had given him, “—trust me absolutely, don’t you, Blake?” He stoked Blake’s hip with his clean hand. “Without limit. Therefore you trust that I will allow it when the time is right. You trust me to make it good for you, don’t you?”

He brought his mouth to Blake’s cock and rubbed the tip of it against his lips. Blake shuddered, helplessly trying to thrust his hips up, to get inside Avon’s mouth. Teasingly, not removing his fingers from Blake’s arse, still pressing little circles against Blake’s prostate, Avon kissed and delicately licked Blake’s cock, lightly as a kitten lapped cream. Blake’s fingers scrambled, trying to catch in the bedcovers.

“I’m sure this must be quite maddening,” Avon said in an almost polite tone. “I think that really, you’d like to fuck my mouth. You want, I imagine, to shove my head down, right down to the root, and have me. To do it bruisingly hard, to come until I can’t take any more. Even though I’m your dominant, and you really shouldn’t think that way about me. That’s right, isn’t it, Blake? You want to fuck me.”

Blake’s hips were still straining, but he looked almost frightened.

“It’s all right, dearest,” Avon said, kissing the head of his cock, “you can try that. You can try anything. You can’t hurt me—you don’t have to watch yourself here. You don’t have to worry. You don’t have to fight me. You’re safe, you can let go.”

Blake visibly relaxed as he spoke, and Avon felt a low burn of contentment at guessing right, at being on top of this, at being powerful enough to soothe and to fix. He thought they were coming along nicely together.

Avon sucked Blake off, relishing the way Blake strained against the ropes with how much he wanted it, the gasped but identifiable sound of the repeated word ‘please’ coming from around the gag, the way Blake’s head lolled from side to side. He came quickly, worked up and long-denied, and Avon drank it down, his buzz of contentment only feeding on Blake’s enervated slump. He slipped his fingers out of Blake and sanitized them, removing Blake’s gag carefully.

“All right?” he asked.

Blake nodded, still breathing hard. “More,” he half-demanded, half-begged. “Please fuck me. Avon, please.”

Oh, Avon could hear that the rest of his life and not get tired of it. He kissed Blake’s temple, relishing Blake’s unashamed greed. That was quite correct—his submissive ought to ask him nicely for satisfaction. He bet Blake could beg eloquently, given an opportunity.

“I don’t like denying you anything,” Avon said, tapping Blake’s lip with a finger, “and I would certainly like to, but as it happens I’ve got other plans right now.”

Avon generously lubricated the dildo (never having intended to just use saliva—there was what one said for effect, and then there were practical considerations to think of) and pushed it into Blake, loving the way Blake’s breath caught as he fucked him with it, the little whine when he stopped.

Avon pressed against Blake, dragging his erection against Blake’s thigh. “There,” he murmured, hearing his voice tremble, just slightly. “Feel how much I want you. That’s what you’ve done to me. I think you ought to be punished for that, don’t you? I think you ought to make it up to me, Blake.”

Lust had been crashing into Avon like waves for the whole encounter, and now he could let himself succumb. He found himself scrambling to get at Blake’s mouth, his hands fumbling as he eased his cock in, as Blake’s warm, wet mouth closed around him. Oh yes, oh god. He gripped his hands in Blake’s hair and fucked down into Blake’s throat, Blake moaning pleasurably around him.

“You like that?” Avon gasped. “I knew—oh, Blake, I knew you would.” Blake used his tongue enthusiastically, slurped loudly, sucked Avon like he’d warmed up with the toy but as though this was so much better, so much more what he wanted. Like he loved the taste. He was desperate and out of practice and starving for it.

“That’s so sweet, darling,” Avon panted. “Such a good submissive, so eager to please me, just like that.” Blake did something revelatory with his tongue. “Oh, that’s good, my clever, clever—”

He came down Blake’s throat with a broken noise and pulled out of Blake, sliding to the side, not wanting to fall on Blake and crush him. Blake gave his cock a small, gentle kiss in parting, and Avon felt himself at risk of spasming again, though he’d nothing more to give. He arranged himself along Blake’s side, pleased when Blake nuzzled into his neck.

“Thank you, Avon,” Blake murmured, meaning ‘for the privilege of sucking off my dom’, and Avon thought fuck, fuck I have to make him come again, I need it. He slipped Blake’s rope cuffs off the rings but didn’t undo them, and instructed Blake to turn over. He stroked down Blake’s back and began to fuck him with the dildo, pressing it in and out.

“I can’t come a second time,” Blake said weakly. “I’m sorry, Avon, I can’t.”

“I don’t really believe that,” Avon said airily, twisting some of his fingers in with the toy, using them to directly stimulate Blake’s prostate even as he fucked him. “Besides, it’s not for you to decide. It is up,” his mouth twisted, “to me, Blake. You agree?”

Blake shivered in a particularly interesting way. “I—yes, Avon.”

“Mm. Good.”

A few minutes more of sensation and Blake was fully blissed out, shaking slightly beneath him—at last totally disconnected from his anxiety, fully inhabiting his body.

Avon was languid with coming, high with dominating Blake. Like this, he felt incredibly powerful: desirable and confident, as though he could do anything, handle anything; as though everything was under control and going to be all right.

“You needn't worry,” he murmured. “I’ll tell you what you can do. I have you. You’re safe. You’re safe here with me.” He ducked to kiss Blake’s collar once more, thinking darkly of the reason he’d come into the hotel almost shaking with the need to have Blake. Why he’d leapt on the opportunity to ease Blake’s nerves, never mentioning the fragile state of his own, and how this would brace them. “I can’t protect you from everything, but here, I can keep you perfectly, Blake. You do belong to me, don’t you? I know you do, but say it anyway. Say you’re mine, Blake.”

As long as he wore the collar, Blake was his. Ownership was a common element of scenes, but when Blake said yes, Avon felt it like it was abiding and real. Rapt, he insisted on the words themselves:

“Yes, Avon, I’m yours. I belong to you. Yes, yes, just you.”

“That’s right,” Avon said, continuing to fuck him with the toy. “That’s exactly right. I can see how much you like this, even though you’re exhausted,” he said, sliding the dildo in and out more aggressively now. “Well, you’ll love taking my cock even more. That’s right, isn’t it, pet? You’re desperate to have me inside you, exactly like this.”

Blake nodded desperately. A weak little ‘uh-huh’. He was close again now, no matter what he’d said. Avon glowed with satisfaction: he’d known he knew best.

“No one ever properly trained you, did they, Blake? You’ve never really been collared. And I bet no one’s ever even fisted you.”

Blake shook his head weakly. No.

“Oh, but I’m going to,” Avon said, dreamily describing it as he worked Blake towards a prostate orgasm. “Oh yes. Here’s what I’m going to do, Blake. You’ll clean yourself up for me and lie down on our bed, and I’ll tongue you to loosen you up. I’ll finger you, just like tonight, just the way you like it. And then I’ll fuck you. Maybe on another night I’d shove a plug in to keep you full of me, but this night, I’ll want you relaxed. I’ll want you to feel me dripping down your legs. Perhaps that will excite you. Or perhaps you’ll feel ashamed, but I won’t let you—I’ll tell you how good you look, how much I want you. I’ll go so slowly you’ll beg for it, thrash for it, and when I’ve worked you wide open I’ll slide my whole hand into you, and you’ll feel so full of me that you’ll never want me to stop. You’ll love taking it for me, you’ll love—” Avon caught himself, swallowed, “how I’ll make you feel.”

“Yes,” Blake panted, “yes, yes, Av’n, Av’n, Av’n, please Avon—”

Avon kissed Blake hard, thinking that he was never going be able to forget this.

Blake came again, gasped when Avon pulled out the toy and shivered when Avon cleaned him up (even as Avon neatened himself). Avon then pulled Blake’s head to his chest and settled in for aftercare. A lot of doms considered it a chore or an epilogue, but to Avon it was very much a part of the sex act. He stroked Blake’s back, frowning when he felt a couple of short, stifled hitches in Blake’s breath—Blake felt compelled to cry, to weep into Avon’s chest, but for some reason he wasn’t allowing himself to do so.

“Don’t try holding back,” Avon said, turning Blake’s face up to his. “You know better. You have to come down now. You have to let it out.”

Blake shook his head. Avon thought Blake would have grit his teeth against it, if he’d still had the strength after having been fucked to pieces. “I won’t—”

“Blake,” Avon said carefully, letting Blake feel strongly that this was his dom speaking, that he was still wearing a collar, and that nothing Avon said at present was quite a request. “You are going to do this for me. I insist on it, Blake.”

Blake settled back against him, and when the tension crested he squeezed his eyes shut tight against it, then released. Let it come. He had a good hard cry, more to do with stored tension than the particular violence of what they’d done (though it had certainly been an intense encounter—Avon had no complaints on that score). Avon stroked him, occasionally kissing his hair and murmuring comforting nothings.

Avon thought that anyone who didn’t think this was intimate and erotic was missing out, but that he didn’t particularly care about the sex-lives of morons. Still, it baffled him. How could anyone fail to savor the rush of a strong, enduring submissive opening to you like this, because of what you’d done? The fact that it was Blake crying for him—well. Avon wasn’t capable of getting another erection at present, but he was nonetheless aroused as well as touched.

Coherence fell away from Blake again, and Blake started to murmur things he probably wouldn’t even remember later, to pour out everything to Avon. Everything was awful and he was afraid and he hated that, he was sick of it, god he was so tired of this. He didn’t know if anything was going to get better, for him or anyone, and what else was he supposed to do, but all the same he hated this. He felt worn thin by anger and horror and loss, felt hunted and cornered like an animal, and he missed Earth, he missed everything. He wanted to go home; there wasn’t any home to go to. “Don’t leave me, Avon,” he begged softly. “Don’t leave me.”

“I won’t,” Avon promised. “I—will never leave you, Blake.”

And obviously everyone knew that what you said in a scene wasn’t necessarily real, couldn’t possibly count as a promise. But Avon could feel he was making one, nonetheless. Stupid, he thought. It was stupid to give someone what they’d never even really asked for. To confuse this pleading with a true confession of dependence. Idiotic to actually offer yourself in aftercare. Nevertheless, Avon couldn’t help himself.

When Blake felt better Avon fed him, feeling that Blake shouldn’t go to sleep on an empty stomach. Blake swallowed hard, taking the slice of melon from his hand, and Avon thought, Oh, you like this, don’t you? He hadn’t expected Blake to go in for something so—well. It was rather old-fashioned, wasn’t it? He was glad practicality had moved him to do it, and if Blake wanted it, he supposed he wanted it too. Blake’s tongue delicately chased a drop of juice as it ran down Avon’s fingers, and Avon thought—No, perhaps I love it.

“Change into nightwear,” Avon said, unwilling to quite relinquish Blake and very willing to take this opportunity to blamelessly see his caretaking fantasy through.

Blake hesitated. “I didn’t actually bring any.”

Avon rolled his eyes, but only said, “At least tonight you can’t sleep in your clothes.”

“You’ll stay?” Blake asked quietly. They were still in aftercare, and Blake could make a request like that without it reflecting on him.

“I said I would,” Avon said, equally quiet. “Lie down, Blake. The ties won’t hurt your circulation.”

And so Blake fell asleep in Avon’s collar again, in cuffs Avon had tied, out of his clothes and in Avon’s arms. And Avon thought, even through the haze of afterglow, that the hangover from this was going to be awful. It was going to be so much worse than it had been, because in the morning he’d have to untie Blake, and he never, ever wanted to.

***

Blake woke up feeling better, more alert, more centered and more himself than he could remember having felt in a long, long time. He stretched languidly, enjoying the snug pressure on his wrists and neck—the secure confinement of Avon’s warm arm on his torso, and of Avon’s possessive hand splayed on Blake’s chest. Blake closed his eyes and luxuriated in the warmth. They didn’t have to be anywhere for a little while.

“I see you’re awake,” Avon murmured, though when Blake glanced over at him he saw Avon’s eyes were closed, so really he must have felt it.

“Mm,” Blake said by way of agreement.

“Allow me,” Avon said, reaching a hand up to pull the string of Blake’s collar’s knot. The collar slipped open and fell away, and Blake felt an odd little flicker of loss. He’d gone to sleep last night, but technically the session had only ended with that movement of Avon’s hand. Sleeping tangled together (which had felt to Blake at once like sharing a bed with a lover, a sleepover with a childhood best friend, and, distantly, the comfort of being a child and sharing a bed with his siblings or parents), had been part of the scene. Avon slipped back from him demurely now that it was closed, and the invisible barriers marking a scene off from reality fell.

“I don’t know how it was for you,” Blake said, a little guarded, but determined to push past the sudden sense of discord that had sprung up between them, as though Avon had drawn himself away some vast emotional distance when he’d pulled back the tie and stopped touching Blake, “but I think that was a wonderful idea of yours.”

Avon smiled, a little. “Well. I enjoyed myself.”

Blake sat up against the headboard. “I’m sorry I was so out of form. I normally provide a bit more for someone to work with—I suppose at the moment I’m too raw.” He brought his hand to his mouth, thoughtful. “It’s as though there’s a disconnect between me and this—it’s difficult to either offer up resistance or to throw yourself into compliance, after you’ve been through the institutional version of a scene.”

Avon shook his head. “Sometimes one can enjoy a lack of sophistication.”

Blake gave him a sour look, because Avon really didn’t have to rub it in, and Avon winced.

“I apologize, that—wasn’t precisely what I meant. I—” Avon paused, then continued, “ought to tell you it was entirely satisfying for me. Perhaps,” Avon glanced at the door, away from Blake’s face, “we might have a real session, while we’re here. I think it would do you good.”

Blake blinked at him. “Avon.”

“Hm?”

“What do you mean ‘a real session’?”

Avon blinked at him. “Well—the obvious. A full scene. I don’t have my own supplies, which is rather irritating, but I suppose we can make do with what they’ve provided us with here. When you’re not quite so tired, we could do the thing properly. Just this once. Longer, and with the option of—What? What is it?”

Blake was looking at Avon as though he’d stopped speaking Standard English.

“I remember my sex life fairly well,” Blake explained. “As in, as well as anyone. And don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t remember ever having had—” it was on the tip of his tongue to say ‘better’, but Blake rerouted the impulse efficiently, bearing in mind that uncharitable ‘lack of sophistication’ comment, “more involved sex than the sex we had last night.”

Avon had on that look of almost hurt confusion he got when something very stupid happened. Say, when someone presented him a pad with a four-digit security code and said they were using it to store highly sensitive information, what did he think?

“At some point in your life,” Avon said after a moment, “someone really ought to have taken you on a proving flight.”

“I had several very decent partners,” Blake said with half a defensive laugh.

Avon’s jaw clenched. “Be that as it may.”

“Maybe you just have higher standards than most people,” Blake said, turning the tension of the conversation with a sly, charming smile. He knew he argued like a sub (as one of his less decent previous partners had oh-so-endearingly put it). He shifted the parameters of the engagement, outlasted opposition with his greater stubborn determination, and often won subtly, or through employing social pressure, rather than meeting Avon barb for barb. Some people resented that, but Avon seem to think Blake just wielded an equal and opposite weapon.

“Oh, I know I do,” Avon said, with only a hit of a smile on his lips but more amusement in his eyes. “Well?”

“All right,” Blake said after a moment. True, Avon had said he was bad in bed, which did sting a little (it was a slight stain on the previous night’s sense of perfect openness between them—Blake hoped he could avoid thinking about it when they did this again and being sullen), but Blake knew why he’d been lackluster, and Avon seemed willing to take it. “Tonight? Since they’ve moved the meetings forward to accommodate your workshop, we’ll be back early, and I shouldn’t be quite so tired. How long do you envision this real session taking?”

“Exactly as long as I like,” Avon said, a hint of idle challenge playing in the words.

“Sounds interesting,” Blake said with a grin. “I’m going to have a shower—could you call up for breakfast?”

“Mm. What do you want?”

“Anything, I’m famished,” Blake said. “Is there anything you want to do while we’re here? Not exactly the garden spot of the galaxy, but—” Blake shrugged.

Something flickered in Avon’s eyes, as though he were thinking something he didn’t quite want to say. Blake let him keep his own counsel—Avon valued privacy, and he might come out with whatever it was in his own time.

“Not particularly,” Avon said. “Why, do you?”

Blake thought it over as he worked the knots off his wrists and ankles, unwinding the cords. “I suppose we risk recognition if we loiter in the shopping arcades or anywhere too public, but frankly I’m dying for a look at something that isn’t the Liberator.”

“Lovely as her over-complicated, mystifying circuitry is,” Avon agreed.

Blake nodded. “If I can’t play flaneur without putting us in danger, I’d like to go for a walk somewhere attractive and relatively private. You can come, if you want. Iri’s local, she might know somewhere suitable.”

“All right,” Avon said as Blake got up, watching him walk to the shower.

“God, that’s so much better,” Blake enthused, stretching his arms above his head as he went. “I feel fantastic. Avon,” he glanced back over his shoulder, “I really appreciate your giving me a hand with this.”

Avon gave him a lopsided smile. “What are friends for?” he said in a flat voice. “Incidentally, you are in the white jacket today.”

“Right,” Blake said, shutting the door. From the shower, he thought he heard something smack against the wall outside. A sort of soft sound. Possibly the ropes that had been on the bed? But when he came back out Avon had gone to his room to change, and everything was left for the cleaning staff in the sanitizing bin or neatly tidied away, as appropriate.

***

As the Arrcul rebel faction was almost entirely composed of subs, the portion thereof that could code was no exception. Said portion had gathered in a small lecture hall (like most rebel groups, this one had a significant student-and-professor contingent, capable of securing a classroom for a club meeting at short notice). When a handsome, dark haired, screamingly top man wearing very tall black leather boots and a long, stiff black coat with a high collar, leather epaulettes and a touch of gold embroidery at the collar and cuffs walked in and glared at them by way of introduction, there was a stirring of interest in the room—not all of it strictly professional.

“To begin with,” he positively sneered, “I’d like to know if any of you,” he held up a pad of the sort they used, “know why this,” he dropped it on the ground, crushed it with the heel of his boot, and snapped his fingers—someone picked up on what he wanted and handed him the remnants, and with quick, clever fingers, without even having to look at what he was doing, the dom plucked the pad’s datacard from the mess and tossed the rest into a bin by the lecturn, “was an irresponsible, idiotic idea. You are all lucky not to be dead right now. Only the fact that the Federation doesn’t care enough about you to pay a great deal of attention to what you are doing has preserved you. Fortunately for you, I rely on skill rather than luck. I doubt that more than a handful of you will actually benefit from the miserable amount of training I have time to convey, but we’ll see if you can manage to impress me. So far, you haven’t. My question, please.”

“Woah,” muttered a girl in the back. Her neighbor’s hand shot up.

The dom pointed at her. “You.”

She swallowed and lowered her hand. “Well, it’s obvious I guess, but, um. Is there a way to decode the datacard?”

“Well done,” he said almost sarcastically. “There certainly is.” He flicked a device in his hand, and an image of a piece of machinery shot up on the lecture screen. “This,” the man sneered, pointing at the image, “is a basic Federation decoder. It is absolutely standard, an idiot could use it, and your four-digit code crumples under it like wet paper. It is, in fact, overkill—

“He spoke to me,” the girl who’d been called on muttered sotto voce to her friend. “Is he even real? I think I might faint.”

“Taken,” said a jaded older man next to her, shaking his head. “Any good dom is taken. That’s the rule.”

“He’s off the Liberator, isn’t he?” ‘Woah’ muttered, considering it. “Must be the famous Kerr Avon. They travel around, don’t they? Maybe he’s not taken—maybe he’s looking for the right sub, or for some sympathetic shore leave relief. I’d do a lot for the cause. Especially if the cause wants to yell at me while imparting valuable professional advice.”

Avon was outlining the hazards that faced people trying to coordinate covert communications and how to recognize them when a hand rose near the front. An attractive collared sub with brown curls and a coat like Avon’s, but in white, with the same gold embroidery at the wrists and neck, set down the stylus he’d been tapping against his lip when he was called on.

“Yes?” Avon asked, his voice dipping warm and amused. “What are you doing here, besides undermining my authority?”

“Oh,” the second girl muttered, a little excited, “I think that’s Blake. The man himself.”

“Just thought I’d brush up,” Blake said mildly. “No one’s meeting me at present because half of the delegation’s in here. Av’n, it’s all very well to say they can jam, and that when they do, you’ve got to move, but how can you tell the difference between a jam and the distortion that’s inimical to short-range equipment, if your signals are fighting against the regular transmissions on a populated world like this?”

“Now that,” Avon said with an indulgent grin, “is a very good question, Blake.” He ran his hand through Blake’s hair as he passed him, as though he couldn’t quite help doing it, and cast his gaze out to the room, raising his eyebrows. “Well? Thoughts?”

“Taken,” the second girl said with a sigh. “What a little teacher’s pet.”

“Told you,” muttered the old man, almost sing-songing it.

“I didn’t want to believe,” said the first girl, shaking her head. “We’re all fucked, we’re not beating Roj bloody Blake. Domming him has to be like climbing a mountain or something.”

“Did you have an idea?” Avon suddenly asked, raising his voice. “There at the back.”

“Nothing worth sharing,” the first girl managed.

Avon gave her a sharp grin. “Then kindly don’t. I’m not accustomed to not being paid attention to.”

“I’ll just bet,” the first girl whispered when he turned around. She then shook her head and got seriously to work.

***

Avon approached their suite attempting to conduct a normal conversation with Blake (who apparently had a lot of thoughts about the proposed Arrcul boycott of Terran products, which Avon was struggling to follow), feeling writhing, roiling tension in his stomach. He knew Blake hadn’t agreed to sex for the same reasons Avon had suggested it, but how could he chat right now? All Avon could think was, “I’m going to have you again. Maybe in minutes, maybe in an hour, I’ll be touching you again. And whatever else happens to me, I’ll have had you. Had you twice. I know what you look like when you come. I’ll always know. I know what you look like when you’re mine. And I always will.”

Avon had managed to talk himself out of feeling churlish about Blake’s boy’s-school, favor-between-friends reception of an act that had, to Avon, been lovemaking. So Blake didn’t know how he felt—well, Avon hadn’t told him. He had, after all, framed it all quite casually: he had wanted Blake to understand it in those terms, rather than to see it for what it was to him. He’d reminded himself not to be so crass as to blame Blake for something he couldn’t help, or so insensible of his opportunities as to reject the gift that was Blake’s agreeing to another session. This adjustment to his own mood had been rather quickly accomplished: the intense afterglow he’d been suffused with and the promise that he could have Blake this evening as well had certainly helped the resolution along.

The same afterglow and promise had resulted in Avon’s spending the day half-high. He’d sailed through the training lecture confident, replete from the previous night’s session of very satisfying domination. The part of the morning where, in a surge of pride and affection, he’d absently ruffled Blake’s hair in public had been a particular low-point, but thankfully Blake had seemed to think the gesture playful rather than possessive. Even now, Avon was too distracted by the immediate prospect of doming Blake again to dwell on the slip-up.

For his part, all day long Blake had seemed beautifully chipper. It was a pleasure to watch him charge through meetings, fresh and handsome, steady and focused. He’d seemed grounded, open, and more than usually winning. Anyone who knew him well would have known he’d been fucked, could have told that he’d given himself to someone for the night and been well and thoroughly used. Blake had spent the day looking well-cared-for, content, absolutely owned and more than usually attractive: looking exactly as he might in one of Avon’s fantasies where they won the war and/or ran off together. Looking like Avon’s most prized possession, like his beloved submissive. Just seeing him throughout the day had made Avon a keenly wistful, and so delighted it hurt.

“You’re quiet tonight,” Blake commented as Avon closed the door of their suite behind them.

“Am I?” Avon asked, aware that his expression must be furtive and stupid. Think about trade relations, he scolded himself. Not about how warm he is, how close. He didn’t want to press Blake about when they were going to start. No one liked a pushy dom.

“We don’t have to do this,” Blake said. His voice sounded deliberately casual, as if he were trying to convey that if they didn’t, he wouldn’t hold it against Avon. He wouldn’t really mind.

Oh no, Avon thought, his mood suddenly plunging, oh don’t do this to me, don’t you dare take this away from me, I can’t endure it like you can, I’m not impregnable like you are.

“Don’t we, Blake? And why do you say that?” Avon asked, his voice sharpening like a knife scraped against whetstone.

“We can, of course, I just want you to know I’m not going to—hold you to it, or anything,” Blake shrugged. “Obviously I want to, but I know I’m not exactly your type.”

Avon blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

Blake looked like he might make a joke there, but then he shrugged, serious.

“I assume you go in for—well, not to be crass, but ‘the best money can buy’. You know—well-trained, delicate, pretty, large-eyed. That sounds about right. You don’t tolerate imperfection, and you’re—” Blake chose his words as he poured both of them drinks from the sideboard without thinking about it, bringing Avon his before taking a sip of his own. He landed on, “—very comfortable being what you are.” Blake sat down at the table, gesturing with his drink. “If I had to guess, I’d say you’d go in for someone very traditionally submissive. Someone who would complement you.”

“You think,” Avon said, allowing his tone to give nothing away, “I want the cliché, do you? Or rather, you think that is what I am—suited to.”

Blake laughed. “Well, no one would blame you. I can’t really compete on those terms—I don’t have any illusions on that score. Not that I don’t have, you’ll admit, more than enough self-confidence.” He shrugged. “I know I’d be a good partner for someone. And I could, actually, pull in my day—you’d be surprised. But it’s certainly been a while, and if you want the Submissive Experience,” Blake took a sip, “I’m not what you go in for.”

Avon eyed Blake over the drink Blake had brought him—two fingers of something Blake knew he liked.

“Allow me,” Avon said, taking a seat himself, “to clarify this. You believe, firstly, that I am shallow, unsophisticated and common in my tastes. Second, you think so little of yourself that you assume almost anyone would rather fuck any given member of the cast of SubSluts 9 before you. That is what you are saying, isn’t it?”

“No, it isn’t like that,” Blake said, dismissive rather than angry. “I know you’re probably complex and exacting about partners where you can be. You’re certainly complex and exacting about everything else, which is exactly why I doubt very much that this,” he swirled his glass, indicating the room and the both of them, “is what you want, given that most of the time you and I struggle to see eye to eye. Last night helped me a lot, and I’m grateful, Av’n, but I don’t want or need a pity fuck. So, if you want a bit of stress relief with someone safe and sympathetic, I’m sure some of the people from the training session would be happy to—”

“I’m not interested in fucking the people from the training session,” Avon said shortly. “Present company excepted. I am interested in what I was promised this morning. Unless, of course, you are rescinding the offer?”

“No,” Blake said. “No, I’d like to. That’s not what I meant.”

“For the record,” Avon said, nearly interrupting him, “not to cast aspersions on the many no doubt interesting submissive people in the world who happen to be—how did you put it? Ah yes. ‘Delicate and cow-eyed’—”

“I said large-eyed,” Blake corrected him, rolling his own eyes, but Avon was having none of it.

“—I find,” Avon continued, “that when one opts for the lowest-common-denominator ‘ideal’, the experience often utterly fails to overwhelm, or even to appeal. It merely feels like some impersonal, ill-fitting idea of what one’s sexuality ought to be.” He stood and walked to the bathroom. “Order food for us to come in a few hours. Please,” he appended a little belatedly. 

“What do you want?” Blake called after him.

“Oh, you choose for once,” Avon snapped, his tone making the benign sentence sharp.

As he showered, Avon hoped, as he’d often had occasion to on the Liberator, that Blake was the sort of submissive who fretted and sulked under a dom’s disapproval. He knew, as he’d often had occasion to consider on the Liberator, that Blake wasn’t. He knew that Blake had a strong sense of personal morality (even as Avon privately had to acknowledge that he himself did), and that all the feeling-bad-about-something in the world didn’t sway Blake if he thought he was right. Blake was fundamentally patient (at his core, if not on the surface). He was centered and absolute and good. He was that sort of sub; that sort of person. It was what Avon loved in him—well now. It was one of many things.

Avon knew he was somewhat upset, but he also knew that even as Blake forced him to feel intensely, he had to put annoyance and anger aside if he was going to dom Blake tonight. And he was; there was no question of that. Avon thus knew that he had to dismiss the emotions. He had to feel them and let them go, as best he could. He had to let the water pound into his muscles and work the tension out. He had to come to any sub receptive and clean, and he had to come to Blake in love. Anything less would be disgusting. A colossal waste.

When he felt ready, Avon came out of the bathroom in a hotel robe. Blake eyed him slightly warily, the tightness of regret in his face. It seemed he had felt a little sorry for upsetting Avon. At that, Avon felt the last of his resentment uncoil and flow out of him.

“It’s too early,” Blake said. “The kitchen’s closed between meals, I couldn’t place—”

“Now,” Avon interrupted him. “Take off your collar. I want to start now. Do you agree?” Blake had tied it again after Avon had last removed it: it would have to be re-done for the scene.

“You’re angry with me?” Blake asked instead of answering. Sensible question. He was, after all, about to put himself in Avon’s hands.

“No,” Avon shook his head slowly, smiling a little. Meaning it. “I’m not, Blake.”

Blake raised an eyebrow. “You were, though, weren’t you? Do you want to tell me why?”

“It isn’t important.” And it wasn’t. Avon pitched his voice to seduction. “Come on, Blake. Don’t keep me waiting. Do it for me.”

Eyes going dark, Blake removed his collar silently.

“Come here,” Avon murmured, “over by the wardrobe.”

There was something slightly transgressive in how he was commanding Blake without having collared him—they weren’t fully in scene. The moment was liminal and strange.

“Give me your collar,” Avon said. Blake complied, holding it out to him.

“Stand there,” Avon said next, and he swept behind Blake, tying the collar on again, pulling it tight. When Blake was his again he pulled Blake’s back against him, running his hands over Blake’s chest and burying his face in Blake’s neck. Avon pulled open the top drawer, revealing the range of toys Blake had riffled through two days earlier.

“Which do you want inside you?” he whispered into Blake’s ear, his breath brushing cover the rim of it. “Choose.”

Blake shuddered and looked at the array of toys before him.

“That one,” he said after a moment, his voice soft and rough. Avon opened his eyes and looked down at the toy Blake’s finger was pointing at. Textured, long and thin—his eyes hadn’t been too big for this stomach, then. Bigger than last night’s, Avon was pleased to note, but not too. Blake couldn’t take the whole length, of course, but then it was double ended and wasn’t designed for that. A significant portion would stick out no matter what they did—providing a convenient handle for Avon’s use. Avon liked the idea. He thought perhaps Blake did too.

“Did you clean yourself up for me?” he asked.

Blake nodded. “I had a conference here after our walk, before I came to your session. I ducked back in and got ready while you were over there preparing.”

“How thoughtful,” Avon purred, enjoying knowing that Blake had sat through the lecture attentively, having readied himself for his dom’s use. “You’re such a good boy when you want to be, Blake.”

He gave Blake’s handsome suit a last fond stroke before stepping back. “Naked on the bed. Except for this, I think.” He held up a harness, then tossed it to Blake, who caught it neatly.

When it was done he crawled over Blake, who lay down at the press of Avon’s hand on his chest, still and obedient. Avon kissed from Blake’s mouth down his neck and torso, then came back up to his mouth again, sliding a hand around Blake’s partly-erect cock. Even choosing a toy and a couple of kisses had gotten Blake excited. Avon smiled indulgently, taking the lube from the bedside table drawer where he’d left it the previous night. He worked Blake open slowly and thickly coated Blake’s chosen toy.

“Say please,” Avon commanded, and he grinned and slowly pushed the thing in when Blake obliged him. He gave it a few firm pumps, then let it rest, securing it with the harness. The harness was flexible enough to allow for some movement, but tight enough that the toy would stay where Avon put it. He slipped his fingers over to Blake’s cock, which he started to explore and slick luxuriantly.

“It’d be such a shame to waste this,” he murmured. When Blake was very hard, Avon slipped a cock ring of the sturdy modern sort that actually kept you from coming, harmlessly and indefinitely, onto Blake. (What had people even done with male subs before they came on the market? Used their imagination, Avon supposed. He preferred to use something like this—on himself, for example, if he felt like taking a sub longer than biology alone allowed.) He sat back to admire the image.

“Now,” Avon said, slipping off his robe and leaning back indolently on the pillows, “get me ready, Blake. Because you’ve managed to impress me. You’ve tried so hard to reaccustom yourself to this, difficult as it must be for you, that I feel like rewarding you. And because I am feeling exceptionally generous, and because you are exceptionally lucky, I’m going to take you like this—I’m going to let you put that,” he gestured at Blake’s cock, “inside me.”

Blake schooled his expression of surprise and flattering lust into one of pleasingly dutiful acceptance. He then considered his assigned task with a rather professional expression of serious assessment that amused Avon. Blake crisply asked if Avon would please turn over. Lazily Avon did so, grinning into the pillow when he felt Blake’s hands guiding him up and shoving additional pillows under his hips, and then Blake’s tongue licking at his entrance. It was above and beyond his instructions—it was also very similar to what Avon had suggested he would do to Blake the previous night. Avon was pleased by Blake’s evidently recalling that. He was still better pleased that Blake had extrapolated what he might enjoy based on that information, and both pleased and unsurprised that Blake had the effrontery to turn the tables. A different dom would have punished Blake for acting outside his remit, but Avon wasn’t at all that sort, and he supposed that after their argument that Blake was attempting to show him that he did know the kind of dom Avon was, really. He’d been shown it. He knew he could trust Avon to reward his efforts with kindness. All told, that was as endearing a display as what Blake was doing with his tongue (and that was particularly good).

“Very obliging,” Avon praised as Blake tongued him lavishly, adding slick fingers carefully. “Mm. You are talented. I’d be willing for you to do this all day.” And so he would: it was at once madly arousing and relaxing.

“Obviously I would appreciate that,” Blake said, clearly at once meaning it and slightly ironic. “But I’d love to be allowed to fuck you, Avon. If that would please you, of course.”

Avon laughed, feeling spooled out and indulgent. “Yes, I’m sure you would love to fuck me. And come to think of it, it’s an excellent suggestion. Yes, you may.”

“Thank you,” Blake said quietly as he slid in, obviously fighting the instinct to press home. To go too quickly, to plough in too deeply. His thighs strained with that resistance. Avon loved the evidence of his struggle, even as he loved the careful glide of Blake’s cock into him. The fullness of it.

Once in, Blake let Avon adjust, holding himself absolutely steady. He was admirably self-disciplined, even after his long draught.

“Go on,” Avon said, like he was turning on a machine.

Blake began with sweet, shallow strokes. Avon felt himself stretching around Blake—enjoyed the fluttering sensations.

“More,” Avon said, wriggling under it. Blake progressed to filling him fully and then pulling out, setting a steady, slow, rhythm. It clearly cost Blake to be so compliant, and his arousal was making it very difficult for him.

He was bigger than Avon. Stronger. Avon didn’t have a safeword—doms didn’t need them. Blake could have pressed Avon down and fucked him. But he didn’t, and he wouldn’t unless Avon told him to do just that, because he was Avon’s, and because he was good.

“So gentle,” Avon half-teased, half-praised. “Fuck me harder, Blake. You don’t need to be tentative. That’s it,” he said with a harsh breath as Blake’s rhythm sped up. As Blake began to smack against his prostate. “Yes, that’s—More, Blake. Give me more, there’s a good boy. Fuck me like I’d fuck you. That is what I want.”

With little whimpers (oh, he must really want to come now, Avon thought—it was delicious), Blake took him harder, faster, deeper.

“Can I—?” he asked, moving Avon, shoving Avon onto his cock.

“Yes,” Avon said, letting himself be pulled, working himself on Blake as though Blake were a toy, “I told you I like initiative. And that’s very good, pet. You’re such a good fuck, aren’t you? So hard for me, and so big. Every bit of you pleases.”

“You’re so tight,” Blake said unbidden. “I’ve hardly ever fucked a dom like this, been allowed, it’s—You’re so warm,” he said, something like wonder in his voice.

Grinning, Avon clenched hard around Blake, and Blake stuttered, “You feel so good, I feel so taken, held in you, and your skin is so—You were so fucking attractive today in that lecture, shit, that’s not scene, I shouldn’t bring—”

“Tell me,” Avon snapped, grinning, delighted, “I’d like to hear how you want me.”

Blake immediately poured out, “God, you’re handsome when you’re angry, I’ve always thought so but today you could have had me on that desk, I was sitting there ready for you, everyone wanted you and I thought—Av’n,” Blake broke off, his frustrated arousal evidently intense.

“Stroke me,” Avon demanded. “Do it right and I’ll come on your cock. All around you. That’s it,” he said as Blake began to follow his instructions. “Yes, that’s right. It’s going to be very tight and very good, and you still won’t be able to come, because I’m going to use you as long as I please.”

Blake made a pathetic moan, and Avon shivered. “Don’t pout,” he advised. “Be good for me.” A wicked idea came to him, even as arousal strung him out. “In fact, I think you ought to thank me.”

“Thank you, Av’n,” Blake panted, fucking Avon harder, stroking his cock in time with it.

“Nngh. What—for?”

“For letting me please you,” Blake managed. “Allowing me inside you, letting me take your arse, my dom’s arse, for—”

Avon came on the pressure and the litany, and the tight clench made Blake nearly sob.

“Kerr—” he half-begged, shaking.

Avon took several moments to get his breath back.

“Sorry,” Blake said, trying desperately to get himself under control. “I shouldn’t—”

“Oh, I think you should,” Avon corrected him. “Pull out,” Avon instructed, and he smiled rather sadistically when Blake had done so. He turned over on his back.

“Now back in–-gently,” he purred, and with a low, helpless moan Blake did as he was told. Blake rested hard and still in him, and Avon luxuriated in his own sensitivity and soreness. “You do know I’m not punishing you, don’t you, Roj?” he asked, relishing both Blake’s personal name and the way Blake nodded weakly. “Of course I’m not,” Avon soothed. “I’m simply making it good for you. And what I think would be very good for you, is for you,” he ran his hands up Blake’s arms, “to fuck me until I feel absolutely replete. You want that, don’t you, Blake?”

Blake nodded again, the look on his face, even shattered as he was, one of satisfying eagerness.

“I thought you did. And you are allowed to call me,” Avon said, lifting his hand to Blake’s mouth to kiss, “anything you like, dearest. Hold still.”

He groped with his kissed-hand for the linked nipple clamps on the bedside table, and Blake’s nostrils flared and his arms trembled, but he stayed just where Avon had put him as Avon fastened them on. Avon tugged the chain between the two clamps and Blake bit his lip. Avon reached his hand around and idly played with the toy in Blake, drawing it in and out, shoving it in, establishing a rhythm. Blake moaned and gasped, pushing back onto the toy, working himself on it when Avon wasn’t giving it to him, clenching hard around it—Avon could feel the resultant resistance to the movement of his wrist. Blake’s spasaming hips caused him to fuck Avon almost incidentally—Avon thought the erratic spikes of pain and sensation piquant, like aftershocks.

“Can I kiss you?” Blake asked breathlessly.

“Oh yes,” Avon said, staring into Blake’s blown-wide, lust-dark eyes. “You don’t need to ask. Anything you want to give me, I want—unless I tell you otherwise.”

Blake kissed him hard, and then pulled back. Avon tapped Blake’s hip and let go of the toy. Blake took this as the signal to fuck Avon properly again until Avon, enjoying it even though he couldn’t come for a second time just yet, took pity on Blake’s over-taxed arms and poor, straining cock.

“Stop,” he said, and Blake did so instantly. “Mm. Enough for now, I think. Did you enjoy yourself? Or rather,” he managed a lopsided smile, “did you enjoy me?”

“Yes, Avon,” Blake said, voice hoarse, “I enjoyed you immensely.” And there again was that trace of awe. Avon didn’t know what top had looked at Blake’s cock and failed to conclude that they wanted to have it in every way possible, but their loss was certainly his gain. Blake treated being used that way like Christmas.

Avon smiled. “You’re very welcome.”

And Avon loved hearing that beautiful voice wrecked—he said so.

“Clean me up,” he added.

Blake took a tissue from the side-table and removed the evidence of Avon’s earlier ejaculation. Avon was slightly disappointed that he’d left it too late to have Blake lick it off him—that was really only pleasant up until the thirty-second mark. He liked Blake being full of his come, and Blake was oral enough to cherish any order that involved being told to use his tongue.

“Clamps off. Now get over to the saltire,” Avon instructed, sitting up and rolling his shoulders, picking up the bottle of salve. “The way you played with it the day before last—like you were daring me to strap you up on it. I’d say teasing,” he said, following Blake over. Avon suddenly caught Blake’s chin in a cruel grip that forced up his face, even as he pushed Blake back against the saltire. His hand looked to him like a second collar, marking Blake still further as his. “But you wouldn’t, would you? Not my Blake.” He shook his head. “You’re too good a boy for that. Well? Aren’t you?” he snapped, and Blake shivered.

“Teasing is offering only to deny,” Blake said, his throat working in Avon’s grip. “And I can’t deny you anything now, Avon. You can do whatever you like to me.”

Avon laughed. “That’s right. No, I knew you didn’t do it intentionally. Teasing is cruel and prudish, and you are neither. You love this, don’t you? The way I make you feel.” He brushed the fingers of his free hand lightly over Blake’s cock, feeling Blake shudder.

“Yes,” Blake managed. “Yes, I do. I love it. I need you.”

“You always do,” Avon whispered savagely.

Blake just nodded and continued. “You’re so good. No one’s ever—” Blake thought to cut himself off, but Avon raised an eyebrow.

“No one’s ever made me feel like you do,” Blake finished quietly, and Avon made a low, melting noise of pleasure and kissed Blake brutally hard. Even if it was scene, he wanted it. He wanted to own Blake’s memories of desire and satiation. If there had to be anyone after him, he wanted to be the one everyone else was compared to.

“Wrists,” he said, hungry to continue, and Blake held them up for the shackles. Avon dropped to confine Blake’s ankles—Blake obligingly spread his legs—and Avon kissed and licked his way up Blake’s claves, his thighs, his hips, his chest—avoiding Blake’s poor suffering cock entirely. Then, when he was standing again, Avon twined his fingers with the fingers of Blake’s bound hands and kissed him again thoroughly, pressing his body against Blake’s smooth skin.

He pulled back to study the effect. Blake wore his collar—that was the first thing he noticed. He scanned for and clocked it automatically, and felt a sense of satisfaction, contentment and relief whenever his gaze brushed the thing. Blake’s hard, wet, red cock was—Avon brushed it again with his fingertips—still warm from him. Still so needy. His abused nipples were still red, pinched, stiff and sensitive from the clamps—the gentlest brush of Avon’s palm against them made Blake bite his lip. Avon’s eyes traced the handle of the toy he’d buried deep in Blake, and then scanned Blake’s face.

Blake’s eyes were patient: intelligent and warm. His breathing was ragged, but he didn’t complain about the denial Avon has asked of him. Blake’s face was flushed—there was something almost maidenly about the blush, about his heaving chest. And Blake looked like he loved doing this for him. He looked good and pure and perfect. Avon felt himself swelling. That—was an inexact way of putting it. Yes, he was getting hard once more, despite the torpidity of his recent orgasm, but more than that he felt flooded with affection for Blake, with satisfaction. Just like the illustration. No. Better. Blake.

“You’re so beautiful,” he breathed, dazed. “My prince,” he said, half mocking and half meaning it. He dipped shaking fingers to the head of Blake’s desperate cock, which twitched at his touch, gathered a drop of precome, and lifted it to Blake’s lips. Blake chastely kissed it away, looking at him. Avon smeared the remainder over Blake’s bottom lip, where it shone and glinted in the room’s low light.

Between having come on Blake’s cock and the sense of power the lovely tableaux filled him with, Avon felt himself climbing into the invulnerability of topspace. He felt utterly in control: focused, absolutely clear. Hyper-alert, especially present and involved in the moment. Rapturous. Like everything was happening fast, but he was very much on top of it, riding the whirlwind. It was everything that felt good about exertion and danger. And he felt such tenderness towards his submissive: like this was all for Blake, an act of nurturing and devotion that Avon, powerful and generous, could easily afford to give Blake. Blake, who trusted him. Blake, whose pleasure and whose life were in his hands. He could whip Blake to ribbons, now, and it would be done in love.

Blake would probably enjoy it, too. Avon could tell, by the heaviness of Blake’s gaze, that he’d given Blake rapture in equal measure to his own; that he’d possibly taken Blake deeper into their shared altered state than he himself had gone. Avon had to remain aware, had to direct the action, but Blake looked just as Avon wanted him to. Languid and voluptuous and meditative; his surrender a thing of safety and trust. Avon knew how subs felt, now—in the past, he’d made them tell him in great detail. The texture of exchanges like this could be molasses-slow for them, and there was often a curiously silent quality to these moments that had little to do with the amount of sound in the room. Anna had said that everything felt like it was happening in another world, while hers was utterly still.

The tranquility of a substate might be pierced by suddenly overpowering sensation—but even that was absorbed by the intimacy built between the dom and the sub, whereby even the most painful and harsh sensations became lush and smooth. When he had Blake, when he really had him utterly, Avon would make him try and say exactly what this felt like for him, in his own words. He could come to know the precise taste of Blake’s surrender: exactly what Blake was giving him. Just where he brought Blake. And even in that most personal and unshareable of places, Blake wouldn’t be alone. Avon wouldn’t be excluded. It would take practice and time and work, but they could be together totally.

He didn’t want to whip Blake to ribbons just now. He was aiming for a smoldering slow burn, not a wild, uncontrolled explosion. Avon had no objection to blood, but he thought often it was a shortcut. A good dom didn’t need it. A good dom, given the right, well-constructed relationship with a clever, giving, obliging sub (and Blake was certainly all those things), only needed the touch of his hand or the sound of his voice. All else was prologue.

“Is there anything you’d like?” Avon asked softly, feeling his heart constricting with how generous he wanted to be to his submissive. “Don’t be afraid, you can tell me anything.”

Blake’s mouth worked—he was visibly struggling to articulate how he would like to come, but he couldn’t say the words, couldn’t shape the request. Too unused to saying that kind of thing, these days. Or maybe other doms had never demanded his participation here before. It was so sweet. Avon hadn’t thought he could feel any more enchanted, but there it was.

“It’ll come,” Avon soothed. “I know you trust me, but this is new, isn’t it? It’s all right. When you’re comfortable with me like this, you’ll tell me. You’ll learn how to, and then you’ll tell me anything I ask.”

And Avon was too high to realize he was thinking, and worse, talking, about forever, in a way that jarred even with the protective codes of conduct of a scene. He had a million plans for Blake, and (too far gone to know that it wasn’t a good idea) he started telling Blake all about what he was going to do to him: what they were going to do together.

“One day,” Avon said, pressing his erection into Blake’s thigh and Blake’s into his palm, pressing his lips against Blake’s collarbone, “I’ll take you apart. I’ll do everything that anyone ever did to you, and we’ll make it safe again. Then you’ll see you’re unbreakable, and that none of it really touched you. When the time’s right,” he smiled gently into Blake’s skin, “when we are accustomed to one another, I’ll hurt you. When you’re ready, I’ll let you show me how strong you are.”

Blake’s eyes flashed. He looked angry, and underneath it, almost frightened. “You don’t need to coddle me. I’m not pathetic, Avon. I can handle anything you—”

“Shh,” Avon said, smoothing away and dismissing this first show of defiance—the ragged edge of Blake’s pain. He didn’t take it personally: it was nothing to do with him, other than that Blake didn’t want to show himself too frail for his use. Didn’t want to look or feel broken before him, in and of himself rather than by Avon’s hand. Of course he didn’t. Avon understood that.

“I didn’t say you couldn’t. You are, if anything, too fearless, and save that you are human, there is no weakness in you. But you’ll show me when I decide. When I say you will, and not before. And I’ve decided you aren’t going to have that tonight. There isn’t any shame in that, is there, Blake?”

Blake shook his head no, and Avon stroked his cock and nuzzled his cheek.

“That’s right,” Avon agreed, giving the toy in Blake firm pumps, building to an idle rhythm. “There is no shame whatsoever. I decided it for you. And you are obedient, and biddable for me, just me, and so very, very fuckable. And strong enough to take whatever I choose to give you.”

Blake wet his lips, his hips jerking. He had been too strung out by his long-denied arousal to feel desperate any longer. He’d been floating on a plane of sensation. But Avon’s words and his hands had re-honed the sharp edge of Blake’s desire.

“Can I have your cock?” Blake asked, his voice wavering on the last word.

“Mm,” Avon stretched against him, giving the toy a twist so Blake felt the texture. “That’s better. You’re learning to give me that already—such a quick study. Go on. Tell me how you want it.”

Blake gathered his wits to gasp out, “Avon please. I know you’d feel so right. Warm, better than this thing, better than anything.”

Avon fucked him faster with the toy as a reward. “You don’t feel full now?” he asked, mock-quizzical.

“No,” Blake shook his head, babbling as Avon stroked and fucked him, “it’s good, but it’s not enough, it isn’t you. I need more. I need you, need you all the way in me, your hips slamming into mine. Hard, like you want me, like you enjoy using me. Earlier you made me think about it, about how you’d take me—and you’d even come in me, wouldn’t you Avon? Some doms don’t, but you’d give that to me, wouldn’t you? If I needed it? If I asked? I know you would, you’re so generous with me really, you always are. I bet you’re good, I bet you’re brutal and sweet and so good. I’ll be good, I’d try and make it good for you. I’ll be quiet, if you tell me. Or I’ll moan, if you let me. If you like that. I want to make you happy. I want to make you smile just like that,” Avon was giving him his wickedest grin, “and leave you so fucked out you can hardly manage a sneer, please, Avon, please—”

Well now. It had taken a bit of work for Avon to bring it out, but there it was: Blake coming into himself, offering an enthused submission that was at once compliance and almost resistance, hitting Avon’s weak points and shaking Avon’s control as it did. There was Blake, with him fully. Avon hadn’t even known he was missing anything, but that was superlative. Blake had it in him to be a phenomenal submissive, because he was dedicated and focused. Because he understood power, and he was so brave. He put others before himself (and thus deserved to be put first by a dom). He was resilient: he loved and let himself be loved through anything. Blake never stopped caring. Never stopped giving of himself, physically and emotionally.

I don’t deserve you, Avon thought, slamming his lips down on Blake’s. No one could. But you’re mine, you’re mine, you’re mine. And I’ll never let you go.

“That’s very pretty,” Avon said when he pulled back, feeling warm and drunk. “I’m so proud of you. You ask to have it so nicely. And you will have it. Soon. My prince deserves anything he wants. Well,” Avon smirked, “anything he can ask me for. Fuck into my hand. Show me how you need it.”

Blake did it, holding Avon’s eyes. Electric and present. There, right there with him.

“God, I’m going to love putting you through your paces,” Avon sighed. “Naturally I love tying you up, but won’t it be exquisite when you can hold absolutely still, through anything, just because I’ve told you to? Not everyone can, but you’ll be able to, for me.” He gave a breathy, dreamy little exhalation. “And then there’s everything technical. Electronics, etcetera. Well,” Avon smiled, honey-slow, “you must know I’ve looked into all that. I’m really quite good with it. Oh, and sounding—you’d let me sound you, wouldn’t you, pet?” Just another way of playing with Blake’s ample, lovely cock.

“I’ve always thought that would hurt,” Blake offered quietly, misgiving clouding his gorgeous hazel eyes. A hint of a pout about his mouth. Oh, Avon knew he would have to watch the temptation to spoil Blake rotten.

“You’ve never had that before either?” Avon asked, shaking his head. “It won’t when I do it to you. Trust me?”

“Yes. Always.”

Warm satisfaction pooled in Avon. “As it should be. You’ll only get hurt when I want you to,” Avon promised, practically cooing it. He was drunk off the hypnotic way Blake’s hips moved, the judder of Blake’s cock in his hand, the smell of him, every shift in his breathing. Taking it all in, nothing but this moment real: an ownership that seemed bone deep and everlasting. “I don’t make mistakes—not with you. There will be no accidents. But when I do want you to get hurt, well—” He shivered, rutting against Blake’s leg. “You’re so pretty tear-streaked. You’ll look so good in a proper collar once I’ve given you one—I don’t know how I’ll keep from fucking you all the time. Just looking at you in my collar will make me hard.”

“Kerr,” Blake said, a little confusion or distress on his face, presumably from the strain his body was under.

“Mm.” He loved that. “Or branding,” Avon continued, picturing it. “Yes, we’ll have to do that soon after I collar you, won’t we, my own?”

“Avon,” Blake tried again.

“Hush. I know it’ll hurt, but you’ll be brave for me. When it’s done, you’ll love it. And you know I’d never allow you to come to any real harm.” He dropped Blake’s dildo and twisted the fingers of his now-free hand around Blake’s collar. “Say you’re mine, Roj,” he commanded, just wanting to hear it.

“I—” Worked up and still looking confused, Blake could hardly get it out. “I’m yours, I—”

“That’s so good, darling,” Avon breathed. “Doesn’t it feel good to say it? Oh, Blake. Say you love me.”

“All right, that’s it. Avon, we’ve got to talk. Torque.”

Loud alarms sounded in Avon’s brain and he stopped touching Blake immediately. He took a step back, holding his hands up, bewildered and stricken. He breathed hard, trying to catch hold of himself.

“Blake, what’s wrong? Do—do you want me to release you?” he managed to ask, confused, stumbling over his own tongue.

“No,” Blake said, getting his breath back, fighting for it. His voice was remarkably steady now, even though he must still be on the brink of his long-denied orgasm. “I just really needed to talk to you, properly. At first I thought you were just building a rhythm—well, by the way. Using the words and the ideas to take us deeper. But collars and branding—?” Blake frowned. “Avon, are you—are you honestly interested in me?”

Avon plummeted down from his invulnerable topspace high. He caught up on what he’d been saying, and froze completely.

“You’ve picked,” he said, voice low and dangerous, “a hell of a time to ask stupid questions. It’s a scene, Blake,” he sneered, hoping to slip free of this without enduring a devastating, crushing humiliation, a rending of his fantasies. “Even someone as rough and under-developed as you knows the etiquette of that. Or do you really not understand the difference between dreams and reality?”

Blake frowned as though the stuff of Avon’s self-protective comment had touched a nerve. A minute ago Avon would have comforted him, or snarled ‘Don’t you dare so much as hint you’re not mine while you’re wearing my collar,’ but then a minute ago Blake had wanted this, wanted him, and now Blake didn’t. And if Blake didn’t want this, it was all worthless. Sophistication and abject devotion collapsed into meat and noises and nothing.

“Possibly,” Blake said, accessing Avon with his eyes.

“Possibly?” Avon sneered back.

“I did think it was part of the scene,” Blake said, somehow maddeningly calm, even with Avon’s toys still in him and Avon’s collar still on him (looking at it hurt now, when it was a joke at Avon's expense) (as did his persistent erection, but he supposed Blake had more to complain of in that regard). “But now I’m not so sure,” Blake continued.

“You, unsure?” Avon said, all icy mocking surprise.

“There’s a first time for everything,” Blake said evenly. “It sounded like you wanted me.” Avon’s mouth opened and his eyes were furious, but Blake pressed on. “Not just for the scene. More generally. Though I didn’t think you liked me much, or that this was anything like what you wanted, really. Was I wrong, Avon? That’s why you were upset earlier, isn’t it? And why you threw the ropes at the wall? And it’s why you wanted this—” Blake’s gazed sharpened, “after that run-in last night. It’s possibly why you came along with all of this in the first place, almost without argument.”

“Oh, but surely you are never wrong, Blake,” Avon seethed, mentally cursing himself for an idiot for having underestimated Blake’s perceptiveness, for having been clumsy and having let much too much slide. If the game was up, then it was, and Avon had a gambler’s nerve.

“Surely you are in the right by default,” he sneered at Blake. “But I lack your rectitude, and I must admit that I am confused. You say that you don’t like the way I treat you at present. I act the way I do because the alternative consists of spending all of my time tripping over myself and pleading with you to submit to me, making,” Avon smiled unpleasantly, “a nuisance and a spectacle of myself. So, you say you don’t appreciate me keeping my distance. Neither, it seems, do you appreciate honesty. Even in a scene, it apparently disturbs you. I, apparently, disturb you. What, then, would you have me do? Follow you around begging you to stay safe, even more than I already do? Touch you without having you, as though you and I were neutrals? Never touch you again?” Leave you, Avon didn’t suggest. He’d said he never would, and it had meant something, to him. “What is it to be, Blake? I suppose by now you must be uncomfortably aware that I would do anything for you, so you might as well just tell me what precisely you’d find least offensive to your sensibilities.” Avon said it with vicious sarcasm. He turned away from Blake, wrapping his arms around his torso.

“I know you’re not interested,” Avon said shortly, tugging the tatters of his control to himself, feeling laughable and wretched and exhausted. Pitying Blake, who had not, after all, deserved any of this. “It isn’t any of my business. This—was a mistake.”

“You can’t seriously want me,” Avon heard Blake say quietly, and he whirled back, angry again, to catch (and Blake said it with a horrible little half-laugh), “I have trouble believing it. Avon, everything you’ve ever said— I mean, you have no interest in me, or in what I do—”

“Oh yes, now I recall,” Avon gave him a tight, faux-polite smile. “You are a political resistor, all noble purpose; I tried to knock over a bank, and blundered it by misadventure. I am, of course, wholly defined by that incident. Naturally. I ought to leave you alone and keep to my sphere, oughtn’t I? Vacuous criminals only, perhaps. Or at least someone expensive, with very large eyes, who can take a bigger dildo than you and doesn’t know any words that aren’t ‘oh, master’. Anything further would, of course, only be an encumbrance to the sort of person who would suit me.

“You know nothing,” Avon said, advancing on Blake, putting his hands on either side of Blake’s head against the bars of the saltire, and leaning in to hiss in his face, “about what I want, Blake. And you apparently don’t even care enough to pay any attention.

“So,” Avon grinned, quivering with anger, still not touching the man he’d been told not to touch, “shall I tell you? Perhaps it would amuse you—after all, I did promise you an evening’s entertainment. You see, I want,” he ran a finger along Blake’s collar without touching Blake’s skin, “something a bit meatier than the waifs you offered me—physically and emotionally, as it happens. I want someone with substance. Character. Imagination. I want,” he leaned to whisper into Blake’s ear, “to dominate someone who is utterly determined to take what I dish out, when we’re fucking and when we aren’t. I want someone who is worth winning. And you, Blake, are either the epitome of what I want, or a type wholly unto yourself.”

Avon pulled back to look at Blake’s face. Avon knew he was out of control, and he hated nothing more than that. He’d never come to a sub like this. Yet Blake regarded him evenly, totally without fear. It made Avon’s heart judder. Oh, perfect. Why did he have to be perfect?

“I didn’t say that as a judgment on you,” Blake said quietly. “I’m sorry if I implied otherwise. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I said it because I’m battered and out of practice.” His mouth twisted wryly. “You said so yourself.”

“When I said unsophisticated I mean unspoilt,” Avon said through his teeth. “Pure. As though I were your first. I ought to have been. If I had been, you’d certainly know better than to talk about yourself like that in front of me. If you belonged to me, I would remind you that my sub is, grotesquely enough, an actual hero. Uncompromising, strong-willed, brave: proven capable of resisting even torture. And yet he is mine. He allows that. He needs me to take care of him, to retrain him. And I revel in it. I positively glut myself on him. There is no ‘enough’.” Avon pulled back from the hypothetical with a bitter smile. “All we agree on regarding your experiences is, apparently, the actual order of events.”

Blake closed his eyes, and Avon watched him, hungry and alone, cast out of the garden. When Blake opened his eyes again, he looked resolute, set in his courage. Despite everything, Avon’s lip quirked—the expression was familiar.

“When we went to that first meeting here,” Blake said, “I remember thinking that I didn’t want to do anything without you at my side. That it was going to be difficult and awkward, just stupid, if I couldn’t rely on your being there with me. And that is how I feel about everything, Avon. Yes, I need you for work: you know I do. But if I think about anything after that—about trying to do anything without you, hell, even civilian life—I run up against the space where you ought to be, and I can’t even see the basics of it. It’s not that I can’t imagine life if we win: I just have trouble imagining a life for myself now that you’re not a part of. Clearly, you should just be there—and if we grant that, I have to start thinking about what capacity, exactly, I think you ought to be there in. Not unrelatedly, if I think about sex—which, as I think you know, I haven’t been doing much for a while now—”

Blake breathed; Avon didn’t—or at least he didn’t think he did, because he thought of absolutely nothing but what Blake was saying. He watched Blake like he would watch him under some potentially dangerous sex-act: rapt and focused and hyper-attentive.

“It’s not just that you’re the best sex of my life. Well,” Blake’s face twisted, “no, to be fair, that is certainly a factor, but I don’t think that’s only down to how gorgeous your mouth is and how your eyes flash when I do as I’m told. When I think about you in a sexual or romantic context—look. What I’m trying to say, very inadequately, is that I think it would feel very good to say that I love you. That isn’t scene.

“In fact, if I have a type, Avon—I think all my life, I’ve been waiting for you.” His lip quirked. “My knight,” Blake said.

He just—said it. Refusing to be even slightly embarrassed by this raw, childish, messy, disclosure, that stabbed right through self-preservation, driving down into the knot of his desire. Blake tilted his face up for a kiss, expectant. His eyes half-shuddered when Avon dipped to give him one.

“My beloved,” Blake breathed into the little space between their mouths before they met, “my lord.”

Avon kissed him with strange, almost chaste gentleness, but his voice, when he pulled back, was almost furious.

“Well it took you long enough to realize it,” he said harshly, not sure himself whether ‘it’ referred to Blake’s commitment to him or to his own commitment to Blake.

Avon slipped Blake’s ankles and then his wrists free of the saltire with shaking hands.

“I suppose I was still in a dungeon of sorts, and I needed you to rescue me," Blake said wryly. "Thank you, Avon. You always do manage to,” he added, letting himself be borne down to the thick carpet.

“Yes I do,” Avon growled, running his hands over Blake. “I did it for your sake, because you deserve it, and because I want what I have always wanted, Blake. My forfeit, my prize, my reward.”

“Take it,” Blake gasped as Avon pulled the toy out of him and threw the harness somewhere or other, further lubricating his own re-stiffened cock with the salve he’d brought over to the saltire. “Please, take it.”

Blake whimpered when Avon raised his legs above his shoulders, bending Blake back and shoving himself into him. Blake had clearly been sufficiently abused that he felt every stroke keenly. It was also quite evident that Blake was one of those subs who got off on the idea of their dom’s cock: who liked it better than any toy because it was their dom, directly enjoying them.

“Oh you like that, don’t you?” Avon said insinuatingly as he hitched Blake’s hips high and aggressively fucked him, Blake’s poor, swollen cock bouncing with the thrusts.

“I love it,” Blake hissed, under such strain but still trying to please Avon, squeezing around him and moaning whorishly with lust and gratitude. “I love this, I love you, thank you.”

“Look at you,” Avon said, fucking into Blake hard, the way he’d wanted to all evening, the way Blake wanted him to. “Writhing for it. Begging. You don’t obey anyone, but you obey me. So sweetly. Perfectly. My perfect prince—”

And now, with every slamming thrust, a desperate ‘Avon’ popped out of Blake’s mouth.

“I want—” Blake begged, mindlessly, at the end, “I want, I want to belong to you, I, Avon, I—”

“Oh, Blake,” Avon said as he ripped the ring off Blake’s cock, “you do.”

Blake finally came with a scream, on the built-up stimulation and on no direct stimulus but Avon inside him. The contractions were wild and strong, and they wrung a triumphant orgasm out of Avon.

Avon slumped over Blake. A few minutes later, when he could move again, he pulled out and pushed a plug into Blake’s arse in his stead. Blake raised an eyebrow as if to say, ‘Really? After all that?’

“I like my come in you,” Avon said matter-of-factly. “You like it too. This was always how I intended the scene to end. I got rather carried away—that,” he smiled, “wasn’t entirely to plan—but I see no reason to dispose of the plan altogether.” He settled back on top of Blake, and his sub wrapped his arms around him. Very nice.

“We understand that I think the whole concept of monarchy’s inherently evil, yes?” Blake rumbled underneath him.

Avon smirked. “But you still like being called my prince.” Blake shivered, and Avon grinned wider, “In part,” Avon said smugly, “because it is so filthy and elitist and wrong. Don’t you?”

“Yes,” Blake said sullenly.

“Well,” Avon drawled, “all right then.”

“And we understand we’re together, now?” Blake asked, seeking absolute clarity on this key point.

“That goes without saying,” Avon said. “But do it again anyway.”

“I belong to you,” Blake said, with a pleasing solemnity.

“Yes, you do,” Avon agreed, oozing contentment. “Black leather, I think, for the collar.”

“What a surprising choice.”

“Shut up, Blake,” Avon said, smacking Blake’s chest tiredly.

“Earlier,” he added after a moment’s peaceful silence (which was about as long as he and Blake were ever either peaceful or silent while conscious), “when I didn’t say whether I wanted to do anything while we were here—”

“Oh yes, I noticed that,” Blake said, stroking Avon’s back and arse with his hands.

“Mm. Yes, you notice bloody everything, don’t you?”

“Not for months,” Blake pointed out. “Not, in fact, until you were literally promising to brand me, at which point even I had trouble ignoring the retrospectively obvious signs—”

Avon rolled his eyes, though he spoiled it with his grin. “Well, you were rather busy doing a reasonable impression of a monk. Anyway, my point is, I want us to have a nice dinner.”

He could practically hear Blake frowning. “Is that all?”

“An excellent, formal dinner,” Avon clarified. “Such as they serve downstairs.”

Blake’s breath caught. The sound was very slight, and Blake recovered almost instantly. But Avon was, after all, on top of him—and he was a very good, very observant dom besides. He knew when he’d landed a hit.

“With you,” Avon continued, his grin transitioning into a smirk, “dressed nicely for me again. With my plug in your arse, and my collar on your neck, and your leash in my hand. And if I hadn’t just fucked you stupid, the suggestion would excite you, wouldn’t it? Despite all your modern, fastidiously correct sensibilities.”

Blake continued to caress him. “Yes, my lord.”

“I don’t think,” Avon said with consideration, “three better words exist.”

***

They finished up their business on Arrcul in few more days. They went down to the hotel restaurant for dinner every evening, like a very conventional sort of couple—the dull kind of tourists who didn’t stray far from their hotel. And after dinner Avon fucked Blake (twitching and stimulated and hot from an hour under the leash) ragged, still holding Blake’s leash in one hand. Of course they had both additional meetings and less routine sex, but Avon thought it important to give a sub stability with a few companionable established practices, especially in the honeymoon training period. Better for bonding, he explained to Blake as he arranged a perhaps unnecessary number of pillows for Blake to lay over while he ploughed into him with inelegant simplicity. Being taken was a favorite of Blake’s, and Avon did like to indulge him.

When they teleported back to the Liberator, Avon was grinning more smugly than ought to have been allowed. Blake was wearing a simple leather collar—different from the casual velvet one he’d gone down to the planet with. He looked simultaneously irritatingly refreshed and like he was having trouble standing. After the teleport beam stopped wobbling, Blake didn’t. He had to steady himself against the wall of the bay, as though he were woozy.

Watching him stagger, Avon thought perhaps he’d overdone it this morning. But he did so like Blake sore and limping from him, and it had seemed a low-impact sort of day. Well. In terms of the schedule, at least.

“Are you all right, Blake?” he asked, exceptionally solicitously.

Jenna, manning the teleport with Gan, looked pointedly at him. “Oh for goodness’ sake,” Gan muttered. “I’ll drop by with it later.”

Blake raised an eyebrow. “Is that a bet lost?”

Gan gave Blake a sheepish look and walked off, following Jenna towards the flight deck. Avon supposed this meant that at least two of their coworkers had allowed themselves to read more into his charging after Blake than Blake had. This was—slightly embarrassing, but then if he was actually fucking Blake rather than just thinking about it constantly, why should it be? He had always thought that bedding Blake would be a monumental accomplishment: he’d been rather looking forward to everyone they knew coming to understand that Blake was his, now.

“Do you want a regenerator pad?” Avon murmured, feeling slightly guilty. He didn’t like seeing marks he’d put on Blake erased, but he was still learning how to handle him, and if he’d perhaps over-estimated—

“Oh stop fussing,” Blake said fondly, giving Avon a quick kiss on the cheek and walking in the direction of the flight-deck himself. Avon inevitably trailed after him.

Avon pretended the others weren’t all looking at him and Blake as though Jenna had taken advantage of walking into the room first to mouth ‘collared!’ or something of the sort and to make a lot of related hand gestures. Gossips, the lot of them. Blake, however, seemed to be in a good mood with them, and with the universe in general (save, naturally, the fascist dictatorship in charge of a sizable chunk of it).

Avon had come up at his side. He found he was in a similarly benign humor.

“And what,” he inquired, “did you lot get up to while we were gone?”

***

Blake rolled his eyes as, yet again, someone started to cut his leather collar off. This was the seventh time.

“Look,” he said, clearing his throat, “look I can see you’re trying to—demean me, or whatever, but I really don’t advise that.”

The warlord jeered and waved his henchwoman on. “I am sure you do not.”

Blake exhaled. “You kidnapped me and chained me up, so my dominant is already going to be,” Blake winced, choosing a word, “difficult about this, but you can still stop this, Jafress. You can make a better decision. All we want is some information—”

The collar fell from Blake’s neck, and he rolled his eyes. “Well that’s done it,” he muttered irritably. “He hates replacing those.”

Sure enough, Blake heard far-off shooting.

“Oh look,” Blake said in a tone of great unsurprise. “The cavalry.”

A guard captain called the Jafress away, and they hurried to evacuate or to respond to some emergency. Avon, carrying a blaster, slid into the room, almost skidding on the damp subterranean floor. He recovered and doggedly pretended that nothing of the kind had happened. Blake allowed it. He also allowed himself an undignified wave of sentiment: Avon rescuing him always made him feel in equal measure protected and charmed, and more than usually interested in indulging in a lavish display of the gratitude due to his preserver.

“Hello,” Avon said casually to Blake as he approached his submissive at a more sedate speed. The slower pace both looked more commanding and put him at less risk of falling over. Upon arrival, Avon bent down and expertly laser-probed through the ties binding Blake without cutting into Blake’s skin. There was, Blake thought, a lot to be said for an experienced dom.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Blake said pleasantly, with a light rumble of innuendo.

“I see they cut off your collar,” Avon responded in a slightly tighter tone, his eyes glittering a little dangerously. “When will they learn?”

“I don’t think backwater planets pass around a newsletter,” Blake pointed out.

“They ought to,” Avon said, priming his gun. “Because I’m going to kill him,” Avon said in a conversational tone. “And this could all have been easily avoided. Did they hurt you?”

“No.”

Avon nodded. “Then I’m only going to kill him once.”

“I did try to warn him,” Blake said.

Avon patted his cheek. “I know you did, dearest. You always try. I keep thinking, ‘eventually he will give up on all the idiots in the universe. Eventually the law of averages will sink in, even for Blake.’ But no.”

“No,” Blake agreed. “Gun?”

Avon handed him one of the non-isomorphic spares he’d brought with him.

“I’m still hoping to talk it out,” Blake said in a warning tone, though he didn’t think the Jafress was really the sort of ruler anyone would weep over the loss of.

Avon rolled his eyes. “Of course you are. Allow me to say ‘I told you so’ in advance.”

“Allow you, my lord?” Blake said, his eyes wide and serious, his mouth distinctly amused. As ever, Blake gave the very old-fashioned endearment a slightly amused ring, even as he endorsed it. He knew Avon loved it—both the heavy weight of the term and Blake’s insouciance. Taken as a whole, the sentence Blake had just uttered might mean ‘I’m in no position to allow you anything, given that you own me utterly’, or ‘I would allow you more interesting liberties than the privilege of venting your annoyance’. Or even ‘perhaps I don’t feel like allowing you anything at all—perhaps I feel like having you work to make me give you an inch, and only submitting once you’ve conquered my resistance’. But all of the implied meanings were distinctly flirtatious.

Avon’s lip quirked in response. “Don’t start something you can’t finish in a literal dungeon,” he muttered. Blake sighed regretfully (though he was sure they’d make up for lost opportunities back on the ship—though he sulked about the danger to Blake and the inconvenience to himself they involved, Avon was also very fond of rescues). Blake pointed out the way he’d seen the Jafress go.