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This follows on from this. And has prostitution fantasies, D/s, painplay, but no sex and no Batman. Good thing I quit assigning age ratings to my fics.
PACT II (BATMAN WAS WRONG)
When I'm at Court and I'm not making music for one purpose or another, I spend a lot of time thinking about street gangs.
I'm not the only person here who ever gives them a moment of consideration. The Council also thinks of them sometimes - I know because Van tells me, and somehow the minutes from these occasions tend to pass through my hands. The Council makes simplistic proposals to drive gangs out by force or wholesale slum clearance, and speaks of doing whatever it takes to protect the poor, innocent cityfolk from the horrors in their midst; they write off all the codes and histories of the gangs as superstitions, and ignore the symbiotic nature of cities and their gangs, gangs and their cities. They've no idea how complex gang structure is, or what it's like to grow up in its shadow.
A gang is an elaborate pyramid hierarchy - each has its own structure and code, but they share much of the same machinery. All have a leader, or more than one (though that usually turns bad fast), levels of enforcers and trusted lieutenants, and at the low end you find specialised worker ants out on the streets making money by whatever means they are assigned. Some gangs also use assassins and moles, but it can be hard to draft grunts in to such short-lived careers as those - most prefer to take other, more stable, specialitites. The success and survival of any one member is dependent on the whole structure, and is depended on by it in turn - that's what loyalty is, knowing you'd starve or die without the gang that you give fealty to. So before my childhood took its sudden upward turn, I was trying to figure out how to get into a gang.
I was young, but smart enough to know I wouldn't be able to charm pennies from pitying strangers forever and that eventually I'd have to run away from Berte and find a real job. And there was one job that, from all the stories and laws, I knew I wanted, in any gang that would have me. I wanted to be a smoothman.
All the strongest gangs had one. Smoothmen solved problems; they made deals, talked out truces when a turf war was deemed to be not worth shedding blood over, soothed egos and reminded everyone of their place, delivered threats and promises, knew their leader's mind and spoke it. Smoothmen didn't have to look tough - some codes forbid them from carrying weapons. I started learning to hide knives.
(I knew you couldn't become a smoothman just like that, so I thought I had to find another way to get into a gang that didn't require being particularly strong or brave. I found out where the male streetwalkers plied their trade, and, afraid and hiding and not sure I even wanted to live to grow up, watched them until I knew everything men did when they fucked for money; all the reassuring dirty-talk and the cost of each act, the bloody mess when someone didn't pay up; the joy at discovering they'd ensnared a priest or lordling or someone else they could permenantly lean on for money. I'd heard that a lot of smoothmen - some of the men, most of the women - had been whores or pimps once. Maybe it was just trash-talk from weaker gangs, but I believed it. It was a gloomy education, lamplit at best, and it wasn't until I was being schooled at the Collegium that it ever occurred to me that anything was odd about my complete lack of interest in what men did with female whores.)
And at court, when I chance to think of it, I think I'm a smoothman. I make everything around me go as easily as I possibly can; I flatter people who no one else would; I have answers to everything rehearsed and filed away to produce whenever necessary; I am the most approachable person in any given room, and the best liar. I share glimmers of gossip in return for heartfelt or dangerous secrets, and I'd hate me for all of it if I wasn't so damn good at what I do. I wonder how many of the gang smoothmen had the Bardic gift. It would explain a lot, and the Council would be engagingly horrified about it.
(I first practiced these skills on a gang enforcer who wanted protection money because I was busking on his turf. I successfully convinced him that he didn't want to skim my cupful of pennies because I was an asset to his organisation, bait to draw in marks and hold their attention while his cutpurses worked the crowd. I told him how much worse off he'd be if caused me to leave my corner and take my skills elsewhere. He agreed to leave me be - maybe knowing that most of my earnings ended up in his hands anyway - and I was almost dismayed, because I hoped he'd send a real smoothman to negotiate with me, though that was a tad ambitous given the pettiness of the issue and the fact that I was I've no idea how young because no one was counting up anything except for those pennies.)
So I stop by Vanyel's office with a bite of lunch, a few pages of mental notes about what needs to be said to who to soothe away which crisis, and a clutch of official secrets culled from a bad-tempered scribe who should never, ever have been accompanying a foreign envoy but oh am I glad that he was. Van's secretary is out, long since jaded to Van's complete lack of regard for lunchtime - as am I, but I come here almost every day with food and sometimes brandy because what I am here to do is make everything easier - whether it's finding the right leverage with people, sharing the right words or keeping my lifebonded going. Which has seemed easier, lately. He has more energy than he used to, and seems more peaceful even underneath his glacial public persona. I feel like I daren't speculate as to why, for fear of fracturing it with my thoughts.
I share what I've learned that needs sharing and prepare to move on to the next thing that needs my attention, and he politely gets the door for me in view of the fact that I'm holding two instruments and a wodge of messages I need to pass on to the Seneschal. It's all politics, in here - not even I get to see that mask slip, or share anything with him on a personal level, even with only the two of us present, so I leave it at "I'll see you later."
He nods, barely catching my eye, and his reply is so quiet I might not have caught it if he hadn't been standing right by me. "Yes, milord."
I kick the door shut, staring at him in shock.
He doesn't do this. He's discreet by necessity, and while it would be impossible to keep it secret that we share a bed even if either of us particularly wanted to, he's extremely cautious about where and how he alludes to our relationship at court, even when there aren't doors standing open right by him. Bedroom-talk in his office - even the implication of it - is unheard of, so I drop what I'm holding - gently - and grab him and push him against the door, less gently.
It's a game. It's a game and the table is clearly a lot bigger than I thought it was so I kiss him roughly, hands going places they probably shouldn't, while I collect my brain and try to figure out what the hell he's up to.
It's not so hard to see it; part of me had already decided that Van's renewed vigour and the calm that seemed to lie beneath it really is connected to the sex we've been having - all the playful and bizarre things I've done to give him powerlessness - and he's done the unthinkable and let it get into his head and go places with him. Even he has quiet moments, and while I've been thinking of myself as the state's own smoothman, maybe he's been three rooms away thinking of himself as my personal whore.
I'm not going to pretend it crosses his mind as more than a passing comfort, but, oh stars, I don't even know where the walls that we've been living between even are any more. I stop kissing him and take him by the shoulders, looking up at his inscrutable face, smoothing out the rumples I just made in his shirt. "You're mine," I announce, and I pick up my burdens and leave.
I hang on to that anticipation of later for the rest of the day - it's better than sifting through crumbs of my past - even through a dreary evening engagement that leaves me hopeful that Vanyel will get back to our room before I do tonight. Sadly not. I discard my knives and half my clothing, itching a little from wanting him, needing to vent the day's frustrations.
But his absence gives me a little undisturbed time to myself (no one bothers us here any more except in dire emergencies; I like to imagine them shrinking from our door, assuming that we must be engaging in every kind of unnatural act, when really we're more likely to be slumped in front of the fire talking about cricket.) I could use that time either to think over all the questions at the back of my head or to take the edge off the pent-up want I'm still feeling from our earlier encounter - I settle on the former, because it's somehow more pressing and I know if I tried to do both at the same time I'd only get terminally distracted.
It doesn't really work. I sit there plucking chords on my gittern as I watch a candle burn down, trying to feel out my frustrations in music. It starts fast, and then the beat stumbles, and it definitely switches to a minor key right there, and there's a jarring change of octave that my ears can't adjust to as easily as my hands do - it's all just noise, and I'm making it without directly understanding it. I don't know the whole story.
But I know half of it. My hands pause, strings gently vibrating beneath my fingers.
I know half, and I can learn the other half. I hope. But what about the half I do know?
I strike the loudest, ugliest dischords I can without breaking the thing (and thank the gods I don't believe in for Vanyel's magical sound-shielding - it's kept the ears of our poor neighbours from worse than that before now). Pain. Power. Day after day I work the skin off my fingertips keeping them at bay and then there's this part of me that wants to revel in them. Music, then noise. Both from the same place, both from inside me. And I'm inflicting them on my own lifebonded because -
- because I love him.
I press a hand down on the strings. Silence.
I've been hurting him and treating him like a tenpenny streetboy because I love him. He likes it - more than just likes it, he needs it, it's making him happy when little else is and whatever I try doing to him he begs me for more (and I do not discourage begging in this regard; I've been a beggar-child, I know those depths). Is it so much of a leap to say that the part of him that wants it is open to what I've offered because he loves me?
I don't lie to myself - I've used equally willing men for my pleasure before without love being involved on either side, but this feels so different and, if he's cheerfully alluding to it in semi-public, it's much more serious, and every bit of it has been loving. Not brutal or exploitative or against either of our natures. Whatever strange notes it emits form a lovesong.
I'm playing the same tune more gently, noticing the feeling of my own shaky heartbeat in the inevitable pauses between chords, when the door finally opens.
Vanyel acknowledges me with tired eyes. There's that feeling to his presence that's both drained and somehow - essential, like a layer of dust has been scraped off our lifebond - that I know indicates he's been using magic all night, which means he'll probably be too weary inside to want sex, and I realise I don't even mind because I've got all these needs and ideas about lovemaking that aren't merely about sex any more. He murmurs an apologetic greeting and sits himself on the floor by my chair, his head tilted against the arm. "What's that you're playing?"
"Not yet sure." He nods, used enough to my meandering composition process that he doesn't press it; he hears things when they're ready, or when I cave and start asking his opinion. He usually flatters me horribly.
"How was the party?" he asks; not yet too weary for pleasantries.
"Awful," I reply. "I was trying to liven it up, and it felt like wading through mud. And the Duke was blind drunk before it started, and the Countess was determined to turn the whole event into a quest to find a match for her youngest daughter - even sank to approaching me..."
"Oh my." There's a grain of amusement in his voice. "However did you evade her clutches?"
"Told her straight-off that I'm as lowborn as a roach. I would've left at that point and spared us both further embarrassment, but..." I shrug. "The iron-cast laws of patronage required my continued presence. And besides, your mother was on form."
"She was?"
"Yes. It would've fallen apart without her determination to chatter all the ghastliness away." He looks up at me with an awkward sort-of smile. I find myself running a hand through his hair instinctively, and it feels a bit like what happened in his office earlier, a power-game surfacing unbidden. His posture could mean anything if I didn't already know what it meant. He seems full of such gestures - either that, or I'm reading too much into harmless habits like his willingness to sit at my feet, biased by the obscene things he's let me do to him - but...
If you wanted to not know yourself fully - to let pieces of yourself sit untended and unacknowledged, for years or decades, rather than allowing yourself to know and enjoy them as well as you can - the best way to do it would be to do exactly what he's been doing. Ignore yourself. Fill the wondering parts of you with worries and politics, don't look for ways to be happy, don't let anyone in who might find, in plain sight, the things you never looked for.
And he's...anxious tonight. Trying not to feel. I can tell. I reach down as far as his neck, gathering his hair and letting it slip through my fingers. Trying to soothe - but was it my fault? Did I go too far earlier? Did I make him feel unsafe? "What is it?" I ask softly.
"Had to reset my traps on the Border." I nod, still awed by the idea that he can act at such remote distances; I can write a song and someone could carry it far away, and sing it in their own voice, and it would still mean the same thing, but that's the closest my work can come to what he's doing. And - "One of them had killed four people. Scouting party from Karse. A team of soldiers cleaned up the mess, and then I reset the ward - so it can happen again."
Oh gods, this again.
It's happened before a few times; it was uncomfortable for both of us, the first time he came back here late at night with blood on his hands, but we dealt with it, and now - I don't want to think that I'm used to it, but we've learned how to handle it.
That first time it happened, we shared dinner in awkward silence and then slept fitfully and as far apart as possible, and found ourselves lying awake long before morning; somehow we got talking, and he found his way into the crook of my arm, mutual reassurances passing in the spaces between words - no, I don't hate what he is, and no, he's not conscienceless, he doesn't grant himself the freedom of agression or cruelty or self-justification; he's a killer who never wanted to be.
That night we talked til it didn't matter any more, and then saw in the dawn with sex and a hand of piquet. I guess we all have our own way of making the world a safer place; I can soothe pain, and he can kill people several hundred miles away. His is the heavier burden, and I'll gladly help him to bear it.
So now? I don't know if I need to say anything or if I just need to be here for him while he sits there and fights his own shadow, but I'm not good at silence, I'm really not. "Van..." I hazard, hoping not to misstep. "It's not like they just stumbled over that thing, is it?"
"No," he snorts. "Even if they hadn't died there, they would never have got more than ten miles inside the border - and I can't know what damage they might've done on the way. I'm just tired of senseless death."
I squeeze his shoulder, feeling his tension through the cloth of his shirt. "Who isn't tired of it? No one I'd want to know." My eyes slide to the place on the mantlepiece where I left my knives. Is it selfish of people like me to assume that people like him are going to kill to protect us?
He bows his head a little, and I can feel that tension pressing against him, like he has to fight it to draw breath. "I should forget about it and be glad that we're both safe..."
"No." I stroke at his shoulder, down to his chest. His heart seems to beat hard and fast. "You've always asked me to question the things I do - I'd think less of you if you didn't do the same."
He sighs, and he reaches upwards, clasping my hand in his and then going higher, up to my elbow, hand tightening on me. I can tell he needs something but I let him wait. I let it focus, his touches increasingly insistent, his shields lowering until there's almost nothing about him I can't feel.
"You're exhausted," I tell him.
"Not completely." His voice shakes.
"What do you want?"
"Would you -" it's barely more than a whisper - "Would you hurt me?"
"Why?" I challenge. He can't not reply. He's getting used to this tone of voice; it has strings attached, sometimes knotted leather ones, and he isn't allowed to ignore it.
"Because I deserve it." I can feel his muscles bunching again, bracing themselves to feel pain.
No.
Oh, no. No way. He isn't - "Vanyel, no. I can't -" I shove him away, exasperated, and drop to my knees beside the place he slumps. I grab his face in my hands, turning him to look at me. "I can't hurt you for - for that. I'm not a, a judge or a god. I'm not going to be your conscience. I can only hurt you because -" now my voice is cracking and it's not because I was singing all night, it's because this sounds so foolish now I'm saying it to him and it's making tears prick at my eyes anyway - "Because I love you, and I want you to like it. I want to make you feel. I can't slap you into absolution. I haven't the right to do that."
He's breathing like he's been running from himself for a long time. From all the horrifying things he's seen and done and from what he wants and fears and feels, from his remorse and his ability to ignore it and to kill again and again. From loving me and feeling - it's like I can see it through a crack in the walls he puts around things, not his shielding but the harder blocks we all use to survive - like what he is and does and how he has endured means he's something unloveable, unspeakable. Like he only deserves to have me in his life if I'm there to punish his moral transgressions.
No, no, no.
"Van, I love you -" I try again.
"You do have that right." He's closed his eyes, and I lean my head against his, trying to listen to what in the hells he's been feeling without flying off into another rage. "I'm yours. You've every right. I'll take anything you feel I deserve -"
"Then stop trying to tell me what you deserve." I kiss him, claiming his lips with possessive insistence, hands slipping down his back and touching him steadily and gently until he relaxes against me. He's mine to care for and turn on and play with; not my vassal, even when I hold his head between my hands; not my prisoner to be condemned and sentenced. "I'm not here to deal out answers to god-sized questions. I'm here to make love with you."
He's silent for many moments, and I can feel him absorbing my words, still stinging from denial - a hurt I couldn't avoid granting him. Eventually he speaks. "I can't avoid those questions, and I - hoped you'd..."
"Beat them out of you?"
"Yes," he admits. "Every damn time I have to look at what I've done and ask myself if it was truly necessary. There's times it's been a wholehearted yes -" His eyes narrow for a second, as if under the glare of bright nostalgia and his own glorious arrogance. Those are the times they sing songs about. "But others - I don't know, and here I'm too far away to know. I didn't even feel them die -"
He shivers in my arms, I don't know if it's for the unspeakable act of empathy that he's implying or from the numbness of killing without it. Feeling his feelings is always a fact followed by guesswork. I know what Vanyel is, and often have no idea why or how.
"I can't tell you," I reply, "and I could hit you til I broke both my wrists without silencing those thoughts of yours. I know you."
"All too well." I shake my head, no, not yet, nor ever, and he sighs. "I'm sorry I asked for that. Pain is - much simpler than wondering what the gods have in store for me -"
"Ask anyone else and they'll tell you, love." I squeeze him tight around the ribs, because I am not, never will be, prepared for his meeting such a reckoning. Not that he'd delay it for fear of pain, or for me, or for any selfish thing. "I'm not the only one who sleeps safer because of you. And - I wish it didn't have to be you, but I think it's better you than someone who didn't worry over it."
He nods slowly - I'm sure he's killed such mindless butchers, and seen his own reflection in their glazed eyes. I do think that this is getting through to him; I'm sure he's been told it before, maybe by himself, but when he hears it from me, close and honest like this, he has to believe it.
"You alright now?" He shrugs, helpless and not without humour - talking has changed nothing, only made it possible for him to be easier on himself within the confines of his own wariness. I clasp him by the shoulders and hold him at arms' length, mock-frowning. "Now tell me again why you want me to hurt you."
He shifts under my hands and I can feel the shape of the thing inside him that comes to the fore when I make such implicit threats, the thing that touched me earlier and told me what it wanted - muscles set just so, senses awaiting impact, and - yes - a blush of shame on his face that is, itself, an answer. I give him time to provide me with a better one. One that can accept love unconditionally. "Because you can," words that traced out the form of the power I have over him, "and bearing it for you is a joy to me."
I smile widely, and wonder what he felt emerge from me to touch him. An alleyway shadow, gripping rough and ready to unleash savagery. Part of me that's older than tasteful music and good conversation but no stranger to the meanings of pain and of power.
I hadn't decided. I can beat him, or deny him again, and either one will pain him, and either one will fulfil his shamefaced cravings, and either one will let me revel in his acceptance of my right to torment him - it's like I've created a perpetual perversion that I couldn't even stop if I wanted to. But he's ultimately so right I can't deny him. "I can hurt you, and I will. Strip."
I have him lean over the back of my chair, and I remove my own clothes slowly as he watches, keeping my belt clasped in one hand. "I really could break a wrist trying to hurt you as much as you want me to, you know?" He inhales sharply; this is new. I've only hurt him with my own touch or with petty knotted toys, until now. I come close behind him, and stroke his ass with my right hand, letting the end of my belt caress his legs as I touch him. I slap him once, hard, and the air whistles out of his lungs.
I step back and raise my left arm to bring the belt down on his so elegantly presented body.
I feel him tense and untense as the sensation passes - the blow wasn't hard, but it was fast, and men who like to taste pain have told me how the instant stinging warmth of it settles and spreads before - if you do it right - laying a foundation for blistering agony. I try another just like it, a second pinked stripe to match the first, and I steal a look at his face. He seems gently perplexed, content to submit to this treatment but finding it easier than expected.
Well, fine. I try a hard one, and he groans, startled. My cock stirs at the sight of the line of welts on his ass, and I plant another hard blow directly atop it, and a third, just in case he hasn't got the point yet.
He's clinging to the arms of the chair, gasping. I grab his chin, watching something happen that I'm becoming used to - a damp-eyed descent into a world of desperate sensation. I kiss him, malevolently gentle, and whisper, "You asked for this. Do you like it?" I land another blow before he can answer, and its suddenness knocks his words astray. "Does it make you hard?"
I flick the end of my belt over my shoulder, watching him gather his wits and realise the question wasn't rhetorical. "Yes -"
"Whore." I bring my arm down hard, and the curled end of the belt follows through faster. He gasps and curls his shoulders, fighting to accept pain as easily as I cause it, knees sagging, face buried in the back of the chair. A few strokes later, I slip a hand in his hair, turning him to look at me again.
His eyes are damp, and as I watch his first tears escape their edges. "You want this," I remind him. "Do you know what I was thinking about this morning?" He blinks at me, not comprehending the change of subject. "I was thinking about when I was living on the streets and trying to learn what whores did in case I ever had to be one of them." He breathes heavily and I can feel his mood drop, like he's scrambling down to my level to save me from memories because gods know I often do the same for him. "That's where I first saw things like this. Saw a lot a boy shouldn't have. They were greedy or addicted people who endured anything from anyone because they were so desperate to have what they wanted." I step back from him again. "Begging pennies with their bodies. They had nothing else, but I watched them because I knew they had more than me. Hunger's good at telling you your place."
He tries to right himself, to stretch out a hand. "Stef -"
"Keep still. Don't call me that right now. What would you do for more pain?"
"Milord," he breathes, "anything."
"You'd beg for it, wouldn't you?"
"Anything - milord, please - I'm yours for anything -"
"Spread your legs." He gives a stifled groan as he does so, raw-red flesh sticking to itself, stiff muscles shifting. I reach a hand to cup his balls, squeeze the base of his cock, run two fingers up the shaft, find the head leaking fluid. "You do want this." I press against him briefly, a reminder that he's not the only one, and then I offer a rough parting squeeze and I get to work on his thighs.
I only stop once I see that the welts upon welts on his soft skin are cracking and bleeding. He's tried writhing and tensing and streams of incoherent sounds, none of which have done aught but add to my fervour. Twice, he yelled enough, and the first time I told him he was a lying whore and I knew he still wanted this; the second, I simply ignored him until he fell silent, and I watch his face crease with tears and sweat and concentration. There's peace in there, peace in my tiring arms, the tumbling runaway feeling of power relieved uncontrollably, freeing us.
I stop, and I help him upright, half-carrying him to bed, laying him face-down and studying his marks while he lays there, still moaning softly. I sigh, and by way of an apology for my extravagance, I reach under the bed for his medical kit. It's still strange to be dabbing at him with salve-soaked rags of cotton and not singing under my breath to heal him - counter to one instinct, indulgent of another. Maybe that's why I enjoy this so much; it's the one time when I can have total relief from attempting to stop others' pain. He hisses and twitches as I work him over, and can sense the pain I put him through as being something like a warm bath, slowly draining, leaving him covered in the wet film of its memory. He's hyperfocused on himself at skin level, without thoughts, without a world outside of him and me, without emotion other than the exhilerated feeling of survival.
Bringing him to this state is so satisfying. I don't even want to come, I just want to watch him lying prone on top of our sheets, helpless and happy and thoroughly marked.
My hands are still hungry after doing all they can to patch up the damage they caused, so I let them wander up his spine, continuing to touch and tend and heal. He's murmuring to me, turning his head as his mind comes back up to the surface, and I see his lips fold into a frown. "Stef - what you said earlier -"
"Doesn't matter." I curse myself inwardly; this isn't about me baring my scars to him, and I chose a stupid time to let that story spill out. "I shouldn't have said it. I'm sorry."
"But it was true." I press my lips together in a flat line, unable to deny it.
He turns under my hands, reaches up for me, and pulls me down into the protection of his arms, touching the back of my head with one hand as if he had the power to reach inside it and pull out all the bad memories. Gods, don't, you'll cut your hands open on all the sentence fragments. I shouldn't have told him about that, but I'm too tired to feel guilty about something that is so like him, really - I clear his mind of his own troubles and he immediately starts attending to mine?
He doesn't have to do anything for me and there's very little he can do, because he can't soothe away my past any more than I can his - but he's offering me support, because it's in his nature and because he loves me, and because I've spent all my energy on hurting him so I'm too tired to tell him not to worry about me. But I trust him, and that does at least offer us another possibility. "Would you come into my mind?"
He nods, and pulls my head against his own, eyes closing. His presence seems to - there's no adequate words for this - grow from that point deep inside where I never, ever lose the sense of him, and it passes among my tangled thoughts as gently as starlight. I'm almost too in awe of it to show it what I'm imagining, what I don't know how to say.
I can't speak to his mind, only offer it mute mental gestures - like putting my whole heart into performing a song without words. I want him to look at my assemblage of dischords - the knot that I found and tried to unravel into harmony. I know how I wanted it to sound now, and all it needs is a little more work and imagination. All it needs is this form I can see in my head:
Two shapes, warped and cracked and weatherbeaten. Life hammered them into something other than they would be otherwise. Push them together and every splinter finds a matching valley, every twist a concavity to nestle within, a seamless join formed out of two mismatched lumps of chaos.
I feel his laugh from somewhere deep inside, a flickering glow of joy and understanding. :I see it. We go well together, don't we?: I wonder, in return, what other lord has ever let a bastard streetchild belt him out of love, and he tells me, :Gods, I know, I'm lucky.:
continued here
PACT II (BATMAN WAS WRONG)
When I'm at Court and I'm not making music for one purpose or another, I spend a lot of time thinking about street gangs.
I'm not the only person here who ever gives them a moment of consideration. The Council also thinks of them sometimes - I know because Van tells me, and somehow the minutes from these occasions tend to pass through my hands. The Council makes simplistic proposals to drive gangs out by force or wholesale slum clearance, and speaks of doing whatever it takes to protect the poor, innocent cityfolk from the horrors in their midst; they write off all the codes and histories of the gangs as superstitions, and ignore the symbiotic nature of cities and their gangs, gangs and their cities. They've no idea how complex gang structure is, or what it's like to grow up in its shadow.
A gang is an elaborate pyramid hierarchy - each has its own structure and code, but they share much of the same machinery. All have a leader, or more than one (though that usually turns bad fast), levels of enforcers and trusted lieutenants, and at the low end you find specialised worker ants out on the streets making money by whatever means they are assigned. Some gangs also use assassins and moles, but it can be hard to draft grunts in to such short-lived careers as those - most prefer to take other, more stable, specialitites. The success and survival of any one member is dependent on the whole structure, and is depended on by it in turn - that's what loyalty is, knowing you'd starve or die without the gang that you give fealty to. So before my childhood took its sudden upward turn, I was trying to figure out how to get into a gang.
I was young, but smart enough to know I wouldn't be able to charm pennies from pitying strangers forever and that eventually I'd have to run away from Berte and find a real job. And there was one job that, from all the stories and laws, I knew I wanted, in any gang that would have me. I wanted to be a smoothman.
All the strongest gangs had one. Smoothmen solved problems; they made deals, talked out truces when a turf war was deemed to be not worth shedding blood over, soothed egos and reminded everyone of their place, delivered threats and promises, knew their leader's mind and spoke it. Smoothmen didn't have to look tough - some codes forbid them from carrying weapons. I started learning to hide knives.
(I knew you couldn't become a smoothman just like that, so I thought I had to find another way to get into a gang that didn't require being particularly strong or brave. I found out where the male streetwalkers plied their trade, and, afraid and hiding and not sure I even wanted to live to grow up, watched them until I knew everything men did when they fucked for money; all the reassuring dirty-talk and the cost of each act, the bloody mess when someone didn't pay up; the joy at discovering they'd ensnared a priest or lordling or someone else they could permenantly lean on for money. I'd heard that a lot of smoothmen - some of the men, most of the women - had been whores or pimps once. Maybe it was just trash-talk from weaker gangs, but I believed it. It was a gloomy education, lamplit at best, and it wasn't until I was being schooled at the Collegium that it ever occurred to me that anything was odd about my complete lack of interest in what men did with female whores.)
And at court, when I chance to think of it, I think I'm a smoothman. I make everything around me go as easily as I possibly can; I flatter people who no one else would; I have answers to everything rehearsed and filed away to produce whenever necessary; I am the most approachable person in any given room, and the best liar. I share glimmers of gossip in return for heartfelt or dangerous secrets, and I'd hate me for all of it if I wasn't so damn good at what I do. I wonder how many of the gang smoothmen had the Bardic gift. It would explain a lot, and the Council would be engagingly horrified about it.
(I first practiced these skills on a gang enforcer who wanted protection money because I was busking on his turf. I successfully convinced him that he didn't want to skim my cupful of pennies because I was an asset to his organisation, bait to draw in marks and hold their attention while his cutpurses worked the crowd. I told him how much worse off he'd be if caused me to leave my corner and take my skills elsewhere. He agreed to leave me be - maybe knowing that most of my earnings ended up in his hands anyway - and I was almost dismayed, because I hoped he'd send a real smoothman to negotiate with me, though that was a tad ambitous given the pettiness of the issue and the fact that I was I've no idea how young because no one was counting up anything except for those pennies.)
So I stop by Vanyel's office with a bite of lunch, a few pages of mental notes about what needs to be said to who to soothe away which crisis, and a clutch of official secrets culled from a bad-tempered scribe who should never, ever have been accompanying a foreign envoy but oh am I glad that he was. Van's secretary is out, long since jaded to Van's complete lack of regard for lunchtime - as am I, but I come here almost every day with food and sometimes brandy because what I am here to do is make everything easier - whether it's finding the right leverage with people, sharing the right words or keeping my lifebonded going. Which has seemed easier, lately. He has more energy than he used to, and seems more peaceful even underneath his glacial public persona. I feel like I daren't speculate as to why, for fear of fracturing it with my thoughts.
I share what I've learned that needs sharing and prepare to move on to the next thing that needs my attention, and he politely gets the door for me in view of the fact that I'm holding two instruments and a wodge of messages I need to pass on to the Seneschal. It's all politics, in here - not even I get to see that mask slip, or share anything with him on a personal level, even with only the two of us present, so I leave it at "I'll see you later."
He nods, barely catching my eye, and his reply is so quiet I might not have caught it if he hadn't been standing right by me. "Yes, milord."
I kick the door shut, staring at him in shock.
He doesn't do this. He's discreet by necessity, and while it would be impossible to keep it secret that we share a bed even if either of us particularly wanted to, he's extremely cautious about where and how he alludes to our relationship at court, even when there aren't doors standing open right by him. Bedroom-talk in his office - even the implication of it - is unheard of, so I drop what I'm holding - gently - and grab him and push him against the door, less gently.
It's a game. It's a game and the table is clearly a lot bigger than I thought it was so I kiss him roughly, hands going places they probably shouldn't, while I collect my brain and try to figure out what the hell he's up to.
It's not so hard to see it; part of me had already decided that Van's renewed vigour and the calm that seemed to lie beneath it really is connected to the sex we've been having - all the playful and bizarre things I've done to give him powerlessness - and he's done the unthinkable and let it get into his head and go places with him. Even he has quiet moments, and while I've been thinking of myself as the state's own smoothman, maybe he's been three rooms away thinking of himself as my personal whore.
I'm not going to pretend it crosses his mind as more than a passing comfort, but, oh stars, I don't even know where the walls that we've been living between even are any more. I stop kissing him and take him by the shoulders, looking up at his inscrutable face, smoothing out the rumples I just made in his shirt. "You're mine," I announce, and I pick up my burdens and leave.
I hang on to that anticipation of later for the rest of the day - it's better than sifting through crumbs of my past - even through a dreary evening engagement that leaves me hopeful that Vanyel will get back to our room before I do tonight. Sadly not. I discard my knives and half my clothing, itching a little from wanting him, needing to vent the day's frustrations.
But his absence gives me a little undisturbed time to myself (no one bothers us here any more except in dire emergencies; I like to imagine them shrinking from our door, assuming that we must be engaging in every kind of unnatural act, when really we're more likely to be slumped in front of the fire talking about cricket.) I could use that time either to think over all the questions at the back of my head or to take the edge off the pent-up want I'm still feeling from our earlier encounter - I settle on the former, because it's somehow more pressing and I know if I tried to do both at the same time I'd only get terminally distracted.
It doesn't really work. I sit there plucking chords on my gittern as I watch a candle burn down, trying to feel out my frustrations in music. It starts fast, and then the beat stumbles, and it definitely switches to a minor key right there, and there's a jarring change of octave that my ears can't adjust to as easily as my hands do - it's all just noise, and I'm making it without directly understanding it. I don't know the whole story.
But I know half of it. My hands pause, strings gently vibrating beneath my fingers.
I know half, and I can learn the other half. I hope. But what about the half I do know?
I strike the loudest, ugliest dischords I can without breaking the thing (and thank the gods I don't believe in for Vanyel's magical sound-shielding - it's kept the ears of our poor neighbours from worse than that before now). Pain. Power. Day after day I work the skin off my fingertips keeping them at bay and then there's this part of me that wants to revel in them. Music, then noise. Both from the same place, both from inside me. And I'm inflicting them on my own lifebonded because -
- because I love him.
I press a hand down on the strings. Silence.
I've been hurting him and treating him like a tenpenny streetboy because I love him. He likes it - more than just likes it, he needs it, it's making him happy when little else is and whatever I try doing to him he begs me for more (and I do not discourage begging in this regard; I've been a beggar-child, I know those depths). Is it so much of a leap to say that the part of him that wants it is open to what I've offered because he loves me?
I don't lie to myself - I've used equally willing men for my pleasure before without love being involved on either side, but this feels so different and, if he's cheerfully alluding to it in semi-public, it's much more serious, and every bit of it has been loving. Not brutal or exploitative or against either of our natures. Whatever strange notes it emits form a lovesong.
I'm playing the same tune more gently, noticing the feeling of my own shaky heartbeat in the inevitable pauses between chords, when the door finally opens.
Vanyel acknowledges me with tired eyes. There's that feeling to his presence that's both drained and somehow - essential, like a layer of dust has been scraped off our lifebond - that I know indicates he's been using magic all night, which means he'll probably be too weary inside to want sex, and I realise I don't even mind because I've got all these needs and ideas about lovemaking that aren't merely about sex any more. He murmurs an apologetic greeting and sits himself on the floor by my chair, his head tilted against the arm. "What's that you're playing?"
"Not yet sure." He nods, used enough to my meandering composition process that he doesn't press it; he hears things when they're ready, or when I cave and start asking his opinion. He usually flatters me horribly.
"How was the party?" he asks; not yet too weary for pleasantries.
"Awful," I reply. "I was trying to liven it up, and it felt like wading through mud. And the Duke was blind drunk before it started, and the Countess was determined to turn the whole event into a quest to find a match for her youngest daughter - even sank to approaching me..."
"Oh my." There's a grain of amusement in his voice. "However did you evade her clutches?"
"Told her straight-off that I'm as lowborn as a roach. I would've left at that point and spared us both further embarrassment, but..." I shrug. "The iron-cast laws of patronage required my continued presence. And besides, your mother was on form."
"She was?"
"Yes. It would've fallen apart without her determination to chatter all the ghastliness away." He looks up at me with an awkward sort-of smile. I find myself running a hand through his hair instinctively, and it feels a bit like what happened in his office earlier, a power-game surfacing unbidden. His posture could mean anything if I didn't already know what it meant. He seems full of such gestures - either that, or I'm reading too much into harmless habits like his willingness to sit at my feet, biased by the obscene things he's let me do to him - but...
If you wanted to not know yourself fully - to let pieces of yourself sit untended and unacknowledged, for years or decades, rather than allowing yourself to know and enjoy them as well as you can - the best way to do it would be to do exactly what he's been doing. Ignore yourself. Fill the wondering parts of you with worries and politics, don't look for ways to be happy, don't let anyone in who might find, in plain sight, the things you never looked for.
And he's...anxious tonight. Trying not to feel. I can tell. I reach down as far as his neck, gathering his hair and letting it slip through my fingers. Trying to soothe - but was it my fault? Did I go too far earlier? Did I make him feel unsafe? "What is it?" I ask softly.
"Had to reset my traps on the Border." I nod, still awed by the idea that he can act at such remote distances; I can write a song and someone could carry it far away, and sing it in their own voice, and it would still mean the same thing, but that's the closest my work can come to what he's doing. And - "One of them had killed four people. Scouting party from Karse. A team of soldiers cleaned up the mess, and then I reset the ward - so it can happen again."
Oh gods, this again.
It's happened before a few times; it was uncomfortable for both of us, the first time he came back here late at night with blood on his hands, but we dealt with it, and now - I don't want to think that I'm used to it, but we've learned how to handle it.
That first time it happened, we shared dinner in awkward silence and then slept fitfully and as far apart as possible, and found ourselves lying awake long before morning; somehow we got talking, and he found his way into the crook of my arm, mutual reassurances passing in the spaces between words - no, I don't hate what he is, and no, he's not conscienceless, he doesn't grant himself the freedom of agression or cruelty or self-justification; he's a killer who never wanted to be.
That night we talked til it didn't matter any more, and then saw in the dawn with sex and a hand of piquet. I guess we all have our own way of making the world a safer place; I can soothe pain, and he can kill people several hundred miles away. His is the heavier burden, and I'll gladly help him to bear it.
So now? I don't know if I need to say anything or if I just need to be here for him while he sits there and fights his own shadow, but I'm not good at silence, I'm really not. "Van..." I hazard, hoping not to misstep. "It's not like they just stumbled over that thing, is it?"
"No," he snorts. "Even if they hadn't died there, they would never have got more than ten miles inside the border - and I can't know what damage they might've done on the way. I'm just tired of senseless death."
I squeeze his shoulder, feeling his tension through the cloth of his shirt. "Who isn't tired of it? No one I'd want to know." My eyes slide to the place on the mantlepiece where I left my knives. Is it selfish of people like me to assume that people like him are going to kill to protect us?
He bows his head a little, and I can feel that tension pressing against him, like he has to fight it to draw breath. "I should forget about it and be glad that we're both safe..."
"No." I stroke at his shoulder, down to his chest. His heart seems to beat hard and fast. "You've always asked me to question the things I do - I'd think less of you if you didn't do the same."
He sighs, and he reaches upwards, clasping my hand in his and then going higher, up to my elbow, hand tightening on me. I can tell he needs something but I let him wait. I let it focus, his touches increasingly insistent, his shields lowering until there's almost nothing about him I can't feel.
"You're exhausted," I tell him.
"Not completely." His voice shakes.
"What do you want?"
"Would you -" it's barely more than a whisper - "Would you hurt me?"
"Why?" I challenge. He can't not reply. He's getting used to this tone of voice; it has strings attached, sometimes knotted leather ones, and he isn't allowed to ignore it.
"Because I deserve it." I can feel his muscles bunching again, bracing themselves to feel pain.
No.
Oh, no. No way. He isn't - "Vanyel, no. I can't -" I shove him away, exasperated, and drop to my knees beside the place he slumps. I grab his face in my hands, turning him to look at me. "I can't hurt you for - for that. I'm not a, a judge or a god. I'm not going to be your conscience. I can only hurt you because -" now my voice is cracking and it's not because I was singing all night, it's because this sounds so foolish now I'm saying it to him and it's making tears prick at my eyes anyway - "Because I love you, and I want you to like it. I want to make you feel. I can't slap you into absolution. I haven't the right to do that."
He's breathing like he's been running from himself for a long time. From all the horrifying things he's seen and done and from what he wants and fears and feels, from his remorse and his ability to ignore it and to kill again and again. From loving me and feeling - it's like I can see it through a crack in the walls he puts around things, not his shielding but the harder blocks we all use to survive - like what he is and does and how he has endured means he's something unloveable, unspeakable. Like he only deserves to have me in his life if I'm there to punish his moral transgressions.
No, no, no.
"Van, I love you -" I try again.
"You do have that right." He's closed his eyes, and I lean my head against his, trying to listen to what in the hells he's been feeling without flying off into another rage. "I'm yours. You've every right. I'll take anything you feel I deserve -"
"Then stop trying to tell me what you deserve." I kiss him, claiming his lips with possessive insistence, hands slipping down his back and touching him steadily and gently until he relaxes against me. He's mine to care for and turn on and play with; not my vassal, even when I hold his head between my hands; not my prisoner to be condemned and sentenced. "I'm not here to deal out answers to god-sized questions. I'm here to make love with you."
He's silent for many moments, and I can feel him absorbing my words, still stinging from denial - a hurt I couldn't avoid granting him. Eventually he speaks. "I can't avoid those questions, and I - hoped you'd..."
"Beat them out of you?"
"Yes," he admits. "Every damn time I have to look at what I've done and ask myself if it was truly necessary. There's times it's been a wholehearted yes -" His eyes narrow for a second, as if under the glare of bright nostalgia and his own glorious arrogance. Those are the times they sing songs about. "But others - I don't know, and here I'm too far away to know. I didn't even feel them die -"
He shivers in my arms, I don't know if it's for the unspeakable act of empathy that he's implying or from the numbness of killing without it. Feeling his feelings is always a fact followed by guesswork. I know what Vanyel is, and often have no idea why or how.
"I can't tell you," I reply, "and I could hit you til I broke both my wrists without silencing those thoughts of yours. I know you."
"All too well." I shake my head, no, not yet, nor ever, and he sighs. "I'm sorry I asked for that. Pain is - much simpler than wondering what the gods have in store for me -"
"Ask anyone else and they'll tell you, love." I squeeze him tight around the ribs, because I am not, never will be, prepared for his meeting such a reckoning. Not that he'd delay it for fear of pain, or for me, or for any selfish thing. "I'm not the only one who sleeps safer because of you. And - I wish it didn't have to be you, but I think it's better you than someone who didn't worry over it."
He nods slowly - I'm sure he's killed such mindless butchers, and seen his own reflection in their glazed eyes. I do think that this is getting through to him; I'm sure he's been told it before, maybe by himself, but when he hears it from me, close and honest like this, he has to believe it.
"You alright now?" He shrugs, helpless and not without humour - talking has changed nothing, only made it possible for him to be easier on himself within the confines of his own wariness. I clasp him by the shoulders and hold him at arms' length, mock-frowning. "Now tell me again why you want me to hurt you."
He shifts under my hands and I can feel the shape of the thing inside him that comes to the fore when I make such implicit threats, the thing that touched me earlier and told me what it wanted - muscles set just so, senses awaiting impact, and - yes - a blush of shame on his face that is, itself, an answer. I give him time to provide me with a better one. One that can accept love unconditionally. "Because you can," words that traced out the form of the power I have over him, "and bearing it for you is a joy to me."
I smile widely, and wonder what he felt emerge from me to touch him. An alleyway shadow, gripping rough and ready to unleash savagery. Part of me that's older than tasteful music and good conversation but no stranger to the meanings of pain and of power.
I hadn't decided. I can beat him, or deny him again, and either one will pain him, and either one will fulfil his shamefaced cravings, and either one will let me revel in his acceptance of my right to torment him - it's like I've created a perpetual perversion that I couldn't even stop if I wanted to. But he's ultimately so right I can't deny him. "I can hurt you, and I will. Strip."
I have him lean over the back of my chair, and I remove my own clothes slowly as he watches, keeping my belt clasped in one hand. "I really could break a wrist trying to hurt you as much as you want me to, you know?" He inhales sharply; this is new. I've only hurt him with my own touch or with petty knotted toys, until now. I come close behind him, and stroke his ass with my right hand, letting the end of my belt caress his legs as I touch him. I slap him once, hard, and the air whistles out of his lungs.
I step back and raise my left arm to bring the belt down on his so elegantly presented body.
I feel him tense and untense as the sensation passes - the blow wasn't hard, but it was fast, and men who like to taste pain have told me how the instant stinging warmth of it settles and spreads before - if you do it right - laying a foundation for blistering agony. I try another just like it, a second pinked stripe to match the first, and I steal a look at his face. He seems gently perplexed, content to submit to this treatment but finding it easier than expected.
Well, fine. I try a hard one, and he groans, startled. My cock stirs at the sight of the line of welts on his ass, and I plant another hard blow directly atop it, and a third, just in case he hasn't got the point yet.
He's clinging to the arms of the chair, gasping. I grab his chin, watching something happen that I'm becoming used to - a damp-eyed descent into a world of desperate sensation. I kiss him, malevolently gentle, and whisper, "You asked for this. Do you like it?" I land another blow before he can answer, and its suddenness knocks his words astray. "Does it make you hard?"
I flick the end of my belt over my shoulder, watching him gather his wits and realise the question wasn't rhetorical. "Yes -"
"Whore." I bring my arm down hard, and the curled end of the belt follows through faster. He gasps and curls his shoulders, fighting to accept pain as easily as I cause it, knees sagging, face buried in the back of the chair. A few strokes later, I slip a hand in his hair, turning him to look at me again.
His eyes are damp, and as I watch his first tears escape their edges. "You want this," I remind him. "Do you know what I was thinking about this morning?" He blinks at me, not comprehending the change of subject. "I was thinking about when I was living on the streets and trying to learn what whores did in case I ever had to be one of them." He breathes heavily and I can feel his mood drop, like he's scrambling down to my level to save me from memories because gods know I often do the same for him. "That's where I first saw things like this. Saw a lot a boy shouldn't have. They were greedy or addicted people who endured anything from anyone because they were so desperate to have what they wanted." I step back from him again. "Begging pennies with their bodies. They had nothing else, but I watched them because I knew they had more than me. Hunger's good at telling you your place."
He tries to right himself, to stretch out a hand. "Stef -"
"Keep still. Don't call me that right now. What would you do for more pain?"
"Milord," he breathes, "anything."
"You'd beg for it, wouldn't you?"
"Anything - milord, please - I'm yours for anything -"
"Spread your legs." He gives a stifled groan as he does so, raw-red flesh sticking to itself, stiff muscles shifting. I reach a hand to cup his balls, squeeze the base of his cock, run two fingers up the shaft, find the head leaking fluid. "You do want this." I press against him briefly, a reminder that he's not the only one, and then I offer a rough parting squeeze and I get to work on his thighs.
I only stop once I see that the welts upon welts on his soft skin are cracking and bleeding. He's tried writhing and tensing and streams of incoherent sounds, none of which have done aught but add to my fervour. Twice, he yelled enough, and the first time I told him he was a lying whore and I knew he still wanted this; the second, I simply ignored him until he fell silent, and I watch his face crease with tears and sweat and concentration. There's peace in there, peace in my tiring arms, the tumbling runaway feeling of power relieved uncontrollably, freeing us.
I stop, and I help him upright, half-carrying him to bed, laying him face-down and studying his marks while he lays there, still moaning softly. I sigh, and by way of an apology for my extravagance, I reach under the bed for his medical kit. It's still strange to be dabbing at him with salve-soaked rags of cotton and not singing under my breath to heal him - counter to one instinct, indulgent of another. Maybe that's why I enjoy this so much; it's the one time when I can have total relief from attempting to stop others' pain. He hisses and twitches as I work him over, and can sense the pain I put him through as being something like a warm bath, slowly draining, leaving him covered in the wet film of its memory. He's hyperfocused on himself at skin level, without thoughts, without a world outside of him and me, without emotion other than the exhilerated feeling of survival.
Bringing him to this state is so satisfying. I don't even want to come, I just want to watch him lying prone on top of our sheets, helpless and happy and thoroughly marked.
My hands are still hungry after doing all they can to patch up the damage they caused, so I let them wander up his spine, continuing to touch and tend and heal. He's murmuring to me, turning his head as his mind comes back up to the surface, and I see his lips fold into a frown. "Stef - what you said earlier -"
"Doesn't matter." I curse myself inwardly; this isn't about me baring my scars to him, and I chose a stupid time to let that story spill out. "I shouldn't have said it. I'm sorry."
"But it was true." I press my lips together in a flat line, unable to deny it.
He turns under my hands, reaches up for me, and pulls me down into the protection of his arms, touching the back of my head with one hand as if he had the power to reach inside it and pull out all the bad memories. Gods, don't, you'll cut your hands open on all the sentence fragments. I shouldn't have told him about that, but I'm too tired to feel guilty about something that is so like him, really - I clear his mind of his own troubles and he immediately starts attending to mine?
He doesn't have to do anything for me and there's very little he can do, because he can't soothe away my past any more than I can his - but he's offering me support, because it's in his nature and because he loves me, and because I've spent all my energy on hurting him so I'm too tired to tell him not to worry about me. But I trust him, and that does at least offer us another possibility. "Would you come into my mind?"
He nods, and pulls my head against his own, eyes closing. His presence seems to - there's no adequate words for this - grow from that point deep inside where I never, ever lose the sense of him, and it passes among my tangled thoughts as gently as starlight. I'm almost too in awe of it to show it what I'm imagining, what I don't know how to say.
I can't speak to his mind, only offer it mute mental gestures - like putting my whole heart into performing a song without words. I want him to look at my assemblage of dischords - the knot that I found and tried to unravel into harmony. I know how I wanted it to sound now, and all it needs is a little more work and imagination. All it needs is this form I can see in my head:
Two shapes, warped and cracked and weatherbeaten. Life hammered them into something other than they would be otherwise. Push them together and every splinter finds a matching valley, every twist a concavity to nestle within, a seamless join formed out of two mismatched lumps of chaos.
I feel his laugh from somewhere deep inside, a flickering glow of joy and understanding. :I see it. We go well together, don't we?: I wonder, in return, what other lord has ever let a bastard streetchild belt him out of love, and he tells me, :Gods, I know, I'm lucky.:
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If I wasn't so tired from pulling a double shift I could be slightly more coherent. But damn this is good. I will be forever in awe of your Stef characterization; I think you give him a maturity and a greater aweness of himself and Vanyel than he had in canon.
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srs thankyou - I kind of wrapped it up in a hurry for
ngl, I have been shipping this pairing for so damn long I don't even care about whether they're IC at this point - I am all about the idealised version of them in my head, BITE ME. Stef, especially, I still feel like canon dropped him right as he was about to get really interesting and I've written more fic about him being in his 30s (and a brilliant, powerful social engineer, and still sometimes suicidal, and still always incredibly lonely and unanchored) than in his teens - so screw canon, I write the Stef I care about. ;_;
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I love these kind of rambly fics, though. I'm all about the internal monolues, figuring out what makes them work. The ending felt right to me (and funny enough I have a nonLHM fic that is giving me the same problem, in that it will not end, ugh).
And oh god, I love the direction you took Vanyel in, him trying to turn what he and Stef do as punishment. ;____; And and and the little extra bits of worldbuilding you toss in, like the gangs, and how Stef can tell when he's been working magic, and the part at the end where he asks Van to come into his mind so he can see how Stef sees them, and and and--I could gush for much longer but I'm running out of character space. Just. So much love.
I really shouldn't be staying up so late reading this for like, the third time. But, so. Much. Love.
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guh I guess some things just tail off. I like when I can set up either an epic parting shot/punchline or where it feels like there's some kind of coherent argument being made, but, yeah, then there's stories that just want to ramble.
Van, making himself miserable, YEAH. Stef mentions at least twice in canon that he lets Van in his head sometimes but you get the impression that it's not a very frequent occurrence. I always wondered what that would be like for them.
<3
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TAKE THAT AND RUN WITH IT, PLZ.
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i might
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Their class differences would undoubtedly come up now and then. IIRC, canon gives us the scene where Van gives Melody to Stefen and Stefen tells him he doesn't know to ride, indeed knows nothing about horses at all, because as a poor city dweller he'd never had the opportunity to learn. And Van, for all his squishable goodness, completely took his priveldge as the son of a wealthy land owner for granted.
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So essentially I want it to come up in their relationship and therefore it is GOING to get into the kink. :)