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“It was a question,” he says, opening a space, hoping the space was always there, “And one of the possible answers is ‘no,’ if you wish it to be your answer.”
Such an easy thing to say. A statement of definition. And yet.
Cliopher’s hands stay where they are—hovering, fingers in an arc, paused in the motion of the Astandalan greeting above his own forearms—which is, at least, not a retreat. And yet not a positive choice.
“It isn’t,” Cliopher says, and then interrupts himself in self-correction: “I mean it is an answer, but it isn’t mine.”
This close, Fitzroy can hear and see, in the movement of shoulders and the inflation of ribs, the way that Cliopher draws in a long slow breath and lets it out, and he can feel, in the currents of magic, the way that doing so allows some kind of stretched-wire tension to dissipate. It isn’t fear for his life. That is very easy to recognise in the traceries of magic, sour-tasting and ice-rimed. But it might be fear of something else.
“I’m sorry. I know, of course, that nothing will happen—I touched you already—I know—but…” Cliopher’s shoulders twitch upwards, and his left hand makes a gesture of ambiguity before it returns, slightly dislodged, to its position above Fitzroy’s hand. “I cannot help but think that I will hurt you.”
“I beg your pardon? My dear Kip, you do remember that it works the other way around?” He swallows. “Worked.”
Cliopher is watching the stillness of their respective hands in the air, but he looks up when Fitzroy speaks. He pauses, puts his words in order, reasons through. He always does. “When Ludvic—Well. What hurt him, really, I think, was the Ouranatha, more than the physical burn, and you were badly damaged by it all. It’s not that I enjoy a burn, but I couldn’t put a compress on you to help you if you were being quietly full of guilt.”
He doesn’t think someone has spoken of him to him this way since before he was Emperor— you were hurt by this. It’s a shift in thinking that requires him to be capable of being hurt by other people, and it’s one thing for it to be understood when he says it himself, but for Cliopher to say it as simple as that, a deduction from observation…
No, he remembers now. Cliopher had spoken this way when ‘Domina Black’ had left the Imperial apartments.
Always looking up at him, always looking at him, always seeing him.
Fitzroy doesn’t have a response. Understands, now, that he cannot use the painstakingly unobtrusive techniques he has always used, cannot open a door and wait and hope and hope that Cliopher will walk through it, because Cliopher is afraid of hurting him. Understands that the understanding of power that he has always been so careful of is different from the other side. He thinks, perhaps, that this may have been the case for much longer than he’d realised.
“May I?” he asks, and knows that Cliopher understands that as the question it is, rather than a command.
“You may.”
In court’s long sleeves, the Astandalan greeting, gripping the forearms, might not involve any actual contact of skin, and Cliopher’s hands are holding his sleeves, but Cliopher is not in court’s long sleeves, and his fingertips spread across the curve of skin before the elbow.
He has forgotten where to put his hands, where is standard, if he has gripped too far up Cliopher’s arms or is holding too tight or too loose. It is not the sort of thing he had ever thought one could forget—once he hadn’t thought this to be a skill or knowledge at all, just an instinct attendant on being alive and going out in the world. But it is, and it has suffered under disuse.
There is a pulse underneath his index finger. Close to the surface, and shallow. If his skin hadn’t been so tuned to touch by its absence, so desperately, graspingly enervated and alive to texture and feeling, he’d have missed it, but it’s there.
Cliopher breathes in and out again in his slow way. The tangle of fear latches and catches and fades, and his pulse slows.
Fitzroy thinks of cadence and of composition. He thinks, alive, alive, alive and touching me—
“I have always thought you had very fine hands,” he says, and his excuse for it is that he’s delirious, febrile. The way he had been when Cliopher had looked up and laughed and met his eyes, years ago—blood-rush, or blood loss, dizzy. Wounded. Endlessly joyful.
“Likewise,” says Cliopher, and he says ‘my lord’ a moment too late to be natural, remembering to add it consciously.
He laughs suddenly. It all sounds so absurd—a polite exchange of compliments, like two courtiers meeting in a hallway with nothing to say to each other. But it’s true, and he does mean it. What he means is I have thought of your hands; I have thought of them more than I realised; I have thought of touching them.
Fear is often a bright emotion. It’s sharp-edged. Brighter and sharper than Fitzroy had been capable of feeling for, oh, a thousand or so years. Brighter than he’d known he had been capable of feeling. But now, as it fades, he realises he had been terrified, too. Is terrified. Of this.
Of the pulse underneath his fingers, saying alive, and the way it might stop, might have stopped, because of him touching it. And terrified, too, of wanting it.
His eyes are fixed on his hands, the span of them across Cliopher’s forearms, the fine lacquer of his nails, the fact that Cliopher’s skin is a paler brown on the inside of his wrist than the outside, and darker again past the line around his wrists from court sleeves. He wants to look up at him again, but can’t seem to drag his gaze away. Was it this hard, the second time he looked at Cliopher and met his eyes? Had he been this afraid? Had his blood beat in his ears like this? If it had, would he have noticed over the force of his joy? “I’m certain I’ve done this wrong, somehow,” he says, because he is. “But I’m not sure how.”
He hears the drag of his own breathing. Cliopher’s grip tightens fractionally, and it’s good, and that’s—it’s not bad that it’s good. It’s not dangerous, he tells himself.
“Nevermind about showing you,” Cliopher says, firm, the way he is when he’s Decided. “Not greetings, not now—that’s not important. Can I…”
The firmness fades, and he’s come over all careful and tentative. He doesn’t have to be, but Fitzroy is glad for it. Glad of the care. When Cliopher reaches for him he jerks a nod; when he draws him forwards Fitzroy almost collapses into him.
The curls of Cliopher’s hair are soft against his chin, where Cliopher tucks his head into his shoulder. He smells of thyme soap and the faint grassy sweetness of the skirts he had worn at the ceremony, and the deceptive sea-air salt smell which is not actually real, is instead an artifact of magic.
Fitzroy folds his arms, slowly, like a clockwork figure with a damaged flywheel, around his waist, his back. He composes and discards a joke about being fairly certain that he will not need to use this greeting, because Cliopher had said ‘not important,’ and is doing this instead, which means, since his mind moves in these neat lines of priority in logic, that this is important.
He says, instead, inanely, “Hello, Kip.”
Cliopher says, into his collarbone, “ Tor,” and he says it ragged. Fitzroy holds him tighter, instead of hovering his arms against him without applying pressure, because twice now Kip has held him and squeezed like this when he was crying or about to, and in both cases it had helped. So he would like to do the same.
He sorts through selves and names. He—he the Sun-on-Earth, he the boy in the tower, he Fitzroy, he Artorin, he the man in the cell, he Tor who is different, he knows now, from he Artorin—tries to decide who he is at the present moment. Another altogether, maybe. Free and freed, now, and wild beneath the skin.
They’re shaking. Both of them, he and Kip, like two strings trembling in a minor chord. Someday he is going to have to learn how to fold all the selves into one self, overcome the artificial divisions he’s put in place to try to keep from collapsing, but that’s too large an undertaking for today. He will sort it out once he’s repaired the hole in his heart, he decides.
There is something better and more maddening than Kip’s pulse against his fingers, and it’s Kip’s pulse against his chest.
He’s wondered, sometimes, whether time in Solaara runs to Kip, to what he thinks needs to be done, to his timespans and estimations—that in Solaara after the Fall they had as much time as Kip needed to do what needed to be done. They lean against each other for an amount of time that runs like that, slippery, outside of the standard units of measurement. As long as necessary. As long as he wants.
That’s dangerous. Because as long as he wants could be—forever. Forever, time running around them like water against a rock, still and solid. Hanging on. Forever.
But there’s a shivering hitch in Kip’s breathing, and it seems very wrong that he should be upset. So Tor shifts back, though it’s like swimming against a current, so that he can look at his face. Hold his face in his palms, brush the tracks of tears from his cheeks. He’d wanted to do this at the ceremony, but—it wasn’t part of the protocol. It would have broken the ritual, somehow, he’d known, and just the touching of hands around the shell and the ember had been overwhelming enough.
“I’m sorry,” Tor says, clumsy and unpracticed in apologies, “That you’re scared, I’m—“
“I’m not,” Kip says, reaching up, holding his wrists, not pulling or pressing, just touching. His eyes are black and shining, and they always have been, and Tor has always known that, but the knowledge feels new again. “That’s not—why I’m, ah. Discomposed. I’m sorry.”
“I think if we’re both sorry it cancels out,” he mumbles. He misses when he had writing calluses, had lyre-string scars in tiny parallel lines on all his fingertips, but he’s glad, at least, that one of the side effects of living like the Emperor is that his hands have been entirely smoothed, soft, now, to touch.
“Important legal principle, yes.” There’s the almost-imperceptible rumble of his voice in his jaw, the way that his smile is moved by the muscles in his face. “It’s… Well. Sometimes something you’ve wanted for a long time can be overwhelming.”
He hadn’t considered that Kip might actively want to touch him. Had thought—had been relieved to think that if he actually objected he wouldn’t, but—but that’s not the same as wanting. “Oh,” he says, and thinks some poet you are, with nothing to say, and realises he’s smiling too. A helpless kind of smile. “I think I ought to sit down before I fall over.”
“Right,” Kip says, and Tor can see in his face the switch to a task, the focus. He manages to clear a reel of tapestry from the divan without ever letting go of Tor, sits down, pulls Tor after him until they’re piled up together, and Tor curls in and around him. Kip gathers up his hands. Winds fingers together. He hasn’t had his writer’s callus come under Conju’s attention, and so it’s still there; Tor sets his thumb against it just to feel it. A narrow scar against the back of his hand, parallel to the ridge of his metatarsal. Another on his index, from a pencil-knife; Kip writes with a dip pen now, but the line and angle is unmistakeable.
Tor runs the point of a nail down his palm, the line beside the muscle of his thumb. Kip breathes in hard and tenses, but he doesn’t tense away; Tor looks up, searching for a signal to stop, and doesn’t find one. He does it again, meanders in a circle, watches Kip’s fingers twitch. Kip makes a very quiet noise in the back of his throat, unclassifiable.
His brain stalls like someone’s hammered a wedge between the ticking gears. Replays the noise.
Something goes sharp and calculating in Kip’s eyes, not quite like solving a problem, but—solving a puzzle, maybe. Slightly different.
Kip likes puzzles.
He holds Tor’s wrist again, solid and sure, the pressure against the bone and tendon in tiny points of glittering sensitivity. Shifts closer. It does absolutely nothing to quiet the ringing note in the back of his head, the electric hum of his blood, his fixed and fixated attention on the way Kip’s body is warm against his side and his leg. And he—presses his mouth to the base of Tor’s palm. Not like a courtier’s kiss to the hand, nothing formal or polite. Nothing that could be explained away. The whisper of his breath.
“I,” Tor starts, and finds he can’t put together a sentence which isn’t ‘do that again.’
“If I have made you uncomfortable…” Kip says, and waits. It isn’t, in fact, an apology; Tor can recognise those from him. It’s something more like a negotiation, a manoeuvre. If it were an apology it wouldn’t be said so close to Tor’s skin, or with his gaze holding so still and bright. If it were an apology he wouldn’t have a fingertip stealing underneath the cuff of his sleeve.
“You have not,” Tor says. He doesn’t know his role in this negotiation—his role has always been to support Kip, because his manoeuvres have always ended well for Tor—so he defaults to honesty. “You have only ever put me at ease—or if you have not, I have most desperately needed to be made uncomfortable.”
A smile, slow and clever, slips over Kip’s face. His voice is lower than usual. “I don’t want to push you now because I’ve let my own desires run ahead of me.”
It knocks Tor breathless. “No?” he asks; he curls his left non-captured hand around the broad curve of Kip’s shoulder, almost, but not quite, pulling. “Not even a little push?”
“No.” Closer now, closing him in, and in a mirror of the way Tor had reached for his shoulder, he sets his hand against the nape of Tor’s neck, thumb against the place his skull comes down to meet his spine, where his heartbeat jumps and thunders. Surrounded. “Ask me.”
Everything goes hushed. “Oh,” he says. Breathes in hard. “Oh.” And then, caught between leaning back into the solid pressure of Kip’s hand and pushing closer to him, “Will you kiss me?”
He will.
Tor can’t stop smiling into it, which makes it more difficult; he is incredibly out of practice, and never had done this quite as much as certain stories implied, but he’s fairly certain from his vague memory that he ought to be more co-ordinated than this. In short order, though, he ceases to be able to worry about that, or in fact to worry about anything at all, kisses soft and slow and careful, closed-mouthed. Careful because— forever, he thinks again. He could want to do this forever.
And careful because Kip is still, maddeningly, only touching him in those same places, the hand on his nape, the hand he’d—he hadn’t kissed it. It wasn’t a kiss, not like this. His mouth hadn’t been this soft, or this warm.
If they go carefully enough, perhaps they can slow down the flood of feeling so that Tor doesn’t drown.
Kip—opens his mouth, just a little, just to breathe, because he hasn’t done that in a while and it’s necessary for staying alive and so on and so forth, and Tor loses his mind and makes an absurd noise like a tiny bird and presses up against him. Fitzroy remembers how to do this now, and his Radiancy knows nothing so well as he knows how to read Cliopher Mdang, and the man deep underground on the inside of his skin, underneath all the selves, is so full of joy that the streaming light of it renders the other selves translucent.
Metaphors go wandering through his mind like drunk dancers, stumbling into walls and changing shape. All the ways he might describe this, later, all the words that fall short. Like the way sunlight goes golden at sunset, and a perfect cold bright morning, and the way that a swift’s wing touches the sky, and being looked at. None of them are any good.
“Kip,” he says, and kisses him again. Maybe he hasn’t entirely lost the habit of poetry.
He opens his eyes just to see if Kip makes the same expression when he’s learning how to take Tor apart as he does when he’s learning to take apart an institution and put it back together improved. He doesn’t. He’s flushed darker, he looks stunned, his mouth is wet. The thinking-crease between his eyebrows has relaxed. That doesn’t mean he’s stopped thinking.
“When you ate the burning coal I thought about it for hours,” Tor says. “I was distracted for at least two days. I’m distracted now. I kept thinking about fire and your mouth.”
That must count as asking, because he gets what he’d asked for. The hand at his nape tightens a fraction, steady like guiding a skittish animal, and Kip’s thumb presses at the line of his neck behind his jaw. He tilts Tor’s head back so his mouth falls open; he couldn’t have been more deliberate about it if he’d taken hold of Tor’s jaw. He licks into Tor’s mouth and the candles on the desk all catch light and roar and burn like forges.
Of course he has a clever tongue. Tor has always known this about him.
How strange, to think that there had been a time when he had resolved to stop wanting things.
Tor has seen a demonstration of a lightning-generator. There had been no magic to it, and he had almost not believed it, but there it was. Only human forces, only the natural laws which move energy in its basest forms. There are two plates, and a static charge on each, opposite; there is only the air between them. Far apart they are inert and safe to touch or walk between; closer together they hum and reach for each other, exerting a magnetic force. There is a boundary of distance at which the force of energy between two sheets of copper or gold becomes stronger than the resistance held by the air between them, and the lightning lifts off the metal and runs across the air like a silver salmon arcing upstream. It is not the energy that glows and burns, it is the air. When the plates touch there is no sound or light, and the energy flows quiet, quiescent, biddable.
These points of contact are not enough. Which is to say they are wonderful, and he would be satisfied with them forever, would have been glad just to hold his forearms and speak to him, but he wants Kip closer, and it is not the distance that burns or gives off light, it is the wanting. His whole body is flushed over-warm, blood up and running. There is a kind of awake which is more awake than just not being asleep.
Somehow pulling him closer is not possible—Kip must move himself, insists something tangled-up and complicated from the back of his mind. It doesn’t explain the reasons. Tor knows there is some coded phrase in the language of intimacy for this, some new way of kissing, but he’s out of practice and doesn’t remember and he doesn’t want codes and ciphers and signals any more.
“My dear Kip,” he says, and is distracted again by the press of the hand on his hand, is distracted again by the shiver of lightning. He says, “Please,” and draws in a sharp sudden breath, and remembers what he wanted. “Would you come closer, please?”
Kip’s eyes close for a moment, as if re-centering or recalibrating; his hand on Tor’s neck goes soft again. “I would, if you’re sure,” he says. “I meant it when I said I don’t wish to push you, or for you to push yourself. It must be…”
He’s thoughtful again, trying to phrase gently the way that he holds gently. Tor, therefore, has to give the question the care it deserves, and he does pause to think, to make sure he’s sure.
“It has been a thousand years, yes,” Tor says, eventually. “I’d noticed. And yes, it’s fairly overwhelming. But I’m comfortable. If you are.”
“Right,” Kip says, and he’s still for just long enough that Tor thinks he’s going to shift away, but he smiles instead. Soft and fond and beautiful. The smile settles in the creases around his eyes, all the familiar shapes of his face changed and made brighter by it.
When he’d been travelling with Jullanar, very early on, before he’d decided who he wanted to be, there had been a repeating device in most of the local songs; a person was described as being so beautiful you’d walk into the river. It had two aspects, and Fitzroy had been poetically interested in them: first the lighter, comedic meaning, whereby the sight was so arresting you’d forget your surroundings and walk into the river from distraction, and second the tragic meaning, whereby the lack of having of such beauty would cause you to walk into the river to drown. Ridiculous, of course, but compelling.
Tor is not, he tells himself very firmly, going to have another heart attack. He’s forbidding it. He informs his heart it had better behave or there will be consequences.
Kip kisses him again, this one quick. Familiar, he thinks. A reassurance. Then he takes his hand from Tor’s hand—terrible—and sets it instead on Tor’s shoulder, the shape of his palm against the silk at his collarbone—excellent—and shifts up on his folded legs and, neatly, spine shifting as he keeps his balance, puts himself down again in Tor’s lap—which is entirely out of the descriptive range of any of the adjectives Tor can remember.
He has to let himself calibrate to it. Has to cling to Kip’s arms and shudder. It doesn’t feel quite so controlled any more, less restrained.
Fitzroy was a cuddler, a grabber, a hanger-on to arms, an enthusiast for communicating with his hands, with touch. That was taken from him, he thinks with sudden anger. He had found it for himself, puzzling out the mystery the same way he’d chosen a name and who to be when the world was new to him. And he’ll get it back. He will. He is.
The weight of Kip’s body, holding close. A solid pressure all the way down to his bones. In some ways it feels like re-setting a dislocation—a force that sets him right, puts him back where he ought to be, on the inside of his body. He holds tight against Kip’s back, presses open-palmed against his spine and the span of his shoulder blade, and burrows his face into the warm hiding-darkness of Kip’s shoulder, closing off the rest of the world. There, again, the smell of his soap, and some faintly floral thing he uses in his laundry, and the smell of his skin, clean and velvet-textured.
Kip hums; it rumbles in his chest and throat. He strokes Tor’s arm and the place his shoulder meets his neck, and despite the difficult angle he presses his lips to the facet of Tor’s head behind his ear. His breath against the shaved skin.
Tor remembers that sex is a thing that exists. He remembers it all at once, and then he remembers, also, about the existence of his cock, which he had been attempting for about a thousand years to forget. Remembering is very nice, it turns out. He decides to remember also the way that the muscles of Kip’s thighs had moved when he’d danced, and the broadness of his bare shoulders then. His calves, the shine of sweat on his neck and his belly in the red firelight.
He feels very clever, like he’s invented something, or solved a puzzle, or neatly stolen something tricky and hidden.
He is allowed to touch—he has asked, and Kip would, he would, tell him if his answer changed—Tor knows he would, and that the fear of being tyrannical is not rational. He is allowed to touch. So he sets his fingers on the tops of Kip’s thighs, and then when Kip hums again, his hands entirely. Feels the give of the skin underneath the linen of his trousers, the tiny leap the muscle makes, like a startled fish. He turns his head sideways and kisses Kip’s neck, first on the edge of his collar and then, slower, over the place his carotid artery rises as an underground river from the crossing-point of tendons to just below the surface. The skin here is soft, almost delicate, and the fear, which is now growing desperate in the hidden places of his mind as its influence wanes, reminds him of how fragile a man ultimately is.
He isn’t going to hurt Kip.
They fit together like a puzzle, sat like this—Kip raised above him for once, the difference in their heights reduced, where Kip can reach whatever he likes and Tor can kiss at his neck and jaw and then look up at him, moon-eyed, happy. He thinks he must be making some ludicrous besotted expression and doesn’t mind at all.
“Tor,” Kip says, soft as anything. “My lord. My friend.” He directs him by a hand on his jaw, thumb sweeping across his cheekbone, tilts him back to kiss him. Something about the words and the easy, forceless direction, all suggestion and gesture and still inviolate, as sure and true as my friend, makes Tor’s stomach swoop like the start of a long fall. Kip holds his head in place and kisses him over and over as he pulls himself together.
He holds Kip’s soft waist, his strong shoulders, and he winds his fingers into the curls at Kip’s neck that are slightly overgrown and go wandering over his shirt-collar in the evenings when he’s starting to get dishevelled.
He hadn’t known how much he’d noticed that. How long he’d spent looking at the back of Kip’s neck, staying late because the work won’t wait, distracted, not consciously aware that that was what he was looking at. He thinks—he can look on purpose, now.
Teasing kisses, now. Light, almost glancing, Kip placing himself almost out of reach so that Tor has to reach for him, on purpose. But never—never really denying him anything, just playing with the idea; every time Tor shifts to meet him Kip catches him halfway, almost desperately, as though he can’t bear not to—
Kip gives him a long lingering press of lips, the kind that draws out tension the way a fiddle’s string goes tight and trembling. He draws back a fraction and shakes his head like shaking away a thought, or a dizzy haze, the kind of dizzy haze he’s given to Tor that blurs the world around them, anything further away than Kip’s face inconsequential and covered in mist.
“Let me look at you,” Kip says, in a voice that makes him think again of fiddles, or more rightly cellos, rasping bow-work right at the bottom of the scale. “Let me see.”
Tor shivers, or maybe he doesn’t move at all and the world lurches around him, shaken from its bearings. There’s a prickling, squirming feeling in his stomach, making his thighs twitch; it takes a heroic effort to subdue the impulse, rooted somewhere underneath the conscious mind, to rock upwards. If he took his hands off Kip, they’d shake, but that’s all right, because he won’t. “You always have,” he says, raw-edged. “You always can.”
Breathing in sharply, his eyes wide and intent, Kip tugs at the front of Tor’s robes, starts to pull at the sash holding it closed, gets his hand underneath the undershirt and presses his palm, impossibly warm, over Tor’s heart. He thinks madly of golden marks, of burning, of permanent evidence of being touched.
Swaying back a little further with the senselessly graceful motion of a good sailor when the sea rises under the prow, Kip pauses, probably wondering why Tor made such an interesting expression, and then, neatly, he sets himself down on top of Tor. The radiating warmth of him is incredible, but it doesn’t come close to the line of his cock against his belly, even through the layers of fabric.
Tor makes a frankly uncharacteristic growling noise; without ever consulting his brain, his hands tighten convulsively on Kip’s waist, pulling him forward into the press of Tor’s hips.
The kissing, the holding, had been exquisite. Like something delicately, beautifully made. This is beautiful the way that a wild thing is; clumsy, perhaps, ragged and hungry but perfect. Kip’s core muscles go tight, and he breathes a sharp-edged moan, and the sight of him, still looking at Tor—
Every citizen of the Empire walks into the river, every river, all at once. They must.
Kip grinds down, his strong thighs shifting, and Tor comes. Just like that. He might have shouted; he wouldn’t have noticed either way.
“Ecological catastrophe,” he mumbles, blinking sightless at the ceiling.
“What?”
“The river,” Tor explains, earnest. A man can’t be expected to be coherent in these conditions.
Dazed, he smiles at Kip. The kind of helpless, fond smile that he had spent so long suppressing. “I’m so glad it’s you.”
He doesn’t know what, specifically, he means, but he means it. Glad to be relearning this with him specifically; glad it was Kip who looked up and laughed at him; glad that Cliopher Mdang is Cliopher Mdang. All of it.
There’s something in Kip’s face he hadn’t expected. Worried, very nearly distressed. He’s trying to hide it.
“Kip?” he says, very gently. “Are you alright?”
“Are you?”
“I’m marvellous.” Tor takes his hands and presses, trying to be steady. “That was wonderful.”
“Then I’m alright,” Kip says, and Tor can breathe properly again.
He lifts Kip’s left hand to his mouth and brushes his lips against a bluish smudge of ink on his knuckle. “If there is something,” he says, “We can address it now, or—put it aside for a while. Or you can say it’s none of my business, of course.” He lets his voice go slightly silly, imitating a non-specific court accent: “Lord Mdang, would you care to set the committee’s agenda?”
Kip laughs a little, which means Tor’s won the game of being alive. “I think I’d like you to distract me,” he says, and Tor trusts the deliberacy of it, the thoughtful care.
“Very well. I’ll accept that challenge.” He thinks through how to do that, thinks about the incredible noise that Kip had made, hard against him even through all that fabric. He distracts himself briefly, which is counterproductive. Ask me, he thinks. “I want quite desperately to suck your cock,” he says.
Kip makes a squeaking noise, like something rubber being stepped on. Tor adores him.
“It’s a bad idea right now, of course, because I got lightheaded when you touched my hand and I think there’s a chance I’d pass out entirely if I got my mouth on you,” he continues, watching for any sign the pronouncement is unwelcome and not finding any—finding, in fact, that Kip’s ears have gone red and his eyes have fixed wide. “But a bad idea can be a good thing to want, and I’m enjoying wanting it.”
“I like the—the closeness of it, I like the weight, I think you’d sound incredible,” Tor says, and for a moment he feels clumsy and awkward, talking like this. He used to be able to make anything sound seductive, and now all he can muster is this relentless, artless honesty, nothing clever and everything desperate. But awkward and artless and true seems to be working, and Kip bites at his own lip, breathing hard, and squirms, rocking himself against Tor’s hips with a hitching little movement. “I wasn’t letting myself think about it, I wasn’t letting myself think about how much I wanted you—I think I’ve wanted you forever—Kip—“
He’s not going to be able to go again, he can tell, so his own arousal is a warm background burn without any frustration, just pleasant and prickling, psychological rather than physical. “Kip,” he says again, because he likes saying it, and kisses him again because he can, this time with more presence of mind and focus, although ‘more’ is still not ‘plenty.’ “Can I think about it?” he asks, against his mouth. “Can I want it?”
Kip says something urgent and incomprehensible in what is probably language but is definitely obscene. He interrupts Tor to kiss him, and then seems to realise that requires that Tor stop speaking and draws back, pants into the hot space between them like there’s not enough air there. “Yes,” he says, and “Yes” again, and other little noises that slip past the ears and settle instead in the blood the way that sparks land on charcloth.
“I like the being-surrounded,” Tor continues, feeling rather like the conversational train has derailed and is now slicing through someone’s garden. “I think it would feel safe, with you. I like the immediacy. I like—your thighs, Kip, you have no idea—“
Kip, always efficient, takes hold of Tor’s wrist and directs his hand where he believes it should go, and Tor has always been inclined to agree with his policies. Before Kip can react to his own presumption Tor cups him through the fabric, the linen stretched tight across his cock at the hips, blood-hot. Kip jerks. “Oh,” he says, thready, thin, “Oh, your hands.”
Tor would like to encourage future presumption of this kind. He pulls apart Kip’s laces, and, since it seems to be working as intended, since he doesn’t actually know if he could stop, he keeps talking, letting the words fall out of his mouth: “I’d like the way I couldn’t think about anything but you—the taste and sound of you—nothing else in the rest of the world. Yes .”
There’s no texture quite like the skin on a cock, which is an odd thing, perhaps, to appreciate, but he does. Warm, velvet-like in its softness, the pulse beneath the skin. Kip shudders; his legs tighten convulsively against Tor’s hips, as if to keep him in place, stop him from leaving. He makes a high-pitched whimpering noise, cut off and wanting and perfect.
“Yes—“ Tor says. “Just like that, exactly—that’s what I meant, Kip.” There’s something about having permission, to want, to think about it, to like the way that Kip fucks into his hand. Whatever that something is, it rings like a bell in his head, reverberating. “Let me see, show me, Kip, please,” he gasps, like he’s riding the edge right there with him, bone-deep desperate, “I want to see,” and Kip buries his face in Tor’s shoulder with another indescribably perfect noise and comes all over his hand and his wrist and the buttons of his robe.
Tor feels the shape of it like sympathetic magic, a reflection, sharp-edged. The gleaming-brilliant inverse of an ache. He wraps his not-sticky arm around Kip’s shoulder and holds him tight as he pants into Tor’s collarbone. He does not say ‘thank you,’ even if he’d like to, because it might be true but it’s also somehow very weird.
He feels the way a leaf does when the light comes through it. Outlined as stained glass, rendered glowing. He feels like he wouldn’t cast a shadow if he stood in front of the sun, and for the first time that isn’t a glittering kind of curse.
“…Hm,” he says.
Kip leans back just enough to blink up at him; he’s making a confused, grumpy expression, like Tor had woken him up early and he wants to go back to sleep, or just back to basking. Which is understandable. Tor kisses the side of his head and says, the happiness seeping out through his voice, “Sorry. You smell like my court perfumes, that’s all.”
“Oh.” Kip leans heavier against him and Tor tips him gently to the side to avoid a worse laundry incident than the one that’s already happened. “It’ll wash off,” he says, almost achieving lightness. “Nobody will notice.” He pauses for a moment. “…Rhodin will notice.”
He hadn’t even considered the idea of secrecy, and finds it implausible as soon as he does so. And unpleasant. “It wasn’t that,” he says, which is one of his best understatements. “It doesn’t suit you—“ he smiles at Kip’s quiet, indignant noise— “So I suppose I will have to find one that does. Something with lemongrass, maybe.”
That gets him an approving, warm ‘mm.’ He breathes in slowly and thinks about sandalwood and white pepper and whatever it is that makes clean linen smell like clean linen. “Feonie hasn’t attacked you with her cabinet of strange oils and musks yet, has she? Pity.”
“You like anything that makes me more ridiculous,” Kip says, and Tor decides that he likes him when he’s comfortable enough to grumble. I did that, he thinks, and resists the urge to display his feeling of smug triumph by cackling like a villain in a melodrama at a corner penny theatre, and not a good penny theatre at that.
“Not at all.” He rubs his thumb against Kip’s shoulder and smiles against his hair. “I like the idea of smelling like you, that’s all. Of smelling like something you like.”
Kip’s fingers tighten very slightly against his waist. He pauses mid-breath for a moment and then resumes. It’s impressively restrained. Tor feels extremely accomplished.
There are certain unfortunate practicalities that must be taken care of, eventually. With great regret, Tor acknowledges to himself that he can’t sit on the divan holding Kip forever. He cleans his hand as best he can on the hem of his robes, since they’re pretty much a write-off in any case, and re-ties Kip’s trouser laces. It takes him longer than it should, because he has had very little occasion to tie or un-tie anything recently, and the mechanics are reversed and mirrored on someone else’s clothes, but he does do it. When he has bested the string in pitched single combat he looks up to find that Kip is giving him one of his devastatingly earnest and open expressions.
He kisses him, of course.
It’s nice to have a response to those expressions. Before he had just looked back at him and enjoyed them and tried to think of some way to express the depth of his regard which was not forbidden, or—moreso earlier on, and much less recently—he had looked away, because he didn’t know or understand the source of the expression, knew only that the openness of it was too much to bear. He still doesn’t quite understand them, because some knowledge needs time to develop, to grow away from scrutiny, to settle into place and become less delicate and fragile.
He pulls away slowly, because he doesn’t want to be pulling away. Threads his fingers through Kip’s hair.
After working on his costumes for the Vangavaye-ve, Feonie had seemed to have got an idea of what Kip actually liked to wear, which meant fewer Astandalan-style layered robes and more of these, short-sleeved loose tunics which make him look much more comfortable. Made him look almost at home. Tor regrets the loss of the very magnificent robes, but he’s coming around to the idea of trousers. They make some things much easier, apparently. “I’m certain I have another tunic in here somewhere,” he says, standing up, feeling for a second like a newborn giraffe, because there is no blood left in his legs.
He has to look behind him before he walks further away, because without noticing he had acclimated to Kip-touching-him being a feature of the world.
There is a tunic, though he has to exercise a little magic to find it underneath all of the everything-else, and leggings too, and they might even fit him, which is a surprise, because he had not acquired them with the intent of ever wearing them. Just to touch the soft-fuzzed fabric, the tiny organic inconsistencies in the cotton. He does so now, and congratulates himself on his good decisions.
Undressing in a small room with someone else is different than in his dressing-room with the aid of several attendants, or beside the wide blue side of the sea, and it occurs to him that he would be well within his rights to be uncomfortable, but he isn’t. He folds his robes so that the mess is not facing outwards, and decides quite firmly that he will solve that problem later. He has only a limited amount of time with Kip left before he leaves, and he will not spend it on laundry.
The cotton is very soft. He moves around to feel the way it moves in response, and is delighted that it doesn’t pull and coil and flare around his legs the way that his robes had been cut to do. “I think I will take this with me when I go,” he muses. “I’m sure it’s entirely out of fashion, but it feels like the textile version of a happy cat.”
When he turns back to the divan, Kip has not moved, or particularly changed his expression. “Ah,” Tor says. “There’s the something.”
“Yes.”
He winds his fingers together in front of his chest and pauses before he sits back down, tucking his bare feet underneath him. Kip shifts towards him and then stops himself. Tor doesn’t pull him closer, but he does let his hand fall open on his knee, and after a breath Kip reaches for it, threads his fingers through Tor’s.
“I am… Concerned,” Kip says, in the considering way that he puts words in order for a proclamation or statement, looking steadily at their hands, “That my… Rather, that I might be in some way keeping you tied to your position and the Palace when your freedom is…”
He trails off, because there is no way to say it. Tor cannot articulate it either, but understands.
How can you be unaware that there is nothing you could have done while remaining yourself to prevent my attachment to you? he thinks. How do you not know that I will always turn towards you, will always wait and watch for more? It is not an answer to Kip’s concerns—might worsen them—and it tastes of tyranny to him in its grasping possessiveness.
“I am reluctant to be without you,” Tor says. He wishes for the wrenching, impossible honesty that had somehow found him when Kip said ask me, and settles instead for this deliberate, difficult, careful honesty. “I regret if you would prefer that I not, but I am not sorry, because I’m glad about it. When I go I will miss you over and over. Which is good.”
He wants to curl into him again, to cling to him. But this needs to be said carefully. He takes a breath. “Because,” he continues, “Missing is a symptom of loving, and the Emperor is not permitted—not capable—of loving. But I am. And I do.”
Kip presses his eyes closed. “I have only ever wanted your freedom,” he says, and opens them again, still looking at their hands.
“You have,” Tor agrees. He has given it to him, also. He had dreamed of a rescue, those frozen years before the Fall, hoped for a hero and found one. “But—correct me if I’m wrong—you have wanted my happiness, too.”
“Of course I have,” Kip says, with a sudden shocked indignation at the prospect that his priorities were ever elsewhere.
“Then you have succeeded on two fronts, and met all of your objectives. Congratulations. Exemplary performance.” Kip’s ears go pink. Tor pulls at his hand and he moves immediately, leans up against him, settles heavy and warm against his side. He says, with a vehemence that surprises him, an insistence, “You are not imprisoning me by allowing me to reach out to you. It’s the opposite.”
Kip tightens his grip on Tor’s hand, and the pressure unspools the tension in him, the unusual vertigo-feeling of not having anticipated Kip’s thoughts correctly. “My lord,” Kip starts, and pauses. “My—Tor. There is a house in Gorjo City…”