Work Text:
The drink.
The marching powder.
The swirling melancholy notes from the phonograph.
It was all Armstrong’s idea.
It was all Armstrong’s fault.
---
As the night wore on, Blore had the oddest sense that the dining room was slowly morphing into a half-melted impressionist painting. The fabrics and furnishings all shifting and blending into a hazy cacophony of colors and textures. The golden flickering candle light whirling into the blue softness of the grand velvet curtains. The jewels hanging from the chandelier above catching small rays of light and casting them in different directions, creating faint pinpoints of colored light across the room. The once cold, harsh marble mantle, now a smooth surface with muddled edges.
In stark relief to this dream-like scene, was Armstrong.
Even as Ms. Claythorne and Lombard melded into the transient painting, Armstrong remained crisp and clear; in some sort of high definition. Blore could see each individual strand of glowing auburn hair that had slowly become dislodged throughout the evening by Armstrong’s anxious, unsteady fingers, the light sheen of sweat on his golden forehead, the small clumps of white powder resting in his mustache, even the slight tremor in his hands as he lifted the bottle of brandy to his lips.
After a hearty swig of the burning liquid, Armstrong jerked the bottle from his mouth, gesturing wildly with it as he carried on with his increasingly passionate nattering on the war. Armstrong’s words, however, had long since faded to a bloody, gory static ringing between Blore’s ears.
Blore, instead of watching the progression of the flush creeping across Armstrong’s collarbones, or the candlelit tawny hairs on his flexing forearms, or even the straining tendons in his neck, tilted his head back against the dining room chair and let the static consume him.
---
Blore had thought playing bullfighter had sounded like a rather extraordinary idea. Until, that is, he found himself colliding headlong with the front hall’s massive gong.
As he lay sprawled across the floor, the clanging of the gong timing itself to the rhythmic pulsing forming in his head, he gazed up to find Armstrong with his head thrown back in uproarious laughter.
It was strange to see him so loose, so carefree, the man had been nothing more than an anxiety-riddled stick in the mud since arriving, even prior to the numerous mysterious deaths.
In that moment, clear as day, Blore could picture Armstrong as a young lad, masterfully riding a horse through the sprawling grounds of his family’s estate, stopping for a lavish afternoon picnic, sneaking away to woo some horridly beautiful girl. All so exceptionally, joyously mundane. Long before the corpse filled trenches, the endless bottles of booze, or the young woman’s blood soaked corpse on his operating table.
Blore winced as invisible fingers dug and burrowed through the muscle and sinew of his chest cavity, scooped up his heart, and squeezed with a frightening strength.
It was a sad, shameful irony, Blore reflected, that Armstrong had finally found some semblance of that old joy the night before he was to be murdered.
---
The imposing voice immortalized in the grooves of the phonograph record boomed through the loudspeakers, filling every nook and cranny of the near-desolate house.
“Prisoners at the bar, how do you plead?” Inquired the disembodied voice.
Four cries of “Guilty!” spilled out onto the rolling hills of Soldier Island for no one at all to hear.
---
If Blore had known that accompanying Armstrong to the kitchens in search of the last vestiges of coffee would result in the other man bodily pressing him against the wall’s cool tiles, their lips locked in a fervent entanglement, he, of course, never would have come.
But he had.
And the feel of Armstrong’s warm, chapped lips, mixed with the heady scent of sweat-tinged bergamot cologne became a new drug for Blore, something even more potent than the powder or the brandy, something that was impossible to resist.
And how the shallow, surface level parts of him begged him to at least attempt to pull away from this perversion, no matter how seemingly impossible the task, to sock Armstrong square in his perfectly sculpted jaw and race back to the others. But in his core, in the very depths of his being, lived a creature, a slithering, snaking sort of thing, capable of smothering any sense of decorum, any sense of rightness. The creature was kept under constant lock and key, only allowed to emerge in the depths of night, when sleep eluded him, and the only cure was images of golden muscled bodies playing on his closed eyelids and a hand wrapped around his cock. But now, as Armstrong’s lips migrated, dancing across his neck, his hands skating across smooth, feverish flesh, the creature broke forth from it’s imprisonment with renewed ferocity, it’s tentacles weaving and snaking along his innards, swirling themselves into every single nook and cranny until he was consumed.
---
Blore scrambled, digging his knees further into the duvet and grasping at the muscled forearm that was hooked across his chest as Armstrong slid his thick, oiled finger inside of him with ease.
Getting a bit too used to this, aren’t we old chap?
Blore minutely shook his head from side to side, a pathetic parody of the vehement negative he wished his mind could conjure.
The truth was, though he would never admit it, not even in the complete solitude of his mind, these acts were a necessary evil.
Back in Edmonton, Blore lead a monotonous life. He would wake each morning, have himself a cuppa while reading the paper, spend eight hours at the precinct, tend his fruits and vegetables at his beloved allotment each evening and then return home. All the while, the creature was growing inside its cage, feeding on Blore’s resistance to it’s desires. With each passing day it grew larger and larger, until, eventually, it’s dark, smooth flesh was bulging in the spaces between the steel bars, exerting so much force that Blore was forced to release it, lest the cage be destroyed entirely. The creature would spill into him, settling itself warmly in every crevice and recess of his body, silkily whispering it’s desires into Blore’s ears, which he was helpless to ignore.
He often ended up in a pub bathroom in some far away town, on his knees, breathing in the heady scent of a man as he worked their cock into his throat, or getting fucked up against the bathroom door, a broad hand muffling the groans of pleasure trying to escape him. He carved these memories inside himself, the feel of a cock pulsing on his tongue, the burn as he was stretched, the quiet huffs of air on the nape of his neck as he was brutally fucked, they were the only things that kept the creature sedated, until it was once again locked inside it’s cage.
That was the difference between Blore and Landor. The kid wasn’t ashamed of his creature as he should have been. He embraced it, let it permanently reside within him.
The night Landor had been picked up, he had been flaunting himself indiscriminately, casting his wet, doe eyes at every man in the restroom, practically begging to be bent over the sinks and fucked.
With such blatant displays, it had only been a matter of time before he would have been arrested anyhow. Yet, on the drive down to the station, Blore had considered letting the lad off with nothing more than a warning. A stern word about keeping himself in check, or, if that should fail, at least advising him on discretion. That thought process, however, was quickly swallowed by a sudden wave of intense loathing, the likes of which he had never felt before.
It wasn’t fair.
Blore needed him to feel the shame and the disgust and the fear that he felt each time he gave into the desires overwhelming him.
He wanted to see him flicking a band against his wrist each time a perverted thought popped into his head, or watch as he injected some absurd concoction of chemicals with promises of a cure into himself, or even witness his body convulsing as electric shocks ran through him.
It wasn’t enough to hold the kid at the station, drag him in front of a judge and have his record permanently stained with “immoral activity.”
He needed Landor to hurt.
Before he could brood further, Blore was yanked, quite literally, from his odious reverie as Armstrong suddenly moved the forearm that had been all but holding the entire weight of his torso, in search of the small vial of oil, lost somewhere in the folds of the duvet.
With the effects of the marching powder all but worn off, Blore, with tremendous effort, slid the heated skin of his cheek along the cool, silky sheets, to watch as Armstrong’s large, moonlit fingers uncapped the vial and generously lathered his, to be frank, absurdly thick cock, with oil.
After tossing the vial somewhere into the moonlight-dappled room behind him, Armstrong gracelessly scrambled behind Blore, immediately grabbing his hip with one hand and guiding his cock to his entrance with the other.
Blore groaned into the sheets at the first press into him, the burning stretch sending bolts of electricity throughout him, alighting his entire being in acute sensation.
Blore, ripped suddenly from his all-encompassing pleasure, loathfully realized that he would surely miss this. Well, as much as one could miss anything from beyond the grave. Rather, it was the knowledge that he would never again get to feel the pleasures of his own particular kind of sin that caused an ache to form in his gut. A deep, throbbing sort of thing, possibly the creature railing against his entrails in profound grief for that which would never be again.
“Alright?” Armstrong asked, voice trembling with barely restrained need, hips flush against Blore.
With the heaviness of his realization clogging his vocal cords, Blore pushed his hips backward, urging Armstrong on wordlessly.
Armstrong pulled his hips back slowly, snapping them forward again in a rush, starting up a merciless rhythm that prohibited Blore from dragging any of the room's heady air into his lungs, leaving him perpetually dazed.
Blore submitted to the feral pounding, carving each and every sensation inside himself, in an effort to preserve them for all eternity.
A sob left his throat as the pleasure overcame him.
---
As sleep overtook him on his final night, Blore dreamt of split knuckles, blood soaked concrete, and endless fields of lavender.