Work Text:
It's not that difficult to guard against your own heart, your Third Master had told you. Falling in love doesn't happen that easily, not for someone like you. You hadn't wanted to ask her what she meant.
Luring the Marquis into bed with you had been easy. He hadn't exactly been subtle. You had let your naive gaze linger a little too long on the hard lines of his chest, on the thick muscles of his forearms, and soon he had pulled you roughly to his side and tugged open your robe without much preamble.
And now it's been weeks and you're thinking about his cock, and you want it, you want the wrong salt taste of it, you want it filling your mouth, want him to nearly choke you on it. You miss the jolt of vicious excitement when Zhuang Luyin gets hard just from your mouth alone, when his precome oozes onto your tongue, when he grips you ungently by the hair and adjusts your position around him. When he says, "yes," and "that's right," and "so clever, Zang Hai, with that silver tongue of yours," and leans back on his arms like he's content to keep you like that for as long as he wants, regardless of whether or not anyone gets off, regardless of whether or not you can breathe, and you're thinking about it in the middle of the day, growing stiff in your official robes, wondering if you can afford to go to him twice in the span of two days without looking greedy, or cunning, or like anything other than a virginal boy excited to experience his first flush of real longing.
The marquis knows better. You can't always hide the repulsion on your face. You have so far masked it as shock, faint prudery, over the acts men do to one another, but he's no fool, he knows you know that this is all a transaction.
Still. You want his cock in your mouth and you want it filling you up. You want him to choke you and then fuck you and leave you wrung out and unable to think about anything but the edge and the ache. You're too busy wanting it to be really that horrified that you want it. It is what it is, you tell yourself. It's part of the game. Except—
It's harder, Third Master had told you, to guard against the pleasure and the power of a successful seduction. That's where the real trap lies. In getting used to it. Wanting to do it again.
That's not what this is, you tell yourself, as you make your way to the marquis' bedchamber. It's not about the power. He retires for the night, finds you in only your inner robe, sitting daintily on the side of the bed. Tilts his head.
"I got tired of waiting," you tell him truthfully, and he lets you strip off his robes and run your hands over the long, coiled muscles of his abdomen as he pushes you down.
It's not about the power, you think as he holds you in place, murmurs low-toned encouragement as you suck him. It's not as if this has grown impossible to stop. You can not only stop whenever you want, you can and will cut down the source of your current fixation. The thought of it mingles with all the rest when he fucks you, first with his blunt fingers, then later with his cock, sliding into you on a single long thrust that leaves you gasping. You will cut him open and flay him the way he had them— the way he— but now he's inside you, splitting you into pieces, his body draped thick and heavy over you, his voice rasping, almost soft as he tells you, calls you—
—and you need this, don't you, isn't this part of it, isn't this all part of the pageantry of revenge, the part where you can no longer tell what parts of you long for him to suffer and what parts of you just long for him, and when he pushes your head down and lifts your hips to gain purchase against the flimsy mattress, you let go and allow him to manhandle you, allow him to touch you, feel you, slide his lips over all the untouched parts of your body, because that's how this is supposed to go, isn't it—this merging of vengeance and lust into a new hard lump in your throat? When he calls you beautiful, babbles about how willowy and soft your body is under his hands, how unlike the soldiers' bodies he's used to, when he murmurs that you would bear him brilliant children and for a moment some mad damned part of you wants it, wants to transcend your destiny by co-mingling your families forever, give birth to his children, let his own progeny live with all of that trauma passed down, looming over the shape of their lives, while he takes you and uses you like the formless slut you are beneath his hands, just a soft pillowy shape ready to enfold him...
Well. You enfold and enfold and enfold. You mold yourself to him. You want it. You want it.
You can have this, you tell yourself. You can have this, and you can also have cutting him open slowly, watching his eyes widen as you tell him who you really are, whose body he's been grooming all these months, whose hands he's allowed to slowly pull him apart. You can have his moans and his guttural crles when he comes, your name on his lips, his hands in your hair, his body melting into yours—you can have all this, now, and you can have his blood, later. His shouts of horror, his cries of agony, his moans of despair.
But for now?
This is fine. It's fine.
You'll stop when it's time. You will.
It's just not time yet.
Not yet.
Not yet.