Chapter Text
I feel the familiar dip of the mattress as he climbs up next to me, on top of me. He straddles my thighs, his weight sinking into my muscles, numbing them. He grips my wrists and my arms stiffen. For a moment he only watches me, waiting for me to stop trembling – waiting for me to give up. My heart has long since ceased fighting – it is only the survival instinct flowing through my veins that keeps my limbs struggling against this entanglement.
Whatever sign he’d been searching for – he finds it. Though he releases my wrists, all my strength has withered and died, and I lie idly as he slides down onto my chest. He stretches out full-length atop my body; my lungs can no longer hold a full breath. He covers my eyes with one hand and I feel a vibration in my throat. It’s my own voice.
He smothers me entirely – as he always does – but he never closes my mouth.
I wish he would.
You’re in jail again. Again! You’ve known this guy barely three weeks and he’s already doubled the number of times you’ve been behind bars. That’s four times total, for the record. You are really starting to question your decision to take off with Baram.
He’s taking a piss in the corner. Ask them to bring you to the toilet, you dirty prick, you say, but he laughs it off. You cross your arms in disgust and try to ignore the voices of other brigands and thieves in neighboring cells. Once upon a time, you’d thought you were better than men like them. But that was before you had hair on your chin and the strength to to drive railroad spikes into the ground, and before you could truly understand the injustice of a measly bag of two hundred gil at the end of a back-breaking week of manual labor.
You know exactly why they rob and fight and vandalize. Ruining something for someone else in turn makes them feel more like their own suffering is justified. Or paid for. Or avenged.
You get it; you really do. But that doesn’t mean you’re happy about spending another night in the drunk tank, dodging roaches and mildew and puddles of piss as an overpaid guard jangles the keys just out of reach like he’s teasing an animal. This is humiliating.
“Hey, when’s dinner?” Baram barks, rattling the door of your shared cage.
The guard clangs a baton against the iron bars. The sound pierces your temples; the throbbing behind your brow intensifies. “This ain’t a bed and breakfast, punk. Be grateful you even got a roof over your head tonight.”
“I’ll suck the meat off your bones,” sneers Baram. He flashes his teeth with a hiss.
“You a man or a dog?” an inmate from the cell just to your left chuckles, and Baram flips a damning gesture in his direction. The man only laughs harder. “Little puppy thinks he’s tough! Good thing these bars are here to keep him from humping my leg!”
Malicious laughter erupts around the room; Baram’s face begins to turn red. But before things can escalate further, you reach through the bars and grab the man’s collar. With a swift flex, you bring his forehead in sharp contact with iron. A drop of blood lands on your cheek; a few more soak into your shirt. The man slumps to the floor like a sack of bricks.
I have a headache, you say. So does he. Quiet down for a fuckin’ minute.
Baram slides onto the barebones cot at the other end of the cell without another word. He’s watching you closely.
* * *
Your coin purse is unnervingly light, and Baram’s posture has changed, if just slightly. You keep your head down, shielding your eyes from the early morning sun, but it reflects mercilessly off the puddles on the ground. The air is stiflingly humid. At least your night in jail kept you out of the rain.
“Let me buy you a drink,” he says. You sigh audibly in response.
He’s uncomfortable; it’s palpable. You both walk free because you paid off the guard. He doesn’t like this distribution of power, but that’s not your problem.
Though you can recognize an attempt at calling truce.
Hair of the dog?
He visibly relaxes. “The only thing that’s gonna get me through this morning,” he admits. “I feel like there’s a knife stickin’ outta my head.”
You let out a grim laugh. Hangovers: the great equalizer. Insult and injury all wrapped up in a neat, painful reminder of a night of poor decisions.
Lead the way, you say, and his feet cut the quickest path to a nearby open tavern.
Someone is pacing outside my door. The floorboards are squeaky as hell; can’t they hear themselves? Do they think they’re being stealthy?
The footsteps halt. They must be listening at the keyhole. When my silence disappoints them, they finally walk away. Innkeepers don’t trust me awake or asleep.
I wish I could camp outside, alone, but I never know when he’ll come and pin me down. A nosy proprietor is embarrassing, but even with Interceptor at my side, an opportunistic beast would quickly be the death of me.
Is that what he wants?
You roll another cigarette. This tobacco is better than any you’ve ever had at home – you didn’t even know it could be this good. This stuff is spicy and fragrant, like incense. It doesn’t taste stale, the way you’ve always thought it had to. The flavor lingers on your lips like a kiss; the smoke is tinged just slightly blue. You’re twenty-four years old, you’ve just sailed on your first ship, and now you’re riding your first train and smoking your first real cigarette.
And perhaps your first real friend is sitting by your side.
Baram puts his arm around your neck and plucks the roll from your mouth with the tips of his fingers. The action is deliberate – he’s pulling you close, but you don’t mind. He leans in, takes a drag, and places it back upon your lips. You catch a whiff of his exhalation as the wind whips it out of the boxcar to dissipate into the shallow valley below.
You both sit on the ledge of an open door on the side of a shipment car. The latch had yielded easily to two men with nothing to lose, clinging to the side of a quickening train. Inside, you found barrels of apples and sacks of dried tobacco, and you both decided you deserved a holiday for once in your lives. The train is heading north across the Mirror Plains toward Doma – which had only ever been a faraway, mythical place on the map to two lower-class young men from the Southern Continent.
Now, you look out across the expanse known as the Veldt and wonder absently about the herds of strange-looking creatures in the distance. Are they really that big, or are they closer than you think?
“We could make our living off of this,” comes Baram’s voice. He has gone back into the boxcar to sift through the other packages stacked therein.
What, stealing shit and reselling it?
“Something like that.” He brings over two apples and sits back down beside you. He pulls out a knife to carve the fruit as he continues.
“There are three basic categories of things you can take from others: goods, money, and ideas. I suppose you could add a fourth category – lives – but unless you’re hunting bounty, that’s no good on its own.” You watch his work with the blade. He’s not carving the apple to eat it.
“Reselling goods is obvious, but cumbersome. How much could the two of us really carry off this train? Not enough to be worth the risk involved – at least not with this freight. Ideas are potentially the most valuable, but you have to know what to do with them. Say we stumble upon some big secret – who’s gonna listen to a couple street rats like us? We get dismissed as nutjobs, quietly killed off on the side. We’d need a middleman to actually succeed there. No good.”
He takes a pinch of herb from a different sack and tucks it into the bowl of the makeshift pipe he’s created. You hand him the matchbook.
“Stealing gil, though – that’s where it’s at! Clean and simple; doesn’t involve anyone but ourselves.” He puts a flame to the bowl and inhales from a smaller opening on the other side of the apple.
Gil is the most obvious target for thieves. That’s why we’re sitting in this box of produce undisturbed right now: everyone knows it’s not worth stealing. A shipment of gil is gonna be way better protected. It’s your turn, but you hesitate with the match as you watch for Baram’s reaction.
“That’s why we gotta learn to be invisible. Like shadows.” He smiles, heavy-lidded, and prods the apple toward you.
Shadows aren’t invisible, you say plainly, and lift it to your lips. The smoke, saturated with the flavor of fruit, swirls down into your lungs and up to your brain as you lie back against a burlap sack to relish it. Through the frame of the narrow doorway, you watch thin, wispy clouds slowly change shape as they amble across the cerulean sky. You are vaguely aware of a soft weight on your shoulder. At some point, you close your eyes.
No, no, no – why has he come on this night? I’ve been alone for weeks – months! – and now that I travel in company, he visits. There were just enough beds, but not enough rooms to guarantee privacy, so I must share this space with the others. And now I share my bed as well.
He sits on my chest – breathing becomes so difficult – holding my head to the side of the pillow. All I can do is stare at the ex-General sleeping in the bed to my right. The boy she’s been stealing glances at every time I see them stirs quietly beside her. He disgusts me, the way he clings to his past with one hand while groping at her with the other. I’ve heard his sad story twice already, and I barely know him. He talks too much.
“Let me go,” I try to say, but it comes out a low groan. I wish to turn away from these two.
The hand at my jaw slides down to my throat. I wish he would dig his fingers in – close off my windpipe and stop my breath for good – but he won’t. Instead, he teases me. He listens to my heartbeat, touches my throbbing pulse points, reminds me so torturously that I am still alive in such a vulnerable state. He makes me stare at those two for what seems like hours, watching them toss and turn, surreptitiously draping their arms over each other as though they don’t realize what they’re doing. It’s driving me mad.
Then at long last, he mercifully covers my eyes, fingers still cradling my throat.
Doma is a fascinating country. Its people value order – much as they do in certain parts of the Southern Continent – but everything is so much cleaner here, it’s almost surreal. Is this really a city? Where are the trash-strewn alleys? Where are the rats?
For the first time in your life, you feel self-conscious. You look and dress and speak so differently from these people, you wonder if they’ll drive you out simply for sullying their image.
You are suddenly aware that you haven’t had a bath in... you can’t even remember.
“This all looks fancy here, but where there’s a city, there are slums,” says Baram confidently. “Let’s find someplace more familiar.”
You trust his instincts and follow him through the winding streets in search of seedier territory. Not that you would’ve minded staying in the city center, if you could fit in, but...
He easily sniffs out other foreigners, more Southern societal rejects who’d just so happened to drift into this part of the world. In a flash, he sells off a good stock of the herbs and tobacco you’d lifted from the train, and his coin purse is quickly brimming.
You’ve got a knack for that. You sure we shouldn’t stick to stealing goods? He hands the money over to you without explanation. Is he paying you back, or entrusting you...?
“Ha! No, these guys are too naive to know just yet that I’ve completely ripped them off because they’re used to shitty, overpriced Marandan weed as a standard – but they’d catch on soon. This business involves too much looking over your shoulder. We’ve got enough to get by for a little while now, so let’s enjoy it!”
It really is we – Baram could’ve kept that money and left you in the dust – you certainly wouldn’t have been able to push that stock as efficiently as he had. But what should be his hard-earned gil is in your pocket and he’s practically dragging you along, now. His motives are ever enigmatic. Does he need you for something?
Of course: another bar. This one is just shy of being a literal hole in the wall, but here you are. The beer is terrible, so you demand something better; you have the gil for it, after all. The bartender sets a tiny bottle in between you and Baram, and you now wonder if it’s the two of you who are getting played. But Baram nods encouragingly, and you hand over the coin to pay for it.
Skeptically, you take a gulp, and at once you’re breathing fire. Baram isn’t the only one laughing as you choke and gasp for water. “Haven’t you ever had copperwine before?” he says, wiping tears from his eyes. A glass of water appears on the table.
That’s not copperwine! What the fuck!
“No, no, it’s like a fine copperwine – but this stuff’s clear and made from rice. More potent. You gotta sip it, or... you know.”
Your expression must be vengeful, because he quickly tries to stifle the rest of his laughter. And then despite his own advice, he shoots a mouthful of the liquor himself and grabs the water out of your hand to chase it.
Why the hell did you do that?
“Even the playing field,” he sputters, features contorted.
By now, you’ve attracted an audience. You worry that this night is just going to end like all the other late nights in bars back home – but then you remember that you control the gil this time, and thus you control the flow of alcohol. He can’t drink too much if you don’t let him. This must have been his design.
The flush subsides from Baram’s cheeks as he catches his breath. He pours two more shots from the bottle you’ve purchased and slides one toward you.
“This time, we sip.”
Maybe he doesn’t need you for something so much as he wants you.
* * *
What is this?
You point at a silver star made of blades. It rests beside small knives and darts in a glass case.
“It’s called shuriken,” says the proprietor, eyeing you suspiciously. “Not a toy.”
“Is this a damn weapon shop or a toy store?” counters Baram. “We’re not idiots.”
You ignore his outburst and continue to engage the proprietor. A throwing weapon? How much?
The man still seems hesitant to sell to you out-of-towners. “Ahh, it requires training to use... I cannot in good faith sell you something with which you could easily hurt yourself.”
I can throw blades, you shrug. I’ll prove it. Got a target?
Baram is seething as he follows you out behind the shop. You pull your own collection of knives – all mismatched and dulling terribly – from their holsters and stand back. With little effort, you send them all streaming into the bullseye. A glance at your friend tells you he is no longer so angry about the unjust need for demonstration. You can’t help but smirk.
Always been a hobby. Come home after work, throw knives at the wall to blow off steam. What, you’ve never tried it?
The weapons proprietor shows you how to hold the stars, and you practice with a few rounds. Doesn’t quite equate to the old knives you’re used to, but you like them just fine. They’ll make a nice souvenir of your first trip to Doma, anyhow.
Baram makes no protest as you hand over the money for a set. It really is yours to do with as you wish.
As you leave the shop, he says, “Show me how you do that, later. That was amazing to watch.”
His eyes catch yours for a brief moment – and for some reason, he begins to look different to you.
* * *
You don’t think they’ll charge us for this?
“This is the shittiest inn in the city, Clyde. Look, there are already holes in the walls!” Baram takes a piece of charcoal and draws a small target across the wooden panels. You retrieve your new shuriken and study them in the flickering gaslight. Each star has six sharp blades. They’re still a little strange to hold.
You aim and release the first star. It lands a few inches to the right of the target.
Guess these take more practice. I can throw my knives with my eyes closed, anyway.
“Do it!” says Baram. He takes a swig from a bottle he’d bartered some more tobacco for – a better deal than paying the actual gil price, he’d said.
You grab your favorite knife, conceal your vision, and send it effortlessly into the target as promised. Baram cheers and hands you the bottle.
“Do it again; I wanna make sure that wasn’t a fluke,” he goads. “Close your eyes.” He brushes his hand over your lids and presses the hilt of another knife into your palm; you know exactly which one it is by touch alone. You hesitate a moment, thinking about where you were standing when he bade you shut your eyes. Then you raise your arm and throw. You hear a small gasp as it sinks into the wall.
You find Baram standing right next to the target, ear touching the bullseye. The blade has just barely missed his flesh.
What are you doing? you cry out, and he breaks into a fit of laughter that catches you entirely off-guard.
“That’s amazing! You’re amazing! Dear gods!” He passes you the bottle for another celebratory drink, and at once you realize you’d been holding your breath. His arm is around your shoulders, your pulse is racing from the shock, and you – and you’re suddenly giddy and lightheaded, and you take him into a rough embrace, swearing into his nearly-severed ear, Don’t scare me like that, goddammit!
He grips the collar of your jacket, ragged nails scratching just slightly against the back of your neck, and his cheek slides against yours as he searches for your own ear and says, “Sorry, I do stupid things sometimes.”
And then you kiss him, or he kisses you – either way, you’re both slightly off-target this time, and the coarse hair on his chin scrapes your lips before you find what you were aiming for, but as soon as you taste the tang of copperwine you know you’re in the right spot, even if you’re not entirely sure why you were heading there in the first place. At this point, reasons hardly seem to matter – why are you in Doma? why did you waste your money on throwing stars? why did it take this long to get to this point? – and you push your tongue into his mouth.
He laughs into your kiss – it hums against your lips, your tongue – sending a wave of excitement down your spine, causing your hair to stand on end. His hands are not shy, circling your waist, grabbing your ass. He presses you closer and you feel him hardening against you. And suddenly you are filled with a desperate desire, a need that hasn’t consumed you so fully in far too long – but here he is, the cause and soon-to-be release of it all, undoing your belt buckle as he sucks at the skin on the side of your neck.
You both stumble toward the bed and you fall into it as your knees check the side of the mattress. Baram climbs on top of you and straddles your waist, his weight pleasantly spreading across your hips as he sits himself down. He leans in to slide the jacket from your shoulders and tosses it aside. But as he pulls your shirt up, he lifts only the hem and collar over your head, stretching the fabric behind your neck and down around your back, keeping your forearms wrapped in the sleeves. They are effectively pinned down by your own weight laying on top of the shirt.
He stops to look into your eyes for a moment, and you know he sees the warning you flash him – I could put you out if I had to – you both know you’re stronger than him on equal ground; probably faster, too. His heaving chest reveals exactly how turned on he is by this role-reversal.
He grinds his hips into yours as he slides down for another kiss, and you find yourself fruitlessly reaching up to touch him, hindered by the shirt binding your arms. This entrapment is frustrating, but it only serves to heighten your excitement – this unknown, this uncertainty about where you stand anymore – it quickens the rush of blood through your veins. You squirm beneath him, needy and overcome by lust, as he nips at your earlobes, jawline, collarbone.
At long last, he turns his attention further south, unbuttoning your pants. The gentleness with which he’d just been caressing your neck and shoulders is gone in an instant, as he jerks the fabric downward. He doesn’t discard this item either – and now the movement in your legs is compromised too. You flash him another warning look – you could get out of this if you absolutely needed to – but he’s not worried about that.
He grasps your cock with a firm hand, squeezing gently, running his thumb along the underside, up and down. At this, your countenance finally breaks, and a grunt escapes your throat. His own breathing has grown audible too, and you can feel his arousal pressing into your thigh. You again helplessly flex the muscles in your arms, wishing to tear away the denim from his waist in turn, but your limbs are still trapped. Instead, you throw your head back wait for him to act.
You feel his fingers pulling back your foreskin as he shifts lower down toward the foot of the bed. And then there’s the warmth of his breath on the head of your cock, and then –
You wonder if Baram will ever stop surprising you. Not likely anytime soon – not tonight, at the very least. Gripping the base of your cock, he takes you into his mouth, and you no longer stifle your moans. You ball your hands into fists and arch your back slightly – you could tear this damned shirt in two, or wriggle out of it fairly easily – but Baram stops and pushes you back down. These bindings are symbolic at best, but the sensation of restraint is real enough, and it’s keeping you from automatically grabbing at his hair as he goes back down on you.
Oh, it feels good. You never thought you could be so aroused by something so simple and stupid as this.
But it’s not the mere restriction of your ability to move, it’s him, it’s that he threw you down and tore off your clothes, that he pinned you under his weight as he kissed you all over, that it’s his lips around your cock – this crazy, undisciplined, alcoholic wreck of a man whose eyes caught yours out of all the others in the bar that night a month and a half ago, convinced you to throw your whole known life away and follow him to the other side of the world on a whim – once again, defining reasons seems to be an exercise in absurdity. You don’t know why you love this; you just do.
Baram pulls up and crushes his lips against yours, now desperate in his own right. Bracing himself over you with one hand, he undoes his own belt and buttons with the other and wriggles out of his pants, kicking them aside. Then he leans back and pulls off his shirt as well. He hovers over you, completely naked before you for the first time, and once again you curse the entrapment of your hands.
“You can touch me next time,” he says with a sly grin, and runs his fingers dramatically over your face, neck, torso, hips, thighs, just to punctuate a point of dominance.
Fuck you, you breathe through a languid smile, and you consider knocking him in the jaw tomorrow morning as a point of self-sufficience.
He writhes his hips, brushing his cock against yours, gliding his balls along the length of your shaft. You disregard the urge to grab him and pull him down on top of you and instead try to focus on not coming just yet – he’s left you so achingly close to the edge that every touch now drives you closer to the falls.
He sits back on your thighs and pauses for a moment to look you over. And then he begins to stroke himself. You watch as he pleasures himself into a state of vulnerability, his expression shifting from seductive to submissive, and you can’t help but squirm beneath him, you need to be touched –
You turn your head as he spills onto your chest, a few droplets reaching as far as the underside of your chin. His semen puddles in the ridges of your abs, in the crook of your collarbone. His body softens, and then he leans in to kiss you, sucking gently on your bottom lip as he reaches back to finish you off –
You groan and gasp as he brings you closer and closer to climax; the inability to move is nearly unbearable yet exhilaratingly so, and I am overwhelmed with the desire to bite into his flesh, if my mouth is the only part of me that is allowed to move. But my breath quickens, and I have no time to act upon it as at last I release into his hand, and his kiss muffles my vocal pleasure.
… Or... what has –?
He no longer pins me down.
The sheets of my bed are tangled about my waist, and I can feel that every muscle in my body has been straining; I relax. My eyes adjust to the dim light of dawn filtering through the curtains to see the blonde woman – the former Imperial General – staring at me from her own bed. A deeply-tanned arm is draped sleepily over her hips. Her expression is impossible to read, but she won’t look away.
A horror washes over me. I turn to face the other side.