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It had started, like all things seemed to start in science club, with an offhand comment that was both entirely inappropriate for anyone to make, but at the same time entirely appropriate when framed as coming from the mouth of Pomefiore’s number-one eccentric Rook Hunt.
He had burned himself on one of the hot alchemy beakers after carelessly handling it, and was standing at the sink, hand under the cold water gushing from the tap, waiting for some sort of relief.
“Isn’t it curious,” Rook had said, standing there and looking to the rest of the club like he was helping, even though he had not lifted a single finger, “how some species actually find pain arousing?”
The blood, which had been pounding in Trey’s ears, had suddenly all seemed to dissipate, unfortunately allowing him to hear Rook clear as a bell. It did not make his brain’s ability to process the question any faster, though, as at first he wondered if maybe he had merely misheard.
But Rook Hunt, not missing any opportunity in which to voice whatever strange and invisible line of thought he was having, repeated the question. “Some species are actually known to bite as part of mating. They seem to find the combination in tandem with sexual intercourse magnefique.”
He just stood there, hand under the icy tap water, mouth slightly agape, and brain processing, trying to come up with any response that isn’t just ‘that’s interesting’.
“That’s interesting.”
“I thought you’d think so.” Rook had smiled, a strange smile, the type of smile he only makes when he’s got something up one of his sleeves. Unnerving. “Don’t let the first-years see you’re half-hard, mon ami.”
He had glanced down, and it seemed Rook has indeed noticed it before he himself had even felt it, the burgeoning of an arousal making itself known at the front of his trousers. Try as he might to keep his calm, he had still felt the creeping red blush making its way across his cheeks and up the shells of his ear.
Rook turned off the tap abruptly, and had run a single, black-gloved hand across the fresh burn, and he’d felt it. He’d felt the searing pain and the chill down his spine, the way the touch made him arch his back, as if to curl away from it. Unbearable agony, the soreness of it, the way it bit into him like a wild animal.
Then his eyes had met Rook’s, just once, that appraising gaze, and the pain hadn’t faded, but he had felt it somewhere new, the way something else bloomed in tandem with it between his thighs. He could feel that burgeoning arousal harden further, and he arched himself and crouched over the sink, praying the fluttering white of his lab coat would hide the truth.
“Rook,” he’d said, finally having the sense to pull his hand away and turn the tap back on, “what are you doing?”
“This is science club, tréfle,” Rook had replied back with another smile, this one slightly more sinister. “I’m experimenting.”
* * *
That burn had long healed, but it had opened something in him, the bloom of a rose he had not known was budding until Rook had brought his attention to it so sharply. A rose he could have let bloom and die, that he could have ignored until it withered, but whatever Rook had done had long uprooted that sprout, and he found himself standing with it in his hands, desiring to nurture it to full maturity, no matter how dangerous that was.
“You’re such a ordinary guy,” Rook had said to him again one afternoon, “it’s almost boring sometimes.”
“I don’t know if that’s true anymore,” he’d said with a wry smile. “Though, don’t tell anyone I said that.”
“Oh? You’re confiding in me? Is that wise?”
“You won’t tell,” he’d said, and he’d believed every word of it. For Rook, the thrill of the chase, the idea of something interesting existing was more important than if something was actually interesting or not.
“Is that trust?”
“It’s intuition.”
Being only the two of them in the greenhouse, Rook had picked up a knife he’d been using to prune the leaves of his foxgloves and twirled it between his fingers expertly, until the blade was nothing more than a silver flash of light.
“Trey Clover,” he’d said, “the way you’ve been goading me…can I trust you’re having the same sort of curiosity as myself?”
An ordinary guy. That’s all he is. Ordinary. Patissier by family trade. Reliable, as the others say. If he was not vice dorm head, he would perhaps be nobody. Ordinary, much as it sounds like an insult to some who strive beyond it, is a compliment to him. He’s never wanted anything but.
His eyes, now matter how hard he’d tried, could not look away from the knife.
Rook sheathed it, then, as the clock hit five-thirty with a loud chime the reverberated across the school grounds.
“Perhaps another time,” he’d said, wearing the same smile as last time. “I’ll see you again tomorrow.”
And he’d been left there, still unable to answer, even though it had seemed so easy. Rook had already been pushing, just one small word and he’d have fallen onto the point of that knife. The thought of that alone made him chill, and rather than horror, he found himself consumed by the morbid fascination of how such a thing might feel.
The burn he remembered well, but he barely remembered what it felt like it for it to hurt. He’d been burned more than enough as a child retrieving hot pastries from the oven, and it had been no different than those. It hadn’t hurt any more or any less, and there was no particular reason why it should’ve caused such a response in him, but yet it had.
Now it weighed heavily on him, the idea of what pain felt like, the strange fascination with trying to remember how getting burned on that beaker had felt but being unable to remember anything more than the vague sensation of hurt, and nothing else.
He’d cleaned up the remainder of mulch that’d been left on the workbench and headed back to the dorms, where even after a shower, dinner and heading to bed, he’d been left unable to think of anything else but what it might feel like to be burned again. The sensation of Rook running a single finger across it still fluttered in his mind, the sensation of what kind of pain it had been long gone, but the memory of the thrill remaining.
After Rook had left, before he'd cleaned up and left he’d spent five minutes in a bathroom stall pouring his own seed into his clenched fist, unable to do anything but tremble weakly over the toilet bowl and pretend, just pretend, he was still ordinary. That was the moment that had left him, the moment he’d looked down at his hand, he’d understood.
The image of the knife had spun in his head, the curiosity of what that would feel like, and if he’d have the same sensation, the same desire to spill over into his hand.
He wanted so badly to find out.
And the time came, sooner than expected. Crewel had sent the two of them to gather more mulch for the gardens from the storehouse. Small, cramped and dusty, the door had shut behind them, leaving barely a light.
“Clover, light please,” Rook says, bending down to undo the twine around the bags of mulch strapped together.
He pulls out his pen, sets the gem aglow, watches Rook’s eerily shadowed face as he pulls a small penknife from his pocket and slits open the ropes.
“Take this, please,” Rook says, handing over a heavy bag of mulch to him, and he barely notices the cut until he feels a slight, strange burning from his palm, and pulls back from the white fabric of the mulch sack and notices the wetness, and the deep stain that shows near-black in the light of his gem.
“Did you cut me?”
"Oh? It was certainly an accident if I did, tréfle. My apologies.”
Rook’s voice has never sounded less apologetic, and his eyes glow eerily astute in the low light, appraising, as though waiting to see some sort of better reaction.
None come, a cut is a cut, and he can’t tell if Rook looks disappointed in the dim glow, but he bends to heave another mulch sack over his shoulder and together they head back to the botanical garden, depositing the sacks near the small back door they’d left through.
“First aid,” Rook says, grabbing the kit from the wall. “Give me your hand.”
Rook takes his muddy, dirt-stained fingers neatly in his own gloved ones, and he sees the cut cleanly for the first time. Long, a deft slit all the way across his palm, neatly leaking a thin line of blood that seeps into the creases of his skin as though it's dyed silk.
The sharp smell of disinfectant hits his nose first before the searing pain does. Burning, enough that it's all he can feel, every last nerve of his body seeming to scream all at once. Never has disinfecting a wound been so painful, feeling like it vibrates in his bones, and it's not until he looks at Rook’s face he understands that it is not merely the disinfectant.
Rook is not being gentle with it at all, rather, he's pressing firmly down, digging his fingers into the flesh and he cannot hide the gleam in his eyes, the same gleam Trey had seen him with once before, when Leona Kingscholar had made a particularly loud growl that had echoed across the cafeteria after a first year had stepped on his tail.
“You’re hard again,” Rook murmurs, and he feels himself being backed into a wall, pinned by that gaze, those sharp, clear green eyes. “The knife didn’t do much for you, did it? But this—magnefique. You look like you’ve just had your fill of a fine woman.”
Rook takes the penknife from his lab coat pocket and flicks it open neatly with a gloved finger. He can’t help but feel something cold fill his veins as Rook draws it closer to his throat, the blade keenly sharp, glinting venomously under the greenhouse lights. The flat of the blade comes down against his collarbone, and Rook traces his milk-white skin deftly, with the silent threat that at any moment he might turn that blade and paint that white flesh red.
“Can I ask you something, Clover?”
“I think I’m not in the position to refuse.”
“Why aren’t you stopping me?”
He swallows thickly. The question settles in him, and the answer that comes to the forethought of his mind is simple.
I don’t want to.
The knife nicks the curve of his collarbone. A single drop of blood blooms, rolls down, down. When it reaches the collar of his t-shirt it’s stopped by Rook’s hot tongue, which licks it, sucks at the wound enough to leave a bruise, and then his teeth bite lightly at Trey’s throat, and he can’t help but think that no matter how human Rook is, there’s something in him that makes him separate from the rest of them, some part of him that’s become like an animal himself.
Thinking that makes him even harder, if that were possible, and when he feels Rook’s teeth lightly on his throat he shudders, because he wants him to bite down, wants to feel what it would feel like to be rendered truly breathless. One of Rook’s hands, clad in black rubber, grabs at the nape of his neck, fists in the short hair he has there, and pulls his throat taught, while the other steadies at the base of it, thumb pressing into the hollow with just enough pressure he feels like he’s about to choke.
Rook forces him to his knees, and he’s never felt anything like this, this desire to just keep going at this breakneck pace until they’ve gone too far to ever be able to return. In spite of never before having tasted another man on his tongue, or even having entertained the thought as more than a passing one, he finds himself eagerly helping Rook open his trousers, desiring what’s about to come. Rook pushes him back against the greenhouse wall with one hand, and with the other brings his thumb to Trey’s mouth and hooks it over his lower jaw, forcing his mouth open wide.
“Don’t bite.”
He nearly chokes at the pace Rook forces himself inside, the tears come instantly and he coughs on it, but that only seems to make Rook’s expression light up even brighter. He’s not sure why, until he feels Rook’s boot come down between his legs, and he understands just how hard he is, that he’s every bit as hard as Rook is on his tongue right now, perhaps even harder.
“Did you know,” Rook says as he takes Trey’s head in his hands and starts to thrust inside, to the point where he can barely breathe, “this is called a throat fuck? Sorry, that’s crude to say, isn’t it. Vil would shame me if he heard such a word like ‘fuck’ come out. But,” he says, pausing for a moment to look down at Trey’s ravaged face, at the mess he’s made, cheeks streaked with tears and a mouth that’s drooling, “sometimes things are just so crude you can’t call them anything else but what they are, can you? How does it feel, tréfle? Do you like having me fuck your throat? You look like you like it.”
Rook’s boot-heel grinds heavily against his pants, and he realizes he’s going to come, Rook resumes thrusting with vigor to the point where he’s dizzy with how lightheaded he’s become, and the heel of his boot is firmly grinding against him in such a way that when Rook releases into his mouth and holds himself there, forces him to choke his seed down and massages his throat until he swallows it all, he comes. His throat burns, his lungs feel numb with every shallow breath and his head swims. He comes under the heel of that boot, Rook’s gloved fingers digging into the base of his skull, and the dull throb of his palm resonating in his bones.
The end result is strange, lungs raw, throat sore and eyes watering. All of his muscles ache and a lingering fever resounds in his body’s core. It feels like the passing of a summer cold, the way his nose drips.
Rook hands him a handkerchief with a flourish and zips up his trousers.
“How did it feel? Tell me everything.”
He doesn’t know what words Rook expects him to be able to pull out, if Rook is hoping he’ll be able to voice something so lewd, a confession so filthy neither of them will be able to ever repeat it, but be left to ruminate on it for the remainder of their days. Instead, he has nothing really to say about it. He’s an ordinary guy, so his words in turn are also ordinary.
“It was different,” he says, and he’s surprised how hoarse his voice comes out. He coughs lightly, wipes at his still-dripping nose with the handkerchief. “But I don’t know what else to make of it. Sorry if you were hoping for something more.”
“But did you enjoy yourself?”
He inhales too deep and coughs again. The surface of his tongue tastes like Rook, everything with a strange astringent flavor. If he tries, he might still feel Rook’s shape in his throat, the place that’s been hollowed out there for him. The feeling of those deft fingers massaging his throat and inviting him to swallow still lingers, the way Rook had held him and made him drink it down like how one feeds a drug to a wild dog.
“I think…I didn’t hate it, if that’s what you want to know.”
“That’s a start,” Rook says. He picks up one of the mulch bags and casually slings it over his shoulder, as though continuing where they’d left off with club work is the most natural thing in the world. “I’ll be over by the lilies, if anyone asks.”
He wipes his teary eyes on the back of his labcoat sleeve, rises to his feet, and cleans his glasses on the handkerchief before shoving it deep into his pockets.
The start of what, he wants to ask, but Rook is already elbow-deep in the soil, humming to himself with a strange fervor, and it’s only then Trey notices Leona Kingscholar far off on a tree clearly visible from the high glass walls near the lily patch. Rook already looks deep in thought, like he’s suddenly long forgotten anything happened, like ten minutes ago he hadn’t been hilt-deep in his throat.
He returns to his patch of strawberries in a daze, and by the time club has ended and he’s returned to the dorm, he doesn’t remember a single thing about the details of the rest of his day. Everything except for that moment is a hazy blur, and what is sharply in focus still feels like a dream, like it hadn’t really happened, let alone to him.
Before heading to bed, he brushes his teeth twice, just to be sure, and finds a single golden curl stuck in one of his back molars.
A crude reminder it hadn’t been a dream at all.