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In his early memories, there are moments of gentleness. He recalls the steady warmth of his father’s hand on the back of his head, the soft fur of his stepmother’s gloves, the sweetness of whipped cream, the sound of his friends laughing—Ingrid, snorting; Sylvain, wild and delighted; Felix, clear as a peal of bells.
It is not the case that he despises these memories. No, he turns away from them specifically because he loves them too much. If he does not force a separation, he would stay in them forever, dreaming until the end of his days.
And as happy as those times were, there was still pain. He is a child of Faerghus, after all. There is no place, no time, no season that is not without some bitterness. Winter’s beauty is cut through with the sting of the frost on his cheeks. The fruit that grows in spring gardens is sharp and sour in the mouth. Summer heat harmonizes with the burning of overworked muscle. Autumn’s richness brings with it howling wolves.
As a child, Dimitri complained sometimes of the sting of sweat in his eyes or the chafing of his feet in his boots or the ache in his arms when he raised a heavy lance, but his father’s reply was always the same: “not all pain is an evil thing.”
The problem is, Dimitri thinks, that he has also withstood so much pain without usefulness, without reason, without any sweetness after, that his mind has jumbled it all up. He is confused, and does not know how to fix himself.
It is shameful, he feels, to be knocked onto his back at the training grounds, feeling bruises blooming under his skin, and shiver. Shiver, but not with discomfort. There is something else that curls like a hot claw down his chest, his belly, the tops of his legs.
He does not like to think about it. He does not want to admit that after all that he has endured—beatings, wounds, torments, freezing lonely wilderness, the white-hot slice of a knife down the right side of his face—some sick and twisted part of him still craves pain.
The matter is complicated by Felix.
The first time that Felix kissed him, both of them sticky with sweat and cinders and blood on the night after their victory at Enbarr, he had bitten Dimitri’s bottom lip. It did not bleed, but in the morning there was a swollen patch of red flesh that memorialized that ravenous kiss. Dimitri had touched it and smiled, smiled so wide that he could feel it sting anew.
Felix had not been gentle. That was why it worked, that was why it always had worked between them: Felix did not go easy on him. Felix would never let him falter without knowing it, and Felix had a sharpness that Dimitri could not help but wish to rake himself across.
Felix kept him honest, and he did not fear hurt or hurting. They both knew how to endure the bruises and strains and damage. Dimitri even started to imagine that Felix, like him, could find the tiny grain of satisfaction that pain wrapped itself around. That was why it started so well.
And that is why it has since become a problem.
***
“Stop,” Dimitri bites out one night when they are in bed together.
The blankets smell of sex and they are both lying spent and tired. Dimitri is curled onto his side, facing away, strands of hair sticking to his face.
Felix lies behind him, bent into the same shape, but not quite pressed against him. He quickly removes his hand from Dimitri’s back.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, voice tight and layered with nerves.
“I don’t know,” Dimitri admits, feeling his clenched muscles and the hammering in his chest. “I can’t explain.”
“Try,” Felix demands. “I just… I just touched you between your shoulder blades. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
Dimitri feels his mouth bowing down with strain and misery.
“You didn’t,” he says into the pillow. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“You’re hiding something.” Felix is frustrated, although he sounds like he’s trying to conceal it.
“It isn’t important.”
“Dimitri,” Felix says, and that name is an important signal. He is actually upset now. Dimitri braces himself and then rolls over onto his back so that at least he isn’t hiding his face. Felix admits, “This isn’t easy for me, you know?”
“You mean… to be with me in this manner?” Dimitri nods, a sinking sensation in his stomach.
“No,” Felix groans, then throws an arm over his eyes. “Yes. But not because… not because it’s you. But also because it is you . Ugh. I just mean that I’m trying, and it’s hard. It isn’t… being tender and, and romantic like this is not in my nature. I’m not Sylvain. I don’t really know how.”
“Felix, you don’t need to be. I would not want you any different than how you are, how you have always been. My heart craves nothing more or less than your nature, harsh and peculiar as it might be,” Dimitri tells him, hesitantly rolling further over until he is face to face with Felix.
Felix nodded jerkily into his arm.
“You say that,” he says, scowling although he has gone red to the tips of his ears. “But I’m not oblivious, boar. Something is missing. And I don’t know how to give it to you.”
“It’s enough, Felix. More than enough.”
“If you think that answer satisfies me, you don’t know me as well as you think.”
Dimitri closes his eye and lets out a deep, slow breath. He can feel Felix’s warmth beside him. The sensation is grounding, familiar, with a low thrum of need beneath it.
If he cannot say this to Felix, then who? Felix is both his oldest friend and the clear-eyed witness of all of his darkness. Who else has seen and known and recognized so much of Dimitri’s ugliness before, and loves him still? So many dear, dear friends in the Blue Lions he knows care for him, but none of them had been willing to climb down into the ugly muck of his life and challenge him to crawl back out of it.
“You said it wasn’t easy for you,” Dimitri breathes, “being gentle. What if we tried something easier for both of us?”
“What does that mean, boar?” Felix shifts slightly. Dimitri keeps his eye closed so that he can say the rest.
“I want you to hurt me,” Dimitri admits. “I want you to use me as you see fit, command me to do whatever you wish, and I want it to be painful.”
Felix falls silent. Dimitri keeps breathing, as steady as he can manage. Still, Felix does not reply.
“Felix?” Dimitri asks, opening his eye to look.
Felix’s face has gone pale and strained, his bright hazel eyes shining with an incendiary mixture of emotion.
“You—” Felix starts as Dimitri looks up to face him, but the words come out chaotic and tangled. “Boar, you can’t— I’m not going to— if this is some form of idiotic atonement , leave that to the Goddess, I’m won’t… I am not going to be another lash you use to destroy yourself with, you fool. You don’t just get to… to give up again, and make me a part of it!”
His breathing is getting very fast as he finishes.
“That is not what I meant,” Dimitri corrects quickly. “I swear, Felix, you have misunderstood me. I promise, I am not seeking suffering or an early grave. It was… it was a foolish thing to say, you are right.”
“I am,” Felix says roughly, his eyes searching Dimitri’s face for any sign of deception.
“Put it out of your mind, I beg you,” Dimitri whispers. “Please, let us just sleep for now. I do not trust my own wisdom enough to talk about this more.”
Felix watches him for a long moment, then finally lets out a breath and nods. Before he lays his head back down, he surges forward and pressed his forehead to Dimitri’s. The gesture is oddly more vulnerable than even earlier that evening when he had gripped Dimitri’s cock in his hand.
Dimitri leans against Felix and settles a hand onto his flank, running his fingers over rib and muscle and old healed wounds. Felix buries his hand in the hair at the back of Dimitri’s head and lets his fingers tighten. Dimitri feels the burn in his scalp.
And, damned though he might be for it, he cannot fight back a little gasp of pleasure at the sensation.
***
They do not speak of it again until Dimitri feels himself sinking. These episodes come and go, sometimes mingled with horrible wild energy where he cannot sleep, cannot rest, cannot do anything but work and work and work. He never feels mad during these times, only after. When he was younger, he craved these periods, finding in them closeness to the dead and purpose in seeking vengeance on their behalf. Now, they frighten him.
As king, his dark moods are more manageable. Someone will always be there to prompt him to eat, to rise in the morning, to try to rest at night. Unlike their days beneath his Uncle’s regency, Dedue wields enough authority now that he can declare it a fine day to ride and send Dimitri out of his dark study and into the sunshine. If there is no other recourse, Ashe has found an old herbal remedy that sends Dimitri into a blissfully dreamless sleep.
But when he feels himself sinking, Dimitri still panics. It feels like drowning. He grows heavier and heavier and the light of the surface dims and it seems impossible that he will ever gain the strength to draw another breath.
Like being underwater, the whole world feels muted. Not only tasteless, but devoid of any sensation. A world of ghosts, while the spirits of the dead grow clearer and more tangible. Hours slip past him in moments and then a few seconds endure for a millennium.
Dimitri wonders if Felix will hate him again for this. It has been days since they have seen one another, and Dimitri’s heart shrivels at the thought of sending an invitation. He still walks upright, rises from his bed, does what he must, but Felix will see through it in an instant. Better to hunker down and hide, a wild animal in a cave, trying to believe Dedue when he reminds him every night “it will pass, Dimitri. Remember that it will pass.”
Until, one day— “Boar, spar with me.”
Dimitri looks up blearily to find Felix standing over him. He has been sitting in his study for hours, making no progress on interpreting a survey of the conditions of city bridges.
“I am occupied, Felix,” Dimitri manages to say through his exhaustion. “Another time.”
“You’re just going to sit in here and rot, then?” Felix demands, folding his arms over his chest. He looks beautiful like this, every motion decisive and full of purpose, his long hair flicking in his wake. But even if Dimitri buried his face into Felix’s locks right now, he cannot imagine that he would feel anything. That is the worst part of it: the sinking steals even the things that he loves.
“Another time,” Dimitri repeats, dropping his gaze.
“This can wait,” Felix says, tugging at the edge of the pages in Dimitri’s hand. Dimitri does not let go. “You’re no use to anyone if you don’t train.”
“I cannot,” Dimitri admits.
Felix pulls harder at the paper and leans forward over the desk.
“Do I need to drag you out of here?” he says, voice deceptively soft for how dangerous the look in his eyes is.
Involuntarily, Dimitri loses his grip on the parchment. Felix jerks the report on bridges out of his hand, and Dimitri feels the corner of a page catch on the skin of his finger, opening up a thin, agonizing cut.
He gasps at the feeling. It is the first time in days that he has really been aware of his own body at all, as anything more than weight to haul around. The sensation spreads out from the cut, setting his nerves on fire as a single bead of blood forms on the side of his finger.
And Felix is still leaning over him, looking ready to eat him alive if he does not obey. Dimitri is the king of Faerghus, the king of Fódlan somehow, and he wants to obey. He wants to fall to his knees before Felix and do whatever he asks, but at the same time…
The prospect of being dragged intrigues him.
“Drag me, then,” he whispers, “if I have displeased you.”
Felix’s eyes widen. He stares down at Dimitri, at the accidental cut on his finger that is still throbbing with pain. Dimitri feels that his breathing is speeding up, his face is warming, his clothes becoming too tight and constraining. The flood of sudden sensation after such a long absence is overwhelming. He licks his lips.
Felix’s pupils have blown very wide, making his eyes almost black. His expression flickers, a few contradictory emotions passing over it like clouds in a high wind. Finally, he speaks.
“You weren’t exaggerating, then. You really do… enjoy it.”
Dimitri has no capacity left to care. He feels so wretched and desperate that he simply nods.
Obedience is rewarded. Felix sits on the edge of his desk and leans down to kiss his neck, before scraping his teeth over the tender skin. Dimitri shakes beneath him. A hand undoes the buttons of his tunic and then slips inside his shirt to stroke and then pinch the bud of his nipple.
Dimitri pants and writhes against Felix’s teeth and nails. When he finishes into his clothed lap, Felix has never even laid a hand on him below the waist.
“It’s so pathetically easy to bait you,” Felix scoffs, looking at the mess he has made of Dimitri with a barely suppressed smile of pride. “But I suppose this is one way to handle it.”
“Thank you, Felix,” Dimitri tells him shamelessly.
“Don’t thank me,” Felix warns him. “I’ll do better next time.”
***
He does. And then he does even better again. After Dimitri has shaken off the sinking spiral, their relationship changes. As difficult as it is, Dimitri tries to take things slowly, but he finds Felix increasingly ready to adapt. Whatever revulsion he had once felt towards serving this particular desire is clearly dissolving. Dimitri begins to suspect that Felix is increasingly finding his own satisfaction in these pursuits.
“You should come to Fraldarius,” Felix says briskly one day. “A few weeks away from the capital will serve you well.”
“I would love to,” Dimitri smiles. “If I can manage to get away.”
“Manage it,” Felix commands. “I have ideas. A manner of showing you… hospitality in a house where you are not master.”
Dimitri nearly chokes at that. He clears his throat a few times before he responds.
“Then it shall be done, Your Grace. Perhaps by Harpsring Moon.”
Dimitri has always loved visiting Fraldarius. As a boy, his father would sometimes send him there for the summer, hoping to keep him away from the recurrences of the plague that persisted in the cities. Even if the reasons were grim, Dimitri could remember only joy in the Fraldarius coasts.
While the halls of the palace and the streets of Fhirdiad are haunted by memories of terrible, unnecessary pain—Rufus’ icy cruelty, Cornelia’s giddy torture, the simple harshness of poverty and sickness after his escape—there are no such revenants in Fraldarius.
And yet, Fraldarius is not a land of pure comfort. He remembers the sensation of salt stinging his windburned cheeks, of sand scraping the bottoms of his feet, of shells cutting into the palms of his hands, of the cold northern sea slapping against his bare chest. All of it is good pain. The kind of pain that makes everything else feel more wonderful, like the rough stone needed to hone a sharp blade.
While Dimitri is still king in Fraldarius, he is also a guest of the duke, and that means that manners compel him to lay aside his usual burdens. The servants do not come to him to ask what he will have for dinner or when will he schedule his meetings or how many flowers he will want to decorate his room. They are not difficult questions, but Dimitri realizes in their absence just how many things he has been fretting over. Without them, he feels light.
Felix, on the other hand, seems to radiate a kind of satisfaction at running his household. While in Fhirdiad he is still brusque, perhaps overly critical and overly familiar in the eyes of some, in Fraldarius he does not bother to offer Dimitri a choice.
“Have one of these,” he instructs Dimitri at breakfast, offering him a raspberry held lightly at the tips of his fingers. He does not set it down, just waits until Dimitri bends his head to bite the fruit from his hand.
“Take off your boots,” he directs Dimitri when they are walking down to the beach. Dimitri does and he is rewarded with the sensation of warm sand between his toes.
“Wear this,” Felix bids him when he shivers in the wind after their swim, and Dimitri wraps himself in warm, soft wool that Felix has remembered to pack.
“Keep it,” Felix decrees that evening, when Dimitri finds himself unusually absorbed in an old book full of peculiar folktales from lands beyond the sea.
“Lie back on the bed and take off your clothes,” Felix finally says that night when they are alone.
Dimitri obeys him as swiftly as he can. Felix’s chambers are warm, a window cracked to let in the evening breeze from the sea. The bed is spread with soft furs and blankets, shrouded from the sides by curtains.
And dangling from the top posts, Dimitri notices ropes.
Despite the comfortable atmosphere, he finds himself beginning to tremble. Felix has not taken off a scrap of clothing aside from his gloves and he stands at the foot of the bed, watching as Dimitri strips naked with the smoldering hint of a grin.
“What now?” Dimitri breathes out.
“Now, I ask if you if you have been good,” Felix says, voice low. “Or if you have been a wild boar in need of a firm hand.”
“A firm hand,” Dimitri agrees, mouth very dry. “Please, Felix, I want you to do whatever you must to rein me in.”
“It ends whenever you ask,” Felix reminds him. “But I do not intend to be gentle. Perhaps it would be easier if I trussed you up? That ought to make you more compliant.”
“Yes,” Dimitri nods, although this is only a part of the game. Ropes do not hold his strength for more than a moment. But he wants to be good, to keep himself under control for Felix.
Felix tugs at one of the long coils of rope tied to the post of the bed, testing its strength in his hand.
“Stay still and let me work,” he tells Dimitri. “It isn’t easy to keep you bound.”
Dimitri was anticipating that Felix would bind his hands, but Felix’s work goes far beyond that. He loops rope around Dimitri’s arms, shoulders, elbows, securing knots that rub against his chest and the sides of his thighs. The position he finds himself is not exactly comfortable, but neither is it too awkward to maintain. And, most importantly, Dimitri realizes that Felix has made it almost impossible for him to pull free. Unless he bursts all of the knots at once, he will remain immobile.
The thought of that sends a rush of blood between his legs.
“You enjoy this, I see,” Felix notes, rubbing one clothed knee against the hard curve of Dimitri’s cock. “Such a pretty little gift you make this way. I ought to keep you like this all of the time.”
“Please,” Dimitri begs him, nudging his hips into the air as he strains to find some friction, but Felix draws his knee back.
“Too impatient,” Felix scolds him. “You’re like a wild animal in a rut, thinking with nothing but your cock. How shall I make you tame?”
“I—” Dimitri starts to ask, but he can’t.
“Answer the question.”
“Felix, I want…. I…”
“What do you need, Dimitri?” Felix murmurs.
“I need you to hit me,” Dimitri chokes out. “I need to hurt .”
As soon as he says it, Felix rolls him over onto his stomach. His erection presses against the bed and he moans, but Felix tugs the ropes to shift his hips up. He can feel his asscheeks spreading open and his cock twitches at the sensation.
The first slap is such a shock that Dimitri actually shouts. Felix spanks him across the buttocks hard enough that it stings.
“Surprised, boar? Or can you not handle it?” Felix’s voice asks from behind him, gleefully sadistic.
Dimitri moans into the pillows and tries to lift his ass higher.
“I can handle it,” he promises, his face sweaty.
Felix spanks him again. He waits a few seconds between each strike, letting the sting set in and radiate down the backs of his legs. It feels warm. His whole body feels so warm.
“Harder,” he manages to get out.
Felix smacks him harder, hard enough that he clenches his teeth. The pain is exquisite. He gasps with every strike, and each one gets worse. Maybe Felix is hitting harder, or maybe it is just the inflamed, pulsing skin on the back of his ass and thighs.
“Look at you,” Felix grits out, and he sounds both tired and exhilarated, the way he does after a hard fight. “All spread out and tender before me. How much more can you take, I wonder?”
“More,” Dimitri groans. The blankets beneath his face feels wet. He has been sweating, maybe drooling. His whole body feels alive. He is so present, just a creature of flesh, filled with need.
Felix spanks him hard enough that the world whites out for a second and the ropes tighten around him, burning as they shift against his skin. Dimitri goes limp and helpless in the bonds, unable to do anything but just exist at Felix’s whim.
“One more,” Felix tells him. “Just one more.”
Dimitri takes it. He realizes that he is not just breathing heavily anymore; he is crying. He is weeping into the blankets, but not with sadness. With relief.
“And just like that, the wild boar is tame,” Felix breathes, suddenly much closer. Dimitri feels warmth against his face. Felix’s tongue lathes up and down his cheek, licking one of the overwhelmed tears away.
“Feels good,” Dimitri whimpers through his gasping tears. “Make it feel good, Felix, please. Want to feel good.”
Felix slides out a knife and cuts the ties to the bedposts. The ropes loosen immediately. As Dimitri feels his muscles relax, Felix flips him over onto his back. His ass is raw from the spanking when it touches the blankets.
First, Felix kneels down at the side of the bed and licks a long stripe up Dimitri’s cock. His mouth is so soft and so good, despite the pain he inflicted earlier. He sucks at the head for a minute and then swallows Dimitri down.
“Ah, Felix, ah!” Dimitri cries out, back arching. Pleasure and pain mingle as his raw ass shifts against the wool blankets, while his cock is enveloped by that beautiful mouth. “Wait–”
Felix pulls his head off, his lips decadently pink and wet.
“Inside of me?” Dimitri begs weakly.
Felix does not seem to be capable of teasing him anymore. His eyes seem fevered, shimmering with desire as he sees Dimitri splayed out and tear streaking below him. Even like this, Dimitri realizes, maybe even especially like this, Felix still loves him. The thought is too much to think about.
Felix drizzles oil over his fingers and it drips down to soothe the inflamed skin as Felix massages his hole open.
Dimitri feels so limp and pliant that when Felix enters him, it is heavenly. Felix guides his legs up so that he can hook his shaking legs around Felix’s waist. He fucks him hard, not brutal anymore, but enough that he will feel it in the morning.
Dimitri looks up at him from his slitted eye, lashes still wet with tears. Felix’s hair has come down. He has stripped off his surcoat and dragged his trousers down to the knee. His loose white shirt is stuck to his chest with sweat and his face is flushed from exertion and desire. As Felix’s nails dig into his thighs, Dimitri smiles dreamily, relishing in the certainty that Felix wants him and that he too has been slaking some part of his desire.
When he comes, it is a long and massive sensation, an eruption that consumes every part of his body. His spatters his stomach and chest, and his legs splay wider, every drag of Felix’s cock against his prostate more and more overwhelming.
Felix finishes a moment later with a shout and a burst of wet heat. Dimitri sighs contentedly as the sticky liquid dribbles down to soothe the abused backs of his thighs.
For a few seconds, they stay like that, breathing hard, Felix half-inside of Dimitri. When Felix finally finds the strength to pull out, he crawls up onto the bed beside Dimitri and presses a few damp, messy kisses onto his lips, his forehead, the sweaty tangle of his hair.
“You were so good,” Felix murmurs, his hands tracing over the rope burns. Now, his soft and delicate touches do not feel wrong or false. They are just what he needs. “Perfect, Dimitri. You were perfect.”
“Thank you,” Dimitri replies when he is able to, fresh tears slipping down his cheek, “for all of this, Felix. It was… I…”
“You liked it,” Felix says with soft amusement. “That’s all that matters to me.”
“It’s so hard to explain—” Dimitri begins, but Felix shakes his head.
“You don’t have to explain,” he says shakily. “Just tell me how I can make you feel good. I… I would like to do that again too.”
Dimitri smiles, languid and warm in Felix’s arms. And it is so much sweeter, so much realer, so much brighter than if the pain had never been there. With Felix, the pain would always be there. And every time that those old memories pricked at him, Dimitri would remember the bliss that came after.
“Let me clean you up,” Felix says after a few minutes pass in the quiet gentle press of their bodies. “You don’t need to get up. I’ll take care of everything.”
Felix, true to his word, has prepared warm water, a soft sponge, a silken nightshirt, and a pot of cool salve to massage into Dimitri's red skin. Dimitri is half-asleep while it is happening, and he slips into unconsciousness at some point before Felix has lain down beside him.
When he wakes, the cool morning breeze is stirring the bedcurtains. He is lying on his stomach and he does not anticipate being able to ride his horse at any time in the near future.
Felix lies beside him, blinking slowly awake. Dimitri slides off the bed and goes to open the window fully to let in the light and the air.
As he does, he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror. He pulls the hem of the nighshirt up to examine himself. While his buttocks are still pink, there is the clearly defined outline of a hand in dull red spread across his left cheek.
Dimitri cannot help but laugh. Felix lifts his head to look and his eyes widen.
“Which of us is truly the wild animal I sometimes wonder?” Dimitri remarks, lowering the hem of the nightshirt.
Felix groans in embarrassment and buries his face beneath the pillow.