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Monstra bends to Salem’s command, rooms appearing when she wishes, windows opening and sealing according to her needs. The door to Tyrian’s room recedes with a wet, sucking noise as she passes through it, causing him to stir on his small bed. He opens his eyes enough to see that it is her and relaxes again.
“Your Grace,” Tyrian slurs, eyes half closed. Salem can see his tail twitching beneath his blanket, but the movement is less pronounced now that the bulbous tip has been removed. The metal replacement currently rests on the floor at the head of the bed.
Salem crosses the room and pulls further flesh from the floor with a flick of her fingers, expanding Tyrian’s bed. He shifts back a bit and rearranges his blanket to make room for her.
Salem undoes the ribbons that hold her frosted glass hair pins in place under her hair, placing all the ornaments on a bedside table that arises with her need for it. She leaves her bun in place, though dozens of years of practice mean it can be done and undone with little more than a thought. Her dress takes three clasps to remove, and she drapes it over the pins.
Tyrian is quiet, breath steady, but Salem knows the stillness of predator and prey alike. This is the calm silence of something watching and waiting for a moment to strike. It is so foolish as so be almost sweet, like a puppy that thinks it can best you with its milk teeth.
If Salem wants, she can find the mindset of the girl she used to be and lay it over the world like a gel light filter. Once upon a time Tyrian was the sort of creature that lurked in the shadows beyond her tower and made her sick as she wondered if the world truly was too cruel for someone like herself.
Now he waits patiently as she lies down, deferring to the timeline she sets. She arranges the blanket around her shoulders, although covered or uncovered makes no meaningful difference to her. Pain is a distant memory and many sensations are meaningless without that context. However, Tyrian can get cold easily when he isn’t in motion, blood pumping.
Tyrian has closed his eyes again, and Salem is fairly certain he has fallen back asleep. It’s the small hours, and such distinctions matter to mortals. Salem stays still and quiet, watching him. She is gratified by the fine lines forming at the edges of his eyes. A mark of her intersession into his life. She found him perfectly wrought for her purposes and prevented his end at the hands of some do-gooder Hunter or Atlesian prison guard.
Salem reaches for Tyrian’s chest, fingernail lengthening as she moves. She scores a line into the skin beneath his clavicle. She doesn’t draw blood, and Tyrian slowly opens his eyes.
“Your grace,” he purrs, a smile curving his lips, “To what do I owe this honor?”
“To how good you are at knowing when to keep quiet.”
“Ah,” he says, and says no more. He slides across the bed to wrap his arms around her and press his face to her neck. He inhales deeply as one hand pushes between her thighs.
“Do I really smell so good?” She asks, teasing but curious. The unrestrained evidence of his arousal amuses her.
“Like the true flower of decay,” he says as his fingers work roughly over her folds. He does not care for finesse, having learned that the body responds to touch with lubrication regardless of skill. Salem would rather not know whose body he worked this out on, but the knowledge serves her. “Like the first bloom of rot.”
Salem closes her eyes and the memory of a large windowsill with cut-glass vials of perfume comes to mind. The warmth of Tyrian’s body seeps into her own, and, as expected, something like arousal is building inside of her. Her thoughts slide to other times and other hands, to worship that was quiet and intimate and a man who would tell her over and over that her humanity was intact even as she reeked of death.
Salem pushes Tyrian onto his back and starts slicing into his chest.
He groans, running his hands down her arms to cover her fingers as the blood begins to flow. She has to work carefully to keep from seriously injuring him, and since she only has her nails she has to avoid his larger scars.
Even so, Tyrian’s reactions are rewarding. He clutches at her and thrusts his hips, his erection jerking against her ass. It’s almost a shame to reward someone who suffers so beautifully, chest heaving, stretching the cuts she has made, sweat beading his skin. “Please,” he says, voice thin, and Salem isn’t sure if he’s begging for her to stop or go on. His ecstatic suffering is one of the few new experiences she has had in the last millennia.
Still, she refuses to treat him to this and then deny herself what she came here for.
Salem stops straddling Tyrian so she can roll over and pull him on top of her, the bed shifting with a sucking sound to keep up with the change in position. Tyrian smiles down at her, halfway between a normal expression and a feral grin. He looks tame in the dim light, a wolf that has learned to sit and heel for its meat.
“And now for the main course,” Tyrian says, kneeling so he can look survey Salem’s body. He takes a moment to part her folds and peer at the flesh beyond.
Salem isn’t sure why this pleases him. She always thought it all looked like nothing so much as viscera. Maybe that’s why he likes it. Of all the things for the sea of darkness to leave intact the deep red of her cunt feels somewhat ridiculous. The last fool to peer up her skirt said it meant she was still human inside, because there are no depths to which a man won’t sink to get his dick wet.
“Tyrian,” she says, and presses a finger into his lips, distracting him. He sucks it once and then bites down hard. Her blood, black and viscous, fills his mouth. He loves to make her bleed, even knowing that she feels no pain and couldn’t fear him if she tried. It’s a shame he can no longer feel his stinger like he used to. He used to enjoy when she put the tip in her mouth and drank the poison from him. She’s sure her blood is at least and bitter and burning, but he smiles as he licks it off her skin.
Salem wraps her other hand around his dick and pulls him forward just hard enough that he releases her finger to focus on entering her. He leans over as he pushes himself inside, and they both sigh, breath mingling between them, once he is fully seated. Blood is dripping off his chest onto hers, and she is glad she kept her hair up. The rough, copper scent is pleasant to her nose. It smells honest somehow, like sweat or the musk of sex.
“Start slow,” she says, one finger on his chin, and his eyes lower for a moment in deference as he nods. She watches his expression shift as she feels every inch of him dragging back along her cunt. Warmth blooms through her hips, but she keeps her face steady as Tyrian’s grows more tortured. He wasn’t made to fuck slow and gentle; it overstimulates him.
Salem guides Tyrian’s mouth to her neck. His hips stutter, and she grips one hard in warning. If she wanted him to go faster, she would have said so. But she allows him to bite her. The pain is sharp and momentary, a mere pinprick on each spot where he breaks the flesh.
Salem can feel the tension in Tyrian’s body as he tries to restrain himself, but the taste of her blood is too much. He moans as his tongue laves over a spot at the top of her breast where it tingles like he has removed an entire strip of flesh. Her cunt is warm and wet, pulsing like a heart. It feels more alive than any other part of her. If she could make Tyrian do this for hours she would, for that sensation alone. Mortal flesh isn’t strong enough, though, even flesh as sick and resilient as his.
She would never ask, anyway. It would be showing her hand. Tyrian likes to think Salem is better than him. He likes to be the lowliest of creatures because it means he is free to do anything he wants, and he likes to think he serves the highest deity because it means he should be allowed to get away with everything he does.
Salem knows the only difference between the two of them is awful, god-given power. She is great enough to see past the horizon, and sometimes she wishes she could lay down and join Tyrian in the dirt.
“Alright,” she says, “You can cum now.”
Tyrian sits back on his knees, black blood staining his mouth and dripping down his chest, mixing with his own. It must burn. He must like it; he grows harder inside of her. He smiles so she can see how the fluid has stained his teeth. “Does that mean I can do this properly?”
Salem presses a hand to a particularly deep cut across his right pectoral. A breath hisses out through Tyrian’s teeth. “I suppose I can allow that. Since you’ve been good.”
Tyrian throws his head back and laughs triumphantly before he resettles his hands on Salem’s thighs and lifts her a bit so he can thrust so fast and hard he’s pushing her up the bed. Salem locks her legs around his back and meets him thrust for thrust. She’s so close she almost doesn’t want to touch herself because she knows that will be the end, but then Tyrian makes a hard, feral sound deep in his throat and she can see how desperately he keeps his eyes on her. With just a moment of hard pressure on her clit she’s cumming, muscles flexing and spasming so powerfully it hurts. Salem throws her heat back, lets her vision blur. She’s screaming loud enough for the gods to hear.
Then the tension snaps completely and they both fall limp. Tyrian is curled against Salem’s chest, breathing hard. He’s still inside her. She can feel the flutter of him softening, and the heat of his release. Salem flicks some sweat off his forehead and he makes a faint, pleased noise.
In a moment she will get up, wipe the fluid from her skin, put her hair back up and her dress back on. She has to finalize the Vacuo plans: Make sure Watts did maintenance on the small airship like she asked instead of x-ing out Ironwoods eyes in photos on his tablet. Figure out if that grey child actually has a pilot’s license as he claimed. Send a treat to her favorite scarlet-silver Hound.
There is, as there will be until the end of this miserable world, so much to do.
Tyrian presses closer to her skin, goosebumps rising on his own. Salem reaches past him and adjusts the blanket so it covers his shoulders. The end is close now. And though she would rather she had lived and died in a normal span of time, never to know a world without magic or with faunus, if she must live this life then it is good that she found Tyrian in it. He is such a perfect specimen. So fascinated by pain and how it proves the fragility of the body. Even as he lives within such a body himself! His simpering bravado is unlike anything she has ever seen, and yet it makes perfect sense coming from a man who was born with the power to destroy with a flick of his limbs.
Salem curls a loose strand of black hair around her finger. Tyrian’s plait is fraying. Maybe she’ll take it out and re-braid it before she leaves. She picks up the end where it is tied with a leather cord and kisses the spot that delineates the braid and the lock of loose hair at the end. The weariness that never leaves her bones is shellacked over with pleasure so she almost feels content.
Tyrian Callows, she muses, the flower of my decay. The bloom on my rot.