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Artemy hit the floor on his knees with a resounding wooden thunk, a sting of surprised tears in the corners of his eyes, and an instant lunge of arousal in the pit of his gut.
Daniil stood over him like a black cloud brooding on the horizon. He must not have had more than the half-glass of vodka he’d set aside – the flush in his cheeks was still faint and delicate, his eyes still clear and bright as lightning cracking through that brooding cloud. His hands still hovered in the air, as if he’d expected pushing Artemy to the floor to take more force than that.
It would have, if Artemy had been at all braced for it. But it hadn’t seemed like it was going to be one of those nights. When he’d walked into the bedroom to find Daniil nursing that half-full glass, the bottle on the bureau fermenting lamplight into a fiery orange vintage, he’d relaxed into the assumption that it was going to be one of the gentle ones.
Are we celebrating something?
In tear-stung hindsight, he should have seen the bitter twist of Daniil’s answering smile. Should have taken the silence, no sound aside from him setting the glass on the bureau, as a sign. But he’d leaned in obliviously to drink the taste of vodka from Daniil’s kiss, and then that one hard shove had sent him down.
He looked up at Daniil from under his lashes, turning what could have been a snarl into a beckoning, self-satisfied smirk. If there was one thing he’d learned in the last two months, it was that nothing stung the noble Bachelor like not having the effect he wanted on a person.
“If you’d told me it was a special occasion, I would have gotten down on my knees without the help,” he said. Maybe it would fluster Daniil out of this sour mood, but that twist in Artemy’s gut told him he would be disappointed if so.
There was too much of an ugly thrill in meeting those dark, vindictive eyes from below. In the bruised throb of his knees and the powerful, purposeful step Daniil took towards him, imperiously taking up all the space in front of him.
“Oh? I wasn’t under the impression that you appreciated bending the knee to anyone,” Daniil said. A slur whittled only the sharpest edges off his diction, leaving his voice cold and constrictingly smooth as snake scales. Had he pushed Artemy down, then, just to see whether he could be the one to put him on his knees?
Big Vlad Olgimsky and the Sand Pest and the Powers That Be had all tried and failed, after all. Did it make him feel more powerful than all of them to look down as Artemy blinked coquettishly back up at him?
“Most of them don’t give me such a good view in return,” Artemy said. From that height, he couldn’t have missed how Daniil’s trousers were starting to tent. He rubbed his cheek against the tightening fabric with feline smugness and another mischievous, unmastered look tilted up at Daniil. “I’ll bet I could bring you to your knees from mine.”
Would Daniil rather have stood over someone groveling? He would have to find a way to cope with his disappointment, if so. If Artemy was going to be pushed closer to the ground, he was going to use all of its surer purchase against the person who had put him there.
Daniil slid a thumb under his belt’s showy silver buckle. Flashing the light it reflected into Artemy’s eye, flicking it as a tiny amber spotlight across his face.
“I doubt you could wager anything I’d be interested in having,” he said.
Two months, and maybe what they had both learned best was how to hurt each other. Artemy bit his tongue until the urge to prove Daniil wrong by promising too much had passed.
“Funny, you seem very interested in what I’ve got to offer right now,” he observed, tweaking the fly of Daniil’s trousers with his teeth for emphasis. “If you’re still on your feet by the time I’m finished, you can have me on my knees whenever you want for the next week. How about that?”
He had already brought more colour to Daniil’s cheeks than the vodka had. Daniil’s hand strayed to the most natural place it could, fingers spread through Artemy’s hair in a way that could lie tender or curl tight to command him with pain.
“And if you succeed in this bold endeavour of yours?” he asked.
“Then you pitch in at the clinic for at least two days this week,” Artemy bargained. He wouldn’t say what he already had more than enough times before – that they could use the help and Daniil, surely, could use the chance to make himself useful. He’d proven even worse at sitting idle than he was at hiding his arousal, betrayed, either way, by his restless hands. The one on Artemy’s head flexed and loosened in what could have been affection or the start of curling tight.
“You have very unorthodox hiring practices,” he observed. But when he took his hand back, it was to work open his fly and the buttoned front of his underwear. It seemed he wouldn’t give Artemy any advantage by hobbling himself with trousers pulled down around his knees – he drew his cock out from that modest fabric slit with the grand, patient air of someone giving a greedy child more indulgence than they deserved.
Saliva flooded Artemy’s mouth, and he tried not to give himself away with a swallow. But judging by the haughty little smirk that met him the next time he looked up, that moment of hungry weakness hadn’t gone unnoticed. He’d been surprised the first time he had seen the foreskin surgically stripped back from the head of Daniil’s penis, but now, close enough that he could have stretched out his tongue to cup it, it seemed like just another brazen invitation. Only Daniil’s fingers still cupped around the shaft held him back, waiting for an indulgence that hadn’t been quite given to him yet.
But why should he wait? He’d bet that he would be good enough to bring Daniil down – he hadn’t said anything about behaving while he did it. He opened his mouth to just as brazenly take that taste, that invitation, wrapping his tongue around Daniil to where the firmly curled dam of those fingers stopped him. Savouring the musky, honest taste of him, not so different from any man under all the layers and pretensions.
“Not as unorthodox as your ways of showing a man you want him,” he drew his tongue back to say. “You could have just offered me a drink.”
Daniil made a smug, ugly sound in the back of his throat, releasing his cock to Artemy’s attentions, resting his hand on Artemy’s head again the way a hawk’s talons might rest on a rabbit’s back for the split second before they broke skin.
“In a sense, it could be said that I have,” he pointed out.
A drink to work for. Haughty bastard; Artemy caressed his tongue lavishly around the head of Daniil’s cock, taking it no deeper than that yet, taking satisfaction in the bastard’s sudden, rapt silence. Shutting him up might have been the same sort of victory as someone putting Artemy on his knees, something else worth savouring.
So of course Daniil couldn’t let it last. “Considering your absolute disdain for me when we first met, I would never have expected to see you so utterly infatuated with-”
Teeth were hardly kosher at a time like that, but Artemy used the slightest tweak of his to suck that taunt back down Daniil’s throat as an affronted gasp. The fingers in his hair snared tighter.
“Of course a sharp edge would be your retort,” Daniil said, through what sounded like his own teeth clenched tight. “Old habits die hard, as they say. I was a fool to think you would ever play fair.”
Artemy drew back to say something about that, about how Daniil was the one who’d shoved him to his knees without setting any rules of engagement at all, and a second hand snared his hair, shoving him much deeper onto his task than he’d been ready for.
He gagged around his own shock and the head of Daniil’s cock, and that nasty thrill bolted from his gut to groin again. One part fear, one part offence, dissolved in a deluge of enough excitement to wash them both away. He grasped for some purchase on the other man that would give him more control over his pace, wrapping his fingers around Daniil’s ass tight enough, maybe, to hurt him in turn.
He should have been bolting to his feet, mad as a branded bull. Should have been showing that big city bachelor what happened when he goaded someone talented with and born to use sharp edges. But adrenaline was beating from the grip of his fingers down to his own hardening cock, trying to tell him he was in danger, and he-
He’d missed that, hadn’t he? Being stung by fear or surprise and striking back in whatever way would best bring it to its knees. Being challenged, not to creep away from a military ambush or cut some leering bastard with a knife before they could gut him, not this time, but to relax his mouth and his raw throat and prove that nothing Daniil did could really hurt him. He moaned around Daniil’s next thrust as if it were just what he’d wanted, not a surprise at all, though he kept enough of a hold on the other man’s bucking hips to keep that thrust from punching the back of his throat.
Daniil’s breath shuddered in echo of Artemy’s moan. Artemy couldn’t look up to see how much more colour might have climbed to his face – he could only read Daniil now through those unsteady breaths and the fingers curled against his scalp. The rocking of his hips and full hardness of his cock, which slid from Artemy’s lips and back too quickly for him to savour it the surgical, meticulous way he would have wanted to.
If he could have set the pace, not just tried to keep it from choking him, he would have melted Daniil slowly. Stripped away his inhibitions and his guard until he was ready to fall practically of his own will. But his grip on Daniil’s left hip slipped from the next thrust, and he coughed like an amateur as Daniil hit the back of his throat again.
It shouldn’t have been what pulled that fear-offence-excitement taut and hot inside him. Shouldn’t have been what made his own cock throb like a blaze stoked too high in a factory’s furnace. He tried to blink the sting and blur from his eyes and only squeezed the first two tears down his cheeks.
“Oh? Is it possible that you’ve bitten off more than you can swallow this time, my dear Haruspex? I should take that as a mark of pride, considering the trials and atrocities you’ve devoured without complaint before.” Daniil panted, his neat diction in pieces, his pace relentless. “It seemed to me that any incurable disease or ill-fated wonder could disappear in you as easily as their bodies slip under the Gorkhon.”
His words were a buzz of implication over Artemy’s head. A ringing in his ears as he forgot where, in that punishing rhythm, he was supposed to breathe. But Daniil was right – he’d endured worse. He’d beaten worse. If he couldn’t control Daniil’s pace and wouldn’t pull back, the only thing to do was to ride it through, letting his arms go slack and Daniil’s hands shove him onto another wrenching, hungry cough.
He must have been almost as hard as Daniil himself. Stoked almost too high by the pain of swallowing, the sting of fingers puppeting him by his hair, the hasty attempts to caress Daniil’s cock with his tongue before it could pull back again. He kneaded his fingers into Daniil’s ass just to feel it, the tautening muscle that told him he was about to be brutalized again, the trembling deep in it as Daniil’s breathing, too, unravelled.
“What is this to you, I wonder?” he barely seemed to have the breath to gasp. “Penance? Or do you think you can consume me as well? Swallow me into this- this tidy little world you’ve devised, where-”
Artemy moaned as much for himself as Daniil this time, for the only answer he could give and to goad the man gripping his hair just that little bit further. He was close, it was all so damn close, the raw, ravenous pain he seemed to swallow straight from the back of his throat to his own cock, the piston-hard slide of Daniil’s in his mouth, slick and hot with saliva, and-
Daniil blurted an oath, Latin, it must have been, as Artemy sucked voraciously at his cock. Gripping his ass, holding him close this time, by surprise, deep enough for the first hot spurt of his come to hit the back of Artemy’s throat as another punishing blow.
Deep enough to feel like drowning for the first second. Daniil’s hands were braced on Artemy’s shoulders, his legs bent almost to buckling, almost to falling. Artemy could have let him fall.
Could have rocked back and let him fall, but buried his face against Daniil’s trousers instead, drinking as deeply as he could. For as long as he could, until his throat was sticky and raw and Daniil had started to find his balance again. Shakily, still taking much of his support from Artemy’s shoulders as he pushed himself back up to stand straight.
His cock slid, softening, from Artemy’s lips, and a strand of saliva hung amber-lit between them for a second before breaking. What was left of it clung cool to Artemy’s chin as he caught his breath, watching Daniil tuck and button himself hastily away.
That flush burned brilliantly from his chin to hairline, but there didn’t seem to be any triumph in it, for him or Artemy. He had tucked his gaze away as well, as if it, too, were something he’d exposed more of than he’d planned to.
“Maybe we’ll call that a draw,” Artemy said, sticky and hoarse and still not as much so as he likely would be by morning.
Daniil’s gaze darted back to and away from whatever mess he’d made of Artemy’s face. “That may be for the best,” he agreed. “That was certainly...that is to say, I won’t be impugning your talents again. I...”
“Why are you in such a hurry, then?” Artemy asked, letting his legs out from under himself to sit on the floor. It seemed like a safer bet, yet, than trying to stand and follow Daniil to the door. “Why don’t we-”
“I need-” Daniil stopped a step short of the door, maybe as some of his well-trained capital etiquette finally caught up with him. It was a hell of a way to leave a man he had just throat-fucked half to death, after all.
“I need a little fresh air,” he finished. “A walk in the cold would do me good right now, I think.”
“What is this about, Daniil? You’ve never-”
“Not now,” Daniil snapped. “Acta est fabula, good Haruspex. Applaud or not, it was a shoddy performance on my part, but-”
“Daniil.”
Shutting him up didn’t feel anything like a victory now. Just the stubborn, hungover silence that fell after intoxicating noise. His fingers were still wrapped tight around the doorknob, his lips pressed white over whatever else he would have said.
Two months, and maybe they hadn’t learned anything at all. They’d always known how to hurt each other – how long would it take them to learn how to stop?
“The invitation to help out at the clinic is still open,” Artemy told him.
Daniil swallowed. A telling little sign he might have tried to hide, but the lamplight told all secrets.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said.
And left, closing the door quietly behind him. Artemy sat under the implications of everything he’d said, still wincing to the pit of his stomach with every swallow and hard as the stones of Ur Heelu because of it.
He sighed, and even that raked down his throat. Shuffling back to sit against the bed, he worked open the buttons on his own trousers and thought of Daniil’s fingers tangled brutally in his hair as he wrapped his own around his cock.
#
It was four days later that Artemy went looking for one of his father’s journals, which he’d lent to Daniil, and ended up looking a little more closely through Daniil’s desk than he should have. Talking to the man hadn’t made him much less of a mystery, and shuffling through papers didn’t either, but maybe that was why the photograph had been tucked into such careful hiding beneath them.
A sepia picture white-seamed and brittle with age, of a Daniil younger by years and cares, framed by four other young men wearing the same wide, invincible smiles. The capital’s university was as unmistakable behind them as the hopeful fervour was in their eyes.
So begins the death of death, a bold hand had scrawled on the back of the picture. And below that, a date, eight years and four days before Artemy had found it buried deep but not forgotten in a desk drawer.