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The hour is so late it’s become early, the sun threatening the dark horizon, and though Flins is exhausted, he doesn’t want to sleep. Sleep means losing the man beneath him. Sleep means letting go, and he has let go so many times in his life. He would like, for once, to be selfish, just a little, but he can’t steal Varka from his men any more than he can pluck the stars from the sky.
Varka himself sits against the headboard, his head tipped back, his eyes closed, his breathing even, and Flins is astride his lap and draped across his shoulders. Varka is warm beneath him, his heart beating an even, steady rhythm, so full of vibrant life even in his repose. Unlike Flins, Varka can sleep anywhere. He doesn’t have the weight of years to keep him awake, to urge him to imprint every waking moment in his memory. Young, impulsive, willful, he’ll forget memories as soon as they’re formed, but Flins clings to them. Memories are all he has.
“You’re awake,” Varka says, smoothing his hand down Flins’s back. His voice is low and rough with sleep, thick with dreams.
Flins makes a soft sound.
“What’s on your mind this time?” he asks.
That Varka will go with the rising of the sun, that Flins is not canny enough to keep him. In ages past, he might have used his knowledge and his magics to bind Varka to him. He has Varka’s name, and names have power, but respect has changed. No longer does he wield names as weapons. Varka will go, and Flins will not stop him, either. “Nothing of great consequence,” he hedges. Though he may not weaponize names, he is still fae, and he is still bound by many rules; he cannot lie, and so he doesn’t. He prevaricates, dissembles, minimizes. “The way your voice sounds right now.”
Varka rumbles with laughter. “My voice is it?” he asks, turning his head to press his lips to Flins’s ear. “And what, exactly, do you like about my voice?”
Everything. He likes everything about Varka’s voice, and about Varka, but that is too honest, so he practices synecdoche. “The rough and rumble of it,” he says, tracing ancient runes into Varka’s naked chest. They are, both of them, naked, and Varka’s cock is half hard against the swell of his ass. He likes that, too. “Your timbre is low and rich, dark and mellow, like midnight on a moonless night, but weighty. A comfortable blanket that wraps around me and warms me.” Varka warms him.
“You’re fit to give a man an ego.” Varka’s fingers climb the ladder of Flins’s spine, stroking over the knobs of it and then back down, easing between the globes of his ass to rub one finger across his loose hole. “It’s almost dawn.”
Flins says nothing. He’s never much liked the daylight hours, but since falling into this arrangement with Varka, he likes the thieving sun even less.
“You could stay,” Varka offers, his finger rubbing against Flins’s softened rim.
Flins doesn’t give him the victory of his sighs, keeping his face tucked into Varka’s neck and his lips closed. He doesn’t rock his hips backward, doesn’t arch with low and smoldering pleasure—but he can’t stop his cock from twitching between them. “Could I?”
“You could.” Varka catches Flins’s earlobe in his teeth, bearing down gently as his finger slips into Flins’s body. The pressure is still incredible, still deliriously good, even though they’ve come together at least three times over the course of the night. Varka’s stamina is the stuff of legends, and Flins, well. Flins has always had intense appetites and few ways to slake them. Humans can rarely give what he demands, but Varka never fails to satisfy. “You could stay with me.”
Lips curling against Varka’s neck, Flins rolls his hips to push that finger deeper into his body, delighting in the rough slide of it, almost unpleasant with no oil to ease the way but still so very good. “You know our agreement.”
“I do.” Varka rumbles with more laughter, and Flins can’t stop the groan that spills out of him. “I need to outsmart you, hm? A battle of wits.” For Flins isn’t canny enough to see a way around this most ancient tradition, to bind Varka to himself, but he has given Varka the secrets of binding him. “Let’s see, then… What has teeth but no bite?” His finger curls inside Flins, stroking over his prostate, and Flins exhales a heavy sigh of pleasure even as he wants to slap Varka upside the head and roll his eyes.
The things he puts up with for this mortal. “Too easy,” he murmurs. “A comb. You must try harder.”
“Who says I’m not trying very, very hard?” Varka asks, shifting his hips to rub the line of his cock against Flins’s thigh. “I’m always hard for you.” He breathes the words against Flins’s ear, cradling the back of Flins’s head in his large, callused hand, and Flins smothers a quiet groan. “Here’s another, then: If two is a couple and three is a crowd, what are four and five?”
Flins groans, but it has nothing to do with the pleasure simmering in his veins. “Varka,” he breathes. “Varka, are you even trying? Nine. The answer is nine.”
“The trouble,” Varka says, reaching for the oil on the bedside table, “is that you’ve been playing at riddles for centuries.” He pours oil down the seam of Flins’s ass, letting it drip across his skin, and Flins sighs gustily. The slide of Varka’s finger inside him grows easier, smoother, and he starts a slow and lethargic rhythm to impale himself deeper, taking his pleasures in easy rolls of his hips. “Use my true name. If you command me to stay, Kyryll Chudomirovich Flins, I will.”
This is such a curious game they play. Flins will no more demand Varka stay than Varka will command him to demand it. Instead, they turn around children’s riddles—and Flins would wonder if Varka even wanted to play the game at all except that sometimes, rarely, he submits riddles that rattle Flins’s bones and catch his breath and exhilarate him with their possibilities.
A second finger pushes into Flins’s ass, and Flins arches, gasping. His fingers curl around Varka’s forearms, and he bears down, pushing those fingers deeper still as they pet over his prostate.
“I’m easy to lift but hard to throw. What—”
“A feather.” Flins slides his hands up Varka’s arms, grasping his shoulders as he sits upright, as he moves his hips in earnest, riding Varka’s two fingers. They stretch him wide, though there’s little need, testing his body for the length of Varka’s not inconsiderable cock.
Varka’s fingers curl over his prostate, and he gasps. They pull wide, and he groans. Varka himself watches Flins in the darkness, his own gaze heavy-lidded, his eyes glassy with desire. “I’m so fragile that speaking my name will break—”
“Silence.”
The rumble of Varka’s voice is its own caress, stroking over Flins’s body like so many hands. He wants to drown in it, wants to tell Varka these riddles are good enough but they aren’t—not enough to fulfill the requirements of those old magics, but enough to make Flins’s cock twitch and leak and ache with need.
Taking his fingers from Flins’s ass, Varka nudges his cock against his hole. “What fills up a room but takes up no space?”
Flins groans as that voice washes over him. “Light.” He reaches back, knocking Varka’s hand aside and taking his cock in his own palm. He rubs the wet head of it against his hole, teasing himself with the illusion of penetration, caressing them both until Varka, too, is breathing heavily, is almost panting, is bright-eyed with his lust. “Try harder.”
Varka thrusts into him.
Flins’s head falls back, and his fingers dig hard into Varka’s shoulders. He clings as he sinks down Varka’s cock, as it stretches him to the point of breaking, his body still too tight to comfortably accommodate him even after all the sex they’ve already had throughout the night. It doesn’t matter how many times Varka pulls him onto his cock, Flins is never truly ready for it, so much slighter than his sumpter beast of a lover.
Lover. He wonders, sometimes, if they’re truly lovers. If they’re not something else entirely. But these are the games the fae used to play with their lovers, and he remembers watching his people lure humans in with the promise of unimaginable pleasure and then laughingly abandon them. He doesn’t want to abandon Varka, but there are rules he must still follow, Teyvat’s laws.
“Fuck, Flins,” Varka breathes, curving his hands over Flins’s hips. “You’re still so fucking tight. You…” He pulls his legs in so he’s kneeling with Flins still spread across his lap, and then he tips Flins backwards, sliding his hands up Flins’s back to catch him, bearing him down the bed. He keeps Flins’s legs sprawled over his hips, hips canted up, and he starts a slow, deep pace, bottoming out with each thrust. “What… what has a head but… but no… no brain?”
Flins arches his back, throwing his arms over his head and circling his hips to grind down onto Varka’s cock. He’s split wide open, every one of those exquisite thrusts dragging Varka’s cock over his prostate. In these moments, he feels like a fae prince, like he is entirely what he was in ages long past, a creature of midnight and magic and starlight. “Too many answers,” he gasps. “Corpses. Lettuce. Your cock.”
Laughing, Varka drives harder into him, faster, and Flins burns as the sound washes over him. He bends over Flins’s body, bracing himself on his forearms, and fucks into Flins like the night is still young and they have hours ahead of them, like the sun isn’t kissing the horizon and threatening the dawn. Slow, steady, even. He has more control than anyone Flins has ever met. “My cock? My cock buried in your tight little body,” Varka purrs, turning his lips to Flins’s own, each word a caress against them. “My cock fucking into you, carving into you, making you mine. You’re mine, aren’t you?”
Oh, how he wants to be Varka’s and Varka’s alone, how he wants Varka whispering filth in his ear every night. How he wants Varka to take him, fuck him, fill him, mark him, claim him, to murmur sweet nothings against his jaw as his cock buries deep inside him.
“Ask better riddles,” Flins gasps, tipping his head back and arching beneath Varka’s massive body.
Varka rakes his teeth down Flins’s throat. “What breaks but never falls?”
“Day,” Flins groans, stretching his arms above his head, stretching his whole body. He digs his feet into the bed, lifting his hips to meet each of Varka’s devastatingly deep thrusts.
“What falls but never breaks?” Varka murmurs against Flins’s ear like he knows the effect his voice has. His tongue flicks the shell of Flins’s ear, and Flins shudders.
“Night.” He drops his hands over Varka’s shoulders, raking his nails up his back. “More.” More riddles or more of Varka’s cock, he doesn’t know, but he doesn’t care. Both. Either. Neither. He can’t think anymore, and maybe that’s the point. Maybe this is how Varka finally defeats all the rules that govern Flins’s life.
“What can be touched but not seen?” Varka asks, exhaling the words.
Flins—Flins doesn’t know. A wicked elation seizes him as Varka moves harder, faster, as Varka reaches between them to fist Flins’s cock. Flins cries out, and Varka catches his mouth in a savage, brutal kiss, a demanding kiss, as he fucks deeper into Flins’s willing body. His cock takes up so much space that Flins can’t breathe, or maybe that’s the riddle, a cleverer turn of phrase than Varka has managed, and Flins, his thoughts floundering, can’t come up with an answer, not when he’s nothing more than a sieve for pleasure.
He aches with it, drowns in it. Euphoria destroys any hope of reason, steals his breath, sends him deep beneath cresting waves of tremendous pleasure. He can’t breathe, can’t think, can only feel the cock driving relentlessly into him and the hand pulling over him, tugging at his own cock until the pleasure is too much, until he’s shaking and shuddering and coming apart. His cum splatters hot across his stomach and his chest as Varka devours his mouth, his tongue, as Varka’s hips lose their rhythm.
“Answer me,” he whispers against Flins’s mouth, but Flins can’t. Can only gasp as a stronger ecstasy seizes him. “Tell me,” Varka demands. “Tell me, Flins. Tell me, tell me, tell—” And then he’s coming, too, is driving deep one final time. He shudders apart, curled over Flins’s body, and empties into him, and Flins whines in the back of his throat. His nails dig deep into Varka’s back, drawing red lines over his skin.
Varka all but collapses onto him, but Flins doesn’t mind his weight. No, it’s a comforting thing, being half crushed into the bed at his back as Varka mouths his neck, his jaw. Varka’s kisses bring him slowly back to himself, pulling him out of that redolent ocean, the crashing waves of ecstasies, and he sighs, dreamy and soft. He doesn’t know how Varka manages to stay awake both day and night, but he’s reaching his limit as light licks at the edges of the curtains.
What can be touched but not seen?
“A heart,” he breathes, to his great disappointment. “A heart.”
Varka sighs, his nose in the crook of Flins’s neck. He pulls away, pulls out of Flins, leaving him bereft and empty, and settles his hand on Flins’s stomach, not quite possessive but certainly something wanting. Needing. Hungry. “I’ll have to think harder,” he says in a low, wicked murmur, the words a sensual promise.
Still floating, not quite back in his skin, Flins blinks up at Varka. The hateful sun limns the edges of his shoulders and lights the golden crown of his hair. “So you will,” he replies. If nothing else, he will certainly enjoy Varka’s attempts if only to hear the riddles in his voice.