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It isn't until Easthies's palm cracks like lightning against his cheek that it occurs to Qifrey that no one has ever hit him before. Not like this. Not in the face. Not, he thinks with a wry grin and blood on his teeth, that he can recall.
There's a biting indignity to the act. Like a child turning his palms over to be struck with a cane after being caught in a lie. A slap isn't an act of aggression as much as it is an insult with velocity.
That must be why it feels so good. So good, in fact, that it's surprising and relieving when nothing twinges or creaks within him. Only satisfaction blooms, spreading through him like blood in water. It's hot and more startling than the pain, than his glasses clattering on stone, sliding out of reach.
It's no matter. Easthies has his head so far up his restrictive sense of justice that he won't notice the way Qifrey's eye waters not from the impact but from the lamplight. He won't see what Qifrey can't.
"Struck a nerve, Captain?" he asks, remembering to speak—that it's something even Easthies would expect him to do in response to a violent outburst. He lets his body become liquid as Easthies grabs him by the fabric at his shoulder and shakes him. It makes his head snap back against the stone wall, and that isn't quite as alluring a sensation.
"Ow," he whines, drawing the sound out, allowing it to be both a sincere complaint and a splinter working its way under Easthies's skin. Just because he rarely has the chance to flirt doesn't mean that he doesn't understand the mechanics behind it. He can manage it even like this, bruising and thorny and at an ostensible disadvantage that, judging by the color on Easthies's cheeks, is an advantage in sheep's clothing. It feels like one, anyway. He wonders if Easthies knows that all he is to Qifrey is a convenience. As easy to play as a single, chiming bell.
A means to not an end but a bloodletting of sorts. Every day that goes by without a reckoning builds the pressure behind his eye. Every time that Olruggio looks at him with fondness, he feels not the terrifying stirring of his eventual fate, but the throb of an infected wound. Easthies is merely the lance.
"Forgive me if I misread your intentions," Qifrey continues, emboldened by this mask he's never worn before. He doesn't have to be mild or polite. He doesn't have to smile or suppress a flinch or pretend not to notice the aching chasm between what he wants and what he can never, ever have. Right now, in Easthies's private office, he is simply an unapologetic problem. The irony is not lost on him. It is without contrition that he seeks punishment from a man who will never know how much he deserves it. "Your interrogations tend to be so hands-on," he adds, licking his teeth. "I'm sure you can see how I came to be mistaken."
Here's the thing: Qifrey came here to get roughed up. Badly, if possible. It's something he articulated to himself clearly before orchestrating the required circumstances. Something he pictured at great lengths for many days. He considered it while bathing, while raking his fingernails up his inner thighs, while wondering how to satisfy this fever without accumulating more debt he'll never be able to repay.
He thinks of Olruggio, and how angry he'd be about this, and how that specific anger would feel like drowning, and then he starts to lose his grip on the part of this that was starting to feel good. It makes his ears ring with such an acute buzz that he nearly misses Easthies's next words.
"When have I ever been anything but clear about my intentions?" the captain of the Knights of Moralis asks, so close to Qifrey's face that he can taste the mint tea on his breath. It's a shockingly human and mundane thing to know about Easthies. Another chip in the surface of Qifrey's tenuous pleasure.
No longer enjoying something has never stopped Qifrey from continuing to do it. He opens his mouth to say something about Easthies's clear intention to find new and exciting ways to interpret the laws of the land through a narrow lens and then apply that myopic interpretation toward events of little consequence and people of even less agency.
Then Easthies kisses him with the same force he applied to his open-handed strike. It hurts nearly as much, their teeth clashing together and Qifrey's lip splitting with the impact of it. The tang of his own blood overpowers the raw taste of Easthies's mouth and the faint mint on his tongue. The fastenings on Easthies's cloak dig into his sternum.
He jolts with the screaming instinct to fight.
His heartbeat roars like rushing water in his ears. It's terror. It's terror, actually. But not a terror he can remember ever belonging to him before. Is it something buried under his skin like the seed of his future undoing? The magnitude of it dizzies him and the tempest in his ears builds to something more akin to silence.
He's frightened and he can't see. Not clearly. Not well. So it takes a while for him to recognize that Easthies is no longer kissing him. He's propping Qifrey up against the wall, both hands now fisted into his uniform. And he sounds—damn him—he sounds concerned when he asks, "Did I hurt you?"
A soft, hysterical sound gusts out of Qifrey. It's laughter, he hopes. "Says the man who very recently knocked my glasses off my face. A feat, considering they're spelled on."
His voice is too high, his words awkwardly syncopated. He hasn't sounded so plainly unnerved since he was a boy hurtling himself into his master's bed, chased by formless nightmares he could not recount clearly, no matter how patiently Beldaruit questioned him.
Why is he recalling that now? Why must his unruly mind divert him from what he asked for, what he wanted?
He wants to remain in the silence. He wants the clarifying pain back. He wants.
His breath hitches.
He wants.
There's wonder alongside the wanting. He desires many things, but few of them are fleshly desires. His fear is animal fear that continues to ripple through his muscles, a distant thing compared to the new nearness of wanting. How utterly strange to find himself reaching for the burn of Easthies's downturned mouth with frostbitten fingers.
If he asks, if it's what he asked for— "You surprised me is all," he admits with more honesty than he cares to. His cheek is still inflamed from the impact, but now his face heats with an intoxicating mixture of shame and hunger. He traces Easthies's mouth and feels the stickiness of blood on the knight's lips. The light around them is starting to make his head pound. "Will you dim the torches?" he whispers. This is no place for fire, no time for warmth.
At Easthies's command, some gesture Qifrey cannot make out, the room sinks into near-darkness. Only one small votive remains on Easthies's desk, flickering like a starfly. Of course the man has chosen an office like a tomb, a place the sky can't touch. Relieved, Qifrey shudders and slips the heavy fabric off his shoulders. As the shape of Easthies forms more clearly before him in the low light, he unfastens his belt as well. He toes his boots off with ease. One, and then the other. The rest is sealed with a spell that—
All he must do is turn one tiny sliver of a button clockwise and the seam splits down his back. Easthies flays him with shaking hands.
Shivering, Qifrey removes his cap and allows it to fall. On its descent, its long ribbon catches around his wrist as if in protest, and his breath catches in turn.
He drags his attention back to this place.
He has no desire to undress Easthies. He will not map out the shape of his body with his fingers. There's only one form he wishes to memorize. But he exerts what little control he has left by unbuckling the fussy silver clasp hanging over Easthies’s shoulder and demanding, "Take off the circlet too. I want to touch your hair."
Easthies does as he's asked with no protest, setting the jewelry aside on his desk. He removes his cloak as well. He's still overdressed for whatever this is, but it's better that way. Better not to forget what they are, a stalwart knight and a wayward witch.
"Without a stitch," Qifrey murmurs with a drunken sort of giggle.
"What?" Easthies asks.
Qifrey kisses him, making sure it still hurts. His bottom lip is already swollen, plush against his tongue as he pries at the split, refusing to let the blood clot. He puts his hands in Easthies's dark waterfall of hair, finding it silky and pleasant to the touch. Qifrey enjoys the minor, inconsequential pleasures in life. You cannot lay roots in a fleeting moment.
Easthies kisses like he's fighting, with no finesse but a great deal of determination. It's a fight Qifrey surrenders to. Perhaps the only fight he will ever surrender to. He lifts his chin, exposes his neck, and cries out quietly at the drag of teeth that teases at hurting properly. The real agony is how close the shadow of what might have been remains, a spectre hovering just beside them, daring Qifrey to name it.
"Fuck," he says helplessly, raking his fingers down the back of Easthies's long neck. Why isn't anything enough? "Stop delaying."
With a low, amused sound, Easthies turns him. Like the mint tea, it's unsettlingly human. "Some might call it courtesy," he says with infuriating calm. Qifrey is both relieved that his partner in this charade will not be utterly inept and frankly quite irritated that Easthies is evidently getting laid.
"I didn't ask you for courtesy."
"You didn't ask me for anything." The moment has stilled, a pond freezing over. Easthies's fingers hook on Qifrey's sharp hip bones. His thumbs stroke slow circles. Patient, expectant circles.
Qifrey's breath huffs out with the specific sort of sigh that comes with losing a game that didn't feel important until the bitter end. "Was undressing not a clear enough signal?"
"Say it."
"Say what?"
It's cold in here. Qifrey's shivering is bordering on convulsive. He bows his head, forehead coming to rest against the wall. His arousal gives a confused twitch, but is undeniably invested in whatever he does next. "Fuck me. Is that what you're asking for? Vulgarity? Fuck me so I feel it long after I leave this miserable office."
So he forgets what he does not have the cruel privilege of unknowing.
There's no smug response from Easthies. He goes directly to work, producing something warm and slippery and offering no warning before applying it on and in Qifrey with surgical precision. It doesn't hurt at all, but it's unexpected and strange and humiliating enough to feed the sickening desire that drove Qifrey here in the first place. He tries not to think about being forced to ask for this. But he knows Easthies's demand wasn't a power play. It was an upstanding knight needing to know he had been given full permission to enter. Absurd considering the number of ways he insinuates himself into the lives of others without permission or welcome. Just one more way the knights exist to serve a narrow purpose under the guise of morality.
He wonders if Easthies can tell how difficult it is to remain anchored in this place. Then Easthies penetrates him and his thoughts dissipate like a cloud of steam. He's full and empty, shocked and pleased—terribly pleased. "Oh," he grunts, bracing himself against the wall, scarred socket pressed to the cool solidness of it. He'd rather hoped it would hurt more, but this is a different kind of overwhelm. A foreign presence in his body making him a host twice over.
"Qifrey," Easthies says, reminding him that there's a man attached to the proceedings. The utterance is not a question, thankfully. He has moved past needing to maintain moral superiority. The alternative, that he is simply being perceived, is too unpleasant to acknowledge. He does not want to be Qifrey the teacher right now. He wants to be a body made to feel. He wants to stop thinking and he cannot. Stop. Thinking.
Easthies abruptly takes him in hand, residue of whatever he prepared him with slick on his palm. His grip is tight and a little mean, and no one's ever done this to Qifrey before. He jerks, trapped between one sweet violation and another. "Yes," he says, in case Easthies can't tell by the way he's hardened to a painful extent that he wishes for this to continue. Preferably to completion. He chases the friction and the building pressure that's unsettlingly similar to the cottony feeling before a headache and yet entirely unalike. He can hear Easthies breathing like they're grappling. Like he's chasing something too. He can't—he's not going to finish, he can tell. It's not enough, not enough. His hand darts out and finds Easthies's free one and he pulls Easthies’s fingers up to his throat and presses them there and he won't beg, he will not, but if Easthies doesn't hurt him right now he will end this and murder the man with ten different types of forbidden magic.
"Qifrey," Easthies says with a growl, fitting finger and thumb in a clawed grip and holding him like a whiskercat caught by the scruff. It sends a flaming arrow of heat right through the core of Qifrey even as his breathing grows labored and his constricted blood flow does something alarming to his perception. It doesn't take long after that. His release is little more than an afterthought compared to his body fighting to stay conscious. It's a victory—and hard-won. He goes limp, caught around the chest by Easthies who does not relent. It makes Qifrey feel like a rag doll. Like he's stumbled and fallen into the dark, empty well of his own mind. His sickening, resigned compliance swallows him as surely as a rogue wave, leaving him submerged in blissful nothingness. He has no sense of when Easthies finishes, only a dim awareness that he served his purpose. It always ended, eventually.
The silence lasts a long time.
"Qifrey," Easthies says, a little worriedly. Qifrey is on the floor swaddled in garish rad fabric. He feels the wiry edge of his glasses pressing against the bridge of his nose. "I wasn't expecting us to part companionably, but I wasn't anticipating…." He gestures at Qifrey's body, likely trying to illustrate that he's been catatonic for an unspecified amount of time. "This."
"Mn," Qifrey acknowledges.
"How does this spell work?"
Qifrey lifts a numb hand to the bridge of his nose and presses one finger to activate the spell that seals his glasses neatly in place. The room sharpens into focus. Easthies crouches before him, his long hair unbound and tangled. His face is sweaty. Qifrey has never seen him sweat before. He might be sore and sticky and temporarily harboring Easthies’s semen, but he thinks the knight's bedraggled appearance gives him a slight philosophical upper hand.
"I'm fine," he says before Easthies puts him through the torment of enduring whatever his approximation of care looks like. As if to prove it, he begins to get dressed. This is the logical thing someone does after having sex that neither party will ever acknowledge again. As his mind slowly shuffles back into place, he's pleased to find that his thoughts remain gauzy and fleeting the way they do when he's very ill or terribly injured. Perfect.
"That's good," Easthies says with palpable awkwardness. When Qifrey has made it to his feet and finished dressing, he gingerly retrieves his soiled cloak from the ground and hangs it over his desk chair. Presumably to burn it and commission another. It's with far more reverence that he takes Qifrey's cap in two hands and offers it to him.
Qifrey's knees go watery. A prickling feeling extends from his fingers to his toes, the numbness like having slept wrong on every limb. His ribbon dangles between them, brushing the floor he debased himself on. "Thank you," he manages to say, unable to hear his own voice. He fits his cap back on and threads the long black ribbon between his fingers, smoothing it into place. The drag of satin against his skin returns him to his body in increments.
Easthies regards him dubiously, as if expecting him to swoon to the floor. It's not out of the question. So he forces a smile that feels like a grimace, nods his thanks, and takes his leave. He pauses in the doorway, unable to resist his impulse to have the last word regardless of whether or not he deserves to. But when he looks at Easthies, who stands very still with one hand on his cloak, looking not smug but unsettled, not looking at Qifrey at all, his words die in his throat.
This was his doing. Another casualty of his self-destruction. At least, he thinks, it's someone he can't stand.
The thought brings him no comfort.