Chapter Text
It was a fair deal. A lesser sacrifice than some Daniil had made for his work.
Still, his nerves seemed to hum in tune with the streetlamps as he let himself out of the row house where most of his neighbours would already be sleeping. All ignorant of what he was setting out to do.
No one would escort him. No one would force him. Georgiy had made that absolutely clear. A commitment of this magnitude required his full, willing consent.
Though the weight of his gaze and cut-granite voice had made it clear that he understood, as well as Daniil did – money could do strange things to consent. Enough money could make a man agree to what he might otherwise find terrifying or repulsive. A promise of money paid out regularly, as much and for as long as his work required it? For the rest of his life? For that, Daniil would gladly sacrifice the better part of a year.
It would be a moment in time, in the grand scheme of things. A brief discomfort. Still, he stood staring at his hand on the doorknob, a slight tremble he could only see in the shadow of his fingers against the wood.
Months of negotiation and preparation would culminate in that night. And he could still throw it all away in a moment if he decided the prospect was simply too much to bear.
He opened his fingers from the doorknob, and his hand fell obediently to his side. He breathed a sigh into the kindly-tepid early summer air, one of the first nights that had been truly pleasant to stand in. Would the river still be cold?
Almost certainly. It would be up to the man waiting in it to keep him warm enough to stand it.
Daniil set off at not quite quick enough a clip to keep the thought from following him. His footsteps seemed infinite and lonely in their echo from the slumbering houses nearby, the few lit windows like overheard secrets. Though winter’s teeth had fully worn away, he walked more comfortably with his hands tucked under his arms.
Hunched against the possibility of someone seeing him from one of those lit windows, recognizing him and somehow guessing what he was doing out at that ungodly hour. What would they think? Was there really even the slightest chance he would be able to keep them from finding out throughout the whole endeavour?
When it hadn’t even started yet, not in earnest, and already he seemed to feel it glowing from his skin? He had stopped taking the hormonal supplements that meant almost as much to him as life, but not as much as his work, months ago, as soon as they’d agreed on the initial terms that would evolve into their ironclad contract. He had endured the indignity of bleeding as he’d once thought he would never have to again, the intangible, unmistakable tectonic shift of emotions beneath the surface of his mind. He had timed his blood, to determine when the most ideal date for his body might correspond with his- his client’s? His partner’s?- Andrey’s early-summer rut.
He had endured, as well, every preparation and precaution Georgiy had touted as necessary. Thinking too much on those when the river was a dark, slithering glimmer just ahead seemed unhealthy.
He left the street where he would be able to walk along its bank. Out beyond the borders of the town, he’d been instructed, just into the steppe. It wouldn’t do to undertake this experiment where the noise might disturb- or offend- the good folk of the town.
Stars swallowed the sky as he left the streetlamps behind. The factories bulked and dozed on his left, and that twisted shell-tower they said Andrey himself had conceived, modelling it after deeply submerged secrets of his kind, glowed like a low harvest moon on his right. What could have convinced the merman to betray those secrets or design so brilliantly for the sake of humans? What complicated, unconventional process must it have been for him to supervise its construction? It was no wonder, certainly, that he’d had them plant it on that little island in the middle of the river.
Daniil had met him only a few times since arriving in that town the year before. Almost all in the course of those negotiations, and every time, Andrey had smiled at him like something good to eat.
The rustle of grass beneath his feet had no lonely echo. The brooding factories and light of the tower fell behind, and he turned his head just in time to watch a deep ripple not quite match the flow of the river.
He stopped to watch, but the flow ran true after that. Was Andrey already marking his steps? For how long? A shiver of true chill, a stray steppe breeze, raced across his skin; cupped in the steppe and stars, he had almost felt unobserved, but they said nothing done near the river was done truly out of sight.
Should he call out? The lights of the town were still a close starfall glimmer behind him. Walk to the first bend in the river, Georgiy had said. The one with the flat stone that looked almost like an altar, and hadn’t he realized how unsettling that comparison might be under the circumstances?
Sit on the stone and wait, and Andrey would find him there. If he was still willing, of course. He could still turn and walk back to town, and Georgiy would be only professionally, politely disappointed.
He could continue to scratch out the meagre living he had in that town for the last year, lowly exile, assisting the more clinically-qualified local doctors and even the pharmacists with their excess patients and stock irregularities. And every day, he would know he had run from the opportunity to accomplish something more.
To resurrect the work he had left in ashes, and to help a fellow researcher of the taboo and condemned-as-mythical advance his own theories. There was so much to be learned from the merfolk’s exceptional longevity, so much that might be applied to the human pursuit of the same – but would those discoveries be compatible with the landbound, weaker human body? No child conceived between a mer and human, according to grave Georgiy, had ever survived to term.
Starlight crystallized on a slab of stone ahead. A sinuous bend in the river, like the glisten of black silk. Daniil’s stomach tried to turn back without him.
It was another sign of how far he had fallen, yes. That he would even consider lending his womb, the rest of himself by extension, to such an experiment. He’d had far more means than his own body once.
But now he had nothing, and what he had drunk that morning at Georgiy’s instruction churned in his gut. He shuffled towards the stone, failing to force himself to stride proudly through the long, still spring-soft steppe grass.
The stone was clean of all but that cosmic, silvery light. He swept its edge conscientiously with his hand anyways before sitting.
Crossing his legs at the ankles, tucking them close to the stone’s base. Should he disrobe? Lie down? No – those two metres from the river and the height of the stone would be trial and pain for a mer. Andrey would want him in the river, that slick black lap whispering its secrets to him where it ran skin-shallow over silt.
Clean and deep enough that it seemed nearly to thrum at the centre. He had always been a strong swimmer, but his best stroke would be like the spindly flailing of a drowning beetle compared to the creature he’d come to satisfy. A bolt of scarlet in the black, beneath the surface, quick and gone before he could be sure he had seen it.
He leaned forward from the stone. His breath hung between parted lips.
There – a stir of translucent fin, like blood on the surface. A divot in the strong course of the water as something dragged it down. A second’s churning silver, and head and shoulders and the firework red flare of a dorsal fin emerged from the current.
Pale skin glowing with moisture, a lean body with good health. Hair as dark with water as the river itself slicked back from the fierce, hawkish features and feral eyes that had haunted Daniil’s last several nights of troubled sleep.
That assessed him now, as they had before, with a nearly supernatural glee. Georgiy would have negotiated for his favoured mer to have practically anyone in the town. So why, why on earth had Andrey asked for Daniil?
He could have had the most hardy and fertile young woman. So why was he baring that mouthful of needle teeth now in such unabashed delight?
“You came after all,” he said, in a hush and tremble Daniil had never heard from him before. A ripple across the water’s surface. “I thought you might lose your nerve.”
He had come so close. So many times; he had barely been able to force down soup and bread for dinner, and only by reminding himself what sort of exertions he would endure before he had the chance to eat again. A mer in rut was a formidable thing; the water around Andrey all but simmered with intent.
“I struck a fair bargain with Georgiy,” Daniil said. Hands folded primly, too protectively, perhaps, in his lap – in front of what he had agreed to offer up to Andrey. How many years had it been since he had allowed anyone access to that native, unnatural part of himself? University experiments, drunken nights that had left him despising himself... “I’ll uphold my end of it.”
Andrey rolled his exceptional eyes. Despite the strength of the current at that depth, he hovered all but motionless – his tail must have been working mightily below the surface, bending the river’s flow into the steady vortex that supported him.
“And I’m sure there isn’t the slightest appeal for you in this,” he said. “Lie back and think of grant money. Maybe it isn’t the first time you’ve done something of the sort.”
Heat prickled Daniil’s cheeks as if drawn by blood and needle teeth. His hands cupped more tightly into his lap.
“Are you suggesting I used sex to secure my academic success in the capital?” he asked.
“Not at all,” Andrey replied, but not with the embarrassed rush of someone who had been misunderstood. With teeth, still. “If I didn’t think you were doing something exceptional- almost unthinkable- for me, I wouldn’t be half as interested. No, I just wanted to see you blush and squirm like a virgin sacrifice.”
In that case, he had gotten exactly what he wanted. Daniil tried to sit as still as possible, to satisfy him less.
“This is a business arrangement,” he reminded Andrey. “I would appreciate it if you-”
“To you, maybe. My only business right now is you. Come over here,” Andrey ordered him. “Let me get a look at you up close.”
Daniil’s instinct, bristling in his shoulders and quick in his gut, was still to refuse. He had been comfortably untouchable to the merman whenever they had met before – to everyone for the past year, come to think of it. He had kept his own space. Now he had agreed to give it up, and what if Andrey changed his mind? What if, at the last minute, he decided Daniil wasn’t what he wanted after all? That could scuttle their arrangement as easily as any of Daniil’s misgivings. No – for the sake of his work, as pitiful as it felt, he had to do everything possible to please the creature grinning in the water.
He pushed himself up from the stone. For good measure, on his way to the river’s edge, he began undoing the buttons of his shirt, starting from-
“Not so fast,” Andrey scolded him, giving the water a deeper, gulping flip with his tail. “Do you always unwrap other people’s presents for them? You can take your shoes off. Then come down here.”
Daniil burned inside and out with the careless confidence of the order. He had been so focused on the physical consequences of th at bargain, he hadn’t considered how it would feel for Andrey to be a prince to him for the night. To practically own him. Georgiy’s authority, and the weight of coin, a lifetime’s worth, were behind every word the merman spoke.
He stooped to slip off his shoes. He had forgone socks and garters, or anything, really, that would complicate the process of undressing. He was meant to be simple and easy that night – or perhaps Andrey would have preferred him to be complicated? More layers to unwrap.
The thought burned under his skin, firing him brittle as he approached the water. Not yet wading heedlessly in, but rolling his trousers to his knees and venturing only that deep. Just enough to feel the great pull of the current against his shins, and the disturbance Andrey’s tail created in it.
Andrey rolled his eyes – the sort, in legend, that would lure young maidens to their doom.
“Don’t be squeamish,” he said. “Sit down. Make yourself comfortable in my house. I won’t have you looming over me.”
The water was still chill with spring, though it, too, had lost its teeth. Daniil closed his over his tongue, holding back a gasp as he lowered himself down to legs tucked close and the river pulsing against his stomach. His trousers sealed tight to his skin – Andrey would have no easy time ‘unwrapping’ him, but looked, drifting closer, like the sort to relish a struggle.
Drifting, slow and unstartling, for just a few unfurling feet. Then his tail flashed, a red break of the surface, and he was in front of Daniil, steadying himself in the shallow water with webbed hands flattening the silt.
So close, Daniil’ s gasp drowned in the undeniably piscine scent of his aquatic features. The dorsal fin falling sleek to his back. The graceful ventral cloak billowing from beneath his arms, the scales scattering to skin around his- yes, his navel. Daniil had wondered if he would possess such a telltale, familiar feature, if the pregnancy of a mer was at least that similar to-
A webbed hand, dense, flexible carnelian between fingers one joint too long, closed over his knee. A frisson fled through his skin.
His hands closed to fists in the silt. This was his choice. To let Andrey touch him however he might, as long as that excluded any great physical harm and included leaving him pregnant with whatever creature their mixed blood would birth.
Andrey looked as though he fully intended to glory in that freedom. That one-night dominion . A true prince of the river, as long as he had Georgiy’s patronage. He slid his hand up Daniil’s thigh, searching Daniil’s eyes as if for the moment when he might object.
Circling those raw-flesh-rending teeth deftly with his tongue. Another shiver raced from his touch as Daniil recalled what Georgiy had told him, warned him, really – that the enchanting nature of mer kisses was no myth, but the product, rather, of a powerful aphrodisiac in their saliva, and never more so than when they were rutting.
“You’re as delicate as you look,” Andrey observed. “I’ve wanted to find out ever since I first saw you.” His hand slid naturally, nudging, possessively into the tight seam of Daniil’s crotch. “I could smell it on you, you know. You’re not like any of them. I knew then that I needed to have my hands on you.”
Daniil’s tongue went sour between his teeth. Careful , he reminded himself, but he could hardly say nothing in response to that.
“Is that it, then?” he asked, arch and still brittle. “Is it only my sex that interested you in this arrangement?”
“In a manner of speaking.” Andrey plucked and stroked at the water-stiff, stubborn fabric, finding where he could gather it between his fingers. “They’re so complacent, most of them. Like carcasses rotting in the sun. Then you showed up, and, looking at you, smelling you, everything about you says you’ve fought like the devil to be what you are. And to get what you want? I wanted to know how much you’d do. How much you’d throw off as ballast- dignity?- and what would be left of you afterwards.”
Before Daniil could even begin to answer that, before he could find words in the odd, giddy twisting of his gut, Andrey’s fingers tightened. On the crotch and thigh of his trousers, tearing them open with a long, drowned, wounded sound.
Daniil yelped in protest as the river coursed in to caress his bare flesh. The length of one thigh, and to stir the dark nest of his pubic hair.
“Idiot,” he snapped, forgetting himself entirely for that moment. “What am I supposed to wear to get home?”
“I don’t give a damn,” Andrey informed him, all cheer and teeth and, a second later, silver bubbles as he plunged his head into the water and Daniil’s crotch.
Daniil locked rigid from thoughts to toes. Starlight glimmered on the surface of the river and his mind as Andrey’s nose tucked and nuzzled into his folds. Brisk and unashamed, and a tongue that felt too long lapped eagerly at him, not as if to arouse him, but as if savouring a taste it had long been starving for.
For longer than any human could have gone without breath. When Andrey finally surfaced, the spread of his fins was all explosive delight.
“You taste like heaven,” he crowed. “How do you feel?”
Hot. Burning strangely where that tongue had savoured him, despite the chill of the water. How much of an effect might that aphrodisiac have when applied directly to the relevant area ?
“Cold and half-naked,” Daniil replied. The longer he sat there, the safer it felt for him to be terse with Andrey. The better, perhaps – the architect-prince didn’t seem the sort who would enjoy a stoic, retiring partner. “I don’t suppose you feel the cold.”
“Not at all,” Andrey confirmed. “Don’t worry – I’ll warm you up.”
Though first he seemed intent on chilling him further, tearing his trousers from that long initial rip to useless rags that flowed and fluttered, pinned beneath his legs. His shirt was no defence at all, of course – the white fabric already clung like a fading dream to his skin, and parted in a long line of popping buttons as Andrey seized hold of it.
Such a casual strength in deceptively lean limbs. Daniil’s skin prickled with it as much as the cold, with the slick whisper of his shirt tear ing away like a snake’s moult, and then with the clever touch of fingers climbing to the scars on his chest.
Tracing the rough, pearly lines of them, relish ing, it seemed, the secret they whispered . “ I’ll bet you divested yourself of these just as soon as you could ,” Andrey said.
“Eight years ago,” Daniil confirmed. His labia still held that restless heat, but otherwise, he still felt only like a man allowing himself to be touched where he ordinarily would not.
“Hm. And took something no doubt scientifically interesting to make yourself look and sound- and taste- more like a man. Is it going to get in the way of you giving our mutual benefactor what he wants?”
Not what you want? Daniil almost asked. But did he really want to pry into Andrey’s motivations beyond what he could smell, what he saw so clearly in the mer’s eyes? It might be as simple for him as satisfying his body’s urge to produce offspring. Combined with the curiosity he apparently felt towards Daniil, would he need any other motivation?
“I’m not taking it right now.” The words and thought still stung – after all he had fought for who and what he was, to take that sabbatical not nearly enough by choice. It would be the last time – that he swore to himself, while staring into the intrigued pulse of Andrey’s gills.
Gaping like wounds a long way from scars across the shallow trench of his clavicles. Their flutter and sigh seemed a secret language of its own, tensing and relaxing in time with the flare of his nostrils.
“You’re serious about this,” Andrey murmured. By the flutter in his voice, he might just have been realizing how much.
“Of course,” Daniil said. “Why? Are you not? After all the arrangements we...”
His voice and gaze fell to the nudge of something- both Andrey’s hands were occupied, braced against his chest, but something was prodding against his shin, through the tatters of ruined trousers that still flowed across it. Something strange at first, confusing for how stubbornly his mind wanted not to recognize it for what it must be.
He had never seen a penis so garishly large before, after all, or that threatening shade of red. Like a snake testing the air beyond its burrow, it curved out from a slit in Andrey’s scarlet scales more or less where sexual organs would have been located on a human lower half. According to Georgiy’s dry, unsensational explanation, merfolk were all equipped the same in that regard, capable of both siring and bearing children with any other of their kind. Perhaps Andrey understood, better than most, how it felt for Daniil to exist between the most typical human assumptions about sex.
Such sentiment, solidarity, seemed far from the mer’s mind at present, however. His eyes, the hawkish intent in his face, the way he loomed over Daniil’s folded legs, his tail trailing out behind him into the full of the river.
“Oh, I’m as serious as the grave,” he assured Daniil. “I thought you might try to toy with me. A terrible idea right now, to be clear. Or you would get as far as actually setting foot in the river and go soft on me. But you’re a fighter. You know what you want, and how you’re going to get it. You’re better than I ever could have hoped.”
His hands, river-cold, slid around to Daniil’s back as he spoke. Spanning his spine with slick cartilage, his quick intake of breath with greedy fingers. Pulling him forward in the silt, so that it stirred to clouds around him and the black remains of his trousers slipped free to vanish in the body of the river.
“If you were mer, we’d fight,” Andrey muttered in quick, hazy focus as the water swirled up around Daniil’s ribs. “Miles up and down the river. The winner would be the one to bear the children. The stronger one, you see? But it’s no good with you – I’d break you for sure. So this is backwards, but it’s how it has to be. Georgiy’s going to look after you, isn’t he? He’ll want to poke and prod you, make sure everything’s going according to plan.”
“I’ll be checking in with him regularly,” Daniil confirmed. Andrey didn’t need to know the rest – that, once the pregnancy became impossible to hide, Daniil would sequester himself in the Crucible under the pretense of leaving town for a business trip. Like a maiden pregnant out of wedlock, concealing his condition and, yes, placing himself under Georgiy’s more constant supervision. Not a part of the bargain he liked, but a practical one, considering the risks he was going to be bearing.
“Good. Fine. He didn’t appreciate it when I called him your pimp. I don’t suppose you’d appreciate it, either.”
“No, I wo-” Daniil didn’t have time to finish saying before Andrey’s eager lips closed over his.
Before Andrey’s runaway tongue slid into his mouth. Like his fingers, subtly too long, wrong, licking around Daniil’s teeth as it had below – not to titillate him, but to sate itself, to sample and sully every hidden nook of him . It tasted of nothing he knew, jasmine breathed on a morning by the sea, maybe, sunset scuttling a breached ship with a cargo of myrrh. Dangerous, he reminded himself, a dangerous taste, but it was far too late to concern himself with that. His mouth was already full of it – Andrey might have been trying to fill him with as much of it as possible, drugging him eagerly for the coupling to come.
The heat in his mouth, myrrh and the unknown, trickled in search of that which still burned between his legs. Each breath fanned it faster on its way. He moaned into Andrey’s mouth as it reached his stomach, igniting the tension he had carried from town.
Taking on the weight of his anxiety and sinking faster. He pressed his legs together, but couldn’t seal off the well that seemed to be filling between them. The heat and shameless wet, the swelling throb of his sex slicking and thickening and suffusing itself in sodden anticipation.
“Oh,” he breathed over Andrey’s teeth. “Oh, that’s...”
“Quite something, isn’t it?” Andrey laughed. “I’ll make this easy on you, fighter. At least at first.”
And then? Daniil ran a tingling tongue around his lips. His breath burned like liquor, his sex like sugar water boiled down to thick syrup. His mind still seemed clear, not fogged by either fire, but could he trust what a good idea it suddenly seemed to tell Andrey that-
“Georgiy had me drink something,” he was already saying, too late to decide either way. “Something he procured locally. Every day for the last week; the Kin say it’s supposed to help with- with fertility.”
Though without knowing exactly what he was drinking, he hadn’t placed much more faith in it than he would in a particularly flavourful tea. The aim had felt far more important than the effect – by drinking it, he had declared his intent ion to carry through with that bargain, and to accept Georgiy’s guidance in matters of his health.
And, it seemed, he had further pleased Andrey. “ Oh, that’s delightful,” the merman gloated. “ That must have been Burakh’s work. I wonder if Georgiy told him what it was for. I wonder if he even picked it up himself, or if he sent a hired hand. Nice and anonymous. And do you feel any different for it? More fecund?”
“And how is fecundity supposed to feel?” Daniil asked, with the uncomfortable suspicion that he might know. If it felt like anything discernible, it would be that hot, sponge-soaked sense of heaviness now in his sex.
“Like life, I suppose.” Andrey let his tail flow loose and heavy in the current, let it pull him and, by extension, Daniil deeper into the full of it. “Do you feel like you have more of it in you than usual?”
At that precise moment, yes, though he doubted the dubious concoction he’d been drinking with his breakfast had anything to do with it. The river folded its dark tongue around his thighs, but couldn’t cool him between them. Such a placid, pretty part of his everyday life it had been for the last year, a power he had never appreciated, a depth he had known but only now felt as his feet ceased to touch the bottom. A strong swimmer he was, yes, yet he found himself clinging to Andrey for how suddenly the world was all black water and starlight.
A constant, shivering course across his naked body. The steppe slept serene and unreachable around them; for more than money, more than his work, he was in Andrey’s power now. A mer could do as they pleased so easily with a human removed from the shore.
For the moment, Andrey seemed content to spin him in the current, steadily farther from the town. Supporting him by one hand around his back while the other ventured lower, rubbing indulgently through his folds to find the swollen head of his clitoris. Encouraging him by fingertips and only the occasional, unsettling brush of cartilage, and with another powerful kiss.
Daniil closed his eyes to it, t o take as much as he could from it. It would be easier that way. Only as his tongue numbed and his sex seemed to steal its sensitivity did he realize he had neglected to answer Andrey.
“Yes,” he managed to slip into the kiss.
“Mm? Yes, what?” Andrey murmured into his mouth.
And by then it was yes everything, wasn’t it? This was how humans immortalized in legend for their foolishness were seduced by the mer. The beauty of the world turned to another facet, one of watery light and secret river sounds, and the chemical cheat of whatever their saliva carried. His sex might have been malleable clay beneath Andrey’s fingers, a soft, pliable heat trickling, restored from the giddy furnace in his stomach. He wouldn’t have to worry at all about whether it would fit the inhumanly large member now pressed against his thigh, would he?
“It feels like life,” he said. And tried to remind himself it was still business, starlight and magic or not, but a harsh tweak of Andrey’s fingers tugged him down to a groan, thoughts and all.
“Good. Good,” Andrey muttered into his hair. “It’s no good if you don’t catch, right? Not as far as Georgiy is concerned. He needs his chimera. All right, fighter. I’ll give you what you need. And you’ll give me the same.”
He clasped his lower hand to Daniil’s hip for guidance. His fins drifted in silken embrace; beneath the surface, Daniil could feel, his tail beat a lazy vortex, holding them both upright, bringing them together on a slow, calculated trajectory. Not calculated quite right – the hot, self-slicking length of his erect ion slid along the seam of Daniil’s thigh, driving a shiver up Daniil’s back with its closeness and meaning.
So many years since he’d suffered any touch there. Now he was going to let this creature, sinister with hormones and smelling of the sea, thrust into him, abuse him into pregnancy. So far from the riverbank , from the lights of town, it was hard to remember what it was for.
Andrey kept a curse behind his carnivore’s teeth. His gills and nostrils flared together as he firmed his grip on Daniil, lifting him another hand’s-width from water that now seemed warmer than the air, and nestled him more carefully against that formidable cock.
That close, intimately so, it felt too large and vulgar for any more clinical term. That hard and hot and intent, pressing through Daniil’s folds to what felt like a full stop against his entrance. Andrey had worked his flesh marvellously soft, but would it be enough for-
A twitch of Andrey’s tail rose naturally to a roll of his hips, and the thing was inside. So tightly, suddenly, Daniil couldn’t help the wounded sound he made around it. All those years spent treating that feature of his anatomy as a no man’s land made the intrusion a stark, wrenching, unfamiliar feeling, a stretch his body would have ousted, relieved if it could have.
But he had no purchase in the water by which he could struggle free of it. No grip except on Andrey, who hadn’t stopped, as any attentive partner should have, to see if he was all right. No, the merman repeated that fluid, pitiless motion in rhythm, and a shock of premature orgasm ripped no pleasure through Daniil’s body. Only another snared-fox yelp, frightened and echoing, as the stretch between his legs spread deeper and still wider.
He forsook his grip on Andrey to try to fit his hands into the squelch and slosh of water between them, to take hold of, some control over what was happening below. But every plane of flesh and scale was slick, and Andrey answered those probing hands with a furious shake of his head, a baring of starlit teeth that seemed to burn away any shadow of reason in his eyes.
All the magic of slow-dance spinning down the river had sunk away. This was nearly an animal Daniil had invited into himself, perhaps just in rut, or perhaps always, perhaps the mer only mimicked so much of human speech and reason like clever birds, words they’d learned would get them what they wanted-
In the sleeping, unreachable distance, the tower was still a crack of golden light. Could something without reason have made that? Something without a beautiful, intricate mind?
Andrey groaned into Daniil’s shoulder. The cloak of his ventral fins drifted about them both, wrapping their union in something almost like modesty. Daniil’s legs kicked weakly, independently with each deepening of it, his pelvis seemed swollen and shoved to perfect hardness with its intrusion, and his grip had relented to Andrey’s hips, miming, at least, how he might have held a human lover.
Maybe this would be the worst of it. Maybe the worst had already passed – those first seconds of fear and alarm, and already he was adapting, rationalizing, reminding himself why he had agreed to that indignity. No one but he and Andrey and the residents of the Crucible would ever have to know.
“Oh,” Andrey groaned, far more like a word this time. “Oh, fuck, that’s good. I always forget how fucking good it feels, how-”
And that many words strung together might have been reassuring if not for how they reignited his briefly slackening rhythm. He drove out what would have been Daniil’s answer as another wordless cry, he thrust and whipped and nearly rolled so that Daniil clamped his mouth shut in fear the next second might plunge them both underwater, and, with a cry of relief or triumph of his own, he shoved himself finally to the point where he was pressed flush against and into Daniil.
Daniil clung around him, pressing the sting of surprised, indignant, wounded tears to his wet chest. It wasn’t painful, not quite, not tearing or worrying, but it was a deep, blunt terror to his instincts, which had always seemed to say he shouldn’t have that space in him at all. He could try, he was trying, to use it as just another tool for his work, but he couldn’t convince his nerves that he wasn’t being intruded on through a wound.
“I always forget how tight you are,” Andrey’s gloating didn’t help in the least. “You’re all so small down there, that tight fit feels fucking fantastic. It’s a wonder we ever get around to fucking each other when you’re all so-”
Would Daniil have begged him to stop? Speaking, or everything, stop , he’d changed his mind? He had no time to find out before Andrey’s mouth was on his again, a frantic, sharp flurry of kisses travelling as far as his forehead and chin but returning always, lingering, where they could sink deep and make him more pliable, in more than one way, to what was happening to him.
And never did Andrey stop sliding into, nearly out of, into him, in rhythm, all the while. Their teeth clicked together; keen tips nearly tore his lip. Daniil’s second orgasm came as abrupt and sloppy as the first, little more than a buck and gasp, and, at first, he thought the new sensation intruding on his pelvis might be a part of it. A filling warmth, deep and luxurious. Only when Andrey collapsed against his shoulder, coming closer than ever to tipping them both underwater, did he realize what it must be.
Panic tightened his pores, pulled him up stiff as a log in the water. One moment, like waking from a dream, in which he couldn’t imagine how he had been so reckless, letting someone fuck him in that no-man’s-land way without any sort of barrier, forgetting, even, to insist that they pull out before climax.
But, of course, that was the point. That unsettling, unparalleled feeling was the point, an intrusive glut of softness pushed up deep in him, imposing on every shift of his pelvis. Far more than a human partner would have dispensed in him, and the texture...
“That’ll fix you,” Andrey chuckled into his shoulder. “It doesn’t come out easily, you know. It has to stay put in water, after all.”
Long enough to do its job. Dense and creamy and nearly clinging in a way he couldn’t stand being able to feel so clearly. But what else could he do? It wouldn’t come out easily, and he had agreed to this, every step of the way.
He might cross the unseen line between pregnant and not at any moment. He might have already. He would carry that uncertainty for weeks before he found out whether he was carrying what would secure his future.
“Thank you,” he said, though he couldn’t decide whether it was appropriate. It didn’t feel so with Andrey still lodged inside him, stopping him up like a cork in a bottle. But the merman might just have given him his future, and that was something. “You can return me to shore now. I’ll-”
Andrey’s laughter exploded over the water and the sleeping steppe. He spun extravagantly, holding Daniil by the hips to keep from slipping free.
“I don’t think so,” he said, still out of laughter. “No, you’re staying right here until I’m through with you. You think rutting is just once and done? That whip cracks over us for weeks. I want you here with me for all of it, my fighter. You can bill Georgiy for the overtime later.”
“What?” Daniil squawked, shocked and unlovely and too late to draw in a proper breath before Andrey rolled him underwater after all. Only for a moment, but that blur and cough of black water was a potent reminder of just how easily the merman could put him there and keep him there.
“I didn’t agree to this,” Daniil spluttered anyways, raking wayward hair from his eyes. “The arrangement was that I would stay with you long enough to...”
But he could see the mistake there now, couldn’t he? The grey area he wouldn’t have expected Andrey to be ruthless enough to claim for his own.
“Long enough to make sure you walk away stuffed with half-mer, right? What do you think will be a better guarantee of that? One halfhearted fuck, or a few weeks of due diligence? You want to be sure, don’t you?”
Yes. Yes, of course, if he was to go through with it, he wanted to do so properly. Thoroughly, banish as much of that uncertainty as possible. But after what those few minutes had done to him, the idea of weeks stretching ahead was insurmountable. Could one person even endure that sort of focused attention?
“At least let me go home for the day,” he tried to bargain, too late, he suspected. “I’ll come back to you in the evenings, but-”
“No, you won’t. You’ll get in your nice cozy house, your warm, dry bed, and decide it’s sure enough. You’ll talk yourself out of coming back.” Andrey rolled his streamlined hips, a reminder, perhaps, of how firmly sunken he still was in Daniil. “You think I don’t know I only have power here? When what we want comes in reach of the river, we have to take it. And then we have to hold tight to it for as long as we want to keep it.”
Of course he knew. Powerless beyond the river, beyond their arms’ reach. Daniil had taken comfort in that, hadn’t he? In knowing Andrey could only exert his wishes, enforce his terms within those very narrow limits.
But so far from the bank, they didn’t seem narrow at all. The river was the world, everything else a rumour whispered by the winking stars.
“Are you really prepared to keep me here against my will?” he would have liked to challenge Andrey, but came far closer to begging.
Andrey shrugged, carrying the motion through both of them and the current that still carried them in turn. How far were they from the town now?
“I don’t think it’ll be against your will,” he said. “Given a little time, you’ll realize it’s for the best. When you go home, you can do it confident, and our mutual benefactor will be impressed with your dedication. Besides-” His tongue flicked around his lips, courting the dangerous edge of teeth- “I have one surefire way to make this more agreeable for you.”
“Forcibly drugging someone hardly counts as-” Daniil rushed to say, and wasn’t quick enough. And couldn’t lean back far enough to escape the kiss, or the way it forced him underwater until he had to take it and what was in Andrey’s lungs or drown.