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Amon pours salt water over the large graze on Lee’s outer thigh.
Lee clenches his toes, but makes no sound. He earned the injury by getting too close to an earthbender with a knack for throwing people. Amon witnessed it firsthand: one hard stomp and an explosion of pavement, and the earthbender would launch opponents skyward. Lee didn’t fare too badly, as he’d been thrown more horizontally than vertically, sending him skidding across the pavement. It was watching a motorcyclist come off their bike, albeit without the bike.
That’s why Lee now sits bare-legged on the edge of a crate while Amon crouches next to him and washes grit off the injury.
Lee could clean the road rash by himself, but given his general indifference towards his own body, Amon doesn’t trust him to do it properly. If Lee was presented with a first aid kit, he might just drink the rubbing alcohol. Besides, Amon doesn’t begrudge the task. Occasionally he likes to try convincing himself that he’s a halfway decent person. He never entirely succeeds, but the illusion is nice while it lasts.
Once the injury seems clean, Amon reaches for a pot of ointment. He smears a thin coat of it across the graze. Lee stares straight ahead, slouched over with his arms resting on his knees. Lee looks like he should be smoking a cigarette, but Amon talked him out of that a while ago, so now there’s a cigarette-shaped void in Lee’s right hand, and his fingers drum uneasily against the crate.
While Amon applies the ointment, Noatak appraises Lee’s legs. They’re sinewy. A little on the skinny side. Not too hairy. Not the nicest legs Noatak has ever seen (if he wanted to see those, he’d look in a mirror, ha), but… Well.
Lee fidgets.
Amon finds a square of gauze and some tape. He applies the gauze, secures it, then considers Lee’s general personality, and adds more tape. Enough tape, in fact, to run all the way from Lee’s outer thigh to his inner thigh. Amon looks at the tape, nothing else. Noatak looks at everything except the tape.
As Amon applies the tape, one of his thumbs briefly touches the inside of Lee’s leg, and Amon feels him flinch.
Then Lee utters the words of romance: “Think I got beaned in the dick earlier.”
“Excuse me?” says Amon.
“When that guy was throwing chunks of pavement. Fucker got me on my upper leg. Groinal area. Is groinal a word?”
“What do you mean,” Amon says, “you think you were hit in the dick?” He does not say: You’ve either been hit in the dick or you haven’t. There is no middle ground. Rather like how one cannot be ‘slightly dead’, one cannot be ‘slightly hit in the dick’.
Noatak then congratulates himself for making Amon say ‘dick’ in a voice that, somehow, still sounds imbued with gravitas.
Lee shrugs. “Didn’t seem a big deal at the time.” His heart rate suggests he’s… not lying.
“Are you in any pain?” Amon asks, in a tone that suggests he’s not in the mood to play doctor.
“Not really.”
Amon doesn’t ask, Would you like to be? He stares critically between Lee’s legs, still unsure if the guy is telling the truth.
“You’re honestly telling me that you suspect you were hit in the groin, but you’re not sure?” Amon persists. Noatak does not add, Sweetheart, you have no secrets from me. I’ve seen your balls. On multiple occasions, in fact, because I swear that a large part of your loyalty to Amon is dependent on my ability to deliver an excellent handjob. Your nuts are as normal as everyone else’s. They can’t deflect rocks. Don’t give me this ‘ooh if I get hit in the balls then it doesn’t hurt’ crap because that just makes me want to see what happens if I punch you in them.
Lee fidgets again.
“May I?” Amon asks. He moves from a crouch to a kneeling position, placing himself so he’s facing Lee.
“Yeah. Sure,” Lee says quickly, even though Amon didn’t specify what he was about to do. Lee’s face has turned a faint shade of pink.
Amon tugs Lee’s underwear down to expose him. There’s nothing particularly novel about this; Amon has had sex with Lee before, because, well… Lee is just there, and contrary to popular belief, Amon is allowed to do fun things in his free time.
Lee’s cock looks absolutely fine. Much like the rest of Lee, it appears to enjoy being noticed.
“Really?” Amon asks. Even if he wasn’t wearing a mask, he couldn’t be more deadpan.
“It’s clearly swollen,” says Lee, with the expression of a guy who’s desperately trying to hide the fact that he believes himself to be a comedic genius.
Amon fixes him with an unblinking stare. He does not find this conversation funny. “Numerous spiritual practices consider the sexual fluids to be sacred. Wear a protective cup when you’re fighting.”
“They’re all too small,” Lee lies.
Amon asks, patiently, “Do you know what the most overlooked pressure point on the human body is?”
“Uh,” says Lee.
Amon’s left hand wraps around Lee’s genitals before he can react. “A person’s first energy center is located above the perineum. Perhaps this is to be expected given that the excretory and reproductive organs are also located in this area. This first energy center is the foundation of all the others, and they are dependent on it.” Or, as Noatak would put it: No one’s in their right mind if there’s something wrong with their guts, cock, or asshole. “Not even the crown chakra is exempt from this dependency. The sacred and the profane are two sides of the same coin.”
“Okay,” says Lee, in a slightly higher octave than usual.
“Of course, everyone’s familiar with what happens when there’s an impact to the genitals, but the entire area between the legs is extremely vulnerable.” Amon slips two fingers behind Lee’s balls and presses upwards.
Lee makes a noise and grips the edge of the crate.
“Have I convinced you to wear a cup yet?” Amon says flatly.
“What’s a perineum?” Lee asks, fdistracted.
Amon prudently ensures that Lee’s cock is safely pointing away from him, then answers that question by indicating with his fingers.
Lee hisses between his teeth and sits bolt upright.
“You hold a lot of tension in your pelvic floor,” Amon says, and Noatak thinks, You know, if I wasn’t spending all of my time running around in a mask punching people, I would’ve been a fantastic masseuse. Maybe I could combine the two. Perhaps that would qualify as ‘bonesetting’. As opposed to… bonersetting. He then wonders if spending almost every waking moment trying to look authoritative and imposing has taken its toll on his internal monologue.
“Mm!” says Lee, who doesn’t quite have two of Amon’s fingers up his ass, but is still being made acutely aware that he has a prostate.
“I can do this indefinitely,” Amon says, “And you won’t ejaculate. Instead, you’ll leak sexual fluid. This is completely involuntary. Some schools of thought believe there are many health benefits to purging these fluids, providing that it is done gently.”
Lee’s knuckles are white as he grips the edge of the crate. He could get up and leave at any time, but no, he’s clinging on to that crate for dear life. Amon - or Noatak, as Noatak has greater custody of the more prurient parts of his mind - takes a moment to appreciate how Lee’s cock is flushed pink from the base to the tip. Noatak does not tell him, You have nice veins, because that’d be a sweet nothing in the same league (or in the same vein, even) as, Your neck would look great with my hands around it, or If I had your dick in a jar, I’d keep it on the mantlepiece.
“It would work better if my fingers were penetrating you, though,” Amon says with clinical indifference, while Noatak counts on the fact that Lee’s too distracted to notice Amon’s own erection. Amon’s aura of self-control is as much of a fiction as anything else. If Noatak really had any self-control, then he wouldn’t be only ten seconds away from sticking his fingers up the ass of his right-hand man… Who is literally on his right hand at the moment.
Lee spreads his legs further, leaning back, then apparently realizes that ‘sitting on a splintery crate’ is not the best location for getting fingerbanged. He then asks, “How do you want me?”
Amon almost says, Hands and knees, because there’d be something in those words that’d almost be better than sex. But he stops himself. He decides that he wants to see Lee’s face. The novelty of keeping someone on the floor with their head bowed is always short-lived. It’s better to be looked at, while still remaining fundamentally unseen.
“On your back. Legs spread,” Amon says. He withdraws his hand.
Lee quickly gets off the crate, kicks off his pants, and assumes the position on the floor. His face is pink. He spreads his legs and holds them back (although he keeps his hand away from the gauze taped to his leg, to Noatak’s relief).
Amon refrains from helpfully pointing out that Lee’s current pose is also great for realigning the spine. There are a lot of things out of whack with Lee, and his spine is the least of them.
Amon looks down at Lee, who (in sharp contrast to Amon himself) is leaving very little to the imagination, and Noatak thinks bitterly, Well, I miscalculated, because now I want to fuck him. Noatak isn’t sure why he resents this. Perhaps he just likes the fantasy that he can play Lee like a cheap erhu without surrendering to his own appetites, just to maintain the illusion of superiority, but… Well, that’s an illusion that’s increasingly difficult to maintain.
He distracts himself by taking one of the pots of ointment and scooping out a generous amount to use as a lubricant. Lust isn’t much different from pain: it can be ignored. Besides, it’s about the journey, not the destination. Getting your rocks off takes seconds, whereas anticipation can be teased out for as long as you like.
And on that note, he then pushes an index finger into Lee as slowly as he can.
Very quietly, Lee grumbles, “C’mon.”
“You’re tense,” says Amon.
“You could fit your arm up there and you know it,” Lee mutters, because patience is not one of his virtues.
Like wearing a glove puppet, Noatak thinks, then wonders why he doesn’t find this simile as funny as he should. His fingers gently massage the muscles at the entrance to Lee’s hole. As expected, Lee relaxes.
As they’re facing each other, Amon watches him. Lee looks at the empty space somewhere to Amon’s left. His face is flushed, and his expression is somewhere between embarrassed, distracted… And mildly annoyed, because he’s not one to appreciate subtlety. Noatak has a theory that, at any given time, Lee needs something to keep his mind occupied - be it ideology, sex, or alcohol - and if a thought or sensation doesn’t consume his mind so completely that it obliterates all else, then he starts to feel uneasy.
“Relax,” Amon says gently, despite Lee’s earlier protest that he was relaxed.
Lee gives him a look that says ‘you try relaxing while you’re holding both your ankles’, then lets out a deep breath. Amon feels him ease up a bit.
It’s strange, really, how different body parts don’t always seem to share the same agenda. Most of Lee remains tense, while his cock seems happy enough. Granted, a penis isn’t a particularly complicated thing. All the troublesome parts of a human body are generally above the neck.
Amon uses Lee’s discarded underwear to wipe fluid off his abdomen. “Does that feel good?” he murmurs, in a tone that certainly doesn’t get used in public.
Lee’s expression loses some of its annoyance, so that just the vulnerability is visible. He nods.
“I see,” says Amon. He curls his index finger against Lee’s prostate. “When I do this, you feel… safe, don’t you?”
Lee responds with another nod. He’s not one for talking at times like this. Ahh, Noatak thinks, Higher functions, who needs ‘em?
“Good,” Amon says. There’s no delicate way to put it: Lee’s really leaking now. Noatak notes how the line between ‘sexy’ and ‘disgusting’ is a thin one, probably because both suggest a loss of control somewhere. Everyone spends their every waking moment trying to convince themselves and others that they have a measure of dignity, self-mastery, autonomy, and so on and so on, but you might as well face it: a human body is just a seeping lump of jelly propped upright by bones and stubbornness. Perhaps Lee likes Amon so much because he gives him an excuse to accept this
Noatak almost wishes that he could accept this. He sees his own body is less of a guilty pleasure and more of a means to an end, even though he’s forgotten what the end is.
“You’re very relaxed now,” Amon says, and adds two simple words that are granted greater power by their current context: “Well done.” Only during sex can you praise a guy just for unclenching his asshole, but there you go.
Lee grunts softly, appreciative.
At times like this, Noatak’s confident Amon could tell Lee, ‘Tomorrow, I want you to cut your own dick off and dance around with it while reciting all the prime numbers up to one hundred and ninety-nine,’ and Lee would agree to it.
“Just a little longer,” Amon says.
Lee’s eyes are glassy, but his brow furrows slightly. Amon watches how the muscles in his abdomen move as he breathes. He always looks so pliable when he’s like this. Amon could keep him like it indefinitely, but the novelty would wear off eventually. Novelty always does.
“Just a little longer,” Amon repeats, “And then all the tension will flow out of your body.” The word ‘tension’ is chosen carefully. He does not say ‘fear’. No one particularly wants to hear the word ‘fear’ while they’re being fingerbanged. Still, it’s an unavoidable fact that people like Lee carry fear the way vermin carries diseases. The best they can do is repurpose the fear as hatred, then repurpose hatred as motivation, because… Shit, what do they have?
And Noatak really shouldn’t be speculating about the nature of a man’s psyche when he has two digits stuck up the guy’s asshole, but… Well…
Lee doesn’t look at Amon’s face (not that there is much to look at) but instead stares at where Amon’s hand meets his body. Lee’s balls have tightened, and Noatak finds himself wondering yet again just what sort of man gets off on being fingered by a fully-dressed guy in a mask. He has his theories, and most of those theories suggest that it has something to do with power. People are weak, and everyone (or at least almost everyone) has to surrender to something.
Noatak catches himself thinking, I swear I didn’t create Amon as a fetish thing, even though his internal voice carries a distinctly un-Amon-like note of desperation, and something else in his brain says, Excuse me. You are an adult male who spends all his free time in leather giving commands and/or punching people under the guise of anonymity. Did you not consider certain things beforehand?
Ahh, higher functions. Who needs ‘em?
Lee makes another grunt that’s somewhere between pleasure and discomfort, and Noatak uses this as an excuse to stop thinking. With a deftness that he usually reserves for picking pockets, Noatak uses his free hand to unfasten his pants while Lee is distracted, then withdraws his other hand and slides his cock into Lee in one fluid motion.
Lee lets out a strangled noise. His cock twitches hard and lets out a stream of come, then another. The orgasm affects his entire body; he sits upright, muscles going taut, and props himself up on his elbows until the orgasm passes.
There’s always something uniquely flattering about seeing someone climax as soon as you enter them, and Noatak has to draw in a deep breath to keep himself quiet. This isn’t easy, especially not while he feels Lee’s ass squeeze around his cock, and he pointedly avoids looking at the expression of relief on the other man’s face.
Amon keeps fucking Lee. He wants Lee to have full awareness of what he’s doing, now that Lee’s need to ejaculate has subsided and his mind is more lucid.
Lee’s eyes lose some of their glassiness. All the same, he doesn’t look like a man who’s thinking, ‘Wait, what am I doing, how did I get here, who dumped yogurt all over my abdomen, and why am I getting reamed by a guy with no face?’ Instead, his gaze seems to focus a little, and he wraps his legs around Amon’s hips. It doesn’t matter that he’s gone flaccid and the refractory period has kicked in; no, Lee wants Amon inside him regardless. Perhaps it’s this fact that keeps Amon from lasting as long as he’d like. Any self-control that Noatak still has left probably exits his body via his dick when he realizes that Lee is content to let himself be used.
Amon soon withdraws (Noatak might be a different kettle of rotten fish, but Amon’s too polite to finish inside someone without warning) and empties his balls on Lee’s lower belly, which is already marked with come.
Then Amon blinks, returns to himself a bit, and notes how Lee is smiling even though he still doesn’t meet his eyes. He looks happy. It’s ridiculous. His face is flushed and his hair is a mess, while Amon still looks like Amon, albeit with his dick out. (This is not a particularly good look for Amon, but Lee doesn’t seem to mind.)
Amon then finds himself staring for a moment.
Lee seems like a different person when he’s genuinely happy like this.
Noatak reflects: You know, maybe Amon IS the solution to everything. For about ten minutes at a time, anyway. Thirty minutes if I’m feeling really patient and if I already jerked off an hour beforehand.
Noatak catches himself almost thinking that Lee looks… Ah, fuck it, is ‘beautiful’ too nice a word for a pale, stringy guy who’s over forty? Some men seem more attractive when they’ve got that post-coital glow about them.
Then Noatak remembers the twaddle Amon said earlier about how the sacred and the profane are two sides of the same coin. This forces Noatak to a desperate grab for his own comforting cynicism, reaching for it in the same way that someone caught mid-coitus might reach for a pillow to hide their dick. Noatak’s not about to start having feelings just because Lee looks happy that Amon blew a load on him.
Meanwhile, Amon reaches out to the first aid kit, takes some of the gauze, and repurposes it as a cleaning cloth. He cleans Lee first, because it gives him a sense of ownership.
None of them are the habit of talking after sex, so Lee just watches Amon with an expression best described as ‘indulgent embarrassment’, while Noatak just… observes, and tries to figure out if he feels irritated for some reason he can’t articulate.
Noatak doesn’t tell Lee, Well, your prostate felt fine. I’m giving you a clean bill of physical health. Your mental health is completely fucked however. Good luck with that.
Eventually, Amon asks, “Feeling better?”
Lee nods.
Amon runs his hand along Lee’s uninjured thigh. He’s relieved to notice that he managed to avoid getting semen on the gauze over his other leg.
Lee basks in the attention.
Amon then gives Lee’s good thigh a slap, and says, “I told you. Energy center behind the perineum. Wear a cup during combat.”
“Yeah, see, I still don’t think I follow the ‘energy center behind the perineum’ thing,” Lee says airily, his face still flushed, eyes bright. “Can I have another demonstration?”
Amon says in a voice that’s a little too Noatak-like for comfort, “I don’t do encores. Put your pants back on.”
Lee grins, revealing surprisingly nice teeth for a guy who gets hit in the face at least once a week, and picks himself up the floor.
They both turn their backs on each other as they sort their clothes out.
Idly, Lee says, “As there’s an energy center in the lower abdomen, what’s the logic in only making it accessible via the asshole?”
“I… don’t think logic has much to do with it,” Amon says. “Besides, it’s not only accessible via the anus. Perhaps you’re thinking of the prostate, which is only a component, not the entire system. And even the prostate can be stimulated externally.”
“Oh.” Lee pauses. “Y’know, I find this kinda thing really interesting.”
Amon turns to face him, and gives him a long look.
“For the sake of my spiritual development,” Lee adds.
Amon maintains his stare. “Try meditating.”
Lee shrugs. Amon reflects ruefully that this is unlikely to be the last he’ll teach Lee a few things about anatomy. And, who knows, maybe Lee might gain something from it.
Of course, it was possible to bang some sense into Lee, then at their current rate of screwing, the guy might end up becoming an Awakened Master by the end of the year, and then Amon would have competition. So thank fuck that’s an unlikely scenario, Noatak thinks, as much as he’d like to believe that his dick has magical powers.
Amon comments, as he readjusts himself, “Wear a cup in future. That’s an order.” He’s going to keep insisting on this until Lee complies.
Lee looks as if he’s about to protest, then hesitates, and concedes, “...Yeah. Okay.” The rest of him might get stabbed, pelted with bricks, or set on fire, but at least his junk should survive. And that’s for the best, really. Noatak suspects that Lee does a lot of his thinking with his dick. It would certainly explain a lot of his tolerance for Amon.
There’s a heavy pause, and then Lee asks, “You actually worry about me, huh.”
Only about the parts of you that wobble, Noatak thinks, yet feels very glad he’s wearing the mask. Noatak hides behind Amon as Amon gives Lee another long look and says, “Someone has to, Lieutenant.”
And Lee, well… Lee turns away from him, and goes to find his pants.