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In the beginning, their jailers bring the bucket every day.
At least, this is how John decides to define a day. There is no way to see the sky from here, nor any other source of natural light. They have only the stalactites above their pit, glittering damply like dark stars, and John is unsettled by the familiarity of that. It should not be comforting to look up and see only a black-on-black sparkle; it should not make him feel grand and still and peaceful.
He can almost feel the sky wheeling out beyond. He tells himself this is imagination and not memory. When he can too clearly taste the glitter of stars above a great plateau, when he recalls the light upon Lake Hali, he shuts his mind against it and turns to arguing with Arthur.
Perhaps... perhaps we could dig. This floor is nothing more than loose soil, packed only by the pacing of its prisoners—
"Dig with what, John?" Arthur is still ostensibly ignoring him. But there is nothing to do, and John has their eyes, so a certain degree of cooperation is required. "We have no tools. They've taken everything. I have only the shirt on my back," and here Arthur plucks with disgust at his stiff hem, "and I will not thank them for that. Is— what is on my clothing?"
Bloodstains from the viscera pit, John volunteers. The silence between them threatens to stretch long, so he presses: When you stopped listening to me and walked us off a fucking cliff.
"Oh, fuck you—"
And so on.
At some point, a hulking shape moves along the rim of their pit. A slab of meat is dropped in with a damp, heavy sound. The bucket of water is raised, sloshed loudly about, and lowered. John privately adds one to his count of days.
This makes twelve, nearly two weeks, and he holds this number in his mind like a talisman. It helps to review the count when Arthur is sleeping and there is nothing else to distract him from the unseen stars. The King is not the sort of being that would count by days: to divide time so neatly is very human.
"Was that—?"
The bucket. They've thrown in some food, too, ten paces forward and two to your right—
"Yes, yes, I heard it. I don't require your help to eat." Arthur sneers at him, and John coils darkly in his head as though he might sneer back. "Certainly not when I'm being fed scraps like a dog."
The problem is: Arthur still thinks he's the one here to be broken.
Through human eyes, it is unthinkable to waste a single day. Or perhaps that's just Arthur, the unrelenting pace at which he drives himself: he claws at every moment for purpose, for meaning, for some call-and-response with the world. Even in his listless stretches of lethargy, he can be goaded to muttering or snapping. He is constantly alight with fear and fury.
John is distantly aware of how he would've viewed this, and how their captor views it now: like an insect trapped at the bottom of a jar. There's a charming novelty to watching a beetle on its back, wondering whether it'll manage to get its little legs beneath it. From a god's perspective, such observation is not significant enough to call malicious. A beetle is just a beetle. A human is just a human.
"Fuck," spits Arthur, recoiling from the hunk of meat in their shared grip. "What is this?"
John brushes his thumb along one charred edge. Even in the dim beneath their stalactite-stars, he can recognize the jut of the femur and the waxy pale skin.
I don't know, John lies, as he has lied at every meal. He is not the King, and Arthur is not a beetle. Some sort of meat.
"Cooked abominably," complains Arthur, and sets to eating.
John cannot explain to him that his suffering is incidental. That every poke and prod is an offhand entertainment, or worse: an enticement, to urge John in the right direction. To goad him into serving his true nature.
From the King's perspective, it is inevitable that Arthur will break. What the King would call cruelty— what He'd deign to consider significant— is the act of trapping His own fragment in a hole in the ground. Shoving a god into a little glass jar.
Does He think that John, deprived of any other entertainment, will crack Arthur open and save them all the trouble? Well, fuck Him. He doesn't know what He's dealing with.
Keep the shard of bone, he urges Arthur, after the meal. One of them has to put some effort into their escape attempts. We can use it.
"For what?" The bitterness, the suspicion, raises his hackles. But he must stay level. He must.
I don't know, Arthur. Something useful. Would he cooperate if he knew he held a piece of his own kind? A crass reminder to John that he is inhabiting an animal fit for slaughter? Better not to know. Better to be petty than cruel. We'll get nowhere by your sitting here and sulking.
"Sulking?" He rises to the jab beautifully, as he always does. Bright and fierce as a flame. "I don't know what the fuck you expect me to do—"
And so on, always the same.
Sometimes he thinks about the letter, that written warning: that He intends to drive the world mad. He cannot tell Arthur that he understands why.
It's— the malevolence isn't the point. The King is not cruel for cruelty's sake. He just does not know how to touch something without breaking it. He doesn't know what to do with a beetle but flip it on its back to watch the little legs wave.
Arthur is not a beetle. He is not the King. He holds these talismans in his mind, too, with the fragile count of water-buckets he insists on calling days.
The first day they don't refill the bucket, it's possible John overreacts.
This was intentional! He cannot pace, but he can gesture his fury the way Arthur does: splayed fingers, clenched fist, an angry snap of motion through his wrist. He can feel the air moving over his knuckles. Anger always makes him feel more real, more physical, embodied. They know that humans need water. Arthur, this is only the beginning—
"They forgot," says Arthur. His voice wobbles, so infuriatingly fragile that John wants to choke the sound from his throat, wants to crunch that uncertainty between his teeth. "They're not exactly human, John. Perhaps they're barely intelligent to begin with. We should expect this sort of thing."
Barely intelligent, John sneers back at him, but it sounds thin. It's humanity they regard as barely intelligent. They will starve you like the forgotten dog you are.
"And yet I have my scraps," scoffs Arthur, and holds up their charred meal. It's a human forearm, butchered below the elbow to just before the curve of the wrist. John knows this with the familiarity of old experience: he recognizes the shape of the bones, the texture of crisped skin.
All John has to do is tell him, and he'll squawk and drop it, maybe even scramble clumsily backwards through the dirt. John has his foot, he could send them both crashing down—
No. No.
Then enjoy your fucking scraps. He settles down to seething, impatient, as Arthur eats. Normally he might enjoy the tactile sounds, the crunch and chew, the reverberation in his hand when Arthur tears a strip with his teeth—
But he shouldn't. He tries not to.
"Oh, fuck you."
If only, mutters John. To his great satisfaction, Arthur inhales a bit of meat and has to spend the next five seconds pounding on his chest to get it out. Anything would be less appalling than sitting here listening to you complain and chew.
Wheezing, Arthur says: "You needn't try to choke me."
Then give me anything else to do, Arthur. I beg you.
"Oh, you beg me, do you?" Arthur lifts the forearm and crunches char between his teeth. Sometimes John aches to do the same: to have jaws so that he might crack bones in them. To put Arthur in his mouth and bite. "This is all it takes to reduce a god to begging. A damp hole in the ground."
Of course not, John grumbles. A hole in the ground with only you for company.
"Well! Forgive me for failing to entertain you, your majesty."
That's low. Perhaps Arthur knows it, because he goes sharply silent, but too late. It has brought out the growl behind John's voice.
As though you would make good entertainment. A blind man going in circles and whimpering to himself. I have already experienced plenty of that.
"I wonder why!" Arthur grinds their palms in the dirt, and John is again aware of himself as a body, aware of the dirt-damp divots between his fingers and his terrible absence of claws. "Maybe because there's a fucking monster hitching a ride in my skull—"
I am trapped in your skull, and it's so unbelievably fucking dull—
"—ruining everything in my life, providing the most useless advice—"
—watching you do nothing over and over—
"—because you've deluded yourself into thinking you're remotely human!"
Arthur throws up his hands in overblown offense, and John doesn't think. In a moment of bristling impulse, of embodied fury, he snags his fingers into Arthur's hair and yanks.
The squawk is like hot blood between his teeth.
No, Arthur, he growls, rippling and low, I am not human. I am a monster. He twists hard, and Arthur yips indignation, arching up into the pull. The ugly charred forearm has fallen into the dirt. John wants to grind it under his heel and watch blood and juices run. Does my confession satisfy you? Or shall I continue to prove it?
"Let me go, you psychopath—"
No. Arthur tries to yank away, but John hauls him back by his hair. It makes Arthur breathe in startled open-mouthed gasps, and John rumbles satisfaction in his ear. Do you know what I have available to me, Arthur? Let us count. The walls around us are crumbling dirt, too useless to carve into.
"I know this, you absolute—"
Shut up. John twists to shake Arthur under his grip. He thrills at the whine and arch in response. The floor is even more useless. Damp, dark soil, utterly uniform aside the corner you piss in.
Arthur makes a noise of disgust low in his throat, half-choked.
A few fragments of bone you've yet to make useful, he continues, and you. My only entertainment. So, congratulations. John ratchets tighter, voice rippling low. Fucking you would be an improvement.
Arthur rocks his hips forward, just once, rabitty and quick. Then he freezes.
"Don't—"
It's a splintered, fearful sound. For an instant, he relishes it. Something inside him curls hot and hungry around its prey.
Then John realizes himself and snatches his hand away.
"Christ." Arthur smacks his shoulders back into the dirt wall behind them. He takes the opportunity to press John's arm behind them, pins him to the wall. "Don't be obscene."
John's fingers are wedged between the heat of their body and boring damp grit. He feels as though he's being smothered, and that terrible instinct rebels. He could—
He can't. He won't.
Obscene? His voice has gone thin, stumbling, trying to regain his footing. Trying to work back up to a convincing proper anger, a safe anger. The kind he's allowed. The things I have learned about humanity are one long list of obscenities. Indignity after indignity.
"Most of them your fault!" snaps Arthur. He leans more firmly against the wall, like he can punish John by grinding him deep into the dirt. John fights down the urge to claw at his back, to score lines of heat into his skin—
Fuck you, he mutters, instead. He simmers resentfully like that until Arthur scoffs and lets him up.
And so on.
But something changes.
That night, Arthur slides a furtive hand beneath the waistband of his trousers. Even with their face turned away, with nothing but the same dark walls around them, John can feel the rocking shift of his weight and the quiet brush of movement.
What are you doing, rumbles John, in genuine puzzlement. Arthur freezes at once, with a tight clench to his shoulders that John does not recognize.
"Nothing," he mutters, more irritated than seems warranted. "Sleeping."
This is a foggy instinct to him: he only half understands. Arthur...
"Indignity after indignity," mocks Arthur, low and vicious. His voice is strangely breathless. "If you touch me right now, I'll kill you."
John's hand is within reach of his hair. His heel is braced in the cool soil. He could flip them over, wrench another furious gasp out of Arthur, and watch.
He doesn't. He lies still and silent, and counts this as another day.
Eventually Arthur hisses his frustration, abandons whatever he's doing, and curls miserable onto his side. In time, his breathing evens out to the steady rhythm of sleep.
John spends the whole night thinking about it.
It comes up again when Arthur is pining for a shave.
Perhaps we could sharpen a piece of bone, muses John. Arthur is exploring the scruff on his chin, scratching his nails through the stubble, and by reflex has brought up his left hand to do the same. John, intrigued, presses the pads of his fingers to the soft curve under Arthur's jawline.
For a moment he feels Arthur stop breathing.
Arthur clears his throat, but does not move away. "If only they'd left me my bag..."
Then we would already be gone from here. John scoffs, tightens his nails against the side of Arthur's throat. Arthur makes a small noise, perhaps startled, and John feels the pulse jump under his fingertips. I suppose bringing bone to such a fine edge is unrealistic. And rather a waste of time.
"We seem to have too much of that," Arthur mutters. He sounds... distracted. John can feel the vibration of his voice against his fingers, and he spreads his whole palm across the breadth of Arthur's throat so that he can feel the hitch and falter. Suddenly tight with complaint: "John."
It's the tone that means you are crossing a line. John hates that tone. If there are so many fucking lines to cross, maybe Arthur should make up his mind about what they are.
He drops his hand.
Well. Perhaps it's for the best: you are, after all, a blind man trapped in a filthy pit. Should your hand slip, it would be a particularly embarrassing way to die.
"Thanks," grumbles Arthur, as he rubs the place where John's fingers touched the heat of his skin. "I will soldier on without it."
Their jailers haven't come today. Or yesterday, if there is a yesterday without a meal to mark it by. The bucket is running low, and neither of them have talked about it.
What is there to say? John needs water only because Arthur does. He barely comprehends the relief of drinking: it is a chore he experiences only secondhand, and seems rather unpleasant, wet and messy and gasping. It only reminds him of their many near-drownings. At least food is more varied, textured under his fingertips and satisfying to hear in Arthur's teeth. For all that he should not enjoy it, knowing what it is. For all that it's meant to make them ashamed.
He can say none of this to Arthur. Instead, he decides to ask:
What else is on the list? Of what you'll do when we're out of here. After the shave.
For a moment he fears Arthur will resent the question. Will tell him that human desires are not John's to hover over for secondhand enjoyment; will leave him nothing but a vague longing for texture and teeth, and no distraction from the stars above.
But Arthur holds out only an instant, and then he sighs. It's the kind of sigh he is letting John in on, a brief and vibrant commiseration. A moment to pretend they both want things the same way.
"A proper dinner," he says, wistful. "Not all this charred meat, but perhaps a proper vegetable stew..."
Can you describe it? His fingers drift back to the heat of Arthur's body. He traces the pad of his thumb down the long cord of muscle that joins Arthur's neck and shoulder. Feels it jump beneath his hand.
"Eating? I'd hardly know how." Arthur swallows. John feels the motion of it roll beneath his fingers. "I... did you eat, as the King?"
I'm not sure. He hesitates, fingers gone still. Yes? But perhaps not the way you eat.
"What does that mean?"
I don't know! He struggles with the language. His fingers fall from Arthur's skin. I had a mouth, though it did not look like yours. But I didn't process food the way you do. I don't think I... required it, the way you do.
"It's like..." Arthur reaches out and, to John's jarring shock, takes his hand. He lifts John's knuckles between them, where John holds perfectly, impossibly still. "Texture would be most familiar to you, I suppose. And warmth. Yes?"
Yes, breathes John. He can feel warm breath over the backs of his fingers, collecting in the divots of his knuckles.
"Do you have any frame of reference for taste?" He knows this tone: Arthur has forgotten to hate him. Curiosity has caught him up and taken him somewhere else. The pad of that thumb shifts across the lines of his metacarpals. "If I say that something tastes bitter, you know how that ought to feel?"
I suppose. I know it would be unpleasant.
"Yes. Sort of. In small quantities, it can add a sort of..." He presses the edges of his fingernails to the bones in John's hand, a shocking bite, "... potency and nuance to the flavor. Tastes work in tandem, like the notes of a chord. Bitter might pair with, I don't know, earthy," and here he shifts his fingers to grip John firmly, the bite of his nails no longer focal but now counterpoint to the pressure, "and together they make for a more interesting experience. Do you see?"
I... I think that I do. His voice has gone soft with reverence. In the dim light, Arthur's hand upon his encompasses his vision. Arthur's pressure-and-pain upon his wrist is all his physical existence.
"Some flavors are very mild," Arthur continues, grip lightening to a ghost of a touch. "And others are—"
He stops. Something in his shoulders pinches inward, suddenly, with abrupt— self-consciousness? Arthur has gone very still. Arthur's breath hitches. John recognizes that telltale tension, that distracted shallow edge to his breath.
"Overpowering," he finishes, but without conviction. He clears his throat and summarily releases John's hand. "But I am truly no expert. I was never a particularly good cook."
No. No, he doesn't want that to be the end of it, the last thing he gets to feel today. He presses his knuckles back into the warm flinch of Arthur's palm.
Come on. Finish the lesson.
John hears it in the sharp catch of Arthur's breathing: this is another of those invisible boundaries. He has overstepped.
"That was it," he says, snippy, and shoves John's arm behind him. Back into the cool and uniform dirt. For a moment John clenches a fist, one hard spasm of anguish, and gets nothing but dull grit under his nails.
They fall silent. John retreats like a slinking animal to the corners of their mind, and he sets to rubbing the pads of his fingers over the expanse of his palm. Perhaps Arthur's nails have left little crescents on the back of his hand, but he can't reach that part of himself. He has no way to know.
Cold and hunger are his tortures for you, he says stiffly, into the quiet. Boredom is his torture for me.
"Then where is he? Why hasn't he come for us yet?"
Everything in John slams to a halt.
What?
"If you're so opposed to boredom, the same must be true of him." Arthur scrubs a hand over his face with a shuddering sigh. He mutters, into the meat of his palm: "We both know that he's you."
It hurts so much more than he expected. John is silent as a man punched breathless.
Arthur, he says, after a long moment, when he can. Anger rises loud and sweet, but he closes himself to it. He trembles in the grit behind Arthur's back, where Arthur put him. Keeps his voice strained and steady. He has a million other toys to break. If you're not... amusing enough, or if he thinks you're too likely to break under rough treatment—
Arthur scoffs. "As though we haven't had rough treatment—"
—he will find other entertainments, John finishes. And leave me to rot. With you.
Arthur says nothing. But he eases forward some, relaxes his shoulder, to let John up out of the dirt.
In this pit, I have nothing. Not even a body of my own. He settles carefully beside Arthur's hip, so that he can just feel the warmth of their body against the heel of his hand. He keeps his fingers curled in tight. Can we not enjoy a daydream?
Arthur clears his throat. John subsides to a shimmer of uncertainty in his head, waiting.
"No," says Arthur, his own voice strangely tight. "No, we cannot."
The meal that day is a lower leg. Perhaps Arthur knows by the shape of the bones. Perhaps it means something, the way he smooths his fingers nervously up and down the long ridge of the shin, the way he hesitates to eat.
John could tell him. He doesn't. He stays silent.
That night, Arthur again curls up in the dirt with their face turned away and his hand down his pants. Perhaps he can feel John rippling with curiosity in the back of his mind.
"Shut up," he mutters into the dark.
I didn't say anything.
"Good. Keep it that way."
But there is no way to keep him from noticing. Arthur's breathing comes quick and shallow. After a while, his shoulders shift just slightly, rhythmic; he cants his hips, curves his back; John feels the shift of weight pressing his wrist and ankle into the dirt.
The dismissal was clear. He is not meant to ask. But Arthur grinds John's heel into the dirt, and his breath catches the way it did under John's palm, heard through the cold dark. John wants his fingers at Arthur's throat again, his claws in Arthur's hair, wants to feel every gasp under his hand.
Arthur whimpers into the dirt, and John breaks.
Arthur, he rumbles, low and careful. Not angry, not monstrous. Arthur makes a breathy sound in his throat, bright as starlight, then chokes it off in a hurry. When he speaks, his voice is a croak:
"Would you kindly shut the fuck up."
It's that tone again, the stupid fucking invisible line. Trying to shove John back into a corner of his head, back in the dark and the grit. Not yet, John wants to beg him. Not yet.
Arthur, he presses, velvety as their first day together. Soothing, human, smooth as silk. The voice of a friend. You've been holding out on me. On us.
He is rewarded by Arthur's sudden freeze, the way he tightens down like he's bracing for the claws. This is blood between his teeth: a little beetle waving its legs. He bites back the urge to set claws to Arthur's belly, sink into him like a blade. He stays smooth and gentle.
"What are you..."
All those daydreams, continues John, and you ignore the one comfort available to us. We might at least enjoy it.
The sound Arthur makes is briefly incoherent. Then: "I— t-that is— Christ, John! Be decent."
Arthur is barely breathing, his body one trembling line of tension. His hand is still down his pants. John keeps his fingers still in the dirt, but his whole being aches like a bowstring held taut.
What you're doing now. Is that decent?
He is rewarded with a full-body shiver, and then the moment breaks. Arthur recoils, jerks his hand free, rolls them over in the dirt so that he can sit up and glare at nothing.
"Fuck you!" Arthur has pinned him again, perhaps reflexively, left hand to the dirt at his back. John claws his useless human fingers through the soil and seethes. "How— how could this seem appropriate—"
Appropriate? Arthur, we share a fucking body—
"And it's my body! You're not even human, you wouldn't know what to do with it—"
Oh? He simmers dark and vicious at the challenge, and that shuts Arthur up. John can feel his pulse jumping, the quickening of his breath. You think I'm a blushing innocent? I treated your kind as playthings for millennia.
Arthur makes a strangled sound. "Well. Congratulations, then, on— on fucking the Neanderthals, or whatever it is you mean to brag about."
John is silent a moment. Then he says: At least sit up so I can watch.
Arthur makes another truly spectacular noise. "No!"
Why the fuck not?
"This— it's private!"
I help you piss, Arthur. I don't understand how this is any different.
"That is your problem, isn't it." Arthur shoves his back more firmly to the wall, grinds John deeper into the cold dark grit. A sneer has come into his voice, closed and tight. "How could I forget: you're not human enough to know these things. And I don't intend to teach you."
Fine. John's voice is a low growl. He understands perfectly well: for his every cruel hunger, Arthur has a hunger of his own. And only John has gone to the trouble of restraining himself. Then I invite you to stop me.
He kicks them off-balance enough to wrestle free, and then the column of Arthur's throat is hot under his palm. Arthur makes a beautiful little sound. John can feel him swallow under his fingers. He closes his grip, nails pressing stiff crescent marks into the line of Arthur's throat, and feels the shuddering gasp of response—
"Don't—!"
Arthur recoils so clumsily he strikes the back of his head into the dirt wall and showers them with soil. He scrambles to his feet like he's trying to escape his own hand. That jolt of real alarm startles John into silence, and then Arthur has seized his wrist.
"I am not your plaything," hisses Arthur. "I am not anyone's toy! If you think I'll just roll over and, and take your rough treatment—"
Arthur—
"—then you can fuck right off! I still have my pride." There is a tremble below it, though, a new and alarmed uncertainty.
It doesn't taste to him as the shiver and whine did. But, with a jolt, he realizes: he still wants to take Arthur between his teeth. Wants to crack open this prey-animal fear and hear it hitch his voice into gasping.
"I told you," hisses Arthur, squeezing John's wrist so tight the bones creak. It's the sort of thing he only does when he is very, very afraid. "That I don't like to be pushed around."
I wasn't trying to hurt you, murmurs John. But maybe that's a lie. Maybe it's as thin a fiction as his silence over their meals.
Does he want Arthur afraid? He wants... reaction. Response. The jump of Arthur's pulse under his thumb, that tremble of caught breath. It intoxicates him: it satisfies something vividly dark in his soul.
The hunger of a monster. The King, breaking toys.
I'm sorry.
He lets his hand go limp until Arthur releases him, and settles harmlessly at their side, fingers turned away. Sheathing the claws he does not have.
Arthur wavers a moment, then hisses a sigh.
"Fine. Yes, fine, I believe you. Now— now I am going to close my fucking eyes, and you are not going to have anything to do with this. Am I understood?"
Yes. I... You can pretend I'm not even here.
"Good."
This time, it goes on much longer. The night is timeless and cold outside the close warmth of their body. John listens to the shift and rasp of Arthur's arm working, his hips canting forward in the dirt. Sensation bleeds over in little shivers: he pretends not to notice the secondhand tension that tightens his fingers and curls his toes.
Arthur bites off a desperate, frustrated sound in his throat, and hitches forward enough to jar John's ignored wrist. John pretends he doesn't listen to the whole thing. He pretends he isn't tracking every twitch of Arthur's hips that slides their ankles together, every whimper that grits John's palm against the soil. Arthur just keeps tensing and tensing their shared body, and John just has to sit here and take it, pretend he doesn't fucking notice he's being rutted down into the dirt—
"Fuck," hisses Arthur, a muttered litany, "fuck, fuck—" And then, on a breath, "John—"
He doesn't think. It's pure reflex to murmur back to him, low and resonant:
Arthur.
Arthur makes a breathy, desperate sound that cracks his voice. His pulse stutters within John's wrist— their body arches in sudden tension— and then relief crests like a secondhand sunrise.
John feels it in his fingers and toes, in the backs of his eyes. Arthur has fallen to breathless gasping, his pulse still hammering under the pad of John's thumb. Under their skin is a pleasure like bright blue skies.
Did... was that because John...?
Arthur lets his head thunk back into the gritty dirt, his eyes shut, and John can feel his burning humiliation. Those beetle legs mill in fascinating, desperate complexity.
"Not a word."
So they don't talk about it.
The bucket stops coming. So does the food. John, miserably adrift, gives up on the whole fucking concept of days. Somewhere, the King must be laughing.
"They have to feed me," mutters Arthur, in the midst of an ill-advised fit of pacing. John has been biting back the reminder to save his energy. It's better to see him moving than sluggish, better agitated and sharp than ground down to stillness. "He wants me alive. Doesn't he?"
Heavy footsteps move above them. Arthur startles to attention, tracking the sound with the blind tilt of his head.
Back up, murmurs John. Arthur holds for a stubborn moment before he does. The water-hook probes down into the pit, catches the handle of their bucket, and lifts it up. John doesn't even have a chance to announce it: Arthur gives a shuddering sigh of relief at the rasp of steel on steel.
The bucket gives a dull, sloshing thud when it hits their floor again. Arthur starts forward at once, and he has no need of John for this. He puts his face to the water and drinks in long, messy pulls, gasping between mouthfuls. He drinks like a dog.
Behind them, something thumps down into the dirt. Dread lances all through John's being. He can feel it in his fingertips and his toes.
"Three paces," John begins, voice tight, but Arthur has taken to ignoring him at mealtimes. The pit is small enough to navigate by touch, and so he does: swiping water from his chin with the back of his wrist, then crouched to fumble with his fingertips through the dirt. He finds their meal still warm and seeping juices between the char.
It's another leg.
With a foot.
Arthur makes a sound in his throat that John has never heard before: like a laugh gone sideways, a desperate burst of air. He stares blindly at the foot, his pale fingers tracing the curve of the ankle.
John should hold that side. He nudges Arthur's hand away and takes their meal by the ball of the foot, to help him pick it up. Arthur makes a sound like he's been burned and recoils all at once, so sharply that John drops the thing. He is left with only its lingering warmth in his palm.
"This," Arthur begins, and stops. He sounds... tired. Brittle. Far too calm. "This isn't... How much of—?"
John coils uncertain within him. He hesitates on the cusp of the lie.
"How much of it, John?"
All of it.
Arthur snaps.
"Fuck you," he hisses, already scrambling backwards and away, "fuck you for thinking— as if I didn't suspect—"
Everything of John aches with a numb, distant exhaustion. Guilt would be more appropriate, and shame better still. But he is not that sort of creature.
I thought you'd prefer the lie.
"Fuck that. Fuck that. I'm an investigator, I—" His back has hit the soil wall of the pit, but he's too angry even to wedge John behind him. John curls his fingers, uncertain, in the dirt at Arthur's hip. "I want the truth, John, the bloody terrible truth, every time. Every time."
You can't bear it, John does not say. You'd only shut me out.
This place is cruel, he says instead. I only meant to soften its blows.
It is the wrong thing to say. Arthur hunches like an animal in a corner, sneering through his teeth, wild with pain. Then he barks another harsh, ugly laugh.
"Is that why you offered—?" He can hear Arthur's throat working, the click of a hard swallow. The tight fury in his voice. "Am I a, a pity fuck for the monster in my head? What a new fucking low."
What? The question startles him to silence. For one taut moment, there's nothing but Arthur's thin breathing. Arthur, not everything is about you.
"Oh, fuck off. Is this fun for you, then? Watching me slowly ground down to nothing, chewing on— on—" He cannot say it. "—and chasing scraps from my fucking jailer? Is this how you treat your pets?"
That hurts like a slap. The blow is a relief: it feels like something, raises his hackles like any living animal. John flares hot, and it's like unfurling to his full height.
You think I'm enjoying myself? His tone goes cutting for lack of any better claws. Sitting in the dirt with an idiot who flinches from his own hand?
"You cannot make me beg for it," says Arthur, brittle violence in his voice. "If that's what you mean to do."
John is struck speechless at that. At the implication in it.
Is that what you think I'm doing?
"What else," demands Arthur, cracked and low. "Why else? I don't know what you— I don't—" He shudders to a stop. "What the fuck is the point, if not to—"
His fingers tremble in a clenched fist. He cannot seem to finish the sentence. And John, in a fit of what certainly isn't pity, doesn't want to let him. Wants something very different, with the same fervency as when Arthur sets his lips to water.
Is this it? His palm closes around the skinny column of Arthur's throat, just hard enough to hitch his breathing. That little gasp shudders electric through them both. Is this what you think about in the dark?
"Shut up." Arthur's throat bobs with the swallow. John tightens his grip. It earns another hitch of breath under his palm, another whole-body jolt and tremble.
Coward. What are you so afraid of?
For a moment, Arthur hesitates. Then he says, cold and hard as glass:
"You."
Good.
John tangles fingers in his hair and wrenches him down into the dirt. Arthur arches in his grip like a wild thing, a sharp groan between his teeth.
"Fuck you," he spits, hanging on so hard that his nails bite vivid marks into John's wrist, "fuck you—"
No, he snarls back, alight and victorious, fuck you.
John knocks his head back into the gritty wall, and catches him instead by the jaw, hard enough to bruise a thumbprint into the crook of his throat. Arthur makes a ragged sound and tries to speak, but John has better uses for him: he shoves two of his filthy fingers into Arthur's mouth.
The wet heat is a revelation. Teeth scrape clumsy over his knuckles; sweet velvet flexes under his fingertips and against his nails. He growls deep and sets a thrusting rhythm, willfully obscene. Arthur's answering jolt and shudder is very telling indeed.
You think I don't know? John rocks deeper towards the tight heat of his throat, thrills at the clench and swallow around his fingers. You think I don't see your every filthy desire? Oh, Arthur. You want to roll over and take it.
Arthur whimpers around the weight on his tongue— then bites. Hard.
Fuck—! John tries to recoil, but Arthur has the joints of his fingers between his teeth. Just like— like when— Pain seizes into panic. Stop, stop!
"Ha!" spits Arthur, the moment he has John out of his mouth. John's fingers ring hot with his hammering pulse. "Fucking try me."
John can picture him like this: eyes bright and wild, pupils blown dark, flushed all down his chest. He has freed John's wrist to palm himself through his gritty trousers with long, slim pianist's hands. His heartbeat is sprinting in their chest, in their wrists, through their fingertips.
"Bastard," he breathes, voice rough as though drunk. His breath comes shallow and fast, tongue at his teeth, pulse aflutter. "Do your fucking worst."
Something breaks in him. Some careful worry crunches in his teeth like char.
Gladly.
John plants his foot and bucks them straight into the dirt. Arthur goes down face-first with a yelp, choked off when John takes him by the throat. For a moment they struggle on the ground, mad and mindless. Arthur's fingers claw at John's wrist; John kicks them off balance, grinds Arthur back against the soil. He chokes pretty catching whimpers from that throat.
You want a monster? John rumbles in his ear, hot as blood and wildfire, flexing his fingers like claws. Arthur's pulse jumps madly in his grip. I'll make you cry for mercy.
Arthur, gone so dizzy that even John can feel it, finally pries the hand from his throat to bite him viciously on the wrist. John snarls in reply, rakes stinging nails down his stomach until Arthur is rocking into the gritty dirt below them, thighs pressed tight. He whines a gasp on every thrust, the sound punched-out, rhythmic.
So desperate, John growls. So fucking loud. Everyone can hear you getting fucked.
"Fuck," chokes Arthur, and breaks: he tries to shove a hand down his pants. But John won't allow him even the dignity of a hand on his cock. He seizes Arthur's wrist in a bruising grip and crams him back against the dirt wall. Finally it's Arthur's fingers pinned by the weight of their body, ground into the soil with every humiliated rock of his hips.
Stay there, John tells him, voice rough. You'll take what I fucking give you.
Arthur whines through his teeth, hips working against nothing. John leaves him like that to rake another row of scratches down his belly, and lower, lower, grinding down hard and rhythmic with the heel of his hand. Arthur arches under him, and John growls in his ear like a beast.
Fuck, yes. Like that. John ruts him down into the dirt, too hard, unrelenting. You— are— mine.
"God— fuck, John—!"
Arthur makes a spectacularly desperate sound, stutters his hips, and spends filthy wet heat into his only pair of pants. John ruts him through it. With every pulse he grinds warm seed into his skin, until Arthur is sticky and whimpering, voice wrecked.
Crowded up against the wall, flushed and panting, stinking of John's claim... Arthur sounds thoroughly debauched. Ruined. John bites with his nails just to earn another jolt and gasp.
This must be what it's like, to feel the burst of hot juices between one's teeth. To know it's wrong and shameful and so fucking good.
In the ringing aftermath, there's nothing but their breathing. Arthur sounds as though he's been sprinting for his life. Everything feels beautifully faraway, and hazy, and warm.
"Fuck," he croaks. John rumbles his own ragged agreement.
For a long time they simply lie together. Arthur has gone loose and pliant, slumped there in the dirt to catch his breath. John raises a hand to smooth back the sweat-sticky hair from his face, but hesitates. He doesn't know that it's allowed.
Perhaps it isn't, because something shifts. Arthur tips his head back against the dirt, eyes shut, and mutters, "You don't think he'll use this?"
John attempts to scrape some coherence back together.
What?
"I..." He halts, for a long and trembling moment. Arthur refuses to uncover his eyes, and John waits in that warm dark. "That I have this... perversion."
Tone carefully level, John asks, What perversion is that?
Arthur's voice hitches on an odd, bitter laugh, more breath than sound.
"Come on. A man isn't meant to enjoy being degraded this way. By a—" He halts again. "By a monster."
Any monster, asks John, voice low, or only me?
Arthur closes his hand gently, clumsily, over John's wrist. He finds the divots of his own bite mark and soothes that bruise with the pad of his thumb. It's all the answer they need.
Arthur. The vicious confidence has abandoned him. John shifts subdued against his mind. I... the things I want...
"Are your nature, at least," says Arthur, wry. Bleak. "You have a good reason for depravity. The sort of creature you are, or used to be... Well. I would not expect those appetites to be polite."
Or gentle.
"Or gentle." He is flushing again, John realizes, searing with warm life against his wrist. "I have no such excuse."
John is silent a long moment, deciding what to say. What not to say. But here, in this warm darkness, it's easier to speak freely.
I have wanted to touch you. But I... don't know how to touch something without harming it. It's... disconcerting.
"Disconcerting," Arthur repeats, and there must be something fond in the shape of his mouth. "Well. There's something very human in that. Unwanted desire."
I'm sorry, John offers, before the will can leave him. If this was another hardship at the hands of a monster.
"This would be a good deal simpler," Arthur murmurs, "if it was."
They sit like that for another moment, sweat cooling prickly on their skin. Arthur shifts a little, and grimaces. John can hear it in the shape of his breathing. He ought to get them out of their pants, at least, and clean up a bit.
But Arthur only draws another thin breath, and says, quick like a confession: "Do you think he knows? I just... Christ, if he tries to use this against me..."
The horror hangs silent between them. Yes, John can imagine that. Far too vividly.
I— He chokes off a lie already half-formed. I don't know. If it causes you fear and shame... Perhaps. But it's as you said: desire is a human concern. I don't think it's something I spared much attention for, before you.
"Jesus," mutters Arthur, the smile finally warming his voice, "are you saying I'm corrupting you?"
Congratulations, Arthur.
He exhales a little chuckle. Arthur shifts their arms beneath his head, and rests with his cheek pillowed on their folded hands. John is held between the warmth of his knuckles and the heat of his breath, cradled away from the grit. It feels... nice.
The meals stop coming as frequently, after that. The water no longer marks the days. But humans are adaptable, and in this, John is human enough to count.
He stops counting days. He takes to counting nights, instead: every time Arthur stifles a whimper against John's palm, or falls asleep with the warmth of his breath ghosting over John's knuckles. He shuts his mind to the wheeling stars above Carcosa, and listens only to the rhythm of Arthur Lester, asleep.