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“Tell me,” Elias begins — one of his more dangerous openers, Peter has learned — “how would you describe our marriage? ‘Irretrievable’, perhaps?”
Peter Lukas has never considered himself conventionally attractive (nor exceptionally skilled at fellatio), but in fifty-some years of life he's never suffered for lack of men willing to have him on his knees in front of them. And every one, without fail, would gasp and murmur things like yes and please and various expletives while he brought them to their climax.
Elias Bouchard is in this way — and so many others — an outlier.
Peter tries to sit back on his heels to answer, but the fingers weaving through his hair tighten their grip, keeping him in place. (He really is overdue for a haircut. Eight months at sea will have that effect.)
He meets Elias’ eyes (the ones he can see, at least) just in time to watch that practiced indifference sour into a frown. “I didn’t say to stop,” Elias chides.
Peter concedes without fanfare, licking a diligent stripe under the underside of Elias’ cock.
Elias is — Elias is indescribable; he’s simply Elias (and even that name, Peter knows, falls leagues short of the truth). He's unlike anyone else Peter has ever known — much less shared his bed with, so to speak (not that Elias has ever seen his bed) — in far too many ways to count. Peter has long since given up on trying to understand him, ‘understanding’ being antithetical to all that Elias is: a man who seeks to Know everything, never to be known himself. There is a distinction, of course, between the man in front of him and the Patron he serves, but even if that line hadn’t been blurred decades ago Peter gets the feeling that Elias — Jonah — similarly defied description, even before he ceded the more human parts of himself to something greater.
It’s one of the things Peter likes best about him — how impossible it is for him to be understood. There is something terribly Lonely about being so close to someone who is in every way that matters still a stranger. It’s the only way their arrangement could ever really work.
One thing Peter does understand quite well, however, is the necessity of picking his battles and ceding the rest (namely, those that end with Elias spreading his legs); so he lets this one be.
“Good,” Elias says. Peter doesn’t bother trying to puzzle out exactly what Elias is talking about, just flicks his tongue against the sensitive skin below the head before taking Elias back into his mouth.
Elias is vocal during sex in all the wrong ways. Peter is fairly certain he could suck Elias off under his desk during a meeting without so much as a sigh on Elias’ part (not that he’s ever suggested they put this to the test), but he’s always talking about something: signatures and dividends and ‘architectural balance’, as if having Peter’s prick inside him is as good a time as any to consider the cost-benefit analysis of whatever new initiative he’s considering for the Institute. (Peter puts up with far too much when it comes to Elias. He’s well aware of this, and sure he’ll have ample time alone in his quarters to ponder the implications of that later.)
He’s almost foolish enough to think that will be the end of it — that Elias might finish, offer him a clinically metric handjob in return and he can get back to the Tundra before sundown — when he realizes that Elias is already talking again.
“I took the liberty of filing for divorce,” he says. Peter swirls his tongue around the head of Elias’ cock. The hand in his hair adjusts itself near-imperceptibly in reply. “You’re responsible for two hundred and ninety-eight pounds of the filing fee and an electronic signature; unless, of course, you’d prefer a subpoena.”
Peter rears back with more force than his last attempt, and Elias allows it. Peter watches as he draws his hand back from Peter’s head to find purchase on the edge of his desk, fingertips digging into the lines of the wood with an intensity that betrays his restraint.
“You know,” Peter says, “sometimes I really do think you just talk to hear the sound of your own voice.”
“Oh?”
Peter stands and is met with little resistance as he forces Elias back across the desk, his far hand scrambling across the tabletop to keep his balance.
“By all means, then,” Elias continues, insufferable as ever, “feel free to shut me up.”
Wrapping a hand around Elias’ still-leaking cock, Peter strokes, experimentally, and marks the way Elias’ breath catches in his throat as Peter palms over the head. He knows Elias — he may not understand him, but he knows Elias, in a lot of ways he should regret — well enough to tell how close he is to the precipice, even before Elias brings one hand up to tug at his shoulder in encouragement.
“I could,” Peter says, “but we both know you’d enjoy that.”
Elias has the gall to laugh, dark and treacle-sweet. “You know me so well.”
Your family must be so ashamed of what you’ve become, Elias doesn’t say. (Peter hears it anyway, nestled in his thoughts like a parasite).
He steadies himself with one hand against the desk (dangerously close to Elias’ bared hip) as he presses his thumbnail into the slit at Elias’ cockhead just enough to watch him hiss through that smug little grin. “I really ought to leave, you know,” he says.
Elias doesn’t falter. “Then go. Far be it from me to keep you here against your will.”
Peter tries to think about the sea, about the steady beat of ocean currents against the Tundra’s hull, about anything that will not award Elias the satisfaction he’s so clearly poring through Peter’s mind for. Elias watches him like a predator all the while, eyes glittering in amusement below the sterile office lights. (But it’s inevitable, isn’t it, like waves crashing on the shore — Elias wants something from him, and either Peter will give it freely or Elias will find a way to take it. That’s how this always goes.
Peter thinks he hates Elias. For a moment, he even thinks it might be true.)
“Fine,” he says, at last. He unhands Elias’ erection and wipes the precome from his palm across the fabric of Elias’ trousers, and delights in the indignant noise he receives for the effort. It’s easy enough — easier than the alternative should be, really — to retrieve his coat from the floor, refasten the open buttons on his shirt, straighten out the creases in his trousers, and ignore the feeling of a hundred eyes boring into his skin.
“If I have to get my legal team involved you’ll be responsible for all fees accrued therein,” Elias says, “and my lawyers are not cheap. For your sake, I’d advise that you sign the documents I’ve sent you with as little fanfare as possible.”
Peter hums noncommittally. When the well-worn wool of his coat is secure over his shoulders once more and he turns back towards the center of the room, he's not surprised in the least to find Elias is already ignoring him, busy rifling through a cache of manilla folders in one of his desk drawers.
“I’ll see you next spring then, Bouchard,” he says and escapes into the cold embrace of his Patron.
/
Peter isn’t sure, in the decade or so since he let one of his nephews talk him into the purchase of a mobile phone, that he's ever actually answered a call on it. He makes outgoing calls plenty — coordinating with shipyards and moving funds from one account to the other so he can pay his crew their wages — but he doesn’t answer them. He doesn’t even keep the ringer on, half the time; more often than not he’s content to let the battery run its natural course as the Tundra moves into open sea, only to power it on again some weeks later to a slew of missed calls he immediately deletes. (Leaving a voicemail that no one will ever hear must be a somewhat Lonely experience, he figures. He’s not lazy; it’s strategic.)
There is, of course, a first time for everything (though at his age, they tend to come few and far between). If he were asked — if his God could speak in a tongue he understood — Peter would say he doesn’t know why he answers the call; that it’s a reflex, unthinking, and by the time he even realizes what he’s done there’s little to be saved by backing out. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time he's lied.
It’s not as if he recognizes the number. His phone has no contacts in it (he has a handwritten note, somewhere, with Nathaniel’s number; what else could he need?). He doesn’t doubt he knows who’s calling nonetheless — perhaps the Beholding is rubbing off on him after all, he jokes to himself — and answers it, anyway. There’s no sound on the other end. His crew is on shore for the night at his behest so he’s alone for now; blissfully Alone, with his thoughts, and the water, and the silence on the other end of the call.
The silence goes on long enough he almost thinks he’s mistaken — that it’s a wrong number, that he’s overthinking things, that he has nothing to repent for and the weight on his shoulders is little more than his body begging for sleep — and then Elias speaks.
“You picked up,” he says.
“I picked up,” Peter agrees. “Were you hoping that I’d let you leave a message?”
“No,” Elias says, “but it seemed like a disc — a distant…” He trails off with all the elegance of a newborn foal. “A distinct possibility, so to speak.”
Peter can count the number of times he's heard Elias Bouchard stumble over his own words with a closed fist. He shifts his phone between his hands to retrieve a box of cigarettes from his coat and narrowly avoids dropping either in the water below. “Are you drunk?”
A pause, as Peter lights his cigarette and returns the carton to his breast pocket. Then: “Yes, it would appear so.”
Peter cannot help but laugh, full-bellied, smoke pouring out from his lungs into the salted mist around him. “If I’d known that walking out would leave you this bereft, I would’ve done so years ago.”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“Why would I, when you’re so clearly eager to flatter me all on your own?”
He gets no reply but the sound of water against the Tundra’s side. If they were still in Elias’ office, Peter thinks, still face-to-face, Elias would scoff at him, turn back to his paperwork, and gesture for Peter to leave like a petulant child. Or he’d say nothing, turn his head, pull Peter close to find a better use for his irksome tongue. It doesn’t matter. Elias isn’t here, and Peter suspects that even if he were it wouldn't be an Elias that Peter knew how to handle. Uncharted waters, as it were. A vessel veering dangerously off-course. With a leak in the hull. Already half-sunk.
It doesn’t matter. He’ll never find a nautical metaphor that can settle his stomach, so instead he tries a drag from his cigarette. (It proves equally ineffective.)
“I hate you,” Elias says, pointedly enunciating every consonant. He’s farther from the microphone this time; Peter can just barely hear the ghostly chime of glass hitting glass as Elias presumably pours himself another drink.
“I know.” Peter exhales smoke. “And yet, you called me.”
“Yes. I called you,” Elias says (as if it bears repeating), each word slow and deliberate like it takes some great effort on his part to shape each sound correctly. “I called you, because I don’t understand.”
“No, I seem to recall that not exactly being your lot’s modus operandi,” Peter says. “What’s your Institute’s motto, again? I see, I hear, I do nothing of importance?”
“Hysterical,” Elias says without a hint of humor. “Do you even realize I can’t See you while you’re on that boat? It’s too close to your Patron, always, regardless of where you've anchored it.”
“Yes,” he says. “That’s the point.”
“You —” Elias falters. On the dockyard below, Peter watches dog-watchers moving cargo off of real container ships, grey-feathered seagulls circling croppings of rock, stars flickering in and out of existence overhead in some great celestial wink. He runs a hand across his tired eyes, and finds that the world has failed to redraw itself into a more agreeable shape when he opens them again. “I’d like to, just this once.”
“You’d like to do what, Elias?”
“Understand,” Elias says. “I’ve tried but I can’t figure this out, and you know — I need to know, to understand this. So make me understand.”
“You’re delirious,” Peter says. Beyond drunk, he doesn’t add. Peter is no stranger himself to nights lost at the bottom of the bottle, but he’s a sailor (and built like one, for all that’s gotten him) and Elias is… he's Elias, as ineffable as he is indefensible. In another life, he thinks, if things were different, Peter would have been charmed to meet Elias in some pub — a pretty little thing, lithe between wrought angles, begging to be taken apart. He’d buy Elias a pint and when the liquor made him trip over his words as he questioned Peter with that single-minded intensity it would feel like an invitation, not a threat to his life.
Peter wishes he was drunk, too. He wishes Nathaniel had never saddled him ‘liaison to the Magnus Institute’. He wishes that he and Elias had never met. He wishes for a lot of things he knows he cannot have (such hopeless longing — if his Patron had a mouth, it would be smiling).
“Don’t be obtuse,” Elias says, drawing Peter back to the present. “I know you understand it.”
Peter laughs. “What do I understand?”
“Detachment,” Elias says all too quickly, like blood seeping from a wound. “Isolation.”
“Elias,” Peter starts (get ahold of yourself, he would continue) but Elias barrels on —
“I need to understand. How is it you feed the hand that feeds you?”
“Surely you have an answer in that library of yours —”
“No, you,” Elias howls. “How do you — how do you feed It, Peter, when It calls to you? I know what It asks of you but — but tell me, is your Master content to sate Itself on what meager scraps you leave behind for it at sea like some street-roaming dog while you refuse to mar your own two hands or does It call to you to bite, to tear, to rip flesh straight from the bone every time you fuck me —”
“Elias,” he repeats, and by some surely unrelated miracle Elias stops. “What’s going on?”
Elias doesn’t answer.
Peter takes a final drag from his cigarette before smothering the butt out on the railing in front of him. He may serve a different Master but there is some comfort to be had, still, in watching the embers fall to the water below as the filter collapses in on itself. (Besides, the Desolation is hardly a stranger to him— he knows the scalding burn of an attachment better off up in flames all too well.)
When Elias finally does respond, Peter’s almost forgotten he asked a question at all, voice somehow impatient as if Peter were the one who left him minutes without reply: “I’m calling you on the phone.”
Peter wants to laugh, but can’t quite find it in his throat. “I don’t understand you,” he says.
“Have you ever?”
“No,” Peter says, on instinct. He thinks of Elias as he left him that morning, the arrogant tilt of his jaw. Peter knows every one of Elias’ buttons that can be pushed and he has calloused grooves and has grooves in his hands for the pulling of every one of Elias’ strings and still that understanding falls short (because Peter needs it to. He wonders how much he would find he really knew about Elias, if he ever let himself connect those dots.) “Sometimes, nearly. You are my husband.”
“For the interim,” Elias says. “And how does that taste, I wonder?”
Like bile in Peter’s mouth. Like the burn of whatever hard liquor he can hear on Elias’ tongue. Like seawater, breathed into the lungs as easily as air. He says none of it and, safe on the Tundra’s deck, he knows for once Elias cannot hear it.
“The Lonely goes hungry on my account,” Elias asks, “doesn’t It?”
“Tonight? Far from it.”
“You know that’s not what I meant.”
Peter should hang up. He really should hang up — he should let Elias enjoy the Isolation of a dropped connection and take his time bringing the Tundra back to British shore again. He won’t, but he should.
“If I was a better scholar,” Peter says, “I would tell you that you have to really know something to mourn its absence. A minnow, bred in some bait shop on the shore, doesn’t feel deprived of the sea — it’s never known the sea at all. If it dreams of endless waters that’s just fantasy; nothing real is lost. Nothing like that perfect moment when a wild fish is caught on a hook and pulled to the surface, knowing that the sea is still there, and knowing that it will never taste that sea again. That’s where the Forsaken lives.”
Solace acquired a handful of commercial fishing vessels some decades ago (something about diversifying their portfolio; moving an empty container ship back and forth across the Atlantic is not a particularly lucrative business model, as it happens, and the crew does need to be paid). In his youth, before he was trusted to oversee the family business proper — a time that seems so long ago now it might as well be fictional — Peter weaseled his way onto a handful of them. There is something uniquely comforting about the kind of Isolation that can only be had adrift, miles away from civilization — even sharing quarters with a crew of forty men, names he never learned and faces he’d never see again, Peter has never struggled to find his salvation in the water.
The percussive noise those mackerels made, thrashing and shuddering as they tried to free themselves from the gillnets like some unholy beating of drums, is something he's never been able to forget. That terrible, foolhardy rhythm of flesh against bone as they would throw themselves against the deck with such violence he couldn’t help but wonder if it isn’t always the cold that does away with them in the end, but that torturous impact.
Elias wants, what — an apology? Supplication? For Peter to suffocate in that fishnet? Peter wishes Elias were dead, and wishes even more that he could really want that to be true. He wishes there wasn’t a part of him that was still waiting for Elias to stumble, break down the carefully-planned walls they’ve constructed around whatever it is they’re doing in each other’s beds and take from him what they both know Peter’s been offering him for years: a four-letter word for devotion. Return it, even.
It would destroy him, of course. Antithetical to everything Peter has ever worked for and everything that he was raised to be; everything from mast to keel would come crumbling down and Peter does not doubt for a moment that he would not make it out of that wreckage alive. He should almost thank Elias for keeping that line firmly uncrossed, but Peter knows better than to think Elias does what he does for Peter’s sake — if Elias had ever been capable of something like fondness, it is an inclination long since lost. Peter doesn’t doubt Elias would take the opportunity to tear Peter down so easily if he were able — doesn’t doubt he will, once he finds a way, once he decides Peter is an obstacle between him and the new world he intends to create — but for now they’ll have to settle for meandering conversations over the telephone, lest Peter forget that at his core he is weak, and foolish, and irrevocably human.
“But you’re not,” Elias says after a moment.
“Not what?”
“A scholar.”
“No,” Peter agrees, “I’ll leave that to you. I am the humble servant of something greater than myself; but when all is said and done I’m still a man. And I have my own… hungers, to sate.” Peter thinks about lighting another cigarette, and then about throwing his phone as far out into the water as he can manage. He does neither. “That’s what you wanted to hear, isn’t it?”
“This isn’t about what I want,” Elias says. “It never was.”
“No, I suppose not.” He sighs. He’s too tired for this. “Are we done now?”
Elias laughs. “We haven’t started.”
“What is it you want from me?”
“Nothing,” Elias says. “I’m offering my service. You are a man with a — hunger, as you’ve said. Let me sate it for you.”
“Elias.”
“Do you want me to beg?”
Heat coils low in Peter’s stomach. “Elias."
“Because I will. Beg for it, that is — if you want me to. You have me on my knees, proverbially speaking. Or any other way that you’d prefer.”
An hour ago Peter wouldn’t have thought Elias capable of the words — Elias Bouchard doesn’t supplicate, he demands. There has to be a game here, but Peter can’t quite figure it out, nor can he really bring himself to care anymore — in for a pound, as it goes. “I bet you’d let me have much more than that,” he says instead, and when Elias rewards him with some low, breathy noise Peter knows he has made the right choice.
“Please,” he says.
“Please what?”
“Fuck me,” Elias says, and if Peter wasn’t already half-hard despite himself that desperate plea alone, he thinks, would be enough to get him there.
“Where?”
“Right where you left me,” Elias says. Peter presses the button to end their call at last, tucks his phone back in the breast pocket of his coat, and lets the gathering fog wind up from his legs to his throat.
When it clears again Elias is watching him like a wild animal. “You came,” he says, in a tone that Peter might describe as ‘incredulous’ if he thought Elias capable of such a thing. He’s stood leaning back against his desk, a bottle of scotch positioned dangerously close to his foot, a near-empty glass in one hand, a slight discoloration creeping across the fabric at his left thigh that Peter recognizes as his own handiwork.
If there’s a trap laid here, it doesn’t seem inclined to spring — Elias just watches (and isn’t that all Elias ever does), flushed from his cheeks to where the undone top button of his shirt reveals a single collarbone — and really there are much worse ways to die, Peter decides, so he closes the gap between them.
He takes the glass from Elias and downs what’s left of it, carefully returning it to the desk behind Elias’ back to free his hands as Elias pulls him forward to meet their lips. Elias tastes like his expensive liquor (and poison, probably, and Peter can’t bring himself to mind when Elias is sliding a hand around the side of his neck and making noises up into his mouth like nothing he’s ever heard).
Peter catches his breath as Elias pulls away to push himself up into a sitting position on the edge of his desk. “If I’d realized all it took to make you this needy was whiskey, I’d have brought you a bottle every visit.”
“You aren’t the only one with needs, you know,” Elias starts, removing his own cufflinks and depositing them neatly at the edge of the desk. “I just don’t see any reason to award you the satisfaction of that knowledge when I have other ways of getting what I want.”
“Like begging me over the phone to come fuck you?” Peter slots one of his thighs between Elias’ legs as he is pulled forward by the lapels. “I’d have assumed that was beneath you, but clearly I thought too highly of you. You’re kind of a whore, really, Elias.”
Elias laughs, dark and perfect. “You know that’s not my name.” (Dangerous. He watches Peter, undeniably pleased, as Peter rucks up Elias’ shirt to sidle one hand up below the hem. Peter’s not sure he’s ever been so aroused in his life.)
With considerable restraint, Peter slides his free hand up Elias’ leg, holding him down where he’s already trying to cant his hips up to grind against Peter’s thigh.
“Jonah,” he says. When Elias’ breath hitches Peter can feel it against his neck. “Jonah,” he starts again, just to feel the shape of that sound in his mouth, “I won’t make you beg, but I will have you tell me what you want from me. We aren’t all omniscient. Use those words you’re so fond of, hm?”
As an incentive, he shifts his weight where he knows Elias needs it, and the hands at his shoulders dig into the fabric of his coat appreciatively. Elias slides a hand down Peter’s sleeve to tangle his fingers in one of Peter’s belt loops. When he speaks, the amusement in his voice is audible: “Make me your little ‘whore’.”
Peter isn’t too daft to realize he’s being mocked, but he doesn’t need another invitation to throw Elias back across the desk. And then Elias is kissing him again — drinking his fill — dizzying thoughts intruding in Peter’s mind that aren’t quite words but might be verbalized as ‘yes’ or ‘more’ — and Elias is pushing Peter’s coat from his shoulders and somewhere, in the bedlam, that rocks glass teeters off the edge of the desk.
This is a bad idea. Peter knows this is a bad idea. It would be a bad idea with any man in the world; he’s sober and Elias is the farthest Peter’s ever seen him from — this would be wrong even if it weren’t Elias, even if every kiss he was pressing to Elias’ neck, reverent, didn’t feel like a confession — but Elias is wrapping a leg around Peter’s hips and panting ‘please’ into his ear and Peter — foolish, mortal Peter — has never known how to deny Elias anything.
He’ll have ample time in the Forsaken to unpack what that says about him later. For now, he has more pressing needs to attend to.
He makes quick work of Elias’ belt. Elias fumbles to return the gesture but eventually manages to figure out the buckle and then there’s nothing preventing Peter from wrapping a fist around both of their erections, or stroking upward, or reveling in the way Elias’ eyelids flutter closed at the contact, mouth parted obscenely. Peter moves his affections down to Elias’ collarbone, nipping at the skin there before he unhands them both and gently pushes Elias away by the hip.
Ignoring the grit of glass shards ground up further under his boot, Peter rounds the desk. There’s a bottle of cheap lubricant hidden behind the ink cartridges in one of the right-hand drawers, third from the top — Peter knows this from experience, no Beholding necessary — and he retrieves it, pretending he cannot feel the dizzying intensity of Elias’ gaze on his back the entire time.
Elias has the audacity to glare when Peter tries to warm it between his palms. He’s a pettish bastard and he will complain if it's too cold — Peter knows this, too, from experience — but he has no desire to rehash old arguments (certainly not now when Elias is so responsive, desperate to be under him) so he ignores it as he moves back between Elias’ open legs, and pretends not to be amused when Elias escalates to a scoff.
“Perhaps you misheard me when —”
Whatever Elias had intended to say is abandoned as Peter presses two fingers into him, curling up with practiced ease to push against that sweet spot. “There?”
“Christ — yes, ‘there’.” He pants as Peter repeats the motion; some twist of Peter’s hand as he pulls back draws out a noise low in his throat that Peter finds himself particularly fond of. The last time they’d been in this position, two years ago now, Elias has been droning on something in the vicinity of collateral and fiscal liability —
(‘You aren’t listening to a word of this, are you?’ Elias had asked him, entirely composed. As far as Peter could tell, the only outward response to direct pressure against his prostate was a near-imperceptible shift in his inner thigh, too subtle to notice if Peter hadn’t taught himself to look for it.
‘No, not at all,’ Peter had agreed. Elias lifted one knee up and over his shoulder in invitation.
‘Get on with it then,’ he’d said. ‘I haven’t got all day.’)
In comparison, the Elias in front of him now is so eager Peter almost worries that's the trick, that Elias is pretending to give him what he wants to prove some sadistic point; but there’s something so pleasant and hazy in the snippets of awareness bleeding over to Peter’s mind that he has to believe would be hard to fake (but what does he know about the Eye?).
In any case, Elias is plaint below Peter’s touch as Peter draws his fingers back and guides Elias’ calf across his shoulder. His hands shift up to Elias’ hips, thumb digging meaningless patterns into the exposed flesh below his shirt, as he finally pushes in.
He takes Elias hard and fast (the way Elias likes it — for the sake of efficiency, he claims, though Peter has his suspicions). Elias knows how to angle his hips to get Peter where he needs him; when Elias’ breath stutters in a gasp Peter can tell he’s succeeded and brings a hand up to hold Elias’ thigh in place, putting the full force of his weight behind each thrust as best as he can manage.
Peter obliges Elias’ attempt to pull Peter down towards him until he’s close enough for Elias’ teeth to graze his neck. In the motion Elias’ folded leg is pushed back against him, caught between them, allowing Peter to sink farther in — and oh, oh, isn’t that something. Fuck. The resulting positioning of Elias’ legs can’t possibly be comfortable by Peter’s estimation, but the keening noises Elias is making are the opposite of complaint, and Elias is tight, and hot, and so eager, and Peter wants him so very badly, so he takes all he can get.
It doesn’t take any considerable effort on Peter’s part before Elias is coming undone. Peter slips a hand between them to improve on whatever friction Elias had managed to find by rutting up between them to tug him through his orgasm, delighting in every half-formed curse Elias pants against the side of his neck.
He braces his arms against the desk so he doesn’t crush Elias beneath him as he chases his own climax and quickly finds it, hips stuttering while Elias pants a beating rhythm into his ear. When Elias’ grip loses its ferocity Peter takes that as invitation to disentangle himself. His jumper is stained with Elias’ spend (recompense for this morning, he supposes). Probably won’t be any harder to get out of the cable-knit than blood, and he knows that game well enough.
For his part, Elias looks thoroughly wrecked: pupils dilated to the edges of his irises, flushed across his chest, Peter’s semen dripping down his thigh. The moment Peter takes note of this his expression sours — seeing the same through Peter’s eyes, no doubt — and Peter does his best to choke down a laugh as Elias tries to work out a way to extricate himself from his rucked-up button-down without dirtying the fabric.
“Sated?”
“Don’t get cocky,” Elias scoffs. He makes a vain attempt to wipe his hand clean on the desk itself before giving up, unfastening the remaining buttons of his shirt with nettled acceptance. “It’s not a good look, you know, at your age.”
Peter’s never been here before. He’s been in the Institute a handful of times and spent time enough in Elias' office, bent him over his own desk more than once — but Elias is so absurdly fastidious he’s never allowed Peter to debase him to the extent that he can’t return to more pressing matters the moment they’re done. And he always does, and Peter leaves him to it, retreating into the Lonely. Quick and efficient.
He knows he could leave now — knows that he should, even; he should let Elias handle whatever the hell is wrong with him on his own and let them both forget this ever happened by the next time the Tundra berths this side of the Atlantic.
Instead, he asks: “Are you going to remember this in the morning?”
The look Elias offers is nothing short of disdain. “What do you take me for?”
“Someone who’s had far too much to drink,” Peter says, and his mind is immediately flooded with the knowledge that there is a box of tissues at the bottom of one of Elias’ bookshelves. Humoring the implied request Peter makes to retrieve it and moves it to the desk.
“I’m not that far gone,” Elias says, scandalized, and attempts to clean himself up with the tissues. Peter rights his trousers and works his belt back through the proper loops. His coat seems to have escaped the worst of the carnage, but he inspects each seam regardless after lifting it from where it was piled on the floor (Lord knows he doesn’t need any more scars).
“I didn’t know you drank,” Peter says after a moment.
“I don’t,” Elias replies, which is quickly amended: “Not usually.”
And Peter cannot help but press where there might be something raw: “What, is it a special occasion?”
“It is, in fact,” Elias says, tone biting. Peter shrugs his coat back across his shoulders and collects Elias’ trousers from the floor to offer the same inspection. Fortunately, the sleek material of Elias’ trousers has considerably fewer folds for glass to conceal itself in, so he finishes and holds them out for Elias just in time to meet his eye as he elaborates: “I’m getting divorced.”
Peter laughs. Elias accepts his trousers nonetheless, and Peter has managed to reign in his amusement (more or less) by the time he’s finished discarding soiled tissue into the bin below. Peter catches him by the shoulder when he slides off the desk before he can complete the movement by falling to the floor. If Elias has a complaint he’s too occupied by redressing himself to voice it, bringing a hand up to steady himself on Peter’s forearm before he can lose his balance again.
“You’re absolutely plastered,” Peter says, and the noise Elias makes in response is not entirely disagreement. “How are you going to get home?”
Elias’ hand slides up to settle on Peter’s shoulder. “Do you care?”
“I’d prefer that you live through the night.”
“When would you prefer that I die, then?” He experiments with supporting his own weight before deciding he’s stable enough to release his grip on Peter, working to right his shirt.
“When the Silence succeeds.”
“Of course,” Elias says, as if there could be any other answer. Peter watches him fasten each button of his shirt into a buttonhole on the other side, and tries very hard to think about anything other than the fact that every match is off by one lest Elias notice and fix it.
Instead, he thinks about how those long, capable fingers would look in a ring if Peter ever got around to buying him one, but that veers dangerously close to the sentimental so he pivots and thinks instead about how skillfully those hands might encircle all other sorts of things — and then he’s picturing how they might ghost around the rim of a glass, flip pages in a book — might fasten knots in the Tundra’s mooring line, meticulous, precise — might perform any number of activities they would have shared, across the past three years, if they were married in any meaningful way.
They aren’t, and never will be. Peter knows this — counts on it, even — and thinks about how it might look nonetheless. (Perhaps it’s an apology to his Patron. Perhaps on some level, he enjoys it).
Elias, it seems, is either too focused on the task or too intoxicated (or both) to intrude on Peter’s thoughts, so his worry is needless. Elias only scoffs to himself when he reaches the hem and realizes his mistake, quickly redressing it.
“Let me take you home,” Peter says.
“No. You know full well what I think of your ship.”
“Your home,” Peter clarifies. “That is, I assume you don’t live in this office…?”
Elias hums. Peter finds the address of Elias’ townhouse has been slipped into his thoughts, somewhere between indignation (‘It’s a bit of an eyesore, don’t you think?’ Elias had said, standing at the dock. Peter crossed his arms. ’You would know, I suppose.’) and simmering regret.
Mist creeps up from the edges of the room. Peter is prepared to have to sell this as a good idea — promise Elias that the Lonely won’t claim him so long as Peter navigates for them, point out how elegant this solution is compared to stumbling miles home — or (God forbid) finding out if Elias can use the Beholding to teach Peter how to drive a car — but Elias just takes the hand offered to him without protest.
Peter’s immediate impulse is to let go, but he doesn’t. He tries not to think about it — he tries not to think about anything. He lets the fog embrace them both, that comforting, bone-deep cold, and when it thaws again he finds himself standing in front of Elias’ bed.
Elias shuffles his touch away the instant the fog has cleared, undeniably comfortable to be back in his own territory.
It’s entirely too intimate. There’s a reason that they usually screw in Elias’ office (or the occasional hotel room or, in one particularly ill-advised tryst, in Simon Fairchild’s bathroom). Here Peter cannot help but notice the framed floor plan labeled Millbank Penitentiary in a gaudy script, or the ashtray beside it half-filled with cigarette butts (Peter’s never seen Elias smoke). He knows on some level Elias must hate Peter knowing him this way just as much as Peter does, so he tries to watch with a singular focus as Elias sits on the edge of the bed to untie his shoes and slide them neatly below the bedskirt. (There’s a book on the dresser, dog-eared, beside a pile of change stacked by denomination. Peter looks away and tries not to notice anything else, like the Oriental rug below the bed, or —)
“You owe me fifty pounds,” Elias says, apropos of absolutely nothing.
Peter watches as Elias attempts to smooth out the sheet beside him like he doesn’t realize the folds are caused by the fact he’s currently sitting on it, and makes no move to assist. “Wasn’t it two-something this morning?”
Elias nods. “Yes, two ninety-eight to the court for the divorce and another fifty to me personally. Separate cheques, if you don’t mind.”
“For what?”
“You broke my rocks glass,” Elias says.
“I’m fairly sure you broke your rocks glass.”
“That’s not how I recall it.”
Peter watches Elias unbutton his own collar again (Sisyphean, isn’t it? — Peter can’t begin to guess with the deal with those buttons is but he enjoys watching Elias’ hands work far too much to call him out on it). “I’ll buy you a new one.”
“I’m looking for recompense, not a replacement,” he says. “It was antique. A gift, from a dear friend.”
“What, Fairchild?”
Wrinkles form between his eyes (the corporeal ones, at least, in an expression Peter is well acquainted with.) “If it was a Fairchild heirloom I’d have destroyed the thing myself.”
“You did,” Peter supplies. “And you don’t have any ‘dear friends’.”
He thinks that's true. Then again, how would he know — he sees Elias no more than once a season, often less. Who’s to say, really, how he entertains himself when Peter’s not around; who he works with, or drinks with, apparently, or leads into his bed. Certainly it isn’t — it shouldn’t be — any of Peter’s concern.
Elias is watching him carefully. Peter has no doubt Elias knows exactly what he’s thinking, and waits for Elias to pull at that thread until it unravels, make clear that he owes Peter nothing and how pathetic it is that Peter might have ever wanted that, antithetical to all he purports to serve. They’ll get in an argument — again — and Peter will leave when it becomes clear neither is going to back down and that much, at least, will feel normal again.
“My first husband,” Elias says instead.
Peter waits for the punchline. It never comes. “I’m sorry?”
“You’re forgiven,” Elias says, and Peter suspects Elias knows full well that’s not what he meant but can’t find it in himself to be surprised.
“Magnanimous as ever.” Peter watches Elias settle himself against the headboard, and when that provides no clues he supposes he might as well ask, if only to get the thing over with: “Did you divorce him, too?”
“The union was never legally binding,” Elias says, “and in any case, he died soon after.”
Peter ignores that Elias has just impressed on him exactly which of his desk drawers now houses this man’s skull. Satisfied that whatever game he’s trying to play has run its course (or at least no longer able to resist the sedative effects of alcohol) Elias turns away to rest his head on a pillow, drawing the sheet up over his waist.
“You’re welcome, by the way,” Elias says after a moment.
“For what?”
Peter gets no reply. He can’t be sure whether Elias is ignoring him or has finally passed out (or inadvertently suffocated himself in all that hideously ostentatious bedding, maybe). Either way, Peter supposes it's not really his problem. Elias is a full-grown man. He can handle himself (or not, as he sees fit).
Peter is already drawing fog through the corners of the room when he is seized by a memory that he knows isn’t his. There is something deeply unnerving, he finds, in the way feelings he knows are not his are sewn inextricably into the very cloth of what he’s seeing; he has no choice but to watch as a young man, dressed in the costume of a bygone era, cough up purls of white smoke.
The noise — that horrible noise he makes every time his chest heaves, choking, drowning — stirs in the memory some sick sense of affection — of veneration; there’s more there, a series of memories woven together in a rope Peter doesn’t dare follow downward — and below it — above it — folded into everything he sees and is, a curiosity so violent it has already dug itself through every inch of his bone. Curiosity not as interest but hunger — ravening — the need to see, to watch, every bit as desperate as the gasping of the figure before him, as this man — this man who Peter does not recognize, but there is no doubt, in the fabric of this memory, that the russet brown of this man’s hair is love itself — succumbs to the Forsaken.
With considerable effort, Peter manages to claw his way out of it, peeling back the fraying edge where the foreign memory meets his own consciousness. He breathes. (Elias does not stir.)
The fog — the real fog, twisting up around his feet, not the mist of that ghastly vision — chills Peter from ankle to throat as if reclaiming him as its own. There’s no need for it — Peter has no desire to lean back into that memory, gets the feeling if he did he would never be able to crawl his way out again — but this does little to pacify his Patron, so for both their sakes he allows it to envelop him entirely.
If he spends more time in the Lonely than is strictly necessary to find his way back to the Tundra, no one is there to notice (and if No One does notice, well, It’s hardly going to complain). When he does, at long last, reemerge on the deck of his ship, there is no one there either to hear him curse below his breath (and how lovely it is, really, to be heard by nothing but the gentle water below).