Archive of Our Own ^beta

Prince shuddered, even though the movement couldn’t breach his shoulder—the Dictator hadn’t animated anything below his neck to motion yet.

“Why does my touch rattle you so, my Prince?” said the Dictator, easily cradling Prince’s cheek in his long hand.

Itself a piece of art, and an artist’s, thought Prince. The neat nails unmarred by picked skin. The long, graceful fingers, and shallow whorls stamped on their ends. Each detail was impressed in Prince’s mind, since the first time the Dictator flexed his fingers near Prince’s face.

The Dictator of Life tipped Prince’s head up so that he might coax out some imperfection. He analysed the butterfly wing-sweep of Prince’s blonde lashes. How their soft shadows fell across his face with each blink. The miniscule freckles that dotted his cheekbones—texture flecked onto his skin by the marriage of masterful wrist work and paint. Or, perhaps, he was investigating Prince’s eyes, which glowed in the crafted daylight.

“This was . . . your request,” he chided. And it was true.

The artisan’s workshop they stood in didn’t exist even a few hours ago. The Dictator had created it specially for him. A circular skylight let in a digital sun, searing Prince’s skin no differently from the real thing. Tables with prototype designs and studies of paintings, of skin, of hair, even the toes Prince sought to have sculpted. The two stood at the centre, surrounded by an audience of statues. White marble sculptures caressed by glimmering, sunny fingers. Even more were covered in drapes—those that depicted multiple figures. Prince failed to decipher the poses behind their fabric veils. The silhouettes were unreadable—all he knew was that their bodies were entwined.

The Dictator straightened, eyes once again dancing across Prince’s body in totality. Prince peered back. The Dictator had dark, unshorn hair. But greater. It bled into crimson where the sunlight encroached. Where his hair scraped his sharp face, the sun’s strokes insisted it become carmine. The river of black tumbled into red, into lush rose as it cascaded past his shoulders. The Dictator had projected a white robe onto his form, so abundant in material it draped over his body without clinging, spilled to the floor without swallowing him. The colour should have washed out his light skin. Instead, it was ethereal.

The Dictator’s gentle clutch skimmed over Prince’s bare elbow. He was naked. The Dictator was moulding the body that was to become his, after all. The Dictator pulled at his shoulder, and Prince’s shoulder moved. The Dictator pushed against his hip, and Prince yielded. The Dictator’s warm thumb slid along the dip in his pelvis, working the clay of his hipbone.

To be the Dictator’s work was a boon seized greedily. To be the subject of his intensions was no less torture. His gaze was divine. And it was hellish. Prince was too exposed for the Dictator’s murmurings, careful as he leaned further over Prince, fingers skating in systematic lines over Prince’s back. Forced to withstand the touch of those fine palms massaging down his spine, pulling the flesh-

“Latissimus dorsi. Now, I must tug the muscle. Tease loose the knots that would misshape it.”

Prince could not move. When had the medium ever revolted against the artist? Why would it want to?

Prince occupied a body that was at once his, and to his torment, wholly, deliciously not.

The Dictator pulled at Prince’s lip, scrubbed at his throat, then stepped behind him and changed his pose. Prince’s shoulders drew back and his chest rose enough to arch his neck. To the side, the water glass clinked, and the Dictator violently swirled his paintbrush clean. The serpentine brush turned on Prince, ready to dampen his chest with more freckles.

Prince wished only that the Dictator would craft a work so fine that he divorced the memory of his own drawn lines. That he would look down upon Prince, and be sublimed by the body of his design— quake at its beauty. At its exactness to his own taste. He should lay his hands upon Prince anew, seduced by the perfection he had wrought.

The cold brush point tasted Prince’s nipple.