buy forever at a price
You can’t remember the last time you were content in life; first it was schoolfeeding, then it was rising through the ranks of Orphaners, then it was Mindfang and helming and always pushing yourself for more one way or the other. Then, of course, it was Dol, and death, and more time than you want to consider trapped in your own head. You weren’t content even when you were sleeping, which was more often than not.
Now it’s Suf, sprawled languidly over you and under your cape, and you’re discovering that contentedness is sand through your fingers and a little like heartbreak.
merry christmas, you poor fools who have been with me long enough to keep asking me for this pairing & the even poorer fools who are encountering it for the first time
Because I have lived my life in debt I’ve spent my days in deep regret Yeah, I’ve been living in the red Oh, ‘cause I can’t forgive and I can’t forget
—
It’s an odd feeling, being content.
It’s odder, considering the context of it. You’re dead, and trapped in death with more than a few people who have no cause to like you, and there’s no certainty as to how long this situation is going to continue - but you’re content. You can’t remember the last time you were content in life; first it was schoolfeeding, then it was rising through the ranks of Orphaners, then it was Mindfang and helming and always pushing yourself for more one way or the other. Then, of course, it was Dol, and death, and more time than you want to consider trapped in your own head. You weren’t content even when you were sleeping, which was more often than not.
Now it’s Suf, sprawled languidly over you and under your cape, and you’re discovering that contentedness is sand through your fingers and a little like heartbreak. This can’t last forever, you know, but while you have it…
This has been good for you.
“I can hear you thinking, Dualscar,” Suf says into your shoulder. You’ve learned the hard way that he doesn’t sleep much but he does sleep often, and one of the silent arrangements you’ve come to is him napping on you every so often while you read, since he likes the contact and you’ve got nothing else to do. Probably one of the reasons that you’re content is that you have time to read now, and there’s a library steadily growing at Dol’s place of media that people remember.
This one… is likely Dol’s. There’s still not much in the way of things to read, and rainbow drinker romances are probably a treasured remembrance of Alternian culture or something, which is definitely the reason you are putting it in front of your eyes.
“I am insulted,” you begin, “that you think one second a’ my attention could be torn from the plight a’ these star-crossed lovers, an’ furthermore-”
Suf wriggles just enough that you can see the curve of his grin without craning your neck. “Give me a couple hours before you’re distraught and need comforting.”
For all his tone is warm and light, there’s exhaustion underneath. He’s used to being run ragged, to catching sleep where and when he can, and his body still hasn’t caught up with the fact that he’s safe. Sometimes you wonder if part of that is you, if your blood triggers some fight-or-flight instinct in him that makes it hard to relax around you - but you don’t have any evidence of that, and you’ve learned to hear the sound of your own fears talking, a little. He wants to be here, and you want him to be here. That has to be enough.
You lay one hand along the flat of his back, tug his stolen cape into a better alignment, and settle in. The slow in-out of his breathing fades into the background, and you let yourself sit in the moment.
—
Suf wakes up gentle this time. A few times he’s catapulted off you from day terrors, or instinctively heading to the nearest door because something you’ve done reminded him of being shaken awake and shoved out a door by Dol. You’ve had to learn how to work with the trust he’s shown in you and sometimes, you almost feel like you’re getting there.
“’Ciple’s the cat,” he says, stretching against your hand on his back and yawning. It’s only when he does that you realise you slipped your hand under his shirt at some point, and probably woke him up by rubbing your thumb along his side. You picked up the habit from when he’s been awake, but you’re not sure how you feel about it when he’s asleep. It seems more possessive than you should be aiming for, more you bending him to your whims than you’re comfortable with.
“Sorry,” you say, and move your arm to the top of the seating block, which you’re fairly certain is a safe location.
Suf looks at your hand, then back at you, frowning. “You,” he says, eventually, sounding so much like Dol that you nearly flinch, “really have been thinking.”
“I have been known to, on occasion,” you drawl, laying the sarcasm on thick in the hopes of deflecting him. Instead, he rolls over until he’s straddling your waist, pinning you to the seating block. When he doesn’t say anything, instead chewing on a corner of his lip thoughtfully, an alarmingly analytical look on his face, you risk shifting backwards so you can sit up a little more. “I’m tryin’, Suf, but you’re sendin’ some mixed signals.”
“You’re not jumpy like this around Psi,” he says, thoughtful. “So it’s something about me.”
“I have no idea what you’re talkin’ about,” you tell him, the usual fears creeping into the edges of your mind. “I’ll have the conversation’, Suf, but I ain’t sure what conversation we’re havin’.”
“You always-” Suf waves his hands in frustration. “I don’t know how to describe it. You act like I’ve got a foot out the door and any little thing is going to be the last straw. You don’t turn into a doormat with Psi.” When you don’t say anything, because that was the last thing you expected Suf to complain about and you’re too busy trying to scrape your wits together enough to at least attempt an explanation of you and Psi, he droops a little. “It’s just- I don’t know. Sometimes it feels like you’re afraid of me.”
You laugh before you can stop yourself, pressing your hand over your mouth a little too late to do anything. When his expression turns worried, you reach up to his face, then reconsider and let your hand drop before it reaches him. “You fuckin’ terrify me,” you tell him, instead, digging the fingers of one hand into your abandoned cape, where he won’t see.
“And Psi doesn’t?” Suf asks, bewildered. “The man who shoots lasers out of his face and hates you. You’re fine with him.”
You groan and let your head thunk back against the arm of the seating block, narrowly avoiding catching your horns. “Psi an’ I…”
He knows what you’re like, is the thing. He’s seen you and Psi together, he knows that you’re both fucked up. You’d thought he’d come to terms with it, with Psi at least, but apparently he hasn’t considered it too far past the surface of things.
To be entirely fair, the surface of things was distracting enough that you can’t blame him.
“He hates me,” you say, eventually, and shrug a little. “I ain’t gonna be able to change that, with our reasons, and we ain’t friends, so.”
Suf gives you an odd look, then shakes his head. “So, what, you’d trust me if I hated you?”
“I ain’t sure why you don’t,” you say, and then freeze. You didn’t mean to say that; you can almost feel the disapproving glare that Dol uses when she smells self-pity. You wouldn’t be surprised if it could tunnel through walls. “There ain’t much in the way a’ things to recommend me to someone like you,” you mutter, trying to make it better. Justified pity may be a short step above gratuitous pity, but it counts. “Psi likes to fuckin’ roll around in my control issues, but I ain’t sure how to turn them off around you, alright? An’ if I overstep, you’re the one that gets hurt. An’ I’m still a highblood, an’ you’re still you. It’s fuckin’ subconscious sometimes.”
Suf’s silent for a long time. “So you want ‘subjugating the lowblood’ roleplay?” he finally asks, dubious.
“What?” you yelp, sitting up and nearly headbutting him in the process. “Suf, no, what the fuck, I just said-”
His laughter cuts you off. At first it makes you even more afraid, but he rests a hand on your shoulder to support himself as he wheezes, “Your face,” and you relax slowly.
“You’re the worst,” you tell him, your heart still trying to find its normal rhythm. “You are absolutely fuckin’ abysmal. I can tell you this because I hate you now.”
Suf grins, and before you can do anything, leans in to kiss you. Your hand automatically curls around his shoulder, and when you realise, you try to tug away. He reaches up to keep it there and kisses you again, longer this time. You make a pathetic noise in the back of your throat that you will deny for the rest of your miserable existence. “I might not know about control issues,” Suf says, when he pulls away, “but I know about fear.”
“I ain’t afraid,” you say, confused and a little breathless.
“Yeah you are,” Suf rebuts. He twines his fingers through yours and looks down, shadowing his eyes enough that it’s hard to tell where he’s looking. “Afraid of things breaking. Afraid you’re going to be the one who breaks everything. Afraid of hurting people, afraid of who you are.”
You swallow, and tentatively slide your other hand along his cheek. “Suf…”
He forces a smile. “I kept myself lonely for a long time so I wouldn’t hurt anyone.” He’s quiet for a moment, then leans into your hand, closing his eyes and sighing. “I treated Psi and Disciple as too precious to fuck up and that fucked us all up extravagantly. Don’t do it to me.”
Carefully, you tilt his head so you can kiss the corner of his mouth. You don’t think you’ll ever be able to say the words that explain how pathetically important he is to you - Psi hates you, and that’s good, you think, it keeps you honest, but Suf makes you want. You want to be someone who will never hurt him. You want to be worthy of him so much that it makes you ache, and it’s worth all the pain of dragging yourself through the glass you made of your life. Dol did a little of the same, in the short time you knew her before you died, but you were still the Orphaner Dualscar then. You don’t know how to reconcile that self with the person you are now, and it hurts, but you can’t not make the effort now.
“You fuckin’ ruined me,” you tell him before kissing him again. He laughs, only for it to stutter into a moan when you nudge him into a deeper kiss. He loops his arms around your neck and rolls his hips against you in a slow rhythm, almost absent-minded as he slides his tongue against yours nearly in time. It’s leaving you a little light-headed, but you don’t need to concentrate - the opposite, really. He pulls away to breathe after a moment, pressing his forehead to your shoulder before mouthing at your vestigial neck gills like he can’t stand to not be doing something. When you work your hands carefully under his shirt - big enough that it’s stolen from you, you think - you can feel his breath hitch under your hands against your throat. “I wake up an’ panic,” you whisper, hoarse, before you can convince yourself not to. “That it’s- not here. That I don’t get you.” You swallow, your hands tightening on his sides. “I don’t know why I’d get you.”
Suf laughs again, but it feels - wrong, somehow. Self-recrimination in a single syllable, something you’re all-too-familiar with. “Yeah, it’s a fucking mystery,” he says, bleak and too quiet. “Psi practically worships the ground I walk on and hates me for how we imploded when we were alive. Then along comes someone who just - likes me. Who wants me, not memories.” He lowers a hand and presses it against your gills, making you jolt in surprise as the feeling goes straight to your toes. “I’ll tell you when you fuck up,” he says, and digs his fingers in. You shift your grip to his hips and gasp through your teeth, doing your best to pay attention. “You’d be working to be better no matter what,” he says, and strokes teasing lines against your gills, too light to do anything but keep you squirming. “But you decided to try it with me. And I’m- I’m fucking awful at everything about quadrants, I don’t know why you chose me.”
“Suf,” you beg, and tug at his shirt. He takes his hands off you to help you remove - yes, your shirt, he keeps thieving your clothing and you’d give him all of it if he just asked - and you throw it across the room before sliding your hands up his back, trace your nails back down and watch him shudder. “You’ll tell me, you won’t - don’t let me fuckin’ ruin you.”
He kisses you hungrily, like you’re the first person he’s kissed in a thousand sweeps and he’s making up for lost time. You bury your hands in his hair and kiss him like you know there’s a thousand sweeps without this sort of touch waiting for you, finally discarding your fear that he’ll abandon you if you don’t toe the line of the boundaries you’ve set in your head. He’ll tell you. He’ll tell you, he’s here with you, and this time is yours.
He yanks at your shirt impatiently and you lean back to let him pull it off. When you take over getting it around your horns, he pushes you back into the block and follows you down, pressing his chest against yours and laving his tongue against the gills of your neck. You moan in response, one of your hands going to a death-grip on the arm of the seating block and your hips snapping up before you can stop yourself. He echoes your moan, one hand going to the meat of your thigh and digging in hard enough that you’ll be surprised if there aren’t bruises tomorrow, even through the increasingly-embarrassing sodden mess of protection your pants offer.
“I want you,” you tell him, the words not feeling as stupid and forced as this sort of talk usually does to you. You’re not thinking now, just reacting, and all your reactions are more. You’ve been afraid of asking for more for as long as you’ve been in this situation, but - fuck. He groans at the roughness of your voice and scrabbles one-handed at your pants. “Want everythin’ you’ll give me, I’ll fuckin’ - I’ll beg, I’ll-” You cut off with a gasp as his fingers twine with your bulge, tugging it the last little bit out of your sheath.
“I know you would,” Suf says, his voice only a few rough degrees away from a growl. He manages to crawl down the length of the seating block to peel off your pants, your efforts hindering as much as they help. “I don’t want you to be thinking hard enough for begging.” He moves forward, just enough that he can comfortably reach your bulge again, then stretches it to its full length, leaving you pushing desperately back into the seating block, your breath coming in ragged gasps. Then, before you can recover, he bends down and taking as much of your bulge as he can fit into his mouth.
“Fuck,” you gasp, “Fuck, Suf-” He looks up at you and slides his mouth along your bulge another impossible inch, the seal of his mouth hot and wet and too much. Then he backs off a little and you don’t want to believe that the keen you just heard came out of you. “Don’t fuckin’ stop, I’ll- ungh-”
He moans with you as he sinks back down, fitting more of your bulge into his mouth somehow as the sound reverberates through you - where is it fuckin’ going, he doesn’t have that much mouth on his body - and this time as he rises something slick tangles with the tip of your bulge. Your other hand joins its partner in gripping the arm of the seating block, desperately trying to keep yourself grounded as you whine, helpless. “I was jokin’,” you tell him, breathless, “about you havin’ a big mouth, you didn’t have to prove it-”
He meets your eyes deliberately, his mouth still too full to have any chance of talking back to you. Instead, he closes one eye in a wink before turning his attention back to your bulge. You have one chance for trepidation - what have you done, what did the wink mean, it would be alarming if you had any mental energy to devote to being alarmed - and then he swirls his tongue around your bulge as he takes you back into his mouth - and - and doesn’t stop. Before you can do much more than gasp at the feeling of his throat around you, his nose pressed against your skin - you can feel him swallowing reflexively, you are fucked and not in the obvious sense, there’s no way you’re going to be able to go back to everyday life after this - he pulls away, his tongue pressing against your bulge in an insistent rhythm the entire time, and does it again before you have a chance to recover from how fast your heart is pounding.
“Suf,” you beg, helplessly clenching your fingers around the arm of the seating block, your hips twitching desperately at his every movement no matter how hard you try to keep still for him. “I can’t- I need somethin’, Suf, fuck, please-”
He reaches a hand up without breaking stride. You immediately grab it and lace your fingers through his, like you can somehow regain your composure if you just hold tightly enough, but he has other ideas. “Like it when you take what you need,” he pants, lips shiny and wet, pressing your hand into his hair. Your fingers close reflexively at that, your bulge sending asynchronous pulses through you that make your muscles seize up, your toes curl and your nook throb. He coaxes your bulge back into his mouth and your vain hope that you were desensitized enough to the softness of his lips and the feel of his tongue gets ripped to shreds. Your hand tightens more in his hair, pulling, desperate for a sensation different enough to keep you grounded, and Suf’s rhythm gets interrupted by a whine that sounds filthier than any of his deeper groans.
“Keep goin’,” you say, not sure whether you’re asking or ordering. You punctuate it with a tug on his hair and - oh fuck, he starts sucking harder on the upstroke, hollowing out his cheeks and working his tongue against the length of your bulge, your genetic material drooling down his chin when he stops to catch his breath. He’s wholly focussed on drawing every whimper he can out of you, using everything at his disposal and seeing what works. For your part, you’re glad to leave your hand locked in his hair and let him tease out the reactions he can. When he twists a little as he sinks down onto you, you can’t resist pressing deeper into his mouth, your hand holding him there for longer than he usually waits, and when he feels you take over his arms wobble as he moans, followed by an attempted swallow as he tries to keep up with your genetic material and his own spit.
You ease up only to push him back down, which elicits another whine, and then you’re controlling him entirely. He makes desperate little noises when he changes direction, nails digging into your hips where he’s rested his hands and tongue working against your shallow thrusts. If you could still think, you’d be worried that you were being too rough, not giving him enough of a chance to breathe or swallow or rest his jaw - but he predicts your timing and moves with you, determined to stay with your pace.
With your hands as they are you can’t reach your nook, and Suf doesn’t seem inclined to, and without it every increase in sensation is frustration incarnate. You’re left writhing under him with your hand locked in his hair, gasping every breath, before you manage to get out, “Suf- fuck-” He looks up at you and your carefully-collected thoughts scatter. Fuck, you’ve never seen anything as hot as the debauched mess he’s made of himself, satisfaction in the slow way he licks his lips. You crawl back up the couch and manage to prop yourself up, then nearly lose your progress as you see him - still wearing pants, though his bulge has wormed its way out, covered in your colour and his own, pupils blown and chest rising and falling with short, sharp breaths. Your cape is still bunched up around his legs, and a selfish urge to wrap him in it hits you hard.
It takes you a minute, but you manage to get his pants undone and he slides them off, lying back against the cape when you give him a nudge. You’re not even going to attempt to return the favour, given that your teeth make it a losing prospect, and you hope he doesn’t mind - but he doesn’t seem to. You carefully balance on your knees over him and reach back to wrap a hand around his bulge - and the way he closes his eyes and the slightest noise he whimpers make your heart stutter in your chest.
You reach up and brush his hair away from his face, leaning down to kiss him as you sink down onto his bulge. The heat of him inside you nearly takes you then and there, but you stop for a moment and press your forehead against his until the feeling passes. “You’re good,” you tell him, hoarse, and rock your hips. With the way you’re leaning, you’re nearly lying on him, though most of your weight is propped on your arms.
He loops a leg over your hip and tugs until you rest your weight on him fully, reaches up to brush your hair out of your face like you did for him. “I’m not going to break, Dualscar.”
You laugh, a shapeless breath, and watch his eyes drift almost-closed when you squeeze. “I might.” You kiss him again , heedless of the mess you made of him, and break for a gasp when his bulge ripples against exactly the right spot of your nook. “Suf, you don’t even know, fuck, the way you look-” you say, your speech centre slowly losing control of your vocal chords.
“I like this,” he says, a near-chant to the lashing of his bulge. “I like - the sounds you make, Dualscar, please-” You scrape your teeth along the line of his neck and he whimpers in pants. “Like it when you stop worrying about hurting me.”
“Suf,” you groan, beyond any further conversation. You dig your fingers into his shoulders to try to hold yourself together and he whines, arching and taking you with him.
“More,” he says, grabbing your hips and pulling you down onto him, lashing desperately inside you. “More, fuck, Dualscar, I trust you, please-”
You increase the urgency of your movements, and, taking a chance, sink your teeth into him a little harder than you’ve done before. It tears a shriek from him, and you panic at first before, “-yes, fuck yes, more, Dualscar please-” spills out of his lips. When you lick the wound, the deep groan he makes goes straight to your nook, and you bite again without thinking, one of your hands sliding down to his grubleg scars and digging in.
Given his ministrations, you thought you’d be a lot further ahead on the needing-a-bucket front than him, but when you dig your fingers into his grubleg scars he does the same to your back and strains against you, whimpering your name one last time before he collapses, boneless back into the seating block. Your name - your name on his lips - takes you with him a moment later, and you take a moment to catch your breath before starting the process of finding a way to get off Suf and still fit on the seating block.
He reaches up and grabs your arm with a loose, lazy swing of his, keeping you in place. “S’fine. I’m fine,” he says, and smiles at you. His smile is tired and triumphant and smug and you feel the same.
You kiss him. He makes a surprised noise, but melts into it anyway. “We made a fuckin’ horrendous mess,” you inform him. “Where’d all that come from?”
“Mmh.” He shrugs, as much as he can lying down with you on top of him. “I like oral.”
You groan and close your eyes. “Hadn’t noticed.” Sleep is particularly appealing at the moment, but for all of Suf’s good traits, his comfort as a sleeping platform isn’t one, especially considering that you’re taller than him. You haul yourself upright, then pick him up with a grunt from you and a squawk from him. There’s a pile in the next room, so you dump him in it before staggering to a recuperacoon for your own sleep.
—
When you wake up and stumble out to the kitchen, Suf is sitting there with a piece of toast in hand and coffee in front of him, two things he’s decided that he can make without setting your hive on fire. His hair is still wet from a shower, so he can’t be too far ahead of you, which means you get to sit down for a while.
You need it. You’re more exhausted than you can remember being in two lifetimes.
“So,” you say to Suf, for lack of anything else to say. He looks up, letting you see the marks on his neck properly, and your heart sinks. You shouldn’t have let yourself go; they’re bright, bloody slashes against the grey of his neck and bruised besides. “I didn’t mean-” you say, inadequately, and gesture at his neck.
He blinks at you, then raises a hand to his neck and hisses when he bumps one of the gashes. There must be some expression on your face, because his expression goes determined, and then he presses his hand flat against the wound. The, “ah-” he gasps out, his eyes half-lidded, wakes you up the rest of the way, and then he drops his hand. “Got it?”
“Uh,” you say, and - fuck, you’re older than him by an uncomfortable factor and he’s still making you blush and gawk like it’s your first contribution. “I dunno,” you say, managing to scrape half a wit together. “You might need to demonstrate again.”
He considers the toast in front of him, then throws it at you. You grin and start chewing on it, and he smiles as he looks back down at his palmtop. “As long as you’re paying attention.” He looks up again, briefly, and then sighs. “And…” His finger circles the rim of his cup of coffee, and he looks up at you a lot more hesitantly this time. “What you said. You and Psi hate each other.” He shrugs at that. “If you think you’re not friends, you haven’t been looking hard enough. You’ve got more friends than you think.”
You look at him for a long time. He looks back at you, level, until you jerk your head in a brief nod and bite into your toast.
—
You’re not good with people, and never have been. In life it was easy enough to reduce everyone you knew to a few traits, and in death it’s been easy enough to hide from unpleasant realities. You’ve been hiding from the unpleasant reality of your own history a long time, burying yourself in controlling your own impulses. There are harder steps to face, but…
You get to pick. It’s going to be a long eternity without people by your side, and contentedness, and at some point you’re going to have to put some effort into creating it. So you’re starting easy, with a bottle in hand, and when Mindfang yanks open her door to your knock, you hold it up without words.
She looks at it uncertainly, and then at you. “Ditching your quadrants already, Dualscar?”
You could roll your eyes. Instead, you say, quiet, “Before everything, we were friends, Spin.”
Mindfang rocks onto one foot, crossing her arms and raking you with a glare. She’s harder than the Spin you knew, lost something of the kismesis she was. “Forget it. I don’t need your sanctimonious hoofbeastshit. Does it rub off on you when you’re fucking Dol’s kid?”
“’Bout as much as you wish it would when you’re fuckin’ your revolutionary,” you say, with half the bite and no less cruelty. If Psi and Suf - and Dol - have taught you anything, it’s that kindness and friendship are very different things. “I ain’t here to judge and I ain’t here out of pity.”
Mindfang rolls her eyes, the mechanical one whirring slightly. “You’re here for friendship. This is revolting, Dualscar.”
“I got sick a’ hurtin’ people,” you say, letting a corner of your mouth hook into a bitter smile. “Afraid a’ breakin’ everything because I am who I am, an’ there ain’t much that’s nice in that.”
The expression falls off Mindfang’s face, leaving someone older than you who lived through every single moment of every single mistake a long lifespan and certainty in your actions can grant someone.
“So,” you say, and hold up the bottle again. “Are we havin’ a drink or what?”
She snatches the bottle out of your hand and turns back inside, leaving the doorway open. “Empress fucking knows I can’t let you go around blubbering feelings like that when you’re sober. It’s an embarrassment to everyone who knew you when you were vaguely competent.”
You step in, close the door, and get on with making a death you can live with.
—
I've put my money where my mouth is For the first time in my life I've made mistakes, but I believe that Everything was worth the fight
