ninefox | Until We Have Faces

Entry tags:

fives,
psl

Until We Have Faces

Krell had to pin him with the Force to get him on the altar, and not gently. The back of his head might be bleeding, but it's hard to tell: the antechamber already smells of iron. The whole station is a bristling-black hulk of ancient ore, nickel and iron and ice and stone. The lack of anything resembling alloys or right angles makes it feel horribly unreliable, not a machine guaranteed to keep the air in, but an ancient brooding piece of debris untouched by the steadiness of engineers. It did have an airlock, that Krell and a few shame-faced clone guards shuffled him through, and iced-over doors somewhere in the dimness of their crisscrossed headlamps that must lead back into the warren of Ninefox Point.

The benighted promontory did not orbit so much as a brown dwarf or black hole: it was a rogue planetoid, drifting through the ragged stretches of starless, lifeless space. Here, old Strife, the Dark Side of War, had been confined ever since the ascendancy of the Jedi, noble Combat, and the rest of the Light pantheon. But even reviled and relegated Gods were due certain honors, and retained certain powers - and certain appetites. And Krell - who had his own suspicions about the future of that ascendancy - had come to give Strife his due and be rid of his most vexing problem in one blow.

It's pitch-black with him and the others gone. The heavy magnetic manacles embedded in the alter are utterly immovable; the stone beneath him is pitted and rough and cold, almost untouched since the creation of the universe - except, of course, for all the sacrifices that have come before.

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His laughter is choked and disbelieving, completely devoid of humor. "You?" He rubs his face against the rough stone, dragging abrasions into his skin. "You'll take care of me?"

He laughs again, the sound edging towards unhinged. "Just how fucking soiled and defective am I that the... the avatar of death without honor, of betrayal and pillage and murder and rape thinks I'm beautiful and wants to take care of me?"

Jedao

swallows him.

A mouth the length of his body opens up, and Fives is pulled in by half a dozen tongues, or tentacles, or some other appendage. And then it closes, and then they're gone. It feels like zero gravity, like floating in salt water much more concentrated and buoyant than Kamino's, warm and wet and soft and yet equally supported by the press of flesh from every side. There's no teeth, no bones, no sign of which way would be up or out. There's only the dizzying slick close press everywhere.

He gets dizzy here from not breathing, but his lungs don't burn and he doesn't pass out. He can struggle and struggle until he wears himself out. It's so warm it would be steaming, if there were any air for the steam to float in, warm as a jungle or a sauna, and even more oppressive.

Fives struggles as he's pulled in, but it's useless, as useless as everything he's tried so far, and as the darkness closes in around him and the tentacles withdraw he screams.

The fear he'd felt before is nothing to this, to the absolute, unreasoning terror of being engulfed like this, pressed in on all sides, hot and slick and darker than the emptiness between stars. He has no air, he's dizzy with its lack, but he screams and howls and roars as he thrashes against the walls if his amorphous prison.

He screams until his voice is a barely there gravelly rasp, his throat bleeding with it, he twists and kicks and gouges and thrashes, trying to get purchase on something, clinging to the irrational delusion that he might possibly tear his way out. And in the end he hangs limp, his mind drifting loose with the horror of it, his memory reaching back to the oppressive, liquid warmth of his growth tank, except there he'd drifted in endless twilight, not this impenetrable blackness.

He twitches and whimpers almost soundlessly, exhausted and despairing, wishing for death even as he dreads dying here, alone in the dark, consumed utterly by the deathless evil that's stalked his and his brothers' nightmares all of their short lives.

It's only then, when he finally calms, however miserably, that Jedao disgorges him gently back onto the stone. All the places Fives has bled - his wrists and ankles, the claw marks, even the scrape on his cheek - throb and tingle slightly, but with strangely little pain. A smaller, rougher tongue laps at the places, only one at a time, and Jedao seems to have folded into something smaller, now, a jumble of folded limbs settled between Fives' sprawled legs.

And there is, now, light: a collection of lambent yellow eyes, gleaming in the dark. It's not enough to make out Jedao's shape by, but it is something other than black.

"I will take care of you," he promises softly, fiercely. "I may be wicked and brutal, but I am all you have, now. And you are fierce, and glorious, and clever and brave and devoted. And you are not devoted to me, but you are all I have."

He doesn't have the energy to struggle anymore, even enhanced as he is, his limbs are leaden and his head is foggy and even the icy cold of the room, now that he's been released from the humid heat of the creature's belly, or whatever that had been, isn't enough to stir him into any kind of motion. Not even to pull away from the creature that's curled itself between his legs, that's lapping at him now with one rough-tongued mouth.

The light's no comfort, not when it's the creature's eyes staring balefully down at him, and neither is the fierce promise of care. The care of a monster, a creature made of claws, of mouths full of tongues and sharp teeth, of some shapeless, consuming maw and the belly attached to it.

He's screamed himself hoarse, his voice nothing but a rasping, wordless croak, and so he has to content himself with struggling for enough coherence to think, as clearly as he can manage it, I'm not yours. I'll never be yours.

"Barely the strength for breath, and there's still defiance in you," Jedao murmurs, and drops another one of those soft kisses at the corner of Fives' mouth.

"Fine, don't be mine. But let me make you feel better than this, dear wildling. I can do that. I am not only the things they've told you."

He wants to close his eyes, to block out the gleaming eyes looking back at him, but the thought of the darkness behind his eyelids is unbearable in this moment, so he turns his head laboriously away, only to find they follow him there.

His breath is steady and slow, his heart no longer a trip-hammer; panic can only be sustained so long, and the darkness has winnowed it away. He's not sure if the creature can actually read his mind, it said it doesn't use the Force but that it's of the Force, but in case it can he lets the next thought rise through the exhaustion to the surface of his mind. I can't stop you.

Jedao nuzzles him, strokes more human-feeling hands along his arms. He hadn't planned it, but engulfing Fives had been very helpful for remembering certain physical articulations more precisely.

"No, but you can certainly choose to be more miserable about it. The body exists to feel, you know. To grow and change and scar and survive and ache and year and delight and die and rot. You aren't meant to be all pure, none of you. It's cruel of her to ask it."

"She's our goddess and we're hers!" he manages to croak, the words torn, barely above a whisper, from his ravaged throat.

He won't hear Her called cruel, not in Her treatment of them, not without finding some last iota of strength in himself to counter the insult. It's the last strength he can muster, though, and he wishes for nothing so much than that he had the energy to curl in on himself, draw into a ball against the cold and the eyes and that voice, insidious and coaxing.

"She's the Republic's goddess. That's not at all the same thing as the people, no matter what the knights tell you. Is it even still called that? I have no idea how long I've been here, you know."

The hands stroke Fives everywhere, slow and firm, gently massaging out aches and nots and weary soreness.

Ours, he thinks doggedly, tiredly. Our goddess, our Republic. Ours to serve and protect.

Not his anymore, though, not when they've both cast him out and turned his back on him, and he curses Krell again, if only in the aching, fractured recesses of his mind. He wonders how many of his brothers Krell will waste on his next campaign. Wonders if Rex will continue to follow him with the blind obedience expected of them and expects he will. He's been made a very effective object lesson.

"Why?" he manages to rasp, but it'll take catching the tattered edges of the thought that goes with it to catch that he means why is he doing this? Why is he pretending he cares?

"Is it really so unendurable, to believe that I like you?" He sounds a little plaintive, maybe even hurt. "It doesn't have to be complicated. It doesn't have to be a judgement. I'm war, and you're a warrior. A stubborn, fierce, irrepressible one. I'm lonely, and you're here. Why not?"

The last of his breath gusts out in a ragged sigh and he goes limp under the stroking hands.

"What-" He breaks off, his throat too torn and his breath too short, and finishes silently, expecting to be understood by now- Do you want of me?

He sighs, softer but somehow the same, and he doesn't slump over Fives but he rests a check against Fives' shoulder for a few moments.

I could eat the whole world and still want more," he admits. "But right now, I want you to let me make you feel something new, and...try not to hate yourself about it?"

I can't stop you, he repeats, too tired for more direct defiance for that. Too despairing to delude himself there'd be any point to it if he could find th energy. He's been given to this monster, to do with as it wishes... it just so happens it doesn't appear to wish to maim or kill him, though whether he'll be devoured and destroyed nonetheless remains to be seen.

He cups Fives' face in two hands - still long-fingered, but humanly so, now - and kisses him slowly, sweetly.

"My stubborn darling," Jedao murmurs as he kisses him, another hand arranging Fives' legs, stroking up his thighs to cradle his balls.

He doesn't have the energy to even try to turn away this time, doesn't have the energy for anything but to lie there and take whatever the creature decides to do to him. And it still aches that what it chooses is this; tenderness like he's never known, soft hands and sweet lips and a gentle, searching tongue. Words and touches he's never let himself even dream of, because they were banned to him and his kind, always and forever.

And now he's been throw away like so much garbage and this... this is what he's sacrificed to. A hand, gentle on his skin, touching him in places no one else has ever touched him, making what little breath he has catch as his skin pebbles, not with cold, but with the novelty of the sensation. His legs twitch, trying to spread farther, and whines quietly in the back of his mangled throat, in mingled shame and arousal.

"So beautiful," Jedao croons, kissing down Fives' chest again, nipping carefully at Fives' nipples again on his way down. He licks long, long paths over Fives' belly, kisses his cock softly in passing, bites a little more firmly at the back of one spread, folded-up thigh before his tongue drags another hot, wet stripe over Fives' hole and balls in one stroke.

He flinches away minutely when the creature comes too close to the desecrated brand placed directly over his heart, the ashhawk with its widespread wings barely recognizable now. It's the only move he makes, though, until that tongue drags across his... Force, his hole and his balls, and he shivers as his legs twitch in an effort to splay wider, as a groan spills from his wrecked throat.

He's naked. On a table. In the cold and dark at the end of the galaxy. Sacrificed to an ancient evil that's been used to terrorize him into obedience his entire life. And in this moment all he can think is please and more and yes.

He gets his wish. Jedao licks him again and again, then seals his mouth over Fives' hole and starts sliding his tongue in. His hands flex on Fives' thighs, occasionally digging in with claws again, as though Jedao just can't help himself; he moans into Fives' flesh like he can't get enough.

He's too exhausted for his wheel's to spin, to exhausted for anything but laying here and feeling and, as that tongue drags over him again and again and again, all he can feel is warmth and pleasure. Even when the claws did into his thighs it's just sensation, something to remind him his body's still there, still his. His hands flex helplessly against the stone beneath him, nails chipping and tearing as they drag over it, and that's more sensation too.

And then the tongue is pushing into him, and it still feels... good? But also strange, alien. Forbidden. His breath hitches on a startled protest that's no more than an incoherent noise, and he tries to brace himself to pull away.

Jedao laughs softly as Fives pulls away, and lets him do it, although not far, not more than an inch. He laps at Fives' balls again, laves and wraps his tongue partway around them, pulls them into his mouth to suck on as he rubs Fives' wet, empty hole with a careful thumb.

Fives whines as the creature sucks on his balls and squirms helplessly at the thumb rubbing against his hole. He's breathing like he's run all day with a full pack, and even then he shouldn't be this tired, this lax, this willing, and he knows in this moment that he's weak. That he'd deserved to be cast out.

What he doesn't tell himself is that this is the first gentle touch he's felt in weeks, the only touch he's felt in his life meant to give pleasure; that directly on the heels of a brutal battle he's been beaten and threatened and terrorized, cast out from everyone and everything he's ever known; that he's fought as hard as he could and now, in his exhaustion and despair, he's being offered gentleness and pleasure. All he sees is weakness, betrayal of the ideals he was made and trained and sworn to uphold. And if he's damned already he sees no point, right now, in fighting any more.

He takes a deep, sobbing breath and goes limp for the creature's touch, not pushing into it but not pulling away.

"You're going to feel so good," Jedao promises, nuzzling Fives' balls a little more before sliding his tongue back inside Fives, wriggling this time, stroking him from the inside.

He's not quite sure if the creature's voice makes it better or worse, the reminder of just what he's giving himself to. But his Lady has not just cast him off but let him be sent to this place, given into Her rival's clutches, why shouldn't he give himself to him? It's not like he actually has a choice anyway.

And, Force, then it's inside him again, pushing and stretching and stroking, and he never knew this was even a thing that could be done to a man, but it's lighting up his nerves and forcing his breath out on weak, almost mewling whines of pleasure. Even the faint burn of the stretch as the thing's tongue pushes into him is more pleasure than pain, and he tips his head back and gives himself over to it.

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