Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/6175255.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      Magic:_The_Gathering
  Relationship:
      Tezzeret/Jace_Beleren, Unrequited_Kallist_Rhoka/Jace_Beleren
  Character:
      Jace_Beleren, Kallist_Rhoka, Tezzeret_(Magic:_The_Gathering), Baltrice_
      (Magic:_The_Gathering)
  Additional Tags:
      Extremely_Dubious_Consent, Alpha/Beta/Omega_Dynamics, set_during_AOA, Art
      Chat_Industries_Presents, is_this_a_dead_dove:_do_not_eat_kind_of
      situation?_my_frame_of_reference_is_fucked, Erotic_Electrostimulation,
      Collars, Omega_Jace_Beleren, Beta_Kallist_Rhoka, Alpha_Tezzeret, Mating
      Cycles/In_Heat, Violence, Illusions, a_motley_assortment_of_telepath
      problems, Porn_With_Plot, Slow_Burn, Sort_of?_-_Freeform, Masturbation,
      Dissociation/Dysphoria, Fingering, Hand_&_Finger_Kink, Abuse_of_Power,
      Oral_Fixation, Tags_will_be_updated_as_needed, Emotional_Manipulation,
      Multiple_Orgasms, I_am_the_shadow_that_stalks_the_Art_Chat_by_which_I
      mean_my_shit's_dark
  Series:
      Part 1 of Magic_A/B/O_Trainwreck
  Stats:
      Published: 2016-03-06 Chapters: 5/? Words: 6634
****** the magpie comes at noon ******
by John_the_Alligator_(Chyronic)
Summary
     A bartender brushes hir fingers over Jace’s knuckles and he jerks
     with the shock to his neck and dumps half his glass onto the bar.
     Someone in the street throws a wild punch that gets Jace in the jaw
     and he sits down on the pavement, hands twitching uncontrollably.
     Kallist grabs his hand or claps him on the back, and the pain stops
     Jace’s breath.
     It’s safe as long as where people touch him is covered, and so it’s
     just as well that Jace feels naked when he’s wearing less than three
     layers; by and large it’s served him well. He’s getting along fine.
Notes
     Realized I had five finished chapters from NaNo. Updates will be
     slower from here on out.
     I think this is Dead Dove: Do Not Eat territory. If you want
     something significantly healthier and more consensual, go look in
     TJ's direction.
***** Chapter 1 *****
Jace is in his room, which is unsurprising, and is probably asleep, which is
barely surprising. It’s midway through the afternoon, but Kallist knows
Tezzeret called him yesterday, and after that Jace is almost always at least
two of drunk, exhausted, or miserable. Though that raises the question of why
Tezzeret is having Kallist do this, if he just saw Jace. Krokt only knows what
goes through that man’s head; best not to wonder.
Kallist admits to himself that he is stalling. He turns the device over in his
hands again. “Device”—it’s a collar. It’s beautiful workmanship, as odd as
“beauty” applying to anything Tezzeret makes is. The leather’s soft enough that
it flows over his fingers like cloth, though there’s etherium contact plates on
the inside and probably wiring between the layers of leather. Examining it
won’t tell Kallist anything; he’s not a mage, let alone an artificer. But
whatever it does, he doesn’t want to find out, and he doesn’t want to be
responsible. What possessed Tezzeret to choose him as an errand boy?
With one last worried sigh, Kallist swallows his misgivings and shoulders the
door open. He’d knocked vigorously before giving up and using the key Jace gave
him. Even with permission, it felt off. Everything about the situation feels
off.
The sound of the door makes Jace startle. Kallist knows better than to expect
that it’ll actually rouse him; he picks Jace up by the ankle and shakes.
Jace makes an assortment of whining noises that eventually form into words.
“Kallist?”
He grins in spite of himself, in spite of everything. “Yeah? Back to the land
of the living?”
“’S it morning already?” Jace groans.
“No,” Kallist says. “But Tezzeret sent me—“
Jace flinches. He flinches hard; Kallist couldn’t have ignored it if he tried,
and he was trying. “No, it’s too soon, he just had me, he can’t—“
“Jace!” Kallist snaps, making his voice harsh because it’s the only thing he
knows that will make Jace stop for long enough to get a word in. “I’m a
glorified messenger.” (The sharpness carrying over is unintentional. He’s more
irritated than he’d thought, worry finding an outlet in anger.) “He doesn’t
need you, I just have to give you this, it’s okay.”
Jace relaxes so quickly he almost goes limp. “Okay. What is it?”
Kallist tries not to curl his lip. “Some artifact. I’m supposed to put it on
you.”
“As long as it means he doesn’t need me,” Jace says, mustering a grin.
“Yeah.” Kallist belatedly sits down on the side of the bed, then blurts out,
“It needs to go around your neck. Sorry.” So much for tact.
Jace sits up and tilts his head back unquestioningly, and it hurts. Kallist
doesn’t know what he’s doing to his friend, only that it’s going to be bad, and
he’s trying to block out everything that would make it worse and failing. Jace
smells like fresh water and new leaves, strongly enough now and here—in his
room, having spent half the day in bed—that even to Kallist it’s obvious, and
he’s still too dulled by sleep (and, Kallist realizes with a pang, by all
likelihood lingering pain) for there to be any suspicion in his eyes, even the
normal amount. He’s looking at Kallist through the mess of his hair and still
smiling slightly and Kallist wants to touch him so badly—
He exhales. Counts: one, two, three, until he can trust himself to breathe in
again. “Okay,” Kallist says, largely to himself. This is only going to get
harder.
When Kallist brushes his fingers against the side of Jace’s neck—by accident,
even—Jace leans into the touch on apparent reflex, the side of his face nudging
against Kallist’s wrist. Kallist swallows and tries to make it quick, getting
the collar on him and buckling it as fast as he can with his hands shaking
slightly. As soon as the buckle’s done up the tongue seems to meld into the
rest of it, forming a closure more thorough than any lock.
This is wrong. This is so fucking wrong, and Kallist can do nothing about it,
and it’s increasingly clear Jace knows no better.
“Is that okay?” Only when Jace tilts his head further into Kallist’s hand does
he realize he hasn’t moved. (When he pulled the collar tight, Jace went still
and silent. It is not okay.)
Jace swallows, then nods (his skin is soft and warm and he’s so easy to hurt
and it’s horrible). “It’s… weird, but not uncomfortable. Any idea what he wants
from me?”
“No clue,” Kallist says honestly. In the back of his mind he feels a spike of
desire that seems foreign, external, but on momentary examination that’s
ridiculous. It’s him, him and his stupid crush when he can’t even manage to
protect Jace as a friend. He pulls his hands back. “I should go.”
Jace bites his lips, then nods. “I should get more sleep.” (What did Tezzeret
do to him?) “It’s—Kallist, it’s okay, you just did what he told you to. It’s
fine. Whatever Tezzeret wants, it’s not worth getting you in trouble. I’ll
figure it out.”
Kallist nods, can’t force words. He leaves in a hurry.
He doesn’t have the heart to tell Jace he’s already in trouble. Kallist is a
beta and even he can tell the scent of fresh water and pale green things is
clinging to him. This is going to be bad.
 
===============================================================================
 
It’s bad.
The ominous sign flavor of the day is calm, instead of rage. Kallist doesn’t
deal with the boss himself often enough to know if that’s better or worse, if
Tezzeret is more dangerous when he doesn’t think through what he’s doing or
when it’s exactly planned. The only reason he’s interacting with the man so
much is that Kallist has been sort of pulled along in Jace’s wake. Which he
doesn’t resent—it’s better than Jace being in this alone, as shit protection as
Kallist is being—but…
“I did it,” Kallist blurts out, since Tezzeret seems to be ignoring him, back
turned as he fiddles with something that glows softly. Kallist’s hand flickers
toward his sword at the condescending display of conspicuous vulnerability;
fuck alphas, fuck Tezzeret in particular, fuck this entire situation. “Sir,” he
adds, spitting the word.
His guess that it would be an insult and a deniable one seems to hold true.
Tezzeret turns at that, finally, sets down the glass and metal orb he was
working on and crosses to Kallist. Worryingly close. Arm’s-breadth close, for
someone his size.
“Rhoka," Tezzeret says mildly. “What do you want?”
Kallist snaps. “I don’t know what you’re doing to Jace but I will not be party
to it and I am not your errand boy,” he says—yells—the words falling out of his
mouth in a rush.
Somehow without moving Tezzeret gets colder, grows taller. His lip twitches. “I
don’t pay you to second-guess me.”
A scent that’s more concept than sensation, ozone and malice, is forcing a
headache up behind Kallist’s eyes. He clenches his fists. “I don’t work with
you to hurt my own.”
“Your own.” Tezzeret’s eyes flick across him dismissively. “I see.”
Then Kallist is reeling, catching himself with a hand slammed painfully into
the floor. His face throbs. The past few seconds resolve: Tezzeret hit him,
hard, hard enough to knock him over but, Kallist realizes, with his flesh hand,
not his metal one. His cheek feels torn, but that’s just from Tezzeret’s
knuckles hitting his teeth; his face isn’t laid open like he could’ve done with
the claw. Small mercies.
Mercy.
Right.
Tezzeret observes Kallist for a moment, then drops to one knee so their faces
are closer to level. “I suppose the fault is partly mine for expecting you
could infer the rules from context, so I’ve gone easy on you. Consider this a
warning.”
“Against what?” Kallist snarls. He’s at least going to make Tezzeret say it,
for all that Kallist thinks he knows.
“Shall I say ‘inappropriate fraternization’?” Tezzeret says, almost kindly. It
makes Kallist’s skin crawl. “I can smell him on you. Keep your hands off my
things.”
(The ‘filthy’ seems implicit.)
“You sent me,” Kallist grits out. “And he’s not a thing. He’s a person.”
Tezzeret reaches over and knocks Kallist to the floor. There is no violence to
the motion, no unnecessary force. He stands. “He’s a tool. A weapon. Remember
that. Now get out.”
Half Kallist’s face feels like one huge bruise. His skin’s hot with rage; his
mouth’s hot with blood. His hands shake.
There’s nothing he can do, he thinks dully. The knowledge throbs in time with
his cheek. But he’s giving in so easily…
Hating Tezzeret, hating himself, Kallist goes.
***** Chapter 2 *****
Jace can’t get back to sleep. He tries. The unfamiliar weight of the collar
around his neck won’t let him settle into unconsciousness. He wasn’t lying to
Kallist; it’s comfortable enough. But he can’t stop tracing his fingers over
it, trying to dip them under the edges and failing, feeling out what it does to
his body, a hard line resting at the base of his neck. He’s sleepy enough to
feel like his head’s floating, disconnected from the rest of him. Which is,
admittedly, preferable to the early bone-deep ache.
The buckle seems to have fused to itself; Jace can’t get it off. He shudders
whenever he’s reminded, though he’s having trouble keeping thoughts in his
head. It fits him closely enough that when he hooks a finger into the metal
loop at the front—he is not going to think about that at all—it’s as if he were
pulling his whole neck forward from inside. And… he hopes he’s wrong. He really
hopes he’s wrong. Let the sharp jolt of pain when Kallist touched him be a
coincidence, be a flaw in the construction, be anything but by design…
A flaw in Tezzeret’s workmanship that he let pass into someone else’s hands.
Yeah, right.
Jace starts actually shivering. People don’t touch him anyway. Not only does
Tezzeret have no reason to care, he has no reason to provide a disincentive.
Not when Jace gets so little human contact that a few strokes to his neck left
him hard.
He’s trying to ignore it.
Kallist had no reason to know what he was doing. Not all omegas would react
like this, and Kallist thinks Jace is a beta, anyway. But his hands were warm
and callused and—safe, and he smelled so good. Jace is used to Kallist’s scent,
used to it meaning safety; he’s never reacted like this before. He hasn’t
thought about Kallist like this at all. But his shields were all down, even the
ones that he usually manages unconsciously, meaning his own senses weren’t
dulled either.
The collar puts continuous light pressure on the softest parts of his neck, the
vulnerable skin where someone could easily kill or mark him, just insistent
enough to be impossible to ignore.
It was all he could do to not let something slip. And now he can’t stop
thinking. If he’d… not begged. Asked. Asked Kallist to stay. His friend
probably would’ve. Jace could have just… swallowed his pride enough to ask for
contact. (Normal people, real people, they do that, right? They touch each
other, because they want to, without violence?) Kallist had never smelled that
good before, worn sun-warmed leather and clean sharp metal and safety. Maybe
he’d want Jace, even, if Jace asked. Maybe.
Jace wraps a hand around his cock loosely and has to stifle a scream with his
other hand. He’s barely touching himself, but he’s been hard and leaking and
trying to ignore it since Kallist got the accursed thing buckled. The shift in
angle presses the collar insistently into his throat, and Jace lets his eyes
slide shut and curls in on his side.
He tightens his grip and can’t keep from whining, presses the heel of his hand
into his mouth. Maybe Kallist would hold him by the throat, like this, gentle
but unbreakable, if Jace asked. Not enough to be sexual in and of itself—would
that still be too much? Jace strokes himself slowly, gasping into his hand.
Kallist could do more than that if he wanted, Jace thinks with a sudden
wildness. He shoves his fingers into his mouth to see if that stifles the noise
any better, imagines how Kallist’s scent would linger anywhere he touched. But
even if he took great greedy palmfuls of the skin Jace would offer him the
scent would dissipate in a few hours. That’s not enough. If Kallist marked him,
though—
Jace shudders as he comes; it leaves him spent and gasping but not finished.
He’s a sticky mess, of course, but he thinks he might be actually wet as well.
He gives his fingers one last suck and carefully reaches down, hooking a single
finger into himself though his arm strains at the angle. Jace isn’t in heat, so
that much penetration is about the high end of what he can stand, but he’s wet
enough to take it. He squirms back on his own hand, suddenly more desperate
than he is tight and oversensitive.
People like omegas. Jace knows this, academically; it’s a physiological effect.
Maybe he should tell Kallist? Maybe he’d want to. To.
He’s barely half-hard but when he tugs on his cock once, twice, finger twisting
inside himself, Jace comes again, thrashing against the bed. The aftermath
brings some level of calm. He can think.
The wash of embarrassment at the thoughts he just had about his best friend is
excruciating. In its wake, he tries to consider himself critically, emotion
aside.
That he can remember, Jace has never thought about Kallist romantically or
sexually before. Jace likes him, of course, cares for him, but that’s all.
That’s been all. He forces himself to set the shame and guilt aside and
consider it evidence. He was attracted to Kallist, and his body let him take a
finger, and… And he just came twice and could probably go again, though the
need has passed.
Fuck. Fuck. He does know what that means.
Jace will be in heat by the end of the month. If he’s lucky.
***** Chapter 3 *****
In the end Jace has about three weeks. It’s long enough to prepare somewhat,
long enough to let shame and laziness drag at him so he makes mistakes.
Long enough to figure out the collar is exactly what Jace was afraid of.
People don’t trust Jace; they barely look at him. Outside the Consortium he’s
wallpaper. Within the consortium he’s isolated by age, being a mage and a
planeswalker, and by being close to Tezzeret. People’s fear of Tezzeret rubs
off on Jace with the paradoxical kick of resentment at some teenager having
this kind of power. There are two species of reactions he overhears, for all
that Jace tries not to listen: What did he do to deserve that? and What’s he
going to do to me?
(Nothing. Jace isn’t going to do anything Tezzeret doesn’t make him. He wishes
he could tell people. He wishes it would help.)
But no one is perfect. A bartender brushes hir fingers over Jace’s knuckles and
he jerks with the shock to his neck and dumps half his glass onto the bar.
Someone in the street throws a wild punch that gets Jace in the jaw and he sits
down on the pavement, hands twitching uncontrollably. Kallist grabs his hand or
claps him on the back, and the pain stops Jace’s breath. It’s safe as long as
where people touch him is covered, and so it’s just as well that Jace feels
naked when he’s wearing less than three years; by and large it’s served him
well. He’s getting along fine.
The shadow cast on his success so far is that it means he is hurt near-
exclusively by people he (loves?) (trusts?) likes. He stops in to see Emmara
and she puts her hand on his, lightly, ungloved, and he successfully hides his
initial flinch, the growing anguish at the regular shocks when she doesn’t let
go. (Which—he doesn’t want her to, even though he wants the pain to stop. Her
hand is so soft. Jace is still mystified; do friends do this? She seems
worried.) Jace can’t tell what’s going on. She’s already always uneasy about
his work.
But Kallist. Kallist is the worst, by far. He keeps touching Jace, and now Jace
notices it more than he ever did, and he can’t tell Kallist he’s hurting him.
Jace is sure Kallist already blames himself for the collar. To tell him that
it’s hurting Jace, to tell him he’s hurting Jace—Jace can’t. He can’t.
When he’s alone Jace runs his hands over the collar, looking for a weak point,
looking for some idea of how it works. Anything. He can feel the contact plates
against his skin, smooth and evenly spaced, but the outside is just leather and
the loop and buckle have no seams. The leather is slowly worn even smoother
under Jace’s frantic, increasingly hopeless hands.
And he doesn’t know why Tezzeret is bothering. Jace doesn’t touch people.
People don’t touch Jace. It’s visible in how little impact the collar is having
at all: sometimes people brush up against him, sometimes they hit him, and Jace
has two friends in the world. That’s it. Why does Tezzeret care?
He hasn’t explained what it’s for, either. Jace has determined that the thing
is telling Tezzeret something; whenever they’re alone he’s had Jace jerk his
shirt down far enough to let Tezzeret drum the fingers of his right hand
against the collar, once, twice, and then let Jace cover himself back up.
There’s some kind of data transmission happening, Jace can almost taste it when
he’s not distracted by the tiny sympathetic sparks set off by the tapping
claws. But he doesn’t know what Tezzeret knows and he doesn’t know what he’s
planning.
The collar sits neatly just below the tops of all of Jace’s shirts, under the
collar of his cloak. It’s too comfortable, he thinks, to be coincidence. Jace
begins trying to ask Tezzeret if—when, damn it—he’s going to take it off.
In the meantime he does as he is told, and he hurts people as little as he can
within the parameters he’s given. (It isn’t much.) Jace gets better at hiding
pain. He gets better at flinching, and at pretending he isn’t. He wears the
leather around his neck smooth and the metal hardware shiny with anxious
unquiet hands.
But it’s fine. He’s fine.
===============================================================================
The ironic thing about being agonizingly aware of a given presence is that it
throws absences into sharp relief. Jace is more sensitive to touch than ever,
craves human contact more for all that it’s entwined with pain. The weight and
constriction of clothing helps; the collar helps, and isn’t that its own form
of awful. And he’s much more aware of the tiny bit of contact he gets that
doesn’t hurt.
Tezzeret doesn’t touch Jace on purpose, the way, for example, Kallist does. But
he doesn’t shy away like other people do. So there are still just—brushes—human
warmth on him, when Tezzeret’s too impatient to tell Jace how and where to move
and moves Jace himself, or when Jace knocks himself half-unconscious on the
floor, again, and Tezzeret picks him up anyway. And it doesn’t hurt. After
weeks, the absence of pain is a—figurative—shock in itself, is itself
pleasurable when it should be neutral. When Kallist or Emmara touch him Jace
has to force himself not to jerk away; when Tezzeret touches him Jace has to
stop from leaning in.
Which would be fine—it could be fine, it would—if Jace weren’t also going into
heat. He’s sure no one can tell, not even Tezzeret; after that afternoon with
Kallist, Jace worked enchantments that could support permanent illusions into
the walls of his room, his bed, and his cloak, for when the spells he does
while awake aren’t enough. So no one will ever catch him off guard again. And
his conscious illusions are up in every waking moment, so when Jace is awake no
one can tell what he is and Jace’s own senses are dulled defensively. He can
still tell Tezzeret’s an alpha, betas off the street can tell Tezzeret’s an
alpha, but it doesn’t affect him much beyond the degree to which he acts on the
knowledge alone. Nothing—embarrassing, nothing unguarded, not like what
happened with Kallist. Even when the hunger starts creeping up on him.
Jace’s body is doing all kinds of things to convince him that the incipient
heat is an excellent idea. By and large it’s backfiring. Heightened sensory
input just means spending more time cold, in pain, or both. The fear keeps his
head clear when he’s around people, lets him ignore his body. The only other
effect it has on him is reminding him why illusions are vital.
Jace knows his illusion work is good. He’s been fooling betas for as long as he
can remember (which, admittedly, isn’t that long). Alphas and other omegas are
more of a problem, both because they’re better equipped to find him and because
there’s fewer to practice on. But since the time early on when Tezzeret had
Jace upgrade the illusions until they could fool him, Jace’s control has never
slipped around him once.
By now he thinks—or at least hopes—that Tezzeret has functionally forgotten
Jace is an omega. In the absence of any sensory reminder, balancing the
abstract knowledge with the absence of stimuli when there should be something
visceral should create a mental disjunct which makes remembering unintuitive.
Jace doesn’t exactly get the inverse of that. It is perpetually, painfully
obvious that Tezzeret is an alpha; not only like he’s never bothered to hide it
(why would he, if it gives him an edge over people, Jace has thought,
experimenting with borrowing Tezzeret’s brand of logic) but like he hasn’t even
thought about it. He takes up space in a way Jace can’t understand or imitate;
Baltrice towers over Tezzeret when they’re side-by-side but never seems to
dwarf him. And it feels like his scent is everywhere in the damn compound, in
varying degrees of intensity. Or maybe it’s on Jace. Jace aggressively does not
put words to it. That would be thinking about it too much.
All in all Jace could do with being reminded of Tezzeret’s status less.
But it’s fine. Jace is fine. He keeps busy, he keeps out of trouble, he keeps
away from other people. He’s already an expert at not addressing things and
working around them; the only time the situation—collar, heat—really comes to
mind and won’t leave is when he’s alone with nothing to do. And Jace studiously
avoids that.
So only then, at the end of the day in the space before sleep, does Jace let
himself think. The inexorable force that is oncoming heat washes over him, more
intense for the day’s absence, and the anxiety that comes with it. Even
Tezzeret can’t get angry at Jace for disappearing once it hits, he’s sure
(pretty sure). Jace can just drop off the face of Ravnica.
Figuratively; planeswalking in altered states is dangerous. He should stay
somewhere that isn’t unfamiliar.
Jace adds more locks, magical and physical, while he’s refining his illusion
enchantments. Against orders, he even adds one magic layer that will open for
no one whatsoever. He stockpiles water and changes of bedding in case he has
the presence of mind to want either. And as far as preparation goes, that’s
about it. Jace will handle this like he has the few previous heats he’s dealt
with: lock himself away and get through it as quickly as he can.
The back of his mind has thoughts on what “getting through it” should entail.
Jace doesn’t really know what Ravnican omegas do to deal with heats—especially
ones without a relationship or a bond to fall back on—but this is Ravnica: if a
demand exists, someone will be selling.
So it’s late at night, near the end of the third week he’s been collared, when
it occurs to Jace that he wouldn’t have to deal with things on his own. Money
is entirely irrelevant to him at this scale. Instead of suffering alone or
violating a friendship by asking, the situation could make actual sense, an
exchange Jace can understand with someone he won’t have to see again.
He’d dismiss the idea out of hand, but contact during heats does help end them
sooner; the more physical, the more sexual, and the more sustained the better.
And Jace has no affection for the process itself, no desire to make it last
longer than necessary, no expectation that he’ll enjoy it beyond what’s
physical, momentary, and embarrassing. The sooner he can stop being useless,
the better. He can just… seek out an alpha sex worker (where—Rakdos, maybe?),
bring them back to some more rural Consortium safe house no one uses, wipe the
person’s mind of identifying details before they leave, once he has his sense
of self back.
Jace curls up on his side, lights down, feeling a sense of lightness as his
brain goes back to ruminating on imagined touches; if he doesn’t put a face to
the hands he imagines, if he pretends it’s a stranger who is actually getting
something out of touching him, some of the guilt goes away.
He’s not entirely absolved: he’d be taking advantage of anyone he hired, still,
through the difference in power between them if nothing else, and he’d have to
erase parts afterwards; Jace is unfortunately recognizable, and Tezzeret’s
enemies are his. But at least it wouldn’t be like asking—say—Kallist, someone
who’d feel they were hurting him if they said no. And there’d be some level of
renumeration for their trouble, for having to deal with the mess he knows he’ll
become.
He loses himself for a little while; any contact would be better than cold
sheets and his own hands. Only—
Jace’s blood runs cold. Only the one person who can touch him without hurting
him is, still, Tezzeret. The pain from sustained touch, with his nerves
sensitized, would be immense. He hooks a finger in the loop of his collar and
jerks to snap himself out of it, and the shame and guilt he’d avoided come down
on him fivefold.
Without looking, Jace throws up another layer of complexity on the enchantment
locks, a barely tweaked replica of the ones already on his room, then arms the
lot of them. He’s close. And he will not rope anyone else into it.
***** Chapter 4 *****
As he drifts off to sleep there’s still a point where Jace loses control of his
thoughts, and these days that inevitably means thinking about sex. It’s getting
a bit old, and he’s not even gone into heat yet. On the other hand, when he’s
in heat he won’t be able to mind, so maybe he’s getting it all out of the way
now.
Jace doesn’t really know how he’d want to be touched; eavesdropping with his
mind he’s picked up that there’s great variation in what people ask of each
other. Three-quarters unconscious and unselfconscious with it, he wonders what
he’d like. He lets himself imagine someone—faceless, guiltless—with gentle,
insistent hands, stroking down his neck until Jace goes limp enough for them to
run their other hand up the inside of his thigh, parting his legs softly but
inexorably. Maybe they’d make him beg for them to go further than leaving
fingertips at the join between his leg and hip, still stroking the back of his
neck so his pleas are barely coherent.
But someone touching his neck would run into the collar. And the collar—
Jace’s sense memory shocks him, violent and sharp as if to make up for the
delay. He whines and flinches, but at some point he must have slipped into
sleep, because he can’t make the now disorientingly soft contact stop. Jace
feels tears start in his eyes. He can’t move his lips, so he tries to shout
with his mind, Please, please make it stop, please it hurts.
The hands disappear and Jace sobs with relief. A single hand replaces them, its
owner’s motions much sharper and more purposeful. But they don’t hurt. That’s
the important part. Jace lets himself be examined, manhandled into a more
exposed position, their hand stroking his cock just enough times to make him
whimper at the loss when they move on. Two fingers test how wet he is, how
open, how close to a proper heat. He doesn’t open his eyes.
Then something long and hard and cold is inside him, and it moves once and Jace
is coming, finally, the stranger stroking him through it.
Even in his sleep, orgasm means a moment of clarity, a brief reprieve from the
crushing tide of hormones his body subjects him to. The evidence clicks; he
resists it. He realizes the new person has a scent and that he knows what it
is, and he wants that to be enough to kill his desire, to let him wake up.
Instead he’s squirming down on his imaginary Tezzeret’s fingers in short order,
and his other hand closes over Jace’s neck like he’s known how wretchedly
sensitive Jace is there all along. His metal hand adds another finger—two?
three?—and Jace pants through the impossible stretch, can’t still his hips and
can’t make himself want to. It doesn’t hurt, now, still; it’s not Jace’s hands
and it doesn’t hurt, and that’s enough to make it suffocatingly, inconceivably
good.
Warm, human fingers trace the divide between Jace’s collar and his neck, and he
tries to arch into them, his whole body humming. Tezzeret’s hand moves upward,
slipping into Jace’s mouth, and more than anything Jace is caught with a wash
of gratitude that he’s been given something to do. He licks, hollows his
cheeks, and when Tezzeret adds another finger and pulls his hand away to
flatten his palm on Jace’s throat the sensation’s too much, it’s too much, and
his mouth goes lax as he comes, gasping for air that’s not entirely there.
On top of it all, the dominating sensation is still the lack of pain. Jace
didn’t know that the absence of pain could be a sensation. Dream-Jace has
forgotten how to be anything but grateful for it.
===============================================================================
When Jace wakes up he changes his sheets and hates himself. On the other hand,
he has the presence of mind to hate himself; the heat’s held off for one more
day. Two thoughts war in his head: if anyone knows their dreams aren’t their
fault, it should be the telepath; but if anyone can control their dreaming
self, it should be Jace. He strikes a bargain with himself that he’ll learn how
as soon as he can.
He wonders briefly if it wasn’t a dream, then dismisses it. None of his wards
have been tripped, he can’t conceptualize a reason why Tezzeret would want him
anyway, and even if he did Jace cannot imagine Tezzeret staying silent that
long, especially if Jace himself were nonverbal.
Jace drops the wards on his door that go against orders and dresses with
shaking hands. It’s mere luck that Tezzeret’s the first person to look at
him—people he passes in the hallways look studiously away—and snap that Jace
should do his shirt up; he’d left his collar in plain view.
Jace is still fidgeting with it during Tezzeret’s actual debrief, since it
gives him something better to do than look at Tezzeret (considering Jace’s
night) or Baltrice (considering she’s Baltrice). He’s having trouble focusing.
The warm haze in his head is starting to bleed into the day. So when Baltrice
snaps he doesn’t know what she’s reacting to.
“Boss, you want me to do what?” she says, making an abrupt gesture with her
hand.
Neither of them are paying enough attention, and Jace stands at her elbow
height; her knuckles crack against Jace’s face, her enough—though at a fraction
of her strength—to make him wobble on his feet.
The hard, bright pain from her hand mixes with the immediate shock, cool and
sharp, and Jace feels his cock stiffen in his pants.
“Fuck, I’m sorry,” Baltrice says. “I did not actually mean to do that.” There’s
an unspoken for once, or maybe this time. Jace is barely listening, still
buzzing with pain.
And, apparently, with something other than pain.
Shit.
***** Chapter 5 *****
The heat takes him that night.
Jace has only been in heat a couple times before, little enough that when he
wakes up somewhere between midnight and the early morning he doesn’t
immediately know what’s going on. His mind is foggy and his skin feels like
it’s on fire, but when he throws off the covers the shock of cold hurts. Jace
scrambles to wrap himself up again, shivering pathetically.
At first he thinks he’s sick. But other than the burning chill, he feels fine.
He tries to stretch out, preparing to stand up, but when his thighs rub
together he gasps and goes still. He’s evident so wet that he’s been leaking,
leaving the backs of his thighs and between his legs sticky and damp. Even
alone, it’s humiliating.
Without really thinking about it, though, he’s rubbing two fingers against
himself, some animal part of his brain assessing how easily they slide before
he forces them inside his body. Jace is in heat and he has small hands besides;
it’s not enough. He manages three, then four, and that does hurt, but the
stretch makes up for what he’s missing in length and angle somewhat. If he
could get his hand in up to the wrist, though. That might be enough, but it
feels impossible. He shoves the four fingers as deep as he can, unshaped noises
falling out of his mouth, and spreads them—a spark of pain, a spark of
pleasure, there’s no real difference—then curls them in on themselves,
wondering if he can at least hit his prostate and—
There. He comes, technically. Jace barely feels it. Orgasm means he stops
breathing for an instant, muscles seizing and then relaxing involuntarily; more
of him’s sticky in a way that’s sort of abstractly unpleasant, and a tiny bit
of mental clarity comes back. It does nothing for the howling need inside him,
which, Jace knows from experience, is only going to get worse. He can smell his
own desperation, already, on every inhale, his body trying to signal to any
human who’s breathing that someone should fuck him.
But he can think, if only a little. Jace clumsily adds to the cocoon of
illusions surrounding him, makes himself outright invisible. There’s no time to
check his work. Hopefully it holds. He pulls his fingers out resentfully,
cursing involuntary and heartfelt, and rolls over, and starts to think about
another set of illusions much more carefully.
The way Jace sees it, there are four kinds of illusions. They can be made to
produce something that isn’t there or to obscure what is, and they can exist
outside the mind so the senses take in false information organically or reach
directly into a single mind and provide direct stimulus. Jace needs practice at
veiling what is and at direct neural stimulation, it’s why his last illusion in
case anyone should still make it into the room probably wouldn’t hold up well.
And when he’s in his right mind, Jace has a healthy caution against testing
magic on himself. But he’s not in his right mind, and maybe…
Jace does his best to focus, and reaches inside his brain. If he can just…
skirt around the kinds of things that happened in his dream.
What does Jace want?
He wavers. The vulgar fact is that Jace’s body wants to be fucked and filled
with come for as long as humanly, physically possible. But what does Jace want?
He toys with sensations, somewhat disconnected from the fact that entertaining
ideas alone is leaving him panting. The only animate things he’s had inside
himself are fingers; he doesn’t feel up to doing more than drawing on that. But
he can give himself a hand on his inner thigh, parting his legs and exposing
him. Another hand rubbing at his rim, not anywhere near enough, just toying
with him while he whines, unable to collect the words to beg. An imagined
someone touches his cock, in feather-light strokes.
Jace pauses.
That’s three hands.
Oh.
It’s hard to want things for himself. But he can conceptualize people wanting
something from him; and so, with a mental stretch, he can imagine being wanted.
Jace has the anonymous hands blindfold him, hold him down—no violence, no
unneeded force, just preventing him from moving any way they don’t want him
to—and wander over his body. Warm, rhythmic motions on his neck make him go
limp, while the owner of the first pair of hands finally gets a finger inside
him. They stroke and curl like they’re trying to get Jace off on as little as
that alone.
He mewls, a soft high noise, and in response there are fingers tracing his lips
delicately. The contact makes him shiver. The hand at the back of his neck
disappears, then gets a finger into the loop of his collar and jerks him
forward. Jace’s mouth opens in a gasp and is immediately filled with two
fingers, which start thrusting—in, out, in, out, getting his lips warm with
friction and slick with spit. The single finger inside him just twists.
Jace isn’t keeping track of the sounds he’s making; they’re no one’s concern
but his own, and he doesn’t care to know. He can feel himself vocalize, though,
from moans to whines to futile attempts at words, the sound caught in his
throat, vibrating against his collar and the fingers fucking his mouth.
Suddenly two more fingers are inside him. The angle feels—wrong, somehow, how
independently they’re moving. Thrust in, twist, scissor out; a regular pattern,
but out of sync with the first one—
His face goes hot. More so, anyway. There are two people inside him,
testing—well. Testing how he’d feel to fuck, too impatient to wait turns.
Jace’s mental crowd have been awfully patient so far, overall; maybe they share
that opinion, wanting to actually get themselves inside him. A third person
could probably fit a finger more, while a fourth would be stuck rubbing where
the other digits disappear inside him.
And much of him is unexploited yet: hands raking nails across his ribs, toying
with his nipples, pulling his legs further up and apart. Someone could hook a
finger into the corner of his mouth to force it wider, so the two fingers there
can turn into three and the thrusts can be almost brutal, like—simulating the
real thing is still daunting, though now he wants it—like someone actually
fucking his face. (There’s a kind of pretension there, that a part of him not
meant for sex, not meant to be penetrated is still there for someone’s
pleasure; he should hate it; he shivers.)
With a dozen hands, Jace wrings orgasm after orgasm out of himself, driving
himself further into heat; each is slightly stronger, the spike in pleasure
actually noticeable, until his body has nothing left to give. He’s absurdly
wet, his face is marked by spit and tears, and he’s exhausted.
Jace falls into mercifully dreamless sleep.
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