Rings

1x3

His Master is a virgin; or rather, the human boy who is becoming himself and his Master is a virgin; and he does not want to die like this.

The black tooth of that damned stone pulses just under his skin, and Zoisite can feel it cold beneath the surface when he runs his hands down his Master's chest, power pulsing like the distant touch of a silky black flower. Every time he sees it, his heart wrenches, an angry fist on the bass notes, a wrong chord. He's dying. He's dying before his eyes.

His mind, Zoisite thinks, must be slipping and sliding, grating this way and that, catching again and again on the Princess--and every time it does his Master's groans of pain are like knives through him, and he can feel the whisper of black magic draining away another mouthful of his life, and it passes over his skin and raises goosebumps and he can never catch it.

He had not been particularly afraid in lifetimes. Not with the castle ceiling caving in upon him. Not spiraling into death the first time, nor any of the rest. Certainly not in battle, or enduring Beryl's torture. But now--

He wants to tell him he isn't going to die. But the stone beats there like a new heart, and he cannot lie to his Master. So he just locks the door against Beryl's prying human shadow, and it's a strange dance, so strange, and painful, because his Master remembers, he can tell, remembers every step, but has never before walked them, and he is dying, and his own heart is dying with him, a crack more towards broken every minute. And Zoisite has spent countless millennia wanting this, more than anything in the world, but not even knowing why, or how, or with who, but wanting so hard that the first sight of the perfectly familiar figure in the tuxedo had shattered--everything he thought he was.

He, here now, is not the Master he remembers. He's thinner, very morose, no swordsman's callus on his hand, circumcised, and the barenaked head of his cock alarms Zoisite in ways he cannot name. And he does not command him with the same power, and he shakes with virgin nerves when he touches him, shakes his head when he hesitates. "Go ahead," he whispers. "Fuck me, please." I don't want to die a virgin.

Zoisite lies back along the bed--and just being here again, naked beneath his Master, makes his eyes water--and guides him down atop him, and his Master groans as he sinks down slowly on his cock, almost painfully tight, and it's one long strange blinding pleasure in the mad night in the Kingdom.

His Master has an odd look upon his face, contemplative, even as he shakes with the pain of a virgin.

"I remember," he says, at length, and stills his shuddering attempts to move and just sits there impaled upon him. "I was...riding you like this, once, long ago." He runs his hands down Zoisite's arms, and Zoisite pants at his touch, because he wants it so much it hurts. "You were chained to my bed with silver rings. There was a scarf tied round your eyes. There was a ring..." He doesn't say it, but wraps thumb and middle finger round the base of his cock and balls, and there's a puzzled look on his face which means he doesn't understand why, and then he gives a little whimper and a tug. "And--this seems like the most important thing in the world, I don't know why..." He lets go of his cock, hesitantly brings his hand to touch the base of Zoisite's throat. "There was a ring round your neck."

"You had it made for me, in secret," Zoisite whispers. "It locked shut, and you kept the key, and it would be hidden under my uniform, so only you and the Shitennou knew what I was to you. It--I lost it. When I died. It didn't come with me."

The sound that lock had made when it closed, silvery steel around his throat forever, was etched into his memory. The weight of it at the base of his neck, the way it tugged if he was leashed by it, exactly how he would spin the lock to the back and fold his jacket over it.

"But why?" his Master asks, now, the circumcised boy atop him with hands too smooth to be those that had collared him. "Why did I--own you?"

Zoisite closes his eyes for a moment, because the mere fact that his Master has to ask this hurts more than anything else in his life.

"Because I loved you."