Disclaimer: These characters do not belong to me.

Blackwood is writing a letter. To whom, Coward doesn't know; nor does he particularly care at the moment, because he is on his knees, and when he is on his knees all he can think about is the man who puts him there, time after time, and hooks himself deeper inside his chest each time so that he always comes back begging for more.

Kneeling at Blackwood's feet, Coward waits, and opens his mouth for his fingers whenever they come near. Sometimes Blackwood feeds him slices of fruit; his head is too clouded to identify it, but it is sweet and rich and velvet on his tongue, cuts the taste of lust and makes his mouth water. Other times, Blackwood simply gives Coward his empty fingers dripping with the juice of the fruit, and he sucks them clean and burns for more.

Other times still it is Blackwood's fingers, and his fingers alone; the taste of his skin fills Coward, clean and dizzying. He holds them in his mouth and keeps them warm and wet, works his tongue around them until his jaw aches a little. Blackwood pulls them out with a slick pop and pets the side of Coward's face, leaving wet streaks upon his cheek.

Coward pants, a sodden noise that breaks the still air, and twitches at the sound of his own need. Blackwood does not look up from his paper, but a smirk tilts his lips, and the sight brings blood to Coward's cheeks, burns through him like an inferno. Makes him need more.

Sometimes, when they do this, Blackwood leaves Coward alone in that room while he goes elsewhere to finish his work, leaves him hungry and waiting and lost in his tumultuous want, leaves him pinned like an insect by the memory of Blackwood's cool eyes, leaves him until the moment when Blackwood returns and it is like a blast of wind stirring the dead stillness of the room. When Blackwood is there Coward sees only him, and when he is gone it is barely different; the difference is, perhaps, alike the one between fixing his eyes upon the sun, and knowing that anything else is visible only through the light it casts. Blackwood is the sun to him, and sometimes he leaves to remind Coward of it, and comes back to sear him with the fact of his existence.

This time Blackwood is kinder. With a flourish he writes his last word, and sets everything aside. Motions Coward forward with two fingers, and it's all the command he needs (no, not a command, a release), and he scrambles forward on his knees, falls toward Blackwood until his face hits Blackwood's clothed thigh, and he nuzzles him blindly, mouth working hungry and open, until Blackwood frees his cock and draws Coward onto it by a hand fisted tightly in his hair. Coward's hands are clenched uselessly at his sides, and he rocks off-balance as Blackwood pushes himself into his mouth, draws out, stoppers Coward's breath again with his relentless, smooth thrusts, and Coward swallows the taste of him and only wants more.

"What wouldn't you give me?" Blackwood says with a voice curling ragged at the edges, a look of dark wonder in his eyes like a boy burning ants to see what he can do with his own two hands, and Coward thinks that if there's an answer to that question, neither one of them has found it yet.

Coward is never afraid when he is in Blackwood's bed; not when Blackwood lays an arm across his throat and pushes the breath slowly out of him; not when he has a knife tracing exploratory lines across Coward's skin; not even when Blackwood comes to him in a visible, icy fury at the blindness of the world around him, and says in a quiet voice like broken glass, "I'll leave you bleeding tonight."

Coward wonders if it's because he is wrong inside, somehow, so that he has no limits to speak of, so that he would let Blackwood kill him, even, and still not fear him for a moment. He also wonders if it isn't that Blackwood is watching just as carefully as Coward; he wonders, if he ever were afraid, if Blackwood would simply stop in his tracks and never go that far again. He wonders because after Blackwood tells him, "I'll leave you bleeding tonight," he waits, struck still like stone, and doesn't move until Coward bows his head in the wordless consent he has never once withdrawn.

He wonders until Blackwood tells him, one day. Blackwood tells him that he enjoys leaving fear in his wake, enjoys the looks it draws to him, enjoys the power in which it cloaks him; but he does enjoy like fear in his bed. It is unsubtle, he says, undistinguished. (Unnecessary, Coward thinks, when he has never once needed a threat to wish to do Blackwood's bidding.)

Implicit in Blackwood's words is that if Coward were afraid of Blackwood, this would stop; and maybe the reason this has continued for so long is that Coward has seen more of Blackwood than anyone else has been shown, and the word no has yet to cross his lips.

(Coward knows it never will.)

He goes to his knees for Blackwood and will do so a thousand times more, but he is no less his equal for it; he knows it and Blackwood knows it, and it's what makes him invaluable: his loyalty is not the blind, meaningless loyalty of those who know nothing of Blackwood. He knows everything, and here he is: willing, loyal, possessed.

This is Coward's place; his to guard jealously, his to protect, his to fill. His to keep.

With a hand on the back of Coward's neck Blackwood might own him, but Coward—

Coward is the ear into which Blackwood drips his plotting words; the steadfast gun at his side; the hand ever-ready to do his bidding; the one to whom he comes when he is weary, ill, furious, and Coward takes whatever Blackwood might give him because he can, because it is his right; and Blackwood trusts no one, he says, but he sleeps in Coward's bed without stirring, even as Coward's fingers lay across Blackwood's throat where he could kill him before he awakens; and Blackwood fucks him until he sobs helplessly for more, but Blackwood also fucks him until Blackwood is shaking and shaking, and when he finishes inside Coward, Coward draw his hand to his cock and whispers please and I need you and does everything else he can to piece Blackwood back together again.

Coward is not the only one possessed.

"I would kill you before you ever left me," Blackwood says one night, testing, hard, honest in a way he most likely does not mean to reveal; it's designed to frighten, perhaps, to remind Coward that Blackwood is at heart dangerous, like a wild animal with the cunning to cloak itself and bide its time.

It also says that, whether or not Blackwood wishes it, Coward has sliced his way into Blackwood's being as surely and as permanently as he could ever want.

Coward reaches out, draws Blackwood's hand toward him, and fits it around his own throat. His pulse beats quick in the way Blackwood always causes, out of excitement and never fear; he knows Blackwood can feel it against his fingers, Coward's life resting in his hand, and Coward promises him, "If I ever leave you, it will be because I am already dead."

-Fin-