Bane had not seen the Lady Talia for days; her duties as Queen kept her busy, he knew, but this seemingly minor separation had a strange hollow feeling to it, a guilty relief and simultaneous regret. Truth be told, Bane would normally have haunted Talia's suite until he caught a glimpse of her, or had a moment's excuse to converse. He had simply... somehow... neglected to do this, forgotten to spend time hurting over her, in the urgency and excitement of his new preoccupation.
He felt certain that he should be consumed with guilt when he saw her at last; after all, he had spent decades within a few coins' reach of any number of whores, within a careless word's grasp of lovers and brief dalliances, and not one of them had truly tempted him. Though he was far beyond the regret and loathing of the Pit, he had near convinced himself that he had a true distaste for the pleasures of the flesh. Only Talia still held any attraction for him, a temptation so far removed from his body that it allowed him to separate himself into the fiercely-denied physical self and the longing, powerful emotional self- the selves that John had begun to draw back together.
And there was the crux of the matter. What he felt for Talia was pure, crystalline, sharp as a razorblade and distant as a star; what he felt for John was immediate and tangible, physical as hunger and- gods, he hardly dared admit it to himself- it moved him in his soul, left him longing, felt like the comradeship of battle and the safety of home at once.
He had no name for it, but it consumed him, and so when he saw the Lady Talia rounding the corner ahead of him- loose-clad and wimpled- the breath fell out of him like the load from a broken cart and he remembered a whole week's worth of suffering at once.
"My lady," he said, and though decorum called for him to bow his head, he stood stricken in the hall and stared at her, lips parted against the steel and leather that bound his face.
"My knight," said Talia, and she tilted her head and smiled at him, the smile that was only ever his. "How fare you, and your men?"
"Very well, my lady," replied Bane, and hesitated for a moment before plunging on: "I have seen little of you, these few days."
"We must meet soon, and speak over a private dinner," said Talia. "I have missed you, Bane."
A private dinner, a meal without eavesdropping ears? "And I have missed you, Talia." There had been other things he wanted to ask her, things that required discretion, things he hoped he could remember before Talia could summon him to her chambers to break bread— things that had utterly slipped his mind now, lost in the complex and smoke-sweet beauty of her face.
She moved to brush past him, and her scent trailed over him. Once he would have taken in her scent, her exhaled breath, and tasted it on his lips for hours; now, though, he was a changed man, a man who had felt his flesh on another's, a man with newborn vestiges of confidence in circles beyond those of killing. It was with the memory of John's pliant skin that he raised his hand to grasp Talia's upper arm, a simple and honest gesture, nothing strange between friends who had shared a ratty blanket for years in a dark prison; but now his palm hungered for the knowledge of herskin, and she stumbled at his touch and half-pulled away, half-fell before he caught her.
There was a shape to her clothing, an unexpected dimension, a pillowed addition at her middle, and it took him a moment to realize that Talia had padded her belly to counterfeit pregnancy. Of course she had; she was several months behind schedule in producing a child, and the scheme—
Already she feigned a gravid womb, and had no lover to plant his seed? Surely she could not be so foolish. Even between newly married couples longing for a child, the space between vows and conception sometimes rolled on for several months. She would already be seeking a father for her child if she… if she…
But Talia caught her feet, a deep flush in her cheeks, and swept past him without a word, leaving him to realize at last that he would never have been the father of her child, that she had already chosen another and was content with her choice, and that in this— as in all things— he had been her fool. He pictured John, wry lips and almond eyes adoring him unstintingly, and he knew that in the thousands of touches between himself and his manservant-enemy there had never been a hurt that stung this deep.
The day passed in a sick haze, a nausea of the spirit. Bane finished his supervision of the yard, watched his men beat and block each other with staves and swords, stalked the armory and terrified its inhabitants, and finally locked himself into his billet with a pile of leather strops and every edged weapon from the armory with even a hint of the twinkle that betrayed an edge out of true. For the rest of the afternoon he worked, while his mind broke itself upon the things that no strop or steel could put straight again.
The scent of John had worked its way into every plane and crevice of Bane's room, sweat and milk-lye soap and the linen-page savor of his skin. Bane could smell him through even the metal of his mask, could imagine the salt and sweet of him even though he had never truly tasted; there seemed to be no place in himself to hide from the way John's throat moved, from the fractional inclines of John's mouth and the meanings behind each subtle degree.
He had come here to ponder Talia's actions and motives, to begin the painful process of burning and cutting her from his heart, and instead he discovered that she had begun to diminish in his mind to a girl again, a small sweet friend he had protected for nearly twenty years. The corners of his mind where once he had treasured the flicker of leafy sunshine in her curls and the milky curve of her shoulder had changed, taken hard shapes of muscle and graceful patterns of straight dark hair, had become John. Vivid memories replaced the imagined ones, images with sounds and textures to match them, the certainty of John's regard and trust uprooting tremulous hopes from misinterpreted smiles.
And where Talia remained, she was no longer a temptation and an object of bittersweet longing; she was a girl, a young woman with a sweet smile and a vicious mind, a child quick to kill and quicker to lie, never counting the cost of deception and destruction to her own soul. She was young, Bane realized, for all that she had slain her bridegroom and taken his kingdom; she was of an age where young men still carry their first beards and their first loves. Below the disguised surface of her, dark and yawning depths opened, hungry for sun and choked beneath the placid green lawn of water-weeds.
If she had felt the need to lie to Bane, her oldest friend, there must be no person left to whom she could tell the truth. The decisions she made now were world-changing ones, with thousands of lives at stake, and who advised her? Had he abandoned her after all, in his pursuit of a dream? Was she alone?
The sound of a hand at the latch roused him, and John opened the door to find him sitting in near-darkness, surrounded by flawlessly honed weaponry and thin-scraped leather shreds.
"Bane," said John, worry in his voice.
"It's nothing," replied Bane, but his throat felt thick and rusted.
"Nothing enough to drive you through three days' work without stoking the brazier at all?" John closed the door behind him and stripped off his shirt as he crossed to the brazier. The smell of him flooded the air, chasing away thought and memory and Talia's strangeness in his mind. For a moment there was relief, the return of something right to this small world, and then growing grieving rage. How dare he, this upstart hedge-knight spy? How could he come into Bane's home and tear away and replace everything he held dear, and kiss him and touch him and never ask to be kissed in return even though his eyes were filled with it? How darehe displace Talia in his dreams, make his flesh a hungry beast where once it was an obedient tool, leave Bane wanting to expose the ruin of his mouth and feel skin against it and hope that the look in John's eyes would be untempered by disgust?
It hurt too much, it hurt him to standing and through the bull's-charge to seize John by the shoulders and it hurt him into a roaring wordless groan as he crushed John into the wall, narrowly missing the brazier and leaving John's feet dangling off the floor.
"You did this," rasped Bane, "you mademe this way, and I can't— I can't—"
John didn't reply, but his breath came in gasps, and his lips parted as if to make words. The tautness of his shoulders and the grip of his forearms on Bane's biceps spoke of fear and long training against danger, but his wary eyes said: trust, I trust you.
"Take off my mask," said Bane, and when John did not immediately comply he crushed his body into him, ground his hips against John's until he felt a hardening response, and he repeated: "Take it off of me, gods damn you—"
John's fingers were quick, and he managed to unbuckle half of it before he remembered that there should be some way to give a dose of numbing medicine, but Bane dodged his attempts with a snarl. "I want to feelit," hissed Bane, and John went back to unbuckling with trembling hands, and after only a few more moments the mask peeled away and clattered to the floor.
John exhaled, and his breath shuddered across Bane's lips, hypersensitive between the numb ribbons of scar. "Do you feel it," murmured John, and Bane's mouth took his, tasting salt skin and faintly dry lips and startled movement as John's lips took the shape of a syllable. No, mouthed Bane; he knew what came next, horror and embarrassment and withdrawal and shame, and all he wanted now was the length and the depth of this kiss, to drown out for a moment what would follow after. He mouthed the line of John's lower lip, feeling scars catch roughly on the fullest part, feeling his skin draw and pucker as he followed that shifting slope and found the place where it melted into wet-soft mouth. John opened for him, and he pushed in blindly, desperately, curling his tongue to trace the vault of John's palate, feeling the breath rush from John's nostrils across his cheek and feeling his own familiar groans rising through his chest. And John let him, and John yielded to him, and John met him and fought back and took in return, and nothing had ever hurt this much, not the wounds of battle nor Talia's lies nor the growing stabs of agony that racked him now, alone and bare without his mask.
He felt the kiss ending the way a drowning man feels his last breath escape. He braced himself for pity, for loathing, for John's eyes to drop away from his own; but as John pulled back from the kiss, though his bruised red mouth quivered, his gaze held Bane's, fierce and afraid at once.
Bane was not accustomed to keeping close watch over his mouth; it was hidden from most, no need to disguise his thoughts, and every shift in his expression felt naked under John's eyes. And still, even while John traced the lines and corrugations of Bane's face, no hint of condescension appeared in those almond eyes, not even the shadow of distaste. Something softened in John's face, and then John's hand rose and his thumb trailed over Bane's lips, smearing the faint traces of the kiss.
"Hells," said John, voice glowing and broken, "saints, my gods, I do love you."
The script of Bane's imagining did not exist here. He knew he should say something in return, but everything around him seemed to be collapsing, and he let John slide down from tiptoes to the flat of his feet and staggered backward toward his cot. Knives of pain raced up his spine, each piercing deeper than the last; an oppressive reeling hum closed in from all sides.
He knew this feeling, though he had thought it long dead: fear, fear of loss and fear of isolation, fear of new dark beautiful things with unimaginable dangers and difficulties lying within. He had been loved, as a soldier loves his commander, as a child loves her protector; he had never been loved like this, and it terrified him to his bones.
"Talia does not love me," he began, intending to say a hundred other things, but his tongue lay stricken in his mouth. Talia did not love him, and he was free to love and be loved, and nothing had ever been so right or so painful.
And yet John's face twisted as he spoke, unreadable. "No," he agreed, "she does not," and he looked away, fixing his eyes upon the mask where it lay, half under John's unused cot.
Will you kiss me again, Bane wanted to say, and I will never hurt you if I can help it, and I have been a fool. But he hurt so much that his breath came in gasps and his ribs seared him with each gasp, and he felt his consciousness crumbling like an undermined wall.
John was beside him now, crouched over him, cradling his head; the comfort of touch and the comfort of steel, the mask closing over his face and the astringency of medication tingling in his throat. The pain receded, leaving the shaking aftermath of adrenaline in his veins, and he found himself lying across John's thighs, still cradled against John's slim forearm, and those dark eyes looking down at him.
"Are you all right," said John; his palm smoothed across Bane's chest, and Bane caught him by the wrist and tackled him to the bed.
Now he felt keenly the absence of kissing; his mouth opened uselessly against his mask, lips seeking soft flesh instead of steel, and finding only their familiar prison. And John, too, kissed his mask and breathed through it and groaned, frustrated and longing. They moved this way, skin gliding against skin, looking for some way to get closer than lips could take them; but there was no replacement, not even when John pulled back to fix him with a tentative, vulnerable, questioning look, not even as John took up the armor-oil and opened himself, fingers probing and stretching while Bane rutted against his belly and groaned and hoped and feared.
Then Bane took him, slid inside of him with a slow careful push, and John lay widespread and utterly naked before him, breathing shallow and fast, borne almost to the edge of his bearing by this most intrusive touch. And Bane held himself still and steady, too afraid to move, too afraid that he would spend himself and bare his soul and speak the words that echoed behind his lips.
At last they accommodated one another, the moment of crisis withdrawn past the threshold of movement, and gently Bane rocked into John, letting himself ride and crest each swell of pleasure. John, for his part, yielded beautifully, moaned and hissed and arched beneath him, matching him stroke for stroke until they both strove against each other like wrestlers, savage and distraught in their pursuit of pleasure.
John was the first to succumb, pleading wordlessly even while Bane caught his length in one hand and worked him to helpless climax; he curled inward as he came, as if protecting his heart, and the convulsion of him around Bane's cock brought him to the point of crisis as well, and he shuddered as he spilled into John's depths, biting his half-numbed tongue until it bled to prevent himself from saying the things that would leave him completely vulnerable.
And if his mouth tasted of blood afterward, there was no other who could taste his mouth or see the streaks of red, with his mask to protect him; with John curled to his chest and trembling as if in tears, there was no one to see if Bane's own eyes shone and if his tears fell to seep below the edges of the leather straps. He was alone, even with John against his skin and leaking his seed onto their shared bed; but he was safe, with no lips to steal his secrets from his own breath.
