Disclaimer: Ronin Warriors is not mine but they have my love.
Title: A Myth Hides Behind a Mask
Author: Melee
Warnings: Implied sex, yaoi, het, general vagueness of plot and setting. Also, I will probably continue to change the title several more times.
Summary: A fantasy alterverse in which Rowen searches for a lost friend and mythical creatures surround him.
Notes: This is so AU as to be unrecognizable. Because she's charming, the 'Wolf' chapter is for faceless, who didn't give up until I gave in. I am intensely embarrassed to have done so.
Wolf
"I'm not a whore."
The lord shifted on the bed at the quiet declaration, rolling onto his back to lift his head curiously, dazed by sleep. The sun through a gap in the curtains threatened to blind him. "You?" he murmured. "Are you sure? Present circumstances would seem to indicate – "
"I wasn't. Not before this," the dark voice corrected itself. "You had no right to do... this to me."
Now the lord did sit up, silk sheets falling away from skin that was not so soft as it looked. Pushing a hand through the midnight sky of his hair, he peered into the corner, always the same corner, and lifted his eyebrows curiously. "I can't think of any other reason you would have been where I found you."
Blue eyes widened at being discovered, bright and accidentally stunning under a head of dark hair. A sun-browned face jerked away from the gaze of the older man in the bed. "I... don't remember, but it had to be something else."
"Are you going to stay there?" the lord asked, rising. Sheets fell back, leaving a tall, pale man standing on the cold wood floor. The young man in the corner blushed, as he did every day, but his eyes flickered over the scars on leg and back, tracing the lines of the body until finally rising to the small crossed mark under the lord's eye.
"Perhaps it was something else," the lord agreed amiably, pulling a robe over his nakedness. He walked past the long ling of tall, curtained windows to the dresser that blocked the young man into the corner, splashing his face with the water in the basin. He could see his companion watching him at the corners of his vision warily, and he winked at his reflection, showing a sharp white smile.
"I'm going to leave today," his companion whispered.
The smile cracked into a frown, teeth still bared grotesquely in an inhuman snarl. "Leave?" the lord repeated carefully.
"I'm not a prisoner. You can't make me stay – " The lord bent down, hitting him across the face. The dark young man who might as well have been a boy next to the centuries his elder had seen would not look into the lord's furious amber eyes.
"You? Leave?" the lord demanded. "If you get cold, you'll catch a chill that almost kills you! If you get wet, it's the same. You breathe that dusty, dirty air outside this house, and you'll cough until you haven't enough air in your lungs to think."
He could see the fury in the young man's face, even as he turned it away from the man who had struck him. The young man reached out to pull the curtains back from the last window, revealing the courtyard of the manor in the late morning light. "Why do I have to stay like this?"
"You," the lord replied angrily, "are too young and too human to be here for any reason other than the one for which I brought you here." The other swallowed, blinking quickly, but he said nothing. The lord made a sharp, disgusted sound in his throat. "I would never have asked for a prostitute on her deathbed if it weren't for your eyes. Remember that."
"I'm not a woman!"
"When you live in a wizard's house, it is best not to lay such an obvious challenge before his friends," the lord advised, his anger softened by the sight of the eyes that had first caught his attention a year ago, even as they snapped with fury. "I think," he said, tilting his head back while he regarded a creature that he found beautiful with open calculation, "that I am glad you don't remember."
The fury died, the eyes now startled. The young man drew an arm across his chest, for modesty or for fear. The pale, soft fabric of the shirt on his wrists was striking next to his caramel skin. "What?" he asked.
The lord went to his knees on the edges of the blankets that had been piled in this, his captive lover's favorite corner. Though every day, it seemed, he swore to force the young man to come to him. "I like believing that you have only ever been mine," he said.
The young man snorted, looking away sullenly from the older man who was something more than a man. He was shivering with their nearness. The lord laughed. "And your disgust is your fire. I would not do without it." He leaned forward suddenly breathing against the other's lips in a practiced tease.
The maybe-once-a-whore, a young man of fired eyes and fragile health threw himself towards the pale demon that had found him, fevered and dying in a house of prostitution and brought him to a world above that of men, tasting lips and a mouth that were as familiar as anything in a life that was missing its true memories. He tightened an arm around the other's neck as if he meant pull his captor down indiscreetly before the tall courtyard window and let the world bear witness. The lord let the robe fall from his back, flicking it away, the young man trailing a hand down his chest and past his stomach.
Afterwards, when the curtains had been closed and the other had lost his garments in turn, the lord pulled back, releasing a soft breath against his human's neck. "I see that you like me anyway," he murmured, satisfied to have confirmed something he already knew.
The young man dropped his eyes in embarrassment, avoiding the confident gaze of the wolf, but the demon – or was it a god? – had seen the hidden smile. "I wish this world were not too rich for your heart," it said to the mortal creature beneath its arms, "for your lungs, for your blood, and every part that is a thing of your humanity. I wish that I were a lord over men instead of myth, that I could not run over ground and through forest as easily as any beast you have ever known, but I cannot be what I am not."
He hesitated, reluctant. The cloth that his lover had gathered at the corner under the window was soft beneath his arms, and the skin against his own was warm with perpetual fever. He worried that if he left the brightly colored room for as long as an immortal might consider brief, he would return to find this frail creature he had so carefully trapped finally succumbed to the weight of the ancient magic that is the nature of the places that belong to creatures of myth.
But there was nothing for it. "I am leaving you for today," he said.
Now the young man beneath him took his turn to demand in anger, "Leave?"
"I need to attend my wife," the lord explained. He said it lightly, but he gripped the discarded robe in a tight fist and wouldn't meet the young man's eyes.
"Is she – "
" – human?" He smiled fiercely. "No, but not wolf either. I'll be back, always. I... dislike dragons."
Someone knocked at the great oak door. The lord of wolves pulled back from the warmth of the corner, pulling the robe over himself again. With a flick of his hand, he covered the human in a fold of the cloth that had cushioned them in what for a time had seemed an act of love. He felt the sun against his back suddenly. The young man behind him had opened the curtains, detaching himself from the life of his keeper watching the beauty of the forest that lay beyond the house.
The lord beckoned to whatever waited in the hall. The door opened, and an animal that few have ever seen entered, seemingly human. "The lord of the house advises you that your lady is arriving," it said.
Then the wizard's delicate servant paused, feathers brushed with gold shifting over its shoulders. It stared into the center of the room at nothing at all, overlooking with professional detachment the indiscretion that curled against the window, wrapped in verdant cloth, a hand raised to the glass in fond desire for freedom.
"Will you be receiving her?" it asked. "If not, the wizard will send her to you... here." The blond animal's failure to look pointedly at the wolf's lover was so tangible as to have been reality.
"I'll be there," the lord said, perhaps too sharply. He stood when the servant had left, dressing without a word to the young man sitting silently in a tangle of blankets before the window. At last, the lord stood before his looking glass, in haughty waistcoat, tailored shirt and trousers, wrapped over it all in the fur of his past kings, the badge of something out of legend, something greater than human. Dressed in all that separated them, he turned to the young man that was now nothing more than his whore.
"Perhaps it was something else," he said, echoing words of not so long before. "You might have been a hero." And with a laugh, he left the young man in his corner to watch the world that wasn't his through the glass.