One step forward, twelve jumps back.
He's starting to lose control, and it scares him.
Every day a little bit of Amon slips away, and a little more of Noatak takes its place.
The post-fever rebuilding efforts are going much too slowly, and things are starting to fall apart. Every moment when the Equalist movement is not running at full strength, racing towards the endgame, is another moment for doubt and longing to wedge cracks in his coalition. Between his concerns for his revolution and the recent emotional flashpoint with Korra, he remains frustrated and constantly on edge.
But mostly it seems to be Korra.
Being in love is ruining me.
Ruining you, or making you free?
Love…
He had forgotten that love felt good. Love of friends...of bedmates...
Love of family.
His treatment of Tarrlok gives birth to fresh guilt gnawing at his soul.
But love requires sacrifice. Love requires compromise.
Love requires ceding control, and ceding control, unless part of a strategical feint, is unacceptable.
It is the one lesson from Yakone that still burns within his mind.
That, and the bloodbending.
So by the spirits he will regain control - both over Korra, and over himself.
The apples strewn about the bed are expensive, as are the two lengths of silk cord tucked under the pillow, but should everything go as planned, they will be well worth the cost – which leads to the other important part of his presentation.
Washed, groomed, perfumed, he recites to himself.
When Korra sneaks into his quarters later that night, she discovers him stretched out across the bed in all his naked glory.
There's nothing new to see along his bare frame, but her pupils still widen and her throat contracts; even from all the way across the room, he can feel the blood rushing towards her lower regions.
So far so good.
"Good evening, Korra," he purrs in a sultry tone.
She swallows again. "H…hel…"
This is working much better than I expected.
"Why don't you join me?" he says sweetly, patting an empty patch of bedding. She disrobes with lightning speed and sits cross-legged on the spot he indicated.
She reaches out an arm, hesitantly touching his chest as if it's made of fragile porcelain. "You look…and you smell...I mean…"
"Delectable?" he adds helpfully.
"Fuck yes," she answers, unconsciously nodding her head like a puppy being presented with a large bone.
He proffers an apple, which she eagerly accepts. Korra bites into it, moaning with delight as the sweet flesh slides across her tongue.
"How the hell do you afford all this? I'm sure Hiroshi Sato wouldn't appreciate what's left of his fortune going towards treats for the Avatar."
"I have acquired cash and capital throughout the years on my own merits, Korra."
She makes air quotes and gives him one of those looks.
"Acquired. Not stolen. Ac-qui-red," he rebuts firmly.
As Korra finishes her fruit, he slowly runs a hand up and down her side, pressing into certain areas he knows are sensitive to her.
"So…" he begins, "I thought we might enjoy a little competition this evening."
Korra glances around the room, and at the apples. "I think you're two tubs and a fair short of a party game, love."
"It's more of an endurance challenge than anything else." He rubs an apple against her shoulder.
She looks at him oddly, then insight flashes across her face and her eyes narrow. "Where are the ropes?"
He obviously failed to look convincingly innocent, as Korra's eyes narrow even further and she glances at the pillows.
Oh, shit, did I look at-
He grabs for her arms but it's too late; she reaches under the pillows and removes the silk cords.
"Really? Really."
He stares dumbly at her.
"I thought you were finally, finally getting past the whole 'not being honest with me' thing."
His brain races for a dozen phrases to turn the situation around, but then he notices that she's wrapping a rope around her left wrist.
"Korra?" he says perplexedly.
"You need to learn not to use manipulation as the default method of getting me to do things. You ask me outright." She wraps a rope around her right wrist. "If I say no, I probably have a good reason for it. And even if I don't, it's not your place to question my logic, or lack thereof, unless my life is actually in peril."
She slides back to the headboard and ties the other ends of the ropes to the posts, giving each one a few experimental tugs. Her arms can comfortably reach from the headboard to her waist.
"That's not quite what I had in mind," he mutters.
"Then next time, ask first, and you might get what you want from the beginning," she replies firmly.
"There's going to be a next time?" he adds hopefully.
"That depends on how you behave for the remainder of this time. So…master." She utters the word with as much disdain as she can muster. "What did you have in mind for this evening?"
"I was going to tie you up and pleasure you, always bringing you close but never letting you over the edge until you begged me for release or, even better, for me to fuck you."
"And the apples?"
"Those…were just for decoration," he admits sheepishly. "Honestly, I wasn't planning to do anything with them."
"Boring." She kicks his thigh. "But I have something that might work." She bends her knee upwards, a signal for him to come closer.
He leans on top of her, sliding a hand towards her abdomen.
"See, that?" She knowingly glances down at his descending fingers. "That's the kind of thing you need to stop doing for reasons other than being a good boyfriend."
He inwardly curses himself (both for acting on instinct and for getting caught) and the hand quickly withdraws.
"Small steps." She smiles. "Small steps. Now, if this is supposed to be an endurance competition, there should be winning and losing conditions." She picks up a nearby apple. "This will be our scorekeeper."
He raises an eyebrow.
"I keep the apple in my mouth," explains Korra, "and you use that gifted tongue of yours. After my first orgasm, if the apple is still in my mouth, I win."
"Third," he counters.
"First. You'll just have to make it a good one."
"And what happens if you win?"
"I'm not saying," she replies, sticking her tongue out at him. "I promise I won't do anything particularly dangerous. Or maybe not," she adds casually. "That's the risk you take when you trust someone with your body and soul."
"And if the apple falls?"
"Well…you'll have a captive, hysteric, nubile woman completely at your mercy. I'm sure you'll think of something villainous to do with me."
He plucks an apple from the sheets and lodges it in her mouth; he can't help but smirk at her muffled protests of indignation.
"Deal."
He doesn't start from below. That would be too easy.
Instead he starts at the neck – little nibbles on small patches of skin, mostly around the hollow of her throat. He traces his fingers along the other side of neck, on the area directly opposite his lips. A rumble of appreciation sounds through her chest.
"You know, it's perfectly alright to open your mouth…let it all out…"
She mumbles something through the apple. It sounds suspiciously like "fat chance."
"Suit yourself," he says with a shrug.
After finishing his assault on her neck, he's moves on to her shoulder blades, running his tongue inside the little space between the arm joint and the clavicle. She pulls an approving hand through his hair.
"Ah, ah. No hands, Korra."
She makes a nasal, disappointed noise.
He kisses his way down to her left breast; her nipples grow hard, the areolae darkening from the sudden rush of blood to the skin. He wraps his tongue around the stiffening flesh, tenderly pulling and biting at it. He loves the textural contrast between the two areas of skin: one rough, one smooth.
He uses one hand to gently stroke the underside of her breast while the other hand makes spider webs up and down her sides.
She moans and the apple shifts a little, but it is no forfeit. Not yet.
He does the same thing to her right breast, but this time the hand on Korra's side moves inwards and deliberately traces a line from her heart to her stomach, and makes slow, lazy circles around her navel.
She squirms against the sheets, and her movements reveal a glimmer of the moisture gathering between her legs. Part of him wants those legs to be tied down, but he rather enjoys it when she squeezes his head between her thighs. Another time perhaps, he thinks to himself.
He decides that enough time has been spent on her bosom and he resumes his flurry of tiny kisses, this time beginning at the area above her heart and working his way downwards. He stops at her belly button, and swirls his tongue around and around; it's a ticklish spot for Korra, and she responds accordingly but still holds onto the fruit.
"Fshee shee faf faf." Cheating bastard.
He gives her an expression of mock denial before laying one last kiss on the mound of hair and fat just above her clitoris before retreating off the bed to grasp Korra's right foot.
She vocalizes her frustration, and he chuckles.
"Patience, Avatar. But I promise that I'll keep it to just one leg. This time."
He tries sucking on her toes (because she really enjoys having the same thing done to her fingers), but it seems more ticklish than sensual, so he leaves it alone.
When he moves up to the arch of her foot, it sends another rumble through her body.
Then the ankle.
Then the calf.
Then the knee.
Then the upper thigh.
And as he goes up and in he starts to take longer and longer with his kisses, the pauses in between taking even longer still.
He stills briefly on the artery, letting the pulse of blood inside her body sing to him.
And then his lips are there, and she opens for him like a flower.
He starts by taking a deep breath through his nose. Several deep breaths, to be exact.
Not that he really needs to smell her: the scent has long been burned into his brain.
It's heavy, earthy, like a patch of soil after a rainstorm, but there's a minute sweetness underneath it, a note he can never quite identify. The smell is always changing in subtle ways, nothing drastic though. But he appreciates the variances, no matter how small. It lets him experience something new every time.
He kisses her nub, pulling it back and forth between his lips. He smiles when her thighs take their usual place against his head.
Slow and steady, Noa.
The tip of his tongue flicks against the nerve bundle. His movements are fleeting, designed to cause minimal pleasure and maximum agitation. She starts moaning from behind the apple – the kind of moaning that, if her mouth were unobstructed, would send the blood in his veins racing straight to his cock. As things stand, he is concentrating too hard to spare any blood for an erection. He is, after all, in a competition.
And so far, his plan is working beautifully.
When he figures she's had enough teasing, he starts making slow circles around her clitoris, feeling the grip from her thighs grow tighter and tighter, her breathing becoming more rapid and shallow. This goes on, and on, and on, and the circles become faster and faster until it seems like a blur to him; he can't tell if her moans are of approval or of oversensitivity.
Then he just stops - without warning and without remorse. She gives a muffled scream of anger.
He looks up at her eyes, and she glances down at the apple. He removes it from her mouth.
"Well? Ready to give up?"
To his surprise, she grins at him. "That's." (pant) "It?" (pant) "What else." (pant) "Have you." (pant) "Got?"
Annoyance surges through him, and he unceremoniously shoves the apple back in her mouth.
He doesn't go for her clit again, not yet; too much stimulation too fast and things might become painful (or she'll peak too soon) and thus be counter-intuitive to his goals.
Instead, he runs his tongue up and down the space between her outer lips, and delights when her pelvis shivers in response. He takes two fingers and runs them along the area between her outer and inner folds until his digits are drenched with her essence.
Then his fingers move between and through.
The pink skin inside her body is soft and smooth, and he can feel the little folds and ridges of the muscles underneath it, the ones that give him (and her) so much pleasure during their couplings. He slowly rotates his fingers around the total circumference, then in and out, and then in all directions until he hears a crunch from above.
He looks up from his work to see that Korra has accidentally bitten into the fruit, and from what he can tell only a thin sliver of flesh (and her careful jaw grip) is keeping their scorekeeper from dropping to the sheets. Her face is flush with arousal and embarrassment, but her eyes still show a measure of defiance.
"Yield," he growls.
No, is her silent reply.
He crooks his fingers upwards, dragging the pads across the rough patch of skin directly underneath her clitoris, and he hears the scrunching of the sheets as her hands ball around them and she lets out a particularly gratifying groan.
"Yield."
"Bih may." Bite me.
It's at this point that he decides to forget careful plans and measured movements: he will make her cum, she will scream his name and she will drop that fucking apple.
His tongue replaces the fingers currently inside her, and said fingers go to straight for her clitoris.
His assault on her center is so aggressive that her hands leave the sheets to scrabble for purchase on the headboards; her grip becomes so painful he has to surreptitiously bloodbend various areas on his face relieve the pain. Her breathing becomes shallower and shallower, the movements of his mouth and hands more and more violent, the tension in both their bodies twisting and stretching to almost unbearable levels.
Then Korra's back arches, her thighs crush and relax, his chin is suddenly soaked with moisture (in addition to what was already there), and she lets out a scream – a full, unobstructed, game-losing wail.
He presses the upper roof of her cunt with his tongue once more for good measure, and triumphantly rises up to face the conquered Avatar…and the blood rushes from his face.
It's just a tiny piece, and it dangles from the bite she made earlier, but Korra has it clenched between her teeth, and the rest of the apple hangs from it.
"I thstill got it."
He opens his mouth to challenge her, to demand her forfeit, to say that such a victory is ludicrous.
Let it go, Noa. Be gracious. You lost.
I could hear her scream. The whole damn base could probably hear her scr-
Noatak…yield.
Wanting to change your ways for someone you love is easy. Actually changing your ways for someone you love is a pain in the ass.
Power and trust. Trust and power.
Trust means honesty. Trust means faith.
Faith sometimes requires uncertain action.
And so for the first time in their relationship, without scheme or plot or self-interest behind it, he yields.
"It seems I have lost, Avatar," he says softly. "I must admit your…temerity…is admirable."
"Back to 'Avatar' now, is it?" she says, her voice devoid of any sarcasm or taunt.
"No! No…" He hesitates. "But it is wise to show respect to one's victors…and hope that they will show mercy to the conquered."
Korra burns the silk ropes away. He winces at losing such expensive material, but he says nothing about it.
"Hmm," she murmurs as she sits up and moves towards him. "I know just what to do with you."
He braces himself for something painful, something horrible, something humiliating. He more than deserves it, considering the things he's put her through - tonight, and so many times before now.
He doesn't expect her to pull him up to the top of the bed and nestle against him with her back against his chest.
"Your punishment –" Korra pulls his right arm across her waist. "–is to stay right there for the rest of the night."
She smirks at the dumbfounded look on his face, then shakes her head and kisses him on the cheek.
"You really shouldn't think the worst about people." The smirk fades. "Especially when they love you."
He stays awake long after she has fallen asleep and listens to her breathing as he runs his fingers through her hair.
He is still awake come the morning.
"You look like you've been up all night," says Korra groggily.
"I have," he says bluntly.
"Why would you –"
(Noatak…yield.)
"We can't meet anymore."
He can feel her stomach drop.
(Noatak…yield.)
"Not here. It's not good for you, and it's not healthy for our relationship."
She sits upright. "What exactly are you saying?"
(Noatak…yield.)
He gives her a satisfied smile. "Korra…you are going to find us an apartment."
Author's notes: It was originally supposed to be three orgasms to crown a victor, but I couldn't figure out how to convincingly write out three different cunnilingus scenes in one chapter :p
The apartment thing is a new development (one I hadn't originally planned), but given that I'm trying to move Amon past (most) of his control freak tendencies/trust issues in the next couple of chapters, this makes a lot of sense (besides, I've asked y'all to suspend your disbelief about Korra sneaking into the Equalist base for booty calls way too many times now).
As always, reviews, suggestions and (helpful) criticism are always appreciated.