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The first time they fucked, Hades didn’t know the other man’s name and didn’t think anything of it. He’d introduced himself as Meteor and Hades thought it sounded like some half-baked effort to seem into astrophysics, but his eyes were the clear blue of beaches only Azem talked about and he’d winked at him. Winked at Hades, like he wasn’t responsible for a third of the Convocation’s power alone, like he wasn’t stern and serious. Like he didn’t use extra aether to get wrinkles out of his robes. Meteor turned big, blue doll-eyes and flushed cheeks against him and Hades wasn’t responsible for ending up here, really.
Here being his own private apartments on the edge of the city, even with his books and archives and crystals scattered everywhere. Hades would normally feel shame, not at the clutter but the obvious evidence he did nothing other than work, but Meteor was pulling his hair and biting his lip and Hades was whimpering into his mouth and had absolutely no time to be embarrassed.
“Come here, handsome,” Meteor growled, tipping Hades’s head back by a fistful of hair and sucking marks into his skin. They both knew he was Emet-Selch, and Hades’s lip curled at the uncomfortable sentiment; neither wanted anything to do with his title in this room, and so he said, “Call me Aidoneous.”
“I’ll call you whatever I want.” That should have made Hades throw Meteor off him, but it wasn’t said as though an insult. It was said with hot smoke and promise and Hades felt it curl between his ribs and squeeze.
“You’re quite insolent, aren’t you?”
Meteor’s hands slid below Hades’s ass and he was hoisted by his thighs onto the counter, knocking creation blueprints and old tea mugs to the floor. No one cared.
“Not insolent,” Meteor corrected, running his index finger along Hades’s mouth and slipping it inside. Hades obediently sucked. “Charming.”
Now he bit.
“Insolent,” he insisted.
But his robes were already above his waist and he was seconds from disintegrating them with his mind, anyway. They weren’t doing anyone any favors.
“Charming,” he relented, and Meteor huffed and nuzzled the crease of his hip. He breathed deeply, smelling him, Hades realized, face hot. He pushed his pelvis up and Meteor pushed back.
Hades felt mindless with the contact. It had been too long since he had allowed himself anything like this, and Meteor responded with an eagerness that said he could taste it. His eyes were greedy and his lashes were coy and Hades thought he looked like something out of myth. Something fast-growing and wild.
Meteor was undoing Hades’s laces like he was a gift, but he pulled the pants themselves off with a ferociousness that said he liked to tear the paper.
“I don’t normally do this,” Hades said, and Meteor snorted, but not unkindly. He gestured to the three cases of Convocation equipment blocking an entire quarter of the room.
“Seems like you do it all the time,” Meteor said, but his eyes were sparkling. Hades laughed and pulled his hair.
“Brat.”
“Usually, yes. Do you have any oil?”
“How far do you think I’m letting you in, exactly?”
Meteor held eye contact while he licked a stripe just to the side of where Hades wanted him.
“As far as I tell you to?” The sentence was a command, but it was spoken as a question: Meteor was looking for permission, for boundaries.
Hades could take whatever he had to give, and he would prove it.
“As far as you tell me to,” he confirmed, and leaned back to let himself become eclipsed by Meteor’s shark-toothed smile.
The second time they fucked, Hades was determined not to be taken by surprise. He’d spent their first night writhing on the floor in mindless pleasure as Meteor sucked his brain right out of his cock, as he split him open and made him come, and come, and come, and this time, Hades was going to destroy him.
He would start with dinner.
Hades was an exceptional cook, even if cooking itself was hardly in fashion. Azem had taught him some centuries ago on one of his rare expeditions out of the city, and the creation of flavor with fire and his hands held more satisfaction than conjuration. He found he quite liked it and kept refining the trade.
On a date, he hoped, it would impress. Not that he went on dates; he wasn’t Hythlodaeus.
He spent weeks preparing. He grew many ingredients on a balcony garden outside his sleeping quarters, but the meat he had to hunt, and he had no space for larger ingredients like gourds or fruit trees.
Not that he was cooking gourds tonight, but he did love candied squash, and he’d bet a week’s research that Meteor’s pertinent mouth would, too.
There were four courses, and Hades decided not to look closely at why he hadn’t stopped at one. Why his knees went to jelly and he burned the caramel three times, or why his heart burst out of his chest when the door’s crystal chime announced Meteor’s arrival.
Hades opened the door and thought he would die.
Meteor had forgone his robes, instead going for personal off-duty fashion of pressed slacks and a tight silk shirt open at the top. Hades stared at his exposed collar and fantasized about biting marks into it until Meteor was forced to cry mercy.
“Meteor,” Hades greeted around a swallow, thankful his voice held steady. Meteor grimaced like something was black and bitter in his mouth.
“Kore,” Meteor corrected.
Hades’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. Exchanging true names was normal with your nearest and dearest but doing so before even an appetizer was quite presumptuous. Without regard to propriety nor with conscious permission, he replied truthfully.
“Hades.”
Instead of looking Kore in the eye and seeing Kore, the real him, whoever was behind that sly smile and comfortable enough to share his true self, Hades spun on his heel and marched to the plates. He didn’t want to see how Kore accepted his real name. He didn’t want to see if he was being mocked.
Kore’s pointed shoes clicked against the tile as he followed Hades. The serving room had a gilded fireplace and two cushioned chairs with a small table between them. It was intimate, informal, comfortable. Hades was almost always here alone, and when he wasn’t, it was just Daeus. He tried not to look around too much.
He had set two starters of herbed peach slices down when Kore’s body pressed against him from behind, head to toe, arms like great branches of a sheltering tree.
“Hades,” Kore purred, nipping the back of his neck. He was opening his jaw to see how much he could fit in a bite while Hades pushed his hips backwards helplessly.
“After dinner,” Hades said, but mostly it was a moan.
“Now,” Kore groaned, but Hades had worked hard for this, and he was going to show him. He didn’t think, just acted, tucking his foot behind Kore’s ankle and sweeping it from under him so he tumbled ass-first into thousand-year-old hand embroidered cushions. One hand circled Kore’s throat, and the other took a peach and put it past the barrier of his lips without asking.
“Eat,” Hades ordered, widening his legs to box Kore in. Kore’s pupils were huge, devouring him with their own gravity, and he sucked far more of Hades’s hand into his mouth than was necessary for eating a fucking peach. “Stay.”
“Yes, sir,” Kore purred, and it was lightning to his cock.
But he was a patient man. He liked to take his time and to watch, even if he had to ignore how warm he felt every time they said the other’s name.
Their real name. It was perverse. He’d never hear the end of this from anyone. Notorious celibate celebrity Emet-Selch falls for some hothead in less than a fortnight and other scandalizing news at eleven.
“There will be four courses,” he began, not giving his opponent any time to adjust or protest. “You will sit for all of them, and I will serve you. You’re permitted to forgo anything you don’t like, but not dessert. Would you like wine?”
Hades had never been like this with anyone. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth with his own recklessness, but he couldn’t take it back. He wanted to always be looked at like Kore was looking at him now. He wanted every morning to be Kore’s flushed skin and greedy hands, greedy eyes and mouth, greedy everything. He wanted to drown in their greed and be loved.
“I love wine.”
Hades lifted an eyebrow and held it there until Kore had eaten two more peach slices and remembered his manners.
“Please.”
“Good boy.”
The third time was different.
They didn’t fuck at all.
Kore had come over, boisterous and cocky as ever, but Hades felt something simmering under his skin. An agitation that had claws, a frantic evasiveness in his eyes. Something was wrong.
But Kore wouldn’t tell him.
So, that night, Hades took him over his knee and removed one article of clothing at a time. He had run his fingers along Kore’s spine until he shivered, not sexual but vulnerable, and Kore finally looked at him. His eyes were calculating amid a languid face.
“I’ve been nominated for the seat of Azem.”
Whatever kind of night Hades thought they would have, they weren’t anymore. He felt Emet-Selch coming together in jagged pieces even without his mask as he withdrew and straightened his spine. “Congratulations,” he managed.
He was starting to suspect he’d spend his whole life angry with Venat.
“Don’t do that,” Kore snapped, sitting up and pushing at him. “Don’t shut me out. I don’t want to stop seeing you.”
“It wouldn’t be professional—”
“Fuck professional,” Kore said, and bit at Hades’s lip until there was blood. “I want to bond with you.”
Hades couldn’t help himself, he snorted, and even to him it sounded particularly derisive. “You want no such thing. You’re lust-drunk at a moment of tumult and change. Don’t be stupid.”
Hades expected Kore to remove himself and fix his clothing, mumble and get angry and leave, but he didn’t. Kore looked at him with his dangerous, wild eyes, and he grinned. It was the grin of a hyena, impolite and feral and satisfied. It promised he’d chase until he couldn’t.
“That’s not a no.”
“You don’t want me.”
“I do. I will prove it to you,” Kore said. “I will court you.”
Hades jerked away like Kore was venomous. No one had ever had the audacity to say such a thing, much less say it and mean it, but Kore’s aether didn’t waver; he wasn’t lying. He was determined. Eager.
Always so fucking eager.
“You’re basically a dog,” Hades informed him, and Kore laughed until he ached and pushed him off the sofa.
The fourth time was the first time he stopped counting.
Hades considered himself to be a smart man with a very large brain who could, in fact, count above the number of four, but Kore was on his knees behind him holding his cheeks apart and licking him open. He’d never felt anything like this. It was filthy, and sloppy, and disorganized, and he wanted more of every single part of it. More tongue, more wet, more mouth. Deeper, harder. More mess. He begged for fingers and prayed for salvation and was given both in abundance. He painted the bed below him in hot stripes of his release, again and again, but Kore wasn’t done. Kore wouldn’t even let him move.
“Please, my love,” Hades said, mindlessly. He was moving very fast for a leader of a peoples so historically slow, but when his smarts walked out the room and he was just a writhing mass of nerves and heart, the feeling left behind certainly seemed like love.
He hoped Kore had the decency to not look smug about it.
Hours or years later, Kore rolled him over into his own mess and straddled his chest, big hands working his own cock as he came and came. Hades soaked up his partner’s trembling thighs and ragged breathing and arched his face to the sun for a kiss.
“Stay,” he whispered, and Kore was already nodding.
“I’ll stay.”
“Bath?”
Kore’s laughter was the gates of spring flung open. “Bath,” he agreed.
They were in too deep not to disclose their relationship to the Convocation, but by the time Hades worked up the courage, Kore had been Azem for three and a half moons and they were violating a lot of ethical regulations. Lahabrea was going to skin him alive.
“No, he’ll skin me alive,” Kore corrected. “He hates me.”
“He does not hate you. You are trouble.”
“He hates me.”
“He voted for your appointment. Enthusiastically, even.”
“But…?”
Hades shrugged and bit Kore’s freckled shoulder. “You are very annoying.”
“I love it when you praise me.”
“Extremely annoying, even.”
“Don’t stop, darling.”
“I begged him to fire you. To vote for anyone else.”
“If you keep going, I’m—”
“I will tell Venat you make sex noises to get out of adult conversations.”
“You’ll do no such thing. You’d rather conduct a children’s chorus.”
“I would. That should tell you how serious I am.”
The bells of Kore’s laughter chimed throughout their home, as it always did. Every season had the warmth of holiday because of that laugh.
“I will tell Lahabrea,” Kore said, rubbing their noses together. “I am the newest appointment and, quite honestly, the least qualified. Look at me, I’m a mess. If anyone is getting fired, it’s me.”
Hades sat up to argue, but Kore stopped him with one of his huge mitts and pushed him back down. He lowered himself onto Hades’s cock, one steady breath at a time, until Hades was all the way inside and discovering a new god or two. “Hnh, you’re amazing.”
“I know,” Kore said. Hades bucked hard in rebuke.
“No one is getting fired.”
“I know,” Kore said again, but this time he picked himself up and hurled his weight down and then Hades was being ridden to the bottom of the mattress. To oblivion.
“You’re a menace,” he hissed, bracing his feet to give as good as he got.
“I know,” Kore moaned, and now it was Hades who was laughing, and he did until he came.
The first thing Hades became aware of was sand. Thicker grit than he’d normally expect, and sharper; there were several grains in his eyes, which didn’t help when he threw up sea water and squeezed them shut.
“Easy, darling, easy.”
That voice…
“There now, that’s it. Have some water.”
His voice.
“Well, if it isn’t the Warrior of fucking Light,” Hades managed. He sounded like dead coral.
“If it isn’t my favorite elderly dependent, back from the dead,” Kore said, and without even looking up, Hades could feel his smile. For the first time in thousands of years, he took a breath and felt alive.
He took the skein of water with gratitude and sat up, soaking in the heat of the sun. There were gulls screaming, and he thought for a second he might have lifestream soaking his hair, but then Kore was kneeling in front of him, armor gleaming and completely inappropriate for a beach, and nothing else in the universe mattered.
“Are you real?” Hades asked. It wouldn’t be the first time he had awoken like this, but it would be the first time it wasn’t a lie.
Instead of words (woefully inadequate things, words), Kore tackled Hades’s naked body, even though it pressed metal plates into all sorts of crevices and weighed as much as another person. Every kiss with Kore felt like a first kiss, but today was worse; Hades’s nerves were new, infantile, scared and exposed.
He had so many questions.
“Later,” Kore said, as though he could read his mind, and maybe he could. Maybe their soul bond persisted to this day, beyond time and death. “I’ve missed you too much to talk first.”
“I don’t care how long I’ve been dead or if this is even Etheirys, that armor comes off first.”
He should have been surprised when Kore was naked a second later with only a thought, but he wasn’t. It felt like old times in his Amaurot apartment, when they were young and stupid and couldn’t ever fuck fast enough.
“You couldn’t do that when I died.”
“Which time?” Kore asked, sucking along Hades’s neck and inhaling over his pulse. Hades was thrumming, hot and alive, and his mate was drinking him down.
“How long has it been?”
“I said later.”
“I’m not going to do what you say just because—oh!”
Kore had descended and sucked him down, and the juxtaposition of being lifestream detritus and the scalding heat of his lover’s mouth had him coming in seconds. He might have blacked out, or died again, or maybe it was just a series of birds overhead, but by the time he came back to himself, Kore was resting on his stomach and petting his thighs. Their eye contact was so heavy with meaning it hurt to carry.
“How long have you been alone?” Hades asked, petting Kore’s chestnut hair. It was a little longer than last time.
But Kore only smiled, and it was peaceful. “I’ve never been alone, Hades. There are always new people to love and families to build. I’ve only been waiting for you.”
“You did it, then. You kept traveling.”
“Among other things.”
“What kinds of other things?”
There they were: Azem’s shark teeth.
“Burning down libraries, censoring theater from all world governments, general dereliction of duty, you know.”
“You became a monster without me, then.”
“Absolutely. Of the highest order.”
Hades sighed, and a feeling of release went through him until he was suddenly, finally free.
“Let’s get to it, then.”