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“Fuck!” Luca yelped as the blue light of an attempted stun sailed past his ear and fizzled out against the brick wall of the China Town building he was sprinting past. The flickering lights felt hectically bright, and the eerie music from the abandoned shops discordant and grating against his ears.
The small pink bottle in his pocket clinked in time with his pounding heartbeat as he ran. He’d been subtly (he thought) sniffing it every five seconds as he deciphered—and after popping the last cipher, had thought he was clear to duck into the corner of one of the abandoned buildings and take a good long inhale before he sprinted to the exit gate.
That had, of course, been when the Hermit stepped around the corner. Luca had barely had a second to scramble to his feet with a sickening rush as the Euphoria washed over him.
His head was spinning a million miles an hour, and a rosy pink haze had descended over his eyes. Worst of all, there was an achingly hot feeling in the pit of his stomach.
His heartbeat was roaring in his ears ten times louder and harder than usual, and his head felt weightless and empty.
What had Vera done to her perfume today?
He was higher than he’d ever been, but luck was on his side. The hunter was sloppy today–off his game an unusual amount. Normally it was all Luca could do to force a draw. There was something different about the Hermit today though–he had spent nearly the entire match circling the map, simply watching and waiting.
Luca, crouching in the corners and behind pallets as the hunter moved by, had had the strangest feeling he was looking for him.
“Ah!” Luca yelped as the next stun caught him on the shoulder and froze him. Adrenaline surged through him and he turned on his heel the moment he was free and threw the perfume bottle straight at the hunter.
It was a ridiculous move, but an unexpected one. The bottle shattered against the Hermit’s shoulder, enveloping him in a cloud of pink fog, and he stumbled backwards a few steps. That was all Luca needed to vault over a windowsill and disappear into a crumbling hotel lobby. The exit gate was just on the other side, and if he could just catch his breath for one second–
Five paces from the gate, the hunter’s staff came down hard on his ankle, and Luca went crashing to the dirt before he even realized he had been hit.Chin slamming hard against the cobblestones, he bit his tongue and cursed as the copper taste of blood filled his mouth.
The Hermit’s fingers closed on his ankles and dragged him backwards, even as Luca dug his nails into the dirt, leaving long furrows behind. He could almost see the faces of his teammates when he got out, disparaging him for losing their four-man victory.
Shit. Luca shook his head and frowned. Why did he even care? It wasn’t like any of the other survivors liked him, not really. He was too fucked in the head to make friends here, except for Vera, but she was too princessy to have real friends, either.
And why was that even his concern right now?
“Hey there.” The hunter released him, and Luca rolled onto his back and grinned up at the hunter as charmingly as he was able. It wasn’t hard–for a dead man, the Hermit was fairly easy on the eyes. Tall, pale, slender, and he knew how to show a guy a good time, always obeying the rules of civility to the letter. Unlike the other hunters, who took losses badly, creeping up to exact revenge on the survivors later in the dark hallways of the Manor, the Hermit was–as his name–silent and reclusive.
Oddly enough, the look on his face wasn’t the one of austerity Luca had come to know–it was somehow more familiar. Disdain intermingling with a strange spark in his feline amber eyes. He looked desperate.
Luca’s stomach flipped, though he wasn’t quite sure why.
The Hermit was holding the shattered remains of Vera’s perfume bottle. The jagged edges were cutting into his hands, but he did not bleed. “Get up,” he ordered. His voice was low and dangerous. The back of Luca’s neck tingled, and he scrambled obediently to his feet.
In the rosy haze of the perfume still clouding his vision, he could see someone else flickering over the hunter’s image–a crisp white collared shirt, laboratory apron tied over it, and his long blonde hair pulled back with a ribbon. The face was lost to the ever-present fog in his mind.
“Are you even trying, Balsa?”
“What?” Luca shook his head, dazed. “Say it again?”
The Hermit was watching him with something almost like concern on his face.
Luca shivered as a cold breeze blew through China Town, cutting through the thin fabric of his shirt like it was nothing. The paper lanterns hanging from the awnings rattled, and leaves skittered across the cobblestone streets. “You…you didn’t say anything, did you.”
The Hermit’s expression shuttered. “What was in that bottle, Balsa?”
Luca was certain he had never told anyone his last name.
They knew him just as the Prisoner.
“That? I–it’s Euphoria,” Luca said, unsure. He felt strangely empty–there was something pressing he had forgotten. Something terribly important. Absently, he brought his hand to his face and felt the sting of his palm on his cheek– again and again and–
There was a cold hand seizing his wrist. “Stop.”
Then he was released, as the Hermit turned away from him suddenly, and the broken bottle fell from his other hand, shattering on the ground. Luca was frozen for a moment, watching the glittering glass spill out across the cobblestones, until he heard a strange choked sound from the hunter, and took a step forward, confused.
It sounded almost like a cry, but that couldn’t be.
He was a fool. He should have let Luca leave. Should have accepted his defeat and retired to his silent room, til he was again summoned for one of these pointless matches. He didn’t even really know why he had been looking for Luca today—No. It was pointless to lie to himself. He did. It was the anniversary of his murder, and he hated himself for this foolish nostalgia as much as he hated the boy who couldn’t remember he’d killed him.
Luca was so close. Alva could taste him in the air, the crackling charge around him that seemed to draw him closer the further Alva wished to be from him.
“Get away from me,” Alva gritted out. He was trembling with the effort not to reach out and grab the shackle around Luca’s neck, drag him closer til he could have him in his hands once again. Whatever Luca had done to him–whatever had been in the glass bottle he held now, was making his head spin and a terrible hunger writhe in his gut. Luca smelled so sweet, so inviting. Alva groaned, pressing a hand to his forehead. What was the matter with him?
He had always wanted to touch Luca. In their last life he had been endlessly on the edge of taking him by the arm and kissing him, ravaging him, imagining marking every inch of his skin with bites and kisses.
But Alva Lorenz was not that type of man. To do something like that to Luca would be unfathomable, and so it had remained nothing but a constant need he had learned to bite back and replace with a sharp scorn in his voice that made Luca flinch.
Frustrating, endless torment that he was, Luca stayed. Just out of reach, with his head tilted. His eyes were wide, cheeks flushed with exertion and whatever had been in that bottle. “What’s the matter? Never been high before?”
God help me . Alva wanted to grab him by the throat and force him to look at him, really look , til he remembered him.
Still, he savored the way Luca looked at him when they came across each other in matches, like he was a puzzle he hadn’t quite figured out. Once in awhile, when Luca was at his maddest, he thought he saw flickers of recognition.
“I said get away.”
He never listened. Even when they had been student and teacher, working side by side on the machines in Alva’s workshop, Luca had always had a habit of acting first and thinking later. Alva had never been able to break him of it.
Luca came closer, looking up at his face scrutinizingly. “Didn’t think it would affect hunters like this. How d’you feel?”
Even high, he was annoyingly inquisitive. Always needing to know how things worked and why they did that, and maybe that was why he had once been called Lorenz by Alva’s colleagues and other students.
Alva had never been able to bring himself to call Luca that, even jokingly. The wedding band on his finger had burned like a rebuke and turned his stomach.
He was sick, for thinking the way he did about Luca. Sick and a sinner.
Alva shoved him away, and Luca crashed into the wall, head thumping hard against the stones. Infuriatingly, he grinned, canine flashing white in the dirt-wrecked mess of his face.
“What have you done to me?” Alva’s lips were a hair’s breadth from Luca’s. He could almost taste the dry wine scent of the Prisoner’s breath, agonizingly tantalizing. Luca always drank before matches. Maybe too much, but he had never been able to say no to alcohol. “Why must you torment me like this?”
Luca’s eyes were shaking, confused. Still, that slight smile that made Alva’s heart ache sharply, remained on his face. “I—“
Alva’s mouth crashed against his, lips slotting into place, his hands on Luca’s shoulders to hold him against the wall, though he didn’t struggle to get away as Alva had thought he would. Luca moaned into the kiss, his hands on Alva’s chest, curling into the soft linen of his shirt.
He felt so slight in Alva’s hands, the fabric of his shirt so thin. His skin was so warm. Alive. Alva wanted to rend a hole in his chest and hold that pounding heart in his cold hands.
“You should have left when I told you to.”
Luca felt the cold air on his thighs before he fully realized what was going on. The Euphoria made him slow to react, so maybe that was why he didn’t fight quite as hard as he could have to get away. The Hermit’s hands were on his inner thighs, prying them apart, his weight pressing Luca up against the stones of the wall beside the exit gate.
Luca could only stare, wide-eyed, at the hunter’s face, amber pupils wide and dark. He was panting, and Luca realized it was the first time he had heard him breathe. He sounded so human , and Luca’s heart ached strangely.
His lips parted, and immediately the hunter’s hand came up to stop his voice coming, his fingers digging into Luca’s cheeks.
Luca could feel the Hermit pressing against him, the hardness straining at the fabric of his elegant trousers. He was painfully aware of the black dirt underneath his fingernails and scuffing his prison uniform. How could anyone want to touch him like this?
He knew his flushed face reflected the Hermit’s own, the glassy, half-lidded eyes that pinned him more surely than his hands did. It was wrong, insane, that he was getting hard from this, even worse that the hunter’s hand over his mouth made odd things twist and shiver inside his gut.
Of course he liked it like this. He was sick in the head–that was why he’d killed someone he couldn’t even remember the face of.
The hunter’s fingers on his thighs moved up to his boxers and pulled them down, freeing his cock, reddened and hard despite the chill that cut through Luca’s bones. Luca clamped his thighs together, unwilling, and choked out a dry sob against the Hermit’s palm as they were forced apart anyway.
The hunter’s skin was cool, soft against his shaft as he began to stroke it, hand moving up and down in an almost tender manner that seemed strange for the way that he was boxing Luca in, trapping him.
Horrifyingly so, it didn’t take much at all before Luca bit down on Alva’s palm to muffle the sob and came, white spilling out over the Hermit’s hand, and sagged in his grasp. Against his will, there were tears forming in his eyes, slipping down his cheeks. Fuck. He hadn’t cried even in prison, not even when they’d informed him that he would be hanged, the worst way to die.
He expected the hunter to release him now. He’d gotten his humiliation–Luca was wrecked and weeping in his hands.
Instead the Hermit unbuttoned his own trousers, and Luca’s eyes widened.
The forced orgasm had relaxed him, but even with that, the Hermit had done no preparation. “No,” Luca said, and then again, louder. “Don’t–I can’t–”
The Hermit picked him up by the throat, bracing his back against the wall, and with his other hand pushing Luca’s legs apart.
The tears were coming again, and the hunter leaned in as if for a kiss. He licked a tear from Luca’s cheek instead, and Luca shuddered. He could feel the Hermit’s cock pressing against his hole, precum leaking from the tip.
Without any further warning, the hunter shoved inside him, and Luca screamed. He could feel his hole tear, feel the Hermit push all the way inside him, filling him completely. Every minuscule shift of his hips made Luca’s hips spasm as the Hermit hit his prostate. “St-stop!”
The Hermit only adjusted his hold on Luca’s hips and slammed his cock in deeper, and Luca felt the weep of blood dripping from his wrecked hole. It felt as if he were being rearranged, his internal organs shoved around so that his stomach could mold itself around the Hermit. “You’ll kill me,” he begged. Could he even be killed? It felt as if he would die any second.
Blood slicked the Hermit’s cock, and the next time he moved, Luca felt stars explode behind his eyelids. His forehead hit the hunter’s chest, and he scratched uselessly at the Hermit’s coat, unable to scream. He felt like a toy–held against the hunter, unable to breathe or scream, he could only tighten his legs around the hunter’s hips and pray it would end soon.
“Luca,” the hunter breathed, his voice coming out a rasp, and he bottomed out inside him.
The pain of being slammed into that final time was unbearable. Luca’s vision went dark, and he could feel himself losing hold of reality. A groan scraped from the Hermit’s throat as he came, cock throbbing with every burst of cum that filled Luca. Barely conscious, Luca buried his face in the Hermit’s chest, shaking, barely able to keep his legs around the hunter’s waist, as cum dripped from his used hole. His vision blurred.
Alva was finally warm. Holding Luca, feeling his body trembling as he leaned into Alva, destroyed, was delicious. He wanted to have him again and again, til the only word Luca would ever be able to manage again was please, and he finally recalled the pain and the torment that followed Alva through his nights of endless unrest.
Luca was his, after all.
It would take some time, but as far as anyone knew, they had forever. Plenty of time to realize all of Alva’s unfulfilled desires.