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His Second lays cradled in the valley of his arms, tucked tight between bicep and pectoral, abdominal and thigh, calf and toe. Swaddled like a child, encased in amber, buried tight beneath Vessel's humanoid form and his fledgeling divinity. His second. His only transitively, through the grace of their God, but his nonetheless.
In the greasy yellow light that slinks beneath their blinds, his second is limned in an oily gold; fluttering lashes, open mouth, hair twisted up into a bird's nest from how he trembled from their God's mercy only minutes ago. Beautiful thing, in all his forms. Offering, musician, lover; his second devotes himself with every stubborn inch of his tattered soul, and the results are exquisite.
Vessel's thumb sweeps soothing strokes across his second's arm, a gentle metronome to shepherd him into dreamless rest. His sweet lamb, most beloved of his little flock, the only one who twists Vessel's own insides up into such Gordian knots of deep, possessive want.
(This is not to say that he does not love his other acolytes — they are his, so of course they are beloved, else they would not return from their God's subsuming embrace — but his second was the first among them; the only among them for a time. He has given the most. This devotion does not go unnoticed.)
His second sleeps the sleep of the drained, or the drugged — after their offering to Sleep he is both, so this comes as no surprise. Deep, dreamless, thick as tar and twice as sticky. Dragging him down to aqueous depths. Like this, Vessel can do whatever he likes.
"Reckless thing," he murmurs again, breath cool against a gracile curve of neck. "You give yourself too freely."
It's not something that Vessel can rectify — not something he wants to — and in his current stage of metamorphosis any attempts would break his second entirely. He has no wish to do that, not when there's still so much his second has left to give.
But he is not entirely without resources, here. Their god has made sure of that.
A twitch of muscle in the flesh of his cheeks and his fangs flick free; needle-thin and sharp as night, a thin coating of enamel atop a core of distilled divinity. A gift from their god, tucked out of view until he's ready to bestow his blessing upon the worthy.
His Second has proven time and time again that he's the most worthy of all the acolytes, the best fit to receive what Vessel has to give. Nothing less than total devotion will do.
A disharmonic hum as he brushes lips across his second's shoulders, his throat. Choosing by touch alone a rare unblemished portion of skin — lower down the shoulder, tucked sweetly behind the curve of the scapula. Barely visible without a mirror, and muscled enough to feel satisfying under his tongue. His second will feel it burn with every move he makes. The ache will linger for weeks.
Vessel bites.
His teeth sink in with a sweet little triplet of pop-pop-pops, his second's insides sundering beneath the press of his lips. His second gasps, ribs flexing in their cage, but even sunk deep as he is he knows his place; he's pliant as the grave.
With his teeth in his second, hooked deep into muscle and fascia, blood slinking coyly into his mouth like a prayer, Vessel sighs and relaxes his jaw. Lets slip from his fangs the smallest drip of distilled divinity, right into his second's flesh — oilslick on water, a taste of starstuff, bottled lightning rent down to static shock. A taste, a tether, a promise.
He sinks himself under the skin of his second, as their god had done just hours before, and it feels like bliss.
It feels like bliss for him, at least. For his second, it must be a wildfire trapped, raging under the skin. Scalding and scouring and consumptive, nothing but gilded golden ash left in its wake. Divinity never melds clean with the muck of humanity, after all, and Vessel knows that more intimately than most.
But, drugged and drained and caged as he is, Vessel's second doesn't struggle, doesn't wake. All he does is whimper, soft and pained, cracked as the peeling plaster on the walls, while Vessel grinds his fangs even deeper into muscle until they threaten to scrape bone.
He grinds the rest of himself against his second, too; the length of them pressed close enough to fuse skin to skin, meld the two of them into a single greater whole. One day, he will. Or Sleep will drain his second dry, and he'll swallow down the dregs and eat the bones, cracking the marrow clean.
There's something sour in that second thought, and some fresh-baked instinct has him casting a knee over his second's hip, rolling them on the creaking bed until his second is trapped between spring and skin, breathing shallowly through his open mouth as Vessel's weight presses him down, still insensate despite it all.
Just where he should be. Perfectly pliant in the cage of Vessel's arms.
He could fuck him like this, worn thin with offering and tied down by Vessel's teeth, and he half considers it before discarding the idea. He's done so before; feeling his second's body yield like clay underneath his Promethean hands, moulded into shape to take Vessel in any way he saw fit.
It's hardly the only thing he's done to his second when they're in this state. They make it so easy for all his darkest impulses to bloom; Vessel's marked him with bruise and blood in constellations strung taut across sallow flesh; plucked out teeth to wear about his neck, stitched his mouth shut to render him mute — and how sweetly he sang, gagged and bound — making him come again and again until every touch was agony and he awoke with Vessel's name curled like a prayer in his mouth.
Vessel can do whatever he likes. And his second will thank him for it; has thanked him before for every depravity, sweet and tremulous and gossamer-thin in the midnight glow.
But tonight he has no great plans, no pressing desires beyond his teeth in his acolyte's flesh, and the hot slide of skin against skin. Tonight, this is enough.
That little droplet of divinity has made its way into his second's bloodstream by now. Vessel can feel it, see it; his second is sweating despite the air's chill, limned in coruscating technicolor as slatted light splays neon slashes across his skin. Only the blood dribbling sluggishly from the twin punctures on his back, the rash-black prickles of Sleep's sucking grip, the bruised kissmark from the needle shade the picture towards one of debauchery, not idolatry.
Vessel sheathes his fangs at last, sucking blood from his teeth; salt limned with worship, swallowed down; then sets his mouth back to that sweetly marred skin, smearing blood between their bodies as he presses his second closer still. He breathes deep, tonguing at the needle-kiss that adorns his second so perfectly, and waits.
When his second finally wakes, it is with his name on those perfect lips.
"Vessel?" he slurs, thick with chemical lethargy and thin with lack of air, carrying an abnormal lisp that pricks at Vessel's awareness, makes him purr saccharine sweet in his second's ear.
"Is it too much? Can you feel it inside you?"
Vessel can feel it, that drop of godliness stuck amidst the muck of humanity, however changed his second may already be. He can feel it in a molasses-hot fever bubbling beneath skin, burning through meat and blood and bone and soul, scorching out the chill of their God's ravenous touch. Blasphemy, yes, but the kind of blaspheming he's permitted as the First. A blasphemy that's holy, in the end.
"Please. Please, Vessel."
Vessel hums in reply, pleased, a harmony not meant for human throats echoing out from beneath his ribs as he noses behind his second's ear. His agony is as beautiful as his surrender, and Vessel loves to drink it in.
He doesn't move in response to the pleas tumbling from his second's lips, doesn't give him the relief of a full breath of air or the release of permitted motion. All he does is tilts his Second's head to the side, all the better to watch saltwater slide over the bridge of his nose and across his temples, dripping silent onto the bare mattress as his second gasps.
He drinks his fill of the agony, lets himself be warmed by the flames that lap at his second's skin, before he finally deigns to offer his forearm; stygian dark against that bitten-red mouth.
All the permission his second needs is a whispered, "Go on."
With a noise of relief so profound it skirts the line of orgasmic, his acolyte kisses his chilled skin, and opens his mouth.
Then he bites, nascent fangs scything through fascia smooth as glass, and after a moment Vessel feels the tiniest ooze of divinity seeping under his own skin from where his second is whimpering in relief. It's barely anything, not really, except that it's everything — a starstuff-strike of the ourobouros he's strung so carefully between his second and himself. A confirmation that his own power has taken root in his acolyte's fertile soil of a soul. That the bond between them is just as unbreakable as he wants it to be.
That, while this man may be Sleep's second, he's Vessel's as well.
There's nothing left between them, not now. Nowhere his second can go that Vessel cannot follow. The culmination of patient practice, a completed consumption in all but name. Vessel swallowed so sweetly, that his second never even noticed the teeth.
Vessel laughs, then, wild with possessive joy, and digs his fingers into his second's needle-bite until it oozes fresh-black gore. His Second, with his tattered soul and unblinking devotion. His Second, laced with Vessel's own divinity and the sucking lesions of their god's unending need.
His Second, who would do anything Vessel asked of him, no matter the cost.
Vessel leans down, brushing his lips against a sweat-slick nape. "I won't let you fall," he says, breath coruscating sweet against feverish skin. Soothing His Second's pain, if just for a moment.
Then, he opens his mouth. His fangs drop. Desire pools heavy as blood beneath his tongue he watches His Second — radiant in relief. Lips pressed reverentially against Vessel's own skin, carmine against snow against raven-wing black.
It's beautiful. But Vessel has always been greedy for more. And why should he deny himself when His Second gives in so readily to all his desires?
The neck this time; right where it will ache with every shuddering breath. Where everyone can see the mark of his second's devotion writ in flesh. Where the rabbiting pulse will carry his divine insanguination straight to his second's reckless heart.
Vessel bites. Underneath him, His Second screams.