Work Text:
“Harder,” Sleipnir moaned.
Pain twisted through him, sweet as flames coiling through him, blackening his toes, chewing their way up his legs until they burned and burned in his chest. He gasped in ecstasy, blood and spittle gurgling up his throat, choking him.
Barnabas twisted the knife jutting from his chest.
“Yes, my lord, thank ah-ah--”
Sleipnir writhed and whimpered. His breath came in shuddery little gasps punctuated with high whines. His chest tried to seize around the cold, blunt intrusion of the knife, but it was failing. His whole body was failing, his heart fluttering in panic as blood leaked out of him and soaked the bed beneath him.
Barnabas leaned close, his mouth nearly touching Sleipnir’s blood-flecked lips. “Does it hurt, dear one?”
“Yes,” Sleipnir sighed in rapture.
His vision darkened, then seared white as Barnabas leaned his weight into the knife pinning Sleipnir to the bed. Sleipnir raised trembling hands to grasp at Barnabas’s shoulders, but his grip was so fragile, so weak, that Barnabas shrugged him off.
“Your body tries to stir, even as it perishes,” Barnabas said. He straddled Sleipnir’s slender hips, which allowed him to shift his own and feel the frail flailing of Sleipnir’s body beneath him.
It was true what he said. Sleipnir’s body was trying to stir. But it had no blood to spare, and the pain was so encompassing, so exquisitely wretched, that he could only manage it in fits.
Death clawed at him with its cold, slippery, greedy hands, and Sleipnir chuckled wetly. It would have him, but not for long, never for long. His lord always brought him back again, denying death its due.
Barnabas closed the tentative distance between them, smearing Sleipnir’s blood against both their lips.
“Goodbye, my love,” he said. “Until I see you again.”
“Yes,” Sleipnir said.
And then there was nothing.
#
He woke to pain. Searing, clutching pain.
Barnabas hadn’t removed the knife. Or he’d made another Sleipnir with the knife still in him. Sleipnir wasn’t sure. He’d never find out. Was he the one who died? Was he a new person with the memories of a person who died? Did it make a difference? Remembering death did not horrify or repulse him. It only made him greedier for the burn.
He reached trembling hands for the knife. He screamed when he moved it. It was like his chest had healed around it and when he so much as touched the knife he tore the wound back open, turned those fragile, new edges back into shredded ruin.
Barnabas padded toward the bed. He wore only a robe, untied and open. His chest was bare aside from a smattering of rough, dark hair. His cock lay flacid between his legs as he stepped to the edge of the bed. But no piece of him was as raw and open as Sleipnir. He wore his nudity as casually as armor. He was untouchable, unreachable, aloof, a god peering down on his creation.
“Having fun?” he said.
Sleipnir pried the knife out of his chest one agonizing bite of steel at a time. It clawed him open on the way.
“Yes,” Sleipnir said, airy, half the word sneaking out of the hole in his chest in a wheezy gasp.
Dark, dark blood bubbled out of the hole left by the knife. It spread oil-slick over Sleipnir’s pale chest, a blanket of crimson that leeched the heat right out of him. The world became cold, cold, so very cold. Sleipnir’s limbs went limp. The knife fell beside him, tumbling from unfeeling fingers. The pain passed into something else, a buzzing numbness, a cool emptiness, a rushing eternity.
Barnabas stood at the edge of the bed and watched until Sleipnir’s eyes closed once more. Or perhaps he watched even longer. Sleipnir would never know.
#
He woke to pain. And pleasure.
Sleipnir gasped and arched onto his shoulder blades as something stabbed deep inside him, igniting a flash fire of agony followed swiftly by crackling, white-hot ecstasy.
“Ah, you’re back,” Barnabas said. His voice was breathy, less controlled than usual, despite his vice-like grip pushing Sleipnir’s thighs nearly down to his chest.
He snapped his hips forward, and Sleipnir screamed.
“That’s it,” Barnabas said. “Let me hear you, dear one.”
Sleipnir clung to the mattress. He arched into and away from the pain, but there was nowhere to go. He was caught on Barnabas’s pummeling cock, his traitorous body responding with blinding sparks of pleasure.
It was like breaking. It was like dying. But this was not the clean cut of the knife, his blood boiling out in a hot red stream. This was friction, heat, a gradual wearing away, a prying open. Sleipnir was eroding, turning from stone to sand as Barnabas speared into him.
“Touch yourself,” Barnabas said. “Come with me.”
Sleipnir would have laughed if he could have.
“Yes, my king,” he groaned.
He grabbed his flaccid cock and stroked it to attention. He grit his teeth and focused on the aftershocks of ecstasy. He moaned as the sparks shot through him, buoying him along, holding him just above the pain, just above, just barely above—
Barnabas came first and without him. He emptied himself and, satisfied, slid out of Sleipnir and left him to lie there throbbing and bruised, holding his cock.
#
Sleipnir lay that way for some time, not moving away from the mess that leaked out of him. Barnabas came and went, dressing before he left, returning some time later grumbling about “incompetent fools.”
“My lord,” Sleipnir said.
Barnabas snapped his head toward the sound as though he’d forgotten Sleipnir’s existence.
“Please,” Sleipnir said. “Finish it. Please, once more.”
Barnabas sighed. He shed his clothing before he approached the bed. There, he straddled Sleipnir’s prone body, perching over him like a mountain about to entomb him. He took Sleipnir’s chin in his hand and bent to kiss him.
“Greedy little thing,” he murmured.
Sleipnir was still reeling from the softness of that kiss when Barnabas grabbed the knife on the sheets and plunged it into Sleipnir’s chest in one swift motion.
Sleipnir screamed and howled, arching onto his shoulder blades. He grabbed at the knife but met only slippery, gushing blood, that blanket that leeched the heat out of him as it covered him. His heart beat frantically, trying to push the blood anywhere but out, but Barnabas dragged the knife downward and the hole grew and Sleipnir screamed and the pain left him blind to all else.
It hurt. It hurt. It hurt so much. So indescribably much. Sleipnir screamed until his throat was too raw to make sound. He writhed and wept. His chest was an open wound, his heart a distant, helpless flutter. Light and color faded, everything going gray, everything swallowed by the pain. It was like Barnabas had a whole claw in Sleipnir’s chest and not one simple little knife, but then, he was a master with a blade. Barnabas knew better than anyone how to cut deep, how to cut permanent, how to open wounds that wouldn’t stop bleeding until there was no blood left at all.
Sometimes, a single well-placed strike, a single blow driven deep enough, hard enough, could hurt more than a thousand haphazard claws.
And then it didn’t.
Sleipnir was too far away. He looked back upward at the pain, a distant tether to life. He reached for it, but his hand slipped right off, slick with blood.
He didn’t reach again. He’d passed through the hardest part. Now came that buzzing nothingness, that brilliant oblivion, that serene blank waiting always on the other side of life, stalking every breath, haunting every heartbeat.
It would win.
It always won.
Sleipnir slipped away.