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There is blood still on his lip and his black eye throbs from where he took the punch during practice. His breath is ragged in his chest and hurts his raw throat, but he’s never been harder than he is right now. Above him, in dishabille, is the King. His greying dark hair is plastered over his brow, falling free and wild over his face, his coat half-draped on one shoulder and sliding off the other one, one side of his suspenders unsnapped and his flies undone.
His cock is inches in front of Cor’s split lip, red and damp, and Cor thinks he might faint. If it weren’t for Clarus’ hands on his shoulders, forcing him to stay down, to stay on his knees, he would. But they ground him, keep him from running away. “Go ahead,” Clarus murmurs, nudging him forward. The King looks almost delirious. “Take it in your hand.” His fingers tighten on the aching muscles of Cor’s shoulders.
It is an order.
Cor’s cock throbs.
It doesn’t feel like his hand as he lifts it, but its stunningly real when he wraps his fingers around the cock before him. Warm, and thrumming with blood and pulse, hot under his fingers. The King gasps, a delicate, quiet sound, and he seems so much smaller somehow like this, and yet as impossibly impressive as the distant stars. “Just like that.” Clarus almost sounds patronising. “You know how to stroke yourself, do the same. Feel his cock in your palm.” They’re in a public hallway, anyone could come in and see. Anyone could walk by and see the King of Lucis cracking apart, with Cor bloody and on his knees, and Clarus whispering what to do into his ear.
He’s wanted this—Cor has wanted this so long, dreamt of it so long, and now—
He’s giddy.
“Swipe your thumb over the slit, get it all wet. Squeeze at the base. Take his balls in your hand, feel them.” Clarus’ fingers are inching up Cor’s neck, wrapping gently around the base of his throat. His pulse is so loud in his ears he can barely hear the older man’s voice. He can’t look away from Regis’ face; his hazel eyes almost black in the light reflecting off of the walls, his skin all the paler for the black walls and his black clothes, but for the bright flush of arousal high on his cheekbones. The bright red of his lips.
As Cor is watching, Clarus leans forward and kisses those red lips, and Regis grabs for the other man’s collar, holds tight, moaning into his open mouth as Cor strokes his dick, and finally, wraps the fingers of his other hand into Cor’s short hair, tugs him forward, unrelenting and too-hard just behind his left ear.
They don’t break until Cor feels like the tension is fit to cut with a knife. Then Clarus looks back down at him. “What do you want, Cor?” The King asks, speaking for them both, too-gentle. There is venom there, Cor knows.
“Please.” Cor’s voice doesn’t sound like his own; he sounds shattered and raw and young, younger than he’s felt since he was—since he last saw them like this, by accident. Years before. “Please, Your Majesty.”
Regis wears sovereignty like a cloak, a mantle that he never drops, even like this. Even when he has saliva bright on his lips and his cock is hot in Cor’s hand. He leans back against the wall, half-smiling, and raises one eyebrow. “Words, Cor,” he admonishes, gentling the fingers in his Marshal’s hair. “You can ask.”
“Let me suck your cock, sir.” It’s rude and blunt but he’s desperate, and Regis laughs, smoky heat and gilt-edged steel.
“I think we can do that, don’t you, Clarus?” He doesn’t look at Clarus as he asks it; he looks instead at Cor, at his swollen broken lip and the blood on his cheek and his throbbing eye and the erection that’s brutally tenting his pants, pressing against his fly so hard he can feel the chill of the zipper through his boxers. Regis lifts one foot just enough to dig the toe of his boot into the base of Cor’s cock where it’s bent against his fly, right above his balls, and he bites his unbroken lip until it bleeds to keep from shouting as his vision whites out. “I daresay our Marshal doesn’t seem a man well acquainted with sucking dick on his knees, though.” It has been years, but Cor knows he isn’t to speak; knows this isn’t for him. The number of times he’s thought about, hand on his cock, falling to his knees before the King in his throne room, with the entire council watching, and sucking his dick— “Might you tell him what to do, love?”
Clarus chuckles. The fingers on Cor’s neck sneak a tiny bit higher, above his collar, and they’re searing hot on his skin. They tighten. Just once. He almost forgets to breathe.
“I’m sure we can figure something out.” Clarus presses on his shoulder, pushes Cor forward, and he doesn’t have to be told what to do; he leans closer, one hand flattened onto the king’s boot for balance and the other still around the base of his erection, swallows the head of Regis’ cock. It’s blood-hot against the roof of his mouth, salty and the scent fills his nose. Cor moans, helpless, closes his eyes because he can’t bear to look up, and he dips lower before Clarus’ fingers tighten on his throat. “No,” Clarus commands. And he freezes. “Slowly, Marshal. Take your time. Lick his slit, taste him.” He does it, licking the king’s slit, under his foreskin, and it’s working because Regis sighs in pleasure, his thumb glides along the shell of Cor’s ear. “There you go, Marshal.” Cor can barely breathe, and he pulls back for a breath.
“Thank you,” his voice cracks as he whispers. “Thank you for letting me suck your cock, sir.” Regis laughs again, that thumb against the shell of his ear again, and Cor is almost scared to open his eyes.
“You haven’t done it properly yet, have you, Marshal?” Cor trembles. “Get back to work, and we’ll see if you’ve earned this.”
Cor does as he’s told, and swallows Regis’ cock back up, moaning helplessly when the king’s toe digs into his balls again, hard enough that his head almost hurts with it. He finds a pace soon enough—Regis has a slim, long cock, and the head bumps against the back of his throat, hard and wet on his soft palette. He almost feels like he needs to gag, but the thought is so far out of his mind he keeps forgetting about it. The first few times he tries to take the head in his throat he can’t quite do it, but then he finally tamps down his gag reflex completely and tilts his head forward, straightens his throat, and Regis’ cockhead slides down his throat.
“Fuck,” the king whispers, voice catching. He grabs Cor’s hair and drags him further forward, slides another half an inch in, cutting off Cor’s air. He shakes and whines, swallowing convulsively, pathetically trying to breathe. He gets a half-breath in through his nose, and then—
Clarus’ fingers around his throat, tight enough that he can feel Clarus stroking Regis’ cockhead through Cor’s trachea. He chokes, but can’t pull back, not with the king’s fingers in his hair and Clarus’ hand on his shoulder and on his throat. Instead, Clarus shoves him further forward, until Cor is heaving for breath that he can’t get, his lungs trying to inhale and unable to, crying helplessly.
Panicked, he opens his eyes, and looks up. At this angle, his nose shoved into Regis’ stomach, hair in his nostrils, he finds the king looking down at him. His eyes are all black with his blown-wide pupils, and his mouth is open to pant for breath. “There’s a lad,” Regis murmurs, pulls him closer, and Cor swallows again, choking. “You can do it.” He drags his toe up Cor’s cock and it throbs again. Clarus’ hand around his throat tightens until Cor knows he’ll have a handprint bruise there afterward, and it will be livid. “You can take it.” Cor will try, his head spinning with lack of air. He’s crying. He will try, swallowing and bobbing further down on Regis’ cock, moaning but it comes out only as a muffled whimper.
He wants his last moments to be like this, Regis’ cock filling his throat until he feels like he’ll never not feel the shape of it there again, Clarus’ hand choking him, stroking their king’s erection like Cor is just there to keep it warm. He wants to die like this, where all he can see is the king’s dark eyes. They keep fucking him until his vision is blacking out, fuck him until his heartbeat is so loud his ears hurt, fuck him with Clarus whispering words he doesn’t understand, until his cock feels like it’s going to explode untouched, break in half.
Regis fucks his throat until Cor can’t see can’t hear, fingers in the king’s trousers white-knuckled as he hyperventilates but can’t get any air, his vision blacked-out and his veins throbbing, sobbing helplessly and trying to breathe as Clarus chokes him, as Regis’ cock chokes him, until he knows he’s about to pass out and his face hurts from so much blood being trapped there. His vision is double and fuzzy and all he can taste is Regis’ cock, all he can—
“Don’t come, Marshal. Not until I say you can.” he hears the king’s voice. It’s an order, and one he can’t not follow. He didn’t realise he was humping the foot against his cock, he’s too close to passing out or coming or both. Moments before he picks one or the other, Regis pulls back, Clarus’ fingers around his throat loosen, and Cor almost screams as he inhales one huge, shaky breath and Regis strokes himself twice and comes on Cor’s face.
He sags, insensible, collapsing back against Clarus’ legs. Cor can’t see, his vision all white and black spots, and Regis’ come is dripping down his lips into his open mouth, salty and tacky on his tongue. His throat burns inside and out, aching with the new-formed bruises. He can’t move even if he wants to, and he just lays there for a time, trying to breathe and his lungs burning with each inhale.
A thumb against his broken lower lip helps him focus, and he knows it is the king. “Your Majesty?” he asks, his voice absolutely shot, ragged and raw and ruined and completely shredded. It’s tiny; more a whimper than speech, but he can’t force his bruised, ruined vocal chords to do more than whisper. He still can’t see, but it’s Regis.
“You did very well,” Regis murmurs, and Cor almost comes right then and there, untouched, just from the praise. But he hasn’t been told he can, so he doesn’t. Just burns. “That’s my lad.” Cor thinks he might faint.
The king kisses his too-hot brow, brushes his hair off of his face. “He looks lovely like this, don’t you think?” Clarus, who Cor is still leaning against to stay upright, hums in response, strong hands on his shoulders tightening for a moment. He can feel the noise down through the older man’s legs against his back. “I think we might have to keep him.” Clarus laughs, and Cor’s swimming head throbs at the sound, he moans. Wanting more, wanting anything. Keep him. Do it again, trap him on his knees again, fuck him until he can’t breathe again—
“I think we might,” Clarus agrees, and Cor sobs.
It is two weeks later, when the bruises on his throat have healed, that he is called to the Royal apartments at midnight. It’s not out of the ordinary, as the king sleeps very little, and the Crownsguard at the doors let Cor in without asking. He goes to Regis’ office and finds him there working, and for a time Cor stands at parade rest.
Clarus is in the armchair by the window, stately robes sloughed off, in only his shirt and trousers, scrubbing his fingers through his long, thinning grey hair, reading dispatches. Even the king has disrobed, and he looks smaller than Cor remembers—and Regis was always slim, his presence far outmatching his slender body. Neither man speaks to him, and Cor waits patiently, mind blessedly free of thought. They don’t even acknowledge his presence, until with a quiet click Regis sets down his pen, stands.
Cor snaps to attention. “At ease,” Regis says, leaning on his desktop. He’s wearing his knee brace, Cor notices—his leg must be bothering him. He was, now that the Marshal thinks about it, stiff this morning at briefing, the last Cor saw him. For a long moment Regis says nothing, considering and gathering his thoughts, before he sighs.
The whisper as Clarus puts down his paper is loud in the silence.
“I understand that the position Clarus and I put you in some weeks ago is not an easy one. It is precarious, and was improper, on both of our parts. I invited you here tonight not as your king, Cor, but as a man. You are not beholden to me, and if you want to back out, you have only to say the word.” Cor blinks. Nonplussed.
“Your Majesty,” he begins after a moment, glancing to Clarus, “I would not have...knelt, for you, sir, if I did not want to do so.” Regis is watching him, grey eyes sharp as knives. “You did not ask anything of me I would not have willingly given.” A pause, a correction. “That I did not willingly give.”
“Would you do it again?” Regis phrases it as a question, but it hardly is one. Cor thinks about being on his knees—the heady scent of his king’s cock in his mouth, Clarus’ fingers bruising his throat. He thinks, too, about the fact that it has been two weeks and he has not touched himself. Thinks about—how Regis told him not to come. Regis never told him he could.
Cor’s mouth is dry. He licks his lips to try and wet it; it does not help. “Permission to speak freely, Your Majesty.” His voice cracks as he says it.
He knows his cock is hard.
“Granted,” Regis replies, still watching, still considering. Clarus is watching him now, too, just as thoughtful. It’s like being in a room with two coeurls, who would eat him at the first provocation, and it’s terrifying and exhilarating all at once.
“You never told me I could come, Your Majesty. So I haven’t.”
All at once, the king’s eyes go very dark, and his thin lips turn into a small, knife-blade smile. Clarus sits up the rest of the way.
“For two weeks, Your Majesty. And if you tell me not to, I...won’t, sir.” Cor feels like he’s giving up a part of himself, saying it. He knows, realistically, that Regis could never let him come again. But he would gladly trade that, gladly, for another chance to kneel for him. He takes in a shaky breath. “I would do anything you wanted of me, sir.”
“You can still back out,” Regis’ voice is low and rough with heat, and Cor feels his cheeks burn with a flush. “If it isn’t what you want. You can leave, Cor, and never come back, and we can all pretend this never happened.” Pretend that Clarus didn’t stroke the king off in Cor’s throat, that Cor didn’t almost pass out with his mouth fucked wide on the king’s cock, that he didn’t have to sneak back to his rooms with the hardest erection he’s ever had, faint and woozy, with the king’s come on his face and that he has barely slept for two weeks because every time he does he dreams about it. “If you want to leave now, we shall never speak of it again.”
“Am I correct in surmising, sir, that should I, the invitation will not be extended again?” Regis nods. It is now or never, then. Cor clears his throat, tries to remain professional, even though he has never in his life wanted to drop to his knees more than right now. “What will you do to me?” He sounds young again; young and frightened and horribly, terribly, desperately aroused.
“Whatever we want,” the king replies, and Cor has to breathe, hard, to tamp down the rising urge to sob. “Whenever we want. Wherever we want.” He thinks again about falling to his knees in the audience hall, begging for it before the council. He would do it. “Whatever you want.” Cor doesn’t know how he would even ask for what he wants. Or even what he wants. Regis is still watching him, and his smile softens into something of suffusing affection and indulgence. “What would you like, Cor?”
“Anything,” he whispers, voice raw. “Anything, sire.”
“Do you want to come?”
“No.” He shakes. He doesn’t want to. He’s given it up, now, and he doesn’t want it back. That’s just another part of him, serving king and crown. Regis’ indulgent smile grows.
“What if I never let you come again?” Cor sobs, a wet sound. He can imagine it, all right—all too well. Can imagine never being allowed to come again while Clarus and Regis use him. “Would you like that?”
“Yes, sire.” Regis’ smile grows again. Cor whines. “Please, sire.”
“On your knees then, Marshal.”
Cor has never been happier to kneel, and he drops so fast that if the carpet wasn’t there to catch him, he would have been sporting aching knees for days. As it is, they hurt from taking all his weight so abruptly, and he breathes out a long, shaking breath he didn’t know he was holding. He feels so right, on his knees, and he whines as the king comes over from behind his desk, very slowly. Without his cane he doesn’t move as fast as he used to, but Cor can wait. When Regis finally stands before him, the king’s slim fingers tangle in his hair, tug Cor forward so he can bury his face in Regis’ hip. He breathes in the scent of the other man’s skin and clothes, and sags like a puppet with his strings cut. This is enough, more than enough. Just to be touched like this. It is not to last, though—that moment, gentle and fleeting, was reassurance, nothing more, and Regis pulls away, leans comfortably against his desk and stares down at Cor.
The sound of Clarus standing and coming over to join him is oddly loud, and Cor finds himself staring up at both of them, Clarus glancing at him, heated, before burying his face in Regis’ shoulder, ducking slightly to do so. He’s still watching Cor with one eye, and he murmurs something inaudible as Regis, not looking, slides his fingers around the back of the older man’s neck, and Clarus yields to him without hesitation, head hung in servitude.
To serve at the king’s pleasure, Cor is learning somewhat belatedly, is a heady position to have.
“Take your cock out so we can see,” Regis orders, and Cor moves sluggishly to do it, his hands shaking as he gets his fly open, rocks back on his heels. He pulls his cock out and it springs free, achingly hard with his balls already tight, red and wet at the tip.
The king’s eyes go very, very dark.
“Oh,” Regis murmurs, “Well. Isn’t that something.” Clarus looks up, and raises both his eyebrows. “We should have started taking care of him much sooner, don’t you think, love?”
“Quite.” They’re both staring at Cor’s cock, the first they’ve seen it, and he feels like he should be embarrassed, but he wants to own his cock, all of eight and a half inches and wide enough that his fingers can’t touch around it, thickly veined. Apparently, they like it too. “It’s almost a shame to leave it untouched.” Regis kisses the corner of Clarus’ mouth.
“He has to earn it.” Cor whines, and the king lifts one foot, drags the toe of his boot from the base of his cock to the tip, grinding just under the head. He bites, hard, on his tongue, to keep from shouting. That would be more attention from the Crownsguard at the door than he wants.
It would be so easy. The door to the office, to the wider suites, is unlocked. Anyone could walk in at any moment, and find Cor with his cock out, practically begging, on his knees. He wants someone to come in and see him like this, utterly ruined. All he can think about is how humiliating it would be; could anyone follow a Marshal they knew would kneel?
They’ve all seen him kneel.
They know he would kneel.
As Cor watches, Clarus nuzzles Regis’ jawline, stubble scraping his neck, and Regis lifts his head, baring his slender throat, leans more into the other man’s lap. Cor has seen his king shirtless before numerous times—in the sparring yard, on their journeys, tired and exhausted at midnight briefings with his hair mussed and his grey eyes hazy. But it’s totally different to see Clarus peeling him out of his shirt like this, undoing each button by touch while kissing Regis and boxing him in against the edge of the desk, revealing first the pale arc of his neck, then the too-thin dip of his collarbones.
Regis has lost weight again, Cor distantly notices. He’s thinner than the last time Cor saw him without his shirt; the narrowing of his chest and waist isn’t as noticeable in his coat. Each inch of skin revealed is another visible rib, the dip on his sternum, the dusting of hair across his chest and stomach down to the top of his trousers. Clarus knocks his suspenders off, and Regis sighs in pleasure, loops his arms around the older man’s shoulders.
The angle isn’t the best, and Clarus breaks away after a moment, draws the king back around his desk, fumbling with his flies as they move. Regis bats his hands away and does it himself; deft and efficient, so that when they stop and he leans up against the desk edge, Cor can see his ass, pale and tight and—fuck. He wants to touch, wants to reach out a hand, but Regis is as out of his reach as is the moon.
It’s not a show that they put on. There’s no such artifice. But, Cor distantly knows, it is for him. They could have just as easily fucked right where they were, fucked with Regis hanging onto the back of Clarus’ shirt and moaning into his mouth, ankles locked at the small of his back. Instead, he leans forward and braces himself over his desk, dark hair scattered over his face and grey eyes bright, as Clarus plasters along his back, one broad palm stroking his king’s cock and the other behind him. Cor can tell when Clarus manages to get a finger—slick with lube from somewhere, must be—into the king because Regis hisses between his teeth, and a line furrows his brow, his lips hitching tight.
Regis is mostly naked, and Cor and Clarus are still both dressed. Clarus has him pinned to his desk, face buried in his narrow shoulder, Clarus moaning helplessly each time his fingers fuck into the other man, but Cor doesn’t for a moment see Regis as anything but completely in control. He is letting Clarus pin him there because he wants to be; taking those fingers willingly because he wants to be. He wants Clarus’ broad, callused soldier’s fingers in him, and he takes it so beautifully, mouth relaxing and dropping open and his head hanging from his shoulders when, by Cor’s count of his gasps, Clarus has three fingers in him.
“You’re so hot,” Clarus murmurs, and Regis laughs. “Fuck,” the older man swears, panting for a moment, forehead furrowed. “Leg all right, love?”
“Fine.” Regis looks up at Cor then and his smile both softens and hardens; gentling but all the more deadly for it all the same. Cor shudders, his cock throbs. “Do you want to touch me, Marshal?”
“Yes, sire.” Not a question, but Cor answers all the same. “So much.” Regis just smiles at him; no such invitation is offered. Instead, Cor watches as Regis moans, bereft, when Clarus pulls his fingers free. He breathes, for a moment, and then—
Cor’s heartbeat is loud, and his breath caught in his throat, as he watches what happens next. Regis leans back against Clarus’ powerful shoulder behind him, elbows locked, sweat beading on his hairline gleaming in the light of his desklamp. He’s panting, nipples hard in the chill air of his office, and he lets Clarus take his weight as his mouth falls open, lips red and wet. “Oh,” Regis whispers, even as Clarus sobs aloud, shuddering hard behind him. Clarus shifts, slightly, and Regis sighs in pleasure, his face clearing, his eyes tense and his jaw tight but his smile beatific. His cock, which Cor can see over the top of the desk, jumps in Clarus’ hand as the other man fucks into him in one long, slow stroke. Cor can feel his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, and he feels like if he can’t touch, if he just has to look, that he might die. He can only imagine what that feels like, taking the king, knowing that he’s willed it and—
They don’t offer touch, though. They just offer the spectacle, the sight that Cor will never forget of Regis’ face at the moment a man fucks into him.
“There’s a love,” Regis murmurs, in pleasure, as Clarus settles into him, their temples pressed together. “Don’t you want to show Cor what I look like when I come?”
“He’s seen,” Clarus points out, shifting back and finding a slow, deep pace. Their height difference is just enough that Cor can guess that every time he gets to the hilt, Regis is rocking up onto his toes, his weight hanging off of the cock inside him, struggling to keep on his feet. “Last time.”
“I rather think he was probably too near to blacking out to see properly,” Regis points out, and Cor wonders how he can still speak, when his own tongue and brain seem to have completely ceased to work. Clarus just grunts in response, and looks up to stare at Cor where he’s kneeling, his cock dripping hard. “Cor,” Regis coos, still smiling at him, and Cor would gut himself for this man, right then and there, if he but asked, “Do you want me to touch you?”
“Yes.” His voice cracks in the middle of the word, shatters. He can’t find anything else, his vocabulary gone, and Regis’ smile gets that venom-edge again.
“Stroke your cock for me, Marshal.” Cor fumbles, his hands clumsy, to do as he’s been asked, and when he wraps his fingers around the base he has to duck his head, dig his chin into his collarbones, and sob, breath hitching for a moment.
He almost comes.
Almost.
But he doesn’t.
It’s hard to do it and stay coherent, stay watching them, but he manages it after a moment, keeping his fingers to the base and not touching the soaking head or he probably won’t be able to hold off. Regis and Clarus both watch him with dark eyes, and Cor can’t look away from them as Clarus starts rubbing his fingers over the head of the king’s cock, as Regis murmurs him into a faster pace, until Clarus is moaning helplessly into his king’s neck and Regis is gasping for breath, rolling his hips backward into the cock buried in him, biting his lower lip. “So deep in you,” Clarus sobs, and Regis laughs. “Please, gods,”
“You can wait,” Regis chides him gently, one hand wrapping around the back of the older man’s neck, pulling his head down, and then his voice cracks, his full, swollen mouth softening. “Clarus,” he’s rocking up on his toes, taller than Clarus is at that angle, hands white-knuckled, and Cor’s cock is jumping in his hand, throbbing as he tries to keep from coming. “Love,” he’s moaning, his too-thin belly shaking with tension, his face angelic, “Fuck—“
Regis comes.
Last time, Cor barely got a good look at it, could barely see. Now, he has as clear a view as he is ever like to have. Regis looks almost pained when he comes, his eyes soft and sagging and his mouth in anguish, the tendons in his neck standing out against the skin. Clarus shudders behind him, still fucking him, not yet finished, as Regis comes in a few short spurts over his desk, his head lolled back on Clarus’ shoulder as he groans, cock jumping. His cheeks are flushed something awful, and there are tears on his lower eyelids. He’s smiling, indulgent. “Just like that,” Regis murmurs, riding out his orgasm, cock still dripping. “Do you want to come?” It’s such an innocent question, and Cor almost answers, almost begs, but it’s not for him.
“Yes,” Clarus chokes out, palms flattening over the edge of the desk to have something to hold onto for leverage as he fucks Regis so hard the king’s breath is broken gasps in his chest, the desk thunking with the force of it. “Regis, please. Please, you feel so good.” Clarus moans, helpless. “Regis, please, may I come.” His voice cracks, and Cor guesses that Regis has tightened around him almost too-hard, because Clarus’ fingers go white-knuckled. “Love—“
“Yes,” the king murmurs, and Clarus doubles over behind him, blunt nails grasping helplessly for the king’s hip, digging in. “Yes, just like that.” Cor never expected that he would see Clarus beg, but he’s begging, begging like Cor would in his place.
After Clarus comes, Regis shifts forward slightly with a hiss between his teeth, pulling off. They both look ruined, and Cor knows he’s no less shattered. Clarus is shaky with orgasm, and sinks back into the king’s chair, as Regis lifts his hair off of where it’s sticking to the back of his neck, stares down at Cor. He hasn’t stopped touching his cock, and he’s sweating all over, cold despite his clothes, and he’s shaking. Regis reaches over to soothe the stress from Clarus’ brow, and strips his trousers the rest of the way down, toeing his shoes off before he comes around the desk. Here, naked but for his socks and the shirt hanging half-off one shoulder, unbuttoned, with his body covered in sweat and streaks of come down the insides of his thighs, he’s never looked more like a king. Cor has seen him crowned and throned, cloaked in power and magic, and that has never been as regal as he is right now.
Regis stops just in front of him, reaches out and grabs Cor’s hair tight in his fingers, pulls. Hard. Cor whimpers. “Stop,” the king commands, and Cor stops. He’s panting for breath; his throat hurts. His cock burns it’s so hard he feels sick and faint. He’s never been so hard in his life. Regis doesn’t touch him, though, doesn’t for even a moment give him what he wants. Instead, he bends over, gently takes Cor’s chin with his free hand, and pulls Cor up to straining on his knees to kiss him.
It is the first time Regis has kissed him. In that moment, Cor is absolutely sure he could die and he would have no regrets. His king’s lips are soft, wet and damp from his earlier kisses. His beard tickles at Cor’s cheeks, and he tastes ever-so-faintly of wine. It’s simultaneously the most intimate and heartbreaking thing that anyone has ever done to him.
He does not touch. He knows better. He wants to touch; wants to reach and grab for the king’s thighs, to tangle his fingers in his greying hair, gasp for more like a man wanting water in the desert. Instead, Cor moans open-mouthed into the kiss, dizzy with want, and thinks that he could die like this, die, and he wouldn’t mind.
A month goes by in which not even for a moment does Regis look at him anything other than Marshal of the Crownsguard, but every time the king calls out at a council meeting, “Marshal,” Cor has to bite the inside of his lip and pinch the skin of his palm to force himself to keep from getting hard—all he can remember is Regis smiling at him and saying on your knees then, Marshal. When all is said and done it’s been almost two months since he came, and he wakes up in the middle of the night more than once a week desperately hard, his balls drawn up tight and his cock throbbing against the waistband of his boxers, and all Cor can do is grab his erection around the base and breathe and try to think about nothing, nothing at all.
He promised not to, and he won’t. He won’t.
It’s a rainy evening in Insomnia, the thunder crashing over the Wall, lightning scattering when it bounces down and hits the spells overhead. Cor is interrupted by a knock at his door, and finds a Crownsguard waiting for him. “Sir Amicitia has sent for you, Marshal. He says you are requested at His Majesty’s apartments”
“Thank you.” Cor hopes it comes out clearly, and not like his tongue is leaden, for it is. It feels like cotton on his mouth, and he breathes, sharp, through his nose to keep his control. “Dismissed, Captain.” Left alone he has one more moment in his rooms, forehead pressed against the cool wood of the door. There is no way that walking to the royal apartments with an erection so hard he can’t see straight is a good idea.
He manages. Somehow. He’s shown in, and they’re quiet inside—Noctis is, no doubt, doing work before bed in his room, and the halls between the door into the rooms and the royal bedchamber are empty. Cor stops at the door when he arrives and knocks, briskly. “Marshal Leonis,” he calls, “Your Majesty.” It’s quiet inside, and he stands at parade rest for several minutes before the door opens. It’s the King, and he steps aside, lets Cor come in, before he closes the door.
Cor has been in the king’s bedchamber several times through the years. It’s lit well tonight, the drapes pulled open to let in the light of the Wall and the lightning outside through the great picture windows. “Your Majesty.” Cor murmurs. His tongue still feels leaden, and he wants to drop to his knees. “How is your head?” Weather on the Wall is always hard on the king, and he isn’t at all surprised he was called here tonight because of it. No doubt Regis needs—something.
“I will live,” the King replies, turning and walking back to his bed. Clarus is there sprawled on the bedsheets looking more than a little ragged, his eyes glassy with arousal, naked as the day he was born. His fingers are grasping at the sheets, and he tilts up like a flower to the sun as Regis walks to his side, grabbing for the king’s elbow to pull him back into a kiss. It is a familiarity that Cor knows he would never be allowed, but wants like burning all the same.
Cor stands, unsure, at the door, as Regis turns back to him. He’s still almost dressed, and there’s something electric about him tonight, like the lightning of the storm that rages outside of the city’s Wall. “Come here,” Regis commands, his thick voice low, and Cor doesn’t really notice his legs moving until he’s standing just before the king, his knees shaking.
He always forgets how much shorter than him Regis is. He seems so much taller, his presence far outstripping his slim, narrow form. “Would you like to suck my cock tonight?” Regis asks, as if he is questioning the weather, and Cor feels faint again. He has to breathe before he can find it in him to answer.
“Yes.” His voice comes out choked and cracking. “Please, sir.” Regis smiles; pleased, and Cor sighs in relief when Regis murmurs to him that he may kneel, and he practically falls to the floor, knees buckling, hands loose at his sides. Regis kisses him then, too-gently, fingers in his hair, pulling him up as high as he can get at that angle.
“Clothes off, Marshal,” the king commands, and Cor does as he’s been asked as the king climbs back on the bed and lets Clarus do the same to him, the older man fumbling with his shirt buttons and then the fly of his slacks. In all black still, the way that Regis sits astride Clarus’ lap, he can see Clarus’ cock in detail, the way he hasn’t yet. It’s shorter than Regis’ cock is, but wider around than Cor’s, the head purple and fat. It looks like getting it in would hurt, and it’s wider than Cor’s wrist. As he watches, Regis reaches back and grabs it, and Clarus bucks under him, yelping, his cock spilling precome as Regis shifts up, gets his trousers off, and settles back down to rub it in the crack of his ass, his skin slick and shiny.
Cor doesn’t realise he’s still dressed until the king turns around and his steely eyes rest on Cor, who fumbles, shrugging out of his shirt. His belt buckle seems impossible to figure out, but he gets it on his third try, and pulls it off before pushing his trousers and boxers down together over his hips, his hands shaking. Regis is still watching as he rolls to the side slightly to get them the rest of the way off, and he gets back on his knees, taking a shaking breath.
Regis reaches back, grabs Clarus’ neck, and forces him to roll forward. “What do you think,” the king asks, kissing the other man’s temple. “Does he pass muster?” Clarus’ fingers grab white-knuckled for the king’s hips, and he pulls Regis back so that his cock slides underneath the king’s, their lengths atop one another.
“He’d look better with you pinning him to the sheets and crying,” Clarus growls, and Regis laughs, low and deadly.
“Maybe next time,” Regis admits, and Cor.
Takes in a deep breath.
Holds it.
Counts to ten.
Breathes, very slowly, back out.
Doesn’t come.
He knows, with certainty, that he will not sleep tonight. He will be up, even after a cold shower, barely able to keep himself still let alone sleeping, with the thought of the king pressing his face into the pillows and fucking him wide open, holding the base of his cock, over and over. The thought of not being able to come while the king takes his pleasure makes him feel ill, and he’s never wanted to beg for something more in his life.
“Come here,” the king commands, and Cor does so, sitting down on the bedsheets. Regis gestures him closer, and Cor comes like a dog to heel, kneeling between his open thighs. Regis kisses the same way he fights; all command and no restraint. It’s a little like being cut open, teeth on Cor’s lower lip and fingers bruising around the back of his neck. He anchors himself with his palms flat on the mattress, bent over Regis, moaning unabashed into his open mouth. He stays there, kissing his king, until Regis pulls him away with a sharp jerk on the short hair on the back of his neck, and Cor falls back to his heels, his face burning and his head pounding.
He sees why they pushed him back. It’s a show again, for him to watch and want, because Clarus has lifted one of Regis’ slim thighs, soft with dark hair, over his wrist, the other (with his bad knee) on the other side of Clarus’ open legs. The older man has two fingers in him already, and Regis moans, head rolling back on his shoulder, hips rolling to ride the thrusts. But only for a moment, before Regis is reaching down and pulling his fingers out. “No,” the king murmurs, “Not tonight.”
And then Cor watches, dumbfounded. There’s no way Regis is about to do what he thinks he’s about to do—but he reaches for the bottle of lube on the bedside table, slicks his hand, slicks Clarus’ cock, and then grabs it tight in his fingers before he leans back, free hand supporting him, and cants his hips wide, bites his lower lip, and pushes onto Clarus’ erection. The older man makes a broken, ruined noise, his blue eyes wide, holding tight to Regis’ hip. “Regis,” Clarus gasps, ragged, and the king moans, broken and beautiful. “Regis—“
“Just like that,” Regis murmurs. “I want to feel you in the morning.” Cor’s own cock twitches. He’ll feel that a lot more than just in the morning. He knows with certainty that Regis will be limping for days, but he doesn’t seem to care in the slightest, fucking himself down and open with ease. He takes it so well, so quick and so clean. When he finally works down to the base, Clarus is actively wheezing for breath, his chest rising and falling like he’s just been running for an hour, not just had a man sink down on his cock agonisingly slow, and Regis slumps back against him, looking sated and full, his own erection hanging pendulous and his balls pulled up tight. “Come here,” he murmurs, stretching his clean hand out toward Cor, who comes forward immediately, lets the king push him down between his thighs. “You know what to do, Marshal.”
The following minutes are both agonising and almost dreamlike. Regis lets Cor and Clarus do all the work, his head lolling back against the older man’s shoulder, enjoying the attention and the chance to just let go completely. Clarus sets a slow, deep pace that’s all about thrusts that linger, and every time he pushes up Regis’ cock slides into Cor’s throat, and he has to force himself to breathe shallowly through his nose, savour the feeling of having his mouth fucked open. They don’t care the slightest for his comfort or his need and he wouldn’t want it any other way, he wants to be debased and ruined and humiliated and there only for his king’s use. He moans, occasionally, when his erection catches on the sheets, the cloth rough friction against the head, and moans louder when Regis tangles slender fingers in his hair and drags him down to fuck hard up against his soft palette, choking him with his cock.
Before long, Clarus is begging to come, and Regis is still riding him as long and slow and sure as he wants it. Every now and again he will drag Cor forward and rut into his throat until Cor is tearing up and choking, but then he stops again. His self-control is almost superhuman, because Cor doesn’t think that he could still be holding out with a cock as wide as Clarus’ in him and fucking someone’s face at the same time, but he isn’t Regis. “Oh, love,” Regis sighs, in pleasure, stilling on Clarus down to his base, as the older man comes, reaching out to grab Cor’s hair, dragging him forward with a yelp to bury Regis’ cock in him to the hilt, choking off his air and shoving straight past his gag reflex so all that Cor can do is heave as Regis, with a broken, wet, ragged sound, comes down his throat in hot spurts.
Clarus doesn’t let him go until they’re both done, and it takes long enough that by the time Cor pulls back he’s gasping, vision blacking out again, trembling and weak on the sheets. Regis keeps gentling his hair, thumb rubbing just under the shell of his ear, and Cor lays there insensible for so long he doesn’t know what’s happening until he finds himself wobbling to get to his elbows.
Regis is staring at him, mouth and eyes soft, looking down into his eyes. “Do you want to come, Marshal?” He asks; the opportunity is there. He could say yes.
“No,” he says instead, the sweetest of lies. “No, sire.” Regis cups his chin, smooths his hair from his sweaty forehead.
“Are you certain, Cor?” He hasn’t called Cor by his name once this whole night, and he whimpers, grasping for the other man, Regis allowing it, letting Cor bury his face in the dip between his thigh and his too-sharp hipbones, damp with sweat and come. He just nods, rather than force himself to say it again. He doesn’t think that he could do it twice. He doesn’t think that he could be offered that twice, and turn it down willingly, without losing his mind. He’s already close enough to cracking.
“All right.” Regis lets him go and Cor is almost glad for it, the king pulling away, soothing both men on the bed. Cor doesn’t even really notice that he’s gone until he’s back, gently putting soft wax on Cor’s cracked lips, wiping down his tender, too-hard cock, cleaning Clarus up.
Outside the windows, thunder rolls, and Cor is starting to be coherent enough to consider somehow finding a way to get back to his rooms when he finds Regis pressing him back to the bedspread. He’s dressed to sleep, in only an old t-shirt, from Lestallum by the looks of the stylised meteor on it, and soft flannel pants. His dark hair has been combed before bed, and he’s holding Cor’s boxers. As he sits up, scrubbing his face, he finds his cock has gone soft, and Clarus is gone, but from the en suite bathroom there are the sound of the man brushing his teeth.
He doesn’t know how much time he’s lost, or how long he was dozing, but Regis doesn’t seem to mind. “Here,” the king says, handing him a shirt—it must be one of Clarus’, none of the king’s would fit him. Cor’s shoulders wouldn’t ever get into the sleeves.
“Your Majesty—“
“Stay the night,” the king orders, gently, straightening Cor’s short hair. “There’s room for one more.”
There is a rumour in the Crownsguard, after it’s been three months since Clarus shoved Cor to his knees in the hallway and Regis fucked his throat until he couldn’t speak. The rumour is that Cor hasn’t gotten laid, and that’s why the Marshal is ready to bite someone’s head off. He’s been short-tempered with his men, he knows, but only after nights where he’s not slept well, and the tension is getting to him.
But every time, Regis offers. Regis had even offered the first night he had ridden Cor’s cock, when Cor had bitten his lower lip to bleeding, when Clarus had held his hands down to keep from coming, and the king had been tight and hot and something otherworldly around his dick, wringing his sanity from him one slow slick inch at a time, and Cor had begged not to come.
He almost doesn’t want to any more. That, somehow, giving it up has given more in return than he ever got when he did orgasm.
That night, Regis had grabbed his cock around the base hard to keep Cor back from the edge, to not let it happen by accident, and ridden him until he had come shouting on his Marshal’s dick. It’s still the best sex he’s ever had.
No; the problem is definitely not that Cor isn’t getting laid. It’s not a lack of affection either, because Clarus and Regis are almost too-nice to him, for all that they ruin him weekly. No; the problem isn’t even that he hasn’t come in three months and his body is helplessly keyed-up and on edge. The problem is that he can’t stop thinking about what he wants the King to do to him.
After sparring practice, after debrief, Cor takes himself and his half-hard erection to the showers to clean up. Usually he stays with his men, wanting to give them something concrete to follow when it comes to their Marshal, more man than image, but he avails himself of his rank and right by using a single stall to himself and closing the door.
By the time the water is on, his cock is blood-hot and hard in his hand, and Cor leans his forehead against the black tile of the shower wall and breathes for a long moment, closing his eyes. The water is hot and pounding on his shoulders, and it’s all-too-easy to start stroking himself, to fumble with soap and get the fingers of his other hand back behind him, slide one fingertip inside him, to clench down on it.
He wants something awful; somehow even more than he did before. Before, he could only imagine what Regis would look like sprawled and sweaty on his sheets, what his cock would look like. Before he could only imagine how it would feel to have Regis push him to his knees and slide a thumb into his pliant mouth, press his tongue down, and ask him, do you want to come, Marshal? Now, he knows all-too-well what the king’s cock tastes like, what he looks like when he comes with his mouth open and the tendons in his neck tight. It’s a whole other kind of problem, and it’s one that haunts him.
Now instead of having dreams of the imaginary, Cor sees the real. He keeps dreaming of Regis choking him with his slender, powerful hands and not stopping. Cor knows he would come as he passed out, he knows it in his bones that he would want Regis to do it again and again, until his throat was permanently painted yellow and black with healing bruises. He wants Regis to bloody his mouth while fucking his throat, to rip him by fucking into him from behind without any lube. He wants Regis to press his cock into Cor’s eye, blind him for king and country, wants to die on his blade real and figurative sure as breathing.
The thought of Regis pinning him to the ground and running him through, the cold steel of his sword stabbing straight through Cor’s stomach, is what almost makes him come with three fingers in his ass, and Cor bites his lip to bleeding and holds the base of his cock hard in a vice-grip until it passes, and then turns the water all the way to freezing and shivers through cleaning his hair to make it go back down, the urge to orgasm physical and overwhelming.
He will last. He has to.
A scream in the palace wakes Cor in the darkest hours of the morning. He lays in bed for a moment, disconcerted, trying to force wakefulness into his sluggish muscles. His room, as Marshal, is a floor below the royal apartments. There’s another scream, and he rolls out of bed in only his shirt and boxers and stumbles blindly out of his room, turning in the hallway. It’s from above, and he starts running, uncoordinated but absolutely wide awake.
It’s only halfway up the servant’s stair that Cor realises with a gut-wrenching sickening feeling of horror that Clarus is gone for the next few days, overseeing matters of import outside the city Wall. Regis’ rooms are guarded around the clock, but a guard is not the same as an Amicitia, and it is a long-since open secret that the King’s bodyguard shares his bed. “No,” Cor whispers, and summons his sword to his hand as he takes the stairs three at a time, skidding in sock-feet along the hall on the wax-shiny floor above to the door to the royal apartments.
The door is open, and the Crownsguard who had stood there lay dead.
Cor jumps over their bodies and sprints inside. Knocked dazed in the hall is Gladiolus, Clarus’ son bleeding from a strike to his forehead, his eyes glassy—but he’s conscious. Iris is sitting over him, and it’s her that’s screaming, ragged and raw.
Cor spares them only a glance, because the door to the Kings bedchamber is open, and he throws himself through, slamming the wood back against the stone walls and running directly into an assassin, currently held back by the full might of the Armiger. “Cor!” Regis shouts, and he ducks automatically, without thinking, as a blade flies through where his head was moments before he’s already moving, sword in hand as he knocks the woman aside, flipping his katana around and tossing the sheath aside so that it Warps back into air.
There’s no time to think. No time to do anything at all but drive the woman back. She’s quick, and smaller than he is, trying to use that to her advantage. He’s still exhausted, but has adrenaline on his side, and the following exchange of strikes is brutal, her slim knives the kind of light sword that his blade is not well-matched for. She gets past his guard and slices a long, shallow gash across his stomach and chest.
He doesn’t notice. He just uses the moment she does it to grab her hand in one of his, using the other for his sword, and brutally wrenches her arm behind her back. Her scream when the arm breaks is loud, and she tries to get him again but he’s ready, snapping her wrist to make sure there’s nothing she can do with that arm. She tries to throw him off, but she’s unused to how dark Lucian apartments are at night, and he knows the king’s bedchamber by now almost as well as his own, and trips her over the stepstool by the bookshelf, traps her against the vanity, and pins her to the top by running her through the abdomen with his katana, the tip puncturing straight into the wood behind her and quivering there.
At that point, the old unused sconces above the electric lights roar to fire and life, and Cor finds himself gasping and covered in sweat as the King joins him, fire dancing at his fingertips. Regis is, as Cor can now tell, unharmed—just coated in the thin sheen of sweat that has come to accompany his use of the Armiger. His grey eyes are ruthless, and he grabs the woman by the throat, hauls her up the arc of Cor’s katana, her body convulsing as it slides back up the blade with a sickening, wet noise.
She screams again, thrashing against the steel impaling her belly, and looks at him in absolute terror.
“You hurt my children,” Regis snarls, as deadly as the fire that currently coats his other fist. “You come in here and hurt my children, and you expect for even a moment that you will die a quick death?” She’s shaking violently, and blood is everywhere—Cor’s, hers, doesn’t matter. “Where is Noctis?” Regis asks, not looking at Cor, who holds his injured stomach.
“Asleep by my guess, Your Majesty.”
“Iris?”
“Unharmed. Gladiolus seems to be concussed.” Regis nods, curtly. Cor almost feels sorry for the assassin; what Regis is about to do will be almost without a doubt a fate worse by far than death.
“Fetch a doctor for Gladio, and get Iris out of here.” As he speaks, there is a crack like shattering glass and the Armiger explodes to life around the king, glittering blades agitated with his mood, nearly vibrating where they hang in midair. “Come back after.” Cor nods.
“At once, Your Majesty.”
He leaves, and rushes back into the hallway. First he checks Noctis’ room, and finds the prince unharmed and asleep in bed, one arm thrown over the edge of the mattress—a deep sleeper, he had hoped the boy would have missed the entire thing. Worry assuaged, Cor lets go of his own gut wound to crouch beside Iris, who is completely insensible, hyperventilating. “Iris,” Cor gentles her, lifting the girl into his arms, “Iris, please. Hush.” She wails into his shoulder, her small hands fists in his shirt, as Cor cups the side of Gladio’s face. He blinks owlishly at Cor, who uses his other arm to pick the boy up. Now fourteen, he’s far too large to do it with ease, but Cor manages it, and carries the siblings back out of the apartments.
In the hallway he finds several members of the Crownsguard, summoned, and he immediately hands Gladio off to the first person he sees. “Get the boy to a doctor, quickly. He’s concussed.” The man nods, and then Cor hands Iris to Monica, who takes the girl without question. Despite his own wound, Cor has to be Marshal. “Get guards on the Prince’s room, nobody but the family is allowed in or out. I want the Citadel in lockdown and the city on alert. Double the guard at the gates, and I want four men on either side of the doors into the apartment.” He’s out of breath and his chest hurts; it is only now that he spares a thought for the fact that the assassin’s blades might have been poisoned.
The woman, still pinned by his blade to the desk, is screaming inside the apartments. If it’s words, he can’t catch them.
He ignores it.
“Get these guards to the doctors; see if there’s anything that can be done.” He will feel grief later, after the moment is over, if all four of them are dead. He will have to call their families. Out of breath, still disoriented, he remembers it only at the last moment— “Does someone have a phone?” His own is still below in his rooms, and he shan’t be going to find it. The king, no doubt, is probably too furious to dig around for his own.
Someone, he doesn’t see who, hands him one. Cor blindly dials Clarus’ personal number, and has to call thrice more before the man, bleary with sleep, picks up. “What happened,” Clarus manages, voice thick. He doesn’t recognise the number—and no doubt, is assuming the worst. “Is everyone all right?”
“Assassin. Gladiolus is concussed,” Cor tells him first, and Clarus swears. “He’ll be all right. It didn’t seem serious, he was mostly in shock. Noctis slept through the whole thing. Iris is distraught; I can only guess Gladio tried to stop the woman and she saw her strike him down. She’s with Monica.”
“Regis?” Cor is pushing back into the apartments. All the lights are on now, switches properly flipped, and guards have poured in. The screams have stopped in the king’s bedchamber, and he strides toward it as the door eases open and he finds the king waiting for him, looking hollow-eyed. There is blood on his hands, and a fine spatter over his face. He doesn’t seem concerned.
Cor hands him the phone.
“Exhausted,” Regis says, one hand pressed to his temple. “Unharmed. She told me very little.” Cor ascertains all he has to know from that, and turns back around to the Crownsguard swarming into the apartments.
“Get someone in here to clean up and take the body to the coroner,” he calls, and a Lieutenant strides forward, someone from the night shift, in uniform. He and Regis both step out of the way and let the woman through, and she returns a few moments later with Cor’s blade, which he takes unquestioning, and the body.
She leaves, after.
Cor shrugs his ruined shirt off, and uses it to wipe the blood off of his sword. The gash on his chest is stinging something fierce, and he summons back his sheath, puts his katana away, as Regis is finding the owner of the phone, returning it. Cor follows him back into his bedroom a moment later, and smiles slightly to see that the king is tired enough that he flicks off the lightswitch and then waves a hand to drop the flames where they burn before he collapses into his vanity chair, sprawled boneless and regal despite his dishabille, his hand on his right temple over the scars that crown him, his hair ragged. Cor follows him in, breathless, and without thinking about it falls to his knees at the king’s feet, exhausted as the adrenaline leaves his system.
Regis reaches out with his free hand and smooths the hair back from Cor’s brow, then pulls him over to press his face into Regis’s thigh, fingers carding through his hair and cupping the back of his neck. Cor closes his eyes, not caring in the slightest about the blood on the vanity and the floor, or his own injury.
“Not Imperial,” Regis murmurs, thinking aloud as he strokes Cor’s hair like Cor is a beloved pet—which, he supposes, he rather is. “Wouldn’t name who, though. We’ll have to look into it; a breach of security of this magnitude is serious.”
“I will personally audit the Crownsguard,” Cor mumbles, sinking down to his heels and collapsing further into Regis’ lap. “I will make sure the oversight did not come from within our numbers.”
“Clarus will have to deal with the staff. But that is for the morning; I daresay he must return early from this trip. Gladio will need him.” Cor nods. His chest is burning, and Regis hums quietly. The door is still open, and he tugs on Cor’s hair to make him look up.
The King’s eyes are like the ichor of daemon blood in the low light, his hair shadow on the stars. He cups Cor’s chin gently. “Was Iris screaming what woke you?” Cor nods.
“Immediately, Your Majesty.” He’s hard; he isn’t sure when he got hard. Probably when he fell to his knees, desperate for reassurance and starved for touch. He has killed in his King’s name many times, will kill again. This, though, is oddly different. It is the first he has killed since he has kissed the man. It’s the first time he’s willingly laid another human being low after seeing Regis coming apart with euphoria and ecstasy on his haggard face.
Cor shudders when Regis leans to the side to look down at the cut over his stomach and chest. It’s not deep; no gut-wound worries. It’s just superficial but it burns something fierce, and he’s faint from bleeding like a stuck pig. It barely even reached the corded muscle beneath his skin. Regis leans forward and digs in two fingers to the gash, into the aching open nerves and viscera, and Cor moans in pain, pressing his face into the other man’s hand for reassurance. Cor needs a potion at the least; he really needs stitches. Something about the way Regis just reached into him, like he owns all of him, every inch of Cor, makes him shake in pain and want and agony.
“You did so well tonight,” Regis soothes him, fingers warm on the back of his neck even as the king lances bright shocks of anguish up his spine, fingers still cutting into the meat of him. “I’m so proud of you, love.”
It’s too much. Months of waiting, and now a night of fear and anger, of Regis sinking fingers into his open muscles and bleeding wound and Cor letting him,on his knees and the light of fire and blood and power on his king, and the gentle touch on his hair, the anchor at the back of his neck, and the praise, the most damning of all the praise, that he’s done right, and—
Love—
Cor comes untouched, so hard he can’t see, hear, think, breathe, as the King of Lucis impales him and tears open when he could so easily just kill his Marshal. Cor comes so hard for a moment he feels like he might drown, vision white and his knees shaking as he cries ragged, muffled sounds into Regis’ thigh, grasping helplessly at the man’s wrist. Cor comes, in his pants, after four and a half months, and it is euphoria and damnation and—
“Oh, love,” Regis murmurs, leaning forward, kissing the top of his head, “You earned that.”
Clarus comes back two days later, looking exhausted, the skin around his strong jaw and sharp eyes sagging. Cor, still with his chest bandaged under his uniform, meets the man at the Citadel steps and gives a surprised grunt when the other man drags him into a tight hug, broad fingers digging into his shoulderblades. “Thank you,” Clarus whispers, his voice cracking.
“It’s my job, Clarus,” Cor replies, bemused by the affection, and Clarus lets him go after a moment, holds him at arms length.
“But Gladio wasn’t,” Clarus replies, and Cor understands. Smiles. Clasps Clarus’ arm, and says nothing at all, because nothing needs to be said.
Five days later, Cor finds himself in the King’s apartments. This is not so strange in recent days; they are perhaps as much a home as his own are. A meeting ran late, Regis is in a fowl mood, Clarus is tired, Noctis has long since gone sadly off to bed without a bedtime story from his father. These are all things that Cor finds they are all becoming uncomfortably used to.
“Stay,” Regis says, without looking at Cor. He had meant to. He remains, relaxed and at parade rest, by the door out of the King’s office as he cleans up papers and pens, his greying hair spilling messily over his face. “Clarus and I have something for you.”
“A gift?”
“Of sorts.” The snap as Regis straightens his papers by slamming them against the desktop is loud in the otherwise quiet of the office. “Not anything tangible, if that is what you’re thinking.” Regis looks up then, his dark eyes unreadable, and Cor finds himself shifting slightly. There is something about the way Regis is looking at him that sees right through him. “Clarus wanted to thank you.”
“For Gladio?” Cor’s glance toward Clarus reveals nothing. “It was only my job—“ Regis holds up a slim-fingered hand to forestall any further commentary, and the smile that plays on his thin lips is. Indulgent.
“Marshal, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”
He deflates. “Yes, Sire.” Cor follows them back to Regis’ bedroom like a lost puppy, hopeful every step of the way. When they arrive Regis gestures mutely, and Cor strips without being told to, kneels on the carpet at the bedside and waits there patiently until Regis is on the bed.
All he does is take off his shoes, and the unspoken power in that lack of disrobing leaves Cor’s mouth dry. Clarus strips down to his shirt and trousers, but he is a bigger man than both of them by far. Regis watches Cor for a time, his sharp face unreadable, before he spreads his thighs on the bedspread and beckons Cor closer. He comes when he is called, loyal to a fault, and settles in Regis’ lap. “You can touch,” the King murmurs, and Cor doesn’t have to be told twice, grabs at his biceps, digs blunt nails into the corded muscle of his shoulders. His skin is sagging more and more every day; he’s losing weight again.
The angle is off. Regis is not a tall man, and Cor is. He has to stretch down awkwardly to kiss the other man. He assumes it’s intentional, and doesn’t startle when he feels fingers sliding back between his cheeks, wet with lube, and moans when Regis slides two fingers into him, crooks them forward. “Can you be patient, Cor?” Regis asks, as sweet as arsenic.
“Yes?” He’s breathless already, hard and dripping.
Regis just smiles, and Cor loses count at the next finger, and soon loses sense of time, curled over Regis, sweat dripping down his hairline and salty against his lips. His whole body feels too-hot, and they haven’t once touched his cock, his balls tight and drawn up. It’s like before that night all over again, before he had knelt at Regis’ feet and come with fingers cutting into the quick of him, tearing open his blood and viscera. Like this he’s just rocking between friction and too-slick pressure, a rock and a hard place, stretched wide open and wanting.
In the wild yawning wheeling of his arousal, it takes Cor longer than he would later like to admit to focus on the fact that Clarus has pressed up behind him, hot and solid as stone, and there are more fingers in him than just Regis’ four. He shudders, dripping wet with lube, and moans, tipping back slightly onto the older man’s shoulder as Clarus crooks two fingertips into his rim, pulls out. The noise he makes must be questioning and confused, needy, because Clarus presses a stubbly kiss to his neck, splays his other hand over the taut muscle of Cor’s stomach.
“Patience,” Regis chides, a reminder of his promise, and Cor finds himself moaning anyway as perhaps six fingers between the two of them force him open. He didn’t know that he could do this, didn’t know he could get so wide and wanting, and he feels uncomfortably open, his skin prickling with sweat and his hips aching from being spread so wide for so long. It feels like it’s been decades, centuries, and yet only painful, anguished seconds, when they finally pull out. Cor might be too far gone, his knees shaky and his thighs trembling with the force it’s taking to keep him upright, but he can put two and two together, he can figure out what’s happening.
“Are you ready?” When Regis asks it, it’s not a question so much as just a warning. They will, regardless of if Cor is ready for it or not, fuck him. He will just hold on for the ride, a warm and willing and gaping hole ready to be filled. So if he is ready? It does not matter.
“Yes,” Cor whispers anyway, his voice cracking on the single word, and he trembles when Regis kisses the arc of his collarbones, the peak of one nipple.
“You can do it, love.” Cor hopes he can. Cor thinks he can. Cor wants to, he wants to something awful, he wants to as Regis pulls him down, nudging his cock up into Cor’s too-wide hole, and the first few thrusts seem like nothing at all. He’s so open he can’t clench down, he’s so wide that he thinks his heart could fall out his aching ass and shatter on the flagstone floor. “See how easy it is?” Regis continues, and Cor whimpers, moans, grabs at his shoulders as Regis fucks up into him, Clarus’ broad fingers wiping his sweat-damp hair off of his forehead. “Breathe,” Regis adds, and—
Cor remembers once, viscerally clear, when he was fifteen during the war, being shot by an MT. It was his first time being shot, and he’s taken half a dozen bullets in the thirty years since, but that first time always stands out to him. Three bullets, to the torso, one lodging near his hip, the other two in his gut. It had been a white-hot pain something like dying, burning and throbbing deep into the soul of him. At fifteen, the worst pain he’d known before had been sparring and the occasional sword-wound, the time he had fallen out of a tree and snapped his shin in two places. Being shot had been—
He had not screamed. He remembered that. He hadn’t screamed, had just laid there panting high and panicked through his teeth as Regis had skidded to his side, dirt and dust and blood staining the black trousers of his suit. It had been Cor’s first time seeing his king scared, blue eyes bright and oddly wide, the whites visible all the way around, black hair scattered over his forehead and his sharp face. “Cor,” he’d gasped, and had dropped the potion three times before he’d managed to shove it into his hands, clasping them closed around the bottle. “I’m sorry.”
At the time, Cor hadn’t understood why the King had apologised. What had he to apologise for? Cor was his sword arm, bloody and meant to die for him. He had sworn an oath even at that tender age to die for his King, by his King, and he had not regretted for even a moment taking the hit so that Regis would remain pristine but for dirt on his suit. He understands now, he understands exactly what Regis had meant with it so long ago, because as Clarus slides closer, pulling Cor’s thighs open until they burn with the stretch, Cor takes in this sharp, little breath that hangs in his chest and he exhales it in a long, high sob as the other man pushes up into him.
“I’m sorry,” Regis whispers, a benediction and a blessing and forgiveness thanks and awe and anguish, and Cor cries, pressing their foreheads together to aching, shaking violently like he’s freezing cold. “You’re doing so well, love. You can do it.” Cor isn’t so sure that he can. He isn’t so sure he can keep going, doesn’t know if he can keep this up, doesn’t know if he should— “Breathe,” Regis warns, and Cor keens, biting his lower lip to bleeding as Clarus bottoms out inside him, stretching him too-wide, too-far. He feels like he’s being skinned open from the inside out, and he would collapse for certain if Clarus wasn’t been behind him, keeping him upright between them.
He has not once gone soft. His balls throb with every inhale, and his slit is dripping like a leaky faucet. All he can think about is how he came curled and painful and bleeding over Regis’ thigh, and how this is all he wanted then. And now. And now—
“How is that?” Regis murmurs, coos. “Is that what you wanted, love?” Cor just cries, hot shameful needy tears, cries and nods helplessly because if he knew how to speak once he doesn’t now. Regis laughs, breathless, kisses the panic-fast pulse in his throat. “I thought so.”
When they start fucking Cor, it’s whiteout like dying. He’s screaming, he knows, because his throat hurts. He can’t hear it except as static like a badly-tuned television, and every thought that hits his mind flits away immediately like they’re channel surfing, fizzling out from being too close to a fire. He’s clawing at Regis’ back, almost hyperventilating, and between one breath and the next he loses track of his body, all of it hot and burning from the inside out. He feels like he’s gone too close to the sun, feels like he’s superheated glass and the slightest touch will shatter him into dust and nothing but glitter. He barely notices when Clarus comes first, except that he’s full of the hot slick warmth of come deep inside past where their cockheads are meeting and grinding. It’s trapped inside him up until Clarus pulls out, his ass clenching to try and have that friction back, and then the semen drips out of him slow and viscous and sticky. “You’re so open,” Regis whispers, tasting each word like a revelation. Like he’s savouring it. “You can’t even keep it in, can you?” Cor knows he’s supposed to respond but all that he can get out are these sharp little noises that get cut up and chewed in half somewhere in the vicinity of his teeth.
Regis is holding him shut again, fingers pinching the sensitive skin of Cor’s friction-swollen rim, forcing him to stay tight as he fucks up into the slop of lube and come. “You’ll feel this in the morning,” Regis murmurs, like that isn’t obvious like that isn’t the intention like Cor isn’t terrified he’ll never be able to close again, that they’ve ruined him forever. “Every time you walk you’ll feel our come in you. Sticky and dripping.”
Cor is, vaguely, distantly, almost sure that he is pleading, but he can’t remember the words, and if they’re coming out they’re coming out in a language that is so complex he couldn’t even begin to know. Regis seems to understand. Regis always understands. Clarus holds him up and Regis is still fucking him, fucking him so long that Cor can’t believe he’s still going, because Cor is so far away into his own head and out of his own skin that he doesn’t even want to come any more, doesn’t even—
He shudders hard all over when Regis hitches up deep into him, nails digging into his hip hard enough to leave welts, as he comes. This time he’s already so full and wet that he can hardly feel a difference afterward, except that he is still wanting, still needing, and there is a distending in him, a weight that makes him feel filthier than anything he’s ever felt in his life, gritty and overwhelmed and desperately needing a shower. A few months before, he’d have come the moment that they got into him, perhaps sooner. Now, though, he’s still hanging on and Regis hasn’t had to warn him even once. Cor knows how to wait. He knows how to wait and how to hold on and how to just keep going even when it seems like he’s at the end of his rope even—
“Do you want to come?” Regis asks, his voice hoarse with orgasm, and Cor is staring at the ceiling but he can still barely see despite that, mind and sight alike a haze. He tries to answer but all that comes out of his mouth is a low whine like the hum of an engine. “You have to ask,” Regis is precise and deadly as a blade, a scalpel slicing through Cor’s flesh to get to the hot throbbing heart of him, knowing just which nerves to set alight. “Ask, Cor.”
His tongue, when he unsticks it from the roof of his mouth, is as sluggish and heavy as lead. “Please,” it takes him three tries to get the word out. “Please, please,”
“Please what?” Regis is so patient, so understanding, so—
“Please,” Cor sobs, his voice cracking, “May I come?”
He can hear the smile in Regis’ voice, feel it in the coals of the embers of his touch, when his King replies, as gentle as dying, “Yes.”
Cor comes apart in strings and anguish, in shattering glass and frayed rope and self-control and the hot wet breath that hangs low in his lungs. He comes in the rush of water and the beat, beat, beat, of his heart, and cries laughing as he does so, euphoric beyond words, floating up, high, high as the clouds, and too full of too much and not enough, never enough. Never enough.
Afterward, Cor is distantly aware that he is still a person, still a living being, but all of that is lost behind the haze that takes him like mist and sleep and darkness. For a long time, he just is aware of his mind, of his closed eyes, of his chest, of his shoulders, of the ache in his hips. They clean him up, leave him hypersensitive and still naked but not sticky any more. Every once in a while, Regis or Clarus will touch him, shift him, and he will open toward the warmth of their contact, of their love, and bask in it like a cat in the noonday sun.
“I need you to come back to me, Cor,” Regis whispers in his ears, and it’s from a long way away, warm hands brushing down his sides. “When you’re ready.” When you’re ready lets him float for a while longer, lets all the worries about the Wall and the War and the coming Night just fall out of his head like water through a sieve, one drop at a time, washed away and leaving him oddly empty but sated.
Touch comes back to him first. He isn’t cold—he’s warm, under the thick comforter of the King’s bed, his face and arm mashed into a chest and shoulder. It’s Clarus: he’s too big, to solid to be Regis, his skin slightly saltier, his sweat slightly tangier, and one of his big hands is splayed over Cor’s hipbone, fingers rubbing over the arc of his pelvis. Regis is sprawled over Cor’s back, a proprietary hand on the top of his stomach, over the faint scar left from the assassin, a dip in the mattress under the weight of his elbow beside Cor’s head. His chin is digging into the Marshal’s shoulder, and he and Clarus are talking conversationally around Cor, neither of them seemingly intending to go anywhere at all.
Their voices lull against him like the slow wash of ocean waves to shore, and Cor makes a questioning noise, tilting his head back into Regis’ chest, cracking his eyes to stare, vision fuzzy, up at the King, who smiles down indulgently at him, his beloved pet. “Go to sleep,” Regis murmurs, fingers brushing Cor’s hair off of his face. “You did so very well earlier. You’ve earned it, Marshal. Let us take care of you for a while, for once.”
Cor laughs, and for his efforts, gets a chase kiss, Regis’ lips soft on his, his beard tickling Cor’s skin, and he does as he’s been told, spiralling out into darkness and the safety, the warmth, of something not so much unlike home.