make you mine

“Enter.”

The voice is honey-balm to the ears, a salve to Vizaeth’s fractured soul—blessed Abyss, he’s missed it. The doorhandle shivers out of his reach for a moment, before he blinks hard and forces it to settle. He draws a shaky breath and steps into Pharaun’s office.

Pharaun is sat behind his desk. It’s not so grand as the one in his quarters—standard Sorcere fare of unadorned dark wood, clawed feet sunk into the carpet. It’s crowded with papers, three gold-topped inkwells clustered at one end; red, black, and acid green. Deep orange flames cling to the sconces, the room far brighter than the corridor outside. It takes Vizaeth’s eyes a moment to adjust, and by the time they have, Pharaun has set aside whatever he was working on, and now leans forwards on his elbows, lips curved in a sliver of a smile. He gestures at the chair opposite.

“Apprentice Thaezyr. Have a seat.”

Pharaun has his hair pulled over one shoulder, braided above his ear on the other side, exposing the fine column of his neck. The fine, unmarked column of his neck.

Vizaeth’s vision swims. Soft laughter echoes and he knows it’s in his head, but that doesn’t stop him hearing it. Bruises erupt like boils along Pharaun’s throat and Vizaeth’s fists clench atop his thighs. His nails are sharp lately, ill-tended and jagged. He’s lost count of how many times he’s cleaned blood from his palms. Pharaun clears his throat and the bruises vanish.

“You are something of a rare sight,” he begins. He twirls a silver pen between his slim fingers, glinting in the torchlight. “Tell me, what have you been up to that’s so thrilling it takes precedence over my classes?”

“Nothing.”

Even half-lying to Pharaun makes his stomach clench. Not that there’s much in it—what little he’s forced himself to eat rarely stays down. He stares at the pen as it flashes back and forth. The nib is very sharp, he notes. It would have to be, to keep up with Pharaun’s calligraphy.

“Is that really the best you can come up with? Particularly since it’s apparently only my lectures you’ve developed a distaste for, which is odd, because you’re usually so…” The pen stops, the end rapping hard on the desk. It sounds like a bone breaking. “…attentive.”

“Sick,” Vizaeth manages. His voice rasps, parched as the rest of him. “I’ve…been sick.”

“Exclusively at the exact times of every single class of mine for the past three months?”

Vizaeth nods.

“A most convenient illness. Yet oddly I’m inclined to believe you, since reports from the classes you have dragged yourself to do not bode well for your future at Sorcere.” Pharaun holds up one of the papers he was working on, and Vizaeth catches his own name there before it’s tossed aside. “If your performance gets much worse, the best you can hope for is being held back a year. Can House Thaezyr afford that?”

It can’t. With so few daughters accepted into Arach-Tinilith, and his older brother having barely scraped through training at Melee-Magthere, a decent wizard is the best it can hope for. His mother hasn’t birthed a living child in five years. They’re lowly enough already, but in Menzoberranzan there’s always further to fall.

“Yes.”

Pharaun scoffs.

“Right. Look, apprentice Thaezyr…Vizaeth.” The sound of his name causes the room to blacken at the edges of his vision. His nails gouge deeper into his palms. “I don’t care if your House collapses under its own inadequacies, but the more apprentices that fail out of my class, the worse it is for me. So whatever is going on, you’re going to pull yourself together and fix it. Do I make myself clear?”

Fix it. How is he supposed to fix it when every time he walks into that room he sees Pharaun trapped beneath Despana on the floor? He can’t hear a word anyone says, all he can hear are the moans Despana stole, the lies he induced Pharaun to speak—and lately Vizaeth can’t even tell if they were lies, despite how well he knows Pharaun’s voice. Reality is fraying. He knows he’s slipping, but towards what, he isn’t certain. The vicious glint of the pen-nib flashes where Pharaun taps it against the parchment. It would bury itself in his neck so beautifully.

Would Pharaun kill him, if he asked? He used to think he would, used to know what Pharaun would do, but since he let Despana infect him, nothing makes sense anymore.

“Do I make myself clear?” Pharaun repeats, harder, louder. He thinks Vizaeth is ignoring him. As if he’s capable of such blasphemy.

“Yes, Master Mizzrym.”

He gets up, and the office spins around him for a nauseatingly long time before he can force it steady. His pulse throbs with a question he doesn’t know how to ask. The possibility of an answer terrifies him, the fear a foreign object lodged beneath his ribcage, scraping against bone with every ragged breath. Pharaun looks back to his papers, clearly expecting him to leave.

If Despana has utterly stolen his mind, there’s always the pen, even if Pharaun won’t wield it.

Vizaeth steps around the desk. Goes to his knees. Puts a hand on Pharaun’s thigh. Pharaun doesn’t look at him.

“Are you intending to be a cliché, then? I’m not going to improve your reports in exchange, you know.”

Vizaeth says nothing, only slides his hand higher up Pharaun’s thigh. Pharaun sets down his pen and shifts his chair back, parting his legs. The intrusive fear begins to dissolve as Vizaeth hurries to slot himself into the welcoming void between Pharaun’s legs, deftly plucking open the laces of his breeches. He hasn’t been this close to Pharaun’s cock before—their previous two engagements, his mouth was wholly occupied with Pharaun’s. He’s felt it inside him though, and knows it better than his own.

Teasing licks and slow strokes encourage it to hardness, pre-cum wetting his tongue. His stomach growls—he hasn’t had an appetite in months, but now he’s starving. The scent is mouth-watering, but underneath there’s something off, something sickly-sweet. Despana’s rot. He tries to ignore it, let the taste of Pharaun and only Pharaun fill his head. A mere taste is not enough.

He swallows Pharaun’s cock in one smooth, swift motion, a long-absent sense of relief filling him as he captures every precious inch safely within his mouth. He tilts his head enough to meet Pharaun’s eyes. Pharaun lets out a breathless laugh.

“No gag reflex? You should have mentioned that sooner.”

Vizaeth lowers his head further, until his lips press to the base of Pharaun’s cock, the hot length of him thumping to a heartbeat still distressingly out of sync with his own. He needs to stay like this for hours, days, keep Pharaun inside him until he can cleanse Despana’s influence. Pharaun needs more, though, so he hollows his cheeks, and dips his head so Pharaun’s cock hits the back of his throat in a steady rhythm.

No, he doesn’t gag. Not since he got this body.

Pharaun likes it, he can tell from the bitten-back groans above him, the hand that’s gone pale-knuckled on the arm of the chair. Vizaeth can’t help but smile as he draws up, slow, dragging his tongue along soft, warm skin. Despana never made you feel like this.

He’s just taken Pharaun again, deep enough to make him take Lolth’s name in vain, when there’s a rap at the door, and the Archmage’s voice cuts through the sex-heavy quiet.

“A word, Master Mizzrym?”

Pharaun curses under his breath and shoves Vizaeth into the dark, enclosed space beneath his desk, drawing his chair right up to the edge, trapping him. His cock is still buried in Vizaeth’s throat as he calls, “Come in, Archmage.”

“Hard at work as usual, I see,” Gromph says. Vizaeth can picture him taking in Pharaun’s desk, scattered with papers—does he note the flush on his face? The lust-blown darkness of his pupils? Vizaeth swallows, carefully. The arm of the chair creaks beneath Pharaun’s death-grip.

“Oh, naturally, Archmage.”

“I am not here to bandy words, Mizzrym.” Gromph’s footsteps draw nearer. “I could not care less who you drag to your bed, but—despite the apparent mountain of evidence to the contrary—this is, in fact, a school. Whatever your…relationship with Rai’gy Despana, you will keep your dalliances out of the lecture halls. There are others aside from yourself who have to use them.”

Vizaeth’s jaw tenses. Soft, echoing laughter, my dear Rai—the stench of Despana’s insidious magic clogs his nose. He only realises how hard he’s bitten down when Pharaun’s knee cracks him in the side of the head.

“I’ll bear that in mind, Archmage.”

“See that you do.”

There’s a heavy beat of silence, then retreating steps and the door clicks shut. Pharaun exhales sharply and shoves his chair back; a line of drool drags from Vizaeth’s lips to his cock, then snaps.

“Well, that was bad for my blood pressure.” Pharaun scowls down at him. “And what’s the matter with you, then, that you nearly bit my cock off?”

“He touched you.” It comes out a growl.

“Gromph?”

“Despana.”

The scowl shifts slowly to a smile. Pharaun’s hand comes down to cup his cheek, thumb brushing across the soft place, sunken with sleepless shadow, beneath his eye. “Oh, you jealous little thing. Were you spying?”

Vizaeth grabs his wrist. “Why did you let him touch you?”

“He’s rather good with his hands,” Pharaun says. Pauses. “And his mouth.”

Throbbing pressure behind his eyes. Despana’s magic is too strong—it’s embedded in Pharaun’s skin, racing through his veins with every beat of his poisoned heart. Pharaun tugs him up into his lap and fits their mouths together.

“If you were spying,” he says, between the deepening slide of lips, “you ought to have said something. Better to join in than to watch, no? Or is that what you like? Watching?”

Vizaeth can’t answer. All he can do is snarl and bite at Pharaun’s mouth, drink his low laughter and try to push his own breath into Pharaun’s lungs as the pounding pain behind his eyes intensifies. Pharaun palms his cock, hand hot through the thin material of his breeches. One hand there, the other driving ink-stained metal into his neck, that’s what should happen next. If he can’t get Despana’s influence out, that’s what will happen next, because the whore might be able to fuck him, but he’d never die for him.

Pharaun’s hand slows. “Shall I stop?” he teases.

“No.”

“Are you sure? Because you seem a little worked up.” He kisses along Vizaeth’s jaw, right up to his ear. “Are you upset with me? I’d hate for you to be upset with me.”

“Not you,” Vizaeth forces out. Pharaun’s fingers tug at his laces, insistent. “Him. The thought of him touching you…” In a clumsy scramble of lips and teeth and hands, Vizaeth wrestles free of his breeches. “…putting his unworthy hands anywhere near you…”

“Unworthy? That’s a new one.”

“He is unworthy.” He straddles Pharaun, looks down at him, pouring himself into the wide darkness of his eyes, around which only the thinnest sliver of crimson remains. “He’s not like us. He doesn’t belong here.”

“He’s not here anymore.”

“Good,” Vizaeth says, and impales himself on Pharaun’s cock.

Their kisses grow messy now, Pharaun biting at his lips, his tongue, hands tight on his hips to rock into him. Inside him now, yet still waves of Despana’s poisonous magic roll off him, oozing out of his pores. Unless he wants to skin Pharaun alive—and he does, he wants to wrap that flawless flesh around him, seal them up together—he can’t remove it.

But maybe he can overpower it. Subdue it. Strangle it with himself until Pharaun’s head is clear, until he’s himself again.

Vizaeth rolls his hips, takes Pharaun deep. Even in his desperation he’s careful with every spider-engraved button, one after another until his hands slide beneath black silk to the hot skin beneath. That thin layer is all that lies between him and the precious heart beneath; he can feel it racing beneath his palms. His mouth waters. He could keep that safe in there too, Pharaun’s heart. Their heart.

The office fills with the sound of flesh meeting flesh, hard breath, wet mouths. Pharaun matches his pace, flushed dark now.

“Gods, you’re a little demon,” he pants. He hauls Vizaeth up and shoves him onto the desk, atop all the scattered papers scrawled with his name. One of the inkwells spills, blood-red ink spreading like a massacre beneath them. At this angle, every thrust has him seeing stars—Vizaeth howls a moan, and Pharaun puts a hand over his mouth.

“I really don’t need the Archmage catching me in quite such a compromising position, my dear.”

Triumph swells. Not my dear Rai any longer—Vizaeth has taken it back. Pharaun’s words are his again. He wraps his legs around Pharaun’s waist, driving him deeper with his heels. The spilled ink soaks into his hair, darkens his collar, bloodstains exactly where they would have been if Pharaun had buried the pen in his throat. He buries his tongue there now instead, kissing Vizaeth deep and hard and hungry as he comes. He digs his nails into Pharaun’s shoulders and vows that Despana—that no-one—will ever sully him with their touch again.

Pharaun’s hips twitch once, twice, then he stills, trailing sweet, slow kisses down Vizaeth’s neck, accented with grazing teeth. Vizaeth does not relax his grip.

“An insatiable little demon,” Pharaun murmurs. “Unfortunately, I don’t have time to play with you all afternoon.”

He tears himself free, leaving Vizaeth to right himself. Pharaun’s release trickles down his thigh as he stands, and he wishes there was a way to keep that from happening. He’s lost too much of him already. Pharaun tugs him up into a kiss that’s all tongue and teeth and wicked smile, and it takes just three expert strokes of his hand for Vizaeth to finish, whimpering and dizzy.

“A gentleman never leaves a boy wanting,” Pharaun says. His lips are at Vizaeth’s neck again. His neck, where they belong, and he realises he can’t smell the rot any longer. It’s been purged. “But if you’re still feeling fiendish after classes, why don’t you come by my quarters again? There’s a sadly neglected bed up there in need of some company.”

“Yes, Master Mizzrym.”

Pharaun chucks his chin.

“Pharaun,” he says. “I’m certainly not your teacher right now, hm?”

Vizaeth has never seen a sunrise, never wants to, but the thing that soars in his ribcage can be nothing else. He meets Pharaun’s glorious eyes with a reverent smile.

“Yes, Pharaun.”