your heart beats for me, too

Vizaeth rarely leaves Sorcere. For one thing, it’s not often permitted, and for another, he has nowhere to go.

Home? That crumbling stalactite, clinging to the cavern ceiling on hope and desperate prayers, where incense and grief-stink fill every neglected hall? His mother would rather suckle her newest caul-wrapped stillborn than welcome him back to her arms, let alone her House.

Out? Out where? He has no money—all of it gone on robes Pharaun ruined and jewels he’s lost—and House Thaezyr has no credit in any place worth patronising. He has no allies to watch his back in even the tamest of taverns, and he’s nowhere near highborn enough to be invited into a hunting party down in the Stenchstreets. It’s only by Lolth’s malicious grace that he crawled from his mother’s womb somewhere other than the gutter himself.

So no, Vizaeth doesn’t leave Sorcere very often. Soon he’ll be forced to, for the day is fast approaching when he’ll be cast from the tower forever, flung into the black pit of Menzoberranzan to survive on his own insufficient merit.

He dreams, sometimes, that he won’t go. That instead he’ll hide in forgotten rooms, live in the walls, kill inattentive late-night wanderers. Haunt Pharaun from the shadows until they’re both insane with it.

He gnaws at the skin peeling from the base of his thumbnail as he slinks through the crowds of the Bazaar. The seam of two sound suppression enchantments renders the stalls across the street to silence, and he can’t read lips. He could send Lothaphyon, watch through her eye, hear through the ears she remembers having, but Pharaun knows her, and she’s much too distinctive to escape notice. She’ll return if she’s destroyed, Vizaeth can bring her back, but he doesn’t want to feel her bones crush and crack beneath a well-shined boot.

Said boots are knee high. Laced tight, with intricate silver webs decorating the tops. Close-fit leather teases out of them beneath elaborate robes slit high and laced viciously tight—his waist is barely wider than Vizaeth’s. With rubies woven through his hair and black-veined diamonds dangling from his ears on silver chains, Pharaun is a scream in the silence of the sound-negation, just begging to be relieved of all he flaunts. The Sorcere Master’s brooch over his breast keeps him alive, as does the fact that he carries himself like the Mizzrym he is: head high, eyes cold, wreathed in an aura of untouchable disdain.

The sight of him is nauseating, in a way that tightens Vizaeth’s thighs and burns the back of his throat. Sense would have him stop, turn around, leave, but how can he? How can he, when Pharaun’s fingerprints are seared on the inside of his flesh? How can he, when Pharaun’s started looking at him again, smiling at him again, even though that smile makes him want to scour every inch of his flesh to raw meat?

How can he, when Pharaun’s started touching him again?

He’s hurrying to gather his things even before the lecture finishes, but his hands, grown unreliable of late, send ink and nibs and papers scattering to the floor. By the time he’s gathered everything up, everyone else has left. The door slams shut with a hollow boom, leaving him alone with Pharaun.

Nibs. Inks. Papers, so many papers; how can there be so many? One after the other crammed into his satchel, just his spellbook left, and it won’t fit, it won’t fit, why won’t it fit?

Footsteps ascend towards him, heelclicks he knows as well as his own heartbeat, and oh, how he regrets sitting at the back of the hall with nowhere to run. Hands settle on his desk, perfectly painted nails of black and amethyst sliding over the dark wood. “Having trouble, apprentice Thaezyr?”

Vizaeth shakes his head. One hand trails over the desk, caressing scratches and carved names, and as it rounds the corner towards him, his spellbook finally settles. He grabs the strap of his satchel, poised to bolt, but the hands are on his arms. Not hard. Not forceful. Just there, sliding up from elbow to shoulder with the presence of the body attached to them at his back.

“Relax.” A whisper at his ear, pinning him in place. Pharaun’s thumbs dig into the tight muscle either side of his spine, and a gasp spasms out of him. Pharaun chuckles. “My, you’re so tense. Let’s remedy that, shall we?”

Each expert press of his hands sends cold heat down Vizaeth’s spine. Rhylfein’s waiting for him out in the corridor. Their classes finished at the same time and Rhylfein said he’d wait and he hasn’t broken his word yet, so he’s out there, waiting, and Pharaun is in here, touching. There’s something metallic on Vizaeth’s tongue, and he can’t tell if it’s love or loathing.

“There, that’s much better.”

Pharaun tugs him around and there’s nowhere else to look. Crimson eyes burn into his, and the classroom becomes a dim, unreal void, the idea of anything beyond it mere fantasy. Pharaun strokes his throat, circling the barely visible remains of the bruise he left there. “I want you to do something for me.”

Vizaeth’s heart clenches, a solid mass of immobile muscle in the cage of his ribs.

“What?”

“Just a simple thing.” Pharaun’s nails skim along the curve of his jaw. “A new Master joined us recently, and he has in his possession a rather rare volume I’ve had my eye on for quite some time. He’ll not last long here, and I’d hate for such a precious tome to go to waste.”

“I’m not stealing anything for you—” Vizaeth starts. Pharaun’s grip turns iron.

“You’ve done far worse for me and enjoyed every second of it. Think of it as a test of your skills! You’ve clawed your way very nearly to the completion of your academic career; I have faith you know enough magic to do as I ask.” His fingers press hard enough to burn their prints into the bone as he tilts Vizaeth’s head up. “But if you’re in need of a little incentive…”

The kiss is gentle, for all the strength holding him in place. Soft, sweet motion, a persuasive graze of teeth—Pharaun’s tongue has haunted his mouth since the first time he pressed his lips to Vizaeth’s, and if Vizaeth just had the nerve he’d bite down and swallow.

Pharaun breaks away with a pleased hum. “Feeling cooperative now, love?”

His saliva is mixed with Pharaun’s, a dark blessing slicking down his throat. So little. It takes so little to change him.

“What’s the book called?”

Pharaun finishes speaking with the wine merchant and moves on without taking anything. Whatever he wants will be delivered into his possession by hands other than his; he’d never degrade himself with such mundanity as carrying his own purchases. The noise of the market swells and fades as, hood up, head down, Vizaeth shadows him through a multitude of sound suppressions. Each time he passes the seam of an enchantment, the magic scrapes his skin like dull razors. His whole body is thorny with pain—he’s been out here for more than an hour, since he followed Pharaun to the Bazaar instead of Veryan to the alchemy lab. Master Do’Urden will note his absence, add it to the pile of black marks he’s already stacked up, but at this point he doesn’t care. There are things a person needs to do—things they have to do—if they want to continue being alive in any meaningful sense. What he has to do now he wishes he didn’t, but such is the way the web is woven. He can only squirm as Lolth wills.

Deep in the Bazaar, Pharaun finally stops at a building that, by way of subtle signage and decoration, declares itself a bath-house. At the elegantly nondescript door, he pauses, glancing over his shoulder. Vizaeth freezes, the crowd feeling suddenly thin and treacherous, but Pharaun’s gaze never comes near, and a moment later the door swings smoothly shut behind him.

For several minutes, Vizaeth vacillates between the door and the street. It’s the kind of place that caters to Menzoberranzan’s better-off inhabitants; the kind of place Rhylfein or Veryan could walk into without a thought. The kind of place he’ll never belong. He should have known Pharaun would choose somewhere like this! The skin at the base of his nail peels away in a stabbing stripe, spilling blood over his tongue.

He can’t give up. His plan can still work, he need only have faith. Vizaeth hooks his thumbs together, makes the sign of the spider over his heart, and heads inside.

The entryroom is small, tiled in burgundy and gold, with potted nightlight fronds lending natural illumination, and a hint of some warm, enticing perfume hanging in the air. An attendant behind a curved desk guards the only other door—he glances up from filing his nails as Vizaeth approaches, thin mouth twisting in a sneer. “Deliveries are taken at the rear door.”

“The Master who just arrived,” Vizaeth says, reaching into his pocket. “I’m to be sent after him.”

A snort of derision. “Is that so?”

He holds out a ring, whose hammered-flat top bears the engraved sigil of House Mizzrym. “He gave me this to show you, so you’d know who I was for.”

The attendant’s eyes widen a satisfactory amount. Vizaeth lowers his head, softens his posture; makes himself look biddable, comely—exactly the kind of boy to be put to such purpose as he implies.

“Alright,” the attendant says. “Third door on the left. And leave your boots in the antechamber, I don’t want you tracking filth everywhere.”

Vizaeth inclines his head and hurries through. Red lanterns pulse in glass-fronted alcoves embedded in the walls of the narrow corridor, an artery two drow wide and eerily silent. He slips the signet ring onto his finger: he and Pharaun are well-matched enough for it to fit, and its presence is a settling weight, a reminder that he’s doing what’s right. What’s necessary.

Three doors down, and he’s in the antechamber. He slips off his boots and takes a seat on the wooden bench, next to the neat pile of Pharaun’s folded clothes. One obstacle left, just one more door, beyond which he can hear the faint lap of water as a body shifts within it. He takes a moment to gather himself, stroking the fine material of Pharaun’s robes with one hand and the knife strapped to his thigh with the other. Once his breath is steady, he rises, takes hold of the door handle, and turns it.

The private bathing room is small—not much larger than his room at Sorcere—and the bath sunk into the black-tiled floor takes up most of it. Pharaun is a blur within the hazy layer of steam that drifts up from the water, heavy with a sickly, almost floral scent. He’s laying back with his head and arms on the edge, a mask of black silk over his eyes, hair still bound in bejewelled braids. The tipped-back curve of his neck glistens. Vizaeth wets his lips and, barefoot, pads quietly across the slick tile towards him.

Not quietly enough. Pharaun clicks his tongue, annoyed. “I specifically requested to be left alone. Whatever you’re offering, I don’t want it.”

Vizaeth keeps his mouth shut. He reaches the top of the bath and crouches, tugging the knife from its sheath. From his pocket he takes a small, clear vial, and carefully—very, very carefully—applies its contents to the edge of the blade. Tears threaten his vision, and he blinks them away. He can’t afford any mistakes. He won’t get another chance.

Pharaun huffs, reaching up to tug off his eyemask. A brief flicker of shock crosses his face. “Thaezyr? What are you—?”

“I’m doing this because I love you,” Vizaeth chokes out, and lunges forwards to slice the knife across Pharaun’s throat.

“He fucked you again, didn’t he?”

Vizaeth refuses to look up from Rhylfein’s chest, instead curling closer. There’s a steady heartbeat against his cheek, the slick comfort of sweat under his palms and blood under his nails. Rhylfein likes it when he scratches, so he always does.

“Yes or no question, Viz.”

“You think I had a choice?”

“I know for a fact you didn’t. You want to hide it from me, wear less makeup. Or more illusions.”

Pharaun likes it when he bleeds, so he always does. He used to like it. Still likes it, still loves it—Pharaun inside him, over him, marking him with teeth and nails and blade and tongue. Their pulses run in time, an endless thrum he can never escape: I am yours and you are mine; you are mine and I am yours.

Except he’s also Rhylfein’s now, though Rhylfein isn’t his. Not the way Pharaun is. The knowledge aches, somewhere deep and wounded, clots every atrium of his heart. Rhylfein tries to pull his head up, make him look at him, because Vizaeth can’t not answer when their eyes lock—something about that particular shade of red, close to arterial, shakes loose words that ought to be left to rot inside him. He doesn’t want to look. To answer. So he bites instead, sinking his teeth into the hand that caresses.

Rhylfein curses, shoving upright out of his arms. Vizaeth lunges after him, panic skidding around in his stomach—don’t leave, you can’t leave, you can’t leave me!—but Rhylfein bats his hands away.

“I’m sick of this,” he snaps. “You’re fucking exhausting, Thaezyr. You love him, you hate him; you’re dressing like him again, only now you’re begging me to rip your clothes off at every opportunity, like you can’t stand the way you look. He smiles, you simper, and a few hours later you’ve got me inside you, tasting his rancid perfume on your neck.”

The desperate remnants of a candle flicker, throwing thin shadows on the walls. Lolth’s obsidian face watches impassively from the corner, only Her inscrutable smile visible beneath a shroud of webbing. Rhylfein’s expression softens. He strokes Vizaeth’s hair back from his face, avoiding the bruises half-showing beneath streaks of sex-melted makeup.

“Don’t let him keep doing this.” It’s the closest he’s ever heard Rhylfein come to begging. “Tell Master Do’Urden. Master Zaurett. Hells, tell the Archmage! He hates Mizzrym already, give him a good excuse to push the bastard off the damn ledge.”

Vizaeth swallows, with as much difficulty as if there’s a hand wrapped around his neck. He wants to swear he will, he will, he’ll tell all of them.

“I can’t.”

An angry breath hisses from Rhylfein’s nose. “You mean you won’t.”

“I mean I can’t.” His voice shades towards a whine, a desperate prayer. Long, black limbs appear over the crown of Lolth’s head, curious. Waiting for the correct answer. “I love him. You’ve always known that, you said you understood!”

“I do. Everything you’ve told me, I can’t help but understand that no matter what he does to you, you’ll go crawling back because he’s that far under your fucking skin. But you know what else I understand? You, Thaezyr. And if anyone else touched you the way he touches you, you’d slice their fucking face off, so answer me one thing—”

Rhylfein takes his face in both hands, and the last time he looked at Vizaeth like this, they were holding a knife over Merdax Kenafin.

“—why the fuck does he still have eyes?”

It’s only a nick, a little love slit of a thing, but from the way Pharaun reacts, anyone would think Vizaeth had tried to behead him.

He curses, thrashes up, and Vizaeth sees—feels—the beginnings of a spell gathering in his mouth. Vizaeth drops the knife and grabs him with both hands. There’s new strength in his arms, rushing up from the abyssal depths of a love that has him weeping as he forces Pharaun under again and again.

Spitting water and a jagged laugh, Pharaun keeps fighting even as his limbs lock up one by one. “Clever little brat. You know I take…an antivenom…for that…”

“I switched it out days ago,” Vizaeth says, and the first glimmer of something like fear touches Pharaun’s eyes. “You never noticed, because you always drink it with wine. You can’t stand the taste.”

The muscles in Pharaun’s neck flex, his jaw spasming as he tries and fails to retort. The venom’s taken him completely now. He’s wholly at Vizaeth’s tender mercy.

Vizaeth takes up the knife and slips into the bath, straddling Pharaun’s form, careful not to push him back under. He doesn’t want him to drown. Drowning would leave him a bloated, ugly corpse; a wasteful, ruined thing too hideous to contemplate.

He lays the flat of the blade over Pharaun’s lips. “I already miss your voice. If there was a way for this to happen and keep it, I’d do it.” He moves the knife to the hollow between Pharaun’s collarbones. “All I wanted was you. To touch you, feel you, be you…”

Skin breaks, and Pharaun makes an urgent, dead sound. Vizaeth plunges his hand beneath the water and finds exactly what he expects—Pharaun’s cock, hard, the venom having the same effect as it did on him so many months ago. He strokes idly a few times, more to feel the realness of it than in any attempt to accomplish anything, then returns his hand to Pharaun’s chest. The signet ring gleams.

“You fucked me over,” he says. The blade sinks deeper as he draws a line out towards Pharaun’s shoulder. “I gave you everything, and you ruined it all with petty games. Trying to make me jealous, take necromancy from me, make me leave Sorcere. Leave you!”

Pharaun’s breath comes fast through frozen lips. Vizaeth alters his angle, cutting down along the outer edge of Pharaun’s pectoral, then back to the centre to carve a matching line down the inner edge, marking his space. Blood thins in winding trails through the scented water.

“You ruined it,” he repeats, softer. “But I forgive you. I can’t do anything else, can I? Not when I love you. Not when I’m yours.”

The bath turns redder and redder as he cuts, until at last the skin peels down in an imperfect flap above Pharaun’s heart.

“The thing is,” Vizaeth says, as he brings the blade to bear on the exposed, bloody flesh, “that you forgot that you’re mine.”

Almost-screams echo dully from the walls, lost in the steam. Pharaun’s cock is hard as iron against his thigh, his own straining in the sodden confines of his robes. He regrets not undressing, that he can’t experience this skin-to-skin. Every letter adds to his pleasure—and to Pharaun’s, courtesy of the venom. It’s a small space to work with, but in the end it all fits perfectly, just as he knew it would, and though it’s hard to make out the words—what with all the blood—he can trace the shape of them clearly enough.

Vizaeth Xunhrae Thaezyr

The slick, sensual glory of it makes his aching cock feel like a starving cunt, pulsing with need. He presses a reverent kiss to Pharaun’s paralysed mouth, the dead feel of it sending a shiver crawling down his spine. No wonder Pharaun enjoyed it so much when it was him. He sits up, sucking blood from his fingers with a sigh, then carefully lays Pharaun’s skin back into place. His own blood—full of the soundfeel of shredding Weave, more sensitive to it now than ever, not fixed, only more obviously broken—spills to seal, restore, and cleanse. Much as he wants to leave a scar, it’s better for there to only be the hidden one. A secret they can share.

“Now you won’t forget,” he says. “Now we both have what we want.”

The only traces left of his work are a few thin lines of blood. A deep, low moan escapes him as he laps them up, savouring a taste no-one else gets to indulge. Pharaun’s eyes roll desperately, non-words lurching furiously from his immobile lips. The flush on his face and the heat of his cock make a lie of his complaints—Vizaeth takes a firm grip on it, able at last to lavish him with the attention he deserves.

He grinds against Pharaun as he strokes, the twin sensations tangling through him until he’s panting with it. His teeth and tongue chase up to Pharaun’s pulse, racing so fast it makes him dizzy, and he can’t resist: he sucks a bruise into the perfect skin, then another and another, biting and biting until his mouth fills with blood and sweat and love.

Pharaun’s close. He can feel it. Smell it. He brings the knife to bear once more, drawing a deep, uneven line down his upper arm.

“We’re bound, Pharaun.” Thayan runes hiss through his mind, boiling forth from the wound as eager darkness. “We always were. I’ve misread Her signs so often, gotten so much wrong, but what I do know—” pleasure spikes, making him gasp, “—what I do know is that She means for us to be together. Whatever form that takes.”

He spits out the words of the geas, vision tinged red as the spell erupts along with his orgasm. Pharaun spills over his hand soon after, painting his own signet ring in a glorious confirmation. Binding ties of blood and bone and seed, an unbreakable promise: you will not tell, you will not retaliate, you will always, always, always remember.

Magic clicks into place, like a blade sinking home. Vizaeth blinks away blood-haze, a breathless smile on his lips. Pharaun is limp beneath him, eyes fallen to glassy, vacant slivers. Tears track down his cheeks. Vizaeth kisses them away.

“The venom will wear off soon,” he says softly. “You’ll be alright. You know I’d never really hurt you.”

He climbs from the bath, feeling as if he’s been reborn from the heated depths, cast up and out of the Abyss freshly made. A full-body shudder of magic casts the water from his robes—but not the cum or the blood. He wants to keep those, his stains and Pharaun’s blending, blurring. Merged. As they’re supposed to be.

He slides the knife back into its sheath, then crouches to press one last kiss to Pharaun’s forehead. “I’ll see you in class,” he whispers, and walks out of the bath-house with his head held high, and his heart lighter than it’s been in a long, long time.

He leaves the signet ring behind, discarded on the black tile in a pool of blood-tinged water.

They’re in bed, and Pharaun is tracing his scars. Back and forth, up and down, dead flesh made living. The book he stole sits on Pharaun’s vanity, and the last two hours were the reward for a job obediently done.

Lips press to his neck. Teeth nip, lazy, not nearly enough to rip his throat out. Pharaun’s voice purrs, sex-edged and low, against his skin. “I knew you still loved me. Even when you’re fucking the Dyrr boy, you still love me.”

“I’ll always love you,” Vizaeth says.

It’s the truth. It will always be the truth. No matter how much it hurts, his devotion will never die—it is a lich, eternal, his heart a phylactery that cannot be destroyed. He will always love Pharaun.

Whether Pharaun wants him to or not.