Absence Makes..., Xenosaga (Albedo/Rubedo) Title: Absence Makes... Author:plaidmutineer Rating: R Warnings: Perversion, in ways only Albedo can perv! (Metaphorical guro, shota, dubious consent, purple prose) Prompt: Nov 10, Xenosaga, Albedo/Rubedo, shota, dubcon -- "It was a gentle mindfuck." Word Count: 2,147 Summary: A soppy old phrase, taken to a rather literal conclusion. A/N: On account of multiple interferences, this is either very late, or very, very early. Either way, I think I get a booby prize. All apologies and gratitude for clemency.
It had begun quite simply, when Albedo had found the cracks to slip into the confoundedly sound battlements of Rubedo's psyche. It was much easier when he was at rest - if you could call it rest, anyway. His actions during the implementation of Proto-Merkabah had left Rubedo perturbed, dissecting events across the stars with a restless fury, even in his sleep. It nearly made Albedo wonder if Rubedo wasn't subconsciously opening doors himself, the guilt of his long-ignored crimes eating away at the foundation he'd worked so long to maintain.
There was little finesse in simply breaking down a crumbling door, when one could squeeze past it -- and squeeze he, did, writhing against memories, pleasant and unpleasant alike with a serpent's slick grace. Rubedo stirred, momentarily -- the mind in its slumber being a confused and feeble creature to begin with, it was easy enough to write off the random firing of thoughts as a dream. What dreams may come, indeed. If not for that luck of human failing, Albedo's entrance would have been felt as one feels a wound pried open with spears.
It was a gentle mindfuck, really.
He had to smile, letting Rubedo feel the sharp edge of every tooth ghosting across the dark expanse with a feather's light, maddening tickle of grace. One hand, still within the dreary confines of reality, gripped Simeon's control, while the other slid into a depth of endorphins, something to keep the body alert. It ran hotly between his fingers, tingling with phantom delight.
"You miss this, don't you?" The question, rhetorical though it was, always stirred Rubedo to answer, if muzzily this time, behind the veil of sleep.
It was a playful routine, at first; perched atop his sleeping form like a night terror. Waiting there, to crush the breath from him in his embrace if he stirred too heavily, letting him wake to the horror of nothing really there. Let him sweat it out, pore over his defenses for chinks in the armor, or sob like a child if he had to! The game could have gone on forever.
However, as the nights progressed, Albedo began wandering through dark corners in the back of his brain, as one would peruse through an antique shop, searching for the right item to set off the silent alarms. The hormonal triggers were in the running to become his favorites; it was nearly as exciting as upsetting a fully wakened Rubedo, the rush of chemicals arcing around him as lightning before the storm.
Alas, how all good things must come to their ends -- and this nightly play had been a good thing, indeed.
"Enough already!" The force of Rubedo's rejection shunted Albedo against imaginary walls, but would not afford him the delightful crack of bone or contusion of muscle. The disappointment was the only pain he could manage to pull from it, and the taste of that had grown dull and familiar to him.
"Is this what's going to get you off now? Screwing around with my dreams?!" Shocked to wakefulness, Rubedo's shoulders rose and fell rapidly, the drape of his over-sized pajamas fluttering on his scrawny body. His blood ran palpably thick with fever, and their tiny little space was filled with the rushing noise of it, as a seaside cave is filled with the crashing echo of the breakers outside.
"As if I weren't in them to begin with." Albedo scoffed, drawing himself back to his feet, regrettably unharmed. "It would be impolite to turn down your invitation!" His hand reached out across the blackness, cutting a pale path towards Rubedo's heart. "Pretending that your body isn't aching for what was lost -- it's pathetic."
"... Who's pretending about anything?" The corners of his mouth were drawn tight, the youthful curve of his lips pulled to a glowering line. "I'm not gonna say it, and you're not gonna make me. A few hours every night isn't going to change my mind!"
"That's true. You might as well not say anything at all."
Albedo's arm stretched impossibly toward his brother, crossing vast emptiness and a few short meters all at once. Rubedo wrested away the curve of starving, skeletal fingers, holding him firm with all the strength a man could muster, but all the stamina of a tired child. His method acting was weakening his grip, much to Albedo's delight.
"Oh, my! Where is your fire, Rubedo? Where is that flame to burn me to ashes? You were so determined to make me leave a moment ago -- why stop now?"
Albedo advanced as Rubedo's hands gave out, deliberately bruising the path beneath him, crushed thoughts sending up a mingled scent of blossoms and antique gun oil. The infinite canvas of a vague landscape began to melt out of the dark as they wrestled, silhouetted in a pale sunrise. Soon, Rubedo was sprawled beneath him, a fly in aspic, hand sliding down his hip for a firearm that wouldn't be there, because he knew his luck in a dream wouldn't work that way.
It was but a shift of one letter, to turn a pistol to a piston. He bucked beneath him, growling deep in his throat, in that absurd tone of his youthful facade. Ah, the threats of a kitten, all pinprick claws and tiny fangs. The dull, echoing roar of heated blood grew louder, and Albedo craned his head over Rubedo's shoulder, that his whisper would not go unheard as he struggled to push him away.
"You're not going to say it, hmm? Then, please, allow me the pleasure. I want you, Rubedo. I need you, right next to this --"
Albedo tugged at his brother's arm, plunging it past the projected form of his own chest like a dagger in pantomime. He cackled in delight at Rubedo's horrified gasp, as his fingers stretched uselessly against the shadow of non-existent ribs, trying to block his hand from pressing against the heavy throbbing of his heart.
"How it misses you," Albedo purred venomously, leaning down to match the gaze that Rubedo was trying to avert his eyes from. "You lead this poor thing down a path to Hell, Rubedo. Don't you feel it, beating only for your presence? If not me, then surely, you'll make some pretense of kindness for this weary heart."
"Y... you call this kind?!" Rubedo's hand squelched around the thumping tangle of muscle, blood and sinew. It was all too large for his small fingers to encircle in his grip, but Albedo knew the callouses from handling his weapons were scraping against his insides with every pulse. Far away, his real body swelled in ecstatic response.
"Yes," he cooed lowly, embracing Rubedo with his free arm to feel the small expanse of his back. He caressed the invisible beastly wings of the monster, spread tattered and thin beneath adolescent skin, tracing where their outlines might be through his bedclothes with a long, sharp fingernail. "And the scars, you can feel them as well, can't you?"
What a brave boy that the cowardly man Rubedo had decided to hide behind -- he was making such a gallant effort not to gag, only a faint sickened sound in the pit of his throat. He helplessly twisted away from Albedo's hand, only to find himself shoved up to the elbow in his chest cavity, eliciting a delirious trill from him.
"There -- right there, Rubedo, a tattoo of ragged love, with your name carved a mile deep into its flesh!" He gasped, his voice growing reedier with gulps of air, arteries fluttering around Rubedo's fingers, tangling around him with pulsing insistence. "Oh, it's so good to be touched there again, isn't it? Don't you miss it, too?"
"You sick -- crazy -- bastard!" Rubedo choked around the shape of his curses, his grip growing slippery with his sweat, with Albedo's blood, and he tugged sharply, scratching and bruising in the depths of him. "This isn't gonna get you anything except killed! You think this'd work out just like you planned?!"
"Passion improvises, never plans, Rubedo -- hnn!" A surge of fresh pain from Rubedo's threatening hand jolted electric through his nerves. The dreamscape seemed to flicker, super-imposed with the sight of his own, real body in his E.S., shuddering with the sensation, flesh groping with itself clumsily, as corporeality tended to do.
It was just too soon to end the fun just yet.
"So... you just want me to stop the ride to let you get off, Rubedo?" The impression of his voice was low, rustling over him like silk, twisting slickly into knots to hold him fast.
"This place has never been under my jurisdiction. Your question shouldn't be, 'What am I doing to you,' but instead, 'What are you letting me do?'"
"Like hell," Rubedo ground out stubbornly between clenched teeth, and attempted closing his fist around anything in reach, only to feel more of the arterial mess slipping from his grasp.
Albedo's soft chuckle puffed against Rubedo's cheek, warm and smelling faintly of iron. "I know, you've been a languid fellow in the past, perhaps even lazy -- but not this lazy. You want the answer. Why not take it?"
"Why...?" Rubedo repeated incredulously, his body falling still.
Perhaps it wasn't just the last dregs of sleep paralysis that let Albedo push Rubedo's weakening consciousness back into the support of his embrace. Albedo shifted himself against his smaller form, astral edges wisping away into trails of cold ice. The dreamscape shrank around them in a painfully bright cocoon. (He wasn't about to let Rubedo miss a single detail for lack of good lighting.) He slanted around him at impossible angles, giving the suggestion of restriction between strong arms and legs, and the warm promise of his mouth tilted slightly out of reach, to leave him uneasier still.
He reveled in the softness of Rubedo's adolescent shell, felt the man behind it match his own strength with a throaty howl, filtered through the child as mewling threats his hands would not deliver. Everything about the youthful state he'd stubbornly frozen himself in was narrow -- narrow throat, narrow shoulders, narrow hips, and of course, his narrow mind -- but with enough pressure, everything parted for him with a cry, trembling with a desperate tension. Albedo knew they were no such gifts to offer to Nigredo, not in this place behind the last feeble barriers of closed doors and closed eyes.
"Mine," he sang tunelessly, harsh and low, but Rubedo would not answer in kind, not even as the dragon's wings were broadening, stretching, to accommodate them both. Rather, he bit against Albedo's collarbone to muffle himself instead, his rage coursing like venom, flowing straight into Albedo. Albedo greedily swallowed it, letting it burn in his throat with a caustic edge of intoxication that no liquor could match.
As they moved, Rubedo's stifled curses grew strange, deteriorating into mere guttural punctuations of furious noise. He clawed furiously at the core of Albedo with unevenly-bitten nails, encouraging what was in his hand to hurt as much as possible, to set non-existent nerves afire. Imaginary pain, imaginary numbers, every figment of agony for Albedo to beg for, more and more of it. Rubedo obliged him blindly in his anger, their shared vision smeared into blurs of meaty scarlet and bony alabaster.
Gliding up against the much more faint scars of his brother's unsteady heartbeat, Albedo seized the Link like a tightrope of razor wire, about to break beneath their struggling play, before he was gone, coldly snapped back into the cockpit of Simeon. A warm ooze slid from the steely grip of his hand, to gloss over the expanse of his midsection.
The Link shivered with a familiar tremor, casting an arc of brilliant red. Albedo exhaled, tasting the flat, recycled air, relishing the not-quite-there sense of something (someone) heaving, and giving way next to his own heart with a violent splash of --
Nothing.
The Link's (no, Rubedo's) crescendo fell into abrupt silence, blazing red lines gone cold silver, and a flash of cut wire slipped away into the darkness. Silence, as loud as empty seats in the grandest theater of invisible burlesque.
A sound caught in the raw confines of his chest. Not a whimper, not a crestfallen cry, not a bitterly disappointed groan, no, no, no -- it twisted its way up his throat, and blossomed over his tongue into raucous, breathless laughter.
You see?! he crowed into the dead signal. Wasn't that easy, Rubedo? Just like I told you! Just shut the door, and walk away.