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Blue. It’s all blue, smooth and so clear it looks like one of those gelatin cakes Trey sometimes makes, glassy and deep, like you could just pool it in your hands. There’s barely even a splash when Deuce stirs it, as though the whole potion is just one smooth mass, not entirely liquid or solid.
“D’ya think that’s the sapphire?” Deuce says. “Or is it that other stuff we put in, what was it.”
“Nightshimmer,” Ace says. “Textbook says it comes from falling stars in winter.” He eyes the nearly empty phial of it, picks it up and holds it up, eyeing the few drops left. “Says in the textbook it sells for five-thousand madols a gram, how much d’ya think our leftovers are worth?”
“Nothing,” says an unamused voice behind them, plucking the phial from Ace’s aloft fingers. “Pups should not steal from the academy in which they are enrolled to make such a scant profit, Trappola. Where would you plan to sell it? Sam would alert me right away, and I’d fail you both.”
“I-I was just…theorizing,” he grits out, turning to face an unamused Professor Crewel. “It was a joke, y’know?”
“I prefer none of that in my class, as you two know well,” Crewel says firmly, eyes narrowing. “If you continue on without an ounce of sincerity, it will cost you. If you do not wish to take my class seriously, I’ll end up seeing you next year when you learn just how important it is, puppies.”
Crewel sets the phial back on their table and walks away to bark something at another pair of misbehavers, leaving the two of them once again alone in the corner. Deuce is still diligently stirring the potion, clockwise three times, counter-clockwise twice. Repeat. Just like the books says.
Miffed as he is about his plans being foiled, he eyes the phial on the table again, then gets back to the recipe at hand, since Deuce seems to have issues reading and stirring at the same time.
“Without an ounce of sincerity,” Ace mumbles, looking over the book recipe again, “he acts like we don’t do the work at all, y’know?”
“Maybe if you were helping me stir, he’d think you were more invested,” Deuce grumbles. “My arms are getting tired, y’know.”
“I’m reading the instructions, I’m doing the managing,” he says. “You just opened up the book and asked me what way clockwise was again, so don’t act like you didn’t also cause this.”
“Well then, what’s it say now?”
“Wait two minutes, then add the larkspur petals, exactly fifty-three.”
“Ok, you recount ‘em, I’ll keep stirring,” Deuce sighs.
He sounds like he might add something else, but doesn’t complain further as Ace sets off counting, arranging the petals quickly into pairs of fives, and counts them, then double-counts. He glances over at his timer. Minute and twenty-two seconds left. Then he glances over at Deuce, who is watching the cauldron intently, lips moving slightly, mumbling something to himself. It’s that same face he makes whenever he’s concentrating hard, and it’s the same no matter the setting.
The last time he’d made it had been last night, when his mouth had been wide and drooling, firmly sucking around Ace’s—
Brrrrr! Brrrrr! Brrrrr!
His thoughts are jarred by the buzzing of the alarm he’d set, and Deuce glances up.
“I counted two sixties,” he says. “It’s been two minutes.”
“You were counting? I set a timer.”
Deuce blinks. “I wanted to be sure.”
“You’re too much, man,” he sighs, scattering the petals on the smooth, glassy surface of their potion, which is now edging towards royal purple. “Ok, just gotta brew these until they sink to the bottom, and we should be ready to strain it into our vial.”
“Finally,” Deuce breathes, wiping the sweat from his forehead. “I’m going to need a massage after this. I’m aching.”
He smirks to himself at that, already thinking about the prospect of extending a friendly hand to Deuce after all this is ended and the school bell dismisses them for the day. They have club, sure, but after that somehow they always end up meeting in the Heartslabyul showers at just the right time before dinner when they’re near-empty.
Deuce stays quiet enough with a few fingers shoved in his mouth, and if he’s raging enough, ten minutes is more than enough for both of them to get some quality time.
There’s something in Deuce that is always surprisingly insatiable, some part of him that rocks his hips back against Ace’s own, that always seems to try and press their bodies closer. That was how they’d ended up like it in the first place. Deuce had just looked at him, with a look that only Deuce seemed to know how to make, a deep, aching and longing within his eyes. He’d leaned forward to kiss him, then, sensing it was what Deuce wanted, and he’d felt compelled to answer that.
In the end, like his brother said, a hole was nothing more than a hole.
Deuce and him had become something a bit that could be loosely described as friends, and now that had been upgrade to “something like friends, with benefits” or “something like friends who are sex friends”. It was a surprisingly easy solution to their need to get off in a way more meaningful than simple their own hands, and from some of the nastier stories his brother had told him, it wasn’t even unusual. It was that condition of coming to a school with no women, and nothing more.
“A secret between bros,” his brother had said. “Sure, some of ‘em might be gay, but ya just gotta follow two rules: ya don’t kiss, ya don’t give em anything to lead em on. No romance. Just stick it in. That’s enough.”
He’d never understood why anyone would even feel the temptation to try such a thing until Deuce had looked at him that way.
It was only in the aftermath he’d realized he’d broken the first rule his brother had given him, but he figured it was the only way of getting in. Just something for Deuce to loosen up with, to make Deuce feel like he was being cared for.
And, the more they did it, the more he was sure Deuce had been one of the ones his brother had been talking about. It wasn’t anything in particular or anything concrete he could describe. It was just the way Deuce looked at him, the way Deuce melted under his hands, the way Deuce always seemed more than eager to suck him off, even when he hadn’t been asking.
So far, that hadn’t presented any problems, but the more they became intertwined in school life, doing class projects together, hanging out with Grim and Yuu, getting up into mischief and sometimes preventing it, the more a strange, nameless blob of fear began to unfurl in his chest.
The more time he spent with Deuce, the more Deuce laughed with him and ate lunch with him and fought with him over petty things, the more he began to fear an inevitable confession. He began to live on edge of that, always skirting the edge of situations where they were alone and Deuce was talking freely, afraid one of these Deuce would ask him if he wanted to date for real, and he’d have no answer for that.
He’d toyed in his mind with a thousand scenarios of being caught by that question, and how to slip out of it. To say no would certainly cause a rift, and one he wasn’t sure he wanted to deal with the trouble of cleaning up after. He had toyed often with the idea of saying yes, too, but he wasn’t sure how such a thing would work out.
It wasn’t like he was exactly lacking experience in the department of dating someone you didn’t really have feelings for.
But recently, more and more he was toying with that idea, the idea of saying yes if the inevitable came, and just how he would have to go out with Deuce for at least a short time before breaking up with him, if it came to that. They got into fights easily. It wouldn’t be hard to spark a small one after a few days, and then a bigger one a week or so later, leaving them with no choice but to break up.
Smooth and easy.
He looks up at Deuce now across the cauldron, watching as he’s stirring, brow furrowed, staring intently at the last two larkspur petals that are holding out and refusing to sink.
Would Deuce make an equally frustrated expression at their inevitable breakup?
He couldn’t help but wonder, if only because it was such an unknown factor, but the only possible end.
“If you help me stir,” Deuce says exasperatedly, snapping him out of his line of thought, “they might sink faster.”
As he says it, one of the petals finally withers and sinks, leaving only one remaining.
“I suppose,” he sighs, grabbing the second stirring stick.
They stir in silence for about a minute, watching the other groups already straining off finished potions, until finally Deuce makes a slight noise and pumps his fist in the air.
“Finally!”
Deuce stretches his tired arms and grabs the straining equipment off the table, filling a beaker with a perfect amount of glassy, translucent potion.
“It looks like the book illustration,” he says, thumping a fist to his chest proudly. “I think we did it. I’m glad I didn’t do all that stirring for nothing.”
“Yeah, we did fine. With this, we’re gonna get an A, I’m sure,” he says, holding up the beaker to the light. Absolutely clear, without a single trace of sediment. He’s strangely proud of it, in a way, the way the potion is such a beautiful, endless deep blue.
He sets it back down on the desk and Deuce begins cleaning up the remainder of ingredients they didn’t use, scraps of plants, and their pestle and mortar, badly in need of a wash after grinding some wormwood into a fine powder.
As he himself begins to sweep some of the debris off their table into the trash, the phial of nightshimmer catches his eye once more. It still has a few drops left in it. He glances back over his shoulder. Crewel is currently in deep discussion on the other side of the room with another pair of students, who seem to have somehow turned their cauldron’s content into neon orange sludge.
In one swift motion, he sweeps the wormwood shavings from the table into the trash and pockets the phial, making it look natural as can be.
Always cover your movements with others, that was what his brother had taught him. Mix a bit of truth in a lie, mix a bit of a real action into the hidden one. The real truth is always there, deep down, wrapped inside something else, but there has to be enough of it that isn’t a lie in order to conceal the real truth.
He looks back at their cauldron, still filled with the dregs of their potion, which Crewel himself often takes care of disposing.
“Waste after all that work,” Deuce says, peering into it with him. “The color’s so pretty, right?”
“You think Crewel would notice if I snuck a sip?” he says, half-joking, still drawn in by that beautiful blue color. He has an impulse to taste it, and dips a gloved finger in to swirl it, then watches as the ripples slowly dissipate across the beautiful glassy surface. “I mean, just a sip, the effect wouldn’t be strong, right? You have to drink like, a whole bottle for shit to happen anyway.”
“Ace,” Deuce says, blue eyes so wide the spade mark drawn down onto his cheek warps and ripples, “it’s a truth potion. Wouldn’t that be dangerous?”
“Like how? They wouldn’t let us make anything that dangerous as first-years.”
“They let us pick mandrakes.”
“Yeah, with upperclassmen as supervisors. They’re not gonna let us make anything that dangerous alone.”
He grabs a silver tablespoon used for measuring off the table. “It’ll just be a sip, maybe it’ll make me spill all my guts to you,” he laughs. “Just kidding. It probably just has an effect like when people get drunk, right? Like your brain gets a little loose.”
“Ace,” Deuce hisses. “Don’t. You really shouldn’t.”
It’s too late. He’s already decided, driven by a desire to wring some sort of further excitement out of this. His heart beats wildly at the thrill of skimming off the smooth surface of the dregs, pulling up a spoonful that’s to the brim, the glassy surface holding itself with perfect tension.
“Here it goes.”
“Don’t do it, I’m serious.”
“Too late.”
He takes the spoonful down, just like when he was a child and his mother would shove an entire spoonful of medicine into his mouth all at once. It tastes like medicine, too, with the bitterness of the wormwood powder, and burns a little like the time his brother had let him have a shot of whiskey last Christmas. It rolls down his throat, that burning, fiery feeling lingering, even when he feels it settle heavily in his stomach.
“Do you…feel any different?” Deuce says, after about thirty seconds have passed.
“Nope. Guess we failed. Don’t tell Professor.”
“Isn’t gonna whip you if he finds out?” Deuce says. “You better make sure he doesn’t find out.”
“Not like I’d hate it.”
“What?”
“I wouldn’t hate it.”
It’s out of his mouth a second time, and it’s only then he actually listens to what his own mouth is saying. There are plenty of times he’s spoken before he’s thought, acted before really considering consequences, but this is the first time he’s genuinely surprised by his own mouth.
Deuce eyes him at first with suspicion, as though he hadn’t really been listening either, and then wild horror when what is no doubtedly the horror of Ace’s own expression sinks in.
“Potion!” he gasps, perhaps a little too loudly, because the pair of students next to them turn their heads to look. He lowers his voice to a half-whisper. “Is that the potion?”
“It’s supposed to make you tell the truth,” he snorts. “You really think I’d honestly say I want Professor Crewel to smack me?”
“It’s not a joke you’d normally make,” Deuce says. “It’s weird. Are you joking?”
“‘Course,” he says, and rocks back on his heels, only a second before his mouth opens without his brain telling it to and, in something that feels like an event he’s only watching and not really participating in, says, “no.”
“Did you say no?”
“I did.”
“Ace…”
“Don’t,” he says, taking a deep breath, and he slaps a hand over his mouth, trying to quell the rising panic in his brain, the kind that buzzes so violently he can barely think. “Don’t ask me any more questions, Deuce.”
Deuce levels his gaze at him. “Wait…is this a prank?”
Yes. Say yes. Yes.
He feels it forming on the tip of his tongue. Yes. It’s a prank. Yes.
“It’s not.”
His own tongue betrays him.
A deep, unspeakable horror begins to rise within his chest. Part of him desperately, desperately wants to play this off as a prank, so Deuce will think he was joking about perhaps thinking about being at the mercy of Crewel’s whipping rod once or twice in the shower because he’d ran out of other interesting things to think about.
The other part of him feels, though, that the more he might try to do that, the bigger a mess this might entangle him in. All it’ll take is one wrong slip-up. Though, maybe if he just bites his lip, doesn’t talk at all, once the potion wears off he really can pretend it was all a prank for show.
He hastily grabs the potion book off the table and scans the recipe desperately. Desired effects. Desire effects. He finds it at the bottom.
Optimal dose 1-2tbsp per 70kgs.
“What?” Deuce says, grabbing the book. “You look like you saw one of the ghosts. What’re you looking at?”
He bites his tongue and points to the small text at the bottom of the recipe.
Deuce’s eyes go wider than he’s ever seen them. On his face is a look of sheer terror, the kind often reserved only for the worst of incidents they’ve experienced together.
“Are you gonna be ok?”
“Don’t know.”
That, at least, is both what he had intended to say and the real, honest truth.
* * *
Deuce had tried to convince him to go to Crewel, to just take the punishment that came with this and ask for an antidote, but he’d refused. Even as Deuce had grabbed both his arms and tried to drag him back to the classroom after he’d quickly escaped after the final bell, he still dug his heels in and refused.
Professor Crewel was kind if you were genuinely in need of help, yes, but he did not take kindly to rule-breakers, often nearly on the same level as a certain tyrant Prefect.
“He’ll kill me.”
“You’re just gonna stay like this, Ace? Through club? Through dinner?”
He can’t help but notice Deuce’s emphasis on that last part, if only probably because if there’s one person better at doling out punishment than Divus Crewel, it’s Riddle Rosehearts.
“Yes.”
“What if Riddle asks if anyone wants to confess to who left the hedgehog shed door unlocked last week?”
“Won’t answer,” he says, trying to keep his answers as short as possible to avoid any slip-ups. “Keep my mouth shut.”
“Can you do that?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” Deuce says, as though he doesn’t quite believe that.
He’s not sure if he believes it either, but he has to try.
“I’m not sure if I should…leave you, though. It feels wrong.”
“They’ll get more suspicious if we’re both absent,” he says, which is true, but part of him is also desperate to just get the rest of this day over with and sleep off this stupid mistake as soon as possible. “I’ll be fine.”
“Then uh, I gotta get to club,” Deuce says. “I’ll see you at dinner. Be uh…be careful, ok.” He pats Ace’s shoulder awkwardly, as though trying to be comforting somehow, and takes off down the hall, double-timing his steps, trying his best to be on time.
“Trappola! Come here, mutt!”
Ah. Shit. Shit shit shit.
He turns on his heel to face Crewel, who’s face is so flushed in anger in nearly matches the shade of his gloves. “I want that phial I know you took.”
“Don’t have it.”
He’s relieved to find he can still weave a bit of a slick-tongued lie in there when it’s not a direct question, it seems.
Crewel holds out a single hand. “You’re trying to tell me you didn’t take it?”
“Yes.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
Yes.
“No.”
He winces physically as it comes out, and the expression on Crewel’s face changes slightly.
“Trappola, tell me, did you take the phial from the classroom?”
“Yes.”
“For what purpose?”
“Madols. I was gonna see if I could sell it.”
A wry smile quivers at the edge of Crewel’s lips. He reaches a hand into Ace’s blazer pocket and pulls out the phial.
“I told you it’d be pointless,” he says. “I also told you that attitude of yours would get you in trouble, but it seems you didn’t heed my warning.”
He blinks, doesn’t say anything.
“You tasted the potion you made, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“How much? A drop?”
“A spoonful.”
“You idiot mongrel,” Crewel hisses, pulling him by the sleeve into an empty study room at the end of the corridor. He shuts the door behind them with a force that makes Ace shudder slightly, because it seems like all the windows in the room might shatter at the way it makes the walls vibrate. “You weren’t even listening in the beginning of the class when I said today was about dosages, were you?”
“No.”
“On the crown of the Witch of Thorns herself,” Crewel breathes, clutching his pointer uncomfortably tight in his hands, “I should just expel you right now.”
He blinks, trying to ignore the wave of nausea rising in his throat, feeling very much like opening his mouth might now get him in more trouble than it’s worth.
“Nothing to say to that?”
“Please don’t.”
His voice comes out very small, something only half-said, and pathetic sounding plea. It’s not how he wishes he sounded, but it’s very much how he feels, the thick lump rising in his throat, choking him.
“I won’t,” Crewel says softly, “because I think by the end of tonight you’ll have punished yourself enough.”
“What does that mean?”
“You drank a truth potion,” Crewel says. “A potent one. And it seems, unfortunately for you, you brewed it correctly. Draft of Sincerity. It forces you to answer to questions addressed to you honestly, and I doubt you’ll get through the rest of this evening without at least a few slip-ups.” He clasps Ace on the shoulder with a look in his eyes, no longer of anger but more of wry amusement and pity. “I never took you to be this much of an idiot, Trappola, but it seems even you proved me wrong.”
His voice rings loudly in the empty room, perhaps simply because of the weight of the words. It makes his skin crawl, the way Crewel says it, and it’s beginning to sink in just how bad a mistake this is. There’s a lump in his throat and now something heavy settles in his stomach, a feeling of dread, one that spreads cold through his chest until he can’t breathe properly.
“I’m sorry,” is all he can force out, and Crewel looks down at him with nothing but complete and utter pity this time.
“You will be,” he says, opening the door much more gently than he’d closed it. “If you get through the night, I expect you to pay better attention next week. You’re an idiot, but you don’t have to be.”
Suddenly, Deuce’s offer to stay with him sounds so far away, but also so much smarter than he’d thought.
* * *
He skips club and heads straight back to the dorm. It’s off-season, and while his phone has already buzzed with what has to be at least one irritated text from an upperclassman asking where he is, he ignores it. He’ll bluff a stomach flu. In fact, he’s more than prepared to bluff a stomach flu for the whole evening.
The Heartslabyul common room is devoid of life, thankfully, and he speed-walks across it to the stairs, and manages to duck into his room without running into a single soul. With that, he changes out of his uniform, hangs it up on the wall and, instead of going for his dorm uniform, opens his closet to go straight for his pajamas. The more sick he looks, the better. For extra effect he even rubs some of the red eyeliner pen he uses for his heart under his eyes, trying to make himself look flushed and weary.
Then, he slips into his sloppily made bed, practicing a fake cough for those who might need to hear it. He’s perfected a good one after years of faking sick to get out of whatever necessary, but he hasn’t used it in a while, given Riddle isn’t really the type to fall for something like that so easily.
He finds himself actually a bit exhausted, and he lets himself nap, if only to further the illusion. Sleep grogginess from a nap is a good look for faking sick, he’s learned over the years. He’s tired from the emotional punch of the interaction with Crewel, and the sheer amount of existential dread he’s experienced in only the past hour, which feels like the average person’s lifetime worth.
His mind spins at first, going over again the embarrassing admittance to Deuce that he’s at least a little hot for the Professor, which it seems Deuce had ignored in favor of being surprised the potion even worked at all, mercifully. He hopes it stays that way, because Deuce is easily the type of person to remember it five hours later at the least convenient time.
Still, worrying about that somehow only makes him more tired, and he slips into sleep and doesn’t even realize it until about an hour and a half later, when he’s roused by the sound of heels coming up the stairs. He thinks nothing of it, until those heels stop just outside the door to their room, and there’s a sharp knock.
Only one person in Heartslabyul would dare to knock like that.
“Trappola! You’ve shirked your club practice. They messaged me that you didn’t show. Your club is a commitment, you know.”
His voice is sharp even through the thick wooden door, and even though he can’t see Riddle at all, it’s too easy to picture the exact expression of disapproval he’s probably currently making. His arms are likely stiffly crossed, mouth in a thin line, eyes narrowed.
He closes his own eyes for a moment, and when he reopens them Riddle is standing at the foot of his bed, looking exactly as he’d assumed.
“Answer me.”
He shakes his head and coughs, gesturing to his throat.
Riddles eyebrows raise. “You can’t talk? Are you sick?”
He shakes his head again, but his jaw forces itself open and words fall out before he can have the sense to try and fight his own body. “No. My voice is fine.”
“Trappola…your body language doesn’t seem to be matching your words. Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“So you’re not sick?”
“Yes.”
“You’re acting so strangely, though.” Riddle’s eyes linger on the ceiling tiles for a moment, as though he’s searching inside his own brain for the answer to Ace’s problems. “What’s wrong with you? I’m your Prefect, Trappola. Tell me.”
There’s something that jolts inside him at that command. The question itself, he can already feel his tongue preparing to answer, but the way Riddle commands sparks something in his potion-addled brain that makes him feel compelled to tell the truth, and the whole truth.
“Deuce and I made a truth potion in class,” he says.
It falls out his mouth once again uncontrollably, like the time he and Grim had made a bet to see who could stuff the most sugar cubes in their mouth at once, and it’d gotten to the point where he’d accidentally laughed and they’d come out on the table in a vile avalanche he’d been unable to stop. These words feel like that, dropping from his lips, and he can do nothing but catch them in his hands and know they’re already a lost cause, and they can’t be put back where they were.
“Go on.”
“The Draft of Sincerity,” he says. “I drank a spoonful. I don’t wanna spill my guts. So I’m faking sick. I don’t want you to find out.”
Riddle snorts at the last part. “A bit late for that,” he says. “I’d say I appreciate your honesty but well…I suppose you really can’t help it then, can you?”
“I can’t.”
“If it’s that bothersome, you should just confess to Professor Crewel and ask for an antidote. Thought it’d be good if you didn’t indulge in such nonsense in the first place. Do you have a teapot where they meant to put your brain?”
“I don’t think so.”
Riddle snorts again. “So you just have to answer all my questions now, hm, Trappola? And there’s nothing you can do about it?”
“Yes.”
The smile on his face is terrifying, even more terrifying than when he’d Overblotted. That had been a Riddle Rosehearts out of control, entirely unable to stop himself from going overboard and destroying everything in sight.
This Riddle Rosehearts, however, is glancing down on him from beneath long red lashes, a cruel smirk on his face. Entirely in control. Entirely in a mindset where he knows exactly what he’s doing.
It’s a thousand times worse.
However, that expression drops quickly, as Riddle seems to think of something, and while his expression is still stern, there’s a thoughtfulness to it. “As much as I want to cause you a bit of trouble and finally get a straight answer from that silver tongue of yours,” Riddle says, “I feel it’d be unethical for me as dorm leader to use this to such an advantage. However, I will say I still expect you at dinner.”
“I don’t want dinner.”
“We’ll make arrangements.”
“No,” he says, and it’s both the truth and what he wants to say anyways, just perhaps less tactful than he’d normally try to spin it. “Sorry, Prefect, but I don’t want to…say anything.”
“From the look on your face,” Riddle says, perching himself on the edge of the bed, “I can guess you’ve already said something you regret?”
“Yes.”
“What? Tell me.”
“Prefect,” he grits out, hoping desperately Riddle will take that back in the next three seconds, but he doesn’t.
The harder he grits his teeth, the more he clenches his jaw, the more he can feel the words on his tongue building, forming in a frightful way that he knows what might spill, what sort of thing he might say, but not exactly how.
“I told Deuce I wouldn’t mind having Professor Crewel whip me,” he says, expelling it all in one breath, letting it spill into the air and pool there. And then, because it seems the potion isn’t done helping his tongue loosen, “I don’t want Deuce to think I’m like that. I’m not like you guys,” he says, and the more the words spill out, the more he aches, the more he doesn’t want to hear what his own voice is saying. He fists a hand in his pajama shirt, twists the fabric in his fist, as though somehow that will stop the flow bursting forward from him. “I don’t wanna be like you guys.”
Riddles eyebrows shoot up so high on his forehead they disappear entirely behind his bangs. “Like what?”
No. No no no no. No.
There's something that hits him, then, a nauseous fear, something in him that he can sense he doesn't want to push past. There's a fear there so deep, so paralyzing he doesn't want to plumb the depths of it, to pull back the curtain on the root of it all. There is something there to be uncovered, but he knows it's something that, once brought out of the shadows, cannot go back. Anything, anything but that. That's what the fear is telling him, that he doesn't want to journey to that place he can't come back from, not yet. He can't breathe, but the more he tries to choke down the words, the more he can feel the build, and the need to stop it somehow, physically, to prevent them from coming out.
He turns, shoves himself face-first into his pillow, and he can feel Riddle’s hand come up to grip his shoulder tightly, trying to pull him ‘round.
“Trappola? Are you alright?”
That. That he can answer.
“No,” he breathes out, trying desperately to find a way to bite back the panic in his chest. “Take it back. Please. Take it back, Prefect, please.”
“Ace.” Riddle’s voice is softer now, and it sounds as though there’s some regret to it, as though he hadn’t fully understood what he was probing, deep down. “I don’t want to torture you,” Riddle says. “My apologies. You don’t have to answer.”
The coil of fear, knotted so tightly in his stomach unwinds, and he finds he can breathe again, slightly, but he still doesn’t turn to face Riddle.
He breathes, first in gasps, then shakily and steadily, trying to get his body back to normal.
“I’m sorry,” Riddle says, and his voice sounds a bit shaken, like he means it. “I shouldn’t have pried. Go take a shower and calm yourself down for dinner. I’ll make sure to make special arrangements.”
“Do I really have to go?”
“If you’re not actually sick, the rule is you have to attend,” Riddle says. “But…as your Prefect, as much of an idiot as I think you are,” he says, “it’s still my duty to protect you.”
“Don’t worry,” he mumbles into the pillow.
“Hm?”
“I think I’m an idiot too.”
Riddle laughs. “At least you’re self-aware,” he says, opening the door. “Not all of us are so lucky to realize our mistakes in time to fix them.”
“Thanks.”
The door shuts behind Riddle with a firm click, and he sighs into the pillowcase, breathing in the scent of rose-perfumed laundry detergent. The fabric is choking him with every breath he draws, but somehow he’s not ready to turn over yet, content to just lie here, face down, for a few more minutes.
Finally, he gets the energy back in his limbs, and his lungs feel steady. He raises his head, pushes himself out of bed and grabs his shower kit and towel. Just a quick shower. Five minutes in and out, tops.
Everyone else is still at clubs, no doubt Riddle had excused himself a bit early to check on him playing hooky. He has the large, spacious shower room to himself and sighs, relieved. His pajamas get left in a pool of fabric on the floor, and he hangs the dorm uniform he brought with him haphazardly in one of the open cupboards. Soon, he’s shut away behind a curtain of one of the shower stalls under a deliciously perfect hot stream of water, and he can feel the residual panic from earlier just melt away.
As much as Riddle had been angry, he really isn’t the type to take something like Prefect duties so lightly. He’s also not the type to be anything but thorough, either. If Riddle says he’ll make arrangements, he will. He has no doubt they’ll be, at the very least, meticulous. Hopefully Riddle will invent something like a silent dinner, he thinks, or let him eat in the kitchen. Maybe he can help Trey with the dishes in exchange.
The more he toys with it, the more he thinks the prospects don’t sound too bad. Riddle, at the very least, is reliable, and Trey is also a kind upperclassman, in most fashions. They’ll take care of him.
He bathes his head in the water and starts up with shampoo.
Get through dinner, then just go to bed early. By tomorrow, this will be nothing but a bad dream. Deuce will likely forget about the incident, too, or at the very least be easy to convince it was a half-joke. Deuce doesn’t take most things like that too seriously, and he might not have even taken the meaning of it literally.
He rinses his hair and blinks the water out of his eyes, surprised to find he hasn’t realized the arrival of another over the sound of the shower. There’s another towel draped over the wall between their stalls, and he can see the shower caddy on the floor, edge of the basket just slightly under the wall and into his shower stall’s territory.
“Ace?” a voice calls from the stall next door. “That you?”
It’s Deuce. He tries to bite his lip, to feign it’s not him, but the answer is forced out of him. “It’s me.”
“Good, I recognized your shower stuff. I forgot my soap. Spot me some?”
“Yea.”
He hands the bottle under divider, and Deuce’s hand meets his, clumsily slips against his fingers before taking the bottle in his hand and disappearing with it into his own stall.
“Did you go to club?”
“No.”
“Aren’t you gonna get in trouble?”
“I will.” Even if it’s the potion spitting out the words for him, the tone is all his, the dejected, flat sound of it. “They messaged the Prefect,” he adds, even though the potion isn’t forcing him to, but it’s his own choice, and he wants to complain, just a little bit. “So I’ve got him on my ass too.”
“Not your day,” Deuce says with a snort. “Not like you didn’t kinda…well, nevermind.”
“What?”
“It’s just,” Deuce says, “isn’t it kinda your fault? For drinkin’ the potion. I told you not to do it.”
“I know it’s my fault,” he snaps. “I don’t need you rubbing it in. Prefect also said I have to go to dinner, but he’s gonna make “arrangements”.”
“He knows about the potion?”
“Course he does,” he sighs, leaning against the cool tile wall and turning off the shower spray. His voice echoes loudly against the tile without the noise of the running water pounding down on his head. “I couldn’t lie about it when he asked.”
“Can you lie about anything now?”
“I think so.”
The curtain behind him opens with a wet sound, and Deuce is standing there, wet and fully naked, holding the bottle of body wash in his hand.
“You can still lie even with a truth potion?”
“Crewel said it makes you answer questions sincerely,” he says. “So if it’s not a question, I think I don’t have to answer it. Or I can lie about it.”
“We could test it,” Deuce says, bending to put the bottle back into the shower caddy on the floor. “Lie to me right now. Anything.”
“Ok I um…I love oysters,” he says. “They’re my favorite food.”
Easy. It came out so easy, so smooth. It’s a surprise to himself, and Deuce’s eyes widen slightly.
“So you can lie!”
“Yeah, but the problem is…avoiding questions,” he says. “People ask them more than they realize.”
“Like what?”
“Like just now,” he says with a groan, grateful he doesn’t feel the spinning compulsion to elaborate further. “You asked me one just now. Do you not even realize? Are you that thick?”
“Hey,” Deuce says, edging slightly closer to him, mouth set in a thin line. “I’m trying to help. But if you don’t want it, fine.”
He turns to walk away, and with an urge to get Deuce to stay, he reaches out a hand to grab that bony wrist. Deuce has a lot of hard muscle and striking power, but his wrists are so slim, bony and slightly pointy in a way that always makes them feel so fragile in his hands.
“I do want it,” he says, pulling Deuce back into the stall, also finding the rising feeling there’s something else he wants, too. “I’m sorry. You’re not thick. I’m the idiot who drank the fucking potion.”
That makes Deuce’s furrowed brow relax, and his mouth turn up in a slight grin. “Yeah, you’re an idiot. My idiot.”
“That’s my line,” he says, and he pulls Deuce closer, thinking it is more than the perfect time to get rid of some of his tension.
Deuce pulls the curtain shut behind them, and he finds himself being pushed back against the shower wall. It’s not the first time Deuce has initiated, but at the same time today it somehow feels wildly out of control, and something inside him flutters like a moth in a bell jar. He can feel the pulse of it, trying to flutter out and up, and he realizes more than ever just how urgent this is.
“Promise me you won’t ask me more questions,” he says, turning Deuce and pinning him face-first against the wall. He dips his fingers low, grabs the conditioner from the basket and one-handedly squeezes a puddle onto the base of Deuce’s spine before slicking up his fingers with it. One finger in, shallowly, only to the knuckle. “Please,” he breathes into Deuce’s ear. “I don’t want to make any more mistakes.”
“You…sound like…something happened,” Deuce says, and it comes out slower than usual.
If this were a normal day, he’d think it’s because Deuce seems to lose his trail of thought easily to pleasure, but he realizes it’s because Deuce is trying very, very hard not to ask another question.
“It wasn’t a big deal.”
“Wasn’t it—I mean,” Deuce breathes, “you said it was a mistake.”
“Not a big one.”
Ah, it feels so good to be able to lie again. Deuce doesn’t even probably know what he’s playing into, the way he’s letting Ace just mold him with the answers he wants to give. The scale model of the world is back inside is hands, and Deuce is there, made of ash and clay, ready to believe whatever he wants.
He’s so good. He’s such a good boy like this, melting into putty under his fingers, willing to do anything he asks. And beautiful, so beautiful, skin milk-white, water droplets clinging to his long, dark lashes, blue eyes nearly shut, but open just enough to glance back at him with that aching, searing gaze.
He presses in roughly, feeling himself sink deep into Deuce’s slick insides. Deuce’s thighs shake slightly, the way they always do, like they’re about to give out, but Deuce always holds himself steady. It feels good to be back where he belongs, pressed deep to the hilt, Deuce bent over for him, panting and biting his lip to try and hold back his noises.
Deep, deeper his sinks, then pulls out and watches the shiver that trembles down Deuce’s spine, the way Deuce just craves for him, and feeling the way his body opens up for him as he pushes back in.
“Ace,” Deuce is breathing, lips nearly kissing the wet tile of the wall and he murmurs it into the cold marble. “Ace, I’m gonna come.”
“This fast?”
“Can’t hold it in,” he says breathlessly, and it comes out as a half-moan, “‘M sorry.”
“It’s fine,” he says, thinking he’ll just pull out and get off in the toilet stall instead. “Go ahead.”
Fast, so fast as Deuce comes nearly on command, hot and white and it splatters all over his stomach and drips down into the dregs of shower water, swirling into the drain. Down it goes, and he reaches over to turn the shower knob on, to wash away the evidence they were ever here.
He pulls out, still achingly hard. Whatever. He’s about to gather up his stuff and head towards the toilets but Deuce pulls him back, pushes him against the wall now.
“You didn’t come,” Deuce says, pressing a hand between his legs. He shivers, finds himself leaning into it. “Should I get you off?”
“Yes,” he breathes, but by the time it comes out he realizes he’s said the wrong thing, and he hadn’t even thought no, even though that would clearly have been the proper answer.
He’s never let Deuce touch him before, not like this. It’s always just in the hole, and he comes inside or on Deuce’s back, or in Deuce’s mouth, or just outside of it. Like this, Deuce’s body is pressed against him, hand between his legs, easing him back against the wall, and he finds himself leaning into it, even though so much of him is screaming that this breaks the rules, somehow, this isn’t how it’s supposed to go.
His mind is already flashing, images of things he doesn’t want to think about, of how it always is when he gets Deuce off like this, spreading him wide with his fingers, hand firmly around his dick. Deuce likes that, Deuce loves that, Deuce moans and shakes his hips because Deuce was built for that sort of thing but no, no, he’s not like that. He’s not like them. Like he said to Riddle, he’s not like them, he doesn’t want them to think he’s like them—
“Ace?” Deuce is murmuring in his ear. “Where should I touch you?”
He doesn’t want to answer that. His whole brain lights up, all at once, all of the synapses firing in a cacophony that sends him into overdrive. There’s no pillow here, and he bites down on his lip hard enough to draw blood, but it’s not enough, he can feel the build in his mouth again, the avalanche of words like those sugar cubes, ready to spill forth. There has to be a way, a way out.
No. No no no.
He wants to be able to lie again. He wants Deuce to take it back.
Anything but the truth.
Anything but that.
“That’s—question—” he grits out, through his teeth, and watches Deuce’s beautiful, heavy-lidded eyes spring wide.
“Sorry! Sorry Ace, I uh…if you want me to…no, wait, ‘if’ is a question word, is it? I—”
It’s too much, he’s too slow. He can feel the press of the words from the back of his throat, the prickling at the edges of his jaw, like he’s about to vomit them onto the shower floor. In panic, he grabs the only thing to fill his mouth, and pulls Deuce into a rough, fierce kiss, fills his mouth with the breath from Deuce’s own, and feels as he’s able to say the words against Deuce’s lips, muffled and unintelligible.
He’s breaking a rule he’s breaking it, he’s breaking it, it’s breaking breaking breaking—
Finally, he feels the nauseating feeling subside, and breaks the kiss to come face to face with Deuce, who’s looks just as spent as he had a minute ago, only now with flushed lips to match.
“Sorry,” Deuce says, “about the question, I—”
“It’s fine. It’s gone now. I’m gonna get dressed for dinner. I don’t need to get off, don’t worry about it.”
“But you already came,” Deuce says, holding out his hand, Ace’s sperm pooled in his palm. “You came when you kissed me. You didn’t realize it?”
The nausea comes back, full force, but without the sensation of words building in his mouth. This is an entirely different type of sickness, one that comes from the core of him, bubbles up in his stomach and threatens to spill all of his guts all over the black-and-white checkered floor tiles.
“No,” he says, feeling a hot flush creeping up his cheeks. He pushes past Deuce, letting their wet shoulders collide roughly, damp skin sliding each other, and he can feel the gooseflesh on his arm where they touch, the way everything stands up, putting his skin on edge. “That was another question. You’re really bad at this.”
Deuce makes a sputtering noise, as though he’s about to protest that, but Ace takes his shower caddy and rips open the curtains, heading out to the dressing area to see others are slowly pouring in from club activities. Head dizzy from the blood rush and the slow-dispersing humiliation, he dries himself off in a whirlwind, shoves on his dorm uniform and hastily scribbles a heart on his face. Not his best, but passable enough. He shoves on his sneakers as fast as possible, watching the entrance to the showers, heart pounding, trying to get out of here before Deuce rounds that corner and has a chance to say anything else to him.
He makes it back to their room, shoves his pajamas under his pillow in a lumpy pile and puts his damp shower caddy on the bottom shelf of his wardrobe to dry and heads down to the kitchen.
Nobody’s in the kitchen at this hour, nobody at all, and he puts his head down on the counter and takes a seat on one of the wooden stools. The kitchen counter is cold, but it does little to soothe the burn that still aches in his face, the dizziness making his head spin. Things are so blurry, he can barely remember what’s happened and what hasn’t, can’t keep track anymore of what truths he’s told and what he’s managed to leave unsaid.
That’d been far too close, Deuce too thick to even realize just how many questions he asks in an average conversation, and how dangerously close they’d come to being unable to go back. He doesn’t even know what he’d been about to say, what had been about to spill out his mouth without his consent, but he was sure whatever it was would certainly have been dangerous. He could only imagine what the potion thought he wanted to say, what it was going to make him say, whatever its strange idea of the truth might have been, the same way it’d had him say ‘yes’ in the first place when Deuce had stroked that hand between his thighs.
The potion was clearly ignoring the bigger, better part of him and what he would’ve normally said in favor of some warped truth that had led him to have to choke down his words by sucking Deuce’s face clean off.
So caught up in it all, he hadn’t even realized he’d embarrassingly released into Deuce’s hand. Even he had never gone so far with Deuce to have Deuce release in his hand, even thought he’d stroked Deuce a bit to get him hard once or twice. He’d come in Deuce’s mouth, yes, and Deuce had promptly spit it out and yelled at him to warn him next time, which had resulted in a scuffle that sent both of them tumbling off the bed. He had come inside Deuce once, which had also led to an equally similar scuffle, though that one had been in the showers and had ended with both of them nursing bloody noses and trying desperately to ice down the swelling enough that Riddle wouldn’t notice and ask what had transpired.
However, he’d never left Deuce open any part of him in the same way as he did, never had Deuce hold him in his palm like that before. Their bodies had been pressed together, and he had felt how warm Deuce was, the hot bloom of blood pulsing beneath his skin, hotter even than the spray from the shower. Their bodies had smelled the same, like his own soap. Deuce’s lips has tasted just slightly of iron, the blood from his own lip.
He runs his tongue over it now, the patch of his lip where the skin is scraped off still raw and chapped. His mouth has gone dry, and his face still sears hot. He pours himself a glass of lemonade from the pitcher in the fridge, downs the entire thing in one long sip, and puts the dish next to the sink for whoever is on dish duty.
There’s a buzz in the dinner hall now, and he heads out to join everyone at the long table.
“Ace,” Riddle says to him as he enters. “Sit next to me. Trey and Cater will join us. They’ve been briefed on the situation.”
“Alright,” he says, and while he could say more, he’s gotten now into the habit of no longer wanting to say anything unnecessary, before it triggers an accidental line of questioning he doesn’t want to answer.
“We’ll only be asking you yes or no questions,” Riddle says, seating Ace firmly at the corner of the table between Trey and himself. “And only when necessary. You are free to ask for revoking.”
“Thanks,” he says sheepishly. “You’re…you’re really lookin’ out for me.”
“Of course I am,” Riddle says. “It’s my duty.”
“What’s the catch?”
Riddle smiles widely, and his eyes sparkle. “You’re on dish duty for two weeks.”
“T-two weeks?”
“It was Trey’s request.”
“Ah-ha,” Cater says with a snort. “You’ve been be-Trey’d.”
“I just thought,” Trey says, “I really wanted to try out some new recipes this week, but it’s exhausting to have to both bake and do dishes. So I figured our underclassman wouldn’t mind repaying us.”
“You’re so wicked,” Cater says with another laugh, idly scrolling through his phone. “The very image of a perfect upperclassman, but only on the surface.”
“That hurts.”
“It should.”
“Phones away, please,” Riddle says as the clock strikes precisely six in the evening. “It’s dinner time.”
The meal appears magically on their plates as it always does, just in time for someone to hurriedly slide into the chair next to Cater.
“Sorry, so sorry I’m late Prefect,” Deuce says breathlessly, hair still slightly damp from the shower and sticking to his forehead. “Got back um…late from club,” he says, glancing at Ace for a moment, and then back down at the now-full plate of food.
He glances down at his own plate, then back up again. Their eyes don’t meet. Deuce is already talking to Riddle about something, gaze intensely focused on his potatoes.
He picks at his own potatoes, the feeling of hunger rather sapped by the events of the day in general. After using so much energy he’d normally be able to inhale a meal no problem, but right now his stomach feels strangely…absent. His whole torso seems to be filled up by a swirling, flipping sensation, something that makes him feel like his heart is vibrating in place and his lungs feel too heavy to properly breathe.
“Do you need salt?” Trey asks from his side, holding up the small glass shaker.
“No.”
“Just thought I’d offer.”
Trey’s voice has that gentle tone it often does, but there’s a different tone to it this time, coaxing, as though he’s trying to tame a wild rabbit. It’s the voice he uses when he’s teaching pastry, that sort of tone that tries to coax trust out of someone. It’s too gentle.
He glances up at Trey, who’s set down the salt shaker and is now pouring himself another glass of water.
Their eyes meet, just for a fraction of a second, and Trey smiles, something soft that doesn’t quite meet his over-analyzing gaze.
He quickly turns back to his potatoes. Then his glance goes to Cater, who isn’t paying him much attention, caught up in talking animatedly with Deuce about something that had happened in his Poison Refinement class. Riddle is seated at the head of the table, as always, neatly cutting into his chicken with poise that belongs in a ballroom.
Then, he catches it. The slightest exchange of glances between Riddle and Trey. It’s only a moment, and it’s subtle. Trey glances at him, then to Riddle, and Riddle catches his look.
They don’t say anything. Riddle barely reacts.
Ace shoves a forkful of potato in his mouth. Heavy. It tastes like wallpaper paste. He tries to swallow it down, but it goes down so heavy, and he realizes there’s a slow-creeping nausea rising in his throat.
Had Riddle told Trey about what happened in his room? Had he told Cater? Did they know?
He looks back up at Trey, who smiles at him again, tone so gentle. “Please tell me if you’d like something,” Trey says smoothly, so easily phrasing away the question. “I don’t want to ask the wrong thing.”
“No thanks.”
“Feel free to say at any time.”
Ah, he knows.
He knows he knows he knows.
He knows, he doesn’t know what Trey could possibly actually know, since Riddle hadn’t known, Riddle had never forced him to say what he’d almost been forced to say. Trey knows only that Riddle doesn’t know what Ace was about to say, but that it’d driven him humiliatingly to nearly the point of tears, face-down on his bed in a pillow, trying so desperately to bite his tongue. It makes his head spin, trying to work out the ins and outs of what they could possibly know, or if they could have possibly figured anything out, if they could have noticed.
Trey pours him another glass of cordial and watches as he takes a sip.
It feels like suddenly he’s too aware of his own presence at the table with the rest of them. He feels both like he is and isn’t present, like his mind is wrapped inside itself, and the low buzz of conversation fades out into a static that plays numbly in loop on the back of his brain. The sound of his own throat swallowing the cordial is loud, too loud, he can hear it so sharply, as though he’s inside his own head, as though he’s left the world and gone inside the shell of his body.
Trey’s eyes are kind and warm and look through him like he’s made glass.
He wants Trey to look somewhere else, anywhere else, anywhere so he doesn’t have to feel how careful he’s trying to be, how much thought he’s putting into his presence, how aware he is of it.
Don’t, is what he wants to say, but he doesn’t want to risk that opening, the possibility of Trey responding without thinking, ‘Don’t what?’ before he chokes on the words that will try to force their way out of his throat and into the world, into being, where he can’t take them back.
Trey is still just watching him, like he waiting dutifully for something, for Ace to give him some sort of non-verbal signal or nod to pass the butter or the pepper grinder.
He forces down another forkful of potato and looks across and over the table, past the gravy train. Deuce is offering what seems to be a quick glance in his direction, but he turns his eyes down again, and Ace has no choice but to stare at the smudge of black on his eyelid where his spade has been hastily applied and not given enough time to dry.
Deuce is staring still intently at his food, then at Cater, who’s still talking animatedly about something involving a melted cauldron.
“—after all,” Cater says, voice suddenly cutting sharply and clearly through the buzzing din of conversation, “you can’t hate Vil that much, right?”
Not like it’s hard.
He takes another swallow of his cordial and realizes, once he puts the glass down, that most of the gazes are fixed on him.
“What’d you say?”
“I said not like it’s hard.”
“Cater!” Riddle hisses. “No questions!”
He blinks. “I didn’t say that out loud.”
“You did,” Deuce says. “You said it right to Cater.”
“I just thought it.”
“You said it,” Trey says. “Don’t you remem—”
“Trey,” Riddle hisses again, this time with even more force. “The rules for this dinner.”
“Sorry,” Trey says, clearly trying his best to re-adjust. “I didn’t even hear what Cater said.”
“I was talking to Deuce,” Cater shrugs. “I just said you can’t hate Vil Schoenheit that much.”
Deuce’s eyes widen, like they do once in a rare while when he’s finally understood something he’s been puzzling over. “No you didn’t,” Deuce says. “You asked it. You asked who could hate him.”
“No,” Riddle says firmly. “No, it can’t possibly involve hypothetical questions, or general addressments. That would be impossible.”
“You don’t know, Riddle?”
“I’m not Azul,” Riddle says bluntly. “I learn how to solve problems, not memorize lists of things. I don’t recall every effect for every potion. And potion making is delicate, even highly refined potion makers struggle with unforeseen batch side effects.”
“But what does that mean?” His voice trembles as he says it, hands clenched tightly in the fabric of his pants, clawing so tightly he can feel the heat of his sweaty palms through the fabric. “Is just any question going to cause me to spill my guts about shit?”
“Language,” Riddle says, narrowing his eyes. “But I think we can’t know unless we test it further. We could ask some mor—”
“No.”
His whole body is trembling now, and the buzzing in the back of his skull is a roar. It’s too loud, the din of the table is too loud, and he begins to hear, just briefly, snippets of whatever the others at the more oblivious end of the table are whispering.
“—but then he—”
“Could it even—”
“What would that feel like, anyway—?”
He’s about to force himself to snap his eyes back to Riddle, who seems to be trying to talk to him, and Trey, who’s shaking his shoulder, when he feels it. That familiar sensation from before, the feeling of nausea, but not from anything he’s eaten. It’s the tingling at the edge of his jaw, the avalanche of words trying to spill out, trying to answer questions he hasn’t even been asked, questions he’s only heard. He’s sure of that, now, no matter what that had been asking, the potion has already heard it, and already lit up the map of his brain, searching to pinpoint an answer for him to spill forth.
“Trappola?”
“Excuse—” he just blurts out, and before he can try to make any more graceful of a gesture, he stumbles backwards awkwardly and rockets out of the dining room and towards the bedrooms, ignoring Riddle’s distant but shrill yell about not running in the halls.
The nausea is getting too great to bear, to the point where he feels as though he’s going to scream whatever words he’s keeping back at this point if he doesn’t free them. He stops midway in the hallway, not another soul around, and buries his mouth in the sleeve of his blazer, letting out the muffled words against the cloth.
He doesn’t know what he’s saying, what he’s even answering, and he no longer cares. He drops to his knees, head pressed against the wallpaper, whole body broken out in cold sweat.
Alone. He just needs to be alone, he needs to be in his room, alone. Maybe if he sleeps, maybe—
No. People talk in their sleep. It’s not even uncommon. In sleep would be worse, maybe, defenseless, unable to keep himself from mumbling out something dangerous.
He can't stay here. Not until this wears off.
Yuu, maybe Yuu will let him—no, but Grim can’t keep his mouth shut, he’d be so likely to ask too many ugly questions without even realizing.
There’s nowhere.
There’s nowhere to go.
His whole body shivers, and his fingers grow cold. He can’t breathe. Every breath feels like breathing in too little air, like no matter how deep he tries to breathe his lungs won’t fill. His head spins, and he feels like everything around him is shrinking, shrinking, like the corridor is closing in around him.
I can’t I can’t I can’t—
“Ace.”
“Not you.”
His answer is instantaneous, a gut reaction, but from himself, not the potion. He almost thinks he’s hallucinated the voice until a familiar, warm hand rests heavily on his shoulder, trying to pull him up.
It’s a hand he recognizes just by the feel, and when he glances down at it resting on him, there’s the briefest flash across his mind of that hand from only an hour ago, his sperm pooled in the palm. A wave of nausea rocks him so hard he actually thinks whatever forkfuls of potatoes he’d managed to down might come back up all over the hallway tile.
Deuce’s hand just grips him harder as he tries to pull away, to wriggle from under that grip. “I’m going to take you to our room.”
“Go ahead,” he says, wrenching his shoulder from Deuce’s iron grip and rising to his feet, steading himself with one hand against the wall. “Ask me why.”
“I won’t.”
“I know you want to. Go ahead. Ask me why ‘not you’.”
“I don’t get you,” Deuce bites out, clenching his teeth and slamming Ace to the wall by one of his shoulders, so violently the overhead flying teapots rattle a little from the force. “I don’t get what I did. I don’t get why we’re suddenly fighting. I’m trying to help you!”
“You’re the last one,” he says, gripping Deuce’s wrist and trying to pry it from his shoulder. “The last one in this place I want help from.”
“Tell me what I did wrong.”
“You have to make it a question,” he laughs, watching the way Deuce’s brow furrows and the spade across his eyelid warps the more his eyes narrow. “Otherwise I’m not gonna answer.”
“I’m not gonna do that,” Deuce says through his teeth. “Not when you look so scared.”
“Ha?” It comes out his lips, a short, sharp laugh, hysterical-sounding, and then it shakes him. He laughs, he laughs so hard tears come, so hard he can’t breathe, and sinks to the floor against the wall. Deuce’s grip slips down his arm, from his shoulder to his wrist, and Deuce sinks with him, until he’s sitting perched on his heels, gaze never leaving Ace’s face, even though he wishes it would. “I’m not scared of anything.”
“I know you can still lie,” Deuce says, his voice low. “I know you’re lying right now.”
“Don’t.”
“Ace,” he says. “Get up. We’re going to our room.”
“I told you,” he says, and his voice cracks as he says it, and he can feel the heavy lump in his throat. “Not you.”
“Too bad,” Deuce says, jaw clenched tight and hand curling tight enough to bruise, “because it’s me.”
He yanks Ace up with enough force it feels like his arm might pop from its socket and drags him down the hallways to their room.
They walk in silence, but Deuce’s footsteps say enough, heavy and fast on the floor, not slowing down to making sure he’s keeping him up, pulling him along until they reach the door of their room, the cute little paper cutout nameplates that have been there since the day after there ceremony bearing down on them. Heart for him, spade for Deuce, diamond and club for their other roommates, guys he talks to now and then.
Once upon a time he’d probably intended to be better friends with them, more than just passing “yeah, I sleep in the bed next to that guy”, but somehow he and Deuce had gotten caught up together in too many schemes with Yuu and Grim and the other backdrop of various standouts and oddballs at their school for that to really have happened.
“D’Mante and Quatre aren’t coming back,” Deuce says. “I saw them in the showers and told them you had the flu. They left to stay with a friend in Octavinelle.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“You didn’t have to be an idiot,” Deuce says. “I told you not to drink it. I told you.”
“I know.”
“I’ll get you some water.”
“No.”
He lays facedown on his bed again, face pressed back into the pillow, which still has the dent in it from earlier. It’s still the shape of his face, the blankets puckered slightly where he’d breathed them in, trying to keep himself steady. It still smells the same, like roses and like his own bed, that scent that just smells like something he owns, something that just smells comforting.
Deuce sets down a glass of water on the desk next to his bed anyways, and he can feel the weight as Deuce sits on the edge of the bed.
“Can I touch you?”
“No. Why would you ask that?”
“My mother rubs my back when I don’t feel good. It helps.”
“You’re not my mother,” he says, voice muffled by the pillow. “And I’m fine.”
“I’m trying,” Deuce says, voice wavering, “to be patient.”
“I didn’t ask you to. You can leave.”
“Only you,” Deuce says, and he feels the weight shift. At first he thinks Deuce is actually getting up, but then the weight shifts closer, and Deuce’s voice resonates slightly sharper in his ears. “You did something stupid, and even now that I’m trying to help, you still won’t let me. Only you’re like this.”
“Plenty of guys are like this.”
“I’ve never met someone like you,” Deuce says. “Even delinquents are more honest.”
“Is that supposed to sting?”
“It’s supposed to explain,” Deuce says, and his voice starts to build, first a low rumble, but he’s clearly hit his limit. “At least when some other guy punches you, he’s yellin’ at you about why you’re a no-good rotten punk!” he yells, clenching his fist firmly in the palm of his other hand, like he’s trying to hold himself back from smacking Ace cold to the jaw. “You’re actin’ like you wanna fight me, and I DON’T GET WHY!”
“I TOLD YOU,” he roars, tearing his face up from the pillows, hoping to feel the sear of that punch, the shock of a crack to his jaw, anything to feel something else, anything else. “IF YOU WANNA KNOW SO BAD, GO AHEAD. ASK ME.”
It rings, the beams of the ceiling shaking, and there’s the high-pitched vibration of porcelain from the shaking of the glass rose-shaped lamp on the desk, and the tinkle as the floating teapots in the hallway outside the door shudder. Everything in the room seems to shake, and then come to a standstill.
“I don’t wanna be that guy,” Deuce says, dropping his fist and leveling him with a serious, piercing gaze, one that makes him ache. “If you wanna tell me the truth, say it without my help.”
He smirks. “Weak,” he says. The words come too easily, it’s too easy to just punch down like this and watch Deuce’s face crumple, to go from furious to shattered in half a second. “You have me right where you want me, and you can’t even do it.”
“Why would I want you here?”
The question drops like a stone, and Deuce seems to have not realized he asked it until it’s too late.
He chews at the part of his lip where the skin was torn away earlier, looks at Deuce with a plead, a prayer, grabs the pillow and breathes heavily into it.
“Please—”
“Ace, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—you don’t have to tell me!” Deuce says, and his voice nearly reaches a yell with how quickly he blurts it out. “I won’t listen,” he says, squeezing his palms over his ears. “You don’t have to say it.”
Instantly there’s relief, the unwinding of that coiling in his chest. He sits there in silence, pillow still gripped tightly in his hands, still chewing at the same spot on his bottom lip.
He reaches a hand out, for a second, but then drops it between them on the bed and curls it into a fist on the blankets.
It would be so easy to just say it. It would be so easy to just let Deuce ask him and to just let the potion vomit all of his secrets forth for him. He wouldn’t even have to be responsible. Everything out in the open, and it wouldn’t even be his fault. Deuce would feel so guilty, he’d never tell. Nobody would ever have to know.
“I still don’t understand,” Deuce says, and his voice aches, so much the way it hits Ace’s chest makes it feel like he’s developed a new wound. “I don’t know why you think I want you here. I don’t know what I did. You’re so…”
“Irritating?”
“I don’t know why you’re suddenly so afraid of me.”
He’s such a good boy.
“Ace,” he says, softly, and he reaches to bridge the gap between them, to rest his hand over Ace’s. “I want to ask you some questions, if you’ll let me.”
His first instinct is to run, to escape, by any means necessary. He wants to suddenly, actually come down with the stomach flu and heave potatoes and cordial all over the floor. He wants to go to Diasomnia and beg Sebek to show him to their spinning wheel, and prick his finger and fall asleep forever. His mind reels with a thousand things he wishes he could do, each more dramatic and embarrassing than the next.
All of them are still admissions of the truth.
He has long gone past being able to escape holding his secret, because Deuce knows he’s carrying something, and that in itself might as well be the same as just saying it outright. It’s uncomfortable, the way Deuce is looking at him now, so kindly, as though there’s a trust between them, as though whatever he could have to say can’t possibly be as bad as whatever is going through Deuce’s head.
He wants to believe that.
“Go ahead.”
“Can I ask you some questions?”
“I already said you could.”
“I know,” Deuce says, “but I wanted to make sure you really felt okay about it.”
His heart aches. That new wound torn open in his chest tears further, a new aching line drawn across the center of him.
“Why are you afraid of me?”
“It’s not you,” he breathes, and he’s relieved to find that’s able to be the full, honest truth, that what he knows deep inside him is also what the truth seems to be. “It’s me.”
“I don’t get that,” Deuce says. “Not at all.”
“I’m afraid you’ll ask me to be your boyfriend,” he says, taking a deep breath, trying to steady the shaking of his lungs, “and I’ll say yes.”
Deuce’s eyes widen. “Would it be bad if we…if we did that?”
“No,” he says, and he can feel the choke in his throat now, the way his body is shaking, tears threatening to spill over. “But I’m scared.”
“Tell me why you’re scared.”
“Please,” he chokes, and he can feel the hot tears spilling over his lashes. “Please don’t make me say it.”
“Ace—”
“Please.”
“Say it,” Deuce says, squeezing his hand tighter. “Whatever it is can’t be as bad as you think it is.”
“I can’t.”
“It’s hurting you.”
“I know.” He curls inward, as though trying to make himself smaller, as though maybe he can curl into himself and disappear. “I know, but I can’t do it. I’m so scared. Please,” he breathes. “Please, ask me.”
“I won’t,” Deuce says softly. “Say it yourself. I’m right here, and I’m not leaving.”
“I’m scared,” he says, taking a shaky breath, and it feels like he’s going to swallow it down once more, like it’s going to be eternally stuck in his throat.
Deuce levels a strong gaze at him, squeezes his hand tightly, and looks at him with that serious gaze, the one he has when he’s said something he means so strongly, even if that sort of integrity feels laughable.
No, but it’s not laughable at all.
It’s enviable, that conviction, that commitment to trying to live honestly.
In a world of tricksters and liars and con-men, Deuce is refreshingly honest in his simplicity. But everything about that is why being with Deuce is, in a way, soothing. In spite of all their arguments and squabbles, in spite of the times Deuce doesn’t know this-way from that-way or will get fooled by the same card trick three times in a row, in spite of all of the messes Deuce has helped to cause and he’s helped to clean up, in the end, he can only envy that strength.
“I’m scared to say I’m like you,” he says. “That I’m in love with another guy.”
Deuce doesn’t say anything. Ace finds his body being pulled forward, forward into Deuce’s chest, against a neck that smells like Deuce’s shampoo and his own soap.
“I didn’t know I was like this either,” he says. “Until I met you. And it just felt right.”
“Never?”
“Maybe a little, if I think hard,” he says. “But I didn’t know how much until you kissed me.”
Deuce’s voice vibrates in his chest against the side of his cheek, and his heartbeat is clear, so steady, so calm. Just like this, Deuce is relaxed, somehow, at ease in spite of it all. He presses a hand to his own chest and finds his heart, too, feels like it’s slowing down, slowly finding a rhythm again. His breaths are still shaky, and cheeks are stiff with sticky tears that are slowly drying, leaving salt-trails in their wake.
“One more question,” Deuce says, “but I promise it’s short.”
He lifts his head. “Go ahead.”
“Can I kiss you?”
“Yes,” he snorts. “But you don’t need to ask that.”
Deuce smiles, just slightly. “Right now,” he says, taking Ace’s head in his hands, “you look just like you did the day you first kissed me.”
“How’s that?”
“Like you want me to kiss you,” he says. “Really badly.”
“I looked like that?”
“Well,” Deuce says quickly, “I mean, I think it looks like that. But I don’t know if—”
He cuts Deuce off mid-sentence himself by closing the distance for a kiss, pressing his salty, tear-stained lips against Deuce’s own. They’re soft, and taste like the raspberry cordial Deuce had been drinking at dinner, far too sweet a taste against Deuce’s own image. He tries to push Deuce down, like he always does, but Deuce pushes back this time, and he forgets just how strong those arms are, how easily Deuce can pin him down if he really tries.
This time, Deuce has him pinned easily in five seconds, arms held down at his sides, their lips still locked together. Deuce kisses him deeper, as though he’s testing his first time being in this position, being the one in control. He breaks the kiss, comes up for a breath, and gazes down at Ace with an intensity that quickly dissolves into something a bit more hesitant, but still earnest.
“I don’t know if this is the mood for this now,” Deuce says sheepishly. “But after the shower I, um…”
“You what?”
“I kept thinking I really wanted to touch you again,” he says. “I wanted to watch you enjoy it, but it was over kinda…fast.”
“Yeah,” he says. “That was…sorry.”
“You don’t have to say sorry.”
“I know,” he says. “It’s just still…embarrassing,” he groans. “I don’t wanna remember that now, please don’t make me.”
“We could overwrite it,” Deuce says, gently palming over the center of his pants. “Do you want to?”
“Yes,” It comes out so easily, with no hesitation, and he knows it’s not even the potion’s effect anymore. It’s simply how he feels.
“We can stop if you don’t like it,” Deuce says, slowly rubbing him through the fabric, “but is this good?”
“It’s nice,” he says. “Just a little—fuck, right there,” he breathes. “Whatever’s right there, it’s good.”
Deuce presses a little circle with his thumb over the head of his length, and slowly undoes the button of Ace’s pants with the other hand. “And this?” he says, moving to rub it through the thin fabric of Ace’s boxers. “Better?”
“Now I get this,” he breathes, and he finds his hips arch up into Deuce’s touch, the same way Deuce always does to him, like he’s trying to fuck into his hand. Deuce rubs against the outline of his hardened length slowly, and he can’t help but let out a small gasp. “Have you practiced this?”
“I do myself,” Deuce says. And then, slightly hesitantly, “and sometimes I pretend I’m doing it to you when I do it.”
“Fuck,” he breathes, because that sends a hot shiver down his spine, right between his thighs. “You want to do this to me?”
“I’ve thought about it a lot,” Deuce murmurs, and he leans his head low, so he can kiss Ace’s temple, and then down the line of his jaw. “I thought about what you’d look like.”
“What do I look like?”
“I don’t know,” Deuce says, “but you always…we do it with me facing the wall. So I thought…if I could do this to you,” he whispers, pressing a kiss to his neck, “I’d know what you look like when we do those things.”
That just about sends him over the edge, but Deuce pulls his hand away at just the wrong moment, only for him to hear the sound of Deuce opening the top drawer of his desk next to the bed.
“I don’t keep my lube there.”
“This is fine,” Deuce says, pulling out a tin of lotion and putting some in his palm. “This works.”
Deuce slips his hand under the waistband, and the sudden direct stimulation is so much he shivers, and his hips twitch and rut into Deuce’s palm.
“You like it,” Deuce says, bending to press another kiss to his neck, just under the line of his jaw, and he can tell it’s not a question. “I don’t even need to do anything, you’re rubbing yourself against my hand.”
“Do it,” he murmurs, pulling Deuce in by the collar of his blazer for a full, deep kiss. “Find out what I look like.”
Deuce wraps a palm fully around him and begins to stroke, and he groans, something deep from within his ribs. His lungs, which had been so shaky, so heavy, now breathe deeply as he gasps when Deuce grips him in one hand to stroke and in the other brings down his palm and rubs it against the head of his erection. It’s so much, the stimulation, he can feel himself leaking and his hips arch off the bed. Deuce kisses him again, licking up into his lips, and he parts them to let Deuce kiss into him, to rub his tongue against his soft palate and the insides of his cheeks.
Then he comes, hard and fast and this time he knows it because he can feel himself spill hot over Deuce’s fingers, into his hand. His lungs are heavy once more, but it’s with a sweetness, his whole body uncoiling and relaxing into something over-sensitive and sleepy. Deuce lets him down, gently, pressing a kiss to his brow and diligently cleaning off his fingers with a wet tissue Ace knows he’s also borrowed from the desk drawer.
“You look hot,” Deuce says. “That was…hot.”
“Just hot?”
“I’m not very good with adjectives,” he says, shoving the tissue packet back in the drawer. “You know that.”
“I do remember the time you described Grim’s fur as ‘light black’.”
“That’s a real description.”
“It’s grey. You can just say grey.”
“And I can just say you were hot,” he says, standing up and taking off his blazer before folding it and placing it neatly on his own bed. “Should we sleep?”
“It’s too early.”
“It feels like it’s been a long evening,” Deuce says, shoving on his pajamas and shoving Ace over a little to get some room on the narrow bed. “I think you should sleep too.”
“Dunno if I can,” he says. “How can I be sure if the potion wore off for class? I don’t wanna go to History and answer Trein’s questions with ‘shove it, old man’.”
“That’s your honest feeling about history?”
“Well…not all of it. Just the boring parts.”
“Which feels like all of it, sometimes,” Deuce sighs. “I feel it too. And no matter how much I study…feels like it doesn’t stick.”
“Not your fault. You’re just a natural bonehead.”
“Is that something you say to the guy you just confessed to?” Deuce says. “You’re a real catch.”
“You knew I was like this,” he smirks. “And yet you fell in love with me anyway.”
Deuce looks like he’s about to retort with something else, but there’s a sharp knock at the door that Ace knows all too well.
“Come in, Prefect Riddle,” he yells in the general direction of the door.
The door opens to a rather exasperated-looking Riddle, who is holding a small vial of bright red liquid, nearly the same color as fresh blood.
“I had to interrupt the Professors’ card tournament night to get this,” he says, not bothering to camouflage a single ounce of the disappointment and spite in his voice. “I expect Professor Crewel is going to have some words for you tomorrow.”
“He already had them this afternoon.”
“Well,” Riddle says, crossing his arms irritatedly, “he’ll have more. But this is the counter-potion. Drink it, within about fifteen minutes you should be back to your old, silver-tongued self.”
“Tell me how you really feel about me, Prefect,” he grumbles, but then seeing the livid look in Riddle’s eyes, hastily softens it with, “as I fully deserve to hear your real feelings as punishment for my idiocy.”
“Spare me,” Riddle says, placing the vial on the desk next to the bed. “I have had more than enough of my fill of your antics today, Trappola, and as much as I take no delight in your suffering, that doesn’t mean I haven’t forgotten your punishment.”
“You already put me on dish duty.”
“I know,” Riddle says. “Which is why I was thinking we should have a proper high tea this Sunday. I’ll tell Trey to bake as much as he wants. The plates are all yours.”
“Ouch,” Deuce says under his breath, though he at least seems relieved that, for once, he has no part in this.
He really can’t blame him.
“I’ll be taking to bed now,” Riddle says. “You both do the same. And please, do us all a favor,” he says before he closes the door behind him, “it’s only Tuesday. At least wait until next week to have any more of your…mishaps.”
He stares at the little red vial on the desk, waiting until the sound of Riddle’s heels have fully faded.
“Well,” he says, picking it up, and admiring the way the color shines in the lamplight, “any last questions?”
“No. Drink it already.”
“I will, I will.” He makes a great display of undoing the stopper and swallowing it down in one gulp, shuddering at the taste of it. “It’s like that cherry cough medicine.”
“Oh, like the bad stuff from when we were kids?”
“Yeah. But like…ten times that. Ugh. Disgusting.” He grabs his pajamas from behind the pillow and shoves his dorm clothes over his head, leaving them in an unceremonious pile on the floor. “I’m gonna go brush my teeth to get that taste out.”
“Okay.”
He comes back to find Deuce still laying on the end of his bed in the same position like he hasn’t moved, and he’d think he hadn’t if not for the fact his dorm uniform is neatly hung up where it belongs, the pants and shirt tucked into his wardrobe.
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“The Prefect said not to get into more mishaps. I figured we should start small.”
“You gonna brush your teeth?”
“I will,” Deuce says, patting the space on the bed next to him. “I wanted to…lay here a little bit. If that’s ok. Has the counter-potion worked?”
“I can’t tell,” he says, laying down in the narrow space left between Deuce and the edge of the mattress. “It didn’t feel like anything when I took the first one, either.”
He wraps his arms around Deuce, buries his face in Deuce’s silky hair, just inhales. Warm. It’s so warm here, and something expands in his chest, a warm feeling that just spreads through him. At first he thinks it’s the counter-potion, this feeling of undoing, but then he realizes it’s not that at all. All his muscles ache, and one by one he can feel himself sinking into the mattress next to Deuce, feeling nothing but a sense of peace.
Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next week, but here and now he’s at peace with himself. He’d held in that truth so long, gripping it so tightly he hadn’t even realized the toll until now, now that his body is finally relaxing after carrying such a heavy fear so far. It had weighed more than he’d thought, and the more he’d ignored it, the heavier it seemed it had grown. He presses a kiss to the crown of Deuce’s head and feels the sense of joy unfurling in him, so much that he can’t keep himself from smiling into the pillow.
“Has it kicked in yet?”
“Mm. Dunno,” he says, unable to answer fully, because sleep is calling. He wraps his arms tighter around Deuce, buries his face in the curve of his shoulder. “Ask me something.”
Deuce pulls Ace’s hand into his and tangles their fingers together, thinking seriously, brow furrowed again, mouth set in a thin line. “Will you be my boyfriend?”
“You couldn’t ask if I like oysters again?”
“I thought I should ask something better.”
“Then no,” he says. “I won’t.”
“I—” Deuce’s voice breaks, for a moment, and he sounds almost heartbroken. Then it seems to finally hit him, and he sits up violently. “Ace! Was that—hey, don’t just go to sleep—!”
He can’t help but laugh, and pull Deuce’s head down for one last, drowsy kiss, his own limbs so heavy it takes all his energy.
“I know,” he says with another short, sleepy laugh, letting his eyes slip closed, the last thing in them Deuce’s slightly shocked and puzzled expression, which still dances on the back of his eyelids. Deuce. His rival. His roommate. His first love. “I’m a pretty good liar.”