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Varka is on top again, the boy beneath him. Normally, Varka likes this position. He likes the feeling of someone smaller under him, the feeling of himself encircling them, protecting them from the world. He likes to be the only thing they can see and the one who gives them everything they need.
"Kill me," Lohen tells him, voice rushed with excitement. His eyes are always the brightest when he says this, the most alive when he's begging not to be. "Squeeze until I turn blue."
His hands are around Lohen's throat, Lohen's hands around his, holding them in place.
It's one of those moments where a second lasts an age and he feels pinned by time itself, by his inability to meet the situation. It feels almost like he can see the future sometimes, like he's watching what will happen next from the safety of the past where nothing has happened and he still has the option to refuse. One of Lohen's hands will move to its favorite place in his hair, close to the skull, twisting and pulling. "Fuck me when I'm dead," he'll say. Varka will be choking him by then, just a tiny bit, but he'll force the words out through the meat of Varka's fingers, thin and strained. "Promise me you'll fuck my corpse so when they cut me open I bleed cum."
And it's so awful that Varka will actually put some effort in, closing off his air so that he doesn't have to listen anymore, so he doesn't have to think about it. After that, the boy will go quiet, body twitching under him, squeezing down so hard it hurts. It will feel like Varka's being wrung out, like he's gonna pull the boy's organs out along with his cock with every movement, but he won't be strong enough to stay still. That's not what Lohen wants, anyway. He wants it fast and hard, always.
Varka watches himself settle for shallow and heavy, Lohen's body shudder with every thrust, mouth flapping with what might be moans but might also be more terrible words. His eyelids flutter, eyes seeming to change color whenever he tilts his head back and the light hits them. Black to purple to red, glistening beautifully, turning to white when Varka spears into him hard and they roll back in his head, his entire body arches up off the floor.
It's only when he feels the boy's nails scraping at his hands that he's thrown back into the future and suddenly he can feel the heat of Lohen's body around him, the slickness of his blood as he thrusts, the sound of his own heart pounding in his ears. Lohen is making a sound, a tiny, rattling choke that Varka keeps fucking out of him. His face has gone red, eyes wet, but he smiles as if he's finally found peace even as his nails tear bleeding gashes through Varka's skin.
There had been a time when he thought that Lohen might follow in his footsteps. He had also been a handful when he was this age. Overconfident. Always looking for a fight. It was only after he left the city walls and learned about the world, about himself and the surprisingly weighty responsibility of being born stronger than the people around you. Lohen only needed more time to mature. Someday, in the course of his travels, he would discover himself the same way Varka had. Only that had never happened for Lohen.
He lets go of the boy's throat, gets off of him completely and falls backwards in his eagerness to get away, scooting back on the floor.
In the taverns they sing songs about him. He's considered a hero. People look up to him. Children want to be him when they grow up.
His back against the wall, Varka puts his hands over his eyes and shudders, trying to erase the image of a corpse-like boy from his head. Dead, leaking cum. Like a zombie, the corpse of a boy lifts himself up from the floor, his bare feet sounding wet against the floor as he lumbers over.
"I can't do it," Varka tells him before Lohen can even say a word. "Don't ask me to. I can't."
"What, li--like you've... never..."
Varka looks up to see the boy scowling, a hand over his throat, which must be hurting him bad. His voice is almost unchanged from how it was when Varka was choking him, thin and forced. It makes Varka think about how delicate the throat is. How many things can get broken and how easily.
After swallowing a few times, he clears his throat and continues, "Like you've never killed anyone before?"
Which he has, of course. Of course he has, and Lohen knows it. Lohen has seen him kill. They'd had passionate and almost normal sex afterward.
"I can't," Varka repeats. His mouth is dry and it's all he can think to say.
Lohen stares at him for a long while. Again, Varka feels pinned, this time by his own shame, which doesn't make sense to him. The biggest shame of his life is what he's allowed himself to do to this boy, and yet Lohen still somehow makes him feel inadequate for not being able to do more when his face turns to a sneer. People who fear Lohen's knife don't understand the way his voice itself can be poison, the way it eats into you when he looks down at you from above, his small body covered in bruises and scratches, dripping blood that you drew, and spits down at you, "You're pathetic."
It feels like his guts are transforming into snakes inside of him, squirming and growing scales, chafing against one another as they move. The thing that's hardest to understand is why it is he wants so bad to please this boy who only wants what he shouldn't and everything Varka can't give him.
"I'm sorr--" His throat thickens and he cuts himself off, blinking away any emotion, trying to force it away. Lohen's hips are right in front of his face, the red dripping between his thighs suddenly all Varka can see. "I'm sorry." He can't help himself as he grabs the boy, his waist so thin that Varka's hands can almost fit all the way around it, the bones of his pelvis like little shells, sharp and delicate. He rests his head against Lohen's stomach, still batting his eyelids but it's no use because his breath is shuddering obviously, voice thick as he croaks out another, "I'm so sorry."
"Get!" Lohen's voice shrieks higher than it should as Varka wraps his arms around him. His body turns to stone in Varka's arms, rejecting the warmth of the embrace with everything it can as he attempts to peel Varka off by his hair. "Get off!"
When Varka obeys, it's as unwillingly as anything else he's been forced to do. Sometimes he wonders what would happen if he ever ignored his orders. How would the boy react if Varka pinned him down and made sweet, gentle love to him? Maybe it would teach him that there's more to sex than pain. Unfortunately, it might also do more harm than good.
Varka looks up at him, and Lohen, annoyed, looks down. Taking in a breath, Varka opens his mouth to speak, and Lohen cuts him off with a cold downward glance and the observation, "You got soft again, old man."
He can tell without looking. Cringing, he lets out his breath, then takes in another, shorter, one. "I can do it," he says, sounding just about as convinced about it as he feels, which is not very. "I can... I'll finish it. Just don't make me choke you. And don't talk about dying. Please."
"You're so boring when you get like this," Lohen sighs, appearing to think about it. An idle hand reaches for a dagger that's not there, patting his bare skin where it would usually sit, then smoothing down his body, matching his movement as he crouches down in front of Varka, holding his head up again by his hair. "Fine. But you're gonna make it up to me. Get on the ground."
Varka, already on the ground, furrows his brow and obeys in the only way he can think to, sliding to lie down. He's rewarded by Lohen moving as if to crawl over him, one hand on his shoulder and the other on his cock, soft now but giving an obedient little flinch when it finds itself in Lohen's hand.
"If you keep acting like a bitch," he says as he begins to stroke, looking down into Varka's eyes, "someday I'm gonna fuck you like one." His expression doesn't match his words or betray his earlier outburst, not even his disappointment. And the shock that comes isn't because of Lohen's words or the almost soft, affectionate way he says them. It's the realization that he would prefer that. The idea of having sex without using his cock sounds foreign and unpleasant, but being with Lohen is so rarely about the sex in the first place.
Lohen smiles like acid, beautiful and corrosive, gazes into Varka's soul, then lets out an amused little laugh as if he can read Varka's thoughts. His breath smells like blood as he leans in closer, teasing Varka with a kiss that he knows by now he'll only be punished for taking. Carefully nursing his tortured cock back to life, Lohen whispers, "You'd probably like that, though."
He feels his cock reacting, answering for him even as he bites his lip against a response, and hates his body not for the first time since it became Lohen's playtoy.
If only he could please this boy and be the only one to bleed to do it.