Fic: A Choice of Several Deaths
Title: A Choice of Several Deaths
Pairing: Rupert Giles/Ethan Rayne
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Drugged!sex, possibly non-con issues about the drugged part, but not really. Despite the title, not a death-fic.
Summary: "It wasn't a walk down the garden path." Ethan wants Rupert to keep moving from his old life. Set post Rupert quitting school, and prior to the Eyghon demon cult.
I couldn't manage the accent marks for the Hungarian, so if anyone would like to show me how, please, please do. ETA: ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
ctorres figured it out! Yah!
No beta, so all mistakes mine.
Title from a poem by Gwendolyn MacEwen.
Feedback petted, coddled, and fed biscuits.
---
They went to Budapest.
Rupert hadn’t attended lectures in weeks, but it hadn’t sunk in yet, that he had won, that he had left behind his planned and unavoidable life and was on the verge of something his, at last, not something handed-down and destined and suitable.
It was Ethan’s idea to go to Budapest (it was always Ethan’s idea), and it was also Ethan’s idea to do it the fast way – he found a transportation spell and chanted it solemnly, sprinkling them both with sand. It was foolhardy – most of what they did was foolhardy, Rupert knew his father would pronounce that over them with furious voice – but they managed not to kill themselves, managed to land at night in the middle of the bridge connecting the two halves on the city. On the sidewalk, even.
It was an unusually warm October, summer still holding the city fast, and the night in which Rupert and Ethan arrived, triumphant, was still warm, the air fragrant. The lights of the city glowed on both sides of the bridge.
“Right then,” Ethan said, shouldering his bag. “I think we need a smoke.”
Two hours later, they’d smoked most of the first pipe. Ethan sprawled back on the cushions in the dim light of the coffee house, playing with one of the nargillah’s mouthpieces. The place was quiet. There were two other men, sitting near the front window, talking softly and occasionally referring to leather-bound books piled on the table between them, and one waitress, bored, at the long counter, surrounded by cases of cakes and sugared figs.
Rupert, mellowed by the fragrant tobacco (and something else --- opium? Ethan had laced it, he realized, and he didn’t care), watched as Ethan rubbed the edge of it between his fingers.
“We should stay here,” Ethan said.
“What, in the coffeehouse? On these pillows?”
“No, in Hungary. Lots of occult exploration here. Lots of demons. Lots to do.”
“We don’t have any money.”
“We’ll get some. You’ll wait tables.” Ethan grinned at that, the thought of Rupert with his sleeves rolled up, mangling Hungarian as he tried to take orders.
“I’ll wait tables?”
“Be good for you. Never had a job in your whole, bloody, privileged life.” There was an edge to the last, a bitterness that made Rupert sit up and look at his friend more closely.
“You’re jealous.”
“Of you?” Ethan barked. “Of the tweed jackets and the destiny as a Watcher and the family estate?” His mouth twisted. “Nah.” Yes.
Rupert heard the lie. He sat up, looked at Ethan more closely. Ethan looked away, closed his eyes, took another hit of the pipe. “Damn it, we’re out of tobacco.” He sat up, looking for the waitress. “Pincérnő!”
She arrived. The pipe was refreshed. Rupert watched in silence.
Ethan breathed in the new smoke and smiled. “Oh, that’s nice. Plum-flavoured. Try it.” He held out his mouthpiece to Rupert, ignoring that Rupert held the other in his hand. His thumb traced the edge, rubbed in circles. Rupert watched, mesmerized by the callous, the graceful arch, the meat of the thumb pad. Ethan stretched closer, moved the nargillah until he could place his mouthpiece in Rupert’s mouth. “Breathe in.”
Rupert did. The smoke danced through his mouth, into his lungs, heady and sweet.
Ethan hadn’t let go of the mouthpiece. His thumb brushed Rupert’s lip as Rupert sucked the fumes through the water in the pipe’s bowl, as the opium hit him, stronger this time.
“Oh,” Rupert gasped at it, at the warmth suffusing him.
“Good?”
“Very.”
The waitress was there, suddenly. “Zárási.”
“What did she say?” Rupert thought the word was beautiful, the waitress was beautiful, and yes, it was a bloody good idea to stay in Hungary, in Budapest, here on this pile of cushions.
Ethan stood up. “Closing time.”
They walked to a park near the bridge, and flung themselves down on the cool grass.
“Probably a law against sleeping outside,” Rupert yawned. “Keep off the grass, and all that.”
“I can take care of that, “ Ethan declared, and cast a glamour. “There. We’re invisible. No one can see anything I do.”
“Going to do something worth seeing?” Rupert moved to put his satchel under his head. He hadn’t done this in years, slept outside. Certainly not at Oxford. He was happy, he realized suddenly.
Ethan rolled to his side, looked at Rupert. “Maybe.” He reached up and brushed the pad of his thumb across Rupert’s lip, again, like he had at the coffeehouse. “I spiked the pipe.”
Rupert laughed. “I know.”
“You don’t mind?”
“I needed it, I think. Too much worrying.”
“Yeah.”
They stared at each other for a minute, the sound of the night city and the park blanketing them softly. “I like you like this, “ Ethan murmured, his thumb smoothing down harder across the curve of Rupert’s mouth. Rupert closed his eyes, felt his awareness concentrate at the touch, the pleasure of touch, Ethan’s callous (What had he been doing to get calluses?) rough on the foreward pass, gone on the backward swipe. He was drugged, yes, but he’d been fine before, mobile, until Ethan had started touching him. Now he felt limpid, delicious, heavy with pleasure. He moaned, and suddenly the thumb was gone, and Ethan was taking off his glasses, was kissing him. It was like floating, the ebb and flow of the waves, the mouth on his rhythmic, demanding. Rupert moaned again into Ethan’s mouth, and Ethan’s hand came up to grip the back of his neck, calloused thumb fitting into the groove behind his ear, stroking the thin skin. Ethan tasted like coffee and smoke, and magic and freedom, Rupert thought, dizzy.
“What?” Ethan pulled back. Rupert realized he’d murmured the words into Ethan’s mouth.
“Nothing,” Rupert reached for Ethan’s mouth, his shoulder, rolled on top, and Ethan just as quickly pushed him back on the grass, moving so he was blanketing Rupert instead, lying between his legs. The pressure was perfect, the weight on him made the pleasure intensify, made him feel hot and desperate.
Ethan held himself off of Rupert, pushed up on his forearms, looked down at him.
“You don’t mind?” he repeated, voice thick, and rolled his hips. Rupert gasped with it, his own pelvis stuttering up involuntarily. “That’s a no, then,” and Ethan did it again. Rupert wrapped a leg around Ethan’s hip, bringing them flush together.
“God. Again.” He was breathless with it, with the sight of his friend above him, dark eyes shining and liquid, stars dancing beyond them. Ethan obliged. Rupert whimpered.
“You’ve done this before?” Ethan asked, keeping his mouth out of reach. Rupert’s eyes locked on it, the wide bitten curve of it, wanted it. “Rupert?”
“Hm?”
“You’ve done this before?”
“Sex?”
“Sex with a man.” Ethan had stilled, was looking at him intently.
“God, no. My life’s been very, well…”
“Yes.” Ethan looked pleased, looked smug even. He pressed down again. Rupert moaned. “I’m corrupting you.”
“Not bloody fast enough,” Rupert groused, and Ethan smiled and bent his head again to take Rupert’s mouth.
It was a blur, the rest of it, their shirts rucked up and pants shoved down, hot skin everywhere, cocks sliding slick, hard against each other. Ethan kneeling, pulling Rupert’s hips up against his, stretching Rupert’s hands above his head, holding them as he reached a hand between them and grasped both of them in his large palm, sucking Rupert’s neck hard as he jacked them both. Rupert felt pinned by the pleasure, liquid from the opium, given over totally into Ethan’s control, and he spilled first, helplessly falling into the whiteout of release.
Ethan let him go, let his wrists go, slicked his hand with the mess on Rupert’s belly, braced himself above him, and closed his eyes, moving his fist fast on his cock. Rupert floated, watching him, and Ethan came with a shout, striping Rupert’s stomach and chest.
They cleaned up with Rupert’s shirt, and lay back to sleep, Ethan on his back, Rupert curled into his side.
In the morning, Rupert woke up alone.
----
It was another three weeks before he saw Ethan, and by then he’d explained it to himself, gotten past (he thought) the hurt and bewilderment. (He’d had to call his father, he’d had to wait for money to be wired so he could get a train ticket, he’d had to make the trip back in a shirt still smelling like Ethan, like both of them, his jacket tight around him to keep it private, this humiliation.)
His father had expected him to go home and apologize, to go back to school, to walk on towards become a Watcher, but Rupert went instead to London. He got a job waiting tables (the irony, Rupert thought, bitter, but it was easy and waiting jobs were plentiful), he spent his nights studying occult texts borrowed from the library, stolen from his family’s collection.
He was in a second-hand bookshop, browsing through the pitiful new age/ occult/ spirituality section in case there was something useful, when Ethan found him.
“’Lo, Rupert.” He was leaning against the doorway to the back room, leather jacket open and casual, arms open.
Rupert stared at him, blank, shocked by the pain rising. “Ethan.”
“There’s something I need your help with.” No apology in his voice, no trace of it.
“Oh?” Rupert turned back to the book he was holding blindly, pretended to be studying the catalogue page.
“A summoning spell. We need a sixth.”
“’We’?”
“Just people I’ve met, in places like these.”
“And you think I should join you?”
“I don’t want to do it without you.” Ethan stepped closer. “I’m the fifth person they asked. I suggested you for the last.”
It flooded through Rupert like relief; the sweetness of it, Ethan wanting him. Waking alone, on the riverbank in Budapest, he’d thought immediately that Ethan had been disappointed in him, had left because he hadn’t satisfied.
The remembrance of that lonely shock drained the relief from him, made his shoulders tighten.
“Now you want me.”
“Yes.” Ethan stepped closer, reached out to caress the back of Rupert’s neck -- the same thumb, the same callous, smoothing casually over corded muscles. “I always want you.” The touch was electric, and Rupert pushed back into it before he caught himself.
“You left me.” He could barely voice it.
“Sorry.”
“You left me.” Rupert turned and stepped away from the caressing hand, dropped the blankness, glared at Ethan.
Ethan looked away, looked left.
“Why?”
“You were sleeping. I woke up, and you were sleeping.” Ethan said the words slowly, not meeting Rupert’s eyes. His mouth twisted as if the words tasted foul. He looked up. “I felt badly.”
“I wanted it.”
“I know.”
“I wanted it.” Rupert stepped forward and caught Ethan’s chin. “It wasn’t a walk down the garden path.”
“Maybe it was.”
“Then I liked being led.”
“What if I do it again?” They were an inch apart, now, Rupert backing Ethan up against the stacks. “Corrupt you further?”
Rupert leaned forward and kissed him, firmly. “You can’t.”
--
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summer_of_giles,
