three coins (lotrips au, sable knot; andy serkis/elijah wood; nc17)
Three Coins
Lotrips AU, set in the Sable Knot universe.
Andy Serkis/Elijah Wood
NC-17
Warnings: Non-consensual, heavy BDSM.
Written for the arcana_fic challenge.
Three of Coins: Industry, hard work and talent pays off. Inverted: failing to put sufficient planning into an endeavor leads to ruin.
*
Elijah is ushered into a sumptuous room. A well-dressed gentleman lounges on the settee, meticulously attired and immaculately coiffed. His glossy black curls are tamed and combed, his mustache and goatee lightly waxed to neat points. He might be out for an evening at the theatre.
To Elijah it's quite amazing how many of the masters dress their best for a visit to Sable Knot. Even if they avoid the smoking rooms and the lounge, even if they're only stopping in briefly for a go with one of their favorite slaves, still... the masters often polish themselves up to a high standard.
Perhaps they dress perfectly in hopes their visits will go unnoticed. After all, who would suspect a respectable, beautifully attired gentleman of visiting a slave brothel?
Loads of people, actually; but they'd hardly be likely to say so to a gentleman looking his best.
"Stand here," the master beckons.
Obediently Elijah moves into place. The master stands and paces a slow circle around him, regarding him closely.
"How old are you?"
"Sixteen, sir."
"And how does a boy who makes such big, innocent eyes come to a place like this, at such a tender age?"
"I'm here on account of my father's weakness. Sir."
"I suppose by this you mean you inherited your father's debts, and you were put into slavery to work it off til such time as those debts have been paid."
Elijah nods.
"You're a liar."
"Sir?"
"I spoke to Madam Olivia about you when I made the appointment. She says you were tried for petty theft and assault. You tried to stab a young man whose family was sheltering you. Isn't that true?"
Elijah says nothing, though he feels his cheeks and ears burning. Not with shame at having lied, but shame at having been caught. "I was ill, a nervous condition, from my father; that's what I meant, in speaking of his weakness."
"Another pitiful lie. Your third, I believe. I put you at eighteen at the least. I'm something of a connoisseur of male youth and beauty; and to my eye, you, boy, are well on the way to leaving your loveliest years behind you. Don't turn those big blue cow's eyes on me!" the master snaps. "I shan't fall for whatever tricks you're accustomed to playing with angelic looks and filthy lies. What do you have to say for yourself?"
"I apologize," Elijah mouths, staring fixedly at the rugs. "We're supposed to tell the masters the things we suppose they'd be pleased to hear..."
"Nonsense. You thought you'd be treated more kindly if you represented yourself as younger than your true age, and implied that it was your poor blameless father's imaginary debts that brought you to these bitter straits and not your own crimes."
"My father isn't blameless," Elijah scowls, and the master slaps him full on the face. The blow is open-handed, but still so forceful that Elijah staggers.
"You are not to speak to me unless I ask you a question, and I believe I'm done listening to your lies," says the master. "Undress quickly, go to the foot of the bed, and put up your arms. Take hold of the bedposts."
Elijah complies, fast as he can, a cold blade of fear slicing through his innards. Soon he's positioned just as the master ordered. Elijah eyes the bedposts with dread. They're outfitted with manacles designed to hold a shackled slave spread wide for punishment.
The master doesn't reach for them, though, and Elijah relaxes a little.
"My name is Andrew," the master informs him as he sorts through a drawer full of implements. "I think I should like to hear you say it."
"Andrew," Elijah repeats dutifully.
"Surely you can do better than that."
Elijah swallows his ire and tries to lower his voice to a sultry purr. "Andrew."
The master strides behind him. "No, no. All wrong. Perhaps 'sir' will have to do, then."
"Yes, s--aaah!"
The pain of a crop across his naked thighs makes Elijah shout and jump, his hands automatically straying to cover and protect himself.
"You really are quite miserable at this," the master tells him with obvious enjoyment, and snatches up Elijah's hands, pressing each wrist into an iron cuff, then shackling and chaining his ankles.
For a taller slave the position might not be such a strain, but Elijah is a bit small, and his limbs stretch painfully between the four unforgiving manacles. He makes a little noise of complaint, tugging in hopes that Andrew will make some sort of adjustment to ease the tension.
"Much better," the master approves, and brings the crop down on Elijah's thighs again, and again, and again and again and again.
*
When he first came to the Knot, Elijah was beaten methodically by three other slaves who examined him closely and commented to one another on the effects of their blows. Ignoring his cries of indignation and pain, they measured out the beating impassionately until he was broken and weeping. They drove him to the very edge of his endurance, and then they cut him down and took note of the pace of his recovery. It was a test of his limits, to see how much punishment he could take and still continue working.
It was nothing compared to Andrew.
Andrew tires of the crop and uses a quirt. He tires of the quirt and uses a strap. He dines. Elijah hangs limp from the cuffs, muscles shaking and cramping, drenched in sweat and tears.
After his apertif, the master returns, and uses a cane.
*
The beating slows. Between strikes, Andrew runs his fingers over Elijah's hot, smarting skin. With a sort of dull, exhausted horror, Elijah feels himself rousing at the touch. Even desire hurts; then Andrew grasps him by the hair and chews a kiss onto his lips, and each twinge and throb of pain becomes a powerful pulse of want, building to spasms of desperate need.
Andrew closes his fist around the knob of Elijah's prick, and even though his body is already pulled almost unbearably taut, Elijah wrenches at his tortured wrists and ankles to somehow stretch further, pushing into Andrew's hand. His ribcage rides high, his breath coming short, sobs wracking out of him with every impossible thrust forward.
His crisis comes over him, such powerful pleasure that for a bare scraping instant Elijah believes it was all worth it-- and then almost in that same instant, the master lets go, pivoting away, and brings the cane across Elijah's arse, the hardest strike yet, obliterating the bliss of orgasm, reawakening every particle of pain.
By the time the master finally takes down his own trousers, Elijah is almost insensible. Andrew fucks him where he stands in the cuffs; cramps crawl up and down Elijah's limbs without cease, dwarfing the familiar pain of buggery.
Then the master grows more vicious, slamming into him with such force that Elijah feels the bones of his arms jarred almost out of his shoulder sockets. His voice rasps rough from sobbing, but he can't help crying out again. The master answers with a roar of satisfaction, and it's over at last; or if there is more, it goes on without Elijah. He loses consciousness gratefully.
*
Elijah wakes still hanging, his arms gnarled with excruciating aches.
The master is impeccably tidy again, though the room stinks of sweat. It can't all be from Elijah.
"You're a hideous disappointment as well as a liar," says the master. "I've never seen a slave wilt so quickly, after just a few taps with the crop. I may as well have been beating a rug."
A rap sounds at the door, and the master opens it.
"Ready to go?" the new arrival asks.
"All finished here, and good riddance."
The other man peers in at Elijah with undisguised curiosity. "Aren't you going to leave him a tip, Andy?" he asks. "It's traditional."
"That one? I wouldn't give him a penny."
"Tch. You've had a good three hours out of him, and he won't be working for days from the look of those welts. Here then." A faint jingle. "At least leave him that."
Andrew laughs. "You're so clever, Stephen. So appropriate," he says. Elijah hears coins chime on the lacquered wood of the sideboard.
Servants come in directly after the men leave, and unlock the shackles. Elijah cries aloud with relief as his limbs finally have a chance to move again, and cries again, this time in pain, as they handle him to put him onto a stretcher.
The pressure of lying on his wounds nauseates him. He's hot and cold all over. His vision seems to blur in and out of focus in time with his pulse.
Finally they lift him up, and onto an infirmary bed. The sheets are softer, and someone presses a cool damp cloth on his brow, and on the worst and hottest sore spots on his flayed back. He feels better, but he cries more, trying to be louder and more piteous, though he can't seem to make much noise beyond a husky groan.
Glass clinks, and he smells the sweet sharpness of laudanum.
When he wakes again, he knows they must have given him the drug, though he can't remember it. His body seems heavy, weighed down, yet at the same time it feels as if he's drifting up and up.
The lovely feeling ends too soon. The welts burn. Elijah knows he must be badly scarred, and then what will become of him? All his visitors fuss over his smooth skin. Disfigured by marks, he won't look so young or innocent, either.
Elijah works himself into a state, weeping from pain and fever and sheer vexation til the nurse comes. She hums over him and puts a pipette between his lips, dribbling a cloying sweet liquid into his mouth.
It's not laudanum, and it's barely a swallow. He whinges, trying to lift his head to follow the pipette for more.
"Sh," the nurse pats his hair. "It's elixir of morphine, a few drops is quite enough. You'll see."
And he does; his vision hazes over and he sees.
*
Thanks to the fever, Elijah stays in the infirmary for an entire week. Three luscious, brilliant days of laudanum and morphine, and four more days of drifting away, feverish and sore all over, but free.
The nurse, Rose, salves his hurts with ointment and promises he won't scar. "The skin was only broken in two tiny little places. I'm sure it all ached like blazes, but it was only welting, love, you'll heal up nice and pretty again."
"Is he ready to work yet?" Maisie asks Rose.
"He can go back to his own room today, and get back to work tomorrow. He'll be a bit sore yet, so try to book him with people who'll go easy on him at first."
"Most of his are easy on him. He was well due for a good clouting, this one."
Rose makes a tutting sound at her and goes. Maisie glares after her with a curled lip and turns to Elijah.
"Ordinarily we bill a master for the lost wages when they put a slave out of service," she says. "Mr. Serkis signed the bank draft, but he put a hold on it. He said you lied to him, so you deserved what you got. He suggests we should dock you from your tips instead of charging him. Did you lie?"
Elijah would be furious ordinarily, but at the moment his rage is a far-off, inconsequential thing; Rose gave him a last sip of laudanum to dull the pain of moving back to his room.
"I told him what I thought he wanted to hear," Elijah says. "Isn't that what we're meant to do?"
"Well, you did a bad job of it," she tells him.
"I spotted that."
Maisie neatens the folds of her dress, as if the fabric darts and tucks are infinitely more interesting than Elijah's woes. "It's not up to me if they take it out of your savings. Most likely he'll be the one to pay whether you deserved it or not. Leastways now you can get back at it. Up with you, back to your room. Your gentlemen have been pining for you. Your diary's full for the next fortnight and more."
Slowly Elijah lifts himself up from the bed. He takes care, not so much because of the pain; more because his head feels as though it might float away from him entirely at the least excuse.
Leading him back to his room, Maisie carps and cavils at Elijah's slow progress. When he's finally in his own bed, she stands in the doorway to berate him.
"You had ought to rest up and be ready, for tomorrow you'll have an appointment to keep. No more of this 'fever' lark. You may have Rose fooled but you don't fool me."
"I'll be able to rest as soon as you go away."
Maisie makes a disgusted sound and turns, but then she pauses and slips a hand into her apron pocket. "I nearly forgot. Mr. Serkis left you these." She puts three coins into his palm.
Elijah looks at the money stupidly. Three farthings. Just less than a penny.
"Didn't think much of you, did he," Maisie laughs, and takes her leave.
*
Three weeks later, Elijah is ushered into a sumptuous room. A well-dressed gentleman lounges on the settee, meticulously attired and immaculately coiffed.
"Aren't you a lovely lad," the master breathes, looking Elijah up and down. "How does a young boy like you find himself in a place like this?"
For days, Elijah weighed it; three hours of agony against a week of freedom. Five days of soreness and mending against three days of morphine and laudanum.
And inescapably, he considered the euphoric height of the crisis he reached during the beating... wondering how that consuming pleasure might have felt without the interruption of the master's cane.
Elijah sets his shoulders and answers, "I'm here on account of my father's weakness."
Lotrips AU, set in the Sable Knot universe.
Andy Serkis/Elijah Wood
NC-17
Warnings: Non-consensual, heavy BDSM.
Written for the arcana_fic challenge.
Three of Coins: Industry, hard work and talent pays off. Inverted: failing to put sufficient planning into an endeavor leads to ruin.
*
Elijah is ushered into a sumptuous room. A well-dressed gentleman lounges on the settee, meticulously attired and immaculately coiffed. His glossy black curls are tamed and combed, his mustache and goatee lightly waxed to neat points. He might be out for an evening at the theatre.
To Elijah it's quite amazing how many of the masters dress their best for a visit to Sable Knot. Even if they avoid the smoking rooms and the lounge, even if they're only stopping in briefly for a go with one of their favorite slaves, still... the masters often polish themselves up to a high standard.
Perhaps they dress perfectly in hopes their visits will go unnoticed. After all, who would suspect a respectable, beautifully attired gentleman of visiting a slave brothel?
Loads of people, actually; but they'd hardly be likely to say so to a gentleman looking his best.
"Stand here," the master beckons.
Obediently Elijah moves into place. The master stands and paces a slow circle around him, regarding him closely.
"How old are you?"
"Sixteen, sir."
"And how does a boy who makes such big, innocent eyes come to a place like this, at such a tender age?"
"I'm here on account of my father's weakness. Sir."
"I suppose by this you mean you inherited your father's debts, and you were put into slavery to work it off til such time as those debts have been paid."
Elijah nods.
"You're a liar."
"Sir?"
"I spoke to Madam Olivia about you when I made the appointment. She says you were tried for petty theft and assault. You tried to stab a young man whose family was sheltering you. Isn't that true?"
Elijah says nothing, though he feels his cheeks and ears burning. Not with shame at having lied, but shame at having been caught. "I was ill, a nervous condition, from my father; that's what I meant, in speaking of his weakness."
"Another pitiful lie. Your third, I believe. I put you at eighteen at the least. I'm something of a connoisseur of male youth and beauty; and to my eye, you, boy, are well on the way to leaving your loveliest years behind you. Don't turn those big blue cow's eyes on me!" the master snaps. "I shan't fall for whatever tricks you're accustomed to playing with angelic looks and filthy lies. What do you have to say for yourself?"
"I apologize," Elijah mouths, staring fixedly at the rugs. "We're supposed to tell the masters the things we suppose they'd be pleased to hear..."
"Nonsense. You thought you'd be treated more kindly if you represented yourself as younger than your true age, and implied that it was your poor blameless father's imaginary debts that brought you to these bitter straits and not your own crimes."
"My father isn't blameless," Elijah scowls, and the master slaps him full on the face. The blow is open-handed, but still so forceful that Elijah staggers.
"You are not to speak to me unless I ask you a question, and I believe I'm done listening to your lies," says the master. "Undress quickly, go to the foot of the bed, and put up your arms. Take hold of the bedposts."
Elijah complies, fast as he can, a cold blade of fear slicing through his innards. Soon he's positioned just as the master ordered. Elijah eyes the bedposts with dread. They're outfitted with manacles designed to hold a shackled slave spread wide for punishment.
The master doesn't reach for them, though, and Elijah relaxes a little.
"My name is Andrew," the master informs him as he sorts through a drawer full of implements. "I think I should like to hear you say it."
"Andrew," Elijah repeats dutifully.
"Surely you can do better than that."
Elijah swallows his ire and tries to lower his voice to a sultry purr. "Andrew."
The master strides behind him. "No, no. All wrong. Perhaps 'sir' will have to do, then."
"Yes, s--aaah!"
The pain of a crop across his naked thighs makes Elijah shout and jump, his hands automatically straying to cover and protect himself.
"You really are quite miserable at this," the master tells him with obvious enjoyment, and snatches up Elijah's hands, pressing each wrist into an iron cuff, then shackling and chaining his ankles.
For a taller slave the position might not be such a strain, but Elijah is a bit small, and his limbs stretch painfully between the four unforgiving manacles. He makes a little noise of complaint, tugging in hopes that Andrew will make some sort of adjustment to ease the tension.
"Much better," the master approves, and brings the crop down on Elijah's thighs again, and again, and again and again and again.
*
When he first came to the Knot, Elijah was beaten methodically by three other slaves who examined him closely and commented to one another on the effects of their blows. Ignoring his cries of indignation and pain, they measured out the beating impassionately until he was broken and weeping. They drove him to the very edge of his endurance, and then they cut him down and took note of the pace of his recovery. It was a test of his limits, to see how much punishment he could take and still continue working.
It was nothing compared to Andrew.
Andrew tires of the crop and uses a quirt. He tires of the quirt and uses a strap. He dines. Elijah hangs limp from the cuffs, muscles shaking and cramping, drenched in sweat and tears.
After his apertif, the master returns, and uses a cane.
*
The beating slows. Between strikes, Andrew runs his fingers over Elijah's hot, smarting skin. With a sort of dull, exhausted horror, Elijah feels himself rousing at the touch. Even desire hurts; then Andrew grasps him by the hair and chews a kiss onto his lips, and each twinge and throb of pain becomes a powerful pulse of want, building to spasms of desperate need.
Andrew closes his fist around the knob of Elijah's prick, and even though his body is already pulled almost unbearably taut, Elijah wrenches at his tortured wrists and ankles to somehow stretch further, pushing into Andrew's hand. His ribcage rides high, his breath coming short, sobs wracking out of him with every impossible thrust forward.
His crisis comes over him, such powerful pleasure that for a bare scraping instant Elijah believes it was all worth it-- and then almost in that same instant, the master lets go, pivoting away, and brings the cane across Elijah's arse, the hardest strike yet, obliterating the bliss of orgasm, reawakening every particle of pain.
By the time the master finally takes down his own trousers, Elijah is almost insensible. Andrew fucks him where he stands in the cuffs; cramps crawl up and down Elijah's limbs without cease, dwarfing the familiar pain of buggery.
Then the master grows more vicious, slamming into him with such force that Elijah feels the bones of his arms jarred almost out of his shoulder sockets. His voice rasps rough from sobbing, but he can't help crying out again. The master answers with a roar of satisfaction, and it's over at last; or if there is more, it goes on without Elijah. He loses consciousness gratefully.
*
Elijah wakes still hanging, his arms gnarled with excruciating aches.
The master is impeccably tidy again, though the room stinks of sweat. It can't all be from Elijah.
"You're a hideous disappointment as well as a liar," says the master. "I've never seen a slave wilt so quickly, after just a few taps with the crop. I may as well have been beating a rug."
A rap sounds at the door, and the master opens it.
"Ready to go?" the new arrival asks.
"All finished here, and good riddance."
The other man peers in at Elijah with undisguised curiosity. "Aren't you going to leave him a tip, Andy?" he asks. "It's traditional."
"That one? I wouldn't give him a penny."
"Tch. You've had a good three hours out of him, and he won't be working for days from the look of those welts. Here then." A faint jingle. "At least leave him that."
Andrew laughs. "You're so clever, Stephen. So appropriate," he says. Elijah hears coins chime on the lacquered wood of the sideboard.
Servants come in directly after the men leave, and unlock the shackles. Elijah cries aloud with relief as his limbs finally have a chance to move again, and cries again, this time in pain, as they handle him to put him onto a stretcher.
The pressure of lying on his wounds nauseates him. He's hot and cold all over. His vision seems to blur in and out of focus in time with his pulse.
Finally they lift him up, and onto an infirmary bed. The sheets are softer, and someone presses a cool damp cloth on his brow, and on the worst and hottest sore spots on his flayed back. He feels better, but he cries more, trying to be louder and more piteous, though he can't seem to make much noise beyond a husky groan.
Glass clinks, and he smells the sweet sharpness of laudanum.
When he wakes again, he knows they must have given him the drug, though he can't remember it. His body seems heavy, weighed down, yet at the same time it feels as if he's drifting up and up.
The lovely feeling ends too soon. The welts burn. Elijah knows he must be badly scarred, and then what will become of him? All his visitors fuss over his smooth skin. Disfigured by marks, he won't look so young or innocent, either.
Elijah works himself into a state, weeping from pain and fever and sheer vexation til the nurse comes. She hums over him and puts a pipette between his lips, dribbling a cloying sweet liquid into his mouth.
It's not laudanum, and it's barely a swallow. He whinges, trying to lift his head to follow the pipette for more.
"Sh," the nurse pats his hair. "It's elixir of morphine, a few drops is quite enough. You'll see."
And he does; his vision hazes over and he sees.
*
Thanks to the fever, Elijah stays in the infirmary for an entire week. Three luscious, brilliant days of laudanum and morphine, and four more days of drifting away, feverish and sore all over, but free.
The nurse, Rose, salves his hurts with ointment and promises he won't scar. "The skin was only broken in two tiny little places. I'm sure it all ached like blazes, but it was only welting, love, you'll heal up nice and pretty again."
"Is he ready to work yet?" Maisie asks Rose.
"He can go back to his own room today, and get back to work tomorrow. He'll be a bit sore yet, so try to book him with people who'll go easy on him at first."
"Most of his are easy on him. He was well due for a good clouting, this one."
Rose makes a tutting sound at her and goes. Maisie glares after her with a curled lip and turns to Elijah.
"Ordinarily we bill a master for the lost wages when they put a slave out of service," she says. "Mr. Serkis signed the bank draft, but he put a hold on it. He said you lied to him, so you deserved what you got. He suggests we should dock you from your tips instead of charging him. Did you lie?"
Elijah would be furious ordinarily, but at the moment his rage is a far-off, inconsequential thing; Rose gave him a last sip of laudanum to dull the pain of moving back to his room.
"I told him what I thought he wanted to hear," Elijah says. "Isn't that what we're meant to do?"
"Well, you did a bad job of it," she tells him.
"I spotted that."
Maisie neatens the folds of her dress, as if the fabric darts and tucks are infinitely more interesting than Elijah's woes. "It's not up to me if they take it out of your savings. Most likely he'll be the one to pay whether you deserved it or not. Leastways now you can get back at it. Up with you, back to your room. Your gentlemen have been pining for you. Your diary's full for the next fortnight and more."
Slowly Elijah lifts himself up from the bed. He takes care, not so much because of the pain; more because his head feels as though it might float away from him entirely at the least excuse.
Leading him back to his room, Maisie carps and cavils at Elijah's slow progress. When he's finally in his own bed, she stands in the doorway to berate him.
"You had ought to rest up and be ready, for tomorrow you'll have an appointment to keep. No more of this 'fever' lark. You may have Rose fooled but you don't fool me."
"I'll be able to rest as soon as you go away."
Maisie makes a disgusted sound and turns, but then she pauses and slips a hand into her apron pocket. "I nearly forgot. Mr. Serkis left you these." She puts three coins into his palm.
Elijah looks at the money stupidly. Three farthings. Just less than a penny.
"Didn't think much of you, did he," Maisie laughs, and takes her leave.
*
Three weeks later, Elijah is ushered into a sumptuous room. A well-dressed gentleman lounges on the settee, meticulously attired and immaculately coiffed.
"Aren't you a lovely lad," the master breathes, looking Elijah up and down. "How does a young boy like you find himself in a place like this?"
For days, Elijah weighed it; three hours of agony against a week of freedom. Five days of soreness and mending against three days of morphine and laudanum.
And inescapably, he considered the euphoric height of the crisis he reached during the beating... wondering how that consuming pleasure might have felt without the interruption of the master's cane.
Elijah sets his shoulders and answers, "I'm here on account of my father's weakness."