Fic: Let yourself out if you can (Jonas RPF, Joe/Nick, NC-17)
Title: Let yourself out if you can
Fandom: Jonas RPF AU
Pairing: Joe/Nick, some Joe/Demi and Nick/Demi
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 18,100
Warnings/Spoilers: slavery, dub-con/coercion, underage sex, incest, mentions of other dark stuff including genital mutilation, rape, and violence
Summary: In a not-so-bright future, Joe and Nick are taken as collateral by the intergalactic central government to pay their family's debts. They are trained as body slaves, and the fact that they are only 13 and 16 just makes them more valuable commodities. Although Kevin buys their freedom before they can be sold to a stranger, the experience of the training program may have changed their relationship forever. This is a companion to Anywhere and everywhere people (J2, NC-17), set in the same universe and sharing many characters, but you don't need to read that to understand this.
Notes: Written for jb_bigbang. My endless thanks to mediaville for her graphics, beta work, cheerleading, and all-around fabulousness. Title from Carl Sandburg (the rest of the poem can be found at the end).
It was hard to be afraid anymore, once he was in the shuttle with Joe, being taken to the intergalactic terminal in the capital. Kevin had watched silently when the slaving agents came, a man and a woman matching stride in their dark uniforms, and he’d turned away to cry as Nick and Joe followed them to their shuttle. Nick felt hollowed out, thinking of it now, remembering his oldest brother’s stricken face. Kevin had said he’d take care of them, after their parents were taken, shipped offworld and erased from even the galactic census data for the planet, no trail to follow. Kevin said he’d take care of them, even though he was only sixteen, not even in tertiary school yet, and Nick had turned to him as the slaving agents came towards the house this morning. “It’s not your fault,” he’d said solemnly.
Kevin shook his head. “I’m going to fix this. For all of us.”
Nick didn’t know how that was possible, with Central Government’s tight slave restrictions, but he hugged Kevin anyway, Joe piling on so it was all three of them in a tangle of arms and clasping hands. No one said what they were probably all thinking, that this could easily be the last time they were all together, the last time he or Joe ever saw Kevin.
“Be good, okay?” Kevin said.
Joe tried to be serious and comfort Nick on the shuttle, but Nick already felt like his insides had been scooped out, like there was nothing left in him to hurt by the time they banked around the spires of the capital. He squeezed Joe’s hand anyway, because maybe Joe needed the comfort more than he did. The city loomed huge and forbidding before them, dark metal lacing up toward the sky. “We’ve just got to stick together, right?” Joe said.
Nick nodded gravely, even though nothing in the galaxy could make it as simple as that. He stared at the Central Government insignia on the back of the seat in front of him, his mind going blank as he gave a first thought to just what was going to happen to them next. When Mom and Dad were taken, they hadn’t stopped to consider anything beyond the shuttle that was carrying them away. He had been young enough, childish enough, that he’d run down the path waving his arms at the departing shuttle as though that would tell his parents more fully that he loved them. He hadn’t thought about where there were actually going. It hadn’t mattered. But now it did.
Every once in a while, there was a news vid talking about the lovely conditions of slave training centers, as though that would convince anyone of anything. No one who had ever seen a slave could believe that being one would not be so terrible. Nick sat quietly beside Joe. No one spoke to them. The pilots in the cockpit were talking softly to each other, too low for Nick to hear.
They landed on a transfer pad and Joe and Nick were ushered into the bright humming chamber of a system jumper. Nick had never seen one for real before, only the holographic depictions in his physics class, and he was curious, eager to look around, although he didn’t want to show it. The long-distance transporters were rare and expensive. There were only a few of them in their solar system, and they were mainly used by diplomats and business people for whom intergalactic travel was commonplace. Dimly, Nick was aware that the fact that they were traveling in a system jumper meant they were probably going to one of the more prestigious training centers on an inner planet. Either that or there was already a buyer lined up for them somewhere.
Nervousness knotted Nick’s stomach as he considered that possibility. The idea of someone owning him, starting immediately, no training period to prepare him for it, was almost too much, and he had to hold back panicked tears as a tech strapped them into the transporter. Nick closed his eyes and took deep breaths, settling into his seat as the humming of the machine grew louder. No one said where they were going. There was only the automated voice telling them to relax and calm their minds, and then a sharp sound and a current that raised the hair on Nick’s arms. When he opened his eyes again, they were on a slightly different transporter platform, the light yellowish instead of white. Two new techs unstrapped Nick and Joe, and at last someone spoke to them, a woman in a sleek, dark suit with sharp eyes and a cold smile. “Welcome,” she said, extending a hand to Joe and then Nick. Joe hesitated before shaking, but Nick gripped her cool hand firmly to show he wasn’t afraid.
“You are now entering one of the most elite slave training facilities in the universe,” said the woman, leading them out of the transporter room on wobbly legs. “It is an honor to be placed here, and the fact that you have been means you have great potential for service.”
Nick wanted to ask what that meant, and Joe raised his eyebrows to show he was curious too. But she was walking briskly along the corridor, signs pointing out the way to the “assessment and induction center” in the direction they were headed. Their escort obviously didn’t need them, and Nick wondered who would, as the corridor didn’t branch, and there were no doors to either side of them, only the long, silent stretch of walkway ahead.
The corridor curved up into a ramp, and Joe took Nick’s hand again as the center’s tall front doors came into view, arched and gleaming gold, archaically beautiful. They opened automatically, and stepping through them was like stepping into one of the historical recreation holos they’d seen at school. The floor turned from industrial carpet to polished stone as they passed through the doors, and the bench by the door was intricately carved from dark wood. “Wait here,” said the woman, and Joe and Nick sat obediently.
“Well, it’s pretty,” said Joe, looking around, not letting go of Nick’s hand.
“I guess,” Nick agreed.
“Maybe it won’t be so bad, huh?” Joe tried, nudging a little closer to Nick on the bench, like he thought Nick needed comfort. But Nick wasn’t a little kid anymore. He didn’t need Joe to pretend things like that for him.
“Don’t say that,” he snapped, and Joe tugged at his fingers.
“You can’t give up now,” Joe told him. “You can’t just decide it’s gonna be awful ‘cause then it will no matter what. There’ll be lots of other kids, and-”
“And they’ll all be slaves too,” Nick interrupted.
Joe’s voice turned to a whisper in the empty, echoing room. “Maybe Kevin will find a way to appeal still. Or buy us out. You don’t know.”
Nick yanked his hand out of Joe’s and folded his arms, slumping down against the back of the bench. He didn’t want to think about it, he didn’t want to hope anymore. He’d done enough of that before Mom and Dad were taken. “Stop,” he said angrily. Joe looked as though Nick had slapped him. “Just give it up, Joe. We’re slaves now, and we’re going to be slaves forever, and we have to get used to that instead of making up stupid stories about how everything will be fine.”
“You don’t know that.” Nick turned his back, hunching into a ball at the end of the bench. “You don’t, Nick. I don’t care if you pout, but you don’t know that we’re always going to be slaves.”
His voice was rising, echoing off the high ceiling, the word “slaves” still hanging in the air as the woman who had escorted them up came in to collect them. She raised her eyebrows as though she’d heard, but she said nothing, did not refute Joe’s claims that they might still be saved.
They walked up the broad steps leading from the old-fashioned foyer up to another, more normal-looking corridor, its many doors labeled “classroom”. There was a lift at the end of the hall, and although Nick still had no idea where they were - what planet, what solar system, let alone what city - he knew they were going up. The lift platform was surrounded by windows, and outside was a mass of tall buildings, clearly larger than the capital city on their homeworld. He had to restrain himself from staring, from taking in every little detail that might tell him where they were. Either they’d find out or they wouldn’t, and that was what he would have to get used to now, being completely at the mercy of others for information.
The woman did not speak to them again, not in the lift and not when they reached a large, sturdy desk outside an austere office door. There was a man at the desk, and his eyes passed over Nick and Joe appraisingly. Nick felt like an object, a piece of pottery in the marketplace, a piece of meat. “They’re pretty enough,” the man said, and Nick looked down at his feet. “I think they’d be a welcome addition to any harem.”
“No one is concerned about what you think,” the woman replied coolly. “The sooner I can get them through intake, the sooner I can go back to doing regular collection.”
“You always did love striking fear into the hearts of children,” the man said with a wicked flash of a smile. “Follow me, boys. We’ll get you what you need.”
Inside the office another woman checked them in, entering their personal information into a database from the ID chips they’d carried from home. It was all very formal, efficient. “You’ll have to go to requisitions next, boys,” she said, snapping trackers onto Joe and Nick’s wrists and pointing them in the right direction. The woman who escorted them from the transporter did not reappear, and they walked alone down the corridor to another lift. Nick began to wonder just how many levels this strange facility had, decorated in a confusing mix of archaic and current styles, every door opening onto another set of offices, another wing of classrooms. He had always known the number of slaves in the universe was massive, but somehow he hadn’t pictured so many in one place, so many kids like him and Joe being prepared for that life.
It was only the two of them in their room, and Nick was grateful for that. He lay down on his narrow bed, dangling his fingers over the edge and rubbing his face into the clean, cool pillow. Joe sat on the bed across from his, unpacking the new bag he'd gotten from the requisitions office. Nick wasn't quite ready for that. Looking at the sum of his possessions now, the things he was allowed to have as a slave, was somehow more than he could take. He closed his eyes as Joe rustled through the bag. "These are the most boring clothes I've ever seen," Joe said conversationally. "Look at this."
"No," Nick replied.
Joe sighed. "I'll just have to describe them to you then. It's the color of dirt, different kinds of dirt, and it's all sort of stretchy and weird, so it'll probably stick like crazy."
"Stop," Nick said. "Just stop."
“You can’t keep on denying it,” Joe sighed. He got up and lay behind Nick on the bed, folding an arm around Nick’s waist and tugging him in close. He nuzzled into the curve of Nick’s neck. “This is what it’s like now, nothing to rebel against. Any household diagnostic will tell you that once something’s broken, you have to deal with it as it is. And that’s what our lives are at this point. They’re broken. There are plenty of things that could happen later, but for now, we have to start from here.”
“I’m not going to argue with that,” Nick replied. “Everything is broken, and I thought it was pretty obvious that I knew that. Maybe even better than you did, since I’m not trying to make jokes about the stupid clothes.” He tried to stay stiff and not relax into the familiar shape of Joe’s body, tried not to seek comfort from his brother like he’d done after every bad dream in their shared childhood. The training program would be a few months, a year at most, from what he’d read, and after that they’d both be put into stasis until they were old enough to be sold as body slaves, and after that there was no reason to think they’d ever see each other again. Having Joe curl around him now just made it worse to know he wouldn’t have this later. Tomorrow their training would start for real, a whole course of who knew what, and after a while, Nick let himself relax, worn down by Joe holding onto him, breathing softly against the back of his neck.
Hours of etiquette classes followed by hours of physical training left Nick and Joe too tired to talk the first few days. There was so much to memorize, so much to learn about, and Nick found he aches in muscles he hadn’t even known existed.
After a week, it started to feel a little more manageable, a rhythm to the days that wasn’t so bad really. They sat with the other kids at meals, but it was almost impossible to make friends in the limited time allotted for socializing. Nick figured that was probably part of the point. But at least he had Joe every night, sharing his room, the sound of his breath lulling Nick into sleep.
Nick was grateful that so far there hadn’t been any weird sex stuff, that that aspect of service as a body slave had gone unmentioned. But at the same time, they both knew it was coming. “I just wish they would start on it already,” Joe said one night, in the silent darkness after lights-out.
“Start on what?” Nick replied, even though he knew.
“Fucking,” said Joe simply. They didn’t use a lot of coarse language around their house, and the word was a jolt of the unfamiliar. But Nick couldn’t argue with it.
“Maybe they don’t think we need it,” Nick said, hoping Joe would play along, pretend that that was at least a possibility.
But Joe sighed. “They brought us here, all the way into the beta system and not somewhere closer to home, and they did it for a reason.”
“I know.”
“Maybe it won’t be so bad.” Joe had said those words so many times over the last week, and Nick had begun to say them too, as though anything could make either of them believe it.
“At least they can’t touch us,” Nick offered. “Not like that.”
“Not unless they freeze us for a while first. And I don’t think they’re ready to do that.”
Nick squinted at the ceiling. “That means they’ll have to start training us to do that stuff pretty soon.” The words seemed to hang in the air after he said them because Joe didn’t even make a noise in response. It was just silent, and Nick lay awake for a long time, wondering what those lessons would be like. He’s sure many of the other kids are more experienced than he is sexually; Nick has never even kissed anyone. He wonders if any of this would be easier if he’d had sex, or if knowing what it was like with a partner he cared about would only make it worse.
One morning they came into their regular classroom to find two new instructors there. They were honest but unsympathetic. "Today we'll begin teaching you about the sexual services you'll perform as body slaves," said the older of the two, a small woman in a dark, form-fitting jumpsuit, her greying hair pulled back tightly from her face. "Up until now you may have hoped that these services would not be required in the household you'll eventually serve, and it's very true that in some households body slaves do not perform these duties, but in the overwhelming majority of cases, these are things you will need to be familiar with. We’re going to tell you the truth about these things, no euphemisms, no squeamishness, and if you have questions, you should ask them. You will be fucked by your owner, and likely also by your owner's family, friends, colleagues, and political allies. If you are sold commercially, you will be fucked by hotel guests, by repair shop employees, by market customers. Because you are a slave, nothing about the disposition of your body is your own choice, and the sooner you understand this and learn to live by it, the less painful your life and your master's will be."
Nick could see some of the other kids trembling, even some of those older than himself folding their hands tightly and forcing back tears. But he kept his eyes wide open and did not cry, did not even respond when Joe leaned a little closer into him. He had to be alone right now, the way he would be once he was bought. No matter how small and scared he felt, no matter how much he didn’t want any of the things they were setting up to demonstrate at the front of the room, he had to survive it on his own.
They started with anatomy lessons, a basic overview of the parts of genitalia: male, female, intersexed, mutilated and decorated in all sorts of ways in the vids they showed. “It is within any owner’s rights to make any of these modifications on you,” the woman told them, over a hologram showing a penis split down the urethra and rejoined with luminescent thread.
Nick remembered the anatomy lessons they’d had in his primary school, how all the kids had laughed at the long scientific words for their body parts. No one laughed this time. Some of the children here were probably not even old enough to have covered anatomy in school yet, and it made Nick feel sick to think that this would be their first time hearing about the way their bodies worked. He risked a glance at Joe and found him staring wide-eyed at the vids, mouth open in horror.
It seemed to go on and on, hours of lecturing on how their most sensitive parts worked, and how they could be modified to an owner’s liking. Nick pressed his legs tightly together in unconscious defense as a vid showed the process of castration, the wounded flesh sterilized and cauterized, marked with a brand showing who owned the slave’s body.
Nick had never realized how many things were done to slaves under their plain public uniforms, what the slaves he’d always seen in the marketplaces back home could be hiding. When nearly every kid in the room was shaking and flinching at each new image, the instructors turned off the holo-generator. “We’ll continue tomorrow,” said the man, younger and softer spoken, who had given most of the presentation. “Please come prepared with questions.”
It was so much like what a normal teacher, a real teacher for real people, would say, and that was somehow as disorienting as anything. Nick felt lightheaded and dizzy when he stood to leave the classroom, as though the afterimage of all those unnaturally pierced and sewn and stretched bodies was burned in behind his eyes. Joe put an arm around him, and for once Nick didn’t protest, holding onto his big brother as they made their way back to the dorm.
The rumor spread like wildfire in the dining hall that night: tomorrow they would be given their first set of instruments, strange devices on which to practice their sexual skills. Nick wrinkled his nose when Joe whispered this to him, still thinking about the slave anatomy lectures, although the instruments couldn't be anything that extreme. "They can't touch us," Joe reminded him, "so it's just us, just for us to figure out."
Nick shook his head. That didn't make it better, and he didn't want to talk about it. He ate the rest of his dinner without tasting it and got back to the room before the warning bell for lights out had even rung. Joe was still in the entertainment lounge downstairs, watching the filtered vid channels they let slaves in training see -- no news, no current affairs, no live content of any kind, only rebroadcasts that had been bouncing around in the void for years.
He felt jittery, keyed up after all the sex vids and the explanations of them, all the whispers and suggestive hand motions in the dining hall. Nick didn’t want to let them affect him, and it wasn’t as though he liked what he had heard about the “instruments,” but he couldn’t help the way his body reacted when he thought about sex. His dick was half-hard, and the fidgety desire to touch it had plagued him for hours. It wasn’t just the vids or the talk; it was also being fourteen and having all this energy pent up all the time, just waiting to embarrass him.
Nick looked at the door, then took the chance and stripped out of his loose uniform pants. He hadn't touched himself in days, had barely been alone enough to consider it, but at that moment it seemed so simple compared to everything else that was and would be expected of him. It was easier to focus on this than to let his thoughts bounce over everything he’d seen so far in training. Cupping a hand around his dick and stroking until it felt good, until the feeling good blotted out everything else. He didn't try to imagine anything in the space behind his eyelids, let the physical sensation carry him, since all his old fantasies seemed like contraband, personal things he should have left behind. It didn't take very long; it never did. Once, mortifyingly, Joe had told him that he would develop more stamina as he got older, but Nick didn't really care. He was only pleasing himself. For right now, that was enough. He held his dick in his hand after he came, anxiety filtering back as he looked at it, the pink, vulnerable head resting in his palm, the fold of his foreskin, the little smeared slit. All of it might be just more flesh to mark and claim once he was owned.
Every trainee was given a package with their ID number on it the next day at the beginning of class. Nick looked around the room, noticing that the youngest kids had the largest packages. Some of the ones even younger than Nick could barely see over the tops of the sealed boxes on their tabletops, and Nick leaned back in his chair, not wanting to touch his own. Joe was curious though, turning the package between his hands, checking to see if it rattled, although Nick was sure it was too carefully packed for that.
"These instruments are yours to use," the older teacher said. Even after two weeks, Nick didn't know her name. "Younger and smaller trainees have been given a wider variety of instruments because we assume they will need more gradual preparation. As I have told you before, you will most likely all be used sexually by your owners, by their families, by their friends, and by their colleagues. Because most of you are underage, this part of the training program must by law be voluntary -- we cannot monitor nor require that you use what we've provided for you. But you're risking serious injury if you do not. Going into a sexual situation with an experienced slave owner without preparing yourself is foolhardy at best."
She launched into a long explanation of the "instruments" that might be contained in their packages: dildos of various sizes designed for vaginal and anal penetration, clamps and weights designed to cause pain in sensitive areas, and salves and creams to make the use of the other things easier. The teachers traded off giving a long list of precautions and safety instructions, so much to remember that for the first time since they'd arrived, Nick had to jot down notes on his tablet. He could see other kids around them doing the same thing, although Joe just looked over his shoulder as Nick wrote.
They were dismissed two hours before the usual time. "Practice," the teacher said firmly, looking at each of them in turn, most everyone shying away from eye contact. "Find a partner to help you, if you like. We cannot encourage you in this, but as long as your partner is also underage, there is no statute prohibiting it."
Joe raised his eyebrows at Nick, and as Nick realized what Joe was implying his face went hot. "You're my brother," he wanted to say, but the room was so quiet that everyone would hear if he did.
As crazy as the idea was, as Nick looked around the room he realized that there was no one else he could imagine partnering with. So many of the other kids had been developing friendships, friendships close enough that they could trust their bodies to people they'd only known for a month. There were clumps of people around the emptying room, making whispered plans, and one of the older girls even beckoned to Joe to join her. Nick felt a lurch of possessiveness. He hadn't let himself make friends, since he knew he couldn't keep them, and now Joe was all he had.
Nick couldn't tell him not to go with the girl, even though he wanted to. If Joe wanted to practice sex with a stranger, that was his choice. Joe looked at him anyway, questioning, and Nick swallowed down his feelings and gave a little shrug. He could practice on his own with Joe gone. It would be better, getting a feel for the things his body was capable of by himself. Nick walked out of the room, back down the long hallway towards the lift to the dorms. He didn't look back.
Nick sat down cross-legged on his narrow bed and set the box squarely in front of him. He would unpack it thoroughly. He would figure out what all the things inside were. He would practice using them on himself until the regular class period ended, and then he would stop. He wouldn't think too much about it, he wouldn't think about what Joe was doing with the girl, he wouldn't get tangled up in whether or not it felt good. It didn't matter. His body was something to use, and he just had to figure out how to do it, like any physics problem at school.
There were three dildos, and he laid them out in size order on his blanket, lining them up smallest to largest. Even the smallest was larger than Nick's own dick, and the thought of putting it inside himself was intimidating. There was a plug too, and Nick's stomach knotted as he thought of wearing it, practicing with it, walking around with it as they were expected to do. He lined up the little clamps as well, one set for his nipples, one set for his balls, deciding he would not try them today, them or the heavy black cockring in the box beneath them. What would the point of that be if he couldn't even get hard, and surely he couldn't get hard while he was sticking something up his butt.
He settled the bottle of standard lubricant they had provided in the crook of his knee to warm it, touching his new toys. There was a part of him that wanted to defy orders, to ignore all the warnings that it would hurt worse and put all these things back in their box and leave them there. But then Nick thought of Joe, practicing with the girl, learning how to do these things, and Nick couldn't let Joe get ahead of him in this.
Nick undressed and lay down, spreading his legs and pointing his toes to the corners of the bed. He picked up the smallest dildo, and the smooth surface of it warmed to his touch. They had said it was best to start by using your fingers, but that was somehow too intimate; it wasn’t as much like touching himself if it was only the dildo. He covered the smallest dildo in lube and pressed it to his asshole, the rounded head bumping against the opening, pressing not quite hard enough. Nick shut his eyes.
He felt stupid and childish and scared. This, after all, was so much better than what would come after training was done.
Nick pressed harder, forcing the tip of the dildo into his ass, and even that burned a little, narrow as it was, the weight of it prying him open. Slowly, he worked it deeper, twisting it into himself, and it seemed to go on forever, even though it hadn't looked that long when he was just holding it in his hand. Little by little until it was all the way into him, his hand pressed into the crack of his ass, the dildo pressed deep into him, not hurting exactly but still burning a little, taking up too much space inside him. Nick held it still, his every breath jostling it a little, so that it seemed even bigger, even stranger. They had said there was some way it would feel good, the slide of it applying pressure to his prostate gland in a way that might be better than this, might even be pleasurable. Nick couldn’t decide if he wanted that, or if it was better that it was uncomfortable, that every move he made reminded him that this wasn’t something he wanted to feel. He circled the dildo a little more, turning it inside himself until suddenly he felt something new, a little spark of something that made his dick twitch for the first time. And after that he couldn’t help chasing it, see-sawing the dildo into his ass, slowly, so slowly, in case he missed it by going too fast. But it was tricky, trickier than he’d thought, and after a while Nick stopped moving the dildo and moved his ass instead, rocking back onto it, even though it was awkward and didn’t quite feel good.
It was as he was experimenting, twisting his hips up to meet the depth of the dildo, that Joe walked in. Nick went still, mortified, his asshole tensing, trying to close up tight again. He wondered what he looked like, skinny legs splayed wide, cheeks spotted pink. Joe swallowed, dryly and audibly, and he paused, one hand clenched on the doorframe, his expression unreadable. Then he knelt beside Nick’s bed and whispered, “Can I help?”
Nick was too ashamed and worked up to answer. He could feel Joe’s breath ruffling his hair.
“It’ll be better if I help,” Joe coaxed. “I promise.” He looked straight into Nick’s face, his eyes wide, one hand coming up to push a tangled curl off Nick’s forehead. The shock of even that small touch was electric, and Nick had been practicing on his own for so long. He didn’t need persuasion. He nodded. After all, Joe had tried this by now, with the girl from their class, and that was more expertise than Nick had going for him.
Still the sensation of one of Joe’s fingers, thickly coated in lube, sliding around the stretched opening of his asshole, was confusingly intimate. “You have to be wet enough,” Joe said matter-of-factly, even though Nick had been the one taking notes and paying attention in class. His dick started to rise, as Joe pulled the dildo partway of him and then fucked it back in in one slow, steady thrust.
Instinctively Nick cupped his hand around his stiffening dick, ashamed that there was some part of him, however deeply buried, that found this humiliating process arousing. But Joe only knocked his hand away, saying, "S'okay, it's good to like it. You're just" - he looked away for a moment, up at the ceiling as if he could find the word he was searching for up there - "responsive. That's awesome."
Nick's cheeks burned, but he dropped his hand, tried to concentrate on what Joe was doing, so he'd know how to do it to himself next time. Tried not to focus on how weird it was being touched like this by his brother.
“Have you figured out the prostate thing yet?” Joe asked, and Nick had to shake his head. Joe pulled the dildo out of him, all the way out of him, so he ached with the sudden emptiness. But then Joe’s fingers were filling him up again, parting him and stretching him open in a different way. “It’s easier like this,” Joe explained.
Nick shut his suddenly tearing eyes. His brother wasn’t supposed to teach him this, move in him this way, twisting his fingers slow and gentle until Nick felt it again, that heat building in his belly, the swoop of pleasure that curled his toes. “There,” Joe said, pressing a little, rolling his fingertips over that spot until Nick’s dick started to react, fattening up between his legs. Just a physical reaction, but knowing that did nothing to diminish the fear and disgust he felt at himself. His own body was betraying him, his hips swiveling to follow Joe’s hand, his balls tingling.
“You can come, Nick,” Joe said softly, when he’d teased Nick right up to the edge of orgasm without touching his dick at all. “It’s all right to feel good. It’s all right. Just let yourself.” There was something coaxing in his voice, soft and persuasive. Nick wrapped a trembling hand around the shaft of his dick, and it only took two strokes before he came.
Joe held his fingers in deep, watching Nick’s face even though Nick couldn’t look at him just then. He kept so still, lining up their breathing so that every time Nick breathed in, Joe breathed out. It was a game they used to play when they were little, on the long shuttle rides out to the resort on their homeworld they visited every summer. Nick was always comforted by it, by having Joe’s attention so fully focused on him, but now it was strange too, Joe’s fingers inside him, holding him open.
“You okay?” Joe asked, pulling out at last, leaving Nick to wind the blanket around himself like a shield.
“I’ll be fine,” Nick said.
Joe looked torn, like he wanted to reach out, his hand hovering awkwardly at Nick’s shoulder. And Nick wasn’t sure if he wanted Joe to touch him anymore either. Finally Joe stood up, heading towards their small bathroom. “Next time we can try one of the bigger ones if you want,” he said over his shoulder.
Nick’s asshole was still sore and slick. He was naked underneath the standard-issue blanket. Every part of him felt raw. “Thanks,” he managed. He was grateful, in a way, and he knew Joe didn’t have to help him.
“You’re welcome,” said Joe quietly. “I don’t want this to be hard for you. Harder than it has to be.”
Nick nodded. Joe had been gentle with him, as respectful as he could be while fingering Nick’s ass. And it hadn’t hurt by the end, which he probably couldn’t have accomplished on his own. It could have been a lot worse, Nick tried to tell himself, but he still felt sick in the pit of his stomach.
“Did you have sex with her?” Nick asked in the dark that night.
“With who? Demi?”
“Is that her name?”
“Yeah, that’s her name. I didn’t have sex with her. We were just practicing. Just like I did with you.”
“Just practicing,” Nick repeated. He felt strangely hollow, hearing Joe say it like that. Of course it was just practicing, with him and with Demi. They all had to learn, and it was better not to do it on their own, and Joe was helpful by nature. None of what had happened today was something any of them wanted. That didn’t make him feel better either.
The next day everyone Nick saw looked as uncomfortable as he felt. They all knew how they’d spent their afternoon the day before, and even many of the kids who had paired off yesterday couldn’t look at each other now. They were subdued during more vids showing different kinds of sexual intercourse, all of them running together in a blur of different skin tones and slapping flesh until Nick just stopped watching, letting his eyes drift to Joe beside him. Joe saw him looking and reached out for his hand, taking it and lacing their fingers together like he had on the day they arrived. Joe held his hand through the rest of the class, stroking Nick’s knuckles with his thumb, and Nick couldn’t help feeling a little bit better.
“Do you want to…” Joe said as they were leaving the classroom, swinging their clasped hands and looking happy for the first time in days. He waved at Demi, but he didn’t even move toward her in the crowd.
“Sure,” Nick said before he could think too much about it.
They left lunch early to go back to their room, and Nick couldn’t help but feel a sick thrill of anticipation as Joe lay down in bed beside him, both of them naked this time, their bodies warm together. “Do you want to try the bigger one this time?” Joe asked, touching a slick fingertip to Nick’s asshole, feeling him out.
“I guess.”
“You’ll be fine. I won’t let it hurt.” He twisted his fingertip in a little, Nick’s insides giving around it, making room.
“I can help you too. After. If you want,” Nick whispered as Joe dug out the dildo and lube, and Joe paused.
“Yeah, thanks.”
Joe opened him up on two fingers again, until Nick was shaking and hot all over, and when Joe finally slid the dildo into him, it barely even hurt. Nick heard himself whimpering, tried to swallow back every helpless little noise that threatened to burst out of him, but he couldn’t concentrate. And then Joe wrapped his other hand around Nick’s dick, and that was so much better and so much worse at the same time. He came all over his belly, all over Joe’s fingers, forgetting that Joe was his brother, forgetting that they had been forced into this, feeling nothing but good for that one moment.
“You’re good at this,” Joe said, pulling the dildo out of him.
Nick sat up, curled his legs up to his chest self-consciously. “Shut up.”
“No, Nicky, that’s a good thing. That’s what they want. And don’t you want to be at the top of the class?”
“Not like this. Not a class like this.” He felt so ashamed suddenly.
Joe gathered him into a hug, held on until Nick relaxed and let him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you feel bad. Do you want to help me practice? You don’t have to, but, you know, I’d like help.”
Nick sighed. “Sure.”
He couldn’t help noticing the differences in their bodies, the trail of dark hair on Joe’s stomach, the heaviness of his balls, the places where Joe was starting to look grown up while Nick still looked like a kid. Of course they liked that better, the traders; everyone had told him that, how his soft, fair skin would fetch a high price at market. He touched Joe’s asshole, pushed inside slowly with one fingertip, testing the give of it, the way Joe stretched open for him. It didn’t take long before Joe was asking him for more, spreading his legs wider and swearing he could take it, it would be fine, it wouldn’t hurt him.
Nick tried not to think too hard about what he was doing, or look too closely at the line of Joe’s neck as he arched back on the bed, or let Joe’s soft groans turn him on all over again. This wasn’t sex; it was practice for a job they both had to do and neither of them had asked for. But he couldn’t look away as Joe stroked up the length of his own dick, smearing it wet with precome, pausing and jerking himself off hard and fast. He had watched all those vids and masturbated hundreds of times on his own, and still, this was different, watching Joe touch himself that way, working himself hard and fast between his clutched fingers.
They did it a lot in the following weeks: practicing. It wasn’t sex, and Nick tamped down all the confusing feelings he had when Joe touched him. This was work, something they had to practice so they could be obedient slaves when they finished training, and it was easier to remember that when Joe was off with Demi, doing all the same things and not meaning anything by it.
And then, as abruptly as the unit on sexual service had begun, it ended. It was oddly disorienting, not spending his afternoons in bed with Joe, not getting off every day. Nick was jittery in the new lessons, with nowhere to put that energy, and he couldn’t exactly ask Joe to help him out with no reason. He told himself over and over that he didn’t even want Joe to do that, that it was a relief.
They were back to etiquette classes for a few days before they began on their special skills interviews. Each trainee was recorded demonstrating any skill of affinity that might make them more saleable on the open market. “It doesn’t matter what,” said their regular etiquette teacher. “It can be an academic skill, or an artistic one, or even a family disposition to a particular feature that might be good for breeding. Please be prepared to disclose any and all special talents to your interviewer. Failure to do so is, of course, illegal, as you are all central government property until you are sold to a private citizen or a corporation.”
Nick could hear all the other trainees discussing this at lunch that day, what exactly counted as a skill or affinity. “Are you going to talk about music?” Joe asked, and Nick sighed. It was harder to talk about things he already cared about, but he sort of had to. He had tried not to think about playing music as one-by-one the instruments in their house disappeared to pay their parents’ debts over the last few years, until all that was left was a cheap holo-keyboard that Nick could compose simple melodies on, his fingers moving instinctively to pick out a tune. Eventually even the holo-keyboard broke down, but Nick still remembered the feel of it, the sensors on his fingers that made the “keys” make noise when he moved them a certain way; not as good as the manual piano they’d had when he was little, an exquisitely made antique, but still something.
He sang for the interviewer, just to prove he could, and when he listed off the instruments he could play, part of him hoped that they would make him prove it, bring him a piano to practice on, its fine white keys worn and yellowed with age, it resonant tone as deep as Nick remembered. But all they did was make a note in his record, no proof needed. For all Nick knew he could have claimed to train animals in his spare time, or weave replicas of AncientEarth tapestries, other things they couldn’t possibly have had him demonstrate. But he was only honest, wondering how his music could be used to suit his new master, wondering if he would grow to hate it if he were forced to play instead of choosing it freely.
As the weeks passed, people started to disappear from their classes, there one day and gone the next. It was mostly the older kids, the ones who would be eighteen soonest, who could be put into stasis for only a year or two before being sold as legal adults. Joe was sixteen, and the fewer people there were in class in the morning, the more Nick worried that Joe would be next. He didn’t say anything about it, but the thought of being here without his brother was more than he could handle. He needed Joe, and however hard he tried, he hadn’t been able to stop himself.
One day they were called into the office they’d gone to on the first day, and the fact that they had not called Joe alone was cold comfort. The same admin woman was there at her desk, scrolling through files on her desktop display, as they entered. “Joseph and Nicholas Jonas,” she said, tapping a file and opening it in the holo-field above the desk, so all their personal information spilled out in midair. He saw graphs of “progress” statistics and wondered how they could be measured. Did they know when he shut his eyes in class during vids about typical slave punishment, or how he came on Joe’s fingers at night without Joe even touching his dick? The graph showed a steady upward motion. “Your time at this facility is almost complete. Tomorrow you will put into a state of suspended animation and moved to our stasis facility, where you will remain until you have reached legal adulthood.”
They both nodded their understanding, and Nick wished Joe was holding his hand right now, so his fingers would shake a little less.
“The agency has made a fairly unusual recommendation for the two of you, however. Because of the intensive way you have been involved with each other over the course of this program and the particular progress we have seen you make together, they have decided you should be sold as a set, and therefore Joseph will be kept in stasis for several extra years until Nicholas has also reached legal adulthood.”
It should have made Nick happy, but it just made him feel sick to his stomach. They had monitored, they had known; maybe they had even seen him and Joe together, doing all those things that felt so intimate. He pressed his lips tight together and didn’t speak.
“Obviously, if we’re unable to find a buyer for the two of you as a pair, you will eventually be sold separately, but I anticipate that you two can fetch a very high price as a, shall we say, matched set. If you have no questions, you will be put into stasis tomorrow morning, and when you wake up, you will both be adults.”
She looked back and forth between the two of them and then nodded smartly. “All right, then you are free to go. If you have any personal effects you would like available to you when you come out of stasis, please leave them in the boxes provided in your room. A tech will arrive to take you to the medical wing before the breakfast bell tomorrow morning, so please be prepared to go then.”
She dismissed them, and as soon as they were out in the corridor, Joe threw his arms around Nick and hugged him tight. “We’re going to get to stay together,” he said. “Isn’t that amazing?”
Nick buried his face in Joe’s neck and didn’t say anything. He was grateful, but at the same time, they’d be slaves together not free. “They’re going to make us have sex. With each other. Whoever they sell us to, it’s so they can make us have sex with each other.”
“Better each other than other people, right?”
Nick didn’t want to touch Joe in front of anyone else; strangers would have been less disgustingly intimate. But he didn’t say that. “I’m glad we get to stay together,” he said instead.
The tech came early the next morning, not so long after Nick and Joe had both given up on pretending to sleep. He was only a few years older than Joe, and he didn’t try to make small talk as he led them to the medical wing, a place neither of them had ever visited. They hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye to anyone, and surely that was intentional. This way they couldn’t give the other trainees any clue what to expect when their time came.
The stasis room was long and low, with a row of open tanks down its length, just waiting for cargo. There were wires and tubes and measuring implements everywhere, a confusing jumble of them hanging above each tank. “The doctor will be in shortly,” the tech said as he left them. Then he added, “It’s just like falling asleep,” as though the words would seem comforting and not eerie.
They were alone, just the two of them in this room full of highly technical, probably dangerous medical equipment, and Nick had a passing urge to smash everything in sight, just to see what would happen. “Where do you think they’ll store us?” Joe asked, looking around in unabashed fascination.
Nick wrinkled his nose. “I don’t want to think about it.” His own body, floating suspended in a tank, stacked someplace with who knew how many others.
“It’s not like we’ll know. Do you think we’ll know? Like be able to see ourselves from outside while we’re suspended?”
“That’s all metaphysical garbage people make up because they like to think there are things science can’t explain. The whole point is that your brain function is non-existent, that nothing in you anywhere is moving or growing or changing, not a single neuron.”
Joe grinned. “Now that’s the spoilsport little brother I love so much.”
“Shut up.”
Joe hugged him, in spite of Nick trying to bat him away. “Don’t fight me,” Joe said, digging his chin into Nick’s shoulder. “I won’t get to do this again for five years.”
“You won’t remember those five years,” Nick argued, but he laced his arms tight around Joe’s back.
A door at the other end of the room slid open, and in walked an older woman in a blue physician’s uniform. “Sit down, gentlemen,” she said, gesturing to a bench beside the nearest tank. “This is all a pretty simple process, but I’m going to run through it for you anyway. You’re going to be cleaned up in that room over there. Then we’ll put you under one at a time and get you settled in the tank. There will be one IV line running muscle relaxants and preservation agents into your bloodstream once you’re unconscious, and you’ll be fitted with an oxygen mask in case of any complications at this end that mean we have to wake you back up. But those are very rare. Everything else you see there is revivification equipment that will have to be attached to your bodies and shipped with the tank, but none of it should worry you. I’ve done this hundreds of times.” She smiled at them, more kindly than anyone had in months, and Nick wondered why anyone with a smile like that would be working in a slave training center.
The “clean-up” was as thorough and humiliating as Nick expected, and he tried to distance himself from his own body, float outside it like Joe had said as a tech washed him all over, his pad scrubbing at every fold and hollow of Nick’s naked body.
They were allowed a little pair of underwear when they got into the tank, and Nick didn’t care how kind the doctor’s smile was when she was looking at him almost naked and plugging tubes into his arms. She did Joe’s first, Nick noticed, and although she said they’d go under separately, she had them sit down in the tanks at the same time, both of them shifting awkwardly on the hard plastic, jostling the web of tubing around them.
“Joe first?” the doctor asked, even though she clearly didn’t mean it as a question.
Joe looked at Nick over the rim of the tank. “See you in five years,” Joe said casually, as though he wasn’t scared at all of what lay on the other side of that gap. “Love you.”
“Love you too,” Nick replied, as he watched Joe fitted with an oxygen mask and given an initial shot of sedative.
“Lie down and count back from 100,” the doctor said.
Nick watched his brother drift off to sleep, and after that he had to stop looking. It was too much like Joe was dead, lying there limp as the doctor and the tech checked his vital signs and the dosage for the next set of drugs. He could hear them even though he kept his eyes shut, reeling off numbers at each other, and he could hear when the tank started to fill with liquid, chemicals to preserve the surface of Joe’s body like the other drugs would preserve the inside. It was gross to think about, and Nick tried not to, but the rush of liquid in the tank was hard to ignore.
An alarm sounded, blaring out from the comm unit on the wall, one sharp shock of noise, and then the same cool, familiar voice from the office. “There has been a change of plans.”
The doctor picked up the message on her wrist unit. “A change of plans?” she asked incredulously, and now Nick couldn’t help looking at Joe floating in the tank, functionally dead. His stomach ached, and hysteria was rising like bile in the back of his throat. They were supposed to go under together. That was supposed to be the only good part of this, that whatever else happened, he and Joe could go into stasis together and wake up together.
“We’ve located a potential buyer, and they want to have, shall we say, a better matched set. Send him back to the dormitory. We’ll hang on to him for another six months, maybe a year.”
Nick sat still, curling into himself in the tank. Six months was a lifetime to survive here without Joe. The doctor sighed and tapped off her wrist comm. “All right, Nick. Up you get.” She helped him out with a hand on his elbow, and let him change into his trainee uniform with her back turned. “I’m sorry,” she said, as Nick took one last look at Joe in the tank, floating still and lifeless. He was going to wake up and not know about any of this.
Nick shook his head mutely. Then he went back to his newly single room and lay in bed for as long as he could.
Next>>
Fandom: Jonas RPF AU
Pairing: Joe/Nick, some Joe/Demi and Nick/Demi
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 18,100
Warnings/Spoilers: slavery, dub-con/coercion, underage sex, incest, mentions of other dark stuff including genital mutilation, rape, and violence
Summary: In a not-so-bright future, Joe and Nick are taken as collateral by the intergalactic central government to pay their family's debts. They are trained as body slaves, and the fact that they are only 13 and 16 just makes them more valuable commodities. Although Kevin buys their freedom before they can be sold to a stranger, the experience of the training program may have changed their relationship forever. This is a companion to Anywhere and everywhere people (J2, NC-17), set in the same universe and sharing many characters, but you don't need to read that to understand this.
Notes: Written for jb_bigbang. My endless thanks to mediaville for her graphics, beta work, cheerleading, and all-around fabulousness. Title from Carl Sandburg (the rest of the poem can be found at the end).
It was hard to be afraid anymore, once he was in the shuttle with Joe, being taken to the intergalactic terminal in the capital. Kevin had watched silently when the slaving agents came, a man and a woman matching stride in their dark uniforms, and he’d turned away to cry as Nick and Joe followed them to their shuttle. Nick felt hollowed out, thinking of it now, remembering his oldest brother’s stricken face. Kevin had said he’d take care of them, after their parents were taken, shipped offworld and erased from even the galactic census data for the planet, no trail to follow. Kevin said he’d take care of them, even though he was only sixteen, not even in tertiary school yet, and Nick had turned to him as the slaving agents came towards the house this morning. “It’s not your fault,” he’d said solemnly.
Kevin shook his head. “I’m going to fix this. For all of us.”
Nick didn’t know how that was possible, with Central Government’s tight slave restrictions, but he hugged Kevin anyway, Joe piling on so it was all three of them in a tangle of arms and clasping hands. No one said what they were probably all thinking, that this could easily be the last time they were all together, the last time he or Joe ever saw Kevin.
“Be good, okay?” Kevin said.
Joe tried to be serious and comfort Nick on the shuttle, but Nick already felt like his insides had been scooped out, like there was nothing left in him to hurt by the time they banked around the spires of the capital. He squeezed Joe’s hand anyway, because maybe Joe needed the comfort more than he did. The city loomed huge and forbidding before them, dark metal lacing up toward the sky. “We’ve just got to stick together, right?” Joe said.
Nick nodded gravely, even though nothing in the galaxy could make it as simple as that. He stared at the Central Government insignia on the back of the seat in front of him, his mind going blank as he gave a first thought to just what was going to happen to them next. When Mom and Dad were taken, they hadn’t stopped to consider anything beyond the shuttle that was carrying them away. He had been young enough, childish enough, that he’d run down the path waving his arms at the departing shuttle as though that would tell his parents more fully that he loved them. He hadn’t thought about where there were actually going. It hadn’t mattered. But now it did.
Every once in a while, there was a news vid talking about the lovely conditions of slave training centers, as though that would convince anyone of anything. No one who had ever seen a slave could believe that being one would not be so terrible. Nick sat quietly beside Joe. No one spoke to them. The pilots in the cockpit were talking softly to each other, too low for Nick to hear.
They landed on a transfer pad and Joe and Nick were ushered into the bright humming chamber of a system jumper. Nick had never seen one for real before, only the holographic depictions in his physics class, and he was curious, eager to look around, although he didn’t want to show it. The long-distance transporters were rare and expensive. There were only a few of them in their solar system, and they were mainly used by diplomats and business people for whom intergalactic travel was commonplace. Dimly, Nick was aware that the fact that they were traveling in a system jumper meant they were probably going to one of the more prestigious training centers on an inner planet. Either that or there was already a buyer lined up for them somewhere.
Nervousness knotted Nick’s stomach as he considered that possibility. The idea of someone owning him, starting immediately, no training period to prepare him for it, was almost too much, and he had to hold back panicked tears as a tech strapped them into the transporter. Nick closed his eyes and took deep breaths, settling into his seat as the humming of the machine grew louder. No one said where they were going. There was only the automated voice telling them to relax and calm their minds, and then a sharp sound and a current that raised the hair on Nick’s arms. When he opened his eyes again, they were on a slightly different transporter platform, the light yellowish instead of white. Two new techs unstrapped Nick and Joe, and at last someone spoke to them, a woman in a sleek, dark suit with sharp eyes and a cold smile. “Welcome,” she said, extending a hand to Joe and then Nick. Joe hesitated before shaking, but Nick gripped her cool hand firmly to show he wasn’t afraid.
“You are now entering one of the most elite slave training facilities in the universe,” said the woman, leading them out of the transporter room on wobbly legs. “It is an honor to be placed here, and the fact that you have been means you have great potential for service.”
Nick wanted to ask what that meant, and Joe raised his eyebrows to show he was curious too. But she was walking briskly along the corridor, signs pointing out the way to the “assessment and induction center” in the direction they were headed. Their escort obviously didn’t need them, and Nick wondered who would, as the corridor didn’t branch, and there were no doors to either side of them, only the long, silent stretch of walkway ahead.
The corridor curved up into a ramp, and Joe took Nick’s hand again as the center’s tall front doors came into view, arched and gleaming gold, archaically beautiful. They opened automatically, and stepping through them was like stepping into one of the historical recreation holos they’d seen at school. The floor turned from industrial carpet to polished stone as they passed through the doors, and the bench by the door was intricately carved from dark wood. “Wait here,” said the woman, and Joe and Nick sat obediently.
“Well, it’s pretty,” said Joe, looking around, not letting go of Nick’s hand.
“I guess,” Nick agreed.
“Maybe it won’t be so bad, huh?” Joe tried, nudging a little closer to Nick on the bench, like he thought Nick needed comfort. But Nick wasn’t a little kid anymore. He didn’t need Joe to pretend things like that for him.
“Don’t say that,” he snapped, and Joe tugged at his fingers.
“You can’t give up now,” Joe told him. “You can’t just decide it’s gonna be awful ‘cause then it will no matter what. There’ll be lots of other kids, and-”
“And they’ll all be slaves too,” Nick interrupted.
Joe’s voice turned to a whisper in the empty, echoing room. “Maybe Kevin will find a way to appeal still. Or buy us out. You don’t know.”
Nick yanked his hand out of Joe’s and folded his arms, slumping down against the back of the bench. He didn’t want to think about it, he didn’t want to hope anymore. He’d done enough of that before Mom and Dad were taken. “Stop,” he said angrily. Joe looked as though Nick had slapped him. “Just give it up, Joe. We’re slaves now, and we’re going to be slaves forever, and we have to get used to that instead of making up stupid stories about how everything will be fine.”
“You don’t know that.” Nick turned his back, hunching into a ball at the end of the bench. “You don’t, Nick. I don’t care if you pout, but you don’t know that we’re always going to be slaves.”
His voice was rising, echoing off the high ceiling, the word “slaves” still hanging in the air as the woman who had escorted them up came in to collect them. She raised her eyebrows as though she’d heard, but she said nothing, did not refute Joe’s claims that they might still be saved.
They walked up the broad steps leading from the old-fashioned foyer up to another, more normal-looking corridor, its many doors labeled “classroom”. There was a lift at the end of the hall, and although Nick still had no idea where they were - what planet, what solar system, let alone what city - he knew they were going up. The lift platform was surrounded by windows, and outside was a mass of tall buildings, clearly larger than the capital city on their homeworld. He had to restrain himself from staring, from taking in every little detail that might tell him where they were. Either they’d find out or they wouldn’t, and that was what he would have to get used to now, being completely at the mercy of others for information.
The woman did not speak to them again, not in the lift and not when they reached a large, sturdy desk outside an austere office door. There was a man at the desk, and his eyes passed over Nick and Joe appraisingly. Nick felt like an object, a piece of pottery in the marketplace, a piece of meat. “They’re pretty enough,” the man said, and Nick looked down at his feet. “I think they’d be a welcome addition to any harem.”
“No one is concerned about what you think,” the woman replied coolly. “The sooner I can get them through intake, the sooner I can go back to doing regular collection.”
“You always did love striking fear into the hearts of children,” the man said with a wicked flash of a smile. “Follow me, boys. We’ll get you what you need.”
Inside the office another woman checked them in, entering their personal information into a database from the ID chips they’d carried from home. It was all very formal, efficient. “You’ll have to go to requisitions next, boys,” she said, snapping trackers onto Joe and Nick’s wrists and pointing them in the right direction. The woman who escorted them from the transporter did not reappear, and they walked alone down the corridor to another lift. Nick began to wonder just how many levels this strange facility had, decorated in a confusing mix of archaic and current styles, every door opening onto another set of offices, another wing of classrooms. He had always known the number of slaves in the universe was massive, but somehow he hadn’t pictured so many in one place, so many kids like him and Joe being prepared for that life.
It was only the two of them in their room, and Nick was grateful for that. He lay down on his narrow bed, dangling his fingers over the edge and rubbing his face into the clean, cool pillow. Joe sat on the bed across from his, unpacking the new bag he'd gotten from the requisitions office. Nick wasn't quite ready for that. Looking at the sum of his possessions now, the things he was allowed to have as a slave, was somehow more than he could take. He closed his eyes as Joe rustled through the bag. "These are the most boring clothes I've ever seen," Joe said conversationally. "Look at this."
"No," Nick replied.
Joe sighed. "I'll just have to describe them to you then. It's the color of dirt, different kinds of dirt, and it's all sort of stretchy and weird, so it'll probably stick like crazy."
"Stop," Nick said. "Just stop."
“You can’t keep on denying it,” Joe sighed. He got up and lay behind Nick on the bed, folding an arm around Nick’s waist and tugging him in close. He nuzzled into the curve of Nick’s neck. “This is what it’s like now, nothing to rebel against. Any household diagnostic will tell you that once something’s broken, you have to deal with it as it is. And that’s what our lives are at this point. They’re broken. There are plenty of things that could happen later, but for now, we have to start from here.”
“I’m not going to argue with that,” Nick replied. “Everything is broken, and I thought it was pretty obvious that I knew that. Maybe even better than you did, since I’m not trying to make jokes about the stupid clothes.” He tried to stay stiff and not relax into the familiar shape of Joe’s body, tried not to seek comfort from his brother like he’d done after every bad dream in their shared childhood. The training program would be a few months, a year at most, from what he’d read, and after that they’d both be put into stasis until they were old enough to be sold as body slaves, and after that there was no reason to think they’d ever see each other again. Having Joe curl around him now just made it worse to know he wouldn’t have this later. Tomorrow their training would start for real, a whole course of who knew what, and after a while, Nick let himself relax, worn down by Joe holding onto him, breathing softly against the back of his neck.
Hours of etiquette classes followed by hours of physical training left Nick and Joe too tired to talk the first few days. There was so much to memorize, so much to learn about, and Nick found he aches in muscles he hadn’t even known existed.
After a week, it started to feel a little more manageable, a rhythm to the days that wasn’t so bad really. They sat with the other kids at meals, but it was almost impossible to make friends in the limited time allotted for socializing. Nick figured that was probably part of the point. But at least he had Joe every night, sharing his room, the sound of his breath lulling Nick into sleep.
Nick was grateful that so far there hadn’t been any weird sex stuff, that that aspect of service as a body slave had gone unmentioned. But at the same time, they both knew it was coming. “I just wish they would start on it already,” Joe said one night, in the silent darkness after lights-out.
“Start on what?” Nick replied, even though he knew.
“Fucking,” said Joe simply. They didn’t use a lot of coarse language around their house, and the word was a jolt of the unfamiliar. But Nick couldn’t argue with it.
“Maybe they don’t think we need it,” Nick said, hoping Joe would play along, pretend that that was at least a possibility.
But Joe sighed. “They brought us here, all the way into the beta system and not somewhere closer to home, and they did it for a reason.”
“I know.”
“Maybe it won’t be so bad.” Joe had said those words so many times over the last week, and Nick had begun to say them too, as though anything could make either of them believe it.
“At least they can’t touch us,” Nick offered. “Not like that.”
“Not unless they freeze us for a while first. And I don’t think they’re ready to do that.”
Nick squinted at the ceiling. “That means they’ll have to start training us to do that stuff pretty soon.” The words seemed to hang in the air after he said them because Joe didn’t even make a noise in response. It was just silent, and Nick lay awake for a long time, wondering what those lessons would be like. He’s sure many of the other kids are more experienced than he is sexually; Nick has never even kissed anyone. He wonders if any of this would be easier if he’d had sex, or if knowing what it was like with a partner he cared about would only make it worse.
One morning they came into their regular classroom to find two new instructors there. They were honest but unsympathetic. "Today we'll begin teaching you about the sexual services you'll perform as body slaves," said the older of the two, a small woman in a dark, form-fitting jumpsuit, her greying hair pulled back tightly from her face. "Up until now you may have hoped that these services would not be required in the household you'll eventually serve, and it's very true that in some households body slaves do not perform these duties, but in the overwhelming majority of cases, these are things you will need to be familiar with. We’re going to tell you the truth about these things, no euphemisms, no squeamishness, and if you have questions, you should ask them. You will be fucked by your owner, and likely also by your owner's family, friends, colleagues, and political allies. If you are sold commercially, you will be fucked by hotel guests, by repair shop employees, by market customers. Because you are a slave, nothing about the disposition of your body is your own choice, and the sooner you understand this and learn to live by it, the less painful your life and your master's will be."
Nick could see some of the other kids trembling, even some of those older than himself folding their hands tightly and forcing back tears. But he kept his eyes wide open and did not cry, did not even respond when Joe leaned a little closer into him. He had to be alone right now, the way he would be once he was bought. No matter how small and scared he felt, no matter how much he didn’t want any of the things they were setting up to demonstrate at the front of the room, he had to survive it on his own.
They started with anatomy lessons, a basic overview of the parts of genitalia: male, female, intersexed, mutilated and decorated in all sorts of ways in the vids they showed. “It is within any owner’s rights to make any of these modifications on you,” the woman told them, over a hologram showing a penis split down the urethra and rejoined with luminescent thread.
Nick remembered the anatomy lessons they’d had in his primary school, how all the kids had laughed at the long scientific words for their body parts. No one laughed this time. Some of the children here were probably not even old enough to have covered anatomy in school yet, and it made Nick feel sick to think that this would be their first time hearing about the way their bodies worked. He risked a glance at Joe and found him staring wide-eyed at the vids, mouth open in horror.
It seemed to go on and on, hours of lecturing on how their most sensitive parts worked, and how they could be modified to an owner’s liking. Nick pressed his legs tightly together in unconscious defense as a vid showed the process of castration, the wounded flesh sterilized and cauterized, marked with a brand showing who owned the slave’s body.
Nick had never realized how many things were done to slaves under their plain public uniforms, what the slaves he’d always seen in the marketplaces back home could be hiding. When nearly every kid in the room was shaking and flinching at each new image, the instructors turned off the holo-generator. “We’ll continue tomorrow,” said the man, younger and softer spoken, who had given most of the presentation. “Please come prepared with questions.”
It was so much like what a normal teacher, a real teacher for real people, would say, and that was somehow as disorienting as anything. Nick felt lightheaded and dizzy when he stood to leave the classroom, as though the afterimage of all those unnaturally pierced and sewn and stretched bodies was burned in behind his eyes. Joe put an arm around him, and for once Nick didn’t protest, holding onto his big brother as they made their way back to the dorm.
The rumor spread like wildfire in the dining hall that night: tomorrow they would be given their first set of instruments, strange devices on which to practice their sexual skills. Nick wrinkled his nose when Joe whispered this to him, still thinking about the slave anatomy lectures, although the instruments couldn't be anything that extreme. "They can't touch us," Joe reminded him, "so it's just us, just for us to figure out."
Nick shook his head. That didn't make it better, and he didn't want to talk about it. He ate the rest of his dinner without tasting it and got back to the room before the warning bell for lights out had even rung. Joe was still in the entertainment lounge downstairs, watching the filtered vid channels they let slaves in training see -- no news, no current affairs, no live content of any kind, only rebroadcasts that had been bouncing around in the void for years.
He felt jittery, keyed up after all the sex vids and the explanations of them, all the whispers and suggestive hand motions in the dining hall. Nick didn’t want to let them affect him, and it wasn’t as though he liked what he had heard about the “instruments,” but he couldn’t help the way his body reacted when he thought about sex. His dick was half-hard, and the fidgety desire to touch it had plagued him for hours. It wasn’t just the vids or the talk; it was also being fourteen and having all this energy pent up all the time, just waiting to embarrass him.
Nick looked at the door, then took the chance and stripped out of his loose uniform pants. He hadn't touched himself in days, had barely been alone enough to consider it, but at that moment it seemed so simple compared to everything else that was and would be expected of him. It was easier to focus on this than to let his thoughts bounce over everything he’d seen so far in training. Cupping a hand around his dick and stroking until it felt good, until the feeling good blotted out everything else. He didn't try to imagine anything in the space behind his eyelids, let the physical sensation carry him, since all his old fantasies seemed like contraband, personal things he should have left behind. It didn't take very long; it never did. Once, mortifyingly, Joe had told him that he would develop more stamina as he got older, but Nick didn't really care. He was only pleasing himself. For right now, that was enough. He held his dick in his hand after he came, anxiety filtering back as he looked at it, the pink, vulnerable head resting in his palm, the fold of his foreskin, the little smeared slit. All of it might be just more flesh to mark and claim once he was owned.
Every trainee was given a package with their ID number on it the next day at the beginning of class. Nick looked around the room, noticing that the youngest kids had the largest packages. Some of the ones even younger than Nick could barely see over the tops of the sealed boxes on their tabletops, and Nick leaned back in his chair, not wanting to touch his own. Joe was curious though, turning the package between his hands, checking to see if it rattled, although Nick was sure it was too carefully packed for that.
"These instruments are yours to use," the older teacher said. Even after two weeks, Nick didn't know her name. "Younger and smaller trainees have been given a wider variety of instruments because we assume they will need more gradual preparation. As I have told you before, you will most likely all be used sexually by your owners, by their families, by their friends, and by their colleagues. Because most of you are underage, this part of the training program must by law be voluntary -- we cannot monitor nor require that you use what we've provided for you. But you're risking serious injury if you do not. Going into a sexual situation with an experienced slave owner without preparing yourself is foolhardy at best."
She launched into a long explanation of the "instruments" that might be contained in their packages: dildos of various sizes designed for vaginal and anal penetration, clamps and weights designed to cause pain in sensitive areas, and salves and creams to make the use of the other things easier. The teachers traded off giving a long list of precautions and safety instructions, so much to remember that for the first time since they'd arrived, Nick had to jot down notes on his tablet. He could see other kids around them doing the same thing, although Joe just looked over his shoulder as Nick wrote.
They were dismissed two hours before the usual time. "Practice," the teacher said firmly, looking at each of them in turn, most everyone shying away from eye contact. "Find a partner to help you, if you like. We cannot encourage you in this, but as long as your partner is also underage, there is no statute prohibiting it."
Joe raised his eyebrows at Nick, and as Nick realized what Joe was implying his face went hot. "You're my brother," he wanted to say, but the room was so quiet that everyone would hear if he did.
As crazy as the idea was, as Nick looked around the room he realized that there was no one else he could imagine partnering with. So many of the other kids had been developing friendships, friendships close enough that they could trust their bodies to people they'd only known for a month. There were clumps of people around the emptying room, making whispered plans, and one of the older girls even beckoned to Joe to join her. Nick felt a lurch of possessiveness. He hadn't let himself make friends, since he knew he couldn't keep them, and now Joe was all he had.
Nick couldn't tell him not to go with the girl, even though he wanted to. If Joe wanted to practice sex with a stranger, that was his choice. Joe looked at him anyway, questioning, and Nick swallowed down his feelings and gave a little shrug. He could practice on his own with Joe gone. It would be better, getting a feel for the things his body was capable of by himself. Nick walked out of the room, back down the long hallway towards the lift to the dorms. He didn't look back.
Nick sat down cross-legged on his narrow bed and set the box squarely in front of him. He would unpack it thoroughly. He would figure out what all the things inside were. He would practice using them on himself until the regular class period ended, and then he would stop. He wouldn't think too much about it, he wouldn't think about what Joe was doing with the girl, he wouldn't get tangled up in whether or not it felt good. It didn't matter. His body was something to use, and he just had to figure out how to do it, like any physics problem at school.
There were three dildos, and he laid them out in size order on his blanket, lining them up smallest to largest. Even the smallest was larger than Nick's own dick, and the thought of putting it inside himself was intimidating. There was a plug too, and Nick's stomach knotted as he thought of wearing it, practicing with it, walking around with it as they were expected to do. He lined up the little clamps as well, one set for his nipples, one set for his balls, deciding he would not try them today, them or the heavy black cockring in the box beneath them. What would the point of that be if he couldn't even get hard, and surely he couldn't get hard while he was sticking something up his butt.
He settled the bottle of standard lubricant they had provided in the crook of his knee to warm it, touching his new toys. There was a part of him that wanted to defy orders, to ignore all the warnings that it would hurt worse and put all these things back in their box and leave them there. But then Nick thought of Joe, practicing with the girl, learning how to do these things, and Nick couldn't let Joe get ahead of him in this.
Nick undressed and lay down, spreading his legs and pointing his toes to the corners of the bed. He picked up the smallest dildo, and the smooth surface of it warmed to his touch. They had said it was best to start by using your fingers, but that was somehow too intimate; it wasn’t as much like touching himself if it was only the dildo. He covered the smallest dildo in lube and pressed it to his asshole, the rounded head bumping against the opening, pressing not quite hard enough. Nick shut his eyes.
He felt stupid and childish and scared. This, after all, was so much better than what would come after training was done.
Nick pressed harder, forcing the tip of the dildo into his ass, and even that burned a little, narrow as it was, the weight of it prying him open. Slowly, he worked it deeper, twisting it into himself, and it seemed to go on forever, even though it hadn't looked that long when he was just holding it in his hand. Little by little until it was all the way into him, his hand pressed into the crack of his ass, the dildo pressed deep into him, not hurting exactly but still burning a little, taking up too much space inside him. Nick held it still, his every breath jostling it a little, so that it seemed even bigger, even stranger. They had said there was some way it would feel good, the slide of it applying pressure to his prostate gland in a way that might be better than this, might even be pleasurable. Nick couldn’t decide if he wanted that, or if it was better that it was uncomfortable, that every move he made reminded him that this wasn’t something he wanted to feel. He circled the dildo a little more, turning it inside himself until suddenly he felt something new, a little spark of something that made his dick twitch for the first time. And after that he couldn’t help chasing it, see-sawing the dildo into his ass, slowly, so slowly, in case he missed it by going too fast. But it was tricky, trickier than he’d thought, and after a while Nick stopped moving the dildo and moved his ass instead, rocking back onto it, even though it was awkward and didn’t quite feel good.
It was as he was experimenting, twisting his hips up to meet the depth of the dildo, that Joe walked in. Nick went still, mortified, his asshole tensing, trying to close up tight again. He wondered what he looked like, skinny legs splayed wide, cheeks spotted pink. Joe swallowed, dryly and audibly, and he paused, one hand clenched on the doorframe, his expression unreadable. Then he knelt beside Nick’s bed and whispered, “Can I help?”
Nick was too ashamed and worked up to answer. He could feel Joe’s breath ruffling his hair.
“It’ll be better if I help,” Joe coaxed. “I promise.” He looked straight into Nick’s face, his eyes wide, one hand coming up to push a tangled curl off Nick’s forehead. The shock of even that small touch was electric, and Nick had been practicing on his own for so long. He didn’t need persuasion. He nodded. After all, Joe had tried this by now, with the girl from their class, and that was more expertise than Nick had going for him.
Still the sensation of one of Joe’s fingers, thickly coated in lube, sliding around the stretched opening of his asshole, was confusingly intimate. “You have to be wet enough,” Joe said matter-of-factly, even though Nick had been the one taking notes and paying attention in class. His dick started to rise, as Joe pulled the dildo partway of him and then fucked it back in in one slow, steady thrust.
Instinctively Nick cupped his hand around his stiffening dick, ashamed that there was some part of him, however deeply buried, that found this humiliating process arousing. But Joe only knocked his hand away, saying, "S'okay, it's good to like it. You're just" - he looked away for a moment, up at the ceiling as if he could find the word he was searching for up there - "responsive. That's awesome."
Nick's cheeks burned, but he dropped his hand, tried to concentrate on what Joe was doing, so he'd know how to do it to himself next time. Tried not to focus on how weird it was being touched like this by his brother.
“Have you figured out the prostate thing yet?” Joe asked, and Nick had to shake his head. Joe pulled the dildo out of him, all the way out of him, so he ached with the sudden emptiness. But then Joe’s fingers were filling him up again, parting him and stretching him open in a different way. “It’s easier like this,” Joe explained.
Nick shut his suddenly tearing eyes. His brother wasn’t supposed to teach him this, move in him this way, twisting his fingers slow and gentle until Nick felt it again, that heat building in his belly, the swoop of pleasure that curled his toes. “There,” Joe said, pressing a little, rolling his fingertips over that spot until Nick’s dick started to react, fattening up between his legs. Just a physical reaction, but knowing that did nothing to diminish the fear and disgust he felt at himself. His own body was betraying him, his hips swiveling to follow Joe’s hand, his balls tingling.
“You can come, Nick,” Joe said softly, when he’d teased Nick right up to the edge of orgasm without touching his dick at all. “It’s all right to feel good. It’s all right. Just let yourself.” There was something coaxing in his voice, soft and persuasive. Nick wrapped a trembling hand around the shaft of his dick, and it only took two strokes before he came.
Joe held his fingers in deep, watching Nick’s face even though Nick couldn’t look at him just then. He kept so still, lining up their breathing so that every time Nick breathed in, Joe breathed out. It was a game they used to play when they were little, on the long shuttle rides out to the resort on their homeworld they visited every summer. Nick was always comforted by it, by having Joe’s attention so fully focused on him, but now it was strange too, Joe’s fingers inside him, holding him open.
“You okay?” Joe asked, pulling out at last, leaving Nick to wind the blanket around himself like a shield.
“I’ll be fine,” Nick said.
Joe looked torn, like he wanted to reach out, his hand hovering awkwardly at Nick’s shoulder. And Nick wasn’t sure if he wanted Joe to touch him anymore either. Finally Joe stood up, heading towards their small bathroom. “Next time we can try one of the bigger ones if you want,” he said over his shoulder.
Nick’s asshole was still sore and slick. He was naked underneath the standard-issue blanket. Every part of him felt raw. “Thanks,” he managed. He was grateful, in a way, and he knew Joe didn’t have to help him.
“You’re welcome,” said Joe quietly. “I don’t want this to be hard for you. Harder than it has to be.”
Nick nodded. Joe had been gentle with him, as respectful as he could be while fingering Nick’s ass. And it hadn’t hurt by the end, which he probably couldn’t have accomplished on his own. It could have been a lot worse, Nick tried to tell himself, but he still felt sick in the pit of his stomach.
“Did you have sex with her?” Nick asked in the dark that night.
“With who? Demi?”
“Is that her name?”
“Yeah, that’s her name. I didn’t have sex with her. We were just practicing. Just like I did with you.”
“Just practicing,” Nick repeated. He felt strangely hollow, hearing Joe say it like that. Of course it was just practicing, with him and with Demi. They all had to learn, and it was better not to do it on their own, and Joe was helpful by nature. None of what had happened today was something any of them wanted. That didn’t make him feel better either.
The next day everyone Nick saw looked as uncomfortable as he felt. They all knew how they’d spent their afternoon the day before, and even many of the kids who had paired off yesterday couldn’t look at each other now. They were subdued during more vids showing different kinds of sexual intercourse, all of them running together in a blur of different skin tones and slapping flesh until Nick just stopped watching, letting his eyes drift to Joe beside him. Joe saw him looking and reached out for his hand, taking it and lacing their fingers together like he had on the day they arrived. Joe held his hand through the rest of the class, stroking Nick’s knuckles with his thumb, and Nick couldn’t help feeling a little bit better.
“Do you want to…” Joe said as they were leaving the classroom, swinging their clasped hands and looking happy for the first time in days. He waved at Demi, but he didn’t even move toward her in the crowd.
“Sure,” Nick said before he could think too much about it.
They left lunch early to go back to their room, and Nick couldn’t help but feel a sick thrill of anticipation as Joe lay down in bed beside him, both of them naked this time, their bodies warm together. “Do you want to try the bigger one this time?” Joe asked, touching a slick fingertip to Nick’s asshole, feeling him out.
“I guess.”
“You’ll be fine. I won’t let it hurt.” He twisted his fingertip in a little, Nick’s insides giving around it, making room.
“I can help you too. After. If you want,” Nick whispered as Joe dug out the dildo and lube, and Joe paused.
“Yeah, thanks.”
Joe opened him up on two fingers again, until Nick was shaking and hot all over, and when Joe finally slid the dildo into him, it barely even hurt. Nick heard himself whimpering, tried to swallow back every helpless little noise that threatened to burst out of him, but he couldn’t concentrate. And then Joe wrapped his other hand around Nick’s dick, and that was so much better and so much worse at the same time. He came all over his belly, all over Joe’s fingers, forgetting that Joe was his brother, forgetting that they had been forced into this, feeling nothing but good for that one moment.
“You’re good at this,” Joe said, pulling the dildo out of him.
Nick sat up, curled his legs up to his chest self-consciously. “Shut up.”
“No, Nicky, that’s a good thing. That’s what they want. And don’t you want to be at the top of the class?”
“Not like this. Not a class like this.” He felt so ashamed suddenly.
Joe gathered him into a hug, held on until Nick relaxed and let him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you feel bad. Do you want to help me practice? You don’t have to, but, you know, I’d like help.”
Nick sighed. “Sure.”
He couldn’t help noticing the differences in their bodies, the trail of dark hair on Joe’s stomach, the heaviness of his balls, the places where Joe was starting to look grown up while Nick still looked like a kid. Of course they liked that better, the traders; everyone had told him that, how his soft, fair skin would fetch a high price at market. He touched Joe’s asshole, pushed inside slowly with one fingertip, testing the give of it, the way Joe stretched open for him. It didn’t take long before Joe was asking him for more, spreading his legs wider and swearing he could take it, it would be fine, it wouldn’t hurt him.
Nick tried not to think too hard about what he was doing, or look too closely at the line of Joe’s neck as he arched back on the bed, or let Joe’s soft groans turn him on all over again. This wasn’t sex; it was practice for a job they both had to do and neither of them had asked for. But he couldn’t look away as Joe stroked up the length of his own dick, smearing it wet with precome, pausing and jerking himself off hard and fast. He had watched all those vids and masturbated hundreds of times on his own, and still, this was different, watching Joe touch himself that way, working himself hard and fast between his clutched fingers.
They did it a lot in the following weeks: practicing. It wasn’t sex, and Nick tamped down all the confusing feelings he had when Joe touched him. This was work, something they had to practice so they could be obedient slaves when they finished training, and it was easier to remember that when Joe was off with Demi, doing all the same things and not meaning anything by it.
And then, as abruptly as the unit on sexual service had begun, it ended. It was oddly disorienting, not spending his afternoons in bed with Joe, not getting off every day. Nick was jittery in the new lessons, with nowhere to put that energy, and he couldn’t exactly ask Joe to help him out with no reason. He told himself over and over that he didn’t even want Joe to do that, that it was a relief.
They were back to etiquette classes for a few days before they began on their special skills interviews. Each trainee was recorded demonstrating any skill of affinity that might make them more saleable on the open market. “It doesn’t matter what,” said their regular etiquette teacher. “It can be an academic skill, or an artistic one, or even a family disposition to a particular feature that might be good for breeding. Please be prepared to disclose any and all special talents to your interviewer. Failure to do so is, of course, illegal, as you are all central government property until you are sold to a private citizen or a corporation.”
Nick could hear all the other trainees discussing this at lunch that day, what exactly counted as a skill or affinity. “Are you going to talk about music?” Joe asked, and Nick sighed. It was harder to talk about things he already cared about, but he sort of had to. He had tried not to think about playing music as one-by-one the instruments in their house disappeared to pay their parents’ debts over the last few years, until all that was left was a cheap holo-keyboard that Nick could compose simple melodies on, his fingers moving instinctively to pick out a tune. Eventually even the holo-keyboard broke down, but Nick still remembered the feel of it, the sensors on his fingers that made the “keys” make noise when he moved them a certain way; not as good as the manual piano they’d had when he was little, an exquisitely made antique, but still something.
He sang for the interviewer, just to prove he could, and when he listed off the instruments he could play, part of him hoped that they would make him prove it, bring him a piano to practice on, its fine white keys worn and yellowed with age, it resonant tone as deep as Nick remembered. But all they did was make a note in his record, no proof needed. For all Nick knew he could have claimed to train animals in his spare time, or weave replicas of AncientEarth tapestries, other things they couldn’t possibly have had him demonstrate. But he was only honest, wondering how his music could be used to suit his new master, wondering if he would grow to hate it if he were forced to play instead of choosing it freely.
As the weeks passed, people started to disappear from their classes, there one day and gone the next. It was mostly the older kids, the ones who would be eighteen soonest, who could be put into stasis for only a year or two before being sold as legal adults. Joe was sixteen, and the fewer people there were in class in the morning, the more Nick worried that Joe would be next. He didn’t say anything about it, but the thought of being here without his brother was more than he could handle. He needed Joe, and however hard he tried, he hadn’t been able to stop himself.
One day they were called into the office they’d gone to on the first day, and the fact that they had not called Joe alone was cold comfort. The same admin woman was there at her desk, scrolling through files on her desktop display, as they entered. “Joseph and Nicholas Jonas,” she said, tapping a file and opening it in the holo-field above the desk, so all their personal information spilled out in midair. He saw graphs of “progress” statistics and wondered how they could be measured. Did they know when he shut his eyes in class during vids about typical slave punishment, or how he came on Joe’s fingers at night without Joe even touching his dick? The graph showed a steady upward motion. “Your time at this facility is almost complete. Tomorrow you will put into a state of suspended animation and moved to our stasis facility, where you will remain until you have reached legal adulthood.”
They both nodded their understanding, and Nick wished Joe was holding his hand right now, so his fingers would shake a little less.
“The agency has made a fairly unusual recommendation for the two of you, however. Because of the intensive way you have been involved with each other over the course of this program and the particular progress we have seen you make together, they have decided you should be sold as a set, and therefore Joseph will be kept in stasis for several extra years until Nicholas has also reached legal adulthood.”
It should have made Nick happy, but it just made him feel sick to his stomach. They had monitored, they had known; maybe they had even seen him and Joe together, doing all those things that felt so intimate. He pressed his lips tight together and didn’t speak.
“Obviously, if we’re unable to find a buyer for the two of you as a pair, you will eventually be sold separately, but I anticipate that you two can fetch a very high price as a, shall we say, matched set. If you have no questions, you will be put into stasis tomorrow morning, and when you wake up, you will both be adults.”
She looked back and forth between the two of them and then nodded smartly. “All right, then you are free to go. If you have any personal effects you would like available to you when you come out of stasis, please leave them in the boxes provided in your room. A tech will arrive to take you to the medical wing before the breakfast bell tomorrow morning, so please be prepared to go then.”
She dismissed them, and as soon as they were out in the corridor, Joe threw his arms around Nick and hugged him tight. “We’re going to get to stay together,” he said. “Isn’t that amazing?”
Nick buried his face in Joe’s neck and didn’t say anything. He was grateful, but at the same time, they’d be slaves together not free. “They’re going to make us have sex. With each other. Whoever they sell us to, it’s so they can make us have sex with each other.”
“Better each other than other people, right?”
Nick didn’t want to touch Joe in front of anyone else; strangers would have been less disgustingly intimate. But he didn’t say that. “I’m glad we get to stay together,” he said instead.
The tech came early the next morning, not so long after Nick and Joe had both given up on pretending to sleep. He was only a few years older than Joe, and he didn’t try to make small talk as he led them to the medical wing, a place neither of them had ever visited. They hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye to anyone, and surely that was intentional. This way they couldn’t give the other trainees any clue what to expect when their time came.
The stasis room was long and low, with a row of open tanks down its length, just waiting for cargo. There were wires and tubes and measuring implements everywhere, a confusing jumble of them hanging above each tank. “The doctor will be in shortly,” the tech said as he left them. Then he added, “It’s just like falling asleep,” as though the words would seem comforting and not eerie.
They were alone, just the two of them in this room full of highly technical, probably dangerous medical equipment, and Nick had a passing urge to smash everything in sight, just to see what would happen. “Where do you think they’ll store us?” Joe asked, looking around in unabashed fascination.
Nick wrinkled his nose. “I don’t want to think about it.” His own body, floating suspended in a tank, stacked someplace with who knew how many others.
“It’s not like we’ll know. Do you think we’ll know? Like be able to see ourselves from outside while we’re suspended?”
“That’s all metaphysical garbage people make up because they like to think there are things science can’t explain. The whole point is that your brain function is non-existent, that nothing in you anywhere is moving or growing or changing, not a single neuron.”
Joe grinned. “Now that’s the spoilsport little brother I love so much.”
“Shut up.”
Joe hugged him, in spite of Nick trying to bat him away. “Don’t fight me,” Joe said, digging his chin into Nick’s shoulder. “I won’t get to do this again for five years.”
“You won’t remember those five years,” Nick argued, but he laced his arms tight around Joe’s back.
A door at the other end of the room slid open, and in walked an older woman in a blue physician’s uniform. “Sit down, gentlemen,” she said, gesturing to a bench beside the nearest tank. “This is all a pretty simple process, but I’m going to run through it for you anyway. You’re going to be cleaned up in that room over there. Then we’ll put you under one at a time and get you settled in the tank. There will be one IV line running muscle relaxants and preservation agents into your bloodstream once you’re unconscious, and you’ll be fitted with an oxygen mask in case of any complications at this end that mean we have to wake you back up. But those are very rare. Everything else you see there is revivification equipment that will have to be attached to your bodies and shipped with the tank, but none of it should worry you. I’ve done this hundreds of times.” She smiled at them, more kindly than anyone had in months, and Nick wondered why anyone with a smile like that would be working in a slave training center.
The “clean-up” was as thorough and humiliating as Nick expected, and he tried to distance himself from his own body, float outside it like Joe had said as a tech washed him all over, his pad scrubbing at every fold and hollow of Nick’s naked body.
They were allowed a little pair of underwear when they got into the tank, and Nick didn’t care how kind the doctor’s smile was when she was looking at him almost naked and plugging tubes into his arms. She did Joe’s first, Nick noticed, and although she said they’d go under separately, she had them sit down in the tanks at the same time, both of them shifting awkwardly on the hard plastic, jostling the web of tubing around them.
“Joe first?” the doctor asked, even though she clearly didn’t mean it as a question.
Joe looked at Nick over the rim of the tank. “See you in five years,” Joe said casually, as though he wasn’t scared at all of what lay on the other side of that gap. “Love you.”
“Love you too,” Nick replied, as he watched Joe fitted with an oxygen mask and given an initial shot of sedative.
“Lie down and count back from 100,” the doctor said.
Nick watched his brother drift off to sleep, and after that he had to stop looking. It was too much like Joe was dead, lying there limp as the doctor and the tech checked his vital signs and the dosage for the next set of drugs. He could hear them even though he kept his eyes shut, reeling off numbers at each other, and he could hear when the tank started to fill with liquid, chemicals to preserve the surface of Joe’s body like the other drugs would preserve the inside. It was gross to think about, and Nick tried not to, but the rush of liquid in the tank was hard to ignore.
An alarm sounded, blaring out from the comm unit on the wall, one sharp shock of noise, and then the same cool, familiar voice from the office. “There has been a change of plans.”
The doctor picked up the message on her wrist unit. “A change of plans?” she asked incredulously, and now Nick couldn’t help looking at Joe floating in the tank, functionally dead. His stomach ached, and hysteria was rising like bile in the back of his throat. They were supposed to go under together. That was supposed to be the only good part of this, that whatever else happened, he and Joe could go into stasis together and wake up together.
“We’ve located a potential buyer, and they want to have, shall we say, a better matched set. Send him back to the dormitory. We’ll hang on to him for another six months, maybe a year.”
Nick sat still, curling into himself in the tank. Six months was a lifetime to survive here without Joe. The doctor sighed and tapped off her wrist comm. “All right, Nick. Up you get.” She helped him out with a hand on his elbow, and let him change into his trainee uniform with her back turned. “I’m sorry,” she said, as Nick took one last look at Joe in the tank, floating still and lifeless. He was going to wake up and not know about any of this.
Nick shook his head mutely. Then he went back to his newly single room and lay in bed for as long as he could.
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