Swordspoint fic
"Chained by Memories"
Crossposted to _Riverside a while ago, apologies if you have to read it twice!
As ever, any comments will be framed and hung over my bed. Many thanks and kisses go to my Beta, Just Ann Now.
Now: WARNING for M/M rape, not particularly graphic but clear enough.
It had been an excellent fight, and Richard St. Vier strode back to Tremontaine House in triumph. He went through the narrower backstreets, generally used only by the servants and porters and messengers, to enter through the gate of the Tremontaine Gardens. He wanted to avoid the grand front hall, where he would be waylaid by maids who were nervous and rather in awe of him, and footmen who were eager and rather jealous of him.
He found Alec where he had left him more than an hour ago: reading in the window seat of their bedroom, long legs stretched out on the cushions against the glass. The only change to the picture was that a few hundred pages more had been turned. The Duke Tremontaine looked up at Richard’s arrival and drawled,
“You’re beaming. And not bleeding. I take it everything went well?”
“Very. It was against someone called Julian Ross. I don’t know where he’s come from, but he’s really good, really fast.” The swordsman sat down on top of the writing desk, looking cheerful. “He’ll get popular quickly. And they only wanted it to first blood, so I’ll get to fight him again before long.”
The Duke had long since gotten bored of ruminating on how poetically peculiar his swordsman’s happiness concerning challenges was. “And how did you beat him?”
“Beat attack fourth and a fleche with a feint to the elbow,” said Richard, and grinned when Alec glared at him. “I cut his shoulder,” he amended. “Better?”
“Much,” the young man answered, stretching. Richard darted forward to pluck the book out of his hands, unceremoniously pulling him off the ledge. Alec, who never really seemed to have full control over his limbs, staggered against Richard, clutching at his shirt, and the swordsman took the opportunity to grab hold of his wrists. Alec struggled half-heartedly for a moment before retaliating by capturing Richard’s mouth and kissing him hard. Richard guided him backwards to press him against one of the elaborate posts at the foot of the bed, smugly pinning his hands over his head.
Alec yelped and pushed at Richard with the sudden strength of terror. His eyes were open too wide, his arms pulled back down across his chest. Richard’s first thought was to run back to him, restrain him, but he sensed too that this time the thing from which Alec had to be kept was Richard himself. He forced himself to take a step back.
Alec was shaking, tense and brittle.
“Alec? What’s wrong?”
Horn shoves him back into the wall, tearing at his trousers. He shouts, tries to kick him, but the shackles pull him off balance, and he staggers. Horn grabs hold of his hair, drags him down and forces him to turn around, to kneel against the wall, just like so many tortuous times with Mother in the shrine. The chains wrench his arms above his head and the freezing stone numbs the front of his thighs, but not the back, where Horn is pawing at him, then pushing into him, agonising, divine punishment. Alec screams and sobs into the wall, fighting uselessly against the chains, the hands. He shouts for Richard, though he doesn’t realise it, and wouldn’t understand why if he did. At one point he tries to kick at Horn’s stomach, but he can’t twist around enough to see, and every time he moves the shackles wrench his wrists, his shoulders.
Even much later, Alec never would explain the terror he had felt that once by the bed-posts, the horror of the memories behind it. But then, Richard never needed him to. He found out enough from Alec’s movements, as when, while fighting, he could realise how his opponent had been injured in the past. Here the challenge was to cure, not to injure, but still, over time he learnt: not to hold his lover's wrists above his head; not to move him from his hips; not to stand behind him and touch.
And later still, when not only was Horn long dead and buried, but when most of the city thought the Mad Duke and his swordsman fling were, too, Alec taught him to forget what he’d learnt: taking Richard’s hands and holding them where he wanted them, when he wanted them; making demands in his gorgeous, breathless bed-voice; then, in a voice entirely different: “Oh, Richard, stop thinking I’m still a challenge.”