Fiction. Lucien Pike demands his secretary’s time and attention.
Some character introspection and slice-of-life with Lucien Pike and Gellert Osgodby. 3.2k.
These characters were introduced in:
https://johannestevans.medium.com/gellerts-new-job-a57c3e6e26bd
Content warnings for blood and violence, animal death (in a fable), mild transphobia, general bastard men being bastards to one another. It’s not foot worship but there is an extended foot massage.
Gellert was dozing in a sunny spot in the lounge across from Pike’s office, shoulders against the padded head of an old chaise long. It was at least sixty or seventy years old — Pike had brought it over from his old house when they’d moved everything over to the hospital as their base of operations, and Gellert had had it reupholstered so that it was newly plush instead of threadbare, as it had been.
He had his arms crossed loosely over his chest, his head back and his feet up on the end of the couch, his shoes removed. When the door opened, he knew that it was Pike, because although he could feel the shift in the air at the size of him, he balanced his weight out on the uneven boards of the hospital’s floor, so that they creaked as they would for a far lighter man.
“You wearing your sunglasses?” asked Pike.
“It’s too bright, the light hurts my head,” said Gellert.
“So close the blind.”
“I don’t want to close the blind, I’m enjoying the sun.”
Pike huffed out a low sound, a laugh.
Pike’s optician was an ancient, grizzled woman with jowls that hung down like curtains, in parallel to the chain from her own glasses, and Pike had a long-standing relationship with her. Although he didn’t need glasses of his own to see, his vision utterly perfect, he had a variety of eyeglasses made with dark, frosted glass to protect him from the sun, all of them with caps that curled around the sides of the eye.
Pike had spare sets of sunglasses because he liked the metal of their rims and arms to match whatever jewellery he was wearing to cap his ears or to decorate his fingers and hair, but Bethel had made spares for Gellert because he broke so many of them these days, and she’d made him sunglasses like Pike’s.
They were a relief to wear, and like Pike, he’d begun to wear them whenever they were walking outside together, or even just outside of Pike’s particular territory, where the lights were always dimmed and everything tinted to warm colours.
He’d gone into a mundane supermarket on Tuesday — supermarkets were outlawed in magical communities as part of Cymru-Loegr’s antitrust laws, and it was one of the few crown restrictions that Lashton took to heart, if not out of respect for the crown rule — for the first time in nearly ten years. He hadn’t stayed for a long time, had only dipped inside to buy something to drink on his way elsewhere because it was closer than anywhere else.
He’d kept the sunglasses on the whole time, their deep red tint blocking out the painful white brightness of the supermarket displays and their product-stuffed shelves, forcing all the lights into dimness so that they couldn’t all demand his attention at once.
He’d had sunglasses before, but never ones like these, and he didn’t even think they were enchanted, just far more robustly made than sunglasses for humans. For vampires, eliminating excess sunlight was a starker safety concern, well-communicated by the frankly nauseating posters about eye ulceration in Bethel’s shop.
Gellert liked them — and Bethel made them to his prescription.
Pike slowly crossed the room with his cat-quiet gait, and Gellert opened his eyes, looking at him through the dark-tinted glass — or, more accurately, looking at Pike’s crotch, which was in line with Gellert’s head.
Through Pike’s impeccably tailored, gold pinstriped suit trousers, Gellert looked with unveiled disinterest at the prominent bulge against his right thigh, prominent, but not erect.
“Are you trying to tell me something?” he asked, directing the question more to Pike’s penis than the rest of him, and then leaning back to look up at Pike’s face.
“You sick?” Pike asked, and Gellert raised his eyebrows. Pike had removed his own glasses to come inside, was squinting in the bright summer’s light shining in from outside, and Gellert sat up to pull it down. He didn’t answer right away, letting Pike adjust to the dimmed light.
“I’m not sick,” said Gellert. “I was just resting, that’s all. Sunbasking.”
“Basking,” Pike repeated.
“You don’t know what it means?”
“Yeah, I fucking know what it means,” said Pike. “You just talk like an old man.”
“There’s something very funny about a vampire your age calling me an old man,” said Gellert. “Curious, isn’t it, that I’m not laughing?”
“You barely ever laugh,” said Pike.
“You’re barely ever funny,” Gellert replied, and Pike reached down, hooking his hand under the base of Gellert’s ankles and lifting them up, insinuating himself so that Gellert’s socked feet rested in his lap. Pike’s heavy thighs were higher up than the end of the chaise, almost as high as his head, and Pike took hold of one of them and began to massage it.
Gellert hissed out a tight, bitten-back noise: he wasn’t ticklish — he didn’t respond to tickling in the same way he didn’t respond to loud noises or sudden pain — but Pike’s strong, cold hands pressed hard against the soles of his feet, massaging the muscle there as deeply as was possible, and with Pike’s strength, that was very deeply indeed.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” he muttered, and Pike responded by sliding his thumb in one hard, smooth line down the centre of Gellert’s foot, forcing a breathless noise out of him and making him grasp tightly at the fabric of his own jumper.
“Why not?” asked Pike. “S’good for you. Deep tissue. Gets out the bad humours.”
“Don’t fucking put on the humour talk with me,” muttered Gellert. “I know full well what you do and don’t believe in, and if you didn’t believe in germs you wouldn’t make your factory staff wash their hands twice before coming in.”
“Small-minded, you is,” said Pike smugly, like he often did when he felt he’d won an intellectual point. The dull, aching pain that his fingers forced through the soles of Gellert’s feet culminated in a hot, burning sweetness that rushed up his calves and thighs and pooled between his legs. “Maybe I can believe in two things at once.”
“You can’t even hold two thoughts at once, Mr Pike,” said Gellert: Pike raised an eyebrow, quirked his lip up, and did something to Gellert’s foot that made him let out a sound that was more a whimper than a moan, though he tried to stifle the sound by pressing his balled fist against his mouth.
“You say I can’t hold two thoughts,” said Pike. “I’ll make it so you can’t hold one, mate.”
“Don’t call me mate when you’re touching my fe — eet, fuck, Lucien — !”
Gellert’s back was arching right off the chaise, and Pike didn’t let up for even half a moment, kept working his feet over with his precise, carefully ordered movements — the same as when he was cutting hair or shaving someone’s face, including his own. He did it with his meals, as well, separated everything on any plate given to him without even thinking about it, ordered it by colour and category, and then ate it in clockwise order.
Pain and pleasure combined into a sort of constant buzz and thrum that radiated up from one of his feet and then the other as Pike swapped over, and Gellert could barely breathe he was drawn up so tightly, the world narrowed down to the hard weight and strength of Pike’s hands.
He was breathing heavily by the time Pike stopped, started idly rubbing Gellert’s knees without any promise of moving up higher, and Gellert was red-faced, his eyes wet.
Pike’s nostrils were flaring as he breathed in deeply, and Gellert was surprised he didn’t push Gellert’s legs apart so that he could press between Gellert’s legs, inhale with his face buried against Gellert’s cunt, lap at where he was wet through the fabric.
Pike looked lost in his own little world — he’d gone to a meeting up in Llallwg Forest this morning. He’d told Gellert he didn’t want him coming, but Gellert hadn’t taken it personally. Yves, who was ordinarily Pike’s right hand, hadn’t been invited either: Pike had gone up alone, riding a motorbike instead of sitting in the back of a car.
“Can I ask you a question?” asked Pike.
“Something tells me you’re going to regardless.”
“What’s your real name?”
Gellert arched one eyebrow looking up at Pike very coolly, and retorted, “Why, are you hoping to make use of your fae blood and steal my soul with it?”
Pike looked down at him scornfully. “That’s fucking racist.”
“It’s speciesist,” said Gellert, “and yes, I know, that was my point.”
“Oh, fuck’s sake,” said Gellert. “It’s wrong to ask your fucking name now?”
“You know my name.”
“Yeah, but your real name — ”
“Is Gellert. It’s the name on my passport, on my ID, on my payslips — ”
“The name you were born with.”
“I wasn’t born with a name,” said Gellert. “My parents didn’t name me until after I was born.”
“Cunt,” said Pike irritably, and Gellert laughed.
“The point I am making, roundabout as it may be,” said Gellert, “is that it’s rude to ask.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know exactly,” said Gellert. “Why exactly it bothers me that you should ask — I suppose for the same reason I would be bothered if you called me she or her. That you call it my real name, when I haven’t used it in fifteen years, when it’s not my legal name. They call it a deadname, you know.”
Pike looked alarmed, his eyebrows furrowing, and he looked at Gellert uncertainly.
“Like a deadland?” he asked.
“Um,” said Gellert, and thought about it for a moment, even as he was lulled by the slow, careful rhythm of Pike’s hand rubbing his calf, back and forth. Coupled with the pleasant numbness and residual pleasure from Pike’s massage, it was sending him somewhere halfway between sleep and waking.
A deadland was a fae phenomenon: fae lands, when first they were founded, were tied to the blood of whoever lived on them, thrived in them. Gellert didn’t pretend to entirely understand it, but then, he wasn’t meant to. It was to do with how powerfully magic flowed through fae land, built as it was into other dimensions, even though those pockets of extra existence sometimes occurred naturally — it had to be tied in some way to a living bloodline.
The bloodlines could be moved, the stewardship passed over, but when it wasn’t, when all the people attached to a piece of land died, the magic was unfocused, and the land went… Bad.
Wrong.
Pike was looking at him concentratedly, his gaze focused, concern writ in the press and twist of his lips, his unblinking eyes. He took Gellert very seriously, when he realised Gellert wasn’t joking about something, and for fae, even fae like Pike who only ever visited fae kingdoms and didn’t belong to any of them, a deadland was very serious business.
It was serious business for everyone, really — very few people entered a deadland and came out again still living.
“They call it a deadname,” said Gellert, “not because it’s cursed like a deadland is, but because it’s charred ground, no longer… nourishing. Old. To be forgotten — buried.”
“Makes it sound like you’re transitioning from being a corpse to being alive,” said Pike.
“Some people see it like that,” said Gellert.
“How do you see it?”
“I think,” said Gellert slowly, lifting one foot against Pike’s chest, so that Pike wrapped his hand loosely around it and cradled it to his chest, tapped his foot against Gellert’s heel, “that I was alive with my birth name, and I am alive with my own one — my real one, I would call it. But there was a wrongness, before, a… it was like some of my limbs were out of joint. Not just with my old name, my old clothes. When I started testosterone it wasn’t anything mystical, it wasn’t like a paling falling or a veil withdrawn — it was just like that, a limb being set back into place.
“Emotions I had always been overwhelmed by were suddenly bearable, easy to digest, to comprehend, in a way they never had been before. Certain phantom pains, stiffnesses, strange oddities where I felt not at home in my own body, they faded away. Do you understand what I’m telling you, when I say it was not mystical, but medical? Psychological, physiological?”
“My head got stuck on you saying paling. An’t heard anyone use a word like that for years,” said Pike.
Gellert kicked him in the chin, and Pike responded by kissing it through his sock. Gellert released a sound of disgust, and Pike kept hold of his foot.
“Are you sick?” asked Gellert.
“What? No. Why the fuck d’you think I’m sick for?”
“You’re unusually pensive, that’s all,” said Gellert. “Not your usual raucous self.”
“Fae don’t like me,” said Pike.
“No one likes you,” said Gellert. “I don’t even like you.”
Pike looked at him very flatly, and Gellert sighed.
“My mum’s parents were born in London, both of ‘em,” said Pike. “But at least they was both fae, full-blooded, and they was both from fae places. My mum grew up in London, with other fae but not with other fae. And that was ‘fore I was a vampire.”
“Fae don’t care for vampirism.”
“They think it’s unnatural.”
“Funny,” said Gellert.
“Is it?”
“Mmm. Fae don’t like vampirism because it’s a disease cultivated for aesthetic and class — a cosmetic disease. And yet well I know that fae love a good Botox injection.”
Pike laughed at that, and although the smile was thin, it was genuine.
“Feel better?”
“Yeah. Feel better if you suck my cock.”
“And I’d feel better if you sucked mine, but such is life.” Gellert was rubbing his foot absently against Pike’s chest, and Pike was letting him, still cupping his ankle, his foot. “You’ve never told me anything about your mother before.”
“You’ve never told me anything about your dad.”
“What’s to tell? He’s dead.”
“D’you like him?”
“I don’t remember,” said Gellert. “He died when I was little more than a child, three or four. Long enough to struggle with me, more so than my mother did — long enough to ask for help on both of their behalf.”
“You’re not bitter then,” said Pike dryly.
“Your mother was a whore,” said Gellert, and Pike lunged for him, squeezing his hand so hard around Gellert’s throat that Gellert coughed, and he slapped Pike on the inside of the wrist so that his grip relaxed.
“You fucking take that back,” he growled.
“Don’t pull at my father’s thread to get me not to pull at your mother’s,” snapped Gellert, peeling Pike’s hand away and laying it on his chest instead. “Just tell me you don’t want to talk about her.”
“I don’t want to talk about her!”
“Yes, understood,” said Gellert. “You know I push your buttons because you make them so accessible. If I can see them, so can anyone.”
“What kind of name is Gellert?” asked Pike.
“Gelert was a dog,” said Gellert.
“This like an Indiana Jones thing?” asked Pike, and Gellert huffed in amusement, minutely shaking his head.
“Llewelyn mab Iorwerth,” said Gellert, “the mundie King of Gwynedd, almost a thousand years ago. They say he came home from hunting one day to find the crib in his infant son’s room overturned, the room in disarray, the window broken. Blood was spattered upon the ground, stained the nursery’s curtain. Llewellyn’s most noble hound, Gelert, who he had left to guard the child, came up to him, wagging his tail. His muzzle and the front of his chest were stained with darkening blood.”
Pike had gone serious again now, looking down at Gellert uncertainly, his head tilted to one side to listen carefully. The gold cap on the tip of his ear was shining as it moved in the light.
“Llewelyn felt at once the most impossible melancholy, and more than that, the most overwhelming rage. In less than an instant, he had drawn his sword and driven it through his loyal friend’s breast, piercing his heart. The dog looked up at him with betrayal in his eyes — why, his eyes asked, begged? Why would you do this? He did not understand. And as the dog’s yelps quietened, as he died on Llewellyn’s blade, he heard another sound, an infant, crying. He found his son nestled safely amidst blankets and pillows, utterly unharmed on the floor beside his crib — and beyond the nursery’s blood-stained curtain, the wolf Gelert had fought to protect him, its throat torn, its body still and dead.”
“I heard that story before,” said Pike. “’Cept it was a man from Bombay told me, and in his version, it was a mongoose.”
“A mongoose?”
“Yeah,” said Pike. “A mongoose killed a snake and the woman thought it killed her baby and she smashed its nut in.”
“Right,” said Gellert. “That’s all the commentary you have?”
“What d’you want me to say, that it’s fucked up you called yourself after a dog? You know it is.”
“It’s not about the dog, it’s about the story.”
“You want to stop someone killing a baby?”
“The story,” said Gellert, “is about a creature being killed simply for doing what it is supposed to do. Because of its appearance, because of Llewellyn’s assumptions and his own anxieties, the dog was killed, when it did no wrong.”
“No,” said Pike.
“What the fuck do you mean, no?”
“It’s about greed,” said Pike, sounding infuriatingly self-satisfied.
“How is it about greed?”
“Because the priest went off to get food and left the baby.”
“What priest?”
“The priest the woman was married to. The father of the baby.”
“Pike, it’s not about the mongoose.”
“It is, it’s the same story, so — “
“Jesus fucking Christ, Lucien, it’s not about the Indian story, it’s about the story I just told you.”
“It’s the same story.”
“No, it’s fucking — !”
Gellert looked at Pike’s face, at the way his lips were smiling in a cold, smug way. “I only push your buttons,” he said, mocking Gellert’s precise inflection and his northern lilt in the same imitation, “’cause you make it so fuckin’ easy.”
“You just guaranteed I never suck your cock again,” said Gellert.
“Not this week, maybe,” replied Pike. “I don’t wanna… work. Can’t think right.”
“I can handle everything,” said Gellert. “I expected you to be gone for longer in any case, until — ”
“No,” said Pike. “No, not you either.”
“You don’t want me to work?”
“No. Want you with me.”
“Doing what?”
“Don’t matter,” said Pike. “Bath. You need a haircut — cut your hair. Fuck. Watch a movie.”
“You don’t want me to call a woman you know for that? Mirabelle, or Yuuko, or — ”
“You,” said Pike stubbornly. “Me and you.”
“Lucien, I was only lying down for an hour, but I have the new maps to draw up, the factory numbers to go through, those applications for — ”
“Later,” said Pike. “Tomorrow.”
“Okay,” said Gellert quietly, and swung his legs out of Pike’s lap to stand.
“You’d’ve liked my mother,” said Pike.
“Would I have?” asked Gellert.
“Yeah,” he said. “She was a seamstress. Sharp. Same as you.”
Gellert nodded, and didn’t prod at the wound.
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