Romance/fantasy short. An arena brute enjoys one of the attendants.
3.5k, M/M. Nasty violent guys getting off on treating each other a bit roughly. Adapted from a TweetFic.
Kick has fought in several arenas over the past few years, and this one is no different to the others. At first, you come, you pay to enter, you fight, you win money. You come back, you pay again, you fight some more, you win some more. He’s risen enough through the ranks that the process has changed a little for him, but it’s the same as other arenas too — he doesn’t pay to enter any more, and he’s given a decent stipend to stay and entertain, to keep fighting.
He’s a headliner, now.
One benefit of this, of being a regular fighter, is that you get to take your pick of the attendants, many of them pretty young things who like to lust and swoon over the fighters, like to lay their delicate hands on your body and feel the muscle under their fingers; others are squires who are training to fight themselves, who are still too young or too unrefined to win in the arena just yet.
Kick’s favourite isn’t either of the two — he’s a little older than the rest, a little scrawny, and he walks with a visible limp. He keeps Kick’s armour clean and in good condition when assigned to him, oils up his body with care and attention.
More importantly, the first time Kick comes in from a fight with a fire burning under his skin, his cock hard and his heart beating fast, grabs Stone by the hair and pulls him to his knees, he drops obediently to the floor. He stumbles a little, but he doesn’t protest, doesn’t argue, doesn’t fight he stares up at Kick with his eyes wide for a moment before he opens his mouth.
“Good,” Kick murmurs. “You know what you’re for.” And when he eases his cock down Stone’s throat he feels the heart and skill of his tongue, feels the wonder of his lips closing around Kick’s cock and the satisfying heat and pressure of it even before he starts to fuck Stone’s throat.
Kick is good, is the thing — there’s a reason that when he asks to have Stone and only Stone, the arena management immediately arrange for Stone to be his regular attendant; when he asks for nicer clothes, finer armour, they’re provided for him; when he asks for more money, they give it to him.
It’s a fair gamble on their part, he’s got no illusions about that — if Kick dies whilst still in the arena’s confines, still not only in their employ but in the lodgings they provide him, they’ll easily be able to recoup their losses.
He’s strong, he’s vicious, he’s fast, he’s cunning. The arena-goers fawn over him, naturally, and sometimes he fucks them too, the prettier ones with fat arses and grabbable hips. He likes to fuck the posh ones best, the ones who’ve never brawled or fought or even been close enough to smell the blood. He likes to see the fear in their eyes as they realise just how fucking strong he is, as they thrill with terror and arousal and want at the understanding that there’s a monster in their bed, a predator, and that he’ll fuck them until he’s satisfied and until then, they’ll be powerless but to withstand him.
Stone —
Stone is different, of course.
Kick mostly lives to fight, and fucking is a second thought — when he’s in the mood, a fuck is wonderful, but mostly it’s something he’s drawn to just to work out the energy after a fight, something he doesn’t want to think about. A good attendant is valuable, not just to dress one’s wounds or polish your armour — he can fuck their holes, their mouths, not have to worry about anybody’s feelings or attachment to him.
Kick mostly doesn’t have the time or inclination for people’s feelings or their desires for relationships — he likes to train when not fighting, and he does demonstrations for the Royal Court or teaches the students the Queen requests that he give tutelage to; he seeks out the best eateries and he eats voraciously, often allotted complimentary meals or special dishes in recognition of his work.
He doesn’t drink much. He likes to be drunk, likes ales and beers and meads, certainly likes when people don’t want him to pay for any of these things, but what he doesn’t enjoy is how friendly people get when drinking, doesn’t much like to be crowded in by the roaring people in a tavern or a pub.
There’s a reason he’s always been drawn to the empty spaces of an arena floor, fighting to be the only man left on the sand, and not a member of the audience.
Mostly he lingers in the comfortable quarters arranged for him or in the arena’s gymnasium — he swims, he enjoys the sauna, he gets massages, he exercises, he fucks the attendants.
There are a dozen of them, and one or two would be warriors themselves one day. He can see the muscles on those now, feel the strength under their skin as he grabs their waists or grips at their thighs, see the wild fever in their eyes while he’s fucking them or when they ask if he wants to practise sparring, that beautiful glint of bloodlust that will serve them well.
The rest will never make it.
They’ll either learn that at this stage, get told they’re better off in another job, learn that if they want to linger in the arena they’ll be better off approaching service, becoming a masseuse or a trainer or a whore, or —
They’ll try to make it anyway, and they’ll die.
Most of them, Kick wages, will do that: it’s the way of things. Pride is important in the arena, gives a fighter drive, but it’ll also be their downfall, and will undoubtedly kill them dead.
Such is life.
Stone is a cold little fucker. He’s permanently scowling as he limps around, one leg held stiff, and he tuts a lot. He tuts when Kick’s armour is dirty, when he’s got blood or dirt or viscera stuck into the scales or between the panels of his plate, when it will prove hard or complex to clean; when weapons in the arena are rusting from lack of care or simply age; when other attendants have fucked things up, left a workspace in disarray or left a mess behind them.
When he tuts, his lip curls in a little snarl that you can see just for a second, which Kick enjoys. He’s got a raspy, throaty voice, and when he speaks it’s gruff and direct — he barks orders or delivers instructions, but doesn’t waste much time on anything else.
He’s got a wet mouth and a tight arse — the first time Kick bends him over he grunts, all tension, and then relaxes, turns to jelly beneath him as Kick lines himself up and rails into him. He tends to come fairly easy, which is good for him, because Kick doesn’t normally put much effort into making his partners come.
“You always come that fast?” Kick asks the first time, after Stone has come shuddering beneath him, and moaned into his hands as Kick kept fucking him through it, after it.
“I don’t fuck much,” says Stone.
“Well, I do,” Kick says. “Better get used to it.”
“Does it sound like I’m complaining? Let me mop up this mess, and then I’ll wash your tunic.”
He’s not the prettiest of things, but Kick thinks he has a real allure to him. He likes it.
He enjoys when he comes in from the arena spattered with blood-sticky sand and other people’s gore, when Stone comes to him and stands under the hot shower’s spray with him, scrubs it all from his body as Kick grabs and tugs at his cock to distract him, laughs when he stumbles.
“You need to shave,” mutters Stone after he slaps his hand away again. “It’d not cling to you like it does, if you shaved.”
“I’d not look much of a man with no hair on me.”
“Because the essence of manhood is being as hairy as a bear.”
“You’re hairy.”
“I don’t get viscera stuck in my chest hair, though.”
Stone grunts when Kick bends his knees so he can better reach and tug at the attendant’s balls, squeezing them and rolling them against his palm — he’s sensitive here, likes the pain, likes the threat of the pain. Stone stops for a second in his ministrations, heaving in a breath and leaning his head on the fighter’s arm.
“I tell you to stop?” Kick asks dryly.
“Fuck,” Stone grumbles, and goes back to scrubbing at Kick’s flesh as he keeps pulling on Stone’s prick, feeling the pleasant weight of his cock in his palm. “You’re a nasty cunt, you know that?”
“Uh huh,” Kick says. “That’s what it says on my title plate. Kick: The Nasty Cunt.”
“They can’t fit ugly on the plate too?” asks Stone, and Kick chuckles.
His cock’s not that big — short, thick. A decent size to play with. Kick never bothers with this sort of play with the other attendants — he fucks them, sure, but if Stone has a night off or goes elsewhere for a few days, he doesn’t bother with stuff like this. None of them have Stone’s particular nasty attitude or his capacity for venom — even the sassier ones get flustered if Kick retorts or insults them back when they put on a bratty act, back away from a real verbal fight.
“A weekend off, huh?” Kick asks.
“It’s about to be,” Stone says. Maybe this is why they call him that — he’s stone-faced.
“Best make use of you while I can, then,” says Kick, and shoves him up against the shower wall.
* * *
When he comes back, Kick always likes to reach out and grab him, feel the physicality of the man, feel the muscle on his skinny body. There’s a surprising amount of it — it’s hard and packed in, like the muscle on an emaciated street cat. Kick likes to grab him by the hair, the shoulders, put his hand around the back of his neck to pull him closer, and he does so now.
Pulls him body-to-body, so that Stone looks up at him, Stone’s chin against Kick’s chest.
“Disgusting,” says Stone. “You have a stench. Haven’t you bathed since Friday?”
“You weren’t here to bathe me,” says Kick.
“What did you do before you came into the arenas and had attendants to bathe you?”
Kick shrugs. “Stank.”
“Ugh.”
Kick grabs him around his hard jaw, squeezes either side, watches the way Stone’s teeth clench, showing themselves, but it’s not reluctance — even as he grits them, he pushes his body close into Kick’s, crotch to crotch, leg to leg.
“Going to kiss me?” Stone asks, arching his eyebrows. “What next? Going to bring me flowers, take my hand and lead me to the dancefloor?”
“I’ll toss petals over you,” Kick suggests. “Fuck you in the sands on the arena floor.”
The kiss is a clash of mouths.
It’s a hard kiss, biting and wonderful — Stone kisses him as viciously as Kick starts it off, stands on his tiptoes so that he can push back into Kick’s mouth, catch his lip with his teeth. He grunts when the fighter grinds their crotches together.
Kick hauls him by the hair into the baths, and barks, “Everyone, either get out or enjoy the show.”
There’s only three fighters in, and they all file out. One of them touches Stone, one of the swordsmen Kick never remembers the name of. It’s not lascivious — none of them are interested in Stone on account of his being an ugly little prick — but playful, a slap on the arse, and it takes Stone by surprise. It’s a sharp sound, the slap echoing off the tiled walls.
Kick stares, spellbound in his way, at the way the attendant’s body stiffens, the way he turns, the way his lip curls in that familiar little snarl Kick so enjoys to provoke, but a good deal more savage than usual.
The swordsman playing with him makes the wrong choice — he doesn’t flinch away.
“Come on, Stone,” he says, spreading one hand to the side and going to cup his cheek with the other. He laughs loudly, obnoxiously. “What, he can touch you, but I ca — ”
And then he’s on the floor.
Stone is standing over him, one foot pressing on the swordsman’s throat and the other putting weight on his wrist, twisting it in a way that makes the swordsman cry out in pain, makes him fucking whimper like a pup.
“Don’t fucking do that to me,” growls Stone, and leaves him there on the floor, stunned, for his friends to pick up and carry away.
The plan isn’t to fuck anymore, it seems — Stone stalks out of the baths and attends to the rest of his work.
“Didn’t you know?” asks one of the other attendants when Stone requests their services in the baths. “Stone was reigning champ for three years.”
* * *
It’s a few days later that Kick pulls him down into the baths and pushes his hands into the scarred muscle on Stone’s bad side, presses down on it, pulls and pushes. The whole time, Stone moans and writhes under his touch — it must hurt, but there’s relief in it too. He goes buttery and loose in Kick’s hands.
“Must’ve hurt, stepping on that cunt’s throat like that the other day,” Kick says. “You shouldn’t fucking strain yourself.”
“It hurts whether I strain myself or not. That’s what happens when a wyvern takes a chunk out of your thigh and swallows it.”
He presses harder, watches Stone gasp, feels the delicious tremor that runs through his body.
“You kill it?”
“The wyvern?”
“Mmm.” He presses harder, twists his hands slightly, and Stone’s head tips back, his eyes closed, his lips apart: he looks utterly and completely in bliss.
“I did,” he says distantly. “I was on the floor, it lunged. I managed to get my spear down its throat.”
“Spear?”
“Of course.”
“Slow,” mutters Kick, shaking his head. “Clumsy weapon.”
“In clumsy hands, no doubt.”
“These hands feel clumsy to you?”
Stone moans as Kick presses in with his thumbs on where the tissue is scarred and smooth at once: his cock bobs, jerking against his hairy belly. Kick licks a stripe up his shaft, and keeps massaging the wrought and twisted meat of his thigh as he sucks it into his mouth.
After Kick comes, Stone drags him through the water, pulls him bodily into his lap, settles him onto his thighs.
“Why’d you stay?” He touches Stone’s jaw, presses on his cheeks.
“I belong here,” says Stone, and puts his hands on Kick’s shoulders.
“You fight after that? You kept fighting?”
“No. I couldn’t.”
“You were scared of getting killed?”
“I was ordered not to,” says Stone simply, and smiles. “By royal decree. I train students the same as you do — I was told I was no longer to fight in the arena, but that I could attend if I wanted.”
“The Queen decreed you couldn’t fight?”
“Not in the arena, no.”
* * *
Kick watches Stone more closely after that. Stone limps, and his mobility isn’t great, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t fast, and it certainly doesn’t mean he isn’t lethal.
Some of the fighters know him, play with him. Not like the fucking swordsman had — he obviously didn’t have the trick of it — but the other, keener ones. Now that Kick knows what he’s looking for, he sees it every day. He sees the boys and girls and everyone else who fights on the sand or attends in the baths play with Stone, and it’s like watching people play with a tamed wildcat.
They play and it’s fun — they trust him, to an extent, but also know that he’s wild, that he could kill them easily if he wanted. Stone is little but he’s powerful, he’s small but he’s fast — he bites like a wildcat, claws like one too.
He doesn’t generally teach weapons skills or hand-to-hand — he tutors his students in searching an enemy for weaknesses, and then to exploit them. It’s magical, yes, about how to use a magical field to test for tremors in someone else’s body; it’s physical, yes, about feeling for weaknesses, flinches, shakes in someone’s body; most of all, it’s psychological.
Stone sees secrets in people’s eyes Kick couldn’t even dream of.
He sees where their eyes go, watches when and where they look away, says the right words so that people reveal where their wounds and weaknesses are — and then, horror of horrors, ecstasy of ecstasies, Stone makes them look at him. He makes them see the things in his eyes that trigger caution, trepidation, then fear.
He doesn’t put it on with the fighters he doesn’t already know — he doesn’t need to. It’s just the ones that know to look that he gives them something to see.
He catches Kick watching him, and he turns to look at him, a hand on his hip, his eyebrows raising.
“Why do they call you kick?” he asks.
“Short for Kicker,” says Kick. “My father was a farrier. Grew up with carthouses.”
“Learn how to fight from them, did you?”
“It’s why I bite,” says Kick, and gnashes his teeth. “Why’d they call you Stone?”
“It’s my name,” says Stone, and Kick laughs.
* * *
It’s late in the night when Kick comes in one evening and finds that the arena is lit up, even though it’s a fightless night and no one’s training: the braziers are all lit, the mirrors around the arena reflecting the firelight down onto the sandy ring.
Stone has a spear in his hands, and is facing one of the Queen’s sons — he’s tall and dangerously beautiful in the way that jellyfish are, his hair pink and floating around his head, his lips even pinker and sweet with venom. His lip is bloody — his shirt is slashed thrice over.
The prince lunges and Stone dances — it’s clumsy, but it’s still faster than his opponent can match, and the prince hisses when the spear jabs and cuts across his side.
“Cowardly, your highness,” says Stone. “Show some spine.”
“What you call spine, I call dishonour.”
“There’s no dishonour on the battlefield, highness, nor on the arena ground. There’s only strength and weakness.”
The prince’s floating cloud of pink hair spreads wider, shifting on the air and rippling where it floats — his sleeves, too, the skirt of his robe, the chain around his neck. His eyes are pink-white and shining like light reflecting off the surface of champagne.
Kick sees him set his jaw, feels the change in his resolve — Stone must feel it too, because he grins. He dodges twice, three times, and then his highness lashes out.
Raw power crackles on the air as it’s expounded with the force of a whip crack — Stone gasps, shudders, tries to dodge away and fails, because the prince has finally swiped for his bad leg instead of avoiding it every time.
Stone hits the dirt, hands in the sand, breathing heavily.
“Better,” he rasps. “You’re learning.”
“You think I should feel victory, using your injury against you?”
“Use everything against me. That’s what a fight is. Speaking of — Kicker!” Stone gestures for him to drop down into the sand. “Help me challenge the boy, will you?”
Kick laughs and jumps down, coming at the prince from the other side as Stone pulls himself to his feet.
* * *
“What’s with Princess Bubblegum?” Kick asks when they’re showering. He pretends not to notice Stone’s heavy breathing and the exaggeration of his stagger, doesn’t comment on the clear fact that he’s in agony.
“He killed a boy when he was young,” says Stone. “Makes him hold back.”
“On purpose?”
“As on purpose as any child’s actions can be called. He regrets it now, and falters at the recollection, but it will make him a liability if he goes to battle.”
Stone can be so wonderfully cold.
Kick pulls him close, kissing him hard, bites his lip, grabs at his arse, his lower back, his jaw.
“It doesn’t do to hate weaknesses,” says Stone. “All of us have them. It’s ignorance of them that makes me angry — ignorance of weakness makes every such weakness keener.”
“What are my weaknesses?” asks Kick.
“You’re slow — you telegraph your movements too much when you get cocky, because you’re a hedonist. You enjoy the fight too much, at times, and so you make it easier on your opponent: you draw it out. It’ll get you killed one day.”
Kick kisses him again, kisses him harder, presses down on his bad leg. He finds the scarring and kneads it like bread, searching for the twisted muscle that’s still alive and aching from today: Stone’s sound of pain is ragged, loud, and full of plea.
“What are your weaknesses?” he asks.
“You’re a significant one,” says Stone — it’s an answer to a different question, one he didn’t ask, but it’s not an answer he’s displeased to hear.
When they kiss again, it’s a clash of teeth.
Kick searches for the next answer in his mouth.
FIN.
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