Chapter 8 #3
The prince opens him with patience that borders on cruelty, one finger and then two, his fingers stretching Bryn with a care that his retracted claws make possible, his mouth returning to Bryn's cock to keep him suspended between pleasure and the unfamiliar ache of being spread open, and by the time he's worked three fingers into him Bryn is begging.
He doesn't know when he started. He doesn't know what he's saying.
The prince's name, mostly. Please. More.
Words that aren't words, just sounds, and Ithyris responds to each one with his hands and his mouth and his voice murmuring against Bryn's skin, low reassurances that Bryn can barely hear over the roaring in his own ears.
"You're ready," Ithyris says, pulling his fingers free, and the emptiness makes Bryn whimper and he hates the sound and can't stop it. "Look at me, Bryn."
Bryn looks at him. The prince is kneeling between his spread thighs, flushed and scaled and breathing hard, the violet patterns extending down his chest and across his shoulders, more extensive than Bryn has ever seen them.
He unfastens his trousers and frees himself and Bryn sees the full size of him for the first time and his breath catches.
He is proportional to his size in every other way.
Thick and long and flushed dark, the head wet, and the sight of him sends a spike of fear through the arousal because Bryn's brain, in a brief moment of clarity, does the math and finds it concerning.
But the fear is tangled so deeply with the want that he can't separate them and he doesn't try to, because he has spent his entire life trying to separate things that were tangled together and it has never once made him happier.
"Go slow," he whispers.
"Always." The prince grips himself and positions the head against Bryn and Bryn feels the blunt, hot pressure of him and he exhales and wills his body to open and Ithyris pushes in.
The stretch is enormous. Bryn gasps and his hands fly to the prince's forearms and grip and Ithyris stops, just the head inside him, and waits.
His whole body is shaking with the effort of holding still.
The tendons in his neck are taut and the scales at his throat are flickering rapidly and his eyes are locked on Bryn's face, watching for pain, reading every shift in Bryn's expression with the same intensity he brings to everything.
And the care in it, the restraint, the way the prince is trembling with how badly he wants to move and isn't, cracks something in Bryn that he thought was already broken.
It's not possible to break something that's already broken, he thought.
He was wrong. There's always another layer.
"More," Bryn says.
Ithyris sinks deeper. Inch by inch, pulling back and pressing forward, working himself into Bryn in slow, rocking thrusts that let Bryn's body adjust to each increment, and the fullness is overwhelming, a pressure so deep and so complete it borders on too much.
Bryn feels every inch of the prince, the thick drag of his cock against Bryn's walls, the stretch of his body accommodating something it was not designed to accommodate and doing it anyway because Bryn's body has apparently decided that it will reshape itself around this man if that's what's required.
When Ithyris finally bottoms out, his hips flush against Bryn's, Bryn is so full he can feel the prince in his stomach and his chest and his throat and there is no part of him that is not occupied by this feeling.
"Bryn." His name on the prince's lips. Wrecked. Holy. Spoken the way Ithyris says everything that matters, with his whole self behind it. His forehead drops to Bryn's and his breath comes in shattered gasps against Bryn's mouth. "You feel... gods, you feel..."
"Move," Bryn manages. "Ithyris, please move."
He moves.
The first thrust punches the air from Bryn's lungs.
The prince pulls back slowly and drives in deep and the angle finds that place inside him and the pleasure detonates through his body and he cries out and his nails rake down the prince's arms, leaving lines in the skin between the scales.
Ithyris does it again. And again. Finding a rhythm that is slow and deep and devastating, each thrust dragging against every nerve ending Bryn possesses, and he is pinned beneath the prince on the forest floor and being taken apart from the inside and he has never felt anything close to this, the pleasure and the fullness and the weight of Ithyris above him and the sounds the prince is making, rough and broken and his.
The scales flicker across Ithyris's skin where his control slips, violet shimmering over his shoulders and down his arms, spreading and receding with each thrust, and Bryn watches them move across the prince's skin and finds them beautiful in a way that would have terrified him a week ago and now just makes him want to touch them.
His eyes blaze above Bryn, dark and bottomless, and he whispers against Bryn's ear as he moves inside him.
How perfect Bryn is. How tight. How Ithyris has dreamed of this, of him, of what Bryn would look like under him, and the reality is better than anything he imagined.
How he wants to keep Bryn full of him, wants to stay inside him until neither of them can move, wants to mark him so thoroughly that every Drekian in the palace will scent it on his skin and know that Bryn is his, has always been his, was always meant to be his.
Ithyris's mouth finds Bryn's throat. His hand wraps around Bryn's cock, stroking him in time with his thrusts, and the dual sensation of being filled and stroked overwhelms every remaining circuit in Bryn's body.
He claws at the prince's shoulders. He hears himself making sounds that are not words, gasps and broken syllables and the prince's name, always the prince's name, and his legs wrap around Ithyris's waist and pull him deeper and the prince groans, raw and animal, and his hips drive harder.
"Close," Bryn gasps. "I'm close, I'm..."
"Let go." Ithyris's voice is destroyed, barely a voice at all, just breath and heat and the ragged remains of words. His hand tightens on Bryn's cock, his thumb working the head, his hips snapping into Bryn at the angle that makes his vision go white. "Let go for me, Bryn. I want to feel you."
Bryn comes apart so completely he loses time.
The orgasm tears through him in waves, rolling from the base of his spine outward through every nerve and every muscle, and he arches against the prince and cries out and his body tightens around Ithyris's cock, clenching, pulsing, and he spills over the prince's fist and onto his own stomach and the pleasure goes on and on, each wave pulling another sound from his throat, and he is sobbing or gasping or both and he can't tell the difference and doesn't care.
Ithyris follows. He pins Bryn to the earth and buries himself to the hilt and comes with a sound that is not human, a low, resonant roar that vibrates through both of them, and Bryn feels the prince pulse inside him, hot and deep, filling him in waves, and it doesn't stop.
Ithyris comes and comes and Bryn feels the heat of it pooling inside him, more than he expected, more than seems possible, and the prince's hips grind against his with each pulse as though he's trying to push himself deeper, trying to eliminate every last fraction of distance between them, and his face is pressed into Bryn's neck and his body is shaking and he whispers Bryn's name against his skin as though it's the only word he knows and the only one that matters.
For one shattered, unguarded moment, Bryn is just wanted.
Not useful. Not strategic. Not a substitute or a placeholder or a second choice or a convenient body that happened to trigger a biological response.
Just wanted, wholly and completely, by someone who chose him with the full weight of his soul behind it.
It is the first time in his eighteen years of living that he has felt this way, and the feeling is so enormous and so unfamiliar that his body doesn't know what to do with it and so it does the only thing available to it: it rests.
He lies on the moss with the forest canopy spinning slowly above him and Ithyris still inside him, not withdrawing, his weight pressing Bryn into the earth and his breath hot against Bryn's neck and his heart hammering against Bryn's ribs.
The prince's hand is still wrapped loosely around his cock, slick with his release.
Bryn's thighs are trembling where they're locked around the prince's waist. He is aching and full and wrecked and he feels, for the first time in his life, that he is exactly where he is supposed to be.
That there is no ledger to balance and no crisis to manage and no wall that needs holding up.
There is just this. The moss and the light and the weight of the prince on top of him and the warmth of a body that chose his.