the empire and the sun

[Luc Wynn]

Whatever he'd expected, it hadn't been this.

Later, perhaps, he would review the words in his mind; find them lacking the accusing, bitter taint he heard in them at first. But in that moment, the last drops of whiskey catching the flickering light from the lamp, the words were an exceptionally well-placed knife through his breast.

They had never talked about it – Luc's peculiar attractions, his steadfast disinterest in women – but a part of him had always simply assumed that Gust knew. Even if it was not consciously, how could he not? Luc was all too aware of who owned the skirts that Gust found his way under, after all.

"You must think yourself so very clever." It was not in his nature for his anger to be a loud, blustering thing. Even now, it was limited to a tart edge to his voice. Luc's lips twisted, the thinnest veneer of contempt pulling at them. He didn't want to look at Gust; didn't want to see the face of one of his dearest friends behind such words. "Been thinking that one up all night, have you?"

Why can't you just be happy for me?

[Augustus Kinkade]

So much for the subtle way of admitting the thing.

Luc was simmering with anger, the sort that Gust had seen on him only rarely but could read with the clarity afforded some fifteen or more years as dearest friends. And what keen irony that his own fears lurking beneath his flippant admission had been upended and pinned on Luc instead. God, but he must live with it all the time, Gust realized — So much so that he was incapable of parsing what Gust was attempting to convey.

"I thought myself a bit behind the curve, actually," he muttered, and he didn't want to be angry about it, could recognize the innate unfairness even with his mind so sluggish, but he was, a little. Had Luc ever confessed to him, trusted him? No! But Gust trusts Luc with this most dangerous of secrets, and what does he get? Rejection and sour grapes.

Gust tipped forward in his seat in an attempt to catch Luc's eye, and was rejected there, too. "Lu," he repeated, and slid from the edge of his chair down onto his knees on the floor. Abandoning his empty glass in the middle of the oriental rug, he shuffled on his knees until he was positioned before his friend, and draped his arms across Luc's knobby knees. "Lu," he tried again, and laid his cheek along his forearm as he stared up at that bitter moue. "I wasn't talking about you, hmm?"

[Luc Wynn]

It had been a mistake to come here alone. He knew that, now. Whatever thing had wormed its way under Gust's skin, whatever injury he thought Luc had done him, Luc could neither fathom it nor did he think it likely that Gust would admit it even if he asked. If Tansy had been here, perhaps she could prise the cause from him, or at the very least helped to protect Luc from it. Even if his brothers had been here, headache of a different kind that would be, it would be preferable to this.

In spite of everything, though, he did not wish to see Gust like this: On the floor, drunkenly trying to deny the injury after it had been given. A long moment passed with his anger twisting with the hurt in his heart, but this was Gust. Had he said far worse, Luc would still not be able to deny him entirely; not for long.

"I'm sure you weren't." He did not give into his desire to push the other man away; did not give in to the aching that prompted him to prefer a long, cold walk back to St. Paul's than another moment in Gust's company. Neither did he move to comfort him, to do anything but ignore the weight across his knees in favor of pouring more whiskey into his glass.

[Augustus Kinkade]

There could not possibly be anything quite so deflating as confirming a reality you feel certain another person has been hoping for, only to have said other person dismiss everything you'd said. Intoxicated as he was, it took Gust a longer moment to recover than his typical buoyant bounce back.

Watching as Luc fixed his gaze anywhere but on the man hunched over his knees, Gust licked his lips and considered what to do for the best. Or if not the best — A bit pointless to aim for a bar that high — at least to shift the mood.

"Lu," he said once more, and slid his hands between the upholstered arms of the chair and Luc's thighs as he pushed back up onto his knees. "I was talking about me."

This was his very best friend in the entirety of the world, a man he would have stepped in front of a bullet for without a scrap of a thought. The urge to explain everything was desperately strong, but Gust knew Luc far too well — Enough to swallow everything back. Even now, even like this.

"Look at me," he murmured, hands continuing to slide forward as he leaned in, fingers catching against bony hips despite Luc's closed-off body language. Biting against his bottom lip, their faces just far enough away to focus, Gust canted his head to catch that furious gaze. "I'm on my knees, here, Lu."

[Luc Wynn]

Luc had been mid-sip, and as all these thoughts passed through his harried and liquored mind, the whiskey had burned away in his mouth. By the time he swallowed it back, thickly, it felt as though he was swallowing his numb tongue as well. "You're drunk." Far outpacing the anger was the desperation for that excuse to hold true.

How long had he wanted this? How many times had he hoped, as a young lad following behind in Gust's footsteps, that he would one day confide that he also watched when the other men of the house bathed? Yet it had never happened, and as the notches on Gust's bedpost had fairly whittled it to nothing, Luc had thought he'd stopped hoping. It was a frail thing, beating at the bars of his ribs, but apparently it hadn't yet perished.

To look at Gust was to look upon the face of sin, and as soon as he finally turned his gaze, he knew he was lost. The ache had grown too great – a mourning of the years lost that they might have shared, and a great yawning need to fulfill a love that felt like a prophecy now. To proceed with this any further would be to damn them both.

"In the morning you'll hate me for this." A whispered admission of his fears, though it was not Gust himself that prompted the words. He had been this close before, to other curates, to men who had thought themselves inverts only while in their cups. To lose his friendship with Gust over such a folly would break him in a way that Luc knew he would never truly recover from.

[Augustus Kinkade]

"You've got that backwards," Gust replied, his voice firmer than it had any right to be under the circumstances. In this, he felt entirely assured, however Luc might have longed to so martyr himself for the cause of Gust's untended cock. Luc could have spit in his face and not dissuaded him from their friendship.

And God help him, 'beautiful' was not a casual nickname, however casually it had been employed — When he was like this, when he was drunk enough to lower whatever little defenses he'd built around his heart and truly see Luc, his was a beauty that felt like a knife. That was Luc, in the secret chamber of Gust's heart: A bruise he couldn't keep himself from pressing.

Without warning, he hitched Luc forward by the hips and instantly settled in the gap it opened between his friend's knees. The angle was awkward as he leaned in, and Gust pressed more of his weight against Luc's chest than he'd intended as their mouths met. All instinct now, he licked past Luc's lips, a low and indulgent hum of satisfaction sounding in his throat.

[Luc Wynn]

Luc couldn't do much else but scoff at the idea of it. There was no conceivable future where he could hate Gust. His friend frustrated him, hurt him at times, teased with a sharp edge that had drawn blood more times than Luc dared admit to even himself, but through it all, it was the two of them together.

Somehow, in spite of everything, he hadn't considered truly that this would go any further. This was the most forward Gust had ever been, perhaps, and the revelation he had given Luc still had the curate reeling, but it was still just the way of things. Teasing and denial, the safe game of keep-away with Luc's heart and Gust's intentions.

The hands upon his hips, pulling him forward, drew a gasp that was just as quickly consumed by the lips Luc had dreamt of for some fifteen years. It was not his first kiss, but he had not had so many before for it not to be special; it was Gust, and that alone made it so. But it also meant that he was inexpert, awkward even in his hunger. "We can't," Luc tried to protest against the other man's lips, hands hovering anxiously and then cupping Gust's face. "The staff," he started again, only to fail still in the face of his own desires.

Gust was drunk – they both were – and Lord knew that the light of sober morning disabused many of their drunken notions. The idea of it turned his stomach, but Luc could hardly consider anything but following through with this particular sin regardless.

[Augustus Kinkade]

"We can," Gust said, breathing hot into Luc's mouth as he nodded against his hands. "They won't." Coming up on twenty years Gust had been the master of this house, and while the staff should not have been aware of why he needed it in this instance, they knew his preference for privacy, whether carousing with friends or 'entertaining' one of their mothers.

His own hands shifted from Luc's hips to the front of his trousers, deft fingers opening them quicker than any corset. "I want you in my mouth," he said, and rocked once against the front of the chair before easing away, down onto his heels. Weeks this had been on his mind, since the party where Walker had wrapped his pretty mouth around Gust's cock and proceeded to suck his brain right out through it. Even in that midst of that magnificent display, the thought had lingered there in his mind, amplifying the work of that sweet, hot mouth: Parting his own lips to take a cock past them, feeling the heft of it against his tongue, the musky taste of sweat and spunk and male —

And he hadn't thought of Luc at all, hadn't imagined that cock attached to his friend's lanky frame, or Luc's elegant fingers twisted into his hair. But now that it had occurred, there was nothing Augustus Kinkade wanted more in the entire fucking world than to make this man come undone and to watch it happen.

"I want you to come in my mouth," he amended, fixated on the picture it painted as he tugged Luc's cock free from layers of fabric. "Fuck," he whispered, awed, and immediately arched up on his knees again to lick a stripe from balls to tip. He flicked a look up to Luc's face as he lipped against the head.

"Tell me what you like."

[Luc Wynn]

Things were moving far too quickly, and far too slowly. Fear still coiled about Luc's heart and mind, but this was Gust's home; if he said that the staff wouldn't bother them, that this was safe, Luc would believe him. His lust wouldn't allow him any other alternative. Even accepting that this would be the end of their friendship, that this tainted well could never be cleansed, was an easy task in the light of Gust's tongue in his mouth.

There was a gulf between them in their experience though, and it was made all the more obvious the longer they kissed; the faster Gust's hands divested him of his trousers, at least enough to pull his length free. Embarrassment burned at the sight of it – Gust of all people on his knees, holding Luc's member, looking at it as though it were the last gulp of water in a desert – but more than embarrassment (and the knowledge of the sins they were committing) was the painful need.

The all of it was thoroughly too much; Luc buried his face in his hands, peering through his fingers as though watching some horrific event. The irreverent language from Gust drew an almost painful moan from him, and his cock twitched in that warm grasp. "Gust," he started, unsteady, "Gust–" repeating more urgently only to strangle his dear friend's name at the end when he felt the warmth and wet of a tongue upon his length.

Burying his face in his hands, he couldn't warn Gust in time – didn't even think to warn him, just gasped another strangled noise that originally was meant to be "Oh!" and with a clenching of his buttocks and a spasm of his hips, the curate began to come. Even when the spasm and pleasure had passed, he kept his face buried in his hands, absolutely mortified that he had already made a complete mess of things (and no doubt Gust).

[Augustus Kinkade]

What was the saying, about man making plans and God laughing? Gust's plans hadn't even been particularly well-formulated beyond a sort of indelible instinct that tended to carry him through these things. In the wake of Luc's abrupt climax, Gust rather supposed he deserved to have such aborted satisfaction.

His lips had been against the head of Luc's prick: That was the fortunate bit. There was a prominant, dripping stripe across Gust's lips and cheek, but he'd caught the majority of Luc's spunk on his tongue. Startled by the swiftness and intensity of the orgasm, he blinked, staring a moment at where Luc's jumper was hitched up, revealing a pale stripe of skin and a line of sparse hair that traveled down to his rapidly spent cock.

On instinct, Gust nearly swallowed. He caught himself at only the last second so that he might sway up again in a single, smooth movement, tug Luc's long fingers away, and shove his coated tongue into his friend's mouth.