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AI Fic: All That Time, Silent Still (11/29)
TITLE: All That Time, Silent Still
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: NC-17
PAIRINGS: Mavid, Tiedam, miscellaneous hints of others both slash and het.
DISCLAIMER: I do not own this sandbox, and all of the sandbox games played within are entirely fictional.
SUMMARY: Civilizations have crashed before under the impact of one great catastrophe. Make it two, and what’s left behind is barely recognizable. Slavefic AU.
CONTAINS: Coercive themes by definition; sex, violence, language, and torture both onscreen and off. Contact me if you want or need to know more.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
Part Nine
Part Ten



Part Eleven

The rain didn’t stop. It fell in sullen curtains for the next three days, making it nearly impossible to exercise the horses, feed and monitor the other animals, and bring in those crops that were ready for storage in the corn bin and root cellar. It turned everyone’s mood foul, David included, and gave him nowhere to go where he could vent that temper, not after what Michael had said to him in the carriage. Did it matter, that he would not do in anything in response to the fraying tempers of everyone else who lived in the house with him, if it remained forever that he could? If he could have them killed with as little need for justification--less--than he could the small herd of pigs that grazed on scraps outside? If he were to exhaust the estate’s winter food supply and had to turn begging to the House, then at least he would be chastised for wasting a resource. If he were to kill off all of his slaves and start anew, then the House would both receive its fair share of the taxes and be privately relieved of the burden of having to feed many mouths on a food supply that had said in all bluntness that it could not continue to feed more than a few several generations before David’s birth.

David was doing good work, he had wanted to spit back into Michael’s face as much as he had wanted to pull Michael back down into his lap and ravage his mouth further, stop being gentle and make Michael moan and writhe, turn him loose finally with his lower lip swollen and color rising high in his cheeks. He had to admit to himself that he wanted to pull Michael down by his wrists, not so hard that Michael could not tug himself free if he wanted to, but still hard enough that Michael would be examining the red marks left in his skin afterwards and wondering if they would become bruises. He had to admit that he wanted to take Michael, and he was not sure what that said about him and his supposed interest in doing good work.

He didn’t--he didn’t like to compare his confusion to Michael’s, but it was there. And David did not know what to do with it.

He spent those three days locked into his office, reading the fiction when he could stand it, going over the projected crop yields when he could not, listening to the government wireless always. It was a background hum most of the time, but David still perked and turned towards the tiny set whenever he heard of an accident amongst the high-noble set, waiting. It was never Carrie, and it was rarely fatal. Living on the fringes meant that people got hurt, was all. By the end of the three days, David knew that he was snappish and difficult to please whenever he came out of his office in order to deal with matters that could not be attended to from within, and Archuleta was going back to tiptoeing around him with a lean and hollow look whenever they crossed paths in the hallways, though he thank whatever God was out there who had allowed their world to come to such a state that he didn’t try to make himself available to David sexually again.

“Get out of my kitchen,” Carly said over her shoulder to David as David entered her sacred space and then stood watching her for several moments, leaning his hip up against the scarred, unfinished table on which Carly alternately kneaded bread dough, sliced vegetables and fruits both fresh and tinned, and turned meager amounts of meat into feasts that could feed an estate of twenty even though it only needed twelve slaves, at most, to keep it running. There were streaks of flour of David’s pants when he took his hip away again; it was bread day.

“Want to get technical,” David said. Carly threw him a look over her shoulder suggesting exactly what he could do with his technicalities. The meat tenderizer came down a little harder than was strictly necessary on the cuts of beef that she was preparing to bread and fry; with the miserable weather, they were all craving something hot and comforting.

“Fine.” David backed away from the table with his hands raised in a placating position. “I just--” Would really like someone to tell me that these supposed games of pretend that I’m playing actually mean something, please tell me that I’m doing good work for someone other than to salve my own conscience. Carly gave him another look which did not suggest that she would be pleased if he required her to hold his hand through whatever crisis he was undergoing. He had said nothing to any of the other residents of the house about what he and Michael had done in the carriage on the way back home. He highly doubted that Michael had remembered enough of his social skills or developed enough trust in the same people that he was sharing a dorm with in order to do the same. David was about to force the responsibility on her, anyway, so that she could yell at him, when the soft slushing of the rain against the window abruptly turned into something harder. He and Carly snapped towards the sound at the exact same second.

“Oh, fuck,” Carly said in a toneless voice as she twitched the curtains back and they both realized that what had been a cold rain moments before, irritating but not damaging to anything other than the people who had to work in it, was turning first into slush and then to outright ice before their eyes. She let the curtain fall back into place, hurriedly brushed the cut vegetables that she had been working with on the counter into a bowl, and raced for the women’s rooms deeper into the house so that she could throw on a coat and boots that could stand to see mud. David’s obscenities were softer as he wheeled in the opposite direction and towards his own quarters so that he could do the same, but he was willing to lay his side-by-side with Carly’s and bet that he was giving her competition when it came to outright creativity. They could not afford to lose the crop to an early storm. They could not. Not if that would mean going to the House, and begging, and--and revealing everything that David was doing and trying to do here, once the House realized how many mouths he was actually feeding against the number of people that he needed.

In his bedroom, David hurriedly threw on his oldest, thickest coat and pulled on the single pair of boots he owned that actually had rubber soles--it being difficult to even obtain goods from other portions of North America, let alone venturing further north or south than that--and raced for his door again before he even had the buttons finished. He nearly plowed headfirst into a small, dark form before he realized that it was there.

“Jesus.” David reeled back, put his hand over his heart. “You’re going to earn yourself a black eye with a doorknob, you keep doing things like that.”

Archuleta even looked affronted for a moment, before he remembered that it was his master that he was speaking to, and dipped his chin down towards his chest. “I am not quite that short, sir,” he answered, cutting his eyes up towards David to see if even that was going to be acceptable. David had to suppress a sigh. He reached out and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, encased in a thin shirt that was still probably not adequate even though he had been working inside all day. David was going to take his victories where he got them; in the earliest days, it had been a struggle to convince Archuleta that he was not displeasing David by keeping his clothing on at all.

“Close e-freaking-nough,” David said, and put his hand upon Archuleta’s shoulder. The tension in it was so close to what David had felt running through Michael’s shoulder like a current that David wanted to flinch back, and then he said he couldn’t take it any longer, and tugged Archuleta close to him again. Even though Archuleta had to tilt his head back in order to look David in the eye, he was right, he was not so short that David had to stoop. He was barely a boy; soon he was going to be a man. And what kind of world was he walking into, for the rest of his life, because there was only so much that David could or was willing to do?

It poured out of him in a rush. “Archuleta, I don’t believe in slavery.” The boy leaned back and stared at him, eyes wide. They only grew wider when David went on, “I think that it’s one of the most terrible things that one person can do to another short of killing them.” Given what he had seen the day before, both in and out of the carriage, there were many times when it was worse. “So I’ll say it again: I do not fuck children, not under any circumstances, and I do not fuck people who do not have the power to push me away and have it actually mean something. I have no reason to demand that you trust me on this, but it’s true, and I hope that someday you will. I hope like hell that I’ll be able to protect you enough to give you that time.” He thought that he might need to cup his hands beneath Archuleta’s eyes in order to catch them when they inevitably came rolling down his cheeks. “But until then: go put on some warm clothes. Go put on all of your warm clothes. The fields are starting to ice, and we are going to be eight different kinds of fucked if we don’t get enough to feed everyone inside before it’s ruined.” David squeezed at Archuleta’s shoulder for emphasis.

He could see the thoughts running through Archuleta’s brain and decided to call that a victory, that he could read them now. Finally, Archuleta went with David’s command, the part of the speech that was likely the easiest for him to cling to and use as an anchor. “Okay,” he said before he went tearing off down the hall towards his own quarters. David didn’t hear the fall of his feet as he went; kid had even been trained to run quietly. David ran in the other direction, towards the fields.

He went out the grandiose front door rather than the kitchen back; the ice hit his skin like needles and made him yelp. It was like being struck with miniature fangs, over and over again. David smothered the yelp with a curse when he saw that there were already others out in the field, bringing in crops, and flicked his collar up in order to protect himself as much as possible before he ran to join them. It was more akin to an awkward jog, as the recent rains had already left the earth a wet and sucking mess that wanted to pull at his boots and restrain him to his place. From the corner of his eye, David saw Michael working beside Kristy Lee, a woven basket between the two of them and already near to full with winter cabbages. Jason several yards beyond them, at the place where the vegetables gave way to the wheat, was driving two horses hitched to a thresher, cutting the grain. Archuleta ran out of the house a few paces behind David and, upon a few whispered words with Carly, began aiding in gathering the wheat before the ice falling down from the sky could wet it to the point of useless mildew. David took a knife from Noriega and began hurriedly cutting the asparagus stalks that were already turning dark as the moisture inside of them began to freeze.

Michael looked up towards David once, even though David had done nothing to signal his presence. David didn’t know what he was supposed to be reading there, only that it was unsafe for him to continue holding Michael’s gaze for too long without giving some signal as to what had occurred between the two of them in the carriage, and went back to cutting the asparagus with more force than was probably strictly necessary. He swore as he missed cutting his thumb to the bone by mere inches, looked up to see that Michael’s attention was focused firmly on task at at hand once again.

Even with the collar of his coat turned up and a hat on his head, David was soon soaked through and shivering hard, cursing the sky for the freezing slush that it was pouring down the back of his shirt and then holding against his spine, and the earth for soaking it all up so quickly to turn into a semi-liquid pudding that tried to suck everyone’s boots off of their feet and made their fingers stiff, stupid, and dangerous. David heard a faint yelp and looked to the side to see that Noriega had cut himself across the back of his hand with his own knife while struggling with a particularly tough stalk of asparagus. Cursing loudly enough to be heard until he was inside, he went to clean it up and returned moments later with a bandage wrapped around the wound so that he could begin working again. They could not spare anyone for anything less severe than a broken bone, and even then it would depend upon how severe the break, and whether or not it had taken place on the dominant hand.

David tried to take a special care with his own knife after Noriega’s accident, thinking of the antibiotics that Noriega would now have to take to prevent fever, but it was hard when so much of the world wanted to center down to nothing more than the amount of food that they had to bring in and the cold that wanted to prevent them from doing that. He was barely even aware of the fingers that he was trying so hard to prevent from damaging, so often was he plunging them into the mud, pulling them back out, plunging again, moving on to beets when they had retrieved all that they could of the asparagus. While the beets were more protected than the other crops from the falling ice, being below the ground, David looked up at the bullet-colored sky and predicted a hard frost heading their way on the heels of the rain, inexorably.

Which was going to have to do battle with the last remnants of the warmer season first, and would be throwing down all of the detritus of that fight onto the heads of them on earth while the two of them duked it out. David was not certain of the sound that he made when he felt the first hard ball of outright hail strike him in the shoulder like an angry animal, halfway between yelp and curse, and darted to the side on instinct. That hardly mattered when there was plenty of hail starting to fall there, too, and everywhere else that David cared to turn his eye. Rather than returning to the rhythm of pulling crops, hurling them into the nearest available basket, and then stooping to pull more crops that was at least keeping the core of him warm even if it was doing not much else, David leaned down to pick up a piece of the hail. It was already slightly larger than his thumbnail, and he didn’t see any of the other pieces falling to the ground and stinging him along his back getting any smaller.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” David whispered without bothering to keep it low. From the fields, he could hear the horses that Jason had harnessed to the thresher squealing and doing their best to kick at the sky in spite of their yokes. Dimly, it sounded as if Jason was doing some cursing of his own, too.

“What do we do?” Carly yelled at him, holding a fistful of beets by their leaves in one hand and trying to shield her head with the the other.

“Keep working!” David yelled back at her. If they were all sore and bruised tomorrow, well, they would cope with that a hell of a lot better than they would not having enough to feed everyone. He worked even faster than before, until he was gritting his teeth against the curious and thoroughly unpleasant sensation of cold-numbed and nearly useless fingers attached to arms that had fire running up and down them. His back was so cold and wet that he hardly even felt the hail falling onto his shoulders and spine, heard it more than anything else, and didn’t even bother to swear any longer unless he should feel a chunk of ice striking his head particularly hard or clipping him in the ear. And when the gardens had been picked so clean that even the rabbits venturing from their holes the next morning would be hard-pressed to find something to steal, David went into the wheat fields, and assisted the people who were already working there at bringing in bushel after bushel of freshly-cut wheat into the barns, and spreading it out across the aisles, inside of the scrubbed and unused stalls, even the offices. The horses stretched their necks out over their doors first in curiosity and then so that they could strain in attempts to lip up the nodding, sodden heads of grain. Coming in out of the rain, making some pretense of getting warm again, and then immediately heading back out into it was eventually worse than simply running around half-frozen to begin with, and David wondered how many would be laid up with their first winter colds of the season by the next morning.

“No heat,” David ordered as he helped to spread out his--he had lost track, all that he knew by that point was that his arms were quivering--one of numerous bushels across the aisle. Not with the humidity already as it was, not with the terror of mildew ruining all of the work that they had already done. He considered ordering all of the horses blanketed and then throwing open the windows and doors to bring the temperature more into an equilibrium with what was happening outside, only to dismiss the idea when he heard ice being driven up against the sides of the barn, too. There was no point in bringing the wheat inside in an attempt to dry it if the rain was just going to follow.

“That’s it,” Jason said an indeterminate amount of time later. There were blue shadows under his eyes and not a little amount of ice in the ends of his long hair where the body heat could not melt it away again. If David had told Jason that they had worked the entire day and night through, he did not think that Jason would have been surprised; until he glanced out of the stable window, noted the particularly evening quality of the air, and realized that there was no day that he could have worked through a day, a night, and another day without simply dropping dead to become a part of the mud that David quite believed that they had not done exactly that.

“We can’t bring any more in here,” Jason continued. He spread his arm out to indicate the solid floor of fresh wheat that was steaming in the relative warm and dry of the barn, and the horses who were enthusiastically trying to steal in. “It’ll pile up too high, never dry off.”

“And be completely useless,” David finished. At Jason’s sigh and slight lifting of the arms, David thought very hard about turning and driving his fist into one of the barn’s support beams. He probably wouldn’t even feel the knuckles tear. “Okay,” David said after he had spent several seconds standing completely still and with his eyes closed, waiting for the urge to pass. “Okay. Everyone inside, we’re done for the day.” And they would just have to hope that the wheat that had stayed outside was still good when they went to retrieve it in the morning.

David was certain that they resembled nothing so much as an army of bedraggled zombies when they all finally made it back into the house, covered in mud and not particularly giving a damn where they happened to track it. Carly made a few noises about them taking off their shoes when they were at least in the living room and standing on hardwood that could be mopped relatively easily, only to give up by the time the first four people had headed past her without even giving proof that they had heard. Eventually, David even saw her heading down one of the carpeted hallways without bothering to lift up her skirts to keep them from dragging. He wasn’t even certain that he could work his fingers well enough to unlace a pair of boots, anyway, and if the carpets were permanently stained then they were his to begin with.

During the flurry of picking and throwing, David had never paused to ask anyone where they were taking the baskets upon baskets of vegetables and few, solitary fruits once they had been whisked away and empty baskets put in their place. Upon entering the hallway which led to his quarters and discovering that he was going to have to pick his way carefully to avoid breaking his neck amidst the dark shadows, David raised his eyes up towards the ceiling and sighed.

“Tomorrow,” he promised the beams above his head. “Canning can wait until tomorrow.” He wondered if Michael even realized that David not only ate the products that came out of his own kitchen, but even knew how to preserve most of them. If not, then David dearly wanted to see his face when he figured it out.

The water in the house never rose to particularly warm, but David was still so chilled that even a tepid shower felt as though he was in danger of scalding. He watched the muddied water swirling down the drain at his feet and flexed his fingers until he could feel them again before he scrubbed down every inch of himself with harsh homemade soap rather than the smoother and infinitely more expenses brands that were available in the city. When it was all done and David stepped out to dress, he still thought that he could taste gritted dirt in his teeth.

He couldn’t think of doing anything else other than sleeping, but David still forced himself to eat a solitary meal in his study before he turned on the wireless to listen to how other estates in his region had fared after the sudden, devastating storm. “We’re taking over your living room,” Carly said as she brought it to him. There were purple bruises on her forearms where the hail had struck her; most of David’s were hidden beneath his fresh coat. “You’re welcome to join.”

They might be wearing the same bruises, but they were dressed in vastly different clothing and--damn him--David found that his mind was turning to what Michael had told him about the inescapable differences between slaves and masters, no matter how much David was trying to do something different here.

“I’m fine,” David said after a long moment. The quirk of Carly’s eyebrow said that he needed to improve upon his acting skills, but she only nodded and left him to his own thoughts. He ate, and then he turned on the wireless.

For once, the fact that David kept his estate overstaffed meant that he had fared better than his neighbors rather than having to struggle in order to keep them all from tipping over the boat altogether. He had more mouths to feed, but he also had more hands to bring in foodstuffs, and today that had worked in their favor. David remembered how he had cursed the wheat that was going to have to lie in the fields overnight without pausing to reflect upon how much was already in the barns, but most of the farms and estates surrounding him did not sound as if they had been able to manage nearly that much. The government-paid announcer was assuring her unseen audience that of course, the government would be able to feed all of its citizens throughout the winter, but David heard a faint upward lilt in her voice. He wondered if she would still be reporting the next time that he tuned in; they could all be replaced so easily, they were all so trained to sound exactly the same, that it was difficult to tell them apart. The reporter knew: it was going to be a very bad winter. The aristocracy would survive--David’s class always survived, and generally well enough that it was even called “living”--but the rest of the population would be having a hard time of it. The first ones to go would be the slaves.

David sighed, turned his gaze away from the radio so that he was instead gazing upon the rows and rows of books that he was not supposed to own, not supposed to have read, not supposed to admit to even knowing of the existence. He was fairly certain that the characters within any of those pages would be able to find a way out of this without losing a single life either on his estate or off of it, and probably so smoothly that the strings of the author would not be visible at all.

A knock sounded at the office door. Thinking that it was Carly, Kristy Lee, or perhaps even Jason, David called out without looking away from the shelves, “Oh, knock that off and get in here.” He understood why such a long beat of hesitation followed when it was Michael’s deceptively graceful form that slipped through the opening in the door like water and then shut it behind him.

David took his feet down from his desk. “Hey,” he said. Michael had bathed and changed clothing. There was color back in his face; everyone had been bleached the color of old clay by the time that they had gathered all of the crops that they could for the day and given up.

Michael dipped his head very slightly and, when David expected him to hover by the door and away from David, the way that he had during all of their other interactions, instead came forward so quickly that David found that he was the one to stand and take a quick step backwards. He always forgot how fast Michael could be until he did something like that.

“Is there something wrong with one of the horses--” he started to ask, but Michael then seemed to decide that the most expedient way to shut David up was to kiss him. Oh. Horses are fine. Good news. Once upon a time, Michael had known how to kiss, and right in the here and now, he knew how to reclaim lost skills. David still hadn’t entirely managed to shake away his last dream, but he put his hand against Michael’s chest and pushed him back slightly all the same.

“What.” David stopped for a moment in order to convince his mouth to make saliva again. “Okay, no, no. This has to...no.” His own voice was faltering and uncertain, and he saw that the corner of Michael’s mouth was crooking up, just slightly.

“So you’re confused, too?” Michael sounded pleased that they had common ground. “Do you--do you know how much you confuse me?” He was leaning into David’s hand, and David was wondering if he was still slightly chilled, if Michael’s skin was really supposed to feel that warm, but he was not attempting to kiss David again. “I thought that I knew how to survive with what I am and not think about anything else, but you--” Michael gave up on speech, seeming tired by even saying that much, and pushed his mouth to David’s again. He waited from that point forward, though, to see what David would do next.

He was going to hell. He was going to hell, and he was never going to make it out again. David let out a sound that didn’t know whether it wanted to be a sigh or a growl and hovered unhappily between the two, dropped his hand from Michael’s chest. Whatever disappointment Michael might have felt surely lasted no more than a second, because David tangled his hands through Michael’s hair and jerked him forward hard and against David without giving him the option of pulling away. It pressed David back against the desk, but Michael was the one who was pliant, leaning up against David’s chest for more. David knew what he was doing this time--he was glad that he had never put a lot of stock in heaven, anyway--and tried to keep his hands far away from the collar on Michael’s neck. He couldn’t help but brush against it a few times in spite of his best efforts, though, and he could not stop himself from noticing that, warmed by so much contact with Michael’s skin or not, he knew immediately what he was touching. He jerked his fingers away.

“Don’t stop,” Michael muttered to him. Slave or not, it was more order than plea; David let out a short laugh.

“Fuck being a good person,” David said against Michael’s mouth. “I won’t.” He kissed Michael slowly and deeply, the kind of kiss that unhinged his knees whenever it was done to him, felt Michael trembling with the same response. Okay. Okay. There was a fire roaring in the fireplace, damn the scarcity of the wood, and the rug in front of it was soft enough for their purposes. David fisted his hands through the front of Michael’s shirt and walked them both backwards until they were standing on the rug, being nearly scorched by the heat of the fire. Michael had no reason to shiver, but he was not the only one; David was trembling even beneath the sweat. He only took his hands away from Michael’s neck so that he could place them against the belt, pulling his sweater up and tracing the warmed skin underneath. The coarse trail of hair leading beneath Michael’s pants made David’s breath catch in his throat. He attached his mouth to the side of Michael’s neck in order to stop himself from tugging them both down to the rug and only kept them upright for a few more seconds. Michael sank down to the rug as though he was boneless, pulling David down on top of him.

“Do you--” David started as he realized that he was standing at the gate of something.

Michael’s mouth quirked. His eyes were gleaming, not as much as they were in David’s dreams, but enough to convince David that the person beneath him was solid, was real, and that should have made him pause, but instead it only spurred him on faster. He kissed Michael behind the ear, always avoiding the collar as much as he could and all but flinching whenever his chin or cheek touched it all the same. They only sat up long enough to draw their shirts over their heads before they were back onto the rug in a tangle. Michael had his hands on the small of David’s back and was opening and flexing his hands. It was a gesture that David did not understand until Michael shifted his knee between David’s thighs and flipped them over so that Michael was the one on top. Their pelvises were aligned and every slow slip of one body against the other, even through two layers of clothing, made it increasingly difficult for David to think. He didn’t even realize that Michael had started to move down until he felt the warmth of breath fanning out around his navel. He didn’t speak, but, attuned to every move that David made, Michael still felt him tense.

“I’m good at this,” he said in a tone that David wanted to point out was maybe just a little matter of fact, considering that the goal of this was some extremely satisfying sex.

That’s not exactly what I was looking for, David thought and was about to say; the warmth of Michael’s mouth around his cock was enough to bring his hips up from the rug and kill any doubts or protests that he might have still been willing to voice before they could escape his throat. He put his hands back through Michael’s hair and stroked at the nape of his neck, not able to avoid the collar any longer. For so long as they had been back inside the house and out of the elements, it ought to have long-since warmed to the temperature of Michael’s skin and yet still remained slightly cold. David wondered if it was uncomfortable to Michael, always being chill like that, or if he had become accustomed to it. Then Michael was drawing a slow, wet trail around the head of David’s cock and ethics were absolutely the last thing that he could think about, because he was coming out of his mind and body at the same time, and there were white coronas flashing behind his eyes. He sank back down to the rug with his hand still tangled into Michael’s hair, never mind that Michael was letting David’s cock slip out of his mouth and crawling back up the length of his body, his movements slightly uncoordinated as he clearly was not certain what they were supposed to do next.

Call David a lot of things, he figured, few of them flattering, but he had never been the type to kick a lover out of bed as soon as he had obtained his own orgasm, or else just kick them, whatever it was that Michael was expecting him to do. He rolled them over so that he was the one on top now without bothering to put himself away first and slipped his hand into Michael’s pants. Michael shivered when David took him in hand, and then arched, and made sounds that David wanted to hear him make again. David put his hand against Michael’s hip and pushed him back down while he ran his thumb across the tip of Michael’s cock and heard Michael hiss. He started to kiss Michael while he stroked him off, but soon leaned back so that he could look into Michael’s face, wanting to see exactly what expression he wore when he came. Michael had his head tilted back and his eyes closed, but there was no denying that this was a face with life in it. He shivered hard and didn’t make a single sound when he orgasmed.

David rolled to the side so that his weight was not centered upon Michael while Michael was coming down; they were both breathing faster. David could already see the expression of moments before fading away, and was certain that he was going to be called “Master” again within the next few seconds, or at the very least his name repeated in the tone that meant the exact same thing. David got up before he had to see it. There was a couch in one corner of David’s study, and a blanket thrown over the back of it for nights when David, or his parents before him, had spent so much time fretting in this office that even the walk down the hall and into the master suite was too far.

“Here,” David said as he settled back down on the rug beside Michael and threw the blanket over them both. “Seems like the warmest place in the house to sleep tonight, doesn’t it?”

For one of the rare handfuls of times since they had met, David saw the corner of Michael’s mouth quirk up. “Yes, David,” he said obediently, in a tone that could have meant absolutely anything that David wanted it to. Even though David had to wait a long time for Michael’s body to relax into sleep, he was still awake when Michael’s breathing became steady and even.

End Part Eleven

Continue to Part Twelve